Without Sin (An Owen Day Thriller)

by Rachel Ford

  I waited for the tone, deciding whether to hang up or leave a message. It sounded. I started talking. “Hi, Detective? This is Owen. Owen Day. Andrew Welch’s brother. Anyway, I was calling –”

  At the same time, the car’s speaker system announced, “Incoming call from Detective Clark.”

  I glanced at the touchscreen, trying to figure out which button I needed to drop my current call and accept the incoming one. I rarely got enough calls for that to be an issue. I never got enough calls for it to be an issue in the car.

  “Incoming call from Detective Clark,” the car repeated.

  “Ah son-of-a-bitch.”

  I hit the hang up button. It was the wrong thing to do. It dropped both calls, incoming and outgoing.

  “Shit.”

  “You gotta press the ‘end current call and accept incoming’ button,” Jason said.

  “Shut up,” I told him again, and tabbed through the display to the recent calls button. I found her number and redialed. The phone rang once, and then again. She picked up on the third ring.

  “Mr. Day?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Didn’t mean to hang up on you. Having some trouble with the buttons.”

  “Ah. Well, um, how can I help you?”

  “I needed to ask you a question.”

  “Okay.”

  “Judge Dandridge –”

  “I can’t talk about that.”

  “She wasn’t killed in that fire, was she?”

  She said nothing for a long moment. “I can’t answer that, Mr. Day. I’m sorry.”

  “Okay,” I said. Her silence had been answer enough. “One more question, and I’ll leave you alone.”

  “I can’t answer anything to do with the Dandridge case. It’s an ongoing investigation.”

  “I know, I know. But she wasn’t at home at the time of the fire, was she?”

  No answer.

  “So I’m going to make a guess, and you tell me if I’m right. She was on an airplane when the fire started. Probably, on an airplane heading home from somewhere. And her kids were there, at home, when the fire started.”

  No answer. One second elapsed. Two seconds.

  “How did you know that?” Her tone sounded neutral. Too neutral. Her control was so good it was almost robotic.

  “The rhyme. It’s all over the news.”

  “It didn’t say anything about an airplane, Mr. Day.”

  “No, it didn’t.”

  “Then how did you know?”

  “Because this is our break, Detective. Martinez, Anderson, Andy…we didn’t know if he was targeting them specifically, or if they just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  “But now we know. ‘Ladybird, ladybird fly away home.’ He knew she was flying. He knew she was flying home. He targeted her specifically, and he timed it. ‘Your house is on fire.’

  “These aren’t random killings, Clark. He’s researching them. He’s getting to know his victims: who they are, what their plans are, where they are.”

  I told her what I’d found earlier about the sandy hill riddle. She didn’t seem particularly impressed. “That’s awfully vague.”

  “I know. But it fits.”

  “Maybe. But I’m not sure I buy it.”

  “You mean, because even if you accepted that it was a cryptic reference to Andy’s decade and a half old drinking problem, Martinez wasn’t a serial killer?”

  “And Anderson wasn’t an egg.”

  “Humpty Dumpty might not have been an egg.”

  “What?”

  “The rhyme, it might have referred to something else. Something not an egg.”

  “Like what?”

  “Uh…Richard III. You know, of England? And there’s a cannon at a church called St. Mary at the Wall.”

  “A cannon?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. But I’m pretty sure Anderson is neither Richard III or a cannon.”

  I frowned at her sarcasm, more particularly because of the tone of tried patience. “I’m aware. I don’t know how those rhymes apply. I’m working on it.”

  “Mr. Day, you don’t need to be doing that. We have a team –”

  “And I’m sitting in my office thinking. I’m not interfering with you, Detective. I’m just thinking.”

  “Mr. Day…”

  “And I’m not completely off the wall, am I? I figured out Dandridge wasn’t home, didn’t I? I figured out she was on a plane?”

  She said nothing for a moment. “We’ve been looking at how the rhymes might apply to the victims. We’ll keep pursuing that angle.”

  “Good.”

  “And,” she added, “if you do think of anything else…”

  “I’ll call,” I promised.

  I don’t know if she was happy about that. But she said, “Good. You do that,” anyway.

  Then we said goodbye, and I went back to thinking. For about a second and a half. Because that was how long it took Jason to verify I was off the phone.

  He seemed under the impression that that signaled the end of the injunction against talking. Because immediately he blurted out, “Holy shit, dude: the judge’s kids? That’s a sick dude.”

  “People who cut people’s throats for laughs aren’t usually anything else.”

  “Yeah, I know. Just…that’s still twisted, even for twisted.”

  I ignored him and stared out the window.

  He waited about five seconds this time. “Thank you, dude, for bailing me out back there. I owe you.”

  “Damn right you do. Five grand.”

  “I know. I’ll figure something out.”

  I figured hell would freeze over before I saw the money. I’d counted it as lost the moment I agreed to the scheme. I said nothing.

  “Listen…Megan: you’re not going to tell her, are you?”

  “What, that you’re putting her and the kids’ lives in danger by trying to stiff criminals? Or that you consider robbing her guests? Or maybe that you were stupid enough to borrow money from a low life like Travis anyway?”

  He kept his eyes on the road and shrugged nervously. “Yeah.”

  “I should.”

  “She’ll kick me out if you do.”

  “Jesus, Jason. You’re what? Twenty-five?”

  “Twenty-four.”

  “Okay, you’re a twenty-four year old man. You don’t need your big sister to take care of you.”

  “I know,” he said. “I’m pathetic. But dude, I got nowhere else to turn. I’m out of lifelines and bridges to cross. And yeah, it’s because I burned ‘em all.

  “But if she kicks me out…I don’t know where I’m going to go. I got no job. No one wants to hire me. Not once they run a background check on me.”

  I said nothing.

  “And the kids like me. I like them. We’re good for each other.”

  I thought about that. Jason was no kind of good influence. But they did like him. And I knew what instability did. I knew what people coming into and going out of your life did to a kid.

  “And I can help keep an eye on things for Meg. You know, be an extra set of helping hands and all that.”

  I snorted. “Another child to babysit, you mean.”

  “No, man, I mean it: I can help.”

  “I’ll keep my mouth shut, but on one condition. Two, actually. First, you start pulling your weight. You help around the place.

  “Second, you stay the hell out of trouble.”

  He agreed, so quickly that I doubted he’d heard anything other than my promise to keep quiet. He told me I wouldn’t regret it, and that he’d start working on figuring something out for the money soon.

  I tried to ignore him and think about the case.

  I was still trying when we reached Megan’s house. There were no media vans there today. Maybe there wouldn’t be again. Not with the speculation and horror surrounding the judge’s family.

  Megan opened the door a second before I knocked. I could hear the TV blaring away in the living
room. I figured the kids were in there. It sounded like some kind of cartoon.

  She stepped out onto the front step, dropping herself into my arms and sobbing. “Oh my God. Oh my God.” Then, she pulled back to frown at me. “Where the hell were you? I was about to call the cops. I thought he got you.”

  “Who?”

  “Who? The killer.”

  “It’s my fault, Meg,” Jason said.

  She looked past my shoulder toward her brother. “Your fault? How?”

  “My, uh, truck. Started acting real weird. I didn’t think I’d make it home. Luckily, I was right by Owen’s place, so I called him.”

  “Your truck? Jason, you just got that damned thing.”

  “I know. I’ll get it figured out.”

  “I told you it was a shit box.”

  “Well I didn’t have a lot of options, did I?”

  “And you’re supposed to be getting a job. How are you going to work if you don’t have a vehicle?”

  “He was out looking for a job,” I intervened.

  “And did you find one?” she asked, of him.

  “A few prospects, maybe.”

  “Prospects? Here we go again: still no job, and now no truck either. I told you when you moved in. A job was part of the bargain.”

  “I know. I’m working on it.”

  “How are you going to do that without a truck?”

  Silence.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Owen’s helping me,” he said. “Aren’t you, Owen?”

  “Owen?” she said. “You’re helping him?”

  I tried to keep a scowl off my face. “I guess so.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The ruse placated Megan. Me, on the other hand? I took Jason aside to remind him of what I’d done to Tiny that afternoon. “So maybe you should think twice before you try to entangle me in your bullshit next time.”

  “Dude, you’re not entangled in anything. The truck works, as much as it ever did, anyway. All we got to do is pick it up and say you fixed it. ‘Replaced the spark plugs.’ Or whatever you want to say. Done.”

  He had a point. We’d already started lying, and we did need to see the cover story through. So I let him slink off to the garage.

  Dinner had already been served: take and bake pizza and premade salad, all of which was surprisingly alright.

  Megan talked while I ate. I listened and tried to be sympathetic. I wasn’t good with grief. I suppose normal people would have classified my own coping mechanisms as unhealthy. And they probably were.

  But I didn’t get sad. Not the way normal people – healthy people – did. I didn’t sit there and indulge the emotion. I didn’t try to work through it or talk about stages. I did something about it.

  Which worked out alright when it was a problem that could be solved. Most problems could be solved, one way or another. Shitty job? Find a better one. Shitty neighbor? Move. Or for that matter, make them realize it’s in their best interests to move.

  Someone murders your only brother? Find the fucker and make him pay.

  The zero-point-oh-one percent of cases, the true outliers, were where I hit a wall. It had only happened a few times in my life.

  And this wasn’t one of them. I didn’t need stages of grief, or a shoulder to cry on, or a support network. I had a mission.

  But I was broken. A goddamned freak.

  Megan was normal, and she processed her emotions in normal, healthy ways. Like crying. So I tried my damndest to be the shoulder she needed.

  She told me about the candle lighting ceremony, and how beautiful it had been. How she hadn’t been able to stay. She’d barely been able to drive home. She told me it hadn’t really sunk in yesterday. But now, she was starting to understand – really understand – that Andy wasn’t coming back.

  “What am I going to do without him?”

  The truth was, she’d adapt and evolve. So would the kids. So would I. It’s the only thing any of us could do in the circumstance. But that wasn’t the answer she was looking for. I knew that. It was a cold comfort.

  I didn’t wait to find out if Maisie still had kitchen duty. I took care of my own plates, and suggested we join the kids.

  She nodded vaguely.

  “Or if you need a break, I can watch them. We can play a game or watch a movie or something.”

  “No,” she said. “We’ll watch something together.”

  So we did. It was some godawful cartoon, with a lot of loud characters and a nonsensical plot. Megan stared absently at the TV. I waited until the kids returned to the show to bring up my phone.

  There were new headlines up about the Dandridge killings. An anonymous source within the police department had confirmed that there’d been three victims: an adult and two children. Neither had been the judge or her husband.

  Another anonymous source ID’ed the adult victim as Terri Lange, the family’s nanny. The same source indicated that Lange had died sometime before the fire started, but elaborated no further.

  I scoured the internet for articles and came up with plenty. None of them contained anything beyond what the first said, though.

  The show ended, and the kids started arguing about whose turn it was to pick the next thing. Ben won by maternal decree, apparently for the third time in a row. Maisie and Daniel sulked.

  A new, equally awful program started. Megan stared at the walls, at her family photos hanging there. Jason wandered in, grabbed some pizza, glanced at the scene in the living room, and absconded to the garage.

  I went back to my phone. I didn’t have my evidence boards, but I could do some digging anyway. I decided to focus on Martinez and Anderson: Mary Ann Cotton and Humpty Dumpty.

  There had to be some relevance to the rhymes the killer had picked. There had to be a link between each poem and its corresponding victim. Something that I wasn’t seeing.

  I went back to the beginning: Angela Martinez and Mary Ann Cotton.

  Cotton’s conviction had been for the murder of a stepson, but she’d been implicated in the deaths of numerous relations. She had lost multiple husbands and children – and collected insurance policies on them.

  I had the idea that that might be the link: that maybe Angela Martinez had lost a relative or even a spouse. Maybe the killer had considered the circumstances suspect. Maybe he or she was exacting some kind of revenge.

  Maybe he was meting out justice, in his own mind.

  Angela Martinez had been twenty-two years old at the time of her death. Plenty old enough to be married, and plenty old enough to have had kids.

  I ruled out marriage. I’d already searched the public records for her, and turned up neither marriages nor divorces. Plus, she shared her last name with the rest of her family, so it wouldn’t be a married name. I turned to children and other relatives instead.

  I spent a fruitless hour digging through birth notices, obituaries and death notices before I found anything remotely plausible. Angela Martinez’s grandmother had passed away when she was seventeen.

  Nothing about the death, at least based on what I could find online, looked suspicious. The old woman had been seventy-eight years old, and she died in her sleep. Not much to see there.

  But it was all I found, so I put a note in my phone. Ask DC about AM’s grandmother. Probably a waste of time. But maybe the girl had been her grandmom’s favorite. Maybe she’d inherited her life insurance policy, or her house, or her saving’s account. Maybe the killer knew her, or heard about it somehow.

  A third program started, again chosen by Ben. Maisie and Daniel had taken a box of Legos out, and had some kind of multi-colored skyscraper in the works. Jason made another pass, and again opted out of the festivities.

  By time the third show wrapped up, even Megan had had enough. She decided it was time for bed.

  Ben pitched a fit. He wanted to see his cartoon. He hated her. He didn’t want her to tuck him in. He wanted Daddy to tuck him in. Where was Daddy? Daddy would have let him see a cartoo
n. He missed Daddy.

  Megan was in tears by time she wrestled him up to his bed. She came back down, and poured herself a glass of wine, full to the top. Half a bottle, or nearly. She sat on the sofa and drank her wine and wept. She poured a second glass and started to talk.

  “It’s so hard on the kids. They’re too young for this. No one should lose their parents at that age.”

  “I know.”

  “How did you do it? How did you and Andy survive?”

  “Not easily,” I admitted. “But they’ve got a support structure we didn’t, Megan. They’ve got you. They’ve got Jason, and me. They’ve got their grandparents.”

  “You had your grandmother,” she pointed out.

  I thought of the old woman who had taken us in. She’d left our mom years earlier with an ex, when she moved onto a new guy. We were her penance, she’d tell me and Andy. “Your mom’s getting back at me, for what I did to her, the little bitch. Sticking me with her own hellions.”

  A cruel, angry woman, frustrated with her life and willing to take that frustration on anything she could. “She was blood, but she wasn’t family.”

  “Family is blood. Andy forgave her, you know that? He said if Jesus could forgive him, he could forgive her.”

  I said nothing.

  “God wants us to forgive. It’s the only way to move forward.”

  “Well, it’s not something the kids will have to worry about anyway.”

  “‘Forgive us our sins, as we have forgiven those who sin against us.’”

  I said nothing.

  “I know you think I’m preaching. I’m not, Owen. But your salvation: it worried Andy. Yours and Jon’s. He missed out on seeing his oldest boy, because of everything that happened.”

  Everything that happened. That was one way to put it.

  “He was afraid he was going to miss out on seeing him forever. He tried to talk to him. But you know how stubborn Missy is. She didn’t like that. She’d always interfere.”

  “She does what she thinks is right, to protect her kid.”

  “Andy wasn’t a threat to Jon.”

  I decided to let it go, to keep on shutting my mouth.

  She said, “I know she thinks she’s a Christian. But Pentecostals aren’t really Christians. And anyway, I don’t know what kind of woman can call herself a Christian and keep her kid from seeing his dad.”