Death Loves a Messy Desk

by Mary Jane Maffini

  “Hello?” I said.

  Nothing.

  “Where are you?” Mona said.

  “I’m inside someone’s house. There doesn’t seem to be anyone home. Mona, if I pick up the phone here and call 911, will you be able to tell where I am?”

  Mona sounded miffed. “I was just going to suggest that.” I could hear her calling out to someone else in the dispatch center that a call from Charlotte Adams would be coming in and to get the address. Pronto. “Don’t turn off your cell, though,” she said.

  By this time I had stumbled into the kitchen. Telephone, telephone, find a telephone. At last I found the portable phone and pressed the three magic numbers. My fingers were shaking.

  One of Mona’s co-workers picked up immediately. “Okay, hang in there,” she said, “we got you. Number forty-three Chianti Drive.”

  I slunk along the hallway and crawled along the living room floor. The house smelled of furniture polish and Tex-Mex leftovers that hadn’t made it back to the fridge, and, unless I was mistaken, someone had been smoking an illegal substance. Were they all stoned? Was that why no one answered my knock? But I had more urgent matters to think about. I crawled through the living room and over to the large bay window. I stuck my head up and peered out onto the street. Clear. No one there, no one coming. I had just about let my guard down when the malevolent cab rumbled into view, slowly, creeping past each house. Most were in darkness, and not a human being was in sight. Were my diagonal tire tracks still on the lawn?

  The truck stopped. Did I only imagine the evil hissing of the brakes? Smarten up, I told myself. There is no way he—or worse, they—can know you are here. Even if he spots your tire tracks, there’s no possible way he can see you crouched here. The laws of physics don’t permit it.

  The truck backed up and turned toward the window where I was hiding. What had given me away? As the engine roared, I scrambled away from the window and across the hallway.

  I shouted into both phones, “He’s going to ram the house. Get some cars here fast. He’s going to come right through the window!”

  I dashed up the stairs, dropping the house phone handset. I could hear the 911 operation squawking. In response to a truck that probably weighs eighteen tons, hurtling straight at you, flight is the only real choice. As I hit the second floor running, a door opened and a sleepy-looking teenaged boy in pajama bottoms lumbered into the hallway.

  I screeched to a halt.

  I believe we both screamed.

  He rubbed his eyes.

  I caught my breath and regained my equilibrium before he did. “He’s taking a run at the house.”

  “What?”

  “Is there a way out from the second floor? Oh no, I suppose not. This was a bad move on my part.”

  By this time, his adolescent jaw practically rested on his bony chest. I suppose he thought he was dreaming. He said, “Who are you?”

  “I’m Charlotte. We absolutely need to get out of here right away. We’re in danger, and I mean big-time.”

  “What?”

  “Please stop saying what. I’ll explain when we’re safe. The back door might be blocked. If there are two of them in the truck.”

  “What? I mean two of . . . who?”

  “Later. It will take too long. Is there a good hiding place here?”

  “What?”

  “No more whats. Someone is after me and they’re about to ram your house with a truck.”

  He blinked.

  Useless in a crisis. Heaven help your future mate, I thought.

  So. Next move? Under the bed. Behind a door? Anyone who would chase an innocent person through a residential area and try to ram a house they were hiding in would not hesitate to search under a bed.

  “We need a place to hide.”

  “Wha . . . I mean, there’s the closet.”

  “They’ll look in the closet. Is there a way out to the roof?”

  “No. But I have a secret compartment in my closet. If you want to try it. There might be room for both of us. You’re not too big. That is, if you’re really real.”

  I followed him back into the bedroom. “What do you mean, if I’m really real?”

  “I’m probably just dreaming you and this whole thing. I had a lot of tacos just before I went to sleep.”

  “You’re not . . .” Wait a minute. Why was it so quiet? Shouldn’t that damned semi have hit the house by now?

  I headed through what must have been the parents’ bedroom to the window and lifted the corner of the blind to check on the truck. A massive oak tree blocked my view of the lawn. I listened. I couldn’t hear anything that sounded like an engine revving. Had they just come into the house instead?”

  “Where’s this hidey-hole?” I said. “Mona? We’re heading into a hidey-hole in the boy’s bedroom closet. They’re about to ram the house with the truck.”

  “Never dull with you, is it?”

  “Who’s that?” the boy asked.

  “911 operator.”

  “911?” he squeaked.

  “Yes, the police are on their way.”

  “The police?”

  I perked up. “Oh, hey. Is that sirens? That’s great. Sounds like they’re getting close already.”

  “Yeah. Oh shit. I better flush my stash.”

  “By all means,” I said shakily, “we don’t want to complicate an already unbelievably complicated situation.”

  He raced back to his room, grabbed a small bag of something, and scurried to the bathroom. As the sirens drew closer, I heard the toilet flush. One, two, three times. He wasn’t a boy to take any chances.

  I hurried down the stairs as the first knock sounded on the front door. I was filled with joy and relief until I heard a familiar voice.

  18

  Shorten your To Do list.

  Pick the top five items for the day and sort them in priority order.

  Don’t add more than you can do.

  Keep new tasks recorded on a master list.

  “Charlie? Are you in there?”

  What were the chances?

  I opened the door. “Hello, Nick. What brings you here?”

  “Hey, you called 911, babe.”

  “I figured I’d get patrol cars, not a detective. And don’t call me babe.”

  “There are uniforms here, too. 911 call went out. So, like, what’s this about a truck?”

  Behind Nick’s handsome head, a “uniform” rolled his eyes. Nick’s all-around dopiness is well known inside and outside the force. Now with his wife Pepper on sick leave, he’d be on his own to figure things out.

  I spoke past him to the officers on the pathway. “I was pursued by a truck. A big rig, Volvo. Red. Just the cab. No license plate. I think there were two people in it, but I can’t be sure.”

  “Why would they chase you, Charlie? Did you cut ’em off in traffic or something?”

  “No. They or maybe just he followed me from the interstate and . . .”

  “Were you coming home from a club or something? Some guy figured he wanted to get a little friendly?”

  Not everyone’s like you, Nick, I thought. I raised my chin and stared him down. “I was at a client’s home, and on the way back I noticed him on my tail. I thought he was just playing games, being a bully, trying to scare the woman in the little sports car. Having fun.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I could see the boy hovering nervously on the staircase.

  “So what are you doing here?” Nick looked around. Sniffed the air.

  The boy quivered.

  I stepped outside, waving Nick along with me.

  “I tried to outrun the truck. It followed me all through this subdivision. I was doubling back, blowing my horn, but he was determined.”

  One of the uniforms spoke up. “We got a lot of calls about that. They thought it was kids drag racing or something. So we’ve been driving around . . .”

  The other one silenced his partner with a dirty look. “Let’s let the lady tell her story.”


  There was hope for the force after all.

  I continued. “There was a space between two houses over on Valpolicella. I thought my little car could fit in and maybe the truck wouldn’t be able to, so I gave it a shot and ended up on this street.”

  “Chianti,” the chatty one said.

  The partner said, “Keep going, miss.”

  “So I spotted this open garage with only one car in it and I turned back and drove in.”

  Nick said, “Whose garage is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You didn’t even know them?”

  “Right.”

  Nick would have trouble with that, a garage being a man’s castle.

  I preempted his next question. “I needed to hide.”

  Not that it worked. “You just drove into their garage, just like that?”

  The smart uniform said, “She was being chased by a rig that would squash her and her Miata like a bug. So it’d be all right in that case.”

  I shot him a grateful look. “That’s right. And I closed the door so the guy or guys who were trying to squash me wouldn’t know where I had gone.”

  Nick’s brow was furrowed. Perhaps he was trying for an intelligent and thoughtful appearance. “Hm. What happened then?”

  “Well, I knocked on the door, hoping the homeowner would answer and we could call the police. And I called 911 on my cell phone.”

  “And did the homeowners answer and scare the guy or guys away?”

  “No one answered, so I just went in to use the—”

  “You unlawfully entered someone’s house?” Nick shook his big beautiful empty head.

  “Extenuating circumstances,” the future of policing in Woodbridge said in my defense.

  “I guess.” Nick needed to chew on that one for a while.

  “And I called 911 on the house phone so they’d know where I was, because I had no idea after that wild chase.”

  “But you were in someone else’s house,” Nick said.

  I was just about to say, Give it a rest, when the boy stepped outside.

  “I’m Jason,” he said, “I live here. It’s okay if she was in my house. I invited her in. It was an emergency.”

  Nick nodded sagely. “Okay, okay. Yep. That’s good.”

  The smart officer’s opinion of Nick seemed to be written right across his face, not that Nick would pick up on anything subtle like that.

  I said, “Getting back to the issue of the truck. I peered out the window and saw it on the lawn, moving toward the house. I thought it was going to smash its way into the house and we’d be toast. I told the operator.”

  Not So Smart said, “Yeah, we got that one, too, but we thought—”

  I didn’t wait to be bailed out this time. I said, “Where is the truck? Did you spot it? It must have taken off when the patrol cars showed up.”

  Smarty said, “We didn’t see him, but there’s an APB out and—”

  “That’s an all-points bulletin, Charlie,” Nick said. “We use them to—”

  “Right. Everyone knows that. And they have the description?”

  “Yes ma’am,” the bright light said. “And we think we’ll get a bit more from talking to some of the homeowners who called about the truck’s rampage through the area. It will all help track down this guy.”

  “One thing I want to mention. There was a killing not far from here the other day.”

  All three of them nodded gravely.

  The boy’s eyes widened.

  “I think the truck was trying to chase me into that area. It’s very isolated. Maybe I would have ended up as a victim, too. Driven off the road, murdered, and then stuffed in my—”

  Nick scratched his head. “Not much room in the trunk of your sports car, Charlie.”

  The smart officer said, “Do you have any reason to believe that this truck was connected to that?”

  “While he was pursuing me, I realized where we were headed and what had happened, and I did everything I could to avoid that spot.”

  “Do you know anything about that murder?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “You think someone is randomly targeting people on the interstate and then running them off the road? Thrill killing?”

  “Yes, that could be it.”

  “Do you know anyone with a big rig?”

  “No one. Except . . .”

  “Yes, miss?”

  I looked him straight in the eye while trying to appear rational. “This will sound crazy.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “I was almost run off the road on my way to an appointment at Quovadicon on Monday; that’s the day after that body was discovered.”

  “By a truck?”

  “No. I got a look at a woman in an SUV. She was headed straight for me. I swerved and ended up on the median. My Miata got stuck on the cement planter.”

  Nick scratched his head again. “Try to stay on track. He’s asking about trucks, Charlie.”

  The other officer didn’t even glance at Nick. “It’s okay, miss. Keep talking. You feel there’s a connection?”

  “First, a truck came down the road right after the SUV. There were two guys in it, and I was standing in the middle of the road by then. I guess I was just shocked by what had happened.”

  I was thinking fast. Finding connections I hadn’t thought about.

  “The woman driving the SUV was Barb Douglas. She was obviously in a panic and driving like a bat out of hell.”

  “Okay.” He carefully made a note of that.

  “The guys in the truck were really ticked off at me because they had to stop. Now I’m wondering if those truckers weren’t pursuing her.”

  The two younger officers exchanged glances, while Detective Nick merely looked puzzled.

  Smarty said, “Then?”

  “They lifted the end of the Miata and I was able to get off the median. The woman in the SUV was long gone by then. I learned later that she got a call on her cell phone. I think someone called to tell her about the murder and that was why she panicked.”

  “You know her?”

  “I hadn’t met her, and she’s been missing ever since.”

  Smarty frowned. “Are you sure? We don’t have any reports on missing women in the system.”

  I said, “That’s true. I understand your policy says you don’t take info on people who might have walked away of their own accord. I didn’t understand it. Her door was open at her apartment. Her cat was missing and not in its crate. Her landlord and landlady couldn’t understand it. She never went back to work and—”

  “Hold on. You know all this how?”

  “Because I spoke to the police, to Nick’s wife, in fact.” To Smarty I explained, “We went to school together and I went to visit her at home. She’s on sick leave because of a difficult pregnancy. When I asked, she told me they don’t follow up on this kind of situation.”

  Nick blanched. Mention of his wife has that effect. I should have brought Pepper into the conversation earlier.

  Smarty cleared his throat.

  I let it all out in a torrent. “And she told me about the policy, so I followed up myself. I was supposed to meet with her, and there was a reason to believe she would be upset by that. I got this woman Barb Douglas’s address and I went to reassure her, and that’s when I realized that she was really missing.”

  “Sorry, miss. I think you must have misinterpreted what Detective Sergeant Monahan said. We would definitely follow up on a situation like this. I know the book cold, and that’s our policy.”

  So Pepper had been lying. I had sensed it and I hadn’t been smart enough to do an end run around her and march into the station. Was Barb Douglas lying dead somewhere in the back of her SUV because I hadn’t had the guts to follow through?

  “There’s more,” I said.

  The boy on the step said, “Awesome.”

  “Yes, miss.” The pencil was poised.

  “The men who stopped in the truck gav
e me their names, Mel and Del, and said they were with Quovadicon.”

  Scribble scribble.

  “But I learned afterward that there was no one in the company by either name.”

  “You could have been wrong about the names?”

  “I’m sure that’s what they called themselves.”

  “Would you recognize them?”

  “Sure I would. I’ll never forget their faces.”

  “Have you seen them before or since?”

  “Today I thought I saw them filling up a van at a gas station.”

  Our eyes locked.

  Smarty said, “Do you have a description?”

  “Sorry, I took off when I saw Del stop the fill-up and hop into it. Just a generic white van. Now I’m asking myself if they weren’t chasing her on that road and maybe they caught up to her eventually and now . . . Oh my God.”

  “That could be one possible reason, miss. We don’t want to overlook it in our investigation. Detective Tierney is in charge of that case. You’ll hear from him.”

  We both cast a glance at Nick, who appeared to be having problems following the conversation.

  He frowned on cue and said, “So these guys might know who you are? And that’s why they tried to run you over? Not sure . . .”

  “I’m a witness, Nick.”

  “Oh.”

  The boy plunked himself down on the steps and stared at us. This was probably better than anything on his Play-Station.

  “And,” I said, “one more strange connection. The murder victim was found in the trunk of a blue Impala.”

  “Okay.”

  “Barb Douglas was seen in the passenger side of a blue sedan, possibly an Impala, parked outside her apartment on several occasions. Seemed like a friendly relationship. I’m just passing on what her landlord said. Someone should talk to him about all of this.”

  Smarty said, “Yes. Detective Tierney will follow up on that. But there are lots of blue Impalas out there. The media mentioned the body in the trunk. They didn’t give a name or anything, so why would this Barb panic?”