A Trace of Death (A Keri Locke Mystery--Book #1)

by Pierce, Blake

  “I hate roller coasters,” Mia muttered to no one in particular.

  Ten minutes later, as they finished wolfing down their sandwiches, Ray’s cell rang.

  “Sands here,” he said through a full mouth. He listened intently for a minute while everyone else remained silent. When he hung up, he turned to them. Keri could tell it was bad news before he spoke.

  “I’m sorry to say our leads didn’t pan out. We had a surveillance team following Johnnie Cotton as he drove around town in his van. At some point he made them and they had to take him down. Ashley wasn’t in the van. He’s down at the station right now.”

  “Is he being questioned?” Senator Stafford asked.

  “He was but he started asking for a lawyer pretty much from the get go. He’s been in this kind of situation before. He knows there’s no advantage for him in talking.”

  “Maybe he’d be more receptive if Detective Locke had a conversation with him,” Senator Penn suggested.

  “Maybe—she’s great with interrogations. But I don’t think Hillman would go for it. This case has a lot of heat already and I don’t think he wants to do anything to jeopardize a conviction.”

  “Lieutenant Hillman left me his card earlier. I think I will use it. Why don’t you two go down to the station? I have a feeling that by the time you get there, he’ll have had a change of heart.”

  “Senator, with all due respect, once a suspect asks for a lawyer, there’s a ticking clock. There’s only so long you can hold them before it’s viewed as a gross violation of rights.”

  “Then you’d better get down there fast.” He stared at them both with such certitude than they couldn’t help but wonder if it was possible. Keri looked at Ray, who shrugged.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “No harm in trying.”

  They headed for the door, escorted once again by the security guard. They were almost outside when Mia ran after them. She opened her mouth but before she could speak, Keri beat her to it.

  “Don’t worry, Mia. I’ll order the Amber Alert as soon as we get in the car. We’ll get her back soon.”

  Mia gave her a small hug, then waved to the security guard to help them navigate the throng of press just beyond the gate. With their shouted questions and bright camera lights, the reporters seemed like jackals now. But very soon, they could be a useful tool to get a teenage girl back home to her family.

  So why do I have such a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach?

  CHAPTER NINE

  Monday

  Night

  Johnnie Cotton was already in Interrogation Room 1 when Keri got to the station. She’d dropped Ray off at his car by Denton Rivers’ house and expected him to arrive any second. Hillman wasn’t around but Detective Cantwell caught her in the hall outside the room and told her that Hillman had put her back on the case and that she was authorized to question Cotton. He said it flatly, without emotion, but beneath that she could sense the veteran detective’s disdain. She chose to ignore it.

  While she waited for her partner to arrive, she stared at Johnnie Cotton through the one-way mirror of the interrogation room. Since they’d tried to avoid him back at his place, this was her first real chance to get a look at him.

  He didn’t look like the stereotype of a pedophile. His eyes didn’t constantly water. His chin wasn’t especially weak. His shoulders didn’t slope. He wasn’t particularly pudgy or pale. He was just a regular-looking guy—dark hair, medium build, maybe a little pimply-faced for a thirty-year-old man, maybe a little short. But on the whole, he was mostly unremarkable, which was, of course, far more troubling. It would have been preferable if these types were easily identifiable.

  He stood in the corner of the room, his hands cuffed in front of him, with his back pressed against the wall. She suspected that had been his default position in prison just to survive. Pedophiles weren’t popular there.

  Keri made a snap decision. She wasn’t going to wait for Ray. There was something about this guy that made her think he’d just shut down if confronted by her partner’s looming presence. She’d use it if necessary, but later. She walked into the room.

  Cotton’s eyes darted at her when she walked in, then twisted away almost immediately.

  “Come over here,” Keri said. The man complied. “Now follow me.”

  She led him outside the interrogation room, into the hallway. Cantwell and Sterling, who had been chatting in the hall, turned to them, stunned.

  “Locke, what are you doing?” Sterling demanded.

  “We’ll be right back.”

  With that, she led him down the hall and into the women’s restroom, as her fellow detectives watched with astonishment.

  “Wait here,” she told them, then closed the door and focused on Cotton.

  “There are no cameras in here. There are no microphones in here.” She unbuttoned her blouse, exposing her bra and stomach, and said, “I’m not wearing a wire. Whatever you say, it’s just between you and me. Tell me you want a lawyer.”

  The man looked at her, confused.

  “Say it,” Keri said. “Say, ‘I want a lawyer.’”

  He complied.

  “I want a lawyer.”

  “No, you can’t have one,” Keri said. “Do you see what just happened? If this place was wired, which it isn’t, nothing you say could ever be used against you now because I just denied you your constitutional rights. The bottom line is that we’re alone. I’m not here to hurt you. I’m not here to trick you. Do you understand?”

  The man nodded.

  “The only thing I want is Ashley Penn.” The man opened his mouth to speak but Keri interrupted him. “No, no, don’t say a word yet. Let me just set the groundwork a little more. Earlier this evening, I broke into your house, looking for Ashley. You weren’t home. I saw the shoebox in your closet. I saw all the pictures.”

  A bead of sweat glistened on the man’s forehead.

  “When you came home, you saw that they’d been disturbed. Am I right?”

  He nodded.

  “You knew someone had seen them. You took them somewhere and destroyed them before you were arrested. Am I correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, between you and me, that’s not going to work. I saw them and I can testify that I saw them. My testimony will be more than enough to revoke your probation. All I have to do is say the word and you’re going straight back to prison. Here’s the deal. I get Ashley Penn back and you keep your freedom.”

  The man paced.

  Then he said, “Those photographs, I never wanted them. They just show up in the mail.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “No, it’s the truth. They just show up.”

  “From who?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “There’s never a return address on the envelope.”

  “Well, if you don’t want them, why didn’t you just burn them?”

  He shrugged.

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Because you like them too much?”

  He exhaled.

  “I know it’s hard to understand,” he said. “I think someone’s setting me up. They wanted them in my house. They knew I wouldn’t be able to just get rid of them. They wanted the police to find them. They want to send me back to jail. And now here it is, actually happening. I should have burned them all the second they showed up.”

  “You can still get out of this,” Keri said. “Where’s Ashley Penn?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Keri frowned.

  “Tell me what you did with her.”

  “Nothing.”

  “I don’t believe you, Johnnie.”

  “Honest to God,” he said. “According to the news she got taken after school, right? In the middle of the afternoon?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I was at work,” he said. “I work down at Rick’s Autos in Cerritos. I was there all day. I didn’t leave until after five. You can call Rick and he’ll tell you. He warned me that if I misse
d any more time, he’d fire me.”

  “You miss a lot of time lately?”

  “I’ll skip a day here and there. But Rick warned me so I was careful to stay the whole day. Besides, they have security cameras there. You can see me in the lot all day long. I never left, not once, not even for five minutes. I even ate my lunch in the break room. Check it out. Call him, he’ll tell you.”

  Keri felt a growing unease. His alibi was so specific that it would be easy to poke holes in it if it wasn’t true, which meant it probably was.

  “All day?” Keri asked.

  “Yeah. At one point, I got a call around two from some dude wanting make a… purchase—”

  “Don’t worry, Johnnie, I’m not looking to bust you for dealing. Go on.”

  “Well, he wanted me to meet him in the Cerritos Mall parking lot. But I didn’t know the guy and like I said, Rick—”

  “Warned you, I know. So if you were there, then who had your van?”

  “No one. It was with me all day.”

  “Someone had it.”

  “No, no one,” he said. “I had it parked right there on the lot. I was literally walking around it all day long. It was right there.”

  “We have it on videotape taking Ashley.”

  “That’s impossible. It was with me. Go look at Rick’s cameras. You’ll see.”

  Keri took Cotton back to the interrogation room. When she stepped out, Ray was waiting for her.

  “I can’t leave you alone for a second,” he said.

  “Follow me,” she told him, not feeling playful.

  They headed to the garage where Cotton’s black van was being processed. Keri typed the plate number into the computer. To her astonishment, it didn’t match the van. The plates on Johnnie Cotton’s van were registered to a white Camry owned by someone named Barbara Green from Silverlake.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Ray asked, equally stunned.

  “You want my theory?” Keri said.

  “Please.”

  “Whoever took Ashley Penn was trying to frame Johnnie Cotton,” she said. “He used a black van for the abduction, same make and model as Cotton’s. He stole Cotton’s plates so that we’d be able to ID him eventually but covered the front one so it would look like Cotton was being sneaky.”

  Ray joined in.

  “And he replaced Cotton’s plates with Barbara Green’s so the guy likely wouldn’t notice the difference until it was too late.”

  “Exactly,” Keri agreed. “And I’m willing to bet that whoever did all that also sent Cotton those pictures of the little girls. Cotton claimed they just showed up in the mail, no return address. Whoever it was knew the guy wouldn’t be able to toss them and that we’d find them when we searched the house, making him look even guiltier.”

  “So Cotton’s not our man,” Ray said.

  “No. But that’s not the worst of it. Whoever our guy is has been planning this for a while. He knew Cotton was Denton Rivers’ dealer. He knew he was a pedophile. And he actively tried to undermine Cotton’s alibi by trying to get him to meet at the mall.”

  “So we’re right back to square one,” Ray said.

  Keri shook her head.

  “Worse than square one,” she said. “We’ve wasted the one thing Ashley Penn doesn’t have: time.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Monday

  Night

  Ashley was having trouble opening her eyes. She knew she was conscious but everything felt heavy and fuzzy. It reminded her of when she was eleven and tore a ligament in her ankle while surfing; she had to have surgery and they’d put her under. When she woke up, she’d had this same feeling, as if she were waking not just from sleep but almost from death.

  How long had she been lying there?

  Her head already hurt. There was no individual source of the pain. It throbbed all over, so much so that she feared the act of moving would make it worse.

  Despite her anxiety about the pain it might cause, Ashley decided it was time to open her eyes.

  It was pitch-black. She could see nothing.

  And that’s when the fear started to hit her. This wasn’t a hospital.

  Where am I?

  She imagined it was what one might feel after being roofied. That set off another spasm of fear.

  How did I get to this place? Why can’t I remember anything?

  She tried to control the terror she felt starting to grip her. She reminded herself of how she handled it when a really huge wave knocked her off her surfboard and forced her down toward the ocean floor. Freaking out did her no good. She couldn’t outfight a wave. She had to stay calm and wait it out. She had to feel the fear but let it pass through her so she could take action when the wave passed.

  She forced herself to do the same here. She couldn’t see and she couldn’t remember, but that didn’t mean she was helpless. She decided to try to sit up.

  She pushed up on her elbows until she was sitting upright, ignoring the jackhammer in her head. After it subsided slightly, she checked herself in the darkness. She was still wearing her top and skirt. Her bra and panties weren’t missing but her shoes were. She was on a thin mattress, her bare feet resting on the scratchy wooden floor. Other than the general aching and headache she didn’t think she had any injuries.

  Her right ear felt funny. She reached up and realized that her earring was missing and her lobe was throbbing. Her left earring was still there.

  She reached out to get some sense of her surroundings. The floor was definitely wood but there was something weird about it she couldn’t place. She continued to feel around until her fingers bumped into a wall at the head of the mattress. To her surprise, it was metal. She rapped her knuckle on it. Even though it was thick, the noise echoed throughout.

  She used the wall to brace herself as she stood up and ran her fingers along it, taking tiny, careful steps. After a moment it became clear that the wall was curved. She followed it around in a circle until her feet bumped into the mattress again. She was in some kind of cylindrical room. It was hard to gauge the size of it but she guessed it was about as big as a two-car garage.

  She sat back down on the mattress and was surprised by the sound it made. She stomped her foot on the wooden flooring and realized what had seemed odd about it before: it felt hollow below, like she was on a patio deck.

  Ashley sat quietly for a minute, trying to force a memory, any memory, to return to her throbbing head. She could feel the fear beginning to take hold again.

  What is this place? How did I get here? Why can’t I remember anything?

  “Hello!”

  A quick echo spit back at her, suggesting a closed structure with a tall ceiling. No one answered.

  “Is anybody there?”

  Not a sound came.

  Her thoughts turned to her parents. Were they looking for her? Had she been gone long enough to make them worry? Would her dad even notice she was gone?

  Tears came to her eyes. She angrily wiped them away with the back of her hand. Senator Stafford Penn didn’t like crybabies.

  “Mom!” she yelled, hearing the panic rise in her voice. “Mom, help me!”

  Her throat felt like sandpaper. How long had it been since she drank anything? How long had she been here?

  She crawled around on the floor, feeling for anything other than the mattress. To her surprise, her hand bumped into a plastic bin in the center of the room. She got the top off and felt around inside. There were several plastic bottles, various containers, and…a flashlight?

  Yes!

  Ashley turned it on and the room sprang to life. Almost immediately, she realized it wasn’t actually a room. She was in some kind of silo, up near the top where the ceiling funneled to a point ten feet above her head. In the plastic bin were bottles of water, some soup, peanut butter, jerky, toilet paper, and a loaf of bread. Next to the bin was a plastic bucket. She could guess what that was for.

  She shined the light along the walls, hoping against hope there might
be a door. Nothing. What got her attention, though, was all the writing on the walls.

  She moved toward the nearest one, written in black magic marker.

  I’m Brenda Walker. I died here July 2016. Tell my mother and father and my sister Hanna that I will always love them.

  A phone number followed. It had an 818 area code—the San Fernando Valley.

  Jesus!

  Ashley moved the light along the walls. There were other messages in different handwriting. Some were short and to the point like Brenda’s. Others were long and rambling, seemingly written over a period of days. There were at least a dozen different names, and their messages literally covered the walls.

  Ashley felt herself starting to hyperventilate. Her knees wobbled and she dropped to the floor, grabbing the edges of the bin to steady herself. The flashlight fell on top of the loaf of bread. She closed her eyes tight and breathed slowly in and out, trying to force the messages on the wall out of her head.

  After a minute she opened her eyes again and glanced back at the bin. The flashlight had rolled off the bread and was lying on the bottom, next to some peanut butter.

  A lot of good that will do me, considering I’m allergic to the stuff.

  She picked up the flashlight and gave the container of peanut butter a useless whack. As it shifted position in the bin, she saw something underneath it that she’d missed before. She leaned in, looking more closely. It was a thick black permanent magic marker.

  And that’s when Ashley began to scream.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Monday

  Night

  Keri waited at the front door, trying to maintain her patience. She’d been standing here for over two minutes.

  After the Johnnie Cotton lead had turned up nothing, Hillman told them to start from scratch. They still had to run down everything Cotton had said for confirmation. Patterson was supervising the CSU search of Cotton’s van, just in case something turned up. Sterling was headed to Rick’s Autos in Cerritos to meet up with Cotton’s boss to review his surveillance video and confirm his alibi.