But I didn’t answer him, because my brain had gone down a little path all its own. It certainly wasn’t interested in anything further that was said in this blasted meeting, the point of which seemed to be to blame everything involving the suspicious deaths of nine women on Carol Frank, including the fact that anyone found out about the suspicious deaths of the nine women, which was just bad for business.
No, what my attention had turned to was the fact that Suzanne Farkanansia was not at work that day. That Bill Nestor was still missing. And that, before I had made an appearance in Bill’s life, Suzanne was his most trusted associate at the office. Did any of these idiots know that? Did any of them know that Suzanne had proclaimed her “love” for Bill the weekend before?
“Carol, we’re going to need an answer from you,” said Junior Gestapo Brent.
“I’m going to the bathroom,” I said. I got up from my chair.
“Take your seat,” Terry Bronk told me. “We’ve only been here ten minutes; no one needs a break yet.”
“Speak for yourself,” I said. “I just got here after sitting in traffic for half an hour, and I had two cups of coffee this morning.”
I headed for the door, leaving my purse on the table, so it would look like I was coming right back.
“Fine, we’re taking five minutes.” The tone of Terry Bronk’s voice suggested that I was systematically destroying any chances I might have to save my job, but I hadn’t supposed I’d come out of this room employed anyway. Screw him. Screw, screw, screw. I walked quickly away from the conference room and into the main office, cubicles as far as the eye could see. I marched to Charlene’s cubicle, as was my intention, and thanked my ever-loving stars that she was in there.
“I need your help,” I said over her shoulder, as low as I could.
She didn’t bat an eye, didn’t stop typing for a second. Out of the corner of her mouth, she said, “Whatever you need.”
“Back row, file room,” I said. “Bring your car keys.”
*****
Charlene was close behind me after I’d ducked into the crowded back row of red-rope files. As requested, she had her car keys in her hand. “Where are we going?” she asked, her eyes alight.
“Just I’m going,” I said, “if you’ll let me use your car.”
“Sure, that’s fine. What are they doing to you in there?”
“Scapegoat,” I guessed with a shrug. It didn’t surprise me that Charlene had a good idea of what was happening in my “meeting.” She always knew more or less what was going on.
“Are you okay? Where are you going? Is it about Bill?”
“I hate to sound melodramatic,” I said, “but really the less you know, the better. If anybody asks, just say that I told you I had an emergency and needed to borrow your car. And play dumb about anything else.”
“I don’t know how to play dumb.”
“Then just look angry for being interrupted. One more favor?” I asked her. “Can you get me a copy of the employee address list?”
“It’ll take a second,” she said. “Wait here, and be really quiet.”
She left me there, in the rows of red-ropes. I was so grateful to her. One might not expect for Charlene to be so eager to help me in my escapade, because she was such a staunch supporter of the rigors of the law firm. However, I happened to know that she detested Terry Bronk. He wasn’t ethical enough for her tastes by half, and any time he sent down a mandate or said something about the practice of law, I could see her cringe. So I could rely on her to aid me in any way that would irritate him.
I had another problem, though. I had a car; I’d soon have Suzanne’s address, but I was stuck in the back row of the file room. Assuming I could walk out of the office without Donna, Junior Gestapo Brent, Terry Bronk or any of my other inquisitors seeing me, I’d have to stroll off the elevators into the parking garage where half a dozen police officers would see me leaving. At least the two who’d escorted me here that day knew perfectly well who I was and my relationship to Kansas City’s Most Wanted. They might be curious about where I was heading.
And maybe they should be. Should I tell them? It was probably a better idea to have the police pay a call to Suzanne than for me to go knocking on her door. I’d already involved myself far too much and look at the trouble it was causing. I was being pegged as an opportunist and a blackmailer and lobbyist and probably a skank, too. All I had to do was suggest that Suzanne Farkanansia might have a motive to help Bill Nestor, and that maybe they should check with her.
Two things made me decide to go there myself, though. The first was blind stupid stubbornness. I was pissed off at the way I was being treated by my so-called employers, and this felt like a satisfying action to take. The second was that at the bottom of it all, Bill Nestor was still my friend and still a good boss, better than any of those jerks back in my “meeting,” and I thought I could talk him into turning himself in. I’d almost managed it the day before.
Unfortunately, my reality was stuck here in the file room, not dashing to Bill’s rescue or thumbing my nose at Terry Bronk. Hell, assuming I somehow got from here to Suzanne’s house, nothing said she’d be home or have any idea of Bill’s whereabouts anyway.
If that were the case, I’d just go home and watch Battlestar Galactica.
*****
Charlene had the same concern when she returned with the employee address list. “How are you going to slip by them?” The conference room was directly on the hall leading to the elevators and stairs.
“I guess I could try for the back doors,” I said, doubtfully.
“They’ll catch you,” Charlene said. “If you walk that far.”
“Well, so what if they catch me? There aren’t any bars on the windows. I can damned well leave if I want to.” My voice didn’t have as much bravado as I liked. I needed to be able to leave here as quietly as possible, if I wanted to do Bill any good.
Suddenly, to my horror, a face appeared at the end of the aisle, ugly and menacing. The evil troll Lloyd had found us. Charlene, apparently feeling the cold prickling of his gaze down her spine, turned and stared at him as well.
He sneered at us. “Want to tell me what’s going on back here? I thought it was just the file clerks who liked to hide in these back rows.”
Charlene started to say something, but I interrupted her, putting a hand to her arm to show it was nothing personal. I was fed up to my eyeballs with asinine behavior and if I wasn’t going to take it from Terry Bronk, I certainly wasn’t going to take it from Lloyd. Even though Lloyd was scarier.
“I’m in trouble,” I told him, softly but clearly. “And Bill Nestor is in trouble. I’m trying to get out of the office without anyone seeing me so I can help him.”
Charlene looked wide-eyed at me. “Do you know where he is?”
“Maybe. I’m not sure.”
“Where?” asked the scowling Lloyd.
I looked from Charlene to Lloyd with a heavy sigh and then finally said, “I’m not sure, but I think he could have gone to Suzanne’s house.”
“Makes sense,” said Lloyd.
“I can’t believe no one else thought of it,” said Charlene.
I resumed, “But the point is moot if I can’t slip out of here unnoticed. I can’t get to the stairs or the elevator without passing the conference room, and there are six pissed-off administrators in there who would love to fire me. At the front garage door are just as many cops who possibly don’t have Bill’s best interests in mind, and I’m in a pickle.”
Rheumily Lloyd stared at Charlene. “What’s your business in this?”
“She’s using my car, if that matters—”
“Where’s your car?” he asked her.
“Um, it’s…” she gestured vaguely in the air. “On Level P2, by the air conditioners sort of.”
“Take the service elevator, then,” Lloyd said, as if this were the most painfully obvious thing ever. He motioned for me to follow, and I did it because I was too stupefied to do
anything else. He led us through the back stacks, mostly out of sight from the rest of the office, to the corner of the file room where the maintenance access rooms were located. The service elevator was here, and as a security measure, it was unusable to anyone except the maintenance staff, Lloyd, and his minions. You had to have a special all-access keycard to even open the doors.
Lloyd produced said keycard and opened the elevator for me. I stepped inside, still too shocked to find words.
“Remember it’s the red Corolla,” Charlene said to me, her eyes flicking nervously toward Lloyd, as if she were standing beside a raccoon that might or might not have rabies.
I nodded mutely.
“Think you can help Bill out?” Lloyd asked me, and I nodded again as the elevator doors began to swoosh closed. Lloyd said, gruffly, “I always liked Bill Nestor.”
My daring escapade came close to a crashing halt in the garage, though, over the stupidest little thing. Full of smugness for both getting a car and finding a sneaky way out of the office, I pulled up to the exit, rolled down the window, and reached for my keycard to open the garage door. But then I remembered that I wasn’t in my car and that I hadn’t thought to ask Charlene where she kept hers. I fumbled in the console for a moment, glancing up to see an eagle-eyed young police officer watching me intently. He was on the outside, viewing me through the glass of the fire exit door that was next to the garage door, and I figured that I had about thirty seconds before he came to ask me what the problem was. To ask me where I worked. To ask me who I worked for.
Most of us kept our cards in our cars somewhere. There were only two or three good places to keep a card. Okay. Not in the console, not in the glove box. I checked spot number three, in the sun visor, and felt a wash of relief so great it dizzied me, when Charlene’s blue electronic access card flopped into my lap.
As I drove out, the uniformed officer looked at the license plate of Charlene’s car and then looked briefly into my face, which I kept half bored, half impatient. He drew himself up as if he was going to stop me and ask a question—maybe it had been fairly apparent that I was in an unfamiliar vehicle. On an impulse, I held up the employee address list that Charlene had printed for me, and waved it as if it meant something. Good old rules of looking busy: always carry a piece of paper, and always look a little worried. The officer waved me through, and I was outside on the sunny streets of Kansas City.
Chapter Sixteen
I knew Suzanne’s end of town well enough to find her house after one missed exit and a couple of wrong turns. She lived, as most of us did, on a cluttered residential street of young trees and exactly-the-same houses. The only thing that distinguished her putty-colored home from the others was the godawful long name on the mailbox.
Since it was a weekday morning and still during the school year, the neighborhood was mostly deserted. A retiree was out walking his retriever. Nothing else.
I parked Charlene’s car in Suzanne’s driveway and climbed out, inspecting the house critically for signs of Bill. Aside from a dead giveaway, like his poking his head out the window and waving at me, the only other sign I could think to look for was maniacally neat curtains. But Suzanne had shades, so I saw nothing except an ordinary house. I had driven all the way out here, so I might as well give her a knock and see if Suzanne had heard from Bill. If she actually was sick, she might not know anything about what had happened, and she could have spoken to him without understanding the importance.
I went to Suzanne’s front door and rang her doorbell. On the way here, had I actually been able to bring my purse along with me, I would have called Gus and told him what I was doing. A guilty feeling hit me when I missed Suzanne’s exit that perhaps this little blow I was striking for my self-respect was counterproductive to the job the police were trying to do. My lecture from the night before—as nicely as it had ended—actually did make an impression on me about the importance of communicating with the authorities. I even reached for my purse to call the police department before remembering that I’d left it back on the conference room table.
Brilliant. Not only had I left my purse, but I wasn’t even in my own car. Why couldn’t I hold onto my possessions this week? My plans to head home and immerse myself in Battlestar Galactica, assuming this adventure didn’t work out, were for naught because I had to take Charlene’s car back to her. I sighed deeply, distressed at the minutia of adventure. On television detective shows, nobody ever had to mess around with returning cars or losing keys or purses, or finding the stupid keycard that opened and closed a garage door, or locating someone’s address and finding the right damned exit off the highway, or explaining why she ran away from work in the middle of a disciplinary hearing. On detective shows, they just skip to the good parts, when all the action and romance happen.
Suzanne answered her door looking terrible. Normally she came to work with perfect hair and perfect makeup, but today she was bare-faced and her hair lay flat and unstyled. Without any grooming, her huge tortoiseshell glasses were all one could really see of her face. Her enviably long-limbed body, which always wore pantsuits so well, just looked gangly and mannish in a gray sweatsuit. But there was something more to her dowdy appearance than day-off slovenliness. She looked exhausted. She didn’t even bother to greet me. “Why are you here?”
“Hey, Suzanne,” I said with great false cheerfulness. “I was wondering if you’d heard anything from Bill.”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I’m worried about him. No one has seen him in a couple days…” I trailed off, wondering if it were possible that she really had no idea what was happening at MBS&K. “Haven’t you talked with anyone at work? No one’s, um, called you or anything?”
“No. I guess since I resigned, no one feels the need to tell me things. Why should they? I call in sick, and they just say, ‘Oh, fine, whatever.’ ” She glanced behind herself and then looked back at me. Flatly she glared at me for several seconds. There was some inner conflict going on. I had committed an insult to her, yet she needed me for some reason. And I understood what it was as soon as she opened her mouth to tell me. “Come inside. Maybe you can talk him out of it.”
*****
She took me through her house, which was no bigger than my own but filled with much nicer stuff. Let’s just say that her dining room chairs would never submit to being painted apple-green and orange. She had real art on her walls; had spent time with her wallpaper trim and moldings; and had collected fine china, brass lamps, good sets of books, and all those sorts of things that one doesn’t have money to buy when one spends all her money on DVDs of television shows. Suzanne didn’t comment on anything that we passed even though I tried to make a few impressed noises. Complimenting a woman on her house usually seems like the proper thing to do, after all. She lead me through her kitchen to a basement door, and down we went into a remodeled, dark-paneled rec room, complete with a bar and a pool table. And here was where I saw Bill Nestor.
He looked frightful. Never had I seen anything like it. For all I could tell, he wore the same suit I’d seen him in the day before and the day before that, but now it was quite dirty, with what appeared to be real dirt. He had scratches on his face and hands. Here was a man who had crawled through a ditch or a hedge or both, and I doubted whether he’d slept the night before. I could see that he was caught up hard in one of his obsessive rituals. He had all sixteen of the pool balls from Suzanne’s table lined up before him on the felt surface of the table, all exactly spaced from each other, lined in numeric order except for the white one which had a place as a “zero,” I guess, and he was watching them as if they threatened to do something dangerous.
“It’s just about time,” Suzanne said, nodding toward him.
“Time for what?”
Bill answered my question himself by suddenly seizing the white ball and hurrying around the corner of the table, where he placed it in a new spot. He proceeded then to do this with each other ball, one at a time, until he had the
m lined parallel to the long side of the table. This took a couple minutes, and Suzanne and I watched the whole spectacle with morbid fascination. Once he’d made the transition, Bill set about spacing them evenly from each other, and the balls, which wanted to roll, made this a merry little game for him. Bill looked about as merry as death, but the balls seemed to be having a good time.
“He’s been doing this for almost fifteen hours now,” said Suzanne wearily, “and I can’t talk him out of it. At three this morning, I took all the balls away from him and threw them outside into the culvert. He went in and got them, and he shouted at me not to ever touch them again.”
“Bill shouted?” I asked.
Suzanne held her lips firmly together and nodded.
“You don’t have to talk about me like I’m not here,” said Bill. “I’m sorry I shouted.”
Suzanne whispered to me, “You’re the big expert. Fix him.”
“How did you know I was here?” Bill asked me, looking up briefly from his work.
“It was a lucky guess. I couldn’t think of anywhere else.”
“He showed up yesterday afternoon,” said Suzanne, aside, “and asked if he could stay with me.”
I didn’t want her to elaborate on what that exchange had been like. Had I been in her place, I would probably have been overjoyed that a man I truly wanted turned up on my doorstep, asking for refuge. I suppose I might have maintained some semblance of that joy until about the fifth hour he lined up my pool balls, and then thoughts of romance probably started to die down. Talk about uncomfortable.
I announced, to Suzanne, but loudly enough that Bill could hear me clearly, “Bill is wanted for questioning by the police. That’s why he asked you to hide him, and that’s probably why he’s stuck over there playing a game of pool with himself. I tried to get him to have a meeting yesterday—”
“Meeting is a code word,” said Bill with an unpleasant glimmer in his eyes, even though he wouldn’t look up from his game.
My Boss is a Serial Killer Page 21