Yours, Mine, and Ours Read online

  “Okay.” George was flipping through the report. “The coroner was able to put the TOD somewhere between six P.M. and ten, right? And this fucko, he’s not keeping them alive for long—the histochemistry proves that.”

  “Yeah, but—” Emma Jan began.

  George was too intent on making his point, and cut her off (she should get used to that right away). “Yeah, this fucko is beating them to death but he’s not taking, say, three days to do it, right? They’re not walled up somewhere getting poked and paper-cut and stuffed with, I dunno, suet and cranberries, right?”

  “Uh…”

  I was right there with Emma Jan. Did George think teenage boys should be on the lookout for suet salesmen? Or cranberry bogs? And if so, shouldn’t we get BOLO paperwork started? What was suet, any—

  “What’s suet?”

  I flashed her a grateful look.

  “Duh, you need it to make mincemeat pie. It’s fat. S’matter with you?”

  Emma glanced at me and I could, for those few seconds, read her mind: What’s the matter with me?

  “Can you two focus, please, pretty please? Forget about the fucking suet. Who cares about the fucking suet? Why are we talking about suet?”

  Well. Now that he’d brought it up, I cared. How often could you fight crime and discuss the merits of suet in the same morning? I loved my job. Except when I hated my job.

  “My point is, if Behrman can’t tell us he was home jerking off to a rerun of Sons of Anarchy, then—”

  I couldn’t help it. I knew he hated interruptions when he was on a roll, but I had to know. “Why would he be masturbating to…”

  I trailed off as George gaped at me. His expression was wondering, yet filled with contempt for whatever poor idiot loser didn’t know all about Sons of Malarky, or whatever the thing was called.

  I don’t mean to sound like a snob, but I didn’t watch much television. Why would I? Why would I get hooked on a show when any second one of my sisters can show up, kidnap my body, and get me tossed into a holding cell? There’s not a big enough DVR in the world to make that fret disappear.

  “Are you fucking kidding me, Cadence? Who wouldn’t he jerk off to? Have you seen the show?”

  “Uh—”

  “Yeah, don’t fucking tell me, you don’t have time to watch much TV, spare me. I’ve got three words: Katey Fucking Sagal, okay? Here’s three more: Kim Fucking Coates.”

  “I’m sure Kim is very pretty, but maybe we should get back to—”

  “Kim’s not pretty, Kim’s a guy, you TV-free dumbshit.”

  “Wait. Are you bi, then?” Emma Jan asked. Then, to me: “Is he gay? I didn’t think he was. I don’t care,” she was quick to assure us, “it’s just that I’m finding this kind of confusing.”

  I shook my head. “Oh, George isn’t gay. I don’t think. I’m probably the wrong person to ask. I don’t think he’s entirely straight, though, either.”

  “If you two harpies don’t stop talking about me like I’m not sitting here hearing every harpy word from your harpy beaks…”

  “Is anyone truly entirely straight, though?”

  “Good point,” I admitted. “In George’s case, most of us here think he’s that thing where he’s sexually attracted to anything.”

  “What, anything?”

  “Anything.”

  “I mean it, harpies! You’re inches away from my permanent shit list!”

  I shrugged. “Men. Women. Large domesticated farm animals. Ice cubes. It’s … it’s something like ambisexual. Wait. I know this. Intersexual?”

  Don’t you hate it when you can practically feel the word in your brain, but can’t think what it is? I knew this, too … I’d just read it, or Shiro read it … Argh! It was right on the tip—

  chapter twenty-nine

  Pansexual.

  chapter thirty

  “Ah-haaaaa!” I screamed into Emma Jan’s shocked face. “I did know! Pansexual. I knew that. I knew I knew that. It’s pansexual; the word is pansexual.”

  It was odd, though. The thing that had just happened. When Shiro came out, she usually stayed for a bit. But not this time.

  This time she remembered a word I couldn’t, a word I didn’t know because she was the one who read the government study. So she surfaced long enough to give me the word, then sank back into my subconscious or psyche or what-have-you, leaving me in control of the body so we could finish the briefing.

  It was helpful. The thing my sister did for me helped matters, it improved my quality of life. Not in an obvious way, like a physical fight where she saved me from being mutilated in a dozen horrible ways. This was subtle, it was something that hardly ever happened. It was something I … liked?

  My doctor was pushing for reintegration, but all three of us were resistant. They didn’t want to disappear, and I didn’t want to kill them. My doctor kept telling me/us it wouldn’t be like that, that I’d/we’d all live on through the new personality, the fourth, the one who was whole, the one no one had seen for decades. The person I had been until the day my mother killed my father.

  Maybe … maybe it would be like that. Helpful and not bewildering and scary. Maybe being one instead of three really was the best thing for all of us.

  I didn’t know. I didn’t. And because I was a coward, I didn’t want to find out.

  “If you two are done playing Guess What George Is, can we please pretty please get back to the string of vicious murders we’ve decided, for funsies, should stop? Cripes, I thought I was self-involved.”

  He had a point. When a sociopath is knocking you for being too self-involved, it was time to reexamine your life.

  When we had no comment, he added, “Yes? Everybody back on board? Peachy. Anyway.” He glared at both of us, obviously silently daring we, the TV-less dumbshits, to interrupt once more. “Anyway. My point is, if Behrman can’t account for his whereabouts that evening, he’s cooked, right? So he tells us he’s at the movies to see … what the fuck was it?”

  “Fast and Furious VI: Even Faster,” Emma Jan read, checking her own paperwork.

  “God, God, God.” He shook his head and smoothed his tie (a run-over poodle with a black background). “Don’t even get me started on goddamned movie franchises. Fast and Furious did so well, there’s an F&F Six? A six? When they only made one Independence Day? Jesus. Unbelievable. The things you find out about when you can’t get your hands on a bomb.

  “Anyway, the theater this movie was playing in, the one Behrman says he saw? They had a major projection malfunction during the last matinee that day. They couldn’t fix it, so they refunded everyone in the theater their money—which morons who’d go see that piece of shit did not deserve—and they didn’t even sell tickets to the show Behrman says he went to. He should have told his story that way, but he didn’t. He didn’t because he wasn’t even there. Get it?”

  “I get that he picked the wrong alibi, and has bad taste in movies, but—”

  “Think about it. It’s nothing the movie theater would have, say, told a reporter. They focused on fixing it and getting back to charging admission for their shitty movie. So yeah, Behrman picked the wrong alibi, but even better, he has no idea that we know what a fucking liar he is. That’s our angle. That’s what we hit him with.”

  “Nice,” I said, and I meant it. Shiro had been getting A’s on her homework since before we were in training bras. Trust her to root this out and serve it up, practically on a dessert plate. And George had that tally-ho-the-fox look in his eyes. “Oh, wow, that’s very, very nice.”

  “So!” Emma Jan was on her feet. “Let’s go see him. And on the way, do you want to hear about Saint Antipas, who was roasted to death in—”

  “No thanks.”

  chapter thirty-one

  “I don’t want to criticize,” I began.

  “Don’t listen to her,” George told Emma Jan. “It’s a trick. Whenever she says she doesn’t want to criticize, or make waves, or question judgment, she starts with that.”<
br />
  “Thanks for the warning.”

  “It’s just … you know that saying about the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result?”

  “Know it? It’s the damn motto for BOFFO. People have cross-stitched it on samplers.”

  “I’m bringing it up because we’re on our way back to Heron Estates. And we’re going into the same trailer. The one with the gigantic mirror. And Emma Jan is with us.”

  “Thanks for the update,” he said, and Emma Jan laughed from the backseat.

  “So I’m clearly the only one worried.”

  “It’s okay, Cadence. The truce is on.”

  “Truce?” I propped my arm on the headrest so I could turn around and make eye contact while I fretted. “What truce?”

  “Between me. And her. The woman in the mirror.”

  “And…?”

  “So I won’t engage this time. It’s the solution my doctor came up with after years of trying other stuff. I’ll try not to look. And if I do look, I won’t engage. We had a hypnosis session first thing this morning; it should hold.”

  Hmmm. Hypnosis. As a subject of that same therapy, I had great respect for it. Hypnosis had been the only way I unlocked memories I’d repressed for decades. It made sense that it could help someone with their delusion.

  “It doesn’t matter anyway.”

  “No?” I asked.

  “After all,” she said bitterly, looking out the window (I wasn’t sure why; the only thing to see was Highway 35), “it’s not like I’ll never see her again.”

  I didn’t say anything. More miraculous, neither did George. I won’t deny I thought the whole Mirrored-self Misidentification thing to be pretty weird. But a delusion was a delusion was a delusion. There were BOFFO employees who thought aliens were beaming commands through the internet. And ones who thought the late bin Laden had been the reincarnation of porn industry actor John Holmes. Was that any nuttier?

  I decided this was a good time to bring up someone who’d been on my mind, strictly in a professional capacity, so I told them about Dr. Gallo.

  “No shit,” George said, eyes widening and then narrowing with interest. “Here to help out the family? Huh.”

  “I know what ‘huh’ means.”

  “Enlighten the gal in the backseat, then,” the gal in the backseat called.

  “He’s wondering—and now he’s got me wondering—if Dr. Gallo might make a good suspect.” And I had to admit, on short acquaintance the good doctor gave off that vibe. Not the murder vibe, the I-can-handle-anything-even-felony-assault vibe. “I’ll go back and talk to him, officially this time.” I was thrilled at the thought. Because it would help the investigation. Not because I wondered what his long black hair felt like. Or how he smiled when he was truly happy.

  “But what about the blackout?”

  “It’s for the media, not family members,” I pointed out. “He’s too good a resource to waste by keeping him in the dark about what I’m doing. It’s worth the risk.”

  She shrugged. “It’s your risk.”

  It certainly is my risk, missy, and I’ll thank you to let me be the one to worry about it.

  We pulled into the trailer court, and thank goodness. Not one of us had said a word the rest of the way, and the time draaaaaagged. Long silences were something that I, as George Pinkman’s partner, wasn’t at all used to.

  chapter thirty-two

  Joseph Behrman opened the door and didn’t look at all happy to see us. This cheered me up; guilty people usually weren’t happy to see us, either.

  “I thought you were gonna call before you came. Like you did last time.”

  “Yep, well, that’s the thing about the FBI, sometimes we can be rude like that.” George was leaning on the house, well back from the door. “You gonna let us in, or are we gonna have this chat on your sidewalk?”

  Behrman pointed. Ick. His nails were filthy. “And she’s back.”

  Emma Jan shrugged and smiled. “Sorry. A minor overreaction.”

  “Overreaction,” he repeated, dumbfounded. “That’s what you’d call that?”

  “It’s not my fault the woman living in your mirror wants to kill me. Where’s your dog?”

  “Inside,” he said shortly, then stepped back to let us in.

  It made me wonder, would Emma Jan think the dog’s reflection was the pet of the woman who lived in the mirror? Or did the delusion only affect her reflection? I tried to imagine poor Emma Jan in a fun-house mirror … terrifying. No wonder George was smiling; he loved any kind of excitement or trouble. Exciting trouble was his favorite.

  “You’re in deep shit, Sylvester,” he said cheerfully. It was a line from Stephen King’s The Stand he liked to trot out when busting someone’s story. “Oh, now, you’ve got company. Who’s this?”

  There was another man in the living room, slowly climbing to his feet. He looked like a truck driver who’d played lots of football: big, thick shoulders and arms, sturdy legs, a small-ish beer belly that would probably give him trouble as he got older and didn’t decrease his beer consumption. Black hair pulled back into a ponytail, blue eyes. A face that was more strong than handsome … broad forehead, big nose, big chin. Not handsome, but far from unattractive.

  He greeted us with, “Got a warrant?”

  “Ooooh, rookie mistake. You hate to see it,” George said, miming sorrow as only a dedicated sociopath could. “We don’t need one to chat. Besides, your boyfriend let us in.”

  “We’re not faggots,” Behrman snapped. Then, pointing to Emma Jan: “We gonna have trouble with her again?”

  “What ‘we’? My partner fixed everything while you hid behind the couch.”

  “That’s a fuckin’ lie!”

  “Oh, there’s no shame in it,” Emma Jan piped up. “The whole thing was scary and dangerous and surreal.”

  Yes: those three words summed up my life.

  “We didn’t get your name, big guy,” George said.

  “Philip Loun.”

  “L-O-O-N?”

  “No, like ‘loud’ without the D. After you’ve added an N. Me and Behrman go to the same AA meetings.”

  “You do know that lying to cops isn’t one of the twelve steps, right?”

  “Nobody’s lying.” Behrman reluctantly shut the door and went to sit in the chair opposite Loun.

  “Wrong yet again, Mr. Behrman. You were lying. Which sucks for you, because now we’re at least ten times more interested in you than we were yesterday.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “The movie, Mr. Behrman. The one you didn’t go to.”

  “Don’t look at the mirror,” I whispered to Emma Jan, who’d been staring, wide-eyed, at the living room.

  “I don’t know where I can look.”

  I understood, sure. A small Confederate flag had been tacked up over the television. And posters were all over exhorting how swell the Third Reich was.

  There were also quite a few old mug shots that had been printed out, framed, and hung for some reason. All the subjects, except for one, were black males … the stereotypical Bad Guy pic showing a brooding African American male with features exaggerated to make him look meaner, wearing the hey-look-at-me-in-standard-prison-issue striped shirt.

  The exception was a white female, wearing a long dark skirt and nice blouse, buttoned to her chin. She looked like she’d come straight from Central Casting for Stereotypical School Marm.

  I wasn’t close enough to read any of the names, but the pictures were old, early-to-mid twentieth century old.

  Finally, Behrman’s big gurgling aquarium—it was half as long as the entire living room wall—was so green, I could barely make out the fish that were in it … and they didn’t look like fish. Turtles? Body parts?

  “You can see ’em when they swim close to the glass,” Behrman offered.

  “Hey, don’t worry about a thing, Officer,” Loun told Emma Jan. “You’ve got nothing to worry a
bout from The Good Citizens.”

  “It’s ‘agent,’ actually. And I don’t?”

  I wanted to ask, but had low interest in displaying my ignorance. Fortunately, George knew I was clueless, and could never resist a chance to show off. “The Good Citizen was a monthly ‘yay, facism!’ rag that quit printing around 1933.”

  “Well, there was other stuff going in on 1933,” Emma Jan offered. “Their to-do lists probably got hard to manage after a while. ‘Hmm, shall we stop earning money to pay the mortgage, or should we stop our malicious hate-mongering which we’re hoping will spread to the next generation?’ You see how it is.”

  “We took that name for our militia,” Loun confirmed.

  Outstanding. Serial murder and white supremacists. It was shaping into a lovely week.

  “You said I shouldn’t worry, but now I’m extremely worried,” Emma Jan said. “You recall Waco, right? Didn’t work out so good for you guys. Right?”

  “The Good Citizens follow the teachings of Edith Overman. We’re all about women’s equality.”

  “All women?” she asked. “Or just white women?”

  Both men shrugged.

  “I see. Can’t win them all, I suppose.”

  “Edith Overman?” I asked. Because of two bad things, I had to ask. Bad thing one, Edith Overman was obviously a mover and shaker in the booming business of bigotry and racism and I should’ve known who she was. Bad thing two, there are so many of them, so many zealots and racists and warlords-in-training, no matter how much I read I can never keep up with them. And they always found someone—or someone found them. For every JFK, there was an Adolf Hitler. For every Gandhi, there was a Jim Jones.

  “Bad boys. Very bad boys.” George shook his finger in mock-scold. I think it was mock-scold. “You left a few things out. You’re also all about anti-Semitism, racism, anti-Catholicism, and anti-immigrant.

  “Here’s the hilarious part, guys: Overman hated immigrants, and yet she was not Native American.” He swung on Emma Jan, throwing up his hands in mock-despair. Or real despair. “This, this is why I can’t ever get on board with these dumb shits. Can you imagine going through your whole life teaching your kids and your neighbors how to hate immigrants while being so dumb you don’t know you were descended from illegal immigrants?”