“I still do, when she’s not using my head for a soccer ball. I had to get a crown fixed last time!” He hooked his finger and stuck it in his mouth, pulling his right cheek back. “Ee? At un air.”
“Please stop showing me your teeth.” Gross. And his health benefits were excellent; I don’t know what he was complaining (so much) about. About the only government agency that had better bennies was the NYPD. “And we can go in just another minute. I’m expecting—”
“Hey, gorgeous!”
The three of us looked; I could already feel the smile blooming on my face, chasing away my yucky mood. Patrick Flannery had come to pay me a visit. And … yes! He was carrying a cake box!
He practically galloped up to me; I was always surprised at how quickly he could move for such a big man … six foot three, two-twenty, and none of it was fat. Amazing, given what he ate. The man practically drank cake batter.
“Great.” George threw his hands in the air. “It’s goddamned Little Debbie.”
“Shush,” I said, and then the breath whooshed out of my lungs as Patrick hugged me so hard he pulled me off my feet. Gaaaah! “Agh, stop, you’re gonna crack my short ribs.”
“Oh, please.” He set me down, smiling. Like a love-struck idiot, I grinned back. The force of his extreme good looks was more intense than the hug. He had dark red hair, like cherry Coke with real cherry juice, and chocolate truffle–colored eyes. (That was a lot of food imagery … I shouldn’t have skipped breakfast.)
Despite the December weather, he was dressed in khaki knee-length shorts (his favorite brand—he had at least six pairs) and a denim shirt with the sleeves rolled back, showing the dark reddish hair shading his heavily muscled forearms. (You wouldn’t believe what an intense upper-body workout baking for a living was.) He wore shorts all year around. I thought it was impractical (Minnesota winters!) but who was I to judge someone else’s strange habits?
I knew he’d looked at me carefully as he approached: he needed to figure out which one of us was driving the body. He’d gotten really good at reading our expressions and body language. He was better at it after three months than some co-workers I’d known for years.
He didn’t run up and hug me without a careful look anymore.
“Hey, Cadence. We on for tonight?” he asked, handing me the box. I didn’t have to look to know he’d made me a coconut cream pie. I had become very popular at work once I started bringing his home-baked treats to the office.
Coconut cream was a safe enough choice: it was my favorite, Shiro didn’t hate it (her fave was baby turtle bread from Kyoto), and Adrienne wouldn’t eat it as her favorite dessert was sirloin steak, but she did like to channel her inner Three Stooges and throw coconut pie. So it was all good. I guess.
I was so busy remembering how hard it had been to get coconut pie out of my washing machine that I realized I hadn’t answered him. “Should be,” I sort-of promised. “I’m sorry we haven’t had a lot of time together lately.” I was, too. Except when I wasn’t.
He reached out, put his finger under my chin, and gently tipped my head up. “You’re worth waiting for. All of you.”
I started to melt. I could actually feel the muscles in my legs go all rubbery. I guess clichés became clichés for a reason, because melting was the perfect word to describe me. I was becoming a beurre blanc! No, wait, that had vinegar in it … beurre noisette? Drat it to dratdom; Shiro was the one who was fluent in French. I’d taken Spanish.
Regardless, soon I’d just be a puddle in an empty shirt, jacket, and slacks. They’d only be able to identify the puddle that was me by my federal ID. (Ooooh, I love accidental rhyming!) Meanwhile, best of all, he was still there. He was still touching me. Even better, I was still there. “Patrick, you’re the best.”
He leaned closer. “That’s true. God, you look gorgeous today. Every day.”
“You always say that.”
“It’s always true.” His mouth was very close now, and I was glad. The whole world had sort of tipped away from us. It was scary and exhilarating at once.
“Gimmee!” George “I will always kill the mood” Pinkman said, then snatched the box out of my hands. “Awww, Little Debbie, you shouldn’t have.”
“Tell me,” he replied grimly, giving my partner a level stare. “Despisement” would not be too strong a word to describe how he felt about George. Nor would “loathe,” “detest,” and (not “or”) “abhor.” George could usually charm females (and female sociopaths could almost always charm males), but could almost never fool a man. He sure hadn’t fooled Patrick, who followed up his glare with: “Shouldn’t you be stomping puppies or whatever it is you do when you’re not torturing my girlfriend?”
George laughed. “Oh, Little Debbie, you’re so cute! You have no idea what torture is.”
“Hi,” Emma Jan said, sticking out her hand. I was startled; I’d forgotten she was there, but now was glad. The atmosphere had gone from loving to murderous in about half a second. “I’m Emma Jan and I collect unusual deaths.”
There was a short silence while Patrick digested that, followed by, “Nice to meet you?” he guessed.
“New girl,” George said by needless explanation.
“Patrick Flannery.” He shook her hand. Since he knew about BOFFO, I could tell he was trying to guess what her superpower was. (That was how Michaela occasionally referred to our, um, special psychotically-based talents.) He wasn’t rude enough to ask, at least not where she would hear him. “You sound just like Paula Deen.”
“So I hear.”
“I hope you like it here. But I’ll get out of your way. I’m sure you’ve got evil to crush and stuff.” He turned to me. “Tonight?”
“Yep.”
He bent and brushed a kiss on my cheek. In that moment, all thoughts of the good Dr. Gallo fled my overtaxed brain.
(I wonder how Dr. Gallo kisses?)
Now where in heckfire did that come from? I must be sleep-deprived. It was the only explanation.
Patrick smoothed my bangs away from my eyes, then tenderly whispered, “Don’t let your asshole partner have even one crumb.”
“Aw. That was so sweet.”
“’Bye!” George was clutching the cake box like a mama cat hung on to one of her kittens. You could practically hear him hissing my own, myyyyyy precious. “No, really. ’Bye! Hope you don’t fall down the stairs and land on your face, or accidentally get your shirt caught in a tractor engine and spend the next year growing back all the skin on your chest.”
Patrick headed toward the elevators, muttering. I caught “asshole” and “shithead” and something that sounded like “mucker.” Oh. Wait. It wasn’t “mucker.”
“How long have you two been partners?” Emma Jan asked. I understood her surprise. There was a bet going around the office about when one of us would snap and beat the other to death. If I killed George in September of next year, I’d win almost eight hundred bucks. And if he had killed me last month … well, let’s just say he wouldn’t have had to borrow lunch money twice last week.
“An eternity,” he sighed, opening the box. “Ohhhh, baby! Where you been all my life?” He heaved the pie plate out of the box. The coconut custard was piled high with fluffy meringue, and had been sprinkled with toasted coconut. The shortbread crust looked like tender, buttery perfection. “Now I remember why you keep Little Debbie around in the first place—besides, I can assume, his big dick.”
“He bakes?” Emma Jan guessed while I felt my face go red to my eyebrows.
“You must be a trained investigator for the federal government,” I teased. Patrick was actually the head of a baking empire, his pies and cakes sold in supermarkets across the country. George’s nasty “Little Debbie” nickname was vintage Pinkman: it was meanly funny, with more than a smidgen of accuracy.
“Cancel my lunch plans, I’m eating your pie. Oh, awesome. I can’t believe I got to say that to your face after all this time.”
“I’ve got three words for you, Geo
rge,” I said sweetly.
“Merry Christmas, baby?” he guessed, sticking a finger into the delicate meringue and scooping some up for a taste. “I want you? What a stud? Please bang me? Little Debbie blows?”
“Splenda Sugar Blend.”
“What? Fuck!” He shook his finger like it had burst into flames and he was trying to wave it out. “Get it off, get it off, get it off off off !” Then he thrust the pie at me and sprinted toward the men’s room.
After a long, thoughtful moment, Emma Jan said, “It’s really weird around here. Are there forks?”
chapter twenty
After George had finished sterilizing his hand (I’d never seen someone go through two bottles of Purell in less than three minutes) and screaming curses at me, Emma Jan, the absent Patrick, the pie, Johnson & Johnson (the company that made Splenda), the absent Patrick, Shiro, Adrienne, the absent Patrick, coconut, meringue, and Splenda, we were able to hit the road.
While we headed to the suspect du jour’s house, I took another look at his file.
Joseph Behrman was a long shot, but he had known the latest JBJ victim, had a criminal record including assaults on teenage boys, and was vague about his whereabouts the night of the murder.
George drove. Emma Jan huddled in the backseat, averting her eyes from the rearview mirror. I pretended she wasn’t doing that, kept my mouth shut, and re-read his file.
Sentence: Ten years, criminal assault
Inmate name: Joseph Aaron Behrman
Sex: Male
DOB: 12/20/1975
Ethnicity: White
Identifying marks: Swastika, left bicep. 88, right bicep. 88, left shoulder blade.
Custody status: Parolee
Releasing facility: Stillwater Penitentiary
Date received: August 17, 2001
Date paroled: January 5, 2008
Crime, Description: Criminal assault. Tampering with a witness. Burglary in the first degree.
Minimum sentence: 6 years
Maximum sentence: 6 years
He looked good on paper (actually like a routine scumsucker), but I had my doubts. He was a little old to have nothing but agg assault and the like on the books, and I didn’t think he’d began secretly killing teenagers practically the day he was paroled.
He also wasn’t exceptionally bright; testing had revealed an IQ of 109. Not that serial killers had to have good IQs like, say, Bundy. But it sure helped.
Behrman was also a misandrist, and he had hurt boys in his past. So we’d go talk to him, more to eliminate him than anything else. It was also a good way to see Emma Jan in action when (probably) our lives weren’t at stake.
I was glad for the chance; she made me nervous. And I was worried about the rearview mirror. George wasn’t. He was always up for excitement.
“Aw,” George said as we swung into the small trailer park. We had just pulled off Highway 149 outside West St. Paul, after passing a few strip malls. George had cruelly refused to stop for a Frappuccino, so we were actually a couple of minutes early.
There was not a heron in sight in the Heron Estates. Only a small, slumped group of mobile homes, no more than two dozen, in various shades of blue and white, green and white, and yellow and white.
Typical of every trailer park I had ever seen, some of the residents appeared to be indifferent slobs who forgot they parked their cars on the lawn. These same people painted their homes about every forty years, and mowed their sad, straggly grass every ten. The gravel roads and general lack of vegetation always made it look like it’d be ninety degrees outside, even in December. You could pretty much smell the despair, and hear the soundtrack from the movie Bastard Out of Carolina.
The other group took meticulous, almost fanatical care of their property. They painted every other year; they grew tons of flowers. They mowed obsessively. Their homes looked like mini-estates, and all the stranger because usually the one across the gravel drive looked condemned.
Behrman lived in one of the former, a faded yellow mobile home with tired white trimming. The dirty snow surrounding the walk was stained with the comings and goings of a small, depressed dog. We could see where the chain had been anchored through the snow and into the ground.
The chain led to a miniature black Lab, or an enormous dachshund. She twitched her eyebrows at us, rose from the nest she’d hollowed out in the snow, and approached, wagging her tail. She was thin, and cautiously friendly. There was a small round blob of white fur on top of her skull; the rest of her was black.
“Huh,” George said aloud. “A neglected dog on a chain outside a shithole. What are the odds?”
Emma Jan didn’t say anything. She just reached into her bowling ball–sized purse and pulled out a muffin. The muffin wasn’t wrapped, and it hadn’t broken in her purse. This was miraculous, given that she had a brush, a wallet, Chapstick (blech! couldn’t stand the taste … like eating a candle), a spare clip, Kleenex, sunglasses, and airplane peanuts. And that was what I just glimpsed when she’d opened it earlier.
She broke the muffin (blueberry) into pieces and offered them to the dog. It must have been hungry, but at first was too scared to come closer. But then it did, gently taking the muffin chunks while also flinching away like it was all a big, mean trick. Like the pain was coming … the dog just didn’t know when.
I could relate. I bet Emma Jan could, too.
Her lips were pressed together so tightly they almost disappeared, and she finally said something I didn’t think was bizarre: “Some people don’t deserve a dog.”
“You probably should have asked the owner,” I said, hating my inner (and outer) Goody Two-shoes, but compelled to blather about rules anyway. “It’s, uh, not cool to just walk up and do that.”
“Unusual death number forty-seven: Prince Popiel, Polans tribe. Ninth century. Eaten alive by mice. That’d be okay for the guy in there,” she told the dog, letting it lick the crumbs off her glove. “That’d be okay for the guy who thinks it’s fine to treat you like this.”
Her Southern accent got thicker when she was angry, I was alarmed to notice. Oh, dear. We did not need another rabid PETA member … the last one had been reassigned after a month in the field. He’d started shooting at cars that ran over squirrels.
It’s not that I didn’t feel bad for the dog. It’s that there were rules.
“Let’s get this show on the road,” George said with jarring cheer, trotting up the short sidewalk without even glancing at the dog. “Ladies first. Then Emma Jam.”
“Emma Jan.”
“Like it matters. Then you, Cadence. Come on, ándale already.”
He banged on the front door. “FBI! Secret Santa! FTD delivery! Avon calling Joseph Behrman, come on down!”
“Don’t have ta yell,” Mr. Behrman said, pulling open the front door. He looked like his intake photo: heavy, short, with shoulder-length dark blond hair. He was in a T-shirt and jeans; bare feet. He smelled like Marlboros and gravy. “Don’t worry about the dawg.” Really! He said it just like that: dawg. You could hear the W. “She won’t hurtcha.”
“Don’t worry, we’re federally sworn upholders of the law and are prepared to shoot her at any moment,” George promised. “Your PO let you know we were coming?”
Behrman sighed. Marlboros, gravy, and grape bubblegum; I stood corrected. “Yep. Talkin’ to the wrong guy but come in anyway.”
He stepped aside for George. George stepped aside for Emma Jan, who had given the dog a final pat and then joined us on the sagging porch. And that’s when the poop slammed into the rotary blades.
chapter twenty-one
When I thought about it later, I realized I should have been tipped off at once. When I thought of George, “helpful” wasn’t the first word that came to mind. How many times in my life would I have to relearn the same damn lesson? Puppies caught on quicker than I—
chapter twenty-two
I had no time to listen to more of Cadence’s woe-is-me catechism; New Girl was, as George would put
it, “losing her shit.” I found that phrase revolting to contemplate yet had to acknowledge how apt it was.
The entire west wall of Behrman’s living room was a mirror. Tacky and smeared, and I had no idea when it had last been cleaned, but a mirror. And it was the first thing Agent Thyme saw when she walked past him into the room. Which would have been no problem at all, except Agent Thyme suffered from Mirrored-self Misidentification.
“Watch out!” Agent Thyme’s terrified shriek seemed as though it would shatter the mirror—which, depending on how large the shards, would have solved the problem, or exacerbated it. Her normally pleasing alto was climbing into a deafening upper register. “She’s going to try to kill you!”
Then she launched herself at the west wall.
I managed to get between her and the mirror, but she had gotten up such momentum my back slammed against the mirror. “Stop it,” I managed, trying not to wheeze. When Cadence got the body back, she would wonder why her kidneys were throbbing. And possibly why she was urinating blood. I would have to leave her a note …
Agent Thyme was a blur of clawing fingers and kicking feet. In the extremity of her terror, she’d forgotten even the simplest takedown moves. Not that they would have worked on a mirror. I think.
I was good, but I had my hands full. I was constrained as I could not kill or seriously injure her. She was constrained by nothing, since in her mind she was saving us from the evil double who lived in the mirror. Thus, every few seconds a fist would get past me and clip me on the ear, or my shins would take another knock. Was the woman wearing steel-tipped yet sensible flats?
Behrman was staring at us, openmouthed. My partner turned to him and said, “This is a thousand times more awesome than I ever could have hoped.”
“Agent Thyme, stop it—ouch—right now. Ouch! You are on the—argh!—list of people—ow—I do not want to hurt. Ow, you pointy-toed shrew! You are not on the—stop it!—list of people I will not hurt.”
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