by R. H. Herron
What are you TALKING about? This is a police department, not a retail establishment. You think I have money in my desk?
All I know is that I’ll make a shit-ton more if I go public and sue the department. If I sue, you all lose your jobs, and I want you to be able to take care of Jojo, so I’m doing this as a favor to you. There are seven of them. That’s less than a hundred and fifty grand from each guy. They can each pull a second mortgage to shut me up, don’t you think?
It’s impossible.
Make it possible.
There were more—Omid saying he was working on it, saying he needed more time, saying he needed to meet with her.
You had your chance. Just work on making it rain for me, Daddy.
“How? How did she get like this? This is Harper!” She sank into the uncomfortable chair next to Omid’s bed and flicked through the messages—more of the same. Omid saying he was working on it, Harper threatening to go public.
“I have no idea.” Omid rubbed his temples. “Fuck, I have a headache.”
“That’s what you get for not telling me about this and then forgetting about it.”
Omid closed his eyes. “I wish I hadn’t remembered.”
“Did you talk to all the guys? All seven?”
Omid nodded, his eyes still shut.
“And?”
“And they’re trying to come up with the money. Toomey has it liquid, and the rest are pulling it from their houses or selling stocks.”
“You’re serious.”
He blinked his eyes open and stared at her. “As a fucking heart attack.”
This wasn’t Omid.
Omid took the high road.
Omid cleared house, he took names, he righted wrongs, he flipped tables in the temple. It’s what she loved about him. He was strong where she was weak. She’d crossed a line once, but he never would.
Omid was one of the good guys.
He didn’t cave to blackmail.
“Oh, my God.” He had to cave, and Harper was smart enough to know it. If he didn’t, he’d lose his department. They’d—all the men involved—lose their jobs, the city manager would sweep in and take it over. Omid would be the top sacrificial lamb.
They didn’t have enough in savings to get them through this kind of storm. No money for Jojo and college unless they sold the house. Their Golden Years Fund, the money they’d been planning on spending on a sailboat even though neither of them had taken sailing lessons yet, would be drained—and fast.
Not like she’d need golden years. Not with this man, the one she didn’t know anymore.
She leaned forward. “Who has her?”
Omid shook his head and stayed silent.
“Do you know?”
“Of course I don’t. But it’s not one of ours—it’s that fucking CapB. It has to be—everything is about that goddamn Kevin Leeds.”
“Your memory is back now, huh?” The trust Laurie’d had in her husband for eighteen years was gone. She would leave Omid for this. She could forgive infidelity before she could forgive him for covering up this serious a crime. She was the one in the family who had fucked up, who couldn’t be trusted. Not Omid. It had never been Omid. “Convenient.”
“Who do you think I am, anyway?”
Laurie had thought she’d known. “We have to go public, give it to the detectives and to the media. One of our guys might have her, even though that sounds impossible—”
“Kevin Leeds. There are no coincidences. Jojo was found at a murder scene. We go after him, after them. It’s a CapB thing, I know it.”
Laurie dug her nails into her palms. “If there are no coincidences, then what the hell do you make of a teenager threatening to take down a police department and then disappearing?”
He didn’t answer her.
Laurie gripped the rail on his bed. “What if this were Jojo? What if she were missing? You’d go to each of their houses and take them apart with your bare hands, just in case.”
Over the sheets his hands flexed. “Laurie.”
“You’d tear off the roofs and rip up their subfloors. You wouldn’t rest until you’d gotten her back.” She paused. “Why protect them? What if it was Jojo?”
“Jojo wouldn’t be having sex for money.”
It was such a terrible response she could barely take it in. “You asshole.” I can’t do this alone.
“Don’t tell her I knew.” He reached for her.
Laurie lurched backward. She hadn’t even considered telling Jojo. But Jojo knew everything else.
“Please, Laurie.” His face was a rictus of pain. “I’m begging you like I’ve never begged for anything in my whole life. Don’t tell her. She can’t know. She’d never get over it.”
Screw him. He’d never get over it.
But neither would Jojo. “What are we going to do?”
Finally he looked at her. Those black eyes, the ones she’d seen in every light, the ones she’d fallen in love with, were flat. There was no life behind them. “I don’t know.”
It was the last thing she expected him to say.
Laurie bent at the waist and tried to breathe.
THIRTY-SEVEN
IN HER BED Jojo read the Facebook messages—all of them—a dozen times.
The ones to the cops were gross. Super disgusting, actually. I want you to lick my button again. I get so wet when I think of u, like, I’m dripping right now. Who in the world would, number one, sleep with any of them and, number two, apparently get off on talking about it afterward?
And it seemed like Harper really got off on it. There was nothing she didn’t seem happy to discuss, and now that Jojo had imagined her getting the shocker from Dan Toomey, she had to admit that sex had gone back to just sounding nasty.
And the messages to her father . . .
She looked around her bedroom.
Randall, Jojo’s old teddy bear, was flopped sideways, as if he, too, had lost the will to live. She pulled him into her lap.
She squeezed.
There it was.
The lump.
Time for surgery. Using her fingers, she ripped into the side seam of his belly—the same one she’d gone into years ago—and pulled out the paper-towel-wrapped cube.
She unwrapped it. The small diamond gleamed. It fit on her middle finger, though she knew she couldn’t wear it there. The second ring they’d stolen that day, the one that hadn’t been reported or apparently even noticed missing, the one only she and Harper knew about.
Jojo got out of bed, scattering Randall’s innards as she did.
She pawed through her wooden jewelry box. There it was, the long silver chain Dad had given her last Christmas. She slipped it through the ring and clasped it around her neck.
Why, though? Why was she trying to get closer to Harper, a person it seemed like she barely knew?
What they’d done together in bed couldn’t have mattered at all, could it? Sex was apparently a job for Harper. Either that or she was really sick in the head, or both.
Jojo didn’t know which option made her want to cry more.
Downstairs, the front door gave its opening creak, making her jump. Mom. Jojo ran down the steps, carrying the cell phone with its fatal messages.
Mom was hanging up her sweater. “Hey.”
If Jojo didn’t tell her now about Dad, she’d lose her nerve. “Mama, there’s something . . . something you need to know.”
Her mother froze. “Is Harper back? Did they find her?”
Jojo shook her head. “Uh-uh.”
Her mother didn’t say anything. She held up one finger and kicked off her shoes. She left them there, which was freakish in itself. Mom didn’t usually ever leave shit lying around except in the trunk of her car, which always had enough junk in it for her to hold a garage sale. “Just give me one
second.”
“No—”
“Seriously, Jojo. One second.”
She went into the kitchen, leaving Jojo’s heart hammering in her throat.
And under her terror at telling her mother about what was on Harper’s cell phone was a sicker, darker feeling.
Dad wasn’t Dad. She’d read the messages he’d sent to Harper. He wasn’t the man she thought she knew. Dad, covering shit up? Willing to talk about blackmail? With the girl Jojo loved so much it sometimes hurt her heart?
Mom came back carrying a glass full of wine. “Okay. Tell me. Is this about your father?”
Shock was a gut punch. “Yeah.”
“I saw his Facebook messages to her. He showed me.”
Tears rose in the back of Jojo’s throat, but she was angry, and she didn’t want them. She swallowed as hard as she could. “He’s not doing it right.” Childish playground words, but they were all she had. “He’s doing it wrong.”
“I know.” Mom sat next to her and held out her arm.
Jojo leaned in. “How could he?”
“He’s doing the best he can, but he doesn’t know how to—”
“He’s a good cop,” she interrupted, in case Mom had forgotten. “He’s not a bad cop.” But Dad was covering up a crime. Multiple crimes. Big ones. “He knows that she’s underage. Like, technically, she’s a child.” God, it sounded sick that way. Jojo was a child by those standards, too. She tried to picture herself fucking any one of the officers and only felt a slick of nausea rise in her gullet.
“I know.”
The words came then, the ones she wanted to hold back but couldn’t. “Harper saw me.” Oh, God, that was the wrong tense. “She sees me. No one ever sees me.”
Mom frowned. “Huh?”
No one saw her. Not in her whole life. Harper, on the playground when they were four, had seen her. She’d never stopped. Harper made Jojo feel special, sparkly, like someone magical, not just a girl who got decent grades and didn’t suck at soccer. Harper saw inside her—Mom and Dad never had. Her parents thought she was going to become someone impressive and smart and important someday, which was why they didn’t want her going into emergency services.
Harper had always thought she was impressive and smart and important.
But what if that had all been a lie?
Like Dad had been lying. “What’s he going to do? Does one of them have her? He has to go public with it, right? He has to.”
“I don’t know.”
Jojo twisted and pulled her legs up, so that she sat cross-legged facing her mother. She folded her arms. “What part don’t you know?”
“Any of it.”
Panic streaked through Jojo’s body, opening like a zipper from the top of her head to the bottom of her feet. If Dad didn’t know, and if Mom didn’t know, then what the fuck were they supposed to do? “Mom?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to scare you.”
“Too late.”
Mom looked surprised. Jojo guessed it was a long time since she’d admitted she was scared of anything, least of all to her mother. “Baby—”
“I wish you’d stop calling me that.”
“Okay.” Mom closed her eyes, as if by doing that she could shut Jojo up.
So Jojo said, “Also, I might be gay.”
Mom choked on her wine.
The terror grew wider, opening into a chasm in her chest, the Grand Canyon of fear. She didn’t know if she was more scared of Mom not accepting her or the fact that it might be true. “I mean, I might not be gay. I have no idea.”
“Joshi.”
Tears spilled down Jojo’s cheeks, and she swiped them away angrily. “I don’t want to talk about it.” Why had she said it? She was such an idiot.
Mom reached out a hand to touch her cheek. Her palm was warm, and it smelled like the Jergens lotion she’d used forever. “I love you.”
Jojo made a strangled noise. It was all she had.
“Listen to me, Jojo. I love you so hard that you could do anything, be anything, and I’d love you. You could murder six babies and eat them, and I’d be really upset, but I’d love you.”
Jojo’s spine went rigid. “So being gay—possibly being gay—is like being a baby-killing cannibal? Are you actually serious?”
“No! Shit. Sorry. I’m just—”
“Because that’s completely offensive, you know that, right? I thought you were all for human rights.”
“I am. Jesus, Jojo, it’s just a lot.”
Jojo unfolded and refolded her arms even tighter against her chest. “Sorry that you found out your daughter might be a dyke”—it was the first time she’d said the word out loud, and it sounded dirty and hollow in her mouth—“and that your husband is a piece of shit all on the same night.”
Mom looked wounded, as if Jojo had said something unfair, but she hadn’t. Jojo might be a dyke. Dad was a crooked cop, willing to cover up crimes of his own staff to avoid a scandal.
Jojo’s phone pinged with a text. She looked at it automatically—it was from a number she didn’t recognize.
Cordelia, where’s your ring?
Her heart pounded in her temples.
No one called her Cordelia but Harper.
No one.
No one else knew about the second ring she still had.
Harper’s still alive, but she probably wishes she wasn’t. Love, CapB.
She felt the blood drain from her hands and face, and she went cold all over. The ring on its chain felt heavy under her shirt.
“What?” Mom demanded. “Give it to me.”
Jojo held out the phone.
Mom gasped. She stood and then sat right back down. “Whose number is this?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who’s Cordelia?”
“Me. I am. So is Harper.” Literally no one knew that. They’d kept it their secret code name for each other.
The rings they’d stolen had been their Cordelia rings.
Harper’s still alive, but she probably wishes she wasn’t. Harper was wishing for death? What were they doing to her? Jojo’s stomach heaved.
Now Mom said, “How are you both Cordelia? I don’t understand!”
Was she ignoring the most important part on purpose? “She wishes she wasn’t alive! Mom!”
“Honey, if it’s CapB, it’s him. It’s Kevin. You know that.”
They were missing something. She could feel it. As her mother finished talking, Jojo closed her eyes and thought as hard as she could. It felt like doing math in her head, the same kind of preliminary confusion, but if she just thought for a minute . . .
“I’ll call dispatch,” Mom said, her phone already in her hands. “They can run the number and see if it matches anything we have.”
Jojo formed herself into a ball on the couch, bringing up her knees and hugging them against her chest as hard as she could. “You can’t call them.”
No answer from her mother.
“Mom? Mom! Hang up! It has to be a cop.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
LAURIE WAS SO involved in trying to figure out what the next steps would be—no Omid to help her—that she didn’t listen to her daughter’s words at first.
She didn’t hear her until Jojo was standing up, in her face, almost shouting, “It isn’t CapB! And it isn’t Kevin! It’s got to be a cop!”
“But the text says—” She caught herself. She sounded like an average citizen, believing what was in front of her face instead of really thinking about it. “Okay, what?”
“Kevin. It wasn’t him. He wouldn’t set CapB up like that—he loves them. They love him.” Jojo shook her head hard. “I think someone is trying really hard to make it look like it’s CapB, except it’s someone else, trying to throw us off the scent. But that message means it has to be s
omeone who knows that Harper and I are involved with the group.”
“You were assaulted in his house.” She still couldn’t stay the word rape to Jojo. “In his house.”
“Kevin’s gay.”
The sudden pivot of topic made her head hurt. “No he’s not.” Kevin Leeds was dating some model, wasn’t he? He was last year, anyway, when he first started hitting the news for being an activist.
“He told me. I didn’t want to tell because it’s not my secret, but I had to. Didn’t I?”
Laurie crossed her arms hard across her chest. “So what?”
“So he didn’t rape me. And that means that—”
“Believe it or not, a gay man can rape a woman. It’s about power, not—”
“I know.” Jojo cut her off. “I get that. I’m not stupid. But listen. Kevin is my friend. The people in CapB are my friends, too. I know you hate that, but it’s true. I know I can trust them.”
“How?”
“How do you know you can trust yours?”
Laurie winced. Most of her friends worked with her. And she had no idea how she could trust any of them anymore. “What are you saying, exactly?”
“It could be anyone on that list that she was chatting with. You know her, she’ll tell anyone anything. Except Ramsay. It’s probably not him because he’s dead.” Jojo covered her mouth for a moment.
Laurie’s heart clenched in her chest. “I still don’t . . . I can’t accept that it’s a cop. Not one of ours.”
“Mom, use your head. Why would CapB, a group working for the good of humanity—”
Laurie resisted the urge to roll her eyes.
“—kidnap a girl, one who’s been working with them? That would mean Kevin was in on it, right? And his lover is dead.”
Laurie gaped. “Zachary Gordon was his . . .”
Jojo nodded shortly. “He wouldn’t rape me and kill the man he loves. He wouldn’t hide Harper, and he wouldn’t try to implicate his group with a terrifying text. Unless he hated CapB or something, but he doesn’t.” Jojo’s voice was raw. “He loves it. And the organization loves him. They idolize him. They wouldn’t do this. There’s nothing in it for them except the end of the group. On the other hand, Harper has been extorting money from these officers. From Dad.” It hurt so bad to say it out loud. “To keep it out of the papers. The one thing that would make it go away is if she went away. It has to be one of the guys on the list.”
