“So, how does the poison work exactly?”
“If the toxin comes into contact with the skin, it can cause an erratic heartbeat and close down your nervous system. At best, you pass out for a while, at worst, you enter into a coma which can last for days . . . or forever.”
“And if swallowed?”
“Heart attack. On the spot. Widow maker. No hope.”
She turns to me, smiles.
“Great,” I say. “Can we go now?”
“Oh dear,” she says. “Now I’ve gone and spooked you.”
“No,” I say. “I just know me, and dollars to donuts, if I spend any more time anywhere near the vicinity of this plant, I will find a way for it to touch me. So, can we go?”
She steps forward, pulling her layers of gloves off.
“If you insist,” she says.
I keep as much distance as I can from the English Blooms as I make my way around them like I’m stepping away from a rabid dog that’s bearing its fangs, moving away step by step, but never letting it out of my sight either. When we come to the arboretum door, she tosses the gloves onto the workbench, and takes back her drink. I open the door and allow her to exit first. I follow, closing the door behind us.
“The cold night feels pretty damn good after being inside that glass house,” I point out. That potentially poisonous house.
“I’ll walk you back,” she says.
When we come to the cottage, I stop outside the door.
“Aren’t you going to invite me in, Steve?” she asks.
Maybe it’s the way the moonlight is shining in her eyes, but I can’t be sure if what I see in them is desire or desperation. A little of both I can only assume.
“Listen, Janice,” I say. “It’s cold. It’s late. I need to get some rest if I’m gonna be able to keep a proper watch on the property.”
“What happens when you’re asleep?”
I pull out my screen-cracked smartphone with my free hand. “I installed a RING system. It will sound an alarm if an intruder shows his face.”
“And your gun,” she says like a question.
“Yeah,” I say, “and my gun. Hopefully, I never have to use it.”
She comes closer to me.
“I sure would like to see your gun,” she says.
“Maybe tomorrow I’ll let you hold it.”
“A woman can only hope.”
I open the door, step inside.
“Oh, and Steve,” she says.
“What is it, Janice?”
“You might want to lock the door,” she says, “if you plan on polishing your big stiff gun again.”
“I think it’s had enough polishing for one evening,” I say, closing the door, locking it like she suggests.
“Wow, Jobz,” I whisper to myself. “You really are a fuck up sometimes.”
I decide to celebrate my fuckedupness with one final drink for the road. The slumber road, that is. But I’ve already had enough alcohol today to qualify me for an all-expenses-paid, month-long stay at the Betty Ford detox facility. That said, I open the fridge, locate the quart carton of Lactose-Free non-fat milk, and pour myself a double shot.
Returning the carton to the icebox, I check my smartphone for any text messages that might have come in while I was touring Janice’s hothouse. A hothouse that was both hot with lust and deadly poison. Is it me, or have I walked onto the movie set of some old gothic Hollywood production where both the man and woman of the house appear every bit the privileged upper crust suburbanites they seem to be, but in reality live a life of quiet despair, alcoholism, philandering, and rampant fiscal irresponsibility. Or what the hell, maybe I just grew up with this pure-as-Ivory-soap TV image of Terry McGovern and today that image has been officially shattered.
I sip my milk, look for any texts that might have come through from Henry or Miller. Ok, who the hell am I fooling? I just want to know if Kate texted me. Maybe her date isn’t going so well. Maybe she can’t help but think of me even when in the presence of another man. Maybe she went home early, and now has no choice but to toss and turn in her bed while visions of Steve Jobz fill her brain.
Keep dreaming, Jobz . . .
I down the rest of my milk in one swift pull, set myself down on the bed, rest the back of my head on the pillow. Closing my eyes, I wait for the onslaught of sleep. It comes to me faster than I ever anticipated
In the dream, I see myself walking out the cottage door. It’s no longer night, but daytime. The winter is somehow over, almost like those climate change freaks are right after all, and an upstate February winter has turned into a beautiful summer’s day. Hey, if this is what the Greenhouse Effect is all about, bring it on.
I walk around the back of the big house to the hothouse attached to its side. I enter through the door. Closing the door behind me, I hear the lock engage. Suddenly, what had been daytime turns to night. The overhead heat lamps are turned off. The space is not hot at all but freezing. My teeth are chattering, and my bones feel brittle. My breath exhales as clouds of thick vapor. I feel for a flashlight on the worktable to my right. When I locate one, I depress the switch, shine the light on the room.
The plants are all dead. The roses, the lilacs, the hydrangeas, all of them have drooped and are covered with a coating of ice. The once red roses are now black. I take a step forward, make my way down the first aisle until I come to the corridor that runs perpendicular to it. I sense the presence of another human being, and I call out.
“Hello?!”
But no one answers.
I shine the flashlight to the right. I see no one. Nothing but dead plants. But when I shine the light to my left, I see something that makes me catatonic with fear. The English Bloom plant has grown to be as big as an adult human being. It has a head. The head belongs to Janice. The plant's many stems are wrapped around someone. It’s Terry. His eyes are wide open, his mouth agape. He’s dying. Janice sees me, her entire plant body quivering and trembling. She releases a laugh that slices through me like a cold knife. It’s not the laugh of a woman at all, but instead, a highly pitched alarm . . .
When I wake up, I’m drenched in a cold sweat. I hear something. It’s the same noise I heard in my dream. My nightmare. I sit up, flip on the bedside lamp. My smartphone. It’s lit up.
“Jesus, the alarm,” I say, shaking the cobwebs from my head.
Gazing at the digital screen, I see that the RING app is indicating an intruder is present. This is it. The real deal.
I jump out of bed, grab my gun. Opening the door, I step out into the cold darkness, make my way quickly along the wooded southern perimeter to the front property. I see the black sedan. It’s parked on the frozen lawn. The trunk is open, and I spot a man dressed all in black who’s just dumped something onto the frozen ground. He doesn’t see me as he slams the trunk closed, gets back behind the wheel, takes off.
Aiming the pistol barrel at the car, I punch the trigger. But the damn safety is on. Thumbing the safety off, it’s already too late. The car has already disappeared into the dark of night.
The house’s front door opens. It’s Terry.
“I heard something,” he says. He’s wearing a dark blue robe over his pajamas, leather slippers on his feet. “Was it Anatoly?”
“Stay back,” I say, tiptoeing to what appears to be a small pile constructed of something red. Blood red. It’s tough to tell what it is, even on the spot-lit front lawn. “It could be dangerous.”
“Be careful, Jobz,” he says. That’s when I see Janice. She too is wearing a robe. She’s standing beside her husband, close to him.
What the hell am I doing? I’m just a simple screw up who works for the State Unemployment Insurance Fraud Agency, and now I’m about to put my life at risk by taking an up close and personal look at whatever Anatoly Brezinski, The Flower Man himself, just deposited on the front lawn. But then, I was a cop once, and I can’t seem to quit being a cop, even if the cops quit me.
When I reach the pile, what I see sends
shivers up my spine. It’s a pile of rose heads.
“What the hell is it?” Terry asks.
“Flowers,” I say, slipping the semi-automatic into my pant waist. “Roses. Just the heads.”
My eyes focused on the flower pile, I make something out under the rose petals. Something that’s not red. More like brown, or black. Retrieving my cell phone once more, I thumb the flashlight app. I shine the bright light on the pile, and the brown/black object becomes more visible. It’s wavy and somewhat thick, like a piece of clothing maybe, or a cloth.
Taking a knee, I begin to remove the rose heads, one by one, placing them to the side onto the frozen solid ground.
“What is it?” Janice barks. “What’s going on, Steve?”
I peel off a couple more roses, then a couple more. That’s when I see hair. Brunette hair. I touch the hair, and when I pull back my fingers, they are stained with something. Blood.
Warm, fresh blood.
Heart pounds, brain floods with adrenaline. My breathing goes shallow, rapid. I know I should run, but I can’t help myself. I keep digging, keep mining through the mound of roses, like this pile and what they are concealing was my destiny all along.
“Jobz!” Terry shouts. “Speak to us, Jobz. What the hell is going on?”
Then, I remove one more rose. That’s all it takes to see the eye. The wide open brown eye. I remove another rose, and another. I see a second eye and a nose. It’s a face that’s stained with droplets and streaks of blood. Below the nose is a mouth that’s agape, the tongue protruding from the thick pale lips. The face belongs to a head that, like the rose heads, has been severed.
I thrust myself back onto my bottom. It’s like a power far greater than me has shoved me violently backward.
“Oh, dear God in heaven,” I spit, my stomach turning, everything that it contains coming up on me.
When there’s nothing left to puke, I crab backward, putting as much distance as I can between the severed head and myself.
“My God, what is happening?!” Janice screams.
“Call 911,” I answer. “There’s been a homicide. A brutal homicide.”
Detective Miller and I stand in the driveway, in between several idling APD blue and whites, and an EMT van parked perpendicular to the garage, its open back bay facing the lawn. While a forensics team works the scene, snapping digital photos, dusting for prints, bagging the rose heads, the old detective and I sip coffee from cardboard cups and try to make sense out of Megan Barker’s brutal beheading.
“Tell me once more,” he says, after a time. “You were asleep when you heard the black sedan pull up.”
“Like I already told you, Miller,” I say, “I never heard the car. I heard an alarm.”
“Right,” he says. “The RING home security system you installed this afternoon.”
“Yes, it can notify you via alarm in case of a breach. It alerted me right out of one nightmare so that I would have no choice but to tend to another nightmare.”
Miller sips his coffee. “Guess it goes without saying that Anatoly is sending a direct message to Terry in the form of murdering his lawyer.”
“Gee, you think so, boss? So, when are you finally gonna pick him up?”
“The rest of Megan’s body—her torso—was discovered inside her downtown office, laid out on the couch. The blood was everywhere. By the looks of it, she wasn’t murdered in her office but transported there from the place where they cut her head off. I’m guessing whoever did the actual killing didn’t have the slightest clue what he was doing.”
“But what about The Flower Man? How come he’s not in custody already?”
“We’ve already been to see him. He’s got a rock-solid alibi.”
A jolt of anger runs up and down my spine.
“Are you kidding me? He just beheaded a beautiful woman, for Christ’s sakes, Miller.”
He pauses as a stretcher is rolled out to the site of Megan’s remains. God knows where her torso was dumped. The stretcher is collapsed to ground level while several EMTs position themselves around the now rubber sheet-covered head.
“I know that. You know that. God knows that. Hell, even Terry and Janice know that. But what we have here is a grisly crime committed by a monster who can lawyer up and tie up the court system for years. Or . . .”
He allows his thought to trail off while just one of the EMTs lifts the head, sets it down onto the gurney. I stare down into my black coffee, toss it out onto the barren lawn.
“Or what?” I say, my tone as sour as the taste in my mouth.
“Or one of us, someone who is not officially a cop, can infiltrate The Flower Man’s world, maybe gather some evidence—physical evidence—that might actually tie him directly to this murder.”
“Maybe you can use the video from the RING device.”
“You can’t make out a face in the video. Just a big man wearing black. We need something better. Some direct evidence, not circumstantial open-to-interpretation shit.”
“What about all those roses, Miller?”
“What about them?”
“Can’t they be connected directly to The Flower Man?”
“He doesn’t grow his own roses, Jobz,” he says, sipping his coffee, but then like me, tossing what’s left of it onto the lawn. “They are provided to him by a distributor. And no doubt whoever severed them from their stems was accompanied by one of his many undocumented Russian lackeys.”
“I guess what you’re telling me is that The Flower Man ain’t stupid.”
“No, he’s not,” Miller says. “And Terry McGovern? His wife? What about them?”
“They’re in this up to their eyeballs. In what capacity exactly, I’m not sure, Miller.”
“I’ll need you to maintain your vigil here while you also pay Anatoly a visit.”
“Again, the problem of being in two places at once.”
“You have that RING system. But I get what you’re saying, Jobz. That severed head just raised the stakes big time. I’m gonna give you somebody to help you watch the joint.”
“Who?”
“You’ll know him when you see him because he’ll be driving one of those.” Cocking his head in the direction of the APD blue and white cruisers. Then, “You’d better get back in the house. Janice must be a mess. Terry too.”
I think about earlier tonight, or should I say yesterday evening, having wild sex with Megan Barker on her own couch. How is it possible that she’s gone now?
Miller takes a step or two toward the cruisers. But then stops, turns back to me.
“Oh, Jobz,” he says, reaching into his pocket, pulling out a business card. “You saw her yesterday afternoon, didn’t you?”
My stomach feels like it’s been kicked with a steel-toed jackboot.
“I wanted to interview her about the McGoverns.”
“I see,” he says. “They’ll want to interview you about it. The cops. My cops. I can’t stop them from doing their jobs.”
“I know. I’ve got nothing to hide. Whenever they wanna talk, they know where to find me.”
“It will probably happen after the autopsy. They’ll want to see if she was having relations with anyone prior to her murder. Physical relations.”
I feel like I might throw up again.
“I get it, Miller,” I say.
“No, Jobz, you really don’t get it. Nobody gets it. Not even me.”
All I can manage is a nod before I turn, head back into the house.
“We need to get the hell out of here before that Russian bastard kills us all.” Janice panicked. She’s seated at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette, her hand trembling, a glass of whiskey set on the table within reach. “Anatoly has gone too far this time. I told you this infernal lawsuit was going to be trouble. Big trouble.” Shaking her head bitterly. “And to think we sponsored he and his daughter for their citizenship.”
And to think you’ve been sleeping with this animal . . .
“Calm yourself, Janice,�
� the bathrobed Terry insists while sipping on his own glass of whiskey. “The man is dangerous, and soon he will be in police custody.”
“Not so fast,” I say, grabbing a glass from the cabinet over the sink, bringing it with me back to the table, pouring myself a shot. “According to Miller, Anatoly Brezinski has a rock-solid alibi. Seems he’s been out to dinner all evening with friends. And from there he went to bed. His wife will attest to that.”
“She’s lying,” Janice says.
“Or maybe he killed poor Megan earlier in the day.”
“No,” I say. “He didn’t.”
“How do you know?” Terry says.
I drink some whiskey. “Because I paid her a visit earlier yesterday evening. Trust me, she was very much alive.”
“What could you possibly have to talk about?” Terry inquires.
“You, naturally. Your lawsuit. Its veracity.”
Janice looks right at me, then at Terry, and back to me again.
“She wanted to drop it, didn’t she?” she asks. “Megan thought it was an unwinnable bullshit suit instigated by a man who can’t bear to part with his ego.”
I nod.
The Flower Man Page 12
