Title: Suburban Trash
Rating: R
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Puck/Kurt, OCs
Genre: Drama.
Word Count: 3116
Warning: Sex, swearing, sometimes-graphic violence. Possible OOCness.
Disclaimer: I don't own it and I'm not making any money from it, this is pure entertainment and not intended to offend.
Author Notes: One more chapter left after this one. I'm happy to take bets on how you think it's going to end.
Summary: Kurt has this plan for how his life is meant to turn out. This plan includes very specific ideas of what he should be doing, and where he should be living, and who should conveniently die.
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The disappearance of Cassandra Stoker was much more highly publicised than any of the disappearances before her. She was a design editor for a fashion magazine, did a lot of charity work. She was a local C-list celebrity and so her disappearance was considered big news. According to the papers it took them three days before anyone thought to go to her house to check if she was Ok. The house had been empty; all of her ID, her money, her keys still on the table and signs of a break in. Glass panel in the back door broken, nothing stolen, and a tiny smear of blood in the hallway.
Stoker was put on the depressingly large list of 'missing, presumed dead'. Another state statistic.
What really stuck out for Doug was the date. 16th, the day before he had been home sick. The day he'd seen Puck take bleach and a bloodstained shirt to the shed. Paranoia seemed like a fitting addend to his growing list of neuroses. Former alcoholic becomes obsessed with the idea that his next door neighbour may be a murderer. He had nothing to go on but a sense of foreboding and a dirty shovel.
"Do you ever think there's something not quite right about Puck?" he asked Marcia after putting Braedon to bed.
"Noah?" Marcia asked, hands on her hips. "Really, hun?"
Doug saw the twitch of her lips and knew what she was thinking. "Not like that. I mean in a... dangerous way?"
"He seems find to me," Marcia replied. "He's quiet, but he's friendly enough. He's wrapped all the way around Kurt's little finger, that's for sure."
Doug frowned and looked out the window at the curtains hanging in 56's windows. Lit up from the inside the brown glow was like liquid chocolate. Wholly innocent, seductive in its suburban sweetness. It disturbed him and he didn't know why.
"I know that look," Marcia interrupted his thoughts, snapping their own curtains firmly shut. "Doug, honey. I love you to pieces but you are such an old-fashioned heterosexual male. I think you have a problem Noah because he defies stereotype. Noah is a normal, hard-working man. A tradesman. A man who chugs beer and doesn't know mauve from taupe, and it bugs you that he's not what you expect from a gay man."
Doug didn't try to correct his wife. He had the feeling that telling her he suspected their neighbour of murder wouldn't go down any better than the idea that he disliked Puck because the other man made him feel uncomfortable. Sexuality had nothing to do with it, he thought. The strange feeling he had about Noah Puckerman was not seated next to the knowledge that he was gay.
Doug kept quiet and conceded the point to his wife. He let her have the victory and her peace of mind. It wasn't until he was at work the next day that he started researching.
He started with the Lima killings, which would have happened around the time that Puck was sixteen or seventeen. Six boys missing, two bodies recovered a few weeks after their disappearance, three found in the months following, and one that wasn't discovered until new building developments unearthed the heavily decomposed body over a year later. Each boy – each victim – was identified by the same parameters. They were between sixteen and eighteen years old, played either football or hockey, were all over five-ten and as built as a teenage frame allowed. And, unofficially, were described as being difficult or aggressive. High school bullies.
The McKinley High yearbooks had made it online two years ago, though they'd only been scanned back to 2004 so far. Doug looked up 2009 and searched through the scanned, graffitied pages for the student photos. The victims all had the same kind of look, and the same sorts of activities listed underneath their names. They played sport throughout the entire school year, swapping over to something else when the season ended, and had practically no other extracurriculars listed. They all had the same kind of look too, the kind that reminded him uncomfortably of being shoved into lockers and hassled for liking math more than sport.
Doug hesitated, then looked for Puckerman. The first thing he noticed was that the page, like others before it, had been scribbled on in black marker. Most of the slurs had been thoughtfully blurred out by whoever had uploaded the images, but Doug could make out one or two. 'Loser' was scrawled across the bottom of Puck's yearbook photo, obscuring most of the three listed extracurricular activities. Only the beginning of football was recognisable, and the tail end of a word that ended in 'ections'.
Doug looked up 2010, the year after the disappearances. The black scrawls and graffiti that had marked the previous year were nowhere to be found. The graffiti had disappeared with the dead boys, leaving every page clean and readable. Or almost every page. Under the name Noah Puckerman the list of 'Football, Basketball, New Directions' had been added to in neat, precise handwriting. One word; 'Clyde', and a nearly perfect love heart.
An odd feeling curled tight in Doug's chest, like a cold iron vice that made it hard to breathe. He looked for Kurt Hummel. A superior smile stared at him from the middle of a page full of awkward or bored teens. Under the list 'Cheerios, French Club, New Directions' the name 'Bonnie' was scrawled in a messy script. Doug shut the browser, feeling twice as paranoid as he had before.
The reality of it didn't really sink in until Doug found out about Kurt's new job. He was still twitching with the nervous energy of paranoia, stealing glances at 56 (and the big white ute when it was parked in the driveway) and attempting to hide it all from his wife. He wasn't paying a whole lot of attention to what Marcia was saying until the words 'design editor for Runway' popped out of her mouth.
For some reason the phrase seemed familiar. Way too familiar to just be plain old déjà vu.
It took him a moment or two before he pegged it. Cassandra Stoker had been the former design editor of Runway magazine. Stoker, who disappeared the day before Doug had seen his neighbour with a bloodstained shirt and who's death conveniently opened up a place for Puck's boyfriend in the magazine. Holy shit, Doug thought, all of the circumstantial evidence clicking right into place. My neighbour is a murderer!
.
.
Neither Phil Constance nor Edgar Bateman were on the List, and as far as Puck knew neither of them deserved to die. The truth was they were convenient. It wasn't actually that hard for a guy like him to make sure everything was in place like it should be.
Puck timed it as perfectly as he could and came home early on Saturday afternoon. He parked his truck in front of the house, leaving the dirty shovel behind in the back. The sleeve of his shirt was stained in tacky, drying blood. He caught a flash of movement from the corner of his eye as he disappeared into the house.
The only thing he had to do after that was sit back and wait.
He threw the shirt into the laundry hamper.
The police came knocking at quarter past seven, pretty much just as soon as Kurt announced that dinner was done. They knocked on the door politely enough but would not be swayed from coming inside the house to 'ask a few questions'. Puck kept a straight face through it all. He answered all of the questions honestly, knowing that despite the law of 'innocent until proven guilty' a lot of police stuck with the opposite theory. On paper you were innocent until proven guilty. In real life you were guilty until proven innocent.
Kurt fussed and hovered in the background, hackles raised and puffed up like a show dog with a bad temper. Puck couldn't reassure him without looking horribly suspicious. The less Kurt knew, the better. As good an actor as the other man was, there was a note of panic in his eyes that couldn't be faked. Puck thought it gave the whole thing a really nice touch.
Especially when the question "do you mind if we take a look around" yielded a bloodstained shirt, a pair of dirty, blood-smeared work gloves, and a shovel with a smear of blood on the handle. That was when the switch clicked firmly towards 'guilty'.
"It's my blood," Puck protested. He stood up, the dining chair he'd been sitting in skidded back several inches. He made sure to make it sound like a lie when he said; "I don't know what happened to Phil, but I didn't have anything to do with it!"
He was in handcuffs within the hour, Kurt shrilly threatening lawyers in the background as Puck was led out to the police cruiser. He glanced at the neighbour's house as the car engine started and saw Doug's face in the window. Puck didn't stop himself from smirking.
A smirk would only help what he was trying to do here.
At the station Puck was cooperative and went through the motions without complaint. He quietly allowed himself to be searched, then fingerprinted, and answered all questions with the same blunt honesty he'd demonstrated at the house. It was all the same questions anyway, phrased in a different manner. They all amounted to the same thing, and even the stupidest man alive knew not to actually confess to murder.
By the time he actually got to a holding cell he was feeling pretty confident. They'd already found the bandage on his forearm, and these days lab work could be pushed through pretty quick. Hands uncuffed, Puck sat down in the holding cell and smiled to himself. He really should have asked to call Kurt and tell him to calm down, but he didn't want to be caught saying anything that might come off as suspicious.
Instead he told the cop that swung by not to bother with any lawyers.
"I'm totally innocent," he said plainly, a barefaced lie that sounded like truth, "sooner or later it'll be proven and I'll be a hundred percent off the hook."
He got a sceptical look in return.
The next morning, as soon as the station was officially open for business, one very pissed off designer was stalking through the front doors and demanding to speak to his partner. Puck could hear his voice all the way from the holding cells and had to smile. There was a shrill note in Kurt's voice that was normally nowhere to be found. He was genuinely worried, and possibly thinking of doing something stupid to make sure Puck didn't gain a conviction. It took only four minutes (Puck was counting) for Kurt to badger his way into a visit.
Kurt looked furious. He glared at Puck through the bars of the cell, standing with his hands on his hips. "Just what the hell," he hissed, "did you think you were doing?"
Puck leaned against the open bars of the cell and smiled at Kurt. "I didn't do anything," he replied, "it was Ed."
"Don't give me that false-innocence," Kurt snapped, clearly forgetting they had an audience, "I can see deep shit when you step in it, you lousy... ratweasel!"
"I'm serious. It was Ed Bateman. I'd bet anything."
"You mean to tell me you had nothing to do with...!" Kurt's eyes widened suddenly, and he blinked. He gave Puck an odd look, grey-blue eyes flicking down to the bandage on Puck's forearm. "Oh."
"With me now, Princess?"
"I'm getting you a lawyer," Kurt announced. "Don't argue," he added, in a tone that meant Puck would be exiled to the couch for months if he disagreed. Kurt leaned forward and pecked his lips in a quick kiss. "I need to get to work. I'll make sure that lawyer shows up as soon as possible."
Puck nodded, knowing it was useless to argue.
"I am not," Kurt finished imperiously, "happy with you."
Puck didn't get to hear the case that was being made against him, based on the purely circumstantial evidence he had left for them to find. He heard about an hour after Kurt had left that his ute had been claimed for forensics and a team was currently going over the truck from top to bottom. Puck just hoped they didn't toss or confiscate anything from the glove box. It was all paperwork, including his registration and insurance. He already knew they wouldn't find anything.
His lawyer showed up around lunchtime. A sharp-looking woman dressed in a tailored pantsuit that Kurt would definitely approve of. (God, he hoped Kurt hadn't hired her based purely on her wardrobe.) The woman introduced herself as Patricia Roth and before he knew it Puck had been bundled into a private room to discuss things with his lawyer.
"So I'm totally innocent," Puck said straight away, impressed when her mouth tightened a little to indicate that she'd caught the lie. "In the sense that they won't find anything," Puck clarified, "in my truck, or wherever that shit with Phil went down. The blood's mine, the dirt's from work, and anyone'll tell you I got on fine with Phil."
"Even so," Patricia told him, a hint of disapproval hovering somewhere around the corners of her mouth, "the lab work won't be back for another two weeks. Until then the only evidence of your innocence in existence happens to be your word."
"Same as any innocent man would say." He pointed it out with a smirk. "Story goes like this," Puck said, "last I saw of him, Phil was just fine. We clocked off at the same time the day before he disappeared, I went home to my partner, got a good night's sleep, and the next day at work Phil wasn't there. I assumed he was out sick and so did everyone else. Then just after lunch I cut myself on a bit of pipe, bled on my shirt pretty bad before I got to the office for some first aid. I went home early, next thing I know there are cops in my front yard and I'm getting asked all sorts of questions about how well I know Phil Constance."
Patricia narrowed her eyes at him, the crow's feet in the corners crinkling. She did not look impressed. She took a breath, folded her hands on top of the table between them and said; "If you're lying to me, Mr. Puckerman, you'd best come clean right now. I'm not obligated to pass on anything you might tell me, but the only way I can defend you to the best of my ability is to know everything right from the start."
"The blood's going to be mine," Puck stated again, and pulled back the sleeve of his shirt to show her the bandage still on his forearm. "I just want to know how long it's going to be before I can go home."
"You have a couple of very long days ahead of you," Patricia told him, seeming to have accepted that Puck's story wasn't going to change. "You'll go through at least two more rounds of questioning, which I can sit in on to make sure nobody steps out of line. You'll also have a bail hearing within the next week, during which a judge will decide whether or not you're a flight risk and if you should be given the opportunity to pay your way out of a stay at the county jail while the evidence against you is processed and the case presented. If – and yes, I do mean if –"
Puck gave her a wounded look, as if he were truly offended that she didn't believe in his innocence.
"If," Patricia reiterated, "the evidence doesn't pan out, you'll be free to go. You'll receive no compensation for your lost time or any emotional distress you may have gone through. The best you can hope for is a formal letter of apology."
"But none of this will go on my record, right? It won't say I was arrested?"
"It will say you were detained and questioned," Patricia clarified, "but that you were not guilty."
Puck nodded. That was what he wanted to know. There were only two other questions he wanted to ask, but he set them aside in favour of something more practical. "How long until this bail hearing thing?"
He didn't think it would be smart to say the other two aloud. How long would it be until they found Phil's blood in Ed Bateman's truck, alongside the murder weapon? And how long would it be until he could go home and rub all of this into his neighbour's face?