Lizzy Gardner #2_Dead Weight (4 page)

“Yes, I remember him. A big man with a couple of extra chins.”

Lizzy couldn’t con irm that since she’d only talked to the man over the phone, but neither did she care how many chins the man had.

“Detective Roth,” Lizzy continued, “stated the basics, including the dates and location you already told me about. But he also mentioned that there was some tension between your daughter and her father.”

“Did he now?”

Lizzy nodded.

Jessica remained quiet, as promised.

“Doesn’t surprise me much,” Ruth said, “but it’s absolute rot. Every detective that has ever worked on my daughter’s case will say anything at all to take the blame off of them. From the beginning they had their minds made up, certain that Frank had something to do with Carol’s disappearance.”

Ruth Fullerton looked annoyed but there was something else in her expression that Lizzy couldn’t quite put a inger on.
What was the
woman hiding? And why would she hide anything at all if she was dead
set on inding her daughter?
“Would it be okay if I spoke with Mr.

Fullerton myself?”

“You can try,” she said, hesitation in her voice. “He’s a workaholic and he’s rarely home. If Carol were here now she would say nothing has changed.”

Lizzy wondered if that was a good thing or a bad thing, but either way she let it go. “What does Mr. Fullerton do for a living?”

“He works for Supremacy Insurance. He’s a salesman.” Ruth Fullerton took a sip of tea and then set her cup on its matching saucer before pushing herself to her feet. “I have one of his business cards in the kitchen drawer. I’ll be right back.”

Lizzy made a few notes before she stood and looked around the room.

Jessica had found a photo album on the bottom shelf of the glass coffee table and was flipping through the pages.

As Lizzy crossed the room to take a look at the pictures on the mantle, she felt as if she’d been jolted back into a seventies time warp. The couch was plaid and the built-in bookcase to her left had been painted a burnt orange color. A brick ireplace was framed by green walls while the wall to her right was covered with mirrors from loor to ceiling.

If Mrs. Fullerton’s daughter had gone missing twenty-one years ago at the age of sixteen, Carol Fullerton would be thirty-seven-years old now. That is, if she was still alive. That would put Mrs. Fullerton at about sixty years old.

The eight-by-ten framed photos lined up neatly on the mantle appeared to be standard school portraits: elbows resting on a table, one hand over the other, back straight, hair combed, chin tilted just so.

Lizzy followed the photographs through Carol’s life from kindergarten through eighth grade. Cute kid. Nothing from high school. The last photograph was different than the others: black and white, taken outside, her hip leaning against an old car, a wide smile plastered across her face.

“That was Carol two days before she disappeared,” Ruth said as she returned to the living room and handed Lizzy a business card.

Lizzy tucked the card into her back pocket and wondered if that’s why Carol wore such a big smile the day the picture was taken. Did Carol know she would be gone in two days? Unfortunately, statistics pointed to another direction altogether. “Is that the car Carol was driving the day she went missing?”

“Yes, it’s a 1969 Ford Torino. She bought the car from her friend for two hundred dollars, which was a lot of money back then. At the time, we didn’t have that kind of money lying around, so Carol asked her grandparents for a loan.”

“You also mentioned her friend when we talked on the phone last week—Ellen Thomas, correct?”

“That’s right.”

“I couldn’t locate her under the name Thomas so I looked up state marriage records and ascertained that she now goes by the name of Ellen Woodson and resides in Auburn.”

Lizzy considered that to be a lucky break, considering Auburn was less than an hour away. “I did inally get in touch with Ellen on the phone, but she didn’t want to talk to me. She said too many years had passed and although she sends her sympathies for what you’re going through, she refused to say anything else.”

“I was afraid of that. You might get much of the same from my husband, but please don’t let Ellen or Frank discourage you. My daughter is out there somewhere. I know it. We were very close back then. She told me everything. She was my best friend.”

Lizzy sighed. She was hearing a lot of that lately. People believed what they wanted to believe. Sisters were sure they knew everything about one another and nobody knew one’s daughter better than a mother. .or so they all thought.

“If you two were close,” Lizzy said, “why would Carol run away?”

“I don’t know. But I can’t go on like this. My days are numbered. I have to know what happened to her.”

Jessica was still lipping through the picture album when the front door burst open and a man came through the door.

Jessica shut the photo book and slid it back onto the coffee table.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

The man had a thick head of jet black hair which was obviously a wig and looked sort of odd on an older man who was small in weight and height. The man was seventy-ive percent hair and twenty-ive percent everything else. He held a briefcase in one hand and a suit jacket in the other. Sweat trickled down the side of his neck.

Ruth straightened her spine. “Frank, I’d like you to meet Lizzy Gardner. She’s the woman who was abducted all those years ago. You know, the girl who escaped the madman and then helped the FBI find the man who killed so many young girls.”

Frank wasn’t impressed. Not only did he ignore Lizzy’s offered hand, he sneered at her. Lizzy pulled her hand back to her side and left it there.

“I told you I didn’t want any strangers in my house,” Frank said.

“We’ve been through this, Ruth. Over and over again. I’m not going back in time just so I can relive every detail with a female cop wannabe who likes carrying a shiny gun because it makes her feel like a man.”

“Frank!”

“It’s okay,” Lizzy said. She’d dealt with worse than Frank before.

Sticks and stones and so on; the man didn’t bother her. “We’ll let ourselves out.”

Jessica was already halfway out the door by the time Frank disappeared down the hallway.

“I’ll be away this weekend,” Lizzy told Ruth once Frank was out of earshot, “but I have a few ideas. I’ll call you Monday.”

“I’m sorry about Frank. He’s not usually so ornery.”

“Just take care of yourself and let me do the worrying for a while.”

Ruth squeezed Lizzy’s hand and nodded, then stood at the doorway until they drove away.

Chapter 6

San Francisco, Here I Come!

It was ive o’clock on Friday and Lizzy was driving at a snail’s pace on I-80 West heading toward San Francisco, which was better than being stuck in the stop and go traffic heading east.

The heat had gone from blistering to extreme, which meant you could fry an egg on asphalt. The air conditioner in her old Toyota, aka Old Yeller, hadn’t worked since the beginning of time.

She rolled down a window; hot air against warm sticky skin didn’t help much. She was beginning to rethink the whole summer versus winter thing. The Sacramento heat was downright sti ling. Hopefully, San Francisco, surrounded by ocean and bay, would be cool and overcast with billowing white fog.

She eyed the oil light on her console. It lickered on and off. She tended to believe everything was ine as long as the light stayed OFF

more than ON.

A ring sounded and she clicked on her earpiece and pushed a button on her iPhone. “Lizzy Gardner. How can I help you?”

“I can think of twenty ways but let’s start with where are you?”

It was Jared, her lifelong soul-mate if you believed in that sort of stuff. “I’m on my way to an exercise and eating right seminar in San Francisco. It’s supposed to be life altering.”

“Turn around and come home. I love you just the way you are. And besides I picked up fresh salmon and that sappy movie you’ve been begging me to watch with you.”

“You rented
The Notebook?
”

“I did and now my reputation at the movie rental store has been tainted.”

She smiled. “That’s sooo sweet and I’m so sorry.”

“Does that mean that you also forgot our plans to move your stuff into my place this weekend?”

No, she hadn’t forgotten, which, she realized, might very well be another reason she had taken the Diane Kramer case. She cared deeply about Jared, but things were moving a little too fast.

“Still there?”

“I’m here.”

“You need more time, is that it?”

“I think so.”

He sighed. “Take all the time you need. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Thanks.”

“So what’s with the seminar? Since when do you care how many calories are in a Rice Krispies Treat?”

“I’m being paid at an hourly rate to keep an eye on Anthony Melbourne. It’s a long story.”

“The fitness guy?”

“That’s the one.” She should have known Jared would know who Anthony Melbourne was since Jared considered raw broccoli to be a delicious snack, and he woke up when it was still dark just so he could spend an hour a day in the gym, longer when he could spare the time.

“So what’s this all about? Did his wife ask you to watch him?”

“No, he’s not married. A woman came into my of ice two days ago concerned about her sister who has been missing for more than six months. As far as the police are concerned, the missing woman was not happy with her life and therefore ran off to start over somewhere else. The woman who hired me is convinced her sister is in trouble.

The problem is she’s basing her theory on female intuition—nothing more, nothing less.”

“What do you think?”

“I told her she was wasting her money. She’s been doing her own investigation and I must say she’s thorough. I would hire her if she wasn’t already too busy raising three kids and a husband.”

“Lucky guy.”

She laughed. “I should be back home by noon on Sunday.”

“If you play your cards right,” he said, “I’ll make you dinner, followed by life-altering sex.”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

“Be careful,” he said, his tone serious.

“I miss you.”

“Miss you too.”

Chapter 7

Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater

As far as Hayley Hansen was concerned, drug dealers were all the same—scumbags of the earth. They didn’t care or even think about the harm their actions caused. They took one life at a time, destroying everything in their paths, including family members who couldn’t do anything to save their loved ones.

She walked the darkened streets, knowing she was putting herself in danger. It was way past midnight and everyone knew that nothing good happened after the witching hour. She had walked these streets many times before, though, and she wasn’t afraid.

There were shadowy movements in the alleyways as she passed by.

In a not-so-distant apartment building, she heard a man and a woman shouting at one another, back and forth, each trying to out-yell the other.

Hayley had been dragged to this area a couple of times by her mom when she was small; whenever Brian stayed away for too long this is where they went. Her mother had never brought her inside the drug dealer’s apartment. Instead, Hayley was told to wait outside by the pool.

The Greenhill Apartment building was known for its big rooms and even bigger cockroaches. She had stolen a quick look inside the apartment once and saw that that much was true.

She’d seriously hoped she would never step foot on these grounds again, but here she was in the middle of the night looking for Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater. At least that’s what he used to call himself. “
Hey
there
,” he’d say, when he crept quietly into her room. “
It’s Peter, Peter,
Pumpkin Eater and I’m hungry
.”

Parts of South Sacramento could be downright frightening. This particular street smelled like her mom’s house after a party: like urine, ashtrays, and trash. Every building on the street had at least a few windows boarded up with plywood. Graf iti, not the cool artistic kind, covered eighty percent of the warped, weather-beaten fencing around the apartment building. The grass, if you could call it that, looked as if it had never been touched by the blades of a lawn mower.

Trash floated in the pool, mostly around the edges.

The funny thing was. .as much as she despised Peter, he was a mere squid in a shark-infested sea. Squid or not, he deserved to rot in hell.

Peter just happened to be the irst one on her list: Peter, Randy, and Brian. After those three were taken care of, maybe she could breathe easier and sleep through the night again. Maybe her mom could get her life back in order.

The irst apartment on the ground loor had curtains that had been pushed open. Inside, an old lady sat in her big cushiony chair and watched television, her face inches from the screen.

“Hey baby,” came a voice from the shadowy depths of a tall hedge of poisonous oleander.

She ignored the voice and kept on walking. The apartment she was looking for was at the far end of the complex. Although Lizzy’s sister had been nice enough to buy her a new pair of jeans and a few shirts, Hayley had opted to wear the out it her mother had given her a few years ago, back when Mom had been trying so hard to get sober. Her mom had been drug free for a few months and during that time they had gone shopping.

Best day of Hayley’s life. Not because her mom bought her an out it, but because they had never done anything like that before. The two of them spent the entire day window shopping and then they ate Chinese food at the food court. Mother and daughter—just out shopping for the day—an honest to goodness fairy tale come true.

Neither of them particularly loved sweets, but they stopped at the candy store that day too. Twenty minutes later they exited the sweet shop with a bag of sour gummy worms and black licorice shaped like tarantulas. They had laughed about that for days.