by James Andrus
He smiled at this woman’s wit. He scooped the powdered pills into the paper cup of water and turned toward her. He thought, she might make a good subject after all. He probably could keep both of them safely.
He held up her head for her to drink the drugged water and caught the slightest look from her and then saw Stacey peek across the room at them. They had a plan. They were involved in a conspiracy against him.
Right then he realized the detective couldn’t be part of the experiment.
This would be her only dosage.
It was dark by the time Mazzetti caught up to John Stallings at a deserted Chevron station a mile from William Dremmel’s address. He still felt the sting of not identifying Dremmel after he talked to him at the community college. He’d fucked up and couldn’t deny it or blame someone else. All the clues added up and he fit perfectly into them, but Mazzetti hadn’t seen it. He needed a guy like Stallings to point him out.
Before Mazzetti was completely out of his car, Stallings said, “Where the hell you been? We gotta get moving.”
“You gave me a lot of things to check, and I got ’em all right here.” He held up a manila folder crammed with papers.
“Did you tell the L.T.?”
“We got to confirm a few things before we get all the troops out here.”
“Tony, tell me this isn’t a glory grab on your part. We’re talking about Patty here.”
“Don’t pull that shit on me, Stall. You’re the one who says too many cops slow things down. Now look at what I found.” He laid the folder on the hood of his car and flipped through the first few pages. “This guy has never been arrested. Works part time at the community college and part time at this little drugstore chain.”
“Yeah, I knew all that.”
“Did you know one of his coworkers died the other night.”
“How?”
“The chick that was electrocuted over in Durkeeville. We thought it was an accident but there were some suspicious circumstances.”
“Like what?”
“She stepped in a puddle and supposedly pulled a CD player into the water at the same time.”
“And you guys closed it out without investigation. Jesus, you and your clearance rates.”
“Hold on, Stall. You’ve seen the squad. We got shit going on. There hasn’t been time to talk about murders when it looks like an accident.”
Stallings held up a hand in surrender. “You’re right, Tony. What else do we have on this guy?”
“Lives with his mother who gets disability. No police or fire service calls to the house or about the family.”
“Nothing?”
“Not even a noise complaint.”
“They’re either the perfect neighbors or someone’s keeping a low profile.”
“You been by the house?”
“Yeah, there’s a minivan in the carport and lights on in the main room.”
“Could it be the vehicle from the beach cam?”
“Looks like a million other vans.”
“You got any ideas?”
Stallings was a little surprised that the King of Homicide would ask for ideas. “It wouldn’t hurt if we got a good look at the house quietly, then decide if we need to take action.”
“Like get a warrant?”
“Tony, there won’t be time for a warrant if we see something that tells us Patty’s inside. We’ll have to act.”
“Didn’t you learn your lesson the last time we did that?”
Stallings was about to just move forward without him, then realized the homicide detective might have a point. An image of Maria flashed in his head as he was trying to decide what he should do about a warrant. He’d lost his decisive edge and did the worst thing any cop could do. He just stood there.
Forty-six
Patty Levine had swallowed the water and realized how smart it was to put powdered pills in water and make someone drink it. That way they couldn’t spit out the pills and the broken tablets acted faster with no time release. She recognized the familiar taste of the Ambien. The bitter stinging aftertaste on her tongue gave her confidence. This asshole had looked at her and thought two would knock the shit out of her. She wasn’t sure what the Oxycontin added in might do, but the two Ambiens wouldn’t beat the adrenaline pumping through her right now.
She lay perfectly still with her eyes closed as he heard Dremmel move around the room. He talked with Stacey for a few minutes longer. Patty listened but really didn’t pick up much. It sounded like a checkup at the doctor’s office.
Despite her heart starting to race at the prospect of her escape attempt, she forced herself to breathe normally, throwing in a little fake snore after a few minutes. It was so relaxing she almost made herself nod off for real; the Oxycontin apparently increased the effect of the sleeping pills. She fought the urge to give in to sleep, if not for herself, then for the girl across the room who was counting on her.
Then it happened. First she sensed her captor close to her. So close she felt his breath on her neck. He was checking to see how soundly she was under. She wanted to surprise him and take a bite out of his face as he leaned in close. She could imagine tearing his nose off or taking off part of his ear. But that wouldn’t stop him. Instead she kept up the steady breathing and now closed her throat so there was also a slight snore.
Then she felt him stand up and start to fiddle with her handcuffs. He inserted a key and they notched open three clicks giving her wrist a wide birth.
She had a decision. Act now and use her hands while he was close or stay silent and try to slip out while he was out of the room.
Patience had never been one of her virtues.
John Stallings shushed Tony Mazzetti as they crouched in bushes on the side of a house directly across from the residence of William Dremmel. Mazzetti had kept blabbing about all the things that were wrong with this plan. Stallings had already explained that gathering intelligence on the house was the most important thing they could do right now. He didn’t want to have to say it again.
Instead, Mazzetti said, “Stall, this is bullshit, slinking around like some kind of pervert. What do we do if someone catches us?”
Stallings just stared at him for a minute. “Tony, we badge ’em, you moron. Now shut up and let’s see what’s going on at the house.”
The house was quiet as they sat in the bushes, a cool breeze kicking up from the east. Fifteen minutes of surveillance produced no information, but this was about Patty, and Stallings was prepared to stay all night if it meant saving her. The thought made him a little guilty as if he was choosing her over Maria, but he knew his wife was safe. He couldn’t say the same for Patty.
Mazzetti leaned in and said, “We should let the L.T. know what the hell is going on.”
“Go call her.”
“You don’t have to stay. There ain’t shit going on. C’mon Stall, this is degrading.”
“Welcome to police work, Tony.”
Mazzetti grunted and started to move when Stallings grabbed him by his arm. “Take another look, Tony. You notice anything about the house we could throw in an affidavit for a search warrant?”
Mazzetti turned his eyes to the house and studied it. Concentrated hard on the older home. Then shook his head. “What do you see, Stall?”
“The path leading to the front door. Wouldn’t you call that decorative sand on each side of the walkway?”
Mazzetti stared. “Son-of-a-bitch. Maybe you’re not just lucky on cases.”
It was the highest compliment Stallings could have ever expected from the homicide detective.
William Dremmel laid out the two, heavy-duty contractor bags in the living room while his mother continued her longest streak of consciousness in almost a year. He could hear the news from the other room. He’d finished with the girls for now, loosening Patty’s cuffs mainly to let Stacey see him do it and keep her calm. That’s why she hadn’t been put down for the night yet. He wanted the young woman to get used to a quiet room again while Detective Le
vine snoozed. He knew he should’ve just given her an overdose and be done with it, but he didn’t want Stacey to freak out at the prospect of a dead woman in the room with her.
Later tonight he’d dose Stacey so she’d be asleep when he took the detective out for good. He’d end it quickly for her, probably with a simple asphyxiation either by strangulation or with a plastic bag over her head. He had no interest in either method for the purposes of his research and didn’t want to try another knife attack because it was too messy.
There was a school being built just the other side of I-95 with the foundation about to be poured. He’d already scoped out how to peel back the metal mesh, bury Patty, and have the mesh back with virtually no chance of being seen from the road. In the next few days tons of concrete would seal his little foray into multiple test subjects and he could go back to maintaining one at a time. He already knew his next would be the waitress from Denny’s, Maggie Gilson.
Now he had to go talk to his mother before he got her back on her medication schedule.
Patty Levine waited after she had heard the door click shut. There were no other sounds in the room. She used an old courtroom trick to stay awake silently by holding her breath for as long as she possibly could, then letting it out silently. The activity focused her hazy mind and made her heart rate soar, pumping adrenaline into her system to fight the effects of the drugs she’d been given.
She popped open one eye for an instant, then analyzed the scene she’d taken in like a flash photograph. There was only the smaller floor lamp on in the corner by Stacey. No one was in the room that she saw, and she couldn’t tell if Stacey was awake or not.
Patty opened both eyes and scanned the room, then the door. She moved her head to check behind her toward the closed closet and caught Stacey’s attention.
“I thought you were out for the night,” said the young captive.
“That’s what I wanted Dremmel to think.”
“How’d you do that?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Special police training?”
“Yeah, sort of.” For the first time in a couple of years she didn’t feel the slightest twinge of guilt for her drug use. The two Ambiens were just her maintenance dose. Now she had some time to figure out what to do.
First, she moved her right hand but found it was secure even in the loosened cuffs. She just couldn’t fold her hand enough to slip through the opening. She’d seen it from prisoners over the years where someone had thin hands or were some kind of crazy double jointed and slipped their cuffs. One woman just tossed the cuffs back to her but didn’t try to escape from the patrol car. Another young man slipped the cuffs off, then managed to reach out the window, open his door, and sprint like a greyhound. He ran until he reached the next block and was hit by a city utilities truck. Patty had insisted on cuffing his broken arm despite his cries of pain.
Now she tried her left hand. This cuff was open a little wider. She touched her thumb to her pinkie and took a breath to ease out her hand. She felt pain shoot down her hand from the cuff scraping her thumb. But it was still moving, so she didn’t stop. She pulled as if it wasn’t her skin peeling away like cheese in a grater. It felt like someone had lubricated her hand when she realized it was her blood but it still slipped through the open cuff hole.
She let out the smallest squeak as pain overwhelmed the drugs in her system and her own natural toughness. She kept pulling until all at once her hand popped free. With no wasted motion she had the loose arm of the handcuff wiggled through the eyebolt in the wall and was sitting up working on her leg shackles. Using the open cuff arm that had swung free once her hand was out, she attacked the hinge of the leg shackles like it was a pry bar. When that didn’t work she checked the chain itself. Handcuffs were relatively cheap but leg shackles could get expensive. Dremmel was apparently on a budget and bought cheaper shackles. The chain wasn’t as solid as the handcuff’s few lengths. She wedged the cuff arm through one of the chain lengths and popped it open with a few hard twists.
She was free.
Forty-seven
Dremmel acted as if he was watching Jeopardy! but, like most nights, there were no questions that could really stump him. This country was once called Ceylon. What is Sri Lanka. This compound is present in all life on Earth. What is carbon. The science questions tended to be downright insulting. His mother beamed with every right answer, justifying every act of parenting she had ever advocated. But he was only thinking about one right now.
Finally, at a commercial, he said, “Mom, we gotta talk.”
“I’d love to chat with you, William.”
“Mom, you really screwed me up with some of the things you did.”
“You mean the drugs or fucking a teenage yard boy?”
He flinched and shifted on the couch. “Mom, don’t talk like that, please.” He shuddered.
“Whatever you want, dear.”
“You don’t understand what it did to me. What I’ve done because of it. I never had a normal girlfriend.”
“I thought you had girlfriends. What about Lee Ann?”
He hesitated. “She wasn’t really a girlfriend.”
“Then what about the girl in the front room now? Isn’t she a girlfriend?”
He stared at his mother, not sure what to say or how the hell she knew about Stacey. “Mom, um, how…”
She smiled, a light in her eyes he had not seen for years, then leaned up out of the chair, stood, supporting herself on the chair arms like it was a walker. “I can pull this thing over any of the stairs in the house. I have plenty of time during the day when you’re out and about and you leave the key to the room in the front room cabinet.”
Dremmel stared in shocked silence as his orderly world was shown to be a complete sham. “Did you talk to her?”
“Oh no. That’s your business. I just checked in on her as she slept. She’s very pretty.”
The calculating, scientific part of his brain realized that his mom had grown tolerant to the Ambien he’d been feeding her like candy. He also didn’t realize her desire to overcome her lonely existence and see the world. That gave him a pang of guilt too.
Finally, Dremmel had recovered enough to ask, “You get up in the middle of the day and cruise around the house?”
“Some days. Not too often.”
“Do you want to hear about why there’s a girl in my darkroom?”
She was about to answer when he heard a loud thump, then a crash near the front of the house. He sprang to his feet and reached for his stun gun in his pocket as he darted to the other room, his mother turning to follow him in walker mode.
Once she was up and around, Patty Levine immediately went to Stacey and broke her leg shackles the same way she broke her own. The handcuffs were a bigger problem until she let her engineering class she took her junior year come back to her. The professor drilled into them to think outside the normal parameters of a problem. Basically, think outside the box. Patty saw the answer almost immediately. She used the open cuff arm on her left wrist as a lever to start to twist the eye-bolt in the wall.
She looked back to Stacey and said, “Roll with the turn so I can get this thing out of the wall.”
After two minutes they were both out of bed, naked, scared, and ready to kick some ass. Patty closed the open cuff so both of them were around her right wrist and not swinging awkwardly free. She had a separate shackle cuff with a short length of chain on each ankle.
Stacey still had her hands in cuffs in front of her, but they were ready to make their move.
Patty quietly tried the door handle. Locked. The door was thin, but sturdy. Now she had to decide if she should wait and try to surprise, then overpower Dremmel, or knock down the door and run. She wanted the confrontation, but wasn’t sure what her reaction time was like because of the drugs and her depleted state. Her first responsibility was to ensure Stacey was safe and got away. Then she could worry about what she’d do to William Dremmel.
&nbs
p; She looked at Stacey. “We’ll be out of here in just a minute. Once we’re out, run for the front door. If you can’t get to the front easily, just run to the rear of the house. No matter what happens don’t stop.”
“I’ll follow you.”
“No, you have to find the right door yourself.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m staying.” Then she turned and kicked the door as hard as she could.
Stacey was terrified as she stood behind Patty when she kicked the door once, twice, three times. It cracked, then she put her muscular shoulder into it and knocked the door all the way open. She followed the gutsy detective out the door but froze when William Dremmel stood right in front of the door with that scary electric shock thing in his hand.
Patty didn’t hesitate to swing at him, connecting with his face. Then she heard the ugly chatter of the device and Patty yelped and jumped away from Dremmel.
Stacey kept her head down and turned toward the back of the house, ready to sprint. But two steps into it she almost fell over an old woman in a wheelchair.
The woman screeched, “William. William.” Then she wrapped surprisingly strong arms around Stacey’s legs. It was like being caught in quicksand. She struggled but it made no difference. The old lady held on tight and Stacey fell over, pulling her out of her wheelchair onto the floor.
Stacey started to break free of the screaming old lady when she heard another blast of the stun gun and then Patty was flopping around on the cold terrazzo floor.
The old lady’s arms weakened and released as Stacey stood up into a crouch like a sprinter on starting blocks. She was going to make it.
Then she felt a strong hand on her ankle and looked back just as the stun gun made contact and the pain she’d felt before started crackling through her body.
John Stallings saw motion in the front room. There was a flash and he heard faint screams from inside the house. That was all he needed to push him into cold, calculated action. He looked over his shoulder to Tony Mazzetti at the other corner of the house attempting to make a phone call. “Tony, something’s happening. We gotta move.”