by Mark Stone
“I’m not sitting down, Justin,” I muttered, my heart still racing. “Just get to the damn point already.”
“Fine,” he said, shaking his head and steeling himself. “The other day, Charlotte came to me and ask me what it would take to terminate her parental rights.”
The bottom fell out of the whole damn world as I stood there, listening to what Justin had to say. This couldn’t be right. He had to have misheard Charlotte. Either that, or I’d misheard him. Charlotte Cooper was the best mother I’d ever met, hands down. Her entire life was Isaac. She lived for his triumphs, and she died with his failures. All of her joys, every single one of them, came from him. I knew that like I knew my own name. There was no way she’d ever consider terminating her rights. It was an impossible scenario.
“You’re wrong,” I said, though I couldn’t look at Justin. I couldn’t look at anything, really. My eyes sort of zoned out, my mind cementing itself on just how ludicrous all of this was.
“I wish I was,” Justin said meekly in response.
“You don’t understand,” I said in a much louder tone, shaking my head. “I’m not saying I think you’re wrong. I’m saying that you are wrong. Period. End of sentence. That’s all she wrote. Charlotte Cooper isn’t the kind of person who would give up her child. She’d never consider the option.”
“And I’m telling you that she did,” Justin said, rounding the desk and walking toward me. “I know it’s hard to comprehend. I get that. I couldn’t believe it when she asked me about it either. Trust me, I tried to talk her out of it. I begged her to reconsider, but I couldn’t make any headways.”
“Then why didn’t you come to me?” I asked, anger flashing hot through me, my nostrils flaring. “Why didn’t you tell me what was going on? If you couldn’t stop this, then I certainly could have.”
“Because I couldn’t tell you, Dillon,” Justin said quickly. “She was my client. We had confidentiality.”
“Screw your confidentiality!” I shot back.
“That’s easy for you to say,” he answered. “You didn’t take a damn oath to uphold it. Now, I know you’re upset, but-”
“You didn’t have to take her as a client,” I said. “You could have turned her away and come to me.”
“That’s not how it works,” Justin lamented. “Even if I’d have told her no, I still couldn’t have said anything about what happened between us. That’s confidential too. And to answer your question, I took her on because I knew that no one else would have fought the way I did to change her mind. I did it because I wanted to keep them together, and I figured that- if I could just make her see past whatever was making her think this way- I could do that. Now that you’re investigating an active crime pertaining to her safety, the confidentiality goes out the window. I can tell you what I know about her wanting to give up her parental rights to Isaac. ”
“Don’t you get it, though?” I asked, my head hurting from confusion and my palms sweating, still clutched to the back of the chair. “If you’re right about this, then there’s more going on than we previously thought. Charlotte wouldn’t give her rights to Isaac away. She just wouldn’t. Not unless there was something else at play here.”
“Something else at play?” Justin asked. “Like what?”
“I don’t know,” I said, turning and heading toward the door of the office. “But I sure as hell intend to find out.”
8
“You have to sleep, Dillon,” Rebecca said, walking out of our bedroom and into the kitchen, where I sat with my laptop open, the same place I had been for hours. The search for Charlotte had been called off for the day due to darkness but that didn’t mean my work was over. In fact, I was just getting started. The first seventy-two hours after a disappearance were always the most crucial. As such, I couldn’t waste any of them sleeping, eating, or doing anything that didn’t pertain to bringing Charlotte back to the people who loved her.
“I can’t do that, Rebecca,” I said, looking up at my wife, half apologetic and half determined. “That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t, though.”
“That’s exactly what it means,” Rebecca said sighing, blinking those seafoam eyes at me and trudging herself into the kitchen. She patted my shoulder as she took a seat next to me. Most wives would have probably been upset about their husband’s sitting up all night, diving headfirst into an investigation that involved the first woman he ever loved. Rebecca wasn’t most women, though. She was extraordinary, and that meant she stayed up when I did, and she didn’t complain about it.
“What are you doing, exactly?” she asked, looking at my computer screen and seeing mug shots plastered across it.
“I’m taking a look at all the violent offenders who are free and walking among us in a fifty-mile radius,” I said, shaking my head. “You’d be surprised at the sort of people we have living in spitting distance of us.”
“If they’re not in jail anymore, it probably means they haven’t reoffended,” Rebecca said. “People make mistakes. They’re allowed to move on with their lives, Dillon.”
“Of course, they are,” I answered. “That’s what prison is supposed to be about, rehabilitation. But that’s not the case for everyone. Statistically, a lot of these people are going to reoffend. The fact that they’re not in jail right now just means they haven’t been caught yet.”
“Isn’t that on you, though?” she asked. “To catch them, I mean.”
“It is,” I said quietly, thinking about Charlotte, about the idea of one of these hooligans grabbing her, taking her hostage, killing her in a horrible way. “And I will. I just don’t know if I’ll do it soon enough. I never know if I’ll do it soon enough and that’s the part that scares me. It’s the part that-”
“Keeps you up at night?” she asked, finishing my thought and giving me a half smile. “It must be hard. I’m actually just starting to understand how hard it is, but you can only do what you can do. You can only be where you can be. And don’t forget, Dillon, there are more detectives out there than you. The beat is too big for just one man.”
I looked over at her, remembering where I’d heard that saying before. “Did Clive tell you that? You got that from Clive, didn’t you?”
“He says it a lot,” Rebecca answered, smirking at me.
“He thinks he looks like me, you know,” I said, shaking my head and biting my lower lip. “He tells everybody.”
“I know,” she answered, nodding. “He told me that too.”
“And what did you have to say about it?” I asked, feeling the tiniest amount of relief from the pounding pressure I’d dealt with since the second I got Isaac’s call this morning.
“I told him not even on his best day,” Rebecca answered, leaning forward and planting a kiss on my cheek. She pulled away and blinked at me, her face losing what little levity she’d built up in the last few seconds. “She’s going to be okay, you know.”
“I wish I could believe that,” I answered, sighing and slumping into my chair. “But statistically-”
“Forget the statistics,” Rebecca cut me off, waving her hand dismissively at my sentence. “We have lived our entire lives beating the odds. You’re from Florida. I came from New York. Statistically, we never should have even met, much less got married. And how many times have we cheated death already? You’d have thought that, judging by the numbers, it would have caught up with us by now. It hasn’t, though. I get that the system is built on numbers and odds, but we don’t have to beat the system. We just have to save this one person. We just have to bring this one woman home, and we will.”
“How do you know?” I asked, blinking back rare tears and wrapping my hand around my wife’s.
“Because of you, sweetheart,” she said. “Because I’m married to Dillon Storm, and he doesn’t quit. He doesn’t lose, and he always does what he says he’ll do.” She swallowed hard. “Now tell me you’re going to do it. Tell me you’re going to find Charlotte and bring her home.”
I looked at my w
ife, a torrent of emotions swirling through me. “I’m going to do it,” I said, nodding firmly. “I’m going to bring Charlotte home, damnit.”
“Yes, you are,” she said, squeezing my hand. She lifted me palm and kissed it. “Now, let’s get back to work. What about her laptop? Did you find anything on there?”
I shook my head, surprised and impressed at just how quickly my wife could get down to business. She might have been new at this, but you couldn’t tell it from the way she was acting.
“She doesn’t have a computer,” I said. “I mean, Isaac does, but I doubt much would be on there. She used her phone for most things, including dating apps. But all of that seemed to be wiped clean from the device before we found it.”
“And Jonah’s working on getting the metadata?” she asked without missing a beat, referring to our precinct tech guy.
“He is,” I said.
“Well, I doubt we’ll find out anything tonight,” Rebecca said. “It’s after midnight, and I can’t imagine the kid is still-”
My phone rang and Rebecca’s mouth tightened.
“That’s him, isn’t it?” she asked without even looking down at my screen.
“It is, actually,” I said, reading the name as it appeared across my phone. “I knew I wasn’t the only person working tonight.”
“I guess good men never sleep,” Rebecca muttered. She nodded at me. “Go ahead. Let’s see what he has to say.”
I grabbed the phone and answered the call. “Dillon Storm,” I said, though I was sure Jonah would have recognized my voice.
“Dillon,” he said, his voice frayed and a little on edge. “I got through the security settings. I finally got to the metadata.” We waited a beat before he hit me with the good stuff. “I think there’s something here you might want to see.”
9
Knocking on Jonah’s door, I took a look around. It was the middle of the night, and seeing as how he was working with Charlotte’s phone during what absolutely had to be afterhours, it made sense that he asked me to come here instead of the precinct. Jonah was a good guy and pretty tech savvy. I had known him since he was a kid and watched as he’d grown from a nervous young boy to the slightly less nervous, slightly less young man who answered the door. He was good at his job. In addition to his tech skills, he had a pretty decent mind when it came to cases and human behavior. He was going to make a damn fine detective, if that was where his path led him.
“Hey, Dillon,” Jonah said, smiling at me as he answered the door. “Come on in. Don’t mind the mess. I haven’t had time to do a lot of cleaning lately.”
He wasn’t lying. As I walked into the living room of Jonah’s quaint two bedroom house, I caught a whiff of stale pizza, warm beer, and old Chinese food. It was a mixture of aromas that threw me headlong back into my bachelor days.
“It’s okay. I was single too once,” I said, catching sight of the overflowing trash cans and discarded pizza boxes on the table. “Though, I can’t imagine any girl would take two steps into this place and not rush back out the door.”
“You’re probably right,” Jonah said, shaking his head. “I wouldn’t know, unfortunately. Work has kind of taken priority for me as of late.”
“You are making something of a name for yourself around here,” I said, settling alongside Jonah at the dining room table and looking over at his computer. Charlotte’s phone was plugged into it, running right into the machine via a white wire. “There are other important things in life, though.”
“I know that,” Jonah said. “But I figure I’ve got plenty of time for that once I’m secure in my job. Besides, what sort of girl worth anything would go for a guy who didn’t have his life together?”
“You’re young, Jonah,” I answered. “The girls you’d be interested in are young, too. You’ve got plenty of time to get your life together but that’s neither here nor there.” I pointed to the phone, and looked at the younger man. “What have we got here?”
“Quite a bit, actually,” he said. “So much that I should have probably called Boomer first, but I know what Charlotte Cooper meant to you.” Jonah blinked hard. “You were very good to me in the past, Dillon. You were good to mom, and you got me out of a really tough spot. I figure the least I can do is help you out where I can.”
Jonah was, of course, alluding to a time when he’d been blackmailed into breaking a few laws. He had planted my half-brother’s blood at a crime scene as part of the greater plans of evil people. I vouched for him after everything came to light, after I brought everything to light. Partly because of that, Jonah was given another chance, and he used that chance for all it was worth.
There was more to what he’d said than just gratitude, though. He knew that, once this information hit Boomer’s ears, I would be bound to follow his orders. I would have to do what the chief of police asked of me. This way, by the time Boomer found out what I knew, I would already have acted the way I saw fit. This was important, especially since I was more than willing to bend a few rules to find Charlotte, if that was what was necessary.
“I was just doing my job, but I’m sure you understand that now,” I answered.
“What I understand is that my life is the way it is because you were kind and generous,” he said, shrugging.
“You’re giving me too much credit,” I corrected him. “What happened to you wasn’t your fault. Making you pay for that wouldn’t have been fair.” Motioning back to the computer, I asked, “So, what’s up?”
“The security systems on these new phones is nothing to sneeze at. People count on their privacy, and hackers are pretty inventive now. That’s why it took me so long to crack into it,” he said. “Once I did, though, I found a couple of things of interest. The last calls on Charlotte’s phone had been deleted. There were two, both to the same number, and both took place at about one o’clock in the morning.”
“Do you have the number?” I asked.
“I do,” Jonah said, typing on his own phone. “I’m texting it to you now, but there’s more than that. There’s something a little more pressing.”
“I’m listening,” I responded.
“I was told Charlotte went on a date the night she disappeared with someone from out of town,” Jonah said, finishing sending me the number.
“Some guy she met on a dating app,” I said, bile rising into my throat. I might have been young enough to technically be part of the online dating generation, but I was so thankful to be married right about now. The idea of scouring the web for a date like I was picking out a slab of beef at a meat market sickened me. I didn’t know why or how the world had changed so much that people couldn’t just go to bars or talk to people they liked at the supermarket, or in my case, at the hospital.
“Right,” Jonah replied. “Well, that app had been deleted, too, along with all the data it had. Luckily, it had only been deleted last night. Otherwise, regaining that data would have proven pretty impossible.”
“But it wasn’t impossible, was it?” I asked, narrowing my eyes.
“It most certainly was not,” Jonah said. “Not only did I recover the app and all the conversations that Charlotte had while on it, but I pulled the profile of the guy she met last night and cross referenced his legal name with hotels in the area. Turns out our guy is named Dustin Reynolds. He checked into the Lamont Motor Inn off the interstate yesterday afternoon, and unless the lady at the front desk is mistaken, he hasn’t checked out yet.”
My heart jumped as a slow smile spread across my face. Not only had Jonah found out who Charlotte had gone with last night (a man who was probably the last person to see her and might very well be the person responsible for her disappearance), but he also served him up to me on a silver platter. Throw a cherry on top of this, and I couldn’t ask for anything more.
“Jonah, my man, I could kiss you right now,” I said.
“No thanks, Dillon,” he answered. “I think I’ll just take your advice and clean up around here a little.” He shrugged. “Th
at way, maybe I’ll get a better offer.”
10
I didn’t wait for day to break before heading out to the Lamont Motor Inn right off the interstate. That might have been the polite thing to do. After all, Dustin Reynolds was probably tired after a drive from St. Petersburg and a date with his online sweetheart. As it turned out, I didn’t give a damn how he felt. He was still at the hotel. I knew that much for sure. What I didn’t know, though, was how long the man was going to stay in the hotel, or if he had Charlotte with him. For all I knew, the sonofabitch was holding my ex-girlfriend hostage in one of the seedier motel rooms in the city.
The idea made my blood boil, so much so, that I had to remind myself I had no evidence that he was responsible for this, yet. Sure, I had a hunch that the guy had something to do with it. The dating app on Charlotte’s phone, the one that identified him as her companion for the evening, had been scrubbed. That seemed like solid evidence of someone who wanted to cover his tracks. What was more, Charlotte’s disappearance had hit the news earlier in the day. Her picture had been plastered everywhere. If Dustin saw this, and there was very little chance that he didn’t if he had a television or even a radio on at any point during the day, then why wouldn’t he come forward to give us his side of the story?
The only possible explanation was that he had to have something to do with this. All I could hope was that I wasn’t too late, and that Charlotte was still alive in that room.
As I sped toward the hotel, blazing through red lights on the empty streets with the sort of reckless abandon that only a police officer on a mission could ever truly have, I decided I had other fires to put out first.
My first call was, as it should be, to my wife. I explained the situation to her, and though she was understanding, I could tell that she’d wished I would have just waited for Boomer. I couldn’t wait for Boomer, though. I couldn’t wait a second longer than I had to. Getting the chief of police involved would mean coming up with a plan. It would mean being careful and considerate of everything that happened next. While I was in no hurry to break laws or step on someone’s constitutional rights, I would do what it took to save Charlotte. It would be better for everyone if Boomer wasn’t a part of that. I’d call him after everything was done, hopefully with Charlotte at my side, and let him pick up the pieces. I’d take whatever the fall for my actions were. It would be more than worth it if it meant saving the woman I used to love.
