Rolling his shoulders forward, he peered down his nose at the floor of the small wooden porch on the back of the house. No more than four feet square, heavy lattice enclosed two sides of it, a stairwell extended out to the left, running along the side of the house.
On the ground before him, both squatting down, their hands and feet bound before them, were the two girls he’d nabbed from the corner some hours before.
“Get your asses in here,” he snapped, leaving the door open as he turned and walked back toward the living room.
The ploy was simple enough, something he had first developed back in Baltimore. There, it often required a bit of water to really achieve his goal, but given the extreme cold of Columbus, there was no need.
Once it was clear that neither of the girls had any intention of saying a word to him, he tried separating them, intimidating them in every way he could think of.
Despite their obvious fear, neither had a said a word.
From there, he had gone on into this approach, stripping the girls of their coats and leaving them to brave the cold in nothing but their working attire, fishnets and lace offering no protection against the bitter night.
As with most aspects of what he did, fear was his greatest ally, knowing the girls were too frightened, too browbeaten, too fearful for each other and their families, to ever risk calling out or even thinking of escape.
Striding into the living room, The Muscle walked over to the recliner and stood behind it, clutching the back of it as he waited. A moment later he heard the door swing shut, followed in order by the girls hopping into the room.
With each landing they both looked as if their legs might give out beneath them, their bodies on the brink of hypothermia, unable to take it any longer on the porch.
“Alright, so I’m going to ask this one last time before things really start getting ugly. Who the hell was Jun, and what was she doing here?”
Chapter Fifty-Five
“Good God dude, did you keep this thing in your freezer before bringing it over?”
Holding the computer at arm’s length, Deek grasped it by opposite corners, twisting the laptop between his hands, examining it closely.
“You remember the case I came by about a couple days ago?” Reed replied. “The girl and the pictures and KCBS and all that?”
Stopping the rotation of the computer, Deek lifted his gaze to Reed. “Yeah?”
“This is her computer. It’s been stored in the trunk of her car for at least the last four or five days, possibly much longer.”
Leaving the explanation at that, omitting huge chunks of information that were relevant to the case but not to the very specific thing he needed from Deek.
“Can you get it going?”
Maintaining the pose, Deek stared up at Reed for a moment longer before flicking his gaze back down to the device in his hands.
“Yeah, but I’m going to need you to do something for me first.”
Acutely aware of the ticking clock hanging over them, Reed fought the urge to pull his phone out and check the time. Already approaching midnight, he had to trust that Deek knew he wouldn’t have shown up unless the situation was urgent, especially not with his ailing grandmother asleep upstairs.
“Anything,” Reed replied, “but can it wait?”
On every word he placed an extra bit of tension, hoping to in some way impart the trepidation that was roiling within him.
Again pausing, Deek pulled the computer close to him, pressing it against his chest and wrapping it up tight within his arms.
“No,” he said, his tone matching Reed’s. “I need you to run up to my grandma’s bathroom and get the hair dryer from beneath her sink.”
Standing there, Reed felt his lips part slightly, confusion flooding his features. Right now, there was a young girl that could already be gone, was at the very least in grave danger. The key to finding her, to shutting down whatever nefarious scheme she’d been unwittingly pulled into, could be stored on the computer now nestled in Deek’s arms.
“Hair dryer?”
“Yeah,” Deek replied. “Right now this thing is a cube of ice. If it warms up too fast it could fry the circuitry, and if we just plug it in, condensation could form and catch the whole thing on fire.”
His lips parting a bit more, Reed nodded, for the first time understanding the request that had been made.
“Down,” he commanded, his voice raised slightly, Billie going flat to the floor beside him. With her ears pointed straight up, she watched as he wheeled and bounded up the stairs, taking them two and three at a time.
Emerging on the first floor of the home, he again caught the scent of apple cinnamon in the kitchen as he stood and surveyed the layout, moving his gaze from left to right.
Despite having worked with Deek in some form for the better part of a decade, never before had he been past the kitchen and foyer, seeing just the area immediately inside the front door before descending into the basement.
Rising onto the balls of his feet, his running shoes silent against the linoleum floor, he tiptoed through the kitchen, finding a living room on the other side, the furniture and color scheme a perfect match for what little Reed had already seen of the place.
Retreating back, he moved through the kitchen and past the door to the basement, descending a narrow hallway, peeking into doorways as he made his way forward. With each step the sound of a woman snoring could be heard, growing ever louder as he approached the far end of the house, mercifully finding what he was looking for just short of the master bedroom.
Pushing out a small sigh of relief that he wouldn’t have to enter to find the master bath - or worse yet run the risk of waking her and trying to explain to a startled elderly woman why a detective was slinking through her bedroom - he veered off to the side. Without turning on the light, he opened the cabinets beneath the sink just wide enough to see what he was looking for, extracting a white and pink hair dryer with the cord rolled up around the base of it.
Leaving the doors standing open, not wanting to risk the hinges creaking as he put them back into place, Reed moved back toward the basement in elongated strides, his feet touching down as infrequently as possible.
“You find it?” Deek asked as he returned to the basement, still sitting behind the computer bank he worked from, his body wrapped around the laptop in his arms.
“Got it,” Reed replied, unfurling the cord, holding the dryer in one hand, the plug in the other. “Where should I...?”
“Right over there,” Deek answered, thrusting his chin forward a few inches and pointing to a power strip along the wall.
Doing as instructed, Reed plugged it in and handed the dryer over to Deek, the man immediately setting the laptop flat atop his thighs and kicking the dryer to life.
On the floor, Billie’s ears perked slightly at the sound of the whining engine, she and Reed both watching in anticipation as Deek slowly passed the warm air back and forth across the top cover.
After five interminable minutes, he opened the top cover and again started the process anew, Reed counting every second in his head that passed, silently willing things to move forward.
In his experience, phrases such life or death had become overwrought clichés, the sorts of things people bandied about to try and impart urgency when there really was no call for such a thing.
This was not such an instance.
Forcing himself to remain still, not to rush forward and grasp the dryer from Deek, turning it to the highest heat setting and blasting the thing back to life, Reed dropped to a knee, resting a hand along Billie’s neck. Feeling the striated muscle running beneath her fur, the tensile strength of it indicating she was just as amped on adrenaline as he was, he pulled in long breaths of air, again finding himself doing the only things he could, which were wait and hope.
Two things he had never been especially adept at, yet had somehow become indispensable parts of the investigation.
Ten minutes after it began, the soun
d of the dryer fell away, Deek turning it off and lowering the machine to the ground by his feet.
“Alright, let’s see what happens,” he said, more to himself than to Reed, and pressed the power button in the top corner.
Rising from his knee, Reed inched closer, watching as a series of lights appeared along the rear base of the laptop, the sound of a fan belt soon following in order.
“That doesn’t sound good,” he whispered, drawing nearer, unable to see the screen, knowing only that a faint glow was illuminating Deek’s features.
“It’s not,” Deek said, “so once I get us in here, we’re going to need to move fast. I don’t have a power cable for one of these, so between the battery and the engine warming up, there’s no telling how long we’ll have.”
To that Reed said nothing, having suspected as much since the moment he arrived.
Chapter Fifty-Six
With his left hand draped over the steering wheel, Reed held the piece of paper up just below the rearview mirror, allowing the headlights from the cars behind him to help him read the blue ink strewn across it.
Put there by his own hand just minutes before, it was a bullet-pointed list highlighting some of the key things Bethanee Ing had mentioned in her notes, the document far too lengthy, the details much too extreme, to be completely gleaned through in the short time available.
Instead, he and Deek had made a quick pass, buzzing for certain names and phrases, jotting down only that which could help Reed in the immediate future. From there, he had left the device with Deek, pleading with him to do whatever possible to retain as much information as he could before the computer crapped out.
Agreeing without a single objection, Deek was doing just that as Reed and Billie departed, both running up the stairs and sprinting across the front lawn, piling into the sedan. Only once they were rolling did he pull out his cell-phone and tell it to call Grimes, the list still held up before him, the events of the coming hours playing out in his mind.
“Come on, pick up,” he muttered, switching his gaze from the paper to the road and back again. “Pick up.”
Four rings into the call, the captain did.
“Where are you?” he answered without preamble. “And what have you got?”
In short order Reed answered both, outlining his trip to the impound and the subsequent visit to Deek. Throughout Grimes remained silent, waiting until Reed was finished, his pulse climbing, his breath growing shorter.
Lowering the list and tossing it onto the passenger seat, Reed checked the rearview mirror, changing lanes as he headed toward the freeway.
“Where are you now?” Grimes asked.
“About to jump on the outer belt,” Reed said, “I can head south to you or go straight on into the city. Your call.”
Knowing what his preference was, not wanting another wasted moment to pass, Reed clutched the steering wheel, waiting for Grimes’s response.
With his sole focus on the two options he had laid out for him, never did he expect the response he was given.
“Go downtown,” Grimes said, “but don’t go anywhere near Clintonville just yet.”
“What?” Reed replied, his voice higher than anticipated, his foot rising slightly off of the gas.
If the captain heard the change in tone, or it bothered him in the slightest, he did nothing to reveal it, pushing right past to answer the question.
“There’s no way we can act on this without bringing in the FBI. They’ve already been working the corner with the girls on it, they know about the secondary location.
“After that all day affair we just had here, if we leave them out in the cold now we’re going to be knee deep in shit for the next decade.”
Once, twice, Reed began to respond, scads of objections coming to mind.
Erring on the better side of judgment, he kept each to himself, raising his hand above the wheel and wanting nothing more than to bury his fist into the center of it.
“Dammit,” he muttered, his clenching knuckles just barely tapping the leather center of the wheel, light enough to keep the horn from sounding out on contact.
The captain was right. While the murder was his, the rest of what was occurring was under the FBI’s purview. That very day they had brought them and a host of other agencies all together in good faith, asking for their input and assistance.
If they acted without them now – even with the life of a young girl hanging in the balance – it would be a black mark that no amount of spin control from Dade downtown would ever be able to polish away.
“Okay,” Reed said, “but just them. We get everybody else involved, it’ll be like this afternoon all over again.”
“Agreed,” Grimes said, spitting the word out before Reed’s had even faded from the air. “Greene and Gilchrist are still here. The three of us are rolling now, will see you there in ten.”
His eyebrows rising slightly, Reed glanced to the clock on the dash, seeing the digital readout state that it was now almost a half hour into a new day.
“You’ve got Tucker and Gott on standby already?”
“No,” Grimes replied, “I’ll call them from the road.”
Drifting to the right, Reed exited from the outer belt onto Interstate-70, using the east-west thoroughfare to push him back toward downtown.
“And if they’re not available?”
“Then I guess we tried.”
Chapter Fifty-Seven
The main FBI office for the state of Ohio was located in Cincinnati, on the north side, just off of the Ronald Reagan Highway. Housing the Special-Agent-In-Charge for the state, it was home to most of the heavy lifting that occurred, a series of satellite field offices spread across the rest of the state, all ranging in size and scope.
For Columbus, the office was newly placed in the Arena District just north of the convergence of the Scioto and Olentangy Rivers, not far from The Bottoms. Having been displaced by construction in their former home, they jumped in on the gentrification that seized the interior portion of the city, all too happy to take a government discount on a first floor spread overlooking the water.
Parked alongside the glass and stone structure, a fountain standing silent out front, Reed could imagine that during the right time of year and under the proper light, the place and the view would both be incredible.
Given the night he’d had, everything he knew still lay ahead, he could barely give a damn about the building or the men he was there to meet with.
All week he had felt like he was running in place. He’d been forced to blow off his visiting parents, to deal with an ME he could barely stand, to accept assistance from a freelance photographer that was acting against his explicit orders.
It was far from the best investigation of his career, the sort of affair that could have easily been derailed at any of a dozen points. Despite that, he was now on the verge of doing what he’d set out to, finding Bethanee Ing’s killer and saving Tek-Yen from a similar fate.
The time for talking, and for planning, was over. It had been a mess from the start, Reed unable to find the fault in careening straight ahead in the same manner until it was over.
Ignoring the cold, Reed was leaning against the front of his sedan, Billie out and sitting on the ground beside him, as a pair of headlights approached. Moving fast, the vehicle laid on the gas until the last possible moment before hitting the brakes, a squeal sounding out as a black sedan similar to Reed’s pulled to a stop at an angle.
Behind it, a small puff of smoke rose, bringing with it the acrid smell of burnt rubber, as the driver’s side door burst open and Alastair Gott spilled out.
“What the hell, detective?” he snapped by way of an opening, the look on his face displaying that he did not appreciate being called out into the middle of the night.
Narrowing his eyes slightly, Reed bit back the venom on his tongue, instead shifting his attention toward the lights approaching from the opposite direction. Every part of him hoping it was somebody – anybody �
�� else attached to the investigation, if for no other reason than to provide a buffer, he watched as the lights slowed and swung wide, easing into a spot on the far side of Gott.
Under the overhead lights of the building, Reed could see it was a matching sedan, Preston Tucker stepping out a moment later. Glancing between the two men, he nodded.
“Detective.”
“Agent,” Reed replied, his tone hard, letting it be known that battle lines had already been drawn before his arrival.
“The front door should be open,” Tucker said. “The offices are closed, but there’s always a guard in the lobby.”
Ignoring the statement entirely, Reed said, “Jade.”
Across from him both agents paused, each looking his direction. For a moment neither said anything, exchanging a glance.
“What the hell is Jade?” Gott asked.
Again feeling his disdain for the man rise, Reed said, “Jade is the name of the nightclub serving as the second half of the operation.”
Turning his attention to Tucker, he added, “It is also the reason we aren’t going inside right now.”
“Meaning what, tough guy?” Gott said. “You’re going down there right now and storm the place yourself?”
His left hand clenched tight around Billie’s lead, Reed stared at the man, his partner rising to her feet beside him, her body pressed tight, letting him know she was there. With teeth gritted, he aimed his focus at Tucker, not trusting what would come out if he had to speak for one more moment with Gott.
In just a matter of minutes it was already obvious that however the man had acted that morning was just prelude to the real thing, someone that thought entirely too much of himself and his vocation.
“A team of my guys will be here any second, and we’ll have CPD SWAT up in time to meet us there,” Reed said. “Between that and your guys already canvassing the corner, that should be plenty to do a coordinated strike.”
Raising both hands before him, Tucker resumed the good cop role in their partnership, patting the air, his tone nothing short of placating.
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