“He’s okay, I guess.” She tapped the legal pad with the pen. “What else?”
“Oh, right. Well let’s see, we can write down that they worked together on the sale of some county buildings recently.”
“This is already a lot of ways they could be connected,” Maureen sighed, as though writing down a few words had greatly taxed her. “How about a drink?”
“Really? Now?” Manny said, raising his eyebrows. It’s barely been two hours. “Go ahead.” He shook his head.
Maureen popped up and ran into the kitchen. She returned with a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. She put one glass in front of him and set about opening up the bottle.
Manny quickly grabbed it from her. “I’ll pour,” he insisted.
Maureen sat herself down on the floor in front of the coffee table with a loud sigh. She held out her own glass and Manny poured two fingers into the bottom before doing the same with his own.
“Kinda chintzy, don’t you think?” she said, frowning at the amount of liquid.
“We got work to do,” Manny replied. “Pace yourself.”
He raised his glass to her, and she clinked her glass with his, though it seemed with no great relish.
“Mm, that’s good stuff,” Manny said before setting down his glass and picking up the pile of Sandra Locke’s financial documents. “Okay let’s see here. Church. School. Business. Most crimes have something to do with money, so let’s start there.”
Manny read through each document carefully, but nothing jumped off the page. Sandra’s checking account balance hadn’t varied by more than a few hundred dollars either way for years. She’d taken out a second mortgage on her home about a decade before, but her job at the county kept her paid well enough to manage. From what he could see on the statement, she wasn’t in any dire financial straits. He was about to give up and move on when he saw a hospital bill on top of the pile.
The bill was for nearly $200,000 and was dated nine years ago. It looked to be a sum total of the hospital expenses for little Evan’s care. There was the prenatal surgery, the NICU stay, and a follow-up surgery to replace the heart shunt. Manny grabbed the remainder of the pile and began to shuffle through it. A different picture started to emerge.
“I don’t think Sandra told me the whole story,” he said.
“How do you mean?” Maureen asked.
“Well, she told me all about her son’s heart surgery, but not about how it just about broke her financially. It seems that her husband’s life insurance policy paid off a hundred grand of the bills. But the insurance company deemed the surgery ‘experimental and high risk’, so they covered very little, leaving almost ninety grand to pay out of pocket. It was six months after this first bill that she took out a second mortgage on her home, I’m guessing to cover the rest. Thing is, now she’s got two mortgages hanging over her. At first, I thought she was doing just fine, that she was making the payments and all. But it says here that the second mortgage was at a premium rate, and she was paying it out of a savings account from a different bank. And thanks to the interest, she ran through her money about nine months ago. She’d been paying off the original mortgage on the house, but that second mortgage had about forty-five thousand still outstanding.
“The bank had started foreclosure proceedings about six months ago. It looked pretty grim for her. But about three months ago, the whole mortgage was paid in full. Both mortgages. That’s just over seventy thousand dollars. She was able to keep the house, and now has the chance to rebuild her savings.”
“What are you thinking?” Maureen asked. She had refilled her whiskey and took a small sip.
“Isn’t it obvious?” he said. “She’s the county treasurer. I’m willing to bet on embezzlement or something like that. She could get away with it, if she had some help.” If she had help. Manny threw down the papers in his hand and picked through the box on the table until he found what he was looking for.
“Papers on the sale of that county building,” he explained to Maureen. “There’s a work order for over one hundred fifty thousand dollars here. It looks like it’s for lighting and drywall work. I don’t know too much about contractor costs, but that seems incredibly high. For example, a five-pound box of drywall nails for one hundred sixty-nine dollars? I just bought a five-pound box at the hardware store last month for a tenth of that. And since when does the hourly labor charge for a crew of this size run into the triple digits? I think there was some money laundering going on here, and I think both Sandra Locke and Tom Lowes were in on it. Now, I scrubbed the Lowes’ financials and didn’t find anything, but he’s a well-connected guy who can easily hide money in his business or in an offshore account or something, but Sandra? Well, it’s pretty obvious she couldn’t. Whatever the case, whatever they were into, it cost both of them their kids.”
Manny jumped up off the couch and pulled out his phone.
“What are you going to do?”
“I promised I’d give Agent Layton a call when I came up with something.”
“Maybe that’s not the best idea in the world.”
“Why?” he asked her, perplexed.
“Oh, never mind,” she said, turning on the television and scrolling through the channels. “It’s just that, if it were me, I wouldn’t want to call in with every little thing I found. Makes it seem like you’re trying too hard to be liked. Like you want daddy’s approval. I mean, what do you really have except a theory? Also, what do you think he’ll say when you tell him you’ve got me hostage over here? I’m sure he’ll just love that.”
Manny paused for a minute and let her comments sink in. She made a point, though it wasn’t one that gave him any real comfort. True, he had a theory about why the children were killed, but he didn’t have any clear picture about who was doing it. Maybe it would be best to have a little more insight on that before going to the Feds. He wasn’t officially part of the investigation after all, and they had access to the same information that he had in that box. More, probably, since they had greater resources and manpower.
He wasn’t happy about Maureen being right, but he flopped down in his chair and tossed his phone on the coffee table. He sat back and glared at her for a few heartbeats. He thought he could see the barest hint of a smile form on her lips as she stared ahead at the TV.
TWENTY
Agent Layton took a long, slow sip out of his glass of water and adjusted the desk lamp to illuminate the contents of the folder he was just handed. Seated in that cramped, makeshift office, he began to trace in great detail the winding road that one Maureen Allerton had traveled since her brother’s death.
After the eight-year-old girl had been examined by the FBI’s psychologist, she vanished for a time into a boarding school in the northeast. All the file had was a name, but there were stories about this institution that he was at least nominally familiar with. The school had been shut down just before the turn of the century, but its reputation lived on, and it wasn’t a good one. This was just the type of place that would create a guarded, untrusting type of person. Maureen Allen certainly fit the bill.
She cropped up again as an adult. The fingerprint analysis brought up a variety of misdemeanors and a felony, spread across four known aliases. And she wasn’t overly sophisticated. They were all variations on her birth name and kept the same initials. He was puzzled by this at first, but after looking at the signature on a forged prescription for pain killers and a signature on an old car title registration, he understood the method to her madness. Despite representing two different names, the signatures were identical; the M and A letters of the first and last name were clearly legible, while the rest of the writing was no more than a couple of wavy lines. Layton found himself smiling at the fact that he didn’t need to waste much time making connections between her identities.
So Maureen Allen, or Allerton, was a con artist and petty criminal. She had engaged in
identity theft and forgery in her past. There was probably more that she hadn’t been caught for, but what he had was enough for now. The only thing he still questioned was why she chose to live the way she did. His working theory was trauma from her childhood, and if she truly did have second sight, that might be another contributing factor. He’d need to know for sure, however, if he was going to follow through with his plan.
And of course, she’d be of no use to him if she was indeed capable of murder.
TWENTY-ONE
Maureen opened her eyes and stared up at an unfamiliar ceiling. Her arm, resting underneath her head, was numb and stiff, and the pillow she was lying on had an unfamiliar smell. She moved her legs and found that they were covered with a knitted quilt. Gradually, the fog of sleep wore off, and she realized she was lying on the couch in the young detective’s living room. Her mouth was dry and as she turned her head, the half-full bottle of whiskey came into view. She had no headache, but she reached out for it all the same, sat up, and tipped a small amount into her mouth. She swished it around and swallowed.
“Well that’s one way to start the morning,” a voice behind her said.
Maureen turned around and saw Detective Benitez standing on the edge of the living room, holding a cup of coffee in one hand and several papers in the other. He was barefoot, dressed in an athletic T-shirt and mesh shorts, and his physique was more apparent to her than it had ever been. It was nice. He was certainly in shape but didn’t seem obsessed with his body.
“What time is it?” she asked, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes and trying not to stare at him.
“It’s about quarter to ten,” he answered, coming over to the easy chair next to the couch and taking a seat.
“I don’t do anything earlier than noon,” she replied, laying back and covering her face with the blanket.
“There’s coffee in the kitchen if you want.”
“I’m not a coffee drinker.”
“There’s cereal and milk, too, if you’re hungry.”
“Didn’t you hear what I said? I don’t do anything this early.”
“I’d think you’d be nice and rested after conking out the way you did last night.”
His words made Maureen throw the blanket off her face and sit up abruptly. She could barely remember when she fell asleep, but she was certain it was only a few hours ago, like usual.
“What are you talking about?” she asked.
“You were out like a light pretty early,” he said, setting the papers on the coffee table and taking a sip from his mug. “I was kind of surprised. You struck me as more of a night owl.”
“What time was I out?” This was very confusing for her.
“Well, I was up until almost one,” he said, cupping his coffee thoughtfully. “You’d been out for at least an hour. I remember because I looked over at you after Letterman’s first guest, and you were slumped over and asleep. You didn’t even wake up when I took your shoes off, lifted your feet up, and threw the blanket on you.”
Maureen looked down at her feet. She hadn’t even noticed that she wasn’t wearing her shoes.
“I must have drunk more than I thought,” she said, trying to rationalize what had made her sleep so easily in a strange place.
“Not really,” the detective said. “We each had about the same amount. A couple of pours from the whiskey bottle. I don’t suppose you had any dreams last night that might be useful?”
The question took Maureen off guard. She didn’t recall any nightmares. She counted the hours in her head. If the detective was telling the truth, she’d been asleep for somewhere around ten uninterrupted hours. It almost didn’t seem real.
“No, I didn’t dream at all,” she told him. “I was really out that long?”
The detective nodded his head and let his self-satisfied smirk take over his face. That seemed to be the only facial expression that he was capable of around her.
“That’s not possible. I don’t sleep like that.”
“I guess you just really needed the rest then,” he said. “Or you’re just really comfortable here.”
“I think I’ll go ahead and take you up on that cereal,” she said, reaching out and taking one more swig from the whiskey bottle to show him that she wasn’t affected by anything he said. “Where do you keep it?”
“I can get it for you,” he replied, setting his coffee on the table and rising from his chair.
“Not on your life,” she said, jumping off the couch and shoving him back down. “Just tell me where the stuff is.”
“Cereal is in the cupboard to the left of the sink,” he said, shrugging and inclining his head in the direction of the kitchen. “Bowls are on the other side, third cupboard to the right from the corner. Milk’s in the fridge, second shelf.”
Maureen quickly walked into the kitchen. She wasn’t sure that she was all that hungry, but she needed an excuse to get out of the living room for a few minutes. The young detective’s patronizing way of speaking to her threatened to heat her up to a point where she would either slap him right in his face or shove her tongue down his throat. Neither option would do.
She stood staring at the cabinets for a moment before opening the one to the left of the sink. She scanned the shelves packed with the bachelor’s survival kit of canned soup and boxed dinners and found a box of generic corn flakes. She pulled it off the shelf, hopped up onto the counter, and began to nibble the cereal straight out of the box. From her perch, Maureen could just make out the back of the detective’s head poking out above the easy chair. She sat, wondering why she had allowed herself to get into the situation she found herself in. Getting involved with people went against every rule she’d lived by her entire life. She really didn’t think that the detective needed her dreams to solve the case, unless the killer happened to be looking into a mirror. And the longer she stayed in town, the more sure she was that the Feds would force her to face her past sins. Of course, it may just happen that if her help really ended up being integral in finding a double murderer, she could find a way to leverage it into some sort of clemency. At the moment, though, the former seemed more likely than the latter.
Maureen sat in silence, continuing to nibble on the corn flakes and wrestle with her thoughts as they turned toward the detective. She still wasn’t entirely sure what to make of him. On the one hand, that smug air of his trampled all over her last nerve and on the other, she almost felt a sense of pity for him. It was clear that he felt like he wasn’t being afforded the respect he deserved from his fellow officers and his bosses. She hadn’t seen a whole lot of their interactions firsthand, but from what he said, it was probable that this was the case. The short time that she’d already spent with him taught her that he was tenacious at the very least. And he certainly seemed stubborn enough to become the kind of detective he wanted to be.
She hopped off the counter, leaving the cereal box behind, and slowly walked back into the living room. The detective was shuffling through several papers, frowning as he looked at them and mumbling something to himself that she couldn’t quite understand.
“Something wrong?” she asked as she sat back on the couch.
“At the second crime scene, Stacey Winherst mentioned finding what she thought was some kind of accelerant used to set the fire,” he said without looking up at her. “We’ve got a decent amount back from the crime lab from the scene, but nothing on that. I’d really like to have a look at it.”
“How’s that going to help?”
“If there’s something unusual about it,” he said, tossing the papers on the table and looking up at her, “then it might point us toward the person responsible. We can’t afford not to have every piece of information, no matter how insignificant it might seem.”
“So why don’t we just go over to the crime lab and ask someone?”
It seemed like an obvious solution to Maureen, bu
t the detective made a face that signaled to her that he didn’t think much of her suggestion.
“It’s going to be difficult to get anyone to talk to us,” he said, thoughtfully. “But maybe we have no choice.”
“Well then, I’m going to take a shower,” she said, looking forward to taking advantage of a house with a proper water heater.
“Towels are in the linen closet in the hallway,” the detective said. He was wrapped up in looking over his stack of papers for the fourteenth time, but as she got up and walked past him, Maureen caught him glance at her backside. She grinned and couldn’t deny the flattery she felt.
That’s right, she thought. Look all you want. I know I have a nice ass.
She grabbed a change of clothes out of the pillowcase and found the linen closet, pulling out two towels: one for her hair and one for her body. She mused about what a luxury it was to be able to dry different body parts with different towels as she stepped into the bathroom and stripped off her clothes. She turned on the shower, set the water to as hot as she could stand, and stepped in.
Maureen stood under the running water and tried to push the thoughts of the detective out of her head. Nevertheless, she couldn’t help but wonder, if they had met under different circumstances, what they might be like together. The fact that she even entertained such an idea surprised her, as she rarely found herself thinking about a man in that way. All her life, she only sought them out when she needed a quick lay, and even then, she always made sure she was in charge of the encounter. Still, she suspected he might be different. Gentler. She imagined him kissing her neck, running his hands up her sides, laying her down—
“What the hell am I thinking!” Maureen said out loud, snapping herself out of her thoughts. She realized that her hand had begun to stray between her thighs, and she angrily pulled it away, cursing her weak, lustful thoughts. Maureen grabbed a bar of soap, scrubbed herself quickly, and rinsed off.
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