The Case of the Red-Handed Rhesus (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) (30 page)

“I kept hoping Mom would come around, like I could change her mind, and then she’d save us both. But she never did. And I wonder now, what if I’d argued with her a little harder? What if I hadn’t pretended to like it when I was with the other girls? What if . . .”

“What if you could have changed her.” It wasn’t a question. This, I
did
know. “I used to blame the alcoholism, instead of Alex. I thought if I could change him, he’d stop hurting me. It was always inherent in
me
to make
him
different. It doesn’t work that way.”

“I know. But it’s hard to accept when you’re brainwashed . . . or when you’ve brainwashed yourself.”

“Honey, Gary brainwashed you.”

“I don’t mean me. I think that’s what Gran’s doing. Brainwashing herself. It’s like she’s all of a sudden admitting Mom’s dead, and everything else is collapsing around her.”

“Listen, tomorrow, you’ve
got
to go to school. You’re already going to be buried under makeup work from missing two days. But after school, I want to take you in to the . . . what does Stan call it? Retread home? And let you visit with Gert.”

I could not save Hugh Marsland. And I couldn’t erase the look of horror from Drew’s eyes when he walked out of the conference room earlier after seeing his old partner’s desiccated head. But I could help here. I understood the isolation of depression, and so did Natasha. “Your Gran needs to know she’s not alone.”

Nana stumped back, impatient for news. “Is Gertrude stuck in the home your mother stuffed me away in when I broke my hip?”

“Yes, Nana.”

“They do okay for the body, I guess. I’m back up and running, and it hasn’t even been a full year since I got out. But they don’t do much for the mind except tell you to stop feeling sorry for yourself. Your granddad needs to get her a better psychiatrist or psychologist than whatever they’re giving her in there.”

“He does?” Natasha’s daze was lifting, returning hope making her straighten her back. “He can make that happen.
I
can make that happen. He can
buy
that.”

“Now come on. I want to know what happened to that poor man at your center.”

“We’re coming.” I shook my head at Nana’s retreating back. “We aren’t going to get your Gran home next week. But we’re
not
going to up and leave her in there to fester.”

“Thanks, Noel.”

“Come on, let’s go see if we can convince my mama to order pizza instead of cooking for this crew.”

Less than an hour later, I was thoroughly enmeshed in parent mode, and Nana was brooding on the sofa. I had promised her a long talk after the twins were in bed. The pizza delivery car pulled up behind our van in Mama’s driveway. Sara, who had been watching from the window, called out, “Pizza for me-e!” and dashed for the door.

“Not so fast.” Lance intercepted her. “Grownups answering the doors, yes?”

“Right.” Her face fell. This wasn’t merely a reminder she was seven and we were a fair bit older. It was a reminder we would only be sure it was the pizza guy on the other side of the door when he handed Lance a hot square box and departed with a tip.

In the living room, William shouted, “No! No, no, no!” He ran at me, flapping madly, jumping up and down when he reached me. “No, no, no, no,
no
!”

“Easy, easy.” I got down on his level to show him I was listening, and I tried to catch the hands. Pointless, as he needed that stimulation to calm himself, but completely automatic on my part.

He pulled them loose and shook them harder. “Circles!” He finally howled. “No circles!”

No circles.
“No pizza?” Pizza was round. William hated round. “We’re making you a waffle, remember?”

“No, no, no! No circles. No
dots.
”

“Do you see the police car?”

Lance was talking to the delivery guy. “We already paid by credit card.”

“Sorry. Should have checked the receipt. I don’t usually do deliveries. I’m supposed to be a cook. But we’re down a manager and Robby’s been filling in for him.”

William persisted. “Circle dot cars are
bad cars.
”

“Isn’t he a little young?” Lance was making small talk now, when he should have been bringing in the food. But he had a point. Our pizza was almost always brought by the teenage Robby, who was perennially late, but always friendly. And he did seem awfully young to sub for a manager.

“No circle dots!”

“Yeah, but Merle, our manager, had kind of taken him under his wing. And the Gibsons have been out of touch ever since we upgraded the technology. Robby’s the only one who knows how to do practically everything.”

“I didn’t know Merle worked for the Marine.”

“You know him? Merle Evans?”

“How many Merles do we have in this town? He volunteers at the sanctuary. What’s up with Merle? Sick?”

“No call, no show. I think he’s sleeping something off in Columbus.”

“Really? He always seemed responsible to me.”

“Yeah. When he isn’t drinking. But get him on a bender? Different story.”

The driver left, and William pounded on my hips. “No! No!”

Circle dot cars.
“That car?” He had been watching at the window with Sara. With some effort, because he struggled, I took him back there and pointed. Abstract concepts like “that” were hard for him. But he was a visual kid. He used a tablet at school and had a specialized chart with images depicting words. The Marine’s delivery car backed down the drive, and for a moment, the magnet on its door rolled into view.

“Circle dots,” Will shrieked. “Circle dot cars are
bad cars.
” The magnet had the Marine’s logo, that scuba diver holding the outsized pepperoni pizza. From the right angle, it looked nothing like a pizza at all but like a wavy, polka-dotted oval. Circle dots. Pizzas were circles. The weird oval might be a circle. Pepperoni might be dots. But so might be police lights. Though Drew’s people had gone, a parked cruiser remained on the curb, and it was illuminated in the departing vehicle’s headlights.

William was going to start screaming soon, and then he’d be gone for half an hour or more. “William,” I said, looking for, and not finding, something to calm him down. I couldn’t ask him the obvious question; it was too abstract.
What are circle dot cars? Why are they bad?
I tried to think of familiar vocabulary words. “William . . . was that car,” I pointed again to the retreating vehicle. “Did that car see you under the Dumpster?”

He cocked his head. “Cars can’t see,” he told me, bewilderment momentarily overcoming his hysteria.

Damn.
“Was that car . . . did you ride in that car?”

“The day we went to town!”

I didn’t know what to make of it. Those were the final words of his favorite book,
We had fun in there and everywhere the day we went to town.
He liked that book.
Loved
it. But he didn’t sound happy now. He sounded intense, desperate, and on the verge of a meltdown. The exhaustion was hitting him hard.

“You rode in the circle dot car the day you went to town.”

“The day we went to town, I
did not have fun.
Circle dot cars are bad
cars
!” And then he broke and threw himself into my arms, sobbing.

Later, when he was calm on the couch, I made another phone call. “Natalie,” I said, “you told me one time you felt like you still owed these kids something.”

“Y-e-ess. Noel, we’re doing baths . . .”

“This will only take a minute, I swear, and it’s the most important thing in the world.”

“If . . . yes . . . but . . .”

“Can you remember what you saw driving home from the pizza place the day William was taken?”

“He wasn’t taken, Noel. I forgot him. My memory is all screwed up.”

“Humor me.”
Humor the authorities who don’t think you forgot him.
“Assume, for the sake of argument, you do remember clearly. Think about what you saw. Do you remember anything funky in the rearview mirror when you pulled out of the pizza place?”

“Noel, I can’t . . . I don’t remember anything at
all
about the rearview mirror. All I remember is we were blocking the pizza guy getting out of the Marine, and he zoomed around us as soon as we got out of the parking lot.”

“I . . . thanks.”

“Did that help? Because I left Adam with two toddlers in the bathtub, and . . .”

“It helped. Thanks. One more thing, and I swear I’ll let you go. Did William
always
hate circles, or was it only after he . . . went missing?”

“It started about then, I guess. It’s relatively recent.”

After we’d hung up, I asked Trudy, “What do you think?”

“Could be,” said Trudy. “Or it could be the cruiser, or nothing. He might have seen a pizza car when he got picked up. We interviewed both drivers working at the time. We can go back over them. I’ll look into it more tomorrow.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“I may not have an answer.”

“Why are you and Darnell still here?” I had asked her this before. She had always been evasive. Although a slightly wider circle of people knew their real roles, Trudy and Darnell were still working largely undercover. “If the June bust took care of your job, why are you still hanging around at the center pretending to be a grad student?”

“Not everything fits yet, Noel. This isn’t the movies where there’s a perfect slot for every tab, and I don’t expect to fully understand all of it ever. But there’s still too much unaccounted for. I want those bastards we arrested to spend a long time in prison. I don’t want a single one of them to get out on a technicality.

“I’ll tell you three things. One: Gary’s organization apparently had patchy records, at best, even though everything Natasha has said leads me to think her cousin was meticulous. She believes he had a journal, and I can’t find it. It’s one thing to bust a guy for
owning
child pornography. It’s another to catch him for distributing it. I don’t think we’ve sorted out all the distributors from the owners yet, and I think Gary had lists of which were which.

“Two: we don’t know
how
the material was distributed, only how it
wasn’t.
We know it came on discs, not how those arrived at people’s homes. There’s no evidence they were mailed. We can’t find any traces of him working via the Internet. We can’t be sure, but Gary even appears to have stayed off the dark web, where it can be hard for authorities to go. He kept everything in pen and ink and worked by word of mouth. I have to think he planned to give up his clients to plead himself down if he ever got arrested. But we’ve gone through his apartment and his mother’s house, and there’s nothing. He tried to plant pictures in Stan’s home and your new building, but we can’t find anything else. The last places he was affiliated with were the university and the center, and that leaves us acres of unsearched land. His records haven’t shown up yet. He
might
have destroyed them, but I won’t accept it until I’ve looked everyplace.

“Three: He’d
made
us, Noel. He told Natasha we were federal agents. Why did he leave us alone to track him after he found out? Was he hoping to lay low and vanish? Did he figure it would be as dangerous to go after us as leave us alone? Or was he confident for some other reason? He was young to be the head of an organization, and there might have been someone above him.
Someone
still knows exactly who we are, and they want to see what we’re doing.”

“Don’t you think they’ll stop acting until you go away?”

“The body at your sanctuary suggests not. The bottom line is we’re still here because there’s still something to find.”

“But . . .”

“Noel, I can’t tell you anything else, and it’s more than you can tell your family. Let Darnell and me manage your Nana.”

“Sure. Good luck.”

“I have a job for her, if she’s up for some holiday fun.”

Dear Nora:

My mother won’t admit my children need medication to help moderate their behaviors. Please help.

Caught in the Middle

Dear Noel:

All
right
already! I’ve never missed a dose! And for the record, I’ve watched them often enough that I’m beginning to see your point.

Love
,

Mom

Trudy humored my family with a halftime highlights version of the last two days. She focused on the heroic rescue of the deputies (by the time she was finished, the center’s walk-in fridge sounded more like a deep freeze) and the grisly horror of the dead body. She didn’t pull any of those details for the children, all of whom had seen at least the headless body. She also confirmed what we already knew, that the head belonged to Hugh Marsland.

It was old enough news for the kids, and both Sara and William were exhausted enough to fall asleep on the sofa, half-eaten plates in their laps, long before she got to the part about the head anyway. I moved Sara’s pizza to the floor but carried the remains of William’s syrupy waffle back to the kitchen before it could drizzle temptation everywhere for Mama’s dogs.

When I returned, Trudy was dodging a question from Nana, who wanted to know how long it would take to solve the case. “It will take some time,” said the agent.

“I watch crime shows,” Nana continued. “And the head you and Noel described was all dried out. How did
that
happen in only one day?”

I expected a lecture similar to the one Drew had given me about not taking too much from CSI shows. Instead, Trudy said, “Hugh had Type O blood. The body was Type A. We’re still missing
that
head. And its extremities. And we don’t have Hugh Marsland’s body.” Then, before Nana could ask anything else astute, Trudy changed the topic. “Now, Ms. Cox, I need a favor from you.”

“A favor? From me?” Nana was instantly suspicious. But also interested. Trudy might have found the path to earning Nana’s silence tonight.

“Yes. You’re an innocent old woman, frail and easily broken, which makes you perfect for what I have in mind.”

“
I’ll have you know . . .
Wait. What do you have in mind?” Curiosity was winning out over skepticism. Nana put down a piece of pizza she had been preparing to devour. Her tiny frame belied a voracious appetite. Only Lance could out-eat her when it came to the Marine.