Out of the Blue: A Pengram Mystery Read online

  “There was the guy at Tasty they call Weird Scott, but he bothers everyone,” Lindsay replied. “He’s not dangerous weird, or not from what she told me. Just off in the head. He also works at the deli counter. I don’t know his last name. And she’d have shitty customers now and then, but that’s normal. I get them at my job, too, horny dads trying to flirt while their wives and kids are twenty feet away.”

  “Did she have a computer?” I called.

  “No,” Lindsay answered. “She wanted a laptop but didn’t have the money. She used her phone for everything. She was like this blast from the past when it came to tech, you know, because her grandparents never had a computer or cell phones and wouldn’t let her have those things either. I helped her pick out a cell phone right after she moved in with me and she was so excited to join this century, she said. She’d never been to an amusement park either so we went south to Rollaway for her last birthday. She had the time of her life on the rides. We rode every last one, even the rides for little kids. There was a hot guy working the Snake and we went on that one three times just so he could check our seatbelts again.”

  With a choked sob, Lindsay exclaimed, “Why didn’t I look in last night to see if she was home? Why did I leave the club without thinking about her? What the fuck kind of friend am I? I was . . . I was partying while she was dying.”

  We had Chloe’s phone, but I had a feeling we weren’t going to find anything on it. This murderer might have been a total stranger to her. We had to see the footage from the cameras at Bounce, if there were any.

  Halloran continued his questioning as I searched through the room, finding nothing of interest. No, Chloe hadn’t done drugs. She had tried marijuana twice in high school and it made her feel weird instead of relaxed, so she hadn’t done it again. Nor had she expressed interest in trying anything else. In fact, Lindsay had seen her turn down pills at a concert they went to over the summer. Chloe didn’t care what anyone else was taking; she just didn’t want to be on anything herself. Yes, she drank, but she didn’t usually get smashed. Two or three times a month was about how often she consumed alcohol. Most of the times it had been to excess, Chloe and Lindsay were at home playing drinking games along with a bad movie on the television.

  No, she didn’t have any other friends, as far as Lindsay knew. Chloe hadn’t talked to her about anyone, and only went out socializing when Lindsay pushed her to do so. She was a homebody happy with a book or TV show for company, a mug of green tea steaming beside her, not a party-hard young adult.

  So how had she ended up dead in the silk mill?

  Oooh, a mystery! I heard Mom’s childish, excited squeal as clearly as if she were right beside me in the room.

  Like it was a show. A game. Where the detectives always won and the criminals always lost, and the grief of the victim’s friends and family evanesced at the end of the episode since they weren’t real people anyway.

  If only.

  If only it worked that way. Lindsay was going to have Chloe on her conscience for a long time. Possibly the rest of her life. That was something my puddle-deep mother would never understand, since nothing ever touched her very much.

  It was early in the afternoon, and there were still many hours of work ahead. I gave a mental slap to my lazy thyroid gland and forced myself to keep going.

  Chapter Four

  You can reimburse me for the condoms.

  It was late. I stared at the text from Tyler on my cell phone, mounds of paperwork covering my desk and an unfinished report on my computer needing my attention. Wanting to ask what about meeting for coffee had inspired Tyler to buy condoms, curious why he felt entitled to my money for a purchase I’d never asked him to make, I was also baffled since none of the handful of text conversations we’d had over the last week were remotely sexual. Frankly, they’d never strayed much beyond hi and how are you and would you like to meet somewhere for coffee?

  Not that I wasn’t interested in sex. It had been longer than I cared to contemplate. But Tyler and I weren’t past the basic social niceties and small talk phase. I didn’t know where or if he worked, and the picture on his profile was the back of a man’s head. I hadn’t put up a picture at all. We hadn’t even met in person yet, and already he was planning to do the dance with no pants tonight. And assumed I was willing.

  That annoyed me. I’d checked the box for relationships, not no strings attached.

  Goddammit, I hated Internet dating. Every festering anal wart in humanity’s maladjusted butt crack seemed drawn to my profile. Fifty-year-old men who bragged about their touchdowns and SAT scores in days of yore; political enthusiasts who prefaced their first messages with demands to know who I was voting for in the next presidential election; narcissists who rated themselves a perfect ten and granted me the honor of meeting them . . . it was an endless parade of dysfunction ranging from simple cluelessness to pure poison. My personal favorites were the self-professed nice guys who had volcanic, misogynistic meltdowns when I did not respond quickly enough to their messages, or decided to take a pass.

  I set down my phone, relegating the debate of whether or not to respond to Tyler to tomorrow. Then I went back to my report.

  It had taken all day and a large group of people to process the scene at the silk mill. The only fingerprints so far to be found belonged to Chloe Rogers. Dozens of partitions, hundreds of props, and there was nothing. As to footprints, we didn’t have those either. This murderer had been exceedingly thorough in leaving no trace. And I’d been right that the partitions were brought to the mill. The current owner of that dilapidated building hadn’t visited it in several years. The partitions weren’t his, nor had they been there when he bought the place.

  Chloe’s estimated time of death was two in the morning, approximately six hours before Cannon Owenby happened upon her body while trying to find the perfect location in which to snap a selfie. The murderer hadn’t moved the corpse to protect his killing grounds. It looked like he had just walked away. I didn’t know what to make of that. Who planned something this elaborate and then left it behind to be found? All we could presume that he’d taken was the generator he used to power the lights, as well as the murder weapon.

  Nor had I gained much information from the lone security feed at Bounce. The quality was poor. At a quarter to ten, Chloe could be identified in a group of people going through the front door. But she never came out, which meant she had left through the back entrance to the establishment. That was reserved for employees. A camera was posted over that door, but it was fake and just there to dissuade thieves. None of the employees had seen a young woman matching Chloe’s description cutting through the back of the building, nor was there any clear reason for her to have done so.

  Was the murderer among those men filtering into the club over the hours? Or had he entered through the back?

  It had been a regular night of work for the employees of Bounce. All of them were clean, a batch of twenty-somethings working the bar and main floor. Some were current college students, others dropouts or recent graduates, and the slightly older ones were either working on graduate degrees or going between two jobs while raising young children. They were an articulate, pleasant, tight-knit bunch, all of them horrified to learn about the murder of a club guest and eager to help in any way they could.

  However, the interviews with them yielded nothing. The bartender didn’t remember Chloe, but the place had been hopping the night before. It wasn’t like she had gone out of her way to make an impression on anyone. Chloe had had quite serious social anxiety, from the sound of it. It was out of character for her to have met a man while dancing and to sneak out the back for a sexual rendezvous. Especially since she had told her roommate that she was still a virgin and extremely nervous about sex. Perhaps other young women would have decided just to grab on to some halfway decent-looking fellow and get it over with, but Chloe? That simply didn’t strike me as her style. She had been very reserved.

  Alcohol could have emboldened
her, though, removed enough of the weight of her inhibitions to take a risk. Yet why would she have agreed to go out the back? She hadn’t had a boyfriend, or any reason to sneak about.

  Halloran flopped down in the chair by my desk. “Sorry about that date of yours.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “The guy revealed his true colors through text when I turned him down. No need to meet him in the raw. You got anything interesting for me?”

  “Press is wanting answers, but they got the standard speech from the king about this investigation being in the early stages. He’s holding back most of the maze details for now.” Captain James King got shortened to king instead of captain behind his back, for reasons that did not flatter him.

  “Not interesting,” I said, continuing to work. I had had a better relationship with the press in the beginning of my career, but those were seasoned professionals. Now they had been pushed out of the business for younger, cheaper amateurs, some of who afforded equal weight to feelings and facts in their reporting. They didn’t read the police reports half the time, asked convoluted and nonsensical questions, and interrupted constantly if they didn’t like what they were hearing. At times they even leaped out of bushes to do ambush interviews. I missed the old days.

  “Wolfie Abbard came in around six and confessed,” Halloran said.

  Wolfie Abbard was mentally ill and confessed to everything. He needed to be in a psychiatric institution but roamed the streets of Darby instead. “Not interesting,” I said. Not a month went by without a visit from Wolfie, who read crime news in the paper or watched it on television and inevitably became convinced he himself had committed it.

  “She was drugged.”

  I looked over to Halloran sharply. “Really?”

  “Serum tests came back. Found just a hint of Quell.”

  Leaning back in my chair, I said, “I don’t know what that is. A roofie?”

  “Street name. It’s a tranquilizer that comes in a powder. Somewhat like Rohypnol but it doesn’t last as long. Can’t taste it, can’t smell it, so if the perp slipped it into her drink, she wouldn’t have had a clue. It goes to work in about ten to twenty minutes, heightened effect if taken with alcohol. Then she would have done whatever she was told to do.”

  “Like allow some random guy to lead her out the back door of the club.”

  “Not a thought in her head and no memory of it later. And it explains the puddle of vomit we found in the maze. Quell can make you real nauseous as it wears off and vomiting is a common side effect.”

  “Where would he get Quell?”

  “Haven’t a clue. Pharmacies don’t carry it. He could have ordered it online through the dark web, or acquired it from some sleazy friend. We’re not going to find him that way.”

  “You seem pretty sure of that.”

  “Because I visited the Itty-Bitty Vice Committee and asked them if they’ve shaken Quell out of any recent cases, even cases from long ago, and they gave me the same blank look you did. They promised to keep an eye out, ask the dealers and junkies they bring in if someone’s got Quell in the goody bag. But that’s just not the shit that there’s demand for.”

  “Interesting drug of choice.”

  “Yeah. He didn’t want her out of it for too long. Just long enough to get her where he wanted her to be, a maze with a scythe or scythe-like instrument in his hands at the end. She must have thought she was about to get out, poor kid, that EXIT sign up there on the wall.” Halloran nodded to the mess on my desk. “Anything?”

  “I had a thought.”

  “Did it hurt?”

  “There was a small fire in Bounce’s break room last night. It was the only remotely unusual thing to happen. Someone put a burrito wrapped in aluminum foil in the microwave and pressed nuclear. No one copped to doing it, not that they would. I’d naturally assume somebody was fibbing, but these employees seemed to have more sense than that.”

  “You think the perp might have done it,” Halloran said.

  “It makes sense, doesn’t it? Everyone but the DJ and bartender went running over to put it out and check that everything was okay. They got to it so fast the smoke alarm didn’t even go off. Their attention was on that side of the club while the perp ferried Chloe Rogers out the other side. He knew the camera was fake.”

  “Maybe he’s one of the employees.”

  I shook my head. “That’s too sloppy for him. This man moved an entire truckload of props into the silk mill without a single witness and didn’t leave one damn print anywhere. Also, every single one of those employees has an alibi. None of them got off work in the time period she was taken, and the three employees not working that night have alibis, too. One was home sick with his family, one flew to New York yesterday afternoon to attend his grandfather’s funeral, and the last one was a female at a seafood restaurant in Napa with friends. Multiple witnesses, receipts . . . I don’t think it’s anyone working at Bounce.”

  “The club is about a half mile from the silk mill. Did he walk her there the whole way? We might catch them on store cameras.” Halloran reconsidered. “No, she probably wasn’t in any condition to walk that far. He would have gotten her out of the club and loaded her into a vehicle. But there weren’t any prints on her, or fibers, nothing, the ME said.”

  “I’m sure he took extra precautions with her,” I said.

  “Maybe there was more than one perp.”

  “I’d be surprised then. People like this don’t usually work together.”

  “Sometimes, but rarely,” Halloran allowed. “Oh, and I forgot this part. With the way those floorboards were, up and down and hacked up and everywhere, it’s going to be a little tricky to determine the perp’s height.”

  “What’s the range?”

  “Between five-six and six feet.”

  “That’s quite a range.”

  “He was definitely a lot taller than she was, but it’s impossible to say what length of scythe he had and where precisely he was standing when the boards in that spot are such a mess. It would help if we had more blood spatter to work with, but he only hit her the one time. So, what’s the next plan of attack?”

  “I want to eliminate this guy called Weird Scott as a suspect. He’s the only one Lindsay mentioned Chloe having trouble with.” This seemed like a pretty weak lead, but it was all I had to go on for now. “What are you thinking?”

  “How the databases have no crimes like this, not really. It reminds me of that one killer who’d take women out into the wilderness. Give them a head start and hunt them down with his rifle like they were animals,” Halloran said. “But this . . .”

  “I know.” It was a much more elaborate fantasy brought to life. I hadn’t ever heard of something like this murder either.

  “And that guy was going for women on the fringe,” Halloran said. “Prostitutes, mostly. Strippers. Women who were easier to access. Women that weren’t going to be reported missing quite as fast, or searched for quite as hard. It doesn’t seem like Chloe Rogers was involved in any of that. Not in trouble. She was just a little lost.”

  I yawned.

  “Don’t you live somewhere?” Halloran chided.

  “Don’t you have a wife and kids?” I retorted.

  “Two lovely girls who have no idea I run a background check on their boyfriends,” Halloran said blithely. He had put them in martial arts at the tender age of five, given them mace for their thirteenth birthdays, and harped on them constantly to be aware of their surroundings. We saw too much from day to day.

  “He ditched all of it there. That bugs me,” I admitted.

  “Me, too,” Halloran said.

  “Like he’s waving it in our faces. See? See what I did just there? He even left the door open and the gate unlocked when he took off, likely so somebody would notice sooner. I wonder if nobody had, would he have contacted us in some way to brag? And . . .” I yawned again.

  “Home,” Halloran emphasized. “This case will still be around tomorrow. But the perp won’
t be.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “He’s long gone,” Halloran said confidently. “Probably collecting new decorations somewhere in Oregon or on the way to Maine to do it there. He’s smart enough to go.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “I’m always right. Except on days that end in –y. Then I’ve been known to make a mistake. Usually little ones that nobody notices.”

  “Luckily for you, only seven days of the week end in –y.”

  I packed up and headed out to the parking lot. On the way home, I received another text. Tyler was offering to give me his bank account number so I could transfer the money. Eleven ninety-nine plus tax for a box of Super Trooper Premium Lubricated Latex, size extra large. His message ended with a winking smiley face.

  Seriously? This guy wasn’t just a pig but a total creep. Now I was positively thrilled to have missed out on meeting him. I couldn’t say I enjoyed being single all that much, but men like Tyler made it look like a treat. I wanted to shoot back something so rude and cutting and emasculating that his manhood shriveled up and died forever in his crusty jockey shorts. Extra large, my ass.

  But I couldn’t bring myself to reply. My mind was focused on another man, one who could dedicate himself so thoroughly to bringing a woman’s life to such a bizarre and gruesome end. I’d be seeing that maze in my dreams for years to come.

  He’s smart enough to go.

  Or was he smart enough to stay?

  Chapter Five

  His eyes were closed, yet he saw.

  How her body shook as she retched, her fragile frame caught up in the violent convulsions . . . She sank back with the dumb look of an animal in pain, eyes closing, perchance to dream . . . Then she came around once more, her delicate features screwing up in her seasickness and confusion . . .

  He had memorized all of that, but what fascinated him was how she fixed up the fallen doll after jostling it loose from its position at the desk . . . This moment in particular riveted him. She had been so well programmed. Even in her uncertainty, even in her sickness and drunkenness, she followed her programming. It was that engrained, a track so worn in her mind that she traveled it without thought.