Famished - Meghan O'Flynn (learn to read books TXT) 📗

“His wasn’t. It was the girl we talked to there, a” —he ran a finger down the page— “Hannah Montgomery.”

Shit. Since meeting Hannah at the shelter, Petrosky had been wrenched from sleep night after night, sheets soaked through with sweat. Each nightmare was the same: a trail of blood leading him to a field where he came upon Julie and Hannah, arms around each other, throats slit. Fuck it; he wasn’t going this time—seeing Hannah was the last thing he needed. His brain was already hazy enough from the midnight shot of liquor he’d used to lull him back into a tortured sleep.

Petrosky slipped out of the room, Morrison scrambling after him.

“Who’ve we got that can go to Montgomery’s place?” Petrosky said.

“Boss?”

“She’s not a suspect, Morrison. We don’t need to do recon on the bereaved.” Their shoes echoed along the cement hall. A breeze blew down from the open ceiling.

Morrison stopped walking. “But—”

Petrosky’s footfalls were heavy, angry. “We just need someone to let her know what’s going on, keep an eye on her. I’m going to follow up this afternoon after we check out the apartment building and get a little background on Campbell.”

On Campbell. And on Hannah Montgomery, the girl who knew two of the victims, one intimately. She had to know something, even if she wasn’t aware of it. Petrosky pushed away an image of Hannah’s wide, frightened eyes. She wasn’t as ignorant as she pretended to be.

She was in danger. And she knew it.

The apartment manager was a wiry man who looked to be in his sixties, though time may have just been remarkably unkind. Dark brown khakis and a button-down shirt hung from his gaunt frame. His shiny skull was speckled with patches of brown age spots, some of which looked too dark not to be malignant.

“Detectives? I’m Samuel Plumber.” His thin lips parted to reveal teeth the same yellow as the whites of his eyes. Liver failure, perhaps, and yet he was still wandering the halls of this shithole.

Petrosky and Morrison followed him into a tiny office. The room was messy, but in a neglected way, not a busy way. The particleboard desk was piled high with folders and crumpled papers, the wastebasket overflowing. No photos, no coat hook, no boots in the corner. Petrosky wondered which unit Plumber lived in, or if he lived there at all.

On the wall above the desk were two small television screens above three VCRs. The recording equipment looked as old as the desk and the cracked vinyl chair, though a crocheted afghan slung over the back of the chair appeared relatively new.

Plumber sank into his seat, and Petrosky and Morrison crowded in behind him to look at the television screens. “I tried to get them as close as I could to what you were looking for. You’re lucky you called when you did; I reuse these tapes every three days.”

“We’ll be taking the tapes with us.” Petrosky squinted at the grainy images. One screen showed a stairwell, and the other, the mailroom right outside Plumber’s office.

“Is that him?” Petrosky asked as a dark-haired man sprinted down the stairs.

Plumber nodded. On the other screen, the man emerged from the stairwell into the mailroom and disappeared from view in the direction of the front entrance.

“He’s in quite the rush,” Morrison said.

Plumber stayed silent. He pushed a button, and the clip froze on the empty mailroom.

“What about the outside of the building?” Petrosky asked.

Plumber shook his head. “I just keep an eye on things in here. I expect the cops to take care of things out there.” He picked up another tape. “I did find some with his girlfriend, though.” But he made no move to insert the tape into the VCR.

“Problem?”

Plumber looked up at Petrosky’s question. “It’s just that she seems like such a good girl, and—”

“Mr. Plumber, Ms. Montgomery is not a suspect at this time. We just need to put together a chain of events for the evening. This was the last place Mr. Campbell was seen alive.”

Plumber pursed his lips. “I must admit, he was trouble. I got calls about him yelling and carrying on all the time. Even yelled at other tenants in the hallway.”

“He yell at his girlfriend?”

“Yeah. One time, someone heard glass breaking or something, and I went up there. She said she dropped a bowl. But ain’t no reason to cry over a bowl.” Plumber sniffed and turned back to the screens. “That boy didn’t do anything good for anybody, from what I could see.”

If Campbell was a shithead, that could be the beginning of a motive. But the girls? It didn’t feel right. The set of Plumber’s mouth was off as well, stubborn, almost defiant, not a trace of regret. Petrosky’s back stiffened. “Mr. Plumber, are you implying that Mr. Campbell deserved to die?”

Plumber looked up at him, his eyes earnest. “No, sir. It’s just that I don’t know of anyone who would be worse off at having lost him.”

The tapes showed Hannah rifling through the mail, then fleeing up the same stairwell that Campbell had run down several minutes later. She had cried on the metal stairs for what seemed like an eternity before going back inside her apartment.

Petrosky was not sure what to make of her actions, but seeing her broken up like that tugged at a tender place in his stomach where this morning’s coffee was still trying to settle. He vowed to think about it later. Or never. For now, recon.

He and Morrison started at the top floor and worked their way down to the residents on the ground level. Many of the apartments were empty this time of day, and Morrison used his notepad to track who would need follow-up calls.

The few residents who were home were of little assistance. In one unit, a young woman in a white tank top and dirty jeans stared blankly at them until they thanked her for her time and left. In another apartment, an older woman with a set of reading glasses on her head and another set of glasses on a chain around her neck asked them four times who they were before shuffling off to her living room. Petrosky closed the front door for her.

“What do you think, Boss?”

“All it takes is one neighbor to hear something. This last floor won’t take too long to finish up, and then we’ll head out.”

“You think Campbell was killed by the same guy who killed our female victims?”

“Looks like it. But with the press leak on something like this, you never know if you’re dealing with a copycat. It’s not likely—but it’s possible. It happened once about twenty years back, some tweaker beating the shit out of dealers with a flathead shovel. Press got wind of some of the details, but not all, and a week later, we had a crack dealer beaten to death with a spade. Small differences, but enough to find the second guy and clear him of the first few crimes.”

“What about the first guy? The serial?”

“It’s probably still in the cold case file.”

Morrison pulled open the door to the ground level hallway. “It’s disconcerting that no one knew either Campbell or his girlfriend.”

“If he was roughing her up, that isn’t a surprise.”

“I got that. Sickening.”

“Life’s not all rainbows and surfboards, California.”

Morrison’s mouth tightened. Instead of responding, he rapped hard on a door.

The knob turned, the door opened. “What the hell do you want now?”

Petrosky balked and recovered.

Janice LaPorte wore a pink and yellow, flowered housedress that undulated around her thin frame like a pair of parachute pants. Her thin mouth was done up in a horrible shade of maroon.

“Ms. LaPorte.”

She frowned.

“We have a few more questions.”

She stepped aside. “Fine.” Her voice was as stiff as her shoulders.

Petrosky and Morrison followed her into a sparse, but clean, living room with flowered furniture in shades of green and orange, still covered with heavy-duty plastic furniture covers. The wooden coffee table was old but polished to a mirrored sheen. She waved them to the couch, and the plastic squealed in protest under their butts. Morrison pulled out his notepad.

She sat across from them in a wingback armchair with a lacy crocheted blanket draped over the headrest like a doily. LaPorte saw Petrosky looking at it and fingered a corner. “Made it myself.”

“It’s nice,” Morrison said.

Petrosky glared at him until he turned his eyes to the notebook. LaPorte watched the exchange with narrowed eyes.

“So, did you meet Ms. Montgomery here?” Petrosky asked her. “Pretty coincidental that you both live in the same building.”

LaPorte’s jaw stiffened. “No. We didn’t meet here.”

“What about—”

“Is this about that poor girl again? I haven’t seen anything since we last spoke.”

“Ma’am, this is about another resident of the building. A Jacob Campbell.”

“Hannah’s Jake?” LaPorte’s eyes hardened. Her voice was cold.

“He was found dead this morning,” Petrosky said.

Her left eye twitched, and Petrosky’s hackles rose.

“I…I had no idea.”

“Anything you can tell us about the night before last? Anything out of the ordinary with either Mr. Campbell or Ms. Montgomery?”

LaPorte shook her head. “Not that I recall.”