Innocent Prey (A Brown and de Luca Novel)

by Maggie Shayne

  Lexi’s wriggling stopped. “No shit?” she said.

  “No shit,” Stevie replied.

  “I knew you wasn’t street, but I didn’t think...” She let it go. “How about you, Number Three? You got wealthy relatives gonna come bail your skinny ass outta here?”

  The new girl was quiet for a long time. Then Stephanie heard her sit down on the bunk on the opposite wall, the bottom one from the sounds of it. She felt sorry for the girl, over there all alone. She was scared. Stevie could tell. She wasn’t sure how, exactly. Maybe the way her voice wavered a little bit, or how even her breaths were unsteady.

  After she sat, the new girl spoke. “No family. No money,” she said. “Foster care, till my last birthday. Then I was on my own.”

  “You aged out?” Lexi said. “Huh, me, too.”

  “That can’t be coincidence, can it?” Stephanie asked.

  “Gotta be,” Lexi said. “You ain’t no foster child. You ain’t no— Jeez, girl, what are you doin’?”

  “What? What’s wrong?” Stevie asked.

  “We got us a cutter.”

  “A what?”

  “A cutter. She cuttin’ herself.” Lexus slid out of bed again and crossed the cell, and there was a scuffling on the other side. “What you got there, girl? Give me that.”

  “Leave me alone!”

  “Yeah, right.” One smack, and then the scuffling stopped. The new girl was sobbing in her mattress, and Lexus was walking back to their side of the cell. “Clever bitch, ain’t you?”

  Then she returned to the bedside and pressed something into Stevie’s hand. It was a length of hard wire, maybe an eighth of an inch in diameter and about three inches long.

  “She broke it off the bedspring,” Lexi said.

  Stevie nodded. “Good. We can use this. Maybe sink the end of it into a bar of soap, for a handle.”

  “Make a nice shiv. You think like a convict, girl.”

  “I guess I do.” Stevie got out of bed and knelt, pulled the box from under the bed to take one of the two new, unwrapped bars of soap from it. Then she pushed the wire into the bar about halfway and stabbed her mattress a few times for practice. She felt the results. “Works.”

  “A mattress ain’t a man, Stevie.”

  “I know.” Sighing, Stevie took the shiv across the cell, held it out to the new girl. “Keep it under your mattress. Be ready to grab it and drive it into him the next time he opens that door. We’re only gonna get one chance. You’ve got to be ready.”

  The girl took the soap-knife from Stevie’s hand. “All right.”

  “No cutting yourself. Not here. We can’t be hurting ourselves here, you understand? We are the only ones on our side. You want to be your own enemy, do it after we get out of here. All right?”

  The girl sighed, but didn’t answer.

  Stevie shrugged and walked back to her own bunk, pausing when she got to the light, stopping right underneath it and reaching up to grab the string and yank it once to turn it off, so the other two could sleep.

  She got back into her bunk, shoving her broken hairbrush under the mattress, then pulling the covers up over her shoulders.

  “Good night, Lexus Carmichael. Good night, Number Three.”

  “Night, Stephanie Mattheson,” Lexi said, picking up the hint easily. “Night, Number Three.”

  “It’s Venora,” she said softly. “My name’s Venora.”

  * * *

  Mason showed up at the butt crack of dawn. I mean, yeah, he’d said he’d pick me up in the morning, but it wasn’t even 8:00 a.m. If he hadn’t had a Dunkin’ Donuts bag in one hand and a large coffee in the other, I’d have thrown him out.

  No, I wouldn’t.

  I reached for the coffee. He moved the cup out of my range. “It’s too hot yet. You’ll have to let it cool. Might as well say goodbye to Myrt first.”

  I started to turn away, then turned right back again. “Is that some kind of judgment about the amount of time I spend saying goodbye to my dog?”

  “What are you talking about? You mean to tell me that you take too much time saying goodbye to Myrtle every time you have to leave her for more than ten minutes? No! It can’t be true. Surely I’d have noticed.”

  Oh, he wanted to play, did he? I snatched the doughnut bag from his hand, opened it. “Which one of these babies is yours?”

  “Glazed. I got you the Boston cream.”

  I reached in, broke an inch-wide piece out of the glazed doughnut and handed the bag back to him. Then I turned around and went to where Myrtle had been lying down.

  Only she wasn’t where I’d left her. She was on the couch.

  I blinked at Mason. “She did it! She got up on the sofa!”

  “And this is a good thing?”

  “She’s been trying ever since she came to live here, Mace. But it was too hard on her. She gave up.” Why did I feel like tearing up? “She’s getting stronger.”

  “She’s getting leaner, and those long walks you take her on are toning up her unused muscles a little bit. You’re good for her.”

  “We’re good for each other.” I looked at the doughnut bit in my hand, sighed. Mason opened the bag, and I dropped the doughnut back in. Then I went over to Myrt, lying on my nice pretty sofa with her head on a throw pillow. Queen of the World. I sat beside her, scooching her over with my hip. She growled. Didn’t mean anything. She always growled if you moved her while she was napping. It was just old-lady griping.

  I rubbed her head and neck, and she sighed but didn’t bother opening her eyes. “Amy will be here in a little while, girl. In a little while. Okay?”

  Deeper sigh. I leaned down and kissed her nose. She shot her tongue out to wipe off my germs. “See you later, boo-dog.”

  Then I joined Mason at the still open door and we headed out to meet with Loren Markovich, aka the Miracle Worker. I phoned Amy from the car to see if she could try to arrive for work early today, so Myrt wouldn’t be lonely.

  Mason rolled his eyes and said now that she could climb on the furniture, she’d be too busy trying out a nap on every single piece to get lonely. Yeah, yeah. Very funny. Also probably true.

  We arrived at Loren’s house, an adorable Cape Cod in a tidy suburban neighborhood that looked like everybody’s idea of the perfect place to live. All the lawns were mowed. All the driveways were paved. All the mailboxes were straight.

  We pulled over onto the shoulder of the road instead of up into the drive. My coffee was half-gone and just the right temp. I hated like hell to leave it behind. We got out of the car. I was in jeans and a yellow T-shirt that said, I’m Here. What Were Your Other Two Wishes? on the front. My hair was in a ponytail. Not my usual attire, but for some reason this detecting gig brought out the “don’t fuck with me” part of my personality. Or maybe I’d just done this enough by now to know running shoes beat heels if you were being chased, say through a snowy pine forest. Jeans beat skirts for just about anything short of book signings and TV appearances. T-shirts were just...easy. And they had the added benefit of being mouthy if you wanted them to be. Which I did.

  Besides, when I put on my aviator sunglasses, I looked badass in this getup. Lara Croft badass. You know, in my opinion.

  Have I mentioned my obsession with mirrors and all things visual? Twenty years, yada yada. You know the deal by now.

  So we walked up this perfect sidewalk to the front door and rang the bell. I heard barking from the other side, followed by a harsh “Nyet!” and dead silence. Then footsteps, and then she opened the door.

  She wasn’t what I expected. I don’t know what I expected, actually. But she was pretty, probably around forty, with dark brown hair in the helmet style of a 1950s TV mom. She was wearing a pencil-slim gray plaid skirt and she almost had the hips to pull it off. Not quite, but almost. A white shell was tucked into the skirt, and she was pulling on a little pink sweater that had the soft, fuzzy look of cashmere.

  “Detective Brown,” she said as she opened the door. “And you must
be Rachel de Luca. I can’t tell you what an honor it is.” She shook my hand. Warm and enthusiastic, that greeting.

  My eyes shot to Mason with a “you told her who I was?” look. To which his eyes replied, Nope. Wasn’t me.

  Loren let us in, leading the way through a living room that looked lived in to a small eat-in kitchen. Then she waved us into chairs and poured coffee without asking. “So tell me what I can do to help you find Stephanie.”

  My immediate reaction was How the hell am I supposed to hate this woman?

  I looked at Mason. Usually I left the questioning to him and just hung out to run the answers through my internal lie detector. He’d spoken to the blind coach on his own already—just briefly, he’d said—but she’d been busy and had agreed to see him again.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m hoping we can go over her disappearance again and maybe stumble on something we missed before.”

  She sighed, shaking her head slowly. “I can tell you one thing,” she said, and she looked at me when she said it. “She did not leave on her own. This isn’t a play for attention, as her father thinks it is. Someone took that girl.”

  “Did you see something that makes you believe that, Ms. Markovich?”

  “No.” She lowered her eyes, shaking her head slowly. “No.”

  “Then why are you so sure?” I asked her. Because she really had been adamant.

  “She was afraid, Ms. de Luca. She was afraid to even walk to the corner by herself.” A sigh rushed out of her. “I’ve tried to get her to find her inner strength. Her mother and I have both tried. Even your books haven’t helped, and I was sure they would if anything could.” She smiled a little. “They’ve helped me.”

  “Thank you,” I said. So she was a fan. Huh. Go figure.

  “I just don’t believe she would have had the courage to run off on her own. And besides, it doesn’t make sense to think she would’ve argued so hard against taking that walk by herself if she’d been planning to dodge around the corner and leave. What if I had given in?”

  “I see what you’re saying,” Mason said. “Have you voiced these concerns to the judge?”

  “I’ve tried, but he doesn’t listen. And as for Mrs. Mattheson, she’s falling apart as it is.” Again a heavy sigh. She sipped her coffee, didn’t look at her watch or the clock on the wall behind her while the silence lengthened. She wasn’t in any hurry today.

  I took a sip of mine. It was damn good coffee. Then I set the cup down and said, “She was giving you a pretty hard time that day, wasn’t she?”

  She smiled. “Stephanie gives me a hard time every day. Lucky for her I raised two brothers.”

  “Is one of them blind?” I asked. Just to see how she would react to that.

  She closed her eyes briefly. “One of them is dead.”

  “I’m sorry. I am so sorry.”

  “I know. You lost a brother last year, too, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah.” It would’ve been hard to live in the vicinity and not know about that. Tommy had been one of the victims of the only serial killer ever to hit the Triple Cities. It had been big news.

  Mason cut in before I figured out a way to change the subject. “Rachel’s been curious how you come by your expertise in helping the blind adjust to their new situation.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know if I’d call it expertise. My mother was blind. I lived with it my entire life. I heard about the judge’s daughter from another employee.”

  “Another employee?” Mason asked.

  She nodded. “I was working as a temp in his office at the time. At any rate, I went to him privately and offered to try to help. He was furious that I’d heard about it at all, but when I explained my extensive experience with my mother’s blindness and told him it might have happened for a reason, he calmed right down. I told him the universe knows what we need and always provides. Maybe I was put into his path because he needed me.” She smiled at me and I knew she’d gotten that “universe provides” line from one of my books. Yeah, I had one for every occasion. Hence the quote-a-day perpetual flip calendar.

  “Oh. So you don’t do this for a living,” I said.

  “Not at all.” She shrugged. “And the way it’s been going with Stephanie, it’ll probably be my first and last effort. Answering phones and managing files is way easier.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “What else can I tell you?” she asked after another sip.

  “Did Stephanie ever mention anything about either of her boyfriends?” Mason asked.

  “Either of them?” she asked, lifting her brows. “I thought Mitchell Kirk was the only one?”

  “He is, as far as we know,” I said. “Mason’s referring to her ex. Jake...something.”

  “Kravitz. Yes.”

  Mason shot me a quick look. “You know him?” he asked.

  “I know who he is, yes.”

  “But you’ve only been working for the judge for...”

  “On and off for two years now. Whenever one of his staffers is out and he needs a temp. And yes, Mr. Kravitz and Stephanie had broken up before I came to work for them. But once I started coaching Stephanie, His Honor made sure I knew who Jake was. If I saw him anywhere near her, I was to report it.”

  “And did you? Ever see him around Stephanie?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “No. She never mentioned him to me, either, not that she’d be very likely to confide in me about her love life.”

  Mason nodded. He didn’t take any notes. I knew he was committing everything to memory and would scribble it somewhere as soon as we were in the car. He said note-taking tended to make suspects nervous. He liked them to be relaxed when he was questioning them. Which was kind of crazy, because who can relax while being questioned by a cop?

  “How about the current boyfriend, Mitchell Kirk?”

  She shrugged, but the telltale way she lowered her eyes told me something. Shit, there I went, using my eyes instead of my gut again.

  “I don’t think he really loves her,” she said softly, bringing my gaze right back to her.

  “Why not?”

  She shrugged. “Have you talked to him yet?” she asked me.

  “Not yet.”

  “But you’re going to.”

  “Yeah,” I told her. Tonight, actually, at the chief’s anniversary party, but that wasn’t anything she needed to know.

  “You’ll see, then,” she said. “He just seems...fake. To me.”

  He wouldn’t be able to get that past me, though.

  Finally she seemed to notice how much of her time we were taking. She got up from the table. “Was there anything else?”

  That was our cue. We got up, too.

  “Nothing I can think of at the moment,” Mason said. “If you think of anything, or hear from Stephanie, give me a call?”

  She took his card and nodded, tucking it into her pocket, giving it a pat for good measure. Then she walked us to the front door, opened it for us. “Detective, is it true that the case isn’t official? That you’re looking into this privately, as a favor to the judge?”

  “Who told you that?” he asked.

  “I went over to pick up some things I’d left at the house. The judge and his wife were arguing about it.” She shifted her eyes between the two of us. “Is it true?”

  “I can only tell you we’re doing everything we can to find her,” he said. “Thanks for your cooperation, Ms. Markovich.”

  “Mrs., actually.”

  “Oh?”

  “Widowed,” she said. There was a wistfulness to her tone. “Long time now.”

  We stepped outside, and she closed the door. Then we walked back to the car side by side and got in. Mason started the engine, then pulled out a phone to key in his notes.

  “Gimme that, for Pete’s sake.” I took the phone from him, opened the notepad feature and started tapping letters with my thumbs, jotting down every detail I could think of.

  “What did you think?” he asked when I pau
sed to search my brain for a word that refused to surface from the murky writerly depths.

  “Of her?” He nodded, and I frowned. “I thought she was telling the truth.”

  “About what?”

  “About everything. I didn’t get a lie vibe from her once, and barely any emotions at all.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. When she mentioned her brothers there was warmth, and sadness, too, for the one she lost. When I asked her about Stephanie giving her a hard time, I think she was a lot more irritated than she admitted to. But I’d have done the same thing in her place. You don’t want to call a bitch a bitch if the bitch in question is in danger of turning up dead, right?”

  “Right. Especially when you work for her father.”

  “Right. And then when she said she was widowed. Little bit of an ‘I don’t want to talk about this’ vibe.”

  “Right. Anything else?”

  “She thinks you’re hot,” I told him.

  “Oh, for crying out—”

  “Seriously, babe. She was totally feeling the Brown magic.”

  “That sounds like toilet humor.”

  “Only to an eleven-year-old.”

  “Josh will enjoy it, then.”

  “Are we done yet, boss?” I asked. “I’ve got books to write, followed by a date with a detective.”

  “I’m taking you home as we speak.”

  “Good.” I took a deep breath, watched the trees go by for a while, then turned to him. “Something bad is happening to that girl, Mason. I think we have to convince her father to make it official.”

  “I think we have to make it official whether we convince the judge or not,” he said.

  * * *

  Stevie didn’t know how she knew Venora was cutting, but she did. The cell was heavy with darkness and sleep. She’d been sleeping, and Lexus was snoring a little bit on the bunk above her. But there was that sound, soft as a fingertip dragging across paper. And in her mind she saw the sharp edge of a broken cot spring slicing across Venora’s skin and leaving a trail of ruby beads behind it.

  “Venora, hey,” she whispered.

  The sound stopped. Stevie thought she smelled blood, then decided that was impossible. You couldn’t smell blood. Could you?