Sketchy Behavior (15 page)

“We will find him, you know,” he said in a quiet voice. “And everything will go back to normal for you.”

Funny how it had only been two weeks and I could barely remember what normal looked like for me.

Justin rang my doorbell at seven o’clock the next morning. I hadn’t slept more than about two hours Sunday night thanks to more nightmares, so I was up, showered, and reading
The Grapes of Wrath
, since we had to have it finished by the end of the school year.

Which was in almost six months. Better to get a head start on it now.

I was so bored I was scaring myself.

DJ opened the door and escorted Justin into the family room. “Morning, Kate,” Justin said, looking all awake and refreshed after what could only have been a great night’s sleep.

He looked around my living room. I was slumped on the sofa, eyes bleary. DJ had black circles so thick under his eyes that he looked like he could have been playing on a football team. Detective Masterson was rubbing a three-day-old beard, and Mom and Dad were silently eating breakfast, staring at the table.

“Lively bunch today,” Justin said to me.

I rubbed my eyes. “It was a long day yesterday.”

He nodded. “I heard about that. Someone left a package on your doorstep? What was it? Was it a bomb or something?”

“No. It was a pot roast.”

He was quiet for a minute, staring at me. Finally he cleared his throat. “Maybe I’m missing something, but I actually like pot roast, and I’m not sure why someone leaving one of those would cause so much sleepiness today.” His eyes widened. “Unless the pot roast was drugged or something.”

I think that Justin has watched too many crime shows on TV.

Either that or read too many Hardy Boys books as a kid.

“We didn’t eat it,” I said. “I made a comment about how I hope John X is enjoying his prison pot roast at the press conference, and then one showed up on my doorstep.”

DJ started clearing his throat, and I guessed I’d talked too much. “But anyway,” I said offhandedly, like it was no big deal and we were just all completely zombied-out for no reason at all. I grabbed my stack of papers for him. “Here’s my homework. Thanks again for doing this, Justin.”

He tucked the papers into his backpack. “Sure, no problem. You positive you don’t want to come to school today? I came here a few minutes early to try and talk you into it.”

I shook my head. “Nope. I’m putting myself under house arrest until this guy is caught and happily eating his share of the prison pot roast.”

Justin quirked his head. “Do they even serve pot roast in prison? I mean, I’m no expert, but I’ve seen a few of those documentary things they show on TV about life in the slammer, and I’ve never seen anyone eating a pot roast.” He shrugged. “But then again, I don’t think I’ve ever really seen anyone eating. I think that show likes to only show the fight scenes.”

Must have been the same documentary I’d watched before. We both just looked over at Detective Masterson, who was skimming the paper through red-rimmed, sleep-deprived eyes.

He looked up at us after a few seconds. “What?” he asked.

“Do they serve pot roast in prison?” I asked. I’d asked DJ before and he hadn’t been sure.

Detective Masterson shrugged. “You’d need to contact a warden with that question. But I can tell you that one of the times I was there they were serving meat loaf.” He rolled a shoulder. “I guess that’s almost like pot roast.”

Except it’s much grosser.

My mother hated meat loaf with a passion. I could only think of one time that we’d had meat loaf in this house, and it was when my grandfather died and some people from my dad’s work brought dinner for us.

Mom said it was like the bologna of dinner meats. She said that someone out there must have not wanted to go grocery shopping that day so she just threw everything she had into a bowl, mixed it all together, and baked it, and unfortunately invented meat loaf.

Mom could barely even stand to say the words. She called it “that horrendous meat product.”

My dad, on the other hand, loved meat loaf. He said that my grandmother used to make it all the time for them for dinner when he was growing up. “It’s an amazing meal,” he told me one time after one of Mom’s tirades on it. “Cheesy, melty, juicy …” Then he’d just sighed and poked at the plain chicken breast on his plate.

Justin shrugged. “Well, anyway. I know there aren’t kitchens in the jail cells, though, so how did John X get the pot roast over to you?”

At the conclusion of yesterday’s cop invasion, they’d decided that there were two possible candidates for the cook who created the pot roast. One was the mysterious, hooded parade shooter, and the other was someone who had watched the press conference and thought it would be a way to end up on the news.

I thought the second choice was just horrible. “Someone would do that?” I had asked.

All of the police people just looked at each other and then shook their heads. “Every day,” someone said. “Fame is a powerful motivator, Kate.”

Which was partially why they had concealed what the package
was from the media. No use in giving the cook — if that really was his motive — a sense of satisfaction.

“They aren’t sure yet,” I answered him. “And by the way, you can’t mention that it was a pot roast to anyone else, okay?” Not like I had to worry too much about that. He didn’t talk to anyone at school.

He nodded. “I won’t. That’s pretty weird though.” He zipped his backpack shut and squinted at the clock over our mantel. “Guess I need to get going. Have a good day, Kate.”

“Thanks again, Justin.”

“I’ll be back around two thirty or so.”

He left.

Sometimes it still weirded me out how much we talked now.

Mom came into the living room as Justin left. She looked exhausted, and she was massaging the sides of her forehead. “Got your homework taken care of?”

I nodded. “Sure you can’t stay home today, Mom?” Surely she needed a break.

She shook her head. “I wish I could, Kate. I know I’m completely booked back-to-back this morning. I’m going to check my schedule though. If I don’t have very many appointments this afternoon I might have Madge move them all to next week instead and just come home early.” She disappeared into her room to finish getting ready.

She and Dad both left at the same time. “Be careful,” Dad said.

“Pay attention,” Mom said.

“Don’t answer the door,” Dad said.

“But please answer the phone,” Mom said.

“Stay inside and lock the doors,” Dad said.

“Bye guys,” I said.

They both left. I sat back down on the couch and pulled over
The Grapes of Wrath
again, but I didn’t feel like reading anymore. All the words were starting to blur in front of me.

So I leaned my head back against the cushion, pulled my feet up next to me, and turned on the TV.

Almost eight o’clock on a weekday morning. I flipped through the channels and settled on an old
I Love Lucy
rerun. Lucy was yet again trying to get Ricky to let her into show business, and I half wondered what my life would be like if I married a Cuban bongo player.

Probably louder. Definitely louder than my life was right now. Detective Masterson was still quietly flipping through the paper, and I think DJ had decided he was going to try and get in a power nap because he just wasn’t feeling very alert. Lolly was lounging on the floor, licking a rawhide bone. She never chewed them, she just licked them.

The show ended and another episode started. I curled up tighter and moved my head to the armrest.

My eyelids felt heavy. And my eyes felt completely dry, like I might need to invest in a humidifier soon.

I blinked to moisten them, but then just kept my eyes closed because it felt good.

The doorbell was ringing. The doorbell was ringing, and no one was going to answer it. So I walked over and opened the door.

John X stood there holding a fork in one hand and a spoon in the other. “I thought I’d join you for some meat loaf,” he said in a deep, bass voice. A man in a hooded sweatshirt came up behind him, also holding utensils.

“I don’t have any meat loaf,” I told him.

“It’s okay. We’ll make some. I have a great recipe from my great-grandmother,” John X said, walking into my house and into the kitchen, where a few bowls were already laid out on the counter.

“Let’s see,” he said, setting his fork and spoon down and rubbing his chin. “We need meat and a loaf of bread.”

The man in the hooded sweatshirt got the bread for John X from the pantry. He didn’t say anything. I looked at him and he smiled politely, but he still didn’t say anything.

John X was looking at me. “Where’s the meat?”

I opened the freezer and there was only frozen rawhide bones in there. “We don’t have any,” I said. “My mom hasn’t been grocery shopping in a while.”

John X looked around the kitchen for a few minutes. “Well, then. Do you have a dog?”

I nodded.

“I guess we found our meat then. Go ahead and call the dog in here.” John X rolled up his sleeves and motioned to the hooded man. “We’ll need your help too. Sometimes dogs can get a bit hard to skin.”

I shook my head. “I don’t want to use Lolly.”

“You just said you don’t have any other meat,” John X in a
duh
tone of voice. “We have to use the dog.”

“No, we don’t. We can go to the store.”

The hooded man started to look impatient.

“Look, just call the dog in here,” John X snapped. “Call the dog or we’ll use you instead.”

I started crying. “Why can’t we just go out to eat?” I asked. “Why do we have to eat Lolly or me?”

“That’s it,” John X said, grabbing my arm. “Get a knife,” he instructed the hooded man. “We’ll use her leg. She’s got more meat there than anywhere else.”

I started screaming and tried to run, but John X had a firm grip on my arms.

“Kate,” he said sharply over my screams. “Kate!”

I screamed all the louder.

“Kate!”

Suddenly, I was being jerked up and shaken. I blinked awake. Detective Masterson was gripping me by both arms, shaking me and yelling, “Kate! Kate!”

The room started to settle into place.
The Price Is Right
was on the TV. Lolly was licking my toes.

Detective Masterson looked scared. He set me down on the couch and exhaled, rubbing his hands together.

I was shaking uncontrollably and tears were pouring down my face.

“Are you okay?” he asked, sitting down beside me and rubbing my shoulders.

“What happened?” I asked.

“You started screaming. You were sleeping, and you just started screaming.” He shook his head. “Then you wouldn’t snap out of it.” He looked over at me. “Are you okay?”

I sniffed and tried to stop the torrent of tears. “He wanted to make meat loaf using me,” I hiccupped.

“John X?” Detective Masterson asked quietly.

I nodded, lifting a shaking hand to wipe my cheeks. Lolly was now laying on my feet.

Detective Masterson sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Well, that wouldn’t have been too tasty,” he said, smiling shortly. “You’re kind of skin and bones, Kate.”

“He was going to use my leg.”

“That makes more sense.” He smiled again at me and took a deep breath. “Sheesh, kid. You scared the daylights out of me.”

I looked around. “Where’s DJ?”

The detective brushed a hand nonchalantly. “That guy could sleep through a root canal. I’m worried about you. Kate, I don’t think you should take the sketch artist job.”

I got the tears to stop and rubbed my cheeks. “Why?”

“Look at you. You can’t sleep, you hardly eat anything anymore. You won’t go to school.” He shrugged. “You are extremely talented, and we’ll be losing a huge asset to the team, but you can’t handle this.”

Now I just sounded weak. There were hundreds of people out there who made their living doing far more dangerous things than criminal sketches. You never heard of any of them having nervous breakdowns.

I’d never had a nervous breakdown, but I wondered if the not sleeping and hardly being able to eat was part of one.

Mom would probably know the answer to that.

Not that I would ask her.

That would be about as bright as giving Allison Northing a megaphone for Christmas. No good could come from it. Sort of like when Grandma Carter got my dad the
Complete Guide to Engineer Jokes
,
Riddles
,
and Slap-Knees
for his birthday about five years ago. He still drags that thing out every so often.

Mom and I still don’t find any of the jokes very slap-kneeish. And what’s with that word anyway? I wasn’t aware that you could just randomly turn verbs into nouns.

“I’ll keep thinking on it,” I said to Detective Masterson. “Maybe I won’t take the job, maybe I will. We’ll just have to see.”

He gave me a long look before nodding. “Okay.”

T
HE WEEK WENT BY VERY SLOWLY. JUSTIN CAME EVERY
morning at seven to pick up my homework and every afternoon before three to deliver it. Most of the days he didn’t stay and chat.

There had been no new leads on the parade shooter. The cops still had a couple of guys watching the grocery store in Ballwin, but no one resembling the man at the parade had been there in the last two weeks.

Detective Masterson and DJ tried to be encouraging, but I could tell that they were starting to get sick of this.

Mom and Dad went to work exhausted and came home even more exhausted.

And I tried every method possible to get myself to go to sleep at night. I had Detective Masterson pick up some lavender-scented lotion at the store and tried using it before I went to bed to get me to be more tired. I tried taking that cough medicine that knocks you out, even though I wasn’t coughing.

None of those seemed to work. I tossed and turned from the moment I got into bed Thursday night. I looked at the clock at one point and it was three fifteen in the morning.

I’d probably slept a whole two hours.

Finally, I gave up. I turned on my bedside lamp and dragged my sketchpad over. I’d been working on one sketch all week, and I was nearly done.

The red-haired man with a buzz cut smiled back at me from the pad, and I started working on his chin.

It was DJ.

I don’t think he knew that I was sketching him. Next up was Detective Masterson and then probably my parents.

I had nothing better to do.

At three forty-five, I finished DJ’s chin and pushed the pad back a few inches to get a better look at it. It looked just like him, and I was rather proud of my efforts.

I yawned and tried to decide if I could fall asleep now. Sometimes just getting a little bit of energy out seemed to help.

I tried shutting my eyes, but sleep didn’t come. My brain was still working overtime. I wondered if John X’s friend had somehow gotten the tip that so many people had seen him at the grocery store in Ballwin, and he’d moved on to a super Walmart or something.

Some of those had self-checkouts. You could go in, get your groceries, pay for them, and leave without anyone so much as even noticing you.

We had gotten some reports back on the pot roast. There was absolutely nothing wrong with it. It apparently had been cooked to perfection, according to some of the people down at the lab. And the note that came with it?

Zero fingerprints, zero DNA.

Not that it was a shock, but it was a little sad. I was hoping that whoever had cooked the pot roast had lost a hair in there or something.

Maybe our hooded sweatshirt friend also wore hairnets occasionally.

I wasn’t going to be able to go back to sleep. I started drawing another head and shoulders shot.

Detective Masterson really did look an awful lot like Orlando Bloom. Same nose, same jawline. The only thing that was different was his hair and the slightly tougher quality in his bone structure.

I worked on the sketch until six thirty and then took a quick shower. I blow-dried my hair, added some cover-up over the increasingly dark circles under my eyes, and pulled on a pair of worn jeans and a blue T-shirt.

Justin was almost annoyingly punctual. I was just walking into the living room when he rang the doorbell. DJ answered it, yawning. “Hey,” he said, letting Justin in.

“Morning, guys,” Justin said. He joined DJ in yawning. “Thankfully it’s Friday, right?”

I nodded, but really, my weekends weren’t that much different than my weekdays now. Everything just kind of blended together. I handed him my stack of homework. “Thanks again, Justin.” We were starting to sound like a broken record. He came in, said good morning, I said thank you, he said no problem, and then he left.

“No problem,” he said, shoving my homework into his backpack.

Then it was his cue to leave. Instead, he sat down on the sofa.

DJ and I exchanged looks, because this was not according to schedule. Then DJ cleared his throat and left the room.

Justin looked at me. “So, have they found that guy from the parade yet?”

No offense to Justin, but you’d think this would have been fairly obvious.

“Um. No. Not yet,” I said. I was still standing by the recliner, just looking at him, waiting for him to leave before I started my new morning routine.
Happy Days
, a show I’d never seen before but was apparently about life in the 50s but was made in the 70s, came on at seven. Then I watched
Friends
, watched a guy named Bobby Flay do cooking competitions, and napped during
I Love Lucy
.

So far, Detective Masterson had only had to wake me up once since Monday because I was screaming in my sleep again. But other than that, I was getting fairly decent three-hour naps in every day.

“Are you going to wait until after he’s caught before you come back to school?” Justin asked, apparently staying to chat today.

I sat down in the recliner, rubbing my cheek. “I don’t know,” I said. I had thought about it, but not very much. What if he never was found? Did that mean I never went to school again? Would Detective Masterson and DJ have to live with us forever?

“Well, I think you should just come on back to school. What’s the worst that could happen?” he asked.

I blinked as a hundred different scenarios that would fit the “worst thing that could ever happen” adjective raced through my head. Classmates could get shot, teachers could get hurt, I could put another cop in the hospital.

Justin apparently noticed the look on my face and winced, rubbing his cheek. “I, uh, I didn’t mean that question, Kate.”

Maybe it would be better if I didn’t take the police department job. Maybe after all this was over and done with, I could get a full night’s sleep, go to school like a normal sixteen-year-old, and have a nice life of homework and Crispix. I was even starting to miss my beat-up, barely working car.

I shrugged. “No big deal,” I said. “But that’s why I won’t go back until he’s caught.” I hadn’t elaborated on the
why
but I had a feeling that Justin got my drift.

He just nodded. “Okay, then.” He stood, pulling his backpack up off the floor. “All right, I’d better get to school. Have a good day, Kate. I’ll see you this afternoon.”

“Thanks again, Justin.” I walked him to the door.

“No problem.”

I locked the door behind him, but not before poking my head outside first. It was a gorgeous day outside. And despite the trampling our front yard had gotten on the day of the pot roast fiasco, it looked like the grass would probably grow back just fine.

Thank goodness. Dad about died when he saw the yard after the barrage of uniforms left.

“What in the …” His voice had trailed off and I knew better
than asking him to finish his sentence as he stood in the front door, staring at what used to be his lawn of perfection. He’d had complete strangers coming to the door in years past, asking him what kind of fertilizer he used and how he kept his yard so green.

I closed the door and turned on
Happy Days
, though by this point I’d already missed the first few minutes of it.

Detective Masterson came in and settled in the recliner with the newspaper, like he did every morning. DJ was on the phone in the kitchen like he was every morning.

And Mom and Dad finished breakfast and left with their usual warnings like they did every morning.

I had just woken up from my nap during
I Love Lucy
when I saw Detective Masterson close his cell phone and look over at me. “Kate,” he said, “time to pay another visit to the dentist.”

I nodded, rubbing the lines on my cheek from the corduroy pillows. “Okay.” Suddenly, I was wide awake. Maybe they caught the grocery store parade shooter! Maybe they’d run him down and I could go to school on Monday!

“And bring something to do,” Detective Masterson said as I jumped off the couch and ran to my room for my shoes. “We’ll probably be there a while.”

“Okay!” I said.

I grabbed my shoes, changed into jeans quickly, and slapped a quick coating of mascara on. I closed my sketchpad and picked up my favorite pencil set, tucking both under my arm.

I could work on my drawings while we were at the station, since apparently we would be waiting there for a little while.

We left a few minutes later. DJ was driving over the speed limit and Detective Masterson kept looking at his cell phone.

“Did they catch him?” I asked excitedly.

“I don’t know,” Detective Masterson said.

“Did they see him?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did they at least identify him?”

He turned and looked at me. “I don’t know, Kate. All they said was come down to the station right away.”

“You didn’t ask why?”

He shrugged. “We’ll find out when we get there.”

I just shook my head and looked out the window. All men were the same, my mother would have said. Any time Dad got off the phone with his side of the family, Mom would ask him what they said, what was going on with everyone, whether or not the dates for the family reunion would work for everyone this summer. And Dad would have absolutely no answers for her.

“I guess they were all fine,” Dad would say.

“You didn’t ask?” Mom would rant.

“I didn’t think to.”

We pulled up at the station and hurried inside. Deputy Slalom was sitting at his desk, and we were told to go on into his office.

I decided that you could always tell what kind of day it had been for the police station by the condition of Deputy Slalom’s wardrobe.

So it kind of scared me when we walked in and his button-down shirt was completely unbuttoned, showing his white undershirt. His sleeves were rolled up past his elbows, and his tie was in a wad on the desk.

“Sit,” he barked as soon as we walked in.

Definitely not good news. I sat immediately, setting my sketchpad and pencils on the floor under my chair. Detective Masterson sat in the chair beside me, and DJ stood behind us, since there wasn’t another chair.

Deputy Slalom was pacing now, his shirttail flapping behind him. He was seething.

I watched him, my stomach knotting tighter each time he passed in front of me. I’d already resigned myself that this was not going to be the good news I was hoping for. Now, I was just hoping that there was a light at the end of the house arrest tunnel.

“Well,” Deputy Slalom growled finally after five minutes
of pacing in front of us. He stopped behind his desk chair and gripped the sides of it. “Good news, Kate. They found the parade shooter.”

He was still seething though, so I didn’t bust into a happy dance just yet.

He squeezed the chair sides tighter. “And I just got off the phone with the Clayton county office.”

Clayton is another suburb of St. Louis.

“It seems that our friendly and entirely
ridiculous
prison system has somehow
misplaced
a certain inmate!” Deputy Slalom shoved his chair against his desk so hard, the three framed pictures he had sitting on it fell over.

I jumped. I’d never heard so many stressed words from Deputy Slalom. At first, it didn’t really register what he’d said because I was so shocked by the chair slamming and the yelling.

He’d seemed like such a docile man.

Guess not.

Detective Masterson went pale. “I’m sorry?” he said.

“Yeah! Yeah, that’s all the guy from Clayton had to say!” Deputy Slalom was back to pacing. “ ‘I’m sorry.’ I’m sorry?! Does that suddenly help things? Are we finally living in a society where all people have to do is halfway apologize, and suddenly everything is all rainbows and butterflies and Hostess snack cakes?!” He banged his fists down on the desk and this time a paperweight fell over.

I kept scooting farther and farther back in my chair. I’d spent many a time in the principal’s office hearing about how being tardy to class is setting myself up on a road of failure and disappointment, but Principal Murray had never yelled like this at me.

Somehow I got the feeling that Deputy Slalom wasn’t yelling at us as much as just venting to us.

He flung himself into his chair with a huff. “John X is missing,” he said in a sullen, deathly quiet voice.

The room immediately felt like it shrunk six feet in every
direction. My chest got tight, my lungs had trouble expanding. I couldn’t feel anything past my waist. Any joy about the parade shooter being captured vanished like the rare package of Nutter Butters in front of my dad.

“Missing,” Detective Masterson repeated after a few minutes of complete silence in the room.

“Missing. Gone. Kaput. MIA.” Deputy Slalom waved a wrist around while he spoke, his eyes glassy, his gaze fixed on the window. “He was in his cell for breakfast, and there was no one there by lunch.”

My hands were shaking violently, and I tried to control them by weaving my fingers together so tight, my knuckles turned white.

“The clever man from Clayton said he thought it was his ‘responsibility’ to let me know that they’d somehow ‘misplaced’ John X, and if he happened to show up here in South Woodhaven Falls, could we ‘please arrange a transport’ back to the prison.” Deputy Slalom started shaking his head.

“What did you say?” Detective Masterson said.

“I said a bunch of words that I’m not going to repeat in front of a minor.” He looked over at me. “And a girl minor at that.” He let his breath out for a long minute and kept looking at me. “Kate. This changes a lot.”

I managed a nod, but I’m not sure how I did. My muscles felt frozen and stiff, like when it would snow a lot on the hill behind my house and Dad and I would go sledding on Mom’s cookie sheets when she wasn’t home, much to her dismay when she’d return.

Detective Masterson looked at me as well and reached over, patting my shoulder. “Don’t panic, Kate.”

He said it in the same tone he’d use if I’d burned myself cooking. If any situation was worthy of a good panicking, I would think that this one would be it.

DJ had been awfully quiet behind us. I looked over, and he was standing there with his arms crossed over his chest, jaw muscles set, eyes glaring.