Frozen Past (28 page)

Chapter 52

“It’s our house,” Victoria said.

“Your house?” Tom asked.

“Well, it was,” Victoria said. “It was our first place. Michael was born there.”

“You two are married?”

Victoria looked at Jaxon and said, “We were.”

Tom turned to Jaxon and said, “You’re Jaxon.” A statement, not a question.

“Come on, Vick,” Jaxon said. “We’ve got to move.”

They both turned and started to walk out.

“I thought you wanted to see the video,” Tom shouted after them.

“We’ve seen it already,” Jaxon shouted back.

“If you find anything else in it,” Victoria said, “Call my cell. Thanks!”

In the car, Jaxon jammed the accelerator to the floor and put the lights on. His car was still his and they couldn’t stop him from using what he had. It took only thirty minutes to make the trip from Quantico to Herndon where the house sat. 90 to 110 MPH got you there fast.

“She’s not going to be there,” Victoria had said on the way.

“I know.”

“We’ve got to try anyway.”

Jaxon knew she was just affirming what they both already knew.

“He’ll have left another clue,” he said.

She nodded, knowing this to be true. She turned to look at him. “I hope we can figure it out.”

“We will. We have to.”

She spent a few minutes on the phone briefing Holt on the situation. When she hung up she said, “He offered to send back-up.”

“We don’t need it.”

“That’s what I said. I told him they would just be in the way.”

“Good.”

“He knows you’re with me.”

“You told him?”

“He guessed.”

Jaxon nodded. It made sense. It would be stupid for her to be doing this on her own.  “Is he going to do anything about it?”

“No—not right now.”

He stared straight ahead and dodged the traffic. “He’s giving you the same twenty four hours as me and then he’s going to have you arrested.”

“Screw him.”

“No.”

She smiled and he caught it out of the corner of his eye. He smiled too and a little of the tension drained out of them. Only a little.

Turning into the old Herndon neighborhood of Oak Place, Jaxon was appalled at the state of disrepair. The houses that had once been cute and appealing, were now trashy and run down. Sad popped into Jaxon’s head. The neighborhood had been his and Vick’s first and Michael had been born here. They had moved shortly afterward, when Jaxon had been promoted to detective, his income taking a nice jump.

The streets were littered with garbage and abandoned cars, tires, refrigerators and window A/C units. It was bordering on a slum. As their old house came into view on the right, he slowed and approached quietly, coasting to a stop one house over. They sat for a second, staring at the ruin of their past life. He felt embarrassed that he had once called this home.

The house sat back about fifty feet from the street, nestled in a yard of weeds and dirt that hadn’t seen attention in probably two years. A small, faded, red wagon lay on its side in the middle of the yard, abandoned and apparently useless, one of its wheels missing. No children could be seen or heard anywhere near their immediate vicinity. The siding hung off in places and the once dark, brown paint had faded to what looked like old, dried blood. A few of the window screens were missing, with one hanging tilted in its frame, the screen ripped and torn. The front door was half open and moved slightly in the breeze. The driveway was empty. As a matter of fact, the whole neighborhood looked empty. Not a soul moved about or made a sound. It was like a ghost town.

Jaxon opened his door and stepped out scanning the area. Victoria did the same. Jaxon cleared his throat and the sound seemed horribly loud in the silence. They looked at each other but didn’t speak as they walked up to the door and pushed it open. The inside was a wreck. Trash and leaves littered the entrance and a broken chair sat blocking the way in. Drywall hung off the studs in jagged tears and spray paint was the primary color on the parts that were left intact. Gang tags and lovers laments greeted the visitors all along the entrance hall. Jaxon kicked the chair out of the way and as they walked into the main room, he saw the ceiling hadn’t been missed either.

“How the hell did they get up there?” Victoria asked, her voice startling him.

“Beats the hell out of me. Come on, let’s go to the basement. That’s where she was in the video.”

Walking into the kitchen, Jaxon was struck by the smell. They both looked at each other in shock.

“Oh no!” Victoria said and dashed through the house to the back where the basement door stood ajar. The smell was stronger and they hurried down the steps into a dark cave of blackness, the stench of decay overpowering. Jaxon hit the light switch out of habit and was surprised when the basement lit up. Someone had paid for the electricity to be on.

The room was stark and bare except for two chairs, a table, some shelves and a mini fridge. The odor was strong and mixed with the stench of human waste. They went to the closet door and swung it open. The decapitated dog lay in a heap in the corner, flies swarming around it, the source of the smell revealed.

“Thank God,” she said and turned away into the room. Jaxon saw the bucket with the toilet seat and put two and two together.

“He dumped her own urine over her,” he said.

She turned and looked at him.

“That’s why she was wet in the video. He soaked her in her own urine so she would be all freaked out.”

Victoria turned away from him, a look of such sorrow on her face he wanted to go to her and hold her, but he knew she would not appreciate it at this moment. She was totally focused on finding the girl.

Scanning the room for any clue, he didn’t see much in the way of evidence. The walls were bare and the shelves mostly empty. The few tin cans on them held rusty nails and discarded screws, but little else. Victoria was squatting near the mini-fridge and he went over to her. She was looking at an old cardboard box full of pictures. She picked it up and carried it to the table.

Inside were pictures of the Worthingtons. They looked to go back about fifteen years and when he saw the man they were now hunting, memories of the domestic disturbance call he went to at their house flooded back in. He remembered it all now. The man had been belligerent and out of control. Jaxon had actually been afraid. The man had been huge and wildly drunk. Jaxon was no midget himself, but compared to Worthington he was small. The drunken state he had been in had been the only reason Jaxon had been able to subdue him.

The pictures all contained Leonard, Madison and a baby. Jaxon grabbed a picture of the Worthingtons and stared at it closely. Nothing was jumping out at him. He recognized the people in the picture and the house where Ellie and her mother and brother still lived, but nothing else jumped out at him.

“There’s nothing here,” he said, throwing the picture on the table and looking around the room frustrated. “How the hell are we going to find her?”

“He must have left something. We’re missing the obvious,” she said. “He’s probably put it in plain sight and we’ve walked right on by. Maybe we need to check the rest of the house.”

Jaxon picked up the picture again and waved it at her. “This is the only thing we’ve seen that ties anything in this house to him. A bunch of shitty family shots that mean nothing!”

Victoria grabbed the hand holding the picture and reached for it. She pulled it from his fingers and worked her fingernail into the edge. A picture had been stuck to the back of the one he had been waving and when she saw it, she smiled. She showed it to him.

“Come on!” he yelled and they bolted toward the stairs.

Chapter 53

Luke’s cell phone went off. The music signaling he had a text message jarred him from his sleep and he sat up quickly, unsure of his surroundings. He had been dreaming and in it he and Ellie had been swimming in the pool with Jimmy and John. Nothing ominous or threatening in that simple act, yet the dream left him feeling disjointed and uncertain. It had been too happy considering all that was happening at the moment. His head still throbbed and he had a brief wave of dizziness as he reached for the phone on the nightstand.

The sender’s number was all zeroes and his heart skipped a few beats.

“Gotcha’ you bastard,” he whispered as he opened the text. It read simply,
‘Bring it, kid!’

Luke called John and Jimmy immediately and told them to get their butts over to his house. Worthington had just sent him a message. They were over in less than two minutes.

Luke was plugging his phone into the computer with a USB cable and loading the program up Bodey had e-mailed him when they both bounded in out of breath.

“What did he say?” Jimmy asked.

“He told me to ‘Bring it,’” Luke said.

“That’s it?”

“That’s all it takes,” Luke said grinning. “I don’t care if he texted me one letter. As long as I receive anything from him, we’ll know his new number. Watch.”

Luke hit a few keys like Bodey had instructed and the program went to work. A few seconds later a whole list of numbers filled the screen and John said, “Whoa! How do we know which is his?”

“Hold on,” Luke said, and clicked a button on the screen. The page changed and more numbers popped up, but an offset area displayed what he needed. He pointed to it and smiled.

“There he is.”

Jimmy and John moved in closer and just stared at the ten digits in awe. Luke wrote the number down and closed the program out opening the software they had used to track Worthington before. He input the cell phone number into the program and clicked ‘next.’ The screen that popped up was not what Luke expected and he felt deflated.

SEARCHING……..QUERY A13244997 EXECUTED……..UNABLE

TO LOCATE GEOSYNCHRONUS POSITION AT THIS TIME………

RESCAN AUTOMATICALLY EVERY 30 SECONDS?

“Shit!” Luke said.

“What does that mean?” Jimmy asked.

“I think it means the program can’t find the cell number. He must have the phone off. Dammit!”

John pointed to the screen. “It looks like it can keep scanning for it. See?”

Luke looked at the screen closer and saw it. He typed the letter ‘Y’ into the box and pressed enter and the screen changed.

AUTO SCAN ENABLED……….AUDIBLE NOTIFICATION WHEN

FOUND?

Luke typed the letter ‘Y’ again and hit enter. The system would give some sound when it found the signal. Luke sat back and sighed.

“We wait?” Jimmy asked.

“All we can do,” Luke said, and stood up. “I need a drink. Anybody want a soda?”

They stood with him and went downstairs to the kitchen.

Chapter 54

As Jaxon ran through the house, Victoria shouted to him, “Jaxon! Wait!”

He stopped and turned. She was just outside the door to the basement and when she saw him look her way, she pointed to something he could not see. He walked back into the room and followed her finger. He hadn’t noticed it before. High up on the wall, mounted near the ceiling, a little grey box aimed its black lens down on them, its blinking red light mocking them. Jaxon walked up to it slowly and then reached up his hand and gave it the finger. He turned to her and said, “Let’s go!”

Slamming the front door open and running into the yard toward the car, Jaxon saw a group of teenagers huddled around his car. They were trying to pop the lock through the driver’s window. He didn’t even slow down. They saw him coming and two of them stepped away, but the one working the slim jim never faltered. Jaxon slowed as he got closer, but strode up to the one at the window and, without hesitating, drew the weapon Victoria had given him and pressed the muzzle against the kid’s temple.

“I appreciate you wanting to open the door for me, but I got it.” The kid raised his hands and backed away. Jaxon thought he was going to piss his pants. The other two looked about to help their buddy, but Victoria had her FBI credentials out and her weapon pointed directly at them.

“Don’t fucking move!” she said. They froze.

Jaxon shoved the kid out of the way, grabbed the slim jim from his window and threw it over the house as hard as he could. He beeped the locks with the remote and slipped into his seat at the same time as Victoria. He started the car and rolled down the window.

“Have a nice day,” and floored the accelerator, laying down rubber for a hundred yards. “Fuckers,” he said under his breath and Victoria chuckled.

“Their lucky day,” she said.

He nodded. The house they were speeding off to surprised them both, yet now that he knew Worthington’s next move, maybe it wasn’t such a surprise. The picture had been a shot of Jaxon and Victoria’s second house. The one they were in when their marriage ended, the bank taking it in foreclosure. The one Michael was killed in. It was the only picture that didn’t fit.

“He knows we’re onto him,” Victoria said, holding on tight as he took a sharp turn at high speed, the tires squealing in protest.

“He’s going to move her again, I know. We have to find a way to predict his next move.”

“He’s guiding us to exactly where he wants us. Are we going to let him lead us right into a trap?”

“At this point, we don’t have any other choice.”

“He’s always one step ahead. We have to find a way to cut him off.”

“I’m racking my brain, Vick! I’m not coming up with anything. Are you?”

She looked away angrily, “No. But he’s giving us easy stuff to use. Think about it. That picture was obvious.”

“We wouldn’t have seen it if you hadn’t peeled it from the other one.”

“But I don’t think he meant that to happen. I think it was random. I’m sure he planted that picture in there for us to find easily, but we almost missed it because it was stuck to the back of another picture.”

“What are you saying?”

“We’ve bitten on the easy bait. We’ve missed something that might give us an edge.”

He thought about this but could not put anything together in his head that made any sense. The pictures in the box were the only things associated with Worthington and Ellie in the whole house.

“What were the other pictures of?” he asked, grabbing onto the only thing he felt was important.

“Worthington and the Mrs. Family shots. Kids and first houses, and toys and cars.”

It made no sense. Who cares about Worthington’s old family memories. His hate for his wife made the sentimental value of the shots unimportant, so why were they in the basement?
“Were the pictures for Ellie?” Jaxon asked. “To make her see he’s not as bad a guy as she believes?”

“That doesn’t make sense. There were pictures with her mother crossed out of them. A big red ‘X’ right across her face.”

“We know he hates her. Does he want Ellie to hate her too?”

“They weren’t meant for Ellie,” she said. “They were meant for us.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Ellie would never hate her mother. He knows that. And the picture of our house was in there too. Those pictures are ours.”

He knew she was right.

They turned into the neighborhood about fifteen minutes later as dusk was settling over the city and streetlights were starting to come on. The neighborhood was still clean and very lived in. Manicured lawns were the norm and children played in the fading light, mother’s calling to them to come home and father’s pulling into driveways from a long day at work. The house they used to live in sat back in a court off of the main road. As they pulled up, they were surprised to see an old for sale sign in the overgrown yard, the faded red letters announcing, ‘Foreclosure’ and ‘Reduced.’ Apparently it had not been lived in since they had abandoned it.

They parked in front of it and stepped out of the car into the muggy night. Jaxon could hear a dog barking in the distance and the sound of a television turned up too loud in one of the houses. A man stood on his porch three doors down, smoking a cigarette and looking their way. He ignored him and strode up the driveway with Victoria beside him. Trying the door, it was unlocked and he drew his pistol as he pushed it open. The house was dark and quiet.

He looked at Victoria who nodded and then positioned herself behind the door, her gun out to cover him. He slipped inside and she followed. They went directly to the basement, both of them scanning the walls and ceiling for blinking red lights and remaining alert in case Worthington was somehow still here. He doubted it though.

They went through the kitchen and stepped to the basement door. A red light caught his eye and he pointed to it, the web cam just within reach. He knocked it off of the wall and crushed it beneath his shoe. He turned and looked at Victoria who shrugged.

He was reaching for the doorknob when his cell phone vibrated in his pocket. Even with the ringer off, the buzzing seemed extraordinarily loud in the silent house. He hesitated, raising his eyebrows to her but she shook her head, ‘no.’ He’d check it later.

The door swung open on quiet hinges and he reached into the dark. If anybody was down there, they were hiding in the blackness. The void below them remained eerily silent.

Jaxon went first and felt his way along the steps, the feel of them stirring up memories of the house when his life had been happy and full. It was surreal stepping down into a hole of blackness, feeling nostalgic and terrified all at the same time. He pushed the memories from his mind and concentrated on keeping his footing in the dark.

Reaching the bottom landing he panned around the space, but the little bit of light leaking from the open door above provided nothing he could discern and the space felt empty. He didn’t know how he knew this, just a cop’s sixth sense and one he didn’t analyze, so he lowered his gun and holstered it, moving to the light switch and flipping it up. Nothing happened.

“I guess the electricity was too expensive to turn on here,” he said, his voice booming in the quiet dark. Something moved behind him and he spun, pulling his weapon out and crouching low. Victoria turned on a flashlight and shown the beam around, keeping her body hidden behind the stairwell wall in case somebody shot at the light source. Jaxon followed the light beam and then saw a rat the size of a small kitten skitter through the beam and disappear into a hole in the wall. He relaxed and lowered the gun.

The basement was empty.