Snuff (26 page)

EIGHTY-THREE

John stood
alone behind the one-way glass, watching as Lisette unlocked Jacob’s cuffs and slid into the seat across from him.

She leaned both elbows on the table and twirled a pen in one hand.  “
So, your official statement, just to be clear, is you’re holding that gun for a friend.” 

Jacob
massaged his reddened wrists.  “I’ve told you, I’m not the only person in and out of that office.  I’m sure you’ll watch the surveillance footage to find out for yourself.”

Lisette
propped an arm on the back of her chair, swinging one leg over the other.  “I’m sure you were smart enough not do anything outright illegal on those tapes.  Your uncle had to have taught you better.”   She swept her hair behind her shoulder.  “You want to tell me this story about Caroline McKay?  I heard it from other sources, but I’d rather hear it from you.”

Jacob blew out a long breath and tilted his head back.  “For the love of
God, I was never convicted.  Nobody can access those records, and I’m not legally obligated to disclose what happened.”

“Jacob.”  She opened a folder and pulled documents out.  “I don’t need to read sealed records to know you had something to do with this.  I’m not in the same league as Einstein out there, but shit.  I know everyone thinks cops are dicks
, but you wouldn’t have been arrested for this fucked-up gang-rape if you hadn’t been involved.  Even watching and doing nothing is a crime.”

He clenched his jaw at the same time his shoulders squared.  “What
does Caroline McKay have to do with Bianca?  I know she’s who you’re after.  How I got involved in any of this is beyond me.”

John was sure plenty of things were beyond him, and he would have liked to say so, but not now.  Not when Lisette had lost her usual abrasiveness in what he assumed was a strategic move to earn Jacob’s trust. 

And Jacob had certainly noticed the soft edges in her voice. 

“A lot of Caroline’s injuries look an awful lot the ones Bianca left on her victims.”  She pushed a photo toward him, which
he ignored.  “One of the girls had extensive knife trauma to her genitals.  Caroline had damage like that, too.  I don’t know, maybe you coached Bianca.  Watched it from that little room my witness describes being above the one she was kept in.  She heard two people having sex above her.”

“Doesn’t mean it was
me.”

“Will Bianca tell us that when we find her?  That it wasn’t you?  I know she doesn’t have the most stable mind, but an animal is never as dangerous as wh
en they’re backed into a corner.  She’ll finger you.  They always do.  She’ll probably do it to get back at you for rejecting her.”

Jacob pushed back from the table’s edge, an arch in his left brow. 
“I have no idea what she’d say.  We’re not close.  I’d like to call my lawyer now.”

“Jacob.” She snapped the file closed and tossed it on the empty seat beside her.  “Your attorney can’t get you out of everything.  Warrants have been served and signed.  It’ll make you look a whole lot worse if you know where my witness is and didn’t help.  She’ll die.  That’s
facilitation.  On top of orchestrating a torture porn slash snuff blog?  You’ll be dead to rights, genius out there will make sure of it.  I hope you didn’t touch anything in that place Brooke’s stashed.  If your prints are there it’ll look really bad.  What’ll be worse is when AT&T gets back to us with the GPS tracking on the nights of the disposals.  ME estimates the girls were dumped soon after one was killed.  Bodies were always warm when we found them.  You told Agent Maxwell you were home in bed each night we found another set of girls.  I’m hoping your GPS proves that.”

Jacob’s flat affect didn’t falter
, but his head cocked to one side as he considered her.  The way he stared made John wonder what sort of expression Lisette was wearing.

“I could really use your help.
You’re my last-ditch, ass-fucked effort.”

Jacob pressed his lips t
ogether, avoiding her gaze while rubbing the back of his neck.

She heaved a
sigh and buried her face in one hand for a moment.  “You know—no, forget it.”  She collected the files, shaking her head, long hair streaming a blonde river down the ribbed fabric of her tank top. 

A wrinkle spliced between Jacob’s dark brows.  “What?”

She waved her hand.  “What I think doesn’t matter, since I’m not Head Bitch in Charge.”

The crease deepened, and he leaned forward.  “Tell me.
  I care what you think.”

“I can’t.  I’m going to call your attorney and tell him to get his ass down here.
  Knowing you, you’ll incriminate yourself the longer I’m in here, and the Lieutenant will have my ass for not calling him the second you asked.”

His fingers curled around her skinny wrist when sh
e’d been about to stand, but she didn’t wrench away. “What is it?”

He passed up a perfectly good opportunity to mention what he’d like to do to her ass
, the voice said in mock wonder. 
It’s amazing.
 

She let a thick silence settle before she spoke. 
“It’s just…for as many insults and bitchy words I’ve had for you, I’ve never thought you were capable of something like this.”  She shook the flimsy folder.  “I guess I always thought you’d be above this sort of stuff.  That maybe you just have this cocky, egotistical demeanor as a defense mechanism.  Growing up with the Ivashkov name had to have been like dragging around a ball and chain.  I figured you were a man-whore because that’s all you’ve ever known, growing up with a father who always had a few mistresses.  I thought because your mother died when you barely hit highschool, you’d be more inclined to protect women, not hurt them.  I mean, your other charges had to do with escorts, and we all know they’re asking for it half the time.  I never really knew why you hired call girls, since it’s not like you need to pay women to sleep with you.  But,” she stood, slipping the fallen strap of her wife beater back into place, “I was fucking dead wrong, wasn’t I?”

His lips parted when the thick
tip of his tongue ran between them.  “I don’t know what you think I’ve done, but I’m not that guy. You know me.”

John realized his head was throbbing because his eyes had gone narrower with each second Jacob’s fingers spent on Lisette’s hand.  He smoothed the skin between his brows
and pressed his knuckles into his lips. 

She nodded as she stood,
but she let his hand linger on hers. “I hope you’re not.”

EIGHTY-FOUR

When she returns, she’s alone.

She pauses at the mouth of the staircase, wearing the same empty smile of one hundred percent genuine synthetic happiness.  Her hair rustles around her shoulders as she skips down the steps.

She jumps the last one. 

“I’ve been thinking about your predicament.”  Those spiked heels click, one careful foot in front of the other, before she takes a seat back on the overturned bucket and lets her purse thud to the floor.  “We have a lot in common.”

I cross my legs and sit up straighter.  “I know,” I say, even though we don’t.

“We both can’t stop feeling sorry for ourselves.”  She ticks it off on a finger. “We’re both baby birds with broken wings.”

Well I don’t know about that, but I nod.

She rolls her head in a slow circle until it cracks.  “Isn’t it fucked-up how I was just dying to be her?  Dead and buried?”

“Who?”

She rambles like she can’t hear me, staring somewhere several feet above my head.  “But there’s a whole world out there that gets off on being depressed and broken.  So maybe it’s for the best.  Don’t you think?”

“What’s for the best?”

Her nostrils flare, eyes flashing like she’s irritated I’m not keeping up.  “That I’m here.  Living.”  She turns her wrists over and studies the bracelets of lumpy scar tissue.  “I tried more than once.  So many times.”  She smiles like she’s reliving some pleasant memory, and tugs at the hem of her high-necked blouse.  “I almost hung myself. 
Almost
being the operative word.  The thing about living in a psych ward is, they don’t even knock.  Just bust right into your room.  They cut me down so quickly.  I’d barely stepped off the chair.”

Words jumble in my throat.  I fight to disentangle them, inching a little closer
.  “You need help.  You’re not crazy, but you need to talk to someone.  Before you can feel better.”

“Is that what you did
after the Toby Years?”  I can hear her capitalize the words through her mock-clinical tone.  “Talk about it with some nice therapist who hung on your every word, taking notes?”

“No
.  But maybe I should have.”

“I’m talking to you.
  You don’t have an official clipboard, but you’re listening.”

“I’m not a counselor.  I don’t know what you need to feel better.  If I could take you apart and put you back together again, I would.”

“We’re beyond therapy.  They don’t have Band-Aids big enough for you and me.”  Her wandering blue eyes roll back, lashes fluttering distractedly. “I think I know why she did it now.  I never got it then, even when I was riding high on this wave of depression, but…” she weaves the fingers of both hands together, “it’s all floating into place.”

“You mean the woman who hurt you?”

She ignores me.  “All I know is that I’m addicted to the way it feels when I look at girls like you.  It feels better.  Until it’s over.  But,” she slaps the knees of her dark denim jeans, “I have too much green to feel blue.  And money makes the world go round, right?”

A knot materializes in the pit of my stomach.  It feels
like foreboding. “How can I help?”  I wave a hand around the room, a splash of desperation in my voice.  “I want to, but not here. We should go to a hospital.”

The word
hospital
triggers an alarm.  Her rounded face hardens like I’ve insulted her mother, and the rapid change to her angelic features is startling.  Camouflage really is nature’s craftiest trick. 

“You’re not listening.  I don’t need help—it won’t work.  Never has.  That’s my point.  You,” she says, staring right through me, like it
may not even be me she’s seeing, “you need my help.”

“Yeah.”  I
blink the stinging sensation from my eyes.  “I need you to let me out of here.  I have a boyfriend who loves me and a baby on the way.”

She nods, swinging
her feet back and forth.  The heels of her boots screech over the ground, though the noise doesn’t seem to bother her, like it does me.  “I’ll set you free.” She leans over to pick up her purse.  It takes a while until she finds what she wants.  The same black canvas case she searched for inside her car before she injected me.

That foreboding in my stomach
swells, ballooning into a fully-fledged freakout. I close my eyes and count to ten. 

She taps the syringe. 
“I’m not ready to surrender.  I thought I was, but I was wrong. It doesn’t mean I can’t help you surrender, though.”

EIGHTY-FIVE

“You almost had me fooled for a minute,” John said, once the door clicked shut behind Lisette. 

She rolled her eyes, swinging into the department’s dark, deserted hallway. “Men are fucking morons.”

He
’d never really believed that until about five minutes ago.  “I guess it’s in our genes.” He trailed her around the desks and cubicles of detectives who’d long ago punched out.   “A woman flutters their eyelashes, and suddenly we’re powerless.”

She shot him a dirty look over her shoulder as she turned the knob of her office door.  “I’ve never fluttered my eyelashes in my life.”  She tossed the thick wad of files on the desk and flung herself into her swivel chair. 

John didn’t doubt that.  “Tell me again that he doesn’t like you, because it sure seemed like he did.  I thought his carotid would burst when you let him touch you.”

“He doesn’t like me.
” She snapped up her desk phone and punched in numbers.  “Is this Sal Morgan’s secretary?  Pardon me, administrative assistant.  Well, transfer me.” Her blonde eyes flicked to the clock mounted above the door.  “It’s not
that
late.”  A tinny voice snapped on the other line, and Lisette waited, unpolished and impatient fingers drumming, for the monologue to cease.  “Tell him this is Sergeant Jennings from Homicide.  I have his client, Jacob Ivashkov, in custody, and he needs to get his ass down here unless he wants Jake to spill his guts about a girl named Caroline McKay.  McKay.  M-C-K-A-Y.”

She slapped the receiver
back on its carriage.  “That’ll get him down here in a hurry. Uncle Ivashkov didn’t get it all swept under the rug for nothing.  Is Heckles still in an interview room?”

“I thought it would be best to keep him close by.”

She closed her eyes for a few beats.  “You think Jacob’ll talk?”

“I think he’ll
talk to you.”

She rolled her head around her shoulders befo
re letting it hang forward, and rubbed her temples with her index fingers.  “Hopefully he’ll tell Morgan he wants to waive his right to counsel.”  She sighed, her breath fogging the desk’s protective glass covering.  “If anything happens to Brooke, I’ll break his fucking neck.”

“Let’s hope
it won’t come to that.”

The beginnings of a smirk twisted her lips.  “Yeah, those m
andated counseling sessions are a bitch.”

She’d know—and John only knew from Stacy’s infallible nosiness.  Before she’d gotten transferred to homicide, a then-detective twenty-five-year-old Lisette shot an unarmed pedophi
le who jumped bail and took two siblings hostage.  The older boy had been found with a severed jugular and a bleeding rectum.  The second had been used as a human shield to stave off her Glock.  The bail jumping pedophile hadn’t won that battle, but he’d left with a souvenir—a bullet between the eyes.  Six mandated counseling sessions for the officer-involved shooting later, she’d been declared fit for active duty.

Four years later, her silver detective shield had been exchanged for the gold sergeant one hanging from her neck. 

“He’s going to deny everything.  Going to pin it all on Bianca’s crazy ass, but she’s not sane enough to do this on her own.  He’s not brilliant either, but he’s got access to pretty much whatever the hell he wants, money and connections like that.” 

Those hours
Lisette claimed to have slept hadn’t eradicated the purplish stains blossoming beneath her lower lashes.  Her eyes looked brighter against slightly wan skin—maybe Jacob had responded to the damsel-in-distress facade. She wore the look well, for someone who hadn’t planned it.

“The thing about lying on the fly,” John said, kneading the bones at the nape of his neck, “is that most people don’t stray very far from the truth.  Half of what he says will end up panning out.  Sifting through
the bullshit won’t be as hard as you think.  Stacy’s on the phone with AT&T.  She’ll find something for us.  She’s never let me down.”