by N. M. Brown
After a moment, Leighton looked directly at the younger woman.
‘Do you know where I could find this guy?’ he asked.
Chapter Forty-Five
As he leaned on the reception desk of Sunbeam Garden Retirement Village, Leighton glanced around at the various pamphlets neatly arranged in fan shapes on the veneered surface. Many of them were advertising low impact exercise classes for more mature persons; others were promoting local golf facilities offering discounts to elderly golfers. A cheap plastic fan was droning nearby, causing the edges of the pamphlets to flutter like leaves in an autumn breeze. A tall, young man with neat bleached hair and sculpted eyebrows had been flicking through a copy of Vanity Fair when Leighton arrived, but he quickly folded it neatly over and smiled at him.
‘How may I help you?’ he asked, cheerfully.
‘I’m looking to visit one of your residents,’ Leighton said.
‘Which one of our guests is it that you’re interested in seeing?’
‘Len Wells,’ Leighton said, hoping it was the right place.
‘Give me one moment please.’
The young man turned away from Leighton and peered at a large A3 spreadsheet pinned on the wall behind the reception area. He then moved a manicured nail down each name in turn.
‘There we go,’ he said without turning around. ‘Mr Wells is in number seventy-seven. That’s in the Rose complex. Have you visited our retirement village before?’
‘No – first time,’ Leighton replied.
‘Here.’ The young man turned back to the desk and rummaged around for a moment. He then handed Leighton a small map printed on peach coloured paper. ‘The numbers and areas are clearly shown. Each area is named after a flower and the colours of the buildings match it – so the Cornflower buildings are purple and the Buttercup ones are yellow.’
‘I get it,’ Leighton said with a smile. ‘It’s a nice touch.’
‘Well, the colours are a little faded, but if you have any problems just pop back here and I’ll walk you round.’
‘Thanks,’ Leighton said with a small nod of his head, ‘much appreciated.’
Leighton left the air-conditioned reception and let the screen door wheeze closed behind him. It was a warm afternoon and the walk through the retirement village was a pleasant one. The entire place comprised a square mile of neat pastel-coloured homes organised in small squares of homes with dipping pools at the centre of each. Leighton noted with a small smile that the pavement snaking through the place was a faded yellow colour. He guessed that the residents of this place would be old enough to remember The Wizard of Oz movie and perhaps appreciate the notion that there might be some place nice waiting over the rainbow.
As he peered around at each collection of small houses, Leighton checked the numbers on the door of each property against the map.
Eventually, as the sun was starting to scorch the back of his neck, Leighton found number seventy-seven located at the northern end of the park. This section backed on the Amtrak Train Line which ran all the way north to Los Angeles. Leighton figured that the rent at this end of the park was most probably twenty percent cheaper, unless the residents were attracted to the regular clattering rhythm of the trains. Wells’ home was a neat, rose-coloured building with a narrow western style porch. There were only two items upon it – a rocking chair and a discarded aluminium walking frame.
Leighton stepped up to the flaking red door and pressed the buzzer.
There was a shuffling noise and some muffled cursing from inside. Eventually, the door opened a couple of inches and a watchful eye appeared.
‘Who the hell are you?’ a gravelly voice asked.
‘Sir, my name is Leighton Jones. I’m sorry to disturb you. I was wondering if I could speak to you for a few minutes.’
‘You selling something?’ The door seemed to close a fraction.
‘No, sir, I’m not.’
‘Didn’t think so. Salesmen and bible thumpers always look good; you look like shit. You a cop?’
‘Yeah,’ Leighton said, ‘well recognised.’
‘Where’s your badge?’ the man behind the door asked.
Leighton reached into his back pocket and took out the black leather wallet containing his gold metal badge and ID. He held it up to the gap so the man could inspect it.
The elderly man screwed up his eye as he peered. Eventually, he let out a sigh suggesting the exercise was pretty useless.
‘Looks legit but my eyes can’t read any letters smaller than a newspaper headline. So how come you never showed it at the start?’
‘I’m not here officially,’ Leighton said.
‘Not official?’ The old man blew out a wheezy breath. ‘So, what the hell do you want?’
‘I’m a friend of Lisa Martinez,’ Leighton said, ‘I was hoping you could give me a couple of minutes to speak about Marianne Hume.’
There was a flicker of something in the eye watching Leighton.
‘Why you chasing that shit? It’s old news.’
‘Yeah, I know, but Lisa told me you had a theory about the suspect.’
‘The kid is dead and my bullshit theories aren’t going to change that.’
‘They might,’ Leighton offered.
‘What difference is it to you?’ the man on the other side of the door asked. ‘You one of those sickos who get off on hearing this stuff or something?’
‘No, it’s nothing weird.’ Leighton held up his hand. ‘I’m looking into a case. I just want to know what you found out.’
‘Have a good day, son.’
The door had already clicked firmly shut before Leighton got a chance to respond, but he refused to quit. He made a fist and banged it on the door, then he put his face so close to the surface it looked as if he was about to kiss it.
‘I think the guy you were investigating has taken another kid,’ Leighton called. ‘I think she’s still alive but she won’t be for much longer unless I can figure it out, so I need your help Mr Wells. Can you hear me? He’s taken another one – she’s seven years old.’
There was a long moment of silence during which Leighton suspected he had made a mistake coming to the place. Then he heard a rattle, and the door slowly opened to reveal a large man dressed in a golf shirt and chinos. His face was prickly with stubble and his hair stood up in tufts that suggested to Leighton that his arrival had interrupted this guy’s siesta.
‘Well, in that case I reckon you better come in.’
Chapter Forty-Six
The stranger had walked aimlessly, pushing his flatbed trolley down the aisle of Northwood Hunting Supplies twice without any success. The place was a cavernous warehouse filled with everything a person would need to hunt and kill pretty much anything. Whilst this was appealing to him on a personal level, he also didn’t like the idea of others being able to come to places like this and gain the same power as him. It made him seem less special, and he didn’t like that at all.
The stranger’s lack of success in the store wasn’t because it was poorly laid out – which it was. Rather, he had been lost in thought. He was remembering how he had almost been caught moments after he murdered his first victim.
He had been parked at the top floor of a multi-storey car park in Winchester sixteen years earlier. It had been a Thursday afternoon in September. At the time, the place was not as busy, and he could have parked anywhere he wanted, but he always liked the view from tall buildings. The stranger had been smoking a cigarette and admiring the view from seven floors up, when the kid had just appeared out of nowhere and stood at his side – he looked about seven or eight; all stick legs and energy. The stranger glanced around to see where the boy had come from, but there were no other cars parked on that level. He must have taken the elevator up just for the view. The boy had been standing on the tiptoes of his baseball boots trying to get a better look when, without saying a word, the stranger grabbed him and propelled him straight over the edge. Without even looking to see the consequences of hi
s actions, the stranger simply crushed his cigarette, got straight into his car and drove down the maddening spiral ramp and out of the place.
He carefully monitored the news in the days that followed, but there was nothing about the incident on the TV. Eventually, he read a small piece in the Valley Chronicle about the fatal accident. It apparently sparked a campaign to have safety rails fitted to the top of all multi-storey parking facilities in the area. Despite the reassuring verdict, for months afterwards the stranger had been sure he would eventually be caught. That was why he moved to Lancaster then San Bernardino, but of course each move only resulted in more victims. This time, he had concluded that if he took just one victim and didn’t get rid of them straight away, he would perhaps not feel the urge to get more. But now she had gone and spoiled everything.
The sound of an announcement over the speaker system shook him from his thoughts, and he found the aisle filled with the items he was looking for. There were hundreds of traps available, but the ones the stranger was particularly looking for were square jaw spring traps. The largest ones were on the bottom shelves of the aisle, stacked vertically because of their size and weight. Using both hands, the stranger grunted as he lifted the first of four steel traps onto the trolley.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Len Wells led Leighton into a small cramped living room and pointed to a round dining table with two wooden chairs pushed into the corner of the room.
‘You can park your ass there. No point getting too comfy.’
‘Thank you.’ Leighton sat down.
While his host vanished out of the room, Leighton thought perhaps he had gone to get some type of refreshment, but instead Len shuffled back into the room carrying a black box file.
‘They wanted me to hand back everything I had,’ he said as he slowly sat down opposite Leighton. ‘Fuck that! Nobody was interested anyway. This is everything that I found on what was happening at the time, and if I hadn’t grabbed it, the whole file would have sat on a basement shelf till judgement day. I reckon the bosses just didn’t want me figuring out stuff that they couldn’t.’
‘Were you working missing persons at the time?’
‘No, and I guess that was the problem,’ Len said with a wry smile.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I was sniffing around somebody else’s case. That meant nobody in the station would listen to what I had to say. Eventually, they said I was obstructive and I got retired out at fifty-eight years old.’
‘How long ago was that?’
‘Eight years ago, give or take. I kind of lost track of time after I lost my wife. But anyhow, everything I’ve got is here. So, what do you want to know?’
‘Anything you’ve got.’
‘I was worried you were going to say that.’ Len sighed and stood up. He shuffled out of the room, and returned with a half empty bottle of Jim Beam Bourbon and a mug with a faded Planet Hollywood logo printed on it. As he sat down, he unscrewed the cap and poured a shot into the mug. ‘I ain’t a drunk, son. This stuff is just the sweetest way to kill the pain in my joints. You want some?’
‘No, I’m good thanks,’ Leighton said.
‘Good, this stuff’s not cheap,’ Leon said and took a sip from his mug. ‘Right, this is how it went down. In eighty-seven I was working vice in San Bernardino. That summer a nine-year-old called Betty Tulin went missing. At the time, nobody in the station seemed too uptight about it. It was just another report to fill in then a matter of waiting.’
‘How come?’
‘Some detective in missing persons established that the kid had already run away a couple of times before. She lived in a cheap apartment block alongside six siblings and a violent father – I’d probably have run away too. Anyhow, given the kid’s history, they figured she would most likely show up after a couple of days, like she had done before.’
‘But she didn’t?’ Leighton asked.
‘No, she did… kind of.’ Wells opened the box file and rummaged his had around in it like a magician mixing up cards, before finally producing a small photograph and handing it to Leighton. ‘Some worker at the Redlands Wastewater Treatment facility fished her body out of the Santa Anna River. They figured she must have been playing somewhere near the edge of the water and fallen in. Absolute bullshit, of course.’
Leighton glanced down at the photograph of the thin, pale figure lying face down on the river bank like a strange dead fish. He was happy to move his eyes anywhere else.
‘When you’re a cop, you think the badge makes you immune to the stuff you see. But some crimes – the bad ones – they stick to you,’ Wells said, quietly. ‘I reckon they stain you – like a messed-up tattoo.’
Leighton dragged his eyes away from the image. ‘You don’t think it was possible that she could have fallen in?’
‘Yeah.’ Wells chuckled bitterly. ‘It’s possible, but so is winning the State Lottery. Doesn’t mean I’m booking myself on the next first-class flight to Vegas.’
‘So, what’s your theory?’ Leighton asked.
For a moment Wells said nothing. He simply looked at the stained tiled floor of his tiny retirement home. Leighton suspected that the older man had not shared his story for a long time. Eventually Wells sighed, then spoke up.
‘She was picked up. Simple as that. The Tulin home was six miles north from the river. No kid is going to walk six miles to play in some river – certainly not on their own.’
‘Any witnesses?’
‘No. Betty said that after supper her sister had gone out to catch fireflies in a jam jar. She said that she would often do this along the road that ran by their home.’
‘What else was on the road?’ Leighton asked.
‘Nothing – two miles of nothing but bushes and telegraph poles.’
‘What did the autopsy say?’
‘Cause of death was drowning. She had most likely been in the water since the day she went missing. Whether or not she was dead when she had gone into the water could apparently not be confirmed.’
‘So not a homicide?’
‘Not officially,’ Len Wells said, tapping the side of his nose.
‘You said you were working in vice at the time. How did you get involved in the case?’
‘About a month after the kid was found I arrested a guy in a drugs raid on a local pool bar. His name was Joelle Hilson and we got him with a bag of cocaine in every pocket. Anyway, as I was driving him back to the station house this guy told me that he could give me some information about Betty Tulin if I could get his charges dropped. I told him I was listening but I couldn’t promise anything.’
‘What did he tell you?’
‘This was a guy who spent most of his week dealing in bars. He said he’d played pool in a biker bar with some young guy who got drunker as the night went on. He said there was a TV above the bar and when a news report came on, the young guy started mumbling that he had killed the kid, and the cops would never catch him.’
‘Did you put his claims into your arrest report?’
‘Sure,’ Wells sighed, ‘but my captain told me to redact it.’
‘Why?’ Leighton asked.
‘He said I had an unreliable witness trying to squirm out of a fistful of drugs charges. I wasn’t even that convinced of the guy’s claims at the time. But there was something that stuck with me.’
‘What was it?’
‘The dealer told me that before he had left the bar that night, the young guy said he was going to do it again.’
‘Marianne Hume?’
‘Damn right! Do you know much about her?’
Leighton shook his head. ‘Just that it seemed to take months for her body to finally turn up.’
‘Nine months. She was taken from her school in October, and her body wasn’t found until the following July.’ Wells absently rubbed his temple as he spoke. ‘I knew it was the same guy. I felt it in my bones. It was like he was getting better at hiding his victims.’
‘What do you
mean?’
‘Betty seemed like she was disposed of in a panic. But Marianne was found in a remote location, like he was being careful.’
‘So, what did you do?’
‘What any cop does – I gathered evidence. On my day off, I took a drive to see Hilson, who was halfway through an eight-month stretch in West Valley county jail. I wanted to get his claims on the record, and see if he could remember anything else. But I guess all that shit he shovelled up his nose didn’t help any because he couldn’t give me a description of the guy in the bar – other than he was skinny. But he did tell me something vital.’
‘What was it?’
‘He said that the young guy had been driving a brown or rust coloured car – a sedan. So, I went digging around.’
‘Officially?’
‘Nope, it wasn’t my case. Hell, it wasn’t even my jurisdiction. But when a cop shows up with a badge and some questions, nobody’s interested in which specific department you’re from. Anyway, I talked with the families and to some neighbours, and what do you know… witnesses in both the Betty Tulin and the Marianne Hume case reported seeing a reddish-brown sedan in the area prior to the abduction. Marianne’s younger sister even told her family that a couple of days she had been followed home from school by a guy in a chocolate coloured car.’
‘Jeez, didn’t that convince your colleagues?’
‘No, son. In our line of work you are expected to follow the rules – even if the rules are wrong. By going digging into somebody else’s case you put yourself outside of the club, and once you’re out you don’t get back in – ever. I took what I had to my superiors – let them know that I thought the kids had been taken.’
‘I take it they wouldn’t listen?’
‘They told me to fuck off. Said I was impeding an ongoing investigation.’
‘So, what was their theory of what happened?’
‘The department was big on gang activity that year, so a couple of missing girls from the wrong side of the tracks didn’t warrant the spending of too many tax dollars. Betty’s death was put down to accidental drowning and Marianne was officially recorded as unexplained, but Betty… she was believed to have wandered off.’
