Being in my hometown didn’t create feelings of nostalgia. I’d grown up in Columbia, but I had also been kidnapped once and nearly killed several times. Despite these incidents, the city had rather low crime figures. For me, it had always seemed like crime came in waves. There’d be a serial killer or something and it would rage for a year or so, then it would go back to simple, petty crimes. Then the rate would soar again as another violent criminal went on the loose.
I jumped on the highway and headed south. The roads were mostly clear, a sprinkling of snow and ice had been blackened by cinders and road salts. Driving there was easy, I remembered the address and the location. It didn’t matter that things had changed in the last twelve years or so.
The SUV turned into the subdivision. Gabriel sat next to me. Xavier was straining against the seatbelt in the back to get a better view.
The subdivision was like a thousand others. It was too old to be made of cookie cutter houses, but that was its only distinguishing feature. The houses had once been considered spacious and the neighborhood swanky, inhabited by the wealthy. However, that had been long before I was born. The wealthy had moved on to better areas, leaving this one to the working classes.
I turned onto a side road and stopped next to the curb. Across the road was a one-story ranch-style house with a brick front, a one car garage and a front yard only slightly bigger than a postcard. The snow in the front yard was untouched. The drive had been shoveled. I frowned at it.
“Is this the childhood home of the infamous Aislinn Cain?” Xavier had slipped out of his seat belt.
“It is,” I frowned harder.
I wasn’t a big fan of change. The house had definitely changed though. Light blue vinyl trim had been put on the sides, replacing the muted pink clapboard siding that had been on it when I was young. The shutters were now painted a dark brown. They had been burgundy. The snow wasn’t deep enough to hide the missing brick-ringed flowerbeds that my mother had created and cultivated. My brother’s basketball hoop was gone from over the garage door. A feat to be sure since my father had not only screwed it in with about a hundred screws, but then siliconed it to make sure that it couldn’t break loose if one of us decided to be stupid and hang from it.
“We should go,” I said. “We look like stalkers.”
“We look like cops,” Gabriel told me. “Weird cops, but cops all the same.”
“Knowing Ace’s luck, the house is probably a meth lab now and they are currently arming themselves for a full on assault,” Xavier gave one of his inappropriate giggles.
“Or that,” Gabriel agreed. I started the car and turned around. Half way down the block, I stopped again. My attention drawn above the road. My frown deepened and I could feel it tugging at my ears. I tried to relax my face and failed.
“What?” Xavier asked.
“I’ve seen tennis shoes thrown over power lines before, but never socks,” I told him, slipping the car into park and getting out. I heard the other doors of the SUV open and shut. The three of us stood in the cold in front of the running vehicle and stared up.
“There’s something in them,” Gabriel said.
“Yeah and it’s foot shaped,” Xavier sounded weird. I looked at him. He was frowning. A faint scent caught my nose, like frozen meat being taken out of the freezer.
“What’s the temp?” I asked.
“What?” Both men said in unison, turning to look at me. I meet their gaze and held it.
“What is the temperature?” I said the words slowly.
“About forty,” Xavier answered. “Why?”
“I smell,” I shrugged. It was hard to explain what meat smelled like when it thawed. It was slightly greasy smelling. “I smell...” I shrugged.
“You smell what?” Gabriel prodded.
“Meat,” I finally answered. “I smell meat, like someone took a roast out of the freezer to let thaw. It’s sort of a sickly, greasy smell.”
“Great,” Xavier said. “You know, you could pretend you don’t have a super nose and we could just drive on, go back to Kansas City.”
“I don’t have a super nose,” I informed him.
“You can smell decay better than a vulture,” Gabriel quipped. “We all have to shower after sex or risk you making a comment about it because you can smell it on us.”
“That sounds creepy,” I told him. “I have never done that.”
“It is creepy,” Xavier answered. “And you have done it. Hell, sometimes showering doesn’t even work.”
“Try using soap,” I retorted. “Everyone can smell sex.”
“No, Ace, they can’t. That’s what we’ve been trying to tell you,” Xavier said. “It took us a while to figure out how you knew, then you commented about something none of us could smell one time. We put the pieces together after that and agreed to shower from then on.”
“Ok, fine, I have weird olfactory abilities. I still smell meat. It’s very faint. So, either something is dead and starting to thaw in a front yard nearby or those feet shaped things in those socks are probably feet.”
“You’re call, Gabriel. We can get in the SUV and drive back to the hotel or we can call the police and fire department and get someone down here to investigate Ace’s nose.” Xavier wrapped his arms around himself.
“Why would someone tie up feet in socks and throw them over a power line?” I asked.
“Because the world is full of sick and twisted people,” Gabriel was digging for his cell phone.
“No, that’s extreme, even for a world of sick and twisted people. They will freeze, thaw, freeze, thaw, in a cycle that will slow decomp while terrorizing the people of the neighborhood because there are weird things hanging from a power line. In a few weeks, they’ll have a break from the cold that lasts more than a few days and the decay smell will spread like fires in a dry corn field.” Something nagged at me. I ignored it.
“We have people coming to investigate,” Gabriel hung up the phone. “We should block off the street and wait for them in the SUV.”
“I’ll wait in the SUV,” I didn’t wait for a reply. I turned and walked back to the warmth of the running vehicle. Perhaps the neighborhood hadn’t changed all that much. We’d never found a pair of feet hanging from a utility line, but we had lived a few blocks from a serial killer. The nagging became more intense. The memory associated with it appeared to be missing. There was just the nagging sense that I knew something about the feet on the wire.
Sirens became louder. A fire truck responded first. Gabriel talked to the men as they climbed from the massive red truck that flashed and made too much noise. A handful of squad cars pulled up within seconds of the fire truck. That was unexpected. Socks on a line didn’t require multiple squad cars. A final car pulled up. This one was unmarked and two men, wearing suits, stepped out. One was older, greying with a paunch that was beginning to make his waistband disappear. The other was younger, his face didn’t have the lines and marks that the older man’s had. They had to be detectives. This meant that this wasn’t the first time they had found feet in socks thrown over a wire.
The older man looked vaguely familiar. I searched the database in my brain for names and faces but came up blank. Gabriel motioned to me. Reluctantly, I exited the vehicle as if walking towards a guillotine ready for use.
“Aislinn Cain, my you’ve really grown up,” the older detective said to me.
“This is Aislinn Cain?” The younger man asked. “The Aislinn Cain?”
“It’s just Aislinn Cain, no ‘the’ required,” I informed the younger man. “I’m sorry, but I don’t remember you.”
“It’s been a long time,” the older man said. “I started the force with your dad. He was a good man. I helped work your disappearance. I was actually one of the officers that interviewed Callow when we did the door to door search.”
“My apologies, but I don’t remember much from that,” I lied.
“Oh, yeah, sorry,” the older man looked embarrassed. “Detective Troy Russell.” He extended his hand out for shaking. I squashed the repulsion it brought on and shook his hand. He’d known my father, I could at least show him some courtesy. Gabriel looked like he’d been bitten by a plague-carrying prairie dog. “It appears that you’ve stumbled into a hornet’s nest.”
“How so?” I asked.
“This is the sixth set of socks we’ve found. They always contain a pair of feet,” Detective Russell informed me. His partner scowled. Russell ignored him.
“Xavier, this is all your fault,” I informed my cohort.
“How is it my fault?” Xavier protested.
“You wanted to see where I grew up.” I didn’t add the duh that formed at the end of the sentence. “We didn’t find a meth lab, we found a serial killer. So, thank you, thank you so very much.”
“Who said anything about a serial killer?” The younger partner asked. The quickest flash of a smile appeared on Russell’s face. If I hadn’t been watching him, I might have missed it.
“The Aislinn Cain grew up to work the US Marshals Serial Crimes Tracking Unit,” Russell told him. “If you need an expert on serial killers, you’re looking at them.” Russell had a moment when he looked confused. “However, I thought there were more of you.”
“We’re a five-person unit,” Gabriel confirmed. “But one is recovering from injuries sustained on another case, the other is jet-lagged. Since we didn’t intend to find a serial killer looking at Ace’s old house, we left him at the hotel to sleep.”
“Which house used to be yours?” The younger man asked.
“The pink one,” I stopped. “No, it’s blue now.” I corrected myself.
“You grew up in a pink house?” Xavier raised an eyebrow.
“It was a dusty pink, not hot pink and back then, it was kind of cool.” I answered.
“It was never cool,” Xavier informed me.