Mounted

by E. H. Reinhard

  “It’s on the other side of the building, facing the other way. Second-story unit. I think it’s the first one in on the far side here,” King said.

  “So the roommate wouldn’t have been able to see the vehicle from their apartment.”

  “Nope.”

  “So what she was saying about not noticing her car out here could hold up,” I said.

  “We kind of tossed around the idea that the roommate was involved, back at the office. I mean, someone goes missing, generally you look at the closest person—especially with her vehicle being here and left in the way that it was. We just don’t have anything to suggest that she was involved, yet we don’t have anything to suggest that she wasn’t, either. Her alibi of being home alone all day leaves a little to be desired, I guess.”

  “You checked over the apartment?” I asked.

  “My guys said nothing seemed off.”

  “Did you run a forensics unit through?”

  “We didn’t, but it might be something that we have to do if we don’t get something that points us in another direction,” King said.

  “Do you know if she’s home?”

  “The roommate?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I don’t know. She just lives on the other side of the building, though. Did you want to pop in there and see?”

  “I do,” I said.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  We rounded the building to the first set of doors on the far side. The doors themselves had small black numbers designating the address tacked to them.

  “This is hers here.” King reached out and knocked.

  A dog immediately began barking inside. From the high pitched yelping, I figured the dog to be some kind of small breed.

  A moment later, I heard the sounds of footsteps coming down stairs. The door pulled open.

  “Ms. Bromley,” King said.

  “Oh, hi. Just Jessi is fine. Did you guys find anything out?” she asked.

  “Unfortunately, not yet,” he said. “We were just stopping out here for a look around.”

  “Sure. Did you guys want to come in?” she asked.

  “Please,” he said.

  “Both of you are fine with dogs? There’s one upstairs. It’s a Yorkie, about this big.” She held her hands up in about a ten-inch circle.

  King looked at me.

  “I’m a dog person. It’s fine,” I said.

  She motioned us inside.

  As we entered and walked up the stairs to the second-level unit, I thought about the fact that if the roommate was involved, she probably wouldn’t have invited us up. I stepped from the top stair into an area of the apartment between the living room and kitchen off to my left. I looked toward the far side of the living room and spotted a small gray-and-brown long-haired dog perched on a couch cushion and staring back at King and me. The dog let out a good ten seconds of high-pitched barks, left the couch, and ran toward us.

  “He’s just showing off,” she said. “Barney, you be quiet before Paul next door starts bitching.”

  The dog continued barking, and a moment later, we heard thumping on the back wall of the living room. The roommate grumbled, scooped up the little dog from the carpet, and held him under her arm. She walked to the far side of the room and banged her fist against the wall behind the television.

  As she walked back, she said, “Sorry. The neighbor, Paul Something, isn’t the biggest fan of my dog or me, I think. Any chance he can make that known, he does.” She stood before the chief deputy and me. “What did you guys want to have a look at? Anything I can do to help, just let me know.”

  The second she finished her sentence, we heard more banging from the adjoining apartment.

  “God!” she said. “He is just the worst. Like a week or two ago, I think he was trying to set up some kind of sting operation to bust me not cleaning up after my dog outside. I mean, my dog goes to the bathroom in one spot outside, and I’m a responsible owner. I pick up after him every time. It’s just annoying. And then about a month ago, he called in the car of one of my friends, who was staying for the weekend, as being abandoned and got it towed. Anyways… Again, I’m sorry. What did you guys want to look at?”

  King and I dismissed her neighbor issues, asked her if we could just have a look around, and proceeded to go through the apartment. I kept my eyes searching for signs of blood. After years of working in homicide, I’d learned the most commonly overlooked locations—the bottoms of door and wall trim, ceiling corners, kitchen-cabinet edges, under the lips of the kitchen counters. After looking high and low, I didn’t see anything that raised any red flags. King let the roommate know that he would keep her updated and would be in touch. We left her and walked back out to the front of her apartment building.

  “Probably not worth the trip, huh?” King asked.

  I shrugged. “It was on my way. Figured it couldn’t hurt to stop and have a look for myself. Do you know if anyone talked to the wall-banging neighbor?”

  “I’d have to check the case file to see who we received statements from and what apartments they resided in. It’s in my car. It would probably just take a second to check.”

  “Let’s just go give his door a knock and ask. Obviously, he’s home,” I said.

  “Sure.”

  We rounded the building toward the back side, where the missing girl’s car had been parked, and looked for the front door of the neighbor’s apartment.

  “If they shared walls, I’m guessing it would be just like her apartment was on the other side. So, the first bank of doors in.” I pointed at the door.

  We approached, and King pressed the doorbell. A moment later, a man wearing a blue sweater and khaki pants answered the door. The bottoms of his pants were tightly rolled—a style that had come and gone from fashion in the late eighties and early nineties. I put him in his late fifties by the amount of gray on the sides of his round, balding head. He adjusted his oversized glasses on his nose and stared at us.

  “Agent Hank Rawlings, FBI.” I showed him my credentials. “This is Chief Deputy King from the Oldham County Sheriff’s Office.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Your name, sir?” I asked.

  “Paul Samson.”

  I took my notepad from my inner pocket and wrote down his name. “Were you the one just banging on the wall?” I asked.

  He pulled his head back. “Is that a federal crime? Wanting a little peace and quiet from someone’s yapping mutt?”

  We dismissed his remark.

  “Sir, did you speak with anyone from my department regarding the missing woman in your complex?” King asked.

  “Missing woman? No. I just returned home late last night.”

  “And you were where?” King asked.

  “Visiting my father, who is ill, in Michigan.”

  “The date you left?”

  “I was gone for over a week. Why?”

  “Anything to prove that?” I asked.

  The man grumbled and waved us into his apartment. “I’ll show you my damn itinerary. Come up.” When he turned to head up the stairs, a braided ponytail swung on the back of his balding head.

  We followed the man into the apartment and upstairs. My nose filled with an odd smell I couldn’t quite put my finger on. We stopped between the living room and the kitchen of his unit, which was a mirror image of the roommate’s we’d just come from. I noticed his wood-cabinet-encased television, which looked like it was from the sixties or seventies. I glanced to the corner of the living room to see two suitcases with the tops open but fully packed—though the clothes appeared to have been worn. The outsides of the suitcases were covered in duct tape.

  The man continued on to his small dining-room area and rummaged through some papers on the table. We followed him. I glanced around the rest of the items set on the table, including a clear resealable plastic bag with toiletries inside—his toothbrush had brown bristles, which was unsettling. My eyes went to the rest of the items—some airplane pe
anuts, a phone charger, a plastic hotel-room key card, and a set of headphones.

  The man pulled a paper from the pile and held it out toward us. “Here, here’s my itinerary.” He dug back into the papers and pulled another. “Hotel information. I have my boarding passes in my carry-on over there.”

  We glanced at the man’s papers briefly, including the boarding passes, and handed everything back to him. He either had a damn-well-thought-out alibi or was truthful. I had his name and could easily call to confirm if he’d made his flights and had in fact checked into his hotel.

  “Just confirming,” I said. “You haven’t been here in the last week? Saw anything suspicious out back here?”

  “No, I haven’t,” he said.

  “Okay, thank you for your time, sir.” I motioned at King, and we started toward the stairs that would take us back down to the front door.

  “Out back?” the guy asked.

  I turned back toward the man. “Correct.”

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “What are you looking for? You think something may have happened back here?” He pointed toward his patio doors, referencing the back lot of the complex.

  “We do,” King said.

  “I have a camera that’s been running. I don’t know how much it picked up over the last week, but we can take a look.”

  “You have a camera facing the back lot?” I asked.

  “I set it up a month or so ago. People weren’t picking up after their pets, and after stepping in dog mess a few times, I went to the management and filed a complaint. I told them to see who it was on the camera in the lot, and they told me they were having some difficulties with them. The cheap bastards just didn’t want to replace them, probably. Well, I went out and bought a camera to see who the person was not cleaning up after their dogs. I figured I’d show whoever I got on tape to the management. And if that didn’t work, at least I could confront the person.”

  I stood there thinking the guy shouldn’t live in an apartment complex that allowed pets if he wasn’t prepared for the occasional foot in poop. His wall banging and the extent to which he’d gone to bust a neighbor showed me that the guy probably shouldn’t live around anyone. However, he might have had camera footage that would help us, so I played nice. “That’s totally understandable. We have some irresponsible pet owners in my facility as well. It can be frustrating.”

  “Right?” he asked.

  “Yeah, so that camera footage?”

  “Sure—one second.” The man walked to the patio doors, slid them open, walked out, and returned with a small handheld camera. “The light is still on. I guess their claim of a ten-day battery is fairly accurate.”

  Neither King nor I responded.

  “This thing is motion activated and can pick up video at night fairly well. Hold on—I just need to get the memory card out and plug it into my computer.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  The man fiddled with the camera, slid out a small SD card, and powered on his laptop. He plugged the memory card in and brought up some app that must have been for the video camera. “Here we go. Any idea what you’re looking for?”

  The screen on his laptop flickered and played a clip of a car parking at night. I took a look at the screen, noting that the recording was black and white and not entirely clear. I chalked it up to being due to some form of night-vision feature the camera was using. My eyes went to the left side of the screen and the empty stall, where we’d been told Katelyn Willard normally parked. I knew that, while we wouldn’t be able to get a look at anyone’s face clearly enough for any kind of positive ID, we’d be able to get a pretty decent view of what happened, provided the camera had done its job and recorded when Katelyn Willard pulled up the night she went missing.

  “Can you go by date?” King asked.

  “This thing just kind of gives me a total run-time bar down at the bottom of the screen. I can drag to one spot or another to go forward or back. There are time-and-date stamps, so I don’t think it will be too hard to find.”

  “We’re looking for this past Saturday night, starting around nine at night,” King said.

  “Okay, I should be able to get that up. Did you gentlemen care for a cup of herbal tea? Maybe some Kool-Aid or a glass of milk with a little honey?”

  The offer struck me as odd, which went along with just about everything else about the guy.

  “No thank you,” I said.

  King quickly declined as well.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  William sat on the top of his washing machine. His swaying feet made a metallic thumping sound as his heels contacted the metal door on the front of the washer.

  “How’s your breakfast?” he asked.

  The woman, shoveling a handful of eggs into her mouth with her dirty hand, took a break from her chewing. “Go to hell.”

  “So the eggs are to your liking, then? Better than the dog food you’ve been eating?”

  “Someone will find me. You’ll burn for this.”

  “Doubt it,” William said. “I almost have everything dialed in. It won’t be long now.”

  “Yeah, you’ve said that before.”

  “Do you know what’s interesting, Erin? You haven’t once asked about what I’ve been doing with the women in the other room. I’ve heard you yell out to them and try to talk to them in the middle of the night. They can’t respond to you, which I’m sure you’ve realized by now, but I know you can hear me with them through the wall. You can hear them plead for their lives. You can hear me kill them. You can hear the saw.”

  She didn’t respond.

  “What does that say about you that you have no questions or worry for others?” William asked.

  She jammed another handful of eggs in her mouth and spoke over her chewing. “You’re trying to play mind games with me, trying to scare me. I’m not that stupid. There’s no other women over there.”

  “Then what is the noise? Where do the screams come from?”

  “I don’t care,” Erin said. “A television, a recording, who knows? Maybe it’s you sitting over there doing an interpretation of a woman. You put a hood over my head every time you take me from this room. You won’t let me see what’s going on over there. If there was blood and guts and dead people, I’m sure you’d want me to see that. Something to strike the fear of death into me. All I get is the little bit I can hear. You have sound deadening all over the walls in here. Barely audible voices that I can’t make out and a scream or two every now and then is all I get. The fact is that you’re a coward, William. You don’t have the testicular fortitude to actually kill me, someone you’ve said multiple times that you want to kill. Why would you have the balls to kill someone else? You’re going to keep me locked up and threaten me until someone finds me. Then you’ll go to jail, and I’ll go back to work. Forget the sports-anchor position—I’ll be a celebrity after doing the circuit of talk shows before I end up getting a national anchor seat. If you actually had any intentions of killing me, you would have done it.”

  “Nice theory,” William said. “We’ll see. I think you’ll end up being impressed by my testicular fortitude in this matter.”

  She tossed the empty pie tin through the metal bars of the large metal crate she was locked in. The tin clanked off the floor, sending some remnants of scrambled eggs bouncing on the cement near the clothes dryer.

  “That wasn’t very considerate of you. Now I’ll have to clean that up,” William said.

  She spat at him through the thick metal bars.

  William chuckled, scooted himself off the washer, and grabbed the pie tin from the floor. “I guess we’re going to go back to the dog food then, seeing as how you’re being a little bitch.”

  Erin grabbed the bars of her enclosure and shook the door, which bounced and rattled the padlock keeping it closed. “Let me out of here!”

  William caught the time on his watch. “I will around noon. Gotta take the dog for her walk outside so she can do her business. I’d enjoy the outdo
ors this time if I were you. Probably won’t be too many more trips out in your future.”

  Erin screamed and wailed. William paid her no mind and left the laundry room. He closed the soundproofed door at his back and stared at the woman across the room, named Courtney, whom he’d picked up the night prior. She, like those before her, was restrained to the wall—her arms outstretched and shackled, her feet the same. William walked across the clean plastic-covered floor, around the table in the center of the room, and stood before her. The woman had been awake since the night before. William had woken a few times throughout the night and heard her crying, sniveling, and whining into the ball gag in her mouth.

  William took her by her chin and turned her head to face him. Courtney didn’t resist.

  He stared at her face and turned her head from one side to the other. “You’re older than I would have liked, but for my little test, I think you’ll do just fine. I suppose I’m about ready to get this show on the road. What about you?” William reached behind her head, undid the straps securing the gag, and let it fall to her feet. He waited for her screams to come, but they didn’t.

  “Please,” she said. Her voice was low, barely above that of a whisper.

  “Please what?” William asked.

  “Let me help you.”

  “What?” William cocked his head. “Help me? Help me with what?”

  “Anything,” Courtney said.

  “Help me kill you? You know that’s what’s coming, right? I’m going to kill you.” He stared at her, but her facial expression didn’t change. “Do you want me to kill you?” William asked.

  “No.” She lifted her head and looked directly into his eyes. “I just think that there’s maybe something we can do to avoid all of this. Maybe we can work something out?” A hint of a smile crossed her face.

  “I’m not sure what that just was, but there’s no avoiding it.”

  William turned and walked toward the knife lying on the table. He took it in his hand and returned to her. He tapped the blade against the palm of his hand. “I’m going to stick this knife into your heart. Care to hear what I’m going to do after?”