Richard Hale - Frozen Past

“He’s been one step ahead of us this whole time.”

He nodded. “We take it slow.”

“Do you want to call back up?”

“No. Do you?”

She grinned and shook her head.

He turned toward the house and whistled. “Here boy! Kujo! Fifi! Here girl!”

She said, “That’s great. Will you just open the gate.”

“Just making sure,” he said. “That book was creepy.”

He reached over and lifted the latch. The gate swung open slowly on rusty hinges. No dogs attacked. They approached the front door and knocked. Nothing. He motioned to the side of the house and she nodded. Weaving through the trash, they stepped over a rather large dirty bathtub and came up on the rear yard. A window was to his left. He looked inside, but the grime coating the glass made it impenetrable. Nothing inside made a sound.

The backyard was worse than the front and an ancient above ground pool sagged onto the back porch, the remaining water black with algae and whatever else had accumulated over the years. As he scanned the backyard, brown fur caught his eye. Victoria saw it too. She motioned to the right and they worked their way around the pool.

Two dogs lay next to each other just outside their doghouse. Jaxon could not tell the breeds. Their heads were missing. He drew his weapon and Victoria did the same.

He noticed the back sliding glass door was broken. He motioned toward it and they worked their way through the yard to the back door. Dirty, grey, sheer curtains blew in and out of the broken glass, but nothing inside made a sound. Jaxon pushed the curtains out of the way and entered the house. The smell assaulted him instantly.

Victoria followed and said under her breath, “Ah, Jesus.”

Jaxon didn’t expect to find anyone dangerous still in the house but he kept his weapon out just the same. They stepped into the kitchen and found dirty dishes and trash littered throughout the room. Pushing the door open into the living room the smell grew stronger and as Jaxon’s eyes adjusted to the gloom, he found the origin.

Two men and a woman were seated on a couch, bullet holes in their heads, flies buzzing around them. They looked to have been dead at least three days. Jaxon imagined the terror they must have felt as their killer lined them up and shot them one by one.

Victoria had moved to a hallway and he followed her down the short dark space. A door to the right yielded to a room full of junk. It was stacked to the ceiling in places with crap Jaxon remembered fondly growing up. Toy G.I. Joes, Atari game consoles, tricycles, big wheels, hundreds of board games, clothing. Jaxon could not believe these people had amassed so much useless crap over their pathetic lifetimes. And why had they kept it all?

The next room was locked. Jaxon felt along the top of the sill and found a key. He slipped it into the lock and it turned. They opened the door onto another world. A hacker’s dream realm laid out before them, computers and monitors and Ipads and PS3’s and Xbox360’s. Everything a computer geek could want. This computer geek was sitting is his chair in front of the three huge computer monitors arrayed across the littered desk. A video of a cat was playing on the screens, but the boy was not watching it. His head was missing.

The killer’s rage was now a living thing. It boiled inside of him, the heat building to a degree that he felt his intestines would burst from his soft belly, a boiling mass of shit and blood exploding from within him. He paced back and forth across the small motel room in Herndon, the pain inside him unable to let him rest. He had emptied his stomach contents completely over the last hour and though he had little left, he felt full of acid and bile. He needed a release.

They were keeping the girl close to their chests, holding and coddling her like a baby. She hadn’t left her house except to visit the boy, who he now knew to be behind the discovery of his cell phone number.

The boy and the hacker.

The hacker and the boy.

The hacker was not a problem any longer, but he still needed to be careful. He had to dispose of the boy. Lucas Neal Harrison had hung on long enough, and since he no longer needed him to entertain the girl and keep her distracted, the time had come, and his boiling rage would cool to a simmer once the boy was eliminated.

But first, he needed to send her a gift. She would be so happy to get it. He could see her face smiling as she held it and he would be in her life. He would know her even more. He moved the hacker’s head to the side of the freezer and grabbed the gift. It would only take a moment to wrap. The busy work cooled his insides and his roiling stomach calmed and grew silent. He sighed and thought only of her.

Jaxon stood outside the hacker’s home who he now knew belonged to one Bartholomew Jenson. The headless teen was more than likely Quentin Jenson, but since the head was not in the house, they would have to wait for fingerprint ID or DNA. The mother, Jeanette, had been the woman on the couch and the other male, Quentin’s older brother, John. All of them had rap sheets, including the hacker. Jaxon was confident it would only be a matter of minutes before they confirmed the headless kid’s identity.

Victoria was working with the Crime Scene Lab, trying to extract anything they could from the boy’s computer, but they had to collect any evidence from the room and the body before they could move the boy out and concentrate on the computers in the room. Initially, Victoria hadn’t been able to manipulate the main system to display anything other than the cat video where the feline tickled the ivories of a pink piano while a large mutt licked his balls in the background. Funny, but pretty much useless and annoying at this point. At least they could turn the sound off.

Jaxon had called the Harrison father and given him instructions so he could come and retrieve the two kids. They were a wreck and even the boy leaked a few tears when Victoria told him his friend and his friend’s family were dead. She didn’t provide specifics. The girl buried her face in Luke’s shoulder and sobbed until the father came and took them home. Jaxon gave explicit instructions to the man not to stop for anything. Take the kids straight to the house and do not leave until instructed. The girl was to remain at the Harrison’s until Jaxon came by to get her. The police officers stationed in the neighborhood would double their presence in front of both their houses. The father didn’t look impressed. “I have a gun,” he had said. Normally, Jaxon would scold the man or tell him to let the police do their job, but this time he didn’t.

“Do you know how to use it?” Jaxon asked.

Surprised, the father nodded his head. “I go to the range once a month.”

“A range is different than pointing it at a man. If you point it at a man, are you prepared to see it through?”

The father hesitated, but then nodded.

“Keep it close,” Jaxon said and looked the man hard in the eye. Mr. Harrison frowned but nodded once and got in his car. Jaxon watched him drive away . If anything happens to those two… but he didn’t let himself finish the thought.

Jaxon’s phone rang. It was him.

“You’re a busy Son-of-a-bitch, aren’t you?” Jaxon said.

“Hello, Detective. We’re getting to know each other now, aren’t we?” Same numbers-all zeroes-same altered voice.

“Oh, I know you good, asshole. You’re becoming predictable.”

“So you say, Detective. How is my girl? I see you’ve been spending a little time with her today. Did she enjoy her outing?”

Jaxon looked around again, trying to find a camera, but nothing was in plain sight. He had to have something around the area. “Why her? I thought this was between you and I. You take my son and I find you and screw you up beyond belief.”