Dying for Her: A Companion Novel (Dying for a Living Book 3) (5 page)

Monday, March 24, 2003

I
t was coming up on six o’clock and the last bit of the city’s congestion was starting to clear off I-270. A bright headache was blooming behind my eyes and I knew it was too early to grab a drink. Instead, I grabbed a burger from the first drive-thru I saw and replayed the last several hours in my head.

The husband had denied taking the teeth, even as a joke, but admitted that it sounded like something he would do. The interviews at Maisie’s school hadn’t turned up much. One teacher thought she might have seen a man matching the description of Maisie’s tooth fairy, but couldn’t be sure. Another insisted that she’d never seen anyone like that. They both maintained the stance that Maisie went to the little girl’s bathroom and never came back, but that there was no way a man could have snatched her. The bathroom was locked, inside their classroom, with the teacher standing outside. There were no windows and no other doors.

She was washing her hands and singing.
She loved to sing
the young teacher had said.
Then she yelped as if surprised and sort of giggled and I asked her what she was laughing at, but she never answered me. When I opened the door, she was gone.

Someone was lying.

I had half of my daily burger down when Charlie called to tell me that the flasher was spotted going into a laundromat in South Grove. I thanked him and whipped the Impala back onto the highway.

I pulled up in front of the laundromat to see an old woman heaping baskets into one of those pushcarts. A boy sat behind the counter with a large Big Gulp soda in one fist and the remote to the TV in the other. Would it kill him to be an attendant and actually attend to the elderly woman? Punk.

Then I saw her.

She walked up to the desk with the kid behind it and handed him a sheet of paper and a pen. She bent over the table in a way that drew the kid’s eyes down the front of her shirt and made him go all red in the face.

I opened the door for the old lady, who thanked me, and I came up behind the girl working the kid.

“Rachel Wright?” I asked.

The girl turned slowly. Her black bob hanging in frizzy ringlets. My face was doubled and clown-like in the dark glass of her large sunglasses. I reached up and tore off the wig and glasses, realizing immediately that I had a problem.

“Hey, ow. You’re hurting me,” she squealed.

It wasn’t Rachel Wright.

The kid chose this moment to get all chivalrous. “Hey man, she’s just applying for a job, get off her back.”

“A job, huh? With false information maybe?” I snatched up the application and sure enough, it was Rachel’s information printed in the little fill-in-the-blank boxes.

“Why are you applying for a job under a false name?”

She went all doe-eyed and soft in my grip. Then I saw the tears brimming. “Christ, don’t
cry
. Just answer me.”

“I was unaware of the false information, sir.” The kid wised up. Nice tits or not, the rats will always abandon a sinking ship.

I ignored him and remained focused on the girl. “How did you come by Rachel’s information?”

The girl was bawling now and I knew I wouldn’t get any further with her until she calmed down. I steered her to the Impala by her elbow. Then I cuffed one of her wrists to the oh-shit handle.

“Please don’t get the bright idea to jump out of a moving car. She doesn’t brake as quickly as she used to. I’d hate to have to drag a sack of meat along until the Impala decides she’d like to stop.”

I went to the driver’s side door and climbed in. Then I backed out of the laundromat parking lot to the sound of the girl sobbing.

When she seemed tired of crying, I tried again. “You about done?”

“I don’t want to go to prison,” she said.

“That’s why we have it,” I replied. “If everyone wanted to go, it wouldn’t be much of a punishment, now would it?”

“Please,” she begged. She yanked at the cuff and whimpered. It hurt like hell banging your wrist bones on that metal. I knew from personal experience. When she finally realized it would only hurt more, she had the good sense to go still. Or as still as she could, given the uncontrollable shaking of her hands. “Please. I’ll do anything.”

“Anything?” I asked. “Like buy me a drink?” Just the mention of booze made my mouth water. I counted up the hours. Too long. No wonder my mind had gone fuzzy around the edges.

“Yes, please, anything.” She began to cry again. I swore.

“If you’ll do anything, start by telling me what the hell you’re doing applying for a job with someone else’s name.”

She cried harder. “I can’t tell you.”

“Let me guess,” I said and turned on the heat. It didn’t work great, but I hoped it would help her shaking. “Someone will kill you.”

She whimpered and gave me the quivering lip for show.

“Of course,” I said and changed lanes, heading back toward the FBRD station.

“And this is the part where I tell you it will only get worse for you if you withhold information. But if you work with me, I’ll work with you. I can make promises about witness protection and all that shit and so on. So can we skip to the part where you tell me why you did it?”

She turned toward the window and then looked into the backseat as if looking for a way out.

“Assuming you don’t go underneath the car and I break both of your legs by running them over.”

Her response to this was to yank at the cuffs again as if she would rather break her wrist and be free than tell me anything useful.

“OK,” I said. I scratched my head and searched for some patience. I didn’t have much, especially not with the pressure building behind my eyes. “I’ll give you some time to calm down and then maybe you’ll feel chatty.”

When I parked the Impala outside the large brick building—an old post office that was claimed and renovated for the FBRD’s cause—her resolve melted.

“OK, OK. Let’s just talk, OK? Don’t take me in yet.”

“Sure,” I said. If the little shit who’d cried for the last five miles wanted to talk now, I’d take it. I’d rather use her fear of custody against her than take her inside and hear the
where is my lawyer and phone
call
bullshit.

Besides, I couldn’t keep her here long. We could detain and interrogate suspects of crimes related to our cases, sure. But I’d have to send her over to the jail sooner or later, once I filed official identity theft charges.

“I know a guy—”

“Let me stop you there,” I said. “A
guy
is pretty damn vague. So why not tell me how you know him and it will save us both a lot of time and energy. Do you get what I’m saying? Speak in complete thoughts.”

She blinked.

“For example, you might want to say his name, followed by his relationship to you.”

“OK,” she said. Her mascara had smeared, giving her dark rings beneath each eye. Not flattering, but neither was the snot coming out of her nose. “Jason, my dealer—like that?”

“Perfect. Don’t stop now.”

She wiped snot across the back of her hand. “I owe my dealer a bunch of money and I can’t pay him. He gave me these papers and told me that if I went around to these businesses and applied for jobs, I wouldn’t owe nothing. He told me to start with the high-class shit, places I knew wouldn’t take me. Then I should apply for everything else.”

I tried not to look as surprised as I was. Cop face isn’t always as easy to pull off as you might think. “How much did you owe?”

“A thousand dollars. Sometimes he just let me fuck him for it, but then he wasn’t interested anymore. He said I got too skinny.”

I glanced at the bony wrist hanging in the cuff. “What’s your poison?”

“What?” she asked. Sitting up as if I’d prodded her.

“Your drug. What are you getting from him?”

“X,” she said. “I get a little coke sometimes, but I don’t like the way it makes my heart race. But I love X. It’s the only time I’m happy.”

I’d seen her cry enough to believe it.

“There are worse drugs,” I said. “So you agreed to file these applications so you could pay off your debt and get more X. And what about Jason? He got a last name?”

She didn’t answer.

So I put the car in reverse and backed away from the building. Charlie stood in full view of the glass and watched me go. I flashed him a one minute finger before looking over my shoulder to check my blind spot. When I turned back around to straighten out the car, he was still there, hand on his hip. I motioned for his patience one more time before speeding away.

“Where are we going?” the girl asked. Her voice was high and hopeful through the thick snot coating it.

“I’m gonna treat you to a meal. Your choice. Then maybe you’ll remember this dealer’s last name and where I can find him. So tell me what you like to eat, sweetheart.”

“You’re going to let me go?”

“Did I say that?” I just wanted more information on Jason and why he wanted someone applying for jobs in Wright’s name.

The girl sobbed again. “Please just let me go. Please?”

“Ah, don’t cry,” I said. “How about if you stop crying right now, I’ll throw in dessert.”

Monday, March 24, 2003

I
’d left the girl in the interrogation room with a couple slices of pizza and a soda. I wanted to finish what I’d started with her, but Charlie wasn’t looking so good.

He was pissed and I wanted to know why.

I knocked before entering his office. “Sir?”

“What’s with the girl?” he said.

“She’s Rachel’s dummy. She’s been going around putting applications in to make it look like Wright is job hunting. She was also given a ticket to Cabo, dated two weeks from now.

“Why would she do that?”

“Because her drug dealer told her to. I’m hoping to find out why.”

The phone rang and after looking at the number, he huffed. He didn’t answer. When his cell went off next and he still didn’t answer, I put my hands on the back of the chair and arched an eyebrow. “What’s going on?”

“How are you coming on the Sullivan case?” he asked, finally looking up from the yellow legal pad in front of him where he was tapping a blue ink pen furiously.

“The wife and kid were a dead-end. Either he was pissed that she turned him in or he came back and saw she was remarried and split. Either way, it seems no one in his hometown has heard from him and he didn’t have much to go back to. He probably started another life somewhere else.”

“I want you to prioritize the case,” he said. “Find where the hell Sullivan is now.”

I stopped shifting my weight from one thigh to the other. “With all due respect, Maisie—”

“Maisie Michaelson is probably dead with her little panties shoved in her mouth,” he snarled. “Keep your eyes on Sullivan.”

We both went very still. The pen stopped thumping against the paper and I gripped the maroon fabric of the chair a little tighter.

“Sure, Charlie,” I said. I used the old name hoping it would soften the irritation in my voice. “I’m on it.”

“I don’t like busting your balls, but someone wants answers,” he said.

“What right does Memphis have to—”

“This isn’t about the friend. Just get me what I need, all right?”

“Answers.”

“Yes, some fucking answers,” he agreed and his shoulders relaxed, inching down away from his earlobes.

“Permission to talk freely, sir,” I said.

“I’m not your commanding officer, Jim.”

“Can you think of any uses a tooth fairy might have for a Q-tip?”

Charlie’s brow furrowed. “Is this a joke?”

“Humor me,” he said.

“He wants to make sure there are no teeth hiding in your ears?”

“Maybe,” I said. “But I doubt it. What else?”

“I don’t have fucking time for this,” he said, falling back against his chair.

I threw him a bone. “We are brainstorming a case. Work with me.”

Charlie exhaled. “I don’t know. He’s going to buccal swab your ass.”

“Why a buccal swab?” I asked. Buccal swabs, those Q-tips taken to the inside of the cheeks to match DNA to crimes, were a strange association.

“To make sure the DNA matches your teeth. There was a punk in my old school. Hank Hills. He used to beat up the littler kids and put their teeth under his pillow so his parents would give him more money, until they caught on, of course. Little prick.”

“To make sure the teeth were yours,” I said aloud, trying the idea out.

Could a man, pretending to be the tooth fairy, come into the Michaelsons’ house late one night and use a buccal swab on Maisie? If so, why check the girl’s genetic history? It wouldn’t point to the Michaelsons. They were her adoptive parents. They’d adopted her just after her birth, and it was not a secret to anyone. So who the hell would want to know where the child came from?

Charlie gripped the edge of his desk, stood and unbuttoned his suit jacket. “I told you to focus on the Sullivan case. Forget about the kid.”

“Sure, sure,” I said, humoring him. I didn’t want him to think I was obsessing. He would take me off the case and stick my ass in counseling if he thought it best. “I’ll find Sullivan first.”

I thought I was lying at the time.