The Mercy of the Night

by David Corbett

  It wasn’t till that moment the name clicked. “You worked on the Victor Cope investigation. When Jacqi disappeared.”

  Skellenger stopped rocking on his heels. “That’s correct.”

  “Well, she’s disappeared again. I’m trying—”

  “From what I hear the family is handling the matter on their own. They didn’t ask for your help. They don’t want it.”

  “Have they reported Jacqi missing? To you, I mean. The police.”

  Another blank-eyed pause. “You won’t be able to find anyone from inside a holding cell, Mr. Tierney, and that’s where you’ll end up if you keep hounding this family. They’ve been through enough. They have a right to be left alone. I trust I’ve made myself clear.” Without looking, he reached behind for the door. “Good day.”

  When Tierney returned to Lonnie’s office he found her leaning against the wall beside the window, staring out beyond the vintage muslin curtains at the drizzling rain.

  Tierney said, “Well that was interesting.”

  She turned toward him but stayed put. “Who was it?”

  “A detective named Skellenger. Ring a bell?”

  “Jordie Skellenger?”

  “You know him.”

  “I told you, I know a lot of the guys here. Occupational necessity.”

  “I mean it rings a bell from before, Victor Cope, Jacqi’s kidnapping.”

  “Sure. I guess. What did he want?”

  “He was contacted by the Garza family.”

  “Christ.” A thin, shuddering breath. “Fabulous.”

  “Lonnie—”

  “Have they reported her missing?”

  “I had the same question. He didn’t really answer.”

  “Phelan, you need to listen to me. I need you to stop. I need you to let go of this and just stop.” She moved toward him, hand held out, as though approaching a strange dog. “I’m asking as a friend. I screwed up, okay? I screwed up by not reporting to the court that she’s no longer here. If DHCS finds that out—”

  “You don’t have that obligation.” He wasn’t entirely sure that was true. Still, he’d read the relevant statutes, which were almost blithely moot on the subject.

  “I didn’t tell the mother either,” she said.

  “That was hardly reckless, given the history. Let alone wrong.”

  “The girl’s seventeen. No matter how screwed up the family is, she’s still a minor.”

  “You hoped she’d come back on her own. When she didn’t, you turned to me.”

  “For God’s sake, Phelan, will you listen? It should’ve been me who called the police. Days ago.”

  “You did what you thought was best. I had a good relationship with her, something her family sure as hell didn’t. She didn’t go home, probably never even thought about it. If I’ve confirmed anything, it’s that. And you said yourself the cops hate her—why contact them?”

  “If only you hadn’t been so, I don’t know, tactless.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’ll call Skellenger, straighten this out.”

  “If you feel you have to.” Tactless? “But I still think it’s wrong to just stop. Of course the family’s pushing back—they’re the problem. You said as much yourself—”

  “Phelan—”

  “If we give up, who fills the vacuum?”

  “I get that, believe me.” She returned to her desk finally and dropped into the chair as though manning a cockpit. “But whatever trouble she gets into is largely her own doing. She has to stand up for herself, Phelan. She has to want to be found.” She wetted her thumb on a damp sponge and began ticking through a stack of message slips. “Girls go missing every day. If anybody understands that, it’s Jacqi Garza.”

  25

  Tierney reached the hospital twenty minutes late for his lunch with Cass. Entering the cafeteria, he performed a quick scan of the crowd and spotted her across the room, wearing a green mock turtle beneath her blue scrub shirt, her hair gathered back in a ponytail—tamed, to the extent possible, with a scrunchie.

  She tapped her wristwatch as he approached.

  “I know. Sorry.” He brushed the moisture off his sport coat, then set it on the back of his chair. “Got held up.”

  She cocked an eyebrow, then sighed. “I took the liberty of ordering. Hope you don’t mind.” Ham and Swiss on rye for him, fruit salad with cottage cheese for her. “Your coffee’s probably cold.”

  “I’ll grab a refill. Anything I can get you while I’m—”

  “I’m fine.” She’d already finished half her meal. “Do hurry back.”

  He did. As he sat back down he saw the wisdom of a little conversational misdirection. “By the way,” he ventured, “not sure if you heard the news. Mike Verrazzo’s dead.”

  She glanced up as though he couldn’t possibly have said anything more inane. “You serious? It’s all anybody’s talking about around here.”

  She filled him in on a few of the gaudier rumors floating around, her tone noticeably unenthused. Stabbing a wedge of melon, she smudged it around in her cottage cheese. “You know what Verrazzo means, right?”

  Tierney feigned deep thought. “Verrazzo, Verrazzo . . . From verus, a genuine thing. A true thing.” What good was a Catholic education if you couldn’t strut your Latin once in a while?

  “It means a guy who works with pigs,” Cass said. “Male pigs. For breeding.”

  Noting her tone—she sounded upset—he said, “You know this how?”

  “My nonno’s from Bonifati. Lotta stud hogs back in those hills. Anybody sticks a microphone in my face, that’s what I’m gonna say.”

  Not upset, Tierney thought. Ticked off. “Now there’s news I’d stay up to watch.”

  “I wouldn’t stay up for any of it.” She toyed with a slice of kiwi, nudged it aside. “I’m sorry the guy died but I also know there’s people who aren’t and I’m already sick of the whole business. Everybody drunk on their own bile, looking for someone to blame. Someone to hate. Hardly a surprise it came to this but that doesn’t make it interesting.”

  Two black ladies—one plump and methodical, as though in pain, the other prim and gray-haired with a veiled cloche hat—sat down at a neighboring table. Tierney could smell their soup and the rain on their corduroy coats.

  “You doing okay?”

  Cass glanced up and gave him one of those looks that have turned men to stone for centuries. He was pretty sure he was crazy about this woman.

  “This is just between you and me, okay?” She glanced up to make sure he’d registered that. “The guy gave unions a bad name. Him and his circle of hotshots, milking this town for every dime they could get while they laze around in their four-thousand-square-foot Monuments to Me in Orinda or Marin. God forbid they have to live in the sinkhole they created by robbing the rest of us blind. Drove the city into a ditch, then walked away from the wreck.”

  Behind her, the two black ladies closed their eyes, murmured grace.

  “The bankruptcy had a lot of fingerprints,” he said, “not just Verrazzo’s. And honestly? I’m not so sure it wasn’t a good thing in the end. The money is gone. First jolt of cold hard truth anybody’s managed as long as I’ve lived here.”

  “Murder’s a kind of truth, too. That how it is now?”

  She resumed attacking her plate. Behind her, the plump black woman lifted her glasses, dabbed her eyes with a hankie. The one in the veiled hat patted her companion’s hand. Tierney leaned forward, lowered his voice. “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Sure you do. You’re angry.”

  She looked up, meeting his eyes with a strange sad emptiness. “I hate the way I feel about this. I don’t like talking trash about some guy a bunch of creeps left to die in the street. And what I just told you, trust me, I’ll never tell
another living soul. Sure as hell not the press—they’ve been running around the halls quoting anybody dumb enough to open his mouth. I’m not gonna join the orgy. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t wish I felt different.”

  The nurses had gone out on a one-day strike three times the past year, no contract since June, negotiations going nowhere. Every nurse walking the picket line got death threats sooner or later.

  “It’s an ugly situation,” he said, “and complicated. The man had friends and he made a lot of enemies. Not your fault you feel how you do.”

  She smiled weakly and shrugged. “First the bankruptcy, now this. Take a guess what either of our houses will be worth now.”

  “It’s not that bad. We’re a stone’s throw from the Napa Valley, remember.”

  “Yeah, well, the stone just got a heck of a lot heavier.” She sipped from her glass of iced tea. “When they find out who killed him—Verrazzo, I mean—is there any chance you’ll wind up working for the defense?”

  Ah, he thought. Now we have it.

  “Hadn’t even thought that far ahead, to be honest. Would you prefer I didn’t?”

  She nudged a stray red curl from her eye. “They’re saying it’s a bunch of kids, maybe gang-related. And that means, you know, Grady.”

  He recalled the offer from earlier that morning: I like the thought of you gainfully occupied. And if he knew Mr. Matafeo, the man was already on the phone, calling around, massaging those connections. Plum case, ton of publicity, milk those billable hours. Only a fool wouldn’t want the thing.

  “I like Grady, and I enjoy picking up work from him every now and then. He gets interesting stuff. But I can resist his sly entreaties.”

  “It just seems like this is going to get real ugly, real quick. And stay that way. Do we want that in our lives?”

  He reached across the table and laced his fingers in hers. A buck-up squeeze. “I like to think I can rise above the fray.”

  “Maybe I wasn’t talking about you.”

  26

  She pretended to finish her lunch, he pretended to sip his coffee, both of them lost in thought.

  “So how’s your adventure with Jacqi Whozit going?”

  He drifted back from his mental haze. “You really want to hear about it?”

  “Any change of subject will do. But I thought I’d be broad-minded and indulge your obsession.”

  He smiled tepidly. “You’re the second person today to call it that.”

  “First being?”

  “Grady. Speaking of the devil.”

  “I could develop a serious crush on that man.”

  He wondered how much to tell her. God forbid he should be tactless.

  “Seems like I’ve hit a dead end. But I saw the mom again this morning, found out she’s involved with some guy named Pete Navarette. Name sound familiar?”

  “I must confess,” she speared a grape, “it does not.”

  “Apparently he’s something of a local character. Grady says he may have been involved in the jewelry store job that put Jacqi’s dad away.”

  Cass shook her head. “I feel for that girl. But this thing just gets creepier.”

  “Spoke to her brother too, and that was, I don’t know, even more interesting. Given how much Jacqi claims to hate her family, I was expecting someone much different.”

  “Since when do people hate their families because they’re different?”

  She slipped off one of her clogs and rested a white-socked foot atop his shoe, inching a toe up under his cuff. A shy little glance. Speaking of changing the subject.

  A phrase came to him, an Irish expression: stepping on stray sod. It meant the eerie sense of being lost in what once had been reassuring surroundings. Being afraid or confused by the thing that once made you feel safe. He indulged the play of her stocking foot against his calf and wondered if she didn’t sometimes ask herself: Who is this strange man? How did he jimmy the door to my life?

  She caught it, his being mentally miles away, and suddenly there was more than a table between them.

  “Know what I think?” Removing her foot, slipping her clog back on. “This idea of yours, easing back into the legal stuff, it’s not good for you. Plays on your worst impulses.”

  What an utter bonehead you are, he thought. “What impulses might those be?”

  “Way you get into tutoring? You oughta go back, get your master’s in math, maybe a doctorate. Teach. You’d be brilliant at it. God knows they need math teachers.”

  He contemplated apologizing for his distraction, but merely said, “I spent almost half my life mastering the illogic of the law. Seems a waste just turning my back on all that.”

  “Hon, you wasted it when you popped that billionaire in the snout.”

  Scanning the cafeteria again, he watched as an Asian family—a father, a daughter, two sons, no mother—wordlessly got up from their table, cleared their trays, tidied their chairs. Beyond them, visible only now that the family had left, the girl sat alone at a two-top, hunched over a pot of tea. She’d pulled her hood up over her head but he had no doubt. The coat alone he recognized.

  It hardly would have startled him more if a wildebeest were sitting there.

  Cass noticed the change in his face, turned to glance over her shoulder. “What?”

  “Table over there, against the wall.”

  Subtly, back still turned, Cass froze. Like she was afraid of the look on his face, didn’t want to turn back around and see it, not yet.

  “Wonder what she’s doing here,” he said.

  Finally she returned to her plate. “Go find out.”

  “You mind?”

  She smiled emptily. “It’s all good. Least now I know what she looks like.”

  Cass fought the urge to watch him walk toward the girl’s table. That’s the way it is, she thought. They develop their little fascinations, tell themselves it’s not important, it’s nothing. Then they leave.

  She began to massage her eyes, trying to hide the obvious—she was doing everything in her power not to turn and look—and shortly found herself remembering a day from two years before, near the end. His wife had become delusional from the morphine, her thoughts mixed up from the chemo, and she was getting harder to talk to, harder to understand. Cass imagined the woman’s thoughts going off in her mind like jagged flashes of lightning in a sea of fog. Roni Tierney’s name had been up on the patient board for a month by then, nothing but lousy news. Everybody was ready for an ending. Well, maybe not everybody.

  The pain team wanted to change her regimen, and Cass came in with the new vial, ready to hook it up to the drip. She blathered the usual chipper nonsense, got no response. The sad lovely woman sat in the bed like a mugged nun. Cass tried to attach the drip to the port in her chest and got for her trouble a windmill of arms, a whimpering cry.

  Roni Tierney wouldn’t be touched.

  Cass tried again, then a third time, but the resistance only grew more intense. Phelan was there, trying not to interfere. She told him, “If she doesn’t cooperate, we’ll have to restrain her.” Another nurse, Arturo, loomed in the doorway, ready to help. They’d lash her hands and ankles to the bed, despite the fact she was already scared. They’d force her to do what they needed her to do.

  Phelan asked to be given a minute. He sat on the bed beside her, took her hand. “I have an idea you think this is something it’s not.” He said he realized she believed they were all there to kill her. The new drug wasn’t a higher dose of fentanyl but some kind of poison. Everyone was lying. She was being put down like a dog.

  “That’s not happening,” he said. “I won’t let it happen.”

  He kept talking, the gentlest voice imaginable, at one point pressing her hand to his cheek, then his heart. Her gaze remained dark and empty, but she listened. In time she nodded, agreeing to be hooked up.

  C
ass, as she stood there watching, thought: Someday I want a man to care enough to talk to me like that. Walk me back from my terror, even if I’m crazy. Promise he’ll never hurt me, never let anyone else hurt me. Never.

  27

  It wasn’t like Jacqi didn’t know he was there. She just thought if she didn’t look up from the table maybe he’d drift away.

  “Hey,” he said. That smart, rumbly, whispery voice. “Are you all right? Did something . . . happen?”

  Clutching her cup like an anchor. Yeah, she thought. You could say that.

  “What I mean is, are you here because you’re hurt, or did someone you know wind up in here . . .”

  She didn’t know how much time had passed since her strange bout of tears, but ever since then she’d been lost in place, trying hard not to think about much of anything at all, especially not that, him, Fireman Mike. A busman had come and gone, clearing away the yogurt and crackers, neither more than half-eaten. She took a slug of cold tea.

  “You’ve made a real impression on the mom unit, know that?” Change the subject, she thought, glancing at her cell. “Been blowing up my phone, telling me I need to do something, get you to back off.”

  Someone moaned loudly from a nearby table, not from pain. Something else.

  “Yes, well,” Tierney said, “that seems to be the general message all around. I didn’t mean to get on her bad side. But my focus is you, not her.”

  Despite her own best instinct, she glanced up. The man had absolutely the world’s saddest smile. And Christ, those eyes.

  “Don’t take it personal. Mom likes being disappointed in people. It’s her reason for getting out of bed.”

  “I’ll stow that away for future reference.” The kindness came off him like too much cologne. “Anyway, seriously—are you here to see someone?”

  The words dissolved into sounds, drifting around in her mind, like her head had become a snow globe. “I just wanted to get outta the rain. And I’m crazy about the oolong here.” She reached under her hood to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. It felt like straw, finally dry. “What’s your excuse?”