Stumbling on the Sand

by Jenna Rae

  Del felt a little better after that, though they really hadn’t said anything. Maybe sometime they’d actually talk. Maybe not. Mac was a pretty closed book and always had been.

  She’d hoped the distraction would give her some clarity on Teager’s odd response to her mention of the carpet fibers. The truth was, even if the Feds did the lab work, even if the carpets were still the same, even if somehow they actually did get some kind of exclusion that said the carpet fiber was very, very likely to have come from the same exact model black Lexus owned by White at the time of Mikey’s murder, that still didn’t mean much without corroborating evidence. There were a lot of people in the city who owned the same model. A good defense attorney would eat that kind of circumstantial evidence for lunch. As if at the thought of lunch, Del’s stomach rumbled. Three bites of the sandwich Phan had given her hadn’t quite done the job.

  She called him, thinking she owed him both thanks and an apology. It was an echo of her thought about Mac, and as she waited for Phan to answer she thought about how many women, Janet and Lola included, she owed both thanks and apologies to. Patterns, she thought idly, people always behave according to patterns that they mostly don’t see clearly themselves. Even if they can see other people’s patterns.

  “He cut a deal.” Phan said by way of a greeting.

  “Just like that?” Del shook her head. “Seriously?”

  “You know why?”

  “Leslie Thorne,” Del guessed.

  “Mikey Ocampo.”

  Del sank into a chair.

  In the silence, Phan filled her in. “Teager had a burner phone, Sandman had told him to get it so they could have nice little heart-to-hearts.”

  “And?”

  “When Teager saw the Feds coming a-knocking, he used his burner to warn Sandman about his arrest, and Sandman threatened him. Told Teager he’d pin two deaths on him.”

  “Teager didn’t know who the second death was.” Del leaned forward as if Phan were across the dining room table from her. “It was Mikey. Sandman had killed Mikey and Teager didn’t know about it.”

  “Teager’s a little smarter than Sandman thought. After you left, Teager really did get sick. He was panicked you’d find out who Sandman was.”

  Del pushed her overgrown hair out of her eyes. “Okay.”

  “Yeah, the Feds got him to set the guy up in a follow-up call. Got Sandman to confess to Mikey’s murder and implicate himself in the sex crimes.”

  “It’s the same guy. It’s Ernie White.” Del sat back. “It was him all along.”

  “You got it. Since your buddy pulled White’s info twice in the last little while, Homeland Security started taking a more focused look at him.”

  “More focused?” Del snorted. “They already had the data from his travel, his financials, his everything. They knew how he takes his coffee, Phan.”

  “Apparently they know a lot more about him now, but they’re not sharing.”

  “So Teager goes to federal prison and White has to decide whether he’s going to try his chances in court or plead out, which is what he’d be smart to do. Have they already picked him up?”

  “Not as far as I know. But you know how the Feds are. They’ll let us read about it after the fact. If they kept us in the loop they might have to share credit for the arrests.”

  Del processed all of this carefully, picking at a frayed cuticle and not saying anything.

  “Hello?” Phan’s voice sounded far away.

  “I’m glad Teager’s caught. I’m glad White is gonna get caught and pay for Mikey’s murder. Which of them actually killed Leslie Thorne?”

  “Teager still says it was White.”

  “Okay. Thanks for telling me.”

  “It sucks, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah.” Del pushed her hair back. “Glad they can’t hurt anybody else, at least for now. But it’s a major letdown. We weren’t even there. And I’m guessing we don’t get to chase him down.”

  “Yeah. But listen, it all happened because you set it all in motion.”

  “I guess.” Del sighed. “Okay, thanks.”

  “Hey, we’ll worry about the follow-up stuff tomorrow.”

  “It’s like that poem—something about not a bang but a whimper. You know it?”

  “Eliot.” Phan’s voice was as flat as Del’s mood. “All too well.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Del tried to feel good about the fact that Teager was off the streets, at least for a while. She examined the gathering fog and realized the night would have been a perfect one for Teager if he were free, so there was all the more reason to be glad. Ernie White would be captured by the Feds, hopefully before he could kidnap and assault another woman. With any luck he’d get locked up too. There wasn’t a whole lot she could do at this point to make things go better, and there were plenty of capable professionals who were working on building a legal case against both predators. Del was out of it. Things had gone about as well as they could have. Soon the women of the Mission would be a little safer, Mikey’s murder was solved, and everyone would feel like they had done something worthwhile.

  After a microwaved burrito, a couple of television shows and a slug of vodka, Del was still wound up and decided to go for a run. The sky was clear when she headed out, but, walking the last block home forty minutes later, Del found herself in a thick fog, both literally and figuratively. She felt her phone vibrate in her sock and pulled it out.

  “What’s up, Phan?”

  “Okay don’t give me shit for this, I’m just feeling—”

  “Like it’s unfinished.” Del paused in front of Phil and Marco’s house, chilled by the evening’s mist but not ready to face her empty home.

  “They’ll catch White. You know that.” Phan’s heavy sigh pushed into Del’s thoughts. “You and me, we’re done with this one, we’re not on point anymore.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Like we’re pushed aside. Hey, you got to meet with Teager, I didn’t even get that.”

  Del grimaced, wishing she’d thought about how Phan was feeling. “Yeah, sorry about that, I guess you’re not pretty enough.”

  Phan’s laughter filled her ear, and Del smiled.

  “Listen, I gotta go, Kaylee’s gonna call to ask me if she can do something I think I’m gonna say no to.”

  “Meanie.”

  Still feeling wound up, Del was trying to decide whether to go inside or take another loop around the neighborhood when she saw movement by Lola’s house. The porch light was still out and the lights were off and the fog was blinding. Her peripheral vision had picked up motion but not a precise location, and she froze, trying to figure out if there was something to pay attention to or not. As she turned her head she felt mist dampen her drooping curls and eyelashes. Was the movement in the house or outside? Had she really seen anything, or had it been the roiling fog?

  Del let out a slow, shaky breath. The movement could have been the fog, a cat, some innocent pedestrian, but Del’s fired-up senses didn’t buy any of those benign possibilities. She felt adrenaline surge through her body, igniting her awareness and tightening her skin. She forced herself to slow down and think. She’d replaced the bulb in Lola’s porch light within six months. It shouldn’t have burned out. Had someone tampered with the light?

  Del felt her stomach muscles clench. Ernie White hadn’t been apprehended, as far as she knew. Assuming that it was Teager who’d gotten fixated on short brunettes, she’d failed to think through the details of White’s possible psychosexual fixations. There was no reason for him to come after her, no reason for him to go after Lola. If he had any sense of self-preservation, he would stay as far from police officers as possible.

  But what if there was something more important to White than self-preservation? What if his ego wouldn’t allow him to consider the possibility that he could be apprehended or convicted? Del eased her way across the street, wondering if she was visible to any possible assailant, White or not. Suddenly impatient with her
self, Del sped up her progress toward Lola’s house. She reached the bottom of the stairs and saw movement out of the corner of her eye. Was the assailant now behind her? Was there even an assailant?

  Del’s hand was already hovering over her waistband, searching for her duty weapon when a creature, either a smallish possum or a huge rat, scuttled along the fence, heading toward the yard behind Lola’s. Awash in relief and embarrassment over her panic, Del smiled, letting her shoulders sag. Her phone vibrated as if in response, and she jumped, startled. It was Sofia Gonzalez.

  “Ms. Gonzalez. You okay?”

  “No.” The whisper was barely audible.

  “You home?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  Del texted Phan to call it in and meet her at Sofia Gonzalez’s house, guessing he, like she, would remember the address the way they automatically recorded any data, never knowing when they might need to recall it in a hurry. Then she raced toward her truck. It was quieter than the bike.

  The little bungalow, so cheerful in the sunshine, was gloomy in the fog. The gate north of the house was unlocked and open a few inches. All the lights were off, and Del turned off her headlights a hundred yards away. She left the truck as close as she dared and wished Phan lived closer. She should wait for him, wait for the Response Team. But the panic in Sofia Gonzalez’s voice, the way she’d limited herself to whispered monosyllables, told Del time was of the essence. Someone, Del assumed Teager, had been there at least once. Del had figured the first incident, the one Sofia Gonzalez had been made to feel silly for calling in, was Teager too. What if it wasn’t?

  Skirting the perimeter of the house, peering in windows as she went along, Del made her way to the backyard. There were nine points of entry, from what she recalled, two doors and seven windows. The doors were good ones, heavy-duty with reinforced frames. The windows were the easiest points of ingress. If she were the intruder, she’d hit the window in the small bathroom across the hall from the bedroom. It was big enough for a medium-sized man to enter. There was a garden bench not far from it, wooden, light enough to move quietly and sturdy enough to use as a boost. She reached that farthest side and saw the bench under the bathroom window. She hesitated. Had that been too obvious? What if it was a trap?

  That whispered voice had been Sofia Gonzalez’s, Del reassured herself. Could it have been recorded? She shook her head. No, it had been Gonzalez. She’d been scared. Could she have been coerced by a captor into responding to Del without giving her a clue?

  She pulled her phone back out of her sock and shielded its lighted face. She texted Phan, apprising him of her status. She heard a bang and a woman’s quiet, inarticulate voice making some sad, scared little sound. Del vaulted toward the bathroom window, driven by instinct even as she thought of the Eliot poem. Was her world about to end? Or was it already over? Like Mikey’s life, like Western civilization, like her relationship with Lola, like the case—had they all just sort of petered off into nothing while she was stumbling around uselessly?

  Del pushed the random musing aside as she pulled herself in through the window, rolling into a crouch and peering out into the hall, gun in both hands. She couldn’t see Sofia Gonzalez, couldn’t see or hear anything. She was cold, damp from the mist that had gathered while she ran and then while she skulked around outside on her own street and then in Gonzalez’s yard. She shivered. There was a morsel of sound, an excited, nearly inaudible exhalation. Not her own. She matched her breathing to the rhythm of the other person’s breathing. It wasn’t Gonzalez’s. She had a wide rib cage and the low, slow breathing that came with it. This person was narrower in the chest, proportionate to his height. Tenth grade music class, Del thought with desperate distraction, had taught her to listen to sounds with their sources in mind. Or had it been her parents’ drunken, depressed, raging inconsistency? She’d learned to know who was walking around, who was stumbling, who was falling against the fragile walls of their trailer. She’d learned on the job too, of course, how to hear what was barely a vibration and place its source, its velocity and direction. And of course Mac had taught her things she didn’t even remember learning. She’d pushed Mac out of her mind, pushed so many things out of her mind.

  She was synced with the intruder. He was to her left down the hall, in either the front room or the kitchen. She drew in air with careful deliberation, listening, listening, waiting, listening. She thought of her daddy and how he took her hunting in the woods, how he demonstrated without words how to listen, how to watch, what to do while stalking prey. Had the bad guy’s father shown him how to stalk prey too?

  He swallowed, a click she heard as clearly as if he’d made the autonomic sound just for her. Kitchen. The white, white, bare kitchen where Sofia Gonzalez didn’t cook but ate toasted waffles over the kitchen sink. She listened and waited again but couldn’t isolate him more than that. Del couldn’t hear Gonzalez at all. She could try to go after him but it would be stupid to do so. Phan was on his way and so was the Response Team. There might be a patrol officer outside right now.

  It had been eleven minutes since Del had texted Phan, thirteen since the first call from Gonzalez to Del. White had had plenty of time to prepare for whatever kind of showdown he was planning. Del stayed crouched in the bathroom, her shoulder stiff, her knees screaming, her body aching from the stillness, her head ringing with the effort of silent, attentive listening. She was stuck. She couldn’t go back outside without risking leaving Sofia Gonzalez vulnerable and couldn’t go forward without risking endangering Gonzalez, Phan, the other officers, and herself. Patience was all she had to offer, now that she’d impulsively, recklessly, stupidly entered the home.

  The seconds slid by slowly, inexorably. Phan would come. The others would come. Ernie White preferred to attack women who were unable to defend themselves or get help.

  Phan was coolheaded, but he operated on emotion more than he realized. He could be trusted to keep his head until he couldn’t, like anybody. The Response Team was comprised of specially trained officers who had that rare and hard-to-keep balance of endless patience and ability to burst into action at a microsecond’s notice.

  “God.” Ernie White’s voice sounded exasperated and amused in equal measure. He was still, from what Del could hear, in the kitchen. Was he standing next to the refrigerator? It sounded like it. “I know you’re there. I had her call you. You are really annoying. I can see why your partner—both your partners—lost patience with you.”

  Del remained silent. The team was surely here by now.

  “He was a beautiful boy, you know.”

  Del closed her eyes for a second then snapped them back open.

  He’s baiting me.

  “A prostitute. What else?” White laughed. “Not that I’m a fag or anything. I like pussy, as you astutely pointed out when we met.”

  Del kept her breath steady. She flexed her feet and adjusted her hands around her weapon.

  “But I couldn’t help myself. I kept tabs on him. Like you kept tabs on me.”

  White seemed to expect a response, but Del stayed silent and still, waiting him out.

  “He wanted to find me. That’s the thing. I’d considered letting him just fritter away his useless life, he would’ve been dead in a year the way he was going. No way he’d survive. But he was looking for me. He looked up my real estate holdings. Can you imagine that? He stalked me.”

  White sounded offended. Del smiled grimly. They always did, didn’t they? The most predatory assholes always saw themselves as hapless victims and their victims as the ones who’d crossed some line only the assholes could imagine existed.

  White shifted his weight. He wasn’t used to exertion. A little golf, a little rape, but not a lot of exercise beyond that. Staying still and alert for a long time was exhausting in a way few people understood unless they were cops or soldiers or prisoners. White was used to being able to stalk his prey, strike and leave, returning at will without consequences.

/>   “So you fucked the kid.” Del heard how indifferent her voice sounded. She resisted the urge to shift her own weight. Her ankles were killing her more than her knees, which was saying something. She forced herself to tense and relax her major muscles, concentrating on that effort and on the labor of keeping her breath regulated.

  “He didn’t recognize me.” White sounded offended by this. “He was looking me up, but he didn’t even recognize me.” He’d lost the thread of his intention to rile her up and was riling himself up instead. Surely he would regain his footing soon.

  Del checked in with her internal clock. It had been fourteen minutes since her text to Phan. Was he outside now?

  “Fifty bucks for a blowjob,” White said, trying to keep his voice cool and detached. “A hunny to fuck him. Guess which I picked?”

  Half and half.

  “But I got impatient. No premature jack for me, though, don’t get the wrong idea.” White snorted. “The whole time he was on his knees in front of me, working away like a good little bitch, I thought about his mom. She could Hoover dick like a pro too.” White laughed, a nasty sound Del thought might stain her if she let it. “I was planning to fuck him in the ass and tell him just before I came, but I thought about seeing his face while I told him and got a little too impatient.”

  Del squinted, fighting the urge to close her eyes to the image White was painting for her.

  “He just sat back on his heels, his stupid face right in front of my dick, and I laughed. That made me jack all over his stupid face.” White laughed again, the sound tinged with hysteria. “He couldn’t believe it.”

  Del blinked, surprised at the dampness around her eyes. Her breath was tight, her body shaking. She could imagine all too clearly the shock and horror and shame on the boy’s face. Had he felt guilty for not being able to protect his mom from this man, from cancer, from death? Had he felt humiliated and dehumanized and despairing? Del’s chest ached. She felt Mikey’s pain and grief as distinct things inside her, wounds she carried along with her own. Would she ever be able to breathe again and not feel Mikey’s wounds lodged in her lungs?