Skewed

by Anne McAneny

  “If that’s true,” I said, “then he’s after more than just his old haiku now.”

  Grady looked up at me, questions brimming in his distraught eyes.

  Nicholls answered. “He might want to finish the job.”

  CHAPTER 45

  The husky ambulance attendants carried Sam’s wrecked body to the waiting vehicle. He looked weightless in their strong hands, creating only a slight mound beneath the sheet.

  I pressed my foot to the accelerator, my passenger quiet and thoughtful. After forty minutes of exacting silence, I broke in.

  “My friend Detective Wexler thought the Haiku Killer had a Renaissance theme going.”

  “How so?”

  “The professor, the priest, and the doctor—philosophy, religion, and medicine. If you were a target, would politician have fit his scheme of things?”

  “Sure. The ruling class. Instead, with your mother, he got the working class. I guess that stayed within his theme, if that’s what it was.”

  “Wexler and I—and most experts—think the Haiku Killer has a God complex.”

  Grady looked out the window, pensive. “Maybe. A professor professing to interpret the greatest minds in the world. The priest, a member of an elite group that offers the closest embodiment of Christ on earth, and a doctor, performing what some call the Lord’s work—saving lives or causing death, making decisions better left to God.”

  “It fits with the haikus, too.”

  “The problem is,” Grady said, “I don’t believe murderers are jigsaw puzzles. Their motivations are never as tidy and packageable as the experts pretend. You can’t just slap the pieces together and get a sharp-edged, full-color picture, like, Here’s Leroy, a psychopath with a God complex. Instead, it might be as inexplicable as, Here’s Leroy, a psychopath with a penchant for murder. Maybe all the victims had hangnails that rubbed him the wrong way or he didn’t like their voices or he was sent to his room too many times as a child. Who knows what makes them act? I have a sneaking suspicion they don’t know themselves. Ted Bundy offered every explanation for his behavior, from too much porn to lack of a father figure to a girl who jilted him. And now they think he was just toying with the experts to amuse himself. These people just are, and a universe that makes sense, as our grand vision has it, simply isn’t.”

  The lament had grown angry toward the end, but if anyone was entitled to pent-up anger, it was the man next to me.

  “I think it’s biology,” I said. “A billion connections per brain—bound to be some bad circuitry in there. With advanced wiring comes advanced problems, unless there are goldfish swimming around out there with autism, borderline personality disorder—”

  “Or kleptomania.” Grady had filled the word with equal parts bitterness and affection, as the full consequences of my mother’s old habit came to bear.

  “Makes it hard to define normal when everyone’s got something.”

  “What the hell did Sam have?” Grady said, still disbelieving his friend’s deception.

  “Nothing atypical, I’m afraid. Self-interest. Greed.” I shivered, thinking of Sam’s comeuppance. “Grady, what was it like when you got injected?”

  “Horrible.” The answer came with no hesitation, no wobbliness. “Not because of the pain, but because it compromised my ability to protect your mother. It hit me so fast and created this distorted perception of clarity and confusion, like I thought I had perfect dexterity and coordination while being clumsy as all hell.”

  “The spastic kid in class insisting he should be chosen first?”

  “Exactly. My mind and body were completely out of sync. I was certain I could handle the situation, but I was half-collapsed on the ground and seeing at least two of your mother. Never even got a clear look at the other guy.”

  “Even when you had the gun pointed at him?”

  Grady took a moment on that one, inhaling deeply and shaking his head. “Know what I do remember? The white knuckle of my thumb against the metal of the gun. Clear as day. Must have been the only thing I could focus on.”

  I pictured my mother at the moment Grady was contemplating his hand. Sober, clearheaded, scared out of her mind, and utterly confused. She’d have been watching her hero, ham-fisted and disoriented, bumbling about with a loaded gun. Had she been calm enough to process what was coming? Did she anticipate the other man’s interference, the change in the trajectory of the traveling bullet? Did she freeze, jump, duck, step back? Did she scream? Did it hurt?

  “I’m sorry, Janie,” Grady said. “Have I ever said that to you? I am sorry.” The words were so full, they crushed me. They pressed tears from my ducts, blood from my heart, and forgiveness to the surface. I tried to remain silent to avoid blubbering while driving—until I didn’t care anymore and let it out. Grady handed me tissues when I needed them.

  Gradually, we got into a rhythm, tossing around hypotheses. Unfortunately, none of them got us any closer to determining Leroy Fitzsimmons’s whereabouts.

  “You got any gum, Grady? This mountain air dries me out.”

  He patted all his pockets and finally felt something. When he pulled out a pack of gum, a folded ten-dollar bill and a plastic flosser came out with it.

  “See?” I said. “You need my mother’s pocket system. She’d have had her hands on that gum in no time.”

  Grady chuckled. “I do need a better system—or at least a wallet.”

  “Holy crap!” I yelled. I slammed on the brakes and skidded the car into a dirt patch on the side of the road, beneath a jutting precipice of rock.

  Grady knew enough to remain quiet, but he must have been concerned that my exclamation might cause boulders to crash down on his head.

  “What if it wasn’t Leroy Fitzsimmons?” I said.

  Grady looked at me like the mountain air had dried out my brain.

  “Listen,” I said, “you never saw the third man’s face, so the possibilities are still wide-open. What if my mother did pickpocket Leroy, but whatever she took from him wasn’t the haiku?”

  “You lost me at holy crap,” Grady said.

  “You said my mother put Abner Abel’s money in the same pocket that she reserved for personal things. Personal things could also mean things that she’d kleptoed.”

  “Not sure you can use it as a verb, but go ahead.”

  “When Mr. Abel threw his money on the table, a note could have been folded up in there—a note with an incriminating haiku written on it.”

  Grady frowned.

  “Just listen,” I said. “My mother would have scooped it up and put it in her pocket along with his money. And already in that pocket was whatever she lifted from Leroy Fitzsimmons. Later, when she pulled it out to look at it, she thought she was looking at her heist from Leroy, but she was really looking at whatever Mr. Abel had inadvertently thrown on the table.”

  “Go on.”

  “I bet if we compared Mr. Abel’s old driving routes with the times and places of the murders, we’d find they matched up. He’s even got a bum ankle, and Mickey Busker said the third man ran with a limp toward the Abels’ house. And talk about somebody rocking a God complex. That guy wrote the book—or thinks he did.”

  “I don’t know. Leroy had those photos that his sister mailed you—and their negatives.”

  “Leroy possessed them, but we don’t know where he got them.”

  “You’re suggesting a link between Leroy and Mr. Abel?”

  “Until two days ago, I never would have thought there was a link between Abner Abel and my mother other than an occasional wave. And now I find out that he fought with her the night she was shot and that he frequented the hotel where you and she . . . you know.”

  “Then why would Leroy have a secret box of information on you and Jack—and me? Why would he have stolen your book?”

  “Because my mother screwed up just like I di
d. She thought she was taking something as valueless as an old tennis ball from Leroy’s pocket, but whatever she took was valuable to him—and he’s wanted it back all these years.”

  “So Mr. Abel would be the one who injected me?”

  “He had access to animal tranquilizers and he admitted to hanging around the parking lot after storming out of Field Diner.”

  “And,” Grady said, his head tilting up to the left in a now-familiar way, “he’s a deliveryman. People would have let him in, even if it wasn’t his usual time.”

  “The college where the professor was killed got meat deliveries and had an agriculture department.”

  “What about the church where the priest was killed?”

  “I read about it in my brother’s book. They had a feed-the-homeless program. Every month, they held a pig-picking.”

  “But the doctor—he was in a remote cabin.”

  “And Abner Abel still knows every back road in the state. He could have been lying in wait when the doctor got to the cabin.”

  “It’s worth looking into. One thing’s been consistent through all these years. That missing haiku. We’ve got to find it.”

  Both my hands reached across the seat and grabbed both of Grady’s hands. I didn’t realize we were touching until I saw the evidence. He saw it, too. A moment passed—awkward, heartfelt, full—before my phone rang. We glanced at each other and smiled before I answered.

  “Hello?”

  “Janie, it’s Wexler. Where are you?” No small talk, no flirtation. And he was back to being Wexler. It was the first time we’d spoken since the tennis ball fiasco.

  “I’m ten minutes outside of town,” I said, keeping my voice as distant as his.

  “Can you get to Sophie Andricola’s? She’s okay but she walked in on an intruder.”

  “Is there a body? Why do you need me?”

  “The intruder was Leroy Fitzsimmons.”

  CHAPTER 46

  I arrived at Sophie’s house alone, having told Grady the call was work-related. Sure, it was an awkward way to start our fledgling relationship, but the last thing he needed to see was Sophie’s larger-than-life drawing of him sprawled on the floor while my mother lay there bleeding. I’d dropped him at my brother’s and promised to call as soon as I knew anything.

  The floodlights and flashing red from the police cars cast Sophie’s cabin in a spooky, strobe-light glow. The quiet aura of my previous visits had been displaced by chaos and coldness, the fresh smell of cedar overtaken by diesel fumes.

  “Wexler!” I shouted when I saw him on the front steps. “What’s going on? You sure Sophie’s okay?”

  “She’s fine,” he said, still sporting layers of frost beneath his air of professionalism. “She returned early from a jog after twisting her ankle. Heard a noise in her studio, went up, and saw Leroy plain as day crawling out a back window, a camera around his neck.”

  I remembered the layout of Sophie’s house and frowned. “What’d he do, shinny down the drainpipe like a horny teenager?”

  Wexler didn’t even grin. This sucked. “The deck is multitiered, so it was only a six-foot jump, then an easy leap to another deck, down a few steps and gone.”

  “So why am I here?”

  “I need your eyes to see everything he saw. Sophie did some new work and Leroy would have seen it. You’ve got to tell me where it’s leading him.”

  As we talked, he handed me surgical booties to cover my shoes. I put them on while he waited, our silence louder than the surrounding melee. The stairs teemed with CSIs looking for fingerprints and hairs, fibers, and anything else that may have caught on the penis tips of Sophie’s sculpted railing—all to close in on the Haiku Killer before he embarrassed his trackers again.

  “Wexler, I have an idea about another suspect.”

  He frowned. “Janie, I don’t do open-and-shut very often, but I’ve slammed the door on this one. Let’s go.”

  Great. What else had he slammed the door on?

  As I reached the top stair, a helicopter whizzed by outside the window. As much as I wished it were the police hot on the trail of an old man on a mission, I knew it was a news helicopter. Something about the way it buzzed at a higher pitch, maybe due to the lighter intellectual load on board. I wanted to take solace in the fact that at least they weren’t here to steal my soul, but once again, I found myself integral to the biggest news story in town.

  As I entered the studio that had previously sent me into a rage, I locked eyes with Sophie. The heavy blanket around her shoulders and the cup of water in her hand suggested either a woman in shock or an overanxious EMT. Her quick engagement with me, accompanied by a lively expression, suggested the latter. Through the bustle of worker bees, she gave off a strong vibe of warning cloaked in excitement, anticipating something. But what?

  A uniformed officer urgently pulled Wexler aside, so I approached Sophie on my own. She shook off the blanket and met me halfway with intense regard. “I finished it late today,” she said. “I was going to call you after clearing my head with a jog.”

  A shift in her gaze led me to the same wall where she’d originally projected my mother’s crime scene. A dozen new, close-up drawings bordered it, but I zeroed in on one immediately.

  “There it is,” I whispered.

  “Right?” She smiled, big and unguarded.

  I spun to find Wexler, but he was involved with two officers now. “Not only that, sir,” said the first officer, “we’ve got a witness outside, says he saw an older man cutting through his backyard and another guy says his son’s car was stolen out of the driveway.”

  Wexler turned, his plate full but his composure intact. “Janie, I’ve got to talk to these witnesses. Did you see anything that might help?”

  A major crack in the Wexler had shown itself. He didn’t like artificial ingredients in his tea, scratches on his car—or ugly imperfections in his lovers. Too bad I didn’t care for those who demanded perfection. The sooner he learned it, the better. Welcome to my life, Wexler. Take it or leave it.

  “I’m not sure if there’s anything concrete here,” I lied. “Let me check something out with my brother and I’ll get back to you.”

  He looked dubious, but sensed that neither his skepticism nor his company was welcome at the moment.

  The officers grew impatient. “Sir? The witnesses? You want us to handle it? Put out the APB?”

  “Go on, Wexler,” I said. “Go handle it. You deal with the unexpected so well, after all.”

  I dashed out, stunting his retort, and raced toward my car. I knew exactly where Leroy intended to go next. I just wasn’t sure he did.

  CHAPTER 47

  Jack answered his cell on the first ring. “You and Grady catch him in the act, Sis?”

  “Go ahead and make fun,” I said, sitting in the front seat of my car with pen and paper at the ready. “We almost did.”

  I told him about Sam’s body and the new haiku. From the utter silence on the other end of the line, I realized that for the first time in years, my brother might not have checked his watch while we were talking, or gestured to someone to get him off the phone.

  “Wow” was all he finally said.

  “Hey, where’d you get all the pictures for your book?” I asked.

  “A cabinet in the sitting room filled with negatives and slides. It was a godsend, in chronological order and everything. Elsa must have done it years ago.”

  “What about the old framed photos? In the same cabinet?”

  “No. Whatever’s not on display in the house is probably in storage. Grandpa did have a unit. Piece-of-shit place called Stuff-n-Stash on Route 59. Figured I’d wait before raiding it in the hope that maybe he can clean it out himself.”

  There was hope for Jack yet. “How do I get in?”

  “My guy, Randall, got the manager to reset the keyless
entry code to 123456 in case we needed to get in. Unit 782. Why? What’s going on?”

  “Turns out you were right,” I said. “There is something in that unit that would have scored record-high ratings for some crap reality show, but I’m going to get it.”

  “Ah, Christ, did Grandpa make a sex tape? That lady with the zodiac tattoos above her ass? I knew it.”

  “Yeah, Jack, I’m rushing around town like a madwoman to make sure Grandpa’s shriveled member doesn’t go viral.”

  “Too far, Janie. Too far.”

  “Look who’s talking. Listen, can you meet me at the Stuff-n-Stash? It’s possible Leroy Fitzsimmons is on the same trail as me and I don’t want to be there alone.”

  “I’m over an hour away, still trying to make this guy our bitch. Good news is, I think we’re going to get him.”

  “Please, Jack.”

  He hesitated. “All right, I’ll slip out as soon as I can.”

  “Love you,” I said and hung up.

  I punched the name of the storage facility into my navigation system and took off. It would only take me thirty minutes, but I could use the downtime to make sure no one else entered the unit. With any luck, I’d soon be looking at the haiku that got my mother killed.

  CHAPTER 48

  The land housing the huge storage facility comprised the former hunting grounds of an old estate. It had been sold by the great-great-grandson of the original owner and converted to Stuff-n-Stash, an architectural insult to the imperial brick home situated in the distance. The bearded man behind the front desk chatted on the phone, his feet propped up, while watching a show about sharks on a ludicrously large TV. I drove by without disturbing him, figuring that’s why they had keyless entry codes. He never even looked out.

  I made my way to unit 782. No cars or customers in sight. Guess most people repressed the urge to paw through old junk in the dark of night. Knowing what a packrat Grandpa Barton was, I didn’t anticipate an easy time of it, but if he’d at least labeled the boxes, the task might not be too daunting. Besides, I just needed one small item. I checked my watch. Jack wouldn’t be here for twenty-five minutes, and that was assuming my notoriously late brother had left his meeting immediately.