Phobias

by Ryan Horvath

  “We’re almost done, I think, detective,” Hardy answered. “Although we could spend a week in here and probably never be done.” She spread her gloved hands out indicating the room.

  “What do you mean by that?” Terry returned.

  Hardy stood up fully and smiled. “This place is rife with human DNA.”

  “What’s the source?” Walt asked.

  Hardy looked at Walt and furrowed her brow. She obviously wasn’t used to answering questions from someone so young. She switched her glance to Terry.

  “It’s okay,” Terry said. “Believe it or not, he’s a consultant on this case. And he’s not a minor… though I never really agreed being eighteen made someone an adult.” He chuckled.

  After a moment’s hesitation, Hardy turned and started to gather some of her tools. “Source is hair. Male and female. From the head and between the legs. Lab’s already called and has a visual match to the missing girl’s hair. DNA takes a bit longer, of course.”

  “Surely this guy isn’t getting hung for some hairs in his house,” Walt said before Terry could.

  Hardy shook her head and stifled a laugh.

  “What is it?” Terry said.

  “There’s… there’s semen and vaginal fluid splatters… everywhere!” She couldn’t hold her laugh anymore and let it go. It was short and, when she finished, she said. “From one male and one female, and they liked it pretty nasty.”

  Walt shrugged. “So the guy liked kinky sex. Still not a crime,” he countered.

  Hardy continued. “We got some of the missing girl’s panties from her house. They… weren’t exactly clean. Lab’s already been able to match the fluid on the walls here to the fluid on the panties.” She shrugged and said, “Coach was definitely screwing the missing girl. That is a crime. Even if the crime isn’t kidnapping.”

  “Still doesn’t make the guy her kidnapper,” Terry said. The coach’s words rang in his ears. The coach said he’d been set up.

  “Whatever,” Hardy said. She shrugged and rolled her eyes. “I’m just here for the evidence. Of which, there is plenty. Figuring out the ‘why’ is for you detectives and the lawyers. That being said, I’m done in here and going to go finish up out in the van.”

  Terry nodded and thanked her and she left them. He and Walt walked deeper into the house.

  “See anything?” Terry asked. “You haven’t been here before and you’ve got a good eye.”

  Walt shook his head as they exited a hallway and went to the bedroom to the right. This was apparently where the coach had been when the shooting started. Walt looked around the room. The coach lived pretty sparsely but something caught Walt’s eye pretty quickly. “Holy… holy shit!” he gasped.

  “What? What is it?” Terry said startled.

  Walt crossed the room, passed the bed, and came to the bureau. Thoughts of Chad being the culprit behind all of this vanished from his mind and he wasn’t really thinking it was the coach anymore either. On the bureau, something rested upside down there that Walt vividly recognized. He reached out for it.

  “Damn it, Walt!” Terry hissed. “Don’t touch anything!”

  “Sorry,” Walt quickly said snapping his hand back. “That… that cap. It’s Calvin’s.”

  Terry looked at the well-worn ball cap that was on the dresser. To him it looked so common as to belong to anyone in the state who was a Twins fan. “What makes you so sure?”

  “I don’t need to pick it up to see the two letters that are written on the inside,” Walt returned matter-of-factly. “And I don’t need a handwriting analyst to recognize that I wrote ‘em there.”

  Terry leaned closer and, sure enough, inside the hat, the letters “CV” had been printed in thick black printing.

  “I wrote those letters there because we went to a game one year and both wanted identical caps as souvenirs. I put our initials inside our caps so we wouldn’t get ‘em mixed up,” Walt supplied.

  “What the hell is it doing here?” Terry said.

  “No kidding,” Walt said. “Especially when I saw it tucked in Cal’s bag not an hour before he went missing.”

  Terry gaped at Walt in surprise. “Calvin had to have been here then,” he said.

  “Or someone wanted us to think he was,” Walt said.

  Terry pulled an evidence bag from his pocket and lifted the hat with a pen he took from a different pocket. Underneath the hat was a small piece of paper.

  “What’s that?” Walt said and pointed.

  They both leaned in. On the paper was simply a photo of a house. There was no way to identify its location.

  “It’s nothing,” Terry said. “Just a picture.” But he had a queer sensation tickling the back of his mind that felt like doubt.

  And alarm bells rang in Walt’s mind. The hat resting on the picture seemed like some kind of message.

  “C’mon, Walt. If that picture was significant, the techs would have picked it up,” Terry said.

  Walt looked at Terry and cocked an eyebrow. “They missed the cap,” he said pointedly.

  “A dirty ball cap in a coach’s house is hardly a miss,” Terry countered.

  Walt looked back at the photo and stared at it. “Can you just bag it anyway and bring it with us?” he asked.

  Terry thought for a minute. “Sure.” He pocketed the bag with the cap and took out a smaller thin sleeve made for photographic evidence. He used a pair of tweezers and slid the photo into the sleeve. “Let’s check the rest of the place out,” Terry said.

  They looked at the rest of the house and found nothing either of them thought significant. “Apparently, the best evidence in the house is of the DNA variety,” Walt summed.

  He didn’t know that the photo in Terry’s pocket, the photo of the house, was better than the DNA.

  Much better.

  ~~23~~

  Chad was anything but prepared when he received the picture message. Almost no one could be prepared for seeing something like that. Well, almost no one normal. Chad only had to give the image a second glance to know that the person who sent this was far from normal. From the setting, Chad was able to tell that the scene was probably in the same place that the vile rape video had been recorded.

  There was a woman in the image. Chad recognized her. He should have. He’d only seen her a few hours ago, though in light of the fact that he hadn’t had a drink in a while, it felt more like days than hours. Chad hadn’t officially met her and had only seen her through the windows of Terry’s car.

  Walt’s mother was the subject of this horrific work of psychopathic art. Chad had thought Walt’s mother was an attractive young woman but there was nothing appealing about her in this manner. She’d been stripped of all her clothing and tied to a chair. Her unconscious head was pulled back and attached to the back of the chair by her hair, which had to have been secured with tape. Her jaw hung slack and her eyes showed no sign of rapid movements. But shortly after the image appeared, it blurred slightly and then changed. Suddenly, slashes appeared across her bare abdomen. Chad realized, by the fact that there was no one there to inflict the slashes, he was seeing the image after it had been doctored. After the slashes, the image blurred and slightly changed again. From her open stomach, a blood balloon burst spraying her legs and lower arms with crimson gore. It was obviously not real but that didn’t make it any less unsettling. Then a message appeared over the image.

  THE WILD CARD NEEDED TO BE INCLUDED IN THE GAME. I AM HAVING FUN! ARE YOU HAVING FUN, DRUNK EX-COP? KEEP MUM ABOUT THE MOM OR SHE’LL END UP LIKE THIS. HA! AND THE WILD CARD DOESN’T GET TO LEAVE THE GAME. IF HE DOES, SHE DIES. IF YOU TELL, SHE DIES. JUST LIKE THAT STUPID CUNT YOU WERE MARRIED TO.

  Chad seethed at the way this sick fuck addressed his loving wife. His stomach turned over as he thought of how Marcia looked when he last saw her. Now this bastard had yet another woman in his clutches. His heart thundered in his chest and ears and he felt rage beginning to boil. The message indicated this was a game to the killer. That made Chad
hate him even more.

  While Chad was trying to decide what to do, Walt approached him. Chad snapped away any revealing expression on his face as fast as he could. It wasn’t easy.

  ~*~0~0~*~

  Terry split them up after that. Chad and Holly were dropped off back at Dr. Justin Andrews’. The clock on Chad’s phone rolled past 3:00 AM and he realized he’d gone a full twenty-four hours without a drop of alcohol. He couldn’t remember the last time that happened. He wasn’t sure if it was the lack of booze in his blood, the image of Walt’s mother he received, or the combination of the two, but Chad felt oddly alert; almost twitchy. So much so that he nearly jumped out of his skin when Holly spoke.

  “So what are we going to ask him?” she said.

  “I don’t think we’re going to ask him anything,” Chad replied.

  “What? Why?” Holly returned.

  “I don’t think he’s here,” Chad said.

  “It’s after three. Where would he go?” Holly said and shrugged.

  Chad didn’t answer her. He went straight to the front door and Holly followed. He rang the doorbell. It echoed hollowly through the interior of the house. He followed up with a series of loud knocks. He and Holly both leaned in and heard no footsteps approaching; no groans or muttered swears from someone who had been roused from a deep sleep.

  “See?” Chad said. “No one home.”

  “So what do we do now?” Holly asked and shrugged.

  Chad again didn’t answer. He knew they had to get inside but he remembered Walt saying the Vale house had been heavily stocked with hidden surveillance cameras. If his shrink was mixed up in this, his house probably was too. Chad looked up and around.

  “What are you looking for?” Holly asked, raising her eyebrows.

  “A camera,” Chad said. He could see none. That didn’t mean there wasn’t one in a tree or different vantage point that couldn’t be seen in the night.

  “I don’t see anything,” Holly confirmed.

  Chad began looking around more. It didn’t take long before he found a silver key. He tried it in the door knob. It worked.

  “Wait!” Holly whispered. “We’re not cops.”

  “I know,” Chad returned. “Cops would need a warrant to go in here. We don’t.”

  “But isn’t this breaking and entering?” Holly countered.

  “I didn’t break anything,” Chad said, and gave her a smirk. He opened the door. No alarm rang out. No guard dog approached. No doctor/owner stood in the doorway with a gun in hand willing to protect his home.

  “I could lose my license for this,” Holly protested.

  “Then by all means, stay out here. I’m sure it won’t look suspicious at all to anyone who happens to look out their window or drive by that an ex-girlfriend is just… hanging out on the front porch or her old boyfriend’s house in the middle of the night,” Chad said. He turned on the flashlight he took from Terry’s car and went inside.

  “You’re kind of an ass, you know?” Holly said.

  ~*~0~0~*~

  “You’re kind of an ass, you know?” Holly returned. She sighed and followed Chad into the dark house.

  “Just trying to be practical,” Chad said. “There are lives at stake.”

  “Okay. Okay,” Holly acquiesced. She looked around them and down the dark corridor that fed off into several other rooms before ending in the kitchen. Glow from a street light back there bounced off the stainless steel refrigerator. “Criminy!” Holly spat out in a whisper. “I thought I lived on the bare side. This guy gives ‘Spartan’ a whole new meaning.” There was no furniture; not a coat rack, not a small table to toss keys or mail on; no small chair or bench to sit on while putting on or taking off your boots. And there were no pictures on the walls. The walls themselves were a bright color; most likely plain white in normal light. They worked their way down the hallway.

  The first room on the right was a simple living room. A plain sofa, easy chair, coffee table, and TV stand that had no TV. A very obviously fake bamboo plant stood in the corner.

  “It looks like it’s never been used,” Chad said.

  “No. It looks like it’s been staged,” Holly said. She once had a good friend who was a real estate agent and she recognized the simplicity of it, though her friend would have had some art on the walls at least.

  The room across from the living room was equally unremarkable.

  “Were you worried about cameras?” Holly asked. “Probably don’t need to be now.” She pointed around. “Nowhere to hide them.”

  Holly didn’t know the place had no cameras. She also didn’t know that they tripped a motion sensor that was embedded in the front door frame the moment they crossed the threshold and their presence in the house was no secret to the owner.

  The bathroom had a toothbrush that had clearly never been used sitting in a cup on the basin. The shower was dry. They moved on to the bedroom.

  “There’s nothing here so far,” Holly said. “Do we have to go in there?” She didn’t like the idea of entering Justin’s bedroom without his permission as if doing so made it okay when he’d done it to her.

  “A man keeps his best secrets in his bedroom,” Chad said mysteriously.

  Holly wondered what kind of secrets Chad kept in his own bedroom. She found the idea of finding out sort of enticing and she blushed. Chad’s wife was lying in a cooler in Holly’s own morgue not even dead for a day. Chad hadn’t had a moment to grieve, let alone think about moving on.

  Holly stood in the bedroom doorway and watched Chad as he looked around. He lifted the mattress first, one side and then the other, and found nothing. He went to the dresser and squatted and Holly noticed how nice his rear end looked and she again had to chastise herself. To her surprise, he started by opening the bottom drawer. It was empty. So was the one above it. The next one up had three T-shirts of different colors and nothing else. But in the top drawer, amid a few pairs of brightly colored briefs, Chad found a pistol. Holly was surprised when he seemed uninterested in it.

  “Don’t you think having a gun is a red flag?” Holly asked.

  “Not at all,” Chad said. “I’ve known lots of guys who keep a little home protection in their skivvy drawer.” He chuckled. “I had this one friend who said having the gunmetal rubbing up against his underwear made his balls feel bigger.”

  Holly also laughed while Chad moved to the closet. There were some clothes hanging in there but nothing else.

  “I’ll tell you what I do find weird,” Chad said when he rejoined Holly.

  “What?” she said.

  “A guy who has no jack-off material in his bedroom, not a magazine, a DVD, hell, even a naked photo of an old girlfriend… or boyfriend… is weird. Really weird,” Chad answered.

  “So what does that mean?” Holly continued.

  “Either Justin Andrews doesn’t have a dick… or he doesn’t live here,” Chad summed.

  Holly recalled when Justin was smelling her panties in her bedroom. She had very clearly seen he had a dick, even if it was through his trousers. That and the fact that he wasn’t here sleeping at past three in the morning made Holly reply with, “I’d say it’s the latter.” She sighed. “So we need to find out where he really lives then. How can we do that?”

  Chad smiled and left the bedroom. He headed for the kitchen. “I was a cop once too,” Chad said to her. “I’m not without my resources.”

  In the kitchen, they found the refrigerator virtually empty. The freezer was empty. The cabinets had a few plates and glasses but there was no food.

  Holly was looking through the kitchen drawers using her phone as a flashlight when she came across something. “Chad? Look at this.”

  Chad came over and leaned in to look over her shoulder. “What is it?” he said and shined his flashlight into the drawer.

  Alone in the drawer, an electronic fob similar to one used for a car or home security system rested. Holly quickly picked it up. It was black and painted on the back were four numbers: 5
816. “Do you think it means something?” Holly asked.

  “Maybe,” Chad returned. “Pocket it.”

  Holly did so without question.

  A second later both of their phones sounded indicating new text messages and startled them. They got the same message from an anonymous number: TIME TO GO. JUSTIN IS ALMOST BACK HOME. They, of course, didn’t know the message had come from Miedo.

  “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Chad said. He moved to the back door.

  “You don’t have to tell me twice,” Holly said, and followed.

  They slipped out the door and back into the night. They left, and did not wait for Justin to come back. That was good, because they would have been waiting for a long time. Justin wasn’t actually coming back. Miedo just wanted to advance them farther in the game.

  ~~24~~

  Tim hoofed it until he was so winded he thought he might pass out. His night of running and being shot at while having a virtually empty stomach and almost no water would become more than he could bear soon enough.

  He continued working his way to the west to try to get as far away as he could from the two jurisdictions that were hunting him. As the 4:00 AM hour approached, he found a park and shambled over to a water fountain that he desperately hoped worked. It did and he drank heavily. The metallic-tasting liquid raced down his throat and into his stomach and he could almost feel revitalization working from there out to all of his extremities. When he was finished drinking, he felt mildly rejuvenated.

  He spied a bench and went over to it. He winced as he sat and put his back against the back of the bench. He must have bruised something on his back when he’d gone out the window. He didn’t think his rib was broken but couldn’t be sure since he only noticed the pain when he slowed down. But there was nothing he could do about it. If the rib was broken, it was broken and he would have to adapt. He shifted where he sat so he could pull the checkbook out of his wallet. When the injury on his back didn’t protest at this movement, he took it as a good sign.

  Tim opened the checkbook. He had little interest for the plain green monogrammed checks so he ignored them except for a glance to double confirm to himself that Heather’s parents’ names were on the checks and his gambit had been worth it.