by Julia Derek
“How bad is it?” Larry asked as Wil rolled down the window on the passenger side and stuck a hand out. He hated rain more than she did. The fat raindrops multiplied on the skin on top of her hand, soon covering it with a thin layer of water. The rain was lukewarm, though, so she didn’t feel it was too big a deal. She looked over at the gray one-story house with the covered porch and estimated how long it would take them to get from the car to the safety of the porch roof. If they ran, it shouldn’t take them more than fifteen, twenty seconds tops. There was a black metal fence going around the property, but the entrance seemed open and shouldn’t provide a problem. She turned her face to her partner.
“We’ll survive,” she said. “But you might want to pull the hoodie over your head.” She touched the hoodie attached to his sweater. Because they were not in the city, they had both chosen more casual outfits this late afternoon. “I know how much you hate getting wet.” She sent him a playful wink.
He smirked at her, then stretched his neck and looked beyond her. “How about you get a head start and make sure that fence isn’t locked? I don’t want to have to climb over it in the rain. My legs aren’t that long and flexible, so it’ll take me a while.”
She rolled her eyes at him. “You’re such a wimp. How the hell did you survive on the force for so many years?”
“By being smart. You’re closer to the entrance. You go check if it’s open. If it is, I’ll come right after you.”
“Fine.” She made sure she had her gun in her hip holster, then left the car and bolted to the fence entrance. Much to her relief, it was open and she could just go through it and continue onto the property. She dashed up the gravel path that led up to the little porch, covering her head with her arms from the rain as best as she could. As she reached the porch, she turned around to see where Larry was. She caught him just as he made his way through the fence and sprinted up the same path she had been on only moments ago.
He was panting lightly as he reached her.
“You okay?” she asked him with a raised brow.
He grabbed onto the porch railing and caught his breath. “I’m fine. I’m just not used to sprinting through rain this late in the day. Remember, I’m no spring chicken like you any longer.”
“That’s the truth.” She turned toward the front door. Like the old paint of the house, the rust-colored paint of the door was peeling. A small window covered by a thin lace curtain was at the top of the door. Wil tried to get a glimpse of the house’s insides, but she couldn’t see much as there was no light on at the other side of the door.
She pressed the doorbell and held it for five seconds, a loud buzz cutting through the silence.
The seconds ticked by and the two of them waited quietly for someone to show up, footfalls nearing them. It remained as still as before, however, the only sound that of the raindrops hitting the porch roof at a steady pace. Wil put her finger on the buzzer and pressed it again, holding it in even longer this time around.
Still no sound of someone approaching the door.
“No one is sleeping that hard, are they?” she muttered to Larry as she cupped the sides of her eyes and tried to get a look through the small window again. Unfortunately, the shading didn’t help; she still couldn’t see what was going on inside the house.
Larry shrugged. “Some people do.”
“Well, we need to talk to this lady,” Wil said with determination, “so she better wake up. Close your eyes.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m gonna feel the doorknob and see if the door is open. Out here in the middle of nowhere, people sometimes don’t lock their doors.”
“And what if it’s open? What are you gonna do then? You can’t go inside without a search warrant. And this is not our jurisdiction anyway, so we’d have to contact the Norman local police and work with them to get it.”
“Not if we run into something that seems suspicious. Then we have probable cause and that’s enough to enter.”
“But we can’t know that because the door isn’t open.”
Wil blew out an impatient breath. “That’s why I told you to close your eyes, Larry. That way you don’t have to be involved in this when I check. It may very well be open.”
Larry huffed. “Fine. I’ll look away. But if that door’s locked, we’re leaving and getting a search warrant before we return. You’re really pushing it here.” Pointedly, he turned his head away from the door.
She tried the doorknob, turning it. Like she had suspected, the door slid open. She threw a glance at Larry, who was still looking away.
“It’s open,” she told him.
He turned to face her again, his eyes going to the door that was now open several inches.
He wrinkled his nose. “What’s that smell?” He leaned closer to the door and sniffed a couple of times, and Wil did the same.
“Smells like something rotten,” Wil said. “And combined with the door being open, that’s very suspicious. Suspicious enough to warrant a search without papers first.”
She pushed the door open with one hand, her other hand on her gun. The smell of rotten fruit and eggs intensified as she entered the house.
“Whoa,” she said and stopped walking, pretty sure she knew what was causing the smell. She reached for the small pack of vanilla strips that she always carried with her when on the job. She pulled a strip out and stuck it right above her upper lip, then handed the pack to Larry.
“Here. You’ll need this.”
He took it and repeated what she had just done, then followed right behind her as she started to walk again. They were in a dark hallway that turned into a dimly lit sitting room with an ancient TV that was on, the volume so low you had to be close to hear what the people on the soap opera were saying. A poster of a huge swastika adorned the wall with the number 666 drawn in red on top of the black Nazi symbol. There was another poster of a flying eagle with the letters AB painted in black beneath it. Both posters were old and frayed. That heavy smell of rotten things hung in the air.
They continued into a room that was next to the living room, a small bedroom with an unmade twin-size bed and a tall dresser in it. A naked lightbulb hung from the ceiling, casting a faint light. Here, that strong rotten smell diminished significantly, and instead it smelled faintly of sweat and tobacco. The rain beat down hard on the windowpanes of the one window in the room.
Preparing themselves for another onslaught of the stench, they walked back into the living room and went in the other direction, passing a bathroom and ending up in an eat-in kitchen. Wil had barely entered it when she spotted a big person lying face-down on a striped rag rug, and she knew she had been right in assuming a dead person was causing the putrid smell that was almost unbearable now despite their vanilla strips. Wil did her best to breathe through her mouth, the stench made her so sick.
“Larry,” she hissed and took a closer look at the person, a chunky, old woman she soon discovered.
He hurried up next to her and they walked all the way up to the woman. They squatted beside her, Wil on the side of the woman’s face that was placed sideways on the floor. She immediately noticed the glassy quality to the woman’s eyes, confirming that she was dead. Wil touched the neck to feel her temperature. The skin was stiff and cold.
She gazed at Larry on the other side. “She’s dead. As cold as her body feels, not to mention stinks, she must have been here a while.”
“Do we think that’s Mary Lou Dalton?” Larry asked, looking up and down the sizeable woman dressed in red sweat pants and a stained blue sweater. The messy, gray ponytail and droopy face told Wil that the woman must have been somewhere in her early sixties.
“Yeah, unfortunately, I think it is. The age is right.”
“Damn. No wonder she didn’t answer the door. Good thing we entered.”
“Right.” Wil sighed. Too bad it also meant that Mary Lou Dalton would be unable to answer why she had pinned the photo of a mutilated Diego to her Pinterest board.
Chapter 22
By the time local law enforcement arrived at Mary Lou Dalton’s house, two hours had passed. Things down in Oklahoma clearly didn’t happen as quickly as they did back home in New York, Wil observed. Because there were no signs of trauma on the dead woman, she and Larry had concluded that she must have died of a heart attack or stroke; given her size and age, not to mention apparent smoking habits judging from all the ash trays filled with cigarette butts around the house, it was almost to be expected that she’d go this way.
As they had waited for local law enforcement to arrive, they had scoped out the entire house and besides the occasional Aryan Brotherhood item, they didn’t find much of interest. That was, except for the thick, worn photo album in one of the drawers in the bedroom dresser. The album was entitled Mary Lou’s Photos.
After looking through the cloth-covered album, they had no doubts that the heavyset, old woman on the kitchen floor was Mary Lou Dalton, and that she had been a long-time member of the Aryan Brotherhood. In the album, there were tons of photos of the woman dating from when she was young and married till present time. Thankfully, she had been the kind of person who loves to write captions describing each photo, explaining who the people in it were, when it was taken and where. Once upon a time, Mary Lou had been married to a man named Tom Dalton who was very tall, very skinny, and very blond. He had towered next to his pretty, young bride, who, according to the caption, had only been twenty years old at the time of the wedding, which had taken place in 1973. Given that it was now 2016, Larry and Wil concluded that Mary Lou had been sixty-two years old.
As they kept flipping through the album pages, they learned that the Daltons had had two children, first a boy, then a girl. There had been four years between the two children, who were named Pete and Kelly Anne. Sadly, it appeared that the husband had died when the kids were still young, in 1998, based on the photos glued into the album. Then, a few years later, Kelly Anne had died. There were quite a few photos of the funerals, but nowhere did it state what had happened to either the husband or the daughter.
Mary Lou had gone from being a happy, beautiful, slender woman to an obese, depressed-looking creature, someone who had stopped caring about her appearance and health altogether. Her transformation pre-funerals to post-funerals was striking. Wil and Larry agreed that it was as if they were looking at two different women. Thankfully, the only thing that didn’t change about Mary Lou was her penchant for writing captions next to the photos that she still took of herself and her son Pete. Pete had been a handsome young boy before the deaths of his father and sister only to transform into a scary-looking skinhead with lots of big tattoos on his arms, chest and back, all of them screaming Aryan Brotherhood.
Obviously, the losses affected both Pete and his mother profoundly. While Mary Lou’s changes had happened gradually, Pete had changed suddenly, shortly after his father’s funeral.
After the photos of the daughter’s funeral, the album had fewer photos, but all of them were darker in mood and most of them were in one way or another related to the Aryan Brotherhood. It seemed clear that at least the son had become a member of this organization shortly after Tom Dalton’s death, and that the mother slowly but surely followed suit.
Larry and Wil were still going through the album depicting the lives of the Daltons when two cops from the Norman PD finally drove up on the road next to the Dalton house.
Wil pushed herself up from the garden sofa on the porch where she and Larry had plunked down as the two cops walked up to them.
“You must be from the Norman PD,” she stated and got out her wallet, flashing her NYPD badge and ID. “I’m Wilhelmina Cooper, a detective with the NYPD. This is my partner, Larry White.”
The first cop, a squat, red-haired man in his thirties, eyed her credentials, then his white-lashed, watery blue eyes went up to her face.
“Yes, we’re the Norman PD,” he said with a soft drawl. “What’s the NYPD doing down here in Oklahoma?”
“We’re investigating a lead relating to a murder that took place in Central Park in Manhattan a few weeks ago. We have reason to believe that the dead woman in the house, Mary Lou Dalton, had knowledge about the murder. We came down here to question her and found her splayed on the kitchen floor. The front door was open and it smelled funny inside the house, so we went in to see what was up. That’s how we found her. We determined that she must have been dead for a couple of days already, maybe more, and that it appears to have been due to a heart attack or stroke, as we can find no signs of trauma. Of course, we didn’t do a thorough check, so maybe the ME will find something. It’s also possible that her death was caused by poison.”
The redhead’s partner, a much older guy, sniffed the air and wrinkled his potato nose.
“That sure smells like death,” he commented, then turned to his partner. “Come on, Miller. Let’s go see old Mary Lou.” He felt his pockets for something. Frowning, he turned to Miller. “You have strips? I seem to have misplaced mine.”
“Here,” Wil said and tossed her pack of strips to him. “These are good. Help yourself. You may need two. She reeks.”
He caught it and muttered “thanks,” then placed a strip under his nose and gave it to his partner, who did the same. The two disappeared into the house.
“Yeah, that’s old Mary Lou all right,” the older cop said when they returned a minute later. “Man, does that old broad stink.” He inhaled the fresh air outside and removed the strip from his upper lip, then tsk-tsked. “Can’t say I’m very surprised to see this, though. Ever since her hubby passed, she didn’t lead a healthy lifestyle. Somethin’ like this was bound to happen.”
“So you knew Mary Lou?” Wil asked the cop.
“Yeah, but not all that well,” he answered. “My wife and I belong to the same church as her is all. My wife knew her better.”
“It appears she was a member of the Aryan Brotherhood,” Larry chimed in.
The older cop waved a dismissive hand. “Yeah, but after she did time in prison, she cooled it off with them.”
Wil tilted her head. “Cooled it off? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“She was never that deeply mixed up with them in the first place,” the cop answered. “The only reason she spent time in the slammer was because she refused to cut a deal with the prosecutor and rat out some of the bigger fish. She didn’t really deal drugs, basically just laundered some drug money in her store that she used to have. The AB let her do her own thing after that. She saved one of the top dogs’ hide big-time, and that’s how they showed their gratitude. By letting her do her own thing. Which was basically subsiding on welfare checks.”
“What about the son?” Larry asked. “Pete Dalton. He’s an AB member, isn’t he?”
“Yeah, he is,” the cop replied. “Pete got heavily involved with them after his father was killed in a bar brawl. Fighting a couple of Mexicans if my memory serves me right.” He looked into the distance for a second, as though searching his mind, then back at Wil and Larry again. “Yeah, they were two against one. But Tom started it, provoking the men from what I understand. In a way, he had only himself to blame.”
“So you’re saying that Mary Lou wasn’t an active member of the AB then?” Larry asked.
“Yeah, that’s what I’m sayin’,” the old cop confirmed. “When her son moved away from here and she got out of prison, she got over it. She became a hermit and kept to herself, harming nobody.”
“What do you make of those posters in the living room then?” Wil asked. “Or maybe you didn’t see them yet.”
“No, I did see them,” the older cop said. “They’ve been there since Pete put them up. My guess is she never bothered to take them down, so that’s why they’re still there.”
“Is the Aryan Brotherhood active in this area?” Larry asked.
The redhead shrugged. “Not particularly. They’re more in Texas these days.”
* * *
Chapter
23
Kate invited Trevor to have dinner with her and the kids. They had been having such a great time all afternoon, watching cartoons with Luis and Anna after the ice cream, that it was a natural progression. She couldn’t see any reason for Trevor to go somewhere else to eat when he was with them, and they were all enjoying each other’s company.
“That would be lovely, Kate,” Trevor replied. “What are you going to make? I’m asking so that I can go and get us a bottle of wine to enjoy it with.”
“I’ll be making chicken with pasta in a cream sauce,” she answered and smiled at him. “Maybe a light red wine would go with that?”
“I think that would be an excellent choice,” he said and sent her a flirtatious wink as he got to his feet. “Will you and the kids be okay without me for a while?”
“As long as you’re not gone too long,” Kate replied with a similar wink back.
“I spotted a wine store half a block away. I won’t be long.”
“Where is Trevor going?” Luis wanted to know, finally noticing that something besides two cartoon figures fighting on the TV screen was occurring. “Are you going home, Trevor?”
“No, I’m just going to pick up something for dinner,” Trevor replied and patted the boy’s dark, curly head.
“Are you getting cake?” Luis asked with excitement.
“Cake, yay!” Anna yelped, wanting to be part of the conversation.
“No, Trevor is not getting cake,” Kate intercepted sternly. “He’s picking up something for us to drink.”
“But I can get us some cake, too,” Trevor said and smiled at the two small kids on the blue couch that were looking at him with bright, happy faces—faces that got even happier now.
“Cake, yeah!!” Luis yelled and his sister yelped along, clapping her hands and bouncing on the couch.
“That’s enough,” Kate admonished them, but she couldn’t wipe away the smile threatening to break through on her own lips. She turned her face away so the kids wouldn’t be able to see that she was no way near as serious about her words as she’d sounded. She gazed warmly at Trevor.
