The Partnership

by Dustin Stevens

  “You can’t have dogs in here,” the woman said, her tone harried, unnecessarily aggressive.

  “I can if she’s a detective,” Reed said, matching her voice, not bothering to lift the badge from his chest and wave it at her.

  More than likely she had already seen it, being a miserly sort that preferred cats and just wanted to be difficult.

  It wouldn’t be their first encounter with such a person.

  “Yeah, who are you looking for?” the young black man interjected, chancing a glare over at his coworker and offering a face that bordered on an apology.

  Apparently it wasn’t his first encounter with her either.

  “Alaina Blair,” Reed said, taking a couple of steps forward.

  The man’s face contorted for just a moment. “I think she’s out on maternity leave, but you can check in on the fourth floor. That’s where they handle the investigative stuff.”

  Thanking the man, Reed led Billie back to the elevator, the lift depositing them a few moments later at their destination, a near copy of the second floor below.

  The same general color scheme permeated everything, the design a bit more open with fewer cubicles being the only difference. Despite the decrease in desk space it was clear that a great deal more activity was afoot, the din of office activity in the air, a large handful of people moving about.

  Less than ten feet in front of them, a man in his late twenties pushed himself back from his desk, using the wheels on the bottom of his chair to roll out into the center walkway. Dressed in chinos and a golf shirt, he looked between the two of them, a curious expression on his face.

  “Help you?”

  “Detective Mattox, my partner Billie,” Reed opened. “Hoping to speak to Alaina Blair.”

  The expression remained a moment before the man pressed his lips together, spreading his hands to either side of him. “Sorry, she’s out on maternity leave for another six weeks.”

  “Is somebody acting in her stead?” Reed asked, taking a few steps forward. To either side of him the narrow corridor leading from the elevator fell away, the room opening up.

  Much larger than it had appeared before, it was apparent the entirety of the floor was one large space, the interior of it divided with cubicles five feet in height, the outside used for offices with clear glass exteriors.

  Many of the offices stood dark and empty as Reed swung a glance about, only a handful with anybody inside.

  “Corner,” the young man said, extending a hand diagonally behind him without turning around. “Don’t be afraid to unleash the dog if you have to.”

  Allowing his confusion at the comment to show on his face, Reed thanked him and set off for the corner, going straight through the room to the far wall before turning a left and heading to his destination. As they went he could feel a half dozen stares cast in their direction.

  In his experience he knew their presence alone would be enough to cause such open gawking, a detective always having that effect, a solid black animal with the appearance of a wolf only heightening it. By the time he arrived at the corner office he had no doubt that word had already spread through the office, almost able to feel the weight of their stares on his back as he went.

  Curling his fingers back toward him, Reed knocked twice on the metal frame of the door, the sound hollow as it rang out.

  With the door to the room standing open he positioned himself in the center of it, making no attempt to hide who he was or to give the impression that the impending conversation was optional.

  Already he had experienced a day and a half worth of setbacks on this case. The fact that Alaina Blair was on vacation was just one more, something he would get past. Now that he had Ing’s name and was standing in the office of her employer, had momentum going for the first time, he was not about to let anything derail that.

  “Yes?” a gruff voice asked, the word sounding artificially louder and deeper than necessary.

  After a moment the owner of it looked up from the desk to reveal someone much different than Reed expected, the man not much older than himself, his entire body mass being much closer to Billie than his own. Dressed in a starched white Oxford shirt and plaid tie, he looked up from beneath sandy brown hair pushed to the side.

  “Detective Reed Mattox, CPD. I’m told you were filling in for Alaina Blair while she’s out?”

  The man regarded Reed and Billie each for a moment before leaning back in his chair. “I am. What’s this about?”

  “Bethanee Ing,” Reed replied, skipping past any amount of decorum, bypassing even the slightest bit of opening volley.

  It had exactly the effect he had hoped for.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The man’s name was Reggie Zawyer, a fact Reed couldn’t help but smirk at. There was a good chance the guy was quite possibly the whitest person Reed had ever encountered, certainly the whitest Reggie. In addition to the plaid tie he wore khakis and loafers with no socks, his handshake weak.

  Whether the name he gave was a moniker he had garnered later in life or what his parents had saddled him with at birth Reed had no way of knowing, but it certainly didn’t seem to fit.

  Upon hearing the name Bethanee Ing he had made a show of rolling his eyes and exhaling loudly, asking them to enter and close the door. As they had done so he had risen from behind his desk and went to the bank of windows separating him from the rest of the office, quickly dropping the blinds in front of each one and twisting them shut.

  The office as a whole was about a dozen feet in width, almost twice that in length. Most of the space was wasted, revealing open swaths of stained beige carpeting, the desk Zawyer was seated behind and a pair of chairs opposite it the only objects of any real size.

  Along the back wall was a pair of bookshelves, those too largely empty, only a few small stacks of things present.

  Even at a glance it wasn’t hard to ascertain that Zawyer’s presence in the office would be short lived.

  “Please, be seated,” Zawyer said, swinging back around his desk and dropping himself into his chair. As he did so he straightened his tie across his torso and leaned back, raising a bare ankle to his opposite thigh.

  “So, this is about Bethanee?”

  Pausing just a moment, Reed rotated in his seat to look at the closed blinds behind him before returning to face forward. “Can I ask what that was all about?”

  Flicking his gaze in the same direction, Zawyer let a flash of annoyance show before saying, “This is a fairly small office with more than its share of idle gossip. You know how it is, I’m sure.”

  “Actually, I don’t,” Reed said. “Wouldn’t dropping the blinds only invite more speculation?”

  Again the annoyance rose to the man’s features, lingering a bit longer this time. “You mentioned Bethanee Ing? What has she done this time?”

  Remembering the clean record he had pulled just hours before, Reed allowed his eyebrows to rise on his forehead. “This time? What makes you think she’s done anything at all?”

  Twice Zawyer opened his mouth to respond, each time showing a bit more agitation before pulling up short. “Can I just ask what’s happened? That might make this easier for me to explain.”

  Clearly the man had no idea what had happened to Ing, but that didn’t stop his attitude from grating on Reed. As much as he wanted to continue pressing on the man’s original supposition that she had done something wrong, he didn’t have the time to splice semantics with somebody that wrote for a living, deciding instead to go for the most obvious tool he had at shifting the dynamic in the room.

  “Her body was recovered from the Olentangy River night before last,” Reed said, placing the words out in a clear monotone, his intention obvious.

  Just as he had anticipated, the look fell from Zawyer’s face, most of the color draining away as well. In one slow, controlled movement he lowered his foot to the floor before rubbing both palms along his thighs.

  “Are...are you sure it was her?”

 
; “Very,” Reed said, keeping the same tone. He didn’t bother to explain the tattoos or the phone message, the particulars of how they came to be having this meeting not important.

  Whatever Ing was covering and why she thought it might be dangerous enough to have a work contact permanently affixed to her body was all that mattered.

  “I...” Zawyer said, all evidence of the previous cocksure middle-manager having fallen away, the first shred of humanity Reed had witnessed present on his face. “How? Please tell me it wasn’t suicide.”

  The images of what had happened to her, been done to her body, flashed through Reed’s mind as he stared across the desk. “No, but in this particular instance, I think suicide would have been preferable.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Zawyer said, his eyes sliding shut. He held the pose a moment before opening them and when he did, the slightest hint of red tendrils could be seen permeating the whites.

  “You knew her I take it?” Reed asked.

  The answer was plainly obvious, though Reed started there, hoping it would open the conversation into something more, eventually steer him where he needed to go.

  Wherever that might be.

  “Of course,” Zawyer said, “everybody did. What you saw sitting out there is the entirety of our department.”

  Again he paused, his lip quivering just slightly, before drawing a deep breath in through his nose.

  “The newspaper business isn’t what it used to be. Nobody reads things in print anymore, which just cripples the amount of money coming in. Couple that with the advent of so many publishing platforms these days, the amount of data that is accessible...”

  “And things are tight,” Reed said, not sure how any of this was relevant, but sticking with the line of reasoning just the same.

  “Extremely,” Zawyer said. “That’s why I’m sitting in this office right now. Thirty-six years old and except for Alaina, I’m the elder statesman of the group. Newbies, fresh out of school, are all we can afford to hire these days.”

  “So Bethanee was just brought on?” Reed asked.

  “Sort of,” Zawyer replied, one side of his face crinkling just slightly. “She started with us as an intern when she was getting her master’s. Few years ago, after she was done, she came on full time.”

  “And hit the ground running?” Reed asked.

  A small snort was Zawyer’s immediate response, his head rocking back just slightly. “We don’t have the manpower or the resources for anything but. This industry is baptism by fire these days, and Bethanee was no exception.”

  The news wasn’t exactly what Reed wanted to hear, meaning there were potentially years of articles that Ing had produced that could have angered the wrong person to be combed through.

  “When I first sat down, you asked what she had done now,” Reed said. “Meaning...she was prone to poking hornet’s nests?”

  Again Zawyer scrunched one side of his face just slightly. “Somewhat. She wasn’t inflammatory just for the sake of being inflammatory, but she was fearless. Made her first big scoop by going after the lunch workers in city schools. Followed it up by writing about the demise of the state health insurance exchange.”

  Reed remembered hearing about both in recent years, the latter much more than the former. From what he could recall both had included a large swath of government employees and public funds, the sort of things that tended to incense readers.

  “She ever get any serious blowback for it?” Reed asked. “Threats of violence, that sort of thing?”

  “No more than the rest of us,” Zawyer replied. “Couple of nasty emails, maybe even a call to our boss. Nothing ever came of it, though.”

  He paused, considering things for another moment, before adding, “We’re pretty careful about not printing anything that hasn’t been vetted twice over. People are just too litigious these days.”

  Reed nodded in agreement, the department having seen their own share of that very same phenomenon.

  He also knew what Zawyer was alluding to regarding the threats, people tending to back down once they discovered that the other side was telling the truth.

  “Okay, so what was she working on when she passed?” Reed asked. While both the topics alluded to - and no doubt a host more - could be enough to get someone riled up, they certainly didn’t seem to rise to the level of murder.

  Definitely wouldn’t precipitate the amount of torture that was inflicted upon her.

  “I don’t know,” Zawyer replied, shaking his head just a few inches to either side. “She’s been off on assignment since I took over this post.”

  His pulse increasing slightly, Reed leaned forward in his seat. “You don’t know?”

  Spreading his hands to either side, Zawyer shook his head. “I’m only the interim guy. Even if they offered me the job once Alaina gets back, I don’t want it.”

  For the first time since arriving, Reed remembered the woman’s name, the directive in Ing’s message.

  “And you’re telling me she’s the only one that would know what Bethanee was working on?”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  For six sweet uninterrupted hours The Businessman had slept. He had crawled between the cranberry colored satin sheets on his bed, not even bothering to bring one or more of the girls home with him, savoring having the expanse to himself. Bypassing REM sleep altogether, he slipped straight to darkness, remaining there until his alarm went off at noon.

  After the initial grog of being jerked awake subsided he rose and showered, changing into a pinstriped suit and a grey shirt with a patterned tie before climbing into his Lexus SUV and driving fifteen minutes into town.

  Bypassing the club for the time being, he maneuvered his way through the thin afternoon traffic, pulling to a stop in front of the hovel The Muscle called a home just before one.

  The two men keeping much the same schedule, The Businessman had known The Muscle would be there, not bothering to call and check before driving over. The sight of the dinged old Caprice parked out back validated such a decision, The Businessman knowing that had he given any prior alert, his partner would have made a point to be gone.

  If for no other reason than to be an ass, to prove that he could.

  Parking right out front on the street, The Businessman hit the automatic locks three times as he climbed from the car, casting a glance in either direction as he walked for the door. At such an hour, on a weekday, he was reasonably certain that his ride would be okay, though he had long since stopped assuming anything in Columbus, the town having proved more difficult than anticipated in a number of different manners.

  While he himself preferred to live outside the outer belt of the city, residing in a small community not far from Easton and driving in each day, The Muscle insisted on living in Clintonville, no more than a stone’s throw from the organizations they ran.

  The Businessman knew it was just posturing, the kind of adolescent behavior that The Muscle should have outgrown decades before, but still clung to with surprising ferocity. No doubt most of it was aimed in his direction, his cohort trying to prove that he was cut from a different sort of material, much stronger than The Businessman would ever be.

  What The Businessman had come to realize was that The Muscle was wrong, or at least his definition of strength was. Real might was not measured in how much a man weighed or bench pressed, not even the kind of car he drove or the neighborhood he lived in.

  True strength was measured in control, both over one’s self and those around them.

  The Businessman knew that and was acting on it, fast expanding the scope of his domain. He wasn’t interested in any petty schoolyard pissing matches, maintaining the partnership only as a means to an end, because he had to have somebody around to do the things he didn’t want to.

  He would even continue past Columbus, on to a few more of the other cities on their list, before severing ties for good, having proved his mettle, establishing enough control to ensure the organization trusted him to run everythi
ng in the United States for them.

  The thought brought a bit of a bounce to his step as he crossed the narrow front yard, frozen blades of grass crunching beneath his feet, and stepped up onto the front porch. With frost still clinging to the boards, the smooth soles of his shoes slid just slightly as he walked to the front door and raised a fist, banging a half dozen times.

  There was no indication of movement from within as he stepped forward and knocked again, knowing better than to open the door without invitation, a booby trap of some sort no doubt lying in wait for anybody foolish enough to try.

  Not until the fourth round of knocking could the sound of heavy footsteps be heard, lumbering movements that seemed to shift the entire building.

  Taking a step back, The Businessman folded his hands before him and waited, watching as the curtain hanging in front of the window shifted to the side, a shadow passing behind it.

  A moment later it pulled open a few inches to reveal The Muscle scowling, his upper half bare, the same wrinkled corduroy’s covering his legs. “What do you want?”

  It was the first time The Businessman had ever seen his partner without some form of bulk-inducing covering, having never before noticed the diagonal slashes that ran across his chest and torso. For a moment he stared at the scars, long stripes of furrowed skin, before raising his attention to The Muscle’s face.

  “Can we talk for a minute?”

  It was obvious The Muscle wanted no part of a conversation, wanted nothing more than to return to sleep, the expression on his face relaying as much. For a moment he simply stood and glowered, leaving The Businessman standing in the frigid air, before jerking the door open a couple of feet.

  “Get your ass in here and close the door.”

  In the preceding months The Businessman had been by the house a couple of times, the only visible change being the amount of garbage that continued to accumulate.

  Stepping directly into the living room area, he saw that it was furnished only by a battered brown recliner and a flat screen TV positioned atop a remainder folding table. The floorboards beneath them were barren expect for a heavy spattering of fast food wrappers, the accompanying smell of grease heavy in the air.