Out of the Blue: A Pengram Mystery

by Scarlett Castrilli

  “An anonymous call came in with a tip about Weird Scott. Real name is Scott Blay. He didn’t show up to work yesterday.”

  “I see. Was the caller male or female?”

  “Woman’s voice, sounded young and nervous. She wanted us to know that he’d been pestering Chloe over the last month or two.”

  “Just like Lindsay said.”

  “This woman gave a few more details. She said he had a crush on Chloe and wanted to move into her apartment.”

  “Move in?” I repeated. My brain was not awake enough for this conversation. “Why did he want to move in? It didn’t sound like they’d ever dated.”

  “That was what the woman said, move in. He kept asking Chloe about it until she complained to management. The boss told him to knock it off and leave her alone. That was just last week. Then another call came in from the same woman about an hour ago, saying that Scott showed up for work this morning.”

  The woman had to be another employee of the store. “Then let’s hit Tasty and have a chat with him.”

  I picked up Halloran and we were on the way. “Oh, I forgot to tell you a part of it,” he said.

  “About the anonymous calls or the documentary?” I asked. “Enough about the stupid documentary! You lost me with all of that, too.”

  “Two of them in that mix had a much older kid. He was S,” Halloran said blithely over my protests. “S was graduating from high school and wanted to have only his mom and dad there for the ceremony, but a bunch of them were so offended to be left out that they showed up anyway to cheer him on. They helped to raise him so they felt they had a right to be there regardless of what he wanted. Held up a big banner with his name on it and all their names around his when he walked on stage for his diploma, introduced themselves to everyone in the bleachers as his moms and dads. I felt so sorry for that kid. He said he didn’t mind his unusual family, but he didn’t like them outing what they did to the world either. He just wanted to fit in with his friends like any other seventeen-year-old. His dad, his real dad, was scolding him to be proud. All that matters is love.”

  “My mother brought a random guy she’d met in a bar the night before to my high school graduation,” I commented. “They made out in the stands like horny teenagers for two hours. Everyone was watching them instead of the graduates and I wanted to die. Then they disappeared towards the end and I just had to hope she wasn’t blowing him in a corner somewhere.” Knowing my mother, chances were high that she had been. Ugh.

  “My folks sat there in the stands like normal people and cheered me on,” Halloran said mildly. “You want to go to Rosie’s graduation next year, Blue? She’d love to have you there. We’ll go out for pizza afterwards.”

  “I would be delighted,” I said.

  “She says you’re the cool aunt she never had.”

  “That’s darling. Tell her hi from me.” I pulled in at Tasty and found a parking spot.

  The grocery store was filled with the rich scent of coffee. I looked over longingly to the baked goods area where it was being served. “I need more caffeine.”

  “Me, too. Let’s talk to him and get some on the way out,” Halloran said. The coffee at the station tasted like lighter fluid.

  The store was virtually empty, and all but one of the checkout lanes was closed. A woman with four very young children was struggling to pay for her groceries as the kids shrieked wordlessly and tried to grab things from the conveyor belt.

  “We could have her summon the manager,” I said doubtfully as something shattered over there. The mom began to yell at one boy in particular as the cashier dove over the conveyor belt to catch a tipping bottle of tequila.

  “God, no. Let’s just go over to the deli and see if this guy is there,” Halloran said.

  We walked past the baked goods to the deli beyond it. There were two counters there, one for the purpose of making burritos and the second for sandwiches and meat slices. Giant hams and turkeys rested on plates behind the glass, along with bowls of pasta salad, chicken potpies, and other items.

  No one was shopping over here, nor was there anyone behind the second counter. On the burrito side, a dazed-looking woman with spiked pink hair was pulling in slow motion a tortilla barehanded from a bag. As Halloran and I neared the counter, we showed our badges. Halloran made the introductions.

  She blinked at us, looking stoned out of her mind. Her nametag said Skyye. “Okay,” she said.

  “We’d like to speak to Scott Blay,” I said.

  Skyye stared at me with incomprehension.

  “Weird Scott,” I tried.

  Her face filled with recognition. “He’s not here.”

  “We were informed that he was,” I replied. This could not be the employee who had called in.

  “No. I mean . . .” Remembering the tortilla in her hand, she laid it out flat. Then she scooped up a spoonful of scrambled eggs. Letting them fall in chunks to the tortilla, she looked back to me. “He’s working. He just stepped out for a smoke.”

  “Where?”

  Her head tilted lazily to a doorway on her side of the counter. A chunk of eggs missed the tortilla and she nudged it on with her index finger. More than a little grossed out, I said, “Shouldn’t you be wearing gloves?”

  Skyye looked at the burrito for a long second. At last she shrugged. Halloran and I exchanged a glance, and then we rounded the counter together to go in back. Startled from her stupor as we passed behind her, Skyye said, “That’s only for employees. You can’t go in there.”

  Neither of us responded, and she made no further effort to stop us. We passed through an empty kitchen and let ourselves out the door. Standing beside a dumpster and looking at a cell phone was a pale, pimply guy in his late twenties, cigarette drooping from his lips. He was a few inches shy of six feet tall, and in my uncharitable opinion, wimpy-looking. There wasn’t a muscle on him.

  “Are you Scott Blay?” Halloran asked, flashing his badge.

  The guy grinned, more at me than at Halloran. This one thought he was a charmer. “Yeah. You here about Chloe?”

  “Why weren’t you at work yesterday?” Halloran asked.

  Scott’s eyes widened. “You think I’m the killer? That is so awesome! What led you to me?”

  He wasn’t called Weird Scott for nothing. “Just following up with the people who knew her,” I said.

  Looking a little crestfallen, Scott said, “I wasn’t here because I try to live a low-impact life. Get me?”

  “Got nothing,” I replied.

  “A low-impact life! No car, no big house wasting resources. That’s important.”

  He looked at us for confirmation and removed his cigarette. I had no idea how this was an answer to why he wasn’t at work. His eyes growing intense with emotion, Scott said, “You can get by without those things. This world is running out of stuff and people are still gobbling up everything in sight. It’s all about short-term happiness. I don’t want to be a part of that. Someone has to be the voice for Mother Earth and she’s hurting. That’s what I tell people. I tell them that all day long and try to make them listen. She’s hurting real bad at how we’re living on her. We have got to change how we live, be low-impact to let her heal. What kind of cars do you drive?”

  “Why weren’t you at work yesterday?” Halloran asked for a second time, the slightest hint of annoyance in his tone.

  Scott sighed. “I stay with friends, rotate through them. I’ve done it for four years now. You have to get rid of your stuff when you live that way, and you can’t acquire more. But you don’t need it. You don’t need any of it! How much stuff do you two have packed into closets that you never use? How much is in your garage?”

  We did not humor him with a response. Getting the hint that we were not going to play along, Scott gave up and said, “I’ve been staying with Dan and Cindy for the last few weeks, but they kicked me out yesterday morning. I called in sick since I had to find a new place to live. You can ask my boss. Hell, you can ask Dan and Cindy. Dan
works in the wine department and Cindy’s over at the meat department.”

  “So you’re a professional couch-surfer,” I said.

  He didn’t take it as an insult. “Yeah, so I don’t use resources.”

  I let it slide that he was using other people’s resources. “What were you doing the day before that?”

  “Worked here until six. Went home and watched TV with the kids. Dan and Cindy got two boys, five and four. Then we got in a fight, me and Dan and Cindy. They didn’t like the movie I was watching with the kids. It wasn’t that scary, just PG-13,” he added derisively. “They said I had to be out in the morning. I went to sleep thinking they’d forget about it, but they didn’t.”

  “Did you like Chloe Rogers?” Halloran asked.

  Weird Scott nodded. “Yeah, she was okay. I was thinking I could stay with her sometime. I would have rather stayed with her than go over to Chip’s yesterday. He’s only letting me stay there until his girlfriend comes back from her business trip early next week. It sucks having to unpack and then pack up all over again right away.”

  This guy was a leech. “Did you like her in a romantic way?” I asked, although my gut told me this was not the man we wanted.

  “She was pretty,” Weird Scott said with what appeared to be genuine disinterest. He had only wanted to charm her for her sofa. “No sparks. She was kind of vacant. So quiet unless she was talking to customers and then it was just what do you want and have a nice day. I’d tell her all about living light on the land and she wouldn’t say squat most of the time. Just another consumer that didn’t care.”

  He shook his head sadly. “I wanted to call her yesterday, ask if I could come over, but I’m not allowed to talk to her anymore. Then I found out she was dead. I hope they do a green burial for her.”

  “A what?” I asked. All I could think of was someone painting Chloe’s body green for some inexplicable purpose.

  “A green burial,” Scott explained, taking a puff of his cigarette. “It’s natural. Wrap you up in a shroud, put you in the ground. No embalming chemicals. You can also have a non-toxic coffin that’s biodegradable so you’re not impacting the environment in a negative way. But I’d only want the shroud. Just going back to Mother Earth. She fed you, so now you can feed her worms. It’s the circle of life.”

  After wrapping it up and speaking with the manager, Halloran and I left the store. We’d decided to skip the coffee after seeing how Skyye made the burrito.

  “No,” Halloran said once we were on the road.

  “No,” I repeated.

  “We’ll follow up on his alibi, but it’s going to hold water. What’s next?”

  I didn’t know.

  Chapter Seven

  The props were all so generic. They were things that could be bought anywhere.

  It was early night. I was staring up at my ceiling, resenting that this was what my brain had chosen to keep me awake. It was times like these when I missed JJ. We would have shared a late dinner. Curled up on the sofa to watch television. Gone to bed together. And that had been another tiny red flag I’d missed in those years, how sex was just a little bit more about him than me.

  Not all the way, or I never would have stayed with him. Not every part of a relationship could be split fifty-fifty either, and attempting to keep tabs on everything to divide it equally had always seemed very unromantic to me. He paid more often when we went out to restaurants or on vacations because he made more money than I did. I rolled the trashcans to the curb more often because I was the one who remembered which night they had to go out. But sex . . . sex should have been closer to fifty-fifty than the sixty-forty it was. Yet that was a major improvement on the handful of guys I’d dated in my twenties. I had still been learning back then what exactly I wanted in bed and how in the world to bring it up. I guess I had expected my partners to know or ask, but by and large, they didn’t.

  I didn’t really want JJ in bed with me right now, talking all about his day before remembering to ask about mine. And then not listening to me quite as attentively as I’d listened to him. But it would still have been a distraction from the case.

  The props in the maze were in Evidence now, and my mind coasted in frustration from one piece to another. There was the artificial Christmas tree. Four and a half feet tall, it was styled after a Classic Blue Spruce and made by a company in the Midwest called Happy Holidays. Happy Holidays had been supplying department stores and box stores around the nation with these easily affordable trees for decades. The particular tree in the maze had been made and sold in the 1970s, one of many hundreds of thousands.

  Where in the world had the perp gotten this tree? The answer was anywhere: a store to sell it back then when it was brand new, or a garage sale later on, swiped from a basement or sitting on a curb by garbage cans . . . And then there were the ornaments on the branches, some popular styles dating back to the fifties and others from the more recent past, utterly standard and wiped down thoroughly. The places they could have come from numbered in the infinite.

  The same problems could be found with the dolls in the classroom and Thanksgiving room, the utensils on the table and the notebooks on the desks, as well as the table and desks themselves. Some pieces were old, others much newer, and all of it mass-produced. That was another reason I was so sure that this had nothing to do with Scott Blay. He didn’t have a pot of his own to piss in. Where would he have stored such an astonishing amount of props? This perp owned a home or a storage unit, or both.

  That indicated to me that he had a job, most likely. Possibly college-educated. Likely sexually inadequate and obsessive-compulsive.

  What was it about Chloe Rogers that had singled her out to him? Was it her attractiveness? Had he attempted to approach her on the dance floor and she rebuffed him, motivating an angry choice to select her? To punish her with his maze? To the unbalanced mind, it might have felt like a personal snub. To her, she had just been too shy and socially incompetent to chat.

  That was heartbreaking to me. When I finally escaped into the adult world, I’d been a mile behind the starting gate compared to my peers. I was so used to moving from one place to another and taking care of my irresponsible mother that I hadn’t had much time for friends or dating. I wasn’t as shy as Chloe, but I had definitely been awkward in my efforts to make up the distance. She’d just needed some time to find her footing, but someone cut it short.

  Or would this man have gone for any female? A female who looked like she was alone? He wouldn’t have gone after a woman with a guy right beside her, probably not even a woman dancing in a group of female friends.

  Although he was a definite risk-taker, he hadn’t wanted to be remembered. I imagined a shadowy figure prowling through the dark corners of the club, a big cat eyeing a herd of wildebeest for the weaker, unprotected one he could catch. In that light, Chloe was the perfect prey. Small. Alone. Drinking.

  He attended to the most minute of details. He had to have been in Bounce on some previous date to know where the staff room was. Had the manager or any employees caught people wandering around in the back in recent weeks? That was something to ask. We needed the security videos going as far back as they had them.

  And he couldn’t be very old. Bounce skewed to people who were in their twenties, thirties at most. A much older man would have stood out among them, the antithesis of what this perp liked to do.

  He worked. He owned a home. He could even have a girlfriend, or be married with kids, if that was something he had an interest in. He blended. He thought through every detail of this crime, whiled away his time in collecting props and scouting locations for his maze and his prey. My brain chewed on that for some time, debating what kind of job and family situation would allow him such copious amounts of free time. Perhaps there were no children in his house. He could be divorced, and his ex-wife raising them. Or there was no family, and his job wasn’t a professional one that would be time-consuming.

  I wished we had similar crimes in the dat
abase to compare this one against. But the man who had stranded women in the wilderness for the sick joy of hunting them down died years ago in prison. There was also a chasm of differences between that crime and this one.

  The man who had killed Chloe Rogers might never have encountered the law, although I was sure he had broken it in some capacity in the past. But he wasn’t prone to rash acts. He flew under the radar. His coworkers and neighbors might know that he had some quirks, but they would describe him as a nice, quiet guy. He could play the game.

  These were the perps that bothered me the most.

  My phone vibrated with a text. Sure it was Halloran wanting to bother me with further details of that bizarre documentary, I was surprised to see the message was from Tyler. I am so sorry.

  Sure you are, I thought, writing, Thanks, Tyler. Unable to help myself, I goaded him with a follow-up message. You should be sorry.

  A minute later, another text came in. I sent that before I meant to. My name is Brendan Cavil and Tyler is my fourteen-year-old son. He and a friend were goofing around on dating sites and contacting local women. I just found this on his phone today.

  That jackass who wanted me to reimburse him for condoms was only fourteen? I almost laughed. And you’re making his apologies for him?

  No reply came. Then several messages arrived all at once.

  I’m handling the first round and explaining the situation to you and the two other women he contacted. He’ll be making the second round either by text, phone, letter, or in person, depending on what you prefer. Again, I am so sorry for this. I had no idea. He’s grounded for a very long time. It was all fun and games in his head. I should drag him into the police station so someone can talk to him about what harassment is.

  My thumbs swept over the keyboard. Well, you can tell him that he was talking to a cop already.

  Oh God.

  I laughed at this man’s misery and asked to voice chat since I was too tired to keep texting. He called immediately. “Hi. Tyler has already been sent to bed in disgrace, so I’ll have him speak to you tomorrow.”