DEAD BY WEDNESDAY

by Beverly Long

  “I know. It’s all I can think about. I’m so sorry, Carmen.”

  She could forgive Raoul. He was a teenager who had gotten caught up in something that was bigger than him. It was harder to forgive Robert. He was an adult and he hadn’t been honest with her.

  “What about Mrs. Minelli?” Raoul asked. “She’s driving this morning.”

  “I’ll call her,” Carmen said. “I’ll let her know that I’m taking you to school. Once I tell Apollo that he is never to contact you again, then we’re going to the police. You’re going to tell them everything. There’s going to be consequences to your actions, Raoul. You understand that, don’t you?”

  He nodded. “I just want this to be over with.”

  “Me, too,” she said. “Finish getting ready,” she added, as she walked back to her bedroom. Once inside the door, she pressed her hands to her eyes.

  She would not cry. She would not.

  She and Raoul would get through this.

  The same way they’d gotten through everything else. Together.

  She picked up her cell phone, which she always kept on her nightstand during the night. She punched in Robert’s number. She was relieved when it went right to voice mail.

  “It’s Carmen,” she said. “You...you should have told me, Robert. You should have told me about Speedy’s and your suspicions about Raoul. I deserved to know that my brother had a gun. I deserved the truth from you.” She took a big breath. “Don’t call me again.”

  * * *

  WHEN THE CAB pulled to the corner, Carmen tossed a ten at the driver and opened her door. The cab had been late picking them up, plus they’d hit some slow traffic. She’d been impatient to get here, to meet the man who claimed to be Hector’s friend who had lured her fifteen-year-old brother into being a criminal.

  She wrapped her scarf tight around her neck. Raoul slid out of the cab and slammed the door shut. “Do you see him?” Carmen asked. The sidewalk was heavy with human traffic, people all bundled up, walking with their heads down to avoid the wind.

  She looked at her watch. Seven minutes after eight. He should be here.

  For the first time, Carmen got nervous. It was broad daylight and there were lots of people around but still her gut was telling her that something was wrong. She heard Raoul’s cell phone buzz. He pulled it out. It was a text.

  “It’s him,” he said.

  “He has your cell phone number?” she asked. Then she waved her hand. “Never mind. That’s not important. What does it say?”

  “Be there soon.”

  They weren’t waiting. They were going to the police and telling them everything. Then they could find Apollo and deal with him. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  Damn, she wished she had her car. There were no cabs. She walked toward Mahoney High, feeling that she’d be safe there.

  They’d walked less than thirty feet before a man emerged from the bushes that lined the street. He fell into step next to them. They were three abreast on the wide sidewalk, her, then Raoul, then the man. She pulled on Raoul’s sleeve, wanting to get him away from the man.

  “Not so fast, pretty sister,” he said.

  She stopped and looked at the man. He had dark hair pulled back into a ponytail. His skin was very pale. She did not recognize him. If he’d been a friend of Hector’s, he was one that she’d never met.

  He was probably five-eight and a hundred and sixty pounds. Not an overly big guy. But she realized that didn’t matter when she saw that he had a very deadly looking gun in his hand and it was pointed at Raoul.

  “We want nothing to do with you,” she said, hating that her voice was shaking. “You just go your way and we’ll go ours and we’ll forget that we ever saw each other.”

  “And spoil the fun?” he asked. “I don’t think so. You’re an unexpected complication but certainly not one that I can’t deal with.” He motioned with his index finger. “Step through the bushes. There’s a black car. Get in the driver’s side. If you make one wrong move, you’re going to have another dead brother.”

  It was crazy. There were people on the sidewalks, on both sides of the street. Mostly kids. Some adults. But nobody was paying attention to them. They were just hurrying to school or to work.

  She looked in the man’s eyes. They were completely devoid of emotion. She wanted to refuse, to tell him to go to hell.

  Raoul could be dead before she finished her sentence.

  She turned and started walking, and she could hear Raoul and the man behind her.

  Chapter Nineteen

  With the exception of the short nap, Robert had been awake for more than thirty hours. They had pored through Sparrow’s banking records. He had over two hundred thousand dollars in the bank. It had all come from one deposit that occurred about thirty days after his parents’ deaths.

  Life insurance proceeds, most likely.

  He wrote out a few checks, for utilities and property taxes, for the property they had searched. Each month he also withdrew a thousand dollars in cash. Maybe he spent that on gas and food and all the other things that ate up dollars, but there was no way to know.

  During the night, teams of detectives had spoken to every one of Douglass Sparrow’s former coworkers and his neighbors, trying to glean any kernel of information. That hadn’t made them very popular. And in normal circumstances, they would have never woken people up in the middle of the night to ask questions.

  But these were not normal circumstances.

  They were waiting to hear that another dead boy had been found.

  “We need to start on the students,” Sawyer said.

  There were over four hundred names on the list. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack. “We need to separate the boys from the girls.”

  Tasha, three desks away, held up a sheet of paper. “Done.”

  Robert smiled. “You need a raise.”

  “Got that right. One hundred and ninety boys. Sorted alphabetically.”

  Robert scanned the list. About halfway down, a name jumped off the page.

  Raoul Jimenez.

  Holy hell.

  He needed to call Carmen, tell her what was going on. He picked up his phone, which was charging on his desk. He saw that he had a voice mail message and realized that his phone was on vibrate.

  He listened to the message.

  And his heart sank.

  I deserved to know that my brother had a gun. I deserved the truth from you.

  He’d talked to her just thirty minutes earlier. Everything had been fine. Now she was so angry her words were clipped. Don’t call me again.

  That wasn’t going to happen. He punched in her number. It rang four times before it went to voice mail. “Carmen, it’s Robert. I got your message. Listen, I don’t know what happened but we need to talk. Before you or Raoul do anything, you need to call me. Please.” He hung up.

  He dialed Carmen’s office phone and left a similar message.

  By now, Sawyer had scanned the list, seen Raoul’s name, and was dialing Liz’s number. From the side of the conversation that Robert could hear, he knew that Liz had not yet seen Carmen.

  Both last night and this morning, Carmen had said that Raoul was getting a ride to school with Jacob’s mother. He had that kid’s phone number. Carmen had given it to him.

  He scrolled through his phone and pushed the number. It rang three times before it was answered.

  “Hello.”

  “Is this Jacob Minelli?”

  “Yeah.”

  “My name is Detective Robert Hanson. I’m a friend of Carmen and Raoul Jimenez. Is Raoul with you?”

  “No. Why would he be?”

  “Your mother drove you both to school.”

  “Nope. Carmen called this mo
rning and said that she was taking Raoul to school. I’ve got to go. Class starts in a minute and if you get caught with a phone, they take it away from you.”

  Robert hung up and shoved back his desk chair. He started running for the door. He stopped halfway through the station and yelled back at Tasha. “Every car in the vicinity of Mahoney High needs to be on the lookout for a woman, Hispanic, five-three, a hundred and ten pounds, likely wearing a blue cape. Also, a Hispanic fifteen-year-old boy, five feet, ninety pounds, likely wearing a red jacket.”

  “You want them picked up?” Tasha asked.

  “Hell, yes.” He wanted them safe, in his arms.

  * * *

  CARMEN GRIPPED THE steering wheel of the old car, unwilling to let the man see that she was shaking. He’d made Raoul climb in back and he sat in front, twisted in his seat, his gun aimed at Raoul.

  Carmen didn’t intend for them to be in the car long. The first cop she saw, she was going to run into the squad car. Hard enough that the guy would get spooked and run but not so hard that either she or Raoul were seriously hurt.

  “Turn here,” he said.

  They’d gone less than two blocks. She didn’t have a choice. She turned.

  Halfway down the alley, he motioned for her to make a quick right. She did and found herself in a small space, just big enough for the car. It looked as if many years ago it had been a small courtyard. There were scraggly, bare branches curving upward on the brick walls. She could see patches of dirt underneath the mostly snow-covered ground.

  There was a back door on the bottom level. Above it, there was a sign. Augusta Custom Framing. It didn’t look as if anybody had used the back door in some time.

  There was a set of wooden stairs that rose from the ground up to the second level. He pointed at them. “Let’s go.”

  She waited for Raoul to get out of the car. She grabbed his hand and squeezed it.

  “Sweet,” said the man. Then he pushed her forward.

  At the top of the landing, he handed her a key and made her unlock the door. It opened into a kitchen that had an old tile floor, a small sink and an avocado-green stove. It smelled like bacon and she could see a dirty plate in the sink that was smeared with egg yolk.

  The bastard had had breakfast before he’d come to the school. That, more than anything that had happened so far, told her that they were dealing with someone who had no conscience.

  “In there,” he said.

  She walked into the living room. There was a couch and one chair. There was a table in the corner.

  On it was a stack of red handkerchiefs.

  And she remembered the conversation that night at Liz and Sawyer’s house. The victims have all been found with red handkerchiefs in their mouths. Shows an arrogance on his part—that he’s so confident that he won’t be caught that he can afford to leave clues at the scene.

  She looked at her brother. He looked scared to death. Oh, Raoul, what have we done?

  * * *

  THERE WAS NO sign of Carmen or Raoul. He hadn’t really expected to see any. School had already started. If they were on time, the cab would have already dropped Raoul off and Carmen would be on her way to work.

  Robert tried her cell phone again. It went straight to voice mail. He didn’t leave one.

  Answer your damn phone, Carmen.

  He parked in a no-parking zone and pushed the buzzer on the school door. It felt as if it had been a lifetime since he’d been at the school but it was really just forty-eight hours ago. Then he’d been here to bust Raoul’s chops about Speedy’s Used Cars. Now, he just wanted to hug the kid and celebrate that he and his sister were okay.

  But he wasn’t going to get that chance, he realized, when the school secretary confirmed that Raoul’s homeroom teacher had already reported him as absent from class.

  Now what?

  Robert walked out of the office and leaned against the gray metal lockers. Now what?

  He looked up. Three boys were walking down the hall. One was looking at his phone, and the other one was laughing at something his friend was saying.

  Friend.

  What was it that Carmen had said? Jacob Minelli and Raoul had been best friends since third grade.

  Robert strode back into the office. “I need to see Jacob Minelli. Right now.”

  The woman didn’t hesitate. “I’ll have to look up his first period,” she said. She typed a few letters into her computer. Then she pressed a button. “Mrs. Black, can you please send Jacob Minelli to the office.”

  “Yes,” came the static-filled response.

  Robert waited impatiently, watching out the windows of the office. He saw a kid come down the steps at the far end of the hallway and recognized him from the photos in Carmen’s apartment.

  He met him halfway.

  “I’m Detective Robert Hanson,” he said.

  “Are you still looking for Raoul?” the kid asked.

  Robert nodded. “Neither Carmen nor Raoul are answering their phones. Raoul never made it to school.”

  “Look, I’d like to help but Raoul and I are sort of not talking to one another right now. I don’t think he’s going to call me.”

  That didn’t match what Carmen had said. “Why?”

  The kid didn’t say anything.

  “Listen, Jacob. Raoul may in trouble. Carmen, too. I need the truth and I need it now.”

  “He’s been doing some crazy stuff lately.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like carrying a gun. He showed it to me.”

  “Did he tell you where he got the gun?” Robert asked.

  Jacob nodded. “Some guy named Apollo gave it to him. What kind of name is that?”

  Apollo. The God of Music.

  Robert pressed a hand against his stomach. His coffee was about to make a return appearance. “Did you ever meet Apollo?”

  The kid shook his head.

  Robert wanted to slam his fist into the locker. “Okay, thanks,” he said.

  Jacob stared at him. “I may have seen his car,” he said. “I had a birthday party. And Raoul got mad and left before everybody else. I saw him going and ran out to stop him. He’s been my best friend for a long time and I didn’t want to fight with him. He was about a block ahead of me when I saw a car pull up and offer him a ride.”

  “What kind of car?”

  “An old black one like my uncle used to drive.”

  “You get a license plate?” Robert asked, hoping like hell his luck was about to change.

  The kid shook his head.

  “Make or model?” Robert asked.

  “I’m pretty sure it was an old Mercury Cougar. They have a real distinct style.”

  * * *

  ROBERT’S HANDS WERE shaking when he pulled out his cell phone and punched up his boss. When Lieutenant Fischer answered, Robert didn’t waste any time.

  “I need all the street camera video from around Mahoney High School this morning. We’re looking for Douglass Sparrow’s black Mercury Cougar and―” Robert stopped and drew in a deep breath “―I think it’s possible that he has Raoul and Carmen Jimenez.”

  Lieutenant Fischer was silent for a long minute. Then he asked, “Are you okay?”

  Hell, no. He was a wreck. So scared that his mind seemed to have stopped working.

  “Don’t worry about me,” he said.

  “Be careful,” his boss said. “Keep your head in the game.”

  His head, his heart. Everything was in the game. Because Carmen was everything, meant everything.

  She’d sounded so angry.

  He’d been wrong to hide his suspicions from her. Realized that now. Maybe that whole horrible scene in the alley with Raoul and those two boys would have never happened if he’d been more
forthcoming.

  No wonder she didn’t want him to call her again.

  The diamond ring felt heavy in his pocket. What the hell had he done?

  “Have you talked to Sawyer?” Robert asked.

  “Just got off the phone with him. He tracked down a former coworker of Sparrow’s from his grocery store bagging days. Said that the guy was always talking about going to some fancy music school and that he was going to be famous someday.”

  But something had derailed those plans and he’d found himself bagging groceries and teaching music in the summer to a bunch of sweaty middle-schoolers.

  And somewhere along the way, he’d decided to start killing them.

  * * *

  “WHO ARE YOU?” Carmen asked.

  “Didn’t Raoul tell you? I’m Apollo.”

  “You weren’t a friend of Hector’s,” she accused.

  The man smiled. He was sprawled in the chair, his butt halfway down, his legs extended. She’d have thought he was relaxed if he didn’t have the gun pointed straight at Raoul.

  “Ah, so he did tell you about me.” The man looked satisfied. “Brilliant, don’t you think? The internet makes everything so easy. Birth records, death records, addresses. After I met Raoul at band camp last year, it was easy to find out more about the Jimenez family. Hector’s stabbing didn’t make front-page news of the paper but there was a nice little article in the archives.”

  She remembered that article. Remembered how her mother had carefully cut it out and put it in the Bible that she kept on her nightstand. And Carmen suspected that every night until her mother died just two years later, the woman had prayed over it.

  It made her furious to think that this man had used it to target Raoul, to make him think that he was somehow closer to the brother that he’d never had the chance to know.

  “You bastard,” she said. “You won’t get away with this.”

  He laughed. “Of course I will. It’s perfect. The police will never find me here. There’s no record of me here. I give the man who owns the frame shop cash every month. He’s happy because his wife doesn’t know he has the money and I’m happy because everything is in his name. I don’t exist.”