Confusion hit on the opposite rooftop. The bros huddled. I sat listening to the distant waves, feeling quietly smug. While I waited for them to formulate their next move, I picked up a dumbbell and did some biceps curls.
The biggest of the bros began loading up the bench press bar. I stood and mimicked him, loading as he loaded, selecting weights as he selected them. The numbers climbed: 360, 380, 400, then 440 pounds. The big guy struggled through three reps, his whole body trembling and mouth pulled taut, baring his teeth. I cracked my knuckles, but before I could lie down, one of the dudes came to the edge of the roof.
“Don’t be stupid, lady!” he yelled. “You’ll hurt yourself!”
“We’ll see!” I yelled back. I went to my bench. I loaded on another 20 pounds. The guys gathered at the edge of the roof and folded their arms—concern for my safety, or their own reputations, written on their stern faces.
I pumped out five slow, careful reps. My arms trembled. My chest felt hot, tight, the muscles working and straining. I felt my cheeks grow warm. I pumped out a sixth rep and heard the guys erupt in moans of awe as I fit the bar back into the rack.
I don’t know what else I expected. A round of applause, maybe. A smile. A wave of admiration. But I got none of that. The guys took in my display, then turned and left the rooftop without another word or gesture, like they’d heard some kind of alarm and were evacuating.
I was alone only a moment before Baby stepped out through the big glass door leading onto the roof.
“We need to talk,” she said.
Chapter 51
“I invaded your space.” I put my hands up. “I totally get it.”
“No, you don’t get it,” Baby said. “Because as far as I know, you’ve never had someone walk into your life and turn absolutely everything you freakin’ know upside down, including your own goddamn bedroom!”
“It needed to be done,” I said. “You and Dad were living like pigs. But I should have consulted you. Or given you a chance to—”
“Don’t try to side with me.” Baby seethed. “I’m pissed at you. So pissed. So pissed I can hardly breathe, and you don’t get to-to-to…to spray water all over my fire!”
I tried to stay silent, tapped my foot. But the words bubbled up.
“You know what, Baby,” I said. “I have had someone walk into my life and turn absolutely everything upside down. That person was you. I’ve never been a mother before—do you understand that? I have no idea what I’m doing here!”
“How many times do I have to tell you? Get it through your thick skull. You are not my mother!”
“Well, I’m something.” I shrugged helplessly. “You can’t have nobody in your life taking care of you, Baby. You’re a child.”
“See, Rhonda, this is what you do,” Baby sneered. “You fall back on that ‘You’re too young’ bullshit whenever you’re losing an argument.”
“Well, it’s true!” I said. “And I’m not losing this argument. It’s not even an argument! You’re just yelling at me!”
“You’re yelling back!” she howled.
“I know!” I covered my eyes, took a breath. “Urgh. I know.”
“I’m going to get you, Rhonda,” Baby said.
“You’re going to get me?”
“Yeah. I’m going to show you exactly how childish I can be.”
She stormed off again. I reached out and caught the glass door before she could slam it, or lock me on the roof. I saw her walking down the stairs with her phone in her hands, texting furiously.
“Storming off during an argument is childish enough!” I called. “Even though it’s not…It wasn’t…Urgh! Baby, we can fix this. Come back and we’ll fix this!”
No answer came back up through the layers of the huge house. My phone buzzed behind me on the workout bench. I picked it up. It was warm from the sun. In my email, a message with no subject header was sitting in the in-box from a name I recognized. I opened the zipped file attachment in it, and a trail of photographs began downloading. In the first, I saw the twisted dead body of Derek Benstein lying beside a darkened glass door.
Chapter 52
Santa Monica Pier was crowded with people slowly shuffling shoulder to shoulder, a loose parade bound for the end of the structure jutting out into the vast blue sea. Past the roller coaster and Ferris wheel, a huge, pink Styrofoam cup had been erected midway between the Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. halfway down the pier and the Marisol Mexican place at its end. The cup towered over the crowd, and an enormous straw, maybe twenty feet high, wavered in the gentle breeze off the sea.
I positioned myself on a bench by the pier rail between two sets of fishermen and watched the crowds looping slowly around the giant cup, receiving their free Miffy’s Tornado Tower of Doom chocolate shakes. I analyzed every face, straightening once or twice at the sight of extremely lean men with dark glasses. It was three hours before the right man came along. I’d already gotten myself two Tornado Tower shakes, both of which sat drained on the bench beside me.
Dr. Perry Tuddy was hiding from the blazing sun under a ball cap wedged onto a tattered blond wig that was tied in a ponytail. I sidled up to him, and he flinched at the sight of me.
“Oh, dear.” He expelled a resigned sigh. “Back to the container, is it?”
“That’s all the fight you put up every time these guys come to abduct you?” I asked.
“Well, I’m not the kind of person who tends to kick and scream.”
“You’re not even going to try to run?”
“How am I going to run without spilling my shake?” He gestured to the counter, three customers ahead of us. I tried to answer but couldn’t begin to approach that kind of logic.
“I’m not here to stuff you into a van,” I said. “I need your help with something else. Grab your shake and one for me, yeah? I’ll meet you by the taco stand.”
Tuddy got the shakes, and the two of us stood in the shade, watching the sea for a while. Jet Ski riders were trailing bright pink flares in promotion of the Miffy’s giveaway, and a small plane was working its way up the coastline dragging a fluttering pink banner with the company’s logo.
“I know this is going to sound crazy,” I told Tuddy, “but I think I’m on the trail of a killer.”
Chapter 53
I told Dr. Perry Tuddy what I knew about Ashton Willisee, describing the chance meeting with the scared, obviously lying teenager in my father’s office in Koreatown and the visit to Stanford-West Academy. I told Tuddy that I thought Ashton was hiding something. The fact that he would lie about his relationship with Derek Benstein had convinced me that the boy was trying to disguise possible knowledge of what had happened to his friend.
“Let me ask you a question,” Tuddy said between sips of his shake. “What has this got to do with you?”
“Nothing,” I admitted. “My only connection is that Ashton came seeking my father’s help and I stuck my nose in. But there’s something in that kid’s face. In his eyes. He’s alone. He might have people around him, sure, but I feel like he’s really alone in this and he needs help.”
“You don’t know the boy. How could you read him like that?” Tuddy asked.
“I guess because I’ve felt it myself.” I shrugged. “When my father left, that’s what it was like. I had my mother, my school friends. I even knew people whose dads had run off under similar circumstances. You know the old cliché. Went out for cigarettes and never came back. But I still felt like I was drowning, and there were a bunch of people on the shore who couldn’t rescue me.”
Tuddy and I watched the water. I used my long spoon to scoop chocolate chunks from the bottom of my shake.
“Okay.” I sighed. “Maybe there’s more to it. My little sister knows Ashton from school. I just met this girl, and we’re not the best of friends yet. So maybe getting involved in this investigation, helping her friend, is something we can do together. Like when you want two kids to get along so you give them a mutual goal?”
“My grandmo
ther used to say, if you want two cats to get along, put them in a sack and tie it up. Leave them there for a couple of hours.” Tuddy looked at the water. “When you open the bag, one of them will be dead or they’ll both be friends.”
“That’s real interesting but not very helpful right now.”
“Okay, so how can I help, then?” he asked. “I mean, why chase me down, of all people?”
I laughed, a little embarrassed. “Look, it’s hard to explain, but…I think I saw your freak flag.”
“My freak flag?”
“Yeah,” I said. I showed him my tattooed arms, gestured to my pink hair. “I mean, look at me. You can spot me a mile away. I fly my freak flag proudly. But you—you’re more subtle. You keep letting the cartel lock you up like an animal. And I think that’s because a part of you enjoys it, and that’s real freaky, man.”
He too toyed with the chocolate in the bottom of his cup.
“I’m addicted,” he confessed.
“Addicted to getting abducted?”
“Not to the abduction itself,” he said. “That’s always traumatic. Always terrifying. It’s the incarceration that my brain feeds on.”
“Who the hell enjoys being locked up?” I asked.
“Me,” he answered. “Have you ever heard of dopamine fasting?”
“No,” I said.
“Dopamine is an organic chemical produced by your body.” He turned toward me, gesturing with his straw. “It’s a part of the catecholamine and phenethylamine families. It acts as a neurotransmitter so that—”
“You’re losing me, Tuddy.”
“It’s your happy chemical,” he said. “Your brain’s happy juice. It’s essential in helping you enjoy things. The taste of chocolate. The smell of sea air. Light and sound and eye contact. When you’re locked in a dark room for a whole day, with absolutely no stimulus to release your dopamine, your brain stores it up.”
“Okay,” I said.
“When I spend a month alone in a shipping container, with no smells or sounds or human interaction reaching me, going through repetitive movements like making meth, it’s like I shut down. I store up the dopamine in my brain. Then when I’m finally released, it’s like I’m walking on sunshine. Literally walking on sunshine.”
I watched him becoming more animated as he spoke, his eyes wide, wandering over the water before us.
“This, all this, it’s like it sparkles.” He gestured to the world around us. “I can smell everything. I can feel everything. The breeze on my skin is like electricity. Everything I eat tastes like it was made in the kitchen of the gods. I’m high for weeks after a release. It’s like the high you get from heroin, you know? A full-body orgasm. Only it lasts days, not hours.”
I stared. Tuddy stood smiling at me.
“I wouldn’t know what the high from heroin is like,” I said. “Would you?”
“I spent eight years researching addictive chemicals,” he said. “You think I didn’t mess around with my own stock now and then?” He shook his head sadly. “That’s why all those companies began bidding for the patent on my methylamine alternative. They wanted to buy the product from me even though it wasn’t complete.”
“Because you were a liability,” I concluded. “Nobody wants to work with an addict.”
“That’s right,” he said. “In other circumstances, they would have hired me to continue my research. But I was so deeply addicted to heroin at the time, I was damaged goods. It was only the months-long incarcerations with the cartel that got me clean. The first time, I had a guard watching me twenty-four hours a day. I couldn’t touch a gram.”
He turned to me, his eyes glittering.
“So, yes,” he concluded. “Freak. Big freak. How can I help you, my freaky friend?”
Chapter 54
I handed Tuddy my phone, then leaned over and flipped through the photographs of Derek Benstein’s crime scene for him. I hadn’t looked carefully at the images myself, only scrolled through them briefly, trying not to focus.
I paused at the photographs of police officers assisting a medical examiner in removing Benstein’s shirt at the scene. His torso was covered in bruises and marks. The photographer had paid particular interest to purple marks on Benstein’s thigh, visible at the hem of his boxer shorts.
“Huh,” Tuddy said.
“What do you see?”
“Something shocking.”
“Oh.” I stood back. “I’m sorry. I only—”
“That was a joke,” Tuddy said. “This young man has been tortured with some kind of electrical device. Probably a cattle prod. Shocking. You get it?”
“I do.” I sighed. “What tells you that?”
“These are electrical burns,” he said, pointing out blue and purple welts on Benstein’s body. “A cattle prod works by connecting two electrically charged prongs to the skin, thereby creating a closed electrical circuit that encompasses the human body. At the site of the connection, you get these burns. You see?”
I looked and immediately felt a little ill. “I see.”
“These were very big charges,” he continued. “Designed for cattle, not humans. So the extreme energy charge can’t just go into the flesh from one prong and turn around and head right back out again through the other prong. It tries to find somewhere else to go in the body. This is what happens when a person is struck by lightning. It’s called flashover. The charge travels through the muscle and skin and creates these bruises.”
He zoomed in on a big patch of blue skin that had burst like a flower on Benstein’s stomach.
“You can also see he’s been starved of oxygen,” Tuddy said, after enlarging the image to focus on Benstein’s face. “The capillaries in his eyeballs have burst. That’s consistent with sustained electrocution. Quite a good resolution in this shot to have captured that.”
I walked away, went to the edge of the pier and looked at the water, sucking in the sea air. I could taste Tornado Tower shake at the back of my throat.
“Are you okay?”
“I don’t spend a lot of time looking at pictures of dead bodies,” I said.
“Neither do I.” He shrugged. “But this young man is no longer in pain, if that’s what’s disturbing you.”
“How do you know so much about electricity and the human body?” I asked, trying to distract my mind from the pictures of Benstein’s twisted face, his bulging eyes.
“We did some experiments in my first residency with electroshock therapy and the electrical pulses that naturally occur in the brain. My professor was trying to develop a new therapy for depression. That’s how I got into the study of narcotics and Alzheimer’s.”
“Okay,” I said. I tried to take my phone back. “I think I have everything I need.”
“Perhaps worth mentioning is this boy’s other experimentation with electroshock.” Tuddy tried to show me another photograph.
“I can’t look.” I held a hand up. “Just describe it to me.”
“There are smaller, older marks on his thighs from a lesser charge,” Tuddy said. “The electrical pulse has gone in and right back out again, creating a site injury and nothing else. Probably a stun gun. And probably self-inflicted.”
“How do you figure that?” I asked.
“The thigh is a natural place for a curious person to experiment with a dangerous instrument. Away from vital organs. Fleshy, hidden from casual view. And I was a curious boy with a dangerous instrument once.” He smiled. “I poured fluoroantimonic acid on my own thigh in freshman year to impress a female. The scars are still very unsightly.”
“So Benstein liked to play with a stun gun,” I said. “And then someone electrocuted him to death.”
“He was also shot.” Tuddy thrust the phone at me again. I winced, saw only red, torn flesh. “See here?”
I snatched the phone away.
“Thanks for the help,” I said, closing the images. “If I need you again, where can I find you?”
“Hopefully inside a steel bo
x, somewhere quiet, far away,” he said. He was watching the ocean. Sea lions were bobbing up at the end of the pier, searching for the fishermen’s throwaways. I took down Tuddy’s phone number as he recited it, and then I walked into the crowd, leaving the doctor to his sunshine musings. There were darker things on my mind. I was sure now that someone was enacting his sick revenge on Ashton Willisee and his friends. If I was going to stop him, I had to find out why.
Chapter 55
Baby was waiting for me on the steps of our father’s house when I arrived home in an Uber. She smiled sweetly as I approached. I should have listened to the niggling uneasy feeling in my belly as she tossed me a heavy set of keys.
“Let’s roll,” she said. “We’ll take the Maz.”
“Let’s roll?” I asked. “Just like that?”
“Yeah.” She turned and headed through the open garage door. “I’ve got a lead on some people who are connected with both Ashton and Benzo. You still want to go messing around that whole, like, case thing. Right?”
“Right,” I said. “But you seem to be forgetting you just about ripped my head off this morning about your room.”
“I know.” She flicked her big sunglasses down over her eyes. “I was being stupid. That’s over now. I checked out my room properly, and they didn’t get to any of my private stuff. You were trying to do the right thing, so, you know.” Baby took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “I forgive you.”
“Oh.” I laughed. “How nice.”
“Don’t push your luck with me, Rhonda,” she said. “You do not want to get on my bad side permanently.”
“Whatever you say,” I said. We climbed into Dad’s Maserati. I was enveloped in his smell again, smoke and sweat, fried food, bad cologne. The driver’s seat was set at the perfect height and distance from the wheel for me. I felt like I was slipping on his clothes. Despite Baby’s cool exterior, I was feeling upbeat about repairing our relationship, avoiding what I had assumed would be days of silent treatment punctuated by the occasional violent outburst.
2 Sisters Detective Agency Page 13
