Oh yeah, got ya. Well, hey, good luck!
Thanks bro, she typed, and logged off.
If that didn’t raise eyebrows over at headquarters, she didn’t know what would. Bro? What the hell had come over her?
She disconnected from all the databases and VPN before emailing the spreadsheet to herself, then checked her phone to make sure it had come through okay.
“Let’s go,” she said, and shoved her arms into her parka.
Holly gave her a curious look but followed her out without saying a word.
It was close to two thirty PM by the time they got back on the highway.
“So let me ask you something,” Holly said. “Did I just help you do something illegal?”
Laney reached for the chocolate still sitting on the dash, unwrapped it, and broke it in two. She handed half to Holly. “Not really,” she said.
Holly took a delicate bite while Laney popped the entire chunk into her mouth.
“So how well did you know this Hopper fella?”
Too well? Not well enough? How well can you know someone when you’re playacting? She’d always been Kendra with him, her entire self hidden away. How much of himself had he hidden?
“He was just someone I worked as an undercover. A confidential informant. He gave us his boss.”
“Oh? But he went to prison anyway?”
Yeah. That’s what he objected to also.
“It’s not like TV,” Laney said. “Just because someone works for the cops doesn’t mean they get away with their crimes. Hopper got a lighter sentence.” Was supposed to get a lighter sentence. He’d known he was playing a dangerous game. He was lucky all he got was a prison term. He could have had his arms and legs sawed off and his torso thrown into the dumpster. She’d seen that happen her third year on the job, and it took years before that blue-bruised carcass stopped haunting her dreams. It had looked like a gruesomely painted mannequin, except for the slick, white bone stubs and the swollen eyes.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She looked at the incoming call and crammed the phone back.
Holly glanced at Laney, and her lips thinned. “Who’s that?” she asked.
Laney sighed. “Boswell.”
CHAPTER
24
LANEY ASKED HOLLY to let her out on the next street over from theirs and walked to her house in the gathering gloom. Ryan clocked her as she neared the driveway and immediately texted, then climbed out of the patrol car. His shoulders squared, one hand a fist by his thigh and the other loosely hovering over his belt, he looked annoyed and ready to act. She could imagine the reaming he’d gotten when Boswell showed up to find the house empty and her footprints leading down the hill.
“Is Ed on his way?” Laney asked.
“Detective Boswell would like you to come to the station.”
She’d expected that too, and she opened her car door without protest. She now had fifteen minutes to decide how much she’d share. In theory, the more Ed knew, the more he’d be able to help. She wasn’t an idiot, and Alfie mattered more than anything, more than her own safety. If a disclosure from her meant he’d find Hopper and by extension Alfie, she’d implicate herself without a second thought. The only question was whether she could find Hopper and Alfie faster on her own. Putting herself in the cross hairs of Internal Affairs would help no one.
Ryan led her to an interview room and left, closing the door firmly behind him. She wasn’t locked in, was free to go, she knew that. But the dingy walls, the stale, airless smell of it, had their effect, and she had to fight against the nervous anxiety cramping her stomach, cooling her fingers and feet. She would try to intuit how much Boswell already knew. The story had been in the news.
The simplest of searches would have brought up Hopper’s trial details, her team’s reports, the court records. And never mind the notoriety the case generated all over again only six months earlier with Harry’s trial. On the surface this was a straightforward situation of an ex-con seeking revenge. It didn’t happen often, but it did happen. There’d been a cop down in Florida whose house was set afire by a felon he’d arrested two decades earlier. Being a cop wasn’t for wusses, they all knew that.
But still.
Ed walked in thirty minutes later, placed a thick folder between them, and sat down. The day had treated him badly—his hair mussed, an oily sheen to his forehead, a weary slump to his shoulders. He twined his fingers, tilted forward on his elbows. She could tell he wanted to play it aloof and wary but was too tired to carry it off. A twinge of sympathy eased her tension.
“Tell me about Owen Hopper,” he said.
“Have you interviewed Jordan Rogers?” Laney countered.
“Yes.”
“Do you know where Hopper might be?” she asked.
“No.”
They stared at each other.
“What did Jordan say?”
“He said you spoke to him this morning. In defiance of a direct request from both me and his parents that you stay away from him.”
“He came to me. I didn’t seek him out.”
Ed looked at his hands, sighed, and leaned back against his chair.
“Laney.” He paused, studying her. “Let’s start over. Tell me why Owen Hopper treated your son to drugs, alcohol, and porn for two months. I’m assuming you didn’t know about this. Right? I have to assume that, or we’re about to start having a very different sort of conversation.”
She detected a judgmental current—he would have known if it had been his son, was appalled at her blindness.
“Of course I didn’t know!” Her throat hurt, as if she’d been punched. “Ed, of course I didn’t know.” She covered her face with her hands, took a deep breath, tried to work through that knot in her larynx.
“Then tell me everything you do know,” Ed said, and his voice was gentler, softer now.
She lowered her hands, her fingers bending and knotting against her thighs. “I knew nothing until Alfie didn’t come home on Tuesday. Everything was fine until then.”
He cocked his head. “What about the last time he disappeared? Do you think that was related to Hopper?”
Well, yes, it was so obvious now. Of course he had been high. Her intuition was rarely wrong. But why had he denied it like that? He’d never lied to her before. Except that’s precisely what he’d been doing for months. Lying and lying and lying.
She nodded. “Possibly. I had a feeling something wasn’t right, but he wouldn’t tell me anything. I tried, Ed.” She looked away. “We had a fight about it.”
He tapped a pen against the folder. “What do you think Hopper wants with him?”
That lump in her throat again, sharp and cruel. What indeed?
Ed opened the folder and leafed through printouts, spreadsheets, reports. “He has no record of pedophilia,” he said, his voice even but his eyes averted. They both knew this meant nothing. It simply meant he’d never been caught. “If he wanted revenge against you, he would have attacked you, right? Why befriend your son?”
He closed the folder and looked at her. “Let’s back up. How does he know who you are? Or where you live?” He patted the manila folder again. “It says here you worked with him for months as an undercover. He was a useful CI. What happened? Did someone blow your cover?”
Her stomach tightened again. She didn’t want to examine how Hopper knew her real identity. Even now, a year after Harry’s indictment, she found it hard to think badly of him and nearly impossible to imagine him willingly exposing her. She decided to sidestep that question and answer the rest.
“Prescription drug fraud. He worked at a dirty pharmacy run by a Russian mobster. He filled any scrip they sent him and filed enough reports with the state drug program so the pharmacy looked legit. Prescription drugs at the counter, street narcotics at the back door. The regulars called that pharmacy konfetka, candy.” She shrugged. “We were building a case. Then my team raided the pharmacy and arrested Hopper.” (Waited until she’d taken a few days’ v
acation and gone in, tore apart the pharmacy, his apartment. She wouldn’t have been able to take part anyway, but that’s not why they waited.) She clenched her jaw against the memory.
Ed nodded. He would have found out as much from the news reports. He chewed his lower lip as if thinking something over. He said, “I got in touch with Internal Affairs, Laney. They told me some interesting things.”
“Um,” she said.
Ed held her gaze, and she had to stare him down, had to breathe through it, fight the warmth crawling up her cheeks.
“Well.” He stood up, gathered the folder. “If you have any more insights, you know how to reach me.”
She stood as well.
“By the way, what kind of relationship did you have with Owen?”
Her heart thumped hard, once, and she froze, felt (heard) her teeth grind against each other.
“Tell me about Harry Burroughs.”
She didn’t move, didn’t blink.
He watched her, waited, then nodded slightly. “When you’re ready, give me a call,” he said, and left the room.
CHAPTER
25
THE DAY HAD grown gloomier, the pewter sky glowing an odd green. There would be another storm tonight. Where would Alfie be when the storm came? Indoors? In a car? What did Hopper want with him? Her mind circled back to that question over and over as she left the station and started her car. She let it run, cranking the heat as high as it would go. Would Alfie be warm tonight?
Hopper was going through them one at a time, ticking their lives off a list. But he’d not touched her. No, he had, as Ed so pointedly said, befriended her son instead.
Back at her house, Laney tossed a frozen pizza into the oven, brewed a cup of chamomile, and settled at the kitchen table with her laptop. Her phone buzzed, but it was only Holly, asking if there was any news.
No news, Laney texted. Then, Thank you for driving today.
Oh please. If you can’t break the law for a friend, what’s the point of breaking the law?
You didn’t break any laws, Holly!
A girl can fantasize.
Laney smiled at her phone and sipped the tea. Love you, she texted.
You better, Holly replied. A few minutes later she texted again. We all just prayed for you and Alfie. Holly believed in the power of prayer and induced her husband, three children, and any extended family in the vicinity to join her whenever something needed an extra cosmic push.
It can’t hurt, Laney texted back.
She then opened Snapchat and looked for JP Spankthemonkey. Because prayer was one thing, and detective work another, and every passing day without her son was a knife in her guts.
CHAPTER
26
SHE FOUND JORDAN Rogers’s handle on Snapchat and sent an introductory chat. She did this as herself, not Kendra. And no, she didn’t care about Ed Boswell’s warnings, or anything Jordan’s parents might have to say about her reaching out to their son. Their thirteen-year-old had spent two months hanging out in a grown man’s apartment getting stoned and drunk. She’d seen him do a hand-to-hand in the school’s hallway. And now her own thirteen-year-old was God knew where. Jordan’s parents could stuff it.
While waiting for Jordan to notice the chat invitation and hopefully respond, Laney scraped the warmed pizza onto a plate and tore off a chunk. She opened her laptop, then the spreadsheet she’d sent herself from Mike’s apartment, and began highlighting rows. Harry had taught her this method: look for connections, the same last names, the same first names, check birth dates, color code everything that looks part of a pattern.
Fifteen minutes ticked by, twenty. She’d forgotten how much she loved this aspect of being a detective. Hell, she loved every aspect of it. She loved the field work best, but this cerebral hunting, this tracking of the spoor a person leaves behind simply by living, stoked the analytical side of her, gave her a sense of power even her gun couldn’t provide.
The first time she rode in a patrol car she was twenty-one, fresh out of the academy, and so thrilled that she had to fight to keep from grinning. It had been the culmination of years’ long dreaming. While a senior in high school, she’d applied to John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She loved everything about what she studied—whether it was criminal law or forensic psychology. She put in her application for the NYPD in her last year of school and entered the police academy four months after graduation.
Somewhere in the mix she’d met Theo—tall, lanky, blond, blue-eyed Theo with paint-splattered pants and sneakers, torn T-shirts, and beautiful hands that smelled of linseed oil. He painted larger-than-life portraits—eight-foot-high expanses of mottled skin and cracked lips—work she found alienating and off-putting, but grand anyway. He could create something she couldn’t, and he did it well, and was beginning to attract notice, a few galleries placing him in group shows to test out the waters.
They were an unlikely couple, introduced accidentally by a mutual acquaintance. Her love for him seemed more than immediate, as if he had already been part of her life, her dreams, and meeting him was simply the next step in the relationship. She loved the dip in his bottom lip, his skin (fine-grained, golden), his voice (his voice made her wet the first time she heard it), the way he spoke about politics, history, literature. She related to none of it, but that didn’t matter. She adored listening to him.
Her friends rolled their eyes behind his back and laughed, and one by one she stopped seeing them. He was all she needed. He and her work. Her world was perfect.
Those first years glowed in her memory with a grotesque intensity. She’d experienced everything new, good or bad, as a revelation, the world opening its secret layers for her as if lifting away veils. The crazy, over-the-top romance with Theo colored everything else to the point that no human misery could touch her. Abandoned children, abused spouses, murdered siblings, Mafia killings, car crashes, teen prostitutes, elderly men dead and bloated and half eaten by their dogs—all of it fascinated her equally. She’d come home and sit on Theo’s painting stool telling him story after story as he dabbed at a canvas, brush between his teeth and a sodden gray rag in his hand.
Every day she’d rise from their bed perennially yearning for him even as he spilled out of her, shower, put on her uniform, and go to work. The rotating shifts never bothered her the way they did the other rookies—she felt she could go without sleep for days if necessary.
Nothing could touch her, nothing could ruin the hard, glossy, luscious shell her obsession had built around her. And then something did, something penetrated the shell, made its home inside. She fell pregnant a year after graduating the academy. The decision to marry and move in together was barely a decision—they just did it, waking up on a Monday, filling out the marriage license forms, and getting married on a Wednesday. After all, she had a steady job, health insurance, and Theo had neither, and he loved babies, couldn’t wait for theirs.
Laney had a hard time believing that had been her life. How was it possible she had ever been that naïve? That in love? She wasn’t even sure it was love anyway, but a kind of madness. She used to think that nothing could hurt more than finding out the love had been one-sided. Even as recently as four days ago, she thought that. Nothing could hurt more than Theo telling her he didn’t love her, had never loved her, had grown to hate and resent her, even down to the force with which she placed her coffee cup on the counter or the way she laughed (horsey, he’d said, and nasal).
And then her son vanished.
She peered at the Hopper spreadsheet, trying to decide if a Donna Orlov (resident at the same building where Hopper had lived for six months in 1999) was a person of interest or a coincidence.
Her phone lit and she grabbed it, pressed the home button. A notification from Snapchat.
Jordan? she typed.
Mrs. Bird? he answered.
They found a body in Mr. Blue’s apartment, she typed. Jordan could use a dose of fear in his life. What was he thinking, going to a grown man’s house
day after day?
She couldn’t quite get her mind around the question of what Alfie had been thinking.
Alfie? he typed, and her stomach flipped at this combination of sentences. She waited. Let him feel scared. Let him feel guilty.
Then, after a sip of tea, No. It’s not Alfie. Now tell me everything.
The app glowed at her while he typed. Finally, I can’t.
Why?
Another pause. You have to promise you won’t tell my mom.
Laney pursed her lips. She’d promise anybody anything to get the information she needed. But for all she knew, this kid was in danger too.
Look, she typed, that man—the Mr. Blue guy—he’s a killer. He killed one person already in that space you say he used to bring you to. Now the best way to avoid being body number two is tell me everything you know. Strictly speaking, she didn’t know for sure if Mr. Blue and Owen Hopper were one and the same and she didn’t know if either one of them had killed the JD in the garage. But the chances of there being some random killer/child perverter on the loose living with Owen Hopper and taking down Hopper’s enemies were slim to none.
We all knew he was dealing.
How long? she asked. How long has he been dealing around here?
Maybe two months? Before Christmas. He saw us at Nuncio’s during winter break and offered us a ride home.
Alfie was with you?
Yes.
When would this have been? Had Alfie acted differently during winter break? God, he had a friend and she hadn’t known about it. How would she know about him visiting unsavory ex-cons? Except she should have known.
Then where did you go?
His place. He asked if we wanted to go. It wasn’t like he kidnapped us. Pause. Sorry. I mean we agreed to go.
What did you do there?
He gave us beer and we smoked a joint.
Alfie smoked too? Well, of course he did. Why would he go and keep going if he wasn’t interested in the offerings?
Hide in Place Page 11