Better Read Than Dead (16 page)

“I’d be happy to. Where’s the key?”

“Under the flowerpot on the back porch. You remember the alarm code?”

“Is that a hint that your birthday is a mere seven months away?”

Dutch chuckled. “Yeah, I’m subtle like that. Say, how’d your party go the other night?”

I suddenly remembered the weekend like a splash of cold water, and was so thankful that I could finally talk to someone about it that my eyes welled up with tears. “I am so glad you asked, Dutch, because there’s something I have to tell you. . . .”

“Shoot,” he said in a voice that said he could handle it.

“Well, the thing is, the reception was actually downtown, and when Kendal and I arrived we had no idea who the bride’s family really was, and as it turned out—”

“Dutch? Dutch, are you in here?” I heard a female voice say in the background of the phone call.

“Yeah, I’m on the phone,” Dutch said, pulling his voice away from the receiver.

“Oh? Okay, well, we still have some things to go over yet, so can you please wrap it up?”

“I’ll be there in a minute, Joe.”

“Kinda late for you two to be having a meeting, don’t you think?” I snapped, suddenly overcome by a certain green-eyed monster.

“I’m on assignment. There are no time frames to follow. It’s what we do,” he answered defensively.

“I see. How convenient,” I said tersely. My eyes had become slits, my foot had begun to snap back and forth and my fingers were drumming in irritation against the arm of the chair.

“Abby,
please
don’t start this again,” Dutch said, exasperation in his voice, which only fueled my anger.

“Start?
Start?!
I didn’t
start
this the last time! Your overly amorous partner started this, pal! So don’t pin this on me!”

“I’m not trying to pin this on you,” Dutch said, his voice tensing further. “I’m just trying to . . . Oh, for Christ’s sake! Why the hell are we even
having
this conversation?”

“You don’t want to converse? Fine, let’s not converse!” I said, and slammed down the receiver.

I gathered up Eggy, who had slept through my entire tirade, and turned off the television and the living room lights. I marched up the stairs and into my bitter-cold bedroom, where I quickly got undressed and piled on a few extra blankets. I hurried into bed and wrapped myself around Eggy as I struggled to relax my breathing. It was hard, but around one a.m. exhaustion finally won out and I drifted off to a fitful sleep.

 

I was cold.

I remember that the most. I was really, really cold . . . and severely underdressed. I was standing in a large parking lot, in a T-shirt and shorts, hugging myself with my arms, and trying to remember how I got there. “Hello?” I called into the darkness. No one answered. I looked around the dimly lit parking lot. There were a few cars scattered about, but I couldn’t see a sign of anyone anywhere. I turned in a circle, surveying the scene, and noticed at the edge of the lot was a large store. I decided to go there and see if I could find help. I walked on the cold pavement, shivering and hearing my teeth rattle, when a man came out of the darkness and began walking toward me. I felt relief as I recognized the blue jacket and red-white-and-blue patch sewn onto the upper right shoulder of his jacket. He was a mailman. I couldn’t see his face, but as I watched him approach I noticed that he reached into his mailbag and extracted a mask, which he then slipped over his head. This alarmed me for reasons I couldn’t understand, and I hesitated in my progress toward him, pausing for a moment as he neared me. Something flickered on the edge of my thoughts, and I knew I shouldn’t be walking to him. I needed to run away, but I couldn’t remember why.

The mailman grew closer, walking intently straight for me now. He was only a few yards away, in fact, when he reached into his mailbag once again and came up with a tire iron. Now I remembered why I was afraid, and why I needed to run. I turned to bolt but my feet were stuck. I couldn’t get them to move. I felt drugged, sluggish and like I couldn’t quite open my eyes all the way. I tried to scream, seeing how close he was to me, but no sound would come out.

The postman was ten feet away now. Nine. Eight. Seven . . . With all of my might I pulled up with my right leg and kicked forward, jumping into motion and straight out of bed onto my hardwood floor. My eyes snapped open, and my breathing came in great, frantic breaths. “It was a dream,” I said into the darkness. “It was just a dream.”

After a moment I collected myself and got up from the floor. I stood on shaky legs and grabbed my flannel robe from the hook by the door; then I walked out of my bedroom and down the stairs, through the living room, which was significantly warmer than upstairs, and into the kitchen, where I flipped on the light, squinting until my eyes adjusted, and I sat down at the kitchen table to collect myself.

I sat there with my head in my hands, thinking about the dream and how terrified I’d been, while trying to rationalize that my subconscious was just trying to work through some of the inputs that I’d picked up during the day. There was something different, however, that I couldn’t quite shake. Something I needed to pay attention to.

I got up and fished through the cupboards for a minute, reaching for the instant hot chocolate I always keep on hand and a large coffee mug. I filled the mug with water and set it in the microwave for a minute, waiting for the water to heat.

Next I grabbed a notepad and a pen off the counter and set those down at my place at the table, then, when the timer dinged, I got the mug from the microwave and mixed in the hot chocolate. I walked back to the table and took a seat, staring blankly ahead, trying to ponder things for a moment. Obviously the dream was about the rapist, and I felt that there were several clues within the nightmare that I needed to make note of.

After a few warm sips of hot cocoa I picked up the pen and began to write down everything I remembered from the dream: the dark parking lot, the cars, the postman, the ski mask and the tire iron. After I finished I looked at my notes, my intuition buzzing.

Eggy came down while I was staring at the words I’d tossed onto the page, and I reached down to pick him up. He was sleepy, so I folded him into my lap and spread the sides of my robe around him.

I looked back at my notes again and asked myself,
What does the mailman represent?
Mail could be news, or messages, or information. Because it came from the mailman it probably meant that it came from a distance. I wondered if Milo had had any luck with the Vegas PD, remembering that I’d connected the rapist to Vegas.

For some reason, though, that didn’t feel like it fit. There was something more significant about the postman that I wasn’t connecting. There had been no mail in the mailbag, just the mask and the tire iron. So what did the postman represent?

Then it hit me, and I sucked in a breath. I got up and carried Eggy to the living room, where I laid him gently on the couch, then darted to my purse. It took a moment, but I found the card I was looking for and quickly dialed the number. After the tone I punched in my home number and added a 911, then hung up and paced the floor.

Within two minutes my phone was ringing and a groggy voice answered my anxious greeting with, “Abby? What’s up?”

“Thank you so much for calling me back, and I’m sorry to get you up at”—I hesitated as I looked up at the clock on the wall—“uh . . . wow, four in the morning, but I have to ask you something. Does Jeffrey Zimmer work for the post office?”

“What?”

“Jeff Zimmer, your suspect in the rape case!” I was practically shouting into the phone with excitement. “Does he work for the post office?”

There was a slight hesitation as Milo seemed to struggle with my question; then he said, “No. He’s a computer tech at Verizon.”

I knew it. “He’s not your rapist,” I said firmly.

“Do you want to tell me what this is about?”

“Okay, you’re going to think I’m nuts, but I had a dream tonight, and in it I was in this big parking lot and I was cold and lost and the only person in the lot was a postman, but I couldn’t see his face, and he reached into his mailbag and pulled out a ski mask and a tire iron and put them on!” I was so excited I was dancing on the balls of my feet.

“You’re kidding me, right?” Milo said in a tone that let me know he wasn’t amused.

I was irritated that he didn’t get where I was going, so I said, “Well, Milo,
funny
as that story is, I’m actually
not
kidding you. So as I was saying—”

“Abby?” Milo interrupted.

“What?” I said, getting impatient.

“Call me in three hours,” he said, and hung up the phone.

“Hello?” I said several times into the receiver, not believing he had actually disconnected.

With a scowl I hung up my end and paced back and forth in the room like a caged animal. I was totally onto something here, and it frustrated the crap out of me that Milo was refusing to listen. I thought about calling him again just to tell him what he could do with his “Call me in three hours” baloney, but decided against it.

Instead I went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door, peering inside with interest. I’d gone shopping on my lunch break, looking around the grocery store at every suspicious-looking person, ready to fire my antennae at anyone who seemed to be lurking in the shadows. Mostly the store was filled with old men and frayed mothers toting screaming children in their shopping carts—not exactly a suspicious group of characters.

Still, my fridge was full, so I set about making a huge omelet, with a side of home fries.

I’m not a good cook, but I know my way around breakfast. Eggy came loping tiredly into the kitchen the moment he heard the crack of the first egg, so I made him a miniomelet too.

He’s less into table manners than I am, and he scarfed his meal down in about two gulps. I ate mine in a dainty three.

By the time I’d washed the dishes and put the ingredients away it was only five a.m. Two more hours to go.

I sighed and trotted into the living room again, wired for no apparent reason. I picked up Eggy, who had claimed my favorite chair, and set him in my lap as I plopped down to watch infomercials.

At exactly six fifty-nine I paged Milo again. I waited five impatient minutes before sending another page to his cell phone. Then another five minutes after that, then every minute for the next ten minutes until finally at seven-twenty, just as I was listening to the instructions for leaving a page, my call waiting beeped. Flashing over, I answered, “Hello?”

“What the
hell
has gotten into you?” Milo shouted into the phone.

“You wouldn’t return my call!” I shouted back.

“Then
why
did you ask me to call you at seven a.m.?” I snapped.

There was a very long, irritated sigh on the other end of the phone, then, “Okay, you win. What’s this all about?”

Finally I had his attention! “Listen, I don’t always get prophetic information in dreams, but I just have to tell you about this one, okay? There’s definitely a clue in it, and I just know it’s important. I think the rapist is connected to the post office somehow. I mean, I remember distinctly that the villain in my dream was a mailman, and mailmen usually know all sorts of important information about the people on their routes. They know their names, how many people live in the household, what kinds of hours they keep, and what their habits are. I think this guy might be a postal worker or a postal carrier.”

“You’re sure it wasn’t just a nightmare?”

“Yes! I’m sure. My guides are trying to tell me there’s a clue at the post office. I’m sure of it.”

“So what do you want me to do?”

“Well,” I said, growing impatient again, “how about checking to see if the three women who have been raped so far were on the same postal route? I also know that there’s usually a person who floats between several routes covering for the main carrier’s day off, so you might want to check that out too.”

“Anything else?” Milo asked, still not convinced.

“Yes, and this is nonnegotiable,” I said, my voice taking on a flinty tone.

“Here we go,” Milo said, more to himself than to me.

“You absolutely
must
warn the public before this Thursday. Your guy didn’t do it, Milo, and if you don’t warn women then it’s going to happen again.”

“We’ve already got a contingency plan for Thursday. I’ve got all the local food markets covered by plainclothed police. There’s no way this guy’s going to attack another woman this week.”

Left side, heavy feeling.
“Milo,
please,
don’t be a fool. If by some chance another woman gets raped and it comes out that you didn’t warn people, it’s going to be your ass—”

“I’m well aware of the possible fallout, but there are also consequences for starting a public panic. Think about the owners of these grocery stores, what kind of financial loss this could bring to them. Not to mention the tidal wave of overzealous tipsters who will flood our severely understaffed unit with a lot of false leads. I’m confident we have the right guy in custody—”

“Milo, you need to listen to reason!” I shouted, growing more and more anxious.

“Will you let me finish?” Milo barked. When I was silent he continued, “As I was saying, I’m confident we have the right man in custody, but
because
I believe in you I will follow up on this postal carrier connection, and contact the media about a news story where we think we have the right man in custody, but that women should think twice about any late-night shopping they need to run.”

I sighed in relief and said, “Thank you.”

“Now, may I please go back to getting ready for work?”