False Positive (7 page)

Saturday. Late Afternoon
.

Ethan missing for twenty-two and a half hours

There were two pizza boxes on Lieutenant Hale's desk when Devereaux and Loflin walked into her office, just shy of 5:30 pm.

“I figured you guys wouldn't have taken the time to eat.” Hale gestured for the detectives to sit.

They both remained standing, each waiting for the other to move first.

“Is there an atmosphere in here?” Hale got to her feet.

“No.” Devereaux took a seat, and Loflin followed suit.

“Are you sure?” Hale's hands had moved to her hips.

“No atmosphere, Lieutenant.” Loflin fidgeted on her chair. “Just a little frustration, I guess. Ethan's still out there, and we don't seem much closer to finding him.”

“I understand.” Hale lowered herself back into her chair. “But we've all been here before. We need to keep the faith. Keep the momentum going. And you guys need to eat. Cooper, I got you anchovy. Jan, I didn't know your favorite, so I went with margherita.”

“Mine's perfect.” Devereaux helped himself to a slice, noticing how grease had escaped from the box and soaked into a heap of half-completed staff appraisal forms. “Thanks, Lieutenant.”

“Margherita's great.” Loflin took her box and set it on the floor. “I appreciate the thought.”

“Good.” Hale picked up one of the four stained, chipped coffee mugs she'd accumulated on her desk over the course of the day. “Now, listen to me. I took a call from the ADA while you guys were heading back here. Dillon Crane's blood tested positive for triazolam.”

“Damn.” Loflin lowered her head into her hands. “I was afraid of that.”

“At the hospital, Dillon said he'd been stung by an insect last night.” Devereaux took another slice of pizza. “Insect? Needle? Maybe I'm stretching, but—”

“Wow!” Loflin straightened up and made a time-out signal. “
Dillon
said?
At the hospital?
You spoke to him?”

“Of course. Dillon's the only one who might have seen what happened in that bedroom.”

“But you can't just talk to a kid without a parent's consent! And Mr. Crane specifically denied his consent. Have you got any idea how many rules you broke?”

Devereaux shrugged.

“Did you find anything else out?” Hale set her mug down.

“Nothing useful.” Devereaux shook his head.

“Shame.” Hale frowned. “But it's always a long shot, dealing with a four-year-old.”

“Forget what kind of shot it was.” Loflin's hands balled themselves into fists on her lap. “It was totally irresponsible. Anything you learned would have been tainted. We couldn't have used it, anyway.”

“Not in court, maybe.” Devereaux dropped a sliver of crust back into the box. “But this isn't Vice. We're not trying to build a case. We're trying to save a kid's life. It was a risk, sure. But it was my call, and I took it. So sue me.”

“Did you think about me for even one second?” Loflin banged a fist on her thigh. “You didn't tell me what you were doing! You didn't want me to interview the parents. You just wanted me to distract them. You used me.”

“No.” Devereaux tried to keep the frustration out of his voice. “We needed to know if it was a coincidence, Dillon showing up in
the ER the day after his brother disappeared. That's why I wanted you to talk to them.”

“Jan?” Hale prompted. “You picked up on that, right? And…?”

“Even money, I guess.” Loflin was regretting her outburst. “Nothing concrete. Let's just say if I had a kid, I wouldn't let it sleep over at the Crane house too often.”

“I still like the mother for the triazolam.” Devereaux turned back to Hale. “She's a nurse. She has access to drugs. She's used to administering them. And an empty bottle was found at her house. We should bring her in. Turn up the heat.”

“No, Cooper.” Hale shook her head. “We don't have sufficient cause. She swore to the ADA that she didn't give any drugs to either kid. She's distraught about it. And your last visit to their house probably ended the Cranes' marriage. I want Ethan back, not a lawsuit.”

“Then what do we do? We can't sit on our hands and hope the boy just shows up on the doorstep in the morning.”

“We're not sitting on our hands, Cooper. We've got a ton of things going on. I'm talking to the FBI. Find-a-Child's working flat out. We're re-canvassing. Searching, physically. The lab's on board. We're getting cooperation from Tennessee. Mississippi. Georgia. Florida. We've got his picture all over social media. And no one's going to stop looking until we find him.”

“I get that, Lieutenant. I'm just frustrated.”

“We all are, Cooper. But listen. Even before I knew Dillon's blood test result, I figured that if anyone had used triazolam on the Crane kids—anyone other than Mary Lynne—they had to get it from somewhere. So I did some digging. I went back to a bunch of my old contacts. And one name kept coming up. Jake Rutherford.”

“My old C.I.?”

“The same. So I was thinking. Rutherford still owes you, right? For saving his skin. You could hook up with him. Encourage him to give you an insight into his customer base.”

Devereaux pulled out his phone and took a minute to compose a text.

“This'll bring him out of the woodwork.” Devereaux hit Send, then set the phone on the edge of Hale's desk. “Or send him running for the hills. It's fifty-fifty, with that one.”

No one spoke for a couple of minutes, then Hale slid out from behind her desk and left the room. Devereaux ate more of his pizza and stared impatiently at his phone. Loflin levered open the lid of her pizza box with her toe, then let it drop straight down again.

Hale reappeared carrying the quarter-full pot from the coffee machine. “What? No one else is going to need it. Any word from Rutherford?”

“Nothing.”

There was an electronic
ting
, but it came from Hale's computer, not Devereaux's phone. The lieutenant glanced at her screen, then swapped the coffeepot for her mouse and clicked on something.

“Jan?” Hale helped herself to some coffee. “Your lieutenant left me a voicemail this morning, and now he's following up. He wanted—”

Devereaux's phone vibrated.

“It's Rutherford.” Devereaux opened the message. “He's agreed to meet. At McCarthy's old place. In two hours.”

“Great.” Hale put her mug on the desk. “How do you want to play it?”

“Rutherford's a lunatic.” Devereaux slid his phone back into his pocket. “He's completely paranoid. If anything spooks him, he'll split. I should go see him. Alone. I'm not trying to shut you out, Jan. But we're more likely to get a result if I go on my own.”

“Don't apologize.” Loflin couldn't keep the disappointment out of her voice. “I can see what you're trying to do.”

The woman took a moment to reflect on her progress.

There was a lot happening at once. The schedule was out of her control, of course. She'd always intended for the handover to be done much later, when everything was thoroughly prepared. When each step had been taken in its own proper time. But all things considered, she felt cautiously optimistic. All the plates were still spinning. And now she had the opportunity to
show
what she'd been teaching was true. That was so much more powerful than simply
telling
. Maybe it was an omen. A sign that at last the pendulum was swinging back in her favor.

She couldn't get carried away, though. The opportunity was far from a slam dunk. She had almost no time to prepare. To reset the stage at McCarthy's so that her own players were in place, ready to hand the detective the rope he'd need to hang himself. But she'd acted the second she'd received the heads-up. And she had a lifetime of experience to call on.

A lifetime of doing things that other people couldn't even imagine.

Saturday. Evening
.

Ethan missing for twenty-five hours

Devereaux parked his charger at the entrance to the turnoff for Irondale Junior High and walked the final quarter mile down 16th Street South to what remained of McCarthy's International Dubbing Studio.

He moved slowly through the irregular shadows thrown by the trees onto the scrubby, dried-out grass at the edge of the pavement, cut across the street, then paused. A lemon-yellow 1974 Pontiac Firebird had been left in the lee of the strange, circular, long-deserted medical center cradled within the curve of the Crestwood Boulevard on-ramp. Devereaux recognized it as Rutherford's car. But that didn't mean Rutherford was nearby. Or that he was alone. And even if he was nearby, and alone, a man as unstable as Rutherford was not to be treated lightly.

Devereaux continued past the on-ramp until he reached the abandoned parking lot in front of the wrecked McCarthy building. Reginald McCarthy had established the studio in 1934, and at the time it was the largest of its kind outside of Hollywood. People thought he was crazy to build it so far from the West Coast, but he took no notice. He didn't need to be near where films were made, he figured, because he wasn't making any. He'd found a niche. His studio took films
other people had made—and paid for, and taken the risk on—and dubbed them into foreign languages, ready for worldwide distribution. His payday was guaranteed, regardless of box office performance. And by keeping his voice artists away from the rest of the industry, he found it easier to pay them less than the going rate.

The business passed from father to son, and over time new services were introduced. Transfers from flammable celluloid film to newer, more stable media was big business for a while. So was copying from film to VHS. And then to DVD. But despite these innovations, McCarthy's was hit hard by lower-cost competition from the East. By 1996 the founder's grandson was ready to quit, but selling the lame-duck company was not an easy proposition. Then fate played its hand. A fire broke out in a storeroom full of long-forgotten reels of celluloid, leaving a very relieved Reginald McCarthy III to retire on his generous insurance payout.

The burnt-out building was never redeveloped. It became a magnet for local kids. For the homeless. For fortune hunters, who'd swallowed the rumors about Norma Jeane Baker working there before her Hollywood transformation and leaving behind a trove of lost movies featuring her voice. But for Jake Rutherford, it offered something else.

A spot in the corner of a noisy, industrial city like Birmingham was never the best place for a recording studio, and things had only gotten louder after I-20 was built almost directly overhead, so McCarthy's had soundproofed the artists' booths extra thoroughly. That made them perfect for conducting Rutherford's brand of confidential business, away from the prying ears of his competitors. And of the police.

Or so he'd thought.

Backing Devereaux's hunch, Hale had called in a favor from a contact in the Birmingham Field Office and arranged for the FBI to run a trial of its next generation surveillance equipment. The trap was set, and Rutherford walked right into it. He was given a choice: Become an informant, or go to jail. He didn't agonize over the decision for very long. And for the next eighteen months he fed Devereaux a steady supply of high-quality leads. Devereaux made so many arrests on the back of them that any other detective would have been
guaranteed a promotion. The arrangement continued to run flawlessly, until one day the wheels came off altogether. Devereaux was in the middle of grabbing up some low-level dope dealers at a vacant apartment in Southtown when the enforcer for the local syndicate showed up, suspecting a spy had infiltrated his camp. Devereaux promptly arrested that guy, too, and handed Rutherford a sufficiently authentic beating that his cover wasn't blown. But in the aftermath the Brass decided that Rutherford would no longer be much use to the police department, so Devereaux advised him to leave town. He fled the same day, and promised not to return. Now the guy was back, and Devereaux had to question his motive: Greed? Stupidity? Or something else?

The old studio looked like a virus had swept relentlessly through its innards, eating away every trace of wood and fabric and leaving only the metal and concrete skeleton behind. The only things to survive the fire and the thieves had then been ravished by time, and were now coated with layers of slimy, dark gray dust.

The roof over the non-soundproof sections was missing, so when Devereaux stepped inside what had been the reception area, the yellow light spilling down from the freeway illuminated a trail of footprints leading toward the entrance to the auditorium. Devereaux paused. The Rutherford he remembered would not have left such an obvious sign of his presence.

A brief lull in the nearby traffic allowed Devereaux to catch a sound from the next room. A succession of sharp, staccato hisses. He moved forward to investigate and through the open doorway he saw a man, about twenty feet away. He was spraying graffiti at the bottom of the space where the giant silver screen had once been. It wasn't Rutherford, or anyone else Devereaux had seen before. This guy was around five-ten, and was in his mid-forties. He was wearing pale jeans and an Italian bicycle-racing-team T-shirt. The picture he was painting looked unsophisticated in contrast with the other images that had been sprayed on that wall. It depicted a pair of stick men, and one was cutting the other's head off.

“You!” Devereaux was angry. The chances of Rutherford showing up now were next to zero because of this fool. “Michelangelo! Drop the paint, and get lost.”

“I don't think so,
Detective
.” The guy turned to face Devereaux, and kept hold of his spray can.

Devereaux heard another sound behind him, and a second guy appeared in the doorway. He was a similar age to the man Devereaux had yelled at, but was two inches shorter. He was a few pounds heavier. He wasn't wearing a jacket over his Public Enemy T-shirt. But he was holding an AK-47 assault rifle.

“What's your next move, genius?” Devereaux stepped across so that he was directly between the two guys. “Shoot me
and
your buddy?”

“No one needs to get shot.” The guy with the paint moved nearer to Devereaux, and his shadow closed in from the other side. “We're here to deliver a message, is all. You ready? Here is it. Jacob Rutherford: Leave him alone.”

“Where is Rutherford?”

“Do I need to finish my painting?” The guy gestured toward the wall. “In case you're not following, the one on his knees is you. Rutherford never wants to see you again. Are we clear?”

“How do I contact him?” Devereaux edged closer to the guy with the gun.

“One more stupid question, and this'll be pointing at you.” The guy reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a battered Zippo lighter. He flipped it open and struck a flame. Then he squirted his can across it, igniting the propellant and sending out a jet of fire fourteen inches long. He was looking Devereaux in the eye but aiming the spray to his right, showering little flecks of molten paint all over the twisted frames of the folding auditorium chairs.

“All right, then.” Devereaux felt a wave of calmness and clarity wash over him, the way it always did at times like this. Times when a solution to a problem became inevitable. A violent solution. His right fist flashed sideways, catching the heavier guy on the temple, then his hand opened and Devereaux grabbed the AK's leather shoulder strap before the guy staggered and fell. “Let's start over…”

Loflin steadied herself against the wrecked door frame, took out her gun in case Devereaux spotted her, then held up her iPhone and hit
its video capture button. Her new partner had once again manipulated events so that he could be alone with a pair of low-lifes. But there'd be no doubt about the outcome this time. No wiggle room. No ambiguity to cloud the conclusion that Internal Affairs would be forced to reach.

She would make sure of that.