The Mind Virus

Chapter 6 - Part 4

A hot, sour odor permeated the air of the motel room. The building didn't have great insulation, and even poorer climate control. Although she was being paid handsomely, Harriett couldn't get out of the habit of staying in cheap, out-of-the-way motels while on jobs. She would tell herself it was to avoid the security and identity checks at classier hotels, but in truth, she just enjoyed sticking to what she knew. It was how she made it this far. Experimentation is what leads to the downfall of people in her trade. Be it arrest, death or getting on the wrong side of someone worse than the police and worse than her employers, Harriett stuck to her risk-averse strategy and it paid her out in spades.

She grabbed her white teddy bear, Mr. Snuggles, off of the bed and pressed him to her chest. She didn't enjoy thinking about her job going wrong. Not in the way that it went wrong that day, but rather in the sense of getting arrested or killed. She supposed getting killed wasn't even the worst of it. Prison, she felt, was much more dire. She put on a good show, but she wasn't as tough as she let on. Her greatest weapon was her mind. The deaths she'd caused had been meticulously planned and discreetly executed. She was neither one to charge in guns a-blazing nor use brute force to achieve her goals. She would get eaten alive by the base thugs in prison. No, she liked her freedom far too much to allow for errors in her work.

Putting the niggling thoughts out of her head, she grabbed her manila envelope and began fingering through the pages. Persons of interest. Getting warm. Cedar Grove Police Department. She pulled out the stapled-together stack of sheets. There was a list of all the detectives in the department. Reflecting back, Harriett wondered why they'd given her these names if they truly believed that the police would be out of the way. Were they covering all their bases or did they just missell her the job? The question made her uncomfortable either way, but there was no backing out now.

Using the envelope as a guide, she slid it down across the page, taking in every name of every detective. No "James Ford" or any variation thereof. She flipped to the page of uniformed officers, did the same, and came out of it with the same result. He wasn't a recent promotion either, it seemed. Thinking about it again, was Harriett sure that Ford was with Cedar Grove PD? He wasn't driving a marked car. She had seen some insignia on his badge, but what did it look like? She cursed her temporary inattentiveness. Detective Ford's appearance at the scene had taken her by surprise, so she wasn't in top form. Rookie mistake. She should always be prepared for anything and everything. Today just wasn't her day.

The option of calling all police and sheriff's departments in the area and asking for James Ford was not off the table, but it certainly had the potential to ruffle a few feathers, and Harriett felt better about leaving that as a final option. In fact, just thinking about the prospect of multiple law enforcement agencies investigating the case she was on made her sweat, let alone calling them all up and asking questions that could lead them there. There was no way to win this, not without just stumbling through blind until she tripped over a new lead.

A curse left her lips as she thought again about the diary that she'd missed by a few minutes. Waiting for a new lead to fall into her lap was not the right course. She needed to get that diary, and that meant finding out who James Ford was at any cost. And if he knew too much about the case, it also meant silencing him.