Grimm: The Chopping Block

by John Passarella

  “Oh—oh, that,” Decker said, chuckling. “Not gonna lie to you, brother. Could have gone better. Rough night, but long as you hit more than you miss, you count yourself lucky, right?”

  “That’s a healthy attitude,” Monroe said, but worried that Decker meant “hit” in a violent context. How well did he really know the man? “Plenty of fish in the sea.”

  “That there are,” Decker said. “Now, we gonna do this or what?”

  “That’s the plan,” Monroe said, trying to sound more positive than he felt. Sometimes theory and practice existed worlds apart. “I brought an extra mat.”

  Decker stared at the coiled mat Monroe extended to him.

  “This for nappy time or something?” he asked.

  “Hands and knees on a hardwood floor,” Monroe said. “You know, after a while you’ll appreciate a little cushion.”

  “Oh. I get it,” Decker said with the hint of a smirk. “Soft, right?”

  Monroe paused, waiting for Decker to finish the thought.

  Suddenly the taller man burst out laughing and clapped Monroe on the shoulder.

  “Holy hell, brother! I’m jerking your chain,” Decker said, shaking his head in disbelief. “You should’ve seen your face, dude. Never would’ve known you were reformed.”

  “This is serious,” Monroe said.

  “As a heart attack,” Decker said. “Gotcha. Full bore. You know me.”

  “Remember, Decker,” Monroe said as they approached the glass door with three golden Ps arranged diagonally, like a mini-staircase. “Pilates is about patience, precision and breathing.”

  “I know how to breathe.”

  “Probably not the right way,” Monroe said, almost to himself, but Decker’s Blutbad hearing didn’t miss a word.

  “You mean I’ve been doing it wrong all these years?” Decker said. “It’s a freakin’ wonder I’m still alive.”

  “Okay, the Pilates way,” Monroe amended.

  “I know all about Pilates,” Decker said as Monroe held the door open for him.

  “Really?” Monroe said, unable to control the sudden elevation of his eyebrows.

  “Yeah,” Decker said, smirking again, as he entered the studio. “Can’t wait to toss around that medicine ball. Bet I can knock you on your ass, Mr. Veggie Burger.”

  Monroe sighed. “It’s not a medicine ball,” he said, hurrying to catch up to Decker. “It’s an exercise ball. And you don’t throw it at people.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Decker asked. “So what do you do with the damn thing?”

  “Mostly,” Monroe said, unable to help himself. “You sit on it.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Decker asked, pulling up short. “What the ever-loving hell happened to you, man?”

  Again, Monroe sighed. “Don’t worry about it. We’re signed up for a beginner mat class. No balls today.”

  “From what I see, the balls have been missing for a while, man.”

  “You know, as soon as I said it, I knew it was a huge mistake.”

  Monroe’s early optimism had fled, reduced to a perfunctory sense of obligation to finish what he had started. But he chose to keep up appearances and hope that Decker would turn the corner and find some value in the class.

  “Don’t sweat it, brother,” Decker said. “I’m ready to kick some Pilates ass.”

  There’s no kicking. The words popped unbidden into Monroe’s head, but he wisely kept them to himself.

  * * *

  Fearing Decker might become self-conscious in a group setting, Monroe had led him to the back row of the class. Out of a dozen students, Monroe counted eight women and four men. And, except for a middle-aged man who had “recent-divorce” written all over him, the others clearly had some experience with the postures, which exposed a flaw in Monroe’s plan. If the class was like an ad hoc pack, Decker’s proficiency status dropped him immediately down the dominance hierarchy, which didn’t bode well.

  Decker lasted all of ten minutes before the problems started. He handled the early postures well enough, even allowing for the restriction of his flannel shirt and jeans. No problems with “one leg circle” or “roll up” and “swan dive.” But “double leg stretch” and “hundred” had him puffing and grunting when he wasn’t muttering curses. “Teaser” gave him fits, especially near the end of the hold period. “Leg pull prone” led to him crashing onto the floor and rolling off his mat.

  “Son of a motherless whore!”

  “Decker,” Monroe whispered, embarrassed by and for him.

  “It’s nothing, I’m fine,” Decker said, waving his arm at the rest of the class, which had collectively paused to gape at him. “Go on about your business.”

  When Decker elevated sideways in “side bend” with his arm extended over his head, Monroe wanted to close his eyes, but couldn’t.

  Decker teetered one way, then the other, and then toppled over with a roar, emitting a growl of frustration as he woged. For a moment, Monroe feared the Blutbad might attack the class. Some of them turned around to stare; others pointedly ignored his outburst in a way that made him angrier still.

  “Decker!” Monroe hissed.

  But Decker ignored Monroe’s entreaties. He stood and kicked his foam mat across the floor. It spun in a half-revolution and struck a middle-aged woman two spots farther down their row.

  “Hey!” the woman yelled, indignant.

  The instructor, a young woman who had an otherwise calm and soothing voice, no longer had a peaceful air about her.

  “Sir, you need to leave now!” she insisted.

  Decker grumbled as he snatched his mat off the floor and collected his belongings from a cubby in the back of the room. As he strode past the woman, he barked, “You need to kiss my ass, lady.”

  Mortified, Monroe gathered his own mat and belongings and hastened after his friend. He offered a quick apology to the woman struck by the kicked mat, and repeated the apology to the instructor. Monroe usually practiced Pilates at home alone and had no investment in the class, but he didn’t want to be permanently banned from the establishment.

  “Bad breakfast burrito,” Monroe said, with a knowing shake of his head. “He’s not usually like this. But, you know, those things really knot up your insides. I’m just saying, we’ve all been there, right?”

  Before anyone could respond, Monroe slipped out of the class, hurried down the hall and rejoined Decker outside the studio.

  As he approached, Decker held up a hand, palm out.

  “Listen,” he began. “Before you say anything—that was on me. Okay, brother? Lost my cool. Mea freakin’ culpa.”

  “I may not be blameless here,” Monroe said. “Maybe a group class wasn’t the right first step on this road, you know? Something—less crowded—might have been the way to go. We’ll reschedule—at a different studio—maybe a private class…”

  Monroe’s voice faded the deeper Decker furrowed his brow.

  “Or…” Monroe began, scrambling, “maybe Pilates is not your thing. It works for me, but not everything works for everyone, right? We’ll find what works for you.”

  “Yeah,” Decker said, nodding. “Something with punching and kicking.”

  “Let’s keep that one in our back pocket while we explore a few options that are less bloodthirsty and destructive.”

  Decker clapped a hand over his abdomen.

  “You hungry?” he asked. “I am well and truly famished.” He smiled broadly and tugged on the distressed bill of his rebel cap. “Well, that wasn’t a total waste of time. I worked up a real appetite with my rage-fest.” Decker shoved the spare foam mat into Monroe’s hands as if he never planned to touch it again. “Let’s go,” he said. “Got a craving for steak tartare.”

  Crossing the street, Monroe opened the Beetle’s driver’s side door and tossed the mats in—then paused with the door held open. For a long moment, he contemplated the idea of jumping into the car and peeling rubber on his way home. The fleeting thought brought with it a rush of relief and
contentment. But he hadn’t gotten this far by taking the easy road. Nobody said helping a Blutbad reform would be easy. It hadn’t been easy for him and it remained an ongoing struggle to stay on the straight and narrow. So Pilates wasn’t the answer for Decker. Something else might work. Right?

  With a sigh, he slammed the door shut.

  And rejoined Decker.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  When the Bremmers arrived at the veterinarian practice, they could not have looked more solemn. Husband Barry stood between his wife and son, his right arm around Logan’s shoulders, his left hand gripping Melinda’s right. Barry Bremmer gave the impression of a man imparting strength to his loved ones, while recognizing the shallowness of his own reserves. Despite their unfounded optimism the day before, the direness of Roxy’s medical condition must have crept into their familial psyche. They had braced themselves that morning to say goodbye to one of their own.

  Juliette had spotted them getting out of their car through an office window. She checked the examination room one last time, then hurried to meet them at the reception area. She would have called them before they left home to expedite their arrival, but she hadn’t been sure at the time. Now she knew.

  “We have an appointment to see Dr. Silverton… about Roxy Bremmer,” Barry told Zoe, who sat alone behind the front desk. Apparently Roger had slipped out for bagels or doughnuts. He and Zoe alternated gopher days.

  Zoe lifted the phone but saw Juliette approaching out of the corner of her eye and dropped the receiver back in the cradle.

  “And here she is!”

  Juliette stood before the Bremmers, palms pressed together in front of her.

  “Okay, I should have called you earlier.”

  Melinda gasped before Juliette could finish.

  “Oh, no… has she… already?”

  Barry pressed his lips together and looked off to the side, to suppress his emotions. His son looked down, unable to meet anyone’s gaze.

  “No,” Juliette said quickly. “It couldn’t have been antifreeze ingestion.”

  “What?” Melinda asked.

  Abruptly, Logan looked up at Juliette, his eyes wide. A brief glimpse of redemption, that whatever had happened to Roxy hadn’t been his fault.

  Juliette shook her head, frustrated with herself.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “This isn’t how I meant to tell—follow me.” She couldn’t help smiling. “I have a surprise.”

  “Surprise?” Melinda asked, confused by the expectation of bad news combined with Juliette’s upbeat demeanor.

  As Juliette grabbed the examination room doorknob, a dog barked.

  “Is that—?” Barry asked her.

  “Yes.”

  “But she sounds…” Melinda paused, her lips quivering. “Better.”

  Juliette swung the door open and led them in. But not before the yellow lab rushed over to her family, licking hands, tail wagging in nonstop excitement. Logan dropped to his knees and wrapped his arms around the dog. Melinda’s eyes brimmed with tears until a few finally escaped. Barry coughed, overcome with emotion. He managed to utter a single word, “How?”

  They all looked at her expectantly.

  She didn’t know what to say. How had the dog recovered so remarkably after yesterday? I wish I knew, she thought. But that’s not an answer she could give them. She reached for the file on the stainless steel counter, flipped it open to glance at the lab results, which she had already memorized but found hard to believe.

  “Her kidney values have returned to normal.” BUN 23, creatinine 0.9, she mused. Exactly the same as five minutes ago, the last time I looked. “She’s eating again. Seems fine. The IV fluids must have worked.”

  “After yesterday,” Barry said. “What you said, the odds didn’t seem great.”

  “Yes, it was a longshot,” Juliette said, smiling as she looked down at the dog, who continued to receive pets and hugs from the entire family. “But Roxy beat the odds.”

  “It’s—amazing,” Melinda said.

  “Roxy’s tough,” Logan said. “Aren’t you, girl?”

  “What now?” Melinda asked.

  “Do you want to take her home?” Juliette said.

  “Can we? Yes, of course!”

  “Then she’s all yours,” Juliette said, cautioning them to let the dog take it easy. No matter how well she presented now, she’d been through a grueling ordeal and might tire easily. “Zoe has your bill. See her on your way out.”

  As they headed out to their car, dog in tow, Juliette watched them depart, smiling in relief. When she woke up that morning, she imagined a completely different outcome for Roxy. She’d been wrong, and that made her day.

  Melinda saw her standing at the glass door and waved. Barry tooted the car horn as he drove across the parking lot. And Logan held up one of Roxy’s front paws against the window in a little doggy wave. Juliette laughed and finally turned away from the door.

  “Wow,” Zoe said. “I never would have believed that was the same dog they brought in yesterday.”

  “You and me both,” Juliette said as she headed back to her office.

  While the dog’s quick turnaround pleased her, she remained baffled by it. She couldn’t explain it logically or medically. But she’d had no reason to keep an apparently healthy dog in her care any longer. The Bremmers certainly accepted at face value the dog’s remarkable recovery. People always wonder why bad things happen to them, but they accept good fortune readily enough.

  Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, she told herself. Accept the win gracefully and move on.

  But something nagged at her subconscious. Nothing specific, but the uneasiness lingered. Why can’t I accept things the way they are? Am I letting my own recent history with bizarre revelations cast a pall over good news?

  * * *

  Nick hung up the telephone and crossed off the last name from his half of the list he’d copied from the geocache logbook. Since all but two of them had used Internet handles, à la “Spelunkid,” instead of their actual names, the most time-consuming part of the investigation dealt with connecting those aliases to real identities with contact details. Cyber-breadcrumbs based upon logged IP addresses and server logs from web hosts and Internet service providers revealed the connections. The PPD’s computer tech guys had helped Nick and Hank obtain and sift through that information.

  Cross-referencing the logbook to the online entries showed that everyone who signed—or stamped—the logbook had also recorded their “find” on the cache’s web page. All of the geocachers had been local to Portland at the time they signed the logbook, with the exception of a woman who had relocated to the East Coast when her company opened a New York sales office. Without a firm time of death for either victim, he couldn’t ask for or verify alibis. Nevertheless, they needed to collect information about their suspect pool.

  Personally, Nick doubted the involvement of any of the geocachers in the bare bones cases, but that belief was far from a certainty. Needing to narrow the pool, Nick focused on men more than women or parent-and-child combinations, such as Brian and Tyler Mathis. And because of the “toy swap” nature of this particular cache, the parent-child combination, naturally, was most common.

  Next, he tightened his solitary-man focus to those with a short history of geocaching. One of them, a college student, had only one “find” on his user history. When Nick questioned him, he discovered that he’d quit after his first cache because his bumbling around in the woods resulted in a horrible case of poison ivy. He showed Nick photos he’d taken at the time and posted to his various social media accounts. When Nick asked why he chose a “toy swap” geocache, the young man answered reasonably that the difficulty level was easy—but not too easy—and that the cache was the one closest to his home. He’d tried to block the incident from his mind, and had forgotten he still had an account on the geocache site until Nick’s phone call.

  Nick looked up from his computer screen to check on Hank’s progress with h
is half of the list and heard his partner wrapping up a call.

  “Anything?”

  “Nothing,” Hank replied. “You?”

  “The same,” Nick said. “No obvious suspects.”

  At that moment, Sergeant Wu walked purposely through the door and made a beeline toward their desks, balancing his notebook atop a couple folders with photos clipped to them. Hank turned expectantly in his chair.

  “What have you got?” Nick asked.

  “Tell us you got something,” Hank pleaded. “Even if you don’t.”

  “How about two missing persons?” Wu asked. “Well, not missing anymore. Since we found them. But that’s it, as far as a pattern.” He referred to his notebook. “We got IDs through dental records on both sets of bones. Marie Chang, twenty-year-old student at Pacific Northwest College of Art, disappeared while jogging twelve days ago. Second set of bones belonged to Luis Posada, middle-aged businessman, never returned to the office after a lunch meeting. Wife reported him missing… two weeks ago.”

  He placed the folders on the corner of Nick’s desk, photos up.

  Nick thanked him.

  “Something else,” Wu said. “While I was getting these copies, I talked to some of the guys down there. The number of unsolved missing person cases in the Greater Portland area has ticked up significantly in the past month.”

  Considering what had happened to Chang and Posada, the implication of Wu’s unspoken conclusion was chilling. At the same time, Nick wouldn’t automatically make that deductive leap. Not every person who went missing ended up as a murder victim. Some simply ran away from their lives. Others eventually turned up, with one excuse or another to explain their absence. Nevertheless, Nick had to consider that the beginning of a potential pattern had emerged.

  “I want to be notified of any new missing persons cases,” Nick told Wu, who nodded. Easier to follow a fresh trail than one that had grown cold over the course of a month. He’d want to review the other missing person case folders, but for now, they had other leads to follow.

  Wu left, and Nick handed Hank the top folder—Luis Posada—while he flipped through Marie Chang’s information. Both victims had disappeared at approximately the same time and their bones were discovered within a mile of each other, in similar shallow graves. Two weeks ago they couldn’t have been more different, but in death, they had too much in common. Nick wondered if Occam’s razor applied. If the simplest explanation is the correct one, maybe Marie knew Luis? A connection between the victims could make solving the cases easier, but first they had to establish that connection.