Aftershock (22 page)

“I don’t get it,” I said. And I wasn’t lying.

“Well, let’s say, just for argument’s sake, that if the DA can’t prove premeditation the charge has to be downgraded to—”

“She brought the gun to school. She walked right up to the boy she wanted to kill. She shot him in the head. He died.”

“I didn’t mean we were going to use that as a line of defense,” he said, sounding defensive as all hell himself. “That was just an example.”

“All right, I get it now. There might be something in the law that can help MaryLou, no matter what the facts are.”

“Exactly! Such as, if MaryLou was a victim of battered-woman syndrome, that could be a complete defense.”

I listened to him explain all about this “syndrome” thing. Then I said, “So, if this Cameron Taft was MaryLou’s boyfriend, and he was always beating her up … Say he was threatening to break her left arm, so he was holding her college scholarship hostage, the same way you just told me, about a man who kept telling his wife that if she ever squealed about beating her he’d kill her dog?”

“That’s it. And that’s only one of hundreds of possibilities. All I’ve filed with the DA’s Office so far are the usual discovery motions—no point letting them have a peek at our trial strategy.”

“You’re driving
that
car,” I said. Either a gesture of respect or a warning—up to him how he took it.

S
wift didn’t have any objection to spending my money. “I think a Cadillac would be just the right image,” he said. “With that suit
and attaché case of yours, driving around in some econobox would be the wrong move.”

“You’re the boss,” I told him, taking the letter that said I was working for him out of my inside jacket pocket, so he’d know I wasn’t mocking him.

C
arolyn Kubaw MacTiever was a trim young woman, from her workout body to a short and bouncy haircut I’d seen before in a magazine. Dolly told me it was “efficient.”

“May I help you?” she said, as if a stranger at her door was standard procedure. Maybe it was all the hotel training.

“I hope you can, Ms. MacTiever.” I told her who I was working for, and I wasn’t shocked that Swift’s name didn’t ring any bells for her. Even when I said who he was representing, her eyes didn’t flicker.

But when I said, “That girl in the school shooting—” she interrupted me by stepping away and motioning me to come inside. Then she pointed silently at a pale-blue egg-shaped chair. She seated herself in the chair’s mate, separated from me by a small table that looked like a slab of geode perched on an hourglass formed from black metal. A high-tech baby monitor stood on the surface of the geode, as if the whole piece had been designed that way.

“We have to be quiet,” she said, holding her finger to her lips. “I just got Talia down for her nap.”

I nodded agreement.

“This is about that crazy girl? The one who brought a gun to the high school and went wild?”

“The girl’s not crazy, but this is about her.”

“If she wasn’t crazy, why would she—?”

Showing her the photo of the black symbol on the red rectangle cut her breath quicker than any stranglehold.

“Them! But they’re not … I mean, they wouldn’t still be in school.”

“Yes, they are, ma’am. Not the same ones you remember, but the same gang. Or club, or whatever they call themselves.”

“A society,” she said, as if I’d been interviewing her about some subject—any subject outside of the rapes. “Tiger Ko Khai.”

“Do you know when they started?”

“Started …?”

“The society. When it was formed.”

“Oh. I’m pretty sure it was 2001. There was supposed to be some special significance about that, but I never knew what it was.”

“You were a sophomore when it happened?”

“A junior,” she said, then slapped her hand across her mouth as if to prevent more truth from spilling out.

“And you reported it to the police,” I said, as if there could be no question about it.

“That same night. Actually, the next day. After midnight, I mean. But it wasn’t me who reported anything—the nurse was the one who called the police.”

“But they never ended up arresting anyone.”

“No.”

“And you knew the name of—”

“Wait! I must have been in a fog when we started talking. The baby kept me up most of the night. She’s colicky, so I had to take her into the guest bedroom and lie down with her. My husband needs his sleep. He’s working double shifts all the time.”

“Ms. MacTiever, I apologize if I upset you.”

“You didn’t upset me. I … I thought I’d put it out of my mind forever,” she whispered. “Then you come here and act like you already know all about it. But how could you? Those records are confidential.”

“They are.”

“Who did you say you work for?” Her voice turned suspicious. Suspicious and scared.

“Bradley Swift, Esquire, ma’am. Please feel free to call him,” I said, handing her one of his business cards. “And, please, just to ease your own mind, look him up in the Yellow Pages, satisfy yourself he’s an attorney, and that he’s representing MaryLou McCoy in the alleged murder of one Cameron Taft.”

“This one?!” she hissed, pulling a local paper from some shelf behind her chair.

I glanced at the
SCHOOL SHOOTING!
headline. “That’s the one, yes.”

“But … she’s a star softball player, isn’t she? I don’t know her. I graduated in 2009. She would still have been in middle school.”

“That’s not the connection, ma’am. It’s Tiger Ko Khai.” Slipping in the name to keep her focused.

“The boy she killed—?”

“Yes. And two others that she shot.”

“What do you want from me?”

I took that as the red-flare signal: the one that told us to stop working the perimeter and strike at the core. “I want you to help protect the next victims from this gang of rapists.”

“Me?”

“You and another forty or so young women, yes.”

“I don’t understand,” she said, glancing around nervously, even though the baby monitor hadn’t transmitted anything but the sweet snuffly breathing of a contented infant.

“No one in that gang has ever been prosecuted for rape. You did everything right. Went by the book. But the police never even made an arrest, did they?”

“No.”

“And you told them at least one of their names,” I said, not spelling out the “their.”

“Yes.”

“That’s happened more times than you could imagine. I mean,
that exact same thing. Why should the police arrest anyone when they know the DA is never going to prosecute?”

“But the nurse—the one who examined me—she told me the doctor had already told them I was … And they had those samples, too.”

“And every time you tried to ask questions, somebody told you they were working on the case.”

“Yes,” she said, with a kind of dull bitterness. “After a while, all I wanted to do was get out of there.”

“That’s why you transferred schools?”

“The school year was nearly over. I got early admission to college, so I skipped my senior year. Nobody did me any favors; I did very well in school.”

“I know. I read the papers about when you came back to this area after you graduated.”

“Why should that have been in the papers? I never saw it.”

“I meant when you got married. You know those society things, ‘Mr. and Mrs. So-and-So, the parents of Whoever, are pleased to announce the engagement of their daughter to …’ ”

She nodded dully.

“It probably isn’t every day that a hometown girl marries someone with an Ivy League degree. And the chain probably ran something, too, bragging about the caliber of personnel they have. The Cornell School of Hotel Administration is one of the most prestigious in the country, isn’t it?”

“It is!”

I guessed she had gone north for college. By the time she graduated, the only job openings were things like working the front desk of a motel chain. Not as far away from a place she’d never call “home” again as she would have liked, but far enough for that “distancing” thing she tried so hard for.

I’m no psychologist, but—
you’re asking this woman to open up a wound and you’re still playing games with words
, I thought to
myself. I didn’t like myself much for doing it. So I started over. As a soldier, I’d seen “distancing” plenty of times. The combat zone might only be a klick away, but some people had to move it to another planet in their minds to keep sane.

“You think that’s right?” I asked her.

“Do I think
what’s
right?”

“Letting them get away with what they did. With what they still do.”

“Of course I don’t. But … I don’t know who you are, and you know everything about me, don’t you?”

“No, ma’am, I don’t. I don’t know anything about you personally; I only know that a crime was committed against you.”

“My husband doesn’t even know.…”

“Are you concerned that your name would come out? It wouldn’t. That would be illegal,” I said, making it up as I went along, and making myself believe it at the same time.

“Sure. Like when they don’t use a victim’s name in the paper, but they give away enough information that everyone would know, anyway. And the way people down there are always gossiping …”

People down there
. “You wouldn’t be a ‘victim’ in this case, ma’am. You’d be a witness. And you know they can’t give any information about a witness. You wouldn’t even be testifying in court,” I said, wishing I had asked Swift some of the things I was pretending I knew.

“You don’t understand. I would like to help that girl. But if my husband ever found out—”

I cut her off before she could end the sentence with “he’d kill them,” or “he’d want a divorce,” knowing either answer would carry its own brand of terror for her.

“I understand,” I told her. “But I can promise you two things, Ms. MacTiever. One, the only thing your husband will ever know about any of this is whatever
you
decide to tell him. And that includes nothing. Nothing at all. That’s not me speaking, that’s the law. Two, I don’t know your husband, much less how he’d react if
you decided to speak with him about it. But I do know this. Your daughter, your baby girl, Talia, when she’s old enough to understand, she’ll also understand that her mother was a hero. A hero for protecting girls like her.”

I barely noticed the single tear tracking down one cheek, but I couldn’t miss seeing her jaw clench and her hands ball into fists.

“Do it for her,” I said very softly as I rose to my feet and left my card next to the baby monitor—Dolly had printed up a bunch of them for me.

All I could do was hope she’d call the number on the card. Because I know how dangerous any wronged person can be if they ever get a chance to hit back.

T
he computer screen said:

By then, I
had
more info, so I typed in:

“Y
ou have to rent some more office space,” I told Swift.

“More space? I didn’t even have my own—”

“Short-term. Just for this case. You’re going to have all kinds of records and exhibits and stuff like that. You couldn’t possibly store them all here.”

He gave me a look. Testing the water to see if I was dismissing
his work, just using him like a tool, or if I had some reason he could live with.

“I’ve been looking around places where they don’t welcome strangers,” I said. “That’s why you rented the car. If the plate traces back to you, so what? You’re not causing any problem for anyone. And it’s appropriate for a lawyer to add on things he needs temporarily, right? I mean, for a particular case.”

“That’s true. But I’d feel better if I knew exactly what you’ve been doing.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” I told him. I guess Patrice had been right. About my voice, I mean. The lawyer didn’t say another word. He started to get up from his chair, as if he wanted to pace around the little room, but he checked himself.

“I’ll get you the address soon,” I said, not telling him I’d already rented the place. “And a receipt for a six-month lease.”

I
found seven more girls on the boss SANE nurse’s list. Seven more who would talk to me, I mean. None of them had disappeared, but some were away at school, or staying with relatives, or just told me they didn’t know what I was talking about.

I saved the most logical one for last. MaryLou’s sister, Danielle. She was real young. Around thirteen. After spending a couple of days watching from a distance, I didn’t know how I’d get close to her without sending up a danger flag. She never seemed to go anywhere alone. I guess it was because she didn’t have a car—there’s no public transportation here. And after what MaryLou said about their parents, I didn’t think that either one would help me. Or that I could trust them, even if they said they would.

Before I did something that might backfire, I wanted to make sure MaryLou gave me everything I could possibly use.

T
hey let me in at the jail without any problem. They even seemed apologetic that I had to walk through the metal detector.

There’s a dozen ways to get a handgun inside a jail.

The easiest is four pieces of plastic. Through an X-ray, they’d look like side-support bars for my black aluminum case. You open the case, slide them out, snap them together, and just follow procedure: left hand behind the head, right hand drives the spike through the trachea.

It’s a quiet death, just a little gurgling sound. Now you have a pistol—the one the dead guard was carrying.

And, if you want, a silencer. The guards all carry the same semiautos. Even though the barrels aren’t extended or threaded, there are silencers that you can push straight in. They won’t hold past a single shot, but you couldn’t tell that just by looking.

What you want isn’t more dead guards; you use the silencer to keep the rest of them silent. That always works—only a gunsmith looks directly into a pistol barrel.

The problem with that move is, you have to run forever after you’re done, even if you don’t have to kill any more than the one guard.
Like Mesrine
, I thought to myself.