Fire with Fire, page 31
“I don’t agree,” Saskia said. “Maybe if we let him get to the storage cupboard, let him get the sample bag with his daughter’s swimsuit in it, it’ll be enough to make him surrender.”
“He wants you to find his kid!” Hodge said. “That’s what the ultimatum was this morning! Find the kid. Bring her home. Dead or alive. An evidence bag isn’t going to make him throw up the white flag.”
“This morning, he had his wife there with him,” Curler said. “He’s tired now. Beaten down. He’ll be hungry and dehydrated, and he will have run through all his supplies of adrenaline for the next goddamn decade. I think Saskia’s right. The whole reason Ryan and Elsie Delaney chose the Hertzberg-Davis lab to stage this thing in was because that’s where the swimsuit got misplaced. The swimsuit is a symbol. It was mishandled, just like their daughter’s case. Maybe finding the suit will change something in Ryan. Give him hope.”
“So you want me to keep my teams back?” Hodge asked, folding her muscular arms. “What about the snipers? Do I call off the shoot-to-kill order?”
Saskia looked at the map. The tiny blue boxes and grids and lines representing the halls, labs, cupboards, and annexes of the building. She visualized Ibrahim and Gary and Ryan in there, human lives held in peril simply by the refusal of one of their number to let them get to safety. She couldn’t ignore the fact that, already, Ryan and his wife had allowed one of the hostages and her unborn child to go free. That they were not merciless. She didn’t know if maintaining an order to shoot Ryan dead on sight at the very first opportunity meant she herself was without that same mercy.
“We got a visual!” someone yelled.
Hodge gripped her radio. The three commanding officers turned toward the building. In the dark beyond the automatic doors of the reception area, someone was moving.
“Let’s just get Ibrahim to safety, and we’ll think about shoot-to-kill orders later,” Saskia said. “One step at a time.”
* * *
“What’s the third sample?” Lamb asked.
Charlie had to drag his mind out of the dark place where it had been swimming to answer her. He’d been thinking about those hours out in the ocean, floating on his back and looking at the stars, trying to talk himself into flipping over and continuing the hellish kicking and pulling toward what he hoped was land. He’d watched the tiny pinpricks of light up there, in the black velvet dome of sky, and told himself the same thing he’d told himself every day waking in his bed in his shitty apartment for five years undercover: that this would end. That he wouldn’t be suspended here forever, rolling on the waves, neither dead nor alive, just like he hadn’t been suspended for eternity in the Death Machines. Neither a good nor a bad guy. Operation Hellfire had ended badly, yes. And maybe in a couple of hours he was going to succumb to hypothermia, or something in the depths would rise up and eat him alive. But it wouldn’t go on forever. Nothing did.
“The what?” he said.
“You said you had three samples in the lab,” Lamb said. She was still tapping and swiping on her phone, scrolling through photographs. “The Mariana Navarro sample. The Travis Bookman sample. What’s the third one?”
Charlie leaned his head against the wall, watched a nurse walk by, scowling. The nurses clearly weren’t happy about them sitting on the floor, but if they felt like that, Charlie figured they should have put out some chairs.
“Dean Willis has only got one good eye,” Charlie said. “His right. He lost sight in the left one in an accident. He killed some people. It was revenge for the eye.”
“What kind of accident? What kind of revenge?”
“I need coffee.” Charlie glanced down the hall toward a vending machine between where they sat and the blockade of officers preventing them from entering the secure ward. “If I can’t smoke in here, I’m gonna need coffee. Snacks. Lamb, you’re the rookie. Go get your superior officer some snacks.”
“I’m not a rookie,” Lamb said. “I’m not a police employee, remember? Tell me about the sample.”
“When you get me snacks.”
“Charlie.”
“There was a robbery.” Charlie let his head thump back against the wall. “A liquor store in Anaheim. Dean had nothing to do with it. He just happened to be there, buying beer. The young Black guy who robbed the place, James Elliott, didn’t even have a real gun. It was a painted water pistol. The kid was sixteen. Guy behind the counter didn’t care. He pulled out a Magnum and tried to blow Elliott’s head off with it. The kid ran. The bullet hit a bottle of Cognac, and a shard of glass got Dean right in the eyeball.”
Lamb glanced over, horrified.
“Dean just killed the counter guy. Popped him clean while he was getting into his car outside his brother’s house maybe a month later,” Charlie said. “That’s about as kind as it gets for Dean. He likes to play with you, like a cat. He used to say, ‘You only get to kill them once.’”
“What did he do to Elliott?”
“He made Elliott carve up his own parents,” Charlie said. “It was a dark, dark thing. Dean was telling the family he’d let the kid live if he did what he was asking him to do to the parents. So, the parents encouraged him to do it. Save yourself, son.”
“That’s…” Lamb’s mouth worked soundlessly while she tried to come up with the right word.
“Horrifying,” Charlie said.
“Yes.”
“He’s a creative guy, our Dean.”
“Did he kill Elliott?”
“Oh yeah,” Charlie said. “Not fast. Dean and some other guys worked on Elliott themselves for a while. The kid had a heart attack, eventually, which cut the party short. I got Dean on tape talking about it, but I also managed the impossible of all impossibles—I got Dean Willis away from his favorite pocketknife for an hour.”
Lamb watched Charlie. He felt her gaze, wondered if all these stories were turning her off being a cop or encouraging her. He was too tired to know the difference.
“It was risky,” he said. “But I had to separate Dean from the knife. All the other guys in the room that night, they would have dumped their knives after the murder. I knew that. But Dean would have held on to his, because it was his favorite. His father gave it to him. He kept it on him at all times. Took it to the bathroom with him. Slept with it under his pillow.”
“So how did you get it?” Lamb asked.
“I bumped Dean off the back of a pickup truck,” Charlie said. “We were loading guns and supplies. Dean liked to go hog hunting. I was standing up there in the truck bay with him, and I saw my shot. I turned around real fast and bumped into him, knocked him off the truck, made like it was an accident. He fell and broke his wrist.”
“You can’t take your knife into the x-ray machine.” Lamb smiled, nodding.
“I made like I was sorry as hell for causing him to fall,” Charlie said. “Drove him to all his appointments. It wasn’t hard to act the part. I was sorry. Sorry and scared. Even a pure accident like that can get you murdered by these guys. They’re fucking psychos. Anyway, I took the knife apart, swabbed the insides, scraped out the little ridges and grooves and indentations on the surface of the blade under the wooden handle. Put it back together. Gave it back to Dean when he was out of the x-ray appointment. Hopefully that sample will be safe from the Delaneys out of sheer statistics. I can’t be unlucky enough for the Delaneys to choose all three of my cases out of the ninety-nine.”
“So you looked,” Lamb said. “You saw the news reports of the cases Ryan has burned so far. You know you lost Navarro and Bookman.”
“I was trying to be less ‘anxious avoidant,’” Charlie said. He turned and widened his eyes at her. “So! About those snacks!”
She went. He sat there thinking about the recording he’d made of Dean talking about the Elliott murders. Dean had been having one of his “confession sessions” after a big night at the clubhouse. Charlie’d had some back-warmer whose name he didn’t know sitting in his lap, whispering dirty things in his ear. He’d ended up guiding her hand down into his jeans to keep it from trailing up inside his shirt and hitting the mic.
Lamb came back, still looking at her phone screen, one fist full of candy bars.
“Okay, let me tell you where I am,” she said. “The picture of the five-year-old blond kid on the couch that Ruby was sent—that’s a no-brainer. It was just on a mommy blog. Likely just came from a Google search. But the videos—I checked out the accounts they originated from. One of the videos is from a gay couple in Utah who run an animal sanctuary. That’s the sick horse. The other video, the one of a goat, is from a woman in Kentucky who owns an emu farm but who keeps a couple of goats as pets.”
Charlie started tearing open a Clark Bar.
“The animal sanctuary account has about six thousand followers, and the emu farmer has about two and a half thousand,” Lamb said. “I selected all the names in both accounts, dropped them into a text document, and compared the lists. There are two followers that follow both animal accounts.”
“Only two?” Charlie said.
“Don’t get excited.” Lamb showed him a picture of an old man with deep hollows in his cheeks, wearing steel-rimmed spectacles and standing by a beat-up Ford pickup truck. He was wearing gray coveralls. “This is one of the accounts.”
“Okay,” Charlie said. “Older male, farmer type. He fits. Where does he live?”
“New York State,” Lamb said. “But I don’t think this is our stalker.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s a legitimate account.” Lamb scrolled through photographs. Charlie saw the old man and a teenager working on the Ford and an old Chrysler. “He’s not a farmer. He’s a mechanic. He runs a shop that specializes in restorations. All the information we want about him is freely available here. There’s his wife. There’s the son. There’s the front of the shop.”
“You don’t think the stalker would have a real account?”
“I think they’d have something like this,” she said. She showed him another account. There were two pictures in the profile, one of a ginger cat sunning itself on the deck of an aboveground pool, one of the Golden Gate Bridge.
“Pretty sparse.” Charlie finished the Clark Bar and rubbed his hands on his jeans. He felt the sugar rush tingling in his empty veins.
“It’s a skeleton account,” Lamb said. “The stalker probably set it up, never filled it out. Then he started using it to search for and source videos and images to sell his story to Ruby about being an animal-loving widower who could use a helping hand.”
“Okay.” Charlie shifted closer to her. “Okay. This is good.”
“So I took the two images in the account and I reverse-searched them, tried to find out if they appear anywhere else on the internet,” Lamb said. “Just like I did with Ruby’s videos.”
“And?”
“They don’t. Which means they’re probably real. The stalker took them himself. And there’s more that tells me we’re in the right place. Look who the account is following.” Lamb tapped a number, and a list dropped down. She scrolled, hit an account, flashed a heavily filtered picture of a beautiful girl with chocolate ringlet curls on the screen. Charlie felt another energy bump in his body.
“Ruby Monacco.”
“You’re damn right.”
“Nice work, Lamb.”
“We need to know who owns this account,” she said. “There’ll be an IP address attached to whoever made it. We just have to hope it’s a cell phone or a home computer and not an internet cafe or stolen Wi-Fi. It’s a start. I’ll text Surge, and he can have Binchley look up the address.”
“That’s going to be a problem,” Surge said.
Lamb and Charlie looked up. The big man was standing over them, his sunglasses dangling off his chubby fingers. The slicked quiff he’d been wearing when Lamb saw him last was windswept.
“I just dumped him.”
Lamb got to her feet. Charlie could see goose bumps had risen all over her lean forearms. “You … you killed him?”
“No, Lamby.” Surge laughed. “I just drove him into the middle of the desert and left him for dead. I didn’t actually kill him.” He gave Charlie a quizzical frown. “I’m not an animal.”
“We should have discussed that.” Charlie raked his fingers over his skull. He had that bottomless feeling of feverish dreams, of realizing he had to catch a flight with only twenty minutes’ notice and trying to pack his bags. Things forgotten, things lost, things left behind. “Saskia doesn’t know Binchley was behind the Hertzberg-Davis thing. When she finds out it was him and that we let him go, she’s going to flip.”
“But I renegotiated with him.” Surge shrugged. “And I’m a man of my word. I said I’d let him go, so I had to.”
Lamb looked dejected.
“I made the game interesting, of course.” Surge was looking down the hall at Bailey and his team. The comment was so offhand Charlie almost didn’t hear it.
“You what?” Lamb asked.
“I evened the odds,” Surge said. “I drove Binchley out into the middle of nowhere, gave him a bottle to catch his piss in, a ball cap to keep the sun off, and a compass to find his way. Then I stood there and called three police stations and let them know where he was. The chase is on! Cops and robbers was always my favorite game as a kid. You, too, probably. Right, Lamb?”
Surge nudged her in the ribs so hard she stumbled backward.
“We still needed Binchley,” Charlie grumbled.
Lamb tapped her phone against her thigh. “I guess I’m going to have to try to look closer at these two pictures. Try to find a source. The Golden Gate Bridge isn’t going to tell me much. Maybe the cat has a tag on its collar I could zoom in on.” She lifted the phone.
“We don’t have time for that now.” Charlie turned her by the shoulder. Surge had walked off toward the officers blocking the hallway, a long and swift stride. “We just brought a T. rex to a cockfight, and we need to get ready to move.”
Charlie and Lamb took up a vantage point by the vending machine, where they could hear the exchange.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“I’m looking into the Delaney case,” Surge told Bailey. “I heard you got a problem with people doing that.”
“We do. You’re denied access to this ward until—”
Surge’s hands closed on Joe Bailey’s shirt and jacket, taking two huge fistfuls of the fabric, the way an eagle’s talons close on rabbit fur. The seams that joined the sleeves to the chest of Bailey’s jacket popped open. Surge lifted and threw the man backward in one motion, sending him smashing into a large whiteboard hanging at the back of the hallway. Surge pivoted and rammed his elbow into the throat of the officer on his left, using the momentum to rake back a haymaker into the other officer’s face. Charlie dragged Lamb through the fray as Bailey and one of the other officers leaped on Surge together, the trio crunching into the drywall as an alarm began sounding from the nurses’ station.
30
Charlie had visited secure wards plenty of times in his career. Here, the patients that hospitals needed to restrain were kept away from the public. The screamers and thrashers and criminals; junkies trying to fight air demons; howling dementia patients brought in from days wandering the streets, scabbed and stinking of urine. Occasionally, when multiple patients needed police supervision or protection at once, they ended up here. He’d responded to the aftermath of a prison riot once and found three members of the same stickup crew sporting puncture wounds, resting up in the same ward, planning their next caper from their neighboring beds.
The lights were dimmer here, and the distant alarm sparked by Surge’s violence seemed muffled. Charlie and Lamb paused in a doorway. Ashlea Pratt was sitting in a bed by a window that was covered by a blind, holding an older woman’s hand and wiping her nose on a well-used tissue.
“If the scans are all good, I don’t know why I can’t go home,” she was saying. “I just want to go home and have a shower and go to bed.”
The ward was clear of other patients. They passed two rooms full of empty gurneys, cleared whiteboards, pushed-back curtain dividers. In the fourth room, they found the curtains drawn around a single bed. Charlie tugged the curtain back, and the sound of the rings sliding on the metal rail jolted Jonie Delaney from her sleep.
“Oh, sorry.” She sat up, shoving back her wilted, sleep-mussed curls. “Wh-what time is it? Do we have to go?”
“Jonie, I’m Charlie Hoskins. I’m a police officer,” he said, taking a chair beside the bed. Lamb checked the door and pulled the curtain back around Jonie’s little section of the big, lonely room. “This is my partner, Lynette Lamb. We’re here to talk to you about Tilly.”
“Is she okay?” Jonie asked.
Charlie glanced at Lamb.
“Tilly?” He was suddenly lost for words. “Uh, we don’t know yet.”
“No, I mean my mom.” Jonie rubbed her eyes. Her movements were slightly stiff, like she was cold. All her limbs were pulled in toward her center. “Someone said she was in the hospital somewhere. In surgery. She got stabbed.”
“I think she’s still in surgery,” Lamb said. “We can find out for you.”
Jonie nodded vaguely. Charlie was about to speak when Lamb surprised him.
“I’m sorry this is happening to you, Jonie,” she said. “All of it.”
Jonie and Charlie looked over at the aspiring young police officer. The words had been so simple, so human and rudimentary, Charlie scolded himself for not thinking to say them first.
“I deserve it,” Jonie said. “I killed Tilly. This is what you get for murdering someone.”
Charlie felt his whole chest seize. He’d heard those kinds of words before, but never from someone who looked the way Jonie did now—so small and alone and frail.
His partner sat on the edge of the bed, and they both listened to Jonie’s story. It was clear to Charlie that the young woman was still shaking off the effects of whatever sedative she had been given. She paused midsentence twice to stare at the ceiling, her lips parted and her eyes wandering slowly. When she was done, the empty room seemed to echo with the confession, like it had changed the very nature of the space around them. Widened and deepened it.
