Out of the Blue: A Pengram Mystery (2 page)

“Mom, they don’t want you there!” Cannon exploded.

I went inside with Halloran, who led me around the partitions. The assistant medical examiner Harley Grave was crouching over the body to take in every detail. Her face was set in a typical scowl. She grunted at me unintelligibly, either meaning
hello
or
fuck off
since those tones were remarkably the same with her.

“What is it?” I asked Halloran once we were around the body.

“Didn’t you tell me you have a date tonight? Some dude named Tyler?” he asked, tripping over another raised floorboard.

“Not a date,” I said. “We’re meeting for coffee. That’s not a date.”

“I think you’re going to be cancelling on him once you see this.”

He arrived at an ancient flight of stairs. The first step creaked in a voluble warning when he began to climb. “Is this safe?” I called after him. “I didn’t plan on breaking a leg by falling through a rotten staircase today.”

“Legs are overrated. You can get around on just one.”

The stairs didn’t give way under the two of us. They just complained with each footfall. At the top, Halloran turned to walk down what had once been a hallway. Now the left side opened into empty space.

I looked down to the trash heaps and paused. “What is that?”

“Come here and you can see it better.”

I trailed after him to where the hallway abruptly ended. Then we stared down to the orange partitions. Set up deliberately to form a maze over the ground floor, paths snaked this way and that. Bulbs hung down only over certain passages, some of which had been decorated. The corpse was just beyond the only place the maze let out.

“Uhhh . . .” I trailed off.

“Yeah,” Halloran said. “File this one under WTF.”

Chapter Three

Darby, California was not a happening place, despite every effort the city made to be one. It was framed with towering wineries and neat rows of vineyards upon the hills to the north, but there was far better to be found in Napa to the east. It had a generous number of museums and art galleries in its sprawling downtown area, but all of them were hopelessly outclassed with what San Francisco had to offer in the south. There were no less than three farmers’ markets but many people went to the one in Sonoma instead; there were hundreds of restaurants yet little that was notable. The city of Darby was by no means small, yet no one had ever heard of it.

My hometown of almost two decades just wasn’t very interesting. I didn’t mind one bit. My childhood years had been spent crisscrossing the country as my forever-fifteen mother chased The One. The man who was her destiny, the man who would make everything right. The man who would love her and save her and support her and fulfill every need she ever had. I hadn’t spent more than two years in any school before being uprooted again. Dallas. Milwaukee. Los Angeles. Tarboro. New York City. Omaha. Portland. Detroit. Tampa. Back to Dallas. On and on and on. It hadn’t stopped until I went to college and put a stop to it myself.

The One remained ever elusive, an elite player in the game of cat-and-mouse. Now in her late sixties, Mom was still chasing him while I stayed put. I didn’t even know what state she was in at the moment. Nor did I really care, if I was honest with myself. They didn’t make Mother’s Day cards for daughters like me to pick out at the store.
Thanks for feeding me, I guess.
Not that I had an address to send it to anyway. The last time we’d chatted many months ago, she had chided me for staying so long in boring old Darby.

What could I say? I liked it here. It was
my
boring old Darby. She also didn’t like what I did for a living since it wasn’t nearly as glamorous and exciting and fast-paced as what she saw on television. I had nothing much to say to that either. The process took the time that it took. The station wasn’t full of hot guys panting after me for dates. Murder cases didn’t always get solved, especially drug- and gang-related ones with witnesses too justifiably afraid of violent retribution to speak. There was a lot of decidedly unsexy paperwork, and music failed to thunder overhead when I gave pursuit to suspects on foot. Nor did I run in slow motion with my long, voluminous brunette locks flowing attractively behind me.

With my malfunctioning thyroid? That was a laugh. I had twenty extra pounds that I couldn’t shed, my hair wasn’t voluminous anymore, and I was always cold and tired. I needed to up the dose of my hypothyroid medication, but my doctor thought it was all in my head. I also needed a new doctor.

My cases weren’t even newsworthy a good deal of the time, outside of the local paper. Darby had its fair share of crime. There were plenty of sad, sorry people doing sad, sorry things, but leaving out the battles over drugs and turf, it was usually crimes of passion. Bad decisions made in the heat of the moment, spurred by fights or break-ups.

This new murder, however, was something different. Very different.

And cold.

It had taken a long time to construct this maze, and I had a hunch the partitions were brought here by the killer along with the decorations. The heaps of rubble were coated in dust while the partitions were spotless. Unfortunately, there were no security cameras anywhere at the silk mill. I was sure the perp had canvassed this property thoroughly before setting up. All there was to keep him out was a fence with holes in it, and a lock that was easy to cut.

He would have had to bring everything in through the back since the front of the building oversaw a busy road. Uniforms canvassed the houses behind the silk mill, but many of them were vacant. This wasn’t one of Darby’s nice areas. Industry had moved elsewhere over the last twenty years and the nearest elementary school had closed, sending this community into a death spiral. The few remaining residents hadn’t seen a truck parked in the driveway or a person moving things in. They hadn’t heard anything either. Tall fences framed their yards, AC kept their homes cool instead of open windows. No one had dogs outside to bark at something strange. Neighbors kept to themselves.

It had to have been done in the night. Several nights, especially if he had to carry in those partitions one by one. Then he brought in the victim, and ran her like a rat through a maze.

The perp had taken the murder weapon with him. Death had come so quickly that Chloe didn’t have any defensive wounds on her arms or hands.

That was a small mercy. There were no overt signs of sexual assault, and she’d been killed with what appeared to be one blow. No overkill. It seemed to me that the joy in this had not come from the execution of the victim but the execution of the
scene
.

I walked through the maze twice before it was processed, careful not to brush against anything. The amount of planning and effort this had taken was unbelievable. He was careful. Intelligent. Deliberate.

And terrifyingly confident.

*****

“She was nice.”

Lindsay Laber was packed into a corner of the sofa, her knees drawn up protectively to her chest. Her eyes gleamed with tears that had yet to fall. Major bed hair and a toddler’s chubby cheeks, she was twenty-one and had shared her apartment with Chloe Rogers for the last year.

“When was the last time you saw her?” Halloran asked as I looked around. The living room was homey but sparse, the few pieces of furniture old and well traveled. On the walls were cartoon-bright posters of jumping dolphins over rich blue waves. There were pictures on the end table of Lindsay with family and friends. Chloe was in one, laughing with Lindsay’s arm over her shoulders. She had been a lovely young woman.

“It was just last night,” Lindsay was saying to Halloran. “My friend Craig turned twenty-one. Craig Palmer. He’s a friend from work. Spazzo’s. We clean up after the kids’ birthday parties and set up for the next ones. I asked Lindsay if she wanted to go along with us to Bounce. She didn’t want to.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“She’s not . . .” One of the tears finally fell as Lindsay realized her tense was wrong. “She always had to get talked into stuff. She was kind of dark. Not like doing drugs or cutting herself or anything like that. She just saw the bad before the good, you know? She was closed in. Not that you could blame her. Her parents were killed in a car crash when she was little, two or three. She was in her car seat and lived. It was an accident, ice on the road and her father lost control. That was in Michigan, I think she said. Then she came to California to live with her grandparents and they were old, so they died when she was in high school. After that she was with some foster family and treated like the help. She didn’t have anyone. People just went away, from her perspective, or didn’t want her around, so why hang on too hard? Why reach out?”

“Did she have a boyfriend?” Halloran asked.

“No. Never. And no, she wasn’t a lesbian. She was just kind of . . . awkward. She said she never knew what to say to guys, or to anyone. You had to prompt her along in a conversation until you found the right angle, and then she’d talk. But she was smart. It wasn’t that. Just shy and awkward. She grew up with a couple of old people who wanted her to be quiet and weren’t involved in her life. They didn’t want to be raising a grandkid. It was like she just never learned how to converse since no one bothered to teach her. But I thought a night at Bounce would be good for her. Let it go, you know? We work so hard. Some drinks, some dancing . . . Usually she just watched TV when she got home from work, or read a book. Those are hers.” Lindsay gestured to the far side of the sofa.

There was a tall pile of library books beneath the end table, a bookmark halfway through the bodice-ripper on top. That was sad to me, a novel that wouldn’t ever be finished. The rest of the books revealed eclectic interests, cozy mysteries and science fiction, more romances and a self-help book at the bottom about overcoming social anxiety.

“She always fixed dinner for two, even though I never asked or expected it,” Lindsay said. “It was sweet. She loved cooking. It calmed her down at the end of the day. She could make a killer grilled cheese.” Lindsay covered her mouth briefly.
Killer
hung in the room between us.

Her voice thin with strain, Lindsay said, “I liked how she made this a home. I always had to get the big plates down from the shelf for us. She was so tiny she couldn’t reach them. She was like a doll. At work she could barely see over the counter. She worked in the deli at Tasty.”

“What happened once you got to Bounce?” I said.

“It was around nine-thirty, or a little later. We got drinks at the bar, sat down in one of those sofa squares in the corner to chat.” Lindsay wiped off her wet cheek. “She clammed up. She needed people to keep picking at her to talk, but . . . I mean, that was fine when it was the two of us here, but we were just messing around at the club, shooting the shit, and it wasn’t the place for that. I was a little frustrated with her and that wasn’t fair. I knew she got frustrated with herself for not knowing how to jump into a conversation. She wanted to see a therapist but it’s just so expensive. Then she got up to dance.”

“With anyone?”

“No. She got up and went over there on her own. I saw her over at the bar getting another drink some time later, and then on the dance floor a couple of times. It was pretty crowded. That must have been between ten and midnight. I’d had a lot to drink so after a while . . . I didn’t see her and didn’t think about it. I was having such a good time. Craig walked me back here around one, one-thirty.”

“Did he stay?”

“Yeah, but it wasn’t like that. I kind of wanted to . . . you know, take it further, but he gave me a kiss and said I was too drunk. He’s a good guy. He was real buzzed, didn’t think he was okay to drive home, so we crashed in my bed and slept until his alarm went off for work at seven. I have today off. He left, and I fell asleep again. I woke up at ten. Her door was open and I figured she’d gone to work, too. She wasn’t scheduled for a shift, but she’s been called in lots of times to cover someone sick. You can go in there to look around, if you need to. It doesn’t . . .”

Lindsay started to cry in earnest. “Her bed is still made from yesterday. She never made it back home. I was too smashed to even notice. If I could have called 911 last night to report her missing . . .”

It wouldn’t have made any difference, I thought. Police didn’t get all hot and bothered about an adult not coming home for a night.

I went to the room to look in as Halloran said, “When you saw her at the bar and on the dance floor, was she talking to anyone? Was anyone trying to talk to her?”

“No,” Lindsay said. “She was by herself. I mean, she was dancing with everyone else on the floor, but not
with
anyone in particular.”

Chloe’s room was simple and tidy, the duvet pulled up over the pillow on the twin bed, half a dozen cartoon sea posters on the walls. Clothes hung neatly in the closet and her shoes were lined up below. On the desk was a picture of a beaming couple with a baby about a year old in their arms. The frame said
Mom & Dad
, surrounded by metal leaves. Several more pictures were behind it, Chloe aging past her second birthday before her parents vanished from the frames.

“Did she ever complain to you that someone at work was bothering her?” Halloran asked in the living room.

“There was the guy at Tasty they call Weird Scott, but he bothers everyone,” Lindsay replied. “He’s not dangerous weird, or not from what she told me. Just off in the head. He also works at the deli counter. I don’t know his last name. And she’d have shitty customers now and then, but that’s normal. I get them at my job, too, horny dads trying to flirt while their wives and kids are twenty feet away.”

“Did she have a computer?” I called.

“No,” Lindsay answered. “She wanted a laptop but didn’t have the money. She used her phone for everything. She was like this blast from the past when it came to tech, you know, because her grandparents never had a computer or cell phones and wouldn’t let her have those things either. I helped her pick out a cell phone right after she moved in with me and she was so excited to join this century, she said. She’d never been to an amusement park either so we went south to Rollaway for her last birthday. She had the time of her life on the rides. We rode every last one, even the rides for little kids. There was a hot guy working the Snake and we went on that one three times just so he could check our seatbelts again.”

With a choked sob, Lindsay exclaimed, “Why didn’t I look in last night to see if she was home? Why did I leave the club without thinking about her? What the fuck kind of friend am I? I was . . . I was partying while she was
dying
.”

We had Chloe’s phone, but I had a feeling we weren’t going to find anything on it. This murderer might have been a total stranger to her. We had to see the footage from the cameras at Bounce, if there were any.

Halloran continued his questioning as I searched through the room, finding nothing of interest. No, Chloe hadn’t done drugs. She had tried marijuana twice in high school and it made her feel weird instead of relaxed, so she hadn’t done it again. Nor had she expressed interest in trying anything else. In fact, Lindsay had seen her turn down pills at a concert they went to over the summer. Chloe didn’t care what anyone else was taking; she just didn’t want to be on anything herself. Yes, she drank, but she didn’t usually get smashed. Two or three times a month was about how often she consumed alcohol. Most of the times it had been to excess, Chloe and Lindsay were at home playing drinking games along with a bad movie on the television.