Out of the Blue: A Pengram Mystery

by Scarlett Castrilli

  The huge backyard was a disaster of his mother’s junk, and the house was as well. The attic was crowded out and then the second floor rooms were crowded out and then the bedrooms on the first floor were crowded out and then the two of them slept in the living room by the time he should have been in high school, he on the sofa and she on the recliner, a stinking carpet of trash below. Moving anywhere through the couple of rooms left to them was like navigating an obstacle course. When he tried to throw something, anything away, even if it belonged to him, she screamed in angry hysterics until her voice gave out. She even screamed when he packed up his things and walked out after turning eighteen. It wasn’t because she wanted him to stay. She was worried that he had packed up something of hers, and he wouldn’t let her unload his bags to check.

  In time, he had to return to that house. It was even worse than before. Having run out of room to cram her shit, she was now wasting money on a tiny studio apartment to fill that up. Mom got her money a million different ways, stealing pills and selling them, helping herself to purses in unlocked cars, whoring herself if she had any takers. Once she scored twelve hundred bucks at the private high school, some idiot parent-helper leaving an envelope of money raised for the cheerleading squad on the back seat of an unlocked car.

  The studio was dirt-cheap because it was in such bad condition. She never hassled the landlord to fix shit up and he never hassled her by raising the rent. Sometimes she didn’t even bother to pay up and the Stone Age asshole never noticed. It was just a single room with an attached bath, holes in the wall letting in rodents and the air reeking like an army of mice had perished among the boxes. Mom showed the studio to him with pride, and after that, she made him drive her newest acquisitions over there and find a place to jam them in while she waited at home. That caused a big fight between them. She liked to have him going back and forth and back and forth with this going to that place and that coming to this place, but he’d only agree to go once each day. Each night, actually. Then he could take her shit and dump it out in random places rather than drive over there, and nobody saw him doing that in the dark.

  She couldn’t see how much he despised her under his blank face. When a massive pile of junk collapsed on her in the hallway, pinning her down with its weight, she begged him to call for an ambulance.

  He didn’t. He watched her struggle to free herself, and every time she succeeded in gaining a few inches, he tipped over another pile.

  Six days later, she died.

  He buried her in the backyard under all the trash her broken mind had loved. Then he made her landfill into his home, throwing out the very worst of the muck until he had reclaimed some of the rooms on both floors. The whole time he did that, he relived the pleasure he’d received from witnessing her futile fight to escape the hallway. She hadn’t come close to making it to the living room, a snail rendered immobile by hundreds of pounds of weight in the shell on its back. She’d pleaded and shouted and sobbed and screamed and threatened and prayed, pulled out all of the stops to influence him, and it made him feel like God.

  In that hallway, she had been worshipping him. In that hallway, she had seen him. Truly seen his blank face the day before she died, her weakened mind unable to superimpose one last image. She saw that he didn’t care. That he had never cared. And she was afraid.

  Her last words were to whisper that she forgave him. Oh, no. This was how he forgave her.

  He wished he had taken even more advantage of the situation, teasing her with the phone and pretending to help pull things off her while piling more on. He made his mazes for animals and that was enjoyable, but it didn’t give him the same rush that he had gotten from watching his mother’s confusion and fear and desperation.

  But now he knew how to get that rush.

  The big-breasted cashier hung up the phone at long last and gave him an insincere apology and smile. She resumed talking as she put his purchases in a bag and then charged him for the bag itself. That was some new law. He didn’t like it. He was already paying for his papers and didn’t think he should have to carry around canvas bags everywhere. All of his mother’s trashcan-diving bags he had put in the garbage long ago.

  “Thanks for shopping at Book Time! Make sure you come back now!” she said.

  Lips up. “Have a nice day, miss.”

  She liked to hear that, miss instead of ma’am, as he had known she would. She thought she had fooled him. Then her eyes slid past to see if anyone else was waiting in line.

  When he pulled the bag off the counter, it swung down and tapped him on the crotch of his pants. The blood instantly drained from his cheeks. That key needed to come or he was going to take the scythe to his own dick and end his misery.

  He didn’t want it to come to that. Maybe it was time to buy another cage with a key. He could be in San Francisco in an hour.

  Maybe it wouldn’t fit. Maybe that sex shop was no longer in business. He wanted to yell at the possibilities, but adrenaline flushed through him at the same time.

  He would beat this. It was just a test, and he would pass.

  “Are you okay, sir?” the cashier asked.

  He imagined this woman waking up in a maze. Heaving herself up, breasts trembling, those queer eyes taking in the station. A New Year’s Eve party. A candy store. A nursery. A Fourth of July picnic with the stars and stripes on the walls beneath pictures of fireworks.

  What would a woman like this do? What coping mechanisms would she fall back upon? Would she go fast? Slow? Pick up something she had knocked over? Stand there and scream? Climb the walls?

  She was too tall. She’d see right over them.

  You get to live, he thought magnanimously, and left the store without a word. Then he claimed a bench to read the newspapers, a bible of him.

  Chapter Eleven

  “You got something?” Halloran asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, staring at the screen.

  I had been watching the videos for the last hour. Going over and over and over those strange little rooms in the mazes, wondering if they had any deeper significance to the killer. School. Christmas. Thanksgiving. Church. Easter. Birthday.

  The second maze was very much like the first when it came to the props. They were generic items that could be purchased anywhere, and were therefore impossible to trace. I had thought briefly that we had a clue in the church room. The religious paraphernalia was stuff that could be gotten in any dollar store from coast to coast, but what about the pews? I’d never gone into any store to find pews on sale. He must have stolen them from a church. But my hopes were soon dashed. Five minutes online taught me just how easy it was to buy from church outfitter stores. It could have come from one of those places, or sites selling used church furniture or even giving it away for free. Churches bringing in brand new pews often just wanted to get rid of the old ones by any means possible. What we had found in the maze was lower-quality composite wood.

  And it was wiped clean, naturally. This man spent outrageous amounts of time picking over every inch of his decorations. Wearing thick gloves, scrubbing with cleansers, packing them up for transport and unpacking without making fresh marks . . . He was unnervingly thorough.

  So I didn’t have anything of interest yet to share with Halloran. I kept watching the maze feeds in the hopes that something would suddenly jump out at me.

  “I had Fagelman see about those security videos at Bounce,” Halloran said. “Old, crappy system and they reuse the same tapes over and over, so he’s watching what little they had. Nothing of interest at this point, just couples and groups going in, a few single women. The perp probably cased the joint some other day.”

  “Unless he was in one of those groups or couples. He can clearly fake being just an average dude if he got Francisco to take the coffee.”

  “Well, the quality is so bad that it’s hard to see anyone. And Fagelman asked the employees if they’d caught people wandering around in back. They said no, that’s a rare occurrence. The door
to the back of the building is hidden behind a curtain, so most of the club guests don’t even know it’s there. One employee said she found a woman in back once, drunk off her ass and hunting for the restroom. Another came across a couple trying to get it on upon the laundry bag of rags, drunk again and that was back in the first week the club opened.”

  “Maybe it’s the woman. She was just faking drunk to scope the place out,” I said wearily.

  “I think he just did it unobserved,” Halloran said. “That big old room they have back there, filled up with equipment and boxes of stuff for the stage . . . It’s not like it would be hard to hide behind those things if someone was going to the back door to dump the trash outside. Oh, and just in case you haven’t been updated, the captain contacted the FBI today to request assistance. Hopefully their behavioral science people can do some profiling, now that there’s been a second murder.”

  “Are they going to stomp in and say it’s our case now just like on TV?” I asked absent-mindedly. “I love when they do that. Then the lead detective bumped off the case hands in his or her badge and gun and goes rogue since the FBI agents always fuck it up.”

  “I can’t watch that shit. It’s like going home from work and putting on the TV to go back to work. How can you stand it?”

  “I don’t usually watch those shows,” I said. “There was just a random police procedural marathon weekend a month ago and I couldn’t find anything else better.”

  “I know a documentary you could watch.”

  “No.”

  “It’s really good.”

  “No.”

  “It’s about sex.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You don’t have to watch these videos, you know,” Halloran said. “We got a call to the tip line from a woman named Psychic Sue. She says we’re looking for a man who lives near a body of water and is crying out in his heart for us to stop him. He’s slightly overweight, has brown hair, and drives an old car that might be gray or black. The uniforms will have him in no time.”

  “Well then, I’ll just go home. Thanks, Psychic Sue.” I hit pause when the feed reached the Christmas tree and pointed to the red bird ornaments. “Look at that.”

  “What about it?” Halloran said.

  “There are three of them. Three red birds, three of these golden balls, three of the silver balls, three snowflakes . . .”

  “Only two of those pink-and-green finials,” Halloran argued.

  I made the feed go forward at an extremely slow pace. As the camera holder rounded the tree, I said, “There’s the third pink-and-green finial down there.”

  “Only one star on top,” Halloran said. “Only one tree.”

  “Not everything is duplicated in threes, but the number is repeated as often as possible: three rooms in the maze, three desks in the classroom, three dolls and three notebooks . . .”

  “More than three presents over in Christmas.”

  I counted them. “Nine presents. Six loops of the lights around the tree. Want to bet there were precisely eighteen eggs in the Easter room? Or some other multiple of three?”

  “Doesn’t help us find him, though.”

  I sank back. No, it didn’t. It could just be a feature of the killer’s OCD, the number three and its multiples holding a special, if illogical, significance to him.

  “Is he planning to kill in threes?” Halloran asked in sudden alarm. “He might be setting up a third maze right this second to finish this off and sate his compulsion.”

  Then we needed to have uniforms crawling over this city. Checking out abandoned buildings, fields and construction sites, anywhere he could be creating his new maze. It struck me how many places this perp must have checked out before selecting the silk mill and former pumpkin patch. Perhaps he hadn’t been as careful of leaving prints in the places he’d rejected. A tire impression, anything. It would be more than what we had now.

  What would he do if he successfully killed a third person? Stop for good? But that wasn’t in line with what I knew about twisted minds like his. They liked what they were doing. They grew addicted to the rush of it, but like an addiction to drugs, they needed more and more to achieve the same high. He might stop for a time once he hit his magic number, for months or even years, but it would not last forever. He would eventually continue with his mazes, or shift to some new ritual, but he wouldn’t simply walk off into the sunset.

  “They were small people,” I said. “Chloe Rogers was so small that her roommate described her as a doll. The perp didn’t want her to be tall enough to see over those partitions. Francisco Hernandez was short, too. And both were light on weight, easy for this guy to move.”

  “I’d better hit the store on the way home and start eating cake,” Halloran said.

  “You’re six feet tall. He won’t want you.”

  “Then I’ll feed you cake until you’re five thousand pounds and he won’t want you either, Short Stuff.”

  “I guess we can’t alert the media for short people to be on guard.”

  “No, but that would be a new one. Well, speaking of height, the second maze let us narrow it down some more. Ground was uneven coming out of that maze, but not like how bad those floorboards at the mill were. He’s no five-six or six even either, got him between five-seven and five-ten now.”

  “Kidnapping prostitutes would be so much easier,” I said.

  “Not in this area,” Halloran said. “They don’t tend to hang out alone. Pull up in a car with a couple of them standing on the corner and they’ve seen his face, they’ve seen his wheels, there could be a pimp nearby watching, he could be caught on a store camera or cell phone . . .”

  “Speaking from personal experience?”

  He waved me off. “Maybe he coaxes a girl inside his vehicle and offers her a drink, but she doesn’t feel thirsty or doesn’t trust him, so he’s got no game. He’s shown his face for nothing. If he isn’t strong enough to overpower her, or if she’s carrying a box cutter or mace, that could go south for him real fast. He doesn’t want to risk a fight getting to his maze. That’s why he sneaks the Quell into their drinks. He doesn’t even fight his victims when they get out of the maze. It looks like he creeps up and takes them out before they can do a thing.”

  “So is he a large and physically imposing psychopath who doesn’t care for physical confrontation, or a ninety-eight pound weakling who can’t win in a battle?”

  “I don’t know. But he lives by a body of water.”

  I didn’t want this to be like the Calderon case, gathering dust in a file cabinet. “And where the fuck does he get all this crap? Is he stealing it from somewhere or is it his? He has to have a two thousand square foot basement or storage units packed to the brim.”

  Halloran’s stomach grumbled unhappily.

  “You need money for the vending machine?” I asked, too full to even think about food.

  “No, I’ve got snacks.” He headed for his desk and opened a drawer. Pulling out a granola bar, he said, “We could make up a list of storage places in the area, see if anyone’s been hanging out there a lot and pings on the manager’s odd-o-meter.”

  “Where do you think he got all of those partitions?”

  “They remind me of the ones in my Catholic elementary school growing up,” Halloran said, eating half of the granola bar in one bite. “Big, ugly canvas things separating the second and third grades in the Clover. It was this building with four classrooms around the chapel we prayed in each morning, all of the rooms open to each other and the chapel as well. The partitions gave each class a little privacy and cut down on some of the noise. After I left, the school moved the grades out into actual rooms in their new building. I don’t know what they did with all that extra space in the Clover.”

  “What happened to the partitions?”

  “No idea. Stuffed them in a corner or basement or hauled them to the dump, probably. Or sold them off, but I can’t imagine who would want them.”

  “The ones in the silk mill cou
ld have been from a school or an office in this area originally,” I said, tapping my finger on my desk. “They could have been part of a cubicle ocean in some business that went down. We know this man has to be a local.”

  “We don’t know that for certain.”

  “But I’d say it’s pretty likely. You can’t see that hay maze from the road, only the pumpkin patch. That place was barely advertised and it’s totally out of the way. And in the past, those bales were always torn down and sold just after Halloween. Yet he knew they were still there. He could live very close to that property. What if-”

  “Service on Wheels,” Halloran blurted. “Someone dropping off the old lady’s food every week would also have seen it if he parked next to the house.”

  “He might have asked her about it,” I said intensely. “We could get a description, maybe a name-”

  Matching my intensity, Halloran said, “She can’t see or hear well. We can send someone out to ask, but I don’t think we’ll get answers from her. We need to contact Service on Wheels and get a list of everyone who’s driven out to her place since last November. I can get on that right now.”

  That was a much better idea. “And I need to talk to the task force about hunting down vacant properties where he could be setting up his next maze,” I said.

  Halloran ate the last of the granola bar in another huge bite. I turned off the camera feed and we hustled in opposite directions.

  Chapter Twelve

  Service on Wheels put up a ridiculous fight about releasing its employee information; the owner was a scorched-earth conspiracy nut with a passionate hatred for the establishment. Why we needed the names and contact details was wholly irrelevant to Jeremiah Dagmar, who was far too delighted to thwart us in this unexpected opportunity to stick it to The Man. He was an old hippie gone bitter and paranoid, his long hair held back in a scraggly gray ponytail and a vicious, childish glee in his watery blue eyes as he argued with legal terms he didn’t fully grasp. Only when threatened with a search warrant did he roll over and let us have his files, which were in no particular order, or any order whatsoever. Finding what we needed was a royal pain in the ass.