Brain Trust

by A W Hartoin

  “I did pay it,” I said.

  “No. I paid it so they wouldn’t shut off your power, ya moron. You forgot in December, January, and March, too. Your late fees are flipping ridiculous.”

  “I was working on cases in those months.”

  “Ameren don’t care if you were busy shooting a guy in the face. They want their money. I taught you better than that.”

  “You didn’t teach me anything except how to make margaritas when I was eight,” I said.

  “And a good job I did of it. A strong margarita’s a good margarita.”

  “Okay then. I’m going to go see my mother in the ICU. Don’t so much care about mixing drinks and electric bills.”

  “That’s freaking obvious, but we ain’t done here,” said Uncle Morty, pointing at the sofa.

  I groaned. “Mom wants me back.”

  “Tenne’s in there. That male nurse talked Carolina into it.”

  “You can just call him a nurse.”

  “Whatever.”

  I went over to the sofa and flopped down. I got a whiff of myself and it wasn’t good. I was going to have to take a sponge bath in Mom’s sink if I didn’t get home soon.

  “So how’d that go?” My mom and Aunt Tennessee had a lot of love and rivalry. Aunt Tenne usually came out on the losing end. I wasn’t sure how this reversal of fortune was going to be handled by either of them.

  “They cried. Women.”

  “Have you seen Mom?” I asked.

  I saw her when they took her down for her MRI.” He turned away, his mouth twisting into a grimace, and I touched his arm. “It could’ve been a lot worse.”

  “That don’t help.”

  “You didn’t see her when it happened.”

  He nodded, still not looking at me. “Keep your phone close. They ain’t got much time left.”

  “Huh?”

  “Tommy ain’t called you yet, has he?” Uncle Morty asked.

  “Not yet.” I looked at his screens. They had Dungeons and Dragons screen-savers up, so I couldn’t tell what he’d been up to. “The FBI stuff is online already.”

  “Hell, yeah. And Big Steve called me.”

  Of course, he did. Nothing I said or did was considered private in the family and although Big Steve and Morty weren’t blood-related, they were still family.

  Uncle Morty put a laptop on his lap and gave me a hard look. “Let’s hear it.”

  “Apparently, you’ve already heard it.” I tried to get up, but he pushed me back down, none too gently.

  “Cut the crap. I know you’re holding back.”

  “Alright, but you aren’t going to like it,” I said.

  “Of course, I won’t like it. Some fucker tried to kill Carolina and the damn FBI is holding back Tommy. What did you get from that waste of skin, Blankenship?”

  I told him about the Unsubs. He already knew about Kansas from Big Steve, but the lawyer didn’t know the big-ticket item. I drew it out just because I could.

  “Mercy, dammit.”

  “There was a fake Unsub and he was after me,” I said.

  Uncle Morty went stock still and then began typing like crazy. I told him about the Cassidy Huff case and he growled, “Bullshit.”

  “Dad’s not infallible.”

  “Shut your yap.”

  “It’s true. I can feel it. Blankenship knew who I was from the first and his interest wasn’t normal. The cops and the FBI sent other women in, other women to play Clarice to his Hannibal, and nobody got past hello. These were trained agents, experienced cops, but I got in. Me. Why?”

  “‘Cause you’re hotter than the Fourth of July,” mused Uncle Morty.

  “Come on. They sent in hotties. They sent in nerds. They sent in everybody they could think of. Nothing. Blankenship is protective of me. He says I belong to him.”

  “I don’t like it,” he said.

  “Neither do I, but it’s working for me. He doesn’t like the idea that I might get killed and not visit him anymore.”

  Uncle Morty lifted his lip in a snarl. “And that’s the reason he gave it up?”

  “He didn’t give up everything. There’s plenty more in that twisted mind of his.”

  “There has to be another reason.”

  “Well…I did eat a crab hotdog for him.”

  He grinned. “And there it is.”

  “It was disgusting. I’m never doing that again.”

  “You’ll eat a live crab if that’s what it takes,” he said.

  “Thanks. You’re all heart,” I said. “So…did you find anything on Joseph Cranmer?” I believed Blankenship, but I wouldn’t be the first person he’d fooled. Part of me was very afraid that I’d been played. I bit my lip in anticipation of the wrong answer.

  Uncle Morty put one of his laptops on my lap. “You got to explain this to me.”

  Please don’t let this be about Fats.

  “Explain what?”

  Please don’t let this be about Fats.

  “How this guy fits in.”

  Guy. Fats could be mistaken for…

  I stared at the screensaver, unwilling to touch the mousepad. “Just tell me.”

  He reached over and tapped a key. The screen lit up with an Illinois driver’s license. Joseph Cranmer, a moderately handsome white guy in his mid-fifties.

  “So he exists,” I said with a whoosh. “That’s a relief.”

  Uncle Morty tapped another key without looking. He had extrasensory perception when it came to keyboards. I’d seen him type on two keyboards at the same time and he didn’t misspell a single word. I wanted to make a YouTube video of it, but he wouldn’t let me.

  The screen changed to a police report filed in the Chicago suburb of Evanston three years ago. The report was extremely detailed, but I doubted that Mr. Cranmer would’ve been thrilled with what it contained. Joseph Cranmer was an ass. By that, I mean that he was so disliked that no one reported him missing. He worked at an H&R Block as a tax preparer and supervisor. He was so hated that when he stopped showing up for work, no one called the police. They had a party with cake and ice cream. His family, including living parents and two sisters, were relieved that he didn’t show up for Thanksgiving and Christmas. They didn’t call the police either. The only reason the police got involved was that his landlord, who detested him as well and let him slide on his rent for three months so he wouldn’t have to talk to him, finally needed the rent and went to the apartment. He couldn’t get an answer for a month and started eviction proceedings. The landlord used the guise of a gas leak to go in and discovered rotted food in the fridge and no Mr. Cranmer. True to form, he didn’t call the police. They only got involved when a curious pawn shop owner questioned why the landlord was pawning an entire apartment full of stuff.

  The cops investigated as much as they could. There were no signs of violence in the apartment or his car, which was in the garage. His wallet and credit cards were gone, but no one had used them. He just up and vanished. They collected a hair sample from his hairbrush but never ran the DNA since they had nothing to compare it with and no concrete reason to believe he was dead. It was the logical conclusion, but people had disappeared before and turned up in Florida twenty years later. Mr. Cranmer was declared missing and that was it until today.

  “Well?” asked Uncle Morty.

  I shrugged. “I got nothing. I don’t see how this is related to Sturgis or Mom.”

  “Me either, but I thought you might get a feeling.”

  “I feel sad that nobody cared, not even his parents. He’s the perfect victim. Did you see how people described this guy?”

  “Yeah,” Uncle Morty growled.

  “The most used words were crabby, mean, and nose picker. How much nose picking do you have to do to have” —I scrolled through the pages— “twelve people use it to describe you to the police?”

  “I’m crabby.”

  I looked over at him, but he didn’t look up. “Er…yeah.”

  “Mrs. Davis says I’m mean.”<
br />
  “That’s because you won’t buy her kid’s Christmas wrapping paper. It’s a school fundraiser. I had to buy caramel turtles from Mitchell Braidwood. They tasted like feet.”

  “The kid was selling Christmas paper in April,” said Uncle Morty.

  “Okay. I’ll give you that one. Anyone else say you’re mean?” I asked.

  “You.”

  “Me?”

  “Once a week and twice on Sundays,” he said, finally looking at me through his new glasses. We were so close I truly appreciated the lack of nose hair.

  “You charge me for your hacking when I’m doing stuff for Dad.”

  “I got a business to run,” he said, but a lot less gruffly than I expected.

  “You realize that I don’t get paid a dime, right?” I asked.

  “So I am mean.”

  “Not always. You bought all my fundraiser crap and came into my school as a volunteer. Sure, you did convince everyone that you were a vampire, but they still learned stuff, mostly because they were afraid not to, but it was good.”

  “I’m crabby.”

  I put my hands up. “Yeah, you’re crabby, but not a nose picker. That’s the salient point here. I’ve never seen you pick your nose and I would call the police if you were missing and so would everyone else, including Mrs. Davis. You fixed her microwave that one time.”

  “Yeah?” he asked.

  “Yeah. You are no Joseph Cranmer. Trust me on this.”

  “Alright then. Now who’s paying for this research?”

  Oh my god!

  “Tell me you’re just messing with me,” I said.

  Uncle Morty chuckled. “I’ll do it for a bottle of your dad’s special peach schnapps. I know he has a secret stash somewhere.”

  “Done. So did you find anything on that place in Kansas?”

  He tapped a few keys on my keyboard, once again without looking, and a wide shot of a grain elevator appeared. Even if I didn’t know it was Kansas, I would know it was Kansas. Talk about flat.

  “That doesn’t seem like a good place to bury bodies. You’d be right out in the open. Anybody could see you digging. The highway is right there.”

  He tapped again and the screen switched to a grainy satellite photo. The grain elevator was enormous, but there wasn’t a lot else going on. Small town. Plenty of highway traffic.

  “You think Blankenship’s full of it?”

  Uncle Morty tapped the screen so hard it tipped backwards. “Use your damn eyes.”

  I grabbed the computer before it tumbled off my lap and I did use my eyes. There was a whole lot of nothing in my view.

  “Just when I think you got something going on upstairs,” he grumbled. “Zoom in, ya nitwit.”

  I take it back. You are super mean.

  I zoomed in and it took me about thirty seconds to get it. A chill raced down my arms. “That looks like…”

  He tilted his screen toward me. It showed an aerial view from CNN.

  “A mass grave in Bosnia?” I asked.

  “Looks familiar, don’t it?” Uncle Morty asked.

  “Yeah. I mean, a lot smaller, but yes, it’s similar.”

  “Blankenship wasn’t playing you,” he said. “That crab dog worth it now?”

  “I’m kinda nauseous, but yes. How many do you think are there?”

  Uncle Morty’s fingers drummed his laptop. “Assuming they’re not stacked, average height of five eight with…say a foot between each grave, I’d guess in the neighborhood of forty to forty-five.”

  “Isn’t that a lot for one dude? How could nobody notice?”

  “Ridgeway confessed to seventy-one, but they think it was closer to ninety.”

  “I wish I didn’t know that.”

  “Not knowing don’t change it.”

  His logic worked, but it didn’t help me any. I put the laptop back on the table. “Unless you’ve got something else horrifying to show me, I’m going to see Mom.”

  He waved me away. “Yeah, yeah. I got to get through the Huff info and see if there’s any connection to Blankenship.”

  I kept expecting him to say something about Calpurnia Fibonacci, but he didn’t.

  “You won’t find anything connecting him,” I said.

  “‘Cause he’s full of crap. Go on now.”

  Does he really not know about Fats?

  “I’m telling you he’s not,” I said.

  Maybe I can get away with it. Maybe they’ll never know.

  “There’s no freaking chance that guy’s on the level,” yelled Uncle Morty.

  I stepped outside the door, heading for the ICU.

  “Mercy, a moment, please,” said Grandad from behind me. He leaned on the wall next to the door of the waiting room. I’d never seen my grandad lurk before. It couldn’t be a good thing.

  I glanced back at Uncle Morty and Grandad waved me down the hall.

  “What’s up? Uncle Morty said Mom’s okay.”

  “She’s snoozing. They had to give her a sedative for the MRI.”

  “So…”

  “How do you know Calpurnia?”

  Dammit. So close.

  “Er…what are you talking about?”

  Grandad had gone outside that morning with a respiratory therapist, who was having a smoke, and he saw Fats Licata snag me.

  So not that close.

  My voice went all squeaky ‘cause I’m so smooth. “Who’s Calpurnia?”

  Grandad gave me the stink eye that usually came from Aunt Miriam. “Don’t kid a kidder. Calpurnia put that beefcake on you and I want to know why.”

  “She’s a girl,” I said.

  “Fats is still a beefcake,” he said. “How did this happen?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  Grandad crossed his skinny arms. “Carolina’s asleep. We appear to have the time. Explain yourself.”

  Wait a minute!

  I crossed my arms. “Explain yourself.”

  Grandad’s blue eyes went wide. “Explain what?”

  “How do you know Calpurnia?”

  “I didn’t say I knew her.”

  “You didn’t have to. You called her Calpurnia. Everyone who doesn’t know her calls her Calpurnia Fibonacci. Both names without fail.”

  Grandad’s eyes went shifty. “I don’t know about that.”

  “I do. Calpurnia scares people. It’s a respect thing, but when you meet her, it’s different. You’re still scared, but she’s human. She’s Calpurnia. How come she’s Calpurnia to you?”

  “You’re changing the subject.”

  “Damn straight.”

  He relaxed and smoothed back his faded red hair. “I arrested her mother several times.”

  “Are you kidding me?” I asked.

  “Why would I kid about that? What a woman. A real firecracker.”

  “What did you arrest her for?”

  He grinned at me. “Public disturbance mostly. She brandished a firearm in Tulio’s once.”

  “Was she crazy?”

  “She was beautiful. Legs for days and she could dance. We did the tango once. It was ethereal.”

  “I don’t know what to say about that,” I said, starting to get a little uncomfortable.

  His smile got wider. “She smelled like orange blossoms and good merlot.”

  “I got it.”

  “And when she walked, there was this swing to her hips.”

  I put my hand up. “That’s quite enough.”

  Grandad focused on the wall like he forgot I was there. “I never get to talk about her.”

  “Let’s keep it that way. So how does this connect to Calpurnia?”

  “Well, she was there when I arrested her mother before and after they went to Italy. Beautiful girl and smart. You could tell, even when she was young. I used to do puzzles with her while her mother was being arraigned. When she was older, she’d call me to ask about certain arrests.”

  “Holy crap. You were a Fibonacci mole?”

  He laughed. “Of course not. Sh
e could’ve gotten that information from anyone. Now it’s online. We had a nice relationship. Her business is her own. She never gave me cause to arrest her. Calpurnia is a Fibonacci, after all.”

  “Her mother was a Fibonacci and you arrested her,” I pointed out.

  “Marcella was a Meucci. They have a totally different kind of luck,” he said. “Now, how do you know Calpurnia?”

  “Does Grandma J know that you have a huge crush on Marcella?”

  “Had. The woman’s been dead for twenty years.”

  “And yet…” My turn to give the stink eye.

  Grandad started to protest his innocence, which wasn’t going to work out for him. I’d seen that look in his eye. Men looked at me like that all the time. Grandma wouldn’t care if Marcella was dead. That look said it all.

  I just let him go on until the ICU door opened and Mom’s day nurse, Takira, came out. She saw me and said, “Thank goodness. I was just coming to ask where you were.”

  My chest got tight. “Everything okay with the MRI?”

  “Fine. I need you to make a command decision.” She waved me inside.

  “Your father should be making the command decisions,” said Grandad.

  “Well, he’s not here, is he?” I went through the door.

  Grandad dashed over and stopped it from closing. “We still haven’t heard anything from him.”

  I glanced at the wall clock. Five minutes left. “We will,” I said, more confident than I felt. If the FBI didn’t come through, I had a real problem. If Uncle Morty was right about Kansas, how could I keep that from them? Blankenship’s buddy might be on the prowl right now.

  Grandad’s forehead creased into a dozen lines, making his freckles stand out against his pale skin. “What are you thinking?”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.” I meant it, too. Even if I had to go back to Hunt and eat a live crab, as Uncle Morty suggested, Dad would be coming back.

  “How?” Grandad asked.

  “Let’s just say the FBI won’t be thrilled with me.”

  “I like the sound of that.”

  I kissed his weathered cheek and went inside. In five seconds, I was wishing I hadn’t.

  Chapter Eleven

  I’D BEEN HANGING out in hospitals since I started nursing school when I was eighteen and I’ve seen a lot of stuff, plenty of it weird. I’d never seen yelling in the ICU. Especially not doctors. ICUs are quiet. I rarely heard patients call out. Mostly, they didn’t have to, being so closely monitored, but they endured tremendous pain while waiting for the morphine to kick in. They didn’t scream when being moved despite the agony it caused. You want to see the definition of fortitude? Go to an ICU.