by Greg Rucka
“He was dead when you got there?”
I nodded.
“I imagine that was a surprise.”
“What was that smell?” I asked. “There was this awful stink, what was that?”
Munez glanced at Hoffman, who kept her gaze planted on me. “The Quick boys were entrepreneurs, it seems,” Munez said. “Aside from their cottage industry marketing dirty pictures of you, they were cooking crystal meth. Normally it gets brewed up in the high desert because the process stinks so bad. Setting up in a peppermint field, that’s almost clever.”
“If you say so. Next you’ll tell me they were forging bonds or something like that.”
Munez shook his head, chuckling, and made some notes. I risked a second glance at Hoffman. She was still watching me, no smile. She looked like she wanted to belt me, actually.
“Is there anything else?” I asked. “I’d kind of like to get home.”
“A couple more things, but we can get through them pretty quickly if you’re willing to cooperate.”
“Of course,” I said.
Hoffman snorted.
Munez said, “We’ve towed your Jeep in, but I’d like your consent to perform a search of the vehicle.”
“Sure. Can I ask what you’re looking for?”
“Methamphetamine. Chemicals or supplies used in the production of methamphetamine. Firearms. Large stacks of cash.” He smiled at me. “I somehow don’t think we’ll find anything like that, but we need to be thorough.”
“I understand. Do I just wait here?”
“It’ll only take a few minutes,” Munez told me, rising. “We’re going to need your clothes, I’m afraid. I’ll have a deputy bring you a change.”
“You need my clothes?”
“Evidence. The deputy will take you to a washroom, you can get cleaned up and changed.”
“Washroom would be great,” I said, and gave him the same smile he’d been giving me.
When they left, the female deputy came back with a bundle under her arm, and she walked me to the ladies’ room, stayed with me while I changed. I stripped off the jeans and shirt, then spent ten minutes getting the blood off my arms and hands before putting on the replacements. The jeans she gave me were blue and clean and enormous on me. I had to roll the cuffs up, and the waist kept slipping because she had to take my belt, too. The shirt was big, dark green, with the Lane County Sheriff logo on it, and comfortable. I wondered whose clothes I was wearing. When I saw myself in the mirror I looked silly as hell.
When I was finished, the deputy walked me back to the interview room without a word. Hoffman and Munez hadn’t returned yet. I tried to think if I had anything embarrassing in my car, if I was going to need an explanation. If they went through absolutely everything, I figured the worst they would find would be some bad Euro Pop CDs.
It took close to another hour before they returned, around three-thirty when Munez came back, Hoffman still with him. He brought his papers again, and they took the same seats.
“We’re finished with your vehicle, Miss Bracca,” Munez said. “You’ll be pleased to know we didn’t find anything questionable, and we rotated your tires for you.”
I laughed, and he grinned, pleased that I’d accepted his joke, then checked his notes once again. Hoffman shifted in her seat. He seemed to actively ignore her.
“So, what does this have to do with your father’s disappearance?” he asked.
“I’m sorry?”
“Detective Hoffman tells me that this all has something to do with the fact that your father disappeared and your brother died and you being famous and like that and the pictures on the Net. She thinks maybe one or both of the Quicks knew your father at OSP. Your dad was an inmate there, wasn’t he?”
I shook my head, doing my best to look bewildered. “I don’t know anything about that. The first I knew that Chris and Brian had been at OSP was when Detective Hoffman told me.”
“Hmm,” Munez said, and scribbled some more notes, then took a moment to look over everything he’d written. Then he produced two typewritten pages and slid them to me. “Would you read these over, please?”
I read the pages. It was a typed statement about what had happened at the Quicks’. There was nothing I disagreed with.
When I looked up again, Munez slid me his pen. “If you agree with the statement, I’d like your signature and a date at the bottom.”
I gave him both, slid the pages and the pen back.
Munez checked them again, then tapped the sheets together on the tabletop, squaring the edges. “Okay, you can go.”
Hoffman snapped as if he’d lost his fucking mind. “What?”
He ignored her. “Thanks for your time, Miss Bracca. If we need to contact you, you’ll be at your home?”
“Yes, I gave the number to the deputies.”
“She’s a material witness,” Hoffman said. “Put her in a goddamn cell!”
Munez looked at her, and it was clear that no matter how much Hoffman had wanted to belt me before, I was maybe coming in second in the hostility department right now. It was clear, too, this wasn’t the first time they’d had this fight.
“Well, Detective,” Munez said. “If this was your case, then that would be your prerogative, wouldn’t it? But it’s not—what I’ve got is an officer-involved shooting with cops from way out of their jurisdiction, and an armed and dangerous fugitive rolling through mine. The Lane County D.A. isn’t going to let me hold Miss Bracca here just because you think she’s lying to you about something up in Multnomah, and I happen to think she’s told us everything she knows about Mr. Quick.”
“Then hold her for twenty-four.” I had to give Hoffman credit for stubbornness. “Suspicion of murder for Christopher Quick.”
“And risk a suit for harassment? C’mon, Detective. Even if her GSR hadn’t come back negative, you and I both know she didn’t cap him, the brother did. There’s nothing in her vehicle or on her person tying her to the crime, and as far as I’m concerned, her story more than checks out.”
“I’ve explained this. You’ve got the pictures, you’ve got the people who did it, you’ve got the fact that her brother was murdered last week, her father disappeared this past Tuesday—”
“Tuesday, huh?” Munez got his things together, then went and opened the door for me. I got up to join him.
“I just need you to sit on her for a couple of hours,” Hoffman told him. “You can do that much.”
Munez smiled tightly at me. “You get back to Portland, Miss Bracca, you might want to file a missing persons report about your father. Been gone since Tuesday, that’s nearly forty-eight hours. We’ll call if we have further questions, like I said. You can talk to the deputy at the desk about your vehicle, he’ll tell you where you can retrieve it.”
“Thank you,” I said.
I heard Hoffman yelling at Munez through the door as I went down the hall.
The female deputy was at the desk, and she gave me my car keys and directions to where I could find it. I thanked her and made my way to the Jeep. Thursday late afternoon, Parka Man’s deadline was Friday at noon. I’d make it back in plenty of time, but climbing behind the wheel, I knew how close a call it had been. Maybe Munez liked my smile, maybe Munez didn’t like Hoffman, maybe Munez just couldn’t be bothered; whatever the reason, I’d gotten out lucky.
I pulled out of the garage, onto the street, and Marcus was there, and he raised a hand to flag me down. I stopped but didn’t get out of the car.
“Headed home?” he asked.
“Why? You gonna be back tonight?”
He made a slight, almost amused grunt, but there was a weight on him, now, a shadow, and he looked tired. “Somebody’ll be there. We’ve got a mountain or three of paperwork that’ll have to be filled out.”
“About me?”
“We fired several rounds at Mr. Quick as he was departing. The whole incident has to be accounted for.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“
For?”
“I’m pretty sure you guys saved my life.”
“And here I was about to tell you how close you came to losing it.”
“Trying not to think about that.”
“You know, Miss Bracca, it wasn’t just you who almost died. Quick was throwing those bullets our way when the shooting started.”
“I’m glad he missed.”
“Not as much as we are.” There was no mirth in it. “Don’t you think it’s time you stopped dicking us around?”
The sky had gone to a late-afternoon blue, and there was purple rising to the west with the sunset, rain-heavy clouds. I hoped it would hold off until I was home.
“No, huh?” Marcus asked.
“You want to ask me anything else,” I said, “you’ll have to talk to my attorney.”
Marcus stepped back from my door. “We will. See you tomorrow, Miss Bracca.”
He went back inside, and I went for the interstate.
CHAPTER 35
First thing I did when I got home was get out of my new clothes and into a hot shower. I’d gotten stuck in traffic coming into town through the Curves, the winding portion of Five that descends through the South Hills before you hit the Marquam Bridge, and that’s when the sky had really opened, and I’d begun to feel an itchiness along my legs, and I’d convinced myself it was Chris Quick’s blood, dried and flaking on my skin.
When I was dry and dressed again I checked my voice mail, and among the garbage was a message from Chapel. He wanted to see me first thing tomorrow morning, and said that Hoffman and Marcus had been in touch.
I fixed myself dinner, a pot of Kraft macaroni and cheese, and I really wanted a drink or three, but kept myself to a couple of cigarettes and a diet Coke. I’d given things a lot of thought on the drive up from Eugene, and the only conclusions I’d come to were that I didn’t really have any conclusion at all, and I was getting very scared, indeed.
If Brian Quick was the Parka Man, and if he was on the loose, then he now needed me as much as I needed him. But if he had another accomplice aside from his brother, then maybe I was getting ahead of myself. Why Brian had shot Chris, I didn’t know, but greed seemed like a good motive for it. Remembering Anne’s reaction to the scent of my money in the air, there was certainly a precedent for it in the family.
Maybe Brian had decided he didn’t want to share a million dollars with his brother.
So the question really was, did I believe that Brian Quick and the Parka Man were the same person? And I just didn’t know the answer to that. If I trusted my memory, the voices didn’t match.
It was obvious that Brian and Chris were responsible for the pictures. They’d been at my home the night I’d returned from the tour, Chris inside, working on the cameras, Brian waiting outside. And when Brian had seen me, he’d seen all of their preparations for my return vanishing with my untimely arrival. He’d been so focused on keeping me out of the house, he’d panicked, and that’s how I’d ended up in the truck without my clothes. It explained why he hadn’t escalated; a rape would have sent me to the hospital, and maybe even more. All those cameras would have gone to waste.
Greed.
One or both of them had gotten into my home on several occasions, frequently enough to plant the cameras, to set up all the wiring and things that Burchett and his crew had discovered. If Brian could do that, then he could certainly bypass my alarm and take a fancy infrared photograph of me, then get out again without waking me up.
So there was evidence Brian could plan, he could do that. Yet he hadn’t anticipated me showing up in Junction City, and when I had, his first instinct had been to open fire, a panic response, like the night I’d returned home. He’d reacted as if cornered.
That wasn’t the Parka Man at all. The Parka Man had planned everything to the last detail, had predicted how I would react to the photograph, had been waiting for me at Mikel’s place when I arrived.
Which brought me back to the accomplice angle, but now I was out of luck. There was no one left. “You’ve sure grown up,” the Parka Man had told me, but everyone who knew that was accounted for. I’d seen Gareth Quick, and his Alzheimer’s had seemed real enough, especially when coupled with Anne’s hostility. Chris was in a Lane County morgue, and Brian was God Only Knew Where, intent on keeping the cops from sending him back to OSP. The Larkin brothers were supposedly in Alaska, and while I only had Sheila’s word for that, hatching a plot from Nome that would be contingent on knowing when I was in Portland just didn’t seem plausible.
What I needed to do was remember. Remember who it was I’d overlooked.
Who I’d forgotten.
The debate started around nine-thirty, while I was sitting in the living room with the Taylor, trying to rediscover what I’d wanted to play the night before. It wasn’t going well, and the more I fought it, the worse it went. My fingers ached, and wouldn’t take instruction right, gone sloppy, missing strings, too far from the frets. I was bearing down on the back of the neck too hard, and my left thumb started aching immediately, but instead of relaxing my hand, I fought it and gave myself more pain.
Then I lost my pick in the hole, and I had to shake it free of the chamber. When I finally got it out and tried again, I discovered I’d knocked the guitar out of tune, and almost every string had gone sharp, and the discord felt like it went straight up my spine.
Then I broke the high E on the Taylor.
I sat there with the silent guitar in my hands, feeling everything crashing over me. The smell of mint so strong I thought I would gag. Tommy, wherever he was, if he was still alive, and if he was, maybe that was worse, Steven, ashes, floating on the Pacific, and Mikel in his best suit in a box in the ground.
And I wanted a drink so bad, there didn’t seem a point in staying sober.
I wanted to get the bottle of Jack out of the pantry and pour myself a glass and blast myself into oblivion, and I couldn’t even do that, because once I had one, I knew I’d have another, and another, and another.
I’d never seen my father drinking liquor, only beer. It was my mother who had drunk Jack Daniel’s, always on the rocks, always in a dark glass, so she could pretend it was iced tea.
I was a liar.
I was an alcoholic, just like my father, just like my mother.
Maybe it was just time to admit that I was my parents’ daughter.
There was knocking on the door and I went to answer it, then stopped halfway down the hall. I checked from the window of the living room, pressing my face against the cold glass, and I could see a car parked across the street, and I could make out a woman on my porch, waiting at the door.
“Dyke Tracy,” I said, when I opened up. “What a surprise.”
“You drunk?”
It was a stupid question. I had the glass in my hand. “Go away.”
“We need to talk.”
“Oh?”
“Please.”
It was the way she said it, nothing behind it or in it except fatigue. I knew the feeling.
“Yeah, come in,” I said. “Fix yourself a drink. There’s even beer in the fridge, untouched, pristine. Are you off duty? You can drink off duty, right?”
I went to my cigarettes and lit one, watched as she moved through my kitchen. She went to the fridge and looked inside, brought out a bottle of beer. I clapped one hand on the counter in approval, because I didn’t want to spill my glass. She’d gone with the IPA.
“Click would approve,” I told her.
“You’re hammered.”
“Nailed, baby.”
She set the bottle on the counter. “That’s not terribly smart, Mim.”
“I’m not terribly smart, Tracy.” I took a gulp of my drink, maintaining eye contact. “Bet you don’t think I’m drinking iced tea, do you?”
She didn’t answer.
“It’s Jack rocks. It’s a man’s drink, but strong enough for a woman,” I said. She didn’t laugh. I finished what was in my glass, then went for the bottle to refi
ll.
“They rushed the job on that computer they took from the Quicks’ place,” she told me.
“Shack. Not a place, a shack. I’ve been in places, they don’t look like that.”
“They found multiple files, images of you. They were in different stages of being doctored up like the ones that already went public.”
“I look forward to seeing them.”
“Thing is, according to Burchett and his people, there should be a couple gigabytes of video of you, just the raw video. There was no sign of it on the computer.”
“Maybe it was boring, so they deleted it.”
“They can check for that. It wasn’t there.”
I shrugged and sipped.
“I have a theory,” Hoffman said, after a moment.
“I have one, too,” I told her. “It goes, dinosaurs are thin at one end, thick in the middle, and thin at the other end.”
“You quote Monty Python when you’re drunk?”
“It’s a theory.” I sat at the table, a little heavier than I had wanted to.
“I think the person who killed your brother is the same person who took your father,” Hoffman said. “And I’m beginning to think that’s not the same person who took the pictures. Brian and Chris, they were planning on their little spy game back at OSP. Chris took computer courses in prison, Brian studied to be an electrician. I think they only planned to spy on you, maybe ultimately to blackmail you.”
“They teach courses on kidnapping at OSP?”
“Not officially.”
“So what the fuck is your point?”
“I don’t think your father wanted to go with the person who took him. I think this person is the reason you’ve got a bruise on your throat and a cut on your forehead and swollen knuckles on your hand, and he’s why you spent today running up and down the I-Five corridor. I think you’ve been trying to figure out on your own who that person is, and that for some reason you think it’s someone from your days in foster care. That’s why you went out to see the Quicks, and that’s why you were trying to be so subtle about what we might have found at his place. Forging bonds. You were fishing.”
