The Drop Zone
Page 23
“He told us where to take it. But it wasn’t safe there.”
Peterson cocked his head. “Where wasn’t it safe?”
“Across the harbour. A warehouse. A …”
“The Drop Zone?”
“It wasn’t safe.” Bettis was shaking his head in distress. “Tooka said it wasn’t safe.”
“So you moved the body,” Peterson said.
“Not us. Tooka moved it. Buried it.”
Peterson let the silence have its time, then he held up the hard drive. “You recorded how many girls?”
Bettis shrugged.
“Why?”
“To watch.”
“And the flash drive?”
“For when we travel.”
Peterson pointed at the chair across the room. “We swab that chair for DNA, how many girls we going to find?”
That shocked Bettis. His eyes went to the chair. “Each of us had our favourites.”
“How many?”
“I wasn’t cruel to them. I tried to make it personal.”
“How many?”
Bettis whimpered. “Ten. Twelve. I don’t know. I just don’t know!”
“More?”
“Yes, more.”
Peterson tried to unclench his fists. “What were their names?”
“I only knew the older ones, the ones I had as patients,” Bettis said. “I didn’t know the others.”
“Where did the others come from?”
“Tooka.”
Peterson put it together. The older ones were the psychiatric wrecks. The others were … “How young were the others?”
Bettis hung his head.
“Early teens, pre-teens?” Peterson pressed.
Bettis nodded.
“Younger?”
“No! Not younger.”
Peterson lowered his voice. “But you wanted them younger.”
“Not me.” Bettis was sobbing.
Peterson wanted to sink inside himself, to creep into a quiet place where he could not be found. But he hadn’t finished. He kept his voice low, like a priest’s during a confession. “Did these other girls have names?”
“No names. Tooka insisted on that. He gave them numbers.”
“And you and the boys just loved where he tattooed the numbers.”
Bettis didn’t answer. Peterson leaned back, let the silence settle.
Another question suddenly occurred to him. How had the 911 caller known about Bettis and Williston taking Tiffany Banks’s body to the Drop Zone? He shot forward on his chair. “The girl that killed herself in the Broken Promise, Molly, she went with you to the warehouse didn’t she?”
Bettis nodded. “We forgot she was in the car. She was stoned. Out of it. Asleep in the back seat.”
“But she followed you in.”
“Yes.”
“And saw you bury Tiffany Banks.”
“I don’t know what she saw. She was stoned.”
“And you never told Tooka she’d been there,” Peterson said.
“I knew what he would do.”
“Is that why she was your favourite? Worried about what she might remember?”
Bettis closed his eyes and didn’t answer.
“For months she was your favourite,” Peterson said. “Did you ever talk about that night?”
“No.”
“Not about the Airport Road?”
“I didn’t know about it! Not until they dug up the body.”
“How did you know? There was no ID made on the body.”
“I didn’t need an ID.”
Peterson thought for a moment. “And she didn’t need one, either.”
“Not after Williston threatened her. He said he’d kill her too.”
“When was that?”
“When she was talking gibberish. Nothing we gave her would keep her quiet. Then she … the drugs or whatever … she just went wild. Screaming about the baby, the baby. Williston, he …”
“He what?”
“He hit her.”
“The way he did the other girl?”
“Yes. Yes. And she was screaming. And Williston was beating her. I grabbed her. I didn’t know what to do. I grabbed her and opened the door and threw her out.”
Bettis bawled. Peterson waited.
“Then what?”
“I called Tooka.”
“You called Tooka?”
Bettis nodded. “She was outside in the cold. Crying. And I was afraid Williston would do it again.”
“So you called Tooka.”
“They came for her.”
“Who came for her?”
“Tooka and two others. They took her away.”
Bettis shook terribly. Peterson waited until he settled a little.
“What did they do with her?”
Bettis looked at nothing. “I was afraid.”
“What did they do with her?”
“Dumped her.”
“On the Strip?”
“Yes.”
“Tooka told you that?”
“He said no one would believe a crazy bitch like her.”
Peterson got up and circled his chair. He wanted to pound his fists into Bettis’s face, the way he had pounded holes in the walls of his home. He sat back down. “What about Stephen Emery?”
Bettis dropped his head. His lower lip trembled. “I didn’t want … But Tooka said there was a problem. He needed to make an example.”
“And you just happened to have a patient that could help.”
“I didn’t want to.”
“But you did! You opened the door!”
Bettis said nothing.
“Tooka tell you the problem?” Peterson asked.
“He said someone had talked too much.”
Peterson stood again and walked over to the sideboard. “His name was Terry Sylvester,” he said, as though hearing the name would make what happened more real for Bettis. “You know what Tooka did to him.”
Bettis nodded.
Peterson opened his shirt to show Bettis the voice recorder. Then he switched it off.
“Simple scenario,” he said. “I go to Tooka, tell him about the hard drive. Then I play this back so he knows what you said. Then Tooka pays you a visit. If you’re lucky, you won’t be alive when he cuts you open.”
Bettis covered his face. He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t cry.
“You own a gun?” Peterson asked.
Bettis shook his head and the shaking seemed to release his voice. He howled.
Peterson took out the Colt Automatic, chambered a round, and eased down the hammer.
“Here’s the big favour I offered,” he said. He set the gun on the sideboard and started for the front door. “All you have to do is pull the trigger.”
Chapter
FORTY-FOUR
Peterson drove straight home to download the digital recording of Bettis’s confession onto his computer, then dump it to an eighty-gig iPod.
His hands were still shaking from what he had heard, and they shook even more from picturing what he was about to see. He needed something to calm down. But he refused to give in to the craving. Wrapped his arms around himself to hold back from giving in. It helped steady him.
He clicked the icon for the hard drive and entered the password: Jelly Fish.
The video came up and started playing automatically. Close up images of male and female body parts squirrelling against each other. Then the zoom pulled back to reveal the slick bodies of Bettis and two nymphs going at it on a throw rug on a hardwood floor. The ram’s head tattoo was clearly visible on Bettis’s shoulder.
Peterson moused over the timeline. There was more than two hours of video. All the players, all the girls, all the
positions. Ten minutes of viewing was more than enough for him. He scanned the rest until he saw Senator James Williston beating Tiffany Banks to death.
He left the den for the dark kitchen, where he splashed cold water on his face and stood for a few minutes, staring out the window above the sink. Then he returned to the den and copied the hard drive onto his computer, then onto two more flash drives.
He paced the den and living room, worrying around the edges of what he was about to do, about what he had kept from Danny, about the green Chevy truck.
The truck had tailed him for days. He’d lose it when he needed to and let it tag along when it served his purpose. It had been parked a block away from Bettis’s house and was now in the Shopper’s Drug Mart parking lot at the end of Peterson’s street.
He had seen the driver up close more than once, a bruiser with hair to his shoulders. He hadn’t needed a clean look at the passenger to know who it was: Dickie Palmer.
Peterson phoned Danny and told him all that had happened at Stoddard, with Miles, and later with Bettis.
“You didn’t give Bettis a lot of choice,” Danny cracked. “Face Tooka, swallow a bullet, or blow the whistle on himself.”
“We get the same results,” Peterson said.
There was a short silence then Danny said, “You don’t have to go there. The hard drive blows this whole thing wide open.”
Peterson didn’t answer. Long silence. Then Danny said, “If you’re worrying about me, don’t. I’m still good.”
Miles’s Sig Sauer was on the dining-room table. Peterson removed the clip, checked that it was loaded, and snapped it back. He pulled on latex gloves and wiped the gun down with a cloth napkin. As he shoved it into his jacket pocket, he looked at the remaining framed photograph of his wife and daughter on the wall above the sideboard. He removed the gloves and traced their faces with a finger. Then he reached into the sideboard for a bottle of London Dock. He poured half a glass and took it to the den and sat in the leather recliner.
He held the glass in both hands and shut his eyes. His thoughts played hard against his feelings. It felt as if his nerves had grown on the outside of his skin. He sat there, thirsting for a drink but not giving in, for a little more than twenty minutes, then he carried the glass to the kitchen sink and dumped it. He checked his watch, patted his pockets for the iPod, the flash drive, and the Sig, and he left the house.
He drove across the bridge to the Strip, trying not to think, not to worry, but keeping track of the Chevy truck in his rear-view mirror.
The Posse worked out of a backroom at the Flame, a raunchy two-bit lounge off the Strip. It was nearly 2:00 a.m. when he turned into its parking lot. He put on a fresh pair of latex gloves and, from under the driver’s seat, retrieved the cat’s paw and slid it up his jacket sleeve. Then he clipped the expired badge onto his jacket and walked over to the main door of the Flame, pausing just long enough to see the Chevy truck swing into the parking lot.
Chapter
FORTY-FIVE
Two guys in black leather coats were sitting on stools at the crescent shaped bar. Both were hard bodies. One wore shades despite the low light, and the other had a lot more muscle. Behind them was a door to a backroom.
The tables across from the bar were all empty, but a young woman and two men were in a booth near the front door. From what Peterson overheard as he walked in, the men were trying to negotiate a two-for-one deal.
The bartender was another of Tooka’s muscle. He wore a dark red shirt and black apron, and his head was shaved. Peterson was certain that he had seen him shaking down pimps along the Strip.
Peterson reached the bar and the bartender snapped down a coaster bearing a stylized image of an Olympic torch.
“You drinking?” he asked, nodding at Peterson’s badge.
“Talking,” Peterson said.
“Talking’s not on tap.”
“You’re not the one I want to talk to. Tooka is.” At the mention of the name, the two heavy hitters swivelled his way. Peterson made sure they saw the badge, but he didn’t need to. By the looks he got when he came through the door, they’d already pegged him as a cop.
“He’s busy,” the guy with shades said. His voice sounded familiar.
“Tell him to get un-busy,” Peterson said. “I got something for him.”
“What you got?” The same guy asked with a hitch in his voice that took Peterson back to the night in the hospital district when two guys had laid a beating on him.
“I don’t play show and tell with the hired help,” Peterson said.
The muscle man got off his stool, showing his size.
“The badge make you tough?” Muscle man challenged, his voice croaky, like the voice of the man who had clubbed Peterson from behind.
Peterson smiled without warmth. Hearing that voice made him want the guy even more. “The badge just makes opening your skull legal.”
The muscle man’s grin gleamed with menace. “Lose the badge, I’ll fuck you up!”
“Don’t let it slow you down.”
They faced off for a second or two then the bartender intervened, saying, “No trouble!”
Peterson broadened his grin for the muscle man. “Somebody yank your chain?”
That did it. The muscle man shifted to his back lag to get his weight behind his fist. But Peterson had already dropped the cat’s paw down his sleeve into his hand. He brought it up hard between the muscle man’s legs.
The muscle man grunted and bent over. He hit the floor after the cat’s paw came down once on his shoulder and once across the back of his neck.
Peterson quickly turned to the bartender and to the guy with shades to make sure they were staying out of it. He pulled his cell phone from his jacket pocket and punched in a ten-digit number. “I’d like to report a bar fight at the Flame,” he said to the man who answered. Then to the threesome in the booth near the door he said, “Time to leave.”
Then the backdoor opened and a guy with dreads and wearing a white shirt with a vest and pants from a pinstriped suit came out. “What the fuck’s going on?”
Peterson nudged the muscle man with his toe. “Somebody thought he was Mike Tyson.”
“A cop,” the bartender announced.
The guy looked at the muscle man on the floor and then at Peterson. “Did you get your badge back, or you just faking it?”
“The man with the inside track,” Peterson said. “That would make you Tooka.”
“What are you after?”
“I have a message from Karl Bettis.”
Tooka looked back down at the man on the floor. “Is this the message?”
“This is just the envelope.”
Tooka gestured with his head for Peterson to follow him into the backroom. Once inside he gave an order, “Out!”
A girl in bra and panties jumped up from a black leather couch, hastily gathered her clothes and left by way of a door to an adjacent room.
The office was all black leather and chrome. A couch and half a dozen leather armchairs, a big-screen TV, and a chrome and glass table that held an Xbox, PlayStation, and Bose sound system. There was a stocked bar in one corner and a desk in another. Tooka’s suit jacket hung from a high-back swivel chair.
Tooka slid behind the desk and lowered himself into the chair, opening a top drawer as he went down. The move wasn’t lost on Peterson.
“What’s the message?” Tooka asked.
“I’m reaching for it,” Peterson said. He still held the cat’s paw in one hand. With the other he reached into his shirt pocket and came out with the iPod. He went over to the Bose and, without taking his eyes off Tooka, docked it.
Tooka picked up a remote off his desk and pressed play.
Peterson remained standing. They stared at each other as they listened. Both expressionless, neither willing to give anything away.<
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When the recording stopped, Tooka leaned back and studied Peterson. Then he said, “You think you got something?”
“There’s more. A hard drive with lots of sex. And one murder.”
“Nothing but bullshit, man. Chump change for a lawyer to eat this up. So where’s it going? I mean, what are you after? You got a number, tell me the number.”
Peterson took one of the chairs. “That sounds like worry.”
Tooka smiled. “The price I’ll pay for peace of mind.”
Peterson gave him the smile right back. “I got nothing for sale.”
“Out-of-work cop, alone in a big house, decent neighbourhood. A few extra in the wallet goes a long way to paying off that mortgage.”
“Like Andy Miles?”
“Nickel-and-dime cop. Errand boy.”
“A fixer,” Peterson said.
“I get a ticket, the man comes across.”
“Like a double murder in the old military housing or a guy strung up and gutted.”
“What language is that? I don’t understand a word you’re saying.”
Peterson held the smile. He undid the buttons on his shirt to show he wasn’t wired. “Let’s talk about you. Big operation, pimp business here and out west, and I’m the one holding a way to cramp your style.”
“You got nothing that’ll stick,” Tooka said.
“It doesn’t have to stick, not to you anyway. But I have more than enough to stick it to Bettis and his little band of perverts.”
Tooka lost his smile. Then he flattened his hands on the desktop. Careful. Unsure.
“I have photos and video of the big-time players doing dirty things with little girls,” Peterson said. “And one of them, a mucky muck in Ottawa, getting carried away with his hands. The kid died. Somehow it gets on the internet, then the media runs with it. The public scandal will have the cops scrambling. Your name is bound to come up, and then they’ll ride your ass, while an unnamed source leaks information. Steady flow. Word gets out where you work, where you play, the kind of dirt under your nails. A week, maybe two, they shut you down and choke off your supply. Then the same source leaks it that Tooka is willing to cop a plea. And then all of a sudden Tooka has to answer to his biker friends.”
Tooka’s surprise showed. “You a crazy motherfucker to bust in here and rag my ass with bullshit. I mean what the fuck, huh? You don’t make it to the front door.”