The Boulevard Monster, page 13
I widened my eyes, trying for a hopeful look. Morrell’s blank expression didn’t change much, but it changed enough for me to know that his bullshit detector was on high alert. “Did you find out something new?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Nope. But tips keep trickling in. The most recent involved you.”
“Okay,” I said, carrying out the aaayyyy as if his statement baffled me.
He pulled a notepad out of his breast pocket, flipped to a page filled with words, and slid his eyes back and forth a few times as though he needed the notes to remind him what he came to ask me. “We had a caller tell us they think you may know more about Randy’s disappearance then you’ve let on.”
“What? Who?”
“Anonymous.”
“I don’t… I’ve told you everything I know.” It was hard to tell whether he believed me or not. “Did they tell you anything specific I should know?”
He scratched his head. “Did you and Randy ever go down to the Boulevard together to look for dates?”
“Dates?”
“Yeah. You know, pick up a woman for an hour or two of fun?”
“You mean hookers?”
“Did you guys like to pick up hookers?”
“No,” I said emphatically.
“Do you know if Randy liked to pick up hookers?”
I knew he had. He’d bragged about it several times. “I think so. Sometimes. But I was never with him when he did. Why?”
Morrell lazily scratched his ear. “Well, we have reason to believe he may be connected to some of the missing Boulevard girls. Have you heard about that? The missing girls?”
I nodded. “Sure. I saw it on the news a while back. Why do you think he’s connected to that?”
“Well, talk on the Boulevard is that he favored a few of the missing girls, if you know what I mean. Some people say he didn’t treat women that well, either. Brianne even said his much the first time we talked to you guys. Can you tell me everything you know about his relationship troubles?”
“I told you everything I know right after he went missing. I don’t know anything else.”
“Do you think Brianne knows anything else?”
“I don’t know. She might. You can ask her anytime you want.”
He wrote something in his notepad, walked to his car, grabbed a paper off the dash, came back, and handed it to me. It was the pictures I’d seen on the girl’s individual flyers downtown, all squashed together in two rows. “Was the girl you saw in the back of his truck the night he vanished one of these girls?”
I scanned each face, but I tried my best not to look at them. The smiles, the eyes, the hope, the life. I knew I’d react and didn’t want Morrell to read that reaction in my eyes, my soul. When I thought I’d scanned each square enough times, I told him I didn’t know.
“Look again,” he said. “Are you sure?”
I faked another long look at each and shook my head. “It’s been so long. I can’t be sure.”
He took the paper back. Then he tossed out a bold, blunt question. “Did you have anything to do with these girl’s disappearances or know who did?”
Luther, my conscience screamed. “No,” I said. “Of course not.”
“Why were you out at Plemons in the middle of the night?”
That question surprised me. It took me second to answer. “I drive around out there sometimes to clear my head. Why?”
“We have witnesses that said a truck matching the description of your Chevy was seen out there on private property, and that someone fitting your description was digging out there. And that just happened to be the day after the last Boulevard girl went missing.”
“I wasn’t digging anything anywhere. When I go out there, I roll down the windows and drive. I never even get out of my truck.”
He glanced at his notes again like a lost man who needed help remembering what to say next. “We also have an officer report that says you were found out at by a construction site, you know, the new school out at West Hill, late one night acting suspiciously.” He flipped a page on the notepad, tapped it with his finger. “And that was the night after another girl went missing.”
“What are you saying?” I asked with an edge of annoyance.
He just stared at me.
“I have a lot of responsibility,” I added. “I told that officer that sometimes I go out to the work sites at night to think things out. Set things up for the next day. So what? That makes me a killer?”
His eyes glued to mine, he licked his lips, and exhaled. I could smell his breath, and it was as stale and nondescript as his expression and clothing. “I didn’t say that. Now don’t get angry. You know I have a job to do just like you. I have to follow up on every lead.” His eyes fell to his pad again. “So you’re sure you don’t know anything about what happened to those girls? Or if any one of them was the one you saw in the back of his truck?”
My eyes moved to the blue jays watching from the dead elm, listening, ready to tell Luther every detail of this conversation. “Positive,” I insisted.
“Okay,” he said flatly. He put his notepad away. “I might have more questions for you later, so don’t stray too far from town.”
His insinuation that I would stray told me everything I needed to know about how my answers had registered on his B.S. detector. “I won’t,” I said.
As he drove away, Brenda suddenly appeared by my side. She smelled sweet, like vanilla. “Was that Morrell?” she asked. I nodded. “What did he want?”
“To know if I’d seen anyone suspicious in the neighborhood lately. There’s been a few garage break-ins this week and a bunch of tools were stolen.”
She nodded, accepting the lie as easy as a dog accepts a treat. “How’s your Dad doing?”
“He’s better,” I said. “I talked him through the albums and now he’s watching Clint Eastwood and eating burritos.”
She laughed. “I think he eats twenty burritos a week.”
I forced a smile and softly agreed.
“Well, I better get. I need to shower before 48 Hours Mystery starts. I never miss that show.”
I nodded. “Okay.”
“I’ll talk to you soon.” She gave me a hug and headed home.
On the way to my truck, I glanced at the elm tree and noticed there was only one blue jay instead of two. Word of Morrell’s suspicions would hit Luther’s ear soon. I hoped he was happy with how I’d handled it.
Two blocks from my house I passed an unmarked Mercy Police cruiser that was heading the opposite direction. When I arrived home, Brianne didn’t answer my calls in the house. Peering out the kitchen window, I saw her sitting on the back porch swing, her arms crossed over her belly, a pensive look on her face. I stepped outside and stopped beside the swing. A crisp breeze sliced through the air, swaying Sera’s bird feeders. Moths swarmed the light above the back door. The bright halogen cut across the backyard, highlighting at least one blue jay in the tree.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
Startled, she jerked her face toward me.
“You feel okay?” I asked again. She’d had a touch of nausea and dizziness lately.
She broke eye contact and looked out across the yard. “Sergeant Adair came by here while you were gone.”
The unmarked car. They’d been watching us, waiting for an opportunity to question us separately. Simultaneously.
“What did he want?”
“The cops think—”
My eyes shot to the bird perched in the tree, and I interrupted her. “Let’s go inside.” I didn’t want Luther receiving a second report. Or third, if Brianne had talked to Adair outside. “Morrell came to my dad’s and talked to me, too. Got my stomach in a knot. I need something to drink while we talk.”
She looked up at me, and I reached for her hand. After a brief hesitation, she took it, and I helped her up and led her to the dining table in the kitchen. She asked for a glass of ice water, and I got myself a beer and sat across from her. There was a half-full mug of warm coffee on the table. Brianne had given up caffeine so Adair must’ve talked to her inside. Good. “What did Adair ask you?” I said.
She swirled her water, kept her eyes on the dancing ice. “If I’ve noticed any changes in your behavior in the past year or two.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him that we’d talked about how distant you seemed after Randy’s disappearance, how you spent a lot of time alone, but that you had gotten better since the wedding.” She took a sip. “And I told him about EnviroTek because he asked how we could suddenly afford the Fit and our new house.”
I took a pull and swished the cold beer around in my mouth to cut through the dry, caked saliva on my tongue. Great. Now they’ll start looking into EnviroTek. Fucking great. “They think I have something to do with Randy’s disappearance and maybe those Boulevard girls, too, huh?”
She nodded, looked up. “Do you?”
A swell of guilt rolled up my throat, and I swallowed hard to push it down. “No,” I lied.
She took another sip of water. If she weren’t pregnant and could smoke, she would’ve been chaining. “Adair said a lot of women on the Boulevard say they saw Randy down there all the time. With some of the missing girls even. Sometimes with another man who resembles you.” She took another sip. “He thinks you and Randy might have had something to do with the first girl’s disappearance, and then you guys got in a fight or something and you reported the body and got rid of Randy so you could lay the blame on him.”
I smacked the table with my palm harder than I intended, startling her. “That’s fucking stupid, Bri. I’ve never been down to the Boulevard looking for hookers with Randy. Ever. Besides, most of the girls have gone missing since Randy vanished, and they didn’t even find the body in his truck. That means I would have to be the one to have kidnapped or killed all the girls since. If I planned on doing that, why would I have called them back then? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Don’t curse at me,” she said with stern eyes. “I’m just telling you what he said.”
I took a deep breath, pushed it out. “Do you believe him? Do you think I killed Randy? Do you think I kill hookers?”
She didn’t hesitate. “No. I know you would never hurt anyone.” Her eyes searched mine to let me know the statement came from her heart. God, I wanted to tell her the truth right then and there. About Luther. The birds. The notes. The sacks. Get it all off my chest. Share the burden that was driving me into the ground. I wanted her to feel sorry for me and for us to wake Sera and run and hide in some foreign country. Mexico maybe. But that couldn’t happen. I pushed the urge to the corner of my mind and locked it away.
“What did Morrell say to you?” she asked.
“Basically the same. He asked if Randy and I went down to the Boulevard looking for hookers together, and where I was the night some of those girls went missing. And then he showed me some flyers and wanted to know if I recognized any of the girls.” I took a huge gulp of beer. “When I told him I didn’t, he got mad. Then when I asked why he suddenly thought all this about me, he said they got an anonymous tip that I was involved. Can you believe that? An anonymous fucking tip.”
“Who do you think called?”
I took another long, slow drink, buying a little thinking time. Telling her I’d initially, briefly, thought it could have been her would not have been a good idea. Not with her pregnant and just having been questioned by the police. And telling her that my second thought was that it was her beloved brother Ryan might not be that smart either. She protected him to a fault, as if he were a helpless child that could do no wrong, wasn’t accountable for his choices. But my assumptions would eventually come out, and I’d rather she heard them without Ryan there. Maybe she’d be less defensive. I swirled the liquid left in the bottle, finished it, and tossed the bottle in the trash. I tried to lay it on her easy. “I don’t know if anyone did call. Maybe he made it up to see how I’d react since I was the last person seen with Randy. Cops can lie to you, you know?” I shrugged. “But if anyone did call, maybe it was Ryan.”
“No way,” she immediately responded. “He’d never do that. He would’ve come to me first.” She glanced at her water, back at me. “Or he would’ve confronted you. You know he does that to people. He never holds his tongue.”
The forceful tone in which she spoke, and the unwavering confidence in her eyes, told me to let it go. Retreat. At least I’d put it out there if later he admitted to it. I got another beer from the fridge and sat down. “Yeah. You’re right. I just don’t know who else it could be. The stuff the cops knew pointed at someone who knows me pretty well.”
“Maybe it was someone you work with. Maybe one of those assholes you fired or something.” She raised an angry finger in the air and widened her eyes. “Or maybe it was someone in Randy’s family. Someone who knows you were the last person to see him.”
“Maybe,” I conceded.
We sat in silence for a short spell. A couple of awkward glances passed between us before I spoke again. “How are you feeling? You know, the nausea and all.”
Her shoulders slumped with instant relief at the change of subject. “All right. When Adair came to the door I thought something terrible had happened to you and nearly vomited all over him.” She chuckled, and so did I. “But I feel better now after talking to you.”
I took her hand, squeezed it, and told her what she wanted to hear, needed to hear. “Everything’s going to be all right. We’ll be all right. I had nothing to do with any of this.”
When Brianne went upstairs to take a bath, I snuck the rifle into the house and hid it in the garage, under a stack of scrap lumber. I loaded the 9 MM, left it under the seat in the Chevy, and then went to the back porch swing, where I sat and drank beer and shot the blue jays perched in the tree with my finger gun. I imagined they were the evil bird-cats in Lurth, the Featherlexes, beasts with tall pointy ears, four sharp claws, and a massive jagged wingspan, beasts that tried to sneak into houses through open windows and chimneys and steal children’s pillows and blankets and toys to torment them. After I’d slaughtered a suitable amount of Featherlexes, I called Dad to make sure he was all right. He was watching another Eastwood flick and eating a popsicle.
Nineteen
Research, Sonogram, and a Name
Sera and I were on our way to the library when I first noticed the cops were keeping a close eye on me. An unmarked cruiser stayed five or six cars behind us the entire way there. I made a few irrational turns to confirm my suspicion, which brought bizarre looks from Sera, and the cruiser followed. When we parked and headed inside, the cruiser parked at the Sonic across the street. I couldn’t tell who was inside, but I assumed Morrell had sent them to intimidate me, to let me know he was watching, not to really spy on me. They were too obvious. Besides, the Mercy Police Department didn’t have enough manpower or money to spy on me twenty-four seven.
Sera had a book report due for history class, and one of the requirements was that they have at least two book sources. Her teacher, seventy-one-year-old Mr. Michael Hayes, Mr. Slenderman to the students because of his vicious criticism and long swooping limbs, was convinced the Internet was destroying the minds of the youth. He believed the information and misinformation on tap made them lazy, arrogant, and weak. That it was more confusing than helpful. I agreed with the confusing part. After I’d learned of Brianne’s pregnancy, I’d done countless hours of online research and found it frustrating.
At night after Brianne had fallen asleep, and after I’d pulled the curtains closed to make sure the blue jays couldn’t watch, I’d researched gifted humans, aliens, vampires—anything I thought might help me deal with Luther.
Like Mr. Hayes preached, the sites I searched contradicted more than they agreed, confused more than they helped. According to some, vampires could die from a stake through the heart. One site said the stake had to be made of oak, but others said it had to be maple, or birch, or cedar. On a couple of other sites: no, all that’s myth; stakes can’t kill them; you have to chop off their heads like a zombie. Some sites said bullets couldn’t hurt them, but others claimed silver bullets could damage them significantly. The whole garlic thing, not true. Or, wait, yes it is. And vampires could die from the sun, burst into flames and disintegrate into ashes the second a ray touched their skin, or, wait, no, that’s bullshit, made up for movie vampires. I’d met with Luther in the daytime, so I knew the sun wouldn’t disintegrate him. But as I looked back and thought about it, he did always make it a point to stay in the shade. In my car on the way to his cabin he’d leaned on the console, out of the sun, and on his cabin deck, he’d stayed in the shade of the trees. All the other times I’d been with him it had been night. So maybe the sun could hurt him, maybe weaken him anyway. Who knew?
If vampires didn’t exist, and Luther was an alien, all bets were off. There are more sites and theories on aliens than anything else on the Internet. If he was from another planet or plane of existence, or if the real Luther had been taken over by a parasite alien, the possibilities were endless. Maybe he could regenerate limbs. Maybe he was more machine than man. Maybe there were thousands like him on our planet ready to converge on me and devour me in a cannibalistic feast. Maybe he couldn’t die, or could live for thousands of years anyway. Or, hell, maybe a good sneeze, a simple germ, could kill him, like in The War of the Worlds.
Much like the alien angle, the gifted/supernatural angle sites gave endless, contradicting answers. Having watched Heroes and X-Files on Netflix while Brianne slept, and having devoured superhero comics as a child, I knew the possibilities were countless as the stars. There were gifted who could heal, fly, morph, were impervious, telekinetic, future seers, and on and on. And on and on. I knew Luther could read and channel emotions, talk to birds—his blue jays anyway—and that he could move faster than a normal human, but I wasn’t sure about what else he could or couldn’t do. To be honest, a part of me didn’t want to know, either.
