Jax nodded and opened his door. I got out and looked at the house itself. It was a two-story colonial with a full veranda on the front side. The paint looked recent. The sea-foam-green was set off nicely by black shutters and white trim. The front door was painted black and had a brass handle and knocker.
I came around the car and headed up the walk toward the door.
Jax came up short, a strange expression crossing his face. “I’ve got a weird feeling, boss.”
I stopped and turned toward him. “What kind of feeling,” I asked in low tones.
“I dunno. Like we are being watched, maybe.”
I nodded and turned back toward the door. “Probably are.”
“Like we are being watched by a bear or something,” Jax murmured. “Just be careful.”
That’s another “great minds” sentiment, I thought and nodded. “That’s how I felt in the cave back there.”
As I climbed the four steps to the veranda, the front door slammed open. A skinny blonde woman came out and pointed at us. “What do you want?” she demanded. She was wearing tight fitting jeans and a gray bolero jacket over a black T-shirt. Her cheeks glowed with high color, and her faded denim eyes were snapping with anger.
“Hello, I’m Hank Jensen with the State Pol—”
Her face wrinkled up like a little kid’s right before a temper tantrum. “I didn’t ask for your names, moron, I asked what you want.”
“So much for polite and friendly,” Jax muttered beside me.
“As I was saying,” I said. “I’m Senior Investigator Jensen with the State Police. This is my partner, Investigator Ritter. We have a few questions for Elizabeth Tutor.” I held out one of my cards. “That you?”
She looked at my card like it was some kind of bug and then waved her hand as if dismissing an errant waiter. Her face maintained the look of pique, but curiosity made a brief appearance before resentment took over again. I had a feeling annoyance was her native expression. “What do you want with her?”
“We are tracking down owners of black 1966 Lincoln Continental convertibles. She is listed with the DMV as having an active registration for one.”
Her grimace got stronger as if pique was not enough for this situation and so she had decided on vexation. “And?” Finally, she snatched the card out of my still outstretched hand. She put an unlit cigarette in the corner of her mouth and then crossed her arms under her breasts. It was almost flirty, except for everything else in her demeanor. It was like she couldn’t help the flirt.
“I’m afraid the rest of the discussion is only for Ms. Tutor.”
“Get off! Get off my steps, you little man,” she screeched at me like a cat. Her face was screwed up in a hateful expression.
She’d gone from zero to irate in about a second and a half. I backed down off the steps and took several steps back from them to appease her if possible. “I really only need to speak with Ms. Tutor.”
She came off the veranda and down the steps in a blink and raised her finger to point it in my face. I thought for a moment she was going to hit me. Her eyes were brilliant with hatred.
“Just stop it.” she snapped. “You know you are speaking to her. I’m not stupid, you know.” Her unlit cigarette bounced in the corner of her mouth. “What do you want to ask me? Be quick.” She snapped her fingers at me.
No one had ever snapped at me in a situation like this. Everything about her behavior was off somehow. Wrong. “We think you may have witnessed an accident a few days ago.”
“Impossible,” she snapped. “I would know if I had.”
She was quite tall, taller than I had thought when she was up on the veranda. She wasn’t as tall as me, but I thought she was taller than Jax, who was only two and a half inches shorter. She was very skinny and had an unhealthy air about her. She had wide shoulders, wider than was fashionable for a woman, even one as tall as she. Her eyes were sunken into their sockets as if she were starving.
“Ms. Tutor, do you still own the car in question?”
She sneered at me. “What do your records tell you, cop?”
I shrugged. “Records are only as good as the people keeping them. In this case, they show you do own the car, but also that you are the original owner, even though you don’t look more than thirty years old.”
“There you have it,” she said. Her tone of voice became smooth and confident. “If I were the original owner, I would be forty-two years old if I bought the car the day I was born. Explain that.”
“People make mistakes. People also give bad information on purpose from time to time.” I knew our best chance was to play nice and lead her where we wanted the conversation to go, but there was something about her, something subliminal, maybe, that made my hackles come up. That little voice I relied on to keep me out of trouble was screaming for me to get gone.
If only I had listened.
She nodded her head with thinly veiled sarcasm. “And I suppose you mean that to be me.”
“You said it, not us,” muttered Jax. “Is it freaky Friday or what?”
Her eyes snapped over my shoulder and sent daggers of disdain in Jax’s direction. “Shut up, buck,” she said. “I can only stand to speak with one little man at a time.” Her gaze shifted back to me. “To answer your stupid question, no, I don’t have the car anymore. It was destroyed in an accident a few years ago.”
“Did you report it?” I asked.
“Of course! Of course, you annoying little shit! To the local idiots. Go talk to them!” Spittle flew from her lips as she spoke, but the cigarette only jerked in the corner of her mouth.
“To the Ontario County Sherriff’s Department?”
“Yes! Yes, isn’t that what I just said? Local. Idiots.”
I shook my head. “It seems strange that it would still be registered in your name after being destroyed, even if it happened in the recent past.”
She took a short step closer. “I said a few years ago. Don’t you listen? Can’t you even listen, you idiot?” Spittle flew from her lips, but the unlit cigarette seemed to defy the laws of physics and stayed right in the corner of her mouth.
I found myself staring at that cigarette, fascinated by its bobbing and weaving with the flow of her words. “But you’re keeping it insured and registered? Even after a few years? That doesn’t make sense to me. Can you help me out there?”
She took another short step forward. “Are you calling me a liar?” Her tone of voice changed from hectoring to an icy calm, and I found myself straining to hear her. Somehow, this change in her demeanor was scarier than the wild woman act.
“I’m asking you why you would pay insurance and registration for a car you no longer own. I’m asking you how you maintained the inspection sticker with no car. I’m not asking you if you think we are stupid—that much is obvious. I am asking you if you think anyone will believe this tripe.”
“It’s true.” She seemed almost bored with the conversation, and her eyes began to drift around the yard, looking at the flowers, the cruiser, the trees. “I don’t care what you think.”
“Ms. Tudor, do you own a pink paisley head scarf?” I asked.
She stared at me for a long, quiet moment and then narrowed her eyes. “I thought you wanted to know about some accident?”
It was my turn to let the silence stretch out—what Jane and Sig called the “Cop Silent Treatment.”
She sneered again. “Maybe the question isn’t how stupid I think you are, but how stupid you think I am.”
“The question still stands, ma’am.”
“Do I look like the sort of trollop who would wear pink paisley?” She rolled her eyes.
I sighed. I was coming very close to the end of my patience and the only thing keeping it in check at that moment was the idea that losing my patience was what the woman wanted me to do. “Ms. Tutor, we can clear all this up if you can prove to my satisfaction that you no longer own that car.”
“And just how would I do that? How can I prove a ne
gative? What would prove it to you?” Her voice was no longer calm and quiet. It was quickly inching its way back to jeering.
I hooked my thumb over my shoulder. “Consenting to a search of those two barns would be a step in the right direction.”
“A step in the right direction,” she scoffed. “You cops. Next, you’ll be telling me you just want to do a cavity search. That it would be a step in the right direction.” Her voice had gone cold and dead again.
Her lability made me want to be far, far away from her. “No, ma’am. No cavity search required. May we have a look?”
Anger exploded across her face. “No! You may not! I want you off my property unless you have a search warrant. No, I want you off my property even if you do.” She wasn’t quite screaming in my face. Jax came up on the balls of his feet next to me—getting ready to take her down, if necessary.
“If we had one, Ms. Tutor, I would have served you by now. Of that, you can be certain.” I tried to make my voice as calm as I could, trying to bring the whole conversation down a notch or two if possible.
“Get off my property this instant. I’ve wasted too much time on this nonsense as it is.” Her voice was calm, but her face was writhing with emotion.
“I hope you realize that I’ll just go get a warrant.” My voice had gone cold and crisp, and at my side, Jax almost thrummed with tension.
She waved it away as if beneath her notice and spit out of the corner of her mouth that was not strangling a cigarette.
“One last question, Ms. Tutor. Do you know a tall, thin man? Your boyfriend, maybe?”
She snatched the cigarette from the corner of her mouth and balled it up. She threw it as hard as she could toward my cruiser. She looked just like a four-year-old throwing a fit. “Get out of here! I said you should go, and I want you gone. GET OUT! GET OUT! GET OUT!” she raved.
“We will go, but we will be back,” I said. “That is a promise.”
She glared at me and started clenching her hands into fists and then relaxing them. Clench. Relax. Clench. The tendons and ligaments in her hands creaked with each movement.
She snapped up a hand and pointed at me—the tip of her finger wavering in my face. She opened her mouth to say something but then quirked her head to the side and looked at me through slitted eyes for a moment. “Your blood is too thick to just throw away. Be glad. Thyowst!” she said with venom. “Thyowst ath ayleevu!”
The words hit me like someone had sucker punched me in the stomach and had stolen my air. Jax kept me on my feet, his hands steadying me. I had no idea what the strange collection of sounds was supposed to mean, but whatever it was, it was affecting me somehow.
“That’s enough, you crazy bitch,” said Jax.
She tilted her head at him, a funny little half-smile on her face. “A baby!” She laughed with evil-spirited delight and then her face turned grim as her eyes narrowed. “Your blood is thin, thrall. Tuyta fyrur thig! Owthuur en thoo sihrd kvolp thitt! You will never see that child!”
“I don’t believe in your voodoo hoodoo,” Jax snapped, “so you can just stow it.”
She laughed brightly. “You will believe it soon enough. You will. Ehk bulva ther.” She sounded satisfied and upbeat. “I curse you both,” she said it like it was an afterthought as if she had already said what needed to be said. She flipped her hair and turned away from us, her manner letting us know we were no longer part of her world at all.
We got back in the car. I still felt hinky, and I’m pretty sure Jax did, too. I also felt nauseated. I started the cruiser and got us the hell out of there. The bad feeling didn’t leave either of us, however.
The only positive thing to come out of that encounter was a surety that she was the woman we were looking for. There was no basis for that feeling—people lie to the police all the time, sometimes just because the truth would embarrass them—but the feeling was strong.
“She seems pleasant,” I said.
“What was all that mumbo jumbo about?”
“I think she was saying we are not on her Christmas card list this year.”
“Whatever it was,” said Jax, “it gave me the creeps. I mean, ‘I curse you both?’ Really?”
“Maybe in her delusion, she’s a witch. Maybe in her insane little world, blabetty yadda yaddy is a curse.”
“Yeah, but in our reality, she’s just a bitch.”
We both chuckled at that, and the hinky feeling evaporated like morning mist.
Jax cleared his throat. “But how did she know about the baby?”
I shrugged. “You’re the right age. Lucky guess?”
“Well, whatever. It’s not like she can really curse us, right?” He shrugged. “I wish we had a search warrant. I sure would like to get a look in those barns.”
“I’d like to go over that property with a corpse dog, as long as we’re wishing wishes.”
“I bet it would alert on every square inch of her property. That was one creepy woman.”
I grunted. “No doubt. I wonder where her long, tall, and ugly male friend was.”
“I’d give odds that he was there, watching us the whole time.”
“That hinky feeling you got when we first arrived?”
“Yeah. The barns,” said Jax. “I could have sworn we were being watched, but it felt different from the woman somehow. I bet both the man and the car were in the barns. Did you see how she reacted when you asked to search them?”
I nodded. “Is there any way you could buy that Aten Kennedy ran into those two in the street fight and then just happened to meet a serial killer later that night?”
“No way at all, boss.”
I gave him a weary nod. “That’s all this case needs. A pair of psychos instead of just one. We probably need to step up our vigilance a couple of notches.”
“Agreed. I don’t think you should ever go back there alone.”
“Yes,” I said. I was modeling scenarios, trying to find one that ended with us getting a search warrant.
“—do you think?” asked Jax.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“I asked if it was time to organize some surveillance on her property. You know, looking for the car and the guy.”
“That’s a great idea. Can you call Gruber and see what resources we can get?”
“Sure,” said Jax.
“Maybe some guys from Troop E who would like some overtime in plain clothes.”
“Like Ben?”
I shrugged. “If he wants it, it’s fine by me. Ben was always solid as an investigator; he just stopped believing after that Sanchez case fiasco. None of which was his fault, by the way.”
“I’ve never heard it any other way,” said Jax. “Ben’s good people.”
“Amen to that.”
I heard Jax start his call to the lieutenant and let my mind wander back to the various scenarios that might lead to a search warrant. The easiest one would be to find someone who knew she still had the car, but she really didn’t come across as the type to have a lot of friends. Then again, people tended to react in an atypical manner when speaking with a law enforcement officer. I’d have to ask the surveillance teams to keep a watch for visitors who were treated to the crazy hoodoo priestess routine.
The next best way I could come up with was to tie Tutor to one of the other victims—with or without her giant friend. That could be a hard sell, depending on how closely she could be tied to the victim. We could also try to goad her into a response while under surveillance and then arrest her to get inside. Chances of that seemed small, however. She seemed wily on an instinctive level, despite being a total and complete wackadoodle. Another way would be to determine that someone else owned the property, and get the owner’s consent for a search whether Tutor liked it or not. That didn’t seem very likely, though. She didn’t act like a typical renter when we spoke to her. She seemed…I don’t know…somehow autarchical about the property. No, the more I thought about her mien during our encounter I seriously doubted we could ge
t her on that last one.
Jax put his phone away. “Gruber’s on it. He said to tell you that you have laissez faire on this one. He will rubber stamp whatever we need. Has he done that before?”
“Yeah. It’s a measure of how…I don’t know…desperate he feels about a case. It’s not a good sign.”
Jax pulled on his lower lip. It was a habit he had tried to break for a few years now without success. He always said it ruined his poker face. “He also said that they’ve counted another whack of bodies. And that there’s no end in sight.”
“Tell me how much a whack is again?”
Jax grinned. “Well, it’s less than a metric ass load. Gruber said, ‘upwards of several hundred,’ whatever that means.”
“It means our killer just passed the known victim count for the Columbian Beast.”
To that, Jax only shook his head. “And more to come, I bet,” he muttered.
Thirteen
“Are you certain those sounds are what she used?”
“It was all gobblety-gook to me, Meuhlnir. Why?”
He sighed. “It sounds like Gamla Toonkumowl to me. Is ‘thyowst ath ayleevu’ what she said to you?”
I shrugged. “Sounds about right. What does it mean?”
“Suffer forever. To your friend, she said: ‘dauda fyrur thig’ and ‘owthur en thoo sihrd kvolp thitt,’ right?”
“Sure,” I said with another shrug.
“Those phrases mean: ‘death for you’ and ‘before you see your whelp.’”
“She was a treat.”
“The last phrase was probably ‘ehk bulva ther’ which just means ‘I curse you’ and it’s clear she meant the both of you. Did your partner die?”
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.
“Before his child was born?”
“Yeah. No one saw the child born. His wife took her own life the night after Jax died.”
Meuhlnir looked away, shaking his head. “So much to pay for,” he muttered.
“That interview was the biggest mistake I’ve ever made.” I took a large gulp of the mead. “That one meeting with Tutor led to so much death. It led to their escape.”
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