He was a scrawny kid, probably no more than eighteen. Close cropped brown hair, innocent Boy Scout looks. But not an innocent mouth.
“Fuck!” he yelled as Finn grabbed him by the waistband and hauled him back through the wire. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
The Boy Scout clawed at the front of his jeans, whirled like a dervish, landed on one knee. Then he burst up out of the crouch jabbing something toward Finn. A stiletto abruptly sprang from the silver cylinder in his hand. Finn leapt back as the kid slashed the right side of his jaw with a switchblade.
“Now you’re pissing me off,” Finn growled.
The kid slashed wildly again, snicking Finn’s shirt front this time, and as the back of his hand passed, Finn gave the kid a swift kick in the side. The knife flew from his hand, sailing into the bushes. The violence felt alarmingly satisfying; and Finn realized he had been wanting to hit someone for quite a while now.
“Fuck you,” the Boy Scout managed to yelp as he dropped to his knees, holding his side and gasping in pain. He stared at Finn and then pursed his lips, working up saliva.
No. This lousy day was not going to end that way. Finn popped him in the nose before he got a face full of spit from the little twerp, and then shoved the Boy Scout face down in the dirt. Straddling him, he bent the kid’s arms back, pulling his handcuffs from the back of his belt. “Get a thesaurus, kid. Learn some new vocabulary.”
He hauled the Scout to his feet by an elbow and marched him back to the cars. Scoletti was stuffing Dreadlocks into his patrol car. The other officer—his nametag said Barton—approached to take possession of the Boy Scout. Stopping in his tracks, the officer said, “Whoa.”
Barton’s eyes wandered over the kid’s bloody face, then took in the slashes on Finn’s jaw and chest, and finally rested on Finn’s right leg. “Want me to call an ambulance?”
Finn looked down. The bottom of his pants leg was drenched with blood that was still pouring out of a gash in his calf. Must have been the collision with the engine block. And damn, now that he saw the extent of the damage, his leg started to throb. “Just let me borrow your first aid kit.”
“Sure thing.” Barton grabbed the Boy Scout by the arm. “What’s the charge, Detective?”
“Burglary, for starters,” Finn said. “Resisting arrest. Assaulting a police officer.”
“Fuck you,” said the Boy Scout.
“Add the usual foul language penalty,” Finn joked. “And demerits for lack of imagination.”
It felt so good to finally catch some bad guys. He followed the patrol cars to the station, where the Sarge insisted that a uniform take him to the hospital.
After twelve stitches in his calf and six on his jawline, Finn returned to the station, spotted with bandages and lugging two ice packs, to interview the suspects.
Kathryn Larson had thoughtfully held off so that they could grill the kids at the same time. Larson took Dreadlocks to the break room, flipping the sign on the window to indicate it was in use. In Finn’s absence, she’d identified the Boy Scout—20-year old Elijah James Winter—and had an EMT examine the kid’s nose. Elijah was handcuffed to a chair in the interview room when Finn limped in and sat down, pressing the ice pack against his burning jaw.
The Boy Scout held a matching ice pack to his nose with his free hand. Without prelude, he whined, “It was all Octo’s idea. He said I had to do it or he’d pound my ass.”
“Octo?”
“That’s what he calls himself.” The kid squinted at him. “The hair. Like octopus arms. His real name’s probably Wilbur,” the kid sniggered. “Or Stanley.””
“If you say so, Elijah.”
The kid’s eyes narrowed. “I go by Lie.”
“Good choice. Descriptive.”
The blue eyes looking back at him over the ice bag sobered. “Octo’s the iceman, dude. Everyone knows he friendly-fired a whole platoon in Iraq.”
“Yeah?” Finn didn’t think either of them looked old enough to join the military. “No wonder you’re scared of him.”
“You gotta protect me from him.”
“Then you need to give me the whole story so I can lock him up.”
“He made me steal those things.”
“Where’d you get the ketamine?” Finn asked.
“Ketamine?”
“The little drug vials.” Those were probably the least valuable items the kids had stolen, but they might lead him to Gumu.
The kid rolled his eyes. “That stuff. I didn’t even want to take it. Pills are easier to sell. Not many freaks want to stick themselves, you know?”
“Where did you get the ketamine?”
“I didn’t steal it. Someone dumped it.”
“Where?”
“You know those shacks across from Vista Village? I found it on the ground there.”
“When?”
“Saturday night.” He set the ice bag down on the table and used his thumb and forefinger to feel the swollen bridge of nose. “Around six thirty?”
“You live in Vista Village?”
“Nah. But I work there a lot, cleaning carpets and drapes.”
So Elijah had been the carpet cleaner working next door to the Duprees. “Why would you stop at the shacks across the street?”
“I seen one car drive in and three cars peel out.” He glanced warily at Finn. “They seemed in kind of a hurry, so I thought they mighta dropped something, left something important behind. You know, like something valuable that someone would miss.”
“Or that they were stashing stolen goods in empty buildings just like you were.”
The kid ignored that. “Only one of them little vials had anything in it.” He pressed the ice bag to his face again. “There was a fuckin’ dart there, too.” He tried to hold up his left hand, but the cuff clanked against the table. “I stuck my finger on that fuckin’ thing. Hope I don’t get some sicko freak disease. Blow darts? Like some fuckin’ Indiana Jones movie or somethin’.”
“What did you do with that dart?” It might contain important evidence—human or gorilla blood or human prints.
“Tossed it in the weeds.”
Finn wondered if it was worth sending an evidence tech or a uniform out to look for it. “What can you tell me about the vehicles you saw over there?”
“Three guys came in a white utility van, you know, like Comcast has, but a lot more beat up. Said Rent-a-Wreck on the side. They unloaded something from the van; I couldn’t see what. Then one got into this really old car—it was like from way back in the eighties or something, and one of ‘em took off in that, and one of ‘em followed in a piece of junk old Toyota.”
It was the same story the Duprees’ neighbor had told. Had the Toyota been Ty Linero’s car? Had the utility van had a gorilla in it? “What time did you come back to rob the Dupree home?”
The kid licked his lips nervously. “Did Octo get a lawyer? You think I should get a lawyer?”
Finn stood up.
Elijah plopped the ice bag on the table and held out his free hand. “Hey, no hard feelings, right? I popped you; you got me back. I’m not yelling police brutality or nothing.”
“We’ll be sure to keep that in mind, Elijah.” As the door closed behind him, Finn heard the Boy Scout say “Fuck” again.
He met Kathryn Larson in the hallway. She held up her right hand; he matched it with a high-five. “Now to sort out the loot,” she said. “Returning all that stuff will get us a lot of gold stars. Maybe even enough to outweigh your demerits, Finn.”
Finn snorted and rubbed a hand over his head. He was exhausted.
The other detective studied him. “You know your shift was over two hours ago, right? I’ll mop up here.”
“I still have to find a gorilla.”
“And I have to find great grandma’s corpse,” she sighed. “And Ryan Connelly.”
“Lots of finding to do,” he agreed.
“Kind of like being a detective, isn’t it? Any apes appear on the radar tonight, I’ll let
you know.”
“And any shriveled DBs and lunatics I stumble across are all yours.” They bumped fists and parted ways.
As he limped back to his desk, he heard a familiar voice emanating from the Captain’s office.
“How long are we going to allow that woman to terrorize our county and make us the laughingstock of the whole damn country? The Council’s revoking her permit to keep those apes.”
Travis Fielding, County Commissioner. The last voice Finn wanted to hear right now. He couldn’t make out the Captain’s quieter reply.
“We’re doing our jobs. You do yours, if you expect to keep it!” Fielding bellowed.
Because he had investigated his son Charlie last year and outed the Fielding family’s embarrassing financial difficulties, Finn was still high on the Commissioner’s hit list. He quickly retreated to his car, where he tried Grace’s landline number. When he held the phone to his ear, he inadvertently brushed his wounded jaw. Wincing, he shifted the phone to the other ear.
“The voicemail box you have reached is full. Please try again later.”
Crap. He tried her cell phone with the same results. Double crap. Grace was no doubt still besieged with calls from reporters.
He slid the seat back and tried to stretch his legs. A jolt of pain from his injured calf made his vision go white for a second. Damnation, whatever the doc used to deaden the gash before suturing was wearing off fast.
After the fog in front of his eyes drifted away, he turned his thoughts back to what he’d learned from Elijah. He called Rent-a-Wreck and asked about white vans that had been rented recently. The clerk said they only had one. And it had been rented for the weekend to Tyrone Linero.
Aha! Ty, boyfriend of Heather, conveniently gone missing at the same time as a valuable gorilla. Finn gingerly shifted to a more comfortable position in his seat. “Where is that van now?”
“Let me see.” Finn heard keystrokes in the background. “It came back on Sunday, and now it’s rented to Linda Swartzski ... Schwarzaki ... something like that. Man, what a name, huh?”
“Who dropped it off on Sunday?”
“We don’t keep that. The record just says returned 10:17 a.m. Sunday, with 195 miles added to the odometer. It has a checkmark under ‘Good condition’ and there’s a note that says “Washed inside and out.”
“What do you do to your vehicles after you get them back?”
“Run ‘em through the car wash, vacuum the interior, and since this is a utility van, they mighta hosed the inside out if it still needed it. We don’t exactly detail them, if that’s what you’re asking. This is Rent-a-Wreck, not Rent-a-Rolls-Royce.” He chuckled at his own joke.
After the first washing, there was little chance of recovering meaningful trace evidence. The second left faint hope of finding anything at all. But Finn took down the current renter’s contact information and passed it along to the Sarge with a request to assign an evidence tech to try to lift prints and check for blood and hair inside the van.
“Human blood and hair?” Greer asked. “Or gorilla?”
As if an evidence tech could tell on sight. “Either. Both.”
He tried the two numbers he had for “Ty” and “Ro” Linero. Voicemail in both places again. Tomorrow he’d call from a spoofed number, see if that would net him better luck.
Ty was the good Linero kid, Heather had told him.
Hardly.
Three guys at the migrant camp; three vehicles. Ty Linero, obviously—he’d rented the van, and the Toyota sounded like his, too. Leroy Shane was a good bet, too. He was driving Ty’s car, so there was obviously a connection. But who was the third man? Tony Zyrnek?
Had Gumu been in the back of the van? Alive? Or dead? The van had taken off in the direction of town and the highway. He suddenly remembered the fresh heap of compost in Zyrnek’s yard.
His shift was long over and the sun had already set as he drove to Brigadoom. His headlights showed that the compost heap was gone. It was too dark to see much, but white tags fluttered at the edges of a dark square. Looked like Zyrnek had planted his garden.
Tony Zyrnek pulled open the door. The bandage on his hand sported multicolored stains. He took one look at Finn and drawled, “You look like you been rode hard and put away wet.”
“Long day.” Finn cautiously touched the bandage on his jaw as he limped into the mobile home.
No enticing cooking aromas lingered in the air this time. Clearly he was too late for dinner. The television was off. A multicolored array of crayons and a drawing pad were laid out under a harsh light over the tiny dining room table. Centered on the table top was a purple bearded iris in a blue-green glass vase. A half-finished representation of the flower lay on the surface of the table in front of a pulled-out chair.
“Where’s Jon?” Finn asked.
“Guard duty, he said.” Zyrnek sat down in the chair he had vacated and gestured to the one across the table. “He feels so guilty about Gumu. He figures the least he can do for Dr. McKenna is to keep the reporters out of her hair. Caryn and Sierra are keeping him company.”
Remorse set in along with fatigue as Finn plopped down heavily in the wooden chair. He should have thought of the security angle himself; the press had probably surrounded Grace’s compound by now. “Damn reporters.”
“That’s the other thing Jon said.” Zyrnek ripped a sheet of cold press paper from the pad and shoved it toward Finn, along with the plastic tray of crayons. “Help yourself. These are what they call student grade, but they’re still pretty decent.”
On closer inspection, Finn saw they weren’t crayons, but pastel sticks. He picked up a blue-green stick labeled Peacock. It felt heavy and thick, more like chalk than a colored pencil. “I’m not here to draw with you, Zyrnek.”
“Sorry; I don’t have paints. Only pastels. They didn’t let us have the brushes in prison.”
Finn supposed it would be a quick job to hone a plastic or wooden brush handle into a nasty shiv. The stitches on his jaw burned with the reminder of a sharp blade. “What do you know about Rent-a-Wreck?”
The question seemed to surprise Zyrnek. “They rent old cars?” He hovered his hand over the box and then selected a pastel stick.
The guy lobbed answers back so quickly, Finn felt like he was in a tennis match. He lobbed one back at him. “You were seen out at the migrant shacks across from Vista Village.”
Zyrnek tilted his head. “Has to be a mistake. I don’t even know where that is. What was I supposedly doing out there, and when? I got a curfew, you know.”
“I see you planted your garden.”
“Yep. Greens, squash, tomatoes, herbs. Some ought to be up a few days.”
“How deep did you dig?”
“Six feet down.” Zyrnek waited a beat as he made strokes on the paper. Then he looked up and grinned. “Actually, the rototiller digs down about eight inches, I think. Maybe ten. Feel free to stick a ruler in. Or bring one of those X-ray gizmos that can see through dirt. Could be buried treasure down there.”
“I might do that.” Finn frowned. “Did you talk to Pinder?”
“You probably know I did.” Zyrnek gave him a sly look. “And I’ll bet you already know what we talked about, so you know Jarvis wouldn’t say anything very interesting.”
“Did he say anything about Leroy Shane?”
Zyrnek shook his head. “Didn’t mention him. The only thing Jarvis ever says about Leroy is that Leroy ‘done him wrong’ and is ‘gonna pay up what he owes or else he’s gonna die.’”
If Zyrnek was telling the truth about Pinder’s influence outside of the prison, that sounded like motive for Shane to do whatever Pinder asked. But that was a big if. It seemed much more likely that all the ex-cons on the outside had concocted some gorilla kidnapping scheme. “Tell me the truth about Ty Linero.”
“Ty?” Zyrnek’s gaze flicked between the flower and his paper as he stroked his flower’s edges in a deep rose. “All I know is what Heather’s told me.”
&nb
sp; “What did she say?” Finn touched the tip of his pastel stick to the paper, drew a tentative stroke for the left side of the vase.
“That he was a good guy.” Zyrnek made a scoffing noise as he rummaged in the box, trading his rose pastel for a blue purple hue. “How good could he be, taking off on a woman and baby like that?”
The trail left by the pastel stick did not feel like a wax crayon, as Finn had expected. The texture was somewhere between chalk and grease. Finn smeared it with his index finger to see how the pastel worked on the rough paper, transitioning the color from a dark sharp edge to a pale center to represent the translucent glass vase. “Did Pinder ever talk about Linero?”
“Yeah, sometimes.” Zyrnek twirled his stick, tracing the curly edges of the iris. “The families grew up on the same block. Sometimes Jarvis would talk about how this Linero was a bad ass and other times he’d talk about how that Linero was a goody two shoes.”
“What did you think of Tyrone?”
“Never met the guy. I’ve just heard Heather and Jarvis talk about him.”
So Zyrnek was sticking to that story. Finn added a streak of dark green to the vase on his paper. “Did Pinder call Linero ‘Ty’ or ‘Ro’?”
“He mostly said just Linero.” Zyrnek stopped drawing and looked at Finn. “Heather said Ty was always the good one.”
“It seems like Linero has a Jekyll and Hyde thing going.”
“Guess Ty does, what with taking off like that. But Jarvis said that Ro was always the bad ass.”
Finn paused, his pastel stick dangling from his fingers. Ty and Ro were different people?
Zyrnek focused his gaze on the flower and started working on his picture again. “I’ve been thinking about Jarvis, and I got to wondering where he met DeeDee. But he wouldn’t say, and it’s not smart to ask Jarvis too many questions. I’ve heard them talking in Spanish, and Jarvis dealt drugs from South America. So maybe they met down there?”
The Only Clue Page 22
