“Uh…not really hungry.” Cal was always cautious about her mother’s cooking, and was in no mood to fake enjoying some inedible lump of goo. Then she spotted a Ritual Coffee bag on the counter, grease spots showing through it. “Wait a minute…you got…?” She moved across the kitchen with as much speed as her body would allow.
“Bear claws,” Starlight said in a distant, somewhat strained voice. “That’s your favorite, isn’t it?”
Cal pulled a sticky pastry out of the bag. Her stomach growled and her mouth started watering. “Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but…why? These aren’t exactly vegan. Or healthy.”
“At least they’re vegetarian. Did you know they have bacon at that place?” Starlight shuddered as if describing botulism Danishes smeared with Ebola. “Sergei said I should do something special for you. Pamper you because you weren’t feeling well. You and your father used to go out and get bear claws Saturday mornings.”
“Yes, we did.” A lump came unbidden to Cal’s throat. She blinked her eyes and waited for the wave of nostalgia and loss to pass. “That was a really nice idea, Mom. Thank you.”
“Starlight.”
“It’s okay to be my mother, Starlight.” Cal kissed her cheek and took the bear claw, and the bag with more inside, to the table. She didn’t bother to get a plate, but closed her eyes and bit into the sticky goodness--and then opened them. “By the way, did you put rose petals on my bed?”
“I did. They will help love find you.”
“Thanks, I think.” She took another bite.
She was aware of Starlight puttering around the kitchen, making the coffee and getting her own breakfast, which consisted of grapefruit and a piece of toast. Good luck trying to get her to eat eggs.
Cal focused on the pastry and the memories it brought back. It had been a special time with her dad. Her younger brother Elrond—Ron, he insisted on now—did other things with him. Fishing, going to the gym, going to baseball games that made Cal yawn with boredom. Those Saturday mornings were just Cal and her daddy. Sometimes, they went to races. If she was really lucky, they’d go over to Hollister Hills and watch rally or motocross.
Starlight put Cal’s mug down in front of her and said nothing about the growing pile of crumbs on the table. Cal demolished the first bear claw and grabbed another. She’d barely eaten since the Golden Gate battle enactment, and her body was making it known.
She took a sip of her coffee to cut the sweetness of the bear claw and winced at the off taste. Whether it was because she had been eating something so sweet or Starlight had doctored it with some spice or remedy, Cal wasn’t sure. She took a few swallows and then another bite of the pastry, trying to slow down instead of wolfing it like a starved dog.
“So you and Sergei…” Cal let the words hang, not sure what it was she wanted to ask. “You’re…getting along pretty well.”
“It’s nice to spend time with an old friend. He’s good for me. And me for him.” Starlight sat down across the table from Cal.
“Yeah. I’m glad you’re enjoying it. I don’t know a lot about Sergei from his younger days. Do you?”
“I knew him back when I met your father. Too old for me then, of course. I was seventeen, Sergei was…” her eyes crossed. “Thirty or so. He was Russian. Back then, that meant Communist, and we thought Communism was cool. We didn’t know about…”
“Gulags? Pogroms? Lubyanka? Collective farm starvation?”
“It was a different time. We had our ugliness too. McCarthy. Jim Crow laws. The Vietnam war. Kent State. Sergei was exotic, even when he tried to explain how things really were in the Soviet Union and why he left.”
“Do you know much about what he was doing before then?”
“No,” Starlight shook her head. “He doesn’t talk about the past. It’s best to live in the present.” She looked around the room, then back at Cal. “We both agree on that.”
Live in the present. Cal had to admit, she spent too much time rehashing her past. Her father, her short career at SFPD, the bomb blast. And Thomas? Was he relegated to her past? Or was he part of her future? Vague memories of last night mingled poignantly with their earlier encounters. Had it been a hello or a goodbye? Had Thomas left only because of Starlight’s arrival home? Or was he gone again? Had he said something about…about giving her a way to get in touch with him?
Cal took another drink of her coffee and shook her head. “What did you put in this coffee? It’s awful!”
Starlight’s brows went up in surprise. “I crushed in one of my herbal energy supplements. To make you feel better. Believe me, they help.”
“Ugh. Those tablets are coated for a reason.” She took a bite of bear claw, trying to banish the taste. “Starlight, you can’t dose someone else’s drink without asking them. I know you’re trying to help me, but I’ve already taken painkillers. You want me to overdose? Never put something in someone else’s drink. Or food.” Cal looked at her pastry with sudden suspicion, but there was no sign that it had been tampered with. If Starlight had offered her brownies, that would be another story.
“Oh, Callie.” Starlight shook her head. “I don’t know how I ended up having such an uptight daughter. It’s not like you haven’t ever had substances banned by the system. We were born to be free. Whatever happened to our inalienable rights?”
“With the violence of the drug trade here, I don’t know how you can say that. There’s evidence all around you of the kind of damage illegal drugs do to individuals and society. How can you just ignore it?”
It wasn’t a new argument. Cal wasn’t sure why she let herself be drawn into it again. She knew there was no convincing Starlight of the evils of illegal drugs.
“The violence is because they’re illegal, instead of free to all. The health problems that people have are because of the impurities,” Starlight insisted. “It isn’t the drugs themselves, it’s what they’re mixed with. If you have pure weed or natural substances, they don’t come with the dangers of street drugs, cut with cleaning powders or worse. And it’s people’s right to use what they want. The system just makes things worse by trying to fight the inevitable.”
“That’s ridiculous. Weed, maybe, but the rest? They’re still addicting. They cause all kinds of damage to your body. They can still kill you. Have you ever seen a meth addict?”
“Meth is synthetic. It unbalances people. Natural things, though, if you just have a little now and then, to help you get through your day…or a little in the bottle to settle a baby with colic…”
Cal stared at her mother. “What?”
Starlight laughed. “Like I said, it’s not like you haven’t had banned substances before.”
“But I haven’t…you can’t put drugs in a baby’s bottle!”
“People have used natural remedies to help settle babies for years. The Europeans have always mixed in a little wine, from ancient Greek times. A tablespoon of alcohol. A drop or two of an herbal tincture…”
“You put drugs and alcohol in my bottle?”
Starlight nodded at Cal’s mug. “What’s the difference? Opiates were used for years in teething remedies and soothing syrups. Then the government came along and decided to interfere. That doesn’t mean they were harmful. You and your brother turned out just fine.”
Cal was too flabbergasted to answer. She knew there was a long history of quieting children with drugs or alcohol, but she thought that was far in the past.
People just didn’t do that anymore.
Everyone knew how damaging it could be to a child. They could overdose and die. They could become addicted. The withdrawals if you decided to stop giving them drugs would be worse than the colic you had used them for in the first place.
The remainder of the second bear claw dropped from Cal’s fingers. Starlight stopped prattling and looked at her in concern. “Callie?”
Cal pushed her chair back from the table. She didn’t bother to answer Starlight’s queries.
Her mind raced, as if a rela
y had finally made a connection.
She knew where she had to go.
Chapter Twenty
Before she left the house, though, Cal remembered she had one thing to check. She went down the front steps and examined the garage door from the outside, looking for evidence of tampering. She didn’t see anything, so she opened the door and was surprised to see her Impreza parked there.
“We saw what happened on the news,” Starlight said from the top of the front stairs. “Sergei said you would need your other car, so we picked it up and drove it here.”
“Thanks, Mom,” Cal said distractedly, getting in and backing out so she could check the garage floor. There, she found what she’d expected: two small stains of brake fluid. “Time to get that security system I keep thinking about,” she muttered to herself. She then checked under the car and looked for any tampering, but saw nothing.
Cal dialed Mickey as she shut the garage door and got back into Molly, waving at her mother. He was probably asleep. It was too early in the morning for him to have recovered from a night of gaming or whatever else he spent his unassigned time doing.
“Hullo?” Mickey’s voice was thick.
“I need you to wake up and get to work,” Cal snapped. She didn’t enforce nine-to-five hours, but somehow it still irritated her that he wasn’t up when she wanted him to be. Not fair, but there it was. “Where is Randy Roubicek right now?”
He cleared his throat. It was taking time for the gears to get moving, and Cal was impatient. She climbed into Molly and started the engine. “Come on, Mickey. I need this.”
“I don’t know, Cal. At work, I would guess.”
“Is he back at work? He didn’t take bereavement?”
“He works at a rendering plant.” Mickey slurped some beverage in her ear. “I doubt they have many benefits. Gotta pay the bills, you know. It’s not actually a slaughterhouse, by the way, I learned. Deadstock, they call it, not livestock, shipped in, processed, shipped back out.”
“Deadstock. Sounds like a music festival for Jerry Garcia fans.”
“Good thing my young head is filled with trivia, Cal, or I’d have no idea what you old people mean.”
“Shut up and get me the address.”
“Gimme a minute.” Cal could hear him shuffling through papers. He’d been trying to sell her on the idea of a paperless office, but Cal had no clue how that would ever work. People needed paper. PIs needed a lot. “I can’t find the address, but it’s one of the only two plants still in business in Butchertown, which ain’t that big anyway. West City Processing.”
“Never mind. I’ll find it.” She pulled out onto the street and pressed the accelerator. The Subaru’s four-wheel drive kept the tires from squealing, but the six screamed a song of mechanical joy. In spite of the incident with Madge, in spite of whatever substances flowed through her veins right now, she felt compelled to get there as quickly as she could.
She muttered angrily to herself. How’d they all dropped the ball? There’d been enough clues, and Cal and the PD had completely missed it.
Her brakes worked just fine this time, though she kept testing them for any signs of fading. The more modern Subaru, with dual crossover systems and its onboard computer, should tell her if trouble started. Caution and eagerness to solve the case warred within her, resulting in a quick trip to Butchertown over the hilly surface streets.
There was no receptionist at the rendering plant, but there was an office with a couple of people doing paperwork rather than working with bloody aprons. Even in such a gritty business, somebody had to keep track of the details.
“I need to see Randy Roubicek,” Cal snapped, flashing her PI badge. “Immediately. Is he here?”
The man and woman there glanced at each other. “Yes…I think so…” the man said, wiping his bald forehead despite the cool of the interior. “Did he clock in today, Mary?”
Mary went over to one of the computers and tapped on it for longer than seemed necessary to Cal. “Yes. He’s here today.”
“Then I need him pulled. Right now.”
“We can’t do that. It will stop the whole line.”
“That’s too damned bad. You want me to write you up for obstruction?”
The man and the woman again looked at each other, but they apparently didn’t know enough about the law, or how to tell a private investigator from a cop, and the bluff worked. “All right,” the man said finally, looking at his watch with his forehead wrinkled. “I’ll call the first break early.”
He went out the back door of the office, which led, Cal assumed, to the bloody and brutal parts of the animal rendering that Cal didn’t want to think about. Was it ironic that Roubicek, someone who made a living chopping up animals, had not been the one to kill his girlfriend? If he had done it, would he have chosen to use a knife, presumably the tool he used to carve meat? She didn’t know much about the process, really. Frankly, didn’t want to.
Cal paced impatiently. Her head and her chest had faded to a dull background ache, and it was her roiling fury that took the foreground. What exactly had Starlight put in Cal’s coffee? Herbal energy, she’d said. Whatever it was, it wasn’t helping her stay calm.
“It’ll be a few minutes,” Mary told Cal. “There are a lot of people working here. It takes time to stop everything.”
“Just as long as he gets out here.”
Eventually, the door opened. The balding man came through, Randy following behind him. Randy looked relieved to see that it was Cal. Rather than the police? Probably.
Cal glanced around the room. “Let’s take this outside,” she suggested, jerking a thumb toward the door she’d come in through.
Outside, Cal looked Randy over. He was wearing the bloody apron she had expected, as well as a cap over his hair, which was pulled back in a ponytail, and a net over the lower part of his face, corralling his beard. He attempted a friendly smile, but his body language betrayed anxiety.
“Did you find something?” he asked, voice cracking.
“Damn right I did. You.” Cal jabbed an index finger into his chest to emphasize each word. “You drugged Alan.”
His eyes widened in alarm. He opened his mouth to protest.
“What was it?” Cal demanded. Ortiz had said that opium was big with the Society crowd. They saw it as a cure-all, and their all-natural granola, back-to-history ethic probably wasn’t so different from her mother’s. Various forms of opiates had been used for hundreds of years to calm fractious babies, so why wouldn’t someone immersed in medieval reenactment use it? “Opium? Heroin? Laudanum? Some homemade syrup full of who-knows-what?”
“No,” Randy protested. “No, I wouldn’t use anything harmful.”
“Yet all of a sudden, Alan was calm and quiet whenever he was with you and Jenna, and irritable and sleepless when he went back to Cruiser. Because you were drugging him into submission and then he was withdrawing when he went back to Cruiser. Cruiser thought you were abusing Alan. It never occurred to him that you were doping him!”
“The doctor examined him. They said nothing physical was wrong with him. It was just his autism. Of course he went back to being that way with Cruiser.”
“What doctor would be looking for withdrawal symptoms in a four-year-old? He was looking for bruises or other signs of physical abuse, not drugs. I bet if he got tested now, he’d show positive for something.”
Randy changed tack. “You’re just guessing, and even if you tested him, it’s too long ago. You have no evidence.”
To Cal, the moment when a suspect went from denial of guilt to denial of her ability to prove guilt, it was as good as an admission. “So there’s evidence to be found, you mean, huh? You don’t think I can find it? Just because there’s nothing in his system now, that doesn’t mean there’s no evidence. Ever hear of hair follicle testing? Whatever he’d been dosed with in the last few months, it will be in his hair. There’s also dogs. Jenna’s apartment is still a crime scene. I bet a good drug dog could find somethi
ng interesting.”
At this, Randy’s face turned as white as the industrial paint on the wall. “It wasn’t my fault. You don’t know what it was like trying to look after Alan,” he said, his voice almost a whisper.
“Go on.”
“You have no idea how much work goes into looking after him. He needs to be watched all the time. If we wanted to go anywhere, he had to have full-time care. He wouldn’t behave at a restaurant or movie. He was constantly squawking and squealing, and he couldn’t tell us what was wrong or what he wanted. Imagine having to put up with a screaming child for days on end!”
“Oh, you poor guys,” she sneered. “Couldn’t have your fun.”
“It wasn’t just about us. It was for his own safety. If we took him to one of the Society events, someone had to hold onto him the whole time to keep him from running in front of a horse or into the middle of a fight. Once, he almost stuck his hand into a blacksmith’s red-hot forge.”
“Yeah, most people rationalize selfish things as ‘for their own good.’ There’s a reason these drugs are controlled, illegal without a prescription.”
“Prescriptions are artificial limits on freedom. All they do is keep doctors, Big Pharma, and law enforcement in business. They don’t stop the abuse. We have an opioid epidemic in this country, all legal and prescribed, because it makes them billions. There’s no news stories about a natural opium epidemic, though.”
“You sound like my mother.”
“And you sound like a cop instead of a parent. You have no idea how hard it is, and what tools you’d use if you were pushed to your limits. Cruiser does it sometimes himself, like when he has to work. It was him that turned Jenna onto it originally, not me. Jenna wanted to do it. She wanted Alan in her home. Our home, with us. Me too. We just couldn’t take him as he was all the time.”
Cal said in exasperation, “Understanding your reasons doesn’t make it right. Neither does the fact that Jenna was complicit—you say. And I know she was making extra money somehow, for the therapies. You want to tell me what she was into that paid so well? Was she dealing it to others?”
The Girl In the Morgue Page 24