The Partnership

by Dustin Stevens

  “Meaning, right after this, I’m going to scan it and enter into facial recognition, hope we get a hit,” Reed said, knowing that it was a longshot at best, pushing on before the captain could say as much.

  Shifting his attention to the side, he added, “While I’m doing that, could you two start going through traffic cam footage from the night before Bethanee Ing was found?”

  Surprised at being drawn into the conversation, Gilchrist’s mouth parted slightly, no sound escaping him.

  “Sure,” Greene replied, “when and where are we looking?”

  Since the girl’s body was first found, Reed had been wrestling with those very questions. More than once he considered the flow patterns of the Olentangy, thinking that there must be one of the local universities that studied such things.

  Despite that, various threads had kept pulling him in one direction or another, limiting the time he had, making it impossible for him to track anybody down to discuss the matter.

  Now, just as then, another roadblock had presented itself, this one being the disappearance of Tek-Yen. As much as he would love to call on a professor somewhere, explain how much the girl weighed and where she was found, hoping they had some sort of computer simulation model that could tell him exactly when and where she went in, time simply wouldn’t allow it.

  Besides, it wasn’t like he knew even how long her body had been pressed against the grate before Dani Baines found her.

  Taken together, it was time to do some educated guessing and hope to get lucky.

  “Go back to the night before her body was found,” Reed began. “By the time we found her she was frozen solid, meaning she’d been in there a while. Given the time of evening we found her...”

  “Right,” Greene said. “They wouldn’t have made the drop during the day, so she was probably thrown in late the prior night.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking,” Reed said, casting a gaze to Grimes before looking back to the officers.

  “And the where?” Greene asked.

  Allowing his focus to glaze just slightly, Reed sat and stared another moment, thinking about the night the body had been found, hearing the rushing water pushing through the grate along the side of the river.

  “There was too much current for the drop to have been made along the bank,” he said, blinking three quick times to pull himself back into focus. “So it must have been from a bridge, somewhere in the middle of the river so they knew that the water would push her body south.”

  In the back corner, Gilchrist extracted a small spiral bound notepad from his front shirt pocket and began jotting notes.

  A few inches before him, Greene nodded. “Start north of Clintonville and work our way south?”

  “Yeah,” Reed agreed. “And once I have this guy entered into the system, I’ll start on the south side and come north to meet you in the middle.”

  The plan was thin, something every person in the room knew, but nobody bothered to comment on. Very rarely was police activity as linear as most procedurals on television made it appear, this being far from the first time Reed had followed what could be an errant path, hoping for nothing more than a new trail to present itself, allowing them to keep moving forward.

  As he had found on more than one occasion, that was always the most important thing.

  Keep moving forward.

  “Captain?” Reed asked, shifting his attention back to the opposite side of the desk. “That work? Or did something happen after we left we should be aware of?”

  To that, a sour expression crossed the captain’s face, his frown growing deeper, a series of lines encasing his mouth. Matching Reed’s gaze for a moment, he shifted to stare out at the parking lot, the darkened space illuminated by overhead lights throwing down straw colored light in wide cones.

  “Plenty happened,” he said, his voice so low it was almost a grumble, “but for the time being, keep doing what you’re doing. As you guys witnessed before you left, right now all anybody is worried about is the politics involved.

  “Far as I can tell, we’re the only ones concerned that there is a whole mess of girls out there that could be in danger.”

  Having spent most of the day feeling the same way, Reed pushed back several smart retorts, leaving it at a small nod.

  “Can we take the blowback if word gets out about what’s going on?”

  Maintaining his pose for a moment, Grimes said nothing, contemplating the question, before slowly turning and looking at each of the men in turn.

  “What is it I’ve always told you? Solving these things has a way of making the backlash a lot less severe.”

  To that he added nothing more.

  Not that he needed to.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Both of the girls sitting in front of The Muscle were clearly petrified, each crowded into the padded cushion of his recliner, the sole piece of furniture in his living room. If he’d had it to do over again, he would have taken them to the house down the street where he’d gathered the girls to watch the newscast, it having a couch and chair, allowing for all to sit, making it easier for him to slowly and methodically pick them apart.

  As it were, the idea hadn’t occurred to him until they had already arrived back at his place, the notion drifting in too late to act on, The Muscle not about to uproot them and march them on down the street.

  Already his nerves were growing frazzled, both from the visit from The Businessman that afternoon, and from the situation as a whole.

  This was not how things were not supposed to play out, certainly wasn’t how they had conducted business in the past.

  The previous two spots had been nothing short of perfect. Never before had The Muscle been to Europe, but he couldn’t have imagined the system working any better there than it had in their first couple of runs.

  The girls were beautiful, they were scared to death, and they were adored by the masses. Money came in by the bucket, there was never the slightest hiccup, and within six months of arrival, he and The Businessman had handed things off to their successors, collecting hefty bonuses in their wake.

  Looking back, it was clear from the start that there were cracks in the model, most of them stemming from the disparate styles of him and his cohort.

  The Businessman was, as they liked to say back in Baltimore, a poser. He was nothing more than a low level employee that had been born into a golden situation, operating under the mistaken belief that his lot in life had anything to do with his own merit. As such, he looked down his nose not only at the girls, but at the people he hired and even the man he was partnered with.

  The Muscle had no such misgivings, taking an extreme amount of pride in extreme self-awareness. Not once had he ever tried to fool himself into believing that he had the acumen to run a successful operation, knowing exactly what his role was and that he did it extremely well.

  It was that reason that the organization had first signed him on when arriving in the United States, his reputation preceding him, creeping out well beyond the city where he had built it.

  That fact alone was what kept him coming back day after day, making it so easy for him to stare at The Businessman with a look that bordered on contemptuous.

  They had sought him out.

  He wasn’t lucky enough to have the right parents or uncles, had never been handed a thing in his life. The way he lived and the way he dressed were all very calculated choices, meant to further the position he held in the world.

  Just because he didn’t drive a Lexus or wear a fancy suit did not mean he was any lower on the totem pole, a fact The Businessman would be best served to learn in a hurry.

  Pacing back and forth across the floor of his living room, The Muscle let those thoughts percolate through his mind, his hands balling up and unfurling by his side.

  In front of him, the girls sat with their eyes cast toward the floor, neither conjuring the courage to look up at him, instead sitting huddled together, their bodies pressed tight, not even managing t
o fill the width of the recliner they shared.

  “Do you two have any idea why you’re here?” he asked, never once breaking stride. Moving from one side of the room to the other, he had already cleared a path, kicking aside stray wrappers and packaging, allowing the heels of his boots to echo against the floor.

  Across from him there was no response, the girls managing to pull themselves in even tighter against one another.

  “Huh?” he asked, raising his voice just slightly, casting a glance over to see both wilt under the sound.

  Sitting together, the girls looked like most every other that had cycled through in the past year, each appearing to be no more than fourteen or fifteen. Armed with bad teeth and ridiculous haircuts, they had done their best to mask any shortcomings with heavy stage makeup and scandalous clothing, though they had both fallen woefully short.

  Just looking at them again made The Muscle almost sick to his stomach, not from his role in the operation, but from the fact that there were people out there that could derive pleasure from such creatures in the first place.

  Stopping his march, he leveled the full intensity of his gaze on the girls, waiting as they each lifted their faces just enough to shake their head from side to side before instantly lowering them back down.

  “Jun,” he seethed, drawing the word out several seconds in length as he began to walk again. “You two lived beside her, were seen talking to her, and I want to know everything she said.”

  Whether or not there was any useful information to be gleaned from the girls, The Muscle didn’t have the slightest idea, long past the point of truly caring.

  What he did know was that The Businessman seemed emphatic that the girl was more than just another poor castoff from China, someone important enough to have brought a lot of unnecessary heat down on them.

  The veracity of that The Muscle could only guess at, the girl having not said a single word about anything as he worked her over. Thinking back to that night with the pliers and blowtorch, he couldn’t help but believe that if there was anything she was hiding it would have already come out, but just the same it was worth taking a little extra time with these two to be certain.

  Shrugging his jacket down off of his shoulders, The Muscle let it fall to the floor, the smack of the leather against wood again making both the girls visibly flinch. Rolling his shoulders forward, he squeezed his fists tight, knowing that veins were beginning to pop up beneath the surface, his bare arms on full display.

  “I guess I wasn’t clear a second ago. I want to know everything Jun ever had to say, and I want to know it now.”

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Once the image was scanned and loaded on his screen, Reed set the facial recognition software to work. Leaving it displayed in the center of his monitor, he watched as the program enhanced the clarity of the image before sharpening it into razor focus.

  From there, it picked out a series of key identifiers, marking each with a small red box, before a network of lines appeared on screen, connecting them to one another.

  Perched on the edge of his seat, he kept his right hand poised above the mouse, his breathing shallow as he sat and stared, hoping for something solid to come back.

  At his feet was Billie, her body pressed against him, her rib cage resting against his calf. Seated with her backside against the desk, she stared out over the room, still ready to bolt off the moment she was given the go ahead.

  Glancing down to her, Reed knew the feeling.

  Downstairs at their own desk he knew were Greene and Gilchrist, each working on the unenviable task of combing through traffic camera footage. With any luck, his own search would give them a name which could lead to a license plate registration, but for the time being they were stuck scrutinizing every vehicle that came into view.

  Given the man’s unique look, and the general lack of traffic during the dead of night, it wasn’t an impossible task, but it certainly wouldn’t be an easy one either.

  Watching as the program went to work in front of him, Reed saw a status bar appear at the bottom of the screen, a series of words scrolling by in order, moving far too fast for him to pick out anything definitively. Instead he allowed his vision to glaze momentarily, watching as the solid green marker moved slowly from left to right, demarcating the progress of the search.

  As he sat and waited, handfuls of thoughts scrolled through his mind, almost always leading him back to the young girl he had shared a meal with the night before.

  After working with Riley for more than a decade, Reed was far past any antiquated notions of chivalry. Never had he met a more capable person than his former partner, the fact that she was a woman only entering his mind on the rare occasion when somebody made a wisecrack about it, the comments never ceasing to irritate him instantly.

  The disparity between Riley and Tek-Yen was so gaping though, as much for their age as their skill-set, that Reed couldn’t help but feel responsible. The girl had not sought him ought specifically, but she had pushed aside her initial trepidations to speak with him, sharing what she knew, departing with the belief that he would soon be coming to help her.

  It was that piece of information more than anything else that Reed had been struggling with since the lunch meeting with Tucker and Gott. While he certainly saw the logic in their thinking, could respect the manpower they had already invested in the matter, he had made a promise.

  He, and by extension Billie, had sat with the girl and told her she was almost free.

  If he couldn’t uphold that, regardless how much bureaucracy was at play, he wasn’t sure he could or even should continue doing what he was doing.

  With his mind muddling through such thinking, fighting to get past the deep seated guilt and frustration he felt, he barely noticed at first as the search stopped moving in front of him. Halfway across the screen, the progress bar halted before evaporating into a single blinking box, white letters on a black background flashing atop the face of the man staring back at him.

  Jerking himself back into the moment, feel a flutter through his core, Reed directed the cursor to the box and clicked on it, a file opening before him, consuming the width of the screen, the previous photo disappearing from sight.

  In its place was what looked like a standard questionnaire, most of the information missing, but enough present to give him what he was looking for.

  “Draymont Slade,” Reed read aloud, his voice just above a whisper, the familiar pinpricks of anticipation moving up through his system.

  Beside him, Billie adjusted herself at the sound of his voice, moving so she could alternate between glancing up to him and watching the stairwell on the opposite end of the room.

  Scrolling down the page, Reed read quickly over the file, his lips moving imperceptibly as he went, no sound passing over them.

  Seeing nothing of much use beyond the man’s name, Reed pushed straight to the bottom of the page, to the line marked previous arrests, the words highlighted in blue, denoting a hyperlink to another page.

  Clicking on it, Reed waited as a new file opened, the pop-up box a bit smaller, fitting just inside the parameters of the previous screen.

  “Twenty-three pages,” Reed whispered, seeing the numbers in the bottom corner of the window, the words Baltimore Police Department stretched across the top.

  “Alright, Mr. Slade, let’s see what brought you out this way,” he whispered, moving the mouse to the vertical bar along the side and beginning to make his way down.

  Arranged in chronological order, the top page was dated 1997, the thick ink and blurred fonts seeming to indicate that the pages had been faxed or were a copy of a copy, clearly not the originals.

  “Responding officers found Slade, twenty-one, in the back bedroom,” Reed read in a fast whisper, “assorted cash and jewelry on his person. When told to cease and desist, Slade resisted, eventually needing to be forcibly restrained.”

  Breaking and entering, grand theft, resisting arrest. Individually, any of the charges
seemed to be of the sort that a young man would begin with, the kind generally viewed as classic stepping stones.

  Taken together was a rare find, not generally the point where someone started, meaning either the file was lacking whatever Slade had accrued when he was a minor, or that he had simply managed to skate by his first two decades without being caught.

  Having nothing more than a photo and a page of the file to go on, Reed was already willing to bet on the latter.

  Pushing down through the file, Reed bypassed a series of scanned photographs of the jewels taken during the robbery. Instead he focused on a secondary cluster of images, these showing a young officer looking to be in his late twenties or early thirties, the left side of his face mottled with dark bruising, a fresh cut extended in a crescent from his temple around the outside of his jawbone.

  “Damn,” Reed whispered, wincing slightly. “That would definitely be the work of someone who would scare a young girl.”

  Again he could sense Billie shifting beside him, her weight pressing so tight against his leg it moved the toe of his shoe a few inches to the side. Keeping his right hand on the mouse, he reached down with his left, jabbing at empty air a time or two before finding her thick fur and running it through his fingers.

  Keeping his face aimed at the screen, he moved past the initial incident to the second in the file, this one dated 2003, the charges including possession of cocaine and intent to distribute.

  Bypassing the details, Reed moved quickly to the end of the report, seeing that Slade had served eighteen months for the incident.

  Moving further still, Reed saw that he had managed to stay out of trouble for less than a year before he had another run-in with police, this one being for assault with a wrench, the prosecuting attorneys wanting to bring maximum punishment before all charges were eventually dropped by the victim.

  Far from the first time Reed had seen such a thing happen, it wasn’t too difficult to determine how that particular situation had played out.