Hold Still (11 page)

Finch pointed a finger at Kevin, anger lining his reddened face. “Hey, you—”

He didn’t finish. Jocelyn strode over to him and, in one fluid movement, sucker punched him in the jaw with her left hand. He wasn’t expecting it. He flew backward for the second time that evening and hit the wall with a thud. Dazed, he slid to the ground. Jocelyn stood over him, chest heaving, her fist still clenched.

Finch rubbed his jaw and looked up at her, a look of pure hatred flashing in his eyes. “You’re dea—”

“Shut. Up,” Jocelyn said, her voice husky. They stared at each other a moment longer, neither one of them giving an inch. Finally, Jocelyn turned and walked out of the room.

TWENTY

October 8th

Jocelyn strode down the hallway
to the doors she and Kevin had entered through. She kept her eyes straight ahead, not even stopping when the doctor in the blue scrubs called after her. Every muscle in her body was tensed up in an effort to keep from shaking. She went through the two sets of sliding glass doors and stopped outside. She moved down from the entrance and sat on a bench that smokers used. She leaned forward and put her head between her knees. She couldn’t stop the trembling, but now with no audience, she let it run its course. She probably looked like she was having some kind of seizure by the time Kevin found her.

He sat beside her with a sigh. She didn’t look at him but recognized the sound of him freeing a Nicorette tab from its wrapper and popping it into his mouth. He put a hand on her shoulder. “You okay?”

She lifted her head and glanced over at him. “No,” she said. “I’m fucking pissed.”

And she was. More than anything—more than she felt afraid or traumatized or lucky to be alive, she felt angry. It raged through her like it had been injected intravenously. For a moment, she felt as though she might split apart, explode into a thousand pieces. Her chest heaved with the effort it took to breathe around the anger. “That motherfucker. I could have been killed tonight, all because he can’t do his fucking job—because he’s fucking lazy and incompetent. I already have one scar because of him. Shit. I should have shot him.”

“Hey, take a breath,” Kevin said.

“I’m trying. It’s not working.”

He laughed. “And you thought you didn’t need anger management.”

Her hand shot out and punched him hard in the upper arm, splint and all.

“Oww,” he said, rubbing his arm. He motioned to her wrist. “You’re going to feel that in the morning.”

“I don’t really care.”

She sat up straighter, focusing on drawing breath down deep into her diaphragm—like she had been taught in the one anger management class she’d attended thus far. She and Kevin watched people drive up and drop loved ones off. Some of them got out of their cars in a hurry, sprinting through the ER doors and emerging seconds later with a security guard wheeling an empty wheelchair. Others dropped their loved ones off and went to park, leaving the person to stand outside the door and wait for them to return. The red lights of ambulances flashed past now and then, headed around to the trauma bay. There were flurries of activity followed by dead silence, punctuated only by Kevin’s incessant lip smacking.

“Hey, Rush,” he said during one lull.

She turned her head to meet his eyes, realizing that her body had finally relaxed. The rage was fading. “Yeah,” she breathed.

“Know how you punched Friendly Fire in the face back there?”

“Yeah.”

“That was pretty badass.”

Jocelyn laughed. It began as a chuckle and kept going. She laughed so long and loud that her sides hurt.

“It was,” Kevin added.

She wiped tears from her eyes, her body still convulsing with laughter, shedding the rest of the tension from the confrontation in the hospital. “Well, it felt pretty damn good.”

“I bet.”

“He’ll report me,” Jocelyn said, her laughter subsiding.

“Fuck him,” Kevin said, waving a hand in the air. “I’m reporting his ass too. What he did was worse. Plus, he’s got a history. One of these days he’ll get what’s coming to him.”

“Hey, Kev,” Jocelyn said.

“Yeah?”

She smiled. “Don’t ever call me a broad again.”

It was his turn to laugh. “Deal.” He clapped her on the knee. “Let me wrap this up, and then we’ll get out of here.”

Jocelyn was standing outside, waiting for Kevin, when a woman in a wheelchair caught her eye. She sat alone in the vestibule area of the ER entrance. It was the bandaged hands and feet that drew Jocelyn’s gaze.

“Anita?” Jocelyn said as she approached. She crossed the threshold of the vestibule and the double sliding glass doors closed behind her automatically with a loud whoosh.

Anita looked up at her and then quickly looked back at her lap. She was dressed in street clothes that looked dirty and rumpled. A red cotton shirt and a pair of faded jeans. They didn’t look at all like Anita’s style. SVU would have taken the clothes she’d been wearing on arrival into evidence. These looked like donated clothes. Jocelyn would bet her week’s salary that one of the nurses had supplied them. Anita hugged her purse to her stomach, her two bundled hands like large paws.

Jocelyn looked around. Anita sat off to the side, as if waiting for someone. Jocelyn watched the parking lot for a moment, but no headlights cut through the darkness.

“Anita,” Jocelyn said again. “What’s going on?”

There was a tremor in her chin. Jocelyn almost missed it. Anita swallowed hard and blinked back tears. “Got discharged,” she murmured.

Again Jocelyn looked toward the parking lot. No one was coming.

“You want a ride home?” Jocelyn asked.

Finally, Anita met her eyes. Something like relief washed over her face, smoothing the lines out of her forehead. “Okay,” she said.

Kevin met them in the parking lot twenty minutes later and helped Jocelyn maneuver Anita into the backseat of their vehicle. As Jocelyn folded the wheelchair and placed it into the trunk, one of Einstein’s security guards called out from a nearby parking lot booth. “That’s hospital property.”

She flashed her badge. “It’s police property now.”

He flipped her off, and she yelled, “Fuck you very much,” as she got into the car. Kevin drove, and, from the backseat, Anita chuckled softly. “You’re something, Rush.”

“You still live on West Chelten?” Jocelyn asked as they pulled out of Einstein’s parking lot.

“Yeah, the Grove Apartments. I, uh, I live on the second floor.”

“You got elevators?” Kevin asked.

“No,” Anita replied.

Before Kevin could get through his eye roll, Jocelyn jabbed him sharply in the side with her elbow. He cleared his throat and smiled tightly at Anita in the rearview mirror. “That’s okay. We’ll get you up there.”

They rode in silence for a few moments. Then Jocelyn asked, “Did someone from SVU come out to talk to you?”

“Oh, he was here,” Anita said, clucking her tongue. “Name was Vaughn. But he was too pretty to talk to.”

In spite of the tension that had been knotting Jocelyn’s shoulder blades all night, she laughed. “Too pretty to talk to?”

She and Kevin exchanged a look. Kevin shrugged and kept his eyes on the road.

“Boy looked like a damn movie star,” Anita continued. “I am not talking to him about—well, you know.”

Vaughn had come out himself. Jocelyn felt a small wave of relief. Vaughn was a lieutenant. He didn’t have to interview Anita. He could have sent one of his detectives to do it, but he had taken the time to go to the hospital himself, which meant that he was taking the case seriously—even if he was too pretty to talk to.

“I remembered something else,” Anita said.

Jocelyn turned in her seat to look at the other woman. The backseat of the car seemed to swallow Anita. She looked so tiny. The white of her gauze bandages stood out in stark relief against the evening darkness.

“What is it?”

“The guy who drove the nails in,” Anita paused to lick her lips, as if her mouth had gone dry just talking about the rape. “He had a big, thick silver watch. I think it was Michael Kors. It was expensive.”

“What’s Michael Kors?” Kevin asked.

“It’s a brand of watch. Phil wears Michael Kors. I remember because I had to spend a half week’s salary on the one he wanted for Christmas. He couldn’t possibly settle for one of their less expensive ones,” Jocelyn said.

Kevin let out a low whistle. “For a watch? That’s bullshit.”

“I know,” Jocelyn said. Phil’s expensive taste had been one of the things they’d disagreed on consistently. Sure, he made more than her, but even an ADA’s salary wasn’t enough to support the lifestyle that Phil aspired to. He saw nothing wrong with spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on needless things.

She had bought him the watch because he’d wanted it so badly, and she had wanted to please him. Even as he had exclaimed over it on Christmas Day and slipped it onto his wrist with a flush of delight on his face, all Jocelyn could think of was that he was wearing three months of electric bills on his wrist. He did not understand her frugality.

“But you came from money,” he would say.

“Yes,” she would respond, exasperated, “but I don’t have any now.”

Kevin’s voice interrupted the memory. “How do you know it was Michael Kors?” he asked Anita.

“It had an MK on it. I know the brand because one of the men in my office wears it. This one was big and clunky.”

“That’s good, Anita,” Jocelyn said. “Did you mention this to Vaughn?”

“No, I didn’t remember till this morning.”

“This is it,” Jocelyn said to Kevin, motioning toward Anita’s apartment building. Kevin pulled over. Together, he and Jocelyn carried Anita up to the second floor. The apartment was small and dated but neatly kept. It smelled like cinnamon and Lysol.

“Where’s my babies?” Anita asked her mother as Jocelyn and Kevin half carried, half dragged Anita into the living room.

Arms crossed tightly across her thin chest, Lila responded, “Terrence is at football practice and Pia’s at her little friend’s house. They’ll be home soon enough.”

Kevin went back down for the wheelchair as Jocelyn helped Lila situate Anita on their pullout sofa bed. The woman was rail thin, her skull swathed in a turban. She barely acknowledged Jocelyn and Kevin, appraising her daughter with pursed lips and a wrinkled brow. Anita began to cry silently, sobs making her body hiccup. Wordlessly, Lila arranged a blanket over Anita’s lap and shook her head, turning her back on her daughter. Jocelyn’s throat felt suddenly tight. The tiny apartment seemed to close in on her, but she steeled herself against the unwanted emotion. She sat beside Anita and leaned in close.

“Pull it together, Anita. It’s going to be okay. I already got two of those fuckers behind bars.” Jocelyn glanced over her shoulder. Lila had disappeared down the hall. “I don’t give a rat’s ass what your mama thinks. This wasn’t your fault.”

Anita smiled and wiped her tears gingerly with the backs of her gauze-bandaged hands. When she met Jocelyn’s eyes, the sadness in her gaze set Jocelyn back on her heels. Anita had been through a lot in her short, tortured life, but this had damaged her in a place her former life had never been able to touch. Her lips pressed into a thin line and lifted ever so slightly at the corners—a cross between a smile and a grimace.

“There’s always more, Rush,” she said. “You put those men away, but there will always be more.”

TWENTY-ONE

October 20th

“Rush, what are you doing?”

Kevin’s voice startled her. The chair she sat in creaked loudly as she jumped. Her splinted hand flew to her chest. “What the hell, Kev?” she said. “Don’t sneak up on me.”

Across the room, a knot of other detectives chuckled. “You’re concentratin’ awful hard there, Rush. Whadda you got on that computer? Porn?” one of them called.

She flipped them off and shifted her chair over as Kevin dragged his own chair around the desks and insinuated himself next to her. He plopped three thick files onto her desk, dislodging a stack of papers and sending them scattering to the floor. “We got reports to write, Rush.”

“Goddammit, Kev,” Jocelyn said, reaching down to the floor to retrieve them. She was already halfway under her desk when she realized that from across the room it would look like her head was in Kevin’s lap. She raised one hand in the air, middle finger extended once again, at the barrage of oral sex jokes that floated over toward the two of them.

“You’re no fun anymore, Rush,” one of the other detectives called.

She sat back in her chair, face flushed, wisps of her brown hair escaping from her ponytail. Kevin was leaning over her desk, squinting at her computer screen. “Are you working on that SVU case again?”

She pushed him aside and clicked out of the screen she had been in. It had been almost two weeks since they had taken Anita home from the hospital. Jocelyn had left several messages for Lieutenant Caleb Vaughn, but he hadn’t called her back. She’d wanted to talk to him about the watch Anita had remembered and whether or not he had tracked down Alicia Hardigan.

The lines at the corners of Kevin’s eyes crinkled. He rubbed a hand over his thinning salt-and-pepper hair as he regarded her. “Rush,” he said, lowering his voice. “What are you doing?”

“Vaughn hasn’t called me back.” She pulled one of the files he’d plopped on her desk toward her but didn’t open it.

Kevin fingered the packet of Nicorette gum sticking out of his jacket pocket. She realized suddenly that for the first time in weeks, Kevin didn’t smell like smoke. It was slightly disconcerting. “So what? Who gives a shit? In case you didn’t notice, we’ve got our own cases to worry about.”

Jocelyn looked away momentarily. A muscle in her jaw twitched. She looked back at Kevin, right into his hazel eyes, and whispered two words. “Rasheedah Jones.”

He paled immediately. He leaned back in his chair, away from her, away from the mention of the single case of his career that had truly gotten under his skin.

“That’s not fair,” Kevin said. “Why are you bringing that up?”

“Anita,” said Jocelyn, holding him with her gaze, “is my Rasheedah Jones.”

Rasheedah Jones had been a seventy-eight-year-old woman who was beaten in a subway stairwell by five teenage boys for no apparent reason. She’d had less than ten dollars on her, and they hadn’t even taken it. One of the things they’d used to beat her—besides their fists and feet—was her own cane.

Kevin had gone around for weeks after that night muttering, “Her own cane” at random times. They’d closed in pretty quickly on the teenagers. The criminal youth of Philadelphia weren’t the brightest, and Kevin and Jocelyn managed to track down pretty good surveillance footage of the boys before and after the beating, including a video showing one of them carrying Jones’s cane off with him as a souvenir.

Then Rasheedah Jones died from her injuries, and the case was turned over to homicide.

But Kevin couldn’t let it go.

Kevin was a pro. He had fifteen more years on the force than Jocelyn did. In fact, he could retire soon if he really wanted to, but he was a bachelor in his midfifties. He ate TV dinners and spent most of his off time at the nursing home visiting his mother. His sister and her family lived in Maryland, and he didn’t see them much. Every year for Olivia’s birthday he dropped hundreds of dollars on ridiculously extravagant gifts. He had no idea how to function outside work.

And that was okay because Kevin could do his job, and it didn’t get to him. But Rasheedah Jones had kept him up nights. He couldn’t let it go, wouldn’t let it go. He harassed the homicide squad, inserting himself into the investigation where he didn’t belong until he got himself formally reprimanded.

“Anita didn’t die,” Kevin growled. “She’ll survive this.”

Jocelyn stared hard at him until he had the good sense to look at his feet. “Who had your back, Kev?”

A moment of silence passed. Then another. Kevin rubbed his hands over his eyes and sighed heavily. “I guess I can always take early retirement if the shit hits the fan,” he said. “What did you have in mind?”

“I want to find Alicia Hardigan.”