by Jenna Rae
“Okay. Talk to me, partner. Something obviously happened. Is it cake? Did Bradley get us cake?”
Phan rolled his eyes. “You know the Feds took Teager from us.”
“And credit for his arrest, naturally. And?”
“He says he won’t talk to anybody but you.”
* * *
There was a fuss about it. The Feds didn’t like it, and Davies did some grumbling, but Bradley played the proud papa and escorted Del into the block-long federal building on Golden Gate Avenue like he was walking her down the aisle.
“Any questions, Mason? Anything you need before you go in?”
Del shook her head. She wished Phan were with her, but she got it—Bradley might end up getting a promotion out of this, unless she messed up. He could move up to commander and maybe end up a deputy chief within a few years. This was good for Bradley, and she didn’t begrudge him that. She would still be a lowly flatfoot, one of the nameless, faceless rabble the savvy step on as they ascend the ladder. But that was okay, she realized. She was doing what she wanted to do. Some of what she was feeling must have shown on her face, but Bradley misread it.
“It’s perfectly natural to feel nervous. You’ll do fine,” he put in. “You’ve interviewed hundreds of guys smarter than Teager.”
Del nodded and smiled her thanks. They were wanded into the lobby and scanned into some inner sanctum, where several very self-important men in suits tried to make them feel like yokels.
Del let Bradley play ambassador while she considered what to say and what to look for in Teager. Who was he, really? What would work best with him? She’d come a long way since her early years as an investigator. Even when she’d been working sex crimes, she’d been clumsy, relying on instinct rather than deliberate strategy. Homicide had helped her get better at that. She considered several approaches, keeping her face neutral and her posture relaxed. Federal agents pretended not to observe her while they made small talk with Captain Bradley.
Her first day at the Mission station came back to her with painful clarity. She’d been sloppy, letting her emotions guide her in her interview with Mikey. She’d been even worse when interviewing Ernie White in the hospital, letting him see her disgust and disdain. She’d handle both differently now. But that didn’t do Mikey any good. She’d let him slip through the cracks with her sloppiness and carelessness. She’d ruined things with Lola by being sloppy and careless too.
She’d learned to be a better investigator. She could learn to be a better partner too.
She followed Bradley and the Feds out of the beige-and-fluorescent elevator into a beige-and-fluorescent hallway and a beige-and-fluorescent conference room.
There was a long meeting during which the Feds declaimed both their superiority and interest in helping the hapless yokels from SFPD. At least Del surmised it was something along those lines. She wasn’t really listening. She made the right faces, nodded at the right times, and mentally ran through several different possible tactical plans for dealing with Teager. She realized everyone was looking at her expectantly and smiled with what she hoped was the appropriate balance of receptiveness and determination.
“Captain Bradley and the rest of the department and I appreciate this collaborative effort.” Del looked around, noting the clear power struggle between the Fed who was overtly the boss and the other Fed who seemed to actually be running the show. Their teams were evenly divided along the two sides of the long conference table. “Is there anything else you’d like to share with us? Any insights you think might be particularly—?”
She didn’t have to finish. The two competing Feds both jumped in, offering bland nothings about Teager and Sandman and sex crimes and their delight at a female officer’s involvement in the interdepartmental investigation. It took seventeen minutes for them to run out of worthless things to say. Finally, after the requisite time-wasting, she and Bradley went on another interminable elevator ride to another bland hallway and another bland conference room, where they cooled their heels for another half hour. Bradley had by this time run out of small talk, and Del had settled into the half-life of waiting that had accompanied her every interaction with the federal government.
Finally she was led into an interview room where Teager sat shackled to a wide brown table. Close up, he looked less like Boo Radley than a preadolescent boy. He straightened up when she entered and actually smiled like they were meeting for lunch at Fisherman’s Wharf. His teeth were too small, his chin weak, his eyes ringed with nervous fatigue.
“I hear you want to talk to me,” she said, returning his welcoming grin. “I’d introduce myself, but I understand you already know me, Mr. Teager.”
Teager sat back, a frown creasing his small, childlike features. He looked like a pouting kindergartener.
“Ronnie, call me Ronnie,” he said.
“High school must have sucked for you,” she said on impulse, “with that baby face.”
“You don’t know the half of it.” Teager seemed pleased by her insight. “Mother didn’t understand.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Del offered. “Or—?”
“Yes, thanks.” Teager licked his lips. “She could be difficult at times, but she was my mother.”
“Did she require much care before she passed?”
“No, no, Mother was ferocious right up until the end. I thought she was in perfect health.”
“So her death was sudden. She passed, and you found yourself lonely and at loose ends,” she prompted. “Vulnerable.”
“Yes.” Teager’s head bobbed up and down. “I know I’ve made some mistakes.”
“Yes.” Del kept her expression neutral.
“I never really would have done all those things, I never would have—”
Del let silence follow Teager’s faltering.
“I never intended—it’s important you know I never wanted to hurt anyone.”
“No?” Del shook her head. “Leslie Thorne—”
“No! That wasn’t my idea! I didn’t want to hurt anyone, I swear, I just—he made me!” Teager was red-faced, sweating. His eyes searched hers.
“Oh, come on, Ronald!” Del noticed she’d adopted a scolding tone and softened it only slightly. “‘He made me do it’?”
“He did!”
Del shook her head.
“It’s just,” Teager whined, “I never had a father, I never had a male role model, and he was there for me in my time of need. I was vulnerable, like you said. You have to understand, you have to see how it was!”
Del crossed her arms. “How can I? Ronald, you haven’t told me anything, you’ve just been making excuses.”
“Call me Ronnie, please?” Teager gave her the big puppy eyes, and Del sniffed.
“Ronnie,” she started, noting the beginning of a smile on his face, “is the name of a friend, someone who trusts you and helps you. You’re not doing either.”
“I don’t know his name! I swear!” Teager actually stuck out his lower lip, and Del had to fight the urge to laugh.
“But you could tell me things.” She leaned forward, let her expression soften. “You’re the only one who can help me.”
“I want to help you. Only I’m scared.”
Aware of their audience, Del leaned even closer to Teager. “I need your help. I need you to be brave.” She watched Teager’s eager smile widen, his flush deepen.
Teager took a deep breath and nodded once. “He’s weird-looking, Sandman. Like an albino or something. Like that movie with Chevy Chase and Goldie Hawn, remember? Mother loved that movie.”
“With the cigarettes and the knitting needles,” Del said, playing along. “He looked like an albino?” She let disbelief cover her budding excitement. Ernie White’s eyebrows and eyelashes were light blond, nearly white. Was that what Teager meant? Or was he fishing, trying to see how close they were to Ernie White?
“Not exactly. He—I took a picture of him, but they have my phone. They took it!” He seemed to expect sympathy
, but Del only nodded her comprehension. Unless Teager’s picture showed White actually committing a crime, it could be explained away by a good defense attorney. If there was one thing she knew for sure about Ernie White it was that he could afford a good defense attorney.
“I’ll check it out, but I need more.” Del sighed. “I’m worried, Ronnie. What might this man do? He seems—”
“Dangerous? He is, he’s very dangerous.”
“Well,” Del murmured, “before you met him, you never hurt anyone, right?”
“And I still haven’t hurt anyone, I swear, Inspector Mason. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. I’m not a criminal! I’m not some monster! I’m a decent guy, I’m a regular guy. I just had a hard time sometimes.”
“Women can be very judgmental.” Del worried she’d overplayed it, but Teager nodded eagerly.
“I just want to—Sandman made it all much worse. He scares me. He really scares me.”
“I know.” Del sat back, crossed her arms, gnawed as though absently on her thumbnail. “But unless we can identify him and convict him, this’ll all get blamed on you and he’ll just run free and keep pulling innocent guys into his web. And all the women! He’ll hurt so many women.”
“I know, I know, but what can I do? I don’t know who he is.” Teager’s eyes brimmed, and Del watched him. She felt dirty, manipulating the little idiot, especially since she wasn’t at all sure it would help anything. Suddenly she gasped theatrically.
“Something just occurred to me, Ronnie.” She leaned forward again, reaching out her hand as if to take his. “A lawyer is going to show up, he’s going to tell you to stop talking to me. Sandman will hire a lawyer to get you stop talking to me and then at the end of it you’ll get blamed for everything. That’s what I predict.”
Teager gaped at her and looked at the door as though he expected a two-headed lizard in a three-piece suit to storm in and forcibly hold its feet over his mouth. Del looked too, hoping Bradley or one of the stupid Feds would take the hint. It took nearly ninety seconds by Del’s count, but finally someone knocked on the door, some thirty-year-old in a blue suit who looked like all the other thirty-year-olds in blue suits. He couldn’t have looked more like a Fed, with his standard-issue haircut and closed expression, but it seemed to work. Teager gasped. His gaze swung back to Del’s face.
“No!” He leaned back against his chair, fighting his restraints. “I don’t want a lawyer, I don’t want one! I want to talk to her! I want her!”
The Fed backed away, his hands up, letting the door shut in front of him.
Del and Teager shared a conspiratorial grin. She debated giving him a thumbs-up and decided against it. He was a successful techie, so while he seemed naïve and easily manipulated he wasn’t an idiot. His salary was easily twice hers. For all she knew, he could be playing her as much as she was playing him.
“Listen,” she said, throwing caution to the wind, “maybe there are things you noticed, things you didn’t even realize you noticed, and we could use those to—”
“His car,” Teager said. “He had a fancy black car. We—he took the girl in the van, but he was in a black car.”
“Do you remember what kind? What brand?”
Teager closed his eyes. She watched his lids move as he searched his memory.
“Fancy,” he murmured. “Expensive, that’s all I know. I’m not a car guy. It’s not a good expenditure of money beyond a certain point.”
“Okay.” Del pushed her hair back off her forehead. She’d gotten it shorn just before Mikey’s murder, and the curls were already outgrown enough to bug her. “Listen, you’re tired, and so am I. Can we take a little break? You can get some food, I can go try to find something we can use to help you. Okay?”
Teager’s disappointment was palpable, and Del let herself show some of her frustration and dismay too. She could imagine Teager’s dragging this thing out until there was nothing meaningful left to find. He could offer her a million tidbits, half of them true, and White’s lawyer would use those to poke holes in any case they managed to make.
Phan called her as she walked from the room. “Hey, you got a message, some car salesman? How’s it going?”
“It’s going,” she said, clicked off, and checked her phone, seeing both a voice mail and an email from White’s most recent Lexus salesman. The guy had made a ton of money off White, and he had to be wondering if she was White’s friend or foe. She’d asked the dealership not to mention her query to White, but she couldn’t be sure the sales manager or his star seller had complied.
“Mr. Devlin, this is a delicate situation.” She kept her voice bright and let a note of chagrin creep in. “We’re concerned about Mr. White.”
“Ernie White is a very good customer, Inspector Mason.” The dealer seemed rattled. “I wouldn’t want to—”
“The thing is, we’re not sure if he’s been the victim of a crime or not, and because he is such an important man—you knew his mother, Eleanor, I presume? After her death, Mr. White came into a rather large inheritance, and sometimes folks in that position are good targets for a mercenary—well, we’d like to check it out and don’t want to alarm him unless there’s something to tell him about.”
“I’m not sure I understand, ma’am. I—”
“All we need to know is if his old car is still there so we can take a look at it. I’m afraid I can’t really tell you more than that. It’s nothing to do with your dealership, but we’d like to prevent any embarrassment or upset for Mr. White. You understand.”
Despite the fact that she hadn’t said anything of substance, or perhaps because of it, the guy seemed eager to cooperate. The car was still there, as it happened. Of course he wanted to help. Of course he understood. Discretion was the soul of—blah, blah, blah. Del tuned out after that. She had to get back to Teager.
Bradley approached her, his face a show of curiosity. She asked him to get the Feds to start the process of getting a search warrant. She texted him the relevant information. Once they had the warrant, they could obtain samples from White’s traded-in Lexus, which still sat on the lot. It had doubtless been cleaned, but Del couldn’t ignore the possibility of a lead. Bradley hustled off, looking glad to have something to do.
An hour later she was again sitting across from Teager and could smell the navy bean soup and apple pie he’d eaten, courtesy of the federal government. She’d forgotten to eat, and her stomach rumbled loudly.
“They could get you something,” Teager offered, gesturing at the camera.
“I don’t know, how was the food?”
Teager wiggled his fingers in a gesture of ambivalence, and Del smiled and shook her head.
“Thanks anyway. Listen, I had a thought. I’d like to tell you a little bit about what I did instead of eating lunch.”
Teager tried to smile but ended up grimacing instead. Del noted this but didn’t acknowledge the expression.
“There was a fiber at this crime scene a few weeks ago. A murder. I have a suspect, and of course I can’t say who it is. Anyway, I think you may have helped me solve it. What I’m hoping is that we can get him on that murder—this suspect—and then use that to gain leverage. Then we can help you. Explain how he pushed you to do things you didn’t want to do. Maybe you were scared of him? Maybe he threatened you?”
Teager’s eyes were wide, the pupils huge. His face got splotchy. Del kept her breathing steady, her expression neutral. She’d expected Teager to feel relief, not panic.
“So, we got hold of his car, the one he had when he murdered the victim, and we’re taking samples now.” She smiled brightly at Teager. “I imagine you’ll feel much better when we can corroborate the theory with forensic evidence. It’s amazing, the FBI has this database of all the carpet fibers from all the cars from all the years. We can use it to identify—”
“I’m sick,” Teager croaked, his hand over his mouth. “I’m gonna barf.” He tried to stand but was shackled and stood hunched over and trapped, his whole body shaki
ng.
Del was ushered from the room by a quartet of Feds who whisked her out of the building before she managed to blink more than a dozen times.
Bradley quizzed her on the way back to the station, but she could honestly say she didn’t know what to think. When she recapped the brief meeting for Phan, he raised his eyebrows.
“What do you think it means?”
“I don’t know.” Del picked at a turkey sandwich Phan had set on her desk. “Could he have been involved in Mikey’s murder? It just doesn’t seem likely, does it? He knew Sandman—dammit, White—when Mikey was killed, but he was still tentative then. I think. I thought. God, I don’t know anymore.”
She thought about inviting Phan to her house and showing him the dining room she’d turned into a shrine to the investigation into Ernie White, but she didn’t want to see his eyes turn cool, his demeanor reflect concern over her obvious obsession. She knew she’d come at the thing all wrong, personalizing it instead of maintaining her detachment. She’d been sloppy, just like she was always sloppy.
She knew the cost. Hadn’t she paid that cost over and over, and inflicted that cost on everyone who’d ever loved or depended on her? She told Phan she was tired and left him staring after her as she fled the station.
At home she stood in the dining room, turning a slow circle to take in the evidence of her own mishandling of the case. She got a half-dozen banker boxes from the garage, which she still had yet to organize properly, and boxed up everything she’d printed out from Mac’s gift to her. It had been a gift, all of it, and one she’d neither deserved nor properly thanked Mac for giving. She grabbed her cell phone.
“What now, Mason?”
“I’m sorry.” Del knew her voice quavered but continued. “And thank you for helping me even after I—”
“You don’t owe me anything, thanks or apologies.” Mac’s voice was quiet, far away. “We don’t do things like that.”
“I didn’t—if anything, I—”
“Yes you did.”
Del bit her lip. “Maybe we should do things like that.”
“Jesus, kiddo,” Mac retorted. “Hang up before this turns into a Hallmark moment.”