Bad Blood

by Hugh Dutton

  The newscast interrupted his pondering with an update. Still nothing concrete, just a live report from the scene with lots of blue and red lights flashing in the background. They did say the unnamed victim was believed to be a resident of Heron Point, the police were working diligently, and stay tuned for a special report: “Are Our Streets Safe?”

  “You know, they’ve had a Peeping Tom running around Heron Point.”

  Gerry turned to see Brian standing nearby, watching the report with his arms folded across his chest in a flexed position sure to set off the saliva glands of any women who hadn’t caught the bar pose. “Really?” He wondered if the peeper problem was known about outside of Heron Point more than Pete believed.

  “Sure as hell do,” Brian said, eyes flicking back and forth from Gerry to the television. “My girlfriend’s got friends there. They’ve been worried about something like this. Shoulda caught that creep before this happened.” He smacked a fist into his other palm.

  “Yeah, it’s too bad,” Gerry muttered, not in the mood to hear a bunch of cop-bashing. Nor did he agree with the assumption that both crimes were the work of the same man, for the simple reason that so many of your true serial Peeping Toms never graduated to rape. The spying itself was their hot flash. Now, a stalker who peeped to handpick his victim, Gerry could buy that one. Pete had told him of the letter one of the violated women had received; the rape made it crucial that Gerry get a look at it. While he made no pretense of being an expert profiler by any means, he figured he could tell the difference between the writings of a guy just playing in his shorts and a lit fuse describing a fantasy he planned on acting out. The detective team assigned to the case would have a working theory he could wheedle out of them, but if he still had a job in Heron Point, he wanted his own opinion.

  Go right now, he told himself. He slipped a twenty under the untouched second drink. Brian always tried the on-the-house line, thinking Gerry still had friends on the force. Which he did, but not enough pull to help Brian if he got his tail in a crack for serving minors or drunk drivers or whatever the motivation behind the obvious efforts to cultivate a cop buddy. Not that he was willing to be anybody’s fixer even if he did have the juice for it, and he never had liked the free drinks for cops ploy anyway. Too close to graft and somehow condescending, as if he was their pet flatfoot.

  As for his buddies in blue, surely he could find someone working the graveyard shift who knew him well enough to talk to him before the two cases got connected and blew up into a media circus. A crime like this in a neighborhood like Heron Point was destined to be a headline screamer and the brass would put the gag on everybody. But not yet, so tonight someone should be willing to show him that letter if he pretended he might be able to recognize the handwriting.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  When J.D. Macken first heard, his gut reaction was, “Oh God, not Ellie.” Chad, a neighbor who got off on others’ misfortunes and loved any kind of nastiness, rang him at work with the news and told him that his oh-so-worried canvass of the neighborhood had identified Ellie as one of the residents unaccounted for. Nobody knew yet if the victim was dead or alive, either. J.D. blew off Chad and his bullshit pretense of concern and tried Ellie’s cell phone. It rolled directly to voice mail; turned off.

  He tossed the phone back at its cradle, leaned back in his chair and threw his pencil at the ceiling with enough force that it stuck in one of the little foam squares. Driven by emotions he was unable to sort through, all this worry and protectiveness about the woman he planned to kill, he sprang up and walked out without even shutting off the lights. He was going home and he hoped to God he would find Ellie there, in bed, snoring her skinny ass off.

  The hell of it is, he thought, as he blew through three straight red lights, why did I think of her instead of Lexy? He grinned despite his anxiety when the answer hit him; any picture he conjured up of Lexy confronted by a rapist ended with her either seducing the asshole into one of her fantasies or beating the shit out of him. Tough, that girl. Ellie was more defenseless, adolescent even, with her moony-eyed romanticism and her head crammed with fairy tales.

  But the real bitch was, why did he worry about Ellie at all? Why wasn’t he hoping she was the victim? Damn it. He was going to kill her anyway, so how perfect would it be if someone had taken care of it for him—he’d get Lexy and maybe at least some of the money later, all with no risk for him. Then why in the hell didn’t he feel that way? Holy mother, now he was really fucking confused.

  Maggie Davis hung up her phone too, pausing with her hand hovering to see if it would ring again. Jill was her third call in an hour to discuss the gruesome event and now Maggie felt a frantic urge to do something, anything, but she didn’t know what. The worries and suspicions and finger-pointing she was hearing all sounded normal enough, except it carried a vicious undertone that was new. As if this one despicable act had stripped away an indefinable yet essential illusion for the women of Heron Point. The whole place seemed at a crossroads that overshadowed her inner crisis. And though Maggie had been longing for something to change her life, this wasn’t it. It just made her want to crawl farther into the bottle and pull the cork shut behind her.

  Jill had guessed the unlucky victim to be Sara Zeletsky, a quiet, shy, younger woman whom Maggie did not know well. Jill had noticed her leaving on her regular jog but hadn’t seen her return. And that drowsy-eyed, detached air of Jill’s hid an unrivaled radar; she didn’t miss much. Anyone who bounced through lovers the way Jill did couldn’t afford to.

  Maggie hoped Jill was wrong, that Sara was safe. The few occasions she’d seen Sara, she reminded Maggie of her baby sister Kimmy. Sweet little too-young Kimmy, dead twelve years now, drowned in a motel pool on her senior spring break trip. With a blood alcohol level of point two three. Ironic how Maggie was taking the same way out, just slower. It was still difficult for her to think of Kimmy, though it seemed to be even worse for their brother Grant. He wouldn’t talk about Kimmy at all. Of course, he wouldn’t touch his trust fund either, their posthumous gift from the great patriarchal tyrant. Maggie saw it as better revenge to party her way through her share.

  But if not Sara it had to be someone, and she realized that hoping it wasn’t Sara was like wishing the horror on someone else. Truthfully, she wanted it to be someone she didn’t know, although that thought made her feel like a bad person. She fixed herself a drink, knowing she’d already had too many again, but this was a day that called for too many. Consider it emergency medication. Help her sleep.

  From the talk she’d heard, every woman in the Point felt furious that no one had arrested the Peeping Tom before this happened. Though she suspected they hadn’t been too concerned about the peeper at the time, because she hadn’t. More like something to laugh off. It was real creepy when she actually envisioned it, and she would feel terribly violated if she found out she had been spied on. But under one of the gnarly little rocks in the backyard of her mind, she had imagined it would be nice to be so hot that men would want to spy on her. No more. She had never fantasized about rape and she got really steamed whenever anyone said women did. God, she wanted to castrate the bastard.

  She replenished her drink, figuring it only counted as a half since she hadn’t quite finished it. She’d lost count again anyway. She took it to bed with her after rechecking the bolted doors and latched windows. Mark was already asleep in his separate bedroom, which was how Maggie liked it. She could finish her drink and think about things without hearing the popping noise he made with every inhalation.

  Sitting on the edge of her bed and massaging her feet, she wondered if she was witnessing the end of the Heron Point she knew. Was this a rough patch or would it slide into becoming just another crime-ridden neighborhood with locked doors and strangers next door? Or had she just finally burned out on the same old cesspool of rumor and innuendo, and begun attributing a malignancy to Heron Point that was really her own? Maybe that was why she liked Brady so instantly. He seemed different tha
n the usual new guy. He didn’t throw money or his mouth around to prove he belonged. His easy friendly manner felt genuine, not the smarmy fawning of a status seeker, something they had too many of around here.

  So what chance did she have of tearing Brady away from a goddess like Lexy? She’d seen the hot flash in his eyes when he looked at Lexy, and longed for a way to tell him how much better she would be for him. She felt like the girl in the old Pretenders song, the one who sings Look at me!

  Maggie rose and walked over to the closet door mirror. She cupped her breasts in her hands and turned back and forth, giving them the critical eye. Not bad, especially after ten thousand Mai Tais, but no match for Lexy. Maybe she should get implants, or a lift done, but the idea of it always felt as though she’d be giving up on her true self. She didn’t want to give up on Maggie yet. And whatever in the world was she going to do with poor old faithful, plodding Mark?

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Brady awoke Saturday morning to the scent of honeysuckle drifting through his bedroom window, a fragrance so reminiscent of Peggy’s perfume that for an instant he thought she was there. He hadn’t encountered the smell before at the new house, but last night was his first time sleeping with open windows instead of air conditioning, thanks to a nice steady breeze that had moved in after Friday’s dose of the daily thunderstorms.

  He sucked in the sweet air and held it, wondering what she was doing at that moment—sleeping in, breakfasting, washing her hair? Was she happy? He rolled over and checked the clock. Wow, nine hours of coma. He’d needed it. Today was party day. He’d spent a lot of time traveling that week and felt pumped about the results. The two properties way down by Sarasota, Mariner’s Retreat and Sandcastle, were up and on the new network, the new terminals in too.

  He had busted a gut to get those two done by Friday, to have a guilt-free day off. When Susan stopped him in the street Wednesday and invited him to a poolside barbecue today, he’d made a vow to be there. Partly because blowing off his first invite seemed a surefire way to torpedo his social life before it ever left the pier, but his main drive was the hope of seeing Lexy there. He hadn’t seen her since Monday, other than in daydreams, of which he’d had no more than, say, fifteen hundred or so.

  After he first heard about Sara he thought the party might be canceled, until he learned more details and realized the invitation had come after the assault occurred. So the party-gang parties on. He agreed with the idea of not letting bad news become a killjoy, though he felt a little freaked out over the horrific nature of the crime and also the scoop about it being the guy who’d been peeking in windows for some time now, something he hadn’t known was going on.

  He took a cup of coffee out onto the porch after his shower and shave, promptly slopping half of it all over the place when he started at the sight of a four-foot-tall heron standing on his stoop. Damn thing stood so motionless that Brady had walked up to within ten feet of it before the bird turned its head and scared his pants off.

  “Looks like you got you a friend there.”

  Brady whirled toward the voice, sloshing most of his remaining coffee down the front of the white Polo he’d selected for party wear. Great.

  “You know, you learn to recognize those suckers, you’ll see they favor particular hangouts. That one might figure this here is his yard.” The speaker was a wide-body muscular type, the tree-dragger from the day Brady met Lexy. Up close he looked somewhere in the forties to fifty range, with close-cut salt and pepper hair showing beneath a Marlins cap and a grin like a picket fence a truck had crashed through. He was standing between the house and the hedges fronting it, next to the tree on the southeast corner.

  “News to me,” Brady answered, holding his scalding shirt away from his belly with thumb and forefinger. “I didn’t see him until I almost ran into him. Scared the hell out of me. He sure doesn’t seem too scared, though.” And who the heck was this cat, hanging out in his bushes?

  “Sorry if I did that to you,” the man said, wagging a finger up and down in the direction of Brady’s spreading stain. “I thought you saw me when you came out. I’m the guy who looks after things around here. Name’s Pete.”

  “I’m Brady. I’ve heard how awesome you are, looked forward to meeting you. Something wrong I don’t know about?” Like, something worth digging around in the yard at eight on Saturday morning?

  The heron took flight without any preliminary move, just a sudden loud leathery flapping of the great wings that startled Brady again.

  Pete chuckled and took his cap off, ran his other hand through his hair, and then replaced the cap. “Reckon he decided you’re too big to eat, and we’re too noisy for good company. They’re ’bout the only birds what seem unaffected by all the people. I do believe most of the seabirds, gulls and such, wouldn’t know how to feed themselves anymore without hotel balconies to eat off of.”

  Brady turned to watch the departing bird, feeling a lurch of discomfort at the way that sounded. Didn’t sit too well to think he was a cog in the machine destroying Florida’s avifauna. Did Pete know where he worked?

  “Anyways, I just stopped to check out that laurel tree,” Pete went on. “Noticed a diseased-looking side of it from the street angle that I hadn’t seen before. Might have to come out of there.”

  Brady shrugged, the search-me variety. Kind of a downer, thinking about the tree being sick, but he wouldn’t even know what to look for. “Anything I can do to help?”

  “Naw, I’ll just keep an eye on it for a few days.” Pete tilted his head a touch, squinting at him. “I hear you’re from Carolina, right, Brady?”

  “Yes sir.” Quite the non sequitur there, and a surprise that Pete knew any of his bio. But something about the guy’s laid-back friendliness appealed in a way he hadn’t yet felt here. A warm tingle climbed his spine at the thought that maybe Lexy had been talking about him.

  “Good folks there. Got kin there myself, up Henderson way.” Pete walked around the hedges and squatted down in the yard, fiddling with a sprinkler head that hadn’t fully retracted. “Have any women living in the house, Brady?”

  Well now, dang if that didn’t belong in the none-of-your-business file. Then he remembered the rape and knew instinctively that this amiable, open-faced man was referring to it. “Nope, strictly a bachelor’s pad.” And this ugliness had thrown a little dirt on the idea of how great it’d be to drag Mom down here to live. “I heard about that nasty business, guess I’d be pretty jumpy right now if I had a family.”

  He hadn’t been able to put his reaction to the news into coherent thought until that moment. Sure, he didn’t need to worry, he wasn’t a woman and he had no wife or daughter. But his undefined angst over the incident stemmed from a deeper sense of affront, or outrage, than he would’ve felt from a man-on-man crime. Now, whether that was gender shame, or good old-fashioned chauvinism, he couldn’t say. It did feel a little better to at least identify his queasiness, though.

  Pete gave the sprinkler a final twist, stood, and stomped it back down into its housing with a well-aimed boot. “Looks like a damn-fool thing to do, don’t it, but sometimes that’s all they need to hook back into their spring.” He squinted up at the climbing sun. “Mostly I hate it for Sara, she’s a nice girl. But I’d really hate if it happened again.”

  Brady was all for due vigilance, but Pete’s vehemence made him wonder if he’d missed something. “I thought it didn’t take place here in the neighborhood. She just happens to be a resident here, but the actual assault was over there near the highway, right?”

  Pete smiled, the haywire teeth oddly charming, though his smile didn’t look to be one of real humor. “No, you’re right, this is a nice safe neighborhood, one of the best. But it’s just like that laurel there, Brady; it ain’t smart thinking to assume there can’t be a rotten spot, even in a place like this. I’ll take off now, see you around.”

  Intrigued, Brady reached over and pulled the screen door open, locking the stopper in place. “Why don’t
you let me buy you a cup of coffee? Need another myself, seeing as how I’m wearing my first one. I’d like to hear more about the wildlife around here, animal and human.”

  Pete grinned again, a wide easy one with his eyes in it, and glanced at his watch. “Well, I ’spect I’ve got time for a half a cup, anyway.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Brady crossed the street a little after one to find the festivities cranking up. He estimated at least thirty people there already, milling about in scattered little clusters and leaning close to swap war stories over the reggae thumping out of a hidden sound system. He even saw one group floating around the pool in a giant inflatable life-raft-looking thing equipped with armrests and drink holders for eight. From the loose, raucous laughter coming from there, he felt confident in concluding that those drink holders were getting plenty of use.

  Jill’s pool was a big one by backyard standards, as was the flagstone patio surrounding it, and good thing too. In a smaller venue, he concluded, no way could a party with so many people still give off the lazy, timeless flavor he felt from the moment he walked in. Yep, this was the life, all right.

  Snaking a path through the waving elbows and gesturing drinks, he said hey to Jill and Susan, the hostess and the source of his invite, respectively, as well as a couple of others he knew, but saw mostly new faces. He came up empty in his hopes of spotting a sleek, glossy mane of black hair. He nodded and helloed his way over to where a thirty-foot awning had been erected against the side of the house to shield the food and beverage from el sol. A guy wearing an apron that read “If you don’t like the food, kiss my ass” over his trunks stood in front of the grill, waving a pair of tongs and a sweating Heineken bottle with equal enthusiasm.