Fire with Fire, page 16
He lit the cigarette and inhaled deeply, eased smoke through his nostrils into the breeze.
“Why did you go undercover?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Why does anybody do anything?”
“That’s not an answer.”
“I need to make some calls.” Charlie started walking again. “Someone needs to dig up the flower bed at Rojer’s mother’s place. See if Tilly Delaney is there.”
“If you want my opinion,” Lamb ventured, “I don’t see it.”
“You don’t?”
“No.”
“You just stuck a gun in the guy’s face.” Charlie laughed.
“I knew he was good for something,” Lamb said. “But Tilly? No. I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“His previous victim,” Lamb said. “The one he was jailed for luring into the disabled toilet? Case file says she was twelve. Then there are these two: Angela Lu and the other girl, the high schooler. They’re in their teens. While the MO was similar—grabbing or luring a girl away in a public place—Tilly Delaney was five. That’s a big age leap. The stats show child sex offenders don’t tend to wander outside their desired age group.”
“I love that. ‘The stats.’” Charlie smiled. “I can see you lying awake at night in your bunk at the academy, reading research papers on pedophiles while all the other cadets are at the bar. Were you popular at the academy, Lamb?”
“I’ve never been popular,” she said.
“Incredible.”
“As I was saying.” She gave him a side-eye that made him drop the smile. “If Rojer’s killed before, it also makes it unlikely he would be keeping these girls captive and then releasing them. I mean, he’s already gone that far. His fantasies and practices have escalated to murder. We know from the stat—ah. It’s just not likely someone who kills during a sex act is going to suddenly back off and let his next victims survive.”
“That theory is sound if Angela Lu and the other girl who went missing are the only markers we’re working with,” Charlie said. “There might be others, dead girls who we don’t know about. Girls who bridge the gap between five years old and twelve.”
“True,” Lamb said. “True.”
They walked in silence.
“So what do we do now?” she said eventually. “Until someone interrogates Rojer and digs up the garden bed, we’re at a loose end with him.”
“We just press on.” Charlie was reading a message from his phone screen. He stepped out into the street to hail a cab. “We’re heading Surge’s way now. He’s got something for us.”
They slipped into the cab. It smelled of feet. Lamb restrained herself for a couple of miles of heat-shimmering landscape before she snapped.
“So is this the part where you apologize for what happened back there?” she asked finally.
“What?” Charlie looked over, broke into that husky laugh that made her teeth want to clamp together. “No, Lamb. It’s not.”
“I was right about Rojer,” she said. “I was right about the pills. I was right about the Coke bottles. I was right about the flashlight. I was right about the step.”
“You were lucky.”
“Angela Lu was lucky,” Lamb said. “Rojer’s next victim was lucky. Me? I wasn’t lucky, I was right.”
“No, you were lucky,” Charlie said, rolling down his window and leaning his tattooed elbow on the sill. “You put a bunch of bullshit, meaningless, insignificant little details together and deduced that a guy with a history of being up to no good was once again up to no good. And, okay. Sometimes, very rarely—I’m talking never—that kind of Sherlock Holmes shit actually works. Every other time, the guy’s walking stick isn’t dented because he owns a curly-haired spaniel. It’s just dented because it’s dented.”
“You’ve read Sherlock Holmes?” Lamb asked.
“I was in prison for nine months. There was reading and jerking off and playing basketball. And I’m all thumbs on the court.”
“Why the hell were you in prison?”
“It was the only way I could get in with the Machines,” he said. He drummed his fingertips on the windowsill. “They cooked up a new identity for me and chucked me in a cell next to Franko Aderhold’s. He was one of the top three major players in the club.”
“So, what? You made friends with him and he just let you into the gang?”
“No.” Charlie laughed again. “No, Lamb. I waited four months for an opportunity to prove my worth naturally. The last thing you want to do is walk up to one of these guys and announce that you’d like to be friends.”
“How’d you do it, then?”
“Around my fourth month in, I got sick. I was in my cell sleeping it off, and I heard someone go into Franko’s cell next door. Someone who wasn’t Franko,” Charlie said. “The guy’s name was Matsukas. He was known for faking illnesses and staying back on the block while everyone else went to the yard so he could steal people’s shit. I got up and dragged his ass out of Franko’s cell, made him eat concrete. Franko appreciated the save.”
“So from there you were buddies?”
“Not really,” Charlie said. “Franko just said thanks, and that was it for another two months.”
“Six months!” Lamb shook her head. “Six months undercover in prison, and that’s before you’re even in the gang!”
“You’ve got to have a lot of patience for this gig,” Charlie said. “Part of the reason you’re not right for it.”
Lamb ignored the gibe. “So what happened?”
“I asked if I could use one of his cell phones. He’d have a cell phone smuggled in every now and then. I’d hear him using it at night. I knew Franko always made people use the phone right there in his cell, in front of him. So I made out like I was talking to a guy about moving a big load of heroin. That piqued his interest.”
“So you got to be a prospect from there, right?” she asked. “That’s how it works?”
“Look, it works like that sometimes,” Charlie said. “If you have nothing to offer, you just come in off the street, and you want to be a gang member, then yeah. You’re a prospect. You wash bikes and eat shit until you can prove you’re worth something. But I was proving my worth pretty fast with this big heroin deal. They were coming to me to be a member. I wasn’t going to them.”
“But I don’t get it,” Lamb said. “The heroin deal. That’s a crime. That’s entrapment. You couldn’t bust them for that.”
“And I didn’t.”
“So you committed crimes while you were undercover.” She looked over at him, her eyes big. “Actual crimes.”
Charlie smiled. “Lamb, the books say that if you have to commit a crime to save your life while you’re undercover, you do it. And that’s the only time you do it. So if those guys sit you down and tell you to do a line of coke, and you honestly believe they’re going to kill you if you don’t, you’re allowed. But from there, you’re supposed to extract yourself from the threatening environment, go directly to a hospital, and alert your superior officer. After that, the whole operation gets shut down.”
“Oh,” Lamb said.
“How long do you think an undercover operation would last if anybody followed those kinds of rules?” Charlie watched the city roll by.
“About ten minutes.”
“Exactly,” Charlie said. “Those first few weeks out on the street running with the crew are all about proving you’re not a cop. They want to see you doing drugs, doing beatings, doing stickups, doing their women. They’ll get whatever they can on camera, too, so if they ever have to face you in court, they can say you spent half your time undercover high as a kite and buried in pussy. You didn’t know your head from your ass, let alone what crimes were being committed.”
There was a quiet in the cab while Lamb thought of the kind of life he must have lived for those five years, the things he must have done. The truth was, she’d been noticing that life written on his skin from the moment she met him, not just in the tattoos but in scars and burn marks and signs of bones broken and treated by dodgy doctors. Homemade stitches, crooked and wide. Charlie had come in from the cold, and it was clear he’d been more than just freezing out there, all alone, undercover with the Death Machines. He’d been dying and a new man had been growing inside him, and now the old Charlie, whoever he was, was in a silent struggle to kill that hidden man while he sat in the car beside her.
She watched his face, his distant eyes. “Sounds crazy,” she said.
“You’d hate it.”
“Why?” she asked, her hackles quickly rising.
“Because undercover work not only requires patience, it’s about emotional control, too. And lying. Those big, earnest eyes of yours would give you away in a snap. And you’ve got to have subtlety. And you’re about as subtle as a brick to the face, Lamb. Or a gun to the face, as you demonstrated back in Rojer’s apartment.”
“I’m not saying I’d be interested in doing it. And even if I were, I wouldn’t be talking about doing it tomorrow,” Lamb said. “I’m talking about one day. Down the track. After I have some experience working the streets as a police officer.”
Charlie gave a resigned sigh, began a nod that morphed quickly into a headshake. Lamb ignored him.
“You’re going to have to be as subtle as you can in a minute. When we get where we’re going.” Charlie glanced at his phone.
“Why?”
“Because you’re not going to like who we’re about to meet.”
“Who are we about to meet?” Lamb asked.
“Turn here,” Charlie told the driver.
14
Saskia put her hands on the knees of her trousers, dropped her eyes to the steel-grille floor of the BearCat, and drew a deep breath. Visions were swirling before her of Tilly Delaney dead on the floor of a damp, dimly lit public restroom while other children frolicked on the sand only a hundred yards away. While cars pulled in and out of the parking lot, and people jogged on sunbaked paths, and the occasional cheerful dinging of bells on hired bicycles split the air, and the tumble of the roller coaster up on the pier competed with the crunching waves. Jonie Delaney was holding her face in her hands. But she wasn’t crying. She wasn’t talking. She was just sitting there, breathing slowly, her eyes closed.
Saskia took her phone out of her pocket, turned the sound down, called Curler, locked the screen, and slipped the device back into her pocket. She quietly recited the Miranda warning to Jonie Delaney. The teenager didn’t move.
“Listen,” Saskia said. “Any minute now, Jonie, your parents are due to call us. They’re probably not going to like what we have to say. And they’re going to destroy another piece of police evidence as a reaction to that. My tactical officers are going to use these moments while we converse with your parents to sneak into the ground floor of the Hertzberg-Davis building and access the PA system. We’re going to use that PA system to send a message from you to your parents…” Saskia’s words trailed off. She grasped at what to say for a moment or two, watching the top of the teen’s curly crown helplessly. “That message can’t be ‘I killed Tilly’ if it’s not the truth.”
“It is the truth,” Jonie said, her face still hidden.
“Tell me what happened,” Saskia said.
Jonie dropped her hands to her lap. She stared at them as she went from finger to finger, scratching at the pale pink nail polish with a thumbnail so that it flaked off onto the grille at her feet.
“She was an annoying little shit,” Jonie said.
Saskia felt her eyes widen.
“That was the only way I could think of her.” Jonie looked at the door of the BearCat, tears finally forming in her eyes. “She was Mom and Dad’s ‘whoopsie’ baby. Mom told me she was pregnant with Tilly when I was nine. She and Dad were all, like, ‘Whoops! I guess you’ve got a sister on the way!’ They were laughing with their friends about it, about how they were going to have to go all the way back to square one and lose sleep and take time off work and do the breastfeeding thing and all that.” Jonie shook her head. “It was a big joke. Like, Oh, man, are your tits gonna be up for it after all this time? Ha ha! Their friends were all saying how annoying it must be that they’d gotten rid of all my baby stuff. The crib and the clothes. It was real funny to everyone.”
“But not to you,” Saskia said.
“Not to me,” Jonie confirmed. “The biggest laugh of all seemed to be that this time around they had a free babysitter in the house twenty-four-seven. They’d go for naps during the day on weekends and I’d be stuck looking after a fucking baby instead of being out with my friends. I missed sleepovers. I missed parties. I missed camps. Sometimes they would get me to sleep in Tilly’s room with her if they had something important going on at work, so they could both catch a full night’s sleep. I just … I’ve just always thought of her as an annoying little shit, and no matter how much people tell me how cute she was or how funny she was, I never saw it.”
“So that’s how it was that day?” Saskia said. “You were the babysitter again? Stuck with someone else’s annoying little shit?”
“They were arguing about something. And it was like, ‘Jeeves, take the child to the beach, will you? We have some things to hash out here.’” Jonie waved a regal hand, her mouth downturned, snooty.
“You felt like you were the help.”
“I was the help.”
“And during this trip to the beach, it all just came to a head?” Saskia asked. “All the times you’d been saddled with the baby?”
“Yeah,” Jonie breathed.
“How?”
“Tanner was out there,” Jonie said. “Everybody was out there, out the back, on longboards. Not surfing. Just talking. He wasn’t someone who ever, like, hung out with our crew. You know? He was from the popular crowd. But he’d shown up to catch some waves alone, and for some reason, he’d come over. And I could see them all talking and laughing, and my friend Michelle was … She was putting it on him so hard. Like that would work. Like she had a chance.”
Jonie laughed and shook her head.
“I kept trying to convince Tilly to go out there with me, but she was afraid of sharks,” she continued. “Mom and Dad were watching Jaws one night, and she crept up the hall and watched for a while from the doorway without them realizing she was there. Traumatized.” Jonie rapped on her skull with her knuckles. “Just traumatized. She didn’t sleep for a week and a half.”
“So what did you do?” Saskia asked. “When Tilly wouldn’t go out back at the beach?”
“I couldn’t stay there and watch Michelle Clayton fake-laughing over Tanner anymore.” Jonie shook her head. “I dragged Tilly up the beach. She was like a wet fucking rat. Crying and squealing. Her hair was plastered all over her face because she’d just gotten rumbled by a wave.”
“So she was still in her swimsuit?” Saskia asked. “And you were carrying the bag?”
“Yeah.”
“And she’d just been hammered by a wave, had she?” Saskia said. “So she was wet and upset.”
“See, she didn’t want to be in the ankle-deep water with the actual babies, but she didn’t want to be out the back, either,” Jonie huffed. “She wanted to hang around in the white wash. Which was so stupid, because if I didn’t lift her up over the waves, she’d get dumped. And by lifting her up over the waves all the time, I kept getting dumped. Neither of us were having fun. A big wave smashed her good, and she came up screaming. I was like: That’s it. That’s fucking it!”
Jonie swept a hand sharply, slashing the air.
“Before we could catch the bus home, I went to the toilets near the parking lot. I had my period, and I wanted to, you know.” Jonie waved again. “I was in there for a while. My tampons were right down at the bottom of the bag and I couldn’t find them, and then I thought, Oh, man, I haven’t brought any. Blah-blah-blah. Tilly was wailing that she wanted to go back to the water, and I was threatening her that if she walked off without me, I was gonna lose my mind. She knew she had a moment to do it. I was stuck in the stall with my pants around my ankles and the bag emptied out on the floor.”
“And she did do it?” Saskia asked.
“She tried to,” Jonie said. “That’s when I snapped.”
Saskia watched the teen’s eyes. They were locked on her fingernails. On the paint flaking and chipping away, landing like little pink stars on the universe of her jeans.
“What happened?”
Jonie shrugged. “I bashed her head on the sink.”
Saskia waited.
Nothing more came.
“And she lost consciousness?”
“She just sort of died.” Jonie had almost cleaned off all her nails. She brushed the chips off her jeans, her eyebrows high but her eyes still downcast. “It was fast.”
“What did you do with the body?” Saskia asked.
“I put it in a dumpster at the side of the parking lot,” Jonie said. “Then I made like I couldn’t find her. Walked up and down the beach calling her name.”
Saskia realized she had been holding her breath. She let it out slowly, glanced at her watch. The interior of the BearCat was hot. She plucked at the collar of her shirt, thinking there would be sweat gathering there, but her skin was dry. She realized the heat was internal. A strange physical discomfort, almost fever-like, radiating from within her.
“You never told your parents what happened?” Saskia asked.
“No?” Jonie shook her head like it was obvious. “I didn’t want to go to jail?”
“You think they would have told the police?”
“They would have had to,” Jonie said. “They’ve been up the police’s ass about this from day one. Calling. Going into the police station. Following the officers to their cars, yelling at them, making threats to go to the press. They’ve emailed senators and gone on radio programs and…” She threw her hands up.
“They’ve been unstoppable.”
“They hired a private investigator guy.” She rubbed her nose. “That was the scariest time. He was all over me. He searched my room while I was out. My computer. My phone. But he was only really interested in the case for a couple of weeks. He was hanging in there, making a show of it until my parents paid him the deposit and the progress payment, two-thirds of what he’d quoted for the whole job. Then he disappeared. Ghosted them.”
