We were halfway to Alpharetta before I remembered that Ms. Washington needed to be taken home. “Wait, we should drop you off,” I told her. “Where do you live?”
“College Park,” she replied.
“We just drove a half hour in the opposite direction, why didn’t you say anything?”
She shrugged and straightened her tortoise-shell eyeglasses. “My kids are grown. My cat is fed. Ain’t nobody anxious for me to get home.” She fiddled with the handles of her embroidered Guatemalan handbag. “I saw that boy get taken. He must be scared.”
Flo and I both assessed her with skepticism. For my part, I didn’t doubt her intent—after listening to our conversation she seemed to want to help. I was just skeptical about how helpful she could be. She practically lapsed into catatonia during a simple car chase. Granted, bullets were flying and our car was kind of disintegrating around us, but still. Focus.
“I don’t know,” Flo intoned. “Maybe we can drop her off at the next gas station.”
“She’s not a stray dog!” I admonished Flo, who shrugged and lit another cigarette to the consternation of Roundtree. She cracked the window to hold the lit end outside, but the wind caught it and it flew from her hand.
“Dammit.” She produced a stick of gum from her purse and popped it in her mouth.
Ms. Washington straightened in her seat. “I work at the DMV. I spend most of my time in a windowless room behind three inches of Plexiglas. Before today the most exciting thing that ever happened at work was when we ran out of decaf. We make the rules, we follow the rules, we enforce the rules. But aside from the rules, there is right and wrong. And I saw that boy get taken. That’s wrong.”
“Why don’t you want us to go to the police?” I asked, knowing that my call to Officer Ned, in my opinion, was just as good if not better.
She shrugged again. “I know how the city works. The first thing they’re gonna do is arrest all of us, then wait for an arraignment date to sort things out. Do you have time for that?” She waited for a response, which there was none. “I didn’t think so.”
“Fine, she’s coming with us,” Roundtree interjected. “Where am I going?”
I instructed him to take Windward Parkway, turn right, then left, then look for the most obnoxious new-built mega home on the street. The concrete roaring phoenix statues sitting sentry at the fence entry were a dead giveaway. There wasn’t actually a gate, mind you, just giant fence posts. I bet he built them just for the statues. We drove to the front door via a circular driveway lined with expensive polished pea gravel. The house itself was a myriad of aimless gray stucco gables and bay windows that I’m sure would have made any Pillsbury recipe winner pee in her pants with joy, but personally I’d rather live under a freeway overpass than this cheaply built suburban-developer white elephant. A camping tent probably had better bones than this thing.
“I’m not having any part of breaking and entering,” Roundtree announced.
“Who’s breaking anything?” Flo asked. “Crash here has a key.” She meant the set of lock picks given to me by Otis.
“I’ll wait for you down the street.” Roundtree stuck out his palm. “I’ll need my phone.”
“Take mine,” Flo tossed him her Galaxy and he wrinkled his nose like she’d handed him a turd. “And take her, too,” Flo indicated Ms. Washington, who didn’t object. “We’ll text you when we want you to come get us.”
“I’ll make sure he doesn’t leave you behind,” Ms. Washington offered. I cracked a half smile, wondering just what she could do to stop him. Anyway, I was pretty certain Roundtree wouldn’t pass up a chance for an exclusive on this story, as his entire beat at the newspaper consisted solely of me, “a trending topic,” it seemed. Roundtree pulled away from the house with his lights out, leaving me and Flo to approach the front door.
“What’s that smell?” I asked.
“It’s Hackman’s place. He probably has a basement full of dead hookers,” Flo said. Lovely.
The first thing we noticed when we entered the foyer, aside from the smell, was the incessant barking coming from the hall closet. Flo opened the door and tiny white ball of fluff flew into her arms. “That bastard! He locked the dog in the closet!”
“Is that a dog?”
I wouldn’t have believed it if I didn’t hear it bark. It was the smallest dog I’d ever seen, no bigger than a bird. It must have been part Pomeranian, part miniature Chihuahua, and part guinea pig. It nuzzled into Flo’s neck and would have seamlessly blended with her short-cropped white hair if not for its tail stub, which wagged like a hummingbird wing above a perfect rosebud of a dog butt.
“Molly just got her before she went into the hospital, didn’t she, little sweetie peetie pucker butt?” Flo showered the dog’s teacup face with kisses. I’d never seen Flo be so affectionate. The dog was getting the kind of lip action normally reserved for her cigarettes.
“What’s its name?”
“Fifi Trixibelle II, after my fourth husband’s sweet pit bull. I suggested it to Molly and she liked it, didn’t she?” Flo cooed to the dog.
“I guess this explains the smell,” I surmised, pointing to the bottom of the closet, which was mottled with animal waste. What a prick that Hackman was.
“The only reason he keeps Trixi alive is because of the insurance policy, which keeps him from liquidating any assets while the settlement is in escrow,” Flo explained. “Alby made sure the dog was listed as an asset.” I was certain Hackman planned to whack the dog the minute Molly flatlined, so we couldn’t leave it there. Flo held onto her as we made our way through the house. Odd, but the smell got worse as we got farther from the closet.
In contrast to its opulent exterior, the inside of the house was a squalid sty. Hackman appeared to live like a bear with furniture, and what furniture there was looked left over from a frat-house fire sale. Cigarette burns covered the chunky chuck-wagon sofa set as well as the upended decoupage coffee and end tables. The only adornment on the walls appeared to be food stains. A lot of food stains. Cardboard pizza containers littered the carpet along with candy bar wrappers, beer cans, empty potato chip bags, and overflowing ashtrays. The food containers all looked partially shredded, as did a pile of mail that lay on the other side of the front door directly under the mail slot. Something glinted among the debris on the carpet and I bent to pick it up. My blood turned cold.
“What’s that?” Flo asked.
“Malcolm’s medical-alert bracelet. He’s allergic to penicillin.” I put it in my pocket and straightened to take in the scene. “What the hell happened here?” I asked. “Does it normally look like this?
“Uh, hard to say,” Flo ventured. “He’s such a slob.”
The kitchen was worse. Grease splattered on the walls, dirty plates piled on every surface, trash everywhere except for inside the trash bin. There was zero dog food to be seen, and it occurred to me with horror that Trixi must have been subsisting on whatever discarded scraps she could forage. That would explain the shredded pizza boxes and even the torn-up mail, as dogs often like to eat envelopes because of the flavored adhesive on the other side of the flaps.
“What are we looking for?” asked Flo. Anything that looks out of the ordinary, I told her. “Does any of this look ordinary?” she said, and I saw her point. On the kitchen counter next to the wall phone, I spotted a long strip of adhesive backing, blank but for a baggage claim sticker on the end. “ATL-GCM” the ticket read, indicating a flight to Grand Cayman that left at 9:32 the next evening. I pocketed it, along with the small notepad next to it. Trixi whimpered from Flo’s arms as we circled back to explore the rest of the layout.
How did they get food on the hallway walls? I wondered. It looked like Hackman and his buddies had covered themselves in ketchup and held a freestyle wrestling match all over the house. The downstairs hallway was illuminated by a light coming from the bath off the master bedroom. Instinctively we walked toward it, following the streaks on the walls. Looking back I’m amazed
at how the human brain is capable of blocking out the obvious when the obvious is too terrible to conceive. Even I, a person who was no stranger to the awfulness that people are capable of inflicting on each other, a person who prides herself on extensive self-imposed training for emergency situations—jaded as I was, I could not see the writing on the literal walls.
Flo got to the bathroom before I did. I noticed that, curiously, on the bathroom doorjamb there was one of those lift locks like you see on the interior of hotel rooms to fortify the door from intruders. Only this lift lock was on the exterior of the door. Flo pulled the door fully open, stepped back, turned around, and tried to keep me from going inside. But it was no use. I could see a panoramic reflection in the mirror over the sink. The blood-streaked mirror. I could see the body face-down in the bathtub, the bits of brain and bone that splattered the tile above it.
“Malcolm!” I screamed.
CHAPTER 5
Flo tried to hold me back, but I begged her to let me go and she did. She turned to text Roundtree to make an urgent plea that he come back to get us ASAP. I ran to the tub and stopped short of touching the body. There was no doubt he was dead. The entire back of his head was missing. I tried to calm myself. It took all of my resolve. His suit jacket hung on a towel hook. In the sink there was a collection of kitchen knives that appeared to have been hastily rinsed, along with a long cable that looked like it had been cut from a vacuum cleaner. I counted 26 stab wounds through his tailored peach-colored dress shirt, as well as ligature marks on his wrists and neck. One arm draped over the edge of the tub showed that his left hand had three of the five fingernails pulled out. My mind went wild then.
He was right there, I practically could have touched him from my car window right there on the curb before they shoved him into the car. I actually created the traffic jam that gave them the time to come here ahead of us and do this. I covered my mouth and sobbed.
Stop, a voice inside me said. April, stop and assess the situation.
It wasn’t my voice, I don’t know where it came from, but believe me, it had an immediate effect. I stopped sobbing and called to Flo to bring me Roundtree’s iPhone. She hung up and with much trepidation entered the bathroom to hand me the phone. Trixibelle turned her head away over Flo’s shoulder as if to bleach the image of the scene from her mind. I flipped through Roundtree’s photographs until I got to those that showed Malcolm during his abduction. I zoomed in to get a closer look at the collar peeking out from the top of his Brooks Brothers suit.
“What color is that?” I asked Flo. I wanted to make sure there was good reason before I upset a crime scene.
“I dunno, kid,” Flo said wearily, her eyes trying to find a place to fix that wasn’t appalling. Finally she settled on closing them all together. “Please let’s get out of here.”
I peered intently at the photo. In it, Malcolm’s shirt looked to be baby blue with pin stripes. I slipped the iPhone into one of my pockets. “Help me turn him over.”
“April, I . . . c’mon,” Flo implored, but then used her boot-clad foot to help me push on the body’s shoulder until it lay face up in the tub.
One eye remained in his skull and the other hung by a string of nerves and rested inside his gaping mouth. As horrifying as this was, I sat back and felt the relief wash over me like the effect of a strong drug. These eyes did not belong to my friend Malcolm, but his father Morton Colgate. To further substantiate this discovery, the corpse’s gaping mouth showed gold fillings. Most of his scalp was missing, but the remainder retained wisps of thick gray hair.
“Oh, thank God,” Flo placed her hand on my shoulder. I could feel her shaking with relief. “Thank God, thank God, thank God.” I stood to hug Flo, both of us crying in relief. I knew Malcolm’s dad had been under investigation for tax evasion since 2010, but wondered what he could have done to deserve such a fate. I knew his ex-wife, Malcolm’s mom, had a hatred for him that could compare with the heat of a hundred suns, but to torture and mutilate him like this? I had a hard time believing it. Someone had been trying to get him to talk. I wondered if he told them what they wanted to hear.
Trixibelle whined loudly. “Look, Trixi’s crying, too,” Flo said.
That might have been true, but she wasn’t crying about the same thing we were. I pulled away from Flo. “Do you smell gasoline?” Before she could answer I caught the reflection of movement in the mirror above the sink. Suddenly Hackman’s portly physique filled the doorway.
He pointed a gun at Flo’s face. “Gimme the dog.”
CHAPTER 6
Here’s the thing about guns: people generally think you have to freeze when someone points one at you. I never understood this, because it would be way easier to hit a frozen target than a moving one. Flo and I are very much on the same page about this, having been shot at a number of times in the recent past. Otis is of the same sentiment. Here is his entire list on what to do when someone has a gun at your head:
WHAT TO DO WHEN SOMEONE HAS A GUN AT YOUR HEAD
Attack Without Hesitation. Hesitation will get you killed. In a fight for your life you must be prepared to attack back without hesitation.
I swatted the gun out of Hackman’s hand in the same instance that Flo’s boot-clad foot found solid purchase in a vicious kick to his crotch. The gun discharged and shattered the mirror before landing in the sink on top of the pile of cable and knives. Hackman screamed, doubled over, then quickly dove for the gun at the same time I did. Flo, still holding Trixi, continued to kick at him furiously. He got to the gun before me, but barely. “Goddammit!” he growled, as I swatted it away again, but not before another wild shot rang out that this time, horribly, ricocheted off the tile, and hit Mr. Colgate in the neck. The gun scuttled into the toilet with a loud splash.
I shut the lid and sat on it. Hackman next grabbed one of the knives on the floor, but Flo already had one from the sink. She stepped on his wrist, breaking the blade from the handle, and slashed his upper arm. He jumped up howling and stumbled back into the bedroom. Flo closed the bathroom door and locked it from inside. She leaned against the vanity gasping for air. Through the whole ordeal, she never loosened her grip on the dog.
“I’m impressed,” I said when we got a chance to breathe.
“Kicking mean old redneck ass is my catnip.”
The smell of gasoline wafted strongly again. I could hear Hackman sloshing it on the carpet outside the bathroom door. “Bitches!” he shouted. We heard footsteps run up the stairway.
“What are you doing?” I heard Ash call after him. I never thought I’d be so happy to hear his voice. Of all the awful things he’d done in the past, I never thought of Ash as an actual murderer. Mean, yes. Idiotic, yes. Selfish, yes—I could have gone on with the litany of characteristics that led to my low opinion of the man, starting with the fact that, 12 years ago, he moved in on my bereft, recently widowed mother like a hyena on the hunt. Even today he remained handsome in an oily, soap-opera-actor kind of way, with wavy blond hair and a jawline like it was carved out of marble. I could almost see why women flocked to him like horseflies to a horse turd, but for me personally it would be hard to get past the vapid black hole he has for a soul. But no disrespect to those who fell for his act. I’ve known the man since I was four. I was there at the front line while he was out to take my mother for everything she had, then zeroed in on the thing that mattered most to her: me. Through bribes, lies, and the simple idiocy of the Atlanta Fulton County family court system, Ash finagled himself into being declared my primary physical custodian. Later I learned it was due to an inheritance I had coming, and how, as my parental custodian, he was in line to be the executor of all the money. It was a clever plan, but it interfered with bigger issues at the time, such as those of the WorldAir CEO, who colluded to bomb one of his company’s own airplanes in order to keep my grandfather’s patent rights under wraps.
So, yeah, Ash may have been a selfish heartless narcissist, a greedy mean-spirited spineless sea urchin of a m
an, but he wasn’t a killer. Surely he wouldn’t stand by and allow his stepdaughter—let alone his biological mother—be burned alive in a windowless bathroom alongside the desecrated corpse of a torture victim. Right?
“Don’t kill the dog! We need the dog!” Ash shouted. The dog? That bastard.
“We don’t need the dog alive,” Hackman shouted back. “Once this place burns down we can come back and dig through the rubble and dig it out. I’ll get another one just like it to show the insurance adjuster.”
“Where’s the claim ticket?”
“I thought you had it!” Hackman yelled angrily.
“What the hell?” Flo said, clutching the dog close to her. I could see the anger in her eyes. Perhaps she knew Ash better even than I did. “Ash Manning,” she shouted through the door, “don’t you dare burn us down.”
Ash either ignored her or didn’t hear her, because in that instant, in a loud whoosh!, I heard the bedroom ignite in a furious blaze. Oh, Christ, really? How cliché, burning the evidence of a crime scene. I should have known Ash would show zero imagination. I looked around the bathroom to see if there was anything I could use to help us escape.
“We gotta get outta here,” Flo unlocked our door and tried to push it open, only to find that Hackman had lowered the flip lock on the other side. I wasn’t surprised. Obviously this was why the lock was there in the first place, to keep Mr. Colgate locked inside while they held him hostage. How convenient it must have been for Hackman to use it on us. My blood boiled at the thought of him, all smug thinking he’d won one over on us. Flo kicked at the door furiously to no avail. It was solid wood, either a fluke of design for such a cheaply built house or, more chilling, a deliberate reinforcement for the purpose of its recent use. I extracted the handgun from the toilet and futilely tried to fire it against the door. The gun would be useless until the cartridges fully dried, so I put it in my pocket.
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