Scavenger Hunt

by Michaelbrent Collings

  “I have a brush full of hairs. Can you picture it?” David opened his eyes wide as he acted out a scene with an invisible second player. “Why, no, officer, I have no idea where she might have gone.” He snapped his fingers. “But I seem to recall… why look at this! Her brush wasn’t reassigned to another child. See, here it is! I don’t know how DNA would help in the search, but….” He shrugged. “Hope springs eternal, officer. Whatever I can do to help. I’ll even pray, and maybe you’ll find something that will tell you where she is.” He pretended to wipe away a tear. “Hopefully she’s just run away. I know that’s what happens with most orphans who disappear. But I do fear….”

  Elena shook her head. The fear was still there, but she did her best to cover it with a snarl. “You think that scares me, you dumbass? You think they’ll find something like that and come for me? Or that if somehow they pinned something on me that I wouldn’t tell them about your part in it? About the fact that you were the guy who did all the deals; that you were the only person who ever touched one of the children –”

  “- and about the fact that I signed all the paperwork that sent them to foster homes before they disappeared?” he finished. He shrugged. “I know you can pin that all on me. But I’ll just tell on you, and I guarantee that the luggage, the DNA, and a few pictures I’ve taken will ensure you sit right beside me in any trial. Maybe I’ll even cut a deal and you’ll end up being the only person in jail. I’m good at deals.” He finally moved away from her, sprawling in the chair on the other side of her desk. “I have no interest in telling what I know,” he said. “But I need you to understand that your hands aren’t clean. They never have been, and now I have proof of that. So whatever happens to me….” He shrugged and flicked a bit of imaginary lint from his lapel. “We’re in this together, Elena. We’re partners. You take half the money, you get half the risk right along with it.”

  “You’ll ‘tell on me’?” Elena repeated. She laughed. It wasn’t funny, and she knew that was the least important part of what David had just said, but for some reason it was the only thing she kept hearing. “You’ll ‘tell on me’?” She laughed again. Harder and longer this time, with a thread of hysteria running through the sound. “You sound like one of the kids. Like a damn child.”

  David shrugged. “Maybe so. Regardless, you better act like a grownup. Make a smart choice.” He pointed at the cash on the desk. “You tell yourself you’re doing this because one kid dying is better than dozens suffering –”

  “We don’t know they die,” she said.

  He gaped. “What the hell do you think happens when they leave here? You think they go to Disneyland and then live the rest of their life in a house made of candy?”

  “We don’t know they die.”

  “We do. You do. You always have.” He stood. “So tell yourself whatever you want. Do what you want with the money – donate it to the home, or buy a boat with it. I don’t care. But you will stop acting holier-than-thou, and you will stop threatening me. Got it?”

  She tried to think of some way around what he had done. Tried to think of something to say that would take back the power she had until now enjoyed. She came up with no solutions to the problems that had arisen, and only one word: “Yes.”

  David didn’t move. He raised his eyebrows as though expecting more. “I get it,” she said. David still didn’t move. He just stared at her for long seconds, and suddenly she realized what he was waiting for. She realized what he expected, and realized also that doing it was somehow the worst thing that would happen today. “I get it… Mr. Higgins.”

  He nodded and walked to the door, opening it and taking a step out. Then he turned back to her. “And I expect you to get me the updated schedules and the paperwork for the last round of state evals by the end of the day,” he said loudly before turning and nodding at the secretary. “How are you, Lettie?” he said.

  “Fine, sir,” she answered.

  “Beautiful day,” he said, and closed the door on Elena.

  4

  The police showed up at her door earlier than Elena expected.

  She had been waiting for it to happen. It was the only possible outcome only a moment after Mr. Higgins – David – left the office. But it still sent a thrill of fear up and down her spine. Something expected and something hoped for weren’t always the same thing.

  But she did the best to put on an innocent face as she opened the door, and thought she sounded calm as she said, “Yes?”

  “Ms. Ruiz?” asked the cop closest to her, a six-foot-tall man with a mustache right out of the seventies.

  “That’s right. Can I help you?”

  The cop was dressed in plainclothes. A detective, which she’d expected, given what had happened. He reached into his pocket, withdrew a wallet, and flipped it open to show a badge and an ID. “I’m Detective Ehlers, Ms. Ruiz. This is Detective Clay,” he added, nodding to his partner, a skinny black woman with hard eyes whom Elena immediately pegged as the one she would have to tread most carefully around.

  “What can I do for you?” asked Elena, trying to get the right mix of curiosity and worry into her voice.

  “There’s been an accident, Ms. Ruiz,” said Ehlers. His mustache twitched a bit, like he had almost said something else but decided otherwise at the last moment.

  Elena still controlled herself, but let a hint of trembling creep into her voice. “What… what do you mean?”

  “You work at the Eighth Street Children center, right?” asked the other detective, Clay.

  “That’s right.”

  “With David Higgins?”

  “That’s right.” She flicked her gaze from one cop to the other. “Why? What’s going on?”

  Ehlers looked at his partner. He looked like he was gearing up to say something – probably trying to figure out how to soften the blow as much as possible.

  Detective Clay apparently didn’t worry about such things. “He’s dead,” she said simply.

  Elena gasped. “Why… how…?” Her legs wobbled a bit, then she felt strong arms on hers, Detective Ehlers guiding her to the chair nearest the door.

  That was good. She’d let herself go weak-kneed, wondering if one of the detectives would help or if they would just let her stand there and either regain her balance or topple to the floor. The fact that Ehlers had moved so quickly and now helped her so gently was a good sign. A very good sign.

  Unless they’re playing me. Trying to lull me like I’m lulling them.

  Detective Ehlers got Elena settled into the chair, waited a moment, then said, “He killed himself.” A long moment later, a moment during which Elena gasped but said nothing, he added, “I’m sorry.”

  “‘Sorry’?” said Detective Clay. She wasn’t asking a question of Elena – another good sign. Instead, she aimed the question at her partner, her voice overflowing with an incredulous shade of anger.

  Elena heard the tone, and immediately reappraised the situation. Detective Clay was going to be a cinch. “What… why are you here?” she asked them both.

  “Like I said,” Detective Ehlers said, “Mr. Higgins killed himself.”

  “But why are you here?” Elena wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, surprised to realize she was actually crying – though for a far different reason than the detectives would suspect. “I mean, why come by like this and –”

  Ehlers looked at his partner, and again Clay did the heavy lifting. “What was your relationship with Mr. Higgins?”

  Elena shrugged. “He was my boss.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No. Just that. Why?” Elena frowned, and now injected a bit of anger into her voice. “What is going on? Why are you here?”

  “Mr. Higgins was found dead in his car.”

  “I don’t understand… was he in an accident or –”

  “It looks like he killed himself. He was found in his garage with the engine running, and he was holding a number of photos.”

  Elena looked from Ehlers t
o Clay, then back to Ehlers. “What kind of photos?” she said in a small voice.

  Ehlers shifted uncomfortably. She wondered how he’d gotten to this point in his career without being inured to this kind of thing, and liked the fact that he had done so. “Photos of you,” he finally said. “They looked like they were… ahem… taken without your consent.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The pictures looked like they were taken by a low-grade camera,” said Detective Clay. She looked at the small room that was living room, kitchen, and dining area in her small apartment. “They looked like they were taken in here, in fact.”

  Elena shook her head. “But I never –”

  “You were in your underwear in some. Naked in a few others.”

  Elena gasped, then her face wrinkled in disgust. That expression wasn’t hard to fake – it wasn’t fake at all, in fact; she just let her real feelings for David Higgins show through. “You mean he….” She looked around as though terrified she was being watched in that very moment.

  “It’s okay,” said Detective Ehlers. He squeezed her shoulder. “We found a camera in his bedroom that we think was the one he used in here. We also found….” His voice trailed off and he looked at his partner again.

  She rolled her eyes, but Elena could tell that Clay felt the same way about her partner as Elena did: he was sweet – so sweet he shouldn’t have made it this far as a cop, and sweet enough that it was easy to help him during the tough moments. “We found some things we think are yours. Did you ever notice anything missing from your home? Ever have a break-in?”

  She gave a tinny imitation of a laugh. “No. No break-in, but I’m not great about locking my door.”

  “Anything ever missing?” asked Clay again.

  Elena thought, then shook her head. “Not unless you count socks. But that’s just life, right? Everyone loses one of their socks and wonders why, then….” She had been speaking quickly, almost babbling as she tried to convey nervous horror. Now her voice petered away. “What?” she said. She tittered. “You saying he took my socks?”

  “No. But he was wearing something that matched something we saw in the pictures.”

  “What? You mean, when he was found? What was it?” She looked around as though trying to spot what might be missing. Though of course she knew what the officers were about to say:

  “He was wearing… some underwear.”

  “That’s not unusual, is it?” She tittered again.

  This time, finally, it was Detective Ehlers who delivered the hard news. “It was women’s underwear.” He grimaced. “Didn’t fit him very well, but he crammed himself in it.” He fixed her with a sudden, hard stare, and now Elena wondered if she had severely misunderstood – and underestimated – the apparently genial cop. “Looked like yours. What you were wearing in several of the pictures.”

  Elena gagged as though about to vomit. “Why would he… why would anyone…?”

  Detective Clay glanced at her partner, and now Elena was certain that his kind-hearted sap vibe had been intentional. Detective Ehlers nodded at his partner, his eyes showing that Elena had passed some kind of smell test. “We think he was probably a creep who took pictures of you and stole some… personal effects for sick satisfaction.”

  “And then he offed himself when he realized what a horror he’d become,” added Detective Ehlers, his voice flat and emotionless.

  “Either that or it was an accident,” said Detective Clay.

  There was no reason to fear. Elena knew that – intellectually if not emotionally.

  It had been only too easy to set it all up. Not hard at all to take several pictures of herself – using a cheap camera she bought over a month ago for cash at a Walmart fifty miles away – strutting naked or near-naked across her front room. Taking some of the underwear she’d worn in the pictures and going to his house.

  David was a pig. She knew that. She knew also that pigs didn’t turn into angels when confronted with a new kind of slops. So she had come onto him. A small matter to get him drunk, a smaller one to urge him into the car with the promise of sex; she told him she had “a thing” for cars. He was already on the verge of passing out, so it wasn’t hard to take his keys and lock him in the car, then wait until he was good and under before unlocking it, starting the car, leaving the garage, and just waiting.

  Hurrying back into the garage was the hardest part. She ran in, holding her breath, and jammed the panties halfway up his pants. She ran into the house, took a breath of clean air, then back into the garage, where she used David’s dead hands to put fingerprints all over the car keys, the pictures, the panties, and the cheap camera that she then took back inside and left “hidden” in a drawer in his bedroom.

  Then she wiped down everything she had touched – it hadn’t been much, other than the wine and the glasses they drank from. Easy. A drunk pervert gets trashed and either offs himself intentionally or just has an “accident.”

  She took her wine glass – she wasn’t about to get nailed for something as stupid as leaving a glass with her DNA all over it at the scene of the crime – and left.

  Easy.

  But Detective Ehlers was staring at her blankly, and Detective Clay now wore an expression she didn’t like, either. Elena realized suddenly that she hadn’t responded to Clay’s last comment. She did now, hoping that she hadn’t waited too long; that they would chalk her response up to stress.

  “I… thought you said it wasn’t an accident. But it was?”

  Both cops relaxed somewhat. “Yeah,” said Detective Clay. “We’re probably looking at suicide, but it could have been an accident. He had a blood alcohol level high enough to knock out the technicians on scene.”

  Elena thought about following up on that. Decided quickly against it. Why feign interest? Why would a person who was supposed to be in her shoes care about anything but what had been done to her? So she shuddered and looked around again and said, “Can someone… can someone check the house for any more cameras?”

  The responses of the two cops showed her she had guessed correctly. “Sure,” said Detective Ehlers, and his voice was kind again. She didn’t buy it this time – not completely – but it certainly sounded genuine. “We need you to come down to the station, if that’s okay. We have to have you i.d. some of the things we found, for evidence purposes.”

  “Sure,” she said. “Of course.”

  “We’ll have someone come in and check your place for any more hidden devices,” said Detective Clay, adding carefully, “if that’s okay with you. It means they’ll have to look around pretty carefully.”

  Elena pretended not to notice the second thing she was agreeing to: saying they could come and look for a camera would be allowing them to search her home. No claims of false seizure should they find anything. But she didn’t care about that: she had nothing to hide. The only thing she’d taken with her was the wine glass, which she’d thrown against a wall three miles away from David’s house, shattering it into just a few more pieces of glass in a nameless alley where they would never be found, let alone tied to her.

  She got up. “Can I get a coat?” she asked.

  “Of course,” said Detective Ehlers. Then, as she turned to go, he added, in a voice too casual to be anything but rehearsed, “I just wish I knew where he printed out those pictures of you.”

  Elena didn’t stiffen; her voice didn’t stutter. She had prepared for that, too. She shook her head sadly. “I don’t know, but I do know that he was always turning off his monitor when anyone came into his office.” She wrinkled her nose. “I thought – we all thought – that he was looking at porn. You don’t think he…?”

  She looked at the detectives, her face a canvas painted in bright colors of disgust and panic. “He wasn’t just printing them in there? On his computer?”

  The detectives shrugged. But they would check the printer to see if it had printed out the pictures. And she knew it would.

  There was a small risk they wo
uld go over his computer as well. But even if they did – and the risk was small, given how obvious a suicide/accident had caused his death – she knew they wouldn’t find much. She had no idea what the new passwords were, but that meant neither did the police. And if they took the time to break into the hard drive, what would they find?

  Nothing. The porn she had alluded to – not a lie at all, and something every single staffer at Eighth Street Children was aware of David doing – and probably nothing else. It would take a pretty deep dive, she figured, to uncover his offshore accounts. Again, not much chance of that, and if they did… well, there was nothing there linking her to any of it.

  Nothing but the luggage with the panties. And if they were found – a pretty big if, because she doubted David actually had the thing – there was now a solid reason they could link to him, not her. The luggage was stolen, the underwear in them was hers, but also stolen.

  He would be branded as what he was. And Elena would come through it just fine. Maybe she could even take over for David. That would be best for everyone, she knew. The kids especially. One or two might go missing, but that was infrequent. Unlike David, she wouldn’t take much off the top, and the rest could go to keeping Eighth Street Children afloat, and keeping the rest of the kids cared-for.

  She only wished she could have acted sooner. It had taken a bit of time to set this all up, and she had wanted to put a bit of distance between what she had to do and the last deal David had brokered.

  She gathered her coat and went with the police. She looked sad, and that was a real emotion. There were so many more kids she could have helped.

  5

  Unlike Mr. David Higgins, un-dearly departed, Elena took barely anything at all off the top. Just enough to move from her one-bedroom apartment to a condo in West Hollywood. Nothing fancy.

  Which meant that almost one-hundred percent of the proceeds she gained went to the home. She was the one tapped to take it over; largely, she suspected, because no one else wanted the job.