“What’s your problem, asshole?” Cristina called out while keeping her distance.
“It’s you and your big, fucking mouths,” he said, his bowling-ball head turning redder by the second.
“We’ve never met you, and we certainly didn’t say anything to you.” I wondered if he was one of those cocky bastards, who, if you looked at them just the wrong way, they’d flip into a Tasmanian devil. Lots of guys were like that as teenagers, with hormones raging. But this guy had to be pushing eighty-five.
“Are you blind and deaf?” he asked, his red face nothing less than a prune.
I looked beyond Cristina and saw a nurse standing outside the facility, waving at someone inside. She was of no help.
“I can see and hear you just fine, Gary. Why the hell are you destroying my car?”
He paused to adjust his grip on the bat, then said, “Because you told Beatrice to watch out for me, like I’m some kind of sex fiend or something, that’s why.”
He raised his bat.
“Gary, it’s not like that. I was just joking with Beatrice. You’ve got to believe me.”
“Of course you say that now, because I’m the one in control.” Clenching his jaw, he brought the bat down with a crashing thud, leaving another divot in my trunk.
I winced. I could almost feel that one in my kidney.
“What the fuck, dude? You can’t just go around destroying people’s cars. Not cool.” Cristina hopped back and forth, locking eyes with me while putting her hand in her pocket. She wanted to use her new toy. I shook my head while looking to the door of the facility for help. A few of the older folks were standing there. Where is the muscle in this place?
“The two of you destroyed my relationship with Beatrice, so I think it’s only fair that I return the favor.”
He raised the bat.
“Stop it, Gary. Stop it right now.”
I looked up and saw Beatrice motioning for the orderly to push her wheelchair.
Gary stopped mid-swing as more sweat dripped off his nose. “But I don’t want to lose you, Beatrice. I’m no sex addict.”
“Gary, put that bat down,” the orderly said.
“Let me handle this,” Beatrice said, rolling up to within swinging distance of his bat. “It’s my fault, Gary. I shouldn’t have said it that way. I was just…you know, thinking about things, wondering if you looked at me as just another ho or if I really mean something to you.”
A ho? Cristina mouthed, a smirk on her face. I tried to ignore her.
Gary dropped the bat and put his sweaty head on Beatrice’s shoulder. “I didn’t mean to hurt anything.”
She pulled him closer while patting his back. “You just got to learn when not to listen to me, Gary, okay?”
“Okay. Can we go back to the way things were before?” he asked, as tears came to life in his eyes.
“That’s just what I wanted to hear.”
Two male orderlies ran up and looked at the mess of glass and dents on my car, then looked at me.
“It’s okay,” I said, leaning down to pick up the bat. Just as I was about to give it to the taller orderly, my eyes picked up a signature on the bat. “Reggie Jackson? Is this real, Gary?”
“Mr. October. Sure is.” I suddenly picked up his New York City accent.
“From the Bronx?”
“Brooklyn.”
My phone rang, and I pulled it from my pocket as I turned away from the growing crowd.
“Good timing, Stan. I just met another guy from Brooklyn. After he destroyed my car, I realized he was using a bat signed by Reggie Jackson.”
“That sucks for you, although no one had better timing than Reggie. Anyway, I’m calling with news.”
“I’m all ears.”
“The ME report came back. And he found something carved into Joanna’s back. I think it might be another message from your kidnapper.”
Beatrice was saying something to me, but I’d lost all interest.
19
Taking a pull on the straw of my smoothie, it actually felt like my body was being infused with twelve ounces of pure health. But my eyes didn’t leave my phone as I sat across from Cristina in our typical corner booth at Smoothies & Stuff.
“You going to show me the picture or keep all the fun to yourself?” she asked.
“I thought you were busy doing your own thing, looking for evidence of Mona and Dexter in the places they like to visit.”
“I was…I am, but it’s tedious.”
“You need an upgrade to a laptop or a tablet?”
She did a double-take, then held up her phone. “You’re such an old fart, Ivy. We don’t use those prehistoric bricks anymore. It gets done on the phone, or it doesn’t get done at all.”
Eleven years separated us, but it might as well have been two hundred years. I flipped my phone around so Cristina could get a better view of the picture that Stan had sent me. “The symbol. This is the top part of the image. You might need to adjust it.”
She used her fingers to shift the image, then looked up at me. “Is this her back?”
“Joanna’s, yes.” I swallowed, realized my throat was dry, then drank more of my smoothie. “I know it’s disturbing to look at with all of the blood.”
She picked up the phone, brought it closer to her eyes. “I don’t see any symbol. I just see chewed flesh and pockets of pus or some shit. Disgusting.”
“Put it back on the table.”
She did that, and I used my finger to point out the position of the symbol.
Narrowing her eyes, she studied the image for a good thirty seconds. “What is it?”
“I have my own thoughts, but I wanted an unbiased opinion first.”
She picked up her soda and gulped down a mouthful. “It’s not easy to get a clear sense of what’s there. Could be a lot of things.”
Joanna’s killer, presumably the same man who’d kidnapped and tortured me as well as killed Eileen Tadlock, must have taken a freakish pleasure in carving his messages into our collective skin. I stopped myself from shuddering, but just barely.
“Take another look,” I said.
Cristina leaned over, using a hand to hold her mane of thick hair out of her face. “My mind keeps going back to the image of the railroad track on the first victim, Eileen what’s-her-name.”
“Tadlock. Don’t worry about that image. And that was just our best guess. Stan even told me when he sent this picture of Joanna’s back that the CSI team has yet to declare their official position regarding the image carved into Eileen.”
“Given that…” She paused, lifted her eyes, then said, “I’d say this looks like one or two things. He could be spelling out the letters F-M. Which caused my mind to immediately think of the FM signal on the radio. Not sure what that really means.”
“Okay, I can see that as a possible theory.”
“And, you might think I’m nuts, but when I see this, I think of a mountain range, with the peaks at the top and the downward angles of the ends and in the middle.”
“A mountain range.” I curled in my lip and gently bit it.
Cristina brought her hands to her temples. “This sounds a little out there, but follow me on this. There’s a railroad track and a mountain range. He might be saying that he’s taking a long, hard journey, with a lot of peaks and valleys, and killing these women relates to either the highest peak or the lowest valley.”
I cast my gaze toward the people in line to order their smoothies. I didn’t see faces, just outlines of their bodies. Finally, I came out of my trance. “You either have one active imagination, or you’re thinking like a killer.”
“I hope it’s the first, but if it helps find this twisted fuck, then I guess we need it to be the second option.”
Picking up the phone, I typed in a quick text to Stan, ending with my analysis of her idea:
Cristina’s theory seems plausible. U guys might want to give it more thought.
“So now what?” she asked, leaning back i
n the booth. “See if the police, with all of their resources, can piece together a suspect who has a violent past, might be a calligrapher or something like that, and maybe lives in the wilderness?”
“Sounds like you could be one of those FBI profilers.”
“You think?”
“Yes, I think. But they don’t take high school dropouts. You’ve got to—”
“Get an education, I know. Jesus, you don’t know when to let up.”
“I was just getting a rise out of you,” I said, pointing my thumb over my shoulder like I was trying to hitch a ride.
She tried to hold back, but she cracked a smile anyway. “You think you’re so witty.”
“You deserve it.”
My phone buzzed, and I glanced at the screen to see a text. “It’s from Stan. It says, ‘Don’t leave where you are.’”
“That’s cryptic.”
Caught up in examining the mountain range or whatever the symbol represented, I downed half of my smoothie in less than five minutes.
“Glad you’re still here.”
I looked up to see Stan walking up to our table, brushing rain off his yellow slicker. Glancing out the window, I noticed the drizzle had turned into a steady, light rain.
“You working as a traffic cop now?” Cristina said.
Stan pretended he didn’t hear her as he held up his arm and flicked a layer of rain off his slicker and into Cristina’s face. “Oh, I didn’t see you there.”
“Very mature, Detective,” she said, wiping her face.
Stan chuckled once, turning his sights to me. “Is that your car in the parking lot with the light bashed in and the huge dents on the trunk?”
“Oh…that.”
His beady eyes got as wide as a dime—which was really large for those peepers. “So you weren’t kidding?”
“Uh...no..”
“A guy in a wheelchair did all that damage,” Cristina added.
He froze for a moment. “What?” “
It’s our other case,” I said, flicking a dismissive hand.
“At least Beatrice said she’d pay for all the damage.”
“Beatrice. Sounds like an old lady,” Stan said.
“She was. Is…at least for now,” Cristina said, bringing a hand to her mouth to stifle her laughter.
“I didn’t know she said she’d pay for it,” I said.
“You had already mentally checked out.”
She was talking about me seeing the text from Stan. “Anyway Stan,” I said, “how did you know we were here?”
“Deductive reasoning. I am a detective, you know,” he said, his eyes briefly shifting to Cristina.
He grabbed a loose chair, faced the back to our table, and straddled it. I could see a bit of strain on his face as he stretched his leg to the other side of his chair. He wasn’t getting any younger, or thinner.
“I was in the area, taking a break from the office and getting a quick bite for lunch,” he said, pulling out his notepad. “And when I got your text, I figured I’d take a chance to see if you were here.”
“When aren’t we?” Cristina asked. “Are we ever going to get even a small office like a real business?”
“If we ever get enough paying gigs. Someday soon maybe.”
Stan set his notepad on the table, turning to Cristina. “Hey, thanks for the theory on the symbol. The lead CSI tech was standing right next to my desk, and it got his attention. He ran off to do a bunch of research. He seemed pretty stoked by it.”
“That’s cool.” Cristina scooted a little higher in her chair.
I could hear them talking more about Stan’s job and law enforcement in general, but I couldn’t focus on two things at once. My eyes were drawn back to the image of Joanna’s back, horrified at the mutilation of her body. I began to slowly turn my phone, allowing me to study the carved markings from different angles, which gave me slightly different impressions of what the symbol might mean. At one point, it seemed so simplistic. I could clearly see the F-M that Cristina had first noted. Then I began to doubt such an obvious option and continued turning the image. Moving the phone farther away, I could see the sketch of the mountain range.
I pinched the bridge of my nose, closing my eyes for a second, trying to decipher the meaning behind a mountain range and a railroad. He had to be sending us a message…a hint as to why he was killing these women. Or was he teasing us, perhaps leaving a breadcrumb trail that might take us right to his doorstep?
But how many more murders will it take before we get to his doorstep?
“Ivy, didn’t you hear what Cristina just said?” I blinked and saw Stan peering into my eyes like a doctor might.
“I was just thinking. What did you say?” I asked Cristina.
“Nothing.”
“Pfft. She said she might think about going back to school if she knew she could get a taste of law-enforcement work.”
I nodded slowly, wondering how she’d respond to working in an environment with so many rules and regulations, but I didn’t let my negative thoughts show. “Cool.”
“Yeah, we have this internship program that I might be able to get her into, but she’d have to be enrolled and have a decent GPA.”
“I said I’d think about it,” she said.
I drank my smoothie until the straw sucked in air, at which time I realized Stan was staring at me again.
I removed the straw from my lips. “What?”
“I wanted to share one more thing we learned,” Stan said. “Just before I left the office, Bryant, my junior detective, found a post on a social media site about Joanna. The person was giving condolences about her death and mentioned something about Joanna having a boyfriend. Any thoughts?”
“Yeah, how the hell did she pull it off?”
He scratched his stubbly face, which sounded like sandpaper. “Pull off what?”
“I don’t like cutting her down after she died in such a brutal way, but she was neither pleasant, charming, witty, nor attractive. I’m wondering who could put up with her,” I said.
“We’ll hopefully find out soon.”
I thought more about the possibility of Joanna having an actual boyfriend. “Remember me telling you at the crime scene that you might want to look for any evidence of her using online dating sites?”
Cristina smacked her hand on the table. “You’re saying she might have been posing as someone other than the real Joanna to some guy she met online?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “I couldn’t imagine it going down any other way.”
Stan said, “Bryant’s one of those computer nerds, says he can hack into anything not owned by the NSA. He’s already working with the IT guy from the CSI team on running a scan on Joanna’s home computer hard drive. We should get a good dossier on Joanna’s life pretty quickly.” He pushed himself upward, glancing over at the menu above the counter. “I could grab a bite here.”
“Do it, Stan. Might make you feel better,” I said.
Just then, he got a call and brought the phone to his ear. I heard a couple of cuss words. Then he turned around, waved at us, and took off through the door.
“Another chance lost to try to add years back to his life,” I said, sliding out of the booth.
“Is that another one of your subtle jabs to get me back in school?”
“That’s paranoia talking to you,” I responded. “It’s your decision; you already know where I stand.”
“That I do.”
We agreed to split up for a while. Cristina wanted to talk to a couple of her street friends, who she said might have a few ideas on how someone could hide from public view. I wanted to head home and jump on my laptop, my earlier breakthrough regarding PAL number three, Leroy Swanson, still fresh on my mind.
Pulling open my car door, someone called out my name. I turned around to see Stan driving up. “Did you spend the night at Zahera’s last night?”
I was hoping these sickening murders had made Stan forget about my sleeping arrangements
. My lips drew a straight line.
“I’m putting in the protection request then. Just wanted you to know.”
“Stan…” I grunted, then scratched my head. “Okay, I’ll call Z and figure something out.”
My phone started ringing, and I asked him to wait. “It’s her right now,” I said, tapping the green button on the phone and putting it to my ear.
“You and I are hitting the bar tonight,” she said.
“Stan wants me to spend the night with you.”
“Absolutely. We’ll make it a party.”
I smiled at Stan and told him everything had been worked out, although I wasn’t so sure I could pull off the role of a perky roommate.
20
While I waited on the search results to pop up on my phone, I checked my makeup in the rearview. It was amazing what a little eyeliner and mascara could do. “Not bad, Ivy. Not bad at all,” I said to myself.
I looked down to see the same spinning wheel on my phone as it strained to pull up the information. I noticed the time—a couple of minutes before nine. I was almost an hour late. Zahera had already sent me three text messages, the latest including a selfie of her face between two lemon-drop martinis.
“Come on phone.” I held it higher, hoping the signal would improve and display the search results.
My phone buzzed again. Another text from Zahera.
Did u get lost, girl? More men 4 Z!!!!
I couldn’t help but crack a smile. I typed in a quick response.
Five minutes away. Save at least 1 for me.:)
In reality, I knew my obsessive tendencies wouldn’t allow me to stop what I was doing, not until I found out what had happened to Leroy Swanson. I’d been working for the last four hours trying to dig up information on his whereabouts. Why? Because when I knew him, albeit almost eighteen years earlier, he was so mentally unstable that I could imagine him killing a hundred people.
He was the next-door neighbor of my foster parents, the Talleys. They were number eight on my foster-care tour. Unfortunately, the Talleys’ social behavior mimicked that of Anika’s parents. Lots of parties, an overflow of booze and drugs. Each night was a free for all—every man, woman, and child for himself. I learned the art of dodging drunks at that age, just ten years old. But there was one time when I didn’t dodge fast enough.
The Ivy Nash Thrillers: Books 1-3: Redemption Thriller Series 7-9 (Redemption Thriller Series Box Set) Page 35