School of Fish

by Amy Lane

  “Oh dear,” Ambrose murmured. “Are you asking me to sabotage their cases, Ellery? That’s beneath you.”

  “No, sir,” Ellery said. “I just need leverage, even if it’s a delay or a bluff. We are working to get this boy’s brother and sister away from the mob, sir, and these two witnesses are key. They are particularly vulnerable if they are convicted. The tiniest bit of fear could be a very good thing.”

  “Indeed,” Ambrose said, and Ellery could hear the wheels turning and even smell a little bit of burning rubber over the phone. “I’ll talk to Mr. Mayer’s attorney and make sure I pick Mrs. Mayer’s representation myself. Is the DA’s office ready to deal?”

  “I’ll ask, sir. It’s Arizona Brooks.”

  “Pfaugh!” Ambrose burst out. “If you can get the teeniest concession from that woman, my clients might not end up on death row. You do what you can on your end, I’ll do what I can here.” He paused. “I can see why you might not have worked out at my brother’s firm, Mr. Cramer, but I do think I’m going to enjoy working with you from here on out.” He paused. “You wouldn’t happen to be available for drinks, would you?”

  Ellery actually felt all his circuits blow at the same time.

  “Mr. Cramer?” Ambrose’s voice had the urgent tone of someone who had called his name repeatedly. “Are you quite okay?”

  “I’m fine, Mr. Pfeist,” Ellery said. “I’m, uhm, in a relationship. I’m not sure drinks would be appropriate.”

  “Oh, that’s a shame.” To his surprise Pfeist sounded genuinely sad about that, although in all their interactions, Ellery would never have guessed the man had been interested. “My brother says you had a thing for that detective—Rivers, was that his name? This can’t be the same man. That man was… not worthy of your talents, Mr. Cramer.”

  Ellery dug his knuckle into his forehead to try to loosen the tension headache forming right there. “I’m afraid it is, and he’s quite worthy, sir. You just have to know how to look.”

  “Well, you let me know if you’re free. I would enjoy… drinks.”

  “Yessir. I’ll do that. I’ll talk to Arizona about making a deal. Let’s see what I can do to put the fear of the California penal system into our leaky bailiff.”

  “You do that, sir. I’ll enjoy hearing the results.”

  Ellery hit End Call and held a hand up to the back of his neck, not even wanting to look at Jackson.

  When he did, he wanted to smack the smirk off of Jackson’s face.

  “Was that nice man hitting on you?” Jackson asked. “You can tell me. I can take it. Do I have competition?”

  “Shut up,” Ellery muttered.

  “Hunh.” Oh! And there was the sound Ellery and Jade had missed when Galen had said something sane.

  “What? You know how I feel about that sound.” As in, he was apparently starting to secretly love it.

  “I was just wondering—do I need flowers? Chocolates? Should I bulk up? What’s the other guy look like?”

  “He’s got warts and halitosis and diaphoresis,” Ellery said, which was all, unfortunately, true. But not the main reason Ellery hadn’t thought about dating him even when he’d been single. “He’s also incredibly boring. I once watched his date fall asleep into his drink at a fundraiser, and Ambrose didn’t even pause for breath.”

  Jackson all but puffed out his chest. “At least I’m not boring,” he said smugly.

  “No, you are not. But you have to blend into the woodwork when we go in here. Kryzynski’s partner is on his way over to make this official, and Mayer is law enforcement, so it does need to be official.”

  “I’ll keep my highly interesting, troublemaking mouth completely shut,” Jackson said dutifully.

  “No, you won’t.” Ellery sighed. “But if you could wait for Christie to get here, it might not bite us in the ass at the end.”

  “Heh heh heh….”

  “What?”

  “Isn’t that redundant? If you’re getting bitten in the ass, isn’t it always in the end?”

  “I could call him back and have drinks after all,” Ellery told him, eyes narrowed.

  Jackson blew out a breath. “Whoooooooo. See? Minty fresh.”

  “Stop it.”

  Then he flapped his arms.

  “I will beat you,” Ellery snapped.

  “Really? But I have information on our mob-boss scumbag. Don’t you maybe want to seduce it out of me first?”

  “I’m trying to work here!” Ellery complained, and unexpectedly, Jackson sobered.

  “It’s bad, Ellery,” he said softly. “Take the laughs where we can get them. This one might break our hearts.”

  Oh. “Let’s work to make that not happen,” Ellery said.

  “Way ahead of you.”

  CHRISTIE ARRIVED a few minutes later, and Ellery could see how Christie and Kryzynski could probably be the shining stars of the department. Tall, slender, elegant, and perfectly coifed, Christie was a Latin counterpart to Kryzynski’s fair-haired Polish ancestry. They both liked the nice suits, the perfect hair, and the consummate professionalism of the job. Only the bags under Christie’s eyes betrayed a rough couple of days.

  Poor Kryzynski. His being a part of Jackson’s world must be driving his partner nuts.

  They all shook hands, and then Ellery asked the obvious question.

  “How’s Sean doing? We visited yesterday but haven’t checked in yet today.”

  “He’s pretty doped up still,” Christie said. He nodded at Jackson. “Your friends, the nurses? They’re awesome. Keep him doped up at every opportunity. One of them put a picture of Justin Trudeau on his wall this morning and called it competence porn to keep his spirits up.” Christie swallowed. “My wife’s baking them muffins this afternoon. The boy got stabbed and dumped on the same day. Anything to make him smile.”

  Jackson chuckled. “Competence porn—that’s good. I got Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie ten years ago. Told me I could take my pick.”

  Christie gave a faint smile. “Good folks.” He looked over Ellery’s shoulder. “What should I expect in there?”

  “She’s hostile, bigoted, racist, and expecting us to go at her both barrels. However you approach her, you should know that I’ve talked with the man who will be providing her and her husband with attorneys, and he’s very amenable to… slowing things down a little, to give us some leverage.”

  Christie nodded. “What about her husband? How does he fit into this?”

  Ellery explained the situation quickly, including their end goal.

  “We need to get a line on where the kids are headed,” Christie assessed. “Which means we need to get some info on Dima Siderov and that little fuckhead who knifed Sean in the gut.”

  “Sergio Ivanov, aka Ziggy,” Ellery confirmed. “Exactly. She’s going to try to bait you. I think her game is to try to make us do something that she can have her lawyer use against us. It’s her only hope. We have to be on our best behavior. She knows the ins and outs here, so all our best protocol.”

  Christie nodded and then gave Jackson an apologetic glance. “I am not casting judgments here, Rivers, because you have been a stand-up friend to my partner, but you are not exactly known for doing things by the book.” He gave a little gesture with his hand by his own cheek to indicate Jackson’s bruise from his dustup the night before.

  Jackson gave a satisfied smile. “Good times,” he said, voice dripping with nostalgia, and then he sobered. “I’m very aware that Ellery is the mouth of our operation, because he’s got the brains to go with it. I know when it’s time to stand back and be muscle and a pretty face.”

  Christie nodded. “Fair enough. Let’s go have us a little conversation!”

  The hostility in the room when they reentered was thick enough to cut with an axe. A knife wouldn’t have made much of a dent.

  “Sorry to be so long,” Ellery said, bringing on his most congenial voice. “Was just having a little chat with Ambrose Pfeist.” Arizona’s eyebrows went up, and Siren l
ooked from Ellery to Arizona as though trying to fathom what was happening.

  Suzanne Mayer jerked as though she’d had an electric cattle prod shoved up her ass.

  “You did?” Arizona said, her eyes widening as she improbably played the ingénue. “What did he have to say?”

  “Not much.” Ellery shrugged. “Just that they’re having a hell of a time getting early court dates. People could end up in county jail for a while before arraignment. General population even. It’s shameful.”

  “General population can be really dangerous,” Christie agreed, taking up the thread. “Particularly if, say, you or your husband were in law enforcement before you were arrested.”

  Christie finished this with a direct look into Suzanne Mayer’s eyes.

  She glared angrily. “Who the fuck are you?”

  “This is Detective Andre Christie,” Ellery said smoothly and then decided on a slight exaggeration. “He’s just coming from the hospital. His partner was injured yesterday when someone tried to steal a case file from my office. You might recognize the name of the file—Tage Dobrevk. Does that ring a bell?”

  Mayer’s ruddy complexion paled to paste. “I had nothing to do with a cop getting stabbed,” she said.

  “Except you did,” Christie told her, his voice pitching, showing his anger. “Do you know what else I did yesterday? Besides wait for word on whether my partner was going to live or die?”

  “I got no idea,” Mayer said, but she was watching Christie carefully, like a snake might watch a mongoose.

  “I sat by the bed of the guy who tried to shoot up the PD’s office yesterday morning. He had a concussion and had been tased within an inch of his life, but you know what? That didn’t stop him from talking in his sleep.”

  Ellery could actually hear her swallow, but he kept his face straight and expressionless because it was a masterful lie on Christie’s part. Jackson had checked that morning as Ellery had driven them to the jail. That prisoner was still in a coma, eyes rolled back in his head, unconscious.

  “Do you want to know what he said?” Christie went on, keeping his voice satin with an edge of broken glass. “Because I gotta tell you, it sure would make an interesting court transcript.”

  “Fiction, I’m sure,” Mayer said, voice flat.

  “Perhaps.” Christie inclined his head. “Perhaps not.”

  Mayer took a deep, fortifying breath. “I need my lawyer now,” she said.

  “Sure,” Arizona told her, pulling out her phone. “Ellery, did you want to call Ambrose, or should I? When did you say he could get an arraignment? Next week? The week after?”

  “Wait!” Mayer said, a hint of desperation in her voice. “You can’t put me in gen pop. They’ll kill me and Jarvis if you don’t get us in isolation.” And finally, a hint of humanity. “Our kids are so vulnerable. We need to be able to move them out of school.”

  Ellery narrowed his eyes, and at the same moment, Jackson said, “Wait a minute. Which school do they go to?”

  And the light bulb went on.

  “Capitol Valley High,” Mayer said. “The guy who asked for the info, he’s one of the assistant coaches on my son’s football team. It’s the reason we gave it to him.” Her eyes cut left. “One of them. Our kid’s only a freshman but he’s got so much promise, and the guy threatened to cut him from the team.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “He loves it so much. It’s the only reason he stays in school.”

  To Ellery, it felt like all of the oxygen had been sucked out of the room, and the room itself had been put on one of those horrible spinning carnival rides.

  Tage Dobrevk, James Cosgrove, Ty Townsend, hell, even Ziggy Ivanov. The one thing—the one thing—they all had in common was the high school, and it was such an ordinary, everyday part of their lives that Ellery hadn’t even seen the connection.

  “What’s the assistant coach’s name?” Ellery said, giving Jackson a small nod. Jackson started to edge his way to the door.

  “Schroeder,” she said. “Baldwin Schroeder.”

  Jackson blinked. “Baldwin?” he mouthed.

  Ellery’s lips twitched. Well, it wasn’t the kindest thing anybody had ever done to a baby, but it certainly didn’t justify manipulating high school kids. Or trying to get them killed.

  “What exactly did Mr. Schroeder ask you to do?” Ellery said, his voice losing some of its edge.

  “He just wanted to know what would happen to the case file at first. Said he knew the kid. I have access to the lists of which PD gets which case, so it wasn’t that hard. But then it got shifted to your office—” She nodded at Ellery. “—and things started to go to shit.”

  “What about your husband?” Ellery asked. “How did he get sucked into this?”

  She swallowed, her eyes cutting left again. “That’s when Schroeder started to get nasty,” she said. “Told Jarvis that if something unfortunate didn’t happen to Tage, something unfortunate would happen to Carlton.”

  Ellery could see Jackson’s expression, and he was right on board. Carlton was almost as cruel a thing to do to a baby as Baldwin.

  “That’s not the only reason, is it?” Jackson asked cannily.

  She took a steadying breath, as if to still her outrage. “No.”

  They all stared at her, and Jackson glared at Christie as if to say, “Do something!”

  Christie cleared his throat meaningfully, and Mayer blanched.

  “Our kid got busted with drugs,” she rasped, eyes growing bright. “He swears he didn’t know where the damned pink pills came from, but the SRO officer had him dead to rights, and Schroeder said he could make it go away.”

  He watched as Jackson’s eyes grew huge—and knew his own were probably just as big.

  Pink pills again. Goddammit.

  Jackson took a deep breath, and nodded, as though knocking the information into its rightful place. “So, this Schroeder,” Jackson asked finally, nodding at Christie to tell him this was important. “Does he have a thick accent?”

  “No,” Mayer said, frowning. “A slight one, but not thick. What in the hell does that have to do with anything?”

  “A lead,” Jackson said mildly. “If you’ll excuse me….”

  He ducked out of the room, leaving Ellery there for the rest of the questioning.

  In the end, Arizona allowed Mayer to call her union, and Ellery called Ambrose Pfeist and told him that Mayer had been cooperative. Christie read Mayer her rights and led her out of the office to central booking at District One.

  Ellery watched them go and then looked at Arizona and Siren, shaking his head. “I am actually really glad that the rest of that mess is in your hands,” he said.

  “She’ll lose her job at the very least,” Arizona told him. “Her husband too. He might even see jail time, since his offense was violent.”

  Ellery scrubbed at his face with his hands. “So was all that enough to get Tage Dobrevk and his family protective custody?”

  Arizona’s eyes went wide. “Holy crap yes!”

  “Oh my God,” Siren chimed in. “Where did you stash that poor kid?”

  Ellery tried to contain his smile. Jackson had filled him in while they’d waited for Christie. It only figured that an old lover had been the paralegal when Jackson had gone to the human trafficking division; he really had slept with half the state before Ellery had come along.

  “Nearby,” he said, keeping his voice mild. “You get the order to the judge, and we’ll have him in your office in the next ten minutes.” He remembered what Jackson had said about napping in the break room. “You, uh, may want to let him sleep on your couch.”

  Siren nodded, and Ellery actually saw the youth in her eyes, in her voice, which she was always so careful to hide with her ruthless professionalism. “Oh yeah, if any kid needs a safe place to sleep, it’s that one.”

  “Alrighty, then.” Arizona let out a breath. “Siren, I’m going to run that request to a judge personally. Could you, perhaps—”

  “Do paperwork n
ext to a sleeping teenager?” She sounded almost eager. “Because if you were the world’s best boss, that’s what you’d be asking me, right?”

  Arizona chuckled. “And I am the world’s best boss,” she said.

  Watching Siren Herrera do a playful fist-pump was one of the most delightful things Ellery had ever seen.

  HALF AN hour later, Ellery and Jackson were on their way to the office after leaving Tage asleep on yet another couch, Siren working diligently on her laptop at his feet. They’d exacted a promise from Siren and Arizona not to leave the boy alone for so much as a second until the marshals got there.

  “We hear you, Ellery,” Arizona said. “We’re taking this seriously.”

  “This kid has been through a lot,” Ellery said. “And you need to listen to him. His parents are going to be hard to convince. You understand that, right?”

  “We understand. But this is a matter for the DA now.”

  “The kid has rights.”

  Arizona crossed her arms and gave him one of those stares that he could have sworn she’d learned from his mother. “Ellery, I will not question your client nor put anything on the record without you in the room. That is a promise. He’s a witness for my house now, and we’re going to keep him safe.”

  Ellery took a deep breath. “Okay. Good. I… you saw his face.”

  She nodded soberly. “Yes. The system has let him down, and you and Rivers jumped in and took care of him. Now trust us a little, okay? I swear, I’m not the bad guy.”

  Ellery gave her a sardonic look. “Not this time.”

  She laughed shortly. “You know, you and Rivers do a lot of good, keeping us in check. Just remember that nobody signs up for the DA’s office going ‘Oh boy, I want to put innocent teenagers in prison so they can get beaten to death!’ okay?”

  Ellery snorted. “I’ll try to keep that in mind.”

  “Then we’re going to do fine. I’ll call you as soon as he’s in custody.”

  “Thank you.”

  And that was about all he could do. Arizona was right. Tage was her boy now, and Ellery and Jackson had to let go.