Out of the Blue: A Pengram Mystery (9 page)

He would beat this. It was just a test, and he would pass.

“Are you okay, sir?” the cashier asked.

He imagined this woman waking up in a maze. Heaving herself up, breasts trembling, those queer eyes taking in the station. A New Year’s Eve party. A candy store. A nursery. A Fourth of July picnic with the stars and stripes on the walls beneath pictures of fireworks.

What would a woman like this do? What coping mechanisms would she fall back upon? Would she go fast? Slow? Pick up something she had knocked over? Stand there and scream? Climb the walls?

She was too tall. She’d see right over them.

You get to live
, he thought magnanimously, and left the store without a word. Then he claimed a bench to read the newspapers, a bible of him.

Chapter Eleven

“You got something?” Halloran asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, staring at the screen.

I had been watching the videos for the last hour. Going over and over and over those strange little rooms in the mazes, wondering if they had any deeper significance to the killer. School. Christmas. Thanksgiving. Church. Easter. Birthday.

The second maze was very much like the first when it came to the props. They were generic items that could be purchased anywhere, and were therefore impossible to trace. I had thought briefly that we had a clue in the church room. The religious paraphernalia was stuff that could be gotten in any dollar store from coast to coast, but what about the pews? I’d never gone into any store to find pews on sale. He must have stolen them from a church. But my hopes were soon dashed. Five minutes online taught me just how easy it was to buy from church outfitter stores. It could have come from one of those places, or sites selling used church furniture or even giving it away for free. Churches bringing in brand new pews often just wanted to get rid of the old ones by any means possible. What we had found in the maze was lower-quality composite wood.

And it was wiped clean, naturally. This man spent outrageous amounts of time picking over every inch of his decorations. Wearing thick gloves, scrubbing with cleansers, packing them up for transport and unpacking without making fresh marks . . . He was unnervingly thorough.

So I didn’t have anything of interest yet to share with Halloran. I kept watching the maze feeds in the hopes that something would suddenly jump out at me.

“I had Fagelman see about those security videos at Bounce,” Halloran said. “Old, crappy system and they reuse the same tapes over and over, so he’s watching what little they had. Nothing of interest at this point, just couples and groups going in, a few single women. The perp probably cased the joint some other day.”

“Unless he was in one of those groups or couples. He can clearly fake being just an average dude if he got Francisco to take the coffee.”

“Well, the quality is so bad that it’s hard to see anyone. And Fagelman asked the employees if they’d caught people wandering around in back. They said no, that’s a rare occurrence. The door to the back of the building is hidden behind a curtain, so most of the club guests don’t even know it’s there. One employee said she found a woman in back once, drunk off her ass and hunting for the restroom. Another came across a couple trying to get it on upon the laundry bag of rags, drunk again and that was back in the first week the club opened.”

“Maybe it’s the woman. She was just faking drunk to scope the place out,” I said wearily.

“I think he just did it unobserved,” Halloran said. “That big old room they have back there, filled up with equipment and boxes of stuff for the stage . . . It’s not like it would be hard to hide behind those things if someone was going to the back door to dump the trash outside. Oh, and just in case you haven’t been updated, the captain contacted the FBI today to request assistance. Hopefully their behavioral science people can do some profiling, now that there’s been a second murder.”

“Are they going to stomp in and say
it’s our case now
just like on TV?” I asked absent-mindedly. “I love when they do that. Then the lead detective bumped off the case hands in his or her badge and gun and goes rogue since the FBI agents always fuck it up.”

“I can’t watch that shit. It’s like going home from work and putting on the TV to go back to work. How can you stand it?”

“I don’t usually watch those shows,” I said. “There was just a random police procedural marathon weekend a month ago and I couldn’t find anything else better.”

“I know a documentary you could watch.”

“No.”

“It’s really good.”

“No.”

“It’s about sex.”

“Maybe.”

“You don’t have to watch these videos, you know,” Halloran said. “We got a call to the tip line from a woman named Psychic Sue. She says we’re looking for a man who lives near a body of water and is crying out in his heart for us to stop him. He’s slightly overweight, has brown hair, and drives an old car that might be gray or black. The uniforms will have him in no time.”

“Well then, I’ll just go home. Thanks, Psychic Sue.” I hit pause when the feed reached the Christmas tree and pointed to the red bird ornaments. “Look at that.”

“What about it?” Halloran said.

“There are three of them. Three red birds, three of these golden balls, three of the silver balls, three snowflakes . . .”

“Only two of those pink-and-green finials,” Halloran argued.

I made the feed go forward at an extremely slow pace. As the camera holder rounded the tree, I said, “There’s the third pink-and-green finial down there.”

“Only one star on top,” Halloran said. “Only one tree.”

“Not everything is duplicated in threes, but the number is repeated as often as possible: three rooms in the maze, three desks in the classroom, three dolls and three notebooks . . .”

“More than three presents over in Christmas.”

I counted them. “Nine presents. Six loops of the lights around the tree. Want to bet there were precisely eighteen eggs in the Easter room? Or some other multiple of three?”

“Doesn’t help us find him, though.”

I sank back. No, it didn’t. It could just be a feature of the killer’s OCD, the number three and its multiples holding a special, if illogical, significance to him.

“Is he planning to kill in threes?” Halloran asked in sudden alarm. “He might be setting up a third maze right this second to finish this off and sate his compulsion.”

Then we needed to have uniforms crawling over this city. Checking out abandoned buildings, fields and construction sites, anywhere he could be creating his new maze. It struck me how many places this perp must have checked out before selecting the silk mill and former pumpkin patch. Perhaps he hadn’t been as careful of leaving prints in the places he’d rejected. A tire impression,
anything.
It would be more than what we had now.

What would he do if he successfully killed a third person? Stop for good? But that wasn’t in line with what I knew about twisted minds like his. They liked what they were doing. They grew addicted to the rush of it, but like an addiction to drugs, they needed more and more to achieve the same high. He might stop for a time once he hit his magic number, for months or even years, but it would not last forever. He would eventually continue with his mazes, or shift to some new ritual, but he wouldn’t simply walk off into the sunset.

“They were small people,” I said. “Chloe Rogers was so small that her roommate described her as a doll. The perp didn’t want her to be tall enough to see over those partitions. Francisco Hernandez was short, too. And both were light on weight, easy for this guy to move.”

“I’d better hit the store on the way home and start eating cake,” Halloran said.

“You’re six feet tall. He won’t want you.”

“Then I’ll feed you cake until you’re five thousand pounds and he won’t want you either, Short Stuff.”

“I guess we can’t alert the media for short people to be on guard.”

“No, but that would be a new one. Well, speaking of height, the second maze let us narrow it down some more. Ground was uneven coming out of that maze, but not like how bad those floorboards at the mill were. He’s no five-six or six even either, got him between five-seven and five-ten now.”

“Kidnapping prostitutes would be so much easier,” I said.

“Not in this area,” Halloran said. “They don’t tend to hang out alone. Pull up in a car with a couple of them standing on the corner and they’ve seen his face, they’ve seen his wheels, there could be a pimp nearby watching, he could be caught on a store camera or cell phone . . .”

“Speaking from personal experience?”

He waved me off. “Maybe he coaxes a girl inside his vehicle and offers her a drink, but she doesn’t feel thirsty or doesn’t trust him, so he’s got no game. He’s shown his face for nothing. If he isn’t strong enough to overpower her, or if she’s carrying a box cutter or mace, that could go south for him real fast. He doesn’t want to risk a fight getting to his maze. That’s why he sneaks the Quell into their drinks. He doesn’t even fight his victims when they get out of the maze. It looks like he creeps up and takes them out before they can do a thing.”

“So is he a large and physically imposing psychopath who doesn’t care for physical confrontation, or a ninety-eight pound weakling who can’t win in a battle?”

“I don’t know. But he lives by a body of water.”

I didn’t want this to be like the Calderon case, gathering dust in a file cabinet. “And where the fuck does he get all this crap? Is he stealing it from somewhere or is it his? He has to have a two thousand square foot basement or storage units packed to the brim.”

Halloran’s stomach grumbled unhappily.

“You need money for the vending machine?” I asked, too full to even think about food.

“No, I’ve got snacks.” He headed for his desk and opened a drawer. Pulling out a granola bar, he said, “We could make up a list of storage places in the area, see if anyone’s been hanging out there a lot and pings on the manager’s odd-o-meter.”

“Where do you think he got all of those partitions?”

“They remind me of the ones in my Catholic elementary school growing up,” Halloran said, eating half of the granola bar in one bite. “Big, ugly canvas things separating the second and third grades in the Clover. It was this building with four classrooms around the chapel we prayed in each morning, all of the rooms open to each other and the chapel as well. The partitions gave each class a little privacy and cut down on some of the noise. After I left, the school moved the grades out into actual rooms in their new building. I don’t know what they did with all that extra space in the Clover.”

“What happened to the partitions?”

“No idea. Stuffed them in a corner or basement or hauled them to the dump, probably. Or sold them off, but I can’t imagine who would want them.”

“The ones in the silk mill could have been from a school or an office in this area originally,” I said, tapping my finger on my desk. “They could have been part of a cubicle ocean in some business that went down. We know this man has to be a local.”

“We don’t know that for certain.”

“But I’d say it’s pretty likely. You can’t see that hay maze from the road, only the pumpkin patch. That place was barely advertised and it’s totally out of the way. And in the past, those bales were always torn down and sold just after Halloween. Yet he knew they were still there. He could live very close to that property. What if-”

“Service on Wheels,” Halloran blurted. “Someone dropping off the old lady’s food every week would also have seen it if he parked next to the house.”

“He might have asked her about it,” I said intensely. “We could get a description, maybe a name-”

Matching my intensity, Halloran said, “She can’t see or hear well. We can send someone out to ask, but I don’t think we’ll get answers from her. We need to contact Service on Wheels and get a list of everyone who’s driven out to her place since last November. I can get on that right now.”

That was a much better idea. “And I need to talk to the task force about hunting down vacant properties where he could be setting up his next maze,” I said.

Halloran ate the last of the granola bar in another huge bite. I turned off the camera feed and we hustled in opposite directions.

Chapter Twelve

Service on Wheels put up a ridiculous fight about releasing its employee information; the owner was a scorched-earth conspiracy nut with a passionate hatred for the establishment. Why we needed the names and contact details was wholly irrelevant to Jeremiah Dagmar, who was far too delighted to thwart us in this unexpected opportunity to stick it to The Man. He was an old hippie gone bitter and paranoid, his long hair held back in a scraggly gray ponytail and a vicious, childish glee in his watery blue eyes as he argued with legal terms he didn’t fully grasp. Only when threatened with a search warrant did he roll over and let us have his files, which were in no particular order, or any order whatsoever. Finding what we needed was a royal pain in the ass.

Dagmar’s company was a paid service for Darby residents who were elderly and infirm, or otherwise disabled and homebound. There was a much larger county program that was free for those who qualified, and its drivers delivered freshly made food to homes daily. However, people did not have much control over the kind of food to show up at the front door. While the program was sensitive to allergies, it did not cater overly much to personal tastes.

Service on Wheels differed from the county program in that it did not prepare the food itself, and only delivered once a week. Clients supplied their customized grocery lists and money to Service on Wheels, who sent out teams of shoppers to the desired grocery stores to fulfill the requests. The bags of groceries were delivered to the main office in downtown Darby, and then separated by region. Drivers ferried the goods to individual homes. This way the clients could get the brands they liked, and in the quantities they preferred. I would have just ordered everything online and saved myself Service on Wheels’ sizeable delivery fees, but the larger part of their clientele was aged and less likely to be Internet savvy.

The list of shoppers and drivers was extensive. A good number of them were volunteers, and the rest paid minimum wage. Most were Darby residents with a handful driving in from Sonoma. While uniforms flooded the streets to search probable sites for mazes, Fagelman fed us addresses to visit as he found them in the disorganized mess of computer files and paperwork. Information about the employees wasn’t quite as hard to find, but the record keeping on the volunteers was disastrous. Some of the names were only marked down as initials, or nicknames without surnames attached. Sometimes there were phone numbers. Sometimes there were email addresses. Sometimes there was nothing at all. Fagelman even came across a page of phone numbers and nothing to identify whose they were: volunteers, employees, or clients. He called a few. The people to pick up weren’t even related to the company, despite being mixed in with the information that was.

Dagmar didn’t care much about his paperwork, which probably created a pitiable situation for whoever handled his taxes. Just as bad, he deleted each day’s route after it was run so we had no history of who had gone where and when. He also had to pocket a very tidy sum, considering what he charged and how much of his labor was made up of volunteers.

Halloran and I worked separately, starting on the drivers since the shoppers didn’t visit clients’ homes. Most were women, ranging in age from thirties to sixties. Housewives, empty nesters, a veteran with a prosthetic leg, many of them had volunteered several hours a week with Service on Wheels for years. By and large they didn’t care for Dagmar or the company itself, but felt a responsibility to the people they served. They usually took a few minutes to do a chore or two around the house while delivering the groceries, watering a plant or unloading a dishwasher after putting the food away. Some of the clients needed to be in nursing homes, but were fighting to the end to remain independent.

As I was leaving my third house, Halloran called and said with a sigh, “I just talked to a woman who admitted giving her day’s client list to her son and son’s girlfriend once. She let them do the delivery run for twenty bucks.”

“Anything strange about the son and son’s girlfriend?”

“No, it wasn’t that. They don’t live in California anymore and are now married with kids. But we need to ask these people if they’ve done the same. She didn’t inform Service on Wheels that she let someone else do it, and she said plenty of the volunteers have done the same even though it’s not allowed. Feel sick one day and just pass it along to a neighbor or someone else who attends the same church, or separate out a client’s groceries from the coolers in the back of their cars and send it on with a friend who lives that way.”

“Fuck.”

I called up the people I had already visited to confirm they had never given out their client lists, and then proceeded onwards. Some people weren’t home, nor were they answering their phones. At times the phone numbers in the files were wrong, or the addresses were. People had moved away. Or they had quit volunteering for the company ages ago and were surprised to find out their names were still listed as active. Two had died, both of natural causes. Baffled at how the company had survived so long in this state, I crossed Darby again and again.

Nobody set off any warning bells in me. They were just regular folks. Some women admitted to letting their husbands tag along for the deliveries, but there was nothing dodgy about the men when I was speaking to them. They were dads, grandpas, obese, retired, coming back from golf or going out with the kids to a park. The only one being a little squirrely at first thrust out his medical marijuana card and said defensively it helped him control his pain. I assured him I had no interest in his pot brownies and that was true. I didn’t, whether they were legally acquired or not.

It was evening when Halloran and I were forced to call it quits, and dark when I arrived at home. The harvest moon was full and eerily large just above the horizon. Back in my peripatetic childhood, I remembered one of my mother’s slightly better boyfriends calling it a God’s Eye moon. The years had erased his name from my memory, his face and where we had been living at the time as well, but the quiet drawl of his voice and the curl of his cigarette smoke stayed with me.

Unblinking, the moon stared down to me now.

Was it also staring down to a new maze? Upon some terrified man or woman, amnesiac and nauseous from Quell and turning around in confusion at how they had gotten there?

It would also be staring down to the man with the scythe. Traveling along the maze to watch his victim inside.

I didn’t think I was going to sleep tonight.

If things got too hot for him in Darby, would he simply pick up his toys and select a place somewhere else to play his games? But the way he’d left the gate unlocked and the door open at the silk mill . . . He was so convinced that he had covered his tracks in every conceivable way that he was practically shouting at us to discover what he had done.

But arrogance was often a serial killer’s downfall. And I thought he had made a tiny mistake in selecting the old, off the beaten track farm property. Tens of thousands of people drove past that abandoned silk mill on a daily basis; the same could not be said of the second crime scene. He was intimately acquainted with this city. A traveling serial killer would not be.

There was little in the fridge but a tinfoil mystery pack in the back. I unwrapped the half eaten burrito and sniffed it, determining it would make a suitable dinner even though it was more than a little disturbing that I couldn’t remember when it was I consumed the first half. Warming it up in the microwave, I settled down to eat in front of the television. There was another police detective show on, one I didn’t recognize. Delightfully, the case was solved and wrapped up in forty-two minutes. Then another episode of the show started and I watched it purely for the purpose of irritating Halloran with the plot the next day. I had to get him back for that documentary.

The episode was a bad one, and I laughed when the perpetrator of several heinous murders turned his clichéd crosshairs to the lead detective on the case. That was an exceedingly rare occurrence in real life, but gauging from how often Hollywood liked to beat that drum, it happened with clockwork regularity. Admittedly, I hadn’t dealt with serial killers too often, but the ones I had certainly hadn’t taken time out of their days to contact me. Nor did they always walk away from the crime scene with a souvenir from the victim, like this TV villain was doing. While they weren’t evil geniuses, most of them were smart enough to know that a souvenir, if found, was going to get them in very big trouble indeed. The lord of the rat maze probably hadn’t strolled away with anything belonging to Chloe or Francisco except his memories of the last minutes of their lives.

When the show ended, I flipped to the local news. Standing at a podium was Captain King, starched and pressed within an inch of his life and his comb-over working overtime to cover his scalp. Although he appeared somber to the cameras, I knew he was tickled pink to be receiving so much attention. His ego was a hungry beast, at least it was when he was around. I’d never seen someone in such stellar health take so much sick leave. The man to precede him in the position had taken one sick day in fifteen years.

After giving a detailed update on the case, King took questions from the press. They had dubbed the perp the Maze Killer.

If we didn’t bring in some answers soon, he would start leaning hard on us. Not because he had ever struck me as someone who desired justice above all, but because failing to solve this would bring him negative attention. The Calderon case had driven him insane. He wanted to be the hero, minus having to perform heroics. And then he would harass me about the other cases I’d set aside to work on this one. I needed to reassign those to other people.

Halloran called on my house line. “Got something you’ll find interesting. Very interesting.”

“Let me be the judge of that. Aren’t you home? Why are you calling on this phone? Nobody calls me on this phone except my mother when she’s being obsessive and I’m ignoring her on my cell.”

“I’m home. Just getting voicemail on your cell.”

I picked up my cell phone. I’d used it so much today that it had run out of juice. Flopping over in a very elegant move, I plugged it into the charger. “What’s up?”

“Reuter went chasing after those partitions.”

I’d completely forgotten, too involved with the chaos of Service on Wheels to make a mental note of that. “What did he find?”

“He got lucky as hell. He’s working under the assumption that the perp is local and acquired the partitions locally. There are so many of them that he eliminated all of the small-size and medium-size businesses in the city and focused on the big ones. The industrial parks and such-”

“Jake, that’s still a ridiculous number of businesses!”

“Yeah, but a lot of those parks are relatively new, Pengram. Built in the 1990s and early 2000s during the tech boom. These partitions are older, made in the 1970s. Why would a company renting space in a spanking new industrial park set it up with dozens of old partitions for their cubicles? These are computer-related companies, solar power, et cetera. Reuter took a picture of the partitions and sent them out to the older parks and business strips.”

“The businesses in those places could have changed hands half a dozen times and more in all of these years,” I argued. “And just because a place is new doesn’t mean a company is going to purchase brand new furniture to go with it.”

“Yeah, but he got two hits just hours after sending out the picture. The first hit was a swing and miss at a temp agency. The owner used similar partitions back in the eighties before he sold them off, but then he dug up some old pictures of the office and he’d forgotten that his had a teal stripe along the top. These don’t. The second hit was at Pan-Tastic Breads. Company has been in Darby since it started up in 1965, run by two generations of the Shacter family. It was passed on from father to daughter in 1989. Alice Shacter wrote back to Reuter that those partitions looked very similar to the ones from the company’s head office. She tried to dump them some years after she took over. Can’t be positive, of course, but same color, same height, same style, same fabric.”

“Tried to dump them,” I echoed.

“The company is located at the far end of Mission Road-”

Distracted, I said, “Anywhere near where Francisco Hernandez was taken?”

“No, the head office is a couple of miles south from there. Pan-Tastic Breads used to be right at the end of the line on that road until it was expanded. She told Reuter that they renovated the building in 1997, expanded it for more office space, and updated the furniture and all of that. Their partitions were old and ugly and falling apart, she said, and she hated the color. So they were carried out the door to the back parking lot one afternoon and set up by the dumpster. It wasn’t just the partitions but tons of crap the office didn’t need anymore and none of it was worth the effort of selling. Beat-up filing cabinets, broken chairs and desks, splitting trashcans, nonfunctional computers and phones and printers, it was total garbage. They hired a crew from Beater Boys to bring a big truck over, pick it all up and carry it to the dump.”

“Beater Boys? The red trucks going around town?”

“Yeah, it’s a company in her husband’s family, so that worked out nicely for Pan-Tastic. Sure they got a discount on hauling. But when the driver got there in the morning with a few guys to load up, a lot of what had been set out by the dumpster was gone.”

“Someone had taken it overnight.”