Riker's Calling - Episode 21

Riker Wednesdays

FROM RUBIK’S TO RUBIDOUX, bird to falcon, I only had to drive about an hour outside L.A. to get to the middle school. From the principal to the janitors, there were seventeen males on staff, so I thought I’d start from the top and work my way down. Principal Shannon Plemons was a creature of habit, leaving his home, arriving at work, leaving his office, arriving at home, always at the same time, always departing with a bag lunch and returning with two quarter pounder meals and two happy meals. A lot of McMeals for someone who supposedly lived alone.

Then there were the diapers, about six a day, Plemons tossing them in his garbage can every morning as he pulled away. He either had one of the freakiest bathroom habits I’ve ever heard of, or he was hiding a toddler somewhere in there. After three days, enough to know this was in fact his routine, I lifted one of the diapers, as well as the fast food straws, with the intention of getting them tested for DNA. When going in for the dirty deed of actually extracting it, I didn’t expect to find something that would take my feeling from suspicion to a sense of urgency, but that’s exactly what happened when I discovered a used tampon hidden alongside the baby crap. If my instincts were correct, this would be a case of long-term abduction, Dory confined somewhere on that property with at least one kid fathered by Plemons. If this was true, it meant she was still alive, but without more solid evidence, bureaucratic red tape would keep authorities from going in, so while the principal was out overseeing a couple thousand teenagers, I popped the lock of his back door and let myself in.

---

READING THE TELEPROMPTER AS ROYCE RIGGS, Helsehurst could barely keep it together, the repetition slowly killing him from the inside out. Every year for the past half dozen or so it had been getting worse, making him seriously consider prematurely bringing his grand scheme to a close. Before, killing was just part of setting up for the reward, like doing warm-ups before a game, the real euphoria, his touchdown, being the actual reporting of it. Now he actually found himself yearning to reconnect with those murderous moments, as a means to release the tension, the frustration of what his work, his life, had turned into.

He had barely made it to the nine year mark, September, 2016, no longer being able to handle what the news industry had become. Regurgitating everything to the point of disgust. Calling just about anything breaking news, and keeping it labeled as such long after the fact. He could remember when breaking news was just that, breaking, having an expiration period of about fifteen minutes. Nowadays they were still calling it such twenty-four hours later. The repetition enough to drive anyone insane.

His latest sentence of purgatory reporting was on The Ghostwriter. A disenfranchised writer who had snapped and now had the publishing world on edge. At least it was a story he could somewhat relate to, with it even managing to bring out his competitive side a little.

I was here before you, and now that I’m finally returning back to the game, you’re going to be yesterday’s news.

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PRINCIPAL PLEMONS’ COMPUTER WAS A CARD CATALOG OF KIDDIE PORN, his taste for taboo primarily centered around girls of middle school age. He had a few camera angles of a live feed from the girls locker room of his own school, along with profiles on many would-be victims. It looked like he was about ready to put in an order for two this time. Little did he know his pedophile brokers were now in the Los Angeles County jail. A place he’d be calling home very soon.

On the surface, the house showed no signs of anyone living there except for Plemons, but by the time I got to the basement door and found it to be padlocked, it was pretty apparent what I was going to find on the other side. I gave a light tap of five knocks.

Like an echo, five came back.

I put my ear to the door, gave three more.

Two answered back this time, followed by a hush and a scolding whisper. “Stop it, Mary-Anne!”

I picked the padlock and opened the door.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Plemons. She thought you were trying to play with her. It won’t happen again.”

After ten years, the asshole still made her call him Mr. Plemons?

“Dory? Dory Thompson?”

“H-h-hello? Whose there?” Her voice was now shaky, foreshadowing what was about to come. I hurried downstairs and found an image that will stay with me for as long as I live.

Three human beings. Human Beings. Two completely naked, a pregnant woman in her early twenties, with a stomach full of black and blue, which I would later find out to be from Plemons beating her to try and terminate the pregnancy, sitting there with her four-year-old daughter and eighteen-month-old in nothing but a diaper.

Each of these three living, breathing, human beings had a shackle around their right ankle, linked to a chain that went no further than six feet.

Five feet away sat a seatless toilet bowl, a bucket at its side for manual flushing. The only other things inside the windowless basement was a bare mattress, an old black and white TV, a few plush toys and a pile of books. Hundreds of them.

When Dory laid eyes on my face, the first she had seen in a decade that wasn’t Plemons or her two kids, she broke down in a flood of tears.

Two days later Dory’s parents would be found dead, by way of Spyderco.