Point of Impact (Last Chance Downrange Book 1) Read online

  “Mr. Harris, that’s right.” She handed him the clipboard so he could check in. “He’s expecting you.”

  He signed his name on the entry log. Tried not to let on that this was the most conversation he’d had in four days. Talking to Mr. Harris was going to have him right back at his apartment with only the ambient noise of city traffic for company. His two cats were the only living creatures he spent time with until he was ready to venture downstairs.

  He’d given up expecting people to understand why he was the way he was or how he managed it, especially when people insisted on reading that book.

  Sure, it’d been a bestseller. The library next door to the elementary school a block from his building had sixteen copies, and most of them were usually checked out. He’d heard lately they were thinking about putting it on the high school English curriculum.

  Someone had made a ton of money writing about the worst two days of his life. Whoever it was never got any information about what’d happened aside from compiling hearsay. Then again, he’d refused an interview and heard from his lawyer that everyone else involved did the same. None of them wanted to relive any of it.

  People thought what they wanted to. Jacob just went home to his solitude.

  He left Naomi to her bestseller and headed for Mr. Harris. He was eighty-seven next month and had some dementia but had agreed to talk. Jacob could take all the photos he needed.

  When he reached the room and saw Mr. Harris in his high-backed chair looking out the window, the light caught Jacob’s attention.

  He dug out his camera and slipped the bags off his shoulder.

  Jacob lifted the Nikon to his eye and looked at the man through the lens Grandpa had given him. A way for him to see the beauty in the world, the way Grandpa always did. The truth people tried to hide or walk away from—the good below the surface.

  So he could experience it for himself, at least from a distance.

  He’d needed it after all those hours at the whim of a man whose intention was to torture them until they broke. And that had only been the beginning of his plan.

  Jacob had spent every day since—a span of more than fifteen years—purposely not thinking about it. Trying to find peace and see the good in what God had made. After all, he’d seen the bad. There was nothing worse left.

  The click of the shutter reassured him. Like waking up to the relentless mew of hungry felines, waiting for him to dish out breakfast.

  After getting a handful of good shots, he lowered the camera and took his things in. A pat on the shoulder jolted Mr. Harris out of his musing. The old guy roused as though he’d been sleeping, smacked his lips, and blinked.

  Jacob pulled over a stool that might not bear his weight for long and sat opposite him. Mr. Harris wore brown slacks, wool slippers with tan rubber soles, and a threadbare blue shirt. Bumps ran up the older man’s arms.

  Jacob grabbed a blanket from the end of the twin bed. “Here.” He waited for a second just in case the older man wanted to object, then settled it over his legs.

  Mr. Harris clenched the edge of the blanket with knuckly hands. “Ah, yes. Our chat.”

  “If that’s okay with you,” Jacob said. “It doesn’t have to be today.”

  Mr. Harris lifted his hand and waved away Jacob’s comment. “I should tell someone.”

  The comment was plenty loaded, but Jacob wasn’t about to ask questions on the man’s situation. Mrs. Harris had passed away in the ’90s—so coming up on thirty years ago now. Three children, seven grandchildren. They all lived in Seattle, and none had visited recently.

  Whether that was due to them, or Mr. Harris, Jacob wasn’t about to get into it. He was more interested in Mr. Harris’s life as a young man. The stories were forgotten as the years passed, which he then compiled into a book. It was Jacob’s way of giving a voice to too many who were overlooked. Silenced or simply neglected.

  “Was there a specific time you wanted to tell me about?”

  Jacob preferred to leave the interviewee to decide what to reveal. He wasn’t worried about prejudice or corroborating stories to get to the truth. He wasn’t a reporter. He simply wanted people to talk in their own words. He’d developed a radar for stories that were genuine and held back what he thought might be fabricated or embellished. Out of the thousands of hours of interviews he did for a book, only a fraction would be printed about the person.

  And still, people insisted on reading the drivel published about him.

  Jacob let Mr. Harris think about his question. He needed a subject for his new book and hadn’t found the right person yet. The process had gone on so long it had set his schedule back.

  God, is it Mr. Harris…or someone else?

  A nurse came in. She spotted them talking and motioned that she would come back.

  “There was a tree in the back yard. An oak, I think,” Mr. Harris began. “We used to climb to the top before supper, and my sister would pull us down so she could be first.”

  Jacob recorded the conversation with a handheld voice recorder.

  “She pushed my brother once. He fell and broke his arm. She told mother it was me, and I had to sleep the night in the shed.” He swallowed. “I couldn’t sit for a week.”

  Jacob wanted to smile, but that wasn’t the kind of parenting he’d been raised with, and neither was it amusing or “just a fact of life.” He didn’t frame the stories he was told with his own experiences, just presented the words of the storyteller.

  His upbringing hadn’t exactly been full of peace and love. His parents had argued more than they got along—with him in the middle. Passed between them like a chess piece when they were “off” and ignored when they were “on again.”

  “That was the tree we buried Timmy under.”

  Jacob held the question on his tongue.

  “The summers after the harvest failed. Pa took him to the shed. Two days later, the sickness took him to Jesus. Ma broke after that. Jennie took up with the preacher’s son, and Pa kicked her out.” He fell into a period of silence.

  “What happened to your parents after that?” Jacob asked. Eventually he’d get to the old man’s adult life, but that might take several conversations.

  “Pa spent all day drinkin’ at the creek.” Mr. Harris blinked, the only movement aside from the rise and fall of shallow breaths. “Mama saw the preacher’s wife at the house. I thought she had the same sickness as Timmy.”

  An orderly pushed another resident down the hall in a wheelchair. Only after the sounds of their conversation faded did Mr. Harris speak again.

  “All day, muttering and carrying on. I was sick of it.” His expression flexed like a tick in his cheek muscle. “She wasn’t right. Yelling at me about peelin’ potatoes. Holdin’ that knife out, wavin’ it in my face. That’s why I grabbed the poker. Told Pa she fell over, hit her head. The blood had stained the floor, and she was cold by the time he got there. The water in the pot boiled until there was nothin’ left. The gas ran out. He slapped me for letting the gas run out. Told me I was useless. That I couldn’t even stop her from killing herself.” Mr. Harris blinked. “He never even thought I could’ve done it.”

  Jacob held himself still. He’d learned not to show a reaction, or people generally shut down. When he could speak without inflection, he said quietly, “Did he ever find out the truth?”

  “I told him,” Mr. Harris said. “The night he had that heart attack. Told him he’d be going to hell, where I put her.”

  Harris blinked. It lasted two seconds. He said nothing and blinked again.

  Jacob watched him succumb to a nap, thinking about what Mr. Harris had just said. Before he proceeded with the story, he’d investigate the man’s background. See if he could find anything to provide insight into what Mr. Harris said. Jacob had met people who’d done bad things before, but there was something off about the unemotional way he’d told this story.

  The sister he had mentioned might still be alive. Any of her children might’ve been told stories about the family.

  Jacob looked at the framed wedding picture on the mantel. A bride and groom smiled, but it hardly told the whole story. He needed the words, which meant coming back and talking to Mr. Harris some more.

  Not just to find out if he’d ever killed anyone else.

  Jacob found himself in the hall with both his bags. He wondered how he got out there without realizing and looked back at the door for a second. No part of him wanted to associate with someone who could turn out to be at all like the man who’d captured him after homecoming, his senior year. A deranged madman who’d been given back-to-back life sentences for what he’d done to not just Jacob but others.

  “Everything went okay?” Nurse Naomi stopped in front of him. “You look a little spooked.”

  She probably wanted him to talk about what she’d read.

  “Everything’s good.” He could find out what he wanted to know on the internet before asking the administrator to reveal personal information for Mr. Harris’s next of kin.

  Jacob went to the lobby, where the administrator stood behind the desk with Naomi’s relief. The administrator straightened her suit jacket. It didn’t help the straining buttons. She shook her head. “I don’t know what’s wrong with that girl lately.”

  “Celia’s been like this since she got a boyfriend.” The receptionist pushed her glasses up her nose. “She said she’d be seeing him this weekend. Maybe they went out of town?”

  Jacob frowned. Celia hadn’t felt good about the boyfriend last week when she stopped him in the parking lot to talk. She’d said she wanted advice from someone older. It wasn’t like he knew her well enough. They’d barely spoken before that, but she’d been upset. The whole thing seemed off to him, but he still tried to encourage her.

&nb
sp; Until the boyfriend showed to pick her up. Jacob had just about managed to keep from getting a fat lip and a black eye, but it had been close.

  Celia had simply hopped in the guy’s car without a look back.

  Jacob didn’t think anything good had happened between them.

  “Celia knew she had a shift.” The administrator shrugged. “When she gets here, let me know. I want a word with her about her responsibilities.” She glanced at Jacob, winced, and walked away.

  The receptionist looked under the counter, then at him, then under the counter again. Guess the book is still there.

  Jacob knew Celia enough to know the girl probably just forgot to call in sick. Or the receptionist was right, and she had spent the weekend with her boyfriend out of town.

  He didn’t need to get in the middle of a young woman’s poor choices, though. It was none of his business, even if she was nice and that conversation hadn’t had an ulterior motive.

  He had work to do trying to figure out if he’d been interviewing a murderer today. Then he would dismiss Mr. Harris as a candidate and meet with someone else.

  Jacob needed a story to tell.

  3

  Virginia

  Addie leaned back in her chair. She tapped her pen on the desktop and compiled her thoughts. Except that there weren’t any. Her brain didn’t want to think of anything. It was blank.

  Sure, Zimmerman had told her not to come in. Technically it wasn’t tomorrow. She had a report to write and figured maybe he might've forgotten that order by the time she finished.

  Meanwhile, the entire team sat around the office writing up their reports from the café operation. The suspect was being interviewed. She hadn’t done anything since she sat down.

  Now she had to wonder what was wrong with her.

  Not that she’d let anyone else know there was a problem. Zimmerman may or may not let her in there to talk to Benning as part of the interview. It wouldn’t have anything to do with whatever issues she did or didn’t have. Addie still wasn’t going to hold her breath that he’d ask her. Not after that conversation they’d had at the scene.

  She tuned out the buzz of people moving. The general office chatter. Her profile for William Benning indicated it was unlikely she could persuade him to give up the location of the bodies he’d buried. Might not be impossible, though.

  The seven they had discovered were in locations that held no connecting pattern. No way to predict where another would be.

  The phone on her desk rang.

  She picked up the handset. “Special Agent Franklin.”

  Dead air greeted her.

  Someone had her extension and felt the need to call her whenever they wanted to disrupt her train of thought and interrupt her work. Always a blocked number. Even the tech guys couldn’t figure out where the calls had originated. Someone spoofing the IP, calling over the internet.

  She sighed. It hardly helped to dissipate the weight of exhaustion and frustration. She replaced the phone.

  Addie had to contend with the frustration over unanswered questions with every case. Usually, she went for a run to bleed off the tension. Knowing there were possibly five young women out there who might never be found. Or, if they were, it was because of happenstance and no other reason.

  Addie shoved her chair back and headed to get a drink. She should get water, but the truth was she would pour a cup of old coffee and she knew it. The profile she had on herself was the skinniest she’d ever done, but there were some key details on it. The rest she didn’t want to know.

  One of her colleagues, Bill from Albuquerque, left the kitchen with his own cup. He lifted it in salute.

  “Hey.” She passed him and headed inside. They’d learned early on she had a hard time with small talk. Addie tended to answer only the question she was asked and didn’t volunteer much else in terms of information. She wanted to do her job—solve the puzzle. She wasn’t here to make lifelong friends. She wasn’t wired that way.

  Being relational meant attention. It meant people realized she wasn’t worth sticking around for.

  Sometimes attention led to…

  She shook off the rush of memory laced with the tang of fear that not even coffee could get rid of when everyone knew coffee was magical.

  Addie poured a mug anyway. She drank it black to have the most coffee in the mug possible. It burned going down but in a good way.

  Considering she could muse about coffee for hours on end, she headed back to her desk. The murder board on the wall had been covered with victim photos, crime scene information, and an entire section on the suspect list they’d compiled.

  It all pointed to one person: William Benning.

  She should be satisfied he was in custody. Instead, Addie blew on her coffee and studied the other suspects. Benning could have a co-collaborator. A protégé, or mentor. She dismissed several possibilities as she’d done throughout this case. Each one still went on a list because occasionally, her assumptions were proven wrong.

  “I need to show you something, Addie.”

  She spun around, careful not to spill her drink. Special Agent Mills, the newest member of the task force, had paled.

  Addie frowned. “Everything okay?”

  “Come on. I’ll show you.” Mills headed back to her desk and sat.

  Addie looked over her shoulder.

  “Carova Beach Fire and Rescue in North Carolina pulled a body out of the surf this morning. A young woman washed up just after five.” Mills pulled up a photo.

  The woman had been a blonde, but the body was marred and bloated. Given the markings, Addie motioned to it. “Same M.O?”

  “Preliminary indications are that this is one of Benning’s victims.”

  Addie wasn’t sure that connection could be made at this juncture. She drew the line at giving killers fun nicknames that sold more newspapers or got more hits on social media. Publicity killed their ability to investigate when everyone had a bias over what they’d seen or heard or what a friend heard from another friend.

  They’d succeeded in keeping this case out of the media. For the most part.

  She struggled to formulate a question but managed it. “Has an ID been made?” Addie studied the photo.

  Mills clicked to the open tab with the police report. “The ME has the body, and I requested the DNA be run to see if it’s a match to any of our missing women. But this one has been dead only hours.”

  “So it could be someone we didn’t yet know is missing. Someone Benning took in the last few days.”

  “Before we started to follow him.”

  Addie nodded. Had it been days?

  Mills worked her mouth back and forth. She glanced up and frowned. “You okay?”

  “Just tired,” Addie said. “But no more than anyone else here.”

  “We’ve all been working pretty well around the clock the last few weeks.”

  Addie nodded. “He’s in custody now. If we can get this case sewn up, we’re all good to take that long weekend.”

  Zimmerman wanted everyone to have a few days off instead of ordering Addie to take a couple of weeks.

  Like that would solve her problem.

  “I’m looking forward to a break.”

  Addie didn’t even know what that might feel like. Who cared about rest? “Send me what you have. I’d like to look at it.”

  Mills nodded. “Will do. You wanna drive down if it’s one of his?”

  She shrugged off the question—or tried to. Mills wanted to be, what? Friends? “I’ll be here until Benning isn’t, at least. I want to finish up with him.” If Zimmerman let her.

  Someone else could do the leg work if there was another victim. Tonight was the first time she’d gone out with the team on an operation in a couple of months. They compiled the evidence, and she formulated a picture of their UNSUB—an unknown subject, the label for an offender they hadn’t identified yet.

  If she needed to speak personally with a witness to get a better picture, she’d do it. But it wasn’t often necessary when the people doing the interviews were highly trained FBI agents. They produced quality work. This team was the best.

  She headed back to her desk, rolling her shoulders as she walked, shrugging off the idea that she wasn’t the kind of FBI agent she wanted to be when she’d joined the FBI. The coffee hadn’t done anything to perk her up, which was her fault since it would never be coffee’s fault.