by April Hill
Another dead end, one that added a confusing twist. According to Professor Kruger's testimony, his beloved mother had passed to her reward while traveling abroad, where she had been cremated and her remains interred in a small family mausoleum—near Munich. Not Millberg.
* * * * *
"Where's the microwave popcorn?" Beth called from the kitchen. It was nighttime, raining, and they had decided to stay in for the evening and watch a movie.
Adam called back. "I don't have a microwave."
Beth walked into the living room, carrying an empty bowl. "Who doesn't have a microwave?"
"I don't. I never liked them."
"So no popcorn, I guess. What's on tonight?"
He scanned the TV guide. "The Great Escape starts at nine. Video on demand."
She sighed. "I figured you'd pick a war movie. That's okay, though. Steve McQueen and James Garner in one movie. What's not to like?"
The Great Escape began at nine, but the low lights, the soft rain outside the window, and the glowing fire in the fireplace proved irresistibly romantic. By the time the inmates of the German prison camp began digging their tunnel to freedom, Adam and Beth had muted the sound and moved on to other activities.
Suddenly, Adam sat up and dumped her off his lap. "Where's the remote?" he asked, probing rudely underneath her for the missing device.
Beth looked confused and annoyed. "I don't know. Why do you…"
But Adam had already found the remote. "I need to backtrack a few minutes."
"Gee," she sulked. "And I thought I was holding you attention."
He kissed her quickly. "Quit whining, and watch this."
Beth knew every scene in The Great Escape virtually by heart, and when Adam scanned back to the scene where several shabbily dressed prisoners of war appeared on the screen, walking around in a makeshift garden, she sat up and began watching intently. When they started dumping dirt from the bottoms of their baggy trousers, she turned to Adam.
"Okay, what?"
"I think that's how Kruger's handling the problem of the dirt. He hauls it to the front yard, in broad daylight, and builds those terraces. A guy down at the precinct said something last week about buying a few yards of topsoil to landscape his yard. About the mess in his driveway and how long it took him and his brother-in-law to haul it to the back in a couple of wheelbarrows. But it sailed right over my head then. I didn't make a connection. Do you know what a cubic yard of topsoil looks like when you have to buy it somewhere and have it dumped in your driveway?"
"Is this a trick question," Beth asked, "like 'Who's buried in Grant's tomb?'?"
"It's one of the things I asked around the Kruger's neighborhood, Beth. Has anyone noticed any new construction going on? Big projects. Large trees going in. Retaining walls. People notice things like that, but not if a neighbor does it all the time. Not if he routinely moves dirt back and forth from one place to another on his own property."
"He's been burying all those poor women in his basement?" she asked, in a hushed whisper.
Adam shook his head. "He's not burying anyone in his basement, Beth. He's burying them in yours."
* * * * *
Proving it was something else, of course, and it was still only a theory. A tunnel, from the inside of Kruger's potting shed, under the wall, and into the basement at 285 Hazelwood Circle.
"My theory, in a nutshell," Adam explained. "He needs your basement to store the bodies. He needs the tunnel to get back and forth from your basement to his shed without being seen. He needs his own landscaped yard to dispose of the dirt from the tunnel that he's built to get to your basement where he stores the bodies. A big circle."
"But how could he do all that hard work?" Beth asked. "He's got to be close to seventy years old."
"Sixty-eight," Adam said. "And probably in better shape than me. And he's certainly had the time. If I'm right, he's been working on it for years. That’s why he cozied up to Fred's mother. A ninety-year-old woman with major health issues, severe hearing loss and almost no short-term memory after a couple of strokes. I checked. Kruger was living in a two-bedroom apartment at that time—with his mother. So, he goes out and arranges things so he's got total access to a house, a yard and a basement no one ever sets foot in. A helpless old woman gets her house fixed, Fred and Ginger are happy as clams to have someone else dealing with Mom's problems, and Felix has a place to pursue his hobbies."
"But he had to be worried about being caught," Beth said. "If Fred's mother had gotten really sick or died."
"I think he probably had everything pretty well done by that time. But then you come along and buy the house, and he's out of luck. That's the one thing that doesn't make any sense to me. Why would he risk his chance to finally own the damned house by taking off on a pleasure trip to Europe the way he did—with Dear Old Mom?
"Maybe he planned to never come back," she suggested.
"It's a small world, Beth. When someone started digging around in that basement, he'd be picked up by the police in whatever country he was in—or by Interpol. Besides, he wasn't finished, and he liked what he was doing. He wasn't ready to walk away from his playground—from everything he'd worked so hard on. That's probably going to have to stay a missing piece of the puzzle for a while. In a way, though, what finally happened was even better for him. He gets the second house, keeps using yours as his private storage locker and starts digging himself an access tunnel."
"I'm sorry to say it, Adam, but even I can see a lot of holes in that theory," Beth said.
"I never knew a brilliant theory that didn’t have holes, babe. And I may be completely wrong. So, we're really no better off than we were before."
"I know you said that we may never know what his motive is, Adam," she said, quietly. "But what does your theory say about it?"
"The popular psychological take on guys like Kruger says that they hate their mothers or women in general, but that's usually just what it sounds like—amateur crap. The truth is that we may never know. It looks like he may have been picking victims because of their names. It's horrifying, choosing a victim by nothing more than her name, but we may never know the significance of that, either."
"But what have I got to do with it?" she asked, morosely. "I don't have a flower name."
"Probably nothing. You’re not a flower, but you made yourself a thorn in his side. And a pain in his ass."
"Thanks," she growled. "Is that your way of saying, 'I told you so'?"
He grinned. "That's one way. I'm still thinking up a couple of others. Anyway, let's go to bed. I've got a big day tomorrow. There's not a lot I can do about Kruger's basement, but I'm finally going to get some help and go over and start tearing up yours."
"Technically, Fred is still the homeowner," Beth reminded him. "You may have to ask his permission to do anything big."
McCann smiled. "For a cop, I'm getting pretty good at dodging all those annoying legal issues. We’ll dig and ask permission later."
CHAPTER TEN
When Beth woke Adam from a sound sleep the following morning, he took one groggy look at the bedside alarm clock and groaned. "It's six o'clock in the morning, and we went to sleep sometime after two," he growled. "What could you possibly have done in only three-and-a-half hours?"
"Well, good morning to you, too, Lieutenant," Beth growled back. "Go back to sleep. I'll handle it myself."
McCann was out of bed in an instant. "The hell you will. What's going on?"
Beth threw up her hands. "Nothing's going on! I just wanted to tell you something."
"Tell me what?" Adam looked around for a blanket. He was naked at the moment, and shivering.
"What time are you going over to the house to meet Ed?" she asked, pulling on a sweatshirt.
"Not until around noon, when he gets off duty. Which is why I was planning to sleep late. Why?"
"I wanted to be sure all the cats are out of the house before you guys started working. I was about to run over and…"
"Go
back to bed," he ordered. "And if you wake me up again before ten or try going to that damned house again—ever—I swear I'll wear out that plastic bath brush on your stubborn ass."
"I wish you’d find yourself a new threat," she grumbled, walking into the living room to find her purse and car keys. "That one's getting old. Besides," she called airily back to him, "by a very odd coincidence, the bath brush seems to have disappeared."
He grabbed a pair of shorts and slipped them on, and started looking for his pants. "Give me a minute to get dressed, and I'll drive you over there and back. And if it's all the same to you, don't look too hard for the Devil Cat From Hell once we get there. The wounds I've already got haven't healed yet."
"It's silly for you to go with me," she insisted. She picked up her car keys from the end table and slipped them in her pocket. "Just go back to sleep. I won't take long. I'll be careful. I'll lock all the doors and windows the minute I get there. Now, warden, will all that make you happy?"
It didn't make him happy, and McCann took immediate steps to end any further discussion of the issue by following her into the living room and dumping her over the arm of the couch.
"Okay, so maybe you didn't quite get that part about your not going to the house," he said affably, yanking her pants down to her knees. When Beth tried to kick him, he retaliated with several stinging, open handed slaps to the backs of her thighs. "You're not going back to that house," he repeated, punctuating his remarks with resounding thwacks to her upraised bottom. "You’re not going to ask to go." Thwack! "And if you try to go when I'm not around to stop you…" Thwack, thwack! "I'm going to start shopping around for a couple of high-quality paddles." Thwack! At this point, he reached down and picked up one of the plastic rods. "But for now, these will do just fine."
On her failed mission to find evidence in Felix Kruger's yard, Beth had found the long white rods totally useless, but they proved to be more than adequate for what Adam had in mind. In just under thirty seconds, her bare backside was laced with eight perfectly matched red stripes. The deceptively slender length of plastic made almost no sound as it landed, and because there was an instant's delay between the actual blow and the white-hot pain that followed, her first howl was a bit slow in coming. That initial shriek, however, was followed by seven long, drawn-out wails of anguish, one after each stroke.
Beth had never suffered a genuine caning, but the burn left in the wake of McCann's slow, hard swats suggested to her that a bamboo cane and the cheap plastic rod from a set of mini-blinds might be fairly close relatives. Later, when she finally took the time to pull down her pants and investigate the damage, Beth found a neat set of quarter-inch-wide lines, with each livid red line spaced precisely a half-inch apart, inching downward over both cheeks like the rungs of two diminutive ladders. Her rear end looked—and felt—like she'd sat down on a heated barbecue grill.
When he dropped the rod on the couch and reached to help her up, Beth pushed his hand away and struggled up on her own then stood for several seconds, rubbing her behind and swearing.
"That wasn't fair!" she cried, pulling up her pants—very carefully. "Kruger has no idea what we know—which according to you may be nothing, anyway. I won't go near the basement. I'll find the cats and my laptop and be back here in around an hour—tops."
Beth was a little slower than usual because of the clumsy boot on her foot, but she was closer to the front door than he was. She picked up her purse and snatched a set of keys from the rack by the door.
Adam swore and turned back to the bedroom to get dressed and go after her. By the time he realized what had happened, she was already pulling out of the parking lot—with her keys in her pants' pocket, and his car keys in the ignition.
* * * * *
Beth talked to herself all the way from the beach condo to her own house, and by the time she pulled up in front, she was regretting having impulsively taken Adam's keys. Not only was it going to result in another argument and another spanking, she didn't even really want to be here at the house. With every day that passed, she had become less confident of her sleuthing skills and more worried that everything she'd suspected about Felix Kruger was true. Her dented Honda was parked at the curb where she'd left it. It had somehow avoided being ticketed or towed, but it looked dustier than ever, and depressed. One of the front tires was almost flat, which wasn't a surprise. The tire was bald and normally required an infusion of air every few days. She circled the block once, hoping that Kruger wouldn’t see her or recognize Adam's blue Jeep Cherokee. None of the homes in Cottageville had driveways or garages, and a quick check of the parking spaces in front of Kruger's place showed that he wasn't at home. Probably at work at this hour, although Beth knew that a college professor's office hours and class schedules could vary wildly from day to day. The risk was there, and she knew it.
She would do exactly what she'd told Adam she would. In and out fast. Carefully. Doors locked. Grab the cats and the laptop and back to Adam's in about an hour. Where Adam would be waiting, mad as hell about her taking his keys, and even madder that she'd gone to the house without him. Which meant that in an hour—including the time it took her to say a nervous hello and set the cat carrier down—she'd be back over the arm of the couch with her pants drooping around her ankles and her ass in double jeopardy. Spanked twice in the space of maybe two hours, and this one wouldn't be impromptu. Maybe he'd even worked up enough steam to find the heart-shaped bath brush from where she'd hidden it behind the bath towels.
She'd heard that silly threat so often—the one about not being able to sit down for some exaggerated amount of time. But this time, she had a sinking feeling that the threat might turn out to be a lot more than rhetoric and hyperbole. How many times had he warned her about not doing exactly what she was doing now? Beth groaned and could have sworn that she felt a corresponding throb in her already well-spanked rear end. A premonition, maybe. If Adam was in the kind of mood she thought he'd be when she saw him next, she might genuinely not be sitting down for a week.
She unlocked the front door and stepped into the hall, making sure she turned the deadbolt after she was safely inside. The house was silent and felt stuffy. The steeple clock that had once belonged to her grandmother had stopped, and she'd never realized before how familiar and comforting the sound of its ticking had been. From upstairs she heard a thump. One of the cats. A moment later, Velvet, the one Adam called the Devil Cat From Hell, appeared on the stairs, but didn't seem inclined to come down, making it clear that her company couldn't be had for a mere pat on the head or affection. Beth could see from where she stood that the bowls of dry cat food in the kitchen were still half-full, but Velvet was waiting to be bribed—with a nice slab of fresh salmon, maybe.
The remaining two cats greeted her affectionately, and Beth was relieved to see that they seemed fat and healthy. Adam had come by to feed and water them every day since she left the house, but she was anxious to get them all packed up and out of the house. Although it hadn't been discussed in any real detail, Adam seemed to feel that she'd be moving in with him right away, and that was fine with her. The little house was the first home she'd ever owned, but she'd never really felt comfortable in it. And now she understood why. It no longer mattered to Beth what came of Adam's investigation or what they found out about Kruger. Or even what happened between her and Adam. She never wanted to see the house at 285 Hazelwood Circle again. Tomorrow morning, she would call Fred Lawrence and tell him that she would be completely moved out by the end of the week. She no longer wanted to live in a fairy-tale cottage—or across a narrow strip of dead grass from a real-life ogre.
Corralling the cats was a bigger job that she'd expected. They were all cunning and streetwise and wary of anything remotely resembling a cage, and all three were able to evade capture for more than an hour. Finally, she trapped two of them in the small laundry room and crowded both into the larger cat carrier. A quick glance at her watch gave her a shock, though. It was almost nine-thirty. The ca
t hunt had taken close to an hour-and-a-half already, and the remaining fugitive—Velvet—was an experienced alley-brawler, unlikely to go down without a fight. Beth sighed. That double jeopardy, double-header spanking was definitely in her future.
A half-hour later, she had cornered Velvet under the bed, using several cardboard boxes to create a sort of "box canyon," with only one way out. Velvet curled up against the wall, snarling and hissing.
"Ungrateful bitch," Beth swore under her breath, dabbing at two long, bleeding scratches on her arm. "How'd you like to stay under there with all the dust bunnies for a while, huh? All by yourself? While all the nice boys and girls sleep in a big, soft, king-sized bed and dine every night on roast turkey from the deli section, and yummy canned tuna? Real albacore, too, not that cheap stuff I used to eat."
Velvet appeared to need time to think it over, so Beth got up and limped to the next room to find her laptop, which contained the entire manuscript of the romance novel she had begun to think of as "Brad the Cad and The Pregnant Nun." She was gathering up the stack of books on pregnancy and childbirth when she heard the stairs creak.
When Felix Kruger spoke to her from the doorway, less than six feet from where she stood, there was no time to do anything but whirl around and hurl the laptop at his head. The laptop was old and heavy, and when he grabbed at his shoulder and swore, she began throwing the books. As he batted them away like foul balls, Beth tried to dodge around him and make it into the hall—and tripped over a copy of Successful Breast Feeding. Before she could scream, Kruger's hands were at her throat.