Sergeant Tan Lo slapped the file onto the desk of Mariella Cruz, his premier night shift detective.
“Gotta hot one,” he said.
Cruz’s partner, the vampire Niles Gule, stopped typing his report to gaze askance at the file resting on Cruz’s desk.
Cruz plucked the file and flipped it open.
“Missing person,” Lo explained. “In Cherry Hill. Call just came in.”
“How long has our target been missing?” Niles asked.
Cruz was silent as her dark eyes studied the file.
“About five hours,” Lo replied. “Like I said, it’s a hot one.”
Cruz frowned as she closed the file. “We’re not waiting 24 hours? This woman is an adult.”
Lo grinned, his white teeth shining against his dark complexion. “Ordinarily, we would wait. But this case doesn’t feel like the usual housewife wandering off shopping. Locate the husband and have a chat.”
“Got it.” Although he didn’t understand why they were shifting protocol, Niles nevertheless tossed his suit jacket over his shoulders as he rose.
Cruz collected the file, her keys, and her purse. As was her wont, she shot off, a bullet already on course. Niles followed behind her, having no trouble keeping up with her given his long stride.
One ten-minute harrowing drive through the dark city later delivered the pair to the Cherry Hill neighborhood of Baltimore. The area south of the city filled up a peninsula jutting in the Patapsco and was surrounded on three sides by water and one side by a major highway and railroad lines. It was a small sea of green surrounded by the industrial areas of Shoreline, Fairfield, and Westport. A couple of turns on residential streets brought them to a neighborhood with the feel of a college campus. Individual apartment buildings stood well back from the road on spacious lots with lots of grass. Oddly, whoever built the neighborhood hadn’t felt the need to create parking lots for all those scattered buildings, so cars lined the streets, which were fortunately well lit with streetlights.
Cruz drove past the home of Sherri and Keith Sapinna, the address of which she’d derived from the file Lo had provided, and drove to the end of the street. This took them to what looked like a derelict park. What had once been basketball courts still sported cracked, weedy paving surrounded by a rusted, chain-link fence. A pavilion sagged beneath a series of large oak trees while a series of trailers added to the sense of a place time had left behind.
As Cruz puttered her Fiat slowly through the park, a Caucasian man of approximately thirty years of age waving a flashlight flagged them down.
Keeping the car in gear, Cruz merely braked and cautiously rolled the window partially down.
“Can we help you?” she asked.
The man’s face appeared to glow ghostly white in the light of his flashlight. “Are you the police? I called the police.”
“Mr. Sapinna?” Cruz asked, her tension easing.
“Yes! Yes! Are you the police?” Sapinna’s voice was frantic.
Cruz gestured for him to back up, then she found a grassy spot to park her car. As she and Niles climbed out, Sapinna paced in agitation.
Cruz proffered her badge. “Detective Cruz. This is my partner, Detective Gule. Tell us what happened.”
Sapinna raked his hands over his face, in his nervous state nearly bopping himself in the eye with his flashlight. “I worked late tonight. Boss called an end of shift meeting that ran long. When I got home, Sherri wasn’t there. I didn’t worry about it at first because I noticed her running gear was missing.” He slapped his hands against his thighs. “She likes to run in the evening to avoid the heat.”
Niles shot Cruz a concerned looked which she returned with a twitch of her shoulder. Never a good thing when a woman ran alone after dark in a large city. Unfortunate events were likely to occur.
“What makes you think she’s not out running?” Cruz asked.
Sapinna gestured wildly. “Firstly, her normal run takes about twenty minutes. She’s been gone over four hours. Plus, I found this.” He waved for them to follow him.
His flashlight swishing back and forth, Sapinna hustled into the park. He passed the various decrepit buildings and headed towards the river. Here, trees created thick cover between patches of mown fields. A faint path carried them alongside the railroad tracks. About fifty yards along the path, Sapinna stopped and pointed with his flashlight.
“I found her stuff here. Can’t be right.” He again shifted around on his feet in agitation. He just couldn’t stand still.
Niles and Cruz approached the spot, allowing Sapinna to light it for them. There, resting on the grass beside the path lay a cellphone. Next to it rested a set of headphones.
Sapinna flicked the flashlight around the area, half blinding Niles every time the beam strafed his face. “I called for her and searched around in a circle. And I found this.” He marched off the path towards the railroad tracks. Down a bit of an embankment he stopped and again focused his light.
Scrambling after him, Niles and Cruz found the light glowing on a piece of cloth.
“That’s her headband,” Sapinna said, his voice growing desperate. “And over there, her shoes. I mean, no one goes running without their shoes! No one goes anywhere in a place like this without their shoes!” His voice became a wail.
Niles gestured for Cruz to stand back. With his exquisite night vision, he could survey the area in a way no human could except in broad daylight. He studied the grass, noting three lines where someone had crushed it in passing. He supposed one path would have been caused by Sherri herself. The second could be Keith Sapinna’s original visit to the site, and the third… either Sapinna trampled things more than Niles might expect, or someone else had walked this way.
“She’s been kidnapped!” Sapinna moaned, holding his head, flashlight now illuminating the sky. “Nothing else makes sense.”
Niles asked Cruz to move Sapinna away from the scene. He then carefully studied it, memorizing where all the various pieces of clothing and equipment lay in relation to each other. At first glance, the scene appeared to tell the tale of a woman running along the path. She’d been stopped at this point. Someone or something drove her to drop her phone and headset then dart off the trail. She dropped her headband five feet further, and then five more feet further, cast off her shoes.
The grass might contain the key to the mystery. Niles studied it for more foot impressions. A path of crushed foxtails led to the tracks, but there his trail ran dry. The soil around the tracks had been packed hard by the summer sun. The tracks themselves rested on sleepers atop a thick bed of stone. Assuming Sherri Sapinna and perhaps whomever had joined her used the tracks to leave the area, no footprints would reveal their direction. Niles suspected the only way to ascertain where the missing woman had gone would be to search the tracks in both directions in hopes of finding the place where the woman with or without her alleged companion left the tracks. A hard search better left for daylight.
He returned to Cruz and Sapinna.
She had tugged her notepad from her purse and was jotting notes. As Niles walked up, Sapinna was telling her where he worked and the hour he came home.
“My boss and my entire work crew will vouch for me,” he grumbled, apparently thinking Cruz suspected him of something nefarious.
Cruz plastered her pleasant-cop-just-doing-her-job smile on her lips. “I’m sure they will. How is your marriage?”
Sapinna’s mouth opened in surprise, then snapped shut again. His eyes narrowed. “Oh yeah. I see where this is going. Blame the husband.”
Cruz’s eyes widened. “I’m not blaming anyone, Mr. Sapinna. I’m merely asking standard questions. Please tell me how you and Mrs. Sapinna were getting along.”
“Maybe she decided to take off,” Niles suggested to calm the man down.
“My wife did not just take off!” Sapinna exclaimed. “We have a good marriage. We’ve had our rocky patches, but we’re happy together.”
“Children?” Cruz asked.
“Two, a boy seventeen and a girl twelve.” He glared resentfully at the pair of detectives. “Both home worried sick about their mom.”
“Can you think of anyone who would want to harm your wife?” Niles asked.
“Of course not!” Sapinna stomped around in a circle like a caged lion. “Sherri is a wonderful person. A good mother. Caring. Volunteers all over the place. She wouldn’t run off and leave her family.”
Cruz scratched notes. “All right. Why don’t you go home, sir? Man the phones in case she calls.”
Sapinna started. “Yeah, you’re right. I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Not the sort of call you want your children handling,” she added gently. She gestured with her pen. “Meanwhile, I’ll call in the forensic team to survey the area and develop leads for us. Could be something of value on the dropped phone.”
“I didn’t touch anything,” Sapinna insisted. “Didn’t want to mess up your CSI team.”
“That’s good,” Niles replied. He wanted to roll his eyes. Everyone was an expert on crime scene techniques now, thanks to television. He held out his hand to shake Sapinna’s. “We will do everything in our power to find your wife, Mr. Sapinna.”
Sapinna disparaged the offer. He waved at the two detectives in disgust, whirled, and marched away into the darkness.
“Phew!” Cruz whistled while she pocketed her notebook. “He’s got himself wound tight.” She fished out her phone to call for assistance.
“Do you blame him?” Niles asked. “Assuming what he says is true, his wife has gone missing in the dark of night, in a not-so-nice park, near an industrial area. Not a pretty look on the face of it.”
Cruz frowned. She held up a finger, asking him to hold that thought, while she conversed with folks back at headquarters. After she ascertained a team was on the way, she hung up and stuffed the phone in a pocket.
She tilted her head at her partner, squinting to make out his expression in the glare of her car’s headlights. “Why do I hear a note of disbelief in your voice?”
“Disbelief?” Niles lifted a brow. “I’m not sure if that’s the right word. Let’s just say I’m withholding judgement pending further review.”
“Ok, what’s got your shorts in a bunch?”
Niles scowled. “My shorts are never in a bunch.”
“Yeah. Sure.” Cruz folded her arms. “Spill it. What’s bothering you?”
“The phone.” Niles headed back to where the phone still rested on the grass. He pointed to it.
Now back in almost total darkness, Cruz retrieved her phone a second time and hit the flashlight ap. She gazed down at Sherri’s phone where it still rested on the grass alongside the headphones.
“What’s the problem with it?” she asked.
Niles gestured with his toe, not touching anything. “I’ve got no problem with the phone. But I do have a problem with the headset.”
Cruz bent down, but she didn’t touch anything either. “What about it?”
Niles used his toe to punctuate his point. “It’s neatly coiled up.”
Cruz straightened. “Ok. Yeah.”
Niles turned to her. “People do that. When they finish listening to something on their phone, they usually tug the earbuds from their ears then wrap the cord up. Some people wrap the cord around the phone itself before putting it away. Others disconnect the cord, wrap it into a coil round their fingers, then pocket the cord.”
Cruz stood in the darkness pondering the cord at her feet. “What are you suggesting?”
“That the idea some stalker attacked her while she was jogging and ripped her phone from her doesn’t hold water. Maybe the phone was dropped. Can’t say. But the earbuds were removed and carefully wrapped up, like people do almost instinctually these days.”
Cruz drew her breath before releasing it again. “So that means…”
“Whoever set that cord there, did it as a normal course of removing the earbuds,” Niles explained. “It doesn’t read rushed or that an attacker ripped the buds off and tossed them.”
Cruz pursed her lips. “And that means…”
“We take a hard look at our grieving husband,” Niles answered.
Cruz nodded sagely. “Yep. That’s exactly what we do.”
Her face was grim even in the darkness and she and Niles returned to her car to await the arrival of the crime scene team.
The night would be a long one.
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