Me, Myself and Why? Page 18

  I searched Jeremy’s face for any sign of cruelty or teasing, but saw none. Yeah, I guess Opus did seem sort of sweet on me. It irritated me that there were so few people at BOFFO who were nice enough to the guy for him to focus romantic energy on them. Sure, we were a cluster of freaks, perverts, obsessives, isolationists, and sociopaths. But we were federal employees! It was time to hold ourselves to a higher standard.

  “Can I get you something to drink?” Tracy offered. “I think Jeremy has a beer or two in his fridge. I’ve had one already.”

  “No thanks.” I turned and looked out the window, down the street. I could almost make out the liquor store Adrienne had broken into. But that’s not where my mind was.

  “Jeez, Trace. She’s aw-aw-aw-on duty. Hey, I kt-kt-can get you a water if that’s b-b-better.”

  I tried to keep my voice light. “Sounds super!” I was sweating in any case. It didn’t help that I was standing right about where George’s necktie had been.

  Finding articles of clothing at a crime scene does not constitute airtight evidence that the owner did it.

  Jeremy and Tracy had gotten awfully tight, awfully quickly. They shared a few attributes, to be sure: a “survival” experience with the ThreeFer Killer, some minor personality quirks, the ability to make it through an interview with a federal agent without giving much useful detail, and apparently a familiarity with the contents of Jeremy’s refrigerator.

  And now he’s calling her “Trace” within twenty-four hours of allegedly meeting her, even though she’s never offered it up as a nickname to me through two or three substantial and friendly conversations.

  Didn’t he say those dogs belonged to a sister? Wasn’t she moving around? Didn’t those dogs try to rip your throat out?

  Ice crept up my spine. Hearing the water pour out of the kitchen faucet behind me made me want to pee. Bad.

  The two of them had stopped the friendly conversation. They were watching me, I knew.

  Has she figured it out? Is she going to break?

  I couldn’t turn around to face them. Terror was actually clogging my throat; in fact, terror felt an awful lot like cotton wads jammed past my tonsils. I couldn’t move. I almost couldn’t think. I didn’t know—

  Hang on, sister.

  What?

  I am coming. Right now. Just stand still. Try to smile. Say something sappy. Laugh if you can.

  I said, “Boy, this neighborhood is beautiful!” then broke into a coughing fit.

  I suppose you are doing the best you can, Shiro said from the side of my brain. Relax. I am

  Chapter Eighty-six

  Here. I was right here.

  I took a deep, steadying breath to lose Cadence’s cough. I could understand her terror; the last clues had dropped on her like cluster bombs.

  Jeremy and Tracy were, of course, the ThreeFer Killers.

  Things fell into place with near-sickening rapidity. Like any test question, once you knew the answer, everything else was obvious. The evidence was still circumstantial—but far stronger than it had been with George.

  Tracy hadn’t been a living victim—she was in on it. She had been planted. And while we were all looking the other way, her accomplice, Jeremy, was already in place making mischief and muddying the waters.

  Were they siblings, as Jeremy’s comment about the dogs suggested? Lovers? A killer team-up of murderers, like Bianchi and Buono, the Hillside Strangler? Or Carol Bundy and Doug Clark, the Sunset Strip Killer?

  Time to mull over that later. For now, for this small spot of time, Tracy and Jeremy must not must not must not suspect I was driving the body. They would not understand this quirk in a federal agent and they would immediately become suspicious. They had to believe I was still Cadence: giddy and charming and not at all disturbed by their company, or much of anything else.

  “—something to eat?”

  Eh? Ah. Jeremy, doubtless trying to trick me into ingesting something that would make me sleep, so he and Trace could drag me—us—to some fetid alley where he could cut our throats and then draw things with our blood.

  Keep underestimating me, Jeremy. “I would rather—uh—that, that—yeah, that would be super fantastic neato!” I tried to sound as enthusiastic as a cheerleader cheering for—er—whatever it was in sports a cheerleader cheered for. “Just golly—gadget cool!”

  “Jeremy just offered to make steaks for me,” Tracy suggested. “You like steaks, right?”

  “Absolutely niftilicious! Jeepers, that sounds tasty.” If I had to keep this up much longer, I was going to need an insulin shot. “Ah, but here’s the problem: I have got—ahem, I gotta get you guys outta here, stat! My boss will be soooo mad at me if you get yourselves killed and all. You know, because we stayed here. With the ThreeFer Killer.”

  They looked at each other.

  “You know, George Pinkman! He’s, ah, still at large. Still walkin’ around out there.” It felt good to inject as much truth as I could into this charade. “Cop just spotted him on Hennepin less than an hour ago. Guy could be on the way here. So this isn’t safe.” I circled the kitchen with my fingers. “Nothing here is safe. We gotta get all out of here and stuff.”

  Jeremy shrugged. “Okay. To where?”

  “Why, HQ, silly! It is, gah it’s, the only place to be!” I tried to laugh, feeling ridiculous. How could I look anything like Cadence? We looked different, dressed different, talked different, acted different . . . there was no way they were buying this.

  He looked at Tracy, who smiled weakly and nodded, and then he turned back to me. “Lead the way, Agent Jones.”

  I wondered if he realized he was no longer stuttering. I sincerely hoped he wasn’t fucking with me as I was with him.

  I made my eyes widen to better imitate Cadence’s big-eyed deer-in-the-headlights stare. “Well, sure! Sure, sure! You want to ride with me instead of in your own car, and that only makes sense, cuz y’know, for your protection.” Fuck. How was I going to alert anyone with them always two feet away? And what if they were armed? “That is just a Brillo-shiny idea, and it will also save on gas and protect the environment, which is one of my many duties as a socially and environmentally conscious member of our society.” Hmmm. That came out a little stilted. I added, “So it’ll be superawesome and fun! And awesome. But mostly fun! Let’s saddle up, tiny soldiers!”

  I was giving myself a migraine. I should be getting some sort of award for this . . . an Oscar, or possibly the Nobel Peace Prize.

  What to do? Call for backup? I had no proof, only Cadence’s hunch. But I wasn’t about to get in a car and go off with them unless a SWAT team knew all about it. And possibly the marines. I was a good fighter, but these two psychotics had killed more than a dozen people in less than two years—and they had done it without anyone figuring out anything, until today.

  If they had stayed gone, we would probably never have caught them. But like all Bond-influenced villains, they had to put themselves in harm’s way to prove how clever they were.

  Well, it was my job to make them pay for that mistake. Without making any dumb mistakes of my own. BOFFO was counting on me. Society was counting on me.

  My sisters were counting on me.

  “Let’s get to that car then!”

  Chapter Eighty-seven

  Texting would be too suspicious in front of them, but a quick call to Michaela would work, right? I called on our way out to the car.

  “Do you have Jeremy, Cadence?” she asked. “Is he safe?”

  “Oh, he is more than safe, boss.” I gave Jeremy the thumbs-up and a smile. “He’s supersafe! You don’t get safer than that. And Tracy’s here, too. That’s right, she was here the whole time. It was convenientastic!”

  “Are you all right, Cadence?”

  I took a chance that my charges could not hear the other end of the line. “No! Not at all! And we are heading back to HQ right now.” Please, Michaela. Put it together.

  “All right. I know you’re stressed out, but do what you
can. Make them comfortable and make sure they’re not too distressed. We don’t need a lawsuit right now.”

  “Say, have you found George yet?” I got into the car as Tracy got into the passenger seat and Jeremy got in behind me.

  “Obviously not.”

  “No, of course not. Gosh, he’s a devil to find. I wonder if we ever will. The guy could be dead, for all we know.” This was as far as I dared go.

  “I doubt it. But I am beginning to suspect that the sighting was a false alarm. We won’t be too far behind you, Agent Jones. An hour or two at best.”

  “Anyone back at the office who can help me through the secured-witness process?”

  “Agent Jones, they’ve already been through that process.”

  Sigh. “So, just Pam then.”

  “Just Pam then. And probably Opus.”

  I did some quick math in my head. Three of us, two of them. Only one of us was a trained agent.

  Not quite fifty-fifty.

  But there was nowhere else to go.

  “See you back at the office, then. Don’t forget our meeting in thirty minutes!”

  “Agent, there is no—”

  I hung up, taking a mental note to train my boss on how to spot stress in a colleague’s phone manner. Sure, it would not be as fun as whittling phallic objects; but surely she would see the point after today.

  Chapter Eighty-eight

  I felt a bit safer now that Jeremy and Tracy knew I had called in and reported my status—and the fact that they were with me. Surely, self-preservation would keep them smart.

  Indeed, we made it to BOFFO headquarters without Tracy accusing me of being onto them, or Jeremy attempting to garrote me with a George Pinkman necktie. I took them through the automated security portals—ruing the fact that there were only two security guards in our office who could assist me with this matter. Naturally, we ran into neither of them.

  “Anyone here?” I called out. I’d been around BOFFO when it was empty, to be sure. This was creepier than that. “Pam? Opus? Hello?”

  “I’ll ba-ba-bet they’re in your conference room,” Jeremy guessed.

  “Why do you say that?”

  He held up a cell phone. “I sent a mi-mi-message ahead for them to be there. While in the car. Sh-sh-seemed you were onto us.”

  Them? My heart sank. Whatever math I had figured out, these two had outcalculated.

  Sure enough, by the time we made it to the conference room, there were two figures securely cuffed and facedown on the floor. Pam was one of them. Poor agoraphobic thing was streaming tears—even here in a confined space, trouble had come to her.

  Next to her was . . . George Pinkman! He looked furious.

  Looming above them both was the hulking form of whom I now understood to be the third party in the ThreeFer killing conspiracy: Cadence’s good janitor friend Opus.

  Chapter Eighty-nine

  I was startled to find myself back at BOFFO headquarters, and certainly not happy to see my good buddy Opus as a bad guy in cahoots with Tracy and Jeremy. I was even more distressed when I saw Pam crying.

  George sputtering on the floor—I guess I didn’t mind that too much. Though he smelled like he had pooped his pants.

  Why did Shiro leave me here? It couldn’t just be to enjoy George messing himself. This is a dangerous situation.

  And one that requires thought.

  Delegation, I finally guessed glumly. Shiro wants me to sweet-talk Opus. She and Adrienne get all the fun jobs. I get the work.

  He didn’t look angry or mean, to be sure. Just very, very large.

  “Opus. I’m disappointed to see you here.”

  He cocked his head. “Cadence?”

  “It may still be Shiro,” Tracy pointed out. This knocked me back a step: They know my secret? My names?

  Of course they knew my names. With Opus on the inside, they probably had full files on me.

  I took a deep breath. “Yes. Cadence. Opus, why would you do this? I thought we were friends.”

  He nodded. “We’re friends.”

  “My friends don’t cuff people and shove them onto the floor and scare them until they cry,” I pointed out. I looked down. “Well. Maybe George.”

  “Fuck you, Jones! Get me the fuck out of here!”

  “Michaela will be happy I found you.”

  “Christ, all you people had to do was look in the goddamn broom closet! I’ve been there for days. I had to crap my own pants in there; you couldn’t follow the smell?”

  Opus lifted a bottle of Citrus Windex, pointed it downward, and spritzed the back of George’s messy suit pants. “Stay quiet. I’m talking to Cadence. Cadence is nice. Cadence doesn’t like you much. Not when you call me rain man.”

  “Fuck you, you crazy retard, you fucking rain man, you fucking retarded rain man! I’m going to fuck you up when I get up!”

  “George, please shut up. I’m getting a handle on this.”

  “Nice fucking handle, triple bitch—”

  Opus kicked him in the head, and his lights went out. I opened my mouth to protest, but thought better of it. “Opus, that was sweet. You’re right. I don’t like George much. But Pam’s my friend. Look at her. She’s terrified. She’s not a trained agent. Did you have to do that to her?”

  Opus motioned to Jeremy but wouldn’t look at any of us. “Brother told me to. Brother said I had to. Everyone in cuffs. That’s what brother said.”

  “I did,” Jeremy agreed. I looked for the family resemblance. It was hard, since Opus was so shaggy and large, and Jeremy was smaller and had a shaved head. But I supposed I could see it.

  “Opus was the large man I saw leaving your house. He left George’s tie there.”

  “You can uncuff dt-dt-the secretary, Opus.”

  “She sits in that chair and doesn’t move,” Tracy added, pointing.

  Pam dutifully went to the chair, but huddled in it with her knees over her face. What this was doing to her sense of BOFFO’s office as a safe place I could only guess.

  I decided to press my luck. “Why not let her go? We can leave the office before she could call anyone for help. They’re all still—”

  “No. We will only be a moment to make our proposal, and then you will have a decision to make, and then my brothers and I will either kill all three of you . . . or we won’t.”

  Proposal? This was the oddest serial killing I’d ever been involved in.

  Tracy motioned for me to sit down across from her. “So you know about the three of us now.”

  “You’re triplets,” I deduced. “You’re close in age, and seeing you stand here together, it’s easier to see some physical resemblance.”

  “Born v-v-five minutes apart.”

  “And of course you have . . . social ec-centricities . . . that probably were a burden to you growing up.”

  “Burden.” Tracy swallowed.

  “Wa-wa-worse than burden,” Jeremy added. “But we dj-dj-don’t have time for a full counseling session today. We grew up close. Sh-sh-stayed close. Fought together. B-b-protected one another. Like you.”

  I looked at each of the three of them. They were not looking at me with anger, or hatred, or fear, or even calm murderous intent.

  They were looking at me with admiration.

  Opus took a step forward. “I found the nice agent at BOFFO. She was nice to me. I told the others: she can show us how she does it. She can show us how to fit in. She can show us. She can show us how to make it stop. Make it stop.”

  Tracy massaged her hands. “Make the proposal, Jeremy. Make her see. Time is running out.”

  “The others want m-m-me to talk,” Jeremy explained with an apologetic, almost charismatic smile.

  “That seems kind of mean.”

  “I don’t mind stuttering,” he managed without any tic at all. “And I find I can be persuasive.”

  “Your stutter’s getting better.”

  “I’m closer to the apex.”

  “You mean the kill?”

&n
bsp; “Maybe not this time. Maybe this time, it can be d-d-different.” He grimaced. “Different.”

  I looked over at Tracy. “I don’t understand. Say what you have to say.”

  “We want in.”

  “In? In to what?”

  Tracy clicked her tongue impatiently. “In to you. Your life.

  Your work. What you do. Who you are.”

  “You want to work with me?”

  “I work with you,” Opus pointed out.

  “Yes you do.” I didn’t know what else to say.

  “And live with you,” Jeremy rushed to add. I don’t know what compelled him to think this would sweeten the offer. “Cadence, surely you see the symmetry of it all. What my siblings and I do together . . . what your siblings and you do together . . .”

  “Is completely different,” I finished for him.

  Tracy hissed and I heard Opus whimper worriedly behind me—I couldn’t help but feel a pang for my work buddy, even if he was one-third of a psychotic serial-killing mastermind team—but Jeremy instead sat down right next to me and put his hand over mine.

  “You mo-mo-must see the symmetry, Cadence. The symmetry.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I see: three of this, three of that. Very clever. But that’s—”

  “That’s not all,” he interrupted angrily. “You’re not paying attention! We complete you. Opus validates your need for true and meaningful companionship. Tracy validates your first sister’s need for focus and proper planning. And I validate your second sister’s need for . . .” He paused.

  “Mayhem?” I offered.

  “Unstructured expression.”

  “You believe I need these things.”

  “We believe you do. We believe BOFFO does. It makes so much sense, Cadence. Think about it. We know if you think about it, if you try hard enough, if you really want to help us and your friends, you will agree.”

  That was quite the string of nonstuttering—and Jeremy didn’t say any more. I sensed the final offer was on the table.

  I spoke slowly. “So let me understand: if I agree to help you get jobs here . . . and if I agree to live with you, so we can be together . . . you’ll let Pam and George go?”