by T. R. Ragan
His mother’s image disappeared, prompting him to step away from the mirror and take a seat on the lone chair in the room. After all these years, it amazed him that he could still look into the mirror and see her face as clearly as if he’d seen her yesterday. She’d been so beautiful. “You’re my sweet little boy and nobody else’s,” she would say to him as she pulled the covers up tight around his shoulders before kissing him on the cheek every night. Sometimes she would hum a little tune, a sweet lullaby she’d made up.
He closed his eyes and imagined breathing in the scent of her. She often smelled like a field of newly blossomed flowers. She had been named after a flower, too. He’d never met his father. He learned early on that it wouldn’t do any good to ask about him, either. It just made his mom sad when he did.
His mom was a hard worker. Like most people, she had her bad days, and she didn’t always have enough time for him, but he didn’t like to think about those days. He preferred to concentrate on the good days. His mother had inherited a small farm in California from her grandfather. It took a lot of hard work to keep the farm running. Every morning, he would help his mom collect eggs. Afterward, he was in charge of making sure the straw lining was clean and free of broken shells and bird poop. He would chase the roosters and then feed the pigs. The mother he remembered was always smiling and laughing. She was the happiest person he’d ever met. Sometimes she would chase him and tickle his sides when she caught him. Good times on the farm—at least until the day he found his mom in the barn with a shovel in her hand and dirt on her face. He’d never forgotten the way she’d looked at him when he entered the barn. She’d looked angry and sad all at once. That was the day she’d accused him of all sorts of transgressions, and even decided to tell him about his long-lost father and how they were more alike than she’d ever dared to imagine.
His mom disappeared soon after. Nobody knew what happened to her, but one thing for sure, his life hadn’t been the same since.
From age eleven to thirteen he lived with a total of four different families. He never understood why the first three foster families didn’t like him enough to keep him for very long. He behaved and did as he was asked. He ate his vegetables and made his bed. He was a good boy.
The first family he stayed with was the King family. Mr. and Mrs. King didn’t like him wetting the bed. He didn’t like wetting the bed either, but they never really seemed to get that, and they would yell longer and louder every time it happened. He tried his very best not to wet the bed. One day, he didn’t drink water all day, but in the morning the thin mattress was soaked clean through.
He had yet to turn twelve when he moved in with the Platt family, family number two. The Platts had a lot of kids, and he remembered how much he liked it there. He’d never had friends before, but living with the Platt kids was like having a half dozen built-in friends. After Mrs. Platt found all of her children playing doctor—he was the patient and her biological kids were the doctors and nurses—he was the one who was sent away to live somewhere else. That was the first time he could remember crying since his mom left him.
His new foster parents, his third family, had picked him up straight from school the next day. He never even got to say goodbye to the Platt children. His new foster parents were the Hargroves. Mr. and Mrs. Hargrove had two other foster kids. Both boys. All three of them walked to and from school every single day. Everybody made their own meals, mostly peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Nobody ever asked him if he did his homework. Nobody cared. On two separate occasions, one of his teachers, Mrs. Trumble, walked him home early so she could talk to Mrs. Hargrove. On the first occasion, he didn’t pay them any mind. The second time, though, he listened from the kitchen and was surprised to hear them talking about one of the boys having a dark mind.
A dark mind.
To this day, he wondered which of the Hargrove boys they had been talking about.
He never found out because two days after his twelfth birthday, he was taken to live with the Becks. He liked Mr. and Mrs. Beck straight off. They were hard workers. They ran their family business right out of their home. The Becks loved their work and it wasn’t long before they told him they loved him, too.
They made sure he did his homework. They praised him when he received good grades, and they scolded him when he dragged mud into the house or forgot to feed the dog or the cat. If he complained about being bullied at school, Mr. Beck met with the principal and made sure appropriate actions were taken to see that the bullies were punished.
The best part was when Mrs. Beck tucked him in bed at night. It was the strangest thing, because no matter how many dead bodies she embalmed during the day, she always smelled as sweet as a rose at night.
CHAPTER 9
I didn’t want to hurt them, I only wanted to kill them.
—David Berkowitz
Davis
Friday, May 11, 2012
On the third knock, Hayley set the Kindle to the side, removed the cat from her lap, and went to the door. Lizzy had made her promise she would look through the peephole before opening the door, so she did it out of respect more than anything else. She released a heavy sigh when she saw that it was Jessica. She opened the door and Jessica stepped inside without waiting for an invitation. Hayley had almost forgotten how pushy she could be. She shut the door and bolted it, as Lizzy had instructed.
“Well, hello to you, too,” Jessica said, a big sappy grin plastered across her always-happy face. “Where’s Lizzy?”
“She had a meeting tonight.”
“With who?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“Why not?”
“Because if Lizzy had wanted to tell me, she would have.”
Jessica rolled her eyes and then leaned over and rubbed her fingers through Hannah’s soft fur. “You’re getting so big, kitty cat.”
Hayley took her seat on the couch and picked up the Kindle again.
“What are you doing?” Jessica asked.
“What does it look like?”
Jessica left the cat alone and grabbed the leather satchel hanging from her shoulder. She pulled out a pile of mail along with a half dozen manila folders and placed it all on the coffee table in front of Hayley. “Turn your Kindle off. We have work to do.”
“I thought you were working on the Cartwright case.”
“I’m working on at least six different cases at once. But I’m keeping a few hours every day open for you.”
“Wonderful.”
Jessica ignored her sarcasm and rambled on some more. “I figured the two of us could work together while you’re trapped here. I’ll stop at the office every chance I get, grab any work Lizzy has for us, and bring it here.”
Hayley nodded, hoping she had finished.
“I would have come earlier, but I was watching one of the claimants today. He was doing all sorts of heavy lifting. I got some great pictures. I think I might be finally getting the hang of this whole surveillance thing.”
A quick learner. It only took her two years, Hayley thought. “What about school?”
“Since when do you care about my schooling?”
“You’re right. I don’t care. Forget I asked.”
Jessica waved a hand through the air. “No, I’m going to tell you, because the truth is I like that you care about me. I care about you, too.”
Hayley wanted to shoot herself, wondering why she’d asked her about school in the first place.
“I’m taking a night class and a couple of online courses,” Jessica began. “But I’ve moved out of my mom’s house and into my own apartment and I need money, which is why I figured I’ll squeeze in all the overtime I can.” She stopped talking long enough to point a finger at Hayley. “If you ever get that monitor off your leg, I’d love to show you my place.”
“Yeah,” Hayley said, “I’d like that, too.” She meant she would like to get the monitor off her ankle, not the part about seeing Jessica’s place. The two of them were sweet and sour, o
il and water…there was no reason to pretend they were buds. But, of course, Jessica took it the wrong way.
She smiled again and her eyes lit up excitedly. “I don’t think Lizzy has ever been this busy,” Jessica went on. “She has at least a dozen workers’ compensation cases, and now that you’re out of the gray-bar hotel, she wants you and me to work together on finding an eighteen-year-old girl.”
“What’s the deal?” Hayley asked, ignoring the reference to jail as the gray-bar hotel. Jessica was by far the weirdest person she’d ever met.
“A woman living in New York has asked Lizzy to find her daughter. The woman was forced by her parents to give her up eighteen years ago. Lizzy would like this case solved pronto.” Jessica handed Hayley a file.
“What’s the urgency?”
“The woman recently married a politician. I’m assuming she wants to bring everything out into the open before her husband runs for office. She wants Lizzy to find her quickly and discreetly, and she’s willing to pay more for faster service.”
“If she lives back East, why would she hire Lizzy?”
“An investigator in Manhattan already located the adoptive parents. According to the report, their adopted daughter, Adele Hampton, who is also our client’s daughter, ran away from home when she was sixteen. Although her adoptive parents haven’t seen her since, Adele took a few things that didn’t belong to her when she left, including their credit card. The charges that went through before they closed the account were all made in the Sacramento area. The statements and receipts are all in the file. The investigator in New York referred her client to Lizzy since they worked together before.”
“I’ll read through the file, do a search, and then make a few calls if I need to,” Hayley said. “What else do you have?”
Jessica grabbed another file, but before she opened it, she said, “Has Lizzy told you much about the Danielle Cartwright case I’m working on?”
Haley shook her head.
“Danielle Cartwright is thirty-nine, but she’s been married and divorced three times. I’ve met with Danielle once already and I’ve read the files. If what Danielle says is true, all three husbands were douche bags. The last husband was into pornography; he even did some of the filming himself. After she found videos with his name as director and producer, she kicked him out of her house.”
“Where was she when he was making movies?”
“Danielle is a personal shopper. Her business is booming. She spends half her time in New York City, London, and Paris.”
“So it makes sense that she might not know everything these guys are doing.”
Jessica nodded. “She also tends to go for flashy, good-looking guys.”
“Men who easily attract the attention of beautiful women.”
“Right again.”
“So what’s the story?” Hayley asked. “I’m assuming you brought her up for a reason.”
Jessica nodded. “Dominic Povo, her newest fiancé, is up to something, but I have no idea what. He works in construction and he has a crew of guys working for him.”
“So, you’re sitting in the car watching these guys hammer nails all day?”
“Yes, because that’s what they do,” Jessica said, using her hands for emphasis. “They’re in construction. Dominic Povo is good-looking, too, easy on the eyes, but that’s not the problem—”
“Jessica, get to the point. What do you think Povo is up to?”
“I don’t know, but during my last visit to the construction site, I saw a van pull up to the side of the house they were working on. Two men transferred big bulky garbage bags from the van to a wheelbarrow. If they had loaded the wheelbarrow with bricks or paint, I wouldn’t have looked twice, but big bulky garbage bags?”
“Are you insinuating that they were getting rid of bodies?”
Jessica looked behind her as if to make sure the construction workers weren’t standing in Lizzy’s kitchen. “I don’t know, maybe,” she whispered as she turned toward Hayley again. “Crazy, huh? Do you think I’m being paranoid because of everything that’s happened in the past?”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I think.”
“That’s not all…before I could drive away, one of Povo’s guys knocked on the passenger window of my car. He asked me if I needed any help.”
“What did you do?”
“I told him I was looking at model homes and getting a feel for the neighborhood.”
“You didn’t give him your name, did you?”
Jessica winced. “I told him my name was Kat Sylvester.”
“That’s the stupidest name I’ve ever heard.”
“I know.”
Hayley sighed.
Jessica pulled a business card from her pocket and handed it to Hayley.
“Magnus Vitalis, a handyman,” Hayley read aloud.
“He gave me his card and told me he’d be happy to give me a private tour of any of the homes I might be interested in.”
“Do you think he knew you were watching them?”
“I don’t think so.”
“So what have you learned about Danielle’s fiancé so far?”
“Not much.”
“Other than the dead bodies being delivered in garbage bags,” Hayley reminded her.
“Povo moved to Las Vegas when he was eighteen,” Jessica said, ignoring the sarcastic comment. “He went to culinary school, but he never graduated. Now he’s a foreman. He makes a couple hundred thousand dollars a year.”
“That sounds high to me, you know, for a construction foreman. It would make sense if this was some crazy-ass twenty-story building, but it’s not.”
“Povo is clean. He’s never even gotten a speeding ticket.”
“What else?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve been working on the case for a while now, right? What else do you have?”
Jessica frowned. “This isn’t my only case. I can’t afford a hundred dollars a month to have portable Wi-Fi or whatever it takes to bring my computer with me and have Internet capabilities. I certainly can’t afford to drive to and from the office with the cost of gas what it is right now. And Lizzy doesn’t have the money to fly me to Vegas on the weekends to see what he’s up to.”
“You can’t just sit in the car all day. You need to get social and start talking to people. Do something. Anything.”
“I’m working my ass off,” Jessica said.
“But you’re not getting anywhere, are you? You’re working for a private investigator. You can’t wait for everyone to hold your hand and tell you what to do.”
“You don’t have to get so snippy,” Jessica said.
Hayley picked up her Kindle and started reading where she had left off.
“I guess jail time didn’t change your disposition any.”
Hayley ignored her and kept reading.
“That was uncalled for,” Jessica said. “I’m sorry. Was it bad in there?”
“It was a fucking tea party.”
“Oh.”
Hayley sighed. She didn’t want to take her frustrations out on Jessica, so she set the Kindle aside once again and said, “Listen, Jessica. Lizzy wouldn’t have given you the job if she didn’t think you could handle it. Focus. Try to think outside the box and do what you were hired to do.”
Jessica seemed more apprehensive than usual, and that’s when Hayley realized she was seriously concerned. “Nobody’s going to kidnap you or shoot you, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“How do you know? What if those bags were actually filled with dead bodies?”
“What are the odds?” Hayley asked. “Use your instincts, Jessica. If something feels wrong to you, then something is probably very wrong; it’s how the universe works. The people who don’t listen to their instincts are the ones who end up in trouble…or worse.”
Granite Bay
Friday, May 11, 2012
No matter how hard Lizzy worked on not allowing her thoughts to get the
best of her, it was as if a dark sense of foreboding continuously floated close overhead. She’d talked to her therapist about it on many occasions, but the darkness was something she still needed to work on.
The navigator told Lizzy in its robotic voice to make a right onto East Roseville Parkway and then another right after that. A private security guard greeted and allowed her through the decorative iron gates after she told him Stacey Whitmore was expecting her. Lizzy drove to the front of a sprawling mansion at the top of the hill and shut off the engine. As she made her way to the front entry, she admired the healthy green palm trees surrounding the property.
Stacey opened the door, thanked her for coming, and ushered her inside before Lizzy had a chance to rap her knuckles against the solid oak door.
The house was enormous. They passed by a large kitchen with impressive cabinetry and beautiful granite countertops. The living room was filled with Victorian furniture: heavy chairs with dark finishes and elaborate carvings. Every piece looked as if it belonged in a museum. The views outside the floor-to-ceiling windows were stunning: endless manicured lawns, a small lake in the distance, and the sky painted lavender and peach. It made her feel like she was looking at a painting.
Stacey gestured for Lizzy to take a seat on the couch while sat in a green velvet chair close by. “I’m really not sure why I’m here,” Lizzy said. “I hardly knew Jennifer or Michael before she was killed, but I’m going to be forthright with you because, strangely, I felt your pain when you spoke to me about Michael. You were right. My gut feeling is that the man is innocent, but gut feelings are never enough when it comes to murder.”
Lizzy sipped her tea, hoping Stacey would chime in, but she didn’t. Stacey was a great listener, a professional, and it was clear the woman wasn’t going to say a word until she was certain Lizzy had finished talking. Lizzy had no reason to withhold information, so she told Stacey everything. “Jennifer and Michael hired me to check out a workers’ compensation claimant. I met with them twice. The first time I met Michael and Jennifer was at their house. I liked them both straight off. They were friendly, and I was especially impressed with the way Michael and Jennifer treated each other with love and respect. Since they didn’t have children and they tended to hold hands and gaze into one another’s eyes—”