The interior of the house was lit up like a Christmas tree, silhouettes moving behind shades.
His first inclination was to burst out of the car and rush the house, Billie by his side, intent to help sift through every scrap of paper until they had something to work with.
A roster of support group members. A set of phone numbers. Even a photograph with everybody present.
He fought the urge, though. As much as he wanted to, there were already capable people handling that. He needed to stay outside, wait for Earl and his team to show up, to handle things properly.
This case was about to make its second round through the airwaves. The third would be when they solved it. There didn’t need to be a forth later on talking about how badly they mishandled things.
Reed sat behind the wheel, the windows up and the air on, waiting until a pair of headlights appeared in the rearview. Sitting up high and square, he recognized the crime scene unit van, waiting until they pulled in behind him before exiting.
Stepping from the driver’s side, Earl was dressed as usual in bib overalls, beads of sweat gleaming along his bald head. Behind him a pair of techs moved immediately to the back and began to unload supplies.
“Would have been here earlier,” Earl said. “But it took me a few minutes to find this.”
He stopped a couple of steps from Reed and extended his hand, a clear plastic evidence bag in it holding a stone the size of a soda can, a smear of dried blood on it.
“Thanks for bringing it,” Reed said. He knew the request had been an odd one, something he had thought of on the fly and asked of Earl when he called in the body. He reached out and accepted the bag, holding it by the sealed top.
“You sure about this?” Earl asked. “You know once that’s opened it won’t be admissible anymore.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Reed said, gripping either side and pulling it apart like a bag of potato chips, the adhesive seal along the top ripping open. “This rock was used for a canine homicide, which is hardly our biggest concern right now. It might not have held a fingerprint, but it will damn sure hold a scent.”
Reed peeled back the sides as he opened the rear door and held the bag in front of Billie. “Smell.”
Just as she had outside Ira Soto’s home, Billie moved straight to it. She kept her nose just millimeters away from the stone, careful not to touch anything, silent as she drew in the signature scent of whoever had held it last.
Reed knew there was no way Billie had forgotten the smell. She worked with scents the way humans worked with their eyes, her memories linked inexorably to certain aromas. The only occasional problem came because of her extreme abilities, which made it difficult for her in places where multiple smells had been left.
Give her one specific scent source, though, and tell her to find it, there was none better on earth.
It took Billie only seconds to reacquaint herself with the smell, still standing in the back of the car, before she let Reed know she had the signature down.
“Search.” The word came out hard and fast, a clear command. The sound of it still hung in the air as she darted from the back seat, a black bolt of fur that shot past Reed onto the street and went to work.
Reed didn’t bother to attach her to a lead, giving her the freedom to move as she needed to. Instead, he circled around to the edge of the car, watching as she held her nose just inches above the ground, working in a sweeping pattern in search of that one particular smell.
“Damn, look at her go,” Earl whispered, Reed having completely forgotten the man was still standing there.
“Just wait until she picks it up,” Reed said, leaving the big man standing in the street and walking a few steps across the dirt patch that served as the front yard.
Eight feet to Reed’s left, Billie caught the scent, picking it up running in a diagonal line for the front door. In an instant her body went rigid and the sweeping pattern she was moving in stopped, replaced with a path straight toward the house. Feeling his pulse pick up, Reed fell in line behind her, watching her go to the front door.
There she stopped, her body poised, clearly wanting to pursue further.
Stepping up behind her, Reed clipped on the short lead, only vaguely aware of Earl and his team following behind. Gripping the lead in his right hand, Reed pulled open the front door with his left.
Instantly, Billie tugged straight ahead, yanking Reed through the kitchen. He barely had the time to notice the yellowed linoleum floor or the stove and refrigerator, all remnants from the 70s, before moving straight into the living room.
“Heel!” Reed snapped as they entered the space, Billie pulling up short the moment it left his lips. She dropped her backside to the floor and looked up at him, her ears lowered. “Good girl.”
On the floor in front of them was a male in his mid-to-late 40s, just as Greene had said on the phone. He was lying flat on his back, his arms extended outward in a starfish pattern, his eyes staring straight up at the ceiling. He wore a pair of khaki shorts and a Cincinnati Bengals t-shirt, the exposed skin of his arms and legs mottled with bruises. Between the ugly green and blue spots the skin was the color of straw, the result of both jaundice and the extra bright lights illuminating him.
Like Ruggles, there was no readily visible cause of death, though Reed figured it wouldn’t take much to discover a broken neck once again.
The body was positioned flat in the middle of a threadbare rug. Along one wall was a faded green couch and on either end a pair of collapsible dinner stands that served as end tables. Opposite them were a short television stand and a flat screen TV, far and away the nicest thing in the house.
“What did she find?” Bishop asked, appearing in a doorway on the opposite end of the room, a stack of papers in his hands.
“It’s our guy,” Reed said. “We gave her the scent from one of the previous murders, she caught it within seconds and followed it straight in here.”
Bishop nodded, Reed able to hear someone behind him continuing to rummage, the additional sound of footsteps moving about on the floor above.
“We get a name yet?” Reed asked.
“Frederick Handley,” Bishop said, holding an envelope out in front of him, the top edge of it torn open. “Appears he lived alone, was renting on a week-to-week basis.”
Neither one needed to comment on the motive attached to that, able to see Handley’s condition for themselves.
“Anybody else?” Reed asked.
“No,” Bishop said. “No sign of a list of other members in the support group either. We’ve got a laptop, but it’s going to be a while before forensics can send someone down here to start digging through it.”
“Shit,” Reed whispered, running a hand over his face. He wiped the sweat against the leg of his pants, glancing down to Billie and the body of Frederick Handley on the floor beside them.
In any other career, the scene would be nothing short of perverse, two men having a discussion with a fresh corpse lying just inches away from them, neither even glancing at it.
Given the situation, and their job at the moment, neither Reed nor Bishop gave it a second thought. They had both grown far too accustomed to dead bodies over the years.
Seizing on the last thing Bishop said, Reed stared down at the floor for a couple of seconds, thinking. They needed a roster, names and addresses, somewhere for them to go next. If not to find the killer, then at the very least to ensure that more scenes like this one weren’t popping up throughout the area.
The problem was, nobody did things on paper anymore. In this day and age, everything was digital. If there was a list, it wouldn’t be written, it would be somewhere Handley could use it efficiently at a moment’s notice.
“The laptop,” Reed said, “does it have internet?”
Bishop turned in the doorway, staring back in the opposite direction. “Hey, Ike, does that laptop have internet?”
The sound of papers being tossed about stopped. “Christ,” Iaconelli muttered, his f
ootfalls heavy. “We’ve got a power cord and a white cord coming out the back of it. Does that mean we’ve got internet?”
Reed didn’t bother to respond. Instead, he went straight for his cell phone, dialing from the recent call log and leaving it on speaker for all to hear.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Paul Neil Tudor.
Three days ago, The Good Son had never even heard the name. He had no idea the man existed, no reason to at that. One glance at him in the Big Q that afternoon proved he was from a different social class. Everything about him, from the car he drove to the way his hair was cut, even the way he carried himself, made it plain for all to see.
That no longer mattered. What did was the opportunity the man presented. Perhaps even more important, he had also mentioned having a wife. Assuming she was around the same age, she would be a prime target as well. If he was a donor, it stood to reason she would be also.
Two potential livers would guarantee success. It had to. There was simply no time for anything else.
At 9:30, The Good Son parked two blocks down from their house. He was old enough to know how the world worked, had seen enough to know where he did and did not fit. Never had he begrudged someone who had more than him anymore than he hoped others looked down on him for having less.
The Tudors had clearly awoken under a better star than The Good Son. That was fine. That was not why he was slumped behind the wheel of the car, watching, waiting.
Parked behind an enormous pickup nudged tight against the curb, The Good Son reclined the driver’s seat down as far as it would go. From there he could just barely see over the steering wheel, like a drowning man holding his nose an inch above water.
With each passing moment, the temperature inside the car climbed. Despite the late hour, the heat still lingered, seeming to radiate up from the asphalt. Combined with the humidity that hung like a film in the air, the temperature inside the car held at close to triple digits.
At such a reclined angle, The Good Son was helpless to stop the sweat that streamed down his forehead. It traveled over his cheeks and onto his neck. It burned his eyes and tasted salty on his lips, his t-shirt soaked through.
After twice circling the block, The Good Son had settled on his position because it afforded him the best combination of seeing the Tudor’s house and remaining in the shadows. As much as he wanted to crack open the windows, to run a towel over his face, to gulp from the bottle of water beside him, he couldn’t.
That kind of movement would only draw attention.
He had not seen anybody else out on the street, but he couldn’t take the chance. Not now. Not with the end so close.
The Good Son sat and stared at the light burning bright in the upstairs window two blocks away, focusing on the single yellow glow until it became a blur, his mind thinking back to everything that had landed him here.
Not once had his mother ever let him forget that her condition was his fault. He’d known it for some time even before she started using it as a weapon against him, the kind of thing he overheard once in a conversation long ago, his mother on the phone, him supposed to be asleep in bed.
She was suffering from end stage liver failure brought on by two and a half decades fighting hepatitis C.
Most people heard the word hepatitis and immediately associated it with some form of venereal disease, mistaking it for type A. They didn’t realize that types B and C were even more deadly, more pervasive the world over, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives every year. It was often contracted congenitally, through no fault of the patient.
In the case of his mother, it was caused by a birth complication bringing him into the world.
Since the moment he had found out years before, The Good Son had begun steeling himself for moments like this. Perhaps not sitting out in the dark, waiting to commit yet another unspeakable act, but times when his mother would be very sick. Always in the back of his mind he had held out hope that a cure would be developed, that it would be affordable, that a perfect donor match would arise, but deep down he knew how unlikely that was.
Hope. The kind of thing that often teased people in places like Franklinton, but never seemed to actually materialize.
Months before, when it became obvious that sitting and hoping was futile, The Good Son had begun to condition himself to what must be done. He spent hours by his mother’s side, forcing himself to watch her deteriorate, knowing it would be those images that sustained him.
Parked on the street, staring at the light two blocks away, The Good Son thought of his mother curled up on the couch. He thought of how unresponsive she was, how her feeble body was barely able to take even a sip of water under her own control.
The image brought on a shudder, a momentary chill despite the suffocating heat inside the car. It caused his throat to tighten and his heart to palpitate, knowing just how close he could be to losing her.
Just as fast, the feeling passed. It was replaced with steely resolve, his features hardening. His vision became clear again, focusing on the upstairs light down the street.
The Tudors were in there. They would provide everything needed to heal his mother, to ensure she stayed with him for a long time to come.
He would do what needed to be done. He had to.
There wasn’t time to even consider failing again.
Chapter Fifty
The search of the house had been called off. The rest of the place was just as Spartan as the living room, Frederick Handley having winnowed down his entire existence to nothing more than bare subsistence. The sole place in the entire home with much real wealth at all was the bathroom, enough pharmaceuticals to outfit the rest of the house in top-of-the-line goods.
Matching Reed’s initial assumption, precious little of any value was actually put down anywhere on paper. There was the usual assortment of bills a person accumulates – water, sewage, electric – along with a 6” stack of medical bills.
The only thing each one had in common was the red stamp announcing that the bill was past due.
Nothing resembling a support group roster was found.
All five men were crowded around the laptop. Reed was the only one to have touched it, first lifting it up to recite a series of numbers and letters on the bottom. It took him three tries to get the right combination that Deek was looking for, eventually figuring out the serial number and the IP address. Once those were in place, he opened the top and hit the power button, standing back as the computer took on a life of its own.
Placed on the table beside it was Reed’s phone, set to speaker, though Deek remained silent as he worked.
The only sounds came from Earl and his team as they wrapped up in the living room.
Reed’s attention was focused on the small white arrow on the screen, Deek having remote access from his basement miles away. In quick order, he was past the standard log-in screen, moving right into the files, a long list of titles stretched along the right side of the monitor.
“Anything in particular?” Deek asked, the voice sounding detached and somewhat robotic, drawing the group in closer.
“Can you blow these up any?” Iaconelli asked. “I don’t have my glasses on.”
A caustic remark flitted through Reed’s mind at the request, disappearing just as fast. In front of him, the window was enlarged to full screen, the titles growing two sizes larger.
“That work?” Deek asked.
“Yeah, we’re good,” Reed said. He rested his hands on his knees, bent forward at the waist, and ran over the list of titles, all arranged in descending alphabetical order.
Prayer request. Memorial template. Fundraiser – Luncheon.
“At the bottom,” Greene said, Reed shifting his attention down to the last entry in the window.
Active Membership.
“Active membership,” Reed said, resisting the urge to reach out and begin maneuvering things, watching as Deek did it for him.
The file was an Excel spreadsheet, a list of eight na
mes in a column. Spread out to the side beside each one were mailing addresses and telephone numbers, even a few email addresses.
“Jackpot,” Iaconelli whispered.
“And two of these we can cross off,” Reed said, extending a hand toward the screen. “Henry Ruggles and Frederick Handley are both already gone.”
“So that leaves six people to be warned,” Bishop said.
“Or six people who might be our suspect,” Reed said. He stared at the list momentarily, then pushed himself to full height, bumping into Gilchrist behind him as he did so, the young officer leaning in close to see the screen.
With the laptop no longer serving as the hub of everyone’s attention, all five took a step back, standing in a loose cluster, Billie still on the floor by Reed’s feet.
Nobody said a word, a few exchanging glances, as Reed digested what he’d just learned. They now had six names, presumably one of which was working with an accomplice to target the others. Somehow, they needed to figure out who that one was and warn the others without setting off any warning signals.
“Officer Gilchrist,” Reed said, “can you run out to my car and grab the papers folded up on the passenger seat?”
Casting a quick glance to Greene, Gilchrist nodded and disappeared through the doorway, excusing himself past the techs in the living room.
A moment later, they heard the front door swing shut as he headed outside.
“Big Q employee list,” Reed said as way of explanation to the others. “Didn’t think I’d need it when we got here.”
Greene and Bishop both nodded. On the opposite side of the circle, Iaconelli stood and wiped sweat from his forehead.
“Okay,” Reed said, thinking out loud, “we now have a roster of everybody in the support group. So far two members have been eliminated.”
“So we presume that the killer will continue targeting them?” Bishop asked.
Reed didn’t answer right away. He took a step forward and glanced through the open doorway into the living room, at the body lying prone on the floor. Around him, Earl and his crew were busy setting things up, a series of lights on tripods clustered nearby.
The Good Son: A Suspense Thriller (A Reed & Billie Novel Book 2) Page 20
