With Vics You Get Eggroll (A Mad for Mod Mystery Book 3)

by Vallere, Diane

  She shrugged and slumped down on the sofa. Her shoulders sagged. “Chad thinks we’re not ready for a dog. He says we have to make our own life first before bringing any crutches into it.” She bent down and kissed Rocky on top of his head. “You’re not a crutch, are you? No. You’re Madison’s perfect little guy, right? Who needs a real man when she has you?”

  Ouch. After being faced with my emotional limitations with Hudson that morning, her words caught me off guard. My breath caught in my throat and my face felt warm. “Effie, can I use your restroom?” I asked.

  “Sure. Down the hallway, second door on the left. If you get to Chad’s office you went too far.”

  I left the room and hurried down the hall with Effie’s words in my ear. I’d thought as much already, but hearing it from someone else was worse. Was I ignoring what Hudson offered me—an invitation to experience life with another person—because I’d convinced myself that Rocky was all I needed?

  I splashed cool water on my face and wrists and looked around for something to use to dry off. Below the sink was a small cabinet, and draped over one of the doors was a pair of gray hand towels. I freed one and blotted my face and hands. When I was finished, I opened the cabinet door wide enough to drape the towel over the top. A bundle in a similar dark gray towel shifted inside and landed by the opening. I bent down to push it back in, but froze when I saw what had been wrapped inside.

  It was a carpet knife. The curved metal blade matched the description of the one Effie had seen in the abductor’s hand outside of the Landing. The initials “EL” were carved into the handle.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The handle of the knife was wrapped in the same type of dark gray towel that I’d used on my face. It appeared to have been propped along the inside left wall of the cabinet and knocked loose when I opened the doors.

  My brain spun in circles, trying to understand what this meant. What was Lyndy’s carpet knife doing in Chad’s apartment? Why had it been hidden under the sink in his bathroom?

  I stooped down and opened both doors to the cabinet. To the right was a black plastic bin filled with bars of soap and a package of razors. A dopp kit sat against the back. Stacks of toilet paper were lined up in the middle. And the bundle with the knife was in front of it all.

  I had to call the police and let them know what I’d found, but I needed a landline. I needed to convey the address for where we were, which would show up on the caller ID.

  If I repositioned the knife so I could close the cabinet doors, my fingerprints might be left on it—or worse, Chad’s fingerprints might be destroyed. But the knife was in Chad’s house. Of course his fingerprints would be on it—it would almost be more suspicious if they weren’t.

  I was caught in a tug of war of indecision. Finally, I pushed the knife back into the cabinet with the toe of my shoe, closed the doors as best as I could, and snuck out into the hallway.

  Effie had said that Chad’s office was farther down the hall. He had to have a phone in there. I snuck from the bathroom to the office. A black laminate built-in desk filled two-thirds of the room. Three computer monitors and a handful of keyboards were scattered across the surface. I spotted the phone, a black cordless model, resting on the charger, next to a scanner/printer. Wasting no more time, I grabbed it from the base and called 911.

  “Please state your emergency,” said a female voice.

  “This is Madison Night. I have information regarding the abductions that have been taking place in the Lakewood area. Can you connect me to Sgt. Osmond at the Lakewood Police Department?”

  “What is your emergency?” she asked again.

  “I’m in an apartment that I think might belong to the Lakewood Abductor. Luxury Uptown Lofts, apartment two-thirty-seven on the second floor.”

  I heard the sound of keys clicking. “Please—I need to speak to someone from the police force.”

  “Are you in need of medical assistance?” she asked.

  “No—not yet, anyway. I’m here with a college girl named Effie Jones. She was one of the targets who got away.”

  “Help is on the way,” she said. “Please stay on the line.”

  Out front, I heard a door slam. “Where’d that thing come from?” a male voice asked. It was Chad.

  “I have to go,” I said into the phone, and set it back on the cradle. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, but letting Chad discover me making phone calls to the police from his office wasn’t something I thought would have a good ending. I couldn’t let him know I’d made that call. I couldn’t let him do anything with the knife. But I also couldn’t leave him alone with Effie and Rocky.

  I slipped out of the office and back to the bathroom. I double-checked that the knife was where I’d found it, and closed the cabinet doors. I washed my hands and dried them a second time, and then returned to the living room. Chad stood next to the sofa. The picture of nineties grunge, he wore a faded Nirvana T-shirt over a cream long sleeved thermal and jeans. He aimed a remote at the TV and flipped through a few screens until he landed on ESPN.

  “Chad, hi. I didn’t hear you,” I said. He glanced at me and looked back at the screen. “I hope you don’t mind that I brought Rocky for a visit. I thought it would be nice for Effie since she’s been through such a scare.”

  “She needs to stop acting like she’s a victim. Nothing happened to her. Best thing is to move on and let life get back to normal.”

  That was an odd response, coming from someone who claimed to care about her. Effie sat on the sofa with her knees pulled up to her chest. She kept her eyes focused on the coffee table in front of her, like she couldn’t hear that we were talking about her while she was in the room.

  I forced a smile into my voice. “I’m sure Effie wants nothing more than for life to get back to normal, but speaking as someone who’s had a couple of shakeups myself, I know it takes more than a few days to get over the scare of being attacked.”

  “Effie wasn’t attacked. Nobody laid a finger on her. Paying her extra attention only makes her feel like she’s a victim, and she wasn’t.”

  In the distance, I heard the sound of sirens. I knew they were headed this way. What I didn’t know was how long it would take for them to get past the buzzer in the lobby and up to the second floor to us. And what Chad was capable of doing in that same amount of time.

  “Chad, I know you want me to snap out of it, but it didn’t happen to you,” Effie said. “You don’t know what it was like. Women are getting killed by this guy and it could have been me. And you don’t care!”

  Effie had stood up to face Chad. Tears flowed down her red face. I had no right to watch their fight be played out in front of me, but there was no place for me to go.

  Rocky sensed that Chad was threatening Effie, and his playful barks turned into bared teeth and a low growl. He jumped down to the floor and faced Chad, barking at him as if to say “Leave my friend alone.” Chad kicked his foot out in Rocky’s direction. I jumped in front of his foot just in time to absorb the blow that was intended for my dog. I dropped to the ground and pressed my hands against my calf where he’d kicked me.

  “Madison!” Effie screamed.

  Chad looked up at her and then down at me. He grabbed a blue nylon jacket from the back of a chair and shook his head. “I’m out of here,” he said. He whipped the front door open and found himself facing two uniformed officers.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “Back inside,” one of the men said. They entered the apartment. Behind them was Sgt. Osmond from Jumbo’s parking lot the night before, and behind him was Chief Washington himself.

  “Ms. Night, you made the call?” Osmond asked.

  I nodded.

  “What call? What’s this about?” Chad asked.

  “Is everybody okay? Does anybody need medical help?” Osmond asked.
<
br />   “No,” I said.

  The chief looked at my leg, where a purplish-red bruise was forming on my shin. He looked at Effie for the first time since he’d entered. She was back on the sofa, hugging a thick black pillow close to her chest. Mascara ran down her cheeks and smudged around her eyes, giving her the appearance of having been battered.

  “Did he do that to you?” one of the officers in uniform asked.

  She swiped the back of her hand over her eyes and distorted the smudge of makeup even more. She sniffled twice, but didn’t answer the officers.

  Chief Washington turned to one of the officers. “Wait here with him while I talk to Ms. Night.”

  He looked at me and I pointed down the hallway. Once we were clear of the others I turned to him. “Do you usually respond to 911 calls?”

  “We’ve got every available man out on the streets looking for this wacko. Pressure from the city is almost unbearable. This isn’t the time for me to pull rank and prop my feet up on my desk.”

  I nodded my understanding. We reached the bathroom. He hesitated in the hallway when I went inside. “I’m not using the facilities. I need to show you something.”

  He stepped inside and I opened the cabinet door. I stood up and pointed at it. “I wasn’t going through his things. I used the towel to dry my hands and face and the door opened up. It must have been propped along the side and it fell. The towel opened up and I saw the blade.”

  The chief dropped to a squat and lifted the edge of the towel until he exposed the curved blade wrapped inside. He whistled. From a pocket of his suit jacket, he pulled two folded up plastic bags. He held one open at the edge of the cabinet and used the razor to bump the knife forward until it tipped and fell in. He sealed the bag by sliding a small red clasp along the top edge, and then put the towel into the second bag. He set both bags on the sink and then stood up. Both of his knees snapped when he straightened.

  “I don’t like getting old,” he said. “The body likes to remind me that I’m not twenty-five anymore.”

  “You’re preaching to the choir,” I said.

  “I hear you got Lt. Allen swimming. That’s good. He needs an outlet like that.”

  “Chief, what do you make of this knife being here in this apartment?”

  “I don’t know what to make of it. What are you doing here, anyway?”

  “The young woman out front, Effie Jones, she used to live in my apartment building. She’s the one who was approached out front of the Landing. She was pretty shaken up, so I called an officer she knew to come and take her statement.”

  His face clouded. “I thought she came in to make her statement?”

  “She did, the next day. That night she talked to Nasty. Nast. Donna Nast. Officer Donna Nast.”

  An unexpected grin replaced the cloud. “Donna Nast is no longer on the force.”

  “I know. I didn’t know it that night, but I know it now.”

  “That still doesn’t tell me what you’re doing here.”

  “My building is empty right now. It was down to Effie and myself. Her boyfriend Chad suggested she stay with him instead of remaining in the building. They both graduate college this year, and I get the feeling their on again off again relationship was in the on position.”

  “So you came over for a social call and found a curved knife that matched the description of a weapon that she gave. You know there’s a chance she’s seen this before. There’s a chance her whole statement was intended to punish her boyfriend for a fight. I have two college-aged daughters. They don’t play fair.”

  “Effie wouldn’t do that.”

  The chief stepped out into the hallway. “Where’d you call us from?”

  “There’s a room with computers and a phone down the hall.”

  “Show me.”

  I left the bathroom and retraced my steps until I was back in the computer room. “The phone is on the charger by the scanner,” I said. I walked behind the desk and pointed to the phone.

  Chief Washington followed me behind the desk and took in the computer setup from left to right. The screens were dark, but I could hear the sound of computer fans whirring from underneath the desk. The chief reached out and tapped the space bar on the main computer and the large monitor in the center of the desk flickered to life. The screen was divided into a nine box grid that appeared to be running individual movies in each box, like the picture in picture feature on a TV, only covering the entire screen. I leaned forward to make sense of it, and then gasped when I recognized three of the video feeds: Chad’s living room, the Landing parking lot, and Effie’s unit in my apartment building.

  In addition to a number of interiors that I didn’t recognize, I understood one thing. Chad Keith had been monitoring Effie’s every move.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  “Ms. Night, when you made the call to 911, it came up as Big Bro Security. Do you know what that is?” Chief Washington asked.

  “No. Do you?”

  “Ms. Night, I think you’re going to have to let me take it from here.”

  “What about Effie?” I asked. “She’s been living here.”

  “Can she stay with you?” he asked.

  “We should leave that decision up to her.”

  Chief Washington and I walked back out to the living room. “Mr. Keith? We’re going to need to ask you a few questions.”

  “Yeah? I want to ask a few questions myself. Like who gave you the right to enter my apartment?”

  The chief held up the plastic bag with the knife in it. The color left from Chad’s face, like a glass of Kool-Aid being drained with a straw. His complexion was left a shade of greenish beige. He doubled over and threw up on a plant in the corner. When he stood up, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Are we going to talk here or your place?”

  “I think ‘our place’ would be better,” the chief said.

  Chad nodded. One of the officers cuffed his hands together and led him out of the room. Effie put her hands over her face and sobbed openly.

  I put my hand on her shoulder. “Effie, I think it’s best that you don’t stay here tonight. Do you want to stay with me?”

  “I want to go home,” she said between ragged breaths.

  “Home? To the apartment on Gaston?”

  “No, home. To see my parents. They live in McKinney. It’s about an hour drive in traffic.”

  “I can take you. Do you need to pack your things?”

  Effie picked up a worn teddy bear—obviously more well-loved than the one I’d seen at her apartment the night she’d been attacked—from the sofa with one hand and her handbag with the other. “I’m ready to go now.”

  We left the apartment behind. Effie grabbed the power cord to her phone on the way out. Rocky had calmed down from the melee, but he stayed close to Effie as if he sensed that she needed his company. When we reached my car, I found a piece of paper tucked under the front windshield wiper.

  “You didn’t get a ticket, did you?” Effie asked.

  I glanced at the writing. Meet me at the cemetery entrance on Oak Grove at sundown. –T

  “Advertisement,” I said. I crumbled the paper into a ball and tossed it onto the floor of my car.

  Effie’s parents lived in a small ranch on the outer edge of McKinney, a town about thirty miles north of downtown Dallas. As soon as I saw the house, I knew why she’d wanted to live in my building.

  The house was a sprawling ranch. The lines of mid-century were evident in the split of the roof, half on a slope, half flat, and the row of perfectly square windows that lined the right-hand side of the façade. Care had been taken in the form of maintenance and landscaping. Tall stalks of bamboo flanked a bright white door that contrasted nicely with the pink brick. The attached garage was on the right side of the house; a restored
yellow Pontiac GTO was parked in the driveway. I pulled in behind it.

  The front door opened and a woman in a long olive green linen sundress stepped out. She waved to us and Effie waved back. Even from a distance, I could see the resemblance between mother and daughter.

  “Do you want to come in?” Effie asked.

  “No, thank you. I need to get back. You have my number, right?” Effie nodded. “I want you to call me if you need anything.”

  “I’ll be okay here. They’ve been wanting me to come visit for a while. I would have, except Chad didn’t want me to leave.” Her eyes went red again and filled with tears.

  “Effie, it’s okay. Chad’s with the police now, and you’re here.”

  “I still can’t believe it was him. Why? Why would he do it?”

  “I don’t know.” I smoothed her hair away from her face, and then stopped when I realized what a maternal gesture it was. I glanced back over at the front door and saw Effie’s mom watching us. She smiled. In her arms was a black Shih Tzu as in need of a haircut as Rocky. I smiled back. It didn’t take a mid-century modern interior decorator to recognize that Effie’s parents were good people.

  Effie gave Rocky one last hug, and then got out of the car with her teddy bear and her handbag. I waited until she was in her mother’s arms before backing out of the driveway and heading back to Lakewood.

  When I reached Mad for Mod, I fished my hand around the floor of the car for the wad of paper I’d thrown there and smoothed the crumpled ball open. I hadn’t wanted to tell Effie that the note was from Tex, but now that I was alone again, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. How had he known I was at Effie’s boyfriend’s apartment? He couldn’t have, not unless he’d followed me there. So, did that mean he’d suspected Chad all along? I didn’t know. Maybe Nasty was right. Maybe I didn’t know Tex as well as I thought.