by R. H. Herron
Now to sort through all the data and search for that zone, that small segment of the map that included the area of Hind and Seventeenth.
The returns were massive. It would take days to go through the data. Laurie blew out a breath of frustration.
“Can I help?” Charity wasn’t great at her job—too slow, too worried—but she was a sweet woman with good intentions.
“No thanks, hon. You probably don’t want to, anyway.” Who knew how far down this would take Laurie? She didn’t need to drag anyone else with her.
Charity nodded and cracked open a bottle of nail polish.
Laurie narrowed the search down to the last two years that Dixon was employed.
Better. The data was still vast, but it was doable. Maybe.
As long as no one stopped her.
When 911 rang, Charity grabbed it. Laurie’s nerves tensed. She was logged in, and there was a spare headset next to her. Rita was on break, and Shonda was somewhere chasing her down—that left just her and Charity in the room. Usually two dispatchers ran a call—one on the phone and the other on the radio, putting it out to the officers. Any other dispatcher would have answered the phone and put out on the air whatever kind of call it was, multitasking and using the mic pedal to switch back and forth between talking to the officers and the citizen on the phone, but Charity wasn’t that dispatcher.
Shit.
Maybe it wouldn’t be a big deal.
“He what? Where’s the gun?”
Laurie could hear the screaming coming over Charity’s headset. No way in hell would she be able to get info from the reporting party and talk to the units. Laurie pulled on the headset. The call landed on the screen in front of her. 2D71 and 3D42 were available. She attached them and the sergeant to it, then verbalized it on the radio.
Almost immediately Shonda was back in the room. She slid a seemingly grateful glance at Laurie and took over the dispatching while Charity continued to talk to the woman whose husband had just taken off with the gun and the dog, heading toward the freeway.
And almost as immediately, two people rushed into the room.
Rita moved quickly to stand next to her. “Can we talk in the supervisor’s office?”
Laurie flapped her hand. “I wish I could. But I don’t have time.”
Behind Rita stood Mark Colson. “I knew that was your voice. What are you doing here?”
Laurie tried a grin. “Hey, I just got let out of the pokey, so I thought I’d come do a little pro bono work.”
“Shit, Laurie. You shouldn’t be here.” Mark’s voice was concerned.
“Why not?” Laurie kept her eyes on the screen and the pages scrolling by. Every traffic stop, every lunch break, every hit-and-run, every cold burglary—every single thing Dixon had done on duty was logged. She could find it. She had to find it.
“You’re on admin leave.”
She made a come-on gesture with her left hand. “Bring it to me. I haven’t signed anything yet. Haven’t talked to my supervisor.”
Rita said, “I’m trying to make that happen. Can you please stop what you’re doing and come talk to me?”
“Respectfully, Maury is my supervisor.”
Colson straddled a chair backward and scooted close to her. She minimized the search window.
Colson said, “That’s beside the point. He’s not here. Rita’s in charge. And above her I’m in charge. You know that.”
His voice was strained, and he wasn’t the best under pressure. He had, though, always been a good man, as far as Laurie knew. He wasn’t on Harper’s list, but how could she trust any of them? How far did the rot go in the apple? “Please, Mark. I’m running one search.”
“Okay, then, how about telling me what you’re searching for?”
She folded her lips. “I don’t want to tell you.” Truth was best—he’d sniff out a lie, and she certainly didn’t think she could come up with a good enough one, anyway.
“We’ll be able to tell, you know. As soon as you stand up. We’ll be able to look at what you searched.”
She knew that. That was for later. “Please, Mark. I’ve got a hunch.”
Colson gave a strained smile. “Let us help you, Laurie.”
“Please. I’ll ask for help as soon as I know what I’m looking for. I promise.”
Colson folded his hands together, as if in prayer, and then shook them out. “Is this about Kevin Leeds?”
“No. This is about Jojo.” Mostly.
“How is she?”
Laurie shook her head slowly. Maybe she could use this. “Not very good. Not good at all. I’m worried.”
Colson had two teen daughters. “Laurie, I’m so sorry. Still . . .”
“Look. I’ve got this wild hunch. It isn’t about a single person who works here, I promise you that I’m telling you the God’s honest truth. I’m doing some digging. Please, Mark. It’s for Jojo. For our little Car 143.”
He shut his eyes. “If the chief finds out about this—”
For a moment Laurie was confused. Omid was—No, wait. He meant Brent Stanley. Omid wasn’t the chief, not until he was better. And maybe not then, either. She wasn’t a dispatcher, or at least she wouldn’t be one after she got the admin leave papers. And who knew how long that would take to sort out? She might not have a job afterward. They’d change the outer door code—they always did whenever anyone went out on admin leave. Protocol. To keep them from doing exactly what she was doing—screwing around in the records database.
“He won’t find out. We won’t tell him, will we, guys?” Laurie looked at Rita, Shonda, and Charity, all of whom shook their heads.
“Other people heard you on the radio. They’ll be coming in to find out why.”
Shit, she hadn’t thought of that. “Rita, can I use your office? I’ll close the door and keep the light out. You can talk at me while I work.”
“God, Laurie.” Rita was already moving toward the office. “God.”
A little more time, that’s all Laurie needed. There was something in her brain, something about that part of town generally and Dixon specifically. She’d find it, and then she’d know where he was.
And then she’d do something about it.
FIFTY-FOUR
AFTER MOM LEFT, Jojo and Kevin had gone back to the couch, but it was different now. While they’d slept earlier, they’d cuddled. He’d felt so close. Once, after they’d checked the phone, before they’d drifted off again, Jojo had felt his chest shake and felt him cry. He’d been almost silent, except for softly sped-up breathing that sounded wet. Jojo had turned to face him and, without saying anything, put her arms around his neck and held him for a long time.
Now that Mom was gone, the house felt too big. As if reading her mind, Kevin said, “You want to get out of here?”
It should be fine, as long as she kept Mom in the loop. Mom had her phone—Kevin could text her and tell her where they were going. “Where do you want to go?”
Kevin spoke to his toes. “I want to go home.”
Kevin’s mother and the rest of his family were out of state. His church at home thought gays went to hell. Zach had been his person. Football had been his life. Zach was gone, and his career would be, too, she assumed. A player couldn’t play while fighting felony charges, could he?
Of course he needed to go home. Jojo felt a surge of unearned luck run through her veins like gold. She still had Mom. And even if he’d lied, she still had Dad.
“Let’s go,” Jojo said.
* * *
* * *
KEVIN’S house was trashed.
“Fuck,” he said as they entered each room. “Fuck me. Fuck.”
Every piece of the living room furniture was broken, as if someone had taken a sledgehammer and beaten each one apart. The glass in the cabinets was shattered. It looked as if one chair had
actually been sawed down the middle. Every wall was covered with swastikas and things Jojo didn’t recognize but kind of understood: KKK, 14-88, GSS.
In the kitchen every dish was broken, every glass thrown against the wall. Each pantry item had been opened, and the floor was covered in a nightmarish goo of cornflakes and raisins and canned pineapple. Flour covered every surface, sticky and white.
“Oh, my God.” Jojo covered her mouth with her hand. “What’s that smell?”
Kevin crouched to look more closely at the filth covering the floor. “Yeah, that’s shit. And piss.”
Jojo gagged and sidestepped her way out to the hall, swallowing hard. “Should we be in here? Is it safe?”
Kevin slammed into a bathroom, kicking a path through broken porcelain. He raised his voice to a shout. “I hope it’s not safe! I hope someone’s here who I can tear into pieces!”
But it was too quiet. There was no one here but them, Jojo could feel it. “Why didn’t the alarm go off?”
“I didn’t bother to set it. I didn’t think it could get any worse.”
Each room was wrecked more than the last. Jojo tried to take Kevin’s hand as they went into his bedroom, but he shook her off. His body radiated pure anger, and with every step he took, his breathing got heavier. A dark fug with a tang of uric acid hung in the air. The curtains were on the floor, and half the books on the shelves had been torn apart, page by page. Each wall was covered with something worse: KILLER, RAPIST, BURN AND DIE.
The only room left untouched was the spare bedroom, the one Jojo had woken up in. Kevin stuttered a breath as they entered, and Jojo stifled a scream. There, on the bed, was a single white rose.
Kevin yanked open the bathroom door.
“No. I can’t . . .” He shut it again.
“What is it?”
“More roses,” he said in a flat tone. “Right where his body was.”
“What the fuck?”
Kevin sank to the floor. His legs splayed out before him, and he held on to his elbows. “This was all I had. This was all I had. I had my job, and I had Zach, and that’s all I needed. It was everything. It’s all I wanted.” His voice was a bloody wound.
Jojo knelt beside him. “You still have your voice. CapB needs you.” Stupid words. She knew that Kevin would throw all of CapB into the ocean if it would bring Zach back.
He hadn’t seemed to hear her, anyway. “This is all because of what I did. This is all my fault. If I had just kept my mouth shut, never gotten political, never gotten involved . . . It’s all my fault.”
It wasn’t his fault—he was just the unlucky one who’d been targeted. Now he was broken. He didn’t even look the same. His face had changed, as if it had been taken apart and put back together by someone who didn’t understand what he was supposed to look like. The skin hung heavy under his eyes, and his cheeks were hollow.
It terrified Jojo even more than the rooms had.
“But we don’t stop fighting.” She’d heard it a million times in the meetings. We don’t ever stop fighting.
Kevin flopped backward and stared at the ceiling. “Oh, yeah, we do. We stop. We always stop. They make us stop. They break us, and then we can’t fight back. They force us to surrender. We never win. I can’t believe I ever thought we could.”
Jojo squatted to take his hand. “We have to get out of here.”
“Never moving a muscle again.”
“We should call the cops.” The words sounded flimsier than the idea. Jojo wanted to shove them back into her mouth whole, but she’d choke on them, vomit them out again in pieces. The cops were the good guys. They had to be the good guys.
They weren’t the good guys. Not now.
Kevin didn’t bother responding.
Jojo’s palms were sweating. “I’m going to get you a glass of water—” For a second she’d forgotten the damage in the kitchen. There was no glass for her to get. “Come on, Kevin, we have to go. There’s no point in being here.”
Movement in the backyard caught her eye through the window. Instinctively, she ducked. “There’s someone out there.” What if it was the people who had done all this?
Kevin didn’t move.
“What if it’s them?” she hissed.
Kevin kept his eyes closed. It was as if she weren’t there, as if he couldn’t hear her at all.
Jojo straightened so that she could just peek out the bottom of the window. She expected something terrible, a clown face at the window or a bonfire of nightmarish proportions.
But there, in the middle of the yard, wearing a yellow sundress and a gorgeous smile, Harper was flying, up and down, up and down.
Harper’s ghost.
Obviously.
Harper was dead, and now she was there—flying up and down, her gorgeous tumble of long blond hair floating and falling like yellow mist. Jojo turned to ice and then to liquid heat—nothing made sense, but there Harper was. Even dead, she was beautiful. Jojo touched the ring at her throat and felt it hot against her skin. Harper was dead.
But—the ghost was jumping on the mattress she and Kevin had hauled outside last night.
And the apparition waved when she saw Jojo at the window. Through the glass, Jojo could hear a laugh. Did ghosts laugh out loud?
It was her. It had to be.
“Kevin! Shit, Kevin!”
She raced for the door. She heard Kevin get up and chase her. She slammed through the living room, dodging a broken chair and a balled-up rug, leaping over a shattered lamp. She threw open the door to the yard, and there:
Harper.
Smiling.
Reaching out to her.
But then Harper wavered in Jojo’s sight, going blurry at the same time a great roar ripped through her brain, and that’s when she knew for sure: Harper was dead, and this was her incorporeal form, come to tell Jojo she loved her for the last time.
Jojo tried to reach out a hand, but her own body was gone, she couldn’t move, she had no thought except for a punch of stark fear—
And everything went dark.
FIFTY-FIVE
LAURIE CLUTCHED THE steering wheel. She sat in the department’s parking lot and tried to breathe calmly, the way she’d been trying to learn in that damn yoga class, but what good was breathing when she was getting nothing done?
She looked at Jojo’s phone. Almost 6:00 P.M. It would start getting dark in a couple of hours, and they were no closer to finding Harper now than they were three days ago.
About an hour earlier, Jojo had sent a text from Kevin’s phone. Laurie had read it when it came in, but she read it again.
On our way to Kevin’s, will keep you posted where we are.
When she’d texted back, asking Jojo to tell her when they got there, Jojo hadn’t responded. Stubborn. Just like her father. Laurie hadn’t talked to Omid in hours. She should go to the hospital to check on him in person, but then she remembered.
She’d finally remembered what had been niggling at the back of her mind about Seventeenth and Hind—Darren Dixon’s beat wife.
Lots of cops had beat wives—local resident women who liked men in uniform and gave them a place to “relax” between calls while still remaining on their beats. Some of them eventually became real wives, only to be left for a new beat wife a few years later.
Everyone at the department thought Darren had one. They’d never figured out who it was, but in dispatch they laughed about it. On his midshift break, no matter the time, day or night, his patrol unit often stopped in the same area.
They thought he’d been going there for sex.
But what if he hadn’t? What if he owned another property?
A place to stash kidnapped girls? It’s not him, her brain said. He’s a useless drunk. This is a rabbit trail. Leave it alone. Let the department find Harper—this isn’t your job.
Something tugged her, though. It kept pulling.
She’d combed through every record for the last two years of his career, hoping for the one time he put himself out verbally at a specific address on either Hind or Seventeenth, but he never had. Not once. She’d gone deeper into CAD and tracked his unit’s motions, hoping he always parked in the same spot, but he never did. It made logical sense—the housing was too dense in that area to offer up easy, regular parking spaces.
She straightened her shoulders and swallowed, hard.
At least she could look for his Range Rover. She could do that much.
She drove Hind, and Seventeenth, and Brockley. She found two Range Rovers, neither of them with the 11-99 sticker and the 5211OS plate. She combed side streets and went in circles, just in case she’d missed something. Her stomach hurt, sour and cramped.
Just as she was about to give up, she found it on Eighteenth wedged between a motorcycle and a dumpster in front of a broken-down apartment building.
No one was around the vehicle. No cars drove by. There were no pedestrians leading dogs, no mothers pushing strollers for an early-evening walk.
Laurie leaned down and grabbed her phone, ripping it out of the wheel well and shoving it into her pocket, duct tape and all. She stood straight again, her face hot, as if she’d done something wrong.
Which she hadn’t. She could do something wrong, though.
What if she stood in the middle of the street? What if she screamed Harper’s name until the neighbors called the cops?
That would be something. A rookie pulling up on a dispatcher losing her shit, the dispatcher who’d just been arrested for punching a police officer. Of course, they didn’t even know about her second crime, pistol-whipping the ex-cop she was currently hunting.
Laurie rubbed her cheeks, hard. Her head ached. She looked up at the windows all around her. Too many. Too many old houses split into four or more units. Too many apartment buildings. The windows flashed the lowering sun back at her, glaring and painful.
He was up there somewhere, in one of them.