Only Child (12 page)

• • •

I
cruised the neighborhood the way I'd case a bank, starting out way past the perimeter and working my way toward the center. Only a fool goes into the jungle without memorizing enough trail-markers to find his way back out.
When you look for kids— runaways, castoffs, missing-and-presumed— finding a body is always one of the possibilities. But this time I was starting at the other end of the tunnel. That changed the game. If I stepped out of the shadows, had the mother "hire" me, got the names of Vonni's friends from her, and tried to talk to them, I might as well dial 911 on myself.
In the past, I'd sometimes pretended to be a cop. Never flashed a badge or anything stupid-amateur like that. I'd just plant an impression and let people fall into their own assumption pits. It's especially easy when people
expect
a plainclothesman to come around, asking questions.
But I didn't look the part anymore.

• • •

T
en days of drifting with the currents didn't lead me to a way in. I didn't know much about small towns, and what I thought I knew wasn't proving out. The mall was the real city, like I'd suspected, but inside it the population was as fractured as Manhattan's. Rich and poor walked the same paths but never touched, like human railroad tracks.
Some kids lounged around the food courts, designer shopping bags stuffed with credit-card purchases, gabbing on cell phones until they drove away in their mothers' Mercedes, or their own Miatas. Other kids worked in the fast-food kiosks, earning less in a month than their better-born counterparts spent in an hour, saving every dime so they could go mobile, too.
That was the common ground. Car culture. You couldn't get anywhere without one, in every sense of the word.
The parking lot had enough diversity to make a liberal come all over himself. Cute little LOOK AT ME! roadsters stood shoulder-to-toe with hulking monster-truck imitators, Corvettes were docked nose-to-nose with minivans, and thoroughbred sportscars shared space with pro street-quarter-horses. Fundamentalists don't care what you wear to church— only attendance counts.
The cars got closer to each other than the clans ever did. Inside, a see-and-be-seen parade. Jocks in letterman's jackets. Whiggers in hip-hop gear. Cholas in tight jeans and bright-colored spike heels. JAPs in pastels. Goth kids in their bloodless black-and-white. Rich boys in stuff that showed they were.
Their jewelry was as varied as their hairstyles, but they all seemed to pack pagers.
Like a prison yard. Everyone crewed and cliqued, no mixing.
I wondered if that was how Giovanni saw it, back when he'd made his choice.

• • •

T
he mall seemed to be on a strict schedule: near-empty in the mornings, stuffed with adults at lunchtime, and swamped by a wave of teenagers in the afternoons. Then came hordes of married-with-children until mid-evening, after which the teens took over again and carried it to closing time.
In-store security was tight— undercovers so obvious that they must have been hired as deterrents, lots of fiber-optic cams, especially wherever they sold CDs or clothes— but the corridors and the outside grounds didn't get any real coverage. At night, they tightened up the perimeter a little. But it was mostly rent-a-cops, eye-fucking wannabe lowriders who spent hours draped over their not-much cars.
Malls are like cities; they have whisper-streams, too. But without a native to front me, any attempt to tap in would draw way too much attention.
So I kept sniffing around the area, looking for openings. I found some places where hanging out for a few weeks could make you into enough of a regular to talk with people without drawing suspicion, but I didn't have that kind of time. Anyway, I couldn't picture Vonni's crowd spending hours in a low-rent tavern, or at the local OTB parlor.
After the Plymouth dusted off a poseur Firebird with more tire than motor on Hempstead Turnpike, a hardcore Nova slid in alongside me a few lights down. The driver looked over, raised his chin in a question I answered with the Roadrunner's cartoon horn. He cracked his throttle deep enough to let me know he was carrying heavy. I held the engine against the brake just a little past idle, quiet as a turbine.
We both left on the cross street's yellow. He got out first, but I drove around him just before the Torqueflite grabbed second gear on its own.
The Nova's driver passed me as I backed off, made a "Follow me!" gesture out his window. In the diner's parking lot, I got an invite to a not-yet-completed section of the LIE, where they were running for money.
Later that night, I stood off to one side and watched the drivers of a couple of trailer queens go at it. Negotiations first. They argued about lengths and the bust— who got to leave first— for what seemed like hours. When they finally got down to it, the race was over in less than ten seconds.
There was a lot of buzz in the crowd, but it had nothing to do with a murder. Everybody wondering if some guy named Gary was really going to show. I listened close, but all I could pick up was that this Gary was from Island Trees originally, moved to the Midwest a long time ago. Supposed to be the fastest gun on the East Coast years ago. Supposed to be coming back now. Maybe so, but it didn't happen that night.
Still nothing. When you're man-hunting, you can buy information. Lots of it's always for sale— separating the diamonds from the dirt is the trick. I knew the kind of people to ask, and I knew where to find them. But I didn't have a target. And I couldn't offer anything as good as what the cops would have already put on the table, a year ago.
I went through the motions, but I didn't lie to myself about it. I was marking time, waiting for Wolfe.

• • •

I
was watching a fight on ESPN2 when my cellular buzzed.
"You want to come here?" I asked Wolfe, holding the phone to my ear as I looked out the window into the darkness.
"Once was enough," she said.
"Just say where and when."
"Right now. You're close enough." Then she gave me an address on lower Broadway.

• • •

A
large office building, diagonally across from Federal Plaza, a few blocks away from what the tour operators like to call "ground zero." The man at the security guard's desk was hunched over a paperback, his back to me. I made enough noise to let him know I was there. He turned and looked up. Mick.
He walked into the freight elevator, me following. There was no floor indicator, but I could feel us going down.
Mick still had the paperback in his hand.
The Bottoms,
Joe Lansdale's long-running smash.
"You like that one?" I asked him. "Me, I like his Hap and Leonard stuff the best."
Mick pulled the lever and the car rattled to a stop. He pulled back the gate and pointed to the left— all the answer I was going to get.
I stepped out, moved toward the only light. Heard the elevator door close behind me, the whirl of the machinery as the car went back up to the lobby floor.
Some kind of storage room, near as I could tell. Wolfe was perched on a two-drawer lateral file cabinet, wearing blue jeans and a pink pullover with matching sneakers, her hair in pigtails. In that light, she looked like a teenage girl.
With a hostile Rottweiler.
"Ah, shut up, Bruiser," I said to the beast. "You know me." He snarled softly in agreement.
Wolfe pointed to a carton on the floor. Looked like it was stuffed with paper. "That's all the hard copy that's coming," she said. "The rest, you'll have to hear it from me."
"Fair enough."
"You're paying a lot of money for not very much," she said, like she was warning me against a bad investment.
"It's not my money."
"I know whose money it is. And I'm guessing there isn't a lot in here that they don't already have."
"Maybe."
"You don't sound so sure."
"I'm not. I know stuff's for sale. But, sometimes, there's no way the potential buyer can make contact without telling the seller more than what he wants him to know, right?"
"Sure. And you're saying you're just a cutout? They only hired you to get . . . what I've got?"
"If that's all they wanted, they could have used a go-between a long time ago. This town, you can find a thousand lawyers to do anything by the hour.
In
an hour. It's just like I told you it was— they hired me to find out who did it. And why."
"If there
is
a 'why,' " she said.
I wasn't going to argue with Wolfe about that one. She'd prosecuted hundreds of humans who did freakish things without a "why" that would make sense to anyone else. "Yes," is all I said.
"What do you want first?"
"It doesn't—"
"The stuff on the killing? Or on your clients?"
"Oh. The killing," I said, opting for the secondhand stuff before whatever Wolfe had dug up on her own.
"It
is
a Queens case, technically. But most of the spadework was done by the Long Island cops. That's where the girl lived, where all her friends were, where she went to school . . . you know."
"Did they form some kind of—?"
"Joint Task Force?" she said mockingly. "But of course! And it appears the feds got to play, too."
"Profilers?"
"Yep. But you know how that works. They— if they're very good— can tell you the
kind
of person who might have done it, but that's a few miles short of an ID. And, with a kill like this one, there isn't much guesswork involved. A freak or a frenzy. Or both." She took a deep drag off her smoke. "Or a cold-blooded attempt to make it look that way."
"They don't even have a guess?"
"Truly, no. Not that they didn't try. But there never
was
anybody they really liked for it."
"Because she had no one that close—?"
"She had boyfriends," Wolfe said. "Nothing super-deep. She wasn't pregnant. In fact, the autopsy said she was a virgin."
"So she wasn't—?"
"Raped? No. Or sodomized. No indications in her mouth, either. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a sex crime. Not with all that stabbing and slashing. You know how some of those maggots love their in-and-out."
"The wounds . . . ?"
"That's one of the things I got to look at, but not bring along. Ever since the slime-sheets started publishing autopsy photos, every coroner's office in the country tightened up. Good thing, too. What do you want to know?"
"The bloodwork?"
"Not all that useful, since so much time had passed. Coroner said
minimum
of two weeks since death. But, still, they went the route. Even toxed her hair. Negative on everything. Plus, she had no tracks, and there was no independent indication of drugs."
"Did it . . . the killing, look professional?"
"Professional? She was stabbed seventeen times!"
"If a pair of prison hit men cornered their target in the shower, they'd stick him that many times, just to be sure."
Wolfe lit another cigarette. Sucked in the smoke like bitter medicine. Held it down a couple of seconds, then blew a harsh jet across the room.
"I'd forgotten," she said softly.
"What?"
"How . . . tuned in you are. If you'd ever worked the other side of the street—"
"I'm working it now."
"That's what you say."
"Behavior is the truth," I told her. "We all live by that. Come up with another explanation for what I'm doing," I challenged her. "I can't be working for the killer, helping to cover his tracks. According to you, there aren't even any tracks to cover."
"You're working for gangsters."
"I didn't say I turned citizen," I said. "What I said was the truth— my job is to find whoever did it. And that's what I'm doing. It's a job a citizen
could
do, right?"
"Sure," she said.
"You believe me," I told her, sure of myself.
"Why do you say that?"
"You wouldn't have gotten me that info if you didn't."
"I'm in business."
"Bullshit. I know what you do for a living. And I know where your lines are."
"You're so certain?"
"Yeah."
I felt her gunfighter's eyes measuring me, waited for the judgment.
"She was just a kid," Wolfe finally said. "I wouldn't mind helping out anyone hunting whoever did it."
"More than one?" I asked her, not pressing the personal.
"Come again?"
"Edged weapons leave tracks, just like bullets. If more than one knife was used . . ."
"That's only true if they were used at the same time."
"And . . . ?"
"The TPO is very shaky, you know that much already."
I nodded. Time and Place of Occurrence is never more than a guess when the body isn't discovered at the original scene. "It would still help to know if there was more than one blade. Not likely two freaks would go off at the same time."
"Ask Bianchi and Buono," she said, in her diamond-cutting prosecutor's voice.
"The Hillside Stranglings weren't spontaneous," I told her. "Those two maggots had spent a lot of time together, mixing their juices, before they blended into a sex-kill unit. Felonious gestalt. Like Leopold and Loeb."
"Could have been the same thing here," Wolfe said, stubbornly. "There isn't enough information to even guess from."
"Sure," I said, trying to maneuver her back to where I needed her to be. "Let's work with what we have."
Wolfe leaned back a little, cast her eyes up as if the grungy basement ceiling had some answers. "The victim was stabbed
and
slashed," she said. "The same weapon could have inflicted all the wounds, if it was configured that way. Or it could have been more than one."
"Defensives?"
"No."
"No?"
"Her hands were clean. Wrists, too. Maybe the first thrust brought her down . . . ? I hope so."
I didn't say anything, the silence between us ugly with the thought we shared. Sure, it would be better if the first plunge had been right into her heart, so she wouldn't have died in pain and terror. But if Vonni had even so much as scratched one of them, maybe there'd have been some DNA under her fingernails.
"You see anything in the county-line thing?" I asked her.
"Oh, yes," she said, the deep contempt acid in her mouth. "There's jurisdictions known to be soft spots. A DA in charge who cares so much about a perfect conviction rate that he won't move on anything less than a signed confession.
"Rapists read the papers, especially when they're Inside, marinating in their own hate. For the child molesters, all the more so. Especially the 'boy lovers'— they've got a real underground wire, pass along information like they do photographs.
"What any freak's really looking for, with soft prosecutors, is a deal. You get a DA who's afraid of taking a case to trial, you can get him to give away the courthouse." She pulled on her cigarette, let the smoke float out her nose, ground out the butt on the side of the file cabinet, dropped it on the floor. "But that's for sex crimes," she went on. "For this, I don't see the logic. Doesn't matter how spineless the DA is— homicide like this's a guaranteed life-top, no matter where you do it."
"So the cops don't have a clue . . . whether it was a panic-dump, or part of a plan?"
"They don't even know where it happened. It's not possible she was just hanging out in the place where they found the body. She had to have been
brought
there. But that could have been from any direction. Maybe right after it was done, maybe a week later— nothing points either way, so far."
"How early can they pinpoint her, on the day she disappeared?"
"They can't pinpoint her at all," Wolfe said. "She walked out of her house and that was
it
. Nobody saw her. Nobody talked to her on the phone, and she didn't leave any answering-machine messages, either. Nobody got an e-mail from her. She didn't page anyone. She didn't have a cell phone. No letter she mailed that date . . . or after . . . ever came to anyone. Plus, not a single sighting from the minute she walked out of her house until the body was found."
"
Somebody
was supposed to meet her. She was being picked up."
"That's what she told her mother, sure."
"It seems likely to me," I said. "She didn't have a car. And the bus service around there is lousy at that hour."
"It's not so much lousy as lightly used," Wolfe corrected me, rapidly leafing through the paper until she found the document she wanted. "The police were all over that the very next morning," she said, tapping the paper for emphasis. "The driver was emphatic— no one
close
to the girl's description got on during his route. And, yes," she said, anticipating me, "there were already passengers on the bus by the time it got to her stop." She gave me a level look, waiting. When I didn't speak, she said, "They checked every car service, too. It's not like here— cabs don't cruise, you have to call them."
Wolfe held out her pack of smokes to me. I took one, fired a wooden match, lit her up first. Neither of us said anything for a while.
"I don't like this as a random," I told her. "The girl told her mother she had an appointment. And plans for the whole day, deep into the night. But, unless one or more of them's lying, none of her friends knew anything about it."
"People lie."
"That's what all those years as a prosecutor taught you. Thing is, they also tell the truth. And if someone she knew
is
lying, then either they're the person she met, or they know who it is. Doesn't sound random to me."
"The liar could be the girl herself."
"I thought of that. Off on an adventure, and she didn't know the territory. Sure. But teenagers, they don't usually go on adventures by themselves. Runaways, yeah. But you didn't see a shred in all that stuff you brought about a reason for the kid to run, did you?"
"No. But that doesn't mean—"
"I know," I said. "The mother didn't have a boyfriend?"
"There's no evidence she even dated. Why are you so big on that one?"
"I was in a case once. Mother's boyfriend, a few years younger than her, he was going at the daughter for years, since the kid was about nine or ten. Girl gets to be thirteen, she disappears one night while the mother is at work. During a big snowstorm. Boyfriend said he had a few beers watching TV, fell asleep, never saw her leave. They find the kid's body in a vacant lot, day or so later. The same snow that covered the kid covered whatever tracks there might have been.
"The cops find the girl's diary in her school locker. She thought she was having an 'affair' with the boyfriend. They were going to get married as soon as she became of age. She didn't want to wait."
"What did the boyfriend get?" she asked, eyes cold.
"Get? He never got
arrested
. They questioned him, but he was smart. Kept it very simple. Didn't admit anything. He had a prior— exact same MO, but no homicide. And he knew they couldn't even make out the stat rape without his confession, much less a killing, so he lawyered up immediately. Forensics were useless; they
had
lived in the same house."
"This isn't anything like that."
"Okay."