The Scorekeeper

by Dustin Stevens

  In order, he pulled up the other two as well, putting them all three in a row.

  Side by side, it was impossible not to see that they were identical.

  “I’ll be damned,” Grimes whispered. “Good catch.”

  “But how...?” Gilchrist whispered. Leaning forward across the desk, he looked up to Reed, confusion on his face.

  “I don’t know,” Reed replied, his focus on the screen, staring at the three matching images across it. “I’m headed there right now to find out, though.”

  Pulling his attention from the screen, Grimes said, “You’re headed over to FCC?”

  “I am,” Reed said. “Still all clear?”

  “Like I said,” the captain replied, “they’re there and waiting for you. Deputy warden is a guy named Mac Hollins.”

  “Hollins,” Reed repeated, committing the name to memory. “Thanks.”

  Shifting his attention to Greene, he asked, “Any luck on the owners from the two houses?”

  Flicking a glance to Gilchrist, Greene said, “The one I spoke to earlier, the developer, is Mark Lawson. He lives up in Dublin, was an engineer before trying his hand at this.”

  “And the owner of the place you just left is named Ray Cicotte,” Gilchrist added. “Moved to Florida last year, had the house on and off the market ever since.”

  Pausing, Reed considered the new data, adding it to the enormous tangle that he had already accumulated in just the last few hours.

  How it had been such a short period of time, he still couldn’t begin to understand.

  “Why on and off? Any connection to Lawson?”

  “We don’t know,” Greene said. “Haven’t been able to get either one on the phone, it’s going on three in the morning right now.”

  Reed knew exactly what Greene was getting at, even if he had the social grace to pull up just short of it. Calling and waking civilians in the middle of the night was not something they were particularly keen on, especially with everybody almost aching to make a public target out of law enforcement these days.

  Still, the situation they were staring at was beyond extenuating. If someone was forced to miss a few minutes rest in the name of saving someone’s life, they would just have to understand that.

  And as much as he hated dealing with the media, if Reed had to stand in front of a microphone and say as much, he would be glad to do so.

  “Keep on them,” Reed said. “And be sure to ask them if they know each other, if either of them has ever dealt with Della Snow or her mother.”

  The last part seemed to surprise all three, their faces displaying a range of reactions. Gilchrist went for full-on surprise, while the two senior men in the room seemed more contemplative.

  “Her mother?” Grimes asked.

  “That’s what I’ve been upstairs talking to the doc about,” Reed said. “Each time we get Della on the phone, she starts apologizing, telling her mama how sorry she is.”

  “Sorry about what?” Greene asked.

  Casting his attention that way, Reed gave a grim shake of the head. “We don’t know yet. Dr. Mehdi’s working on it right now, but we think whatever it was is the commonality in all this.”

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Reed was barely out through the front door of the precinct when his phone sprang to life again. Thinking it was the captain pulling him back, he came up short on the front steps, ready to go back inside if need be.

  Sliding his phone out, he looked down to see a different name staring up at him, one that he had completely forgotten about in the preceding hours.

  Feeling the all-too-familiar tinge if self-flagellation pass through him, he jumped down the last couple of steps, using his momentum to carry him to the car. Swinging open the rear door, he held the vibrating phone in his hand, allowing Billie to climb into the backseat.

  Only as he was sliding into the front seat himself did he accept the call.

  “Deke.”

  “Dude,” Deke replied. Piping in through the speaker on the side of Reed’s phone, his distinctive voice sounded a bit more distorted, the word pulled out to several syllables in length. “So damn sorry this took so long.”

  Since the last time they’d spoken, Reed had been sprinting all over town. He’d been to two more active crime scenes, had consulted with a psychiatrist, and had pulled Paul Bingham out into the middle of the night.

  All in the name of finding a young woman he still felt no closer to actually rescuing.

  Things taking longer than expected was something he was fast becoming far too accustomed to.

  Turning the ignition over, Reed again set the flashers to running, his new default for getting anywhere it seemed. Even at such an hour, he couldn’t afford the extra time of obeying posted traffic laws, especially with Della running down to what could be her last bits of oxygen.

  “You said things were interesting last time we I heard from you,” Reed said. “I take it that went deeper than you anticipated.”

  “Hell of a lot deeper,” Deke said. “Like, Alice in Wonderland deeper.”

  Not expecting the allusion, especially not from Deke, Reed felt his eyebrows rise. Operating the steering wheel with both hands, he turned hard out of the parking lot, moving toward the heart of The Bottoms.

  The route to Franklin County Corrections was one he was fairly familiar with, the facility sitting just over the Olentangy River. Visible from some of the streets he and Billie spent every night scouring, it was one of the few places he could get to without the need of the GPS.

  Rendering the device thankfully dark and silent on the dash beside him.

  “Shoot,” Reed replied.

  “You asked me to look into the call Della made to 911, right?” Deke said. “Trying to backdoor our way into a location we could trace?”

  “Right,” Reed replied. His idea had been to at least narrow it to a particular call center, cutting their geographic scope down to something reasonable.

  “Well, the part that took so damn long was there wasn’t one.”

  Without even realizing it, Reed pulled back on the gas. The car slowed beneath him, his focus shifting from driving to the information that had just been handed over.

  Swallowing twice, he felt his eyes glaze as he tried to process it, his mind fighting to keep up.

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  “There wasn’t a call to 911,” Deke repeated. “It took forever because I figured there had to be one, right? That’s how you said she got ahold of you in the first place?”

  His speed continuing to slow, Reed rolled through the small business section of The Bottoms. At such an hour, most everything was closed, their lights out for the evening. On either side, a series of mini-marts and diners drifted past, an abandoned schoolhouse and derelict gas station dotting the corners.

  Lit up by the flashing lights on the front of his car, long shadows covered everything, making it look even more ominous.

  “Yeah,” Reed said. “Jackie – our dispatcher – called and said she had one from the 911 controller, then she patched me straight through.”

  “Exactly,” Deke said, “and that was my mistake. I took it at face value, kept assuming that it must have gone that way. So I kept digging around, trying to figure out how somebody could have masked a call so that it didn’t show up at all on the logs.”

  “But it didn’t exist,” Reed muttered, his mind finally catching up, allowing him to jump forward a bit in the narrative.

  “Nope,” Deke said. “Wasn’t until I finally stepped back that I realized if I couldn’t find it, it didn’t happen.”

  Coming from most anybody else, Reed would have snorted. He would have taken the comment as what he heard kids call a humblebrag, somebody feigning modesty in the name of pointing out how great they were.

  In Deke’s case, he didn’t have to. The man was right.

  If he couldn’t find it, the call didn’t exist.

  “Son of a bitch,” Reed muttered. With it came a tiny new jolt of ho
stility, this one roiling through him, reengaging his body in the task at hand. Pressing down on the gas, he shot across the bridge into town, the myriad lights of the city dancing on the water outside his passenger window.

  “Exactly what I said,” Deke replied. “After that, it was easy. Pulled the records on your dispatch desk, and sure enough, it was right there. A direct line in at ten twenty-eight from another one of the burner phones purchased at Bingham’s Drugs.”

  Bile climbed in the back of Reed’s throat. Casting his gaze to the rearview mirror, he could see the mix of emotions he was feeling splayed across his skin, everything from the previous five hours depicted in full visual.

  None more apparent than the fact that he’d been getting played all night, and he’d walked right into it.

  “Thank you, Deke,” Reed said. “Seriously, that’s some hellacious work you’ve done tonight”

  “Naw,” Deke said, shrugging off the praise, “sorry it took so long, sorry it isn’t more helpful.”

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Deke was wrong. Reed knew it the moment the last words were out of his friend’s mouth, but he was too deep in what had just been shared to actually say as much at the time.

  A faux pas he would be sure to fix in the near future.

  The information might have taken a little longer than expected to deliver, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t useful. With just a single phone call, the man had managed to further solidify the working theory Reed had been formulating for the better part of the last hour.

  Already he was thinking the motivation behind all of this involved Della Snow’s mother, that it concerned someone thinking they had been wronged and looking to extract their own unique form of judgment for it.

  Now he also knew that it somehow involved the 8th Precinct, the dispatch desk there chosen with the specific intent of funneling the call to the on-duty detective.

  Whether that was meant to be him directly, Reed couldn’t be certain, though he was doubtful. While he had handled a bevy of high-profile cases, the perpetrators behind each of them were either dead or incarcerated.

  And he had only been with the 8th for a short period of time.

  There was the possibility that it could have something to do with a case stretching back to Reed’s time with the 19th, back when he and Riley were still together, but that seemed even more unlikely. None of the locations he’d been sent thus far seemed to pertain to anything he could remember, nor could any of the names that had come up.

  What it could all mean, Reed still didn’t quite know. He was certain that it was connected, small hints at how starting to show up, but he was still lacking that one key piece of information that he needed.

  Like the whiteboard in the conference suite on the third floor that Dr. Mehdi had been drawing on, he had all the peripheral information in place. He could even see some of the lines and arrows pointing various ways, but he needed that one central thing with the multiple circles around it to make everything clear.

  Until then, he was still left doing what he had been all night.

  Running whatever errands this guy seemed intent to keep sending him on.

  Coming down off the bridge into the Arena District of downtown Columbus, Reed took a quick right. Three blocks later he turned into the main entrance of Franklin County Corrections, a monolith of concrete and stone. Shrouded in halogen light and its resulting shadows, the place looked even more imposing than Reed remembered, stretched over three city blocks in length.

  Entering through the main gate, Reed found the small front lot empty. Taking the closest visitor stall, he killed the lights and the engine, grabbing the short lead from the footwell behind him.

  Stepping outside, he opened the rear door and affixed it to Billie’s collar, just two feet of room separating them as they walked along the front sidewalk and turned down a narrow corridor funneling them inward.

  At the end of their walk stood a pair of double doors, both with steel frames and double-paned glass exteriors. Stenciled across them were the name of the facility and the operating hours, Reed ignoring the information and instead focusing on the single man standing behind them.

  Looking to be somewhere around fifty, he was a compact guy with steel gray hair cut short and combed to the side, a pair of wire-rimmed glasses resting on his nose. Dressed in a tie and slacks, he stood with his fists on his hips, the tail of a sports coat bunched behind them.

  The set of his jaw made it clear he would rather be anywhere else in the world.

  Making no effort to come closer, he stood and waited as Reed and Billie entered, passing through the door and under a fan blowing superheated air down from above. Moving into the main of the lobby, they could see a janitor using an enormous buffer on the tile floor, the man glancing over every few seconds.

  Whether it was being nosy or just not wanting to see a dog on his clean floor, Reed couldn’t be certain.

  Did not care in the slightest either way.

  Pretending not to notice the body language that was being thrown his way, Reed walked across the foyer, extending a hand before him.

  “Detective Reed Mattox, my partner Billie,” he said. “Thank you for meeting us.”

  Accepting the shake, the man squeezed harder than necessary, glancing between the two of them. “Deputy Warden Mac Hollins. I was told it was necessary.”

  Which Reed took to mean he had gotten a call from Chief of Police Eleanor Brandt, probably incurring the double indignity of not only being told what to do, but by a woman no less.

  The guy seemed like the sort that would notice both.

  “Extremely,” Reed said, biting back the acrimony he was already feeling, knowing nothing good could come from voicing it.

  “Aren’t they always,” Hollins said, masking an eye roll as he turned away. Removing his hands from his hips, he strode fast across the foyer. Using a badge attached to his waist by a retractable chain, he got them past a locked door, the bright light and sound of the buffer both falling away as they passed through.

  In their stead was the same plain concrete that had adorned the outside, the world seemingly shifting into a muted grayscale.

  Exactly as Reed would imagine such a facility to be.

  “The man your captain requested has been brought up into an interrogation room,” Hollins said. “He’s been in there for an hour or two now, so I’m guessing he’s pretty pissed off.”

  Reed got the impression that was actually Hollins’s own thoughts being projected, but he let it go.

  With any luck, he would get what he needed and be gone within minutes.

  If having to put up with Hollins in the meantime was the cost of that, so be it.

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Hollins had projected that Paul Klauss would be pissed off when they arrived, though, to their surprise, he was fast asleep. Bent forward at the waist, his arms were curled up on the table before him, his head resting on them.

  Framed inside the picture window of one-way glass overlooking him, the man appeared not to have a care in the world. Sleeping peacefully, one would think he was at home in bed instead of inside a cell deep in a medium-security facility.

  Or that an armed guard with a shaved head was standing at attention outside his door.

  Or that two detectives and the warden were staring through the glass watching him.

  “You believe this shit?” Hollins muttered. Reaching out, he pressed an intercom button for the room. “Hey! Wake your ass up!”

  Glancing over, Reed could see a flush coloring the smaller man’s face as he released the button, watching for signs of movement within the cell. When none came fast enough for his liking, he pressed it again, adding, “Now!”

  Letting it go a second time, Hollins stepped back, returning his fists to his hips as he stared at the prisoner before them.

  “Thinks we’re here for his damn entertainment.”

  Why the warden seemed to think that, or why Klauss’s sleeping was seen as such an af
front, Reed didn’t have a clue.

  Even less the inclination to stick around and try to find out.

  “Thank you, Warden.”

  Looking over at him, Hollins appeared like he might say something before thinking better of it. Instead, he merely nodded, glancing over at the guard as if seeking approval.

  There was none.

  Not about to leave Billie standing in the hall with the man, Reed patted at the side of his leg, the sound of it bringing her to her feet. Moving for the door, he nodded as the guard opened it, stepping inside a space that was at least ten degrees cooler than the hallway outside.

  In the air was the smell of citrus disinfectant, strong enough it tickled his nose.

  He could only imagine what Billie and her heightened sense had to be experiencing.

  Going straight for the chair sitting opposite the man he was there to see, he lowered himself into it, Billie doing the same without being instructed beside him.

  It wasn’t like it was their first time together inside such a room.

  Awoken from his slumber, Reed gave the man a moment to collect himself. Pushing himself upright in his seat, he spread his eyes wide and blinked several times. Twice he raised his hands as if wanting to rub his face, both stopped by the manacles keeping him strapped to the metal table between them.

  At a glance, Paul Klauss was a completely unremarkable man. Sandy brown hair was cut to a medium length, pushed to the side and falling across his forehead. He didn’t wear glasses, had a pale complexion, and no facial hair to speak of.

  Dressed in an orange jumpsuit, he looked to be of both average height and weight.

  “Nice pooch.”

  Even his voice didn’t resonate in any way with Reed, neither deeper or higher than average.

  “My partner, K-9 detective Billie,” Reed said. “And I am Detective Reed Mattox.”

  For an instant, lines formed on Klauss’s forehead as he tried to place the names, eventually giving up on it.

  “I don’t think we’ve met.”

  “We haven’t,” Reed said. “Before tonight, I had never even heard your name.”