Coming Back (13 page)

Dean

The first half of my shift was spent cruising or walking the streets, just to be out and about in the community, being seen by the people.  Mid-morning, I got a text from Christie that stopped me in my tracks.

I’ll never forget everything you did for me, Dean.

I called her right back to make sure everything was still OK and she deflected everything, saying she’d see me on Saturday.  I made her promise.

It was early afternoon with my lunch at my desk when I was finally able to start the task that was the main reason for waking up today.  I’d been up late into the night trying to figure out how best to tackle it and decided it all had to start with a map.

Bringing up a map of the area around the Black Ridge Gas ‘n’ Snack at the edge of the forest on the computer, I printed it off and retrieved it from the beat-up multi-function printer in the corner.  I grabbed my calculator, looked at the scale on the map, and sighed.  This was going to rely on a lot of assumptions.

According to Christie’s statements, she had no idea how long she’d fled through the woods, but it was multiple days and nights.  She did know that she brought no food except for a chocolate bar and sixty to seventy ounces of water in a bottle.

How long could somebody go on such meager supplies?  Plus with food poisoning?  Most people would probably go a day or two, but for the sake of a worst-case scenario, I estimated seven days.

I knew from my occasional hikes that a fit person packing reasonably light could do two to three miles per hour.  At eight solid hours a day, that was maybe one hundred and sixty-eight miles over the course of a week.

Looking down at the map, I imagined a circle with a scaled one hundred and sixty-eight mile radius drawn on it, with the Black Ridge Gas ‘n’ Snack in the center.  My heart sank when I estimated the area of forest within that circle at thousands of square miles.

That wasn’t all that needed to be taken into consideration though.  Christie had packed
extremely
light, she was also very fit, and a lot of the time she was running for her life, which might push that hourly mileage up.  There was also no telling whether she’d been going for eight hours a day or even more.

On the other hand, there was that food poisoning holding her back, plus a lot of that forest was mighty dense and she wasn’t following a trail.  The reality of being lost in the forest was that you didn’t go in a straight line, you zigzagged all over the place, went in circles, doubled back on yourself, and went sideways trying to find a place to cross rivers.

Running for your life would take even more concentration away from staying in a straight line.  Plus, by the end of it all, she wasn’t running.  Christie had
crawled
out of that forest.

Erring on what I considered the extreme high end of all the assumptions, I upped my original numbers to nine hours a day at three miles an hour.  That made the radius one hundred and eighty-nine miles, a marathon a day for a week.  Ridiculous, but what if it was possible?

I pulled out a compass, one used for drawing circles rather than finding north, from my drawer, set it to the appropriate size against the scale, and then used it to draw on the map the area where that house in the woods might be located.

It was a nearly impossibly large search area.  At some points, if Christie had actually managed any kind of straight line, she could have come from the opposite edge of the forest.  More likely it was closer to the Black Ridge side, but it was still in my assumed realm of possibility.

Christie’s statements indicated that the guy didn’t spend all of his time at the house in the woods; rather, he actually came and went most days.  So he needed to drive as close as he could and get through the forest to the house some other way.

I looked at all the points where the circle I drew came close to the edge of the forest or actually off the edge and found the nearby roads.  Tracing them about as far as you could drive in a couple of hours, I wrote down a list of all the cities and towns with populations that seemed large enough to have a hospital.

I had thought about searching for Chinese restaurants, but they were far more numerous and existed in far smaller towns.  If the food poisoning was from a restaurant and it was bad enough, a hospital would have been made aware of it.

After an hour of online searches, I was armed with a list two pages long of hospitals and the respective phone numbers close to centers of population that were themselves within driving distance of the forest.  I started at the top.

“Good afternoon, Millwoods Hospital, Jane speaking.  How can I help you?”

“Hi Jane, this is Dean Hawking from Warfields Police over in Missouri, I’m hoping you can put me through to somebody who can help me find some information,” I said.

“What kind of information are you after, sir?”

“I need to know if you treated anybody for food poisoning in August of last year.”

“Hmmm, well, we almost certainly did, it happens all the time.”

“Right.  Um… I’m specifically looking for food poisoning that resulted from undercooked chicken… that’s salmonella, I think, from a Chinese restaurant.”

“I see.  We can’t give patient information out over the phone, you understand-“

“Yes, yes, of course.  I’m not looking for any personal info at this stage, just trying to narrow down my search.  If you can help, that would be great.  I’m working in conjunction with the FBI on this one.” I rolled my eyes at the name drop. “So if required, we can get all the necessary paperwork together once we know which hospital or hospitals we need to get information from.”

“OK, well, that kind of information might be recorded in the doctor’s notes, but I don’t have access to them.  Please hold, I’ll try to find somebody who can look that up for you,” Jane said.

I drummed my fingers on my desk in time with the hold music, some watered-down version of a hit from the eighties suitable for an elevator.  The first person they put me through to couldn’t help me, although I did have to give the disclaimer again about not needing personal information yet, and once more to the third person I spoke to.

I left my contact details with them when they said it would take them a little while to go through the records and then moved on to the next in the list.  The conversations went much the same until shortly before six o’clock in the evening when I was just about ready to call it a night.

“August last year?” asked the hospital receptionist.  “Yes, absolutely, that was a big month for food poisoning.”

“Big how?” I asked.

“We treated most of the people from that Golden Dragon thing.”

I felt my skin prickle.  Before continuing, I had to lick my lips.  This felt
big
.  “Is the Golden Dragon, perhaps, a Chinese Restaurant?”

“Yes, it was big news around here.  You don’t remember?”

“No, I’m over in Missouri.”

“I see.  Well yeah, lots of people got salmonellosis, and that one girl…”

I held the handset hard against my ear and held my pen poised over my pad of paper.  “Where is that restaurant?”

“Oh, it’s here, a few blocks away on Fifth.  They’re closed down now though, probably for good.  The ambulance chaser is going for blood.”

“They’re getting sued?”

“Into the ground.  Hey, you want his contact details?  He threw his cards out here like they were confetti every day for a month after people started coming in.  He’s representing a whole bunch of the victims.”

“Yes please.”

“OK, please hold, I’ll find one and be right back.”

Once again I was subjected to an awful version of an old song while I waited, but I hardly even heard it this time.  This felt
right
.

Dean

Much to my frustration, it turned out that the lawyer, Lanford Bannerman, had finished up for the night and was unreachable.  Despite the hospital receptionist’s comment, I tried the number listed for the Golden Dragon and found it to be just as disconnected as she had thought it would be.  There was also no answer from the owners’ cell or landline.

I thought about continuing through the list of hospitals, but every bone in my body told me this was what I was looking for.  Instead, I decided to call it a night and try the lawyer and restaurant owners again first thing in the morning.

My head felt hot with a rush of blood into my brain, the gears churning with possibilities when I tracked these people down.  This could be the lead that gave Christie some closure.  She deserved that peace.

When I arrived home, King picked up on my nerves and reminded me that he still considered himself a puppy, getting all bouncy and finding a ball and short tug-o-war rope for us to play with.  He wolfed his dinner down, but I was too on edge to get through much of mine.

Christie had visited my house often enough that it seemed to retain a faint hint of her perfume, her presence.  We’d made some happy memories inside these walls in the short time we’d had so far.  Truth be told, I was starting to think of it as our place rather than just mine.  Every breath reminded me of her, of everything I’d learned over the past two days, and my mind absolutely would not relax.

It was a long night and I had trouble sleeping.  King seemed to be troubled as well, often scrabbling to his feet so I could see his head over the foot of my bed as he stared off into the darkness, listening to something.

Sometimes he would whine and go out to patrol the house, sometimes he would lie back down into a fretful rest.  It was odd behavior, even for him, and it kind of made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up a little.

I joined him on one of the household patrols, pulling back the curtains on the windows on each side of the house to peek out.  There was nothing I could see, but I had this creepy feeling anyway like I was being watched, half-expecting to see a face pressed against the glass.

In the end, by hook or by crook, I managed some sleep and the disturbed night didn’t seem to hold King back when we went for our run in the morning.  My mind was elsewhere though, and as soon as humanly possible, I was back at my desk for work despite not being scheduled that day, holding myself back until the clock struck eight-thirty.

“Good morning, Lanford Bannerman.”

“Good morning, Mr. Bannerman, this is Dean Hawking speaking, with the Warfields Police Department.”

“Ah, yes, Officer Hawking, I just listened to your voicemail a few minutes ago,” said Bannerman.

“Sorry to call so early, but I was hoping you might be able to help me out?”

“Well, perhaps, but I’m not sure exactly how you’re involved with all this.  Are you able to fill me in a bit?”

“I have a... victim who was abducted some time ago but who has now, thankfully, escaped.  In August of last year, she was fed some chicken from a Chinese restaurant and…”

“And she got food poisoning, and you think it might be related to the Golden Dragon,” Bannerman finished for me.

“Exactly, she was near-ish the area.”

“OK.  What can I do for you?”

“I understand you’re representing several of the people who ate the contaminated food?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“I haven’t managed to get through to the owners yet, but I’d like to get my hands on any information that I can regarding who was at the restaurant that day.  Security footage, debit and credit transactions…”

“Well, we have a bit of a problem there, Officer.  I am the legal representative, so my clients’ information is privileged.  I can’t share anything.”

My heart sank.  “I’d really…”

“However,” he continued, “I have already done a hell of a lot of legwork on this, as I’m sure you can appreciate.”

“Sure…”

“What I
do
have is a list of people who made purchases on their cards that day whom I haven’t been able to track down or whom I am
not
representing.  Maybe that would give you something to work on while you wait to hear from the owners?”

“Yes!  Thank you, Mr. Bannerman.”

I gave him my official police email address and tried the owners of the restaurant again while I waited for his email.  By the time I’d failed to get through on the landline and mobile numbers again, I saw his message had come through with an attachment and a short note wishing me luck.

When I opened the file, I had a sinking feeling.  It seemed that the Golden Dragon had been a pretty popular restaurant.  Worse than that, when I copied the first name into the driver’s license search, there were over a dozen potential matches.

It felt like I was at the bottom of a steep mountain that disappeared into the clouds far above me.  I brought some coffee back to my desk and decided to skim through all the license photos for each name to see if anything jumped out at me.

At the same time, I’d cross any obvious mismatches off like women and elderly customers, just so I could have some kind of priorities when I went through it a second time and delved deeper.  It was not going to be fun.

After seven hours of scanning through the details of hundreds of people, I had a short list of ten guys that struck me as being of interest, the kind of men that looked like they had a mean streak in them.  On these ones, I did a search for prior arrests and found a couple that had records.  Most didn’t.

The monotony of it all made my head feel like it was stuffed with cotton wool.  I was starting to think of the next cup of coffee when a driver’s license came up with a photo that chilled me as much as any mugshot ever had.

I didn’t want to judge a book by its cover, but this wasn’t the kind of face you’d ever want to meet in a dark alley.  It might be the last thing you ever saw.

When I entered his details into the system, I was presented with a laundry list of offences, including drugs, assault against former girlfriends, members of the public and arresting officers, and, worst of all, a conviction for rape that had resulted in a pitifully short sentence.  A shiver ran down my spine.

I wrote his name, Kodey Garrod, down on my list and put an asterisk next to it.  I was about to exit the screen when I noticed an alert and clicked through to another page.

My brow furrowed as I read the information there.  Apparently, Kodey had been reported missing in September of last year by his landlord, who seemed to have done a lot of work trying to track him and his back-rent down before reporting it to the police.

According to the report, nobody had seen him for several weeks by the time the police started looking into it.  There were no signs of a struggle at Kodey’s apartment, or anywhere relevant to him, but it was still an open Missing Persons case.  I sat back and ran my hand through my hair, trying to wrap my head around it.  That was
awfully
close to when Christie turned up again.

Sitting forward again, I clicked back to his driver’s license details and copied the number to do another search.  My mouse cursor turned from an arrow into a little hourglass and I tapped my fingers impatiently on my desk while I waited.

Sometimes when people went missing, it’s because they
wanted
to go missing.  In those cases, we’d periodically do a search for any activity on their Social Security numbers, driver’s license, bank accounts, and credit cards to see if they turned up, perhaps setting up a new life for themselves across the country.

Nine times out of ten, these searches yielded nothing. 
This
time, I had to stare at the screen for almost half a minute before I could believe what I was seeing.

Kodey Garrod had paid for a rental car and provided his license as proof of I.D. in South Dakota yesterday. 
Yesterday
.

As I dialed the number for the car rental place, my mind was running a mile a minute.  Why in the hell would somebody, missing for half a year, go and rent a car
now
?

One thought forced its way into my mind and my knuckles went white on the handset.  What if this was
the
guy?  Christie didn’t have a police car parked outside her house round the clock anymore.  Had Kodey been waiting for the path to be all clear?

Through the earpiece, I heard the phone start ringing.  If I could get the license plate number of the car they rented to him, I would be one step closer to tracking him down.

I tried to convince myself that the timing of his disappearance was a coincidence, as was his return, but that feeling from last night, that creepy sense of something not right, someone watching, returned like cold fingers trailing along the back of my neck.

“Answer the phone,” I said through clenched teeth.