Seven and One: Part 3 of the Neverland Disorder, a Detective Kelli Hench Mystery

He had to work to find them, but he didn't mind.

That's the thought that bubbled up to the top of my head. He has a goal, Peter Pan does, an idea. Archetypes? Maybe. Either way, he's chasing something beautiful in this fallen world, and so what if he's gotta work a little harder.

It's just part of the chase.

The setting, he's setting off his jewels. His Jewel? No names yet, no faces, free association works when I have the data, when I don't it's noise trapping me into a line of thought, dismiss it.

And get back into the roller derby, girl. Before I break an ankle.

Push, push push, elbows up and drive into the curve, dodge a knee, the hip and the bounce and the shorter gals trying their best to make the tall skinny one lose a step or lose a tendon or three.

It's a great way to spend an evening, and the beer at the end of the night tastes cold and wet, and well earned. By the time I get to the untaping, and the cataloging of new aches and bruises, I'm surprised mostly that the idea that had surfaced was still there. Waiting.

Russ was there, he'd brought Elena, his eldest granddaughter, to witness the mayhem. "Kelli, how you haven't ended up in the ER, I'll never know."

"Dumb luck, or maybe a little bit of skill?" I know what I look like out there, like a spider on ice skates. That's part of the thrill, though. Put a little mind and bodywork into it, stay away from the ladies with torque advantage, and I've got a good workout. And some anger management thrown in free.

Elena's face was lit up like a little Christmas tree. "Papa, can I do this?"

"Can you? Yeah, probably. Are you going to? Not while your grandmother has anything to say about it." He grinned, ruffled her hair and gave her a kiss.

She just shook her head and wandered off to talk to some of the other ladies.

"I don't think you'll stop her that easy, Russ."

"Yeah, we're in trouble there. Connie's never gonna let me live this down."

Or me. Consuela Ortiz is a wonderful lady. But if the two of us had managed to put her so far one and only baby girl into a mindset just this side of murder and mayhem, Connie wasn't going to be nice about it. "You could bring her along next time, give Elena the chance to convince her. And then you're not quite in the firing line."

"Yeah, I'll be sure and tell Connie you're the one to blame for this."

All heart, that Russ Ortiz. "Listen, have you been thinking about Peter Pan?"

He shrugged. But he didn't deny it. Six months gone, the press had stopped showing up. And the higher ups in the department had gone away with the coverage.

Leanna Ringham's parents were still involved. Quiet phone calls, once a week or so, they checked in with me or Russ, knowing there wasn't anything new yet. Needing the comfort of knowing we weren't giving up just because the noise and light of the lookie-loo's had moved on to the latest and greatest headlines.

There's a pace to these cases. The other fifty percent, the ones that don't get solved by the rules of thumb: boyfriends or girlfriends, money, debt. Bad times and bad connections and the obvious tracks to somewhere. We settle into the grind, waiting and hoping, and working every trace we can get our hands on. Even, no especially when we know the hints and traces won't pan out.

I knew Peter Pan wasn't done yet. Did he?

I didn't get the chance to let Russ in on my little epiphany, if that's what it was. He had his little tagalong to keep up with.

Elena had wandered through the rest of my team, and she'd run up against the one lady I'd have figured for "Least Likely To Put Up With Little Ones". Margaret Stimps, a tank on wheels, all elbows and knees and scars where she'd had those joints rebuilt as needed. Bottle blonde, I had not the foggiest clue what Maggie did for a living. Only that whatever the outside world was for her, on skates she was a tornado ready to descend.

She and Elena were thick as thieves when Russ came to claim his granddaughter. "Hey Papa. Looks like you brought us our next skater." Maggie held her hand out, and Elena slapped her palm down on it. "She's all ready to armor up and dive in with us next week."

Russ held his hands out for Elena to grab onto. "You ladies are trying to get an old man into trouble."

Maggie clapped her hand on his shoulder, than tweaked Elena's nose. "Uh-huh. Just remember, you're the one who brought her down to the river. It ain't our fault she dove in to get a drink." Our team bomber chucked her bags over her shoulders, smiled and waved at Elena one more time, and then headed for the exits.

I saw her again just about twenty-four hours later. Alone in her apartment, a spare little place with only a howling little Beagle puppy to mourn Maggie Stimps's passing.

Roger McCall was the officer who'd caught the first call. I got there before the crime scene crew had even unloaded their kit.

"Where's your partner?"

He shook his head. "Family trouble, she's off this week."

Life gets us whether we want it to or not. "Hope it's not that big a deal?"

"Her brother-in-law's stuck in the medical center, some kind of nerve issue they have to cut him open for."

He stood in the doorway, minding traffic until we had a quorum. Little apartment, one room studio, really, except they'd thrown up a wall or two. No one wanted to pay the extra rent.

Roger had the puppy leashed, at least.

"What's your little buddy think of this?"

"He's a lot better now, with someone to keep him company."

That part was the same story as Leanna Ringham, wasn't it? Puppy raises a racket, enough to get someone else, the neighbors maybe, wondering what was going on. A call to the uniforms, please come in and check the nice lady next door's ok?

And here we are. I knew the name, knew I'd be seeing a familiar face in a few minutes. The questions were necessary; they were also a way to hold off that moment when I turned her head my way. "What did the neighbors have for us?"

"Maggie Stimps. She's a coach at Cy-Fair, volleyball maybe? And she's on a roller derby team."

"Yeah. I know about that part. They say that's her only real hobby?"

He was holding the puppy, now. Absentminded petting, like a squirmy stuffed animal. "That's right, said during the season she's out with her kids until ten every night, up at the school or wherever, then the rest of the year she's here or at a derby."

"Any friends?"

"Nobody new. Said she broke up with her girlfriend a few months ago, other than that she's pretty quiet."

We took all her noise, I guess. Well, us and the volleyball team. I wondered who'd get that job, telling her kids. I didn't envy them, whichever one of the principals or coaches got the call.

I couldn't avoid it anymore. Time to see what Maggie could tell us.

No blood. That was the first thing. "How'd you know to call me in?"

"Look at her hands."

And her face. Blisters, loose skin and hair; burns, third-degree. Oil, maybe? A mass of blistered burnt patches on her hands, did she get burned at the stove, stumble, heart attack?

These burns, though. Blisters, skin peeling back halfway up her elbows, and her face was covered from her hairline to the base of her throat. Someone had thrown a pan full of hot oil onto her face, her hands. She'd covered her eyes, that's where her hands got it, the splashback found its way around the shield and onto the cheeks, forehead, chin.

I pulled the gloves on, then ran a finger along the back of her hands. Rubbed the residue that came away. Oil, slick, just a little.

They'd wiped her hands and face, after. There were a few threads from the cloth they'd used, clinging to her hair and the back of her wrists, along with bits and pieces of her burned flesh.

The place didn't smell of anything in particular. No burnt fry cook odor. And there were no other visible wounds. I didn't want to turn her, not with the CSI's coming up the stairs behind me. Time to check out the rest of the apartment.

Especially the kitchen.

Roger and his little furry buddy watched me head that way. "Was I right?" he asked me.

To call me in, he meant.

Unfortunately, yeah, he was right. Maybe it was just an accident, that's all.

Except for there being no pans in sight. No oil spill on the floor, no hot burner left on. No sign of panic because her evening meal had turned to a nightmare.

So. Best case, someone had cleaned up because they didn't want to be involved?

Yeah, uh-huh, they'd gone so far as to make sure there were no dishes in the dishwasher, either. A faint smell of bleach, they'd gotten the spaces in between, hadn't they? No remnants. How far had they gone in the cleanup?

If the oil had been hot enough to burn Maggie's skin, slough it off in pieces, it would have left more than a slick. The place was vinyl and veneer, well kept but old. They might have cleaned up the oil, but they hadn't replaced any of the flooring or cabinets.

I walked the rooms, the bathroom, the bedroom, the rest of the living room where I could get around the crime scene gang. Nothing, no scorch marks.

No smoke marks on the ceiling. Wherever it had happened, Maggie didn't get a faceful of smoking hot oil in the face here in her apartment.

'He didn't need to, but he liked to work to find them.'

Ok, now where did that come from? The night before, at the derby, something like that, but what did it have to do with this? Wait.

"Stop." The morgue team were there, the crime scene investigators were done with the body, they were handing things off and getting ready to move her. "Don't shift her yet."

There was something, what was it? I moved back to the living room, ignoring the looks. "Step back please, just give me a minute. With her."

I'd need some help. The something, what stuck in my mind, was Maggie's hands. She'd brought them up, protection, sure, the oil burns and the skin falling away testified to it. But she wasn't just protecting herself.

She was praying. "I'll need some help. And a camera." I moved back, accepted the camera from the tech, let the coroner's lead come in to the body. "Lift her up to her knees, please."

Rigor made it easy, the coroner's lead tech rotated her up to her knees, and that's when everyone else saw her. She was kneeling, praying, hands up and face to the sky.

I'd said she wasn't posed. I was wrong. I took the pictures, coroner's lead in the frame but I couldn't do anything about that. Maggie's locked pose came through regardless.

"Before, or after?" I asked him. Here, peak of rigor, all he had to do to keep her in place was hold his hand on her back.

He waited for me to finish the pictures, then he felt her joints. "After, I think. Maybe she was like this to start, but they'd have had to have re-posed her when rigor started."

"More than once?"

"Probably. It's not a switch, it's a process. Pose her, wait for the relaxation, do it again, until the lock really set in. A couple hours from onset, at least."

She'd left, we'd left the arena about ten, ten-thirty. Give it a couple hours for leeway here or there, wherever she'd been, then they'd brought her back here.

And sat 'til sunrise. Patiently rearranging her limbs. One by one. "And she fell over, then."

He nodded. "Right, as soon as they got what they needed, got her set into this pose. They'd have walked away, and she'd have rolled right over without anyone to hold her in place." He illustrated by taking his hand away, just far enough for Maggie's body to roll over and meet it. "You done?"

"Oh. Yeah, go ahead."

The CSI techs broke out the vacuum. They'd have done it anyway, but now we all knew where the most likely place for evidence was going to be. Right next to her, where the killer had spent hours building something. Vacuum the floor, and her body, eliminate me and Roger and themselves from any hair fibers or skin particles. And the dog.

The puppy held still and quiet, in Roger's arms but wide-eyed and paying attention. He gave one little whine, a little howl, when they took Maggie away.

I worked through my list. Maggie's ex-girlfriend, she'd been in Atlanta with family. Whatever the breakup, Rachelle was heartbroken when I called her. Teary, "Where do I come to see her?"

No leads there. "She was quiet, we were quiet. Most nights, she'd have something to do with her girls, or the derby. Any free time, she'd rather curl up on the couch and let the t.v. drone on than just about anything."

"Any friends over, old lovers maybe?" Game nights, movie nights, anything where there was a crowd...

"Not really. When she was younger... she said she'd ditched that part of her life years ago, and was relieved to do it."

Ok. "What about family?" That was a heartbreaker, too. An old one, though.

"The boys, her brothers, they're all that's left. Maggie's parents passed away years ago, I don't think she ever had the chance to come out to them. Or wanted to, even. The boys, well. I think we saw them once, her nephew had a soccer match up in Nacogdoches a couple years ago. We made the drive, it was as close to a family reunion as..." Rachelle stopped to blow her nose. "We had a good time, it was one of the good ones, really. Maggie was shocked."

"How so?"

"Wally and Rich, her brothers." She stopped again. "They're good people, but they're small town. They accepted Maggie, me. They just never knew what to make of us, that's all."

Richard echoed that, when I called him, and then when I made the drive up to Bryan. He wasn't snuffling, more like leaking tears, he'd wipe them when he noticed, otherwise they were tracks running down his face. "We, Wally and I are twins."

He pointed at the pictures on the wall behind him, the foyer was a family gallery. The twins and Maggie, three little tanks even as kids. Beaming in every picture, towheads posing in front of Christmas trees, tractors, a duck blind.

"How much older was she?"

"Five years. Just old enough to give us hell, young enough not to think we were too much trouble to play with."

"Did your parents know?"

"About her being a lesbian? Dad did, he didn't care, so long as she was happy. But Mom, well."

Dad had been around the world in the Navy. Mom on the other hand. "If she ever made it farther than Houston or Dallas, I'll eat my hat." Deacon's daughter, raised in the Baptist church. "A good woman. She was just naive, that's all. Dad just didn't want to disturb her, talking about it. Besides, I don't think Maggie even wanted to admit it to herself, not until they were both gone."

"You're saying your father knew before Maggie did?"

He shrugged, a gentle smile coming through the still-running tears. "Yeah, I think so. I wish he'd had the chance to tell her it was all right."

"Did you?" Maybe I shouldn't have asked it. I wasn't a therapist. But I did have to know how Richard and his brother fit into this.

"Couple years ago, up at Stephen F. Austin, Wally's youngest, Will, played a soccer tournament; Maggie and Rachelle came up. It was the first time we'd all been together in I don't know how long. I tried to tell her, best I could, all I could get out was that I loved her." He gripped his hands together, smooth calloused diesel mechanic's hands with grease permanently embedded in the creases. Like he was holding on to his sister. "I'm no good at that kind of thing."

Wally and his family were out of state, Michigan. "He moved up there years ago, he works for a small town water department. Been there, what, twenty, thirty years now?"

I had to do that interview by internet video. Wally Stimps was the image of his brother. Down to the quiet tears that started rolling as soon as he realized why I was calling. "Rich told me. I can't believe Sissy is gone."

Maggie'd always been there, big sister. "When's the last time you talked to her?" I asked.

"Couple months back. I called to let her know Will is getting ready to be a father."

"How was she doing?"

He shook his head. "Rachelle had just left. I think Will's news was the first good news she'd had in a few weeks. Her volleyball team's done well over the years, gone to State good and regular, but she told me they'd hit a patch. All her seniors graduated, and the other kids aren't up to that level yet."

I'm glad he didn't ask about the roller derby team then. We weren't much more than a way to blow off steam; success we measured in how few bruises we picked up on any given night.

One night a week, three or four months out of the year, and I'd known precious little of this. Rachelle's face I knew, now that I thought about it, but just as a presence in the stands cheering us on. If Maggie had ever introduced her, I didn't remember it. "Was that normal for you and your family?"

Wally held his hands up to the camera, not an excuse, just... "I can't explain it. We're all like that. Rachelle was the first of Maggie's girlfriends that I actually got to meet, and that just the one time."

The thing sort of wound down; there were no ghosts to chase in that family. Not any apparent to me. No screaming matches, no threats to the family honor. Small town, sure, protected, probably. Deadly?

I didn't see it. Rachelle didn't know the names of any of Maggie's other lovers, short or long term. So that was out. And however much Maggie may have been a tank on the skates, there were no grudges, not in the local roller derby community.

I checked, I didn't rely on my own memories. Half a dozen other permanent clubs in the regular tournaments, probably another dozen or so that popped up regularly enough. Most of them, the captains remembered us and Maggie, enough to say "Uh-huh, that's right", or similar.

None of them had any bad blood. Was it worth chasing? Maybe, but only if nothing else came up. If there's a couple dozen people, all of them doing some variation of "Nice lady, I remember her. No, ma'am, we had rough games sometimes but shook hands and walked away enjoying the ride", digging for the possibility one of them might be lying is harder than it sounds. Fishing expeditions look great, but they take resources I don't have. There were half a dozen other cases on the roll at the time, active and doing.

Whatever happened to Maggie, I owed her more than chasing the goose trails. That could wait; if we ended up on the cold case pile. Until then, let's keep it to the more likely paths.

Family, the handful of friends I knew about... none of them giving any indication, and none of them giving me reason to mistrust their story.

Right. So back to basics. Maggie leaves the arena, bag of stinky clothes and headed for home and shower, maybe a cold beer. She's the quiet type, none of her co-workers had seen or heard anything saying she'd been out cruising the bars in the wake of Rachelle leaving, so she'd stuck to her habits. Homebody.

How's someone get her out of that habit at ten o'clock at night?

"Who hates someone that much?" is how the CSI lead tech had thought of it, at the apartment.

"It's not hate." Not really, not from where I sat. "Think about it. They'd have had to embrace her, close up, full on, for hours. Holding her hands. Holding her pose. Bearing her weight every minute of it. Could you do that, hold up their dead body in your arms, for someone you hated?"

That wasn't hate. Love, obsession.

Passionate dispossesive? There were three candidates. Someone who loved her more than anything.

Someone who was driven by her.

Last? The craftsman. Professional, in approach if not in bankroll. Someone who needed her for the work.

Hate wasn't in it. Once she was gone, someone who hated her? They'd be done and gone, as fast as possible. Just like the accidental killer, but they were of no concern, given the way they'd treated the body.

How would the Lover get Maggie out of her routine? Personal. A greeting, in person, the half-remembered somebody, where had Maggie seen that person before?

The Obsessed? A call; not the first. Oh, no, there would have been contact before. Email, text, phone, letters written painstakingly by hand, cut from magazines decades old, chalk or crayon, something. But a call, it would have to be, or something similar, immediate.

The Indifferent? Anything at all, but that one shared the need for it to be immediate. They wouldn't have needed to contact her before.

That one may have picked her out just weeks ago. The Indifferent, the Killer, would be exquisitely aware of what happened if they got caught. Care, pick out the target, make sure she didn't have any outside entanglements. Move on at the least suspicion; but not from Maggie. She'd been perfect.

The call, the call, the common denominator wasn't it? No cell phone in evidence, so I called around until Sprint found her for me, and released the phone records. About two weeks after Maggie was gone, I sat on the floor of my office, an ancient yoga mat protecting my hips and knees, and poured through who and what and when of Maggie's cell phone life.

Which is a lot easier than it used to be. I don't need to keep someone on line, patiently entering numbers as I ask for them and doing the lookups. I key in the numbers and get the name back in seconds.

Pretty much the same thing we all do, at home, when we get an unknown number on the caller ID and run to Google. Difference here being, in my official capacity, I get the answers straight from the horse's mouth.

Well, most of the time it's that easy. The big carriers, I just cycle through their software. It's the little ones that take longer.

And of course, that's what the killer, assuming that's who'd called Maggie at ten-thirty that night, right as she'd have been starting up her car and heading out to the casa... that's what they'd done. Bought a burner from some small time network, not even Wal-Mart this was the corner gas station variety, fifteen, twenty bucks and they'd have an hour tops of cell time.

Plenty for the work they needed, and straight into the trash it goes. Me?

Sure, it was a dead end. No search engine magic to solve my case for me. But I knew now how they'd done it. When.

The arena parking garage has cameras. I had a time; we'd already watched Maggie walk from the elevators to her car, fire it up and roll for the exits.

Now, the timestamp matching the phone records, was there a pause there, one we hadn't paid much attention to before? A couple minutes, there, the video rolling and Maggie's car waiting at idle.

It was an older, four-door sedan, Toyota Corolla, mid-size and mid-life and reliable as an old penny. I'd called it a warm-up pause, first time through. And maybe it was, her habit. Keep the old 'yota running right, treat it right, and it wouldn't keel over somewhere and leave her stranded on the side of the road.

It also made a perfect time to call, now didn't it? For someone who'd spent a little time watching her. Observing Maggie. That was, in fact, exactly the right time to call.

Oh, but how would, did, they know? Watch, learn. Doesn't do them any good, now does it, unless they know she's there. Listening to the grumble of a hundred thousand miles or so of scar tissue warming up in an underground garage. Pushing the buttons on the radio. Maybe searching the messages on the phone, looking for Rachelle? Who knows, but someone watching.

Problem with a camera system attached to a public arena: too many people to nail down. This wasn't four hours later, the last kid out of the ball park and not even the janitors left to stick out. Maggie was in her car with stragglers still coming down out of the stands. Half a dozen people came out of the elevator. Any one or none could have been the...

If I'd been there, where would I have wanted to spend my time? In the garage, that's the old school way, right? Not even, no one's going to take the chance on a rent-a-cop asking a question, starting with "Why aren't you upstairs instead of hanging out down here?" The paranoid maybe, the Obsessed or the Lover, they'd be the type to hang out in the car, especially if they've made a mistake, gotten too close to her.

The Indifferent would have been in the stands. That one knew they'd be safely anonymous, sitting in the stands with a dog and a beer and a bucket of popcorn after the break. Would they have been cocky enough to have come down in the elevator with her?

One car. One car had left, after Maggie. I counted. Seven people came out of the elevator, two of them had ridden together, the first car to leave. The other six, four came past the camera, then Maggie, and then the last. Toyota Corolla, then a Honda Civic.

I didn't remember if that's the way it happened in terms of history, which car came off the lot first. That's the way it happened that night. Had the Civic's driver been sitting there, watching Maggie? The number pre-programmed. The button under their thumb. Waiting to go, in that magic moment? I thought maybe so. I thought maybe that would work just right. Call, watch her leave. Follow her, to wherever it was that had been agreed to.

This was someone who'd bought a burner phone to cover their tracks. But that was easy, wasn't it? Cheap. The Civic was no rental; they'd known better than that. Five minutes and we'd have been knocking on someone's door. So, stolen, bought for cash.

No Civics that night with those plates reported stolen. Cash? Maybe, but it was only two years old. And Hondas didn't lose their value that much, how many people drop seven or eight thousand in cash, just for a throw-away car...

He'd made just two mistakes. Will. Maggie's nephew. Everything else, he'd approached it almost perfectly.

College kids with a new baby on the way don't have the cash to spare to feed their hobbies. So he'd driven his car, knowing, wrongly as it turned out, that a public arena would hide his car in a sea of anonymous fans.

His only other mistake? Hugging his aunt's body for hours. The DNA strands were precious and few, but they were there. Carefully vacuumed away, a handful of the hairs from his beard, broken away and embedded in the collar of her shirt. Where he'd used his chin to help hold her in place.

Love? Yeah. Obsession, yes. Was he the Indifferent Killer? Not yet. I think we caught him on the brink. His aunt, his godmother. His uncles, they loved their sister and her ways, not theirs, were hers.

Will, he loved his aunt, as well. Enough so that he couldn't just accept her life, her desires. We found out Maggie's old lovers, because Will kept a list. Where they were now, where they'd come from. Names, addresses, a list a list with dates. All I could assume is that those dates corresponded to breakups, that's what the one next to Rachelle's name looked like. I didn't show the list to her, when we found it. There was no need.

He begged to confess. Fought with his lawyer, the public defender because Wally couldn't afford better. Got up on the stand and told the judge and the jury exactly why he'd done it. That his aunt was going to hell if he didn't do what his father and his uncle couldn't bring themselves to do. Protect Aunt Maggie from herself.

The jury wasn't impressed. They looked at his confession, the DNA evidence, the pictures of Maggie's skin and hair sloughing away.

They convicted him before lunch. Sentenced him to the needle the next day.