Twelve years gone, p.1
Twelve Years Gone, page 1
Twelve Years Gone
A Detective Emily Tizzano Vigilante Justice Thriller
KJ Kalis
Contents
Also by K.J. Kalis:
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Epilogue
A Note from the Author
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2021 K.J. Kalis
eISBN 978-1-7352192-3-3
ISBN 978-1-7352192-4-0
All rights reserved
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved, no part of the publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise including technology to be yet released), without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.
The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of author’s rights is appreciated.
Also by K.J. Kalis:
The Kat Beckman Thriller Series:
The Cure
Fourteen Days
Burned
The Blackout
The Bloody Canvas
Sauk Valley Killer
Christian Non-Fiction (Karen Kalis)
Miserable Christians: Eliminate Discontent, Rediscover Your Joy and Live an Abundant Life
1
Five years had passed, and she could still feel the cold metal of handcuffs being clicked around her wrists. Former Chicago PD detective, Emily Tizzano, stepped out the front door of her small house just outside of Chicago. The morning air was cool. Somewhere in the distance, she heard a single bird chirp. It was far more cheerful than she was. She looked up and down the street, half expecting someone to be staring at her, but they weren’t. It was a feeling she hadn’t been able to shake, even after all these years.
She reached over to the black mailbox that was just outside of the front door, flipping the lid open. Inside, there were two letters and a magazine with coupons in it. There was also a fat envelope with nothing written on the outside. Emily pursed her lips and shook her head. It was the first of the month. The envelopes kept coming.
Emily clicked the door closed behind her, twisting the deadbolt and hearing it click into the frame. Her neighborhood was safe — she knew that — but for some reason it didn’t feel that way. It felt like all the safety and security she knew in her life had been stripped away and sat just out of reach.
She padded down the hallway, avoiding stepping on her dog, Miner, named for all the holes he dug in her backyard. “We’ll go for a walk soon,” she said, taking the mail to the kitchen. It landed on the counter with a slap. The only thing she bothered to open was the fat envelope. It was filled with hundred-dollar bills, just like every other envelope had been for the last five years. The first of the month, it appeared out of nowhere, filled with five thousand in cash from someone. Who, she couldn’t be sure, though she thought she had a pretty good idea.
She picked up the money and stuffed it in a drawer in the kitchen. It would go to the bank later. She had long ago given up the idea of trying to talk to the person who was giving it to her. Even if she confronted the person that she thought was giving her money every month, she knew they would deny it. As a former detective, she knew she had no other evidence besides the fact that it replaced the salary she had lost when she’d been terminated from the Chicago Police Department. The money should have made her feel better, but it only left a bitter taste in her mouth.
Pushing the thought aside, Emily scooped out dark black coffee grounds from the container on the kitchen counter and put them in the coffee maker, hearing the bubbling of the water starting to boil. While she was waiting, she refilled Miner’s water dish with fresh water. He wouldn’t drink anything that had sat for more than a few hours. She didn’t know why. She glanced at him. He was standing right behind her, staring at her. “I know you want to go for your walk. Just let me drink a little coffee first, okay?”
The silver and black dog Australian Cattle Dog grunted and laid down on the floor. She’d gotten him two years before, after visiting a local dog shelter. He had looked up at her with such sweet brown eyes that she couldn’t resist. He was only six months old at the time. “Now, you know that blue heelers require a lot of exercise, don’t you?” the girl who was helping her with her adoption paperwork said, “The young couple that brought him to us left him here because he was taking up too much of their time.”
Emily nodded. She knew what the girl was really asking her, which was if she was prepared to take care of this dog or if she’d be like so many other people that got a dog and then decided it was inconvenient and left them at a shelter, hoping for a better home. “I’ve got nothing else to do,” Emily said.
The girl tilted her head and squinted a tad, as if she was wondering how it was that someone so young had nothing to do. Emily decided to finish her thought for her. “You could say I’m retired.” The girl nodded.
Emily and Miner had been inseparable ever since. No matter where Emily went, Miner was there, too. After tripping over him in the kitchen, she looked at him and mumbled, “Maybe I should rename you Shadow?”
She took a moment and refilled his food dish and then set it down, hearing a few mouthfuls of crunching behind her. Emily checked her phone. There was nothing new on it. She’d check her email later. Before the pot finished perking, she poured herself a cup of coffee and took a sip. The bitter liquid scalded the roof of her mouth. She put the cup down quickly. It was too hot to drink. Emily walked down the hall, grabbing a leash and a bottle of water. Miner ran to the door and sat in front of it as if saying to her, “If you’re going somewhere, you’ll have to take me!” Emily clipped the leash to Miner’s collar, pulled on a light jacket and slipped into her tennis shoes, stuffing her cell phone in her pocket.
Emily had repeated this same process nearly every morning for the last two years, except if it was pouring down rain or too cold, as Chicago winters were prone to be once in a while, the winds howling off of Lake Michigan at a sub-Artic level. Miner would go for a walk no matter what, but there was a point at which it made little sense to suffer through the weather.
As Emily ran down the steps, she glanced around the neighborhood. It was filled with small bungalows that had mostly been built in the 1960s. Some of them had been fixed up — even fully remodeled with new landscaping. There were others that looked like they were stuck in a time warp, as if nothing had changed since the day the first family that owned them had moved in.
Miner stopped for a second, sniffing the grass and poking at a bug with the tip of his black nose. Emily waited patiently, knowing that she didn’t have anywhere to go or anything to do that was pressing. That had been the hardest part of adjusting to life after the Chicago Police Department. The adrenaline, the shift work, the calls in the middle of the night — it was something that kept her going and gave her life structure. Now, all of it had been taken away from her.
After about an hour of walking, Emily knew that Miner had had enough for the moment. As they stepped inside the door, Emily unclipped Miner from his leash. The dog trotted to the kitchen where she could hear water being lapped up. She slipped off her shoes and walked into the front sitting room that she had converted into the office after Luca left. It wasn’t much, just an old desk with a creaky chair and a file cabinet in the corner. If her mother had seen it, she would have scolded Emily for her lack of decor. Unlike her mother, decorating and cooking wasn’t her thing. Emily plopped down in the chair, pulling her long black hair up into a bun on top of her head. She flipped open the lid to her laptop, hearing the whirr of the fan inside start to hum. The screen lit up and Emily typed in her password, walking back to the kitchen to get a fresh cup of coffee while the machine woke up and loaded. Back in the office, Emily sat down again and stared at the screen. She had more than one hundred emails, most of them junk. Scanning the names that popped up, she saw that some of them were retailers and some of them were places she had ordered from trying to sell her more things she didn’t need. She qui ckly deleted those, getting down to a list of seven emails. They were all the same. People had found out that Emily was a former detective who sometimes helped solve problems, problems that no one else could. How they found out about her, she wasn’t sure, but the number of requests for her help seemed to grow every single day. She sent each email to the printer which started to clatter in the corner, feeding the paper through and spitting it out. She closed the lid on her laptop and got up, pulling the sheets off the tray.
Emily sat down at her desk chair, the old wooden back creaking again. The monthly mystery cash would have allowed her to buy new furniture, but she liked the old chair. Taking the sheets from the printer, she spread them out across her desk, looking at each one individually. She started with people’s names — Leo, Jane, Sal. Reaching for the sheet on her left, she picked it up and looked at it, scanning it quickly, setting it down again. As she picked up the second one, Miner came into her office, curling up by her feet, resting his head near her toes. “The second one is a no,” she said to him. Jane’s husband had left her. She wanted Emily to kill his new wife. Not exactly a cold case. Emily knew Miner didn’t understand, but it didn’t matter. It made her feel better to have someone to talk to since most of the people she used to hang around with were either connected to the police department or her ex-husband. Loneliness had become her new partner. Whether that was by design or because she learned the hard way that people couldn’t be trusted, she didn’t know. It didn’t matter.
Emily scanned the other emails and picked them up in one pile, all except a single sheet she set off to the side. So many requests, most of them for cases that weren’t really cases at all. Someone got offended by something—a marriage that went bad, a brother that supposedly stole money from a sister—those weren’t the cases Emily was interested in. She was only looking for cases where a wrong needed to be righted, one that was something deeper than just some hurt feelings or broken dreams.
Emily stood up from her desk and took two steps toward the corner where there were two cardboard boxes stacked. She opened the lid and slid the rejected emails in, adding them to a pile that had to be five hundred sheets thick, years of requests for her help.
Emily sat back down at the desk, picking up the single sheet of paper she’d set aside, twisting back and forth in her chair as she read it again. It was a sad story, one she hadn’t heard before. The boxes were filled with the history of people’s lives, their anger at people who had done them wrong, the injustice that they felt with no way to rectify the situation. She understood their pain, every single one of them. But just because they were hurt didn’t mean that she could do anything about it or that she’d even want to.
“Miner, this is one to think about.” Emily stood up from the desk, taking the email with her into the kitchen. She popped her cup of coffee into the microwave to heat it up, noticing there was another cup — the one she had poured before she went on her morning walk — still sitting by the coffee maker. She would work her way through both of them by lunchtime.
While she was waiting for her coffee to heat, she reread the email a couple of times. It was from a woman named Vicki Schmidt, who lived somewhere in Ohio. Her daughter, Sarah, had disappeared twelve years before. No matter what Vicki had done, she wasn’t able to get closure. Sarah’s body was never found. “I ran across your name in an online forum about unsolved crimes. Someone mentioned that you were one of the best cold case detectives that Chicago PD had ever seen. I’m sorry to bother you with my daughter’s story, but I can’t sleep. I haven’t slept in the twelve years since Sarah went missing. My doctor thinks my newly diagnosed heart condition is a coincidence. I don’t believe that for a minute. I’m sure the real problem is a broken heart…”
In her mind, Emily tried to imagine what Vicki Schmidt might look like. She wondered about her house and the town that she lived in. But one thing Emily knew was that she couldn’t commit to a case too fast. She had done that once, and that was the single case she’d not been able to close.
She put the email down on the kitchen counter. She had errands to run. Vicki’s email would be waiting for her when she got home. The woman had waited twelve years, she could wait a few days more while Emily made up her mind.
2
Sleep didn’t come easily to Emily that night. She tossed and turned so much that at some point, she felt Miner jump off of the bed and curl up on his blanket in the corner. He only did that when she had nightmares. Unfortunately, it was more nights than she would have liked. The image of her own arrest, the handcuffs, the video cameras, her partner whispering in her ear, “I’m sorry, Emily,” as he led her out of the front door of her house were mixed in with the images of the crimes she had seen, the dismembered bodies, the old photographs and the vacant faces of family members that had long ago given up hope.
Startled, Emily sat straight up in bed. The room was still dark. She glanced over at her cell phone sitting next to the semi-automatic pistol by her bed. It was four o’clock in the morning. She sat for a moment, waiting for the memories to slide back into the box they emerged from nearly every night. She heard rustling from the corner. Miner jumped back up on the bed, coming close. She could feel his hot breath near her face, then the damp lick of his tongue as he kissed her on the cheek. He turned around twice and curled up near her feet. She didn’t move. She sat stock still, waiting for reality to soak back into her skin. Although she desperately wanted to go back to sleep, the longer she sat there, the more she realized that it wasn’t going to happen. Not tonight.
Swinging her legs over the side of the bed, she padded towards the bathroom, brushing her teeth. There’d been many times as a detective she had been woken up in the middle of the night, but much of that stopped once she had been moved to the cold case division. That’s where she really found her calling. Somehow the pain of the families who didn’t have answers and the victory that criminals felt at getting away with things so evil they could barely be spoken about for years, if not decades, fueled her.
She was on her fourth year of working in the cold case division, closing more open folders than anyone else ever had, when she noticed people started to whisper around her. At first, she thought it was just office gossip. Police officers were worse than anyone else when it came to gossip, worse than anyone else she had ever met. Over the next week or two, the whispers became stares. Finally, she asked her partner, Lou Gonzales, what was going on.
“Why do I get the feeling everybody’s staring at me?” she said to him one afternoon while she was pouring over one of the newest cases she was working on, the rape of an elderly woman from ten years before.
Lou looked startled, something that Emily picked up on right away. “I don’t know. Why would you say that?”
Emily caught him glancing toward the captain’s office that was stationed at the end of the hallway. Something was going on, she knew it. She just didn’t know what.
Two days later, her doorbell rang at eight o’clock at night, hours after her shift was over. She opened the door, her hair up in a ponytail, her face scrubbed free of makeup, wearing leggings and a T-shirt, barefoot. Lou was at the front door, his badge dangling around his neck between the lapels of his brown suit coat. He wasn’t the only one. There were two detective cars and two cruisers. Lights from news channel video cameras blinded her momentarily. “What’s going on?”
