Devils in Dark Houses

by B. E. Scully

  “Yeah, don’t remind me. Jen and me barely made it through her puberty alive, and now they want her behind the wheel of an automobile.”

  “Is she on all of these sites like Facebook and Twitter and all of that? I mean, you know the kind of trouble kids are getting into these days online. How do you and Jen handle it?”

  Martinez shrugged. “She does all the stuff every kid does these days. We monitor all three of them as much as we can. Or Jen does, anyway. I’ll admit I’m not much into all that computer culture. Hell, I still miss file cabinets. Where are you going with all this, Cass?”

  “It’s just these kids, Monte. Kids like Ross Delvin. It’s like they’re in some weird new reality of their own.”

  Another shrug. “But no less of a reality than any other kind, right? Just different from the old-fogey version. You know, our version.”

  “I guess. But when you create your own reality, what happens when it meets up with someone else’s reality? And maybe those two realities have nothing to do with each other. And maybe sometimes they even cancel each other out.”

  “That’s too out there for me, Cass. I’m just a crime-solving fool with bad knees and an outrageous mortgage to pay each month. Did you hear that property taxes are going up again next year? Soon a working stiff won’t have a dollar left at the end of the day.”

  “That’s why I rent. Own as little as possible. Stay mobile. Isn’t that what the next generation’s all about?”

  Martinez never could understand his partner’s lifestyle. No marriage, no partner, no kids, no pets. She didn’t even have a houseplant to take care of. The few times he’d stopped by her apartment, it always looked as if someone was either just moving in or just moving out.

  For seven years now, he’d been inviting his partner over for weekend barbeques or even dinners with just him and Jen, but she never took him up on it. A few years ago, one of his cousins, a terrific guy named Dave, had split up with his wife after almost ten years of marriage. Dave had recently hinted around that he was ready to start dating again, and Monte thought he’d be a perfect match for Cassie. A history teacher at a local high school, Dave was smart, funny, and just easygoing enough to take the edges off some of Cassie’s sharper corners. Monte had been wracking his brain for ways to get the two of them together, but as far as his partner was concerned, anything outside of work was strictly off-limits.

  Martinez figured Shirdon’s past probably had something to do with it. In addition to her sister’s suicide, he knew from the loose-lipped assistant that after college, Cassie had moved around like a nomad—nine times in less than five years. It seemed as if for a while, at least, she’d been on the run from reality as much as kids like Ross Delvin were now. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Martinez figured only the means and methods were different.

  All of his speculations about his partner stayed that way, though, until one rain-soaked night almost two years ago. They’d just wrapped up a triple homicide that had taken over the better part of their lives for four months, and Martinez had invited Shirdon along to The Slammer for a round of celebratory drinks. He figured she’d decline like always, but to his surprise she’d said, “First round’s on me.”

  Five rounds later, the bartender announced last call. Martinez and Jen’s youngest kid had been sick with the flu all week, and he should have been home hours ago.

  “I’m not steady enough to drive,” he’d told Cassie. “Let’s split a cab. Your place is on the way to mine anyway.”

  “That’s okay. I need the walk.”

  “What? It’s pouring down rain outside!”

  But Cassie had just shrugged and drained the last of her drink. “I like walking in the rain. It’s like everything washes away with it, you know? Right down the gutter.”

  “Too bad it doesn’t take some of this city’s trash down into the gutter with it.”

  Shirdon had smiled, but her eyes were somewhere else. “Aw, this city’s a lot better than most. That’s why both of us ended up here, right?”

  When Monte was only four years old, his parents had woken him and his older brother up in the middle of the night and bundled the family into the back of a truck. He couldn’t remember much about that night—the smell of the dry, rustling sage as they crouched in the bushes, swallowed up by the pitch-black desert; the urgent, angry whispers of the “coyotes” that had been hired to get them across the border; the never-ending journey in the suffocating heat until emerging into the dazzling, bewildering lights of a city that looked more like the places in the telenovelas his grandmother watched on TV than the dirt-poor Mexican village he’d just left behind.

  As soon as they got settled in, his parents had trudged ahead through the convoluted bureaucratic maze of paperwork and government offices that eventually led all of them to legal citizenship. But those years under the radar had taken their toll—Monte had never really shaken that hidden sense of shame, that feeling of not really belonging anywhere. If that saying about the best cops being one step away from the criminals they chase had any merit, then Monte had been destined to become a cop since he was four years old.

  That night in the sage bushes had been over forty years ago, but the wary watchfulness of the outsider had never entirely left his blood. It came in handy for a cop, and maybe that’s why he and Cass had hit it off so well right from the start. The same restless, displaced blood was in her veins, too.

  That night at The Slammer, Monte had kept his voice calm and casual. Just idle chitchat among friends. “I’ve been back to Mexico lots of times, but it’s not home to me. Left it too early, I guess. You’re an import, too, right?”

  Cassie hesitated so long he thought she wasn’t going to answer. Then finally she said, “Military family. Army. My dad retired to Washington while we—while my sister and I—were still in school. I trickled down to Oregon after college. After a few false starts, that is. Or more than a few, I guess.”

  Now it was his turn to hesitate. But his cop’s instincts told him it was now or never. “You have a sister?”

  Shirdon’s eyes went even farther away. “No. I had a sister. She killed herself when she was seventeen.”

  “Jesus, Cass, I…I don’t know what to say.” And even though he’d already known about her sister, it was true. It was like that whenever he had to show up on some poor bastard’s doorstep with the news that, hey, your wife or husband or, god forbid, child is dead. What the hell was there to say? Nothing.

  But Shirdon went on as if she hadn’t even heard him. “I was in college at the time. Me and my sister were always close—real close. It’s like that a lot of times with military kids. When you move around all the time, it’s good to have someone who’s always there. Only when I went to college, I got all wrapped up in my own fantastic new life. Apart from holidays back home, I didn’t even know anything was wrong with hers.”

  “That’s just the way it is with young people, Cass. You know that.”

  “I know. And you know that sometimes that doesn’t make it a damn bit easier to deal with.”

  Martinez couldn’t argue with that. He didn’t want to push too far, but he couldn’t help asking anyway. “Why’d she do it?”

  Now that the dam had broken, Shirdon figured she might as well let it empty. “You know, sometimes I think it would be easier if there had been some big reason. Mental illness, drug abuse—something. But it was just a pile-up of little things—her boyfriend broke up with her, some issues with a group of kids at school, her first-choice college turning her down. Little things. But not so little when they’re happening to you. Especially when you’re only seventeen. Still, one hell of a waste.”

  She shook her head and Martinez could see her fighting back tears. He knew his partner well enough to know that she’d sooner walk over hot coals than start bawling in the middle of The Slammer. He banged his glass on the counter and growled, “Goddamn it, I don’t care about some last call—me and my partner here just helped put a goddamn killer
behind bars!” He turned to the other stragglers still littering the bar and shouted, “Now I’d say that warrants one last last call, don’t you?”

  The bar erupted into a chorus of “Hell, yeahs!” and a scatter of applause. Another round appeared and disappeared almost as quickly. “You okay?” Martinez asked his partner. She was as unsteady on her feet as he was, and he wished the hell she would take him up on his offer of a cab ride.

  “I’m okay,” she said, her words thick with the booze. “A dangerous thing, Monte, hanging on to yesterday—ghosts from the past more alive than people in the present.” She stood up and zipped her coat, already heading toward the door. “And presently, I’m going home. Give my love to Jen and the kids.”

  After that night, she’d never mentioned her sister again, and he’d never brought it up. Even so, whenever they had a case where a young girl ended up dead—and let’s face it, that was a whole lot of times—it hit her hard. Maybe those ghosts from the past weren’t buried as deep in their graves as Cass thought. Maybe they never were.

  His partner’s voice brought Martinez out of his own reminiscing. “Hey, Monte, look at this.”

  She’d pulled up Ross Delvin’s Facebook page. Like a lot of young people, it was set to “public” so that anyone could see his posts.

  She clicked on the “about” tab and Martinez rattled off the following statistics: “‘Ross Devlin, twenty-seven years old. Birthday, January fifth, nineteen eighty-seven. Relationship status: It’s complicated.’ Jesus,” Martinez grumbled, “whatever happened to the idea of privacy? It’s like that old philosophical question, ‘If a tree falls in the forest with no one there to hear it, does it make any sound?’ Only in the case of these kids, the question is, ‘If you live your life with no one there to see it, is it even a life?’”

  “New world order, partner. Us old fogeys are just trying to keep up, remember?”

  “Damn Internet—it’s everywhere and nowhere, full of everybody and nobody. The whole thing is getting goddamn creepy if you ask me. And speaking of creepy, what’s with that eyeball thing?”

  They both stared at Ross Delvin’s profile picture—a bloodshot eyeball being held open by spikes.

  “I don’t know,” Shirdon said. “But look at this guy’s online activity. Look at all of these accounts. What the hell is a Sound Cloud Stream? And when does he have time to, you know, work a job, little things like that?”

  Martinez smiled. Even though it drove his partner crazy, moments like this were exactly why he sometimes liked to hold things back a bit, to sit on information until just the right time. “I think I might have the answer to that one.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Now don’t start going off on me or anything, because I still think Loney’s death was a freak accident. But I did a little digging on this Delvin guy. Seems he stormed off his job a couple of months ago, and let’s just say it wasn’t an amicable parting of the ways. Knocked down some shit on his way out and started threatening people. His boss called the cops and filed a report, but decided not to press charges. Probably just wanted to get rid of the guy.”

  “So where’s he working now?”

  “Nowhere that I can tell. And next question, no, I don’t know how the hell he’s paying the rent.”

  “Well, I can tell you one thing—I’m going to talk face-to-face with Ross Delvin if I have to stake out the lobby of his apartment building all night.”

  “Okay, but I know you don’t mean this night. Dammit, Cass, it’s Saturday and we’ve got two straight days off coming for the first time in I can’t even remember how long. I’m sure you’ve heard of this great concept called ‘the weekend’?”

  Shirdon stared at the bloodshot eyeball, then rubbed her own bloodshot eyes. “You’re right. Ross Delvin isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. At least I hope he’s not.”

  * * *

  Less than ten blocks away, Ross Delvin indeed wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. In fact, he was in his apartment that very moment, finishing off the unpleasant task of stuffing the stiffening corpse of a pizza deliveryman into his hall closet.

  The Eye had captured the entire cleanup process, but he’d made his own backup copy, just in case.

  3

  The eyes staring back at Tyler in the mirror were on the small side, light hazel and constantly darting from one thing to the next. In fact, Tyler’s whole face was lean and sharp, like a cat’s. Or like a weasel’s, depending on who you asked. Tyler kept his hair short and fuss-free, his physique fit and quick. He liked to think of himself as a sleek missile, always set to fire.

  His superhero towel-cape was draped around his shoulders, but so far Tylerman seemed to be in hiding. Instead he felt shaky and out of sorts—a little sick, even. Maybe he’d taken a few too many pills. He couldn’t even remember which ones or how many anymore. Like everything else these days, those kinds of details were getting a little blurred around the edges.

  “You’ve got to focus yourself, my man,” he told his reflection. “Because tonight’s the night you and Brooke finally make history.”

  He chose a casual black sweater and a pair of jeans that cost more than most people’s monthly rent—a very Steve Jobs ensemble. On the drive over to Brooke’s place, he kept channeling the Jobs vibe: in control; self-assured; the superior man capable of bending the world to his superior will. That was the right mantra for tonight: What would Steve Jobs do?

  By the time he was standing in front of Brooke’s apartment door, wine bottles in hand, the armpits of his sweater were soaked through. His head felt as shabby as his shirt, but he kept repeating SteveJobs, SteveJobs, SteveJobs. His mantra.

  Brooke answered the door in a pair of baggy sweatpants, her dark hair pulled back in a sloppy ponytail. Not exactly history-making attire, but if things went way the way he planned—when things went the way he planned—she wouldn’t be wearing much of anything before too long. Even with no makeup and the frumpy sweats, she still looked beautiful. Not pin-up, cheese-ball beautiful like a lot of guys liked, but classic beautiful—graceful and swan-necked, soft dark eyes. A little fragile, a little melancholy around the edges. She always made Tyler think of those Victorian ladies you saw in cameos or old oil paintings. She could have been out on a lonely cliff somewhere staring at the sea, waiting for some mysterious gentleman to come and save her.

  Tyler was no mysterious gentleman, but who was these days? At least he had the gentleman’s bankroll, which is more than you could say for Ross Delvin.

  Brooke Merrill had caught his attention the first time she’d given him that shy sideways glance when they’d been partnered up for a sociology project their sophomore year. It would have been easy if all he’d wanted was to have sex with her, and at first that’s all it was. But even sex with a girl as fine as Brooke wouldn’t have been enough for him to throw over the frat parties and sorority girls to hang out with her and a loser like Ross Delvin. No, by the time the project had come and gone, Tyler Wickett was bona fide, quicksand stuck in love. The only problem was, by the time he first realized and then admitted it, somewhere along the line she’d fallen in love with the loser.

  But Tyler wasn’t going to think about Ross Delvin. Not tonight—not ever again, if he could help it. Tonight belonged to Tylerman.

  He held out the bottles of wine, trying to steady his still-shaky hands. “Hey, am I early? I brought two bottles, one for you, one for me. Or maybe both for me, depending.” He laughed, trying to sound casual, but he was aware that he was talking a little too fast, a little too loud. Get it together, Tylerman. SteveJobs, SteveJobs.

  Brooke just stood there in the doorway, and for one crazy minute he thought she wasn’t going to let him in. Then finally she said, “No, I mean, yeah—” She laughed then, too, and opened the door with a sweep of her arm. “I mean, come on in, Tyler. I was just watching some stupid movie on TV, so—”

  “Okay, cool. A movie’s cool. I’m not much hungry anyway. You don’t want to go out somewhere, do yo
u? I thought we’d just hang out here.”

  “No, um, here’s fine. I’ll open up the wine—oh, wow—niiiiice,” she said, inspecting the labels, and Tyler began to relax. He was on top of things, no problem. Singapore, here we come.

  By the time they’d worked through the first bottle, the movie had been all but forgotten and Tyler was feeling like himself again. The wine had gone straight to Brooke’s head, and she’d been babbling for fifteen minutes about some dog she’d had as a kid. Tyler was only half listening, though you could never tell it from his face. He’d perfected the “that’s so fascinating” look back in college, and it had proven as useful as anything he’d ever learned in class. Maybe more so.

  At the mention of the name “C.J. Porter,” though, Brooke had his full attention. He realized she’d been talking about her friends from that MS support group—Tylerman’s alter egos, right here in the living room between them.

  “You don’t think it’s weird, do you?” she was asking him. “I mean, I know there’s all kinds of lunatics and fakes out there online, but these women have become like my best friends. I swear to god, Tyler, it’s like we’ve known each other for years or something.”

  Tyler felt his pits go damp again, but his smile was smooth and cool as ice. “I don’t think it’s weird, no way. I think you have to go with your gut in situations like this. I mean, why is an online friend any less of a friend than a meat space one? Just because you know whether they have bad breath or dandruff or whatever?”

  Brooke laughed, which gave Tyler time to think. He had to bring Brooke around to the MS somehow. That was the last hurdle to clear on the last-stretch sprint to The Plan. But she had to be the one to bring it up. “So where online did you hook up with them?”

  Brooke swallowed the last of her wine and said, “I met them on a support group.”

  Tyler waited. He had to play this one just right.

  “For multiple sclerosis,” she added, and then burst into a flood of tears.