Repo Madness

by W. Bruce Cameron

“The pain goes from behind the ears all the way down the back,” Alan complained.

  “Do you think I don’t know that, Alan?” I responded in irritation. I scrambled some eggs, and Jake came out of the bedroom and gave me a What, no bacon? expression.

  I vaguely registered that the house looked neat and clean. It seemed unlikely that I’d been picking up after myself, but I couldn’t exactly remember not doing so, and anyway, the alternative, which was that Alan had defied my orders and continued to be the midnight housekeeper, meant having a fight, and I just didn’t have the energy for that at the moment.

  I called Barry Strickland, wincing as I tilted my head to cradle the phone with my shoulder. He grabbed it on the first ring, and we exchanged pleasantries. “You get much snow over there?”

  I turned and looked out the window. A soft, smooth layer of white stuff coated everything. “Yeah, looks like six or seven inches.”

  “Didn’t get that much here.”

  “So I have a question for you. Just go with me for a minute.”

  “All right,” he replied cautiously.

  “You know this thing I’m looking into. How Lisa Marie got out of my car that night.”

  “Oh. I thought this was going to be about Blanchard. I talked to my contacts; they want to meet with you.”

  “Okay, sure. No, this is about Lisa Marie. What do you know about Dennis Kane?”

  “The medical examiner? I know he was incompetent. A couple of convictions were reversed because he botched the autopsies. He’s not even a forensic pathologist; he’s a general practitioner. We’ve got a good one now. Kane’s not been M.E. for, what, more than three years?”

  “Do you know him personally?”

  “I’ve spoken to him, sure. What’s this about?”

  “I was just thinking, if you were going to murder somebody, wouldn’t that be the perfect job? They pull a body out of the water, and you’re the one that put it there. You find exactly what you want to find, and you miss anything that might incriminate you.”

  “Where is this coming from?” Alan demanded.

  When Strickland replied, I heard something in his voice, a caution, as if he were trying to figure out a way to let me down gently. “Ruddy. I know you like to read mysteries, but I have to tell you, life isn’t like that. There’s almost never any mystery to it. Usually a robbery goes bad, a husband loses his temper, two guys get in an argument. Murder is always simple and usually stupid. Smart people don’t kill people.”

  “All right, but yesterday afternoon, when I got home, Lisa Marie’s father was waiting for me in my living room. With a club.”

  “A club?”

  “A chair leg, like what you can get at the hardware store. He hit me with it.”

  “Is he okay?”

  I laughed mirthlessly. “He hit me in the head and you’re worried about him?”

  “No, I’m worried about you. If you put him in the hospital, the judge is going to revoke your probation, even if it was justifiable.”

  “He’s probably got a sore stomach this morning, but he walked out of here under his own power.”

  “All right.”

  “But you have to wonder why he was here. He said someone left a message at his company, saying I was running around denying I had done anything to his daughter. But I’m not. Very few people know anything about it. There’s you. There’s the medical examiner. And that’s it. Whoever called Walker did so just to stir things up, maybe to get him to come here and put my head in telescopic sights.”

  “It’s not just Dr. Kane who knows. You told David Leinberger,” Alan reminded me.

  “I told this guy Leinberger that I was looking into a missing persons case,” I added, “but I didn’t explain who Lisa Marie Walker is to me.”

  “If he is the murderer, he would know that,” Alan argued. “And what about Audrey Strang?”

  I put my hand on my phone. “Audrey Strang couldn’t leave semen,” I hissed.

  “What was that? I didn’t catch it,” Strickland said.

  “Oh, I was just … talking to my dog.”

  Jake, sprawled on the couch, opened one eye but otherwise didn’t move.

  “I can find out if Kane has ever been suspected of anything,” Strickland advised me, “but I know he’s never been convicted of a crime.”

  “Can you get a copy of Lisa Marie’s autopsy?”

  “Oh, and you told the bar owner, Wade Rogan,” Alan interjected.

  “I don’t know, Ruddy,” Strickland waffled.

  “Can you try? Please?”

  Strickland thought it over. “All right, I’ll try,” he told me.

  We hung up. “Alan,” I said, “you know how hard it is to carry on a conversation with you yammering away?”

  “So you’ve got Leinberger, Rogan, and then the mayor of Shantytown, and Rogan said he told him why you wanted to talk to him. Amy Jo Stefonick knows—maybe she told somebody else. Audrey Strang could have told somebody, too.”

  “Amy Jo said the guy that night had a bald spot. Leinberger doesn’t have a bald spot. And Rogan’s isn’t a spot; it’s his whole head.”

  “You don’t know Leinberger doesn’t have a bald spot; you didn’t look. And it was night; maybe Amy Jo is mistaken. And people do go more bald; maybe Rogan’s spot got to the point where it got easier just to shave his skull.”

  “If I didn’t already have a headache, you’d be giving me one.”

  “And what do you expect Lisa Marie’s autopsy to prove?”

  “You know what? I’ve pretty much had it with you. Anytime you get an idea—like how practically every woman who has ever vanished around here was killed by the same person who murdered Lisa Marie, even though there’s not a shred of evidence, and three of the women didn’t even drown; they’re just gone—I’m supposed to take you seriously and fly to Beaver Island and traipse out to Shantytown to track down Phil somebody. But when I get a really good idea, like maybe the reason why the good doctor Kane didn’t save the semen was that it was his, you piss and moan like I’m wasting your time.”

  “Oh my God. Good doctor,” Alan breathed. “That’s it!”

  “What?” I replied suspiciously. It didn’t sound like Alan’s reply had anything to do with my rant.

  “He wasn’t a good doctor. You heard Strickland.”

  “Are you going to answer what I just said? I made some damn important points there.”

  “He’s been out of office for three years.”

  “And?”

  “Two of the three women who vanished did so in the past three years. But the ones who drowned were while Kane was medical examiner.”

  I could hear the excitement in Alan’s voice, and it irritated me. “Please get to your point so we can go back to mine,” I said icily.

  “What if Lisa Marie was the first? The man who took her from the 7-Eleven couldn’t have known you were going to drive into the lake; he was just being opportunistic. Then when he reads about your accident and how they’re looking for Lisa Marie, it gives him an idea on how he might dispose of her body.”

  “And it works,” I added, catching on.

  “Yes! But only because the M.E. is incompetent and doesn’t mention the semen. Let’s say our killer thinks that maybe he figures he can get lucky twice. So, sure enough, he sees some guy buying Nina Otis drinks, and kidnaps her, and when he’s done, he tosses her in the lake. Next he boats out to a party on a sailboat, slips aboard, and takes a drunk woman captive. He sees a woman getting intoxicated on the public docks and snatches her. Each time, he gets away with it because Kane is not a good doctor.”

  “But now,” I finished for him, “we have a new M.E. One who can’t be counted on to miss things. So he has to come up with a new MO.”

  “He’s doing something else with the bodies.”

  I thought it over. “You said two out of three.”

  “Yes. Kane was still M.E. when Rachel Rodriguez vanished.”

  “Not every body tossed into the water
is going to wind up in Boyne City,” I speculated.

  I could practically feel Alan deciding not to remind me that Nina Otis didn’t float to Boyne City. I was grateful to be spared the nitpicking. “So Rachel Rodriguez could have sunk,” he agreed. “She could still be at the bottom of the lake.”

  “Makes sense. Of course, maybe the reason the women who vanished in the last three years haven’t been found is that Kane knows he can’t pull the same trick anymore. He’s no longer M.E.”

  “I suppose,” Alan said condescendingly.

  “God, you’re a joy to be with. Come on, Jake. I’ll drop you at Uncle Kermit’s; Daddy’s got to go urinate for the doctor.”

  * * *

  Dr. Schaumburg asked me how I was feeling, and I told him I felt bloated, hungry, I had a headache, a muscle twitch, irritable bowels, and was in a bad mood. He told me that when I came back in for another test in ten days, he would see about adjusting my medication. I didn’t tell him that some of the symptoms might have had less to do with the pharmaceuticals and more to do with having been brained with a chair leg.

  I left the little cup in his capable hands and went out to try to find future repo Mark Stevens and his soon-to-be-ex–pickup truck. Through a process of elimination I found the place—most of the houses were summer homes, unoccupied in the dead of February. Fresh tracks in new snow up one driveway led to a small place with sawhorses in the front yard and a stack of new lumber off to one side. No one was home, and the vehicle that left the tire prints was not around.

  My headache receded a little when I met up with a guy who decided he didn’t want to pay for his Toyota because it stopped running. When I explained what a repo would do to his credit, he gave me a check, shaking his head over his plight but not blaming me. I’d get a hundred dollars for making the collection, part of the two-hundred-dollar fee that would be added to the end of his car loan. He shook his head over that, too.

  Alan was asleep when I ate a burger for lunch. I threw away the bag and then, after a moment, opened the glove box, got out my medication, and threw that away, too. I didn’t know what I would do in ten days when I had to take another urine test and, at that moment, I didn’t much care.

  Alan woke up and ran me through a review of everything we knew about the “case,” which was frustrating because once we took out our speculations, we really knew almost nothing.

  Maybe it was just psychological, but I felt measurably better with the medication in the trash can and not in my bloodstream. I stopped in the Bear for a moment, and Kermit said the flights for the Wolfingers were all set. The tickets cost a little more than expected, because the people at the “Grand-Prize Center” insisted hotel reservations could only be made a week in advance, forcing an airline penalty that was probably further disincentive to collecting the Hawaiian vacation. I gave him thirty-two hundred bucks, thinking I had just wiped out my fiscals.

  Darkness was settling in when I turned down my street in Kalkaska. I parked in the street and looked at my house. Footprints tracked up the sidewalk to the front door from the car pulled over by the tree Jake had decorated that morning. Katie’s car. She was obviously back in town, and now she was in my house.

  I got out of my truck and headed in to find out what was going on.

  21

  Lisa Marie’s Autopsy

  My small table was set for two. A tall candle burned in the center of it, putting out a warm light. Something good was cooking, and as I slipped off my shoes, Jake came up to me, wagging. “Are the two of you having dinner?” I whispered to him.

  The bathroom door opened, and Katie came down the hallway. “Oh! Hi, Ruddy.”

  She stopped about five feet away from me, smiling. She wore a pair of jeans I hadn’t seen before, snugly fitting, and a silk blouse that matched her blue eyes. Her hair had been cut and was curled up softly on her neck.

  “She’s beautiful,” Alan said breathlessly, articulating my feelings exactly.

  “Hi,” I managed to say, instead of Oh my God or something. “How’s your aunt?”

  “It turned out to be mononucleosis,” Katie said. “Can you believe it? She’s, like, in her late fifties, but she never had it as a teenager, and when you get it this late in life, they have trouble diagnosing it. They thought it was Lyme disease, because of the fatigue, but then she turned yellow and her neck got all swollen.”

  Katie was not wearing her engagement ring. I swallowed back my disappointment. “So, she’s fine?” I ventured.

  “She’s really sick, still, but yeah. She’s going to fully recover.”

  “That’s good,” Alan observed, probably just to remind me he was there.

  “You look … amazing,” I told her with feeling. “I like your haircut. It’s cute.”

  She smiled at me. “I’m making that chicken you like,” she said.

  “Sounds great,” I replied. I felt precarious, like one wrong word and I’d fall into a hole and be unable to get out. I so, so did not want to say a wrong word.

  Katie went into the kitchen, dug in her purse, and came to me, holding a small envelope. I accepted it without comprehension—it was full of business cards. I pulled one out and saw her picture on it. “I got my license. I’m an official real estate agent!” She spun in a tight circle and then came into my arms.

  “Congratulations! That’s wonderful!” I told her.

  She eased out of our embrace far too soon, heading back into the kitchen. “I really missed Jake, so I picked him up at Kermit’s. He was so excited, he practically ran to my car!”

  “He ran? I can barely get him to get out of his chair.” I gave Jake an accusing stare, and he glanced away guiltily.

  Katie poked her head into my refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of champagne. “And I was thinking, I have this big news, who can I tell? Who do I celebrate with? And it just seemed … I wanted to celebrate with you.”

  My mouth was a little dry. “Good decision. You want me to open that?”

  “You are, after all, the professional barman.”

  I took the bottle from her, and now we were standing very close, smiling into each other’s eyes.

  “Ruddy…,” Alan warned.

  I glanced away, sensing her puzzlement as I did so, and focused on peeling the foil from the champagne. It was my fault—I’d actively tried to connect with Alan, I’d wanted him back, and now he was here, in my head, ruining my life. The cork popped out, and I blinked. Katie put a hand on my back as I poured, and I knew that when I filled the glasses, we would clink them and sip and then put them down and kiss long and deeply, that I would touch her through that silk blouse and that she would lead me down the hallway. The chicken would be overcooked.

  But none of that was going to happen as long as Alan was here.

  The bubbles boiled up in the thin flutes, giving me a reason to stay focused on my pouring. Alan made a distressed noise because he could feel my rising excitement, knew what I was thinking, knew he couldn’t possibly live through what was going to happen next.

  So I went into my head, wandering its corridors, turning the corners, and descending deeper into myself. I pictured Alan, not as a person but as a presence, finding him there in my consciousness. I mentally reached out to him and strongly, and firmly, pushed and pushed until he was forced into the darkest recesses of my mind, a closet with a door that I could close and lock. When I finished and resurfaced, Alan was gone.

  I turned and grinned crookedly at my fiancée. We sipped champagne, we folded into each other’s arms, and as we went down the hallway, all I could think was that if I could force Alan away, it meant he wasn’t real.

  I had a mental disorder. When I was talking to Alan, I was really only talking to myself.

  * * *

  The chicken cooked for an extra hour or so, but it was still pretty good. We opened a bottle of wine after the champagne, but neither one of us was really interested in drinking much more. It seemed more important to go back down the hallway to the bedroom for act two
.

  Later we lay sprawled, legs entangled, the candle from the table now on my dresser, tracing a bright-yellow circle on the ceiling. Katie’s head was on my chest.

  “I guess I was surprised to see you,” I ventured, when what I really wanted to ask was, Are you back for good?

  She sighed contentedly. “I figured a few things out.”

  “Oh? Care to share?”

  She looked up at me. “We never dated.”

  “Sorry?”

  “I think that’s what’s been bothering me the most. When I lost my home, I moved in here, like, same day. We barely knew each other at that point, and then from that moment on we were living together. Instead of being that wild, fun time of exploring and learning about each other, I was over here, trying to figure out how to fit all my stuff into your closet. You know? It kind of took the romance out of it.”

  “Well, but we did have a rather intense moment together,” I offered mildly, thinking back to how she lost her home.

  “Right. Not the most romantic of circumstances,” she replied levelly.

  “I get it,” I told her.

  “I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t happier when we got engaged, but now I know. You gave me a ring, but we were living as if we were already married. Did I want that, a life predecided because I had no other place to live? You move in with someone because you love them and want to be with them all the time, not because your house trailer was destroyed. You get engaged because you want to be married, not because you already are.”

  I searched for something to say. “I’m sorry for everything,” I murmured. An apology worthy of Jimmy Growe.

  “No, no, you did nothing wrong. In fact—God, Ruddy, that thing I said, about how my dad wouldn’t have liked you, I was just being a bitch. I thought you were denying me sex to prove some kind of point, and it pissed me off. I said what I said to get back at you. I’m so sorry.”

  “I would never deny you sex to prove a point or for any other reason.”

  She chuckled. “Actually, I think my dad would have loved you.”

  “Maybe not loved,” I responded cautiously.

  She rolled and propped herself up on one elbow so she could look into my eyes, her gaze earnest. “I think I started questioning everything, not just how our relationship skipped dating and went straight to me picking up your socks from on top of the hamper every day—”