Out of the Blue: A Pengram Mystery (8 page)

Chances were slim in a city this large that the murderer would happen upon Brendan and Tyler Cavil. “For now, I would stay in at night,” I said. “And don’t accept drinks from strangers.” That Chloe was slipped a roofie in her drink had been released to the press; that it was Quell specifically was held back.

“Darby has always seemed fairly safe to me,” Brendan said. “Some areas more than others. I don’t usually stay up-to-date with the news, but it seems like this is very unusual.”

“Most of the murders I deal with here are pretty routine,” I agreed. “Two drunk guys in a knife fight outside a bar, or drive-by killings that are drug related. Domestic conflicts that end badly, too, jilted lovers, that sort of thing. Stranger on stranger, those aren’t nearly as frequent.”

“I read about the Calderon family.”

That had been five years ago, a family of four found shot to death in a car parked behind a strip mall. Halloran and I had gotten gray hair from an investigation that went nowhere for months, and never was solved. “That was an ugly case,” I said.

“You sounded furious in your quotes.”

I had despised that journalist, who insinuated the murders were drug-related even though there wasn’t a shred of evidence to back up the claim. “I thought it was racist, deplorable, shoddy fluff reporting,” I said. “The journalist saw the surname of the victims and built up a tower of cards around that. He went so far as to say they were in the country illegally when a five-minute investigation on his part would have shown that wasn’t true. My partner and I dug up everything we could find on their lives. Whatever happened to them, I don’t believe it had to do with drugs.”

And, frustratingly, once the public got it into their heads that drugs and illegal immigrants were involved, they’d stopped caring. The newspaper had had to issue an apology and a retraction for that article, which failed to clean up the damage already done, and I’d gotten reprimanded for speaking to the press without clearing it first. Anger had gotten the better of me at how that dead husband, wife, and teenage children were dragged through the mud for no reason. That same journalist later went on to write a fawning article about a local doctor facing charges in court for child molestation, and trashed the preteen girls’ reputations in the process. One was an eleven-year-old foster child who wore provocative clothing and had a history of sexual abuse. Another was ten but had kissed two boys at school. So clearly this case had shades of gray.

No. No, it didn’t. Their history was irrelevant, the smears on the girls’ characters disgusting. They were children. After the overwhelming outcry, the terrible article going viral and circling the globe, that journalist didn’t work for the Darby Star anymore. Good riddance.

“How long have you lived in Darby?” I asked Brendan as Tyler popped open the driver-side door and climbed inside with a vacuum. I’d assumed he was just going to clean the outside, but there was an inch of dust squatting on the dashboard so I did nothing to stop him.

“Ten years since the divorce. We were living in San Francisco before that,” Brendan said. He waved away my apology for bringing up something painful. “It was amicable. We got married right out of high school. It was a very bad decision on both of our parts.”

“We all make a few of those.”

“I don’t know what we were thinking. Everyone tried to talk us out of it, but Abby and I were so pigheaded about making it work that we just ignored the advice. But the divorce was the best thing we ever did. It let us become a little older and wiser versions of the friends we were in junior high. Anyway, you probably didn’t need to hear all of that.”

“Does Tyler live primarily with you?”

“Yeah. Abby lives close by in Harris Park, but Darby’s got better schools so we agreed to have him stay with me once he hit seventh grade. I drive him over to Harris Park most weekends. She’s giving him hell over his rude little dating site spree, too.”

I glanced over to the head bobbing about in my car. “He seems like a good kid.”

“He is, ninety-seven percent of the time. And then there’s that last three percent when I wonder what species of alien is inhabiting him.”

Three
, I thought, reminded of the mazes. Brendan inspected the remaining food in concern. “Would you like me to get more for you?”

“No. This is plenty.” I couldn’t help but smile. It was amazing how much a meal made me feel better. The chilidog and nachos long gone, I began to enjoy the fries at a slower pace.

Tyler whizzed through the car in record time and popped back out. “I hope you weren’t saving that dust for anything because it’s gone now,” he said in good cheer.

“I write my grocery list in that every week. How dare you,” I said flatly.

Brendan laughed. “Do you have kids?”

“No.”

He nodded. “I don’t think I could do what you do and have kids.”

“The hours would make it really difficult, especially being single.”

“Not just that. If I saw what you saw day in and day out, I’d be too paranoid to let him leave the house. There really is something to the saying that ignorance is bliss.” He caught a napkin as the breeze threatened to sweep it off the table.

Tyler gave one last rub to my hood with a rag. “All done.”

Halloran sent a text asking where I was. Groaning, I stood up. “Duty calls. Are you sure you won’t let me pay for any of this?”

“I am very sure of that,” Brendan said.

“Then thank you for everything, both of you. I need to get back to work.”

“Do you have cats?” Tyler asked as he chucked the rag in a can.

“No, I don’t,” I said.

“Do you like them?”

“I love cats. Why?”

“Dad found three abandoned kittens in the dumpster at his work two weeks ago. Someone threw them away so he brought them home. We’ve had to feed them from bottles and everything because they’re so young. You could come over and see them. They’re really funny when they play. My mom might take one when they’re bigger and we’re keeping the other two.”

“I think Blue is pretty busy right now,” Brendan said. A twinkle in his eye, he added to me, “But you have to eat. You’re welcome for dinner with Tyler and me any day that fits into your schedule. Something better than junk food.”

“I’d like that,” I said, feeling my heart skip a beat.

Halloran sent another text.
Dammit, Jake
, I thought. Why did it have to be right this second? I wanted to enjoy this a little bit longer.

“It was good to meet you,” Brendan said. We walked to the car and he opened the door for me. I got in and he closed it. Taking the bags of chips I hadn’t eaten, he tucked them into the pocket behind my seat. Then I waved to them and drove out of the stall.

Three
.

I called Halloran. “I’m heading for the station, Jake. I want to watch the crime scene videos. There’s something about those mazes that’s bugging me.”

“Meet you there,” he said, and I took one last glance at Brendan in the mirror before turning onto the road.

Chapter Ten

“Horrible, isn’t it?”

He stared at the woman on the other side of the counter. Dyed red hair caught in butterfly clips, seven tan and one charcoal. Eyes so disturbingly yellowish-brown they had to be colored contacts. Fake breasts strained proudly at the buttons of her skimpy pink blouse. Her lips and cheeks were plumped with fillers; her forehead was as smooth as a statue’s; and her teeth were blindingly white and even. In the mirror behind her, he could see a reflection of clinging, low-cut jeans and platform sandals.

Disgust filled him. She was fifty trying to be twenty, and plain despite all of her efforts to be beautiful. Chewing a bulbous purple wad of gum, she rang up his copies of the newspapers and stared at the headline articles on each one. “Just horrible.”

The key still hadn’t come, and infection was setting in. His dick was on fire, the pain making it hard to concentrate on keeping up his end of a conversation he had no interest in having.

“Just horrible,” he echoed at last, pulling down his lips in a grimace. Her unbalanced clips in their haphazard positions irritated him beyond belief. It was like she’d done her hair in the dark, or in the light but gathered it unevenly on purpose to look young and cutesy.

If it’s good enough to do, it’s good enough to do well!

The phone on the counter rang. Holding up a red-nailed finger to excuse herself, she answered it and stopped ringing him up. He let the grimace fade, although his irritation with her was only growing. He shouldn’t have to stand here waiting around.

It had taken him time as a child to learn how to approximate facial expressions. Standing at the mirror in the bathroom, he practiced for long hours with cutout pictures of faces from his mother’s magazines.

This was happy. Lips up.

This was angry. Lips set.

This was sad. Lips down.

This was excited. Lips parted.

This was nervous. Lips pursed.

This was sexy. Lips pushed out.

His face was normally blank, and the blankness made his father angry.
What are you, a robot? A robot kid?
Then Dad mimicked his face, nothing in the eyes, nothing in the lips, a canvas untouched on his forehead and cheeks.

But he wasn’t a robot. When his father pulled his pants down and mocked his tiny manhood, he kept his face blank. When he was being beaten, he kept his face blank. That was
his
power, even at three years old. His father wanted lips pulled down, tears in the eyes, a wail from the throat. Concession. Contrition. For crimes that occurred only in the realm of Dad’s mind. It made Dad crazier and crazier how he could not prize a reaction from his son with slaps and spanks and insults and fists.

He stayed blank. And silent. Then his mother would rush in to save him and press his face to her chest, screaming at Dad about how he was making her baby cry.

He wasn’t crying.

As his father saw a robot before him, his mother saw superimposed expressions over his blank face, so he laughed and angered and wailed in her head. He breathed in her perfume and memorized the pattern on her shirt as he thought about jamming a pencil in her eyes that did not work. She didn’t need them. She could get around with touch and scent and sound, just like the animals did once he was through with them.

Things that didn’t work belonged in the trash.

His father went away one day and did not return. His mother pulled her hair and cried over her broken heart, because just as she did not see the blankness on her son’s face, she had mistranslated her husband’s rage as love.

Fascinating.

She was fascinating for how she did not
work
. She changed her name a few times a year, demanding that he call her Peggy or Sunshine or Lana or Suzette or Jaguar now, and getting angry that he did not know this in advance. She changed his name too. He could wake up as Alvin and go to sleep as Zeke, blow out the candles of a cake with
happy birthday, Connor
written in blue icing and unwrap a Christmas present addressed in pink ink to Vanessa. One time she called him by his real name and then slapped him when he responded, shouting
don’t you know you’re Wolfe now?
That had been when she was on her Jaguar kick.

She promised to always take care of him and then vanished for days at a time. Sometimes she announced they were homeless and they would live in a car or with a friend of his mother’s for a week or two. And then she’d say they got the house back and they would go home. She tripped on the stairs yet would not move the books or heaps of clothes; she got ill from bad food yet refused to throw out what was expired in the cabinets. She bemoaned how the house was full to the rafters but went shopping daily for more shit.

She loved shopping. Discount stores and garage sales and going out of business sales . . . The night before the trash was picked up, she hung canvas bags from her arms and shopped even more in their neighbors’ cans on the curb. Or she would outright steal from yards and open garages. Sometimes she roved as much as two to four miles away from the house, testing doors of businesses to see if they were locked, raiding the donation piles left outside the library. If something happened to be too big for her to carry away, she’d come back for the pick-up and drag him out of bed to help.

See this? Look what they were throwing away! Oh, you like it, I can tell.

He didn’t like the little baby dolls, naked and stained with their hair chopped off. He didn’t like the broken computer equipment or TVs with shattered screens, or yet another huge entertainment center with splintered sides. He wasn’t going to read the torn and tattered books reeking of cigarette smoke and cat piss. At Christmas she went shopping in the house and backyard, collecting crap and wrapping it up and pretending it was brand new from the store bought just for him.
Look what Santa brought!

Just once she found an unlocked back door to some tiny antique shop and returned with dolls and vases and knick-knacks she’d swiped from the storeroom. A loaded handgun too, which had been hidden on a high shelf until her wandering hand passed over it. She was spitting mad that someone had called the police after she turned on the lights in the front of the store, sirens interrupting her midnight shopping spree.

All of it was good for nothing shit. Even the handgun was practically an antique. Sometimes he sneaked outside with some of her shit and returned it to a neighbor’s can to let his mother find it all over again. She never caught on that it was the same old shit. She just crowed in delight and sent him off into the house to bring out the other so she could admire her new matching set. He came back empty-handed, of course, and then she’d get mad at him for not organizing shit he wasn’t allowed to touch. Once she got so upset about it that she smacked him over the head with the ancient cast-iron skillet she had rediscovered, and he woke up on the floor of the kitchen with her asking if he had fallen.

A did not equal A.

If A equaled B, it did not necessarily mean that B equaled A.

That was her brain, a constantly shaking sieve where the grains of logic sifted through.

He had done well in school, the scant times he’d gone in his elementary and junior high years. But she always pulled him out since public schools were institutions of brainwashing. They would make him a homosexual. They would turn him away from God. They would teach him to be ashamed of his country instead of its proud patriot son. His homeschooling curriculum basically consisted of workbooks and television. Then she would forget about how evil public schools were and send him back for a month or two, telling him to find a pretty little girlfriend like other boys did.

He didn’t want to find a girlfriend. He was above that. The poems and roses and sighs and angst . . . he watched people turn themselves inside out over love on television and at school, and he felt superior for how he did not crave these things.

The huge backyard was a disaster of his mother’s junk, and the house was as well. The attic was crowded out and then the second floor rooms were crowded out and then the bedrooms on the first floor were crowded out and then the two of them slept in the living room by the time he should have been in high school, he on the sofa and she on the recliner, a stinking carpet of trash below. Moving anywhere through the couple of rooms left to them was like navigating an obstacle course. When he tried to throw something, anything away, even if it belonged to him, she screamed in angry hysterics until her voice gave out. She even screamed when he packed up his things and walked out after turning eighteen. It wasn’t because she wanted him to stay. She was worried that he had packed up something of
hers
, and he wouldn’t let her unload his bags to check.

In time, he had to return to that house. It was even worse than before. Having run out of room to cram her shit, she was now wasting money on a tiny studio apartment to fill
that
up. Mom got her money a million different ways, stealing pills and selling them, helping herself to purses in unlocked cars, whoring herself if she had any takers. Once she scored twelve hundred bucks at the private high school, some idiot parent-helper leaving an envelope of money raised for the cheerleading squad on the back seat of an unlocked car.

The studio was dirt-cheap because it was in such bad condition. She never hassled the landlord to fix shit up and he never hassled her by raising the rent. Sometimes she didn’t even bother to pay up and the Stone Age asshole never noticed. It was just a single room with an attached bath, holes in the wall letting in rodents and the air reeking like an army of mice had perished among the boxes. Mom showed the studio to him with pride, and after that, she made him drive her newest acquisitions over there and find a place to jam them in while she waited at home. That caused a big fight between them. She liked to have him going back and forth and back and forth with
this
going to
that
place and
that
coming to
this
place, but he’d only agree to go once each day. Each night, actually. Then he could take her shit and dump it out in random places rather than drive over there, and nobody saw him doing that in the dark.

She couldn’t see how much he despised her under his blank face. When a massive pile of junk collapsed on her in the hallway, pinning her down with its weight, she begged him to call for an ambulance.

He didn’t. He watched her struggle to free herself, and every time she succeeded in gaining a few inches, he tipped over another pile.

Six days later, she died.

He buried her in the backyard under all the trash her broken mind had loved. Then he made her landfill into his home, throwing out the very worst of the muck until he had reclaimed some of the rooms on both floors. The whole time he did that, he relived the pleasure he’d received from witnessing her futile fight to escape the hallway. She hadn’t come close to making it to the living room, a snail rendered immobile by hundreds of pounds of weight in the shell on its back. She’d pleaded and shouted and sobbed and screamed and threatened and prayed, pulled out all of the stops to influence him, and it made him feel like God.

In that hallway, she had been worshipping him. In that hallway, she had
seen
him. Truly seen his blank face the day before she died, her weakened mind unable to superimpose one last image. She saw that he didn’t care. That he had never cared. And she was afraid.

Her last words were to whisper that she forgave him.
Oh, no
. This was how he forgave her.

He wished he had taken even more advantage of the situation, teasing her with the phone and pretending to help pull things off her while piling more on. He made his mazes for animals and that was enjoyable, but it didn’t give him the same rush that he had gotten from watching his mother’s confusion and fear and desperation.

But now he knew how to get that rush.

The big-breasted cashier hung up the phone at long last and gave him an insincere apology and smile. She resumed talking as she put his purchases in a bag and then charged him for the bag itself. That was some new law. He didn’t like it. He was already paying for his papers and didn’t think he should have to carry around canvas bags everywhere. All of his mother’s trashcan-diving bags he had put in the garbage long ago.

“Thanks for shopping at Book Time! Make sure you come back now!” she said.

Lips up. “Have a nice day, miss.”

She liked to hear that, miss instead of ma’am, as he had known she would. She thought she had fooled him. Then her eyes slid past to see if anyone else was waiting in line.

When he pulled the bag off the counter, it swung down and tapped him on the crotch of his pants. The blood instantly drained from his cheeks. That key needed to come or he was going to take the scythe to his own dick and end his misery.

He didn’t want it to come to that. Maybe it was time to buy another cage with a key. He could be in San Francisco in an hour.

Maybe it wouldn’t fit. Maybe that sex shop was no longer in business. He wanted to yell at the possibilities, but adrenaline flushed through him at the same time.