Hush

by Anne Frasier

  What had he done?

  What was happening?

  Out of control. Out of control.

  Now what? The man would talk. He would turn him in.

  He executed a U-turn and came back for the pathetic, worthless life-form that was trying to crawl away. He ran over him again, bones crunching. Then again, and again, finally leaving the scene.

  He looked in his rearview mirror. It was late; the streets were deserted.

  He got on the interstate and drove a full fifteen miles north of where he lived and pulled into a self- service car wash, closing the door behind him. Quickly, he fed money into the meter, turning the dial to hot/soapy. With the wand, he directed the high- power washer toward the car, knocking off chunks of flesh, the water running pink around his feet. After that he drove home, silently entering the house through the side door that led directly to the basement. He kicked off his bloody shoes, then crawled into bed, rocking himself to sleep, sucking his thumb, his mind chanting, Out of control. Out of control.

  Pounding on the floor above woke him. He looked at the clock: 11:45 A.M. He jumped out of bed, his heart racing while the pounding kept on and on. He lost his balance and fell to the floor, to the cement, holding his thick head. Confused. He was so confused. Can't remember. Can't remember.

  Last night. He remembered being sent out for beer. Instead of coming back, he'd spent her money. He'd gotten drunk. No wonder his head hurt so much, no wonder he couldn't think. No wonder he couldn't remember anything else.

  And now she was awake and furious. Unsedated, yet confined to bed, she'd want to know what he'd done with her money. She would yell at him, scream at him.

  Dirty boy, dirty, dirty boy.

  Chapter 32

  Regina Hastings loved Chicago—she'd lived there all her life, but the heat was smothering. They should let cops wear shorts the way they did in Florida.

  She'd grown up south of Chinatown in what was referred to as one of Chicago's bungalow belts. The houses were small, the lots were small, and most people didn't have air conditioners. But when you're little, you don't notice things like that.

  She rechecked the address in her notebook, slowing her Corolla in order to spot the house numbers. She was on the south side of the Twenty-fifth District, an area of town she wasn't that familiar with. Her beat had always been north of Grand. She spotted Hanks, the tavern where a brutal murder had taken place a few days earlier.

  She was sick of the Madonna Murderer case. When she was initially "chosen" to be a part of the investigation, she'd found it flattering. And she thought it would be fun, interesting, a break from rapid-response patrol, not to mention more hours and more money. But damn. She was always assigned the boring jobs. If she'd wanted to do this kind of door-to-door shit, she'd have become an Avon lady. And if she'd wanted to work on a project that required long-term commitment with possibly no chance of fulfillment or success, she'd have become a cancer researcher.

  And she had to admit to herself that she missed being able to torment Ronny all day.

  The fucking house numbers. Wasn't it a law that residents of Chicago had to have visible numbers on all the houses? If it wasn't, it should be.

  Counting back from the corner, she finally hit pay dirt.

  The place she was looking for was in a run-down area that the revitalization project hadn't yet found— or had purposefully overlooked. It was rust-stained stucco, with pale green shutters and matching trim. Weeds grew in the chain-link fence that surrounded an adequate yard. She could hear downshifting semis from one of the nearby interstates.

  This was about the twentieth stop she'd made today. A month earlier, they'd investigated everyone they could find in the Chicago area who'd been released from a mental hospital within the last five years. Now they'd decided to go back ten years, which gave them a head count of literally hundreds of ex-patients to wade through. This time they were looking for patients who had a connection to math. And guess who had to do the footwork? Give it to Regina. Regina will do it.

  The task had seemed insurmountable, but thank God they'd pulled officers from other sections who were now having as much fun as she was. What really burned her butt was that Ramirez was lounging around at Headquarters, soaking up air conditioning, faxing handwriting samples to offices, schools, public agencies, basically any place that kept documents on file. Maybe she should give him a break. He'd actually been going out of his way to be nice, but she was scared shitless of becoming just another notch in his belt. Instead of driving him off as it did most guys, her rape revelation seemed to have increased his interest. Almost every day he invited her over to his place for dinner, but she always declined, mostly because she knew that a little wine, a little candlelight, could send her over the edge and pretty soon he'd know the what and where of her tattoo.

  She stepped from the little green Toyota she'd recently purchased. She'd never had a new car before, and she couldn't help but admire it on a daily basis, looking it over for door dings every time she got out. Two days ago, someone in the parking lot at Headquarters had put a tiny dent in it. She'd flipped out when she'd seen it.

  Dressed in her blue uniform, her badge in place, clipboard in hand, Regina approached the fenced yard looking for signs of a dog. There were none. The gate wasn't locked, so she lifted the metal latch.

  At the front door, she knocked, then stepped back to wait, grateful that the porch was at least shaded. To her right, a window air conditioner hummed. The shades were pulled down tight to keep out the hot sun. She knocked a second time. Finally a middle-aged man answered, drying his hands on the red-and-white- checked apron that was tied casually around his waist.

  "I was canning spaghetti sauce," the man said with a friendly, almost bashful smile. He was of average height, dark hair, dark eyes.

  A man who cooked. For Regina, it was almost love at first sight.

  "Just wondered if I could ask you a few questions," she said. "It'll only take a minute."

  "Sure." He opened the screen door wider. "Why don't you come in? It's too hot to stand outside."

  Regina didn't hesitate. "Thanks," she said, stepping inside the cool darkness. As her eyes adjusted, she noted that the living room was neat and tidy even though the furniture was old. From the back of the house, a television blared loudly.

  He closed the door to keep the cool air from escaping, then took a seat on the couch while she sat in a chair nearest the door.

  "That smells good," she said, her stomach growling in a Pavlovian reflex.

  "It's an old family recipe," he said, bobbing his head. "Lots of garlic and oregano."

  She got back on track and established that his name matched the one on her list. She asked her first question on the standardized form Detective Irving had drawn up to simplify her job. "Were you a patient at the Elgin Mental Hospital?"

  "That's right." His affirmative got the ball rolling.

  That was followed by several more seemingly harmless questions. "What do you do for a living?" she asked. "Chef, maybe?" Good to joke around, lighten the mood a little. Everybody was intimidated by the uniform.

  He rubbed his hands together. "I do like to cook, that's true, but when I'm not cooking I transcribe music."

  She made a note of that, balancing the clipboard against her leg. "What does that mean exactly?"

  "Say, would you like something to drink? Iced tea? Pepsi? Water?"

  "No thanks, but that's nice of you to ask. What do you mean by transcribing music?" she repeated.

  "I listen to music and transcribe it into notes."

  "Oh, wow. So you're a musician?"

  "More into music theory."

  She had no idea what that meant, but she plowed on. "Anything else? Do you do anything else?"

  "I write code part time for a place called Astral Plain."

  "Code?"

  "For computer programs."

  "That must be tough. I don't know anything about computers. I mean, I know how to read and send E-mail and that's i
t. I keep thinking I should take a class. I think the department even offers them for free."

  "Yeah, you really should."

  "So you design programs?"

  "No, I write the code. Code. You know. The system of numbers that gives the computer the commands."

  Red flag.

  But the connection with numbers didn't really mean all that much. She'd had a lot of red flags that day. In fact, one of her interviews was with a math teacher, another an accountant. It seemed like the mathematics field went hand in hand with mental instability. Good thing she hated math.

  He stared at her, trying to read her mind, but couldn't.

  She was one of those tacky kind of women with huge bleached hair, big boobs, and a cocky, almost mannish way of carrying herself. When she wasn't working, she probably spent a lot of time in bars or at home laughing along with a sitcom soundtrack.

  "Do you like foreign films?" he asked, noticing that she wore no wedding band.

  She waved his words away. "When I see a movie, I don't want to have to read the print at the bottom of the screen—"

  "Subtitles. They're called subtitles."

  "Well, I don't want to have to read anything, and I want the actor's voices to match the movement of their mouths." That said, she got back to the questions. "How long have you worked at your present occupation?"

  Sweat was rolling down her face, taking cream- colored makeup with it. Her shirt was wet at her armpits, and she was beginning to smell up his house.

  "Are you married?" he asked.

  "Can we please stick to the question? And no, I'm not married."

  "Five years," he said. "I've been with Astral Plain five years. I've been transcribing music a lot longer. It's kind of an off and on thing, you know."

  She jotted that down. "Well, that's it. Told you this wouldn't take long." She got to her feet and held out her hand toward him, obviously expecting him to shake it.

  He didn't want to touch her, but he forced himself to take her hand—and immediately knew he'd made a mistake.

  The handshake was the final part of the interrogation.

  "That's quite a scar you have there," she said, turning his arm so she could get a better look. "Did you get it cooking?"

  He laughed nervously.

  "It's a burn from a car accident I was in years ago. Doctors tried doing a graft, but it didn't take." His mind raced. "Hey," he said as smoothly as possible. "Would you like to take a jar of spaghetti sauce with you?"

  At first he feared she was going to refuse. But then she smiled with those big yellow horse teeth of hers and said, "Sure. I'd like that."

  He hurried to the kitchen, his eyes rapidly moving from place to place, looking for something, something—

  He opened one drawer, then another.

  There. A heavy wooden meat tenderizer.

  He picked up a quart jar of spaghetti sauce, wrapping a big kitchen towel around the base, hiding the wooden mallet, then scurried back out to the living room.

  "Careful," he said, extending the spaghetti sauce to her. "It's still hot."

  "That smells great." She reached for the jar with both hands.

  He pulled the meat tenderizer from under the wrapped towel. Swinging high and swiftly, he brought it down against her temple, the blow dropping her to her knees, the spaghetti sauce falling with her, breaking, the sound muted by the towel and the thick red contents of the jar. Dazed, she moved her sauce-covered hand to her gun. Before she could make contact, he stepped hard on her hand, her fingers snapping. He struck again, and again, and again until she lay on the floor unmoving.

  He stopped his ragged breath and listened for any sound from the bedroom. Nothing but the television blaring away. She hadn't heard a thing. Why did drugs get such a bad rap? If he had his choice, he'd keep his mother medicated for the rest of her life.

  "Are these all the reports from today's canvass?" Max asked, thumbing through a stack of papers. He stood in front of the wall of fame—the wall loaded down with an ever-growing array of crime-scene photos, the metro map with the yellow-headed marking pins denoting every Madonna Murderer crime scene since the very first eighteen years ago. In the center of the wall someone with a sense of humor had enlarged a color photo of the formaldehyde globe with its floating tattoo so it was now the size of four eight- by-tens.

  It was 7:00 P.M. and most of the superficial members of the task force had gone home two hours ago. The only people left were Ramirez, Ivy, and Max. Any phone messages would be handled at the main switchboard.

  "Wait a minute, Detective." Ramirez dug through a stack of papers. "Hastings faxed these to us about an hour ago." He handed them to Max.

  "Why didn't she bring them in?"

  "Says she got sick when she was out doing her canvassing," Ramirez said, leaning so far back in his office chair Max thought he might tip over. "Heatstroke, maybe." Ramirez shrugged, pulled another sheet of paper from the desk and handed it to Max. It was a faxed note from Regina.

  "Anything stand out in the interviews?" Ivy asked.

  She sat at a table in the corner of the room, a half- eaten sandwich at her elbow, along with a cold cup of coffee. She'd spent the entire day reading and rereading crime-scene interviews, trying to find anything that may have been missed the first, second, and third times through, something that might tie in with Max's number theory.

  Max handed her half the stack, then dropped down on the sofa.

  "An amazing percentage of mental patients have some kind of math background," Ivy commented.

  "I have three right here," Max said.

  "That seems odd. Doesn't that strike you as odd?"

  "What are you saying? That the answers aren't accurate?"

  Ivy rubbed her temples. She'd been sitting under fluorescent light for too long. All the numbers and letters on the page in front of her were jumping around. "I don't know. I'm not thinking straight. So where do we go from here?"

  "We'll pull the patients with a mathematical background, and you and I will interview them starting early tomorrow."

  Ivy nodded dully. She needed to close her eyes for a while. Maybe she would he down on the couch. Take a little nap before going home to feed Jinx. . . .

  The sound of a plastic receiver clattering into the cradle jarred her, and she realized she'd been sleeping while sitting at the table. She'd been dreaming about lying down.

  "She doesn't answer her phone."

  "Who?" The question came from Max.

  "Regina."

  "If I were sick," Ivy said, talking with her eyes closed, "I wouldn't answer the phone. Half the time it's just a telemarketer anyway."

  "Yeah. Yeah, I guess you're right." Ramirez got to his feet, gathering up his take-out trays, wrappings, and cups. "Maybe I'll swing by her place in the morning, see if she's feeling any better."

  "Let's all call it a night," Max said. "I promised Ethan I'd be home early." He checked his watch and realized it was already too late for that.

  The next morning, Ronny Ramirez went by Regina's place even though it was a whole forty-five minutes out of his way and would mean fighting rush-hour traffic on the way back to Headquarters. She had an apartment in a suburb north of Area Five. It wasn't a great place, not like Ramirez's warehouse apartment, but it was okay. The building was a huge brick thing that looked like a hospital—and maybe had been a hospital at one time. A lot of old people lived there, and a lot of crying kids. When you walked down the dark hallway, you could smell the gross stuff they were cooking. At his place, they didn't allow kids. His place was geared toward single people in their twenties, with a lap pool and a great workout room.

  Her car wasn't in the parking lot. She'd just gotten it two weeks ago, having him come out and look at it when they were taking a break. Like a kid with a new toy, he thought, smiling to himself.

  She must already be at work, he decided.

  He pulled out his cell phone and dialed Headquarters. "Extension 280."

  A woman answered, but it wasn
't Regina. "Regina there?" he asked.

  Whoever was manning the phone must have been new—she had to ask, and then she came back on the line with a negative.

  Ronny pushed the end-call button, then sat there drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. She should have been at work by now. Thirty seconds later, he parked his black Lexus and went into the building.

  He buzzed her room, but there was no answer—not unexpected. So he buzzed the office manager and asked to be let in to check on the welfare of a friend.

  The female manager accompanied him to Regina's room, knocking. When there was no answer, she unlocked the door.

  He'd been to her place several times in the past two weeks but still hadn't been able to get her to soften toward him. She thought he just wanted in her pants. He did want in her pants, but he'd been forced to grudgingly admit to himself that he liked her. Hell, he couldn't quit thinking about her. He'd always been physically attracted to her, but something happened the day she told him about being raped and almost dying. He began seeing her as a multidimensional person with feelings and a past. And he suddenly wanted to prove to her that he could treat her with the respect and admiration she deserved.

  The only pet Regina had was a fish she'd told him was called a betta. He wasn't a pet person—pets were a pain in the ass. Anytime anybody in his building left for a few days, they always had to find somebody to take care of Muffy, or Fluffy, or Foo Foo. At the time she'd told him about the fish, he'd wondered why anyone would want a damn fish, but later he'd caught himself looking at it, admiring the colors.

  "Regina!"

  Silence.

  It didn't take but a minute to see that she wasn't there—the apartment consisting of a combined kitchen- living area, a bedroom, and a bathroom. The bed was a mess, but the other times he'd been there it had been unmade. The bathroom didn't have that humid, recently used feeling. The sink was dry, and, when he pulled back the pink shower curtain, so was the tub.