Innocent Prey (A Brown and de Luca Novel)

by Maggie Shayne

  The chief frowned like he didn’t know quite what to make of me. Yeah, I get that a lot. Then he went right back to business. “Mason, you’re driving me.” He started for Mason’s car. Front seat. Passenger side. Aka my spot.

  “Sure, Chief. Where to?”

  “The hospital. I need to be there.”

  Nodding, Mason opened the back door for me. I’d just as soon have gone home, because I needed to think about what had just happened out here today. Okay, picking up on the judge’s impending medical crisis was the kind of thing I’d normally do. But that flash when I touched Venora LaMere’s hand was just...freaky.

  Mason held the door for me. “You look shaky,” he said when I slid past him into the car.

  “I’m good,” I said with more conviction than I felt. Because he had a job to do, and seeing to my needs wasn’t a part of it. I could handle that myself, thanks. As soon as there was an opportunity to go home, I’d go. Until then, I wasn’t going to turn into a fragile wilting flower who couldn’t handle looking at a dead girl. A dead girl who was less than two years older than my nieces.

  Mason’s look lingered. He knew me too damn well, and his cop sense was as good as my NFP. No, that wasn’t true. Not anymore. My NFP was hopped up on crack or something. But before. It was just as good before. And he knew I wasn’t okay, but he also knew there was nothing he could do about it right now. And he’d better also know that I had a handle on it and didn’t need his help.

  Mason drove faster than he normally would have, but that didn’t bother me. We both liked to cut loose on deserted stretches of pavement every now and then. My T-Bird hadn’t been souped-up like his Monte Carlo had, but I could do a pretty decent burn.

  So he drove, and the chief called the judge’s wife and told her to meet us at the hospital. Poor woman had barely been holding it together with the runaway daughter. Now she had to deal with a stroked-out husband and her runaway kid being upgraded to kidnap victim.

  After the chief hung up with her, he and Mason went back and forth with each other about the case, and I sat there and tried to figure out what the hell I’d seen in that flash of mine. I mean, yeah, I was shocked by it, and completely confused, but I also knew what to do with it. Just like in the other visions or dreams or whatever the hell I’d had in the past, I had to revisit it. Look for details. Figure out what they meant.

  But for the life of me, all I kept getting was the springs of the bunk above Venora’s, and the sight of her belly, all trailed in ruby lines, and her hand dragging that piece of metal across her skin.

  We were at the hospital before I knew it, parked in back and headed for the emergency-room entrance, even though that wasn’t protocol. Chief Sub got his badge out and used it like Moses’s staff to part the waters ahead of us as we ran through. He accosted the first nurse he saw. “Judge Howard Mattheson. He was just brought in.”

  “Yes, we have him. Are you family?”

  “No. I’m the chief of police. I was with him when he—”

  She put a hand on his shoulder, stopping his stream of words. “Call his family.” Her tone was saying a lot more than her words. Jeez, the judge might not pull through.

  And how the hell was he going to tell us what he’d been holding back if he died?

  Don’t worry, you seem to have some kind of a line to the dead.

  Fuck you, Inner Bitch.

  Mason said, “Look, there’s the waiting room. Let’s get out of the way, Chief.”

  The chief nodded, a little spaced out, I thought, and I found myself taking him by his arm like he was my grandpa or something. If he’d been himself he’d probably have resented that. As it was, though, he didn’t even seem to notice as I guided him into the waiting room. He found a chair and sank into it. I went to the vending machines. One for soft drinks, one for coffee and one for snacks. I leaned on the snack machine and looked through the glass at the selections inside.

  Then I heard a woman’s voice. “My husband,” she said. “Howard Mattheson.”

  “Marianne!” Chief Sub sprang out of his seat and hurried out of the waiting room in her direction.

  I no longer knew what I was looking at, and my head sort of lowered itself between my outstretched arms.

  Mason came up behind me and put his hands on my shoulders, rubbing like a pro. “You okay?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What happened back there?”

  I brought my head up, shook it. “Damned if I know, Mace. I got some kind of flash when my arm brushed across her hand.”

  “Flash?” His hands on my shoulders stilled, and he turned me around. “Like before?”

  “Yeah, except I wasn’t sleeping and I don’t share an organ donor with this kid. Or maybe I do. I don’t know. Maybe she got a bone graft or something from your brother?”

  He was watching my face like it was going to tell him the secret of life. “We’ve both seen the recipient list. The name Venora LaMere wasn’t on it. We’d have remembered if it had been, even if Amy hadn’t heard it. It’s an unusual name.” He took a breath, then asked, “What did you see?”

  “Her, cutting her belly with a piece of wire. The lines of blood on her skin. And a bunk above her.”

  “Bunk above her,” he repeated.

  “Yeah. She was lying on her back, on a narrow bed, and there was a bunk above her. I could see the springs, sagging down in the middle.”

  “So someone was in the bed above her, then?”

  My brows went up. “I don’t know. Maybe it was just old.”

  The chief came back, Marianne Mattheson tucked within the circle of his arm. She was shaking her head and crying softly. There wasn’t a hell of a lot I could do, so I offered to get them all some coffee from the cafeteria, which had to be better than what the machine had to offer.

  By the time I got back with it, Marianne’s sister had arrived to be with her. Marianne seemed to be getting hold of herself and was urging the chief to go back to work trying to find her daughter. I didn’t think he’d told her yet that it was pretty certain Stephanie had been kidnapped, or that one of her fellow abductees had been found shot to death. If he had, I figured, she’d have been on a stretcher herself.

  * * *

  I felt about as comfortable at the Binghamton Police Department as a Muslim going through U.S. airport security. I didn’t have a damn thing to hide, but I was sure everyone there thought differently. Or anyone who recognized me, at least. A celeb—even a minor one like me—at a police station was high test fuel for the gossip machine. And when you were known as a lifestyle guru, your own life was always a juicy target for the naysayers.

  Besides, I’d given the people here a pretty hard time when my brother, Tommy, had gone missing last summer. Especially the woman at the information desk, who looked almost exactly the way my mind-camera had projected her on my inner private viewing screen. She was heavy, with thick glossy ringlets in her hair and a snotty expression on her face when she looked my way. I could hear her expression loud and clear. You again?

  I shrugged and said, “I don’t like it any better than you do,” as I followed Mason and the chief past her desk like a trained puppy.

  The hospital had been kind of a useless detour, but I understood the chief’s need to see his friend in good hands at the E.R. and talk to the worried wife before he could focus again. He seemed like he’d bounced back. Worried, yeah, but he didn’t look lost anymore. He was back to being large and in charge.

  “Mason?” I needed to go home. I’d done my duty, but I was done now.

  He turned to look at me just as Rosie appeared. “Glad you’re back.”

  Rosie had a doughnut in one hand and a very badly stained The Cleveland Show ceramic coffee mug in the other. I had to bite my lip hard to keep from laughing, because “Cleveland” and Roosevelt Jones bore more than a slight resemblance.

  He fell into step beside us, and we all wound up in the chief’s office. I had no idea why I was being included in this inner-circle huddle, but
there didn’t seem to be a way to get out of it gracefully, so I tried to stand unobtrusively near the office door and keep my mouth shut.

  The chief was sitting behind his desk, and he looked right at me and said, “Close the door, please.”

  “Look, guys, I don’t really need to be here for this, so, um—”

  “Stay put. I wanna talk to you. And close the door.”

  I closed it. The chief was hard to argue with.

  “Rosie, where are we on finding a connection between the four girls?”

  “I only found one connection, sir, but it’s a big one. Venora LaMere and Lexus Carmichael were both wards of the state. Foster care.”

  The chief frowned. “That’s too odd to be coincidental. But I don’t see how Stephanie could be connected to two girls in the system.”

  “Maybe ’cause her father’s a family court judge?” I said. “Which begs the question, why did he lie about knowing the names? I mean, who’s gonna forget a name like Venora?”

  Mason blinked at me like I’d just suggested that Jesus was a pagan.

  “What? Like it’s not obvious? Or do we just pretend not to notice things that look bad for the guy because he’s in the hospital and a friend of the chief’s?”

  Rosie looked at his shoes, and Mason said, “Rachel...”

  The chief held up a hand. “No, she’s right.” Then he looked me in the eye. “Sit down, Rachel.”

  The words I don’t work for you, so don’t fucking tell me what to do were on the tip of my tongue, but I bit them back. He was being bossy, but he’d been through a lot and I’d just sort of insulted his friend. So I sat. I imagined Mason was about to fall over dead and ask the chief how the hell he did that, but now wasn’t the time.

  “What made you think the judge was lying about not knowing those names?”

  I heaved a giant sigh, and looked at Mason and then at Rosie, who sort of knew about my...quirks. Neither of the men flanking me were any help, though, so I complied. “Look, Chief, I was blind for twenty years.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “When you’re blind, you depend on your other senses. Mine got really strong. I can tell a lot about people by hearing them talk.”

  “Tone of voice. Pitch. Steadiness. I get that,” he said.

  “Mason thought he was lying, too,” I said. “His cop instinct. It’s a lot like that.”

  “So how did you know he was about to have a stroke? You hear that in his voice, too?” He was watching me like I watch a dwindling bowl of M&M’s.

  I didn’t know how the hell to answer him, so I went with the truth. “I felt it.”

  “You felt it. Like an...intuition?”

  “More like a baseball feels a home run hit.”

  He blinked once, then shot an accusing look at Mason. “She’s a fucking psychic.”

  I sprang out of my chair. “Don’t call me that! I’m not a fucking psychic!”

  “That’s how she helped you nail the Wraith?” The chief went right on, undeterred by my most menacing tone. “With E-S-fucking-P?”

  “I’m standing right here and can speak for myself, and it’s not ESP.”

  “Then what the hell is it?” Chief Sub demanded.

  “I don’t know. You try being blind for twenty years and then you can tell me what it is, how’s that sound?”

  He glared at me. I glared back.

  “You don’t like me,” I said, my tone low and even. “You don’t like people who don’t back down when you roar, and you especially don’t like it from women. You like it even less that I think your friend the judge might be up to his elbows in some kind of kidnapping ring, and you’re kind of freaked out by someone who’s more perceptive than any cop on the force.” I sent Mason and Rosie a quick look. “No offense, guys.”

  “None taken,” Rosie said.

  I barely paused, ’cause I was on a tear. It doesn’t happen often, but, baby, when it does...

  “The thing is, Chief, I don’t fucking care what you think of me. I don’t even want to be here right now. I have no interest in being an amateur sleuth, and if it’ll make you feel better, I’ll swear on a stack of chocolate chip pancakes not to get mixed up in any more of your cases. That work for you?”

  He opened a drawer, rifled around until he pulled out a sheet of paper, then slapped it on top of the mess on his desk. “No, I’m afraid it doesn’t. Scribble your name and social on there and sign it. I’ll fill in the rest.”

  I looked at the paper but didn’t reach for it. “What is it? A restraining order?”

  “It’s for the W-4 I have to file to make you an official police consultant.”

  “I just said I didn’t want—”

  “Yeah, I got that.” The chief was completely calm but deadly serious. “Fact remains you’re needed here. If you can help us get those girls back alive—and after what I saw today, I think maybe you can—then you’ve got to. You know that as well as I do, don’t you, de Luca?”

  I closed my eyes, not to feel anyone but to block out the big fat guilt trip being heaped on me by Chief Soulful-When-They-Wanna-Be Eyes. It didn’t work. I leaned forward, picked up the paper.

  “As far as anyone needs to know,” Chief Sub went on, “we’re using you because you can give us a unique perspective on Stephanie Mattheson’s situation due to your years of blindness. No one is to use the phrase police psychic. Ever.”

  “You hired a psychic?” I asked. “’Cause you can’t be talking about me after I told you—”

  “Down, girl.”

  My eyes widened, and I looked at Mason. “Did he just ‘down, girl’ me?” Then Chief Sub. “Did you just ‘down, girl’ me?”

  Ignoring me, Chief Sub shifted his attention to Mason. “Now, there’s one more thing.”

  I stood there holding the form and wondering how the hell I’d just been out-argued, bossed around and dismissed. None of my usual tactics worked with this guy.

  “What’s that, sir?” Mason asked.

  “According to Rosie’s report, Venora LaMere’s last known location was two miles across the state line in PA.” He said PA, not Pennsylvania. No one in the Triple Cities calls PA Pennsylvania. It’s too close and we say it too often to waste time. Or syllables. “It looks pretty solid that’s where she was abducted. The state line was crossed.”

  “By two miles,” Mason said.

  “Doesn’t matter. That makes this federal. I’ve spoken to the FBI already. They’re sending a field agent. Be here by the end of the day. You’ll be working under him. For now, get over to Social Services and start digging into those two girls’ files.”

  “I’m gonna need a warrant for that,” Mason said.

  “It’ll be there before you are.”

  Mason got up and opened the door. Rosie went through it, and I started to follow, the chief’s form still in my hand.

  “Scribble your Hancock on there and leave it, de Luca,” the chief said.

  “Chief, I don’t sign things without running them past my—”

  He tapped his desk with a forefinger, three insistent times. I slapped the paper down, picked up a stray pen, scribbled my Social in the appropriate spot and signed the bottom. Then I pushed the paper across the desk toward him, lifting my head to look him in the eye.

  He looked right back. And then he smiled. “Your antennae are off, by the way. I actually do like you, de Luca.”

  “Only because I let you win Round One,” I said. “Just don’t get used to it, Chief.”

  “I love a challenge. Get out of my office.”

  8

  Stevie woke up with a heavy throbbing head and a bad case of cotton mouth. She was in bed. At least it felt like a bed. She stretched her arms out to the sides. She was right. It was an actual bed, not a hard little cot. And there were pillows and sheets and everything.

  Her heart jumped and beat faster. Had she been rescued? Was she safe again?

  “Hello? Is anyone there?”

  A soft groan was her answer, t
hen Lexi’s voice. “Damn, my head...”

  “Lexi?” She scrambled to the edge of the bed, feeling her way. “Where are you?”

  “In a bed, same as you.” Stevie moved closer, following Lexi’s voice, feeling her way. She bumped into a small table, rectangular and low, then an overstuffed chair, before she found the other girl’s bed and sat on its edge.

  “Where’s Number Four?”

  “Sissy,” Stevie said, thinking hard and finding the name in the foggiest depths of her memory. “I heard the Asshole call her Sissy before I passed out altogether.”

  “Sissy, huh. How the hell you remember anything? Fucking drugged us like animals. Freaking darts.”

  “Lexus, where is she?”

  “Still sleepin’, by the look. Tell you what, we got us some better digs, that’s for damn sure.”

  “Tell me.”

  “First, it’s round. And there ain’t no windows. I think it must be a basement or something. You know? Walls made outta stone blocks.”

  “Cinder blocks?”

  “I guess. Except they’re curved. There’re four beds, sort of evenly spaced around the edge. One part of the right curve is walled off, with a door in it. Then in the middle, looks like somebody’s livin’ room. Got a little table, a couch, a couple chairs, a stack of board games.” She sighed. “Ain’t no TV, though. Damn, I miss TV.”

  “Me, too. And the internet. And my phone.”

  Sissy whimpered in her sleep. Stevie got up and started feeling her way to the other girl’s bed. “Four, huh. Must be they’re still gonna bring in one more girl.”

  “Looks like.”

  She made it to Sissy, sat on her bed and touched her shoulders. “Easy. You’re okay.”

  She felt the girl come awake. It was nothing in the way she moved or anything she said. Just a shift in the feeling of her. It was odd how easily she could distinguish awake from asleep. She wondered if she’d been able to do that before.

  “Where are we?” the new girl asked.

  “I don’t know. But it’s better than where we were.”

  Stevie heard Lexi get up and walk around, heard a door open. “It’s a bathroom. Shower and everything.” There was the sound of running water. “It works.” Lexi moved back into the main room. “I don’t see no door. How the hell they get us in here without a door?”