Hold Back the Dark (6 page)

Ed was his favorite detective in the financial division. He was a paperwork ninja. He could cut through huge amounts of bullshit armed with nothing but a calculator and a spreadsheet. Josh could keep his checkbook balanced and had a rough idea of what was in his pension fund, but walking into Ed’s office with its piles of paper and folders and ledgers made his skin itch. Anyone who could plow through all that paperwork and find something that would hold up in court was a hero in Josh’s book. After all, Al Capone had been put away for tax evasion in the end.

“Any idea what connection she might have had with the Dawkins?” he asked.

Clyde scrolled down the computer screen. “Last known job was with a cleaning company. Maybe she was their housekeeper.”

“I thought those people had to be bonded. What kind of idiot would give an identity thief access to their home and all their records?” Elise asked.

“The kind of idiot who gets ripped off,” Josh suggested. “The kind who might get angry when he finds out what’s happened and confront that person.”

“And get himself killed for his trouble? Like that professor over in Davis who confronted his yard guy about a stolen check and ended up dead?” Elise shook her head. “I don’t know, Josh. This looked personal. It looked deeply angry.”

Josh peered at Lois Bradley’s record. She’d just come off a year at county. She’d done six months two years before. “It would be her third strike. What’s more personal than someone threatening to send you away for the rest of your life?”

“But what would this have to do with that stuff on the walls? That has to mean something.”

He gave the only answer he had: a shrug.

Elise sighed. “Fine. What’s her last known address? We’ll go pay Ms. Bradley a visit.”

“Right after we see Jenna Norchester,” Josh agreed.

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“
I
really don’t know how to thank you.” Marian Phillips had a tight grip with both hands around Aimee’s hand an hour later. The lobby shared between the police department and the fire department was nearly empty, and her voice echoed in the huge atrium. “You’ve been so kind and so generous with your time. I really appreciate everything you’ve done for me and for Taylor.”

A stab of guilt hit Aimee. She was beginning to feel like she hadn’t done much for the girl at all. It was hard to feel successful when your patient’s main form of communication was scrawling cryptic symbols in her own blood and then rocking herself. “I wish I could do more.”

“All the driving back and forth, and getting us settled at Whispering Pines? I don’t know what more anyone could do. Nothing will bring my sister back to me. Or my brother-in-law. I wish you could have known them.” She stopped sniffing and looked up. “Then again, I suppose you did.”

“Not in any real way,” Aimee said, patting Marian’s hand. As a therapist she was privy to things that people wouldn’t tell their closest relative or their most trusted friends, sometimes in much more graphic and lurid detail than she wanted or needed to know—but that didn’t mean she really knew those people. She didn’t know what it was like to sit and watch a movie with them or share a meal. She didn’t know what books they liked to read or how they liked their coffee. Mostly she knew what they were afraid to let anyone else know, even themselves.

Marian threw her arms around Aimee. “You’re a sweet girl.”

Aimee smiled into Marian’s hair. “It’s been nice to meet you, too,” she said, thankful that someone with this much compassion would now be looking after Taylor. “I wish it had been under different circumstances.”

Marian released Aimee from her hug and blew her nose. “You’ll come and visit Taylor, won’t you?”

“Her new doctor may not want that, Marian. I’ll do what I can, but I don’t want to antagonize her new doctor. That’s not in Taylor’s best interests.”

“Why would your visiting antagonize anyone?” Marian’s brow furrowed.

“The new doctors will want to draw their own conclusions about Taylor’s behavior and draw up their own treatment plan. They won’t want anything to interfere with that, and visits from a previous therapist could be viewed as interference,” Aimee explained. It galled her, though. It was hard to let Taylor out of her protective hands.

Marian nodded slowly. “I suppose I can see their point. I don’t necessarily agree with it, though.”

“I’d like to keep in touch,” Aimee said, pulling one of her cards from her purse. She wrote her home phone on the back. “Here are all my numbers. Call me anytime you want, and please keep me informed of Taylor’s progress.”

“Of course I will,” Marian said, and gave Aimee a last hug good-bye.

Aimee walked past the glassed-in booth where the desk sergeant sat and out to the parking lot, feeling like she was leaving an awful lot of unfinished business behind.

“But I promised not to tell,” Jenna Norchester whispered.

Josh rubbed his hand over his face, took a deep breath, and counted to ten. Again. Another teenaged girl that he’d like to shake until her teeth rattled. Did this one have a hot shrink who could distract him, too? That would make it all into just the most perfect clusterfuck ever.

“I’m sure that Taylor would understand if you broke your promise to her,” he said. “Things have changed a lot since you made that promise to her. A whole lot.”

Jenna’s lower lip quivered, and she let her straight brown hair fall in front of her slightly horsey face. “I know that. My dad told me. All the kids at school are talking about it and it’s been on the news and everything. It’s so awful.”

“That’s right,” Elise said softly. “Everyone’s talking about it anyway, so it’ll be okay if you tell us what really happened. Jenna, if you know anything that might help us catch who did this, you know it’s right to tell us.”

Josh couldn’t tell if Elise wanted to smack the girl as much as he did. She had a knack for looking all concerned and sympathetic; then when you least expected it,
POW
! The tough broad inside nailed you. It was damn effective.

Jenna looked up at her dad, who stood behind her at the kitchen table. “It’s just that Taylor and I have been friends for years. Absolute years,” Jenna wailed, which was pretty much the way she talked about everything. She wailed. She shrieked. Josh had a distaste for drama.

“They went to kindergarten together,” Charles Norchester said. “They walked to school together when they were old enough to cross the street by themselves.”

“But lately…” Jenna’s voice trailed off and she started with the lower lip quiver again.

Josh was sure that the quiver thing melted her daddy’s heart, but it had been tried on him too many times by too many perps and too many girlfriends for it to affect him anymore. “Lately what?” he asked.

“She started hanging with a different group of kids. She never wants to come over and hang out anymore. I had like this whole
O.C.
party where we wore bikinis and everything and watched the DVDs, and she wouldn’t even come. She said it was lame. All she wants to do is lie around and talk about…”

Josh wanted to bang his head on the table when Jenna trailed off again.

“Talk about what?” he asked, apparently a shade too quickly or a touch too sharply, since Elise kicked the back of his chair.

Mr. Norchester crouched down next to Jenna’s chair. “It’s okay, honey. I know you want to honor the promise that you made your friend, but sometimes breaking your word is the right thing to do. I know it’s confusing and hard.”

Josh wanted to gag. What was this, a freakin’ after-school special?

“But she’ll never ever talk to me again. She said she wouldn’t if I told, and I don’t think she really cares if she does or not, anyway.” Jenna was crying now.

“So you and Taylor had a falling-out?” Elise asked. “What was it about?”

Jenna took a deep, quavery breath. “It wasn’t really about anything. Taylor just…changed.”

Oh, great, Josh thought. Another discourse on Taylor’s mood changes.

Elise put her hand on his shoulder and kept talking. “But she came over the other night. To study, right?” Her voice was a soft melody of concern and understanding.

Jenna Norchester burst into tears again. Josh rolled his eyes and shoved the tissue box across the kitchen table. How could someone possibly think a promise made to a friend was more important than a homicide investigation?

“We just said that—about the studying. We weren’t, really. I mean, there really was a test in World Civ and I studied for it. Really, Dad, I did.” She looked up at her father, who patted her again and assured her that he knew she had.

“But Taylor didn’t study for the World Civ exam,” Elise said.

Jenna shook her head. “No, she didn’t.”

“What did Taylor do instead?” Josh asked.

“She snuck out to see him. She made me promise not to tell,” Jenna whispered.

Elise and Josh exchanged looks. So Taylor had not been here the entire evening, and she’d been with someone. Things were starting to get interesting. “Who did she sneak out to see, Jenna?” Elise asked.

“Flick,” she mumbled.

“Flick? Is that someone’s real name?” Josh had met enough Rainbows and Cedars and Sunshines to know how deeply the hippie movement had sent down its roots here, but Flick?

“I don’t know his real name. Everybody calls him Flick,” Jenna said.

“You don’t know it, or won’t tell it?” Josh asked.

Jenna lifted her head high. “I don’t know it. I’m telling you, everybody calls him Flick.”

Josh rose out of his seat. He’d had enough. If he had to take this little brat down to the station and lock her up for a while to get the information he needed, that was precisely what he was going to do.

Elise put a hand on his arm. “When did she leave? Do you remember what time?”

Jenna gnawed on her lower lip. “We waited until Dad was watching
The Daily Show
rerun. That’s at like eight o’clock. So it was after that.”

“And when did she come back?” Josh pressed. They knew she had; Norchester had told them he’d watched her walk out the door.

“Around nine-thirty. I was getting really nervous.
The Colbert Report
was over and my dad could have checked on us any minute. He does that just randomly. Walks in to see what I’m doing.” She glanced at her dad again. This time the glance didn’t seem quite as loving.

Josh looked over at Mr. Norchester, too. Apparently there was at least one parent who was keeping track of his kid. He wondered how much longer he would be able to do that. “She just snuck out and left you here? That doesn’t seem like something a friend would do. Why didn’t she take you with her?”

Jenna’s eyes grew wide. “Do you have any idea what my dad would do to me if he caught me sneaking out? I’d be grounded until I was like thirty, and Mom promised to take me shopping on Saturday! I wouldn’t have gone with Taylor if she had begged me. Besides, I don’t like Flick. I think he’s mean.”

Norchester suddenly slumped down into a chair and put his head in his hands. Josh supposed it could be pretty overwhelming to suddenly realize that the only reason your daughter wasn’t going to be a suspect in a murder investigation was because she was afraid she wouldn’t get to go to the mall.

“What did Taylor do while she was gone?” Elise asked. “Did she tell you?”

“I don’t know.” Jenna’s face went pink.

“Jenna,” Elise said, her voice making it clear that she didn’t believe her. “What did Taylor do?”

“She had a bottle of wine that somebody gave her dad. Her and that boy were going to go to the park and drink it and make out. Her parents wouldn’t let her see him, so she had to find ways to sneak out to see him. Her mom had figured out she was sneaking him in at night, so she’d locked Taylor’s windows and was checking on her all the time, and making her take drug tests and stuff. She said they were like the Gestapo.”

Josh looked over at Elise. They weren’t going to get anything else from Jenna.

Elise had clearly reached the same conclusion; she stood up from the table. “Thank you, Jenna,” she said gravely. “We appreciate your help.”

Jenna slumped down in her chair. “I hope so. Taylor will never forgive me.” Then the waterworks started again. Mr. Norchester patted his daughter’s back while she sobbed onto his shoulder that she should have tried to stop Taylor, but she hadn’t known how, and nobody knew how mean Taylor could be now.

Josh followed Elise out the front door. Forgiving Jenna was going to be the least of Taylor’s problems. Her alibi had just been blown, and she’d just been put back in the running as a suspect in her parents’ murder.

He fingered the lamp cord in his pocket. All around him, his life went on as normal. Everyone doing everything the way they did it every day—the fools. Nothing was as it had been. Food tasted more savory. The spring air was sweeter. Sex was amazing, revelatory. Everything was better, and they didn’t even notice. They trotted along on their paths like the sheep they were.

Almost everyone he’d ever met was a fool, with the possible exception of Orrin. He would miss him. Everyone else was a touchy-feely sack of tears and fears, a tool for him to use. But in a way, he’d been a fool as well.

If he’d known how it would feel to take a life, he would have done it long before. The rush of adrenaline when the lamp had connected with the back of Orrin Dawkin’s head had been incredible, nearly indescribable in its wild joyousness. The feeling had coursed through his system like wildfire, making his heart pound and his breath come fast. It had felt so good, he couldn’t think of words for it. It was better than drugs and better than sex, although the ecstasy had had something sexual to it. His cock had hardened as he looked down at what he’d done, at the way Orrin’s blood and brains splattered across the tidily vacuumed living room carpet. The feeling had made him reel, it was so powerful.

He’d known then not to rush with Stacey. When you discovered nirvana, you didn’t want to just visit it. You wanted to live there. It had been sweet, so very sweet, to watch Stacey’s eyes glaze over and to see her head loll back like an old pudgy ragdoll. Then he’d released the cord the smallest amount and allowed the oxygen to rush into her lungs again. He’d watched as Stacey remembered where she was and what was happening to her; watched as the horror and the terror and the knowledge of her own helplessness had washed over her. Then he’d tightened the cord and done it again, and again.

After Stacey was finally dead, it had taken only a few quick strokes to make him explode inside his pants with a burst of rapture he’d never experienced before. He wanted to feel that again. He wanted to feel the power and the control and the sweet release. He was breathing hard just thinking about it. He slid the cord between his fingers again and replayed it in his mind all over again.

There had to be a way to make it happen. It was dangerous, though—so dangerous. He’d have to be smart and bide his time.

It had been easy to get a warrant for Lois Bradley’s last known address on Acacia Avenue over in north Sacramento near Del Paso Heights. With two strikes against Lois already, Judge Neely had been willing to believe that she might be predisposed to committing a third crime worthy of a strike.

Josh stood to one side of the cheap hollow-core door at the entrance to her apartment, and Elise stood on the other beneath the air-conditioning unit that jutted from the wall. Their hands hovered near the weapons on their belts.

The long, low building was painted pink with turquoise trim in an attempt at whimsy, but the paint didn’t disguise the boarded-up window in the back, or the parking lot with only a scattering of gravel over its hard-packed dirt. The whole neighborhood had a defeated air, as if it had nothing left to lose.

Lois had something left to lose: her freedom. Paperhangers like Lois were not generally violent. They worked behind the scenes. They weren’t into direct confrontation, but as Elise had pointed out, that wasn’t always the case. If push had come to shove for Lois and she had killed the Dawkins, then she’d graduated from white-collar crime to something much grittier. Shooting a cop would be another big leap, but it was unwise to ever underestimate a third-striker. When faced with spending the rest of their lives in prison, people tended to get unpredictable.