Fixed in Blood (14 page)

I hate this shit.

Boss Man knew he was screwed.
Fucking celebrities. Think they can do whatever the hell they want and then hide behind their army of lawyers and publicists to make it all go away.

The asshole promised me. Said he had it all under control. Crystal had been…what did he call it? Oh yeah, an “unfortunate accident.”

That unfortunate accident had cost him twenty-five thousand dollars. Then the asshole went and offed Francie. He’d be limping for a month after that one. It was always the entrepreneur who took it in the shorts.

And now the guy wanted to make another movie.

Boss Man didn’t say “no.” He said “fuck no.” Staz had played a little whack-a-mole on his foot after Francie died. That fucking piece of tuna on the other end of his space phone might damage more important body parts if he crossed her again.

And he didn’t need any more visits from the Seattle PD, either. Keep them around long enough, even they can smell something other than a doughnut.

Captain Hollywood wasn’t playing games anymore. It was all out in the open now and he’d offered the major payday. Three hundred thousand dollars for one more girl and a quiet place to do the filming. Said he was hoping for something nautical this time. Money like that might make it worth the risk to a lesser man.

But he wasn’t stupid. He told Hollywood to go shop somewhere else.

That’s when it all came down. Not two hours after he told Glamour Gus to take a hike. How Mr. Fancy Pants made his connections that high that fast Boss Man would never know. But he did. And Boss Man got told in words leaving no room for doubt it would be in his best interest to accommodate the gentleman from Tinseltown.

I hate this shit
.

What was he supposed to do about that uppity chick in charge? With all her fancy ideas about female empowerment and healthy work environments? He brought up his concerns and got handed his hat. Told in so many words to handle it. Just keep Hollywood happy.

This ain’t no rock-and-hard-place thing the nuns were always talking about. I know who’s got the juice and what I gotta do.

There was a knock on his office door. He almost barked for whoever it was to take a powder. But then it dawned on him. With this latest shit storm going down, he almost forgot he’d sent for her.

“It’s open.”

The ginger with the bad attitude stepped inside. She was wearing baggy sweatpants and a cut-off tank top. Boss Man looked at her flank. The skin was still raw from the scouring she took.

“Would it kill you to dress yourself up a little?” he asked. “I got a whole closet of fancy clothes for you girls. There’s gotta be something your size. Which reminds me, walk a little taller. Show off the goods.”

Delbe Jensen stared at him but said nothing.

“Did you hear me?”

She held her stare.

I hate this shit.

He pulled himself up out of the chair and braced himself against the shot of pain that ran from his foot to his spine and up into his neck. He shouldn’t have to deal with her attitude when he ought to be resting his injury and taking care of business. But the girl needed to learn.

He forced himself to move straight and steady. Each step brought another electric jolt, fueling his determination to force the girl back in line. He stopped two feet in front of her.

“I asked you if you heard me.”

“Hear you?” Her mouth was full of sass. “Am I supposed to listen? You bark your orders like you’re some kind of king or somethi—”

A fast backhand across the mouth stopped her mid-word. He grabbed a handful of red hair and pulled her to her knees.

“I’m not
some kind
of king, Missy. As far as you’re concerned, I am
the
king. You got that?” He twisted his hand tighter and she grimaced in pain. “Now, like they say in the movies, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. The easy way is you settle down. Take your assignments. Earn my trust. Check with the other girls. You earn my trust, you make your way out of the back rooms. Start getting the nicer assignments. Bigger tips. You can get your own apartment, have fun on an off night. You pay your debt and we go our separate ways.”

“Or maybe I go straight to the cops the minute I get out of those back rooms. You’re no pimp. You’re a slave trader.”

He kicked her on instinct. Hard and in the gut. He paid for it with another wave of pain from his injured foot.

“Then we have the hard way.” He bent low, his words spitting on her face. “And if you think you’ve already seen the hard way…guess again. I got a whole category of men waiting for what I’m selling. And they’ll make the guys meeting you in the back rooms look like the Prince of Wales. Do we understand each other?”

Delbe nodded. She lifted her hands up into her hair, trying to relieve some pressure. “I understand. Just let go of me.”

Boss Man looked down at the bruised and crying blob at his feet. She’d be more of a mess in an hour or two, once those welts really colored in. He ran through a list of customers who’d be willing to take some damaged merchandise. He’d have to lower the rate.

I’ll call it a scratch-and-dent sale. All products sold on an “as is” basis.

He relaxed, pulled his hand free from her hair, and took a half step back.

Delbe lunged up at him, arms and fists flying in all directions. She caught hold of his shirt and pulled, ripping a sleeve down to his elbow.

He responded with three swift kicks to her groin. This time he didn’t feel one twinge of pain.

Delbe dropped and rolled. She coughed out a trickle of blood before rolling to her side, curled into a protective ball.

Boss Man turned and hobbled back to his desk. There was no need to hide his injury now. Delbe posed no threat. He settled himself back behind his desk and watched her sob on the floor. When her crying settled and her breathing normalized, he spoke.

“Get back to your room. Take a bath.” He glanced at the clock. “Then get in that closet and put on something decent. Your first customer will knock on your door at five thirty.”

Delbe brought herself to her knees, then stood on shaky legs.

“Go on. That clock’s not standing still.”

Delbe brought herself to her full height. She turned to face him, the blood on her lip underscoring the hatred in her eyes.

“Now, I said.”

Delbe backed her way out of his office, never taking her eyes off his.

Gotta hand it to her, she’s got fire.

He pulled a bottle of vodka from his desk drawer, screwed off the cap, and took a drink.

“Jennifer,” he roared as he returned the bottle to its hiding place. “Get in here.”

The teenager slinked in. Shoulders slumped. Hair in her face.

Kid’s never gonna make anything of herself with that attitude. Hell, if she was a little older, I’d put her out of her misery and send her off to play with the glamour boy. But like the wife says, I got a soft spot where kids are concerned.

“Who’s working tonight?”

The girl kept her eyes down. “Everyone. Pete and Nick are dropping the girls off and picking them up.”

Boss Man nodded. At least something was going right. Business was especially good at marina hotels.

“When’s that boat show end?”

Jennifer glanced up. “Sunday. We’re booked solid till then.”

He nodded again. Three days. Hollywood could wait. It would give him time to scout a location.

He already had the girl.

“It’s roomier than you’d think.” Lydia stood in the center of Mort’s main salon. “A fireplace, a kitchen. It’s nice.”

“It’s called a galley.” Mort wasn’t surprised how fast Lydia had gotten back to him. She had information regarding Jennifer and wanted to it discuss in person. He’d told her he planned another visit with Charlie Fellow first thing in the morning and she’d offered to drive up to Seattle. Lydia had suggested meeting for dinner, but Mort had asked her to consider coming to his houseboat.

“There’re two bedrooms. I use one for my office. The heads are small, but there’re two of those, too.” She’d never feel truly comfortable outside of her own home, but Mort hoped she’d come to feel safe on his houseboat. “Go on out to the deck. It’s covered. I can be out there even when it’s raining.” He followed her and watched her admire the sparkling skyline.

“Not as majestic as the islands and mountains from your place,” he said. “But if I get ambitious, I can walk to work. The Crystal’s not too far, either.”

“You and Larry still meeting on Thursdays?” There was a wistfulness in her voice.

“Will be until we’re too demented to tackle Will Shortz. Then we’ll probably take up tiddlywinks.”

She kept her back to him. “And Robbie and Claire? Is there room enough when they and the girls visit?”

He wondered if it brought her pain or pleasure to imagine his family time. “We make do. Micki and Jim still come by to watch the games. Bruiser’s been known to take a dive. He chases the ducks. As smart as he is, he hasn’t realized they can fly away whenever they want.”

She was silent for a while. He stood behind her.

A movement turned his attention to Aggie’s boat. His neighbor was out on her own deck, wrapped in a blanket on a teak chaise lounge. Mort reached out to touch Lydia’s shoulder. Her reflexive flinch made him regret the move.

“Easy, Liddy.” He turned to call out. “Aggie, come meet a friend. Up from Olympia for a visit.” He noticed a stiffness as Aggie pulled herself up from her chair, and hoped the night air wasn’t troubling her aging bones.

“You’ll like her,” Mort said to Lydia. “Edie used to talk about certain characters blessing your life in the knowing. Aggie’s one of them.” He saw the flicker of apprehension in her eyes and softened his voice. “It’s okay. She’s never heard your name. She doesn’t know a thing about who you are or who you were.”

Lydia forced a smile and nodded. She held out her hand as Aggie approached.

“Agatha Skurnik, kayaker, woman of wisdom, and all-around great bullshit buddy, meet Lydia Corriger, psychologist, animal lover, and possessor of any manner of special talents.”

Lydia’s head rose in barely noticeable tension and he was sorry for his clumsy attempt at humor.

“It’s lovely to meet you, my dear.” Aggie was gracious as she held on to Lydia’s hand for a moment. “A psychologist. What is your specialty?”

“I’m in private practice. I see the whole spectrum. Depression, anxiety…but I prefer the tough cases.”

Aggie nodded toward Mort. “Like this one here?”

Mort didn’t expect Lydia’s good-natured reply. “I’m good, Ms. Skurnik. But not that good.”

“I’m Aggie to my friends.” She released Lydia’s hand and pointed to the bottle of wine on the deck table. “Are you two on your way to dinner?”

Mort shook his head. “I’ve got some snacks. This is work. Lydia’s helping me with a case.”

“Oh? I assume it’s the two murders I’ve been reading about. Are you a profiler like those on the television set? I do love my crime shows.”

“No,” Lydia replied. “I’m more a researcher. One of those special talents Mort talked about.” She turned to him. “I’ll go get my briefcase and we can get started.”

Mort hoped Aggie wouldn’t be put off by Lydia’s obvious rejection of any attempt at small talk. He knew it was a well-practiced defense in the face of strangers.

Aggie responded with the kindness of a queen. “Of course, my dear. And it’s time for me to go inside. It was lovely meeting you.”

Lydia said the same and went back into the salon. Aggie turned to Mort and reached for both his hands. She held tight and looked him squarely in the eye.

“Be careful with that one, Mort. She’s frightened. And frightened creatures can be dangerous.” She patted his hands before releasing them. “The forecast is for a fair morning. I’ll be out in the kayak by five. Join me if you wish.”

He knew Lydia would wait until Aggie was gone to emerge from inside.

“Lovely woman,” she said. “Given your proximity to neighbors, you got lucky.”

“I did, indeed.” He poured two glasses of merlot and handed her one. “Have a seat. Tell me what you found.”

Lydia sat down and took a sip. “This is good. And thanks for sending me what you had on that phone Jennifer used.”

“Did you get the photos of the tattoo as well?”

“I did. It’s a two-headed eagle, wings unfurled, bounded by a heavy circle. Unusual, its being red. Any leads on the artist?”

Mort shook his head. “Micki’s checked all the parlors in King and Pierce Counties. No bites.”

“Remember my patient? Delbe Jensen? Before she disappeared, she talked about having been branded. At first I thought she was talking about the stigma of being a bankrupt failure. Bauer thought so, too.”

“Paul Bauer? From the Oly PD?” Mort asked. “Great guy. You still seeing him?”

“I contacted him when Delbe went missing. Since she’s an adult and there’s no sign of foul play, his hands were tied.”

“But yours aren’t.” Mort sensed there was more she wasn’t revealing. There too often was with Lydia.

“All three women, my Delbe and your two cases, were in deep debt to Rite Now Finance. Two had the same tattoo. Delbe said she’d been branded. There’s a connection.”

“Were you able to find out anything about the design?”

“It’s a pretty common symbol. There have been references to double-headed eagles since before the Dark Ages. It’s represented on the Albanian flag. It was the symbol of the Hapsburg Empire. It’s used by the Freemasons sometimes. I even found several motorcycle gangs with a two-headed eagle in their logo.”

Mort leaned forward. “It’s not unusual for more hard-core gangs to be involved with prostitution. Maybe one of them has moved into the movie business. You got a list?”

Lydia seemed skeptical. “One’s in Ohio. Two in Texas. Another in Georgia. There’s no indication any of them are involved in organized crime. Petty complaints, some minor drug offenses, but nothing rising to this level.”

“So we got nothing.”

“Not until we find the artist who did the work.” She paused. “I got luckier with Jennifer.”

Mort’s pulse quickened. “Tell me.”

Lydia nodded. “Your team discovered Jennifer used a prepaid burner to make the call to Social Services. It was part of a bulk purchase made by a chain of convenience stores covering Washington, Oregon, and Idaho.”

“Unfortunately,” Mort said, “video surveillance cameras usually dump every three days or so. Add to that it’s unlikely Jennifer bought the phone herself. Whoever’s behind this probably sent someone in to buy a few…maybe a dozen…to be handed out as needed. Needle in a haystack.”

Lydia nodded again. “But we do know the time Jennifer’s call came in to Social Services. I was able to work backwards, coordinating the time of the call with cell towers in service, and zero in on the phones being used within a two-minute window of when Jennifer called.”

“Ten o’clock on a balmy spring night? City this size? There must have been hundreds of calls.”

“Actually, over thirteen thousand. People are addicted to their cells. I ran a program cross-checking those phone numbers in use during that two-minute window against phone numbers enrolled in monthly service plans.”

“How’d you get that? You’d need a warrant for every carrier.” He held up a hand. “Scratch that. I don’t want to know. I’ll trust you and your bat cave.”

“I was able to eliminate the overwhelming majority of numbers. I was left with less than two hundred numbers to check out.”

“Those must be the calls from prepaids.”

“Right,” Lydia said. “Crossing that with the inventory list your team got from the bulk buy, I narrowed it down to nine.”

“And we still have nothing.” Mort didn’t want to sound ungrateful for all her work. “The beauty of a burner is there’s no need to register. You walk in, plop your money down, and get a phone for as long as the prepaid minutes hold. No names involved. A joy to drug dealers and pimps everywhere.”

“It would seem so. But I’ve been something you’ve never been.”

Mort’s heart stuttered its beat. He didn’t need Lydia returning to what she’d been. “What’s that?”

“A teenaged girl.” For a moment he caught a sadness in her eyes. “Jennifer must have known what was going to happen to Crystal. Picture it, Mort, you’re a teenaged girl, scared witless, and you’re up to your neck—for reasons we don’t know—in something very, very bad. You’re the kind of girl who cares enough about little Nyla to phone for help before bolting. What’s your next move?”

“Run.”

“That’s what a teenaged
boy
would do.”

“She can’t call the cops,” Mort said. “She’s in too deep.”

“You’re right. And she wouldn’t call her parents, because if they’re good parents she’d be in big trouble for getting mixed up with this whole mess, and if they’re bad parents they’d be no help anyway. There’s only one person a teenaged girl would call after she knew Nyla would be safe. Her best buddy.”

Mort recalled the countless hours Allie had spent as a young teenager gabbing on the phone with her friends. In her later high school and college years, his daughter didn’t seem to rely on them as much. Had Allie grown weary of the common comfort of friendships, or had her friends noticed her danger long before her own parents had?

“So then what did you do?” Mort’s energies were better spent nailing a murderer than analyzing the roots of his daughter’s criminal behavior.

“I tracked those nine numbers. Six numbers engaged in calls lasting far beyond that two-minute window. Two lasted less than thirty seconds…long enough to make a connection with voice mail, leave a message, and hang up.”

“That leaves one.” Mort’s antennae were humming. Lydia had found something.

“And
that
one number called one specific number six times in rapid succession over a period of fifteen minutes. She was reaching out to one person and following up to make sure they were coming for her.”

“Or wondering what was taking them so long.”

“Exactly. One number calling another. It had to be Jennifer reaching out to a friend.”

“I assume you called.”

“I did. A man answered. When I asked for Jennifer, he said I must have the wrong number. I told him I was a social worker from Jennifer’s school and she’d listed this number as her emergency contact. He asked ‘Jennifer Lightfoot?’ Told me his daughter was her best friend. Said Jennifer practically lived at their house but wasn’t there at the moment. I asked him to spell his daughter’s name so I could update the school records.” Lydia handed him a sheet of paper. “Her name’s Shaina Sichelle. Sixteen years old. Sophomore at Foster High in Tukwila. I slipped into the school district’s system and—”

“You ‘slipped in’?” Mort didn’t like how easily Lydia’s old habits came back to her. Even if she was working for the good guys this time.

“Jennifer Lightfoot is also a student there. She filed papers to drop out more than six months ago. But she was only fifteen and didn’t have parental consent. Records indicate she was a good student. More A’s than B’s. But since January she’s been racking up unexcused absences and her transcript is riddled with incompletes.”

“You get an address? Parents’ names?” Mort recalled witnesses described Jennifer as possibly Native American.

“One parent. Tom Lightfoot. Jennifer’s records show she missed a week last December. It was an excused absence. Mother’s funeral. I followed up on that. Mary Lightfoot died of lung cancer. She was thirty-eight.”

Mort thought of Robbie’s devastation when Edie died…and he was already an adult with girls of his own. “Jennifer have siblings?”

“No. Here’s what I’ve learned about her father. Thomas Blue Lightfoot is affiliated with the Quinoc tribe. He’s forty-four years old. Educated on Quinoc lands. Nothing past high school. Enlisted in the Marines in 1990 and was deployed to Kuwait. Wounded in an explosion. Lost his right arm and eye. Limited sight in his left. Makes his way on disability and veteran’s benefits. Police record is limited to a couple drunk and disorderlies and one report of his home being burglarized six years ago. He was also questioned two years ago in connection with a string of local retail thefts. No charges were filed.”

“Wait a minute. You could have pulled the D&Ds off public records. But a burglary report and Lightfoot’s questioning resulting in no charges…that’s not public information. Are you telling me you have access to the police department’s system?”

Lydia held his gaze. “There was nothing in any federal database beyond his military service.”

Mort leaned back and stared up at the stars. He ran a hand over his salt-and-pepper hair. “You tapped into the FBI’s database? Liddy, they monitor for leaks on a constant basis.”

Lydia nodded. “I’m untraceable. Do you want to know more?”

Mort stared at the beautiful and broken woman sitting across from him. Had she put The Fixer behind her? He’d used The Fixer to protect his daughter and brought Lydia a fresh round of heartache. Was he doing it again? Was his drive to find the killers clouding his ability to see what it might mean to Lydia to reengage with her dark history?

“Was this a mistake?”

Lydia dropped her gaze. She gathered her papers and stood.

He rose and took a step toward her. She stepped back.

“No, Liddy. I don’t want you to go. I like having you here…on my boat…in my eyesight.” He urged her to sit. “I’m wondering what this is doing to you—all this sleuthing. Is it stirring dogs best left sleeping?”

She looked up at him. “You mean, is The Fixer rising from the dead?”

Mort turned his head right and left to see if any neighbors might have heard her question. There were no signs of activity on the boat moored to his left. The hedge fund manager who owned it was only there on the occasional weekend. One small light burned in Aggie’s boat. From his many times aboard, Mort knew it was her bedside lamp. They were safe. No one would have any reason to suspect The Fixer and the cop who let her go were floating on a houseboat in the shadow of Seattle’s glowing skyline.