XGeneration (Book 5): Cry Little Sister

by Brad Magnarella

  Behind Janis and Scott, Mrs. Spruel let out a huff. “For the town’s sake, let’s hope for a speedy trial and sentence. The sooner this thing is out of the news, the better. I can’t believe it took a murder—a murder—to finally put those criminals where they belong.”

  Mr. Spruel grunted in what sounded like agreement.

  When Janis turned, she found him sitting opposite Mrs. Spruel at the kitchen table, poking through the small pile of items he had dug up and dropped into his fanny pack during that day’s metal-detecting trip.

  “It’s better to hope they do it right,” Scott told his mother. “Otherwise, they’ll get out on some sort of technicality.”

  Mrs. Spruel shook her head, as though he couldn’t possibly know what he was talking about.

  Scott sighed and gave Janis the “why do I even bother?” look. But beneath his exasperation, Janis could feel his contentment that David and the others—but especially David—had finally gotten their comeuppances. That made it all the harder for Janis to share what she was about to tell him.

  She squeezed his hand twice until she had his attention.

  They didn’t do it.

  His eyes flinched. What are you talking about?

  It wasn’t them.

  He looked toward the television, as though seeking confirmation that it was them, that they did do it.

  Listen to me, Janis said. They left their house last night around ten-thirty, but they didn’t go to the doctor’s house. They went to Murder World. I tracked them. They were back home and asleep by midnight.

  Well, what about when you were asleep, between midnight and two. His gaze hardened with conviction. They could have gone back out then.

  At two, they were right where I’d left them.

  But that doesn’t mean they didn’t duck out again…

  Scott, how does that make any sense? I saw them go out, come home, and then go to sleep. Who wakes up, what, a half hour, an hour later, commits a murder, and then goes right back to sleep?

  She and Scott were facing one another without speaking, accenting their telepathic points with tilts and nods of their heads. Janis was glad neither of Scott’s parents were paying them any attention. She noticed J.R. watching from the floor rug, eyes large and nervous.

  Well, something connects them to the murder, Scott shot back, otherwise, the police would never have gotten an arrest warrant from the judge.

  Janis hesitated. He had a point. She collected her thoughts.

  There are two important things to consider here, she said after a moment. One, there could be four innocent people in prison. She watched Scott’s face harden at the idea that they could be innocent of anything. And two, if that’s the case, there’s still a killer out there.

  Scott followed her gaze to the sliding glass door. He sighed and dragged both hands through his hair.

  All right, he said. Assuming you’re right about this, what do we do? For obvious reasons, we can’t tell the police that you tracked their movement last night via the astral plane.

  Yeah, Janis agreed, doubt that would hold up in a court of law, either.

  So…? Scott looked ready to declare victory by default.

  So, we go to Murder World, she said. Whatever David and the others were up to last night might clue us into whether it made sense for them to commit a murder an hour or two later.

  I don’t suppose there’s a way to talk you out of this? he asked.

  Nope.

  He bounced her hands in his in thought.

  All right, partner, he said at last. When do we leave?

  How about as soon as your parents go to bed?

  14

  If Murder World had seemed creepy to Scott during the day, it was crap-your-pants scary at night in the wandering beams of his and Janis’s flashlights. As they crept along the gum-stained thoroughfare, Scott kept imagining someone paralleling them, scuttling behind the looming rides. And the more Scott dwelled on what Janis had said earlier, the more that scuttling person became the killer.

  When the killer jumps out, I’ll faint, Scott thought to himself. And how is that gonna look?

  A scuffing sound made him shoot his beam off to the right. The light illuminated the entrance to Murder Mansion. Beside the sealed doors, someone stood in a black cloak, staring back at them.

  “We’re alone.”

  Janis’s voice sent a stake through Scott’s heart. When he steadied his beam and looked again, the cloaked figure became a grandfather clock with a thirteen hand—part of Murder Mansion’s façade. He moved his light around the plaster clock before retraining the beam ahead of them.

  “Just being cautious,” he said. “We’re on thin enough ice with Detective Buckner.”

  “This was actually a good time to come. The police are tied up over at David’s and Dr. Fields’s houses.”

  Janis flashed her light above the entrance to the Bloodsucker ride. The pale face of the vampire with its glaring red eyes and severe widow’s peak leaped from the shadows. Scott eyed the chipped red-painted fangs before following Janis’s light down to the entrance. Like on the Murder Mansion ride, its double door was sealed and criss-crossed with brown chains.

  “They always seem to park their motorcycles over here,” Janis said. She led the way around the domed Bloodsucker ride.

  Scott searched the pavement where David and his friends had been standing the first time he and Janis had seen them. He toed aside crushed cigarette filters. Farther along, he found fragments of headlight plastic from when Janis had toppled their bikes.

  He nearly stepped on a pair of red stains. He backed up and knelt to the ground, bringing the face of his flashlight right up to them. He was about to call to Janis, but she called out first.

  “Take a look at this,” she said.

  She had made her way ahead of him and was shining her light against the curved back of the building. When Scott arrived beside her, he saw a small door painted the same red color as the wall. It looked as if it might lead to an engineering room. A security padlock hung from a thick hasp.

  “Lock looks new,” Janis said. “And what about this?” She touched her finger to some scratches in the metal door beneath the lock.

  Scott nodded. “You’re right. Someone pried off the old lock, replaced it with theirs.”

  He braced his flashlight between his shoulder and cheek, fished out his wallet of picking tools, and set to work.

  “Probably David,” he said as the pick clicked between his fingers.

  “Which means whatever’s inside should explain why they spend so much time here,” Janis replied.

  “And why they would murder a pediatrician,” Scott reminded her.

  The lock clicked open. Scott slipped the shackle from the hasp.

  “No guard dogs inside,” Janis said when he looked up at her. “I checked. But I’m going to shield us just in case. I still don’t think they’re the killers, but I wouldn’t put a booby trap or four past them.”

  “Good thinking.”

  The atmosphere around him churned as though it were congealing into something viscous. Scott drew the door open and squinted against the refraction of light off metal. It took him a moment to realize he was looking across a shaft, one that dropped straight down. A metal ladder was bolted to its side. He spanned the shaft with an arm and gripped the top rung. He gave it a shake. Not only did the ladder feel solid, but nothing shot up at him.

  “It’s about a ten-foot drop to open space,” he told Janis. “Some sort of room.”

  He donned his headlamp laser and stepped through the door onto the ladder. A feeling of déjà vu shivered through him. Peering between his shoes, his climbed down two or three rungs. A warm, skunky air pushed past his face.

  “Hey, cut your light for a second?” he said.

  Janis’s flashlight clicked off and the shaft went dark. But the room below him continued to glow.

  “Let me check it out,” he whispered.

  He descended the rest of the way,
released the ladder, and took in the illuminated room.

  “Whoa.”

  “Don’t leave me in suspense or anything,” Janis said from above.

  “It’s … You have to see this for yourself.”

  Scott stepped away from the rattling ladder and peered around the small forest. There was no other name for it. The shaggy plants grew from hundreds of black pots, their stems stretching up toward pendant lights that had been strung to machinery on the underside of the tilt-and-spin. On the far side of the room, beyond the plants, something hummed and hiccupped.

  Janis landed beside him. “Okay, this is whoa worthy.”

  “I never would have figured them for horticulturists.”

  “It’s a marijuana-growing operation,” Janis said. “This must be their ‘delicate work.’”

  As Scott looked back at the illegal plants, everything crystallized. “I guess this explains David’s warning to stay out of Murder World and to keep their names from Chief McDermott’s ear. They didn’t want anyone to catch on to what they were doing, least of all the law.”

  “I think with those first two encounters they were trying to scare us.”

  “Dr. Fields must have been a buyer or something,” Scott said, struggling with how to keep David and his friends culpable for the pediatrician’s murder. “Maybe he owed them money or…”

  Janis looked at him with tired eyes, a hand on her hip.

  “Hey, I’m just thinking out loud here,” he said.

  “Well, if you’re going to do that, at least make some sense. The doctor was eighty-two years old.”

  Suddenly, Scott remembered something. “Hey, I spotted a couple of stains on the ground outside, like we saw on those boots at the house. Dark red, might’ve been blood. Why don’t we suspend our David-did-it, didn’t-do-it debate until we’ve searched the place.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  They split up, working their way down parallel rows of plants. Scott pawed leaves from his face. The collision of the hot overhead lights with the sheer volume of potted vegetation clogged the air, making it difficult to breathe. At the bases of the plants, Scott observed a network of PVC pipes that dripped water into the soil. To his left, plywood shelving held racks of smaller plants.

  “See anything over there?” he called to Janis.

  “Just one heck of an operation.”

  Ahead of Scott, the humming, hiccupping sound grew. He emerged from the plants at the same time as Janis and found himself standing before a pumping system. It looked as though David and the others had hooked it into the tilt-and-spin’s coolant system then installed their own pumps to push water through the network of PVC pipes. The pumps’ motors, which he recognized from the garage, had been wrapped in some kind of sound-dampening material.

  “Well, here’s our blood,” Janis said. “And probably what you saw outside.”

  Scott found her inspecting a half-empty vat, which had been set on a shelf. Red liquid dripped from the vat along a clear tube and into the main artery of the pumping system.

  Four filled vats sat in a row beside it.

  “Liquid fertilizer?” Scott asked in disbelief.

  “The thing we weren’t supposed to have seen in David’s garage wasn’t dog blood, it was all of this.” Janis spread her arms. “That’s why they were acting so protectively. I don’t know the ins and outs of drug laws, but I’m pretty sure a bust for something on this scale would mean prison time.”

  Scott took one last stab at keeping his David-and-friends-as-vampires theory afloat.

  “Any fingerprints in here?” he ventured.

  “No energetic matches. But you actually raise a good point.”

  “I do?”

  She turned and disappeared back into the plants. “Come on.”

  “Where are we going?” Squinting, he swam his arms in after her.

  “Dr. Fields’s house.”

  Two police cars were parked on the street when Janis and Scott pulled up on their beach cruisers, Janis’s front wheel clicking where Scott had repaired the hub that morning. The detectives themselves were not in sight. Neither were the neighbors who Janis imagined had spent the day idling in the street, peering anxiously past the yellow crime-scene tape that barricaded the front lawn.

  “There’s that X,” Scott said.

  Janis studied the pale-yellow door that had been tagged corner to corner with the giant letter. From its dark red color to its runnels, the letter was a chilling match to the one Janis had envisioned upon arriving in Murder Creek.

  A shiver ran through her. Scott’s arms enclosed her shoulders, and she shrank into his warmth.

  “You all right?” he whispered.

  “Yeah,” she replied, not at all sure. “This should only take a minute.”

  She closed her eyes and concentrated toward the house. What had once appeared to her as solid lines of brick and plywood dissolved into intersecting patterns of energy. Janis aligned herself with those patterns, moved through them.

  To that point, she and Scott had assumed that whoever had broken into Scott’s house and later killed the husky (and presumably the other dog) had also murdered Dr. Fields. After all, there had been no obvious signs of entry at the pediatrician’s house, either. But to be absolutely certain, Janis needed proof. And the best proof would be to find a match to the energetic fingerprint she had detected at the other crime scenes.

  “There’s one here, too,” she said suddenly.

  “A fingerprint?”

  “Over a glass door that leads into the kitchen.” Janis palpated the frazzled lines of energy, the sickly ochre color. “It feels exactly like the energy over the sliding glass door at your beach house, only fresher.”

  “So the killer was in our house…” Scott said faintly.

  “Out on another one of your night rides?” a new voice asked.

  Janis slipped back into her body. Detective Buckner ducked under the tape and finished crossing the lawn toward them.

  “Yeah,” Scott said, clearing his throat. “I guess curiosity got the best of us.”

  Detective Bucker took a breath and glanced back toward the house. His face looked tired and grim. “Well, there’s nothing more to see tonight. We’re actually wrapping up.”

  Janis took that as their cue to leave. She began to turn the front wheel of her bike.

  “But maybe I can satisfy another of your curiosities,” Detective Buckner said. “That stained rag you gave me this morning came back from testing. They rushed it because of today’s development. It wasn’t blood.”

  Janis almost said we know.

  “It was a chemical compound, high in nitrogen and phosphorous. Possibly a fertilizer. You said you found it in a vat?”

  “In their garage,” Scott answered, nodding.

  Detective Buckner grunted. “Their garage had been cleared out by the time we arrived today.”

  That must have been what they were doing last night, Scott spoke-thought. Should we tell him about their plant nursery in Murder World?

  No!

  Scott flinched. But the force of Janis’s response had startled her as well.

  No, she repeated, more gently. My intuition is telling me to hold onto that info for now. We may need it.

  Detective Buckner’s brow furrowed. Then his nose wrinkled. He leaned forward, his nose wrinkling a second time.

  “What else have you two been up to tonight?” he asked.

  Great, Janis thought toward Scott. He smells the plants on us.

  “Well, let’s see,” Scott said, too quickly. “After raking up around the house and burning the dead sea grass, we hung out on the beach for a while. We tried throwing the Frisbee, but it was a little too windy. Neither of us would have been mistaken for Captain America.” He forced a laugh.

  That’s horrible on so many levels, Janis thought to herself.

  “Hey, can I ask you something?” she said to Detective Buckner.

  He turned his dubious gaze from Scott to her. In
Champions parlance she was attempting an “inversion”—posing a question to the interrogator to try to reverse their roles.

  “How did you close in on David and his friends so quickly?”

  It worked. Janis could see by the double blink of his eyelids that the question caught him off guard.

  She pressed her advantage.

  “The evidence must have been strong enough for the judge to issue the arrest warrant, right?”

  Detective Buckner found his footing. “I can’t discuss certain details of the case,” he said. “But since Chief McDermott released that information to the media an hour ago…”

  Janis caught herself leaning forward. The question had been nagging her all evening. Since she knew David wasn’t the killer, what could they possibly have on him?

  “Last month, David and his friends threatened Dr. Fields,” Detective Buckner said.

  “They did?” Janis hesitated. “Over what?”

  “We’re still piecing that together. But the threat was issued in public with multiple witnesses present.”

  “Like a threat to do him some kind of harm?” Scott asked.

  “A threat to slit his throat,” Detective Buckner answered.

  15

  “We need to go back to basics,” Janis said. “Deal in only what we know.”

  It was the following morning, and she and Scott were sitting on a bench on the empty boardwalk. The toes of their shoes pointed toward the flat expanse of the Gulf, as gray as the sky overhead.

  “It’s hard to get past the fact that they threatened the doctor,” Scott said.

  Irritation gripped Janis’s throat. She waited a moment before speaking. “I know they threatened the doctor, Scott, but nothing places them at the crime scene. And there’s a good reason for that. They were either at home two nights ago or in Murder World, remember?”

  “Well, what about the knife?” Scott asked.

  Besides the revelation that the X on Dr. Fields’s door had been painted in dog blood, the knife had been the other big news of the morning. Police had recovered a kitchen knife from David’s property that they said may have been used in the slaying. Janis reminded Scott now of the statement’s speculative wording. “And anyway,” she added. “I have an idea about that.”