TWENTY-SIX
Cul-de-Sac
The stink surprises Harriet. It is the smell of fresh, cut grass. It might as well be the scent of a fruiting body, of a corpse in a drain culvert left for days to the bugs and bacteria. For her, it's the smell of decay. The odor of utter stagnation. All her muscles cinch up like a too-tight belt.
Ingersoll, from the back of the Escalade (his presence upgrades them from the Cutlass Ciera, without question), sees her shoulders tense and says: "This is familiar to you, Harriet."
"Yes," she says. The word lies there, gutted of emotion.
Around her, the suburban boxes. The white-washed curbs, the bird baths. The solar lights, the clematis growing up around mailboxes. Pastel siding. Bright white rain gutters.
She wants to set fire to everything here, wants to watch it burn down to greasy cinder.
"I think I turn here," Frankie says, and then doesn't do what he just said. "No, shit, fuck, wait. This one. Here we go. These fuckin' little avenues all look the same. The houses, the lawns. Cookie cutter, copy paste bullshit." She can feel him eyeing her before, during, and after the turn.
"He doesn't know," Ingersoll says.
"He who?" Frankie asks. "He me?"
Harriet shifts uncomfortably. "No, he doesn't."
"How long has it been since I partnered you two?" Ingersoll asks.
Frankie has to think. Harriet doesn't. "Two years, three months."
"What don't I know?" Frankie asks.
"Nothing," Harriet answers.
"Everything," Ingersoll says.
"Tell me," Frankie says. "I wanna know. You know everything about me. I'm an open book over here. I don't keep nothing from you."
"Will you tell him?" Ingersoll asks as Frankie pulls up into a cul-de-sac, a suburban dead-end of same houses. Frankie looks to her.
She feels ill.
Odd, given that Harriet rarely feels anything. Does she enjoy the feeling, just because it's a sensation? Is torturing herself as much fun as torturing others?
She chooses not to answer Ingersoll's question or her own.
Instead, she says, "We're here," and gets out of the car.
"He does not kill them?" Ingersoll asks, his nimble fingers looking through a wicker mail holder hanging in the foyer.
"No," Harriet says. "He's a con artist. He cons them out of it."
Frankie yells from the other room, from a den office. "Nobody's here. He's gone."
Ingersoll nods. "Not unexpected. He will have left some trace. Some sign of his passing. More important, I want a sign of the girl's passing. You will find it. I will wait for you to find it."
He goes and sits at the breakfast nook in the kitchen and steeples his hands, sitting perfectly still and perfectly silent.
Harriet and Frankie continue to put the pieces together.
The house – at 1450 Sycamore, in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia – is owned by a Dan and Muriel Stine.
Dan loves fishing, the stock market, and, despite his apparent conservative sensibilities, the glam bands of the 1980s – Poison, M?tley Crüe, Warrant, Winger.
Muriel also plays the stock market with her own money from her own accounts. Beyond that, the house doesn't contain nearly as much information on Muriel. It's because they are divorced. Six months now. They have a daughter, an eight-year-old named Rebecca. Frankie finds the papers in the office.
"Dan still lives here," Harriet says. "Muriel has moved on to greener lawns."
"This place really gets to you," Frankie says.
"It does no such thing."
"You're lying to me."
"Keep looking. Ingersoll will want useful information."
Gaynes' modus operandi isn't that he cons people out of these houses, just that he cons people into telling him where they live. He meets them at a convention, a restaurant, a bar. They're working. They're away from home. Ashley comes, breaks in, lives here until they come back, and that's that. That's his trick. On the one hand, it's simple. On the other, it's too simple. Ashley thinks himself better than he is, perhaps.
Harriet cannot find out where Dan – the owner of a local sporting goods franchise – has gone. Maybe to visit a mistress. Maybe to find out how soccer balls and Pilates equipment are manufactured. Harriet doesn't really care. This place is like a crime scene, but the fingerprints she seeks aren't those of Dan Stine.
Harriet decides to check upstairs.
Halfway up the carpeted steps, she smells it.
Decay.
Real, this time. Not metaphorical.
She calls to Frankie. Like dogs, they sniff around.
Master bathroom, second floor.
The shower curtain is closed. The toilet seat is down. A little glass pipe, its bulb end darkened with carbon, sits atop it. The stink is terrible in here.
"Fuck. He's dead," Frankie says, mumbling behind the arm he's got pressed to his mouth and nose. Harriet doesn't bother. The smell doesn't disturb her. Not like the smell of cut grass. Or potpourri. Or a roast in the oven. "Stupid prick got into the product and fucking ODed. Holy shit."
Behind the shower curtain, a shadow. Harriet pulls it back.
A body lies in the tub. Plastic bag over the head. Dried blood clinging to the inside of the bag at the back of the head.
Frankie blinks. "Someone killed Gaynes."
"It's not him," Harriet says. "It's Dan Stine."
"How do you – ?"
"I just know." She holds her breath, then tugs the bag off the head. The back of the head is a ruined mess. "Gaynes hit him with something. A pipe, a bat, a crowbar. I didn't see any blood, but I bet you'll find it downstairs. Or outside. But the hit didn't finish the job. Hence, the bag. While Stine was down, Gaynes suffocated him with the bag. Maybe he did it in the tub, or maybe he just brought the body here."
She stands up.
"Ashley Gaynes is now a murderer."
"C'mon," Frankie says, stopping her as they walked down the stairs. "I want to know."
"No."
"We're up here doing all the work, Ingersoll's downstairs… I dunno what. Receiving important instructions from the devil, probably."
"Ingersoll doesn't take orders," she says.
"Whatever. I'm just saying, you can tell me. You don't have to tell me in front of him. That's what he wants. He wants to see it unfold. He likes putting things in motion, seeing how they play out. So tell me what's up. Right here. Right now. He doesn't have to have the satisfaction."
Harriet stares.
"You ever notice that Ingersoll looks like a praying mantis?" Frankie asks.
Harriet pushes past him and heads down the stairs.
"Ashley Gaynes has gone off the reservation," Harriet explains to Ingersoll as Frankie catches up, frowning.
"Oh?" Ingersoll asks, idly drumming his fingers on an issue of Field and Stream.
"He's consuming the product, as Hawkins suggested. And he's no longer conning people out of their homes. He's simply murdering them and taking their places."
"That is a dark turn for our amateur con artist."
"Yes."
"I like it. Good for him. Any news of the girl?"
Harriet hesitates. "No."
"Any idea where they're going?"
"No."
"So you've found very little of value, then."
Frankie shrugs. Harriet says nothing.
A thin smile spreads across Ingersoll's face. With his lack of eyebrows, it's difficult to tell whether the smile shows genuine amusement of some sort or is sour and sarcastic.
He takes a napkin from the napkin holder and unfolds it.
Then he pulls a pen from his pocket.
Ingersoll lays the thin napkin over the issue of Field and Stream, then gently runs the pen in a diagonal arc over the napkin.
Like a child holding up a school-made snowflake, he pinches the napkin at each end and holds it up. On it is revealed a company name and a phone number.
Harriet reads it aloud: 321 Trucking, then the number.
"I don't get it," Frankie says.
Ingersoll stands. "I found the only piece of actionable information in this house, and I never left this table."
"That's why you're the boss," Frankie says. Harriet hears the exasperation in his voice.
Ingersoll hands the napkin to Harriet. "Call this trucking company. This will lead us to him, to our case, and to the very special girl. Time is wasting, my friends."