[Martin Rhodes 01.0] Close Your Eyes

by Thomas Fincham

  “Sure, you have the right to an attorney, but before you make that call, just remember that once your lawyer is here, I won’t show you any leniency. Right now, if you answer my questions, it might not be all bad for you.”

  Guzman did not look convinced.

  “Plus, we have seized your gun, which we checked and found it was not registered, so that’s a felony in this city. On top of that, I’m thinking if we did ballistics tests on it, we might find a match from your gun to the bullet found in Reed Yates’s body. What do you think?”

  Guzman swallowed. He stared at Crowder and shook his head. “Shit,” he said. “I didn’t mean to shoot him, okay? The guy was being unreasonable. He wanted to take my phone.”

  “Your phone?” Crowder said.

  “Yeah, I told him I had bought it.”

  “From who?”

  “The same guy who ratted me out.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “I don’t know his full name, but he was white.”

  “Did he at least have a first name?”

  “Derek, I think.”

  “How did he know Reed Yates?”

  Guzman shrugged. “I think he was the guy’s best friend or something. He said he took the guy’s phone from his school locker.”

  “And why did this Derek give you the phone?” Crowder asked.

  “He didn’t give it to me. He sold it to me.”

  “For how much?”

  Guzman shook his head. “It doesn’t work like that.”

  “What doesn’t?”

  Guzman went silent.

  “Come on, talk to me,” Crowder said. “What you have to tell me can’t be worse than going to prison for murder.”

  Guzman sighed. “He gave me the phone in exchange for some goods I had sold him.”

  “You mean drugs.”

  Guzman licked his lips and nodded.

  Crowder said, “Just so that I understand, the phone was a payment for the drugs you had given to this Derek person, is that right?”

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  Crowder looked over at the mirror and then continued. “Okay, so Derek gave you the phone and then Reed Yates later showed up to get his phone back, but why shoot him? It was only a phone.”

  Guzman put his palms on the table. “Like I told you before, it was an accident.”

  “Please explain that to me, because right now I don’t get it.”

  “I thought he was gonna shoot me.”

  Crowder leaned forward. “What?”

  “Yeah, I told the guy to beat it. It was my phone. But he insisted it was his. He said he had a GPS tracker on it and that’s how he found me. The guy was persistent. I pulled out my gun. I didn’t mean to shoot him. I just wanted to scare him, you know.”

  “But you did shoot him.”

  Guzman looked away.

  “Alfonso,” Crowder said. “You shot Reed Yates, didn’t you?”

  “I want my lawyer.”

  Crowder stared at him and then said, “Fine. We’ll play it your way. But the moment I leave this room, I won’t be able to help you.”

  Guzman put his face in his hands. “I thought he was gonna shoot me.”

  “Reed Yates, you mean?”

  “Yeah. He reached inside his jacket and I thought he was gonna pull out a gun, but…”

  “But what?”

  Guzman went silent.

  “But what, Alfonso?”

  Guzman’s shoulders sagged. “It wasn’t a gun.”

  “What was it?”

  “It was an inhaler.”

  “For asthma?”

  “I guess so. I didn’t mean to. It was an accident.”

  Guzman broke down.

  Crowder left the room and entered the room adjacent to it. Chief Baker and Tim Yates had seen the entire confession.

  “We got our man,” Crowder said.

  Yates turned to the chief. “Thank you for allowing me to observe this.”

  “You’re welcome, and I hope the PD won’t be hearing from your lawyer anymore.” “Absolutely,” Yates said. “And thank you again.”

  As Yates was leaving, the chief added, “In cases like these, anything can change the course of an investigation. This doesn’t mean we aren’t doing our jobs. We are sometimes one anonymous tip away from solving a case.”

  Yates knew the tip was not anonymous. It was Martin Rhodes.

  SEVENTY-SEVEN

  The car pulled into the back of the house. Rhodes got out. “Thanks for the ride,” he said.

  “No problem,” Jo replied.

  Rhodes walked up to his apartment. He saw Tess’s mom waiting by his front door.

  “Where is she?” the mom said.

  “Where is who?” he replied.

  “Tess.”

  “How would I know?” he asked, confused.

  “I saw her sitting in your car earlier.”

  Rhodes’s heart sank.

  Rhodes turned and ran back to Jo, who was pulling her car out of the back lane. He waved to her. She stopped.

  He leaned over to her window. “We need to find my car.”

  “I’ve put a call out already,” she replied.

  “You don’t understand. A neighbor of mine might be in that car.”

  Jo was confused. “What…?”

  “I’ll explain later, but we have to find it.”

  “Okay, get in.”

  As they drove, Rhodes told her about Tess and how she had once hidden in his trunk.

  “How can you be sure she was in the car today?”

  “The window,” Rhodes replied. “The witness outside the station mentioned my window was down. I thought that didn’t make sense, but now it does. Tess must have rolled it down.”

  “What if she wasn’t there when the killer took it?” Jo suggested.

  “If that was the case, then she would’ve come home by now,” he said.

  Rhodes frowned. He now regretted letting her use his car as a refuge from her problems at home. He should have let her sit on his front steps when he had first met her. At least then her life would not be in danger.

  SEVENTY-EIGHT

  Tess gripped the handrest as the man drove erratically around the city.

  Earlier, when Rhodes had parked the car by the subway station, Tess had used the backseat to get out of the trunk.

  She wanted to surprise him.

  She knew he would be upset with her, but she wanted to be part of his investigation. She wanted to help him solve the case he was working on. It was more exciting than sitting outside her house waiting for her mom’s creepy boyfriend to leave.

  Helping Rhodes at the pizza shop made her feel needed. She never knew her dad, and her mom moved from one job to another, one city to another, and one boyfriend to another. Throughout all this, she was nothing more than someone who tagged along with her mother.

  There were times when she felt like her mom would have been happier if she was never born. Her mom never said it, but she felt it.

  She did not think anyone cared for her or protected her, not even her mom. Her mom did not even take her side when it came to her boyfriend. She accused Tess of lying. She thought Tess was jealous that she finally had someone in her life.

  That was not the case. Tess wanted her mom to be happy. She wanted someone to take care of her mom like she wanted her mom to take care of her. But more often than not, Tess felt like she was on her own.

  With Rhodes, it was somehow different. He had tried to ignore her, but she could tell he cared. He did not have to stick his nose in when it came to her mom and boyfriend, but he did. Ever since he had, her life had been a little easier.

  When Rhodes had parked at the station and left, she had decided to come out of her hiding place. She waited for him in the passenger seat. But the car became hot and she decided to roll down the windows. That’s when this guy jumped in the car. She was going to scream, but he showed her a knife and told her to keep her mouth shut.

  He asked for the
car keys. Her eyes flicked up at the driver’s side visor. She had seen Rhodes keep an extra set of keys there.

  She begged the man to let her go and just take the car, but he did not listen to her. He drove off in a hurry.

  As the Malibu weaved in and out of traffic, she said, “Please let me go.”

  “I can’t,” the man replied.

  “You can drop me off by the side of the road.”

  “You saw my face,” he said.

  “I won’t tell anyone, I promise.”

  “Just shut up and let me think.”

  SEVENTY-NINE

  Jacopo was furious at himself. His knuckles were white as he gripped the steering wheel tight. He could not believe they had found his kill room.

  How was that possible? His master had planned everything with incredible skill, and he had executed the plans to perfection.

  Then what went wrong? he thought.

  He tried to go over all his steps, but he could not see where he had slipped up.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have gone back into the tunnel, he thought. Maybe I should’ve cleaned up before I dumped the last body.

  He gritted his teeth. I got careless, he told himself.

  He should have dumped his victim’s appendages when he had the chance. Instead, he kept them in a bucket, as if they were trophies of his kill.

  He had gotten cocky. He thought he could clean up his mess later. He thought he had time. The police were too far in their pursuit, he believed. The news reporter was their way of keeping a tab on the FBI. She always reported on their progress on the case.

  He should have known something was wrong when she had failed to report anything new. The FBI had withheld vital information from the media. This should have raised a red flag, but it was not his job to monitor this, it was his master’s.

  Jacopo shook his head.

  He could not blame his master. That would be wrong. It was not his master who had failed, it was him.

  His master had always told him to leave no evidence behind. He did. He was going to dump the bucket of appendages at a more convenient time.

  His master had told him to always wear gloves. He did not. He found it was easier to perform the procedures with his bare hands.

  Now the entire kill room was covered in his fingerprints.

  “Shit!”

  He pounded on the steering wheel.

  The girl next to him let out a scream.

  He turned to her. She instantly fell silent when she saw the look on his face.

  He should not have brought her with him, but he needed a hostage in case things got complicated.

  He would kill her and dump her body when the time suited him, but for now, he had to find a way to contact his master.

  EIGHTY

  Rhodes felt helpless.

  They were driving back to the spot where his car was taken from, but he knew it was a waste of time. Agent Pullinger—Jo, as she had corrected him many times now—was on the phone throughout. She had contacted every law enforcement agency in Bridgeton. She was doing her utmost to locate his Chevy Malibu, and ultimately, Tess.

  Rhodes wanted to do something. But what could he do that the FBI was not?

  If anything happened to Tess, he was not sure if he could forgive himself. There was already too much blood on his hands. He could not bear any more of it.

  Tess was innocent in every sense of the word. She had harmed nobody. In fact, there were others out there who wanted to harm her, and he did not just mean the killer. The killer had used an opportunity to his advantage. He was escaping capture, and when he saw an unlocked vehicle, he did not hesitate to make use of it.

  Rhodes was thinking of her mother. She had neglected Tess, which was why she had looked for a father figure from a total stranger. Rhodes was nothing more than that to her, he believed.

  Rhodes had never been a father to anyone, and he had no desire to be one in the future. Tess was a good kid, and he felt bad for her. He meant every word when he had warned her mother and her creepy boyfriend about treating Tess improperly. Rhodes would have made good on his promise if anything remotely bad happened to her.

  Why? Why am I getting involved in something that does not concern me?

  Maybe it had something to do with his upbringing. Tess did not know her father, and Rhodes would have been better off if he did not know his father either. At least Rhodes had had a loving and caring mother. Tess did not even have that.

  Maybe that was why he felt this anger inside him now. It was consuming him, eating away at every fiber in him. He had not felt this way since he had shot and killed that man almost ten years ago. If the man who had taken Tess was standing in front of him now, would Rhodes do the same to him? Shoot him without a second thought?

  He was grateful he did not own a weapon. He no longer trusted himself with one.

  Jo’s phone rang again, and he turned to her eagerly.

  Jo listened and said to him, “Unfortunately, we still have not located your vehicle, but my supervisor spoke to BTA security, and they know who the killer is. His name is Craig Orton. He was a former BTA employee. Several years ago, Craig Orton drove a bus full of passengers into a lamp post. Fortunately, no one was seriously injured. But when he was taken in for questioning, they found Craig Orton was under the influence of drugs and alcohol. At the time of the accident, Orton’s marriage had fallen apart, and he was fighting his ex for the custody of his daughter. Prior to this, there were other incidents involving him. He had once assaulted a passenger who had been rude to him. He also had issues with his superiors regarding his tardiness and erratic behavior. Unsurprisingly, after the incident with the bus, the BTA fired him. His union couldn’t help him either because he’d had too many strikes against him. This explains why he was using the subway to dump his victims.”

  Rhodes thought of something. “I’m not too familiar with the Train Killer case, but weren’t the victims from some mental institute?”

  “They were,” Jo agreed. “And, apparently, right after the bus incident, he was referred to the Bridgeton Mental Care Institute.”

  Rhodes thought about it and nodded. He then looked out the window. The feeling of powerlessness did not leave him. In fact, he felt even worse after what he had heard. Craig Orton was not only a murderer, but also insane.

  Sensing his mood, Jo said, “We will find him. And we will find your neighbor. I promise.”

  Rhodes did not respond. He just stared out at the passing streets.

  EIGHTY-ONE

  Jacopo was breathing heavily. He tried to control his composure, but nothing worked.

  He needed his master now more than ever. He just was not sure how to contact him.

  His master came to him, not vice versa. His master always chose the time and place, and he always kept himself hidden from him. Jacopo always thought this was odd. Did his master not trust him enough to reveal his true identity? Jacopo trusted his master implicitly, and he wished his master would trust him in return.

  Maybe his master was waiting for the time when he had truly proved himself. Maybe he was waiting for when the mission was complete.

  Jacopo grimaced. His carelessness had nearly sabotaged the mission. Now he was not sure if his master would ever reveal himself to him.

  He took a deep breath.

  Not all was lost. The FBI agent had not gotten a good look at his face. He had gotten a jump on her before she had the chance. On top of that, the tunnel was too dark for her to see clearly.

  His heart sank again.

  The FBI was probably going through his kill room with a fine toothcomb. He did not have time to scrub it clean. They would surely find something that would connect him to the murders.

  He punched the steering wheel.

  The girl jumped up from her seat. He had startled her.

  He had forgotten she was there. She was another problem he had to deal with.

  He had his knife in his pocket. He could cut her throat and dump her body by the side of the
road.

  He had already committed three murders. What was one more?

  Yes, that’s what he would do. Stab her in the chest with the knife and then bleed her until she was gone.

  But a thought popped in his head. He could not do it in a moving car. Plus, it would be messy. The blood would easily get on him. He still had to go back to his luxury apartment and retrieve his belongings. How would he explain the blood if anyone saw him?

  Another thought came to him. What if the FBI was already at his apartment?

  He cursed.

  He could not go back.

  It was too risky.

  He felt like a caged animal with nowhere to run. The FBI was closing in on him. And he was running out of options.

  He suddenly had an idea.

  He turned the wheel and drove in the other direction.

  EIGHTY-TWO

  Tess thought about jumping out of the car, but at the speed they were going, she knew she would either seriously hurt herself, or worse, she would not survive the fall. Plus, there were cars right behind her coming at a fast pace.

  She had to come up with a plan.

  She was not sure if anyone knew she was with this man, so it was up to her to do something. There was no telling what this man would do to her once he stopped the car. On numerous occasions, he had moved his hand over the side pocket of his jacket. It was where she had seen him keep his knife.

  She did not believe for one bit that he would let her go. She knew what he looked like. She had watched too much television and seen too many movies to know that he would kill her the moment he got the chance.

  She could not let that happen.

  He was too strong for her to overpower him. Even he knew that, which was why he had not restrained her yet.

  But she was smarter than him.

  She leaned back and gently pulled out her cell phone from her back pocket.

  She thought about calling her mom, but dialing her would mean punching a lot of numbers, or scrolling for her name in her contact list.

  She looked over at the man.