Out of the Blue: A Pengram Mystery

by Scarlett Castrilli

  Brendan Cavil had a pleasant voice, deep and rich. “All right,” I said. “I look forward to hearing from him.”

  “Are you really a cop?”

  “One of Darby’s finest. What do you do?”

  “I own the Breathe yoga studios here and in Sonoma and Napa. And I raise a son who misplaced half of his brain after his thirteenth birthday. He still hasn’t found it and I’m about to put up missing posters on street corners.”

  I smiled into the darkness. This guy sounded like a single father. “Hormones,” I said.

  “But it’s no excuse. He’s blaming his friend and that’s no excuse either. I know the idea most likely came from Rocco, but Tyler went along with it and he has to take responsibility for that. They discovered some awful men’s rights website with a page about how to impress women, or bitches as they were called, and the boys were copying lines straight from that. Including what he sent to you about wanting money for his imaginary condoms.” The man sounded mortified. “I’m going to have a long night ahead poking through his phone and laptop to see what else he’s been up to. This stuff didn’t even exist when I was his age.”

  “I hope this is the worst of what you find,” I said.

  “So do I. Again, Ms. Blue-”

  “Blue Pengram,” I said. “And you don’t have to apologize again. You didn’t do this.”

  “Ms. Pengram, I’m apologizing once more anyway. This isn’t how I’ve raised him to speak to women. He’ll be contacting you very soon to make amends.”

  “Okay. It’s just Blue, though. Good night, Mr. Cavil.”

  “Just Brendan. Good night.”

  When I still couldn’t sleep half an hour later, I went online and searched Brendan Cavil and Darby. A website for Breathe Studios popped up first in the results. Following it, I landed on a page about the company and its owner.

  Damn. My eyes widened. Beside the blurb was a picture of a very handsome man in a white T-shirt and blue jeans. He had a shock of dark hair, beautiful brown eyes, and a chiseled frame. His arm rested over the shoulders of a boy with the same dark hair. That had to be Tyler, who appeared to be about ten in the shot.

  The first line of the blurb said they had relocated from San Francisco to Darby and the rest of it was about helping people to meet their goals with classes offered at all levels from expert down to beginner. I surfed through every page of the website, which was beautifully done. The pictures showed real people with real bodies working out, not airbrushed fantasies of youth and fitness. There were classes for seniors, classes reserved for women and teens, co-ed classes and even a little daycare where parents could leave their kids for an hour to play while they exercised. I almost wanted to go.

  Finally too tired to keep my eyes open anymore, I set down my phone and fell asleep. But it didn’t last long. A call came in at half-past three. I fumbled at the nightstand for the phone, my brain still half in a dream.

  Groggily, I said, “Yeah?”

  “It’s me, sunshine,” Halloran said heavily. “There’s been another one.”

  Chapter Eight

  It was as bright as day when I got to the back of the old farm property, though it was still some time from dawn. A vineyard ran on the other side of the fence, and a crew moving giant overhead lights to the block due for harvesting had spotted the body. Their foreman, the only one fluent in English, called 911 to report it. The lights were still there, illuminating both the maze and a row of vines sporting large, swollen merlot bunches. We were at the very western edge of Darby.

  This time, the victim was male. Mexican and in his thirties, short with a wiry frame. That shocked me. Until Halloran had informed me the victim was a man, I’d just assumed it would be another woman.

  Death had come for him quite recently, sometime in the last few hours. The guy had been killed in the same manner as Chloe Rogers, an unhappy gash slicing across his neck so deeply that it almost severed his head. His long-sleeved blue shirt was stained with vomit, and he was barefoot. Two sightless eyes stared over to the vineyard.

  There were no orange partitions here. The maze had been created with moldy hay bales stacked up high. After inspecting the body, I straightened and looked back to the maze. “How long did it take to set this up? And where in the hell did he find all of these nasty old hay bales?” I asked in astonishment. This was the work of days, a truck, and considerable muscle power, or more than one person.

  “It was already here,” Halloran said, standing at an angle on the uneven packed earth. “The owners used to have a pumpkin patch in the front and set up a maze in the back for the month of October, a buck to walk around it. Just a small thing for toddlers, nothing complicated, a piece of candy for them at the end.”

  I shivered, even in my thick coat. It was a very cold night. “How do you know all of that? Have you been here before?”

  “Yeah. Didn’t even realize it until I was pulling into the driveway and thought the place looked familiar. Then I remembered. Laila and I brought the girls once to get pumpkins when they were little, about two and four.”

  “Why only once?”

  “It was sweet but kind of dinky, and too far to drive. There are better pumpkin patches around Darby, much closer to where we live. They’ve got live music and bouncy houses, barbecue and wagon rides. One has a little petting zoo with goats and pigs and a real elaborate corn maze. We checked those out the next few Halloweens and never came back to this one.”

  All of the years I had lived in Darby and I had had no idea this pumpkin patch and maze were here. The other ones had billboards and signs and promoted themselves in the paper. “It must not have been very well advertised.”

  “No, not at all,” Halloran said. “They basically just put up a little sign in the front back when we came here. Saw the pumpkins before I saw the sign. I only knew about it those years ago because I’d come across a tiny ad in the back pages of the Star. It was their first year having the pumpkin patch and maze. Haven’t seen an ad for it since.”

  “This perp has to be local.”

  Looking tired, Halloran rubbed his eyes. This was too early even for him. “The husband died of a heart attack last November and the wife just left this maze up. She’s in her eighties, poor health, and couldn’t deal with it. The maze was his thing, not hers. That’s all I know so far. Got someone with her in the house right now. All the perp had to do was dress up the place, if he did, dump the man in there, and close him in with some bales.”

  Still! The audaciousness of this killer blew me away. If there were as many props in this second maze as there had been at the first, he’d spent considerable time dragging it in. “Did she happen to notice anyone going back and forth across her property?”

  Halloran shook his head. “He didn’t even have to use her driveway to come in. He could have entered this property through the vineyard. That fence is nothing to get over.”

  “Is the vineyard blocked off?”

  “Yeah, uniforms are over there. The manager isn’t happy about it. He wants to pick those grapes, death be damned.”

  I needed to walk this maze. A uniform was bringing over a small ladder. “What’s that for?” I said.

  “I asked for him to find me something that would let us climb to the top,” Halloran said. “Let’s look down before we go in.”

  There hadn’t been anything dangerous to us in the first one, but I understood. Halloran had been so sure this killer had moved on to ply his trade elsewhere, and here was proof that he had not. Now my partner was beginning to doubt what else he had been so sure about previously.

  The ladder was set up beside the bales. I climbed up several rungs and looked over. Then I climbed up several more and stepped off onto a bale. The maze sprawled out below me. Some of the stacks were covered in weathered old tarps, and others had been left open to the elements.

  Halloran called, “Did he make his little Hollywood sets in there?”

  “Looks like it,” I said. “What kinds of decorations were in her
e before?”

  “Well, it’s been more than a decade since I was in there, but I still have some pictures we took of the girls going through it. It was stuff like a paper skeleton tied to a bale, bats hanging on a string, a couple of jack-o’-lanterns. A coffin that shook and howled when you walked by, I remember that. Thought it would scare the girls, but they just cracked up and tried to open it. There wasn’t much, honestly. You could see it all in a few minutes.”

  Either the killer had taken down those decorations, or the owner had already removed them before he died. “There’s no Halloween stuff now that I’m seeing,” I said, walking along the bales cautiously. Camping lanterns were in the corridor beneath me. It widened into a birthday scene.

  Grunting, Halloran came up the ladder. “Another Thanksgiving set?”

  “Happy birthday,” I said, staring down to the dolls sitting around a table. A stuffed layer cake in pastel colors was at the center, six gold candles with fake flames jutting from the top layer. Each doll had a plate and plastic fork, and one was wearing a fast food crown. A little pyramid of presents rested beside the cake.

  Halloran came up behind me. “I thought I’d seen pretty much everything,” he remarked.

  Another pair of camping lanterns was in here. I moved along the bales, noticing the fork just past the birthday room. There were no lanterns down the dead-end corridor that ran alongside the party. “He always gives them a choice,” I said. “You can go into a completely black space, or into a lit room.”

  “What’s the next room?”

  I followed the line of bales. “Looks like he went with Easter.” Plastic eggs were littered generously around a small living room scene. Chairs and an end table with an Easter basket atop it sat beneath hotel art hanging from a bale. One egg was crushed as if the victim had stepped on it.

  Chillingly, there were no hay bales blocking off the adjacent, unlit corridor. “Look at that,” I said in amazement. “This guy could have gotten out if he’d gone this way. But it was night and pitch black, so he went to Easter instead. The perp was so certain that the victim would do this that he didn’t bother to block off an escape route.”

  “The hell is that?” Halloran said.

  “What?”

  Putting on a pair of gloves, he got down to his knees and leaned over the side of the bale wall. He pulled out a purple plastic tube that had been wedged between the bales. “Why is that in there?”

  It was open on both ends. The answer came to us both, but he spoke first. “A spyhole. He was using this for a spyhole! It’s the height an average adult would need it to be to see through. Are there any more over there?”

  At a spot where the corridor narrowed, I stepped over to the other side. Then I looked back. “Yeah, I see several. He must follow along with the victim through the maze, just on the outside where they can’t see him. They’re in the corridors and rooms, nowhere else.”

  “Like a mad scientist watching the rat go through the maze.”

  “Were there holes in the partitions at the silk mill?”

  “I don’t know. Probably. They were old, beat-up things. Maybe he carved out a hole to watch and stuffed the piece back in when he was done. We’ll have to look them over.”

  I moved on to the last room, which was the one the victim must have started in. This one had been done up to look like a church, an altar with a Jesus statue and candles with the Virgin Mary on the glass. One candle was still burning. Sitting in two pews was another collection of dolls. There was a line of vomit on the floor in here that extended to the corridor.

  A mouse skittered out of a crevice in a sagging bale, ran along the wall, and vanished into another crevice. With the maze hanging out here almost a year now, it had to be playing host to a multitude of rodents.

  I looked up to the house. Over a hundred feet in the distance, large trees shielded the windows almost completely. The woman who lived here would have had to be outside to see much of the maze. Also, all of the lanterns within the bales had been placed on the ground. The light to reach the top of the maze would have been minimal.

  Halloran dropped over the side of the bales and into the Easter room. He bent down to the floor.

  “Find something else?” I called.

  “A driver’s license for one Francisco Hernandez,” Halloran said. “Picture matches the victim. Thirty-two. Darby address. It was in this big blue egg that was cracked open.” Making an Evidence bag appear as if by magic, he slipped the license inside.

  “The cracked one was pink.”

  “No, this egg isn’t broken. It was cracked open with the license pretty visible.”

  I thought of the prop hand that had been among the Christmas presents. “Somehow he made Chloe open up the gift . . . and he wanted this man to open up the eggs. He may have left that egg open on purpose so Francisco would notice his license and stop in there.”

  “It doesn’t look like these eggs have been touched,” Halloran called as I backtracked to Easter. “Maybe the victim was so panicked that he didn’t notice his license between the halves of the egg. He just stepped on that other one and charged on through.”

  “Shake the eggs,” I said.

  Halloran lifted a purple egg and shook it. “Doesn’t sound like anything is in there.” Cracking it open, he confirmed it. Then he stuck the halves back together and put it down in the exact same place he’d found it. Moving to another one, he shook it. “Nope.”

  I watched as he went through them. A blue one rattled. Cautiously, he opened it up to reveal jellybeans. “These look about a million years old,” he said. Closing the egg and returning it beneath a chair, he pulled a red one from the Easter basket. “Something is in this one, too.”

  Since there didn’t seem to be any present danger, I dropped into the room and landed in a stagger beside him.

  “Graceful,” Halloran said. “Practically ballet.”

  “I missed a calling.”

  Halloran opened the egg. “Oh, that’s lovely. A bloody toe.”

  “Real?”

  “Fake.” He showed me the toe, which was a withered, pinkish-gray stump with blood around the nail.

  “It could be mistaken for real if you’re freaked out, possibly drugged up, and it’s night,” I said.

  He capped the egg and dropped it into the basket. “But Francisco didn’t poke around and find it, it seems like. He even threw up on the go.”

  “Why a man?” I asked. “Most of these assholes have a type. A specific sex, a race, an age group. I would have thought this would be a teen girl or young woman, likely white.”

  “He’s got a type. Breathing type,” Halloran said.

  “He’s not sexually assaulting them, but something about this . . . the intensity of it is so sexual to me,” I said.

  “Maybe he identifies as bisexual.”

  “I think whatever his sexuality is, it runs a distant second to his psychopathy. Whether the victim is male or female, this is the ultimate power game. He puts them here against their will, and he controls every detail of what they see. Maybe he even controls what they hear. He gives them choices of where to go but they aren’t really choices at all, and he knows precisely which way they’ll pick. He gets off on the control, and his anticipation of their moves. Was there an EXIT sign by the body?”

  “Yeah. It was attached to the fence but fell off when the picking crew came over to see if it was really a body they were looking at.”

  “So he teases them and terrorizes them and finally murders them. But these aren’t rage-fueled deaths,” I said as Halloran checked over the last eggs. “It’s like he’s just done with them by then. He’s gotten what he wanted, so he kills them with a single blow and walks away. The game isn’t about reaching the finish line but the journey of getting there.”

  “Seems like rage built this,” Halloran commented.

  “Rage built it. Rage watches it. But it isn’t rage at the end. He’s gotten his release. The murder itself isn’t much more than a cleanup job
.”

  “Think of the gobs of free time this fellow must have. This is true dedication to a craft here. Maybe he doesn’t hold down a job but gets all of his money from mommy and daddy. So he can do what he pleases.”

  Something was niggling at me about the scenery, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Together we explored the church and birthday party, where I discovered the presents had no bottoms. One lifted to reveal a cell phone. The taunting in its placement . . . the mockery in this entire construction . . . This man was luring his victims along with scenes that looked on the surface to be happy and calming, twisting them in his perversion to lead them ever closer to death.

  We returned to the body, where the assistant ME was bending down. “Did anyone ever tell you how funny it is to have a medical examiner with the last name Grave?” I asked innocently, as I had many times before. Halloran was called away.

  “Oh, shut your shit-hole, Blue-balls,” Harley yawned sourly, shaking her braid over her shoulder. “I knew I shouldn’t have changed my name when I got married.”

  “The original wasn’t any better.” Her maiden name had been Ghole, which was pronounced ghoul.

  A uniform was watching her in appreciation, and then turned away hastily when I noticed him. Harley Grave usually took people aback. A blonde bombshell with an hourglass figure and legs a mile long, she belonged on a movie screen or catwalk. Instead she mucked about in blood and guts and had a fouler mouth than anyone I’d ever met. A total misanthrope, I took it as a point of pride that she loathed me less than most. Looking over the corpse, she snapped, “Well, what the flying fuck happened to you?”

  “He had a bad night,” I said.

  “Sir! Sir! Stop!”

  I looked over the fence to the vineyard. A man was storming past the rows and aiming in our direction. Eller was chasing after him. “Sir, you can’t be in here!”

  Halloran returned to my side. “Well, we’ve got a very angry vineyard manager to speak with,” he said, nodding to the man over the fence, “and an old woman with some dementia back that way to speak with, too.”