They Thought He was Safe

by P. D. Workman

  “What’s up?”

  “Have you ever had this happen before? I can’t get the memory card out.”

  Mr. Peterson took it from him and examined it closely.

  “Hmm… it certainly is stuck in there, isn’t it? I’m not sure what I would suggest. Maybe take it to a camera repair store and see if they can retrieve it. Can you still access what’s on the card?”

  Zachary tested it, worried that after pushing and pulling the memory card around it would no longer be connected to the innards of the camera, but he was still able to pull the images up on the LCD screen.

  “Yeah, see? They’re still there.”

  “Can you transfer them to camera memory and use a USB cable to connect with the computer?”

  Zachary looked over the camera. The mini USB port was just below the card slot, and it too had been deformed by the violent attack the night before. “I don’t think that’s going to work either. Even if we can bend it back into shape…”

  “You’d best not mess with it. Leave it to the repair shop to take a look at, they have a lot more experience with that kind of thing.”

  Zachary sighed. “I’d better see if I can get hold of my witness again. Maybe meet him at a photocopy shop to get a hard copy of the documents. I thought taking the pictures was a good idea last night, but it seems like it was just a waste of time. I wasn’t thinking clearly. Didn’t even notice the damage.”

  “I’m sure they can still be recovered, but you might want to follow up with him just in case.”

  “Okay. Do you have a shop nearby that you’d recommend for repairs? My little place back home is pretty basic.”

  “Yeah, I can take you over there this afternoon. Why don’t you see if you can get a bit more sleep this morning? You look all in.”

  Zachary shook his head. “I’ve got too much to do. And if this is the work of a serial killer, every hour could make a difference.”

  “Serial killers don’t kill every day. That’s not the way it works. You have time.”

  Zachary considered this. Mr. Peterson was right, of course. The difference between a serial killer and a mass murderer was the cooling off period between kills. A mass murderer might kill more people all at once in one angry rampage, but a serial killer killed, had a cooling off period, and then eventually ramped up to kill again. If Jose had been taken just over a week before, and John had suggested that two to six men a year had disappeared, then he wasn’t likely to kill again in the next month. Zachary wasn’t racing against the clock to get the case solved in one or two days. It would take longer than that to sort out what was happening and get the police onside.

  “Okay. But I still can’t sleep during the day. I slept at the hospital last night, too. Not just here. So I’ve had enough to get me through the day.”

  Mr. Peterson shrugged and shook his head, giving up.

  Zachary returned to the bedroom and picked up his phone. He didn’t have John’s direct number, which meant that he would have to go through Philippe again, and if John were at work during the day, then he was going to have to wait until the evening again before being given an opportunity to talk and discuss his needs. But Zachary might as well get started right away. Maybe he would be lucky and it would be John’s day off. He’d been at the hospital quite late, so maybe he had known that he wouldn’t be at work the next day and could stay up late.

  Philippe answered the phone after quite a number of rings, and sounded out of breath. “Zachary?”

  “Yes. Sorry, did I get you at work?”

  “Yes. It’s okay for a minute, but I can’t let the boss see me talking on the phone. What’s going on? Is everything okay?”

  “I wanted to get John’s number from you. Or if I can’t get that, if you would get him to call or text me. He’s got my card, but I didn’t get his numbers.”

  “You met with him last night, right? Why do you need him again today? He’ll need to keep his head down. Not let anyone figure out what is going on.”

  That was probably a bit paranoid. There was only one killer, not a big conspiracy. The chances that John would somehow tip off a serial killer as to where he had been the night before and the information he had shared with Zachary was highly unlikely.

  “I need to get another copy of his documents. I ran into a problem with the pictures I took. Can you let him know? I really need to start going through all of that information. See if I can verify his findings.”

  “I’ll call him, man,” Philippe said, sounding frustrated, “but I don’t know if he’ll be able to do that. He works hard, and he was already out last night. If he does too much sneaking around, someone will catch on. They’ll know that he’s up to something.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Z

  achary didn’t want to put the case aside while he waited for a response back from John, so he considered the information he already had, and then called Detective Dougan. The policeman answered his phone with a testy ‘Dougan.’

  “Uh, yes, Detective Dougan. It’s Zachary Goldman. I wanted to talk to you about Jose Flores for another minute, if you have the time.”

  “I told you that if you harass me, I’m just going to block you. What is this about now? We just talked yesterday.”

  “Yes, sir, and I don’t intend to harass you at all. I have had a couple of developments and I just wanted to follow up with you and keep you informed.”

  “Have you been drinking?” Dougan asked suspiciously.

  Zachary paused, frowning. “No. I haven’t had anything to drink today.”

  “You sound like you’re slurring. You haven’t had anything at all?”

  “Oh… no. I ran into some trouble last night, and I have a fat lip… that must be what you’re hearing.”

  “You ran into some trouble?”

  “It’s unrelated,” Zachary said, not wanting to have to explain again or to distract Dougan from the case at hand. “I don’t want to take up any more of your time than I need to.”

  “Okay. Go ahead. What have you got?”

  “During the course of your investigation, did you get Jose’s cell phone number?”

  “No, I was told he didn’t have one. I figured it was bull crap. Everybody has to have a phone number these days to hold down a job. But he wasn’t the registered owner of any phone number, and his landlord said he didn’t have one.”

  “I got it from his boss and Dimitri, a friend. Same phone number from both, so it looks like it’s legitimate. Dimitri says that it was working up until Wednesday. It was going to voicemail, but it was still in service. Sometime since then, it has started getting the ‘not in the service area’ message, so I’m assuming that’s when it ran out of juice.”

  “I doubt it will help to shed any light on the case, but go ahead and give it to me and I’ll take a look.”

  Zachary read the number off to him. “I thought maybe you could see who he’s been talking to on the phone… maybe someone on his call logs will know what happened to him.”

  “Yeah. Possibly. But probably a wild goose chase. Give me this friend’s number as well.”

  Zachary gave him Dimitri’s number. “I’d offer to go through the logs myself, if I thought you’d give them to me.”

  “Unfortunately, not something I can do. We’ll have to run them down ourselves. Is that it, then?”

  “I wanted to ask you… and this is only very preliminary, not something I have any proof of… but has there been any investigation into rumors of gay immigrant men disappearing over the past few years? Like maybe there is someone targeting them…?”

  “What?”

  “I am hearing talk of quite a number of men who have disappeared in the last few years. They say that the police won’t pay any attention, but I don’t know if that means that the police have looked into it and discounted it as a possibility, or whether that means that they haven’t looked into it.”

  “First I’ve heard of it,” Dougan growled. “I can check to be sure, but I think I woul
d have heard about it if there was an investigation underway. I don’t like to get involved in finger pointing, but you should understand that every time there is a bust at one of these lounges, the gay community immediately starts whining about relations between the police and the gays and how we’re always too quick to bust them and slow to listen to anything about how they are being victimized. So yeah, you do hear about violence against them whenever there is a bust. But that doesn’t mean that there’s anything to it.”

  “No, of course not. There are always going to be a lot of… different perspectives on community policing.”

  “Yeah. If you want to put it that way.”

  “I don’t have anything on this yet, but… I am going to be looking over some documents on these disappearances. So this is just a heads-up that I might have something to discuss in a day or two, once I’ve had a chance to go through the data. I don’t want to surprise you.”

  “You’re going to find out that there’s nothing to it, I can guarantee that.”

  “Good. I hope there isn’t. I’d rather not think that someone could have been operating here for that long. I’d rather not think of the friends and family who have been left behind finding out now, years later, that it wasn’t ever dealt with at the time.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “No.” Zachary bit his lip. “I didn’t mean that at all. I’d like to put this to bed just as much as you.”

  “I doubt that. Let me just warn you, if you get anything, you’d better be bringing it directly to me, and not discussing it with anyone else along the way. If something like this leaks out to the public, there will be widespread panic. I do not want to have to deal with the consequences of something like this getting out into the wild.”

  “I think you’ll find that it already is in the gay community. But maybe not in the mainstream. I’m not going to give the information to anyone else. Just to you.”

  “See to it.”

  Despite his assertion to Mr. Peterson that he’d had enough sleep and wouldn’t be able to sleep during the day, Zachary fell asleep while he was holding an ice pack across his eyes. He had apparently been conked out for a couple of hours when Lorne came into the room to see if he was ready to go to the camera repair shop.

  “Do you want to sleep longer? We can put this off for another time.”

  “No.” Zachary blinked his eyes, trying to clear his vision, knowing that if he rubbed them, the bruises would make him regret it. “I want to get those pictures processed as soon as I can. I haven’t heard back from Philippe yet about what John said.” He picked up his phone from the bed beside him and looked at it. There were several missed calls from Philippe. The ringer was turned off and with the phone on the bed, the vibration hadn’t been enough to wake him up. “Oh, I guess he did. Hang on a sec, I need to see what he has to say.”

  Rather than checking the voicemail messages that Philippe had left, Zachary just called him. Philippe answered almost immediately this time. “Zachary? Where the hell have you been? I thought he got you too!”

  “Thought who got me?” Zachary asked, a knot tightening in his stomach.

  “I’ve been calling John and calling him. He doesn’t answer. I checked with one of the guys who works at the same site as he does and John didn’t show up today! He never misses work, but he didn’t show up today. No one knows where he is. Every call just goes through to voicemail, and he’s not returning any of them. It’s just like with Jose, Zachary! What’s going on?”

  Zachary looked over at Mr. Peterson, who could probably hear Philippe’s panicked voice, even though Zachary didn’t have it on speakerphone.

  “I don’t know what’s going on. Maybe he is sick today. Do you know where he lives? Or who he lives with?”

  “They said he didn’t go home last night. He went out to the hospital to see you, and then he never went home.”

  “He would have had to go home,” Zachary said blankly.

  “I know, but he didn’t!”

  “He had all of those papers. He would have gone home to put them away somewhere safe. He had put all that time and effort into all of that research. He wouldn’t have let anyone else get their hands on it.”

  “He’s missing!” Philippe insisted.

  “I hear you… are you going to report it to the police?”

  “He wouldn’t want me to.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because, we don’t report each other to the police. If he was just somewhere else… I would get him in trouble. I don’t want to get him in trouble.”

  “He could already be in trouble. Not with the police, but with someone who intends to do him harm. You need to report it.”

  “No, I can’t. Nando told me to stay out of this. He’ll kill me if he finds out that I talked to you and that I’ve been talking with John. I’m just supposed to be going to work, not getting myself in the middle of something like this!”

  “Nando would want you to tell if you knew people were being victimized. He’d want to know about Jose and the others.”

  “No, he wouldn’t! He would tell me to mind my own business unless I wanted to disappear too!”

  Zachary didn’t know what to say to that. He let the words just hang in the air. Did Nando know something about what had happened to Jose and the missing men? Or did Philippe?

  “I’m going to have to get the police involved,” he said finally. “They can do more if they start while the trail is fresh.”

  “You’re just going to cause more trouble!”

  “Then I’m going to cause more trouble,” Zachary agreed. He hung up the phone. He looked at Mr. Peterson. “You heard?”

  “Who is this John? He’s the one who let you take pictures of his research?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe he changed his mind. Maybe he decided that dealing with you was too dangerous and he needed to go underground.”

  “I hope so. I’d much rather think he was in hiding than that something had happened to him.”

  Dougan didn’t answer the phone when Zachary called him again. Zachary wondered whether he had already blocked his number, or whether he would because Zachary had called twice in one day. But he tried to stay calm about it, left a message about John and his unexpected disappearance, and he got ready to go to the camera repair place.

  Pat was up and gave Zachary a careful hug, trying to be mindful of all of his bumps and bruises. “You’re a good man, Zach. Please be careful and don’t do anything risky because of this case. I wouldn’t want anything else to happen to you.”

  Neither of them had told Pat yet about the call from Philippe. Zachary was still hoping it was a mistake, and that they would soon hear that John was okay.

  “I’m just fine,” he assured Pat. “I know it looks bad, but… I’ve dealt with worse. We’re just going over to the camera store. Nothing is going to happen there.”

  “I’ve been to the camera store with Lorne,” Pat said, his eyebrows drawn down in a dramatic scowl, “and every time he goes, they empty out his wallet.”

  Zachary laughed. “Well, I can’t promise they won’t do that,” he agreed. He might find one or two things he needed to add to his collection while he was there too. There was nothing that was quite so much fun as a camera store, especially if they had vintage cameras and parts as well as modern digital.

  “I don’t know if it’s a good idea turning the two of you loose in a camera store,” Pat said. “It’s akin to taking a couple of alcoholics to a wine tasting.”

  In spite of Zachary’s reassurances, Pat still patted his shoulder and clucked over him like a mother hen, always protective of his family.

  “We won’t be long,” Zachary promised.

  “Oh, I’ve heard that one before. You won’t be back until you’ve cleaned the whole store out.”

  The owner and staff at the camera store gaped at Zachary’s ugly bruises, and then tried to pretend they weren’t staring every time they looked at him. Zachary tried to ignore the
looks and just to talk to them as if everything were normal. Mr. Peterson greeted the owner as an old friend, then gestured to Zachary.

  “Rocky, this is one of my of foster kids, Zachary. The only one who inherited my love of photography.”

  “Hi,” Zachary shook hands with him. “Might have had something to do with the camera you gave me for my birthday.”

  Lorne waved his hand. “I knew you had the eye. That’s why I gave it to you. You were a watcher, always observing everything.”

  “Well, it was the first birthday present I ever got, so even if I hadn’t had an innate talent for it, I think I still would have pursued it as a hobby.”

  Mr. Peterson cocked his head. Zachary replayed what he had just said in his head. “What?”

  “You mean it was the first birthday present I ever gave you?”

  Zachary shook his head. “No, the first birthday present I ever got. First one I can remember, anyway. Maybe I got things as a baby, from welfare organizations, but our parents never had any money for gifts.”

  Mr. Peterson considered this seriously. “I never knew that.”