by Somer Canon
I sighed loudly and started taking some notes on a notepad that I kept in my bag. I usually prefer to take my notes digitally, but my thoughts tend to be more linear if I actually write them out, and this story was too easy to get screwed up. By this point I knew that I had to pretend to be ignorant of who was committing these murders and keep writing as if the assumption was that it was a perfectly mortal human being who had severe rage issues. I started gabbing at Terry to keep him from noticing my agitation.
“It’s odd that you all don’t do more digital data input. Like, it’s weird that you have all of these open files just stashed everywhere. A fire would wipe out your whole system, or a crazy person with a gun and a big van could just take it, right?” I rambled.
“We do input into a secure database that is housed off of the premises,” Terry said warmly. “Honestly, the paper part is for the older fellas who aren’t very tech savvy and there are hard-copy things that are easier to handle rather than the cold stuff on a computer screen. You can handle and hold those photos and get really close looks whereas the ones that were scanned into the database just don’t have the hard cold evidence feel to them.”
I smiled at him, liking his answer. He busied himself while I finished making notes. He had quietly moved the file back to its place in the wall. I shouldn’t have been looking at some of it and he was doing me a big favor by helping. A small part of me whispered in the back of my brain that he might tell Stephanie what I had gathered that day. I didn’t fret over it because if she had failed to get at that information at that point, well, she was shitty at her job and was leaning too hard on being helped. Not my problem.
I left not long after, giving Terry a kiss on the cheek and a covert pat on the ass on my way out. I had an appointment at a McDonald’s to interview Bridget Maditz, the girlfriend of the guy I was calling The Soap Victim, Martin Hamrick. I had many questions for Ms. Maditz, especially in light of what Grenadine had told me about her personal bar of Martin soap. How I was going to get any details out of her concerning that was beyond me. I had spent hours thinking about it and couldn’t get around the fact that the murderer confided in me about the soap and unless I told Ms. Maditz that, I was going to have to hope for the unlikely.
I came upon Bridget Maditz sitting in a booth that was decorated to resemble a somber café as opposed to the brightly colored plastic looking restaurants of my youth. She was sipping a large, iced coffee and looking around her nervously, her eyes darting about the restaurant. She had the appearance of a frazzled pink Muppet with her frizzy orange hair and Winnie the Pooh tank top. I gave her a small wave with a warm smile on my face and went to the register to order a Diet Coke. When I had my drink, I made my way to her booth. She watched me approach uncomfortably and fidgeted, making the vinyl seat make embarrassing sounds under her.
“Ms. Maditz,” I said as congenially as I could manage. “Thank you so much for meeting me. Can I get you anything to eat? It is nearly lunch time.”
I had to offer. It made me look generous and friendly. I hoped she’d say no. I was still full from all of the confections at the police station and I didn’t want to have to skip dinner in order to maintain my calorie limit.
“No thank you,” she said softly. She had a sweet, high pitched voice.
“Alright then, but you let me know if that changes, okay? I’ll try not to take up too much of your time. Now let me begin this by saying how very sorry I am for your loss. I can’t imagine how hard it has been on you losing someone so close to you. You have my sympathies,” I said, observing the formalities as an icebreaker.
She nodded simply, lowering her eyes and taking an awkward drink of her beverage. I noticed that her fingernails were short and clean and I felt myself sink back into the booth, relaxing more by the second.
I went through my usual spiel with getting her permission to record the interview and take her photograph. She declined the photograph, but agreed to the voice recorder, so when my small voice recorder was sitting atop the table between us, I took out my notebook with prepared questions and pulled out a pencil.
“Can you tell me about how you found out about what happened to Martin?” I asked.
“The police came to my door. They told me that he had checked into a motel and they’d found his clothes and a note that made them believe that something happened to him. They didn’t know about the soap for sure yet and they didn’t say nothing to me about it. When they knew for sure about the soap, they came and gave me their condolences,” she answered. I could tell that she had told that story before by the way her voice had gone monotone.
“How long had he been missing before the police came to you the first time?” I asked.
“Not long enough for me to really start worrying about him,” Bridget answered coolly.
“Can you please try to elaborate?” I asked.
“The man was usually feet up in a bottle if you know what I mean. He’d go on benders and crash on couches or sleep in his car. It wasn’t weird for him not to come home at night. Him going to a motel? That was weird. He was a cheap bastard and never spent money on nothing except Wild Turkey and Bud.” She got a little heated there at the end. I decided to prod about the motel.
“Were you told for certain whether or not he had someone with him when he checked into the motel?” I asked.
“No. I mean, he had to either have had someone with him or was going to meet someone. Son of a bitch. He had more shortcomings than a person ought to, but I never pegged him for a cheater,” she said angrily.
I nodded sympathetically. And I meant it. It’s not fun to be blindsided like that.
She leaned forward, elbows on the table and whispered to me.
“He was a bad man,” she breathed. “He would get in the drink and beat me. And sometimes he made me do sex things that were bad.”
I leaned forward to meet her, a look of feigned concern on my face.
“Like what?” I whispered back.
She looked down for a minute, thinking about whether or not to tell me.
“He’d make me lay down naked in the bathtub and he’d…” she paused.
Just say it, I thought, knowing what was coming.
“He’d go to the bathroom all over me,” she said, her eyes lowered and shame sending a flame of red creeping up her neck and into her face.
I reached out and patted her hand, sincerely feeling sorry for her.
“That must have been horrible,” I said.
“It was,” she answered. “He would aim for my face and try to get me to open my mouth. But it was awful. It would get in my eyes and go up my nose and it’s just a smell that would be inside of my head for hours after.”
I grimaced. My head would not be able to take that kind of torture. I’d bathe in bleach and kill the guy in his sleep.
“You’d need a pretty strong soap for that,” I blurted. I didn’t mean to say it and I was certain that she wouldn’t suspect that I knew anything, but I knew better than to blurt. Interviewers do not blurt.
“Yeah,” she said, smiling sideways and looking uncomfortable. “Any soap will do, though.”
“Well I think that that is all that I need from you Ms. Maditz,” I said, clicking the voice recorder off. “I’d like to thank you again for giving me your time and I truly am sorry for your loss even though, if you’ll excuse me for saying this, it sounds like life is looking a bit brighter for you now that it’s all over.”
“It’s sad that that’s the case,” she said, getting up from the booth. “But it is. Life will be better for me now.”
She smiled at me and turned and walked out of the McDonald’s. I watched her go, nodding in agreement. After talking to Bridget Maditz, I was glad that Martin Hamrick had died. Usually, I was pretty good at maintaining a sense of detachment from the crimes that I wrote about. Every once in a while, one would get under my skin and I would feel a deep pain and sympathy for the victim and their families that it would form a hard ball in my gut and Anais woul
d have to take over for a while. I didn’t know much about Martin Hamrick, and being someone who profiles murderers, it’s my job to look at all of the angles of the human psyche to find reasons for this and that. For Martin Hamrick, I had no interest in that and only felt a sense of relief that the world was free of one more piss-poor excuse for a human being.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Why I drove to Grenadine’s pond, I have no idea. I was feeling tense and I didn’t want to be around any people. Aside from my hotel room, it was the most peaceful place that I could think of. I stayed in my car and ate a Fudge Mound, not willing to share anything with the batty fairy who lived…in the water? In a dimension accessed by the water? I didn’t know.
As I sat in my car, windows closed tightly and the air conditioner keeping me cool, I saw someone walking among the vegetation in my rearview mirror. Startled, I spun in my seat and saw Stephanie approaching my car. She was dressed in a sharply pressed pair of brown slacks and a maroon blouse that offset her olive complexion in a very becoming way.
She came up to my passenger side door and made a gesture with her hand like she was pulling up one of those old-style car door locks. I hit the button to unlock the door and she got in, sighing heavily as she settled in and slammed the door.
“You said you’d stay in touch,” she said lightly.
“I’ve been busy,” I said, frowning at her and leaning away, not sure what to expect.
“Busy fucking Terry,” she said. “Do you do this on all of your case files?”
I rolled my eyes and sat back heavily into my seat. Terry’s chattiness was a quirk that I did not appreciate in the least.
“I sort of thought you’d like to cooperate with me on this,” she said. “I’ve been happy to share what I know and since things are moving slowly, I would have appreciated a little wheel greasing from you.”
“Yeah, Terry told me that you were trying to get him to get some stuff out of me,” I said. I could use Terry’s big mouth to my advantage too. “I gab during sex, Stephanie, not after.”
I tried not to laugh at the amazing reaction that I got out of Stephanie. Her mouth was hanging open and her eyes were wide. Her mouth started working, trying to find something to say and I just sat staring back at her, biting the inside of my cheek. She surprised me when she reached behind my seat and grabbed my bag and jumped out of my car with it. I scurried after her, but she was running as hard as she could toward the pond. She turned and looked back at me and then twisted her upper body and swung as hard as she could and threw my bag at the pond. I screamed at her and watched helplessly as the bag that held all of my notes and the voice recorder headed for the serene brown water.
My bag didn’t hit the water. It didn’t hit anything. I watched it soar towards a watery death, and then Grenadine was standing next to me, handing my bag back to me. I screamed and jumped to the side, falling to the ground with a thud. The noise (and lack of a splash from my bag) caused Stephanie to spin to face me.
“That wasn’t nice, you petty thing,” Grenadine said to Stephanie. She was back in her Nummy Nellie form, the sunny blue bonnet crowning her head.
“No,” I said from the ground. “Go away! Don’t do this!”
“Shut up,” Grenadine snapped at me.
“What the hell?” Stephanie said, staying by the edge of the pond.
“Stephanie D’Agostino,” Grenadine purred. “Why are you bullying Christina Cunningham? And why are you throwing things at my nice clean pond?”
Instinct had me scrambling on my back away from the little girl who was advancing towards Stephanie. I was the only human that I knew of who had interacted with Grenadine in modern times who lived to tell the tale. And seeing how she was looking at Stephanie, I was worried that that trend was going to continue.
“Tsk tsk,” Grenadine said to Stephanie, shaking her head. “What a messy person you are, Stephanie.”
Grenadine turned to me and smiled. Her grayish-green teeth scared me as bad as her gross dirty talons. Reading my mind, Grenadine barked a laugh and put a demure hand over her mouth.
“She was planning on surprising Terry at work today,” Grenadine said to me. “She was going to seduce him. She was going to try to use sex to get answers out of him. She’s done it before. Terry is convinced that they are friends, but any time he feels conflicted about giving in to her demands, this woman uses sex to get it out of him.”
I looked at Stephanie and she was again wearing her gape-mouthed face of shock, staring at the little girl in the blue and white checkered dress.
“Honestly, Christina, I don’t know why you bother with that idiot,” Grenadine said, picking on Terry again.
Grenadine ran to Stephanie. Stephanie put her hands out before her and almost fell back into the pond. Grenadine had stopped right in front of Stephanie and was looking up into her face. She turned to me and smiled her decaying grin at me again.
“Would you like to see my stew pot, my little investigator?” she asked me.
“No,” I said, realizing I had been holding my breath, and I started panting to try to get oxygen going through me again.
“It’s a lovely stew pot, Christina,” Grenadine said. She turned and grabbed Stephanie by one of her wrists. Stephanie yipped in pain and tried to pull away. Grenadine pulled Stephanie down to face level and slapped Stephanie. Still holding Stephanie’s wrist, Grenadine turned and started walking the ten or so yards back to where I was lying.
“I haven’t had a guest for dinner in an age,” Grenadine said. When she reached me, she touched one of her taloned fingers to the tip of my nose.
I wasn’t sprawled out on a mossy piece of land by the pond anymore. I was seated at a honey-colored heavy wood table looking at an enormous blazing fireplace. I jumped and made a noise that sounded something like when you step on a cat.
I looked at my surroundings. I was in some sort of rustic dwelling with rough but clean stone floors and the walls had the same warm, honey-colored wood as the table. The fireplace was enormous. I could have walked into it standing completely upright and maybe even parked my small car inside of it. I recognized the smell of the place as the way Grenadine always smelled; wood smoke, green leaves, and cool clean air. It was warm and cozy and completely freaking delightful.
And of course, hanging from a hook, sitting just askew of the roaring fire was an enormous, shining brass stew pot. It wasn’t the rough black that I was expecting and seeing that glowing brass made me think of Christmas. Everything here managed to be simple, yet grand all at once.
I noticed Stephanie hanging by her hands from the ceiling in the corner farthest from the fireplace. The place sort of lost its charm then.
I got up as quietly as I could from the heavy wooden chair I was inexplicably plopped onto and made my way to Stephanie, a finger over my mouth gesturing for her to be quiet. Her face had gone an alarming shade of white and her eyes were darting all over the room in panic. I did a quick look around to make sure we were alone and then I reached up to try and get her hands free. She had her hands bound with what looked like a thin, gold-thread rope that was hung over a shiny brass hook hanging from the ceiling. I also noticed that there was a rough, heavy cloth sitting beneath Stephanie’s feet and I began to panic when I thought of the enormous brass stew pot.
“Just hold still and be as quiet as you can,” I whispered up into Stephanie’s face. She nodded quickly and whimpered.
I spun around and searched the room for something to cut the rope and I saw nothing. My mind raced, and I got an idea. I turned to Stephanie and got into her face again so that I could whisper closely and know that she was hearing me.
“I’m going to climb you,” I said to her. “I need to get a little bit higher to pull the rope tying your hands off of the hook up there and then we’ll get the fuck out of here, okay?”
Stephanie looked up at the hook and then looked down at me, scared out of her mind. That made two of us.
“Okay,” she said. “Please hurry.�
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I reached up and put my hands on her shoulders and lifted myself so that I could wrap my legs around her waist. I went a little too high and my thighs ended up gripping her ribs. She grunted and gasped from the squeezing, but I kept with it because getting her out of there was more important than making sure that she could breathe easier for a few seconds. I squeezed tight with my thighs and moved myself up so that I could slip the rope off of the hook, but it was too tight and wouldn’t move up quite enough. I cursed my stupidity and got down. Stephanie gasped as quietly as she could manage.
“I’m sorry, that was a really stupid idea,” I breathed at her. “I’m going to bring one of those chairs over here and you’re going to climb onto it and free your own hands, okay?”
“Yeah, okay. We should have done that first,” she said.
I ran to the table and tried to pick up one of the heavy wooden chairs, but it slipped from my grip and slammed onto the stone floor. I looked around frantically and tried again, struggling with the size and weight of the thing the whole way to Stephanie. I finally got it to her and she stepped up onto it and reached up to slip the rope off of the hook. I watched her jerk her hands once, twice, three times, each jerk getting more frantic.
“What?” I asked.
“It won’t come off!” she said.
“Just pull the loop off of the hook!” I said to her.
“What the fuck do you think I’m doing?” she spat down at me. “It gets tighter or something the closer it gets to the end of the hook and it won’t come off.”
“Okay, okay, let me look!” I said, climbing onto the chair with her and trying to get a look.
She was right. Whatever knot that had tied the thin, ribbon-like rope was designed to get tighter the more you pulled on it and by the time it had started sliding up the curve of the hook, it was too tight to move any further.
