The Abbey (13 page)

He shrugged, his face going pale.

“We’re a flower shop. We don’t run background checks.”

“Even still, at least get a fucking credit card imprint. This was a threat to my daughter.”

I closed my eyes and counted to ten, calming myself.

“Okay,” I said, nodding. “Who took the order?”

“Me.”

“Do you remember what your customer looked like?”

“I don’t know,” he said, shifting on his feet. “It was a couple of days ago.”

I rubbed my scalp line and breathed deeply, trying to keep myself from exploding.

“Think hard.”

“Come on,” he said, shaking his head. He started to speak a few times but then stopped and restarted. “He was old. Like, maybe thirty or thirty–five.”

“What else do you remember about him? Was he tall? Short? Did he have tattoos or anything like that?”

“He had a tattoo on his neck, and he wore a frilly shirt like he was a pirate. I thought he was weird.”

“Are you sure the tattoo was on his neck?”

“Yeah. I know a neck when I see it.”

I ignored the barb and took my notebook from my inside jacket pocket.

“What was it a tattoo of?”

The kid shrugged.

“Some sort of weird design. It looked like a spiderweb.”

I jotted it down.

“Was he white, black, or what?”

“He was like Chinese or something.”

“Anything else you remember about him?”

He shrugged.

“I don’t know. It was a few days ago.”

I asked him a few more questions, but that was all I got out of him. When I finished, I nodded, closed my notepad, and slipped it back in my jacket pocket. The trip hadn’t been a complete waste, at least. I thought I had enough for an ID. I looked up and leaned forward so my face was about a foot from the clerk’s.

“If my kid gets flowers from your store again, I’ll put your head through the front window. Do you understand me?”

He nodded, his face pale. I turned and walked out of the store, flexing my fingers. I inhaled deeply and opened my car’s door as I tried to put my thoughts in order. I couldn’t be sure, but I had a pretty good idea who had sent those flowers. Now I had to figure out why.

I took out my cell phone and thumbed through its memory until I found John Meyers’ phone number. After blowing him off earlier, I hoped he’d still take my call. The phone rang twice before he picked up. I spoke before he could.

“Hi, this is Detective Ash Rashid with
IMPD
. There have been some new developments in Robbie Cutting’s case, and I wondered if I could take a look at the safe Mrs. Cutting found.”

I heard Meyers cluck his tongue a few times.

“I’m in court this afternoon, but I think I can arrange that,” he said. “I’ll have Maria call you when she’s ready.”

“That’s fine,” I said, climbing into my car and turning the key. “I’m in Plainfield right now, but I can be in Indianapolis shortly.”

“We’ll be in touch.”

Meyers hung up, and I turned on my car and headed to the first drug store I could find. I bought a pint of Maker’s Mark and put it in my glove compartment. I like bourbon and Maker’s Mark is one of my favorites. It comes in a square bottle, so it doesn’t roll around in my glove compartment. A big part of me wanted to drink the entire pint right there, but I still had work to do. More than that, drinking in the middle of a parking lot was almost a surefire way to be arrested for a
DUI
. I closed my glove compartment and left the lot.

Mrs. Cutting called as I pulled onto the interstate. She agreed to a meeting at her place in twenty minutes. I threw my cell phone on the empty seat beside me after hanging up. As soon as I flipped on my car’s siren and lights, traffic parted in front of me as if I were leading a Presidential Motorcade.

Twenty minutes later, I parked beside the Cuttings’ guest house and got out of my car. It was stiflingly hot, and I could feel beads of perspiration slide down my back. I opened my cruiser’s trunk to get my evidence kit. Olivia’s evidence collection kit was neat and orderly in a fishing tackle box; I’m not that fastidious. Mine was in a cardboard box that had once held paperbacks my wife bought on the Internet. I grabbed it and walked to the open front door.

I hadn’t been in the guest house before, but I recognized it from the crime scene photos. The home was open–concept and had a small entryway that led to a kitchen and living–room area. Under normal circumstances, I would have taken off my shoes to avoid tracking in mud or other contaminating particles, but the situation being what it was, I wasn’t too worried about collecting legally admissible evidence. I didn’t expect my investigation to end in a courthouse.

“Hello?” I called, pausing near the kitchen. Maria Cutting shuffled out of a hallway on the left side of the room. She wore a green tank top and bluejeans that were tight around her hips. I hadn’t noticed it before, but she was more than a little attractive despite the puffy, gray patches under her eyes. She nodded at me, her lips thin and straight.

“Detective,” she said.

“Thank you for seeing me, Mrs. Cutting,” I said, crossing the room towards her. “Your attorney says you have something to show me.”

She nodded and led me down the hallway from which she had come. The guest house’s master bedroom had a vaulted ceiling and a large picture window overlooking a formal rose garden. The furniture was gone, and most of the carpet had been pulled up, exposing the plywood subfloor. Mrs. Cutting stopped in the center of the room, her eyes transfixed by a red stain on what remained of the carpet. I looked at my feet, preferring my shoes to the intimacy of her grief.

“If you’d like, I can give you the name of a cleaning service that specializes in situations like this,” I said. “You don’t need to take care of the room by yourself.”

“Yes, I do,” she said, her voice hoarse. “Robbie was my son. This is my responsibility.”

Stepping into the room without explicit permission felt wrong somehow, almost as if I were invading a religious shrine, so I stayed in the doorway. Eventually, Mrs. Cutting looked back up at me. Her eyes were momentarily confused, as if she were surprised I was there, but then she regained her focus and waved me over. My feet drummed hollowly against the plywood floor, and I could see a tear slide from the corner of one of her eyes to her cheek.

“It’s on the floor in the far corner of the room,” she said, pointing to a spot about ten feet away. “Please, look at it and leave me alone.”

I nodded, knowing that anything I had to say would have been inappropriate. I shuffled across the room towards the far window. As Mrs. Cutting had said, there was a green safe lodged between floor joists. It looked like Robbie had peeled back the carpet and cut through the subfloor with a saw. The metal was thin, and it flexed beneath my fingers. On closer inspection, it looked more like a cash box with a combination dial than a safe. I looked back at Mrs. Cutting, but she had turned her back to me.

I reached into my evidence kit. I didn’t usually collect evidence myself, but part of my job was to be prepared at all times. I had the usual things – latex gloves, bags, and evidence tags. But I also had a number of hand tools, including a thick, flat head screwdriver. I jammed my screwdriver in the seam between the safe’s door and side and wrenched it to the right. The metal flexed and gave way, exposing a sliver of the interior. I placed the tip of my screwdriver into that slot and pulled again, prying the door open as if I had a crowbar.

I looked inside, and for a moment, it felt like someone had put my guts through an old–fashioned clothes wringer. I hadn’t expected much in the safe. Instead, I found a snub–nosed, thirty–eight caliber revolver and some sort of Styrofoam container. I glanced at Mrs. Cutting. She was watching me now, but I didn’t think she could see the handgun from where she stood.

“Do I want to know what’s in there?” she asked.

I licked my lips before answering.

“Probably not,” I said. “Would you like me to tell you anyway?”

She looked down at her shoes.

“I don’t know.”

“Tell you what, then,” I said. “I’ll hang on to it, and you think about it. If you want to know more, you can give me a call.”

Mrs. Cutting closed her eyes, and for a moment, it looked as if she were going to start crying. She covered her mouth with the flat of her palm and eventually nodded to me before stepping into the hallway. Once she was gone, I reached into the safe and pulled out the handgun. That gun would have been useless in court, but it told me something important. Robbie Cutting knew someone was trying to hurt him. I wished he had told us.

I turned the gun around and stared down its sights. The piece was old and not particularly well cared for, and I could tell right away that Robbie hadn’t fired it. Its barrel and chamber were so far out of alignment that any rounds put through it would have stuck in the chamber and blown up like a pipe bomb. I swallowed and dropped the revolver into my evidence collection kit beside some brown paper bags. I reached back into the safe for the Styrofoam cube wedged in back.

The cube was maybe five inches on a side and held together by brown packing tape. I cut the tape on one side with a box cutter from my kit and tilted the package open like a jewelry box. Someone had bored six circular slots into the Styrofoam, five of which were occupied by stoppered test tubes of what looked like blood. The sixth slot was empty. I stared at it for a moment. Like the gun, the cube was no longer admissible in court since I wasn’t on a case, but I could use it. I dropped it in my evidence kit and shut the safe’s door.

I grabbed my box and started to leave but stopped in the doorway and said a short prayer. Robbie was eighteen years old when he died. It was a waste. On my way out, I met Mrs. Cutting in the living room and thanked her for her time. Her movements were stilted, but she put her arms around my neck in an awkward attempt at a hug. I patted her back. She looked as if she were going to say something when I pulled back, but I think she realized mid–thought that there wasn’t much to say.

I put my evidence kit in my trunk and pulled up to the gate in front of the Cutting’s house. I looked left and right. The street was empty except for a gray Ford Taurus on the side of the road to my left. That figures. The Cuttings lived in an old covenant community with its own private security force, garbage collectors, and snowplows.
IMPD
was called in for violent crimes and other felonies, but the neighborhood’s private security took care of noise complaints and other minor incidents. They also kept the riffraff under watch.

I pulled onto the street and glanced in my rear–view mirror. As expected, the Taurus followed about a hundred yards behind me. I could see two men inside. They were a good distance away, but from what I could tell, they looked too young to be retired from the force. They were probably off–duty officers picking up a few bucks for a few hours of easy work. It was a common arrangement. I ignored them and drove through the neighborhood without incident. They followed me for a moment when I turned out, but I lost them in traffic shortly after that, presumably when they turned around to find some other brown person to harass.

Since it was my night to make dinner, I stopped by the grocery on my way home and picked up a rotisserie chicken, coleslaw, and mustard potato salad. The sun was setting on my way out of the store, but the blacktop radiated heat from earlier in the day. I climbed into my cruiser and glanced in the rear–view mirror as I put my packages on the passenger seat. There was a gray Ford Taurus with two men inside a few aisles away. It could have been a coincidence, but I doubted it. They were still following me.

I left the parking lot and took a circuitous route home, including a stop at Starbucks for a cup of coffee, to see if my tail would follow. I lost track of them occasionally, but I eventually managed to spot them again each time. Whoever they were, they were pretty good at being evasive. If I hadn’t gotten lucky at the grocery store and spotted their vehicle, I wouldn’t have even known they were there. About twenty minutes later, I pulled into my driveway. Thankfully, Hannah and Megan were still out, so at least I didn’t have to worry about them for the moment. The Taurus drove past as I opened my door, its occupants never looking in my direction.

I took the food I had purchased to the house and put it in the refrigerator. My street had long, sloping hills and ran straight for about two miles in each direction, allowing multiple vantage points of my house. If the Taurus’s occupants were smart, they’d pull off at a church up the street. The building would afford easy cover, and with cars parking near it constantly, an anonymous Taurus wouldn’t stick out like it would elsewhere in the neighborhood.

I checked to make sure I had a full clip in my firearm before going to my backyard. My department didn’t have a written protocol about what to do in situations like that, but if they did, I imagine the suggested first step would be to call backup. There were at least two problems with that, though. If cars started piling up in my driveway, my tail would know something was up. They’d split before we could find out who they were or who sent them. The second problem was that my call would go over a police radio, which I assumed my pursuers were bright enough to have. If I wanted information rather than to scare them off, I was on my own.

The sky was streaked with oranges and reds by the time I stepped onto my back lawn, and the evening insect symphony was beginning to warm up. It looked like it was going to be a nice night. The skies were clear, and the temperature was relatively balmy. I’d prefer overcast for what I planned to do, but early evening glare would work for me, too.

I walked to my cedar fence and used the center support beam as a step. I heaved myself over the top and into the alley behind my house. I was too old to be jumping over fences, though. I rolled my ankle on the landing, but I was okay. I straightened and rotated my foot. It hurt, but not enough to slow me down. My high school soccer coach would have told me to walk it off.

I walked six blocks, roughly half a mile, in the direction the Taurus drove as it passed my house. My neighborhood had been built in a grid pattern with side streets that ran perpendicular to the main road every block. I hung a left at one. I couldn’t see the Taurus, but the church was a block in front of me. It was an imposing building with rough stone walls and stained glass windows. It had plenty of shadowed nooks in which to hide. Hopefully my tail was in the lot, and equally important, hopefully they weren’t expecting me to flank them.