Connected, Unconnected - A Kelli Hench Mystery - Neverland Disorder Part 2

I hate the three in the morning calls. They're bad enough for normal reasons.

Answering for work just makes it that much worse.

For this one, though...

"Russ, I swear to God, if you got me out of bed for a party girl..."

"Trust me, Kelli. She didn't take the pills on her own."

I plead insanity due to lack of sleep. Don't get me wrong, I always take
the side of the corpse, especially when its a girl who looks like she's still
young enough to have borrowed her mom's clothes for a night out.

It's just that I'm not usually on the list for catching these cases.
Not when they look so obvious.

Like Ginny Baciagalupe's untimely end was supposed to look. Party girl,
almost expensive black evening outfit, more on the high business end of the
rack, not the high end trashy section of Macy's. Curled up in the corner
of an almost expensive hotel room, one of the new downtown hotels that's
come in in the past few years with the new arena.

Pills on the bedside, trails of what we're sure will test out to high grade
cocaine on the marble counters in the bathroom. The usual set dressing.

No condoms.

Girls' night out, maybe?

"Ok, Detective Ortiz, Detective Hench, here's how we got here." Officer
Shay Jackson brought me back to the moment. "The night desk manager clues
to the fact that Ms. Baciagalupe should have checked out at noon. She told
me and Officer McCall they'd have just charged her card for another night,
but the place was filling up and they needed the room. Apparently Prince
played the Toyota Center last night, and they'd booked the room for another
guest."

I wondered if Russ had already heard the spiel. I also wondered if maybe
I should pay more attention to who's coming through town. It's not like I'd
have all that many more chances to go see his Purple Majesty play live.

I focused back in on Jackson. "The maid couldn't get into the room with her
pass key, so the manager had to open the deadbolt. That's when we got the call."

I wondered how far into the room they got before they noticed. Ginny wasn't
very big, five foot nothing. I stepped back to the door. "Do you know if the
lights were on when they came in?"

Officer Jackson tilted her head at me, then radioed her partner. McCall was
downstairs with the manager. McCall answered back almost immediately. We all
listened to him over Jackson's squawk box on her hip. "She says the desk lamp
was on, she turned on the light at the door switch, and that's when they saw her."

I had it in my head. Peel away Ortiz and Jackson, the impatient tech
team standing in the hallway behind me, turn down the lights...

Yeah. Black outfit, corner of the room, probably at first the maid and the
manager would have seen just a pile of clothes. Turn on the overhead lights,
keep walking...

I moved next to the dresser with the tv on it. "McCall, was the tv on, the
radio, anything like that?"

A couple minutes, then his static-filled answer. "No, ma'am. Just the one
light, nothing else."

Ortiz waved at me, like he wanted me to keep going while he eased out into
the hallway to talk to the techs.

God, I hate early morning. Maybe I should have stopped for a coffee downstairs.

Instead, I bent down where I was at. Then even further, 'til I could get a
good look at the floor between me and the body. What's missing?

"Shay, Roger, did anybody pick anything up? Pills, bottles, anything at all?"

She probably shook her head, until she realized I couldn't see her from where
I was. "No ma'am. McCall?"

He took the time to ask the manager, not just going with the automatic
response. But he said the same thing.

"Uh-huh. Shay, see any pills, other than what's on the nightstand?"

The nightstand, the empty pill bottle and cap sitting next to it. Officer
Jackson stepped around behind me, craned her neck as best she could to see.
"No ma'am. The pill bottle on the stand there, and there's what looks like
cocaine on the counter in the bathroom."

I put my hands down first, then laid my head on the floor so I could look
under the dresser. Then I turned over and lifted the bedspread to look
under there.

Neither one of them were hiding anything but a couple dust bunnies the
cleaning crew had missed. Certainly not any pills.

Like the kind you'd spill if you were looking for a little fix. Or, the way
it often happened, the handful that got away when you were looking for that
one last, great big fix, the biggest hit of all.

Not what I'd expect, in other words. Where was the hesitation, the oops
before the big event?

Her face told me something else. "Is Russ back?"

"Yeah, Kelli, I'm here. You see it?"

Yeah, I saw it, them. The story that Russ had read to say that she hadn't taken
the pills all on her lonesome. I resisted the urge to reach for her face, to
turn her head back and forth to read the story complete. Not that I needed to.

The bruises on each side of her jaw gave mute testimony.

Bruises. I mimed holding her chin, forcing her head back, the other hand
holding the pills to force down her throat...

She should have fought. I moved in close now, close enough to see the smudges
in the foundation on her face, the smears of her makeup matched the bruises.
And the stress marks, down each side of her throat.

Push them down her throat, hold her head in place with the one hand, massage
her throat with the other, force the reflex...

"Did the coroner's team do anything yet? Are we free here?"

Mary Sullivan stuck her head in from the hall. "We got our pictures, Detective,
and the coroner team's been in for their initial exam. Liver temp, rigor,
she's been there since about yesterday morning, almost twenty-four hours
now."

Her face, the part I couldn't see, would wait. I went for her hands first.
Turn them over, no strain marks, no tearing under the skin.

No blood under the nails cut just short? "Did you chew your nails, Ginny?"

I think she did. Chewed, but not so much that she couldn't keep them neat.
Just long enough, if she'd fought, she could have gotten purchase enough.
Where was the fight?

Time to look at the pill bottle. "Adderall."

High-tech speed for the smart set. Controlled high, barely legal if she had a
scrip, and there were always doctors ready to help someone else find that
little kick. "Maybe she kept her fingernails short for a more practical
reason."

"What's that?"

"Maybe she spent time at a keyboard. Do we know anything about her yet?"

We're not too far removed from the time when the only answers that question
would have provided were from a driver's license. But the Web giveth plenty,
whether we want it to or not. "Online profile says she's a college student,
computer science and math."

That may matter, later. For now, Ginny's body is more immediate. Hmm.
"Hey, Mary? Can we get that coroner's tech in here for a minute?"

The tech looks barely older than our victim.

"I need you to open her mouth for me."

He's pure nerves, getting his gloves on, then the forceps. I wait behind
him, far enough so I'm not looming, nor blocking his light. When he gets her
jaws apart, little by little, that's when I lean in, pocket flashlight in
hand. "Ah, now there you go."

There are a handful of pills stuck in her throat, a dissolved mess on
the back of her tongue. I stepped back so Sullivan can take a picture with
the good camera.

My mind wanted to go back to the immediate, the focus. Run through how it
happened, what she did. How she got here. So I let it.

She's stoned, drunk, maybe...

"Russ, can you see anything on her social media that's health related?"

"Not really. Well, unless you count the American Diabetes Association. She's
got links to them on her list."

Diabetic? "Mary?"

"Got it, Kelli." Suitcase in the closet, handbag on the table in the corner.
Pocket insulin injectors, a couple in the bag and a couple more in the little
suitcase.

Diabetic shock?

I step back to the bedstand to check the obvious. The label on the
bottle's scratched, worn. The Adderall part's clear enough, already saw that,
but where's the name?

The address I can make out, it matches Ginny's address on her license. But
the name's been worn away too much for me to read. The date on the bottle's
way off, the prescription filled a year ago.

"Russ, maybe there's a roommate?"

Not that she has her girl listed as a roomie on the profiles. But the inference
is easy enough. Russ is on the phone as soon as he's confident we're not
sending McCall and Jackson's compadres to an empty apartment.

Out of date prescription... "Hey, Russ? We're gonna need to go through that
apartment. And with the roommate's cooperation, if she's up to it."

The look he gave me said it all. He rolled his eyes, but he told dispatch
to have the officers hold tight and be ready to meet us there. "How long,
Kelli?"

It took us another hour or so to finish up in the hotel room. Not that I found
anything else that stuck out to me, but I don't always get the chance to
go over the scene myself. Usually, I'm stuck reading secondhand reports.

After leaving the room to Mary and her crew, we stopped at the desk on the
way out.

"No ma'am, she was the only one listed on the registration. She booked the
room last week, just for last night and done." The night manager shrugged.
"A conference, a concert, we get a lot of people like that, take a room for
a night or two so they don't have to get back on the freeway."

I ignored what I knew, or what I thought I knew, while I let the car follow
along behind Russ. I needed to enter the apartment on neutral ground, no
biases.

Two of the department's finest were waiting for us. Good thing, otherwise
we'd have been stuck calling somebody to let us through the gate.

"When you were in college, did you live in a place like this?"

I rolled my eyes. "Best I could do until I graduated was sharing space with
five in a three bedroom house in Montrose. You?"

Russ shook his head. "I lived at home as long as I could. Only way I could
scrape the tuition."

The skyrise was new, ish. Money, developers moving inside the loop,
chasing the new imports and their relatively good paying jobs. I fought myself,
a surge of jealousy at this kid's parents and their money paying for a little
easier life than I'd had.

The roommate set us straight, once she got through a little of the
shock. "Ginny paid for this," she told us, waving at the apartment. "She
had some royalty money from Intel, she worked for them over her summers since
back in high school."

Royalties?

"Yeah, she's smart, she was on a chip design team she couldn't tell me about.
It was enough, with her scholarship, to get a good place."

Turns out, Ginny was a National Merit kid with a full ride. The computer
science and math was a double major, and still she'd had enough time, brains,
and luck to get her name on a patent with Intel on her summer breaks.

In other words, what the hell was she doing with a mouthful of amphetamines?

The roommate's name was Abigail. And that's where the interview hit the rough
patch.

"Oh, man, what am I gonna do? I can't afford this place by myself? And Christ,
who's gonna call her mom?" She broke into tears, and we almost lost her.

Russ was the one who brought her back to the immediate. He gave her something
concrete to work on.

"Adderall? Ginny didn't take anything like that, she couldn't. She was
diabetic, she really watched her food and everything."

"Abigail, how long have you been here, with Ginny?" Russ asked. He sat
across from her, close enough to be able to look her in the eye, but not so
close he'd intimidate her by accident.

She thought about it. "About six months or so. Since the start of the fall
semester. She's two years older, we were in band together in high school and
she told me the space was mine as soon as I said I was coming to U of H."

"Do you know who her roommate was, before you got here?"

She laughed. Well, half laughed, it turned into a cough because she was still
crying. "Yeah. I know who her roommate was." She stopped to wipe her face
on her sleeve. "The klafte, Ginny called her. The bitch."

"Sounds like quite a story," I said.

"You have no idea."

"But was she so nasty that Ginny wouldn't have met her for a night on the
town?"

Abigail shook her head.

But then. "Well, maybe." Now when she shook her head, I could see that Abigail
wasn't so sure. "Ginny could be awful forgiving. She trusted people, even
when she shouldn't have."

We went through the rest of it, the other questions. Boyfriends, debts.
I didn't push, and neither did Russ.

Whatever had happened, the girls were too modest, too ordinary. This case was
going to take some work, there was no use pushing Abigail hard up front.

Besides, we still had to call Ginny's parents.

That aftermath took a couple weeks to settle out. The parents, divorced and
on the sort of terms that meant we only ever saw Dad, or Mom, but not both
in the same room at the same time. Middle class, Dad was a non-degree engineer
at one of the plants on the ship channel, Mom an office manager downtown,
both of them still a bit shocked that their little girl had turned into a
pocket genius and made it to the full scholarship and paying for her own
apartment route.

All of them, parents and child, were telegenic. The story was too good for
the camera crews to ignore, so Russ spent a good part of his time babysitting
reporters. Patiently explaining, over and over again, that this wasn't a
crime of passion, there was no bloody gun, we were going to have to do real
detective work.

"But, whoever you are, wherever you are, we won't stop until we catch you."

The police chief liked that bit, so Russ didn't get the usual visit from the
higher ups, demanding action and results. Or, at least, something to say in
front of the cameras.

Of course, that meant I felt the pressure. Well, more like I put the pressure
on myself. But that's another part of working the sorts of cases I do, the
slow, difficult to solve ones. The ones you spend weeks, months,
years with family members and friends, quiet and desperate, still holding
out hope that this time, this call, will be the one that sets them a little
bit free.

Real detective work started with finding Ginny's former roommate.

"Leanna. I don't know her last name, only that she used to go to Rice."

As it turned out, Leanna didn't go to our local big name university; at least,
not any more. She got kicked out when one of the sociology professors had
to take out a restraining order.

Swinging from a lady's gutters at three in the morning, stoned drunk and
naked, screaming bawdy limericks involving the professor's presumed bedroom
habits, is apparently enough to get even the more liberal side of academia
to cut you loose from the friendly confines of campus. Who knew?

After that, Ms. Leanna Reollic disappeared off the face of the planet. Well,
the official planet. But I wondered.

When I was in school, I'd known a few Leanna's, a few Ginny's. In our little
world, the crazy, the weird, the outcasts, at least when I was that age,
always seemed to drift to one particular area of town.

Was the Montrose District still home to our little tribe of nitwits? Or, well,
their kids?

As it turns out, yeah, in between the new stores, the new restaurants, the
outer skirts of the same deep pocket development programs on each side of
Montrose, there were still a few places for the lost ones.

An old house here, a dive bar there. Not the places the hipsters came to when
they needed a new place to discover. Nope.

The places where the lost went to because they could find nowhere else to go.

And, the places where a cop stuck out like a sore thumb. It took me a couple
days, afternoons wandering from place to place. But I found her, in a
rambling barn of a house just across the street from Numbers. It had been
a bar, cafe, used bookshop, a rotating cast of ready to be bankrupt businesses
on the ground floor, for as long as I could remember.

The upstairs rooms rented by the month, if you knew who to ask and could
hang on through whatever level of noise this month's tenant downstairs brought
to the party.

No one there knew Leanna Reollic by her given name. At best, she was the
madwoman who lived in the attic space, coming out only when the party at
Numbers ramped up to her level of engagement.

"Huh. She's the house drug dealer?" Russ had the same instinct I did.

But, as best as I could tell, she wasn't. "Not that they'd own up to it, if
she was. But they didn't get nervous when I asked. They were, well..."

"Amused?"

"That's it. They've got a ghost in their attic. And she's not Casper, or
even Beetlejuice, so they were happy to tell me some stories."

The stoner, the owner's nephew in charge of collecting the rent and keeping
the noise below arrest levels, told me Leanna once spent a month in the attic
without coming out at all. The nephew had even put threads, pieces of hair,
on the door to see if she was sneaking out when he wasn't around.

"It got to the point where I wondered if I needed to call you guys, maybe
she'd died in there. But I banged on the door, and she screamed at me to go
away, so I just let her be."

"Is there a bathroom in there?"

"Half, a sink and a toilet. Half fridge and a microwave, too." He shook
his head at that. "I guessed she was like one of those guys in Japan, the ones
who never leave their apartments, have you heard of them?"

A booklady, a cat, and her collection of costume jewelry from Ren Faires across
the land lived in the only two bed apartment in the place. More expensive
than the one bedrooms, she told me, but at least it gave her a place to
keep the cat box.

And it was the first room their upstairs ghost passed getting down from the
attic.

"She comes and goes a lot more than the others know. I get half her packages
from Amazon, but she needs fresh stuff. She usually goes down to HEB, first
thing in the morning while the rest of the house are still sleeping it off."

I'd figured something like that. Much as the rumored ability of Amazon or
their competitors to deliver fresh groceries might seem like living the
dream for the wired set, it had yet to pay off in reality.

But something else the booklady said... "What kind of packages?"

"Her medicines, mostly. Mail-order pharmacy importing half their stock
from Vancouver, it's half price or better."

"What do you do with the packages?"

"Leave them in front of her door. No one else goes up there, so they're pretty
safe."

Russ and I were drinking coffee in his office. Unlike mine, he worked his
tail off to clean the desk and keep his notes organized. He even had the
drawer where he kept his working case notebooks, the big yellow legal pads,
organized, so he could pull the Ginny book out and lay it on his desk while
we were kicking ideas around.

So, I saw it on his face, first, the realization. The faint connection, and
then he scrambled to go back through his notes, looking for the other half of
the memory.

"Adderall, an old prescription with Ginny's address on it."

"And Abigail told us?"

"Ginny was diabetic, and disciplined about it. To the point where she watched
anything else she took like a hawk so it wouldn't interfere with her
insulin." He flipped a couple more pages, scanning for anything else that
might jump out from his chicken scratch shorthand.

When he confirmed his memories of the case, he leaned back in his chair,
stared at the ceiling. "So, what do we do next? We don't really have enough
to swear out." He rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands. "Not for any
of the judges I know."

I ignored the implied question. My cases don't usually have the immediacy
of what Russ works on, so the judges in town are even more inclined to make me
do it right, cross every "i" and dot every "t".

Instead, I smiled and hit him with the obvious. "When's the last time you went
clubbing, Russ?"

I wish I was an artist. I'd hang a picture of the look on Russ's face right
then in front of the whole department, so everybody could go to work and get
a laugh in before the day starts. Sadly, I'll just settle for the memory. It
was pretty much the book definition of incredulous.

Not that I meant we were gonna get dolled up for a night on the town. Imagine
Russ in tight pants and a silk shirt... No, just no. And I don't want to
admit how long it's been since I dug out a skirt on purpose.

But we were going to hide in Numbers, and wait for the ghost across the street
to show up.

The architecture of the place lends to it. There's three bars, main room,
back porch, and upstairs. The upstairs bar isn't supposed to be an observation
deck.

It just works that way in practice. From memory of my days going in and out
of there on a regular basis, we like to pretend that we don't ogle each other
like the straights do.

But it's only pretend. Numbers is the place where the Doors' "People are
Strange" is the most descriptive song available; it's the place where everyone
meets, the borderland. Gay, straight, black, white, club kids and cowboys.
Wherever any group rubs against another, Numbers is the safe space to meet
and pretend.

A fairy dances through occasionally. But she's inviolate, the most protected
person in the room.

Everyone else is vulnerable. By choice, it's the only place most of them get
to be themselves. To the point where leaving, going back out into the real
world, is shock enough that none of your new friends will protect you from it.

In the end, we spent three days, nights, sitting in the upstairs bar, waiting
for our ghost to come visit the borderland. The bar, the barkeeps and the
waitstaff, knew we were there. We'd warned them all, aside from the fact that
we stuck out.

But sticking out was normal here. There's always a handful of observers
wandering the floor with a look of "I cannot believe these people actually
exist" on their face. That we were the suits who kept coming back three days
in a row was unusual, but not really unprecedented.

When I was a kid running those floors, we were part of a tenure case for
a sociology professor up at U of H. She spent a month watching, recording,
thinking about us, and then wrote a textbook about the experience and her
conclusions. From what I understand, it's now given out for the therapists
getting their grad degrees, part of their standard curriculum for helping
parents understand how to deal with kids who are just slightly off bubble.

These days, it's the same crowd but not. Russ knew about Numbers, more from
reputation than experience, but he'd been in and out enough not to be too
caught up in people watching.

She came in to "Redemption Song", on the third day, just after one in the
morning when the bartenders were getting geared up to run people off. That
last mad rush with last call looming.

We'd have missed her, except for the part where she was dressed up like
a member of the Queen's entourage, and she'd only stopped in for a drink
with the peasants as a way to while away the pleasant hour.

I mean, evening gown, hair done up in a pearl net with ringlets artfully
turned, a hint of a veil suggested even, opera gloves, the whole works. It
was as though she were expecting to make a performance.

I saw her first, but I couldn't quite believe what I was seeing. After a
few minutes, I managed to pick up my mind and turn it back to the printout
of her old Rice ID on the table in front of Russ. Like half a dozen other times
over the past couple hours, I leaned over, just to make sure.

And there was no question. "It's her, Russ, just over there."

"What's she wearing?" he naturally wondered.

"Don't worry, you won't have any problem picking her out of the crowd." I had
to give him warning, at least a little bit.

He giggled, shook his head. "She dresses up just like my granddaughter."

This case was back a few years ago, six years before we met Peter Pan. Back when
Russ only had one granddaughter. I think Elena was about four, maybe five
at the time, still into the dressing up like a fairy princess stage.

"Let's just hope we don't have to dress you up to match," I said.

I heard the chuckle, then the scrape of his chair.

We both knew from the outfit she was wearing that approaching Leanna directly,
in the middle of the end of night crowd at Numbers, was a mistake. Instead,
we just headed across the street.

We had the advantage of knowing where she was going home to. No sense not taking
it.

Looking back at it, both now and during and after her trial, I wonder if she
knew. Who told her? Abigail, the booklady?

Hell, the stoner nephew. I'd lived in similar places, I knew how protective
people were, the little culture that formed.

The evening gown was her armor; she performed her part, and we performed ours.
It was after two in the morning, after the parking lot behind Numbers cleared
out, and the remnants of her audience had flown off to the House of Pies or
Taco Cabana or whatever other all nighter was open for the haggard and wound
up.

She didn't invite us into her attic. She sat, contrary to the gown, two
steps up from the bottom of the stairs, me a step or two up, Russ a step
down from her. We ran through it, why we were there, why we suspected her
hand in Ginny's death.

She admitted it. Oh, not in detail, and not enough either of us would have
felt comfortable swearing to it in court, but it was enough that we stopped
her, gave her the Miranda, then waited.

"I loved her. I hated her. Why did she kick me out, and then call me, email
me?" Leanna was confused, hidden away behind her attic door.

I could sympathize. When the lawyers started in on their battle, and the D.A.
put together his package for the judge, I got the chance to read the emails
Leanna was talking about.

Ginny was gentle, but she was clear. Whatever Leanna had thought was going on,
Ginny wasn't interested. Ginny's only mistake was, she didn't realize when Leanna had
gone from heartbroken to something more, something committed to the lefthand
path. Ginny was too young? No, but too trusting for sure.

The jury recognized it; even the D.A. didn't complain too much when the defense
found an expert to point out how deep into herself Leanna had crawled. "Will
she ever come out? Most likely, no."

Committed to an institution for life was the jury's say, and the judge agreed.

Why am I thinking about Leanna, when I'm in the middle of chasing Peter Pan?

Because, as it turns out, I'm on my way to interview Leanna again. Something
sticks out in my mind, about Peter and his Neverland approach.

I think he's part of the Numbers crowd. I think Leanna might have heard of him.

I fear that I know him.