Page 30 of One Final Target

Tara pointed to a chair. “Have a seat. We’ll tell you everything. We have a name.”

“A name to go with the picture?” On high alert now, Jodie didn’t want to sit. She wanted to pace, plan. Instead, she sat to listen to what they had to say, holding her hands in her lap to keep from fidgeting.

“Yep. While we got nothing from the spent casings or energy cans, San Bernardino pulled a couple of prints off some of the rounds collected from the stolen ATV,” Mike said. “They belong to a Dennis Marshall Collins.”

“Do you recognize the name?” Tara asked.

Opening and closing her fists, Jodie shook her head. “It’s vaguely familiar, but I don’t know why.”

“You interviewed him about a year ago. Remember when you covered for me at civil service interviews?” Mike asked. He pulled out a file she recognized as a background packet.

Jodie did remember. She hated doing civil service interviews, but Mike had been sick, so she covered one day. The process fornew hires at the PD was long, and there were any number of hoops for a new applicant to jump through.

“A skinny little white kid.”

Tara nodded. “You barely passed him, but the civilian gave him high marks.”

Mike took a pile of papers out of the file. He laid the papers out like a deck of cards, singled out one form, and pushed it toward her. Each interviewer filled out such a form about the candidate after each interview. She scanned it as everything about the interview came back to her.

“You didn’t like the guy,” Tara said.

Jodie shook her head. “He said the right things, but something was off. I wanted to outright fail him, but the civilian thought I was being too hard. I figured the rest of his background would bear me out. I settled for just giving him the lowest score possible.”

“Why didn’t you like him?” Mike asked. “The civilian loved him.”

“He condescended to us. I got the distinct impression he thought he was smarter than anyone and he wouldn’t be teachable. Plus, he sounded so rehearsed. I can’t explain my feelings any better. I felt as if he were saying what we wanted to hear and he didn’t believe any of it. I know she liked him. I couldn’t explain to her why I had the reservations I had.” She reached for more of the papers, scanning each.

“He wasn’t hired. You were spot-on with your reservations. All the endorsements in his background were weak. Nothing stood out about him as a candidate to be a police officer.”

She snapped her fingers. “Then I was right.” She frowned; something wasn’t adding up. “Wait, he decided to kill my teambecause we didn’t hire him a year ago? As much as I want to get the guy who killed my team, Collins is a stretch.”

“We’re not certain of anything yet. But his prints were on the bullets—one dot—and he has a tenuous connection to you—another dot. At the very least he loaded the rifle used to shoot at you. Still another dot. Odd coincidence, wouldn’t you say?”

“I don’t believe in coincidence.”

“Neither do I. Smiley is on his way to talk to him as we speak. All we wanted was to get your read on the guy,” Mike said.

“I thought he was a little liar, unteachable, not psychotic.” Jodie reviewed the information in the background package. Nothing stood out; nothing said Collins would make a good cop. He barely passed the other portions of the application. The actual psych exam was sealed, but Dr. Bass didn’t consider Collins a viable candidate.

“Because of the strange connection,” Tara said, “right now he’s our best lead.”

“Any association with Hayes?”

“None we’ve found so far.”

“All of this is certainly odd.” Jodie leafed through the paperwork. Neighbors saying Collins was quiet, a good neighbor, yet they didn’t know him well enough to offer an opinion. The candidate’s own statement saying he wanted to serve his community and believed law enforcement suited him. There were deficiencies, however. Some classmates said he was a little weird, but they didn’t elaborate. The hardest part about conducting a background investigation was getting people to be open and honest about the applicant. Either these people really didn’t know Collins, or they did and didn’t want to say.

He worked from home so had limited contact with anyone athis job. His work history contained the most positives. He’d been with his employer for seven years, since his teens. His supervisor gave him high marks, said he completed every assignment thoroughly and on time. He wasn’t sure Collins had the right temperament to be a police officer. That comment had been highlighted, probably by the selection committee.

Then Jodie keyed on Collins’s address and memorized it. She wanted to contact the kid again, get her own feeling for him all over again. Mike would never sanction her having any contact with a suspect since she no longer worked for the PD.

Mike moved to take the background paperwork from her and put everything away. “It doesn’t make sense. Maybe he’s not the guy who set the bomb. But for some odd reason he handled those bullets. He could lead us to the shooter.”

“Then again, it wouldn’t be the first time a weirdo acted out because he was rejected.” Jodie said the words without conviction. How would a little misfit like Collins have managed to take out her whole team and then disappear?

“If you think of anything, let us know,” Tara said as she and Mike made their way out.

When the door shut behind them, Jodie uncovered her whiteboard and wrote down Collins’s address before she forgot it. It was in Lakewood, an area bordering East Long Beach, about twenty minutes away from where she lived. She holstered her concealed carry weapon, and then, almost as an afterthought, she shoved her old city ID card into her pocket. It wouldn’t hurt to take it, and like the gun, she might need it.

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