Out of the Blue: A Pengram Mystery Read online

“Mom, would you knock it off? Go stand over there!” Cannon exclaimed. Bridling, she fell quiet but didn’t leave. Cannon shook his mother off his arm and glared at her ferociously. “Go!” he insisted. She walked halfway down the driveway and stopped there.

  Fagelman opened his mouth to continue the story, but Cannon spoke first. “Sorry about that,” he said to me. “I was skipping class. Just first period. I have analytic geometry.”

  He looked a little anxious at his confession. I nodded with understanding. If I’d been enrolled in analytic geometry, I’d be skipping it, too. Algebra had been a breeze. Geometry slaughtered me.

  “She wouldn’t let me study last night,” Cannon said. “My brother’s wife is at the hospital having a baby and Mom was throwing a fit because the labor nurses won’t let her in the ward. My sister-in-law doesn’t want her there and my brother doesn’t either after the crap she pulled at their wedding. Mom’s been freaking out about missing the birth for two months now. So this morning I decided to skip so I don’t flunk the first test of the year. I just thought I’d take the long way to school and forge myself a note about a dentist appointment.”

  I was surprised his mother let him walk there without holding her hand. Still halfway down the drive, Mrs. Owenby stared at us balefully. Then she took out her cell phone and tapped the screen with angry jabs of her index finger.

  “He’s never been inside the fence before,” Fagelman said. “Just walked by it a few times over the years. But today he noticed the lock was cut on the gate and the chain removed.”

  “Like, there’ve always been some cut places in the fence,” Cannon put in. “I could have sneaked in if I’d gotten down on my stomach and slid. But I never did.”

  “He could see through the links that the door was also open,” Fagelman continued. “He figured that he could wander around the inside of the mill and kill some time.”

  “Did you go straight from the gate to the open door?” I asked the boy.

  Cannon nodded. “Yeah. I couldn’t go around to the front. Mom might have seen me from the road if she was driving past. She was going to try to crash the hospital again since Ranger stopped answering his phone.”

  Ranger and Cannon. I stopped myself from rolling my eyes. Having endured a childhood with a nickname that was most people’s favorite color, I had deep sympathy for kids with bizarre monikers. My full first name was even worse. There had been nothing more embarrassing than teachers calling out Pengram, Bluebonnet for attendance on the first day of school.

  “I didn’t see the body right away,” Cannon said. “I went in and just kicked around a pile of junk at first to see what was there. It wasn’t anything interesting, concrete and rebar and stuff. Then I wanted to take a selfie of where I was and post it for my friends. I saw some stairs on the other side of the building. So I walked along the partitions to see if I could get around them. I thought a picture from the second floor would be best, well, what’s left of the second floor.”

  “Were you alone?”

  “Yeah. It was dead quiet in there. It was weird.”

  “What was weird?” I asked.

  He took a moment to mull it over. “The way the partitions were lined up everywhere. The place is trashed up. All the desks and tables and tools . . . I don’t know, whatever a silk mill used to have inside, those things are gone. But the partitions are still there. They got left behind and I could see a bit over the top. Some papers are still tacked to them. And no one piled them up to the side or anything. That just seemed weird to me. Anyway, I headed around them. They stopped a couple of feet before the wall and that’s where . . . that’s where she was.”

  “What did you do then?”

  Blood rushed to his cheeks, staining them scarlet. “I screamed. I screamed at the top of my lungs. Her neck was all hacked up and the way she was staring . . . staring in a pool of blood . . . That’s just not what anyone thinks they’re going to see when coming around a corner. I didn’t smell anything to warn me something was there. I guess because she hasn’t been dead that long. Then I stopped screaming and I thought the person who killed her might still be in the mill. I ran like hell back to the door and got out. I called 911 and shouted there was a body, send someone, anyone, there was a dead girl in the old silk mill. I was panicking and screaming into the phone, turning in circles here in the driveway. I thought the killer might be sneaking up on me. Then I hung up even though the woman told me not to and I called Mom. She’s mad at me for not calling her first.”

  Bless this kid’s decision to put 911 ahead of his mother. I noticed that she was a few feet closer now, and staring at her phone in fury.

  Halloran appeared in the doorway and motioned for me. Nodding to Fagelman to take over, I doubled back to the walkway. The mother made a beeline for her son as I left. Her voice rang out moments later. “What do you mean a deposition? He and I need to get to the hospital! I’m about to become a grandmother!”

  “Mom, they don’t want you there!” Cannon exploded.

  I went inside with Halloran, who led me around the partitions. The assistant medical examiner Harley Grave was crouching over the body to take in every detail. Her face was set in a typical scowl. She grunted at me unintelligibly, either meaning hello or fuck off since those tones were remarkably the same with her.

  “What is it?” I asked Halloran once we were around the body.

  “Didn’t you tell me you have a date tonight? Some dude named Tyler?” he asked, tripping over another raised floorboard.

  “Not a date,” I said. “We’re meeting for coffee. That’s not a date.”

  “I think you’re going to be cancelling on him once you see this.”

  He arrived at an ancient flight of stairs. The first step creaked in a voluble warning when he began to climb. “Is this safe?” I called after him. “I didn’t plan on breaking a leg by falling through a rotten staircase today.”

  “Legs are overrated. You can get around on just one.”

  The stairs didn’t give way under the two of us. They just complained with each footfall. At the top, Halloran turned to walk down what had once been a hallway. Now the left side opened into empty space.

  I looked down to the trash heaps and paused. “What is that?”

  “Come here and you can see it better.”

  I trailed after him to where the hallway abruptly ended. Then we stared down to the orange partitions. Set up deliberately to form a maze over the ground floor, paths snaked this way and that. Bulbs hung down only over certain passages, some of which had been decorated. The corpse was just beyond the only place the maze let out.

  “Uhhh . . .” I trailed off.

  “Yeah,” Halloran said. “File this one under WTF.”

  Chapter Three

  Darby, California was not a happening place, despite every effort the city made to be one. It was framed with towering wineries and neat rows of vineyards upon the hills to the north, but there was far better to be found in Napa to the east. It had a generous number of museums and art galleries in its sprawling downtown area, but all of them were hopelessly outclassed with what San Francisco had to offer in the south. There were no less than three farmers’ markets but many people went to the one in Sonoma instead; there were hundreds of restaurants yet little that was notable. The city of Darby was by no means small, yet no one had ever heard of it.

  My hometown of almost two decades just wasn’t very interesting. I didn’t mind one bit. My childhood years had been spent crisscrossing the country as my forever-fifteen mother chased The One. The man who was her destiny, the man who would make everything right. The man who would love her and save her and support her and fulfill every need she ever had. I hadn’t spent more than two years in any school before being uprooted again. Dallas. Milwaukee. Los Angeles. Tarboro. New York City. Omaha. Portland. Detroit. Tampa. Back to Dallas. On and on and on. It hadn’t stopped until I went to college and put a stop to it myself.

  The One remained ever elusive, an elite player in the
game of cat-and-mouse. Now in her late sixties, Mom was still chasing him while I stayed put. I didn’t even know what state she was in at the moment. Nor did I really care, if I was honest with myself. They didn’t make Mother’s Day cards for daughters like me to pick out at the store. Thanks for feeding me, I guess. Not that I had an address to send it to anyway. The last time we’d chatted many months ago, she had chided me for staying so long in boring old Darby.

  What could I say? I liked it here. It was my boring old Darby. She also didn’t like what I did for a living since it wasn’t nearly as glamorous and exciting and fast-paced as what she saw on television. I had nothing much to say to that either. The process took the time that it took. The station wasn’t full of hot guys panting after me for dates. Murder cases didn’t always get solved, especially drug- and gang-related ones with witnesses too justifiably afraid of violent retribution to speak. There was a lot of decidedly unsexy paperwork, and music failed to thunder overhead when I gave pursuit to suspects on foot. Nor did I run in slow motion with my long, voluminous brunette locks flowing attractively behind me.

  With my malfunctioning thyroid? That was a laugh. I had twenty extra pounds that I couldn’t shed, my hair wasn’t voluminous anymore, and I was always cold and tired. I needed to up the dose of my hypothyroid medication, but my doctor thought it was all in my head. I also needed a new doctor.

  My cases weren’t even newsworthy a good deal of the time, outside of the local paper. Darby had its fair share of crime. There were plenty of sad, sorry people doing sad, sorry things, but leaving out the battles over drugs and turf, it was usually crimes of passion. Bad decisions made in the heat of the moment, spurred by fights or break-ups.

  This new murder, however, was something different. Very different.

  And cold.

  It had taken a long time to construct this maze, and I had a hunch the partitions were brought here by the killer along with the decorations. The heaps of rubble were coated in dust while the partitions were spotless. Unfortunately, there were no security cameras anywhere at the silk mill. I was sure the perp had canvassed this property thoroughly before setting up. All there was to keep him out was a fence with holes in it, and a lock that was easy to cut.

  He would have had to bring everything in through the back since the front of the building oversaw a busy road. Uniforms canvassed the houses behind the silk mill, but many of them were vacant. This wasn’t one of Darby’s nice areas. Industry had moved elsewhere over the last twenty years and the nearest elementary school had closed, sending this community into a death spiral. The few remaining residents hadn’t seen a truck parked in the driveway or a person moving things in. They hadn’t heard anything either. Tall fences framed their yards, AC kept their homes cool instead of open windows. No one had dogs outside to bark at something strange. Neighbors kept to themselves.

  It had to have been done in the night. Several nights, especially if he had to carry in those partitions one by one. Then he brought in the victim, and ran her like a rat through a maze.

  The perp had taken the murder weapon with him. Death had come so quickly that Chloe didn’t have any defensive wounds on her arms or hands.

  That was a small mercy. There were no overt signs of sexual assault, and she’d been killed with what appeared to be one blow. No overkill. It seemed to me that the joy in this had not come from the execution of the victim but the execution of the scene.

  I walked through the maze twice before it was processed, careful not to brush against anything. The amount of planning and effort this had taken was unbelievable. He was careful. Intelligent. Deliberate.

  And terrifyingly confident.

  *****

  “She was nice.”

  Lindsay Laber was packed into a corner of the sofa, her knees drawn up protectively to her chest. Her eyes gleamed with tears that had yet to fall. Major bed hair and a toddler’s chubby cheeks, she was twenty-one and had shared her apartment with Chloe Rogers for the last year.

  “When was the last time you saw her?” Halloran asked as I looked around. The living room was homey but sparse, the few pieces of furniture old and well traveled. On the walls were cartoon-bright posters of jumping dolphins over rich blue waves. There were pictures on the end table of Lindsay with family and friends. Chloe was in one, laughing with Lindsay’s arm over her shoulders. She had been a lovely young woman.

  “It was just last night,” Lindsay was saying to Halloran. “My friend Craig turned twenty-one. Craig Palmer. He’s a friend from work. Spazzo’s. We clean up after the kids’ birthday parties and set up for the next ones. I asked Lindsay if she wanted to go along with us to Bounce. She didn’t want to.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “She’s not . . .” One of the tears finally fell as Lindsay realized her tense was wrong. “She always had to get talked into stuff. She was kind of dark. Not like doing drugs or cutting herself or anything like that. She just saw the bad before the good, you know? She was closed in. Not that you could blame her. Her parents were killed in a car crash when she was little, two or three. She was in her car seat and lived. It was an accident, ice on the road and her father lost control. That was in Michigan, I think she said. Then she came to California to live with her grandparents and they were old, so they died when she was in high school. After that she was with some foster family and treated like the help. She didn’t have anyone. People just went away, from her perspective, or didn’t want her around, so why hang on too hard? Why reach out?”

  “Did she have a boyfriend?” Halloran asked.

  “No. Never. And no, she wasn’t a lesbian. She was just kind of . . . awkward. She said she never knew what to say to guys, or to anyone. You had to prompt her along in a conversation until you found the right angle, and then she’d talk. But she was smart. It wasn’t that. Just shy and awkward. She grew up with a couple of old people who wanted her to be quiet and weren’t involved in her life. They didn’t want to be raising a grandkid. It was like she just never learned how to converse since no one bothered to teach her. But I thought a night at Bounce would be good for her. Let it go, you know? We work so hard. Some drinks, some dancing . . . Usually she just watched TV when she got home from work, or read a book. Those are hers.” Lindsay gestured to the far side of the sofa.

  There was a tall pile of library books beneath the end table, a bookmark halfway through the bodice-ripper on top. That was sad to me, a novel that wouldn’t ever be finished. The rest of the books revealed eclectic interests, cozy mysteries and science fiction, more romances and a self-help book at the bottom about overcoming social anxiety.

  “She always fixed dinner for two, even though I never asked or expected it,” Lindsay said. “It was sweet. She loved cooking. It calmed her down at the end of the day. She could make a killer grilled cheese.” Lindsay covered her mouth briefly. Killer hung in the room between us.

  Her voice thin with strain, Lindsay said, “I liked how she made this a home. I always had to get the big plates down from the shelf for us. She was so tiny she couldn’t reach them. She was like a doll. At work she could barely see over the counter. She worked in the deli at Tasty.”

  “What happened once you got to Bounce?” I said.

  “It was around nine-thirty, or a little later. We got drinks at the bar, sat down in one of those sofa squares in the corner to chat.” Lindsay wiped off her wet cheek. “She clammed up. She needed people to keep picking at her to talk, but . . . I mean, that was fine when it was the two of us here, but we were just messing around at the club, shooting the shit, and it wasn’t the place for that. I was a little frustrated with her and that wasn’t fair. I knew she got frustrated with herself for not knowing how to jump into a conversation. She wanted to see a therapist but it’s just so expensive. Then she got up to dance.”

  “With anyone?”

  “No. She got up and went over there on her own. I saw her over at the bar getting another drink some time later, and then on the dance floor a coupl
e of times. It was pretty crowded. That must have been between ten and midnight. I’d had a lot to drink so after a while . . . I didn’t see her and didn’t think about it. I was having such a good time. Craig walked me back here around one, one-thirty.”

  “Did he stay?”

  “Yeah, but it wasn’t like that. I kind of wanted to . . . you know, take it further, but he gave me a kiss and said I was too drunk. He’s a good guy. He was real buzzed, didn’t think he was okay to drive home, so we crashed in my bed and slept until his alarm went off for work at seven. I have today off. He left, and I fell asleep again. I woke up at ten. Her door was open and I figured she’d gone to work, too. She wasn’t scheduled for a shift, but she’s been called in lots of times to cover someone sick. You can go in there to look around, if you need to. It doesn’t . . .”

  Lindsay started to cry in earnest. “Her bed is still made from yesterday. She never made it back home. I was too smashed to even notice. If I could have called 911 last night to report her missing . . .”

  It wouldn’t have made any difference, I thought. Police didn’t get all hot and bothered about an adult not coming home for a night.

  I went to the room to look in as Halloran said, “When you saw her at the bar and on the dance floor, was she talking to anyone? Was anyone trying to talk to her?”

  “No,” Lindsay said. “She was by herself. I mean, she was dancing with everyone else on the floor, but not with anyone in particular.”

  Chloe’s room was simple and tidy, the duvet pulled up over the pillow on the twin bed, half a dozen cartoon sea posters on the walls. Clothes hung neatly in the closet and her shoes were lined up below. On the desk was a picture of a beaming couple with a baby about a year old in their arms. The frame said Mom & Dad, surrounded by metal leaves. Several more pictures were behind it, Chloe aging past her second birthday before her parents vanished from the frames.

  “Did she ever complain to you that someone at work was bothering her?” Halloran asked in the living room.