Chapter 13
W hen John and the ogre rounded a blind corner at the same time, they came to within an inch of running smack into each other.
It hadn’t been an accident. John had gotten there first and had seen the other man coming down the hallway toward him. He’d backed out of sight and waited until just the right moment to step around the corner and almost cause a collision.
“Hey, Frank, how’s it goin’?”
John’s friendly tone and amiable smile took the other man aback. “Uh, you know, typical morning. Another day, another dollar.”
“Tell me,” John said. “I’m up to my eyeballs in paperwork.” Making a point of leaning sideways in order to see around the man’s massive body, John looked down the hallway in the direction of Tom Barker’s office. “Is Barker in?”
Frank’s initial discomposure had worn off. Between pads of flesh, his porcine eyes turned into slits of suspicion. “Why?”
“Nothing major. Just something I’ve been wanting to talk to him about.”
“Run it past me. Maybe I can help.”
John brightened. “Maybe. Do you know anything about transmissions?”
The slitted eyes blinked several times. “Transmissions?”
“Yeah, I overheard the boss telling somebody—can’t remember now who—that he had a transmission guy who’s top-notch. Even better,” he said with a wink, “he gives cops a discount on repairs or replacement. My gears have been grinding lately, and I thought—”
“That’s a pile of bullshit, Bowie.”
John frowned with puzzlement. “Really? Which part? The boss doesn’t have a guy? Or he has a guy, but the guy doesn’t give discounts?”
The ogre gave him a baleful look. “I’ve got work to do.” He sidestepped John but deliberately rammed into his left shoulder on his way past, snarling in an undertone, “I’m on to you.”
“Goes both ways,” John said as he flicked a piece of colored paper at the ogre’s face. It hit him square in his broad forehead, bounced off, and fell to the floor.
The ogre looked down and saw that it was a gum wrapper, wadded into a ball, rain-soaked and muddy, but recognizable as the brand he habitually chewed.
He raised his oversize head. The two men stared eye-to-eye with full understanding of each other’s malice. The ogre was the first to break away and resume his progress down the hallway.
Earlier, when John had returned to his house to retrieve Beth’s things, he’d given the dwelling, the shed, and the property a thorough inspection. He’d even searched his SUV for a tracking device.
He’d found the gum wrapper near the entrance to the cul-de-sac. He figured the ogre had left his car on the shoulder of the main road while he’d explored the dead-end lane on foot.
After the torturous farewell scene with Beth in the hotel parking lot, he’d driven all the way back to the fishing camp, returned the compact car to the camouflaged garage, secured the cabin, and then had paddled the boat back to his house, where he’d dragged it into its hiding place.
Taking those precautionary steps had been time-consuming, but he’d felt they were necessary. He would have to be extra vigilant now that the ogre had discovered where he lived. He was even reluctant to leave Mutt alone in the house. Before locking him in, he’d told him, “If anyone poses a threat to you, tear his throat out.”
At least he’d made the ogre aware that he was aware.
Now, as he entered the CAP unit, he greeted fellow detectives with a raised hand or a terse hello but didn’t stop to chat with anyone. When he reached his desk, he booted up his computer and checked his email inbox, but only tackled the time-sensitive ones.
Or tried to tackle them. He would be in the middle of composing a reply when he’d realize that his hands had come to rest motionless on the keyboard. Sentences were left unfinished because his mind continued to revert to those last few minutes with Beth.
When they’d parted, the disappointment and accusation in her eyes had submersed him in guilt. Recalling those same eyes, dazed and lambent after their kiss, filled him with lust.
Re- filled him with lust. Because he’d been bedeviled ever since he’d slid into the booth in that bar and looked into her face. He’d wanted her before he’d learned that she wasn’t just some restless barfly hoping for an afternoon delight, but rather a smart and ambitious woman… who had the potential to make his life hell on earth again.
In that most unromantic of settings, he’d wanted her right then. He’d wanted to see what kind of hair was tucked under the ball cap. He’d wanted to see under her white t-shirt. He’d wanted to see her under him, naked and tangled up.
He still wanted that. But being around her also had awakened him to the hollowness inside him. The Mellin case and its aftermath had scooped him out. She’d been right about that, and he’d purposefully kept himself empty. But now, because of her, an alien yearning was seeping into that vacancy. He denounced it. He couldn’t give it a foothold. He must not.
“Not gonna happen.” He spoke in a whisper so the coworker nearest him wouldn’t overhear, but he felt he had to say it aloud in order to affirm it, to make it substantive and permanent.
And anyway, she’d made plain her contempt. Because he’d refused to get involved, she thought he was a self-preserving coward. Well, he would just have to live with her low opinion, because his refusal was final.
“So get over it, John.”
He propped his elbow on the edge of his desk and cupped his hand over his mouth. He stared at the words on his monitor, which he didn’t remember typing and could make no sense of now. He watched the cursor blink.
But his focus on it didn’t prevent him from hearing Beth’s impassioned voice. “… the individual who took Crissy… still out there… waiting for Thursday night…”
“Shhhhhit!”
Before he could talk himself out of it, he discreetly reached beneath his desk and into his boot, where he’d had a thin pocket sewn into the shaft. He slid a thumb drive from it.
After Barker was appointed head of the CAP unit, John had surreptitiously transferred the entire Mellin case file onto two thumb drives. He kept one in his boot. In the event that a cold case investigation into Mellin ever ensued and, coincidentally, John and the file were to suddenly disappear from the department, Mitch had the second thumb drive.
He inserted his into a port and began searching for a name and a telephone number in Galveston. It took him a frustrating twenty minutes to find that information; then he placed the call from one of his burner phones.
“Detective Morris, please,” he said to the person who answered. When asked to identify himself, he did. “I’m working a case here, and I believe Morris might be able to provide me with some background on a suspect.” He was asked to hold.
Moments later, a female voice said, “Gayle Morris.”
As John introduced himself, he realized that his palms were damp, his mouth dry. “I’m calling about a missing person case you had in May of 2022. Larissa Whitmore.”
He heard her sigh. “You don’t forget those.”
“No, you don’t. Were her remains ever recovered?”
“Negative. Not a trace.”
“What’s Patrick Dobbs’s status?”
“He was convicted of statutory rape, now serving his sentence. He’s filed an appeal.”
“On what grounds?”
“He claims that the whole time he and Larissa were together, she used a fake ID that put her age at twenty-one. It fooled bartenders as well as him. He didn’t know she was a minor.”
“That argument didn’t come out at his trial?”
“It did, and it was supported by several witnesses. But the prosecutor shot it down. He and Larissa were stoned, all over each other, sex was a sure thing. Therefore, the prosecutor argued, it would have been in the accused’s best interest not to question her age. The jury thought so, too.”
John fiddled with a stray paperclip as he pondered the blowback that might come from taking this conversation further. To hell with it. “Detective, please don’t think I’m a loony tune.”
She chuckled. “Can’t promise.”
John liked her. “Did you or anyone working on that case consider a tie-in with the blood moon that night?”
“Of course. Dobbs took Larissa out in his boat to look at it.”
“We had a young woman over here named Crissy Mellin. She disappeared on the night of the next blood moon, which was in November.”
“Yes, I know. When we learned about it, I assigned somebody to see if there was any correlation between your case and Larissa Whitmore, and also to two previous cases.”
“In 2018? Jackson, Mississippi, and Shreveport?”
“Yes. But nothing came of our inquiries. Dobbs wasn’t near either of those cities on the nights of the 2018 abductions. In fact, when one of them occurred, he was in Croatia on a humanitarian mission, teaching English to schoolkids.”
“So you never found any link?”
“None. What about your case? If I recall, your suspect hanged himself while in custody.”
“That’s right. Billy Oliver.”
“Didn’t he confess?”
“He signed a confession and claimed to have disposed of her body where it would never be found. You’ll be able to hear all about it on TV.” He told her about the upcoming episode of Crisis Point .
“I’ll be sure to watch. Are you in it?”
“No. But I was on the Mellin investigation team. Until recently, I didn’t know anything about the blood moon aspect. Zilch. I guess nobody thought it was relevant because you couldn’t even see the moon the night Crissy went missing.
“But this upcoming program has got me thinking back on that case. Four missing girls, four blood moons, four remains never discovered. It seems too bizarre a coincidence for our team to have overlooked the moon angle.”
She said, “That’s why I tipped you.”
John’s fingers went numb. He dropped the paperclip. “You tipped us?”
“Yes. As soon as I heard about your presumed abduction and realized the moon had been red that night just like when Larissa Whitmore disappeared. You were leaning hard on… Oliver, was it? But at that point he was classified as a person of interest. Jackson and Shreveport had never even gotten that far. Neither had nailed down a suspect, so, I thought until you had indisputable evidence on that young man, you’d probably want to check out those two cold cases, see if you could find a connection to yours. We talked about it at length.”
John bent his head over his keyboard and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Detective Morris, do you remember who in our department you talked to about it? At length.”
John burst through the office door with such impetus, it crashed against the inside wall, cracking the pane of glass stenciled with Tom Barker’s name.
He was sitting behind his desk, feet propped up on the corner of it, lazily swiveling back and forth in the leather chair, talking on his cell phone. He gaped as John crossed the room in three strides. In the process of rounding the desk, he knocked Barker’s feet to the floor, then yanked the cell phone out of his hand and hurled it against a file cabinet.
“What the—”
“You son of a bitch.” John grabbed a fistful of his shirt and hauled him out of the chair. He drove his other fist into Barker’s nose and relished the sound of cartilage crunching and seeing blood spurt from his nostrils.
Barker screamed.
John shoved him back into the chair with such force it rolled backward and slammed into the wall. The impact dislodged a brass plaque of commendation and sent it to the floor, barely missing Barker’s head as it fell.
John leaned over him. “You knew. You knew about those missing persons cases, their tie-in to the blood moon. Jackson, Shreveport, Galveston. You knew, but you didn’t follow up because you were too fucking intent on wrapping up Mellin and getting your promotion.”
He thrust his index finger toward Barker’s swelling nose. “I’m going to bring you down. For Billy Oliver. For Crissy Mellin. And for my own goddamn gratification.”
He withdrew his hand and stood up straight. “And if you send your gorilla to my house again, I’m gonna shoot him in his bloated gut. Not so he’ll die, but so he’ll wish he was dead. You’ll lose your muscle, and without him, you’re a limp dick.”
Barker glared at John from above the hand he’d placed over his smashed nose. “I’m gonna have you charged with assault.”
“Do it! I can’t wait to have my day in court. But in the end, I think it’s going to be you on trial, not me.”
“I want your badge and your service revolver on my desk. Now,” he shouted, although it was nasally. “You’re over, Bowie. Out! Fired!”
John threw his head back and laughed. He tossed his badge wallet onto the desk. He took his service revolver from its holster, removed the clip, and laid both on the desk. “Thank you. I can draw unemployment.” Leaning over the man again, he said with quiet intensity, “Now I’ve got no procedural boundaries, no job to lose, and that ought to make your asshole pucker.”
He straightened up, turned, and walked out of the office. Personnel who had congregated outside the door to watch the unfolding drama parted for him when he didn’t break stride.
As he passed the ogre, he paused and smiled at the man. “What I said about shooting you in the gut? I was kidding.” Leaning closer in, he said, “You mess with me again, I’ll blow your fucking head off.”