Green Tea (28 page)

“You go to work. I’m pretty sure that I’m perfectly safe. No matter who the bad guy is
,
he isn’t going to want to pull attention to himself, so he isn’t going to do anything to hurt me. I’m going to snoop around on the Internet for a while, think for a while, then call Jovana and see if there is anything I can do to help with the cleanup at the ballroom, or somehow pay back her or the girls from the bar for all they have done for me and my family, then I’m going to check on Adeline, then I’m going to the mall and finding a completely inappropriate and unbelievable sheer something fabulous to wear tonight, I’m going grocery shopping, then I am going to meet you back here, with a wonderful dinner prepared, and me, in said unbelievably sheer fabulous outfit, doing my very best to get all of your attention back to more pleasant things.”

“Well, I won’t be going outside for a few minutes, I’ll put the kettle on so you can have a cup of tea.”

Good thing we have an automatic shut-off on the kettle.

Good thing AJ makes his own hours.

I’m just sayin’.

My mom called before I could put my plans for the day into action. “Hello, Love.”

“Hi, Mom, what’s up?”

“Your brother and his new bride have asked that I give the family a call. They would like to get together here for dinner tomorrow tonight, along with a few members of Morgan’s family, to eat some of that leftover food from the wedding, and open their gifts.”

“Oh, crap.”

“Excuse me?”

“I special ordered their gift and I don’t think it’ll be done.”

“I’m sure they will understand, Love.”

“Maybe, but that doesn’t make it better. I’ll give the guy a call.”

“Will we see you here for dinner then?”

“Of course. Can I bring anything?”

“I was hoping you would ask. Morgan invited AJ’s grandmother. She has accepted the invitation. Can you pick her up, and of course, AJ is more than welcome.”

“I can do that. Remind me to thank Morgan.”

“You’re a grown woman Cara, I’m sure you can remember such a basic thing on your own.”

“You would think so, but I seem to be having problems remembering anything these days.”

“Tis all the stress from the situation you find yourself in. It will get better in time.”

“I hope so. I’m beginning to worry about myself. I’ve always flipped from one subject to another, but it used to make some sense. There used to be a thread to it. Now I’m just all over the place.”

“Often you don’t see the connection between two things until you have the luxury of looking back at them. If you are having problems Love, perhaps you should change your vantage point.”

“Good idea, but I think the only thing I haven’t tried is standing on my head.”

“Then I’ll leave you to it.”

With that she was gone.

I texted AJ and extended the invitation. He said he’d already gotten word from Jovana; she would be there as well. He was very touched that his grandmother had been invited. I reminded him that he’s part of a family now, caught myself before I said ‘for better or worse’, and that if it hadn’t been for him, Morgan would have had to walk down the aisle naked. His ‘damn, wouldn’t have minded seeing that’ made me laugh; too bad he wasn’t close enough to smack.

Jovana had AJ pass along the message that there was no need to help clean up the ballroom. Morgan’s father had paid for a crew to take care of it. Yay!

Next I called AJ’s grandmother, told her that AJ and I would pick her up, and that my parent’s house is three steps beyond casual for these things.

I called my engraver guy; he said he could have the gift done by tomorrow afternoon. Yay again.

I called Adeline, offered to go over and fix lunch and visit. She said that she was spending the whole day painting, and that she’d see me soon.

Most of the day to myself. AJ usually works a short day on weekends. Today, a shoot with a mom and dad and a bunch of little ones, might take longer than usual. He said he’d be back in time for dinner. Grocery shopping and the mall could wait; I felt a solution to my mysteries coming on.

Logging onto the Internet, I had no idea where to start. That’s one of the nice things about the Internet; you can start just about anywhere.

I started out with the obvious and figured I’d branch out from there. I typed Jerkface’s sister in the search engine and hit return. I got 193,000 results in .26 seconds. Great. I typed in a plus sign and added Jerkface’s name; that cut it down to just 187,000.

I puttered around the Internet for a while, very hit or miss, and happened onto a site that offered to find Jerkface and his sister for me, for just under twenty dollars. I was tempted. I decided to look to see if there were any sites that would give me such information for free, and although I didn’t find that, what I did find was a site that listed Jerkface and a hand full of people in his life. My guess is the intention was to sort out the person you are looking for from everyone else with the same name.

The right basic geographical area and his sister’s name were there for Jerkface.

The right geographical area and her brother’s name were there for Jerkface’s sister.

They both had two other matching names. I assumed one to be their father, and one to be their mother, or stepparent, or whatever.

I jumped up and celebrated that minor victory with a cup of tea, and a happy dance in the kitchen while it brewed.

Once I had my cup of tea beside me, for its magical powers, mostly of caffeine, I tried to find information on the parents.

First I tried the sex offender registration stuff. I figured if Jerkface’s father was a perv years ago, he’s probably still a perv, there is no cure for evil, and sexual abuse on a child isn’t acting out, it is evil. Couldn’t find him.

I spent the better part of my whole cup of tea searching anything that came to mind with no luck.

Frustrated, I typed ‘how to find a person for free on the Internet’ and everything I needed appeared before me. I love the Internet.

I printed out some articles, and some step-by-step instructions. How to look people up through everything from social networks to military records; reverse email directories, to professional organizations and yearbooks. I even found a way to look up a person’s family
tree, that
was helpful.

More tea.

I know that I should have opened tabs or extra windows or whatever, but I just can’t do that, so my printer was pretty busy for a while.

I took all the printed material, highlighted what I thought might match, then went back to the computer and searched on that information, printed it out, and highlighted some more.

By the time it was time for more tea, I had every horizontal surface in my apartment covered with paper, a really good feeling about finally getting to the bottom of all this, and was secure in the knowledge that if Teagan was available to help me, I’d get it done in half the time.

“Hey.”

“Hi, you busy?”

“Not really. Jessie has a meeting.”

“Today?”

“Yep. What about you?”

“AJ’s working.”

“And you questioned Jessie having a meeting?”

“Okay, stupid response, can you come over?”

“Sure. Why?”

“I think I’m onto something with the whole Jerkface thing.”

“Four minutes, put on the kettle.”

It took us about four hours, but we had a solid case, documents to back it up, and were mostly convinced we were right.

“Now what?”

“We could call Steph.”

“Do we trust her?”

“Cara, I don’t trust anybody about this. This is scary. To be looking at proof that you have found a serial killer. And, I’m not even sure what the ramifications for all of this are going to be. What if it rains back down on the family.”

“Oh, it’s gonna rain.”

“We can’t do
nothing.
”

“Teagan, if we found it, then the professionals can find it.”

“If they want to, but I’m beginning to think they don’t want to.”

“Why?”

“I have no clue.”

“So what do we do?”

“Since it is the family that will pay the price, I think we should talk to Mom and Dad.”

“Agreed.”

“Do we go to them, or ask them to come to us.”

“We always go to them, but this is something profoundly different. I think they should come here.”

“Agreed. I’ll call Mom and see when they can come.”

Teagan called Jessie to let him know she would be late. I called Mom and told her I needed to talk to her and needed her to come to my apartment. It was a rare request. She said she and Daddy would be here in less than thirty minutes.

I looked around, saw the mess that is my home, the first time my parents have been over since AJ moved in and didn’t even bother to straighten up. Another rare event.

When Mom and Daddy were settled on the couch with a cup of tea, Teagan and I did a tag team approach to fill them in on as many details as we had and how we got there.

Teagan started, “We’re going to present this to you just like we would present it to a lawyer or the cops and we need you to be completely honest about what you hear. If we’re crazy, or wrong, or should just back away, we need you to tell us. If we need to go to the cops, or the FBI, or whatever, we need to know that too.
 
Some of this stuff you probably already know, and I apologize if we are repeating something, but we’re going to go from top to bottom.”

All she got was a nod of agreement. My parents were in
listening to something important
mode. They’re really good at that. Probably comes from all those doctor’s reports when my sister was sick. My parents can take it all in, process it,
then
ask really intelligent, cogent, and relevant questions.

We explained all the background stuff.
 
About Billy getting hoodwinked into having me work on Louis’s condo.
 
About Louis’s car accident, the first time I went to the condo, about meeting Joe-the-cop, Louis’s one time partner, who was now christened Jerkface.
 
I told them about Jerkface showing up at the condo, and then showing up at my apartment after I’d found the journals.
 
I admitted to my parents that Jerkface sat on the couch they were now sitting on to read the journals with me.
 

I looked over at Teagan. She gave me a look to continue.

“Almost the minute I brought the journals back to this apartment to read things started getting strange but I didn’t know that at the time. The journals were ugly, but they didn’t tell me anything at the time. I’m not sure of the exact order things happened, I wasn’t writing it down, but as close as Teagan and I can come to it, this is what happened.”

Teagan handed me the papers we’d been working on.

“Jerkface started lying to me right from the start, but I didn’t know enough to know it was lies, and me, being me, I just took it at face value. First it was the journals. Then he said that he had a warrant, he used flattery, saying that my brilliant detective skills helped to figure out that Louis, Bernie and another lady that doesn’t matter for this discussion, all had the same three letters in their car tags and that he talked to other cops and that they thought I might be on to something. Since then I contacted a friend of mine that knows about math and he said that the chances of there being any connection between those three because of the tag numbers was basically the same as a random event. Jerkface is a cop and would have known that, so from the very beginning he was just playing me for a fool and I kind of thought he was, but since he was a cop and everything, I ignored my instincts.”