The Highly Effective Detective

by Richard Yancey

  One morning, Parker Hudson saw me sitting in my car and came over to say hello and tell me that he was glad I was still on the case. I asked him if he had given any more thought to the hypnosis thing, and he just laughed and shook his head.

  I visited Mom a couple times, picked up my new clothes from American Clothiers after arguing with Simon, my wardrobe guy, that I should be able to return them for a full refund, except there was the problem that they had been altered to fit me and all purchases for altered apparel were final, and generally moped around, waiting for a break in the case or a break in the monotony of my life.

  Another morning, I came into the office and saw Felicia sitting at her desk, going through the want ads. She stuffed the newspaper in her desk drawer when I came in. When I accused her of looking at the want ads, she denied it, and when I checked her desk after she left for the day, I found it locked tight.

  Speaking of the paper, I checked it every morning for a follow-up story on the possible Lydia Marks/dead goslings connection, but no story appeared. I called Paul Killibrew at the paper and he told me that his editor had killed the story because he didn’t think there was enough of a story there. I hung up thinking it was pretty wonderful human beings weren’t stories, because most of us would be dead. Thinking that made me think of Susan Marks, but I got her voice mail when I called. Finals would be over now, and maybe she moved back home with her dad for the summer.

  The weather turned hot and dry. By midmorning, the temperature was in the eighties. I sat in my little Sentra and sweated, watching the joggers and the walkers and the baby strollers on the trail, hardly paying attention to the cars as they went by. I was pushing the envelope on this case; I knew that. Nobody had come forward and I had no leads left. How long would Parker Hudson pay me to sit in my car every day and sweat?

  Then one morning, a cop car pulled in directly behind me and flashed its lights at me. My heart fluttered and the adrenaline made my ears sing. I was busted. The licensing commission had found out I was conducting a stakeout without a license and had issued a warrant for my arrest.

  A sheriff’s deputy got out of the car and came up to my window. It was Deputy Gary Paul.

  “Thought that was you,” he said, and showed me his bad teeth. “How ya doin’, Ruzak?”

  “Can’t complain,” I replied, the phrase used by most people who can.

  “You working or taking a break?”

  “Both, I guess.”

  He laughed. “Me, too. Let’s go have breakfast.”

  “I just ate six Krispy Kreme doughnuts.”

  “Then you’re ready for a real breakfast. Follow me.”

  He went back to the car and I followed him out of the lot.

  He took Concord Road to Kingston Pike, then turned north onto Lovell Road, where he pulled into an IHOP parking lot. He hitched his belt when he got out of the cruiser and slapped me hard on the shoulder on the way to the door. He ordered a Rooty-Tooty, Fresh & Fruity, and I ordered two eggs and sausage with a glass of orange juice, since I’d already had about thirty-two ounces of coffee that morning.

  “I ran that partial through the system again,” he told me.

  “Don’t tell me. Nothing.”

  He shook his head. “So I had a clerk pull the paper.”

  “No match there, either.”

  “Nope.”

  “You have much experience with regression therapy?”

  “I don’t even know what that is.”

  “I was recommending it to my client, but now I’m thinking I should do it. Maybe I’d remember the tag right. Also, you should never recommend someone do something if you’re not willing to do it yourself.”

  “I also spoke with Harvey Listrom.”

  “That’s terrific. Who’s Harvey Listrom?”

  “The lead detective on the Marks case. They haven’t developed any suspect who drives an SUV. They haven’t developed any suspects period.”

  “What’s his theory?”

  “Random crime. Husband’s been cleared. No evidence the marriage was unhappy. Stepkids have airtight alibis. Bank account overflowing. Health good. No sign of forced entry. Nothing missing from the house. Looks like she was taking her morning jog and somebody snatched her. She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “And now she’s probably dead.”

  “They usually are after this long.”

  Our food came, but my appetite had left.

  “That sucks,” I said. “I met her daughter. I mean her stepdaughter. A really nice girl.”

  “Too nice to have to deal with something like this.”

  I nodded. “But it made sense to me, HRT being connected to both things. First, it came flying down the road ten, maybe twenty miles over the speed limit.”

  “On the other hand, I pull fifteen to twenty speeders off that road every month. Doesn’t mean they kidnapped somebody.”

  “And call me naïve, but I honestly think most people would have stopped if they’d done something like that—hit a gaggle of baby geese.”

  “You’re naïve.”

  “I’ve got that habit,” I admitted, “of thinking people are going to react to something the same way I would. Still, if it was the kidnapper, that would explain why he didn’t stop.”

  “So would being an asshole.”

  “But what about HRT? Why would somebody who hit some geese come looking for me, unless they were the kidnapper, too, and thought I could connect them to Lydia Marks?”

  “Maybe HRT wasn’t stalking you. Maybe that SUV you saw had nothing to do with Lydia Marks or the geese.”

  “It just seems too much of a coincidence, the geese, the SUV, and Lydia Marks.”

  He shook his head. “Maybe it is all connected, Teddy, but you can’t prove it. It’s like a Rorschach test: You see in the blob of ink what you want to see.”

  “You know what the funny thing is? I’ve been out there every morning for the past two weeks, and even before the sun comes up, there’re people walking and jogging that trail. I can’t believe nobody saw what happened. And on the flip side, I can’t believe Parker Hudson was the only one who saw the geese die.”

  “People don’t like to get involved.”

  “Did Listrom talk to Parker Hudson?”

  He shrugged. “I gave him the name.”

  I hadn’t touched my food, but Gary Paul’s plate was clean. He had wiped it clean with his last slice of toast and jammed the whole thing in his mouth. Most cops I knew were prodigious eaters and did their eating fast. At least I shared that with them.

  “Could you get me a list of all black Ford Expeditions registered in the state?”

  “Huh?”

  I repeated the question.

  He sipped his coffee. He took it with lots of cream and three of those little packets of sugar. I also noticed that he bit his fingernails to the quick. When you’re a self-possessed, procedurally oriented kind of guy, like this Gary Paul obviously was, sometimes normal human anxiety leaks out in little self-destructive habits.

  “Do you have any idea how many black Ford Expeditions there are in this state?” he asked.

  “I’ll pay for it.”

  “That’s not what I meant, Ted. You’d be looking for a needle in a haystack.”

  “I don’t know what else to do at this point. Does the department ever use psychics?”

  “Ever use what?”

  “Psychics—you know, people who get in touch with the spirit world to solve the case.”

  “Not that I know of.” He was smiling. “Why?”

  “Just wondering. Seriously, I can’t think of anything else—I mean, getting that list is all I’ve got left.”

  “Sure. Give me a couple days.”

  He wouldn’t let me pick up the check, reminding me that he had invited me. I followed his patrol car out of the lot. He turned right onto Lovell and I turned left and jumped on the interstate, heading back downtown. My stakeout of the jogging trail was over.

  Fe
licia wasn’t in when I got back to the office, but she had left a message that something had come up and she might have to miss work again the following day. For once, I didn’t mind. I watered the plants and locked the place up, and I half-expected to see Susan Marks sitting on my stoop as I went out the door. Then I did a funny thing: I went to a movie. I’m not sure why I went to a movie, but it felt like I was on some kind of vigil; I was waiting for something, but I didn’t know what I was waiting for. The atmosphere felt pregnant, like the air just before a summer storm or on the eve of a big battle, or that moment right before the batter leans back to unload on a big fat change-up and you know he’s going to hit it out of the park. I ordered a large popcorn and a Coke, which together cost more than my ticket, and hardly paid attention to the movie, which I think was a comedy, only there seemed an awful lot of bloodletting and cursing for a comedy, but the movies have changed a lot even since when I was a little kid, which might explain why I watch the old ones on AMT or Turner Classics. After the movie, it was time for dinner, so I went through the drive-thru at Buddy’s Bar-B-Q and had a pork dinner with corn on the cob and coleslaw. I drove home, checked my messages (I didn’t have any), and then settled down to Biography on A&E.

  When I got in the next morning, Felicia was waiting for me, standing by her desk in lime green shoes, slacks, and jacket over a satiny black blouse, holding a newspaper. I felt something contract in my chest when I saw the expression on her face, but it wasn’t my heart; it wasn’t something physical. It went deeper than that.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Have you seen this morning’s paper?”

  I took the paper to my desk and read the entire article, then picked up the phone and dialed the number. Her voice mail picked up. I hung up and Felicia set a cup of coffee by my elbow and then went to her desk. I could hear her typing something on her computer. I stared out the window into the alley, where two pigeons sat on the windowsill directly opposite mine. I watched the pigeons for a few minutes, then called over to Felicia to say I needed a phone book. She came in and placed a single sheet of paper with Susan Marks’s address and directions there, which she had pulled from the Internet. She had also printed out the address for Kenneth Marks in Farragut.

  I passed the dry cleaner’s at the bottom of the stairs. They were already at work, and it flashed across my mind that for weeks on my way up to my office, particularly when things weren’t going well, I would think at least I didn’t run a dry cleaner’s, with all those chemicals and the smell and customers complaining I had lost their clothes or lost one of their buttons, that at least I didn’t have to work over those steaming machines pressing shirts all day. And thinking that always made me feel fortunate, until I thought about it too hard and realized my good fortune had depended on my mother dying.

  She was sitting on the bottom step, the same step I first saw her on, wearing shorts and a sleeveless white shirt. Her brown hair was pulled back and held by a pink scrunchy, which made her face look even younger and more boyish—that and the fact that she wasn’t wearing any makeup.

  I sat on the step beside her and we didn’t say anything at first. Then she turned toward me and put her head on my chest and I put my left arm around her. She cried until I could feel the wetness from her tears against the bare skin beneath my new oxford shirt and undershirt. She said something that I couldn’t hear, but I didn’t ask her to repeat it. I just kept my arm around her and rubbed her bare shoulder with the palm of my hand.

  Then she said something else, and this time I understood.

  “You told me to hope.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She cried some more—not your wailing kind of crying, the kind you see on the news practically every night when the story is from the Middle East, but a soft, quiet crying, pressing her face against my chest. Her shoulders and arms were covered in freckles.

  “Help me,” she whispered.

  “I’ll help you,” I said.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  TWO HIKERS FROM NEW JERSEY FOUND THE SKULL OF Lydia Marks high on a ridge in the heart of the Great Smoky Mountains. The rest of her bones had been scattered by the wild animals that had feasted on her. One of the hikers slipped the skull in his backpack and they descended nine hundred feet down the mountain to the nearest ranger station, bringing the skull with them because, they told the newspaper, they were afraid no one would believe them.

  Within hours, the forensic pathologist with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation determined the skull belonged to a female between the ages of thirty-five and forty and that the quarter-size hole in her cranium had probably resulted from a massive blow to the head with a blunt object. Dental records confirmed it was the skull of Susan Marks’s stepmother.

  The article said the TBI and the Sevier County and Knox County sheriff’s departments had formed a joint task force to investigate the abduction and murder of Lydia Marks. They had set up a tip hotline and were asking the public for any information that might aid in the investigation. A spokesperson for the TBI told the reporter they had no suspects at this time.

  I asked Susan if she wanted to go up to the office for a few minutes, but she told me she had to get back home; her father needed her. I walked her to her car and asked if she needed a ride; I thought maybe she shouldn’t be driving. But she told me she was okay to drive, so I went back to the office. Felicia told me both Deputy Paul and Parker Hudson had called while I was outside with Susan. I called Deputy Paul first.

  “This is a huge break,” he said.

  “How so?”

  “It’s not a missing person’s case anymore. It’s a homicide. Top priority. And now there’s physical evidence. Something to work from. It’s terrible. It’s shitty. But the odds were always that she was dead, and now that we have a body, we’ve got a better chance of finding the son of a bitch.”

  “I don’t think the Marks family considers it a huge break.”

  I called Parker Hudson.

  “I wish to God I had gotten a better look,” he said. “But I was focused on the geese. I didn’t even think to get the license number.”

  “We don’t know it’s connected,” I said. “But you should call the task force.”

  He said he would. I said, “And I’ll get hold of a hypnotherapist.”

  “Really, Teddy, I don’t think that’s necessary.”

  “It won’t hurt to try.”

  “I won’t do it.”

  “You will do it, Mr. Hudson.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said, ‘You will do it.’ When something like this happens, doing anything less puts you on the wrong side—the bad guy’s side. You understand what I mean?”

  When I hung up, Felicia was standing in the doorway. Her arms were folded over her lime green chest.

  “I’m going to help her,” I said.

  “How much is she paying you?”

  I didn’t answer. She said, “Why are you going to help her?”

  “Because I promised I would.”

  “Is there a reward?”

  “A reward for what?”

  “Finding the killer.”

  “Sometimes it isn’t about money, Felicia.”

  “So you’re willing to break the law for honor. It’s just at money you draw the line.”

  “It’s not a bad place to draw it.”

  “Aren’t you noble.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Come on, Ruzak. You know the real reason you want to help this girl.”

  “She asked me to help her and I promised I would.”

  “And why did you promise that?”

  “She asked.”

  Felicia laughed. “Okay, whatever. You want me to find a hypnotherapist for you?”

  “That would be great.”

  I picked up the phone again and, after getting transferred a couple of times, spoke with the head of the joint task force, a detective with the TBI named Janet Watson, which was the
same last name as Sherlock Holmes’s sidekick. I told her about the black SUV that hit the geese around the time Lydia Marks disappeared and about the partial tag I spotted when a black SUV that might or might not have been the same one that hit the geese tailed me on Gay Street. Deputy Gary Paul of the Knox County sheriff’s office had run the partial for me and hadn’t found a match, but he was checking it again, I said. Then I asked her if she went into law enforcement because she had the same last name as Dr. Watson. That was a mistake, asking her that, because after she told me she didn’t know what I was talking about, she treated me like you would a crank.

  Felicia came back in after I got off the phone and handed me a piece of paper.

  “Parker Hudson has a three o’clock appointment for next Tuesday. You want me to call him?”

  “I’ll call him.”

  “Address is on the paper,” she said, and turned on her heel without saying another word.

  There was something else I wanted to do, someone else I had made a mental note to call, but now I couldn’t remember, so I got up and watered the plants and waited to remember. The best way to remember something is not to think about it, but to think about or do something else, and then it always comes to you. Try it next time you lose your car keys or can’t remember somebody’s name. I was misting the fern on the windowsill when I remembered, and I got on the phone right away to Paul Killibrew, the guy at the Sentinel. I told him his editor might be interested in running the follow-up now that Lydia Marks had been found murdered. He said he’d check again. Then I called Parker Hudson, told him about his appointment, and hung up before he could argue with me. Sometimes doing the right thing makes people uncomfortable, which is why the right things don’t get done more often.

  Felicia told me something had come up and she had to take the rest of the day off.

  “What’s come up?” I asked.

  “It’s personal.”

  “Is somebody sick?”

  “Didn’t I just say it was personal?”

  “Technically, it’s a business question, Felicia. I mean, I guess I kind of need a reason before I let you take off.”

  “Okay, boss. I’m not feeling very good, if you must know.”