The Innocent

by David Baldacci

  He examined the door and the framing around it. “Steel on steel. Tough stuff. But there’s always a way.”

  “What kind of Fed are you?” she asked, her eyebrows hiked.

  “Not the career-kissing type obviously. Stay here.”

  “Robie, you can’t just—”

  He drew his pistol, fired three times, and the trio of locks fell out onto the sidewalk.

  “Holy shit!” exclaimed Vance as she jumped back. They heard running feet, as the other two agents were no doubt coming to find out what had happened.

  “An alarm will probably go off,” said Robie calmly. “You might want to call the cops and tell them not to bother.” Before she could say anything, he opened the door and stepped inside.

  No alarm went off.

  Robie did not take that as a positive sign. He kept his gun out, felt for the light switch, hit it, and the pawnshop was quickly draped in weak light. Robie had been in pawnshops before and this looked pretty typical. Watches, lamps, rings, and an assortment of other items were stacked neatly in bins or inside glass cabinets. All had tags with numbers written on them. The man’s military background, thought Robie. You never lost that precision. Or at least most didn’t.

  But the floorboards smelled of urine and the ceiling was blackened with decades of grime. Robie didn’t know what the place had been before it was a pawnshop, but it had not worn well.

  There was a cash register cage. Robie noted the bulletproof glass. There were scratches on the glass and what looked to be two dents from gunshots. Upset customers or people looking to rip the guy off. Ex-military Rick Wind probably dealt with that with his own hardware. Robie figured there were at least two guns in that cage somewhere.

  He looked toward the ceiling corners and saw the camera mounted in one. It had a direct shot of the cage. That might come in handy.

  Robie moved forward, doing visual sweeps. He heard nothing except the sounds of life outside. A breeze pushed through the open door, rustling lampshades and lifting tags on the merchandise. When he heard footsteps behind him he turned to see Vance there, gun out, her expression seriously pissed off.

  “You’re an idiot,” she hissed.

  “I told you to stay outside,” he whispered back.

  “You don’t tell me to do anything. Not unless you want your ass—”

  Robie put a finger to his lips. He’d heard it before her.

  A squeak. And then another.

  He pointed to the back of the shop. She nodded, her angry expression gone.

  Robie led the way, turning down one aisle, and rode it back to a pair of swinging doors with a gap between. The doors were moving slightly, but that was not the source of the squeak.

  He looked at Vance, pointed to himself and then the door, and then motioned to the right. She nodded in understanding and took up position on his right flank.

  Robie lifted one foot, kicked one of the swing doors open and bulled inside, his gun making arcs and ready to fire as he stepped to the left. Vance followed on the right and cleared that part of the room.

  Nothing.

  She looked down and grimaced as the gray critter skittered into a darkened corner.

  “Rats.”

  Robie looked down and saw the animal’s tail before it whisked out of sight.

  “I don’t think rats squeak like that,” said Robie.

  “Then what?” she asked.

  “That.”

  He pointed to one darkened corner of the room on the left side.

  Vance looked that way and caught a breath.

  The man was hanging upside down from the exposed rafter.

  They approached. His body was swinging slightly. And the rope was squeaking against the wooden beam. Robie looked at the slit between the pair of swing doors.

  “Acted like a funnel with the front door open,” he said. “With the wind outside. Got the body to move a bit.”

  Vance looked at the dead man. He was black.

  And green. And purple.

  “Is that Rick Wind?” asked Robie.

  “Who the hell can tell?” replied Vance. “He’s been dead a while.”

  “Didn’t kill himself. Hands are bound. Not strangulation.” He touched the man’s arm. “And he didn’t kill his wife and kid. Condition of the body means he was dead before they were. Rigor’s long since passed.”

  Robie bent over and looked at the man’s open mouth. “And there’s something else.”

  “What?”

  “It seems they cut out his tongue.”

  CHAPTER

  29

  ROBIE HAD LEFT Agent Vance to deal with the new body in the pawnshop. They had confirmed that it was Rick Wind. The cause of death was not obvious and would probably require a medical examiner to figure out. They had checked the shop’s surveillance camera. Someone had taken the DVD. Robie was now sitting in his apartment typing on his computer. He was not working the murders of Jane Wind and her ex-husband. He had his mind on something else, at least for now.

  He typed in the name Gerald Dixon. He got too many hits, because it was too common a name. He switched tactics, going from Google to a more exclusive database to which he had access. The hits that came back were more manageable. He refined his search, utilizing other databases. It finally narrowed to one name. Robie looked at the street address. It did not match the one that Julie had gone to in the cab.

  But one line on the man’s record caught his attention.

  Foster care provider.

  The guy and his wife took in foster kids.

  He wrote down the address and then checked his tracking device. Its range was long enough for it to reach here. Julie had not moved from the crummy hotel. That seemed unusual unless she was afraid of being spotted. In any event, she apparently was no longer interested in leaving town.

  He wondered what had changed her mind. Was it the house where she had stopped? Robie was going to find out. But he had somewhere else to go first.

  Gerald Dixon lived in a two-story duplex in a lousy neighborhood. When Robie knocked on the door it took a long time to get a response, and he heard noises inside that bespoke of frenzied activity. When the guy finally opened the door Robie noted the crimson patches on his cheeks, the bloodshot eyes, and the smell of breath freshener that shot like a cannonball from his mouth.

  The idiot’s been slapping himself to get sober and sucking on Listerine to hide the booze smell. The foster care standards must be plummeting in this country.

  “Yeah?” the man said in an unfriendly tone.

  “Gerald Dixon?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  Robie flashed his badge. “I’m with D.C. Internal Affairs.”

  Dixon took a step back. He was an inch shorter than Robie but unhealthily thin. Most of his hair was gone, though he couldn’t have been much over forty. He had the pale, translucent skin and jerky manner of someone whose body and mind had been substance-abused to the point of no return.

  “Internal Affairs. Ain’t that for cops?”

  “It’s for a lot of things,” said Robie. “Including your situation. May I come in?”

  “Why?”

  “To talk about Julie.” It was Robie’s gut instinct that the girl had used her real first name.

  Dixon’s face screwed up. “If you find her you tell her she better get her butt back here. If she ain’t here I don’t get paid.”

  “So she’s gone missing?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Can I come in?”

  Dixon looked put out, but he nodded, stepped back, and let Robie pass through.

  The inside of the house looked no better than the outside. They sat on tattered chairs. Baskets of dirty laundry were piled everywhere, but Robie had a notion that before he knocked on the door all the clothes had been strewn on the floor. He also noted papers and the edge of a beer can sticking out from under a chair. He wondered what else was under there. His seat was very hard. He didn’t think it was the cushion.

  A
small, curvy woman wearing tight jeans and an even tighter blouse came out of the back, wiping her hands on her pants leg. She looked to be at most thirty. She had mousy brown hair, a heavily made up face, and the air of someone who was totally disconnected from reality. She lit up a cigarette and eyed Robie.

  “Who’s he?”

  “Some dude from Internal Affairs,” growled Dixon.

  Robie flipped open his badge. “I’m here to talk about Julie. And smoking around our children is prohibited,” he added.

  The woman quickly stubbed the cigarette out on a tabletop. “Sorry,” she said without sounding sorry in the least.

  The woman snapped, “She’s gone. Run off. Little shit never appreciated what we gave her.”

  “And you are?” asked Robie.

  “Patty. Gerry and me are married.”

  “How many foster kids do you have currently?”

  “Two not counting that shit Julie,” said Patty.

  “I would prefer if you wouldn’t refer to one of the children under our responsibility as a shit,” Robie said firmly.

  Patty glanced at her husband. “Is he with the foster care people?”

  “He told me Internal Affairs,” said Gerald, looking betrayed.

  “I’m with the government,” said Robie. “That’s all you two need to know. So where are the other kids?”

  Patty adopted a loving matronly tone. “In school,” she said, smiling. “We send those little angels to school every day, just like we’re supposed to.”

  Robie heard a sound from upstairs. “You have kids of your own?” he asked, glancing upward.

  Gerald and Patty exchanged a nervous glance. He said, “We got two of our own, little ones. Don’t go to school yet. That’s them up there probably reading. They’re real advanced for their ages.”

  “Right. Now about Julie.” He opened a notebook he drew from his jacket. Gerald Dixon’s eyes widened as he saw the revealed weapon. “You’re carrying a gun.”

  “That’s right,” said Robie.

  “I thought this was about foster care,” said Patty.

  “This is about what I say it’s about. And if you two want to stay out of serious trouble I suggest you cooperate fully.”

  Robie had decided he was done playing nice with these idiots. He didn’t have the time or the desire.

  Gerald sat up straighter and Patty sat down next to him.

  Robie said, “Tell me about Julie.”

  “Is she in trouble?” asked Gerald.

  “Tell me about her,” repeated Robie firmly. “Full name, background, how she came to be here. Everything.”

  “Don’t you already know that?” asked Patty.

  Robie looked at her with a face of granite. “I’m here to confirm the information we already have, Mrs. Dixon. And please keep in mind the request I made for cooperation and then focus on the possible consequences of not cooperating.”

  Gerald sharply elbowed his wife and snapped, “Just shut up and let me handle this.” He turned back to Robie. “Her name is Julie Getty. She came here, oh, about three weeks ago.”

  “Age?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “Why was she placed in foster care?”

  “Her parents couldn’t take care of her.”

  “Yeah, that I get. Why couldn’t they care for her? Were they dead?”

  “No, don’t think so. See, the agency people don’t really tell you that much about that stuff. They just give you kids and you take care of them.”

  Patty added quickly, “Just like they were our own.”

  “Right. Like you said, not counting that shit Julie.”

  Patty colored and looked down. “Well, I didn’t mean it exactly like that.”

  Gerald added, “Truth is, Julie could be a real piece of work. Speaks her mind too much for my taste.”

  “And so she’s not here anymore?”

  “Run off in the middle of the night.”

  Patty said, “We’ve been so worried.”

  “And you of course reported this, right?”

  Gerald and Patty looked at each other. He said, “Well, we were hoping she’d come back.”

  “So we were waiting for a bit,” added Patty.

  “Has she run off before?”

  “Not this time, well, except for last night.”

  Robie looked up from his notes. “This time? Was she placed with you before?”

  “Three times.”

  “What happened those times?”

  “Don’t know exactly,” said Gerald. “I think her parents got her back. Remember the caseworker telling me Julie’s mom and dad would do that. But then there she’d be back in foster care.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “Last night right after I served her a delicious dinner,” said Patty in a syrupy tone that made Robie want to pull his gun and fire a shot just over her head.

  “And when did you discover her missing?”

  “This morning when she didn’t come down.”

  “So you don’t check on your beloved ‘wards’ at night?”

  “She was very private,” said Gerald hastily. “We didn’t like to butt in.”

  Robie pulled the empty beer can out from under the chair. “I can see that.” He waved his hand in the air. “And you might want to open some windows. Get the reefer smell out.”

  “We don’t do drugs,” said Gerald, feigning astonishment.

  “And I don’t know whose that is,” added Patty, pointing at the beer can.

  “Right,” Robie said dismissively. “Have you heard from Julie since she left?”

  They both shook their heads.

  “Any reason to believe someone would want to hurt her?”

  The Dixons looked genuinely surprised by this question. Gerald said, “Why, has something happened to her?”

  “Just answer the question. Anybody come around here you didn’t know? Suspicious cars?”

  Gerald said, “No, nothing like that. What the hell has she got herself involved in? Gangs?”

  Patty put a hand up to her ample bosom. “Do you think we might be in danger?”

  Robie closed his notebook. “I certainly wouldn’t rule out the possibility. Some folks don’t care who they hurt.” He had to fight back a smile.

  He rose, lifted up the seat cushion, and pulled out a baggie of coke, some vials containing a brown liquid, two capped syringes, and elastic strips used to pop the blood vessels to the surface for ease of injection.

  “And next time try locating your pharmacy somewhere more private.”