by Mary Stone
“Think of it as an act of mercy.”
After all he’d been through, the kindness of this man made him forget even his hunger. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t worry about it. I saw somethin’ in you that I couldn’t let go.” His nose wrinkled, and he scowled. “You could’ve ended up with one of those sex perverts. You’re very lucky.”
The food stuck in Ben’s throat. “What if my girlfriend wasn’t as lucky?”
“You need yer strength. Eat up, then worry about everythin’ else while that there food is digestin’.”
He nodded, sitting at the table and shoveling food into his mouth with gusto. “I don’t know how to thank you for saving me. When I woke up in the pens with five other men, tied up and shackled, I didn’t know how I would get away. And I couldn’t leave my girlfriend behind. I’ve heard about human trafficking before, but you never think it will happen to you, you know?”
“I’m sure you never considered it affectin’ your life.”
“Hopefully, you can use your resources to help me find my girlfriend. I’m sure she’s terrified.” The food in his stomach congealed and turned into a hard lump.
“Have y’all been together long?”
Ben shook his head. “Actually, just a few months. We met on one of those singles excursions. I wanted to do something good, and maybe meet someone, and she was there, digging irrigation ditches alongside me while a lot of the others did their best to avoid the hardest work. When we returned home, it was like we were meant to be.”
“What a lovely story,” the man said warmly as he gestured at his plate. “Have you had your fill?”
“Yes, thank you.” He pushed the empty plate away as his host sat in front of him. “You’re a very good cook.”
“Yer not the first to say so, but I thank ya. Tell me, how did they manage to catch you? You seem like a strong, capable man. I’m sure it was quite a fight.”
When the older man complimented his physique with a wide grin on his face, Ben pushed aside the discomfort that welled-up inside him. He got the impression that Farmer Brown didn’t spend much time with strangers. The man’s word choice was awkward at times, but Ben chalked that up to his solitary life.
Eager to win the man’s favor in hopes of saving his girlfriend before she went through too much, he told the story of how they were captured. “We worked at a soup kitchen one night, and when we were leaving, we were ambushed. The last thing I remember was her commenting about the alley we were being led through.” He took a sip of the juice and cleared his throat. “We wouldn’t have even been walking if our car service wasn’t horribly late, but I got impatient. Next thing I know, we’re in cages with dirt floors. Then our heads were covered, and we were led to a stage.”
The older man’s elbow rested on the polished wood, his chin in his hand as he listened intently. “Isn’t it strange how events can lead us in completely different directions in an instant?”
Lifting a shoulder that still felt too heavy, Ben frowned. “Yes, I guess it is.”
“And you never had an inkling that you were in danger before you were taken?”
He took another sip of the juice, willing his hands to stop trembling. A chill passed through him, and he hurried to explain it away.
But his host held up his hand. “They gave you ketamine mixed with a few other things. No tellin’ what, but as it’s been leaving your system, you’ve been shakin’ quite a bit. It seems to be completely normal and shouldn’t stop you from being able to run.”
The one word walked up Ben’s spine like a spider.
“Run?”
“Run, walk, jump, whatever.” The man cackled. “The side effects won’t stop you from movin’ freely.”
He’s so odd.
“That’s good to know. I feel a lot better now that breakfast is settling in my stomach, and it’s nice to be clean after being kept in that cage.” Ben felt the heat rise up his neck to heat his cheeks. “I’m embarrassed that you had to clean me up and dress me while I was passed out, but I appreciate you taking care of me and providing me with clean clothes.”
“I consider it a necessary part of carin’ for my fellow human, so don’t give it another thought. There was nothin’ to it.” Farmer Brown grinned and stuck a toothpick between his teeth. “Do you think you can move around freely now?”
“Yes, I can.” Ben tilted his head at the other man’s odd choice of words. “Do you know where my girlfriend might be?”
Golden eyes fixed on him, the odd man shrugged, the toothpick moving up and down. “I think I’ve been mighty clear that I haven’t a clue where she is, but I’m sure she’s fulfillin’ her purpose, wherever she ended up.”
Another chill shot through him, and his stomach clenched. He couldn’t place it, but something was wrong with this man. Panic grew in his chest. Every fiber of his being screamed at him to run away.
It could be the medicine, he thought, but the explanation was thin, even in his weakened state.
“I’m glad you’re feelin’ good. You’ve had a rough time of it, so I’m givin’ you a head start.”
Ben’s mouth went dry. “Head start?”
His host stood and took a rifle from a rack nearby, grinning wider. “Out that door behind you. You’ve got five minutes.”
His breath caught in his throat as his heart thundered in his ears. “For what?”
“It’s huntin’ season, and you’re up next.”
Ben stared at the man, trying to make the words make sense. “I don’t understand.” He couldn’t mean the horrible thing that was starting to sink in.
But the gun-toting man only smiled back at him, the toothpick tipping up like an erection. “Time’s a wastin’. Four minutes now. I suggest you run.”
Horror and understanding cracked through Ben simultaneously. This man was serious. He had been saved for this man’s pleasure. For his prey.
Without another word or thought, Ben shot to his feet and took off, knocking the chair over in the process. The crack of wood on wood sounded behind him even as he wrested open the door.
The trees. He would make it to the trees.
Hope swelled in his chest as he leaped off the porch.
A few strides later, he nearly took a tumble down a hill, but his girlfriend’s lovely face in his mind’s eye gave him strength. Speed.
His legs pumped, feeling heavy at first, no doubt from the drugs he’d been given, and gradually obeying his command. He was halfway to the trees already. He was going to be okay, and he would find her, rescue her.
Ben counted the seconds in his head, the time flying by faster than his feet could eat up the expanse of ground between him and safety.
Three minutes left.
Two.
Ninety seconds.
The unmistakable click of a rifle hammer sounding behind him send a shock through his body that had his muscles freezing up.
Farmer Brown had lied. He wasn’t being given a head start. He was only target practice.
Pushing his feet faster across the uneven ground, he knew even before the laugh rang out behind him…
He was a dead man.
2
Detective Ellie Kline sat at the table in the evidence locker with her laptop balanced on her knee.
At the other end of the long table, Jillian Reed typed on her own laptop, case files lined up between them. Next to each file sat an evidence box, the best picture of the victim available in the evidence propped against it. Near Jillian, a gray scanner was silent for the first time in over an hour as it finally finished uploading the last picture into the database.
“What’ve you got for the case number?” Ellie leaned over to scan Jillian’s notes, whose fingers were still poised over the keyboard.
“She could be one of three missing people in the right demographic,” the evidence clerk said, pointing to the screen. “Lily Tanner, brown hair, green eyes, twenty-one. Harriet Spiel, blonde hair, blue eyes, twenty-three. Or Angela Long,
hazel eyes, no natural hair color listed.”
Ellie frowned. “No natural hair color?” She craned her neck to see the photo of the woman with purplish hair and nodded. “I see.”
Jillian shook her head, fluttering her stick-straight blonde hair and running two fingers down a lock. “No. But as thin as her hair is, I’d lay my money on a natural blonde. Even if it was dyed right before she was kidnapped, you’d be able to see how thin it was compared to a natural brunette.”
“Makes sense.” Ellie sighed and bit her lip. “Too bad the detective didn’t note the condition of the hair at the time of discovery, but I’m not surprised. If I asked Nick basic questions about dyeing hair and the different hair textures, he wouldn’t have a clue.”
Ellie smiled as she thought of her boyfriend, Nick Greene. As wonderful as he was, he was as clueless as the next man about things like that.
“Understandable, but shouldn’t a detective be a little more observant than that, regardless of how much personal hair dyeing knowledge he has?”
“He should, but there’s not much that can be done after the fact.”
Jillian twisted her brightly painted red lips to the side and rolled her hazel eyes. “Let me guess…Jones again.”
“Yeah, it’s him.” Ellie could grit her teeth every time the man’s name was mentioned. Detective Roy Jones retired on a glamourous case while leaving others to grow cold. And now she was cleaning up his mess.
“He sure did catch a lot of cases.”
“I thought the same thing, but Fortis told me that Jones was one of only three lead detectives working violent crimes at the time. He’s bound to be on a lot of these.”
Jillian snorted, turning her nose up. She might have been of short stature, but Jillian wasn’t one to bow to authority. “No wonder the man was burned out by the time he retired.”
“I was thinking the same thing. His partner took early retirement several years before him, and they had one detective out on medical leave for almost a year, and another on sabbatical for undisclosed reasons.” Jillian cupped her hand and threw her head back as if she were drinking from a cup, and Ellie nodded. “He wouldn’t be the first detective to spend an extra long stint in rehab. That’s three detectives with rookie partners working the entire greater Charleston area for more than a year. It’s no surprise the caseload was huge.”
“I don’t think I could do it,” Jillian said. “I bet they hardly saw their families.”
“If they saw them at all.” Ellie scanned the three women’s faces Jillian had arranged. Lillian, Harriet, and Angela. The crime scene photos they were comparing the face shots to were grainy. “I wish the quality on these was better. And what about that one?” She pointed to the picture lying on the table of a young woman whose face was turned to the side. “How did this come up as a match with half her face obscured? Does she look like any of the Jane Does to you?”
Jillian glanced at the photo and to the photos in front of the boxes, shrugging. “It’s really hard to tell from the angle. It’s frustrating.”
“Think how technology has improved in just the years since these cases. I can’t imagine the mess Jones was working with.”
“I don’t want to. This is bad enough. Half of the results we’re getting aren’t even close.” Jillian squinted at the computer screen and groaned. “Cell phone pictures were so awful just a few years ago. I can’t believe I thought they were good back then.”
“Same.” Ellie let out an exasperated breath. “Every new cell phone seemed like it was years beyond the one before, but pictures I took just two phones ago are horrendous.”
“It’s a wonder we’ve identified any of these women.” Jillian pushed her chair backward until she was balancing on two legs and turned her laptop so Ellie could see the screen. “What do you think about this one with our Jane Doe? It looks like her.”
Ellie compared the photos, eyes narrowed as she took in every detail. She shook her head, pointing at one of the identified women. “I think our Jane Doe is this woman, Angela.”
Jillian leaned closer to the picture and arched her eyebrows. “How do you figure that? I can’t tell anything from this picture except that they have the same nose and the same basic eye shape.”
“See her pinky finger? The last joint is crooked, just like this Jane Doe.”
“Don’t a lot of people have that?”
“Yes, and it tends to run in families, but it’s still something we can base a preliminary identification off of.” Ellie pointed at a picture from Angela’s missing persons kit, a photo of her standing with her family. “Her brother has the same bent joint on the same hand, and so does their mother. It’s not enough to make a positive ID from a picture, but it is enough to ask for a DNA comparison.”
“I see it.” Jillian nodded, her smile growing wide. “Ellie, you’re a genius.”
Ellie laughed, wishing her family thought so. She’d wanted to be a detective since she was kidnapped when she was fifteen, and her parents had been fighting her professional decisions, even after her dream finally came true last fall. But her parents had finally settled down about it a little, after her father’d had the life-saving heart transplant he’d needed since his combination stroke and heart attack the night he’d discovered she’d been abducted.
She shook her head. “Just observant. It was a skill I perfected to survive, constantly being in the public eye. You have no idea how boring those charity dinners can get. And it wasn’t like I could whip out a tablet and entertain myself when I was a kid, so I studied everyone at the events and made up a backstory for them. I did it for so long I got really good at cataloging everything that made a person stand out, even while introductions were still being made. When I was old enough to leave the dining area unsupervised, I would search the house top to bottom for ‘clues.’”
“I bet they called you a ‘handful’ a time or two.”
“I earned a lot of creative euphemisms when I was a kid, much to my mother’s mortification. I thought the expressions were wonderful, and I used to brag about how ‘insatiable’ my curiosity was. Little did I know that was code for ‘nosey.’” Ellie shrugged. “I’m not sure why anyone was surprised that I went after a career in law enforcement at Charleston PD. I pretty much skipped playing cops and robbers and went straight to detective work.”
“It sounds like you had an awesome childhood.”
“I was a handful.” She pulled the corner of her lip between her teeth and smiled. “At least it wasn’t boring.”
“There is that.” Jillian wrote Angela’s name and missing persons case file number on a sticky note and fixed it on the outside of the evidence box they were working to match to a missing person. “Why am I surprised that that’s all you did?”
Ellie shrugged. “I had to find a way to amuse myself. Acting like a fool was Wes’s thing.”
“I can imagine.”
Ellie glanced at the files spread across the table and blew out a heavy breath. “I can’t believe we’ve made so much headway this month, but at the same time, it’s like every discovery just uncovers more work.”
“Because it does.”
“At least we’re getting closer finally. I feel like we could get all the Jane Does connected to Steve Garret and Eddie Bower identified by the end of the year.”
Ellie’s very first case as detective had been a simple looking box that housed what little evidence remained of a girl who’d been murdered in a grizzly and somewhat puzzling fashion. That girl had led to another, then other horrendous truths.
Once she’d realized that there was more, much more, to the human trafficking ring than just a couple of men, there had been hope that they could solve many of the cold cases the evidence locker housed.
“It’s only February, Ellie. You can’t expect to solve all these so soon.”
Ellie frowned at the rows of boxes. “I know, but the sooner in the year we get these wrapped up, the better. It’s one less year to come and go without answers for th
e families, and that’s why we’re doing this. I know this isn’t the outcome they’re hoping for, but at least they’ll have closure. If we give them nothing else, we can give them that.”
“There are so many of them.” Jillian gestured around the space. “I don’t know how it’s possible for one person to inform them all, and who would want to? That’s a lot of grieving families to visit.”
Ellie lifted one shoulder and let it fall, pursing her lips. “I don’t know how Fortis’ll run it. It would be cold to send out a certified letter in the place of an actual detective, but at the same time, some of these families live out of state.”
“We send official letters through email and have the local PD run the notifications to the house personally.” Lead Homicide Detective Harold Fortis stood in the doorway, lips tight, clearly trying not to laugh when Ellie jumped and turned around. The gray at his temples stood out from his wavy brown hair, showing his age, in his mid-forties. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I was going to ask you how you liked your new space, but your new desk is still empty. I came down here on a hunch, and I was right. Is there any particular reason you haven’t moved your things yet?”
“I like it here.” Ellie rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “And there’s no reason for me to be up in Violent Crimes with ‘the boys,’” she held her fingers up in air quotes and wrinkled her nose, “if I’m working cold cases by myself.”
“You can’t build camaraderie if you refuse to work side by side with your peers,” Fortis pointed out, though his tone held no malice. The overhead light glinted off his hazel eyes, making them even more dazzling than usual next to his tanned skin and dark brown coarse curls. “But you stay down here if you want to. I’m bringing in another detective to help us clear our caseload, and I’ll just use the desk you’ve abandoned for them instead.”
“Not sure how I abandoned a desk I never sat at, but okay.” Ellie cringed at her own snarkiness, but it was true. She’d been stuffed in the basement when she’d first come on as detective and discovered that she and File Clerk Reed worked so great together that she hadn’t wanted to leave. Besides, upstairs was a man’s world. She’d never let that stop her, but she wasn’t here to make friends.