Ruckman Road: An Alex Penfield Novel

by Robert W. Stephens

  “Can I get you anything to drink?” she asked.

  “Do you have Negra Modelo?” Torres asked, remembering Penfield’s preferred brand of beer.

  “We do. Be right back.”

  The waitress turned and walked toward the bar.

  “I was terrified you were going to offer me a Bud the other night,” Torres said.

  “What’s wrong with an old-fashioned American beer?” Penfield asked.

  “You realize Budweiser was sold to some Belgian company, right?”

  “It’s still American in my book.”

  “You’re like one of those guys who will only buy an American car, not realizing it’s built in Mexico or Canada.”

  “Stop destroying my sense of patriotism,” Penfield said.

  Torres smiled as the waitress returned with the two beers and two chilled glasses.

  “I don’t need the glass,” Torres told her.

  “Would you like a glass?” the waitress asked Penfield.

  “No, thanks,” he said.

  The waitress walked back to the bar and placed the two empty glasses on the counter. She returned to their table.

  “Can I get you anything to eat?”

  “I’d like to get an order of the fried pickles for the table. You want anything, Pen?” Torres asked.

  “Not just yet. The pickles are great,” Penfield said.

  “Would you like me to leave a menu?”

  “Sure,” Torres said.

  The waitress took Penfield’s menu but left Torres’. She turned and walked toward the register to input the order. Both Penfield and Torres took long pulls from their beers.

  “How are you feeling today? Better?” Torres asked.

  “Yeah, much better than yesterday. No problems,” Penfield said.

  Torres took another pull from her beer, while Penfield looked at the various decorations hung on the walls and ceiling. Torres put her beer on the table. She twisted the cold bottle in her hands.

  “When are we going to have the conversation?” Torres asked.

  Penfield turned to her.

  “What conversation?”

  “About how I got you shot,” Torres said.

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Come on, Pen. Dominic Stewart was in the room I searched.”

  “Yeah, and you searched the room. You checked under the bed. You checked the closet. That hiding place is not something anyone would notice on first inspection,” Penfield said.

  He thought about mentioning the sight of the smothered baby in the crib. It was enough to shake the strongest cop. He didn’t know if Torres realized the child was dead when she first entered the room. She probably didn’t, but she’d later told him about it in the hospital. She was horrified, as he expected her to be. She eventually admitted that she’d been having nightmares about the baby. In her dreams, she’d enter the nursery and try to wake him. He wouldn’t move, though. Then she’d turn and watch Dominic Stewart crawl out of the hiding place in the closet. She’d have a gun in her hand, but she’d been unable to draw hers because she cradled the baby in her arms. He’d pull the trigger over and over.

  The truth was they were both suffering badly from the incident, and neither of them was willing to admit as much to the other. Penfield didn’t know if that was out of some strange sense of not wanting to burden the other. Maybe it was out of a fear of showing weakness and not wanting to let their partner down.

  “You jumped in front of me because I was too slow. That bullet was meant for me. He aimed at me,” Torres said.

  “He wanted to kill us both. It didn’t matter who he aimed at first.”

  “It does matter,” Torres said.

  “The way I see it, you saved me just as much as I saved you,” Penfield said.

  “How’s that?”

  “If you hadn’t kept your head right, you wouldn’t have been able to fire back. I’ve seen other cops in similar situations. They freeze. They either get themselves or their partners killed. Usually both. You didn’t do that. You put three rounds in that son of a bitch. Don’t forget that,” Penfield said.

  “So you’re telling me there wasn’t one time in that hospital room when you didn’t blame me?”

  “Do you want me to blame you? I’m telling you there wasn’t once when I got angry with you. I’m still not upset. Shit happens. It’s part of the job. You know that,” Penfield said.

  Torres finished her beer and looked away.

  “I don’t think you’re being straight with me,” she said.

  “Well, I am. There’s no issue between us, other than you ragging me about being slow when I climb the stairs.”

  Torres turned back to him and smiled.

  “You are slow on stairs. You move like a goddamned old man.”

  “You wait until you hit forty. You’ll move slowly too.”

  “Forty’s not that old,” Torres said.

  “Tell that to my back and knees,” Penfield said.

  “So we’re good?” Torres asked.

  “We’re good, and don’t bring this up again. It’s not an issue. It never was,” Penfield said.

  They had a couple more beers and ate their food. Penfield could tell a weight had been lifted from his partner. Torres was almost always in a good mood. He chided himself for not recognizing what had been going on with her. He’d placed so much thought on his own medical condition. He’d asked her a few times during her hospital visits how she was doing, but in hindsight, he’d been too quick to accept her answers. She’d been suffering as much as he had even if she hadn’t been physically hurt like him.

  Once Penfield got home, he walked into his bedroom and stripped off his clothes. He climbed into the shower and drenched his body with hot water. He looked at the pink scar on his side. It didn’t look any different than it had that morning. He wasn’t really sure why he was expecting it to, but it had begun to hurt again while he was at the restaurant with Torres.

  Penfield walked over to his dresser and pulled out a t-shirt and sweatpants. He slipped them both on and tossed the wet towel in the washing machine on his way back to the kitchen. He’d only eaten a few of the fried pickles and now realized he was starving. Penfield wasn’t a good cook by any means. He practically lived off of canned foods. He opened the pantry and removed a can of tomato soup. He dumped it into a bowl and placed it in the microwave. He then made himself a peanut butter sandwich while the soup heated. It certainly wasn’t a classic pairing, but it would fill him up. The microwave beeped, and Penfield carried the hot bowl and a glass of iced tea into the living room. He sat on the sofa and turned on the television with the remote. He flipped the channel over a dozen times while he ate the soup. He never once settled on anything to watch. He muted the television and walked to the front door. Penfield reached into his jacket pocket, which was hanging from the wooden peg on the wall. He found the thumb drive Torres had given him. Penfield had left his laptop on the kitchen table, so he retrieved it before going back into the living room and sitting back down.

  Penfield plugged the drive into the computer and pulled up the “House Videos” folder Torres had copied. There were dozens of file, as she had said. He had no idea what he was expecting to find, but these files had to be checked. They really had nothing else to go on unless someone, somewhere, decided to come forward with the truth or at least a piece of the truth to what caused Joseph Talbot to fall or be pushed into the Chesapeake Bay.

  There had to be a decent reason Talbot would have installed the cameras to begin with. The only thing Penfield could think of was a break-in.

  Penfield assumed a potential intruder would naturally come in through a window. The basement had windows that were large enough for a man to enter. However, the door from the first floor to the basement had been locked when they toured the house. The front, side, and back doors all had glass panes on the upper half, but the glass was intact, and nothing looked like it had recently been repaired. That meant an intruder would probably enter t
he house through one of the windows on the first floor. There were only three rooms on that floor: the living room, the kitchen, and the den in the back of the house. The kitchen window was small. Plus, there was a large drop-off from the kitchen window to the ground. It would have required a ladder to reach the window. There were far easier windows to access. That left the living room and the den. The living room faced the street, which probably was patrolled once an hour by the security guard. That still gave a thief plenty of time to get inside. Nevertheless, the obvious choice was one of the windows in the den. It faced the back of the house and was easily obscured by the large oak trees that sat between the house and the playground. Furthermore, the long row of garage units would block someone’s view of the back of the house if they drove down that narrow road that led to the resident parking spaces.

  Penfield opened the folder marked “Den.” He saw again that the files were named after the date they were recorded, so he clicked on the oldest video file and watched the image of the den. As before, the light in the room changed as the sun made its way across the sky. Penfield sped up the image as best as he could. It was mind-numbing work to say the least. The images rarely changed. Talbot would appear sometime in the morning. He would sometimes watch television while he ate his breakfast. He would check something on his computer, maybe the news or email, or maybe he’d quickly gone through some of the security footage from the day before. The camera’s angle was too high for Penfield to ever get a good look at the computer screen. Talbot would eventually leave the room, and then it would be empty for several hours while he was at work. He’d return in the evening. He’d lay on the sofa and watch television on some evenings. On others, he wouldn’t be in the room at all. Occasionally, he would fall asleep on the sofa and eventually drag himself out of the room, presumably to head upstairs to his bedroom.

  Penfield made it through almost two weeks of footage for that particular room before he noticed something interesting. Talbot was on the sofa watching television. He suddenly moved from the sofa to the middle of the room. The sudden movement made sense since the camera didn’t record every second of each minute. His position change in the room wasn’t what Penfield found interesting, though. Talbot was staring at the ceiling as if he had heard something above him.

  He was gone from the room in the next frame. Penfield pulled up the kitchen video file from the same date as the den video. He found the matching time on the file and watched as Talbot walked through the room. Penfield repeated the process with the living room file and saw Talbot walk through that room as well and make his way toward the staircase.

  Penfield remembered the layout of the house. The master bedroom was directly above the den. Penfield pulled up that file and saw Talbot enter the room. His position jumped around the room as the video advanced. He then looked at the ceiling in the bedroom. His positioned remained that way for a minute or two, and then he left the room. Penfield found the file of the third floor landing. He watched as Talbot opened the door to the third floor and walk directly toward the camera. The camera was placed directly between the two third-floor bedrooms, so Penfield had to guess which room Talbot entered. Penfield checked the file for the bedroom to the right of the camera, but Talbot didn’t appear in the video. He found Talbot when he pulled up the file for the left side bedroom.

  Talbot stood in the room for a few minutes. Penfield did a quick calculation. He factored in the rate of recording and concluded that Talbot had stayed in that bedroom for close to an hour. He saw Talbot walk around the room as well as check the closet multiple times. It was difficult to see inside the closet since Talbot’s body position blocked the view of the camera, but Penfield seemed to remember seeing that the closet was empty in that bedroom. At the very least, he could see from the video that the room was empty. Why would Talbot stay in an empty room for an hour, and what drew him there in the first place?

  Penfield looked at the time on his cable TV box’s front display. It was after midnight. He couldn’t believe he had spent so much time on this. He closed his laptop and dragged himself into the bedroom. He fell into bed, which only served to make the pain in his side flare up again. He closed his eyes and hoped Patricia Porter wouldn’t visit him in his sleep again.

  Chapter 9

  The Windows

  Hannah Talbot slid the key card in her hotel room door and pushed the heavy door open. The room was in complete darkness. The shades were pulled shut, which didn’t make much difference considering the sun had set a few hours ago, but it blocked what little light the street lamps outside provided.

  She fumbled for the light switch as she pushed her suitcase past the door, which seemed determined to shut on her. She found the switch, but all it did was light the short entranceway into the room. She entered and found a second switch farther inside the room, which lit up the two lamps on the sides of the beds.

  It was a typical hotel room. The walls were painted yellow and featured paintings that depicted naval ships sailing on what she assumed was supposed to be the Chesapeake Bay or Atlantic Ocean. She’d hoped to get a king-sized bed but was instead stuck with two double beds. The room had a small refrigerator. She opened its black door and saw there was barely enough room to store her to-go box which contained most of the salad she didn’t eat at the restaurant across the street. By all practical purposes, she should have been starving, but she found she could barely get anything down, even the glass of water. Her stomach was turning, and she thought she might vomit at any moment. She knew it wasn’t any kind of illness. It was undoubtedly the stress and anxiety of her brother disappearing.

  It wasn’t hard to tell what the two detectives thought. She knew they both assumed Joe was the body in the water the jogger had spotted. Yes, it could have been him, but there was also a good chance it wasn’t. The detective told her the woman had only seen the face of the man for a couple of seconds. She also said his hair had been partially covering his face. It had to have been a tremendous shock to see a body down there. There was simply no way she could know who it was for sure, especially since she admitted she didn’t know Joe very well at all.

  Hannah emptied her clothes into the dresser and placed her toiletries on the sink outside the bathroom. She brushed her teeth and finished what was left of the small bottle of mouthwash. The hotel didn’t supply much, just a small bar of soap and even smaller bottles of shampoo and conditioner. She washed her face with the thin washcloth and then dried it off with the hand towel.

  She walked back into the main part of the room and grabbed the remote control that was placed in front of the flat screen television. She collapsed on the bed, still fully clothed, and stared at the ceiling. She couldn’t understand how this had happened. Considering the time zone difference, she had still been at work this time yesterday. She remembered going into the staff meeting with her boss. The woman hated being interrupted by cell phone calls and had a strict policy about not bringing them into the meeting. It wasn’t good enough to silence it or even turn it off completely. You had to leave it at your desk. The meeting had gone long, which was usually the case, and Hannah had found herself rushing to make the next one. By the time that meeting was done, rush hour had been in full swing. She’d made the decision to work late. The report her boss wanted wasn’t going to write itself, and she may as well write it then and there instead of sitting in heavy traffic and writing the report once she finally got home. It wasn’t an easy assignment and required Hannah to pour through several quarterly reports. She had been so stressed that she’d never once thought to check her cell phone, which she’d shoved into her purse just before she’d dashed off to the staff meeting.

  She’d eventually finished the report and had reluctantly decided to stop at the gym to avoid the traffic that hadn’t lightened even after she worked late. The radio had said there was a back-up on the 405 due to an earlier car accident. Hannah had felt like she’d gained a few pounds. She rarely weighed herself, but she could tell by the way her clothes fit. She�
��d spent an hour on the treadmill. She hated the ridiculous emphasis L.A. put on people’s appearances, but she had to admit that it forced her to go to the gym way more often than she would have otherwise.

  Hannah had finally gotten home late at night and had spent the next two hours eating dinner and turning her brain off by watching some silly reality TV show. She’d taken a shower, laid out her clothes for the next day, and had then looked for her phone to turn her alarm on. That’s when she’d realized she hadn’t looked at her phone for hours. She’d tried to remember where she’d last seen it. It had taken her a few minutes to remember it was still in her purse. She had turned the phone on and then tossed it onto her bed while it powered up. She’d gone into the bathroom to brush her teeth when she’d heard the phone ping. She’d gone back into her room and saw the word “Voicemail” on the phone’s display. She hadn’t recognize the number and almost had put off listening to the message until the following morning. It was Detective Penfield’s message about Joe, and everything had changed in those few seconds.

  Hannah didn’t know how long she’d stared at the hotel room’s ceiling before drifting off to sleep fully dressed. She did know it was after two o’clock in the morning when she woke with a start. She didn’t remember dreaming something disturbing. She also couldn’t recall any noise in the hotel like a door slamming that might have been the reason for her waking so abruptly. She watched the television on a low volume for a few minutes. Then she scanned a few news sites with her cell phone, but nothing could take her mind off of Joe. She looked at the time on her cell phone. It was now pushing three o’clock, and she was fully awake. She thought she might go crazy if she had to lay in this bed for four or five more hours.

  Hannah climbed out of bed, put her jacket on, and left the hotel room. It didn’t take long to drive back to the fort. There was no traffic that time of night, and Penfield had been right when he said the hotel was just a few miles away.

  Hannah parked in the same spot she had parked in before and got out of the car and walked back to the house. The fort was quiet, as she expected it to be. The only thing she could hear was the wind through the trees. Joe had told her the fort was the windiest place he’d ever been. Most of the houses around Joe’s were empty, so there were no lights on inside, which was to be expected for this time of night. Even the porch lights were off.