“All right,” he said. Still deciding what to do with me. “Tell me something. I was in the medical superintendent’s office a little while ago, and this goddamn sonofabitch Stretto came in. He damn near accused me of setting that bomb myself. According to him, I’m implicated in what’s happened to all these girls. Now where did he get an idea like that?”
I shrugged. Trying to stay calm. But all of a sudden my heart started to pound. Without transition I felt sure that I could get something I needed out of Acton.
“Stretto almost got killed,” I said as evenly as I could. “Now he wants to blame somebody. You’re as good a scapegoat as any.”
“How do you figure that?” He sounded like he needed a lump of granite to chew on.
“The bastard who set the bomb knew Alathea was here. Who could’ve told him? Five people. You, me, Stretto, Ginny, and Lona. And you’re the only one who wasn’t there.”
I had him now. That was the kind of argument he understood. He chewed his lip for a while. When he said, “I didn’t even know what room she was in. Who did you tell?” he wasn’t challenging me anymore. He was working on the case.
I said, “Nobody,” and waited.
He chewed for another moment, then spat, “Damn it, I did. I didn’t talk to Stretto at all. He wasn’t in when I called. I left a message for him with one of his secretaries.”
“Which one?”
When he finally met my eyes, he looked like he was actually angry at himself. And just like that I knew what was going on with him. He was such a belligerent cop because he didn’t have any other way to let out his frustration. For almost two years now, he’d been trying to figure out what happened to these missing girls, and all he’d got was nowhere. Their deaths—and the manner of their deaths—made him sick with rage, but he hadn’t accomplished a thing. So he took it out on people who made him look bad to himself. When he said, “I didn’t get her name,” I wasn’t even disappointed. I was relieved. Because now I knew he would answer my questions.
“Never mind,” I said. “We already knew it has to be somebody who works for the school board.”
His anger jumped into focus on me. “How the hell do you know that?”
I took out the piece of paper that Ginny had taken from Martha Scurvey’s office and handed it to him. While he checked it out, I told him where it came from.
That made a difference to him. “Now maybe we’ve got something.” He put the paper away in his pocket. “All those other sheets. We’ve had them analyzed. We can prove they were all made by the same company—but we already knew that from the watermark. We haven’t been able to prove they came from the same ream. Too many minute variations in the composition of the paper. Except for the last two. The lab boys are ready to swear they came from the same sheet. Fiber-tear, composition, everything matches.
“If this piece comes from the same ream, we’ll have some proof we can use.”
I could almost see the wheels turning in his head. Get a warrant, search the school board offices, track down the source of the paper. Embarrass Stretto as much as possible in the process. It was a good system. It might even work.
But it would take time—and I didn’t have time. Mittie didn’t have time. So I took hold of myself and asked, “Acton, why did you have to scare people like the Christies? You didn’t think they were pimping or pushing for their own daughters. What were you trying to do?”
He didn’t look at me. But he answered.
“Ah, screw it. I was trying to make something happen. Push here, and hope the wall cracks over there. I wanted to keep it all out of the papers. Send a message to whoever was responsible. If I kept a lid on sensational stuff like that, the people who knew what was going on would know I was still after them. I wanted to make the bastards nervous.”
I almost asked him why he thought that was a good enough reason to make miserable parents feel even worse, but I was afraid he’d stop talking. Instead I said, “It was worth a try. Tell me how you found Alathea.”
He still didn’t look at me, but now it was for a different reason. “I didn’t tell Mrs. Axbrewder the whole truth about that. Some guy saw her out on Canyon Road and called in. I told Mrs. Axbrewder she looked sick. The fact is, she was wandering down the middle of the road buck naked. And bleeding. The guy who called said he thought she was trying to hitch a ride. When the doctor saw the cuts and scrapes on her, he said it looked like she’d crawled through a broken window or something.”
I was staring at Acton, but I didn’t really see him. I was thinking, Naked. Crawled. Something I’d been trying to figure out earlier came back to me. The timing. Every one of those kidnapped girls had been missing for two or three months before turning up dead. Except Alathea. She’d only been gone for ten days. Why?
Now I knew why. Because she’d escaped. They didn’t fill her up with junk and then leave her to die like the other seven. She escaped. For a while, she managed to fight off the junk. She broke a window where they were keeping her, and crawled out, and went down Canyon Road, trying to hitch a ride until it was too much for her and she passed out.
Which put her in a coma.
She’d tried to do something that nobody could do. Alone she’d struggled to climb out of a hell she hadn’t chosen and couldn’t refuse. Just thinking about it made me want to scream. But I didn’t. Instead I said, “This time you’d better put a guard on her room.”
“Believe it,” Acton growled. “Anybody who wants to get at her now will have to fight off half the department.”
I said, “Good.”
Then I asked Ted to tell Acton everything he knew about Sven Last.
Acton had already heard that the bomb was planted by some clown pretending to be a doctor, but he didn’t have the details. I made Ted spill them all. He hated doing it—hated having to say such things out loud—but I didn’t leave him any choice. I wanted to cover every bet I could think of.
When Ted was done, Acton went one way to put out an APB, and I went the other. Ted followed me as if he were being sucked along in my wake.
I didn’t have a very clear idea of where I was going. First I wanted to see Ginny. After that I’d try to figure out what came next.
I got lucky. I caught up with her while she was being wheeled from surgery to recovery. The aides objected, but I made them stop long enough to let me take a good look at her.
She was still unconscious—dead to the world, pale, breathing gracelessly through her mouth. The stump of her left forearm had been strapped in tight white bandages, and the rest of the arm wore a cast to keep the bones from shifting. Helpless as a kid.
I could’ve kissed her and she never would’ve known the difference.
I let her go. I was too tense to stand there. Once I’d put her purse beside her so that she’d have her .357 handy when she woke up, I found out from the aides what room she’d be in when she came out of recovery. Then I let them take her away.
With Ted still trailing behind me, I left the hospital, feeling like a murderer who just hadn’t managed to find the right victim yet.
16
The sun was setting in a bloodlike red wash as I drove the Olds out of the parking lot, and while Ted and I cruised down Paseo Grande toward the Murchison Building, darkness slowly thickened in the air. It was night when we parked in the basement garage and rode the elevator up to Ginny’s office.
I’d taken her keys. I unlocked the door, snapped on some lights, and we went into the back room. The smell of very well-done coffee reminded me that I’d left the pot plugged in. I offered Ted a cup, then poured myself one and sat down at Ginny’s desk to drink it. It tasted like burnt sweat-sock squeezings and motor oil, but I sipped at it anyway as if it were liqueur.
For a couple of different reasons, I didn’t want Ted to ask me any questions. He hadn’t said anything since we’d left Acton, and I didn’t want him to start now. For one thing, I didn’t have any answers. And questions would just interfere with what I was trying to do.
Sitting in G
inny’s office, at her desk, drinking her coffee, I struggled to think like she did. I didn’t have any red-hot flashes of my own, and I knew I wouldn’t get any if I tried to force them. So instead I tried to look at things her way.
Six hours ago, she’d been sitting right in this chair and she’d said. Its right here in front of me, but I can’t see it.
She’d had all the pieces she needed, she just hadn’t been able to put the puzzle together. Now she was in the hospital, doped up with scopolamine or sodium pentothol, and I had to do it for her.
Which wouldn’t have made sense to Ted, even if he’d been in the mood to try—which he wasn’t. He stood me as long as he could. Then he said in a strained little voice, “Let’s go.”
I drank some more coffee, almost gagged. “Exactly where?”
“After Last. He’s our lead. Somebody can tell us how to find him.”
“It’s too early,” I said. “Pimps don’t even think about business until after ten.”
“For God’s sake!” he protested. “We’ve got to do something. They’re doing it to her right now!”
He was probably right about that. Now would be a good time for them to shoot her up if they wanted her compliant later on—say between eleven and two. But reminding me about things like that only made it harder for me to stay calm. “Goddamn it, Ted!” I began “you think—?”
I stopped. An idea hit me—an obvious idea, something I shouldn’t even have had to think about. Something Ginny would’ve done automatically. But for some reason it felt like more than that.
I grabbed the phone and called her answering service.
When the woman answered, I said, “This is Axbrewder. Ginny Fistoulari is out of circulation for a while. I need to know if there are any messages for her.”
Ginny—bless her punctilious heart—had kept my name active with her answering service. In a bored voice, the woman said, “Some man’s called four times in the last two hours. Didn’t leave a name. He wants her to call him back.”
She read off a phone number. I grabbed a pen, scrawled the number on Ginny’s blotter. Thanked the woman and hung up.
“What is it?” Ted asked.
I was already dialing. “Do you believe in intuition?”
“Intuition?” he rasped. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“In that case, maybe what you ought to do is pray.” The number rang. I shut Ted out of my mind, concentrated everything I had on the secrets hidden in that phone line.
Somebody picked up the phone. A burly male voice said, “Yeah?”
“I was told to call this number.” I held the receiver against my head so hard it felt like it was bending.
“Who’d you want?”
“I don’t know. They want me. All they left was this number.”
“Your name?”
“Fistoulari.”
The man covered the mouthpiece. I heard him shouting, but I couldn’t tell what he said.
A minute later another man was at the phone. “Fistoulari?”
It wasn’t much, but it was all I needed. “No. I’m her partner. My name’s Axbrewder. I was with her when you pulled your little doctor act at the hospital.”
There was a long silence. Then the voice snarled, “Well, aren’t you the clever one? How did you know it was me?”
“I’m good at voices.”
“Goodie for you.” He paused. “Where’s Fistoulari?”
“That little toy you left behind blew her in half.” I wasn’t about to tell him the truth. I didn’t want him to go back and take another crack at her.
“Too bad it didn’t get you, too.”
“Too bad for you. Kidnapping, dealing, and prostitution aren’t bad enough. Now you’ve got murder one. You’re as good as dead, punk.”
“Yeah, well—” His voice changed, became softer and greasier. “That’s what I want to talk to you about. I heard rumors that bomb didn’t do everything it was supposed to. I shouldn’t have let him talk me into it in the first place. But that little whore can identify me. I want to deal.”
“Deal, hell.” I gripped the edge of the desk to keep myself from shouting. “You killed my partner. Why should I deal with you?”
Ted stood in the light across the desk from me. He was chewing on his mustache, and his hands made fists at his sides.
“Because,” the voice said, all oil and lechery, “I can give you the man who’s responsible for all this. I’m just the errand boy. He’s the one who kidnaps the girls. He’s the one who gets the junk and pumps it into them until they’re ready to do anything. Anything, Axbrewder. He’s the one.”
I took Ginny’s battered old letter opener in my free hand, bent it double, and threw it across the room hard. It took a sizable hunk out of the plaster. “Convince me.”
“No problem. But I won’t give you time to locate this number. I want to meet.”
“That sounds like a great idea. Then you can just shoot me, and there won’t be any witnesses left.”
“Suit yourself,” he snapped. “I’ll be in that abandoned Ajax warehouse down at the end of Trujillo. About an hour from now. That’s a good place for me, because I’ll be able to tell if you bring anybody with you, like maybe the cops. If you do, you’ll never find me.”
The line went dead. I was left with what felt like a perfect set of my fingerprints indented in the handle of the receiver.
Ted hadn’t moved a muscle. He stared at me, dumb with pain and urgency.
I didn’t want to say anything, but I forced myself for his sake. “You got most of it. That was Last. He wants—he says he wants to deal. Trade us his boss for some kind of immunity. Either he’s telling the truth, or he wants to set me up.”
Ted struggled to find his voice. “What’re you going to do?”
“What the hell can I do? I’m going to meet him.”
“He’ll kill you.”
“No,” I said evenly. “You’re not going to let him.”
While he absorbed that—or tried to, anyway—I dialed the answering service again. When I got the woman, I said to her, “Listen, this is an emergency. Call the police, get a message to Detective-Lieutenant Acton. That’s A-c-t-o-n. Give him that number you just gave me. He can track it down, I can’t. Tell him I just talked to Last. L-a-s-t.” I hung up before she could think of a reason not to do what I told her.
“That’s going to do a lot of good,” Ted said acidly.
I shrugged. “It’s worth a try.” Got to my feet. “I can’t tell Acton where we’re going. Last says he can spot it if I don’t go alone. If he sets me up—or gets away from us—maybe Acton can nail him by staking out that number.”
Ted didn’t answer. He looked bedraggled, as full of self-pity as wet poultry, but the dull glare in his eyes said as plain as words that Last wasn’t going to get away from us.
“Come on,” I said softly. “It’ll take us a while to get down to that warehouse.”
Ted just turned on his heel and walked out of the office.
I unplugged the coffeepot, snapped off the lights, locked the door, and followed him to the elevator.
While we rode down, I said. “It could be that he really does want to deal.” I wanted to be sure that Ted wouldn’t go off half-cocked. “He’s not stupid. And he knew about Ginny and me. This partner of his must’ve told him we were prying. When he saw us at Alathea’s room, he knew he had a chance to get us all.
“After he sets the bomb, he gets out fast. He doesn’t want to take any chances.”
The doors opened, and we headed into the basement toward the Olds.
“But then he can’t find out what happened. So he starts trying to call Ginny. If somebody returns his call, he knows he’s in trouble and he better find a way to get off the hook.”
I unlocked the Olds. We climbed in.
“If nobody calls back, he can figure he’s in the clear. No witnesses who can tie him to the kidnappings. He can go back to pimping for his partner, and his partner will never k
now the difference.”
Ted paid no attention. Instead he stared out through the windshield into the night. Tears streamed down his face again. I locked my jaws to make myself shut up, and concentrated on just driving for a while.
But silence wasn’t what he wanted, either. By the time we were down in the valley, working our way south along the river, he’d started to talk himself.
“She’s all I have left, Brew.” He was gnawing on his mustache the way a drowning man clutches at straws. “You probably don’t know what happened to us. Things like that don’t happen to hotshots like you.” He was bitter—but not at me. “We were happy back then, she and her mother and me. Before Mittie was born, I was a cop, pounding a beat in the days before they switched to squad cars, and we had a little house over on Los Arboles, and we were happy, her mother and me.
“Except her mother didn’t like me being a cop on the beat. She wanted me to be a detective. But in those days they had rules that said I was too short to be a detective. When Mittie was born, I quit the cops to work for myself. I wanted her to have a father she could be proud of.
“But it didn’t work out like that. People don’t hire you for what you can do. They don’t know what you can do. They hire you for what you look like. You’re built like a tree, and Ginny looks like a steel trap, and people just naturally go to you when they’ve got something important. They come to me when they’ve got something grubby.
“Domestic surveillance.” His bitterness was so thick it practically fogged up the windows. “Prove that so-and-so is cheating on such-and-such. Then so-and-so can get a fat divorce settlement.
“You know something, Brew?” He chuckled sourly. “They almost put me out of business when they first invented no-fault divorce.”
For a while he went back to staring out the window. I hoped that maybe he wasn’t going to tell me any more. I was in no shape for it. But he wasn’t finished. A couple of minutes later he continued.
“Her mother wasn’t impressed. I wasn’t doing what she thought detectives did. Solving murders, rescuing kidnapped babies, breaking up drug rings. When Mittie was three, her mother ran off with an insurance salesman.” His tears kept running, but he had a curious kind of dignity about it. It didn’t make him sob or lose control. His voice didn’t even shake as he said, “I raised her myself. She’s all there is.”