Murder Board

by Brian Shea

  The two disappeared inside. Barnes passed by just as a large man was shutting the door behind the two visitors. She looked up from her phone and shot a peek to the right. Coming out of the bathroom was Tabitha Porter. Barnes averted her eyes and the door closed. She wasn’t sure if the doorman noticed, but she needed to regroup and call Kelly.

  Barnes sprinted down the stairwell and collected her composure before returning to the lobby. The couple at the main desk were no longer there. The older man who’d been reading the paper was now huddled by the bubbler, taking advantage of the complimentary water. He smiled at her as she moved outside.

  She pulled her phone as she walked in a hurried pace toward her unmarked. Kelly’s phone went straight to voicemail. She hung up and hit redial. Same as before. This time she waited for the greeting message to finish, followed by the tone.

  “Hey Mike, it’s Kris. I got an eye on—”

  Her head fell forward. The stinging blow to the back of her skull sent shockwaves down her spine. She felt the impact of her forehead as it struck the driver’s side door of her Caprice. Phosphene stars fluttered across her field of vision before being swallowed by the darkness.

  25

  Kelly woke disoriented by his surroundings. Light seeped in through the thin lace of his mother’s curtains. He sat up and rubbed his eyes, Embry’s tiny frame slumped over his lap. She stirred at the jostling, but didn’t wake. Kelly checked his watch, 8:21 a.m. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept in.

  His joints popped as he stood and gave a long, welcomed stretch. The position he’d conformed to on his mother’s loveseat caused some soreness. Kelly rubbed at his rib cage.

  He took a moment to cover Embry with the blanket his mother must’ve placed on them before retiring for the evening. She was so peaceful, curled up in a tiny ball. Kelly laid a gentle kiss upon the top of her head before moving into the kitchen to fetch some coffee.

  Kelly’s mother was already up. She took a bite of her peanut butter and jelly toast, her morning dietary staple. She gave a warm grin as he entered.

  Kelly moved over to the pot. His mother made a strong batch of coffee and he looked forward to his dose of caffeine.

  “Why didn’t you wake me?”

  “Looks like you needed the rest. Plus, Embry didn’t want to separate from you and go to her room.”

  “I haven’t slept like that in a long time.”

  “I wish I could say the same. Your daughter had me watch the entire movie while you snored away. That giant shark gave me nightmares.”

  Kelly laughed. “I didn’t believe anything could scare you.” He gave his mother a kiss and pulled up a nearby chair. Kelly spoke in a quieter tone. “Do you have any idea what Brayden was referring to the other night?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He said, maybe it’s time I knew. Knew what? Not sure what he meant by it. I’ve been kicking it around in my brain ever since.”

  His mother refused to make eye contact and picked up the last bit of her toast. “You know Brayden. He says crazy things sometimes, especially when he’s hopped up on whatever kind of poison.”

  “That’s the thing. He wasn’t high. Trust me, I know these things. Brayden’s a mess, no doubt about it, but the other night he was clear of mind. Clearest I’ve seen in a while.”

  She chewed slowly. He could tell there was more to this conversation than she was letting on. He’d never registered any deception from his mother in the past. She was a woman who was open and honest. But everything he saw in her now pointed in one direction. His mother was holding back almost to the point of lying. Kelly burned with the need to know why.

  His daughter crept in from the living room shrouded in the blanket. She shuffled her feet without picking them up off the ground. Kelly saw his mother was glad for the interruption; she slowly got to her feet. Balancing on her cane, she ambled to the cabinet above the counter. “What can I get you for breakfast, my dear?”

  “PB and J on white toast.” Embry sat on the other side of her dad.

  “A girl after my own heart.”

  “Can you put extra jelly? My mom doesn’t let me have it at home. Says it’s too much sugar.”

  “Maybe that’s because you’re already too sweet.” Ma Kelly set about making the meal.

  Embry handed her dad his cell phone. “Here you go, Dad. Sorry I made you turn it off last night. I know you got important stuff to do.”

  Kelly smiled at his daughter’s gesture. “Nothing’s more important than you.”

  Kelly forgot he’d turned the phone off. He realized that was also a contributing factor in sleeping through the night. He pressed the power button and sipped at his coffee while the phone booted up.

  Once the startup was completed the phone repeatedly beeped and vibrated with text and voicemail alerts. He scanned the texts first and saw the majority were from Devers, with one from Barnes. Then he looked at the voicemails, one from Devers and one from Barnes.

  He listened to the message from Barnes first. “Hey Mike, it’s Kris. I got an eye on—” The words interrupted midsentence. There was a bang of metal and it sounded like the phone hit the ground. He could make out the garbled voices of a male. Maybe two men. Then, a loud crunching sound before the message ended. Everything about it registered as bad. Very bad.

  Kelly tried calling Barnes back. It went straight to voicemail. He then checked the message from Devers.

  “Hey Kelly, it’s Brush. Got the skinny on that girl you be looking for. Told you I’m good like that. Yo, anyways. She at the Bayside, room 612. The spot by the old lotto joint. Hit me back. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll give a shout out to your fine-ass partner. Later days.” The message ended. He looked at the time. Devers left his message an hour before Barnes’s disconcerting voicemail. Devers’s text messages said much of the same.

  There was one text from Barnes. Heading to Bayside. Checking out Devers’s intel. Let you know if it’s good.

  “Ma, I need you to watch Embry. I’ve got to go.”

  There was no argument from his daughter this time. She must’ve seen the worry in his eyes.

  Kelly drove through the steady traffic like a Richard Petty on the last leg of the Daytona 500. The Saturday morning flow was nothing like the bumper-to-bumper of the weekdays, but this was Boston and traffic was never great. Barnes would’ve been proud of the way he rode the bumper of the car in front of him. He had his wigwags and visor strobe activated, but in the gray light of day his unmarked Impala did not catch the attention of the other commuters. Kelly chirped his siren and cleared a path.

  He’d already called Sutherland and given him the situation. To say his direct supervisor was a ball of concern, and pissed to boot, would be a disservice to the definition of either word. Members of the Eleven were dispatched to assist.

  The tires squealed as he entered the hotel’s parking lot. Kelly recognized the familiar face of Sergeant Cooper, a man he’d served under and with during his time as a street cop in the rough C-11 District. The man was as tough as he was fair.

  “Sarge, how’s it looking so far?”

  “Detectives Hardy and Casallas are processing the scene by the car.” Cooper pointed in the direction of Barnes’s vehicle. “I’ve got a few officers inside the hotel working on pulling the surveillance. The manager was initially less than cooperative about coming in on his day off to assist. Apparently not a fan of police, but not to worry. I told him we’d have to shut down the main lobby until we were able to figure out what’s going on.” Cooper gave his version of a smile. “I think he got the message. He arrived a few minutes ago.”

  Kelly walked over to where Barnes’s Caprice was parked. He recognized one of the detectives. Hardy had been in C-11’s bureau when Kelly had been a patrolman. The other face, a younger man, he did not recognize.

  “Hey, Greg. Anything?”

  “Not much. Her phone’s smashed, but other than that we’re not seeing much in the way of evidence. We’ll know
more once we process the car. Maybe we’ll get lucky and get a usable print.” Hardy shrugged. “At least there’s no blood.”

  “Thanks. Keep me posted if something pops up.”

  Kelly strode away toward the main entrance to the hotel. Prints or lab work wasn’t going to cut it. Barnes was in trouble and he needed something to go on, and he needed it sooner rather than later.

  The doors slid apart, and Kelly entered the lobby. He veered right and walked to the clerk standing behind the desk. He flashed his credentials. “Where are they?”

  The receptionist lifted a plank where the front desk connected to the wall and ushered Kelly into a short hallway to a door marked Manager. It was ajar, and Kelly entered, bumping one of the patrolmen in the back.

  “Tell me we’ve got something, fellas.” Kelly squeezed himself in. The small office was now much smaller with the two patrolmen, the manager, and Kelly.

  “The person who paid for the room did it in cash and used a BS name of John Smith. They checked in at 9:17 p.m. so we’re running the tape to see if we can get a visual on a car from the camera on the exterior of the lobby entrance.”

  “Good thinking,” Kelly said.

  The manager was hunched over the controls, manipulating the frames. A few minutes before the check-in time a white van pulled in. Kelly watched as Tabitha Porter stumbled out with several other girls. The frames edged forward, but the plate had a cover, and at the angle of the camera, nothing was visible.

  The manager continued to slow play the footage. Then Kelly saw something. “I need you to slow it down even further.”

  The manager did as he was instructed, and the images on the screen jittered frame by frame. “Stop.”

  Frozen in black and white was a dark-colored sedan, the same vehicle he’d seen Tabitha Porter and the unknown girl drive away from the nail salon in.

  “Can you zoom in?”

  “I can try. Sometimes this system doesn’t cooperate.” The manager pressed a button on the keyboard and Kelly almost did a rendition of his mother’s jig.

  On the screen was a clearly discernable license plate. Kelly wrote the alphanumeric combination in his notepad. “Keep running the tape and see if you can get any clear visuals of any of the men escorting these girls. Send me anything you get.”

  Kelly called in the vehicle information to dispatch. The Audi A8 returned to a leasing company out of Ohio. No information came up regarding the registered owner. It would take some digging to get that. In the meantime, dispatch put out a BOLO, or Be on the Look Out broadcast, on the car to all members of the department and neighboring agencies.

  He left the cramped space of the manager’s office and made his way through the lobby and back outside. Kelly made a point of stopping by Sergeant Cooper before he left.

  “I put the plate out on the broadcast.”

  Sergeant Cooper nodded. “It just came over the radio. Where are you headed?”

  “I’m going hunting.”

  “You didn’t know, or you did. Either way, it makes you one of the dumbest people on the planet! Who kidnaps a cop? And worse, you brought her to this house.”

  “What did you want me to do?”

  “I should’ve taken off your damned head instead of your hand!”

  “Let me make it right.”

  “No. You’ve already proven yourself worthless lately. Maybe you lost too much blood during your little surgery. Regardless, it’s his turn now. Hopefully, he proves more capable.”

  “Please. Don’t put this on him.” The man’s voice quavered slightly. “He’s just a kid.”

  “I told you, he’s part of our crew now. It’s his rite of passage. We all had to do something similar. Now it’s his turn.”

  Barnes heard the voices. They were close, but there was a barrier muffling the clarity. She had a splitting headache resonating from the back of her skull. It was dark. She smelled a strange combination of dank mustiness and heavy cologne. Barnes made an effort to move, but her arms were restrained behind her back by some type of cord. Her wrists were tethered to her ankles, hogtied. The more she squirmed, the tighter the bindings cinched down, cutting into her skin. Her eyes were wrapped in a cloth, sealing out the light. Barnes had no reference for time, nor could she account for how long she’d been unconscious.

  She was lying on her left side in a distorted fetal position. Panic started to set in when she felt the plastic she was lying on. The cold seeped up through the ground, penetrating the plastic and entering her bones.

  “It’s time to earn your keep, little man,” a man’s voice echoed. Barnes noted an Eastern European accent, but in her haze couldn’t bring forth the mental clarity to pinpoint its origin.

  Barnes listened to footsteps walking away from her. The voice hollered back from a distance, “Not here. Drive her to the Lower Mills.” A door slammed, followed by the roar of an engine.

  “Grab an end,” an accented male said.

  Barnes felt the plastic curl around her. Suddenly the air around her mouth turned warm and sticky; she found it difficult to breathe. And then she felt the hard tug as her body dragged over the concrete floor. Her mind raced as she was hauled away.

  26

  Kelly looked at the map on his phone. His mind raced to connect the dots, knowing every second Barnes went unaccounted for meant a diminished return on the probability of finding her alive, if at all. After Danny’s death, he vowed to never let anything like that happen again.

  The body of Faith Wilson was found on Von Hillern. The nail salon was on Dorchester Ave. The brothel was on Millet Street. Barnes was snatched while surveying the group at the Bayside. All of those places were located within Dorchester. Kelly wagered whoever was responsible must be local to the area.

  Kelly knew these streets. He also knew there were a million places to hide among the homes and businesses packed into the six square miles of Boston’s most population-dense, diverse section.

  He started his search at Dot Center and began spiraling out from the intersection of Dorchester Ave and Savin Hill. The one-way streets and staggered loops slowed his pace. Most of the houses in the residential areas were multi-family triple-deckers, which meant lots of cars parked in the streets and small lots behind the houses. Kelly didn’t have time to get out and check the backs of each house. He hoped he’d get lucky by covering more ground and did his best to scan the vast rows of curb-parked vehicles for the Audi. He’d driven by several, but none matched the plate he was looking for. He noted the location and license plate of each in his notepad as he passed by, in the event they’d changed plates. Kelly tried not to think about that and focused on what he could control. Right now, it didn’t feel like much.

  As he crept down Pleasant Street the radio crackled to life. “Car forty-one, I got eyes on the suspect vehicle heading south on Treadway. Coming up on Savin Hill.”

  Kelly’s heart skipped a beat. While experience had quelled most of his physiological reaction to police stress, the thought of stopping this car and getting a lead on finding Barnes caused his adrenaline to kick in. The dump of epinephrine coursed through his blood and his hands trembled. Kelly gripped the wheel tightly and pressed down hard on the accelerator. The Impala resisted and squeaked out its mechanical protest.

  “Turning onto Savin.”

  “Keep a loose follow. Wait until you have another unit with you before you attempt to stop,” the distinct voice of Cooper ordered.

  Kelly picked up his mic. “I’m only a block away. Forty-one, you should be seeing me behind you in a sec.”

  “Forty-one copies. Passing Dot Ave now.”

  Kelly whipped the car hard taking the corner at Pleasant and Dorchester Avenue. It was the quickest way to intercept and catch up with the cruiser. He saw the light blue stripe of the rear bumper of the patrol car up ahead and maxed his Impala’s RPMs, closing the distance. “I’ve got eyes on you. Light it up!”

  The cruiser’s light bar activated and the LED blue and red pulsed their strobed patt
ern. The siren reverberated off the neighboring houses. Kelly was tight on the bumper of the squad car. The Audi slowed and began pulling to the right side of the street. The cruiser slowed with it, keeping a distance of two car lengths.

  Almost at a stop, the Audi’s tires squealed wildly, and the car shot forward. It took an immediate right onto Aukland, down the wrong way of the one-way street. The cruiser kept pace and Kelly followed.

  “In pursuit. Vehicle traveling south on Aukland. Speeds at 80.”

  Kelly heard responding units chiming in their location and possible intercepts. It was all background noise to the roar of his car’s engine as he fought to keep pace.

  The Audi blew the stop sign at the intersection with Bay Street. A vehicle proceeding from Bay barely missed a side-impact collision with the fleeing suspect. The car veered sideways and redirected into the path of the cruiser in pursuit. The right front corner of the civilian’s bumper clipped the right rear of the squad car, sending it into a spin. Had it not been for the lag of his car, Kelly would’ve been next in line for a head-on impact. But the Impala’s poor performance gave him enough of a gap in space and time to expertly navigate the two crashed vehicles.

  Kelly zigzagged through the scattered cars. As he zipped by the disabled cruiser, he saw both patrolmen were dazed but okay.

  “Collision at the intersection of Bay and Aukland. Forty-one is out of commission. I’m now lead in the pursuit. Audi approaching the T-intersection with Dewar. Speeds 70.”

  “Break it off. It’s too dangerous,” a nasally voice said over the radio.

  Kelly focused on the road ahead. He wasn’t sure who was calling termination of the chase.

  “This is Lieutenant Duff. I said break it off!”

  Kelly slid on his nearly bald tires as he braked to avoid a car pulling out from a back lot between two houses. The jerkiness of the erratic movement caused him to drop his microphone. He focused on driving.