Stumbling on the Sand

by Jenna Rae

  “I’m working on it. Fucker’s going down.” Jones tapped his forehead. “Feds are en route with our uniforms for support, got federal warrants for Teager’s arrest, his place, his computers.”

  “You forgot your candy,” Del called as Jones turned away.

  “I’m on a diet,” the computer specialist responded, waving over his shoulder as he walked off to his undersized cubicle. “Family history of diabetes means I don’t eat candy anymore. Next time, bring protein bars. And hey, Mason? Thanks for asking about my mom, huh?”

  Del nodded and turned to Phan. “This won’t hold water unless we get something we can use that’s not from the Feds and inadmissible.”

  “Yeah, so where are we?”

  “Teager could turn on Sandman,” Del suggested with more hope than conviction.

  “You got a chicken or goat to sacrifice?”

  By nine the station was full, as though someone had sent a message to everyone that things might actually move. How the word got out, Del never knew, but somehow everyone drifted in and started exchanging ideas for ensnaring Sandman. Bradley arrived a little after ten, puffed up like a Friday night quarterback, and announced Teager’s arrest. He had no further information to share, though, since the Feds were keeping their prize all to themselves.

  Davies weighed down Del and Phan with the mountains of paperwork related to Teager’s arrest and the search for his buddy, and Del was actually happy to do it. She and Phan didn’t leave until nearly nine that night, but they were still on a high from the partial win. The ride home was so quick and easy, and the hour so late, Del didn’t realize until she’d parked and gone into the front door that she had entered Lola’s house instead of her own.

  “Oops,” she said aloud. Lola was at the top of the stairs. “Forgot which house I live in. Sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Lola headed down toward her. “Want some dinner?”

  “Sure,” she said, as casually as she could. “I’m starving. And I have good news.”

  “For good news, you might get dessert too.” Lola seemed to realize then what her words implied, and she flushed and rolled her eyes.

  “Only if it’s homemade,” Del said, following Lola to the kitchen. “If it’s store-bought, I’ll change the news to mediocre.”

  Lola giggled at her, and Del felt light and free at that sound. She waited until she’d washed up and eaten a giant bowl of Lola’s beef stew before bringing up the case.

  “Thanks for dinner,” she said. “I forgot to eat today.”

  Lola smiled, but she seemed tense. She made a pot of tea while Del explained what Anton Jones had found.

  “So you knew it was that man Teager even before there was any real reason to? How did you know?”

  “Well,” Del admitted, “I didn’t know. I guessed, because of the way they described the peeper. Then I figured I’d guessed wrong, since he had alibis for some of the incidents. He also didn’t seem sophisticated or experienced enough to successfully pull off the kidnappings.”

  “This Sandman guy committed some of the crimes, which is why Teager had an alibi for some of them?”

  “Exactly.”

  “So how will you get Sandman? How’ll you figure out who he is?”

  “Jones is hoping to track him back from Teager’s computer.” Del made a face. “We’re hoping Teager will turn on him. I think he’ll turn if his interrogation is handled right. Which it won’t be. Either the Feds will do it, and I’m not confident about them, or Davies will, and he doesn’t have the self-control, or, frankly, the finesse.”

  “Why can’t you—?”

  “That’s not how it works.” Del rubbed her eyes. “There’s a hierarchy, and I am nowhere near the top of it.”

  “But do you have any idea of who he is?”

  Del hesitated. Part of her wanted to show off, let Lola think she was the world’s most brilliant investigator. But she wasn’t. And she didn’t have the answer. She’d just about decided to put the case aside and try to talk to Lola about their issues when she heard herself talking.

  “Five years ago there was this kid. Mikey. Ten or eleven years old. Single mom, poor, lived in a shitty, overpriced rental. Landlord raped the mom, according to Mikey. Kid freaked. Shot the landlord.” Del shook her head. “Mom wouldn’t cooperate, wouldn’t get a medical exam, wouldn’t corroborate the kid’s story. I don’t know why. I don’t know if she’d had bad experiences with police before, or if there was some legal problem, or if the landlord bribed her, or threatened her, or what. Anyway, the rich white landlord got away with rape, and the little brown kid went to juvie for shooting him. The mom died. Cancer. Mikey went from juvie to a group home. Ran away about a year back. Then the kid got murdered a few weeks ago. Me and Phan got called on a body, juvie John Doe. It was our turn. I almost didn’t recognize him. We still haven’t been able to solve Mikey’s murder, and I’m not sure we ever will. That’s the case I’d like to solve.”

  “Oh, Del.” Lola reached out and squeezed Del’s hand. “How awful.”

  “Anyway, the landlord was a guy named Ernie White. There’s no real reason to think he killed Mikey, not really, but I keep thinking about the guy. Mikey was the only one who ever stood up to White. Not one woman or kid White had access to ever reported him or talked to police. Phan and I have interviewed over forty women who were tenants or employees of White’s family, and not one will say a word against him. They just get the big, faraway eyes, you know what I mean. But Mikey stood up to him and now he’s dead. I don’t know. Jones and the Patriot Act basically solved the Teager case, and somebody else will break the rest of it and figure out who Sandman is. Or they won’t. And we’ll get called to work on it or not. Probably not.”

  “You sound kind of finished with the whole thing.”

  “Yeah, it’s not my ballgame anymore, Davies has it. Ah, it’s kind of a letdown and kind of a relief. Now I can focus on Mikey. I owe the kid. I have to know what happened. But there’s nothing. We can’t find out where he was that last year, who he hung out with, who might have killed him. There’s nothing on him from the time he skipped school one day and never showed up at the group home again. Nothing.”

  “You have a hunch about what happened.”

  “No.” Del smiled. “Yeah. Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “And your hunches are right, time after time.”

  “I dunno about that. I have a hundred hunches, maybe two are right. Worse than a clock.” Del smiled at Lola’s confidence in her. “But I want to pursue White some more. Just ’cause I owe Mikey and I can’t do anything else for him. Back when, White seemed to want to hurt Mikey. Like it was personal. He couldn’t get to the kid while he was locked up, but once he was out—maybe I just didn’t like the guy.”

  “Go get ’em.” Lola’s tone was matter-of-fact. “He sounds like a terrible person.”

  “He is,” Del said. “I broke my own rules with White, got a buddy to give me this mountain of data on White, where he goes, his spending habits, all the digital footprints he’s left over the last few years. My dining room is a war room on White. That can’t be healthy. And it’s useless anyway. I can’t get anything on the guy even with all that data, which I shouldn’t have.” Forestalling the question she saw coming, Del shrugged. “You know I hate the way nine-eleven changed us.”

  Lola shook her head. “We’ve never talked about it.”

  “There’s a lot of stuff we haven’t done.” She sat back, pushing away her empty bowl. “The Feds have gotten more and more intrusive, spying on private citizens, collecting data on all of us, using the Patriot Act and intrusive Homeland Security practices to push aside our civil rights.”

  “It’s hard,” Lola said, “they have to prevent terrorists. But—”

  “Exactly,” Del cut in. “Anyway, I got this huge file on White, just page after page of information on where he’s been, what he’s bought, who he’s been in touch with, all this stuff. But there’s mountains of it. I’ve been going
through it, trying to make a timeline, trying to find patterns. If I can’t find Mikey’s killer, maybe at least I can get the asshole who put him in the place that made him vulnerable. And I’m getting nowhere.”

  “Sounds pretty frustrating.”

  “Yeah.” Del looked away, gathering her thoughts. “On a totally different track, I was thinking about what you said. You know, about us?”

  “Ah.” Lola seemed to be processing the shift in topic at her own pace. “And?”

  “You scare the hell out of me.”

  “I do?” Lola gave a nervous laugh. “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know.” Though she’d started it, Del wanted out of the conversation. “You just do.”

  “Good.”

  Lola smiled at Del’s snort. “If you’re scared and I’m scared, we’re in the same boat. We can start from, we’re both scared and trying to figure it out. Okay?”

  “Yeah.” Del nodded. “Okay.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  They stood holding each other for a long time. Del felt Lola’s warmth and breathing and wondered how she’d managed to forget how much Lola meant to her. She wandered home with her thoughts full of Mikey Ocampo and Ernie White. She started to disassemble her war room, sickened by the realization that she’d let the predator take up space in her home and in her head. But before she’d taken down more than a few sheets of paper, she was struck by a thought. On impulse she called Mac.

  “You know it’s the middle of the night here, right?”

  “Sorry.” She wondered if Mac understood that the apology was meant to cover more than the late-night intrusion.

  “This about the lecherous landlord?” Mac sounded tired, and she mumbled an affirmative, struck by a sudden awareness that she had no idea how old Mac was. “Okay, let’s update. Check your email in about ten, fifteen minutes. And Mason? Get some damn sleep and let everyone else get some too. Asshole will still be around tomorrow.”

  After a quick shower Del read the update from Mac. She texted Phan to ask if he could call her, despite the late hour, which he did.

  “This better be good.”

  Del gripped her cell phone. “Sorry—listen, I was thinking about porn buddies.”

  “I’m not gonna be your porn buddy, Mason.” Phan’s voice sounded tired. “Especially if you can’t let me get twenty minutes of sleep.”

  Del shook her head. “I’ve been assuming all these years that White did rape Mikey’s mother. But we don’t know. I don’t know.”

  Phan huffed. “Unless you have something worth saying—”

  “I know him, how he gets these women in the rental properties, how he insinuates himself in their lives. You know how these guys are too, they start violating the women’s privacy bit by bit. They say they stopped by to check on the plumbing and stuff like that. Like it’s perfectly legit, but it’s not. Like the Feds do with us, violate our privacy bit by bit. They make it seem reasonable but it’s not. It’s the same thing pedophiles do. They groom their victims. They cross the line a little bit, then a little more. They acclimate the kid to grosser and grosser violations—it’s the same pattern. It’s always the same pattern.”

  “Jesus, Mason, where is this headed?”

  “I started thinking, what about Sandman?”

  “What do you mean, what about Sandman?”

  “You and Jones, you were talking about it. Guys who like porn have a porn buddy in case they die or something. Now that Teager’s popped, who’s Sandman’s new porn buddy?”

  “It was a joke. I don’t actually—”

  “But some guys do, right? Sandman cultivated this friendship. He pushed Teager to go further than he would’ve on his own. Sandman groomed him. Like a pedophile grooms a victim.”

  “Ah.” Phan sounded less sleepy. “Like Janet groomed Sterling.”

  Del bit her lip. “Anyway, one of the things these guys sometimes do is, they groom more than one. They’re working one kid, they’re working this other one just in case, maybe a bunch of kids at once. So what if our guy is the same? What if he was grooming Teager and some other guy too?”

  “So, what are you saying?” Phan spoke in a quiet, reasonable tone. “Jones has already been looking at the chat rooms, trying to connect Teager and Sandman with other guys. He hasn’t found anything significant.”

  “We have to pursue this aggressively, Phan, we—”

  “And what?” Phan said. “Hack into his computer? Illegally monitor his Internet usage? What exactly are you talking about? You already did that, remember? You haven’t come up with shit even after you got ahold of your Fed buddy—and don’t think I haven’t noticed how shy you’ve been about that—and broke your own protocol and still didn’t come up with anything.”

  “I know, but listen.” Del made a face at the phone. “If we try to rope Sandman in with a new pal, he’ll just shut down. He’s gotta be wary after Teager was arrested. And maybe he hasn’t been grooming another Teager. Maybe. But if you were Sandman, what would you be doing right now?”

  Phan remained silent.

  “What would you be doing right now, what would you be thinking?”

  “I’d be worried Teager would turn on me. If I couldn’t get him released, if I couldn’t have him killed, I’d be erasing my tracks. Cutting any possible ties between him and me.”

  “You’d make sure there was nothing tying you to it,” Del said. “That’s what Ernie White was doing after he got out of the hospital when Mikey shot him five years ago.” Del stared at her dining room wall, tacked up with paper. “That was a natural thing to do, right? If you’d been breaking the law and maybe taking pics of your rape victims, or bragging to your buddies, or whatever—if somebody actually said you raped his mom, you’d want to cover your tracks, right? Even if you knew nobody would believe the kid, if you’ve intimidated the mom so much she’ll never come forward.”

  “How do you know—?”

  Del chuckled. “His financials. Back then we only looked for money moving from White to Mikey’s mom. But that was all we knew to look for. A little while ago I called a friend in Homeland Security and just heard back. White paid somebody to wipe his tech clean. Bought a new phone, new computers where you can partition your hard drives, all kinds of fancy encryption software. He wanted to cover his tracks.”

  “So you want to prove White is Sandman by showing Sandman’s doing the same thing. There’s some kind of signature to the housecleaning process?” Phan spoke with a touch of belligerence. “Where’s this going, Mason? You want to see who’s been buying pricey electronics? I don’t see what your plan is here.”

  “All I’m saying is, sometimes we catch them, not because of what they did to kill the victim, but because of what they did to cover it up.”

  “Okay,” Phan said with finality. “I’m out. No more late night, random brainstorming sessions. When you have some kinda cogent plan, great. Until then, I’m going to head back to my girlfriend. Yes, she’s actually thinking about taking me back, or was until you called me.”

  “Sorry!” Del grimaced. “Say sorry to Alana for me.”

  Del eyeballed her table, covered in dozens of stacked printouts of the data on Ernie White. There was so much paper covered in so much information that she couldn’t seem to get anything useful out of it. She’d become so immersed in the past and the possibilities that nothing was clear to her. She was entombed in mental fog. But how could she get out of that? What were the blind alleys and what were the paths to redemption?

  She thought of Nana and her weird religious fervor at the end of her life, how bizarrely evangelical and judgmental she’d become, convinced that everyone around her was a terrible sinner who was just covering up their tracks. Had that been part of what made Daddy fall apart? It couldn’t have been easy, watching his mom lose her marbles like that. Had she been mentally ill or just pickled from alcohol and ignorance? Would Del end up going crazy too? Families could make a person crazy. Hadn’t the job taught her that?


  On impulse Del ran a quick check through all the paper to see what she could put together on Ernie White’s mother. Eleanor Jane White had been born in Oklahoma and lived in Kansas, Missouri and Texas, picking up and surviving a well-to-do husband in each state. With her increasingly sizable inheritances, she dragged her young son Ernie with her to California, buying up one rental property after another and amassing an even larger fortune as the years went on. She’d died several months back, leaving her fortune to her only child. She’d been the defendant in dozens of slumlord lawsuits and the subject of two antitrust investigations, and she’d won or settled each of them. She’d let Ernie play property manager and given him a very generous allowance, but she’d stayed in charge until her short illness and death.

  Del paced the house, trying to process what she’d learned about Eleanor White. Did any of it matter? All it really meant was that White had gone from playing errand boy to being the big man. Had his mother killed her husbands? Did White believe his mom had murdered her husbands? He’d taken control of an estate worth tens of millions and had done little with it other than live off the interest and dividends and fly to countries where he could buy sex with even greater impunity than in the United States.

  Over the last weeks, she’d examined dozens of photos produced with her low-end printer: White in front of his mother’s Los Altos mansion, White in front of his own Sunset-District mansion, White in front of his black Lexus, the fourth in five years, and now his old one because he’d traded that one in on yet another black Lexus a couple of weeks back. After her run Del emailed White’s Redwood City Lexus dealer to ask if the dealership still had the model White had traded in. She wanted a carpet sample from the trunk. It was a longer-than-long shot but worth the time and effort to run it down, if only so she could put it out of her mind.

  It was after three in the morning when she finally dropped into bed, shaking with exhaustion and trying to remember how many days it had been since Mikey’s murder.

  Five hours later she walked into the station to find Phan waiting for her.