Die Smiling

by Linda Ladd

  Bud kept his eyes on the road. “She’s actin’ like nothing happened, happy almost. Maybe doin’ it was good for her, who knows? It seems to me like she’s puttin’ on a big act.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “Who knows?”

  “I don’t see how she got through it without breaking down.”

  “Everybody grieves differently, right?”

  Right. And did I ever know it. Brianna took the cake, if you asked me, but Bud didn’t ask me so I kept my mouth shut.

  Walter Costin lived in a fairly new apartment complex in Camdenton, one by the name of Berkshire Gardens, and one that had tennis courts, a swimming pool, and a little picturesque residential lake with a jogging path around it, not to mention lots of serpentine lanes through well-lit parking lots and flower beds full of red tulips and yellow daffodils. Seemed a little on the pricey side for a student/funeral parlor night man, now didn’t it?

  We got there a few minutes later. Bud didn’t want to wait in the car for the warrant to show up, and neither did I. Costin had a first-floor unit, all dark and unwelcoming, and we approached it, guns drawn, as if Osama bin Laden was holed up inside. No car, nobody answered the door, but a few of the neighbors were peeking out their windows, finger hovering over 911, no doubt.

  Bud took off to the manager’s office to flash his credentials, and I stayed with weapon trained on the door in case Walter threw it open and invited me in for tea and Nazi pastries. By the time, Bud got back with the manager, our colleague Doug Obion had shown up, signed warrant in hand. Charlie can move fast when the case demands it. I told Obion to stick around outside for backup, then handed the manager the official papers. He unlocked the door and flipped on the light, and Bud and I entered, weapons galore and wary as hell.

  The place checked out clear, so we left Obion outside watching the parking lot for Walter’s arrival and began our search. It looked like Costin didn’t have a lot of furniture, or many other possessions, for that matter, or else he’d cleaned out the place after our little interview downtown. I had a sneaking suspicion, however, that he lived somewhere else and used this address to con unsuspecting employers and law enforcement officers. He was a pretty smart cookie if he managed to get down to Florida, slice up Vasquez’s face, and leave him for dead, then beat it back here in time for that interview we had with him. But he could’ve done it; he’d had enough time.

  I told Obion to get hold of Lohman’s Funeral Home and find out if Costin had quit his job or not. I had a feeling he was long gone by now. Obion was back quick enough with the news that Costin had stopped showing up a couple of days ago. Lohman didn’t know where he was. Bud was tossing the kitchen cabinets, taking out his frustration on some unfortunate brass hinges, but I headed for the telephone answering machine, which was my investigatory wont. Glad to see it had both Caller ID and an answering machine with three messages blinking, I pressed the button. The first one came up, a hang up, and I had a feeling they all would be hang ups. I was proved wrong, however, when the second one was his stripper girlfriend’s whiny voice wanting to know where he was and why he’d stood her up. Number three, however, hit the jackpot.

  “We gotta talk. You know where. We’ll both be there.”

  That was it, but funniest thing, it was Shaggy Becker’s voice, clear as day. Bud and I looked at each other, and then I punched back through the ID listings. “He called from the jail.”

  Bud slammed a cabinet door. “C’mon, let’s go. Shaggy knows a helluva lot more than he’s sayin’, and he’s going to tell us the truth this time, if I have to beat it outta him. Look, I gotta go back to the Lodge and pick up Bri. I’ll run her home and meet you downtown.”

  “Okay. I’ll nose around here some more. Shaggy’s not going anywhere.”

  I watched Bud get out his cell and dial up Brianna. But see what I mean about Bud’s mood? Temper, temper, my, my, and I thought I was bad about that sort of thing.

  Sisterly Love

  The older one did as the boy said, although her new boyfriend tried to talk her out of breaking it off with him, even refused to leave when she asked him to. He didn’t understand, and she was afraid to tell him the truth, afraid of what the boy would do. And her fears were well founded. One day her boyfriend just went missing and no one knew where he was. He simply disappeared. And she knew, she knew the boy had killed him, even before the day the present was left at her front door.

  It was a pretty pink gift bag with three long-stemmed carnations decorating the front, and as she pushed aside the crumpled white tissue paper, she was filled with cold dread. When she saw the blood and severed lips lying in the bottom, she ran to the bathroom and vomited. She burned the bag with the lips inside, and when her new boyfriend’s family came around looking for him, she told them that he had just not shown up one day, that she didn’t know where he was, that she feared for his life, and they believed her. Then his body was discovered, and even when it was, the police didn’t come around to question her. They had no leads, no idea who could’ve done such a terrible thing. The older one knew, she knew in her heart that the boy had killed him, but there wasn’t anything she could do about it, not with his threats to harm Bubby and her. He had proved himself capable of cold-blooded murder more than once. He’d kill them both in the blink of an eye. He had no conscience, no sense of right and wrong. He had become the personification of evil.

  That’s when she made the decision. She had to get away and take Bubby with her. They had to flee the boy’s evil influence and go into hiding. But she told the boy that she realized how much she loved him now and told him everything was back the same between them, just the way he wanted, but all the while she suffered his attentions, she planned her getaway. Sissy moved into her house, too, but she didn’t tell Sissy because Sissy was loyal to the boy, in love with him. Sissy would still do anything for him; Sissy would probably like it when the older one was gone and no longer competition for his affections. Then Sissy would have him to herself, and eventually, Sissy would probably die.

  Bubby had just turned eighteen and was thinking of going to college. He was ready to move out of their adoptive parents’ house, anyway, because the two doctors wanted to move their practices to Seattle and settle there with the twins. All their older children already were out on their own, but they truly loved Bubby and begged him to go along. Once she’d made her escape plan, the older one talked privately to Bubby and told him that she was going to disappear and that he needed to do the same. She told him about her boyfriend and that she would send him enough money to find a safe place where he could go to school and make a new life. He refused at first, but she told him that once he was settled somewhere, she would escape and join him and they could be together. Then they would be safe from the boy and try to forget all the terrible things that had happened in their childhood.

  Bubby agreed to go, and one day he just left home and told the parents that he was going off to travel the world and decide what he wanted to do and not to worry, that he would be all right. Nobody knew where he went. The older one pretended that she was as shocked as Sissy and the boy at his decision, but inside she felt nothing but relief. Bubby was out of danger, out of the boy’s evil clutches, and soon she would be, too. So began her own secret plan to escape. She bided her time, thought out everything in detail, planned for every contingency, and made sure the boy and Sissy had no idea what she had in mind.

  But she hated the boy now, hated him for all the things he’d done, for killing her boyfriend, who’d done nothing but love her. She hated looking at him, hating it when he forced her into his bed, but she smiled and pretended she loved him again. She continued with school, as if nothing happened, got her degree and made some money, and all the while she kept in touch with Bubby on the sly.

  Then the day came. Bubby had prepared the way, and he’d chosen a wonderful place, a place she knew a little bit about, but where nobody would think to look for them. He was happy there, had a good job, one he loved and
was very good at. She waited until the boy and Sissy went out clubbing one night, and then she left everything as it was and walked out the door forever.

  Eighteen

  I poked around the apartment for a while and found a few things, one of which was an old photograph of some kids, two boys and four girls. I recognized Walter as the oldest in the group right off the bat. They were standing in front of what looked like an indoor swimming pool. The other boy in the picture looked a hell of a lot like a miniature Shaggy Becker. One more good reason to sweat Shaggy in his cell, I must say. As much as I didn’t like the idea, Shaggy was shaping up as a suspect or accomplice or person of interest, at the very least.

  I nosed through some books and notebooks, found nothing, except that Walter Costin liked Shakespeare, which fit rather nicely with our Smiley Villain quote. I pulled the mattress off the bed and almost missed the piece of clear tape that blended into the white mattress pad. I ripped it off and found that somebody had cut away about a four-by-six-inch square of padding. I lifted it out and found three videotapes secreted inside. I smiled, pleased as punch, and pulled them out. Plain VHS tapes, no writing, no labels, but highly suspicious.

  I searched the apartment for a cassette player, found none, but was pretty sure we would find whatever Costin was hiding in his bed interesting, to say the least. Then again, he filmed himself and his girlfriend having sex at the funeral home and didn’t mind showing it on TV so maybe he made a habit of videotaping unsuspecting women. If so, we’d nail him for that, too.

  After about an hour, I tried to put in a call to Bud and tell him about the tapes but found my cell on low charge. I took Obion’s car with a promise to have it returned as soon as I reached the sheriff’s office, then I left him on guard at the Berkshire Gardens, in case Walter Costin was stupid enough to show up there, which I was pretty sure he wasn’t unless the videotapes meant something special and/or incriminating to him. I plugged my cell phone in the car charger and drove downtown, wondering if I really wanted to know how much Shaggy was involved in this case. He just wasn’t the type to kill somebody, nobody could make me believe that, and I never pegged him as the type to protect a guilty party, either. Especially a killer like Costin, if indeed, Costin was the killer. But we were getting close now, to some piece of the puzzle that would hopefully ignite a lightbulb inside my head and I could say, “You’re busted, freakshow.”

  The sheriff’s office was pretty much deserted this late at night. Just a couple of dispatchers at the duty desk and the jailors downstairs. Charlie hadn’t come in, must’ve made his call to the judge from home. I made sure Obion’s squad car got back to him, and then I went upstairs and plugged in the VCR in our conference room. I chucked in the first tape and found it was another porno, all right. This one wasn’t semidark like the one Charlie had shown us. This one had lights set up all around. This one was of Hilde Swensen and Walter Costin getting into some serious S and M stuff, with whips and belts and black leather restraints. Enough to bring blood, but they were both enjoying it, no doubt about it. The tape went to static for about ten seconds, then I put in the second tape.

  Another sex scene began, but this time it was Brianna and Walter Costin. Good God, what the hell’s going on with these people? This one was much more tender, a couple in a hayloft, and they were really young, too, not much more than teenagers, it looked like. They kept saying how much they loved each other, but I’d seen enough to get the drift. I punched Eject and pushed in number three, wondering who Walter’s next lover would be. This time it was a darkened bedroom with a large man lying on a bed snoring, but it wasn’t Walter.

  There was some low whispering in the background, and then the light on the camera came on and focused on the man. Three children appeared around the bed, but their faces were partially shadowed and I couldn’t tell for sure who they were but my skin crawled because the tallest one looked a whole helluva lot like Brianna Swensen. She picked up a pillow and put it over the man’s face. The other two leaned on it and helped her press it down, then all three calmly looked into the camera lens and smothered the guy until he was dead. The tape went to static, and shocked, I stared at it until the tape hit the end and began to rewind.

  I had just witnessed a snuff film and/or an actual murder, and a cold-blooded, deliberate one, at that, one perpetrated by a bunch of kids. I frowned, tried to think how all this fit together. Was the other girl Hilde? The boy, Shaggy? That didn’t make a lick of sense, but everything pointed to it. Still I couldn’t believe any of them would kill somebody like that, not now, much less when they were children.

  Frowning, I took the three tapes and headed down the steps to the county jail, in too much a hurry to use the prisoner elevator. A deputy let me in the heavy steel door, and then led me back to Shaggy’s cell block. Surprisingly, Bud was already there. I thought it’d take him more time to get Brianna home and tranquilized. Shaggy was lying in his bunk fully clothed, a little odd in itself, but who knows, maybe Shaggy always slept in his clothes. After all, it was Shaggy I was talking about.

  Bud stood outside the bars. He didn’t mince words. “Okay, Shaggy, I’ve had enough of this shit. We served a warrant on Walter Costin’s place and found your message on his answering machine. What’s going on between you and him? Where were you plannin’ to meet him?”

  Shaggy didn’t looked surprised by the news, which surprised me. Something was wrong with this whole scenario, something I couldn’t put my finger on, but made me damn nervous. He just stared at me, then looked at the tapes I was holding. He said, “What’re those tapes? You find those at Costin’s house?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “Just curious.”

  “I found them hidden in Costin’s mattress, as a matter of fact. You know anything about them?”

  He sat up quickly. “You watch them?”

  “I sure did. You in one of them, Shaggy?”

  “What tapes?” That was Bud.

  “There’s a couple of sex tapes, one with Costin and Hilde, and I’m sorry, Bud, but one’s of Costin and Brianna, when they were really young.”

  “What the hell?” said Bud.

  “And one looks suspiciously like a snuff film. But since it’s three juves smothering a guy, I think it’s probably some kind of homemade horror movie they did for laughs.”

  “What the hell?” Bud said again.

  Shaggy went white and retreated to the corner of his cell, as far away from us as he could get.

  “Are you the little boy in it, Shaggy? Or is that Walter Costin?”

  Shaggy put his hands over his face and began to rock back and forth. Bud and I looked at each other, and then Bud grabbed hold of the bars, his voice tight but controlled.

  “Shaggy, you gotta stop this and be up front with us. We’re tryin’ to find out what went down. We know you’re involved with Costin. He’s the perp, isn’t he? He killed Hilde, didn’t he? Why are you protectin’ him?”

  “I don’t know anything.”

  “Bullshit.” That was me. Very pissed, to be sure.

  Maybe Bud and I should play some good cop/bad cop like in all the movies. Problem was, Shaggy knew us both too well not to see through that bluff. And at the moment, we’d both be the bad cop, anyway.

  Bud said, “Where’s Costin now? You gotta tell us.”

  “Why should I?”

  I had to admit; this innocent act of Shag’s was wearing pretty damn thin.

  “Let me have him alone for a minute,” Bud said, not looking at me.

  I’d never seen Bud act like this before. He wasn’t even trying to be impartial anymore. He needed to be taken off the case, oh, yeah.

  “What’re you gonna do, Bud? Beat him with a rubber hose?” I laughed. Ha ha, but I sure as hell hoped not.

  Bud gave me a look that told me to get real. I believed it and decided that maybe he had some kind of trick up his sleeve that would entice Shaggy to spill his guts. It went against my grain to walk out, even for a few minutes, but I played alo
ng. Bud was pretty good at stuff like this, even when he was enraged. He had calmed considerably now, though. His teeth weren’t even gritted.

  “Okay, I’m gonna go upstairs and get us some coffee and check in with Obion at Costin’s apartment. See if he’s seen anything. Play nice, the two of you. Remember, we’re all friends here.”

  Or used to be.

  I went for the coffee, called Obion, and found out that all was quiet at the Berkshire Gardens, which was about what I expected. Walter Costin had been smart enough to fly the coop, and all we had to do now was get Shaggy to tell us where he was supposed to meet him. And why. And when. And who had killed who in that snuff tape.

  Afraid to leave them alone too long, I waited five more minutes and then entered the cell block again. Bud had the keys from the jailor and was unlocking Shaggy’s cell. That didn’t appear a good idea to me.

  “What the hell are you doing, Bud?”

  “He’s gonna show us where Costin’s holed up.”

  “You got the sheriff’s okay on this, I take it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Like hell you do.”

  The jailor was sitting in the next room, ignoring us, reading a Hotrod magazine. I could see him through the observation window. He didn’t seem to notice that Bud had the keys and was unlocking his prisoner. I frowned.

  “Bud, this is a stupid idea.”

  Now he was inside the cell, snapping handcuffs on Shaggy’s wrists. “He won’t tell me here, but he said he’ll show me.”

  Shaggy said, “I’ll tell you everything I know, but only if I go along for the ride. You couldn’t find the place, anyway. It’s way out in the sticks.”

  I hesitated. “We need Charlie’s permission to do something like this.”

  “He’s gonna show us where Costin’s supposed to meet him, Claire. What’s the matter with you?”

  “What’s the matter with you? This is throwing procedure to hell. We can get our badges pulled for this. I’m not willing to do that.”