Fire with Fire, page 18
Curler licked his teeth, squinted into the sunlight. “They’re gonna turn on you.” He shook his head. “The whole team. Look at them. Look at their faces.”
Saskia didn’t look. “I know. I know.”
“Saskia,” he said suddenly. The insubordination shocked her, but his eyes took her somewhere else. “I like you. Okay?”
She couldn’t respond.
“I like you as a person,” he went on. “So I really don’t want to see this whole thing collapse in on you. Knocking out the SWAT leader with the haymaker from hell was a questionable decision. And now—”
“He made a reference to my assault,” Saskia said. Curler waited. It was a story she’d told so few times in her life, she didn’t know where to begin telling it. How to capture what had happened in complete and logical sentences, when so much of the event defied words.
“I was twenty-three,” Saskia said. “I had an internship at a fashion magazine over on Wilshire. Every morning, my roommate and I would ride into work in my convertible wearing practically nothing. Miniskirts. Tube tops. We’d passed this homeless guy a few times before on the way in, and he’d yelled at us. You know, called us names. We didn’t pay much attention. It’s Los Angeles.”
Curler’s eyes searched hers.
“One time, he approached the car,” she continued. “I should have seen it as a warning sign. That he was advancing.”
“What did he do?”
“He dumped a bucket of sulfuric acid in my lap.”
“Jesus fucking Christ.” Curler’s hands flew to his head. Saskia didn’t know what he’d been expecting, but it mustn’t have been that. Then he did what every one of the people who knew Saskia’s story had done the first time they heard it. His eyes roved over her, searching for signs of burns.
“My damage is all below the waist,” Saskia said. “My friend got it worse. It sort of bounced off me and up at her, at her top half.” The chief straightened, signaling the end of her little therapy session. “Point is, the guy fled. And if he hadn’t dropped the bucket, they might never have caught him. His sample went into CODIS, and he popped up again a year later on the other side of the country.”
Curler nodded, his face unreadable. Then he said, “Now I feel like punching someone.”
“I’m telling you this because I want you to know.” Saskia fixed him with her gaze. “I would love, love, to tell the Delaneys, ‘Yes. I’ll do whatever you want. Just don’t burn any more samples.’ I’d love to tell the SWAT team, ‘Yes. Do it. Go in there. Blast those fuckers. Save the samples.’ I know better than anyone how powerful a single sample can be. I know it.”
Curler watched her.
“But that’s not my job here. My job is to get the hostages out alive.”
“I get it,” Curler sighed. All the anger had gone out of him. “I believe you.”
Saskia said, “Let’s get a recording of Jonie to play to them. And I’m not the negotiator here. I know that. I’ve overstepped my bounds. But I also think having any part of Jonie’s script read ‘I killed her’ would be a mistake, even if we think that’s true.”
Curler leaned against the BearCat, nodding, rubbing his stubble with his hands. She could smell his cologne and the laundry powder in his shirt, even though there was sweat beading on his collarbones.
“I don’t think it’s true,” he said.
“You don’t?”
“No,” he said.
“It’s the dumpster thing,” Saskia said. “I looked at the case file. There’s no mention of dumpsters down on the esplanade. But there were trash cans. The type with the narrow openings and a hood over them, to stop seabirds and homeless people from foraging in them. You couldn’t fit a body in one. And Soloveras and Dubois had them searched anyway. Probably the only example of them going the extra mile in this whole case.”
“Just because the dumpster wasn’t mentioned doesn’t mean it wasn’t there,” Curler countered.
“Why search the basically inaccessible trash cans and not search a dumpster?”
“Look,” Curler said. “The dumpster thing isn’t the reason I don’t think Jonie is guilty of this.” They looked at the teens holding each other, Tanner curling one of Jonie’s ringlets around his big index finger. “There was so much detail in the first half of her story. About the tampons. About the friend trying to flirt with Tanner. About the kid watching Jaws from the hallway. If Jonie had snapped and killed her little sister, some of that level of detail would have come through in that part of the story.”
“Could she have blocked it out, like she said?”
“I have some psychological training in trauma responses, but it’s not my primary expertise,” he explained. “Having said that, I feel that her mind would have obliterated the entire incident. Not just the killing but the whole morning at the beach. The brain isn’t selective. It doesn’t play the tape through perfectly and then say, ‘Okay, we just want to delete minute seven to minute nineteen and preserve everything else perfectly.’”
“Right,” Saskia sighed, her thoughts racing.
“And there was just … something about the way she said ‘it,’” Curler said.
“When?”
“She was talking about the body,” Curler said. “She said, ‘I put it in a dumpster.’ I just don’t see her having that kind of … detachment … toward Tilly’s body.”
“So why would she be saying all this stuff?” Saskia asked.
“She may believe that she did it.” Curler shrugged. “Those moments after Tilly vanished would indeed have been incredibly traumatic. Maybe her mind has inserted something there. Something that makes sense. It’s just not real enough to have any detail to it or for her sister to appear in it as more than a placeholder. A cardboard cutout. An ‘it.’”
“But why is she so calm about it? About all of it? I mean, she’s so cold right now. I’d be in hysterics. Doesn’t that lend credibility to her claim that she just snapped and killed Tilly? Maybe she’s a sociopath. Maybe Tilly was always an ‘it’ to her. Curler, that teenager’s parents are in that building right now holding three hostages at gunpoint, and I haven’t seen Jonie Delaney shed a single tear yet.”
They looked at Jonie. She was sitting now in one of the fold-out chairs, Tanner knee to knee with her, talking and gesturing as if he was explaining something to her, while she quietly nodded along. She smiled suddenly at something Tanner said, a broad and uninhibited smile like her sister’s.
“I’d say she’s completely disassociated from what’s happening here,” Curler said. “Her mind has compartmentalized it all. Gone into safe mode. Offered a simple-to-follow solution to something that it insists is a small and temporary problem. Tell them you killed Tilly, and this little hiccup will go away. Everything will be back to normal.”
“Will she stay like that?” Saskia asked. “Or is she about to completely lose it?”
“She’s a teenager,” Curler sighed. “Whether she’s about to completely lose it is impossible to tell at the best of times.”
“So let’s get her on tape.” Saskia turned and started walking back toward the tent, Curler at her side. “She might be right about one thing: maybe she’s the key to ending all this.”
16
Surge was waiting for them outside the trailer at the end of the row of trailers, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses with small, round lenses that gave him the look of a gothic, meaty GI Joe. He was watching them approach across the Universal lot with his big arms folded and horsey mouth grinning around the butt of a cigar. Charlie noticed that the skin on the knuckles of both of his hands was grazed clean off and there was blood in between his chubby fingers. It wasn’t a new look for his old friend.
“Hoss and Lamb! Hoss and Lamb!” Surge cheered. “Look out, folks! The dynamic duo is here!”
“Hi, Surge.” Lamb smiled.
Surge jutted his chin at Charlie. “Have you heard about the Navarro sample?”
Charlie froze in step, one foot out, one foot behind. Lamb halted beside him, stilled by his grave energy.
“I’ve been avoiding it,” Charlie said. He held his breath. “Did they burn it?”
“No.” Surge exhaled cigar smoke through his nostrils like a steam train, smiling at Lamb. “And it was Ferboden who stepped in, so I hear.”
Charlie felt his phone ringing in his pocket. He picked it up, glanced at the screen, and nodded to Surge. Before Lamb could follow Surge toward his trailer, Charlie shook his head.
“Just give me a minute before you go in.”
He answered the phone, walking out into the road between the row of trailers and the shady lots, out of earshot of his partners. In a nearby studio, the huge roller doors were up and crew were lugging couches into a set made up to look like a Christmas-themed family living room, complete with fireplace and tree.
“Sass.”
“Did you just pick up one of the early suspects in the Delaney case?”
“Rumors,” Charlie said. “They’re flying around. I just heard one about you diving on the Navarro case hand grenade. Is that true?”
“Yeah,” Saskia breathed. “They were going to burn it or the Encino double homicide sample. I made a little personal appeal. It stopped them destroying your sample, but everybody heard me do it. Now I’m waiting to get burned at the stake by an angry mob of police officers.”
“Thank you, Sass.”
“Don’t thank me,” Saskia snapped. “Thanks mean dick to me right now.”
Charlie hung on in silence, thinking about Mariana Navarro. Franko Aderhold, his old neighbor on the cell block, had spoken about himself and his friend Dean Willis carving up a Hispanic girl named Navarro in the months after Charlie earned his trust in prison. Charlie had listened, deliberately nonchalant, half expecting the tale to have been a test to see if he was a bleeding heart about kids, or Hispanics, or witnesses. A year later, he had found himself invited on a mission with Dean and Franko to burn down an abandoned house Dean owned outside La Habra, because cops were sniffing around the place about a missing Hispanic girl. They’d sprung it on him: the burning, the full story about what had happened to the Navarro girl. Charlie had stood in the living room of the house with Franko, sloshing gasoline on the walls, knowing that under the carpet, only feet from where he stood, there might be a bloodstain that could prove Navarro had died there. He’d walked into the yard with Dean and Franko, watched the flames spread through the house, and in desperation had come up with the most bullshit excuse in history to go back inside. His car keys. He’d patted his pockets, called out a half-hearted explanation, and dashed back in. With flames licking the walls all around him, crawling up the ceiling and spewing black smoke, he’d dug up the corner of the carpet with his pocketknife, ripped up a slab, found the big, dark bloodstain exactly where Franko said it would be. He’d gouged madly for a splinter of wood from the patch, his fingers bleeding from gripping the carpet staples and his lungs filling with ash.
He hadn’t known, as he left the burning house, whether Dean and Franko had bought his story about leaving his keys inside. He didn’t know if they’d looked in on him, seen him digging up the carpet through the windows. He’d run out of the flames and heat and smoke wondering if he was running into a hail of bullets.
Charlie had put the Navarro splinter of wood and the blood trapped within it with the other biological evidence he’d squirreled away over his years undercover with the Death Machines. Keeping the evidence, rather than submitting it and having the lab test it immediately, was a policy Saskia had constantly pushed him to drop throughout his time under. But Charlie knew risking the occasional trip to an expensive, temperature-controlled private storage facility in Fairfax was a lot safer than having Death Machines DNA pop up in a lab while he was in with them. The Delaneys, civilians, somehow working out how to access the inventory lists from Hertzberg-Davis, had proven he was right to be paranoid.
“I can’t guarantee the Navarro sample won’t come up again,” Saskia said. “It’s a crazy little game of roulette we’re playing with these fuckers, and there don’t seem to be any rules.”
“Except find their kid, and find her fast,” Charlie said.
“So are you looking into it? Even though I asked you not to?”
“No comment,” Charlie said.
“Hey, fuck you, too.”
“What did you expect me to do, Sass?”
“I expected you to lie low until the gang forgets about you.”
“That’s never going to happen,” Charlie said. “They’re going to hit me or someone I care about, whether it’s now or twenty years from now. So, while you’re busy, and I’m busy, and Viola can’t scratch her ass without eighteen paparazzi crawling all over each other to get it on camera, and Surge is—”
“You brought Surge in on this?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“Oh, fuck my life.”
“The guy’s a getter. He gets things. And speaking of, I’ve gotta go.”
“Hoss, if I can’t stop you working on this thing, you might as well do me some actual good,” Saskia said before he could hang up.
Charlie started walking back toward the trailer, toward his partners, who were standing in the shade outside.
“Find out what the garbage disposal situation was on the esplanade at Santa Monica, would you?”
“Why?”
“Just do it,” Saskia said. “Particularly the parking lot. Look for dumpsters.”
Charlie hung up on Saskia Ferboden and presented himself to Surge outside his trailer. He could hear a steady banging coming from inside the rusted old vehicle, as well as a muffled groaning that seemed to be causing Lamb deepening concern. Around them, the sunny lot was a hive of activity; the makeup trailer two spots down was now hosting a queue of female actors dressed as pirates. No one was acknowledging the ruckus inside the trailer. Charlie stepped up and pushed his way inside, feeling the desire for coffee and cigarettes burning at the back of his throat.
Brad Alan Binchley was bleeding and cuffed at the wrists and ankles to the stem of the table in the trailer’s kitchen booth. He sat, essentially hog-tied, glaring viciously at the team as they entered. Charlie could see Binchley had been working at bashing the tabletop upward off the stem to try to free himself, but the trailer was vintage and had been sturdily built, so the tabletop was warped but still in place. Surge had shoved a sock in Binchley’s mouth and duct-taped it in. Lamb crept into the trailer cautiously, took one look at Binchley, and let out a wail of surprise and horror.
“Lamb Chop, I think you might recognize this guy,” Surge said cheerfully as he locked the trailer door behind him. He slid onto the bench beside Binchley, his jeans riding up, exposing his missing sock. Binchley winced as Surge elbowed him in the ribs. “I hear you two had a little bam-bam in the ham, am I right?”
“You fucker.” Lamb was raising a shaky finger to point at Binchley. “You fucker! You fucker!”
“We don’t have time for this,” Charlie said. No one heard him. He popped open the window of the kitchenette and lit a cigarette, found his painkillers where he’d left them by the sink, and downed a handful.
“Do you have any idea what you did to me?” Lamb seethed at Binchley. “Do you have any idea what you did to my life?!”
“You want to punch him?” Surge grinned. He beckoned Lamb over. “I’ve punched him a few times already. It’s fun. Come on! He’s got a good, meaty face. Soft bones. I haven’t broken his nose yet. I left that for you. What can I say? I’m a gentleman.”
Lamb’s fists were balled. She was thinking about it. Charlie tried not to pick at the stitches in his scalp and felt tired.
“Enough messing around,” he said. “Un-sock this idiot and let’s get him working.”
“Why is he here?” Lamb sank into the green corduroy armchair, her fists still balled. “Where the hell did you find him? Isn’t he supposed to be in jail?”
“I found him exactly where Hoss said I’d find him. He was at his ex-girlfriend’s place in Anaheim.” Surge was smiling as he unwound the tape from Binchley’s head. A considerable amount of the biker’s ponytail and beard were ripped free as the tape came off. He vomited Surge’s sock onto the tabletop and wheeled on Lamb.
“Well, if it isn’t my baby police bitch.” Binchley gave a bloody smile.
Lamb made a disgusted noise.
“So nice to see your tight little ass again. I thought for sure you were just a memory for me now.”
“Shut up,” Lamb snarled.
“I guess you’re upset because they fired you. They must have fired you, right?”
“That’s right.” Lamb’s face was scarlet.
Charlie was surprised that there were no tears yet.
“They fired my ass. I’m out. Because of you. Because of you!”
“Oh dang!” Binchley laughed. “Poor li’l baby. You got fucked by me and the LAPD in the same week. And all you got out of it were marching papers and a couple of ground-shaking orgasms. Or, at least, that’s what it sounded like to me.”
“Hit him, Lamb.” Surge beckoned her again. “Come on. Just once. Do it for me.”
“I’m not going to hit a handcuffed man.”
“It’s the cheapest therapy you’ll ever get,” Surge reasoned.
“Binch, you’re going to do some work for us,” Charlie said, pulling down a coffee mug for himself. “We need your expertise with some computer stuff. You help us out, and maybe I’ll make it so you get out of here without Lamb putting your balls in a blender.”
“Oh, fuck you,” Binchley scoffed at Charlie. “You snitching, lying, backstabbing motherfucker.”
Charlie poured his coffee.
