“I died,” I said.
Chapter 87
I HADN’T CRIED since I was a small boy, maybe four or five years old. I didn’t cry when my father died, not even close. But my grief for having deserted Jeff Albert seemed unstoppable right now. I put my head in my arms, and the pain just flowed.
I heard Tommy explaining to Dr. McGinty that a chunk of debris had slammed into my flak jacket and that my heart had stopped. It had taken CPR to start my pump again.
As Tommy talked, I saw Rick Del Rio’s face as if he were in the room. I heard him laughing, saying, “Jack, you son of a bitch, you’re back.” I heard the helicopter blow up and felt the scorching heat come in waves across the field.
The shrink said, “You were dead, Jack. Tell me what you could have done to save that man.”
My mouth moved, but I couldn’t speak. I stood up and so did Tommy. He put his arms around me and hugged me for the first time since we were ten. I cried onto his shoulder and he comforted me.
This was my brother. We’d shared a room from the time we were brought home from the hospital. I knew him as well as I knew myself; maybe I knew him better. I had to accept that underneath the enmity, Tommy and I still loved each other. It was a huge moment between the two of us.
I started to say it was good to be able to tell him what had happened to me, but he spoke first.
“Well, isn’t this something? And Dad thought you were perfect. I guess he was wrong, brother Jack. Not perfect at all.”
Tommy had suckered me. And now he was twisting the blade.
The anger was instant and overwhelming. I pushed him with all my strength, watched as he slammed into a bookcase and tumbled to the floor.
“What else do you need to know, Dr. McGinty?” I said. “I think you’ve heard enough.”
Then I left the building.
Chapter 88
I FELT PRETTY bad now. I felt betrayed by my brother. I got on the freeway and drove north, just barely noting the highway signposts zipping by.
Speed gave me a feeling of escape, but my thoughts circled like a hawk on meth. I could run, but I couldn’t hide from this terrible feeling of guilt about Jeff Albert. I knew that logically I shouldn’t blame myself, but it didn’t help one bit.
I took the off-ramp at Carrillo Street in Santa Barbara and got back on the 101, this time heading south back toward LA.
I put my phone into the holder and called Justine.
The sound of her voice over the speaker made tears come to my eyes. “Jack. Are you on the way into the office? I want to bring you up to date.”
“Got time to have coffee with me?” I asked her. “I need to talk to you about something.”
“Uh, okay,” she said. “Meet you at Rose. Don’t tell me you’re going to share, Jack?”
“Hey, you never know. Stranger things have happened.”
“Not true,” she said. “Not with you.”
Nothing bad had ever happened while I was having coffee with Justine. Also, I couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t been there for me.
The Rose Café had once been a gas company dispatch office. It had multipaned windows and I beams overhead. There was an in-house bakery and tables the size of pizzas, all of them full. The place smelled like cinnamon-apple pancakes.
Justine was waiting at her favorite table in the back when I got there. She was wearing skinny black trousers and a pearl-colored blouse with a ruffle at the neckline. Her hair was cinched up in a ponytail with a pink band that matched her lipstick.
She smiled at me and put her handbag on the floor to free up the stool. I sat down and she asked me, “And where were you when the earth sneezed?”
It felt like old times to be with Justine at the Rose. We used to come to this place on Sunday mornings, read the paper, rate the bodybuilders who came in after their workouts at Gold’s Gym. I’d seen Arnold here often, and Oliver Stone, whose studio was a couple of blocks away.
I told Justine that I had been at Blue Skies, and that there hadn’t been any real damage. That was factually true but not entirely accurate.
I wanted to tell her the rest of it. I wanted her to help me put myself back together. I hoped she would read the trauma in my eyes.
“I was on Fairfax,” she said. “I pulled into that strip mall off Olympic. Holy crap. Talk about a minute and a half lasting a lifetime.”
She hardly stopped for breath. She put her briefcase on the table. Yearbooks came out, and Justine showed me a list of names and page numbers.
“I’m praying that I’m right about this feeling of mine, Jack. One of these kids could be our killer. I’m meeting with Christine Castiglia after this. She’s the key to this; I swear she is.”
Justine showed me pictures of teenage boys who matched Christine Castiglia’s description of a kid who might have abducted Wendy Borman. I tried to stay focused, but my mind kept shooting back to Afghanistan. I saw Danny, his blood glowing green through my NVGs. Jeff Albert screamed in my mind, “Danny is dead.”
“Are you all right?” Justine finally asked. “Is Tommy okay? Something happened, didn’t it?”
“He’s fine. But I…” My face got warm. “Some memory from the war shook loose. I want to tell you.”
Justine closed the yearbook and looked at her watch. “Damn it, Jack. I have to go. I’m meeting Christine on Melrose in twenty minutes. If I’m not there, she’ll bolt. Here’s an idea. Come with me. We can talk on the way in the car.”
“No, you go ahead,” I said. “This can wait. Honest. Tommy’s fine. I’m fine.”
Justine snapped her briefcase closed and picked up her handbag. She stood and put her hand on my shoulder.
Our eyes locked. She smiled, and for a second I thought she was going to lean down and kiss me. But she didn’t do that.
“Wish me luck,” she said. “I’ll need it with this girl.”
I said, “Good luck.” She said she’d see me later. Then I watched Justine through the multipaned windows as she walked up the street to her car and left me all alone.
It’s what you deserve, Jack, I told myself.
Chapter 89
JUSTINE HAD BEEN seesawing for days between mindless optimism and gutless despair. If the e-mails Sci and Mo-bot had found on Jason Pilser’s computer could be trusted, the Street Freeks were going for another kill in just days. They had to be stopped somehow.
She could just about picture their target: a teen girl who was either cocky or naive, but either way, vulnerable to being talked into a careless rendezvous, and then, possibly, her death.
Justine’s head hurt thinking about it. She felt she was so close to the killer, but she knew she might fail anyway.
On the other hand, Christine Castiglia was a force for good. There was reason to believe that she could help Private get ahead of the killers before Monday, before another girl died.
Justine parked her car on the busy block on Melrose where she and Christine had agreed to meet. She was ten minutes early.
Traffic was heavy, and the air quality was poor. Justine dialed up the air conditioner, then she took her BlackBerry out of her handbag and put it on the dash.
She scanned the street, saw kids in clumps, hanging out on the sidewalk.
None of them was Christine.
As noon passed, Justine had a bad thought that started to grow. Christine had defied her mother by asking for this meeting. It had been courageous to do that. But had the girl changed her mind? Or had something happened to Christine?
By twelve fifteen, Justine was sure of it.
At twelve thirty, she called Private and checked her voice mail. There was no message from Christine.
Justine tossed the phone back onto the dash. Her headache was making spidery inroads into both hemispheres of her brain.
She really wanted to talk to Jack. But there was a danger in seeing him outside the office. Coffee with him at the Rose Café had pulled hard on old feelings, made her wistful and sentimental about what they’d once had.
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They had both been so stupid in the past. For her part, she’d thought she could get him to open up and tell her his feelings. But Jack apparently couldn’t do that kind of intimacy, and Justine couldn’t do without it.
She’d bought him a mug with a happy face and lettering on it that read: “I’m fine. Really. How are you?” Jack had laughed and used the mug, but he still kept big parts of himself locked away from her. He never saw why talking about his inner life was good for him. He didn’t seem to need to do it.
Jack was gorgeous and he knew it. Women flattered him, flipped their hair, touched him, gave him their phone numbers. Jack was always modest about his good looks, probably because he could be.
She and Jack had fought, made up spectacularly, fought again, and when they broke up the third or fourth time, Jack had slept with an actress. So she and Bobby Petino had spent a memorable night dealing with their own purely sexual tension—and Jack had found out. Of course he had—Jack knew everybody’s secrets.
She and Jack had another reconciliation, but both had brought so much past hurt to the party, the relationship could only fail. They’d broken up again a year ago, and now any thoughts of getting back together came with the knowledge of how the relationship would end….
She was startled by a tap on the window.
Christine Castiglia, pale in a black hoodie and jeans, looked nervously up and down the street, then opened the car door and got inside.
“Dr. Smith, I had this idea?” Christine said. “We should go to the coffee shop where I saw those boys that time?”
Justine smiled at Christine. Hope spread its great, wide wings and soared. “What an excellent idea,” Justine said.
Chapter 90
THIS WAS WHERE it had all started, wasn’t it? All of the murders so far.
Becki’s House of Pie was a hole-in-the-wall eatery on Hyperion. It was gloomy, and it smelled of coffee and the disinfectant a busboy was using to mop the floor. There was an electric clock on the wall above the cash register. It made a loud tick every time the second hand moved.
Justine wondered what the Schoolgirl killers were doing right now, at this very second.
“This is where we sat,” Christine said, pointing to a red vinyl booth with a table scarred by decades of blue-plate specials.
A picture window alongside the booth faced onto the lunch hour traffic streaming up and down Hyperion. A motorcycle farted through a yellow light, the rider’s fat ass slowly moving away.
Christine said, “I sat here. My mom sat there. I can still see it.”
The waitress had bushy gray hair, a pinafore over her blue velvet dress, and a name tag reading “Becki.” She looked as though she’d been in the house of pie for fifty years.
Justine ordered coffee, black. Christine asked for tuna salad, then said, “To be honest, Dr. Smith? I wouldn’t want to get someone in trouble if I’m not sure.”
“Don’t worry about that, Christine. Your word alone can’t hurt anyone. We’ll still need proof. It’s not that easy to convict somebody of murder.”
“The van stopped in the middle of the road,” Christine said, pointing to the cross street. “I looked away, and when I turned back? These two guys were swinging the blond girl into the van.”
“Would you like to look at some pictures for me?”
“Sure. If it will help.”
Justine got the three heavy yearbooks out of her briefcase, then pushed the short stack across the table to the girl.
Justine sipped her coffee and watched Christine scan the pages. The girl paused to examine not just the portraits, but the group and candid photos too. For a few long moments, she stared at a black-and-white group shot under a heading “The Staff of The Wolverine.”
“What do you see?” Justine finally asked.
Christine stabbed the photo with a finger, pointing out a boy in a line with nine or ten other kids.
Then Christine exclaimed, “It’s him.”
Justine turned the book around and pulled it toward her.
The caption identified the yearbook staff and their graduating classes. She checked the caption against the students’ faces, then flipped to the portraits of the class of 2006.
The boy Christine had stabbed with her chewed-up fingernail had dark hair, a nose that could be called pointy, and ears that might be described as sticking out.
Suddenly Justine was so wired, she felt as if she could run electricity for all of East Los Angeles off her mood.
Was Christine’s memory this good? Or was she just trying to please Justine like her mother had said she would?
Justine said, “Christine? It was nighttime, right? The van stopped for a minute, and the kids were moving. Are you sure this is the boy you saw?”
Christine was a bright girl, and she understood the potential problem instantly.
“I worried that I wouldn’t be able to recognize him? But I do. Like I said the first time, Dr. Smith, I’ll never forget his face.”
“Okay, Christine. Great job. And now that face has a name. This is Rudolph Crocker.”
Chapter 91
IN THE BEGINNING, Justine had fought Sci’s suggestion to install a high-tech dashboard computer in her Jaguar. It would mess up the look of the car, and also guaranteed that she’d never have a moment away from work.
Sci had won the battle using undeniable logic, and now Justine silently thanked him. The little box, with its seven-inch touch screen, connected up with Private’s international network and forensic databases. It also did engine diagnostics, had a rear-obstacle-detection system, and played CDs.
Ingenious little box.
Justine punched Rudolph Crocker’s name into a search engine. As the compact computer brain searched the Internet, the screen filled with a list of men named Rudolph Crocker. There were Rudolph Crockers in many states and in diverse professions: doctors, lawyers, firemen, a handyman, a pool boy, and an underwear model in Chicago.
There were no Rudolph Crockers with a criminal record, but there were three men with that name in greater Los Angeles.
The first had been born in Sun Valley in 1956 and worked as a schoolteacher in Santa Cruz until his early retirement in ’07.
The second Crocker on the list was an equities analyst at a brokerage firm called Wilshire Pacific Partners.
Justine tapped the keyboard, and the firm’s website came up on her screen.
There was a tab, “Who We Are,” and Justine clicked on it and scrolled down the list of personnel, which displayed bios and thumbnail portraits.
Rudolph Crocker was the seventh party down.
Justine stared at the small picture. She had to be sure that this slick business-style portrait matched the one in an old yearbook—but it was undeniable. Indisputable. This Crocker was the same one who had graduated from Gateway Prep in ’06.
Justine called the office. Her calls to Jack, Sci, and Mo-bot went straight to voice mail. She knew everyone was working flat-out. Sci and Mo were immersed in the computer angle of the Schoolgirl case. Jack, Cruz, and Del Rio were working the NFL fix and Shelby Cushman’s murder.
The Wendy Borman connection was Justine’s brainstorm, and she had to take it to the end. Sci had isolated two male DNA samples from Wendy Borman’s clothing. The samples didn’t match anyone on file, living or dead, so she would have to collect a DNA sample from Crocker for comparison.
And she’d have to do it herself.
Or would she?
An idea bloomed. She happened to know someone who was completely up to speed on the case and as motivated to catch the Schoolgirl killer as she was.
Unfortunately, this person happened to hate her guts.
Chapter 92
JUSTINE HAD BEEN aware of Lieutenant Nora Cronin for years. Cronin had five years in homicide and was known to be an honest cop. She would’ve had a big future, but back-talking her superiors had stunted her career. Also, her weight problem probably didn’t help, especially not here in LA.
Bobby
Petino, however, thought Cronin was the real deal and a winner. He had talked her up to Chief Fescoe, who had assigned Cronin to the Schoolgirl case, reporting directly to him.
Justine knew that Cronin had worked hard on the case since Kayla Brooks was strangled two years ago, and that she was conceivably more frustrated than Justine. Cronin had more at stake too. The Schoolgirl case was her number one job.
After parking her car on Martel, a narrow road in West Hollywood, Justine walked a dozen yards to where Nora Cronin was lying on her stomach, peering underneath an ancient Ford junker parked at the curb.
“Hey, Nora, it’s me,” Justine said.
“Oh, happy day,” Cronin muttered. She came out from under the car with a knife in her gloved hand. She gave the knife to a uniform, saying, “Edison, bag this, tag it, take it to the lab.”
“Yes, ma’am, Nora, ma’am. Forthwith.”
Cronin stripped off her latex gloves and scowled at Justine. “So what’s the deal, Justine? I hear you and Bobby are kaput, and you didn’t even tell me. I have to wonder: Are you still even working the Schoolgirl case?”
“Private is under contract to the city. We’re doing this for free. No billable hours.”
Justine waited for Cronin’s next crack, but it didn’t come. Cronin put a hand on her hip and said, “Is your air conditioner working?”
The two women sat in the Jag with the air on high while Justine briefed Nora on Christine Castiglia.
“In 2006, Castiglia saw two kids toss a girl who looked like Wendy Borman into a black van. An hour ago, she identified one of them. I think Wendy Borman might have been the first schoolgirl in the spree.”
“I know about that Castiglia girl. Kid was eleven at the time, right? Her mother put up a firewall to keep the cops away from her. You saying you trust her five years later to make a positive ID?”