Dead and Gone

by Tina Glasneck

  Brian pulled his phone from his pocket. Son of a gun. “Nutsbe, you’re going to want to get a hold of Rochester’s medical examiner’s report,” Brian said as he made his way back to his car.

  “Ruh-roh.”

  “Joe Rochester just told me his dad died of natural causes, got dragged to Sophia’s house and buried in her garden, but lost his thumb to a pair of shears. The thumb is MIA.”

  “That’s some serious shit going down in crazy town. If Sophia would stop crying, I’d go over and pry her out of there. Take her to a hotel.”

  “You saying you’re too chicken?”

  “I’m good to go toe-to-toe with a wacko who steals thumbs from dead guys. Shoot, give me a room full of ‘em. But a woman in tears? Nope, not going near that.”

  “Stay sharp. I’m out.” Brian swiped his phone to end the call and climbed into his car. He drove to the Community Center, parking once again in the shadowy corner of the lot away from the lights that had blinked on now that it was dark. He opened the app to do his penance and watch Sophia cry. He found her pacing and muttering under her breath in a foreign language.

  She went to the cupboard and pulled out the PIN creator and put it in her purse. She stopped and looked around. “Are you watching me?” she asked the ceiling in English.

  Brian wasn’t sure if she was talking to him or Ashtart or whatever she thought was in the ether.

  “Are you listening to me?” she asked, her focus sliding across the room and up into the crown molding.

  Brian chewed his upper lip as she wandered from room to room, scanning.

  “You are, aren’t you? You’re watching. How creepy is that?” She was looking over her family room, pulling down the pictures to look behind. The lamps. She got a screwdriver and pulled off the electrical plates—all the places where the TV spies hid their surveillance.

  Brian’s phone rang.

  “Brainiack here.”

  “You seeing this?”

  “Yup. You want to fax me over a copy of the warrants, so I have them in hand when the cops show up?”

  “You need to intervene.”

  “How? She’s kicked me off the case.”

  “Lynx. I’m going to send Lynx over. She’s got a soft spot for our girl Sophia.”

  “Lynx left for Atlanta, remember?”

  “Margot and the kids. I could shoot them over there.”

  “There’s a crazy person who took a thumb trophy nearby, and you want to send in Sophia’s kids?”

  “Shit.”

  “Yup.” Brian tapped off the phone and watched Sophia take apart her eating area, then her kitchen.

  “I’m going to find you. I know you’ve put something here.” Her body grew rigid, her eyes wide. “My bedroom?” she whispered. “Were you watching me sleep? Did you watch me get dressed?” she yelled toward the ceiling. “That is so messed up. That is so creepy!”

  Brian watched her storm up the stairs and could hear her in her bedroom. It sounded like she was throwing things around, then there was a squeak of springs, and Brian imagined she’d thrown herself across her bed. The sound of muffled sobbing filled his comms, hammering home the fact he was a piece of shit for telling her what he needed to say. Selfish. Self-centered. Just plain dumb.

  Time passed and now there was silence. Brian hoped Sophia had cried herself to sleep.

  Brian wiled away the silent hours listening to an audio book playing low on his CD player. He still had Sophia’s house up on his phone. Every five minutes, he’d do a camera check of her interior. He got to the camera that focused up the stairs and wished he had a way to check on her in her room.

  Brian remembered the pill bottle on her bedside table, and he thought about the fragility that Lynx had talked them through. He thought about the paper they were handed with the five-hundred and fifty-five plus reasons why she was in health-threatening, if not life-threatening, straights. Phone in hand, he got out of his car to pace. He thought about how he’d noticed when he was down talking to Joe that Sophia’s car had been parked too close to the road, which meant that the infrared perimeter alarm wouldn’t engage if someone were to come onto her property from the front. He thought about how the person who had dug up Sophia’s garden and buried the body knew how to move in her yard without turning on the lights. Had to be a guy—Rochester weighed a good hundred-and-sixty pounds. A hundred-and-sixty pounds of dead weight was hard to drag. Did the guy know about the thermal cameras? Or the new lock system?

  Brian looked at his watch, zero dark thirty. Thorn was probably en route. He called Nutsbe. “Brainiack here.”

  “Copy. What have you got?”

  “Night as dark as Satan’s heart.”

  “I hear you. Nothing’s happening up at Sophia’s house. She was on the rampage and then all I got was sobbing. There’s been nothing for a couple hours. I was about to call you. I looked back at all the interior video from the point you left her place. I’ve got nothing. Of course, the lights have been off downstairs, and the interior cameras aren’t thermal. Kind of feels wrong. My antennae are up—”

  “We’re on the same wavelength. I’m going up to look around. If Thorn’s playing Sleeping Beauty, shake his ass out of bed, would yah?”

  “Wilco. Out.”

  Brian drove to the empty house with his beams off. Turned the dial so he could exit without the interior lighting up. He did a quick weapons check and pulled his tactical gloves on. Yeah, something was making his senses hum. Brian’s eyesight grew keener, his ears increased their acuity. He shifted his head left and right, taking in the whole panorama. A car drove up the main road. An owl hooted over to his right. Brian dropped his weight, flexing his thighs, to walk low and slow across the street and silently into the trees. There, he pulled out the black bag that held his phone. He gave the area a quick sweep before he lowered his head, looking into the bag that kept the light from his cell from giving his position away. He checked the cameras on the back and front of the house. He checked the left side then the right. While the view from three of the sides had shown glimmers of color—a dot of yellow from a bird in the tree, a bit of blue, red from the neighbors’ windows—the cameras on the north-east side showed complete darkness.

  Brian pulled out the case with magnetic comms buds that slipped into his ear canal, he tapped the collar he wore against his vocal cords that translated the movement of air passing up his throat into words and sentences. “Nutsbe we’ve got a situation,” he mouthed.

  “Copy. What’s your sitrep?”

  “Cameras on the right have been tampered with. I’m showing black.”

  “Copy. I have the same. And I know why. On my tape, while the police and CSI were on scene, a guy in a suit and tie, looking like a detective, was on the side of the house, shutting a window. That in itself was odd. But then he pulled out a can of silly string and shot crap all over the camera lens. He must like his true crime shows on TV.”

  “You recognize him?”

  “Negative. He kept his head down or a hand over his face the whole time. I’m assuming that Sophia opened the window, and he wanted an entrance point. If she forgot that she’d opened it, she’d forget to go lock it. And this is the one in her guest bathroom. Out of sight, out of mind.”

  Brian made his way forward. “Her van is parked in front of the alarm. We wouldn’t have gotten a ping from that.” He pulled out his night vision monocular and scanned the house. “I’m going in.”

  “Copy. Thorn is four minutes out. I’ll send closest available for back up.”

  “Keep an eye on the interior, let me know what you get.”

  “Wilco.”

  Brian used the phone app to disengage the alarm and unlock the front door. He slid his tools into his pockets. He did another quick weapons check and worked his way up to Sophia’s house. If someone was in there, Brian wanted to get the jump on them before they had a chance to panic.

  36

  Brian

  Tuesday early a.m.

  Brian was
on the stairs, making his way up with his shoulder pushed against the wall, his gun stacked with his flashlight. He hadn’t engaged the beam. He preferred to approach in the dark.

  He heard a chuckle in Sophia’s bedroom. Brian pressed his body against Sophia’s half-open door and sidestepped until he got a view of her bed. A man’s form, in women’s clothes and a cheap blonde wig, hunkered over Sophia. In the dim nightlight, Brian could see the tango lift the hem of Sophia’s nighty in his hands and ease it up. Sophia lay flat on her back, not moving.

  Brian slapped the door open. It banged into the wall.

  The man turned a startled face in his direction.

  “You. Hands in the air,” Brian commanded, shooting the flashlight’s high-lumen beam into the man’s eyes.

  “Thorn on scene,” Nutsbe’s voice said softly over his comms.

  The man ducked behind the bed.

  Brian hadn’t seen a weapon on the guy. Even so, he kept his shoulder against the wall and kept a low profile as he edged into the room. As he came parallel to the end of the bed, the tango uncurled, leaping toward Brian. With the angle and the dark, Brian refused to pull the trigger on his gun. There was no way he was going to endanger Sophia. Brian shoved the gun back in his holster as the man brought his weight against Brian, knocking the flashlight from Brian’s hand and burying something hot and sharp into his gut. The man scrambled to get past him, but Brian grabbed the guy’s dress and rolled him, then slammed his fist into the man’s head. The tango lay between Brian’s knees shrieking, as Brian pinned him with one hand around the throat, while he pummeled him with angry punches.

  Thorn flipped on the light, disorienting Brian. “Brainiack. Stop. He’s out, man. Stop.” Thorn caught hold of Brian’s fist and held it in an iron grip. Brian looked down at where he had crushed the man’s orbital socket, making a crater in the guy’s skull.

  “Is he still alive?” Thorn put two fingers on the man’s carotid. “You’re bleeding,” he said with a lift of his chin toward Brian.

  Brian looked down at his grey camo BVDs to find an ever-expanding bloodstain around his waist and down his pants leg. He could feel the warm wetness pooling. Brian pulled the first aid kit from his leg pocket, found his QuikClot combat gauze, and stuffed it into the slash. “Son of bitch.” His skin felt cold and clammy. How much damned blood had he lost? He heard sirens outside. Saw the red and blue lights strobing the walls. But what he hadn’t seen or heard was Sophie.

  Brian woke up from surgery to find Nadia in his room. When he looked her way, her face crumpled as she started crying. Shit. He looked up as Nutsbe opened the door. Nutsbe turned Nadia’s way, shook his head and started to retreat.

  “Nutsbe, what happened to Sophia?” It took everything in him to get that one sentence out clearly. His body was still under the influence of some heavy drugs.

  “She’s going to be okay. They found ketamine in a syringe on her bed.”

  “Is she awake?”

  “Sophia’s been out since we brought her in. All her vitals are stable. It’s a matter of time.” Nutsbe sent an uncomfortable glance toward Nadia who had pulled her heels onto her chair and was hiding her face behind her knees like a child. “You’ve got twenty new stitches, dude. Not much in the way of bragging rights. You left a good amount of blood on Sophia’s carpet. That’s gonna cost you.” Nutsbe turned to Nadia. “Hey, Nadia, you know what would help? Brian needs some orange juice and a banana. Could you run down to the cafeteria and get that for him? Make him feel better?”

  Nadia stood, nodded her head and slid out of the room.

  “You’re an ass,” Brian told him.

  “I’m protecting her.” Nutsbe slid into the seat that Nadia had just relinquished. “You want to hear the shit that went down after your delicate princess-self took a swoon?”

  Brian propped himself up on his elbows.

  “The tango was Will Sheppard dressed up in his wife’s clothes.”

  “That’s very Alfred Hitchcock of him.”

  “Isn’t it, though? It gets better. Thorn let the paramedics in, then slipped across the street to shake the house before he identified Will to the police.” He gave a theatrical shiver. “This is going to creep me out the rest of my life, and I just saw the pictures. Thorn’s gonna need years of therapy.”

  Nutsbe moved the chair over to Brian’s side, his phone in hand. He held up the screen, which showed a picture of closet with shelves lined with baby food jars.

  “What is that?”

  “Thumbs,” Nutsbe said as he swiped his finger to bring up the next photo. “See this? They’re in alphabetical order. This one is for the wife Janice. Sometimes the names are listed by first, sometimes last. She was under J for Janice. Under each one is a series of numbers—GPS coordinates.”

  “How did you figure that?”

  He flipped the picture to the one that said Keith Rochester. “It has Saturday’s date, followed by these numbers, that when you put them into the Garmin give you—”

  “Sophia’s front yard.”

  “Bingo. They have CSI following up in the other spots. Homicide down in Harrisonburg now have names and dates to go along with those two graves they found down there.” He scrolled to another picture. “Look at this.” Nutsbe glanced over at him. “Can you see?”

  “Barely. I’m still pretty fuzzy from the meds.”

  “It originally had Marla Richards’s name on it, but it was crossed out and Rochester’s name is written beneath. The original GPS coordinates are scratched out too.”

  “He changed his mind about who to kill?”

  “The date changed to one day earlier. He had planned to kill Marla—Betty, really. Ha! That would have messed up his system, but good—on Sunday. But I guess he was out stalking and saw Mr. Rochester go down. Rochester was an R, and that was as just as good. He’d already done the whole thing with the flowers, according to the estimated time of death put together by the medical examiner. So he tucked Rochester in the shallow grave.”

  “Why do you think Sheppard moved the flowers from Sophia’s yard to the Richards’s?”

  “‘Cause he’s bat-shit crazy?” Nutsbe tucked his chin as he shook his head. “Ready for the shit?”

  “That wasn’t enough?”

  “Sophia Abadi is on the next jar with the formaldehyde already in it. The date was last night. And the GPS coordinates are for the one that was originally on the Richards/Rochester jar. We’ve already got word back from PD that there’s a four-foot-deep hole in the woods.”

  Brian’s whole body frosted. His stomach flipped over.

  “Dude, you’re turd-green.” Nutsbe pushed a pink plastic container under Brian’s chin.

  Brian waited for the wave of nausea to lift, then he brushed the pan away. “Anesthesia,” he said.

  Nutsbe caught his eye. “She’s fine. He didn’t hurt her before you got there. She was drugged and has no idea what happened.”

  Nutsbe and Brian turned their attention to the door as it swung open. Titus moved into the room to stand at the end of Brian’s bed. “This week Panther Force captured a dangerous mental patient and returned two kidnapped kids to their father, revealed a Hamas informant, and solved the murder and disappearance of eighteen people, as well as safeguarding what could have been a nineteenth victim. If Brainiack hadn’t got that paper cut, we would have come out looking like superheroes.” Titus moved closer to extend his hand. “Outstanding effort, gentlemen.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Brian said as they clasped hands.

  “Brainiack, there’s a lady outside who would like to see you, if you’re up to it.” He reached out to shake Nutsbe’s hand. “Nutsbe, Nadia told me to tell you the cafeteria is closed, but she’s heading to the grocery store to get orange juice and bananas.” He shook his head and left.

  Nutsbe grinned. “Good luck.” And he slipped out too.

  Sophia walked into Brian’s room wearing a nightgown and robe, with slippers on her feet. She looked too pale. Her eyes were haunt
ed. Her lips trembled at the corners, and Brian was afraid she was about to start crying again. He didn’t think he could handle it.

  She swallowed hard and got herself under control. “They say you’re going to be good as new.”

  “A little scratch, no big deal.”

  “This never would have happened if I weren’t such an idiot. I should have let you take me to a hotel. Neither of us would be here now.”

  “I don’t blame you a bit.”

  She came farther into the room and sat on the corner of his bed. For a long time, they looked at each other. To Brian it felt like a balloon had been stretched to capacity, ready to pop and now the air was slowly being released. The tension was easing.

  “I was so angry at you.” Sophia closed her eyes tightly. “I felt so betrayed.”

  Brian stilled. Duty first, always. But could he have fought harder? Done something different? Brian didn’t usually second-guess himself. Review and learn was one thing, but this was a different process—more of the blame and shame variety.

  “They told me what happened at my house. Why I was in the hospital. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you. I’d be dead.”

  They both sat in complete silence. There was no denying that truth. It was stunning. Incomprehensible. But nevertheless, probable.

  “I tried to put myself in your place, to imagine what this was like from your perspective. If our roles were reversed, I don’t think I’d have been out sitting for hours in a car, keeping watch. I think I would have said, ‘to hell with her, I’m heading home.’”