Judged

by E. H. Reinhard

  “Wait,” Jensen said. “I know you. We had a session a few months back. Timothy, right?”

  “Correct, and we’re about to have us another little session.” Tim took a step backward and grabbed the other jab stick.

  “Whatever this is, we can work it out, Timothy. Just tell me what I can do. We’ll figure it out.”

  “Shut up. Walk your ass to the living room. Backward. You make a sudden move, and I shoot.”

  “Okay, okay.” The doctor kept his hands up and followed instructions. Not a word came from his mouth mentioning the well-being of his lady friend lying on the ground. The doctor placed one designer-shoe-covered foot behind the next and curled around the kitchen while Tim followed. “I won’t call the police.”

  “Yeah, I know you won’t,” Tim said.

  “Let’s just talk about whatever the situation is.”

  “We will, I assure you.” Tim stood at the border of the kitchen and the living room and motioned toward the couch with the barrel of the gun. “Lie down on that couch.” Tim glanced back at the woman, facedown and not moving on the floor and figured the drugs would take effect before she regained consciousness from the pistol whipping. He turned back to Jensen, who sat. “I said lie down. Feet up, head on the pillow.”

  Jensen obeyed. Tim walked for him, pointed the jab stick toward him and launched it forward. The doctor caught the needle in the center of his stomach as he tried to move to defend himself. Tim tossed the stick to the ground. It bounced and came to rest near a big fireplace. He kept his gun sights on the doctor.

  Jensen scrambled on the couch, trying to get himself up. “What the hell did you just do?”

  “It’s a deer tranquilizer. There’s nothing you can do. Just let it work.”

  “Deer tranquilizer?” The doctor swung his legs off of the couch and attempted to stand.

  Tim kicked him back into the couch cushions. “Just sit there. You’ll never get out of this house either way.”

  “What the hell is this?” Jensen asked. His words became sloppy.

  “This is your judgment,” Tim said.

  “Judgment? For what?”

  “We’ll get to that in a little while. I still need to finish getting ready. You coming home unexpected kind of ruined my preparation. All in good time, though. You just relax and have a nap.”

  Jensen didn’t respond. The doctor’s eyes rolled back in his head, and he collapsed to the couch cushions.

  “There we go,” Tim said.

  Tim’s eyes caught the chaise on the far side of the fireplace. It would be perfect. He just needed to deal with the woman and finish getting ready. Tim jammed the pistol back into his waistline and walked back into the kitchen.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Alice Schipper sat across from me in an interview room on the third floor. She was filling out a statement regarding her relationship with the late Glen Scobee, the visit he’d made to her house the night he was killed, and the van she’d seen out in front of her property.

  Ms. Schipper signed her name at the bottom of the sheet and slid it toward me. “That should be everything I told you.”

  I picked the paper up, glanced over it to confirm she’d included everything we’d discussed, and placed it into a file. I handed her the stack of papers that included the different photographs of vans.

  “I’d like you to look those over and pick out which van you saw.”

  She nodded but said nothing. I watched as she looked at every single sheet. She backtracked from the end of the stack and pulled out a single piece of paper. “This was it,” she said. “Stick some numbers on the rear glass, and it’s exact.”

  She held the paper out toward me, which I took and turned in my hand. She’d picked the Ford Transit Connect, just like the woman from Liberty City.

  “You’re positive?” I asked.

  “That’s it,” she said.

  “And this color?” I asked.

  “The streetlights on my block have a warm hue, so I can’t be entirely sure if it was beige or gold or silver. It had metallic paint, so I doubt it was white.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you need anything else?” she asked.

  “We have your statement and the selection you chose. That should be it. If I need anything, I assume I can call you?”

  “That’s fine,” she said.

  I saw her to the elevators, across from the main entrance to the tech center, and clicked the arrow down for the elevator.

  “Find who did this,” Ms. Schipper said. “The affair aside, he was a good man and didn’t deserve what happened to him. Rachael didn’t either.”

  I didn’t tell her that he, in fact, was not a good man.

  “We’re working on locating the person responsible. This van identification could help.”

  The elevator dinged, and the doors opened. I figured a stop at the tech center behind me was in order to confirm the van we were looking for.

  “Can you find your way out?” I asked.

  She nodded and stepped inside. I turned toward the tech center and entered as the elevator doors closed at my back. The rectangular office spread out before me—long desks filled with computer monitors and individual stations spanned the right and left walls. The back of the room contained two glass offices that I figured were for leads. In one of them, the light was on and a man wearing a white dress shirt and black tie was seated behind a desk. The only two people manning computer stations looked at me briefly and went back to staring at their screens. At a quick look as I passed the men on my way toward the back office, both guys appeared to be viewing footage from the car dealership. I rapped on the glass window next to the open office door, and the bald, midforties man rose from his desk and approached. The name plaque on the man’s desk read Joe Payton.

  “Can I help you with something?” he asked.

  “Agent Hank Rawlings,” I said. “I’m working the vigilante case and had a little update on what we might be looking for.”

  “Ah, yes—one of the agents in from Virginia if I’m not mistaken. Couch had mentioned you guys were in on it,” he said. “Joe Payton. Tech lead.”

  I shook his hand. “I just finished up an interview with someone connected to one of our victims. It’s looking like we have another verification that it was a Ford Transit Connect van.”

  “All right. Couch had said that you guys spoke with someone earlier that mentioned that. This is in addition?”

  “Yeah. Two people now claim they’ve seen the same van.”

  “Okay. I’ll just double check with my guys that they are on the lookout for that van in particular. I have a pair running through the footage now. They’ve been going at it nonstop since we got access to the dealership’s account from the security company. What do you think the odds are of us finding the vehicle in question on the footage we have?”

  “I can’t really say for certain, but I have a feeling that our perpetrator knew his victim’s routines. I guess our victim from the dealership worked mostly nine to fives, except on Tuesdays when he’d get picked up by a cab around eleven or so at night and return in a cab around two thirty in the morning. I’m not sure how far the footage rolls back, but you guys may want to focus your attention there.”

  “Sure,” Joe said. He went toward his desk, leaned down, and wrote what I’d just told him on a piece of paper. He turned back toward me. “We’ll plug away on it for a little bit more here tonight and get back on it in the morning when I have a few more guys at my disposal. Pretty soon, I’m going to have to send these two that are still here home. I might stick around for another hour or two and poke around at it, though. No pressing plans for the evening.”

  “I appreciate that,” I said.

  I left him with my direct number in case they came up with anything and headed back to the serial crimes unit a floor down. I walked in and glanced toward Couch’s office. Beth was sitting across from him at his desk. I knocked and entered.

  “Did she pick one?” Couch a
sked.

  I slapped the file I held against my hand. “Ford Transit Connect, just like our nameless woman in Liberty City. I just stopped in the tech center and confirmed this was the van we were looking for. It sounded like they were going to work for another hour or so before shutting down for the day.”

  Beth dug into her bag and removed a file. She placed it in front of her and flipped through the papers inside.

  “Does tech have your number if they get anything?” Couch asked.

  “Yeah, I talked to a Joe Payton up there. I gave it to him.”

  “Okay,” he said. “We need to find that damn van. It’s looking like it’s about the only real lead we’re working with. I’m going to get the word out to everyone in local law enforcement. If there’s a wheelchair van anywhere that remotely matches the description, I want it stopped. Especially if they come up on one driving around after they would normally be conducting business.”

  “I agree,” I said. “What happened with the interviewing today? Anything?”

  Beth took her nose from her papers and looked at me. “Aside from pissing off law enforcement from our questioning, no,” Beth said.

  “We didn’t get anything with cross-referencing the van with potentials?” I asked.

  “These are all of our van owners here.” Beth referenced the papers before her. “Not a single Ford on the list.” She stared down and flipped through the pages. “Chrysler, Chrysler, Dodge, Honda, Toyota, another Honda…” Beth’s voice trailed off as she went through the rest of the papers. “If it is a Ford van, it could belong to a business that our guy drives for. It could be part time if he’s in law enforcement. We’ll need to look up the businesses that provide disabled transport and make some calls. Maybe we can find a place that has a fleet of these vans.”

  “That’s probably our best route.” I looked at my watch. “Except its pushing seven o’clock, and I’m betting most of the transport places are closed for the night.”

  Beth flipped the cover on the folder closed and leaned back in her chair. “Most likely, but I can start getting a list together for morning. Which sounds like a hell of a lot better idea with my feet up back at the hotel.”

  Couch cracked his knuckles and then clasped his hands before him on his desk. “Sounds like that’s about a wrap for today, then?”

  I rubbed my eyes. “Looks like it. I’ll give Beth a hand with the list, and we’ll get back to it in the morning.”

  Couch clicked a couple keys on his keyboard and powered down his computer. “Okay. I’ll get the word spread about our van to local law enforcement.” He scooped up his phone from his desk. “I’ll be here tomorrow by seven thirty.”

  Beth and I grabbed our things and left Couch’s office to head out. We walked toward our cars in the lot.

  “Did you want to get this list together and go grab something to eat? Maybe have a beer or something?” Beth asked. “I saw a sports bar not too far away from our hotel. It looked like walking distance.”

  “Yeah, that’s fine,” I said. I veered right toward my rental car parked a few spots away from Beth’s. “I’ll meet you back at the hotel.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I stared up at a basketball game playing on one of the monitors overhead. My elbows were up on a bar—before me, what remained of a giant plate of nachos. The sports bar a block or so from our hotel also appeared to brew their own beer, judging by the giant stainless-steel and copper brew kettles along with a pair of fermenters walled off by glass at the back of the building. The rest of the business’s interior was standard sports-bar fare, with framed jerseys and miscellaneous sports equipment hanging from the walls.

  Beth wiped her mouth with a napkin and tossed it into the empty bowl from the Caesar salad she’d ordered. “Do you think we’ll have any luck from the list?” she asked.

  “Thirty or so places to call. Better than nothing. We’ll see how it shakes out.” I took a sip from my soda and waved the bartender over. He walked our way.

  “Refill?” the bartender asked.

  “Nah. Let me get a beer. I saw you guys had some kind of a pilsner that you brew here. That’s fine.” I glanced at Beth. “What are you having?”

  “Um, let me get a Midori sour,” Beth said.

  The bartender nodded, filled a pint of beer, and set it before me. He headed to the other side of the bar to fix Beth her girly drink.

  I gave Beth a sideways glance. “Midori sour? I thought you asked if I wanted to go grab some dinner and have a beer?”

  “More of a figure of speech. I don’t drink beer,” she said. “And I like Midori sours.”

  “Maybe you should have just gotten a kiddie cocktail,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Kind of like a Shirley Temple.” I took a drink of my beer.

  “What’s that?”

  “A Roy Rogers but with ginger ale instead of cola.”

  Beth stared at me, confused.

  I shook my head and chuckled. Apparently, I was going to be the only one to catch my sarcasm. “Forget it.”

  My phone vibrated against my leg. I glanced at the number, which had a Florida prefix, and hit Talk.

  “Agent Rawlings,” I said.

  “It’s Joe Payton, from the tech department.”

  “Yeah, Joe. Did you guys find something?”

  “I’m looking at your van on my screen right now. Are you still here?”

  “Shit. No. We were just grabbing a bite to eat.” I figured our walk time back to the hotel, and then the drive back to the field office. “We can be back in about fifteen minutes or so. Are you sure it’s our van?”

  “If it’s a Ford Transit Connect with numbers on the back glass, I am.”

  “Okay. We’re headed back.”

  I clicked off, looked at Beth, and jammed my phone back into my pocket. “Tech has our van.”

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  We paid our tab and headed out. I dialed Couch on our rushed walk back to the hotel.

  “Couch,” he answered.

  “Tech has our van on the car-dealership video,” I said. “We’re headed back to the office.”

  “I’ll meet you there,” he said and clicked off.

  We grabbed our car from the hotel and were back at the FBI office within minutes. Beth and I made our way up to the tech center on the third floor and entered. Joe sat staring at a video monitor at one of the workstations on the right-hand side of the room. One of the other two tech guys that I’d seen earlier was working at the computer station next to him.

  Joe waved Beth and me over and pointed at the monitor in front of him. “There’s your van,” he said.

  Paused on the screen was a wheelchair-accessible Ford Transit Connect van on the street running adjacent to the car dealership’s entrance. The footage had been shot at night. One top corner of the screen said the time was 2:18 in the morning on a Wednesday. The date was a couple of months back. The darkness of the footage didn’t reveal an exact color or let us make out the exact numbers on the van’s rear driver-side glass, but they were still there.

  “Can we zoom in on those numbers on the window?” I asked.

  “It just gets pixelated when I try.” Joe nodded his head toward the other man working at the computer beside him. “Mark here is running it through a few programs to try to clean it up.”

  “This should only take a little bit,” Mark said.

  “A plate number is probably out of the question?” Beth asked.

  “Yeah. Here. I’ll run it from the time he comes until the time he leaves,” Joe said. He clicked a few buttons on his keyboard and let the footage play, starting twenty minutes prior. Joe leaned back in his chair and ran his hand over his bald head.

  We watched the video of the van pulling up, parking, and shutting off its headlights. The driver never exited the vehicle, and we couldn’t get a look at him inside through the van’s tinted windows. A taxicab pulled into view and entered the dealership parking lot.

&nbs
p; “While I was waiting for you guys to get here, I ran the other camera angles. Glen Scobee is in the cab. He leaves the taxi, walks around the building for his car, and you’ll see him driving past on the video in just a minute or so here,” Joe said.

  Beth and I watched the screen as the taxi that Scobee had arrived in pulled from the lot. A minute or so passed without any other cars in view, and then the screen seemed to illuminate from a pair of headlights off frame. We watched as a car passed the parked van.

  “Scobee?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Joe said. “Our guy doesn’t follow him, though. He waits for another few minutes and drives off. It’s too long of a time gap. Scobee would be a mile away or more.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  The van remained where it had parked and left roughly five minutes later, as Joe stated.

  “What do you think?” Beth asked.

  “Making sure his Tuesday nights are the same every week. I’m betting that he didn’t follow him because he knew where he was going already. From the looks of things, he also knew when he’d get back to the dealership.”

  “I’m done with this over here. The image should be coming up now,” Mark said. He rolled his chair a bit away from his workstation so we could gather around and look. The image came up on the screen. While still not crystal clear, the digits were recognizable on the glass—eight numbers total, separated in a group of two, then three, then three more numbers. I saw a word or a group of words below the numbers that was two small to make out.

  Beth rattled off the numbers. “Some kind of business registration numbers?” she asked. “Not enough numbers for a phone number and no dashes between the number groups.”

  I stared at the numbers, focusing on the way they were arranged. I could see what looked like the faint outline of something else at the front of the numbers and again at the end. I pulled my head back a little from the screen and squinted a bit.

  “No. It’s a phone number with the three for the Miami area code and another number at the tail missing. Hyphens are probably just missing as well or were just never there.” I looked at Joe. “Let’s find out who owns these ten possible phone numbers. We’ll cross-reference their names with vehicles.”