Murder 42 - A Thriller (Sarah King Mysteries Book 2) (3 page)

5

The precinct had emptied by late evening. Stefan waited in a coffee shop across the street. Something about the fall of night made him think people were more willing to open up about the darkness inside them—the part they wouldn’t share with anyone else during the day.

The barista wore a beret, and he remembered when, briefly, he’d worn one as an undergraduate. Majoring in French philosophy could do that to people. What he planned to do with that degree he couldn’t say now, but at the time it seemed like a good idea. That and a law degree led him to the Bureau, so it must’ve been a good choice.

Once the sun set and it was nearly dark, he finished his coffee and rose. The people in the shop were mostly college students, young and debating ideas—something that didn’t seem to happen once people got out into the working world.

The temperature had lowered but not to anything near what someone outside of Arizona would consider cool. His first week at the Phoenix office, Stefan had experienced temperatures over one hundred twenty degrees. He remembered wearing shorts on a Saturday and burning his thighs on the leather seats of his car.

Crossing the street quickly, he had to remind himself to slow down. That was something his TAs—training agents—were always telling him:
slow down and take your time. Think things through.
But the excitement was too much, sometimes. It worried him that he might make mistakes because of it.

The precinct was quiet. He passed reception and found Lunds still on his computer. The guy had put in a twelve-hour day and looked exhausted. His sleeves were rolled up, and on the underside of his forearm was a tattoo of a skull with a knife through the eye and an inscription above it.

“That’s pretty wild,” Stefan said, leaning down for a closer look.

Lunds rolled his sleeves back down. “Just youthful indiscretion. You ready?”

“Yeah.”

Lunds stood up, stretched, and led Stefan to the back interrogation rooms. Stefan did a quick count of the murder board as they passed: no cases had been cleared today.

The rest of the precinct looked modern, but the interrogation room looked like a warehouse with a desk and some folding chairs set up. It was the only room he’d seen that looked as though it hadn’t been changed in decades.

Lunds sat in one chair, and Stefan sat next to him. Lunds leaned back, setting his arm on the backrest, and exhaled with his eyes closed. “So what made you want to be a fed?” he asked.

“9/11, I guess. I was in high school, and I knew that I’d be doing something related to terrorism.”

He smirked. “Well, this is about as terrorism as it gets.”

Stefan was still trying to figure out what Lunds meant when the door opened and a uniformed officer brought in the prisoner. The man was shackled and looked defeated, unable to lift his eyes from the floor. He was led to the table and sat down, his chains rattling against the tabletop.

“Mr. Mendoza,” Lunds said, turning to him, “this is Special Agent Miles with the FBI. He’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“I told you everything,” the man said, his voice cracking.

“Well, you haven’t told Agent Miles here everything.”

Mendoza finally raised his eyes. Stefan thought he looked like the kind of guy who would sit behind a computer all day and not want to venture out into the world. He was maybe a hundred ten or a hundred twenty pounds, with arms as thin as sticks. Glasses sat on a thin nose, and he looked as though he was having trouble breathing. Stefan could hear the faint, raspy sound of asthma with each exhalation.

“Virgil,” he said in the friendliest voice he could muster, “tell me everything about that video.”

He swallowed. “The one where the kid—”

“Yes,” he said a little too quickly.

“I bought it from Naughty Nancy’s. It’s that store down there on Seventh, next to the gym and the hair salon.” Virgil paused as though he were waiting for Stefan to say he knew the place.

Since Stefan didn’t, he just remained quiet and stared at him.

“Anyways,” Virgil said, looking down at the table, “that’s where I got it.”

“How?”

“I was just there, and the dude workin’ there asked if I wanted some crazy porn and I said sure. So he pulled that out from the back and brought it out. It was in, like, a black case. No pictures or nothin’ on the cover. And he said it was the craziest shit I was ever gonna see. He said it was two hundred bucks but that it would be the best two hundred bucks I ever spent.”

“Just like that?” Stefan asked. “He just offered some random customer a video like that?”

Virgil shook his head. “Nah, man. I been in there a lot. They get me porn that ain’t legal—”

“Child porn, you mean.”

“Yeah, man. Yeah they get that for me. For a lotta dudes. But he said this was the craziest shit I ever seen.”

“So what’d you do then?”

“I said I wanna see some of it. And he said I couldn’t. That I had to take his word for it and just buy it. So I did.”

“So you took it home and played it?” Virgil nodded. “Then what?” Stefan said. “After you saw it, and you knew what it was, what’d you do?”

He shrugged and looked down at the table. “Nothin’.”

“Nothing. You saw that, and you didn’t think you should call the police?”

“That shit was crazy, man. Too much for me. I just put it away and never touched it again. On my mom’s, bro. I never watched that shit again.”

Stefan leaned back. “How much child porn have you bought from Naughty Nancy’s?”

“I don’t know. A lot.”

Stefan looked at Lunds, who rose slowly. The two men stepped outside and shut the door behind them.

“What’s going on with that place?” Stefan asked.

“Everybody’s tight lipped. We executed a search warrant. Tore the place apart from top to bottom. Nothing illegal, just porn and sex toys. The guy he’s talking about is one of the owners, who also works there. He said he didn’t recognize Virgil though he’s probably come in before. Doesn’t recall anything about selling him a DVD, of course.” Lunds leaned against the wall. “So one of them’s lying, but I couldn’t say which one—the scumbag who sells child porn or the scumbag who jerks off to it. Take your pick.”

Stefan exhaled and put his hands on his hips. He peered in through the one-way mirror at Virgil. The man was picking at a thread of dead skin on his thumb, rocking slightly with each pick, his lips moving.

“How did he buy it?”

“Cash, no credit card trail. His word against the storeowner’s. The other employees, of course, say they don’t sell anything like that there.”

“You think that could be him on the video?”

Lunds shook his head. “No. The guy on the video is clearly white. Just in case, I had Virgil strip nude and checked him out. The nipples and penis are different. Virgil’s got a birthmark on his lower back that the man in the video doesn’t have. Sorry, Stefan, but we don’t really have shit as far as finding who that child is or the bastard who did that to her.”

Stefan rubbed the side of his head. “I’m gonna need help.”

6

Kelly had wanted to meet at a local pub and get the night started with some drinks. Sarah no longer drank, but she was happy to drive everyone if they wanted to. She drove Kelly’s Nissan with six girls crammed in and the music turned up so loud it hurt her ears. Two of the girls, Kelly’s friends, were already singing at the tops of their lungs.

When they arrived at the pub, Sarah let them out. Kelly stayed in the car as Sarah tried to find parking.

“You’re quiet,” Kelly said. “Talk to them. They’re fun girls.”

“I’m just tired.”

“Well, you’re never gonna make friends, young lady, unless you put yourself out there.”

Friends
. She hadn’t thought about friends in a long time. At one point in her life, the point when she was drunk every day, she had a lot of friends and a lot of men. That seemed like a lifetime ago, now. Since her breakup, she had no inclination to go back to that life.

“Maybe this was a bad idea, Kel. You guys would have more fun without me.”

“Bullshit. You’re just sulking ’cause of Gio. Forget him. There’ll be guys here.”

Sarah sighed as she found parking around the building and thought for a moment while Kelly stepped out of the car. Eventually, she let out a deep breath and undid her seatbelt before climbing out.

Kelly linked her arm with Sarah’s in a casual gesture of affection. Sarah instantly doubled over in pain. It began in her stomach, just below the navel, and emanated in all directions. And it wasn’t slow, like fire. The closest comparison she could make was if someone had set a bomb off inside of her.

She groaned, holding her stomach, the pain forcing her to her knees. Kelly held on to her arm tightly, panicking. She took out her cell to call for an ambulance, and Sarah managed to gasp out, “No ambulance.”

Sarah saw Kelly but not as she was now. Sarah saw a date, a high school dance, with kissing and drinking and friends. Then a boy drove her in his car, a silver car going fast on the highway. He pulled over in a dark spot near a canyon and they were kissing when he tried to remove her dress. She said no, and he ripped it off and raped her as she screamed for help. But nobody came.

“You okay?” Kelly said, bending down next to her.

The pain could hit like a sledgehammer, but it always went away. Sometimes it lingered, and sometimes it was a flash that would topple her and disappear as quickly as it had come. But it always went away. Her greatest fear was that one day it wouldn’t.

Sarah got to her feet and cleaned the blood away from her nose. She looked into Kelly’s big, beautiful eyes. More than anything else, she wanted to ask her what happened to that boy—if he had ever been prosecuted or if this was a pain she carried every day alone. But Kelly wouldn’t understand. Even Sarah didn’t understand.

“I’m fine. It’s nothing. Just migraines I get sometimes.”

“That seems like a pretty big deal, Sarah. We should go to the hospital.”

“No, no it’s fine. Let’s just go in. I’ll have some water and be all right. Really.” Sarah took her arm, ignoring the throbbing that lashed out inside her head every few seconds. “What were you saying? Something about having a lot of fun tonight?”

The night dragged on about as Sarah expected. Kelly and the girls got drunk, flirted with boys, and danced, while Sarah sat at a table away from everyone else and tried to look as unwelcoming as possible. She didn’t want to speak to anybody and hoped a stern face was enough to ward people off.

But the men still came and tried to talk to her. She had to brush them off—politely at first and then rude and to the point. The more who approached her, the more it aggravated her. Though she knew she wasn’t unattractive, she didn’t believe herself to be stunning, either. She wondered what it was about her that drew men in.

After several Diet Cokes, she checked her watch: it was only ten thirty. She wasn’t going to make it to two or three in the morning.

“Kelly,” she yelled over the din of the music at the bar, “would you guys mind calling a cab? I think I’m just going to go.”

“No, no, stay here,” she said, her speech slurred from the countless shots.

“I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Just either call me and I’ll come back, or please call a cab. Don’t go home with strange men when you’re like this.”

“Of course I’m going to. What fun would it be going home with strange men sober?”

Sarah grabbed her arm, staring right into her pupils to make sure Kelly was paying attention. “Because they could hurt you. Call me or call a cab, okay?”

Kelly lost her smile. Something passed between them, but Kelly didn’t know what it was. She pulled away. “What’re you, my mother?”

She turned away and took another shot. Sarah had done all she could do. Maybe she’d swing back around closing time and make sure they weren’t going home with anyone they shouldn’t be.

Once out of the club, she realized how warm it had been in there. The air cooled her skin, and the sudden change from warmth to cold made her skin flush. One of the bouncers said, “You leaving? Aw, come on. Come back in and lemme buy you a drink.”

Sarah smiled briefly, her teeth clenched so she didn’t snap at him, and turned away without saying anything.

“Hey,” the bouncer yelled as he chased her down, “night’s just starting. Come back. You too pretty to be sittin’ at home on a Friday night.”

“I appreciate it, but no, thank you.”

He swung around in front of her and blocked her path to the parking lot. “Nah, don’t be like that. Come in and have a drink.”

“I don’t drink anymore.”

“You wouldn’t be in there if you didn’t want somethin’ to drink. Just come in. My name’s J. J. I’ll take excellent care of you.”

The bouncer touched her arm lightly, and pain shot through her as if she had been injected with acid. She saw J. J. sitting next to a hospital bed, reading to a man who didn’t move. A machine beeped near him, and with each beep, the man’s chest would go up and down.

“Is it your father?” she asked.

“What?”

“The man in the hospital, is it your father?”

“What the fuck did you say?”

“Never mind,” she said, trying to get around him. “Excuse me.”

“Hey,” he said, sticking his hand in front of her and pushing her back. “What did you say? What about a man in a hospital?”

“Please leave me alone.”

“Not until you tell me what you just said.”

Sarah touched him lightly on the arm. His mouth fell open and his hands gripped his head as he screamed. She jumped back.

“I’m sorry” was all she could say.

Sometimes, the pain could go the other way. Something she’d only learned this past year.

Sarah hurried past him. He yelled things at her and followed her a few steps before crumpling over in pain again. This was what happened when she let her guard down, when her mind wasn’t completely focused and closed to any impressions she might get. This was why she didn’t like going out anymore.

She got into her car and looked around to make sure the bouncer hadn’t followed her. Before she could get the key in the ignition, tears streamed down her face, and she rested her head against the steering wheel and wept.