The One That Got Away (6 page)

The younger of the inspectors wrenched Zoë to her feet.

“What the hell is going on, Acosta?” the other detective said.

Acosta rose to his feet gingerly. “She’s a drunk.”

“I’m not. I need to talk to you about this murder.”

The detective who’d helped Zoë up hadn’t released his grip. “Do you know something?”

“Yes, I might. I just need to know some details.”

“Goddamn it,” the other detective said. “Are you a reporter or a blogger?”

“No.”

“What’s your name?”

“Zoë Sutton. Fifteen months ago, a man abducted me and killed my friend. I saw the news. This is the same guy.”

She expected this information to unlock a door, gain their confidence. Instead, she got blank looks. Honesty should have bought their trust, but it seemed to have done the opposite.

“I’m not crazy.”

“No one is saying you are,” the younger detective said.

“Ms. Sutton, do you realize what you’ve done?” the other man asked. “You’ve just contaminated an active crime scene. Do you know what damage that can do to our case?”

“I’m trying to help you.”

“Well, you aren’t. Take her in, Acosta. Book her on something. I don’t care what.”

Acosta took out his cuffs, and a cheer went up from the crowd.

No, they were going to listen to her. She shook off the younger detective’s arm and reached for the zipper on the side of her dress. Both detectives reached for their guns. Acosta leapt back from her. She ignored the peril she had placed herself in and tugged the zip down. She yanked the dress to one side to reveal the letters
IV
carved into her hip.

“Does the woman in there have a scar like this?”

Their stunned silence told them she did.

Marshall Beck sat in the dark in the Assessment Annex at Urban Paws. Only light from the streetlights lit the room. The fighting dogs were quiet. They’d been rechristened. Many had never been given names and the ones that had wore moronic fighting ones, like Killer or Beast or Diablo, given to them by their moronic
owners
.

He came here most nights, after hours, to hang out with the animals. He enjoyed the solitude. The creatures helped him decompress when people and their attitudes overwhelmed him and he needed somewhere to escape. When the noise of his thoughts threatened to split his skull, they offered him silence. They didn’t bombard him with their problems and petty squabbles. They gave him space. He liked that about them—they weren’t sentimental, and they didn’t judge. If one of them died, they didn’t mourn. They moved on. He felt a special kinship with these fighting dogs. It was why he’d chosen to sit with them instead of the others. Life and death were all they knew. They’d understand the enormity of the problems he faced now.

Beck leaned against the wall, watching Brando—one of the pit bulls—in his cage. While all the other dogs slept, this one remained awake. He sat upright and stared back at Beck. Of all the fighting dogs the shelter had taken in, Beck felt an instant connection to Brando. Life had dealt these dogs a shitty hand, and it had taken its toll. The ordeal had broken some, driven others crazy, and left some frightened, but not Brando. He still possessed the soul he’d been born with. The behavioral trainers at the shelter would be able to rehabilitate the other dogs, but not him. Brando wasn’t the type to change. He was a universal constant. The instructors hadn’t seen it or hadn’t wanted to, but Beck did. Underneath the lacerations and scars, the truth about Brando shone bright in the dog’s eyes. And what he recognized in the dog, the dog recognized in him. They were both survivors. They’d both suffered, but they hadn’t succumbed.

A lightning flash of his past arced across his mind—him, a child, in the foster home, whipped again for an infraction.

He winced at the memory. Brando bristled at the sign of his weakness and growled. Beck smiled. “That kind of reaction will get you killed,” he said.

The dog stopped growling.

“Not that it matters. You know they’re going to have to put you down, don’t you?”

Brando just stared.

One of the dogs whimpered at the sound of Beck’s voice and retreated to the corner of its cage. Except for a twitch of an ear in its direction, Brando remained statuelike.

“It’s a sorry state of affairs when you have to pay the price for the person who put you in this predicament.”

The dog neither agreed nor disagreed.

“Hardly seems fair. But life is like that.”

The whimpering dog settled down.

“I bet you wish you could even up the score, don’t you, Brando? Of course you do. If you’re lucky, you might even get the chance.” He sighed. “I’m not sure I’ll get the chance to continue my work, though.”

After tonight’s fiasco, he was in virgin territory. His work had been discovered. Where did he go from here? He felt as trapped as these dogs.

“I screwed up, Brando. I got it wrong again. There’s a chance I could end up in a cage now.”

The damage had been done. He’d given the cops an opening. Laurie Hernandez was a big chunk of evidence and so was the construction site. They had the beginning of a trail.

But could it lead back to him?

He didn’t think so. At first, panic had told him that it was a foregone conclusion the cops would be beating down his door, but the feeling had changed in the tranquil surroundings of the rescue center. Logic had replaced panic—thanks to Brando’s soothing influence. When he picked apart his earlier actions, he saw that he was safe. He’d been careful. The cops would be hard-pressed to make any connection between him and Laurie Hernandez. He hadn’t left any prints at the scene, and even if they found any DNA, they had no comparison source. Other than the plastic sheeting and Laurie Hernandez herself, he hadn’t left anything behind. He still had his whip and knife. The police had a corpse, and that was it. Despite his screwup tonight, he was indeed safe. He smiled.

Brando stiffened.

Beck nodded. “Can’t be too cocky about these things. I suppose I should check the situation.”

He clambered to his feet, and the sudden movement set off a sea of reactions from the dogs. He let his absence settle them.

In his office, he switched on his computer. He looked up all the local news channels on the web. Laurie Hernandez was their collective top story.

“Let’s see how bad it is,” he said and clicked a video link.

It was the typical news report. The field reporter, Dinah Ortiz, stood in the foreground and cops worked the crime scene in the distance, while a crowd of onlookers gawked and jockeyed for fifteen nanoseconds of on-air time. She relayed the scant facts: that the body of an unidentified female had been discovered naked and hanging from her wrists at the development site. She also intimated that the victim had been brutalized. Sadly for Ms. Ortiz, she had failed to secure a statement from the police.

The three-minute report told him little. That was good. It confirmed his feeling that the investigation wasn’t leading the SFPD to his door.

He replayed the clip. His attention drifted from the reporter to the scene itself. There was an intensity surrounding the event, with the reporter’s shot-in-the-dark speculation and the fervor radiating off the onlookers. This reaction to his handiwork took him by surprise. He’d always striven to keep his actions hidden from the public and police. Seeing this interest in what he’d done stunned him—and intrigued him.

Privacy had always been his watchword, but should it be? He did what he did for one reason—to punish those whose behavior was unacceptable. Until now, his message had been confined to those he taught a lesson to. That was small time. Media interest in Laurie Hernandez’s death would change that. It would provoke discussion, speculation, debate. It could affect real change.

He smiled. He’d seen tonight as a screwup, but it was turning out to be serendipitous. From now on, he wouldn’t attempt to hide his work. He would broadcast it and let it be a warning to others that their bad conduct would not be accepted.

He leaned forward on his chair and checked out the video reports from the other local affiliates. He was rewarded with different talking heads with the same backdrop. He absorbed the sights with pride.

The ABC affiliate had an updated report, and he clicked on that. The video started with an intro from the in-studio anchors.

“There was an interesting turn of events at the scene of a brutal murder of a woman at Pier 25 tonight when an onlooker charged through the police cordon. Our news crew was there to catch what happened,” Mick Tolley said. “We go back to our own Dinah Ortiz for a firsthand account.”

Dinah Ortiz stood in a different spot than in her earlier newscast, although the onlookers didn’t seem to have changed. “Yes, Mick. While we were between reports, a verbal encounter between a bystander and police officers led to this.”

Her segment cut to a video. A whip pan zeroed in on a young blonde woman in a skintight minidress breaking through the police cordon. The camera followed the blonde as she yelled and charged at a pair of men, no doubt detectives, who were leaving the construction site. She was too far away from the camera crew for the mic to pick up the details of what she was yelling. The out-of-control woman didn’t get far before a uniformed cop tackled her to the ground. The camera focused on her as the cop brought her to her feet and the detectives moved in.

She looked familiar to Beck.

The camera captured a muffled confrontation with the detectives. Just as it looked as if the blonde was heading to the drunk tank, she unzipped her dress and pointed furiously at her lower hip just above her panty line.

A tingle of recognition crackled throughout Beck’s body.

At a sickening speed, the camera zoomed in on what the woman was pointing to.

He knew what the lens would capture—his mark.

He fell back in his chair, tuning out the remainder of Dinah Ortiz’s report. It wasn’t important. Something amazing had just happened. It’s her—the Vegas girl, he thought, the one that got away.

CHAPTER SIX

When the cops didn’t cuff her, Zoë took it as a good sign. It meant they believed her or at least took her claim seriously. The inspectors simply put her in the back of their car and drove her to the Hall of Justice. They didn’t talk on the short drive, not to her and not to each other. She guessed they wanted anything she had to say to be on the record.

They whisked her through the building and dumped her in an interview room. They took her driver’s license, snapped a photo of the scar on her hip, and gave her a bottle of water. She knew the routine. They were checking up on her. Good. She wanted them to. Then they’d get past the bullshit and could focus on the case.

Of course, checking her out came with its own problems. They would confirm that she’d been abducted, but they’d also see she’d been drugged and drunk at the time. Credibility was everything, and hers was a little shaky. Maybe they were just taking their time to let her cool off. She had crashed a crime scene, after all. That was fine with her. She took long, cleansing breaths as Jarocki had taught her and felt her body calm down as she waited.

It was close to an hour before the younger of the two inspectors entered the interview room.

“Hello, Ms. Sutton. I’m Inspector Ryan Greening. Sorry to have kept you waiting. I hope you’re up for answering some questions.”

“Yes, and I have some of my own.”

Greening took the seat opposite her. “And I’ll answer them if I can.”

She thought it interesting that only one of the inspectors was interviewing her, and of the two, it was the youngest. Did they think she’d connect with someone closer to her own age? Maybe she was overthinking it.
So suspicious, Zoë
, she thought.

He handed back her ID and smiled. “Your hair was longer when this was taken.”

Reflexively, she ran a hand across the back of her head until she touched her bare neck. “Yeah, I keep it short now. Don’t you like it?”

“Sure, it just makes you look different. Before we get started, I just wanted to inform you that this interview is being recorded. Is that OK?”

“Fine.”

He eyed the scratches and bruises she’d picked up on her elbow and shoulder when they’d tackled her. “That wasn’t a very smart thing you did tonight. You could have gotten seriously hurt.”

“I needed to speak to the people in charge.”

“There are better ways of doing it than breaking a police cordon and contaminating a crime scene. You could have called or checked in with a station.”

She didn’t like that Greening was trying to put her in her place. Cops always wanted things done the cop way. Newsflash, the world didn’t operate the cop way, or she wouldn’t have been abducted and they wouldn’t have found a dead woman tonight. “Yeah, but I would have gotten the runaround if I’d done that.”

Greening didn’t have an answer. Instead, he eyed her left temple and winced. “It looks as if you’ve got a bruise coming.”

She guessed the makeup she’d put on to hide the bruise had worn off. “You didn’t do that. I picked that up at work.”

“Really? What do you do?”

“Mall security.”