Dead Memories (Carol Ann Baker Crime Book 2)

by Lissa Pelzer

  Bryan felt a quick burn in his stomach. ‘And why exactly are you here?’ he asked her.

  ‘I’m just the driver,’ she said.

  Bryan shook his head. He pulled his bag off the couch and rooted around inside for his car keys, then shoved it away hard. ‘God damn it!’

  How the hell was he meant to deal with a violent trucker who wanted to see Janine Kenny without involving the police, without saying how he knew to expect him?

  ‘I was thinking,’ Susan said as if someone had asked her opinion, ‘I could come with you, as a ride along.’ She had spotted his wallet near the underneath of the couch and had handed it to him. ‘Valerie could hang here until we get back.’

  Bryan laughed. ‘I’m sure it’ll be quicker and easier if I just go down there alone.’

  ‘Only, you see, I’ve got some experience in these matters. You could probably use my help.’

  He saw her eyes go scuttling towards Valerie and back to him.

  ‘I’m a detective with the Miami-Dade Police Department,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Sure you are. Look, I don’t need any help. You’re welcome to stay here with Valerie until I get back, but–’

  Now Susan held out her hand. ‘I understand that you don’t believe me, but it is the truth and I am offering you some assistance which I think you should take. You want me to drive?’ she asked, and her eyes trailed over to the four empty bottles of Sammy Adams on the drainer.

  She could be a cop or she could be a con woman.

  ‘Sure,’ Bryan said, just in case.

  They got in the car and she turned it around in the street without a single reverse and Bryan felt his balls retract up into his body cavity. He clung to the armrest as he reached for his phone. A couple of week’s ago, he’d been at Patchy’s and seen Lauren, the candy striper from the hospital at the bar talking to Valerie. They seemed pretty friendly as if they knew each other and Lauren was after all a nursing volunteer. Bryan was still wondering how to explain his late night call when Lauren picked up.

  ‘Is everything okay?’ she asked. ‘Is it Janine?’

  Bryan turned his head away from Susan as he spoke. He tried to explain what had happened, without saying what had happened. He asked if she’d go around to his and sit with Valerie until they got back. He didn’t mention the Janine angle of the story.

  ‘Sure,’ Lauren said as if it were two in the afternoon and he’d just asked her out for an ice cream sundae. ‘I’ll leave right now.’

  Caffey

  Tanner was sitting in the passenger seat watching the wing mirror like he thought their fingerprint tech was going to try to get away. They had called into the sheriff’s department and been told they could fingerprint Janine Kenny in the morning, but Tanner didn’t think it would be too much of a problem to swing by there tonight, on the off chance she was awake.

  ‘You know, if these prints don’t turn out to be Janine Kenny’s, then this gun would have been better off not being found,’ Tanner said.

  Caffey dug his thumbnails into the wheel. ‘You don’t get to pick and choose which evidence you use,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not saying that. But a thing is only evidence once it’s been found, right. If it had never been found, it wouldn’t be evidence...’

  Caffey shrugged, trying to stay cool. ‘So what? It would have been better for our case if the British had never invented fingerprinting?’

  ‘The British invented that? Hey, go left here. It’s quicker.’

  Caffey checked his rear view mirror, braked and turned sharply down a side street. ‘But, if the prints turn out to be Janine Kenny’s, she’ll be our number one suspect.’

  ‘I’m fine with that.’

  ‘But we won’t get a conviction. You get that, right?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because she has amnesia! She’s impaired. She can’t defend herself in a court of law.’

  Tanner clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. ‘Do you think an eighteen-year-old girl can be smart enough to know she can’t be charged when she’s impaired?’

  ‘Smart enough? Sure. Focused enough to keep it up and convince the doctors for two months... I don’t think so.’

  Tanner bit at his nail. ’So either way, we’re screwed.’

  ‘Unless she suddenly comes around and tells us that she remembers everything.’

  They laughed, but it only managed two beats before it fell out of the air like a fly hitting a bug zapper.

  ‘We’re getting ahead of ourselves,’ Caffey said. ‘They’re probably not hers, just Chad spinning one.’

  ‘But Jeez. If they’re not Janine Kenny’s and they’re not Purcell’s or Bukowski’s...or Snell’s, then they belong to someone else entirely. But who?’

  ‘A kid who spotted the gun on the side of the road, picked it up and put it down again?’ Caffey asked.

  ‘We never should have listened to him. Going down this route means we’re throwing away a possible conviction.’

  Caffey shook his head. ‘We’re putting the pieces together and uncovering the truth.’

  He sped up to meet the highway, but he needn’t have bothered. In both directions, his were the only lights to be seen. The fingerprint tech had dropped back a good 100 feet too.

  ‘So if it is Kenny, any thoughts on the motivation? Tanner asked.

  ‘Money? Bukowski said, there was money gone.’

  ‘But where’s the money, now?’

  ‘Same place the gun was, side of the road, but this time the kid didn’t put it back. Or it floated away some place. Current location, the soy fields of Indiana.’

  ‘Yep.’ Tanner checked the wing mirror once more. ‘You’re right for once. We’re throwing away a conviction.’

  ‘Or else something good is going to come out of this. I mean something that really makes sense.’

  And Tanner laughed again but stopped mid-chortle. ‘Go right, here.’

  Valerie

  Lauren had parked her Yellow Subaru on the corner and was coming up to the side door.

  ‘Bryan called me,’ she said.

  Valerie threw her arms around her and pulled her into the kitchen. And she felt the ever-practical Lauren struggling to close the door with her foot as she was dragged in. She did freak out at her face and insist they go to ER, but after she got it, that she wasn’t going anywhere, Lauren turned nurse instead and went back out for her med pack.

  Seated together on the couch, Valerie started speaking, explaining as best she could, why everything had happened.

  ‘He had one of those faces, you know…’ she paused as a sob rose up in her chest. ‘He looked like people had treated him rough his whole life, made fun of him, called him names and now he was like fifty years old and driving across the country and would be until he was just too old to do that, and then where would he be?’

  Lauren smiled. Her face was the picture of rosy, good health even at this time of night.

  ‘He asked Jerrod if that girl Bryan is looking after, the one you know too, if she was okay.’

  Now Lauren lowered her chin. ‘Why would he do that?’

  ‘I don’t know, maybe he was just worried about her...but they got weird and froze him out anyway. You know, how they are, how they’ve always been.’

  Lauren started. ‘So that’s all he wanted to know,’ she asked, ‘that she was okay?’

  ‘That’s what I thought.’

  Lauren pushed a stray curl of hair back from her forehead. ‘So is he a psychopath?’ she gave a little laugh, but it sounded fake. ’Why did he do that to you?’

  ‘Because I told him,’ She squinted and handed the warm ice pack back to Valerie. ‘I told him where she was and then his face changed like he didn’t really want to know.

  ‘But why did he beat you up?’ Lauren handed her back the icepack. ‘It doesn’t make sense!’

  And Valerie didn’t really want to spell it out, but what choice did she have?

  ‘He wasn’t trying to beat me up,
Lauren. He was trying to kill me.’

  That got through to her. Lauren’s big doe eyes got bigger.

  ‘I told him where that girl was and he tried to kill me because he didn’t want anyone to know that he knew where they were keeping her.’

  ‘But why?’ Her bottom lip began to tremble.

  ‘Why do you think? Why have Bryan and that woman gone off to the unit? Because he’s after her!’ Valerie shook her head. Maybe it was difficult for someone like Lauren to put together. ‘Somehow he knows her and wants her gone. I was thinking, like what if he hit her on the road that night and Officer Randal and that kid only found her? Maybe he’s scared she’ll get better and remember and tell the cops. Or maybe he did to her what he did to me and they only thought it was a traffic accident…’

  ‘Oh my God!’ Lauren half sat down and stood up again suddenly. ‘We need to call the cops!’ And a moment later she said, ‘We can’t call the cops...’

  ‘No. We’re not calling the cops. But we don’t need to, not for her sake. Bryan’s friend, the woman from the bar, she’s a cop.’

  Valerie reached up to take Lauren’s hand because she’d obviously said the wrong thing. Lauren was visibly shaking.

  ‘Here, sit down. Do you want a drink? I know Bryan keeps a stocked bar...’

  Lauren didn’t answer straight away, but Valerie smiled. Sometimes all you needed to help you feel better was someone else freaking out too. It gave you some perspective.

  But Lauren didn’t sit. Her eyes scanned the room like she was looking for a lost phone. ‘Did you meet this lady cop?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. She’s the woman who picked me up. And she was at the bar a few days ago too, Susan, she’s from Florida.’

  ‘Susan what?’

  ‘I don’t know her last name.’

  ‘Davis... ‘ Lauren muttered.

  Valerie passed Lauren her open bottle of beer. ‘I guess it could be. Now come on. You’re meant to be here to help me out, not the other way around!’

  Red Rider

  He’d been thirteen years old when his father had first taken him to The Counsel, held at a rented log cabin up in the Klamath Mountains. The weekend was designed to introduce the sons to the tenants, several of which, Red had found very convincing and had held even after he left his father’s flock.

  Family can’t be divided. Once a man has made a family, it is his duty to provide for this family for all the days of his life, just as a woman will care for the family without reprise, all the days of her life.

  It is man’s duty to bear the responsibilities of other men when they have fallen. Without this, women will turn to women and sin, to provide for their families.

  And the one that had resonated with him the most:

  Man is the path to God. He cares, he heals, and he cleanses the souls of all the women in his family.

  The prophet had leveled a stare on the six boys seated cross-legged in front of him. ‘When man can heal and cleanse, there is no need for shame. When a woman is wronged, a man can heal her... with his manhood.’

  When the prophet had said this, Red at thirteen years of age had felt his pants move. He realized that the world was full of wronged women and he could save them all, with his manhood!

  For some time, he had looked for ways to practice this principle. He was homeschooled by his mother and three girls came to their house on a Friday to take lessons too. One girl, Gemma, had been ‘wronged’ by her uncle Arnold. Red had heard his father say it to his mother. So he had attempted to care, heal and cleanse Gemma with his manhood in the basement behind the pool table, but it hadn’t worked.

  Gemma had screamed like a maniac the whole time. Apparently, the cleansing element only worked if you were married. The prophet had left that bit out. His father had dragged him out of the house and beat him black and blue. Gemma had been beaten too. Which seemed wrong. Maybe if he’d just married Gemma they could have done it again, and all would be just fine. Red shook his head at the memory of it.

  At eighteen, he had left his family and community and set out on his own. For years he went from couch to couch at the homes of friends who had also made their own way. They smoked, drank and went whoring. Then he got clean, got a job in construction and met a nice girl.

  He married Buttercup and rented a farm consisting of nine acres of scrub in Orange County. When they first moved in, it was just a shack and nothing more. Nothing grew, it wanted irrigation, but the potential was there. He’d seen this straight away. This was the message God had sent to him.

  There was a river on the farm that flowed strong and clear. The question was, how to get irrigation equipment for the land without a hundred thousand dollars showing up in a briefcase by the side of the road?

  On his thirtieth birthday, God spoke to him in a dream.

  He said, ‘Man is the path to God. He cares, he heals, and he cleanses the souls of all the women in his family.’

  Red had dissected the words. Caring for women as he wanted to care for the land, healing the dry and barren soil as a man heals a barren woman’s womb and cleansing, as water cleanses, and all…as in, many.

  Buttercup was pregnant at the time. She couldn’t lift water buckets to irrigate a field. What he needed were more women, who weren’t pregnant. So he got them. There was Snowdrop, Bluebell and Honey and the others. Some of his wives had been abused and needed healing and that took time, but he did heal them and they grew strong and carried the water for the fields.

  Soon crops grew in every square inch of that farm. It was all organic and all in demand. Rich folk would drive up on a Saturday and take boxes of their produce away. He remembered how they clambered over each other for asparagus, sweet potatoes, oranges, and peaches. These people were worth a million dollars, but dressed like bums and would pay $50 for a box of mixed vegetables and this was back in the nineties. They cleared $3,000 a week during the growing season and lived pretty well, but then things had started to go wrong.

  Red gripped the wheel a little tighter as the Freightliner rolled into the town where the rehab unit was located. The streets were empty, but he didn’t know the place well. He zoomed into the map and saw a football field about a quarter of a mile away. There would be an empty parking lot there for him.

  He thought of the farmstead again. The truth be told, cleansing and healing were exhausting work. There was always a good feeling when you first saw a woman thrive, but in the following years, as the demands and the nagging started, he found he was less inclined to do much ‘healing’.

  They’d had one season on the farm when nothing seemed to flourish. The strawberries were small and sour, the zucchinis looked like string beans. He couldn’t deny it. Something was going wrong.

  He asked Buttercup, who was pregnant now for the second time, what the problem might be and she told him there were too many women on the farm, that everyone thought, if they didn’t do the work, someone else would.

  Well, how he had laughed. That was a woman’s logic.

  It had turned out that the real problem was Strawberry. She had only been there three months, but she had a mouth on her, and the problems had started when she came along and wasn’t her name Strawberry too, weren’t the strawberries the first thing to fail? So, just as the Lord had sent her to him, so he sent the solution.

  A critter of some description had fallen in a deep unused well and was driving them all mad with its wailing. They needed someone small to ride the bucket down to fetch it out. Strawberry even volunteered and when the rope broke, he figured, she broke too. It was as simple as that. He called down, but there wasn’t another sound from her, or the critter, so he replaced the lid. And lo and behold, as soon as she was gone, the farm began to flourish once more, because there is more than one way to care, to heal and to cleanse.

  And just as with Strawberry, the Lord had sent Carol Ann or Janine or whatever she called herself. God had sent her to him especially because He knew he could do the job. He had failed once, he’d let her go, an
d back home in Sacramento, he was paying the price. But he’d been put back on this route. He’d been given another chance.

  Red pulled up behind the chain-link fence of the stadium and turned off the engine. He waited for a moment in his seat and gathered his thoughts and prayers. With the help of his God, this would be straight forward, but he needed to stay mindful, always conscious of what it was He wished him to do. He was pretty darn certain Carol Ann Baker was just pretending to be Janine Kenny. She had shot that man and that cop at the truck stop in Ohio. No doubt this was just a play. But if she had genuinely lost her memory was it right or even necessary to cleanse an individual who had no recollection of the sin, and no motivation to sin again? Wasn’t it possible that the amnesia caused by the accident, a result of his dropping her off here, had been directed by Him? Red bent his head once more.

  ‘Lord, if she sees me, doesn’t know me and screams, I will take it as a sign! I will say her real name, if she doesn’t know it, I will understand.’

  Then he took his Taser, his duct tape, and a bag, opened the rig door and dropped down into the parking lot.

  Lilly

  Lilly woke up. She sat up suddenly in complete terror.

  She didn’t know which way she was facing. It was dark and the outlines of the objects she could see made no sense to her. Throwing back the covers, she headed towards the door, where she would find the light switch, but two steps later she hit her shin on something hard, a chair, a stool? She couldn’t imagine what.

  Her hands patted at the air until she felt a smooth surface beneath her fingers. It was familiar. Was this a desk and up here, was this a TV screen?

  Gradually, she became orientated. She knew the shapes in the darkness but as she ran through the list of places she could be, nothing stuck. Was she in the room where she slept in Opa-Locka, at Cassandra’s place or at Bobby’s condo in Sunset? Was she in a hotel? Her terror increased.

  A cord for an overhead light hung down and she pulled it. The small energy saving bulb flickered on, illuminating the desk, the stool, some of the grey-beige carpet and nothing more. A wave of heat flowed over her body and she broke out into a sweat. For a moment, the truth eluded her. Her fogged mind chose to believe she was in a hotel room, that she had drunk champagne and the asshole had spiked her glass. It had happened before.