In the Guise of Mercy (Maggie Macgowen Mysteries) Page 9

  "So I heard."

  "Maybe you're looking for her, too?"

  He shook his head. "Not me."

  "Glad I ran into you," I said. "Saves me a lot of phone calls. I was hoping for a chance to talk to you about what you remember from that particular day ten years ago. You were there, saw everything."

  "I saw the beginning, that's all. After Mike drove away, I know nothing."

  "Interesting running into you, here, now," I said. "I would stay and chat, but I need to get back to Harry. When you're feeling a little better, I'd like to sit down with you."

  He frowned, puzzled. "Feeling better?"

  I nodded toward the men's room door beside him. "I believe I interrupted you on your way to take care of some business." I flipped him my card before I turned to walk away. "Call me any time."

  Harry watched all this from the other end of the hall. I saw him roll his eyes and shake his head.

  "Better watch yourself," Harry said when I caught up to him.

  "Maybe you'll explain to me what his problem is."

  "He's afraid you might actually find Jesus, something he's worked on for ten years and failed to do."

  "Maybe if he didn't work so diligently on his hard-ass routine," I said, "he'd get somewhere."

  When we were back in the car, I asked Harry, "Did they find the gangbangers who followed that policeman home?"

  "Like I told you," Harry said, sounding cocky. "Cops are too smart to get followed home. The guy's step-kid got into a situation with some knuckleheads at school--he owed them money for bud--and they went after his mother as a warning. That's all there was to it."

  "You're a genius, Harry," I said.

  "I know," he said. "That's what I keep telling my wife."

  I laughed; sometimes he reminded me of Mike.

  "The thing you got to remember is," he said, "most violent crime is a family affair."

  Harry and I made another circuit of the eastern end of the division, up and down dark and quiet streets and through the empty parking lots again. It was well after two o'clock. The bars were closed and the drunks were all down for the night.

  "The druggies are pretty much all stoned or broke by now," Harry said. "In another half hour the dealers will close up shop."

  With every circuit, we passed the bus station, looking for the right combination of people in every taxi.

  At about two-thirty a taxi left the cab stand at the bus station and headed east on Sixth Street. Harry saw it in his rearview mirror and told me not to turn around, so I adjusted my side mirror to get a look. There were two passengers in the back, both of them sitting very low. In the front seat, next to the driver, sat a tall, blond woman.

  "That isn't her," I said, disappointed. "Nelda is small and has dark hair."

  "We'll see," Harry said.

  The taxi turned onto Kohler; we stayed on Sixth, drove on for half a block. Then Harry made a sharp U-turn and stopped about fifty yards from the intersection. He seemed to be counting, as if this were a familiar dance and he was waiting for his cue to cut in. I watched the clock in the dash tick off seconds. At forty-five, Harry's internal alarm must have gone off.

  When Harry moved, he moved fast. With the car lights off, he revved the cruiser, floored it, careened around the corner and laid rubber as he braked to a quick stop less than a foot behind the taxi. Somewhere in the dust and noise, he had snapped on all his lights, catching the front seat passenger in motion just as she slipped back into the taxi after making her buy.

  I snapped on my camera's flash--a dazzling halogen drilling a hole through the dark--and captured the scene in bright silver artificial light, with Harry's red-and-blue gumballs flashing on the margins. It looked wonderful, unearthly.

  The cab driver had to have known what his fares were interested in when he picked them up. He had stopped maybe thirty feet before the salvage yard fence, lengthening by a few seconds the time it would take for the passenger to make her buy, forcing her to cross the street but also leaving himself a cushion for escape if things went sour. He hadn't counted on Harry.

  For an old-timer, Harry was quick on his feet. He had his rover radio in one hand, calling for backup, and a Kel-Lite flashlight in the other. In three long strides he was beside the front passenger door shining his Kel-Lite into the faces of the passengers. I was right beside him, my bright light adding to their alarm. I was pumped.

  Everyone inside the cab froze; the only movement was nervous shaking, which I suspect was exactly what Harry intended.

  "Hands where I can see them," Harry bellowed, and four sets of upraised hands cast shadows in the flickering lights, a puppet show of a sort, a Noh drama. With his flash he picked out the face of the blonde in front and abruptly yanked open her door.

  "You, keep your hands where I can see them, and step out."

  "What is it, Officer?" The woman stayed in her seat, trembling. "We haven't done anything. We just came in on a bus and we're lost. I think my cousin gave me the wrong address. Or maybe I wrote it down wrong."

  "You're all family, then?" Harry's flashlight played on the two black men in the backseat. "I suppose if I ask your cousin's name, you'll all say the same thing?"

  One of the men in the back said, "I don't know what she's talking about."

  "Where you from?" Harry asked him. There was some equivocating, but the two passed up their IDs. Harry looked at the IDs and passed them back. The woman said she hadn't brought her purse with her to such a bad neighborhood, so she had no ID. Said her name was Nicky Jones.

  "Ma'am, I need you to step out of the vehicle," Harry said. When she still did not move, Harry reached for his handcuffs. The woman hopped out so fast she nearly fell on the broken sidewalk.

  "Oh, please don't cuff me, Officer. I've never been arrested before."

  "Uh-huh," he said. He pulled her hands behind her and snapped the cuffs on her skinny wrists. "Why don't you go stand over here where Detective MacGowen can keep an eye on you."

  I'd been promoted, suddenly. Doing my best to look detectivish, I walked her a few feet away from the car and watched her through my camera lens.

  "Don't do that," she pleaded, trying to block her face with her shoulder. "Why d'you have to do that?"

  "Just covering our backsides, ma'am," I said, imitating Mike when he retold stories about the street.

  The woman who called herself Nicky Jones didn't look much like my image of a crackhead or a dealer. She was plain, and very thin. Not pretty, not a drugged-out hag, either. Her thrift-store duds made her look like a small-town hick, pastel polyester pull-on pants and a striped T-shirt with a collar, pink Keds: old-fashioned, unhip, square, with a big teased hairdo. I thought it could be a costume so that she would blend in with the folks who rode Greyhounds instead of 747s. An ordinary woman from the heartland.

  Harry came over to talk to AKA Nicky.

  I saw movement behind the fence, a figure too tall and too human in structure to be a dog. Someone was taking a big risk, staying around to eavesdrop while the police questioned Ms Nicky Jones. As I turned off my camera I wondered what a random flash shot aimed at the dark figure behind the fence would pick up.

  Harry was busy with his arrestee.

  I took a few steps into the street to get away from the flashing car lights, and saw the figure move again, a head, a shoulder, spikes of hair.

  The Dumpster, where we had seen people congregating earlier, was on my side of the fence. It was about five feet high; the fence behind it was eight with a double strand of barbed wire at the top. Someone had thrown a flattened carton over the barbed wire, perhaps so he or she could climb over.

  "Be just another minute, Maggie." Harry had his rover radio in his hand. "I'm going to turn the collar over to that female rookie we met, give her the experience of booking in a female prisoner. I don't want to do it because we'd have to drive all the way over to Hollenbeck Station. Central doesn't have holding facilities for women."

  I said, "Okay," watching the figure in the da
rk, so still that after a while I thought that maybe I had fooled myself into seeing something that wasn't there. But it turned as Harry moved, as if watching him, or watching the prisoner. From the angle the chin was pointed, I thought I was outside the person's field of vision.

  The backup car turned in off Sixth with a roar of dual carbs. The figure behind the fence grew very still for an instant, and then hunched down and began to slink away, deeper into the darkness. As it moved, fearing that I was about to lose something essential, I feinted right, into shadow, flipped on the flash and camera again, and ran toward the retreating shape, hoping that the camera would capture more than I could see.

  "MacGowen!" Harry shone his big light on me. "Bring that camera, come here."

  Whoever had been on the other side of the fence was gone. I trotted back across the street.

  "Look at this." Harry gestured with the beam of his flash. On the taxi's front passenger seat there was a little pile of shiny, sugary-looking chunks, each one about the size of the nail on my pinkie finger. If I sat where our suspect had been sitting, the pile would have been between my legs.

  "Twenty rocks," Harry counted. "Enough for a party. What did they cost you? About a hundred?"

  The backseat talker said, "I gave her a hundred. She went over across the way and made the buy."

  I filmed the crack cocaine for Harry.

  "Oh, please, Officer." Ms Jones seemed genuinely frightened. Her shakes seemed to start where her feet touched the sidewalk and zap a cold line up through her spine. "I've never been in trouble before. I was just doing a favor for friends. I'm not a user. I can't get arrested. What will happen to my family?"

  "You shoulda thought of that before you came down here." Harry scooped the cocaine into a plastic evidence envelope and wrote on it. The end of the bag hung out of his breast pocket while he reached back into the car for the purse sticking out from under the seat.

  He held up the purse. "Yours?"

  "No. I told you. I didn't bring my purse. I don't have ID. That one must belong to the last person who took the cab."

  The cab driver had his head back against the seat and seemed to be praying to the heavens. When Harry showed him the purse and pointed to the woman, the cabbie nodded; the purse and the woman belonged together.

  Harry found a wallet inside the bag and went through it while he lectured the backseat passengers about the dangers of fooling around in a neighborhood where they didn't belong, and told them to go home to Covina. And then he sent the cab and its passengers away.

  Harry handed me the expired Utah driver's license he found in the purse. She probably wasn't Nicky Jones. No surprise there. But I wasn't certain she was Barbara Adams, as the license named her, either.

  Harry pulled out Nelda's mug shot and held it in the light for her to see.

  "Friend of yours?" he asked.

  I thought there was a flicker of recognition, or maybe something else, like the possibility of a back door out of a bad situation, a bigger fish to offer up when charges were filed. But she shook her head and said, "Don't think so."

  Harry turned her over to the female rookie and stood back to watch how the officer handled a routine search. She patted the prisoner's pant legs, around her waist and shoulders. Then she put both hands into the woman's hair and gave it a tug; long black hair tumbled out as the blond wig came off, and with it a short crack pipe. Suddenly the out-of-town hick was a streetwise con.

  The process took a little while. Harry yawned; I was bone-tired. I leaned against the side of Harry's car, flipped the video replay button on my recorder to see what I had captured behind the fence.

  Black, indistinct patches against deep charcoal. A sudden bright flash of silver when I turned on the light, and then a human figure began to take form, someone crouched low, head dropped between shoulders, the form furtive, featureless, on the move. Disappointed, I watched this amorphous being retreat, merge back into the black.

  And then there was a second light source from the side; Harry's Kel-Lite swept the yard. A vague profile became, for an instant, a full face.

  I froze the frame.

  "Harry," I said, my hand and voice shaking. All of a sudden I wasn't tired anymore. "Take a look."

  He looked into the monitor, a screen smaller than the mug shot in his pocket.

  "Huh," he said. "What a surprise. The lady got herself promoted from buyer to dealer. Must have a sugar daddy out there staking her."

  "You think?"

  He turned the image back to face me. "Maggie MacGowen, meet Nelda Ruiz."

  But by then, Nelda was long gone.

  Chapter 6

  Looks like you had quite a night, Maggie." Guido scanned through the images I'd shot during my ride-along with Harry and sorted them into clusters on his digital editor: the streets, the makeshift shelters, the people, the police, Nelda's face caught raw against the dark, Lisa's mug shot, the he-shes at Club Caribe, the tattoos on the back of a man lying spread-eagled on his apartment floor, his pregnant girlfriend surrounded by uniformed police.

  "There are some good images here," he said. "No awards for cinematography--pretty rough--but a lot of great content. Let me show you what my guys brought in while you were napping."

  After I left Harry, in the deepest, darkest hour of the night, I called Guido. I intended only to leave a message but he picked up, said he been waiting to hear from me. I told him in brief about the events of the night and that I was dropping off some footage at the studio for him to work with. I left the camera's memory cards, the draft of a narration script, and a shot list on Fergie's desk where he would find them, and then took my turn napping on my office sofa.

  Guido came straight in to the studio after I called. The previous evening he had summoned a couple of his graduate film students and, first thing in the morning, sent them off with an experienced union crew, Paul Savoie on camera and Craig Hendricks as soundman and field producer. They were to record background scenes from Jesus Ramon's neighborhood: the mother's bodega, the telephone booth from which Nelda was seen making a drug sale, the downtown alley where Mike said he dropped Jesus, and so on.

  One of Guido's film techies had connected his digital camera to his computer so that, using a Wi-Fi Internet connection, he was streaming images from the field to Guido for capture as they were shot. Guido kept an eye on both a monitor displaying the live feed and a monitor displaying old footage called up from the studio's news archives. Somehow, he managed to find ten seconds of an ashen-faced Mike Flint walking away from the grand jury room where he had been called to testify about what he had and had not done on the day that Jesus vanished. The grand jury found there was no evidence of a crime and dropped the inquiry, but Mike was rattled to his core by the grilling he got. And the image showed it.

  When Guido wakened me from my nap, he had a rough-cut ready to show me. I walked down to his work area to see what he had. It was good, even with the holes he had left to insert the new footage his crew would send in that afternoon.

  "Think what we have is adequate for Lana's purposes?" he asked as I watched over his shoulder. "Hit the highlights, boost the drama, make tantalizing promises."

  "We're getting there," I said. "I'm going to leave you to do your magic. I'll be downstairs in the audio booth recording the voice track for you to mix."

  He looked up at me from his monitor, brow furrowed. "Don't you want some face-time in this piece?"

  "Guido," I said. "Look at this face. I've hardly slept for forty-eight hours. I need a shower, a meal that doesn't come out of a paper bag, and a week at the beach before I'll put this face in front of a camera."

  "Actually," he said, smirking, "at the moment that face would lend a gritty--okay, scary--cinema verite quality to the piece. But suit yourself."

  "Later." I walked out clutching a draft copy of the narration script.

  "Maggie," he called after me. "Time?"

  "First read-through clocked at just under eight minutes. I need to cut it to five or six."r />
  He didn't respond. I know he heard me, but he was already bent over the digital editor, lost in images.

  Taping the voice track took less than an hour. Guido listened to the various versions, told me he had all that he needed to cobble together the technical parts, match voices to images, and that I should go home for a while.

  We decided that later he would pick up some dinner and bring it to my house. We'd eat, fine-tune the proposal, keep each other company, and probably drink too much. With some luck we'd have a nice promo package for Lana's review by Thursday, leaving plenty of time for a last edit before her flight left for New York later on Thursday evening.

  I loaded my bag with discs, notes, and the thick bundle of sympathy cards that had arrived from all over the globe since I was last in the office. When I arrived, I had started to look through them, but had to wrap them back up in big rubber bands to take home. The variety of outpourings of grief and remembrance was heartening, sad. Daunting. In the bundle were long confessional letters from cons--both current and ex--and little boxes with religious tokens, packets of photographs, mementoes people thought I might appreciate. Every note was touching, and I appreciated every one, but I could only read a few at a time. And I certainly needed to read them at home, privately, just me, a bottle of wine, and a big box of tissues.

  When I got home, I dithered around outside for a while with the horses, not quite ready to go into the empty house alone. Early Drummond had, as he told me, fed and watered the horses that morning. They had what they needed, but all three of them were antsy, begging for attention. Every day, no matter how sick he felt, Mike had always managed to come down and spend some time with them, even if it was just to lean on the rail of their enclosure and scratch whoever nuzzled up to him. Horses are dumb creatures, but they're very intuitive. They knew something had tipped their universe. They didn't want explanations, they wanted comforting.

  I gave Rover a last pat and walked up the front walk. Feeling shaky, I opened the front door and went inside. Everything looked the same as it had when I left on Sunday night, all of our things undisturbed, familiar. But I felt like a stranger among them. I turned on music, loud, and went into my workroom where I had left Mike's files.