“By definition,” Rhetta replied, “dealers are stupid.”
“So they could have wanted the cash. Or committed payback on behalf of a loved one.” She fell silent, processing her thoughts, looking for a conclusion.
Ham turned to Grace. “I’ll see what I can shake loose. Later?”
Later, as in grabbing some burgers and rolling around in her sheets while they mulled over the case. “Clay,” she said apologetically. “Sleepover.”
Ham looked bummed but he took the news well. He said, “Sure, man,” and Grace and Rhetta watched him trot away.
Rhetta smoothed some errant strands off Grace’s forehead and sighed, pursing her lips. “I feel terrible about Malcolm.”
“Jamal’s back in the Sixty-Sixes,” Grace said, “except he never left.”
“Oh, that’s awful, Grace,” Rhetta replied, also very sad. “How’s Mr. Briscombe doing?” Ham’s call had gone out on police channels; bad news traveled fast.
“Still alive. Sort of.” Grace had left the hospital to come to the crime scene. Jedidiah Briscombe had looked like death, shrunken in the hospital bed with a cannula in his nose that was giving him oxygen but not much comfort. “I put the word out, hope Jamal comes in to see him. If he does, I’m cuffing him to Mr. Briscombe’s hospital bed.”
“Mae told me that some of the girls at school think boys in gangs are scary-cool. That’s what they say, ‘scary-cool.’” Rhetta looked stricken. “I don’t know what Ronnie would do if Mae … well, actually, he might lose his mind if she brought a boy home for a simple, innocent study date. Even a nice boy.”
“I’m wondering if Malcolm joined up, too,” Grace said. “That could explain why he snuck out of the house. Maybe Tyrell gave him a job and Malcolm screwed up. Maybe he did something more unforgivable than getting fired from a place Tyrell hoped to toss.”
“That sweet baby?” Rhetta caught her breath. “What if Todd joins a gang?”
“He’s not going to join a gang. And Mae is smart. She wouldn’t date a gangbanger.”
“You’re smart. And some of the guys you wind up with …” Rhetta scrunched up her nose.
Grace was mildly affronted. “Hey, I only pick up nice guys. Mostly.”
“How about that one who left you handcuffed to your bed all day?” Rhetta countered.
“Zach? He got scared. I forgot to tell him I was a cop.” Grace shook her head. “Rhetta, your kids are good kids. They’ll stay good kids. Thanks for moving on this so fast,” she added, changing the subject. “I know you’re busy.”
“I gave you cuts. It was the least I could do, for Malcolm.”
Bobby trotted up with a notepad and pencil in hand. His hair was pulled back in a long ponytail, and he was wearing a black leather vest over a burgundy shirt. He said, “We’re getting the footage off the minimart security tapes. They’ve got a camera aimed at the front door, and another directly at the street because of the number of drive-bys. They got their windows blown out last Halloween.”
“Straight at the street? Whoa, talk about a lap dance,” Grace said. “That’s just a damn gift.”
There was a phantom smile on Bobby’s face. Nobody could be very happy at the scene of Malcolm Briscombe’s death, but they were cops, used to a sort of tough love that left civilians stymied. You saw what a cop saw, you had to put it at a distance. Look at Bobby, all messed up after he went undercover in that child sex ring. Hateful and angry, till Grace made him scream out his rage and horror.
Grace said, “I’m going to go take a look at the dealer while Henry’s got him on the table.”
Rhetta nodded. “And I’m going to pray for his soul.”
“Don’t bother,” Grace said. “He doesn’t have one.”
Forty minutes later, Grace put on a surgical gown and a mask and entered Henry’s morgue. Her mission: to collect more information on the case; and also to curse the dead scumbag to hell. Henry had told her on the phone that he placed his victim—if a dealer could be called a victim—at under eighteen. She had three cases involving minors now: Haleem, Malcolm, and Shithead. She wanted very badly for there to be good solid links between two or even all three of her cases so she could gift-wrap it and hand it to Captain Perry. Make it a scoop that Kendra Burke would be forced to share with her adoring public. But that might be more than even God could manage.
I’m gonna hate you on sight, Grace promised the dead dealer as she approached Henry’s slab. But when she saw Henry weighing his lungs, then moved her line of vision to the profile of the corpse’s face, she was startled by Shithead’s youth. He might be older than Malcolm, but he certainly couldn’t be as old as Jamal. Another kid, murdering people. Decrease in violent crime, her ass. How the hell had he messed it up so bad?
Then her heart hardened. She didn’t care how he got there. She wasn’t a social worker. He was a dead POS. Piece of Shit. Dealers dealt out death. They weren’t selling Girl Scout cookies. He’d known what he was doing.
Just like Jamal.
“Hey, Henry,” Grace said. “Emily taking to the new member of the family?”
Emily was Henry’s “new” twenty-one-year-old cat, whom he’d adopted when her predecessor, Molly, had to be put down. Grace had slept with Henry the night of Molly’s death: two drunk, sad people, one of them knowing that this was comfort sex and the other shopping for engagement rings. Now Henry had a second new cat, acquired after a court reporter they knew had been murdered. Grace had found homes for the dead woman’s cats, named after the Seven Dwarfs. Captain Perry’s was Grumpy. Rhetta wound up with Bashful, even though she was originally going to get Doc. Henry’s was Sneezy. Grace had passed on getting one. Gus was it for her.
And so was one night of cat pity sex.
“Yeah, so far they seem to be doing well together,” Henry told her, flushing a little, obviously remembering their encounter as well.
“That’s great. You got anything for me?” She looked down at the dead dealer.
“There are three entry areas. The back, which you saw. But also here …” He showed her the entry wound between the vic’s shoulder blades. “And here. Look. Straight down into his neck and shoulder. Ballistics is on it.” He gestured to the collapsed veins in Shithead’s arms. “Heroin. Heavy user.”
“Did you get a better estimate of his age?” Grace asked.
“I’m thinking maybe fifteen if that. I’m basing that on his skeletal development and dentition. He’s got a Snake Eyes tattoo.” Henry used his gloved hands to move down the drape and show Grace the inside of his forearm. Two slitty, serpent-like eyes were colored fluorescent green. “He was so dirty when he came in that I couldn’t even see it.”
Dead, dirty, in the morgue. A bad end all around. Next time she saw Jamal, she was dragging him down here to take a look at what was in store if he didn’t shape up.
Maybe I’m his last-chance angel, she thought, but she felt very cynical. She didn’t want to save him from going to hell. She wanted to drag him out of it. Maybe he was already in too deep.
Maybe he was just too heavy.
Maybe her hands were already too full.
“Tough times,” she murmured.
CHAPTER
SIX
After the morgue, Grace went back to the squad room with a brown paper bag in her grasp, to find a pair of white net wings dotted with white flowers taped to the sides of her chair. A halo was clamped to the back. Ham had phoned this one in, so to speak. She put down her bag, pried off the halo, and set it on top of her head. Pressing her hands palm-to-palm in prayer, she glided over to Bobby’s desk to see what was going on.
Both Captain Perry and Bobby were eating marshmallows as they watched some tape on a monitor. Bobby had on what Grace privately called his grandpa glasses. She had some old-lady glasses, too, which she used for sewing and reading late at night.
Grabbing a marshmallow, she looked at the monitor. The tape was on pause, revealing a section of badly lit street. It was time-stamped twelve twenty-three
a.m. By the lividity of Malcolm’s corpse and the temp of his liver, Henry had put time of death after eleven thirty p.m. and before one a.m.
“This is the minimart surveillance tape from the camera aimed at the street,” Bobby explained. “Watch this.” He gestured with the remote.
Two white smears appeared—headlights—and she kept watching as a white blob turned into a white pickup. Looked like a Chevy. There were a couple of shapes inside the cab that were moving around. Driver and passenger. And there was a decal or decoration on the driver’s-side door.
“Stop,” she said, and Bobby, already anticipating her request, hit pause and typed a couple of keys. The image enlarged on the screen, but not by very much before it became a shimmer of pixels. On TV shows you got all the stylish close-ups, but not in real life, and not in the OK state. Bobby ratcheted it back down, and Grace made out a circle with rays emanating from it—a sun, or maybe it was a ring of fire, with 110–110–110 above it, in text that curved around the circle. Around the bottom, like a motorcycle rocker, SONS OF OKLAHOMA.
“That’s that crazy white supremacist group,” Grace said. “Bought up all that land off the 270 last summer.”
“And registered a lot of weapons,” Captain Perry added.
“Which means they’ve got ten times as many that they haven’t registered,” Bobby put in.
Two seconds later the truck whooshed out of frame. “All that movement inside the cab …” Grace pondered.
“We think they were cheering,” Bobby said. His voice smoldered with anger.
“For running over a kid?” Grace leaned in and scrutinized the monitor. “A black kid?”
Bobby reran the tape. “We’ve all been wondering when the Sons of Oklahoma would make their first move. This may be it.” Oklahoma City PD had talked about slipping someone in undercover to monitor the Sons. So had the Feebs—the FBI—but so far that had just been talk.
“Who gets the pool?” Grace asked. They’d all laid bets on when the Sons would break a law. Grace had figured they’d wait for something like the anniversary of Ruby Ridge. Today was just a blustery day in March.
“That’d be Butch,” Bobby replied. “Just under the wire. He said mid-March.”
“I had April Fools’ Day,” Captain Perry grumped.
“That’s all we need. A smug Longhorn.” Grace made the sign of the cross at Ham as he walked in. He grinned at her halo. He was windblown and drinking a Styrofoam cup of coffee.
“Hark,” she said. “Behold.”
Joining the group, he glanced down at the monitor.
“Sons of Oklahoma,” Grace explained. “Ran over Malcolm, looks like.”
“Yeah, I know.” He sounded unsurprised “Indian told me word on the street is the Sons of Oklahoma are starting a ‘cleanup campaign.’” He made air quotes. “Telling the locals the cops aren’t doing their job so the Sons are going to do it for them. Get rid of all the drug dealers and the pimps. And the illegal immigrants.”
“Especially the ones with brown or black skin,” Bobby grumbled. “That’s how it usually starts, doesn’t it?”
“Vigilantes,” Captain Perry said, disgust in her tone. “We’ve all seen it before. They’re usually racist thugs disguising their motives by appealing to people’s fear. Then when they’ve got community support, they turn against the local authorities.”
“The community’s already turned against us,” Bobby said. “Crime-ridden neighborhoods, substandard housing … it’s hard for them to see what good we’re doing.”
“People in those circumstances don’t want to admit that things could be worse,” Captain Perry countered. “With no police force to protect them at all …” She shivered. “I wouldn’t want to be around to see that.”
Grace blew her bangs out of her angelic eyes. “Well, tougher times are here, aren’t they.” As she took off her halo, she gave Ham a pointed look. When Ham blinked, confused, she reminded herself that she’d had that conversation with Earl. Sometimes it was difficult to keep the men in her life straight. Let’s see, she thought. One of ’em is trying to keep me from going to hell and the other one takes me to heaven on a regular basis. Okay, I got ’em straight.
“If we have the Sons of Oklahoma to deal with on top of all this gang warfare,” Bobby said, “then people should be warned. They need to stay off the streets, go home at night …”
Grace thought of her family. Of Clay. Her stomach tightened. “Yeah, got that right. Kendra Burke—”
“Ol’ Softie’s woman?” Ham snickered.
“You know that’s not going to fly,” Captain Perry said. “Upstairs is telling a different story. But I’ll see what I can do.”
“Maybe we can cut the Sons off at the knees,” Ham said. “Start watching them, tracking them. They do anything, we bring them in. Keep sweeping until the streets are clear.”
“Yes,” Bobby said. “That would prevent them from building a relationship with the community.”
“Then they’ll start talking police harassment,” Grace argued. “If we bring ’em in but the DA lets them walk, they’ll be holding press conferences in front of the Murrah Building.” The Alfred P. Murrah Building was the site of the Oklahoma City bombing, carried out by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. Grace’s sister Mary Frances had died there while getting Clay his Social Security card. Everybody on the squad had lost friends and colleagues.
“Yeah, and Kendra Burke will be interviewing them,” Ham said. “In a nice tight close-up, to show off those big white teeth of hers. That she is lying through.”
Whoa, the love for Kendra was leaving the building. If this kept up, no one would be going to Butch’s wedding.
“But if we can tie them to Malcolm’s hit and run and Haleem’s drive-by and/or the dealer’s shooting, we might be able to shut them down altogether,” Captain Perry said. “Like Bobby said, before they build up steam in the community.”
“One, two, three, like dominoes,” Grace said, making a flicking motion with her thumb and forefinger.
“Exactly. So there’s your mandate, Detectives. Solve these three cases as quickly and as thoroughly as possible. If we can prove the Sons are involved in any of them, we’ll kill two birds with one stone.”
Her dark brown eyes glinted. “I want the Sons quick, and I want them legally. And this has got to be done by the book. I do not want procedural errors. I want it provable and squeaky clean. Got it?”
They nodded and broke it up like a team that had been huddling with their quarterback. Grace was glad Kate was their captain. She was smart, a great tactician, and committed to the job. Perfect credentials, as far as Grace was concerned.
Energized, Grace crossed to her desk, opened her brown paper bag, and pulled out Mr. Briscombe’s framed photograph of Jamal and Malcolm at Jamal’s getting-out party. With a pang, she touched Malcolm’s face with her fingertip. Then she set the photograph on her desk, angling it just so. Next she opened the drawer where she kept the dried petals from all the roses the father of a murdered girl kept sending her, hoping to remind her to keep on working that cold, cold case. She had not forgotten. She would not forget.
So much death among the roses.
Ham walked up to her. “I got stuff on the dealer,” he said. “From Indian. His name was Chris Jones but he went by Ajax.”
“Because that is so much sexier,” Grace drawled.
“Someone accused him of cutting his heroin with kitchen cleanser. Jones beats the accuser to a pulp and injects him with ammonia.”
“Well, damn, he’s no angel.”
“He got a bad reputation for dirty drugs. Plus he banged some underage girl, got her pregnant, dumped her, and she committed suicide. So I could see someone hating him enough to shoot him three times.” Ham gazed down at the picture.
“And me, hating him enough to be glad he’s dead,” Grace said.
She couldn’t be sorry about it. But she was very sorry that this was the kind of world Jamal couldn’t seem to leave, no matter
how hard she tried. He was going to wind up in hell, way down deep where the fire was hot.
Contemplating the work ahead, she made a face. “Sheesh, Chris Jones. Why couldn’t his last name be something like Nemecek-Gulac?” Which was the least common surname in the United States, and the answer to a bar bet.
“I’ll start a file on him,” Ham said. “You should have your sleepover.”
“You’re a good man, Dewey,” she said. She fluttered her wings, which were still attached to her office chair. “A real angel.”
“Payback.” His smile was lecherous.
“With interest,” she promised. She had rarely been clearer that the sleepover was the right thing to do. With the mayhem on the streets, Clay was safest with her, knowing he was loved, knowing he had people watching out for him.
She shut the drawer and got ready to leave, already planning the required store run before she picked up Clay. At the thought of the fun to come, she brightened, and reached in her pocket for a cigarette.
“Sure, I would love to see Astronaut Farmer,” Grace said as Clay held out the video. With all the deftness of a card sharp, she shuffled the three zombie movies she had rented—who knew there were so many to choose from?—to the bottom of the pile that was threatening to spill over on the coffee table. She made a show of admiring Billy Bob Thornton’s smile as he stood in front of a barn. What on earth had possessed Clay to change his mind and watch this thing? She had a sneaking suspicion that Earl had had a hand in this.
Clay looked at her apprehensively. “You’re not disappointed, are you, Aunt Grace?”
“’Course not, man,” she said, taking his choice to the DVD player. “I think the popcorn’s nearly done. How about you grab it?” He scooted into the kitchen, and she put the disk in.
Dressed in raggedy sweats and a too-small Frontier City T-shirt that had really had its day, Clay opened the microwave door. “Oh, good, this is the kind with extra butter.” Grinning, he plucked up the steaming popcorn bag with his thumb and forefinger.
“There is no other kind,” Grace declared as she headed back to the couch. “Grab the Cokes, too.” She reached for the bag of sour candy on the coffee table and ripped it open. Dove in and stuffed her mouth full of eye-watering, sour goodness. Sugar, fat, and caffeine. How bad could one movie be? “We’ll need the salt.”