Dead Weight

by Ragan, T. R.

  Jessica Pleiss, one of two part-time assistants she couldn’t afford but also couldn’t manage without, walked in at that moment, bringing a wave of dry heat in with her.

  “Oh, good, I’m glad you’re here,” Lizzy said without looking up.

  Jessica laughed. “I’m always here at three o’clock on Wednesdays.”

  Lizzy glanced at the clock. “You’re right. Sorry. I’m a little overwhelmed at the moment.”

  Jessica walked around Lizzy’s desk and glanced at her computer screen. “Who’s that?”

  “Anthony Melbourne, a fitness guru and motivational speaker. Ever heard of him?”

  “No, but just looking at those rockin’ abs makes me feel as if I should go run a few laps around the park.”

  Lizzy smiled. “Yeah, I know what you mean. Sadly, I can’t remember the last time I set foot in a gym.”

  “What’s the deal with this guy?”

  “Looks like we have another missing person case.”

  “Anthony Melbourne is missing?”

  “No.” Lizzy handed Jessica the binder. “Andrea Kramer has hired us to find her sister, Diane. She believes Anthony Melbourne has something to do with Diane’s disappearance. I’m not so sure at this point, but that’s neither here nor there. She’s hiring me to keep an eye on Melbourne.”

  “I thought you said you were too busy to take on too much more.”

  “True.”

  “You’re becoming a softy.”

  “Not me,” Lizzy lied. At the age of seventeen, Lizzy had been abducted by Samuel Jones, a madman known as Spiderman. After two months of watching him torture his victims, she’d managed to escape with her life, but at what price? She’d spent over a decade hiding from her own shadow until six months ago when her abductor came back into her life, determined to take care of her once and for all. He killed a local anchorwoman and a young girl who had taken Lizzy’s defense class. He had sliced through a window screen and took her while she lay sleeping; the poor girl hadn’t had a chance in hell of getting away.

  Samuel Jones was dead now. And everyone, including Lizzy’s therapist, seemed to think Lizzy should snap out of it—move forward and forget it ever happened. But it wasn’t that easy. She wanted nothing more than to let it go and move on, but the harder she tried, the more difficult it was to do.

  Jessica grabbed the mail from the Incoming tray and took it to the desk she shared with Hayley, the other part-timer. “Is Hayley coming in today?” Jessica asked.

  “I’m not sure. She talked about having to attend lab at school.” Hayley Hansen had helped save Lizzy’s niece. Hayley lost her pinky finger in the ordeal and in return gained a new lease on life. That’s what Hayley had told her, but Lizzy wasn’t sure she believed it. There was something different about Hayley. She had always kept to herself, but lately she’d been more stand-offish than usual. Lizzy thought it might have something to do with Hayley’s mother, a woman who had once used her daughter as payment for drugs and who was no longer a part of Hayley’s life. For the past six months, Hayley had been living with Lizzy’s sister, Cathy, and her niece, Brittany.

  Hayley was a smart girl. She had taken the high school proficiency test, received her GED, and was now taking summer classes at Sierra College.

  “These pictures came out great,” Jessica said after opening a large cardboard envelope. “Hayley definitely has a knack with a camera.”

  Jessica crossed the room and handed Lizzy three eight-by-ten photos of a man playing tag football with friends and then two more pictures of the same man carrying a stack of lumber to his truck. “I don’t think Mr. H.D. Palmer is going to be receiving workers’ comp for too much longer.”

  “These are good,” Lizzy said. “Do you mind dropping the photos at the prosecuting attorney’s office on your way home later?”

  “Not a problem.” Jessica took the pictures back to her desk. “Are you going to visit the mother of that missing girl today?”

  Lizzy looked at the clock on the wall. Damn. “I was supposed to be there five minutes ago.”

  “Mind if I tag along?”

  “What about all the paperwork that needs to be done on Jim Thatcher?”

  “Finished it yesterday.”

  “I don’t know, Jessica. Ruth Fullerton is a very sick woman and—”

  “I’ll sit quietly in the corner. I won’t say a word. You don’t even have to pay me. I just need to do something other than opening and filing mail.”

  “Fine.” Jessica was right; she had become a softy. “Grab the Fullerton file and let’s go.”

  ***

  Mrs. Fullerton’s hands shook as she poured tea. It was way too warm for hot tea, but Lizzy wasn’t about to say anything. Ruth Fullerton had lost her hair due to chemo treatment for lung cancer. Her head was covered with a brown tight-fitting head scarf. She was thin and fragile looking; too young to be dying.

  “Sugar, cream?”

  “No thank you.”

  “How about you, young lady?”

  Jessica lifted a hand in protest. “I’m fine, really. Thanks.”

  Lizzy opened her notebook and as soon as Mrs. Fullerton took a seat in the cushioned chair across from her, she didn’t waste time getting down to business. “I wasn’t able to talk to the lead investigator from your daughter’s case since he retired eight years ago,” Lizzy told her, “but I did talk to Detective Kent Roth.”

  “Yes, I remember him. A big man with a couple of extra chins.”

  Lizzy couldn’t confirm that since she’d only talked to the man over the phone, but neither did she care how many chins the man had. “Detective Roth,” Lizzy continued, “stated the basics, including the dates and location you already told me about. But he also mentioned that there was some tension between your daughter and her father.”

  “Did he now?”

  Lizzy nodded.

  Jessica remained quiet, as promised.

  “Doesn’t surprise me much,” Ruth said, “but it’s absolute rot. Every detective that has ever worked on my daughter’s case will say anything at all to take the blame off of them. From the beginning they had their minds made up, certain that Frank had something to do with Carol’s disappearance.”

  Ruth Fullerton looked annoyed but there was something else in her expression that Lizzy couldn’t quite put a finger on. What was the woman hiding? And why would she hide anything at all if she was dead set on finding her daughter? “Would it be okay if I spoke with Mr. Fullerton myself?”

  “You can try,” she said, hesitation in her voice. “He’s a workaholic and he’s rarely home. If Carol were here now she would say nothing has changed.”

  Lizzy wondered if that was a good thing or a bad thing, but either way she let it go. “What does Mr. Fullerton do for a living?”

  “He works for Supremacy Insurance. He’s a salesman.” Ruth Fullerton took a sip of tea and then set her cup on its matching saucer before pushing herself to her feet. “I have one of his business cards in the kitchen drawer. I’ll be right back.”

  Lizzy made a few notes before she stood and looked around the room.

  Jessica had found a photo album on the bottom shelf of the glass coffee table and was flipping through the pages.

  As Lizzy crossed the room to take a look at the pictures on the mantle, she felt as if she’d been jolted back into a seventies time warp. The couch was plaid and the built-in bookcase to her left had been painted a burnt orange color. A brick fireplace was framed by green walls while the wall to her right was covered with mirrors from floor to ceiling.

  If Mrs. Fullerton’s daughter had gone missing twenty-one years ago at the age of sixteen, Carol Fullerton would be thirty-seven-years old now. That is, if she was still alive. That would put Mrs. Fullerton at about sixty years old.

  The eight-by-ten framed photos lined up neatly on the mantle appeared to be standard school portraits: elbows resting on a table, one hand over the other, back straight, hair combed, chin tilted just so.

  Lizz
y followed the photographs through Carol’s life from kindergarten through eighth grade. Cute kid. Nothing from high school. The last photograph was different than the others: black and white, taken outside, her hip leaning against an old car, a wide smile plastered across her face.

  “That was Carol two days before she disappeared,” Ruth said as she returned to the living room and handed Lizzy a business card.

  Lizzy tucked the card into her back pocket and wondered if that’s why Carol wore such a big smile the day the picture was taken. Did Carol know she would be gone in two days? Unfortunately, statistics pointed to another direction altogether. “Is that the car Carol was driving the day she went missing?”

  “Yes, it’s a 1969 Ford Torino. She bought the car from her friend for two hundred dollars, which was a lot of money back then. At the time, we didn’t have that kind of money lying around, so Carol asked her grandparents for a loan.”

  “You also mentioned her friend when we talked on the phone last week—Ellen Thomas, correct?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I couldn’t locate her under the name Thomas so I looked up state marriage records and ascertained that she now goes by the name of Ellen Woodson and resides in Auburn.”

  Lizzy considered that to be a lucky break, considering Auburn was less than an hour away. “I did finally get in touch with Ellen on the phone, but she didn’t want to talk to me. She said too many years had passed and although she sends her sympathies for what you’re going through, she refused to say anything else.”

  “I was afraid of that. You might get much of the same from my husband, but please don’t let Ellen or Frank discourage you. My daughter is out there somewhere. I know it. We were very close back then. She told me everything. She was my best friend.”

  Lizzy sighed. She was hearing a lot of that lately. People believed what they wanted to believe. Sisters were sure they knew everything about one another and nobody knew one’s daughter better than a mother...or so they all thought.

  “If you two were close,” Lizzy said, “why would Carol run away?”

  “I don’t know. But I can’t go on like this. My days are numbered. I have to know what happened to her.”

  Jessica was still flipping through the picture album when the front door burst open and a man came through the door.

  Jessica shut the photo book and slid it back onto the coffee table.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  The man had a thick head of jet black hair which was obviously a wig and looked sort of odd on an older man who was small in weight and height. The man was seventy-five percent hair and twenty-five percent everything else. He held a briefcase in one hand and a suit jacket in the other. Sweat trickled down the side of his neck.

  Ruth straightened her spine. “Frank, I’d like you to meet Lizzy Gardner. She’s the woman who was abducted all those years ago. You know, the girl who escaped the madman and then helped the FBI find the man who killed so many young girls.”

  Frank wasn’t impressed. Not only did he ignore Lizzy’s offered hand, he sneered at her. Lizzy pulled her hand back to her side and left it there.

  “I told you I didn’t want any strangers in my house,” Frank said. “We’ve been through this, Ruth. Over and over again. I’m not going back in time just so I can relive every detail with a female cop wannabe who likes carrying a shiny gun because it makes her feel like a man.”

  “Frank!”

  “It’s okay,” Lizzy said. She’d dealt with worse than Frank before. Sticks and stones and so on; the man didn’t bother her. “We’ll let ourselves out.”

  Jessica was already halfway out the door by the time Frank disappeared down the hallway.

  “I’ll be away this weekend,” Lizzy told Ruth once Frank was out of earshot, “but I have a few ideas. I’ll call you Monday.”

  “I’m sorry about Frank. He’s not usually so ornery.”

  “Just take care of yourself and let me do the worrying for a while.”

  Ruth squeezed Lizzy’s hand and nodded, then stood at the doorway until they drove away.

  Chapter 6

  San Francisco, Here I Come!

  It was five o’clock on Friday and Lizzy was driving at a snail’s pace on I-80 West heading toward San Francisco, which was better than being stuck in the stop and go traffic heading east.

  The heat had gone from blistering to extreme, which meant you could fry an egg on asphalt. The air conditioner in her old Toyota, aka Old Yeller, hadn’t worked since the beginning of time.

  She rolled down a window; hot air against warm sticky skin didn’t help much. She was beginning to rethink the whole summer versus winter thing. The Sacramento heat was downright stifling. Hopefully, San Francisco, surrounded by ocean and bay, would be cool and overcast with billowing white fog.

  She eyed the oil light on her console. It flickered on and off. She tended to believe everything was fine as long as the light stayed OFF more than ON.

  A ring sounded and she clicked on her earpiece and pushed a button on her iPhone. “Lizzy Gardner. How can I help you?”

  “I can think of twenty ways but let’s start with where are you?”

  It was Jared, her lifelong soul-mate if you believed in that sort of stuff. “I’m on my way to an exercise and eating right seminar in San Francisco. It’s supposed to be life altering.”

  “Turn around and come home. I love you just the way you are. And besides I picked up fresh salmon and that sappy movie you’ve been begging me to watch with you.”

  “You rented The Notebook?”

  “I did and now my reputation at the movie rental store has been tainted.”

  She smiled. “That’s sooo sweet and I’m so sorry.”

  “Does that mean that you also forgot our plans to move your stuff into my place this weekend?”

  No, she hadn’t forgotten, which, she realized, might very well be another reason she had taken the Diane Kramer case. She cared deeply about Jared, but things were moving a little too fast.

  “Still there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “You need more time, is that it?”

  “I think so.”

  He sighed. “Take all the time you need. I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Thanks.”

  “So what’s with the seminar? Since when do you care how many calories are in a Rice Krispies Treat?”

  “I’m being paid at an hourly rate to keep an eye on Anthony Melbourne. It’s a long story.”

  “The fitness guy?”

  “That’s the one.” She should have known Jared would know who Anthony Melbourne was since Jared considered raw broccoli to be a delicious snack, and he woke up when it was still dark just so he could spend an hour a day in the gym, longer when he could spare the time.

  “So what’s this all about? Did his wife ask you to watch him?”

  “No, he’s not married. A woman came into my office two days ago concerned about her sister who has been missing for more than six months. As far as the police are concerned, the missing woman was not happy with her life and therefore ran off to start over somewhere else. The woman who hired me is convinced her sister is in trouble. The problem is she’s basing her theory on female intuition—nothing more, nothing less.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I told her she was wasting her money. She’s been doing her own investigation and I must say she’s thorough. I would hire her if she wasn’t already too busy raising three kids and a husband.”

  “Lucky guy.”

  She laughed. “I should be back home by noon on Sunday.”

  “If you play your cards right,” he said, “I’ll make you dinner, followed by life-altering sex.”

  “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

  “Be careful,” he said, his tone serious.

  “I miss you.”

  “Miss you too.”

  Chapter 7

  Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater

  As far as Ha
yley Hansen was concerned, drug dealers were all the same—scumbags of the earth. They didn’t care or even think about the harm their actions caused. They took one life at a time, destroying everything in their paths, including family members who couldn’t do anything to save their loved ones.

  She walked the darkened streets, knowing she was putting herself in danger. It was way past midnight and everyone knew that nothing good happened after the witching hour. She had walked these streets many times before, though, and she wasn’t afraid.

  There were shadowy movements in the alleyways as she passed by. In a not-so-distant apartment building, she heard a man and a woman shouting at one another, back and forth, each trying to out-yell the other.

  Hayley had been dragged to this area a couple of times by her mom when she was small; whenever Brian stayed away for too long this is where they went. Her mother had never brought her inside the drug dealer’s apartment. Instead, Hayley was told to wait outside by the pool.

  The Greenhill Apartment building was known for its big rooms and even bigger cockroaches. She had stolen a quick look inside the apartment once and saw that that much was true.

  She’d seriously hoped she would never step foot on these grounds again, but here she was in the middle of the night looking for Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater. At least that’s what he used to call himself. “Hey there,” he’d say, when he crept quietly into her room. “It’s Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater and I’m hungry.”

  Parts of South Sacramento could be downright frightening. This particular street smelled like her mom’s house after a party: like urine, ashtrays, and trash. Every building on the street had at least a few windows boarded up with plywood. Graffiti, not the cool artistic kind, covered eighty percent of the warped, weather-beaten fencing around the apartment building. The grass, if you could call it that, looked as if it had never been touched by the blades of a lawn mower. Trash floated in the pool, mostly around the edges.