Disenchantment 12

It had been several days of ill luck, decided Detective Hornblende, that didn’t favor Persephone Phileus. The missing persons department wasn’t usually this busy, and the personnel were often able to lend themselves to other departments to help with investigations. Most of the cases they received were runaway kids or upset spouses who hadn’t notified their significant others, usually due to anger, but sometimes miscommunication, that they wouldn’t be home. All were usually found within twenty-four hours, occasional stragglers taking up to two or three days.

 

On another level she was lucky that people were looking for her at all being that departmental policy refused to acknowledge an adult to be missing until she had been gone at least three days, unless there were extenuating circumstances, like those of Missus Persephone Phileus, where the occurrence happened under strange situations, such as a possible abduction, and where there was left little doubt that someone had absconded with her rather than the person leaving of her own free will.

 

The entire department had been a mess this Christmas season. With the exception of summer, Christmas time was the time of year that many members of the force had wanted time off. For some strange reason, his captain had allowed almost half the department time off around the holiday. Maybe teachers and students could take significant time off around the holidays, but cops couldn’t usually do so, with the apparent exception of this year, as crime doesn’t usually take time off around the holidays just because others do.

 

Hornblende rarely watched television or films, and when he did on rare occasions, he almost never watched police procedurals or cop dramas as he found them to be ludicrously inaccurate. Like other bloated and poorly managed government entities, the police department could often be highly inept. There was to some extent the existence of taking care of their own if an outside force threatened anyone, but there certainly wasn’t the well-oiled machinery shown in fiction of a police department coming together to solve crimes. Ego, laziness, and horrible mismanagement usually rang to be truer. Sometimes he wondered why they solved as many cases as they did.

 

Reynolds had gone back to the scene, claiming that there was no wash there at all, a fence? Yes. A wash? No. Hornblende had asked Chu to check it out for him, as when he got back from interviewing Oren Phileus at his home, he had been on the job for over thirty hours. When he did arrive the next day, Chu had claimed that he had been too busy with other assignments, and he had no cases as far as Hornblende knew, and hadn’t even done it. Hornblende was more than just beginning to think that Chu liked to work missing persons because most of the cases solved themselves with very little work being put in them by the police in many instances.

 

That wasn’t the case for all of them. Hornblende was still haunted by the case of Matthew Nicastro, a child that had been abducted several years back, who seemed to have disappeared without a trace. One minute the boy had been playing in the street, the next he was completely gone. Of course, that had been Hornblende’s case, like this one. When given an opportunity, Chu seemed to deliberately pick the easiest cases, cases that statistically would be solved with minimal effort, basically most cases of teenagers, especially fifteen to seventeen years of age.

 

Hornblende had had to go out himself, pushing forty-eight hours after the woman had been missing, to check the scene. With missing persons, it wasn’t like homicide. They rarely had forensics investigate, because, unlike homicide, there was not always a clear case of a crime, no body to investigate, often not even a real crime to solve. Most times the last place that the person had been seen had little, if anything, to do with the case. Their homes were what usually helped out the police, that’s where any clues might be.

 

Hornblende had driven out to the scene, and Reynolds was correct. There was no wash. There was a chain link fence, and it did seem to have a hole in it, and also there did exist a tree. Hornblende wasn’t familiar with trees and plants, not being much of a botanist, but he supposed it looked like a willow tree, the branches and leaves seemingly nearly coming back down to the ground. However, several feet beyond the tree and the fence there was no decline down into the wash, there was actually the opposite, an incline of a hill that climbed up, not down. Again, there was the hole in the fence, and it was partially covered by the tree, but there certainly wasn’t any wash.

 

Hornblende had had to double check, and had even called Reynolds back out to the scene, to make sure that this was the place that Phileus had been picked up. Reynolds hadn’t been very happy about having to come back out on his day off, but he did acquiesce to the request eventually. The next day Hornblende had even gone to the tow truck company that the police hired to remove vehicles for them. The driver had been able to confirm that it was the place he picked up the Honda.

 

He had walked around the area, but it was typical Californian desert, weeds, dirt, small, twisted shrubs, and an occasional cactus greeted him, all in addition to the massive amount of trash thrown by careless people out of their cars to dot the landscape. Hornblende had also walked to the top of the hill, and he was able to see the fourteen freeway, even near the top he could hear it. It was a relatively small and undeveloped area. Any direction one ventured, and civilization of some form would greet him once again, in not too long a time. One certainly couldn’t get lost here unless he unintelligently ran around in very small circles.

 

Yes, so, it was a mystery. He knew that he needed to talk with Phileus again, but he liked to think a lot, maybe more than others, about how to approach any situation, primarily work-related situations, the best way possible. He had decided that this was the best place to interrogate Phileus again, if the man was willing.

 

Hornblende was there again. It was dusk, on a late December’s day, the sun was going down at what traditionally should have been a normal time, but there was something very off about the temperature. Southern California was thought of as being a great climate year-round, but that wasn’t necessarily true. Sure, if one lived near the coast, he or she could expect moderate temperatures in both winter and summer, but once one got too far inland, the summers and winters were less forgiving. Most of Southern California was a huge desert. Temperatures could soar into the triple digits easily in summer and plummet below freezing in the winter. It wasn’t extremely uncommon to receive snow in the winter in Santa Clarita. However, the strange climate shift this year was a big exception to what normally occurred. So, there he was, on a December evening that felt like, outside the air conditioning of his car, a July afternoon.

 

The last time he had come, he had stayed too long, far into the night. When he arrived, he had first parked very near where Phileus’s wife’s car had been parked, but after having investigated that area, he had moved his vehicle several hundred yards away, to peer around a different section of land. When darkness came, he used his heavy, steel flashlight that could just as easily be a weapon as it could be a tool for breaking up the darkness of the night. When he had decided to go back to the original place, he opted to leave his vehicle and travel by foot, also deciding to turn off his light. It was intuition of sorts, a gut feeling. He was glad that he did. When he arrived, he saw Phileus there, looking around, picking up pieces of garbage strewn about. That was odd.

 

Hornblende wasn’t sure what the man was doing. Either he truly believed he might be able to find his wife, or at least a clue to his wife’s disappearance, or he was making sure that he didn’t leave any evidence, and there was something truly sinister about his actions. Another interesting thing that Hornblende noticed about the man’s behavior in general, was that he did not contact the police at all, again. Most people, when a family member is missing, will repeatedly call the police, to the point of being aggressively annoying in the process of the investigation. Phileus, rather conspicuously, had not called once to check on the investigation. Nor had he seemed to ask a friend or other family member to do so on his behalf.

 

Hornblende waited. Chu had asked him for some help phoning friends of a missing teenager this evening, but Hornblende had just grunted. Honestly, fuck Chu, he was a lazy idiot and a shitty cop. The missing teen might have upset Hornblende, but this particular girl had run away three times in as many months, and he was fairly certain that she would be back home by morning. Let Chu call her friends and waste his evening poorly navigating the girl’s social media for clues to her whereabouts, Hornblende had his own case to solve, and at that moment, he needed to wait.

 

To pass the time, Hornblende turned on the radio to a long-standing LA radio station on AM, as FM was usually lost between Los Angeles and the surrounding hills, listening to oldies, usually fifties, sixties, and seventies rock, with occasional eighties, nineties and early aughts playing as well. Hornblende was already a full-grown man and working in law enforcement when some of those songs came out. It made him feel old to think that those songs of not just his youth, but early adulthood, were now oldies.

 

It was times like those, where he had time to think, that he pondered why he had become a cop, why he had wanted to be involved with missing persons. Although the vast majority of them weren’t missing for long, those that were needed a voice, someone to speak for them when no one else would. His sister had needed that voice when he was a child, and no one spoke for her. Her disappearance and eventual death was also what destroyed his mother, and killed his own childhood.

 

He sat and waited, listening to the music at a very low volume, and thinking of his sister, for well over three hours, then as he expected, a car pulled over, right where Missus Phileus’s car was towed from.

 

When the vehicle shut off, and more importantly the head lights shut off, Hornblende recognized it as Oren Phileus’s Ford Focus. They were certainly a weird couple, as most of their neighbors sported significantly higher-priced cars, yet they opted for older vehicles, an older model Ford and Honda Civic.

 

Hornblende gave the man some time. Phileus got out, turned on his own flashlight, and began looking around. However, then the man did something that Hornblende didn’t expect. He shouted out: “Perry!” This guy had to be a complete idiot. What made him think that his wife would suddenly show up back here?

 

“Perry!” Phileus shouted out again, this time going back behind the fence and tree.

 

Hornblende was easily able to follow the beam from his light. He was about to get out of his car when the man said something strange.

 

“Thanatos!” he yelled.

 

Thanatos? What the hell is wrong with this weirdo? Hornblende stood still, thinking. Thanatos? Wasn’t that a comic book villain? What is wrong with this guy? He made a mental note to look it up later. Mental illness certainly might be a possibility, and that wasn’t the firs time that Hornblende thought it.

 

Eventually Hornblende did get out of his car, and he walked over to Phileus’s location. After several minutes, the man had returned and sat on the hood of his vehicle, just sitting, staring off into to space. Hornblende felt his service nine-millimeter in its holster, the steel felt good and gave him a certain comfort. He would have preferred to have his snub-nosed thirty-eight, his own weapon, but he had never had to pull his weapon on the job, and it was easier to carry around the police-issued weapon, less questions from upper management.

 

As he got within twenty feet of the man, he turned on his flashlight, the other on his holstered weapon, not drawn, but ready to be. “Mister Phileus,” he called, the sound breaking up the night, not a shout, but far from a whisper, a voice that commanded respect and presented authority.

 

The man made a rumbling sound, almost like the beginning of a scream that he suddenly tried to stifle, and jumped off his vehicle onto the ground. He looked almost excited for a second or so, but then seemed to calm down to an almost melancholy state. “Yeah, I suppose he wouldn’t use a flashlight. Who are you?”

 

The reason police used high powered flashlights at night was to half-blind suspects while giving the officers plenty to see, also keeping the flashlight up near their heads, the beam aligned with their eyesight. “Do you have any weapons on you this evening?” he asked. His hand was still on the nine-millimeter, but he hadn’t drawn it.

 

“No, who are you?”

 

“It’s Detective Hornblende.”

 

“Oh, you.” Phileus seemed to visibly relax.

 

“What are you doing out here?”

 

“Do you hear all the crickets, and toads? All the night life? I couldn’t hear all that the other night?”

 

“Mister Phileus, why are you here?”

 

“Looking for my wife.”

 

“What makes you think that she would be here?”

 

“This is the last place I saw here. You obviously think it a possibility too, right? So, it’s not too far off. Or...are you following me?”

 

“I’m doing my job, Mister Phileus. I’d like to ask you a few questions, if that’s okay. We all want to find your wife.”

 

“Maybe stop shining that light in my eyes, yeah?”

 

“Of course,” Hornblende replied, and lowered the flashlight.

 

“So, can I ask you some questions?”

 

Phileus just looked at him for several seconds before responding, “Am I under arrest?”

 

“I saw you go through that fence. I could arrest you for trespassing, but I would rather just talk to you.”

 

“There aren’t any signs telling me not to trespass. Who owns the land on the other side? The city? The county? If there aren’t any signs on public property, I can enter.”

 

Hornblende had no idea who owned the land, but did assume it was Los Angeles county land. “That’s not exactly how it works, but I’m not worried about that. I just want to ask you some questions.”

 

“Am I under arrest?”

 

“No.”

 

“Then, I’m free to go?”

 

“Mister Phileus, who is Thanatos? Why were you calling that name?”

 

“Am I free to go?”

 

“Yes, who is Thanatos?”

 

Ignoring him, Phileus immediately got back into his car and started the engine.

 

“Mister Phileus! Your cooperation is imperative to solving this case. Don’t you want to find your wife? Who is Thanatos?”

 

Phileus only said one more word before he drove off into the night: “Lawyer.”

 

Hornblende stood there for a few moments, thinking about his options. That guy was fucking crazy. “Shit,” he mumbled into the night.