Take Your Turn, Teddy

by Take Your Turn, Teddy (epub)

  The smart-ass kid laughed and said, “Aye, Aye, Captain,” before he pulled away.

  Strode couldn’t pull himself from the road ahead. Instead, he buried his head into his hands and felt himself quiver in regret and frustration.

  Sergeant Lantz’s heavy steps stopped behind Strode. “Come on, man. Let’s get you home.”

  “I saw her, Lantz. I see her everywhere.”

  Sergeant Lantz rested his hands on Strode’s shoulders and turned him away from the empty road before them. “Easy, Strode. You’re alright.”

  But Strode went on, too far into his own thoughts.

  “I see her everywhere, and then she disappears.”

  Lantz sighed, looking away from the sorry son of a bitch before him. Finally, he turned Strode to face him. Strode’s eyes hung low, examining the road at their feet.

  “Look at me, Strode.” Strode hesitated but then brought his eyes to Lantz. “You’re a good cop. You saw shit that no rookie should have seen. But you have to let it go, man. It’s not your fault.”

  Strode shook his head. He didn’t argue, but he knew it wasn’t as simple as letting it go.

  “I want you to take some time off, Strode. Talk to your therapist, play some golf, or whatever the hell you do in your free time. Then, when you come back, I need you sharp, okay?”

  Strode was too worn to protest.

  So, there he was, day two of his leave on account of multiple mental breakdowns.

  He raised his particularly thin and frail shoulders and rolled them back.

  Breathe.

  Strode reached for the notebook on his coffee table. His ex-wife, Maggie, had put him in touch with the therapist who had given it to him.

  But what was he supposed to do? Keep a record of his own insanity? Share his feelings? Strode rolled his eyes and gave the notebook a toss. “Give me a break.”

  Strode dragged his worn moccasin slippers to the coffee machine and flipped it on. He had used the same filter three days in a row. His mind was too deep into other thoughts to notice the ever-weakening strength of recycled grounds.

  The coffee machine groaned as it tried to circulate the worn grounds.

  Strode had to meet his therapist that afternoon. It had been a year and a half since the Starling house nightmare. That’s what his ex-wife called it.

  Strode spread his hands out on the counter and took a deep breath.

  Thud. Thud.

  Strode stayed as he was, hoping the noise would cease.

  Thud. Thud.

  “I can’t. You’re not here.”

  Thud. Thud.

  Strode tightened his grip on the counter. Unwiped jelly stuck to his palms. “Please, go away.”

  Then came the smell of bleach. He immediately visualized the overturned bottle in the Warren’s living room. Had Mr. Warren planned on getting rid of the bodies before taking his own life? Had he succeeded somehow with Jackie? Those questions had haunted Strode ever since the night he responded to screams at the Starling house.

  The thuds stopped, but when Strode peeked over his shoulder, she was there—Jackie Warren.

  The bleach burned into his nostrils and stung his eyes. Strode rubbed at them frantically.

  “She’s not here. She’s not here.”

  But when Strode turned again, Jackie Warren was swinging her head back and forth, humming. She kicked the cabinet again with her bare feet.

  Thud. Thud.

  If Strode and Maggie had ever been able to have the daughter they wanted, he always thought she might look like Jackie. Jackie had dark chocolate-colored hair with big brown eyes to match, just like Maggie.

  Strode had only seen Jackie’s olive-colored skin in pictures and a few times when she was playing outside of the Starling house. He would drive by every few days just to check on the two houses at the township’s edge.

  Only now, as she sat on Strode’s kitchen counter, Jackie’s skin wasn’t warm-looking. Instead, it was a ghostly pale, and her eyes were anything but calm and beautiful. They bulged. They said fear and extreme, wicked pain. They said, “Evil was here.”

  A deep incision wound around her neck, accompanied by a mirage of green and blue. She hummed and bobbed her head, and one side of her neck gave way. Her head hit the top of the opposite shoulder. One eye sat further out than the other. Her innocent Winnie the Pooh pajamas were marred by slices and bloodstains. One pant leg exposed what appeared to be a broken ankle. It twisted in a freak-like contortion.

  She hopped down from the counter, her head barely hanging on. Her feet gave a final thud as her heels hit the floor. Then, there was a snap. It made her bend at the knees, but her face stayed the same—dead-cold.

  “I’m sorry, Jackie. I couldn’t find you in time. I’m so sorry, sweetie.”

  Strode heard his therapist. “Separate the painful from the imaginative.”

  He turned to the little girl, “You can’t keep doing this to me. I have to get better. I lost Maggie. All I have is my job.”

  An invisible force threw something over Jackie’s head and around her neck. Her eyes bulged wider and wider as she gasped for air. Her feet kicked as her breaths became shallow, more like croaks. Blood poured from her neck, down her pajamas, and onto the kitchen floor. Strode watched the front of his tan slippers absorb the red, making them a deep purple color.

  “No, no. Stop. Stop.” Strode felt the weight of his head lighten, as if it were a balloon on a string, inevitably blowing away into the clouds.

  The bleach smell burned Strode’s eyes and began to blur his vision. “Enough!”

  Strode reached for a spatula and swatted just above Jackie’s head, hopping he could take the invisible force harming her. Jackie’s limp body fell to the floor. As he thought he might have done if he had ever found her body, Strode knelt to Jackie’s side and took two fingers to her eyelids, closing them.

  His stomach turned—both from the gore and the ever-growing weight of the Starling house nightmare.

  “It’s not real. It’s not real,” Strode tried to convince himself. He rose from the dusty and blood-covered kitchen floor and grabbed a coffee mug from the cherry-colored cabinet.

  He carried his coffee to the back porch and shut his mind-made manifestation of horror inside. He hoped in the time it would take to finish his cup, the bloodied scene would clean itself up or disappear or whatever the hell it did to go away.

  Strode fell into the ragged armchair he substituted for appropriate outdoor furniture and brought his palms to his face as he tried to breathe. His hands shook.

  Less than two years ago, Strode thought he would make a good cop. Now, he was a man with a gun and a badge who, on a good day, didn’t have a breakdown.

  Strode put his hands out in defense and spoke to the empty yard. “I know. I know. We don’t call them breakdowns. We call them,” he raised his fingers to create air quotes, “bad brain days.”

  Strode sighed. This time mostly with exhaustion. Whatever the hell he had, whatever had buried itself deep within his brain since the night he found the slaughtered Warren family at the Starling house, and the Blackwoods not long after, was wearing on him more and more each day. Some people knew it. And that’s why some people wanted him to hand in his gun.

  He wasn’t sure a simple reclassification of his upsets (“bad brain days”) per his therapist would be enough.

  The sound of the red telephone, the one Maggie had picked out to match the red laminate-decorated kitchen, rang through the glass of the sliding door. It was soft but enough to let Strode know someone needed his attention.

  He ventured inside, pausing to ensure the Warren girl’s corpse was gone, and answered the phone.

  “Hello?”

  Strode circled his head and inhaled, smelling for bleach.

  A woman on the line asked, “Is this Officer Strode?”

  Strode peered up again, double-checking for Jack
ie or his mind-made remains of her. The coast was clear, and the smell was gone.

  The woman on the other end was patient. She waited a moment for Strode’s response.

  “Yes,” Strode said. “I’m off today, though. Did you need the number of the station?”

  Strode felt his anxiousness pick up the pace. He hated shoving work off to other officers. Trying to cope with everything without being a burden to everyone else was sometimes enough to send him over the edge.

  The woman maintained her patience as Strode’s mind derailed.

  After a moment, he remembered someone was still on the other side of the line. Though Jackie, or the illusion of her, was gone, Strode was no longer alone with his thoughts.

  He cleared his throat. “Excuse me. Could you repeat that please? I’m afraid you cut out a bit.”

  The woman paused and then said, “Oh, sure. I said I don’t need the number to the station. I’m actually looking for you, Officer Strode. We went to the academy together.”

  Strode thought her voice sounded familiar. She wasn’t hard to place. Only one woman was in the academy when he went. He couldn’t remember her name, but her grit, ferocity, and keen attention to detail were unforgettable. One word, not a name, came to mind when Strode reimagined this woman—badass.

  “Ringing any bells, Officer Strode?”

  Damn it, Strode thought. I did it again. He could hear his therapist, Dr. Evers, say, “Remember to be present. It’s not enough to exist in the background.”

  His ex-wife had said something similar toward the end of their marriage.

  Strode bypassed the woman’s name, hoping it would come to him, and said, “You climbed the rope faster than half the men. They didn’t think, as tiny as you are, that you could do it. Remember that?”

  The woman on the other end laughed. “Explicitly.” Then, her laugh, her energy, cut off, like it had suddenly run out, like an hourglass. “Officer Strode, I’m afraid I’m not only reconnecting with you to relive our academy days.”

  It was humorous to Strode how she made it sound like ancient memories rather than only a couple of years prior.

  She continued. “I’m calling from Michigan. I joined the police force in a town not too far from the academy. Have you seen what’s going on here?”

  Strode eyed his office door around the corner, trying to remember if any of his research, his newspaper clippings, had come from Michigan. Either way, given his state, Strode thought it best not to admit an obsessive pastime willingly.

  “I don’t believe I am familiar with the situation, ma’am.”

  The woman’s tone on the other end of the phone dialed back even further, past low energy, and into chilling. “We found a body. In the woods. He was a young man. The guys wouldn’t call him a kid like I do, but he was only twenty-three.”

  Strode felt his breath bury deep within his chest. It hung suspended. The victim wasn’t as young as Jackie Warren, but yes, Strode would agree that twenty-three years old was a kid.

  “Well, I heard your name when I visited the training camp recently,” she stopped.

  Strode could only imagine what the officers-to-be at the academy had to say about the unhinged rookie. He hoped the next time they ran laps in Michigan, it was humid as fuck, and their trainer took them to the park to run uphill.

  Strode laughed into the phone, which turned out to be a more fitting response than his sarcastic mind could’ve conjured if he’d tried.

  The woman on the other end offered an awkward giggle and said, “What’s important is, I think I could use your help. I heard you were on leave, and I just thought with your, er, um, experience with this sort of thing, you could help.”

  Strode rubbed his face, reminding himself to shave before he went anywhere. He wasn’t sure he was in a place to help anyone. He had a feeling Dr. Evers would agree.

  Strode waited for the woman to continue. After a few moments of shared silence, she went on.

  “The body we found here, the kid, he’s our second victim in two weeks. The cuts, the indications of torture, just the extent of mutilation, reminded me of—”

  Strode winced. She didn’t even have to say the names. That’s how fragile he was. Strode tried to say it, and found his voice cut off. He cleared his throat and tried again. “The Warrens and Blackwoods.”

  She answered in a near whisper, “Yes. I’ve heard about your—”

  “Delusions,” Strode supplied.

  “Questions. I was going to say questions. Like you, I can’t let these go. Yours had missing teeth, and ours have missing fingernails. I wanted your help because I think you’re right. There’s more here, and we need to figure out what it is.”

  Validation. That’s what she was offering Strode, even before the investigation. Validation in her own belief in him. It felt so foreign to him Strode didn’t know how to accept it.

  The woman went on, “I mean, to make someone suffer like that, to create so many incisions, to remove each fingernail, I would say it’s barbaric, animalistic, but none of them feels like the right word. It feels—”

  Strode interrupted her, “Personal.”

  “Exactly. Personal. Is that how you felt with your cases?”

  “Yes. In the Blackwood case, we believe the mother was beaten to death by the father. There was so much bleeding and swelling of her brain. But the man, his injuries were monstrous. It was a different kind of suffering. It was like the goal wasn’t to immediately kill but to make him bleed, really bleed. Still, it was less patience than we saw with the Warrens, and less so than what you’re describing now. It was like the killer decided Arthur Blackwood just wasn’t worth it. It had to be done to get him out of the way.”

  “Like he was somehow competing with the true killer?” the woman asked.

  “Exactly, yes. That’s what I thought.”

  Strode felt a dryness in his mouth, and it hit him that this was the most he had spoken with anyone in a long time. Even his hour-long sessions with Dr. Evers were quieter.

  Strode nervously scratched the bottom of the phone’s receiver; Maggie hated it when he did that. The red paint lifted from the phone easily and nestled under his nails.

  “I didn’t know about the domestic situation. You believe the mother was beaten by the father? Wasn’t there a witness? I read about it. The boy? Theodore, I think it was.”

  “Teddy. He liked to be called Teddy,” Strode corrected.

  Strode heard the woman’s chair squeak as her eagerness prompted readjustment. “So, there must be something there. Did he see the man who killed his father? Did he see how he was killed?”

  The scene tore into Strode’s mind, and the gore of the Starling house where Teddy and Lila Blackwood had moved to replaced that morning’s torment of Jackie Warren.

  Her patience had faded. “Strode? Strode, are you there?”

  Strode sighed. “We don’t know exactly what happened because we never found Teddy.”

  Strode expected shock, maybe even hysteria, not because she was a woman, but because the details were wicked and disturbing. They had haunted Strode ever since.

  But the woman stayed calm. “I see. Well, I want you to come take a look at the body we found today. I want to see if it looks anything like what you’ve seen. I think you might not be so crazy after all.”

  Strode laughed. “Gee, thanks.”

  “How far of a drive will it be for you to Michigan from Starling?”

  “Starling was the name of the house.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Starling was the name of the house where both families were killed.”

  “Oh. Of course, Starling was the mother’s maiden name.”

  Strode, again forgetting to be more aware and present, nodded as if the woman could see him.

  But she didn’t press him.

  “Well then, can you come right away?”

  Strode hesit
ated. “If it’s not too much trouble, could someone from your office report it to mine? Just so the sheriff doesn’t think I’ve lost my marbles again.”

  “Of course. I’ll take care of it.” The energy, the pleasantness, had returned in her voice. “It’s going to make one hell of a story, the cop off his hinges solves the murder of the Starling house and Warren Woods.”

  Strode froze. “Where did you say you found the body? Where in Michigan?”

  “Oh. I said Warren. Warren Woods.”

  It was funny. Wasn’t it? How calmly she could let Warren pass between her lips. The name was a pest laying eggs in the corners of Strode’s brain, biting, tearing at his peace of mind, and calling the havoc home—an invasive intruder that no number of pills or sessions with Dr. Evers could exterminate.

  “Yeah, Warren Woods is a big one, but someone called in about the smell of the body,” she went on.

  Strode didn’t even realize he was holding the kitchen telephone between his pointer finger and thumb. The other three fingers, not a thought but a reflex, hung in the air, counting how many times the woman said “Warren.”

  She filled the gap of silence. “Well, great. Can you be here in the next few hours? I’m going to make them hold the body for you as long as I can. I don’t want to move it, just in case.”

  “I’ll hop on the interstate in thirty minutes. Should be there in two hours.”

  “Perfect. What kind of car will you be driving? I’ll have someone meet you at the entrance of the hiking trails.”

  “A red Ford Pinto.”

  “Got it. Well, Officer Strode, we’ll see you in a bit. And don’t forget, Warren Woods.”

  Strode slid the phone back on its base on the kitchen wall and said to the empty room, “How could I?”

  Strode pulled the plug on the coffee machine. He went down the dim hall and folded some old t-shirts into a bag. He realized then that he needed new clothes. He stepped into faded and slightly distressed Levi jeans and kicked his bedroom door shut behind him.

  He was packed and in his Pinto in under five minutes. He did another quick shoulder roll and took a deep breath. If he was going to help the police in Michigan, and maybe, just maybe, clear his name, he needed to focus.