Destinations Unknown Read online

  “Could you just tell us, please?” I said, a bit more loudly than was probably called for.

  Officer Seiler looked at me, then back at Dobbs. “Let me guess, your new CS sidekick?”

  “He’s a bit uneasy.”

  “Think maybe he’s wound too tight?”

  “Could be, but he seems like an okay guy.”

  Don’t you just love having people talk about you like you’re not there? Does wonders for the old self-esteem.

  The two of them continued chatting about this and that—how the department was still trying to track down family members, the weather, the accident in Columbus that was all over the news, the recent budget cuts (Damn the budget cuts!)—so I turned around to lean against the wall and nearly jumped out of my shorts when I found myself face to face with a small, slightly hunched, bespectacled man who immediately reminded me of the drawings of Mole from The Wind and the Willows.

  “She was an odd’n,” he said, nodding toward room 716.

  “Hello,” I said, nothing if not quick on my feet.

  “I’ll not speak ill of the dead,” said Mole, “but I have to tell you, I’m not going to miss the power outages.”

  I looked toward 716, then back at him. “Okay…?”

  He gave out with one of those exasperated sighs that suggests the listener should have been able to figure out the rest for themselves already, if they had half a brain and were paying attention, which obviously I had not been so he was going to explain it to me very slowly, taking pity on my lack of common sense. “Them packages she was always getting. Every time she got a delivery, you could count on the power on this floor going out sometime that night. Got so bad that the management company had the custodians install a breaker box down by the laundry room so they wouldn’t have to keep going to the basement. Thought it was damned considerate of them, myself. Power goes out, one of us’d just grab a flashlight, go down to the laundry room, flip a switch. Still, you couldn’t stay mad at her, not hearing the way she cried some nights.”

  I didn’t want to know this. One of my greatest fears is that I’ll end up old, sick, alone, and forgotten, living out the remainder of my shabby days in some dim little room with no one to talk to or care whether or not I wake every day to the promise of more loneliness, feeling like my whole life has meant nothing.

  Just spreading my sunshine. Hence the daily doses of Zoloft.

  I was about to go into this woman’s home and remove her body. The last goddamn thing I needed to hear was that she kept some of her neighbors awake because she cried every night. It was just too much.

  “Yeah,” said Mole when I made no response, “that old gal could caterwaul with the best of ‘em, I swear. I mean, some nights, she’d wail like nobody’s business.” He stopped talking for a moment, something having just occurred to him. “Huh. You know, now that I think of it, it seems like the worst nights were those right after she got a big delivery.” He narrowed his eyes, thinking hard, then nodded his head. “Yessir, that’d be right. Anytime she got a big package delivered to her, you could count on two things: the power going out, and her crying up a storm. Like I said, she was an odd’n. You got any idea if someone from her family’s gonna be dropping by for her stuff? Don’t mean to sound morbid, but I’d sure like to get a look at whatever it was she had going on in there.” This last said in a tone suggesting Miss Driscoll had some kind of juicy, dirty little secret that he was just dying to be the first to know about.

  I felt even more nervous now. “I, uh…as far as I know, they’re still trying to track down her family.”

  “Damn shame. Don’t think I ever saw a visitor come to her door, aside from the delivery people.”

  “That’s what I heard.” I wanted him to go away. I was trying to think of a tactful way to tell him as much when Officer Seiler stepped in to serve and protect.

  “Come on, Mr. Boyle,” she said, gently taking his arm. “Let’s stay out of their way so these two gentlemen can do their jobs.”

  “Damn shame,” he said again as she led him away.

  “It sure is,” she replied, casting a quick glance over her shoulder and winking at me. Even packing heat, she looked so gorgeous right then I wanted to bear all of her children.

  “You ready?” asked Dobbs, opening the door.

  “No.”

  “Good answer.”

  We righted the gurney and rolled it into the apartment, closing the door behind us should any curious eyes decide to sneak a peek. I found myself hoping that Officer Seiler hadn’t actually left, that she’d stick around long enough to make sure no crowd formed in the hallway, that maybe she’d thought it over and decided I was just the guy to carry her offspring.

  The apartment had a small foyer with a polished wood coat rack, telephone stand, and single chair for callers to use. A framed photograph on the wall over the phone showed a very striking woman surrounded by what looked like dozens of children, all of them smiling the type of forced, could-you-hurry-up-and-take-the-picture-puh-leeeeze smile that we’ve all plastered on our faces at one time or another as suited the occasion. I wondered if Miss Driscoll had been a grade-school teacher at some point in her life, because all of the children in the photo looked to be between the ages of 7 and 12. The glass covering the photo was cracked, the break running down the center of the woman’s face. I wondered why Miss Driscoll had never bothered replacing the glass.

  “All right,” said Dobbs, letting go of his end of the gurney and walking into the living room, “let me make sure we’ve got a clear path before we…”

  “Before we what?” I asked, trying to squeeze around the gurney to join him.

  “…hol-ee shit…”

  “What is it?”

  “You are not going to believe this.”

  You heard it here first.

  I honestly don’t know what I was expecting to see—a room filled with stuffed animals, or priceless antiques, maybe porcelain figurines of angels or those little statues of children with those really big eyes that are supposed to warm your heart but personally give me the creeps; whatever it was, it’d be something lonely-old-lady-like, that was for certain—

  —I’d sure like to get a look at whatever it was she had going on in there—

  —but I think even Mole a.k.a. Mr. Boyle would have started at the sight of what took up a full eighty percent of this old woman’s living room.

  Table-mounted HO slot-car racing tracks.

  It wasn’t just the sheer amount of track—though that in itself was enough to drop your jaw (lay all the individual pieces end to end, and my guess is you’d easily have a quarter-mile or more of the stuff)—but the configurations. These tracks weren’t arranged in anything so banal as circles or ovals or figure eights, but in complex, looping, multi-layered patterns, complete with overpasses, off-ramps, and even rest areas. Model buildings were placed at various points along and around these tracks (there were a half-dozen tracks set up throughout the spacious living room) depicting small townships and bigger cities, including HO-scale trees and human figures.

  “Good Christ,” said Dobbs, looking around the room. “There must be about three or four thousand dollars’ worth of track and…stuff.”

  “At least,” I replied, still trying to absorb all of it. Then thought: No wonder the power was always going out.

  The biggest track—a four-lane job—was wired for individually powered lanes, with power taps located at three different points around the track, all of the wires running underneath the table to a variable 20-amp power supply that was mounted to a small metal shelf running between two of the table’s legs.

  I used to be a slot-car racing fool when I was a kid, and I knew damn well that you can only run a power supply for so long before it starts to really heat up, and if you push your luck (like I always did) you were apt to blow a fuse before you were done.

  And if for some reason you had several tracks and power supplies running at the same time…you could blow out the electricity to th
e entire floor of an apartment building.

  I was so caught up in my own amazement that I didn’t even realize Dobbs had left the living room until he came back in and said, “Oh, man, you gotta see the rest of this place! She’s got tracks mounted everywhere—in her bedroom, the guest room, the kitchen…hell, she’s even got a little one set up in the bathroom!”

  “We’re never going to get the gurney through here,” I said. “There’s barely room to walk around.”

  Dobbs nodded his head. “Yeah, I already figured that out. We’re gonna have to move a couple of these tables. But not just yet.” He squeezed past me, pressing the clipboard into my hands, heading for the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “You just stay here, all right? Miss Driscoll’s laid out in the bedroom, so you wait and take a look around. I don’t think she’s gonna mind.” He stopped, then turned to face me. “I got a digital camera in my bag down in the wagon. I have got take some pictures of this place. My wife’ll never believe me.”

  I stared at him, blinked, then asked: “Why would anyone working a job like this carry a camera with them?”

  He grinned. “Because every once in a while I come across something really weird, and my wife requires proof.”

  “Do you lie to her that much?”

  “I don’t like to think of it as lying. I…embellish. I embroider. I exaggerate.”

  “You lie.”

  “I lie. Just to keep her guessing, mind you. Believe me, after 32 years of marriage, nothing I do surprises her anymore, so I gotta do something to make it interesting for the old gal.”

  “So you carry a digital camera to work in case something weird comes up.”

  “That’s it. Don’t you ever fib to your wife?”

  “I’m divorced.”

  “Oh, sorry. Well, didn’t you ever fib to her when you were married?”

  “Probably.”

  I was tempted to ask him what other weird things he’d encountered that required him to take pictures so his wife would believe him, then decided that some things were better left as mysteries.

  “I’d rather not stay here by myself, Fred. Okay if I come along?”

  “Sorry, my friend, but once we’re on the premises, at least one of us has to be with the body at all times. Them’s the rules.”

  “Then let me go and get the camera.”

  “Oh, no, sorry. I paid a pretty penny for that thing and nobody but me handles it. Look, you’ll be fine. Back in a couple of minutes. Take a look around, it’s pretty interesting.”

  And with that, he left me alone with a dead body, several thousand dollars’ worth of custom-made slot-car racing track, and what felt like a solid rod of iron running from the top of my throat to the bottom of my stomach.

  2

  Okay, confession time: this was not the first instance of my being in a situation like this.

  Back in the Neolithic Period, when I was a senior at Cedar Hill High School and working part-time for the same janitorial company I still worked for, a guy in my class by the name of Andy Leonard flipped out one Fourth of July and killed a bunch of people, including most of his family. The man who owned the company at the time—a Vietnam vet named Jackson Davies—was hired by the city to go in and clean up the Leonard house after the police were finished with it. No one who worked for him wanted to help, so he wound up offering me and a couple of other guys—Mark Sieber and Russell Brennert—300 dollars each to go in with him. Brennert had been Leonard’s best friend. Mark and I gave Brennert a pretty hard time that night; hell, everyone in town was still upset and sick about the murders, and I guess we were looking for a scapegoat. Things were pretty bad in Cedar Hill for a long time after that particular July Fourth.

  I will never forget what that house felt like; even from the street, you could sense the death that had soaked into its walls and floors. And once inside, that death got on your own skin, as well.

  And it was so cold. I don’t think I’ve ever been that cold in my life. I couldn’t stop shaking the whole time we were in there.

  I don’t know if it’s possible to put into words how it feels to mop up a puddle of blood and tissue that used to be a human being. Sometimes I still have nightmares about it.

  Brennert wound up going into the nuthouse for a few weeks after that night. After we graduated, he kept on working for Davies until Davies decided to retire to Florida. Brennert bought the company from him. It said an awful lot about Brennert’s character that he hired me right on the spot when I came looking for work after both college and my marriage (in that order) didn’t work out. We never talk about that night. I guess we can still smell that cold, cold death on each other. Like I could smell it now. Hence the rod of iron inside me.

  Since I couldn’t just stand there—it seemed like there were shadows in every corner trying to move in around me—I heeded Dobbs’ advice and took a walking tour of the place.

  Altogether, Miss Driscoll had 17 tracks of various sizes mounted throughout her apartment—though the track in the bathroom, a small, simple oval, was a battery-operated child’s version of what engulfed the rest of the place. She had arranged the larger tracks to create aisles so that she could move easily between rooms. I couldn’t help but wonder at her fascination with these things.

  And then thought of her loneliness.

  Everything told you that this wasn’t just a hobby with this woman, it was an obsession, something she’d fostered to fill the holes in her life. Dobbs might have found this interesting in a weird sort of way, but the more I moved from room to room, seeing the details she’d added to each setup (tiny bits of trash spilling from a trash can at a rest stop; the tired, road-weary expressions on the peoples’ faces; a vending machine with an Out Of Order sign taped to its front), the more it all struck me as frighteningly sad. A lot of care had gone into the construction and maintenance of these tracks, and I couldn’t help but wonder if it had been her way of avoiding her loneliness.

  It was in the guest bedroom that I first began to notice the trashed cars and tiny memorial wreaths set among the HO-scale buildings. The trashed cars were bad enough—how she’d manage to crumple some of these like she had was beyond me, but damn if they didn’t look like the real thing—but it was the miniature wreaths and crosses that really started to unnerve me. You’ve seen the real thing, I’m sure: drive for any length of time on any stretch of highway through any state, and you’ll pass them; sad little shrines—some homemade, others bought from florist shops—left behind by family members and friends to mark the place where someone they loved died in an automobile accident. Crosses and hearts seem to be the two most popular shapes, usually constructed of wire mesh covered in plastic flowers or plastic white lace to make the shape stand out, ribbons hand-tied all around to flutter in the breeze as if that silent activity was meant to fill the world with movements the dead could no longer make for themselves…and always, in the center of these memorials, staring out at passing cars whose drivers never return the eye contact, are the photographs, the faces of those who will never again see a new place, a different road, or a light in the window waiting for them at journey’s end.

  Yes, give me a mondo case of the willies and I turn into a half-assed poet.

  All of the tiny wreaths and crosses that were set at various points around the tracks had even tinier photographs in their centers.

  And each one was numbered on the back.

  I got out of there, found myself in the suddenly too-small hallway, and without thinking about it walked through the nearest doorway—

  —and right into Miss Driscoll’s bedroom.

  To this day I don’t know why I didn’t just turn around and leave once I realized where I was. I could have just waited in the living room for Dobbs to come back, but I guess morbid curiosity got the better of me.

  The thing is, her body was the last thing I noticed.

  Expensive tract lighting ran alongside opposite sides of the room, giving the place the too-
bright look of a department store; if you wanted to make sure you kept yourself awake at night, this was the way to do it. There were two table-mounted tracks in here, and they were even more intricate than the others—one of them was a four-lane triple-tiered job that must have taken days to set up. There was a computer that had an LCD flat-screen monitor bigger than my television. Pages torn from what looked like a few dozen road and highway atlases were taped to the walls, the windows, and her dresser mirror. The pages sparkled under the harsh lighting, and it was only as I moved closer to a few of them that I saw why: the maps were decorated with dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of small foil stars, each roughly the size of my thumb nail. (Remember those little stars that your kindergarten teacher would stick on your drawings when you got an “A”? Yeah, those.) They were all over these maps; some of the stars were silver, some of them were blue, but most of them were gold.

  And each one had a hand-written number in its center.

  Out in the hallway, a shadow moved near the door.

  “Fred?” I called out.

  Nothing. My imagination. My nerves.

  I was getting jumpy. Jumpier.

  Stepping back, I moved to the side in an effort to avoid bumping into one of the tracks and in the process banged my hip into the back of the desk chair, that in turn rolled forward, hit the keyboard tray, and woke the machine from Sleep mode.

  There were two images displayed side by side on the screen: one was the schematic of an HO-track configuration; the second was a map of the I-71 loop in Columbus.

  They were the same shape. I knew this because I’d just seen it.

  It was behind me.

  I turned to look at the second table-mounted track and, sure enough, eight mashed cars had been set aside, and seven small memorials had been placed at the spot where the accident had occurred.

  Not being one whose grasp of the obvious will ever be called keen, I looked back at the computer screen, then again at the track, then once more at the computer.

  Which is when I finally noticed the stack of files beside the desk.