Peppermint Soul (Liza McNairy Mysteries Book 1) Read online

  "Hello... is this Mr. Picany? Allen Picany?"

  "This is... who is this? If you're selling anything I'm not buying."

  "Mr. Picany... this is Liza McNairy. You called and left me a message concerning the disappearance of your daughters."

  Oh Christ in heaven. Why the fuck did I do that? It's this sickness... booze, websites, and phones don't mix. For a second he thought about just hanging up... maybe cussing her out good first so she wouldn’t have the audacity to call back again. But then something happened. Hope returned.

  "Yes, Ms. McNairy... I did call. Thank you for getting back. You see, I read about your work. I'd like to talk to you about maybe looking into this case too."

  "Please tell me a little about your situation, Mr. Picany... if you have a moment..."

  Did he have a moment? Jesus, that's all he had. Moments. A million fucking moments. Concentrate, Allen... this woman is here to help. Get it together for... what? A moment? Maybe two? Tell her about your situation... you know, the living hell that you call your life. A moment? How in hell could he tell anyone all there was to know in a moment? That'd take twenty years full of tears.

  Even now, two decades after the fact, he still got misty talking about the girls. Yeah, play it again, Sam. Only Bogart never said that, did he? They would have just turned thirty six this year... probably would be married with children of their own. Of course Paula always insisted on baking a cake for them, each and every birthday... it'd set on the kitchen table for a week until she finally dumped it in the garbage and then spent the next month or two zoned out on Xanax. Not that he could blame her... they each had their drugs of choice.

  Oscar Olay saw to it that Paula had a virtually unending supply of anti-anxiety medication. She said how she thought he was simply being kind and who was Allen to tell her different? A man bargained with what he had. Women too. That's how the world worked.

  "What is it you need to talk to me about, Allen? Don't tell me the police finally found something?"

  "No, nothing like that, Paula. I read about a woman and a man who investigate cases like ours... old crimes that have gone unsolved for years, cold cases. They're coming by to talk with me. I think you need to see the both of them too."

  "You're drunk again."

  Yeah, I'm drunk again. So fucking what. I've been drunk every day since it happened. And you're high on your fucking shit. What difference does it make? What difference does anything make any more? Christ, he felt like screaming at her the way he used to do... back when things were bad and it didn’t look like they'd make it. Maybe give her a taste of his backhand. For old times sake. Somehow, though, they did make it... they plowed through the years, stayed together... they faked it when they had to, at least he did. But mostly their marriage survived on account of him knowing when to keep his big mouth shut and his hands to himself, like now.

  "The man this woman works with has a gift, Paula. Maybe together they can help find the girls."

  "I'm not talking to anyone, Allen."

  Hell, he'd talk to her himself, if need be, but Liza McNairy seemed adamant about them both being at the interview... that both mother and father needed to be present... otherwise she doubted she could take the case. No, it isn’t a matter of money, Mr. Picany. It's just the way things work.

  "That's okay, sweetie. I just thought..."

  A goddamned psychic... was that what they were stooping to now? He'd never believed in those shysters. Paula, on the other hand, seemed to hang on their every word. She watched all the shows and even wrote in from time to time, to try and get them to help find the girls. No one ever answered her letters. Maybe the case was too old, or perhaps they just weren’t important enough.

  So why was she so against speaking with Liza McNairy now? It didn’t make sense. Unless because it was him who found her. He loved Paula but the woman had a cantankerous streak a mile wide. Hell, maybe that's why he loved her.

  "Do you really think it'll help, Allen?"

  Chapter 6—Oscar Olay

  (Living on the Edge)

  1

  "Paula Picany called, doctor. She needs another refill. That’s the third one this month."

  Christ... didn’t the woman know better than to bother his assistant with her needs? He'd told Allen to keep the woman in check. All he needed was one more complaint and the Feds would be down on him again. He was already under their microscope. The world was going straight to hell but the United States government deemed it more important to harass hard-working citizens like him rather than to take care of more pressing business, like the likelihood of terrorists getting hold of a nuclear weapon or whether Jay-Z would be putting out a new album this year.

  "Let me call her back, Lily. Could be she misplaced her pills again."

  They had a sweet little racket going. If Allen Picany could manage to keep his junkie wife under wraps and things panned out like they hoped, an enormous payday was just over the horizon for all of them. Not like the Medicare fiasco from twenty some years ago, or all the other flimflams he'd worked with Picany over the course of time.

  Oscar Olay had become a doctor for two reasons: to grow rich and to impress his father. He scored on one but not the other. Goals. What were they good for? Nothing. Good God, ya'll. The years were rapidly piling up too. Hell, he'd turned fifty five a year ago. At that same age his father had been chief surgeon at the Mayo Clinic. Here he was wallowing in general practice, treating goiters and old women's smelly vaginas. It was time to either shit or get off the pot.

  He had skills. But he had to keep them under wraps. It didn’t seem fair that the world couldn’t ever know what a gifted surgeon he really was. Instead, he had to stay in the shadows, honing his practice in secret, all for the mighty dollar. He made ten times more under the table than any legitimate surgeon could hope to make and worked far less hours. But there was a cost, too.

  The old man died last year. Cut him out of the will. Left everything to the cunt he'd married three years prior... some gold digging bimbo, bottle blonde with big tits and an even bigger ass. On top of that the broad was younger than any of the kids. When they tried to challenge the will, the judge threw out the case. Everything was notarized, all the t's crossed and the i's dotted. Nothing to be done but call it valid.

  He'd counted on that inheritance. Banked on it. Mortgaged all his property in anticipation of the big payday. Instead, he got dick. Not only that, but they were threatening to revoke his license to practice medicine. Something about over-prescribing prescription drugs. But hell... that's where the money was. Everyone knew that. Those goddamned lawyers were well aware of that shit. They made a nice living on it too. Suddenly though they were all high and holy about it. Cocksuckers.

  "Hi... is this Paula?"

  "Oh, hello Dr. Olay. Thank you for calling back so quickly. I'm in need again... the dog knocked my Xanax into the bathtub when I was giving him a bath."

  "I understand, Paula... let's make an appointment. We'll get you fixed up. Please though... do me a favor. From now on, call me at this number."

  "Absolutely, doctor. Can I get in today?"

  "Yes... can you be here in an hour, Paula?"

  He'd send Lily home early. Something bothered him about that girl. She might well be a plant. It wouldn’t be the first time the Feds tried to get something on him that way. That'd give him some time to talk to Paula alone... maybe even play around a little, like old times. The woman never could say no. Not when her Xanax was on the line.

  Why hadn’t Lily simply renewed the script over the phone? One call to the pharmacy would do it. The more he thought about it, the better it seemed to replace the girl as soon as he could. It wasn’t that simple though. Lily came highly recommended yet now he wondered if that too was all a fix. It'd be easy enough for the Feds to doctor documents making the woman appear just a little tainted. Just enough that it might interest someone like him.

  She claimed she'd been fired from her last job for dipping into the sample closet one too m
any times. I only took the expired ones, doctor. It wasn’t like I was stealing. He should've checked into that a little more deeply. Instead, he took her word. He knew better too. The thing was, he couldn’t do it all. He needed an assistant. Most of the applicants were run of the mill do-gooders, though. Or so they pretended. Lily Fowler had an arrest record replete with time served.

  "I'm taking a chance on you, Lily. Don’t let me down."

  "Oh, I won't doctor. Thank you."

  If the bitch had really been who she said she was, wouldn’t she have expressed a little more incredulity on his decision to hire her? It was as if she expected the job offer. Like someone schooled her on the right things to say to a man like Oscar Olay. He knew it but he shunted the thought aside. Just another mistake in an increasingly long line of them.

  Christ, where had all the money gone? He estimated he'd made close to a hundred million dollars over the past decade. Maybe the living large had loads to do with it... the month-long vacations in exotic locales, the fleet of private jets... an investment, really... and of course the houses, the mansions in Malibu and the condos in New York... they all drained away precious recourses that he knew he couldn’t afford and yet it seemed as if he was forever keeping up pretenses.

  The only thing to do was to make more of the green. That was the easy part. Keeping it proved a little more difficult. He wondered what it might be like to just be a normal human being... a regular country doctor who really cared about his patients and who spent a lifetime curing whatever ailments assailed them. Take his payment in chickens or bags of wheat or even tubs of lard. Have a big fat wife and a hundred kids who jumped up and down and grabbed him by the legs while they screamed daddy! daddy! daddy! each time he walked in the door at night after a long day of ministering to the ills of others.

  Grandfather had been a man like that. He remembered Pappy telling a story of being rousted out of bed in the middle of a cold winter night to help some poor destitute Inuit woman deliver a baby and who lived two counties away and how the husband came to fetch him and how the trip back could only be made using a dog sled team and how the sun hung on the horizon like a great glowing orb all during the six hour trip and how he was so frozen by the time they reached that remote homestead that his fingers wouldn’t work until he put them into warm water for several minutes and he drank off a draught of brandy and how he delivered a breach birth and both mother and daughter survived and thrived. Now that was a doctor. Those stories of Pappy's exploits in the far north were what drove him to the profession... not the thought of riches and fame. That came later.

  Hell, it was too late for any of that now. It'd been too late for years. Instead of healing people, he made a profession out of torturing them. Rather than giving, he took. That's what it's about, Pappy... not being yanked out of bed in the middle of the night freezing balls as you're dragged behind yowling dogs for hours over tundra and ice. No... this life is all about getting what's yours... taking it if necessary.

  He still had a chance to make things work. He had to. The men with whom he was involved wouldn’t take any less, and they weren’t ones to be trifled with. The Captain made things happen. Oscar felt blessed the day the man took him under his wing yet at the same time he wished they'd never met. All the shit might've have been avoided. But it was too late for that now. Concentrate on the moment... that's what he had to do.

  Maybe he ought to get in touch with Hank Lupo. That man knew how to handle women like Lily Fowler... like Paula Picany. In fact, he'd made an art form of it. Hank got more ass than any man he knew... bragged about it too... how he'd been plowing the Picany woman all the time he'd been in charge of finding the missing twins. Hell, everyone knew those girls ran off, or so Hank said. Ah... the twins... sometimes it seemed as if they were the beginning of the downfall, for all of them.

  He'd warned the Captain about Jonathan Baker. The boy was as close to a complete psychopath as anyone he'd ever had the misfortune to meet and he grew into an even more dangerous man. No one who knew him was safe, not even the Captain. Of course that went with the territory through which they were traveling. None of his associates were your garden variety normal type people... your fine upstanding citizens. They used the system any way possible to feather their own beds. Wives and kids were secondary accoutrements deemed necessary to complete the façade of the usual. So when the Picany twins vanished, everyone knew what'd happened even if no one voiced that knowledge. Even Allen Picany had to be aware

  2

  Of the circumstances surrounding their disappearance. Sure, he played dumb, the blessed maudlin fool, but the man was instrumental in setting up the whole operation. Picany had inside knowledge... though not a confidante of the Captain. The word was that the two of them had developed the business from the ground up without ever meeting once. The entire network had been the result of Allen Picany's well-placed connections in the medical field.

  Not that Allen was a doctor. Neither was the Captain. Maybe that's why Picany had approached him... a third year medical student struggling to make it through school, working two jobs because he had a father who refused to help with his tuition and room and board at college despite being a multi-millionaire as well as a top notch surgeon.

  The Captain had been reticent to meet at first, as if he suspected Oscar might've been a government agent, of all things. He was cautious, that man. Trusted no one, not even Picany, at least so far as Oscar could tell. Most all his interactions with the Captain were mediated through Hank Lupo in those days. That went on for years, until one day out of the blue the Captain approached him. Oscar had opened his first general practice by that time. The hours were awful and the money sucked. The Captain had made an appointment, like a regular patient.

  "Do you know who I am?"

  "Yes sir, I do. You're Mr. Roy Presti."

  "Well, yeah... that's my name... but do you know who I am?"

  "I'm afraid I don't follow, Mr. Presti..."

  "Does the Captain mean anything to you, Dr. Olay?"

  "Oh... you're Captain Presti... is that right?"

  "Yes I am. I thought it time we meet, Dr. Olay. I'm thinking of taking out little business to the next level. Can I trust you?"

  Yep, the Captain was all about trust. From what Oscar had heard, the man didn’t even trust his own wife. Yet there he was sitting on the table in exam room five apparently ready to take their relationship to the next level. But more, the Captain was sizing him up, judging whether or not Oscar was cut of the same steel cloth that he was. Would he fold under pressure, or only grow stronger?

  He'd sensed that his entire future hung in the balance. That one meeting would determine whether the Captain kept him as a partner or cut him loose. For a moment, Oscar thought of foregoing the Captain's offer... but the thought passed quickly. This was his opportunity to show his father how wrong he'd been... that little Oscar could be every bit the man he was despite all the years spent in the great man's shadow, belittled at every turn, made to feel small, worthless, and out of place even though he earned his medical degree without the slightest help from the old man.

  Yes sir, Captain... you can trust me.

  You can trust me as long as the going is smooth, sir. Let the sea get a little rough, though, and watch out. I'll turn on you in a hummingbird's heartbeat. But you don't need to know that, now do you. I'll keep a few secrets, if you don't mind.

  It hadn’t been the kind of job you applied for. Allen Picany had approached him while he was still in medical school, impossibly young, incredibly ignorant. Maybe he led a sheltered life. He had no idea men could even dream up the depravity that Picany introduced into his life. And the endless supply of money that Allen promised wasn’t just some happily ever after fairy tale. Nor was it for the faint of heart. The work that Oscar had done rivaled that of the finest surgeons in the world yet no one would ever know of his expertise.

  "I have a proposition for you, Oscar."

  Picany had introduced Oscar to the Captain by pr
oxy. The man wasn’t with the Sheriff's Department back in those days... instead, he was stationed on the Navy base just outside San Diego at Point Loma. Allen said how the Captain ran a tight ship... that the man refused to meet any of the hired help for fear of... what? Of being turned in? Of being found out? Allen never said and Oscar never asked.

  He said they needed someone with standing in the medical community... a doctor. Someone who wouldn’t be afraid to risk everything in exchange for an opportunity to become wealthy beyond his wildest dreams. As he listened, Allen Picany laid out an itinerary that seemed as far-fetched as any Oscar had heard of and yet the plan had a sort of beautiful symmetry to it, like a newly formed snowflake yet to be deformed by the vagaries of the elements.

  "I'm not sure I'm cut out for that sort of thing, Allen. What if we get caught?"

  "We'll be saving the lives of those who really matter, Oscar. Besides, who's gonna talk? Not the people who need the services we offer, and as far as I know, the dead can’t speak."

  By that he meant those who could pay... pay in cash, and those who would pay... pay with their lives, or at least a small part of it. At first, they bought what they needed wholesale and sold retail to the highest bidders. But that wasn’t good enough, not for the Captain, and not for Picany. Hell, he'd gone right along with the change of plans too. Why not? If they could get what they needed for nothing or next to it, they'd all reap the benefits. And who were they hurting? No one that mattered... only the lost, the disfranchised, the mentally inferior.

  "We'll only take the ones no one wants, Oscar, those who no one cares about. You see 'em every fucking day... the throw-aways, the lost children, the keepers of the street. What sort of life do they have to look forward to anyway? In a few years they'll be so much damaged merchandise. Now, they're worth something. Maybe not to themselves, but to those who can pay."