Fire with Fire, page 15
“Lamb.” Charlie put his hands on her shoulders now. For a moment, they stood there, holding each other, searching each other’s eyes.
“What?”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“For what?”
“For bringing you along. For not putting a stop to all this earlier. What happened in that room just now? That was bad, honey. We’ve lost that lead now. Rojer’s not going to talk, certainly not today, certainly not to us. But it could have gone a whole lot worse. You could have blown his head off. And trying to find a way to explain how that happened, why you were there in the first place, would take me the rest of my natural life.”
He let her go, walked away, and hit the elevator button. Lamb followed him into the elevator. Her face was slowly darkening from red to purple.
“Don’t cry,” he warned.
“Oh, I’m not gonna cry,” she said. “If I lose control of anything right now, it won’t be my fucking emotions. It’ll be my fist. I want to smack you in the mouth so bad I could scream.”
Charlie looked over.
“Nicolas Rojer is going out somewhere at night with a big flashlight and giving kids bottles of Coke laced with pills,” Lamb said. “Then he’s taking them somewhere and abusing them. That’s the truth. You need to believe me. You need to stop treating me like a child. And if you ever call me ‘honey’ again, I’ll do more than just smack you in the mouth.”
Charlie said nothing. She turned to him.
“I deserve to be here!” she yelled. Her voice made his eardrums pulse.
He said nothing. He couldn’t articulate his guilt. His disappointment. Because as he’d stood in Rojer’s apartment beside Lamb, watching her finger apply light pressure to the trigger of the gun that was pointed at the suspect’s head, he’d played out the shot in his mind and seen the devastation that would follow it. Rojer dead on the couch. Lamb having done that ultimate, irreversible thing, her life changed, the die cast, all because she wanted to be a part of his case. Because she wanted to prove herself. Because she wanted to convince him that she deserved a second chance at being a police officer. And in allowing her to come along with him and follow those hopeless desires, he’d put her in a situation she would never have been in as a rookie officer: a dangerous, close-quarters encounter with a suspect on their own turf, with no plan, no rules, no idea of her own authority, of the expectations of the scene. She might have blown Rojer’s head off, or he might have reached into the couch cushions, come out with his own weapon, and gotten her first. Charlie hated himself for not forcing Lamb to go away at Universal Studios. Or at the golf course. Or earlier.
He exited the elevator and rounded the corner, watching his feet on the pavement, feeling miserable, because the truth was he’d had innumerable opportunities to dump Lamb. But he hadn’t. Because he liked her determination. He liked her inextinguishable hope.
“Who’s that?” Lamb asked.
Charlie stopped dead. He looked up, followed Lamb’s gaze down the driveway of the apartment building to where the Ram was parked in the shade of a big Catalina cherry tree.
There was a man standing by the hood with a phone in his hand. He took a quick tour around the car, dialed a number on the phone, and walked off.
“Death Machines,” Charlie said. He hadn’t recognized the guy, but he was typical of the prospective members Dean and Franko seemed to have an endless supply of—the kind of cannon fodder they used in wars with other biker gangs or as mules for drug hauls down to Mexico. Young, tattooed, edgy, and world-worn beyond their years.
Charlie backed up, and Lamb followed him. They walked quickly through the apartment complex courtyard, through an archway, across a garden, and into a sprawling parking area. This time, it was Lamb who was watching her shoes, thinking hard, so it was Charlie who spotted the familiar figure ahead of them, bobbing as he marched across the dry, cracked dirt of a vacant lot.
Charlie grabbed Lamb’s arm and pointed. “Rojer,” he said.
Lamb’s eyes grew wide.
They forgot about the threat at their backs, Charlie grinding to a halt, Lamb beside him. They stood and watched Rojer cross the vacant lot, lift the bottom of a chain-link fence, and slip underneath. As he disappeared down an embankment toward a construction site, Charlie heard Lamb’s voice rattle in his frantic mind.
“Did you see?” she asked. “He’s got the flashlight. He’s got the flashlight with him!”
They pursued. Through the lot, under the warped chain-link fence, down the crumbling, rocky embankment, side by side, their breaths rushing before long as they tried to keep pace with Rojer. The tall, loping figure walked at speed across a street, down an alleyway, through another fence, and into the concrete foundation of an apartment building under construction. There was grass growing in the gaps in the foundations, vines crawling up the half-erected walls, their curling fingers shifting in the hot wind. Rojer walked through a doorway to what Charlie guessed would have been the fire escape if construction of the building had not halted. Lamb and Charlie crouched by a pile of rusting sheet metal and waited, giving Rojer a head start down the stairs. Then they set off again, Charlie in the lead, his gun out, taking the stairs two at a time as silently as he could. At the bottom of the stairwell, he followed Rojer’s distant flashlight beam, one hand out touching the concrete wall in the darkness. He paused, slid his phone out, and flicked it to silent.
“Phone,” he said to Lamb. She did the same.
They walked on. Charlie stifled a yowl when his boot hit a stair in the darkness, causing him to trip forward, his shin scraping against a sharp metal edge.
He growled in pain.
“The step, right?” Lamb whispered.
“Shut up, Lamb,” Charlie huffed.
Fifty feet down the hall in the darkness, his shin throbbing, Charlie heard rustling, saw the bouncing, bobbing flashlight he’d been following had turned into a thin vertical slit. A door almost completely shut, but not fully latched. Charlie reached back, pushed Lamb against the wall. From within the room, Rojer’s voice came, hard and breathless.
“Come on. Get up. Get up. Get up. You’ve got to get out. Get out now.”
Charlie kicked open the door. It flew back and smacked into Rojer, knocking him sideways. A tiny room was revealed, barely bigger than a storeroom, three feet of space between the door and the edge of a fold-out cot. Charlie caught a glimpse of a dark-haired teenage girl rising drunkenly from beneath a twisted sheet, holding her hand up against the dim light of the flashlight that had clattered to the floor.
“What … what … what’s happening?”
Rojer scrambled into the corner of the small room, trying to find his footing, his hands making black spidery silhouettes as he grabbed for the flashlight. Charlie kicked out in the dark, knocked Rojer down again, stomped and stomped until he heard cries of surrender.
He picked up the flashlight and turned around. Lamb was gathering up the girl, ushering her through the door.
13
The squad car carrying Jonie Delaney drove through the checkpoint, into the Hertzberg-Davis parking lot, and straight up to the main tent. By now, Saskia had managed to find a couple of officers to erect a tarp over the side of the tent to shield the internal operations from view of the press gang. This had caused a reshuffle of cameramen and journalists on the hill, and shouts of protest, which Saskia ignored. She waited in the weird blue light of the tent as Jonie exited the car, escorted by a teenage boy.
Whatever Saskia had expected, the girl before her was not it. The seventeen-year-old was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, and was dry-eyed and straight-backed, not hunched and shivering the way Saskia imagined another child in her position might be. Though her face was puffy, obviously from crying, she came forward and shook Saskia’s and then Curler’s hands. Her voice was low and clear.
“I’m Jonie.” She glanced awkwardly at the boy beside her, a brown-skinned hunk with high cheekbones and big, footballer’s hands. “This is my boyfriend, Tanner Court.”
“I’m Ronnie Curler,” the negotiator said as Saskia waved away the patrol cops who had delivered the teens. “And this is Saskia Ferboden. We’re working on getting your parents and the people they have with them out of the lab safely. We really appreciate you coming in. I bet you’re feeling completely numb right now.”
Jonie nodded. “It’s, like, I can’t … I just can’t believe this is happening. This can’t be real.”
“It’s real,” Saskia said. “But we’re going to help you through it. We’re going to tell you exactly what to do. You’re not alone.”
The word seemed to jolt the teenager. Alone. Her eyes, which had been focused on the distant building, likely on the six now-infamous gray windows of lab 21, shifted and refocused on Saskia.
“That’s exactly what I am, though,” the girl said. “I’m alone. First Tilly. Now Mom and Dad. They’re saying they’re going to blow the place up. That’ll mean it’ll just be me. Just me left.”
“Don’t talk like that, babe.” Tanner wrapped a big arm around the girl’s shoulders and shot Saskia a dark look. “You have to stay positive.”
The girl gazed up at him, bewildered. She seemed to give a small nod.
“Let’s refocus.” Curler put his hands up. “The future, we can’t control. The past, we can’t control. Let’s focus on what we can control. These moments right here, right now. We’re all going to take a deep breath, let it out slowly, and do what’s within our power.”
The girl inhaled hard. For a moment, Saskia thought Jonie was going to let out a scream. She went stiff, her jaw locked tightly, the tendons in her neck straining. Then her eyes went to Saskia’s, dropped, and flicked back up, examining all of her in one devastatingly quick appraisal.
“You,” the girl said, pointing at Saskia’s chest. “Can I just talk to you?”
“Ah—of course,” Saskia said. “Let’s go and sit in one of these tactical vehicles. We can have a little time off from everybody.”
Saskia looked at Curler, who nodded back, taking up the notebook in which he had been drafting the script for Jonie to read. She led the girl to one of the BearCats and waved at a patrol officer on her way, making a gesture for coffee. The boyfriend, Tanner, turned in a little circle, looking completely out of place. Having probably decided that he was the last of anyone’s priorities, he sank eventually into a fold-out chair.
Chief Ferboden helped the girl up into the huge tactical vehicle and took the bench seat across from her, so that they were knee to knee. The door clunked heavily closed behind them, sealing them in dimness. In what light the distant windshield provided, Saskia could see there were semiautomatics lining the walls, emergency rescue gear, headsets, gloves, and bulletproof vests stored on narrow racks. The BearCat’s interior smelled of gun oil and sweat.
Jonie Delaney sat for a moment with her head clasped in her hands, her fingers spread, her chocolaty curls showing between the digits. The same curls as Tilly’s, short and spilling down like soft springs. Saskia waited to hear the girl sobbing. But no tears came. In time, the teenager raised her head and looked at Saskia, her eyes hard and determined.
“I have to tell you the truth.” Jonie shrugged sharply. “I don’t have any choice now. The only way Mom and Dad are going to stop all this is if they know the truth.”
“What truth is that?” Saskia asked.
“I killed her,” Jonie said. “I killed Tilly.”
Saskia felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. She glanced at the closed door of the BearCat beside them, thought about the officers outside rushing busily about. Then she thought about her phone in her pocket, its recording capability, her obligations now to launch straight into giving Jonie Delaney her Miranda warning. But what came instead was a plea to a child who had endured so much suffering already, who sat before her, completely at her mercy, waiting with her hands clasped in front of her like she was already cuffed.
“You don’t mean that,” Saskia said carefully. “You mean that you were responsible for Tilly’s care that day and you feel as if you neglected her, and that caused her to be killed.”
“No,” Jonie said. “I mean that I murdered her. I got angry at her, and I killed her, and I hid her body. And the only way you’re going to get my mom and dad out of the lab is if you tell them that.”
* * *
Lamb looked at her watch. At any moment, according to their plan, the Delaneys were going to destroy another piece of evidence in the Hertzberg-Davis lab, approximately twenty-five miles southwest of where she sat on a low concrete wall at the abandoned construction site. Charlie Hoskins sat beside her, examining the graze on his shin and the spot where the sharp metal edge of the stair had cut right through the leg of his jeans. The two had been swept aside while LAPD responded to the scene in the underground parking lot. Charlie had called, and the officers had swooped in with aggressive shoving, barking commands. They’d taken custody of Rojer and rushed the nameless teenage girl into a squad car, then into an ambulance. Establishing Charlie’s identity had taken some time. He had stories about being a two-stripe detective, but without a badge, that had gotten him nowhere. He and Lamb had been relegated to the concrete wall, where they had waited in the sunshine, watching the activity, each lost in their own thoughts.
Eventually, a detective who had taken charge of the scene approached them, and Charlie rose to shake his hand. Lamb rose, too, and stood beside him.
“Hoskins, is it?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve heard about you.” The stocky, mustachioed detective stood back a little and appreciated Charlie, head cocked, curious. “You were on the Machines thing.”
“That was me, yeah,” Charlie said.
“Somebody said they thought you were in Bali.”
“That was the story, yeah.” Charlie glanced at Lamb. “My partner, Lamb.”
Lamb felt a zing of exhilaration rush up her spine. She shook the detective’s hand hard and fast.
“Joe Bailey, missing persons.”
“Who’s the girl?” Lamb asked.
“Angela Lu,” Bailey said. “Fourteen. Went missing yesterday morning. I was dreading the outcome of this one. We had another high schooler vanish maybe a month ago. She was gone for seventy-two hours. Same MO. The kid skipped school to go hang out at the mall, was seen being approached in the street by a tall guy with longish hair. She was dumped in a park after he was done with her. No memory of what happened to her or where she’d been kept.”
Charlie nodded. “So you’ll run the rape kit from that one against Rojer? Confirm a link between the two.”
“Sure will. Just as soon as the lab opens back up.” Bailey cocked his head again, examining Charlie in that curious way. “We might be able to tag him with a couple of other near misses in the area.”
“You didn’t think to check him out previously?” Lamb asked.
Bailey turned to her now, skeptical. “He lives just outside the range we were initially looking at.” He looked her up and down slowly, curiously. “We would have got to him. In time.”
Lamb nodded.
“Funny thing about that,” Bailey said. “Some of the guys are saying they know about Rojer. That he was in the mix on the Delaney case. And now, lo and behold! Here you two are. Questioning Rojer. Without notice to our investigators and outside your jurisdiction, and on the same day the Delaney parents take over the Hertzberg-Davis lab.”
Charlie exhaled wearily through his nose, patted his pockets for cigarettes, and found none. “What can I say, Detective?” he asked.
“Well, you can say what you were questioning Rojer about.”
“It’s a need-to-know kind of thing at the moment,” Charlie said.
“But is it about the Delaney case?” Bailey pressed.
“It’s not our story to tell,” Lamb cut in. She felt Charlie watching her. “Whether we were questioning Rojer on the Delaney thing or a completely unrelated matter, it wouldn’t be strategic for us to disclose that right now. We have no comment to offer.”
Bailey grinned, turned back to Charlie. “These young cops. They’re all trained for television, aren’t they?”
Charlie didn’t answer.
“Just cut the bullshit,” Bailey said to Lamb. “Is the Delaney case being reopened or not? Are we really second-guessing the work of our own officers because a couple of whack-jobs decided to go vigilante on us?”
“Asked and answered, Detective,” Charlie said. He tapped Lamb’s elbow and turned away. “Let’s go, Lamb.”
They walked, the silent agreement lingering between them that they would hail a cab a couple of streets away from the scene at the construction site. Lamb noticed Charlie clicking and flicking the fingers of one hand, his eyes locked on the pavement. They passed a homeless encampment cramped with tents, tarps, and makeshift plywood dwellings. Lamb breathed air heavy with the smell of human waste and alcohol, walking behind Charlie for a hundred yards before coming level with him again.
“Shouldn’t we stay with the scene?” She jerked a thumb back toward the construction site. “Aren’t they going to need us for the report?”
“We’re not staying with any scenes today, Lamb. Ten years on the job, you get to make decisions like that. It’s one of the perks. If they want details on how we snatched up Rojer, they can call us later. Jesus, I need cigarettes.”
“What was all that about Bali?” Lamb asked.
Charlie stopped at a tiny bodega, ordered a pack of cigarettes, and raked the plastic wrap off the box as if he were unwrapping an EpiPen to save someone’s life. “We needed the world to think I wasn’t here. Saskia and I. Before I could go undercover. We needed cops and criminals to believe it, because they talk to each other. So I faked having a drug problem. I did a couple of lines in the station bathroom in front of the right people. Lost my shit at the lieutenant in the bullpen one day, in front of everyone. That kind of thing. Then we spread it around that I’d dropped off the radar. Quit and moved to Bali.”
