Roadrunner

by Michael Lilly

  This time, the woman is no longer in the cell adjacent to Romero.

  According to those who have been paying attention, Romero has been perfectly compliant, calm, and, it seems, almost comfortable.

  To a degree, calmness under scrutiny helps in one’s case for innocence. But in excess, it makes one look guilty even more than being visibly nervous does. An innocent person, while confident of his or her innocence, is also put off by the wrongness of it. They are in the wrong place, while the person who should be there is also in the wrong place. And, of course, they know that the system isn’t all that reliable, and that they may go to jail on circumstantial evidence and lack of a verifiable alibi.

  The supremely guilty, at times, are at peace behind bars. I’d imagine that being under assault by one’s conscience for prolonged lengths of time might be exhausting, and that being behind bars—which is to say, paying into one’s penance—brings with it a modicum of peace.

  In any case, the report was right; Andre Romero looks right at home. My skin tingles. The look with which he greets me is amused more than anything. Red flag.

  “Welcome back,” he says. His feet are covered only with socks, and his cowboy boots are standing neatly side by side at the end of a bench. He can’t have gotten any substantial amount of sleep, but he looks chipper anyway; his clothing is still neat, his hair groomed (if a little greasy), and his face is devoid of the ever-recognizable look of exhaustion spreading through society like an epidemic. He speaks with a deliberate clarity, injecting his words with an artistic inflection, like he’s auditioning for the role of ‘Setup Wizard Narrator.’

  He sits on the floor of the cell, against the wall, with his legs extended in front of him, his ankles crossed, and fingers laced, palms up, in his lap. I almost expect him to feign surprise: Oh, hello. Didn’t see ya there.

  “What would you like to know?” he says. His poker face is strong. His look of amusement has melted away, replaced by one of pure neutrality, if I’ve ever seen it. Aside from the steady, deep breaths, he could be a still-life painting from the nineteenth century.

  I go with something that doesn’t allow him much room for bullshit. “Where’s Perkins?”

  “Who?”

  “Goodbye, Mr. Romero.” I turn to walk out.

  “Oh, do you mean the one with real evidence that could put you in jail? Is that Perkins? He’s been making me call him ‘Master’ all this time. Never bothered finding out his name. I doubt Perkins even is his real name, truth be told.” Fair point.

  I must calculate now, and fast. Clearly, Romero does indeed have some insight into my murderous past. But his mighty need to talk to me right the fuck now has me more worried than ever that another sinister plot is unfolding elsewhere. If they had had evidence of my hobby last year, most likely it would have come up as leverage or a gambling chip at some point. Admittedly, there’s a possibility that they intended to utilize it while they held Beth hostage, but that didn’t last long enough for them to take full advantage of it.

  Fourteen

  Unless, of course, they had managed to dig up evidence from an old case. I take quite a few precautions whenever I make a kill, but even still, I’m only human (if that). Thinking fast and hard, I call to mind my first ever kill: Devin Bailey.

  Devin had slipped under the radar of most cops based solely on how non-threatening he looked. He stood at a towering five feet, three inches. At a glance, the mind didn’t know what to do with him, how to categorize him. That, I think, contributed to his success in anonymity—his simple and forgettable personality and demeanor. I’m well acquainted with that technique now, being a fond user of it myself.

  He caught my attention because he had commented on several of Riverdell’s social media posts about the matter, every time commenting on nothing but the girl’s appearance. At first, he posted from a fake account, but at one point he got careless and posted from his own. I may not have made the connection right away, but he immediately deleted his comment before reposting it, word for word, from his alternate account. It hadn’t been fast enough, however, in our world of push notifications and social media linking us all twenty-four hours a day. I brought the incident up to Beth, who told me to tell the lieutenant, who told me to fuck off and do some real detective work.

  Although I had no legal right to do so, I broke into and searched Devin’s house. At the time, I didn’t know how to pick locks, but as gratuity would have it, the bastard had left his back door unlocked. In a small, innocent town like Riverdell, it wasn’t uncommon to leave a door unlocked, and I’d imagine that Devin liked to think of himself as the most frightening presence in Riverdell, anyway.

  As I moved about his house, the warmth of the day passed in on me and made the house take on a sort of fungal quality. It made me acutely uncomfortable. Every drawer I opened, every shelf through which I rifled, every pile of junk I dismissed fueled a retributive fury in me. I concocted plans to usher evidence into the grasp of the legal system in a way that it might be usable in court. Various ideas came to mind, but few allowed any creative wiggle room, should I have needed to mold the story any further. Finally, I came across a notebook, the pocket-sized variety you can get at a supermarket or a gas station for a dollar. Inside, a list of names and dates was written. There were four names. Three of the names were past victims, but the fourth was not. Not yet, at least.

  The dates were not what I expected, however. I expected the dates to correspond to when the murders occurred, but in every case, the date written down was a date the victim wouldn’t live to see. The extensive details of the cases fresh in my mind, I looked carefully at the dates.

  Karen Voguely, thirty-two, was murdered by strangulation on March eleventh. The date next to her name, however, was June eleventh.

  Rita Ray, twenty-four, was murdered on January twenty-second, and the date next to her name was the same day in April.

  The three-months-to-the-day pattern became apparent fast, but it was nonetheless difficult for me to determine why one might mark something this way. What did those other dates indicate? Did they themselves hold significance in regards to when the murders were to have occurred, or was it the other way around: a reminder of something to occur three months after the victim’s death?

  The third name followed the same pattern. The last name, one that had not yet shown up in our own records, had July thirty-first written next to her name. That day, the day I found the notebook, was April thirtieth. April only has thirty days, meaning that there could very well have been another murder planned either for that night or the following one. I’d considered calling in the squad at once, but what was I supposed to tell them? I have a hunch? I think that line, used with enough substance to get things going, is reserved for seasoned detectives in bad ’70s movies.

  I used the line anyway. However, at the time, the only evidence I could admit to having (without risk of going to jail myself) was the series of Facebook comments, and the lieutenant only echoed her words from earlier: “Fuck off, Thorn, and go do some real detective work. Talk to witnesses, neighbors, hit the pavement, just shut up about the Facebook bullshit. Just another Internet troll who gets off to making a fool out of people, and right now, that’s you.”

  Beth overheard the exchange and looked at me with shrugging sympathy: ‘She’s a bitch, but whaddaya do?’

  Jasmine Cisneros was murdered that night, teaching me a painful truth about the law enforcement system: that it doesn’t always work.

  Growing up, I had wanted to be in some kind of law enforcement from an early age. I would reflect on my abusive situation and long for the police to come and take me away, whisk me off to some foster family where maybe the parents weren’t fully invested and the food was bland and repetitive, but where the fear my father had instilled in me would finally have room to dissipate.

  Of course, I had fantasized many different scenarios of escape, but they all began with the police kicking down the front door and arresting my father, maybe tackling h
im and roughing him up a bit in the process.

  I would often look at police officers in the streets with desperation. If only they knew, I would think. Because that was all it would take, right?

  Yet there I was, with Devin’s notebook in my hand and I knew. And Jasmine still died, because just knowing wasn’t enough. Knowing was only the first link in a chain of events that must occur in order for the law to have any power. The second step would have been to use legal means to obtain proof or evidence, so that the knowledge could then be replicated and demonstrated. I had accomplished most of this, but because I omitted the ‘legal means’ part, the rest was useless. It was then that I realized that I am more powerful than the law, in some cases.

  As Cisneros’s murder was investigated, we ran into the same dead ends as before, even though I knew who did it. I could not find room in the case to point it toward Bailey. The guy was good, and thinking about him deriving some antagonistic satisfaction from his Facebook comments made me furious, beyond what I even knew I had in me. He was not only reveling in his having gotten away with it, but taunting us, gloating about it. The adult version of ‘neener neener neener.’

  The evidence from Jasmine’s murder shaped up to be identical to that of Bailey’s previous victims, but the low level of surveillance and nightlife in the town offered up nothing definitive. A rough estimate to his height, shot-in-the-dark guesses about his motive, and a heaping mass of speculation that didn’t have enough substance of any one kind to coalesce into anything useful, even though I already knew who did it. I knew the big picture, but from my position, I couldn’t make the dots connect themselves for my peers.

  So the investigation rose and fell, eventually to be kicked into another cold cases file and forgotten about. Or until he killed again, at least. But how could I allow that? How could I, with the knowledge that I had, have allowed him to kill another person, and entertain the idea of doing so all over again?

  I couldn’t. I needed to do something. Be it by guilt or a moral obligation I didn’t think my mind would ever permit, my compulsions, previously focused on numbers, symmetry, and patterns rooted in arbitration, now had a target, a presence visibly cutting a rift into the balance of the world. The scales of ‘Okay’ and ‘Not okay’ were tipped heavily in favor of the latter and I had to do something to restore the norm.

  But how to get away with it? Sure, I’m a detective, and thus have a familiarity with what precautions one might take in order to shake off the hunting spotlight of forensics. From the perspective of a criminal, modern forensic science is the bane of their endeavors. And if I was to become a criminal, I needed to pay careful attention to how I executed it, so to speak. The idea made me nervous, but I suspected that were I to have committed this murder, the investigation of it would round back to me at some point, and that was an eventuality I would need to prepare for.

  Or was it? I twiddled my mental thumbs as I pondered the idea. What if someone else did it? Were my skills in manipulation sharp enough that I could drive someone to murder? Could I feel okay with having such an effect on someone? With having created a new murderer? A monster?

  What if it was someone who was already a murderer? Someone who already had his blades drawn on society, and just needed a little bit of direction. Might there have been someone, a murderer, out there, who had a thing for vertically challenged wastes of air?

  Or maybe all that needed to happen was for the evidence to suggest that someone else did it. Of course, I would need to make sure that the guy had no alibi for the time, but that would be easy enough, I’m sure.

  On that note, however, how could I go about deciding who gets framed for it? I would need to have picked him (or her, I suppose, but the jury might be less likely to convict a woman, in my experience) carefully and made sure that he deserved to be put in jail. How might I find such a person?

  To that end, I decided to make another trip to Devin’s house, this time in search of an accomplice. I had always stepped lightly, a result of years of attempting to evade my father’s sweeping, drunken notice. That being the case, I move through his house all but silently, even into his bedroom, where he lay asleep. The faint glow of the clock on the side table indicated three o’ clock in the morning. What little other light persisted was angular silhouettes, and eventually I found my treasure: Devin Bailey’s mobile phone. The weight of it extended beyond its physical mass, drawing also from its potential significance in my timeline, like a bank of dynamic inertia waiting to be imposed on the universe. To think that our paths may intersect soon in such an intimate, deadly way frightens me, but a part of me is excited, as well.

  I only went as far away as the front room to peruse the device’s contents, and I was relieved to find that his phone was unlocked, not unlike his back door. The boy was too trusting. And that was fine with me. The phone, for the most part, was full of the usual: photos of food, selfies, texts, e-mails that made Mr. Rogers seem like a rebellious party fiend.

  My hope was nearly depleted until I found the image folder without a name. In this folder, there were dozens of photos of women. The women varied in ethnicity, age, and level of dress or undress, but they had one thing in common: they were all visibly pregnant.

  That was the uniting factor. All of the women had been pregnant. Every victim was carrying a child, but the murders had been moderately spaced and I suppose the dots didn’t quite connect, even under such an easy, visible pattern. Pregnant women. Although that alone didn’t quite offer a solid pattern as to the motive; Riverdell was a small town, but at any given time, there were double-digit pregnant women anyway, so why these specific ones?

  On that note, I may have a lead to my ‘killer to be.’ All I had to do was find any correspondence with someone involved with the local hospital and clinic.

  Being as the hospital was the only medical building in Riverdell, it also had clinics for the various branches of healthcare: vision, OBGYN, even dental. Of course, each clinic had its specialists, but as far as administration goes, they were all under the care of a health care giant that bought and renovated our dying hospital several years ago. By renovating and consolidating into one hub for medical needs, they were able to breathe life into it, and it proliferated from then on.

  On my own phone, I accessed the hospital’s website and found the acting OBGYN. As far as I could tell, however, there weren’t any contacts in Devin’s phone that matched up with anyone on that list. That doesn’t mean that there’s no relation, however, and there are certainly more people with access to the medical records.

  I looked again through the text conversations with my eyes peeled for anything vaguely cryptic. There was only one that caught my eye, but it was promising. Angie Miller had been texting Devin every couple of months for going on a year, with only a single-digit number every time. Devin never responded, and when I looked through his phone calls, he hadn’t called her, either. But they were in communication. I loaded Facebook on Devin’s phone and opened his friends list. I entered Angie’s name and there she was, smiling half into the camera and half directly into the sun, apparently. Hoping that what I needed was listed, I clicked into her profile and saw that she was a receptionist at the OBGYN. The evidence against Angie Miller as the accomplice was mounting quickly.

  Devin was going to die. And Angie was going to go to jail for it. But first, preparations. How could I do it? I would first need to set the stage, then pull the trigger (whether literally or figuratively I hadn’t decided yet), set up all of the dominoes before tipping over the end piece. No matter the metaphor, careful and extensive steps had to be taken before I was ready to dispatch my target.

  So I took extensive steps. I spent an inordinate amount of time slipping between the two houses, a couple of blocks apart, and thus my affinity for the night deepened. Every few days, I would sneak back into Devin’s house to ensure that no new names appeared at the bottom of his list.

  My game had to be extremely calculated; the evidence I planted in both of th
eir places had to be findable, but inconspicuous enough not to be found and moved before I was able to complete my task. But in time, I found ample hiding places for barrettes, a name tag, a couple of pens, and a toothbrush, as well as an open packet of Plan B with a couple of capsules missing. The story would be that Devin and Angie had found between them a shared hatred for pregnant women, and worked together to target and kill them. Maybe there was a list somewhere of pregnant women, and the texts sent to him from Angie referred to which number on the list was to go down next.

  However, in the ever-romantic throes of mutual hatred, the two ended up conceiving a child themselves. In desperation, she took the morning-after pill to take care of the problem. When Devin came over for another round of the horizontal tango, he discovered the positive pregnancy test and stormed out in a rage before she could explain. Fearing for her life, she panicked. She knew she couldn’t go to the police with so much blood on her hands. It was time for her to confront a dangerous facet about him with which only she was familiar: his inner killer. So she did what she had to do—she killed him before he could kill her. That would be the story, sure.

  Everything was in place. Both of the parties involved were alone in their respective homes. Because of the lack of digital communication between the two, I didn’t have to worry about raising suspicion from their not discussing any of the details of the fake story. All systems were go.