Walk in Darkness - A Thriller (Jon Stanton Mysteries) (11 page)

“Sure.”

As he walked out, he noticed the receptionist had left and there
was a note on the computer. The password was GETMONEY.

23

The trip to the zoo was hurried but the boys enjoyed it. Stanton took them directly to the big cat exhibit and from there they explored the rest of zoo before going out for pizza and then heading home. They were supposed to spend the night but their mother was going to visit her parents in Napa and wanted them back for an early flight the next day. He dropped them off and they hugged and kissed him before running to their mother’s arms. Melissa waved from the porch but didn’t come down.

Afterward, he felt relaxed as he always did after spending time with his family. Though the beach was calling to him, there was something else he felt he had to do.
Though getting dark, he drove to the Aviary’s home and parked up the street about twenty feet, just far enough away that he could still see into the house but they wouldn’t notice him.

Stanton listened to a jazz station on the
radio, and after twenty minutes an old silver Mustang pulled into the driveway. A man in khakis and a button-down plaid shirt stepped out and got his two daughters out of the back. They were close in age and Stanton couldn’t tell which was Tracey.

As the two girls got out the man teased them about something and pinned one of them against the car and began to tickle her. The other one ran up from behind and jumped on his back, laughing, and the man feigned a heart attack and fell over onto the hood of the car.

When they had stopped laughing the girls went into the house as the man took out a rag and began wiping down a few places on the car.

Stanton flipped through Sarah’s file and found the photos the parents had given him. There were a few recent ones, but he got out the second grade picture of her smiling widely with a missing front tooth. He got out of the car and walked down to the man.

“Hi,” he said.

“Can I help you with something?”

Stanton resisted the urge to pull out his badge. “I’m Jon Stanton with the San Diego PD.”

“Oh, you’re the cop. Yeah, my wife told me about you. I think she already told you to—”

“Talk to your lawyer, I know. I’m very familiar with your lawyer already.” He turned to the car. “Sixty-eight?”

“Sixty-seven.”

Stanton whistled. “My grandfather used to work on old muscle cars in the summer when I went to their ranch. He used to let me drive around a sixty-nine COPO Chevelle.”

“You’re kidding me? I would give my arm for a COPO
Chevell. They only made around three hundred of ‘em.”

“I know that now. He offered me either that or a horse for my sixteenth birthday and I chose the horse.”

“Holy shit,” he chuckled, “that sucks.”

“What can you do?” Stanton paused a moment, admiring the car. “What’s your name?”

“Robert. You can call me Bob.”

“Bob, I know what you guys are worried about. If Tracey was my daughter, I’d be worried too. But I promise you I am not interested in getting her into any trouble. I just want to find who killed Sarah.”

“Killed? I thought she was just missing?”

“She is. I’m sorry, I should be more careful with my words. She is just missing. But she’s been missing a long time and we haven’t found a trace of evidence relating to her disappearance. The likelihood of her being alive is almost non-existent. For all intents and purposes, I have to treat this like a homicide.”

Bob shook his head and leaned against the car. “Damn shame. She was a nice girl.”

Stanton pulled out the photo and a pen and wrote his number on the back. “Please just hang on to this. I know you don’t want me to talk to Tracey but if you ever get the chance, if you could ask her if she knows anything about Sarah’s disappearance, I would consider it a personal favor. And I remember all my favors.”

Bob took the photo and paused just a second too long before lowering it.

I’ve got you,
Stanton thought.

“Can’t do it, Detective. I’m sorry. My wife would kill me.”

“I understand.” He began backing up, staring at the car. “Love the car.”

Stanton walked to his car without looking back. He had hit the wrong target inadvertently. The mother was in all likelihood the one allowing the sex parties and Bob
might not even know about them. Once he found out, Stanton doubted he would stick around. The love he showed for his daughters was genuine and he guessed the mother was actually a step-mother. He liked Bob and he wished he could turn around and tell him right now what was going on, but he wouldn’t believe him. The potential people had to be willfully blind always amazed him.

Stanton turned on his car and drove up the street past the Aviary’s house. He saw Bob still standing by the Mustang, staring at the photo in his hand.

24

The next day Stanton woke up early and went surfing. The waves were slight but
enough to propel him in to shore. They were more the waves that allowed time to think and meditate rather than focus on your actions. The water was cold from a coming storm farther out to sea, but the sun was bright and there were plenty of people about.

Stanton struck up a conversation with a woman on the beach who had asked him where he learned to surf and he described the lessons his mother had put him in when he was young. She asked if he would be willing to teach her and he politely declined. There was something about surfing and its lessons he kept completely to himself. He wasn’t selfish in many areas, but this was one thing he shared with few people.

Afterward he went to church at his local ward. The sacrament meeting started a few minutes late due to some ward business. Apparently an elderly woman’s husband had passed away and she had no family out here to take care of her. A sign-up sheet went around to bring her meals, mow her lawn, or just spend some time with her and keep her company. By the time the sheet got to Stanton, it was already full. He wrote on the back that he would be happy to spend some time with her and keep her company.

After sacrament, they broke into lessons, and then into elder’s quorum for the men and relief society for the women. It was a good lesson taught by a local engineer: the Mormon
Church had no professional clergy and all lessons were taught by laymen.

As he was leaving he found a lighter out in the parking lot.
Small and silver with intricate engravings on it. He walked it back to the lost and found and the clerk, an elderly woman with thick glasses, looked at it and said, “Keep it.” He thought about throwing it away, but the engravings were so detailed he felt like it would be a shame. He stuck it into his pocket.

After church, Stanton began to drive to Melissa’s house to see the boys when he remembered that she was out of town. So instead he drove home and decided to read out on his balcony. He opened his i
Pad to a copy of Camus’
The Plague
, a book he had read over a dozen times, and began on the first page.

By the time he looked up, it was getting dark and traffic on the street below was dying down. He stretched and stood up, feeling the breeze hit his face as he watched the waves roll into shore. A few bonfires went up on the beach and it made him smile.

He went inside and looked at the television, but decided he was too tired and went to bed. Something was keeping him up and tying his stomach in knots but he couldn’t tell what it was. Before he could figure it out, he drifted off and fell asleep.

The sound of his cell phone woke Stanton and he jarred awake, his eyes adjusting to the darkness and the dim light of the moon that was coming through the windows. He turned to his nightstand and answered.

“Hello?”

“Jon. I’m sorry to wake you. This is Bob. Um, Aviary, from today.”

“I remember. What’s going on, Bob?”

“I talked to Tracey.” Bob was whispering and the sound had a slight echo. Stanton guessed he was in a bathroom. “She told me that Sarah had been hanging out with some guy nobody else knew. She said he was older, but she doesn’t know how much older. I asked who this guy was but she didn’t know. She did say he would come by the school every Wednesday and walk Sarah home. He worked Wednesdays nearby I guess.”

Stanton frantically wrote everything down on the notepad app on his i
Pad. He repeated the phrase, “Wednesdays at school, probably worked nearby,” to himself until he finally got it down into the document and hit the save button.

“Was there anything else she told you, Bob?”

“Not really. Just that the guy was pretty good looking and young.”

“I really appreciate this. I promise it’ll stay between us.”

“Thanks.” He hesitated. “And, Detective, if you catch the bastard, you don’t let him get away with it. You hear me?”

“I do. Thanks again.”

“No problem.”

After he hung up Stanton attempted to sleep again but was far too excited. Instead, he went out on the balcony in his undergarment t-shirt and boxer shorts and began researching Sarah’s school and businesses within a mile radius of it. Then he began to re-read the file for anything he had missed.

The sun came up a few hours later, but he didn’t notice.

25

Monday morning at the San Diego Police Northern Division was about as busy as it got. Drunks and meth-heads from the weekend that had been locked up in the tank were being released and detectives were assigned new cases at the morning briefing.

Stanton sat in the back row next to a detective that everyone referred to as Slim Jim because he was a hundred and fifty-eight pounds and six foot one. He was dressed in a rumpled gray suit and reeked of alcohol. He mixed sugar and milk into coffee and Stanton heard him burp before he took a sip.

“Hate these fucking things,” Slim Jim said. “In Hollywood they upload new cases for you in your
Dropbox and you meet with the brass when you want to.”

“I heard they also do a lot of cocaine from the evidence lockers. That true?”

He shrugged.

Childs was at the front of the room talking about a drug bust the precinct narcs unit w
as handling with the DEA. A meth lab consisting of four homes on the same block. The homes had been bought by a single individual and only one of them was supposed to contain the labs. The other three were cover so there would be no neighbors.

“You believe that shit?” Slim Jim said. “I’d fuck a horse to buy half a house in that neighborhood and some
tweeker fuck’s got four of ‘em.”

“Not for long.”

“Gentlemen,” Childs said, looking at them, “something you’d like to share with the class?”

“No, sir,” Slim Jim said.

“Good. Then keep your mouths shut and listen up. You may not be risking your ass on this raid but some of us are so show some damned respect.”

“Sorry, sir.”

The meeting continued for another half hour and concluded with Childs asking Stanton to stay a little while afterward. As the other officers filed out, he came to the front of the room and pulled up a chair as Childs finished closing windows on his laptop and turning the projector off.

“Heard you
workin’ the Putnam disappearances again.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Is it important?”

“I’d like to know.”

“School cop at the Huntington Academy called me. He wanted to make sure you was on the up and up.”

“Danny, I’m close. I’ve got something right now that wasn’t in the initial investigation. I need to follow up on it.”

“We’re getting our asses sued right now. You should’a told me you was doin’ this. It’s gotta stop.”

“I just need another couple of weeks. I can even do it on my own time.”

“No deal. Some piece a shit reporter finds out you’re still investigating and the papers the next day say we think Putnam’s innocent and we killed the wrong man.”

“I didn’t kill him.”

“To the public, you may as well have.” He closed his laptop and put it in his bag before slinging it over his shoulder. “I’m serious about this; this comes straight from the chief. No more investigating that shit.”

“What if we were wrong?” Stanton said as Childs was nearly out the door. “What if we chased the wrong guy and the one who took those girls is still out there?”

“Then Lord forgive us, Jon. But until then, leave the fucking cases alone.”

Stanton drove by Woodrow Wilson Elementary and felt a tug of guilt as he parked his car across the street. This was Sarah’s old school and the last place on earth anyone had seen her alive. Childs had given him a direct order and disobeying that order was enough to be on desk duty meeting with the crazies that inevitably come into the station wanting to file complaints against aliens raping them or the CIA sending them messages or their neighbor being a member of the KGB. Childs might even suspend him without pay just to teach him a lesson. Childs was from a military background and didn’t tolerate flagrant disobeying of orders.

Stanton waited around through recess, left for lunch
, and came back and waited another two and half hours before school let out for the day. He had received twenty emails during that time and he attempted to return each of them. The kids began to file out and he put his phone down.

He scanned the perimeter of the school, looking around the edges of the fence and in the parking lot. Who he was looking for wouldn’t stand out. There wouldn’t be tattoos going from his face to his genitals, there wouldn’t be piercings around the base of his neck or a gun protruding from underneath his shirt. He would appear normal
, almost inconspicuous. And after his arrest everyone that knew him would be shocked that he could have committed such atrocious crimes. Everyone except the people that really knew him, his mother and his wife. They might be willfully blind, but somewhere, swimming in the middle of all the denial and self-loathing, they had accepted that something was wrong with him. Of course, they would never tell a living soul about their concerns until it was too late.

Other than the standard crowd of parents, there was no one.
No one near the fences, no one on the periphery or just happening to walk by on the sidewalk. As soon as the kids had cleared out, Stanton started his car and left. He would come back on Wednesday.