Murder with a Twist Page 10

  “I am. Can you do me a favor?”

  “Name it,” Cora said.

  “Use your computer superpowers and dig up anything you can find on Belinda Cooper and her two-year-old son, Davey.”

  Cora looked troubled. “Don’t tell me someone killed a child.”

  “I don’t know. He’s missing. Keep it to yourself for now and if you can stay by your cell phone while I’m out, I’d appreciate it. I might need your help in interpreting my reactions.”

  “No problem,” Cora said. “You know you can always call me anytime, night or day, for any reason.”

  “Thanks, Cora.” My mind conjured up some faint swirls of soothing colors like the ones we had discussed earlier and I had an overwhelming urge to reach down and hug her, but I didn’t. Instead, I grabbed my coat from my office and headed out the front door. It was dark, the air felt heavy and damp, and I felt a chill that seeped through my skin all the way to my bones. I sensed there would be snow coming soon, though probably not tonight. I buttoned my coat clear to the top, unsure if the chill I felt in my bones was due to the weather or my thoughts about the situation I was heading into.

  As Duncan had promised, there was a squad car waiting for me with two uniformed officers in the front seat. I knew them both by name because they had been frequenting my bar a lot in the past few weeks, both while on and off duty. On-duty cops come in for my coffee; the off-duty ones typically come in at the end of their shifts to enjoy a libation and some camaraderie. I was even considering expanding my hours of operation once I opened the new section to accommodate the night shifters. State law requires that bars be closed between the hours of two a.m. and six a.m. Monday through Friday, and two-thirty a.m. and six a.m. on Saturday and Sunday. The one exception allowed is on New Year’s Eve, when no closing is required. But first I had to find staff willing to work those early morning hours, staff I could trust enough to open the place on their own.

  The two cops waiting in the squad car for me were Nick, whose Polish parents had saddled him with the name Nicodemus, and Tyrese, an African American who, unlike his partner, insisted on being called by his full first name whenever anyone tried to shorten it to Ty. They greeted me with somber nods of their heads, which I took to be an indication of just how grim the scene I was about to visit would be. I climbed into the back, which promised an uncomfortable ride given the hard plastic of the seat and the confined space. The feel of cramped quarters made me see a red number zero floating around my field of vision.

  Fortunately, because of the discomfort I was experiencing, and unfortunately, because of the crime scene’s proximity to my bar, the ride was a short one. It was a little over ten minutes, despite a fair amount of traffic, before we pulled up in front of a house in the Halyard Park neighborhood. We were only a few blocks away from Duncan’s house.

  While the majority of the housing directly around my bar is condos, if you go a few blocks to the north, west, or east, you’ll find yourself in one of several eclectic residential neighborhoods that contained a mix of condos and older single-family homes, as well as a mix of ethnic types. It wasn’t hard to identify the particular residence we were headed for based on all the flashing lights and police tape strung up out front. It was a smaller bungalow-style house with a one-car attached garage, similar in style to Duncan’s and, also like Duncan’s, the place was in need of some repair. The pale blue wood siding was faded to near white on the south and east sides of the house, and the paint was peeling badly. A cracked concrete sidewalk led up to a small porch with a wood-post railing, a bead-board ceiling, and a heavy, arched wooden door with a small window at the top.

  Nick let me out of the car—the back doors couldn’t be opened from the inside—and he and Tyrese escorted me past the police tape to the front door. The number zero disappeared from my field of vision. As I approached the house I hesitated, and the two men seemed to sense my reluctance.

  “Are you okay, Mack?” Tyrese asked, looking concerned. “I know Albright thinks you have some unique insights to offer, but maybe going in there is more than you can handle.”

  “You know about my . . . how I . . .” I didn’t go on, unsure how to put my ability into words.

  “Word has spread down at the precinct. Cops talk,” Nick said with a shrug.

  I frowned at this. Up until now, I’d thought that only a handful of cops knew, though I suppose it was naïve of me to think that something like this would be kept secret for long. You can’t drag a lay person along to crime scenes and not raise some questions.

  “Don’t worry,” Nick added. “Everyone understands that you don’t want it known publicly and we’re keeping it amongst ourselves.”

  “Do cops outside this district know, too?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Tyrese said. “There’s bound to be some talk sooner or later if word gets out that you’re accompanying cops to crime scenes. But the official word from our station is simply that you’re a consultant, though most of us are calling you Albright’s secret weapon.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that, or the pressure I felt it put on me. Plus, I knew there were skeptics and naysayers who disapproved of what Duncan was doing—people like Jimmy.

  As if he were reading my mind, Nick said, “I don’t know exactly what it is you do, but Albright definitely believes in you, and the guy knows his stuff. If he has faith in you, so do I.”

  “You’re a psychic or something like that, right?” Tyrese asked.

  “Not exactly,” I told him. “Think of me more as a bloodhound, like a K-9 partner who can detect things normal humans can’t.”

  “You sure as hell ain’t no dog, Mack,” Nick said. “In fact, I was wondering . . . do you and Albright have a thing between you? You know . . . a romantic thing? Are you two dating?”

  Tyrese gave his partner an admonishing punch in the shoulder. “Sheesh, so not the time or the place, bro,” he chastised.

  “Yeah, I suppose you’re right,” Nick said. “Sorry, Mack.”

  “No harm done,” I said, grateful I didn’t have to answer his question about Duncan and me, since I had no idea if the two of us had a “thing,” whatever the heck that was. And I wasn’t about to admit to these two that Duncan and I had slept together. “In fact, I’m flattered. But Tyrese is right. We have more important things to focus on for the moment. So, as much as I’d rather be behind my bar right now whipping up some scrumptious hot toddy, I think we need to head inside.”

  Chapter 14

  Tyrese led the way with Nick bringing up the rear. I stepped to one side just inside the threshold so I could take a moment to deal with the onslaught of visual images, the cacophony of sounds, and the host of bodily sensations that were triggered by what lay beyond. I closed my eyes and tried to sort through them, singling each one out and mentally filing it into one of several boxes I created in my mind. One of the boxes was for sounds, one was for smells, one was for visuals, and one was for touch. Hopefully I wouldn’t need one for taste, but I did set aside a fifth box for the miscellany that I sometimes experience: manifestations triggered by emotional residue and by what I thought of as my sixth sense, for lack of a better description.

  The first thing I filed was the most overwhelming one: the smell of blood. I knew that smell and its associated sound from my childhood, and I was reminded of it when both my father and Ginny were killed. My brain translated the sharp, acrid scent of blood into a sound I can only compare to shrill, high-pitched notes played on a trumpet. I forced my mind to push the sound aside, a trick I learned when I was very young. If not for my ability to filter through the many sensory experiences I have, I probably would’ve ended up in a nuthouse somewhere. The neurologist who diagnosed me said the sensory input I experience is akin to the voices a schizophrenic hears. He warned me that it might sometimes be difficult to distinguish my manifested experiences from the real ones, and if I didn’t learn to ignore my synesthetic responses, it might make me as crazy as all the doctors I’d seen before him
thought I was.

  After pushing aside the smell of blood and its associated sound, the next thing I focused on was a terrible taste. It was as if I had bitten into something rotten, like a bad peanut, or meat that had begun to spoil. The experience was both unpleasant and new to me. I pushed it aside but didn’t file it away in one of my mental boxes, knowing I would want to explore it more later on. Along with the taste, I felt cold, as if I were standing in a draft, and I wasn’t sure if that sensation was real, an emotional reaction, or a synesthetic response.

  I was standing in a small foyer and the entrance to the kitchen was straight ahead. I took a few more steps and looked at the room to my left. It was a small but tidy living room furnished with a mismatched chair and couch, and a yard sale coffee table. Off in the far corner of the room was a door that I assumed led to the garage. On the wall in front of me was a fireplace with a brick surround and the cold, ashy remnants of a fire beyond the hearth. Hanging above that was a flat-screen TV and on either side of it were built-in bookcases. While the bookcase on the left was filled with paperback novels and a few hardcovers, the bookcase on the right held a DVD player, a Wii console, several games, and an assortment of G-rated movies. There were several framed photos of Davey at various ages, one of which I recognized as the photo Duncan had sent to my phone. Most of the pictures were of Davey alone, from infancy on up, but two of them also featured a pretty, smiling blond woman. Based on her age and the adoration I could see in her eyes—even in a picture—I assumed this woman was Belinda.

  The floors were hardwood and there was an inexpensive beige-colored area rug on the living-room floor that had the faint remnants of a pink stain by one corner of the coffee table. I imagined a little boy sitting on the floor watching a movie, or playing a game, taking the occasional drink from one of those little juice boxes that he then somehow managed to spill.

  As I entered the living room, the nasty taste in my mouth lessened a little and the air felt warmer. I stood next to the stain in the rug, closed my eyes, and let my other senses absorb for a minute. Nothing seemed particularly dominant and, as I turned back toward the foyer, I saw Nick, Tyrese, and Duncan—who was holding a camera—all standing there watching me. The sight of Duncan made my heart skip a beat, but I wasn’t sure if it was real or synesthetic.

  “Thank you for coming,” he said. As usual, the sound of Duncan’s voice triggered the taste of chocolate in my mouth; it’d been that way since the first day I met him. Depending on his mood or the tone in his voice, the chocolate taste might be sweet or bitter, but it was always there. Duncan turned to my chauffeurs and said, “Thanks for bringing her.”

  Nick and Tyrese took this as their cue to leave and they exited via the front door.

  “What do you want me to do first?” I asked Duncan once the others were gone.

  “Let’s go through the house a room at a time,” he said, handing me a pair of gloves that I dutifully donned. “Does anything leap out at you here in the living room?”

  “I don’t think so. There may be something about the bookcase over there on the right side of the fireplace, like something has been moved or removed, but I’m not sure.”

  Duncan said nothing, but he took a few moments to snap some pictures, including several of the bookcase I had mentioned. Then he turned to me and said, “Let’s move on.” He placed his hand at the small of my back and gently steered me into the kitchen.

  I could tell from the strength of the blood smell and the lessening of the sound that went with it that little Davey’s mom wasn’t in the kitchen. But I didn’t want to be surprised by the sight of her body, so I hesitated and turned back to Duncan. “Where is she?”

  “In her bedroom, at the end of the hall on the left. We’ll go there last and I’ll warn you before we get there. For now, I’d like you to walk through the rest of the house and tell me what sort of reactions you get.”

  I told him about the acrid blood smell and the shrill trumpet sound it triggered, and then I told him about the taste and the chill I felt. “I’ve never experienced that particular taste before so I can’t tell you what it means, and I’m not sure if the chilled feeling is real or not. But I can tell you that it was stronger in the foyer than it was in the living room, or than it is in here, for that matter.”

  Thus far, I had kept my eyes either on Duncan or the floor, purposely avoiding anything else in the kitchen. While this didn’t block out any of the sound or smell triggers I was experiencing, it did minimize the visual ones. Most of the sound and smell manifestations were minor ones that I knew to be part and parcel of the more ordinary aspects of my surroundings. To prepare for a more involved experience with the kitchen, I closed my eyes for a few seconds to brace myself. Then I opened them and focused hard on the room.

  One of the first things I noticed was a calendar hanging on a small section of wall beside the refrigerator. The top half had a picture of a lake with cloud-studded skies above and snow-capped mountains in the distance. The bottom half was the calendar itself, accurately flipped to the current month of November. Though some part of my mind registered the fact that the numbers for each day were printed in black, another part of my mind saw them in an array of colors. Numbers often appear to me as colors, with each of the digits from zero to nine having its own unique color. The number five, for whatever reason, is always yellow and two is always blue. Oddly enough, this unique way of envisioning the numbers makes me very good at math.

  The other odd experience I have with calendars is that each month has a personality. November is kindly and comforting, a bit drowsy at times, and it always feels a little nostalgic. I ignored these sensations and focused instead on the handwritten items filled in on some of the days: school closed was written in on the day after Thanksgiving; Dr. Fillmore, 10:00 was scribbled in two days ago on the twelfth; and 6:30 hair appt was written in on the twentieth. I recognized the name of the doctor since it was the same OB-GYN doctor I use, and therefore guessed that the appointment was for Belinda rather than for her son. I mentioned this to Duncan before turning my attention to the rest of the room.

  Most of the houses in this neighborhood date back to the 1920s and 1930s, and this kitchen looked like it had last been overhauled in the 1980s. The cabinets were faux wood with a white stripe of plastic trim, the floor was linoleum worn nearly through to the subfloor in front of the sink, and there was a built-in banquette in one corner of the room with a rectangular table sporting the same pink and black Formica that topped all the counters. I wondered if Belinda Cooper owned the house or was renting it and asked Duncan, who informed me the place was a rental.

  As I approached the refrigerator, the nasty taste in my mouth grew and I started to wonder if it was somehow related to a bad smell emanating from inside it. But smells don’t typically manifest themselves as tastes for me. I usually hear or feel smells. My neurologist suggested that I’m able to detect small molecules of odor that linger in the air and that these molecules trigger a wave pattern of sound, or a tactile sensation, or on rare occasions both, that I can discern from the rest of the air around me. My suspicion that in this case it wasn’t a smell triggering the odd taste was supported when I opened the refrigerator door and looked inside. The interior sparkled with cleanliness and the contents were all carefully placed with their labels facing out. Duplicate items were lined up in neat little rows and, as I looked over it all, I sensed that something had been moved recently from a shelf on the left. There was a front-to-back row of yogurts and three front-to-back rows of single-serve juice boxes. As I stared at the juice boxes, the skin on my back registered an irregularity, as if someone was tracing a finger down my spine and skipped a spot.

  “I think something was either moved or taken from this spot here,” I said to Duncan, pointing to the juice boxes. After thinking on it for another second, I added, “Taken, I think, because I sense a void.”

  Duncan opened the refrigerator door wider and started snapping pictures of the contents. “I imagine th
e missing item is probably a drink that Belinda or Davey had,” he said.

  “Maybe,” I said, not convinced. “How long ago did all this happen?”

  “The first officer got here about five minutes after the elderly woman next door called because she thought she heard a child screaming,” Duncan said, still snapping away. “She said she looked out her window but she couldn’t see anything because it was dark and all the shades in the house were drawn. The woman said she tried several times over a period of ten minutes or so to call Belinda, but no one answered, so she called nine-one-one.” He stopped what he was doing and glanced at his watch. “We’ve been here for just under half an hour and we got here minutes after the first officer called it in.”

  “I know from the games I used to play with my father that my sensations regarding missing or moved objects fade and disappear after about an hour or so, depending on how enclosed or exposed an area is, so whatever is missing here was likely removed within that time frame.”

  “Meaning we were very close to catching whoever did this. If the neighbor woman had called when she first heard the screams . . .” He didn’t finish this thought, but the sad shake of his head said it all. “Anyway,” he went on after a few seconds, “it’s possible that whatever was removed was done so by the victim.”

  “Maybe. Have you seen any yogurt containers or juice boxes on top of the trash or lying around?”

  “None so far,” Duncan said, glancing around the kitchen. He walked over to a lidded trash can by the sink and opened it with a gloved hand. “Nothing here,” he said, snapping a picture of the garbage. “We’ll keep an eye out as we go through the rest of the house.”

  Both sides of the double kitchen sink were sparkling clean, and an empty dish rack sat on one side. A quick perusal of the cabinets and drawers showed neat rows of items, with food labels facing outward, dishes organized by size and color, pots and pans all polished to a gleam. It seemed Belinda Cooper was all about neatness and organization.