by R. H. Herron
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Copyright © 2019 by Rachael Herron
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Herron, Rachael, author.
Title: Stolen things: a novel / R.H. Herron.
Description: New York: Dutton, [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018043788| ISBN 9781524744908 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781524744915 (ebook)
Subjects: | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3608.E7765 S76 2019 | DDC 813.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018043788
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
For Sophie Littlefield and Juliet Blackwell, my constant partners in crime and, now, in crime fiction. I could do this job without you, but I wouldn’t want to.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Thirty-one
Thirty-two
Thirty-three
Thirty-four
Thirty-five
Thirty-six
Thirty-seven
Thirty-eight
Thirty-nine
Forty
Forty-one
Forty-two
Forty-three
Forty-four
Forty-five
Forty-six
Forty-seven
Forty-eight
Forty-nine
Fifty
Fifty-one
Fifty-two
Fifty-three
Fifty-four
Fifty-five
Fifty-six
Fifty-seven
Fifty-eight
Fifty-nine
Sixty
Sixty-one
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
ONE
NO ONE EVER called 911 because they were having a great day.
Well, sometimes Jocko Smith did, but he was a local drunk who didn’t get along with his therapist, and 911 was free. When Laurie was on the beat, she used to arrest him so regularly for being drunk and disorderly that she still knew his birthday by heart. Once, years after she’d moved off the street and into dispatch, she’d seen him in Berkeley. She’d been taking nine-year-old Jojo to get her ears pierced for the first time, but Laurie’s car had swerved automatically—violently—when she saw Jocko stumbling in front of the library. Within the time it took her heart to beat twice, she had wrested the wheel back rather than launching herself out of her vehicle and going after him.
What’s wrong, Mama?
Nothing. I just forgot I wasn’t a cop anymore.
Jojo was sixteen now, with multiple piercings, and she was angling for a tattoo.
The emergency line shrilled. Laurie’s finger was fastest, beating Dina by a split second. Dina glared at her, and Laurie grinned.
“911, what’s the address of the emergency?”
“My daughter.” The man’s words were a garbled gasp. “She’s gone.”
Dead or lost, it didn’t matter till Laurie knew where he was. “Confirm your address?” He was calling from a landline, so Laurie had it on the automated number screen, but by law she had to get it verbally, too.
“I’m at 72 Dorset. I can’t find her.”
Laurie tapped the keyboard. “How old is she?”
“Two.”
Shit. This wasn’t a teenager, then. Laurie’s ear got different—she could almost feel herself leaning into the sounds coming over the line. “When did you last see her?”
“God, I don’t know.” A muffled noise. “God.”
Was he drunk? He wasn’t slurring, but he sounded out of it. On something, maybe? Teenagers went missing all day every day, in every town. That kind of call would hold for hours until they found someone who could take the report. But a two-year-old? Sylvia had already put it out on the air, and Laurie could see on the screen that two officers and the shift sergeant were on the way.
“What’s her name?”
“Della. Della Sanchez. She’s two. Did I say that?”
“What color clothing was she wearing?”
“God. I don’t know—I just woke up. I’m so confused.”
Laurie’s breathing slowed. She had to ask the right questions and listen harder to the answers. “Okay.” It was almost nine at night in early summer, not a normal time to wake up from sleep. “You’ve checked the house?”
“Everywhere,” he choked. “Under her bed, and in the kitchen where she hides in the soda cupboard, and even outside. Then I ran back inside. . . . Wait. My wife . . .”
“Where’s your wife?”
“My ex-wife. We’re divorced.”
Could be a custody problem, then. “Does she have keys to your place?”
“Hang on. I have to think. I work nights now—and I went to sleep, and before that Della was with me, and we had mac ’n’ cheese, and then . . .”
“Could she be with your ex-wife?”
As if she’d given him the answer to an impossible test, he yelled, “She’s with my ex-wife! That’s it! Oh, fuck, she came over and got Della right before I fell asleep. I’m so sorry. Oh, my God. I’m so embarrassed. I just woke up, and I was so confused—it’s a new job, and I’m not used to working nights.” He sounded as if he might cry. His relief was palpable, and Laurie had no doubt he was telling the truth. She typed in the info, then ran her finger along her throat as Sylvia caught her eye.
Sylvia cut the units to code two, canceling the second unit and the sergeant. Bragg would continue without lights or siren and make contact. He’d call the mother and make sure it was all legit. And it was—Laurie would lay a paycheck on it. “Okay, s
ir, I’ll have my officer contact you just to make sure you’re all right.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Have a good night, sir.”
“Oh, shit, thank you!”
It was nice. She almost never got thanked, for anything. “You’re wel—” But the caller had already hung up.
“Coffee. I need coffee.” Laurie stood and went into the break room. Back in the day, the coffee scent of the room had been as bitter as the dispatchers waiting to retire. Nowadays only the people remained that way; the coffee was Keurig. Laurie punched the button and waited for it to spit at her. She made a second cup and added vanilla creamer to it—Dina always had a hard time getting the Keurig machine to work for her. She carried both coffees back into dispatch and slid one across Dina’s desk. Dina, who was talking to a citizen about why he couldn’t get a fireworks permit, smiled at her gratefully.
Laurie sat at her station and plugged in. “I still don’t like these K-cups,” she announced to the room at large, as if for the first time.
Sylvia flipped through something on her cell phone and said nothing. Only Bettina rose to conversation.
“They’re handy, though.” It was what Bettina always said.
“The coffee tastes like plastic.”
“So does 7-Eleven coffee, and you bring that in all the time.”
At home Laurie drank her coffee black, but that was because Omid bought the good stuff, the locally-roasted-in-small-batches kind. He was a coffee snob, and now that he was chief and had an office big enough for a personal espresso machine, it had only gotten worse. He’d been talking about getting a home roaster lately. Laurie glanced at the dispatch screen—he still showed as being in the station. He was probably in his office, as usual, doing the paperwork he was too busy with meetings to do during regular hours. Where he should be was home, waiting for Jojo, since Laurie was stuck on shift.
Whatever. They could argue about it later. “I hope we get a good pursuit tonight.” She said it at least once a shift. It was part of her routine.
“You’re sick.” Bettina shook her head. “If I get one, you can have it.”
“Promise?”
“Especially if it’s a foot bail.” Bettina hated the stress that came with officers pursuing suspects over fences and through back alleys, the radio exchanges garbled, the primary officer panting too hard to be understood.
“First Friday night of summer. It’s going to be busy.” Laurie took the first plasticky sip.
Her seat was next to the only window. She set the terrible coffee down and stood, opening the slats of the blinds. Her headset was on, she was plugged in and logged on, but the phones were quiet. So far. Being a dispatcher was two parts boredom to one part adrenaline.
Dina, done with the fireworks caller, groaned and covered her eyes. She was the whiner of tonight’s shift, and it was best just to ignore her.
Laurie touched the glass. “The sky is pink out there.” The dispatch center was sunk into a half basement, and the window looked into the parking lot where the extra patrol cars sat. It was an excellent view if you liked looking at gravel and car tires and cigarette butts (Jimmy’s litter—no one else at the department smoked anymore).
And the sky. If Laurie craned her neck—and she always did—she could look up into the San Bernal sky as twilight settled on the city. Tonight the sunset was a muddy streak of rose with a backwash of pale lavender. It was colder than it should be for June. A wisp of fog crept over the top of the library.
Dina gave another small groan. “Are you going to shut the blinds?”
“Come on. It’s almost dark.” The spotlight Dina was shining on her crossword puzzle was ten times as bright as the tired sun filtering in through the window.
“It’s a different light. It hurts my head.”
Laurie shut the blinds. “Better?”
Dina nodded, wincing, taking a sip of her coffee.
The cubicle walls that separated the stations were only four feet high, and they could talk over them without standing, but Sylvia stood anyway. “If you two are done, it’s time for Jeopardy!” She raised the remote.
The phones stayed quiet enough that they got through the first six minutes of the show without pausing it once. Other shifts watched different shows, but the touchstone for Laurie’s team was Jeopardy!, every night. They watched DVR’d episodes from their days off. Any of them could have cheated and watched at home, bringing all the answers in, but none of the four of them would have done that. Bettina was selfish, Dina was needy, Sylvia was depressed, and Laurie herself was a control freak, but they came together over the half-hour show that, on a busy twelve-hour shift, could last them all night, watched in fifteen-second bursts when all of them were off the phones and the radios weren’t squawking.
Alex Trebek asked one of the players about her pet rat. The player answered in a cloying voice.
Dina harrumphed.
Laurie said, “Jojo wanted a pet rat when she was seven.”
Her co-workers already knew that. Sitting in a room for so long with the same people, a person ran out of tales. Responding to the same stories over and over was part of the job, too. So boring. So rote. So life.
“Gross,” said Dina, predictably.
Sylvia blew a disgusted puff of air out of her mouth.
Bettina said, “I like rats. I had one when I was a kid.”
Its name had been Juliet, and it had liked dandelions.
“Her name was Juliet.” Bettina’s face softened. “She liked dandelions. I’d go out and pick as many as I could in the morning, and she’d nibble them from my hand.”
Laurie said, “We got Jojo a guinea pig instead, and she’s still not over that disappointment.” Sixteen years old, but that rat argument seemed like last week rather than nine years ago.
They got four more minutes of Jeopardy! before the eager-beaver new hires hit the street and started pulling over everything with an expired tag. “Rookies,” muttered Sylvia, running warrant checks on all five people in a car who apparently looked suspicious to the new officer. “They’re exhausting.”
“Run two more,” said Knotcliffe over the radio.
The only time Laurie ever saw Sylvia get flustered was when she had too many people in a queue to check. Once, years ago, she’d missed a felony warrant for murder, and she’d never gotten over it. Sylvia’s checks took twice as long as anyone else’s, even though she could enter a full seventeen-character VIN with her eyes closed.
Laurie started on the first one. “Let me get those for you.”
Sylvia shot her a grateful look. “Rookies,” she said again, as if the word were a curse. “Too much fucking energy.”
Laurie flipped through the pages quickly. “They’re all clear, Sylvia.”
“That last one, too?”
“Yeah.”
911 rang. Laurie grabbed it, beating Dina yet again. She would always be the fastest on the phones, a small, silly point of pride. Still nodding emphatically at Sylvia, she said, “911, what’s the address of the emergency?”
A long pause. “Hello?” The girl sounded far away and muffled.
But Laurie would know that voice even if it came from miles underwater, even if it came from the moon. Her response was frozen in her throat for a split, unforgivable second.
“Jojo?”
“Mama? Help me.”
TWO
JOJO WAS ON a bed in darkness.
She’d walked her fingers to the side of the narrow mattress, but she still couldn’t get her legs to move so that she could stand up and find the light switch. She’d managed to dig her cell phone out of her back pocket to dial 911.
The sound of her mother’s voice in the darkness was a complete surprise, as if she’d totally forgotten what her mother did for a living. At least Jojo knew what city she was in now.
“Baby? Where are you?”
Her mother, always annoyingly calm in a crisis, wasn’t calm now, and that was almost as scary as the fact that Jojo had no fucking idea where she was. “I don’t know.”
“How did you get there?”
“I don’t know.” Jojo’s throat hurt, as if she’d been yelling.
She didn’t remember yelling.
She couldn’t really remember anything right now. Her thoughts were heavy and sluggish, towels dropped in a tub. She could barely move them around in her mind.
“Jojo?” The edge in her mother’s voice was turning sharper.
Move your legs, she told herself. Why wouldn’t they work? Had she been in an accident? Was she paralyzed? “Help.”
“Baby, you have to tell me where you are.” Her mother gasped a breath, and the sound of it sent a tremor through Jojo’s stomach.
“Can’t you see where I am?”
“You know I can’t. You’re going to have to help me, baby.”
Shit. Technology was good and getting better, her mom always said, but cell phone locations were still approximations rather than accurate pinpoints. “I must be in San Bernal, right? If you answered?”
Her mother said, “Yeah. I’ve got you roughly in the Old Coast part of town. Do you know where you might be? I have to get your location.”
In case they were disconnected. Jojo had been around the PD her whole life. Location was the most important thing. You couldn’t get to a scene if you didn’t know where the victim was, no matter how much you wanted to.
Oh, God, what if they got disconnected? “Mama, find me.” The words came out of her mouth like she was five years old and lost in the Exploratorium. “Can you see me on your cell phone?” Her mother had made her turn Location Services on and share it with her. Jojo usually hated it.
“I’m trying.” There was a fumbling noise. “Okay, I can see you on the map. Are you near Grand? And Seventh? Do you know what the house looks like?”
She had no idea. “I don’t know.”
“Are you inside or outside?”
“Inside.”
“Can you get to the door?”
“My legs won’t move.”
Jojo’s mother made that sharp gasping-fish sound again. Jojo had never heard her mother make it before, and she hated it. That was a good feeling, the hating of it, so she stuck with it.