Against the Paw

by Diane Kelly

  Good thing Seth saw me as the person I was today. The capable and smart cop, who could examine evidence, put clues together, and bring the bad guys to justice and some awesome moves to a dance floor.

  A half hour later, my father had finished his shower, my mother had found her missing sandal, and all eight of us were sitting at a long table in my mother’s favorite Italian restaurant.

  Mom took a sip of her wine and looked across the table at Seth. “Did you see your mother earlier today?”

  Next to me, Seth stiffened. “No. My mother lives out of town.”

  “Where?” my mother asked.

  “Out west.”

  The vague answer made me wonder whether he even knew where his mother was living and when he’d last had contact with her. When my mother opened her mouth for another question I knew Seth wouldn’t want to answer, I grabbed my gift bag from the floor and shoved it across the table. “Here, Mom.”

  She took the bag and gave me a smile in return. “Thanks, Megan.” She yanked out the tissue paper and pulled out the gift, a wooden organizer designed to be hung on a wall. It had hooks for key rings and two separate bins for mail. She cast me a look. “You trying to tell me something?”

  “Yes. Get organized.” I gestured to the bag. “There’s more.”

  She reached in to find a decorative container of scented bath salts. “Jasmine! My favorite.”

  She might not know me as well as she thought, but I certainly knew her.

  My siblings proceeded to give my mother their gifts, which included costume jewelry, candy, a pair of slippers, and a vanilla candle. My mother was a sucker for those “as seen on TV” gadgets, so my father had bought her something called a Veggetti that would shred zucchini, carrots, and other vegetables into long, spaghettilike strips. As if that would make Joey and Gabby eat vegetables.

  “Thanks, everyone!” The gifts might be crappy, but her appreciation was sincere. Mom might not be the most organized or observant woman, but she was easy to please. I had to give her that.

  We enjoyed our meal, as well as tiramisu for dessert. After exchanging good-bye hugs in the parking lot, Seth and I returned to his car.

  He didn’t say much as he pulled away from the curb, and he was quiet as we drove toward my house. Was he wondering what it would have been like to have had siblings? To be part of an imperfect yet loving family? Or was he struggling with his feelings toward his own mother?

  He turned into the parking lot of the grocery store where Frankie worked. A special tent was set up for shoppers to make quick and easy holiday purchases. “I’ll be right back.” He climbed out of his car and disappeared inside the tent. He returned a moment later with a bouquet of pink roses.

  He headed north on University Drive, heading away from Travis Avenue, where I lived. I wondered where he was going, but the tight expression on his face told me not to ask, that I’d find out soon enough.

  He continued on until we reached Greenwood Cemetery. He drove slowly down the car path and rolled to a stop at the side of the lane. He sat still for a moment as if collecting himself before reaching for the flowers. When he spoke, his voice was soft and sad. “Come with me?”

  “Of course.” I climbed out of the car, following Seth past several gravestones until he came to one marked with a simple, flat headstone on the ground. The stone read RUTHIE RUTLEDGE, and provided the dates of her birth and death. It took me only a moment to realize this was the grave of his grandmother, the woman who’d raised him, who’d been much more of a mother to him than his biological mother had ever been.

  Seth bent down, holding the flowers, and closed his eyes for a moment, as if having a private, telepathic conversation with his grandmother. A few seconds later, his eyes opened again and he gently laid the flowers on her grave.

  Tears blurred my vision. I was touched, in so many ways. Touched that Seth had remembered to honor his long-dead grandmother today. Touched that he’d expressed some vulnerability. But especially touched that he’d included me in this tribute. He might have attachment issues, but he was clearly beginning to overcome them, to let me in, to trust me.

  As he stood, a warm breeze blew past, feeling like the soft caress of an unseen hand.

  THIRTY-THREE

  DOGGIE BAG

  Brigit

  Her ears perked up when she heard Seth’s car pull to a stop out front. She hopped down from the futon where she lay alongside Zoe and trotted to the door. As Megan approached, she brought the scents of leftover spaghetti marinara with her.

  Brigit wagged her tail as Megan and Seth came inside. To her disappointment, Megan went straight to the fridge with the carryout container. What was wrong with that woman? They didn’t call it a doggie bag for nothing, you know!

  THIRTY-FOUR

  TWILIGHT TRYST

  Tom

  “We’re out of toilet paper,” he said.

  “Really?” Her face registered surprise. “I thought I’d bought some last week.”

  She had. Earlier, while she’d been puttering around out back, he’d taken the unopened twelve-roll package from their bathroom and put it in the trunk of his car. Toilet paper was the one thing they couldn’t do without, the one thing he could think of that could get him out of the house for a bit.

  “I’ll run to the store.” He grabbed his keys and headed out before she could think of anything else for him to pick up. He had no intention of going to the grocery store. Hell, no.

  Seven-thirty was the time he’d spotted the Rabinowitzes’ new au pair taking the baby out for a walk on Friday. He could only hope that the woman was a creature of habit, that she’d be out with the baby again tonight.

  He pulled out of the garage and headed down the street, turning and making his way to Huntington Lane.

  There she is.

  She must have started early tonight, because she was already heading back up the Rabinowitzes’ driveway. She wore shorts that barely cleared the bottom curve of her butt cheek and exposed a long stretch of smooth, creamy thigh. Thank goodness the tiny shorts were in style right now. That body was not built for Bermudas.

  He cruised slowly by. He hadn’t paid much attention to the Rabinowitz home before, but now he took a closer look.

  The home, a two-story model made of gray brick, sat on nearly half an acre. A wide porch and expansive balcony spanned the front of the house. While the sides of the backyard were enclosed with a six-foot wooden privacy fence, along the front of the house the fence was a shorter, four-foot wrought-iron style. Through the bars, he caught a glimpse of a detached structure in the backyard. The yard had no pool, so it couldn’t be a pool house. The house had a three-car garage on the other side with plenty of room for lawn equipment, so it wasn’t likely a storage building. Besides, the arched windows and red door told him it was a guesthouse.

  The only question now was whether the au pair lived in the main house with the Rabinowitz family, or whether she lived in the guesthouse in the backyard.

  I’ll just have to find out …

  THIRTY-FIVE

  ON THE OFFENSIVE

  Megan

  Call me crazy, but I’d actually volunteered to work the night shift this week, trading spots with Summer, who was more than happy to take my day schedule and avoid the inevitable disruptions that working nights caused to a person’s sleeping and eating patterns.

  I felt invested in the Berkeley Place case, and hoped that I might be able to put some clues together this week that would help me identify the peeping Tom. Better yet, maybe I’d catch him in the act and drag his sorry ass off to jail, easy peasy.

  Alas, things were rarely so easy.

  Or so peasy.

  I’d stayed up as late as I could Sunday night, trying to force myself to sleep in Monday morning so that I’d be well rested for my night shift. Despite working out with a Jillian Michaels Kickbox FastFix DVD to keep my blood flowing, I’d only made it until one-thirty before my eyes had refused to stay open any longer. I woke at nine this morni
ng, unable to go back to sleep.

  I made breakfast, took Brigit for a long walk, even brought out Zoe’s fishing pole toy to play with the cat. As Zoe swatted at the catnip-stuffed goldfish at the end of the stretchy line, I wondered, Could Hawke have been right? Could a registered sex offender be responsible for the peeping incidents in Berkeley Place?

  I retrieved my laptop and logged onto the sex offender database, typing in the zip code for Berkeley Place and the surrounding area to narrow things down. Steeling myself, I began to cull through the list. My studies in criminal justice at Sam Houston State University and my police training told me that each sexual predator tended to favor a certain type of victim. The Berkeley Place peeper tended to prefer grown women in their twenties and thirties, so I focused my efforts on cases in which the victims were adult females.

  A half hour later, I’d narrowed my list down to three potential suspects.

  The first was a man named Jerry Jeff Gilbreath, alias JJ Gilbreath, who was in his late forties now. Eleven years prior, he’d been convicted of a nighttime home invasion and attempted sexual assault in the nearby town of Colleyville, another upscale area. Fortunately for the victim, her husband arrived home to find her with her clothing torn as she attempted to fend Gilbreath off with a kitchen mop. The woman’s husband beat Gilbreath within an inch of his life. Fingerprints obtained from Gilbreath linked him to a similar crime committed two weeks earlier. Luckily, the previous victim had been able to grab a phone and dial 911, which scared Gilbreath off before he’d gotten what he came for. He’d served ten years, had been released last year, and now lived in an apartment on Jennings Avenue, not far from Berkeley Place.

  The second possible perpetrator was a man in his early thirties named Nathan Wilmer. He’d been convicted five years ago of three date rapes in which he’d drugged the women by slipping a sedative into their drinks. He’d met all three women via an online dating site. I had to do some digging to find the names of the victims, and more digging to determine what the women looked like. Sure enough, each of the women’s driver’s license photos showed a brunette. Two had long hair, while the third had hair that wasn’t long, per se, but did reach down to her shoulders. All three victims had been in their late twenties or early thirties, around the same age as Kirstin Rumford and Alyssa Lowry. According to the arrest report, officers had found high-powered binoculars in his apartment, along with a telescope aimed from his bedroom window into that of a young woman in the adjacent building.

  Not surprisingly, Wilmer lived in another apartment complex on Jennings, not far from Gilbreath’s. Sex offenders tended to cluster in areas where landlords couldn’t be too picky about who they rented to.

  The last potential suspect wasn’t listed on the sex offender database. As Bustamente had informed the group at the meeting in Forest Park, voyeurism wasn’t an offense for which a convict had to register. This particular man, Blake Looney, had been a loss prevention supervisor at a Nordstrom store in a local shopping mall. According to the report, the store manager had walked into Looney’s office and discovered the man with his eye to the carpet, spying on women through a hole he had drilled in the floor of his office, which sat directly above the ladies’ dressing rooms. Looney lived in a house on McCart, only a couple blocks south of the Berkeley Place border.

  I searched for additional men with voyeurism convictions but, not surprisingly, found very few. In most cases, when a person was discovered watching someone else, the event could be explained away as an accidental observance rather than an intentional act. Unless a third person witnessed the suspect intentionally spying on the victim, there was usually insufficient evidence to warrant prosecution. Looney’s case was unusual.

  I phoned Detective Bustamente and told him what I’d found. “What do you think?”

  “I think you’re a hardworking young woman,” he said, “with lots of ambition. I also think I don’t have time to visit these creeps. Besides the Hurley investigation, I’m working three homicides, two armed robberies with injuries, and a carjacking.”

  In other words, he couldn’t justify spending time chasing these leads given that there’d been no attempt by the suspect either time to enter the victims’ homes and no injuries or significant property damage. I understood that priorities had to be made and that minor offenses would have to fall by the wayside. I just hoped the Berkeley Place Peeper would stick with peeping and not take things any further.

  Given that I was wide awake, I rounded up Brigit and headed to work at eight o’clock, an hour before my shift officially began. Detective Bustamente might not have time to visit the men on my list, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t drive by their places and perform some surveillance.

  I loaded my K-9 partner into the cruiser and we drove through the gathering dusk to the apartment complex on Jennings. I ran a quick search of the DMV records on my laptop to see what kind of car Gilbreath drove. The records indicated he owned a gray Jeep Renegade and provided the plate number. I looked over at his unit. Sure enough, there sat the Jeep, right in front of his apartment.

  I parked and let Brigit out of the back of the squad car. Given that Gilbreath had a history of violence, I experienced more than a little trepidation, my heart pumping as if I’d just jogged a few minutes on the treadmill. In case Gilbreath happened to come outside while I was snooping around the parking lot, I readied my baton, pulling it from my belt and extending it with a flick of my wrist. Snap! As I made my way to his apartment, I performed a simple flat spin with the baton, working off some of my nervous energy. The baton gave off a swish-swish-swish sound as it completed its rotations, the sound soothing my nerves. Some people calm themselves with liquor, others with cigarettes. My relaxant of choice just happened to be my baton. The fact that it could perform double duty as a defensive weapon was the icing on the cake.

  I made my way first to Gilbreath’s car, peeking in the windows to see if there was anything incriminating in sight. All I saw was a greasy burger wrapper on the floorboard and a cardboard coffee cup in the cup holder. I’m not sure what I expected. Surely he wouldn’t be stupid enough to leave a list of his intended victims and their addresses in plain sight.

  I looked over at Gilbreath’s front door. The blinds on the windows that flanked it were closed, but light filtered through the slats, indicating he was inside. Slowly, quietly, I crept to his front door, stopping outside to listen. The telltale click-click-click of a game show spinner came through the door, followed by Pat Sajak’s voice calling out “Six hundred” and a women’s voice crying, “N!” The exchange was followed by a voice from inside the apartment muttering, “Dumb bitch. You shoulda guessed T.”

  A misogynist. Oh, so charming.

  I hadn’t gleaned anything from this visit, but at least I knew Gilbreath was at home and not up to his old, horrible tricks … at least for now.

  Brigit and I returned to the cruiser and made our way down a block and a half to Nathan Wilmer’s apartment complex. As I circled through the lot, looking for apartment 246, my eyes spotted two men coming out of a second-floor apartment. One had a television in his arms, while the other wrangled a treadmill. The first kicked the door closed behind him. Metal numbers nailed to the outside of the door told me they’d just exited Wilmer’s unit.

  I glanced at the driver’s license photo of Wilmer I’d printed out. The picture showed a man with chubby pink cheeks and white-blond hair. Both of the men now coming down the stairs were heavyset, with shaved heads and dark goatees.

  I climbed out of my cruiser and raised a hand. “Excuse me, guys. You were just in Nathan Wilmer’s apartment?”

  “What about it?” said the one carrying the TV. “We got a legal right.”

  “Yeah,” agreed the other.

  I stepped closer. “What do you mean?”

  Mr. Television explained. “We work for the property manager. The tenant’s two months late on rent. We came to take his nonexempt property.”

  “Yeah,” said the other, again. />
  The first set the TV on the asphalt, reached into his back pocket, and pulled out a document folded in thirds. He handed me the paper. “Here. See for yourself.”

  I unfolded the paperwork to find a copy of Wilmer’s lease, which included a clause stating the landlord could, and would, seize nonexempt property to satisfy unpaid rent. Looked like they were within their rights. Assuming, of course, they actually worked for the landlord and weren’t pulling a fast one. Frankly, I didn’t give a crap. Wilmer was a scumbag and if someone stole his television and treadmill, well, that was simply karma exacting a small measure of payback.

  Attached to the lease was an eviction notice dated with today’s date. The notice gave Wilmer three days to vacate.

  I looked up at the closed door. “Is he home?”

  “No. No sign of him.”

  Of course Wilmer might have decided to hide in his closet when these two beefcakes knocked at his door.

  As I debated whether to go up and see for myself, the men stowed the television and treadmill in the back of a small truck. The first reached out a hand for the paperwork I was still holding. I handed it back to him. As I watched, he trotted back up the steps and tacked the eviction notice to the door. Unencumbered now, he took the stairs two at a time coming down, returned to the truck, and motored off without another word to me.

  My eyes scanned the parking lot, looking for the blue Mazda3 registered in Wilmer’s name. There was no sign of it.

  Brigit watched from the back window of the cruiser as I went upstairs and knocked on Wilmer’s door. There was no answer. Reaching to the pouch on my tool belt, I pulled out my cell phone and snapped a pic of the eviction notice.

  Texas law required a registered sex offender to notify local authorities at least seven days prior to an intended move, and required the offender to register with the authorities at his new address within seven days after the move. Failure to comply was a felony. Surely Wilmer knew this eviction was coming. I wondered if he’d notified the chief of police as required. If not, he’d broken the law, even if he hadn’t yet figured out where he was going after his landlord tossed him out.