Black Feathers (28 page)

She kept the change in the hat in front of her to exactly five dollars, a mixture of coins to give the illusion that other people
were generous, a subtle hint to those passing on their way into the courthouse.

It wasn’t really working.

She scooped any new coins out of the hat as soon as the person who threw them in was out of sight; keeping the change to exactly five dollars made it easy to keep track of how much people were putting in. After two hours, she had only a couple of dollars to show for the time.

That, and a frozen bum and a chill that ached all the way up her spine and spread to her kidneys.

She had looked for someplace to sit on one of the main streets as she walked through downtown. The sidewalks were clotted with Christmas shoppers, smiling, bustling along with bags. The courthouse, she knew, was too far away from most of the crowds, and people going into the building—or coming out—likely had their own reasons not to be generous.

But anywhere she looked on Government and Douglas, anywhere that looked remotely promising, already had someone sitting there, hat brimming with silver and scattered bills. A few of them, people who recognized her from the camp, smiled at her as they saw her slowing down, but she kept moving. The others just looked at her warily, not releasing their gaze until she sped up and moved on.

So she had ended up back at the courthouse. Safe, quiet. Far from the drama of the busier streets. And the spot that Skylark had found for her was mostly sheltered from the wind.

Mostly.

A darkness seemed to hover over her: this spot would always feel like Skylark to her. She spent the hours there half-expecting her to suddenly appear, to drop to the ground next to her, smiling and laughing.

But then, was there anywhere in the city that didn’t feel like that?

“Thank you,” she called out after a woman in a business suit who had thrown what sounded like a good handful of coins into her hat without really looking at her, hustling away before the change even landed.

Cassie knew better than to get her hopes up, but she was still disappointed to find—after sifting out the new change—that the noisy handful amounted to exactly thirty-eight cents.

She tucked the money into her pocket; it was better than nothing.

“Hey.”

She glanced up sharply at the voice, bile rising in her throat. A short ways down the block, Harrison and his partner had seen her.

Cassie shaded her eyes with her hand. The grey sky was surprisingly bright, like sunlight on metal. She wondered how long it had been like that. She wondered how long it had been since she had actually looked up.

“Come on,” Harrison said. “We’ll buy you a hot chocolate.”

She looked at them warily, swallowed thickly.

Harrison extended his hand to help her to her feet.

“We need to talk to you,” Farrow said. There was a faint look of discomfort on her face as she spoke. “About your friend.”

Of course. She had known they would be coming.

She looked at them for a moment, then lowered the hand from her eyes. “All right,” she said. “Sure.”

She ignored Harrison’s hand, carefully pocketing her change and stashing the hat into the top of her backpack before creaking to her feet.

It took her a moment to straighten up fully—her bum and
back crackled with pins and needles, and she could almost hear a popping sound as she unbent.

“So where should we go?” Farrow asked.

“What about the place where—”

“There’s a little deli around the corner,” Harrison interrupted, giving her a look. Clearly she wasn’t supposed to talk about seeing him off-duty a few days earlier.

“Is that all right?” Farrow asked Cassie, in a tone that suggested her answer didn’t really matter either way.

Neither of the officers spoke as they walked toward the deli. Partway along the block, Cassie noticed that they had shifted so they were walking on either side of her, boxing her in. They both just stared straight ahead, jaws firm, faces set.

Clearly they didn’t want her to run.

In the deli, she sat down across the table from Harrison while Farrow went to the counter for their drinks.

She didn’t know if she should say anything; the ice seemed too thick for mere words to break.

“We’ve got a picture we would like you to look at,” Harrison said as he stirred sugar into his coffee. Farrow had pulled a third chair up to the table.

“Jesus,” Cassie muttered, shaking her head. “There’s always pictures.” Thinking of how clean Skylark had looked on her school ID. The grey chill of her skin in the other photo.

Farrow’s face wrinkled. “Sorry about that.”

“Hopefully this is the last time,” Harrison said, setting his spoon on a napkin on the table and reaching into his jacket.

He slid the photograph across the table to her. “Do you know this man?”

Gorge surged to the top of her throat, and Cassie had to swallow quickly to keep from throwing up.

She nodded. “Yes,” she said, carefully, staring down at the picture.

Harrison glanced at Farrow, then back to Cassie.

“Are you sure?”

Cassie nodded, then looked up at Harrison. “Yes, I’m sure. Why?” she asked slowly, already knowing the answer, still fighting not to throw up.

Harrison seemed about to speak, but Farrow cut in. “How do you know him?”

Cassie glanced between them, then back to the photograph. “I think he works in the courthouse,” she said carefully. “He said his name was Cliff Wolcott.”

It was the first time she had ever seen him not dressed in a coat and tie: in the picture, he was wearing a black T-shirt, and his hair was messy. His face, though. His eyes. His eyes were cold, sharp, staring directly into the camera lens, directly at her.

On the white wall behind him, black lines and numbers. Measurements.

“Is that him? Is that the guy?”

Another glance between the cops, and Harrison nodded. “He was arrested at about 2:30 this morning. He’s the main suspect in—”

It sounded like he was reading from a script. He broke off, shaking his head. “Yeah, it’s him. We arrested him at home. In his driveway.”

“What?”

Harrison nodded. “He tried to pick up a girl, and she says she got a weird vibe off him, so she refused to go. He apparently got threatening, and the girl called in his plates. The vehicle matched the partial description in witness testimony from a
couple of the murders. So we staked out his place, waited for him to get home.”

He shook his head, inhaled a ragged breath.

“Chris,” Farrow said, and Cassie thought she heard a note of warning in her voice.

“We had to get his family out of the house before he got home,” he said, staring at the table. Farrow shook her head, sighed and leaned back in her chair. “Two little kids. Girls. His wife. We were worried that he might—”

“He’s exhausted,” Farrow said, and it took Cassie a beat to realize that she was talking about Harrison, not Wolcott.

“We were worried that this guy might use his wife and kids as hostages if we didn’t get them out of there.” Harrison sagged in his chair.

Cassie had no idea how to react. It wasn’t Wolcott, she knew that.

So why did they think it was?

“But his family is okay?” she ventured.

Harrison nodded. “His wife is pretty freaked out.”

“You would be too,” Farrow said. “Woke up in the middle of the night, whisked out of your house, told that this person you love is probably a murderer.”

Cassie tried to push down the bile she felt rising again, thinking of how her mother had been, after.

“‘Probably’?” She seized on the word.

Farrow glanced at Harrison, sipping now from his coffee. “We have to say that,” she explained. “Probably. Allegedly. Guardedly. All the legal bull—” She cut herself off. “He’s our guy.”

Harrison was almost the same white as his coffee cup.

“How …,” she started, not even really sure of what she wanted to ask. “How do you know for sure?”

“There was evidence in the vehicle that suggested—”

Harrison cut Farrow off.

“He had a kill room in the back of the van,” he said quickly, anger biting through the raggedness in his voice. “He had a plastic drop cloth, like you buy in the hardware store, with the paintbrushes. He had it taped up to the walls of the van. The van. The fucking minivan.”

“Chris,” Farrow said sharply, but Harrison didn’t stop. “He was killing girls in his minivan. With two car seats in the garage—”

“Chris!” Farrow said again, in a tone so sharp that Harrison stopped in mid-sentence. His eyes were bright, darting from side to side, sunk into deep, dark hollows.

“You need to go,” Farrow said firmly, half-rising from her chair. “Walk around the block. Splash some water on your face. Take up smoking. I don’t care. But you need to pull yourself together, or I’m going to have to file a report, okay?” Her voice softened as she spoke, the caring starting to show. “And you know how much I hate paperwork, right?” She looked like she was forcing a smile.

His face twisted into a grimace that bore only a passing resemblance to a smile. “Yeah,” he said, nodding, his eyes still haunted, furtive. “Gotcha, boss. I know how much you hate reports.”

He rose to his feet, bracing himself against the back of his chair as he looked around the restaurant, his gaze finally stopping at a doorway at the far end of the counter from the cashier. “I’ll just—”

Farrow nodded. “Take your time. Us girls will be fine.”

They both watched him as he shambled across the deli. He seemed smaller than Cassie remembered. Older. Like an old house, starting to fall in on itself.

“He’s not usually like this,” Farrow said, turning back to the table. “This whole thing has taken a lot out of him.”

The woman’s voice was stripped of her usual brusqueness.

“Yeah,” Cassie said, sipping at the hot chocolate.

“He’ll be okay. It’s just … we all have cases that get to us. You never know when it’s going to happen, but sometimes it gets under your skin, and …” She shook her head helplessly. “He’ll be fine, though.” She sounded like she was trying to convince herself.

“What was it that—”

“Set him off?”

Cassie nodded.

“Well, he hasn’t been sleeping. Night shifts are bad at the best of times, and everything’s messed up with Christmas coming, so there’s that already. He’s exhausted. And I think the kids were the last straw for him. He’s having trouble wrapping himself around the idea that a father could do something like that.” She sipped her coffee, scowled at it. “Which is ridiculous, considering some of the things we’ve seen. But—he’s tired. And he’s been worried the last while.” She took another sip of her coffee. “About you.”

The words landed on the table between them and exploded like a firecracker in Cassie’s face.

“Me? What?” She shook her head. “That doesn’t—”

Farrow shrugged. “I know. It makes no sense. No offence, but it’s not like there’s not a couple of dozen other teenage girls on the street at any given time.”

It didn’t even occur to Cassie to be offended: it was a statement of fact, nothing more.

“He’s a dad. I think he imagines his daughters in a few years when he sees you. And these murders—” She glanced at the
doorway that Harrison had disappeared into. “All young girls. Like you. Like his daughters in a few years.” She shrugged. “I guess it’s hard to be a father.”

Cassie dropped her gaze to the table, refusing to meet Farrow’s eye.

But that didn’t stop her. “Cassie, your dad—”

She shook her head sharply.

“Cassie.”

“I don’t want to talk about him.”

The officer took a deep breath.

“Fine,” she said. “All right. This isn’t about you anyhow.”

Cassie almost snorted in disbelief.

Farrow shrugged. “I think he sees something in you. That’s all.” She took another swallow of coffee. “It’s all over now, though. Hopefully he’ll be able to get some sleep, enjoy his Christmas.”

“Is it?” Cassie asked, before she could stop herself. “Is it really over?”

“Oh yeah,” Farrow said, as if there wasn’t a doubt in her mind. “This guy …” She shook her head. “We went through his office. Crown Counsel’s office, can you believe that? That’s gonna make for a nightmare when it comes to trial. Anyway, not my problem. So we go through this guy’s office … We’ve got him. He’s the guy.”

Cassie looked down at the photograph again.

“He was always …” She shifted in the chair, thought about the folded bill in her pocket. “He was kind to me.”

Farrow blinked slowly and her jaw twitched.

“Yeah,” she muttered.

“That doesn’t happen very much.”

Farrow shook her head and turned the photograph to face her on the table.

“Your friend Laura. Did she ever mention him?” She tapped the picture. “Do you think their paths ever crossed?”

Cassie started to speak, stopped herself. No, Skylark had never mentioned Cliff Wolcott.

And she knew, as sure as she could taste the blood in her mouth, that their paths had never crossed. Not even at the end.

“I don’t think so,” she said carefully. “I mean, he might have seen her, but she never said anything.”

“So what are we talking about?”

Cassie jumped at the sound of Harrison’s voice, at the sudden shadow he cast over the table.

His face was slightly pink now, and he looked a bit fresher, like he had taken to heart Farrow’s advice to splash some water on his face. His eyes were calmer, less frantic looking, but they were still ringed with deep grey, almost black circles. Cassie could see the exhaustion that Farrow had been talking about.

“About Skylark. She never …,” she started, only to discover that she had no idea how to finish that sentence. She wanted to say something comforting, something to let him know that he didn’t need to worry about her. “So, it’s over.”

He nodded slowly and picked up the photograph. “So it would seem,” he said quietly, staring at Cliff Wolcott’s face.

Then nothing else.

Cassie glanced at Farrow. The cop shrugged slightly.

“So …,” Cassie started, trying to draw him out.

“Tell me what you know about Cliff Wolcott,” he said, laying the photograph back on the table. His voice was cool and calm: he sounded like a cop again, like a switch had been flicked. “When did you first encounter him?”