Malus Domestica (32 page)

“He had red hair.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah, he was real skinny, had a skinny throat and skinny arms, but he was—he was
sinewy,
you know? The strong kind of skinny. Big hands.” Joel traced the edge of his jawbone. “Had a real sharp jaw. Nose like a beak, big nostrils. Itty-bitty beady eyes, dark eyes.”

Bowker wrote for a long time, pausing every so often.

“Is there anything you can tell me about where this man was holding you?” He fidgeted, rubbing his nose, scratching his cheek. “Do you remember any details about where you were detained?”

“Yeah. Yeah… there was a lot of signs and pictures and stuff leanin against the walls. Like, advertisin signage. Stuff about Firewater sarsaparilla, a big picture of the Loch Ness—no, I mean, the Creature from the Black Lagoon. I think there was something with a clown. I saw something about Wonderland. Welcome to Wonderland?”

“Weaver’s Wonderland?”

“That’s it.”

Bowker sighed in a way that seemed like dejection to Robin. Or perhaps disappointment. “That sounds like the old fairgrounds out in the woods off the highway.” The pen tapped the clipboard. Reaching up to the radio on his shoulder, he keyed the mike. “Hey, Mike. This is Eric. Can I get a ten-twenty?” They all sat staring at each other expectantly for an awkward moment.

“I just got done with lunch and now me and Opie are uptown goin south down Hickman,” said a static-chewed voice. “Ten-eight.”

“I want you to do me a favor.” Bowker examined the clipboard. “We ain’t got a key to the gate out there at the fairgrounds, do we?”

“…Naaah…the city probably does, somewhere, God knows where,” said the radio. “But that don’t stop me from getting out of my cruiser and walking around it. What’s goin on?”

“I’m taking a statement from a fella that says he escaped from involuntary confinement in that location. He was put there by someone he describes as a ‘serial killer’.” Bowker coughed into his fist and keyed his mike again. “I want you to head up there and see if you can find anything shady.”

“Ten-four.”

Bowker sat there, breathing through his teeth and staring at the clipboard. Robin could almost hear his gears grinding. “Okay,” he said, rising up out of his seat and adjusting his patrol belt. “I’m gonna go get this keyed into the system. I’ll be right back.”

As soon as he left, Joel leaned over to Robin and Kenway. “These redneck-ass small-town cowboys…” he growled under his breath.

Robin hugged herself. The break room was cold, it seemed, colder than the actual October day outside.
Must be the slab floor,
she thought. “He’s going to send those two cops out there by themselves? To look for a serial killer?” She smirked. “Isn’t this the part of the movie where the hapless cop wanders into the killer’s lair and gets offed?”

“He prolly don’t even believe there
is
a killer. He prolly still just thinks it was a—” Joel made air-quotes with his fingers, “—sex game.”

The conversation dwindled into silence, and Robin finished off the last of her coffee, putting the empty cup into a trash can that was already full of garbage. Digging some quarters out of her pocket, she went to the snack machine and browsed the junk food inside.

“How long does it take?” asked Joel.

“You know these Barney Fife guys,” said Kenway, poking at the table with his index fingers. “Hunt and peck typists.”

Bowker stepped into the break room and Kenway looked up from his derpy impersonation of the man’s keyboarding skills, casually leaning back and folding his arms, nothing to see here.

The officer paused awkwardly, then sat down and shuffled a stack of papers against the table.

“Okay.” He folded his arms and leaned on his elbows, speaking confidentially. “I’ve got the report filed. You’re on the books.” He twiddled the pen between his forefingers again. “How come it took you so long to come down here and talk to somebody?”

“I don’t know.” Joel sat back and anxiously picked at his fingernails. “I guess I was so freaked out and glad to be away from it that goin to the cops didn’t really occur to me.” Of course, he glossed over the necessity of getting Wayne back to his father at the hospital, the explanation of which would have thrown a real wrench into the situation.

“Fair enough.”

“Besides.” Joel pointed at his face. “I’m black
and
gay. Goin to the cops ain’t gon’ be my first instinct.”

Bowker gave it some thought and tapped the pen on the table. “Mr. Ellis, we here don’t discriminate, okay?” He pointed at his own face, to the
Jarhead
high-and-tight haircut. “Now, I may
look
like Cletus T. Asshole, but I want to assure you that you’re as important to me and everybody else here as the next guy.”

He glanced at Robin. “…Or gal.”

Joel nodded quietly. “Okay.” He bit down on a tight smile. “All right. Aight, we’re cool.”

“Now, you said you met him at
his
apartment. I’m assuming your vehicle is still over there on the property, if this ‘Big Red’ hasn’t moved it to another location.” Bowker fetched a huge sigh. “What I’m gonna do is, I’m going to follow you-all over there to his apartment and we’re gonna kill two birds with one stone—get your car and see if this fella is at home.”

❂

The closer they got to Riverview Terrace Apartments, the antsier Joel became until he cracked the window and bummed a cigarette off of Kenway. Robin sat in the middle, the twenty-sided die gearshift between her knees. He had power-smoked the Camel down to the filter by the time they pulled into the parking lot fifteen minutes later. As soon as they came around the corner of the building and started seeing the 400 block, Joel threw his head back and swore in anguish.

Black Velvet was gone.

“I’m not surprised,” said Kenway. “It’s probably at the bottom of Lake Weiss.”

“You better hush your mouth. I’d sooner you take the Lord’s name in vain than insinuate somebody’s hurt my baby,” Joel told him, and slipped into a loud and vehement string of curses, his fists clenched. “Hell to the naw—I just
had
that sound system put in there. This is some grade-A bullshit.” The truck curved to a stop in front of 427 and Bowker’s cruiser slid into a space across the way.

They all got out, except for Joel, who stayed in the Chevy. As soon as Robin shut the door, he locked her out.

The bitter, clean smell of cut grass lingered in the air, even though the lawn was brown. Bowker knocked on Red’s door. “Police.” No answer. He knocked again, this time more insistently. After there was again no answer, he went to the front office to fetch the property manager and get a key.

Robin pressed the rims of her hands to the apartment’s window and peered through them, trying to see past the blinds, but they were turned so that the cracks between the vinyl slats afforded no visibility at all.

Even though she knew full well that the front door was locked, she took hold of the knob and tried to turn it.

(gotta go gotta get out pack it up go go go)

She snatched her hand back. That was strange. She stepped away, cautiously, as if she’d encountered a beehive. Disembodied smells filled her nostrils: expended gunpowder, sizzling steak.

The green scent of cut grass became stronger. She was overcome by the sudden and intense need to flee, mixed with a cold cloak of guilt. Not remorseful guilt, but only the clear recognition of culpability; she felt chastised for something she’d never done. Abstract words flickered in her head, Polaroids of excited fear.

(stupid let your guard down shoulda done em both)

“What was
that
about?” asked Kenway. “You jerked like you touched a live wire.”

“I don’t know.” She looked at the palm of her hand.
Residual paranormal power? Am I picking up on it?
If so, it was the first time anything like that had ever happened. She wasn’t even sure if it was a thing that
could
happen—the witches were the only ones with any paranormal ability, weren’t they? The sigils and runes decorating her body deflected paranormal energy like a sort of metaphysical armor, but other than the hallucinations of the owlheaded Sasquatch, Robin had never been privy to any kind of paranormal sensitivity. The sigils were an umbrella, but she had never felt the rain itself before. It was a bit like discovering a new sense.

Maybe her sigils being overpowered by Weaver at the hospital had left her sensitive, like sunlight on a burn. Maybe…maybe it was the proximity to Cutty. The creases in Robin’s palm shined in the sun as she flexed her hand. Was Cutty so powerful that her power overflowed into the streets?

Could simply being the daughter of a witch mean Robin could siphon off surplus power like some kind of psychic vampire? She had certainly wondered over the years whether she had inherited some modest fraction of whatever paranormal talent lay within her mother Annie. As far as Robin knew, witchcraft began with a singular ritual, and had nothing biologically to do with the witch herself—it was all on the paranormal side of the equation, spiritual, exterior to genetics, initiated by the sacrifice of the heart to Ereshkigal.

She checked her cellphone.
Call me back, Heinrich, damn you.
Robin crammed it back into her jacket pocket.

Lieutenant Bowker came back with the property manager, a limping stump of a man with a Boston terrier’s googly eyes and a salt-and-pepper beard. His golden bouffant was parted in the center like a monkey’s ass. The name embroidered on his shirt was R
OGER
.

The manager unlocked the door and stepped aside for Bowker, who strode in with his hand on the butt of his pistol.

“Well, damn,” said the officer.

The living room was completely devoid of furniture—of anything, really, that said a human had been living here until last night. The walls were bare, and the spotlessly clean carpet wasn’t even marred by the footprints of a sofa’s legs.

Robin searched the kitchen with her GoPro. No appliances stood on the counters. No food in the cabinets, no food in the fridge except for a single Arby’s sauce packet in the crisper.

Bowker came out of the bedroom. “Can you tell me who the apartment is leased to?”

“Yeah, sure.” Roger stared at the clipboard in his hand. “Says here it’s a fella by the name of Richard Sutterman.” He looked up and shrugged. “I don’t get back here much other than to check on old Mr. Brand in 432. Always havin to snake his toilet out, sewage backin up into his bathtub and whatnot. I don’t recall what this Sutterman looks like.”

Joel leaned against the front door’s frame. “That name mean anything to you?” Bowker asked him.

“Never heard it before in my life.”

Bowker rubbed his face in exasperation and tossed a hand. “I can head back to the station and look through the database, or maybe go talk to the county clerk and see if he can find any info more concrete on this Sutterman fella, but….” His offer tapered off, the unspoken admission hanging in the air: it ain’t much to go on.

Psychic whispers still lingered in the air, tracing cobweb fingers along the rims of Robin’s ears.

She got a faint mental flash of a vial, and a hand using a hypodermic needle to draw out a tiny bit of the contents. Then she flashed on an image of that same needle being injected into a grilled steak. She also got a flash of three words—
Yee Tho Rah—
but had no idea what they meant.

“Come on, the trail’s cold for now,” she said, sidling past Joel. “I’ve got some editing to do while I think, and then I want to go have a look at my old house.”

17

T
HE
SHOPS
AND
OFFICES
of Blackfield wheeled past the windows of Mike DePalatis’s police cruiser. “The old fairgrounds?” asked Opie from the passenger seat. “I ain’t been out there in a long-ass time. Not since I was a kid.”

“I never been there.” Mike’s eyes darted up and down the street as he sucked on the last of his milkshake. “I moved to Blackfield in 2006. When did they shut that place down, the 80s?”

“1987, I believe.”

Mike closed in on Broad Avenue and headed east toward the highway, passing the city limits sign.

It took him longer than he expected to find the turn-off for the fairgrounds. Lined with trees the whole eight miles out to the interstate, the highway was littered with weedy side-roads, all of them twin dirt ruts with mohawks of grass. A few of them went out to abandoned properties with overgrown houses, some to improvised dumps with rusty mattress-frames, ragged recliners, weatherbeaten sofas. One even went to a rumored pet cemetery, and you weren’t going to get Mike out that way if you offered him a million damn dollars.

Ultimately what tipped him off that he’d found the right track was the N
O
T
RESPASSING
sign nailed to a tree, thirty years old if a day and speckled with .22 holes. On the other side of the highway was a small gravel clearing, presided over by a dilapidated aluminum gas-station awning.

Some forty yards back, a steel pole as big around as Mike’s arm stretched across the grassy path. He angled the police car into the ruts and drove into the woods, the undergrowth brushing and clattering against the Charger’s undercarriage.

Pulling up to the gate, Mike opened the door and started to get out. “I got it,” Owen said helpfully, throwing himself out of the car. He checked the gate and found that there was, indeed, a chain confining the gate to its mount, and a padlock secured it. Two of them, in fact. Hypothetically they could go around it, if not for the impenetrable forest on either side.

“Shit.” Mike put on his hat and got out of the car anyway. “Looks like we’re walking.” He hopped over the gate, his keys jingling.

“Maybe we could try our keys on them padlocks,” said Owen, glancing over his shoulder as they set off into the tall grass. “I locked my keys in my truck once, one of them GMC crew cabs? And my neighbor? I don’t know what got into his head but he tried his minivan key and I’ll be damned if it didn’t unlock my truck.”

“Weird. I don’t think a car key will work on a padlock, though.” The grass beat against Mike’s shins, and hidden briars plucked at his socks. “When we get out of here, you might want to check yourself for ticks. Few years ago I was part of a search effort out in woods like this, and when I got home I found one on my dick.” He made a fist and held it up, demonsrating the tick’s exact placement by pressing his other thumb to his wrist. “It was snuggled up right behind the head.”