The Violet Hour, page 19
Vivian didn’t know what the female detective thought of her. The woman was sitting with her legs curled under her on the sofa and her expression hadn’t changed the whole time she had talked, not even when she got to the part about pulling the trigger. But she also hadn’t taken her eyes from her, and it was hard to read what was behind their silent evaluation.
There were no such problems with Lawrence. Maybe because he had seen how she was last night, or because he had spent hours in her company as they drove through the night. Or perhaps because he knew Jimmy, was obligated to him in some way. Whatever, he was a lot less laidback than his partner appeared to be. He sat leaning forward, concentration scoring deep lines around his eyes, his elbows on his knees and palms pressed together at his lips in prayer, and he stared at the floor more than he stared at her. Whatever he had going on with her father, she didn’t think this was what he’d signed up for. She could have told him, that was always the way with Jimmy.
“Look, I appreciate you getting me out of there and everything,” she said, and gestured down at the sweats the detective had given her. “If you could help me out with some clothes that fit, and shoes, I’ll get out of your hair.”
Lawrence drew in a sharp breath and dropped his hands from his mouth. “What did Ike find out about this Jasper?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Just that he wasn’t who he claimed to be. That he was nothing to do with the Maxwells.”
“What was his surname?”
“I only knew him as Jasper.”
“Did you think Ike would shoot him?”
“Well, he pulled his gun. Maybe just to get him to talk, I don’t know, but he looked pissed. Like he would do it.”
“He wasn’t just pissed because Jasper was pretty taken with you? More than he was comfortable with?”
Vivian dropped her gaze to the floor as she recalled the man’s hands all over her, what she’d been about to let him do before he spoke her real name. Ike rarely asked her to do stuff like that, that’s what he paid the dancers bonuses for, but she wasn’t stupid, she knew how it worked. He thought Jasper was going to be his ticket to the Maxwells’ territory, and he’d do anything for that, even pimp out his own girlfriend. Except she had to wonder exactly when Ike had learned Jasper wasn’t the man he said he was. During the time he was gone from the club? Or before he left, jumpy as hell?
She tugged the blanket tighter around her despite the skin on her neck growing hot. “You think I’m just a dumb bitch, right?” She glanced at Cass, figured her neutral expression answered the question. “But I had my reasons for doing what Ike wanted.”
Cass got up and went across the room to the kitchen, where she filled a glass with water at the sink. On the sofa, Lawrence shifted in his seat.
“We shouldn’t tell Jimmy about this,” he said, turning his whole body to face her.
“No,” she agreed.
“But you should still go with him. He can get you to safety.”
He fixed her with his gaze, willing her to listen. She noticed his eyes were hazel too, though not the same as Jasper’s. He was nothing like Jasper; didn’t look at her the same way, hadn’t tried to touch her, not even when they were less than a meter apart in the car driving down empty roads in the middle of the night. That didn’t mean she trusted him. She didn’t trust anyone, including herself right now, and certainly not Jimmy fricking Rosedale. And besides, she’d had enough of being told what to do.
“I just need some clothes, that’s all, then I’ll be gone,” she said, as the woman came back in the room and handed her the glass of water.
Vivian thanked her and took a sip, grateful for its coldness in her throat. Cass returned to her seat and tucked her hair behind her ears. It was the kind of thick, blonde curls that could only be natural, the sort that other women tried to emulate with colored dyes and hot tongs but which she herself probably cursed being born with. Along with the pale skin and blue eyes, there was an attractiveness about her, but in an intelligent, no-nonsense way. Like she didn’t care about how she looked. Didn’t waste her time on it.
“Vivian,” she said. “Is it possible the real reason Jasper was getting in with Ike was so he could get close to you?”
Vivian didn’t correct her for using her name. She was too distracted by the question. “I don’t think so. I mean, plenty of people want to get to Ike. I don’t know what Jasper’s motives were, but I don’t think…”
“He knew your name,” she added.
Vivian looked at Lawrence, but he was busy concentrating on what his partner was saying. She turned back to Cass. “So you think Jasper was coming after me, because of my father?”
“It’s possible.”
“But he…” Vivian lowered the glass to the floor. Jasper had been all over her. He was like a man who couldn’t believe his luck. Did that mean he was just after a piece of her before he screwed her over in some other way? Wow, how naïve was she?
“You could still be in danger,” Cass went on. “If not from Ike, then from whoever Jasper was working for.”
“Working for?” Her heart thumped in her chest as the comment sparked a memory. “He said people knew where he was. That there’d be repercussions Ike couldn’t comprehend if he shot him. It sounded like bullshit, but maybe it wasn’t. My god!”
Her hand went to her mouth as she tried to recall what else Jasper had said that was a clue to who he really was and who might come for her next.
Lawrence shifted to the edge of his seat. “Tell me again what this guy looked like,” he said. “Anything and everything you can remember.”
But Vivian was sifting through her memories of last night, in search of something she knew was there somewhere but it wasn’t immediately coming. Something that had caught her attention.
“Shoes,” she muttered, when it came to her. “His shoes shone like he’d really gone to town on them. They were dress shoes. Not the same boots that all the other guys wear.”
Something else. What was it?
Her eyes came up to Lawrence. “Shit.”
“What is it?”
“He went for his gun. When Ike pulled his pistol, Jasper’s hand went to his hip for a gun that wasn’t there.” The blood drained from her face, while across from her Lawrence straightened, his lips drawing into a thin line. “No one in Palmrey carries their pistol on their hip. It’s either shoulder holster or waistband—”
“Unless it’s a cop,” he finished for her, then drew his gaze from her to his partner. She remained impassive, but the look they exchanged said it all.
“I took pictures,” Vivian said, remembering that first night with Jasper after she had done what Ike asked, when Ike had thought Jasper was a Maxwell and the key to unlocking all his fantasies. Turns out it wasn’t Ike in the frame, though. It was her.
“I had a picture of him on my phone,” she explained.
“The one crushed to pieces in a trash can on the interstate?” Lawrence asked, but Vivian didn’t reply. She was looking at Cass.
“Do you have internet connection here? Because I can do more than tell you what he looked like. I’ll show you.”
*
Hoss felt the strain of a sleepless night pulling on his eyes as Fletcher sat beside Vivian at the table and waited for the cabin’s internet signal to kick in. When it did, they would be able to access Vivian’s cloud storage and the photos stored on it from her phone.
“It needs a little patience and understanding,” Fletch said, more to put Vivian at ease than anything else, he sensed – Fletch had all the patience of a vulture circling a dying man, particularly with anything tech-related. But when the damn thing did at last get working, and Vivian signed in to the cloud and found the photographs, Fletch went quiet. And Hoss thought he knew why.
The man in Vivian’s pictures was the same one he’d seen arriving at Fabrizio’s in the rented Ford SUV the night before. And while he still couldn’t place who the guy was, he was pretty sure Fletch picked up on something about him. Whatever it was, though, it wasn’t good news. Vivian wouldn’t have noticed the subtle change in Fletcher but he did, as he watched her get up from the table and disappear into her bedroom, returning moments later with a bundle of clothes she thought might better fit Vivian than his did. While the teenager went down the hall to the bathroom to try them on, Fletch merely glanced his way before stepping out onto the porch. It was a glance that gave him chills. Made him wish he could go home and bury his head under the quilt.
His heart sinking into his boots with every step, he followed her down the porch steps and into the clearing. The sun had come up and was warming the patch of land outside the cabin where it was protected from the wind by the forest pines. A false sense of security that warmer weather was coming. It was still too early for that.
When Fletch stopped and turned she was paler than normal. “It’s about to get a lot worse,” she said, voice hushed despite being out of earshot of their guest.
“Shit, Fletch, don’t tell me that.” He rubbed his hand over his forehead.
“That guy in the picture.”
“You know him.”
“His name is Joseph Riggs.”
She looked at him like that was a name he should know. On the one hand, he was pleased that uncovering Jasper’s identity had been that easy. On the other, he knew whatever she said next would be something he would wish he’d never heard.
Fletch glanced once at the cabin, then back to him.
“Joseph’s more than just a cop, Hoss. He’s FBI.”
Chapter 23
All the many ways this could come down on them raced through Hoss’s mind in the several strides it took him to reach the closest pine in the forest and drop his shoulder against it. Foremost was how long before the Feds noticed one of their agents had gone AWOL? Then, how long until they scoured the security footage up and down the beachfront and someone added his own snapshot to the list of persons of interest?
He shut his eyes and pressed his thumb and fingers either side of his nose. Thinking his way out of this one wouldn’t be easy. Behind his closed lids was the image of his father the way he’d looked when he last saw him. His jeans hoicked up around his gut, Sykes County Sheriff’s Office t-shirt stretched over his puffed-up chest, hands on hips, irritated disappointment rankling his features and turning his eyes mean. Maybe this was it, his father was saying, the time when he’d finally have to stop running and hiding, and face up to his mistakes.
On hearing his partner approach, Hoss dropped his hand. “Don’t, Fletch,” he said, peeling his lids open. “Whatever it is you’re going to say, just please, not right now.”
He turned to lean his back against the trunk and looked across the clearing to the cabin. The way he saw it, there were a number of issues at play here, but the most immediate was Agent Riggs’ murder. The rest he could deal with somehow – Ike chasing down Vivian, Jimmy’s persistence; all shit things, but things he could manage if he was clever enough. But assisting a cop killer to flee the crime scene? Well, that was a whole other level of trouble. It was entering a room with a locked door and no windows. For a very long time.
“She give you that?” Fletch asked. She was looking at his jaw. He raised his hand to touch the bruise he’d forgotten about. The swelling had come down, but it would sport a decent color spectrum by now. “We’ve got to call this in, Hoss.”
Fletch spoke quietly, but with an air of finality that suggested negotiation was out of the question. Same way his old man would have done. Same way he’d have done if it wasn’t himself with his neck in the noose.
“Sure, sure, we should call it in,” he said, with a nod and a sniff as he stared at the cabin’s open doorway, beyond which Jimmy’s daughter, the Fed killer, was currently trying on his partner’s clothes to find something that fit despite the height difference. “Problem I’ve got, though, Cass, is how the fuck I explain how I know about this. What I was doing there, tracking down a Rosedale. I mean, it’s a little thing, I know, but that’s what I’m getting stuck on here.”
“We can say an anonymous source, a family member, hired us to locate Vivian,” she said, ignoring his petulant sarcasm. “Give them only as much as they need to do their job. We don’t have to mention Jimmy or any knowledge of him.”
“She’ll get life.”
“She might not, if she pleads self-defense, coercion…”
He looked at her. “It was neither of those. You heard what she said.”
“Hoss, she’s a kid. Okay, so she’s old enough to know better, to understand the difference between right and wrong, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t manipulated. By Ike, by Jasper—”
“By her father.”
Fletch’s expression softened. “Yeah. Probably by Jimmy, too.”
“No probably about it. What chance does a kid have with a dad like that, one who kills as part of his job description? Except that won’t wash with the DA. She pulled the trigger on a cop, Fletch. Her life might as well be over.”
Movement came down the cabin’s hall and Vivian appeared in the doorway wearing a cream tank top over a knee-length skirt. Even from this distance he could see the blue and purple bruise forming over her swollen left eye where Ike had punched her. He held up his fingers to indicate two minutes and she folded her arms, dipped her head and turned back inside.
“Just a kid,” Fletch repeated.
“She was scared, Cass. When I met her on the clifftop and again outside Fabrizio’s. More than scared, she was terrified. And yeah, you’re right, Ike used her,” he said, remembering the moment in the trees behind the club when Scott had put his arms around her, stroked her cheek and kissed her neck. “But I don’t think it was him she was afraid of. It was more about being found out. I knew who she really was and that was too much for her, she couldn’t get rid of me quick enough. I was the threat. Well, until Jasper.” He caught her eye and added, “Agent Riggs.”
Agent Joseph Riggs of the FBI on an undercover operation, the details of which only he himself knew about.
“Maybe things have changed since we quit the job, Fletch, but I don’t recall sleeping with the target as being a tactic the FBI employ in their operational strategy, do you?”
Fletcher drew her gaze away, crossing her arms and squinting against the early morning sun rising over the roof of the cabin. “So she could include that in her defense.”
“Absolutely. But bent cop or otherwise, it’s still murder. You know it is.”
Hoss ground his teeth together. Vivian had been shit upon her entire young life, first by being born into a life of crime, and then by being unable to live any other way. She was a woman on the run, fearing for her life just because of who her daddy happened to be. And now she was about to pay the ultimate price for a sequence of events created out of decisions that were never her own to make. Sure, she could have not picked up the gun, not squeezed the trigger, releasing the bullet that killed Riggs. But what would have happened to her if she hadn’t? If Ike found out that she had not only lied to him about who she was, but that the real name on her birth certificate was Rosedale, the daughter of the country’s most notorious gangster. She’d be the one being disposed of by Ike’s cleaners instead of Riggs. And if she was dead, would Jimmy’s quest to find his girl be over? Would he slink away to his hideout, never to be seen again? Like hell he would. This war would only just be starting.
“Listen,” he said, turning to face her. “I’ll get in touch with Jimmy. We’ve done our part, we have her, and now she’ll have to leave with him, she has no other choice, she has to disappear. Because Ike’s gonna come looking.” He expected the weary look she gave him, like she was about to pick through the holes in everything he said, so he went on before she could. “Not to mention pretty soon there’ll be agents all over this. Maybe they already are, and maybe they’re heading for Pinefort as we speak. You’re staying out of this, though, Fletch. This is all on me. I’ll take whatever comes my way. So if anyone talks to you, play dumb.”
“Joder,” she seethed, tightening the fold of her arms.
“I mean it, Cass. If this goes sideways, I want you to say you didn’t know a thing about it, you’re just as shocked as everyone else.”
Her eyes shone under the sun, but they were no less icy than they always were whenever she was losing patience with him. “It’s not you they’ll be looking for, Hoss. There’s no need to panic. If Ike’s boys know what they’re doing, they’ll have erased all trace of Riggs. You may never even cross the Feds’ radar. But if you do, you explain you were working a case. Missing person. That’s the truth. Hey, are you listening?”
“I need to get hold of Jimmy,” he said, mind jumping ahead a few steps. “In the meantime, she can’t stay here.”
Fletch turned to face him. “What else will you do with her, soldier? Take her back to yours?”
“No, course not,” he replied, then remembered what she had told him on the phone the day before, about her and Busta. “Shit, Cass. Look, I promised you I’d keep Busta away from this, and I will.”
She didn’t look convinced as she ran her tongue over her bottom lip, and he knew what she was thinking. That she wished Busta had taken the ferry to the rig after all. Or maybe she was thinking, What the hell made me partner up with this goddamn idiot?
“She’ll stay here,” she said. “Just for a few hours while you fix up something else.”
“All right. But she’ll be gone by the end of the day. I mean that. She’s had a rough draw in life, Fletch. We can’t know the half of it. And now because of Jimmy she’ll always be on the run. Even before she fired that pistol, she was running. She’s worth a lot to a lot of people who want her father’s head on a block. Where the hell is the justice in that?”
Fletcher frowned and shook her head, but at which part he wasn’t sure – Vivian’s rough life, or his pathetic attempts to justify their actions. Neither was he sure whether it was her he was hoping to convince, or himself, or the vision of his father still in the forefront of his mind. Strangely, it wasn’t so much frustration he saw on his father’s face now, but something closer to sadness. Hoss didn’t know why he should distort the memory at a time like this. If Patrick John Hoskins were really standing in front of him, he’d be blood-red with fury. Calling the Feds and turning in his son himself.
