Janice is Missing

by Rod Kackley

  Janice heard the man curse.

  But was it a different man?

  His voice was different.

  The basement door opened.

  Janice opened her eyes just a slit.

  This was another man. This was a small, skinny guy, someone Janice thought might have been in the basement once, maybe twice, but this was not the guy who was in charge.

  He was carrying something that was rolled up in an old carpet or blanket.

  Fuck.

  Janice saw a pair of bare feet sticking out of the carpt.

  Fuck.

  She had been there, too.

  Janice knew.

  It was another woman.

  She screwed her eyes shut tight and did her best to play dead. If she could have used magical powers to evaporate or become one with the wall, Janice would have done that. The last thing she wanted was to be noticed.

  The skinny man dumped the woman about five feet away from Janice.

  The woman was crying, whimpering, whispering as she begged him not to do it.

  But he did it.

  Janice recognized the sound.

  She knew what the woman was feeling.

  Janice had been there, too.

  The woman tried to fight back. The man slapped her hands away, then punched and kicked her until she stopped moving.

  Janice heard her whimpering. She heard the man breathing faster, harder.

  The woman begged him not to hurt her. Then when he did, she pleaded with him not to kill her.

  Finally, she prayed to God to make it stop.

  But God must have been too busy.

  Janice knew what that was like, too.

  There was nothing either woman could do about it now.

  All they could do was submit.

  But soon, very soon, Janice promised herself and the other woman, I will get us out of here.

  We will be free.

  And we will make them pay.

  Nineteen

  The idea that this fat, old guy, who was nothing more than a beat cop with a badge, could have possibly known for years what Joy had been struggling to learn the past few months did take the wind out of her sails.

  But, it couldn’t be right, could it? How could this neanderthal of law enforcement have beaten her to the punch by, let’s face it, decades?

  Joy sat back in her chair, glanced at Amanda, who seemed ready to cry, put her hands together under in chin, and asked, “But no one believed you?”

  “Wait,” Amanda said, pushing a hand toward Joy. “Better question: Who did it and why?”

  Joy ceded that point to her protege, raised her hands into the air palms up, signally to Jimmy that it was his turn, and they were willing to listen.

  Now, it was Jimmy’s turn to lean back in his antique office chair, cross his legs, put his hands behind his head, look from Joy to Amanda and then back to Joy.

  This was Jimmy’s moment in the sun, and he was not going to waste it.

  “Let me start at the beginning,” Jimmy finally said. “Your first victim was who, Cheryl something?”

  Joy and Amanda nodded.

  “Last seen when, and with whom?” Jimmy said, stressing the whom of the question so these millennials would know that he too could speak elite English, just like a college-educated cop.

  “Somebody named Tim, right?” Joy said. “They were in his car, making out, at St. Isidore Park.”

  Amanda squirmed.

  “Right,” Jimmy said, “Somebody named Tim, her boyfriend, hoping to do the nasty at St. Isidore Park in the back seat of his car.”

  Joy was losing patience. Never one to sit quietly while she was being played by someone who thought he or she was the smartest one in the room, Joy jumped out of her chair.

  “We know that. We are aware it was someone named Tim,” Joy said. “But there couldn’t be any evidence against him, or anyone else, or an arrest would have been made, right?”

  “Yeah,” said Amanda. “Tim, Tim, Tim. That’s all anybody says. If everybody is so sure this Tim was involved, why wasn’t he arrested? Maybe there wasn’t enough evidence? Maybe we should put him aside and find the real killer? Or maybe these are just all suicides?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe?” Joy shouted. “Jesus Christ, what a waste of time.”

  “Hold on,” Amanda said, standing up herself and putting a hand on Joy’s shoulder to calm her boss. “If you have known this for so long, why didn’t you put together a case against this Tim, or whoever?”

  “I tried,” Jimmy replied, “but they didn’t want to hear it. They would rather think girls were killing themselves then they had a serial killer running around loose.”

  “What about Chief Doolan?” Joy said as she sat back down.

  “He thought it was some kind of BDSM ring, but that was really taboo, so he never even brought it up.”

  Now, this was something Joy could put her arms around. This was even a better story.

  “Was he right?”

  “He was close,” Jimmy said.

  Joy inhaled and opened her mouth to ask the obvious follow-up question, “How close?”

  But before she could start, Esther marched into the division’s headquarters, almost knocking over a couple of interns who were in an aisle between two desks looking at something on an iMac screen.

  “Stop, just stop,” Esther said. “You aren’t going to believe this.”

  Joy, Jimmy, and Amanda did as they were told. They stopped.

  Esther put one hand up and another on her chest as she made a show of catching her breath.

  “Well, what?” Joy said, looking at Amanda, Jimmy Mack, and then back at Esther.

  “We’ve got another one,” Esther said.

  “Another what?” Amanda said.

  Joy looked up at her protege from behind her hand, peeking out between two fingers.

  “Another victim,” she whispered. “We’ve got another dead girl.”

  “Allie somebody,” Esther said.

  “Doesn’t anybody get last names around here?” Amanda said.

  “And there’s more,” Esther said. “It’s McGuire by the way, Allie McGuire.”

  She and Amanda locked eyes on each other, waiting for someone to blink.

  “Okay, okay,” Joy said. “What else?”

  “Emily Richardson is dead.”

  “What?” Joy said, rising again out of her chair.

  “Holy, fuck,” said Amanda.

  “Emily Richardson,” said Esther, putting her hands on Joy’s desk for support. “Somebody found her last night.”

  Jimmy Mack was the only one still seated.

  “Where did they discover the body?” he asked. “In the forest?”

  Esther nodded.

  As Joy took a breath, carefully thinking what to tell her troops, her people spoke to her.

  A cheer went up in the room outside her office.

  “What now?” Joy barked, outraged that her interns were huddled around a computer screen, evidently playing some kind of online game.

  “We found her,” said one intern.

  “Found who?’ Amanda said as she pushed her way past a surprised Esther and around Joy.

  “Janice,” said another intern.

  “She’s right here,” said intern #3.

  Joy had to admit they were right. Janice was right there, on the screen of an iMac Retina 5K, and she was naked as the day she was born, smiling for all the worldwide web to see.

  "Holy fuck," Joy whispered.

  “Yeah,” Jimmy Mack agreed, “Holy fuck.”

  Twenty

  Amanda clicked the computer screen off well before Jimmy, or the interns were ready to stop watching.

  Joy wasn’t really ready to stop either but agreed with Amanda they had to move quickly and couldn’t spend another minute just watching. They had to start doing.

  “How did you find that?” Joy asked, looking for one intern to another.

  “We just started Googling,�
� said one of the interns.

  “It wasn't that hard,” said another.

  “What do we do now?” said the third.

  That was a good question. Unfortunately, Joy wasn’t sure she had an answer good enough to match.

  She looked at Jimmy Mack. This might be the perfect time for a professional to take over.

  Jimmy Mack smiled at Joy, and then at the interns.

  “Was it a pay-to-play site?”

  The interns nodded in the affirmative.

  “Then there has to be some kind of records on her, Janice, and her customers,” Jimmy said. “She must have been taking credit cards.”

  “We could find out who was hosting the site,” said an intern.

  “Maybe she set up payment options through the host?” said another.

  “Exactly,” said Jimmy Mack, surprising the room with his knowledge of how pay-to-play sex websites operated.

  “How does any of that help us? Is this all we have found?” Amanda said as she turned in her chair and looked back at interns, who smiled at each other.

  “It will take forever to find a list of her customers’ credit cards, and then we have to contact each of them,” Amanda said. “God only knows how long that will take.”

  “We’ll need some kind of a court order, right?” said Joy.

  Jimmy Mack had to admit she was correct, and so was Amanda. This was not going to be easy.

  Joy took another breath and glanced at the interns. She might not have been the consummate, old St. Isidore PD detective that Jimmy Mack was, but Joy wasn't stupid. Something else was up. They hadn’t told all of it yet. They were holding something back.

  Joy thought that the old line about grinning like a Cheshire cat that her grandmother used to say would be a pale description for the looks on the interns’ faced. They couldn’t wait to tell Amanda and Joy what they had found. They were waiting to see who would go first. But they also knew it would be like unwrapping the Christmas presents. Once they finished the thrill would be gone.

  Joy taped her foot. She loved suspense as much as the next person, but now that this bombshell about Janice had been dropped, her inner-writer was itching to be released.

  This definitely was going to be the best story ever told in St. Isidore.

  “Well?” Joy said.

  Joy wasn't stupid, but neither was she a psychic.

  There was no telling what these interns had discovered.

  Finally one of them spoke.

  “We found the common thread,” said a young man with a shock of dyed-pink hair cut in a Mohawk.

  “There is one thing, one person, that ties all of the victims together,” said a girl who didn’t look a day over fourteen, but who must have at least thought herself old enough to get a beautiful sleeve tattooed on her right arm.

  “They all have it in common, every one of them,” said the third intern, a young man who must have been the chairman of his school’s Young Republican Club when he wasn’t at the Chronicle.

  This guy is going to grow up to be a publisher, Joy decided on Day One when he walked into the newsroom.

  Joy took a deep breath and held it.

  Jimmy Mack sat down, put his elbows on his knees and his three chins in his hands, looking like a man who knew the answer to the puzzle on Wheel of Fortune, but had to wait for his turn.

  Amanda lightly tapped the tips of two fingers of her right hand on her lower lip.

  If she didn’t get the interns to talk and talk quickly, Joy was afraid Jimmy Mack and Amanda might explode in a red mist of frustration.

  “What?” Joy nearly shrieked. “What do they all have, STD? What?”

  “Well, we looked at all of their Facebook pages,” said the pinked hair Mohawk.

  “Twitter accounts, Tumblr, Instagram, Snapchat, Kik. we looked at everything,” added the female sleeve.

  “I don’t think we missed anything,” said the Young Republican.

  Amanda wasn’t breathing. Jimmy Mack was, but obnoxiously through his nose that must have been as clogged as his arteries. Joy leaned back and sat on the edge of her desk, ready to drag the truth out of her interns even if it meant she would face St. Isidore’s version of the post-World War Two Nuremberg trials.

  “Tim Sheldon,” Jimmy Mack said, slapping his hand on his knees and quickly lifting his +250 pounds into a standing position.

  “Tim Sheldon,” said intern #1

  “Tim Sheldon,” said #2

  “Tim Sheldon,” said #3, the Young Republican who crossed his arms in a very self-satisfied manner that Joy might have commented on if she hadn’t been so confused.

  Joy noticed Amanda had her elbows on her knees and her head in hands in the attitude of an airsick passenger who would soon desperately need a paper bag.

  Jimmy Mack was on his phone, doing his best to use a meaty, stubby finger to tap the correct buttons.

  “You should get going. I will meet you at his house,” Jimmy Mack said.

  Joy looked at him, at Amanda and at the interns.

  Finally, she turned back to the man destined to become her favorite cop of all time to ask, “Who the fuck are you calling?”

  “Calling headquarters,” Jimmy Mack said. “We’ll need backup.”

  “Let’s go,” Amanda said, as she picked her face up out of her hands, and stood slowly, with the resignation of one ready to walk the plank or the stairs to the gallows.

  “Go where? Call who? Backup why?” Joy spit out each question faster than a chicken would peck the ground for feed.

  “Tim Sheldon,” said Jimmy Mack. ”I’ve known it all along.”

  “Maybe we all have,” said Amanda as she started walking toward the office door.

  “Freeze!” Joy said, slamming the door shut before Amanda could reach the door knob.

  “Nobody leaves until somebody tells me who the fuck is Tim Sheldon.”

  Twenty One

  Paul had always assumed it would happen one day. But why did this have to be the day? He and Tim had an excellent time the night before with Janice and Allie in the basement.

  Paul finally had his own girl, and Tim had his. There was no more sharing, no more sloppy seconds, and best yet, never again would Paul have to just sit and watch while Tim showed him what a man he could be.

  The truth was that Paul had felt jealous of Janice. She had all of Tim’s attention. She was all he cared about. Paul was playing second fiddle just he had in high school. But back then he was just a weak nerd. Now he was a cop who was locked, loaded and ready for combat.

  That is exactly what Paul want to make sure Tim understood now.

  The first text that rattled Paul’s cage had shown up on his phone as he was getting out of his civilian clothes side the St. Isidore P. D. locker room at the start of his shift.

  Paul was looking inside his locker wondering if the weather was going to flash cold enough again to wear department-issued boots—the early spring had just been a tease—when he heard the "ding" alert that a text message arrived on his phone

  “Doolan has assigned cop Jimmy Mack to help with the Chronicle's serial killer investigation.”

  Oh fuck, Paul had thought. That motherfucker has had a hardon for Tim for years. Ever since Tim had called Paul for help when he had accidentally killed Cheryl, and then the two of them had killed Evelyn on purpose, Officer McKenzie had liked Tim for the killings.

  “Thank God nobody wants to believe him,” Tim had said about a year after the first killings.

  “It helps that your brother is a cop,” Paul had mentioned.

  Tim agreed and pointed out that it was his brother, John, who had helped convince the detective squad Cheryl and Evelyn must have died as part of some kind of kinky joint suicide pact.

  Tim always felt like John knew the truth. But just like the rest of St. Isidore, nobody really wanted to believe the truth; at least not this truth.

  Lumpy Doolan was John’s best friend at the police academy, and the two had some kind of a blood brother pact t
hat pushed McKenzie out of the picture.

  But McKenzie had not gone away. When Paul joined the force, Jimmy Mack always seemed to be right over his shoulder, and always seemed so suspicious. Worse yet, Officer McKenzie always appeared to have the confidence that it would be just a matter of time before he cracked the case.

  It might take decades — and it had — but Sgt. James McKenzie would make this case. Jimmy Mack had made that promise to himself because no one else either cared or wanted to listen. But this was the pledge that had kept him going.

  Routinely passed over for promotion after making sergeant and getting a detective's badge, McKenzie refused to give up. He was like the kid digging through horse shit who was convinced there had to be a pony somewhere in the mess.

  Paul had sent Tim a text telling him about McKenzie as soon as he was able to close a bathroom stall door for a little privacy.

  Tim had not responded. That concerned Paul. But it was a school day, and Tim would be working. Paul was sure they would talk about it more before going downstairs to see the girls.

  It was the second text Paul received while he was changing out of his uniform and back into his civilian clothes, knocking the snow off his boots, that scared him.

  “McKenzie and Chronicle reporters going to Tim’s house.”

  Shit and double shit. Tim wouldn’t be home when they arrived. That meant Jimmy Mack and a couple of reporters, probably those bitches who’d been nosing around Emily Richardson and the other parents, would at the house waiting for him.

  They might walk around and look in the windows. They might even look in the basement windows.

  Fuck. This could be bad. This could be awful. Paul decided to text Tim with an urgent message.

  "McKenzie, reporters going to the house."

  Tim called back immediately. He was in the parking lot ready to drive home, shivering, while he waited for the frost to melt off his windshield.

  “Fuck!” Tim said the instant Paul answered his call. “I thought McKenzie was dead.”

  “Nope. He didn't die, and he refused to retire.”

  “Did he ever talk to you about, you know...”

  “Sure, well, I mean sometimes.”