by Jack Heath
The waiter hands us wine lists. Thistle turns hers down, saying, ‘Just a diet soda for me, thanks. I’m driving.’
I say, ‘Soda for me too.’
‘You sure?’ Thistle asks. ‘I’m buying.’
‘Just soda.’
The waiter picks up our wineglasses and goes away. He looks disappointed. Drunk patrons tip more.
‘So,’ Thistle says.
‘So.’
She hesitates. ‘You, uh…wanna talk about the case?’
I’d be much more comfortable on familiar ground. ‘Sure.’
‘No record of the Sheas flying anywhere. But I dug up Robert’s medical records. He had a renal cell carcinoma. Rare in kids.’
I frown. ‘He had cancer?’
‘Yep. But they treated it successfully—with a nephrectomy.’
My feet have been twitching in my shoes. Now they stop. ‘He had a kidney removed? When?’
‘Admitted to Park Plaza two weeks ago, discharged three days later,’ Thistle says. ‘The procedure was a success. Nothing else noteworthy.’
‘So Robert Shea needed a transplant.’
‘Well, he didn’t need one, but you’re better off with two functioning kidneys, yeah.’
‘And a week after he lost his, someone ripped one out of Cameron Hall.’
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Thistle says. ‘But it makes no sense. Cameron Hall’s kidney wasn’t given to Robert Shea. It was left in a car to rot.’
Our soda arrives. We fall silent.
‘I want to know what’s in Shea’s sealed juvie record,’ I say.
‘We’ll need a warrant.’
‘Could you get Luzhin to arrange that? He likes you better than me.’
‘I already did,’ she says. ‘He’s working on it. Why do you think he doesn’t like you?’
Because he knows I eat people. ‘I’m not one of his agents. He’s suspicious of outsiders.’
‘Bullshit. I think he’s proud to have you on his team. And if he’s not, he should be.’
She’s wrong, but the sentiment is touching. I stare down at the menu without really seeing it.
The waiter comes back. ‘Are you ready to order?’
Thistle gestures at me. After you.
‘Porterhouse,’ I say. ‘Raw.’
‘Rare?’
‘Yeah, that’s what I meant. Really rare.’
The waiter turns to Thistle. ‘Ma’am?’
‘I’ll have the lamb cutlets, thanks,’ she says. ‘With a side of Greek salad.’
‘You still okay for drinks?’
‘Yep.’
He leaves again.
‘If it’s the same kidnapper,’ Thistle asks, ‘why was there no ransom this time?’
‘I’m thinking the ransom was a decoy,’ I say. ‘Or at least a side goal. The kidnapper wanted Cameron for his own reasons, probably sexual.’
A woman at another table is glaring at us. I probably should talk quieter.
Thistle says, ‘Is there any evidence that Cameron was sexually assaulted?’
‘No physical signs, according to the hospital exam. But I still want to ask him about it. And now he’s left town to stay with his grandparents.’
‘I could probably get their number,’ Thistle says. ‘I’ll give them a call tomorrow, if you want.’
‘Thanks, but Luzhin said he’d do it.’ Plus, I already tried. ‘Did anyone do a profile while Cameron was missing?’
‘Probably. Not that it’ll do us much good.’
I’m surprised. Most FBI agents aren’t openly critical of profilers. ‘Why not?’
‘Because profiling is mostly statistics,’ Thistle says. ‘If a profiler gets a case, let’s say death by poison, she’ll know that most poisonings are done by women, whereas male murderers use guns or brute force. So her profile will say we should be looking for a woman. Right?’
‘Right.’
‘But that only works because she’s got lots of other poisonings to compare the case to. A profiler’s first step is to examine similar crimes and look for common features among the perps.’
‘And that won’t work here,’ I say. ‘Because there are no similar cases.’
‘Exactly. Kid goes missing, ransom demand, kidney returned, ransom increased, consultant kidnapped…’ She waves her diet soda at me. ‘Similar kid abducted, parents taken, photos stolen, and so on. You won’t find a single case that resembles this one.’
She takes a sip from her straw. I scratch my chin.
‘Well, that tells us something,’ I say. ‘We’re looking for a perp who’s nothing like anyone we’ve caught before. What’s the exact opposite of a typical kidnapper?’
‘Rich,’ Thistle says.
True. Most crime comes from necessity, so most criminals are poor.
‘College educated,’ I say.
She nods. ‘Parents still happily married.’
‘Maybe with a family of his own.’
‘Middle-aged. Female?’
I think back to the man in the parking lot. I didn’t get a good look at him, but he was big. ‘No. The guy who took the ransom was definitely male.’
‘But that could’ve been an accomplice.’
‘A duo?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Okay. A rich, smart, middle-aged duo, one of whom is male.’
‘Married to each other, maybe?’ Thistle says.
‘Husband and wife team?’ I think it over. ‘Maybe they’re looking to spice up their sex life and pay off their mortgage at the same time.’
‘This is good.’ Thistle smiles. Her teeth shine like piano keys. ‘We work well together.’
‘It’s good if we’re right,’ I say. ‘Otherwise we’re just leading ourselves further off-track.’
Our meals arrive. Rare meat doesn’t take long to cook. My steak is thick, bloody, alone in the centre of the plate.
Thistle holds up her glass. ‘Cheers.’
I clink mine against hers. ‘Cheers.’
Thistle stabs a lump of lamb with her fork and swallows it. ‘So how did you end up consulting for the FBI?’
Well, Luzhin caught me eating a mugger, but I was able to blackmail him because of his cocaine addiction.
‘I used to love The X-Files as a kid,’ I says.
She laughs. ‘Me too! I used to dye my hair to look like Scully.’
I smile, picturing her as an ultra-serious young black girl with dyed red hair. ‘Well, I dropped out of high school, and you can’t join the FBI without a college degree. But I still wanted to help, so here I am.’
‘Why did you drop out of high school?’
This part’s true, and therefore harder to explain. ‘I moved into a group home when I was one. But no foster family took me right away, and the older I got, the harder it was. Eventually I was sixteen, old enough to look after myself, so I had to move out of there, but I had no home to move into. I was already flipping burgers at McDonald’s on the weekends, but that wasn’t enough to pay rent, so I had to leave school to work there full time. That lasted until I turned twenty-one—because the minimum wage is higher for adults they had to let me go or pay me more, so they let me go. What?’
Thistle is staring at me. Her head is tilted slightly, like she’s looking at one of those pictures that could be a vase or could be two faces.
Have I said too much? Has she realised what I am?
‘Scary Timmy?’ she says.
Suddenly I’m staring back at her. I can’t believe this.
Reese Thistle. RT.
‘Arty?’ I say.
CHAPTER 15
If you have me, you want to share me. If you share me, you don’t have me. What am I?
Only once before have I met someone who grew up in the group home alongside me. His name was Jared Carter. I didn’t know him well—as a child he was always hovering at the edge of the game or the argument, listening but not engaging.
Unlike the rest of us, his parents weren’t dead, as far as anyone knew.
He’d been delivered to the home as a baby by someone who claimed to have found him in a shopping cart—hence his last name . The only time I remember speaking to him was after I’d found some undeveloped film in the trash, and he showed me how to make a pinhole camera out of a cardboard box. But we had no developing fluid, so we couldn’t look at the pictures we took.
One time a bunch of us were playing tag and some kid tagged Jared and said, ‘You’re it.’ Jared chased the others around in circles for a little while, but he’d never played before and wasn’t very good. He didn’t know how to corner a bunch of players so you could be sure to get one of them. He hadn’t learned how to feint one way so his prey would dodge the other, into his waiting hands.
After a while the kids got bored of being chased so clumsily, and decided that someone else should be ‘it’. But no one volunteered, and an argument broke out. Eventually a kid named Stephen turned to Jared and said, ‘Just fucking run faster, faggot!’ and punched him in the side of the head.
Another kid ran over, and I remember being surprised, him not seeming like the type to break up a fight—but he didn’t; he just started hitting Jared as well. Soon a whole bunch of kids were beating on him.
He never fought back, but he never cried, either. It was like his brain went somewhere else while his body was getting battered.
There were too many of them for me to intervene physically, and I couldn’t afford to lose my whole social group by ratting them out to the carers. So I ran to my room and sat on my bunk, and waited for the noise to stop.
It took a long time.
As an adult, Jared Carter shot his wife six times then ran out of bullets. When the police showed up twenty minutes later they found him on his knees on the kitchen floor, fist clenched around the barrel of the gun, striking her corpse with the butt over and over and over. It was as if he’d stored up every punch anyone had ever landed on him, and now he was letting them all out again.
His baby daughter was crying in front of the TV. She ended up at the same group home he grew up in. And Jared ended up on death row, which is where I found him. His bones are buried in my backyard—this was before I discovered that you could use sulphuric acid to dissolve them.
And now I’m faced with Reese Thistle—or, as I used to know her, Arty.
‘I can’t believe this!’ she’s saying. ‘You’re here!’
I know how she feels. The more I look at her face, the more I recognise the girl I used to know. The birthmark on her neck. The slight angle of her dark eyes.
‘Arty,’ I say again, the name unfamiliar on my tongue after so long.
She giggles. ‘No one’s called me that in years.’
‘You’re a cop,’ I say.
‘I know!’ she says. ‘And you’re…’ She hesitates as she realises there isn’t a word for what I am. ‘You’re you!’
‘Can’t argue with that.’
Arty works for the FBI. It’s weird enough seeing childhood acquaintances as adults. Weirder still to see them in positions of authority. Doctors, cops, politicians.
‘What are the chances?’ Thistle asks. ‘Of us running into one another again after all this time?’
‘One in a million, probably,’ I say. ‘Although, we live in the same city, and we’re about the same age, and—’ Something she said before finally registers. ‘Wait, did you just call me “Scary Timmy”?’
Thistle clears her throat. ‘Uh, yeah. Some of the other kids, they used to call you that.’
That was surprisingly astute of them.
‘God, I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘We were cruel to you, weren’t we?’
I shrug. ‘I think everyone was cruel to everyone.’
‘That’s no excuse. I shouldn’t have stolen your meatloaf that time. You remember?’
‘I shouldn’t have beat you up after,’ I say.
‘Hey, that’s not how it was. I beat you up.’
I frown. ‘That makes no sense. You stole my meatloaf, so I hit you—’
‘And I hit you back, harder.’
‘Yeah, but then I pulled your hair, and—’
She laughs. ‘I kicked your ass, that’s what I did.’
The woman from the next table is staring at us again. I clear my throat.
‘Hey, do you remember Jared Carter?’ Thistle asks.
I pretend to think about it. ‘Vaguely. Why?’
She tells me about the murder of his wife and his death sentence. Then she asks me if I remember Buzz Ritchie. He’d owned the only complete deck of playing cards in the home, so he’d been popular. As an adult he moved to Miami, and drank himself to death at a friend’s thirtieth birthday party.
Do I remember Greta Chase? Little girl, obsessed with Pocahontas. She’s in prison now. Got busted with almost twenty ounces of blow. The cops thought she was dealing, but could only prove possession.
How about Stephen Stattelis? He was the one who punched Jared in that game of tag. Two years ago he lost forty grand at a blackjack table in Atlantic City and tried to earn it back as a male prostitute before getting stabbed to death by a rival’s pimp.
‘Looks like we’re the only ones who turned out okay,’ she says.
It’s just you, I want to say. I’m worse than all of them.
‘Why were you at the group home?’ I ask. ‘What happened to your folks?’
She gives me that look that people get when they’ve explained something a thousand times before, and know exactly what reaction they’ll get. ‘They couldn’t afford to keep me. So my father drove off a bridge. Killed himself, and my mom. Tried to kill me too—I was in the back seat.’
My childhood doesn’t sound so bad compared to that. I’ve always assumed that I was fated to be this way—a man turned me into a killer by slaughtering my parents in front of me. I had no choice. It’s not my fault.
But Thistle isn’t a killer. She had it equally tough, and she turned out fine.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, like you’re supposed to.
‘It’s okay,’ she says. ‘I don’t remember it. So, they were killed when the car hit the water. But I was fine. He put on my seatbelt, can you believe that? Why would you put a seatbelt on if you were going to—anyway. The police boats got to the car less than a minute after it sank, and there was still air in the cabin, so they got me out. But there were no foster families with room for me, so I got dumped at the group home. I guess I’m lucky the cops didn’t just leave me in the evidence locker.’
I chuckle.
She smiles. ‘Thanks. People never laugh at that joke.’
‘Then why do you keep telling it?’
‘I figured someday I’d meet someone who would. And here you are.’
‘Here I am. You left when you were eleven, right?’
‘Ten. A couple adopted me, put me through school—they still live in Houston.’
‘Is your adopted dad a cop?’
She raises an eyebrow. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Most folks wouldn’t let their only daughter join the force,’ I say. ‘They think it’s too dangerous.’
‘Who says I’m their only daughter?’
‘Most folks don’t adopt if they already have kids.’
She laughs. ‘You’re just full of stats, aren’t you?’
‘But I’m right, right?’
‘Half right. My adopted mom was a cop, not my dad. Houston PD.’
‘I don’t suppose you asked her if she knew the guard on Annette Hall’s gate? The ex-cop?’
She smiles. ‘Actually, yes. Couldn’t help myself. According to the company that runs the gated community, his name is Morris Brattan. Mom says he was discharged in 2002 after one too many allegations of sexual harassment.’
‘Did she know him?’
‘Not personally. It was a big department.’
I’ve finished picking the last scraps of meat from my steak. The bone is as clean and white as an elephant’s tusk.
‘You want some of this?’ Thistle asks, gesturing at the remain
s of her salad.
‘Sure,’ I say. I never turn down free food.
She slides her plate across to me.
‘Can I ask you something?’
‘You can ask,’ she says. ‘I might not tell you.’
‘Why did you leave your husband?’
Her hand, which has been fiddling with one of her ear studs, pauses.
‘Funny,’ she says. ‘People usually assume he left me, not the other way around.’
That never even occurred to me. I can’t imagine anyone leaving her. ‘Because he was a player?’
‘Because he was handsome. He had options. But I was the one who left.’
‘So what went wrong?’
She stares down at the table, thinking. ‘This is going to sound awful, but he wasn’t all that interesting.’
‘I’ve heard worse things.’
‘We met in college, and I fell in love with his arms, his cheekbones, his butt—and his wallet. It’s embarrassing, but he tried to impress me with his money, and it worked. He bought me tickets to see all my favourite bands. Jewellery too, sometimes. And fancy food.’
‘Hell, I would have married him,’ I say. ‘How did he get rich?’
‘His parents gave him a big allowance, and one year he gave most of it to a friend who was starting up a marketing company. When it took off, he sold his shares for about five times what he’d paid for them.’
‘Smart,’ I said.
‘Lucky. It could easily have gone the other way, and he was honest enough to admit it. Anyway, by the time I realised that he talked a lot but didn’t have much to say, we were already married.’
A cherry tomato bursts in my mouth.
‘I found myself working longer hours to avoid going home. Inviting friends over for dinner every single night, so I didn’t have to talk to him, but all they wanted to talk about was what a nice house we had. When no one was available, I’d turn on the TV. Didn’t even matter what was on—I’d watch until he went to bed.
‘For a long time, I planned on staying with him anyhow. I told myself I was lucky. But I just kept thinking that he’d had it so easy, with his rich parents and good looks and smart friends. He would never have survived what I went through. And that made it tough to respect him. To love him.’