Cold Shoulder (39 page)

The squad car drew up outside Rosie’s apartment just moments after they’d left for the AA meeting. All vehicles were instructed to be on the look-out for the prostitute Lorraine Page, described as five feet nine, short blonde hair, last seen wearing a cream suit and silk shirt. She was to be arrested on sight.

Lorraine was still uncertain as to why she had let Jake and Rosie talk her into coming to the meeting. Maybe, if the truth was to be admitted, it was because she was at a loss and she was also scared.

The woman was neatly dressed in printed cotton, her hair well cut, parted in the centre and constantly falling forwards to hide her face. She spoke quietly, nervously. ‘My name is Carol. Nine months ago I was sleeping rough, I felt there was no hope for me. I felt no shame, I felt nothing. I had lost my husband, my children, my home and my job. I had turned to prostitution to feed my drinking. I was a prostitute, a thief. I owned only what I stood up in, I had nothing, and no respect for anyone, least of all myself’ Carol continued to talk and Lorraine held tightly to Rosie’s hand, understanding for the first time what she felt, what she had been through and that she was not alone. Everyone at the meeting, she now began to realize, had felt shame and rejection, knew loss and humiliation.

When they stood and warmly applauded Carol, when they embraced her and congratulated her, Lorraine was one of the first to leave her seat. She was shy, at first proffering her hand, but then she put her arms around her. ‘I’ve been there too. I know how you feel,’ she said simply.

Carol hugged Lorraine back. ‘We’ve all been there, that’s why we’re here.’

‘What was the hardest thing for you?’ Lorraine asked.

‘Facing myself, not being angry or ashamed. It wasn’t me but the drink. I hid behind it, I know that now, and I’m determined to stay sober, I got a job today. I was scared but I told them I’m an alcoholic and now that I know that’s what I am, I feel free. For the first time in years I’m not hiding.’

‘You said you hid behind drink. What did you mean?’

‘I was afraid of failing. I’m a nurse and I had a patient, a child, who died. I gave the wrong medication and I was never able to face the guilt or come to terms with it. I have now. It will always be with me but I can deal with it, I’m taking responsibility for myself and I want to stay sober. I
have
to stay sober or I’ll go down again.’

Jake was watching Lorraine. He winked at Rosie. ‘It was good we came. You were right, Rosie, it was important for her.’

‘And for me too. If Lorraine had started drinking I’d have probably joined her,’ Rosie replied, and Jake smiled.

Lorraine joined them. ‘Thanks for bringing me. Now we should get back in case Rooney needs me.’

Rooney watched the FBI agents talking to his chief. He sat in a hard-backed chair at the rear of the room; when anyone looked to him for an opinion he made no comment. The press had been given statements and the suits felt that, by the arrest of Art Mathews, they had been able at least to gain time. Even if they couldn’t provide evidence that Mathews had murdered all the victims, they were satisfied that by his own admittance and subsequent suicide he had been guilty of at least three.

Andrew Fellows had come in and they had been in deep discussion with him for two hours. He did not disagree with their conclusions but raised doubts that Mathews was the killer. Not until they seemed to have grown tired of their own voices did Rooney ease his bulk from the chair. ‘You mind if I put my two cents in?’

They had forgotten he was even in the room. The Chief looked pointedly at his watch. Is it about the Lorraine Page woman?’

Andrew Fellows frowned. ‘Lorraine Page?’

‘We’re still looking for her but it shouldn’t be long.’

Rooney squeezed between a row of chairs.

‘Lorraine Page?’ Fellows asked again, but no one answered him and she was forgotten as Rooney prodded the photograph of Didi, the last victim.

‘What if our killer — and I’m excluding Mathews just for a moment — was looking for this particular woman or man — the transsexual? Looking for her because she and Mathews were blackmailing him.’ There was a low murmur and Rooney held up his hand. ‘Let me finish. Take a look at them. Tough, hard-faced women, all bleached blondes, all prostitutes, as was this victim.’ Again he tapped Didi’s picture. ‘It’s a possible motive because I think Hastings was also being blackmailed and possibly by Mathews…’

The men listened, giving each other sidelong looks. The Chief loosened his tie. Mathews had admitted at no time to blackmailing anyone. Rooney continued to repeat almost verbatim what Lorraine had said to him. He did not mention her part in piecing it together, or that she was the witness who had been attacked by the killer. Just before he gave the name of her suspect, he felt a hot flush spread through his body. The Thorburn family were powerful and all Rooney had was Lorraine’s theory. They did not have enough evidence: her own admission that Janklow had been her attacker would, as she rightly surmised, be tough to prove. As she had said, it would be her word against his. And as yet no incriminating evidence linked him to the murders. Until he had more on Janklow, Rooney decided he would keep his identity to himself.

The room was silent. The Chief stared at Rooney — they all did — and Andrew Fellows’s face wore a half smile. It was hard to determine whether it was through disbelief or because he was impressed.

Rooney decided he might as well go for the big prize. He nodded to Hastings’s picture. ‘He used a garage to park his car, the S and A company. I’ve not gone into this in any depth but a number of the company’s employees were checked out against the description we had from the anonymous witness. The S and A garage is owned by a Brad Thorburn.’ Fellows gasped at this but no one paid him any attention. Rooney continued, ‘I’m not suggesting anything without further evidence. Obviously considering the family’s connections, I have not, until tonight, even voiced my suspicions.’

‘Just what are you implying?’ Fellows asked, his face pink with agitation. Rooney looked at him then, and at the Chief who became aware that Fellows should not have been privy to this statement and suggested that he might wish to leave.

Fellows had not disclosed that he knew Brad Thorburn. He was unsure as to why not but, then, he hadn’t been asked. He intended to drive straight home but changed his mind and headed for Thorburn’s house.

Jake saw the patrol car even before he turned into the road. Lorraine was in the back seat.

‘You want me to drive past the cops?’ Jake asked.

‘Yeah, but not for the reason you think. I’ll go in but in my own time. There’s somebody I want to talk to first. I misjudged Rooney. He must have told them about me.’

She ducked out of sight as Jake passed the police car, turning left at the top of the road before he stopped.

‘Where we going?’ Rosie asked.

‘I need to talk to Andrew Fellows. I won’t do anything crazy, believe me. I just want to run a few things past him.’

‘I’ll drive you,’ said Rosie.

Lorraine hesitated before she agreed. Jake got out and Rosie moved into the driving seat. He watched them drawing away from the pavement but not until they were almost out of sight did he walk off.

The car backfired. Jake whipped round. It had sounded like a gun blast. It made him uneasy and he wished he’d stayed with the two women. He also wished he’d asked a lot more questions, but as he walked on he also realized that he had been part of Lorraine’s cover-up story about the attack. He shook his head. He had known as soon as he saw the injury that it hadn’t been caused by a fall, as she’d said. With all her lies, Lorraine had not only used Rosie but himself. The more he thought about it, the more angry he became, and now he started to wonder where Lorraine got all that money from. He remembered the way she clutched it when he’d stitched up her wound. She was one hell of a liar, he told himself. Maybe there was more to the cops hanging around than either he or Rosie knew.

Rooney had now told the agents about Craig Lyall, again using Lorraine’s evidence. When the Chief got back, Rooney was in the hot seat. Berillo wanted to know why he had been withholding so much evidence, and neither discussed it with him nor provided the agents with the information on Mathews’s blackmailing activities.

‘I only pieced it together tonight. Like I said, it’s just supposition. I’ve been up all night on this. I hadn’t finished interviewing Mathews when the FBI took over. You tell me how such an important suspect with all this high-tech surveillance on his cell was able to slit his wrists. Don’t lay that on me, I wasn’t even in the station. It’s down to the FBI.’

The agents took his gibes and accusations without expression. One of them, a blond, square-jawed man, was making copious notes as Rooney spoke.

‘You’re seriously saying that Brad Thorburn is a suspect?’ demanded his chief. The atmosphere in the room was uneasy. Bean remained silent throughout: he was wondering why Rooney had never mentioned any of his findings to him.

‘I never said Thorburn
was
a suspect. I believe it’s his brother, Steven Janklow.’

The blond agent, tight-lipped with anger, asked if Janklow fitted the description of the killer given to Rooney’s department after Hastings’s body had been found. Rooney shifted uneasily. As he had never seen Janklow or interviewed him, he was hesitant.

‘I’ve not interviewed him. All I know is he knew Hastings and—’

‘And?’ snapped the Chief. Rooney felt as if they were all against him, closing in on him. He pulled at his bulbous nose, half wishing he’d kept his big mouth shut. He took a flyer, lying through his teeth. ‘I held back giving you this information until I’d checked in the files for a possible vice charge against Janklow in the past. So far I’ve not been able to trace it and it was just told to me by one of the workers at the garage. I didn’t want to act on hearsay — well, not until I’d run it past you. I could be wrong on all counts.’

The Chief glanced at his watch and then said, ‘You go through those vice records, Bill, immediately — but until you have more evidence we make no contact with the Thorburn family for two reasons. If our man is Janklow, we need hard facts to arrest him, and the Thorburn family is high society and powerful.’ The Chief said the last sentence directly to the blond FBI man: ‘In other words, back off the Thorburns until I say so.’

The agents departed, with a show of obvious irritation towards Rooney, and the Chief called him into his office. He turned on him in a fury, demanding to know what the fuck he’d been playing at.

‘Just trying to do my job.’

‘Come on, Bill, who are you kiddin’? You’re just pissed off because the FBI have been brought in. If you’d even had half of what you blurted out tonight we could have held them off. What else are you holding back? You’d better come clean with me, Bill.’ He stared hard at Rooney and then asked about Lorraine Page.

Rooney covered like an old trooper. ‘She’s my informant but I didn’t know until tonight that she knew Mathews or that she was with him the night Holly was murdered.’

‘I want her brought in because I want to talk to her. I want to know just what the hell Mathews was up to.’

‘It’s in his file. He’s been in for blackmail and extortion, along with his porno rap.’

‘Is that it?’

‘That’s it. Like I said, let me dig into Janklow’s past a bit more and then I’ll get straight back to you.’

The Chief agreed but told Rooney to call him, no matter what the time was, if he discovered anything else.

Rooney returned to his office where Bean was waiting. He couldn’t stop smiling; he felt he’d shown the bastards. He kicked the door closed. ‘You and me got work to do.’

Bean took off his jacket and hung it over the back of a chair. Rooney was rummaging through his desk drawers. ‘What about Lorraine Page?’ Bean asked. ‘According to officers Hully and Maynard you were at her place. They said you were bringing her in.’

‘I left when she didn’t show — that all right with you?’

Bean’s face was quizzical. ‘You just done a hell of a lot of legwork since you left here last night, but you’ve not mentioned any of this to me — Janklow, the Thorburn family. If you’d seen those agents’ faces, talk about jaws dropping open. I was impressed. They were really pissed. They were patting each other on the back ten minutes earlier about Art Mathews. They really upped the pressure on him, you know, he was crying his eyes out. She tip you off about him?’

Rooney raised his eyebrow in mock surprise. ‘God no, that was supreme detective work on my part, lieutenant.’ Then he scowled. ‘If Mathews said he killed them, I reckon he’d have said he’d shot his mother just to get those suits off him. He was scared — I reckon he was scared shitless about being done for blackmail again. He’d have done eighteen years this time and the little prick knew it. They just wanted to make an arrest, period. I reckon they were lucky he did kill himself because if I’d got my hands on him, I might have got a different result, like negative.’

Bean sighed. ‘So why did he kill himself, then?’

‘Because maybe he knew he was in very deep and we’d have dug up something. Christ almighty, I gave them his fucking file, he was serving time when two of the victims were done. I don’t care what any of that FBI crowd want to say about copy-cat killings, those victims were all done by the same man.’

Bean sucked in his breath. ‘Or woman. That’s what Fellows threw in tonight.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘No. He said that all the crap that’s written about male or female strength is hyped up out of all proportion. If a woman wanted to kill, she could have done it. He even said that was why the victims took a blow to the back of the head first — incapacitated them.’

‘Well, Fellows is looking up his own tight-assed backside. We got that witness, the one that gave us the description, right?’ He almost disclosed who she was but stopped himself Instead he leaned over the desk. ‘She described her attacker as a man, right?’

Bean jangled the change in his pocket. ‘Lorraine Page. Where does she figure in it all, then? What if they were doing it together? She was with Mathews the night Holly was murdered, he said so.’