Twin Offerings

by Ruth Parker

  “He’s clean,” his friend had said. Apparently, he’d run Mullins through the databases, but he came up clean. No arrests, no bankruptcies, no debts, no lawsuits.

  Mullins was the one who’d been selling the tea sets online. That meant that Mullins had names and addresses. Fletcher would just have to persuade him to hand them over.

  He finally got to North Plains and found the small road that branched off from Highway 26. It wound around the farmland, going parallel to a small stream, and finally came to a house. The Mullins residence. Fletcher parked the car and got out. He took a look around. There was a fair amount of acreage, but no crops were planted. There was a white Honda Civic in the driveway, the motor ticking and cooling.

  Fletcher walked to the door, the wet mud squelching around his shoes. There was a neighboring house about a quarter mile down the road, the splintery wooden barn barely visible behind the tall timothy grass and overgrown weeds. Mullins’s house was old. There were a lot of houses like this in the country, wood-frame, paint peeling like dried scabs, thick shingles hanging askew from the eaves. This house would be freezing in the winter and scorching in the summer. The windows stayed open unless someone propped a book in the sill. The kitchen would smell like grease.

  He knocked.

  It was a long time until he heard the squeaking floorboards and footsteps of someone approaching. The door swung open.

  Johnnie Mullins was a sight to behold. He was tall, but his back was hunched, his shoulders sloping forward, his left side lower than his right. The effect was that he looked crumpled. His face was smoothly shaved, his fingernails short and clean. His hair was wet, as if he’d recently showered. The blond tendrils hung in clumps over his face. He looked as if he hadn’t eaten a meal that didn’t come out of a box in a long time. His cheeks were hollow, his eyes searching.

  “Are you Johnnie Mullins?” Fletcher asked.

  “Who are you?” he said. That was a yes, for sure, Fletcher thought.

  “I have a few questions about some vintage tea sets that you’ve sold online. The Whitmoore Sunset Rose children’s set in particular,” he said. Fletcher had the evidence photo of the tea set and handed it to the man. The white tea set stood out on a black background with the police placard indicating its evidence log serial number.

  “What’s going on?” Mullins said.

  “This tea set was found at a homicide scene,” Fletcher said. “It’s a relatively rare piece. Only a few thousand of them were ever made. We did an internet sweep and found that you sold a few of these sets within a few years. I was wondering if you had the sales records. It would be a big help if you could give me the names and addresses of the people who you sold the tea sets to.”

  The man seemed to think for a moment. He looked off into the distance, into the driveway and beyond. Fletcher thought the man might have been high; half the state of Oregon seemed to be smoking weed, and this man might have been one of the many.

  “I sold a few, that’s right,” Mullins said. “I might have the information on my computer still, but it’s been a long time. I don’t keep records or anything. It’s just a hobby of mine, not a business. I sell things here and there if I need the money.”

  It looked to Fletcher like this guy always needed the money. “I’d appreciate it if you could check,” Fletcher said.

  “Sure thing,” Mullins said. “Hold on a few minutes.”

  He left the door open, but did not invite Fletcher to come in and have a seat. However, he did not expressly tell Fletcher that he could not come inside. That meant when he stepped into Johnnie Mullins’s living room, he was not breaking any laws, not violating the country man’s constitutional rights.

  The inside of the house was just as run-down as the outside. The couch was musty and dusty smelling, earthy, like unwashed hair. The carpeting was shag, calico and definitely from the seventies. Fletcher was glad he was wearing shoes. The TV was off and there wasn’t a cable box or antenna hooked up to it, just a VCR with the end of a cassette tape sticking out like a mocking tongue. Fletcher bent down to look at the cassette and saw that it was just a blank Memorex label. He pulled out the tape and saw that the top label was also blank. He put it back into the VCR. He could hear a computer printer whining rhythmically as it printed one laborious line at a time. He didn’t see the cat, but Fletcher could definitely smell that there was a litterbox somewhere in the house that needed to be scooped.

  A small kitchen attached to the living room. There was a tiled bar counter with what he truly hoped was intentionally black grout. There were a couple orange prescription bottles sitting out, one with the lid off. Fletcher reached his hand out to take a peek at the label, when he heard Johnnie Mullins pull back from his desk and shuffle papers around. Fletcher quietly moved back to the porch and took out his phone, trying to look like he’d been waiting out there the whole time.

  “Here’s what I got,” Mullins said. He handed Fletcher two papers. It was a print-out of an email. “I still had this email saved. I shipped the tea set to the guy a few months ago. He lived in California, though, so I don’t know how that’s going to help you.”

  Fletcher took the papers and gave them a cursory read. Just the sort of polite, curt email exchange you’d expect when conducting a transaction. The buyer was in San Diego, too, not even Northern California, where he might have been the one abducting the twins.

  “I guess not,” Fletcher said. “Hey, you mind if I ask you, what’s so special about these tea sets? Why is someone paying two hundred fifty bucks for something they were giving away at Sav-Ons?”

  “Just like anything collectible, I guess,” the man said. He shrugged awkwardly, as if his shoulder pained him.

  “You sold a bunch of them,” Fletcher said. “Did you hit the jackpot at a garage sale or something?”

  “Something like that,” the man said. “Oftentimes people don’t know what they have. You can take advantage of that.”

  “Alright, well, thanks for the information. If you can find information about the other two sales, please let me know.” Fletcher gave the man his card with his cell phone scrawled on the back.

  Fletcher trudged back to his car, full of anger and pent-up energy. He hadn’t known what to expect, but he certainly didn’t expect to be stopped cold like this. Another dead end. He started his car and put it in reverse. He would have to back out the whole length of the long, narrow driveway until he got back on the road. He was halfway down, wishing that the rental car had a backup camera, when his phone rang. He tried to get it out of his pocket while still keeping his head wrenched around backwards to look out the rear window, but he fumbled and dropped it into his lap. He saw the caller ID screen; it showed the prefix for the Sheriff’s Department.

  “What?” he answered. He tried to force his heart to stop hammering, but he couldn’t calm himself. Laurel was still out there, somewhere, and a call from the Sheriff’s Department was either going to be very good news or very bad news.

  “Hey, it’s Bowen,” she said. When he left earlier, Detective Barbara Bowen had taken the lead in the efforts to find Laurel. It was considered the highest priority in the department and the orders were to operate under the assumption that she’d been abducted. “The state tech guy just got back to me.”

  “Out with it,” he snapped. He didn’t care if he was being an asshole to the one detective who had listened to him and taken his concerns seriously. He needed to know. If they found her—he could barely even think the words—if they found her remains, he would completely lose it. He couldn’t lose her, couldn’t bear the thought of never having his arms around her again. Especially since she’d disappeared before he’d been able to tell her how he felt, just how important she was to him. Just how much he loved her.

  “Still haven’t found her,” Bowen said quickly. “He said her phone isn’t putting out any signals.”

  “It could be dead,” he offered, “or turned off.”

  “Sure,” Bowen said. “He got the GPS r
ecords, since she had her location services turned on to run maps. He’s working on getting the maps data, if she typed in any addresses, but he needs a second warrant for that because the phone company is choosing now to take a brave stand on the Fourth Amendment. At approximately nine-thirty, her location moved north. She went west on Route 26, then appears to have gotten off going north on Helvetia. After that, it got a little wonky.”

  “Is that the technical term? This is serious.”

  “I know that,” she snapped back at him. “And I’m up to my asshole in red tape and paperwork. I’ve been on the phone all damned day. Where the hell did you run off to, by the way?”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’m on edge. What was wonky after she got off on—what street?”

  “North on Helvetia, then the signal cut in and out and he wasn’t able to discern a specific street she was driving on.”

  Barbara was still talking, but Fletcher wasn’t listening. Helvetia—he’d passed that highway exit on the way to Johnnie Mullins’s house. She’d driven towards North Plains. Gotten off the highway in the middle of nowhere. Phone turned off. The whole state of Oregon, and she’d gone—or been taken, his mind cruelly added—mere miles from where Fletcher was parked right now. Coincidence?

  That was when he realized. The smell. Earthy like a cat’s litterbox. But there hadn’t been a cat. No cat hair in the messy house, no cans of cat food, no food bowl. No, Johnnie Mullins didn’t own a cat. And Fletcher didn’t smell a cat.

  He had smelled musk. Perfume. The old style of perfume made from a jungle cat’s scent glands.

  The same perfume that Laurel had smelled on the dead twins during the autopsy.

  “Barbara,” he said with lips that felt numb. “Send backup. I think I got the mother fucker.”

  Underwood hated to admit when he was wrong—and he probably wouldn’t admit it publicly, especially not to that Bowen bitch—but he was wrong about his suspect. Looking at him from across the table in the interrogation room (sorry, the interview room) Underwood had to admit at least to himself that this was not the Tea Party Killer.

  He’d driven out to Walgreens and gotten the guy on his smoke break. The kid had practically fudged his jockey shorts when Underwood had flashed his badge and said he was wanted in connection with a child abduction and murder. The guy was a loser. Overweight, wispy hairs over his pimply chin, shoes he’d probably bought at Walgreens with his employee discount. Underwood didn’t put too much stock in all that profiling bullshit, but he had to admit that this guy seemed like an unlikely mastermind.

  In the interview room, the suspect had broken down and started blubbering, begging Underwood not to call his mom. She’d taken him in because she had to, but she’d dump him onto the streets if there was even a slim sliver of a chance he’d been fooling around with any girls again. He made Underwood sick. Underwood had pulled back from the table, ready to put the fear of God into this guy then cut him loose.

  His ear piece beeped softly. He was wired up with an ear bud so that Jennings could watch from the two-way mirror next door and feed Underwood any questions that he wanted asked.

  “Fletcher’s got him,” the voice said. It was a woman’s voice and it took him a moment to identify it as belonging to Detective Barbara Bowen, aka that bitch Bowen. “He’s up in White Plains. We’re moving now. Get your ass out of there.”

  Under other circumstances, he would have resented anyone telling him what to do, but he was in a mild state of shock. Fletcher got him? He didn’t even need to ask what him she was talking about.

  He got out of his seat. “Don’t go anywhere,” he told the quivering, sobbing loser sitting at the table. Let him sit there. Underwood felt no pity for him. He was twenty-four years old and six years ago, when he was eighteen, he’d seduced his thirteen-year-old female cousin. Although ‘seduced’ surely wasn’t the word for it. The fat sack of shit could sit in the interview room until sunrise for all Underwood cared.

  Out in the hallway, Underwood saw Jennings was at his desk, on the phone, rapping his pencil on the desk impatiently. Underwood knew Jennings well enough to recognize that he was on hold. Good. Underwood went out the back so that Jennings wouldn’t see him. Jennings would be royally pissed off when he realized that Underwood had left without him. But that was too damned bad. Jennings was married and had a three-year-old daughter.

  And there was no way that they were going to cuff the asshole without shots fired.

  Underwood burst out into the parking lot, the brisk air hitting his face like a welcome jolt of electricity. He located his car and got behind the wheel. He turned on his flashers and peeled out into the street, towards Route 26. There would be some traffic, but he should be able to weave through the lanes and get there in time. At least, he hoped he could get there in time.

  He wanted this asshole bad. He knew he didn’t earn it—Fletcher had been the one to run down the lead that finally cracked the case, but that didn’t change things. Underwood wanted him bad. Wanted to see the cuffs around his wrists. Wanted to toss the house. Wanted to stay up til three in the morning writing the incident report.

  He had to beat Fletcher. He’d seen Fletcher’s eyes when the former FBI agent got angry. And he knew why Fletcher got kicked out of the Bureau. He’d checked up on their little consultant, made a few calls to some people he knew on the East Coast. A few years ago, Special Agent Fletcher Reed had gotten a tip on a suspect—another hot case like this, in which a series of boys had been kidnapped and ravaged, dumped in the woods alive but in shock so severe that they might have been better off dead. Fletcher’s team had busted down the guy’s door. While the scumbag was on the ground, Fletcher shot him in the back of the head. Four times.

  Those boys who’d been abducted had been strangers to him.

  This guy had Laurel. The woman that Fletcher loved.

  There was no way they were getting out without shots fired.

  Twenty-Four

  He was honestly surprised that the cops had found him. The cops had never given a damn about him before. They never gave a damn when his mother was beaked out of her mind on meth, when she sold off her daughters’ virtue to any lowlife with a few grimy dollar bills. They never bothered to nose around when he killed that man on that cold gray morning. They didn’t ask questions when he finally worked up the nerve to kill his mother. Those lazy cops, they never figured it out when he first tried to take his twins, those two cute little girls fifteen years ago, and everything had gone wrong.

  As long as the property taxes got paid on the shitty little house, no one even knew he existed. Of course, the stupid cops managed to piece it together right when he’d finally gotten everything perfect. His life had been one miserable heartbreak after another—he deserved this happiness. He’d earned it.

  He just wished it would last longer than one night, but one night was all he was going to get. He would have this perfect night with Laurel, with the two girls, then they could all go off into the bliss of pure nothingness.

  He emptied the bottle of pills onto the cutting board. He took a heavy glass tumbler and used the bottom of the glass to crush the pills like a pestle. He ground and smashed, swept them back into a pile, ground and smashed, swept them into a pile, ground and smashed. He finally had a pile of smooth powder, fine and silky. Alone, those pills would not be enough. He had researched the proper dosages, factoring in their ages and body weights. He would have to add some brandy—but not too much, since it didn’t taste very good. They would all drink their tea, then he would wrap them in his arms, feel the love and warmth of his family. They would sleep.

  He set the kettle on the stove to boil. When it started to whistle, he measured a small, level scoop into one of his prized white teacups. He poured a small amount of hot water and stirred until all the powder was dissolved. This would be just enough to make Laurel relaxed, make her happy to be in her new family. He had been sorry to take her sister away from her. That was the truth. He knew how important it was for sisters
to stay together. But after Laurel ran away, he’d been left with no choice.

  He put a teabag inside her cup and filled it the rest of the way with hot water. He loved this cup. It was the exact same set that his sisters had. The tea set was the one nice thing his mom had bought for them, before she’d gotten too deep into the meth. His sisters had loved that tea set. It was the only nice thing they ever owned, a thing of beauty and elegance—a reminder that not everyone in the world lived in a dirty house with a fucked up mother. A reminder that if they could ever escape, there would be a world outside that they could escape to.

  That tea set, it had made the girls a little delusional. When they were taken to Miss Madeline’s house, they had ideas of fine china and cloth napkins and sparkling water. They had wanted to go. They wanted any sort of life that didn’t involve washing their clothes in the bathroom sink and eating cold, discount sandwich meat for dinner. They hadn’t listened when he’d barged into Miss Madeline’s house and begged them to leave with him.

  “You can’t stay here. This isn’t what it seems. Does this look like an etiquette school to you?” he had asked them. It was an old farmhouse, cleaner than their own house, but that didn’t mean much. There were cans of Bud Lite on the living room table. A monstrous television with fake wood paneling dominated the living room; it was on mute, but the cheap sets and bad acting of a soap opera were broadcast on the giant screen. The air was oddly thick, heavy with a smell that was slightly sweet, like how a public bathroom might smell after it has been newly cleaned. The smell of meth.

  “We’re going to learn to be fine young ladies,” Samantha had said.

  “They’re going to make you fuck weird old men,” he yelled. His mother had slapped him when he said that—hard—but he didn’t even feel it. He fell to his knees, his lip bleeding slightly from where it had smashed up against his teeth. He’d never said anything so vulgar in front of his sisters, but they were twelve and they knew about such things. They had managed to stay innocent—but he knew with their home life, once the girls got to high school, it would be all about boys and parties and skipping school. It had been his plan to get a job and get them out of there before that could happen. But now…