The Coffee Shoppe Killer

by Rod Kackley

  What would St. Isidore think of Mary Eileen Sullivan? She couldn’t have cared less. Mary Eileen knew she was leaving the Coffee Shoppe for the last time. She would never return. Besides a couple of bags already packed, Mary Eileen was leaving her life behind. She would have to start all over again.

  The rest of her belongings, her business, her obligations to creditors, her responsibilities to her employees, her life, especially the body parts of her ex-husband and ex-lover — it would all be erased from her life.

  Mary Eileen was no longer scared or even nervous. She was on total autopilot. Her adrenaline was running high and fast, but it was completely under control. She felt just a little nauseous, but no less confident than when she’d left New York after dealing with a chef who had nearly raped her in a freezer.

  Long story told short; she’d left him for dead with an ice pick in his chest.

  Just as then, Mary Eileen had no doubt she could handle what came next. She was supremely confident of her ability to reinvent herself.

  All she had to do was to get out of St. Isidore as quickly and smoothly as possible.

  Where to go next? That question did give Mary Eileen a reason to pause. When the Uber driver showed up in the alley behind the Coffee Shoppe she took time to think about her next move, but only for a moment.

  Mary Eileen made a decision. One word said it all.

  “Drive,” she said.

  MARY EILEEN TOLD THE driver to go north from lower Michigan to the state’s Upper Peninsula. She left the cityscape of St. Isidore behind, drove through a relatively flat landscape of farms, and then rows of magnificent evergreen and pine trees.

  The ride was beautiful. With the shockingly blue panorama of Lake Michigan outside the window on her left, Mary Eileen was traveling through the most magnificent scenery Michigan had to offer. But she didn’t see the lake. She didn’t see the forests. She only saw herself losing Sean Patrick Flynn.

  That hurt more than anything. Mary Eileen knew it was only a matter of time before the police put together the evidence and concluded that she had killed David and Hans. After that, they would not have to waste any time searching for her. Mary Eileen knew better than anyone that a person couldn’t just vanish in this day and age of GPS and smartphones that showed the NSA where you lived. Even if somebody had been shot in the head, drawn and quartered and buried in cement; they would be discovered. It was only a matter of time before the police found her.

  And she knew that as soon as he was told what had happened, Sean would decide that he was done with her.

  God, that hurt Mary Eileen. She had finally found her true love. She had just found him too late. And there would be no way to win him back.

  Mary Eileen sighed. What was done, was done. She would have to start anew.

  Even the day after she’d dealt with the chef in New York wasn’t the first time Mary Eileen had to reinvent herself.

  She knew this time would not be the last, not unless she found another man just like Sean. But Mary Eileen had no misconceptions about the likelihood of that.

  As soon as the Uber driver crossed the Mackinac Bridge into the Upper Peninsula, Mary Eileen told him to turn around and drive back down the Lower Peninsula to the Detroit area. She had to go to Ann Arbor, the University of Michigan. She might reinvent herself, but Mary Eileen would not surrender. Sean was her one true love. There would never be another. She had to find him. She had to win him back.

  But first, Mary Eileen had to get away from the cops in St. Isidore. She knew they’d be after her and probably the state police, too. She would search for Sean. She would find Sean. However, that would have to wait. First, Mary Eileen Sullivan had to find shelter so that she could reinvent herself.

  Mary Eileen needed to find another man.

  Twenty

  “What do you mean, she’s gone?” Chief Lumpy Doolan said.

  “I mean she’s gone. She’s not there. There is no sign of her. How many ways can I say it? There is no one in her apartment. She is not in the Coffee Shoppe. Mary Eileen Sullivan has vanished,” the most obnoxious man in the room, as far as Doolan was concerned, State Police Detective Sean Patrick Flynn replied.

  “But she was just here.”

  “And now she’s not.”

  Fantastic, just fucking incredible, Doolan thought to himself. Murders just didn't happen in St. Isidore. Well, no, that wasn’t entirely correct. The truth is that homicides happened all the time in the city that was wrapped around the world-famous Suicide Forest. But they were always classified as “suicides” or maybe “accidental deaths.” The victims, if that is what the corpses could be called, almost always wound up hanging from a rope in the Forest, or laying on the ground, propped up next to one of the majestic trees upon which the world was drawn to die.

  Doolan had told the state police there was nothing to the St. Isidore Chronicle story about some guy named David who had disappeared and might have been murdered. The reporters had received emails after the story came out explaining that he had just split town, needed a vacation, something like that. “After all,” Doolan had argued, “if he wasn't alive and well, who could have been sending out the emails. The guy must have had a password, right?”

  However, there was no sense trying the to tell the state cops anything, and once they sent this kid Sean Patrick Flynn to town undercover, Doolan knew it was going to be a shitty month.

  Then another somebody that nobody in St. Isidore could ever even remember seeing vanished, or at least that’s what the Chronicle’s two superstar reporters had written, Doolan thought sarcastically.

  That really sent Sean Patrick Flynn and his state police bosses into an uproar.

  Doolan told them nothing was going on. People came and went all the time in St. Isidore. “Okay, we can search the Forest,” Doolan had conceded. That was SOP anyway. Whenever his department got a missing person report, no matter how looney, the first thing they did was search the trees of the Suicide Forest. They didn’t always find the missing person the first time, but leave it to the Deadie tourist brigade, the people who spent their vacation time searching for corpses in the Forest, and eventually, they would find the body.

  Doolan figured that was a good plan this time too when this guy named Hans turned up missing. But, oh no, thanks to the Chronicle the state police sent an undercover cop, this Sean Patrick Flynn to town, to try to pin the killings on one of Doolan’s favorite St. Isidorians, Mary Eileen Sullivan.

  Okay. Fine. Doolan was willing to admit he might have been wrong about David and Hans, but for the love of God why did the parts and pieces have to be found in the basement under Mary Eileen Sullivan’s coffee shop.

  Still, Doolan thought, what does this prove?

  “There’s a chainsaw down there, and a couple of open bags of cement mix,” said Sean, hands on hips, totally in his element, finally, he figured, getting some respect.

  “Oh fuck,” Doolan muttered under his breath.

  “Yeah, and there’s more,” Sean said.

  Doolan put his fat face into his hands and waited.

  “We used the ultra-violet light and found blood splatters all over the cellar,” Sean said. “Of course we expected that.”

  “So, what did you find that you didn’t expect?”

  Sean had no trouble hearing what the chief had asked, but because he wanted to see Doolan’s face, he said, “Pardon me?”

  Slowly the police chief raised his face from his hands. Sean saw the look of a fighter in Doolan’s eyes, the look of an ugly man who suddenly had nothing left to lose. And Sean reminded himself that while Doolan had put on seventy-five pounds since his fighting days, this guy had been the heavyweight boxing champ of the U. S. Navy in his prime.

  Sean backed off the accelerator of sarcasm just a bit when he replied, “We found blood stains going up the stairs, right to the door of Mary Eileen’s apartment.”

  “You didn’t go inside?”

  “We need a warrant.”

  “I though
t you had a key.”

  “BODY PARTS IN CEMENT, who’d a’ thought?” Amanda said with a typical millennial smirk lighting her face.

  “You’d a’ thought,” Joy said. God, she hated it when Amanda played cute. Well, just as Chief Doolan told himself the lie about murders in St. Isidore, Joy knew that she loved it when Amanda played cute and coy. Just not now, when they had potentially the biggest story the St. Isidore Chronicle had ever covered.

  Body parts of one man, maybe two, found encased in cement stuffed in the back of an old stone cellar under downtown St. Isidore. The whole freaking town is fucking freaking out, Joy thought. Everyone’s either inside the Coffee Shoppe getting pushed out by the St. Izzy’s Keystone cop squad or they’re lined up on the sidewalk looking in through the window.

  Amanda had the same thought.

  The Chronicle’s two crack reporters, the journalists who specialized in finding the missing, nodded and winked at each other as two of St. Isidore’s finest not so gently pushed through the Coffee Shoppe’s door.

  Of course, Amy and Joy offered only token resistance to the cops shoving them out the door. The women were more than happy to leave. There was work to be done, interviews that needed to take place, and most importantly, stories to write.

  “We’ve written all we have about David and Hans,” said Amanda.

  “But now we need to do their obituaries and get comments from the survivors,” Joy said.

  “What about our Ms. Sullivan?”

  “Oh she’s the real story,” Joy said with a smile. “That’ll take both of us. But first, we have to find out who she was. Then we can find out where she is.”

  “Okay, how did she get out of town so fast?”

  “Exactly, and where did Mary Eileen go? We know she didn’t vanish.”

  “If we can find her before the cops?”

  “That will be so huge.”

  “So fucking huge.”

  “Yeah, so let’s say you wanted to get out of St. Isidore fast,” Joy said, flashing her eyes at Amanda to stop the snarky, sarcastic answer that was forming on her lips. “Okay, you killed somebody, maybe a couple of somebodies. How do you get out of town fast?”

  “You don't have a car?”

  “Or you don’t want to take your car?”

  “Too easy to trace, right.”

  “Who do you call?”

  There was only one choice in St. Isidore. But it was an excellent choice, Joy and Amanda had to admit when the answer to the question came to them simultaneously.

  “Uber!” Amanda and Joy nearly shouted before they quieted each other with fingers to lips. The last thing they wanted was for the cops to hear their conclusion.

  Amanda nibbled playfully on Joy’s finger as her mentor whispered, “Let’s call Uber.”

  Twenty One

  Even without a finger to nibble, Sean had the same thought. It wasn’t rocket science. It was a homicide investigation. And, while there was a lot to be said for forensic science and computers and analytics; Sean knew nothing would ever replace one-on-one, face-to-face contact.

  There were two kinds of people in the world: those who liked to talk to the cops and feel like they had a role in solving crimes and those who were afraid of the police fearing a detective would figure out they had a part in committing a crime.

  Sean found a member of the former community on the street outside the Coffee Shoppe.

  “Hey. man, if I wanted to get out of here fast, I mean really fast, how would I do it?” Sean said a millisecond after flashing his silver shield in the face of a middle-aged dude who had ‘cop wannabe’ written all over his face. Surrounded by crime scene tape as he was, the brand "I wanna be a cop" was nearly glowing on his forehead.

  “I’d call Uber,” Adam King said. It was true that the one thing he wanted to do more than anything else in the world, at least in his former life, was to be a cop. He had everything it took except the physical strength. Adam couldn’t do a pull-up if his life depended on it. The St. Isidore Police Department let him volunteer every once in a while for parades and that kind of thing. But he had washed out of a paid job on the force.

  While, Adam was in love with his lady, Anne, and satisfied with his business, The Reading Room, he still was thrilled to have a conversation with a real homicide detective.

  “Uber, that’s what I would do,” Adam said again not to be sure Sean had understood, but to extend the conversation for at least one more sentence.

  “Where?”

  “There,” Adam said, pointing at the sign hanging outside a storefront about a block south of where they stood.

  “Right,” Sean said, just a little embarrassed that a civilian had to point him in the direction he should have seen all along. But, he was from out-of-town, a state cop, and Sean never had to apologize or even express thanks to anyone.

  So he did neither. Sean did shoot Adam a quick nod though as he flipped his shield closed and turned on his heel.

  As he did, Sean encountered the other kind of people — the kind who were right to be afraid of the police — as three teenagers who obviously had dastardly deeds on their simple minds scattered in front of him.

  “Catch you later,” Sean said as he snagged one of the punks by the collar and spun him to the ground.

  Sean’s athletic ability was on full display as he strode down the sidewalk, sidestepping the tourists who were on their way to the Coffee Shoppe after hearing of the discovery of human body parts in the building’s basement.

  It took him less than three minutes to push open the door of the Uber offices, showing his badge to a receptionist and find his way to the dispatcher’s office.

  “Mary Eileen Sullivan, that’s her,” said Frank Hardy, the computer geek on duty that afternoon.

  “You’re sure it was her.”

  “Has to be, it’s the only dispatch we’ve had in the past three hours.”

  “She ordered it with your app?”

  “Right.”

  Whereas Adam was more than comfortable, almost fawning, in his conversation with Sean, Frank was sweating. But Sean didn’t think he was perspiring because of an aversion to the police. Rather, Sean could sense a mile away that Frank was uncomfortable with everyone.

  That’s okay, Sean thought. It will just make it easier to get what I need. All this nerd wants is to go back to the online war game he was playing.

  “She wanted to go up north, to the U.P.,” Frank said, anticipating Sean’s question, the way he could see three moves ahead on his chessboard.

  “Okay. The Upper Peninsula. Where’d she stop?”

  “Hasn’t stopped yet. The driver’s GPS shows they went over the Mackinac Bridge and then back down south.”

  “Still driving.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know where they’re going?”

  “So far, no, I don’t.”

  “Think about it,” Sean said. He could tell Frank was a war game player. Had to be. The same program Sean played on his tablet was open on Frank’s iPad Pro. But he could see Frank set the difficulty of the game five times higher than he could manage.

  So, Sean knew that Frank was always looking three moves ahead no matter what he was doing.

  “Where do you think they’re going?”

  “Detroit.”

  “Simple.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s cheap there. And it’s easy to get lost in Motown. Plenty of people will take cash without asking questions.”

  Sean didn’t bother to say thanks.

  It wouldn't have mattered. Frank was already another three moves ahead of him. He knew Sean’s next play would be to get to Detroit as quickly as possible.

  There were plenty of guys in St. Isidore who wanted to be Sean. Who wouldn’t? He was tall, about 6-foot-three-inches with wavy brown hair to top it off. His eyes were warm and welcoming but could narrow into slits warning of danger if angered or confronted by a couple of th
ugs who had decided to test themselves against the state police department’s light heavyweight mixed martial arts champ.

  But Sean was having a day when he almost wished he could be someone else.

  His police instinct drove him to find Mary Eileen Sullivan so that she could be arrested to stand trial on God knows how many murder charges. Danny Fleming, the St. Isidore County prosecutor wouldn’t be able to start the paperwork until the medical examiner had put together all the pieces and parts of the human bodies that were under the Coffee Shoppe.

  But putting his cop DNA aside, his male instinct was driving Sean to find Mary Eileen Sullivan so that he could wrap his muscular, tattooed arms around her to protect this young woman from all of the pitfalls and dangers facing her in her new world.

  Sean knew that she wouldn’t have a thing to do with him once she found out that the story of being a visiting literature professor out of Ireland was just a line of bull. Mary Eileen wouldn’t want anything to do with him.

  Who could blame her?

  But at the same time, if Sean’s cop DNA was right, she was a stone-cold serial killer, someone who deserved to be locked away for the rest of her natural life.

  So why did he want to help her escape?

  Twenty Two

  It had been a taxi ride from hell. But they were finally in Detroit. Good God, Mary Eileen thought, this is worse than Belfast. She got out of the Uber driver’s car, which had been much, much nicer than any of New York’s taxicabs. Her nose wrinkled at the memory of the symphony of obnoxious odors that had wafted out of the last vehicle she’d ridden in, in Times Square.

  At least this car had been clean, the driver’s first language was English, and he was smart enough to know that she wanted just to be left alone.

  Now, she had her wish.