Out of the Blue: A Pengram Mystery (4 page)

Seriously? This guy wasn’t just a pig but a total creep. Now I was positively thrilled to have missed out on meeting him. I couldn’t say I enjoyed being single all that much, but men like Tyler made it look like a treat. I wanted to shoot back something so rude and cutting and emasculating that his manhood shriveled up and died forever in his crusty jockey shorts. Extra large, my ass.

But I couldn’t bring myself to reply. My mind was focused on another man, one who could dedicate himself so thoroughly to bringing a woman’s life to such a bizarre and gruesome end. I’d be seeing that maze in my dreams for years to come.

He’s smart enough to go.

Or was he smart enough to stay?

Chapter Five

His eyes were closed, yet he
saw
.

How her body shook as she retched, her fragile frame caught up in the violent convulsions . . . She sank back with the dumb look of an animal in pain, eyes closing, perchance to dream . . . Then she came around once more, her delicate features screwing up in her seasickness and confusion . . .

He had memorized all of that, but what fascinated him was how she fixed up the fallen doll after jostling it loose from its position at the desk . . . This moment in particular riveted him. She had been so well programmed. Even in her uncertainty, even in her sickness and drunkenness, she followed her programming. It was that engrained, a track so worn in her mind that she traveled it without thought.

Clean up after yourself!

Leave it the way you found it!

A place for everything and everything in its place!

He had spyholes everywhere in the partitions, and he had seen everything. Every step, every wince, every turn, every rise and fall of her chest. Watching her straighten the doll had given him an erection.

Remembering her straighten the doll was giving him an erection now.

He did not touch himself. He could not with the cage. It was cheap, the cheapest he could find in that squalid, shitty sex shop down in San Francisco, concocted of shitty materials and made by some shitty, underpaid Chinese worker. There were burrs in the clamshell rings holding him in.

They constricted his swelling. Painfully. When he was fully engorged, the pain was unbearable. He had to piss sitting down or risk making a mess, but every third time, he did it standing and made himself clean up with a burr digging in from the position. There were open sores now. Four of them.

He didn’t have the key to release himself. It was in the mail to some nonexistent address clear across the country, and who knew how long it would take to show back up in his mailbox? If it did not within a reasonable period of time, he would have to purchase a new cage and use the key from that.

No.

Slow and steady wins the race!

Patience is the key to paradise!

What does not kill us makes us stronger!

The first key would come back to him. He knew that. He liked to test just how much he could stand, and he always passed with flying colors. He was the Spartan boy having his guts shredded by the fox, stoic and immobile as it killed him. Nobody knew of his pain until he fell dead at their feet, the fox sprinting away with bloody paw prints.

She hadn’t been scared in the classroom station. Baffled, but not scared. He could see the gears of her mind turning as she tried to figure out where she was and how in the world she had gotten there. And then she was spooked when he played the insane asylum laughter on one of his many portable cassette tape players. He had predicted that would propel her into the hallway. He had also predicted that given the choice between the dark alley and the Christmas scene, that she would choose Christmas.

Presents! Ornaments! Hearth fire! Carols! Sleigh bells! Tinsel! Plucking heartstrings of olden days, frosted snowflake cookies and packed stockings and cartoons about an animated snowman that danced and laughed and played with the little ones. Hooray! Hooray! Hooray!

He wondered if a Jew would pick the darkness. With Christmas unable to evoke a sense of safety borne of many happy childhood memories . . . what would they do? What would they do?

“What would they do?” he whispered, flinching as the pain from the cage intensified. Perhaps anyone would have chosen Christmas, if only because there was light to see in that station.

Darkness hid things. Scary things. Things that went bump in the night.

She had thought the prop hand was real. He’d wanted to wrap up the zombie head, but it was too obviously a fake. It looked like something a person would see on a lawn at Halloween, tinged green and leering at passerby among gray cardboard graves. No, he could not use the head, too reminiscent of theater. He would have to use that in some other way. But the hand was a piece of gory artwork.

Just as the crazy laughter kept her on the move, the hand wrapped up like a present was what had kept her from searching the Thanksgiving table. He had felt so close to her at that moment, the moment she hesitated above the lids on the serving dishes.

Her mind was within his mind. Her heart was within his heart.

She was within him completely, married to his soul, giver and receiver becoming receiver and giver. He knew her like he knew himself.

If she had lifted those lids, she would have found her cell phone. Her juiced-up cell phone. The dangerousness of her finding it had thrilled him almost to the point of climax. He would have had to burst into the station then, see if he could move faster with the scythe than she could dial 911.

Pain
.

It was agony. His cock was being crushed against the cage, the burrs digging in mercilessly and the key floating around somewhere in Maine. Had it gone out with a hapless mail carrier yet? Was he or she standing on a sidewalk where the address
should
be and deciding whether to stuff it in the box with the nearest number or return it to the post office? Were questioning fingers pinching the letter, feeling the key, the deliverer wondering what it was for? Three guesses!

Wrong.

Wrong

Wrong.

No one would ever guess.

He had built hundreds of mazes in the backyard over the years, always in threes since the yard had three good areas for it. There was the one he was finishing and the one he was decorating and the one still being mapped out, the one that hadn’t yet found its shape so the decorations had yet to come. Yes, one lacked a shape and one lacked a voice and one lacked only its accents. Its style.

The mazes were never quite the same, because why see what he’d already seen? The creative process excited him, and it was a measure of his brilliance that he could have three projects going at the same time. Seamlessly, he moved between them as the mood caught him up. He made barriers out of woodpiles and brick walls and crates and a hundred other things, or used the natural terrain of trees and foliage to his advantage.

It was a rush once all three mazes were ready and waiting. Then he helped himself to cats and dogs around the neighborhood to run them.

But that had gotten dull over time. There wasn’t much going on in those furry little heads. Not as much to play with. They couldn’t appreciate the time and effort that had gone into crafting their surroundings. The sight of Christmas didn’t evoke fond memories in them, nor did they have as much fear of the dark. Some of them startled at the laughter and music; others were wholly oblivious. One cat had gone to sleep halfway through, too bored to explore. Then when he came for it, the damn thing made an impossible leap and got away.

It was the only one that ever had. He’d made sure of that. Afterwards he joined the frantic neighborhood search for Brownie or Fluffy or Pogo, standing on corners to call for them and peeking under cars.

Hysterical.

Cleaning up the neighborhood.

Taking out the trash.

Practice made perfect.

Flicking the switch for the exit sign had been all he needed to push him over the edge in the old silk mill. He had climaxed in his cage as she ran, a hard climax ruined by the clamshells. Then he’d given chase, spurred by sudden fury.
She’d
ruined it!

After she died, he was bored. He put her wallet back into her purse, almost took it back out to leave it somewhere, debated taking it with him . . . but it was like watching a movie for the second time. The laughs had been had.

It had been magic until then. But all good things must come to an end. He didn’t care where the wallet was, so it remained in the purse.

He didn’t climax now. The pain won out over the memory. Frustrated, he attempted to bring back the excitement of watching her. Dancing in the club on her own, avoiding the man who wanted to dance with her . . . lost in the music and her tiny purse bobbing over her back since she didn’t have someone to leave it with . . . she had almost seen him fiddle with her drink, but turned back to the bar just a tad too late . . .

And in the stations, the straightening of the doll . . . the unveiling of the hand . . . the fear of what could be beneath the lids . . . Then seeing the silk mill on the news, news
he
had made, cops crawling around everywhere because of
him
, that gave him a charge despite how they were sparse on the details of what was inside that building other than the dead girl . . . the very dead girl . . .

His erection deflated. His sores stung anew.

And he had to piss. He checked his calendar.

The third time’s the charm.

Three strikes and you’re out!

Good things come in threes.

He didn’t have to follow his programming. He only did it when there was a challenge to surmount.

He went into the bathroom with a spray bottle of disinfectant and a sponge.

Chapter Six

Thinking about Mom had jinxed it. I woke up in the morning to a chipper, rambling voicemail on my cell phone. “
Hey, girlfriend! Your dad and I were just talking about you and-
”

I moaned and muffled my face in the pillow, letting the phone fall from my ear. She always called her latest boyfriend my dad, as if this were a role that any man could step into just by virtue of being in a relationship with her. In truth, she wasn’t sure who my biological father was. It unnerved me when I got random calls from one new dad or another, a faceless stranger feeling more than welcome to discuss my life with me and tell me all about himself. Mom didn’t see what was wrong in giving out my personal information to guys she had known for all of three days. Or less.

She babbled on in the message as I only half-listened. So she had another white knight in her life. If he was like the others, then he was some unemployed or underemployed, substance-abusing, self-absorbed, chauvinistic dude in desperate need of anger management classes and a shower. He splashed paint around an easel or strummed a guitar while singing folk songs or composed long novels about American malaise and the plight of the misunderstood white heterosexual male. He talked incessantly about how he had to remain pure to his art, whether it was writing or painting or music, and that was why he hadn’t succeeded in his career yet. Mom had a type.

A very irritating type. They were men with abundant red flags that any normal woman ran away from at Olympic gold medal speed. Jealous, irresponsible, immature, controlling, sleazy, secretive, at times abusive . . . But Mom gave them a chance, believing there was
always
a jewel to be found in the rough.

No. No, there really wasn’t.

I had had a lot of terrible ‘fathers’ growing up, and took solace in the knowledge that Mom would replace them sooner or later with someone else. It got worse when I hit my teens, some of her creepier boyfriends taking notice of my blossoming body. Mom was furious to see that I had become competition. It didn’t cross her mind that her fifteen-year-old daughter was probably not too happy about drawing the eye of a man in his forties. Nothing had ever gone too far, but that was because she usually dumped the boyfriend-of-the-moment for favoring another woman, not because she was disgusted that a grown man was sizing up her own adolescent child. So she did the right thing, but for entirely the wrong reason. I learned to stay away from home as much as possible, whiling away long hours in libraries and after-school jobs. And when I was home, I gave the cold shoulder to her current boyfriend, turning down gifts and conversation alike, and stayed in my room with a chair shoved under the doorknob.

She had hated that. She wanted to be close. Like we were best girlfriends who were the same age, not mother and daughter. I should want to hang out with her, talk about guys and compare sex lives. She still wanted that now, but I kept her at an arm’s length.

I hadn’t had much better luck than she had in guys once I hit adulthood, although I’d thought I won the jackpot eleven years ago when I met JJ. He was steady. Calm. Attractive. Smart. Older and settled, he sold insurance and didn’t care if he had kids or not. I had never had strong feelings either way, and my job took up an unreasonable amount of time. We puttered along nicely together for the better part of seven years, and then his father died and JJ unexpectedly inherited a very large sum of money.

I thought I had known him. I hadn’t known a thing.

Almost overnight, JJ changed into a graying playboy. Fast cars. Fancy vacations. Hot chicks. I had just been there to spot him in the lady department, apparently, and now he didn’t need me. He had several million dollars in his bank account, and he could do better. So it had been fun, but see you later!

That hurt. No, I wasn’t some dewy-eyed, stick-thin ingénue anymore, but it made me feel like I had eroded beyond the point of male attraction. I was yesterday’s paper, good only for the crossword. Within a month of gaining his inheritance, he moved to Los Angeles to rub elbows with Hollywood and throw his money around to impress girls barely old enough to drink. Just like that, so abruptly that it took my breath away, we were done.

Even now, I still felt somewhat blasted. I had always considered myself a good judge of character, yet I hadn’t seen through JJ. Looking back on it now, I could identify some small signs that love had papered over. He had always been overly concerned about appearances. If someone on his block acquired a better car than his, then he had to get an even
better
car. If I didn’t put on something that he deemed fancy enough for dinner at a restaurant, he ran to the closet to pick out another outfit for me. It was couched in so much love and care that I never argued and just changed. He only wanted the best for me, or so I thought.

I lurked on his social media pages on occasion to help my mental health, and that did more for me than a therapist ever could. There was something so pathetic about him in the pictures. Now pot-bellied, far too spray-tanned, and going bald, he stuck out like a sore thumb next to his shiny new friends a whole generation younger. The wrinkles and tan made him look like a leather handbag. There was a degree of consolation in that. I didn’t have the money or the party life it could purchase, but at least I wasn’t making a fool of myself.

Mom was now laughing uproariously in her never-ending message. It was her habit to talk until it cut her off, and then call back in pique if she hadn’t finished. “
Isn’t that funny, honey? Anyway, Daddy and I wanted to know when you were going to come and visit us here-”

“I don’t even know where you are!” I moaned to the phone.

“-
because Darby is just so dull and there’s nothing to do there! You can meet your new sisters and little nephews and baby niece and we’ll take you to see the volcanoes at that national park-
”

Volcanoes. Her travels must have taken her to Hawaii. I reached for the phone, wanting to cut the message short before it annoyed me any further. Instead, I knocked it off the bed.

“-
and don’t say you have to work! They murder people on the Big Island just like they do everywhere else, so
-”

So I could just walk into a station there and ask for a case? Was that how she thought it worked? I got hold of the phone and mashed my fingers into the screen. One cut off her voice.

I dragged my sorry carcass out of bed and swallowed my pills. Going to the kitchen, I started hot water for coffee and looked longingly at the cereal I couldn’t eat for half an hour. A thump at the back of the house redirected my attention, but only for a moment. It was just another moronic bird bravely challenging its reflection in the window.

Forty minutes later, I was almost out the door when my phone rang. It was Halloran. “I’m having fun,” he announced brightly. He was a shameless morning person.

“Ooh, let me have fun with you,” I yawned. I was most certainly
not
a morning person. “Unless it’s the private kind of fun. I don’t think your wife would be too happy about me joining in.”

Easily distracted, Halloran said, “I was watching this documentary on TV the other day about people in multiple relationships all at the same time.”

“Like a man with two women? Or three?”

“Oh, no, it was much more complicated than that. I had to draw a flow chart to figure it all out. You want to hear?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Of course you do! It went like this: A and B are a married couple living somewhere on the East Coast, and A has his lady friends C and D on the side. And B has a man friend in E, who’s married to T, and T is also seeing C. There was more than that. And then there was a Q mixed in there somehow who broke up with a bunch of them and they were all upset about it. They had a little family support group to talk about their feelings.”

“What?” I asked in bafflement, getting into my car.

“C is bisexual, so she’s got men in A and T and she’s also with a lady we’ll call R. And B likes R too, but they haven’t made a connection yet. That was what they called it, a connection. The dudes are connecting with the chicks, and the chicks are connecting with the chicks, and some of the dudes are connecting with the dudes . . . It just went on and on like that, this circle that got bigger and bigger until I had so many lines on the page I couldn’t see the letters. Or was E married to someone else?”

“Goddammit, Jake, you’re giving me a headache.”

He harrumphed after a second spent in contemplation. “I don’t remember. Then B got knocked up and didn’t know which guy was the father. She thought it was great news but A was spitting nails since she stopped taking her birth control pills without telling anyone. Everybody else seemed more or less like regular people but she was a nut. So E was all excited to be a dad and T was mad at him, and B was going on endlessly to the camera about how she wanted to move everybody to a big commune to raise the kid that all their love had made. They could have their own organic farm. Just perfect! But they all have jobs and own homes and don’t want to move, so she cried her eyes out at another family meeting of a dozen or so people. It was something else. Laila came in and made me rewind to the beginning so she could watch and then Rosie came in so we started it again and eventually all four of us were sitting on the sofa making flow charts and arguing about who went where. Rosie called it a literal clusterfuck and we laughed our asses off.”

“Good old-fashioned family entertainment.”

“You should watch it. It’s called
Love Only Grows
. I got pretty lost. Maybe you can explain it to me. At the end it said A and B got a divorce and DNA tests showed the kid didn’t belong to A or E or any of the other guys, so she had someone secret on the side and that was against the rules they’d worked out.”

“So what other fun do you have for me?” I asked pointedly through a second yawn as I drove.

“An anonymous call came in with a tip about Weird Scott. Real name is Scott Blay. He didn’t show up to work yesterday.”

“I see. Was the caller male or female?”

“Woman’s voice, sounded young and nervous. She wanted us to know that he’d been pestering Chloe over the last month or two.”

“Just like Lindsay said.”

“This woman gave a few more details. She said he had a crush on Chloe and wanted to move into her apartment.”

“Move in?” I repeated. My brain was not awake enough for this conversation. “Why did he want to move in? It didn’t sound like they’d ever dated.”

“That was what the woman said, move in. He kept asking Chloe about it until she complained to management. The boss told him to knock it off and leave her alone. That was just last week. Then another call came in from the same woman about an hour ago, saying that Scott showed up for work this morning.”

The woman had to be another employee of the store. “Then let’s hit Tasty and have a chat with him.”

I picked up Halloran and we were on the way. “Oh, I forgot to tell you a part of it,” he said.

“About the anonymous calls or the documentary?” I asked. “Enough about the stupid documentary! You lost me with all of that, too.”

“Two of them in that mix had a much older kid. He was S,” Halloran said blithely over my protests. “S was graduating from high school and wanted to have only his mom and dad there for the ceremony, but a bunch of them were so offended to be left out that they showed up anyway to cheer him on. They helped to raise him so they felt they had a right to be there regardless of what he wanted. Held up a big banner with his name on it and all their names around his when he walked on stage for his diploma, introduced themselves to everyone in the bleachers as his moms and dads. I felt so sorry for that kid. He said he didn’t mind his unusual family, but he didn’t like them outing what they did to the world either. He just wanted to fit in with his friends like any other seventeen-year-old. His dad, his real dad, was scolding him to be proud. All that matters is love.”

“My mother brought a random guy she’d met in a bar the night before to my high school graduation,” I commented. “They made out in the stands like horny teenagers for two hours. Everyone was watching them instead of the graduates and I wanted to
die
. Then they disappeared towards the end and I just had to hope she wasn’t blowing him in a corner somewhere.” Knowing my mother, chances were high that she had been. Ugh.

“My folks sat there in the stands like normal people and cheered me on,” Halloran said mildly. “You want to go to Rosie’s graduation next year, Blue? She’d love to have you there. We’ll go out for pizza afterwards.”

“I would be delighted,” I said.

“She says you’re the cool aunt she never had.”

“That’s darling. Tell her hi from me.” I pulled in at Tasty and found a parking spot.

The grocery store was filled with the rich scent of coffee. I looked over longingly to the baked goods area where it was being served. “I need more caffeine.”

“Me, too. Let’s talk to him and get some on the way out,” Halloran said. The coffee at the station tasted like lighter fluid.

The store was virtually empty, and all but one of the checkout lanes was closed. A woman with four very young children was struggling to pay for her groceries as the kids shrieked wordlessly and tried to grab things from the conveyor belt.