Color Blind (7 page)

Jenna swallowed hard as Hank put the SUV into park in Thadius Grogan’s driveway. “Irv, find out everything you can about Grogan. Medical history, military past, phone records . . . anything you can get your hands on. I have a feeling we’re going to need it.”

“L
eft in a hurry?” Richards ventured as the three of them stepped into the foyer of Thadius Grogan’s mansion.

“Something like that.”

The front door had been unlocked, not even completely closed. Even if Jenna hadn’t read so many Nancy Drew novels growing up, she’d still think it was a bad sign. This wasn’t the type of house you left unlocked on a
perfect
day, but the timing of the phone call to Grogan from Howie Dumas’s “office” bumped absentmindedness to about number ten on the growing list of reasons in Jenna’s head why the man would rush out the door and leave it unlocked.

She knelt in front of a framed photo on the hallway table. The young woman grinning goofily up at the camera from where she was stretched out on a patch of grass had to be Emily Grogan.

Hank squatted beside her as Richards paced the hall. “Where to first?”

Jenna shrugged, tearing her gaze away from Emily’s photo, noting the lack of any other knickknacks or pictures. “Best place I know to get acquainted with somebody is the bathroom.”

“Remind me not to invite you to any parties,” Hank answered, falling in step behind her.

Instinct led Jenna toward the stairs and into the master bedroom. The spacious bathroom was papered in pink, and his and her sinks adorned either side. Newspapers, books, and magazines covered the counters along with bottles of various soaps and household cleansers, used paper towels, Band-Aid wrappers, and crumb-covered paper plates. She noted the color of the earth her mind showed her. Since she was a kid, messiness showed up in three ways: natural, based on the personality of the person; eggshell when she visited someone’s home who simply didn’t have time to pick up; or the color of wet dirt when someone stopped cleaning because they no longer cared.

The last was the same color she’d noticed in her dad for months after her mother went away.

The whirlpool tub was grungy but not entirely neglected. Not for years anyway. More like days.

“He still cleans or has someone do his basic cleaning,” Jenna said out loud, more for herself than anyone else.

Richards wrinkled his nose at the stacks of water-stained books surrounding the bathtub, the papers littering the floor. “If you ask me, if he
does
have a maid, she isn’t a very good one.”

Jenna moved on to the cabinets, picked up a prescription bottle half-full of Xanax. “I said
basic
cleaning, not full-on scouring. From the water stains on the books, he seems habited, set in his ways. These books stay where they are, splashed or not. If it’s a housekeeper, he’d have her scrub the tub but never touch his stuff. Have Irv find out about the doctor on this bottle, but I’m guessing family physician, not psychiatrist.” Jenna passed Hank the prescription bottle. She glanced over the stacks of papers on a stool by the tub, the open book on the back of the toilet.

Hank whipped out his phone and snapped off a text. “I’ll get Irv on a possible cleaning person, too.”

In the corner sat a hamper, empty except for a pair of boxers and a white shirt at the bottom. “Laundry’s done, but there’s no toilet paper,” Jenna said, nodding to the empty roll on the wall holder. “He has the energy to do the laundry but not change the toilet paper roll? Doubt it. Still, if he has a cleaning lady, he hasn’t slipped so far into depression he doesn’t care about certain things.”

She picked up the book from the back of the toilet.
Too Young: The Story of Bailey Frumpton.
“It’s a memoir by a girl kidnapped at twelve.”

Hank turned over the book at the top of the stack by the tub. “Yep. This one’s true crime, too. The whole pile is.”

“So maybe a little more obsessive with a purpose than depressed,” Jenna said, turning back to the counter and opening the cabinet below the sink.

“How do you know it isn’t him getting himself through?” Richards asked. “You know, reading from people who know. Commiseration?”

Jenna shuffled through the contents of the cabinet, but saw nothing interesting. “Do you see any self-help books lying around?”

Richards didn’t answer, but she hadn’t expected him to. He wouldn’t find any. Whoever Thadius Grogan was, he didn’t want to be pulled from the world of death and evil monsters. It looked like he’d collected every true crime book sold in the city over the past five years. Then when he got his hands on all of those, he went to the next town and the next. Nope. This guy was staying in this world, even if it was because he was stuck here.

“Did you see a computer?” Jenna asked Hank.

“We’ll have to check,” Hank replied.

“Let’s take a look for that, but I want to tour the bedroom on the way out.”

“After you,” Hank said.

Jenna reentered the bedroom. She’d glanced over it when she’d walked through on her way to the bathroom, but she had purposefully not given it much thought or time to register. Now she allowed herself to take it in like a new city, the sights hitting her senses, giving first impressions, and colors danced in her eyes. The stacks of folders, papers, and books continued into the bedroom right onto the double bed, where it culminated in a mountain that took what would’ve been his wife’s place. The bed was halfway unmade on the side next to the stack of open reading material and a smattering of pens and highlighters. “Cleaning woman doesn’t come daily.”

She moved to the bed and perched on the end of the unmade side. At the top of the pile of books lay an open volume on forensic techniques, and next to it, a legal pad scribbled with notes on the material. “Looks like he was researching on his own in addition to the true crime. See if Irv can get anything on who worked his daughter’s case, Hank. We might need to touch base there next.”

A warm, half-empty bottle of water on the nightstand. Advil. Nothing ridiculous. The guy wasn’t an alcoholic. Didn’t seem to be a druggie, either. The Xanax had been in the bathroom, of course, but the thing was pretty full. No other signs.

His pillows sat propped against the headboard like he’d been sitting up and reading. The position didn’t scream “sleep.”
Did
he sleep?

“Let’s look at the other bedrooms.”

Richards led the parade down the hall toward the other doors: three open, two closed. One open door was another bathroom. Across the hall, another open door led into what looked like a never-slept-in guest room. The third room contained a collection of every piece of exercise equipment ever sold on an infomercial. They moved on to the first closed-off room, which turned out to be filled with plain brown boxes sealed with packing tape.

Hank stepped into the room and read the labels scrawled in Sharpie marker on the box tops. “
NARELLE’S COOKBOOKS. NARELLE’S PAJAMAS AND GOWNS. MISCELLANEOUS NARELLE—CRAFTS.
It’s his wife’s stuff.”

“May be worth coming back to,” Jenna said, but she was already three paces toward the last door, pretty sure of what she’d find.

Sure enough, she knew instantly the room had once been occupied by Emily Grogan. White wrought iron daybed with a blue paisley comforter. A tan, shaggy rug on the floor next to a rolling desk chair with a seat made of bungee cords. A vintage record player sat on the dresser a few feet away from various tubes of lipstick. The room had the normal wear of a teen’s after she’d left for college: a rubber bin of Christmas wrappings out of place on the floor by the door, a small, broken television shoved inside to be out of sight until someone had time to fix it.

Richards eyed the wrapping box and TV. “Kids’ rooms always turn into storage when they go off, huh?”

Jenna scanned the pictures taped to the vanity mirror. Emily with friends at a birthday party. Emily with friends dressed up like
Star Wars
characters on Halloween. “Standard. It’s actually how
untouched
it is that bugs me.”

A picture of Emily with Thadius himself. His grin shone under his mustache and graying beard as he looked straight into the camera. Had Narelle taken the photo? Emily stood next to him pointing at the T-shirt that bore the words
NUMBER ONE DAD
stretched across his round belly, her lips rounded in an exaggerated “oh.”

Richards wrinkled his bushy brows. He turned to Hank and back to Jenna again. “Lots of parents of kids who die suddenly leave their rooms intact, right?”

Jenna popped open the oak jewelry box on the dresser. Silver bangles. A string of pink pearls. “Yes. That’s not the odd part. The weird part is all the daughter’s stuff is left as it was the moment she died, but the wife’s is all neatly packed up and shoved out of sight.”

Hank opened the bedside table’s drawers one at a time, shaking his head. “Not
that
weird. His wife committed suicide. She
chose
to leave him. His daughter was taken. Polar opposites.”

“Maybe,” Jenna said, but she was only half paying attention. Yet another open book had caught her eye on the daybed across the room, but this was different. This time, it was the only book in the room.

Jenna’s heart picked up before she lifted the book. Then when she did, it surged an extra few beats for good measure. Her hunch had been right—a journal.

She sat on the daybed with Thadius Grogan’s writing, probably where he wrote his most private thoughts in his slain daughter’s space. Jenna flipped the pages wildly, her brain struggling to connect dots she couldn’t see. It didn’t matter, though. Even if the dots might not be apparent yet, she already knew the picture they’d form when she connected them. Thadius formed more in her mind, a color latching itself to him from the journals. Bright red. And yet it wasn’t red for power like Isaac Keaton. This red was action.

And rage.

The journal wasn’t just entries about Thadius’s nightmares, social anxiety, and trouble sleeping, though God knew there were plenty of those. No. Every other page had a picture of a person or place with scribbled notes about their possible role in Emily’s death, how they might be tied to her killer. Some of them made a bit of sense. Others were outlandish, the stretch of an imagination desperate for closure. One picture featured a pizza boy who’d apparently delivered to Emily’s rental house on two occasions. The note beneath it said:
Possible stalker. Check into.

“Thadius has done the thing right. I’ll give him that,” Jenna said as she read.

“How so?” Hank asked from where he was now studying the pictures on the vanity.

“He’s researched to a fault. Almost overresearched. That’s going to be a problem.”

Jenna flipped another page and another. With every page, she felt sicker. That sickness was Isaac Keaton. The guy was a psychopath all right. He knew exactly what he was doing, and unfortunately he was brilliant at it. Somehow he’d contacted a guy with just the right amount of anger, grief, and frustration. Easy to push off the ledge of depression. Maybe suffering from PTSD. She might not know everything, but she knew Thadius had a serious vendetta and that Isaac Keaton was in his head.

When her grandmother passed years before, she’d seen before her the gentle pearl of acceptance. Since then, she could see the same shade in victims and bereft families when they had the quiet calm of peace with a passing. This was different. This was the lava she saw when a loved one wasn’t past that one stage of grief when it hurt less only because you could wield it instead of feeling it. Anger.

Unable to tear her eyes from the pages of Thadius’s obsession, Jenna muttered, “Hank, we need to find out where Thadius Grogan went after mythical Howie Dumas’s office called him. If we don’t act fast, we might have a revenge killer on our hands.”

T
he bell on the door dinged when Thadius Grogan entered Pembry Pawn. The owner, a clean-cut man about Thadius’s age, looked up but said nothing. The guy turned his focus back to the glass cabinet he was polishing. Thadius bolted the latch on the door, flipped the sign to
CLOSED
.