“Nothing,” Rachel said. “No one’s put out anything on the missing child hotlines or websites trying to find her. I thought I might find something through foster care —more than half the teens in the life are runaways from foster homes. But she’s not in the California system, anyway.”
Before they entered the interview room, Roarke stepped into the adjacent viewing room to take a look at her through the observation mirror.
The girl who called herself Jade was seated at the table, leaning far back in the plastic chair, long legs stretched in front of her to rest on the edge of the table with an exaggerated sensuality. She was raccoon-eyed with heavy makeup and looked supremely bored with her surroundings. At the same time that he could see she was hypervigilant, she wasn’t missing a thing. She looked up at the camera at regular intervals, staring at it insolently.
Her hoodie was fashionably distressed and only partly zipped so it was slipping off her shoulders, baring her collarbone and part of her back. The tattoos there were instantly arresting; intricate patterns that he could only see the top of but which clearly covered most of her back.
And she was very young, her druggie thinness softened by skin round and smooth with baby fat.
Rachel stood at the door, watching him watch the girl. “Any tips?” he asked.
“She’s sixteen,” she said dryly. “Good luck.”
He opened the door for Rachel but made sure that he was positioned where he could see Jade as soon as the door cracked.
She looked up instantly as the door opened. Rachel, then Roarke stepped through, followed by Mills.
Rachel didn’t touch the girl, but the social worker radiated a gentleness that Roarke hadn’t seen in her before as she sat and leaned forward across the table.
“Hello, Jade,” she said. “This is Special Agent Roarke, of the FBI. He has some questions for you, along with Inspector Mills, and I’m here to supervise. Are you comfortable? Do you need anything?”
“I’d blow all of you for a cigarette,” Jade drawled.
Rachel didn’t even blink; Roarke had to admire it. “Anything to drink? Eat?” she asked, as if she hadn’t heard.
Jade waved a languid hand at the Coke can in front of her. “I’m all set.”
Roarke pulled a chair out for Rachel across the table from Jade, and sat in the one beside her. Mills remained standing, leaned a shoulder against the wall.
The girl watched Roarke’s every move, her eyes slipping over him like hands, a blatantly sexual appraisal. He kept his face neutral, but he was startled by the blazing energy coming off her. Maybe she was still high. Whatever it was, she burned.
Christ, he thought. Sixteen.
Rachel shifted beside him, cleared her throat. He spoke to the girl. “We’re not holding you for the dope, Jade. Rachel can take you home in the morning.”
Jade’s eyes flicked toward Rachel, with no readable expression. “Happy days.”
“But we need to ask you some questions about Danny Ramirez.”
She shrugged lazily. “I have a choice?”
“Would you like a lawyer?”
She stared at him with blank eyes, then smiled thinly. “Crowded enough in here already, doncha think? All these people for little ol’ me.” She shifted in the chair, and leaned back again. “Just do it.”
While she had been talking Roarke had been studying her: speech patterns, mannerisms, the way she dressed. West Coast, he thought. Southwest, Pacific Northwest, or California. Or at least she’d been in California long enough to assimilate the style. Despite a street defensiveness, her body language was open, her speech a casual drawl with no Eastern or Southern affect. She was intelligent, too, she had the arrogance of a naturally high IQ and she wasn’t intimidated by adults.
He decided his best course of action would be to get right to it, not coddle her, but treat her as an adult.
“You witnessed the death of Danny Ramirez.”
“No idea what you’re talking about,” she said stonily.
“We have your prints on a lipstick that was dropped at the scene.”
“I didn’t kill Danny.”
“We know you didn’t kill Danny. But you saw it, didn’t you?”
There was a lot on her face, now, but she was silent.
“All I’m asking is what you saw.”
Her eyes flicked to the side. “It was dark.”
“Let’s start with the basics. Even in the dark I think you can tell a man from a woman.”
She gave him a smile so hard it made him cold, and said nothing. Roarke put the police sketch of Cara down on the table.
“Was this the person you saw?” He watched Jade’s face.
She took her time before she looked down, and then she looked at the sketch a long time. “Who is she?”
“Is this the person you saw?”
“Probably. Without the sunglasses. It being night, and all.”
“Can you talk us through what happened? How did you get to the tunnel?”
She shrugged, yawned. “Danny texted me to meet him.”
“Why was that?” Mills asked dryly.
“Guess,” she said, looking straight at him.
Beside Roarke, Rachel suddenly leaned forward. Her voice was soft, and compelling. “I know it must have been hard to see. No matter what else you felt about him. It must have been hard.”
Jade looked back at her. “It was a lot of blood,” the girl said. “A lot of blood.”
“I know,” Rachel said. “Tell us.”
Roarke held his breath, feeling the connection between the two of them resonate in the room. The moment seemed to last forever, then Jade looked away again. But miraculously, she spoke.
“He said to meet in the tunnel so I walked down from the fair, on Haight? So I get into the tunnel and I see that he’s with someone and I don’t know what’s going on so I wait. Back a little. It’s really dark so I can’t see much, but it’s someone thin, pants and a jacket. I figure it’s someone making a buy. But when Danny lights up I see her in the flame.”
Roarke had a sudden, very clear picture of the scene, Cara appearing in the dark, as pale and blond as she was. The last thing Ramirez would have expected in that dank tunnel.
“Did they say anything to each other?” Rachel asked, exactly right, a total pro.
Jade shrugged. “Danny talked some shit. ‘Whatchu want, bitch,’ his usual charm. Wrong thing to say, turns out.” But her voice shook when she said it, and she reached for the Coke can to drink.
Roarke made sure his own voice was steady, neutral, when he asked the next. “Did she say anything?”
Jade put the can down. “Nope. She just stepped up and grabbed his hair and… sliced him.”
She wrapped her arms around her thin torso. Her hoodie slipped down off her shoulders, exposing more of the tattoo, a female figure inside a cone of flames.
“There was so much blood…” she said in a hollow voice.
Roarke’s head was buzzing. She saw it. She saw the whole thing. A direct, material witness.
But he sensed there was more that she wasn’t saying.
“Did she see you?”
The girl’s eyes flicked to his face. “It was so dark. I couldn’t move. I just stood there hoping she wouldn’t see.”
“You were afraid of her?” he asked, and heard the sharpness in his voice. Rachel looked at him, startled.
“She’s standing there with a razor, Danny’s there bleeding out at her feet? Are you kidding?” Jade sounded insulted… but not afraid, exactly. He couldn’t read her.
“She didn’t say anything to you,” he said, and again Rachel glanced at his face, a questioning look.
“No,” Jade said defiantly. “She didn’t see me.”
Lying, Roarke thought, suddenly sure. Why?
“What happened then?” he said neutrally.
Jade looked away. “She leaned over, took his roll.”
“Money, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
> “And?”
“Pocketed it. And then she was gone.” She finally met his eyes. “I waited until I was sure. And I ran.”
She was leaving something out, he knew it. “She said nothing to you.”
Rachel shifted in her chair. Jade’s eyes blazed across at him. “She didn’t see me.” She spat the words at him.
He sat for a moment, and then asked, “Why do you think she killed him?”
Rachel shifted again beside him.
Jade stared hard at him, then her mouth quirked, not quite a smile. “I guess she thought he needed killing.”
Roarke stared back at her for a long moment. “Could you identify her if you saw her again?”
There was a quick, furtive look on her face, instantly gone. “Like I’m gonna forget?” she retorted.
Roarke sat, chair pushed back from the table, just looking at her. She looked right back. “So who is she?” Jade said.
“Our suspect.”
“And what else?”
Roarke looked at her. She stared steadily back at him. “Agent Roarke, right? Special Agent Roarke? So why are you here? Why isn’t Beavis over there handling this?”
“Hey,” Mills grumbled.
“What do you want her for?” Jade continued, never looking away from him.
“Murder,” Roarke said flatly. And he stood, ending the interview.
As they stepped out into the hall, a guard was waiting to take Jade back to a room.
“I’ll be by first thing in the morning,” Rachel told the girl. It would take that long to get her processed out.
“Whatever,” Jade said, and her eyes slid toward Roarke, a watching look.
In a moment, he decided, used it, leaned forward and closed his fingers around her wrist. She looked up at him, startled. “If you think of anything else, you’ll call, won’t you.”
“You bet,” she drawled, but he felt her pulse quicken under the pressure of his hand.
He released her slowly. “Thanks for all your help.”
He turned and walked down the hall, Rachel and Mills following after a moment in his wake.
At this hour the glare of the fluorescents in the corridor was a dreamlike haze. Rachel was silent, but Roarke could feel her thoughts ticking. Beside her, Mills was brooding. “I’m not so sure she’ll rabbit after all. I think she might play this for whatever she can get.”
Roarke thought he might be right.
They walked across the lobby and a guard tripped the doors so they could exit. The fog was so thick for a moment Roarke couldn’t make out the parking lot in front of them. Rachel shivered beside him.
As they wound their way down the curved entry and the front steps into the dark of the parking lot, Mills suddenly said, “She was lying, but I can’t figure out about what.”
“Yeah. Not sure either,” Roarke said. He shot a glance toward Rachel. “We need to work on finding out where she’s from so we can have half a snowball’s chance to find her again.”
“And to start to help her work through everything she’s been through,” Rachel said dryly.
“Right,” Roarke said. “And that.”
“I’ll do what I can,” she said.
Mills turned to her. “So you’ll let me know when she vamooses?”
“I’ll call you,” she said, shaking her head.
“Nice seein’ you,” the detective said to Roarke. “Happy Turkey Day.” And he ambled off into the fog.
Roarke turned to Rachel. “Where’s your car?”
“I’m all right—”
“Don’t be stupid,” he said, and she fell silent. She nodded down a row and they walked together in the drifting fog between cars. His mind was a chaos of thoughts. They finally had a witness. For the first time someone had seen Cara do murder that wasn’t self-defense. Jade could put Cara away. And all this could be over.
Rachel glanced at him, as if she could feel the intensity of his inner monologue. But she was silent. She turned in to the next row of cars and stopped — at a Prius, of course. As she pulled keys from her coat pocket, he stepped close to her.
“Rachel.”
She turned and looked up at him in the dark.
“I need anything that can open Jade up, pinpoint where she’s from.”
For a long moment he didn’t know if she was going to say anything.
“I keep a log of my encounters with any of the girls I talk to.”
Roarke felt a tightening in his stomach that he realized had nothing to do with the case. “I would love to see that.”
She looked away from him. “I’m not going home anyway, not now. You might as well come by the shelter.”
At night the Belvedere place looked like the grand house it had been, a bit of a Victorian time warp, all the windows dark except for the porch light, and the fog. No available parking spot of course, despite the hour. Roarke pulled his car up onto the sidewalk.
As he climbed the steps the door opened, and Rachel stood, half-in, half-out of the light. Roarke felt electricity as he stepped past her.
So that is what this is, he though, and felt a soft darkness open inside him.
She closed and locked the door and moved down the dark hall toward her office.
In the hall there was the wall of pictures, the rows of teenage girls: snapshots, printed-out candids from camera phones. Some brash, some sullen, some haunted… all shadowed in some way.
Rachel slowed in front of it, looking up at the faces. When she spoke, her voice was low, but harsh with anger. “I don’t understand people. How does anyone resembling a human being use a child like that?”
Roarke heard his own words, felt a rush of longing, then an old emptiness. “I don’t know. I’ve never known.”
“This world,” she said. “It never ends.” She turned abruptly away toward the office.
There was a low light on inside, the desk lamp casting a pool of light, and as Roarke stepped past her he could smell her perfume, something rich and autumnal. He remembered the glimpse through the inner door he’d gotten when they’d been in here before, the bed in the back room.
What are you doing? he asked himself, and had no answer. He forced himself to speak.
“I’m keeping you up all night, I’m sorry.”
She didn’t answer, but went to a file cabinet and unlocked it, leaned in to pull out a drugstore composition book with a mottled cover. “This is the last three months. You’ll have to look through it but there are names, places— where I saw her, what she said when I tried to talk to her.”
She opened it on the desk and he stepped beside her, feeling a heat in his groin. He looked down at the book. Her writing was small and feminine.
“The names are easy to find. I box them.” She touched her finger to the page, and he saw she had drawn thick rectangles around dates and names.
“Your woman is in there,” she said, and he glanced at her sharply. “The one you’re looking for. I told you I saw her with Jade.”
He remembered. She gave the girl takeout and then she killed her pimp. That was Cara.
“Who is she?” Rachel asked.
He felt boxed in, like the names on the page.
“What Jade was asking in there, I saw how you reacted.” She didn’t look at him. “What’s happening?”
His mouth was dry. “I wish I knew.”
“Did she really kill Ramirez just because… he deserved it? To help Jade? Is that what it is?”
“Something like that.”
She looked at him so intensely he couldn’t look away. “But you’re out to arrest her? Or is it something else?”
He felt a tidal wave of emotion rising, threatening to overwhelm him. “I don’t know what it is. I have no idea.” He turned away from her, pressed his hand onto the desk. “Everything’s all twisted. I can’t see…”
She reached to touch him. “It’s all right…”
He turned his head, and she looked up into his face, and he felt the sizzle of attraction. He pulled
abruptly back. He could see the jolted look on her face.
“I’m sorry, I was wrong…”
“No, you weren’t. It’s my fault,” he said. “I’ll go.” He didn’t move. She stepped forward and put her hand against his cheek. He reached up and took her wrist, and time was suspended between them. And then he pulled her hard into him, thigh to thigh, hip to hip, and he laced his hand in her hair and he kissed her, felt her mouth open to his, felt her hunger and her longing, felt her softness against his hardness…
He tried one last time to pull back, but she sighed against his neck… and he was lost.
Chapter Twenty-seven
He lay in the narrow bed with Rachel’s warm soft curves wrapped around him. Her breathing was slow and even and he hoped she was asleep.
He still throbbed from the force of his climax, and with a new dark dread: the feeling that all this would have to be paid for.
He sat up too quickly, and froze, afraid she would move, wake. But she lay still, and he eased out of the bed, stooped to the floor for his clothes.
In the bed, Rachel opened her eyes, listening to the door close as he left.
Outside he eased the front door shut to avoid the jangling of bells, and walked down the steps into the dark, lit only by streetlights in the fog.
He stopped on the sidewalk, aware that something was wrong and not sure what it was. And then he realized his car was gone, towed by San Francisco’s hypervigilant traffic division. He shook his head, thought of instant karma… and then turned south toward home to walk.
The pre-dawn was thick and still around him, and the guilt increased with every step; the fog that rolled around him seemed to be coming from somewhere inside him.
What were you thinking?
But he knew what he’d been thinking, however much thinking had to do with it. Relief, release, something normal, something sane. To grab on to some human connection before he crossed some irrevocable line, fell off the edge into an abyss.
He’d left Rachel a note on her desk pleading work, he’d call, she was lovely. None of which was likely to fool her.
There were the first anemic streaks of light in the sky as a cathedral loomed up in the dark in the block ahead.
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