by R. H. Herron
Laurie shook her head. “He seems to be having a little memory loss.”
Omid struggled to scoot up on the pillow and lost his breath, going pale. “Whatever it is you’re not telling me, spit it out.”
Jojo’s eyes were huge. And scared. They looked the way they used to on the first day of school. “Mom, can I talk to you in the hall?”
Omid scowled, but he shut his eyes.
They watched him, waiting for him to protest more.
Instead he fell asleep, almost instantly, an unfamiliar snore rattling out his nose, and the fact that he just went out like that, like a man hit on the head, was terrifying.
Laurie followed her daughter into the hall. She shut the door quietly behind her and ducked out of the way of a nurse hurrying past. “I didn’t tell him, not yet. He doesn’t quite remember, but I’m sure it’s going to come back to him.” What if he remembered right now? What if he was alone when he did? “I should get back in there, so—How did you get here, anyway? Pamela? Has she heard anything else?”
“We have to find Harper.”
“That’s our top priority. What about Pamela, poor thing, has she—”
Jojo shoved Harper’s white cell phone at her. “Harper was sleeping with more of them.”
But the words didn’t make sense to Laurie. “Huh?”
“Harper. She was sleeping with more cops.” Jojo drew back the phone and unlocked it. She swiped at the screen. “Look.”
Laurie looked.
Messages from men.
Men she knew.
Will Yarwood.
Ben Bradcoe.
Heinz Tollis.
Sherm Naumann.
She clicked on Yarwood’s message. What the hell would that bantam rooster send to Harper? You see anything you like?
A picture of a cock, the balls spilling out of the side of the frame, hairy as a spider.
THIRTY-ONE
“DAMN IT, JOJO.” Laurie thrust the phone at her daughter and then thought better of it, snatching it back. These were her guys. Hers. Omid’s. What the hell was ID going to do with this info, if they managed to get past the password protection in the forensic files? What else didn’t she know about the men she’d worked with for years? “What the fuck is this?”
“I don’t know.” Jojo crossed her arms. “But I’m freaking out.”
“Come on.” She led Jojo down the hall to the family waiting room. It was early enough for it to be empty. There was a candle burning under a cross-star object that was obviously trying to stand in for all religions, and there were Kleenex boxes next to every chair. The room felt soggy with other people’s emotions.
They sat next to each other. The phone had locked as she carried it.
Laurie held it out for Jojo’s thumbprint, feeling sick to her stomach as she did so. “Are they all like this?”
“Some worse than others.”
“And they’re all—”
Jojo rubbed her forehead. “Yeah.”
Laurie flicked to the next message. “Dan Toomey. Shit, that motherfucker.” Seeing Toomey’s hand on his cock, his wedding ring gleaming in the foreground—God. “He’s newly married. Like, less than six months. What is his goddamn problem?” She looked into Jojo’s face, as if her child could provide an answer as to why men were such idiots. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be—”
“Mom, what’s going on? I don’t get it. I mean, Harper has sex, but . . .”
A bright red headache bloomed behind Laurie’s forehead. “I have no idea, honey.”
“Does one of them have her?”
Laurie shook her head hard. Did they? As if she fucking knew. “No, of course not.” They knew these men. They were good men.
“But they were paying to have sex with her.”
Laurie caught an unexpected sob before it roiled up her throat, forcing it back into her superheated chest cavity. “It looks like that, but you know what we always say, innocent until proven guilty.”
“Bullshit. Cops say guilty until proven innocent.”
It was true. They joked about it. Even Omid said it sometimes with a laugh.
But they were all kidding.
“We don’t mean it. You know that.”
“You have an innocent man in jail right now. His best friend is dead. Harper’s gone somewhere, maybe dead or something, and Dad has to do something about this. Dad has to fix this.”
Laurie’s patience cracked. At one point she would have been one of the people out there looking, being paid to investigate, being depended upon. “The only thing Dad can do right now is try not to die.”
Jojo’s face went white. She lurched backward as if Laurie had hit her.
“Jojo—I’m sorry.”
“Is he going to die?” Jojo’s upper lip went darker, the way it did before she burst into tears.
“No! I’m so sorry I said that. Dad’s going to be fine.”
Jojo stood and moved, sinking into a chair opposite Laurie. “Is it all my fault? If this hadn’t happened to me . . .”
“This still would have happened. His heart was a time bomb, ready to go at any time. That’s what the doctor said to me.” It was a lie. It was what Laurie had hoped to hear, but all the doctor had said was that it was probably a long time coming and that stress had set it off.
Jojo’s lip flare calmed. “Are you sure? That’s what the doctor really said?”
She would slap anyone who challenged her lie. “On Gramma’s grave.”
Her daughter’s eyes widened.
Jojo believed her.
Thank God.
Jojo slipped back to the chair next to Laurie. “We have to find her.”
Of course they did. Laurie nodded, still scrolling.
“You and me, Mommy. We can find her. We don’t need Dad or the department.”
“Excuse me?”
“And don’t tell Dad. About anything. About what happened to me.”
“Honey, I have to.” She couldn’t handle this on her own. She’d fuck it up. She needed Omid.
“Remember when I did that project on Alzheimer’s? You told me that if when you were a million years old and you got it and you didn’t remember that Daddy was dead, you wanted me to tell you he was at work.”
Laurie felt the bottom drop out of her stomach. Ironically, she didn’t remember that at all. It was what she would want, so she could clearly believe she’d said it. But why had she said it to Jojo? She must have been shaken by a bad dementia call. “This is different. This is Dad’s job.”
“But he can’t do his job right now. That’s what you just told me. So don’t tell him.”
Jesus Christ. “But he’ll see messages on his phone from work.” Panic lit the edges of her thoughts. “I was with him when he woke up, but when he wakes again, it’s the first thing he’ll reach for.”
Jojo’s words were rapid-fire, bullets from a fully automatic. “Get in there. Take his phone. Tell him it died. Tell him you’ll let him know if he’s needed at work. Tell him nothing’s going on. It’s San Bernal, for God’s sake. There’s never anything going on.”
“Jojo—”
“We can find her.”
Laurie’s head throbbed. “What?”
“You and me.”
Never. “Honey. That’s not my job anymore, and it’s sure as hell not your job.”
“Whose is it, then?” Jojo stuck out her chin. “The cops? All those detectives on her phone? How can we trust any of them?”
Laurie rubbed her temples.
Jojo went on. “Don’t you think if it’s one of them, it would be easier if Harper just stayed disappeared? No victim, no crime, that’s what you and Dad always say.”
These were men she worked with. Men she’d always trusted.
Men she now knew were fucking her daughte
r’s best friend for money.
Was one of them hiding more than just dick pics?
Omid couldn’t help.
Who the fuck could she trust? “Joshi. We have to believe that—”
Jojo folded her arms, pulled up her legs, and swiveled in her chair so that she faced Laurie directly. “You know those meetings I go to?”
“You can’t believe everything a group against police brutality tells you.” Brutality. Right there—in the name of the group itself—was inflammatory language. “You know, better than anyone, that police officers aren’t brutal.” But the words felt thin in her mouth, a Communion wafer of a lie.
A couple were. A few.
“Mom.” Jojo’s face was rigid. “You were a cop. You know every system there is in the department, and you have as much access as any detective to the national databases.”
More. Detectives had to run some queries through dispatch—they didn’t understand the more difficult strings of commands it took to run warrant and gun and domestic violence checks on people from out of state or country.
But, stubbornly, she went back to her previous statement. “Our department isn’t brutal.” Linn had broken a suspect’s arm with his asp, which he wasn’t supposed to carry, but that was Linn. Connors withheld insulin from a sex registrant just to watch him freak out, the guy’s brain going sideways as his glucose levels rose. Tollis and Maria had physically taken down a man they thought was psychotic but turned out was just deaf. That one had been expensive. And if Will Yarwood shot at one more person, he’d be permanently desked.
But they weren’t brutal. That was the wrong word for it. An excitement ran through the blood every minute you were on the street, a high hum set right in the thick of your bloodstream. There was always tension when arresting someone, when bringing them in to be booked. You had to be on the highest alert. If they twitched, you brought your A game. If a prisoner went squirrelly, even for a moment, there was a certain pleasure in dropping the person. Cops just standing around piled on. It was fun. They were like puppies that way. After a good tussle, they’d head downstairs and laugh about it with dispatch.
Honestly, except for the time that she’d lost it herself, the time that had sent her off the street and into dispatch, Laurie had always thought it was funny, too—both when she was knocking elbows on the jail floor and when she was in her chair watching it like it was reality TV, which, in a way, it was.
Gallows humor. That’s how you got through a job like that. You laughed about inappropriate things. You shoulda seen how he squawked when Tollis persuaded him into the car.
No, really, he “fell.” Wink.
His head ran into my knee!
It wasn’t brutality. Good men and women died doing this job. They were doing their best and keeping their heads up while they did it.
“Mom? I know you can do this. We can figure it out. Together.”
Jojo. Laurie brought her attention back to her daughter, who was now rolling up and unrolling a magazine, over and over.
What if Jojo were right? What if one of the cops looking for Harper didn’t want her found? Worse, what if there were a group of them who wouldn’t mind if ID “lost” the Instagram messages?
“Okay,” said Laurie. “I’ll do a little digging.”
“We will. Not a little, a lot. It’s an investigation, right? Dad always says there was no one better at digging up dirt than you. I totally believe that you can do it, and you’ll do it faster than the detectives can. There’s no one we can trust to help. No one but us.”
The flattery was working. Jojo hadn’t leaned on her in a long time, and it felt good. Laurie reined herself in. “You do not call the shots here, you hear me?” She could hear herself—her voice pitched high and sharp—but she goddamn meant it. “You step one toe out of line and you’ll be not only grounded for the rest of your life, but you won’t get your phone back till you’re thirty. I’m the boss.”
Jojo nodded. “You’re the boss.”
“Who are you, and what have you done with my daughter?”
Her stupid attempt at levity failed. Jojo didn’t so much as blink. “We have to find Harper, and we have to be fast. What if it’s getting worse for her? I’m here to help. You tell me what I can do.”
Laurie took a breath. “Let’s go check on Dad. Hopefully he’s still sleeping. I’ll get his phone.”
“Then what?”
She looked at her watch. “Then we switch off hanging out with him.”
“We fake it.”
Tiredness made Laurie’s bones heavy as lead pipes. “Yep. All day, we’re going to fake it. I’ll sneak out at lunch and go to work and run some more checks. You’ll entertain him if he’s awake.”
Jojo practically looked chipper. The girl had always liked a challenge. “Okay. Then what?”
“You do more sleuthing in her social media. And I go to Ramsay’s drink-up tonight.” After every department death, there was, of course, a huge funeral with bagpipes and dozens of tear-wrenching heroic photos up on the screen, cycling over and over. Every funeral was followed by an enormous wake, with wives and families in attendance, all the officers spit-shined in Class A’s, their spouses in formal black. But the unofficial drink-up was the real funeral, with just department folk in plain clothes. It was usually held in a parking lot on the west end where the lights were burned out, far enough from residences that no one would call the cops on the cops. It would be tonight, she knew. Probably down on Seventeenth in the currently favored parking lot of a defunct Chinese restaurant. “And I start asking questions.”
THIRTY-TWO
RUNNING CHECKS WHILE Jojo sat with the still-sleeping Omid had brought up nothing. She didn’t know where to start—how did she pull files on her own officers? She’d plugged away, inputting their names into the RMS, but nothing except their own reports chugged back at her, thousands of them.
The good guys.
They were the good guys.
On the lobby camera, she saw Pamela come in. She leaned on Andy. A minute later her cell pinged. Pamela: We’re in the department again, in case you are, too. They’re not doing anything. Help us, please?
She sent a quick message back: I’m working on it right now, I promise. Keep you posted. Then she kept punching in names. There was nothing she wanted more than to find Harper, but she couldn’t handle talking to the Cunninghams. Not now. Not yet. But hopefully soon they’d know where Harper was. Laurie had to keep working.
Maury and Charity had peered over her shoulder a couple of times, and she’d minimized the screen. Omid asked me to try to do more to find Harper’s boyfriend. They might have believed her. They might not have. The good thing was, they didn’t ask.
Jojo texted that Omid had been cleared to drink broth, so at lunch Laurie brought him and Jojo pho. They let him sneak a few rice noodles. He acted like he was getting over the flu, except he was still sleeping most of the time. He hadn’t challenged either of them for his cell phone, which was worrying in and of itself.
After visiting hours she drove Jojo home. She dodged the questions Jojo hurled at her. I don’t know. They’re checking. I’ll look into that, too.
She triple-checked the alarm before leaving the house. “Get pizza or something? I want you to eat. Call me if you hear anything. Don’t text me, call my phone so I hear it. Okay?”
Jojo sat on the couch in her red pajamas, flipping through the Roku, though she didn’t look as if she were reading the words on-screen. “I will.”
“I’ll be home soon.”
Her daughter shrugged, obviously trying to be the girl she usually was, someone who didn’t really need a mother to tell her when she’d be home. But when she waved at Laurie, her eyes looked overwrought.
Laurie took a step back toward her. “I can stay.”
“Mom, go.”
“Yeah. Okay. I love you.”
Jojo nodded and turned on an SNL replay.
Laurie stopped at the All-American Liquor store near the west end—she’d never been in it except to respond to 911 hang-ups and one robbery, many years before. Scotch, but cheap. She didn’t plan on getting drunk, though most of her friends would.
Friends.
“Yeah, that one.” She pointed at a small bottle of Johnnie Walker. “Please.”
The clerk turned to grab it.
Next to her a man said, “Laurie?”
She didn’t recognize him at first. He was out of context and in the wrong uniform, but then it came to her. “Darren?”
Darren Dixon shrugged and looked down at his rent-a-cop uniform. It bagged on his long frame. “What can I say?”
She hadn’t seen him since he’d been fired for posting the anti-Muslim crap when he hadn’t been promoted and Omid had. He’d been such a dick about all of it.
What if he was on Harper’s list?
He shifted his weight so that he leaned against the bulletproof glass. “I heard about Omid. Is he okay?”
The clerk pointed at the credit card reader. “Chip in there.”
Laurie fumbled with her card before slotting it in. “How?”
“The bottom,” said the clerk.
“No,” she snapped, and jerked her gaze to Dixon. “How did you know about Omid?” There was only one way, she knew that already. He still had friends at the department. Of course he did. He probably knew about—
“And your daughter. I’m really sorry. Is she okay?”
Why did people ask that? “So you heard about Ramsay, too?”
Dixon frowned. “What about him?”
The image of the moving blood rose in her mind, and she felt nauseated. She didn’t cushion the blow. “Killed himself.”
He stiffened. “What the fuck?”
“It’s a shitshow, what can I say?”
“Seriously, Laurie, what’s going on over there?”
God, who knew? She took the receipt and, with it, a deep breath. Dixon was still talking, but she couldn’t hear him for the buzzing in her head.
She turned. Took a step toward him, so close that he stumbled backward. “Do you know Harper Cunningham?”