Hello, Little Sparrow by Jordan Jones (ebook audio reader txt) 📗

interested in the name Tommy Roisman, which was the alias this customer used to make the phone line active,” Harlow interjected.

I closed my eyes as the lady typed.

“I’m not seeing anything under that business name, but the address under the name Tommy Roisman was 3001 Industrial Park,” he responded, squinting at the screen. “It’s since been turned off, three days ago.”

“Yeah,” Harlow said. “That was us.”

I took a breath. “Did the technicians not find it weird that they were hooking up one phone line to an empty, decrepit building in the middle of an abandoned industrial park of rusted out factory buildings?”

She nervously shrugged and said, “Let me get my supervisor.”

Harlow shook her head at me as we both looked at the clock.

“Hello Detectives,” a young man with dark skin and a nice sports coat greeted us. “I’m Nelson. I run the front end here. How can I help?”

I once again showed identification and the warrant.

“Well,” he said. “That sure looks official. I’d like to help you out anyway that I can.”

“We’re looking for alternative addresses for the single phone line put in at 3001 Industrial Park,” I responded. “It’s a large, muddied mess of a park with several buildings. This phone line was only hooked up to one. We’re needing any and all information pertaining to it.”

“It was set up by a Tommy Roisman on March sixteenth,” he said. “He has his home address on there at 545 West Sycamore Street.”

I looked to Harlow, and she nodded. It was the same address as the one we searched already.

“What about the technicians?” Harlow asked. “Can we speak to them? Maybe they noticed something about him?”

“Oh, you can, Ma’am, but they probably won’t notice anything about this Tom —, “

“His name —,” I stopped myself from being aggressive. “His real name is Brooks Ingram and he’s a serial killer.”

“Oh whoa…wait a minute,” Nelson said, placing his hands down on the counter. “You mean…this guy’s The Sparrow?”

I nodded and waved my hands down, looking around to see who all noticed.

“Please keep your voice down,” I said. “This is an active investigation and this might be some sensitive material. We have to speak to those technicians.”

“Certainly,” he said. He clicked around in the computer and finally stopped and looked up. “It’s Tad and Andy. I believe they’re working today. Let me check on their route. Ah, here we go. They’re working on setting up internet at a bar here in town.”

“Good,” I said. “Have them cancel the rest of their day and meet us at the industrial park as soon as they’re finished with that job.”

***

My car sat idling, facing the rusted out building we found the phone in. The drizzle had stopped, but we could still see our breath. Overcast was the prediction, and the obvious weather forecast was spot on again.

A van with stenciled lettering on the side pulled up beside us. Two young men climbed out and one threw a cigarette on the ground.

“Are you Tad and Andy?” I asked after rolling down my window.

“Yes, Sir,” the taller one said. He had an earpiece in his right ear and was dumping fistfuls of sunflower seeds in his mouth. “Our boss said you wanted us to meet you here. We told that guy we didn’t want to stay around any longer, man.”

My brows narrowed a bit.

“What guy?”

“The one who made us come all the way out here,” the shorter, stockier one replied. “He was a real weird person, dude. Gotta weird vibe from him. Wasn’t all there.”

“How so?”

The taller one pointed to the shorter one. “Well, he climbed up the pole to tap into our system to get the phone line connected, and this guy goes on and on about what kinds of girls I find attractive and stuff. I thought it was a little strange, especially since he was older than us. He asked if we had ever met a girl online and we both told him no. I mean, I did once, but that was none of this dude’s business.”

I shook my head with my eyes closed.

“Anyway, he stood way too close to us while we worked. It was awkward.”

“Did it occur to you that it was a little strange to be putting in a phone line in an abandoned building?” Harlow asked from across me.

“I sure did, Ma’am,” the shorter one said. “I didn’t want to be here any longer than I had to. I was glad it was only one line. He told us he just bought the place and wanted to turn it into a rubber factory or something. I didn’t really pay attention much after he kept asking us what we were doing later on in the night. Real creepy vibe.”

“Do you have a description?”

“He was average height,” the taller one said, lighting another cigarette. “Nerdy looking. Had those little round glasses you put on the end of your nose. He was wearing a lab coat which I didn’t understand.”

It all checked out. He worked at Fasten Biofuels as a horticulturalist. He studied plants and helped them grow.

I cleared my throat. “Is there anything else you can tell us? Anything you remember from this encounter?”

One looked at the other and they both looked back at us.

“He told us he had some good weed, so when we finished up here, we followed him to a storage unit.” The shorter one looked uneasy.

“And…?”

“And he opened it up. It looked like a bunch of stuff you’d have in your house just locked away. None of it looked out of place or anything, but he pointed to a mattress and said, ‘this is the mattress my mom was on when she rotted away.’” The taller one took a nervous puff. “He asked us if we ever felt