Skin and Blond

by V. J. Chambers

  He drank some of his beer, giving himself a foam mustache. “Doesn’t ring a bell. Don’t think I knew her.” He grinned. “Actually, that’s great. It’s hard to be inspired when I actually know the person. Makes it all too real, you know.”

  I touched my own lip to signal to him that he should wipe his face.

  He went on, oblivious. Crane was one of those guys that people might describe as dreamy. He had it all—the strong jaw, the adorable nose, the soulful eyes, the hair that fell carelessly over his forehead. His only noticeable flaw was a scar on his lip. He’d gotten it as a little boy, falling face first off his bike. Of course, the scar only added rugged flavor to his good looks. Right at that moment, with foam on his face, he didn’t look ridiculous, but instead adorable. “Tell me everything. I’ve been hunting around for a good idea for a book for ages. You’ve got to give me this one.”

  “Well, she’s missing,” I said. “She’s missing, and she didn’t take anything with her except her bed sheets.” I touched my lip again. “You should wipe your lip.”

  “Oh.” He grabbed a napkin and scrubbed away the foam. “Why did she take her sheets?”

  “I don’t know that she did. She might have just taken them to the laundromat. Point is, they aren’t there, but everything else is.”

  He nodded slowly, eyes wide. He was thinking. “Maybe she was recruited into a secret society where they all have to wear sheets for the initiation. Maybe she’s being groomed to do something illegal for them. They pick young college graduates, prey on their idealism, and get them locked up for their crimes. No one knows about the society because they think all these incidents are unrelated.”

  “Is that what your book is going to be about?” I took a long swig of my beer. Crane was an aspiring novelist. He was aspiring because he couldn’t actually finish anything. Crane seemed to fall in love with book ideas the same way he fell in love with women—briefly. After a few months, he would give up on his drafts, disgusted because he was sure that they weren’t any good.

  “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not. It was just my first idea.”

  “If she didn’t run off on her own,” I said, “she could possibly have been carried off in the sheets. Either that, or the person that killed her made a mess on them and wanted to get rid of evidence.”

  Crane gave me a wicked smile. “Evidence? Like blood?”

  “Or maybe he raped her and then smothered her with a pillow and left his DNA all over the place? I don’t know.”

  “You think she was murdered, then?”

  “I don’t think anything,” I said. “But I have to admit, trying to solve a murder case again would be pretty nice.” I finished my beer in one long draught, thinking wistfully of the days when I worked homicide for real.

  “Do you think she was murdered?”

  “Well, the brother thinks she was. He’s the guy who hired me. The police are just treating it like a missing persons case, but the brother thinks she was hurt. He’s convinced she’s dead.”

  Crane signaled the bartender to get me another beer. “Well, that’s it, then. The brother did it.”

  I furrowed my brow. “Why do you say that?”

  He shrugged. “Call it a hunch.”

  “It’s possible, I guess. Anything’s possible.”

  The bartender set the beer down in front of me, and I reached for my wallet, but Crane stopped me.

  “Put it on my tab,” said Crane to the bartender.

  The bartender nodded.

  I smiled at him. “Thanks.”

  Crane smiled back, mischievous. “Well, what can I say? I’m hoping if I buy you a drink, I’ll get lucky.”

  I laughed.

  “Seriously,” he said. “You got big plans tonight?”

  “No plans,” I said.

  “So… my place or yours?”

  CHAPTER THREE

  “So,” I said, leaning over Brigit’s desk to manipulate the mouse, “you just click here, and then it’ll open up the report, and you can see if we’ve gotten any hits. I’m going to need you to check this every morning.”

  She gave me a funny look. “Um… I didn’t think that it was legal for a private investigator to pull a credit report without someone’s permission.”

  “This isn’t a credit report,” I said. “This is just tracking the cards to see if any of them get used to buy something.”

  “But you got the numbers somewhere, right?” Brigit peered at Madison Webb’s cards, which were all spread out on her desk, where I’d left them the day before. “There are only three cards, and you’re tracking five numbers.”

  “Well, one’s her bank account,” I said. “And don’t you worry about where the other one came from, okay? The less that you know about that, the better. Let’s say I’ve got a friend and leave it at that, huh?” Geez. Even the born-again hadn’t questioned this stuff. How did Brigit know about legal stuff anyway? She must have been doing her research. Despite the fact that I was annoyed with her for challenging me, my respect for her increased.

  “A friend?”

  “Brigit, drop it.” I glared at her. “Can you just tell me if we got any hits on the credit cards?”

  She shrugged. “If you promise that you’re taking full responsibility—”

  “I am.” I rolled my eyes. I didn’t really have a lot to lose these days. I’d already been kicked off the police force and had every shred of respectability ripped from me. So, if I cut some corners here and there, I didn’t much care about the possible consequences. I didn’t figure things could really get much worse.

  “Well, then… no, there’s no hits.”

  “See?” I said. “No harm done.” I seized my coffee cup off the table. I always drank a double-shot espresso soy latte every morning. The soy was easier on my stomach. Didn’t used to be a problem back when I was younger, but I was beginning to realize that night after night of drinking alcohol was catching up with me. I couldn’t compromise on the coffee, even though that was probably eating a hole through my esophagus, so I compromised on the milk. I needed the coffee to wake up in the morning.

  Even though I’d adjusted my schedule so that I didn’t have to come in until one in the afternoon, I woke up every day hung over. It was normal for me, and it was totally manageable. I handled the hangover with caffeine, water, protein, and whole grains. The caffeine was for the headache. It dilated blood vessels and fixed me right up. It also woke me up, because I was generally exhausted in the morning, no matter how much sleep I got. Drunk sleep isn’t good sleep. When you have too much alcohol, you can’t get into deep REM sleep or something. The water was for dehydration, which was always an issue. And the protein and whole grains gave my body a good jump start. I generally ate an egg-white omelet with a side of peanut-butter, whole-wheat toast. It soaked up any alcohol left in my system, and it balanced out the sugar rush from the night before. Beer is pretty carb heavy. So, it was fine. I was used to it. One day, a few months ago, I hadn’t been in the mood to go out and drink, and I woke up the next morning without a hangover. That had just felt… weird.

  Back when I was in college, or even when I was Brigit’s age, I could drink three or four beers in an evening and not even get hungover.

  Admittedly, these days, it was more likely that I drank six to eight beers in an evening, which was double the amount, but… Anyway, being in my thirties was not all it was cracked up to be, let’s just say that.

  I took a big drink of coffee, sucking it down like it was my lifeline.

  “So,” said Brigit, “what does it mean that there’s no hits on the credit cards?”

  “Well, it means no one’s using them.”

  “Obviously,” said Brigit, gesturing at the cards. “She didn’t take them with her.”

  “Right,” I said. “I wasn’t expecting anything, honestly. But it would have been nice. If we got a hit on a card, we could have gone after her and had her home by dinner.”

  “You really think she’s out there?” said Brig
it. “You don’t think that she’s…” She bit her lip. “You know, dead?”

  “I don’t know what to think at this point,” I said. “We don’t have enough evidence.”

  “Well, her brother thought he was dead.”

  “You were listening in yesterday?”

  “It was quiet out here,” she said. “The walls are not that thick. I couldn’t help but hear.”

  As if on cue, above our heads, there came a series of barks and yips.

  I groaned. “Tell me about it. The walls in this place are like paper.”

  Brigit looked up. “Is that a dog?”

  I slammed the coffee down on the desk. “I’ll be right back.” I headed for the door.

  “Where are you going?” said Brigit.

  I ignored her. I threw myself out of the office, slamming the door after myself.

  * * *

  The building that housed my office had apartments upstairs. Not a lot of apartments. About four. A row of them. They had back porches that hung off the back of the building, overlooking the parking lot. They weren’t the nicest apartments in all of Renmawr. Well, to be honest, there weren’t a lot of nice apartments in Renmawr. Not in the city limits, anyway. If you were in town, you were pretty much in the bad part of town. The respectable people had all retreated to the outskirts, where they lived in planned communities and townhouses, each with their own annexed shopping center complete with a grocery store and a Redbox.

  So, I really should have counted myself lucky not to be living under drug dealers or people mixed up with the Irish mob, because there was a strong presence of that in town.

  And you know what?

  I did count myself lucky. I was grateful.

  It was just…

  The fucking dog.

  God damn it.

  I stormed up the steps to the next level and stalked down the hallway to Kitty Richards’s apartment. I banged on her door, even though I knew it was futile. She wasn’t home.

  Kitty Richards was at work, and she had a dog that lived with her in this apartment. When she was at work, she sometimes put the dog inside a tiny bathroom at the back of her apartment. That bathroom happened to be right above my office.

  I knew this because I’d been inside her apartment.

  When she didn’t answer the door, I knelt down and pulled aside the mat.

  “Moved it,” I muttered. She used to keep the key there, but she obviously didn’t anymore. Afraid I’d use it again, I guess.

  I began sorting through the things in front of her door. She had a couple of plants in pots, which I lifted, looking for the key.

  Nothing.

  “Damn it,” I whispered.

  From inside the apartment, I could still hear the dog barking. Once he got going, he didn’t stop. He would bark all day long, seeming to never get tired of it.

  Actually, that wasn’t entirely true. Sometimes he switched from barking to whining, which wasn’t much better.

  And it wasn’t that I didn’t like dogs. I didn’t own a dog or anything, but I liked animals. Part of the reason that it drove me nuts was that the dog was obviously unhappy in that little bathroom. The thing was barely the size of a closet, and he could hardly turn around in it. It was cruel keeping him in there, and I could only imagine that she did it because she didn’t want him to mess up her apartment.

  But see, that was the thing. I didn’t understand why people got pets if they valued their stuff higher than they valued the little life they had just made themselves custodians of. Animals were not just accessories. They didn’t exist only to amuse their owners. They had their own wants and needs, some of which might be inconvenient. But that inconvenience came with the territory. People—people like Kitty Richards—needed to be nicer to their pets, darn it.

  I reached up above the door and felt along the top of the door frame. My fingers ran over the smooth surface, slowly, slowly…

  Jackpot!

  There was the key. I fitted it to the lock, and I let myself in.

  Kitty’s apartment looked the same way it always looked. It was super cluttered, like Better Homes and Gardens had exploded. The apartment wasn’t messy or anything. For being crammed full of knick knacks and candles and flowered couches and doilies, it was fairly well organized. It was obvious that it took Kitty a lot of time and effort to get it just the way she liked it. The place smelled of lavender and cinnamon—but not real lavender and cinnamon. Instead, the cloying scent came from scented candles and potpourri.

  I ripped through the living room and went down the hallway to the bathroom, where I knew the little dog was trapped.

  The barking got louder.

  “Don’t worry,” I called. “I’m coming.”

  The barking quieted. Ha. He recognized my voice, did he?

  I didn’t know the dog’s name. I hadn’t really checked. I figured it was stupid to know the dog’s name, anyway. It wasn’t as if animals had names. Names were an absurdly human thing, and it was all part of the way we tried to turn animals into things for our human amusement instead of just letting them be animals.

  Of course, there was nothing we could do about all of that now, not really. If we let all the pets go free, they’d die. They couldn’t take care of themselves. They needed us humans now. We’d created them and now they were our responsibility. But damn it, locking them in tiny bathrooms was not the way.

  I yanked open the door.

  The dog burst out and leaped on me.

  I backed away. “Hey, that’s not cool.”

  It started licking my hand.

  I tugged my hand away. Eeew. Dog drool.

  One time, after freeing Fido here, I’d brought him down to my office to hang out, and we’d had a grand old time. My old assistant had petted him until he went into a petting coma. He spent most of the afternoon sleeping and waking up for scratches behind his ears.

  But Kitty had freaked out when she found out that he was missing and started going door-to-door in a panic. When she found out that I had the dog…

  Well, she and I exchanged words, and I was not polite, not exactly. I told her precisely what I thought about her keeping the dog trapped, and she told me that if I stole her dog again, she would press charges, and I said that the dog wasn’t stolen, and—

  Anyway, the point was, I wasn’t going to take the dog again.

  Instead, I took him out on the back porch. I left the screen door there open so he could come and go in and out of the apartment as he pleased.

  He tried to lick me some more.

  I petted the top of his head and tried to keep free of his mouth. I really wasn’t fond of dog saliva.

  * * *

  “Well, Mr. Webb,” I said, “she didn’t take her cell phone, and she didn’t take her credit cards, so there’s not a lot for me to track her with at this point.”

  “That’s because she’s been hurt or killed, just like I said.” He gripped the back of the chair in my office. I’d asked him to sit down, but he wouldn’t.

  “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe something’s happened to her. We can’t know one way or the other, you realize. But if you want me to keep digging into this, I’ll need to know some details about her life.”

  “Details?” he said. “What do you mean?”

  “Please have a seat, Mr. Webb.”

  He looked down at the chair, and then back up at me. “I don’t think there was anything peculiar about her life. Is there really any reason to go digging into it? Someone’s taken her, probably hurt her. Shouldn’t you be looking for that person?”

  “As I said, Mr. Webb, it’s probably someone that she knows. Why don’t you sit down, and we can chat a little bit about anyone suspicious in her life.”

  He sat down. “Well, I don’t know. I didn’t spend that much time with her. We were close, but she had her own life, you know? I have my wife and my children, and I certainly couldn’t neglect them for Madison.” He cleared his throat. “Not that Madison wasn’t a lovely girl and worth givi
ng my undivided attention to. She was. She was the best sister in the entire world, and I just can’t sleep thinking that someone’s gotten away with hurting her.”

  “Why are you so convinced that she’s gone, Mr. Webb?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. My wife keeps saying the same thing to me. She says that we don’t know what happened to Madison, that she might be just fine. But I… I have a feeling. Like I said, Madison and I were close. I just know that there’s something wrong. I just know it.”

  I surveyed him. I couldn’t help but think of what Crane had said to me last night at the bar, that the brother had killed Madison. But that didn’t make much sense, did it? If he’d hurt her, why was he paying me money to look into her disappearance? I couldn’t reconcile that in my brain.

  I had to admit that Mr. Webb was a little bit odd, though.

  He rubbed his forehead, looking worried. “I didn’t really know her friends. I’m not sure if I’ll be much help.”

  “What about a boyfriend?” I said. “Was Madison seeing anyone?”

  “Oh, not anymore, no,” he said. “She had stopped seeing Curtis months ago.”

  “Curtis? Tell me more about him.”

  “Like I said, they broke up.”

  “Well, maybe Curtis had a grudge against her for leaving him?”

  “No, no,” he said. “He was the one who broke it off. He met someone else. Madison was devastated, but I always told her that Curtis was no good. Of course, she wouldn’t listen. But I have to tell you, I was glad when I heard that they weren’t together anymore. I never liked that guy, and he wasn’t good enough for my sister.”

  “She was devastated?”

  “Yeah, she kept calling him, and he wasn’t interested anymore. I told her to leave him alone, but—”

  “She was harassing her ex.”

  “I wouldn’t call it harassing.” He glared at me. “She was upset. She liked the guy, and he didn’t like her back. It was typical behavior. She wasn’t hurting anyone. Besides, that Curtis guy deserved it for breaking her heart.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, I get it, Mr. Webb. I think I’d still like to talk to Curtis. You got a last name for me? Maybe an address?”