Sadie opened a bottle of pills, then filled the jar at the sink.
Gwen took a pill—only one. Sadie held out another. “To help you sleep.”
As if she could. She waved off the second pill. “Let’s get out of here. It’s too cold in this room.” Gwen turned the flashlight on the vent. A ribbon was flying straight out to signal the airflow. “How come the air conditioner works if the light switch doesn’t?”
“Separate fuses,” said Sadie. “On the fuse box at my house, there are labels for everything, and one is just for the air conditioner.”
They walked out of the white room, but they were not greeted by the same old wall of warm air. The temperature had dropped and the hissing sound was gone.
“That creep.” Sadie shined the flashlight on the far wall of radiators. “It wasn’t just the light fuses. He turned off the furnace too.” The yellow beam lowered to flash on bare feet, and Sadie’s disembodied voice said, “I can’t believe the heat could go down so fast.”
“No,” said Gwen. “Heat rises.” She took the flashlight from Sadie’s hand and pointed it up to the high ceiling beyond the cave of the mushroom farm.
And the temperature continued to drop.
Long after Rouge Kendall had left the bar, Agent Pyle sat alone, his hand inches from the bourbon glass. He didn’t want it anymore. Arnie was only craving sobriety and clarity as he became more engrossed in the enigma of the rookie investigator with the auburn hair.
Either Rouge Kendall was wasting his brain or using it rather well. Arnie thought about his own cramped Washington apartment with the view of a wall, his long hours and lack of satisfaction. He might come back to Makers Village one day when Rouge was running this place, and maybe he would hit the man up for a job.
Arnie stared out the front window of the bar, past the gold lettering on the glass to the sight of last-minute shoppers, adults and children. Music began to pour from loudspeakers on the other side of the street, and now he listened to the Christmas carols of a boys’ choir. The shoppers slowed their steps, turning their faces up to the source of music, craning their necks the better to catch the strains of “Silent Night.”
Two children stopped awhile on the sidewalk to torture a third child, playing keepaway with the middle youngster’s hat as he ran from one to the other, screaming obscenities.
What a place to raise kids. He wondered if Ali wanted children. Well, she might have to wear a bag over her head during the formative years, so she wouldn’t traumatize their kids with her face.
He shook his head.
Naw, the brats would take a lot of pride in Ali’s scar.
Children loved things like that, the scarier the better. His real fear was that she would tell the kids how she got the scar, but never tell him.
It was impossible to shake the eerie feeling that his erstwhile bar stool companion knew what had happened to Ali. Ah, Rouge—strange kid, so subtle with his loss leaders posed as innocent questions, and perhaps they were. But what if Rouge did know—without being told? Given what the young cop would have to go on—
Arnie Pyle jerked up his head to stare at the fool in the mirror. He had worked through the riddle. And now he laid his head down on the bar.
Oh, Ali, no.
nine
“No, Rouge, don’t touch it.” Ellen Kendall was heading down the hallway toward the kitchen where the extension phone was just a ring away from picking up the call. “Let it ring through.”
Her son stood beside the telephone table in the living room, saying to his mother’s back, “Ring through?”
“To the answering machine,” Ellen shouted on the run. She had forgotten that this newly installed device would be a surprise to him, as would the fax machine connected to it.
The phone apparatus sounded a beep, and she hovered over it, waiting to see if it would print out a message or produce a human voice. She turned to see her son at the kitchen door, surveying the mess. Every bit of surface was littered with piles of papers, notebooks and electronic equipment.
“If you pick up the phone, you might interrupt a fax.” And now the paper began to scroll out of the machine mouth. “Coffee’s ready, babe. How come you’re up so early?” She had not yet been to bed. Mastering the technology was taking longer than she had expected.
“I’ve got errands to run before I start my shift.” He walked to the coffee machine, which kept company with a laser printer on the kitchen countertop.
Ellen smiled. He was probably wondering what she had done with the toaster, his only source of breakfast for many years. She tossed him a bran muffin in an easy overhand pitch. Rouge plucked it out of the air and stared at it with vague suspicion, for this was more nutritious than the cinnamon toast he had been eating every day since the age of ten. This was mom food.
The world had changed.
He poured his coffee from the carafe, and then sat down at the table. He piled one mound of paper on top of another to make room for his steaming mug, and now he was staring at the laptop computer.
“That’s a present from Julie Garret. So is the fax.” And now she held up her press credential, another gift. “It’s all attached to a solid job offer from Julie’s paper. Your old lady’s back in harness.” Actually, this announcement was a bit belated. Last night, Julie had left town with the copy for her first story, the best work of her career. But her son didn’t need to know about that yet. He was a close relative, true, but also a cop.
Ellen put on her glasses to read each line as it appeared above the edge of the fax machine. “Merry Christmas, Rouge. I know how Ali Cray got that scar. And Oz Almo’s definitely into something shady. Which one of those gifts would you like to open first?”
“Oz.”
Without turning away from the scrolling lines of type, she pointed to the center of the table. “Check out the red folder. It’s all there. Credit history, financial sheets. Oz has a steady flow of wire transfers from banks outside the area. None of the payments are retainers. They won’t match up with the dates on his client list.”
He pulled the red folder from the pile and scanned the first paragraph of the paperwork inside. “Who is Rita Anderson?”
“She’s a cleaning woman. First clue—Rita comes in once a week to dust, and Oz pays her fifty thousand a year. Next, the sources of the wire transfers are summer people with houses on the lake. They’re all wealthy. I only contacted three of them. Asked if they could give a reference for Rita Anderson. Two of them used her as a cleaning woman. One old lady said Rita was a home healthcare provider.”
“So Rita gets the dirt on these people, and Almo does the blackmail.”
“Works for me, babe.” Though it had taken her entire minutes to work out a pattern of blackmail using an overpaid cleaning woman as an operative. “It gets better. Julie Garret went out drinking with a source the other night. This source wanted to derail him from another story—threw out Almo’s name as a mob connection to Senator Berman. Then the guy tells him it didn’t pan out. Now Julie always knows when this guy’s trying to throw him off. But he figures there might be some truth in it. That’s the source’s style, misdirection with accurate information. So Julie listens. The source tells him Almo is a dead end, all mouth, just throws the senator’s name around to scare the marks into thinking he’s a bigger fish than he is.”
“So the feds followed a rumor and put a wiretap on Oz. They were looking for a mob tie and stumbled on the blackmail?”
“Did I say that? Did I say wiretap or feds? And Julie’s source never mentioned blackmail.” Though the word “mark” implied some kind of scam ten times out of ten.
Rouge went through the sheets more carefully now, reading all the words, never looking up as he said, “You know who Julie’s source is. I know you do. Tell me.”
“You interrogate like a cop. I’m your mother—stop that.”
Rouge sat back in his chair and sipped from the mug. “Okay, I’ll guess, and you tell me if I’m warm or cold.”
He would pick that old childhood game, the one she always lost. It had been his favorite from the time he learned to talk. Ellen was still mystified by his methods for winning every round. And now she was debating whether or not to risk it when he began the game without her.
“The source is a fed on the organized crime task force,” said Rouge, “and his name is Arnie Pyle.”
Her face must have told him that he was dead on target. His smile was very faint; even as a small child, he had always been too gracious a winner to gloat. Or perhaps every win had been entirely too easy for him.
“Rouge, you can’t repeat that. Oz Almo was just one small detail in a task-force investigation. You can’t compromise a—”
“And what Pyle told Julie could only be gotten with federal wiretaps.”
“I owe Julie big-time. I can’t burn one of his sources.”
“So Pyle was going to sit on the blackmail evidence.” Rouge held up the financial sheets. “Two of these wire transfers are from banks in New Jersey. Extortion across state lines is a federal crime. Holding back evidence only makes sense if the fed’s wiretap wasn’t legal. So I can assume it wasn’t.”
“No, Rouge, you can’t assume that. Stick to the facts. Exposing a wiretap might only jeopardize a legal investigation. So if you’re thinking of trying your own extortion on the FBI, it’ll blow up in your face.” Now this was more like parenthood, warning the baby not to play with fire. “If you threaten Pyle, you’ll burn Julie. Oh, and I get burned too. I’d have to nail you for that, babe—child of mine or no. You never burn your sources, and particularly not your own mother.”
He nodded absently, and ran one finger down the asset column of a banking sheet. “I don’t see any major investments.”
“No, I haven’t found any yet. Just a few T-bills, mutual funds, standard accounts—things like that. I don’t think Oz is bright enough to play the stock market. No big-ticket items either. He doesn’t even own the lake house. It belongs to his aunt. He strong-armed the old lady into a nursing home. So the ransom money looks like a dead end, babe. Money leaves tracks, and my financial sources are solid. If they can’t find the ransom, it isn’t there. It’s not like he could pull off a money-laundering scheme. Given what the fed said about him, Oz has zero connections for that kind of a racket.”
“Dad marked the money. Oz might’ve been afraid to spend it.”
“There’s a limit to my talents. I can’t tell you what the little bastard has stashed under his bed.” She tore a long rolling sheet off the fax machine. “And now, best for last—the mystery scar. When she was a little girl, her name was Sally Cray, not Ali. But that much I knew yesterday. Got it from the baptismal records at the church.”
She handed him this sheet as another one was rolling through the machine. “The background on Ali is coming in from an old friend of your dad’s. He’s feeding me clippings and personal notes from his home office. That’s where he’s hiding. Says he’s got the door barricaded against five screaming kids.”
She pointed to the top of the sheet in Rouge’s hand. “That dateline is from a Stamford newspaper. If you were hoping for a connection to Susan, that story kills it. Ali Cray was in a car wreck in Connecticut. It all jibes with her parents moving out of town that year. Two adults and three other children were killed. The only survivor was the little girl. Satisfied?” She turned to the fax machine, which continued to scroll out paper.
“No,” he said. “There’s more to it than that. There are no names here. You said there were two adults in the car. Not her parents, right?”
“Good guess.” She bent closer to the machine and pushed the reading glasses up her nose. “The cops always hold back names till they notify next of kin. Now he’s sending another news clipping for the following day. According to the local paper, it was a family named Morrison. They lived a quarter of a mile from the accident scene. Only one car in the wreck. Ali was with them when it spun out of control on an icy road.”
“And you believe everything you read in the papers, Mom?”
She wondered if this might be an opportune time to remind him that, in her younger days as a Chicago reporter, she devoured cops like him for breakfast—bones and all. “What’s coming out now is handwritten, personal notes. Hold on—this wasn’t in the papers. The little girl was in a coma for two weeks and listed as a Jane Doe for the first forty-eight hours.” She ripped off the sheet and handed it to him, trying not to look smug—aiming for grace and failing, as she always did. “I’m no doctor, but I think we can read coma for head injury. The scar on her face—”
“Now that’s interesting.” Rouge took the curled pages and scanned the lines quickly. “Five people die a quarter of a mile from home, and Ali’s family doesn’t hear about the accident for two days. How long did it take for the Morrisons’ relatives to claim the bodies?”
“It doesn’t say—Wait.” She continued to scan newsprint lines as they rose above the lip of the machine. “There’s an obit here. The family was Jewish Orthodox. They were buried the following day, according to custom. That means there was nothing suspicious about the accident, no autopsy.”
“After all this time, could you locate the Morrisons’ next of kin?”
“Sure. Simple trace work—nothing to it. You want me to ask them why the parents didn’t—”
“No, Mom. When you talk to the relatives who claimed the bodies, they’re probably going to tell you they had no idea who Ali was.”
How was he doing this? “You think the kid was a runaway?” She was feeling the drag of another night with no sleep and sensed the pressure of a borderline aneurysm in her effort to keep pace with his better brain.
“Don’t know, Mom.” Rouge shook his head. “I just think there’s more to it.”
“But the accident is the most likely place for the scar. If she was in a coma, that suggests one hell of a head injury.”
“So the paper didn’t mention the scar specifically? And the personal notes didn’t mention it either. These are not facts, right?”
He had such a talent for throwing her own words back at her. “Right again. So shoot me. I gave birth to you, but don’t let that get in the way. All right—facts. We’re talking about a little kid here. The cops and the hospital wouldn’t release information on a minor until the parents showed up. But two days later, the accident would’ve been old news.”
“Or the details could’ve been withheld for other reasons. I think the story behind the scar is a lot more interesting than this.” He pushed the sheets away and bit into his bran muffin.
And to think she had actually considered mixing water and concentrate to make orange juice for his breakfast. “Okay, there might be more to the story. I’ll get back on it.” She unplugged the phone jack from the fax machine and hooked it up to her laptop, saying, “Cops,” as if they were still the bane and chief blight of her existence. And now she had bred one and even fed him a damn bran muffin.
“Thanks, Mom. And get some sleep, okay?”
“Yeah right, poor old Mom.” She smiled as he kissed the top of her head. He had not done that in a while. How many years? Too long. “What a good boy you are. When you ship me off to a nursing home, you’ll get me a room with a view, won’t you, babe?” Her generation had pioneered psychedelic drugs, rock music and free love, but was her son impressed? No, he was yawning as he left the kitchen.
“Damn cops.”
The doorbell rang. Rouge’s voice hollered down the hallway, “I’ll get it, Mom.”
Ellen was already deep into the mysteries of making Internet search engines more specific, so they would give her less than a thousand responses to every inquiry. As she was turning the pages of Internet for Dummies, she heard a stranger’s voice behind her. She turned quickly to see a man standing in the doorway.
“Excuse me, Mrs. Kendall?” He smiled an apology. “Sorry if I—Well, I’m just waiting for Rouge. He’s still on the phone. Guess I’m a little early.”
She could tell he was a
t a loss, trying to make a connection and not finding one. He would be reading the signs of recognition in her own expression, though she only found his eyes familiar—and shocking. Rouge had obviously been expecting this man. He should have warned her.
“Ma’am, have we—”
“No, we’ve never met. That’s quite a shiner.” Between her son’s account of the black eye and Julie’s more colorful description of an elegant mutt with Las Vegas style, she had no trouble identifying the man in her kitchen. “Pull up a chair, Special Agent Pyle.”
He sat down at the table, showing no reaction to being called by name and rank, though they had not been introduced. And he offered no explanation for being in her house. The fed must assume she had been told of this appointment. And what else had her son failed to mention? “Wasn’t Rouge supposed to pick you up at your hotel?”
“Yes, ma’am. But I was up early, and it wasn’t much of a walk.”
Good guess. Her son must have been surprised when the fed turned up at the door—and displeased. Whatever the boy was planning, he didn’t want it leaked to the press—more specifically, to dear old Mom. Damn cop. So he had probably asked Pyle to wait in the foyer. But the FBI man had wandered down the hall, perhaps led by the sound of tapping keys—or a second agenda.
Another good guess.
Arnie Pyle was spreading a sheet of paper flat on the table. Penciled across the top in capital letters was tomorrow’s headline, “ THE LADY AND THE SHARKS,” followed by a printed synopsis for the political scandal of the year.
Not quite the blackmail story Julian Garret had suggested, it was better—and worse. The opening was a portrait of Marsha Hubble, a strong woman with survival skills handed down from four generations of New York families prominent in political columns and society pages. The lady was born in the arena. With ties of money, politics and blood, she hardly needed blackmail to stave off the top politicians who wanted her resignation. More recently, the lieutenant governor had gained power beyond the state to call out the heavy artillery of federal forces, and she had doubled the full-time BCI contingent over any previous case. But she had done all of this through the offices of her enemies, Senator Berman and his pet governor. It begged the question—How?
The Judas Child Page 30
