Fire with Fire, page 27
“I knew it was something about a missing kid on a beach.” Viola’s jaw was jutted, defiant. “I just took the call from Ruby and put two and two together and rang you. Which I didn’t need to do. Because I’m busy. But I wanted to help you. Maybe I got it slightly wrong. But you need to show some fucking gratitude for once in your miserable life.”
“Let’s just figure this out,” Lamb said. “Ruby, we’re so grateful to you for making contact with us. You’ve saved us a lot of time. We just got some images through from our analyst of that day at the beach, and we would have been very curious to know who the girl in the pictures is, if not Tilly.” Lamb took out her phone and showed the others the pictures Surge had sent. “So this is not a waste of time. And, Viola, we are indeed very grateful.”
Viola rolled her eyes and muttered to herself.
“Ruby, did you happen to see Tilly Delaney or her sister, Jonie, at the beach that day?” Lamb asked.
“No,” Ruby said. “Not that I recall. But I was keeping my head down and trying to go unnoticed, so I wasn’t paying specific attention to other people. Hence the big hat and sunglasses. I bought them at the hotel lobby.”
“You were trying to avoid being recognized by members of the public?”
“Yes.” Ruby smiled. “See, I wasn’t supposed to be at the beach at all. I’d snuck away from my handler. He thought I was at a meeting with my agent. And my agent thought I was in the room with my handler.”
“Why did you have to sneak away?” Charlie asked, his voice finally back at normal speaking volume.
“Uh, because I was eight years old?” The girl laughed.
Lamb felt her own eyebrows rise. She understood Charlie’s question. The girl before them, Lamb had to remind herself, was only ten. But her vernacular, her poised and confident gestures, the way she commanded the room, made that fact hard to accept. Lamb guessed it was no accident. That her parents, who likely had control of the child’s earnings, would have Ruby accompanied by a team of tutors as she traveled the world taking prestigious movie roles. The smarter and more articulate she was, the easier it would be for her to take on the roles of a ten-, eleven-, or twelve-year-old, to keep ahead of the child star’s eternal nemesis: time. Ruby settled on the couch, the tiny chairperson of the meeting, Lamb and Viola on the left of her and Charlie on the right.
“I had other reasons for needing to be discreet,” Ruby said. “I’d been forbidden from going down to the beach because I was in the middle of filming Kokio, and if I got a tan, it was going to be a nightmare for the makeup department.”
“I saw that!” Lamb blurted. She shielded her eyes when everyone turned to her. “Good … uh … good movie.”
“I was also hiding from a stalker,” Ruby said.
“A stalker?” Charlie glanced at Lamb. “What stalker?”
“This is why I felt I should make contact.” Ruby put her palms out, smiling at Viola. “It may be that I can assist in your investigation by providing you with a suspect.”
She talked. They listened. It was a tale that dove into freezing waters and deepened so gradually, so stealthily, that Lamb didn’t realize she was struggling with the dread it inspired until she could hardly breathe. It began as it usually did for Ruby. With an excited, gushing, poorly constructed message in her fan email account. He was a farmer from Wyoming. There were no pictures, initially, just a description of open, icy fields and forests and a little house where he lived with his son and a variety of oddball pets.
“I wasn’t supposed to answer more than twice,” Ruby said. “That was the policy. But there was a lot of activity on Instagram around the Stranger Things kids and how they answered fan mail and how that humanized them. I needed some humanizing. I’d just been snapped wearing stilettos at Paris Fashion Week, and that didn’t go down well. My publicists wanted to reframe my image a little. I answered Jacob’s email.”
“What did you say?” Lamb asked.
“Just the usual. The stuff I’d been taught to say. ‘Thanks so much.’ ‘Your support means a lot.’ Blah-blah-blah.” Ruby waved her hand.
“But it went on?” Charlie said.
“It went on. He wrote back saying how surprised he was that I’d replied at all. He sounded nice to me. Unassuming. Really kind of stunned. So I was flattered. He seemed like a sweet dad who worked hard for a living.” Ruby shrugged. “He wrote back telling me about his son, Harrison, and how smitten the kid was with me. Jacob wanted to know whether he should let Harrison watch The Upgrade.”
Lamb watched Ruby’s face. She saw flashes of the child she really was in her eyes, the regret and embarrassment and terror of being in trouble. The child inside was tangling and twisting around the surreal vision that she was: of a ten-year-old girl, wearing jeans that cost more than Lamb’s car, calling other children “kids” and grown men “unassuming.”
“I continued the conversation with Jacob on my phone,” Ruby said. “My publicists didn’t know about it. My relationship with my father was becoming strained at the time due to the whole Scientology thing. Jacob listened. And his stories about the farm and the animals were nice. They all had their little eccentricities. He rescued a goat that he found abandoned on the side of the road, and I felt like I was there to see it. Finding her. Healing her. Helping her trust again.”
“I’ve seen videos like that,” Lamb said. This time, she didn’t shield her eyes when they all looked. “Somebody finds a kitten in the middle of the road. Or they lure and trap a wild and frightened dog. There’s nice music. Lots of shots at the vet. The befores and afters.”
“Yes!” Ruby nodded eagerly, her eyes big and locked on Lamb. “Yes. They’re addictive, aren’t they?”
“Oh yeah.”
“See?” Ruby gestured to Lamb. “She gets it.”
“It was the story that drew you in,” Lamb said. “This was a good man. A rescuer of animals. An honest single father who cares about his son. I bet the wife was dead.”
Ruby froze. “She was!” she said. “Jacob’s wife. I asked what happened. You know. Eventually. After a few months.”
“What was it? Car accident?”
“Plane crash.”
Lamb looked at the parrot in the tree outside and hated the world and all the weirdos in it for a small moment.
“Did Jacob ever send you a photograph or a video of himself?” Charlie asked.
“No,” Ruby said. “He said he was camera shy.”
“What about the son? How old was Harrison supposed to have been?”
“He was five. I did receive a picture of a kid sitting on a couch once. But that was after a lot of pushing. Mostly it was just pictures and videos of the animals.”
Ruby paused and rested her face in her palm. When a few moments had gone by and she hadn’t continued, Lamb shuffled forward, clasped her hands, tried to present an understanding front.
“So it got sexual,” she said. “Right?”
“No!” Ruby blurted. Her sudden laughter tinkled around the huge room. “No, it wasn’t sexual, ma’am.”
Lamb sat back, feeling her face redden.
“I might be ten years old, but I know what grooming is.” Ruby’s brows were knitted, that curled-lip smirk returned. “My people were schooling me on that when I was still in diapers. Jacob didn’t want dollies. He wanted money.”
“‘Dollies’?” Lamb frowned.
“Nude images of young female children,” Charlie said. “The male ones are ‘teddies.’”
“He started out saying his car had broken down.” Ruby huffed an exasperated sigh. “He was desperate. One of his horses was sick and he couldn’t haul the trailer to the equine vet. He sent me a video of the horse, Maurice. He was in agony. Kidney stones. It was an emergency payment. He walked me through the process, how to send it via PayPal. I told no one.”
Silence in the room.
“Jesus, this is embarrassing.” Ruby rubbed her brow.
“Hey, you got duped by a predatory asshole,” Lamb said. “It just happened to me a week ago.”
“And she’s twice your age!” Charlie quipped.
“It shouldn’t have happened to you this early in life, Ruby.” Lamb ignored her partner. “But it was going to happen sometime.”
A phone started dinging somewhere. Lamb, Viola, and Charlie watched as Ruby dug a cell out of a tiny handbag and looked exhaustedly at the screen.
“No,” the girl muttered, swiping the screen and silencing the call. “You can wait.”
“How much money did you end up giving him?” Charlie asked.
“Not a crazy amount. A hundred thousand?”
Lamb inhaled sharply. She was the only one in the room who reacted at all.
“Over what time frame?” Charlie pushed.
“A year?”
Lamb eased her breath out silently.
“So you … you have those kinds of funds to move around on your own?” Lamb asked.
“My parents have control of my savings accounts,” Ruby explained. “But I have a monthly allowance of thirty thousand dollars.”
Lamb nodded as casually as she could.
“It wasn’t all animal-care emergencies.” Ruby examined Lamb from the corner of her eye, her jaw tight, the gasp obviously having shifted something in her. “There were other things. I wired them some money so Jacob and Harrison could come out to the premiere of Let It Burn that summer. Harrison had a panic attack about his mother’s death in a plane crash while they were boarding, so they couldn’t come.”
“What was the biggest amount you ever sent?” Charlie asked.
Ruby thought. “Maurice’s surgery was about eleven grand in total.”
“When did you realize you were being played?” Viola asked. Something in her tone told Lamb that Viola was speaking from experience.
“August,” Ruby said.
“Two months before Tilly went missing,” Charlie said.
“I was tired of all the games. The stories about why they couldn’t come to meet me, or why I couldn’t get another photograph of either one of them, were wearing thin. Then Jacob sent me a video that he said he had taken, but in the video, there was a reflection in a pane of glass, and I could see it was a woman holding the phone. I trapped him in the lie, and things got aggressive.”
Ruby took the phone from beside her, swiped through to a series of messages, and handed it to Lamb. She scrolled through the texts, which were completely one-sided, a tower of pale gray blocks of text.
Fuck U mouthy betraying little BITCH
YOU STINKING ROTTING WHORE
i know where to find u. I know people to send after u who will enjoy making u there pretty little baby doll punk.
U will answer these messages or i will upload the whole thread to Reddit RIGHT FUCKING NOW!!!!!!
“He says he’ll ‘upload the thread’?” Lamb said.
“Our entire conversation,” Ruby said. “Everything I’d told him over the past year or so. I’d trusted him. I’d bitched to him about my parents, my agents, the network, the studio. Powerful people in this town.” She gave a helpless little shrug, nudged a tear from the corner of her eye with a small, pale knuckle. “It would have been the end of me.”
* * *
Saskia Ferboden could see the muscles covering the back of Delta Hodge’s skull shifting beneath her close-shaved hair as she roared at the three men in front of her. Two of the snipers were heavyset, muscular types whom Saskia couldn’t imagine being very stealthy as they set up their strategic positions to end lives from afar. The last was small and wiry, with a small goatee and thin, wincing eyes.
“Who the fuck fired?” Hodge was demanding. The strap of her helmet was clutched in her gloved fist, and Saskia joined Curler out of swing range of the heavy, blunt instrument. “Who was it? Was it you, Marsh? It was you, wasn’t it?”
None of the snipers spoke. Their faces ranged from blank to defiant. Saskia saw no remorse there, which made a chill settle deep in the marrow of her bones.
“It’s not like I’m not going to find out who it was!” Hodge snarled. “I know your positions! There’s going to be a fucking investigation! Specialists are going to come down here and figure out which one of you it was, so tell me now!”
“Hard to figure out a thing like that,” the little guy said.
“What?” Hodge barked.
“Well, there are variables,” he went on, glancing at the other two for encouragement. “Line of sight. Ricochet. Air pressure. Wind resistance. I mean, I kinda felt like a big gust of wind came just as the shot was taken. You might not have felt it or noticed it, Commander Hodge. You being on the ground and occupied with the extraction and all.”
“Then there’s human error.” One of the big snipers picked up the trail, smiling. “I mean, I’m not one hundred percent sure which covert post I was manning just now. All this drama is messing with my emotions. I think I was at the Echo post up there on the north face. But before the shift change, I was at Juliet. I mean, maybe I’m mixed up, right, guys?”
“Maybe whoever fired did it accidentally,” the little guy continued. He turned to the others. “Or maybe he did it deliberately. But whatever the case, maybe the stress of it all blanked it right out of his brain.”
Hodge sucked air between her teeth.
“You’re all stood down,” she said in a voice so icy it reminded Saskia of a snake’s hiss. “Get off my scene.”
Curler was watching the revenge video on his phone. Saskia leaned over and watched it again. It was the third viewing for her, probably the same for Curler. The stock list he held in his hand was crinkled and dog-eared from overuse.
“The Navarro case,” he said. He was holding the list now beside the itemized case numbers Ryan had sent to the press. “It’s in there. It’s burned.”
“Shit,” Saskia breathed. She felt hollow inside.
“So is the Compton rapist,” Curler said. “The case he burned just before the surrender; that was an aggravated burglary. But the mayor’s niece isn’t there. Neither is the Malibu Mountains Killer. That’s something.”
“Is she dead?” Hodge’s voice was hoarse, her eyes still blazing as she came to join the others. “Elsie Delaney. What’s the update?”
“Elsie and Ashlea just arrived at LAC.” Saskia looked at her phone. “Elsie’s been admitted to surgery, but no, she’s not dead.”
Hodge didn’t react. She was eyeing Tanner Court again, the teenager slumped on the chair in the corner with his head in his hands. “What’s the plan here? Is Ryan answering the phone?”
“No,” Curler sighed. “We’re still pumping the recorded message from Jonie, but things have gone quiet in there. We can only assume Ryan’s going to keep to his threat and burn another sample in”—he glanced at his watch—“eleven minutes.”
“We need to question Elsie Delaney,” Hodge said. “Talk to her on the fucking operating table if we have to. I can’t move my ground teams any closer until I know if there’s a bomb in that lab or not. We’re at all entrances to the ground floor, and we’re on the roof. If I can get confirmation that there’s no bomb, I can move a team down the inner stairwell and to the entrance to the hallway.”
“Elsie Delaney might be in surgery for hours.” Curler shook his head. “We don’t know how deep those scissors went. Whether they hit a major organ. It’s Ryan we have to focus on.”
“That’s bullshit.” Hodge lifted the helmet and jabbed Curler in the chest with it. “You got one of these sickos in hand. Forget the fucking surgery. Hold off on all medical treatment until she tells you what they’re packing!”
“That’s inhumane and illegal,” Curler said politely.
“So is holding a pregnant woman at fucking gunpoint!”
“Stop, stop, stop.” Saskia put a hand on Curler because she didn’t dare touch Hodge. “He’s right. We’ve got to focus on Ryan. But I’ve got someone I can maybe send to sit on Elsie until she’s awake enough to talk.”
26
LAMPUGNALE: Yeah?
HOSKINS: Hey there. Is this Jay?
LAMPUGNALE: This is him. What do you need?
HOSKINS: My name is Charlie Hoskins. I actually got your number from Bill Spavey down at O’Reilly’s. He said you’re the manager there at the Eight Straight Club?
LAMPUGNALE: Yep.
HOSKINS: Look, I don’t want to take up much of your time. I know you’re busy. But I’ve just moved down from Frisco, and I’m looking to get a job—
LAMPUGNALE: Let me stop you right there. I got a full deck of bartenders here already. Besides which, I never hire off the phone. Last time I did that, the guy turned up and he was blind.
HOSKINS: Blind?
LAMPUGNALE: Yeah, blind.
HOSKINS: Oh.
LAMPUGNALE: You ever seen a blind bartender? Because I have.
HOSKINS: I’m looking for a job, but it’s not tending bar. I was wondering who handles your sound down there.
LAMPUGNALE: The sound. Ah.
HOSKINS: I’m completely rigged for audio and visual. I got lasers and strobes and all that. I know you guys do live music all weekend. Tuesdays, too. If you’re not happy with your current sound guy, I was thinkin’—
LAMPUGNALE: We’re very happy with her.
HOSKINS: Oh. Well. Shit.
LAMPUGNALE: Yeah, shit for you, pal. And for the record, we don’t do any of that laser bullshit. This ain’t a gay bar. You should have done your research.
HOSKINS: You’re right. You’re right. I should have.
LAMPUGNALE: Take it from me, man. You want a job in this town? Get off your ass and actually walk into some bars and talk to managers face-to-face. And don’t bother looking for work as a sound guy on this side of Pacific Avenue. Mina and Scott have got it covered from here all the way up Magnolia, pretty much.
HOSKINS: Mina.
LAMPUGNALE: Yeah, she’s good. She’s always on time. Doesn’t mind getting off her ass, that one. And it’s a cute ass, too, which helps.
HOSKINS: How do you know I don’t have a cute ass?
LAMPUGNALE: Ha! Oh, man. That’s funny.
HOSKINS: Listen, I get it. Everything you’re saying. I get it. I just … ah. To be honest? I’m … I’m scratching around here. My wife just kicked me out. I’ve got four hundred bucks to my name right now. I’ve got a trash bag full of clothes in the car with my audio rig. That’s it. It’s, like, I can sell the rig or I can try to use it to get my life started again. If you’re starving, you don’t sell your fishing pole. You catch fish. You know what I’m saying?
