Saturday Night Cleaver (A Barbara Marr Murder Mystery #4) (20 page)

Neighbors stood in robes and slippers on their lawns, some even took pictures with their cell phone cameras. The road had been cordoned off and they weren’t going to let us through until Howard saw an officer he knew and explained the situation. That only got us as far as the sidewalk in front of the house however, and because of the Drano mess found inside, no one no how was letting us any nearer. We stood there, helpless, unable to glean any information whatsoever.

Minutes later, a cruiser arrived at the end of the street and Erik flashed a badge. He stopped and talked to two different people before landing by Howard’s side. “They’re searching the house now,” he said. “We should know any minute if they’ve found Colt.”

“They’re looking for Colt, right?” I asked. “I mean, they understand a man might be dying in there?”

“Yes, Barb, they do.”

Howard pulled me in with his arm and reassured me with his warmth and confidence. “He’s okay. This is Colt. We will find him, and he will be okay.”

“He’s right, Barb,” Erik agreed. “Colt will outlive us all.” He patted me on the back, then strode across the lawn toward the house.

I tried to believe their words, but my heart was sinking like the Titanic with each passing minute.

Twenty minutes had passed, and now I could see that Guy had arrived with his crew set up outside the barricades. Bright lights on booms illuminated him and his fedora. Off to the side of the crew’s work area, was Clarence and Orson leaning against Rick Ash’s truck.

Hints of daylight were creeping into the landscape when Erik arrived, a solemn look on his face. Fearing the worst, that Colt had been found lifeless, I started weeping before he could even talk.

“Howard, Barb, he’s not there. I’m sorry. There’s just no evidence at all that he’s been in there.” He rested a warm hand on my shoulder. “Now, they did make out some unidentified footprints, probably made by a male shoe, outside near a window in the rear, so I’m trying to talk them into authorizing a canine unit, but they’re not very receptive to the idea.”

The fact that they’d found no Colt rather than a dead Colt raised my spirits a millimeter or two. I dried my eyes and tried to calm down. “Convince them, Erik, convince them.”

“I’m working on it, but I think we need to start looking elsewhere for him. I’m not sure this is the place. I’ve requested that a team head over to his car and start working up fingerprints and other data. Where is it parked?”

I gave him the address and he disappeared again.

I wondered how Christina Fetty would react to police descending upon the street in front of her house at dawn like this. The dogs would probably go berserk if they were anything like Puddles.

Then it hit me: Frank and Stein. Those dogs had noses just as good as any canine shepherd, I was sure. They sure had the tenacity.

“I need to sit down,” I told Howard. “I see Clarence and Orson over there. I’m going to see if I can rest in that truck for a while.”

“Have Clarence take you home. I’ll let you know how it’s going.”

“Okay,” I said. “Maybe.”

Now the thing is, I was pushed to the limit. Not only had I bounced off the hood of a car in motion, but I’d also been off my Slay Menopause diet for a couple of days, so my hormones were probably more erratic than Kim Kardashian’s marital status. I’m just setting the stage for the next, very bizarre choice I made, which was not to ask Orson if I could rest in the truck, but instead, to cut through the yards of two complete strangers to Sassafras Street, knock on Christina Fetty’s door, and ask her if she wouldn’t mind loaning me her dogs to help me find my lost friend, Colt. I never considered she wouldn’t be happy to oblige.

As I dashed through the yards, I practiced the wording of my request: “Hi Christina, how are you this morning? Hey, can I borrow Frank and Stein for just a few minutes? I’ll bring them back, I promise.” I tried to put a less frantic, more logical me in her place and realized that approach probably wasn’t the best. I worked another line: “Christina, do your part, save a life, give me your dogs.” No, I didn’t like that one, either.

I pulled up, panting in front of the Fetty home and saw that Christina was awake. The police had set up camp around Colt’s car and one of the officers was questioning her at her door. Christina’s brown hair was smooshed to one side as if she’d had a run-in with a failing student at the local beauty school and her pink robe was so bright I’m sure aliens were spotting her from space. She was already having trouble keeping the two mountainous mutts from nosing their way to the policeman’s precious cargo. This, I realized, was my perfect chance to help Christina and myself without coming across like Courtney Love on a half-day excursion from the looney bin.

The officer slid me a concerned glance as I stepped past him. “Here, Christina,” I said, pushing Frank and Stein back with my whole body. “Let me help you with these dogs. Please, tell this kind officer anything you can remember—he’s trying to help us find my friend Colt.”

Christina’s face shifted from utter bafflement to relieved awareness. She bobbed her head. “Uh huh, uh huh, yup, yup. I see. You haven’t found him yet?”

I wanted to slap her silly and scream “What did I just tell you, you silly twit!” but I knew that was just the hormones and possible concussion talking. She was such a nice lady and didn’t deserve me even thinking of doing such a thing.

“I’ll take Frank and Stein to your backyard for you. Please, continue with the police.”

Bobbing her head again, she focused on the uniform in front of her. “Yup, yup, yup,” she said. “I’ll tell you what I know, uh huh, uh huh.”

I wouldn’t say that I escorted Frank and Stein to the backyard so much as they hauled me there themselves. With my hands grasped as firmly as possible, one around each leather collar, I guided them to the fence gate at the side of the house. The gate was tall, as it obviously had to be, and the latch was higher than I expected. If I let go of a collar, I might not get the dog back. I’d seen Christina command the dogs to sit before, so I gave it a try and hoped for the best. “Sit!” I whispered to Frank. He only panted, his dish-towel sized tongue hanging out of his mouth. I’m pretty sure he was laughing at me with his eyes. I didn’t want to attract unnecessary attention, so I raised my voice only slightly. “Sit!” His obedience wasn’t immediate, but eventually, after what I think was a test of my patience, he plopped his bottom down.

“Good,” I said. “Stay...” I removed my hand slowly from his collar. “Stay...”

As I reached for the latch, Frank stood and nosed my hand away, while Stein pulled me backwards. Undaunted, I gave it another go. Actually, that’s not true. I was daunted. I was daunted big time. My nerves were frazzled, and I was stealing someone’s dogs. I still gave it another go, although it was just more of a Lucille Ball go at it rather than a Lara Croft attack of the situation.

“Sit,” I said, whimpering now. “Sit, Frank, sit. Do this for me buddy.”

He tilted his head in that puzzled way that dogs do. He tilted it first to one side, and then to the other, but he wasn’t sitting. Then, without warning, he stood on his hind legs, planted his two bear-like paws on the gate, and began emitting very deep, very loud, very conspicuous barks.

I fell to the ground and began crying again. My jig was up. Any hope I’d ever had of finding Colt was gone. And my ribs were screaming, “Enough! Enough!”

With the sun making its appearance, I sat and bawled while Frank and Stein joined in the chorus.

It wasn’t long until I realized Christina was standing above me. “Barb? Are you okay?” She called up to her house. “Howard! She’s right here!”

Lovely, kind, sweet, head-bobbing Christina got down on the ground with me and rubbed my back. “Did Frank and Stein hurt you?”

I shook my head. “I was trying to steal them. Do you forgive me?”

Howard was next to me now as well.

“What were you trying to do?” he asked.

“Frank and Stein...sob, sob, good noses...sob, sob, find Colt...sob, sob.”

“Barb, we have some news. I don’t know if it’s good or bad, but we’re certain he’s not anywhere in the Ash house now.”

I brushed my tears away along with some yucky stuff from my nose. “How? Why?”

“Communication here hasn’t been the best among the units so not everyone knew the name of the missing person. When they sent a crew over to check out Colt’s car, one of them realized what was going on. He told me just now that he gave Colt a ride to our house Friday afternoon because his car wouldn’t start.”

“He called the police to come get him? Why didn’t he call us?”

“He didn’t call the police, his cell phone was dead so he started walking to the West Lakes Shopping Center when this cop, a friend of Colt’s, spotted him and stopped to talk. I think the guy said they play poker regularly. Anyway, he gave Colt a ride to our house sometime between four and five p.m. on Friday.”

“But that doesn’t make sense,” I said. “He didn’t come to our house.”

The world was swirling around me. Every time we opened a door, it lead to another door, but never to an answer. Never to Colt. I started feeling nauseas again. I wiped more tears away and tried to stand, but when I did, the ground went wobbly and my legs gave out. Christina felt my forehead.

“Howard,” she said. “She’s burning up.” She pushed herself from the ground. “I’ll be right back. Frank! Stein! Come!”

The dogs followed her into the house and not a minute later, she returned with a puffy floral comforter which she wrapped around me. “Let’s get you inside and take your temperature. And I’ll fix you a hot cup of tea. Don’t worry, I put the monsters in the basement.”

She and Howard helped me up. As we walked back to the house, now in good daylight, I noticed that the very back of her yard, some three feet out from the fence, was covered in decorative, white landscaping rock.

White landscaping rock.

Hmm.

“Christina, why the rock?”

She seemed puzzled by my question. “I think she might be hallucinating, Howard. This could be worse than we thought.”

“No,” he said, understanding my strange query. “She’s asking about your landscaping. The white rocks. I’m not sure it’s a question, so much as a thought.” He was following my drift, I could tell.

Christina’s white landscaping rocks reminded me of those in the Penobscotts’s yard next door.
Next door
. ND. The
nd
in Colt’s text message wasn’t code for Nectarine Drive, it was code for
Next Door
.

Maybe we weren’t the worst investigators in the world after all. The slowest maybe, but not the worst.

The bobbing commenced. “Yup, yup, yup. Those rocks. Only way to keep the yard from turning into one big mud puddle with the dogs around. Uh, huh, uh huh. Necessity.” Then she lowered her voice to a whisper. “Yup, but did you know my neighbor told me, after we put those in, that those kind of rocks are the calling card of,” her voice went even lower, just in case the CIA was listening in, “swingers. You know, couples who like to...whoopee, woo-hoo, with other couples.” She fanned herself. “Yup, yup, yup, wish I’d known that. I would have chosen river rock!”

“Howard, are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“It’s a stretch,” he said, “but you just might be right.”

A mask of sheer terror flashed across Christina’s face as she apparently misunderstood our exchange. “No, no, no, no, no! I swear, we aren’t swingers! We’re as normal as white bread and apple pie! I don’t even like S-E-X. Ask my husband.”

That was more than I needed to know. And evidently more than her husband wanted us to know too, because he was standing on their deck staring down at her, arms crossed, brows deeply furrowed.

Behind him stood Erik, who looked relieved when he saw us. “Thank you,” he said patting Mr. Fetty on the back. “Hopefully we’ll be out of your way soon.” He joined us in the yard. “911 dispatchers took a call from Diane at your house.”

“What’s wrong? Are the kids okay? What happened?”

“Everyone is fine. She was calling in ‘suspicious activity’ in your neighborhood. She heard a possible gunshot.”

Chapter Nineteen

A
ching ribs, fever, and mild
hysteria be damned—nothing was going to stop me from getting to my family if they were in danger. Straightening my back, I threw off the comforter and summoned a mother lode of energy and serious intention. “Take me home,” I said.

Erik had secured a police cruiser and rushed us home with lights flashing and sirens blaring.

“It’s the Penobscotts, Howard,” I yelled over the siren shrill. “Colt stumbled into some evil lair of perverted debauchery they’re running over there. I knew something was odd about her. People from Wisconsin don’t know how to make sushi. A mean Cheddar Mac & Cheese, yes. Not sushi. That should have been my first clue.” I know, there I went with the racial profiling again. “Sushi chefs use cleavers, right? Those severed appendages I found in the woods were probably her handiwork. And now she’s turned to guns!”

Howard remained more even-keeled. “Your mom could have heard a car backfire and mistook it for a gunshot. Let’s stay calm until we know more.”

He was right. I worked to calm my nerves, but the constant squall of the sirens made that next to impossible.