Tellings of the Time: Complete series

10. 10

Chester walks into my office, energy drink in hand, wrinkled Rammstein shirt half tucked into his baggy jeans. I think it’s the second day in a row he’s wearing this shirt, but the days are blurring together a little at the moment. I’m finishing up some of the administration that comes along with the job. Mainly rounding up the case. There are forms to fill in and hoops to jump through, and seeing as we’re not with any official authorities, there’s a lot of extra paperwork to cover all our bases and make sure everything’s above board.

Chester sits on the edge of my desk, plants his feet on the armrests and turns my chair using his feet so I’m facing him.

“What’s up?”

“Got something that might be something,” he says, wiggling his feet, making my chair wobble along with his nervous habit. I swat his feet away and give him a glare. I lift my chin, signaling him to go on.

“Three girls have gone missing from a local foster home in the last six months,” he says, his eyes saddening. “It’s not the first time girls have gone missing from that particular home. I’ve found some old traces on the dark web about at least one of them being sold off about three years ago.”

I release a long breath. This isn’t a social talk, this is a sales pitch. Not that I’m a hard customer, I’ll take on any case I can if I can help.

“Nobody is doing anything about it. They’re foster kids, they tend to run away. Besides, they’re black girls, so everyone just assumes they got themselves in trouble. They’re between the ages of twelve and fourteen, so the official conclusion is that they’ve run off with their boyfriends.”

I huff. A twelve year old doesn’t run off with a boyfriend. It’s just another prime example of authorities not bothering to put in the work and the money to find these girls. Yes, they’re greatly understaffed and underpaid, but to solely make assumptions based on racial profiling is sickening.

And it happens. Way too often. We just tend to give more media coverage to the exceptions than to minorities. Little blond Betty with her big blue eyes just gets more viewers, and that seems to be all that counts. Not that I think Betty doesn’t deserve to be saved, I just think that the same goes for every other kid too.

‘Missing white girl syndrome’ studies call it. So more money and more time are invested in a smaller group of children, making the chances of the so-called minorities returning home safely even slimmer.

“So, what got them on your radar?”

“Uncle of one of the girls is fighting tooth and nail for her. He was in the process of getting custody, but she disappeared before it could be arranged. Says she’s a good kid, who would never run away. Especially not now that she was this close to being with family again. Just doesn’t make sense for her to run away.”

That does sound hinky. Thank God for that little girl to have her uncle in her corner. Chester is spinning his ring with his middle finger as he puts his feet back on the armrests of my chair again and starts wiggling.

“What’s the evidence? What’s making you so sure they didn’t really run off?” The question is more of a formality than Chester having to convince me, because my guts tell me he’s right. Just from this slim introduction I know he’s onto something.

“Did some digging into the owner of the foster home. On paper, she’s a single woman in her fifties, but there’s been a lot of reports from neighbors calling the cops about her boyfriend who seems to come over regularly. She is barely making ends meet on the state’s stipend, but the boyfriend shows a pattern of withdrawing large sums of money despite being on the edge of bankruptcy for years, always somehow managing to get by.”

He pushes my chair away with his feet, starting up the screen of my laptop again. He types in my password, because why the freaking hell would I try to password-protect anything from Chester, and starts tapping away on my keyboard as I sit back and watch. The picture of a balding man in his fifties or sixties shows up on my screen. His hairline is receding, his cheeks are hollow and his teeth are ruined.

“Drug use?” I ask Chester, as I keep looking in the eyes of Duncan Manser. The way he looks at me from the computer screen is enough to make me feel greasy and like I should take a shower.

“That’s my best guess. And I think he’s pressuring the foster parent to sell them. Every time he runs completely out of money, a girl disappears.”

Yeah, that’s too suspicious to be a coincidence. Fuck, if there was any evidence to begin with, it’ll be gone by now. By sitting back and doing fucking nothing, authorities have slimmed their chances of getting these girls home safely. Although home is a word these girls probably don’t know. I ball my fists. Ignorance is bliss and all that, but other people’s ignorance is just infuriating.

“What about the girl that was sold on the internet three years ago?” I ask hopefully.

Chester crouches down next to me, his hands in a praying position tapping against his mouth. “Put up for sale for sexual services, nothing standing out to be honest. But the fact I can find evidence three years later means we’re dealing with amateurs, which would suggest that these last three girls are also being handled by amateurs, giving them at least a chance.”

I nod my head, forcing myself to focus on the three recent girls. If I let myself wonder about all those I didn’t save you could lock me up in an institute and throw away the key.

“What are their names?” I give in.

“Latoya Dalheur, Serena Neale and Jo-Anne McKey,” Ches answers me, looking up at me through his lashes with his big blue eyes. The crease between his eyebrows is the only sign of his anxiety breaking through, but the look of fierce determination has the upper hand.

Well, let’s get Latoya, Serena and Jo-Anne back safely.

“No sir,” I hear Miranda’s raised voice, which is odd, because she keeps up with Chester’s crap and she never raises her voice to him. Now, if there’s someone who deserves a stern talking-to every now and then, it’s Chester. But she’d never call Chester ‘sir’, making me realize she’s talking to someone else. So the fact that I can hear her all the way up in my ivory tower is saying something.

“Agent Sanders! You can’t just walk in!” Before I know it I’m opening the drawer of my desk, grabbing my gun and pointing it to the entrance. My finger is on the safety, ready for me to take it off. Beckett walks into my office like he owns the goddamn place, his eyes widening and his mouth falling open when he sees a gun pointing at him.

“What the hell are you doing, pointing a gun at me? You know that’s a criminal offense, don’t you?” he roars.

“Walking past my secretary without talking to her is a crime in my organization. So if you don’t barge in here, like the rules don’t apply to you, then I don’t have to point a gun at you, like the rules don’t apply to me. Tit for tat. Besides, safety’s still on and I know you can see that from all the way over there, because I can see your fly is open from all the way over here and I’d say that’s about equal.”

His eyes fall down to see if his fly is really open, which of course it isn’t and I put away my gun while he’s looking down. The look on his face sours when he sees I’ve fooled him.

“You’re so childish,” he chastises me.

“And you have as much fun as a hundred year old, who’s been dead for the last twenty years. What do you want?”

I’m really not too happy about him just walking in here like this. For all he knew I could have been in the middle of a sensitive phone call or been just otherwise focused on my work, reasonably expecting not to interrupt my train of thought. I don’t just sit around here looking important, I work hard to keep this foundation up and running. Being a Fed doesn’t owe you any favoritism. Not even if you’re looking all handsome in navy clothing that makes your eyes pop.

“I want to talk about some things that came up while we were examining the serial killer victims.”

“Sure,” I say with the straightest face I manage to come up with.

“Sure?”

“Yeah, sure, why wouldn’t I want to do that?”

“Because you just pointed a gun at me!” he says, raising his hands above his head. There’s a vein on the side of his neck that I can see thumping.

I shrug. “I’ll always help solve whatever crimes.”

“Unless you’re committing them yourself.”

“I don’t have to solve them if I’m committing them myself, now do I? Listen, do you want my help or not? Because I can just as easily shut the fuck up right now.” That’s a complete and utter lie, because I wouldn’t be able to stay away from this case even if you’d swing a bat at me.

He grunts, and tries to take a seat on one of the chairs in front of my desk. “Eh, no, I don’t think so,” I tell him in my most icy tone.

“What?”

“If you want to speak to me, you can go through Miranda.”

“Miranda?”

“My secretary.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” he yells as he walks out the door to Miranda’s desk and starts talking to her in hushed tones. Chester sticks his head around the door, looking at me curiously.

“What was that?” he asks.

A wide grin spreads on my face. “Fun.”

Chester, obviously unable to ignore his curiosity, makes his way into my office. There’s a window right behind my desk, with a wide windowsill. He sits himself down on it, back against the window frame and his knees pulled up. He’s silently watching what’s going on outside down below in the streets, lost in thought. He looks tired, and I make a mental note to talk to him in a bit.

My phone rings, the screen showing Miranda’s name and I pick up, letting it ring four times, just because I can. “Hello darling.”

“Hey honey, I’ve got Special Agent Sanders here for you. Do you have time for him right now?” She puts the emphasis of her sentence on the word ‘Special’ and it’s inwardly making me chuckle. I wish I could see Beckett’s face right now.

“Yeah, send him right up, I’d love to see him. Remind me to give you a raise after this.”

Miranda chuckles, “I’ll put it on the agenda.” Chester is grinning like the Cheshire Cat. God, I love that boy and his tendency for mischief.

Beckett storms into my office again, looking annoyed as fuck. I’m getting way too much fun out of this. He’s so easy to rile up, mister goody two-shoes.

“Was that really necessary?” he asks as he sits down, his legs spread wide like he needs to make sure I remember he’s really a man.

“It was absolutely necessary. Apparently your mama didn’t teach you proper manners, so we have some catching up to do in that apartment.”

“Leave my family out of this. We’re here because twelve women are dead, not because we need to become friends,” he snaps.

My gut is telling me he’s under a lot of stress, working to solve this case. Chester watches him with a cocked head, his fingers tapping to some kind of rhythm only he can hear.

“That’s fair. So, what did you want to talk about?” I watch him with a tilted head, feigning boredom while in actuality I can’t wait to hear what he has to say.

He sighs, rubs his eyes and then lets his forearms fall onto his knees, staring at me with an immense intensity in those emerald eyes. I feel like he’s trying to examine me just by looking at me.

“We have a complete list of victims, and besides them all looking the same, we’re getting nowhere. They have different socio-economic backgrounds, they come from multiple states, they were taken in multiple ways, there’s no pattern in when they were taken. All they have in common is that they look the same. Which happens to be like you. So you’re our lead, you’re our common ground. He sends you things, and we don’t understand why.”

I don’t know how to answer that, because I have no clue why they all look like me.

“The thing is I can’t seem to find a reason why he would focus on you. There’s nothing in your past that indicates he’d target you. Besides the unfortunate situation with your parents. Could it have something to do with what happened to your parents?”

My stomach drops and I feel the blood leaving my face. I was not prepared for that question. And that’s my fault, because I should always be prepared for everything. I close myself off to everything I’m feeling before I start talking.

“My parents were killed by a hitman who was out for two other people. He took them by mistake, thinking they were someone else, he gagged and tied them and then drove their car into a lake. He’s been apprehended and sentenced and has since died in prison. I can’t see any reason as to why that has something to do with this.”

I tell him in my flattest voice, but my heart is pounding and I want to run away. Beckett just keeps staring at me, like my silence will tell him more than my words. It’s making me uncomfortable, so I start talking again.

“Can’t it be because I got a look at him when I saw him in the house and then when he was fleeing?” There’s a knot in my stomach that I need to go away. I don’t have any room for this at the moment.

“Unlikely. The coincidence of these girls looking like you is too big. It might have started off like that, but now you’re on his radar and he seems to be giving you special attention. None of the victims received anything strange before they were abducted, according to all the interviews with friends and relatives. No one reported anything suspicious.”

Chester stands up from the windowsill and starts walking to my desk. “So you mean they do have stuff in common?”

Confusion rises on Beckett’s face. “What do you mean?”

“All of them were abducted without warning, so he didn’t taunt them before he took them. That’s a commonality. You’re missing things. Let me look at your data, I’ll find something.” He opens my computer and types in my password. I automatically get out of my chair, giving it to him.

“You do not have the clearance you need to see the evidence. I don’t think we’ve missed anything,” Beckett says, his nose flaring and his lips flattened. Do I see that vein protruding again? Chester looks at me, I know he’s about to hack the FBI servers and grab the files for himself. The fact he only did so before to get me the names of the victims and not snoop any further tells me a lot. Chester is nosy, and for him to not have gotten into the files before at my request means something to me.

I walk over to Beckett, as Chester starts opening up systems and screens I don’t understand. The agent gets out of his chair, as if he knows what my friend is about to do, so I stand in front of him. He’s towering over me, all hard muscles. I won’t stand a chance against him if I physically have to hold him back. So I use the only other ability I can think of right now. My womanly wiles.

I press my body against him, and feel the warm and hot muscles of his body, and wow. Beckett is still trying to get to the desk and stop Chester, who’s typing away like he’s trying to set a world record. My hands fall on the panes of his chest, and I look up at him from beneath my lashes. In the back of my mind I find myself wondering if his ass is just as firm as the front of his body, but I force myself not to think about it, because it’s not what I’m doing right here.

When Beckett finally pries his eyes away from Chester and makes eye contact, I know I’ve got him. It’s like we’re glued to each other.

“Let us help,” I say in a sultry voice that’s not even an act right now. What the hell is happening with me? Damn. “We’re good at what we do.”

“It’s not the right way, we’re not going through proper channels,” he counters as he takes half a step forward, increasing the contact between our bodies.

“But what’s more important right now? Going through proper channels or catching this motherfucker?” He lays a hand on my shoulder, I think to push me away, but he doesn’t, he just keeps his hand there. Electricity sparks between us. My mouth parts and my blood pressure rises.

“Got it,” Chester says, and I force myself to step away, leaving the front of my body feeling empty. Beckett walks around me and looks at Chester’s screen.

“That”s our evidence!” he bellows.

“Well, no, these are my own files with typed words in them. Do you have a copyright to these words?” His eyes flick over the files he clearly just copied from the FBI files. Chester is a genius. Not just me praising him, no, he got tested and all that shit. He really is a genius. And the speed at which he can read is abysmal. His mouth falls open as his eyes read the lines, and I know that no matter what happens right now, he won’t notice. Bomb going off? He’ll just keep reading. Building collapsing? He’ll go down taking in every last bit of information.

Beckett, to my surprise, isn’t fighting it. I can’t pinpoint why exactly. He’s been a pain in our ass every step of the way, and now he just stands back and lets it happen? What’s that about?

“You missed shit,” Chester says, as he finishes up a few weeks’ worth of research from the FBI in under a minute. No matter how jealous that makes me, it’s impressive. “I need my own screens to show you,” he states before getting up, practically running to his desk.

He rubs the head of the little Kurt Cobain Funko figure on his desk before he opens up his screens. I’ve long since tried to understand why, but it’s something he does every time. My best guess is that it’s like rubbing the belly of a Budha or something, but he does so religiously. His screens light up and he starts clicking and typing like he’s in Armageddon and he needs to get those nukes to the core of the asteroid to save the whole world.

He pulls up a map of the states around Oregon and starts putting little flags in it. Then he opens up all the files of the missing women, and for a moment I’m staring at the pictures of them that were taken when they were still alive. Somehow it soothes me, because it’s a better picture to have of them in my mind than the horror-struck pictures I was sent.

“See?” Chester says, frantically waving his hand at all his screens.

“Ches, babe, lower the way you talk to puny-humans-level. Explain what you’re seeing.” I just see dots, and pictures.

Chester points at his screen with the map of the states surrounding Oregon. “It’s a clock.”

I squint my eyes. Yes, I see a circle in the dots he’s made, but that’s it. “Punier humans talk.”

Chester sighs. I know it’s something he struggles with, but I also know he understands we’re not all on the same level. He squeezes the bridge of his nose, then focuses his eyes on me, like we’re the only ones in the room. It’s something we’ve worked on through the years to help him. “It’s a clock. A clock has numbers. Look at the dates all the victims got taken. Victim number one? Got taken from where the one would be on the map. She’s also buried in the basement where the number one would be. Second victim? Got taken on the second day of the month, from a place where number two would be on the clock, and is buried in the basement where the number two would be. This goes on, it works out for all the victims.”

I stare at the screen, look at the dots, and the dates and force myself not to think about the basement as the ghost of the smell of limes reaches my nose again. He seems to be right. He’s bound to be right, he wouldn’t tell me if he wasn’t right.

“What the fuck,” Beckett whispers as he gets closer to the desk. Seeing him lose his professional standard somehow makes him more human to me. He leans on the desk with both his hand, his nose near the screens. “What the fuck,” he repeats, a little louder this time. He reaches around to grab his phone out of his back pocket andtaps on it, pressing the phone against his ear soon after.

“Winny, we missed something. Something big. This changes everything. Will have it sent over right now.” He then beckons Chester with his chin to do so.

“Aw, Becky, would you like me to use my email to send it over, or should I use yours again?”

“Fuck you, Chester. Just send the damn files over. If I ever catch you using my email again I’ll make you regret it.”

Chester just grins, and I feel like chuckling as well. I don’t know what this means, but it feels big. And sick. I let my eyes glide over the screen again. We need to fix this, and soon. Because it feels like this isn’t over yet.

I’m actually laying down on Robin’s leather ottoman. I’m a walking, well, lying, cliché at the moment. Robin has been staring at me for the last three minutes, and I’ve just been lying here, staring up at the ceiling, counting the tiles. There’s sixty-four, by the way. I release the longest breath ever, and then turn my head to Robin.

She’s looking at me over her moon-shaped glasses and patiently waiting for me to start, notebook and pen ready. There’s a slight crooked grin on her face, and I think I can understand why. I called to have a crisis meeting for both me and Chester, and now I’m here, I’m keeping my trap shut. It’s a little ironic.

“So,” I say.

“So,” Robin concludes.

“Sooooooo,” I try again.

This time Robin shuts up. I almost look at the ceiling again, but I close my eyes instead. “So, there’s a fucking sick serial killer and he’s personally harassing me, sending me photos of his victims, and they look like me, but also at the same time he helped us save four kids we might not have been able to save and I think I’m falling in love with one of Chester’s old hook-ups and I’m so fucking confused.”

She looks at me and gives me her most motherly look. I know what the next question is going to be, and I don’t want to hear it, but she asks the question anyway.

“And how does that make you feel?”

“I just told you, it makes me confused.”

“Confused is not a feeling, confused is a state of mind. What do you feel in your gut? I know there’s a lot of feelings there. You trust your gut feelings like it’s an atomic clock telling you the time.”

I sigh again, and start counting the tiles again, as if this time I’m going to get a different result than sixty-four. Halfway through I find a method to deflect the real question.

“About what part of my statement?”

“I don’t know, Morgan. What part of that statement do you want to talk about?”

I opt for the easy out. “The falling for Chester’s old hook-up part.”

“Well, how does that make you feel?” Damn that woman and her questions. Damn her to hell.

“I… Confused… Well, kind of excited? But a little guilty as well.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Robin says as she starts writing on her notepad.

“I mean, he’s been with Chester, but now we’re sort of dating, and I felt myself falling for him, and I really want to be with him, but it’s weird, you know?” I’m rattling, because I believe that if I only get it out fast enough the words can’t catch me.

“How does Chester feel about it?” Robin asks, never looking up from her notepad. I love that she never judges me. This really is my safe haven.

“He’s the one who gave my number to Remy.”

“Then where’s the confusion and weirdness coming from?”

Yeah, that’s a really good question. Where is it coming from? I’m getting weird gut feelings from Chester. And Beckett is making me feel kind of hinky. But Remy is making me feel like I’m worth a million bucks. Which might be pocket change for him, I suddenly realize. I wrap an arm in front of my eyes.

“I don’t know, can we talk about the serial killer thing now?”

Robin chuckles. “Sure, how do you feel about that?”

“Really? Mostly sad. There’s a very big layer of anger, but beneath that layer is sadness. I’m missing my parents a lot lately. I don’t know if it’s related, but it’s making me sad.”

Robin nods. “And this Remy is making you less sad?”

A smile forms around my mouth. “Yeah, he is.”

“Then my advice hasn’t changed. Start feeling what you’re feeling. Start allowing yourself to feel whatever it is you’re feeling. You’re right on track, you can figure this out. Acknowledging that there’s sadness beneath the anger is big. Anger is easy, anger is all-consuming. Knowing that anger comes from sadness? That’s huge. Now, figure out what you need to either fix the sadness or deal with feeling sad.”

I huff. Just this one time I wish she’d had a magic prescription that says ‘one fix fits all solution, no work needed’. She hasn’t been able to provide me with that so far. We end our conversation and I wait for Chester in the lobby. He doesn’t get out of Ryan’s office angry for once, he looks kind of deflated with his shoulders slumped.

“Wanna talk about it?” I ask him.

“Nah,” he says, staring at his feet. “You?”

“Nope,” I answer, making the p pop.

“Can I drive?” Chester suddenly asks, surprising the shit out of me.

“Sure,” I answer as I hand him the keys to my car.

“Ten and two, right?” he asks as he takes the keys.

“Yeah, ten and two.”

The whole drive home I think about two girls, human beings reduced to numbers on a clock.