The Innocent: The New Ryan Lock Novel

by Sean Black

  Lock stepped out of the office and walked over to Ty. ‘How’s everyone doing?’

  'Shaken up.’

  Headlights swept across the front of the house. Lock went to the window, and took a peek. ‘College security.’

  He watched as the female cop who had tricked Ty climbed out of a cruiser and walked toward the front door. ‘Your buddy’s here,’ he told him. Lock had known him long enough to recognize Ty’s game face. It was the usual precursor to someone having their day ruined by the six-foot-four marine. ‘Let’s hear what she has to say first.’

  Ty didn’t appear convinced. ‘She watched Tromso drive off with me. You trying to tell me she didn’t know what he had planned?’

  ‘No,’ said Lock. ‘I’m saying that we already got enough to deal with here. If she was helping Tromso, that’s for the FBI to deal with. Not us.’

  The doorbell chimed. ‘I’ll get it,’ Lock said.

  He walked into the hallway, and unlocked the front door. ‘Mr Lock?’ she said, putting out her hand. ‘I’m Officer Svenson. I’m acting chief since Officer Tromso was killed.’

  She didn’t look like a cop so much as like a young woman playing a cop in a TV show. It was nothing to do with her gender. Lock believed that in most instances women made for better law-enforcement personnel than men. They generally had better communication and negotiation skills and were less likely to escalate a situation unnecessarily for reasons of ego or machismo.

  But there was something about the woman standing in front of him that didn’t fit with the uniform. Cops had a look to them when they were on duty. Lock could usually pick one out anywhere. They carried themselves differently from civilians. They looked at you differently. Even when they were off-duty, they gave off an aura of situational awareness not found in the general population. It had been said that it was the same for criminals: a thief could pick out another thief from a hundred yards.

  Lock shook her hand. ‘Yeah, I think my partner wants to speak to you about what happened with that.’

  ‘I’m sure he does. I’d appreciate the opportunity to clarify it for him.’

  Lock glanced beyond her. ‘Do you have any other personnel available?’

  She looked away. ‘We’re rather short-staffed right now.’

  That wasn’t what Lock had seen. If anything he had been pretty taken aback by just how many cops they had for a campus that, barring recent events, was very low crime.

  ‘I’ve placed a number of personnel on leave pending further investigation.’ When Lock didn’t react, she added, ‘Personnel recruited by Officer Tromso.’

  Lock didn’t say anything. If she was trying to present herself as some kind of new broom, ready to sweep out the corruption of a previous regime, he wasn’t buying it. Ty had been very clear about her having gone along with what had happened. If she knew what had been going on, she could have turned whistleblower long before now.

  ‘You think I was involved in all this, Mr Lock, don’t you?’ She said it with a smile, as if she knew something that would make him seem foolish when it came out.

  ‘I know only what my partner told me. And I’d believe him over anyone else in this world, so try not to take it personally.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I won’t. May I come in?’

  Lock opened the door and she walked past him. ‘Is the chancellor speaking to the feebs?’

  ‘In his office,’ said Lock.

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘It’s about time. If only he’d done it before now all this could have been avoided.’

  ‘If you say so,’ Lock told her.

  Laird walked into the living room. His wife went to him and placed a comforting hand on his shoulder. Lock had a vomit-inducing feeling that Laird was going to come out of this a hero, even though nothing could have been further from the truth.

  Ty hard-stared Svenson from across the room. Lock had a sneaky feeling that part of the reason Ty was so angry was that he’d been fooled by a pretty woman. Most men would have steered clear of him, but not Svenson.

  She walked straight over to him. ‘Mr Johnson, I owe you an apology.’

  Ty scowled at her. ‘You think?’

  ‘I can understand your anger. I’d feel the same if it was me.’

  From what Lock could see, Ty wasn’t about to be taken in again. He grabbed his partner’s arm before things got ugly. ‘I need to talk to you.’ He pulled Ty into a corner of the room. ‘What do you want to do about Malik?’ he asked.

  ‘What you mean?’

  ‘Well,’ said Lock, ‘he can’t stay hidden for ever. The FBI are going to drag it all out into the open, whether people round here want them to or not. We have enough evidence between the pictures you took at the house and everything else we know about Becker, Tromso and that other lunatic to put him in the clear. Seems like now would be a good time for him to hand himself over.’

  Ty weighed it up. Finally, he said, ‘You’re right. Let’s call him.’

  Lock handed Ty his cell. ‘Here, you do it.’

  Ty took the phone and stepped off into a corner as Svenson walked back over.

  ‘You get a look at the guy who fled the car?’ she asked Lock.

  ‘Not really, no. White. Five eleven, six feet. Average build. Dark hair. Early thirties. That’s about it.’

  ‘Not a lot to go on,’ she said.

  ‘Did you know what was going on?’

  Svenson met his gaze. ‘Knowing and proving are two different things.’

  Ty headed back to them. He grabbed Lock and steered him into the hallway, out of earshot of everyone else. ‘He’s not picking up.’

  ‘It’s late. He’s probably asleep.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ said Ty. ‘But I called the motel manager. He said that the person in that room left this afternoon. I made him go check. Malik’s gone.’

  Seventy

  The alley that ran behind the fast-food restaurant was empty, apart from a few rats foraging for scraps. A cell phone trilled inside one of the restaurant’s three Dumpsters. The display flashed the word ‘Lock’ on the screen.

  Finally, the ringing stopped as it defaulted to voicemail. A few minutes later another call came in. Still no one answered.

  Seventy-one

  It was a little after five in the morning. Ty paced back and forth from the door of Lock’s hotel room to the window. Lock sat at the desk with a laptop. He ran through the pictures from Ty’s cell, making sure he had everything. He had also laid out a time line that documented every event since Ty had received the first phone call from Malik while they were in Manhattan. Finally he had spoken, at length, with an attorney, to ensure that there would be no blowback from his and Ty’s full and frank disclosure.

  In two hours, at precisely seven a.m., Lock was due to start his interview with the assistant special agent in charge for the FBI’s Minneapolis-based VCAC program. VCAC stood for Violent Crimes against Children. The special agent in charge, a twenty-year Bureau vet called Dennis Lee, had already told Laird that he was pulling as many bodies as he could to Harrisburg, leaving only a skeleton staff in Minneapolis. He had requested additional resources from Quantico. He had also requested that Detective Johanssen and anyone else working at state level step off the case after they had handed over all files to the feebs.

  Ty stopped for a moment at the window. Down below on what passed for Harrisburg’s main drag, the lights of the diner had just flipped on. He recognized the young waitress whom he’d stood up for days earlier. She was standing with the short-order cook and a Somali bus boy, all three sipping coffee, bracing themselves for the day ahead. It was about to get busier. Sheer human misery was good for business, thought Ty. We feasted on it.

  The wind was picking up again. It whipped down the street, picking up a missing-person flier with Jack Barnes’s picture on it, throwing it up into the air before it came to rest under a car.

  Lock looked up from his computer. ‘Okay, that’s everything.’ He stood up and reached out a fist. He
and Ty bumped. ‘Keep me updated. Okay?’

  ‘You got it,’ said Ty.

  Ty took a deep breath and walked to the door. Now that Lock had everything, he was leaving, heading to Wisconsin, to find Malik and bring him back. Assuming his friend was still alive.

  Downstairs, he walked past a night porter, the man’s chin resting on his chest as he dozed. Prominently displayed on the reception desk was the same picture of Jack Barnes, this one laminated. Something in the boy’s eyes chilled Ty to the bone. It was a veiled weariness that no child should have.

  Out back, Ty climbed into the silver Chevy Blazer, gunned the engine and pulled out of the tightly packed parking lot. His route out of town took him past the stadium and along Wolf Road.

  He thought about Malik, and how he and his friend must have looked when they were Jack’s age. Even though they had grown up in a place far poorer and more dangerous than Harrisburg, neither of them had spoken of their childhood with anything other than affection. They had had at least one loving parent and lived among a tight-knit community that looked out for each other. And they had had their friendship. When the world seemed organized against you that meant something. That kind of connection ran deep. No matter what had happened over the past week, Ty wasn’t about to give up on his friend. He would find him, and he would help him find peace.

  Seventy-two

  The FBI’s special agent in charge of the Minneapolis office, Dennis Lee, was an Asian American in his late forties, with an easy smile and a compact former-bodybuilder’s physique. He eyed Lock from across a borrowed conference room that linked to Chancellor Laird’s office. Laird, finally as good as his word, had gone all in, offering Agent Lee and his team a free run of the entire campus.

  Lock had already given Lee and the other person in room, the FBI’s legal counsel/media advisor, a woman in her thirties called Becky Coulson, a full run-down of what he knew. He had also handed over the pictures Ty had taken of the Shaw house before Tromso had torched it. Lee and Coulson must already have seen Tromso’s initial homicide book because the first thing Lee had done was make a call to ensure that nothing was going to happen to the bodies of Kim, Landon and Katy Shaw until he said so. It was a first glimpse of good news. The delay meant that if Ty could find Malik, he would be able to attend the funerals. Given the story that was out there, Kim’s family had been pushing for a quick funeral with Malik, as prime suspect, excluded.

  In addition, Special Agent in Charge Lee had also offered to help Ty in locating Malik. Becky Coulson had already drafted, and released, a statement to the media that spoke of new developments, and saying that while Malik Shaw remained someone they wished to speak to as a matter of urgency, he was no longer being sought as a suspect.

  As starts went, it was a good one.

  ‘Not your first time helping the Bureau, Mr Lock,’ Agent Lee said, filling a fresh cup of coffee from an urn near the window.

  ‘Kind of unavoidable, given my job,’ said Lock. It was true. Lock and Ty were usually called upon to provide protection and consultancy services in high-stakes and often high-profile situations. That brought them into contact with United States law-enforcement agencies at every level, including federal. They had been involved in a number of instances when their path had intersected with that of the FBI, sometimes with a good deal of friction, and at others more smoothly.

  ‘You remember Levon Hill?’ Becky Coulson asked him, her hand sweeping back a tangled mane of coppery red hair from thick black-rimmed glasses.

  ‘I do,’ said Lock. ‘Bright guy.’

  Levon Hill was a profiler used by the FBI. He had been called in while Lock and Ty were protecting an adult-film star called Raven Lane from a murderous stalker terrorizing Los Angeles.

  ‘You think we have a serial killer involved here?’ Lock asked.

  ‘Not really, no,’ said Agent Lee. ‘But it doesn’t hurt to have another pair of eyes on things.’

  That was true, thought Lock. It was very easy in an ongoing investigation to lose sight of the obvious. His eyes wandered to the far wall, where the standard photo-montage of victims and anyone connected to the case was plastered, with black lines drawn between them to suggest connection, either familial or circumstantial.

  The pictures of the homicide victims were easy to spot. Not only did they have a red outline running around the edge, but the shots were taken from the crime scene. There were seven in total. The Shaw family accounted for a three-photograph cluster, Aubrey and Gretchen Becker added two, and were arranged alongside Weston Reeves, Aubrey Becker’s old school buddy and partner in perversion. Off to one side, an arrow linked Weston Reeves to the college’s former chief of police, Keith Tromso.

  A series of arrows sped off from Becker and Reeves to a half-dozen other pictures of boys and young men. They included Jack Barnes, and ranged up from him to a couple of young men who looked to be in their late twenties.

  Lock nodded in the direction of this cluster. ‘Victims?’ he asked Agent Lee.

  Lee glanced across at Becky. As counsel, she would have a say in what they shared with Lock and what they chose to withhold. Despite whatever recommendation Levon or anyone else in the Bureau had given him, he was still an outsider. Although, given the conduct of the college’s police department, he was likely to be more trusted than most people around here.

  ‘Jack Barnes you know about. The others have contacted us in relation to either Becker or Weston. So, yes, victims,’ said Becky. ‘From what we can gather, this is only a very small sample of the number we expect to find.’

  One of the pictures of an earnest-looking young man in his late teens had a red frame. ‘This one,’ said Lock, getting up and tapping a finger against the photograph. ‘He was murdered?’

  ‘Suicide,’ said Agent Lee. ‘The father contacted us. The young man had a history of mental-health problems. He took his life a few days ago. He mentioned Becker in the suicide note he left.’

  ‘He mention Weston?’ Lock asked. ‘Or anyone else?’

  Becky shook her head. ‘Just Becker, although there was a reference to “them”.’

  ‘Levon’s going to be here later today. But while we’re waiting, you’ve given us what you know, how about telling Becky and me what you think’s going on?’

  ‘Malik said that Jack referred to more than one person. Of course, that was before any of us knew about Weston Reeves. So, from what the victims have told you so far, was Reeves actively involved in the abuse too? Or was he just the muscle?’

  ‘Both,’ said Becky.

  Lock walked to the window and looked out over the campus. Kids were still going to class with backpacks slung over their shoulders. Life was continuing.

  ‘I think this had been going on for a while,’ said Lock. ‘Because of Becker’s money and connections, no one had the balls to blow the whistle. Until Malik saw what he did. When buying him off with a new and improved contract didn’t work out, someone, most likely Reeves, either alone or working with someone else, went nuclear. They killed the Shaw family, and tried to frame Malik for it. They got wind that Malik had called in people from outside and panicked. Now everyone’s ass was on the line. They used Tromso to cover it up by torching the crime scene and destroying the forensics. We on the same page so far?’

  ‘Pretty much,’ said Lee.

  Lock held out his hands, palms open and facing up. ‘Except we have a couple of loose ends. Jack Barnes and his mom are missing. They could already be dead. Taken out as part of the cover-up. But that would still fit. The real head-scratcher, though, is whoever jacked up Chancellor Laird.’

  ‘Third perp,’ said Agent Lee. ‘They don’t want to be caught so they kill Becker and Reeves. Laird is just one piece of the puzzle. They’re taking a scorched-earth approach. Likely they’re the person or persons who killed Shaw’s wife and kids.’

  ‘Except,’ said Lock, ‘none of your victims mentions anyone apart from Becker and Reeves. That’s weird.’

  ‘Some of the victims have m
entioned Reeves wearing a mask during the abuse. Perhaps it wasn’t him the whole time. Maybe it was this third person.’

  Lock glanced back to the wall. ‘That would make sense,’ he said. ‘So we have another perp still out there.’

  There was a knock at the door. Lee got up to answer it. He opened the door to Kelly Svenson. She was in blue campus-police uniform. A Glock 9mm hung on her hip. She looked at Lock, then away. She was off, he thought. Way off.

  ‘Just wanted to make sure you had everything you needed,’ she said to the two FBI personnel, pointedly ignoring Lock.

  ‘Yeah, thanks, we’re good,’ said Agent Lee.

  ‘Okay, well, let me know if that changes,’ she said, and exited.

  Lock gave it a moment, his eyes never leaving the door. ‘You know she watched Tromso take my partner out in the woods, right?’

  Becky tapped her pen on the desk. ‘We asked her about that. She said she had no idea what Tromso was planning.’

  ‘And you believe her?’ Lock said.

  ‘You think she’s in on it?’ Agent Lee said. ‘She joined the department here less than a year ago. It’s more likely she was worried about crossing her boss than an active accomplice.’

  Lock knew that Lee had a point. She might not have known what Tromso had planned. And even if she had, would she, as a new member of the department, try to stop him? Sadly, in the real world, people like Malik Shaw were the exception, not the rule. It took a lot for a member of an organization like a small police department to blow the whistle. When confronted by corruption many people closed their eyes, especially when those who hadn’t were killed for their trouble.

  ‘What’s her background?’ Lock asked. ‘I mean you’ve looked into it, right?’