“He was wearing a ski mask.”
She pounded the steering wheel. “Shit.”
“Don’t rule it out. I saw his eyes.”
She shoved the car in gear, sped out of the lot. She shifted into second, heart ramming in her chest. “They’ll take you to Marin General. Go with the ambulance and I’ll meet you there, Tony. You’ll be okay. I’ll be there as soon as I can. Call me if you need to. Hang in there.”
There was an explosion of voices in the background.
Jamie listened as paramedics shouted questions and Tony tried to respond.
A kid. Christ.
Why was he in her yard?
Jamie ended the call and tossed the phone on the seat beside her.
Marchek had been at her house that very night. While she was out walking the streets, Marchek was stalking her house. Jamming the pedal to the floor, she sped toward the hospital.
Marchek was at her house.
He’d come for her.
Chapter 30
Jamie and Tony didn’t speak during the ride home.
The young boy sat silent in the backseat.
The doctor had discharged him from the hospital with a clean bill of health. Social services had been notified, and Jamie had agreed to keep him until other arrangements could be made. The other option was to send him to the jail for the night. She couldn’t do that. Wouldn’t. He was only a kid. And despite the fact that she had no experience, she could manage.
Surveillance on Marchek had failed. They never saw him leave his building. He wasn’t answering his door. Patrol had confirmed that there was only one door out of the building, which meant Marchek had gotten by them somehow.
If it really was Marchek who’d been at her house… But it had to be, didn’t it?
And where was Marchek now?
Jamie glanced in the rearview mirror. The boy looked somewhere around seven, but he was probably older. She knew from experience that homeless kids were usually small for their age. And she knew he was homeless. There was no doubt about that—his uncut, lice-ridden hair, his dirty face. Plus, he ate two entire hospital dinners. Any kid who’d spent time with a family that fed him mac ‘n’ cheese wouldn’t have touched the gray turkey and soggy green beans.
When they got home, Jamie found a pair of sweatpants and a long-sleeved T-shirt for him. “They’ll be too big, but at least they’re clean.”
The boy held them to his chest, looking around.
“I’d like to know your name if you’re going to stay here. I don’t want to call you ‘it.’”
The boy didn’t break a smile. He glanced at Tony, then back to her, wide-eyed.
“I’m Jamie. And this is Tony.”
The kid said nothing, didn’t move. Only his gaze hopped back and forth between them like the ball in a Ping-Pong match. “Are you still hungry?”
Silence.
She started to back toward the kitchen and the boy watched her.
“He ate a lot at the hospital,” Tony said.
Jamie remembered a victim from her first year in Sex Crimes—a homeless girl of about thirteen who had been repeatedly raped and sodomized, then left for dead. She’d lived—or rather, nearly died—in some discarded cardboard boxes until trash day came and the garbage men found her and called the police.
After her initial exam, during which she’d had to be strapped down so the doctors could look at her, she ate her way through roughly three times more food than Jamie ate in a day. Then, she’d thrown up and started again. The doctors had forced her to slow down for fear that her shrunken stomach would burst from the pressure. This kid didn’t look as bad as she had, but Jamie thought a little more food might do the trick. Actually, what she had in mind was better than food.
She pulled open the fridge and searched for her stash of soda. She found one Coke and one Pepsi left and set them on the counter. She dug in the bottom drawer of her freezer for the emergency candy supply. Inside was a half dozen assorted candy bars—Butterfinger, Snickers, Twix, and a couple of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.
She emptied the bag on the counter beside the sodas, pushed the freezer closed with her backside.
When she looked up, the boy was halfway across the room. Tony leaned against the doorway and watched.
“I’ve only got two,” she said to Tony, motioning to the sodas. “You want one?”
He gave her a wry smile. “No, thanks. I’m going to stick with water for a while.”
She pulled a stool to the counter and cracked open a Pepsi. Then, she took a long drag on the soda, making as much noise as possible. “Oh, sorry. Do you want one?” she asked the boy.
He hesitated, but made no move to come closer.
She pushed the other can toward him. “Here you go.”
The boy watched her. Jamie continued drinking her soda as she fingered the candy bars.
From the corner of her eye, she could see the boy inch toward her. He stopped at the counter without touching the drink.
“It’s all yours.”
He picked it up and mumbled what she thought was “Thanks,” then gave his full attention to the sweating red can.
Okay, so he did talk. This was good.
Using two long, dirty fingernails, the boy popped the top open and lifted it with both hands as though it were too precious to hold with one. After his first, quiet sip, he seemed to relax.
Jamie laughed. “Good, huh?”
Nodding, he set his gaze on the candy bars.
“You can have one of those too.”
His eyes widened.
“But you have to tell us your name.”
The boy frowned.
“I need to know who you are. I can’t have a stranger living in my house. And I know somewhere there’s someone who’s probably really worried about you.”
The boy looked at the Coke can and blinked, his dark eyes glassy.
“I bet your mom’s missing you.”
He shook his head. “No, she ain’t.” He straightened his back, stood proud. “She left.”
“Okay, then someone else. You can tell me who.”
Tears welled in his eyes. “I don’t know if now is a good time,” he whispered.
“A good time for what?” Jamie asked.
The boy said nothing.
Jamie glanced at Tony, who shrugged. What did they know about kids? “It seems like a good time for a candy bar,” Jamie said. “I think my favorite is Twix. Is that yours?”
He shook his head quickly.
She lifted another. “Snickers?”
He hesitated, then shook his head again. “Reese’s,” he said, pronouncing it “Rees-ees.”
She lifted the peanut butter cups, cold to her touch, pushed the package toward him. “There are two in there—one for each name. You tell me your first name, you get one. Another for your last name.”
His gaze narrowed. “You going to call those folks with the foster houses?”
She glanced at Tony, then back to the boy. “Tonight you can stay with me and Tony.”
She didn’t want to promise anything else. If the boy knew what a foster home was, he’d been in one. And that meant there might not be a family waiting for him.
“Zephenaya.”
Jamie said nothing.
The boy furrowed his brow. “That’s my name.”
“Your first name?”
He nodded. “You can call me Z. That’s what Shay calls me.”
“Shay’s your friend?”
“No,” he said as though not knowing who Shay was made her stupid. “My sister. You know. That’s why I came here.”
Now they were getting somewhere. “Where is Shay?”
“You talked to her—that day was the last time I saw her.”
Child victims weren’t usually handled by Sex Crimes. “How old is she?”
He didn’t answer. Instead he focused on the candy bar and took small drinks from the Coke.
Jamie tore open the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and pushed
them toward Zephenaya. “Here, Z. You can have one.”
He reached in and took one of the brown cups out. Using both hands, he unwrapped it like a present.
“How old are you, Z?”
“Ten,” he said matter-of-factly.
Damn, he was small.
“How old are you?”
Jamie laughed and Z smiled sheepishly.
“She’s almost forty,” Tony called out.
She shot him a glare. “I’m thirty-four, thank you very much.”
“Forty,” Z said. “What’s that come after?”
“Thirty-nine,” Jamie told him.
He nodded slowly, chewing. “What comes after nineteen?”
“Twenty,” Jamie said.
“Twenty,” he repeated. “I forget that one.” Z hesitated a moment. “I got something to tell you.”
“Okay.”
“It’s about Barney.”
Jamie felt her stomach clench. Not trusting herself to speak, she simply nodded.
“I was here when he got hurt.”
“You can tell me what happened.”
He shook his head. “I didn’t do it.”
“Who did?”
“A man. A white man with a knife.”
He looked over at Tony. “Wasn’t him, though. Another white man.” He turned to Jamie. “Wasn’t the first time someone been in your yard, neither. Another time a man was looking in your windows, but it wasn’t the same one as hurt the dog.”
Jamie considered who might have been watching her house, suppressed a shudder. “The one with the knife, what did he look like?”
“Light hair and kinda small. He came around the house when I was getting ready for bed. It was real late. I was tired and my eyes get all itchy. I’d gone to take a—to do some business by the tree and he came around the house.”
The description sounded like Scott Scanlan. “He had a knife?”
Z nodded. “A big one—long like they have in the scary movies. He was right by the garage. I think he was going to steal your car, lady.” He looked around and blinked. “Then your dog came up. The dog didn’t bark or nothing, but I think seeing that dog scared him and he jabbed that knife right into his back.” He blinked hard and licked his lips. “I didn’t move. I stayed real still ’cause I didn’t want him coming at me with that knife.” He started to quiver.
Jamie put a hand on his shoulder.
He looked up, blinked twice.
“Then what happened?”
“He went around the house and took off in his car. Your dog followed him, but he wasn’t doing too good—limping real bad and bleeding. He went up to the porch, and I didn’t know what to do ’cause I didn’t want you to know I was living back there.”
Jamie blinked at this news. Living back there? For how long?
“So, I rang the doorbell and ran.”
Jamie stepped closer to Z, squatted down, so she was below him. “You saved Barney’s life.”
He nodded slowly as a smile took shape on his lips. “I guess I did.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“You think you would recognize that man if you saw him again?”
He pushed out his lower lip, took it in two fingers, and pulled on it lightly. Then, dropping it, he said, “I think so. You got a picture of him?”
“Not yet, but I’m going to get one while you’re getting cleaned up.”
“I’m glad you’re not mad at me that your dog got hurt.”
She shook her head. “Not mad at all. When you see someone you don’t know, the best thing you can do is to hide and keep quiet until he goes away. Or come to an adult like me or Tony.”
Z finished the first peanut butter cup and licked his fingers. Jamie watched him, forcing herself not to cringe at the dirt on those hands. He looked over at the second half.
“Delman.”
Jamie stared, felt her mouth drop open.
“It’s my last name. Zephenaya Delman.”
Jamie couldn’t speak. Heat burned in her neck and cheeks.
“Can I have the other Reese’s now?”
“Sure.”
Z took the candy and peeled off the dark wrapper. Jamie watched him eat. She glanced at Tony, shook her head.
She didn’t want to be the one to tell Zephenaya that she did know his sister.
Shawna Delman had been the first cop raped, more than eight weeks ago.
Three weeks later, Shawna Delman had overdosed on heroin.
No, Jamie couldn’t bring herself to tell Zephenaya that his sister was dead.
Chapter 31
Hailey sat at the small, round table at the far end of the main lab on Monday evening, waiting for Sydney.
There had been no sign of Marchek since he had slipped by the surveillance team. Captain Jules had sent express instructions that women officers be especially alert.
Stay in groups of two or three, request a chaperone to your car, one text said.
As if they could possibly do that and work their jobs.
Her father-in-law had gotten wind of the message before Hailey had a chance to call John. In typical fashion, Jim sent one of his security people to her house to protect them. Again.
Last week, there were security people at the house because someone made a threat against John.
He worked in the DA’s office.
They got threats all the time.
But this threat specifically named John.
Jim would have probably sent one to the department to hover over Hailey, too, if she’d let him. Which she would not. The girls were safe. That was all that mattered.
John would use Marchek’s attacks as another reason she should quit her job. Be a stay-at-home mom and a legislator’s wife, like Liz.
As if there were any chance in hell…
At least Hailey would have closure on one case today. By all the evidence, at approximately eight-thirty on a Thursday morning, Abby and Hank Dennig had killed each other inside her parked minivan.
Hailey had spent more time than she could afford trying to imagine how two people who had once loved each other could go that far. Homicide had taught her that love and hate were often bedfellows.
Was that where she and John were headed?
In the Dennigs’ case, though, she was making educated guesses. Guesses—educated or not—were not a pleasant process. Without a witness, though, there was no one to confirm her theories.
Stephanie Rusch worked in the far corner of the lab. She wore a white coat and held a small set of tweezers to separate evidence onto slides for the microscope.
Why would anyone date someone like Scott Scanlan?
It was a stupid question.
Women fell for terrible men all the time.
Sydney crossed the lab, sat down across from Hailey. She flipped papers, pushed them out into a halo of white on the black table. She took a long drink out of a traveler coffee mug that said “Skamania Lodge” and set it down without looking at Hailey.
At Rookie Club dinners, Sydney tended to sit with the CSU techs and people like Natasha in Personal Crimes—crimes where no one died. She stayed clear of the women who worked the violent crimes, like Homicide or Sex Crimes.
Even in their close group of women, there were still divisions—by department, by class of crime. Maybe it came down to how dirty the job was.
In that case, Homicide was about as dirty as you could get, and Hailey tried not to be bothered by being a bottom-feeder in the world of police work.
The irony was that even with her line of work, the nastiest people she’d met were not the murderers, but the people at her father-in-law’s campaign functions.
Even the thought of him now made her anxious to get Jim off her back. Things were tense enough between she and John with him working so closely on his father’s campaign and beginning to think about the timing of his own.
But Jim getting involved with her cases at work was making her insane.
She needed
a break from John’s family. Maybe from John. She thought of their girls. She wanted so badly for them to grow up with both parents. She would hang in there. Things would get better. The campaign would be over soon. The Dennigs’ case would be done.
With that case closed, she prayed she’d be able to put Natasha’s case to bed. Things were adding up. Roger had gone out to Jamie’s house and taken some casts of the footprints and tire tracks from the boy’s attack. They had another warrant for Marchek’s house, and she knew they were closing in on him. Once they had him, she was confident he’d spill everything he saw the night Natasha was killed, if only to gain some leniency in his own case. Buying favors was an ugly part of the system.
“Okay, let’s start with hair,” Sydney said, her ponytail bouncing over her shoulder as she reached for the first report.
Hailey opened her notebook, pen poised.
“We found nineteen hair samples—fifteen human, four dog. We were able to eliminate eleven of them to the victims and the children. And the dogs.”
“You’ll keep the others on file?”
“Until storage bursts, absolutely.”
The storage of evidence—especially long-term—was a growing issue within the department. Proper preservation required dry temperatures with low humidity. Blood and tissue samples, semen, and anything living, necessitated refrigeration. The lab had a huge walk-in refrigerator, but it was already near capacity—and had been for close to three years. Even after cases were tried and convictions made, evidence had to be held in case of appeal.
“We got forty partial prints from the inside of the car alone. Another sixteen from the outside.”
That wasn’t many for the outside of a car. Hailey would have expected more, especially with kids. “Washed?”
“Probably within ten days, and some rain, too, I’d guess,” Sydney said. “Then, there’s the rest of it.” She pushed the report to Hailey, who scanned the list of other items taken from the car—fiber samples, carpets, threads from another two dozen places that had to be individually sorted and identified under the microscope.
A fully staffed lab could spend weeks on a single case. And from the look of it, the two victims had killed each other. Hailey had found, more often than not, if it looked like a duck and walked like a duck…
The Rookie Club Thriller series Box Set Page 21