New Blood

by Shane Lusher

  I leaned forward and pointed toward his chest. “Now you tell me what else you know about this. Because without any evidence, Dubois is gone. He’s already left town.”

  “What?” Rassi said.

  “He left yesterday. He resigned.”

  I watched his face. He avoided my eyes, looking into the television set, the Nintendo still on pause. He screwed up his forehead and looked at me.

  “You have to go after him,” he said.

  I nodded. “That’s what I told Percy,” I said. “But you know what the problem is?”

  Rassi looked away again. He shook his head.

  “Percy’s got nothing to hold him on,” I said. “And do you know why?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Because the one guy who could have been helping me the past few days has been on a fucking bender.”

  I waited for a response, but he only got up and walked over to the refrigerator. The light in the basement kitchen was off, and when he opened the door to the fridge his face was illuminated.

  I watched the lines around his eyes and a cut above one eyebrow I somehow hadn’t noticed before as he took out the bottle of bourbon, twisted off the top, and took a drink.

  “What the hell happened to you, Dave?” I asked quietly.

  “I can’t talk to you about it,” he said. “But now that Dubois is gone-”

  He walked over to the couch and sank back down into it. “Shit,” he said. “All right.” He took another pull on the bourbon. “I did it,” he said.

  “Did what?” I asked. I realized that I was holding the Ruger in my hand.

  “I switched the guns,” he said.

  “What?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”

  He looked up at me and set the bottle down on the floor. He raised his hands, palms out.

  “Dana, put the gun down,” he said.

  I looked down at the gun in my hand and put it back into my waistband. I’d backed up, and was now standing in the patch of light at the bottom of the stairs.

  “You switched which guns?” I asked calmly.

  “Dubois told me to do it,” he said. “He said that I had to switch his gun with another one he provided me. He told me that his had been stolen the month before, and that it would complicate things if it turned out it had once belonged to him.”

  “And you believed him?” I asked. “Why?”

  “Dana, I-”

  “Jesus Christ, you stupid fuck!” I said. “My brother took you in. He made you Chief Deputy. And then you help his murderer get away?”

  “No,” Rassi said. “No. It wasn’t like that.”

  “It sounds to me like it was exactly like that,” I said. I took the Ruger back out of my waistband and pointed it at him, working my phone out of my front pocket with the other hand.

  “Unless you had something to do with it, too,” I said.

  “Whoa,” he said, holding up his palms. “Wait. Don’t you see? With Dubois gone now, maybe we can do this by the book.”

  “By the book, Dave?” I said. “I don’t know what that means. Why don’t you tell me where that gun is now?”

  Rassi leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands. “I threw it in the river,” he said.

  I took a deep breath and let it out. I lowered the gun, visions of someone’s lip plastered against his face and my fist on the serving end of it.

  “I’m calling Percy right now,” I said. “I’d rather have someone from the sheriff’s department work with you from now on.”

  “Put down the goddamn gun!” Rassi said. “I did it because I got warned off it.”

  “You got warned off of what?” I asked, pausing with my finger hovering above the call button.

  “They told me that if I didn’t, then they were going to go after my little sister. She’s only thirteen years old, for God’s sake.”

  I was watching his hands as he leaned over and picked up the bottle of whiskey. He twisted it in his hand, picking at the label.

  “What?” I asked. “Who?”

  “You got to understand, man,” Rassi said. “They showed me all these pictures.”

  “Pictures of what?” I asked. I crouched down, keeping my distance.

  Rassi looked up. “Pictures of kids,” he said.

  Forty-Nine

  They’d talked to him nonstop for two hours, and then they just let him sit there for another two. There was a plastic pot of coffee on the table, and a plastic pitcher of water, but he hadn’t touched either one. Tuan was getting hungry, and whenever he got hungry, he got pissed.

  The clock on the wall said that it was 10 P.M., and that was what it felt like. He was bored. He should be tired, too, but all he really wanted was to get the hell out. Damn Babcock. Tuan had never needed him on the fly, had rarely used him, but he had always paid his lawyer on time. And now, when he needed him, he was on vacation in the Ozarks.

  It occurred to him then that he could just ask for a public defender. That would take more than another two hours, but at least maybe they would leave him alone.

  Since he hadn’t actually been charged with anything—the prosecutor would have to do that, and not the police—and he hadn’t been arrested, he hadn’t actually waived his right to have an attorney provided for him.

  He stood up and paced around the room a few times, and then beat on the door.

  “Hey!” he said. “I’m hungry! And I want to speak to a lawyer! Now!”

  He looked up at the camera and waited. After five minutes of staring at it, he sat back down.

  Then he remembered: no one had taken his cell phone. Stupid bastards had frisked him for weapons, but they’d let him keep his mobile. Kara would be wondering where the hell he was, and when he switched it on, he saw that she’d already called. Five times.

  “Hey,” she said when she picked up. “Where are you? We’ve got to run tomorrow’s edition.”

  “Can you run it on your own?” Tuan asked. “I’ve got a little bit of a problem here. I’m at the police station.”

  “No way,” Kara said. “What for? Are you under arrest?”

  “Not yet,” Tuan said. “I’m just being held.”

  “Can they do that?” Kara asked.

  Tuan suppressed his first reaction, which was to tell her not to be naive. They could do whatever they wanted to you, and the question was really whether what they were doing was legal, but that didn’t amount to whether you had any recourse for it.

  “Apparently,” he said. “Anyway, just run tonight’s edition. Call Jared if you have to.”

  “I don’t need to,” she said. “Everything’s been pretty quiet around here. At least everything we found to report on. Tuan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Why do they have you there? Are they interrogating you?”

  “Jasper Stevens was killed a few days ago,” Tuan said. “They found his body last night.”

  “That junkie guy? What, do they think you killed him?” Kara snickered. Tuan knew she was thinking that a submissive was not likely to be an aggressor in a violent act.

  “I don’t think so,” Tuan said. “It’s something else.”

  “What is it?”

  “Let’s not talk about it,” Tuan said. “We’re on the phone. Anyway, my lawyer, Andy Babcock, is on vacation this weekend. It seems he’s willing to let me sit here until Monday morning. I was actually calling to see if you know any defense attorneys. Anybody at all.”

  “Jeez, Tuan, I don’t know,” Kara said. “I’d have to ask around.”

  “Could you do that for me?” he asked. “Before you run the paper? I’ve been here for four and a half hours.”

  “Oh shit, yeah, Tuan,” Kara said. “Sure. I’ll ask my mom and dad.”

  Her mom and dad. “Good idea,” Tuan said.

  “What should I tell them?”

  “Make something up.”

  “Okay, I’ll call you back as soon as I can,” she said.

  “Don’t call me back,”
Tuan said as the door opened and Percy Trueblood stepped in. “Just send me a lawyer.”

  Percy came over to him and held out his hand, and Tuan clicked off his telephone and placed it in his waiting palm.

  “I don’t know what you’ve been told or what you discussed with my previous, uh, colleagues, but I think it’s time to read you your rights,” Percy said after he’d put the phone in his pocket.

  Right. Like Percy Trueblood hadn’t been sitting on the other side of the one-way mirror watching the whole thing.

  “Sit down,” he said. He gestured toward the chair.

  Tuan sat, and Percy got out the card, went through the Miranda warning, and then asked him if he wanted to waive his rights. Tuan told him no.

  “But I’m not talking about anything. And you didn’t tell me what I’m actually under arrest for.”

  “Suspicion of murder,” Percy said. “In the death of Jasper Stevens. I’d tell you where he resided prior to his death, but you know that already.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Percy continued. “There’s also breaking and entering, not to mention felony theft. That computer we found in your safe room belonged to Tad Ely, stolen from his house two nights ago. Why do you have a safe room, anyway?”

  Tuan looked over at him. What did Percy Trueblood know about all of it? “Suit yourself,” Tuan said and sighed. “But you’re wasting your time. And mine.” He looked up. “I have a paper to run. It would look pretty bad for you guys to hold me all this time when everybody in town wants to read their paper tomorrow morning.”

  “You got people to do that for you,” Percy waved his hand in the air. “You think I didn’t hear what you were talking about on the phone?”

  Tuan ignored him. “Where did Tweedledee and Tweedledum go off to?” He thought that Percy smirked even harder at this, but he didn’t answer. “Hey, can I have something to eat? Since we’re not going to be talking, maybe you could at least get me a sandwich or something.”

  Percy was twiddling a pencil in his hand, considering Tuan. After a moment he got up and disappeared. Five minutes later he returned with a dried up donut on a napkin and put it down in front of him.

  “I can’t eat that,” Tuan said. “I’m diabetic.” That was a lie, but Percy couldn’t know that.

  Percy just shrugged, and sighed, and continued twirling his pencil as he stared up at the wall behind Tuan.

  After Tuan had finished the stale donut in silence, Percy stood, swept up the napkin, and walked out of the room. When he opened the door, he pulled out his cell phone and dialed a number.

  When the door closed, Tuan got up and went over to listen, but he knew already that the room was soundproofed. Nothing.

  Fifty

  Rassi didn’t actually know who’d accosted him. He’d just parked his car the day after Tad’s murder, beneath a tree in front of his own house, and someone had come out of the darkness and thrown a bag over his head.

  There was more than one of them, and although he’d tried to fight back, two people had been holding his arms as the person behind him had choked him into unconsciousness.

  When he’d awakened he’d been chained to the wall in a room, the basement of a house, he thought. There had been a floodlight trained at his eyes, and so he hadn’t been able to see anything of their bodies.

  Just the masks. All of them had been wearing masks, and somehow the masks contained devices which disguised their voices.

  “So, you didn’t actually recognize Dubois?” I asked.

  “No,” he admitted.

  “Any hint as to where you were? Who you were with?”

  “No, I told you already-”

  “I know, Dave, you told me, but maybe if we go over it again, step by step-”

  “No,” he said. He shivered. “You think I haven’t had time to think this through a million times?”

  Rassi was right. There was nothing more to go on. They’d chained him to the wall, showed him pictures of what they’d done to other kids, and told him that if he didn’t play ball, they would come and get his little sister and then she would be the one they were doing these things to.

  “You didn’t think about getting somebody to watch your mom and dad’s house?”

  “I didn’t know who I could trust,” he said.

  “What about just getting them the fuck out?”

  “And going where?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Anywhere.”

  “I got the feeling these people were connected,” he said. “They’ve been doing this for a long time.”

  “Why do you think that?” I asked.

  “Because some of the pictures were Polaroids, yellowed, you know? The ones like my parents have that were all taken in the eighties.”

  I nodded. I hadn’t really been sure whether how long these people had been doing what they were doing really mattered, but with that information, it was more than possible that Dubois, or someone like him, someone he knew, was behind it. Tuan Nguyen? I’d been thinking more along the lines of Wayne Trueblood, but with all that was going down, I wasn’t so sure anymore.

  We weren’t dealing with your run of the mill child pornographer, hiding behind a computer or having a go with some kid in their charge. This was the real thing. Rassi could remember at least twenty different kids. And they had a pile of Polaroids to show him.

  “They had a noose around my neck,” he said. “When they were done, they just pulled on the rope. I passed out. I thought I was going to die.

  “Next thing I know, I wake up in my car, just where I’d parked it, under that tree, and for a while I thought maybe the whole thing hadn’t happened.

  “Then a few days later I got a picture of myself in the mail.”

  I’d perked up at that, but he shook his head.

  “No prints. No prints, and I thought about running the model number, but then what do you do with that? It’s not like anybody’s got records of everybody who bought a Polaroid camera back in the 1980s.”

  At this point we were sitting in the upstairs front room with the curtains drawn. That had felt much safer than being trapped in the basement with only one way out.

  “Why Dubois, Dave?”

  “Huh?”

  “Why Dubois? What makes you think it was him? If you couldn’t recognize anybody?”

  “The gun, man,” Dave said.

  “The gun is Tad’s murder,” I said. “I’ve registered that. But why do you think Dubois was in on kidnapping you?”

  “Oh,” Dave said. “Dubois was there. At my car,” he said. “I woke up, passed out again, and the next thing I know Dubois was pulling me out.”

  “So, he happened along just at the right moment and got you back on your feet,” I nodded. It did seem a bigger coincidence than it could have been. “How did he react to your story?”

  “What, you think I told him? I was too scared to do anything at first, and then when I got that picture in the mail, I knew I had to keep my head down. And then he told me to switch the guns. I did that for my sister, Dana,” he said, looking up at me, a pleading look in his eyes.

  “What else do you know, Dave?” I asked quietly.

  He blew out through his lips, hard, looked at the empty bottle of beer in his hand and dropped it on the floor.

  “I know what’s on Tad’s hard drive,” he said.

  “What-” I started to say, but just then my phone rang.

  It was Percy. “Where are you?” he asked.

  I looked over at Rassi. “Still at the farm, with Rassi,” I said.

  “Get the hell back here,” Percy said. “I’m starting to sound like a broken record.”

  “We’re leaving now,” I said.

  “Good,” Percy said. “Because Nguyen lawyered up. I’m going to have to let him go.”

  “I thought you had him,” I said. “Child pornography, murder. You can’t hold him on that?”

  “That judge I told you about? The one who was doing some serious drinking?”

  �
�Yeah?”

  “Nguyen’s lawyer happens to know the guy,” he said. “We’ve got a bail hearing scheduled in an hour.”

  “Can they do that?” I asked. I was already halfway up the stairs, the gun back in my waistband, Rassi behind me.

  “If you can get a judge to leave the bar,” Percy said. “Then you can get an arraignment on a Saturday night.”

  We grabbed a couple of bottles of water and went out to my car. Rassi was silent until we’d left the lane and turned onto Franklin Street toward Springfield Road.

  “What are we going to do?” he asked.

  The moon still hadn’t come up, and there were no other cars on the road. The darkness in front of us was what they called impenetrable. What people talked about when they said you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.

  “We’re going in, Dave, and we’re going to sit down with Percy and figure out what the hell we’re going to do about all this,” I said as we pulled up to the light at the intersection to Route 9 and I stopped the car.

  “Dana,” Rassi said. He was looking at me, the red from the stoplight working shadows and light across his face. “I can’t tell Percy everything I just told you.”

  “Why not?” I asked as I took a left onto Route 9. “What’s your problem with Percy?”

  Rassi took a drink from his bottle of water. “When I started at the sheriff’s department he wouldn’t leave me alone,” he said. “Always sticking his head over my shoulder to see if I was going to fuck up. Whenever I did, no matter how minor it was, he was always on the phone with Tad to tell him about it.

  “Now he wants to run me in. I’m telling you, the guy has a personal vendetta against me.”

  I thought about that. “But do you think he’s crooked? You think Percy was in on this? With Dubois?”

  Rassi shook his head. “No,” he said.

  I thought about everything I’d seen or heard from Percy. Compared to Dubois — hell, compared to Rassi — Percy seemed quite on the up-and-up.

  “What would you do, then?” I asked after a while. “If you were me?”