Yours, Mine, and Ours (11 page)

“Don’t talk about janitors,” I said sharply. “Um, custodial engineers.”

Emma Jan’s eyes widened. “Oh, shit! The ThreeFer Killer! One of them worked here.”

“Cadence is right,” George said, and I nearly reeled back and fell out of my chair. “Let’s not talk about it.” He rubbed his eyes. “It’s too early for this shit.”

“It’s past ten in the morning.”

“Don’t remind me.”

I wasn’t surprised George didn’t want to discuss it. We’d had an awful time tracking down the ThreeFer Killer, because it wasn’t one killer; it was three. Murderous triplets, not two words that usually go together. One of them, I was sorry to see then and sorry to say now, worked here, right here at BOFFO, as a custodial engineer.

He’s dead now. So’s his sister. The third one, the remaining triplet … well. The third one wasn’t. Probably.

Anyway, one of their many atrocities was kidnapping George, trussing him up like a roast ready for the slow cooker, and bundling him into a closet for hours and hours and hours and hours.

Even now, months later, I wasn’t sure if George had gotten mega-pissed because of the trussing/stuffing thing, or because the ThreeFer Killers had framed him, or because he deliberately pooped in his pants to provide us with a clue to his whereabouts, and no one noticed. (We can be a pretty self-absorbed bunch. Also, there were all sorts of weird smells on the floor, all the time, so what was one more?)

“What’s this she’s talking about?” Emma Jan asked, tapping the memo. She was dressed in a bark-colored jacket and pants, with a crimson blouse and, of course, her gigantic purse was at her side. If I’d tried to pull off those colors I would have looked like a bleeding tree. She looked like the suit had been designed for her, and only her. “This
Star Tribune
thing?”

“Yeah, while you bimbos were taking your sweet time getting here—thanks for nothing by the way…”

“You beat us by not quite three minutes,” I said.

“Shut up. What, d’you keep a stopwatch on your person at all times?”

“Well, if you must know, after you kept making the same comments about you always being super-early and me always being super-late, I—”

“Shut up! Anyway, I pulled the data she was talking about. Behrman told Shiro and me he’d been to the movie theater in Apple Valley—that great big place by Target and Best Buy?”

I nodded. It was big and shiny clean, and they sold frozen Coke slushies, which I just loved. (If I couldn’t have a Frappuccino, an ice-cold Coke would do, and a
frozen
Coke would be even better.)

They had a big gorgeous lobby with lots of tables and chairs spread around, so you could relax and socialize before or after the movie, and there was a Red Robin across the street. It was a good place to meet up with friends, see a flick, grab a burger, go back into the theater for frozen Coke number four … like that.

There was also a sizable video arcade if your kids wanted to kill time before the movie. Or if, um, you really, really liked playing
Magicka
even though you were in your twenties and childless, and had an alternate personality who felt as strongly about
God of War
, and another one who felt like that about
Rage.

Best of all, the theater had lots of screens—so there was almost always a movie playing that was worth seeing—and ran lots of previews. I loved previews. If they had a two-hour movie that was just previews, I’d go. Twice.

“Right.” George carefully dug through a pile of folders—stacked higher than his head when he was seated—until he found the autopsy paperwork.

Here’s a sad thing I wish I never had to know: there are doctors who specialize in pathology; for whatever reason they are more comfortable having dead patients instead of live ones. And within that group they specialize further. There are coroners who specialize in performing autopsies on children.

So that’s what they do. They cut up dead kids. All day long.

See what I mean? Don’t you wish you could un-know that?

“Okay.” George was flipping through the report. “The coroner was able to put the TOD somewhere between six
P.M.
and ten, right? And this fucko, he’s not keeping them alive for long—the histochemistry proves that.”

“Yeah, but—” Emma Jan began.

George was too intent on making his point, and cut her off (she should get used to that right away). “Yeah, this fucko is beating them to death but he’s not taking, say, three days to do it, right? They’re not walled up somewhere getting poked and paper-cut and stuffed with, I dunno, suet and cranberries, right?”

“Uh…”

I was right there with Emma Jan. Did George think teenage boys should be on the lookout for suet salesmen? Or cranberry bogs? And if so, shouldn’t we get BOLO paperwork started? What
was
suet, any—

“What’s suet?”

I flashed her a grateful look.

“Duh, you need it to make mincemeat pie. It’s fat. S’matter with you?”

Emma glanced at me and I could, for those few seconds, read her mind:
What’s the matter with
me
?

“Can you two focus, please, pretty please? Forget about the fucking suet. Who cares about the fucking suet? Why are we talking about suet?”

Well. Now that he’d brought it up,
I
cared. How often could you fight crime and discuss the merits of suet in the same morning? I loved my job. Except when I hated my job.

“My point is, if Behrman can’t tell us he was home jerking off to a rerun of
Sons of Anarchy
, then—”

I couldn’t help it. I knew he hated interruptions when he was on a roll, but I had to know. “Why would he be masturbating to…”

I trailed off as George gaped at me. His expression was wondering, yet filled with contempt for whatever poor idiot loser didn’t know all about
Sons of Malarky
, or whatever the thing was called.

I don’t mean to sound like a snob, but I didn’t watch much television. Why would I? Why would I get hooked on a show when any second one of my sisters can show up, kidnap my body, and get me tossed into a holding cell? There’s not a big enough DVR in the world to make that fret disappear.

“Are you fucking kidding me, Cadence? Who
wouldn’t
he jerk off to? Have you seen the show?”

“Uh—”

“Yeah, don’t fucking tell me, you don’t have time to watch much TV, spare me. I’ve got three words: Katey Fucking Sagal, okay? Here’s three more: Kim Fucking Coates.”

“I’m sure Kim is very pretty, but maybe we should get back to—”

“Kim’s not pretty, Kim’s a guy, you TV-free dumbshit.”

“Wait. Are you bi, then?” Emma Jan asked. Then, to me: “Is he gay? I didn’t think he was. I don’t care,” she was quick to assure us, “it’s just that I’m finding this kind of confusing.”

I shook my head. “Oh, George isn’t gay. I don’t think. I’m probably the wrong person to ask. I don’t think he’s entirely straight, though, either.”

“If you two harpies don’t stop talking about me like I’m not sitting here hearing every harpy word from your harpy beaks…”

“Is anyone truly entirely straight, though?”

“Good point,” I admitted. “In George’s case, most of us here think he’s that thing where he’s sexually attracted to anything.”

“What, anything?”

“Anything.”

“I mean it, harpies! You’re inches away from my permanent shit list!”

I shrugged. “Men. Women. Large domesticated farm animals. Ice cubes. It’s … it’s something like ambisexual. Wait. I know this. Intersexual?”

Don’t you hate it when you can practically
feel
the word in your brain, but can’t think what it is? I knew this, too … I’d just read it, or Shiro read it … Argh! It was right on the tip—

chapter twenty-nine

Pansexual.

chapter thirty

“Ah-haaaaa!” I screamed
into Emma Jan’s shocked face. “I
did
know! Pansexual. I knew that. I knew I knew that. It’s pansexual; the word is pansexual.”

It was odd, though. The thing that had just happened. When Shiro came out, she usually stayed for a bit. But not this time.

This time she remembered a word I couldn’t, a word I didn’t know because
she
was the one who read the government study. So she surfaced long enough to give me the word, then sank back into my subconscious or psyche or what-have-you, leaving me in control of the body so we could finish the briefing.

It was helpful. The thing my sister did for me helped matters, it improved my quality of life. Not in an obvious way, like a physical fight where she saved me from being mutilated in a dozen horrible ways. This was subtle, it was something that hardly ever happened. It was something I … liked?

My doctor was pushing for reintegration, but all three of us were resistant. They didn’t want to disappear, and I didn’t want to kill them. My doctor kept telling me/us it wouldn’t be like that, that I’d/we’d all live on through the new personality, the fourth, the one who was whole, the one no one had seen for decades. The person I had been until the day my mother killed my father.

Maybe … maybe it would be like that. Helpful and not bewildering and scary. Maybe being one instead of three really was the best thing for all of us.

I didn’t know. I didn’t. And because I was a coward, I didn’t want to find out.

“If you two are done playing Guess What George Is, can we please pretty please get back to the string of vicious murders we’ve decided, for funsies, should stop? Cripes, I thought
I
was self-involved.”

He had a point. When a sociopath is knocking you for being too self-involved, it was time to reexamine your life.

When we had no comment, he added, “Yes? Everybody back on board? Peachy.
Anyway
.” He glared at both of us, obviously silently daring we, the TV-less dumbshits, to interrupt once more. “Anyway. My point is, if Behrman can’t account for his whereabouts that evening, he’s cooked, right? So he tells us he’s at the movies to see … what the fuck was it?”

“
Fast and Furious VI: Even Faster
,” Emma Jan read, checking her own paperwork.

“God, God, God.” He shook his head and smoothed his tie (a run-over poodle with a black background). “Don’t even get me started on goddamned movie franchises.
Fast and Furious
did so well, there’s an
F&F
Six? A
six
? When they only made one
Independence Day
? Jesus. Unbelievable. The things you find out about when you can’t get your hands on a bomb.

“Anyway, the theater this movie was playing in, the one Behrman says he saw? They had a major projection malfunction during the last matinee that day. They couldn’t fix it, so they refunded everyone in the theater their money—which morons who’d go see that piece of shit did
not
deserve—and they didn’t even sell tickets to the show Behrman says he went to. He should have told his story that way, but he didn’t. He didn’t because he wasn’t even there. Get it?”

“I get that he picked the wrong alibi, and has bad taste in movies, but—”

“Think about it. It’s nothing the movie theater would have, say, told a reporter. They focused on fixing it and getting back to charging admission for their shitty movie. So yeah, Behrman picked the wrong alibi, but even better, he has no idea that we know what a fucking liar he is.
That’s
our angle. That’s what we hit him with.”

“Nice,” I said, and I meant it. Shiro had been getting A’s on her homework since before we were in training bras. Trust her to root this out and serve it up, practically on a dessert plate. And George had that tally-ho-the-fox look in his eyes. “Oh, wow, that’s very, very nice.”

“So!” Emma Jan was on her feet. “Let’s go see him. And on the way, do you want to hear about Saint Antipas, who was roasted to death in—”

“No thanks.”

chapter thirty-one

“I don’t want
to criticize,” I began.

“Don’t listen to her,” George told Emma Jan. “It’s a trick. Whenever she says she doesn’t want to criticize, or make waves, or question judgment, she starts with
that
.”

“Thanks for the warning.”

“It’s just … you know that saying about the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result?”

“Know it? It’s the damn motto for BOFFO. People have cross-stitched it on samplers.”

“I’m bringing it up because we’re on our way back to Heron Estates. And we’re going into the same trailer. The one with the gigantic mirror. And Emma Jan is with us.”