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It was empty. Not a damn thing or a fucking person inside the house to show the team of Joy, Amanda, and Jimmy Mack that it had never been used for anything that wouldn’t have been normal for a high school teacher’s home in St. Isidore.
They found the MacBook Air in a bedroom that might or might not have been used to send out the photos of Allie and Janice, who might or might not have been held here.
But the Photo Booth app was wiped clean, and there was no evidence that anything had been emailed out. In fact, the MacBook’s history was wiped clean. Totally erased. That was strange, but not highly unusual in an age when everyone was worried about cyber security.
“And he is a teacher,” Amanda pointed out. “A lot of them just wipe out everything so tests and grades can’t be messed with or copied.”
Jimmy didn’t like it. He didn’t like it at all. The women on his little team might have thought there was nothing out of place, but Jimmy knew differently.
The bed was made like the sheets and blankets had been snapped in place by a military man. There wasn’t a book out of place on any of the shelves. The bathroom was crystal clean.
“Wait a minute,” Jimmy said. “There’s dirt on the carpet. It’s not just a smudge or a spot. Look. I am not sure what it is, but there’s a pattern.”
Jimmy got down on the floor and crawled on his hands and knees following the trail. Amanda and Joy shrugged their shoulders, and although they stayed on their feet, they followed their police dog, kind of a human version of a large, lumbering St. Bernard without the tongue wag, down a hallway and into the kitchen.
Jimmy got back on his feet, with a little help from Amanda and Joy. His face was flushed, beet red, and there were beads of sweat on his forehead.
He pointed down at the floor. Amanda and Joy looked around his bulk.
It was a bare footprint.
“Oh my God,” said Amanda, “here’s another, and another.”
The footprints hadn’t shown up on the carpet of the bedroom or the hallway, but there were outlined perfectly on the linoleum of the kitchen floor.
One set of feet was bigger than the other, and there were also some prints left by a couple of people, again one larger than the other, who were wearing shoes.
“Look where they come from,” Joy said, pointing to a wooden door.
“The basement,” said Amanda. “Can we go down there without a warrant?
"
Jimmy snorted.
“Warrant? We don’t need no stinking warrant.”
Amanda looked to Joy for guidance.
Joy shrugged. She was used to men talking in movie script lines even at times of severe stress. Had to be a gender thing.
“We’ve come this far. Let’s keep going," Joy said.
“After you,” said Amanda to Jimmy Mack as she opened the door. “You’re the one with the gun.”
Jimmy took the lead, thinking again that no cop in his right mind would be walking into a basement that only had one entrance and exit without at least a partner holding a gun watching his back.
Of all the stupid things he had done as a police officer, and Jimmy Mack had done plenty that would fall into that category, this might be the worse.
He had no idea who might be in the basement. It seemed like the women who were here, who had sent Amanda those pictures, had escaped. They weren’t upstairs, and they sure as hell wouldn’t be down here.
So what was Jimmy after?
He wanted an arrest. Jimmy wanted the rat bastard who had done the damage to the women in the photos. He not only wanted to capture the puke, but Jimmy also wanted to hurt him the way cops had beaten the bad guys in the old days.
Yeah, we dealt out our own brand of justice, Jimmy thought. And nobody cared as long as the streets were safe. At least that is the way it was in the old days.
Well, it’s time for some old-school justice to rain down on this motherfucker, Jimmy decided. Just like old times. Just like the good times.
Besides this wasn’t just a guy who had kidnapped and raped two women. This was a maniac who had been killing girls for at least the past twenty years. Maybe longer.
Jimmy was as sure of it as he was certain he would take a massive dump when he and the women were back at HQ.
" I know this SOB, this Tim Sheldon, is the one I have been after all these years," he muttered. "Tim Sheldon has to be the guy who killed all of those girls and boys and hung them out to be found in St. Isidore Park’s forest."
Amanda looked back at Joy and slightly mouthed, "Is he talking to us?"
Jimmy was at least as nervous as he had ever been in a situation like this. Probably more so, because Jimmy knew a madman like this would fight to get away like an ugly man with nothing left to lose.
But that was okay. Jimmy could fight like an ugly man too. And he was ready. After what the doctor told Jimmy a couple of weeks ago, he really didn’t have anything to lose either.
Jimmy pulled out his gun. It was an old .38-caliber snub nose, the same weapon he’d been issued the day he walked out of the state’s policy academy as a rookie in the St. Isidore Police Department.
The new class of rookies, when St. Isidore could afford to hire an officer or two, always laughed at him on the gun range. Jimmy would just smile and wait for their automatics, .45s or 9 mm pistols, to jam.
The old .38 never failed him, or at least it never had. Jimmy was hoping it wouldn’t let him down this time, either.
Jimmy took the lead. He nodded at Amanda to open the basement door, and down he went, both hands on his gun, taking one step at a time.
Amanda and Joy looked at each other and winced every time a step creaked or moaned and groaned under Jimmy’s weight. The women were holding hands. They were scared to death.
Who could blame them? A couple of civilians who might in minutes come face-to-face with a serial killer, or worse yet, a serial killer with his partner. But that isn’t what really scared the women who were hoping to become St. Isidore and even the world’s most famous investigative reporters.
Jimmy wasn’t crazy about confronting a couple of serial killers either. And, as much as he wanted to close dozens of cold-case investigations, he was kicking himself for passing up a pretty attractive early retirement package that had been dangled before his middle-aged eyes a couple of months ago.
Still, he had arrested murders. That was one thing Jimmy was excellent at. He could take a homicide case and solve it, if it could be solved, within 48 hours.
But what Jimmy always had trouble dealing with was the same thing that bothered him, Joy and Amanda as they moved slowly down the basement steps into Tim Sheldon’s dungeon: the victims.
Jimmy could barely bring himself to speak to the surviving family members beyond asking the questions that needed to be answered to move the investigation forward. And as for the dead bodies; forget about it.
They talked to Jimmy. They each had a story to tell. He could handle that on the scene of murder, but later that night, the conversations could continue. The big reason Jimmy was so motivated to solve homicides as quickly as possible was the victims. Until the case was resolved they just wouldn’t shut up.
The teenage girls who had died in St. Isidore Park had been talking to him every night for decades. One way or another, Jimmy was ready to let them, and himself, rest in peace.
Neither Joy nor Amanda had ever seen a dead body. They knew Janice and Allie existed, or least they were alive at one point. Joy and Amanda knew both women were kidnapped and spent days, weeks, or even months as prisoners and sex slaves in this basement.
But suddenly, they were nowhere to be found. Where could Janice and Allie be? Did they run? Maybe they couldn’t wait. Or maybe they were killed? And there was a chance, a possibility, that this was all a scam by Janice to get some publicity for her sex website.
From the smell alone, Joy and Amanda were convinced they would find two dead bodies in the basement. More stairs were creaking. Jimmy was moving forward.
Joy and Amanda looked at each other, then down at Jimmy and saw that he was ready to flip a light switch.
In a second, it would be settled.
They would find Janice or Allie, dead or alive.
Joy wasn't sure which she preferred. She just wanted it to be over.