The Tangerine Killer (21 page)

We didn’t have to wait long to meet Ella. She walked in with bags of groceries about five minutes later. She was hardly the person I expected her to be. She was a twenty something fashion disaster with black hair that morphed into neon pink strands and a nose ring. Not exactly the model of a competent house cleaner.

“You’re the housekeeper?” I said.

The girl ignored me. “Grandma I told you not to let anyone in while I was gone.” Her voice was playful but the glare she sent in our direction was not.

“It’s still my house dear, I’m not quite dead yet.”

“Sure, I know,” Ella said but added under her breath. “Just don’t blame me when someone murders you in your sleep and takes all your money.”

I raised my eyebrow and caught Olin’s shocked stare. Just because the old woman was hard of hearing, that didn’t mean that we were.

Ella stood with one booted foot propped lazily against the wall where I was sure it would leave a nasty black mark on the wallpaper. She twirled a pink lock around her fingers and looked bored. She couldn’t seem to decide whether to throw us out or ignore us. I bit the bullet and jumped in before she had a chance to do either. Despite her attitude I couldn’t help but like her. She reminded me of myself.

“As it turns out Ella, we’re actually here to see you.”

“Why? I haven’t done anything wrong.”

Her eyes flicked away from mine for a moment. She was lying, she’d done something. She probably had a stash of pot in her bag or stolen jewelry. She could have been selling crack on the corner for all I cared. We were only there for one reason.

“It’s not about you. It’s about the little boy that was taken from the daycare across the street.”

She bit her lip as she looked from me to Olin.

“I’ll talk,” she said. “To you. Not him.”

She pointed at Olin with a finger full of silver rings. Her finger flexed in just the right way that it flicked off Olin with disgust.

I didn’t bother and point out the fact that Olin was a real detective not a fly by the seat of her pants investigator like I was. That there was in fact a crazed killer out there somewhere who was bent on hurting all the people around me. Someone who had kidnapped the little boy we were looking for just to destroy the one person who actually believed in me.

Olin didn’t say a word. I guess he figured like I had that it wasn’t worth the effort pulling rank on Ella. He knew as well as I did how fast someone like her could clam up and we didn’t have the luxury of hauling her downtown to intimidate because we hadn’t actually been assigned the job of canvassing the neighbors. We were on our own, lose and free to screw up however we saw fit. I guess it didn’t really matter as long as we got Olin’s kid back in one piece. Then we’d be heroes. If not, well I couldn’t really fall much further but Olin was a different story. Not that he’d probably have any interest in police work again if pieces of his son were mailed back to him in a shoe box.

“Is there somewhere that we can talk then?” I asked.

Mrs. Crumb appeared to have nodded off in the midst of the excitement. Either that or she was dead. Her head tilted off at an awkward angle and a thin string of spit hung out of the corner of her mouth. Ella didn’t seem fazed.

“Grandma, I’ll be in the kitchen okay?” she yelled.

Mrs. Crumb stirred, her eyes fluttering open for only a moment before we lost her again. Olin flung a desperate stare in my direction, obviously not impressed that I was leaving him with the old woman and two evil dogs but we both knew I didn’t have a choice.

I followed Ella down a narrow hallway to the kitchen. The wallpaper looked as though it had once been expensive but now the golden guild had faded into yellowing lines and it was peeling. There was a damp smell that swept up from the floorboards as we walked along. I wondered what exactly it was Ella did in her capacity as housekeeper other than get the groceries and wait around for the old lady to drop dead.

When we reached the kitchen, Ella threw the paper bags she had been carrying on the counter and began tossing the contents into the cupboards. There were various cans full of soup, vegetables and fruit. The poor old lady’s diet wasn’t exactly healthy. Not that I could talk. My kitchen consisted of the very same cans but at least I had the luxury of eating out when I became sick of my processed, preserved food. Mrs. Crumb didn’t look as though she had left the house in a very long time.

“So what do you want to know?” she finally said.

She hopped up onto the kitchen counter like it was a bench and kicked a boot against the cabinet. I leant over on the counter, ignoring her irritation.

“To know what you saw.”

“Who says I saw anything?”

“Mrs. Crumb.”

“Well, she’s not exactly playing with a full deck if you know what I mean. Did you ask her what day it is? Who the president is? If I went right back in that room and asked her if she knew who you were, she wouldn’t have a clue.”

Smart ass. I wanted to smack the kid round the face. This wasn’t a game we were playing. People’s lives were at risk. A little boy’s life. I searched for a way to get her to see that.

“And yet she told us that you had seen something. Now why would she do that?”

“I’ve seen lots of things today. The mailman. The cops. Perhaps that’s what she meant. Mind if I smoke?”

“Not if you give me one,” I said.

“All right.”

“What about her?” I motioned to the other room.

“That old bat wouldn’t be able to smell smoke if the house was on fire.”

I smiled.

“What’s so funny?” she said.

“Nothing, just I used to call my Grandmother the same thing.”

“What did she do to you?”

“She didn’t care,” I said.

Ella twirled her hair round her finger. “So?”

“She didn’t care that I was being hurt. She didn’t stand up for me and she certainly didn’t try and help me.”

“That sucks.”

“Yeah.”

“So what happened?”

“Nothing. I had to take care of myself and then she died. I didn’t go to the funeral and I’m not sorry about it either.”

I took a drag on the cigarette and felt my body relax. I couldn’t remember when I’d smoked my last one but it had been too long.

Ella watched me smoke with a sort of detached interest, flicking her ash into a stainless steel sink that had lost its shine long ago. I felt a pang of envy, wondering exactly when I had become a grownup. For so long I had felt like a rebellious teenager. Running away from home, living on the edge, drowning out my past anyway I could. Now I was the one looking for the lost child, hoping to save him before something terrible happened, the way no one had ever tried to save me.

“Do you have any brothers or sisters?” I asked.

“I have a little brother,” Ella’s voice softened a little. “But I don’t see him much. He lives with my dad. He’s six.”

“If someone snatched him away, your little brother, wouldn’t you do anything to get him back?”

“I’d do anything to get him back now. My Dad’s an asshole.”

I had no doubt that the broken home this kid had come from was probably really fucked up and if she thought her Dad didn’t deserve to have the kid brother, he probably didn’t.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “There is nothing I can do about your kid brother right now but there is another little boy who is only four and he’s in a lot of trouble. If we don’t find out who took him then there’s a good chance he’ll die. We have to follow the clues this sick fuck is leaving for us.”

If there are any, I added silently. Please God let there be some.

Ella wrinkled her nose, apparently trying to decide exactly how much bullshit I was full off. I guess she decided not that much because after she took the final drag on her cigarette she started talking.

“I saw a white van. It’s been parked out in the street all week. At first I thought the Johansson’s were remodeling but I guess it seemed strange that they wouldn’t just pull into the driveway if they were working at the house, you know? Anyway, then I heard that they are on vacation so I guess that van had no business being there after all.”

An unmarked van parked across from a daycare for an entire week and no one ever raised an eyebrow? No one but a punk teenager high on God knows what who just assumed it had every right to be there. Wasn’t that the sort of thing that daycare workers were trained to look for? Weren’t they supposed to report suspicious activity in the area to the police? How could they miss such a blatantly obvious threat? On top of that what about all the parents dropping their kids off and picking them up. Surely one of them would have noticed that the van was not a part of their small, close knit group.

“Was it parked there all the time or did it come and go?” I asked.

“It came, usually after the kids arrived and left just before the pickup rush.”

Well that explained why the parents had missed it but still didn’t excuse the inept daycare workers.

“You didn’t happen to catch the license plate number did you?”

I knew it was a shot in the dark. What teenager pays attention to the tags of unmarked vans? Ella crumpled her face as though she was trying to dredge up some memory that had lodged itself somewhere irretrievable in her brain.

“Yeah,” she smiled sweetly. “It said fuck you.”

“You should have grabbed the little bitch in a headlock and squeezed until her eyes popped out.”

Olin thumped the dashboard angrily and I was glad that I had taken the initiative to drive. We left behind the senile old Mrs. Crumb and Ella and in retelling the story of the unmarked van I had just reached the part about the license plate. Olin’s body had grown rigid at the realization that perhaps this catastrophe could have been prevented if only someone had cared enough to pay attention to their surroundings.

“Perhaps it was a novelty tag?” I said.

“No. The DMV screens all specialty tags for profanity and trust me when I say fuck you would never have slipped through the cracks. She was jerking you around.”

I couldn’t get the van out of my head, the one that had tried to run me off the road back when this whole thing started. It wasn’t too much of a stretch to imagine that the van I’d seen was the same one that Ella had but I knew better than to mention it to Olin. Besides, I liked Ella. She reminded me of myself. I saw the side she kept hidden, the one she used her outrageousness to hide and I had to admit that it scared me. I was living on an edge far steeper than that girl could ever imagine.

“When I think of all the things that could happen.”

“Don’t,” I interrupted. “Don’t do that to yourself.”

He didn’t finish but despite my warning I knew what he was thinking because I had the same thoughts myself. Scenarios that if played out could tear a parent into a million pieces. I pushed the awful truth from my mind and headed back in the direction of the motel.

“You’re not sleeping alone tonight,” Olin said.

The pit of my stomach turned over but I ignored it.

“I just have to pick up some things. A girl needs clean underwear you know.”

He didn’t even smile. It was going to be a long night. If my underwear couldn’t get a rise out of him, nothing would. The good feeling disappeared as quickly as it had come and I started to feel sick again.

The Golden Sun Motel had resumed its previous sate of abandon and neglect. The only evidence that there had been anything out of the ordinary was a stray strand of police tape that flapped lazily from my door. It sounded like a dog panting on a hot summer’s day.

The air inside was unsettled. The room felt as if it had been violated in the worst way imaginable. The bed had been made with fresh sheets but I was pretty sure that if I peeled them off the same blood soaked mattress would lay beneath. The folks that ran the Golden Sun Motel wouldn’t see a little blood stain as cause to toss an otherwise perfectly functioning mattress into the dumpster. My stuff still lay strewn about the room but I couldn’t remember whether they lay in places I had left them or not. I just wanted to get my things and get the hell out of there. I’d had more than my fill of the Golden Sun Motel. Before it had been a place of refuge and comfort but now I couldn’t get the picture of Jill’s dead body lying next to me out of my head.

“Got everything?”

Olin had been very unlike his usual protective self and decided to stay in the car. I saw him close his cell phone abruptly as I opened the door. The guilty look on his face told me he wasn’t sure if I had seen him or not. I decided to play dumb and pretend that I hadn’t, though I wasn’t sure why. Perhaps I just didn’t feel like kicking the man when he was down.

“Yeah but I think a few things are missing.”

“Probably locked in evidence by now. Hope they didn’t have any sentimental value because you’ll probably never see them again.”

“No, they were just junk.” I thought for a second. “You don’t suppose he took them do you?”

“Who? Him?”

It had got to the point where it seemed stupid to call him silly nicknames. The man was a cold blooded killer and kidnapper. He didn’t deserve any less than what he was.

“Yeah. I don’t know, I just have a bad feeling.”

“Well what exactly is missing?”

“I’m not sure.”

Back at Olin’s with my stuff lain out on his bed like a tourist on vacation, I was precisely sure of what was missing. One red thong I had bought on a whim and been too afraid to wear, a bottle of the avocado conditioner I used on my hair and one tube of black mascara.

“A red thong, huh?”

Finally Olin’s face cracked into a grin when I told him what was missing.

“It’s not funny you ass. What if that pervert has my underwear?”

The same pervert that has your son, I thought silently and Olin obviously did too as his face quickly fell. I regretted mentioning it.

“It doesn’t matter,” I quickly said.

“No, it’s okay. I’ll call in a favor. I know someone down in evidence. I’ll get them to look and see if those items have been logged in.”

But deep down Olin and I both knew that my thong, conditioner and mascara did not pertain in any way to the case unless Jill’s decomposing body had somehow wandered over to try them out while I was sleeping. He had my stuff. I knew it in the depths of my soul and that was sick enough but it was whatever he wanted them for that worried me most.

Now that I was back at Olin’s I noticed things I hadn’t before. Photos on the tables that captured a little blond boy with his eyes tightly shut and his head thrown back in a giant laugh as his Dad swung him around in the air. Soft toys piled up in the corner, a yellow plastic dump truck stranded on the coffee table and alphabet magnets on the fridge. The cheery plastic colors spelled out Parker and Dad and a set of numbers had been arranged into 911. I fought the urge to rearrange them before Olin saw but right now that was all he had left of his son. I couldn’t take that away from him.

We sat across from each other at his kitchen table, staring down at uneaten spaghetti that I had overcooked. Neither of us ate a thing and not just because the food was bad. I’d lost the ability to swallow and Olin just pushed the food around his plate forlornly.

“Thanks for letting me stay.”

“That’s okay. I didn’t want to be here alone anyway. So it was either you stay here with me or I was going to move into that dive of a motel with you.”

“They had a great mini bar,” I teased.

“You think you can bribe me with peanuts and porn?”

“Five bucks a jar and all you can watch for $10.99.”

“Well what the hell are we doing here then?”

He laughed and for a moment we forgot our worries but it was only a moment. I cleared away our untouched food and wondered why we were even bothering to try and sleep. We should have been out there looking, searching for a white van that would lead us to Parker. It was just that we didn’t have anything substantial to go on.

“Good night then.”

We stood in the corridor awkwardly. I wanted to tell him that everything would be all right but I couldn’t make my lips form the words. I didn’t know if anything was going to be okay ever again. As Olin stood under the light I noticed the dark shadows beneath his eyes and the way a heavy weight seemed to press him into the floor. I reached out to touch his arm in a gesture of comfort and found myself saying the words I had sworn I wouldn’t.

“It will be okay.”

His eyes caught mine and I felt his muscles flex beneath my hand. I noticed the curve of his lips and the way his stubble had grown. It was at that very moment that I think he really noticed me for the first time too. The real me, tired and sore. Covered in bruises and yet still a woman.

He stepped closer and brushed my cheek. I closed my eyes. I couldn’t do this and yet I couldn’t do anything to stop it. Despite myself I let him pull me in. I was lost in his arms, his warmth and strength. Wrapped together two broken people became one and I knew it was too late. We had crossed the line and couldn’t go back. He pulled my face up then kissed me, our breath mingling as we clung together.

The gentle kiss was the only spark we needed. Suddenly we were taking all we could from one another. I stumbled back into the wall and my fingers clawed his flesh as he held me. His hands pulled at my bra until he freed my breasts and his mouth found my nipples. I let out a cry as he teased one between his teeth, grabbed his hair as his fingers found their way into my pants. When he touched me my legs turn to jelly and I slipped down the wall. He caught me and pulled me back up.

“We should stop,” I gasped.

He lifted his face and I saw the desperation that had temporarily been replaced by desire. Could I really take that away from him? I wanted him didn’t I? But like this? One desperate act replacing another. It was either the worst possible thing or the best and I had no idea which it was. I’d only ever slept with people I didn’t know. Guys I picked up in bars and other places, knowing I would never see them again. This thing with Olin was different. I couldn’t just run away after we’d slept together.

“I’ll stop if you want me to,” he said.

His voice was calm, the desperation probably held back by the need he saw in my face for this not to matter.

“We just shouldn’t,” I sank against him.

“But I want you,” he said.

He pushed my pants down and slipped a finger inside me. I didn’t protest. With those four words I knew I would let him have me because I knew he didn’t really want me. He wanted any woman, someone who could make him forget that his son had been kidnapped. I could fill that void, be that person. As long as he didn’t love me or really need me then I’d be there.