Chapter Seventeen
The woman on the other end of the line had sounded uncertain when Reed called and asked her to meet. No matter how insistent he was that she was in no trouble herself, and that anything she said would be kept confidential, she was resistant to speaking with him.
Three times she claimed to know nothing, having given her complete statement to the officers the day before. Not until Reed asked if she liked coffee did her stance relax even a little, a small tell in her voice indicating he had her attention, if not yet her acquiescence.
Once he landed on barbecue though, any trepidation fell by the wayside.
Reed was the first to arrive at Old Smoque Barbecue, a west side institution that had been turning out brisket and ribs for decades. Located a mile outside of the freeway encircling Columbus, it was just a twelve minute drive from The Bottoms, but might as well have been in a different country given how far apart the two seemed.
Made from rough hewn wood painted to resemble a barn, Old Smoque was a single story structure that stood twice that in height to accommodate the steepled roof. White board fencing surrounded the grounds and an even hedge ran the perimeter of the place, mulched flower beds around it waiting for spring to officially arrive.
Half of the lot was already full despite the odd afternoon hour, most of the vehicles ranging from SUVs to luxury cars, indicative both of the neighborhood and the clientele coming in for an early dinner.
The scent of hickory smoke and barbecue sauce passed through the vents of the car as Reed pulled the sedan to a stop, his stomach rumbling in response. Behind him Billie seemed to have the same reaction, a low whine drawing his attention to the rearview mirror before a pink tongue shot out over her muzzle.
“Yeah, I know,” Reed said, keenly aware of how far off both of their body cycles were at the moment. Neither one had slept more than a few hours at odd times, both grabbing small meals at random hours, Billie shifting her patterns to match his.
Six minutes after arriving, a faded mint green Chrysler pulled into the lot, instantly recognizable. Pockets of rust dotted the sides and Reed noticed a hubcap missing as it rolled into a spot on the front row and stopped, emitting a vicious hiss from the brakes.
Leaving Billie in the backseat, Reed tucked his badge away beneath his sweatshirt and stepped out, already halfway to the car before the driver’s side door opened.
From the description given by McMichaels and the voice on the phone, a pretty close match to what Reed was expecting climbed from the car, moving slow and with great care. He waited until she was completely out and the door shut behind her before stepping forward, his hand outstretched.
“Mrs. Pearlman? Detective Reed Mattox.”
The woman waved a hand at him as she shuffled forward, shaking her head. “Aw, phooey with that Mrs. Pearlman stuff. My name is Gale.”
At some point Reed guessed she had stood close to 5’9”, though those days were long past. Hunched forward at the waist she just barely came to his shoulder, her breath coming in small bursts as she moved forward. Silver curls were bunched tightly around her head, her chocolate colored skin lined with age.
Without regard for Reed’s attempted handshake, she grabbed hold of the inside of his arm, her grip surprisingly strong. With her other hand she motioned towards the door and said, “Help an old woman inside?”
Reed did as asked, maintaining the position until they were seated and waiting patiently as she stared over the menu. After ten full minutes of intent study and confirming that Reed was buying, she ordered a full rack of ribs with fries and a Coke, frowning in disapproval as Reed opted for a pulled pork sandwich for himself, some link sausage for Billie.
Only then were they left to themselves, Reed having a few free minutes before the food arrived to determine all he could.
“So, Gale,” he opened, his voice low. Even tucked away in the corner he wanted to be sure he wasn’t overheard, the case itself still very much a secret. “My officers tell me you might have seen something two nights ago.”
“Never said anything of the sort,” Gale said, snaking a hand into the tin bucket of peanuts on the table between them and removing a loose cluster.
Reed waited for her to clarify her statement but she remained silent, shelling the peanuts and tossing them back into her mouth with surprising gusto.
“You didn’t tell them you might have seen something?” Reed asked, shifting his head an inch to the side, his brows coming together.
Bits of peanut shell fell from her mouth as she chomped down, already reaching for more. “Well now, that’s not what you said the first time. You asked if I saw something that night, which I did not.”
Reed felt his eyes widen a bit in surprise, leaning back in his chair. “Oh, I see,” he paused a moment, pushing a breath out through his nose, willing himself to remain calm.
It was not the first time a witness had chosen to be a touch difficult, using the temporary position of power to extract some small modicum of pleasure. In most instances they did end up providing something useful, a fact Reed reminded himself of as he leaned back in.
“Okay, then, please tell me what you might have seen at any time that would aid us in this investigation.”
Placing a hand on the smooth tabletop between them, Gale swept her hand from left to right in front of her, sending the small pile of loose shells she’d amassed onto the floor. “Definitely never said I might have seen anything.”
Reed could feel a rush of blood come to his cheeks, the warmth of impending sweat along with it. He pressed his lips into a tight line and rocked forward another inch, glancing out into the restaurant.
Nearby, a pair of servers stood in idle chatter with a bartender, all three in their mid-twenties, appearing to flirt with each other regardless of gender. Around the outside of the room most of the tables were filled, singles and couples in conversation or working their way through an early dinner.
“Gale,” Reed said, careful to keep his voice neutral, “I’m very sorry if I’ve offended you in any way. I have spent the last two nights at crime scenes involving some of the most horrific things you can imagine and therefore seem to have forgotten my manners a bit.
“Please, if there is any way you might be able to help us catch whoever is doing these unspeakable things, I would greatly appreciate it.”
From across the table Gale stopped her work on the peanuts, her gaze boring into him, seemingly sizing him up. She remained that way a long moment, the folds of skin around her eyes creased tight, before nodding once in response to whatever she was trying to decide.
“Thank you,” she said, her fingers going back to work while she continued to maintain eye contact. “When you first called me, and even started offering me bribes to meet, I couldn’t tell how serious you were taking this.”
“I assure you, this is my top priority,” Reed inserted.
“I don’t just mean the case,” Gale said. “Of you caring about that I have no doubt. I meant about you coming out here to meet with an old woman and hear what she had to say.”
The confusion that splayed across Reed’s face was far more pronounced than any contrived response he could have come up. He genuinely had no idea what she was speaking about, letting her see the reaction on his face, hoping it would induce her to explain.
“It didn’t always used to be this way you know,” Gale began, her gaze still meeting his. “When my husband, God rest his soul, and I first moved into The Bottoms, it was a respectable place. Poor, for sure, but it didn’t have all the stuff you see around there nowadays, the drugs and violence and whatnot.”
As she spoke a look of disgust passed over her features, her voice rising to match it.
“Began in the late eighties, early nineties, things slowly starting to decline. Gangs showing up, businesses getting robbed, closing their doors and never looking back.”
She paused a moment, moving her attention out the window behind Reed, her eyes glassing over. For a long moment she fought to keep her
face from crinkling into a sob.
When she spoke again her voice was clear, though her eyes remained rimmed with moisture.
“I’m telling you this so you know, that place used to mean something, and it still does to a lot of us old timers. I don’t know who is the one doing this right now, but I tell you, I’m not so certain it’s a bad thing.”
Of everything she could have said, Reed was reasonably certain nothing would have surprised him more. His cheeks puffed out as he pushed the air from them, his eyes widening.
“Mrs. Pearlman, Gale, are you telling me the people of The Bottoms are supporting vigilante justice?”
There were a handful of additional things Reed could have said, giving her the full litany of standard police statements about letting them handle things, but decided to let it pass. Any concerns he had had an hour before about her cooperating with law enforcement were only now heightened, raised by her latest statement.
“No,” Gale said, twisting her head at the neck in a shake of disagreement, “I’m saying we support justice. That’s the reason I’m sitting here with you now, and it’s the reason I don’t feel real bad about what happened to that boy the other night. Or the one last night.”
Over the course of no more than a minute, Reed felt his reaction traverse the full circle from shock to realization. As salacious as the statements were, they weren’t an insight into the greater community or even a sweeping condemnation of the CPD, they were the thoughts of a woman that was longing for the old days, someone that had romanticized the past to a point of golden nostalgia in her mind.
With that realization came a bit of peace, letting his shock and hostility bleed away, though maintaining his pose across from her, careful not to offend.
“Gale,” he repeated again. “What did you see outside that house?”
Chapter Eighteen
Half a dozen homemade pork links sat on the passenger seat of the car, filling every nook and cranny of the space with the smoky aroma of meat. It permeated upward through the thin paper sack they were wrapped in, steaming up the window, driving Billie mad.
Reed could see her stomping back and forth in the rearview mirror, her tongue flicking out, one long unending whine spurting from her. The sound of her paws rubbing against the plastic on the seat reverberated in his ears, the sedan rocking with her perpetual movement.
“Not yet,” Reed said, sliding the car to a stop two doors down from the home of Edwin Mentor. Leaving the sausages in place he took up the long lead from the well of the passenger seat and exited, clipping it onto Billie’s collar and pulling her out.
“Come.”
Just a single word spoken in the correct tone and all thoughts of the sausage were gone. Billie dropped any pretense of even knowing they existed, bolting from the car and standing beside Reed, awaiting instruction.
Attaching the opposite end of the leash to his belt, Reed said, “Search.”
On his first day of training he had made the mistake of attempting to hold the lead, wrapping it through his palm. The instructor had seen the error right off but refrained from saying anything, letting Billie almost break his hand as a manner of teaching a lesson.
Reed had not repeated the misstep again.
Attaching the lead to his waist gave him enough weight to anchor against her, though the real purpose of the long lead was to allow her the freedom to roam. For the sake of the crime scene, and anybody that may be passing by, he couldn’t allow her complete autonomy, though in truth that would be best.
This was a decent enough second though.
The moment the command passed his lips Billie dropped her nose to the ground, drawing in deep breaths, the sound passing out into the brisk afternoon air.
While she worked Reed scanned the neighborhood around him, seeing it for the first time under the light of day. Somehow it appeared even shabbier than he remembered, the illumination serving to make visible many of the inconsistencies that were masked by darkness.
Mentor’s home was one of a string of seven exactly like it, low-slung structures meant for single families. All followed the same basic design and appeared to have the same sort of tenants, each losing battles with time and disrepair.
On the opposite side of the street a trio of multi-story brick buildings appeared to be empty, many of them with broken glass for windows, jagged shards hanging down. Graffiti of various colors covered the bottom floor of the brick, tapering off as the buildings grew out of reach overhead.
A tug on the line drew Reed forward as Billie continued to work, her ears and tail all lying flat, her nose propelling her forward.
The move to Billie was one Reed hadn’t been crazy about upon returning to active duty, but it was the only way he could come back to work under the requirements of the department. Regulations mandated that all active investigators work with a partner, whether it be human or canine.
Faced with the options of a dog or a new recruit fresh off the beat, Reed had chosen Billie, preferring to work with a dog over having to train someone from the ground up.
At least that’s what he tried to tell himself.
In the time since, he had come around on the unique skill set the animal brought to him, gaining a new appreciation for her ability to track. Unlike humans, born with five million scent receptors, Billie was blessed with more than two hundred twenty five million individuals synapses in her nose that could detect and differentiate an odor.
It allowed her to paint an internal image of something using smells the way a human with perfect vision might with their eyes. She could not only tell if someone had passed through, but tell the previous people that had been through and how many times their pets had relieved themselves as well.
Having worked with the Marines in a prior life, Billie had far superior training to many others in the precinct, able to alert on over two dozen possible explosives.
For the purposes of this crime scene though, Reed only needed her to do something much simpler.
Confirm Gale Pearlman’s story.
Giving Billie a fair bit of lead, Reed steered her past the standing crime scene tape to where the murder took place, watching as she covered every inch of it.
The Cadillac was still parked in the same place it had been, the stretch of concrete in front of it stained red in places with dried blood. The presence of so much water the night before had washed much of it away, though residue still covered the entire ten foot square swath between the yard and house save a few large blotches in the center, where Mentor’s body had once been.
At scenes in the past, when blood was pooled into a small location, Reed had seen it grow sticky and form mildew, attracting flies by the thousands. Here it did neither, the wide spread and cool temperatures allowing Billie to work her way over it without disturbing a thing.
With his hands deep in the pockets of his sweatshirt Reed stood and watched, waiting as Billie made a complete inventory of the scene, content that should she ever come across anything again that had been present there she would alert him.
It took almost ten minutes for her to find what Reed was hoping she might, picking up the scent just shy of the blotches in the center of the space and following it back towards the road. Reed felt his pulse increase as she picked up speed and traveled down the length of the driveway and out across the street, heading fast for the alley.
“I saw someone watching, from across the street,” Gale had said. “Maybe a week or more before it happened. At the time I thought it odd, but a lot of vagrants hang out over there.”
“So what made this particular one stand out?” Reed had asked.
“Because this one,” Gale explained, leaning forward, dropping her voice into a conspiratorial tone, “was sitting on the fire escape.”
Reed could feel his belt pulled taut as Billie drug him forward, gaining momentum, her own senses accelerating as she bore down on the target. She increased her pace to just shy of a jog before sliding to a stop.
Glancing up at Reed,
she moved in a quick circle, almost puzzled as she sat back on her haunches.
The search was over. The scent was gone.
“Good girl,” Reed said, reaching out and rubbing Billie behind the ears, his attention aimed at the wrought iron landing on the fire escape above. Standing ten feet off the ground and back eight feet from the corner of the building, it would be the perfect place for someone to conduct surveillance, masked from the world outside.
The fact that Gale Pearlman had even noticed was nothing but dumb luck, a woman out walking her dachshund that just happened to be at the optimal angle and look up at the right time.
For Reed, the tip was an enormous score, well worth the cost of a barbecue dinner. It told him that someone had in fact stalked Edwin Mentor with the intention of putting him down, and had probably done the same with A.J. Wright. It provided the possibility that DNA evidence might be up on the landing somewhere, perhaps attached to the cardboard he could see piled in the corner.
It also meant that whoever was behind this was meticulous and had a significant head start.
“Come on,” Reed said, tugging Billie back towards the car. “Let’s get the criminologists out here to take a look at that balcony.”
Billie balked a moment, remaining on her haunches. Reed pulled once more on her to no avail, the dog remaining rigid. She stayed like that a long moment, meeting his gaze, before sliding her tongue out over her nose.
A smile pulled up the left side of Reed’s mouth as he read her directive, nodding in agreement. “Yeah, let’s go see if we can’t get you some of those sausages, too.”
Chapter Nineteen
Any lingering effects of the canned espresso were now long gone. Reed could feel his eyelids starting to droop, his body fighting back against the odd schedule that had been forced upon it in the preceding days.
The abnormal hours themselves weren’t the sole source of his exhaustion, more the proverbial final straw that was breaking the camel’s back. For three months now he had lived a vampire’s lifestyle, interacting with the world almost exclusively during nighttime hours, having as little human contact as possible.
The Boat Man: A Suspense Thriller (A Reed & Billie Novel Book 1) Page 7
