Jane swallowed hard. “There’s one more thing I have to show you.” Walking to the desk, she slid out the top drawer, removed the ashtray and cigarette pack and dumped the twenty Chesterfield 101 cigarettes on the desk. She gently removed the remaining Chesterfield off the clothesline and tossed into the
pile. Jane took a seat on the end of the bed and confessed what she’d done. Just to make sure he didn’t think she totally sabotaged the original crime scene, she showed him the photo of the cigarette layout in the woods that she captured on her cell phone camera. After a heartfelt
mea culpa
, she could see that Weyler was not thrilled. “Hey, I was pissed-off at Bo for being an asshole. I shouldn’t have done it, but there it is and you can take it to him and tell him what happened.”
Weyler scooped the cigarettes into a pile. “That should go over well,” he said dryly. “The DNA’s completely compromised.”
“They were lying in the snow. It was already compromised.”
“I’ll see if I can sell that excuse,” he said with an edge as he got up with the evidence in hand. “Anything else pertinent to this case that I need to know about?”
Jane figured she was already in enough trouble, it was time to give away the farm. She told Weyler how she followed Bailey to a strip club and watched him hand over an envelope of cash to another man and then disappear.
“Good Christ Almighty, Jane!” Weyler said, his voice rising. “When were you planning on telling me Bailey was working a back end deal?!”
“Soon?” Jane tried to ameliorate the news by informing him of her stripper contact, Ms. Candy Cane, and that she promised to call Jane if Bailey returned.
“And you really think she’s going to call you?”
“I gave her a hundred bucks to buy a new sweater. She seemed impressed enough to return the favor.”
“Jesus, Jane. Have you ever followed any of the rules or gone by the book?”
“I’m sure I have,” she replied, having a difficult time coming up with an example.
“You understand that I’ve got to tell Bo.”
“He won’t know what to do with the information. He’ll either ignore it because it came from me, or he’ll confront Bailey in his erratic manner which will likely compromise the entire
deal that Bailey’s got set up. Either way, the whole thing will blow up.”
“I still have to tell him, Jane.”
Jane nodded. But inside, she thought,
Not if I can get there first.
CHAPTER 26
After reading the thin stack of emails Mollie had given her from Jake, Jane grabbed Jake’s sketchpad and darted downstairs. Sara and Aaron were sitting in the backyard. Jane knocked on Mollie’s bedroom door and tried to open it but it was locked.
“Who is it?!” Mollie yelled with teenage attitude.
“It’s Jane! Open up!”
Mollie opened the door. “Nice shirt. Where do you shop?”
“Let me in.”
“I’m doing prayers.”
“It’s Sunday. Friday evening to Saturday evening is
your
Sabbath…unless of course, you’re jumping back into the Christian saddle?”
“I can do prayers any day of the week,” Mollie said with her back up.
“Are you going to let me in?”
She looked at Jane’s Glock. “Are you gonna shoot me if I don’t?”
“Not fatally,” Jane replied, stone-faced.
When it came to
chutzpah
and banter, the kid had met her Gentile match. “Fine!”
Jane closed the door behind her. “I was reading these emails you printed off. This is really the extent of them?”
“Yeah. Jake didn’t spend a lot of time on the computer or the phone. He liked talking to people face-to-face.”
Jane had already had this confirmed by Hank. She considered how that information could break either way for Bailey’s allegations. If Jake didn’t like to spend time on the computer, maybe he wasn’t obsessing with gay porn. But on the other hand, if he liked one-on-one encounters and he was desperately lonely at home, maybe he was using the Internet to hook up and attain that up close and personal contact with strangers. “Okay…” Jane located the only email that intrigued her. “What did he mean when he wrote you on March 8
th
,
I’m sorry about last night. It’s my fault, not yours. Please don’t think less of me…
”
Mollie snapped the pages out of Jane’s hands and threw them on her bed. “Shut up!”
“You saying that to me or Jake?”
“I told you that it’s none of your damn business!”
“Hey, Liora?” She started to back the girl toward her bed. “I don’t know if you’re coming down off a catnip high, but you
are
going to tell me what in the hell he meant by that and you’re going to tell me
now
!”
Jane had a way of intimidating some people and Mollie was one of those people. “Okay, okay.” She sat on her bed, sliding a large pillow on her lap for security. “I swear to God if you tell my dad…”
“Oh, shit, I’m getting so tired of this.
Tell me what you know
!”
“He was referring in the email to when he snuck out of his bedroom and down the rope—which I’m
sure
you’ve already discovered—and over to my room.” She nodded to a corner window. “He tapped on the glass and he crawled in.”
“Okay…”
“We usually just sat up at night and talked until early morning. Sometimes, we’d kiss, but that was it.”
“But not that night.”
Mollie was clearly not comfortable relaying the information. “He showed up and he was all
ferklempt…
just an emotional mess. I tried to calm him down but he was like crazy, you
know? He said he had a huge fight with his dad…I guess it was the absolute worst but he wouldn’t tell me what it was about. And then, out of nowhere, he crawls on top of me and I’m like, damn, don’t be a
shlemiel
! But then I’m kinda liking it too.” She smiled softly, embarrassed. “We start to make out like we never have before and I’m thinking,
Oi
! Where is this leading? That’s when he pulls out his
shmeckle
.”
“
Shmeckle
?”
Mollie was really embarrassed now. “You know? His… dick. I’d never seen it before. I swear to
Hashem
,
never
! But I just wasn’t ready to do it. I want everything to be perfect for my first time. Rose petals, candles…”
“The age of consent,” Jane quickly added, which elicited a roll of the eyes from Mollie. “Hey! You’re fifteen, for God’s sake. You shouldn’t be having sex!”
“
And we didn’t
! He couldn’t get his
petseleh
up! But it wasn’t like he didn’t keep trying.
Gloib mir
, he kept trying! But what a
klutz
! No matter how much he wanted to
schtup
, it wasn’t happening that night.” Mollie looked up at Jane. “He couldn’t stop apologizing and I was like, ‘It’s no big deal.’ Geez, all the frenzied groping and this off-the-wall need to prove himself.” She shook her head. “But there was no consoling him. He left and I didn’t hear from him until I got that email telling me it wasn’t my fault, it was
his
.”
“What do you think he meant by that?” Mollie started to speak but held back. “What were you going to say?” Jane probed.
“That he’s a
faygala
,” she said softly as if saying it too loudly would make it true. She realized Jane needed a translation. “Gay.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know… He’s been wearing those old time Palm Beach shirts and fedoras… So, either he’s gay or he’s secretly Jewish.”
Jane glanced at Mollie and thought,
Kid, if you only knew the truth.
“Clothing aside, you’re assuming he’s gay because he
can’t get his pecker up?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Well…yeah…”
“Did you ever think that when a guy is stressed or emotionally distraught, it sometimes affects the rate of ascent down there?”
“I thought guys were always ready to go… even when they’re asleep.”
“You’re fifteen. You don’t know everything.”
“So, what was he stressed about?”
“The fight he had with his dad.” Jane paced the small bedroom. Over the last fifteen months, she’d spent substantial time meditating about life, and she’d come up with a few enlightened observations. One of those involved the root of our primal self and the instinctive reason why we do what we do. Jane broke it down to two causes—survival or salvation. We’re either looking to survive on this plane or seeking the promise of salvation on the next one. Some people do both. But in the end, our modus operandi is still centered on the preservation of the
self
now or the
self
after death.
When the
self
is threatened or compromised—usually involving its survival—it acts out in a parallel primitive manner. If a man is threatened by his wife’s male admirers, he might physically assault them because his own survival and identity is wrapped up in the relationship and the thought of having that connection destroyed creates a need to act out in a knee-jerk, primal manner. The more enlightened option—salvation—still held the echo of survival, in that the chaste woman who guards her purity and denies any whisper of the flesh is counting on her eventual survival into the Kingdom of Heaven. As Jane tested this theory in her own life and in the lives of the desperate killers and victims around her, she saw it played out repeatedly. However, the need to survive was the dominant M.O. for nearly everyone she encountered, including herself. She couldn’t escape the irony that for all the years she felt dead inside and even contemplated suicide, the DNA-driven need to fight for one’s
own breath and security in this world motivated her primordial impulse.
So what in the hell triggered Jake’s survival mechanism? What did his father say or do that night that drove him down that rope and to Mollie’s house and then forced him to act out a sexually dominant role? Taking it a step further, what threatened Jake even more two weeks later so much that he abandoned his inborn survival instinct and threw a rope over a bridge support beam with death as his soul’s objective? And if the two were somehow connected, why was his death aborted by another who then used Jake like a pawn in a game of chess?
Jane handed Mollie Jake’s sketchpad. “Have you seen that before?” She shook her head. Jane instructed her how to flip the pages from the back forward to produce the smooth animation of the older man standing on a chair and hanging himself in a jail cell.
“Oh, my God,” Mollie whispered, stunned. “Jake drew this?”
“Do you have any idea who that is?”
“No. But, hey, he’s wearing the same type of vintage shirt and fedora like Jake wears.”
“I know.”
“Why would Jake want to copy the way this guy dresses?”
“I’m more interested in knowing why he wanted to copy how he died.”
Mollie handed Jane the sketchpad. “You know, I told you how Jake liked to wear black and that he told me he was in mourning for the dead. What I didn’t tell you, is that the last time Jake and I talked, he said the weirdest thing. He said he had an obligation…no, wait…he used a different word…” She thought hard. “…an
allegiance.
That’s what he said. He said he had an allegiance to someone he’d never met and that he didn’t understand it, but he had no choice.”
Jane turned away. When she stood on the bridge and felt into what Jake was feeling at that precipitous place, she distinctly
recalled the thought that imprinted on her mind. There was despair and an
allegiance
to death. At the time, she couldn’t understand it, but now it had been confirmed. And when she and Weyler were discussing why people keep secrets, one of his theories was an allegiance to another person. But if that loyalty was unconscious, what in the hell kind of warped psychological game was going on in Jake’s life?
Jane wasn’t waiting until Monday for her big secret tête-àtête with Jordan. Sprinting across the street to The Rabbit Hole, she located Hank working the bar for the mid-afternoon lunch crowd. He’d promised her the use of his truck while her Mustang was being repaired and he kept his word, tossing her the keys and telling her that he filled it up for her. There was a wink that followed that statement which turned heads in unison at the bar toward Jane.
“Like the shirt, Chopper!” he yelled out to her as she left the bar.
It took some getting used to, but Jane actually enjoyed the feel of the truck underneath her. She’d seen the world out the window of a ’66 Mustang for so long that she’d forgotten what it looked like to view everything a few feet higher off the road. The Mustang had become so closely identified with Jane that people who’d only known her for a short time didn’t know she’d actually inherited it more than fourteen years ago. It had taken her a good seven of those years to get his smell out of the car. But his memory always lingered around the edges.
Jane pulled into Jordan’s property, parking the truck around the back of his cabin. Just in case Bo happened to be cruising down the highway, she didn’t want him to think that Hank was hanging with Jordan. Looking around the property, she saw no one, but she didn’t yell out Jordan’s name. She ascended the four steps that led to the narrow porch of the cabin and gently rapped on the door. When Jordan didn’t answer, she peered into a side window. Nobody home. Checking the door, it
opened and she crossed inside. “Hello?”
Nothing.
A thousand thoughts crossed her mind—scenarios of where Jordan might be, interlocking with strategies for her opportunistic visit. She was drawn to the overflowing bookshelves across the room, up the two steps near the loft and single unmade bed. The cluttered collection was arranged in an erratic manner with some books facing forward and others set in backward. Jane hopscotched around the various titles that gave new meaning to the word
eclectic
. Modern classics were juxtaposed next to art books which were wedged tightly against history texts that were cloistering Chinese herbal encyclopedias. There was a section of the center shelf that was less dusty and gave Jane the impression that Jordan frequently sourced reading from that area. Each of the titles appeared to be esoteric in nature. One caught her eye, titled,
Sacred Symbols of the 52-Card Deck
. Jane was about to pull it off the shelf when a large hand touched her on the shoulder. She jumped and spun around.