The Premises Are Unexamined - Neverland Disorder part 7 by M. K. Dreysen

And here we are at last. For your reading pleasure, dear reader: this week's story brings us to the conclusion of The Neverland Disorder...

The Premises Are Unexamined - Neverland Disorder part 7, a Detective Kelli Hench Mystery by M. K. Dreysen

"Maggie Roark, if you're calling me at four in the morning, it had damned well better be something important." Which probably could have gone without saying. It's not like Magpie and I are besties, hanging and chatting and calling each other with the latest restaurant tips.

Four in the morning and you're not at your best.

My phone recognized his number, at least.

"Hey, Detective, you know I'm nothing but interested in not having to make any calls your way. I'm a changed man, right?"

"One can hope." Get on with it, Maggie. Sleep is something to be shepherded.

"I'd say I'm wounded, Detective. But I don't want your own tender sensibilities..."

"Damnit, Roark. Spit it out!"

He told me. I thanked him, called Russ Ortiz and dragged his sunny disposition into the almost light of day. Left Russ with the task of prepping a few uniforms to hang tight and ready.

And got on the road, or at least took the first step to that place where Peter Pan and I had always been headed.

"How often do you think Magpie's been checking his storage unit?" I asked Russ when we pulled into the place.

"What I want to know is how he's been paying the rent?" Russ answered.

Good point, now that the coffee finally caught up to me and I had a chance to consider it. Sure, maybe Maggie had done well enough, found a job somewhere that didn't mind the stains on his permanent record. Someplace he made enough to put the hundred fifty a month for the storage unit in the mail.

But that's only the past year, most of it. Where'd he come up with the money while he was in jail? Shouldn't that have gone to his wife and kids?

"Number fourty-eight," I said.

Russ grunted his answer, turned left at the correct aisle, and pulled up to Maggie's stall. About halfway through the row.

"Big spender, our Mister Roark," I said, once we got down from Russ's car.

Sixty of the garage-type storage units, plus room for another twenty or so, for those RV owners looking for a heavy discount. And that was about the end of the place's amenities. I'm not sure they even had an outside water bib, the kind that was almost a necessity here by the Gulf.

If you didn't have a place to wash the saltwater out of the engines and off the chrome, boat owners went looking elsewhere.

But I wasn't in that market. Russ was, though. "This the kind of place you keep your boat?"

"Not anymore. Connie found a place down closer to Freeport. And it's only about fifty years old, instead of a hundred."

Sure, he exagerrated, but not by much. At least, it didn't feel like much of an exagerration, standing there with the buzz of the only working light in the place coming from three aisles over. Russ had to leave his engine running and the headlights on to give us any view of Maggie's garage.

Like the rest of the units, Roark's was decorated mainly in lack of paint and late-modern corrosion. Inverse Pollock, only the saving grace here was that we were far enough north, just outside of Katy, that the storage unit didn't have the regular Gulf's dose of saltwater intrusion to hurry the process along.

"How are we supposed to open the thing, anyway?" Russ asked.

"Combination lock." One of the big Yale spin-dial things. "I guess that answers your question."

"Yeah. Roark's been selling the combination. Or, at least the space behind it."

Then, shipping had been Maggie's route to the jailhouse. "Let's see what bothered his conscious enough to call us in."

And, incidentally, put off the inevitable day of reckoning that would occur when one or the other of us discovered his sideline. Sure, it was passive income; a D.A. with time on their hands would be happy to pile up the papers for a soliciting stolen goods strike to Roark's scorecard.

Unless what he'd told me was true. In which case, Russ and I would have to make sure the D.A. knew which side the bread had been buttered on for the slightly higher profile crime they were about to be handed.

Maggie had been clear about one thing. "No drugs, Detective. I've got kids."

"And you want to be alive to see them graduate?" I'd asked Maggie. Knowing his answer.

He'd talked to us, me anyway, because of those girls. "That's why I'm calling you at four in the morning. For Elena and Sher."

And probably because somebody had earned his wrath. "Two crates, Russ. And an old suitcase, but that's got nothing to do with the two crates. Just somebody caught in the crossfire, I guess."

"Probably somebody quit paying Roark his rent."

Yeah, most likely. Either way, the big fish, what had us here today, lay in the packing crates. Helpfully standing open so we didn't have to send for the bomb squad to do the de-louse thing. "Ok, Maggie, let's see what kind of truth's behind the lies."

Which the big lie was fairly obvious. The one where Maggie had told me, "No, Detective, these crates are the only ones there."

True, but the concrete, the dust and dirt on it at least, testified to the fact that there had been other crates here within the past couple of weeks. "He'll have found a unit on the other side of town," Russ pointed out.

"Or, right next door." We were going to call it in anyway. Maggie wouldn't have actually just moved his rental fees just to another stall. He'd have a backup arranged, could be Tomball, Humble, could be anywhere in easy driving distance. But he would know that the first thing Russ especially would do would be to call in a warrant for the rest of the units.

Me, too, but Russ is the one with the reputation.

The other lie I was interested in was the one about drugs.

Have you ever wondered where they keep it all? I don't mean the lawnmower that grows legs and walks from your front yard while you're inside getting a glass of iced tea. Or the carbon fiber bicycle that rolled away from the rack outside the library. That kind of thing moves so easily, anonymously, that there's no need for more refined measures.

No, I mean the good stuff. The forgotten Manet, the one that goes missing from the Fine Arts Museum's inventory between last year and this year. Or the case of first editions that left when the assistant manager at the rare book store finally got pissed enough to walk. With a little makeup pay as severance.

And yeah, the cat burglar stuff. Jewelry, paintings. Pictures with presidents and celebrities, signed and framed and valuable as hell.

When the original owner staring out from beside Sinatra or Prince or that lady from that movie, you know the one where she screams through the first two reels and then traps the killer in a car, dies off and can't file charges anymore.

All the goods too hot to fence. Immediately, anyway. There's a lot of capital involved in stolen goods, the high end stuff. And there's a hell of a lot of capital and jail time waiting for anyone who has the misfortune to let me and my colleagues get wind of their basement collections.

I'm certain there are little viewing galleries, where the Van Gogh sits alone in the dark waiting for its owner to obsess over it every few months. In this case, though, Maggie Roark had found a money-making service he could provide. A little storage option, no questions asked.

The only proviso? Besides the no drugs thing. Which, now that I had an understanding of Maggie's business made a whole hell of a lot of sense. Drug dogs would bring this all down pretty fast.

No, the other proviso was "Cased up, and don't touch anything that's not yours."

Someone must have touched something. Or broken some other rule. Like the suitcase guy, maybe they'd just quit paying their rent.

What Russ and I saw was that someone had broken into another case. And then Maggie, or one of his partners, had pulled the rest of their shit to another garage. Then Maggie made the call burning his now former renters. Because they were now bad for business.

"Artwork," Russ told me from the smaller case. "Statues, mostly."

Cast bronze and ivory. The kind I'd seen a few times on the Antiques Roadshow, beautiful little things, nicely wrapped and packed away in straw. Some of them a few thousand. At least a couple of them ten or twenty times that. Big money, in other words.

Slow money, too. A few decades to realize.

I stood at the second case. This one wardrobe height. I pulled the door back and whistled. "Forensics are going to hate us. And the ATF as well."

The second case was full of guns. Cased-up rifles, mostly, the good kind of hard plastic or aluminum cases, the ones meant for travel. I pulled one to get a good look. Inside, locked safely in their specially-cut foam inserts, lay a matched pair of hunting rifles.

The kind with hand-carved exotic wood stocks, gold filligree spider-webbing the barrels and actions, and double triggers. For when his Lordship is out and about in the Range Rover, trying to fill the larder ahead of their Majesties visit, don't you know. "Jesus," I said.

This was only one of the cases. Forty thousand plus for that pair, if it was anything like what the internet told me such a rifle pair could go for. And there were a good dozen or more other rifle cases.

And four pistol cases. Duelling pistols, from the early eighteen hundreds. The kind that Burr and Hamilton would have done their dance with, maybe.

"Holy shit, what's in the suitcase, then?" Russ asked.

"Guy couldn't make his rent, probably just a stolen baseball card collection," I answered. "You think about reasons these two would have gotten their dicks twisted together while I go look."

We ended up guessing pretty close to what had happened. The 'owners' of the rifles and the bronzes had managed to get themselves crossways over missing pieces. The bronze collector came in, probably right after he saw the same Antiques Roadshow episode I had, to dream of big payoffs. And do an inventory that came up one or two short.

The gun collector, for all we know, hadn't had anything to do with that. Only the bronze collector had made the mistake of accusing. And, opening the rifle case to back his story up, he thought. One thing leads to another, and here we were picking up the pieces. Maggie had burned both of them as bad risks.

The suitcase was a little blue pasteboard thing, the kind with brass latches that you squeezed buttons on either side to flap open. A kid's suitcase, the kind that made me think I'd find a pair of underwear and half a dozen books in, like the kid had just run away from home yesterday.

I rolled it down, flipped the latches and lifted the lid to Yolena Scruggs' face staring up at me from the cover of a pile of fashion magazines.

Time rolls on. Two years past Leanna Ringham, less three months for Yolena. Comic books and Maggie's old compatriots murdering a kid from Honduras. A couple dozen or more other cases, some big some small. Time intercedes because Peter Pan hadn't. He, and I was now convinced it was a he, had been quiet.

Done his thing and gone to other places for a while. Quiet places I had no insight to.

The blood rushed in my ears; the dust and dirt came on me, the smell of the storage unit now a weight. One to go along with the guilt I felt for not having found an in, a crack in Peter Pan's armor, one that would have let me go to the parents of the young lady whose face I looked on and tell them "We found him."

Russ, like me, keeps a box of the blue gloves in the front seat of the car. First thing you put on when you hit the scene, depending. We'd each thrown a pair on this time, because fingerprints were likely to be the only evidence we'd get from the stolen property, if any. No need to make the CSI's work any harder than it had to be.

Or, now, staring at Yolena's face, for me to worry I was contaminating our only outside evidence of Peter Pan's existence. "Russ."

"Yeah?"

"When the gang gets here, tell them the suitcase is a separate issue. And that we're going to need them to treat it with care."

He relayed that to whoever had caught the call. Then he came over to see what I knelt over. "Sonofabitch."

"Yep." Glad to see I wasn't the only one with a guilty conscience.

The suitcase held magazines, like the one with Yolena gracing the cover. And it held a fistful of headshots, glamor shots. Which is where we found Leanna Ringham's face. Confirmation of something, I guess.

At minimum, that the suitcase's owner knew that having this particular set of pictures sitting in his house could cause a world of trouble. "Maybe it's not him, Kelli. Maybe it's some schmuck terrified his wife's going to find his, ah..."

"Jackoff pictures?" Which, if he was that kind, would have been a gold mine for us. DNA. Unfortunately, Mary Sullivan's team didn't even find a useable fingerprint.

"Smudges, Kelli, that's all. Nothing I could match up, even if I had something to compare against."

And that had taken them most of a month to process. Other priorities. Still, it meant that once they were finished with them, I could sort through the suitcase without worrying about their end of the case. When Mary turned it back over to me, I brought it into my office and laid the piled contents front and center on my desk.

Yolena appeared there in three places. The cover. A glamor shot. And in a commercial spot in the middle of an ESPN magazine. Some cologne gig, where she was the swooning target of the muscle-bound, presumably wondrously musky smelling lead's attentions.

Leanna came to us from that history with only one appearance. The glamor shot.

Yolena's was all pro. The black and white kind, that actors hand out by the truckload at the comic conventions. Yolena was a pro model, that much we knew, so the careful makeup and oh so effortless natural hair she'd probably spent days perfecting for the picture were no surprise.

Leanna's shot was another story. Mall shot, we used to call them; probably still did, for all I know. The storefronts where you came in, they charged you a few hundred for a handful of dreams. Color, in this case, she wasn't a pro so she didn't know that color wasn't necessary, wasn't even wanted.

Hair teased and brushed up, all Texas baby.

I knew why because I'd done the same thing. Tall skinny girl come to Houston for school, and I'd taken a flyer, because why not? What's the cost of a few pictures, and maybe I'd get lucky enough to pay for a couple semester's worth of tuition. Not real dreams, not really, because the last really tall girls Hollywood had hired were Sigourney, and then Gena, and after those... bupkis.

Too many short actors, and let's face it, I look gawky enough just sitting on the other side of a badge. On those rare occasions when a news crew shows up, on the other end of a lense I feel like an elephant on roller skates.

I knew what she'd felt, though. Maybe Leanna had been like me. Ross egging me on, telling me he was going to get his mug into the limelight, darling, was I too chickenshit to give it a shot?

Ross had even done up my hair for me. "Because if I left you to do it, you'd look like a helmet-head bitch, that's why." Flopping my bangs and curls, that's what he meant, as though I'd left my brains parked at the house instead of using them for proper balast to the done-up do on top of my head.

Leanna, I think, hadn't had a Ross. A friend, equal parts asshole and loving torturing ego stroker, to push her to the better outfit and the slightly less overwhelming hairstyle. She'd gone for something close to what I remembered from her parents' photo album.

Her prom look. She must have worked up her courage within a few months of hitting college. Maybe a Saturday afternoon, time on her hands and she'd said "Screw it, I'm doing it."

Glamor shot. And here it was, on my desk next to Yolena's. Pretty, the both of them; if I put on my critical hat, though, I knew why Yolena had turned pro, and Leanna had gone on to work on her accounting degree. Spirit, magnetism?

I wasn't Peter Pan. He'd seen something there, hadn't he? Me, I saw a pretty girl and a gorgeous about-to-be supermodel.

He'd seen them as parts of his story. He'd made none of those artificial distinctions that cameras and the blind masses enforced. Here were the Dark and the Light, the Earth and the Moon. Here was Beauty in two of her aspects. And he would collect them while they still yet held Her charms, before time could steal them from him.

Who else, then? If I wasn't chasing moonbeams, the sort of accident coincidence Who Ordered That moment that at least got me thinking about the case in detail moment...

If this suitcase belonged to Peter Pan, then some of these other faces were on his list. Yolena Scruggs and Leanna Ringham I'd twigged to because they were on my mind, weren't they? Even as the piles grew and changed, I remembered them. Who else would I need to remember?

I hunted. And damned near missed her. Leanna Reollic, my other Leanna. Not a victim, a killer this Leanna. I hadn't recognized her, because of accident. Because, while she wasn't formally convicted she was very much still safely locked away until her mind came back to something three independent psychologists could all agree resembled accountably sane.

And, because somewhere along the way she'd stopped dyeing her hair blonde. Me, I'd accepted that dishwater blonde and gray hair aren't exactly a bad combination.

Then again, this Leanna had spent her days locked up in an attic apartment. Going out to get her hair done, or even doing it herself, probably hadn't been real high on her list of accomplishments. Either or, I panned through the head shots more than a few times before the perky blonde cheerleader shuffling among the other pictures made an impression on me.

"I guess I'm going to Austin," I told her picture.

Houston doesn't have an Arkham. The state does that for us. For the truly gone, at least. Come in for a weekend stay, Ben Taub's good enough. Come out of a courtroom with the victim's families lined up in front of the cameras to curse the judge for "Bypassing justice" because you don't connect to the world well enough to be judged by twelve good and true, and we send you up the road a bit.

"Ms. Reollic doesn't speak much," her case worker warned me. "The doctor, me, the nurses when she needs something, that's about it."

"Do her parents come?"

Trey Rightwater nodded. "Sort of? They do come, her dad tries to get here at least once a month. But it's awfully quiet even for them."

I came with three pictures. Her, the other Leanna, Yolena. The head shots. "Will these be a problem?"

Not after he'd checked them. "She's shown no signs of violence," Trey said. "These shouldn't be an issue."

"Let's see if she'll talk to me, then."

"Good luck," he said, then he let me into her room. "I'll be right out here."

Where he could respond if things went badly. For this patient, probably not. But most of his other cases would be a great deal more likely to end up badly.

At least I could talk to her without her being restrained, or without me being on the other side of plexiglass. "Hello, Leanna."

The room testified to the fact that Leanna may have retreated from the world, but she hadn't done additional damage on her way down. They'd allowed her a chair, and a table to hold her food trays. The bed might have been a hospital standard, but there were no IV's hanging from it, or monitors like you'd see for the catatonic or heavily sedated.

She sat in one of the chairs, next to the window. She'd been a waif beneath the fancy dress, where Russ and I had interviewed her after her grand night out.

She remained so, only now the dress was a hospital gown. "You haven't visited," she said.

"I'm here now," I pointed out. Sure, a few years between.

Did she make me nervous? We pick up attachments whether we want to or not. If she ever made it back from the void she'd entered, Leanna Reollic would come only far enough to move to Huntsville. By the time that process made its gears circulate... I'd take my chances. "Are you willing to discuss your past?"

"Does it have anything to do with Ginny?"

"Only by accident."

She turned to the window. Nothing much to see except how much Austin has grown; boredom may have done the trick for me. "What do you want to know?"

The window held a bench seat. One of those uncomfortable flat places hospitals use to torture those of us who stay with the injured overnight. I laid her head shot on the cushion. "Do you remember taking this?"

Leanna reached out, to touch her younger face. "I do."

I laid Yolena's picture down next to her own; then the last picture. "Do you know them?"

Her hands hovered over each. "They were younger, two, three years? He called us his L girls."

"You, and Leanna?"

This Leanna nodded.

"What about Yolena?"

This Leanna smiled. Easy, almost wistful. Joyous, I think. "She is such a beauty, isn't she? Y's destined for big things."

I didn't tell her. "Who is he?" But that must have been one question too many.

Leanna turned her face away, the smile fading to a blank look.

I didn't push her. I just took my pictures back up again and walked to the door. Rightwater let me out of the room.

"She gave you more responses than normal. If I'm lucky, I get three questions before she retreats."

"She did help. Not as much as I hoped, but a great deal more than what I came in with. Thank you." By the time I badged out, reclaimed the paraphernalia of the job, I knew where my next best option lay.

"You quit before the next step," Felicity told me. "Before you lost your money to the bonepickers."

"Bonepickers?"

The bottom of the barrel agents. The ones who made their living promising the wanna be models they'd get them their shot. "Catwalks, commercial shoots. That was the promise they all made."

Just throw a little money their way, for the lessons. "How to walk the walk, the poses. The one I went to was a guy named Bernie Truell. He had a place out in Memorial." A school for modelling, Felicity explained. "If you came every week, paid your fifty bucks every time..."

"Promises?"

Felicity laughed at that. "Of course not. As it turned out, best I got out of it was a call sheet for a Macy's commercial."

"And if you had made it? How much money would you have owed him? What percentage?"

She shook her head. "No, Bernie at least never made me sign a contract. Some of the girls might have, maybe." She pointed at Yolena's picture. "Y told me she'd picked up an agent. Ten percent, right? Houston's scene wasn't big enough yet, when we were kids, for any of the real agencies. Now, though, there's more money floating around."

"Who is he, Felicity?" Just like with Leanna Reollic, I expected that to be the one question too many. Maggie didn't have a name for me; "What kind of business do you think I run, Detective?"

Too many names and Roark would be a dead man. Leanna had a name, somewhere on the other side of a fence she wasn't ready to re-cross. Felicity had a name, a possibility at least. Would she give me a place to start? It didn't have to be an answer, just an entrance to a world I'd no knowledge of.

A name, among many. More than a few agencies had sprung up around town; most of those Felicity called the bonebreakers had joined up. The legit ones, at least, those who'd done their best by their students, only they'd never quite had the connections. And now they did, when the New York and L.A. squads came to town.

There were still half a dozen teaching studios, if not more. "We send the new kids here," the secretary at one of the agencies told me, handing me a business card with a Facebook address and a telephone number.

"All of them?" I asked.

She gave me the pro's weary smile. "The ones who come in off the street. Maria does a good job of sorting for us."

Maria handled that L.A. agency. Charlotte handled one of the New York groups; same basic idea. The teaching studios filtered the kids who wanted it so badly they'd pay to get there.

The only men I met were the photographers. All of the talent handlers I found at that level were women. My age or older; I guessed I'd found at least one path forward from when they started getting the "Is that a wrinkle?" and "Maybe the diet's not working?" questions too often to dodge.

Ballet, opera, when age enters the picture there's always teaching. If I squinted, put aside my instinct that insisted these places were just a way to pull money from the desparate, I could accept these ladies were doing the same thing. "How many guys do you get?" I asked Charlotte.

"One in five, some years one in ten. The pretty boys have less competition."

Meaning, if a male beauty walked in blind to the agency, they had less of a line in front of them to get straight to a call sheet. "More girls believe?"

"How many beauty pagents for boys have you ever seen? Cheerleading, dance squads, pageants. Every girl in this world grew up believing they were the most beautiful things to ever grace Bishop, Tyler..."

"Alice, Kingsville. I get it. It's the valedictorians applying to Harvard problem." Where every applicant the town pride is fighting for a spot with has the same basic resume.

"You got it."

Boys don't usually get the "You should be a model" bit; just about any girl that's a little more interesting than average has heard that phrase at least once by the time she graduates high school. Some variation of it, anyway, enough to make the female lane a lot more crowded.

Me, I'd heard that catwalks reward the tall. You know, that the runway models average almost six feet tall. Which, since I was on the other side of that average meant maybe I could pick up the occasional gig that would pad my meager income. If I'd been in New York, maybe.

Not Houston.

"So where do the older male models retire to?" I asked.

When you're on the outside of a network, the threads connecting people always look a snarled mess. From the inside it always makes sense. Russ and I have worked together going on ten years; I'd known of him before that, we'd just never crossed paths. Mary, we'd touched a bit before I got to my desk, so something like fifteen?

I try and remind myself to do my own little recon of my network. Homework, so that I might have a jump on the next yarn ball I'll need to untangle.

With Septimus, if Will Trevanian hadn't shown up at my desk at the last possible second, I'd have chased that killer to ground on my own. And probably not have been here to tell the tale. When I reached that same point with Peter Pan, after Felicity gave me the name Aaron Lopes, and then Charlotte gave me a business card that had Lopes' name on it...

I brought Russ, McCall, and Jackson into the loop. After we received a third puzzle fragment.

Marta and Eugenia Thompson were twins. Tall, basketball scholarship tall, stunning. Like that little girl from the Cheerios commercial had grown up to win the state tournament, take her homecoming queen crown, and with her sister was headed to the cover of Elle or Vogue sometime soon, that kind of stunning.

They'd come to Houston because TSU had offered them that scholarship when they were both sophomores in high school. Mom and Coach Wilkins had gone to school together, back in the day. So a bit of a family in but that's the way of the recruiting game sometimes. They were in their sophomore year at TSU, and this was the year they were expected to make the little program that could into a beast to scare.

They'd gone missing. Which wouldn't have necessarily meant their folder would cross my desk; there are an awful lot of pictures hanging on our bulletin boards.

There are even more in three-ring binders on the desk in Missing Persons. I feel for that crew. Tally Murdock and I go back a bit. Tally would have been my rabbi over in Burglary, only she took the Missing Persons gig about a month after I landed my first gig in Gene's corral.

I brought Tally a coffee and a croussaint one morning, because she looked like she needed it. And I needed a break from staring at the walls of my office.

She handed me copies of her latest, one of those habits. Twenty years in one of the most depressing gigs in the job, but she's a saint still, is Tally. I said the words we all do: "I'll look out for them, Tal."

"Thank you, Kelli," she answered me. Automatic words on her part, too, but no less heartfelt.

Marta and Genia I caught faster than I had the other Leanna. Maybe I'd been primed this time, maybe the twins had just caught in my memory. Either way, when I put their graduation pictures down on my desk, a buzz in the back of my head came on. The one that tells you to do something.

Something was the Peter Pan portfolio. So I did that. Thumbed through the collection. Hoping and fearing at the same time that I would find them there. "Shit."

At least I had a new question to ask. Tally first. Then their parents. "Had the girls tried any modelling?"

Leanna Reollic had given me no name. Neither could Marta and Genia's parents. The Ringhams, no dice there. Felicity's information, Yolena's agent named Aaron Lopes, that was a one-thread connection. Not enough to scare a judge.

"We're going to have to babysit him," I told Russ and the others, once I'd explained the little web of information we were climbing out on.

"You're buying pizza," Shay Jackson said to her partner.

McCall snorted. "Right, then you're getting Thai, from that place over by your house."

It works more or less the way you've always learned that a stakeout should. A couple of vans; two's the minimum needed to really track somebody if they're on the move. A van so that the other half can catch some sleep, to hold any extra gear we might need. And with the new kind of digiwrap on the side windows, so that we could look through and remain unseen from across the street.

I'd give a lot for the kind of microphones the tech magazines claim work miracles. Lasers that catch the glass and record every word in crystal stereo. Infrared cameras that pick up more than that the furnace is kicking on. Lopes had feet in multiple worlds, if he was the one.

Magpie Roark's world, for one. Not the kind of name and service your garden variety social pirate would stumble across. Given his background, I'd have Lopes for the interesting end of the cocktail world, and he the supplier of the dust needed to fuel their desires. X, coke, somebody had to work the right corners to get it. Lopes could have fit the bill.

Gigolo, sure. A little of this and that. But those aren't the kind of roles that lead you to Magpie's space. Shit, for the kind of thing Magpie was into, you'd have to...

Know a few rich people? The kind who could swing a fistful of cash and procure themselves a minor Picasso work on demand?

They call it gentrification. We call it selling out. Lopes' place was just a mile or so from my own apartment; right in the middle of Montrose. Half the properties now were three story walkups, three-fifty to four hundred grand to start.

Ninety percent of the rest would be joining them soon enough. Even the die-hards would join them soon enough. Lopes had landed himself one of the few that survived the process to date. Had he bought it himself? The internet told me the last business address the hundred year old house had been associated with was that of an architect.

Shotgun style, a truly ancient stand of pecan trees looming over from the back yard, a magnolia and a well-controlled brush of azaleas guarded the front porch. Wood siding and brick pilings holding it up over the flood line. The place had been built when the bayous flooded every spring, without fail, and the builders then apparently didn't try and hide from that fact.

We give ourselves away in a thousand little acts. Lopes had thought about this. That's why he'd stashed his portfolio at Magpie Roark's garage for wayward children.

Someone who could afford the sticker price on the house we sat in front of could have afforded the couple hundred bucks a month Maggie charged for a suitcase. Unless that someone had screwed up and murdered his meal ticket. Was that it? Was it as simple as that? Ten percent of the income Yolena Scruggs was earning might have kept the wheel turning in Lopes' favor just a little longer.

He gave himself away twice more. With the datura and the Angel's trumpet plants lining the gravel driveway. The driveway testified to the age of the house. The whole property pre-dated the horseless carriage, at least the common usage of that noisy beast. The gravel led to the addition someone had eventually made, a separate garage in the back yard. A truly impressive crepe myrtle shaded the padlocked doors.

Aaron Lopes used a side door to get into the garage. He had to pause, going in.

To shift the four IV bags. Glucose and saline. He stacked them up in one arm while he dug his keys out with the other.

"See it?" Ortiz asked me.

"Call it, Russ." So he did that: called the SWAT team we'd warned to be on standby. "Shay, Roger, who's on deck?"

"We're both here, Kelli, go ahead."

Russ held up both hands.

"SWAT's ten minutes out."

"We're ready. Shucky's calling now." The second team joined McCall and Jackson one street over. They blocked the street and fanned out to cover the rear, in case Lopes made a run that way.

Shuck Martinez's partner, Rene Ledoux, took point for us. "You come in only after I signal, right?"

"No heroes, Rene, that's your job. Your crew handles all calls from here on out." EMS most likely, given what Russ and I had seen.

Lopes wasn't much of a hero, either. Rene's team went through the same door; there weren't even any windows. Why, in those old garages? Rene came out to wave us in after two, three minutes tops. "Did we get here in time?" I yelled.

He smiled. Rene's not very big, neither's Shuck. They've got a couple monsters on their team, don't get me wrong. But the two of them are medium, tight-cut tight lipped cynics of the war vet set.

Seeing an easy smile on Rene's face, and the thumbs up he gave Shucky when Martinez walked in from the back yard, made going into that garage an easier time than I'd feared.

I don't know what he was preparing Genia and Marta for. The girls lay in two old brass beds he'd anchored to the concrete; they were strapped in ankle and wrist. The glucose and saline bags meant he didn't have to feed them, just clean up what the liquids made natural. They were covered in bed sores, a few weeks' worth, and their minds had taken a long trip to somewhere else on the datura extract he'd been feeding them.

Not all that different, I suspect, from what Leanna Reollic had gone through. Only, she broke under the tender mercies of the scopolamine; the twins recovered.

Lopes never gave us any of that information. Aggravated kidnapping, that much he couldn't avoid. He had to hope that if he kept his mouth shut, he'd get out someday.

Funny thing, though. Turns out plants have DNA too. When Mary Sullivan's team processed Leanna Ringham's body, and the scene, there'd been two dogs. Sullivan's team had waited patiently; the dogs had, with some encouragement, eventually blessed them with fecal samples.

Dogs don't process plant waste very well. Nor the pill material Lopes had used to press the datura flowers into a bite-sized form. "He used raw plant material, didn't dry it or anything like that. If he'd done that, we wouldn't have found anything to recover. Plant cells are tough."

Tough enough to survive the dogs' digestive tract, then wait two years to give us samples to compare against the mature plants still sitting in Lopes' yard. That was enough for the DA, and Leanna Ringham's family. Yolena's family, too, even though they didn't have their daughter's name said in court.

Did I tell the other Leanna's parents what I suspected? That Lopes had treated their daughter to a datura trip, broken her in the process?

No. That's an inference; a leap between the plants in Lopes' yard and the psych research on the compounds one might extract from them. There just isn't enough there for me to do anything other than speculate here. Probably a good speculation, granted. But Leanna might never again confirm that she'd ever known Lopes, to me or anyone else.

Some cases I can only go so far.