He let out a breath, then pushed the intercom button next to her apartment number, its name slot empty.
“Yes?”
“It’s, uh… Mark,” he said into the intercom.
“You have to think about it?” came the sharp reply, then a buzz that sounded equally irritated with him.
She was waiting in the corridor when he got to her floor—jeans, Westlake High T-shirt, hair tied back in a ponytail, pissed as hell. Gorgeous as hell.
“Why the fuck should I let you in,” she asked, arms folded, “after what you pulled today?”
Nice to see you, too.
“Sorry,” he said. He held out the flat box and soda in offering like a Pilgrim trying to appease a cranky Indian. “I come bearing sausage pizza. Best in town.”
Did she almost smile? He wouldn’t bet on it, as she snatched the box and the soda, then retreated into her apartment, leaving the door ajar for him to follow, should he feel he’d had enough SWAT training to dare.
He went into her almost shockingly bare living quarters. On the kitchen counter, to his right, the pizza box and the soda had been deposited. Jordan stood there, arms still crossed, with the coldly accusatory glare of a trooper who caught you doing eighty in a school zone. One sneakered toe tapped to a beat only she heard.
“You think I followed you to your friend’s place,” he said. “I told you—I didn’t.”
Her eyes and nostrils flared, and the words flew out, loud and hard, in what would have been a blur if she hadn’t bitten them off.
“No, but you followed David Elkins after group, didn’t you? What, did you think he wouldn’t tell me? And that’s how you knew about Kay. And how you know about our team without me sharing that yet, and you’re just generally out there fucking working behind my back, aren’t you, Mark? No to the prom, by the way. We won’t be going together this year.”
“I’m sorry,” he said again, knowing how lame it sounded.
“I thought maybe,” she said, her voice much softer, perhaps a tiny waver in there somewhere, “you were one fucking person on this sorry fucking planet I could trust.”
“Some mouth you’ve got,” he said, trying to kid her a little.
Mistake.
Her eyes narrowed and her pretty face contorted in ugly rage. “You really want to talk about my fucking language now? Or is this just a joke to you, Detective Pryor?”
He patted the air with both hands as if trying to hold back an invisible wall closing in on him. “I take this very seriously. There’s nothing more important to me than this.”
“Than what?”
“Than helping you. Helping you find the monster who did that terrible thing to you and your family. What do I have to do to prove myself?”
She screamed: “Be honest with me!”
Then she stood there, eyes averted, clearly embarrassed, hugging herself, shivering but not with cold, and he wished he could take her in his arms and soothe her, but he knew—despite whatever stupid moves he had already made—that that would be the stupidest move of all.
Then she began to speak in a voice so soft he had to strain to hear. “What happened to my family, what happened to the families of the other members in the support group, has taught me a valuable lesson. And that is that no matter how hard you try to be good and do the right thing, in the end, it just doesn’t matter because truly bad shit can happen to anyone, at any time, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”
“Jordan…”
“There are only a few things you can try, when the world is a fucking minefield. You can stay inside. You can carry a mine detector with you, everywhere you go. And there’s one other thing—you can find people you can trust, who can lend you support, like the little coffee shop team we’ve put together.”
“I understand.”
“Do you? I trusted you the way I trust them… no, more, because you’re someone I knew before, back in my other life, and you are like a… a little window onto who I used to be, and that was comforting if scary. I was ready to let you in, Mark. I was ready to let you in.”
He nodded. Then he gave her his smallest smile, but a smile, and gestured to the pizza and soda. “You did let me in. Let’s sit and eat and talk. Like the old friends we are.”
“We weren’t friends, we—”
“Please don’t start that again. We were friends. We did like each other. And I still like you. I know I let you down. I won’t again. Jordan? I won’t let you down again.”
Her body language had shifted into something more relaxed, her weight on one leg now, though her arms were still folded. Her rage had dissipated into a sullen, hurt expression, though her eyes were clearly trying to forgive him.
“I went behind your back,” he said. “To talk to your friends. Why? Because you wouldn’t talk to me about that night. About what happened to you and your family.”
She stiffened a little, but the rage was gone, or anyway tamped down.
He went on: “So I talked to your friends. They didn’t tell me anything that you’d shared with them. I tried, I used my badge and everything, I couldn’t pry anything from them that you told them in confidence.”
In a voice small enough to remind him of how she’d sounded in high school, she said, “That’s because they’re my friends.”
“They are your friends, yes. And I know you’ve been working as a team, to try to put something together that proves one predator is responsible for what happened, not only to you, but Levi’s folks and David’s family. We’re all working toward the same goal, Jordan. I am your friend, too.” He was trying not to choke up but not having much luck. “I swear to God I am.”
“Okay,” she said, with a smaller smile than might seem humanly possible.
It was enough to make him grin at her as he wiped some moisture off his face with his sleeve. “Now, can we frickin’ eat before I starve and the pizza gets completely cold?”
That widened her smile. “I suppose we could eat. Get the plates.” She nodded toward the cupboard by the sink. “And a couple of glasses.”
While he did, she broke two bottles of soda off the six-pack and put the rest in the fridge. He glanced around the apartment and its sparse furnishings—not even a TV; a mattress with a box spring on the floor, a desk with a laptop and a chair. It was a sort of cell—a nice cell, but he couldn’t help thinking that the Rivera murders had consigned the wrong person to jail.
She was getting ice cubes from the freezer when he noticed a colored-pencil sketch of a male face held to the door by a Cleveland Indians refrigerator magnet, a rare personal touch in the apartment. The portrait wasn’t of her brother Jimmy or her father, or even him for that matter. It was someone he’d never seen.
“Who’s this?” he asked as she dropped cubes into the two glasses.
Her hesitation was brief, only a second or two, and she didn’t turn toward the picture. She simply said, “Some guy I met once. Thought he had an interesting face. Just a sketch I did.”
“I didn’t know you could draw,” he said.
She shrugged. “A little. Old hobby. Maybe I’ll pick it up again… I thought you were starving? You want to eat or play art critic?”
He accepted the plate she thrust at him along with a napkin and a glass of Coke Zero. They sat at a black-topped kitchen table with two chairs.
Surprisingly, the pizza had stayed fairly warm. Sitting opposite, the two ate in relative silence for a while. She was on her third slice and he on his second when he finally couldn’t stand the silence any longer.
“I really should have asked you out in high school,” he said.
“Oh, were you thinking that we finally got around to our first date? Well, this isn’t it.”
“Too bad. It’s memorable.”
She laughed a little. Actually laughed!
“I was just scared you’d turn me down,” he said.
“You should have just asked me,” she said, matter-of-fact.
“Yeah?”
�
�I would have been a hell of a lot more fun back then.”
“Maybe. But not as interesting.”
“Oh, you like ‘interesting’ in a woman?”
“Not particularly.”
That made her laugh again. Just a little, but coming from her it seemed huge. “I don’t believe I’ve ever heard you swear.”
“I don’t.”
Now she was grinning. “Is that why you made the remark about my ‘language’?”
He smiled as he started a third slice. “Maybe. You do swear like a stevedore.”
“Wow, that’s an old-fashioned expression.”
He nodded. “Something my dad would say.”
“Why don’t you swear? Are you religious or something?”
“I go to church, but it’s not that.” He finished the slice, sipped some Coke Zero. “There’s a story behind it, if you want to hear it.”
“I think I do.”
Mark told her about Kyle Underwood, the bully at school, and how he’d stood up to the kid, with fists but also with defiant dirty words, which his dad had heard him shouting out at school. How his dad had grounded him for a month and told him never to swear again.
Her eyes were large. “And you never have since?”
“Well, I’m not perfect. If I hit my thumb with a hammer, maybe.”
“I don’t think so. I think you say shoot.”
That made him smile. “Yeah. I can’t remember the last time I slipped.”
“You’re not grounded anymore, Mark. You can swear up a storm if you like.”
“It’s no big deal. Just a habit. Maybe it’s a way of just… still paying respect to my dad.”
“He’s gone?”
“Of a heart attack, when I was in college. He was really young, in his forties. I still miss him. You never stop missing… oh, I’m sorry. So thoughtless.…”
She put her half-eaten third slice on the plate and said, “You really want to know what happened that night?”
“I don’t want to know, Jordan. But I need to know.”
She nodded. “Help me clean up first.”
They were at the sink, and she was running cold water on her plate and she smiled over at him to hand her his. The scent of her shampoo filled his nostrils, and he leaned in and kissed her.
Or tried to. His lips had barely touched hers when she shoved him back so hard, he almost lost his balance and got dumped on his ass.
“You have lousy timing,” she snapped, and she swallowed and her eyes brimmed with tears.
“I’m an idiot,” he said, and he swallowed and felt tears trying to come.
“You are, kind of. An idiot. Get us a couple more glasses of that diet shit, and I will still talk to you. Don’t ask me why. By the way, I don’t kiss on the first date. I don’t kiss on the tenth date, either. Got that?”
“Okay.”
Then the damnedest thing—and that was the word that sprang to his mind: damnedest—she touched his cheek, just briefly, but it was warm, so warm, and so gentle.
“Someday maybe,” she said.
“Eleventh date?”
“We’ll see.”
They returned to the table—it was really the only place where two people could sit and talk in this cell. For maybe a minute, Jordan sat there staring into nothing, or maybe the past; but at any rate, saying nothing.
Finally, in a voice small and emotionless, she said, “It was after dinner. I was up in my room doing my homework.”
Her hands were folded as if she were saying grace, and she looked down at them. She would tell her story in her own time, her own way.
“That’s not true,” she said after a while, shaking her head, her voice normally modulated now. “I was supposed to be doing my homework—algebra. What I was really doing was daydreaming. About a boy I liked who never had the brains to call and ask me out.”
“Sounds like an idiot I know,” he said.
They exchanged tiny smiles.
She continued, back in the emotionless manner: “I heard a crash downstairs, then a struggle, a fight. I got up, went to the door, and I had just stepped out into the hall when my mother screamed for me to run.”
No tears. Perhaps she had drained the horror out of the memory, created distance, to be able to revisit the terrible night.
She seemed to be staring into the past now. “I saw a man in a policeman’s uniform fighting with my father.”
Mark sat forward. “A police uniform?”
“Yes.”
“That’s new. First mention of that.”
She looked at him curiously, as if she’d forgotten he was there. “Maybe it was only that one time that he wore a uniform like that.”
“Maybe not. It may be part of his MO. You’re the only survivor who was actually home during an attack, to report this detail.”
He wanted to reach over and pat her hand, but thought better of it. “Jordan, you’re doing fine. Just fine. Go on.”
But she wasn’t ready to let go of the previous point. “Is it possible he is, or was a cop?”
“Unlikely. The CPD canvassed all the neighbors at all the crimes and no one reported seeing a police car until the first-response units arrived.”
She seemed skeptical.
He continued: “There was nothing in the police report that indicated any of the neighbors noticed a police car at or near your house that night, either. Wearing a uniform might be a way to get someone to open the door for him.”
Again, she was staring into the past. “The badge, the emblem on his shoulder… he wasn’t from Westlake. He was from somewhere else.”
Sitting way forward, he reached his hand near hers, not touching. “Jordan, what was on the badge? What did it look like? Was it star-shaped? Did it have sharp corners? Did it—”
“It was oval,” she cut in. “Silver. A sort of… shield. Like on that old show on Nick at Nite, Dragnet? It had a number.”
“What was the badge number?”
“Sixty-nine.”
“What about the shoulder patch? Did you get a look at it?”
Jordan thought about that. “A triangle, tip down.”
“Jurisdiction?”
“Well, this is going to sound weird,” she said. “I don’t remember ever seeing the name, but when I think about it? The patch is blue with silver letters and it says… I’m sorry, but what I see is FUNKY TOWN, all in capital letters.”
“Funky Town,” Mark said.
She shrugged. “I told you it was going to sound weird.”
“You’re remembering it wrong, but are probably close. Frankfort, maybe? Fullertown? Fultonham? Funk? There is a Funk, Ohio, south of here.”
She shook her head. “I just don’t know.”
Mark thought out loud: “Two-digit badge number—small town, maybe. This might be a real cop from a small town, who drove his own car to the big city.”
But what about Basil Havoc? Had he been zeroing in on the wrong guy all this time?
One way to find out. Finally, just this one way to find out, though it was a risky breach of prodecure.…
On his cell phone, Mark brought up a photo he’d snapped of Havoc, surreptitiously, the night he’d followed the gymnastics coach to the Italian restaurant. “This is a recent shot, but look at it hard. Have you ever seen him before?”
“Yes.”
“Yes?”
“He’s that stupid full-of-himself gymnastics coach. If you mean, is this the man who attacked us? No.”
“You barely looked at it.”
“It’s not him.”
“You seem sure. It has been ten years.”
“How old is that creep—fifty?”
“Around there.”
“Meaning ten years ago, he was forty.”
Mark shrugged. “Yeah.”
“The intruder was in his twenties, young, strong. This guy has dark hair. The intruder was blond.”
Every word she spoke gave fresh information, but it also underlined that Mark had likely spen
t a very long time pursuing the wrong suspect. In his head, he was reeling.
“Should I go on?” she asked.
“What?”
“Am I boring you?”
“I’m sorry, I just… I was… go on, please.”
In straightforward language and in an emotionless manner, she told Mark about watching her mother die, getting pulled out from under the bed, being forced to group her family’s bodies together. She never cried, but Mark wanted to.
Then she stopped and frowned, looking beyond him, into the past, but her eyes were moving quickly.
“You’ve remembered something,” he said.
“He made me take pictures.”
“Pictures?”
“Photos. He had a digital camera.” Her eyes dropped to the table and she rubbed her forehead, as if it were a genie’s lamp and she could wish her life into something else.
She sprang to her feet and began to prowl the apartment, talking more to herself than him, as if she had forgotten he was there. “Why photos? And where are they? Did the police find a camera?”
“No. Jordan… come sit back down…”
She didn’t. “If he’d posted them on the Net, the sick fuck, we’d know, wouldn’t we?” She whirled and planted herself and pointed an accusatory finger. “Did he send them to the police? To brag? Do you people have them? Is that one of the things the cops held back? They always hold something back, they always hold something back…”
She was prowling again. Searching the floor for answers.
“Are they still on the camera?” she asked. Not him. The floor. “Did he print them so he can jerk off to them or some other sick thing?”
“Jordan… take it easy.”
She came over and leaned on the table and, eyes wild, demanded, “I want those photos! Those are the last photos of my family and I want them, and they are for me to have and for me to destroy. If you people have them, goddamnit, I want them!”
“We don’t have them. Jordan. Sit down. We really don’t.”
“It’s not your case. You don’t know—”
What Doesn’t Kill Her Page 17