Dead Memories (Carol Ann Baker Crime Book 2)

by Lissa Pelzer

  ‘As in, saw her go up to his room and stay there. Heard her refer to him as a friend.’

  ‘You tell that to the locals?’

  Davis cleared her throat. ‘Maybe I would have if they’d asked me about it.’

  ‘It’s like goddamn-amateur-hour up there.’

  ‘They’re just following their lines of investigation the way the book tells them.’

  ‘Well, the line they’re following is the one Alvin is feeding them, that Baker shot you, and Madison and Alvin’s case is looking better every day.’

  When Marquez said that, Davis knew it meant he was slowly coming around. She knew now was the time to act.

  She left a message for her doctor saying she need to be discharged, swept the greetings cards into the paper waste and then leaned forward on the window ledge above.

  From here, Davis could see the back of the Denny’s restaurant where she had sat with Carol Ann when she first ran into her at the film festival. She couldn’t help but re-evaluate her actions. Davis had convinced Carol Ann that going back to Miami and turning herself in, would be the best case scenario. All the facts would point to Bobby Alvin trafficking an underage girl across state lines and Judge Ramsey would be seen as her abuser. Carol Ann had been seventeen when she beat Judge Ramsey to death in his hotel room, with his own, handcrafted Japanese fertility symbol. It was obviously self-defense. A good prosecution team can make up anything they like, but it’s hard to ignore a birth certificate and a foot long wooden dildo.

  But something had gone wrong. In the last hours of Sunday, Carol Ann had backtracked hard, had gone off with Bobby Alvin and shot an innocent man in the head. Davis leaned her cheek against the glass. Yet again, with Carol Ann Baker, none of this made any sense.

  An hour later, her taxi dropped her off at a short stay apartment on the other side of town. Davis walked up the concrete path, put the key in the lock and pulled out her laptop to check for a Wi-Fi signal. As the wheel turned, she went through to the kitchen looking for the ground coffee promised by the letting agent, but abandoned it when she heard the familiar ping of her emails downloading.

  A hundred and seventy-plus unread emails trickled down the screen and she closed the window. She opened a new one, went to the National Crime Information Center and typed in her ID and password.

  When had they processed her suspension, Wednesday? The little wheel turned. Would she still have access? They were understaffed in Admin. Surely the small matter of adjusting accounts would take a week or two. But the bar stopped filling. The box came up.

  ‘Account Suspended.’

  With all the cutbacks and budgetary issues in their department, they still deemed it urgent to use the time and the resources necessary to immediately block her account.

  ‘Unbelievable,’ she said. ‘No wonder we’ve got problems...’

  Red Rider

  For the first time since the incident, Ralph ‘Red Rider’ Adams was on I-70 East crossing the border into Indiana. He was hauling a specialty load of prefabricated concrete up to a development in East Ontario, but according to his ELD, the timekeeper his company used to track driving hours, he was going to have to come off the road soon. That wasn’t great.

  His dealings with the cops over that Carol Ann Baker business had left him on edge for a few days. They’d gone through his Freightliner, looking for signs that the girl had been in there. They hadn’t found anything and an hour or so later, they’d concluded that he’d possibly been the victim of a malicious hoax call.

  But it had bugged him out and since then, other stuff had been rubbing him up the wrong way too.

  When he’d arrived back home, his wife hadn’t been in. And normally, that never happened. She knew when to expect him back and she waited in. He’d looked for a note and not found one. He’d called up her cell phone and found it was turned off. The house was deserted. There were no daughters like he’d told Carol Ann Baker when she showed up at his cab door. There had been daughters, once upon a time, but they lived with their mother. Red had no contact with them anymore.

  Then Red did something he hadn’t done in a good, long time. He got down on his knees and prayed. He was so unaccustomed to the act, that the floor hurt his knees and he felt like his hips weren’t designed to hold his back straight anymore. What the hell was wrong with him? He’d spent half his childhood praying. Some feelings surfaced – regret, deep shame – some other ideas. Then he heard a noise behind him and twisted around.

  ‘I didn’t hear you come in.’ His wife stood there looking down at him. She had a laundry basket under her arm. She’d been in the basement. ‘And what the heck are you doing, Red?’

  He’d told her that the castors on the bed were squeaking, got to his feet and kissed her. That was almost a month back.

  Now he was coming over the Indiana state line again and the little symbol for ‘berth’ had popped up on his phone and Red sighed. This was just too close to that weird little town to stop. Just this once, he’d risk a push, he’d tell the firm he couldn’t find a space to stop. He’d keep going another hour or so, just to get closer to Indianapolis. Anyway, there was a truck stop up that way with a nice restaurant and a full-service shower block.

  As he came up to the exit, he put his foot down. The Freightliner groaned as the speedometer climbed. And then something popped. He heard it all the way up in his cab. The truck started decelerating. Red put his foot down further, but the pedal had gone to sponge.

  He turned on his hazards and let the truck slide towards the exit. By the time he reached the bottom of the ramp, he’d lost all power. He pulled up on the side, as close to the edge of the road as he dared and put on the brakes.

  It could have been any number of things, an air intake issue, fuel line, or an injector leak. Either way, it meant two things, he was going to be late delivering and it was going to cost cash to put right.

  First things first, he got on the phone to his firm to let them know. They called up the recovery provider. After that, he took a look.

  He knew already, this was the exact exit he’d been made to get off last time, but he could hardly believe it. What were the odds? He’d ignored the alert and still he’d been pulled down the ramp. Someone up there must really want him to get off here. No doubt about it.

  After he’d got home last time, he’d looked up what was going on with this girl. The cops, who pulled him over, who pulled their weapons on him, had told him they were looking for a cop shooter. At the time, after those three guys had rough-housed him up against his own rig, he thought, ‘Good for you, Honey.’ Red didn’t like the cops more than most regular folk did. He’d got her name, done a search, seen her photo and recognized her face.

  Should he have told the cops that he had given her a ride, that she had run off somewhere around that motel? Why get involved if you didn’t need to, right? And the last thing he needed was cops sniffing around, asking questions, and taking prints even.

  Now he stared down the cracked up asphalt street and wondered what had happened to that girl. And a few moments later, a local pickup pulled up and a guy got out, and Red forgot about it and went over the issue with his vehicle.

  ‘Fuel line?’ the guy asked.

  ‘Could be,’ Red replied, not wanting to turn it into a debate.

  ‘You want to start her up, let me hear her running?’

  Red shook his head. ‘I’d rather get her straight to the shop.’

  ‘You reckon it’s not a roadside fix?’

  ‘That, it is not!’

  ‘Okay, Buddy. We’ll need to lose your trailer. I can probably get another truck out here to move it to somewhere safe.’

  ‘Okey Dokey.’

  It took another two hours to get it done, by which time it was closer to ten than to nine. The guy hinted more than once that he was missing a barbecue to do this and after they were done, Red knew there was only one decent thing to do.

  ‘Hey Buddy, looks like I’m eating alone tonight and as I’ve done m
essed up your meal too, how about you let me treat you someplace?’

  The guy didn’t seem too surprised by the offer and already had a restaurant in mind, so they got in his work truck and headed down the road.

  The guy’s name was Jerrod. He took him to a place with four TVs showing ESPN on mute. Red ordered a stacked bacon burger, and when Jerrod ordered a beer, Red took one too. The girl taking the order shimmied out with a genuinely, warm smile which gave Red the opportunity to say something pleasant about the town he’d been pulled down into.

  ‘Nice folk around here.’

  ‘Sure are.’ Jerrod was squinting. ‘Salt of the earth types. Old families. But you’re from California, right or is that only where the Freightliner is registered?’

  ‘I’m from out west, sure, but I’m no Californian. I was born in Idaho, right on the border. Met my wife on the road and moved on down there a couple of years back.’

  This wasn’t strictly true, but it was the truth he was using.

  ‘You ever been out west?’

  ‘Don’t take this the wrong way,’ Jerrod took a slug of his beer. ‘Never been and no interest in going. I see enough of that place on TV.’

  ‘If I wasn’t living there, if my wife wasn’t from there, I’d be saying the same thing.’ Red smiled and lifted his bottle to tap the bottom of Jerrod’s. And he watched the other man drain his beer.

  ‘Another?’

  ‘Sure. Why not?’

  The girl was quick with the beers and Red had to hurry to empty his so she could take it away.

  Jerrod had already taken a drink when he said, ‘Not that this place is anything to get excited about. Nothing and whole bunch more nothing ever happens around here.’

  Red smiled. ‘That can be a good thing.’

  ‘I guess.’

  For a few moments neither said anything, both turned around and looked up at the TVs as a bloopers reel from last season’s NBA went around.

  Then Jerrod said, ‘Except car crashes. We get car crashes. That’s what passes for sport around here.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I reckon we do them pretty good. We had one a few weeks back, just down from here. Some stoned kid ran a cop car off the road and managed to take out a girl walking along at the same time.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘The girl’s still stuck up in the hospital with... What’s it called when you can’t remember nothing?

  ‘Amnesia?’

  ‘Yeah. But they reckon she’ll live.’

  ‘That’s good. She got lucky.’

  ‘The guy that hit her, he got lucky. If she’d gone and died.’

  ‘For sure.’

  Their burgers arrived and Jerrod started in on his like he was in a hurry to get somewhere, but it was after ten by then, so probably, he just had a hunger on him.

  ‘But honestly, Chad Purcell will end up behind bars sooner or later.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Chad Purcell? He’s the kid who hit the cop and the girl. I know his big sister.’ Jerrod smirked. ‘If you know what I mean?’

  ‘I think I do.’

  ‘But then again, everyone knows her.’ And his face dropped a little. ‘But you know what, that same night, that he ran into that girl, the oldest Snell boy…’ Here Jerrod dropped his voice and came in across the table towards Red. ‘He got shot, right in the head,’ and he put his two fingers between the eyes, ‘by one of his boys down at the trailer park. Everyone reckons it was an accident, that they were playing a game of Russian roulette and it went wrong, but they won’t admit it.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘They weren’t allowed to have guns around.’

  ‘What’s up with that, they all felons?’

  Jerrod pursed his lips like this was said in bad taste. ‘They’re not felons, just their pop took against some of his own a few years back and decided they were all going to go together.’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘He shot his wife. She’d been cheating on him. Shot his cousin as he was the one she’d been cheating on him with, and then shot himself.’

  Red took a sip of beer and shook his head.

  ‘When it comes to guns, that family is stupid. Some people think it’s in their blood. So the city got that trailer park put within a gun-free zone, on account that the high school owns grounds nearby. They gave up their permits. It made it easier all round.’

  ‘Can the cops do that out here?’

  ‘Keep the water smooth?’

  ‘Try that move in California and there would be a riot.’

  ‘Maybe we’re more civilized out here. Why make more trouble over something than there needs to be?’ Jerrod took another huge bite of his burger, worked it around for a few minutes and looked up at the TV before carrying on. ‘But I guess, it wasn’t gun-free. Some friend of them came to stay and he had a gun. Now he’s crying wolf and saying it was someone else altogether, but probably it’s him. They didn’t find the gun, but he had fresh residue on his fingers. But so did Simon, they say. So I reckon it was Russian roulette and the boy went and disposed of the gun.’

  ‘You mean, the guy shot himself?’

  ‘Could be. No one around here would be surprised.’

  Red was mostly just nodding now. In two more bites, Jerrod’s burger would be gone and he wanted to be in a position to leave before it became necessary to offer him another beer. They both looked up at the TV and for a while no one said anything. Then just when Red thought Jerrod had tuned out for good, the guy laughed.

  ‘And you know what?’

  ‘What?’ Red asked.

  ‘I’m going to sound like a dumb ass now, going on about nothing happening around here but on that same night…’ He pointed a finger across the table at Red. ‘On that same night, someone from around here called the cops saying… You won’t know about this, but for like two days back then everyone was out looking for this teenage girl who put a bullet in some cop’s stomach. And some fool reckoned he’d seen her.’

  Red took a big gulp of beer and felt it stick in his throat. He had to give himself a thump there to get it to go down. ‘But it wasn’t her right?’

  ‘Nope. It wasn’t her. It wasn’t nobody. That’s the problem with folks around here. They get themselves worked up. It must have been a full moon that night, for real. Anyway, if they’d thought a cop shooter was in town then they would probably be saying she shot Simon Snell. Hell, they’d be saying she was the girl who got hit on the County Road, too…’

  Red turned his head away, wondering what kind of trouble he’d be in with the man upstairs if he’d let that girl out here and she’d shot someone new. He’d be accountable. But that hadn’t happened, had it? He just had to put it out of his head.

  ‘So buddy, it looks like we’re about done here. How about recommending me a place to stay.’

  ‘The Sleep Cozy is just up the street. It’s clean, it’s cheap.’

  Red forced a smile. ‘Any other options?’

  ‘Sure, but you’ll be paying more.’

  ‘This one time, that’s okay.’

  ‘Well then, friend, you better try the Residence Inn and you better get yourself a cab, because it’s way out of my way.’

  And Red thanked him. There was no way he could face going back to the Sleep Cozy.

  He got the girl behind the bar to call him a cab and got into his room at the Residence Inn at about midnight. Alone in his big bed, with nothing to do but stare at the TV, he soon started thinking the whole thing through again.

  He’d dropped her at the motel, watched her run and not seen her since. What had happened to her? He didn’t have a computer with him, but he had a phone and the Residence Inn had Wi-Fi. He typed in the name, Carol Ann Baker, and the same twenty or so news sites came up. There wasn’t anything new on there, but maybe they didn’t care about reporting that she’d finally been arrested. A month was a long time in the news.

  Now that he was logged in, he figured he might as well sa
tisfy some other curiosities. He typed in the name, Chad Purcell, and the city, and waited to see what would come up. Poor kid already had a mug shot up and there was an arrest report half blacked-out that you could read too.

  Chad Purcell 04.10. Collision with Officer XX. Pedestrian victim Janine Kenny.

  Not much to get excited about, but the internet is a can of worms and before he knew what he was doing, Red found himself typing in the name of the girl who got hit too. When the first picture that came up showed a face with cropped black hair, when he remembered seeing that shock of hair when she took her hat off to scratch her head, Red began to feel uneasy. But one was Carol Ann Baker and the other was Janine Kenny. How was this girl, and that girl, the same one?

  Red rubbed his face and thought of his wife back home. If she were here right now, she’d tell him to forget all about it, to stay well out of it. But she wasn’t here and Red started remembering from previous experiences when someone up there was trying to tell you to do something, that someone wasn’t too easy to ignore.

  Janine

  The boy left and he didn’t come back.

  ‘I figured maybe he needed the bathroom,’ Lauren said.

  Dr. Mathers pressed her slim hand to her forehead. ‘Did you get a name?’

  Lauren shook her head.

  The doctor squatted down next to Janine, got down to eye level and smiled. ‘Do you remember him from back home?’ she asked.

  Janine winced. Somewhere off inside her head, there was a pain, and it made her squint in one eye.

  Dr. Mathers got up and crossed the room to where Lauren had pinned the pictures to the wall. Bryan, her caseworker, had called the place where she had lived before and asked them to email this stuff through. He had also asked if some of the people she knew from before could come to visit, but they’d told him they didn’t have the staff to organize a day-trip like that.

  ‘Is this him?’ the doctor asked Lauren, pointing to a group shot of some kids in a park.

  ‘Could be, but you know, boys in caps, they all look the same to me.’

  Dr. Mathers pulled it off the wall and brought it over to Janine. ‘Have you looked at this picture?’ she asked.