“Tomorrow and the day after, I have my days off.”
“Okay. And?”
“Well, you need to have two days off each week, too. You have two options. Either take the same days off as me, or choose different ones.”
“Who covers the precinct while you’re gone?” she asked.
“That would be Sean. He’s our newest recruit.”
“I’d like money. I’ll keep working.”
“Sure. But don’t forget you need to take two days off later in the week.”
“I’ll remember.”
She turned back to the computer and resumed typing. I was a little disappointed. I would have liked to spend my days off with her. But I understood that she wanted to get a little cash together sooner rather than later.
I remembered being so keen to show up to work when I’d first started a burger job around my high school studies. I’d put in all the hours it took until I’d saved for my first car. My parents had helped out a little with the purchase, but my dad’s rule had been I had to learn the value of hard work. I’d spent most of my free time grilling burgers until I’d started to get behind on my schoolwork. Then, my mom had sat me down and gently explained to me that although it was important to pay my way in life, it was also crucial to get a good education and have a social life.
So I’d found a balance. Avery would, too, given time. She was a good kid.
My brain hurt trying to figure out whether I thought she was a sister or a hot girl I wanted to pin against a wall and spank until she came. She was eighteen. She was so dependent on me for everything. There was no way I could take advantage of that.
But she was so hot.
Things were starting to get a little awkward.
The phone rang and I reached for it a little too quickly. It was easier than trying to focus on my computer when my mind kept wondering what Avery looked like naked.
“Snake Eye Police Department, Officer Rick Porteous speaking, how may I help?”
“Rick? You gotta get over here. They took Tootsie!” Mrs. Vanderhosen’s familiar voice grated down the phone line.
It wasn’t a week in Snake Eye without getting a late-night call from Mrs. Vanderhosen about nothing at all. I figured the old lady just wanted the company.
“I’ll be right there,” I said, without taking any further details. I ended the call and looked across at Avery who had stopped typing and was waiting to find out what was going on. “We need to attend a crime scene.”
“A real one, this time?” She looked skeptical.
“Could be,” I told her, although I was pretty sure it would be absolutely nothing.
I picked up my notebook and pen and led the way to the squad car. At least it was getting an outing, tonight. Most nights, the car just sat in the lot, catching dust from the desert air.
“Mrs. Vanderhosen is a frequent flyer. She likes to call us for everything under the sun,” I explained on the way.
Avery sighed. “I thought you said this might be a real crime.”
“I did. And it might. Just because the lady likes to cry wolf, that doesn’t mean something bad hasn’t happened to her. We’ll never know until we get there.”
I liked using the word “we” when I meant Avery and me. And I wanted her to understand that we had to take every call seriously.
When we arrived at Mrs. Vanderhosen’s, the old lady was standing in her driveway in a long pink floaty housecoat that looked like it had seen better days at least half a century ago. She was wringing her hands and pacing up and down in battered fluffy pink slippers. The spotlight attached to the front of her house was bright enough to give us sunburn.
“Officer! Thank goodness! There’s something afoot and I just knew you’d be able to help,” Mrs. Vanderhosen gushed as I got out of the vehicle.
“Good evening, ma’am. Can you tell me what happened, please?” I took out my notebook and readied myself to take notes.
“I let Tootsie out at nine-thirty and she bounced out with all the vigor of a young pup. Little did I know that was the last time I would see her.”
Mrs. Vanderhosen put the back of her left hand to her forehead dramatically and made an expression more commonly found in a middle school play. I said nothing. Sometimes it was the best response.
“What makes you think she is missing?” I asked.
“Are you kidding me? She didn’t come home! I’ve been standing here calling her for about five minutes. I even put out her favorite treat.”
It’s going to be a tootsie roll, I thought, before Mrs. Vanderhosen spoke again.
“She just loves Twinkies,” she explained. “If one of those won’t tempt her back into the house... well, Officer, I know my dog, and she’s not here. So what are you doing about it?”
I scribbled some notes.
“May I take a look around the yard, please?” I asked.
“Why would you want to see my yard?” she asked in confusion. I didn’t entirely understand her reluctance. After all, she called the cops out for non-problems so often that we’d been all over her house to investigate whether anything had actually happened this time or not.
“Scene of the crime?” I suggested. It seemed odd that she hadn’t taken us there immediately. Usually she was bursting to show us where the alleged mystery had occurred.
“Oh, bless your heart, I would never let Tootsie out in my yard. That’s where my prize begonias live! She goes around the neighborhood.”
“You let your dog run around without a leash?” I was aghast.
“Well, sure. I couldn’t let her out in the yard and I’m too old and frail to walk whenever Tootsie needs to... to... make.”
I tried not to laugh at the turn of phrase.
“So you let your dog run loose and crap in everyone else’s yards and you’re wondering why she didn’t come home tonight? Gosh, let me think, maybe someone was looking for a community service award,” Avery snapped.
I turned very slowly to look at her, in case there was a large bump on her head that had made her think it was acceptable to speak to anyone like that. Especially when we’d had words on my last call-out about the fact she wasn’t supposed to be talking at all. Mrs. Vanderhosen was silent, too, and I didn’t need to be trained in figuring out people’s reactions to know she was hurt.
“Ma’am—” I began.
“No. It’s fine. Don’t trouble yourself, Officer. I... I’m sure Tootsie will find her way home.” Mrs. Vanderhosen’s voice made it clear she was trying not to cry, and for the first time since I’d met her, she was hiding an emotion instead of letting it out.
My palm twitched.
“I’ll send Sheriff Bob around in the morning to check on you,” I told the old lady.
“Thank you, but it’s not necessary,” she replied, then turned and went indoors.
“You are in deep trouble, young lady,” I snapped at Avery. I got into the car and drove back to the precinct. Furious thoughts flew around my head and I couldn’t see a path through the rage that had clouded my mind.
“Are you gonna make me bend over your desk again, officer?” Avery’s tone was unrepentant and a little sarcastic. It fanned the flames of my anger.
“No,” I told her. “Not like this.”
Mrs. Vanderhosen was possibly the most irritating woman on the planet but she was one of my charges, just like everyone else in this small town, and there was no way I would allow a jumped-up little girl from out of town speak to any of my old ladies like that.
“What’s the matter, Officer? Lost your nerve? Or maybe you just know I’m right.”
The brakes squealed and I realized I’d stamped on the pedal as hard as if a newborn had appeared on the street in front of me.
I tried to take a deep breath but delaying what I needed to say just made it louder and angrier in my head.
“You have no right to speak to a frightened old lady the way you just did. You were unconscionably rude. I told you last time when you blurted out stupid questions in
the middle of my investigation that you were to be silent when we attended crime scenes. Now instead of being able to investigate the scene, we have left an old lady in a worse state than we found her.”
“She was attention seeking!” Avery retorted.
“You don’t get to decide that!” I yelled. “You don’t get to decide who needs help and who doesn’t! That’s not your job. You just type up the reports.”
“Most of them came from her! She’s always calling you over. Yesterday, I typed up a report from two weeks ago when she demanded the sheriff himself attend because she couldn’t figure out if milk cartons went in the recycling or the trash. She needed telling because she’s got you guys wrapped around her finger and she’s wasting your time!”
“No. The only person wasting my time is you. And I am not going to spank you tonight. I am far, far too angry and I will never spank when I feel like this.”
“Why not?”
“Because there’s a line. And that’s on the wrong side of it.”
“So we just sit in the precinct not talking until you decide you feel calm enough to hit me? That sounds completely psychopathic,” Avery said.
I said nothing. She didn’t know anything. She was just a little kid from out of town. The silence in the car was thick enough to cut into chunks.
When we got inside the precinct, I went straight to the records office and unlocked the door. In a filing cabinet marked “1970-1979”, I found what I was looking for. I pulled out the file, locked everything up, and placed the fat cardboard envelope on top of the keyboard where Avery was typing.
Without speaking, I returned to my desk and opened a game of Solitaire, but the whole time, I watched Avery out of the corner of my eye. At first, she just froze, but as the minutes ticked by, she slid her hands out from under the file and opened it.
Chapter 9
Avery
Rick was pissed. I didn’t really know or care why, but he was being totally douchey about it.
When he dumped a giant file right on top of my hands while I was typing, my first response was to snap at him, but I bit it back. Things weren’t going so well between us right now and I didn’t know how to handle that.
Vanderhosen. 1972.
A sort of bubble in the pit of my stomach began to vibrate, making me wish I’d stopped for a snack at some point before now. I opened the file.
The murder of Trevor Vanderhosen 11/24/72. Status: Unsolved.
A cold chill ran through my body as I turned the page. It seemed hard to believe anything so serious could have happened in Snake Eye.
Witness report: Mrs. Mae Vanderhosen. Victim’s wife. Date of birth: 10/4/54.
I counted from 1954 to 1972 and shook my head in horror. She had just turned eighteen. I covered my mouth with my hand and tried not to say anything at all. Mrs. Vanderhosen lost her husband when she was eighteen? How long had they been married for by then? This couldn’t be real. Rick was just screwing with me.
What followed was five pages of a witness statement as Mrs. Vanderhosen recounted everything she had seen and experienced. She had been there the whole time, she had seen what happened and the killer knew she could identify him.
Why had the killer spared her? It wasn’t explained anywhere in the witness statement. I guessed it wasn’t the sort of question you could ask a woman who just watched someone die like that.
Three other witness statements described the perpetrator. People had seen him fleeing the scene of the crime on foot then he’d stolen someone’s car and disappeared into the desert.
I turned the page and saw grainy black-and-white copies of the crime scene photos.
“Oh my God.” It was horrific. I’d never seen anything so awful. His face held an expression of shock and the rest of him... I closed the file and shook my head.
Someone had killed Mrs. Vanderhosen’s husband when she was my age. The unfairness of it made my throat constrict. They couldn’t have been married for long. She was probably thinking only of their future together. Maybe getting ready to start a family. And just like that, it was taken away.
“If you tell anyone what I look like, I’ll come for you. Not now. When you’re old, when you’re alone, when you’re least expecting me to return. And I’ll finish what I started today.”
She wasn’t calling the cops for attention. She was terrified of a murderer who was still out there, on the loose. He’d never been caught, by the looks of it. And he’d threatened to come back for her. I couldn’t even imagine what it was like to live your whole life under that dark cloud of terror. I put my head in my hands. I had screwed up big.
Of course, now I had found out that I was wrong, I had to apologize to Rick. Or I could just say nothing and let him calm down. That sounded like it might lead to less spanking.
I closed the file and moved it to the right-hand side of my workspace. Turned back to the report I had been typing up before Rick had interrupted me. My fingers hit the keyboard and my mind cleared itself of anything other than the words on the page.
Almost.
Mrs. Vanderhosen was alone in her house. She had gone through life afraid of her husband’s killer and now, in what should have been her twilight years, she was looking over her shoulder in case the killer came back.
I opened my mouth to apologize then thought better of it. Rick seemed so mad, he could probably keep up this silence for hours. Maybe even tomorrow, too. I’d not got much experience of people who did this when they were upset. Everyone on my street had always just exploded as soon as they felt slighted, without troubling themselves to establish the facts sometimes, never mind not speaking to the person they were mad at.
It was a very middle-class thing to do. I wasn’t sure what the rules were. If he’d just yell at me and throw me around, I’d know where I stood.
Maybe he was mad because I had implied that he was wasting his time taking care of Mrs. Vanderhosen. Obviously, from her husband’s file, she needed some extra hand-holding.
“I—” I began, but the phone rang.
Ugh. Why was apologizing so hard, when my conscience weighed on me so heavily? I just wanted things to go back to how they were a couple of hours ago.
Rick answered it. I strained my ears to figure out what the call was about, but he kept his answers short. When he put the phone back down, I expected him to tell me what was going on, but he didn’t. He simply turned back to his computer and began typing.
Great. Now I had to actively approach him to start this apology off. It would have been so much easier if he had me by the hair and was demanding I said sorry.
“Uh... excuse me?” I began, feeling like it was the wrong way to get his attention, but I had no idea what the correct way would be right now.
“What can I do for you?” The formal tone of his words kicked me in the stomach and throat like I’d made the mistake of standing in the way of a lassoed steer.
“I want to... uh... to apologize...” I murmured.
“What for?”
Oh, great. He was going to make me go the whole nine yards. This was so awkward. I hadn’t felt like this since that time I dropped my lunch tray in elementary school and everyone had laughed and clapped.
Behind my back, I clenched one fist to try and diffuse the build-up of embarrassment that itched at the back of my eyes.
“I’m sorry I was mean to Mrs. Vanderhosen. I didn’t know.”
“And...?”
And? And? What did “and” have to do with anything? Rick said nothing more, he simply fixed me with his best interrogation gaze and I squirmed under it as I remembered how argumentative I’d been in the squad car on the return ride.
“And I’m sorry I spoke to you the way I did on the way back from her place.” Was that enough? Please let that be enough, I begged the universe.
“And...?”
Was he enjoying this? I risked a glance up at him. He was unwaveringly staring down at me. No trace of amusement flickered in his expression. I couldn’t stand it.
“I don’t know what else,” I finished lamely.
“You’re going to apologize to Mrs. Vanderhosen,” he told me. I reached out for the phone and his hand grabbed my wrist. “In person. At a less ungodly hour.”
“Okay. I can do that.” I was a little intrigued by her, now I knew her past. And very aware of how badly I’d wronged her earlier.
“Her dog is still missing and we are going to solve that case if it takes every day of the rest of your life.”
I nodded. I wanted to help her.
“And you’re getting a spanking.”
I deflated. It was really obvious it had been coming but I had still hoped he’d change his mind, especially since he’d said earlier he wasn’t going to spank me. Wait.
“Does that mean you’re not angry anymore?” I asked.
“No. I’m still angry. But I still intend to spank you when I’m not feeling as strongly about this.”
“Why? Couldn’t we just forget about this whole thing?”
“Nope. You and I need to reconcile and on top of that, you need to learn to never, ever do that again. Especially since this was the second time you were out of line on a case.”
Oh, yeah. There was that other old lady a few nights ago. Gosh, I seemed to be screwing up a lot. For a moment, the lid was lifted on my self-confidence and I wondered why he was trying so hard to help me when I was so obviously no good.
“I know you were going to keep working, but take tomorrow off with me and work the day after with Sean. We need to square things between us.”
I didn’t want to lose the day’s pay, but I figured I’d earned a couple of hundred bucks so far this week, it wouldn’t kill me to take the day. I was intensely curious about why Officer Porteous thought we needed to square things so much. There was definitely something between us. Maybe. Or he was the most obliviously helpful guy on the planet and I was the last in a long line of girls he’d allowed to stay in his house—and hired to work with him.
I looked around the empty precinct. If that was the case, where were they all? No, there was definitely something more here than a Boy Scout helping a drifter get her shopping cart across the street safely.
Stay All Night: Arizona Law 2 (Arizona Heat Book 6) Page 6