Rainey with a Chance of Hale (A Rainey Bell Thriller Book 6)

by R. E. Bradshaw

  Rainey heard her father’s name and came to attention.

  “May I ask who’s calling,” she said, cautiously.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Sure, you wouldn’t just tell that info to just anyone.”

  Rainey recognized the Dare County, North Carolina brogue, as the caller identified himself.

  “This is Howard Daniel from Wanchese. Your daddy give me some money and your card in exchange for my promise to call you if I ever seen Chance Hale ‘round here ag’in. I’m a man o’ my word, so I’m a callin’.”

  “I appreciate your call, Mr. Daniel. So, Chance Hale is in Wanchese again?”

  “Call me Howard. My daddy’s Mr. Daniel. Yeah, ol’ Chance rolled in a couple o’ days ago. Took me a while to find what I done with your card, but I found it.”

  “I’m glad you did. If you keep this conversation quiet, I’ll make sure my dad rewards you when he sees you again.”

  “I don’t want to appear greedy, but when might that be, do you think?”

  “He’s heading down there this weekend for a two-week fishing binge.”

  “Well, I look forward to seeing him. Your daddy’s good people.”

  “Yes, he is. Thanks again, Howard. You’ve been a big help.”

  Rainey hung up the phone and wrote the date on a sliver of paper. Using a pushpin, she attached the date to a wall-map of the US on the dot indicating Wanchese, a little fishing village in Dare County.

  Chance Hale made his living as a commercial fishing industry mechanic and crewman. Rainey spent her own money and part of her precious little downtime tracking him and sending missing person flyers to his known locations. She went personally or sent her father to build a network of informants within the fishing community along the Atlantic coast. Chance, through his connection to the disappearance of Alyson Grayson, was Rainey’s number one obsession. The inability to fulfill her promise to Alyson’s mother was the albatross around her neck.

  She kept a journal of Chance Hale’s activities and the missing women cases that seemed to follow him from port to port. She sat back down at her desk, pulled the journal from her satchel, and opened it to the notation she made just two days ago. On Monday, Rainey recorded that Chance had been picked up and questioned in a sexual assault case. The victim was alive, but just barely. With no evidence to hold him on, the Newport News, Virginia police let him go when his lawyer showed up, but not before collecting DNA. Yesterday, Tuesday, another box of bones arrived at the FBI lab with “Attention: Special Agent R. B. Bell,” written on the label. Again the remains were tagged, identifying the victim, the date, and the place of “shipment.” The remains of Margaret Mary Hedrick of Newburyport, Massachusetts, became the sixth box of bones received since January of 2000. The bones had been left in a lifeguard stand in Virginia Beach.

  “Bell.”

  SSA Wood’s voice interrupted Rainey, just as she was about to note Chance’s current whereabouts for her records. She looked up to see Wood standing just outside her cubicle.

  Rainey acknowledged his presence with, “SSA Wood, sir.” She began to stand out of respect.

  “No, no, don’t get up. I hear another box of bones came in.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Same story, no trace evidence?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Still think that Hale boy from Carolina is involved?”

  “It’s the same UNSUB sending the boxes. I know that. And I’m sure we’ll be able to tie Chance Hale to this victim too, but again, it’ll all be circumstantial. He’s involved. Either he is the UNSUB, or the UNSUB wants us to believe he is. There is no such thing as that many circumstantial meetings with women who end up as murder victims.”

  Wood eyed the map on the wall. “Where is he now?”

  “He left Newport News after being questioned in a sexual assault last weekend. The victim lived, but with head trauma too severe to remember anything right now. She might recover some memories, but they’d be unreliable after she’s been repeatedly told what happened to her. Chance is in Wanchese currently. He’s circling closer to home these days.”

  Wood stared at the map for a bit and then turned his focus on Rainey. “Look, oversight says you haven’t taken even one of the mandatory mental health days this year. I am told you have ten days of leave. Make arrangements and let me know when you’ll be gone.”

  It sounded like a polite request, but it wasn’t. It was an order given in Wood’s subtle management style.

  “Yes, sir,” Rainey answered.

  “Good then,” Wood said before starting away.

  Rainey stopped him with, “Sir?”

  Wood turned back to face her. “Yes, Bell.”

  “May I take ten days starting Friday? My father has a cottage in Nags Head for two weeks. I think the salt air would do me good.”

  Wood’s lips curled into a perceptive smile. “Sounds great. Enjoy the sun. Give your father my regards.”

  “I will, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  8

  January 10, 2009

  Volusia County Jail

  Red John Drive

  Daytona Beach, Florida

  “Chance Obadiah Hale. We meet again.”

  “Very Special Agent Rainey Blue Bell. I’ve always thought your name was like a weather report and a country song scrambled together.”

  Eleven years had passed since their first meeting on a frigid morning in North Dakota. It had been four years since she had seen him across a gravel parking lot, headed for a trawler with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder. Chance had celebrated his twenty-seventh birthday four days before this meeting. It was also the day of his arrest for killing a woman.

  He had sutures above his right eye and a purple bruise on the corresponding jawline. Still scrawny with the same stringy, sun-bleached blond hair, he maintained the surfer boy wiriness and emotive sadness the teen girls had found alluring, except it had morphed into more of an unattractive drunken beach bum vibe. The dark bruise on his jaw made the thin patches of facial hair on his chin more noticeable. It was the type of scraggly beard grown by young fair-haired men who really shouldn’t bother. Rainey thought either the glare of the fluorescent lights bounced off Chance’s jail-orange jumpsuit and caused the jaundiced tint to his angler’s tan, or the kidneys and liver of the young but dedicated alcoholic had begun to fail.

  She responded to his critique of her name. “I have to admit, Chance O. Hale has given me a chuckle or two. Our parents had imagination, if not forethought.”

  “I had fucked up parents. I bet yours weren’t much better.”

  Rainey smiled and observed her obsession up close for the first time since they occupied that kitchen table in Joshua Lee Hale’s home; back when “that Hale boy from Carolina” was an arrogant teenager full of hidden patricidal rage. Rainey had discovered, in the years since that explosive first meeting, Chance Hale had a good reason for his detached reaction to his father’s death.

  She kept smiling during her response. “My parents? No, they were just two normal high school seniors with raging hormones.”

  “Backseat baby,” was Chance’s low energy comment. He’d spent his momentary spike in adrenaline on his original dig.

  He was, as they say in recovery circles, unwell. His skin glistened with sweat. Strands of unruly hair clung to his clammy forehead. His voice quivered, and his body shook with each wave of bone-chilling nausea. He had been under medically observed acute alcohol withdrawal for the last seventy-two hours. The bucket on the floor next to his chair indicated he had not cleared the puking stage.

  Rainey opened the folder in front of her, pretending to review the material she knew without the refresher, while nonchalantly replying to his comment.

  “My parents eloped after graduation and ran away to the Outer Banks to become hippies. My name seems fitting for that narrative.” She paused to raise her green eyes to meet Chance’s faded blue ones. “However, I do agree with you on your parentage. ‘Fucked up’ doesn’t really begin to
describe the depravity surrounding your conception.”

  Chance wiped the sweat-drenched hair from his forehead with his right hand. His handcuffed left hand followed with no alternative. The movement caused the correctional officer in the corner to take a step forward. Chance glanced over his shoulder, eyeing his captor with a glint of fear before quickly dropping his hands to the tabletop. The CO relaxed, and Chance returned his attention to Rainey.

  “I figured when I gave that DNA in Virginia you’d get wind of it and it wouldn’t be long before you put a few things together. Care to share the revolting details?”

  Rainey knew Chance wanted to know if what he suspected about his heritage was true. She needed him bruised and tender. It was a win for both of them. He was weak from the forced sobriety. The truth might soften him further. Rainey wanted a confession. She wanted to know who killed the six women in the boxes that had come once a year from 2000 through 2005. She wanted to know what happened to Alyson Grayson. She revealed her knowledge of his genealogy with the sole purpose of abating his defenses.

  “We tested DNA found in the explosion that killed most of your family. We ran it against yours. Joshua Lee Hale, the man you believed to be your father, was really your half-brother. His father, Obadiah Hale, is also your biological father. Your aunt Sarah was your half-sister.

  Rainey watched his reaction. Chance paid close attention to what she said and appeared unsurprised. She went for the worst of it.

  “But that isn’t the whole story, is it? Instead of running off with another man, as you were told, your mother probably died trying to get away from the hell she left you in—but then again, her body was never found. If she’s still alive somewhere, that would mean she got away but didn’t care enough to come back for you after your father blew himself up, and not even after everyone else died in the explosion that leveled old man Hale’s house. The house you were supposed to be sleeping in, by the way. Have you ever wondered why?”

  Chance shrugged indifference, but Rainey knew he had wondered. It ate at him, according to the journals they found in his truck.

  She continued, “The lab noticed something about your DNA. Let me see. I have a report here that explains the findings in layman’s terms. It can be confusing.”

  She flipped through some pages in the file, stopping on the one she wanted, before beginning to read.

  “Your DNA shows an ‘absence of heterozygosity.’ See, it says that right here.” She slid the paper in front of Chance and pointed at the pertinent sentence, as she explained, “This means that large chunks of your mother and father’s contributions to your DNA are identical because they shared much of their genetic code. In other words, it is very likely that they were first-degree relatives, as in father and daughter or brother and sister. I think you see what this means.”

  She waited for Chance’s eyes to leave the paper and re-establish eye contact with her, before asking. “Are those the few things we may have learned that you were referring to?”

  “I suppose that’s enough.”

  “Well, no, not really, Chance. Let’s talk about why I’m here and the stuff in the toolbox on the back of your truck. That’s a little fucked up too, don’t you think?”

  “Well, yeah, if you don’t know what it is.”

  “I’m going to let you tell me what it is, but first I need to know you have been read your rights and are speaking to me at your request without a lawyer.”

  “Yeah, I told ‘em to call you.”

  Rainey pointed at the one-way glass. “You acknowledge there is a camera aimed at us and that you are being recorded. Is that correct?”

  Chance nodded.

  “I need you to answer verbally, for the record.”

  “Yes, I am talking to you without a lawyer on the record. Okay? Can we get on with it?”

  “Are you under arrest, Chance?”

  “Yes, but you know that.”

  “I need anyone who reviews this interview to know. I want no part of an illegal interview that might someday set you free. Why are you in jail in Daytona Beach, Florida?

  Chance dropped his chin to his chest before answering, “I’m under arrest for vehicular homicide. I fell asleep at the wheel and drove my truck into oncoming traffic. I hit a car head-on.”

  Rainey filled in the details Chance shied away from. “You killed a young mother and put both of her children in intensive care. Your blood alcohol concentration was point-two-nine. Is that correct?”

  Chance kept his chin tucked and his eyes focused on the tabletop, when he answered softly, “Yes.”

  “So, you realize you are going to prison and talking with me will have no bearing on the vehicular homicide charge. Is that correct?”

  “Yes,” Chance said, this time raising his head to face Rainey.

  “All right, then,” Rainey said and then asked, “Why did you call for me, Chance? What is it that you think I can do for you?”

  “Maybe you can explain to these yahoos down here that I’m being set up with that serial killer shit.”

  “What makes you think I can do that, Chance? I’ve looked over this evidence. It’s pretty compelling.”

  “I did not kill those women. Someone put that stuff in my toolbox. Joshua Hale was a killer, not me.”

  “Your fingerprints are all over the toolbox, inside and out. You also handled every piece of evidence found inside. If it isn’t yours, how did that happen?”

  “It’s my fucking toolbox. It’d be damn strange if my prints weren’t on it. And I touched all those bags of stuff when I found it, but I didn’t open them.”

  “What do you mean by ‘found it’?”

  “When I came back to the states, I didn’t expect my shit to still be where I left it. I mean, I got on the boat that mornin’ and I didn’t plan to come back.”

  Rainey looked down and pretended to read her notes.

  “In your statement to the investigators, you say you came back to the US because the Brazilian authorities suspected you in a series of missing women cases. Is that correct?”

  “Behind bars in Brazil is no place to be, man. Hell yeah, I left. They’re just looking for a scapegoat. Somebody told ‘em I was there, that my dad was a serial killer, and that I was wanted for a bunch of murders in the states. Who the fuck does that? Find out who is stalking me, telling lies about me, and you’ll know who put that stuff in my truck.”

  Rainey made a note just so he’d see she was listening to him. She gave the impression that his story had value, but she could not let him control how he told it.

  “Hang on. Let’s back up a sec,” Rainey said, leaning a little closer, giving Chance full eye contact—hoping he would see genuine interest in his story. She loved this part of her job. During the last nine years in the Behavioral Analysis Unit, Rainey had come to enjoy the conversations with criminals, especially those who underestimated her knowledge of their crimes. Moving Chance through his timeline without continuity kept him off balance.

  “You say you took a trawler out of Wanchese to South America in July 2005. Is that right?”

  “Yeah. I had to go, man. Somebody was stalking me. Stuff was happening all the time. I just knew whoever it was couldn’t follow me out to sea. I took the mechanic job on the trawler Apple’s Eye for a ride down to Brazil. Worked out of Santos, São Paulo, till the police started dogging me.”

  Rainey knew all about the stalker. In July of 2005, she took ten days off work to vacation with her father in Nags Head, just a few miles from the Wanchese docks. Chance had recently arrived from Newport News, Virginia. He had been questioned, gave a voluntary DNA sample, and was released in the abduction of Donna Hollis Travis. Rainey’s presence was not a coincidence. Chance indeed had a stalker at the time, an FBI agent who didn’t want him to get too comfortable.

  Despite being a barely functioning drunk, Chance was a hell of a mechanic. He traveled up and down the east coast, from dock to dock. Truly gifted with engines of all types, he picked up odd jobs and on rare
occasions signed on for a steady paycheck with a captain willing to overlook his alcohol addiction. Amazingly, Chance had become proficient at maintenance drinking when out at sea, nipping just enough to keep the tremors at bay.

  When he was on shore, he stayed at the docks in his truck. Chance Hale lived a simple life, despite being heir to half of Hale Trucking. He’d been to Wanchese before and had crewed with some of the captains, so the locals welcomed him back. It cost Rainey a leap of faith and a hundred bucks upfront, but it paid off when her phone rang the minute Chance Hale had returned to Dare County.

  Rainey arrived a week after Chance, and with her came the flyers for missing women connected to the fishing industry. Flyers started showing up on the windshields of vehicles parked at the docks and the bulletin boards at local fisherman hangouts. While the flyers did not name Chance as a suspect, they certainly played a part in his leaving when he did. Rainey had no idea it would be four years before he returned. At least the boxes of bones with her name on them stopped arriving once a year after he sailed away. But Chance didn’t know of her involvement in his misery beyond her official capacity as a federal agent.

  She asked, “Somebody was stalking you? Can you tell me more about that?”

  “I guess you know about the girl in Newport News.”

  She did, but asked, “What girl?”

  “Okay, back in 2005, this girl I had a few drinks with—Donna, her name was Donna—well, she ended up gettin’ attacked. They asked me questions. I gave them answers. They let me go. Just like always.”

  “Were you a suspect?”

  “I’m always a suspect. I’ve been a suspect since Alyson disappeared, but you know that. “

  “You’ve left a lot of unanswered questions and missing women in your wake, Chance. I think that’s why you are, as you say, ‘always a suspect.’ I doubt my inquiries into your whereabouts and activities have caused you the trouble those missing women have.”

  “People go missing all the time. Why am I always a suspect?”

  “Since 1998, seven women known to you have disappeared. The partial remains of six of them have been recovered. An eighth, Donna Travis, was abducted and raped. She escaped with permanent brain trauma. Her attacker did not intend for her to live. That many women who know you have been murdered or almost killed. That’s just not the average person’s reality, Chance.”