I hope you all had a fantastic Thanksgiving! Thanks for reading!
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Despite how many cups of coffee he forced down, and it was to the point that he looked quite like a pitiful drunk demanding another shot from the bartender, Douglas Hyde felt less energized now than he had when he’d first stumbled into work this morning. It was only late afternoon, yet his eyes were glazed, his attention span was the length of his nail, and every time someone bumped his desk, he felt the sudden criminal urge to bludgeon them with his corded phone the department had given him. The sunlight landing at angles on his papers did nothing to soften the irritation growing in his chest, but he had a case to work, and no matter what the darkened side of his mind desired, he had to sit here and work.
The case of Jamie Cardew was one that seemed like a classic open and shut case, one that should’ve been over before it had even begun, but the more he dove into it, the more it seemed that her disappearance was not just of a girl tired of living in a quiet town like Graycott. True to what her friends had said, Hyde could find no fathomable reason as to why she’d want to run away. She was a near straight-A student, an apple in the eye of her teachers, and not a single bad word to describe her came from any of the kids he’d spoken with. She was an angel, halo and all, but then where had she gone?
More and more, Hyde found himself believing the boy’s, Clint’s, claims that someone had kidnapped her, but he couldn’t stage an entire investigation, and his career, on a gut feeling. In this field, if there was a lack of evidence, then there was no case, and if he tried to challenge that notion, he’d be like a guppy among a ring of sharks. Not even his friends in his department would branch out to help him. Still, something didn’t feel right about her case, but despite having read over the forensic reports and her file for several hours, he was no closer to a lead than he’d been at the start.
Frustrated, he pushed himself up from his desk, grabbed his mug, and marched into the break room. He poured the cold coffee down the drain and reached for the pot, only to find that it was empty except for a few drops of a bland brew. He pinched the bridge of his nose, struggling to contain his anger. As he decided whether or not to smash the pot on the counter, the door opened and Linda Berk, a fellow detective, waltzed in.
Seeing his expression, she raised an eyebrow and paused at the edge of the counter. “No, I will not help you cover your tracks if you murder someone with that.”
Her snicker relaxed him slightly, and he set the pot back into the holder. “Was I that obvious?”
“I know a murderous glare when I see one. That’s one of the perks of working homicide.” She said.
“Sorry,” he sighed, “I’m just having a rough time with the Cardew case.”
“The runaway?”
He frowned. “Yeah, but I don’t think she ran away. She was on track for an Ivy-League school, had lots of friends, a good home life according to her mother and stepfather, so why would she throw it all away?”
Linda shrugged and reached for one of the bagels they kept in the bread container. From the fridge, she produced the cream cheese and began spreading it on both slices. “Well, have you traced her phone’s last known location? Regardless of whether she ran away or was kidnapped, it’ll tell you where she last was.”
Hyde shook his head. “We’re still waiting for the warrant on that. It’s almost been a week; you’d think those government mooks could have it ready by now.”
Linda pointed the butter knife she held in his direction. “Watch it, one of us is married to a ‘government mook’ as you so artfully put it.”
He held up his hands in mock-surrender and laughed. “I guess it’s too late to ask you to put in a word to him to expedite that warrant?”
“I could be persuaded.” She responded. “If someone would take a look at a case I’m working right now. I’ve hit a bit of a snag.”
“Deal.” He whistled, and as she took a bite out of her bagel, he followed her back to her desk where an open file and several crime scene photos were splayed. “What do you need?”
With her free hand, she pointed to a photo on the far left of a man with a penny-sized bullet wound in the center of his forehead. “Mr. Freeman here was found dead in his home a few days ago, cause of death being the bullet that tore straight through his brain.”
“Looks like a contact shot to me, based on the stippling. Suicide?” Hyde guessed.
Linda smiled and nodded. “That was my first guess, too, but the forensics report came back, and Freeman’s prints weren’t found anywhere on the gun, and he wasn’t wearing gloves when he was found, so—”
“So, not a suicide, but staged to look like one. Who is the gun registered to?”
“To Freeman, but I’m guessing the killer wiped it down after he did the deed. Hence the lack of prints.”
Hyde clicked his tongue. “Did he have any enemies? Or a wife?”
She shook her head. “He’s like your Jamie, squeaky clean. I haven’t found a single reason as to why someone would want him dead, and his wife passed away four years prior. There was no sign of a forced entry, nor was anything taken from the home, as far as we can tell. The weirdest thing, though, is that the body wasn’t moved, nor did it move when he died. The bullet was found in the wall directly behind him, meaning he was already on the ground when he was shot.”
“Why was he sitting on the floor?” Hyde asked.
“The only thing I can think of is that the killer threatened him, but there was no indication of a struggle. Freeman sat down willingly.”
Hyde cocked his head to one side. “So, no sign of forced entry means he knew the killer and let them in, then when the killer started to threaten him, Freeman did whatever his captor said. Did he have any previous charges against him? Maybe it was an act of revenge for something he did earlier in his life.”
“He was a cop in his heyday,” Linda told him, “so, no charges, but I suppose someone he arrested could’ve wanted him dead.”
Like his own case, something didn’t sit right with Hyde. “But wouldn’t they have brought their own weapon? Why use Freeman’s own gun if their ultimate plan was to kill him?”
Linda hesitated in her response, as if that point hadn’t occurred to her, and she began to dig through the papers on her desk, tossing them aside after glancing at them for only a second.
“Maybe the plan wasn’t to kill him.” She uttered, still digging.
Eventually, she settled on a page with paragraphs of text, and Hyde recognized the report immediately. It was a witness’s statement. Without looking at him, Linda skimmed the page.
“Here,” she breathed, “Freeman’s neighbor got home late Sunday night, around eleven-forty-five, and reported seeing a black SUV parked on the curb near Freeman’s house. Now, the time of death was reported to be at about two in the morning. A few hours later, the car was gone.”
“The car belonged to the killer.” Hyde filled in the gaps. “And clearly, they wanted something from Freeman.”
Linda groaned. “But nothing was taken, remember? There wasn’t even a sign that anything was moved.”
Hyde shrugged. “They could’ve wanted information. You said Freeman used to be a cop, right? I’m sure he knew a lot of things that a newly freed criminal would’ve wanted.”
“That’s actually pretty insightful.” Linda admitted, something that, if she hadn’t been neck-deep in papers and failed leads, would’ve caused her physical pain to say aloud. She wasn’t known for handing out compliments around the precinct. “Though, that begs the question, what were they after?”
At that, Hyde had no answers. He had never heard of this Freeman fellow, so he wasn’t sure what information he’d have that an ex-criminal would want. For now, it seemed up to Linda to figure that out, and in the meantime, she could help him with his snag.
“You’ll have to do some digging for that. Question every one of the people he arrested.” Hyde told her.
She groaned and rolled her eyes. “Great. You know, sometimes I really hate this job. There’s a murderer on the loose, and I’ve got to sit in here and collect stories from a bunch of criminals.”
He ignored the urge to fight her point and instead said, “Well, since you’ve got some time to kill, would you mind helping me with my case?”
“I don’t know how much help I’ll be.” She sighed.
Hyde jerked his thumb over his shoulder and motioned her along. “Come on, just take a look.”
Together, they walked to his desk, which, like Linda’s, was a mess of papers and folders and pens haphazardly strewn across the surface. He wasn’t as organized as he normally was, but he dumped most of the blame on that itch in the back of his head that he still couldn’t scratch.
“Here, just read through some of the reports and give me your first impression.” He instructed her.
She did as she was told and sat down in his chair. For several minutes, they were both silent, and her brow was furrowed in fierce determination as she went through report after report, the gears in her mind spinning faster and faster. In the end, when she finally sat back in the chair, her expression was anything but hopeful.
She shook her head. “It looks like she ran away to me, Hyde.”
He frowned. “But don’t you think it’s all too cut and dry? You saw Jamie’s description, right? As far as I can tell, she had no reason to run off.”
“Sometimes people do unexpected things. Maybe she was sick of being in Graycott.” She offered.
“Look at this,” Hyde commanded, and he shuffled through the papers until he found the ones he’d printed— the reports of disappearances that had happened over the past five years.
Linda flipped through them, not bothering to slow down to read them. “I don’t get it.”
“All of these people have gone missing over the past five years, same circumstances as Jamie. No one knows where they went, they just vanished, and there’s no evidence at all to explain what happened. Many of them were labeled as runaways, but I was looking at some of the interviews that were conducted, and ninety-four percent said that the victims had no reason to run off.”
“That’s great,” Linda replied, “but it doesn’t prove anything. Like you said, there’s no evidence—”
Hyde cut her off swiftly, “And that’s the other thing! There is absolutely no evidence. No credit card usage, no stolen cars, not even a paper trail to follow. Cellphone locations turned up inconclusive. There should be something, right? There’s always something.”
“Using cash means no need for credit cards, hitchhiking negates stealing cars, going through shady, shadow-operations means any paper trail wouldn’t ever exist, and taking out the SIM card of a phone stops the location from being tracked.” Linda ticked off the refutations one finger at a time, and though Hyde knew she was just trying to be helpful, in her own way, he still felt a twinge of frustration twist his insides.
Deftly, he plucked one of the missing persons reports from the desk and practically shoved it in her face. “You really think fourteen-year-old Elijah Dunn would have the connections to disappear off the face of the earth?”
“The internet is a big place, Hyde.”
“But none of these people had any reason to want to disappear!”
Linda shrugged. “Everyone has their demons, Hyde. Most you can’t see. I wish I could help, but I just don’t see a case here. It’s a weird coincidence for sure, but until you get some solid evidence, that’s all it is.”
With that, she stood and walked off back to her desk, and as he watched her go, a part of him wanted to scream. It wasn’t that he was angry at her, he knew she’d have helped him if there was a way she could’ve, it was that he was angrier at what he couldn’t do himself, and anything he could do wouldn’t be supported by even those closest to him. He was well and truly on his own.
Hyde dropped into his chair and slumped down, wondering if maybe declaring Jamie a runaway truly was the way to go. It was what most of the precinct had suggested to him, and he’d been stubborn, but if he was being truthful with himself, he couldn’t see the case going anywhere else. With the lack of evidence, Jamie’s case was rapidly losing media coverage, and eventually she’d fade away until all that was left was a name whispered in the wind like an urban legend.
He was afraid that, if he let the case slip away, a part of him would go with it, and for the rest of his life it’d come back to haunt him like the demons Linda had mentioned. It’d be something that he’d never be able to forget no matter how many shots he downed and sleepless nights he toiled through, something that would plague him until the end of his days. In his mind, he didn’t just see Jamie’s smiling face, he saw Elijah’s and Bethany’s and Tyrone’s, plus the others whose names blended together like colors in a paint bucket.
Young Elijah, one of the first things put on his missing persons poster was that he suffered a terrible stutter, something he’d heard had caused him a bit of trouble in school. From what a previous detective had recorded, the bullying had been frequent, but not brutal, and even his older brother, Kyle, had stated that he didn’t think it was any reason for Elijah to disappear. According to the few friends Elijah had had, they’d all reported that he was well-liked despite his stutter. Still, Hyde felt that the reports didn’t do Elijah justice.
As much as he didn’t want to admit that Elijah had run away, Hyde had been bullied extensively when he’d been in school, so he knew just how much it hurt to not feel accepted in a place he’d spent a majority of his time. Though he hadn’t considered abandoning his home, he couldn’t say the same for Elijah without making some major assumptions. Elijah had been dealing with his own problems, and whether or not those had gotten the better of him, he couldn’t say for sure.
Hyde paused.
His heart thudded in his chest, and he quickly sifted through the missing persons reports Linda had seen, searching for particular information. Linda had offhandedly mentioned that people suffered from their own demons, and that was most likely their hidden reasons for wanting to disappear, but he had also pointed out that that had been too obvious to him. It was so easy to say they’d run off, but what if that was exactly what their kidnappers wanted it to look like? It wasn’t just a myth that serial killers chose specific victims, people that were connected in some way, shape, or form, and it wasn’t limited to killers, either. Even kidnappers chose particular people, so what if their criteria for victims were what inner demons they were battling?
Bethany Miller’s file was clutched tightly in his hands, and he flipped it open to read. Sure enough, there was a paragraph dedicated to how she’d been diagnosed with depression at the ripe age of twelve, and she bounced from therapist to therapist and from medication to medication. She’d been admitted to a mental hospital after a failed suicide attempt at the age of fifteen, and after spending several weeks there, she was finally released and returned home. Two months after that, just after her sixteenth birthday, she disappeared. That had been three years ago, and some people thought she ran off, while others thought she finally did succeed in ending her own life, but a body was never found. Either way, Bethany had been dealing with her own problems.
Setting her file aside, Hyde dug around for Tyrone’s. He had vanished four months before Bethany, had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and, like Bethany, had not been receiving the help he needed. Though he hadn’t spent any time in a mental ward, Tyrone hadn’t had the healthiest of lives, and the interviews with his parents revealed he hadn’t been in a good headspace since he was little. Then, when he’d disappeared, they believed he’d simply given up on living a normal life. There was no evidence to suggest his supposed fate, just as there was no evidence to suggest he’d left town.
It was a vague connection at best, but it was all Hyde had, and he spent the next hour reviewing the other twelve missing persons cases he’d found, and in every single one, the victim had suffered from some kind of “demon,” as he’d begun to label it. There was something that they all suffered through, whether it be depression, or a stutter that induced bullying, or anything else that made their lives a living hell. Despite his excitement to have found a deeper connection between them all, it was all just coincidence like Linda had stated until he could get concrete proof, and on top of that, there was still Jamie’s case.
As far as he could tell, there was nothing about Jamie that he could classify as a “demon” no matter how many times he read over her file. She was the odd ball. The one that broke the pattern, and if the pattern was broken, then it could be argued that there was no pattern at all, just a grouping of strange similarities. The other thing Hyde had noticed while reviewing all these files was that, in the beginning, the disappearances happened pretty frequently. In the first year, eight people went missing. In the second year, five people went missing. In the third year, three people went missing, with the last one being Elijah. Then, two years passed with no disturbances until Jamie.
So, what was it about her that had caught the attention of these kidnappers, assuming there were kidnappers in the first place? What demon was she wrestling with that connected her to all the others? How did she fit into the pattern? All the afflictions the others had had been documented, they’d been recorded either by the parents or by a doctor of some kind, but what if whatever she was dealing with had never been detected or written down? He’d played with the idea before when he’d spoken to Clint Saunders and his friends, but they’d all assured him that nothing of the sort was going on. Still, at this point, he had to go at this from every angle.
On his computer, rather than search for information about Jamie, he typed in her mother’s name, Riley Cardew, and he was surprised to find an old inquiry that she’d submitted concerning her daughter almost three years ago. As he read, he learned that her mother had found several bruises on Jamie’s upper arms, and she was worried that kids at school were doing this to her, as it had been the start of her freshman year at Rose Lake, but it seemed the investigation had yielded nothing. They were never able to determine where the bruises had come from, and after the inquiry was made, they never appeared again. Or, at least, another complaint was never filed.
Hyde clicked on the pictures of the bruising, taken from all different angles, and the more he studied them, the more he saw how oval-shaped they were, and how there were five on each arm. Ten bruises for ten fingers. A bubble of nausea formed in his stomach. He was jumping to conclusions again, but he couldn’t deny this new information.
The very next thing he searched for was Jamie’s father, a man by the name of Neil Bonner. From what he could see, however, Neil and Riley had divorced when Jamie was very young, but a year and a half ago, Riley had married a man named Peter Cardew after dating for about the same length of time. Both mother and daughter had opted to take Peter’s last name. Still, that didn’t explain the bruises.
He typed in Peter’s name, a part of him searching for an old criminal background, but there was nothing. The man was as clean as a bar of soap, and a pretty vanilla one, too. There was nothing to suggest that he was doing anything other than living happily with his wife and stepdaughter, but once again there was that incessant itch in the back of his mind, and the longer he idled, the worse it got. He couldn’t go around making accusations without proof.
So, get some proof, he thought. He had two options in front of him: he could either get a warrant to search the Cardews’ house, something that would take a few days, or he could ask Peter himself if he could look around. If Peter had nothing to hide, then he’d most likely say yes immediately, especially if the search was related to finding Jamie. Anything to help my little girl, he’d probably say. A shiver ran down Hyde’s spine, and he rose from his desk more determined than ever. He was going to get some actual, tangible information, whether it helped him find Jamie or not, but he was convinced now that he couldn’t possibly drop the case. He could excuse a coincidence, but not this many. The demons and the bruises were just too alluring for him to ignore, and he felt that if he didn’t look into it at all, he’d be doing a major disservice to Jamie and her family.
He wanted to find her just as much as they did, but he wanted to know the entire story before everyone rejoiced and let the traumatizing experience fade into memory. If she was suffering, he needed to expose it.
He marched past Linda’s desk towards the door, and he heard her snort behind him.
“Where are you going so determined-like?” She demanded, stifling a smile.
He patted his pocket, the keys to his car faintly jingling. “I’m going to go search the Cardews’ house.”
“Without a warrant?” She asked. “That’s awfully presumptuous of you.”
He nodded. “If they’ve got nothing to hide, then they won’t mind me poking around.”
Hyde turned to leave, but she quickly jumped up from her chair, darting around the desk to catch him before he could saunter off.
“‘Nothing to hide’? What does that mean?” She questioned.
“It means what I said.” He replied curtly, stepping past her, but she held up a hand to stop him.
“Hyde, stop for a minute.” Her voice took on an authoritative, detective-tone, and he hesitated. “What are you doing?”
He pointed towards the door. “I’m investigating a missing person.”
“And you think the family has something to do with it?” Though it was a question, Linda said it like a declarative statement.
“I think I need to do some more digging.” Hyde adeptly avoided the question. “Now, if you don’t mind—”
“I do mind, actually.” She snapped. “Hyde, think about this first. Is this really the right thing to do?”
“Why do you care? You weren’t this interested in my case earlier.” He barked.
She set her jaw. “Think about how this will reflect the precinct. Their daughter is missing, and you’re suspecting them of foul play? With no evidence?”
He narrowed his eyes, more anger seeping into his words. “They won’t know I’m investigating them. For all they know, I just want to look through Jamie’s room. And like I said earlier, if they have nothing to hide, then they won’t mind me searching.”
“And if they do?”
“Then I’ll have a reason to get a warrant.” He spat. “Now, move.”
Without waiting for her, he shoved past her and headed for the door, but at the edge of freedom, he felt her hand grab his shoulder.
“I’m coming with you.” She declared.
He snorted. “Like hell you are. You’re homicide, anyway, and I prefer to work alone.”
“Not if you’re going to screw this up.” Linda hissed. “Look, I know you’re under a lot of pressure with this case, and I know you want to solve it, and even though I don’t think anything else is going on here, I trust your intuition. I’ll support you.”
For a moment, Hyde almost didn’t know what to say. In the span of just a few seconds, she’d made the anger he’d felt seem irrational, and as her concerned eyes searched his, he found that he was almost grateful for her offer. She was right, after all, about the pressure he was under, and it was a change to hear that someone had his back, especially when he’d thought she didn’t want anything to do with this case.
“Fine.” He sighed. “But you have to follow my every lead, got it? This is my case.”
Linda didn’t say a word, and when he walked out the door without a single glance over his shoulder, she kept close to his heels.
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Submitted December 02, 2019 at 02:14AM by BraveLittleAnt https://ift.tt/2qUSiPo
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