Out of the Blue: A Pengram Mystery

by Scarlett Castrilli

  Dagmar’s company was a paid service for Darby residents who were elderly and infirm, or otherwise disabled and homebound. There was a much larger county program that was free for those who qualified, and its drivers delivered freshly made food to homes daily. However, people did not have much control over the kind of food to show up at the front door. While the program was sensitive to allergies, it did not cater overly much to personal tastes.

  Service on Wheels differed from the county program in that it did not prepare the food itself, and only delivered once a week. Clients supplied their customized grocery lists and money to Service on Wheels, who sent out teams of shoppers to the desired grocery stores to fulfill the requests. The bags of groceries were delivered to the main office in downtown Darby, and then separated by region. Drivers ferried the goods to individual homes. This way the clients could get the brands they liked, and in the quantities they preferred. I would have just ordered everything online and saved myself Service on Wheels’ sizeable delivery fees, but the larger part of their clientele was aged and less likely to be Internet savvy.

  The list of shoppers and drivers was extensive. A good number of them were volunteers, and the rest paid minimum wage. Most were Darby residents with a handful driving in from Sonoma. While uniforms flooded the streets to search probable sites for mazes, Fagelman fed us addresses to visit as he found them in the disorganized mess of computer files and paperwork. Information about the employees wasn’t quite as hard to find, but the record keeping on the volunteers was disastrous. Some of the names were only marked down as initials, or nicknames without surnames attached. Sometimes there were phone numbers. Sometimes there were email addresses. Sometimes there was nothing at all. Fagelman even came across a page of phone numbers and nothing to identify whose they were: volunteers, employees, or clients. He called a few. The people to pick up weren’t even related to the company, despite being mixed in with the information that was.

  Dagmar didn’t care much about his paperwork, which probably created a pitiable situation for whoever handled his taxes. Just as bad, he deleted each day’s route after it was run so we had no history of who had gone where and when. He also had to pocket a very tidy sum, considering what he charged and how much of his labor was made up of volunteers.

  Halloran and I worked separately, starting on the drivers since the shoppers didn’t visit clients’ homes. Most were women, ranging in age from thirties to sixties. Housewives, empty nesters, a veteran with a prosthetic leg, many of them had volunteered several hours a week with Service on Wheels for years. By and large they didn’t care for Dagmar or the company itself, but felt a responsibility to the people they served. They usually took a few minutes to do a chore or two around the house while delivering the groceries, watering a plant or unloading a dishwasher after putting the food away. Some of the clients needed to be in nursing homes, but were fighting to the end to remain independent.

  As I was leaving my third house, Halloran called and said with a sigh, “I just talked to a woman who admitted giving her day’s client list to her son and son’s girlfriend once. She let them do the delivery run for twenty bucks.”

  “Anything strange about the son and son’s girlfriend?”

  “No, it wasn’t that. They don’t live in California anymore and are now married with kids. But we need to ask these people if they’ve done the same. She didn’t inform Service on Wheels that she let someone else do it, and she said plenty of the volunteers have done the same even though it’s not allowed. Feel sick one day and just pass it along to a neighbor or someone else who attends the same church, or separate out a client’s groceries from the coolers in the back of their cars and send it on with a friend who lives that way.”

  “Fuck.”

  I called up the people I had already visited to confirm they had never given out their client lists, and then proceeded onwards. Some people weren’t home, nor were they answering their phones. At times the phone numbers in the files were wrong, or the addresses were. People had moved away. Or they had quit volunteering for the company ages ago and were surprised to find out their names were still listed as active. Two had died, both of natural causes. Baffled at how the company had survived so long in this state, I crossed Darby again and again.

  Nobody set off any warning bells in me. They were just regular folks. Some women admitted to letting their husbands tag along for the deliveries, but there was nothing dodgy about the men when I was speaking to them. They were dads, grandpas, obese, retired, coming back from golf or going out with the kids to a park. The only one being a little squirrely at first thrust out his medical marijuana card and said defensively it helped him control his pain. I assured him I had no interest in his pot brownies and that was true. I didn’t, whether they were legally acquired or not.

  It was evening when Halloran and I were forced to call it quits, and dark when I arrived at home. The harvest moon was full and eerily large just above the horizon. Back in my peripatetic childhood, I remembered one of my mother’s slightly better boyfriends calling it a God’s Eye moon. The years had erased his name from my memory, his face and where we had been living at the time as well, but the quiet drawl of his voice and the curl of his cigarette smoke stayed with me.

  Unblinking, the moon stared down to me now.

  Was it also staring down to a new maze? Upon some terrified man or woman, amnesiac and nauseous from Quell and turning around in confusion at how they had gotten there?

  It would also be staring down to the man with the scythe. Traveling along the maze to watch his victim inside.

  I didn’t think I was going to sleep tonight.

  If things got too hot for him in Darby, would he simply pick up his toys and select a place somewhere else to play his games? But the way he’d left the gate unlocked and the door open at the silk mill . . . He was so convinced that he had covered his tracks in every conceivable way that he was practically shouting at us to discover what he had done.

  But arrogance was often a serial killer’s downfall. And I thought he had made a tiny mistake in selecting the old, off the beaten track farm property. Tens of thousands of people drove past that abandoned silk mill on a daily basis; the same could not be said of the second crime scene. He was intimately acquainted with this city. A traveling serial killer would not be.

  There was little in the fridge but a tinfoil mystery pack in the back. I unwrapped the half eaten burrito and sniffed it, determining it would make a suitable dinner even though it was more than a little disturbing that I couldn’t remember when it was I consumed the first half. Warming it up in the microwave, I settled down to eat in front of the television. There was another police detective show on, one I didn’t recognize. Delightfully, the case was solved and wrapped up in forty-two minutes. Then another episode of the show started and I watched it purely for the purpose of irritating Halloran with the plot the next day. I had to get him back for that documentary.

  The episode was a bad one, and I laughed when the perpetrator of several heinous murders turned his clichéd crosshairs to the lead detective on the case. That was an exceedingly rare occurrence in real life, but gauging from how often Hollywood liked to beat that drum, it happened with clockwork regularity. Admittedly, I hadn’t dealt with serial killers too often, but the ones I had certainly hadn’t taken time out of their days to contact me. Nor did they always walk away from the crime scene with a souvenir from the victim, like this TV villain was doing. While they weren’t evil geniuses, most of them were smart enough to know that a souvenir, if found, was going to get them in very big trouble indeed. The lord of the rat maze probably hadn’t strolled away with anything belonging to Chloe or Francisco except his memories of the last minutes of their lives.

  When the show ended, I flipped to the local news. Standing at a podium was Captain King, starched and pressed within an inch of his life and his comb-over working overtime to cover his scalp. Although he appeared somber to the cameras, I knew he was tickled pink to be recei
ving so much attention. His ego was a hungry beast, at least it was when he was around. I’d never seen someone in such stellar health take so much sick leave. The man to precede him in the position had taken one sick day in fifteen years.

  After giving a detailed update on the case, King took questions from the press. They had dubbed the perp the Maze Killer.

  If we didn’t bring in some answers soon, he would start leaning hard on us. Not because he had ever struck me as someone who desired justice above all, but because failing to solve this would bring him negative attention. The Calderon case had driven him insane. He wanted to be the hero, minus having to perform heroics. And then he would harass me about the other cases I’d set aside to work on this one. I needed to reassign those to other people.

  Halloran called on my house line. “Got something you’ll find interesting. Very interesting.”

  “Let me be the judge of that. Aren’t you home? Why are you calling on this phone? Nobody calls me on this phone except my mother when she’s being obsessive and I’m ignoring her on my cell.”

  “I’m home. Just getting voicemail on your cell.”

  I picked up my cell phone. I’d used it so much today that it had run out of juice. Flopping over in a very elegant move, I plugged it into the charger. “What’s up?”

  “Reuter went chasing after those partitions.”

  I’d completely forgotten, too involved with the chaos of Service on Wheels to make a mental note of that. “What did he find?”

  “He got lucky as hell. He’s working under the assumption that the perp is local and acquired the partitions locally. There are so many of them that he eliminated all of the small-size and medium-size businesses in the city and focused on the big ones. The industrial parks and such-”

  “Jake, that’s still a ridiculous number of businesses!”

  “Yeah, but a lot of those parks are relatively new, Pengram. Built in the 1990s and early 2000s during the tech boom. These partitions are older, made in the 1970s. Why would a company renting space in a spanking new industrial park set it up with dozens of old partitions for their cubicles? These are computer-related companies, solar power, et cetera. Reuter took a picture of the partitions and sent them out to the older parks and business strips.”

  “The businesses in those places could have changed hands half a dozen times and more in all of these years,” I argued. “And just because a place is new doesn’t mean a company is going to purchase brand new furniture to go with it.”

  “Yeah, but he got two hits just hours after sending out the picture. The first hit was a swing and miss at a temp agency. The owner used similar partitions back in the eighties before he sold them off, but then he dug up some old pictures of the office and he’d forgotten that his had a teal stripe along the top. These don’t. The second hit was at Pan-Tastic Breads. Company has been in Darby since it started up in 1965, run by two generations of the Shacter family. It was passed on from father to daughter in 1989. Alice Shacter wrote back to Reuter that those partitions looked very similar to the ones from the company’s head office. She tried to dump them some years after she took over. Can’t be positive, of course, but same color, same height, same style, same fabric.”

  “Tried to dump them,” I echoed.

  “The company is located at the far end of Mission Road-”

  Distracted, I said, “Anywhere near where Francisco Hernandez was taken?”

  “No, the head office is a couple of miles south from there. Pan-Tastic Breads used to be right at the end of the line on that road until it was expanded. She told Reuter that they renovated the building in 1997, expanded it for more office space, and updated the furniture and all of that. Their partitions were old and ugly and falling apart, she said, and she hated the color. So they were carried out the door to the back parking lot one afternoon and set up by the dumpster. It wasn’t just the partitions but tons of crap the office didn’t need anymore and none of it was worth the effort of selling. Beat-up filing cabinets, broken chairs and desks, splitting trashcans, nonfunctional computers and phones and printers, it was total garbage. They hired a crew from Beater Boys to bring a big truck over, pick it all up and carry it to the dump.”

  “Beater Boys? The red trucks going around town?”

  “Yeah, it’s a company in her husband’s family, so that worked out nicely for Pan-Tastic. Sure they got a discount on hauling. But when the driver got there in the morning with a few guys to load up, a lot of what had been set out by the dumpster was gone.”

  “Someone had taken it overnight.”

  “Yeah. She has a good recollection of the incident. It became a joke among the employees that still lives on in their company to this day. Their trash really was someone else’s treasure. The person carted off stuff not worth the gas it took to drive away. She can’t figure out how anyone even stumbled across the junk back there. You couldn’t see it from the road. None of the employees would have come back to snatch it; she’d informed them that they were welcome to take anything they wanted when it was heading out the door. They skimmed off some of the filing cabinets that weren’t too ruined, and that was it. So the stuff was there when she left work for the day around five, and it was still there when the Acchio night cleaning crew Pan-Tastic uses left after midnight to go to their next office. They picked through the stuff themselves and didn’t find anything to take. Hold on a second, Blue.”

  I waited while he had a muffled conversation with one of his daughters. He came back and picked up the thread of his story without delay. “The lead cleaner of that crew went home after his last job, realized he’d lost his wallet somewhere, grabbed a flashlight and drove back to the three places he worked that night. His wallet had fallen out of his pocket in the back parking lot at Pan-Tastic, and the stuff was still there. It was a little past four a.m. But by the time the Beater Boys arrived to take it away at six, a fair chunk of it was gone. Tons of the partitions, chairs and desks, all of the computer stuff, it got discovered and carried off in less than two hours.”

  That was a very short window of time. I turned off the television and sat in the darkness. “That was nineteen years ago, though, if these are even the same partitions,” I said. “Anything could have happened to them since then. Sold off, used in some other company . . .”

  “True. But keep in mind no one would likely have wanted them.”

  “And how old is this man? Nine times out of ten, they turn out to be twenties or thirties, occasionally forties. They’re still building up their fantasies in their teens and a lot of them poop out in their fifties or sixties if they aren’t caught first.”

  A female voice called on Halloran’s end. “I’ve got to go,” he said. “Anyway, I thought it was interesting.” He hung up.

  I thought it was interesting, too. Even if he hadn’t been the one to acquire them initially, the perp had gotten hold of them somewhere over the years. As to the person who raided behind the business . . . how had he found that stuff, and how had he taken it away? Had he just happened to be driving a truck?

  Or a smaller vehicle. A smaller one that could make several trips to his home in Darby.

  I stared out the window, thinking.

  The moon stared back at me.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Early in the morning, I blindly fumbled through my underwear drawer and came up dry. Fuck. I’d been ignoring Laundry Mountain for so long that it had probably achieved sentience by now and consumed the last of my clean panties while I slept.

  The choices were to go commando, stop at the mall and buy a three-pack on the way to work, or turn a used pair inside out. Staggering to the machine, I chose the least offensive pair from the basket and stuffed the rest into the washer with socks, bras, and T-shirts. When I got home, I needed to remember to transfer it to the dryer.

  While going through the motions of getting ready, I could barely keep my eyes open. As soon as this case resolved, I was calling my doctor and throwing down for an increase of my thyroid m
edication. It was ridiculous to always be so exhausted, like I was ninety-one instead of forty-one. But I just didn’t have the energy to engage in this fight. There was a reason why I hadn’t checked my mail in days, why dishes were forever piled up in the sink and Laundry Mountain reached stratospheric heights. It wasn’t because I was a slob. All of the energy I did have went to work, leaving me with nothing in the reserves for home.

  And then there was smiling, bow-tied Doctor Haglan, suggesting I needed to talk it over with a therapist and his pen poised over a pad to write me a prescription for antidepressants. Last time he had suggested I make time to go out with the girls. I was beginning to hate that smug, sexist old man.

  No one had called to report another murder overnight. That was good. Or maybe it just indicated the body hadn’t been discovered yet.

  You sick son-of-a-bitch, I thought as I brushed my teeth. I didn’t want anyone else to die at his hands, but I was not in control of that. For all of our best efforts, we weren’t moving as fast as he was.

  Before I left, I pulled everything out of the packed mailbox and dumped it on the coffee table. Bills. Ads. Catalogs. More bills. Then I saw my mother’s handwriting on an envelope and swore under my breath. What was it going to be this time? A guilt trip? Boudoir pictures of herself? Articles cut out of magazines? Rambling thoughts composed while drunk? It wasn’t my birthday. Her latest kick was news about celebrities who had had babies in their forties and fifties, and phone numbers to sperm banks. She wanted a granddaughter to buy cute clothes for. Some of the sperm banks listed donor information online, and she enjoyed going through them to select good candidates.

  I thought that was weird, but hey, maybe that was just me.

  Opening the envelope, I pulled out a card and groaned as glitter fell everywhere on the table and floor. Really? My own mother had glitter-bombed me? Who still did that past high school?