thing in my room.
I parked up the road and watched the house. It was two-storied and gabled, painted a charming yellow.
The dream had begun to wear away. It felt distant and unknowable. I didn’t know why I was here. I was trying to reconnect to something I didn’t want to be connected to in the first place. But the only way to learn what might have been going through Collie’s mind, if he had smoked Becky, was to start with her. I wanted to look at home photos. I wanted to get a sense of her. I didn’t know what I wanted to do.
“Jesus, what the fuck?”
I started my car. I felt like an idiot. I was about to pull away, when the mother came out of the house, followed by the father. Their names were in the file but I didn’t feel the need to check. They were both professionals, dressed in proper business suits, holding briefcases. He had oned рowe a power tie and she wore a skirt that emphasized her lovely legs. He was eating a cruller and trying not to get any sugar on his lapel. She sipped coffee. He finished in three bites and popped the code into the garage keypad. The door slid up. Inside was a two-year-old Lexus. The Clarkes said a few words to each other and climbed into the car together. She was behind the wheel. The train station was ten minutes away. They probably both worked on Wall Street within a block of each other. They’d take the LIRR into the city and sit side by side doing the
The front door slammed again. A nine- or ten-year-old girl carrying a backpack hopped off the tile stoop, followed by her teenage sister. Sixteen or seventeen and tall, nearly six foot. They walked over to the car and spoke to their parents but didn’t get in. Mom and Dad waved and pulled out. The garage door closed. The sisters started walking together toward the corner bus stop. The teenager had no book bag, which made me wonder if she was a troublemaker at school, sitting in the last row, popping gum and sneering. Her little sister ran ahead, and she put an extra step in her stride. They both had black hair, shoulder length when it wasn’t splayed and hooked by the breeze.
The Clarkes had a first-rate security system. I had the right tools for the job but it would take me a while to trip the system. It looked like I wouldn’t need them. The back door was ajar.
Even after losing one daughter, they left the door open. She might’ve been killed in a park but they should’ve learned something about safety precautions. I shook my head.
I moved fast through the house. For the first time in my life I felt like an intruder. Scoring a place was one thing, but nosing around, being a snoop, hunting through the belongings of the dead, it somehow felt more corrupt.
I hit the master bedroom. Clarke had a.45 in his nightstand drawer. It was loaded. I thought that was a good thing. He might not have time to unlock the piece from a safety box and snap in the clip if someone tried to take his other daughters from him. My respect for Mr. Clarke went up a hair, even if he was a stupid bastard for leaving the door open.
There were three other bedrooms in the home. One was clearly the little girl’s. It looked like a holdover nursery. There were block letters around the mirror, spelling out SHARON. Pink walls and white bookcases full of dolls. But she was getting old enough to assert herself. There were posters of the latest movie stars and a couple of boy bands. Beside her bed was a shelf full of paperbacks. She liked those ’tween vampire romances that I used to read to Dale. I recognized several of the titles.
Branching off from the end of the hall were the other two bedrooms. They were damn near identical. I couldn’t tell which was Rebecca’s and which was the other sister’s. The parents not only kept Becky’s room the same, they still dusted and sprayed air freshener.
Lots of prints of famous artwork on the walls. Looked like one or both of the sisters were interested in the likes of Manet, Jackson Pollock, Dali. I could check the dressers and become a fucking panty sniffer, see which one’s underwear smelled fresher, but I already felt too ashamed. When even a thief feels embarrassed, you know something is way out of line.
I started with the room on the left. There were no photos. I didn’t know what else I was looking for. Some connection between Rebecca and Collie? Between her and some boyfriend? Gilmore figured it was always the boyfriend.
The cops would’ve been through the place five years ago. They would’ve searched the drawers and found a diary or anything else that might’ve given them a lead. I stuck to the most likely places for a hidden cache. Most teens had one. A secret stash of cigarettes, joints, porn, boosted cash, self-taken nudie shots, or anything else they wanted to hide from their parents.
I checked the floor and ceiling of the closet. The air vent. The molding in the corners of the room. I pulled out drawers in case any of them had false bottoms or had been shortened to leave room behind them. I scored when I spotted a loose faceplate on one of the wall sockets.
The wiring had been disconnected. There was a cubbyhole about five inches deep. Inside was a dime bag of marijuana, half a bottle of what looked like Oxycontin, and several other bottles of Valium, Xanax, and Zoloft. The shit was serious. There were also stolen sheets of empty scrips. I pocketed a couple of them. You never knew.
The pot was skunkweed but it was fresh. This was the seventeen-year-old’s room. She liked to mellow out and did what she had to do to follow her buzz and blunt her anxieties. After what she’d been through, I didn’t blame her. But she was overdoing the self-medication. Too many antidepressants could have opposite the intended effect.
I crossed the hall to Becky’s room, hating myself. I felt like a total fraud. Collie’s name was stuck in my teeth. I’d been in the house almost ten minutes. That was a lot of time to be inside. I scouted the likely hot spots, tried the outlets first just to see if the seventeen-year-old had picked up the trick from Becky. There was nothing anywhere.
“Who the fuck are you?”
I spun and the teenage girl was there in the doorway.
If someone comes in the door, you dive out the window. That was one of the basic tenets of being a thief.
Except that she had her father’s.45 trained on me.
They hadn’t been as careless as I’d thought. She was just walking her sister to the corner stop, waiting with her until the bus arrived. That’s why the door had been left open.
“Oh, hey there,” I said, propping a high-wattage smile in place. “I rang the bell. And knocked, but no one answered. The door was open. I’m Freddy of Freddy’s Fix-It. Seems like you’ve got some faulty wiring that your father wants me to check out.”
“The front door was locked. The back door was open.”
“Right,” I said. “See, I was calling out and I decided to come around the side of the house over there and-”
“Where’s your toolbox?”
“Oh, that’s in the truck.”
“So where’s your truck?”
“We didn’t have a flangella voltometer with us. Very important during electrical work, otherwise you can fry the frammistat. My partner left to go get-”
“Shove it. Who are you?”
“Everybody knows Freddy.”
She was pretty, or had been once. Now her face was thin and drawn, with dark steaming eyes and heavy frown lines across her brow and around her mouth. In ten or twenty years they’d be deep as knife tracks. At the top of her arm, the hint of a tattoo edged out from beneath her black T-shirt.eddрu can fry She was underage too. I wondered who this prick was that kept inking all these little girls.
She reminded me more than a little of Dale. The gun never wavered. It was a heavy piece of hardware. She held it with a two-handed grip, and the muscles in her forearms were tense and sharply defined.
I winced and waited for the screaming. I thought, Now Gilmore is really going to tune up my ass in a holding cell.
“I know you,” she said.
“Everyone knows Freddy of Freddy’s Fix-”
“No, I
I didn’t like the way she said it. There was rage there as well as anguish and an undercurrent of vengeance. I never wanted to be around someone who sounded like that, much less someone pointing a large-caliber weapon at
