Fool's Ride (The Jenkins Cycle Book 2) (8 page)

M
orning arrived
with the promise of good food, movies, walks in the park, shopping sprees, driving around listening to music, fishing trips, indoor public pools, one or two naps a day, and my all-time favorite thing to do: sitting around reading in coffee shops.

But I couldn’t do any of that until I’d done something about Sally, still out there in the minivan. It was a little cold for April, but she’d start cooking from the inside if left for too long. When that happened, I wouldn’t be able to drive the minivan in the comfort I was accustomed to.

I still had a little time before that happened, so I went back through the house looking for anything I’d missed in my first sweep. The upstairs rooms were as empty as last night, but the light streaming through the blinds showed everything covered in a thick coat of dust.

I returned to the little office I’d seen last night and thumbed through the papers and boxes of opened mail. It became quickly apparent that Harriet relied heavily on Medicare to treat her various ailments, one of which was chronic insomnia. A minute later, I also learned she was dead.

Up on the wall, in a gilded frame, Fred had set Harriet’s death certificate proudly on display.

“Alcoholic poisoning,” I read. She’d died more than three years ago.

The date of birth on the certificate had Harriet older than Fred by two years. It also showed her as unmarried. I figured she was his sister, though she could have been a cousin.

With nothing more to look at, I left the room, shut the door, and resumed my tour.

The rest of the house had tables and chairs and things of that sort, but there was something about it all that didn’t look completely lived in. Take the dining room, for example. The table was loaded with fine china, crystal, and actual silverware. The lace tablecloth was now yellowed with age, and each setting had the forks and spoons in the proper locations. Yet the silverware was coated in a rainbow of colorful tarnish, and the china and crystal were grimy with fossilized dust. The whole thing appeared to have been set and left that way for years.

There was nothing physically wrong with the structure of the house, and with Harriet out of the way, I planned to stay there. I didn’t know enough about Fred’s finances, other than he had a few credit cards and a tiny amount of cash left in his wallet. So moving to a fancy hotel didn’t make much sense.

The house had an attached garage packed front to back with boxes, tools, and old furniture. Also, it had a freezer. I couldn’t believe my luck. It was almost like someone upstairs was looking down and saying, “Dan needs a freezer, he’s getting a freezer.” It was a big one, too. Large enough to hold three more prostitutes if needed.

Anxious to start my day, I went outside to get Sally.

The light of the new day revealed something I’d missed last night: the property was sort of a mess. The lawn hadn’t been mowed—ever. The hedges under the windows were like Chia Pets who’d let themselves go, and a branch from the tree out front threatened to bash in two of the second story windows under the press of a light breeze. The house wasn’t falling down or damaged or anything. More like it was slouching around with the intent of one day crumbling and blowing away.

Fred’s minivan, however, was brand new. And clean—like he’d recently washed and waxed it. I wondered if he called it his
baby
.

After checking the perimeter, where Fred’s suburban savannah met overgrown steppes ending in a tree line, I concluded no children or nosey neighbors were hovering in wait for me to drag Sally into the light so they could call the cops.

Even through the sleeping bag, Sally’s body grossed me out all the way from the minivan to the side door. The garage would have been quicker, but it was too packed. Along the way, the hardness of her elbows and knees, and the wobbly weight of her head, were a constant reminder there was a human body in there. When I got to the freezer, I became seized with sudden terror at the thought she might still be alive, like Jacob back at that weirdo mansion.

I unzipped the bag and checked to make sure. Yep, still dead.

The freezer contained some packaged meat and bags of veggies, crusted with frost, but it was mostly empty. I set her gently inside it and used a bag of peas for a pillow. Then I pushed down on the lid along the edges in case one of the seams was loose or the door hadn’t been squarely placed. Working with as many freezers as I had, I knew what to look for.

One time, I’d missed just such a defect and the motor had burned out under too much load. Everything was fine until the second week, and then it was like someone detonated a stink bomb thousands of times more powerful than the one dropped on Mrs. Bloodworth’s English class in ’88. As much as I’d like to take credit for that senseless act of olfactory terrorism, that had been my buddy Simon’s doing.

With Sally out of the way, I rushed upstairs and took a long hot shower.

For all that Fred’s house was in disrepair, he wasn’t a slob. He had soap and shampoo, clean clothes, and deodorant. Another reason to stick around. Using the safety razor and old-fashioned cup of shaving soap was a special joy, almost like a cleansing ritual.

After affixing four little pieces of toilet paper to the cuts on my face, I went downstairs and checked out the refrigerator. No heads or eyeballs or jars of human ears. Just eggs, bacon, juice, bottles of condiments, no fruits and vegetables anywhere, and a small freezer with a carton of ice cream.

Not only was my ride a predator, possibly a serial killer, but he also enjoyed Chunky Monkey. It’s a small world after all.

With breakfast and grooming and cleanup squared away, I contemplated what to do next. What a great ride so far. Fred was sort of old, and slow from being way too overweight for his age, but he was strong enough to kidnap women, and he wasn’t in a wheelchair. After my last ride, maybe I didn’t need vigorous so much. Rest and relaxation—that’d do nicely. Something incredibly passive, requiring zero thinking on my part. No work, no guns or torture, and possibly a trip to the Dairy Queen if I found one in the wild.

“The mall,” I said, finally.

Though I knew all the roads, it didn’t mean I knew where all the malls were. But that’s why they have gas stations.

“I’m looking for a big mall,” I said to the guy behind the counter. “The biggest you got.”

He laughed good-naturedly. “We don’t sell any here, but if you head down to the light and hang a right…”

When he finished, I paid for my little apple pie and carton of milk, thanked him, and left. Ten minutes later I was parked outside a big mall, all boxes and elevations and tacked-on sections flung out in every direction. It was amazing.

I love malls—people from all walks of life coming together to engage in commerce, crowding from place to place, oblivious and preoccupied, yet somehow never actually colliding with one another. Malls were temperature-controlled, too, and nobody smoked indoors anymore so I didn’t have to deal with that.

One of the best days of my life was when I was sixteen and snuck off to ditch a low-calorie diet my parents had put me on when I’d gotten too heavy. I’d taken the bus to the mall and bought a mixed bag of jelly doughnuts and Boston Creams. Then I sat on a bench with a carton of milk and letched over an endless parade of other people’s girlfriends. Near the end of the bag, right when my body was telling me it wasn’t hungry anymore, I found a lemon-filled doughnut—delicious, tart, and sweet—and that stoked the fire a little longer. For the next thirty minutes, I sat there with my arms hooked over the back of the bench. Just me and my empty bag of doughnuts and an avalanche of powdered sugar decorating my shirt.

Ah, the good ol’ days.

After checking the backlit marquis, I hiked way to the other side of the mall and took the escalators up a level to the only bookstore they had.

The escalators were great, but that was a long walk for Fred. I had to sit on a bench for a while to catch my breath. A good time to resume my favorite mall pastime: staring at women.

One thing about Fred: the pigment around his eyes was darker than the rest of his face, giving him a faintly brooding appearance. I didn’t want anyone complaining to mall security, so I made sure to look around innocently whenever a woman passed by. I settled for two seconds coming, five seconds going, which I deemed a good gawking-to-looking-around ratio.

When I felt I was ready, I lurched to my feet and went into the bookstore.

First, I poked through the new releases, judging each book by its cover. Then I visited the little lounge and coffee area they had, bought a large cup of coffee and six different pastries, and found a table in a more or less central location where I could eyeball everyone coming and going. A tactical decision. People were less likely to catch me staring at them because it would be impolite to watch me eat.

A little social judo, that—using people’s good manners against them.

After finishing a peach danish and a bran muffin, I held off eating my next pastry—a huge creampuff, cold and heavy with cream. Needing something to read—part of my cover—I jaunted over to the newsstand to find something that wasn’t too boring:
National Geographic,
Scientific American,
and a science fiction magazine. Just the basics. The
Black Belt Magazine
I added on impulse would teach me some neat moves in case I was ever attacked by ninjas.

Looking for anything cool I’d missed, my gaze strayed to the newspapers. If my eyes could have bugged out, they would have, but probably they just widened a little. And with good reason: every paper had a story about Ernest Prescott’s house of horrors plastered across the front page.

I put the
National Geographic
and
Scientific American
back, grabbed three newspapers, and returned to my table.

USA Today
had a scary picture of Ernest on the front, captioned, “Truth or Scare?” It talked about the unidentified woman who’d been kidnapped and how she shot her way to freedom. It covered the wild parties Lana and Ernest threw at the mansion, and the cultish following that had sprung up since his first book,
Clench
, had hit the shelves.

What I found most interesting were the eleven bodies found decomposing in the mansion’s oversized septic tanks. Each news source confirmed the FBI was running DNA on the remains. One of the corpses had been fresh and easily identifiable—a security guard working for Lana Sandway named Sean Galloway. It turned out Sean and Brian had been ex-military security specialists who’d done mercenary work overseas, possibly for third-world dictators.

The press spent a lot of time focusing on reports of a “sex pentangle”—the phrase of the week, repeated in all three newspapers—between Sean, Brian, Lana, Ernest, and rising MMA star Jacob Sandway. The kinky pentangle rumors and the connection to Jacob’s father allowed the press to spread the sleaze so thin it covered and tainted everything. One paper went so far as to suggest it had really been a “sexagon” before the rich man’s death. Other than the names, almost nothing resembled the truth I’d experienced.

Recalling the bizarre events at the mansion, which to me seemed like only yesterday and would for as long as I existed, I suddenly didn’t feel like eating my last creampuff. I ate it anyway, though, because wasting food is a sin.

I paid for my magazines, and a book I snagged on the way to the checkout line, and left.

The mall had a theater, but
Sliced
wasn’t playing on any of the screens. Taken down, most likely, as an outward display of respect for the victims, though I doubted the self-censorship applied to online video sales or books.

It was a weird feeling, being the center of the nation’s collective astonishment. A real mover and shaker, I was. You line ’em up and I knock ’em down. A dangerous feeling, and faintly intoxicating.

I’d always thought serial killers left clues behind to see their names in the paper, to feel like big men and watch the world dance. Though that was obviously still true for many of them, I sensed an additional reason. In a weird way, knowing all those people were out there thinking about me and what I’d done at the mansion, I didn’t feel so alone.

“I’m
not
a serial killer,” I stated firmly, then glanced around to see if anyone heard me.

At some point in my wandering from store to store, I found myself in an open section of the mall on the ground floor occupied by an enormous jungle gym, safely contained with thick netting to keep kids from toppling out.

If I’d grown up with a jungle gym like that, who knows where I’d be today? All that self-actualization and delirious joy. Maybe I would have lived past my first broken heart and become a movie director like I’d wanted. But then Denise and her baby, and all those other people over the years, wouldn’t be alive today.

Out of nowhere, the jungle gym offered up an altogether different sort of actualization, though very little joy.

In 2004, a man named Gerald Ross had been tried on multiple counts of possession of child pornography, counts of felony child molestation, charges of sexual misconduct with a minor, contributing to the delinquency of a child, aggravated sexual assault and, as if it were somehow on par with those other crimes, obstruction of justice.

Following the trial, after weeks of argument on both sides, Gerald beat most of the charges. But even his incredibly lenient judge, roundly criticized for siding so often with the defense, couldn’t rescue him from one of the counts of possession of illegal porn—because Gerald had been an active participant in the one picture the prosecution managed to rescue as admissible. That one picture should have been enough to nail Gerald on a molestation charge, but the child—a little girl, about eight years old—couldn’t be found.

After that, an expert witness said
this
little girl had never existed, that
this
picture had been doctored. No other pictures were examined by the expert because the defense proved (with the judge’s help) that the prosecution had severely botched the chain of custody.

Before the trial, Gerald had been something of a celebrity in his hometown. He’d had a kids’ television show called
Gerald’s House
on a local station.
Gerald’s House
featured puppets, games, singing, educational skits like on
Sesame Street,
and prizes for lucky kids who wrote in with answers to his weekly question: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” When his show got picked up for syndication,
People Magazine
called him “the next Mr. Rogers.”