The Kid: A Suspense Thriller (A Reed & Billie Novel Book 3)

by Dustin Stevens

“Last night Dennis Weston was murdered in his home,” Grimes said. “It seems someone broke into his wife’s car and she drove them there, was lying in wait when he arrived.”

  He paused there, his gaze fixed the length of the empty second floor, at 10 minutes after 7:00 the entire station still sitting empty.

  “He walked in and saw his wife tied up, went to help her, was hit in the head by the killer. From there he was tied up in an elaborate configuration, basically ensuring that he strangled himself while the killer and his wife both sat and watched.”

  Reed drew a sharp breath in through his teeth, the sound audible, pulling Billie’s gaze up to him. She raised herself from her stomach to her front paws, her neck pressed against his thigh, as he waited for the captain to continue.

  “The killer remained until Weston was dead before turning and walking out. Even dialed 911 from the house phone on his way.”

  Questions upon questions sprang to Reed’s mind, the conditioned response of a detective already in the midst of an investigation.

  Still, he remained silent.

  “They arrived and found the wife, Diedra, passed out in the chair, shock having set in. On the floor at her feet was her husband, long past the point of saving.”

  “Damn,” Reed whispered.

  The sentiment was genuine, even if the relevance to anything they were now doing was still unclear.

  That was a hell of a way for anybody to die, an even worse thing to have to sit and watch.

  “Who are Dennis and Diedra Weston?” Reed asked. Never before had he heard the names, though from the way Grimes was acting he should have.

  The question pulled Grimes’s attention away from the room, his focus moving to Reed.

  “Dennis Weston has been the warden at Franklin County Medical Corrections for 18 years.”

  He stopped there, waiting as things began to align in Reed’s mind.

  “Oh, shit,” Reed whispered, ideas going off like fireworks in his mind. “You think this was connected?”

  “I don’t know,” Grimes said, “but the BCI is handling the investigation. They sent that around to every precinct in the city early this morning, a veritable call for help without saying as much.”

  Reed glanced down at it, knowing there was something in there he would soon need to read, but trusting the captain to fill him in in the meantime.

  “When the investigators spoke to the wife, she told them the last thing the killer said before leaving was it was about payback.”

  Reed’s lips parted a fraction of an inch.

  Payback.

  He should have seen it earlier, should have put things together right after Baldwin first mentioned it to him.

  “Do we know anybody at the BCI?”

  “Not really,” Grimes said, “but I don’t think it matters. They sent that out basically asking for help, remember?”

  Reed nodded, again looking down at the thin file before him. It wasn’t a certainty that the two cases were connected, though the fact that two attacks had been made on law enforcement personnel in as many nights, even as disconnected as two detectives and a prison warden might be, was too much to ignore.

  “You want to make a few more calls just the same? Maybe open some doors for me before I arrive?”

  “Already done it,” Grimes replied. “They’re expecting you just as soon as we get done here.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Franklin County Medical Corrections served as the hub for all major medical needs for the various state facilities in central Ohio. It housed inmates that required more attention than could be provided at the site infirmary in each location, reserved more for chronic diseases or the occasional severe attack than the traditional flu or head cold. Parsed into two separate buildings, it provided both primary care and behavioral health care, the latter serving as a psychiatric ward for a geographic area covering more than half of the state.

  Located just outside of German Village on the south end of town, Reed had been by it a few times, though never actually inside. As the facility was meant to cater to patients that were already incarcerated, his roles in the uniformed division and later as a detective had never required him to make the trip.

  The place looked exactly as Reed remembered it upon approach, chain link fencing rising two stories tall around it, coils of razor wire spooled in lazy loops throughout. In total the facility looked to cover the better part of 15 acres, each of the buildings inside appearing squat and square, constructed of concrete block and brick.

  A guard house stood at the end of the only public drive into the place, a thick man with a bull neck and shaved head stepping out as Reed pulled close.

  He seemed to communicate only in grunts as Reed flashed his credentials and gave his and Billie’s names, waving them through two minutes after stopping. Not once in that time did he enunciate a single coherent word, barely looking up from the clipboard in his hand.

  Allowing the engine to idle, Reed rolled forward to the closest building, following a stenciled sign toward the administrative offices. From there he eased into the first visitor stall and parked, glancing once through the windshield before exhaling and climbing out.

  If forced to guess, Reed would put the construction date on the facility at somewhere in the 1940’s, the building looking more like something that would have once served as an observation post on a nuclear testing site. The outer wall was made entirely of rough cut concrete block, the surface dimpled and textured, filled in only nominally by decades of paint.

  A row of small windows was spaced evenly across the ground floor, all a little too small for the massive expanse of the building, like beady eyes on a wide face.

  Billie waited on the backseat as Reed attached the short lead to her collar before hopping down. Together they made their way over the curb painted red and up a narrow walkway, past a row of juniper bushes in dire need of pruning.

  Clearly, unlike most prison facilities, the inmates that were housed here were not the kind to spend their days performing manual labor.

  The sidewalk extended along the edge of the building for almost 30 yards before making a turn, leading through a set of double doors painted the same dusty brown as the exterior of the building.

  The doors opened into a wide hallway, the corridor extended straight out in front of them. To the left was an oversized window beginning at waist height and extending nearly to the ceiling. A vertical line cut the partition in half, the pieces of glass resting in a stainless steel tract, capable of being pushed to either side.

  Behind the window sat a dowdy woman with silver hair and a cardigan sweater, her lips pursed below a pair of thick framed glasses. She openly stared at Reed as he took a step forward, not sure what the correct protocol was, waiting for her to initiate the interaction.

  She did not. Instead she merely stared at him, an expectant look on her face.

  “Uh, hi,” Reed said after a moment, glancing down the hall. Aside from the complete lack of movement anywhere nearby, it bore a striking semblance to the church corridor he had been in just a day before. “Detective Reed Mattox with the 8th Precinct. My captain called over earlier, you folks should be expecting me.”

  The woman continued to stare at him, the same look in place, before saying, “I wasn’t expecting anything.” She made a point of scanning him once over and added, “Still don’t.”

  Warmth spread to Reed’s face and neck as he willed himself not to react. No doubt she was just a few hours removed from finding out her boss had been murdered in a most gruesome fashion, Reed trying to tell himself her demeanor was just her way of dealing with things.

  Something told him that wasn’t quite the case, though.

  “I’m here to meet with the BCI team investigating things,” Reed said, pushing past her comment, just wanting their interaction to end.

  Extending it a few extra moments, the woman held her gaze before sniffing once and jerking the top of her head toward the opposite end of the hall. “Big office
with Warden stenciled on the door. If you can’t find that, just follow the sound of all that racket she’s making down there.”

  Thus far, Reed had yet to hear a single sound beyond the voice of the woman behind the glass.

  Still, he said nothing of it.

  “Thank you,” he said, tapping his leg and leading Billie down the hallway. To either side a series of wooden doors filed by, all with various names and titles stenciled on them in gold filigree, extending the gamut from Medical Director to Chief Financial Officer.

  Most of the lights inside them were dark, the offices empty, though if that was in response to events of the previous night or just the standard MO around the place, Reed had no way of knowing. If this was his case to work he might think to check into it, but as it wasn’t, he let the thought pass.

  Three-quarters of the way down the hall a sound found his ears, resembling an empty box hitting the floor. Beside him he could sense Billie tense just slightly, his own nerves rising a tiny bit as they walked forward.

  The last door on the left stood open as they approached, yellow light extending out over the black and white tiled floor before fading, blending in with the outside sunshine coming from the window at the end of hall. The sound of more movement could be heard as they grew closer, Reed circling into the doorway and swatting his knuckles at the metal frame.

  Standing in the center of the room was a woman with straight brown hair hanging just past her shoulders, sunglasses resting atop her head. Her eyes flashed as she jerked toward the sound of his knocking, her face bordering on malevolent before softening a tiny bit.

  “Morning,” Reed said, making no attempt to move into the room.

  “Morning,” she replied, remaining rooted in place as well.

  “Detective Reed Mattox, my partner Billie,” Reed said. “My captain called over earlier, said I would be coming by.”

  The woman held the pose a moment, her body completely rigid, before lowering the box she held in front of her a few inches. As she did so, some of the tension she was carrying bled out as well, her features slackening a bit more.

  “Sorry,” she said, “been a rough go since I got here.”

  Without thinking about it, the right corner of Reed’s mouth curled upward as he flicked a glance down the hall toward the front reception counter. “Yeah, they didn’t exactly roll out the welcome wagon for us either.”

  The woman offered a slight smirk as she tossed the box she was holding to the floor, just one of a half-dozen empties that were strewn about the place. Behind her was an oversized desk without a single thing on it, not a computer monitor or even a calendar blotter. A few framed paintings hung from the walls, Rockwellian scenes that made the entire place feel more like a doctor’s office than the place a warden would work from.

  “Cassidy Glenn, BCI,” she said. She pushed out a loud breath before bracing her fists on either hip, continuing to stare at them. “Tell me Detective Mattox, do you drink coffee?”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Reed could count the number of times he had willingly consumed coffee on both hands, finding the taste revolting, hating the roller coaster effect it had on his equilibrium. Spending most of his time on the graveyard shift was bad enough, but swallowing down gallons of liquid caffeine exacerbated the effect to levels that tended to keep him reeling for days on end.

  Despite that, he accepted the invitation from Glenn, a move made as much to get himself far away from the antiseptic administrative wing of the facility as to build inter-agency collegiality.

  The beverages were obtained from the onsite cafeteria, Glenn leading the way with a practiced familiarity that intimated it wasn’t her first such trip on the day. They both ordered plain black and took their cups to go, more than a few curious stares following them as they swept outside and found a picnic table on the grounds, posting up across from each other.

  Around them the day was promising to be exactly as the sunrise had hinted, the sky overcast, the world awash in the same white light that would be present for much of the next six months. The temperature hovered somewhere in the upper-50s, the lack of wind making it bearable, if not quite pleasant.

  “So,” Glenn began, opening the discussion, “your captain said you might have something connected to this.”

  She had tied her brown hair back behind her neck, the sunglasses now resting on her nose. When Reed first arrived she had been in shirt sleeves and slacks, now wearing the matching suit coat.

  “Possibly,” Reed said, “though that was based on a very preliminary look through the notes your office sent out this morning.”

  “Which were themselves preliminary,” Glenn added.

  “Right,” Reed said. He paused there, picking up on her insinuation, and said, “Not your idea, I’m guessing?”

  A single eyebrow rose above the edge of the sunglasses. Reed was unable to see her eyes behind the mirrored lenses, though he could surmise they too bore a similar expression.

  “This thing is a jurisdictional nightmare,” she said. “We’ve got the warden of a prison facility. Normally that would fall under the Bureau of Prisons, meaning it’s an FBI case, only this particular one is state run.”

  Reed nodded, lifting his coffee and taking a small swig. The caustic liquid burned his tongue as it passed through, both from the excessive temperature and a composite makeup that could chew rust from a fender.

  “Making it worse, this place is clearly within CPD control, but the warden lives out in New Albany.”

  “Giving the local police jurisdiction,” Reed said, following her reasoning. He thought for a moment of the Madison County crew he had encountered the day before and said, “Which I’m guessing they’re not quite equipped to handle.”

  “Uh-uh,” Glenn said. “All too happy to hand it off too, though whether that’s because they know they’re in over their head or if they just want no part of this thing is anybody’s guess.”

  Bitterness seemed to practically drip from Glenn’s words as she spoke, pulling up just long enough to take a quick drink of her coffee. If she found the substance to be as revolting as Reed she gave no indication, placing the cup down and staring into the distance.

  Around them the sound of traffic on the roads framing the facility could be heard, large trucks releasing their air brakes and cars playing the bass on their stereos way too loud. Reed pushed them from his mind as he sat and thought, trying to balance what she was saying with her tone.

  If the local police weren’t giving her an issue, he couldn’t quite place where the obvious anger she felt was coming from.

  “So it went to you guys?” Reed asked.

  “No, it went to me,” Glenn said, twisting her head back to look at Reed, “because nobody else in the place wanted it.”

  A bit of dawning hit Reed as he shifted his focus down to the coffee before him. In his limited experience with the organization, he knew the Bureau of Criminal Investigation was an organization housed in the Attorney General’s Office, designed to aid in any investigation involving a state agency. By and large, that meant forensics or prosecution assistance, the investigative wing of the division being quite small by comparison.

  For them to be handed the lead, especially in a case such as this, was quite unusual.

  “This was a dead end, so it came your way?” Reed asked, piecing together things out loud.

  “Exactly,” Glenn said. She jerked her head back toward the building behind her and said, “And what you saw in there was visual proof. No computer, no files, just some empty boxes that were labeled like they should have been something but not worth the time it took me to drag them out.”

  Once again understanding settled in, Reed grasping the vitriol that seemed to be pouring out of her.

  At the moment none of it seemed to be aimed in his direction, a point that was close enough to a victory.

  “Alright,” Reed said, “knowing all that, I’ll go first, lay out what I’m working with. After that you can do the same.
If at the end of it we think there’s overlap we’ll discuss things further.

  “If not, thanks for the coffee, and best of luck.”

  Behind her sunglasses there was very little Reed could discern. Based on her earlier comments, he had assumed her to be much like him, wanting to push straight ahead, to get moving on things as fast as possible.

  They both were facing uphill climbs and as good as the occasional vent session could feel, it didn’t aid either in accomplishing their goals.

  Raising her free hand a few inches from the table, Glenn flicked her fingers back toward herself, motioning for Reed to continue.

  In short order Reed went through the sequence of events, beginning with the basic traffic stop and filling her in through the discovery of the car. He provided a bit more detail than the thin file he had read of her case that morning, highlighting that Hendrix was exonerated and that the car was dumped.

  He held off on what Baldwin heard from Bishop, not wanting to twist her thoughts, cause her to force facts to fit a theory.

  “Okay,” Glenn said when he finished, a bit of uncertainty clear in her tone. “This morning at around 2:00 a.m. a 911 call was placed from the home of Dennis Weston, the warden here. Nobody on the other end, but they left the line open, making sure the call stayed active.

  “Local patrol in the area swung by to check it out, found Weston dead, his wife unconscious, duct taped to a chair beside him. Apparently the killer had worked her over pretty good, too.”

  Reed kept his face impassive as he listened. More than once muscle memory told him to raise the coffee and take a drink, though the actual taste of it kept him from doing so. Instead he kept all 10 fingers wrapped tight around the paper cup, drawing warmth from it.

  “Paramedics were able to revive her, though Weston was long since passed. Choked himself out using some sort of homemade noose.”

  Having read the file beforehand, Reed had a general idea of what she was referring to, her description being as good as anything he could have come up with.