Out of the Blue: A Pengram Mystery (12 page)

“God almighty, that’s a lot of people,” Halloran said. “Checker probably has a hundred employees at any one time, minus the seasonal staff, and Furbaby Mine has to have at least half to three-quarters of that.”

It felt huge to Halloran, but to me, it felt like we were narrowing in.

Chapter Fifteen

He wanted the second girl to go
away
.

It was dark. Late. Long past time for these two girls to have been tucked into bed for the night, but here they were, sitting on the concrete sign that welcomed people to the Shady Days condo development. He assumed they lived nearby.

Had they sneaked out of their homes for a nighttime chat? Attended a party somewhere that the cops broke up? Or had they just never gone in and their parents weren’t looking for them yet? Why were two girls of about twelve hanging around outside at midnight?

The answer didn’t interest him very much. It was just a way to pass the time as he hid behind a wall of foliage. Waiting. He would be exposed if anyone in the house behind him looked out the window, but all was silent.

They were giggling across the street, their faces illuminated in the glow of their cell phones. Both were dressed in jeans and sweatshirts, but otherwise they could not have been more different. The first girl was riveting in her beauty, her toes touching the ground in a perfect point. The second was a short, squat little thing, kicking out her chubby legs and banging her heels into the sign. She wouldn’t turn any heads when she grew up, that was for certain. Chipmunk cheeks and a narrow nose, she had a lower lip that was too full and an upper lip that vanished entirely when she smiled.

He
should
take that one to the maze. Get those genes out of the pool before they passed on to another generation. Her face was so off-kilter.

But he couldn’t stop staring at the beautiful girl. There was a grace and elegance to her features, her hair flowing over her shoulders and down her back in an unbroken sheet. The color was hard to tell in the night, save that it was a light shade. Her looks would grease the road ahead, open doors that would remain forever closed to the less attractive. Even her laugh was beautiful, a tinkle of chimes; her friend brayed like a donkey.

It was hard to make out what they were talking about over there. Their fits of giggles were what carried the best. Occasionally he heard boys’ names. Trevor. Aidan. Other times they appeared to be complaining about teachers. Mr. Danbyth. Mrs. Kellogg. So much homework! Between conversations, they watched videos on their phones and practically worked themselves up into hysterics.

Don’t you like girls? What’s wrong with you? Something wrong with your dick?

His mother would have died of happiness had he come home with a girl like that beautiful one long ago, in one of the random times he had gone to school. She would have melted into a puddle at the girl’s feet. Her dream had been to have a son and daughter. It was every woman’s dream, she said, but she had only gotten the son and he’d ruined her for having more babies on the way out. So it was his job to bring home a girl to become her daughter.

People had daughters and no sons. They had sons and no daughters. They had a mix of the sexes, or only children, or no children at all. But that was not how his mother saw it. A boy and a girl equaled happiness. A boy and a girl made her complete. And since he had taken away her chance at a daughter, he would supply one through some other means.

See that pretty girl on the sidewalk? That girl over there? Go talk to her; show her your smile. You’re thirteen years old, you should be interested in girls now. Bring her over here to meet your mother. I want that one for us.

And then he wouldn’t go over there to meet the girl. He
could
show her his practiced smile; he
could
ask what a lovely chick like her was doing in a place like this, complete with an ironic grin to show how tired he knew the line was. But it was more interesting to watch his mother work herself up into a state over it.

She wanted that girl. She needed that girl. That was
her
girl over there.

And he wasn’t giving it to her. She would scream and spit and smack and still he wouldn’t get her that girl.

You a fag? Only a fag isn’t interested in a pretty girl. You want to bend over for that guy over there? Show him that little brown starfish between your ass cheeks? Get over there and get us that pretty girl! Go on!

He wanted to send this pretty girl outside Shady Days to his mother in hell.
Here’s what I think of your pretty girls, you bitch.
They had had so much meaning to her.

They were nothing to him. Not even worth his dick. In college he had done the girlfriend thing briefly, but every time his dick got near the place it was supposed to want to go, it stayed soft. He wasn’t interested enough in the woman to get hard. He could only get hard on his own.

Calling them and not saying anything, listening to their voices grow fearful in the silence . . . Oh, he had a hundred ways to destroy a woman, and without them ever seeing his face. He did those things to men, too. The professor’s pet. The star athlete. The class clown, the lady charmer, the struggling one on the edge . . . That made him hard as a rock.

He wanted to watch that lovely girl’s face screw up in fright. He wanted to watch her scream and cry.

No
. The flare of rage died away and he looked at the girls upon the sign more coolly. What would a kid do with his maze? Run through it in a panic like the Mexican dude had? Explore like the white woman? Would a child stop to play with the dolls and toys or was this child too old for that? What was her programming?

He wanted to know.

The specific kid didn’t matter. He just wanted
a
kid. But most of them were in bed, safe in their little rooms with their little nightlights and their little stuffed animals tucked under their little arms. He hadn’t really expected to get one, although he had canvassed the food trucks many times and noticed how some people brought children along even at one in the morning. Yet that was not the norm, and those kids never traveled too far from the picnic tables outside the trucks.

Kids were going to be difficult. He had known that all along, and made his peace with never acquiring one. He didn’t want to deal with sneaking into houses, where there could be barking dogs and insomniac big brothers and startled parents with guns. He couldn’t sweep one off the sidewalk walking home from school in the afternoon either. Too many variables, a nosy neighbor, an observant driver. So no kids for him, unless one practically fell into his lap.

And here, surprisingly, was not one but two. Unsupervised. He had circled the block twice in amazement and then parked around the corner, sneaking through the shadows to the bushes. Usually he scoped out places much more thoroughly, but seeing the kids had shocked him into this impulsive act.

He was wasting his time, though. They were going to come off that sign eventually and walk away together. That was what girls did. They hung out in packs. Went to the restroom together at school. Ate together at lunch in giggling groups. Studied at a library with their heads bent in a companionable circle.

What would
two
girls do in his maze? Run in different directions? Give each other a pinkie swear and promise to stay together forever?

He didn’t have what he needed for that. And while he was striking one down, the other could escape.

Just one, he told himself. Just one.

He could play with twosomes some other time.

A car passed down the street. The girls looked nervous, but the driver didn’t appear to notice them. Turning at the stop sign, the vehicle disappeared. But its presence had spooked the girls. The ugly one jumped off the sign and landed in the grass. They spoke a little more, and then she headed off alone.

Incredible!

He took it as a sign. A sign that he was meant to have that beautiful girl. But he had to act fast. He didn’t think this kid was going to stay outside on her own for very long, even with a cell phone to keep her entertained. The cold and quiet would get to her in time, the fear of being caught, or just her own tiredness catching up with her. She would move beyond his reach.

No! She had kept him waiting for a whole fucking
hour
in these bushes!

Slipping through the shadows, he hurried back to his car and popped the trunk to get his supplies.

Chapter Sixteen

“He tried for a kid,” Halloran said.

The blood drained from my cheeks and left them ice cold. Pressing the phone so hard to my ear that it hurt, I said, “What happened?”

“Short version is that two junior high school girls sneaked out of their homes last night to hang out together. Just around their complex, they didn’t go any farther than that. They’re both special needs students. One crept back to her house to get some food, and when she returned, she saw a man carrying her friend away.”

“But he didn’t get her,” I said, my heart pounding in my chest like a caged bird.

“No. I’m at the hospital. They’re going to let us in to talk to one of them soon. Her name is Amber Neris. Her parents are with her right now.”

“See you there.”

My hands shook on the steering wheel as I drove. I didn’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me that the killer might target a child; after all, he preferred shorter, lighter victims. Detouring around the morning traffic with less-used side streets, I soon pulled in at the hospital. Halloran was waiting for me in the lobby.

“When did this happen?” I asked.

“About twelve-thirty last night, maybe a little later than that.”

“And why am I just hearing about it now?” I almost exploded.

“I haven’t known about it much longer than you,” Halloran said calmly, but his face was gray. “Nevea Worther is the girl who was almost abducted. She’s here at the hospital, too, but she’s sleeping right now.”

“What kind of special needs do these girls have? Do they have autism? Down Syndrome? Will they have difficulties in answering questions?”

“No autism or Down Syndrome with either of them. Amber’s IQ is in the low-normal range and she’s pretty up-to-speed socially. She has problems with reading, struggles with math concepts, organizing herself. But she can speak and understand just fine. Nevea’s problems are more serious.”

Only a minute later, we were allowed into Amber’s room. A dark-haired girl with a bandage on her forehead was sitting up in a bed. Her eyes were red-rimmed from crying, and with bags beneath like she’d gotten little to no sleep.

“Amber?” I asked.

She nodded warily.

I took one of the chairs at the side of the bed. “I’m Detective Blue Pengram, but you can just call me Blue. And this is my partner. His name is Detective Jake Halloran.”

Tears filled her eyes and she began to cry. “I’m . . . I’m in so much trouble.”

I looked around for a tissue. Leaning back in his chair, Halloran snagged some from a dispenser. He gave them to the girl, who wadded them up in a ball and wiped her cheeks.

It would be better to let her calm down with some questions unrelated to what had happened. “What school do you go to, Amber?” I asked gently.

“Darby Junior High.”

“Are you in seventh or eighth grade?”

“Seventh.” Anxiously, she asked, “Are you going to find him? That man?”

“We’re doing everything we can, and you can help by telling us what you remember,” I said. She nodded vigorously. “What time was it that you went outside last night?”

“It was after ten. I don’t know exactly, but it was definitely after ten. Dad always looks in before he goes to bed, so I waited until I heard the door to my parents’ room close. Then I climbed out my window and went over to Nevea’s house.”

“Is her house close by?”

“We both live at Shady Days, but she’s clear on the other side. It’s a big complex. It took me a while to get there, and I had to call her on my cell to wake her up. She’d fallen asleep. Then she sneaked down the stairs and out her front door. We sat on the Shady Days sign and waited for one.”

“One what?”

“One o’clock.” Seeing that I didn’t understand the significance, she said with shame, “It’s dumb.”

“That’s okay,” Halloran rumbled. “We just want to know what happened.”

“Everyone’s doing it at school. It’s this stupid challenge. You get the Baddo app on your phone and it gives you challenges to do. Nevea and I just got started. We had to sneak out at night and snap a picture of ourselves. It’ll automatically have a timestamp and calculate the distance from our addresses. Then it goes to our friends list and they can see what we did. Most of them just go to their backyards around eleven or midnight, so we decided to beat them, go a little distance and stay out until one. That seemed like a good time. Then we’d get more points. If you earn enough points, you get a forgiveness medal. That means if there’s a challenge you don’t want to do, like flunking a test on purpose or saying something rude to a teacher, you hand in the medal and pass anyway. Do enough challenges and you become a Big Baddo.”

I would have to look up all of that later. Nothing made me feel older than listening to kids talk about infinite apps I’d never heard of. I didn’t have much more on my phone than what it had come with. Plus a weight loss thing I had bought for a buck ninety-nine but never used, and didn’t know how to delete.

My razor-sharp detective skills told me from the blank look in Halloran’s eyes that he had never heard of this app either. Both of his daughters were in high school now; maybe striving to be a Big Baddo was a fad among younger kids.

The girl looked down at the sheet tucked over her lap. “It was my idea to do the challenges. Not Nevea’s. She’s . . . she’s a little bit retarded. I don’t mean it in a nasty way. And only a little, like she can dress herself and read and stuff,” Amber said defensively. “She’s just kind of slow at getting things, but she’s still my friend. I’m slow at some stuff, too, like math. We’ve been friends since fourth grade and we have dance together after school. She’s great at that. But this is my fault. She wouldn’t have gone outside if I hadn’t suggested it.”

Her voice was distraught. We gave her a moment to collect herself.

“So we were just hanging out on the sign to wait for one o’clock. Talking and watching videos online, like cats doing crazy things. We were having fun. Like, we knew we weren’t supposed to be out there, but it was exciting at the same time. Except we got so tired after a while, and Nevea said she wished we had some soda. We needed caffeine to keep us going. Her parents don’t keep any in the house. They don’t let her have sugar. She was real thirsty and so was I by then. I have soda at my house, so I went back there to get some cans and some chips, too. It took time for me to do that, ’cause I had to cross the whole complex. And when I came back . . .”

She dabbed her cheeks as fresh tears spilled down.

“Where was Nevea then?” I asked.

“She was . . . she was across the street. This strange man was carrying her like she was asleep, her hair hanging down over his arm and swinging. I just froze for a second when I saw that. My brain jammed up. I knew it wasn’t her dad but my brain
wanted
it to be her dad, taking her home to bed. But this guy was taking Nevea the wrong way. Away from the complex, so it couldn’t be her dad. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Then I screamed. I screamed and dropped the stuff I had all over the ground.”

“What did he do?”

“He saw me and started to run. And I remembered my Aunt Sasha telling me . . .” Amber sniffled. Halloran gave her more tissues and she blew her nose. “Aunt Sasha teaches at the junior college extension in Darby, this class for women on how to fight if a guy tries to abduct you. You scream and scratch and kick and swear and don’t let them drag you into a car or house or anything. You might not ever come out. Most guys like that want it to be easy. So you don’t make it easy. Give them hell and give yourself a chance to get away. That’s what Aunt Sasha says. She practiced with me in the backyard over the summer on a mat. She was wearing padding all over and I’d attack her when she grabbed me. It was . . . it wasn’t real when we practiced. Like it was serious, but it was still just my backyard and my mom was there reading a book and everything was okay. That’s why people can freeze up, ’cause it doesn’t feel real when it happens.”

She mangled the tissues in her hand. “But last night, it
was
real. And I heard my aunt’s voice telling me not to freeze. Picture a hammer breaking all that ice that’s keeping you still. So I broke through it and I ran after him. ’Cause if I didn’t, Nevea was going to get kidnapped and killed or molested or something. I didn’t want that to happen to her. There wasn’t time to call 911 or get her parents.”

This girl had guts to go after a grown man, and that choice saved Nevea’s life. A nurse looked into the room, saw us sitting with Amber, and said she would come back later.

“So you ran after him,” I prompted.

“Yeah. I ran across the street.” Her tears stopping, Amber began to look angry. “He couldn’t run too fast since he was carrying Nevea, and I’m real fast, the fastest in my whole PE class. I caught up to him near the corner and I punched him in the back. I was yelling at him to put her down, yelling for someone to call the police, and hitting him the whole time. Total crazy hitting.”

She balled up her fists and spun her arms in a frantic pinwheel to show us how she’d beaten on the man, her brow set in a ferocious glare. “It wasn’t how my aunt taught me, but my body had taken over from my brain. I wasn’t thinking. Just hitting. I tried to scratch his arm, but he was wearing a jacket. And I tried to claw at his face. I screamed
what the fuck are you doing?
I screamed so loud it hurt my ears. I couldn’t see him very well. He didn’t say anything. He never said anything. But he grabbed me.”

She touched her left shoulder. “I jerked away. I don’t know if that was before or after I scratched him. All of it happened so fast. Like a dream, almost. But moments stick out, like my ears throbbing from that scream. I think I called him a shithead and a pervert, too.”

“What happened next?” I asked.

“He dropped Nevea on someone’s lawn. And he shoved me off the curb real hard. I hit my head on the cement. When I looked up, he was running around the corner. Then a car started.”

“Did you see the car?”

“No. I just heard it starting up and driving away real fast. I couldn’t see it from where I was. I crawled back to Nevea on the lawn. She was on her side and kind of propped up on her elbow. She was awake and staring at me, but she wasn’t saying anything. Like no one was home. I kept asking if she was okay and she didn’t answer. Once it looked like she was really trying to answer me, but she couldn’t.”

“How long were you gone to get the food from your house?” Halloran asked.

“Twenty minutes? It takes about eight minutes going back and forth at a walk, and then I needed a few minutes once I was in the house to collect the food. I had to be real quiet.”

It stretched credulity to believe the killer had just chanced upon Nevea in those twenty minutes. Darby was not a small city. And he would have had to do it right as Amber left, since Quell needed time to go to work.

He had been watching them from somewhere nearby. That was the only possibility.

“The police didn’t come,” Amber said. “I guess no one called. So we just lay there in the grass while I listened for sirens. My head was hurting so bad and she was totally out of it. I thought he must have sneaked up behind her at the sign and hit her on the head, and she had a concussion or something. But then I realized how much trouble we were going to be in. I had to get her back home and in her bed so her parents and mine didn’t find out what we’d been doing. I got up and she didn’t, and then I told her to stand and she did. I told her to walk and she walked. It was like she was a robot. Like a drunk robot, you know, weaving around. She still couldn’t talk to me, but she was doing what I said. It was weird.”

“Did you go to her house?” I asked.

“We made it back to the sign and she fell over. She wasn’t quite awake, she wasn’t quite asleep, I don’t know what she was. I sat with her and held my sweatshirt to my head to stop the bleeding. The sodas and chips were all around us and I knew I should pick them up, but I couldn’t worry about that right then. I was just about to call 911 for her when she started coming around, acting more normal. But her stomach was bugging her. She almost threw up, like dry heaving, but only some spit came out. Then we got ourselves to her house. She flicked the lights on upstairs once she was inside her bedroom, and I headed home. I was still holding my sweatshirt to my forehead since my cut wouldn’t stop bleeding. It hurt a lot so I’d take breaks and sit down on the benches. Then I sneaked back inside and cleaned myself up, hid my sweatshirt in my closet. I went to bed and couldn’t sleep. I wanted to keep it a secret, but what if he came back for Nevea?”

Her voice thickened in agony. “What if he was over there at her
house
? So I woke up my dad and told him what had happened. He didn’t believe me at first. He thought it was a bad dream and I’d just fallen when I got up.” She bristled with indignation. “I showed him Baddo on my phone and I was crying for him to please, please believe me. He called Nevea’s parents and he drove me over to the sign . . . He saw the chips and soda cans spilled everywhere in the grass like I said they’d be and then he believed me. He called the cops.”

“Can you describe this man who took Nevea?” I said.

“Not really. It was too dark.”

“What color was his skin? Could you tell that much?”