by Kate Aeon
Hank frowned. “You think Teri actually knows anything that will give you Lenny?”
“I’m not sure. She knows more than she’s admitted to up to now. Whether it’s what we need or not...” Jess shrugged.
They dressed quickly — Jess in running shoes and jeans and a loose shirt that would cover her handgun without leaving a line. It felt so good to be back in her regular off-duty clothes again. Her feet were practically singing.
Hank kept staring at her as they dressed. “You seem so... different.”
“Same old me,” she told him.
“No. In spite of everything that’s been happening to you over the last couple of days, you seem really happy.”
“We’re going to get him,” she said, smiling. “I have this gut feeling that we’re about to get our break.”
Hank walked her down to his car — her personal was in the police parking lot as evidence, and she couldn’t drive the Crown Vic and stay undercover. She’d pick up her work car as soon as she could. She had no idea when she’d get her own car back, though.
She watched Hank while he drove. Something was wrong. He wasn’t saying something.
“What’s bothering you?”
He started the car, then glanced over at her. “Not sure.”
“Okay... what do you think might be bothering you?”
He grinned a little. “You’re painfully persistent.”
“Yes.”
“Right. Well. There are things about Lenny that don’t fit for me.”
“I know. I’m pretty confident, though.”
“I know you are. Between us, we’ll get to the truth of it.”
Jess grinned. “We will. We’re going to break this one. Today, I think. I believe.”
“I hope this really is the breakthrough everyone thinks it is.” He made a face as he pulled into traffic. “And I don’t like you going into that place without me right there with you.”
She turned and smiled at him. “It’d be a little hard to make that look natural. Don’t worry, though. I have the wire. The transmitter is in my purse. I’m armed. Charlie says our guys are searching the club, and standing by to get the warrant that will let them search Lenny’s office. And even if something happened to all of them simultaneously, there’s a team of well-trained cops sitting in a utility van in the parking lot across the street who can reach me in about sixty seconds.” She reached over and patted his hand. “Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”
“All right,” he said. “If you say so. I know you’re a big girl. You can take care of yourself. I know.”
“You’ll have to pretend to be a customer until we get the warrant,” she told him. “Once we have that, it won’t matter if anyone knows either of us is working the case. But until then, just in case someone who could mess this up is watching, hang tight out here.”
“I know.” He gave her one hard hug. “Promise me you’ll stay out of trouble. I don’t want anything to happen to you.” This was a bad time for what she wanted to say next. It ought to wait, she thought. But she realized that she knew, without a doubt, how she felt about him. About them.
And she said, “Hank?”
“Yeah?”
“I... I love you.”
The smile that illuminated his face right then could have lit the world. He wrapped her tight in his arms. “Really? You do? You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“Because I love you, too.”
“So... I get to keep you?”
“Always.”
Jess walked down the peach-painted corridor, her running shoes squeaking loudly in the silence. Most of the backstage lights were off. She could hear cops talking, but without the dancers and the customers and the music, the place felt empty. Jess could smell good coffee brewing, though, and Teri’s door was open; light spilled into the hallway, warm and friendly.
Teri sat in the middle of boxes and piles of paper. She looked tired. She wasn’t wearing makeup, her hair was back in a plain ponytail, and she wore slacks and a pullover that didn’t flatter her. For the first time, Jess could look at Teri and believe she really was in her mid-forties.
“Hey, Jess. Come on in. Have a seat.”
Jess glanced over at the pictures on Teri’s brag shelf. They were all there, but she couldn’t read the one she wanted to see from that distance, and couldn’t think of a reason why she would want to see it right then. If she got a chance to look at it, she’d take it. But even if she didn’t, she still had her interview from the night before to go on.
Excited, Jess settled into the chair across from Teri’s desk.
“Picked up your stuff yet?” Teri asked.
“No. I didn’t even know the club was closed until I got here. They let me in to get my things out of my locker, but I thought I’d come in and say good-bye first.”
Teri gave Jess a wan smile. “Yeah. I’d hoped you would stop by. I wanted to give you a little money for your brother before you left.”
Her brother. Right. Jess focused on being Gracie. “You don’t have to do that. We’ll manage. How are you?”
“I’ll live. Goldcastle is probably out of business,” Teri said. “I should have sold my shares sooner, but the place was doing so well. Who figured something like all of this would happen? And the second it does, you couldn’t sell the stock to save your life. As it stands, I’m out a couple million bucks, but I have other investments. I’ll be all right.” She shrugged. “On a more personal level, I’ve been better. But I’ve been worse, too. I’m going to get out of this town, though. Start over someplace new.” Teri had been pulling photographs off her bottom shelf and carefully layering them into a cardboard box. She turned to Jess. “How are you?”
“Not so good,” Jess said.
Teri raised an eyebrow.
“First, I’m running on two hours of sleep and I feel like hammered rat crap.”
Teri laughed. “Ouch. That’s not good.”
“Second, someone destroyed everything I own last night. Wrecked my apartment, tore up my car. And left a note stuck to my wall with a knife.”
Teri sat up straight and stared at Jess. “Someone... did what?”
“Took a knife, ripped up everything in my apartment, tore the inside of my car apart. Left me a typed note saying, ‘I know where you live.’ Yesterday someone left a teddy bear for me here. The bear was left anonymously backstage — customers never send anonymous gifts. When I asked the police about it, they said it could have been related.”
Teri seemed frozen. She sat staring past Jess, and Jess could see the muscles in her jaw working. And then, under her breath, she said, “That lying son of a bitch.” Barely loud enough that Jess could hear her, but Jess had good hearing.
Teri didn’t meet Jess’s eyes. Instead, she got down on the floor and started gathering up more pictures.
Hiding.
And Jess thought, Bingo.
“Who, Teri?” she asked. “Who’s a lying son of a bitch?”
Teri stayed behind the desk. Frames clattered into a box. “The one who tore up your place. And your car. Of course.”
“You know who did it, don’t you?”
Silence, except for the packing of pictures.
“Teri?”
Teri stood up, and Jess could see tears running down her cheeks. “He swore it wasn’t him, that the one time it happened it was an accident. But lately, I’ve seen the way he watches some of the dancers. And... oh, God. You, too. He watches you.”
“Who?”
“Lenny.”
“Lenny Northwhite?”
“Is there another Lenny?” Teri asked, her voice dark and grim.
“I just wanted to make sure,” Jess said. “There’s more, isn’t there?”
Teri said, “I have to have a cup of coffee. You want one?” She managed an unconvincing smile and held up her hands. They were shaking. “Look at this. I’m a leaf.” Teri definitely needed a distraction to calm her down.
“Coffee. Sure,”
Jess said. “I could stand a cup right now.”
“I should go out and tell those cops out there what I know. But I just... I can’t. Not by myself.”
“Tell me,” Jess said, knowing that at that moment, Jim and Charlie were holding their breath for testimony that could get them their warrant. “I’ll listen. And then if you want I’ll go with you and keep you company while you tell them.”
Teri stood with her back to Jess, pouring two cups of coffee from the coffeemaker.
She turned around, handed Jess a cup, took one herself. Sat, looking older every minute. Older, and more scared. “Lenny killed a girl. A lot of years ago...” She closed her eyes. “He said it was an accident. That they were having sex, that they got carried away, that they’d done a lot of drugs, he passed out, and when he woke up, she was dead. He came to me, and told me that he needed my help. He was in trouble already for a lot of things he’d done. Not one of the good ones, Lenny. He told me that he didn’t want to go to prison, that this had been an accident, but that no one would believe it was an accident. That he’d go to jail.” A pause. “I wanted him to go to jail.”
Jess felt her heart pounding. They had Lenny. They had him.
“Why did he come to you?”
A bitter smile. “I’m his stepsister,” Teri said. “His father married my mother for a while. Lenny spent most of the time they were married sneaking into my bedroom at night and raping me. Doing horrible things to me. When the police got involved, he told them that I’d seduced him. By that time I’d started to develop a reputation at school — the girl who would, you know? I would have done anything with anyone to wipe his touch off my skin, and there had already been quite a few boys. And not always one at a time. Word spreads. It spread enough that my own mother dropped the charges she brought against him. They found all sorts of boys who were willing to testify that I was a nasty girl. My mother was so humiliated she disowned me. Dumped me on my real father. That was a disaster. Anyway, the cops believed him, and Lenny convinced me that if I ever told anyone otherwise, he’d kill me.” She shrugged. “Not like they would have believed me.”
“Oh, God.”
“When I was seventeen, I ran away from my father’s home. Lenny caught me and reminded me that I wasn’t going anywhere. That he would hunt me down and kill me if I took off. He got my father’s permission to have me move in with him — and I went along, because Lenny had pictures of me. Doing... some dreadful things. If I didn’t go along with it, he said he’d send them to my mother.
“So I went along. My mother thought bad things of me, but I just couldn’t stand the idea of her having pictures that proved it. I ended up living with Lenny for a few years, and during those years he owned me.” She shuddered. Sipped her coffee.
Jess took a sip, transfixed by Teri’s horror story, and by the knowledge that it was wrapping a giant noose around Lenny’s neck. The judge would be hearing everything she was hearing.
“I danced in the club where he worked. I did parties. I did his friends. And he took lots and lots of pictures. Lenny loves pictures. One day he took our little family album in to a porn producer, and told the guy I’d do the same things on camera, and the producer jumped right on that, so to speak. For a while, Lenny claimed to be my manager.”
Jess waited.
“And then one night he came into my room and hauled me out of bed.” Teri took a long drink of her coffee. “I thought...” She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter what I thought. He dragged me into his room, and there was a dead girl in his bed. His girlfriend. I knew her as Andromeda. That might have been her real name, but it probably wasn’t.”
Jess nodded, but now she could hardly breathe. This was Ginny’s story all of a sudden. Andromeda the dancer, Lenny’s girlfriend — her sister. And her hands started to shake. She rested them on her lap, clutching the coffee cup like it was her lifeline.
Teri swallowed. “Lenny stuck a gun to my head. Told me that I was going to bury the girl, and he was going to take pictures.”
Jess whispered, “Oh, my God.” This time when she said it, it wasn’t for effect. All hope was gone. For sure, for certain. Jess would never see Ginny again.
Teri’s free hand twisted at her hair, restless, seemingly independent of the rest of her body. Teri looked everywhere but at Jess. “Yeah. So. So I... helped him. He looked... crazy. He hadn’t been bluffing when I was fifteen and he said he’d kill me if I told anyone the truth. And he wasn’t bluffing with that gun. If I hadn’t helped him, he would have killed me right then. We buried the girl under his house. In the crawl space. And he got his pictures. Evidence, he said, that I was an accomplice.”
Jess just nodded. She couldn’t say anything.
Teri kept talking, oblivious to Jess’s distress. “When he turned his back on me — just for a second — I stole two of those pictures, and stuck them in a safe-deposit box. I knew where the body was buried, and it was under his house, and I had proof a dead girl was there. And it might have been me burying the girl, but somebody had to be taking those pictures. That was my leverage to get out of Lenny’s house, out from under his thumb. To get free of him. But I couldn’t shake him completely. He had the other pictures, and he never let me forget it.”
“Does he still live in the same place?” she asked.
“Oh, no. We were both poor back then. He lived in a crappy little house inside the Perimeter.”
Jess closed her eyes and forced herself to take a deep breath. She wanted to cry. Part of her, knowing they’d found Ginny’s killer and the killer of so many other women, wanted to cheer, too. Neither response would fit the situation, and she couldn’t drop out of character yet. She took a big gulp of coffee and said, “Why didn’t you get away from him?”
And Teri smiled. “Lenny has this saying he likes: Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer. He keeps me close because I could hurt him. He likes to remind me that he can hurt me more. From time to time he comes by with those pictures, tells me that he needs an alibi. That he’s gotten in trouble with someone or other, and that I’m going to swear that he was with me. Or wherever he tells me he was.”
Teri closed her eyes and rubbed at her temples with long, slender fingertips. “He’ll say that he hit a parked car and he thought someone might have seen him, and he couldn’t afford the ticket. Or something like that. I don’t suppose I ever believed him — not really — but I never thought he was killing women.” She took another long swallow of her coffee, and Jess took one, too. Matching gestures. Mirroring body language. Giving Teri the subliminal cues that would make it easier for her to open up to Jess.
“I bought into this place when it was still just a concept. By the time it was up and running, Lenny blackmailed me into making him the manager. We’ve been here for a few years. And even now, I don’t know how it ever came to this.”
Jess considered all of the times over the years that Teri could have come forward. Could have explained things to the police. Could have afforded a good lawyer. People got used to keeping secrets, of course. Did stupid things out of habit, once the reason the habit developed in the first place had passed. Compounded the lie without thinking.
Teri and Jess drank their coffee in silence.
After a while, Teri said, “Thanks for listening, Gracie. I can’t believe I was so stupid for so long. I hope I get a chance to make things right.”
Jess nodded.
And then she looked up at Teri, realizing she felt weak. Queasy. Feeling the shape of the room getting slippery around the edges.
Teri was watching her. Smiling at her.
Jess tried to say something, but her tongue felt like lead in her mouth. “Wha...” was all she managed to get out.
And the smile on Teri’s face grew broader. She lifted up the bug that Jess had planted under the edge of Teri’s desk that first day. Carefully and silently, Teri laid the bug on top of her desk. She sighed. Typed something into her computer. Rattled papers. Turned pages.
And then
she stood and walked over to Jess, who watched her coming but couldn’t move. Teri slid a hand down the front of Jess’s shirt, fondled her breast, and said, “I... kept a diary. Of those years with Lenny. Could you... look over it for me? See if you think the police would find it useful?”
She gave Jess’s nipple a little twist, then crouched down in front of her. And in a voice that to Jess sounded like a passable imitation of her own voice, Teri said, “Sure, Teri. If it’ll help.”
Then Teri leaned in and kissed Jess on the lips — a deep, lingering kiss. And in Jess’s ear, she whispered, “Later, you and I will do... everything you can imagine. And a lot of things I’ll bet you can’t.”
The almost-empty coffee cup rolled out of Jess’s hand, down to the Persian rug on Teri’s floor. Spilled coffee on Jess’s leg, and she could feel that it was hot, but she couldn’t respond. And the cup didn’t even make a sound when it hit. Jess tried to understand why it had fallen. She could hear pages turning, but neither she nor Teri was turning them. She looked at Teri, who returned to her computer and twisted the monitor around so that Jess could see it — iTunes on, one track on the playlist titled “Turning Pages,” and the little endless-loop icon at the bottom of the screen. And then, able only to move her eyes, she stared at Teri rolling that big wheeled costume trunk of hers toward Jess. Jess thought she ought to scream, but it was too much effort. Her eyelids weighed five hundred pounds apiece, and they were closing inexorably in spite of how hard she fought to keep them open. Even her arms and legs wouldn’t twitch. Still, she ought to say... something.
Teri stopped the trunk beside the chair Jess sat in, opened the lid, and in a move startling in its speed and efficiency, levered Jess from the chair into the box, and folded her into it. Dropped Jess’s purse in with her. Shoved a frilly pink tulle costume over Jess, and lowered the lid silently.
Jess knew the transmitter was right there in her purse. Jess was wired. She was within range. The building was full of cops. All she needed to do was say one word.
