The photo was the side view of a fairly ordinary-looking black man in his mid-thirties, with short hair and a roundish face that was partially obscured by a beard, and a cheap suit that looked like it had been bought when he’d been a few pounds lighter.
She shook her head. ‘I’ve never seen him before. He doesn’t look much like a Mexican gangster.’
‘No, he doesn’t. So maybe he might have something to do with Paige’s abduction.’
‘Can you find out if your police contact recognizes him?’ Brook asked, clinging to the faint hope that this man might be the one who had Paige, and comforting herself that he didn’t look like the type who could hurt a child.
‘I’m sorry, Ms Connor, but I don’t want anything more to do with this case. I’ve already told you more than I feel comfortable with.’
‘If you’d told me it before, my five-year-old daughter would have been safely with me, instead of God knows where.’
It was a low blow, and an effective one, too. Cervantes looked genuinely hurt. ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he said reluctantly.
‘Can I have the file as well?’ she said, putting out a hand. ‘After all, it does belong to me.’
‘You need to go to the police, Ms Connor.’
‘I need to find my daughter, Mr Cervantes. If I go to the police, I’ll probably be arrested. And right now I’m the only person Paige has got left. So I’m going to find out where she is and, if she’s alive, I’m going to take her home – and then I’ll go to the police and face whatever consequences need facing. And if Paige is dead, then I’m going to find who did it, and I’m going to kill them.’
In the years since her parents had died, Brook had always preached a gospel of independence, determination and positive thinking. The first line in her debut book, You Can Be the Hero, said it all:
Do you want your life story to be something you read with pride or shame?
Brook had always fought to live by that ethos. At times, especially in the past thirty-six hours, it had been incredibly hard, but sitting there now, in Cervantes’s smoky little office, she knew she had to fight back, whatever the cost to her. She owed it to Paige.
Cervantes saw the change in her expression. It looked like he was about to say something, then he clearly thought better of it and handed her the file.
‘Be careful,’ he said as Brook got to her feet.
‘It’s a bit late for that,’ she answered, and walked out the door.
16
The police interview room
Now
Detective Giant cleared his throat and interrupted Brook Connor’s story.
‘The problem we have, Ms Connor, is that your husband’s body was discovered in the trunk of your car in your garage, having gone unreported by you, and the murder weapon is one of your kitchen knives. You’ve admitted that you and he had a fight, and that he struck you in the face, causing a severe swelling, which is still visible now, three days later. And, most importantly, at this moment we have no one who can back up any aspect of your story.’
‘And you’ve even given us your motive,’ said Jenna, making a play of consulting her notes. ‘I quote: “I knew that losing Paige now would mean the end of my own life.” That’s what you said, isn’t it, Brook? I’m sure we can go back and play it on the interview tape, if you want us to.’
‘I know that’s what I said,’ said Brook testily. ‘But I didn’t mean it like that.’
Angie Southby put a hand on Brook’s arm, motioning for her to stop talking, before speaking herself. ‘What my client said shows how much she cares for her daughter, and proves there’s no way she would ever harm her.’
Jenna shrugged. ‘If your client thought her husband was going to take Paige away from her, it’s not inconceivable that she ended up killing them both. There’s a long, long list of cases where a parent kills a child to prevent them from being taken away. And let’s be perfectly frank. It’s not even as if Ms Connor is a blood relation of Paige.’
‘Fuck you!’ snapped Brook, and for a split second Giant thought she was going to jump out of her chair and strike Jenna, but she managed to compose herself. ‘I love that child with all my heart,’ she said tightly. ‘Jesus, she is all I’ve got.’
‘It’s ridiculous to suggest that my client murdered her daughter,’ said Southby, in that aggressive tone of hers. ‘You’ve been through her family home from top to bottom, as well as both the family cars. Have you found any evidence that any harm might have come to Paige?’
‘Not yet,’ said Jenna, meeting her eye. ‘But we’re still looking.’
‘And are you simply looking for evidence of my client’s supposed guilt or are you actually looking for her five-year-old daughter? Because you’re going to look very, very bad if she’s out there alive somewhere and you’re in here, accusing her mother of her murder.’
‘We’ve had the full resources of the US Marshals Service searching for Paige for the past thirty-six hours,’ said Giant, who always got annoyed when his, and his colleagues’, competence was called into question. ‘And as you both well know, Paige Harris’s photo has been all over the media, which means that pretty much everyone in the whole country knows about her. And yet so far we haven’t had a single reported sighting. Not one. Which suggests to me that she may be dead.’ He looked at both client and attorney in turn. ‘Now don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing I want more than for us to find Paige alive and well, but given the time that’s passed since she was last seen and the lack of recent news, we wouldn’t be doing our jobs if we weren’t preparing for the worst.’ He thought about adding that right now they had cadaver dogs searching for any sign of a child’s body in the grounds of the house where Brook had been arrested earlier that night, but he was still finding it hard to believe that the bruised, dishevelled woman in front of him would have killed the little girl – stepdaughter or not.
As he laid out the facts for her, Giant could see Brook getting paler. She swallowed several times in quick succession, and he was about to ask if she was all right when she spoke.
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I know how at least some of this looks. I didn’t love Logan, not any more. I told you that. And I did hire a private detective to follow him, because I thought he was almost certainly seeing other women and I wanted to be prepared, in case he left me for someone else because, yes, I didn’t want to lose Paige.’
In spite of himself, Giant found himself feeling sorry for her, but that had always been his problem. He couldn’t help getting emotionally involved in cases. It had almost destroyed him in the past, and he had no desire to repeat the process. ‘But that’s the thing, isn’t it, Ms Connor?’ he said gently. ‘There was nothing you could have done if your husband had decided to leave and take Paige with him. He was her biological parent. So what was the point of hiring a private detective?’
‘I guess, first of all, I wanted to find out if Logan was actually seeing someone seriously. I think if he’d chosen to leave me, I’d have tried to get him to agree to joint custody or, failing that, I’d have made him a financial offer. Logan didn’t have much money of his own.’
‘But he wouldn’t need your financial offer, would he, Ms Connor?’ put in Jenna. ‘He could just have divorced you. Taken 50 per cent of your wealth, as well as Paige. And there would have been nothing you could have done about it. In fact the only way of avoiding a scenario like that – given that your marriage, by your own admission, was on the rocks – was if your husband was dead.’
‘I would never have killed my husband,’ said Brook firmly. ‘There would have been another way. There’s always another way.’
But this was Giant’s one big problem with her story. Whichever way you looked at it – and Giant had been looking at it plenty of different ways – the only satisfactory outcome for Brook was her husband’s death.
He exchanged looks with Jenna, then leaned forward across the desk. ‘This isn’t the first time you’ve been caught up in murder, is it?’
/> Brook’s eyes narrowed. ‘Are you referring to my parents?’
‘What the hell has that got to do with anything?’ demanded Angie Southby.
‘The circumstances surrounding your parents’ deaths have always been controversial,’ continued Giant.
‘The case was closed,’ said Southby.
‘And there have been several attempts to reopen it.’
‘All of which have failed. It’s been proven as a case of murder/suicide.’
Giant ignored Southby, knowing he couldn’t let this go. ‘You were the sole beneficiary of their will, Ms Connor, and in many ways the money you inherited has been the foundation of your success.’
Brook gave him a withering look. ‘Not only are you suggesting that I killed my parents, but that even my success is nothing to do with me? What the hell else are you going to accuse me of? Getting someone else to write my books?’
Giant’s expression didn’t change. ‘In my experience, lightning doesn’t usually strike twice. A coincidence of this size makes us naturally more suspicious, that’s all.’ He had no idea whether Brook had been involved in her parents’ death or not. In truth, it didn’t look that way, from what he knew of the case – but it was his duty to take this line of questioning, even though he didn’t enjoy doing it. Brook had been proclaimed innocent of all charges, and all he was doing was sticking a particularly sharp knife into an old wound.
And she did look genuinely hurt by what he was saying.
But then, as her lawyer intervened yet again to complain about the line of questioning, Giant saw Brook’s expression change. It was as if a light bulb had suddenly gone off in her head, and she stared at him, her mouth forming a weird little smile.
‘I don’t believe in coincidences, either,’ she said, her words quietening the room.
Giant frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You know I told you that Cervantes saw my husband talking to a black man in his car at the tennis courts a week ago Friday. I didn’t recognize the man in the photo at the time, because he had a full-face beard. But I recognize him now.’
She fixed Giant with a stare that made him want to look away. ‘And who is he?’ he asked.
‘I think you know the answer,’ said Brook. ‘It was you.’
Part Two
17
A week ago
Friday
Right back from when he’d been a young kid, Tyrone Giant had wanted to be a cop. Even the death of his father, a Los Angeles patrolman shot dead by an armed robber when he was only twelve years old, didn’t deter him. Nor did his mother’s desperate requests for him to do another, safer job instead. His older brother became a truck driver, and his sister a marketing executive, so at least two of the three siblings did as they were told. But for Tyrone there was no alternative. As far as he was concerned, his father had believed in what he was doing. It may have got him killed, but Tyrone knew he’d be proud that his son had become a cop. ‘Someone’s got to bring the bad guys to justice,’ his father had told him once when he was a young kid. ‘And if you wait for other people to do it, you could be waiting a hell of a long time.’
The reality of being a cop didn’t quite fit Tyrone’s fantasy, though. He might have had a big name, but he wasn’t a big guy, and he didn’t have a tough demeanour. He carried too much puppy fat, especially on his face, which was round and cherubic, and however much exercise he did, his jawline remained weak and ill-defined. But he still got through the training, ignoring the ribbing of his fellow trainees, and became a patrolman working out of one of the more upmarket ends of Oakland.
His very first arrest was of a drunk outside a bar in Berkeley and it went badly. The drunk – a middle-aged man who could hardly stand up – turned on Giant and they’d ended up on the floor, rolling around and fighting in a heap while passers-by stood and stared, until finally backup had arrived and, when they’d finished laughing, had pulled them apart. A few days later, some wag had stuck a flyer on Giant’s locker with his face superimposed on the body of a heavyweight boxer rippling with muscles. Even his sergeant, who was a decent, paternal sort nearing retirement, had taken Giant aside and asked him if he was really in the right job.
But Giant was nothing if not determined. He started hitting the gym every day and took up boxing. The puppy fat remained, largely because of his addiction to fried food, and although he’d never win any awards for his pugilistic skills, he learned enough that there were no more embarrassing struggles during his arrests, and his colleagues came to accept him, even if he never did truly feel like one of the boys.
But Giant’s ambition had never been to remain in uniform. He considered himself a lateral thinker who liked to solve puzzles and so, as soon as he was able, he applied to be a detective, and passed all the exams with flying colours. He was good at it, too – mainly because he was very observant, and was good at putting all his observations together to make a whole. His patch was downtown Oakland, so there was plenty to keep him busy, and he gained something of a name for himself when his diligent detective work led to the arrest of a serial rapist who’d been targeting women living alone. After weeks of trawling for links between the five rapes, often working alone and late at night, Giant had worked out that all the victims had had takeout pizzas delivered to their homes at some point in the three months before they’d been attacked. Although those pizzas had been ordered from three different outlets several miles apart, Giant was convinced he was on to something, and through a combination of checking the employee records of the outlets, plus on- and off-the-record interviews with the managers and delivery drivers, he’d found the culprit. Miguel Sanchez, a twenty-seven-year-old illegal immigrant, had worked for all three outlets off the books, and had delivered the pizzas to each of the victims before coming back, sometimes weeks later, to rape them. He’d ended up being sentenced to twenty-five years, and for a long time afterwards Giant had been known (affectionately, he liked to think) as Mozzarella Man.
But as a general rule, Giant’s career was largely uneventful, and the guys he put away were often sad and unlucky rather than bad.
And then, one bright sunny morning four years ago, he finally came face-to-face with true evil.
The first person to respond to the call that day had been a young uniformed patrolman called Pico Vasquez. Apparently, the Hernandez family hadn’t been seen for several days and their children had not turned up at school. When Vasquez arrived at their house in a rundown district of east Oakland, there was no answer at the door and all the curtains were drawn. He’d gone round the back, tried the door and, finding it unlocked, had gone inside.
The smell had hit him immediately and, although he was relatively inexperienced, he’d known exactly what was causing it. A few seconds later, as he walked into the living area, he’d realized that what had happened in the Hernandez household was way above his pay grade and, when he’d finished throwing up, he’d put in an emergency call to the station.
By now, Giant was a homicide detective and it was his job to go the Hernandez house and secure the scene. And it was a scene that would stay for him for the rest of his life. The body parts of Pablo Hernandez, aged thirty-four; his wife Gina also thirty-four; and their two children, Pepe, nine, and Adalina, seven, were scattered all over the living room like broken, shredded dolls. The blood was everywhere. Up the walls, across the furniture, staining the windows. It was as if someone had come in and given the place a particularly sloppy coat of red paint.
It wasn’t the gore or the smell that affected Giant. As a homicide detective he’d seen plenty of corpses before, some of them pretty badly damaged and, after the first one, had always been able to tolerate it. It was the sheer wanton cruelty of these killings that had stayed with him. The perpetrators – and Giant worked on the premise that there had to have been more than one of them, in order to subdue the whole family – had to have been complete sadists. They’d tortured the children for some time in front of the helpless parents – almost certainly
until they’d bled to death – and had then spent some considerable time afterwards torturing the parents who, according to the coroner, had both died several hours at least after the children.
Giant had secured the scene, called in forensics and set the murder inquiry in motion, but he’d done the whole thing almost in a state of total shock, as if it was someone else doing it and not him. He and a dozen other detectives had worked round the clock to bring the killers to justice, but it had rapidly become clear that it wasn’t going to be an easy one to solve. Pablo Hernandez, it turned out, was a mid-level drug dealer working for a major Mexican cartel, and it was almost certainly cartel members who’d killed him and his family. The problem was that the family lived in a poor, predominantly Hispanic area where gang influence was strong, and apparently no one had seen or heard a thing. The case initially made headlines thanks to the brutality of the murders, but it quickly faded from view. Maybe, Giant thought, if the victims had been a wealthy white family, there would have been a lot more coverage, and maybe they’d have got a break. As it was, everything ground slowly to a halt, with detectives being moved off the case one by one, until finally there were none of them left.
Giant had pleaded with his boss to let him stay with it. It was anathema to him that the killers might somehow get away with slaughtering a whole family. And it wasn’t as if they didn’t know who was behind it. According to the FBI, the cartel’s top representative in northern California was a successful Mexican-American businessman called Tony Reyes, and the killings would have had to be sanctioned by him. But Reyes ran legitimate businesses, had a stable of top-notch lawyers, and kept himself a long, long way from the action. He probably didn’t even know the identities of the killers. So in the end they couldn’t touch him, and Reyes clearly ran a tight ship, because there were no weak links amongst the layers of cartel employees, and therefore no leads.
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