Chance Reddick Box Set 1

by David Archer

  “Oh, you naughty boy,” Josephine said. “Now you got me hacking into the Metro PD. Okay, I’m running the search. This will take a minute or two. So, are you actually off the bottle, now?”

  “At the moment, anyway,” Dixon said. “I got a new friend, and he convinced me to help him out with a case.”

  “Uh-huh,” Josephine said. “This case have anything to do with the two women who have been arrested for murder? You didn’t realize I would recognize those names, right?”

  “I didn’t, but I should have. I keep forgetting you have a photographic memory. Yeah, it’s related. We are actually working on the Martinez girl’s case, but I think the two of them are related.”

  “They both claim they can’t remember anything about the murders, or the few weeks around them. Kind of ironic that they both went to drug rehab at the same time and place.”

  “Exactly what I’m thinking. If I can find another person out of that group who’s been through…”

  “Holy hard drives,” Josephine said suddenly. “Pete, you might be on to something big. Out of the ninety-three people in that group, police reports have cropped up on eleven of them, all women. The two you mentioned, of course, both when they were reported missing and when they were arrested, but there are nine more missing person reports. Out of those, seven of the women have turned up alive and safe, and all say they can’t remember a thing since before they disappeared. Only one of them has been arrested, and that was for an attempted murder in Sacramento.”

  “Geez, and the police haven’t figured out there’s a connection?”

  “Apparently not,” Josephine said, “but what surprises me is that there hasn’t been more about this in the news. You’d think that many women saying they can’t remember a chunk of time out of their lives would start to get attention.”

  “What about the other two? Are they still missing?”

  “According to everything I can see, they are,” Josephine replied. “One of them was only reported missing a couple weeks ago, but the other one has been gone for almost six months. Disappeared without a sign or a trace, and get this—she left behind a husband and two kids.”

  “Really? That’s interesting. Josie, were any of the others married?”

  “Yes, four of them. Some of them are in counseling, now, still trying to figure out what happened to them.”

  “Can you send me all of their names? I need to check this out.”

  “Sure. Same email address you always use?”

  “That’s the one. And save this number, this is my new phone. And be sure to dress yourself up hot next Friday, I could stand to be seen with a little arm candy.”

  Josephine giggled. “Yeah, right,” she said. “The only way I could dress up hot is to disguise myself as a candle, but you’re sweet to say so. Remember, you don’t show up, I track you down. I’d hate to have to cut off your most important body part.”

  “Hey,” Dixon said. “You leave my nose alone.”

  She giggled again, then said goodbye and hung up. Dixon turned to to the computer and logged in to a Gmail account. A moment later, he sent a file to the printer and told Chance to pay the barista. Once they had settled up, they took their coffees and headed out to the truck.

  ELEVEN

  “We go see each and every one of them,” Dixon said. “The more we can learn about what’s happening to them, the more likely we are to figure out who’s behind it. Let me see, let’s start with the woman who’s been missing for a long time. Her name is Mary Dalton. Her husband is Michael Dalton, he’s a concierge at the Venetian. We should probably talk to him, first.” He took out his phone and dialed the number that was listed for Mr. Dalton and put it on speaker.

  “Hello?”

  “Mr. Dalton? This is Pete Dixon, I’m a private investigator. I’d like to speak to you about your wife, I understand she’s missing.”

  “Yes!” Dalton said guardedly. “Mr. Dixon, can I ask what your interest might be? Forgive me for being cautious, but this whole thing has turned into a nightmare!”

  “No problem,” Pete said. “I’m actually working on another case with some similar features. In that case, a woman went missing and then turned up several weeks later, but with no memory of what she had been doing. I stumbled across a possible connection between that case and your wife’s disappearance, but I’m not actually certain of anything yet. Can you give me a bit more information?”

  “I can try,” Dalton said. “About six months ago, my wife Mary started acting strangely, and nobody who knew her could understand why. We’ve always been careful to make sure the other one always knows where we are, but suddenly she was disappearing for hours, wouldn’t answer her phone, and every time I tried to talk to her about it, she’d swear up and down I was crazy, that it never happened. I asked her if she was seeing someone, if she was having an affair, and she always swore she wasn't, and that everything was fine between us. Then, a couple weeks later, I came home from work one day and she was gone, and nobody has seen her since then. As far as I could tell, she didn’t pack any clothes or take anything with her. She was gone before my kids got home from school, but they just thought she was off on one of her little episodes and didn’t think much about it.”

  Dixon pursed his lips. “Mr. Dalton, I know that your wife went through the rehab program at the Rivers Center a couple years ago. Did she ever talk about anything strange that might’ve happened out there?”

  “What? No,” Dalton said. “According to her, it was one of the best things that ever happened to her. She’d gotten kind of hooked on pain pills, after getting hurt in an accident at the gym. When it got to the point that she was starting to be pretty mean to the kids, I insisted she get help. Her doctor recommended the Rivers Center, and while it sucked to have her out there for six whole months, it was absolutely wonderful when she got back.”

  Dixon nodded to the phone. “Listen, I’d really like to know more about your situation. Can you take a break so we can sit down over a cup of coffee? Say in a half hour?” Dalton agreed, and gave him the address of a coffee shop close to the hotel where he worked.

  “Mr. Dalton,” Dixon said as he and Chance sat in the booth across from him. “This is my assistant, Bill Simmons.” They both shook hands with Dalton.

  “I really appreciate any help you can give,” Dalton said as the waitress walked away after taking their orders. “I'm about at my wit’s end, and my kids are ready to give up on her completely. The police say they just don’t have the time or manpower to really keep looking for her, so I’m not sure what to do next.”

  “Missing persons are always tough cases,” Dixon said. “Unfortunately, in many cases it turns out the person simply decided to disappear, but there are always plenty of cases where it wasn’t voluntary. In this case, I suspect there might have been another factor that’s never been considered.”

  “Another factor? What do you mean by that?”

  “It turns out there’s a connection between your wife and several other women who have disappeared. Most of them have turned up, but they all say they can’t remember what’s happened to them, or where they’ve been. Now, the bad part is that in two of those cases, those women were arrested for committing murder while they were gone.”

  Dalton’s eyes went wide. “Oh, my God,” he said, “you think Mary is out there somewhere, maybe hiding because she committed a crime?”

  “I honestly don’t know about that,” Dixon said, “but it’s a possibility we have to consider. I take it you’ve had no contact from her whatsoever?”

  “No, nothing,” Dalton said. “I’ve gotten hold of everyone we know, just been praying she would contact somebody, but there’s been absolutely no trace of her.”

  “I’m sorry you’re going through this,” Chance said. “I know this has to be rough on your whole family.”

  Dalton looked at him. “I hope and pray you never know what it’s like,” he said. “It’s even worse than losing someone in an accident or something
, because you just don’t know what happened to them.”

  “Yes, sir,” Chance said. “I can understand that. I lost my kid sister a while back, but at least I know what happened. I can believe it would be worse not to know.”

  “Mr. Dalton,” Dixon said, calling them back to the present. “Would you have a recent photo of your wife?”

  Dalton looked at him for a second, then took out his phone. He called up a photograph of a very pretty brunette. “That’s Mary,” he said. “This was taken just a couple of weeks before she disappeared, so it’s about as recent as I can get. She’s thirty-seven years old, about five foot three and usually wears her hair long like this.”

  Dixon gave him his own number and Dalton sent the photo to his phone. “Thank you,” Dixon said. “Any identifying marks?”

  “Yes, actually,” Dalton said. “She has a nasty scar on the outside of her left knee, that’s from when she had to have surgery to correct some torn ligaments. That’s when she got on the pain pills.”

  Dixon nodded. “Mr. Dalton, the connection between your wife and our client is the time she spent at the Rivers Center. There have been several women, as I said, who disappeared this way, and the rest of them have no memory of where they were or what they might’ve done. All of them were present at the Rivers Center at the same time your wife was there.”

  Dalton scrunched up his face, confused. “You think the Center has something to do with this?”

  “I think that’s an awfully big coincidence,” Dixon said. “I don’t necessarily think the Center itself is involved, but somebody who works there has to be. In the other cases we know about, there appears to have been some form of brainwashing involved. These women were somehow programmed to disappear when they did, and in some cases at least, they were programmed to commit murder. What we have to do is find out who was behind that programming, and it’s possible that may give us a lead on tracking down what happened to your wife.”

  Dalton looked from Dixon to Chance and back again. “I put up a reward,” he said. “I offered fifty thousand dollars to anyone who could tell me what happened to her. If you find her, or if you find out what happened, that money is yours.”

  Dixon grinned. “Don’t get your checkbook out yet,” he said, “but we are definitely going to do our best. Since there is an obvious connection between the cases, we’ll make sure we keep our eyes and ears open.”

  “I guess I can’t ask any more than that,” Dalton said. “Thank you, gentlemen, for sharing this with me. And if it turns out Mary really was brainwashed, I hope you can hang the person who did it.”

  Chance nodded. “That’s pretty close to what we have in mind,” he said.

  The two of them said goodbye to Dalton and got back into the old pickup. Chance started it up and pulled away, and Dixon looked over at him. “You built this truck, right? You couldn’t have put in air conditioning?”

  “Open that little vent window,” Chance said. “That’ll point the air right at your face.”

  Dixon twisted the vent window around and then took out his phone and put it on speaker. “Josie? Yeah, yeah, it’s me again. Need you to work that magic and look for any Jane Doe reports. Caucasian female, brown hair probably long enough to go to the middle of her back, brown eyes, thirty-seven years old, five foot three. Bad scar on the outside of the left knee.”

  “Okay, let me see what I can find. Got a timeframe?”

  “Disappeared about six months ago,” Dixon said. “No contact since.”

  “Okay, so we’ll go back the whole six months. There are a lot of Jane Doe reports, most of them for bodies. Oh, wait a minute, here’s something. Fit your description perfectly, even down to the scar on the knee, but she’s alive. Currently hospitalized in a psychiatric facility in Portland, Oregon. Sounds like this could be your girl, because she is suffering from retrograde amnesia. No memory of who she is or anything else before the night she was found walking down the highway in the rain. That was just short of six months ago.”

  “Sounds like a good possibility,” Dixon said. “How much information have you got?”

  “Hold your horses, will you? I’m good, but it takes even me a few minutes to hack into a hospital computer system. Okay, I’ve got the whole file and I’m emailing it to you. Are you still at a computer?”

  “No, but I’ve got a new phone that can get into the emails. Go ahead and send it.”

  “I already did,” Josie said. “Take a look, there’s a picture in the file.”

  Dixon opened the email program on the phone and quickly logged in, then found the email Josie had sent. He opened the attachment, which took a moment, but then it spread across the screen. Dixon blinked, then held the phone out for Chance to see; the photo of the woman that was included in the file was none other than Mary Dalton.

  “Yeah, that’s her,” Dixon said. “Good work, Josie. Put it on my tab?”

  “Ha! Your tab is already too big. Think you might stop by and pay it one of these days?”

  “Next Friday, remember? You be ready, it’s going to be the night of your life.”

  Dixon said goodbye, then immediately called the police department in Portland, Oregon, where the woman had been found wandering down the side of the highway in the rain almost six months earlier. According to the story, joggers had found her walking along, soaking wet and looking dazed, and when they asked her if she was okay, she had just stared at them. She hadn't said a word when police were called, just looked at them as if she didn't understand a word they were saying. A few officers tried speaking to her in a couple of other languages, but she'd finally looked at a policewoman and said, “I don't know what you want me to say.” She'd gone silent again after that, but when she was asked who she was, she only shrugged and began to cry. They'd taken her to the local hospital, but since she wasn't sick or injured, she'd been transferred to the psychiatric facility, where she remained even now.

  “Dispatch,” came the answer.

  “Hello, my name is Pete Dixon, and I’m a private investigator in Nevada. I’m working a case on a missing woman, and I've just come across a news story about the woman you folks found wandering around about six months ago. Can you tell me if she's ever been identified?”

  “One moment,” she said, and Chance heard some old classical music begin to play. A moment later, a woman's voice came on the line.

  “You are calling about Jane Doe?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma'am,” Dixon said. “I’m Pete Dixon, a private investigator from Las Vegas, and I believe she may be a missing woman I’m looking for. Can you tell me if she's been identified?”

  “Well, if she had, I wouldn't call her Jane Doe, now, would I? Can you tell me who she is?”

  “Well, I believe her name is Mary Dalton,” he said. “The photo on the news story looks like her, and she disappeared a couple of weeks before yours turned up. She'd been acting strangely for about a month before that, and no one had any idea where she'd gone, or why. Her husband hasn’t had any results whatsoever through the police, and I’m working on a case that may be related so he asked me to keep an eye out and try to locate her.”

  The woman was quiet a moment, and Dixon figured that she was writing down what he was saying. “Well, I can give you the number of her doctor at the hospital,” she said. “That's where she is right now. I won't say anything to them, so you can handle this however you want, but I appreciate you giving me this information, Mr. Dixon.”

  “No problem,” Dixon said, but she was still talking. She gave him the number and told him to ask for Doctor Albertson, and hung up without saying goodbye.

  He dialed the number she'd given him, but the person who answered said Doctor Albertson wouldn't be in for another hour. Dixon looked at his phone to see the time and realized that it was about lunchtime, so he thanked her and said he'd call back. He turned to Chance, who was just watching him.

  “Well, we may have found Mrs. Dalton,” he said. “But we probably won’t know until after lunch. W
hich reminds me, where we going for lunch?”

  TWELVE

  Chance glanced over at him and grinned, then pointed ahead. A moment later, they pulled in to the restaurant he pointed out and parked. A moment later, the hostess seated them in a booth and left to bring the coffees they had ordered.

  “So,” Dixon said, “are you learning anything?”

  Chance narrowed his eyes. “Like what? Am I supposed to be?”

  “Look, kid,” Dixon said, “you and me, we have a deal. I help you out with this, you help me out with that, yadda, yadda, yadda. The thing is, if you plan to keep doing this thing you do, you need to learn how to be your own investigator. I mean, do you honestly think you’ll find somebody like me, who can keep his mouth shut about what you do, every time you set out on one of these things?”

  Chance screwed his face up in thought. “I hadn’t really considered that,” he said. “I guess I’m learning a few things, but I don’t imagine I’ll need to be much of an investigator most of the time. I mean, usually it’s not that hard to figure out who the bad guys are, and then I know what to do with them.”

  Dixon shook his head. “You’re wrong,” he said. “I mean, how do you know that the person who hurt somebody was really the person behind the whole problem? Things aren’t just in black-and-white out here in the real world, kid, they come in many different shades of gray and green and red and yellow and every other color you can imagine.”

  Chance looked him in the eye. “I don’t get what you mean,” he said. “I knew exactly who killed my sister, and I took them out. I had another case recently, a girl was raped and beaten and left for dead by four truck drivers. They were arrested, but they got off on a technicality. Wasn’t hard to figure out who the bad guys were.”

  “Really? Now, let me ask you this. Suppose that technicality turned out to be the fact that the cops picked up the wrong guys. How would you feel if you found out the men you killed were actually innocent?”