“Detective Dav—?”
“Ms. Jakes?” the desk sergeant said before I could sputter out the rest of Uncle Bob’s title.
She rose. “Yes.”
“Detective Davidson will see you now.”
My jaw dropped to the floor. The desk clerk pointed the way to Ubie’s office just as my backstabbing uncle stepped out to wait for her. He shook her hand when she got to him, then placed his other hand at the small of her back and led her inside.
I was jealous for me and for Cookie. Mostly for Cookie. He was always too nervous or too reserved to do something like that to her. And he’d called this woman in on a case? A charlatan?
Not on my watch. I stood to go prove to Uncle Bob she was nothing more than a fraud when the captain stepped out of the conference room and saw me. He motioned me to his office. After a longing glance toward Ubie, I swallowed hard and followed the captain into his man cave. And what a manly man cave it was. Awards and certifications littered his walls and counterspace, along with files and stacks of paperwork.
“Are you feeling better?” he asked.
“Not so much.”
“That’s too bad.” He sat behind his desk. “Because you are about to feel a lot worse.”
He gestured for me to sit in the vinyl chair across from him. I didn’t. “I want to know why you are having me followed, who those people were, and what you plan to do with those pictures.”
A grimness thinned his lips, like he was about to deliver some very bad news. He stood, retrieved an envelope from his top file drawer, pulled out a stack of photos, and tossed one onto his desk for my inspection.
It was a candid shot of me making what looked like a drug deal outside my apartment building. The photographer made sure to capture the vagrant looking over his shoulder as though watching for a cop as he handed me over something unidentifiable. At the same time, I handed him a few bills, which was very identifiable.
“That’s Chris Levine, a known associate of a man they call Chewbacca, one of the biggest meth dealers in the city.” He tossed another picture down. In it, I was in Misery passing a homeless man a couple of dollars through the window. He was the one who’d handed me the old plastic flower, but that wasn’t in the shot. Naturally. “And that’s Oscar Fuentes. His arrest record is as long as my left leg and reads like a pulp fiction novel. He owed me a favor.” He tossed another one. In this one, I was just getting out of Misery and, once again, handing a man a few bills. I try to be nice, and look what happens. “That’s—”
“I get it,” I said, holding up my hand to stop the tour. “I’ve never bought drugs in my life, and you know it.”
“Sure you have.” A smile that reminded me of sloe gin spread across his face. “And I have the evidence to prove it. Who do you think they’ll believe?”
“All they have to do is test me. I’ll test Pine-Sol clean, bitch.” I was being backed into a corner and did not like it there.
The edges of his mouth twitched. “Oh, I’m very aware of your drug-free existence. I just need insurance.”
“For what?”
“Your silence.”
“You couldn’t just ask? You have to blackmail me?”
“For this I do.”
“That’s so very wrong.”
“True, but just remember what I have on you when I explain my … situation. If I go to prison, you go to prison. I’m just making sure we both have a very good reason to keep quiet.”
“You have my complete attention, Captain,” I said, a cautious anger simmering beneath the surface. “What do you want?”
“I’m not a good person,” he said, seeming to regret that fact.
“Ya think?”
“When I was a kid, my oldest sister was raped by a boy from her school. She was intellectually challenged and he took advantage of that. He was a popular kid, very well liked, from an affluent family. All the things that would allow him to get away scot-free.”
“So he got away with it.”
“For a while. But I’ll get to that. After she accused him of sexually assaulting her, it became a big thing in my hometown. I was from a small suburb near Chicago. Nobody believed her, because why would a kid like that need to rape a handicapped girl? When he could have anyone? The town turned against us. The school turned against her, and what was a little teasing here and there became full-on everyday bullying.”
I could feel the heartache that caused him. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to have an ounce of empathy for a man who would set me up so frivolously, so I fought it. I buried it under a mountain of resentment.
“A few weeks later, she couldn’t take the bullying anymore and killed herself.”
That time, a wave of guilt hit me. It had a smooth, pure texture. Zero conflict. Zero doubt. He felt responsible for his sister’s death. In a word, he hated himself, and I realized that had been the odd emotion I felt every time I met him. I just figured he hated me. I got that a lot. But his feelings were directed solely toward himself. That was new. In general, people can’t handle guilt. Their minds won’t let them for very long. So they make up excuses. Excuses work like a salve, allaying the guilt, letting you forget the real problem. For example, every time an abusive husband says something like, “You made me hit you,” he’s twisting the guilt—she didn’t have dinner on the table, so hitting her was surely his wife’s fault.
“It tore my family apart,” he continued, standing to stare out his window. “My parents split up. My mother sank into a depression. I rarely saw my dad. Within six months, my world had been turned inside out.”
“I’m so sorry, Captain.”
He turned back to me. “It gets better. And this is the part you need to keep very, very quiet.”
“Or you’ll burn me.”
“I’ll bury you. You will spend years behind bars.”
Just when I was beginning to sympathize with him. “How about you stop with the threats and get on with this?”
He walked over and leaned against the desk in front of me, towering over me, making sure I knew he was top dog. After studying my face—my perturbed face—a solid minute, he said, “I was seven when I hunted that kid down and killed him.”
I stilled. He was confessing a murder to me. That was there in the back of my mind, but even more salient was the fact that he was only seven when he did it.
“Did you know that they rarely suspect a seven-year-old of murder? I wasn’t even questioned.”
The shock I felt surely showed on my face. As I’d demonstrated many times in my life, my poker face was virtually nonexistent. But my fight-or-flight response was top notch. He’d just confessed to murder. I wasn’t going to make it out of that room alive. I couldn’t help a glance toward the door.
“No one’s stopping you,” he said, nodding toward my escape route. He didn’t seem particularly concerned. Of course he wouldn’t be. He had evidence of me buying drugs all over town. My accusations would be in retaliation after his attempt to arrest me. He’d really thought this through.
Then again, would he risk someone knowing his deep dark secret? That paltry evidence wasn’t enough. Any good lawyer could get the charges dropped. He had to know that.
“Is this the part where you kill me?” I asked him.
Of course this was the part where he killed me. He would never let me leave here with that information. Would he say that I went for his gun? That we fought and the gun went off? That’s what I’d do.
“No. As I told you, I have enough evidence on you to put you away for a very long time.”
“That evidence is all circumstantial. You’d need testimonies. Eyewitnesses,” I argued. Why was I arguing this? Making the case for him to just kill me and get it over with. Perhaps it was because when I did leave here—
if
I did leave here—I didn’t want to have to worry about him changing his mind. Would I get a bullet to the back of my head when I least expected it? I didn’t want this hanging over my head for the rest of my life. “You’d need credible witnesses,” I added before pointing to the photographs. “Not that crap you sent me in the streets.”
One step ahead of me, he said, “Bought and paid for.”
Damn, he thought of everything. At least he was thorough.
“I also have footage of you constantly talking to yourself. Arguing with air. Shaking some invisible friend’s hand. Hugging someone only you could see. Everything together adds up to a lengthy sentence in prison or the nuthouse. I’m good with either.”
Holy crap. I knew that stuff would come back to haunt me. Damn it.
He leaned closer. “As long as I stay out of jail, you stay out of jail.”
I was beaten. He won. I crossed my arms over Danger and Will. “Why go to all this trouble? Why confess something so incriminating to me now? After all these years? You don’t exactly like me. Or trust me.”
“I do trust you to a degree. I see the lengths you go for your clients. It’s noble. Stupid at times, but noble. But you’re right. I’m fairly certain I don’t like you. And I need to know.”
“If you like me?”
“If he did it. The kid. When I was— When I killed him, he swore he didn’t do it. Over and over. He swore he never touched my sister. But I’d seen the bruises on her. The blood. I also saw the mark she left on her assailant. She said she bit his wrist. He had a bite mark on his wrist days later. But I need to know the truth. I have to be certain.”
If he killed the guy, how was I supposed to find out the truth? Just how much did he know about me?
“I need to hear it from the dead kid, and you are just the person to ask him.”
I shifted in my chair, suddenly uncomfortable. Or, well,
more
uncomfortable. “And how am I supposed to do that?”
“I don’t know. Call him. Channel him. Do whatever it is you do.”
“That’s crazy talk,” I said, inching up out of my chair.
He didn’t move to stop me, but put a hand on the sidearm at his hip. “I’m an excellent shot.”
I plopped back down. “You’re psychotic, is what you are. I am so telling Uncle Bob. You want me to talk to a dead kid? Now who’s going to the nuthouse?”
“Spare me. I know everything.”
He couldn’t possibly know everything. Wait— “Did you bug me?” I asked, appalled. He’d done every other kind of surveillance. Surely he threw in a few bugs for good measure.
“A little.”
“That’s so illegal!” I bolted to my feet.
“So is framing you for crimes you didn’t commit. I think we’re beyond that right now.”
He had a point. And despite everything he just told me, I felt nothing malicious coming off him. I did feel an odd mix of emotions, but I doubted he harbored any ill will toward me. This was a means to an end.
“How do you know I won’t lie to you?”
“I don’t. So I’ll need proof. You talk to this kid, ask him how I killed him, then ask him if he did it.” He tossed another picture at me, only this one was an old school picture of a blond kid, about fourteen years old. “Do whatever it is you do to talk to dead people. Ask him.”
I gave in. “Captain, I can’t just talk to dead people.”
He glowered. “Don’t bullshit me. I will have you in lockup with enough charges to make your lawyer’s head spin before you can say frame job. And I might toss in some charges on kiddie porn to spice things up. I will destroy your reputation in any way that I can.”
He was serious. He was actually serious, but again, reluctantly so. He would do what he had to do, my life be damned.
I blinked in absolute shock. “That’s so not fair.”
“Life’s a bitch that way. His name was Kory. Do your thing or get used to the idea of spending the rest of the decade behind bars.”
It could happen. Reyes was living, breathing proof that people went to prison for crimes they didn’t commit. But the odds of this kid still being on earth, on this plane, were zero to nil. It just didn’t happen that way. Once the departed crossed, I couldn’t talk to them. They were gone. On the other side.
“You’re going to have to indulge me a moment.”
He shrugged a shoulder.
I summoned Angel.
“What the hell?” he said, complaining as ever. “I was in the middle of something.”
“I need you to go to the other side and talk to somebody for me.”
“I can’t just go to the other side and talk to somebody,
loca
.”
“Angel, I really need this. If you can’t pull this off, I’m going to prison on drug possession and kiddie porn.” I showed him the picture. “I need you to find this kid and ask him a couple of things for me.”
The captain watched me with those eagle eyes of his. Not a lot got past him, I could tell. And I certainly no longer cared about what it looked like when I talked to my invisible friends.
“I can’t jump over and back. Nobody can do that.” He dusted off his shirt. No idea why. “Except you.”
“I can’t jump over either. Do you think Reyes can?”
“I don’t think the son of Satan would be very welcome in heaven. Even if he could get there.”
I collapsed onto the chair. This was an impossible situation.
“Why don’t you just summon him?”
“Angel, if he’s already crossed, I can’t summon him.”
“You never listen to me,” he said. He took off his shoe and dumped sand out of it and onto the carpet.
I looked at it, watched it fall through the floor.
“How did you get sand—?”
“It doesn’t matter if they’ve crossed. You’re the stinking reaper.”
I had no idea if the captain knew that part, so I clenched my teeth to demonstrate my annoyance to Angel, and whispered through my teeth so the man couldn’t hear me. “I know I’m the stinking reaper, but I can’t just summon someone back from the other side.”
He put his shoe back on and took off the other, dumped out the sand, then put it back on before leveling a stare on me dripping with attitude, and said, “Yes, you can. I’ve been telling you that forever.
Oh, mi Dios
.”
“Don’t bring God into this, and really?” I stood and sidled up to him. “I really can do that?”
“Of course.” He shrugged, and if I didn’t know better, I’d say his glare was accusing me of being a moron. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
“So, like, how?”
He pulled out his pockets and shook them to get the sand out of them as well. How on earth? Incorporeal sand? Clearly there was a lot I had yet to learn.