Green Tea Page 20

  “Oh, it’s gonna rain.”

  “We can’t do nothing.”

  “Teagan, if we found it, then the professionals can find it.”

  “If they want to, but I’m beginning to think they don’t want to.”

  “Why?”

  “I have no clue.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Since it is the family that will pay the price, I think we should talk to Mom and Dad.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Do we go to them, or ask them to come to us.”

  “We always go to them, but this is something profoundly different. I think they should come here.”

  “Agreed. I’ll call Mom and see when they can come.”

  Teagan called Jessie to let him know she would be late. I called Mom and told her I needed to talk to her and needed her to come to my apartment. It was a rare request. She said she and Daddy would be here in less than thirty minutes.

  I looked around, saw the mess that is my home, the first time my parents have been over since AJ moved in and didn’t even bother to straighten up. Another rare event.

  When Mom and Daddy were settled on the couch with a cup of tea, Teagan and I did a tag team approach to fill them in on as many details as we had and how we got there.

  Teagan started, “We’re going to present this to you just like we would present it to a lawyer or the cops and we need you to be completely honest about what you hear. If we’re crazy, or wrong, or should just back away, we need you to tell us. If we need to go to the cops, or the FBI, or whatever, we need to know that too. Some of this stuff you probably already know, and I apologize if we are repeating something, but we’re going to go from top to bottom.”

  All she got was a nod of agreement. My parents were in listening to something important mode. They’re really good at that. Probably comes from all those doctor’s reports when my sister was sick. My parents can take it all in, process it, then ask really intelligent, cogent, and relevant questions.

  We explained all the background stuff. About Billy getting hoodwinked into having me work on Louis’s condo. About Louis’s car accident, the first time I went to the condo, about meeting Joe-the-cop, Louis’s one time partner, who was now christened Jerkface. I told them about Jerkface showing up at the condo, and then showing up at my apartment after I’d found the journals. I admitted to my parents that Jerkface sat on the couch they were now sitting on to read the journals with me.

  I looked over at Teagan. She gave me a look to continue.

  “Almost the minute I brought the journals back to this apartment to read things started getting strange but I didn’t know that at the time. The journals were ugly, but they didn’t tell me anything at the time. I’m not sure of the exact order things happened, I wasn’t writing it down, but as close as Teagan and I can come to it, this is what happened.”

  Teagan handed me the papers we’d been working on.

  “Jerkface started lying to me right from the start, but I didn’t know enough to know it was lies, and me, being me, I just took it at face value. First it was the journals. Then he said that he had a warrant, he used flattery, saying that my brilliant detective skills helped to figure out that Louis, Bernie and another lady that doesn’t matter for this discussion, all had the same three letters in their car tags and that he talked to other cops and that they thought I might be on to something. Since then I contacted a friend of mine that knows about math and he said that the chances of there being any connection between those three because of the tag numbers was basically the same as a random event. Jerkface is a cop and would have known that, so from the very beginning he was just playing me for a fool and I kind of thought he was, but since he was a cop and everything, I ignored my instincts.”

  Teagan said gently, “We need to stay on track.”

  “True. Sorry. So, anyway, Jerkface just started showing up at the apartment and at Louis’s condo. Seems like where I went, he went. When Teagan beat him up at the condo, he later said that his black eyes were caused by hitting the counter, but that doesn’t make much sense, who trips in spit?”

  My father’s eyebrows went up, but he didn’t say a word.

  “Anyway, so, Jerkface is showing up at the condo unexpectedly, or we caught him there by accident, and then he shows up at your house, and at the time, I thought he was at the cemetery, but now I’m thinking it really was his sister.”

  Teagan was getting frustrated, “You want me to do this?”

  “I told you to do it from the beginning.”

  “Fine. We split this whole problem into pieces. First piece is Louis. We aren’t sure how Cara ended up cleaning out his condo, but it seems that Billy was hoodwinked into contacting Cara, and she was hoodwinked into cleaning the condo.”

  “I already said that.”

  She gave me a look. I decided to let her do it her way. “Louis was a good guy. The ladies we talked to at the condo complex all agreed he was a good guy. He went out of his way to help them. He went out of his way to help the physical therapist who was trying to get him back in shape to get back to work, he was even nice to her brother. He donated a bunch of picnic tables to a group home. Cara went back through his bills this afternoon, and he made regular donations to worthy charities. He’d just renewed his life insurance for ten years. That doesn’t sound like a serial murderer to us, so we kept looking for more pieces.”

  Teagan flipped to the next page.

  “Then we have Jerkface. He seemed scary from the beginning. When he met Cara at the condo, he tried to intimidate her from the start. He showed up at this apartment uninvited, he probably ran her plates the first time he saw her at the condo, or since he’s the one that hoodwinked Billy, he might have already known where she lived. Either way, it’s obvious he’s okay with bending the rules when he wants something and just plain ignoring them when it works for him. Thinking back on it, he pushed and pushed Cara. At first, so that she would become more involved, then so she would back off. According to Steph, his fingerprints were not in the places they should have been at Louis’s. He claimed that he was working on an undercover police thing, but there’s no way. He got mad at Cara’s neighbor and started waving his gun around, the cops showed up but he was back on the street fast enough to break in and get run off by her neighbor again. He’s driving a Mini Cooper, which is expensive on a cop’s salary. He’s threatened Cara several times. At first he was subtle, but he got more and more aggressive and it all got more and more frequent. And before you get mad, Cara did try to get help from the very beginning. That first time that Jerkface showed up at her apartment she called dispatch and they told her that Jerkface was a well-respected cop. It’s not like she was a total idiot.”

  You know what they say, with friends like Teagan…

  She continued, “So, Jerkface had our attention. Cara and I were able to find a little bit about him on the Internet. Seems there’s a blog or a social network page or a website for just about everything these days. You just have to know where to look and be willing to see it. Jerkface has a few people mad at him out there. Mostly for things that pretty much tiptoe on the edge of something that would get him in trouble, but he never really jumped in the pool. Things like having a guy’s car towed. The guy claims that he was in an argument with his girlfriend and that Jerkface threatened to arrest him, but instead, towed his prized show quality car. Another guy said that Jerkface is known for harassing people in Old Town. A woman said that she rebuffed Jerkface, her words not mine, and she’s been getting tickets for all kinds of stuff ever since. We couldn’t find anything that would stick as abuse of power, but certainly a show of power.

  Mom leaned forward and poured herself and Daddy more tea.

  Teagan continued, “Jerkface’s sister is a problem. Her name is Kirsten Branden Gagnon. We heard on the news that she was taken out of Jerkface’s home when he was 12 and she was 10. We really couldn’t find anything about that; family court is usually confidential. We were able to find her high
school stuff, but other than a couple of comments by people from back then saying that they missed her for a few months here and there, nothing huge. She popped up on the radar again when she was about 18. She did a car commercial. We found a bunch of more recent stuff, all of it getting darker and darker. A poem she wrote for some contest. Entries on people’s social network pages. Nothing huge.”

  I think we were starting to lose Daddy. His eyes were starting to glaze over.

  “Then we found a picture of her in the newspaper from years ago. She was a bridesmaid at some girl’s wedding. That picture listed the name of the girl getting married. We started looking up anything we could find on the bride. We found the bride’s mother who had a different last name. We searched for information on the bride’s mother and found a picture of Jerkface’s sister with the bride’s mother and her own mother. That caption told us that Jerkface’s sister and her mother do not have the same last name. So then we did searches for Jerkface’s last name, and Kirsten’s last name, and her mother’s last name, and any and every combination we could come up with using all of them. We found it when we searched for Kirsten, a ‘B’ for Branden and her mother’s last name, Usha. My God Mom, look at this.”

  Teagan handed my parents copies of what we’d found.

  “The trail is so convoluted, no wonder the cops didn’t find it. What do you think?”

  “Well, Love, this might be the most disturbing thing I’ve ever seen.”

  Mom handed the pictures to Daddy.

  “You can tell some of those pictures are altered. She put the face of one person on the body of someone else. Not sure who or why. She has articles about some of the dead girls, but they would never show up in a search because she has blanked out their names or she strategically placed something over them so you can’t read it. It looks like an art project done for shock value. If we didn’t know there was a connection between her and those girls, if we hadn’t followed every twist and turn, we would have just written it off like the rest of the world did, just another angst ridden person throwing negative dregs of delusion onto the World Wide Web.”

  “Love, tell me, if this girl is as unwell as these papers suggest her to be, why would she leave this up on the Internet.”

  “We wondered the same thing. The only thing we can come up with is that she’s either so mentally damaged that she is unaware, or that she figured that no one would put her together with her dead mother. Oh, I forgot that part. Her mother has been dead since she was about 20.”

  “Still, it would seem a girl that has gotten away with so much evil for so long would be more care-filled.”

  “Well, we looked that up too. According to some professionals there comes a time that most murderers either feel confident because they have been successful for so long that they think they’ll never get caught or on some level they actually want to get caught.”

  I floated my theory, “I think everything was going along just peachy keen and then Louis started to do research on the murders because he just couldn’t stand to be away from police work. I think that it was an innocent random event, just like the matching letters on the car tags. I think it happens all the time and people just don’t notice because most random events never turn into something worth noticing. They’ve written books and movies about it, but until you experience serendipity, the power of random circumstances, you don’t really pay attention and even if you happen to notice, you figure it’s a onetime thing and never watch out for it again.”

  “I can agree with you there, Love.”

  “I think that there are girls in the journals that are unidentified, but that doesn’t mean that the police wouldn’t know about them, another stupid assumption I made because I don’t know what I’m talking about and I don’t know all the terms. I think Louis either was getting too close, or he confronted her, or maybe he confronted Jerkface, and it cost him his life.”

  My father asked, “So where does that leave the two of you?”

  “Nowhere. Cara and I have lots of theories, and they even make sense, and we can even kind of back them up, but we don’t have any real proof. We don’t know how to get proof and we don’t know who to trust once we have it.”

  “You can always trust family, Love. Perhaps it is time to call your brother. He is a police officer.”

  “We thought about that too. But while we were looking for things online, we found a whole bunch of issues with cops in this state, and we’re afraid that if he makes waves, then one night when he needs someone to back him up, they’re going to think about his idiot sisters, the ones that made trouble for Jerkface and anyone that has covered for him. They don’t even have to be bad guys. We aren’t bad guys and we helped the whackos. So some cop could have been doing the right thing, not knowing he was being used for the wrong thing, and the next thing he knows, his career is toast. Then where does that leave Rory? Backup-less.”

  “Love, I do not believe for a moment that the whole of the police department is corrupt. If there are even a few bad seeds, I would be surprised.”

  “Mom, it only takes one. Even if the chances are only one in a hundred million, I buy lottery tickets with odds worse than that and I fully expect to win. I can’t do that. I can’t take that chance. If something happened because of me I don’t know what I would do.”

  “Firstly, it is not because of you, you’ve done nothing wrong. Secondly, at the minute, we have no better option. Next, your brother is a full-grown man; you’ve no right to make his decisions, professional or otherwise. We should present this information to him. He has more knowledge than we; allow him the respect of making the decision for himself.”

  “That sounds completely reasonable. Mature even. When did this become policy?”

  “I keep telling you Love, you are not children anymore. Your father and I have done our job and we’ve done it well. We trust each of you to do what is best.”

  AJ called to say he was on his way home. When I explained what was going on, he said he was going to call Jessie and invite him out for a beer.

  My brother showed a short time later.

  My mother gave him a very succinct version of all that we’d rambled on about.

  He thought about it over a cup of tea.

  Having made his decision, he called someone else from the department and invited him over.

  Since that guy is not a member of the family, it was only polite to have something for him to nibble on.

  Teagan and I were making a quick trip down to the store on Benita and Benigno when running toward my car, I smacked full into my neighbor. He’d noticed the parade of people into my apartment and wanted to make sure everything was okay. We told him we had to go to the store but he was welcome to join us in the car and we’d explain everything or when we got back he could come on over to hear my brother explain everything to some guy he had coming over.

  I figure, after he’d been playing bodyguard all this time it was the least I could do.

  He decided to join us in the car. He locked his apartment door and smooshed himself into my backseat, even though Teagan offered to climb back there since she is a whole bunch smaller than he is.

  We went through the whole thing again, without visual aids, and waited for my neighbor to punch holes in our theory. All he did was shake his head, let out a little whistle, and say he’d like to see the pictures.

  By the time we got back to the apartment, Mom had set up a proper tea at the dining room table, and Daddy and Rory had collated all the papers we had produced throughout the day.

  A rather large older gentleman joined us. Rory explained that Erik Nylund was his training officer and that he trusted him one hundred percent. We then sat at the table and explained everything from the moment that Louis entered my awareness. We shared all of our ideas, theories, the facts as we knew them and the fears that we were putting Rory in a terrible situation.

  AJ and Jessie showed up about halfway through, leaned on furniture, and listened.

  Erik li
stened without so much as a question. When we were done, he took a very deep breath, leaned back, drank some tea, and rubbed his chin.

  We all sat in limbo, waiting.

  “I need to get this in front of the right person and I’ll tell ya why. It’s pretty clear you’ve done a great job of building your case, but the unfortunate part is this.” He pointed at the picture of Jerkface’s sister’s mother.

  I was completely perplexed, “I don’t understand.”

  “I can’t be positive, but I’m almost there. There is a big-shot lawyer in town. Lawyer by the name of Peter Magnar.”

  “Is he the Magnar, of Magnar, Wyatt and Strong?”

  “That would be him. If I’m not mistaken and I’m pretty sure I’m not, your murder suspect is the niece of Peter Magnar. I went to school with the SOB. That whole family is a piece of work.”