The larger man reached in as if to slice through the strap and the old man felt a sharp tug. But as his would-be rescuer retreated once more, he found that he was still suspended, though suddenly robbed of breath. A fine, crimson mist filled the car and though he comprehended its meaning, he no longer had the power to scream. A caul of blood masked his face and blinded his eyes. Even as his brain and heart began to power down in furious jolts and ominous lulls he wondered why. ‘Why have you cut my throat?’ he wanted to ask, but the ones who could answer were already driving away in the stolen car they had parked nearby just a few hours before.
* * * *
Byron snagged the phone before the third ring, flipped it open and mumbled, “Chief Patrick here.” The voice on the other end of the phone made him sit bolt upright in bed, his gummy eyes fluttering open. The digital clock glowed redly from its perch—it was three-thirty in the morning.
“Byron?” the woman’s voice sounded uncertain. “It’s me, Reba.”
Byron pictured his best friend’s wife in faraway Atlanta, a genteel, classy woman. The soft lilt of home bled through the tension in her voice. “What’s wrong?” he asked. Something had to be wrong, of course, for her to call at this hour; for it to be her instead of Tom. He thought of Tom’s recent heart problems. “Is Tom okay? What’s wrong?”
There was a pause, and then she answered, a tremor entering her voice now, “He’s gone, Byron. I don’t know what’s happened, but he never came home from his office on Tuesday.” Byron’s free hand slid unconsciously across the smooth, unwrinkled sheet of the far side of his bed. It remained as empty as when he had turned in for the night. He remembered that it was now Thursday—Tom had been gone for over twenty four hours. Julia had not come home either, but he was growing used to that; they were not Tom and Reba.
Reba went on, “I’ve called everyone we know; everyone I could think of. No one’s heard from him or seen him. Then I thought of you. I knew it was a long shot, with you being way up there in New Jersey, but I thought maybe…maybe he just needed some time with an old friend. He’s seem worried lately…preoccupied.” Another pause ensued, this one charged and dark as a thunderhead. “He’s not there, is he?” she asked at last, the tears in her voice betraying her fear.
“I’ll catch the very first flight I can,” Byron replied softly, even as his mind raced through all the details of handing over the reins of his department to his second-in-command. “I should be there by late afternoon. Call me right away if he comes home in the meantime.”
* * * *
Byron sat in the faux leather chair that Thomas Llewellyn should have occupied and slowly swiveled from side to side. The seventh floor office overlooking Peachtree Street was not cooperating. The large chair and the scarred metal desk it faced were the only signs of permanence, and even these were devoid of character, being standard issue in cubicles across the nation. The shelving along the walls was constructed of thin, wobbly railings supporting dusty cardboard boxes; most appeared in danger of imminent collapse. The few filing cabinets were tilted and dented, as if accustomed to suffering the kicks and blows of angry men. The ragged files they contained meant nothing to Byron and shed no light on his friend’s disappearance. Tom’s laptop, the only computer he possessed Reba had explained to him, was nowhere to be found.
Byron had visited the office only once before and that had been many years ago on one of his annual trips to see his mother. Whenever possible, he engineered a stopover with the Llewellyns on his way to their mutual hometown of Columbus, yet a hundred miles further south. It seemed more than a lifetime ago when they had all attended the same high school together; lived in the same neighborhood.
At the time of his first visit Tom had been in the midst of just getting moved in; just beginning his consulting business. And now it seemed to Byron that almost nothing had changed in the room since that time, and this gave him an anxious, uneasy feeling. Thomas had done very well in life, had a good income and a beautiful home in a leafy, much sought-after suburb, yet his office bespoke none of this. In fact, Byron reflected, it was a decidedly mute environment—any single one of his officers’ lockers back in New Jersey displayed more character, more personality, than this dim, silent room.
Byron had opened every drawer, closet, and box in his blind search for any clue as to where Tom had gone—or been taken. Reba had assured him that Tom had no enemies; none that he had ever spoken of. “He’s a municipal planning consultant,” she had reminded Byron shortly after he had arrived. “He visits towns throughout the southeast, by invitation mind you, conducts interviews with employees, observes procedures and writes up his thoughts and recommendations on streamlining operations.
“He’s never the one that actually does any firings, you know, if that’s what you’re thinking. He’s long gone before anything like that gets done,” she had assured him. “People like Tom, Byron; you know that; they always have.”
It was true, Byron thought once more. Tom had always had an easy, witty charm about him. He wasn’t the kind to make enemies. In that way, they were very different men. Byron smiled at the memory of Tom’s slightly sardonic banter, the arched eyebrow, the curved upper lip that belied his innate good humor. He moved easily amongst men Byron reflected with only a little envy. But even as he remembered his best friend, his hands, patting and probing without need of his direct attention, discovered the envelope and drew it forth. It had been taped to the bottom of the battered desk’s slide-out typing shelf—an anachronism concealing a secret.
As the yellowed, brittle newspaper clippings spilled forth onto the desk top like ancient leaves, Byron felt a darkness, the shadow of a black wing, sweep across his heart. He did not need to read the terse accounts to know the story they told; he recognized his old home in the grainy photos, his own mother and father, decades younger, but the strain and heartache already permanently etched into their faces. Worse still, was the tiny inset of a school photo the police had used in their investigation—a boy of ten sporting the heavily lacquered, thrust-up hair of the era; his smile wide and toothsome—a boy that might have been Byron himself but for his blondness. “Daniel,” he whispered.
Byron leapt to his feet sweeping the clippings hastily back into the envelope. A list of names and addresses written on a strip of white paper, obviously much newer than the articles, caught his eye amongst the tobacco-colored shards, and he studied it for a moment. All of the addresses were in Columbus, but the names themselves meant nothing to him. He returned the list to the envelope and stuffed the entire package into his inside jacket pocket. Within minutes he was in his rental car and speeding southward on I-85 through the wind-swept night.
* * * *
The shell of a house peeked whitely out from its nest of riotous shrubberies and questing vines. In the moonlight it reminded Byron of a skull sinking into the overgrown, humid earth. The entrance was only partially covered by a piece of warped plywood. ‘Probably neighborhood kids,’ he thought; ‘the house would certainly qualify as haunted.’ He could picture the local kids taking the dare to enter the decrepit blue-collar bungalow; he might have done the same thing himself once upon a time.
Something flexed and popped beneath his shoe and he flashed a quick beam from his penlight onto it. A barely legible ‘For Sale’ sign lay rusting and forgotten in the tall, rank grasses. The house still lay empty after thirty-five years—a testament to the fate of its original owner.
Daniel’s body had never been found; his abductor and murderer never apprehended by the police. ‘But the man responsible was identified,’ Byron recalled in a frisson of loathing tinged with guilt—‘justice had been served, and more importantly, Daniel had been avenged.’ Of this, and not very much more, he was certain. Just as he was certain when he discovered the clippings regarding Daniel’s kidnapping in Tom’s office, that his missing friend had discovered something new in the decades-old case; possibly something dangerous to them both. Otherwise Byron would never have returned to this hous
e just two blocks from where he and Thomas grew up; never returned to the only place on earth where he had been responsible for the death of another human being—where they had killed his brother’s murderer.
The list of names meant something to Thomas and now he had disappeared. Was he being blackmailed? Had they been found out after all these years?
Byron pushed through the tall grasses and mounted the few, cracked concrete steps leading up to the gapped entrance. With just a pause to quickly illuminate the interior and insure that a floor still existed, he squeezed through and stood inside.
The climbing tendrils that threatened to pull the tiny house down had not yet obscured all the windows, and through these poured a faint, phosphorescent light; Byron stood still and allowed his eyes to adjust. Gradually, objects once recognizable as furniture coalesced into view—a moldering armchair trembling with hidden mice, a pile of unidentifiable debris seemingly swept up into one corner, a two-legged coffee table that appeared to be kneeling like a dog. He glanced nervously down the short hallway and risked a brief flash of his light. The kitchen at the other end of the house remained impenetrable to the weak illumination, but no noose hung there; no corpulent little man dangled kicking and purple-faced, his eyes black with engorged blood; there was no toppled chair.
Something fluttered whitely on the door frame and Byron instinctively sought it with the beam of his light. He half-expected to find a dusty, irritated moth, but found instead a square of paper tacked to the warped, peeling wood, its edges trembling faintly in the slight breeze. Like the list with the yellowed clippings, this also appeared fresh and recent in its brilliance. Byron trod cautiously down the corridor, his heart thudding louder with every step that drew him closer to the kitchen and its dark memories.
It had all started with their dog ‘Buddy’—he was the first to go missing. In reality, he had been Byron’s dog, an amiable mongrel that he had adopted off the street and then left behind as he had entered his teens. Daniel had been only too happy to inherit the black and white cur. In just a short while, Buddy had successfully, and far too easily as far as Byron had been concerned, transferred his allegiance to the younger Patrick—he became Daniel’s shadow and constant companion; there was not one without the other. That is, until Buddy failed to show up for breakfast one hot, sticky morning a month into their summer vacation.
By the second day of Buddy’s absence, Daniel was inconsolable, suffering the loss as a fresh and open wound. It had been Byron that suggested his little brother stop his sniveling, wipe his snotty nose and go from house to house to make inquiries. Byron had not expected this tactic to produce any actual results other than occupying Daniel’s attention for a few days and putting an end to his bawling, if only temporarily. This cynical suggestion would haunt Byron for the rest of his life.
Armed with a crayon depiction of Buddy scrawled onto a page of lined notebook paper, Daniel sallied forth into the early morning neighborhood with full confidence in his brother’s idea. He never came back. The portrait of the dog was later found in a garbage can set out to the curb. The can bore the sloppily painted numbers that once were attached to the decaying house in which Byron now stood. The former, and deceased, occupant denied any knowledge of little boys or missing dogs. No one believed him.
He was an older man who lived alone. So far as any one knew there had never been a Missus or a girlfriend, and there had been rumors long before Daniel disappeared. Some of Byron’s friends hinted at hidden knowledge, kids in the neighborhood who went silent when the subject of Mr. Virgil Curtsie came up—children who went dead white and stared at their feet. When Byron had suggested the door-to-door campaign to Daniel, he had forgotten Mr. Curtsie; he had forgotten the spider that crouched within the heart of their neighborhood, the small, soft man who always found something to do in his postage stamp-sized front yard when school let out. The grubby little man with the thick, greasy glasses that insisted trick-or-treaters come in to his home on Halloween to receive their due.
Even so, the police search revealed nothing useful to their investigation within his walls. Half the neighborhood, adult and child, had stood vigil outside his home the day of the search. When Curtsie had escorted the last officer to the door, Byron recalled the little smile that had lifted his pursed and purplish lips—a tiny, furtive smile of triumph. Thomas had nudged him hard in the ribs that hot day as the sun sank like a ball of fire into the faraway ocean. “We should git’im! You wanna git’im?” he had asked urgently. “If it was my brother, I’d damn sure git’im!”
They were both big boys at fourteen, and athletic, and what they did was not hard to do once they had made up their minds. Thomas had been startlingly adept at violence, pummeling and overpowering the smiling Curtsie as he answered their knock at his back door. Binding him with the clothesline they had brought was the work of only a few moments. The remaining length had been fastened round his fleshy neck and pulled through a lamp hook fastened to the ceiling and tied off to the oven door. Byron remembered being amazed and intimated by his best friend’s unexpected proclivity for violence and his adult-like confidence. From the moment they had entered the house Thomas had moved with assurance.
The entire episode had unfolded in the slow, detail-laden way of dreams; only the moments of violence achieving rapidity, the images blurred and seeping colors. Byron had intended that they should interrogate the grimy little man about Daniel’s whereabouts, but Thomas, in his righteous zeal, had rendered his mouth incapable of forming coherent words. Now, their plan to threaten him with hanging unless he came ‘clean’ would appear to have no real purpose. Nonetheless, Thomas had herded their prisoner onto the chair and threaded the hangman’s rope to its anchor. Mr. Curtsie swayed from side to side and appeared dazed; unsure of what was happening to him. Just as Byron prepared to intervene—after all it was Daniel’s whereabouts that they had come for—Thomas suddenly put a finger to his lips and pointed to the front of the house. “Did you hear a car pull up?” he asked urgently.
Byron sprinted for the front door and peered cautiously through the curtains. The mail man’s jeep was just pulling away from the Curtsie post box. He nearly passed out with relief. When he returned, the chair lay on its side and the man responsible for his little brother’s disappearance dangled from the ceiling. “The bastard jumped,” Thomas whispered at the awe-inspiring sight and pointed to the back door. “Let’s go,” he had commanded the mesmerized Byron; “Now!” Together, they had fled the house like two boys running from a broken window; shouting and laughing with relief when they were safely away. It was only later that Byron realized that Tom had untied the dead man’s hands before they had escaped.
Byron snagged the folded note from the door frame and opened it. In the beam from his penlight, he read the words, “Waiting for you.”
* * * *
The chief of the Columbus P.D. was a large, heavy man not much older than Byron, early fifties, he guessed. He had the look of a college football player gone to seed. The chief slid a paper cup of coffee across his desk and regarded his visitor. Byron saluted him with it and said, “I appreciate you seeing me, Chief Tanner; I’m sure you’re busy.”
“Call me Steve,” he replied, suspicion written all over his face; “How can I say no to a fellow chief…even one from New Jersey?” he added with just the hint of a smile.
Byron smiled tightly back. “I grew up here…born and raised. My mama still lives here.”
“Columbus High?”
“No, Pacelli.”
Chief Tanner took a noisy sip of his coffee and leaned back in his leather chair. “Is that right? You gotta go somewhere, I reckon. Well how in the hell did you end up stranded in the frozen north, pray tell?”
“Pretty easy, actually; I met and married a Jersey girl while I was serving in the army. You know how it goes, when we decided to get out of the service she wanted to settle down close to her folks, and I just wanted her to be happy for a change; it worked …for a while.”
Tanner smiled more broadly now, as if Byron were just then exhibiting recognizable human features. “Wives,” he waved his meaty paw across the top of his desk; ‘they’re something, ain’t they?” He didn’t require an answer. “Looks like they’ve treated you pretty good up there, didn’t they, Chief…for a southern boy?” He slid Byron’s police ID card across his desk to him.
“Yep,” Byron admitted; “they sure as hell have.”
Tanner gazed silently across the desk top at him with the expression of a benevolent uncle for a nephew who has traveled far and done well. “So then, what is it we can do for you,” he asked in the gently tumbled grammar of the Piedmont.
Byron looked at Tanner squarely. “Steve, my best friend has gone missing and I have reason to believe he may be somewhere here in Columbus…his wife is frantic,” he added for emphasis.
“Grown man?” Tanner asked. “He might not thank you if you find him, Byron. Besides, you know as well as me that the police can’t involve themselves with runaway husbands.”
“It’s not like that.” Byron leaned forward. “I think he’s gotten into some kind of trouble. I don’t know if he’s running from something or away from it, but it’s also possible he was taken.”
“Taken?” Tanner echoed. “If you had any proof of that the FBI would already be involved, wouldn’t they?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but continued. “I’m still not hearing why this might be a police matter, Byron, and to tell you God’s honest truth, we’re a little bit busy around here just at the moment. You may not be familiar with the little crime wave we’re having, but the press is having a field day.” He shoved the morning’s Ledger-Enquirer across his desk to Byron and pointed at a photograph of an overturned car—spectators knelt and peered at something dangling within. Chief Tanner stabbed a thick finger at it and said, “Had his throat cut, by God! Run off the road and murdered for no apparent reason; his wallet left behind. It don’t make sense and it’s not the first—we’re rackin’ ’em up day by day. I’ve got a city of over a quarter million people, Byron, and less than five hundred cops to take care of ’em. Like I said, we’re kind of preoccupied just now.”
The Detective Megapack Page 9
