by Osborne, Jon
Angel tried her best to smile at the woman. Wasn’t easy. “No, ma’am,” she said. “I don’t have an axe to grind. Not with you, at least.”
Jelani Diggs still looked suspicious. She narrowed her eyes into tight slits. “You absolutely sure about that, missy?”
Angel kept the smile on her face until her jaw began to ache, feeling ridiculous, like someone who was smiling for a picture they didn’t want to take.
Fake it until you make it, right?
“I know that you didn’t have anything to do with what Razor did to my grandmother, ma’am,” Angel said. “I just want to talk to you about Sasha, that’s all. I’m in way too deep to just walk away now. Please try to understand that.”
“That’s all you want?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Jelani Diggs finally opened the door and stepped aside to let her in. “Well, come on in then. You want some coffee?”
“I’d love some.”
Three minutes later they were seated at Jelani Diggs’s kitchen table with two steaming mugs stationed on tattered placemats in front of them, and Angel took a quick inventory of her surroundings. Jelani Diggs’s kitchen didn’t appear all that much different from her and Granny Bernice’s own kitchen back home. On one wall hung a picture of Jesus Christ, positioned right next to a photograph of John F. Kennedy. A framed copy of the religious poem “Footprints” hung next to the sink.
It was then that I carried you…
Angel swallowed the emotion in her throat and forced herself to concentrate on the task at hand. No time for sentimentality now. She could deal with all of her jumbled emotions later – if and when she ever felt strong enough to actually get around to them at all.
Angel asked, “Ma’am, is there anything else you can think of that might be a clue as to what happened to Sasha? Anything you even think might be a clue?”
The old woman stirred her coffee slowly with a spoon. Her soft brown eyes were filled with an apology when she looked back up.
“No, Miss Monroe. I’m really sorry, but there ain’t nothin’ I can think of at all. Nothin’ for the life of me. We lived such a boring life most of the time, me and Sasha. She was always so busy with school and workin’ and I was always so busy just tryin’ to enjoy what little time I got left and thankin’ sweet Jesus above that He’s given me as long as He has.”
Jelani Diggs retreated into her own thoughts for a long moment then before her face suddenly brightened, giving Angel a pretty good idea of what she’d probably looked like as a young girl. Angel felt a sharp twinge in her heart, remembering how Granny Bernice’s smiles had possessed the ability to rewind time like that.
“Why don’t you go on up to Sasha’s room and take a look around there?” Jelani Diggs suggested. “Maybe you can find one of your clues up there.”
Thinking it was a damn good idea as well, Angel immediately took her up on the offer.
Leaving their coffee mugs steaming on the kitchen table, the old woman led Angel through the living room – past more pictures of Jesus and Kennedy – and all the way up the carpeted staircase to the second floor.
Sasha’s bedroom sat just off the hallway, right next to the bathroom. The old woman opened up the door and stepped to one side. “I’ll just go on down and finish up my coffee, missy,” she said. “You feel free to look at anything you want in there. I don’t care what it takes – I just want my baby back home with me.”
Jelani Diggs’s voice cracked a little with that and her wounded brown eyes filled up with tears. “That girl is my whole life, Miss Monroe. Please bring my baby back home to me.”
Angel reached out a comforting hand and placed it lightly on the old woman’s bony shoulder. “I’ll do my very best, ma’am. That much I promise you.”
When the old woman had finally gone back downstairs, Angel stepped inside the bedroom and took a look around. A lacy white comforter covered a single bed that was stationed in the middle of the space. A rack of stylish clothes stared out at her from an open closet door ten feet away. Angel walked over to the closet and inspected the labels on the clothing inside, lifting up her eyebrows in surprise. All designer brands: Gucci. Prada. DKNY. Burberry. Chanel.
Sasha Diggs’s taste in pictures ran more along the lines of Jay-Z and Barack Obama than Jesus and Kennedy, but her room still looked every bit as neat as the rest of the house. As neat as a pin. Angel had a feeling that Jelani Diggs made sure of that. Much like Granny Bernice had been, Sasha Diggs’s grandmother didn’t seem like the sort of woman who took a lot of guff. It was Jelani’s way and Jelani’s way only – no proverbial highway as an alternative.
In one corner of the room, a desktop computer sat on top of a cheap, pre-fab desk – the kind you buy at Wal-Mart and spend all day putting together before realizing that you have an entire handful of screws left over and not the faintest goddamn clue of what to do with any of them.
The computer itself was an old Apple iMac, the kind with a translucent green cover on back. Cool back in the day but pretty much useless now. Two hundred and thirty-three megahertz, thirty-two megabytes of RAM, a four-gig hard drive. Hopelessly out of date when compared to the newest MacBook Pros that had just come out and an absolute dinosaur for a Rhodes scholar to be working on.
Despite the fact that Angel would like nothing better in the world right now than to brutally murder Sasha Diggs’s father in cold blood – and slowly at that – she couldn’t help feeling a renewed measure of respect for the girl. It was obvious that the kid had made the most out of what she had, which didn’t seem all that much – closet-full of fancy designer clothes notwithstanding.
Angel snooped around the dresser drawers for a moment or two but found only neatly folded clothes inside.
Until she got to the bottom-left one.
As she slid open that drawer, she was shocked to see a black-leather riding crop sitting on top of what appeared to be a miniature sex-toy shop.
There were vibrators in every color of the rainbow. Double-sided dildos. Sex creams that made your skin tingle when you rubbed them in. Anal beads. A strap-on.
Angel opened the drawer to the right of the sex toys. Lingerie of every possible configuration stared back at her. Thongs and G-strings; camisoles and bustiers; bras with holes where the nipples had been cut out.
Not what she’d expected to find at all.
She slid closed the drawers and went back to the desk. More drawers there revealed notebooks and folders, pens and pencils, a stapler. Nothing even remotely close to as shocking as the sex emporium she’d found across the room.
The edge of a business card was peeking out from the corner of a sociology textbook on top, mostly hidden by the cover. Plucking out the card, Angel read the elaborate, raised lettering on front.
Her heart skipped three beats in a row as she scanned the words:
ELITE ESCORTS OF CLEVELAND
CANDY DUBOIS
(216) 542-0928
RATES: $300 AN HOUR – $1,500 OVERNIGHT
CHAPTER 43
Gerald Trebblehorn smiled down at the young Rhodes scholar who was huddled in fear over in the far corner of the decrepit basement on the outskirts of Cleveland.
The poor girl seemed to jump right out of her smooth black skin each and every time he opened up his mouth. Then again, where was the big surprise in that? After all, Gerald Trebblehorn was exactly the kind of man people should be afraid of. Thirty-three kills under his belt already and counting. And he was still only thirty-four years old, for Christ’s sake. He still had a lot of years left ahead of him yet. “You’re a fucking whore?” he asked in a disbelieving voice.
Naked and shivering, Sasha Diggs cowered against the cracked and yellowing basement wall. She’d been in the basement for a week now and she felt hopelessly weak with hunger. The little water she’d managed to drink had come from the leaky ceiling above her head. Her wrists and ankles ached from the police-issue handcuffs that were attached to heavy steel chains and secured to a circular brass t
ether sticking out of the floor. A plastic bucket five feet away overflowed with her own waste. Every last muscle in her body screamed out in pure agony from having slept on the unyielding surface of the basement floor for so long. Worst of all, the lining of her vagina had been rubbed completely raw; her anus scabbed over from the previous huge blonde man who’d violated her every single day for the past week.
Trebblehorn took a step backward and looked over the nigger girl again, feeling a stirring in his jeans. The jigaboo was one fine piece of ass, no debating that much. No wonder Johansen hadn’t been able to keep his dick in his pants.
He stepped forward again and unbuckled his jeans, sticking his throbbing manhood in the girl’s face. “I’ll tell you what, nigger: Do a good job and maybe I’ll let you live.”
He closed his eyes and groaned as the whore took him into her mouth.
Closing her own eyes, Sasha Diggs fought back the overpowering urge to gag, trying desperately to ignore the little voice inside her head that was telling her to bite down with her sharp white teeth just as hard as she possibly could.
No good. The voice inside her head wouldn’t shut the hell up. She opened her tear-filled eyes again. This was it. Do or die time. No turning back now. Like it or not, she needed to do what she needed to do. It was as simple as that.
Not to mention her only chance of actually staying alive.
Sasha took a deep breath through her nostrils to steady herself, then did the unspeakable thing she knew she needed to do.
CHAPTER 44
Dana and Blankenship spoke with the Seattle agents – both black men and highly respected members of the Bureau – as the West Coast feds drove them over to the FBI garage housing Betsy Campbell’s green Subaru hatchback.
“Man,” said Agent Terrance Jones – the Seattle fed who’d caught Dana’s eye back in the courtyard of the Hilton and who caught her eye again now in the rearview mirror. “Whaddya say we switch cases with you guys? I don’t think I’d mind giving old whitey the what-for right about now, considering what they did to that poor woman. Present company excluded, of course.”
Blankenship cracked his backseat window next to Dana to let some fresh air into the car without disturbing the conversation while Jones wheeled his 2006 Beemer out into traffic and pressed down his foot gently against the accelerator, picking up speed and pulling the vehicle onto the southbound freeway. “What’re you guys working on right now?” he asked.
Jones’s partner – Agent John Olokawandi, a twenty-two-year veteran of the Bureau who’d been born in Tanzania, Africa and subsequently raised in Tarzana, California – answered from the passenger seat of the BMW up front. “Outlaw motorcycle club running meth over the border from Canada. We’d go undercover – try to infiltrate the club and all that good stuff – but for some reason or another I don’t think they’d take us. From all reports, they don’t care very much for men of our color.”
Dana lifted her eyebrows in interest. She and her former mentor/partner Crawford Bell had once helped bring down an outlaw motorcycle club in Pennsylvania that had been running ice up the east coast of the United States from Florida. “Which MC?” Dana asked.
Olokawandi blew out a disgusted breath. “The Pagan’s,” he said. “The rocket scientists who think their name needs an apostrophe in it.”
Dana suppressed a small smile, remembering all too well the low IQs that had been associated with the members of the Pennsylvania motorcycle club she and Crawford had helped bring down. “Yeah,” she said, “it’s not exactly a Mensa meeting when you’re dealing with outlaw MCs, is it?”
Olokawandi shook his head. “Nope. Not even close, sister. As a matter of fact, I’d say it barely qualifies as a kindergarten class.”
Ten minutes later, Jones wheeled the BMW up a long driveway and brought the vehicle to a stop in front of an FBI garage fifteen miles south of downtown Seattle. All four agents hopped out, and Olokawandi unlocked the garage before pulling up the ribbed metal door.
Dana almost threw up when she got her first look at the blood-drenched Subaru inside.
Blood spatter covered the passenger window of the car in the backseat, as well as the fabric of the back seat itself, right in front of the driver’s seat. The pure volume of blood made it look as though an abstract artist had simply dipped his brush into a bucket filled with bright red paint before flinging it in random directions with several quick flicks of his wrist.
Blankenship blew out a slow breath through his nostrils and turned to Jones. “Yikes. Looks like a fucking slaughterhouse. You guys got PPE?”
Jones nodded and went over to the corner of the garage. Reaching into a cardboard box, he tossed personal-protection equipment to each of them and kept a set for himself. Paper masks and paper body suits; thin rubber gloves and paper shoe-covers for their feet. Walking back over to them, Jones held a small metal toolkit in his right hand and swept his left toward the Subaru. “Ready to do this shit or what?” he asked.
Dana took in a lungful of air and let it out again over her teeth. “Ready as we’ll ever be, I guess,” she said. “Let’s do this.”
After dressing quickly in their PPE, Dana led the way, climbing into the backseat of the Subaru while Blankenship climbed into the front. The Seattle agents waited just outside the car on either side, ready to provide assistance should it be needed.
Kneeling on the back seat, Dana paused and looked around, wrinkling up her nose against the sharp scent of blood in her nostrils. The metallic odor of blood was one you could never quite remove from your hair and skin and fingernails, no matter how hard you scrubbed or what new soap you tried. Because once you’d smelled blood it seemed to stay in your nostrils forever, tricking your brain into thinking that you were still smelling it even when it wasn’t present. Hell, even after all of these years had passed, Dana could still smell the blood of her parents. Worse, their blood still smelled fresh to her.
She shuddered and scanned the backseat of the car, studying the blood spatter carefully and shifting her thoughts away from the brutal murders of her parents. No time for that now. And no trick of the brain was required here right now. This was fresh blood she was smelling. Very fresh.
Dana narrowed her eyes into tight slits as she recreated the scene in her mind, the resulting mental footage playing across her brain like a low-budget direct-to-DVD horror movie.
“The killer was left handed,” she said after a moment of concentrated focus, trying to ignore just how ridiculous she sounded, even to herself.
Blankenship turned in the front seat of the Subaru and stared back at her. “How the hell could you possibly know that? I mean, I know you’re good and all, but how the fuck…”
Dana cut off Blankenship with an irritated look. Lifting an imaginary knife in her left hand, she brought down the invisible prop again in a slow stabbing motion while she extended her other hand outward toward the window to mimic the path of the blood spatter. “I know because whoever did this was kneeling right where I’m kneeling now,” she said, trying to ignore the intense rush of annoyance in her chest. “The blood spatter is projecting toward the front of the car. If whoever did this were right-handed, the blood spatter would have projected toward the rear.”
Blankenship pursed his lips. “Well, I suppose that’s helpful to know. Still, I’m not exactly sure how.”
Dana ran her eyes over the blood spatter some more. Left-handedness – or sinistrality – presented in just ten to eleven percent of the American population, with females ringing in at about twelve and a half percent while males averaged about seven and a half percent. Statistics showed that left-handers were more likely to be schizophrenic, alcoholic, delinquent and dyslexic – and lefties also showed higher instances of Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis and mental disabilities. Still, percentages and statistics aside, Dana knew that this hadn’t been the work of a woman, though she had absolutely zero doubt in her mind that a serious mental disability had come into play here. After all, only an animal with a v
ery sick brain could’ve pulled off something like this. And the force that it would have taken to produce blood spatter of this magnitude had to have come from a man. Very few women in the world possessed the physical strength needed to generate spray like this. “It’s helpful to know because it cuts down on the pool of suspects,” Dana said, pointing out the obvious. “Not that we have any suspects right now, of course, other than assuming that whoever did this was male, left-handed and a member of the Brotherhood.”
“Well, what good…”
Dana lifted a hand to cut Blankenship off again when her stare suddenly fell upon something encrusted in the dark, dried blood caking the floorboard on the left-hand side of the back seat. She turned to Jones. “Tweezers.”
The Seattle agent unsnapped the toolkit in his hands and passed over a small rubber-tipped pair after first unwrapping them from their sterile plastic packaging. Taking the tweezers with a shaking hand, Dana leaned down to pluck something from the dried blood.
She lifted her hand again and brought the tweezers closer to her face for a better look. Her breath caught in her throat, making her think that she might be imagining the evidence in her hand.
She shook her head hard and refocused her vision. The evidence was still there. Hadn’t just disappeared into thin air in a quick puff of smoke.
She paused and shook her head again, this time in disbelief.
For its part, a single blonde hair simply stared right back at her, not saying a single word.
Out loud, at least.
CHAPTER 45
Angel took the business card with her as she left Jelani Diggs’s house in Westlake, not bothering to tell the old woman what she’d just found in her granddaughter’s bedroom. Angel just didn’t think it would accomplish anything useful at this point. All it would do was embarrass the poor girl when Angel finally found her.