An Ancient Yearning by M. K. Dreysen - Part 5 of the Neverland Disorder, a Detective Kelli Hench Story

I named him Peter Pan because he wanted them to live forever.

Forever. And for him alone.

I don't know who owns what; the Rolls-Royce dealer puts the cars on display in the hotel where the great and the moneyed meet. "How the hell do you get a car on the fifth floor?" Russ asked.

"Can you imagine how nervous the crane operator gets?" I returned. Half a million's worth of steel and glass and whatnot dangling from the end of the rig, and maybe he shouldn't have had that extra cup of coffee...

Yolena Scruggs would have graced any car ad you'd have wanted, if she'd been alive. Dead, she and the dealer were going to have a lot harder time coming to an agreement on contract terms. A beauty, once I'd spent the time I found her face and her hands and her body in everything from dog food spreads to her big-time first international commercial.

One of those high-end resort ads, the ones where they're trying to convince you that jetting off to an island for a week will trim thirty pounds and twenty years and return us all to young and sexy, only this time with money enough to indulge. Not a car ad, but I'm sure the Michelin team would have found her soon enough. Yolena was that kind of beautiful.

Only now that which waits for us all had taken her. She sat in the back seat of the Rolls, one leg up on the leather, the rest of her twisted around and barely hanging on to the seat. Yolena hadn't fallen onto the floor boards; I couldn't see how. Except maybe that she just wasn't heavy enough to have rolled completely over.

Something about her position tugged at my memory. "Tell me about your night," I asked Officer Shay Jackson, giving the stray thought a chance to simmer. "Because there has got to be one motherload of a story to go along with this one."

And how. Five floors up with a pair of Rolls-Royces for company. Russ and I had hit the doors at four a.m., well after whatever party had taken place in the rooms behind the cars had broken up for the evening.

"Fifty-seven possible witnesses on the guest list," Shay finished up. "And how many of them do you think we'll hear a real story from?"

"When did they leave?" I asked.

"Ten p.m.," she answered.

More than enough time for whoever to do the whatever that put Yolena here. "Cameras?" Because no way does the hotel or the car dealer set these pride and joys up without a camera system.

"Stop me if you've heard this one before," Shay said. "But the camera system was down for maintenance."

Right. Of course. "And the cleaning crews?"

"Hit the bricks at midnight."

I let Russ wrangle the night manager. For his health. Shay and I stayed out of the way of the coroners and the forensics crew. I stopped them before they moved the body, just so I could put Yolena's last pose into my...

"Hold on, everybody."

"See, I told you," one of the coroners told his partner. "Don't ever think she's finished."

The guy's face looked familiar, but not enough to chase down at the moment. "I need one of you to go around to the other passenger door. That's right, now, if you can, lift her up, please?"

It took both of them; she'd come to this place recently, there was no rigor yet. Which was a good thing, from my point of view, because if she'd been locked in place the coroners wouldn't have been able to replicate the pose.

"Anyone else..." but the forensics lead was already moving, the camera clicking and whirring. "You've worked with me before, too?"

"We both did, the Maggie Stimps case. Lisa Morgan."

"Kelli Hench. Do you see it, too?" The pose, I meant.

"I think so. She looks like one of those GQ spreads, the kind that take up two pages."

Exactly. The centerfold, with clothes on, a very high end sheer and lace and faded peach, a cloud of dreams across the leather and Yolena's skin. Her leg up, skirt well above her knee and hinting, the other leg down on the floor board, maybe her hair tousled maybe just a natural cut but regardless.

We wouldn't have replicated the pose, not the way they'd done it originally. But Lisa's pictures, even with Gary and Wilson, the coroners I now remembered, holding Yolena's body in place, the pictures told us the parts of the story we needed to see.

The way he told the story. "Shay, how long has it been since you and McCall found Leanna Ringham?"

"Three months." Jackson looked at me, wondering, then back to the posed scene. I saw it when the realization came on, through all the other bodies that had come along in the meantime. "You think it's the same killer?"

"For now, we treat them as different. But we'll need to keep our eyes open." Common elements could be coincidence, so I wasn't yet ready to commit.

In public. In my mind, Peter Pan had already made the connection he'd so dearly wanted made.

Once Wilson and his partner had Yolena's body moved, Morgan and her team could access the car more fully. I stood behind them, a Texas two-step, forward to look over their shoulders, then back out of the way when one of the CSI's needed to move through. "No blood?"

"Small drops, on the leather, but nothing like the Ringham case."

"Right, let me go look at the body before they get away."

Wilson was ready to go now. "Can't you wait for my boss's report?"

I snorted. "Yeah, sure, but not before I get a closer look myself."

There was no major wound; there was, however, a small puncture wound. A needle mark on the back of her neck, with faint traces of blood on the high collar of the dress to go with it. "There. Ok, Wilson, she's all yours. Take care of her, please."

Now it was his turn to snort. Wilson and Gary pulled the blanket tight across her and wheeled her to the elevators.

Russ Ortiz got out of the elevator when it opened, dodged the gurney and made his way to our end of the investigation. "How many people in this operation do you think know about the camera maintenance?"

"Let's see... day and night managers, anybody who's gotta walk by the server closet. Hmm, half of Houston might be too large an estimate."

He laughed. "Not by much. I counted fifty-three on the email chain the night manager showed me."

"And they're just the ones who got tagged on the email. You think the people pushing carts and brooms get email?" I shook my head, and went back to watching Lisa Morgan's team work.

Russ came in to join me. Well, from the other side of the car, anyway. "At least I know which security outfit's in charge of things. But they'll have another fifty people on their list."

I smiled, but the car probably blocked it. "Have fun sorting through those lists. It's your toll for dragging me into this at four in the morning."

He grumbled about it, but Russ made the calls, and the interviews. When the dust settled, I think he had almost a hundred different people he had to trace down. All of them with alibis of one sort or another.

Me, I worried the coroner and the forensics. The coroner I couldn't do much about, other than show up at the autopsy. Which went about as I'd expected. A text book exam.

Leanna had the cut, the exsanguination, and the injection site that looked to be the chief means he'd used to effect these things. Yolena had the injection site. But where was the cause of death?

"Heart failure," but that's where we all end up. Leanna's blood and tissue work had, eventually, shown atropine and scopolamine. Datura. A very traditional means, I'd told myself then. And, a simple way to get the drugs that didn't involved commercial means, for someone who knew what they were doing.

What did Yolena's tox results show? Only... "The dosage was significantly more influential, Kelli."

"Overdose?" I asked Doctor Trainor. Assistant M.E., she'd caught the Ringham case for us. So the whole team had come to the conclusion these were linked cases. Well before I wanted to let certainty block our thought processes.

The datura changed my caution. Not completely. But I was a lot more willing to let everyone go ahead and put the two together.

Tru Trainor's office was a lot more organized than mine. No more clean, but at least her piles were organized and stable. "Yes. Given the heart failure, and some of the other things we found, the Scruggs woman overdosed. Was it intentional, you want me to tell you next?"

Ok, yes.

"Can't say that. Maybe Scruggs reacted to something Ringham didn't."

Or, maybe the scenes were meant to play in very different ways. "If she overdosed, where's the vomit, then?"

"Her throat muscles were significantly strained, and the capillaries in her eyes fractured. Yes, she showed signs of the violent nausea typically associated with the overdose. But just a little of the stomach contents appeared to come along with it. You've got quite a thorough killer to track down, Detective."

The forensics team were similarly helpful. As in, just a little bit more information; he'd left no trace of himself, on Yolena or in the car. But the dress had a story to tell. "It's a custom job, Kelli." Mary Sullivan showed me the tag, one of the little handmade ones sewn into the dress's collar.

The couture ones. The tags there for shows and shoots, to cover the designer's intellectual property. Not the wash and wear tags like you'd find on the rack at Dillards. "She's a model, Mary, maybe she just had it in her closet. Who's the designer, do we know?"

"Felicity DeRoix."

Which I could read on the tag. I grumbled about that.

"Do I look like I spend money on custom dresses, Kelli? You're the detective here, right?"

I shook my head, ignoring the laughter. No, Mary Sullivan no more wasted the money than I did. Not when chemicals and blood were her every day.

Of course, tracking down a custom tailor these days... but then Google's the all knowing, right?

"Holy shit, I should have known." I told myself this when I walked into the tailor's.

I also managed to catch my tongue before I blurted out "Ross Walker". It's been a while; she's changed. I've, well, gotten older.

"Kelli," she greeted me. Warm, professional, though she did walk around from the other side of the counter.

"Felicity's quite busy," the younger man working the front for her had told me.

I showed him my i.d., and told him "I doubt it will take long." He'd gone into the back and brought out a shock of old acquaintance.

We didn't date, when I'd known Ross Walker. He'd been free and restrained, private and shockingly public in antics. We'd drunk wine from two dollar bottles, then puked in the gutter one after the other. College friends, near as brother and sister as anything, and then he'd gone to Tokyo for an internship.

"I wondered if you'd just stayed in Tokyo and never come home."

She sat in one of a pair of comfortable sitting chairs in the front room. Careful staging, so her customers could sit for tea or coffee or stronger while Felicity worked her magic. "I did stay, for about three years. Then Paris, Rome. I've been back, oh, it'll be two years in May, won't it Carlos?"

She called the last over her shoulder, to the back room from which, if the sounds and smells were any indication, Carlos had been pressed into making coffee. I took the other sitting chair, leaning back into velvet and comfort. "You've been successful, I hope?"

Her smile was predatory; it lit the room, absolutely.

However she'd earned her shop and her place in town, though, given Felicity's smile I'm glad I wasn't in the room when she did it. "There're an awful lot of people who should be glad I'm a peaceful lady, Kelli. Otherwise you'd be visiting me behind glass. This is no business for wimps."

Which confirmed an outsider's view of that world, if only a little. "I'm afraid I'm not here just for old time's sake, Felicity. We seem to have stumbled on one of your dresses. Do you happen to know a model named Yolena Scruggs?"

"Oh, she's going places. What happened?"

We were two months in for Yolena; a couple months before Werthal and Hapstam were convicted. Far enough along that I didn't need to hide anything from anyone. "Yolena was murdered, Felicity. About two months ago."

Long enough for the tox results to come back, and for Russ to chase his flock of wild geese. I told Felicity of the dress, then.

"I gave it to her close to a year ago. Carlos, honey, was it last spring?"

Carlos had taken advantage of the boss taking care of the front room to sneak into the back. "What? Oh, Yolena, that's right. She went along with that troop to Milan."

Felicity turned back to me. "One of the money people, not Fertita but one of his crowd, she's enough part of the scene so that she could twist arms for the Texas models. I sent along a trunk full of my work, and told the Houston lads and ladies they could pick one each to take home." She set her coffee down and headed to the back. "Here, she sent me a thank you card."

"When's the last time you got a thank-you card from a kid so young?"

Felicity chuckled when she passed me the card. "You're saying most of my clients are old and come from money?" She pointed at the box of such cards. "Almost all of those are from my clients, Kelli. But, you're right. Yolena was one of the few, especially the models, who took the time."

It was a Hallmark Store card, likely. But Yolena had put the time and the thought into it; she'd signed in purple ink, with a heart and a smile, and a picture of herself in the dress, cut from some fashion magazine. "She and the dress suited each other."

"Damned right. I wonder how much blood she shed to get dibs on it?"

The photo was a tiny one, not much bigger than a postage stamp, really. In it, Yolena strutted down a catwalk, photographers arrayed to capture the moment, her arms and legs and the casual draped peach of the dress arrayed to their best combination.

Did he see her, there? How else would he have known of the dress? This was no workaday outfit, built to abuse with coffee and salad dressing and getting up and down a hundred times a day. The material too fine, the stitches almost an afterthought, would Yolena have worn it often?

Or would she have placed it in a closet? Behind plastic and paper, protected. Brought it ought only for special occasions, and special only rarely means going to the club.

A memory flashed through my brain, then, of Leanna Reollic coming into Numbers, fully arrayed in finery and attitude for a night of being seen by the hungry and the wired, the after-midnight crew.

Was Yolena like that, then? Maybe she'd worn the dress out, sweaty and drink laden and soaked in the uncare of dancing 'til hell wouldn't have it.

The pictures didn't show that; Mary Sullivan had shown me a dress that had been treasured. No sweat stains. No hints of true wear. The velcro tape at the back, the kind a designer throws in because she didn't have the time to sew in the buttons or hooks or whatever, Carlos this thing has to be packed tonight...

That tape had been, was, almost unused. Clean, no folds at the corners from use.

"She loved your gift, Felicity. I'm sorry to have to be the one to tell you she died in it."

Felicity turned her head away from me; to look out the window, to breathe and remember. No tears.

Just a little hitch in her breath before she turned back to me. "That's not the kind of immortality I look for, Kelli."

"I know." I could have asked her a few more questions about Yolena.

Instead, I turned the conversation to just visiting. Catching up with an old friend. It's possible, just, that one or the other of us would have remembered, would have caught up to Peter Pan just a little sooner if I had pressed Felicity more that day.

Possible, but I doubt it. I didn't know which questions would have turned the right memory loose, not then.

Unfortunately, Peter Pan had two more victims to go before I would connect the dots of memory.