Tellings of the Time: Complete series

2. 2

When the police finally arrive, all dressed up in crime scene suits, they process me and my men, taking our clothes and giving us white paper-like jumpsuits. Now that there’s no longer any possible evidence on us, we’re allowed to leave the house.

It’s only taken a couple of hours. Official work takes time and is tedious. We’re not allowed to go anywhere, as we’re still to be questioned about the day. My stomach has settled after emptying it twice in the basement.

Scott and Alex got me out of there when they realized what was going on. They hadn’t seen the face of the dead body, they didn’t have a visual of what the piles of dirt actually meant.

Years of working in this world have hardened me a lot, but it took some toughening up beforehand to prepare myself for what I could be finding. I was definitely not prepared for this. Mexican food will probably be ruined for me forever.

I’ve dealt with death, with the dark side of humanity that society isn’t willing to acknowledge, but never on this scale.

Walking out of that horror house, I suck in lungfuls of fresh air, feeling the tensed muscles of my body relax a little. Shaking the horrific feeling off, I quickly walk away from the porch. I need to get as much distance from this place as I can, even knowing I can’t physically leave right now. Scott and Alex are right behind me, standing on the lawn of the white-painted house I now look at with completely different eyes.

“I don’t think I was fully prepared for this,” Scott says as he uses a hand to rub his eyes, before he combs a hand through his dark blond hair.

“Yeah, not exactly what you signed up for, right?” I ask him.

I single-handedly hired every one of the people on my tactical team. Chester is in charge of the team of hackers that work for us, even if he let me do the interviews. But the team that goes out in the field with me, is picked by me. They’re hired to go out on missions to retrieve children that are being sold in all kinds of deals on the black market, ranging from pornography, to illegal adoption or the most sinister forms where children are being sold with the sole purpose of being abused and murdered.

We come into action whenever Chester’s sure there’s a chance to retrieve the children unharmed, which we excel at. Whenever he finds leads indicating we’re too late to save the kids, he hands over all evidence to the proper authorities.

“Definitely not what I signed up for.”

Alex grabs his shoulder and squeezes it reassuringly.

Leaving the two men behind, I walk to the edge of the lawn. It’s cordoned off with yellow tape, like that’s going to keep me in. It’s not the time or the place to break the rules, and if I’m being honest, I’m actually looking forward to talking to the authorities this time. Maybe sharing whatever it was I found down there will help me work through this, or I’ll be able to retrieve some information myself.

When I look up, I see a big black pickup truck with a person sitting on the hood, fervently tapping away on his laptop. Chester. His half-long blond hair falls in his eyes as he leans with the heels of his shoes on the bumper of the car, hanging over his screen.

Everything about this scene is familiar, from the band stickers on the back of the laptop, to the car’s license plate, seeing as it’s my pickup truck. He’s parked as close to the tape as he could get in front of the sidewalk between several police cars. He’s butting in where he’s not supposed to butt in. It’s Chester to a T.

“Ches,” I say, getting his attention. He raises one finger to me without looking up from his screen, trying to make me wait a second before speaking to me. More familiar behavior. When he squints at something on the screen, he slowly moves his hand down, acknowledging me.

“Hey Abs. You okay?”

He finally pries his baby blue eyes away from his screen as he looks at me, scanning my body up and down, frowning at the weird white jumpsuit, tracing every inch of me as if he’s trying to figure out for himself if I’m all right.

“How’d you get here?” I ask him.

“I drove.”

“You don’t have a driver’s license.”

“Yes, I do.”

“No, you don’t.” My tone is getting a little harsher now. I’ve been driving him around for years because he doesn’t have a license. Bullshit.

“As of this afternoon, I have.”

“How?”

“I hacked into the DMV and made one myself.”

I throw my hands up in the air as I hear that. Jesus take the wheel. For someone who’s a literal genius, he can be really fucking dumb.

“You didn’t think it would be safer to let someone drive you?”

“This was faster.”

“How?”

“Well, I hacked into the city’s systems, disabled all speeding cameras and made sure all the lights were green, creating a green wave so I could get here as fast as possible.”

“While driving?” I ask him in disbelief.

He rolls his baby blue eyes at me.

“No, that would be unsafe. I did it beforehand.”

Yeah, of course, that would be unsafe. I’ve no clue why he would choose now to do such an idiotic thing. He’s been raving about how unwise it would be for him to drive a car, as he can’t anticipate for shit.

Somehow, me finding the lair of a serial killer overlord was a good enough reason to get over here as fast as he could, only to end up waiting outside. Now that I said it in my head, perhaps this did count as an emergency. How long has he been here? Not wanting to think about those bodies in the basement, I nudge my chin toward Chester’s laptop.

“What’s the latest on the kids?”

“I can’t find any traces of them on the dark web. Whoever was messaging about them has gone dormant, it seems. I’ve been trying to hack into whatever surveillance camera in the area I could find, but I got a little sidetracked .”

“Forging a driver’s license, you mean?”

“No, forging would be if it wasn’t a legal document. This is the proper document, given out by the proper authorities.”

“But you didn’t pass the test!” I say as I wave my hands at him in annoyance. Our voices are louder than usual.

He actually did a great job with the parallel parking, which is very impressive. Then again, he probably did the math on how to do it.

Chester waves my objections away with his hand, as if an annoying little bug is flying in front of his face.

“Anyway, facial recognition didn”t find any matches coming from the house going into the city. So either they were driven away in some kind of van we can”t look into, or they took them out back through the woods. Based on your encounter with whoever got out of that house, the police have got a team with tracker dogs coming in. Maybe they can see if they can find a trace of the kids as well. I won’t be of much help if they went out through the woods. Technology will get me nowhere.”

A team with tracker dogs sounds good. As long as we don’t have to bring in the cadaver dogs, everything’ll be fine. Whether they can find their scent and maybe get a trail on the kids or on the fugitive, it’ll hopefully help us solve one or both crimes.

“So, what have you been doing out here if you can’t trace the kids?”

“Besides having the worst signal in the world, you mean?”

“We’re in the middle of nowhere, on the edge of a forest. Surely you know better than to expect a good signal.”

I get the glare. Which actually makes me smile a little. It’s a better feeling than the one I get when I think back on the bodies I found.

“Of course, I know better than to expect prime signal, but every single house I hacked into in the vicinity still has good-for-nothing Wi-Fi. The level of security on these Wi-Fi signals is laughable at best, by the way. One house down the street was named ‘I did your Wi-Fi last night’ and the password was ‘Yomama’. I’m not even kidding you.”

That makes me laugh out loud. We’re on completely different levels on this. I just think the joke is funny, he thinks the lack of a random password with several special characters is laughable. My laughter does make his face light up though.

Our conversation gets cut off when more police cars arrive, one with dog benches in the back. Men and women dressed in police and special unit outfits start climbing out of the vehicles, getting several dogs out. My heart starts racing again, because these dogs could help us find a real lead.

In the garden next door, Dylan stands on the lawn, looking at the newcomers. I walk towards him to talk, staying on my side of the fence.

“How’s the investigation going over there?” I ask him as I point my chin to the house where we thought the kids were being held.

“Don’t know,” Dylan shrugs. He’s a man of few words, but an absolute gem to have with you in the field. “They sent me outside when they started going over the whole house.”

I huff. Working as an independent in the investigative world can be a bitch sometimes. While we deliver solid work and abide by the law, most of the time anyway, authorities tend to think they know better and are the only ones allowed to fight crime. It almost feels like they see us solving their cases as stealing their thunder. Which is kind of true, but it wouldn’t be necessary if they did their jobs properly.

I realize that’s not a fair thought, because most of the people working in law enforcement work their asses off to do a good job and make this world a little safer. But crime is omnipresent and there are only so many people to fight it.

Police officers start entering both houses and it’s like there’s an endless stream of them. The dogs are being led into the houses by their handlers as well. Officials are coming from all directions, all going their own way, doing what they do best.

There’s a cacophony of voices coming from everywhere. The K9 team is coming out of the house with the bodies. One of the dogs finds a trail to whoever it was that left the house, and the rest of the dogs lead their handlers to the fence. In taking down a part of the fence, they could pass through more easily into the forest. Not being able to see through that fucking fence is making me nervous. Not knowing what’s going on is killing me, and I’m nervously walking in circles as I wait for something to happen. There are half moon shaped marks in the palm of my hand from where I’m pressing my nails into them.

The K9 team in the house where the kids were being held takes longer to get out, but finally they are led to the woods behind the houses too. I’m relieved they picked up on anything at all. The empty state of the house left them the option of not finding a thing. Seeing the dogs and their handlers follow a trail validates our finding that the kids were actually there. Or well, there was someone in the house. I don’t know what source they used to get a trace.

An officer I don’t know comes over to talk to me, as my eyes are glued to the fence out back. If the team gets back too quickly, it’ll mean they haven’t picked up on anything, which would be bad news for both cases. There’s an awkward pause where the officer says something to me, which I miss because I wasn’t listening. I look up at him.

“Sorry, come again?”

“Are you Miss Wilder?” the big man with a broad gray mustache asks me again.

“Yeah, sorry, I’m a bit distracted.”

The man’s eyes shift ever so quickly to the house with the bodies in the basement.

“No big surprise there, I’d be distracted if I went into that basement unknowingly as well. I’m Officer Michaelson. Can you give me your statement?”

I suck in a large breath of air through my nose. I’m still so on edge from the day that even recounting what happened sends a shiver down my spine. I pry my eyes from the fence and force myself to keep my eyes locked on Officer Michaelson.

“Sure. We went over to the house next door, three-oh-six,” I say as I point my thumb to the house where Dylan is still standing on the porch. “We had intel that led us to believe four kidnapped children were being held there, waiting to be brought to an alternative location before they would be sold. We combed the house, but there was no trace of the kids to be found.”

The officer squeezes one eye shut and cocks his head.

“On whose authority did you act?”

“I run the FIX Foundation. We’re private contractors. We work alongside police and help solve crimes that involve missing children. You can ask Superintendent Olksen about it. He knows us, we’ve worked together before.”

Michaelson is busy scribbling down everything I say. I’m sure he’s going to be checking every detail of what I tell him. Good for him, it’s his job to be thorough. Then he nods his head, and I continue telling him everything that happened. I hold nothing back, giving the officer some more details whenever he asks for it, like if I can remember details about the Unknown Subject’s appearance. But this isn’t my first rodeo, and there just isn’t anything more to tell him than I’ve already given.

When I reach the part where I find the bodies, I start to stutter. I can’t force my voice to come out of my mouth. The human nose wrapped in cling foil flashes in front of my eyes, causing another wave of nausea. Good thing I’m completely empty after throwing up twice.

I forcefully take three big breaths, using a trick to calm myself down. Four in, hold for four, four out, hold for four. Repeat. My clammy hands have balled into tight fists, and the palms of my hands hurt from where my nails are pressed into them.

Officer Michaelson keeps quiet, as he gives me the chance to get my act together on my own. Silence is your biggest friend in interrogation. After my third breath, I open up my hands, wipe them on my pants and pick up where I’ve left off.

“I took out a rubber glove and pulled the white cloth back, to see a human nose, covered in cling foil. I concluded that there was a corpse buried there. I counted another eleven piles around the basement. That’s when you were called in.”

Business talk makes recounting finding these bodies less personal. I’m depersonalizing myself from the situation, which will help me out short term, but will have to be dealt with in the long run or it’s going to fuck me up. Michaelson keeps scribbling my account down.

“It’s twelve corpses, right? Not just the one?” I ask him as my curiosity gets the better of me.

“I’m not at liberty to say,” he says, looking up at me from beneath his lashes.

Fuck.

Listen, I get it. I really do. I’m just some private contractor he doesn’t know and who could be involved for all he knows. He’s just doing his job. But I really need to know what I actually stumbled upon today.

“I think I’ve got everything I need,” he says. “Just let me write down your contact information so we know how to reach you if we need to.”

“I’ll get you a card, just a sec,” I say as I make my way to where Chester is still sitting on the hood of the car. He looks up when I near the tape.

“Can you get me one of my cards from the glove compartment?”

He nods, gets up and grabs me one. When he walks to the tape to hand it to me, he holds onto the card until I look him in the eye. “Did you learn anything?”

“Nope, he’s not at liberty to say anything.”

Chester scoffs.

“Want me to hack into their system to see all the updates coming in?”

Oh, that’s a way too tempting idea. As much as I want it, I push it away.

“Let’s not piss them off unnecessarily. We can always do that if the need arrives.”

I grab the card from him and rush back to Officer Michaelson, who’s still scribbling stuff down. What is he making of this situation? Before I can ask him what will happen next, the first K9 team gets back, and both Officer Michaelson’s and my own eyes perk up. They’re alone, there’s nobody there with them, and they haven’t found the Unknown Subject. I’m disappointed to see no one apprehended.

The K9 units walk back to the vans, taking Officer Michaelson with them. I hold one of them back when he walks past me, putting a hand on his arm and looking the man directly in the eye.

“Did you find anything at all?” I know it’s a long shot, asking an agent to give information in an ongoing investigation, but I’m desperate. I just need to know.

“Dead end,” the man answers kindly, before walking along with his dog and leaving me in the yard. Dead end. That means there was a lead to go dead. Meaning there was something to chase. My gut tells me the piles of dirt I found were bodies and the man that ran away killed them, or at the very least was involved in their deaths.

Another K9 unit comes out of the forest. It can’t be a good sign, because they practically spent no time in there. If you ask me, I’d say the kids were taken out of the house some other way.

A dog handler with a detective badge walks by, and I can’t hold myself back, even if I know he won’t answer my question.

“Did you find anything?”

He holds his dog back, who sits down on the lawn right beside me. The German Shepherd looks all cute and cuddly with his tongue out. That thing they say about owners looking like their dogs? Not true in this case. The detective eyes me, checking me out from top to bottom, even in the white paper overall I’m wearing. The way his eyes trail over my body leaves me with a dirty feeling.

“I’m not at liberty to say, ma’am.”

Yeah, I knew that, but I owe it to those kids to at least try. The whole reason we started FIX Foundation was because regular authorities fucked up way too often or just didn’t properly look into it. Even if the reasons are valid, like being short-staffed and underfunded, the job still has to be done. I expect him to move along now that he isn’t going to tell me anything, but he just keeps standing there, watching me. He’s getting on my nerves, and my hand itches to reach for my gun. My gun that isn’t there, because it’s currently being processed inside. Standard procedure, but fuck it, I need it right now.

“What?” I snap fiercely when he keeps staring at me.

“What are you doing here?” he asks, his eyes darting to my chest.

Creep.

“I’m with the FIX Foundation. We found the possible location of the children, and then I found the body in the building next door. I’m waiting to be cleared to get out of here.”

“Well, make sure you get home safe, girl. This is no place for you.”

I squint my eyes. Is he implying what I think he’s implying? Men like him always think anyone not working for the government has no business being here, let alone a woman. I choose to ignore it for now. What the hell is he still doing here? I can’t pinpoint what it is, but the man irritates me.

“I can give you a ride when we’re all finished up here. Are you hungry? Let’s grab a bite somewhere. Put some proper clothes on you and go out?”

Let me put on some proper clothes? Fuck this guy. I grind my teeth before I snap.

“Dude, are you for real?” I snap. “I just found a basement full of bodies, there’s kids missing, I’m standing here in a paper suit. I’m not going out with you, not now, not ever.”

The dog, which was cute just a second ago, growls at me, showing its teeth. Guess they do look alike after all. He keeps it on a short leash and starts to walk away.

“I was only being nice. No need to snap at me.”

The audacity of this man. I’m loudly breathing through my nose while I keep my chin high and glare at him.

“No, you were not. You were implying I shouldn’t be here. Well, where were you? Who would’ve been here if it wasn’t me? Were you out looking for these kids? Did you even know the corpses are of missing people? Because they’re dead. And if I hadn’t been here, you wouldn’t have known. Were you missing them? Searching for them? Sounds like you should’ve been here, but you weren’t.” Oh, I’m on a roll now.

His mouth tightens as he glares right back.

“Bitch,” he snipes.

“Well, right back at you.”

I turn my back to him and start pacing the lawn. Women in my line of work don’t get appreciated enough. We not only have to do exactly the same job as all the men, but we also deal with constant flirting or sexual intimidation because there are so few of us. My task force of two make their way over to me. Scott clasps my shoulder when he reaches me. The silence between us is comfortable. We’ve worked together long enough that words aren’t always needed.

“Did they find anything?” Alex asks in his deep voice.

“They’re not at liberty to say,” I answer, rolling my eyes. “But that first guy said something about a dead end, so I think there was a lead, but they ran into something. Second team was back too soon. Kids were not taken out through the woods.”

Scott rubs his eyes. “Think the hack team will be able to find them?”

“Yeah,” I answer without hesitating, looking at Chester, working. “We’ve got our own Pit Bull who won’t let go. We’ll get them. I just hope it’ll be in time.”

A police officer walks out of the house, holding some plastic bags and heads straight over to us.

“All your belongings are in here,” he states as he hands each of us a bag. “All has been processed for evidence. If you’ve given your statement, you’re free to leave.”

I nod and take my bag from him. “Thank you.” My clothes and my gun are in the bag. Any other personal belongings I leave at home or at the office whenever we’re heading out. I don’t feel comfortable taking them out on missions.

“Why don’t you head home with Ches?” Scott says. “We’ll stay here with Dylan until they’re done processing the scenes.”

I nod. I desperately need a shower to make the stench of this whole day disappear.

“What are you doing?” I ask Chester as he walks over to the driver’s side of the car.

“I’m driving us back,” he states as he sits down and closes the door behind him.

“You don’t know how to drive!”

“Yes, I do. I have the knowledge needed to be able to drive, I just don’t have the experience.”

“Or the proper documents,” I murmur so he can’t hear me as I walk around the car to take a seat in the passenger’s side. I can already see this is an argument I’m not going to win.

“Just think of this as me having my learner’s permit, and you can instruct me on the finer details.”

I step into my own pick-up truck and buckle my seatbelt as Chester starts the car. Thank God I don’t drive stick because the thought of those poor gears grinding as he tries to shift is too much to handle at this particular moment. He puts the car into drive, steers it into the street and drives away. He’s not doing a half-bad job either, but there’s some room for improvement.

“Ten and two,” I tell him, as he’s doing a sloppy one and nine with his hands.

“Twelve?”

“What?”

“You said ten and two.”

“For your hands! Position your hands at ten and two!”

Without answering me, he obliges and repositions his hands. We turn a corner, which he does without signaling, but I let it slide, gently bringing it up in conversation before we have to make another turn. It’s late in the afternoon, the worst of rush hour is over, and we’re not in a busy area anyway. If he’s going to learn how to drive, these might be the best circumstances.

During the drive I teach him the difference between passing the steering wheel between your hands and grabbing it over. We stick to a route that doesn’t go over the highway, and before I know it, we’re nearing Chester’s house. He parks the car over two parking spots, but who cares? They’re all his and it’s private property.

Smugness spreads over his face when he takes the keys out of the ignition. He’s beaming with pride, and I don’t have it in me to crush his happiness.

“Aren’t you glad I can drive now?” he asks, jumping out of the car. “Saved you the effort of driving yourself back here.”

When I see this craziness for what it really is, his way of taking care of me because he’s worried, my annoyance evaporates. Climbing out of the car, I walk over to him, leaning into him as he puts an arm around my shoulders.

“Thanks for bringing me home, Ches.”

And just like that, we start walking home.