She'll Never Know

by Hunter Morgan

  Jillian debated how to respond to McCormick's inappropriate remark. A week ago, she might have ignored him. Maybe risen, pretending she thought her order was up, and walked away. But her memories, as much they were scaring her, were also empowering her. She wasn't going to live the rest of her life a meek mouse, and she didn't have to put up with this kind of crap. Certainly not from cops.

  Jillian turned slowly to Patrolman McCormick, offering a sassy smile as she lowered her voice until she knew it was sexy. "You know what I really need?" she whispered, breathy. "Right now?"

  He puffed up like a toad; she could smell the testosterone rising off him like heat off a pavement.

  He cut his eyes, checking to be sure no one in the diner was listening, then leaned closer. "Tell me," he murmured.

  "For you to get lost! You ought to be ashamed of yourself," she lit into him, standing up so she could look him eye to eye. "You're in uniform. You ought to have a little more respect for your position and for women in general."

  The cop a couple of stools down snickered. "Strike three! I think you're out, buddy."

  "Shut up, Savage."

  The other cop got up from his stool, leaving the paper. "Come on, order's up." He tapped McCormick on the shoulder as he passed.

  Patrolman McCormick got up quickly, obviously embarrassed by Jillian's outburst and having it overheard by so many, including a colleague. Apparently he wasn't used to being taken down a notch. "You shouldn't have done that," he bit under his breath as he brushed past her.

  Jillian stared at the cop's broad back as he retreated. Had he just threatened her?

  The guy in black from the head shop passed behind her, right behind the cops, a look of amusement on his face. He'd obviously overheard. He raised one fist in salute to Jillian as he passed.

  To Jillian's surprise, his teenage female companion, walking behind him, stopped and spoke. "I thought every woman between twelve and seventy was going to stand up and clap," she whispered with amusement.

  Jillian glanced at the cash register. McCormick had left his partner to pick up the food and pay the bill and strode out the door. She'd been scared there for a moment, afraid she'd made a mistake and pushed it too far. Right now, the last thing she needed was to have the cops in town pissed off at her. But watching him go, she knew she was just overreacting. Men like him needed to put in their place once in a while.

  Jillian turned her attention to the teenager. "I just can't stand that type."

  The teen girl, dressed in black jeans with hanging suspenders, a tight black T-shirt, and leather straps with studs around her neck and waist, propped one hand on a jutting hip. "Me either. Guys like him, they like think they're all that and a bag of chips."

  Jillian chuckled. Despite the dyed black hair and hideous black lipstick and eye liner, she was quite pretty. "Ashley, right," she said, pointing her finger.

  Ashley gave a suspicious nod. "Right, how do you know that?"

  "I know your mom—sort of."

  She rolled her expressive blue eyes. "Criminy, everyone knows my mother. It's like this curse. Damned to ever walk in the footsteps of the mighty Claire Drummond, second generation police chief." She took a jerky Frankenstein step forward, arms raised, then relaxed. "Anyway." She brushed her hair from her face, moving from comically animated young woman back to sulky teen mode. "I just want to tell you that you made my day. McCormick hits on everyone, but he acts like such a super robo cop that nobody realizes what a creep he is. Even our police chief."

  Jillian couldn't resist a grin. Despite the teen's choice of fashion, she liked her immediately. She had her mother's same penetrating gaze, same forwardness that was refreshing. "Well, thanks. Glad I could make your day."

  "You comin'?" her boyfriend grunted from the door.

  Ashley glanced at him, then back at Jillian. "I have to go back to work, and if you run into my mother, I was not here." She started to walk away, then glanced back. "That Styrofoam cup." She pointed to Jillian's drink on the counter. "Do you have any idea how long that takes to disintegrate? Like a couple million years." She cupped one hand around her mouth so no one else would hear her. "Ask for a paper cup next time. Loretta's got them in the back. She's just too cheap to use them; you have to ask."

  Jillian nodded thoughtfully. "Thanks, I'll keep that in mind." She lifted her hand. "Have a good day."

  "You, too. Come by Stewart's Lawn and Garden and get a plant to brighten up the cottage. Just ask for me. I work there almost every day."

  "I just might do that." Jillian spotted Loretta lifting a bag and got up from her stool. "See you," she told Ashley.

  She grabbed her non-biodegradable cup of Coke and walked to the register.

  "Got your two Cokes, large cup ice water, two burgers and large fries with vinegar and ketchup." Loretta punched the register keys with gusto; Jillian noticed that she seemed to do everything that way. "Anything else?"

  "That'll be it." Jillian paid and headed out. She managed to find a parking space only a block from the street where Ty was life guarding. Her timing was perfect, and she met him halfway between his guard stand and the street.

  "I've got lunch. Want to sit in the shade?" She lifted the two paper bags and indicated the umbrella sales stand behind her.

  "You're the best." He grinned, pulling his shirt over his suntanned chest.

  They spoke to the guy who manned the umbrellas. He knew Ty; of course, everyone in town knew and liked him.

  They chose a bright blue umbrella already open and lodged in the hot sand, and Jillian let Ty spread out the beach towel she had brought with her from the car.

  "Burgers, fries and Coke. Oh, and ice water," she said, sitting down cross-legged. "Sorry, I didn't have time to stop for any fruit."

  "No, this is fine. It's so cool. Thanks." He took a drink of Coke and unwrapped one of the burgers. "You have a good morning?"

  "The best." She set out the little plastic containers of ketchup, mustard, and vinegar and grabbed a fry. "My records had been faxed here. It's like a book this thick." She indicated the thickness of a dictionary with her finger and thumb.

  "That's cool. Maybe we'll find something in there that will help give us some clues where to start looking for you."

  "That's not the best part." She used a plastic knife to cut the second burger in half. "I had another memory. Well, not memory." She took half the burger and slid the other half toward him. "A recollection, sort of. And it had nothing to do with the dream for once."

  "You're shittin' me!" He fixed his blue-green gaze on her as if she were the only person on earth.

  "I think I was a physical therapist," she said softly, almost afraid to say it aloud for fear it would make it untrue. Then she went on excitedly. "It was the weirdest thing. I walked by the physical therapy department in the hospital on my way to records, and when I looked through the windows, I knew what every piece of equipment was. Just like that." She snapped her fingers. "It was like all this technical stuff came flooding back. Types of injuries, length of time of recuperation after surgery. I don't remember anything specifically about where I worked or anything, but I even got some flashes of the faces of people I must have worked on." She took a big bite of burger. "That's got to mean something, right? That things might start coming back faster now. Maybe clearer."

  "Yeah, oh, yeah." He chomped on his burger. "I started doing a little research last night on the Internet. There are sites with missing persons bulletins. They're a mess to try to get through, but I might get lucky and find a physical therapist missing in Butte."

  She laughed. "And her name will be Buffy, with my luck."

  He laughed with her. "Buffy Bigsby."

  "From Butte," she finished, still laughing, not sure why she thought it was so funny.

  Ty took another swig of soda and rested his hand casually on her shoulder. "That's great, Jilly. It really is. I think this is going to work. We're going to find you."

  She met his gaze and a chill of fear rippled through h
er. She didn't say anything, but all she could think of was—would she be sorry when she did?

  * * *

  Claire glanced at the index card at the top of the pile on the car seat beside her and signaled to turn onto Dogwood Avenue. It was one of the oldest streets in the town that had been established in the 1890s. It still sported a red brick walk and lovely old elm and maple trees on both sides of the street.

  Most of the original Victorian houses had been torn down to make way for modern beach houses; there were a couple of upscale townhouses farther down the block. Original land plots had been divided, sometimes three or four times, to make the best return on beach real estate when prices skyrocketed a few years ago. Just one of the old properties remained, looking completely out of place with more than an acre of land and a three-story white clapboard Victorian house, complete with full wraparound porch.

  Claire approached the house slowly; if there was car in the driveway, she'd cruise by, but otherwise, she wanted to have a quick look.

  She glanced at the name on the card, almost feeling a little silly. But she had taken what Ashley had said to heart. Every man in Albany Beach was a suspect. That included Mayor Morris Tugman, aka The Rug Man.

  No white Cadillac in the driveway.

  Claire pulled over to the side and stared through the passenger side window at the house. The wooden exterior was sorely in need of scraping and painting. The louvered shutters needed repair, and the iron fence and gate that ran the length of the property was beginning to look beyond outdated. Of course, there was always someone in town making a snide remark about believing their mayor should live in a nice house, but apparently Morris had no intention of ever selling. He had inherited the place from his grandmother or something.

  And honestly, the place didn't look that bad. Claire thought it was actually kind of charming. The lawn was always well manicured, and Claire liked the old-fashioned lilac bushes and magnolia trees. She heard a dog bark and looked up to see if she'd been spotted by the mayor, but the sound was coming from the backyard near the old barn that really was falling down.

  Claire glanced down at her index card. Morris had been in the diner five times in the last three days, according to Ralph. Apparently he wasn't much of a cook. Claire also learned that there might be something more to Mrs. Tugman's extended stay in Florida. Loretta said the rumor she'd heard was that the missus had left the mayor. She'd been gone since the week before Memorial Day. Since before the killings began.

  Claire glanced up at the shuttered windows in the big house that looked a little bit like eyes. The house seemed to watching her.

  She groaned at her own inanity, shifted the police car into drive, and eased away from the curb. She'd been staying up too late, watching too many old Alfred Hitchcock movies with Ashley. There was nothing about the old Victorian house that looked sinister or even remotely spooky, and it certainly gave no indication that a serial killer lived there.

  This was probably all a waste of time. She glanced in her rear view mirror and pulled onto the street She didn't have time to do this. She needed to get back to the office and do some real police work like reviewing the victims' lists of personal effects; she'd been meaning to do it all week.

  Morris didn't seem to her to fit the profile of a serial killer, but that didn't mean he wasn't one. His index card had moved to the top of the pile because she had begun quietly running background checks on all the men in town, and his had been one of the first to come back with information warranting her attention. It seemed Morris Tugman had a little run-in with the Florida police a few years back, before he was mayor. While vacationing in sunny Orlando, he'd been arrested on one count of invasion of privacy and another misdemeanor count of public indecency, which she knew translated to a peeping Tom jacking off in a flower bed. The case had been dismissed due to a court or county law enforcement error, but Claire had managed to speak with the arresting officer. He still remembered the case because they'd gotten three calls from the hotel before he was able to catch the peeper in action. Evidently, Mayor Tugman had been creeping around the motel he was staying at, peering in the windows of vacationing coeds, and if he saw something he liked, getting his jollies off.

  Claire didn't know she if should laugh or be disgusted. She'd always known Morris was a creep. This just confirmed it.

  But Morris wasn't the only man in town with a criminal record. Her father had always told her that everyone had something to hide. That everyone had a past. And he was right. In a way, she wished she hadn't been forced to run so many of the townspeople's records. There were too many men she would now look at in a different light. True, it was all in the past, sometimes ancient past. And it wasn't fair. But she was only human.

  Claire turned the corner, glancing at the index cards as they slid. She caught them just before they shot off the edge of car seat into the passenger side door.

  All the reports weren't back yet, but Claire had already learned that both Billy Trotter and Ty Addison had been busted for marijuana possession in the last four years. No surprise with Billy. No big surprise with Ty. He seemed like a good kid, but they all screwed up once in a while. Joe Climber from down the street from her parents had an assault charge against him a couple of years back and realtor Seth Watkins—now this one was bizarre—had been charged with invasion of privacy for audio taping women urinating in a public bathroom.

  The incident had taken place in a restroom on a conference floor at a hotel in Reno where he'd been staying for a realtors' convention. Apparently taping hadn't been enough. He'd then proceeded to play the audio tape in a local bar to anyone willing to buy him a drink. Someone called the cops, and the tape recorder was recovered from the restroom. It appeared that Mr. Captain High School Football Team Seth had gone all out and bought two recorder/players so as not to miss out on any of the fun. He'd been put on probation for the little stunt.

  Claire wasn't really concerned with the drug charges of the men in town, or even the assault charges she had discovered. One had been at an Eagles game in Philly. Another of Albany Beach's fine citizens had caught his wife in bed with another man and punched him.

  What did worry her was the Peeping Tom and the pee taping. Both were bizarre, as well as sexual. Although the killer wasn't raping the women or having any sexual contact that the ME's office could find proof of, with serial killers, on some level, it was almost always about sex. It was about degrading women.

  Claire didn't care for Seth or Morris, but she didn't see them as killers. She just wanted to be sure she was seeing them accurately. She was going to call both of them in just as soon as she got her notes together and planned how the interviews would go. She thought she might even call her old beau from the Delaware State Police, now a captain, to ask his opinion on the information she'd obtained and how he thought she should proceed. It might get some people who were upset that she hadn't let other agencies take over her investigation off her back. She also thought he might be able to offer some unbiased observations she might have missed. She'd known Seth and Morris for years. She wanted to be sure she didn't allow that to affect her investigation.

  Claire turned onto the street that ran behind the boardwalk, thinking she would take a quick cruise along the street just to see what was going on before she headed back to her office. As she turned onto the boulevard, she spotted a familiar face. Actually, it was a back. All dressed in black, today sporting a leather belt studded with silver metal spikes.

  Setting her jaw, Claire slowed down, putting down the window. "Need a ride?"

  Ashley turned, paled a shade whiter, and then thrust out her jaw, her expression very close to Claire's. "No," she said flatly. "We don't need a ride."

  Claire nodded to Chain, acknowledging his presence. He lifted one finger in response. At least it wasn't his middle finger.

  "I thought you were at work," Claire hollered above the rumble of a motorcycle passing.

  "I was." Ashley kept walking.

  Claire kept driving
. It was tricky because there were cars parked along the street. She didn't want to have to call in an accident caused by her own negligence while stalking her daughter. The paperwork for a single-car accident involving a police car was mind-boggling. "You're a long way from work," she remarked.

  Ashley shrugged one shoulder. "Not that far. Mr. Stewart gave me a long lunch. I was just walking Chain back to work."

  "You'd think he'd walk you back, being the gentleman he obviously is. The nursery must be a mile from here."

  Ashley turned to her mother and rolled her eyes as if Claire were the stupidest person on earth. "I told you, Mr. Stewart gives me a long lunch. Chain only has an hour." She flipped her hair, teenager style. "I don't mind walking."

  Claire nodded. "Well, I tell you what. You might not mind, but I do. So jump in and I'll give you a ride back to work, sweetie. It's awfully hot to be walking so far in those dark clothes with a serial killer stalking our streets."

  "I'm not hot, and I'm fine. I'm with Chain."

  "Get in the car." It was a cross between an order and threat.

  Ashley halted and looked at Chain, her body language a myriad of markers, all pointing toward one obvious message. The teen hated her mother's guts.

  Ashley said something under her breath that Claire couldn't catch. He answered. The two teens met lip to lip like pecking chickens, and then Ashley cut between two cars and jerked open the police cruiser door. "Call me," she hollered.

  Again, the finger wave from Chain.

  Claire put up the electric window on Ashley's side and speeded up, leaving Chain behind. "I don't know why you do this," she said.

  Ashley clicked on her safety belt and then slouched in the seat, gazing out the window. "Do what?"

  "Worry me unnecessarily. I think you're at work, safe and sound, and you're running the roads with Mr. Chain Link Fence."

  "I'm not running the roads. We went to lunch. Since when am I not allowed to eat lunch? Last week you were harping about how I didn't eat enough."

  "You didn't tell me you were meeting Chain for lunch."