by J. D. Robb
She gestured toward the photos still on the table.
“I have nothing, nothing more to say to you. If you insist I stay in this horrible room, I want my lawyer.”
“You’re free to go,” Eve said easily. “Peabody, why don’t you show Ms. Jones the way out.”
“I see the door.” Spinning to it, she rushed out and away.
“Jesus.” Peabody blew out a long breath. “Intense. Is that really what you think happened? Because it’s not only plausible, but convincing.”
“It’s one way. It’s most of the way. I haven’t got all the threads knotted, but it’s most of the way.”
“Their brother killed the girls.”
“He’s the one who fits, and he fits just fine for all the reasons I hit her with.”
“Yeah, convincing. But do you really think they killed their baby brother? I mean, who went to Africa if he didn’t? Because she’s right, it’s documented.”
“I don’t know, but we’re going to find out.”
“That’s why you said to ask Owusu to see if anybody in the village had a photograph taken of Jones—the younger—when he was there.”
“Any kind of identification’s out since he’s cremated and scattered. He—whoever he was—took pictures. So I’m betting there’s some photos of him. One thing I do know after that little session. However it went down, however the last of the threads knot, she didn’t know.”
“That’s what I think, but you said—”
“I got a rise out of her, didn’t I? Got the shock and outrage, and little bits of information that fill in some blanks. What I didn’t get, once we got rolling, was fear or nerves. Guilt, some guilt over the girls, and I’d have looked at her sideways if I hadn’t gotten some of that. But if I’m right, and little brother hooked with Shelby, and that connection forged the rest of the chain, she didn’t know.”
“But . . . then the Africa bit? Are you saying just a coincidence?”
“Hell no. She’s got another brother, doesn’t she? She’s got a partner. Raised traditional—old traditions. Big brother, head of their little family. Yeah, it could play. We need him in here, Peabody.”
“I’ll make it happen.”
When she started to rise, Eve’s ’link signaled. She pulled it out, glanced at the readout, arched her brows. Then punched for the text. “Son of a bitch. Sebastian came through. My faith in humanity is . . . about where it was a minute ago. I’ve got a meet with DeLonna.”
“No shit? When?”
“Now. Let’s move.”
The bar at the purple moon glittered with stars. More stars twinkled in the ceiling and would, Eve imagined, sprinkle light on dancers who took to the floor when the place was open.
For now its purple booths and silver tables stood empty.
The couple who stood in front of the glittery bar turned when Eve came in.
The man, rangy in good jeans and a white shirt, held both hands of the woman with him. He had an excellent face of strong bones, hard chin, framed by an artful tangle of dreads. Eyes green and hard as the chin watched Eve resentfully as she crossed the room with Peabody.
The woman looked up at the man who said something in an urgent undertone. She only shook her head.
“It’s important, baby,” she said, gave his hands a squeeze, then pulled hers away to stand on her own.
Eve doubted she’d have recognized the skinny, not quite formed DeLonna in the curvy, exotic beauty.
She’d grown into herself, Eve thought, and knew how to make the most of what she had. The short, spiky cap of hair gave her face a lift, made the most of big, slanted eyes of rich chocolate.
She’d painted her lips stoplight red, and wore the same color in a short, snug dress.
“Lieutenant Dallas.” Her voice was smoke.
“That’s right.” To keep it smooth, Eve held up her badge. “Detective Peabody. DeLonna Jackson?”
“It’s Lonna. Just Lonna. Lonna Moon. This is my man, Derrick Stevens. This is our place.”
“It’s a nice place.”
Derrick angled himself between Lonna and Eve. “She doesn’t have to talk to you.”
“Derrick.”
“You don’t have to do this.”
“Oh, baby, you know I do. We’ve got a life, Derrick and me,” she said to Eve, stepping to the side to stand unshielded. “We’ve got a place, and a life that’s a long way from what was. He worries about me going back there.”
“We’re not here to bring you trouble.”
“The trouble was already there,” Lonna said to Derrick before he could speak. “It’s hard to know it, but now I do. We should sit down. We can get you a drink. Derrick, I could use a fizzy water. How about some fizzy water all around?”
“That’d be great,” Eve told her, and went with her to a booth. Eve and Peabody slid into one side. “You were friends with Shelby Stubacker.”
“Best friends ever. Shelby, Mikki, T-Bone. I think I’d have faded away like air without them. Shelby and Mikki, they’re dead, aren’t they? Sebastian didn’t say, not right out, but I knew when we heard about . . . about what they found in The Sanctuary, I knew. I thought they just left me, and it broke my heart.”
“They didn’t just leave you.”
“It’s worse. So much worse knowing that. But it helps, the knowing.”
“You were going to have your own place, your own club—like Sebastian’s—in The Sanctuary.”
“How’d you know that?” Surprised, she stared at Eve when Derrick brought over a tray with tall glasses of water sparkling like the ceiling stars. “It’s all we talked about for days and days when we found out we were moving out. I was so scared, but I couldn’t admit it. Scared at the thought of being on our own, but excited, too. Best friends ever,” she murmured, and sipped her water when Derrick sat beside her.
“Who helped her get the forged documents, the paperwork to get out?”
“You know about that, too? I don’t know, not for certain. Shelby didn’t always tell us everything. She was the captain. She had power, but she had responsibilities. She said things like that.”
“She developed a relationship with Montclair Jones. The younger brother. Sexual?”
On a sigh, Lonna tipped her head to Derrick’s shoulder. “She didn’t see it as sex. She saw it as bartering, as currency. It took me a while to see it as different.” She smiled over at Derrick. “It took some doing for Shelby to draw Monty out. He was a little scared of her, and awful shy, but he was fascinated, too. And he wasn’t smart and straight like Mr. Jones or Ms. Jones. He didn’t seem all that much older than us, though I guess he was. Shelby gave him his first blow job, and was proud of that.”
On a wince, Lonna touched a hand to her heart. “God, that makes her sound awful. You have to understand—”
“I do. She’d been abused, over and over. She learned to survive in a way she thought gave her some control. She was a child who never had a chance to be one.”
“Most of us were.” The first tear slid down Lonna’s cheek.
“Don’t cry, baby.”
“I have to, a little. Shelby never got a chance to be happy, like I did. And Mikki, she was so needy, so angry. But my God, she loved Shelby. Loved her too much, in a way I see now Shelby could never have given back. We followed her, and she gave us direction, she gave us . . . family. We’d hook up with Sebastian’s club sometimes, for fun, for the company. And because you could learn a lot. He said you weren’t going to hassle me about the things I did back then.”
“I won’t. I understand that, too.” To cover it, she shifted her attention to Derrick, just for a moment. “Nobody’s going to hassle Lonna.”
“First time you do, I show you the door.”
“Fair enough. You brought a girl to Sebastian,” she said to Lonna. “This girl.” And laid Merry Wolcovich�
��s photo on the table. “Do you remember?”
“I do. I don’t remember her name, and it turned out she was mean as a snake. But I brought her to Sebastian when I came across some boys giving her trouble. She was giving it back, but they had her outnumbered, so I stepped in.”
“You always do.”
She laughed a little at Derrick’s comment. “I was a fighting fool back then. Shelby taught me how to handle myself, so I pushed right into those boys, went after the meanest one—you can always tell. Take him out, I figured, the rest’ll run off. And that’s how it was. Then I took her to Sebastian because she was alone.”
She ran a finger over the edge of the photo. “She’s one of them, too. In the building.”
“Yes. You tried to help her, but she didn’t stay with Sebastian.”
“Mean as a snake,” Lonna repeated. “But she was just a kid. She hung with us a little while—mostly with Shelby—but she left, and I didn’t see her around anymore.”
“Did she leave before or after Shelby?”
“Oh, let me think about that. It must’ve been after. I snuck back to Sebastian’s a couple times, hoping to find Shelby there, but she wasn’t. It seems to me this girl was, then she wasn’t.”
“Okay. How about this girl.”
At Eve’s signal, Peabody put Shashona’s photo on the table.
“Not one of us,” Lonna said slowly. “Maybe I saw her around—she’s sharp-looking, isn’t she? I wonder . . . did she sing?”
“Yeah.” Connection, Eve thought. “Yeah, she did.”
“That’s it then. Sharp-looking girl, good voice. We sometimes snuck off to Times Square, and I’d sing for the tourists. They’d put money in the box. This girl here, I remember how she came by, sang with me. Just picked up the song—don’t remember which—with the harmony.
“Shelby, Mikki, they couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. T-Bone was okay at it, but he wouldn’t sing out on the street. But this girl stopped—I’d seen her around before, but more up our way, I think. And she’d seen me. I could tell, the way you do.”
“You’d seen her before,” Eve pressed. “Near The Sanctuary?”
“Seems like it. Always with a pack. Girlfriends, laughing, talking, going home or out somewhere. I envied that. She had nice clothes, seems they all did. I hated wearing those hand-me-downs, and I noticed clothes on girls around my age.”
“Then you ran into her in Times Square.”
“That’s right. I was set up with my box, and truth be told Shelby was working the crowd for wallets. Telling the truth, back then it was fun, an adventure. We didn’t have many. But this time, this sharp-looking girl here, she stopped, and we had ourselves a little duet. Then another, before she went off with her friends. I remember because it felt good to sing with somebody, and because I offered her part of the money, and she wouldn’t take it. She said she hadn’t done it for money, but for the song. And damned if she didn’t put five dollars in the box.
“Good, clear voice,” Lonna murmured as she studied the photo. “Gone now, too.”
“She has a grandmother, who raised her, who loved her,” Eve said. “It’s going to mean something to her when we tell her that.”
“Tell her . . . her girl could sure sing, and she had a kindness to her. Lots of girls that age with nice clothes? They’d look down on someone dressed like I was. She didn’t.”
“I’ll tell her. Tell me a little about The Club. Sebastian’s.”
“Well, Sebastian saw we got food. I was getting fed just fine by the Joneses. They saw to it you ate healthy and didn’t go hungry. But some of the girls in The Club would’ve gone hungry without him. You need to know that.”
“Okay.”
“We learned to street snatch, pick pockets, learned a few cons. It was exciting, and I was pretty good at it. I liked having a little secret money of my own, even though it belonged to somebody else. I’d never had my own. Couldn’t do the bjs, and Sebastian wouldn’t have liked it anyway. But I couldn’t do them the way Shelby did, even though she tried to teach me that, too.”
She laughed a little, gave Derrick a wink out of watery eyes. “Not then I couldn’t. I was a little younger, and I told Shelby no way I was doing that. It was nasty. She just laughed, said I should think of it like medicine. Just get it done. But I wouldn’t.”
“Did you ever get caught?”
“Nearly, lots of times. It added to the thrill, I guess. Mr. Jones and Ms. Jones ran things pretty tight, but most of us had had some street time—and I was getting more of it—so we found ways around and through. And we always had each other’s backs.”
“Do you still? Do you know where T-Bone is?”
“He did the same as me, got his name changed. Then he lit out. He wanted to see the world, that’s what he wanted. And he has. He got some education, and that’s thanks to Mr. Jones and Ms. Jones and the rest. He got on a boat, worked on the crew and went all the way to the South Pacific. He’s still seeing the world, and I hope you’ll let him be. We talked after I heard about the girls, and he said he’d come back if I needed. I don’t want him to have to.”
“We’ll let that stand for now. If it turns out he’s needed, I’ll want you to tell him, or give me a way to contact him, to talk to him.”
“I can do that, but he’s probably going to come anyway. We go back. You know how it is when you go back.”
Not as far, Eve thought. But she thought she knew.
“Tell me about when Shelby left.”
“We had it all planned. I still remember being so scared it wouldn’t work, then so happy—and so unhappy—when it did. She got out, she’d set up our place, and would get the rest of us out. I’d have to go. Part of me wanted to so much, and another part just wanted to stay where I knew it was safe. And the new place? It was so nice. I’d never been in such a nice place.
“But she got out, just like she said she would. But then Mikki had to go back to her mother, right on top of it. That wasn’t the plan. We had a meeting—Mikki, T-Bone, and me—and decided Mikki would need to wait it out with her mother for a few days, maybe longer, and we’d wait to hear from Shelby.”
“And you never did.”
“We never did. Now it was just me and T-Bone. And he got in trouble for mouthing off. He was wound up tight—we both were—because he usually knew how to keep a lid on it. He was on restriction and kitchen duty—and they really buttoned down the new place, so it wasn’t easy to slip out like before. But we figured I had to. We had to find Shelby, get some direction.”
She took a long drink now. “I was a skinny little thing. One night after bed check, I climbed out the window of my room. The windows only opened partway, just for that reason, but I wiggled my way out. Then I had to climb down, and I’m lucky I didn’t fall and break my leg, or my neck. Then I ran to the subway. I’d taken Matron’s swipe card out of her purse and I’d have to get it back. I’d have to climb back up, wiggle back in, but all that was for later. In that moment, I was free as a bird, and running to my best friend ever.”
“To The Sanctuary.”
“I took the subway, and I got off at the stop. It’s just a couple blocks to walk, and I ran. I ran, and it was a nice warm night. I remember thinking Shelby would be so surprised to see me. She’d be proud of how I got out the way I did when the new place was so buttoned up. She’d laugh, and we’d laugh, and she’d tell me what to do next. I thought of that. I remember thinking that, and how fast my heart beat.
“And then I don’t remember. It’s all a dark blur. I remember waking up in the morning, in my bed in my room, in the new place. Feeling sick and so tired. And scared, because I wiggled out and climbed down—I was sure I had—but I never remembered climbing back or wiggling in, or laughing with Shelby. And my window was closed tight and locked. I was wearing my uniform pajamas, and I hadn’t been.”
“Do you reme
mber seeing anyone, talking to anyone?”
“I remember just like I told you. Except . . . I had dreams for a while. Dreams where I see myself walking around in there, calling out for Shelby. And everything gets dark, and in the dream I hear someone preaching about cleansing. The mind, the body, the spirit, sort of like what we talked about at The Sanctuary, but not. Cleansing for the bad girl, so . . . she could come home. It’s mixed up. And I was cold, and I was naked, and scared, but I couldn’t scream or run or move. I had that dream a long while.”
She gave a little shudder. Instantly, Derrick put an arm around her, drew her into his side.
“Sometimes in them I hear shouting and yelling. Sometimes I feel like I’m floating, and not scared, just floating away with this soft, soft voice telling me it was all right, to just forget, to just forget.”
“Whose voice?”
“I don’t know. But now I think—” She gripped Derrick’s hand. “Now I know what happened to Shelby and Mikki was going to happen to me. But it didn’t. I don’t know why it didn’t, and how I woke up safe, dressed in my uniform nightgown, in bed with the window tight shut.”
“No one ever asked you about that night?”
“T-Bone. I told him what I remembered, but he figured I’d dreamed it all. That I never climbed down at all. I started to think the same, and I felt awful about it. I’d been a coward and let down my friends. But they’d let me down, too. I held on to that so I wouldn’t feel so ashamed.”
She turned her head toward Derrick, just a little. He brushed his lips over her hair.
“Shelby abandoned me, like everybody, so I wouldn’t care. I’d just get through it, get by. I’d do what I had to do to get through and get by until I was old enough to get out. Nobody was ever going to take me on—scrawny, skinny, odd-looking girl like me. I just had to get through until I could walk out. Then I’d be whoever I wanted to be.”
She finished off her water. “That’s what I did. I changed my name. I didn’t do it legal, Sebastian helped me. If you do it legal, there’s a record. I wanted to just be new, be me. So I was Lonna Moon. I thought it sounded like a singer. It’s all I wanted to be. I did all right. Sang for my supper, and paid the rent singing, waiting tables, whatever. After a while, I didn’t have to wait tables so much. Then I met Derrick. And I’m with Derrick. That’s the best thing I’ve ever been. The only thing I ever want to be.