Fire with Fire, page 14
“I’m going to search the apartment?” She turned to him. “How?”
“Work it out, partner.”
The elevator doors parted onto an open-air catwalk lined with doors on one side, railings overlooking the building’s courtyard on the other. Charlie walked, found a beige door with a glossy gold number, identical to a dozen others they had passed. He watched as Lamb stood back from the view of the peephole, turned sideways to make herself a smaller target, just the way Charlie had been trained to do a million years earlier. He wondered if the teachers had shown her class the same footage they’d shown his, of a drug squad cop being shot in the stomach through a door while attempting to serve a warrant. He remembered the other cadets around him jumping in their seats at the blast.
Nicolas Rojer opened the door and stood there, slightly stooped and wide-eyed behind his steel-rimmed glasses. Wary and quiet. Charlie had seen a thousand people answer the door to the police that way. No greeting, just standing there holding the doorknob and waiting for bad news.
“Nicolas Rojer, I’m Detective Sergeant Charlie Hoskins.” Charlie breezed in through the door without waiting for an invitation. “This is Lynette Lamb. We’re here to have a chat with you. Can we come in? Thanks.”
Charlie scanned the living room. It was typical of a single man living alone, unaccustomed to guests. Acceptably clean, but with clothes dumped in the hallway, dishes in the sink, a smattering of evidence of a quiet evening alone last night; a smudged wineglass on the coffee table, a prone dent in the couch, a remote control on the floor. The place smelled of strong deodorant and damp towels. Rojer’s gaze followed Charlie as he walked through the room and took a small cane chair by the door to the kitchen.
“I thought you guys might come.” Rojer gave a dejected sigh and followed Charlie, leaving Lamb to shut the door. “As soon as I saw it was Mr. and Mrs. Delaney on the news this morning, I figured any minute I’d get a knock on my door.”
“Thanks for tidying up, then.” Charlie kicked a newspaper aside to make room for his boots on the carpet.
“I’ve got nothing to say without my lawyer present.” Rojer picked up the wineglass and did an awkward little dance around Lamb, who was hovering now by the kitchen door. “I was questioned about the little girl going missing two years ago. I told them where I was. That was it.”
“Well, you were hardly ‘questioned,’” Charlie said. “They called you, as I understand it.”
“Yeah.” Rojer returned from the kitchen, having deposited the wineglass, and retrieved the remote from the floor.
“So there was no hauling down to the station,” Charlie said. “No cramped interrogation room. No detectives leaning over you. No cooling-off period in a holding cell, wondering if someone’s going to tell the other perps in holding that you like to molest little girls.”
Rojer coughed, thumped his chest with a fist. “No.”
“Not that time around anyway,” Charlie said.
Rojer winced, standing by the end of the couch. He was still stooped as if he were bracing for a sucker punch to the gut. His eyes traced the apartment for more things that needed tucking away, roving the furniture, actively avoiding Charlie and Lamb. He went to the window and slid it open, letting warm air in and the deodorant stink out.
“Not that time around, no,” Rojer answered.
“I bet you get hauled in every time something happens to a kid within a fifty-mile radius of this address,” Charlie said.
Rojer nodded vaguely.
“So let’s try to avoid that this time. Stop tidying up. Sit your ass down.”
Rojer sat obediently, sinking onto the couch too fast, bouncing a little. A symptom of jail time; ex-cons sit hard and fast like dogs when they’re instructed to. Charlie glanced at Lamb. She met his eyes and scratched the back of her neck.
“Uh, Mr. Rojer, would you mind if I used your—”
“It’s down there.” Rojer waved at the small hallway off the living room. His thoughts were racing, making his mouth twitch.
Charlie told himself not to be hopeful. Excited. All pedophiles are nervous around law enforcement. This visit would be a regular but no less terrifying routine for Rojer. The child molester would be accustomed to getting knocks on his door not only about kids attacked in a fifty-mile radius of his home but also those near misses when kids were grabbed but managed to escape. He’d be questioned whenever a report came in of suspicious activity: kids being approached, spoken to, watched. Rojer had probably seen dozens of cops in his apartment over the years, and some would be polite talkers while others threw his shit around, yelled at him, made threats. The knocks could come at all hours. Sometimes he’d be dragged out of bed and thrown on the floor.
Lamb put her case file on the coffee table and walked away. Charlie heard her lock the bathroom door behind herself.
“Tell me about that day.”
Rojer shook his head, ran a hand through his lank brown hair. “I said already, not without my lawyer.”
“You could just repeat what you told the police two years ago.” Charlie shrugged. “You wouldn’t be adding anything new. No need to involve the lawyer.”
Rojer thought about it, silent, rubbing the thighs of his chinos.
“Yeah, I know that trick,” Rojer said. “If I get it wrong, you’ll jump down my throat.”
“Why would you get it wrong if it’s the truth?”
Rojer mumbled under his breath.
“If you want to do this with a lawyer, we’ll have to go down to the station,” Charlie said. “Make it formal. Right now, this is just an informal chat. But that can change. If you want. It’s up to you.”
Rojer didn’t answer.
“You know how friendly it is down there,” Charlie pressed.
Still nothing.
“What’ll it be? Formal or informal?”
“Informal, I guess,” Rojer relented.
Charlie examined him. He was a good-looking guy beneath the awkward-dad fashion choices and the serial-killer spectacles. Lean and muscular, with a good jawline and big, deep eyes. He had the floppy, semi-long haircut of teenage rock stars and romance movie heroes. The cheap sneakers and plaid shirt were probably a choice intended to remind children of their teachers and fathers. Rojer oozed vulnerable trustworthiness at first glance. Charlie took Lamb’s copy of the Delaney case file from the coffee table and flipped through it.
“You said you went to your mother’s house at 9:00 a.m. to help her remove some hedges from her front yard,” Charlie read. “You were there until 5:00 p.m.”
Rojer said nothing, but he nodded slowly.
“Pretty neat, the whole nine-to-five aspect of it.”
“Well, she confirmed that with police.” Rojer sighed. “They called her right after they called me. She got her times pretty close to mine, only she said I left the house at four. I figure she meant that’s when I came inside the house to have coffee with her, not when I actually left. She must have glanced at the clock then.” He was rambling now, looking down the hall for Lamb. “Got confused.”
“She’s elderly.” Charlie smiled. “They’re a pain, aren’t they? You feed her something very easy to remember. Nine to five. And then she messes it up.”
“I didn’t feed her anything,” Rojer said. “That’s when I was there.”
“It took eight hours to get the hedges out? That’s a long time.”
“Well, they were thirty-year-old hedges.” Rojer braved a small, tight smile. “And there were twelve of them. Their roots were about three feet deep. You’ve got to get down there and get the whole root. The main root. If you snap it, you’ll kill the plant.”
“Right. So it was eight hours.”
“Yes.”
“And I suppose Mom fed you lunch.”
“She did.”
“Well, good for you. You have a nice, fat time frame where you were all tied up and occupied and miles from where Tilly Delaney went missing around 11:00 a.m.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“You were virtuously toiling in the earth and not hunting for prey, as you’ve been known to do.” Charlie scanned the papers on his lap. “Hanging around beaches and parks, pretending to photograph birds, getting shots of young girls instead.”
Rojer swallowed. “I wasn’t at the beach. I was at my mother’s.”
“This is an opportunistic crime, the Delaney thing,” Charlie said. “A lot like your prior. You grabbed your victim in a shopping mall. Dragged her into a disabled toilet. We believe Tilly Delaney was exiting a toilet when she might have been grabbed.”
“I wasn’t at the beach,” Rojer repeated. “I was at my mother’s.”
“Dangerous time to do it, in both scenarios. Broad daylight. Lots of people around. But that’s part of the fun, isn’t it?”
“I wasn’t at the beach. I was at—”
“Problem is, that’s wrong,” Charlie said. “That’s a lie. You weren’t there that day, digging up your mother’s hedges from nine to five. Not on the nineteenth. You were there. You did dig up the hedges. But that was the day before. On the eighteenth.”
Rojer was watching Lamb as she exited the bathroom and walked back up the hall. At Charlie’s words, he whirled around to look at the detective in the chair.
“Huh?”
“You were there the day before,” Charlie repeated.
“No, I wasn’t.”
“Yes, you were.” Charlie flipped the pages of the report. “We’ve got two neighbors on your mother’s street who say you dug up the hedges on the eighteenth of October, not the nineteenth of October, the day Tilly went missing.”
“Well, that’s…” Rojer was sitting upright now, the stoop gone, his back ramrod straight. “That’s not right.”
“Why were you digging up the hedges in the first place?”
“Because she … she was selling them.” Rojer worked a hand through his hair again.
Lamb was hovering by the windows, looking out at the view of Hansen Hills, low and baking in the California sun. Maybe looking for her parents’ house.
“My mother wanted to put a flower bed there instead of the … you know … the hedges.”
“Did she pay you?”
“Did she pay me?” Rojer scratched his stubble. “No. Uh, yes. Yes.”
“I bet you needed it. The money, I mean,” Charlie said. “Not easy to get a job when you’re a convicted sex offender.”
“I shouldn’t be talking to you without my lawyer,” Rojer said.
“Do you mind if I—” Lamb started, gesturing toward the kitchen, but Rojer cut her off again.
“Yes. Yes.”
“So the nineteenth,” Charlie went on. “What were you really doing?”
“I—”
“Because we know you weren’t digging up your mother’s hedges,” Charlie said. “So you can just give up on that right now. You can stop wasting time with it. My time. Your time. Lamb’s time.”
Rojer said nothing.
“We have confirmed with the buyer of the hedges that they were picked up from your mother’s house on the morning of the nineteenth, and that you weren’t there,” Charlie lied. “We also have dashcam footage from a car passing your mother’s residence on the eighteenth, at 10:17 a.m., showing what we believe is a figure with a shovel, and three-quarters of a hedge.”
Rojer scratched his brow. His hand was shaking.
“We also know,” Charlie went on, “that you deposited the check your mother gave you into your bank account the next morning. The morning of the nineteenth. Your bank records show that. So, again, I’ll ask you: What were you actually doing on the nineteenth of October at 11:00 a.m.?”
The man on the couch wiped sweat off his upper lip with the back of his hand. Shook his head, but said nothing.
“Did you leave the bank and go to the beach?” Charlie asked.
Rojer was as still as stone. Charlie heard Lamb shut the fridge in the kitchen, bottles rattling as it sucked shut. He slipped the picture of Tilly Delaney out of the case file and put it on the coffee table in front of Rojer, spun it around so that it faced him. The man didn’t move. His face was blank. Charlie leaned forward, took his gun from the waistband of his jeans, and used it to pin down the corner of the photograph of the missing child, which wanted to flap in the breeze from the open window.
Rojer sat silently, seconds ticking by, staring down at the picture of the girl with the rich, brown ringlet curls, thoughts churning over what Charlie hoped were not holes in his own bullshit. Because he’d risked so much already. He’d risked that Rojer’s mother’s hedges were picked up by the buyer the day after Rojer extracted them from the garden and not a few days later or that same evening. He’d risked that a passing car could conceivably record footage of the hedges from the street, and that they weren’t hidden behind a fence or a wall. He’d risked that Rojer’s mother had paid him by check, not in cash, and that he’d been desperate enough for the funds to bank the check first thing the following morning. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. The kind of spur-of-the-moment, improvisational lies that had kept him alive inside a gang of killers for five years, delivered with skin-saving confidence and not a shred of evidence. But the risky little details had rolled off his tongue, a wave of lies barreling on and on, gathering speed, and he was hoping Rojer would get swept away by them, or at least knocked off-balance. He was starting to believe that was going to happen, because the man on the couch before him began to slowly sink in his seat like a pricked balloon, losing inches all the time, until he was sitting against the backrest. His eyes lifted to Charlie and his mouth opened, and Charlie found himself holding his breath as he waited for an answer.
But before Rojer could speak, Lamb walked into the room and took Charlie’s pistol from the coffee table. She actioned the weapon, flicked the safety off, and pointed it directly at Rojer’s face.
“Where’s the kid?” Lamb said.
Charlie rose slowly from the low cane chair, hearing it crackle and creak in the searing silence that filled the room. Lamb’s aim with the pistol was dead straight, her gaze calm and focused, the way he’d seen her look in the car while the gunman pursued them from the parking lot minutes after they’d met.
“Lamb,” Charlie said gently. “What are you doing?”
“I’m holding the suspect at bay,” Lamb said. “Until we can establish where his victim is and get her to safety.”
Charlie looked at Rojer. The convicted sex offender was watching Lamb’s eyes, chewing his lips, his neck taut as he stretched to maintain eye contact with her high above where he sat.
“I don’t know what she’s talking about,” Rojer said.
“Yes, you do,” Lamb said. “Tell me where you keep them.”
“Keep who?” Rojer said.
“Lamb,” Charlie said. “Put the gun down.”
“No, Charlie.” Lamb glanced at him quickly. By now, he had crept to her side, her outstretched arm level with his chest. “Trust me on this. Trust me.”
Charlie thought about it. Then he reached forward and chopped Lamb’s elbow down with one hand, causing her gun hand to flip up, point the weapon at the ceiling. The gun popped out of her fingers and into his at the same moment Rojer leaped to his feet. Charlie shoved him back down with a shoulder to the chest. Rojer bounced again as he landed on his butt on the sofa.
“Sit down, asshole,” Charlie growled. He glared at Lamb. “Lamb, I’m going to invite you to go and wait outside while I finish this interview.”
“No,” Lamb said again. “I won’t. He’s got a kid right now, Charlie. I’m telling you, he’s taking kids and—”
“Outside!” Charlie snapped.
Lamb’s lip trembled, just for a second, and then her face turned to granite. She walked stiffly out. Charlie looked down at Rojer, who was wide-eyed and staring at his reflection in the television set.
“Lawyer,” Rojer said.
Charlie found her pacing the catwalk outside the elevators, her head down and face mean.
“Listen—”
“No, you listen.” She stuck a finger in his face. “In Nicolas Rojer’s bathroom cabinet, I found an insulin pack. I also found a glucose monitor. And under the couch, where he was sitting, there was one of those … those … those”—she waved her hand—“foot circulation thingies.”
“So?” Charlie said.
“So he has type 1 diabetes,” Lamb said. “And in his kitchen fridge, there are eight bottles of Coke.”
Charlie tried to decide how to react to this information, Lamb watching him all the time for that reaction. His fury had dissolved suddenly under the weight of sheer bewilderment.
“So the guy likes Coke.” Charlie shrugged. “He shouldn’t. But he does.”
“They’re not big bottles,” Lamb said. “Like the kind you’d buy to have in your home and pour out into a glass whenever you’d like a Coke. They’re the small kind. Like you’d have on the go. And there are eight of them. Eight.”
Charlie waited.
“In his bathroom,” she went on, “there were also pills in clear plastic containers. Tupperware containers. Unmarked. Some of the medication was in bottles, labeled, on the shelf in the wall cabinet. Other stuff was in the drawers in these containers. Just random pills. All the same size. I took a photo with my phone. Look.”
“Oh, Lamb.” Charlie held his head.
“Listen, listen, listen, before you discount me completely.” Lamb grabbed his shoulders. “Did you notice the graze on Rojer’s shin?”
“The graze on his shin?”
“Yeah. I bet you didn’t notice that. Right shin. It was big. Chunky. A horizontal graze about three inches wide, with scrape marks below it. Like you’d get if you tripped up a step. And … and … and in his kitchen, beside the microwave, was a big flashlight. You know the heavy-duty kind with the handle on top? Really big. It was out, on the counter. Not put away in a cupboard. It was new. It still had the film on the lens. The … the … the sticker. You know, the sticker? So, he’s out at night, he trips up a step and he thinks, Fuck this. I’m buying a big old flashlight, and—”
