Simon Says... Scream Read online

  “Seems like every couple years one is found over there,” she noted.

  “Looks like a popular place, but with whom?”

  “Everybody. Everybody who doesn’t want to have anything to do with anybody,” the woman replied.

  “Explain what you mean by that,” Kate said.

  “The area’s run-down. Anybody who’s here doesn’t really want to be here, but there are limitations as to how far anybody can go in this world, without some help.”

  “Why are you still here?” Kate asked.

  “Because it’s a job,” she stated simply. “I get to eat for free while I’m here, and it pays the bills.” She shrugged. “Nobody will hassle me. I’m well past being a looker, and, honest to God, most people are just grateful when they come in that they can get a cup of coffee.”

  “How is the coffee here?”

  “It sucks, but, at two o’clock in the morning, when you’re looking for coffee, you really don’t care. It’s a hot drink, and, on this rainy morning, people don’t really give a shit. They just want access to something.”

  Kate studied the older woman, whose hair hung in thinning lengths down her head. It looked like she was balding early, whatever red hair she may have had was a more carroty orange, and her skull showed through. Her apron was dirty, but her hands appeared clean, and, although tired and worn-out, she looked like she could manage most verbally ugly clients. But there was nothing to her, if the customers became violent. The woman couldn’t have had more than 110 pounds on her frame, and she looked more like an old junkie street worker, who couldn’t find any more business because of her age.

  “What was your clientele like last night?” Kate asked.

  “The usual,” the woman said, studying Rodney. “A few came in—a couple girls, a couple guys. A few people grabbed some ready-made sandwiches. Other than that, it was pots of coffee and not a whole lot else. Matter of fact, last night was on the quiet side. The boss won’t be happy.” She chewed on her bottom lip and then shrugged, with an almost philosophical attitude, as if to say nothing she could do about it.

  “If the boss isn’t happy, then what?”

  “Hard to say,” she replied. “He’s been threatening to shut it down for a long time just because there’s not enough business to justify keeping it open.”

  “I guess it’s a numbers game, isn’t it?” Rodney agreed sympathetically.

  “It sure is,” she muttered, “and my numbers say, I need to keep working to pay the rent. So, if this shuts down, it’s not in my favor either. So I sure as hell didn’t have anything to do with any trouble.”

  “Do you know anybody who would have? Any unsavory folks who came in last night who might have had something to do with the dead body in the dumpster?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “All kinds of unsavory players are around here, but nobody I know of is into murder.”

  “Right.” Kate frowned. “No cameras and you can’t ID anybody who came in after midnight?”

  “I didn’t say that,” she corrected, looking over at Kate. “I didn’t say anything along that line.”

  “Excuse me. My mistake. Can you identify anybody who was here?”

  She frowned. “I’m not sure I can, but I didn’t say I couldn’t.”

  “Okay, I’m confused.”

  “Well, you didn’t ask,” she explained, “so I didn’t offer any information.”

  “Right.” Kate tried to figure out this woman. “So, can you identify anybody who came in?”

  “Sure. I mean, Louise was here. Sandy was here. Big Tom was here.” Her face crumpled up. “And that psycho was here, Little Mitt.”

  “Little Mitt?”

  “Yeah, he’s that half-Asian something or other crazy martial arts guy around here. He’s got some brain damage. He was pretty harmless for a long time, but lately he’s getting a little more off his rocker.”

  “Where would I find this Little Mitt guy?”

  “He hangs around the homeless shelters more than anything,” she noted. “Other than that, you’ll find him sleeping on a bench somewhere.”

  “He was in last night?”

  She nodded. “Yeah, it surprised me too because he had ten bucks on him.”

  “Is that a lot for him?”

  She nodded again. “It’s a lot for most people around here. When they get a couple coins, they come in for coffee.”

  “What do you do at the end of the pot, when you can’t sell it anymore?”

  An odd look came in the woman’s gaze, as she turned to face Kate again. “What do you mean?” she asked, her voice almost worried.

  “I’m not here to tell on you,” she responded quietly. “But surely, when a pot of coffee has been sitting there for too long, you don’t serve it.”

  “No, I don’t. We’re supposed to dump it down the sink.”

  “And, in most cases, you would.”

  But she waited. As if she had a lifetime of waiting for others to speak first, never being the first to jump in with an answer. She just stared at Kate. “You got a point to make?” The woman finally caved in to the awkwardness, speaking with a note of challenge in her voice.

  “I’m just wondering how many of these people know that a pot of coffee will get old after a while, so there might be free stale coffee available.” The woman frowned and looked down at her hands, and Kate realized that she’d hit a vulnerable spot. “Again, I’m not here to tell your boss. I’m also not here to complain about you making good use of food that’ll be wasted anyway,” she added. “I’m just trying to get an idea of who was in the area last night, who might have seen something, and who we can talk to next.”

  The woman turned, looked out the window. “If he finds out, he’ll fire me.”

  Rodney piped up. “For dumping old coffee into a cup instead of down the sink?”

  She nodded. “He doesn’t like these guys hanging around. Calls them freeloaders and says that they’re a waste of space. He doesn’t even want them in his place,” she said. “He just doesn’t get it.”

  “He doesn’t get it because he’s never been there,” Kate stated quietly. “You have, so you know what it’s like to go without any hot coffee on a cold night, don’t you?”

  The woman looked at her and then nodded. “I do,” she answered, “and I don’t see the harm in not wasting something. Yet the boss would rather it be wasted than help someone who doesn’t have the money to buy a cup anyway.”

  “Well, some people,” Rodney noted, “are supposed to follow orders regardless.”

  “Some people, quite true,” she snapped. The woman crossed her arms over her chest and looked at him. “And your point is?”

  “His point is, it doesn’t matter,” Kate said, with a wave of her hand. “The bottom line is that a few people stopped by looking for coffee last night. Can I get the names of those people?”

  “I guess.” She paused. “They won’t thank me for passing on their names.”

  “No, of course not.” Kate nodded. “I get that. But the woman who died in that alley won’t thank anybody either. Not unless we help her and at least give some meaning to her death, like by making sure nobody else goes the same way.”

  “You think he’ll strike again?” the woman asked, scratching her arm.

  Kate could see psoriasis patches, old ones, with dead flaky skin, and the woman just kept scratching. Kate reached out a hand and stilled the other woman’s movements. In a calm voice, Kate spoke, while removing her hand from the woman’s arm. “It’s possible. We just want to do our job, so we can put a stop to it.”

  The woman frowned and pulled her sleeve over her scaly skin and leaned back a little farther. Obviously the contact was something she wasn’t comfortable with.

  Rodney walked toward the door, ready to leave. “All we need is a couple names.”

  The old woman looked at Kate first, then Rodney. She muttered a couple names in a soft and quiet voice that Kate couldn’t make out.

  “I didn’t hear
that,” Kate said, pulling out her notepad. “Can you just write them down, so we can remember them?”

  She frowned at that and then shrugged, as if to accept that, if she was in for a penny, she was in for a pound, so what the hell. She wrote down two names. “These two were in last night.”

  “You got the other names, right?” Rodney asked Kate, standing against the doorjamb, his arms across his chest. He looked down the street, then turned to the woman. “Looks like you might have some business coming.”

  “Maybe, or it’s just my replacement.”

  “Who takes over after you?”

  “Riley,” she muttered. “He has been here since forever too. Honestly, if it weren’t for the two of us, the boss couldn’t keep this place open. Nobody else wants to work these hours.”

  “They’re not the best, as hours go, are they?” Kate asked. She accepted her notebook back again, then asked, “How is the coffee now?”

  “Shit,” the old woman replied, “but it’s all I have to serve.”

  “Got it.” Kate hesitated. “Is it really bad, even if I’m desperate for coffee?”

  “Yeah, it is,” she stated. “You better go down around the corner and get something better.”

  Kate wasn’t sure if the push-off was because the older woman didn’t want them around any longer or if it really was ugly coffee, but Kate figured she’d take the hint anyway. “Good enough. Hopefully we won’t have to bother you again. If you do hear any rumors, talk, or anything along that line, give us a shout.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “You’re not in the business anymore,” Kate noted, quietly taking a chance. “Yet you know a lot of women out there who are. We don’t know for sure that the woman we just found was on the streets because she was in reasonably decent shape, but she sure could have been.”

  “She could have been new, or she could have been working high-end.”

  “She could have been either of those, and she also could have been somebody’s mom. She was definitely somebody’s daughter.” Kate’s gaze bored into the other woman’s eyes. “Somebody has to care sometime.”

  At that, the woman looked down at her fingers and muttered, “Nobody ever cares.”

  “We care,” Kate responded, “but we still need help in order to solve these crimes and to ensure we don’t find another body in another alleyway.”

  “You’ll find it anyway.” She sighed. “Another body, another day, another alley.”

  “You’re right,” Kate agreed, “but let’s do our part to make sure there isn’t another one today.”

  *

  Simon stood in front of his building rehab project, arguing with his foreman about the siding to be used. Simon and his crews worked long days and weeks when on a deadline. No Sundays off if they could help it. “I don’t want any cheap vinyl,” Simon stated, “and you know that Hardie board lasts forever.”

  “Not really,” he argued, “but it’s got to look like it belongs in this historical area too.”

  “So what do you want to do?” Simon asked.

  “Brick is expensive. Rock is expensive, and anything else looks like cheap plastic.”

  “If we want to make it look like the rest of the buildings on this strip,” Simon noted, “I’ll have to go with a mixed-media look.” He groaned as he studied the tall building in front of him.

  “Interesting that they made all these so tall and narrow,” the foreman noted. “Reminds me of London.”

  “Only these are twice as tall.”

  “Right. Still, it’s what we’ve got to deal with.”

  “Let me think about that. How’s the plumbing?” Simon asked. Just as his foreman went to answer, Simon’s phone rang. He pulled it out, frowned, then shut it off and put it away.

  “Do you need to answer that?”

  “I’ll get it in a few minutes.” Kate would wait. Normally he wouldn’t not answer, but he knew he wouldn’t like anything about the message she had for him, so he was just as happy to push it off. After that, Simon and his foreman got into a heavy discussion on plumbing and budgets, then adaptations and change orders. Simon was loath to do too many change orders on one building because that was a surefire way to ensure no profits at the end of the day.

  He was in this work for a couple reasons. One was turning these old buildings back into something useful and new, while rehabilitating them for use by the public. Most often for low-income families, homeless shelters, and often women’s shelters, although not everybody knew about them. This town had a huge need for senior living facilities as well. Which is precisely what this one would be.

  As Simon headed off, after this final meeting, and walked toward home, he pulled out his phone again. “You called,” he said, when she answered.

  “I did,” Kate answered briskly. “Remember that nightmare?”

  “Which one?” he asked in a hard voice. “There’s been a few lately, and why the hell do I have to remember them anyway?”

  “You don’t,” she acknowledged, “but you and I both know that whatever is going on in your psyche won’t let you rest until whatever the hell is going on is solved.”

  “That’s an awful lot of vagaries,” he noted.

  “Well, anytime you want to give me something definitive,” she replied in a cheerful voice, “I’d be happy to have them.” Her voice dropped as she added, “Especially right now.”

  “Ah hell.” He stopped in his tracks; a person walking behind him bumped into him. With both of them apologizing and moving out of each other’s way, he hissed into the phone. “What did you find?”

  “A pretty ugly scenario,” she replied quietly.

  “I don’t really want to deal with any more ugly scenarios.”

  “I get that,” she noted, “but, in this case, I’m not sure any of us have a choice.”

  “Why not?” he snapped.

  “Because her vocal cords were cut,” she answered quietly. “To stop her from screaming.”

  A long, drawn-out hiss escaped as Simon realized which nightmare Kate was talking about.

  “Ah, crap, the woman who was screaming but not screaming.”

  “Yep, that one. At least as far as I can figure, that’s the one we’re talking about.”

  “Meaning that I have more than one nightmare?”

  “No,” she stated, with a note of finality. “Just hoping that we don’t have more than one murder victim.”

  “Isn’t your desk piled rather high?”

  “Too damn high,” she groaned.

  “So it’s not like murder takes a holiday.”

  “No, it doesn’t, unfortunately.”

  He groaned. “What do you need from me?”

  “As always, anything you have to give.”

  “Wow, Detective,” he said in a mocking voice. “I didn’t know you cared.”

  “You know I care,” she snapped right back in a pithy voice. “You just don’t know if I care very much.”

  He shook his head at that because it was very true. He wasn’t even sure where the hell their relationship was at these days. She was independent, and, as much as he wanted her to be less independent, she struggled with their relationship as it was right now. “Fine,” he muttered. “What would you like from me?”

  “A heads-up if you get any insights.”

  “You know I’m pushing them away.”

  “But I know that sometimes they won’t let you push them away. And, Simon, I get that you don’t want to do this,” she said. “I really do. But I’ve got to tell you, I really don’t want to stand over any more women who were in the condition of the one I saw today.”

  “That bad?”

  “Worse,” she replied. “I’ve got to go. Remember. Any answers you get, I’ll take them.”

  “You don’t even believe in this bullshit,” he argued.

  “I don’t know what I believe anymore,” she snapped right back.

  It was an argument they’d had many times, and he couldn’t blame her
because he was definitely on the same side in terms of not knowing what to believe. Obviously he was a believer, but sometimes it all just seemed too damn far-fetched to be feasible. As he went to answer her, he realized she’d already hung up on him. He swore, staring down at his phone.

  A man standing nearby, waiting for a bus, laughed at him. “Had to be a woman,” he stated. “Those are the only calls that can screw us over so badly.”

  Simon looked at him, realized what the guy was saying, then chose to ignore him and walked away.

  “You can run, but you can’t hide,” the guy called out with a laugh.

  The trouble was, it was almost true. The guy was right in some ways, and it was all Simon could do to figure out how it would ever work with Kate. Simon was used to having his relationships be a little more amiable. He was wealthy, busy, decent-looking, and confident. Women tended to fawn all over him. Although his last relationship had ended with a less-than-stellar result, he’d firmly expected that, when he was ready, he would find somebody new, somebody better suited to him.

  Kate was not even close to what he had imagined. She was contrary, cranky, independent, and she worked too damn hard. And he just couldn’t get enough of her.

  Chapter 3

  Detective Kate Morgan walked into the jail cell and asked for the prisoner she had sent to sober up. She was given the log-in book to take a look at. She identified the prisoner and asked to speak with him, then headed over to the interview room she had been assigned and sat down, waiting.

  Soon the prisoner walked in on his own accord, looking a little sheepish and red-eyed. He sat down nervously on the chair across the table from her. “Good morning, ma’am,” he started.

  She looked at him in surprise and just waited.

  He winced. “I’ve spent a lot of time in the streets, but I ain’t never seen anything like that.”

  “Hopefully you’ll never see it again either,” she replied in a quiet voice.

  He nodded. “I know. Look. It wasn’t the right thing under the circumstances, but I just couldn’t think of anything to do but drink enough to stop seeing that. Turns out it was burned into my brain.” He wiped his mouth and cleared his throat a couple times. “Could I possibly get a drink of water?”