by Mitch Goth
"Coffee?" Kellen mumbled as she sat down across from Ezra. Between them was a table cluttered with files, photos, pens, and notepads. They'd been working for hours on trying to find a viable lead or connection through the paperwork. But now, even as the clock was inching by midnight, nothing new or worthwhile had come up.
"What?" Ezra looked up, confused. It was the first word she'd spoken to him in over an hour. Besides, the work was more interesting than anything else around him. The police-appointed safe house was a tiny apartment, hidden beside a small grocery store. The walls were bare, the paint was bland, there was hardly any furniture anywhere other than the bedrooms and bathroom, save for the table and a couch. It made a doctor's office look like a luxurious resort on the sandy beaches of heaven itself. Or, Ezra thought so anyway, he wasn't sure how Kellen took their surroundings. For all he knew, it was home to her.
"Coffee?" she repeated, setting the pot on the corner of the table and placing down two mugs. "I hope you don't like it with any shit added in because we don't have any."
"Black is fine, my preferred kind anyway." He nodded, taking a cup. It was the first sip of it they had all night, and the first he'd gotten since being put away. As big of a moment as it should have been for him, it was non-monumental. Perhaps it was due to his busy mind, or that it was far from the best coffee in the world. Either way, his focus should have been elsewhere anyway.
As he scanned through documents and sipped at his coffee, Ezra also kept his eyes on Kellen as she worked. All he did with two hands, she managed to do with one. Ever since they'd come into the confines of the safe house, she'd kept her gun around her waist and her hand around her gun. He wasn't sure what she was expecting him to do, but it certainly kept him completely aware of everything the entire time. Just another thing that his life depended on.
"What kind of RV is in the videos?" Ezra squinted at grainy stills taken from various video sources of the mobile home.
Kellen shrugged, sipping at her coffee. "It looks eighties to me, and obviously it's sand colored, as you've said. But there's way too many people in this state with old, sand colored RV's. Not only that, but who's to say it even comes from Texas? The damn thing could be from Oklahoma or even Mexico. There's just not enough known about the RV to really do or say anything."
"I suppose not." Ezra pulled out another large piece of paper from the pile. "But what about this?" he looked over the sheet. It was a map of Texas, a rather detailed one at that, marking each dump site with a red dot, while every location of disappearance was marked with blue.
"What are you hoping to find from that?" Kellen inquired. "If your plan is to wait for the next dump site, you'll be looking a bit too far into the future to save yourself."
"Attempting humor, I see," he said
"Trying not to laugh, I see," she mimicked.
"I said 'attempting', not succeeding. But no matter, finding the next site is not my goal. My goal here is connection."
"Connection? Connection to what? We've had people stare at it for hours on end, experts, and they don't have anything to go on."
"That's because experts think like experts, in their little boxes of expertise, when there's a whole world of possibilities they're not factoring in or trying to piece together because it doesn't seem probable to them."
"You're insane if you think you'll find anything. If the guy is careful enough to not let cameras catch the license plate of his RV, what makes you think he'll leave us a pattern to go on now? Is he that dumb? I don't think so."
"He doesn't have to be dumb to have an oversight," Ezra corrected, studying the map with almost all of his mind. "He only needs to be a human being. His misstep is here, on this paper, I just need to find out what it is. He spends so much time on the pick ups, on the dump sites, on making sure he leaves no evidence on the bodies, and making sure he's not seen during his time out or the time spent with his victims. I promise you, the secret misstep is here."
"Any guesses?" Kellen raised a brow at him. With a quick glance in her direction he saw her thoughts. She was skeptical yet still intrigued.
"Travel. To do this, he needs to drive for hours and anyone who drives at least a few miles a day, begins to-"
"Do it without thinking," Kellen completed his thought. "You think that he left us a clue in how he travels? How?"
"No idea. But it's here, I just have to find it. I need to find it. Once I find it it'll lead to at least a general area of where he goes when he's not kidnapping or dumping. Because for two weeks at a time, this guy is somewhere with a human being who wants nothing more than to escape. He's gonna be hidden, and hidden well, but this will be the portion of himself left out in the open, his inadvertent bread crumbs."
Kellen paused for a moment. "That's actually a good idea."
"Thank you," he said. After a moment, he handed the map off to her. She looked down at it, then back at him in confusion as he got up from his seat.
"What are you doing?"
"Leaving this to you," he said through a yawn, wandering towards a bedroom. "I've gotten rather exhausted from all of this, and coffee isn't the best upper right now. Besides, I'm a man who needs a fair share of beauty sleep. We'll pick this up in the morning."
"No!" Kellen objected. "There's a girl out there, scared, in pain, and alone. We need to find her. I'm sick of you wasting time."
Ezra sighed. "Everybody found was hours fresh. We've got eight days left before her body turns up, so I'm not worried." He went back to inching his way towards the bedroom.
"You can't just leave me out here. With a new lead, I can't sleep."
"Good, I didn't expect you to." He gave her a tired wink before disappearing into his room.
16
