by A W Hartoin
“Um…Shill got out of prison in 2010.”
“What’s the date before that?”
“2006. Waylon Parks left the DA’s office.”
He nodded, hunching over the keyboard. “That’s right. That’s right.”
Nikki knocked. “Can I come in now?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Nikki came in with a tray. I didn’t get milk. I got a milkshake, vanilla, Fats got lemon water, and Uncle Morty held out his hand. She put a Mountain Dew can in it.
She put her arm around me. “Looks like you did well.”
“Maybe. Can’t really tell yet.”
“I can tell.” Uncle Morty grabbed another laptop and began transferring files. “I’m going to send this to Novak in Paris. He loves this stuff.” He was almost gleeful. Check that. He was gleeful, absolutely giddy. It was a puzzle and Uncle Morty loved a puzzle. When he used to babysit me, we had to do the New York Times crossword and heinous 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzles. On the upside, there was always pizza and he read me books that Mom would’ve considered inappropriate for my age, like To Kill a Mockingbird in the second grade. I asked questions and Mom was pissed.
“What can you get right now?” asked Fats.
“I got a date range. 2004 to 2006.”
“Weird,” I said. “That’s after Cassidy. Why the picture?”
Uncle Morty looked up from the screen. “That was for you.”
“Blankenship didn’t even know me then. You’re saying he arranged all this with the hope of what?”
“It’s just one of his nuts,” said Fats.
Aaron came in with Wallace tucked under his arm. “You want nuts?”
Nikki pointed at him. “Almond cake.”
The two cooks left and pots started banging in the kitchen.
“Okay,” I said. “What about nuts?”
Fats crossed her arms and tapped her foot. “Blankenship’s a squirrel burying nuts. In case he needs them later. This one’s for you and he did know you. He said he followed you for that Unsub. That’s how he got attached.”
“He put Cassidy in there because that’s what the guy used to prove he was for real,” I said.
“And to horrify you,” said Uncle Morty. “He wanted to mess with you and he was betting he’d get the chance. He knew that guy would come after you so he buried a nut. Just in case, he decided to save you.”
“I don’t know if I should be happy or freaked. A lot of planning went into this.”
“I’m both,” said Fats. “Have you got specific dates?”
“Hold on,” said Uncle Morty. “Novak’s on it. He says five hours for portions. Maybe less.”
“What about those dates?” I rustled around through his laptop bag and found my timeline. “What’s the last date we’ve got on the laptop?”
“Looks like February 10, 2006.” Uncle Morty pulled a laptop out of the bag without looking and handed it to me. “Ace did a synopsis on Parks. Maybe there’s a case on that date or something.”
I found Grandad’s file and scanned it, a chill going through me. “It’s not a trial date or a case. It’s Parks last day in the DAs office.”
“That can’t be a coincidence,” said Fats. “What’s the first day?”
“Well, Parks was already in the office in 2004. What happened in 2004?” I looked back at the timeline. “Shill got into the Unsubs.”
“Look up that guy,” said Fats as giddy as Uncle Morty.
“What guy?” I asked.
“That guy!”
“There’s a lot of guys,” I said. “You’ve got to help me out here.”
She clenched her fists. “The one who brought him in. The daughter rapist.”
“Oh, Josef Mayer.” I’d rather not look up that waste of skin, but I did and found a Wikipedia page dedicated to the scumbag. There were details, gross ones, but not the specific dates I was looking for. “He was arrested in 2004 and sentenced in 2005,” I said. “Do you have that date?”
“I got it,” said Uncle Morty. “August first.”
I found a newspaper article on Mayer with specifics. “Mayer was arrested on July fifteenth. A man moving into the house next door heard screaming and called the police.”
Fats looked at me aghast. “You’re telling me nobody heard screaming before?”
“Says here that neighbors heard plenty of screaming, but it was known that Mayer beat his wife so they were used to it. The new guy wasn’t. He insisted the cops enter the house. They did and found the dungeon.”
“Because beating his wife was fine,” she said between gritted teeth.
“I’m just telling you what it says.” I looked back at the article. “Mayer immediately went on suicide watch and was never released on bond.”
“Got something right,” muttered Uncle Morty.
“So the first file happens fifteen days after Mayer was arrested. He had to have brought Shill in before that because he was locked down tight.”
Fats undid her sock bun and shook her head, giving her a mane. “I don’t get it. What’s with these dates? It’s killing me.”
“We’ll know in five hours,” said Uncle Morty.
I pushed back the laptop and took an icy sip of my milkshake. “I think we know now.”
Uncle Morty stopped typing. “We don’t know shit. We got dates and dirtbags.”
“And…the FBI that doesn’t want Tommy Watts anywhere near this.”
“So?” burst out Fats.
Uncle Morty smiled at me. “Wait for it.”
“They know about the Unsubs. The FBI knows.”
Fats threw up her hands and stomped around the room. “Because Mayer got arrested and a DA quit? You’re losing it. That bite injured your brain.”
I did have a headache, but I wasn’t losing it. I was getting it. The dates worked and keeping Dad finally made sense. The FBI said they’d put Chuck and Sydney on the case, but then they blocked them when the burial site was real.
“That has to be it. The FBI loves my dad. He’s their golden boy.”
“Damn straight they do,” said Uncle Morty. “He’s like Mulder without the alien obsession.”
“Mulder?” asked Fats.
“X-Files,” I said. “Chuck likes them, too.”
“Oh,” she said. “Wait a minute. What are we saying?”
I explained Tommy Watts to Fats Licata, as much as I could, anyway. FBI did love my dad. They’d tried all the way through his police career to bring him in as an agent, but Dad liked being a cop. He said no. They tried again after he retired and it was still no, but he started doing consulting for them. Serial killers, spree killers, rapists. Dad worked on a lot of cases for them. My father considered a ninety-hour work week light, so he was always ready and willing to fit in more cases. He taught classes for them and the media loved the skinny redhead with charm for days. Why would they not want him on his wife’s case? A mass grave site that his daughter led them to? That’s a no-brainer unless they had something to hide and they thought Tommy Watts could find it. They had to get the cover-up well in place before Dad was back in action. Me? I was just a dingbat that got lucky a few times. My father was the real deal. Everybody said so.
“If they knew about the Unsubs, why didn’t they do something?” asked Fats.
Uncle Morty kept typing. “They probably couldn’t get in the club. Knowing there’s a group and getting in the group are two different things. Probably suspected Blankenship for an Unsub. That’s why they wanted Mercy in there talking to him. Then you got Sturgis. They saw some connection and they took the case over, trying to cover up the ball they’d dropped. There’s definitely something there that they don’t want Tommy to know. The files will tell us.” He pointed to the screen. “You see that?”
Fats and I exchanged a look and shrugged. More gobbledygook to us. Uncle Morty groaned in frustration. “I shoulda made you learn coding.”
“Yeah, right,” I said. “That totally would’ve happened.”
“Look at it!”
“We’re looking,” said Fats.
Uncle Morty explained in excruciating detail how he could tell that the encryption had changed to a much more sophisticated style on the fifth file. I’m not going to lie. I blanked out and thought about chocolate several times, but the point was that he thought the Unsubs caught on quick and changed up what they were doing, leaving the Feds in the dust.
“So if I’m right and Mayer got the Feds in, it didn’t last,” I said.
“Right. The Unsubs ain’t no idiots.” He drummed his stubby fingers on the keyboard. “You go on. You’re distracting me. At this damn rate, Novak’s gonna beat me on every section. I’ll never live it down.”
Fats and I left, leaving him muttering about the Feds and idiots in our wake. Aaron and Nikki were in the kitchen, making an Italian almond cake. They shooed us out, along with Wallace, so we left the apartment, slowly walking down the stairs, our minds full.
“You know, even if you’re right about the FBI, that doesn’t get you any closer to finding out who attacked your mom or getting your dad back.”
I lowered my ice pack and gave her the tiniest of smiles while holding up the packet. “But I still have this.”
Chapter Nineteen
I SAT IN the back of another ambulance with Wallace on my lap, gnawing on some sort of Greek sausage that Nikki gave her. It had feta cheese and spinach in it. The feta alone sounded like a bad idea, but Nikki insisted. Wallace had only horked down half the sausage and she was already gassing.
“This is so not working out for me,” I said.
Bark.
“You stink. Mom might kick you out.”
Grr.
“What was that?” Dan called back, another EMT with the kindness to fake an ambulance washing to pick me up from Forest Park.
“Nothing. The pug is stinky.”
He laughed. “Isn’t that normal for pugs?”
“It is for this one.”
“We’re getting close. You’re going to want to stow her in five.”
I went to put Wallace in the empty blue pad box, but she wasn’t having it. I was about to wrestle her in with the sausage when my phone buzzed. A thrill went through me when I saw it was Uncle Morty. It was way too soon for the encryption to be broken, but I couldn’t help hoping.
“What took so long?” he bellowed into the phone.
“It just buzzed.”
“Yeah, yeah. You want to hear this?”
“I don’t know,” I said just to bother him. “Do I?”
“You’re a pain in my ass. You know I got books to write. I could be doing other stuff.”
Wallace snorted. Even the pug knew that was ridiculous.
“Puhlease. You’re helping to catch my mother’s attacker. You don’t want to do anything else.”
He grumbled. “Parks is in the clear. He’s not the one.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“In court during Sturgis, defending some dirtbag drug dealer.”
“The whole time?”
He started typing. “That’s what I said.”
“Well, there’s obviously an accomplice,” I said.
“The guy in Sturgis was white. The accomplice is Hispanic. Think, Mercy!”
“You sound like my dad.”
“Somebody has to.”
I sighed and touched my torn lip. Sound like Dad. I was doing more than that. “How about this? Parks isn’t the guy, but he’s the connection between the accomplice and the doer. What kind of gangs does Parks represent?”
“All kinds. He ain’t particular.”
“Well, Blankenship said he saw a tattoo on the neck. That could be gang-related.”
Uncle Morty snorted. “Grandmas got tats these days. That don’t mean nothing.”
“I guess not. Barney didn’t say anything about the guy being—”
He cut me off, “Being what? Like a gangbanger? There ain’t no mold.”
“Isn’t there? Barney thought the guy was normal.”
“You think gang members can’t be well-spoken? You’re hanging out with Fats Licata.”
“She’s not in a gang.”
“Ya don’t think?” he asked with a juicy snort.
“It’s not the same.”
“The hell it ain’t. I wouldn’t let that chick near you if Ace hadn’t arranged it.”
Thank you, Grandad.
“We’re pulling in, Mercy,” said Dan.
“What was that?” asked Uncle Morty.
“I’m at the hospital,” I said. “Gotta go.”
“Find some new connections. Don’t be sitting on your ass, eating lime Jell-O.”
I stuffed Wallace in the box so fast she didn’t have time to growl. Now I knew what worked with the pug—the element of surprise. “First of all, I never eat Jell-O, period. And since when do I sit on my ass? You were just complaining about having too much to do. Now you want more?”
Uncle Morty hung up on me. It was kind of a relief. I’d had about as much crabby as I could stand.
“Hat on,” said Dan as he parked. “I’m coming back.”
Dan got us out of the ambulance and into the ER with zero problems. It helped that the press was nowhere to be seen. He took me to the staff locker room so I could change.
“I think they gave up,” he said.
“They never give up,” I said. “Trust me on that.”
“I guess you’d know. You want me to walk you up to the floor?”
“Thanks, but my bodyguard will be here in a minute.”
“That huge guy?”
I put my ice pack to my face to hide my smile. “She’s a girl.”
“Oh, sorry. She was just so…”
“Huge? I know,” I said. “Can you send her my way when she gets here?”
“Sure. It’s not like I can miss her.” Dan left and I changed back into my sundress and wished I hadn’t left my floppy hat in the truck. I didn’t get my hair cut as Aunt Tenne instructed. Who had time for that? Mom wasn’t going to be happy and she might try to cut it herself. It wouldn’t be the first time. I had some tragic bangs when I was a kid and Mom was too cheap to pay a stylist when she could do ‘just fine myself’. It wasn’t ‘just fine’, but that never stopped her.
Wallace finished her sausage and I got her out of the box. “You don’t have to pee, right?”
Bark.
The pug had peed four times since we’d left earlier, but there was always more where that came from. Fats came into the locker room, frowning. “Did you clear this area?”
“Er…no.”
She smacked her forehead with a hard crack. “You’ve got to be careful. That EMT could’ve done it for you.”
“I wasn’t thinking. Besides, nobody knew I was going to change in here.”
“You don’t know that. People talk. Even people who are helping you.”
I agreed to be more careful in order to stop the lecture, if nothing else, and we headed up to the floor via the stairs, to my dismay. Fats didn’t want me in an enclosed space. She had a bad feeling about me being in elevators and wasn’t about to let me override her.
I huffed and puffed my way up to Mom’s floor. Fats didn’t even get winded. I think she would’ve run up, if I hadn’t been holding her back.
She opened the door to the floor, scanned the area, and said, “All clear.”
I had my hands on my knees, swaying. “Just. A. Minute.”
“You are pathetic. Doesn’t that hot body boyfriend take you to the gym?”
“He tries. I keep sneaking off to the juice bar.”
“Juice bar,” she scoffed. “You need a real gym.”
“I really don’t.” I straightened up. “Okay. I’m better.”
She rolled her eyes and we went to Mom’s room that now had two cops in front of the door.
“We’re getting serious,” said Fats.
“I guess so.”
They checked our IDs and reluctantly let Fats in. She looked suspicious and only
Grandad’s intervention got her past them without an altercation.
We walked in and found Tiny eating a flaky chocolate croissant. He took one look at Fats and pushed it away. I tried to go to Mom’s bed, but Grandad whispered to me, “You want to tell me what happened to you?”
“I had a thing. It’s not a big deal.”
He pushed down the ice pack. “Jesus, sweetheart. What was this thing that happened?”
“Mercy,” Mom called out.
Grandad tried to stop me, but I pushed past him. There was no hiding my lip. Mom may as well see it straight away.
“What in the world?” she gasped. “Were you in an accident? Honey, come here.”
I sat on the edge of the bed and gave her a short rundown on what happened. She had a tissue to her own mouth and with the drooping, it was kind of hard to tell what she was thinking.
“Um…are you mad?” I asked, sounding like I did when I got a C on a pre-calc test in high school. Unlike in high school, Mom wasn’t mad.
“What’s done is done. I want you to call Pete,” she said with a calculating look in her eye.
“Okay.”
“You look like a mutant.”
“That’s fair.”
“Did you get it?” she asked.
“Huh?”
“The thing” —Mom shivered— “in his mouth.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I got it.”
“Turn around.”
Oh, no!
“I’m good.”
“If you won’t turn around, you obviously aren’t,” said Mom. “Ace, can you get me some scissors?”
“No scissors, Mom. My hair is fine.”
“Turn around!”
Grandad suppressed a smile and made a little finger sweep. I turned around.
“Ace, I need scissors,” said Mom.
I backed away slowly. “You’re not cutting my hair. I’ll go to a stylist.”
“You don’t need a stylist when I can do it for free.”
Flashback.
“You just had a stroke. I’ll pay to have my hair cut.”
“You aren’t walking around like that. You look like you have mange.”
“It’s not happening, Mom,” I said.
“Think of what this looks like to the public. Your father has a business and a reputation to uphold.”