by Greg Rucka
It might have been the hardest thing I’d ever been asked to do, and for what felt like minutes, I couldn’t, I just couldn’t. I thought about his threat, about screaming, calling for help, but even if I had lungs like Van, no one would come. In my music room, soundproofed and cocooned, I had no way out.
Nothing looked back at me, just the mask inside the hood, dark on darker, empty. I couldn’t even find his eyes, but I could feel the stare creeping down me. Everything Hoffman had said rushed back at me. I’d felt the eyes of tens of thousands watching me live, I’d known millions more had done the same on screens and pages. Pictures taped to walls and downloaded onto desktops, the gaze of men and women, boys and girls, and I’d had to accept it without too much thought, because it was the kind of thing you couldn’t think about for too long, and even now, with the new pictures, they paled next to this.
This was new humiliation, and I wanted to wail. I wanted to beg him to release me, to leave me alone, because I didn’t deserve this.
Some songs end the way they want to end, you can’t do anything about it, and when you fight it, you end with junk. It was his song now, I realized: he’d pick the ending.
The Parka Man put the heel of his boot on the fingers of my left hand, my fretting hand, and let the promise of more weight rest there, pressing just a little. His head hadn’t moved, the dark, vacant holes still watching me. I bit into my tongue, not wanting to give him a sound.
“I’ll know,” he said.
Then he dropped the rest of the weight, and I tasted blood in my mouth as he ground his heel on my fingers. In my knuckles, I felt bone grinding on cartilage. My eyes filled with tears, hot ones, spilling down the sides of my face, dripping into my ears.
It hurt so bad that when he stopped, I didn’t know it.
“I own you,” the Parka Man said, and I heard his boots climbing the stairs. Then only silence.
I rolled onto my side, holding my fingers in my right hand, and I wept.
CHAPTER 29
It took two rapid-fire shots of Jack to make the pain in my hand subside a little, and even then, the sickness in my head remained. I broke ice into a dishtowel, wrapped my fingers with it, praying they weren’t broken. The ache was constant, and felt deep in the bone.
I checked the whole house, trying to make certain he was gone, looking in all the closets, in all the hiding places. It was when I was checking the pantry that I saw how he’d done the alarm, and that was the final straw, maybe.
The control box was high on the wall, above my stock of canned goods, and the door to it was open. I had to take a chair from the kitchen table to get a good look, and when I did I saw that all of the fuses had been pulled, except for the one to the control panel. It could tell me that all portals were secure to the day I died, it would always be lying.
He could come and go as he pleased. He’d done it twice already, maybe more than that. He certainly had been waiting for me in the basement even before I got home.
It was what Van had said, too. He wouldn’t ever stop. Even if he was sincere now in his promise to return Tommy to me in exchange for cash, that would change, that would change as soon as he saw how easily he could control me.
Which is what made me remember the other thing Van had said, about how I was going to end up. But Van was wrong about one thing: I was doubting that the corpse I left behind would be all that nice on the eyes.
He owned me.
He would kill Tommy. Then he would kill me.
The only way I could stop it was if I found him first.
It took me until dawn to find a place to start, and it seemed weak, even by my desperate standards, but I didn’t have anything else. Thinking about everything he’d said, how he’d said it, the one thing I kept coming back to were the words he’d used in Mikel’s condo.
You’ve sure grown up.
It could mean a lot of things, I told myself. It could mean all kinds of things.
But maybe it means foster care.
There were forty-nine Larkins in the Qwest White Pages, and another twenty-three when I used the iMac in my office to do a Google search. Since I couldn’t remember the first name of either of the parents or most of the kids, I almost panicked. I couldn’t remember the name of any of the four sons.
Of the two daughters, I knew one of them was called Sheila, and I remembered that because I had been so mean to her. Another Google search, this time specifically for Sheila Larkin in Portland, Oregon, kicked back several hits, and by the time I’d sorted all of them it was already past nine, but I’d narrowed it down to three. One of them was thirteen, and had a page devoted to her favorite television shows, movies, and musicians.
She wasn’t a fan.
The second one was just a faculty listing at OHSU, in the Pediatric Care Unit.
The third was attached to a Web site for “Cuddle Group Daycare,” and that was the one I went with, because at the top of the Web page for the site there was a spinning Jesus fish. A phone number and e-mail link were included at the bottom of the page.
I called, and it was answered after four rings. Children were hollering in the background.
“Cuddle Group Daycare.”
“I’m trying to reach Sheila Larkin,” I said. “Is she there?”
“This is she. Who is this, please?”
“My name’s Miriam Bracca. I don’t know if you remember me.”
There was the barest of pauses. “Of course I remember you. What can I do for you, Miss Bracca?”
“It’s actually a little awkward, I was wondering if I could come and talk to you.”
Another pause. I heard a child’s shriek, but I couldn’t tell if it was delight or outrage.
“When?” Sheila Larkin asked.
“Sooner the better, actually.”
“If you don’t mind some dirty diapers, you can come over now.” She gave me an address in the southeast part of town, near Reed College, and I told her I thought it would be about an hour before I got there, and she said that would be fine.
I changed into day clothes, then gave myself a status report in the mirror. My fingers hurt, and the knuckles were swollen, but I could move them, and there was no visible bruising. The gash on my forehead looked calmer, too, less angry. But now I had a golf-ball-sized bruise on the side of my chest from the collision with the Strat, and the marks on my throat were clearly visible, if somewhat faint.
I used makeup to cover what I could, and was headed downstairs when the doorbell rang.
It was Hoffman and Marcus. He was wearing a duplicate of his work suit, and she was going with another slacks-blouse-blazer combo, and when I opened the door she shot me a grin, and when I didn’t return it, it crumpled like rice paper.
“I was on my way out,” I said.
“This won’t take long,” Marcus said. “Could we come in?”
I tried to look past them without being obvious about it, tried to determine if the Parka Man was watching. Leaving them to linger on the porch was only going to make matters worse, but letting them inside might get Tommy killed.
“What’s this about?”
“Let’s go inside, we can talk.”
My hesitation was growing obvious, and I caved, letting them through and then closing the door fast behind them. I had to hope Parka Man wasn’t watching, that he was confident in the scare he’d thrown into me the night before.
They waited, followed me down the hall to the kitchen. Hoffman held up just inside the archway, watching me with her cop look, the one that made it impossible to read her emotions. Marcus went to the table and took a seat.
“What’s this about?” I asked again.
“Have you seen your father in the last twenty-four hours?” Hoffman asked.
“Nope,” I said, and I sounded convincing to me.
“He was staying at your brother’s place, did you know that?”
“I’m not surprised. I don’t think he had anywhere else to go.”
“But you haven’t been t
o see him there?”
“Why would I?”
“You haven’t been there?” Hoffman asked again.
“No, I haven’t seen him since the funeral.”
“He’s not at your brother’s,” Marcus said. “We went by to talk to him this morning, early, and he wasn’t there.”
Hoffman’s expression faltered, her brow creasing, and I knew she was trying to figure out why I’d gone cold on her, and I only hoped she took it the wrong way.
She said, “Normally, someone doesn’t answer the door, we don’t make a thing out of it. They’re out or they’re asleep.”
“Both possible,” I said.
“That’s what we’d be thinking, too, except that Allan, here, he saw something that got us a little worried. He saw some blood, dried blood, on the front step of the condo.”
She paused, waiting for me to react. I didn’t say anything.
Marcus picked it up. “Blood at a crime scene, that’s not unusual, you know. And your brother’s place, that’s a crime scene. So I’m all fired up to go in, hey, it’s blood, maybe there’s trouble. But Tracy here, she’s cooler than me, she says wait a sec, she pulls out her phone, gets one of the state techs on the line, one of the guys who processed your brother’s murder. And she asks them if they pulled any blood evidence from outside of the house. You know what the answer to that is?”
I shrugged, shaking a cigarette loose from my pack on the counter. It was easier to look at the yellow box of smokes than at either of them.
“The answer was no, there was no blood pulled from outside. So we effected an entry, because that’s probable cause, you see.”
“Your father’s missing,” Hoffman said. “There’s a large amount of blood—and it’s new, it’s not your brother’s—in the living room there. Your father’s clothes are still in the guest room. How’d you cut your forehead, Miss Bracca?”
It was the refusal to use my first name that did it, made me see where they were going.
“I took a spill,” I said.
“Looks nasty.”
“I was pretty loaded.”
There was silence. Marcus and Hoffman waited. I tried to think of something to say, and it occurred to me that any lie I gave them now was only going to make things worse. If they knew it was Tommy’s blood on the carpet, then they had probably found some of mine, too; if they had, then they’d be able to match it to the samples they’d taken from my towels and sheets and so on when they’d searched my own home.
Which meant they’d know I had been there. It was only a matter of time.
Marcus asked, “We’re wondering if you’d be willing to come downtown with us and answer some more questions.”
“I really can’t,” I said. “I have an appointment I need to keep.”
“It won’t take long,” Marcus said.
“I’m thinking I should call my lawyer.”
“As always, that’s your prerogative.”
Hoffman didn’t say anything.
I found Chapel’s number and called his office as they watched me. When the receptionist answered, I gave her my name and said I needed to speak to Mr. Chapel.
“I’m sorry, Miss Bracca, but he’s busy at the moment,” the receptionist said.
“It’s Joy, right?” I asked.
She seemed pleased that I’d remembered. “Yes, it is.”
“Joy, could you tell him that there are two detectives in my kitchen asking me to go downtown with them?”
“Just a second,” she said.
The hold music, appallingly enough, was Rosie 105 FM, and they were halfway through the second verse of “Lie Life.” I thought about singing along, and decided against it.
As the third chorus was ending, Chapel came on the line. He was brusque.
“It’s Hoffman and Marcus?”
“Yeah.”
“Put one of them on,” Chapel said.
I extended the phone to Hoffman. “He wants to talk to you.”
She took the phone out of my hand, meeting my eyes. There was anger, and there was hurt, and I tried to give her nothing in return. She put the phone to her ear and said her name, and then for most of a minute, didn’t say anything else.
Then she said, “No, you’ve made that perfectly clear,” and offered the phone back to me.
“They’re leaving,” Chapel told me. “I’ve told them that they are under no circumstances to question you about anything without me present, and that if they want to take you downtown, they’re going to need a warrant. I’m going to stay on the phone. You follow them out, make sure they leave your property. I’ll wait.”
“Gotcha.”
I set the phone down on the counter, and Marcus was already halfway to the front door, Hoffman following. I went after them. Marcus exited first, but Hoffman stopped on the porch to pick up the morning paper and hand it over.
“Don’t make last night a mistake,” she said. “Let me help you.”
I shook my head, said, “I don’t need help.”
And I shut the door on her.
“Why were they there?” Chapel demanded.
I relayed everything the detectives had told me, without embellishment.
“Do you know where your father is?”
“No idea.”
“And you haven’t been to your brother’s condo?”
“Not since I found his body,” I said. “Can I ask you, that bit about a warrant? Are they liable to come back with one?”
“Not unless they’ve got some damn compelling evidence and the D.A. is willing to charge you. It’s the same situation as before. And with the pictures in the media, and so soon after your brother’s murder? Unless the D.A. knows you did something wrong, unless he can prove it, he’d look like a complete asshole. If what you’re telling me is right, they don’t even have a crime.”
“They said there was blood.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. Suppose your father went on a bender, cut his wrists, and then thought better of it? Maybe he’s in a bed at Legacy Emanuel or Providence as a John Doe. Until they know what’s happened to him, they’ve got nothing. And if they think there’s a murder, they need a body, or a head, or some heart or brain matter. Otherwise, they’ve got nothing.”
“So I don’t have to worry about them?”
“Not unless there’s something you haven’t told me,” Chapel said.
I was finding it easier and easier to lie without pause. “No, nothing. They just made me nervous, that’s all.”
“They’re detectives, they do it on purpose. Call me if they come back.”
I told him I would, hung up, and headed for my appointment with Cuddle Group Daycare.
CHAPTER 30
It was Sheila Larkin’s business, and she ran it out of her home eight blocks south of the Reed campus. I drove past the grounds and its falling leaves, onto the slender streets with the slightly upscale housing dedicated to the campus faculty. Pumpkins perched on porches and walks, waiting to be lit up as soon as night fell, and a couple of the homes had more prominent Halloween decorations, paper skeletons hanging from awnings. One home had an elm in its front yard with half of a broomstick jutting from its trunk on the one side, a witch splayed against the tree on the other, as if she’d crashed her flight.
The decorations at Cuddle Group Daycare were bright and nothing as sinister, construction-paper pumpkins of orange and black smiling brightly from where they’d been taped to the windows. There were eleven kids under care, and three other providers aside from Sheila, all of them women her age or younger. The kids ranged from a towheaded toddler who careened around the playroom, head-butting all of the adults in their legs, to a four-month-old little girl, who sobbed hysterically in one woman’s lap.
Sheila Larkin looked nothing like I remembered, and when she answered the door, I didn’t recognize her at all. She seemed to have stopped growing upward shortly after I’d come out from beneath her parents’ roof, then made up for the lack of progress by expanding ho
rizontally, instead. Her hair was long and worn in a ponytail, and it made her seem shorter and fatter.
She smiled at me, though, and offered me her hand, and I followed her into the din of children. We negotiated the playroom, stepping over toys and tots. The other women were all careful to not look at me, or at least, to not look at me when they thought I could see them doing it, and I wondered what Sheila had told them. There were small gates up in every doorway, and Sheila had to open and close three of them before we were done. The kitchen was clean, but cluttered, and smelled of last night’s fried chicken and baby poop. Sheila offered me a seat at the table and a glass of something to drink, and I took the seat and passed on the glass, and after some more mild fussing about, she joined me.
“I was surprised to hear from you,” Sheila said. “I didn’t think you’d even remember us.”
“I wish I could say I’m surprised that you remembered me,” I said. “But I think I made a lasting impression.”
Sheila smiled, and seemed to relax a little. “You know, it was Donny who told us first, that you were a big rock star, now. We were all so impressed, I had to call Daddy and tell him, and he sounded so happy that you had grown up well. He said that all those prayers we were making for you, some of them must have gotten through.”
“I guess some of them did.”
Her face fell. “I’m so sorry about your brother. I barely remembered him, but then I saw it on the news last week, and all I could think was that it didn’t seem fair at all. And they say your daddy did it?”
“He’s a suspect,” I said. “But they don’t know who did it.”
Sheila adjusted herself in her seat. “I don’t expect this is why you called, though, is it? To talk about that?”
“No. I’m actually wondering if you can tell me about your family. After Mikel’s funeral, I started thinking about all the people who had taken us into their homes, and about how . . . how rotten I was, at least. And I wanted to say I was sorry. I was hoping to start with you, sort of work my way through the tree, so to speak.”
“I’m not sure that’s necessary. You had been through some awful things, we all understood.” Sheila looked embarrassingly touched, for a moment.