Me, Myself and Why? (14 page)

HEY here’s Pillsbury and he looks a little scared

Looks a little scared

Syrup in your hair!

And the wheels on the bus go round and

WHOOPS almost missed the turn

Hey Pillsbury looks good kinda cute kinda scared

Kinda not scared

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

ANOTHER TURN WHOOOOOOOO

That’s it. I want him.

(He definitely. Wants. Me.)

Put your hand there, Pillsbury

Don’t

Be

Scared!

We’re getting on the highway and the wheels go round

Wheels go round

(Up and down, that’s right)

And the cars whoosh by, or is that us?

Oh stop yelling, Pillsbury, we didn’t even hit that truck and besides, you were doing so good before you took your hand away

PUT YOUR HAND BACK BETWEEN MY LEGS, YOU FUCKING MAN

The wheels go

SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECH

We’re stopped. Why

Did we stop?

WHOOSH the cars go past on the left,

On the right.

Honk honk!

Honk back!

HONK HONK!

This is boring. He’s just shouting at me. If he won’t fuck me, and my sister likes him so much

Chapter Thirty-eight

“Are you nuts?”

I shook my head, trying to figure out where I—

WhaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaah

“Cripes, we’re in the middle of the highway!”

“No shit! Drive!”

I gunned the engine. The SUV leapt forward.

The vehicle didn’t do less than sixty the entire way home, counting side roads. I was scared, and bewildered, and furious, and worst of all the hem of my dress was around my waist and the front of my underwear had been pulled aside. No doubt courtesy of my sister . . . and Patrick!

“Did you get all the action you wanted?” I hissed, screeching to a halt in front of my place.

“Cadence, I—”

“Don’t even answer. What even happened to those guys in the parking lot? Did my sister kill them and then jump your bones? Is that what you were after—an exciting time with the freak show? Is that all I am to you?”

“Of course not—”

“I said
don’t answer
.” Tears were threatening my cheeks, and I wiped my nose with the hem of my dress—what the frick, it was up far enough anyway. “It’s not fair. They think I’m weak. You think I’m weak. So I do all the investigation and all the paperwork and when it comes time to do something fun like break a nose or impress some guy, my sisters get to come out and then they go too far and by the time I’m back, I’m in my boss’s office or stopped dead in the middle of frayber-hoppin’ Interstate 94. Then I have to solve everything again.
It’s not fair!
”

I leapt over the gearshift and landed on his crotch. He groaned, and I reached down to press him with my fist. My other hand clawed at his neck as I kissed him roughly on the mouth. Before he had a chance to enjoy any of it, I took my fist off his crotch, reared back, and slugged him across the jaw.

Wow! He’s unconscious!

I was heaving with adrenaline, biting my tongue with unfulfilled desire . . . and quite impressed with how much swing radius the passenger compartment of a Lexus SUV afforded an assailant straddling her adversary.

So
that’s
what it feels like! No wonder my sisters keep this all to themselves!

Goose bumps rising, I opened the passenger door, made sure the ignition key was safely in his pocket, locked the doors, and closed him inside. Then I walked up the path to my door, wondering if that vibrator Adrienne had left was still anywhere around inside.

Chapter Thirty-nine

The next morning, I woke up and looked out the bedroom window. Patrick and the SUV had left (presumably together), so my mind turned right away to work. I had one assignment, and I didn’t even need to go into the office to carry it out.

Tracy Carr, our precious surviving victim of the ThreeFer Killer, was propped up in her bed at St. Olaf’s Metropolitan Hospital, the sheets and blankets pulled all the way to her chin. She was clutching the bedclothes so tightly that all her knuckles were white. All the shades were drawn, but every light was blazing. Yerrgh, fluorescent light. Why not just set a crow free to gouge out your eyeballs? It’ll feel the same, and have the same end effect.

“Well, hi there!”

“Hi, Agent Jones.”

“You mind . . . ?” I gestured to the empty chair on the left side of the bed.

“No,” she said, which I figured was a rather large lie. It was a phenomenon I’d seen before. Female victims, no matter how upset or scared or nervous or tired, inevitably chose courtesy over their own wants, even their own needs. She didn’t want me to sit down. She didn’t want me to be in the same building.

And who could blame her?
I
didn’t want to be in the same building, either. If Shiro had been there, she’d have yaked ad nauseam about the weakness of the modern woman, yak-yak, and if Adrienne

(please God not again anytime soon, cut me some slack, okay, God?)

but I just felt sorry for someone who’d let herself be unhappy to avoid the appearance of rudeness.

“I hear they’re kicking you loose after lunch.”

She nodded. They’d kept her overnight for observation, standard op per St. Olaf’s Hospital. I was to try another interrogation, go away, come back to drive her to the safe house on Lake Street, try to get even more info, then go away and discover a clue and solve the case. Sure. And after that I’d find a cure for AIDS, flip the switch in the ancient temple that kept men thinking like pigs, and clean out my fridge.

And I’d have to do all that while keeping things nice and casual, like we were discussing the last movie we’d seen as opposed to, you know, the whole “congrats on escaping the clutches of a madman, now tell me everything no matter how embarrassing or personal” thing.

“D’you want something? A pop? Crackers? Another pillow?” An anti-amnesia machine? The ability to reverse time? Washable cashmere?

Tracy shook her head. Her eyes were so big I could see the whites all the way around her pupils. She looked like a horse getting ready to flee the glue factory.

“Listen,” I said, sitting down. My fingers felt sticky and I peered at them, puzzled—then realized I still had a bit of maple syrup on the first two fingers on both hands. Damn it! I thought I’d washed it all off, but the stuff never leaves your skin.

I sat on my fingers and gave her my brightest nothing-wrong-here smile. All praise to the wanting-to-please stage of assault, because she was sitting there pretending there was nothing wrong with a klutzy federal agent who smelled like syrup. Poor Tracy Carr! “So, I wanted to talk about yesterday some more.”

“I assumed you were here to trade recipes for fudge.” She deadpanned the comment, but it perked me up all the same. She shows some spunk! Less than twenty-four hours after an ordeal which would leave most people gibbering and drooling in a rubber room! Excellent. If I weren’t sitting on my sticky hands, I’d be applauding.

“Fudge, huh? Maybe later. Anyway, the best way for us to lock him—it’s a him, right?—in a tiny windowless concrete block for the next four decades—a block without cable or TiVo, I might add—with awful, awful food—and really
terrible
ambience—”

This earned me a tiny smile, more like an involuntary twitch of the lips.

“—well, then we need to talk about yesterday some more.” I leveled my best serious look at her, not unlike the look I’d leveled at Patrick the previous night after his honkfest.

“Okay.”

Chapter Forty

So we ran through the deep dark details again, starting with the easy stuff. Poor victims! They had to tell the same story to at least twenty different people. Unfortunately, we currently didn’t have a better way to do it at that time.

Her name, Tracy Carr. Address: she was renting a furnished hotel room at the Pyrenees in Bloomington, pending the sale of her house back in North Dakota—she’d been in the Twin Cities for nine months. This was common; as lovely as North Dakota was, lots of residents came southeast for job opportunities, late-night social life, or even just a bit more excitement.

She certainly found that last one, I thought ruefully.

She had turned thirty-three in March (“Now I have lived as long as Christ,” which, sadly, was not the weirdest thing a survivor ever said to me); she had been born in, of all places, Ankara, Turkey, of an American mother; she had dual citizenship. Her English was precise, almost clipped. She had never known her father. Her mother died when she was a teenager.

My pen flew as I took notes, my writing so horrible that only Shiro and Michaela could have read it. Speed before accuracy! Wait. That was entirely incorrect. Never mind.

Tracy was a freelance accountant who worked from her hotel room. Not a big family; she had two siblings but didn’t have much interest in contacting them. (One was not too far away in South Dakota, but the other was in the Southwest—“maybe Arizona,” she said wistfully. Given our winters up here, I couldn’t blame her.) No, she didn’t want me to call anyone for her—the doctors and nurses had already asked. No cousins, aunts, grandparents, pets, dependents, library cards.

She shopped for food occasionally (I made a mental note to have people check out the places she spent money most often; memo to me: pull her credit card receipts) but mostly ordered takeout.

No, she had never seen him before. In fact, in her rush to get out of the dining room, she’d gotten little more than a glance at him: tall, very tall. Slope-shouldered. “Like a farmer,” she added. “If he’d been wearing overalls, he would have looked exactly like that—like someone who worked the earth. But he had on jeans and a denim shirt. Short-sleeved.”

Lank hair the color of mud; no idea of the eye color. Oh, swell. With such a precise and detailed description, we’d probably have him locked up by lunchtime.

She had called 911 on her cell, from the pantry, while listening to the screams. And the murders.

“Good thing you had it charged,” I commented. Memo to me: pull all of her phone records. Whom she called, what they said—the works. And get a transcript of the 911 call if George didn’t have it sitting on my desk already.

“Yes.”

Chances were a few other agents were doing all these tasks and more, but I’d be wise to follow up. Clues often came from even the most obvious sources, no matter how often the bad guy watched
Law & Order, CSI,
and
The Martha Stewart Show.

Something was niggling at the base of my spinal cord, and the more I tried to ignore it, the more weirded out I got. It was Tracy. Something about her—her—what? Speech? Facial expressions?

No, it went deeper than that. Something beyond being a victim, even. Something sad, something that had lasted a long time, maybe even something from her youth. I didn’t know what to do with that; but I’d been doing this job too long to blow off any hunch, no matter how unlikely or unpleasant or just plain silly.

“No,” she replied to my last question, which, fortunately, I hadn’t yet forgotten. Not a muscle moved except those controlling her mouth. “I never go to a gym. It’s too hard.”

“Yeah, I have trouble finding time to work out, too,” I replied, only half listening. It was a partial truth—Shiro got more than enough exercise for all three of us—and I was still distracted.

Tracy had just given me a big clue and she didn’t realize what it was. Neither did I. What was it about? “Plus,” I continued, not having any idea what was going to come out of my mouth next, “I hate getting my sweat all over the treadmill. Who wants to mop up her own sweat? Never mind anyone else’s. Makes me feel like I’m trapped in the hold of a ship.”