“There has to be a door somewhere,” Stevie said. “Maybe there’s a trapdoor in the floor or something. Under one of the beds or—”
“I see the door.” Sissy’s voice trembled when she said it.
Lexus took a few more steps. “Oh, hell no.”
“What? What is it?”
“The door... It’s way up in the ceiling. And there’s no way up there. No steps, no ladder.” Lexi released a shuddery breath. “Girl, we definitely underground.”
“Oh, my God. Oh, my God, we’re underground!” Sissy wrapped her arms around Stevie, buried her head against her chest and sobbed.
Stevie was stunned by that, she didn’t know what to do, so she just did what her own mother would’ve done. She stroked the girl’s hair and told her it would be okay. She was damned if she believed it, though.
* * *
“I miss my dog,” I said, when we arrived at the building that housed the Office of Children and Family Services. Judge Howie’s courtroom was right across the street.
“Aw, come on, Rache. You’ve been away from her a lot longer than this before.” Mason parked the car and got out. I got out, too.
“I don’t care. If I’m going to be bullied into working on this case, then I’m bringing her with me from now on.”
“Yeah, because she’d rather be dragged around with us all day than home playing with Josh. And no one bullied you.”
“What the fuck do you mean, no one bullied me? Your chief—”
“Don’t even try that with me. If you didn’t want to be here, you’d have crumpled the paper in your fist, bounced it off his head and told him where to shove it, and then you’d have been out the door. But you’re here, aren’t you?”
I narrowed my eyes on his stupid gorgeous face. “I hate that you know me so well.”
“Yeah, well, if you really want me on the other side of the chief’s desk, you’re gonna have to lighten up on the old guy.”
“Never.”
He smiled at me. “Good.”
We approached the entrance to the building. An officer in uniform waited outside, official papers in hand. Our warrant, I guessed. He handed them to Mason, who thanked him by name. I was no longer paying attention. There was too much else going on. A guy was sitting on the sidewalk a few yards away, wearing a heavy green military-looking coat, even though it was in the mid-sixties outside today. He was skinny as a rail, and his gray-flecked brown beard probably had things living in it. He was humming real soft. Too soft to attract anyone else’s attention, but it had mine. He had a beautiful voice and a heart of gold and a head that was all mixed up.
“Rache?”
“Yeah?” But the guy met my eyes just before I looked away and flashed me a grin dentists must see in their nightmares.
I fished a twenty out of my wallet, walked over and handed it to him. He took it, pocketed it, broke eye contact and went back to his song.
“That’s Randy,” Mason said when I got back to him. He held open the door, and we went inside and started up the stairs of the sterile office building.
“Randy, huh? So you know him?”
He nodded. “Sleeps at the Y when it’s cold but prefers to be outside. Keeps his stuff in a wrecked car out behind Phil’s Auto Graveyard. Sleeps there sometimes, too. He’s fine as long as he stays on his meds.”
“And he’s on them now?”
“Oh, yeah. Trust me, you’d see a different guy if he wasn’t.”
“Different how?”
“Shouting, swearing, violent.”
“Schizophrenic?” I asked.
“I think it’s technically schizoaffective disorder. It’s a shame. He’s a sweet guy.”
“Yeah, I can tell.” We were walking down a hallway. Other people came and went. There was a very clear difference between the clients and the workers. The workers were all in professional-looking suits or skirts and blazers, the women with their hair and makeup in decent shape. The clients wore jeans or sweats and T-shirts. They were mostly either overweight or severely underweight, and their hair was just the way it had grown, though sometimes in a ponytail. And at both ends of the spectrum, they were mostly women.
The social worker who met us halfway across the child welfare office was an exception to that rule. He was a super-good-looking, blue-eyed blond male who was way more interested in checking out my guy than me. “Chief Subrinsky phoned and told me you’d be coming by. You’re Detective Brown?” he asked.
Mason nodded and accepted the man’s handshake.
Hot Gay Guy finally got around to me. “And you’re Rachel de Luca. I can’t tell you how much your work has meant to me. It’s truly a pleasure to meet you.”
He shook my hand, too, clasping it with both of his and squeezing like he really meant it. I was getting used to that. People saying my work had helped them, changed their lives, saved their lives or their marriages or jobs or whatever, and on and on. I’d given up believing it was all complete bullshit. Mason had convinced me there had to be something to it, and I’d been coming around to thinking that way myself. But I hadn’t wanted to dig too deeply into that end of things. Because, frankly, I didn’t want to screw it up. The stuff came to me, I wrote it down, tweaked it with my own attitude and voice and it worked. If I started taking it as some kind of spiritual mission, I was going to fuck it up for sure.
But now there was this new twist. The NFP and its new level of weirdness. And I had to wonder if the one thing had anything to do with the other. And if so, what? And what did it mean? And what was I supposed to do about it?
“I’m Rodney Carr,” the social worker said. “We can use my office. Right this way.”
So we went straight through the bustling reception area—no, it was too glum to be called that, it was a waiting room, a stark, unpleasant, crowded waiting room. Going straight back without even warming a seat there earned us hate-glares from some of the women sitting in the chairs that lined its walls. They held their runny-nosed toddlers by their chubby arms to keep them from wobbling away. Waiting for their appointments, I guessed.
What was it with the runny noses, though? There seemed to be an age where a kid just had a perpetual snotty face. Thank God Mason’s boys were way past that, because ick.
Carr’s office was small but had fresh white paint on what I could see of the walls. Which wasn’t much, because there were photos everywhere. Kids, all ages and races, were plastered all over the place. They stood in cheap frames on every surface, and were tacked and taped to every available piece of wall. I looked at them, then at the plaque on his desk and read it aloud. “‘There’s no such thing as a bad child.’”
“Only bad parents,” the social worker said. “But with so many of them in here every day, I needed a plaque that left that part off.”
“Probably a good idea.” I sat in one of the chairs in front of the neat but completely covered desk. Carr sat in his chair behind it. Mason stood beside me, ignoring the vacant seat to my left.
“The chief was vague on the phone,” Carr said. “What’s going on?”
Mason looked at the photos again. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Mr. Carr. We found a girl’s body this morning,” Mason said. “We’re still waiting for positive ID, but we have reason to believe it’s Venora LaMere.”
“Venora?” That reaction was real. The news hit him where he lived. No one could fake me out that thoroughly. “Venora’s dead?”
“I’m sorry,” Mason said again. “You knew her?”
Blinking fast, Rodney Carr got out of his chair and went to the wall, pointing at a photo of a smiling teenage girl with short, Gothic-black hair and a pierced nose, smiling at the camera. But not with her eyes. They were empty, I thought.
“This is Venora.” His voice seemed thicker than before. “It was taken a year ago. Her mother’s an addict who abandoned her. She was living with an uncle last we knew. What happened to her?”
“Last you knew?” I asked. “You mean, you don’t keep track?”<
br />
He was looking at the photo, not at me, as he heaved a huge sigh, and I thought he might cry any minute now. “She turned eighteen last year. I don’t have funding or authority to follow up on the girls once they age out of the program.” I frowned at him, so he went on. “We basically set them adrift to sink or swim on their own. Happy eighteenth birthday. Good luck surviving to see your nineteenth.”
Mason went to the photo, looked at it closely for a long time.
“Now that you’ve seen the photo—” Carr began.
“Yeah. I’m sorry, I’m more sure than I was before.”
The social worker blinked three times, lowered his head. “How did she die? She didn’t use drugs, at least not—”
“Looks like she was shot,” I said, earning a quick look from Mason that told me I wasn’t supposed to be revealing stuff like that.
“Oh, come on, how’s it gonna hurt to tell him that? The jogger knew. You really think she’s not gonna Tweet that she found a body on her run down the Rail Trail this morning?”
“Jeez, Rache, you want to show him the case file while you’re at it?”
I shrugged. Rodney Carr wasn’t paying attention to us. He was still looking at the girl in the picture. “I can come in, if you need someone to...identify the body.”
“You don’t have to do that,” Mason said. “We do need her file, though, along with the file on Lexus Carmichael.”
That got his notice. He sent Mason a sharp look. “Why? Is Lexi in trouble, too? What’s going on here, Detective Brown?”
“We don’t know yet,” he said.
So Carr looked at me instead. Right, you want to know something, ask the blabbermouth. I shrugged one shoulder. “It’s true, we really don’t know,” I said.
He nodded, believing me. Not Mason. Then he turned to one of the file cabinets lining the walls of his office. It was stuffed so full he could barely pull out the file he chose. He handed it to me, then moved to another and repeated the entire process. “These should’ve been archived by now, I’m just...way behind on filing.”
Too busy trying to make a difference in the lives of kids no one else gave a shit about, I thought. I liked the guy.
“Lexus was living in an apartment downtown with an elderly great aunt. The address should still be good. She only aged out of the system two months ago.”
“Wait a minute, she aged out, too?” Mason asked.
“Yeah.”
“Mr. Carr, about how many girls in the system have turned eighteen so far this year?”
He tapped a few keys on his computer. “Forty-seven,” he answered, and I heard what he didn’t say. Every last one of them was a knife in his bleeding heart. God, how a guy like this survived in the business he was in was beyond me.
“I’m gonna need their names. I need to check on every last one of them,” Mason said.
Carr picked up the warrant from his desk, scanned it, shook his head. “The warrant doesn’t cover that. Just says to give you the files on Lexi and Venora. If I comply without a proper warrant, I could lose my job.”
My impression of him took a nosedive. “Yeah, but you could save some girls’ lives.”
“I do that every day. But if I’m not here, I won’t be able to do it anymore.” He lowered his head, licked his lips nervously, then said, “I’ll tell you what I can do, though. I can check on them myself. At least make some calls, unofficially, while you work on getting a new warrant.”
Okay, I liked him again. ’Cause that was pretty much above and beyond his pay scale, I thought.
“If some of them seem to have...dropped out of sight, you’ll let me know?” Mason asked.
“Of course I will.”
Mason nodded, handing me the two bulky files so he could take a card from his shirt pocket and pass it across the desk. Rodney Carr took the card and walked back to Venora’s photo, then closed his eyes. “Is there anything else I can do?”
“Are there any photos of the girls in these files?” Mason asked.
“Yes, of course. Photos and fingerprint cards on every child in the system. Just in case.”
Nodding, Mason took the files back from me. “Thanks for your help,” he said.
“Yes, thanks. You’ve been more help than you probably know,” I added.
“Will you let me know...about Lexi?”
“Sure we will,” I told him. Then I shot a look at Mason and said, “I will, that is.”
Back in the car, I said, “Okay, I know your cop instincts are usually supersonic, but damn, Mason, how can you find fault with that guy?”
Mason sent me a look, that one where he raises one eyebrow. I wanted a picture of him sending me that look. It should be on a calendar. “I think that guy gets a little too close to the girls in his care.”
“Yeah. ’Cause he cares more than most.”
“Yeah. Which is suspicious as hell.”
“Yeah. If you’re a dirty-minded pessimist.”
“Or a cop who’s seen this kind of thing way too often.”
I frowned at him. “I think your radar’s off. And I’m positive your gaydar is. Maybe you’ve seen too much. Maybe you’re just a little bit cynical, you ever think that?”
“Every day.”
“I think he’s sincere.”
“Yeah. They always are.” He shot me a look. “Maybe you’re the one whose radar is off. You thought Jake was an okay guy, too.”
“And you didn’t like him, either. What’s up with that? We’re usually right on the same page.”
He shrugged. “He’s an ex-con.”
“And that makes him bad.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yep.”
“Every time? No exceptions?”
“Let’s just say I have yet to see an exception.”
“He’s not your garden-variety ex-con, Mason. He shouldn’t have done time to begin with. I mean, for running off with his girlfriend?”
He shrugged. “Doesn’t much matter what he was in for. He was in.”
I frowned at him. “So even if he was a decent guy when he was sent to prison...?”
“He comes out a criminal. Prison is like...college for crooks. You go in clueless, you come out with a master’s in bad.”
I didn’t say anything, just gaped at him until he looked my way and caught me.
And then he said, “What?”
“I had no idea you were that jaded. Damn, Mason.”
He was quiet for a second or two, his gaze jumping back and forth between the road and me. After a minute, he said, “So...?”
I shrugged. “It’s the first thing I’ve found not to like about you.” I tipped my head to one side, leaning over slowly to put some distance between us. Then I popped upright again. “Okay. I can deal with that.”
He looked at me, then looked again. “Tell you what, you prove me wrong and I’ll consider softening my hard-ass stance. Come back to the station with me and we’ll look over Jake’s backstory together.”
“If we can order takeout, you’re on.” I answered way too fast, and realized that I felt good all over about the prospect of spending a few more hours with him. Even now that I’d found his first flaw. Well, you know, aside from having a serial killer for a brother and covering up his guilt and all that.
But the point here was that despite the awful circumstances, I was enjoying helping him. And, I hoped, helping those girls, too. What the hell was that about? I’d agreed to help out under duress and against my better judgment. I wasn’t supposed to be enjoying it.
I reminded myself that I still missed my dog, and decided then and there that she was off her diet for tonight. Treats would abound to ease my guilty conscience.
We picked up Chinese food. The American version of Chinese food, anyway, which isn’t at all accurate or all of China would be morbidly obese. I got way too much peanut chicken, my favorite. I’d never had the nerve to look up the calorie count of an average serving of peanut chicken, because why mar its heavenly perfection when I knew
I’d just eat it anyway?
We spread out files across a long wooden table in a slightly larger than closet-sized room at the Binghamton PD. We had Lexus Carmichael’s file open next to Venora LaMere’s. We sat in hardback chairs, side by side, eating with chopsticks (I use mine like mini-spears) and flipping pages, muttering observations to each other when we came to them. The dead girl and the girl whose name she’d cut into her skin had a lot in common. Abusive relatives, absentee parents, a lot of trouble in school and a lot of trouble with the law. Both had been in the foster care system, even though living with a relative. The system still paid the relative a stipend to care for the child until said child turned eighteen. At which point, by the looks of things, a lot of relatives lost their interest in having a kid around.
Neither one of them seemed to have had many viable options when that had occurred. How either of them had any connection to a rich and spoiled girl like Stephanie Mattheson was beyond me. The only possible link was the judge. He was a family court judge, and they’d been in and out of courtrooms like his—maybe including his—for most of their lives. Investigations of their mothers for abuse and neglect, digging into absenteeism reported by their schools and finally being removed from their mothers’ custody and placed into the system.
“We need to see if any of their times in court were presided over by Judge Howie,” I said, reaching for another piece of peanut chicken and spearing only empty space with my chopstick. Damn. All gone. I hadn’t intended to eat that much.
I looked around for my Diet Coke, which I never set down in the same place twice. Mason handed me my plastic-lidded, straw-bearing cup without looking up from his file. Someone tapped twice on the door, then came inside. Rosie.
“Damn, Mason. You haven’t gotta train my replacement just yet. I’ll only be off my feet for a coupl’a weeks.”
“Your job is safe from me, Detective Jones,” I told him.
He smiled at me, not the least bit threatened, and tossed the file in his hands onto the table. “Here’s the file you wanted. Jacob Kravitz. Statutory rape and taking a minor across state lines. I took a look at it already, since you seemed to have plenty to do.”
Innocent Prey (A Brown and de Luca Novel) Page 12
