by Tracy Clark
There were dozens of photographs and small personal items that were obviously Allen’s displayed carefully on a long table—a compact with the initials V A spelled out in diamonds, a monogrammed handkerchief with the same letters on it, and a pair of old eyeglasses. I turned around in a slow circle to take it all in, before my eyes fell at last on a shelf of dying flowers in glass vases. Allen’s flowers: the flowers Chandler had sent her, the ones Allen had ordered her to destroy. They were all there, dying by degrees. That was the smell I’d noticed—organic decay. And against a far wall, on a shelf lined in red velveteen, sat a scuffed purse, a man’s watch, a framed photograph of Deton and Henry Peets, and a couple of old billfolds. I found Philip Hewitt’s driver’s license, credit cards, and money inside the first billfold. The second held only two items—an ID card to StreetWise, a newspaper published by the homeless, and an expired meal ticket to one of the local missions, both for a Lyndon Barnes Jr.
“Who’s Lyndon Barnes?”
I thought I’d ID’d all of Chandler’s victims, but there were obviously others. How many more? I picked up a folded piece of paper that looked like it had been trampled on, but I knew what it had to be before I even opened it up. Dontell Adkins’s letter of recommendation. Dontell’s grandmother had taken comfort in knowing a kind woman had stopped to hold his hand while he lay dying. Safe bet that woman had been Chandler. She hadn’t been there to ease Dontell’s fears in his final moments. She had been there to get that letter back.
These were Chandler’s trophies, her prizes.
The purse belonged to Linda Sewell; her wallet and keys were inside. The woman’s wallet belonged to Chandler herself. Was this her idea of a joke? A stack of white paper and a handful of red fine-point markers lined up like pickets in a fence sat on a writing table. The letters had come from here. I rushed out of the room, pulling my cell phone out of my pocket as I went. I dialed Tanaka’s number.
“Where the hell are you? I told you to stay put.”
“Chandler checked herself out of the hospital.” I moved fast for the front door. “She isn’t at her apartment, but she’s built a shrine to Allen, complete with items she took from each of her victims—Hewitt, Sewell, Adkins, even a guy I’d never heard of, Lyndon Barnes Jr. Try running the name. See if it matches any unsolved homicides.”
“Slow down. What? Where are you?”
I closed Chandler’s front door so that it was back the way I’d found it. “Are you still at Allen’s?”
“No. I’m on my way to the hospital to talk to Chandler. Wait. Did you just say she checked herself out?”
“Yes. You’re too late. She’s long gone. She’s not home, either. There are no signs that she’s even been back here. The place looks like a tomb. She’s running.”
“What are you doing there?”
“Don’t worry about it. She’s got no reason to come back here, but she could be heading for Allen.”
“Then that’s a no go. We left her with her lawyers and her security team.”
Chandler would be hard pressed to get past all that, I thought, especially in her condition. Maybe she had decided to just cut her losses and go. If so, she had a healthy head start.
“You need to see her place,” I said. “And then you need to find her.”
Tanaka said, “I need to talk to you first. Will you just stop and . . . Oh, screw it.”
The line went dead.
Chapter 38
The cops couldn’t find Chandler anywhere. Neither could I. She hadn’t booked a plane ticket or run for the train or bus. She’d just poofed. A day went by. The trail was not only cold but arctic.
“She’s not just going to give up.” I turned to Tanaka, who was sitting in my client chair, glaring at me. “She has to be somewhere. Did you ask Allen if she had any ideas?”
“I’m done with you questioning my capabilities, you know that? I know what the hell I’m doing. I ought to arrest you right now. Your fingerprints have been all over this case since day one.”
“And you know why.”
“Don’t care why.”
“You saw that room. The trophies.”
“Yeah, you walked all over that, too. A good lawyer could argue you planted it all or at least tampered with it.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
Tanaka’s expression hardened. “I’m beginning to not like you.”
“I don’t care.”
She stood. “You don’t work well with others. Anybody ever tell you that?”
“Yeah, everybody who I didn’t work well with. You got something to say, say it.”
“I just did.”
We gave each other the cop stare. It was more frustration than anything else, I thought. Chandler was out there somewhere. Time was ticking away. Allen was out there, too, going about her business, making herself a perfect target. No one, not even her Titan handlers, could convince her to lay low until Chandler had been found. She was lethal and on the loose, and no one had a clue as to where she was.
“Lyndon Barnes,” I said. “Or am I not allowed to ask?”
Tanaka paced. “You don’t quit, do you?” She faced me, resigned, it appeared. “DUI two years ago. Alcohol levels through the roof. He hit a pole, took a header into a swampy ditch. It took four hours for someone to find him. DOA at the hospital. And he had no connection to either Allen or Chandler, so there’s your theory down the tubes.”
“There is a connection, or else his ID wouldn’t be on her trophy shelf. She killed him, somehow. Question is, Why would she need to? Why was he a complication for her? She shot most of the others, except for Adkins and the Peetses. Why switch MOs?”
“MOs don’t usually,” Tanaka said. “You find something that works, you tend to stick with it, unless you can’t.”
“Dontell. She couldn’t run him down and be there to scoop up that letter she didn’t want anyone to find. She’d needed a hit-and-run driver. And she couldn’t have been there to run the Peetses off the road, again, into a ditch, because that was the night of that damned gala, and she needed to be seen with Allen.”
“So you’re saying she hired Barnes, then got him, too?”
“Tidying up,” I said. “I’ll bet you anything that’s who he is. That’s how he connects.”
Tanaka turned to leave. “Well, when we find her, I’ll make sure to ask her about it.”
“But Allen’s covered, you said?”
She frowned. “You do not give up.”
“That was rhetorical, right?”
“You can’t interfere from a cell.”
“I won’t lie. That would slow me down.”
She left. I turned toward the window, watched as Tanaka exited the building, got into her car, and drove away. I had a feeling, a bad one, that Chandler wasn’t long gone. Her work wasn’t finished. You didn’t do everything she’d done and then give up when the prize was close enough to taste.
Ben wasn’t in his room the next morning, when I stopped by the hospital. His nurse told me he was down in therapy and still doing well, which was great. I had wanted to talk things through with him, see if he saw an angle I’d missed, but I wasn’t used to feeling weird about it. What Carole told me was still fresh in my mind, and I wanted to ask him about it and get it all out in the open. I had even brought him another greasy sandwich hoping to make it easier to get things started. When I found the room empty, though, I saw an easy out and decided not to wait for him to get back. I left the bag on the table by his bed and went home.
I didn’t hear anything from Tanaka all morning. No more visits from Farraday or Marcus, thankfully. Allen was still, well, Allen. Maybe Chandler was dead somewhere, no longer a threat, or maybe not. I felt as though I was waiting for the other shoe to drop.
That afternoon I spread everything out on my dining-room table, files, newspaper clippings, Dontell’s things, and went over again what I thought I’d been able to piece together. Allen had said she knew Chandler from the old neighborhood, that one day she was j
ust there and never left. There was still no ID on the gun Chandler had used. The make and model matched, but was the gun Allen’s? Hers was missing from the safe, but make and model didn’t mean much until the analysis could be completed. What if it wasn’t Allen’s, and it couldn’t be traced to Chandler?
After walking the apartment all day, turning details this way and that, coming up with interesting scenarios I couldn’t prove, I grabbed my keys and bag and went to Allen’s, even though it was after eight and well past the time to pay a visit. Isabella buzzed me up and met me at the door. I knew instantly from the look on her face that something was wrong.
“Ms. Allen went out hours ago. She didn’t say where.”
“With Titan Security?”
Isabella shook her head. “She sent them away. She said she didn’t need them anymore. Mr. Elliott drove her.”
“Have you called the police?”
“Ms. Allen wouldn’t like me to call them.”
If she’d gone to her office or even to Chandler’s, the police would have spotted her. Where else would she go? And why alone, with just her driver, knowing Chandler was out there somewhere? “Did she have any visitors? Receive any calls?”
“Yes, a call. Then she went.”
I asked for a pen and paper and wrote Tanaka’s number down. “Call Detective Tanaka. Tell her what you just told me. Stay by the phone, in case Allen calls.” I dug in my bag, pulled out one of my cards. “My number. If you hear from her, if she comes back, call me.”
I sat in the car, no idea in which direction to point it. She’d gone alone, Elliott driving. Where? Had the call she had received been from Chandler? If so, why would Allen leave knowing the woman was gunning for her? What was Allen up to? I wracked my brain. They could be anywhere. No, not anywhere. Somewhere significant, somewhere familiar to both of them. It couldn’t be the Homes. They were no longer there.
The Peetses and Dontell; Sewell, Hewitt, Lyndon Barnes. The secret room, the trophies, the shelf. The scuffed purse. There’d been nothing inside of it to identify its owner, but the only victim not immortalized, the one I believed Chandler had also had a hand in killing, was Allen’s mother—shot to death outside the dry cleaners she managed.
I pulled out of Allen’s garage, headed for the West Side.
Chapter 39
The faded sign in front of the deserted storefront read BRILLIANT CLEANERS, MAKING YOUR WORLD BRIGHTER, ONE SHIRT AT A TIME. The place looked like it had been out of business for a generation or more, the windows boarded up, a rusted security gate across the door, weathered ad bills and flyers trapped between the bars. The rest of the block looked much the same—shuttered stores, with handmade signs tacked to them, hawking everything from authentic Memphis barbecue to human hair, all now defunct, abandoned, left to rot at what felt like the end of the world, where even light refused to come.
There was an overgrown lot next to Brilliant with weeds and nettles almost as tall as me. It was likely overrun by vermin, which the city couldn’t keep on top of. There were hundreds of lots just like this all over town. I eyed the sign, the boards, the lot, and shuddered, recalling the last lot and the shoes I’d ruined.
No sign of Allen or Elliott or the limo. No Chandler, either. What if I’d guessed wrong? Miscalculated? What if Allen was just out here somewhere living her life, minding her business? What if Chandler had run and eluded Tanaka and the others?
I dug my flashlight out of the glove box, got out, locked up. There was a rusted Master lock securing the banged-up security gate. I tugged at it. Solid. The gate, too. The entrance between gate and door was strewn with yellowed newspapers and garbage that had blown in on a gritty gust and gotten stuck. The cheap plywood over the windows had been inexpertly nailed up, and there were gaps between the rough planks. I peeked through but couldn’t see anything inside. Somewhere a dog barked, then howled, but I didn’t see anything out on the street that could have riled him up.
I hit the high-beam button on the flashlight and started around the side, sweeping the light across the snaggy weeds at me feet and ankles. There were bars over the glass-block windows running along the foundation—a basement or storeroom. I stopped every third or fourth step, just to get a bead. The rustling from the weeds wasn’t coming from my footfalls. Rats. I picked up my pace, practically ran the last few yards, then whipped around the corner and came face to fender with Allen’s limo, parked at the back door.
For a moment, I stood there staring at it, as though it were some figment of my imagination. But if the car was here, that meant Allen was here. I placed a hand on the hood, found it cold. It’d been here awhile.
The limo doors were open; the keys, still in the ignition. Bad sign. I opened all four doors, checked the car, then popped the trunk, hoping I didn’t find Allen’s body stuffed in it or Elliott’s. I approached the back of the limo, took a breath, then slowly lifted the trunk and peered inside. No bodies, just the spare tire and an emergency roadside kit. I let out the breath I’d been holding.
The dog down the street began to bark again. I went back to the ignition and pulled the keys out, stuck them in my pocket, then headed for the back door. The security gate was open, and the back door, cheap pressed wood, was held ajar by a chunk of concrete block, which acted as a makeshift doorstop. I pushed the door in with my foot, and it creaked back, the beam of my flash catching skittering vermin, whose beady eyes reflected in the light. I shuddered. Rats. This looked like a job for the cops. I dug my phone out of my pocket to call Tanaka.
“Help!”
It was a man’s voice coming from inside. Elliott? The dog stopped barking. I watched the rats scurry around inside. How many were there?
“Help!”
I took a breath, pushed through the door, hoping I didn’t come to regret it.
* * *
Must, funk, and urine, mixed with the smell of cleaning solvent, crawled up my nose as I stepped lightly over a blanket of broken glass, dirt, used hypodermic needles, and discarded bits of desiccated clothing. I could see just enough from the light of the open doorway to register the disaster that Brilliant had become. The gang graffiti scrawled over the walls testified to its current use. The length of each side was pocked with fist- and foot-size holes deep enough to reveal wood and plaster underneath. This was a flop, a drug den. I could hear the rats running along the walls, and I jumped and hopped, letting out a desperate shriek at one point, when a few of them raced across my shoe tops.
I moved farther in, keeping to the center, pausing every few steps, checking my feet, before starting again. It looked like someone, or several someones, had taken a wrecking ball to the counter. The center of it had caved in, and the sides stuck out like bat wings, splintered shards of plastic and Formica studded with bent nails. I stared up at the clothes carousel, frozen mid-lap. No clothes hung from the hooks, ready for pickup, just a few wire hangers inside dusty cleaning bags. The bags, tattered and suspended haint-like, swayed spookily whenever the filthy air shifted.
I kept moving at a fast clip back toward the rear. When I spotted an interior door about thirty feet in front of me, a sliver of light peeking out from underneath, I stopped. This place had been abandoned for years. Why was there light anywhere in here? I backed up, checked for a light switch, and found one back the way I’d come. I flicked it up. Nothing happened. No electricity, but light coming from under a door. Yeah, that ain’t happening. I backed up, turned for the back door. I’d call Tanaka from outside and let her get nibbled on by rats. I was not too proud to tap out. Not that I was a chicken or anything, but light where there shouldn’t be light, a killer on the loose? Nope. I reached the door, had one foot over the threshold.
“Help.”
It was a woman’s voice that had called out this time. Allen? I could feel fresh air on the back of my neck, hear the night—the dog barking, the rats running in the weeds. My car was parked at the curb, waiting for me. One more step and I was home free. I’d call the cops; they’d come. Sure, my inner
idiot said. But will it be in time?
“Help!”
Dammit. I flicked a look of longing at the limo, the outside. Then turned and went back. Gun up, flashlight on and up, moving fast, past the wrecked counter, the rats, the ghostly carousel to the door. I turned off my flashlight, slid it into my pocket, then yanked the door open. Worn wooden steps led down to what appeared to be a basement. The source of the light was at the bottom of the stairs. I didn’t take time to overthink it, or think about it at all. I’d already committed myself. I took a deep breath, tightened my grip on my gun and started down the steps, quickly, alert eyes adjusting to the dim light, mouth dry, my jaw clenched.
Allen was not my favorite person. By rights, I should have strangled her myself days ago, but I did not want to be the one to find her lifeless body at the bottom of these stairs. And I didn’t want to die here, either. I wanted to grow old enough to play strip poker at the retirement home. I had a Labor Day cookout planned at my place tomorrow, and I did not want to have it turned into an impromptu wake. You will not die in this skeezy basement, I promised myself. You will not die in this skeezy, rat-infested hellhole of a basement. You will not die . . .
I was halfway down, just getting a good look at the room. Wasn’t much to it. It looked like there’d been some kind of laundry operation down here at one point: a line of outlets and dangling connectors ran along a niche against the back wall, the machines long gone. A couple of long tables had been overturned, half the legs missing. No sign of Elliott or Allen. Two doors off to the side. Storage? Only place anyone could be. I resumed my descent, heading there. I will not die in this skeezy basement with beady-eyed rats crawling all over me. I will not die . . .