by T. R. Ragan
“Just trying to figure out the connection between the Black Wigs and Nancy Lay.”
She laughed. “Here I am telling you I don’t talk much, and I’m babbling on about my sister’s job.”
“You’re not babbling. I find the whole vigilante story fascinating. But I do have one question.”
“Yes?”
“What is your name?”
She felt heat rise to her face. “I never told you my name?”
“Afraid not.”
“No, that can’t be true,” she said. “I must have told you when I called you to meet at the coffee shop.”
He shook his head. “You said something like . . . this is the girl at the shelter where you brought the dog. His name is Duke now, and I was wondering if you would like to meet for coffee.” His smile grew bigger. “I was going to ask you at the coffee shop, but after getting a call from a client saying they needed something right away, it slipped my mind.”
“And yet you still came here today,” she said sheepishly.
“You’re way too hard on yourself. If it makes you feel any better, I’ve never been a people person myself. In fact, I had a tough time as a youngster. I was bullied, and I’m still working on having normal conversations with people.”
He stopped to unwind the leash from around Duke’s back leg. When he stood straight again, their gazes met.
When she realized she was staring, she looked away and gave Chompers a pat on the head.
“Two crushed souls meet at a shelter filled with neglected and abused animals that just want to be loved,” he said.
She nudged Chompers along and found herself asking, “I wonder how someone goes about fixing a crushed spirit?”
“They start by waking up each morning, looking in the mirror, and telling themselves they are beautiful and they are worthy.”
“I like that. Once a day?”
“Yep. Only once.” He rubbed his hands over Duke’s back, giving her and Chompers a chance to catch up.
“What about meditation and eating right?”
“All good,” he said, “but there’s one more important thing a person with a crushed soul must do.”
Aria arched a questioning brow.
“They must forgive themselves.”
“Forgive themselves for what?”
“For every bad choice they’ve ever made,” he said. “For eating the whole pie, when one slice would have done the trick. For not holding the elevator for a stranger, or for shutting the door in the face of a door-to-door salesman.”
“Do salesmen still go door to door?”
“Trust me. They do. But I have forgiven myself for that one.”
She laughed. “I wouldn’t know where to start. I have never eaten an entire pie.”
“I doubt you have anything to forgive yourself for. Just look at all the good you do for these animals.” His gaze settled on Chompers, who had plopped down on the ground, too exhausted to take another step.
“Looks like I wore her out.”
“We better get her back for some water.” He handed the end of Duke’s leash to Aria, then bent down and scooped up Chompers into his arms and headed back the way they’d come.
Aria followed close behind, thinking Corey Moran was too good to be true. The fact that he was sweet, funny, and nice was a little disconcerting. But he was also damaged goods. Even before he’d said what he said about being bullied, she’d recognized him as a lost soul. Scarred, and a little messed up.
It took one to know one.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Aston Newell made sure all the tools in the shop were in the cart before he rolled it to the side of the garage. He then grabbed the handle on the hinged panels of steel and rolled the garage door closed. Once he clicked the padlock in place, he stood tall, hands on his hips, and took one last look. The air was tinged with motor oil, grease, and sweat. Just as it should be.
He was proud of his shop. He’d worked hard to get where he was today. Just last month he’d hired two more mechanics, and yet he still couldn’t seem to get home at a decent hour. The sound of the front door opening and closing caught his attention.
“Sorry. We’re closed!”
He stood still and listened. The only sound was the whirring of the oscillating fan in the office. He took a step that way, then noticed someone standing within the doorframe. If not for the long black hair and crimson lipstick, he might have thought it was a man.
“Can I help you?”
He or she smiled, and something about those eyes . . .
It struck him then. He knew exactly who it was. He couldn’t help but laugh as he stepped over to the cart he’d just rolled to the side and picked up a crowbar. Then he turned back to Cockroach and said, “A woman—Sawyer Brooks from the local newspaper—came by today to warn me that you might be paying me a visit.”
Aston held the crowbar in his right hand and tapped one end to the open palm of his left hand. He did this again and again as he tried to process what was going on and what his next move would be if Cockroach came at him or pulled out a gun.
One thing was for sure, Aston thought. No way was he going to let Cockroach take his life for something that happened years ago. “Why are you here? Nick and Bruce were the instigators, the leaders of the pack. I only hung out with them because I wanted to survive.”
“And you stood by and watched,” Cockroach said.
Aston nodded. “That’s right. I didn’t touch you. Not once.”
“You always were the loudest and biggest liar. It wasn’t you who defecated in my bed and then shoved my face in it and held my head down so that I couldn’t scream?”
“Come on. We were kids. Kids do stupid shit all the time.”
“Have you ever had your face shoved in someone else’s shit and held there until you passed out?”
“No, but you weren’t the only one it happened to.”
“Ah. So that makes it all okay,” Cockroach said without emotion.
Aston’s heart was racing now. Cockroach meant business. He should have listened to the journalist. If he had, he could have at least been prepared. He had two pistols locked up in a safe at home. This was crazy. “I’m sorry. Is that what you want to hear?”
“It would be a good start.”
“You need to leave. Get out of here before I call the police.”
The corners of Cockroach’s mouth turned upward.
“What do you want?” Aston asked. “Is it money you need?”
“Get on your knees and beg forgiveness.”
Wrong answer. Adrenaline rushed through Aston’s body as he cracked his neck from side to side. Like a linebacker going for a sack, he rushed headfirst into Cockroach’s chest.
Cockroach grunted and fell backward into the counter.
Aston’s eye stung. He thought maybe he had slammed into Cockroach’s zipper or the sharp edge of a button until he raised a hand to his face to see if he was bleeding and felt an object poking out of his left socket. He yanked it out, surprised to see that he was holding a syringe. He tossed it aside. “What the fuck did you do?”
Aston headed for the office phone to call the police, but fell to the floor before he reached the door. His breathing was erratic. He felt dizzy. What the hell was happening to him? He clutched his throat.
Cockroach walked over and hovered, staring down at him with the same fascination Aston had when he was just a kid watching Nick and Bruce do their worst.
Why hadn’t he stopped them, he wondered? He could have run for help. He hadn’t thought of Cockroach in years, if ever. Not until the journalist had come to see him. He wasn’t a bad guy, he told himself.
He wanted to live, wanted to beg for his life. He was ready to do that, but when he opened his mouth, nothing came forth. He couldn’t speak. Opening and closing his mouth like a fish, he tried to push the words out. It was no use.
There was nothing he could do to stop Cockroach from taking hold of his ankles and dragging him across the ga
rage floor. Aston felt the upper half of his body being lifted onto a creeper that was then rolled under a car held up by a jack. How many times had he told his guys not to use the old car jacks? But nobody listened.
“Remember what you said to me after Nick and Bruce tied me to a tree?” Cockroach asked.
Even if he had remembered, what good would it do? Would Cockroach leave him alone?
“You said, stop your blubbering, kid, it will all be over soon. You were wrong.” Cockroach stood up, then grunted and groaned while pushing hard on the side of the Hyundai Genesis, but nothing happened.
Maybe, just maybe, Aston thought, he might live to see another sunrise.
Then Cockroach smiled, and that’s when Aston knew all that groaning and moaning and pushing of the car was just for show, to build tension and give Aston false hope.
Aston knew all that because of the smile. It was a fuck-you smile that said, “Look at me, I’m all grown up now, and I’m getting the last laugh.”
Cockroach then moseyed on over to where the jack was and gave it a good hard kick.
It was dark when Sawyer parked in front of the auto shop where Aston Newell worked. It had been a very long day. After working late, she’d picked up the flash drive at Purple House Digital. The video had been lightened and brightened, leaving no doubt that Otto Radley was the man who had approached a woman sitting on a bench in the park wearing a short black wig.
She would show the newly enhanced video to Detective Perez in the morning. Right now, though, she had one more question for Aston Newell. She wanted the names of the boys who had been bullied. Boys who had grown into men and who might be motivated to seek revenge. Hoping to bribe him, she’d stopped at the grocery store to buy cookies. She would come by the auto shop every day and every night until she wore him down and he gave her the names. Someone out there, someone Aston probably knew, was killing his friends. She needed to make him see that this was truly a matter of life and death.
There was a light on in his office, and she assumed Aston Newell would be the one to close down the shop since he owned the place. With cookies in hand, she climbed out of the car and shut the door. As she approached the office door, she heard a loud crash come from inside the garage. The noise rattled her and she hurried inside, set the cookies on the counter, and went straight to the garage where she saw a man wedged beneath a car.
“Aston!”
The overhead lights flicked off.
She couldn’t see a thing. Her heart pounded against her ribs.
Tools crashed to the ground. A tire flew through the air, hitting her upper body and flinging her to the ground. Next came a metal tool that bounced off her head, but not before leaving a gash near her hairline. Her fingers went to her head where she felt blood.
A shadowy figure ran past her, footfalls pounding against the floor as the person ran through the office.
She jumped to her feet and followed, sweeping a pair of scissors off the desk in the office on her way out, just in time to see the person round the corner and make their way through a parking lot behind the auto shop.
Thankful to be wearing flats, she rushed after the person, running through the parking lot and over an expanse of dead grass and weeds until she realized she was on the train tracks. She was gaining ground, getting closer. There was no way she was giving up now. She ran between the two solid steel rails, concentrating on the railroad ties so she wouldn’t trip and fall.
The person was less than twenty feet ahead of her when she felt the earth rumble beneath her feet. A train was coming. She could see lights in the not-too-far distance, coming straight for her. The freight trains were faster than they seemed, and she jumped to the side, then watched the person she’d been chasing look over their shoulder and jump to the opposite side right before the train passed by, horn blaring.
She leaned over and sucked air into her lungs. Fuck. Whoever it was would be long gone by the time the train passed. She hurried back the way she came. Her cell phone was in the car. She grabbed it and called for help as she made her way back through the office to the garage. Flicking on the light, she went to where Aston lay, unmoving. One of his arms lay still beside his body. She felt his wrist for a pulse. He was gone.
Sawyer sat in the back of an ambulance as an EMT cleaned her up. She had two cuts, one on the side of her face close to her ear and the other at the hairline. He used butterfly strips to close her up, then told her she might need stitches.
Detective Kevin Grumley was on the scene. Sawyer had never met him before. He held a notebook and pen, something Detective Perez never did, and he asked Sawyer why she was there. She told him everything, starting with the write-up she was doing on the Black Wigs and how she believed the recent killings were the work of a copycat.
“The person you ran after,” he said. “Male or female?”
“I have no idea.” She thought of Trudy and what she’d said about the person being a man, but really, there was nothing about the way the person ran that would help Sawyer distinguish male from female. “I would guess the height to be five foot eight, maybe nine. Light-brown hair. I didn’t see the person’s face because the lights were shut off before I realized I wasn’t alone. Once the person took off, I gave chase, and you know the rest.” Sawyer rubbed a chill from her arms. “If we’re finished here, I’d like to go home.”
“Go ahead,” the detective said. “I know where to find you if I have further questions.”
It was well past midnight by the time Sawyer got back to her apartment. She had called Derek on her way home. Despite his concern, she turned down his offer to come to her apartment. She needed time alone to think. Her head was pounding, and she wanted to take a shower and then go straight to bed.
She fed Raccoon, rubbing his fur and apologizing for never being around. Raccoon didn’t seem to mind. He looked nothing like the cat she’d found half starving only months ago. Raccoon was content.
Once she climbed into bed, she flipped through text messages, deleting the one from Derek asking where she was and the one from Purple House Digital since she’d already picked up the flash drive. She looked at the texts from Aria, smiled when she saw that her sister had sent a picture of Corey Moran walking toward the coffee shop. Man, she thought, her sister had fallen fast and hard, it seemed. The next text from Aria was a long one telling Sawyer all about how he had come to the shelter to help her walk the dogs.
Sawyer scrolled back to the man’s image. He had a happy-go-lucky sort of face. Cute. He had a lanky physique and untamed sandy hair. Corey Moran. The name didn’t ring any bells. She had already put his name through a database and nothing popped up. But still, who was he, really? Was he kind and caring? Or was he a womanizer, a “love ’em and leave ’em” kind of guy? She loved Aria and didn’t want to see her get hurt.
Before shutting down her phone, she remembered the other name Emily had given her: Stanley Higgins. If she had thought about it earlier, she would have asked Aria to look him up.
She typed his name into the search bar. There were six guys with the same name in Sacramento. If he was close to Emily’s age, that would put him somewhere between thirty-six and forty.
Bingo.
Only one guy fit the bill. The good news was, he didn’t own an auto shop. The bad news was, he was a taxidermist in Citrus Heights, about twenty minutes away.
She would go see Stanley Higgins right after she met with Detective Perez. She would use the enhanced video to get in to see the detective and then tell him what she and Lexi had learned about Ian Farley, the server at the Blue Fox restaurant.
Unable to keep her eyes open for another moment, she shut down her phone, connected it to the charger on the nightstand, then turned off the light.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Early the next morning Sawyer was on her way to see Detective Perez when she drove her car into the parking lot outside Aston Newell’s auto shop and turned off the engine. Crime tape had been wrapped around the office door.
&
nbsp; Sawyer climbed out and headed for the train tracks. She sucked in a breath of fresh air, trying to wake up all her senses. Her sleep had been fitful. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the person running from her. She’d been so close.
As she followed the steel rails, walking farther than she intended, she stopped when she came across fresh shoe prints to the left where the person would have jumped to avoid being hit by the train.
Bending close, she noticed that the soles looked different from your standard sneaker. This was a boot. She stood and placed her foot next to the print in the soil. Men. Size ten, at the very least. The person running from her was a man.
Thirty minutes after seeing the footprint, Sawyer sat just inside the doorway of the police station, doing her best to ignore the horrible throbbing of her head, inside and out. The minute Detective Perez walked through the door, she jumped to her feet.
He looked right at her and released a low growl.
“Just two minutes,” she said. “That’s all I’m asking.”
“In my office,” he said. “Two minutes.”
They wove their way through mostly empty cubicles. It was still early, still quiet. She could smell coffee as they passed a tiny lunchroom with a refrigerator and sink.
Once they were inside his office and Detective Perez shut the door behind them, she told him everything she’d told Palmer about the interview with Brad Vicente, what she had learned at the Blue Fox, and finally about Ian Farley’s possible involvement and his alleged attack by at least three women wearing wigs after he’d shown up at Brad Vicente’s house.
It wasn’t until she fell quiet that she realized he didn’t appear to be paying attention. After shutting the door, he had slipped his jacket onto a hook on the iron coatrack standing in the corner of the room. He’d then unlocked a couple of desk drawers. Now he was straightening the top of his desk, organizing files, and sifting through a pile of papers he’d grabbed from his in-box. Finally, he looked up at her. “Is that it?”
“No.” She reached into her bag and pulled out the flash drive and set it on his desk in front of him. As she did so, she told him about Ian’s description of the woman with scars all over her arms and how she had instantly thought of Christina Farro, the woman held captive by Otto Radley.