by Willow Rose
He blamed Dottie too.
“Pancakes!” Elizabeth yelled, as they sat down in a booth. Her sisters hid their faces behind the menus when a group of girls their age walked by. It broke Dottie’s heart.
“So, you want pancakes?” Dottie asked with a sniffle.
“Yes! Pancakes!” Elizabeth exclaimed. “I’m sooo hungry, Mommy.”
The pancakes arrived and the family ate in silence. James kept looking at his watch, like he had somewhere else to be. Dottie got the feeling he would rather be anywhere else than where he was right now. Elizabeth leaned in over her plate with her arms surrounding it, like she was afraid someone would take it away from her. Her older sister Tiffany laughed.
“She’s hoarding it,” she said.
“No, she’s not,” Dottie said. “Don’t talk like that to your sister.”
“Oh, come on,” James said. “She’s right. It’s like she thinks we’re going to steal her food…as if she really needs any more.”
The revulsion gleamed in his eyes. He wasn’t even trying to hide it. He was sitting on the edge of his seat, like he was ready to leave any moment. Dottie wondered how it had come to this. How they had all drifted apart like this. Had she been too busy attending to Elizabeth’s needs to notice?
“Okay then,” James said. “Let me have an end piece of your pancake, then.”
Elizabeth let out a desperate cry. “No!”
“Come on,” Dottie said. “Let Daddy have a little piece. You have an entire stack of pancakes. He doesn’t have any.”
“NO!” she screamed. “If he has a piece, there won’t be enough to fill me up! You’re not going to touch my food!”
The girl screamed so loud everyone in the diner turned to look. Dottie felt how she blushed. Was she embarrassed of her own daughter?
Elizabeth couldn’t stop screaming. “I’m so hungry! I’m starving!”
“That’s it,” James said and got up. He threw a few bills on the table. “I’m out of here.”
“You can’t just leave,” Dottie said. “It’s Elizabeth’s birthday.”
“I’m done,” James said. “I can’t take this anymore. Every time we go somewhere with her, she screams like that. It’s even at the house. I’ve told you this for years. You pamper her. You’ve completely spoiled her. I don’t know how many times I’ve told you to stop feeding her.”
“But…but…I’ve done everything I could, James. You know that. I put locks on the refrigerator and everything. I think something is wrong with her. I really do. I think she really believes she is starving and she is desperate for food. That’s why she tries to break the lock to get into the refrigerator. That’s why she attacked the fridge with that hammer the other day. Because she genuinely believes she is in desperate need of food. Every minute of her waking day is filled with this intense hunger. I think we need to get her help.”
James looked at Dottie and snorted. “Nonsense. It’s all just nonsense. You feed her too much, that’s it. If she can’t understand that, then she needs to be disciplined. No one was ever harmed by a good spanking. That’s how my parents taught me what was right and wrong.”
“I’m not going to hit her. What are you saying, James? I’m telling you. It’s not her fault. She can’t help herself.”
James shook his head. His eyes glistened in contempt. Dottie had never seen such resentment in her husband’s eyes.
“Of course she can. Just like everyone else. She has no self-control. Look at her. She’s a whale.”
“How can you say such a thing?!” Dottie yelled and got up.
James threw out his arms. “You know what? I give up,” he said.
Then, he turned on his heel and left. Back in the restaurant, Elizabeth had attacked Dottie’s plate and started shoveling down her food using her fingers, while crying for more.
“I am hungry, Mommy. I’m so HUNGRY!”
Chapter Forty-Four
March 2015
We sent out a search for a black truck, a Ford with YRJ on the license plate and the bumper sticker saying “Shit happens” to all the TV stations, newspapers, and even radio and had them ask people to look for it. We even posted about it on Twitter and Facebook, in various local groups. Two days later, we had a breakthrough.
Richard came to my desk in the morning when I had just gotten in and had my first cup of coffee. He leapt towards me and I knew something had happened.
“We caught a break, Ryder,” he said. “Finally. We found the truck.”
“I’ll be…Where?”
“Parked outside a house on Indian Creek Drive in Cocoa Beach. A local patrol spotted it. It had a sticker like described and the license plate ends with YRJ.”
I strapped on my Glock and asked Beth to come with me before I rushed out. On the way, I called Weasel, the Head of the Cocoa Beach Police Department, and asked her to send all the men she had to the address.
“We think the truck belongs to the shooter at Runaway Country,” I said.
“Already done,” she said with her raspy voice. “Joel, Jim, and Marty are almost there. George was the man on patrol. He’s waiting for all of you there.”
“Who does the house belong to where the truck is parked?”
“A Jennifer and Travis Goodman. That’s all I know so far.”
“Does the truck belong to them?”
“Yes,” Weasel said.
Ten minutes later, I drove through the roadblock into a quiet residential street. George, the officer who had spotted the vehicle during his patrol, pointed towards a truck parked in the driveway of a house from the sixties. It was placed on a canal and had a boat in the driveway next to it.
I walked closer and looked at the sticker on the back and the plate. It all seemed right. “Anyone tried to contact the owner?” I asked, looking at the house.
“They’re not home,” George said.
“You know them?” I asked.
“Sure. Travis used to be captain at the fire station next to us. We saw him all the time.”
“So, he knew Phillip Hagerty?” I asked.
“Sure. They were colleagues. Until Travis was kicked off the force.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Ah, it’s an old story,” George said.
“Tell it anyway.”
“Well, apparently, Travis wore some T-shirts at work that offended some people.”
I frowned. “T-shirts? What kind of T-shirts?”
“Racist ones. Some of the shirts included slogans like MADD—Minorities Against Dumbing Down, stuff like that. Apparently, it created a hostile environment, according to their supervisor.”
“And I’m guessing Travis wasn’t too fond of giving his job to Phillip Hagerty?” I asked.
George shrugged. “Probably not. Especially since it was Phillip who reported him for wearing the shirts.”
“Let’s take a look at this thing,” Beth said, as she came up to me. She grabbed her gun and started approaching the car, sliding up its left side. The windows were all closed. It was hard to see from where I was standing, but it looked empty.
“We need to get ahold of this Travis guy before he leaves town,” I said and grabbed the phone to call Weasel to ask her to bring him in. It was her town. She knew where the unemployed hid during the day.
While I was dialing the number, Beth grabbed the handle of the car door. I knew somehow, instinctively, at that second I should have stopped her, but it was too late. I looked up just as the truck exploded in an inferno of fire.
Chapter Forty-Five
March 2015
The killer was watching the scene.
Kabooom!
The bomb went off.
“I’m so sorry,” the killer whispered.
The killer put down the binoculars, feeling sorry for what had to be done. The radio played Shannon King’s newest album. The killer listened to the lyrics and sang along. The killer felt like sending her another email. The killer needed Shannon to know…needed Shannon to know how
sorry the killer was for what had to be done. Shannon hadn’t expressed gratitude for the killer ridding her of that bastard, Joe. She had been awfully quiet, even though the media wrote about her constantly, some even claiming she had her husband murdered. That wasn’t quite the point to it all. The killer wished they knew the entire truth. If only they knew how he used to beat Shannon up, how he used to mistreat his own family. The pig didn’t deserve any better. Once the killer had realized what was going on behind those doors, the killer just knew it was time for action. Shannon couldn’t do this all by herself. The guy wasn’t going to stop.
It had to be done!
The killer drove off towards the A1A and ended up on Minuteman Causeway. Sirens blared in the distance and several police cars passed the killer’s car on the way to the scene. A fire truck emerged from the brand new fire station next to city hall. The killer could still see the pillar of smoke in the rearview mirror.
“Such an awful mess,” the killer mumbled and stopped at Simpler Times Market to pick up some groceries. “So sad it has to be this way. But, what’s done is done. It had to be this way. It simply had to.”
The killer paid for the steak and beers, then left the store. In the distance, the pillar of smoke had disappeared. At least they had managed to put out the fire.
“I’m so sorry,” the killer whispered again, then drove off.
The killer stopped the car in front of the house and put it in park. The killer’s sister opened the door. “Did you get everything?”
The killer nodded and put the bags down in the kitchen. “First Publix, then Simpler Times.”
The sister smiled. “Good. Simpler Times is the best, don’t you think? Everything is organic.”
The killer never cared much about such things. A steak was a steak, wasn’t it? The killer grabbed a beer and opened it.
“Really?” the sister said. “At ten-thirty in the morning?”
The killer lifted it. “Cheers.”
The sister rolled her eyes. “You’re impossible. Well, at least you got the groceries right.”
“Anything for you, sis.”
“We do make a good team, the two of us, don’t you think?” the sister asked.
“I do.”
“I have to say, I’m really happy to have you here,” she said. “At first I thought it was a terrible idea, you know, based on how we used to fight as kids, but it has been quite nice to have you around, I must admit.”
The killer lifted the beer in the air again. The buzz was already taking off and drowning out the guilt. Life was bearable again. At least for now.
Chapter Forty-Six
March 2015
“BEEEETH!!”
I didn’t believe my eyes. I simply refused to believe it had happened. When the explosion sounded, Beth was thrown backwards into the air and landed in a bush. I ran to her. Her face was covered in blood, her eyes closed. I felt her pulse, while screaming for someone to call for an ambulance. All I could think of while performing CPR on her was the three children playing in her front yard.
“You’re not leaving them, Beth,” I yelled and prayed in desperation, while pressing her chest down and blowing air into her lungs. “Stay here. Oh, Jesus. Those kids need her. Let her stay, please, please, please.”
The ambulance arrived and took her away. Her pulse was weak, but she wasn’t dead yet. There was still hope. Luckily, she was the only one who was hurt by the explosion. It hadn’t been a very big bomb.
Just enough to kill one person.
It was the killer who had placed it there. I just knew it was. The same guy who had shot Phillip Hagerty and Joe Harrison at the country festival. The same guy who had killed four people in Miami six years ago. Unlike the majority of mass murderers in history, he hadn’t committed suicide; it wasn’t a planned suicide where he took other lives with him on the way. This was murder. This guy was a serial and serials didn’t stop until you made them.
While firefighters came and put out the fire, I grabbed my phone from the ground where it had landed when the explosion sounded, and called Weasel. She already knew what had happened.
“I need to find Travis Goodman, pronto,” I said.
“I talked to Jennifer this morning. She works at City Hall as a secretary. Travis moved out a couple of weeks ago, according to her. He lives with his sister in Cape Canaveral. Apparently, it was too much for them that he lost his job.”
“Give me the address and I’ll take the scumbag in on my own.”
“Don’t go alone, Jack,” she said. “You’re upset about Beth, I know, but he could be dangerous. Let me meet you there.”
I met Weasel outside the beautiful house overlooking the river in Cape Canaveral. We walked up the driveway and rang the doorbell. A heavily overweight man in his mid-thirties opened the door.
“Weasel?” he asked.
“Travis. We need to talk. Can we come in?” Weasel asked. “This is Jack Ryder from the Sheriff’s Office.”
“Sure.”
Travis moved aside and we walked in. The TV was on in the living room, the coffee table overflowing with chips and empty beer bottles. Weasel looked at it with a sniffle.
“Are you drinking beer before noon now?” she asked.
“What’s it to you?” he snarled.
I tried hard to hold back my anger, but it was hard. “Let’s cut the BS, shall we? Let’s stop playing pretend for a little, can we?”
Travis looked at me. He was wearing one of his racist shirts. It made my skin crawl. I thought about Emily and wanted to rip it off him.
“My partner is on the way to the hospital because of your little homemade bomb,” I said. “She has three children. They will be orphaned if she dies. Are you happy about that?”
I felt Weasel’s hand on my shoulder to calm me down. Travis stared at me. “What are you talking about?”
“Your truck. You own a black Ford, right? On the back it says, Shit Happens?”
“Yeah, but…”
“No buts…we’re taking you in.”
Chapter Forty-Seven
March 2015
“She’s alive, but in a coma,” the doctor says. “Her skin is badly burned. If she wakes up, she’ll need transplantation.”
If she wakes up.
Ron was standing in the middle of our room at the station as he told us the news about Beth. It was the end of the day and I had let Travis roast in detention for most of the day. He had resisted his arrest and Weasel and I had to bring him in by force. Now, he was yelling and screaming in his cell, stating he wasn’t saying another word without a lawyer. I didn’t care. I was upset. Not just because of his shirt, but about everything. I had made sure Beth’s kids were able to stay with the neighbor. Luckily, they were. Travis could get himself a lawyer if he wanted to. We had a pretty strong case against him. The truck that blew up was his, it was parked in front of his house, he had a grudge against Phillip Hagerty, and he was a stinking racist. He fit the profile of the psychopath we were looking for. I just needed more evidence.
While going through what I had, my phone rang. It was Yamilla.
“Ryder, I have finally finished the autopsy on Daniel Millman. With all that has been going on, I haven’t had the time until now.”
“Daniel Millman. I had almost forgot about him,” I said, thinking about the trail in the woods where we had found his body. It hadn’t been a pretty sight. “So, how did he die?” I sipped my coffee and spat it out when I heard the answer.
“His stomach exploded,” Yamilla said.
“What?”
“You heard me. It exploded.”
I put my cup down and didn’t even bother to dry up what I had spilled. “But how is that possible?”
“I don’t know. But it is. It’s not the first time it has happened.”
“But how?”
“It takes a huge amount of food and liquid. The stomach is capable of extending to quite a massive capacity, but even that has limits. It ruptured. The human stomach c
an hold up to three liters, and it risks rupture at the five liter point, just for reference. When you eat to the point that you think you might vomit, you’re probably at the one to one and a half liter level.”
“So, you’re telling me that he ate more than five liters of food?”
“It hardly sounds possible, right? I mean, think of it. When you know you’re so full you’re about to throw up, you have to power through that sensation and up your food intake to the level that will cause your stomach to rupture. At some point during this feast, your gag reflex will kick in. Now, it does happen that some people have such unusual eating habits that their bodies’ reflexes no longer respond as they normally would. If the reflexes have been ignored for a long time, the person would no longer vomit at the appropriate time. And then, when the stomach gets to this extremely distended point, the stomach muscles are too stretched out to be strong enough to vomit the food out. That’s one scenario.”
“What’s the other?” I asked.
“The food was forced into him over an extended period of time, causing his body to learn how to ignore its reflexes and let the stomach to expand till it burst. There are signs on his body indicating that might be the case here.”
“What signs?” I asked. This had to be one of the strangest cases in my time as a homicide detective.
“Signs of trauma in and around his mouth,” Yamilla said.
“Around his mouth? Hm. Given the fact that Daniel Millman was never overweight in any of the previous pictures of him that I’ve seen, it all seems quite dubious,” I said.
“It sure does,” Yamilla said. “Now, I have looked into it a little bit and found another case that has similar traits.”
