Out of the Blue: A Pengram Mystery (13 page)

“He was white, I’m pretty sure. Or maybe Hispanic with light skin? He definitely wasn’t black. Not as tall as my dad. Dad is six-two. And this guy was wearing a cap over his hair. It came down over his forehead to his eyebrows. That’s all I saw.”

We needed both of these girls to work with the sketch artist, and Amber could have the perp’s DNA under her nails. After speaking briefly to both sets of parents in the hallway, we were admitted into Nevea’s room to speak with her. She had tested positive for Quell.

Nevea Worther hadn’t had an easy start to life. Born almost two months premature, she suffered a stroke followed by a string of seizures as an infant. Although there were no lasting physical impairments, it had left her with a multitude of learning disabilities. Her schoolwork was modified to accommodate her cognitive delays, her math and reading skills more on par with a third grader than seventh. She didn’t always catch subtle cues, either verbally or relayed through body language. Now that she was in junior high, her parents worried tremendously about older boys taking advantage of her. She was highly gullible, always assuming that other people were good and meant well.

She was a pretty and soft-spoken girl, as guileless as a child years younger. My first name made her smile. Eager to please but overwhelmed when taking in more auditory information than her mind could process, I turned it down a few notches to very short and simple questions. Those she answered readily, hugging a stuffed teddy bear to her chest.

She had been sitting on the wall, waiting for Amber to return with soda. The two of them were very thirsty from their long wait. A man came down the sidewalk with a cup and asked what was on her phone that was so funny. Sitting down beside her, they watched a cat video together.

Although she knew not to talk to strangers, the man had been nice to her. He said he lived just across the street, so it wasn’t really like he was a stranger. He asked if she had ever seen him walking his dog around anywhere? His big, dumb brown dog named Brownie? She thought maybe she had.

Oh, honey
. If she had been my twelve-year-old daughter, I would have been terrified.

The man took a sip of his drink and stuck out his tongue. Having asked for orange juice at the mini-mart, he’d gotten lemonade instead. Gross! He hated lemonade. Did she want it instead? He didn’t want good lemonade to go to waste.

She drank it.

They watched more videos on her phone, laughing. She never told him that her friend was coming back. And then she didn’t remember anything. Not even when the Quell began to wear off and she had a stomachache. She had a fragmented memory of going up to her room, but didn’t remember flicking the light for Amber. A phone rang sometime later, waking her up in bed, and her parents soon came flying into her room to see if she was there. Then she had come to the hospital.

It had to have seemed like the perfect catch to this man, a trusting, developmentally delayed girl alone in the night. But then Amber Neris reappeared and took off after him like a pint-size warrior princess. If she’d been only a few seconds later, she would have missed him altogether.

Nevea was banged up from being dropped, but her injuries were minor. She struggled to describe the man. There had been nothing notable about him. He wasn’t fat. He wasn’t thin. She couldn’t tell his eye color. She remembered that he had had on black gloves, and he had no mustache or beard.

Halloran and I were exceedingly careful not to lead her. She was primed to agree with almost anything at a push. Her clothes from last night were taken into evidence. Although she had not touched him while watching videos, she could have picked something up when he was carrying her away.

We left the hospital, Halloran shooting a text to his daughters that said
calm Daddy’s nerves.
He only did that when truly troubled, usually in cases involving kids. His girls promptly sent back thumb’s ups to indicate that all was well with them.

Information began to come in. Searching the area where the abduction had taken place, fresh boot prints were found in a yard across the street from the complex sign. It was estimated from the size that we were looking for a man of average weight who was roughly five-eight to five-ten in height. Uniforms blanketed the area to look for the third maze, which had to be set up somewhere close to Shady Days. Quell did not incapacitate long.

Checker and Furbaby Mine handed over their employee information without any of the fuss that Service on Wheels had kicked up. Although Hannah Blatte hadn’t been very helpful with identifying the people she’d allowed to deliver food, her coworker Bonnie Terrazzo had a far better memory. She and I sat at a table in the staff room, Bonnie running down lists of employee names in both stores. She ticked off the people that had been involved and kept up a running commentary of which departments they worked in and approximately how many times they’d covered for Hannah.

Franklin Kim in the men’s department had done it twice before moving to Sacramento at the end of last year. Money wasn’t his primary objective; he’d had a crush on Hannah. Anya Placer in the gardening department didn’t own a car, but she had passed along the chance to earn quick money to her brother Zach, who was unemployed. He ended up getting sick and letting his old high school friend Miles Jenning do it. Casey Smith working the register at Furbaby Mine had gone on a run with her boyfriend James Ainsley. Swiftly, I eliminated one after another for being the wrong race, wrong age, wrong sex, wrong height and weight.

Then we got even better news.

The house at the corner where the man ran away from Nevea and Amber had a surveillance system. It was ghetto-style, as the owner described it, cobbled together by himself after a robbery several years ago. Set to trigger when it sensed motion anywhere in the front or back of his house, it snapped pictures and sent them to his inbox. He didn’t bother to do the same with the sides of his home since the windows were so high off the ground and had thick foliage planted beneath them. He worked from home and didn’t bother to use his system during the day unless he left to run errands. At night he set it up before going to sleep.

Just the night before, he had stayed up late watching television. It was after midnight when he activated his system. Then he put in earplugs so his neighbor’s dogs didn’t wake him up with their typical three a.m. pee-time barking, and went to bed.

Usually the pictures were just of cats and raccoons wandering through his front and backyard in the nighttime hours, but last night his system had captured something different. The lighting was dim, and the view didn’t extend to the sidewalk or road. But a man came around the corner at the approximate time of the attempted abduction. Looking like he was running, he had been captured in two snaps as he cut across the front yard. The first picture was poor from the distance and darkness. In the second, he was nearing a streetlight and much clearer. A cap was pulled down to his eyebrows.

It was him
.

The camera hadn’t caught his vehicle, but we had a face.

Still in the employee room at Checker, I stared at the picture. He was in his late twenties, early thirties at most. A narrow frame and a weak chin, he had pronounced cheekbones. Neither ugly nor handsome, he was the kind of guy that eyes slipped past.

“What are you looking at?” someone asked over my shoulder, scaring me.

A Checker employee had crept up. She hardly looked old enough to work here. Almost snapping at her for startling me, I asked, “Do you recognize this man? Does he work at this store?”

The girl gave the guy in the picture a swift once-over. She shook her head and said authoritatively, “No, I’ve never seen him before and I know everybody in every department.”

At the table, Bonnie checked another name and said with barely restrained impatience, “You’ve been here a whole month, Reena! I’ve been here nine years. Let me see.”

I showed her the picture.

Bonnie stared at it for several seconds, her forehead furrowing. My heart fell.

“Oh,” she said all of a sudden. “That looks like John.”

Chapter Seventeen

John Elliot Macdonald.

Twenty-eight. Caucasian. An address in Darby, 114B Brae Street. He had been employed at Checker for only three months the year before, working as a stocker from September through late November. After that, he simply stopped showing up for his shifts. Described as quiet, he caused no problems while at work and most of the staff didn’t even remember him. Then again, the turnover at Checker was quite high, so over a third of the current employees had not been his contemporaries in their time at the box store. Even the manager was new as of the spring. The last one had been fired for theft and general incompetence.

Thank God for Bonnie in Electronics, who had excellent recall with names and faces, and said she had almost ten years of pointless store gossip filling her gray matter. I did not doubt her claim. None of that gossip involved Macdonald, however, and she had never engaged him in a conversation beyond
hello
. That was because she worked on the main floor with the customers while he worked primarily in the back. Their only encounters occurred sporadically while clocking in at the same time, and then he disappeared after Thanksgiving.

When I was done speaking with her, she flung open the door to the storeroom and bellowed for someone named Rogelio. “He should talk to you; he worked back here with John,” she said.

A guy appeared within seconds. Rogelio Sanchez was about twenty-one or twenty-two, and he had worked at the store for three years. Wiping sweat from his brow as he took a break to speak to me, Rogelio said the man in the picture could be John Macdonald. “But I’m only seventy to eighty percent sure, ma’am,” he said. “That’s not a good picture, and I haven’t seen him in almost a year.”

“What was John like to work with?” I asked.

“We called him Macdonald. We go by last names in the storeroom. He just worked, Macdonald did. Clocked in, worked, clocked out. Didn’t talk to anyone.” After a hesitation, the young man said, “He didn’t seem to want us talking to him. It was like you were interrupting his thoughts and he just wanted to get away and go back to them. But he didn’t cause trouble like some of the others do. He wasn’t lazy or coming in late or drunk, sneaking out to smoke or stuff like that. Just unfriendly. So we kind of ignored each other and that worked out fine for everyone. He never came to the break room, never hung out at lunch, just vanished.”

“What kind of vehicle did he drive?”

Rogelio shook his head. “There are so many cars out there I never saw. He could have been walking or riding a bike, too, some people here do that. But . . .”

“Something else you remember?”

“It was just a weird little thing I saw him doing once.”

“That’s fine.”

“We had a spill one afternoon. It was this huge bag of popcorn peanuts someone dumped in an aisle back here to be funny. Macdonald had to sweep it up. I walked past that aisle, probably for the bathroom, I don’t remember, but I saw him sweeping. One-two-three sweep, pivot to the other side, one-two-three sweep, pivot back to the first side. It was strange, kind of an OCD dance, but whatever.”

Bingo
, I thought.

I got the old manager on the phone, but learned very little from him. He wasn’t amused to have to talk about the job he was canned from, and he barely remembered John Macdonald. His short employment hadn’t been remarkable in any way, nor was his leave-taking. The guy was such a ghost in his presence that nobody was interested in his unexplained absence. Checker had been ramping up for the holiday season at the time Macdonald quit. A fresh influx of seasonal workers came in and someone else was assigned to take over his job. So that was that, and the former manager confessed that he couldn’t even remember the guy’s face.

That was all right. We had just taken a huge leap ahead in this case.

I updated Halloran so fast as I left the store that I was nearly stumbling over the words. He was talking just as fast on the other end to the task force, demanding information on John Elliot Macdonald. His criminal record, credit cards, aliases, everything they could dig up.

The answers came back almost as fast. No criminal record. No financials or fake names, no marriages or divorces, this man was living lightly upon the world. There wasn’t any trace of him with the DMV as having a license or owning a vehicle. His Checker paperwork was incomplete and I assumed the fired manager was to blame for that, but the home address jotted down in tight but heavy-handed print was confirmed as real, although the property belonged to someone else. Perhaps he was renting.

We got a warrant. Joining up with Halloran at the station, I was soon sweating under my Kevlar. Radio, gun, earpiece, I went fast through the check with my heart beating double time. There wasn’t going to be a third drugged abduction and murder at the end of a maze. We were going to be bringing him in very soon.

But not soon enough to suit me.

We drove through the streets of Darby with sirens pealing, three teams coming along in squad cars behind us. Once we were through the worst of the traffic, the sirens went off. Then we drove through a lower-income neighborhood of single-family residences and crummy apartment buildings. Trash skittered down the gutters with the breeze and the paint had faded on the curbs and road.

As the blocks fell away behind us, the area became even more rundown. It was the kind of place where people took one look at a uniform and disappeared. Old paint, bent mailboxes, tall fences, and weedy yards marked the houses, and some of the broken-down cars at the curbs were older than I was. We parked around the corner from Macdonald’s address to avoid spooking him, and I motioned for two officers to go around the back of a sagging, filthy white structure that needed to be condemned.

It had two stories and a flight of stairs crossing over the front of the building to the second floor. 114A was the ground floor apartment. It appeared to be uninhabited, brown paper taped over a broken window and flapping in the wind. Beyond the large glass door was a room with nothing in it. Upstairs, flowerboxes were attached to the landing. Dead vines trailed down. There was no vehicle in the driveway, which ended in a collapsing carport. The whole place had an abandoned look to it.

Flanked by Halloran and a third officer, I went up the stairs and pounded on the door. The gun was in my hand. “Police! Open up!” I boomed.

Silence.

I pounded again.

The door was such a piece of crap that it gave under my fusillade of blows, swinging inwards. We drew back in surprise. Then, edging forward, I looked in.

The door hadn’t opened all the way. It couldn’t. Boxes were stacked up high on the other side. Squeezing into the gap, I saw a very narrow pathway running along the wall and vanishing at the corner. This was a studio apartment, just one big room and a bathroom to the side. It was filled from end to end with boxes and bags and laundry baskets, all of them packed to bursting with clothes and sheets and metal parts.

There was no other door to the studio, and the windows were inaccessible. The air was stuffy and carried an appalling smell. It wasn’t that of a rotting corpse, at least not human.
That
particular smell was enough to put a person off food for days. This stink was of rodents and mold.

No one lived here. There wasn’t the room. It was just storage.

“He must have moved out,” I said to Halloran, who was a little green around the gills from the stench.

“Or he never lived here.” Nudging aside a bit of plastic, he looked into a bag.

“What is it?” I asked.

“More bags,” Halloran said. “Think mice have gotten into them.”

We explored as far as we could penetrate into the room. Damage to the roof had allowed rainwater in. There were yellow stains on the ceiling and boxes black with rot below. I saw nothing in the baskets and open bags that looked like the decorations in the mazes. Most of it was clothing, men’s, women’s, and children’s. Three large garbage bags were overflowing with old shoes. Once the pathway ended in stacks of old hotel art paintings, we were forced to retreat. I wanted to scream at not finding him here.

Losing the girl would have enraged him. This man was so careful to cover his tracks, and in one bad move, he’d blown it. There was not one but
two
eyewitnesses, both currently under guard at the hospital. He had to be in a nasty mood right about now, wherever he was.

But it wasn’t here. The real question I had was if he had skipped the area once he realized the girls could describe his face. Or was he biding his time here to see if a sketch was put out that looked like him?

It had been dark when he spoke to Nevea Worther and tangled with Amber Neris. That might be giving him a false sense of safety. And he had no idea that he’d been caught on a surveillance system.

We went downstairs, Halloran on the phone and asking to speak with the property owner. The smell chased after us, seeping through the open door and stinking up the yard. Spying a neighbor looking at us over the fence, I called out when she didn’t immediately disappear. “Do you know who lives here?” I asked.

Smoking a cigarette and squinting at me through thick, dirty glasses, the older woman said, “No one. No one in either place.”

I walked through the grass to the fence. “Then whose belongings are inside on the top floor?”

“Don’t know.”

“When was the last time you saw someone here?”

She took a last puff and dropped the cigarette butt. “Years ago. There was a Chinese family that lived on the first floor, mom, dad, and baby boy. Nice people, they didn’t-a speak-a much-a English but nice. They were the last ones to live in that apartment. Moved out in time, don’t know exactly, dad got a second job so they got a better place.”

“Can you estimate when?”

“Maybe 2009 when they left. Maybe earlier than that, like 2008 or 2007. And then there was a woman on the second floor for a while. But she didn’t live there much. Haven’t seen her in a couple of years, maybe 2014 was the last time. Could have been 2013. Wasn’t really paying attention.”

A woman.
Dammit
. “Can you describe her?”

“White chick. Fifties, sixties. Crazy.”

“How was she crazy?”

“Just crazy looking. Crazy hair, crazy eyes, crazy clothes, stickers on her face.”

“Stickers? What kind of stickers?”

“Don’t know. Didn’t really look. Like shiny blue splotches.” She ran her hand over her forehead and temple, swept it down over her upper right cheek. “I never went any closer than this fence after the Chinese family moved out, so I couldn’t see. She wasn’t wearing stickers on her face the first few times I saw her, then she started wearing more and more. But I’d see her clothes, skirt over jeans, scarves everywhere, mid-riff shirt like she was sixteen.”

The woman cackled dryly. “Wasn’t sixteen. Had a little tummy puffing out like a muffin. She wasn’t fat, but she didn’t have no sixteen-flat-stomach no more. She just gave off a crazy vibe so I didn’t want to talk to her. People like that, best to steer away.”

“What kind of car was she driving?”

“Don’t know,” she repeated. “Some big, dirty old pick-up, I think.”

“Boyfriend? Family?”

“No. Just her, stopping by.”

“So she didn’t live there day to day?”

“I don’t know what that crazy woman was doing. I’d see her carrying in boxes like she was moving in, grocery bags, but usually she’d drive away at night. But I haven’t seen her for a long time. I figured she moved out. Place is a shithole, both floors, nothing ever gets fixed up, landlord doesn’t care. That was why the Chinese folks left as soon as they got more money. So it’s empty now. Not my business anyway.” She walked away, ignoring my next question.

Halloran appeared at my side. “The property owner is an old fart named Allan Miner and he was being a dodgy little dancer about this place.”

“He looks like a slumlord,” I said.

“It took some doing, but I convinced him to be more cooperative. No, he hasn’t ever rented to anyone by the name of John Macdonald. He’s never heard of anyone by that name.”

“Of course not,” I sighed.

“The last person to rent that second story studio was a woman named Amanda. No last name.”

“How in the hell did he rent to her without a last name?”

“It wasn’t an official rental deal. No paperwork passed between them. Basically, they met in a bar in Darby one night about eight years ago and somehow talk turned to the studio up there. He didn’t have the money to fix this place up but she didn’t mind. She just wanted it for storage. So he brought her over that same night and showed it to her. She was happy as a clam, wanted to take the downstairs apartment too but she couldn’t afford both. The downstairs apartment is a lot bigger than the studio and he would have charged more for it.”

“It was empty?”

“Yeah, the previous tenants had moved out recently, so he wasn’t getting a dime for either place. He described her as being middle-aged with big hair, dressed in sexy clothes, flirty and made him feel young again. I got the feeling that she might have given him a little thrill that night to seal the deal on the studio, but I didn’t want to ask.” He made a quick jerk-off motion.