The Good Son: A Suspense Thriller (A Reed & Billie Novel Book 2)

by Dustin Stevens

  “It’s not like I wanted to hand this one their way,” Grimes said. “That man bitches enough that I would rather give it to just about anybody else. Fact is, you’re my floater, and you’re a little tied up at the moment. That means it goes to the next in the rotation, which is them.

  “Either I hand it their way and listen to him bitch, or I break protocol and have the union reps down on my ass.”

  It was obvious the captain was venting, but Reed let him go ahead anyway. He nodded, fully aware of the inner-precinct politics that colored every law enforcement house in the country.

  Handling situations like these was why Grimes was the captain, and a pretty astute one at that.

  The look of hostility ebbed just slightly as Grimes swallowed down whatever else he was thinking, pushing his attention back to Reed. “So tell me you’ve got some good news.”

  “I had McMichaels and Jacobs canvas the neighborhoods for both victims. All they managed to pull was a few people noticed a silver car, though no definitive make and model or, better yet, a license plate.”

  He skipped over the part about giving them both a good chunk of overtime, hoping the captain wouldn’t have any objections to it.

  “I stopped by the Buckeye Gas-and-Go a few blocks from Soto’s place this morning. It’s the only business in the area and I was hoping maybe their cameras could have gotten a glimpse of a silver car in the right time frame, but they aren’t even hooked up.”

  Reed watched an additional fold of skin appear at the underside of Grimes’s neck as he drew it back into his chest a little further.

  “I spoke to Janine Rosen and Mae Abbott, the daughters of our respective victims, today. Neither one could think of any person who would want to harm their mothers or any reason why someone would even dream of it.”

  “Does reality match, or are they looking through rose tinted glasses?”

  Reed knew what the captain was alluding to, the kind of thing every cop had seen 100 times before. No family member ever wanted to believe a victim might have a shady underbelly, scrubbing away even the most obvious shortcomings to jibe with some inner image they had of the person.

  In The Bottoms, such things were commonplace, despite obvious indicators. More than once Reed had seen someone with known gang affiliation, carrying drugs on their person, killed, only to have a grieving mother later swear they were salt of the earth.

  “Seems legit,” Reed said. “Both lived on the outskirts of Franklinton, out where the neighborhoods are lower class but still a long way from the worst of The Bottoms. Esther Rosen was a school teacher, faithful to one man her whole life. Ira Soto was a single mother who worked two jobs, now lived as a full-time grandmother.”

  There was no outward reaction of any kind from Grimes, which usually meant he wasn’t pleased.

  “Any whiff of the media yet?” Reed asked, hating to ask the question but knowing he had to anyway. It was better for him to know how much pressure he might soon be facing and where it was coming from than to pretend it didn’t exist.

  “Not yet, but I have a feeling the case I just handed off will catch a few people’s attention. Once their attention is aimed our way...”

  He let his voice trail off, not needing to finish the thought. “What’s your next step?”

  “Mae Abbott mentioned a father who split when she was a baby. I’ll follow up on that, make sure he’s still gone, then circle back on what I have. The crime scenes, the bodies, start digging through the files and see if anything similar has happened in the area before.”

  It was one of the first things every officer learned at the academy, step two in any investigation, following only the crime scene itself, whether the offense was a murder, a robbery, or anything in between.

  “Work the victims,” Grimes said.

  “Work the victims,” Reed agreed.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Two opposing emotions fought for top billing in The Good Son’s mind. The first was concern, worry that despite his best efforts, despite taking every precaution he could imagine, somewhere along the line he had messed up. Left a fingerprint behind, allowed a camera to get a look at his face, done something that would trip him up.

  Thus far, he had been careful, but he had also been lucky. Neither of the previous victims had fought back in the slightest or presented any unforeseen obstacles. Both had been extremely low-visibility, limiting his chances of being spotted.

  Even the phone calls, carefully planned and carried out, brought with them virtually no chance at detection.

  This time was different. The target lived in a better area, on a street where people were out and about. As best he could tell, nobody had spotted anything, but that didn’t mean someone wasn’t sitting on their front porch watching the whole thing through the screen of their cell phone, seeing his every movement.

  The concern was real, very much present, but for the first time in days it wasn’t the predominant thing he felt deep within. In its place was something foreign.

  Something vaguely resembling hope.

  He had pulled it off. The first two incidents were failures because he had tried to do too much. His scrupulous internet research had provided ideas and measures that were beyond his capabilities. This time he had reigned himself in. He had stuck to what he was good at, using a quick strike and a surefire method.

  It had worked.

  This was the break they needed.

  The elation had him walking high on the balls of his feet, each step feeling like he was floating. It carried him from the garage to the house, pushing him through the back door without even pausing to remove his shoes. A smile crossed his face as he stepped into the living room, a renewed sense of purpose pulsating through him.

  His mother would be pleased. She had to be. He had done what was asked of him. They could move on. It was all soon to be over.

  Every bad thing he did would be nothing more than a distant memory.

  “What are you so damn happy about?” she snapped as he entered, her body still twisted up on the sofa. Despite her obvious discomfort, she appeared to have moved no more than a few inches from that morning, no more than a few feet over the previous week combined.

  The Good Son stared at her, feeling the smile recede from his features. “You don’t know?”

  “Know what?” she said. “Know that this is the second night in a row my son’s been home late to make dinner?”

  Venturing a step into the room, his stomach clenched tight. All elation bled away, replaced instead by dread.

  It had worked. There was no doubt it had worked. He had checked her before making the drop. She was less than 100 yards away when he left her. Nobody, not even the idiots at Franklinton Memorial, could have messed it up.

  “They haven’t called yet?” he asked, his voice receding to a whisper.

  At the sound of it, the usual venom faded from his mother’s face, her gaze shifting before realization seemed to set in.

  “You do love your mama,” she whispered.

  “Of course,” he replied. “So very much.”

  Her lips parted a fraction of an inch, her face growing a touch more pale. “And you did it?”

  “I did. Again.”

  All feeling seemed to recede from his lower half as he walked on numb legs and fell into his chair. Without consulting her, he took up the remote and changed the channel, in search of the local news.

  It would be there. It had to be. It would prove to her that he was successful, that he had done as she asked, that soon everything would be okay.

  “They’ll call, right?” he asked, trying to control his nervous energy.

  Rolling onto a shoulder, his mother looked up at him. “You’re sure you did it? You blew the first two.”

  “No, Mama, I swear. Just like I promised you.”

  After his second pass through the channels, The Good Son gave up on the television. He glanced at the old-fashioned clock hanging on the wall, telling him it was still just after 8:00. T
he next round of news wouldn’t be on for another couple of hours, leaving them both in suspense.

  It had to be on there. A person being beaten and dropped off outside a hospital was too big to be ignored. That’s part of why he had chosen to do so during the day this time, so it wouldn’t get swept away like the previous nights, and he could monitor things.

  “They will call, right?” he asked again.

  He needed this to happen. He needed to prove to her that he could be trusted. That he had done everything she asked and then some.

  “I’m sure they will,” she whispered, extending her hand over the side of the couch, The Good Son grasping it in both of his.

  “They have to,” he said, feeling her clammy skin against his palm. “I did everything right. They have to.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The Good Son woke with a start. One moment he was immersed in a dream, more of a memory really, of a better time. He was just a child, no more than 10, running around the park in a pair of cut-off jeans and bare feet. His parents, both of them young and happy, were sitting on a blanket nearby.

  The next moment he was awake in the chair, his body contorted to the side, his hip and lower back both aching from being cramped in an unnatural position. A line of dried saliva extended down from the corner of his mouth.

  The light of day had receded, nothing visible against the blinds hanging down over the windows.

  The television was off, his mother sitting up for the first time in days. She watched him wake without a response of any kind, impassive as he rubbed his eyes and passed the back of his hand over his cheek.

  “Morning,” she said, her voice completely monotone.

  “Morning,” The Good Son managed. He shifted to sit flat on the chair and laced his fingers together, extending his upper body out in front of him. The bunched up muscles of his body tugged in protest, a series of pops coming from various locations. “What time is it?”

  “Morning,” she repeated, her empty gaze still on him.

  Releasing his stretch, The Good Son looked at her, startled by how different she now appeared from the image he’d had in his dream. Just 15 years or so had gone by according to the calendar, but to see her in person, it would appear that more than twice that had passed. All color was gone from her skin, her body pale. Any extra few pounds she might have once carried had been sucked away, leaving her looking almost skeletal.

  “Morning,” The Good Son whispered. His eyes slid closed and his head hung, realization setting in. “They never called.”

  “Oh, they called alright,” his mother responded. This time there was a trace of something more in her tone. It wasn’t humor or optimism, but something that concerned The Good Son even more.

  Sarcasm.

  “They called?” he asked, his eyes opening to look at her.

  “Yup,” she said. “They called Nancy Underwood. She was taken in last night. Far as I know, everything was a success.”

  The Good Son had no words. His stomach bunched tight, his pulse quickened, his throat went dry. He opened his mouth once, twice, to speak, but couldn’t muster anything.

  This was not how it was supposed to have gone. He was the one who had taken the risks, had put in the planning, had been meticulous in making sure everything went off without a hitch.

  He was the one bearing the weight of the heinous acts he had committed.

  The fruits of all that should not have gone to Nancy Underwood. Or any of the others. He did the work. It should be his family who benefited from it.

  “Freddie called this morning to tell me the good news,” she said, putting heavy emphasis on the last three words. “Apparently the whole gang - everybody who’s able to anyway - is going over once she gets out to congratulate her. You believe that shit?”

  The Good Son said nothing. He couldn’t believe a word he was hearing, could feel the room beginning to tilt on its side. His chest struggled to pull in air.

  He and his mother had discussed it. They had thought of every angle, looked into every eventuality. They both knew he didn’t want to do it, but if he did, things would be better. All his effort, his struggles, the horrible images he saw as he tried to fall asleep, was supposed to mean something.

  And that something damned sure wasn’t supposed to be this.

  “How?” he whispered, his voice sounding timid and far away, like it was coming from someone else.

  His mother shrugged, her thin lips resembling a snarl on her face. “I guess she took a turn. Just yesterday they bumped her up.”

  Dropping his gaze, The Good Son stared at the floor. The last three days had drained him. Not only physically, the heat and lack of sleep beginning to take their toll, but mentally and emotionally as well.

  He was not one for hate. He did not believe in random acts of violence, no matter what growing up near The Bottoms might have tried to instill in him. The things he had been forced to do went far beyond anything he would have ever thought possible, but he did them with a noble purpose in mind.

  He wasn’t taking life, he was saving it.

  “Do you love your mama?”

  The question ripped him from his thoughts. His gaze jerked up to her, accompanied by the familiar sense of dread the question always called up inside of him.

  “You know I do.”

  “And you’d do anything for her?”

  Blood flushed The Good Son’s cheeks. For the first time in ages he felt the urge to cry, pulling in a long breath, forcing himself not to show such vulnerability.

  It would only make what she was about to say worse.

  “You know I would,” he whispered.

  A smile stretched across her face. “Good, because there’s a way we can fix this.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Just 13 hours had passed since the meeting with Grimes, but already Reed felt like a new man.

  After speaking with the captain the night before, he had made one more trip through the files before calling it a night. On the way home he had stopped by Old Smoque Barbecue and gotten two pulled pork sandwiches and a half dozen sausage links, bringing it all straight to the couch where he and Billie both indulged themselves. Once they had eaten, it didn’t take but a few minutes of a preseason game on ESPN for their respective body clocks to finally catch up with them, exhaustion pulling them under.

  At 8:30 it was still light outside, but Reed didn’t care. He allowed himself to drift past REM sleep and into a deep slumber, not to move for nearly nine hours.

  The food and rest rejuvenated him immeasurably, waking well before the dawn. He padded into the kitchen to find a Billie awake as well, staring at him from beneath the table.

  “You up for some exercise before it gets too hot?”

  It took only a split second for the question to register with Billie before she was up across the hardwood floor, her toenails clacking as she fought for purchase. Once her feet were under her, she bounded across the kitchen and out through the back door, disappearing into the darkened morning, nothing more than a bolt of black fur.

  Miles from the closest neighbor, Reed didn’t bother to dress as he stepped out onto the deck, the aging pine boards rough against the soles of his bare feet. Morning dew clung to the surface of everything, the air having a clean, damp scent to it that he hadn’t noticed in weeks.

  In less than two hours it would all be gone, burned off with the start of another steamy day, but for a time all was right with the world.

  Every few minutes an inky blur flashed across the back yard, darting between pine trees, their heavily laden limbs dragging the ground. Whatever Billie was after, she kept up the chase for more than a quarter hour before giving in and making her way back to the deck, her pink tongue the only splash of color as she trotted forward.

  “You good?” Reed asked, turning to watch her move right past him and into the kitchen. A wry smile formed as he followed her in, both of them standing under a cool shower together before eating and heading into the precinct. />
  More than two hours later the memory of the rare break from the job, a brief interlude into normality, still buoyed Reed’s spirits. It gave him a glimmer of optimism as he went at the case, intent to pull on the few loose threads he still had before creating new ones if he must.

  The first thing he had to follow up on was the disappearance of Mae Abbott’s father. She had alluded to his leaving when she was only a baby, and at best guess Reed pegged her somewhere in her late 20s.

  The search started with a check through the area hospital records for the name Mae Soto. When that yielded nothing, he made the assumption that at the time she was probably born under her father’s name.

  Having no idea what that was, he ran a search for Ira Soto, finding an admission receipt for her from 1988. Doing the math in his head, Reed figured that would put Mae at 27-years-old.

  Maybe a year or so younger than he suspected, but overall pretty much in line with the person he had met the previous day.

  Drawing up the admission receipt to full screen, Reed scanned through it quickly, finding that Ira Soto had been admitted on May 17th at 9:35 in the evening. She had not given birth until the morning of the 18th and was discharged first thing on the 19th. There had been no health insurance for the service and the hospital had ended up writing off a large portion of the bill to uncompensated care.

  Reed nodded, everything about the receipt, from the inability to pay to the origin of Mae’s name, all fitting with what she had told him. Armed with a first name and a date, he went back into the search and was able to pull a record for Mae Lynn Bester, daughter of Ira Soto and Darian Bester.

  “Darian Bester,” Reed whispered. He flipped open the crime scene file from Soto’s home and scribbled the name across the bottom of Earl’s Post-It note, underlining it twice before dropping his pen and going back to work.

  The first place he began was the national databases, both run by the FBI. In order he entered Bester’s name into ViCAP – the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program – and NCIC, the National Crime Information Center. Each served as national repositories for the names of perpetrators of all violent or heinous crimes, a definition which encompassed everything from serial killers to white collar embezzlers.