James Andrus: The Perfect Woman

Mazzetti stared. “Son-of-a-bitch. Maybe you’re not just lucky on cases.”

It was the highest compliment Stallings could have ever expected from the homicide detective.

William Dremmel laid out the two, heavy-duty contractor bags in the living room while his mother continued her longest streak of consciousness in almost a year. He could hear the news from the other room. He’d finished with the girls for now, loosening Patty’s cuffs mainly to let Stacey see him do it and keep her calm. That’s why she hadn’t been put down for the night yet. He wanted the young woman to get used to a quiet room again while Detective Levine snoozed. He knew he should’ve just given her an overdose and be done with it, but he didn’t want Stacey to freak out at the prospect of a dead woman in the room with her.

Later tonight he’d dose Stacey so she’d be asleep when he took the detective out for good. He’d end it quickly for her, probably with a simple asphyxiation either by strangulation or with a plastic bag over her head. He had no interest in either method for the purposes of his research and didn’t want to try another knife attack because it was too messy.

There was a school being built just the other side of I-95 with the foundation about to be poured. He’d already scoped out how to peel back the metal mesh, bury Patty, and have the mesh back with virtually no chance of being seen from the road. In the next few days tons of concrete would seal his little foray into multiple test subjects and he could go back to maintaining one at a time. He already knew his next would be the waitress from Denny’s, Maggie Gilson.

Now he had to go talk to his mother before he got her back on her medication schedule.

Patty Levine waited after she had heard the door click shut. There were no other sounds in the room. She used an old courtroom trick to stay awake silently by holding her breath for as long as she possibly could, then letting it out silently. The activity focused her hazy mind and made her heart rate soar, pumping adrenaline into her system to fight the effects of the drugs she’d been given.

She popped open one eye for an instant, then analyzed the scene she’d taken in like a flash photograph. There was only the smaller floor lamp on in the corner by Stacey. No one was in the room that she saw, and she couldn’t tell if Stacey was awake or not.

Patty opened both eyes and scanned the room, then the door. She moved her head to check behind her toward the closed closet and caught Stacey’s attention.

“I thought you were out for the night,” said the young captive.

“That’s what I wanted Dremmel to think.”

“How’d you do that?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Special police training?”

“Yeah, sort of.” For the first time in a couple of years she didn’t feel the slightest twinge of guilt for her drug use. The two Ambiens were just her maintenance dose. Now she had some time to figure out what to do.

First, she moved her right hand but found it was secure even in the loosened cuffs. She just couldn’t fold her hand enough to slip through the opening. She’d seen it from prisoners over the years where someone had thin hands or were some kind of crazy double jointed and slipped their cuffs. One woman just tossed the cuffs back to her but didn’t try to escape from the patrol car. Another young man slipped the cuffs off, then managed to reach out the window, open his door, and sprint like a greyhound. He ran until he reached the next block and was hit by a city utilities truck. Patty had insisted on cuffing his broken arm despite his cries of pain.

Now she tried her left hand. This cuff was open a little wider. She touched her thumb to her pinkie and took a breath to ease out her hand. She felt pain shoot down her hand from the cuff scraping her thumb. But it was still moving, so she didn’t stop. She pulled as if it wasn’t her skin peeling away like cheese in a grater. It felt like someone had lubricated her hand when she realized it was her blood but it still slipped through the open cuff hole.

She let out the smallest squeak as pain overwhelmed the drugs in her system and her own natural toughness. She kept pulling until all at once her hand popped free. With no wasted motion she had the loose arm of the handcuff wiggled through the eyebolt in the wall and was sitting up working on her leg shackles. Using the open cuff arm that had swung free once her hand was out, she attacked the hinge of the leg shackles like it was a pry bar. When that didn’t work she checked the chain itself. Handcuffs were relatively cheap but leg shackles could get expensive. Dremmel was apparently on a budget and bought cheaper shackles. The chain wasn’t as solid as the handcuff’s few lengths. She wedged the cuff arm through one of the chain lengths and popped it open with a few hard twists.

She was free.

Dremmel acted as if he was watching Jeopardy! but, like most nights, there were no questions that could really stump him. This country was once called Ceylon. What is Sri Lanka. This compound is present in all life on Earth. What is carbon. The science questions tended to be downright insulting. His mother beamed with every right answer, justifying every act of parenting she had ever advocated. But he was only thinking about one right now.

Finally, at a commercial, he said, “Mom, we gotta talk.”

“I’d love to chat with you, William.”

“Mom, you really screwed me up with some of the things you did.”

“You mean the drugs or fucking a teenage yard boy?”

He flinched and shifted on the couch. “Mom, don’t talk like that, please.” He shuddered.

“Whatever you want, dear.”

“You don’t understand what it did to me. What I’ve done because of it. I never had a normal girlfriend.”

“I thought you had girlfriends. What about Lee Ann?”

He hesitated. “She wasn’t really a girlfriend.”

“Then what about the girl in the front room now? Isn’t she a girlfriend?”

He stared at his mother, not sure what to say or how the hell she knew about Stacey. “Mom, um, how…”

She smiled, a light in her eyes he had not seen for years, then leaned up out of the chair, stood, supporting herself on the chair arms like it was a walker. “I can pull this thing over any of the stairs in the house. I have plenty of time during the day when you’re out and about and you leave the key to the room in the front room cabinet.”

Dremmel stared in shocked silence as his orderly world was shown to be a complete sham. “Did you talk to her?”

“Oh no. That’s your business. I just checked in on her as she slept. She’s very pretty.”

The calculating, scientific part of his brain realized that his mom had grown tolerant to the Ambien he’d been feeding her like candy. He also didn’t realize her desire to overcome her lonely existence and see the world. That gave him a pang of guilt too.

Finally, Dremmel had recovered enough to ask, “You get up in the middle of the day and cruise around the house?”

“Some days. Not too often.”

“Do you want to hear about why there’s a girl in my darkroom?”

She was about to answer when he heard a loud thump, then a crash near the front of the house. He sprang to his feet and reached for his stun gun in his pocket as he darted to the other room, his mother turning to follow him in walker mode.

Once she was up and around, Patty Levine immediately went to Stacey and broke her leg shackles the same way she broke her own. The handcuffs were a bigger problem until she let her engineering class she took her junior year come back to her. The professor drilled into them to think outside the normal parameters of a problem. Basically, think outside the box. Patty saw the answer almost immediately. She used the open cuff arm on her left wrist as a lever to start to twist the eye-bolt in the wall.