by R. H. Herron
It almost hurt, the feeling in Laurie’s fingertips. She was the best at digging things up in RMS, the in-house records management system. Everyone knew it. The new cops came to her with questions about how she made the connections she did in the back end of the computer, and old cops just relied on her to help them as she always had.
Andy moved to the couch and sat at the end of it. He put his palms firmly on top of his thighs. “You two go. I’ll stay here. No one comes in or out. I’ll stay right here.”
“I’m not leaving her.” Not alone with Andy. She trusted him—she did—but she couldn’t leave Jojo with a man who wasn’t her father, not so soon after what had just happened. “But if you stayed, too, Pamela, then I could go do some investigation.” She could go to work and dig deep. She could find Harper.
Pamela shook her head. “It’ll be faster for me to go with you.”
“The officers assigned to the case are already on the way over here. If you come with me, then they’ll have to get the info from you both separately. It’ll take longer.” This was true. “They’ll take your statements from you here and get all the info they need. I’ll be back as soon as I can.” Was this fair? To leave Jojo with them after she’d said she wouldn’t leave her? But if she was at work, she could do something instead of simply sitting here doing nothing but waiting for Jojo to wake up.
“Your daughter is safe,” Pamela spat accusingly, as if Laurie were the reason Harper wasn’t safe. “Your daughter’s here. Go find Harper.”
“I’ll be back as soon as I can.” I promised her. She’s too small. But Jojo was sixteen. Old enough to understand a broken promise.
* * *
* * *
LAURIE drove fast, her grip painful on the wheel. The streets were mostly empty, and she could autopilot her way to the station, her other home.
Goddamn Harper Cunningham.
The arrest. The ring.
Jojo and Harper had been best friends since they’d met at age four. Friday nights they slept at the Ahmadis’ house, giving the Cunninghams a date night, and they reversed it for Saturday nights. Sometimes the girls had pretended to be twins, insisting on wearing matching clothes. The parents had laughed together. One light girl, one darker girl, both wearing matching Lululemon shirts and tights.
Harper got whatever she wanted from her parents, whereas Laurie, the one who did the budget, had to be more careful about their spending on Jojo. Together she and Omid brought in a good living. She routinely broke six figures with overtime, and Omid had made more than a hundred and seventy thousand a year as soon as he hit lieutenant rank. That didn’t compare, though, to the money the Cunninghams made.
Somehow it hadn’t seemed to matter in the girls’ friendship. Harper shared her Pinkberry card with Jojo, and they split huge frozen yogurts every day after school. Jojo taught Harper how to make pot holders with yarn. They were always laughing, in a pitch that sometimes made Laurie’s head ache.
Then, at fourteen, Harper and Jojo had stolen a diamond ring from a jewelry shop.
Of all things.
Most girls stole stuff like barrettes. Laurie herself had made a habit of stealing stickers at their age. Pens. Gum. SweeTarts.
Petty theft.
Grand theft was anything over nine hundred and fifty dollars in California, and it was a felony. The ring had been priced at five thousand two hundred dollars. They’d gone in together, talking to the store owner about buying a friendship ring that they’d share, one girl one day, the other girl the next. To be honest, it was the kind of thing they would do. Harper once talked her father into buying them a helicopter ride on the Fourth of July, just because she wanted it. She was the kind of girl who would easily have been able to convince her parents to buy her best friend a shared diamond ring.
But they’d stolen it. They’d tried on many rings, admiring them in the mirrors and on each other. It never would have worked in Oakland, or in San Francisco. The owner wouldn’t have let them try anything on without parental supervision. But San Bernal was the kind of place two girls could walk into the jewelry store and expect good service. Rich parents were implied in San Bernal, parents who could make or break a store’s reputation on Yelp if their children were disrespected.
So the owner, the moron, had let the girls try on all the rings. When they left, a ring was gone.
The owner called the cops.
The cop who showed up looked at the security footage and recognized Jojo. He called Omid, who had the school resource officer, Darren Dixon, yank both girls out of class. Then Omid himself had driven to the school, siren blaring, lights blazing.
There, in the hallway surrounded by bright pink-and-blue posters for the spring dance, Omid himself arrested both girls. He told Laurie it was one of the worst moments of his life, watching his daughter cry in front of the principal. Harper hadn’t cried at all, he’d said. She just stood there, her chin tilted up, the ring held tightly in her palm. She hadn’t given it up until Jojo told her to, and then she’d thrown it on the floor. It skittered across the tiles and under a locker, Omid said. He’d been furious and embarrassed and had made Darren Dixon reach under the locker to pull it out.
The girls were put in jail. Really, truly in jail. Laurie had been so angry at her daughter that she’d just stood in front of the cell door and stared through the glass. Jojo’s head was bowed, but her foot had tapped impatiently, as if she were just waiting for it to be over.
The Cunninghams had been equally livid when they came to get Harper out, but not at the girls. Pamela, her face red, had stuck a perfectly manicured finger in Omid’s chest. “You should have just written them a ticket. We would have paid the fine, whatever it was. You shouldn’t have put her in there. With actual criminals! What about germs? Bugs? How do we know she’s coming out of there clean?”
Clean? Harper was the one who’d stolen the ring. It had been found on her person, not Jojo’s. It was all Harper’s idea—Laurie knew it.
The girls had been cited, fingerprinted, then released to their parents after less than three hours inside the PD. Harper had told Jojo to fuck off. Jojo had said it back, and then she cried the whole way home. She’d blamed the tears on being upset that she wouldn’t be able to be a police detective with something like this on her record, but they all knew a juvenile record didn’t matter. (Not that Laurie wouldn’t have jumped at the chance of preventing her daughter from going into emergency services. Since Jojo was little, she’d wanted to be first a cop, then an EMT, then a DA, then a cop again.) No, the tears were because Jojo was completely brokenhearted over losing Harper, plain and simple.
The friendship between the families was over, even though the store ended up dropping the charges. Harper’s parents were furious at Omid, and Jojo had tearfully told Laurie that Harper turned away from her at school when they saw each other in the halls. Jojo hadn’t gotten over it easily, crying herself to sleep at night for weeks.
And as far as Laurie and Omid knew, the girls had stayed apart for the last two years. How stupid they’d been. How long had the girls actually been mad at each other? A year? A few months? Less?
Laurie swung into Omid’s parking spot. She didn’t have her badge on her, so she used the code—5150—to open the glass front door. It wouldn’t unlock automatically to the public until eight, and it was only six now. Light was just starting to show over the sycamores on the east side of the parking lot, and no one was behind the front desk. She punched in the code at the interior door, and then she was through and into the station itself.
The rookie, Dyer, was at the sergeant’s desk writing paper, even though he was approximately a million years and forty IQ points from making sergeant. He sprang to his feet. “Laurie!”
“Where’s Colson?” Lieutenant Mark Colson was the midnight watch commander, and a close friend. He’d been at the scene, but Laurie hadn’t spoken to him.
“I
. . . I think he’s in the break room.”
Hurry. “Who’s lead officer on this?”
Dyer blinked. “Um . . .”
“Do you not know?”
Dyer’s face fell, and Laurie felt a pang of remorse that lasted less than a heartbeat. He was going to have to toughen up. “I think it’s Steiner?”
“And where’s—Never mind. I’ll find them.”
Colson and Steiner were both in the break room, which was a room more for working and drinking coffee than it was for eating. The refrigerator always smelled sour, and the overhead fluorescent lights pulsed, out of sync.
Colson stood. “Laurie! What an awful night. How is she? How’s Omid?” He hugged her, his body rigid under the vest. His clothes smelled like Omid’s, like dry-cleaning fluid and deodorant. He was a good cop, one of the best on the force. He and Laurie had started at about the same time, and they’d worked beat four together for a few months. They’d dated for a short time, before Laurie fell for Omid. He was leaner now than he had been then—he’d lost the heavy ropes of muscle in his arms and legs that he’d worked so hard to build up for the first ten years of his career. Now he cared more about bicycling and energy smoothies.
She didn’t answer his question about Omid. “Mark, we have a new problem. There’s a girl missing, Jojo’s best friend.”
Colson nodded. “Dispatch told me. But wait, Bettina sent Jones to take a statement from the parents at your house, right?”
“I want to do some digging.”
“Wait, so who’s at your house? You left the parents of the other girl with Jojo?”
Laurie nodded.
“And you trust them?”
Her stomach jumped. Of course she did. “My gut says they’re not involved in any of this.” What if her gut was wrong, though? What if she’d just left her daughter with . . . ? No. “I trust them.”
“Good enough for me. You’ll be downstairs?”
Laurie nodded with a firmness that was forced. He could shut her down right now and send her home. That’s what Omid would do. No part of this was her investigation. She was just a dispatcher, for God’s sake.
But Colson said, “Okay. I’ll keep you posted, and you do the same.”
So she moved fast.
She took the short staircase two steps at a time, racing around the trash can that the janitor always left right in the middle of the hallway. She slammed into the dispatch center.
Yes, she needed to dig through the database. But there was something even more important to do in dispatch.
Her co-workers said words to her, but she didn’t hear them.
The cameras—she needed to look at the cameras, the ones in the jail.
Laurie needed to see the man who might have hurt her child.
FIFTEEN
“I’VE BEEN WATCHING him,” said Shonda. The computers were above her terminal, and she scooted left so Laurie could lean in closer. “He doesn’t move much.”
It was hard to see much from the small black-and-white image—Leeds was just a blanketed hump on the cot. Laurie sucked in a breath and closed her eyes. She backed up and turned around.
Then she spun again, examining his form. She tried to memorize his position. If by some method she could be spirited into his cell, she’d know where to punch, to stab.
Fuck. She’d thought seeing him would help her deal, but it didn’t.
So she sat at the spare terminal and logged in.
“What are you doing here?” Dina was the kind of person who liked rules and who liked sharing with admin when someone else didn’t.
“Nothing.”
“Laurie?”
So she looked up. “I’m just pulling RMS on him. Okay?” Their records management system was open. There was nothing strictly confidential about checking the database. Unlike running state and federal checks on people without a good reason, which was prohibited by law, anyone who worked at the police department could poke around inside the local system.
Dina blinked. “Should you?”
Laurie didn’t break her gaze. “My daughter was raped.” The word sent a small shock wave through the room. They already knew, of course, but Laurie would lay a million dollars that the word hadn’t been said out loud yet. Not in here. They would have walked around it, softening the phrase into an acceptable euphemism. Sexually assaulted. A 261. Gathering evidence.
No one better have dared to ask whether it was a good one. (She knew they had. Goddamn them.)
The 6:00 A.M. changing of the night-to-morning crew had already begun. Maury had taken Rita’s seat, and Dina was packing up her things—she always took the longest to leave in the morning. Charity was in the tiny break room, sticking her food into the fridge.
Maury flapped a hand in her direction. “Don’t be idiots, you guys. Let her look.” That was his way of telling her he cared.
Laurie pulled up the system. Kevin Leeds. There were six listed, but only one with the right address.
Black male, twenty-two years old. Six foot two. Two hundred forty-six pounds. He’d been contacted a year before as a witness in a car accident.
Laurie’s breathing was tight in her lungs, and the room was almost silent. The phones didn’t ring. The new crew would usually be chattering the usual daily inanities: how tired they were, how they couldn’t wait for their weekend, where they’d order lunch from. Instead they were silent. Creepily so.
But it was better than watching them try to act like nothing was wrong, like the sky hadn’t fallen in and the earth collapsed.
She scrolled further down. Three years before, when he was nineteen, Kevin had been cited for public intoxication. He hadn’t been arrested. She checked the names of the people he was with that night and didn’t find anything interesting.
Where the hell was Harper Cunningham?
There were still avenues to go down, lines to throw out and pull in, but instead of going deeper into the system, Laurie shut down her terminal.
She didn’t look into Shonda’s pod, didn’t let her eyes stray back to the box that held the creature who’d hurt her daughter.
Maury stood. “Whatcha doing now?” He looked nervous, as if he knew she was up to something but didn’t quite want to know what that was.
“Leaving.”
“How’s Omid doing?”
“Also fine.” He’d better be. She couldn’t do this without him.
“Laurie, for fuck’s sake. This is awful. Sit down. Let us get you some breakfast. We’ll have Ruby go for us.”
She tried to smile at him, but it felt crooked. “Ruby hates running for food.”
“Yeah, well, parking enforcement has wheels and they get to see the sun. We don’t.”
Small talk. They were trying to fit her back in, and Laurie wanted to give in to the tidal pull of complaints that didn’t matter and stories that were old news. She wanted to complain about the K-cups and be bored by what her co-workers said to her for the bazillionth time. She wanted to bore them right back. She wanted to sit and tell a Jojo story that they’d heard so often they could probably tell it as well as she did (the night Jojo fell down the stairs and lost a tooth, the time Jojo head-butted a boy in preschool for calling her skin color poop brown). The eternal co-worker small talk was familiar and comfortable.
She couldn’t stay, though. Just like when Laurie was a kid, there was safety nowhere—unless she held her finger in the hole in the dike, the sea would sweep them all away. So she had to make it safe.
But there was still one more thing to do before she raced home to Jojo.
She waved a half-assed good-bye and went upstairs. She walked down the hall and turned right.
Then she let herself into the jail.
“No,” said Sarah Knight. “No fucking way.”
SIXTEEN
“COME ON.” THE video screens wer
e bigger in the jail, in color, and higher resolution. Laurie strained to look at them over Sarah’s shoulder.
The shape of Leeds was a dark shadow against the pale wall. He was still under the thin blanket that was obviously too short for a man his size. His bare feet were off the end of the bed. His back was to the camera, and she couldn’t see his face.
Laurie had thought she’d felt anger before.
She hadn’t, though, not like this. Her forehead ached with the heat of it, and her fingers trembled.
“I love you. You know that. But get out.” Sarah narrowed her eyes.
“No,” said Laurie.
“Omid will fire me.” Sarah had been in charge of the small San Bernal jail for more than ten years now. She ran a tight ship. Before she’d started, there’d been a jail scandal in which a local drunken wiseass was locked up without being arrested as a kind of joke, and then he’d been forgotten. That was before they had cameras in the cells, before they cleared them every night no matter who they thought they were holding. The man had stayed almost four days in the soundproof cell with nothing more than tap water to sustain him. The lawsuit was enormous and deserved, and now whenever that guy saw an officer in town, he flicked a balled-up dollar bill toward the cop. Sarah had lateraled from the Oakland jail, and she always said there was nothing more soothing than San Bernal wannabe assholes. She had a wife named Georgia and a dog named Shackle that Jojo loved. Sarah was blond and small and pretty and constantly underestimated.
And even though she was Laurie’s closest friend at the department, for a minute Laurie thought about knocking her down and steamrolling right over her. Instead she shook her head vehemently. “He won’t fire you. Omid adores you.”
“You can’t go in.”
Laurie held her arms out. “I’m already in.” She did a quick twirl. “I’m in the jail because I let myself in. Not your fault. Now, pay no attention to me. Pretend I’m not here.”
“You’re not getting to his cell.” Sarah crossed her arms over her chest. Bob Ringon eased himself out from behind his desk. Sarah shook her head at him.