by Jenna Rae
She didn’t find any fingerprints on the card the next day. But she did listen to the stranger who called herself Mac and pass the sergeant’s exam. A week after that she called the number on the card.
* * *
Fifteen years later, she wondered where they stood. Did Mac consider them friends? Or was she still grooming Del to join her team? They’d done some investigation together, Del using some of her vacation days once a year for several years to join Mac for what Mac said were practice exercises. Del still wasn’t sure if the information in the files they’d pored over had been real or fictional. One case was the kidnapping of a scientist’s sixteen-year-old daughter, one the murder of a rugby coach everyone claimed to love, and three were serial murders. After a few of these Mac acknowledged Del’s progress as an investigator. It was a few more years before she stopped overtly trying to get Del to quit SFPD and move to wherever Mac worked. They never talked about personal stuff, though Del had come to consider Mac a friend, albeit a strange one. Then came nine-eleven and the changes of the Patriot Act, and the two friends found themselves arguing too much and too angrily to continue their conversation.
“I still think people should have some measure of safety without giving up their civil rights.” Del sighed. She was annoyed with herself for persisting as though they were still engaged in the old argument. “Unless they’re bad guys. Unless there’s a preponderance of evidence that they’re bad guys. Under the law.”
There was a long silence. Del wondered if maybe Mac was planning her next argument or just irritated. Maybe, she thought, Mac was deciding how to deny her request.
“In principle I agree.” Mac was ruminating; Del could hear the short bristles of the familiar high-and-tight haircut as Mac rubbed away a developing headache. It was an old habit, one Del had nearly forgotten. “It’s gotten real fuzzy, Mason. Too fuzzy for any thinking person.”
Del grimaced. “Do we agree for once?”
“Let’s not get carried away.” Mac started tapping at a keyboard. “Principles to the side for the moment, since you reached out. You have a particular bad guy in mind. Let’s save the philosophical discussion for when I’m in your neck of the woods. I’m sending you some data, subject line ‘Rugby’ or the name of the rugby coach. Obviously this is under the radar and needs to stay that way. Fruit of the poisoned tree, so it’s useless in court unless you can establish contact with the info via another route. I don’t exist and neither does the file you’re going to open up at home, not work, not on your cell phone, and delete within a few hours. Understood?”
“Understood. Thanks, Mac.” Del hesitated. “Listen, I’m sorry. I played all high and mighty, then radio silence until I need a favor. That’s not—”
“We’re good, kiddo.” Mac laughed, a sound like a worn-out motor turning over. “You’re a little soft in the head, but I like you.”
The rest of Thursday was a blur as Del worked with Phan on the peeper case. He asked about Teager, and she mentioned her following up on White as another possible perv but kept him in the dark about her conversation with Mac. If anything came of it, she’d tell him what she needed to. If she didn’t have to tell him about breaching her own code of ethics, she would let him stay clean. Wearied by the weight of her secret, she cut out early, claiming tiredness.
“You all right?” Phan frowned and examined her with his usual frankness. “I don’t think you’ve ever wanted to leave before me.”
“Just tired,” Del claimed, looking at his shoulder to avoid eye contact. Lying had become second nature on the job, but lying to her partner, a good partner at that, felt dirty. She let her discomfort show, figuring he wouldn’t ask too many questions if he saw she didn’t want to talk. “See you tomorrow.”
Mac came through. By seven that night Del was at home on her computer. She followed Mac’s instructions before sifting through the files and realizing just how much data the Feds had compiled on Ernie White. While it was clear someone had at least occasionally been keeping an eye on his comings and goings, it was just as clear from the state of the data that no one had gone through it. Doggedly taking notes from the files, Del found herself collating hundreds of disparate tidbits of information. It was overwhelming and tedious at once. At one point she stopped to look over her dozens of pages of notes, spread out like fallen leaves on the dining room table.
She printed everything Mac had sent her, sorting data into discrete categories that she hoped made sense. Soon her table was covered with neat stacks of printouts, and the walls were decorated with giant sticky notes sporting theories, questions and timelines. She was glad to have so much data to work with, despite the unmanageable size of the data pool, but she was also horrified there was so much intrusion into the private life of a man who hadn’t actually been convicted of a single crime. Her head ached with cognitive dissonance: she couldn’t comfortably maintain outrage over the invasiveness of federal law enforcement agencies and use their data at the same time.
She noted White’s regular trips overseas, not only to the usual tourist destinations but also to a variety of countries where it was relatively easy to buy and rent women. And, Del realized with dawning horror, children. Was that what she’d been missing? She’d assumed Mikey’s story was true, that his mom was White’s victim. Had Mikey been White’s target? Boys and men underreported rape and sexual abuse even more than girls and women, a thing Del figured she should have recalled back when she was interviewing Mikey. Had Ernie White raped or tried to rape Mikey? Had he raped both mother and son? Or was she grasping at straws?
On Friday morning she put out a formal request for information regarding ongoing investigations into Ernest White to state, federal and other local law enforcement agencies and called to ask Jones, her favorite computer expert in the department, to create a bot that would track Ernie White’s presence in any investigative nets. It was technically legal but could be challenged by a decent defense attorney, and Del heard Jones’s hesitation when she asked. She was bypassing procedural channels with this particular request, and they both knew she was asking him to go out on a shaky limb with her. She could only hope she’d built enough trust and good faith between them to compel him to help her.
“He’s a really bad guy,” she said lamely. “I have to know.”
Jones talked for a few minutes about the nature of curiosity and its role in learning. Then he discussed its possible neurological correlations with memory formation and retrieval. Through this lecture Del kept her tongue. Jones was brilliant. When he turned pedantic it was because he was buying time to decide how to respond to something, and Del wondered how aware he was of this. Finally Jones was ready to render his verdict. He laughingly demanded payment in the form of chocolate-covered pretzels and a giant bag of gummy spiders, to which Del agreed, knowing this was his way of expressing his discomfort with her request. She felt a pang of guilt. She was calling in all of her favors for this case.
“Sounds fair,” she said, keeping her tone light. “And thank you. I know I’m putting you on the spot.”
“Yes,” he said. “You are. I’m not going to—”
“Of course not,” Del rushed to say. “I don’t want you to do anything unethical or illegal, but if there’s stuff out there in the public domain, information that’s just floating out there and it can help us—”
“Yeah, yeah.” Jones scratched the stubble on his cheek. “Got it. Infospace, the final frontier.”
* * *
They tried to anticipate the perv’s next move. That he was heading toward murder seemed inevitable, and the slow, sure force of that inevitability appeared to paralyze their thinking. In the coming days Del took to driving around and around the Mission at night, looking at each house and apartment and wondering if he was right there in that house, or there in that car, planning his next move. Had he taken pictures of the victims? Was he looking at them right now?
Janet had conducted an in-depth investigation into the ways predators sometimes used cameras
as weapons, often violating the privacy of their victims without their knowledge. That was part of how she’d connected with Sterling, the serial killer who’d come after Lola. Sterling had used her camera in part of her hunting process, following and photographing her potential victims for weeks before kidnapping and killing them.
Before she got derailed into her strange relationship with Sterling, Janet had been developing an interesting set of theories about photography and film as weapons. Del wished she’d asked more about it. Would Janet have some special insight into peepers? She had, after all, studied the subject in some depth. Del played with the idea of going to visit Janet and see if she could gain any insight. Shaking her head at her own folly, Del pushed this thought away.
Captain Bradley called each team of investigators into his office, demanding answers they didn’t have. When it was Del and Phan’s turn, they exchanged warning glances, each telling the other not to rise to whatever bait Bradley threw their way. After haranguing the pair for several minutes, their captain sat back and rubbed his thinning hair.
“We need to get this asshole. What’s our next step?”
“Come on, sir,” Del said. “You know the next step.”
Bradley frowned as if in confusion.
Del shook her head. “He takes another one. Maybe he moves her and someone sees it, maybe he rapes her, maybe he kills her, maybe he leaves something behind. Maybe she lives, remembers enough to tell us something about him. Maybe he takes two more, or three, or seven. He’s escalating, that’s what we know. And he’s smart and careful. We don’t have enough to stop him for now. At this point, we’re just hoping to get lucky.”
“That’s not good enough. Your plan is to what, sit and wait for him to victimize another woman?” Bradley’s thundering voice rang out and his face was bright red. Del almost felt sorry for him. “You’re fucking this up. Maybe we need better guys who actually know what the fuck to do.”
Del blinked at Bradley, refusing to rise to the bait.
“Sir.” Phan shook his head. “Captain, put whoever you want on the case, but it won’t make a difference. We need more evidence. We need some way to narrow down the pool of suspects. We don’t want another victim, of course. But the odds are, that is what’s gonna happen. You know that as well as we do.”
“Shit.” Bradley rubbed his mouth. He sat back and shook his head. “Maybe I need a new team on this.”
Del cleared her throat. “If the next one, assuming there is a next one, gets classified as a kidnapping, the Feds will take it. Until or unless, we’d like to keep it. If that’s what you decide, if you let us, we’d like to keep it.”
She felt the heat of Phan’s gaze and ignored her partner as they left Bradley’s office a few minutes later. She wasn’t sure why she even wanted to stay on this, especially since it pulled her time away from Mikey’s murder. It didn’t matter, anyway, and they all knew it. The disposition of the case was hardly up to anyone in the station.
“You think we might get to keep it?”
Phan shook his head. “I think it’s kidnapping and high profile, which will make it the Feds’ new pet project. It’s too high-profile for them to sit on their hands, you know that. In the meantime, I’m looking at Ronald Teager but not finding a lot on him so far. I’ll get back to you on that soon. Let’s move off those two for the rest of the day and come back to White and Teager tomorrow.”
By lunchtime on Friday, the attacks had indeed been classified as kidnappings and the Feds had taken over. Del and Phan, along with the rest of SFPD, would be allowed to pursue leads, but those leads would be turned over to the supervising Fed, who would not be obliged to reciprocate. Del tried to tell herself she was relieved, because she’d be able to focus on Mikey. It was a lie, but she decided to believe it for the time being.
Chapter Five
Friday afternoon was split between working Mikey’s murder and hunting for the predator. Del and Phan again reached out to everyone who might have encountered a homeless teenage runaway in Mikey’s last year. They also continued to dig through the mountain of files of convicted and suspected sexual predators in the area.
Del’s stomach roiled. None of the rapists or batterers or peepers they interviewed admitted they were guilty. None of them had ever done anything wrong, none of them would admit he’d ever hurt anyone. One creep, convicted of raping a blind eighty-seven-year-old woman, looked right at Del and swore up and down that he had been celibate his entire life. Del laughed and it tasted sour.
“You don’t remember me, do you?”
The rapist shook his head.
“I’m the one who arrested you, asshole. I’m the one who found the video you made of yourself raping somebody’s old, blind granny, you—” She heard her voice rising and saw Phan’s narrowed gaze.
She stood abruptly and left, waiting outside for Phan to finish up. Twenty feet away, a group of kids played on the sidewalk. Great, she thought, perfect. Maybe he can start raping kids instead of little old ladies. It was getting dark and Del wondered where the kids’ parents were. She shook her head.
“I’m done for the day,” Phan said, joining her at the car. “We’ll work on Mikey tomorrow.”
“We haven’t gotten anywhere,” Del retorted. “Or doesn’t that matter anymore?”
“Don’t pull that shit with me, Mason.” Phan tossed her the keys. “Kaylee’s actually willing to spend some time with me, and I’m not letting her down. Especially since tomorrow’s Saturday, and neither of us even considered taking the weekend off. Or doesn’t that matter? I think it does.”
Del flushed with shame and nodded her agreement. “Sorry. I guess I’m just frustrated. Which I know you are too. Say hey to Kaylee for me.”
As she headed to her empty house for the night, her stomach roiled. She was going to have to go to the doctor soon. Her gut was churning day and night, and the pain was getting worse. She was downing antacids like candy. She walked into her dining room and was surrounded by the evidence of White’s self-indulgent life. She sat wearily in front of the neatly organized documentation of an American citizen’s private life and felt soulless. After a while she started slogging through her list of questions and worked on a timeline of White’s life.
“What would a timeline of my life look like?” she wondered. “Who’s keeping track of what I spend my money on and where I travel to and who I spend time with?”
She wasn’t sure if she was paranoid to even wonder about these questions. White was under suspicion because he behaved suspiciously. Resolutely she pushed aside her qualms and focused again on tracking White’s movements over the last several years. By three in the morning she was blind with exhaustion. She staggered up to bed and wished Lola was in it.
“I miss you,” she whispered, only half awake. “I miss you every day.”
On Saturday, Del and Phan were at the station by midmorning despite being off duty. Milner and his current partner, a relative newcomer named Doyle, were already on a call, so Del and Phan were pressed into service on a homicide only a few blocks from the station. They spent an oddly satisfying weekend solving the new case. Their killer was a young man who believed that the victim, a seminary student named Victor Gutierrez, had insulted him. The incident had been initiated by a misunderstanding that took place in front of a Mission Street grocery. The store was one of a row of small, locally owned commercial businesses not far from the station near the other end of the colorful gallery of murals known as Clarion Alley. The shooter had seen Gutierrez standing outside with his sister and her infant son. The seminary student had apparently made some kind of gesture the shooter interpreted as an insult or a challenge.
“He was praying,” the victim’s sister wailed when Del took her statement. “He made the Sign of the Cross!”
Apparently unfamiliar with that particular ritualistic display, the killer had followed Gutierrez to his mother’s home and lay in wait outside. He stuck around until the victim, holding his infant nephew, went outside to
feed the family dog. The killer used a semi automatic and fired six rounds, killing the seminary student and the dog, and wounding the six-month-old nephew and an elderly neighbor who came outside at the sounds of the shots. They arrested the shooter after his ex-girlfriend turned him in by way of a surreptitious phone call.
“We got three kids,” Esperanza, the teenage girlfriend, had mumbled. “He don’t pay nothing to me. Now he gone and kilt a priest? Oh, hell no. He can go to jail. Fuck that piece of shit.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Del said.
“They got a reward for me?”
“I’ll check on that. Thank you for helping us.”
Over the weekend the victim’s family and friends organized a fundraising website and gave Esperanza Cortez, the nineteen-year-old mother of three small children, just over six thousand dollars as thanks for coming forward.
On Monday morning, it was Captain Bradley, flanked by members of the Gutierrez family, who handed the young woman the check and smiled for the cameras. After the brief ceremonial meeting, Phan thanked the witness. He bit his lip. Del knew what he was trying not to say: put it in the bank for your kids instead of giving it to your new boyfriend. They watched the couple race out of the station, the three youngsters trailing behind them. Del and Phan exchanged a hard glance. The paramour was Sal Jameson, a parolee with a penchant for beating up his girlfriends and their kids.
