Thread of Innocence (Joe Tyler Mystery #4)

by Jeff Shelby

  “So we need to talk about it,” I said.

  She pushed the hair away from her face, suddenly looking tired. “Yeah.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  She held up a hand. “Whoa. Let's stop right there. This isn't going to be just my decision. It's ours.”

  “I know that.”

  “So don't ask me what I want to do. It's about what we want to do.”

  I leaned back in the chair. I wasn't sure what she was telling me. I agreed. It was our decision to make. But, ultimately, she would bear more of the physical burden, no matter what we decided. That was the only point I was trying to make. Clearly, I hadn't made it.

  “Whether you like it or not, this affects you differently than it does me,” I said. “In a number of ways. All I was trying to say was that if you feel strongly, one way or another, I will support you. I'm not going to overrule or veto anything you want.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “That sounds like indifference to me.”

  “It's not. It's me being supportive.”

  “Doesn't sound like it.”

  “Are you just looking for a fight?” I asked. “Because I don't really want to have one.”

  She shook her head. “I'm not looking for a fight.”

  “Then accept the fact that I just want to support you isn't indifference,” I said. “I'm not looking to impose my will here, Lauren. I just...”

  She pushed away from the table. “Got it. Thanks.”

  I bristled at the fact she was dismissing me, but I genuinely did not want to fight and I felt like whatever I said or did was going to lead to an argument. I couldn't win.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “I don't know,” she said over her shoulder. “And just so you're clear. That's not indifference. I just don't know.”

  Touche.

  TEN

  I slept upstairs.

  Elizabeth and I went for our run the next morning and I liked that it was becoming a routine. She was already at the bottom of the stairs, tying her shoes, when I walked out of the bedroom. We took our normal route and after the rough emotional conversation we'd had the day before, I pointedly kept it light. I asked her about things I should've known about her if she'd been with me for her formative years. Did she like music? (Yes, but not rap.) Did she like TV? (Not really.) Did she like movies? (Yes, she'd seen nearly everything.) Did she play sports? (Yes, she'd run cross country and played basketball.) She talked easily and for the first time, I felt like she was talking to me without thinking, without measuring her words. She sounded like a normal kid, chattering about everything and nothing. It made me happy for both of us.

  We found Lauren sitting at the kitchen table when we got home, her laptop parked in front of her. She was working from home. Elizabeth muttered a soft hello when Lauren said good morning, then hustled upstairs to shower.

  “Your phone's been buzzing,” Lauren said without looking away from the screen.

  I picked it up off the counter and checked it. There were two texts, both from the same number.

  Paul Lasko's number.

  He wanted to know if I was available to meet for lunch.

  I texted him back that I was.

  He responded immediately that he'd meet me at noon at the same deli we'd met at before.

  I set the phone down.

  “Important?” Lauren asked, her eyes still on the screen.

  “Not really,” I said. “Are you gonna be home all day?”

  She nodded. “Yeah, I'm not going in today.” She finally peeled her eyes from the screen and nodded toward the stairs. “Thought I'd see if she wants to go shopping for clothes. All she has is what she brought with her and the few things we picked up.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I think I'll let you two go do that, if that's okay.”

  “I didn't figure you'd want to walk the mall.”

  I smiled. “Not today.”

  I took my time in the shower, already wondering why Lasko wanted to meet. I hadn't given him much thought after our initial lunch and I was starting to assume that maybe I had barked up the wrong tree, that he wasn't interested. I wouldn't have blamed him. Sticking his nose into this kind of thing could blow up in his face and if he had any career ambitions, they could be torched if I ended being right.

  I pulled on a pair of jeans and T-shirt and scrolled through the emails on my phone as I cooled off from the heat of the shower. There were no mysterious emails this time, but there was one from a parent in Seattle, whose son had been missing for over a year. She told me the story of his disappearance and it saddened me that it wasn't anything I hadn't read or heard before. Being immersed in the world of missing kids made it feel all encompassing at times, like there was an epidemic of disappearing kids. I knew what every parent was going through, how paralyzing it was, no matter how much time had passed since their son or daughter first disappeared. It was debilitating and even with Elizabeth at home, I didn't want to forget that. Every single person who contacted me was going through the same thing I had.

  I'd just gotten a little luckier.

  By the time I wandered back into the kitchen, the girls were already gone. That made me happy. I wondered if Elizabeth would put up any resistance to going, but she'd apparently been up for it, which should've pleased Lauren, too.

  Baby steps.

  The drive over the bridge was the kind of stuff you saw on postcards. The bridge looked baby blue over the sparkling blue Pacific, sunlight reflecting off the mirrored high rises on the other side of the harbor. It was the kind of day that drove tourists to San Diego and reminded residents that the exorbitant real estate costs and constant traffic were worth it. I followed the 5 into downtown and worked my way down Broadway toward Horton Plaza. The side streets were crowded and it took me a few minutes to find a meter several blocks away from the deli. I made quick time to the deli and found Lasko already inside, sitting at the same table as before.

  We shook hands and I took a seat.

  “I already ordered the sandwiches,” he said. “I'm starving. Hope you don't mind.”

  “Not at all,” I said.

  On cue, the sandwiches were delivered to the table. I asked for an iced tea and thirty seconds later, I had one on the table. We ate in silence and when we'd both finished, we pushed the plates to the side and I folded my hands in front of me.

  “So,” I said.

  He leaned back in the booth. “You know what you're getting into here?”

  “Nope. No idea. But I'm hoping you can tell me.”

  “You were a cop,” he said. “You know how we feel about cops spying on other cops.”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “Only thing worse is a crooked cop. Right?”

  He nodded.

  “And only way to find that out is by spying,” I said. “Damned if you do, damned if you don't kinda thing.”

  He nodded again. “Pretty much.”

  “Which is why I said if you weren't comfortable getting involved that I understood,” I said. “And that offer still stands. No hard feelings.”

  The corners of his mouth twitched. He rubbed at his jaw before taking a drink from his glass of water.

  “My dad was a cop,” he said finally. “Chicago. Did 35 years before he retired and moved us out here so we could stop freezing our asses off.”

  I wasn't sure where he was going, but I listened.

  “Last two years on the job, there was a big corruption thing in his precinct,” he continued. “Guys skimming, that kind of shit. I don't remember the specifics. But the guy he partnered with for maybe the last fifteen years he was there? He got named as part of it. This was a guy who ate dinner at our house, came to my baseball games, all that stuff. And they said he was on the take.” He paused. “Nearly killed my dad to hear that.”

  He took another drink from the water, swirled the ice in the glass. “So IA comes at him, asking him what he's seen, what he knows, the usual shit. My dad swears he's never seen anything, never sus
pected a thing. Because he hadn't. IA shakes him pretty good, but my dad never saw anything, so there was nothing to tell, you know?”

  I nodded.

  “Couple days later, partner comes to him, thanks him like crazy for backing him up with IA,” Lasko said. “Then he offered to cut my dad in on the skim. My dad was like 'What the fuck?' Charlie had just assumed my dad knew and lied to IA for him.” He paused. “Next morning, my dad goes in, calls the IA guy and tells him, yeah, Charlie's on the fucking take. Made him a fucking pariah in the department, pretty much lost his friends and got shit assignments his last six months. Charlie got indicted.”

  He polished off the water in the glass and jiggled the glass. The cubes clinked against each other. “So when I tell him I'm gonna be a cop, he kinda nods and tells me he has one question for me. I say okay. He asks if I can take everyone hating my guts if it means doing the right thing, no matter what the right thing is. I think, then nod, say, yeah, I can handle that.” He smiled. “He says I know you can, I just wanted to hear you say it out loud. Don't forget you said it out loud.”

  I smiled in return. “Good cop, your dad.”

  He nodded. “The best. Tough, tough dude.” He paused. “When you said a cop might be involved in your daughter's kidnapping, I immediately remembered that conversation. And that I'd said it out loud. Put up or shut up, you know?”

  I nodded again.

  He set the glass down and pushed it away. “Before your daughter disappeared, Internal Affairs was looking at your guy Bazer.”

  I shifted in my seat.

  “I don't have all the details yet,” Lasko said. “I'm still working on getting more specifics.”

  “Are you gonna get dinged for this?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Think I'm good for now.”

  I didn't ask how or why he thought that. If he thought he had it covered, that was good enough for me. “Okay.”

  Lasko took a cursory look around the deli before he spoke again. “Money went missing from an evidence locker. About two hundred and fifty large. Was discovered during a routine inventory check. I still don't know whether Bazer was targeted directly or if they were just looking at the whole department. But they were looking.”

  The knot in my stomach broke into multiple pieces and swirled in my gut. “What'd they find?”

  He held up a finger. “Not there yet. Around the same time, there were some whispers that Bazer was on thin ice and that he was being looked at by bigger badges than IAD.”

  “Like?”

  “Feds. Not sure who.”

  I thought for a minute. “I never heard any of that when I was there.”

  He shrugged. “Source is good. And I'm not sure there was every anything official. I'm just saying his name came up.”

  I nodded. It was hard for me to believe that something like that could've been going on under my nose while I was in the department, but if Bazer wanted to hide it and the Feds wanted to keep it quiet, it could've been done. If he said his source was good, I didn't really have a reason to think otherwise.

  “Why were they looking at him?” I asked. “Just the money?”

  He shook his head. “No. Bigger. Larger scale corruption.”

  “You're kidding me.”

  “Nope.”

  “So he was on the take? From who?”

  “I don't know that yet,” Lasko said. “But here's where it gets weird.”

  I waited.

  “A few days after your daughter went missing, the money showed up,” Lasko said. “Bullshit story about how it was just misplaced. But it was found, entered in inventory and that was that.”

  My stomach churned.

  “Obviously, that could be the truth,” he said. “But if we're looking at the big picture, that's a pretty big coincidence given everything else that was going on.”

  I nodded. It was. Could it all have been coincidental? Sure. But Lasko was right. Looking at the big picture and given that I was already suspicious of Bazer, it didn't look good.

  “One other thing,” Lasko said.

  “What?”

  “The money,” he said.

  “Not following.”

  “I went back and looked at the money,” he said. “Just to see what was there. Was pulled from a drug bust in Imperial Beach.”

  I shrugged. “Ton of money, but I guess it fits.”

  He shook his head. “No. It's not the bust. That all fits. And I'm not sure this matters at all, but it just sort of rang a bell.”

  I waited.

  “The detective on the bust was the other name you gave me,” Paul Lasko said, raising his eyebrows at me. “Mike Lorenzo.”

  ELEVEN

  Lasko left and I sat there in the deli for a few more minutes, contemplating what he'd told me.

  It shouldn't have surprised me. I was the one who'd started drawing the conclusions about Bazer and Mike. I was the one who had the doubts. But hearing someone else say it, with something more than just conjecture, was jarring. We were still working with suspicion and circumstantial evidence, but it felt more substantial, more real.

  I left the deli and headed home, only to find Chuck parked in front of the house again.

  “We gotta stop meeting like this,” he said, grinning at me as I stepped out of the car.

  “What's up?” I asked.

  He eyed me for a moment. “Maybe I should ask you the same question?”

  I realized my tone had been sharp rather than welcoming. I waved him up the driveway. “Come in.”

  He followed me. “I knocked on the door, but no one answered.”

  “Girls are out shopping.”

  “That's pretty damn nice to hear,” he said. When I turned to look at him, he said, “Girls, I mean.”

  I nodded and opened the front door. “It is.”

  He shut the door behind us and I deposited my kets and wallet on the small table by the entryway. I offered Chuck something to drink, but he declined. I moved into the living room and sat down on one side of the sofa. He stretched out on the other.

  “You look like you saw a ghost,” he said.

  I shrugged. “Maybe.” I looked him over. “How're you feeling?”

  “Went to physical therapy for my shoulder today,” he said, rolling it forward, as if to show me it worked. “I've got two more appointments, then I'm done. Otherwise, close to normal.”

  “Good.”

  “Now tell me about the ghost.”

  “I'm not sure there's anything to tell,” I said.

  “Try me.”

  “Not that simple, Chuck.”

  He folded his hands behind his head. “Joe, I know you've gotten used to working by yourself. You cut us all off when you took off looking for Elizabeth and I get it. That was your choice and what you had to do.” He paused. “But there are a lot of people who want to help you with this and now that you're back here, it's gonna be a lot harder to cut them out. Especially me. You saved my ass and whether you like it or not, the least I can do is be a sounding board. Because otherwise, it's just gonna get real annoying if I keep showing up here and we only make small talk.”

  He was right. I had gotten used to working by myself. I didn't depend on anyone else. I ran all of the scenarios through my head in silence until things made sense. I asked for help when I needed it, but I did the thinking by myself because I'd spent so much time alone. He was right, though. I couldn't operate the same way if I was re-entering my old life. I wasn't sure I was doing that yet, but I was in my old home, living with my ex-wife, back in my hometown. I couldn't pretend I was elsewhere.

  “There's a cop,” I said. “He's helping me.”

  Chuck gave a slight nod of his head. “Okay.”

  “And we're looking at some stuff,” I said.

  “Stuff?”

  I explained to him my suspicions and what Lasko brought to me. He listened without speaking, nodding occasionally, his eyes focused on me. It was somewhat strange having him there, upright, alert. When I'd come
back to San Diego, I'd gotten used to seeing him in a hospital bed. It was like going back in time, seeing him nearly healthy and sitting the living room.

  When I finished, he said, “Wow.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why the hell would either of them kidnap Elizabeth? And then sell her off?”

  I shrugged. “Money? I don't know.”

  “So you're making some jumps there,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “Be careful with jumps,” he said. “Don't get so set on something that you don't know for sure.”

  I nodded. “Right.”

  “But let's say you're right. Why would they do it?”

  “Money's the only thing I've got right now.”

  “Nothing personal?” He raised his eyebrows. “No vendetta?”

  I shook my head. “Not with Mike. No. Bazer? He and I were good until she disappeared. Then it went to shit. But before she disappeared, we were okay. So I don't think it was personal.”

  He nodded. “They knew her, right?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I'd had her at the station. We had barbecues, all that stuff. So, yeah, they knew her.”

  “So she would've known them.”

  I nodded again. I'd maintained for years that for as quickly as she'd disappeared from our front yard, it had to have been someone she knew or, at the very least, was familiar with. She was a cautious kid and she never would've just gotten in a stranger's car or walked down the block with them. Given what she'd remembered about the person being in a uniform, that theory still fit. It may have been someone impersonating a cop, so it may have been the uniform she trusted. But either way, there had been some familiarity.

  “But isn't that pretty crazy to think one of those two guys showed up and took her right from your front yard?” Chuck asked, his brows furrowed. “That seems pretty brazen to me.”

  “Maybe,” I admitted. “But would anyone even bat an eye at a cop? You see a uniform, you think it's okay, it's all good. There's no reason to question anything.”

  “Sure,” he said. “I just find it hard to believe someone who you knew pretty well would've just waltzed into your yard. What if you'd walked outside?”