Jason chuckled. An old pilot flying along in his private plane while an escort serviced him—that would certainly explain the crash. Talk about your friendly skies.
Then he saw a second story, in which an elderly woman was rushed to the hospital with some mysterious ailment. The reporter interviewed the seventy-five-year-old husband, a Jim Hutchinson, who said, “My poor wife, Mary, woke up in the middle of the night, having some sort of fit, or sexual dream, in which she was having way too much fun without me. We haven’t been intimate for years, and she was really going at it. At first, I thought there was someone else in the bed with her; my damned eyesight’s bad and I couldn’t see a thing. When I turned on the lights and put on my glasses, she was there, by herself, climaxing all over the place. Did I mention that she was doing this without me? I still can’t figure out what the hell happened, because her hands were waving over her head like she was dancing on her back. Anyhow, whatever was going on, she was enjoying it so much that I was afraid her heart would give out. Her last climax was so strong she seemed to levitate above the bed. I got scared and called 911 when she appeared to stop breathing. It isn’t fair that she had so much sex that it almost killed her, and I haven’t had any for years.” The old man didn’t seem all that concerned about his wife; he just kept repeating how unfair it was that he’d been left out.
The news reporter joked, “Apparently the wife survived, and is in the hospital in stable condition. I must say, I’m a little jealous myself. It sounds like this elderly couple is seeing a lot more action that I am.”
Jason mumbled, “I think I’m getting the hang of this PI thing.”
Both news stories took place within driving distance of CureStuff Pharmaceuticals, where they developed antidepressant drugs, at least one of which caused unreported side effects of rats humping themselves to death. Both stories included victims suffering from some type of hypersexual response.
“Coincidence? Probably not. There has to be some connection here, but what? And what do an airline pilot and an old woman have to do with the attempted murders of Wendy Thompkins and Joanne Shipley?”
CHAPTER 14
It was Lucy’s sixth birthday. Chelsea invited several of Lucy’s friends for a party, complete with games, cake and ice cream. One of the games was “pin the tail on the daddy,” Chelsea’s idea. She thought the kids would get a laugh out of this, so she made up some paper donkey tails and talked Jason into letting the kids chase him around the house, trying to pin them on his posterior. This started out as fun, with several squealing little girls chasing the daddy donkey. As he fled from the swarm of five and six-year-olds, Jason said, “Thanks, Chelse. I always dreamed of being chased by hordes of children. And the mask and ears make it even better.”
Chelsea yelled over the squeals of the delighted children, “Run, donkey, run! They’re gonna get you.” She couldn’t help but laugh.
Jason was overwhelmed by a swarm of small children, three of whom planted their tails squarely on his rear end. Jason yelped, “Ouch. What in the heck! That hurts. Woman, what did you do?”
Chelsea said, an evil grin, “Why, whatever do you mean, dear?”
Jason turned to look at his backside. Removing one of the tails, he said, “What? Wife, I assumed you’d use Scotch tape. These tails have actual pins in them, and three of them penetrated my blue jeans and stabbed me. Why would you do that? That wasn’t nice at all.”
“Well, you normally use pins when you play pin the tail on the donkey. Did it hurt much? Maybe, if you were a stricter disciplinarian with our thirteen-year-old or weren’t hell-bent on this PI thing, this game might have involved Scotch tape. I guess I was just distracted trying to keep the girls in line. Plus, I didn’t really think the pins would penetrate your jeans,” she said, feigned innocence in her voice.
The game abruptly ended after Jason removed the three pins from his rear end. He looked at Chelsea, and said, “I won’t be able to sit for a week.”
She gave him one of her mischievous grins. “Oh, don’t be such a big baby. You’ll be fine. I’ll make it up to you later.” She didn’t have a puppy face, but she had her own way of making Jason do her bidding
After games, it was time for cake and ice cream. Everyone gathered around the kitchen table, Chelsea delivered the cake with six candles to Lucy, everyone sang “Happy Birthday,” the birthday girl blew out the candles, and Chelsea cut the cake. Chelsea said, “Jason, please serve the young ladies their drinks.”
Jason asked the girls, “So, ladies, what’s your pleasure? We have iced tea or soda, Pepsi, root beer and Fanta orange.”
Jason delivered a cold drink to each guest. The birthday girl was last. “Here, Lucy, a nice big glass of Pepsi on ice. That should go good with cake and ice cream.”
Jason made the mistake of sitting the glass too close to the edge of the table. He turned his back for a second, to go to the refrigerator for his own drink, when he heard a crash followed by, “Daddy! I’m all wet! My pretty dress!” Then he heard his daughter crying. He turned and saw the empty glass on the floor and a very wet birthday girl covered with sticky soda and ice.
One of the guests said, “Lucy’s all wet. Lucy’s all wet. Look what her daddy did.” The children all laughed. Lucy cried even harder.
Another guest chided, “Poor Lucy. Are you okay? I’ll bet the ice is cold. I’m sorry your daddy spilled soda on your new dress. Bad daddy.”
Lucy stopped crying. “Daddy, what did you do? You’ve ruined my bestest new dress. How could you! You are so mean.” Then she began to cry all over again.
Chelsea gave Jason one of her death stares. “Way to go, Dad. The poor thing’s drenched. Come on, Lucy. Let’s go up to your room, clean you up, and get you into some dry clothes.” Again, to Jason, “Good luck entertaining a room full of five and six-year-old girls. Maybe you could play another round of pin the tail on the donkey.”
As Chelsea and Lucy started to leave the kitchen and head upstairs, Lucy’s oldest sister, Lizzy, spoke up in a consoling voice. “Don’t worry, Lucy. You shouldn’t feel too bad. Daddy spilled iced tea on me at my seventh birthday party.”
Lilly said, “Yeah, Lucy. And he took me to the movies for my eighth birthday and spilled a large soda all over me and my popcorn. I was all wet and had to eat soggy popcorn during the movie. Sometimes Daddy’s just mean.”
Jason was mortified and said, “So each of my daughters has a list of the mean things that I’ve done to you over the years? What else is on these lists? Am I really such a bad dad?”
He was immediately sorry he’d asked as his daughters started rattling off all his fatherly mistakes. Lizzy, never bashful when it came to speaking her mind, said, “Well, let’s see. You promised you’d be there for my gum surgery, but you had to go to work that day instead. You hugged me in front of my friends. And one day you dropped me off at McDonald’s to have lunch with some friends, and you refused to let me out of the car around the corner so no one would see that my dad drove me. You also talked to my boyfriend. You really can be mean.”
Lilly chimed in, “Yeah, and he spilled soda on me on my birthday, embarrassed me by asking me if I did my homework in front of my friends, and refused to take me for a ride on the riding lawn mower or let me drive it. Lizzy’s right. He can be a meany.”
He asked, “So each of you has a list. Out of curiosity, do you all have a similar list for your mother? What horrible things has she done to you?”
The girls said, in unison, “There’s no list for Mommy. She never does anything mean. She’s a good mommy.”
Chelsea smiled. “Come on, Lucy. Let’s get you cleaned up.”
Jason was devastated. He tried so hard to be a good dad and a loving father. He had no idea why each of his daughters had such a nasty mental list. He mumbled, “This seems really unfair, but there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about it.” He looked around the room at all of the five and six-year-old girls, bundles of energy that were literally bouncing in their seats or fra
ntically running round and round the kitchen table, and he simply shrugged, gave up, and said, “Okay, so, how about another game of pin the tail on the daddy?”
CHAPTER 15
Todd DeMarco was a construction worker building a skyscraper in downtown Charlotte, North Carolina. He was an ironworker known for his fearlessness when it came to walking the high steel. He was fifty years old and tall. His most prominent feature was a massive beer belly, suggesting that he drank a couple of six-packs a night, although his disheveled brown hair with gray sideburns and round, wrinkled face were also quite noticeable. A large mouth with thin lips, a weak chin, large teeth and a chicken neck accompanied his small, brown, bloodshot eyes and bulbous, reddish nose, which served as further evidence of his voracious thirst for cheap beer. In spite of his passion for drink, he had amazingly good balance on the high beams. However, since he had no waist, his belt had difficulty holding up his pants, which were at risk of falling down around his knees and tripping him, launching him off the building.
On Thursday morning he showed up for work with a mild hangover and coffee from a nearby food cart and took the construction elevator up to the fourteenth floor, where he was welding steel girders into place. Two other men, an electrician and a carpenter, were in the elevator with him. The three of them grunted at each other, and DeMarco said, “Another day, another dollar. Too damn bad we’re on the high steel. Can’t see the babes walkin’ by.”
The electrician said, “Better not be lookin’ for babes up there. That’s a long way to fall for a look at a nice ass.”
The carpenter said, “Yeah, but if he lands on his head, he’ll be fine.” Both men laughed, and they all exited the elevator and took their places on the high steel.
DeMarco sat on a steel beam for a few minutes, drinking his coffee and looking at the stream of tiny people down below headed to work. He finished his coffee and suddenly began to feel strange. He couldn’t stop thinking about sex, which wasn’t all that unusual, but this was different. Something seemed to shift inside his head, and he heard a noise behind him. He turned around and saw a woman standing on the high beam a couple of feet from him. She was a tall blonde whose ample bosom poured out from a see-through nighty, barely long enough to drape across her smooth behind, leaving what felt like six feet of strong, tan legs fully exposed. Her dark eyes had a mischievous glint to them, matched by her pouty grin.
The other two men working nearby heard DeMarco say, “Well, hello there, darlin’. Ain’t you a hot little number! What the hell are you doin’ all the way up here? Don’t get me wrong, I ain’t complainin’, but ain’t you kinda cold with the wind and that flimsy nighty? How about you come over here and I’ll warm you up.”
The other two men were only a couple of steel beams away from DeMarco, close enough to see and hear what was going on. One of them, the electrician, a stocky Mexican gentleman named Jorge with prison tattoos covering his arms and neck, looked in DeMarco’s direction and said to Tony, the large Italian carpenter, “What the hell’s DeMarco doin’? Who the fuck’s he talkin’ to?”
Both men watched as DeMarco walked across the steel beam, reaching out with both hands to . . . something? Someone? But there was no one else on the beam anywhere near him. He kept saying, “You’re one hot broad. Come to papa.” He kept walking forward until he reached one of the upright steel girders. He reached out, placed both arms around the girder and began to hump it like a crazed dog.
Jorge said, “Jesus Christ. He’s gone loco. He’s trying to bang that steel girder. Somebody musta put somethin’ in his coffee. I never seen nothin’ like this before.”
Tony responded, “Me either. I’ve heard of lovin’ your work, but this is fuckin’ nuts. Man, look at him go. He reminds me of my dog, Buck, when he was a puppy and he first met my mother-in-law. He went after her leg like there was no tomorrow. I didn’t make him stop right away, and man, was she pissed. My wife chewed my ass out, but I loved it.” He laughed as they both watched DeMarco continue to go after the steel girder.
Finally, Jorge said, “Hey, Tony. Shouldn’t we do somethin’? He’s gonna hurt hisself, or else he’s gonna lose his balance and fall. He’s a crazy bastard, but he’s one of us. Don’t want to see him die.”
Tony said, “No, let’s just let him be. He’s not gonna fall. He’s got a death grip on that girder. If he keeps it up, worst thing’ll happen he’ll mess his pants. I don’t want nuthin’ to do with that.”
Just as Tony finished, DeMarco let go of the girder, turned and started walking in the other direction on the bare steel beam. He reached out his arms again, and they heard him say, “Oh boy, a redhead. I just love redheads. So fuckin’ much passion. Come here, darlin’. Don’t be shy. C’mere and I’ll keep ya warm. Maybe you can join me and the blonde over there for some real fun.”
He reached out again and began to walk faster, like he was chasing someone, but Tony and Jorge still didn’t see anyone else on the steel beam. Jorge yelled, “Hey, DeMarco, what the hell you doin’? You better slow down. You’re gonna fall.”
DeMarco seemed to hear Jorge, was startled, turned to look in his direction, missed a step and fell fourteen stories to the ground. As he fell, they heard him yell, “Sonofabitch. I was about to get me a two-fer, the blonde and a redhead. Sheeit!” Then they saw him hit the pavement in a spatter of red that continued to spread across the sidewalk.
Jorge said, “I don’t see no blonde or redhead, but I hope he at least got his rocks off before he hit the ground. What a bummer.”
Tony said, “I’ve been at this a long time, and I ain’t never seen nothin’ like that. DeMarco went batshit crazy. He went after that steel girder like a wild man, and now he’s a skid mark on the sidewalk. He musta took some kinda drug or somethin’. I’d know if there was a hot blonde or redhead up here. All I see is you, and you ain’t no hot babe, that’s for damn sure. I better call 911, though I don’t think it’ll do much good at this point.”
CHAPTER 16
Jason had hit a wall with his investigation. He had interviewed Dick Littlething, Lance Harden, Tanya Grayson and his carpooler, Joanne Shipley, and hadn’t been able to remove anyone from his list of suspects. Seated at his desk in his home office, he was drawing a diagram of the case on a whiteboard—a group of suspects on the left represented by stick figures in a dress or pants, along with their names, motives, and a line pointing from each suspect to a specific victim, similarly depicted in a separate group on the right.
“Let’s see.” Jason mumbled, “Littlething was rejected by Wendy Thompkins and Joanne Shipley, and apparently held a grudge against them.” He drew lines from a very short stick figure in pants with Littlething’s name to both of the victims, lady stick figures in dresses. “Harden had dated Shipley earlier, she broke it off with him, and he’s now dating Wendy Thompkins. Even though they’re dating, he blamed Thompkins for the failure of his first antidepressant drug, Pleasuria, because she refused to give a high enough dose in the clinical trials, so he had motives for harming both women.” Jason drew lines from Lance Harden’s name and much taller stick person in pants to both victims. More mumbling. “So, Littlething and Harden are my prime suspects, although I have no idea how either of them managed to administer a drug or poison to Joanne Shipley when they were in North Carolina and she was in Northern Virginia.”
Jason sat and stared at the whiteboard for a few minutes. “Oh crap. Joanne Shipley might also have had a motive for harming Wendy Thompkins. Joanne dated Lance Harden, who broke up with her and went on to date Wendy. Maybe Joanne, an alleged victim, actually faked her own poisoning in order to draw attention away from herself, and she was the one who really tried to kill Wendy.” He drew a line from a stick person in a dress with Joanne Shipley’s name under it to Wendy Thompkins’s stick figure, and another line in a circle from Joanne Shipley to herself.
“This detective stuff is hard,” he mumbled. “I’m literally going around in circles. I have no idea what I’m doing, what the hell’s going
on, or how to figure it out. But I can’t let Chelsea know. She’s already pissed at me for thinking about quitting the government. I also need to do a better job of interrogating this Lucy Chang. I only spoke with her briefly, and I have no idea if she has a motive for harming these two women. This stuff is exhausting. I actually have to talk to people. I hate talking to people. They’re so annoying.”
He had another thought. The only person he could reasonably cross off his list of suspects was Tanya Grayson. Tanya was way too good looking and hot to be involved in murder. Why would such a drop dead gorgeous woman need to kill anyone? She can get whatever she wants from any man just by asking. What kind of horrible world would it be if such a good-looker murdered people? No one would have a chance. It just couldn’t be her. In fact, there were men that would probably kill just to get next to her. Maybe that’s what happened.
He wrote Tanya Grayson on the whiteboard, drew a stick figure in a dress, and then gave this stick figure an ample bosom as an afterthought. He placed this stick person off to the side with no interconnecting lines.
Jason was confused by his own logic and frustrated by his inability to identify the killer. Lucy Chang had mentioned that Tanya was interested in Lance Harden at one point and that Lance had been dating Wendy Thompkins at the time, but that was probably nothing. Maybe it was just Jason’s testosterone talking, but he couldn’t believe that a woman who looked like that, dressed like that, and smelled like that could be jealous of anyone, and certainly not enough to kill because of it. It just was not possible.
Then, Jason asked himself, What would Jessica do? and he decided that at this point Mrs. Fletcher would try to annoy people to death by asking a lot of meaningless questions. So he phoned Dick Littlething to make an appointment for another visit to CureStuff.
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