by J. L. Drake
“Nothing’s wrong,” Jennings said. “It’s a good thing, actually. The blood type is AB-Negative.”
“So?”
“That’s the rarest blood type in the world,” Jennings admonished. “I would have thought you’d know that.”
Lloyd laughed. “I’m not into all the medical stuff—I just sell. Retail is my biz.”
“What’s so funny?” Sonya asked, having walked up behind Lloyd while they were talking.
Lloyd jumped and spun around, gasping. “Shit, woman! Scare the daylights out of me, why don’t ya?” He noticed the dress she was wearing and let his gaze travel over her body in a suggestive manner.
She smiled and shook her head. “Sorry,” she said, and turned her attention to Jennings. “I called my contact and he’s still willing to take anything we have to give him. He said it will make his job of creating forged documents a little harder, but it was still doable.”
“That’s good to hear,” Lloyd said with a smile, stepping closer to her and lowering his voice slightly. “I would hate for my arrival to make your efforts a waste of time.”
Sonya glanced at the young man’s smiling face. For some reason she’d always liked him. She’d often thought it was because despite his outgoing, friendly exterior, there was a cutthroat, remorseless killer buried inside, which she deeply respected.
“I have good news, Sonya,” Jennings announced, stepping through the flaps and into the large area of the room. “The man’s blood type was AB-Negative.”
She blinked a couple of times and her mouth fell open. “Wow! That’s fucking fantastic! The blood will be invaluable to the hospital. They are getting the blood, aren’t they?” She looked back and forth between the men.
“Yes,” Jennings said with a chuckle, “the blood will go to the hospital, as it always has.”
“That’s almost enough to make me forgive you,” Sonya said with a smile.
Jennings laughed. “I’m glad.”
“Okay,” Lloyd said. “That’s enough chatting. I gotta get this stuff out of here and sold so it can be used.”
“Roger and Jack should be back any minute to help you load up,” Sonya said.
He nodded. “I’d appreciate the help.”
“Let’s decide what you’ll be taking,” Jennings said to Lloyd, heading back through the curtain. “I can separate out what you want while we wait and then you’ll be good to go, and so will Sonya’s contact when he arrives.”
“Do you want me to help?” she asked.
“No, my dear, you’ve already showered. There’s no sense in you getting bloodied up again. Besides, you’ll have to take off and get some rest for work tomorrow.”
She glanced up at the clock on the wall, noticing there were only six hours left until her shift at the hospital. “I didn’t realize it was that late. Don’t you have to work too, Jennings?”
He shook his head. “No. I just completed my turn on call, so I have two days off. Once your food gets here you should go home, eat, and rest.”
“Yes, sir, Dr. Jennings,” she said sarcastically, while smiling. “I’ll be sure to do what the doctor orders.”
Lloyd laughed. “I really missed you guys.”
They chatted amiably for the next few minutes while Lloyd decided what to take with him. Soon, Roger and Jack arrived, handing over Sonya’s food.
She decided to wait until her contact arrived before leaving, since he’d never met anyone else on the “team” before—he arrived ten minutes later.
Sonya introduced the man she’d met at the hospital, where she’d been hired for a short term as a traveling nurse.
“Everyone, this is Miles Gardner,” she said, pulling him forward and smiling at him.
“Hello,” he said and blushed scarlet, seeming flattered, yet uncomfortable, by the attention she was giving him.
Everyone nodded at the thickly built, thirty-something man of average height who wore glasses and had thinning hair.
“Nice to meet you all,” Miles mumbled nervously, but was set right at ease when Dr. Jennings started rambling off the list of parts he had for him.
Leaving Miles in the capable hands of the doctor, Sonya headed home, eating the grilled chicken sandwich and carrot sticks Roger had gotten her on the way.
Once her stomach was full her eyelids started drooping and she sped up to reach her house in a quiet suburban neighborhood that much faster. No lights were on in any of the houses when she turned onto her street, and she was glad. Even though, being a nurse, it was normal for her to work strange hours, she didn’t want people becoming suspicious of her movements. It also didn’t hurt that she was a single woman and always left looking like she was going out partying; she figured the settled, married couples who lived around her just thought she was wild.
Pulling up to the small split-level house she was renting—that was a conservative beige during the day—she pressed the button on the garage door opener attached to her sun visor and pulled into the garage. She sat inside her car, after pushing the button again, and waited for the door to close behind her before she climbed out and emptied the contents of the trunk. She threw the trash into a large garbage can she had in the corner of the garage, and emptied the vacuum in it as well.
She put the small bag with the vacuum back in the trunk, shut it, unlocked the door leading into the house, went in, shut and relocked the door, and washed her hands. After checking her phone for messages—thankful there were none—she headed to her bedroom to get a couple hours of sleep, stripping off her clothes as she went.
With a tired sigh, Sonya slid between the sheets of her bed, naked, and fell asleep almost instantly.
Chapter 6
Before the sun was up, Sonya’s alarm bleated insistently, demanding she respond to its disturbing call and rise from her bed. With a mumble and a growl, she slid a hand out from under her blankets, reached over, and slammed her fist down on top of the clock, violently silencing it.
Groaning, she turned her face into her pillow and wished she could go back to sleep, but she knew she couldn’t; it was time to go to work. She found it incredibly difficult to go to work at a job that was there for nothing more than looks, and didn’t even make up an eighth of what she made in her illegal endeavors.
Fighting against every ounce of her being—which wanted her to stay in bed—she crawled out and made her way to the bathroom before returning to her bedroom and sliding into underwear and brightly colored scrubs. I practically live in these things, she thought with a sigh as she trudged down the hall, glad to smell the aroma of coffee brewing. After going without coffee a few mornings because of her insane schedule, she’d purchased a coffee maker with an automatic brewing timer.
In the kitchen, she filled a travel mug to take with her and set off for work, leaving the same way she’d come in the night before.
The hospital was a fifteen minute drive from her house and she fought to keep her eyes open the entire way even though she had the windows down, hoping the cooler air would help her perk up.
As she pulled into a parking space and climbed out, her cell phone rang—it was Jennings. She answered while trying to juggle her coffee cup and keys.
He said, “Good morning,” before she could even say hello, and she smiled.
“Good morning to you too,” she said.
“The parts Lloyd sold brought in more than double the normal rate.”
“That’s great news!” she exclaimed, walking toward the hospital.
“Did Miles have any issues with what he took?” Jennings asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, crossing the road between the parking lot and hospital after a pickup drove by. “I’ll check with him and see how things went.”
“Let me know what you find out.”
“Okay—I’ll call you when I can. Bye!” She ended the call with a grin on her face and a new spring in her step. The good news about the money cheered and woke her up more than the coffee and cool air.
“Sonya,” Rose Adkins, t
he head nurse from her floor, hollered at her as she came through the Emergency Room door. “You’ll be working down here in the ER today, since they’re shorthanded and there was a terrible car wreck. Once you get clocked in, I’ll be going back upstairs, so hurry up.”
She bit her tongue to keep from mouthing off and nodded, heading down the hall to clock in and drop off her personal belongings in her locker. The happiness melted out of her demeanor with each step as she noticed all the hustle and bustle of the ER, but it returned as she thought of a way the accident could work to her benefit.
Chapter 7
David McCoy woke up in his recliner with a pounding headache; the bright sunshine that flooded his apartment only made the pain worse. With a deep grunt, he forced himself onto his feet and made his way to the bathroom, being marginally careful not to step on the case files that were strewn around his living room floor.
After relieving his bladder, he took a couple of pain killers to ease his headache. It seemed getting completely trashed was a birthday tradition for him. He couldn’t help but drink when he went over all the cases, especially Daniel’s.
He headed back out to the living room and started to clean up the file mess with a sigh. While he was doing so, he thought about what he’d read…again. He couldn’t help but wonder how many people realized their loved one was missing and reported it within the first 24 hours. He was betting it couldn’t be too often, unless it was a child or wayward teen. But in all of the case files, the victims were 18 or older—not a single one was a minor. This would cause a delay overall in reporting the person had gone missing, because they probably wouldn’t realize someone was gone until their work called to find out why they hadn’t shown up. Sure, a spouse would know when their husband or wife was missing, but a young adult who could be going to college or was known to stay out all night partying would take longer. And most people would call around to friends or hospitals hours after they expected their loved one to be home before they would even know they were truly missing and contact the police. He was betting those incidents would be closer to the 24 hour mark or beyond.
He was just putting the last file on the neat pile he’d created on the coffee table when an idea of how he could find out if there were new cases hit him like a runaway semi-truck. His chest muscles contracted in his excitement and he found it difficult to breathe. He sat down hard on the floor as his brain raced with possibilities.
His idea was to do a search in the missing persons database for adults that were reported missing within the first 24 hours of their disappearance in major cities. He could add stipulations to the search to look for anomalies such as never having been out of contact with family and friends prior, or for chunks of missing persons in the same area with the same conditions. He just had to search for disappearances from public places, such as bars, where people would be easy to pick up without drawing attention.
The more he thought about it, the more he wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before. For some reason, he’d never looked for any cases far from LA. He’d, for some reason, believed he’d find the perpetrators in California. But if whoever was taking people had moved to a different state, they would be harder to find and track. It would make them smarter than he’d first believed.
He knew they would have to be operating in a city if they wanted to go unnoticed. He still didn’t know what they were doing with the bodies, since none of them had ever been found. The only traces of the victims that had been found were their wallets and other such personal effects.
He was getting excited about his idea and decided he would go into work to use the computer system even though he’d taken a vacation day. The fact he wasn’t supposed to be at work would actually be in his favor because he could focus on his idea without having to deal with any other cases while he did so.
He had the case files in his arms and was about to leave his apartment and head to the office when he realized he was still wearing his clothes from the previous day. With a sigh, he put the files down and headed back to the bathroom to take a shower. He didn’t want to look like a raving lunatic when he arrived at FBI headquarters, ranting about missing persons cases. If he did, his boss would probably send him home and not let him return until he’d had a full psych evaluation. He definitely didn’t have time to waste on something stupid like that. He needed to have access to the resources available at work. If he could find the cases he believed he would, he was sure he could convince his boss to let him work on the case full time. With nothing to go on to advance the case—no new leads—he’d been the only one investigating the disappearances. As far as the Bureau was concerned, the people in the files had just decided to take off and start their lives over somewhere else. There weren’t even any bodies, for crying out loud.
***
An hour later, David arrived at FBI headquarters looking relaxed and professional in a sweater and jeans. He was pleased to see that most of the office was out to lunch. This gave him time to start working before his co-workers got curious. He was hoping to have found some cases before he had to explain himself…especially to his boss.
He started his search in the states surrounding California with no positive results. He found plenty of missing persons cases, but they didn’t have the specific similarities he was looking for. He kept circling out further and further, still finding no results. He became discouraged when he’d gone halfway through the United States and he still hadn’t found what he was looking for.
He took a break and went to the bathroom, noticing it was now after two in the afternoon and everyone was back at their desks. He wondered why no one had bothered him, but he imagined he might have looked so focused no one wanted to intrude.
On his way back to his desk, he bumped into his boss.
“Hey, what are you doing here?” Agent Lance Harmon asked. “Didn’t you take a vacation day today?”
“Yeah…” Agent McCoy said, “…but I had an idea for a lead on my brother’s missing persons case so I came in to do some searching through the database.”
“Oh?” Agent Harmon asked. “What lead did you find?”
“It’s more of an idea, really,” Agent McCoy said, squinting and trying to think of the words to describe what he was looking for. “I think I might have found a similarity in all the cases that could repeat in other similar cases. I’m almost sure the people I believe are responsible for kidnapping the victims in the cases have moved on to other states and may be operating in major cities somewhere else in the US.”
“That sounds promising,” Agent Harmon said. “Have you checked Cleveland yet? That’s the serial killer capital of the US.” He laughed, slapped Agent McCoy on the back, and continued on down the hall.
While Agent McCoy knew his boss was only half-serious and half-teasing with the Cleveland remark, he couldn’t help but think it was a good idea, because, in fact, Cleveland, Ohio was known for serial killers. If the responsible parties were killing their victims, as he believed, then they were technically serial killers. His boss’ joke held an irony he hoped would pan out into some sort of truth…no matter how twisted that truth may be.
Agent David McCoy rushed back to his office and ran a search on Cleveland, Ohio, and sure enough, he found the case aspects he was looking for.
His heart was racing as he started going through case after case, finding a total of eight files that had the details he was looking for.
He had to stop and take a minute to get himself under control before he left his office to let his boss know what he’d found. Obviously he would keep looking, but he wanted to make sure his boss knew he’d actually found leads on the cold case. He would want to spend more work time on the case and he needed permission to do so. If everything worked out, he’d be traveling and chasing down the people who’d taken his brother. After two years he finally had some hope of finding out the truth of what had happened to Daniel. He finally had some hope of getting justice for his brother.
Chapter 8
Sonya sighed and dragged her hands through her long blonde hair after pulling out the elastic tie that had kept it off her neck through her grueling day in the ER. She walked out of the nurse’s locker room with her cell phone in hand, heading for the elevators. She planned to go downstairs and talk to Miles.
There was no one waiting for the elevator when she reached the shiny metal doors, and they opened instantly when she pressed the “down” button. Stepping aboard, she was happy she didn’t have to share the small space with anyone and took the time to skim though her text messages during the short trip down. There was one from Jennings, notifying her that there would be a meeting later in the evening, and one from Lloyd. Chewing on her bottom lip, she replied to his text as the elevator came to a halt and the door opened with a ding.
Slipping her phone into the right pocket of her shirt, she turned left and headed down the hall to the morgue. The halls were surprisingly quiet down in the basement, which was somewhat unnerving to her after being upstairs and surrounded by too many people. She stopped at a huge glass window that looked in on the autopsy area; Miles was sitting just beyond it, filling out paperwork at his desk. He was focused on his task and jumped when he happened to glance around and notice her standing there watching him.
She lifted her hand and waved, smiling at him.
He stood swiftly and struck the edge of his desk in his rush, knocking over his drink; he fumbled with the cup and grabbed the paperwork off his desk, trying to save it.
She laughed and pointed at the door when he glanced up at her again. He was now blushing.
He nodded and motioned to the mess with a lopsided grin.
She nodded back her understanding and headed to the door to wait. She could see him frantically grabbing paper towels out of a holder by the nearby sink and throwing them on the desk to soak up the liquid. She laughed again and shook her head.