Out of the Blue: A Pengram Mystery

by Scarlett Castrilli

  Bingo, I thought.

  I got the old manager on the phone, but learned very little from him. He wasn’t amused to have to talk about the job he was canned from, and he barely remembered John Macdonald. His short employment hadn’t been remarkable in any way, nor was his leave-taking. The guy was such a ghost in his presence that nobody was interested in his unexplained absence. Checker had been ramping up for the holiday season at the time Macdonald quit. A fresh influx of seasonal workers came in and someone else was assigned to take over his job. So that was that, and the former manager confessed that he couldn’t even remember the guy’s face.

  That was all right. We had just taken a huge leap ahead in this case.

  I updated Halloran so fast as I left the store that I was nearly stumbling over the words. He was talking just as fast on the other end to the task force, demanding information on John Elliot Macdonald. His criminal record, credit cards, aliases, everything they could dig up.

  The answers came back almost as fast. No criminal record. No financials or fake names, no marriages or divorces, this man was living lightly upon the world. There wasn’t any trace of him with the DMV as having a license or owning a vehicle. His Checker paperwork was incomplete and I assumed the fired manager was to blame for that, but the home address jotted down in tight but heavy-handed print was confirmed as real, although the property belonged to someone else. Perhaps he was renting.

  We got a warrant. Joining up with Halloran at the station, I was soon sweating under my Kevlar. Radio, gun, earpiece, I went fast through the check with my heart beating double time. There wasn’t going to be a third drugged abduction and murder at the end of a maze. We were going to be bringing him in very soon.

  But not soon enough to suit me.

  We drove through the streets of Darby with sirens pealing, three teams coming along in squad cars behind us. Once we were through the worst of the traffic, the sirens went off. Then we drove through a lower-income neighborhood of single-family residences and crummy apartment buildings. Trash skittered down the gutters with the breeze and the paint had faded on the curbs and road.

  As the blocks fell away behind us, the area became even more rundown. It was the kind of place where people took one look at a uniform and disappeared. Old paint, bent mailboxes, tall fences, and weedy yards marked the houses, and some of the broken-down cars at the curbs were older than I was. We parked around the corner from Macdonald’s address to avoid spooking him, and I motioned for two officers to go around the back of a sagging, filthy white structure that needed to be condemned.

  It had two stories and a flight of stairs crossing over the front of the building to the second floor. 114A was the ground floor apartment. It appeared to be uninhabited, brown paper taped over a broken window and flapping in the wind. Beyond the large glass door was a room with nothing in it. Upstairs, flowerboxes were attached to the landing. Dead vines trailed down. There was no vehicle in the driveway, which ended in a collapsing carport. The whole place had an abandoned look to it.

  Flanked by Halloran and a third officer, I went up the stairs and pounded on the door. The gun was in my hand. “Police! Open up!” I boomed.

  Silence.

  I pounded again.

  The door was such a piece of crap that it gave under my fusillade of blows, swinging inwards. We drew back in surprise. Then, edging forward, I looked in.

  The door hadn’t opened all the way. It couldn’t. Boxes were stacked up high on the other side. Squeezing into the gap, I saw a very narrow pathway running along the wall and vanishing at the corner. This was a studio apartment, just one big room and a bathroom to the side. It was filled from end to end with boxes and bags and laundry baskets, all of them packed to bursting with clothes and sheets and metal parts.

  There was no other door to the studio, and the windows were inaccessible. The air was stuffy and carried an appalling smell. It wasn’t that of a rotting corpse, at least not human. That particular smell was enough to put a person off food for days. This stink was of rodents and mold.

  No one lived here. There wasn’t the room. It was just storage.

  “He must have moved out,” I said to Halloran, who was a little green around the gills from the stench.

  “Or he never lived here.” Nudging aside a bit of plastic, he looked into a bag.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “More bags,” Halloran said. “Think mice have gotten into them.”

  We explored as far as we could penetrate into the room. Damage to the roof had allowed rainwater in. There were yellow stains on the ceiling and boxes black with rot below. I saw nothing in the baskets and open bags that looked like the decorations in the mazes. Most of it was clothing, men’s, women’s, and children’s. Three large garbage bags were overflowing with old shoes. Once the pathway ended in stacks of old hotel art paintings, we were forced to retreat. I wanted to scream at not finding him here.

  Losing the girl would have enraged him. This man was so careful to cover his tracks, and in one bad move, he’d blown it. There was not one but two eyewitnesses, both currently under guard at the hospital. He had to be in a nasty mood right about now, wherever he was.

  But it wasn’t here. The real question I had was if he had skipped the area once he realized the girls could describe his face. Or was he biding his time here to see if a sketch was put out that looked like him?

  It had been dark when he spoke to Nevea Worther and tangled with Amber Neris. That might be giving him a false sense of safety. And he had no idea that he’d been caught on a surveillance system.

  We went downstairs, Halloran on the phone and asking to speak with the property owner. The smell chased after us, seeping through the open door and stinking up the yard. Spying a neighbor looking at us over the fence, I called out when she didn’t immediately disappear. “Do you know who lives here?” I asked.

  Smoking a cigarette and squinting at me through thick, dirty glasses, the older woman said, “No one. No one in either place.”

  I walked through the grass to the fence. “Then whose belongings are inside on the top floor?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “When was the last time you saw someone here?”

  She took a last puff and dropped the cigarette butt. “Years ago. There was a Chinese family that lived on the first floor, mom, dad, and baby boy. Nice people, they didn’t-a speak-a much-a English but nice. They were the last ones to live in that apartment. Moved out in time, don’t know exactly, dad got a second job so they got a better place.”

  “Can you estimate when?”

  “Maybe 2009 when they left. Maybe earlier than that, like 2008 or 2007. And then there was a woman on the second floor for a while. But she didn’t live there much. Haven’t seen her in a couple of years, maybe 2014 was the last time. Could have been 2013. Wasn’t really paying attention.”

  A woman. Dammit. “Can you describe her?”

  “White chick. Fifties, sixties. Crazy.”

  “How was she crazy?”

  “Just crazy looking. Crazy hair, crazy eyes, crazy clothes, stickers on her face.”

  “Stickers? What kind of stickers?”

  “Don’t know. Didn’t really look. Like shiny blue splotches.” She ran her hand over her forehead and temple, swept it down over her upper right cheek. “I never went any closer than this fence after the Chinese family moved out, so I couldn’t see. She wasn’t wearing stickers on her face the first few times I saw her, then she started wearing more and more. But I’d see her clothes, skirt over jeans, scarves everywhere, mid-riff shirt like she was sixteen.”

  The woman cackled dryly. “Wasn’t sixteen. Had a little tummy puffing out like a muffin. She wasn’t fat, but she didn’t have no sixteen-flat-stomach no more. She just gave off a crazy vibe so I didn’t want to talk to her. People like that, best to steer away.”

  “What kind of car was she driving?”

  “Don’t know,” she repeated. “Some big, dirty old pick-up, I think.” />
  “Boyfriend? Family?”

  “No. Just her, stopping by.”

  “So she didn’t live there day to day?”

  “I don’t know what that crazy woman was doing. I’d see her carrying in boxes like she was moving in, grocery bags, but usually she’d drive away at night. But I haven’t seen her for a long time. I figured she moved out. Place is a shithole, both floors, nothing ever gets fixed up, landlord doesn’t care. That was why the Chinese folks left as soon as they got more money. So it’s empty now. Not my business anyway.” She walked away, ignoring my next question.

  Halloran appeared at my side. “The property owner is an old fart named Allan Miner and he was being a dodgy little dancer about this place.”

  “He looks like a slumlord,” I said.

  “It took some doing, but I convinced him to be more cooperative. No, he hasn’t ever rented to anyone by the name of John Macdonald. He’s never heard of anyone by that name.”

  “Of course not,” I sighed.

  “The last person to rent that second story studio was a woman named Amanda. No last name.”

  “How in the hell did he rent to her without a last name?”

  “It wasn’t an official rental deal. No paperwork passed between them. Basically, they met in a bar in Darby one night about eight years ago and somehow talk turned to the studio up there. He didn’t have the money to fix this place up but she didn’t mind. She just wanted it for storage. So he brought her over that same night and showed it to her. She was happy as a clam, wanted to take the downstairs apartment too but she couldn’t afford both. The downstairs apartment is a lot bigger than the studio and he would have charged more for it.”

  “It was empty?”

  “Yeah, the previous tenants had moved out recently, so he wasn’t getting a dime for either place. He described her as being middle-aged with big hair, dressed in sexy clothes, flirty and made him feel young again. I got the feeling that she might have given him a little thrill that night to seal the deal on the studio, but I didn’t want to ask.” He made a quick jerk-off motion.

  “Thanks,” I said with a grimace. “I could have put that together on my own.”

  “They didn’t see each other ever again after that night. She left him some cash each month in the gnome cookie jar in the yard, and he’d stop by to pick it up. A hundred a month. All of it off the books.”

  I looked around the yard for a gnome cookie jar, but it had either been stolen or grass had grown over it. “So that’s her crap up there?”

  “Looks like it. She stopped leaving the money between two and three years ago, Miner said, closer to three. Not long after that, he was diagnosed with cancer. He’s been battling it ever since and hasn’t felt well enough to drive out and see what’s going on here. He’s got a home in Darby and another in Napa, and it sounds like he makes enough dough off his passel of rental properties that losing money on this one doesn’t set him back. He just pays the property taxes on it and lets it rot. And crosses his fingers no one reports him for letting it fall into this state.”

  “Well, it’s not like he can sue a woman without a last name for back rent,” I said.

  “He doesn’t care all that much. This place hasn’t been fit for human habitation for a long time anyway, so he was lucky to get what money he did from her. Needs a new roof and paint, new windows, has plumbing and electrical problems, it’s all gone to hell.” Halloran gave the residence a critical look. “I’d say it has to be knocked down and built back up from scratch, the condition it’s in.”

  What about John Macdonald? I wanted to shout. We would alert the public, plaster the surveillance picture everywhere, see if his social security number was real, interview everyone at Checker who had ever run into him in those three months of his employment . . . But we had hit another wall.

  And I couldn’t see over this one.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “Blue?”

  Standing in the cereal aisle with my basket, I had been debating overlong between something healthy and something tasty for dinner when I heard my name. I turned to see Brendan Cavil with a half-filled cart coming down the aisle.

  I was so tired. But it was still good to rest my eyes on that handsome face. “How are you?” I asked.

  “I’m great. Are you okay?”

  “Just some long days.” I turned back to the cereal selection. “What do I want for dinner, Brendan, Marshmallow Poppers or GMO-free granola? My brain is so fried that I can’t decide.”

  “For dinner?” he repeated incredulously, glancing at the contents of my basket. So far I had achieved a bottle of milk and a bar of chocolate.

  Rummaging around in his cart, Brendan pulled out a wrapped sandwich with the deli logo printed on the paper. He dropped it in my basket. “Have that, it’s a hot meatball sandwich. And these . . .” He put in a twelve-pack of string cheese, a square of cornbread, and another container from the salad bar.

  “You can’t give me your food,” I argued as he did this.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I’ll just go and get more. You have that look.”

  “What look?”

  “The raw look that says you need a good meal and twelve hours of uninterrupted sleep.” He put a few more items in my basket.

  “You seem to have a thing for feeding me,” I said.

  “You seem to need it,” Brendan retorted. “I haven’t forgot our dinner plans for when you get some free time. Any food allergies I should know about?”

  I had completely forgotten about his offer of dinner. “No.”

  “I’ll toss some steaks on the grill for the three of us. Baked potatoes, too.”

  “Why are you single?” I blurted. “There must be something really wrong with you.”

  He burst into laughter and walked with me down the aisle in the direction of the registers. “Well, I’m sure my ex-wife could pour you a drink and go on at length about my flaws. Abby will crack up when I tell her you said that.”

  I liked a man who could maintain a friendship with an ex, and admit that he had had a part in the relationship breaking up, too. Brendan wasn’t a spiteful soul. That was another red flag I hadn’t seen in my years with JJ, how the failed relationships from his past never had anything to do with him. The women were nuts, one and all. And I’d just believed JJ had had rotten luck in love. Now he was undoubtedly down in southern CA telling some new woman that I was nuts.

  That goaded me. But he still looked like a leather handbag while doing it.

  “I hope you get this guy,” Brendan said once I was standing in line. “I’ve never refreshed the local news page on my cell phone hoping for updates quite as much as I have over the last few days.”

  “I hope we get him, too,” I said. God, did I want the satisfaction and relief of pulling this asshole in.

  “And then we’ll see about that steak,” Brendan said, and smiled at me before walking away.

  *****

  “So I’m looking at the birth certificate of one John Elliot Macdonald,” Halloran said over at his desk. “Born the sixteenth of March twenty-eight years ago in a Napa-area hospital.”

  “What are his parents’ names?” I asked.

  “Mother: May Macdonald. Father: none listed. I’m going to look up his mother.”

  “You know what’s amazing to me?” I asked. “How few tips are coming in. He knows how to not be noticed.”

  “Don’t get like this. You always get like this. The closer we get to nabbing someone, the more you start to think we never will. He’s not a mirage.”

  “He’s got no address and no driver’s license and no one calling in to say, ‘oh yeah, I went to high school with him’ or ‘oh yeah, I work with him in the kitchen at the Pig Belly Diner’ or anything else,” I said.

  “No driver’s license for the mother, or current address,” Halloran said after several quiet minutes. “Or any address except the one on the birth certificate, and those apartments went up in that big fire back in the summer of ‘91.
”

  “How do you know?”

  “Had a friend at the time who lived in that area. I remember him telling me that he could see all of the Pequento Apartments going up in flames from the roof of his house. It was a huge place, low-income apartments. That fire displaced hundreds of families living in Pequento and the mobile park nearby. Two people died when they refused to evacuate. Anyway, the name stuck in my head. So May Macdonald was living there when she had her son in 1988, but she definitely wasn’t living there after July of 1991.”

  Getting up, I stared at the map pinned to the wall. There was Bounce and the silk mill in the southwest region of Darby . . . the Wengly farm above it along with the place where Francisco had been abducted . . . Shady Days was further east than those locations but not by far. Macdonald had a definite area that he preferred to work.

  Where are you, you sadistic creep?

  “I thought he could blend,” I commented. “Regular job, girlfriend, wife and kids even. But now I think he’s a real shadow. Instead of playing the part to fit in, he holds back entirely. He doesn’t try to convince people he’s normal, hiding his real self behind a family. He made no friends at Checker. He barely even talked. He doesn’t give a shit what anyone thinks about him, not even using people to refill his narcissistic supply. He’s utterly and totally cut off, lost in his own head.”

  “Mm-hmm,” Halloran said, tapping away at the computer.

  I stared and stared at his hunting grounds.

  The tapping stopped.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I’m looking at May Macdonald’s criminal record. It goes back decades. Small-time stuff, mostly, petty theft, drunk in public, prostitution. Napa, Sonoma, Oakland, Novato, Healdsburg, Point Reyes, San Francisco, Darby . . . But no address is ever listed for her. Was she homeless?”

  “Who the fuck knows with these people?”

  “Yeah, there it is in this report, she’s marked down as homeless. Says here that she was standing in a street, middle of the night in downtown San Francisco screaming her fool head off for someone named Rocky. He was her boyfriend, she claimed. Twenty-two years ago and she was drunk as a skunk, wouldn’t calm down when asked, just screamed even louder. She got put in the back of a squad car where she proceeded to go ballistic, yelling that when Mr. Rochlin got there, he was going to kick the arresting officer’s ass. Then she evacuated her bowels, it says.”