Smokin Seventeen

I’ll have to call in an exorcist before the union lets me build on this lot.”

“I need to download mail,” Connie said. “Does the bus still smell like bear?”

“No,” Vinnie said. “It smells like Mooner.”

I handed Connie my key. “You can use my apartment. Just don’t let Vinnie in.”

“Nice way to treat your relative,” Vinnie said. “You know, I gave you this job, and I could take it away.”

“You didn’t give me the job,” I said. “I blackmailed you into hiring me. And you’re not going to take it away, because you can’t find anyone else stupid enough to work for you.”

“Not true,” Vinnie said. “There are a lot of stupid assholes out there. And where the hell’s my bear? Why aren’t you tracking down my bear?”

“It’s on my list.”

Connie went to her car, Vinnie went back to the bus, and Morelli broke away from the knot of cops and forensic techs and walked over to me.

“This guy’s pushing his luck,” Morelli said.

“Vinnie said he was able to ID the woman.”

“Yeah. Vinnie and half the cops on the force. She got around.”

“Did she have a connection to Dugan?”

“Nothing apparent. She waited tables at Binkey’s Ale House. Divorced. No kids. Twenty-six years old.”

“Maybe this was a different killer.”

“Cause of death is the same. Dugan, Lucarelli, and Beck all had their necks broken. Dugan and Lucarelli were decomposed enough not to show a lot of detail. Beck had severe rope burns on her neck. Probably choked unconscious and then had her neck snapped.”

I felt a wave of nausea slide through my stomach.

“This guy is strong,” Morelli said. “It’s not that easy to choke someone, and Dugan and Lucarelli were big guys.”

I looked to the back of the property where Juki Beck had been pulled from the car. I know him, I thought. This monster. This serial killer. He’s moving among us, looking normal. He’s a shoe salesman, or a cop, or a gas station attendant.

“Why did he bring her here?” I asked Morelli. “I know the lot is shielded by Mooner’s bus, but it still seems risky.”

“This is the ugly part,” Morelli said.

“How could it possibly get uglier?”

“There was a note pinned to her shirt. It said For Stephanie.”

“I don’t understand.”

“That’s all it said. Two words. For Stephanie.”

TWENTY-ONE

I WAS ON MY BACK, looking up at Morelli through cobwebs, and my first thought was that the 7-Eleven victim had exacted revenge on me, and I’d been stun gunned. The cobwebs cleared, and I discounted stun gunning.

“What happened?” I asked Morelli.

“You fainted.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“I agree, but if someone sent me a dead woman I might faint, too.” He was down on one knee, bending over me. “Are you ready to get up?”

“I need a moment.”

“Don’t take too long. People will think I’m proposing.”

I slowly got to my feet. “Why me?”

“I don’t know. Have you been getting threatening letters or phone calls?”

“The only one threatening me is your grandmother.”

“Ranger had cameras working and apparently captured the drop. I haven’t seen the video yet, but I’m told the killer was covered head to toe. The interesting thing is he delivered the victim here in her own car.”

“Have you found the car?”

“Not yet. And if we don’t it’ll be following the pattern because we never found Dugan’s car or Lucarelli’s car. Disappeared without a trace.” He kissed me on the forehead. “I have to get back to the station. I want to see the video, and I’m going to run some names through the system. See if I can connect someone to you and Dugan. There are only a handful of people who know about this note, so keep it to yourself.”

“Ranger?”

“You can tell Ranger.”

Lula was standing by the bus, waiting for me. She was dressed in poison green spandex pants, five-inch leopard stilettos, a low-cut scoop neck stretchy lemon yellow shirt, and she’d had her hair done up in braids that made her look like she was wearing a giant spider on her head.

“Now what?” she asked.

“Another body. This one wasn’t buried. Just deposited.”

“We have a sick individual here. He’s killing too many people. He might even be over the legal limit for Trenton.”

For the sake of keeping the note secret I was trying to look calm, but I was actually very rattled. In a back corner of my mind there’d been a nagging thought that Vinnie or the bonds office might have been involved somehow. It never occurred to me that I was the connection. And pinning a note on a dead woman and addressing it to me as if it were a gift tag was hideously disgusting and beyond frightening.

“You look real freaked,” Lula said. “Are you okay?”

“I have problems.”

“Oh yeah? Like what?”

There was a laundry list, ending with the big one I couldn’t talk about. “For starters, I’ve got the vordo.”

“So you be a good time. What’s wrong with that?”

“I’m too much of a good time. It’s even more confusing than when I wasn’t a good time at all. And I think I might be getting a bladder infection.”

“A bladder infection’s no good. Maybe you should cut back.”

“I can’t cut back. I’ve turned into a sex addict. I get within a foot of Ranger or Morelli and I’m ready to go … and go, and go, and go, and go.”

“That’s a lot of going. I’m a retired professional, and it’d be a lot of going even for me. What you need are granny panties. You put on a big ol’ pair of ugly granny panties and you won’t be dropping your drawers no more. And even if you forget in the heat of the moment, and you pull your skirt up over your head, you’re not gonna see no action on account granny panties have a deflating effect on a man. Your man’s gonna be going unh ah, no way am I getting busy with a woman wearing granny panties.”

Call me crazy, but it made as much sense as anything else going on in my life. And it was better than thinking about Juki Beck. “Okay, sign me up. Where do I get granny panties?”

A half hour later we were at JCPenney, wandering around in the lingerie department.

“This is the perfect all-purpose store,” Lula said. “They got panties to fit any occasion. They got everything from thongs to granny panties and everything in between.” She picked a pair of pink cotton panties off the rack and held them up for inspection. “Now this is what I’m talking about. You don’t want to be seen in these panties. You have to turn the lights out when you put them on so you don’t even see yourself.”

“They look big.”

“Yeah, these suckers are gonna come up to your armpits. Try ’em on, and we’ll take ’em for a test drive. See if you want to hump anybody while you’re wearin’ these panties.”

I took the panties to the dressing room, tried them on, and checked myself out in the mirror. Not a pretty