Con Job

by Laura VanArendonk Baugh

  “That’s going to be hard if you’re in prison,” Daniel said heavily. “Man, Vince….”

  “I know. I know. You don’t even have to tell me. I’m sorry.” He rubbed at his forehead again. “But for Charlie. I had to.”

  “That’s all we’ll need from you at the moment,” Detective Martin said, a little sharply. “Thank you. Rita, you can go, too.”

  Vince rose and walked from the room, not looking back, and Rita followed.

  Detective Martin swore and threw her pen at the ground. “Am I supposed to be the cop who built her career on the guy who stole to get his autistic kid an education and then was even paying it back? Oh, there’s no good way out of this one.”

  Daniel sighed. “Nope.”

  Detective Martin glanced at Jacob. “And I don’t think he’s our murderer, anyway. He only had to ride out Kimberton a little bit longer, so if he snapped and killed her, it would have been an act of impulse violence, not something premeditated like poison. And it doesn’t do a thing to explain Kurlansky and our latest victim, the dead zombie.”

  “The guy’s a friend of mine, so I might be biased,” said Daniel, “but I think you’re right.” He looked at Jacob. “Got any ideas?”

  Jacob blew out his breath. “Everybody’s got something here,” he said. “But most of them aren’t killing for it, I don’t think.”

  “All it takes is one,” sighed Detective Martin. “Man, I hope he can get that money back in the bank before this settles. It’d be great to have nothing missing when it comes up.”

  “But he—” Jacob stopped himself. “He didn’t confess anything. He just talked with us.”

  “And anything we repeat would be hearsay,” she agreed, “not admissible as evidence. If the money’s all back, the case would be dropped, and I wouldn’t be the baddest bad cop of all time.” She rolled her eyes. “Like not having kids yet isn’t enough — if my mom and aunts found out I’d booked a guy for taking care of his autistic kid, I’d have to change my name.”

  “Yeah.”

  Jacob’s stomach rumbled, and he wondered how long it had been since dinner. Had he had dinner? He couldn’t remember. There had been the Expecto Pastrami from the food truck, but had he eaten since then?

  “I think I’ll get something from the snack table, too,” he said. He stood and stopped. “Oh, Sam’s got my wallet.”

  “You can catch her,” said Detective Martin. “Unless things have significantly changed, she’ll still be in line.”

  “You guys want anything?”

  “A perp in cuffs,” said Detective Martin.

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Jacob saw Sam and Lydia from the escalator. They waved to him, holding bags of M&Ms, and he waved back and jogged to meet them. “You’re through! Detective Martin thought you’d still be in line.”

  “Yeah, they’re being pretty efficient. Necessity, I guess. But it sounds like they’ll be out of stuff soon.”

  “Vince was trying to order pizzas, so maybe they’ll come soon. Can I have my wallet? I want to grab something, too.”

  Sam looked at him. “I don’t have it.”

  “I gave it to you downstairs, remember?”

  “And I took five bucks out and left it on the counter, where you put it.” Her eyes widened. “I’m sorry, I thought you saw me.”

  “Better hurry,” Lydia said.

  Jacob turned and ran down the opposite escalator — though that was silly, and if the wallet were gone then hurrying wouldn’t change that. He sprinted across the lobby and reached the Con Ops room, and there was the wallet, brown and rubbed and creased, lying on the pass-through.

  Daniel looked up at him, and Jacob held it up. “Kind of needed this.”

  He held up the wallet to Sam and Lydia, riding the escalator down, and they cheered. He had just made it to the mezzanine again when his phone buzzed. He glanced down to find a text from Jessica. OMG, is it true?

  That depends on what *it* is, he wrote back. Pluto is no longer a planet. There is no Santa Claus.

  A moment later his phone rang. “Oh, you’re hilarious,” Jessica laughed, “but you’re not getting out of it that easily. I mean the picture.”

  “What picture?”

  “Have you seriously not seen it yet?”

  “I’ve been a little busy here, Jessica, what with the con and the murders and the creepers and the zombies and all.”

  “Fine, I get it. I’m talking about — oh, hang on, I’m coming down.”

  She hung up, and Jacob mentally shrugged. If Jessica couldn’t find a legitimate cause, she’d invent one. She was always getting excited about something.

  “Jacob, can you go out and meet the pizza guy?” Vince called. “He’s going to need help.”

  “We got pizza?”

  “I found a place that would deliver. I paid online, delivery and tip too, so you just have to get them to all the food stations.”

  “Right.”

  There wasn’t one pizza guy at the hotel entrance, but two, with pizza boxes stacked high on hotel luggage carts. “You must be having one helluva party,” one said.

  “We’re trying,” Jacob answered. “If you’ll push those after me, we can drop them off where they belong.”

  The hotel had provided paper plates, stacked on each table. Waiting attendees cheered from their line as Jacob led the pizzas to the first table. The delivery guys looked startled, and then they strutted and raised their arms for the applause.

  They left a dozen each of cheese and pepperoni pizzas at the first station, and another set at the second. By the time they had delivered the last, the first station’s line was halfway gone but the remaining attendees looked worried. “Is there gonna be enough?” they could hear someone call. “Should we go to another table?”

  “You’re gonna need more pizzas,” said one of the delivery drivers.

  “It was hard enough getting you guys,” Jacob said. “I get the feeling we’re kind of the only all-night convention that comes to this town. There’s just nothing around here open at night.”

  “Yeah,” agreed the pizza guys. “Maybe we could ask the manager to call out. There’s got to be some locations further out that would be willing to drive in. I mean how often do you get to move eight dozen pizzas at a single sale?”

  “Or maybe they’d just spot us the supplies. We were pretty tapped out after this; we were supposed to get restocked on Monday.”

  “If you talk to him and if he can swing anything, let us know,” Jacob said. “I’m sure we’d be happy to get more if we can.”

  “You got it,” the delivery guys said. “Tip on eight dozen pizzas isn’t too shabby, either.”

  They waved and headed out the door. Jacob turned back into the lobby and nearly stumbled into Ryan Brazil. “Oh, sorry.”

  “Me, too, Jacob.” Ryan smiled a tight little smile.

  “What?”

  “About what goes around coming around.”

  Jacob tipped his head. “I’m not following.”

  “You seemed to think it was fine to look over my shoulder and peek at my stuff. So I thought I’d take a peek at yours. Only fair, right?”

  “I didn’t….”

  “So I took a glance at your wallet, when you left it so conveniently available, and I was hoping I’d find something really juicy. But it was just your driver’s license and credit card. Pretty boring, you’d think — except yours wasn’t.”

  Jacob’s stomach tightened. “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s a different name than the one on your badge. Why is that, I wondered. And why was the name Jacob Tarston so familiar? And it was right on the edge of my brain, I just couldn’t remember.”

  Jacob’s stomach finished tightening and started twisting. “Leave it alone, Ryan.”

  “Oh, it’s too late for that. You should have left it alone before you started talking to the police about my perfectly legal friendship with an adult woman.” He pointed a finger at Jacob’s face. “It would
have saved you a lot of trouble.”

  The words were hard to form. “What did you do?”

  “I remembered. I remembered spending a lot of days watching bad TV, eating cup ramen and hoping for a job. I remembered a dreadful little show about fat slutty women and their bratty, dysfunctional men — and a bratty, dysfunctional kid.”

  Jacob stopped breathing.

  “Have you really not noticed yet? I went to the front desk, asked them to put up a birthday message. They’re so upset by all the weird stuff about the kitchens and the food, they were more than happy to help do something nice for one of the con personnel. Your happy birthday is running on every agenda screen, every map, every in-room closed-circuit TV, pretty much every public screen on this hotel.”

  Jacob tore his eyes from the grinning face and turned to scan the lobby. There, over the green couch, a large screen. Welcome, Con Job! it read. And as he watched, the screen split into vertical panels which rotated to the next message. We deeply regret the inconvenience of our closed kitchens. Packaged foods are available at tables in the lobby, the convention center main hall, and on the mezzanine.

  And then the screen split and rotated again, and Jacob’s face appeared, happy and smiling, his profile picture online. Happy Birthday to Jacob Foster, once Little Jakey Tarston! And beside that, an impossibly real photo from the past, a light-haired little boy with a twisted expression and one hand raised to the camera, the offending digit pixelated out but plainly inferable.

  “Oh, there you are!” Jessica’s voice rang down to him, and he looked up. She was leaning over the railing on the mezzanine. “I’ve been looking for you. Have you seen it yet? Is it true? Everybody’s talking about it!” She laughed.

  So did Ryan. “The only articles I could find said you’d left the family, tried to leave all that behind,” he said. “Nothing’s ever left behind, Jakey. Nothing.”

  Jacob wanted to hit him, wanted to shove that smug evil grin up behind his nose and knock him to the floor, but his arms wouldn’t move. Ryan turned and strutted away, still chuckling, and Jessica’s phone flashed from the mezzanine. “Say cheese! Everyone online wants a pic. They’re all so surprised!”

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Jacob pushed back the Con Ops door and dropped into a chair, but not because he wanted to. His body seemed to acting on auto-pilot and without his consent. He didn’t want to be in Con Ops. He didn’t want to be near anyone he was working with, people who liked him and maybe respected him and maybe, maybe would have given him good references when he was up for Academy admission.

  But his body wasn’t listening to him, and it sat in Con Ops and stared at the photoshoot schedule as if it mattered.

  “You okay, Jacob?” someone called, but he barely registered the words, much less who had said them. His phone buzzed — had been buzzing at irregular intervals — but he ignored it.

  And then the door burst open. “Jake!” Sam stepped inside, scanned for him, started toward him. “Jacob, I just saw — I can’t — I can’t even….”

  “Hey, is this for real?” Paul asked, staring at his tablet. “Our feed is going crazy with tweets about you being Little Jakey Tarston. Is that true?”

  Jacob whirled, jolting the chair from beneath him. He started toward Paul, ready to tear the tablet from him and smash it to the floor, grinding the pieces into the industrial carpet.

  Sam flung her messenger bag to the floor and took a step to reach the folding table of snacks for the Ops team. She swept the table surface, scattering pizza boxes and energy bars across the room. “What is wrong with all of you? Why are you in here talking about Twitter when there’s a creeper out there creeping on innocent kids?”

  The room went quiet, and Jacob froze with the rest. Then Paul said, “Now just calm down a second. What are you talking about?”

  “The same guy who was getting pictures of me is also getting pictures of minors. I think the con’s in enough trouble already, right? And that’s not going to sit well with anyone.”

  “No, it’s not,” Paul said. He turned his head to Daniel. “Does Con Aid know about this?”

  “We do,” answered Daniel, “although we’d be very interested to know what new information Sam has for us. Sam, Jacob, will you take a walk with me to the staff suite?”

  They followed him to the other room. Jacob glanced at Sam and then looked away before their eyes could meet. She reached out and tightened her fingers briefly about his wrist.

  Daniel held the door as they entered the staff suite and then shut it behind them. He turned to face them. “Okay, get it out, whatever it really is.”

  Sam turned and pulled Jacob close, her arms squeezing about his shoulders. “I am so sorry. I am so, so sorry. I just saw.”

  His arms rose mechanically to embrace her in return.

  She held him a moment and then let him go. “You okay?”

  “In there….”

  “Yeah, you had a bad look on your face. I figured it would be better for everyone if we didn’t find out where it was going.”

  “Yeah. Probably. So, thank you.”

  She shrugged. “Meh. What’s the point of being a hysterical female if I can’t use it to somebody’s advantage once in a while?”

  “While I appreciate what you did,” Daniel interjected gently, “you might want to go back and help with the cleanup. Also, is what you said about the minor true?”

  “Yep. I just talked to another girl from the voice contest, who was all excited that he’d approached her with the same skeevy line about keeping in touch and he could drop her name to the right people.” Her jaw muscles tightened. “I hope his pants get dry-cleaned and shrink while he’s still in them.”

  “Detective Martin will be glad to know about the minor — not glad, per se, or not glad about the creeping, but glad that it’s a lot easier to do something about that.” Daniel nodded. “I foresee an unpleasant few days in Brazil’s future. In the meantime, do you mind if I have a word with Jacob?”

  Jacob’s stomach sank. The numbness was fading from him, and it was a horrid first sensation.

  “Sure,” Sam said with only a hint of reluctance. She looked at Jacob, and he gave her a weak smile. She deserved one.

  And then she left, and he was alone with Daniel, the weight of unspoken questions hanging heavy over them.

  Daniel took a few steps away to straddle a chair. “So, what about this?”

  “I’m… not Jacob Foster.” He sat down and looked at the floor. “I started using my aunt’s name when I went to live with her. She and my mom were half-sisters.” He was just delaying, he knew it. He glanced at Daniel and then looked away. “My real name is Jacob Tarston. And yes, I really was Little Jakey on Cougars and Cold Ones.”

  There was a silence, and at last he looked again at Daniel. The big policeman was still, just looking at him. “Wow,” he said finally. “You just kind of forget those might be real people, I guess.”

  “They’re not,” Jacob said, “not by the time the reality TV machine is done with them. My family was paid to be even crazier than they started, which was plenty. Mom wasn’t allowed to see her therapist while we were shooting, they used to tell different people different script scenarios to confuse us, they used to leave cases of beer outside the door just to make sure…. So much of that stuff was staged, but not in any way that felt like — we weren’t actors, you know? We were set up. We were one long prank being played on ourselves, only Mom signed us up for it and rolled right along with all of it.” He shook his head. “That was all fine for her, I guess, but I was a kid. I had no say in it, and she sold off my identity and any future I had.”

  Daniel nodded once. “But you got out.”

  “Aunt Lydia did all that. She knew I was going to be stuck under that forever — Little Jakey Tarston, the Beer Boy whose butt got pixelated out on daytime television. How would I ever get a decent job with that on my resume? What about college? And….”

  “And the Academy.”

 
“The psychological exam. Now you know why I was worried.” Jacob swallowed. “A stable background, they want. No history of mental illness or irrational behavior.” He threw up his hands helplessly. “And I mooned old women in syndication while my mother threw beer cans at her boyfriend-of-the-week’s car. It’s a career-killer before I even start.”

  Daniel drew a slow, audible breath. “Yep, that one would require some discussion with the shrinks.”

  Jacob rested his head in his hands. “Aunt Lydia’s the only reason I’m out of all that. As soon as the show got canceled and the family wasn’t backed by the network lawyers, she tore into them with tooth and nail. She hit them with neglect, endangerment, something about lack of education, I don’t even know, she was a lawyer on fire. The rest of the family was hating all over her — I think now they were hoping to get picked up by the network again — and she pretty much didn’t care.

  “Mom caved, finally. I think she saw that the court was probably going to grant custody to Aunt Lydia if it came to their decision, and if that happened, Mom would have no say over me and she couldn’t drag me back if the show ever got picked up again. So she stopped fighting and I went to live with Aunt Lydia. We’re still working on changing my name legally, because of the way the trust was set up, but I can use another name for everything that isn’t legal stuff. So I call myself Jacob Foster most of the time. My driver’s license still reads Jacob Tarston, but it’s not like I have to show that to everyone.”

  “So your aunt got you out.”

  “She got me away from them, and she got a share of what we were paid put in trust for me. Which was really smart, because Mom and them of course blew through it all in a couple of years, and every once in a while I get a phone call or an email about how they need money and it’s not fair that I have an account full of cash I’m not even using. Like it doesn’t matter that it’s paying for my education, so I don’t have to live like that.” He shrugged. “I’m just telling you this now because I know I’m lucky that I got out. I am. But… I wanted to make it a little further. To take my fresh name out and make it my own, prove that I can be what I want to be without that following me.”