Dead Letter Day (12 page)

“You don’t think they’re werewolves?” He handed me the address for the cop’s house.

“Not any werewolves I’ve ever seen. Or heard of. Or read about.” I scanned the map. “Turn right on Jonquil Avenue.”

Ted’s brow furrowed. “Then what were they?”

“I don’t know. I’ll ask Alex about it. He knows some things I don’t. I can get Sophie and Norah researching, too.”
I glanced down at the map again and my stomach lurched. I tossed the map aside. “At least my GPS doesn’t make me carsick.”

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Ted pulled over to the curb and put the truck in neutral.

Damn. I should have kept my mouth shut. “Lots of people get car sickness when they read in cars. It’s a normal thing.”

“Yeah, but you’re not a normal girl.” He looked hard at me.

“Gee, thanks tons. You sure know how to make me feel special.” Deflect with sarcasm. A tried-and-true defense.

He shook his head. “You know what I mean. Did you see a doctor yet?”

“I haven’t exactly had a lot of free time for that,” I pointed out.

“How about we ask Alex to check you out when we ask him about the not werewolf thingies?” Ted suggested.

“Sure.” Like hell I would, but it wasn’t an argument I was going to win. I’d win through passive aggression, another tried-and-true defense.

He picked up the map, glanced at it and the address again and pulled away from the curb.

Michael Hollinger’s house was a lot more modest than Leanne McMannis’s. Then again, I was quite aware of how far a cop’s salary didn’t stretch. He wasn’t doing too badly for himself. We did our march up to the door and knocked.

At first I thought the door had swung open by itself. Then I looked down. The little girl who had opened the door barely came up to the doorknob. She had on a pair of striped leggings and blue smock top with a big ribbon on the chest. She was, in short, adorable. “Who are you?” she asked.

Ted and I exchanged a look. He crouched down so they were eye to eye. “My name’s Ted. What’s your name?”

She pivoted back and forth on the ball of her right foot, then cocked her head. “Justine.”

“Justine, is your dad home?” he asked with a smile.

She shook her head.

“How about your mom?”

This time, she nodded.

“Could you get her for me?” he asked.

Justine started to scamper back into the house.

“Justine,” he called after her as he stood. “Close the door, honey.”

She came back and slammed the door in our faces.

I shot him another look.

“She shouldn’t open the door to strangers and she shouldn’t leave them at an open door,” he said.

“I know that, but we could maybe have learned a little something.” Who knows what a person might hear through an open door? I admit that eavesdropping isn’t the hobby I’m most proud of, but it is a useful one.

He shook his head. “Maybe we’ll learn more if Ms. Hollinger knows she can trust us, that we have her family’s best interests in mind.”

Okay. That was a reasonable approach, too. The straightforward thing wasn’t part of my usual playbook, but I’d told him—and told him and told him—that he was the boss today.

The door opened again, this time with a full-sized person behind it. Sarah Hollinger looked a little frazzled. Her ponytail was coming undone and her shirt was half tucked in and half hanging out. She was probably about my age, late twenties or so. She was carrying a few more pounds than she needed to, but even with the messy hair and total lack of makeup, she was still pretty. “Can I help you?”

“We were hoping to talk to your husband,” Ted said. “I’m Ted Goodnight. I’m with the Sacramento PD.”

“Is this a joke?” she asked, crossing her arms over her chest. “Because it’s not funny.”

Ted held his hands up in front of himself. “No. It’s not a joke. I had some questions about a case he worked here that might relate to something I’m looking into in Sacramento. I was told he was out on leave.”

She rolled her eyes, but dropped her arms back to her sides. “That’s a nice way to put it. On leave. It sounds like a vacation.”

Ted frowned. “I take it he’s not at home.”

“I couldn’t keep him here. I was afraid he was going to hurt someone. I was afraid he was going to hurt Justine or the baby.” Sarah shook her head and bit her lip. She looked like she might cry.

Ted’s brow furrowed. “I thought his injury was a bite. I don’t understand how that would make him want to hurt anyone.”

Sarah Hollinger looked out her front door, glancing up and down the street as if she was checking to see if anyone was watching. Satisfied, she said, “I think you’d better come in.”

The hallway looked like a Toys “R” Us had exploded in it. There was a trail of dolls and blocks and pretty little ponies up and down it along with one of those bouncy seats and some rattles. We worked our way through to the living room. Sarah picked up a little boy who was bouncing up and down in the playpen, and collapsed into an armchair. With her free arm, she waved at the couch. I picked up a little blanket and a sliding stack of picture books and set them on the coffee table to make room for us to sit.

“Why do you want to know about Michael?” she asked. The little boy bounced on her knee and drooled. Were all babies that slobbery? Eww!

“I had a similar case in Sac. The report from up here was pretty thin. I figured I’d come up and hear about it straight from him.” Ted waved his fingers at the little boy and got a gummy drooly smile back.

“Was it you? Did you get bitten?” Sarah tried to tuck the hair that had come loose behind her ear.

Ted shook his head. “No.”

“So is the person who got bit acting crazy?” she pressed.

Ted and I looked at each other. “I can’t really discuss an open case,” he said.

She waved her hand at him. “Yeah, yeah. Confidentiality. Blah blah blah. Well, whoever it was that got bitten, tell them it gets worse and not better.”

“Worse how?” I asked.

“First of all, the damn thing never healed. It’d sort of scab over and then it would start bleeding all over again. Mike ruined like three uniform shirts because of it. Blood is hard to get out.” She sighed.

That was true. Cold water. Hydrogen peroxide. Those were the only things that worked. Even those were not 100 percent reliable. I saw a little movement out of the corner of my eye. Justine was slipping into the room around the corner. I looked over at her and she made a mad dash for her mother, clinging onto her leg like it was a lifeline.

“Why is she here?” she asked, pointing at me.

Sarah gently pushed Justine’s hand down. “Don’t point, honey. It’s rude.”

“I don’t like her. I don’t want her to sit by my blankie,” Justine whined.

I picked up the blanket I’d moved from the couch and held it out to her. She snatched it from my hand and darted back to her mother’s side.

“Say thank you, Justine,” Sarah said.

Justine shook her head and buried her face in the blanket.

“Justine,” Sarah said, with that mom warning sound in her voice. I totally recognized it. It sounded like my mother. Was that a learned thing? Was there some kind of class? Or was it entirely instinctual? When would I start sounding like that?

“It’s okay,” I said. It wasn’t, though. Why didn’t Justine like me? What had I done to her? I realized she was only a little girl, but seriously, did I have cooties or something?

“So besides not healing, how did your husband get worse?” Ted smiled at Justine, who giggled and ducked behind her mother’s chair. Oh, so that was the way it was. I was competition. Okay. I could see that. I settled back in the couch.

“Justine, honey, why don’t you go watch cartoons?” Sarah said.

“Can I watch SpongeBob?”

Sarah sighed. “Yes. You can watch SpongeBob.”

Justine slipped back out of the room. A few seconds later we heard that someone lived in a pineapple under the sea.

“At first, Mike just seemed a little tense,” Sarah said. “He snapped at me and he wasn’t as patient with Justine or Charlie as he usually is. He had trouble sleeping and…”

We waited.

“All he wanted to eat was red meat and he wanted it really really rare. Like bloody. It was gross.” Sarah made a face.

“So where exactly is he now? You said you couldn’t keep him here? I don’t understand.” Ted pulled out a notebook.

Sara’s chin began to quiver. “That makes two of us. He got more and more tense and more and more angry. He was back at work, but he was getting into fights with other cops and…I think he might have beaten up someone he arrested. No one’s saying anything, though.”

They wouldn’t say anything if they didn’t have to.

“They locked him up now. In a mental ward.” Tears welled up in Sarah’s eyes. “I can’t even take the kids to see him. I think it would scare Justine too much. It scares me. Half the time, I’m not even sure he knows who I am.”

“What do the doctors say?” I asked.

“Bipolar. PTSD. Possibly schizophrenia. They don’t know. They just keep throwing pills at him and nothing makes any difference.” The tears spilled over now. “I don’t know how I’m going to do this. I can’t work. There’s nothing I’m qualified to do that makes enough money to even pay for daycare for the two kids. We were just making it on Mike’s salary and some extra work he’d get now and then as a security guard. The disability pay is about three-quarters of his salary. I had to go on food stamps.”

The baby, who had been happily bouncing and drooling and waving a rubber Mickey Mouse toy in the air, turned toward his mother and patted her cheeks with both his chubby little hands. “Mama,” he said.

Sarah pulled him closer to her. I tried to imagine what that would feel like.

“I’m so sorry, Ms. Hollinger. There are some funds set up for the families of officers hurt in the course of duty. I’m going to give them your name. Is that okay?” Ted said.

She nodded, grabbed a tissue from a box by her chair and blew her noise. The baby laughed and clapped his little starfish hands as if she’d performed some kind of trick.

“I’d like to talk to your husband, too. Would you give me permission to do that?” he asked.

She nodded again. “Do I have to sign something?”

“I think that would speed things along,” he said.

5

THE NURSE HAD CURLY BROWN HAIR, CUT SHORT, AND A round face. She was wearing scrubs that had pictures of Hello Kitty on them. All that should have made her look cheerful. I’m not sure a clown nose could have made her look happy. She sat behind the desk, a sour expression on her face, and looked at the piece of paper Ted had handed her and then back at us. “You want to talk to Michael?”

“Yes, please.” Ted gave her a smile, the one that seems to open doors, especially when the doorkeepers are female.

“He’s not having a good day.” She handed the note back, apparently immune to my sweetheart’s smile.

Ted gave her an apologetic look. “We won’t take long.”

She snorted. “No. You won’t. Not if you want to talk.” She stood up and came out from behind the desk. “Come with me. He’s in his room.”

We walked down the hallway. I could hear a television playing somewhere and smelled cigarette smoke. I wasn’t
sure how that could possibly be legal. Smoking was banned pretty much everywhere in California. On the other hand, this place certainly wasn’t new. Maybe I was smelling a few decades of accumulated smoke that had worked its ways into the cracked tiles and dingy baseboards. I looked over at Ted, but he didn’t glance back at me. In fact, his gaze seemed oddly far away.

The nurse led us to a heavy metal door with a small window in it and gestured for us to look through. Ted took one glance and backed away. “Oh,” he said. “I see.”

The nurse gave him one of those world-weary I-told-you-so kind of looks. I stepped up to the window to see what they were talking about.

The man I assumed was Michael Hollinger was sitting on his bed. Well, sitting is sort of a misnomer. He was more crouching there, legs folded beneath him. I’m guessing he would have been using his arms for balance, but they were wrapped around himself because of the whole straitjacket thing he was wearing. As I looked through the window, his head swiveled slowly around so he could look at me. His lips pulled back and he bared his teeth at me.

Then he threw his head back and howled.

Ted jumped. The nurse shook her head and rolled her eyes. I stared back at him, right into his eyes that had a strange red cast to them. Then he leapt off the bed and hurled himself against the door.

I turned to the nurse. “This thing locked?”

“Hell to the yeah,” she said with a snort. “He tried to bite Tyrisha last night. That jacket’s staying on and that door is staying locked.”

“How…how long has he been like this?” Ted asked. He looked pale.

The nurse shrugged. “It’s been getting steadily worse.
When he first came in, he was a little oppositional, but mainly depressed. Now…well, you see what he is now.”

“What are they doing to help him?” Ted finally tore his gaze away from the window and looked at the nurse.

“The usual. They’re trying different drugs to see if anything helps. He can’t do group therapy anymore, but the doc still goes in to talk to him one-on-one.”