Deranged

by Jacob Stone

  Morris told him he’d take some with sugar. Walsh and Malevich also accepted the offer, while Gilman told him he didn’t need anything. While Conway went to get the coffee, the detective who’d been talking with him filled them in on what Conway had said.

  “Pretty straight story,” the detective said. “Conway owns the place, and also works the bar. The place closes at midnight. He had one person working tonight in the kitchen. Chad Brady. According to Conway, this Brady finished cleaning up the kitchen around quarter to one and then left. My partner visited Brady at his home in Simi Valley, and I got a call from him fifteen minutes ago. Brady was alone with his wife, and no sign of Ms. Maguire. He was cooperative and allowed my partner to check his car, both inside and trunk. No blood. My partner’s convinced he’s clean, and according to when his wife claims Brady arrived home he left here no later than a quarter to one.”

  “Did he see anything unusual when he left?”

  The detective shook his head. “My partner tried asking him about any cars parked here that shouldn’t have been, but Brady claims he wasn’t paying attention. That he was beat after a long night in the kitchen and just wanted to get home.”

  “So that leaves us with Conway. He seems pretty shook up. Or pretty guilty.”

  “I’d say pretty shook up. His story is as straight as it gets. Ms. Maguire finished up around one, and he told her she could leave. He stayed another fifteen minutes handling the day’s receipts, and when he saw Ms. Maguire’s car still in the back lot, he knew something was wrong and he called 9-1-1.”

  “Anywhere inside here he could’ve stashed a body?”

  “No. We searched the place thoroughly.”

  “How about his car?”

  The detective stopped to think about that. “We didn’t check his car,” he admitted.

  Conway came out of the kitchen carrying a tray with three mugs of coffee, cream, milk, and sugar. After he brought those over to the table where Morris and the others had gathered, Morris asked him if it was just him, Brenda Maguire, and Brady working there that night.

  “That was it,” he said. “Friday nights and weekends I have two waitresses working, and I bring in another bartender, but weeknights are slow.”

  “Did Ms. Maguire have any beefs or problems with any of your other employees? Or customers?”

  “No. Never. Brenda’s a sweetheart. Feisty as hell, but as nice and friendly a person as you’ll ever meet.” His face crumbled a bit, and he wiped a thumb over a tear that had leaked out of his right eye. “I should’ve walked her out to her car tonight. With those stories about that psychopath on the loose, I should’ve made sure she got to her car safely.”

  Morris didn’t ask him why he didn’t do that. It would be rubbing salt in the wound to do so, and besides, the answer was obvious. It’s impossible to believe you or someone you know could be affected by a psycho like SCK until it happens, especially when you live in a quiet community like North Hills.

  “Anything unusual happen here the last few days?” Morris asked.

  Conway shook his head.

  “Did you see anyone here fitting the following description—Caucasian, big, wide body, round head like a pumpkin, brownish hair, bald spot?”

  “That’s half my clientele,” Conway said.

  “Anyone new like that the last few days.”

  Conway shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “Give it some thought.”

  Conway gave it some thought and shook his head.

  “Did Ms. Maguire have any customers recently that she found odd?”

  Conway started to shake his head, but stopped himself. “Brenda told me about a guy who stopped in by himself the last two nights. Ordered sirloin steak both times. She liked him. Thought he was funny. There was something else.”

  Conway bit his thumbnail as he thought about what that something else might’ve been. Then his eyes widened. “Jesus,” he swore. “I can’t believe I’d blacked this out. The guy was a New Yorker. Or at least Brenda told me he had a New York accent.”

  Morris felt his pulse quicken. “Did you get a look at him?”

  “No, or if I did I didn’t pay any attention to him. The last two nights were particularly slow and I spent time working on the books and taking care of other business away from the bar.”

  “Could he have paid by credit card?”

  “I don’t know. I can check the last two nights’ receipts.”

  “Why don’t you do that now, and make us a list of everyone who used a credit card the last two nights. Leave off anyone who didn’t spend enough money to have ordered the sirloin steak.”

  “Sure. Of course.”

  “While you’re doing that, how about giving us your car keys and allowing us to search your car.”

  Conway looked at Morris dumbly for a moment before he realized why Morris wanted his car keys. His expression deadened then, but he took a key off his key chain and tossed it to the table.

  “Do what you need to. I’ll get the list for you,” he said without looking at Morris or any of the others at the table.

  They checked Conway’s car. The trunk was empty, and there was no blood in either the trunk or inside the car. One of the patrolmen used a slim jim to unlock Brenda Maguire’s car, and her trunk was empty also.

  Gilman pulled Morris aside. “If SCK ate here, he didn’t pay by credit card,” he said.

  “You never know. This psycho’s already made mistakes. He might’ve made one here. Anyway, that’s what we do. We follow all leads until we exhaust them.”

  “What about that lead from New York I heard about? That SCK might’ve left one of his victims alive?”

  “My investigators in New York are trying to track her down.”

  “How likely was she attacked by SCK?”

  “I don’t know. The same night five years ago when they were expecting SCK to strike again, a man in Queens gets his head chopped off, and this woman is attacked so brutally that it left her crippled. And both of them fit SCK’s victim profiles.”

  “Except there should’ve been a middle-aged woman attacked also that night.”

  “Polk, with NYPD’s help, is looking into that, seeing if a victim might’ve slipped by the police’s notice.”

  Gilman rubbed his jaw as he considered what Morris had told him. “Then goddamn it, let’s find that potential surviving victim,” he said. He hesitated, then added, “The mayor wants to publicly acknowledge you saving people’s lives today in Beverly Hills. The optics aren’t right to do that now, but when they are, we’ll be making a big deal out of it.”

  “After SCK’s been apprehended.”

  “Yeah, after that.” Gilman hesitated again before saying, “Is there anything we can do to help this Brenda Maguire, like offer a reward for her safe return?”

  Morris grimly shook his head. “If SCK took her, she’s already dead.”

  “But maybe he’s not the one who abducted her?”

  Morris didn’t bother saying what they both already knew.

  Chapter Forty-five

  Evan Goldberg thought he was making good time as he raced his road bike along a remote stretch of Mulholland Drive and passed one of his landmarks. A quick glance at his watch showed that he was right. Five twenty-eight. He was two minutes ahead of his best time so far. As he turned a corner, he caught a glimpse of a coyote only fifty feet or so from the road. He’d seen coyotes in the area in the past when he’d ridden at dusk, but never during any of his early morning rides. Seeing a coyote out at dawn would’ve been unsettling enough, but Evan could’ve sworn the animal was trying to drag something into the woods.

  He almost rode past this, but he had an unnerving feeling that what the coyote was trying to drag away wasn’t a large dog or some other animal, but a human body. That he had actually caught a fleeting glimpse of a human leg. He turned his bike around and rode back to where he’d seen the coyote. The animal was almost fully behind a tree, but it was definitely dragging something. Evan g
ot off his bike and headed toward it, moving cautiously through the brush. He picked up a large rock, saw another one, and picked that up also as he continued on toward the coyote. When he got within twenty feet of the animal, it turned toward Evan and bared its fangs. Whatever the coyote was dragging was hidden in the brush and tall grass. Evan started yelling at the animal to get away. At first it stood its ground, and continued baring its fangs, but when Evan threw a rock at it and hit it squarely in the side, the coyote let out a yelp and backed up about ten feet. When Evan threw another rock at it, the coyote took off running.

  A coolness flooded Evan’s head as he moved closer to whatever it was lying in the grass. “Oh Jesus,” he whispered when he got within five feet of it and saw that it was a naked woman. At first only her legs and waist were visible, but that was enough for him to see the bite marks and torn flesh that the coyote was responsible for. He moved a step closer and was able to see that her skull had been cracked open like an egg, and he almost passed out.

  Chapter Forty-six

  Henry left Sheila by the computer while he headed off to the kitchen to make them scrambled eggs and bacon for an early breakfast. Normally he would’ve insisted that she stay in bed longer, or at the very least, given her a bath and dressed her before putting her anywhere, but for the last hour she’d been bugging him nearly nonstop to leave her by the computer. He guessed that she wanted to see whether they’d found the waitress’s body yet. Fine. He wasn’t going to argue the matter if it was that important to her. Besides, he was too beat to argue with her. It was 4 A.M. by the time he returned home after dumping the waitress’s body, but even though he was tired and still woozy from the blow he’d taken to the skull, he was also too restless to sleep. Maybe he dozed for a minute or two, but that would’ve been it, and by 6 A.M. he gave up the fight completely.

  He fried up the bacon first, then broke a half dozen eggs into a bowl. This way he’d be able to add in the bacon grease when he cooked the scrambled eggs. Once he poured in some milk and shook out a healthy amount of pepper, he went about whipping all this up with a fork. He wanted to feel relief that this was finally over, but there were certain things that were troubling him. First, there was Sheila insisting that he remove that poor girl’s clothing after he’d killed her. Wasn’t it bad enough what he did to her? He had to leave her to be discovered like that? He didn’t like it one bit, but he decided it wasn’t worth fighting Sheila over. If it was that important to her for that girl to be found naked, fine, as long as this was finally over. What had Henry most troubled, though, was the look he caught on Sheila’s face when he left her by the computer. It was a look that told him this wasn’t over. Well, like it or not, it was! He’d kept up his end of the bargain, and she was damn well going to keep up hers! He was going to fight her tooth and nail over it if he had to.

  He had zoned out for a minute, and realized he had overcooked the eggs. Eh, it didn’t matter. They’d still be edible, especially with all of the bacon grease he’d added. He spooned all of it out onto two plates, then went to retrieve Sheila.

  “You find what you were so anxious to see?” he asked, not bothering to hide his annoyance.

  She surprised him with what she had up on the computer. It wasn’t a news report about SCK’s latest (and last) victim being found in brush along a remote stretch of Mulholland Drive. Instead it was an article profiling Morris Brick, and Henry felt a chill as he saw how fixedly Sheila was staring at a photo of Brick, his wife, and his college-aged daughter.

  “You need to kill them,” Sheila said in her excruciatingly deliberate way as she pushed out the words through the half of her mouth that worked.

  “What in the world are you talking about? We had a deal!”

  “You messed things up!” she accused, her mouth forming that familiar pinched, angry circle. “It took too long to kill the last one, and the first two weren’t right.”

  “Uh uh. I did the best I could. I’m not killing anyone else. Especially not those three.”

  Her look softened, and her eyes reminded him once again of how they used to look during their early days together.

  “I know you tried,” she said. Her eyes searched deeper into his. “But I’m still suffocating, and I’m not going to be able to breathe freely until you do this for me. I need you to do this for me. Then it will be over. I promise.”

  Henry rubbed a thick hand over his face. At that moment he felt more lost than he’d ever felt in his life.

  “Brick’s wife and daughter don’t look anything like what you asked for before,” he claimed. “And Brick isn’t some soft, white-collar guy. None of them match.”

  “But they’re what I need now. If you kill them, I can live, otherwise it will be like I’m being strangled to death.”

  Henry blinked back several tears. “I can’t,” he said, his voice choking on him. “It’s not possible.”

  “You can do it,” she promised him. Although it took her a while to get all the words out, she explained to Henry how he was going to kill them.

  Chapter Forty-seven

  New York, 2009

  The apartment manager stared aghast at Sheila’s application. “Your last annual salary was only eleven thousand dollars?” he asked, his voice trembling in his growing incredulity.

  “That’s right. That was when I was in Tallahassee working as a hospital orderly. I only moved to New York last week and haven’t had a chance to look for a job yet.”

  “I see.” He dropped the application onto his desk as if it were something diseased. “Miss Jones, this is Central Park West. As I explained when I showed you the apartment, the rent is six thousand dollars a month. That would be for each and every month. I suggest that you confine your search to the Bronx. Or perhaps Jersey City.”

  Sheila broke out laughing. After all, one minute he was acting like he’d cut off his left arm to bed her, and now like she was nothing but dirt. “I’m sorry, but you look so much like you just bit into a lemon.” She wiped a tear from her eye. “I was only having a little fun. That job was back in 1998. That was when my parents died tragically leaving me a good deal of money.”

  She took out her cellphone, made a call, and after a short conversation, handed the phone to the apartment manager, Montgomery Hellinger.

  “My bank,” Sheila explained. “When you have as much money as I do, you’re given concierge service. She’ll confirm the amount I have in my account.”

  Mr. Hellinger spoke briefly over the phone before handing it back to Sheila, his cheeks reddening.

  “I apologize for my rudeness earlier,” he said with the proper amount of contrition.

  “Don’t fret another second about it. As I said, I was only having some fun. If you’d like, I could have you speak to someone at my brokerage firm. I have almost the same amount of money there also.”

  “That won’t be necessary.” He compressed his lips as he manufactured a grave look. “I would like to offer my condolences. I know it’s not easy to lose your parents no matter how many years have passed.”

  “Thank you. We’d been estranged for a while before the fire that took their lives,” Sheila said. “Four years had passed since I’d last seen them, and it was a surprise that they had me listed as their sole beneficiary.”

  “You poor girl.”

  “The money has helped,” Sheila said. “With what they already had and their life insurance and the insurance from their house burning down, it added up to quite a lot, and since then I’ve made some smart investments. Or I guess I should say lucky investments, because I had no idea what I was doing.”

  “I sincerely doubt that,” Hellinger remarked with his earlier jaunty smile back in place. “You impress me as someone who always knows exactly what she’s doing.”

  “Why, Mr. Hellinger, you’re making me blush!”

  “Monty, please.”

  So he was back to flirting with her. Good. She guessed his age at close to forty. Trim, tall, good-looking in a Ken doll kind of way. Not tha
t she had any interest in him romantically. So why was she so glad he was flirting with her again? She wasn’t going to string him along so she could cut his throat or garrote him like all those other men over the past eleven years. That was the promise she had made to herself when she decided to move to New York. No more killings. Well, whatever her reason for enjoying his attention, it didn’t matter.

  “Monty,” she said, smiling demurely.

  “So you’re from Tallahassee,” he said, flashing her a more wolfish grin now. “I was wondering where you got such an exquisite tan.”

  “Well, I was originally from Tallahassee, but since receiving my windfall I’ve been traveling the world. This tan is from four months in southern Thailand where I spent many hours at a nude beach, so no tan line, in case you’re wondering. To tell you the truth, this is the first time I’ve been back to the United States in almost eleven years.”

  “Quite the adventure,” Hellinger said. His grin turned almost obscene in its lasciviousness. “I could only imagine the places you’ve seen and the things you’ve done.”

  “Oh, I doubt your imagination could possibly be wild enough for that. Monty, you’d be shocked. Beyond shocked. Your hair would turn white! But now that I’m in New York, I plan to be a good girl.”

  “One of these days, you’ll have to test me,” Hellinger said, a growing hunger in his eyes as he stared unrepentantly at Sheila.

  “Maybe one of these days I will.”

  There were several more minutes of intense flirting before Hellinger had her sign a one-year lease, and she wrote a check for the full year so she wouldn’t have to be bothered with remembering to send monthly payments.

  “Ms. Jones,” he said with a twinkle in his eye as he handed her a key. “I say this to all our new tenants, but I’ve never meant it as much as right now. I am very glad to have you join us here.”

  The reason he’d been calling her Ms. Jones instead of Ms. Proops, and the reason she’d signed her lease with the name Sheila Jones was because she had bought herself a new identity after collecting the money from her parents’ estate. Only months after it had been transferred to her, she was in Miami and after some inquiries was introduced to an individual who could handle such matters. She didn’t necessarily want this new identity because she was afraid the police would one day come after her for murdering her sister and parents (although she thought it would be a prudent thing to do for that reason too), but more because she wanted to leave her old identify as horrifically abused Sheila Proops far behind. This man with the gold front tooth and greased hair and teardrop tattoo offered her the diamond package for twenty grand.