by Chuck Wendig
ELEVEN
MURDER BALLADS
Closest place to set up camp is a shitty B&B five miles from the lake, and it’s one of those classic B&Bs—the old Victorian house, the Victorian furniture, the named suites (the Gardenia, the Rose Garden, the Mildew and Sadness Special), the one cat for every three steps you take, and of course, the vegan old lady proprietor who will make you a kale omelet for breakfast. They get inside and Miriam tells her that she doesn’t want breakfast, Grosky and she are not a couple, and if any one of these four hundred cats touches her, she will throw it out a window. The woman doesn’t like any of that and sends them packing.
It’s another ten miles down the road to a Best Western straight out of 1976. She makes Grosky get them two rooms. “You snore.”
“Fine.”
Then she leaves her room and goes to his, and she demands that he tell her everything or she’ll cut him up and eat him for breakfast.
He sighs and spills it.
“Mark Daley was drugged. That’s why there wasn’t a struggle.”
Miriam twitches. “Let me guess: ketamine.”
“Yeah. How’d you know?”
Because some cuckoo hooker in Colorado dosed me with it. Back when she was on the trail looking for Mary Stitch, she met a woman in the west end of the state who had, well, something of a fan crush on Miriam. Melora was her name. Pretended to be Miriam’s sister—not in blood but in a strange, cosmic way. Just as Miriam was down under the water in a rushing river, Melora was being drowned in a bathtub by her boyfriend. And there again, all of what’s happening now seems a shadow cast by her past: Melora was a fan too. Dressed up in one of those plague doctor bird masks just like the Mockingbird killer.
Boyfriend tried to drown her in a tub.
Louis drowning Samantha in a tub on their wedding night.
Plague doctor mask.
Ketamine.
Cheap-ass spring-loaded knife.
It’s like an old, bad song with rhymes and repeated lines. A cruel murder ballad of which she is the subject.
“What else?” she asks him.
“We think this killer’s been operating for about three months. And we’ve already got five people dead.”
“Is there any kind of pattern? Who are the victims?”
Grosky sighs. “Mostly men. Mostly white. Wide range of ages. Within a 150-mile radius. Not a lot of traits shared between them beyond that.”
“They all die by knife?”
“A couple.” He goes through his pack, pulls out some files. “Bob Bender, 44. Trucker. Stabbed through the eye with a fishing knife—”
Like Louis would’ve died.
Next page. “Danny Stinson, 60, had his throat opened with a pair of—well, they originally said scissors, but Berks County medical examiner said he thought it was a pair of wire cutters.”
That’s how I killed Carl Keener. The original Mockingbird.
“Then we’ve got Harley June Jacobs. She’s the only lady in the pack. Thirty-seven, shot with a small caliber pistol—.22 by the look of it—right in the ear. Bullet never left her head. Just rattled around in there like dice in a cup, scrambling her brains.”
Harriet Adams died when I shot her in the ear. She was a venomous one. Ingersoll’s most valued killer. Thought herself cold and clinical, but her cruelty betrayed that, didn’t it? Nothing cold about cruelty. Cruelty runs hot.
“Then?” Miriam asks.
“Sims. Wayland Sims, 18. Definitely the most interesting death of the pack, I think. Another neck injury—”
“Let me guess,” she says, her stomach churning. “Barbecue fork.”
Grosky gives her a look that mirrors the feeling in her guts. “Yeah. And you knew that how?”
“I, ah.” Her mouth is dry and she tries to find words. “Story for another time.”
I killed a man inside a Long Beach Island store with a barbecue fork to the neck. Man in dark glasses, in all black. A shooter. He was going to take out half the store—and worst of all, he was going to kill Walt the cart-boy, who never said a bad word to anybody. Before he died, that gunman said things to her. Did the voices send you, too? he asked. You’re the one always messing with things.
More rhymes and echoes.
“After that, Mark Daley,” he says. “And we’re caught up.”
She swallows a hard knot, which she’s pretty sure is just a bezoar stone of anxiety and calcified fear-barf. “There’s something in common. These five died for some reason. It isn’t random.”
“Serial killings, by their nature, usually aren’t.”
“But this isn’t—” She realizes it’s hopeless. Grosky has his world where everything has to fit a certain way: every circle hole gets a square peg, nuance be damned. “Wren isn’t a serial killer.”
He looks confused, like a bear staring at its own reflection in a mirror. “Wren? Wren who? That girl you told me about, Lauren, uh—”
“Martin. Lauren Martin. Wren. She’s the one doing this.”
“And you know this how?”
“I don’t know it, but I know it.” She taps her chest. “It’s the way things add up. The river is rising? Hey, psycho?”
“What’s that? ‘Hey, psycho’?”
“It had been written on the mirror. At Daley’s cabin.”
“And that matters why?”
“It’s something she used to say to me.”
He leans in. “So, this is a message. To you. You’re at the heart of this.”
She shrugs. “Seems I’m at the heart of everything, big fella.”
“What’s next, then? You’re the boss. We’ll play it how you want to play it. Where do we go? How do we find her?”
“First, we need to figure out how the victims are connected. The cops didn’t do it right. They missed something. We start with Daley.”
“Okay.”
“He had property elsewhere, didn’t he? A duplex or something.”
“Rents, not owns, but yeah.”
She stands up. “Then let’s go.”
“Can we get a bite to eat first?”
“Really? The fat guy wants to eat?”
“Miriam, people need to actually eat food. It’s how we survive. Keeps our metabolism going, our blood sugar even, it fuels our brain—”
“We eat after.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
TWELVE
DUPED AT THE DUPLEX
The house is rotting from the bottom up, like the earth is trying to reclaim its materials. The porch at the bottom is crumbling. The powder blue siding is water-damaged and sagging. The flowerbeds are overmulched and shot through with mushrooms. But if you let your gaze tick upward, the house looks okay—it’s got a wooden porch split by a wooden rail, with a door on each side indicating that this is, indeed, a duplex: a house split Solomonically in twain, with each half given over to a different owner or renter.
The house sits down a little side avenue stuffed with houses that all look similar: most are one story, on little postage-stamp properties. These aren’t poor houses, but these aren’t rich houses, either. These are people, Miriam figures, who pay their bills but just barely. A vacation means a fishing day at the lake. A new car means somebody else’s old car.
Still, better than how a lot of people live, she figures.
Miriam and Grosky step out of the car and head up to the porch. A centipede dances ahead of her, its feathery legs carrying it swiftly away.
She steps right up, knocks on the screen door. It rattle-bangs in its ill-fitted frame. Grosky gives her a look. “Told you, nobody was here. Guy lived alone.”
“Right, I’m just making sure.”
“Making sure why?”
“Because we go around back and—” She’s about to say throw a brick through a window, but the door to the neighboring apartment opens suddenly. Miriam nearly pees herself. “Jesus.”
A woman peeks her head out. Older, but not old. Maybe late forties. Her hair looks like a helmet made from broom s
traw and planted indelicately atop a moonish, freckle-specked face. Her eyes narrow to slits, and her mouth purses.
“Whaddya want,” the woman asks.
“Ma’am,” Grosky says, but Miriam interrupts him.
“We’re cops.”
The lady’s eyes shut even tighter, like the pinch of a thumb against a forefinger. “You don’t look like cops.” Pause. “Well, he does. And the cops were already here. I gave them what they wanted.”
“What did they want?” Miriam asks.
“Whaddya think they wanted? To look around. Ask a couple questions.”
“We’re not cop-cops,” Miriam says as Grosky gives her a don’t do this look, a look she returns with her own I am totally doing this look. “We’re Feds. Like, the Bureau? Grosky and Black. He’s Grosky, obviously. I mean, could you imagine me with that name? Ugh, no, thank you. Grosky is the real Fed, and I’m, like, a consultant?”
“Consultant.” The woman repeats the word like it’s gibberish, like it’s a foreign word she doesn’t understand.
“Right.”
“All right. Fine. You want in his apartment?”
Grosky says, “Ma’am, I don’t know that it’ll be—”
“Yes,” Miriam says. “We want in his apartment.”
“I’ll get the keys; hold on.”
The lady disappears. Grosky hisses, “You’re going to get me in trouble.”
“You already got fired. There’s no trouble deeper than fired.”
“There’s sued. There’s arrested.”
“Eh. We’ll be fine. I do stupid shit like this all the time.”
“Yeah, and it’s catching up to—”
The woman is back, coming out of her house like a turtle poking out of its shell. She’s got a hunch to her back and a shuffle to her feet even as she pulls a ratty sweatshirt over her shoulders despite the waning summer heat.
The woman takes a painstakingly slow journey down her own steps and around the railing and back up the steps of the neighboring unit. Miriam is tempted to reach out and brush that straw-mop hair away from her ear just to get a glimpse of her death. She imagines it’s about the dullest death imaginable—a slow, creeping death to match her slothful shuffle—but the desire to see death paraded out in front of her, tawdry and exposed, makes her skin itch with the formicative tingle of insects crawling. Miriam restrains herself. Now is not the time. She clears her throat.
“You’re the landlord, that right?”
“Uh-huh,” the lady says, except with her accent it’s more eh-heh. “Yeah, I rented to Mark,” and she goes on and on in this non-story story about who she rented to before that, how there was Pete (no, Paul), and before that there was a nice Guatemalan couple, and before that there was this guy and that gal and oh she decided to take her house and turn it into two units because her son said it would be good extra income for her since she lost her job at the Giant Eagle and it’s not like she used the whole house anyway since he went away but then he died in Afghanistan and she didn’t have nobody anyway since her son’s father left her six months after Billy (the son) was born.
By the time she’s done with the story, she’s fidgeted with the keys and opened the door. Miriam hates this woman and feels bad for her in equal measure. Maybe she hates her because she feels bad for her. She doesn’t know. All she knows is that she’s pretty sure it makes her a crappy person. Which is not exactly national fucking news, is it? “I’m Debbie,” the woman says, the name sounding like the bleat of a hurt animal.
They go inside.
Mark’s side of the apartment is spare, like the cabin. IKEA furniture throughout. Ikea furniture, Miriam thinks, for college students and divorced assholes.
“Shame what happened to Mark,” Debbie says, sucking her teeth. “Just a real shame that somebody would do that to him.”
“Cops look around much?” Grosky asks.
“Nah,” Debbie says, waving it off. “They were in and out pretty quick. Asked me some questions, then done. Mark was quiet. Nice enough. I know he had some trouble, but that’s not my business, and I don’t know who did what in that story. Sometimes, people deserve what they get.”
Irony of ironies, Miriam thinks. Mark hits his wife but maybe she deserved what she got, is what Debbie is saying. Mark then goes and gets stabbed to death, and it’s a real shame what happened to him. She wants to go off on this woman. She wants to tell her, Well, maybe Mark fucking deserved what he fucking got, and maybe he shouldn’t hit women, but she restrains herself.
She mentally marks that as a note of personal growth. Go me.
Grosky asks if they can look around, and Debbie says sure, sure. So, they do. They poke and they peek. But there’s not much here. The pantry is spare, with a few perishables. The fridge is mostly empty. (“I cleaned it out, didn’t want a smell for the next tenant,” Debbie explains.) It’s a two-bedroom unit. One of the bedrooms is indeed a bedroom. Nothing exceptional here. Nothing under the bed. Naught but clothes in the drawers. The other bedroom is an office with a small glass-top desk, a laptop, and right next to that setup, a treadmill (which is used in the traditional way: to hang clothes).
Miriam opens the laptop screen gingerly and with grave distaste, like she’s handling old underpants filled with medical waste. She’s had to use computers more and more in this life of hers, and it’s irritating every time. They’re so obtuse and belligerent, computers. She’s happy that the technology is advancing to the point where you can just push a button and yell your desires into a microphone hole so the computer just does whatever the fuck you ask it to do.
Screen ticks on.
Windows Vista.
Password line, empty. Cursor blinking.
Password: stabbed.
No.
Password: deadguy.
No.
Password: markdaley123.
No.
Password: eatshitanddieyoufuckingmachine23452.
Also no.
Grosky sidles up next to her. “Lemme get this,” he says in a low voice. She shies away from his bulk as he leans in, fingers ticka-tacking across the keyboard so fast, she’s pretty sure he might be half-robot.
He narrates what he’s doing as he does it. “This is an old piece-of-shit Windows Vista install. Load into safe mode, then just pop open a command line from the start, pull up the username records, then—” Across the screen he types USERNAME markdaley NEWPASSWORD markdaley. “Voila.”
It logs her in.
Now she’s looking at a field full of icons and boxes and blinky things, and she holds up her hands like a poker playing tapping out. “Eeeeeeh.”
“You are a real Luddite,” Grosky says.
“You’re a real Luddite.”
“You don’t know what a Luddite is, do you?”
“Yes.” Blink, blink. “No.”
“Move over. I’ll do this. You keep looking around.”
“Fine,” she says. “You big Luddite.”
Debbie seems to regard this exchange with little interest. Miriam strolls up. “This the whole house?”
“ ’S’also the basement.”
“Can I see?”
“Sure, c’mon.” She brings Miriam to a door across from the bathroom, which opens to a set of uneven wooden stairs that complain with every step. Debbie flips a switch before they head down, illuminating the basement in the light of a single bare bulb that swings every time she takes a step. Like the rest of the house, not much to look at down here. In the corner is a stack mount of a washer and dryer. Next to that is a set of metal shelves, home only to a few scattered tools. On the other wall is a chest freezer. Miriam scoots over to that.
She flips it open.
Empty. Pink stains in the bottom.
“I threw out what was in there,” Debbie says.
“What was in there?”
“Deer meat. Mark was a hunter.”
“Bambi,” Miriam says. “It’s what’s for dinner, huh?”
“Yeah.” But now Debbie�
��s beady eyes are stuck to her like pins in a voodoo doll. “Yanno, you don’t look like a cop.”
“Fed. Like I said, a Fed.”
Debbie makes a nasal hmm. “You don’t look like a Fed, neither.”
“Fine. Like I said, a consultant for the Feds.” She does a Vanna White demonstration of her clothing: the classic white T-shirt and knife-slash jeans. “We’re, like, the rock stars of the law enforcement world. Creative punks, get to dress how we like, come to work whenever. I’m a rebel, Debbie. A loner.”
“Oh. Okay.” Debbie says it not like she’s blowing her off but like that was legitimately enough to pop the flurry of doubt-bubbles in her brain.
Past Debbie, Miriam sees a wooden door in the concrete-block wall. A latch is fixed with a padlock. “What’s that?”
“That’s a door.”
“Yes, Debbie, I gathered that it was a door. I didn’t think it was art.”
“That’d be neat art, though. Clever.”
“Very,” Miriam says, smiling in a feral, overwrought way that says, I am not smiling but I have to make this face in order not to bite your head clean off your slumpy shoulders. “What lies beyond that door, Debbie?”
“My basement.”
“Ah. Okay. So, Mark didn’t have access to that.”
“Oh, sure he did.”
“He did? But it’s your basement.”
“Sure, sure, but you know, it’s, ah, it’s fine. It’s no big thing.”
There. Debbie’s eyes flash like moonlight on pond water. That’s fear. Miriam likes fear. Fear is an injury. It’s like a bullet hole—you find it, you can stick your thumb in there and press until you get a reaction.
“Debbie, did the officers look in there?”
“I . . . I don’t recall.” She’s no longer meeting Miriam’s eyes. She’s watching her own feet. Her fingers pluck at other fingers like she’s a spider tending to a damaged web.
“They didn’t.”
“I don’t remember. Maybe they did.”
“Debbie. Between you and me, I’m just a consultant. I don’t have any real authority. So, you let me in on whatever you’re hiding, and I can’t do anything about it, and I won’t tell anyone. But if I have to drag my Fed friend down here, and he has to drag the cops back out here—probably at a late hour—it’s gonna get messy. You don’t want to end up in prison. Nobody would rent this place.” Now for the final press of the thumb: “What would your son think?”