"Is everything all right?", asked Missy.
I made a waffling motion with my hand. "Eh. Marilyn's car has four flat tires. She's stuck at the mall and I have to go pick her up. Can you get Grace to find a tow truck or a wrecker to go out there with some new tires? Maybe the Toyota place can do something." I grabbed my jacket and headed towards the door.
John caught up to me and laid a hand on my shoulder. "Hold on a second, Carl. Something's wrong here. Four flats isn't an accident, it's vandalism." I opened my mouth to argue, but couldn't. He was right. It was way too unlikely to be an accident. "You should call the police."
"Call the cops? For vandalism? They won't be able to do anything."
"Maybe, maybe not. Didn't you say a few weeks ago that your babysitter saw a car at your house? How do you know it's not the same thing?"
"John, that's crazy!"
He pushed back. "You should call the cops. I'm your friend as well as your lawyer. Listen to me." He turned me back to my desk and pointed at the phone.
I muttered, "This is nuts!", and then dialed 911. The Baltimore County Police said they would send somebody in about fifteen or twenty minutes, which would allow me some time to get over there and find my wife and Charlie.
I looked over at John, who was leaning against the doorframe and smiling. "Happy now?"
"Happy."
"You know, I already had one mother. Look how that worked out!"
He laughed. "Get out of here. Go find Marilyn and take her out to lunch. She's too good for you anyway."
"Very true!"
I took off and drove to the mall. Fortunately I had driven my Lincoln to the office that day. It was only about ten miles away, if that, and I found her and Charlie standing outside one of the entrances to the mall. Charlie was sitting in his stroller, and Marilyn was talking to one of the Rent-A-Cops at the entrance. I pulled up in front of the entrance, and Marilyn finished her chat and pushed the stroller and her purchases towards me. I climbed out and waved at Charlie, who waved back. The security guard took off.
"What's up?", I asked.
"Well, it's the car. The tires are flat, and the guard at the security office thought it looked weird. He said I should call the police. What do you think?", said Marilyn.
"I already did that. Come on, get in, and let's go to the car. Where'd you park, anyway?" She pointed, just in time to see a Baltimore County patrol car come into the mall road. I flagged him down. He rolled down the window, and I asked, "Were you sent over to check on a vandalism complaint?"
He nodded. "You the one who called it in?"
"Yes, sir. I just got here. I'm loading my wife and son in the car, and then we'll go over there, if that's all right."
"Yeah, sure." He picked up the dashboard microphone and started mumbling into it, so I went back to the car and loaded Marilyn's bags into the trunk, while she put Charlie in his car seat. Then we drove through the rows of parked cars to where Marilyn had left her Toyota.
The security guard was right, something did look weird. It didn't look like anything random, and none of the other cars nearby were touched. Things got stranger when the cop knelt down and touched the valve stem on the rear right tire. Then he moved forward to the front tire. He looked up at me and said, "Your valve stems have been cut. This isn't just flat tires."
"Cut!", I exclaimed. What the hell?! I turned to stare at my wife in disbelief.
He checked all four tires, and then looked over the rest of the car. He stopped at the gas cap cover and looked at that carefully. He repeated the inspection at the trunk and hood latches. "Somebody was trying to get into your gas tank and trunk, too." He went over to his patrol car. Before I knew what was happening, he had called back to his dispatcher and requested a crime scene investigator to come out. He made another call about five minutes later, after the wrecker from the Toyota dealership showed. It was decided to have the tow guy load the car on the flatbed and haul it to the Towson impound yard, which was close to the lab people.
All during this, he was peppering both Marilyn and me with questions. Did we have any enemies? Did we have any recent problems with neighbors? Were we involved in any law suits? What did I do for a living? What did Marilyn do? Did we have any other children? It was mostly background, but when Marilyn mentioned the problems the night of the reunion, you could see his ears pricking up, almost like a dog on a scent. That caused another call to headquarters, to talk to an investigator of some sort.
When the car was loaded on the flatbed, he released us, with instructions to follow the truck to Towson and go inside to ask for a Detective Lewis Carstans. Then he took off, to go back on patrol. I looked over at Marilyn. "What the hell is going on?"
"No idea!"
"One of your old boyfriends back in town?", I asked, jokingly.
She snorted. "It's more likely to be one of your old girlfriends!"
That made me scratch my head. It made more sense then I wanted to think about. If this was related to the green car at the house, the night of the reunion, then it made a lot of sense. What if somebody at the reunion was trying to get back at me for something? What? Who? Why? None of this made any sense to me.
Detective Carstans asked us the same questions that the patrol officer had asked, and he asked for any details of the night of the reunion we could think of, which weren't many at all. At least I knew the date, so he could go through their records and find the patrol officer who had come to the house. Then he took our fingerprints, both mine and Marilyn's, to compare against anything they found on the car. I couldn't believe they were taking this that seriously!
Marilyn fed Charlie some cereal she had in her bag; the kid went through Cheerios like I could go through salted cashews! It still wasn't enough, and he was getting fussy by the time we were finished. It would take a couple of days to process the car (read that as 30 minutes to process it, 15 minutes to figure it out that nothing was there, and 2 days of hurry up and wait while this happened. They would call us when we could pick it up. I wrote off the rest of the day and drove us all home. Marilyn could drive my Town Car for a few days and I would drive the 380.
Let's face it; the rest of the day was shot for us. We settled Charlie down by stuffing food into him. He was a bottomless pit. I was going to need to start a second corporation just to keep him fed. Then I made us a very late lunch, and we sat down in the living room to talk while our son napped. Neither of us could make any sense of this. Could it have been an ex-girlfriend? Everybody seemed happy the day of the reunion, and I hadn't seen any of them for ten years. Hell, I hadn't been involved with any of them since I was 16! That was a ridiculous amount of time to hold a grudge this serious.
Two days later we drove to Towson and picked up the car. Detective Carstans said the forensic report was inconclusive. The valve stems had definitely been cut, but they couldn't tell by what. What was interesting was that there was a palm print, the same print, on the car body panels at each tire location. We looked blankly at him, and he demonstrated by kneeling down and placing his left hand on the body panel while he mimed cutting the stem. Same print, same location, each tire. If we ever caught the guy doing something else, we could use his prints to tie him to this, too. Or her. Nobody knew if it was a guy or a girl.