“...you just, you don’t need it, kids. You don’t need to be anywhere near it. I had a friend who got into all of that kinda stuff. You know.” He paused to take a long, drawn out sigh. I couldn’t decide if it was dramatic or not. “She-she was hooked on this stuff called heroin. Anyone here ever heard that word before?”
He waited for a second and several hands went up. “Yeah. You guys.” He pointed at one of the younger looking kids. “Tell me how you heard about it, son,” Tanner said, as he went over and crouched next to the boy. He placed his hand on the kid’s shoulder while he spoke.
“Um, my auntie was really really sick ’cause of it when I was a baby. My momma was sad all the time when she would look after her. She told me it was super bad.”
“I bet she did. I’m sorry to hear about that, son. Is your aunt better now?”
The kid looked down at his hands in his lap.
Tanner sighed. “I’m so sorry.” He turned his attention to the rest of the class and stood. “But listen, this is why we’re talking about this here. So that you all know the effects of these types of things, and you can always, from now on, talk to me and each other if you ever come across it again. Talking about these things helps us to understand them, and to better protect ourselves against them in the future. Knowledge is power, you know? This is a support system, guys. We’re all here for each other. ” He started walking around the outside of their circle.
“Now. If anyone ever offers you drugs, what do you do?”
All together the kids chimed out, “Say no!”
“And what else?”
“Tell an adult!”
“Alright, that’s exactly it. So you kids know about this stuff. It’s real bad, kids, real bad. But you’ve got a little extra family right here and we’re gonna look after each other.” He went on talking, but I had heard enough for the moment. I didn’t need to hear this guy preaching to kids about them bad ol’ drugs to know what he was putting out. Or at least, professing to put out. I sat down on a bench in the mini-corridor that fed into the hall. I waited out my five minutes staring at the motivational posters of hanging cats and unicorns that peppered the length of the hallway.
The class let out and around fifteen little people streamed out of the big double doors until the Sensei himself appeared.
“Hey, Tanner,” I called out as I stood up off the bench.
His head Linda Blair’d slightly and he caught my eye as surprise fed his face. “Ana.” He turned to face me.
“One and the same. How you doing?”
“Yeah, good, good. What are you doing here?” he asked. He seemed to realize that sounded kind of rude and followed it up with, “Is everything okay?”
I smirked to myself and nodded. “Everything’s fine. Just wanted to have a little chat.” I was aware of how menacing that could sound, and basked in it for a second before smiling sweetly. “Nothing bad, just touching some bases.”
He nodded mutely and gestured towards reception. We walked through and he led us back to the office that Archie and I had interviewed him in a few days prior. Tanner held the door open for me and I walked in and sat myself down on the same chair. He sat opposite, behind the desk and laced his fingers together in front of his face, then rested his chin on the steeple. “So. What’s going on?”
“Mr. Tanner—”
“Daniel, please.”
I had to keep myself from rolling my eyes. This guy’s holier-than-thou, arrogant shrink act was becoming a little irritating. “Daniel. I was hoping to talk to you a little more about Pam.”
“Okay, but I mean, is that really necessary? I just had an interview with Detective Goodman yesterday.”
“Yes, I know, but we didn’t really get a whole lot from that.” I was about to continue when he cut me off.
He huffed. “You didn’t? Well, I’m sorry, but that’s not exactly a reason to keep coming to my place of work and—”
“Daniel, if this is problematic for you, please do just say, but this is a murder investigation and I’ve got to ask the questions I’ve got to ask.” I watched the professional pieces of his presentable self fall into place across his face like some kind of twisted game of Tetris. Mmk. Watching you, pal.
He narrowed his eyes at me. “You’re not even with the police, are you?” He leaned back in his chair and scoffed. “I mean, give me a break.”
That was enough for me. “No, Tanner, give me a break. You put on this whole costume, clean cut guy, straight out the ’hood, preachin’ to the kids about staying clean, I mean… c’mon, dude. We’re from the same background. Rough childhood, started training ’cause it kept me off the street and out of trouble. I mean, quit bullshitting me. I know what drugs can do to a person, to a family, but you? You’ve got a chip on your shoulder about it, and I want to know why.”
Tanner huffed again and avoided my eye. I was getting to him, but I wanted answers now and I couldn’t be screwed to wait for that to settle in. I bit the bullet. “I know something was going on with you and Pam.”
That got his attention. “Excuse me?”
“Yeah, I can tell. I can tell by the way you talk about her. Your body language.”
Tanner crossed his legs and gave a half-roll of his eyes. “Ana, I liked Pam, sure, but I am and always have been faithful to my wife.”
I snorted, which wasn’t very professional, but fuck it. “Okay, Tanner, if we’re just going to back and forth with a whole bunch of bullshit, I can go, but I can also guarantee the police will be back here in no time to—”
“Look.” He cut me off. “Okay. I liked her. I liked her a lot. There even could’ve been something there.”
“Your wife is into the idea of a thruple? Your kid, too? That’s cool. Very modern.”
Tanner huffed angrily and scowled at me. I decided two cappuccinos this morning probably wasn’t the best call and I should cool it on the energy a little. “Please, carry on,” I said.
He did, through gritted teeth. I watched him work the muscle in his jaw. “I liked Pam a lot, but I just couldn’t put up with the people she was hanging out with, what she was doing with the time she spent away from here.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, she would come to class, which was great, obviously, but when the class was over, she would leave and these guys would be waiting outside for her. Real shady types. I know those types.” His eyes moved down to the floor and a wistful look appeared on his face. I realized he was reliving the moments, the emotion, and it was playing out across his face. “I couldn’t stand it. After everything I was putting into trying to help her, teach her, educate her, she’d leave with them at the end of the day. I couldn’t take it. I can’t deal with that shit.”
I hadn’t exactly been expecting that and was quiet for a second while I took in what he had said.
“Listen, I’ve got another class soon. Are we done here?” he asked. He had snapped back to reality in my silence. He now looked tired and pissed off.
I checked my watch. I figured I could probably squeeze a couple more minutes out of the guy before he really had to leave. “Just a couple more questions?” I attempted to conjure a sweet smile.
He sighed. “Literally, a couple.”
Carter’s story about running into Pam and Tanner and confronting him floated into my head. “You ever meet any of these shady types you mentioned?”
His brow furrowed. “I mean, ‘meet’ might be a little strong. I acquainted myself with a few of them once or twice, if they were hanging outside the gym or whatever. Nothing ever happened, though.”
Not a word of Carter.
“Gotcha. And how did the two of you leave things? You and Pam.”
“Not great. Not bad, either. Sounds horrible, but she just sorta… faded away. Slowly stopped coming to class as much, stopped answering messages. The first few months, she was in here almost every day. The last month or two, once a week if you were lucky. She just disappeared.” He half shrugged as he stared into the dista
nce. He blinked a couple of times and looked up at me. “Okay?”
“Sure. Okay.” I stood. “I’ll see you ’round, Tanner. I appreciate you taking the time.” I meant it sincerely, and reached my hand out to shake his. He accepted. Then he leveled me with an eyeball and tried to stare me out. I held his gaze.
He released my hand and I headed for the door. I took a second to turn around and watch him walk off.
He wasn’t holding himself as tall as he had been when he had left his class. I had left both of our meetings feeling like he was a weird character, and that he very much rubbed me up the wrong way. I couldn’t help but continue to wonder what he was hiding.
Chapter Ten
I called Archie as I sat myself down on a park bench in the shade near Tanner’s gym. It rang a couple times before he picked up.
“Goodman.”
“Hey, bud.”
“Hey, where are you?”
“At MacArthur Park. Thinkin’ about ice cream. ’S hot.”
I looked up at the sun beating down, dappled through the gently waving leaves of the trees and allowed my ear to tune into the birds’ song coming from the tree above me. It was nice.
“That sounds pretty good. I wish I could join you.”
I frowned. “Why can’t you?”
“Because I have a job. A job which currently has me working through four-hundred-thousand case files.”
I made a noise of disapproval. “You can’t take a break? It sounds like you need a break. That’s too much work, you must be sooo stressed, take a break.”
“Ana…” he said in a warning tone.
“C’mon. Half an hour. I insist. I need to talk stuff out.”
He made a guttural sound of irritation and hung up, then appeared in front of me fifteen minutes later, holding two ice cream cones. He grinned at me.
“Having a nice afternoon?” he asked as he sat down next to me and handed me a cone.
“Better than my morning. How about you?”
“Yeah. Stressful more than anything. So many developments with this vigilante case.”
“You can tell me in a minute if you need to get it off your chest.”
He nodded, and we sat in silence for a second, watching the kids shout and laugh at each other as they played on the jungle gym in the little colorfully decorated area across the path from us.
“I talked to Tanner,” I said after a couple of minutes’ silence.
“Actually talked, or did you beat the crap outta him, too?” He asked, a look of concern covering his face.
I smiled. “As much as he pisses me off, we actually talked. It was interesting.”
“What’d he say?”
I let out a long exhale. “Mostly we talked about his relationship with Pam. Initially, he resisted me posing the idea that he had feelings for her, but eventually he admitted that there had been, at the very least, an interest.”
“He did?” Archie asked as he frowned, suddenly more interested. He wiped some melted ice cream off his chin and looked at me expectantly.
“Yeah, it took a little pressure, a few cliched ‘I love my wife’s, but we got there. He said that what had put him off her was the people she was hanging around with. He seems to have a really fierce anti-drugs stance, it sounds like from all the way back to his childhood. I’m thinking someone in his family… Anyway, the fact that she was coming to him to better herself and then leaving with those guys really ground his gears.”
“Sounds like he really cared about her.”
“It does, doesn’t it?”
“Which, unfortunately for him, gives him an even stronger motive,” he said as he gazed thoughtfully into the distance.
“I know.”
He paused, then continued more confidently, “I mean, he’s got feelings for her, and he decides to act upon them by using his position as her sensei to gain her trust. For example, talking to her about the people in her life, those guys she was hanging out with he didn’t like, trying to give her advice. But they keep showing up.”
I see what he’s doing and raise an eyebrow. I continue for him. “So he starts to get more involved, personally involved, emotionally involved to the point where he actually goes to see her. She opens her door to him and lets him in, hence the lack of a forced entry.”
Archie nods excitedly, the spirit with him now, and goes on. “They chat for a little bit, then he brings up his concern about the drugs, the guys she’s friends with. She gets angry, they argue and he loses it with her. He cares too much and his emotions cloud his judgment. He pushes her, hard, and she falls backwards into the table.”
I thought over what he had said for a moment. “So she smacks her head and he realizes what he has done. He checks her pulse, notices the blood coming from her head wound and realises she’s gone. He panics.”
“He turns the coffee table, the couch, smashes the window, trying to make it look like a break-in. But he’s wild, still caught up in the emotion of the argument, caught in the emotion of having killed the woman he loves and he can’t think straight. He runs into the kitchen, still panicking, and grabs a knife. He has to cover his steps and make it look like it wasn’t just an argument gone awry; people will know, they’ll find out. He has to make it look like something else. He forces himself to stab her, but he can’t bring himself to be violent enough towards a girl that he loves, not enough to convince the M.E. that he hated her, that he was really trying to kill her like that. He hated the drugs, they were what killed her baby, and in a roundabout way, they killed her too.”
I paused for a moment as I let it all sink in. “Man, that kinda makes sense.”
“I know. I think ultimately, he thought he was trying to help her. Then he got so caught up in how he felt about what Pam was doing that he just lost control in trying to take control.”
“He definitely comes across as a guy who always needs to be in control. Of everything. He needs to feel like people know it, too. He wants to be admired, maybe even revered.”
Archie nods. “Yeah, and he felt so passionately about getting her clean, maybe he was even kinda obsessed with saving her, you know, hero complex.”
I laughed as a thought occurred to me. “This almost sounds like your vigilante.”
Archie stopped dead. He looked at me. “It does.”
I read his face. “Okay, friend, I was kidding.”
He looked like he’d just had the silly slapped out of him by this realization. “I know. I don’t think you should have been. I think you have a point.”
I looked at him as if he were joking now. “C’mon, why would he be the guy?”
Archie shushed me with his hand. He then began to explain, slowly, as if he were explaining it to himself as well as to me. “Okay, now, this is just off the top of my head, so hear me out, give me a second.” His eyes were darting all over the place as he collected his thoughts. “Tanner puts on a show of being married. He’s got a loving relationship, they have a sweet kid, but in spite of them, he was beginning to get jealous of these guys hanging around Pam all the time. He was putting so much of himself into working with her, training her, trying to encourage her to better herself and be more healthy. But like he said, every time class would finish, she would leave with these guys, these dealers, bad folks. It ate away at him that after everything, she couldn’t just make a little more effort and stick with him, with his way. And a lot of what he has said up to this point would lead a reasonable, rational person to believe he is an extremely moral man who follows his own rule book.”
“Okay, sure, I can follow you that far. I can see how this leads to him killing her by accident, but becoming a vigilante is a step too far. Where’s his motive? It doesn’t track.”
“Ana, it doesn’t track unless the kid was his!”
“Tanner’s?” I asked, with more incredulity in my voice than I had intended.
“If it was his kid, that is prime motive—he hates drug dealers, his secret girlfriend miscarries his baby because of drugs?
Of course he feels the need to take revenge, I mean, come on!” Archie was becoming excitable.
“Sure, I mean, I get your point. I’m just not sure I can stretch that far.”
“What? How is it a stretch?”
“How is it a stretch? Straight off the top of my head, is his version of events even true? I mean, it’s pure speculation.”
“Ana, half of police work is pure speculation, why do you suddenly have a problem with that now? He goes out and takes revenge, kills the people that gave her the drugs, the people that influenced her, the people that ‘forced him’ to lose his temper and take her life!”
I sighed. “I don’t know. I guess I just hate thinking Pam was caught up in all this bullshit.”
“I know. But the best way to try and clear her name of the bullshit is to figure out how it got there in the first place. She wasn’t this person, so there’s got to be another answer. I think Tanner might be it.”
I had a few more issues with Archie’s theory, but I kept them to myself for now. He needed a little longer to figure out the bones of what he was trying to piece together, and I needed a little longer to figure out all the reasons why I thought it was wrong. He was also too excitable in that moment for me to be able to convince him of anything.
“I guess that makes sense. All you have to do now is prove it.”
“I intend to. This is the guy,” he replied.
I raised an eyebrow slightly, then remembered I had commandeered the conversation. “Since we’re already on the topic, you gonna tell me about these developments with the case?”
Poor Archie. The second I mentioned it, his face seemed to whiten slightly and he closed his eyes for a second. “Man, this back and forth will give me whiplash. We’ve come across two cases that look like almost the exact same M.O. Only they’re out of state.”
“Out of state? What?”
“I know. The first guy we found was a Joseph Testa. It happened a couple months ago. He was found a couple blocks from his ‘office’ out in Vegas, eyes swollen almost out of his head, blue fingertips, foam around the mouth and nose. His insides were essentially burned through. A poison called phenol. It basically has a corrosive effect on whatever tissue it touches. The M.E. thinks it was administered via a little scratch on the skin.”
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