SAGN: Chapter One-The Empty House Of Cecil Barnes free porn video

Chapter One: The Empty House of Cecil Barnes ================================================== The last cup of coffee lurking in the pot was already vile long before Jim Brighton picked it up and peered through the brown stained glass at the oily sludge swirling in the coffee pot. He wondered if it would even be worth it at all and considered just standing there and waiting for a fresh pot to brew; but he couldn't, he already had too much on his plate and the day was just getting started. He poured the noxious liquid into one of the Styrofoam cups that he fished off of the stack by the coffeepot and started heavily dosing it with sugar and powdered creamer to cut the over burnt taste a bit. He reached under the small counter and fished out a fresh coffee filter and dumped one of the industrial sized baggies of the cheap coffee the department favored into it. The pot had cooled off enough by the time that he finished doing that, so Jim swirled around some water in the pot to wash most of the taste of the previous batch away and then filled it to the brim. As he poured the water into the reservoir he thought that in all likelihood, he probably wouldn't even get a cup of this new batch the next time that he was in the vicinity. Jim picked up his bag and blew some of the steam off of his cup and made his way to his desk at the back of the room. Some of the other detectives nodded in acknowledgement of his presence as he passed; a gesture that he returned as he made his way across the room to his desk. Mitch Travers, his partner for the last two years, was already leaning back in his seat behind his own desk waiting for him. Jim could see that Mitch had also already tanked up on the way in. His own Styrofoam cup had already been emptied into the old chipped coffee mug that had squatted on the corner of his desk blotter since he had been assigned to the division. Jim didn't have to look to know that Mitch had already dumped the disposable cup into the wastebasket beside his desk. Jim didn't care for using the cups the department provided; he regularly had a stack of them cluttering his waste pail most days. But Mitch just wouldn't do that. He didn't mind using the cups to carry them to his desk, but he never drank from them. Jim dropped his bag beside the swivel chair and draped his raincoat over the back of it before sitting down and taking a slow sip from his own cup. "How's the hate pot this morning?" Mitch asked as Jim screwed up his face from the acrid taste. "Less the hate pot and more the 'I don't like you very much' pot at the moment," Jim answered him. Mitch's father had been a long haul trucker. When Mitch was a kid he had told him to always treat waitresses with respect or they would find ways to get back at you for it; like serving you the oldest, bitterest coffee in the place. Jim hadn't heard the term before he partnered with Mitch, but he was familiar with the concept and didn't find himself on the receiving end of it outside the station most of the time. Mitch took a sip of his own coffee and screwed up his face. "Must be a one sock day then," he muttered. While Jim was settling in, Mitch started rummaging around among the case folders on his desk. By the time Jim looked up he had found what he was looking for and passed a new manila folder across the aisle to Jim. "Lieutenant Clayton dropped that off just before you came in," he said passing it over and then settling back into his seat to sip from his mug again while Jim looked it over. "What is it this time?" Jim asked, looking at the clean folder unmarked save for the label with the case number freshly affixed to the tab and the front. "Missing person's case," Mitch said. "Like all the others, she said it had priority." "You look it over yet?" Jim asked. "I just glanced at it. Lieutenant said she wanted you to take the lead on this one. I've only had it for about twenty minutes. But get this, when she dumped that one she told me to hand off all of our active cases and concentrate just on this one." Jim's eyebrow twitched upward. "Is that so? Anything else?" he queried. Having the lieutenant pull all their active cases didn't bode well, most of the department was already stretched thin as it was with a rash of other missing person's cases the last few weeks. "Just that she said she wanted a preliminary report on this one by the end of the day." "You think she's bucking for captain already or has she got a personal interest in this one?" Jim asked, not really expecting a real answer from his partner. "Neither," said Mitch. "I think the particulars of that one just bug her, I know from what I saw it bugs me." "What's bugging you about it?" Jim asked him. "That's the thing Jim," he said. "There's nothing that leaps out at me. It looks like a routine investigation and when I looked it over when she handed it to me it seemed pretty simple, but at the same time it bugged me. Something's off about this one." Jim looked up from the unopened folder to Mitch. Hearing his partner say something about a case got his attention every time. Mitch had been in black and whites like Jim before he got his detective's shield and had spent five years in vice before ending up with Jim. If he said something bugged him, Jim made it a habit to pay attention to Mitch's instincts, mainly because it was dangerously stupid not to do so. Jim flipped the folder open and started to go over the cover sheet. He read the name and then looked over the sheet to see if there was a picture to go with the name that was printed there. That slot on the form was empty. Jim made a mental note to correct that omission. That there wasn't any photo of Cecil Barnes there now wasn't that unusual at this stage of the investigation. There would be one there soon enough. "Have you flagged the DMV yet?" "I was just about to pull his file from the database and get it printed out." "All right then, you take care of that while I get up to speed and we'll head over to his house." Jim turned to the file and opened it while Mitch started pulling up the file on Cecil Barnes. It didn't take very long for him to go over what was in the folder. It was pretty standard for the most part, but when he saw the extra paperwork that was included and he had to agree with Mitch. There was something about this one that didn't feel right. Jim made a note of the address in his battered leather notebook. It was over in Olympia, almost on the edge of the precinct. At this time of morning it would take the two of them about forty minutes to get there. He slipped the file into his briefcase and reached for his coffee while he stood up. Mitch had already printed out the DMV file and was just waiting on him. "Let's get going then," he said quietly. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- The light rain that had produced the grey sullen sky overhead had faded to a drizzle now. Along the street the gutters barely held the ribbons of water that flowed there. There had been a heavy localized rainstorm hovering over the city for the last several days and the constant rain was starting to overwhelm the city's sewer system. Jim considered the herky-jerky traffic slowly moving along the street in front of them and then slowly pulled the sedan into the traffic flow. It was just after eight-thirty now. By the time they got away from the knot of cars clogging the main roads he mentally estimated it would be a little before nine. Mitch was sitting quietly in the passenger seat listening to the radio traffic that surrounded them in a low undercurrent of distant tinny voices. He was looking out of the slightly fogged window at the traffic stopping and starting around them. Jim didn't think anything was out of the ordinary about Mitch keeping quiet. Mitch wasn't one of those people who felt that they had to speak just because he had a captive audience and Jim was okay with that. They both knew when it was time to talk and when it wasn't; that was one of the things that helped them work together as well as they did. The traffic started to thin out as they went over the Well's river bridge. The river bisected the town and there were several bridges both for cars and railroad traffic spanning the normally shallow water below. But with all of the rain there had been a noticeable rise in the water level. Jim slowed as they crossed the bridge. The pavement was already slicker than he cared for and he was in no mood to be in an accident this morning. Olympia itself didn't start at the river. Not officially, but for a long time it had been the unofficial dividing line between Stafford proper and everything on the other side of it. Stafford had been a small city for most of its existence; more of an overgrown town in some ways. But as it had grown, it had absorbed several of the smaller surrounding towns. Olympia was on the western edge of Stafford. But that wasn't what made it different to the people on this side of the river. It was more who lived there. Olympia had been the heart of the giant mill town established there in the 1870's and even with the mill gone now, it wasn't that long ago that people who lived on the other side of it were regularly referred to as lint heads by those who lived on this side of the river because of its past. In a lot of ways Olympia had more character than most of Stafford. The city had torn down and rebuilt itself so many times in the intervening years that now there were few of the buildings there older than thirty or forty years. Olympia wasn't like that. The newest buildings in Olympia were at least a century old and many of the houses built by the Alagosta Textile Company were even older. They radiated out like spokes from a wheel around the empty bulk of the shuttered textile mill that squatted like a moldering ogre in the old part of the district. There had been plans off and on to revitalize this area, but until a few years ago those plans hadn't amounted to very much. The mill itself had closed over forty years ago; a casualty of the collapsing textile industry almost two generations ago. Different factions had battled it out over the years ever since over what should be done with the old place. Some wanted it to be converted to a museum, others wanted it torn down and most recently it had been proposed to convert it to a block of high end apartments. No consensus had been reached yet. Jim thought that those who favored tearing it down were just delaying anything being done until decay ended the discussion permanently. Even with its reason for being long gone, that didn't change the rest of Olympia much. Most of the houses that remained were owned now by real estate companies that mostly just rented them out and ignored their existence until a tenant was late with the monthly rent payment. When Jim was in uniform he had to execute more than his share of evictions and domestic disturbance calls in Olympia. For the most part that hadn't changed over the years. Olympia was where you lived if you didn't make much money. In Jim's opinion the fact that it was considered the part of town that was bad once you crossed Mill road was undeserved bigotry. Jim Brighton didn't share that view despite the opinions of others. The people he knew here were less trouble than those in more affluent neighborhoods in his experience. It wasn't that there weren't patches of the area where you had to be careful; there were. But in his opinion the ones who tended to get into and cause the most trouble here were those who came here looking for it. Many of them were recent residents and came equipped with the view, that because of the size of their paycheck, that made them better than their neighbors. Too many of the calls that had come across his desk in the last couple of years had been along those lines. Most of the time by the time he had gotten to the bottom of whatever mess crossed his path it was one of those kinds of people who started it, stirred it up or provoked it in some way. Last week he had to deal with a woman who didn't like renters in her new neighborhood even though many of them had lived there longer than she had been alive. Shortly after she moved in, there had been a rash of renters reporting missing pets in the neighborhood. At first someone had passed a nasty rumor around; trying to say that the Vietnamese family that lived over by Collins Street was responsible. But Jim was already certain that wasn't the case. He had gone to school with both of the Trang's older kids and he knew when he heard it that it was just not true. As Jim worked his way through the particulars he was more certain with each tidbit that he turned up, that this woman who just moved into the area was the one responsible for the whole mess. He suspected that what she was doing was letting their animals loose and then calling Animal Control on them anonymously. One of the people he interviewed told him he had almost caught her doing it, but she had backed off and made some excuse of being there to set up a neighborhood wide meeting about the issue. What cinched it as far as Jim was concerned was later that evening when the guy who was renting the place returned home from work he found out that someone had opened his back gate and released his family's German Sheppard from the back yard. The dog's owner was a carpenter that Jim had gone to high school with. After Jim had got him settled down somewhat he told him that he had ended up with a two hundred dollar fine to get his dog back and as they were talking it over he looked at Jim and out of the blue said that he knew it was her and that she had gone too far. "She's a vicious bitch Jim," the man said. "She's doing it deliberately to drive guys like me out of the neighborhood. I had the cash this time, but next time I don't know if I could swing it. We're paycheck to paycheck as it is. I tell you if I hadn't got hold of Animal Control as quick as I did, that bitch would have succeeded in having Fred put down and that would have broken my little girl's heart. So tell me you're gonna do something about this so one of us doesn't have to." As far as Jim was concerned he really wished he could just have hammered her like a tent peg, but there was just enough lack of evidence that he couldn't do more that try to put the fear of God in her by letting her know that he knew exactly what she had been up to and that he would be keeping a close eye on her from now on. She tried to get indignant about it, but Jim could tell from the way she was shifting around verbally that it was mostly because she knew she had been caught. He laid it on thick and told her that he was going to give her a chance and the only reason he wasn't putting cuffs on her right now was he didn't feel like doing the paperwork. She must have bought it because the rash of disappearing animals suddenly ceased as if it had never happened. It was a good thing too. Jim was pretty sure that he could have made a harassment charge stick, but not much more than that. He was glad she didn't push it, he didn't care for low class bullshit like what that particular woman had been getting away with, but then Jim had a bit of bias in that regard when it came to long time residents and the newcomers they were clashing with. His family had worked for the Alagosta textile mill since just after it was built in the 1870's. His grandmother had started working there as a spindle changer when she was only twelve years old. Her first few years spent working there involved lugging two foot high spools of freshly spun cotton thread away and dropping empty ones in their place. The company liked to hire young girls for that job because they were small and they could slip in and out in the narrow spaces between the banks of spinning machines. A few years later, when the mill couldn't legally hire children any more it didn't affect her; she had just passed the legal hiring age and was kept on. She spent her entire working life in those grim brick walls and when it closed, he remembered how she emotional she was when she told him about it. He knew that mill life wasn't easy, but when told she how devastating it was for her to walk out of those gates for the last time after a lifetime spent toiling within them; it made its mark on him when he was a child. Jim had a hard time reconciling that story with the other ones she had told him. The less sentimental ones she told him; the ones that spoke of the hardship of working in such a grinding, mechanistic environment. For a while, when he was growing up, he had a hard time reconciling the two facets of his family's life in the mills. But eventually he came to see it as two sides of the same coin and after a time he thought he could understand what she meant when she talked about it. The loss of the mill had sent most of Olympia into a downward spiral when it was shuttered. His family, one of the few that could do so, had kept their house though. They had enough set aside to buy it outright when the mill ownership began auctioning off company assets like housing. Enough of the other former workers there had done the same that, at least in his corner of the former mill housing area, the population stayed fairly stable for the time it took for them to find other ways to support themselves. Even with most of the people still living there having to endure their lives being thrown into a state of perpetual flux, it didn't change things too much on the surface. For the most part, the area remained heavily working class in character. They weren't lint heads anymore, but they were still looked down on by the people in Stafford regardless. The only thing that really changed was what it was that being working class meant now. That was the real thing that changing with the final closing of those doors. Most of the homes in this area they were going through were just as shabby now as they were the last time he was here. But from the street address he was given, he had good reason to suspect that just wouldn't be the case when they got to the house where Cecil Barnes was listed as living in. Olympia had been 'discovered' not long ago by the influx of tech workers who came in the last development rush Stafford had sponsored not long ago. The new crowd who came to fill positions that the locals didn't have the skills for didn't take long to spread out across the river looking for cheap rentals. That migration had started about a decade before with Maxintell opening a major operations and development center on the edge of Mill road. When this slow, almost imperceptible change started to happen to the old neighborhood many embraced it. A lot of people on both sides of the river saw it as a positive development. Especially since most of the places that were now rental properties were rundown and nearly ruined. It wasn't anything that was done by the people living inside those old homes though, but rather the damage was done by the deliberate neglect of their landlords. Jim's family may have owned their place outright, but he had enough people that he had grown up with whose families rented theirs, that he knew the deal. And through his job, Jim also became more than familiar enough with the men who held the title to those places. Familiarity led to its inevitable conclusion and it didn't take long for him to learn to hate having to do their bidding every time the black and whites were called. His opinion of them hadn't risen over the years and anymore he looked at them as barely a step above the troublemakers who were trying to purge the longtime residents. The renters who had lived there for years; the people whose only real sin was that their jobs didn't pay them enough no matter how hard or long they worked. The landlords mostly did as little as possible on their end. They were only concerned that the tenants paid their rent on time, didn't complain and didn't burn the place down. Holes in the roof-suck it up. Overrun with Palmetto bugs-not my problem, but God help you if you wanted more than the bare minimum that the law insisted they take care of. Jim knew he was supposed to treat everyone equally under the law, but that didn't stop him from privately holding this group of landlords in deep abiding contempt as their grasping nature drove his old neighborhood deeper into decay. With most of the housing in such poor condition you would think that the level of neglect would have worked against the way things had changed with the influx of new residents. But that didn't seem to deter this new population that slowly started drifting across the river and gradually begin colonizing the former mill town in greater numbers each year. The fact that the rundown mill houses were neglected didn't seem to bother many of the tech workers who moved there. Perversely it seemed to draw them like a magnet. Jim thought, for some of them, that it was the lure of being able to tell their compatriots that they had restored a century old house that did it. Whatever the reason the new residents had for making that choice the city council was very supportive of how their presence was transforming this part of town now. Jim suspected that was driving part of the urgency that the department was placing on this particular case. Cecil Barnes's home was at the end of a cul-de-sac just off of Magnolia Street. On the map it was identified as Magnolia Circle, but there was no sign on the barren upright post on the street corner. Jim privately figured that it was stolen by some bored local teen and it hadn't been replaced yet. Back when the mill was first building what was to become the bones of their company town it was decided that all of the streets would be named after different flowers. Jim supposed, when he bothered to consider it, that it was probably the mill owner's wife who had a hand in that. As if naming the streets after fragrant plants would actually do something to cover over how they exerted their will over those who lived on those streets when they were not working. The houses were typical for the area. Even when this was a mill town this would have been considered the better part of the company town. The houses here hadn't been set aside as someplace where floor workers like Jim's family were going to live. This part of Olympia was where the middle level management had resided back then and the construction of this set of houses reflected that in their design and durability of the construction methods used to erect them. Compared to some of the other remnants in the streets around them they had aged much better than the others. Like most houses in the area they were mainly two-story frame houses. Not all of them had been made over in the wake of the neighborhood's latest wave of gentrification. As they slowly drove down the street Jim knew, without even entering them that many of them had been split in half internally with a purpose built wall to convert them into two subdivided units. Just looking at them from street level he could tell which ones were being still being rented out. Those were the ones with peeling paint and minimal repairs. The people who lived in them were not really in evidence now. Most of the non-tech workers who still lived here tended to work one of the three shifts in the industrial park just down the highway on the edge of town and you wouldn't begin to see the graveyard shift workers begin to emerge until sometime in the afternoon. Working class families weren't the only ones here. Long before the tech workers started to make their mark others were already here. In lot after lot scattered through the neighborhood, Jim could see homes surrounded by small groupings of parked cars. The people in those houses didn't have careers yet, but they were by no means idle. Those houses were usually occupied by nests of college students sharing costs and cycling in and out all hours of the day as they commuted to the university grounds on the other side of the commercial district and their jobs in between sleep and study. The houses of the tech workers though, those were the recent exceptions. Many of the long time residents kept their places up, repairing where they could within the limits their landlord placed on them. Unlike what many of the snobs who were recent arrivals thought, just because they rented didn't mean that they had no pride in their homes and they did what they could within their means. In contrast the change in those homes the tech worker population had laid hands on had mostly undergone dramatic reversals. As you drove through you would see these were the most common ones that showed that time and effort had been spent on them to reverse the slow decay wrought by the deliberate neglect of the previous owners. Their newness differentiated them even from houses that had never been allowed to decay; like the one Jim's family lived in. Jim wasn't surprised that Cecil Barnes's address was one of those newly refurbished houses. It just added weight to the reason that he had earmarked mentally as the reason for the interest in his disappearance. Jim parked the car in front of the house and looked across Mitch to the structure overlooking them. Houses here were offset from the road just a bit. They were raised about two feet higher than the sidewalk with concrete steps that led up the slight incline from the street level. They didn't have large front yards, but that was deceptive. Most of the land that came with these places would be located in the fenced off sections to one side and behind the house. If this was a new house that amount of space would probably have been set aside as a pool area or some other means of relaxation, but in this neighborhood it was just another one of the remnants of the past. A lingering reminder of when the residents maintained kitchen gardens on that land rather than the thick green lawns that existed there now. Each of the houses that lined Magnolia Circle featured a wide sweeping porch that wrapped around and dominated the front of each house. Some of them were low to the ground; others were higher up depending on where the slope of the land had dictated higher foundations on one side. All of them were a relic of a time before air conditioning was a common part of the building plan. Their very presence harking back to when such amenities as a large open porch, well shaded by the broad roof overlooking it, were necessary to deal with the summer heat that made the rooms inside the house unbearable to inhabit during that part of the year. Barnes's house was halfway down the cul-de-sac on the right. Now it sat quietly perched on its slight incline with a path of flattened river stones leading up to a house with brightly newly painted white wooden siding accented by a pale blue-grey trim. Looking at it Jim was fairly certain that it had not looked this good as little as two or three years ago and if it had been subdivided before, it was for certain that it wasn't that way now. Jim's eye passed over the house from the street where he and Mitch were parked. His eyes moved slowly, taking it in and at the same time noting the details that made it stand out from its neighbors. The paint job wasn't the only new thing that he could see from the street level. The front door had been replaced as well. Most of the doors on these old homes had been made from local oak and many of the new owners just had them refinished, but this one was mahogany and even from down in the street where the two detectives were parked, the polished wood gleamed at them. Jim shifted his gaze upward and there he could see the new windows Barnes had installed and along the backside of the roof, where the shade from the surrounding trees did not fall, there was the edge of what he was certain were a set of solar panels mounted against the shingles of a new roof. Everything about the outside of the refurbished home said that the person that lived here now wanted his home to reflect more than just well on him, It said that he had the funds to make this old place into what his mind's eye said it should be. Mitch let out a soft grunt. Jim turned to him. "What's on your mind Mitch?" he asked. "I was just thinking from the look of this place that now I know exactly why this case is getting the attention that it is," he said. Jim just nodded in agreement. He already formed the same opinion as he was looking the place over and he said as much to Mitch. They called in to dispatch and reported their arrival and then the two detectives got out of the car and slowly walked up the stone walkway and knocked on the door. There was always a possibility that Barnes may have already returned, but as they expected there would be; there wasn't any answer. They walked around the house checking for open windows and knocked again on the back door. It was just as solidly locked as the front and like the front there was no answer either. The two men ambled back down to the car and called in a request for the department locksmith to join them. It may be a missing persons case, but it didn't look like anyone was here and they didn't need the paperwork hassle of busting down the door if they didn't need to. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- While they were waiting for the locksmith to arrive the two detectives started shuffling through the file again and looked at what Lt. Clayton had for them so far. Not surprisingly, considering the emphasis that the upper echelon of the department seemed to be placing on this case; a judge's authorization for them to enter the house was right was already filed; right at the front of the thin collection of paperwork. According to whoever had put the file together, Cecil Barnes was listed as being the only person of record living here, but that was something that the two men were going to reserve judgment on for the moment. If it wasn't necessarily the case that Cecil Barnes wasn't living alone. It wouldn't be the first time the two of them had encountered that particular change of circumstance and it probably wouldn't be the last. While they were going over the skimpy particulars listed in the file, dispatch radioed back and informed them that a department locksmith had been diverted to them and was about ten minutes away from the area. Jim picked up the mike and acknowledged receipt of the update and with nothing much in the offing the two of them took advantage of the slack time and leaned back into their seats to wait. The information they had on hand was fairly sketchy right now. As Jim had suspected, Cecil Barnes was indeed a recent arrival in Olympia. He started working for Maxintell as a programmer for eight years and had moved here about four years ago. He had purchased the house recently and had moved in after the renovation just a few months ago. He had no family in Stafford and it had been his employer that had been the one to report him missing yesterday. According to them, he had been working from home for the last couple of weeks and then had abruptly ceased all communication four days before they filed their report. Jim figured that he must have had some degree of value with them since they had bothered to look for him at all and not just fired him outright. According to the initial statement, they had already sent someone to the house to check on him when he went dark. They specifically mentioned that as of the time they reported him missing that there was still no answer either from any of his personal e-accounts or any sign of him at home. His supervisor was the one who filed the missing persons report and according to him there was not any mention whether or not the person that they sent had entered the house. From what the two of them had seen thus far, Jim figured no one had entered the place since Barnes had disappeared and that they would find out for certain once they got in there. As they waited for the department locksmith Mitch started picking apart the statement in the file again while Jim started working out an initial timeline. Five days ago would place the final contact between Barnes and anyone else sometime last Friday. It was Wednesday morning now. With the weekend sandwiched between, it wasn't surprising to Jim that Cecil Barnes's absence had gone unnoticed this long. They probably thought that he had just taken a long weekend and were planning to ream him out for not keeping them in the loop when he got back. As Jim looked over the rest of the file with Mitch he tried to get a feel for who Cecil was. With no sign of forced entry that either of them could spot Jim was leaning more toward the idea that Barnes had left of his own accord so far. The question now was if he had left suddenly like this, why did he feel the need to do that? There were a lot of possibilities for someone like Barnes to take a powder and as a cop he tended to favor the less charitable explanations right away. He looked up at the house again. If he could get a handle on just who Cecil Barnes was, he could begin to get a better idea whether what happened here was Cecil himself or not. While Jim was working up the timeline Mitch had already used the Department Arrest Record System linked to the cars onboard computer to pull up what there was on one Cecil Barnes. Other than a few parking tickets and one speeding ticket issued six months ago, Cecil didn't have much adverse contact with law enforcement. But that didn't rule out that he wasn't dirty in some other way. Jim and Mitch had been part of a task force investigating a government corruption case not long after they had been partnered together. The councilman they were investigating had also been squeaky clean on the surface too. Maybe this Barnes guy was clean in the same way. Jim filed that thought away while he and Mitch started working through the possibilities while they waited. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- The off-yellow work truck the department had sent turned onto the street and parked next to the curb behind them. A woman in her late thirties slid out from behind the wheel, turned around and opened up one of the bins mounted along the truck bed. She glanced over at Jim and Mitch when she heard their car doors open. "You detectives Brighton and Travers?" She asked, finding the tool bag she was looking for. Jim told her they were. She fished out the bag from the bin and asked them for some I.D. After she looked over their credentials and checked their badge numbers against the paperwork she had, she nodded to them both, picked up the bag and started walking up the concrete stairs that lead up from street level. "Let's pop this puppy," she said. "I got two more calls after you guys." The woman kneeled on the porch in front of the door with the two detectives standing off to one side behind her. Before she had knelt and started to examine the lock she had made a thorough examination of the area around the porch. When Jim sent her a questioning glance she told them that if whoever it was that owned the place left a key outside it would save them all the trouble of picking the lock if she could find it. She didn't have any luck though. Apparently, if Barnes was the kind of person to stash a key outside, it wasn't in one of the common places. That was something that Jim could find that he approved of Barnes doing. The woman however, had another opinion of him. She looked over the lock briefly and shook her head in disgust after a moment. "Trouble?" Mitch asked her. "No," she answered. "Just another case of someone with not that much sense opting for the cheap route." The two men looked a little puzzled, but then the fine points of buying locks weren't something they considered unless it had a bearing on a case. She pointed to the polished door in front of them. "That is a solid mahogany door," she said, "probably ran this guy at least three thousand bucks before installation." She pointed down at the matching knob and deadbolt set. "And that is a Simmons lockset that probably ran at most eighty bucks." "Anything wrong with it?" Mitch asked her. "There's nothing really wrong with it," she said, "It's a decent enough lock if all you want to do is to keep the door shut while you're away. Especially if you don't really have that much to worry about losing if someone breaks in. And for an ordinary rental in this area it might even be alright." "So what's the problem?" Jim asked. "Nothing, if you're the guy that doesn't mind advertising that you got some nice stuff inside when you did your rebuild like this guy did. And as long as you don't mind someone being able to pick your lock in under half a minute. Sure it's pretty enough. Matches the door nicely, but personally I wouldn't lock up my shed up with one of these," she said matter of factly. She reached into the bag and found the tools she was looking for after no more than a minute or two of rummaging. The knob and deadbolt turned after less than a minute of effort. Jim waved for her to stand back and knocked loudly on the door. "Mister Barnes, its Detective Brighton with the Stafford police department. We have a writ allowing entry to this home. Are you in the residence and can you respond please?" There was no answer from behind the now unlocked door. Jim unsnapped the leather strap holding his service revolver immobile in his belt holster. Mitch did the same as he took up a position on the other side of the door. Jim turned the knob and pushed gently against the door. It slid open easily for a few inches and was arrested in its movement by an interior chain and a solid bar restraint that held it from opening any further. Jim looked over at Mitch and carefully sniffed at the interior of the house that the barely cracked door revealed. "Anything?" Mitch mouthed silently to him. Jim shook his head no. He looked down at the woman and asked her to take care of the interior latches. A couple of snips with a pair of bolt cutters and the door began to slowly swing open now that the restraints holding in place fell free. Jim thanked the tech and after signing off on her paperwork she walked down the steps to her truck and drove away. "Shall we?" Mitch said gesturing to the open door. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Jim and Mitch slipped inside the living room. The first thing that drew their attention was the rapid beeping from the security system. Mitch entered the department's all clear code onto the number pad before it started to scream and they turned back to the task of checking out the house. No matter how many times he had done it before; doing a sweep and clear always made his skin crawl and his nerve endings jangle. Jim moved to cover the entranceway that he could see leading off from the far side of the room. Mitch moved behind him to cover the door leading to the room behind the archway to the right. Neither of them had drawn their weapons yet, but their hands were resting on the grips ready to lay them on target if needed. "Stafford police department," Jim called again. "Is there anyone in the house?" There was still no response. The two men began to move slowly from room to room. From the locks on the front door it suggested that whoever had set them in place hadn't left. There was no odor either that they could detect, but that still didn't rule out the possibility that Cecil Barnes wasn't lying dead in some other room. There was also the possibility that he was being held for some reason and that made the hairs on the two detectives necks stand up as they methodically cleared the lower floor. When they were certain that the ground floor was clear they paused before going up the stairs to the upper level. Jim motioned toward the front door with his chin. Mitch eased it shut using the back of his hand. When they heard the latch click they moved up the stairs. The stairs made a u-turn at a mid-level landing and then went up and opened onto a wide central passage on the second floor. There were a line of doors on each side of the passage leading into the upstairs rooms. On the far end of the hall was a set of French doors leading out to the small open balcony above the porch. Some of the doors were already open and they checked those ones first, then Jim slipped one of the surgical gloves he carried in his pocket over one hand and used it to open the ones that were closed. Two of them were nothing but linen and storage closets. The last one led to a bedroom. As they opened it the both of them steeled themselves against the possibility of being inundated by the stench of a five day old decomp. But the corpse reek they half-expected didn't roll out of the room when they opened the door. There was no cloud of flies and truthfully the two men weren't entirely sure there would be. This close to the door they would have had more than a bit of warning about something like that. This room was empty, there was nothing in there other than a rumpled bed and some men's clothing draped over a chair pulled out from a computer desk. Both men gave an involuntary sigh of relief. The search already had them keyed up in anticipation of the unknown and now that this part of it was over they could feel the tension drop away a notch from them both. "You call it in Mitch," Jim said snapping the restraining loop back over his revolver. "I'll keep an eye on things here till you get back. Tell them we're going to need some field techs here to dust for prints ASAP while you're at it." The back door was locked just as thoroughly as the others and there was nothing in the back yard when they checked that area again. The small shed in the corner of the yard was unlocked and when they opened it they found it contained nothing in there, but some yard tools. Cecil Barnes's car was parked under the wide overhanging roof of an open sided carport in the back yard. It wasn't a new car, but it wasn't that old either. Jim found the keys for it hanging from a key rack in the kitchen. As a precaution they popped the trunk on the chance that Barnes was in there, but the only thing they found inside were the usual odds and ends and nothing unusual. Jim closed the trunk and re- hung the keys where he found them. They would be collected later when they finished giving the house a more complete examination. Mitch told him that it would be about a half hour before the techs would be here to dust the house for prints. The two detectives returned and began a more thorough sweep. Midway through their sweep of the living room a patrol car with a pair of uniformed officers pulled up. Mitch went outside to brief them while Jim continued his slow methodical search. Whatever else he was, even a cursory examination of this place, told Jim quite a bit about one Cecil Barnes. The work that had been done on the house had been pretty extensive. From the look of it, Cecil had just finished a major restoration of the place. Jim doubted that this place had enjoyed in this condition for quite some time. Whatever he did as a Maxintell programmer either paid him very well or gave him access to something else that did and Cecil was either a very sentimental sort or he was using the place to advertise himself. Jim didn't think that Cecil had done any of this work himself though. So far he didn't think that Cecil was that type of hands on guy. Jim expected that they would probably find contractor receipts and work invoices in where ever it was that Cecil kept his house files. Whoever it was that had done the work, Jim was pretty sure they hadn't come that cheap. The place was clean as well. Not from a detective's point of reference. That remained to be seen. It was just that from what Jim could see Cecil didn't like things to be very disorderly. Mitch had remarked after their initial sweep that his old Chief Petty Officer from his Navy days would have been satisfied about the way the place looked and Jim had to agree with him. But for all of care that had gone into repairing and restoring the house, Cecil it seemed, had some unusual tastes when it came to decorating his home and Jim didn't really think he was the one keeping it clean. While most of what the two men saw was of good quality, there were a lot of things scattered around the various rooms that looked like they had been obtained secondhand. It was clear that the choices were deliberately made, but it wasn't a case of needing to use secondhand furniture to fill out the house. Mostly it was small decorations and in some cases some older pieces that verged on being antiques. Jim got the impression that Mr. Cecil Barnes used these things to express himself as an outlet to his professional life and mentally added some weight to the sentimental side of the scale. Mitch remarked half-jokingly that it looked too clean for a straight man and then laughed and said that they could probably say the same thing about his place. As they bagged items of interest, they didn't really see anything that screamed out to them that there was anything that had taken place out of the ordinary here. If it hadn't been for the inner locks being in place Jim would have been certain that whatever happened to Cecil Barnes, if something bad had happened to him, had happened somewhere else. But the interior locks were still in place and that bothered him. If it weren't for those Jim would have been certain that Barnes had just walked out the door. Jim had finally located where Barnes kept his house accounts and the tech team had just arrived when Mitch called him over to a small room just off of the rambling kitchen. On one side of the kitchen had been build what Jim supposed the realtors called a Florida room. This was clearly a recent addition. It had a red brick floor that you accessed from a short flight of stairs leading down from the kitchen. You had to step down into it and on the side facing the back yard there were large windows with open louvers along the top portion. The room wasn't too cluttered; just a small wicker couch and a set of chairs with some cushions in them to soften the hardness of the wicker. Some plants in large earthenware pots drooped a bit from lack of attention, other than that the room was mostly empty. Overall it put Jim in mind of a Japanese flavor even if not very much in the room overtly stated that. Mitch pointed down to a small raised brick hibachi in the center of the room. "Take a whiff Jim," he said, "tell me if you smell it too." Jim breathed in carefully. At first he didn't really smell anything. The open windows of the louvered transom had seen to that. Then he caught it. The hint of the smell was spicy and earthy at the same time. Unmistakable, even if it had dwindled to nothing more than a faint accent that floated around and seasoned the room. He looked down at the cold ashes on the metal plate sitting on the wire rack of the hibachi and then looked back at Mitch. "Looks like our Mr. Barnes has had a recent taste of lotus," He said to his partner. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Jim found the unused remainder of the black lotus tucked away in a baggie in the drawer of one of the tables. It was impossible to tell just how much was originally in it. There was a notebook as well under the plastic bag as well. Apparently, from what he could tell from a quick glance, Cecil Barnes had been documenting his experiences. Jim collected them both and logged them into evidence. When he finished he went looking for Mitch who had moved on and continued his search while Jim finished up in here. The officer at the door told him Mitch was outside in the back yard. When he walked into the back yard Jim found him stooped down over some bare soil in the northwestern corner of the yard. From what it looked like, Jim would have laid even odds that the reason the soil was plowed up was that Cecil had a mind to try a bit of gardening for his next project. Or it could be that he was just going to pay someone to do it for him. Jim had already found the number for a cleaning service and a landscaping company in the kitchen drawer where he kept a folder with the house accounts. He had noted the information and already planned to visit them after paying a call on Maxintell when they were done here. "What do you have there Mitch?" he called as he came up behind his partner. "Footprints, Jim," Mitch answered him. "Look there, there and there," he said, "they cross onto the turned earth from the lawn there. Go straight across to the fence and just stop," Mitch's finger had been pointing in a line tracing the path the tracks had made as they traversed the patch of soil. "Anywhere from five to six days ago I'd say," he continued. "Hard to be certain without one of the lab guys taking a look at it, what with it raining the last few days." Jim looked over to the fence where Mitch indicated the path stopped. "That's a nine-foot privacy fence Mitch," he said. "If someone went over it they should have left a scuff mark or two and even if there has been rain the last couple of days I don't see anything that suggests whoever it was that made those prints went over that fence." "That's just it, Jim," Mitch said slowly, pointing to the footprint by the edge of the fence. "Whoever it was, I think they just walked through it." Jim looked closer at the track Mitch was pointing to. There was about four inches of unplowed ground between the fence and the plowed earth. Even through the close cropped grass, Jim could see where the white painted wood bisected the footprint. Jim looked at it again. He wasn't seeing things and neither was Mitch. Two inches of what could only be a clear heel print in the soft earth lead up over the short grass and ended as abruptly as if someone had lopped off that person's toes. "Mitch, I don't think our missing Mr. Barnes just walked through the fence," he said. "I don't think he did either, Jim," Mitch replied. "Look at the prints again. They're way too small to belong to Barnes." Jim looked again and saw what Mitch was saying immediately. From what they had seen in his closet, Cecil Barnes wore a size ten shoe and whoever left these tracks wouldn't even be able to keep those on their feet. "If I had to guess I'd say a kid made these tracks, Jim," Mitch said continuing. "A barefoot kid." Mitch rose from where he was squatting at the edge of the plowed earth. "I'm going to backtrack through the yard to see if I can find where they start and then I'm going check the other side of the fence," he said. "See if the other half of this footprint is there on the other side and where it goes to." Jim nodded and went back inside the house. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- While Mitch was making his way to the back side of the privacy fence, Jim went back inside to finish collecting what they had gathered and box it as evidence. He had one of the uniformed patrolmen carry it out to the trunk of their sedan and stand guard over it until they relieved him. The field techs had arrived and were already hard at work dusting for prints and taking photographs. He pulled one of them aside and told him to take casts of the footprints that Mitch had found out back. When he went outside to the front of the house he could see a small crowd of neighbors gathering around, drawn to the activity around Cecil Barnes's house. A uniformed patrolman had already strung yellow crime scene tape around the area and some of them were maintaining a small perimeter to hold back the gawkers in the crowd. A news van had already arrived, but when he told them that this was just a missing person's case and to refer their questions to Lieutenant Clayton, they seemed to lose a bit of interest and didn't push it too much with him when he repeated that there was no comment at this time. By the time Mitch returned from the other side of the fence, Jim was taking down the names of neighbors to interview later. He asked Mitch if he was able to get anything from the trail, but Mitch just shook his head, said they would talk about it later and joined Jim in collecting statements. It was a little after two o'clock when they sealed the house and headed back to the station. As soon as they were pulling away Mitch looked over at Jim. "So did you get anything from the trail?" he asked. Mitch shook his head negative again. "That's not like you Mitch," he said, "What did they do? Disappear?" "It's the damnedest thing Jim," he said finally. "There was nothing in the yard. I didn't expect too much with all the rain this week so that's no surprise. It's the other side that gets to me. I know that it's been raining the last few days and I know that the brush in the woods between the houses makes it harder to follow a trail, especially after a couple of days but..," Mitch trailed off as if he didn't want to finish or somehow couldn't finish. "But what, Mitch," Jim insisted. "You'll just think it's crazy," Mitch replied. "Tell me anyway," Jim said. "I'm almost positive that while I was following the trail I was being watched and I'm certain that whoever it was that made those tracks walked through the fence, passed about a dozen meters into the woods and walked into a tree," Mitch said quietly. "You certain someone was watching you?" he asked. "Absolutely, not at first but the longer I was back there the more I could feel it." "Did you see anyone? Jim asked. "I didn't see anything, just woods, but I could feel eyes on me." "You think it may have been one of the neighbors? Some of those houses might give enough height to let someone watch you back there." "Maybe, but the brush is kind of thick in those woods. Someone doing that would have a hard time following me very deep into it and this didn't feel like that. It felt like whoever it was, they were right on top of me." "You said they walked into the tree? Does that mean you found scuff marks or did you find some blood on the tree or something else?" Jim asked. "Something like that could indicate that we do have abduction. That would be a pretty solid lead." Mitch twisted in the seat to face him. "I didn't find anything that indicated that, Jim. What I saw from the tracks tells me that whoever it was walked into a tree just like we walk into a room." "You sure about that?" Jim asked him. "We've hunted enough together that you know I know how to follow a trail," Mitch said. "And that's what I saw from the trail on the other side of that fence." Jim felt a shiver pass through him that had nothing to do with the chill that accompanied the last couple days of rain, but he had no idea why it was that he should feel that way. Mitch must have misread the trail is all, because someone walking into a tree just wasn't an option. Not like that it wasn't. And the idea that they were the ones being watched only added to the off feeling that this case was already germinating in him. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Lieutenant Clayton was waiting for them when they got back to the station. From the look on her face Jim figured someone from Maxintell had been putting pressure on the captain. The captain passed it on to Clayton. And now it was rolling down to Jim's level. She was a seasoned enough cop to know that Jim wouldn't have too much at this point, but that didn't stop her from making it clear to him that there were eyes on this case that wanted answers. Jim updated her on what they had found so far, with the exception of telling her about what Mitch had told him about where the unknown subject's tracks ended up or Mitch's feeling that he was being watched. That was a pair of details that he couldn't explain and right now he didn't even want to be getting into what it could possibly mean when he didn't have the faintest idea what that would be. He told her that Mitch was logging what they had into evidence downstairs and then he went over the list of preliminary leads that the investigation of Cecil Barnes's house had turned up. That seemed to satisfy her for the most part for now. She told him to keep her posted and if there was any change to call her immediately. "Where to next Jim?" Mitch asked him when he came back from the evidence locker. Jim filled him in on what he had told the Lieutenant first. He told him that after they had grabbed something to eat they needed to go to Maxintell first. Mitch agreed that was the next most logical place to start and told Jim he'd drive. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Jim looked at Mitch across the space between their desks. Except for another pair of detectives on the far side of the office also having a late night, the room was nearly empty now. Mitch poured the rank coffee they'd picked up on the way in into his mug and tossed the Styrofoam cup into the wastebasket by his desk. Jim was putting his cup down carefully on the desk blotter where he was satisfied that he wouldn't knock it over. He reached into and fished around in his coat pocket for a cigarette. You weren't supposed to smoke in here, but this late at night he was in no mood for pettiness. He offered one to Mitch and took a light from him in return. Mitch pulled a battered plastic ashtray out of his desk drawer and set it on the corner of his desk where Jim could reach it as well. It had been a long day for them both. Between the travel and the interviews they had performed there had been no time to brief the detectives that were taking over the other cases that Lt. Clayton had pulled them from. They would have to make time to bring their pinch hitters up to speed as best they could tomorrow. Jim took a deep drag from his smoke and reached across the space between the desks to flick his ashes in the tray. "What have we got so far Mitch?" he asked, half rhetorically. "A fat lot of nothing," Mitch responded leaning back in his chair and taking a cautious sip from his coffee mug. "No, seriously," Jim said. "Do we really have anything?" "We have an empty house, a missing programmer and damned little we can use to figure out where he went to." Mitch's analysis was sadly, right on the money with his assessment. Their interviews at Maxintell hadn't given them that much to go on. Nothing really jumped out at them when they were speaking with the few friends he had there. There was a lot of personal information that helped to fill in some of the blanks on what kind of guy Cecil Barnes was, but there was nothing that would shed any light on where Cecil Barnes might have gone to or why. His boss hadn't been much help either. The copy of their employee records that Human Resources had provided didn't open that many avenues of inquiry either. Jim exhaled heavily. "Let's just go back to the beginning then Mitch. Maybe something will sound off when he hit it this time." "It's worth a shot Jim," he said and reached for the case file and laid it out on his desk. Mitch reached for the DMV photo and laid it beside one they had taken from the search of Barnes's house. "Cecil Barnes, age 31," he said. "DMV has him at 5'9", 190 pounds. Short brown hair and brown eyes. Medium build. Single, with no current relationships. Goes out with his work buddies a couple times a week on average, mostly to shoot pool and hang out. His ex-girlfriend said he loves going to flea markets whenever he can." "Was she the one with the pink hair?" Mitch asked. "No that was her girlfriend." "You think they might have had a bad breakup?" "If you're thinking that she might have been the one to go after him, I'd have to say no. Everyone in his circle of friends told me that it was mutual and they kept up a good relationship afterward." "What about the flea market thing?" "From what we saw in the house I'd say half of his stuff came from there or places like that." Mitch back checked the information his ex-girlfriend had given them and suggested that they pass the word to the units that were patrolling where the local flea market was to keep their eyes open. "His boss said he started working from home sometime around the middle of last month and then just went AWOL sometime in the last six days." "You know this could just be a big nothing Jim," Mitch said. "What we could have here is a guy who's been slacking on the job and just took a powder because he felt like it." "I don't think so Mitch. Not this guy," Jim said. "Maxintell's H.R. department says he's been averaging up to ten hours a day most of the time he's been telecommuting, sometimes more. They mentioned that he's one of the programmers that they like to have working from home. They said they get more out of guys like him when they do that, so they kind of encourage it from those types." "Bit of a workaholic then," Mitch said scribbling on the notepad. "From their login data he's all over the clock," Jim said passing over the sheet of paper to Mitch. Mitch scanned the times and handed it back. "Kind of a night owl it looks like," He said. "He might have opted for this when he started up with the lotus we found at his place," Jim said. "So what if he did?" Mitch answered. "Lotus users aren't a department bell ringer anymore. Hell they weren't a big concern even before the referendum took it out of our hands." "No they aren't, but there may be something in that notebook he kept that may fill in some of these gaps we have. Any word from forensics on that?" he asked. "They're getting us a transcript together now," Mitch said. "So far preliminary reports say there are just his prints on it. They said they'll have the copy of the contents for us by day after tomorrow at the latest." "How about his finances? Did you get anything from his bank that looked odd?" Jim asked. Mitch shook his head. "Unless he's got other accounts stashed away I'm not seeing anything there. They're still going through his computer and so far there's nothing there either. Add to that, the contents of his house safe there didn't seem to have anything that says that he isn't just what the records say he is. A workaholic programmer who likes antiquing in flea markets every once in a while who also has a recent taste for black lotus. He's just not that exciting Jim." "Him disappearing like this makes him exciting enough for me Mitch," Jim said. "And there is the matter of all of his interior latches being closed." "There is that," Mitch said. "You think he might have gone out a window?" "No they were all locked down as well, both floors." "Anything from the neighbors so far?" he asked. Mitch flipped through the notebook and looked over the shorthand notes he'd taken for that set of interviews and shook his head. "Nothing that stands out. He's only been there a little over six months. Bought the place and had it renovated before he moved in. They pretty much say the same thing the company data and his cohorts are telling us. Up at odd hours of the night. Pretty quiet. Nice enough guy. The old lady on the other side of the street was sure he was gay." "And nobody noticed anything out of the ordinary in the last couple of weeks?" "Not that they could recall. Most of them seemed kind of surprised that anything like this happened to him in the first place," Mitch said closing the notebook. "How about his family?" Jim asked. "Any joy on that end?" "Not really," Mitch answered. "Both his parents are deceased, he has no extended family. Father was a Gunnery Sergeant in the Marines. He was K.I.A. in Afghanistan in '06. Mother died of cancer a couple years ago and he moved here after she passed. Has one sister in Seattle. When I called her, she said he usually speaks with her every couple of weeks and she was expecting to hear from him already. She did say that they were making plans to come to his place for Fourth of July this year though, so no indication from her that he was looking to leave." "How's she strike you Mitch?" he asked. "She was upset. I didn't get the impression that they were close, but they weren't estranged either. She's making arrangements to come here now. She'll be flying in sometime in the next couple of days." "Good," Jim said. "Maybe she can point us in some kind of direction after we talk to her in person." "If she doesn't, there's always a trip to see Singh," Mitch said. "Let's save that for later if we have to," Jim said. Mitch knew he didn't like visiting Detective Singh unless it was necessary. He didn't know why Jim had a bit of aversion to him. Singh usually only got involved in cases that seemed to have hit a wall in some way and all Mitch really knew about him was that he was good at what he did. Jim may not want to do it, but from the way this case was shaping up; that option was looking like it was becoming more plausible by the hour. Jim closed the file. "Let's pick this up in the morning Mitch. I get the feeling tomorrow's going to be a long one." Mitch didn't say anything to Jim, but he could tell that he had the same idea and it didn't appeal to him either. ==================================================