by Linda Ladd
I said, “Thanks, Dee. That means a lot to us.”
Bud grinned at me and shook his head. Dee turned a page and twirled a strand of hair around her forefinger, oblivious. Remind me to look for her robe while I’m rummaging around. Or a bath towel might do it. A washcloth, even.
We opened Li He’s door and went inside. I closed it to stop needless criticism of our search techniques, which might not be up to snuff with the seven-million-dollar annual salary the pseudo detectives/actors on CSI make. Maybe we could learn something from them. Like how to never be in the line of fire but get paid loads of money for reading tough-cop lines off a script.
“Li was a very neat young woman.” That was Bud. Of course, he’d notice that first, being the neat freak of the universe that he was. “That’s always a sign of good moral fiber.”
“Then what about obsessive compulsives? They’re looney tunes in their own special way.”
“Not all of them.”
I looked around the nice clean dorm room with its neat stacks of books and papers, and carefully made bed, its pink and white polka-dot quilt all smoothed out and tucked in at the corners in military fashion, and said, “I hope this girl isn’t our victim.” I wondered why I’d felt compelled to say that. No matter who it was, it was a terrible tragedy. “Tell me again what info the SPD gave you on this case?”
“She’s a sophomore here at MSU. She lives in Branson. They said her parents work at one of the shows over there, a thing called the Beijing Acrobatic Troupe. Don’t know much about that yet, except that the cast is made up of Chinese nationals, includin’ her parents, who’re worried out of their minds about her and don’t speak very good English. Accordin’ to them, and Dak and his guys interviewed them both, she’s never gone off alone like this, never gotten into trouble, never given them a minute’s concern. SPD says she’s got a clean record, no drugs, no prostitution, nothin’. Makes good grades, all A’s. Makes friends easily. Everybody liked her. You know the type.”
Actually, I didn’t know many straight arrows, not in my line of work. All my arrows were bent in some way or snapped in two. “Except for getting mixed up with Mikey, if she did. Let’s see what we can find out about her.”
The suite had one bathroom that was shared by all three girls, but I headed for the sink and vanity located in one corner of Li He’s room. The hairbrush I was looking for was sitting right there in plain sight, beside a matching pink comb and hand mirror. All lined up, nice and straight and orderly. I picked up the brush with gloved fingers, found out it looked pretty clean, and then was pleased as punch to see several long black hairs entwined in the bristles. “We got a hairbrush, Bud. Maybe Buck can get a positive ID of our vic off her DNA.”
“Great. And here’s a picture of her. Man, what a shame. She was a little tiny thing, look at that. She’s a gymnast.”
Bud handed me a color picture of Li He in a tight maroon and white gymnastic uniform with the MSU Bears logo across the front. I picked up a different framed photo, a closeup of Li, Delia, and a small girl who looked some years older than the other two and like she, too, had Asian blood. Mel of the Weekend Wedding, I presumed. Sitting together in a booth at what looked a pizza place, very likely Mikey’s, aka the scene of the crime, the happy trio were laughing with their arms around each other. Better times, no doubt about it. Maybe Delia was just in shock today, or a cold-as-ice sociopath, take your pick. Or maybe Mel just went home to get away from Delia’s gloom and doom predictions and penchant for wearing nothing. Unfortunately, if Li was our victim, Delia was probably right on target this time.
I said, “She’s got the same body type as our vic, same length of hair. My gut’s telling me it’s the same woman.”
I returned to snooping. Everything I looked at was neat to a highly unlikely degree. I spent some time shuffling through the papers on her desk. She had her schedule of classes tacked on an yellow bulletin board above her textbooks. I looked at more thick college books lined on the shelf above the desk. Physiology, psychology of the aberrant personality, physics, you name it. Only a thin blue golf manual looked a little out of place, but hey, doctors always played golf on the weekends, didn’t they? Except for Black. He played with me on the weekends, and more power to him.
I took hold of a knob and pulled open the long narrow desk drawer. Everything in its place. Rubber bands, paper clips, Ice Breakers mints—two tins, both spearmint—and a small pocket address book. I thumbed to the M section. Mikey Murphy, address Mikey’s Pizzeria in Osage Beach along with a telephone number, and a little asterisk that said “hot guy” in parentheses.
“She knew him, Bud. She was attracted to him. It’s written down right here in her own handwriting. Black-and-white.”
Bud joined me at the desk, took the book, and started flipping through the pages. “Yeah, Dak mentioned this book might be helpful to us. She has lots of friends. Doofus Dee out there is from Independence, Missouri.”
“What about Mel? You find her name? We need to talk to her, too.”
“Melanie Baxter? Right here. She lives in Fenton, that’s outside St. Louis. And guess what? Lookee here, Claire, our little psychiatric clinic’s number is in here. It looks like she might’ve been a patient at Oak Haven, and if not, she’s probably made a couple of calls out there.”
“Could’ve been when Mikey was being treated inpatient. Could be they were an item even that far back.”
“Could be. Could be a lot of things.”
“We need to get this hairbrush over to Buckeye and put a rush on it. If Li He is our girl, her parents have to be notified, and the sooner the better.”
My cell phone erupted with its perky south of the border refrain so I grabbed it off my belt and found Black’s super-secret, personal number glowing on Caller ID. I did love Caller ID; it took the suspense out of my calls. And I didn’t have to talk to anybody I didn’t like. I picked up in a hurry.
I said, “Where are you?”
“Where are you?”
“I’m in a dorm room at Missouri State with Bud.”
“Well, I sure wouldn’t’ve guessed that one.”
“We think we’ve found our female victim. She’s been missing for several days. We think her DNA’s gonna match up with the girl in the oven.”
“Good. I’m still in the air, about fifty miles west of the lake. Want me to touch down there and pick you up?”
“You cut your trip short?”
“After I gave my speech, I got bored, so here I am.”
“I gotta get a piece of evidence to Buck, then I’ve got to turn around and come back down to Branson tomorrow and interview her parents.” As usual, Bud was gesturing and interrupting me, so I said, “Just a sec, Black.” I held one palm over the phone in case he was going to say something embarrassing about Black and me, and said, “What? I’m trying to talk here.”
“I’ll take Buck the hairbrush. You and Black can stay down here somewhere tonight and interview the parents tomorrow. That’ll save you a lot of driving time. Maybe Buck’ll have the tests by noon and you can give the notification while you’re in Branson.”
“Lucky me. You just don’t want to have to do it.”
“Can’t argue with that.”
“I guess that would work, but I don’t think Buck’s going to have time to match the hair. Lemme see if Black’s okay with it.” I put the phone back to my ear. “Wanna spend the night with me in Branson and then take me to interview the missing girl’s parents?”
“I was hoping you’d ask me something like that, especially the first part.”
I smiled. I had missed him, too. “You don’t have any important meetings in the morning?”
“Nothing that can’t be rescheduled. Does Harve have Jules Verne?”
“Yeah. I think you miss that dog more than you do me.”
“Well, he does lick me in the face and other places.”
“As if I don’t.”
Black laughed, and it sounded sexy as hell. “There you go, tur
ning me on. Where do I pick you up?”
“I guess you can put down out at Springfield-Branson Airport. We’ll have to rent a car. Or we can stay tonight here in Springfield and drive over to Branson in the morning. It’s late, and it’s just a thirty-minute drive.”
“Okay, have Bud drop you off at the airport, but make it at the General Aviation Complex next door to Springfield-Branson. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
I flipped the phone shut. “Okay, Bud, we got about ten minutes to interview Doofus Dee out there and then you can drop me at the airport and drive my car home. I’ll pick it up tomorrow when I get back.”
Bud nodded. “Man, I’m with you on this girl, Li He. There’s just something about her. I hope she’s not the one. She looks way too young and defenseless to die this way.”
“Yeah.” But my gut was telling me she was the one, and now all we had to find out was the why. And who was monster enough to cook some poor innocent nineteen-year-old girl alive.
Here Comes Trouble
After Lotus’s suicide, Tee was careful to act all torn up, like all the other kids in his group. He did one hell of a job on that front, too, but he wasn’t upset in the least. She’d been ignorant to do herself in just because he had his way with her. Even if she hadn’t liked it the first time, she would’ve learned to enjoy it, eventually. But he’d play the morose game because he liked it here at this clinic. He liked it a heck of a lot better than being at home with his whining, sobbing brothers and sisters, moaning about not having a mom anymore.
The therapy group session turned out to be what he really looked forward to the most. Every single day, he learned more and more personal things about the other kids and how to manipulate them. All were damaged goods; all were on the edge and only a slight little shove would push them over it and into utter despair. On top of that, he watched and learned how these supposedly expert psychiatrists worked with their patients, especially their techniques to break through and help the poor saps. Talk about a dream job. Messing with people’s minds. He loved it. He had always been able to do it, anyway, since he was a little kid. But to get paid the big bucks to do it was a whole different ball of wax.
There was one doctor that he liked the best. An older guy, Asian, Chinese, actually, like Yang Wei, and Tee found out he was another reason so many young Asian patients kept showing up. It turned out that he was a defector from China, too, and sometimes when Tee was in a private session with him, the doc would tell him tales about what it was like to live in China and how much he missed his family. But more interesting to Tee, he also told him that the Chinese had become masters at mind control and had used their own citizens in Frankenstein experiments, especially convicts and dissidents. He had escaped the regime and found refuge in the United States, but not before he had been forcibly involved in many of their covert psychological programs.
More than fascinated, Tee began to search for that kind of stuff on the Internet, and he got all kind of hits. In truth, he began to admire the Chinese government and how it worked. He played up to the Asians in house and started hanging around with them. There was a couple of girls who liked him and didn’t seem to mind that he was screwing them both. They were good friends, believe it or not, and both were mentally shaky. He started learning Mandarin Chinese from the doctor and loved it.
Things ended up going so well for him that he decided he’d go into psychiatry someday when he went off to college. He could also major in Asian studies and languages, and then he would see if he could travel to mainland China and study at one of their universities. His professor knew some people there, and things had begun to warm up between China and the United States. Tee was already pretty good at the language, so it would be a snap.
Yeah, his plan for his future was pretty awesome, all right, and he dived into it with great enthusiasm. His dad was pleased to see how happy he seemed now, and so were the doctors. He started working hard to get his high school diploma, right there on the premises, and it wasn’t hard to excel in all his subjects with his keen intelligence. He managed to ace his classes with flying colors. Next he persuaded the doctors into possibly giving him an assistant’s job right there at the clinic, so he could continue his private experiments on the kids. And he was getting better at it. In fact, it was almost like taking candy from a bunch of larger than normal babies.
Buddy, his roommate, was already a basket case, so it didn’t take much to get him started down that road. Buddy was scared of just about everything. Tee tortured him regularly by implanting doubts and fears in his head, and decided to do it now, while Buddy was lying in bed reading a book about alien abductions.
“Know what, Buddy? I believe in those alien abductions you’re reading about. I do. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen them myself.”
Buddy sat up in bed. He already looked terrified. “Seen them? Are you kidding me?”
Tee shook his head. “Nope. I’ve seen them around here. They come at night when everybody’s asleep. You ever see that movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where that spaceship plays those loud notes?”
“Yeah, a long time ago when I was little.”
“Remember when they got that blond-headed girl’s little kid, and the light was really bright and shining through the cracks of the house and everything was shaking and she was all panicking and stuff?”
Buddy really looked uneasy now. He was looking at the darkness outside the window. “Yeah, that was scary.”
“I saw that same thing happen one night about a week ago. Right here at the clinic.”
Buddy smiled a little. “No way. You’re lying, Tee. Cut it out.”
Tee shrugged. “Okay, if that’s what you wanna believe. Forget it. I should’ve known you wouldn’t believe me. I was just trying to warn you, ’s all.”
Tee went back to his computer screen, ignoring his roommate, but it didn’t take long for Buddy to go for the bait, just like Tee knew he would.
“Where’d you think you saw them?”
“Out by the tennis courts.” Tee swiveled his chair around again and stared Buddy in the face, very solemn now. “It really scared the shit outta me, too, Buddy. That’s why I didn’t tell anybody. I just jumped back in bed and pulled the sheet over my head. But it wasn’t a dream. It was for real.”
Seemingly relieved that he wasn’t the only frightened one, Buddy swung his legs over the edge of the bed and put his hands on his knees. He had on black and red plaid boxers and a white T-shirt. “How did you happen to see them? Did you just wake up? Or was there some kind of noise, or something? Like in that movie.”
“I dunno for sure what exactly happened. I just opened my eyes and then I noticed a funny reflection up on the ceiling right over your bed. I looked at you, but you were turned over toward the wall with your back to me, and I could hear you snoring.”
Buddy’s eyes were so wide now, it almost made Tee laugh. “What did you do?”
“I got up and tiptoed over there to that window.” He pointed to the one beside Buddy’s bed. “And I saw this big white glow back through the woods by the tennis courts. It really freaked me out, Buddy, and I got back in bed, really scared. The next morning I went out there to see what it could’ve been, but there wasn’t any sign of anything, so I started reading about all this kind of alien stuff. And guess what?”
“What?”
“They say that’s how the abductions start out. You know, they sort of come around when everybody’s sleeping in the dead of night with their big, advanced laser beams, and then they pick out the specimens they want to take up in the ship and experiment on.”
“Holy crap. You think they’ve chosen one of us kids here at the clinic for their tests?”
“Yeah, I do, but we’d never remember anything about it, even if they chose you or me. They have this mind control thing, see, that makes you forget everything they do to you when they’ve got you. Maybe we were taken outta here that night I saw them and don’t even remember it.”
Buddy
began to shiver a little, and Tee looked down at Buddy’s hands. Now he was gripping them tightly together to control his shakes. He sometimes did that in group when he was talking about his fears. His file was pretty detailed about his childhood. It said his dad liked to sneak up in scary Halloween masks and frighten him out of his wits when he was little more than a toddler, and sometimes would even put on a mask and snatch Buddy out of bed when he was asleep and beat him with a flyswatter. Poor Buddy had been scared of his shadow ever since. And look at him now—he was trembling like a leaf.
“Now, look, Buddy, calm down. Maybe they picked somebody else that night. Maybe they even picked one of our shrinks. Or you know what? Maybe one of our doctors is one of them. Maybe they all are aliens from another planet. Maybe when he does that hypnotherapy routine on you, he’s really taking you up in a spacecraft and sticking probes down in all your orifices. Sure wouldn’t surprise me.”
And that’s all it took. Buddy was terrified from then on and couldn’t sleep at night. All he thought about were little gray people coming to get him, the poor slob. He was so nervous, Tee could make him get hysterical by dropping a heavy book on the floor behind him. Tee had a lot of fun with it for a while, but then Buddy started following him around everywhere he went and wanting to be protected. That soon became a major problem, especially when Tee wanted to be alone with one of his girlfriends.
TWELVE
Slouched in a comfortable, bittersweet chocolate-colored leather chair in the waiting room of General Aviation Complex, I picked up the dull rumble of an approaching aircraft. I was expecting Black’s Lear, but this sounded a whole lot like his Bell 430 helicopter. I could always hear the roar of rotors before the chopper gained visibility, so I walked outside the terminal building and watched the dark sky. The night was overcast, a slight drizzle with the damp smell of rain and mist clinging to the hot asphalt, but not enough inclement weather to cause flight delays. The airstrip lights revealed the tarmac and landing runways, and the tarmac stretched out into the misty darkness, the tower alight and bright, and far off to my left. The glow of Springfield’s heavily trafficked streets bounced with a mysterious pink hue off the low-hanging clouds, a far cry from the inky black quiet of my lake house, where you could count a million stars nearly every night.