A Reagan Keeter Box Set: Three page-turning thrillers that will leave you wondering who you can trust

by Reagan Keeter

  He used a magnet that read “Summertime’s funner time” to stick it to the fridge.

  Connor was halfway to Olin’s house when Austin called. He’d expected it. Austin was probably worried about him—taking off before sunrise and leaving a cryptic note like he had.

  “You’re up early,” Austin said, when Connor answered. “Where are you?”

  “I’ve got something I have to do. I left you a note on the fridge.”

  “I saw it. You’re not coming in today?” He sounded annoyed.

  “I will if I can.”

  “What is this about? Did the police call you? Did they find something?”

  “Nothing like that.”

  “Then what? Is something else going on?”

  Connor wasn’t sure what to say, so he said nothing. He didn’t want Austin to know that he had hacked into Dylan’s website, broken into her house, and remotely taken control of her computer. He didn’t want anyone to know all that. Well, no one but Olin, who had been a part of the break-in and would be a part of what came next.

  “Is it something I can help with?”

  “I found something out yesterday,” Connor said, finally realizing he had a story to tell Austin that might put an end to the questions. “My dad met with some guy named Roland. I mean—it could be nothing, right? But the whole thing seemed strange. I thought I would have a look around my house. Maybe I’ll find something that will tell me why they met. It probably has nothing to do with his kidnapping. But I . . . I just have to do something, if I can.” At least that much was true. He did have to do something. Trying to figure out why his father had met with Roland wasn’t it, though. He had gone as far as he could with that. It was in Olivia’s hands now.

  Austin sighed. “I guess I get it. Do what you have to do. But I want you home early tonight. I have something I need to talk to you about.”

  “What is it?”

  “Better we talk in person.”

  CHAPTER 34

  Olin didn’t come to the door right away. Connor figured he might still be asleep. No matter. He wasn’t giving up. Employing the same strategy he had at Adriana’s and again at Dylan’s, he rang the doorbell again, and this time kept ringing it—one ding-dong after another—for a minute or more, before finally sitting down on the brick stoop with a sigh of frustration, his legs hanging over the edge and splayed out across the walkway.

  Olin might be ignoring the doorbell because he didn’t want to see him. After what had happened last time, Connor wouldn’t blame him if that was the case.

  Maybe the best thing to do was to leave him alone. Connor had likely been projecting his own emotions onto Olin when he had thought Olin would want to confront Dylan with him. Not everyone handled pain the same way. Some people, like Connor, felt compelled to act. Sometimes that action was meaningful. Sometimes it was not. But in all cases, it buried the pain for a while, dulled its edge.

  Olin had been a man of action only because Connor had pushed him into it. (Ironic, when Connor thought about it, considering on a normal day Connor would be the one sitting behind a computer doing “nothing” while Olin was out in the world “making things happen.”)

  He had wanted to turn everything over to the police from the moment they had met. And then what? Wallow in his misery? Maybe. Some people, Connor had gathered, liked to feel every second of their pain.

  And who was he to judge? Who was he to say one way of healing was better than another?

  Although he liked Olin, liked having a partner on his quest, it had been selfish of him to come here, he decided. He could handle this on his own.

  Connor stood up, dusted off the back of his jeans, and had just started toward the car when he heard the door open behind him. He turned around.

  Olin was standing in the foyer, yawning and with deep bags under his eyes. He was wearing flip-flips, shorts, and a gray tee—a combination, Connor noted, that looked more like something he himself would be wearing.

  “What are you doing here?” Olin said, and glanced to his left. Connor remembered from his last visit there was a pendulum clock on the wall, just out sight. “Christ, it’s early.”

  “I didn’t want to wait. I had an idea.”

  “Great. Keep it to yourself.”

  Connor stepped forward. “No, wait. Listen, yesterday was a mistake. It was a terrible idea to break into Dylan’s house.”

  “You think?”

  “But I still want to talk to her. I mean, she’s just a kid, but she might still know something, right? After all, she knew about Matt. So what else does she know?”

  “Leave it alone. We’re not going back to that house.”

  Connor noticed he used the word “we.” It gave him hope Olin was interested in hearing what he had to say. He took another step forward. “Of course not. I have a better idea.” He looked around. Although there was nobody within sight, he still didn’t like discussing his plan where, in theory, anybody could hear him. “Can I come in?”

  Olin moved out of the doorway.

  Connor followed him in and closed the door. “All right,” he said as soon as he turned around. “Here’s what I’m thinking. Remember how I told you I found Dylan’s house using her IP address? I used it again to get on to her computer.” Connor had explicitly avoided the phrases “break in to her computer” and “hack into her computer” because they both had a ring of criminality that wouldn’t sit well with Olin.

  Apparently, though, his word choice didn’t make any difference. “What?” Olin threw his hands up in the air. As they came down, he grabbed handfuls of his hair and pulled his head forward with frustration. “If they find out what you did—”

  “They won’t.”

  “—and they figure out you’re the one who did it . . .” He let go of his hair, looked back up. “It’s not going to be hard to link that to the break-in, and then . . .”

  He didn’t finish his thought. He didn’t have to. Connor got the idea. “They’re not going to figure it out. I know what I’m doing.”

  “Really? Dylan already traced your last hack back to you.”

  Connor ignored the commentary. “I did some searching online and found Dylan’s cellphone number. Then I traced that back to AT&T, and from there to a device. A Samsung Galaxy, to be precise, which was exactly what I was hoping I would find. There’s a lot of stuff out there about hacking Androids. I normally stay away from all that. But this—it seemed like it might be worth making an exception for. Anyway, to make a long story short . . .” He pulled out his iPhone, browsed to a website, entered some information, and turned the phone around so Olin could see the screen.

  On it, there was a map. Pale yellow background. White lines for streets and gray boxes for buildings. And a single blue dot.

  “You see that dot? That’s Dylan’s cellphone. As long as we know where her phone is, we know where she is.”

  “What if she leaves it at home?”

  “She won’t. That thing is probably glued to her hand.”

  “She might.”

  “Would you leave your phone at home?”

  Olin shrugged, but it was halfhearted. Then he asked, “Where is she now?”

  Connor already knew the answer to that question. The dot hadn’t moved since he had first started tracking it. But, to illustrate for Olin how the app worked, he pinched the screen to zoom out. When he did, street names appeared on the map. “She’s at home,” he said, once again turning the phone around so Olin could see.

  Olin bit down on his lip like he had in the laundry room of Dylan’s house. It seemed to be his go-to move when he wanted to think. “How does that thing work?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean—if you somehow managed to get an app installed on her phone, don’t you think she might notice that?”

  “Maybe. But she probably has tons of apps on that thing. I doubt she’ll notice one more right away.”

  Olin considered this as well, then added, “So we just wait for her to leave a
nd then what? Follow her?”

  “Not literally, of course. We don’t have to. But we should stay close. That way, when she ends up in a public location, somewhere she won’t feel threatened, we can talk to her.”

  “Like we did Roland?”

  “That was different.”

  “How?”

  Connor put his phone back in his pocket. “You don’t have to come if you don’t want to,” he snapped. He waited ten or fifteen seconds for Olin to say something, then turned to leave.

  “No, no. I’ll come.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “At this point, what is there to lose?”

  CHAPTER 35

  It had been a long time since Oldrich Kozar had thought about the Heather Callahan murder case, and a lot longer than that since he had worked it. The case had stuck with him for a while. At the time, he had only been a detective for eleven months, and while it wasn’t his first murder investigation, it was the first one he had been told to lead.

  It was a sink-or-swim moment.

  Back in those days, Oldrich was lean and strong. He had an ease of movement and a charm that made people think he was more confident than he was. Inside, he was a ball of nerves. Not just about the case—everything put him on edge, but the case only made it worse. He had been determined to solve it. He’d believed by doing so he might feel like the man everyone already seemed to think he was.

  In retrospect, it hadn’t taken long to make an arrest.

  At first, perhaps just as a matter of course, he had suspected her husband, Frank Callahan. But staff working the Intercontinental Hotel’s front desk had reported seeing him leave the building some ten minutes earlier, and right about the same time he had learned that, a love note had pointed him to a new suspect. A busboy for the hotel had said that same suspect had been in Heather’s room when he’d brought fresh towels up. Guests in a neighboring room had heard screams not minutes later. And, as if all that weren’t enough, her husband admitted during questioning that Heather had been having an affair. It was the reason he had left the hotel alone. He was angry and needed some time to himself.

  They had fought, he said. She had promised to end it. Presumably, that was exactly what she was doing—or trying to—when she’d been killed.

  Oldrich remembered these facts well. But these were what he thought of as top-level facts. They were not the kinds of things that would help Olivia now. If there was anything to be found in this long-closed case, it would be in the details.

  Oldrich sat at his desk in a cavernous room on the second floor at HQ. The building itself was an ornate, grand structure and emblematic of the magnificent architecture the city was known for.

  The first time he’d shown up here, Oldrich had considered himself lucky to work somewhere so beautiful. He hadn’t minded that the desks on the second floor sat facing each other in claustrophobic, makeshift rows, or that, with the high ceiling and nothing to absorb the noise, the many sounds of the department—ringing phones, conversations, the clank of handcuffs, footsteps going every which way, the squeak of a chair’s legs against the tile—would every day seem to swell into a relentless cacophony that left him with a headache more often than not.

  But those days were long behind him. Although his confidence had grown, so had his waistline. His hair had receded. He’d taken to wearing glasses to read and drive. At least the noise on the second floor no longer bothered him.

  An hour had passed since he had spoken with Olivia. The file he had referred to when he talked to her was still on his desk. She had called right before lunch, and since he did not expect to find anything useful in it, he had decided to eat first.

  He opened the folder. As he browsed through the contents, he found himself thinking that this was about as much of an open-and-shut case as he had ever seen. There was only one thing about it that bothered him (he remembered now it had bothered him at the time, as well): Nothing had ever been dusted for fingerprints. Not even the knife Heather had been stabbed with. But that’s just the way it was with a case like this. No need to run it, the chief of police had said. Forensics had been backlogged for months in those days, and they’d had to prioritize the cases where there wasn’t a clear perpetrator.

  He wondered if they still had any of the evidence they had collected from that room.

  Oldrich took the elevator down to the basement. Here, the building transformed. It no longer presented itself as a part of the grand architecture that made Prague so beautiful. With cinderblock walls and low-hanging fluorescent lights, it was as utilitarian as the blocks of cement housing that had been erected in the name of communism on the outskirts of the city.

  He followed the hallways past a boiler room and a janitor’s closet. The evidence locker was behind the last door on the left. He used his badge to buzz himself in. A uniformed officer so young he might have just stopped wearing diapers manned a desk on the other side. Behind him were rows of metal shelves lined with boxes.

  “Got a case I want to check into,” he said.

  The young officer, who was preoccupied by something on his phone, hardly looked up. He tapped one finger on the clipboard that was sitting on the desk.

  Oldrich knew the protocol. He signed the log, registered the case number he was looking into, and the kid was supposed to go get the related boxes for him. It was about maintaining control of the evidence, knowing exactly what came in and what went out. But after Oldrich signed the clipboard, the kid mumbled, “Go on, get what you need.”

  Oldrich grumbled to himself about the kid’s attitude, but didn’t bother to say anything. There were a lot of officers on the force like him. Part of it was because many of them—especially the younger officers—felt like the city didn’t pay enough. Some, for the same reason, took the occasional bribe.

  That’s not why you get into a job like this.

  He already knew the boxes were labeled by case number and that the cases were in order. He browsed to one labeled RA143352-054, carried it over to a small table in the back of the room, and opened it. There wasn’t much inside. The blood-stained blouse Heather had been wearing. The knife that had been used to kill her. A bedside alarm clock that, the theory was, had been knocked to the floor during the struggle.

  Although it hadn’t occurred to him at the time, when he looked back now, he realized forensics had done a piss-poor job of collecting evidence. Maybe, as backed up as they were, they’d known they weren’t ever going to test any of it.

  He took out the knife, sealed in a plastic evidence bag, and sat down in the foldout metal chair facing the table. Would it be worth testing now?

  What the hell? Why not? At least he could rest easy knowing he had been thorough. Oldrich had been a detective for all these years not because he hadn’t been offered promotions, but because he had turned them down. He liked what he did. And if he was going to do his job right, being thorough was part of it, even when it didn’t make any difference.

  Oldrich pulled out his cellphone, called the forensics department. A perky young woman named Basia answered, and hearing her voice made him smile. The forensics department was across town, but he had seen her around his building a dozen or more times. If he was ten years younger, he’d thought more than once, he would ask her out.

  Focus.

  “What’s your turnaround time for a DNA analysis right now?”

  “Two months, I think.”

  “I’ve got an old case that’s resurfaced. Any chance I could get this prioritized?”

  “What kind of case?”

  “Murder. First degree.”

  “How old?”

  “Fifteen years,” Oldrich said as he put the phone on speaker and placed it on the table.

  “That’s old. What makes it so important that you need it now?”

  “There’s been an abduction.”

  “Oh?”

  Oldrich relayed the information Olivia had told him. As he spoke, he picked up the knife and, holding it at each end, turned it over. It wa
s automatic, perhaps drilled into him from so many years of looking for clues. There were, of course, none he would find here with the naked eye. Still, he looked.

  “Same people, huh?” Basia said.

  “That’s right. Why?”

  “It’s not my place to say. You’re the detective.”

  “Tell me.”

  “The murder, then the abductions? Most people never experience even one of those things, let alone both.”

  Until now, Oldrich had thought only about the time that had elapsed between the crimes. But this was like getting struck by lightning twice, and how often did that happen? His cop senses started to tingle. There might just be something here, after all. “Can you do it?”

  “For an active crime, you bet. Bring me the knife. It will take twenty-four hours. System matches?”

  The system she was referring to had been established by the European Union ten years ago with the intention of sharing criminal DNA between countries. All current prisoners had been swabbed and catalogued. If the sample Olivia pulled off the knife was Matthew Jones’s (which, of course, it had to be), there wouldn’t be any issue coming up with a match.

  “Run it against the system,” he said.

  “Understood.”

  Oldrich thanked Basia and hung up.

  CHAPTER 36

  The day was a bust. Connor and Olin watched the dot go from Dylan’s home to Carolton High School and back. Hours passed in between. It was the longest block of time the two had spent together without having something to do.

  “What’s she doing there?” Olin had asked at some point, and Connor had frowned thoughtfully.

  “Summer school, I guess. Should we go down there and try to talk to her?”

  “No way. We have no business being on the school grounds. We’ve been lucky so far, but luck runs out. If we’re going to talk to her, we’re going to do it somewhere smart.”

  Connor reluctantly agreed.

  While they waited for an opening, they kept themselves busy watching TV. They talked a little about what life had been like for each of them before the abductions. But since talking around the abductions was the same as talking about them, that petered out fast. Until Connor could speak to Dylan, he didn’t want to think about any of it, and Olin seemed to feel the same way.