Special Forces: Operation Alpha: Redemption for Avery (Kindle Worlds Novella) (Ryker Townsend FBI Profiler Book 2)

by Jordan Dane

  “He’s not eating until I say he does. Where’s observation? Crowley and I want to watch him before I go in.”

  “Follow me.”

  As we took the stairs to the second floor, Deputy Lovell told us they had arrested Dennis Whitehall, aka Wade Thomas Altamonte, before he left his home for an evening tutoring session with a local teenage girl, Alexis King. A deputy had been dispatched to find the girl.

  “We read him his rights. With him not registering as a sex offender under his real name, we got him on enough violations to hold him. It could give us time to build a case against him for murder,” Lovell said, pointing his spent toothpick at me. “With this guy’s record and the fact that he lied about his name, he’s looking pretty good for Lily Rae’s killing. Don’t you think? Give us time and we could tie him to the others.”

  I didn’t answer him. I had a question of my own.

  “How long has he lived in Big Bear?”

  “He moved here from Arkansas after they hired him. That’s been four years.”

  The disappointment on my face must’ve shown. The deputy grinned.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked.

  “I know what you’re thinking. You think four years isn’t long enough for him to be linked to the older murders, the bodies they’re digging up.”

  “You’re a mind reader.”

  “What you don’t know is…I heard he was related to old lady Sanderson. Betty was some kind of aunt.”

  “Was?”

  “Yeah, she died about ten years ago.”

  “How does that factoid help us today? Enlighten me,” I said.

  “I heard he visited Big Bear, plenty. Summers mostly. Old lady Sanderson would be anyone’s favorite aunt, living in a resort town, right?”

  “Thanks, deputy. You’ve been a big help.”

  When I pulled Crowley aside, I kept my voice low.

  “Have Sinead look into this Betty Sanderson. See if she can find any relationship to Altamonte and have her correlate the dates of the missing girls to see if they were taken in the summer months.”

  “You got it.”

  The autopsy on Lily Rae Hubbard was still pending a final result. It would take time for lab work and to finish processing the body for trace evidence. From seeing his arrest record, I knew Altamonte’s DNA would be on file with the FBI in CODIS, the Combined DNA Index System. If we were lucky enough to find DNA from the convicted sex offender on Lily’s body, we could link her murder to him, which would be a start.

  If Sinead could confirm Altamonte’s tie to the aunt and his summer visits to Big Bear Lake, that might explain some of the abductions, but we still had our work cut out for us.

  Crowley and I were the only ones who knew that I’d already come face to face with many of the missing. They would be identified in the thirty-four bodies recovered. Altamonte might not be responsible for all the deaths. With the missing person reports spanning decades, he would’ve had to be abducting and killing girls from a young age. We would need evidence to implicate anyone else.

  “Let’s do this,” I muttered to Crowley.

  We entered the darkened observation room next door and watched Wade Thomas Altamonte through a two-way mirror. The man sat at a table with his eyes darting around the room. Anytime a noise came from outside the locked door, he would fidget. With faded jeans and a black Nirvana T-shirt and hiking boots, he wore his dark hair long and had scruff on his chin, no doubt trying to appear edgy to the girls he taught.

  “Can you believe it? He teaches biological science, specializing in anatomy and physiology. A pedophile’s wet dream job,” Crowley said.

  I let Altamonte sweat for another hour before I’d seen enough.

  “I’m going in.”

  With Crowley in observation, I headed for the interrogation room. The man sat bolt upright in his chair with his first question on his lips.

  “Am I under arrest?”

  I tossed a file onto the table and sat across from him.

  “Mr. Whitehall, I have no reason to arrest you. You’re a model citizen and a school teacher.”

  The man’s shoulders slumped in relief and his lips twitched into a subtle smile.

  “But Dennis Whitehall isn’t your real name, is it Wade?”

  The man’s body stiffened and his smug expression vanished.

  “What do you know about the disappearance and murder of one of your students, Lily Rae Hubbard?”

  Altamonte clenched his jaw and wouldn’t look me in the eye.

  ***

  Thirty minutes later

  Ryker had Altamonte talking. The man hadn’t asked for a lawyer, but with the sweat glistening on his forehead and down his neck, Lucinda suspected he had something to hide.

  When the door to the darkened observation room opened, someone handed Deputy Lovell a message.

  “Well, this could be something,” he muttered, spitting his chewed toothpick to the floor.

  “What is it?” Lucinda asked.

  “The canvass in the Hubbard neighborhood paid off. It seems Bob Sanford had been away for the weekend, but when he packed his car on Friday night, he saw Lily. It took him until now to say something, because he just got back.”

  “What did the neighbor see?”

  “He saw Lily get into a car outside her house. Someone picked her up.” Lovell grinned. “Now that’s good police work.”

  “Did he get a license plate?”

  “Uh, no. Not exactly.” The deputy shrugged. “But he said he noticed the car, because he had one as a kid. A vintage Mustang.”

  Lucinda smiled and crossed her arms.

  “I bet it’s red.”

  “Yeah, how did you know?”

  Lucinda stared into the interrogation room where Ryker still had Altamonte sweating buckets. Grayson Barbour had lied when he claimed not to have heard from Lily after she’d been kicked out. His words replayed in her head.

  ‘Her dad kicked her out, the tight-assed bastard, but she never came to me. She wouldn’t even return my phone calls.’

  Grayson lied for a reason and Lucinda would find out why.

  “You’re with me, deputy. I know who owns that Mustang and we’re bringing him in for questioning.”

  ***

  Barbour residence

  Lucinda saw Deputy Lovell’s cruiser parked outside the Barbour residence. Driving on his own, the deputy had beaten her to the address. Before she rang the front doorbell, Lovell opened the door and let her in. With watery eyes, Grayson’s mother sat on the living room sofa clutching a tissue.

  “Where’s Grayson?” the woman pleaded. “Where’s my boy?”

  Lovell stepped in front of Lucinda and lowered his voice.

  “Grayson’s in the wind. His mother said he never showed at his part-time job at El Pollo Loco. She’s been trying to reach him on his cell since noon, but he’s not answering. She even tried his friends, but no one has seen him. She was about to call 911 until we showed up.”

  “What about his Mustang?”

  “Gone. Mom says some of his clothes are missing, too. Do you think he’s on the run?” The deputy hoisted his duty belt with both hands. “He’s the last one to see Lily alive. You think he’s the one we’re looking for?”

  “Mrs. Barbour. We’ll need your son’s cell phone number.” While the woman reached for a pen and paper, Lucinda said to Lovell, “Issue a BOLO on Grayson and his vehicle. He could be out of the state by now.”

  Lucinda took a deep breath and shook her head. The BOLO, be on lookout order, might not cover enough ground. Once she had Grayson’s cell, Lucinda would get it to Sinead. If it were activated, his phone could be tracked with GPS. The kid could have good reason to run, but had he been capable of brutally killing his girlfriend, the way Lily had died?

  Truthfully, she had no idea.

  “Can I see Grayson’s room, Mrs. Barbour?”

  Chapter 11

  Off North Shore Drive

  Big Bear Lake

  Evening<
br />
  Lucinda expected Mrs. Barbour to lead her to an upstairs bedroom, but when she departed through French doors onto the patio, Crowley had a good idea where the woman would take her. Grayson lived in the pool house in back. He had a separate entrance through a gate. If the kid brought Lily to his place, it would’ve been entirely possible that no one had seen her.

  She had a bad feeling, especially after she entered the premises.

  “What’s that smell?” she asked Grayson’s mother.

  “It’s the fresh paint. He never wanted me in here, but he finally agreed to a paint touch up. They finished today.”

  “I smell bleach.”

  The woman scrunched her nose and shook her head.

  “Maybe he cleaned off paint. I don’t know.”

  People who tried getting away with murder used bleach to destroy evidence, but the cleaning solvent never got rid of everything.

  “I’ll come find you when I’m done, Mrs. Barbour.” She smiled, to make her polite way of saying she wanted privacy to appear harmless.

  “Yes, of course.”

  After the woman left, Lucinda pulled on latex gloves that she carried in her pocket. From the disheveled condition of the room, she found it hard to determine what mess could be attributable to the work crew or the normal behavior of a teenage boy. She wandered around the quarters, searching through a computer desk before she hit his bathroom. When she opened his medicine cabinet, her eyes grew wide.

  The kid had bottles of prescription meds. With gloved hands, she pulled each container off the shelves and read labels for antidepressants, antipsychotics, and mood stabilizers. Lucinda knew doctors treating certain personality disorders would often prescribe meds to control the associated symptoms—irritability, aggression, and impulse control.

  But this combination of meds could also be used to treat the symptoms of another condition.

  “Are you a psychopath, Grayson?”

  Something disturbed her more. The kid had packed to leave home, but it didn’t look as if he’d taken his meds with him.

  “Not good, kid.”

  Lucinda pulled all the meds from the cabinet and set them on the counter. She’d want a doctor’s opinion of Grayson’s scrip cocktail and what authorities could expect if they encountered him off his meds.

  When she came out of the bathroom, she spied something colorful under his unmade bed. With gloved hands, she dropped to her knees and pulled out a pair of red twill vans—Lily’s shoes. Dark smudges and specks were across the toes. Blood.

  “Oh, Lily. What happened to you here?”

  Lucinda retrieved her cell and called Hutch. She had enough probable cause to support a warrant to search the Barbour home, but Grayson’s mother had given her consent in front of a witness, the deputy. When her ERT answered, she explained what she’d found and gave Hutch the address.

  “Bring your kit. We’ll need luminol and I’ll want to seize his computer.”

  The smell of bleach had triggered a warning in her mind, but after finding Lily’s shoes—the ones her mother had described her wearing on the night she went missing—Lucinda had probable cause to suspect Grayson had lied about everything. Hutch would soon spray luminol over Grayson’s room. Any blood evidence would fluoresce under a black light. If Lily died in his room and he tried to bleach out stains and paint over spatter, Lucinda would know.

  She’d have enough proof to issue an arrest warrant for Grayson Barbour.

  ***

  Big Bear Sheriff’s Station

  8:30 p.m.

  Ryker Townsend

  Perhaps Crowley had influenced me more than I cared to admit, but after leaving the interrogation room of Wade Thomas Altamonte, I almost broke down and called him ‘despicable.’ The man had admitted to multiple counts of sex with minors. He claimed they were all consensual, but he vehemently denied knowing anything about Lily Rae Hubbard.

  While I’d been interrogating our suspect, Sinead had left a voice mail message. She hadn’t found a direct tie to Altamonte and Betty Sanderson, but she still had places to search. She also didn’t find a pattern for the missing person reports linked only to summer months. Our circumstantial evidence had gaping holes we would need to shore up.

  But it wouldn’t matter if Altamonte confirmed or denied. If his DNA could be found on Lily’s body, I wouldn’t need a confession. Science would put him at the scene beyond a reasonable doubt with direct evidence.

  I kept him talking by listening and letting him do all the work. Whenever he slowed down, I would entice him with imagery in the guise of a question, designed to get his blood churning over the notion of young girls.

  “It couldn’t have been easy to register as an offender and get a good paying job. How did you cope with that?” I had asked him.

  His answer repulsed me, but my face remained stoic.

  “Many of these girls in Big Bear, they come from wealthy families. They dress nice. Smell good. Did that make it harder? Any man would be tempted, right?”

  I had to admit there were days I preferred the company of the dead. Today, with Altamonte, I had hit my limit of tolerance. After I left the interrogation room, I grabbed a bottle of water from a small refrigerator in the break room and went searching for Crowley, but the observation room had been empty. I wanted her impressions of Altamonte and to pose a question to her.

  Could Grayson Barbour have been wrong about Lily’s affair with her teacher?

  ***

  Off North Shore Drive

  Big Bear Lake

  8:45 p.m.

  Lucinda blinked her headlights at Hutch as he pulled away from the Barbour residence in the sheriff’s patrol car he’d borrowed to meet her. She couldn’t stop thinking of Lily.

  They had found enough blood evidence to confirm a physical altercation occurred at Grayson’s pool house. In one area of the furniture that Grayson had cleaned with bleach, luminol revealed a spatter of droplets consistent with a severe beating, a different type of pattern than from a high velocity mist if a gun had been used.

  For the blood that the painters had covered over, forensics methods could still determine evidence underneath the paint. With the pool of blood absorbed into the carpet, Hutch had cut away a sample of fibers and padding to show the stain under the floor covering. But since Lily had been butchered by the UNSUB with her internal organs removed and her chest cavity splayed open—that kind of blood loss didn’t match what had been found in the pool house.

  It would take time for Hutch to confirm the blood came from Lily, but he promised to put a rush on it. Lucinda had a suspicion Lily had called Grayson and accepted his hospitality for the night, but something happened. She started the engine to the Chevy Tahoe and pulled from the driveway before a question nudged her brain.

  Lily had left her shoes behind. If she ran from Grayson, barefoot, where would she go?

  Lucinda desperately wanted to sweat the Barbour kid, to get him to tell them what happened to his girlfriend. They couldn’t trace where Lily had gone, unless he told the truth.

  She drove through the quiet, residential neighborhood and stopped at the first few neighbors closest to the Barbour house. If Lily were hurt, she might’ve run to the nearest home, but after hitting three to four houses, Lucinda ruled that option out and jumped back into her SUV.

  With her hands tight on the steering wheel, she peered into the darkness and pictured where a scared young girl might go if she were hurt and barefoot. At this time of night, everything would have been nearly pitch-black. The meager use of streetlights outside the brick wall of the secluded residential neighborhood didn’t help much.

  Down the frontage road, a bright light caught her attention and she headed for it. It might’ve been a beacon to Lily.

  The light she had seen reflected off a large cross, a monument on the front lawn of True Light Ministry, Elias Fenton’s church. She pulled the Chevy Tahoe onto the property, hearing the gravel ping onto the undercarriage of the SUV as she navigated through the shado
ws.

  “The Lord works in mysterious ways,” she muttered under her breath.

  The pristine white church had an impressive bell tower and stained glass windows, and looked large enough to accommodate a good crowd, but after she drove around back, she noticed the rest of the property needed work. A dilapidated shack appeared to be an old wooden garage with overhead doors

  When she heard a dog bark from behind the outbuilding, she pulled her weapon and chambered a round. She took aim with her Glock in a two-handed grip and crept toward the neglected garage. Shadows and the movement of tree branches in the wind played tricks on her mind. Adrenaline ramped up the beat of her heart until she heard the hammering in her ears.

  As she inched closer to the dirty windows, she used her sleeve to wipe off dust and cobwebs. She reached for the Kel-Lite on her duty belt and flicked on the light. The beam cast a pale glow inside the run-down garage.

  The color red jolted her. She grabbed her cell phone and hit Ryker’s speed dial as the vicious dog barked louder.

  She’d found Grayson Barbour’s Mustang.

  “Come on, Ryker. Answer your phone.”

  The dog launched into a frenzy. The noise rattled her.

  But before she heard the next ring, someone struck Lucinda hard. Blinded by an intense pain, she doubled over and saw stars until she fell to the ground and the darkness swallowed her.

  Chapter 12

  Big Bear Sheriff’s Station

  9:15 p.m.

  Ryker Townsend

  When I couldn’t reach Crowley, I called Sinead to have Lucinda’s phone pinged, but her cell had been turned off. Very odd. I glanced through my missed calls and saw her number. She’d tried to reach me, but after only two seconds, the call ended and she hadn’t left a message. Stranger, still. Against my better judgment, I went looking for Deputy Lovell and found him eating cold pizza in the break room. I almost didn’t recognize him without his toothpick.

  “I can’t reach Agent Crowley. Do you know where she is?”

  “Yeah, maybe. While you were in with Altamonte, I got an important message.” Deputy Lovell told me about a neighbor seeing Lily leave Friday night in a red Mustang. “Your lady agent followed me out to Grayson Barbour’s house, but the kid was gone. He could’ve left the state. I put a BOLO out on his vehicle. My idea.”