Out of the Blue: A Pengram Mystery

by Scarlett Castrilli

  OUT OF THE BLUE

  (A Pengram Mystery)

  by Scarlett Castrilli

  Copyright 2016 by Scarlett Castrilli

  Cover image courtesy Depositphotos and Umkehrer

  Cover by Devorah Mast

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Epilogue

  Chapter One

  She had been at the club. Drinking and dancing to rock music.

  And then she was here on the floor. Listening to the ABC song.

  The void between those two places was fathomless.

  The overhead light was blinding. A pool of vomit spread out beside her head, reeking of alcohol. The vicious drumbeat of a headache made her wince. She blinked and rolled from her side to her back.

  Hazy impressions teased at the edges of her mind, a cool stream of shots in her palm at the bar, the tickle of her hair against her arms on the dance floor, quick-stepping away from the asshole with oily skin who kept trying to grind on her . . . She hadn’t really wanted to go to the party at the club when she wasn’t going to know anyone, but Lindsay had cajoled until she caved. She’d drank to make the best of it when, as expected, they all talked to each other and didn’t include her in the conversation.

  She was still wearing the silver dress, but her heels were gone. Groaning, she got up to a sitting position and blinked as the ABC song came to a finish. Instantly it restarted, a chorus of little kids taking it away.

  She was in a tiny classroom made up of only three desks, lying on dirty white linoleum in the center aisle. Dolls sat in the seats. The desks were small, the kind she had had back in first grade. Notebooks were open on the desktops and sharpened pencils rested across the blank, wide-ruled pages. Orange partitions marked off the room. Alphabet and numerical posters were pinned to them, colorful cutouts of elephants and horses, too. Where the teacher and whiteboard should have been was a dim hallway made of more partitions.

  What the hell?

  Using a desk for support, she got up unsteadily. The boy doll slumped, its spineless body slipping down the seat until it was staring at the bare light bulbs above. She swallowed down on a lump of vomit and propped the doll back up. Then she rubbed her eyes, hoping when she opened them that she would no longer be in this dream. By accident she nailed herself in the eye with her knuckle and suspected that she was still a little drunk.

  And she was still in the classroom.

  Her purse! She looked around the small space. Like her shoes, it was gone. That meant her cell phone was gone as well.

  The alphabet song finished again. A maniacal giggle replaced the kids’ voices, like the next track was Halloween music. Hee-hee-hee-HO-HO-HO-hee-hee-hee. Then the laughter screeched to a stop, and the ABC song began for a third time.

  A brush of fear passed through her.

  She must have staggered out of the club, too drunk to know what she was doing, and wandered off into the night. Into some backyard with a creepy playhouse, where she’d vomited and started to sober up. She needed to retrace her steps and find her things. Had she had her purse when she left the club? She’d had it while she was dancing since it was such a little, lightweight thing and she didn’t want to leave it anywhere with her cell phone and wallet inside.

  She weaved through the desks and into the hallway in confusion. Abruptly, the music turned off and lights turned on, illuminating a branch in the passage up ahead. To the right was a little Christmas scene, an artificial tree surrounded by gifts, and a cardboard fireplace with yellow flames. Another hallway extended beyond that room, lit with bulbs.

  To the left side of the passage was absolute darkness.

  Not a playhouse. She didn’t know what this was. She just wanted to be somewhere else.

  As soon as she stepped into the Christmas scene, orchestral holiday music began to play. It was soothing, or it would have been had she not also heard a whisper of that same maniacal giggling. Hee-hee-hee.

  At the tree, she saw in surprise that her shoes were among the presents. A red bow had been set on top. Bending down, she flicked it off and pulled on her shoes. Why would she have put them under the tree? Why would she have taken them off in the first place? She had had a beer and then three shots, true, and she wasn’t someone who could keep pounding them back. The third shot had been too much.

  But she had had that much to drink a handful of times before. Yet it had never gotten her so blackout drunk as this.

  And she would have dribbled her shoes around, just kicked them off her feet at random, not carefully set them up beneath a Christmas tree and balanced a bow on top.

  Someone else had done that.

  This situation was getting weirder by the second. She peeked through the presents for her purse. It wasn’t there.

  Unless it was in one of them. If someone had put her shoes here, had he or she thought it funny to wrap up her purse?

  Cautiously, she picked up a box wrapped in reindeer paper. It was as light as air and obviously empty. Then she got down to her knees and shook all of the presents in turn, letting them fall from her hands when they were as weightless as the first. Lifting the lowest branches, she spied a gift that she had missed in the back. She reached in and pressed a finger to its side, intending to push it and prove it was empty without bothering to pull it out.

  It didn’t move as easily. There was something in this one. She dragged it out and tore open the Santa Claus paper. Beneath was a shoebox. Sure that her purse was inside, she popped the lid.

  It was a hand. Gray with rot and stained with ruby red blood on the fingertips.

  She screamed and shoved the box off her lap. The hand fell out, but the box landed top down and covered it up. Standing up fast, she backed away and looked around wildly. The orchestral music paused for that crazed Halloween laughter.

  Something scraped nearby, like metal on concrete. But there was nobody the way she had come. Nor was anybody down the lit hallway that ran off this room.

  She was inside. It had been a windy day and a windier night, but here the air was still. This was some freak’s home or garage set up in this crazy way! They had seen her staggering around drunk and brought her here to their funhouse.

  She wasn’t having fun.

  Wanting to get away from that hand . . . why had it been in there whose hand was that where was she and what the fuck had she gotten herself into . . . she pushed on down the lit hallway. Her heart pounded as that laughter looped on repeat. Then she came to another juncture.

  She didn’t want to go into the happy Thanksgiving scene with dolls sitting around a table and staring at the holiday bounty. A stuffed turkey with a silly smile rested in a serving dish. Heaped in little bowls around it were plastic eggs, plastic corn on the cob, plastic vegetables, and more. Cutouts of autumn leaves and happy pilgrims decorated the walls.

  But if she didn’t go in, her other option was another pitch-black hallway. She didn’t like either of her choices. Standing there, she crossed her arms over her chest and debated which way to go.

  Her purse.

/>   It was hanging off the back of one of the chairs, the sequins glinting in the light. Stealing into the room, she snatched it up and opened it with a feeling of dread at its weightlessness.

  Her dread was borne out. There wasn’t anything inside.

  Several covered serving dishes rested on the table. The lid of one was caught on a pink tube that looked very familiar. Lifting the lid with bated breath, she discovered the lipstick that had been in her purse. Her hand went out to the next serving dish and froze there in mid-air.

  Scrape.

  Hee-hee-hee.

  She didn’t give a shit about her lipstick, or the emergency tampon she had been carrying, or even her wallet. Her driver’s license and bankcard could be replaced; the five dollars didn’t matter. All she wanted was her cell phone. And she was sure it wasn’t on this table. Ditching the lipstick where it was, she considered taking one of the knives on the place settings for protection.

  But it was plastic. A plastic butter knife. And she didn’t want to touch anything more on the table.

  Hee-hee-hee.

  A green EXIT light flickered at the end of the next hallway.

  Thank God! She hurried for it in a panic as the giggling increased in volume. Once she was outside, she would run to the nearest gas station, have the clerk call the police, and then she was never going to drink again ever ever ever . . .

  There was no door beneath that sign. The partitions framing the hallway ended, and only steps beyond them was a blank wall.

  Hee-hee-hee.

  Scrape.

  The sound was right behind her! She spun around with a scream of terror as a figure in black rushed forward with a scythe.

  It cut for her in a silver arc, displacing the air, and her scream came to a sudden stop.

  Chapter Two

  “It’s bad,” Eller warned.

  “It’s always bad,” I called back to him.

  I strode up the cracked walkway to the old silk mill, a line of squad cars parked at the curb behind me. Traffic was moving slowly as drivers on their morning commutes craned their necks to see what was going on. A dozen people were crowded on the sidewalk, the uniforms keeping them at bay with the mighty power of stern looks and yellow police tape.

  Sadly for the hopeful audience, the mess was inside.

  I had passed the defunct silk mill now and then in all the years I’d lived in Darby, and skimmed the sporadic articles in the local paper bemoaning a historic landmark falling into decay. The property changed hands almost as often as I changed underwear, but all of the heady plans to transform the former mill into a restaurant or a hotel or condominiums, a mini-mall or museum or offices eventually came apart for various reasons. This was a place of dead dreams.

  Taggers had swept through long ago with splashes of faded blue and red on the wall. The weeds were out of control, even growing over the walkway in places. Trash was mixed in, used condoms and spray cans and fast food wrappers. Little of it looked freshly dropped. The homeless population had relocated over the years, a portion to the illegal campsite along the Darby River and the remainder nearer to the recently built shelters.

  Next to Eller, a door was propped open. Voices were booming within the cavernous, two-story building. He stepped aside to let me in. “Real bad, Pengram,” he added.

  I didn’t say anything. Ricky Eller was all of twenty-five or twenty-six, but he had very firm opinions about women working in law enforcement. In the perfect 1950s fantasy world in his head, they didn’t. Unless they were filing papers or pouring coffee, of course. Women were too gentle and sensitive to deal with the seamier side of life. They needed to be protected from it at all costs. Since the day he’d found out I was a homicide detective, he had been very concerned about my life choices. It made me want to kick him in the nuts every time he opened his mouth, but so far professionalism had been winning out.

  I entered the building. Decades of failed renovations had hollowed it out, many of the inner walls removed and part of the ceiling gone so that I could look all the way up to the second floor windows. The windows on both floors had been boarded over, pinpoints of sunlight streaming in through holes in the wood. Empty beer cans were overturned in a corner, thick with dust and anchoring cobwebs. Vagrants had called this place home in the past. The floorboards were uneven, so I stepped with care.

  “Over here, Pengram!”

  Detective Jake Halloran waved to me before bending down to inspect a bloody heap on the floor. I went over, noticing trash piles of broken concrete and bricks, and lines of tall orange partitions throughout the large space. They were old and battered. Bare bulbs on wires hung down from beams. All of it must have been left over from previous owners’ attempts to remodel.

  Halloran’s knees cracked loudly as he got back up.

  “Getting old?” I asked, coming to his side. I loved Halloran, although platonically. My partner had all the complexity and emotional range of a golden retriever, the loyalty and golden hair, too. There was some gray in it now, but it blended into the blond and was hard to see.

  He patted his little beer gut and said, “Just like fine wines, the two of us.”

  I was only forty-one. “Nice. Calling me old without calling me old.”

  “You started it.”

  The dead woman was crumpled on her side like a rag doll. In her late teens or early twenties, she was Caucasian and wearing a blood-splashed silver dress with matching heels. Her light brown hair was tied back in a ponytail, and sodden with the blood that had pooled beneath her. Vaguely visible on the back of her left hand was an iridescent purple stamp. I squinted at it. “Bounce?”

  “It’s a nightclub not too far away,” Halloran said. “Just opened up a few months ago. I tried to get my party on there but nobody would let me in with my golf pants.”

  “Discrimination,” I said absent-mindedly. “Women love golf pants.”

  The woman hadn’t been dead long. The gash in her neck was a killing one, so deep that she’d nearly been decapitated. Looking away from the internal meat, I said, “Do we know who she is?”

  “Purse was right beside her,” Halloran said. “License says Chloe Rogers, twenty-one.”

  “Who found her?”

  “A kid skipping school. Cannon Owenby. He noticed that door was open,” Halloran said, pausing to gesture to another door in the building, “and let himself in to mess around. He’s out back giving his statement to Fagelman, or trying to.”

  “Too upset?”

  “No. Helicopter mommy. She was out there a few minutes ago yelling that she needed to come in here and see the body.”

  “What the hell for?” I asked in astonishment.

  Halloran raised his voice into a hysterical falsetto. “‘Why won’t you let me in? How am I supposed to help my baby cope with what he’s seen when I haven’t seen it for myself? Move! Move! You have to let me see!’ That was generally the gist of it. She started to get real pushy, but Fagelman shut that down fast.”

  “I need to talk to the boy.”

  “Wish you well.”

  Stepping around the body, which had fallen between a wall and some partitions, I stumbled on a raised floorboard and headed for the door that the kid had come through. It led to the back of the silk mill. The weeds were just as out of control on this side, rising high on a lawn and encroaching claustrophobically on the sidewalk. A sagging chain-link fence ran around the back of the property, and beyond it was a line of humble homes. Some of the trees in the yards were turning red and orange with autumn.

  Fagelman was standing in the driveway with a woman and teenage boy, so I steered that way. The fence also enclosed the driveway, but it looked like the lock had been cut on the gate at the end. Another uniform was stationed over there to ensure nobody entered. The crowds appeared to be limited to the front; the only one out here was a curious woman with a dog on the opposite sidewalk.

  “Officer Fagelman,” I said in greeting.

  He turned, abject relief filling his face to see me.
“Morning. This is Mrs. Jennifer Owenby and her son Cannon.”

  Cannon Owenby was a veritable jolly blond giant in a maroon letterman’s jacket. But everyone seemed tall to me at five-two. A backpack was over his shoulder and stuffed to bursting, a gap in the zipper revealing textbooks. Tall and heavily muscled, the boy looked sheepish beside his mother.

  She was a head shorter than her son and dressed in a puffy white sweater. Her beady brown eyes took me in with dislike. “And you are?” she said dismissively.

  “I’m Detective Blue Pengram,” I said, meeting her gaze with bland indifference.

  She didn’t like that. She didn’t like that at all. Judgmental eyes swept up and down my long black coat, lingered on my shoes, and ran up to my face. Though I wasn’t always the best at reading people, I suspected that she was a person who liked to feel important. I also got the impression that she didn’t approve of my less-than-feminine attire.

  “What kind of name is Blue?” she grumbled loudly enough for all of us to hear. Ah, yes, liked to feel important and lashed out when she didn’t.

  “The only one I have,” I said, thinking, what kind of name is Cannon?

  Pink with embarrassment at his mother’s rudeness, Cannon said, “Are you a homicide detective?”

  “Don’t say that word!” Mrs. Owenby squawked at her nearly adult son.

  This was far beyond a helicopter parent. “Yes, I am a homicide detective,” I said, just for the joy of making her hear homicide again. She blanched and clutched her son’s arm as if to protect him from me.

  Fagelman cleared his throat. “Around eight this morning, Cannon came through the gate-”

  “It was open,” his mother cried. “It isn’t trespassing if it’s open. He’s just an explorer.”

  Cannon looked like he wanted to sink through the earth. Rattled, Fagelman lost the thread of the story. “He’s a senior over at Darby High School, lives four blocks away on Miller. Seventeen years old-”

  “Seventeen and a half,” the woman interrupted yet again.