Mother's Milk (24 page)

He retrieved his briefcase and returned to the bedroom. He took the stacks of cash – $10,000 per bundle, two hundred twenty in all. He also took a small leather notebook that contained her pass codes and the numbers of her Cayman Island accounts, as well as the stacks of bearer bonds that had to be worth another hundred K. Lastly, he took a small wooden box that contained glass ampoules of sufentanil, a synthetic opiate used by surgeons that was a hundred times more potent than heroin. He then rearranged the jewel cases and the boxes of heavy coins, so that someone looking into the safe for the first time wouldn't think anything had been taken. He snuck a quick glance at the coins, Krugerrands, antique American eagles and double eagles. The three boxes weighed pounds each and some of the antiques were rare and worth tens of thousands. He felt his rage, at how much she'd kept from him –
Got what she deserved
, and despite what he'd told himself, he grabbed one of the coin cases and shoved it into his briefcase. He then closed the safe, careful not to have it latch, and moved back through the living room. He picked up his glass of Scotch and wiped down any surface he might have touched. He emptied the liquor down the bathroom sink and washed it away. Quickly drying the glass he replaced it in the living-room hutch. Standing there, he looked around.
What have I missed? What have I missed?
It had been just half an hour; right on schedule. He tried to calm himself.
It's perfect.
He mentally retraced his every step through her apartment – no loose ends. This evening into night would mark the start of a new life – one rung falling away as the next appeared. Bye-bye, Janice, with her crumbs of money, saggy breasts and veiny thighs, bye-bye. The vision that took shape in his mind's eye was glorious and heady, the successful surgeon Dr. Chase Strand and his beautiful wife, Dr. Barrett Strand.

With his hands still in the purple hospital gloves, he peered through Janice's fish-eye – the hall was clear. He turned the knob, and keeping the door on latch, headed out and down through the stairwell

R
uth was the first to give voice to what all four of them knew was a big problem. ‘Dear,' she said, while busily preparing a pitcher of iced mint tea in Barrett's galley kitchen, ‘it's not my business, and I'm sure you have your reasons …' She looked around at Hobbs, who was on his cell, the boy with his wild hair and skinny arms covered in tattoos who was so clearly sick, and then her daughter, with her untucked shirt and navy suit that looked as though she'd worn it while playing some contact sport … in the mud. ‘I've never known you to bring home a patient.'

‘I don't want to get you in trouble,' Jerod said. ‘This is nice and all, but you shouldn't do this. You've got a baby here … What if …' He looked at Max, who was staring back at him from the crib on the far side of the couch. ‘You can't take risks like that, not for me.'

‘It's OK,' Barrett said, as her mother came around with the iced tea. ‘They don't know where you are, or where I live,' she said, realizing that might not be true. More importantly, this plan to keep Jerod from harm was way outside the rules of her agency, not to mention the bounds of professional ethics.

‘No luck,' Hobbs said, clicking his cell back onto his belt. ‘I can't get the manpower. Schmitt said I could keep him in lockup, but beyond that he couldn't free up anything more. Low priority.'

‘Not good,' Barrett said, realizing they were on their own.

‘No,' Jerod said, ‘I'd rather stay on the street than get you in trouble.'

‘Stop it,' Barrett said, trying to think through to the next step. ‘What did we see up there, Jerod? How many kids live in that building?'

‘Maybe ten,' he said, his eyes on the small bottle of pills they'd picked up from the pharmacy. ‘They've got the two apartments on the top floor.'

Barrett looked at Jerod; he was shivering and sweating at the same time, and the hairs on the back of his arms were sticking up like porcupine quills. ‘Put two of these under your tongue and leave them there.'

He reached forward. ‘You got to find Marky,' he said. ‘He's the one who collects the money and drops off the dope. But there's somebody behind him.' His fingers rested on the top of the bottle.

‘Who?' Hobbs asked.

‘Don't know,' Jerod said, as he pressed down with a shaky hand on the cap and looked in at the tiny but potent pills. He looked up at Barrett, and then at her mother. Tears squeezed from the corners of his eyes. ‘How sick will I get if I don't take nothing?'

‘Real sick,' she said, ‘you know that.'

‘Can it kill me?' he asked.

‘No, not as long as you can keep some fluid down.'

‘How long will it last?'

‘Few days, the first two will be the worst, it'll be a lot easier with the pills, we can get you off more slowly.'

He put the cap back on the bottle and pushed them away. His hands covered his face and he leaned forward. ‘I don't want to be a junkie. I just want this to be over.' He started to dry heave. ‘I don't want the pills. Take them away.'

Barrett put down her tea and settled beside him on the couch. She put an arm around his shoulder, and felt like telling him to just take the damn pills. ‘You sure you want to do this cold turkey? You're going to be miserable.'

He nodded and rocked in place his head still in his hands, his rough braids making a curtain in front of his face. ‘I can't keep doing this shit,' he said. He bit his lower lip. ‘If I hadn't shot up she'd still be here.'

‘Carly?' Barrett offered.

With his head inches from her coffee table he looked at her, his lashes wet, his mouth twisted. ‘It's my fault. If I hadn't been nodded out I would have been able to stop them. I could have saved her.'

‘Stopped who?' Hobbs asked, kneeling next to him.

‘I thought it was a dope dream,' Jerod said, ‘now I know it wasn't. It had to be real. There were two of them, Marky, and some other guy. I hadn't seen him before.'

‘Did you see his face? What did he look like?'

‘It was fuzzy, but Marky was into him. He's gay, and this guy was like telling him what to do. I remember thinking that was weird; people don't tell Marky what to do. He kind of orders everyone around, but not this guy. Told him to be careful with her, that he couldn't bruise her. He was talking about Carly, like she was a piece of furniture. They took her.'

‘Was there anyone else there?' Hobbs asked.

‘It was the four of us – Bobby, Ashley, Carly … I'm the only one left. That's why they keep trying to get me. I'm supposed to be dead. That's why you shouldn't keep me here with your baby and your mom. It's too much.' He sobbed. ‘There's got to be somewhere else. You shouldn't do this. I'm just a fucking junkie. Maybe you
should
put me in a cell.'

‘My place,' Ruth said.

‘What are you talking about?' Barrett said, noting the determined line of her mother's mouth.

‘Barrett, I don't know all that's going on here. Because Lord knows you keep things from me … your sister too. But I sure as hell know if you brought a patient to your house that something is wrong. I also know that if anyone finds out – like your boss who called here twice this afternoon looking for you – you're out of a job … Am I wrong?'

‘How secure is your place?' Hobbs asked.

‘Please,' Ruth said, ‘it kept out my ex-bastard-cop of a husband when he thought he'd come and drag us all back to Georgia. And Sophie and Max were no slouches when it came to home security, back in the days when having a store and living on the Bowery meant something; they never once got robbed. We can leave the gates down on the first floor; it's pretty secure. There's no easy roof access, and no one knows who the hell I am, unlike my almost famous daughter.'

‘It doesn't suck,' Hobbs commented.

‘That's settled, then,' Ruth said, and proceeded to pick up Max's large Thomas the Train tote bag and then headed toward Barrett's bedroom.

‘He's going to get very sick,' Barrett said, ‘you're not going to be able to leave him alone.'

‘Fine,' she said, ‘I have tonight off anyway, it sounds like you and Detective Hobbs are up to your ears, so I'll take Max and Jerod for the night. We'll figure out what comes next in the morning.'

‘You want a ride?' Hobbs asked.

Ruth stopped packing and looked at Hobbs and then Barrett. ‘No, we'll get a cab. I think you two have things to work on; we'll be fine.'

Five minutes later Ruth had packed up the baby. She passed Jerod the tote and walker and they were out the door and into a cab.

‘What are we missing?' Barrett asked as she watched the taxi from the window.

‘Marky,' Hobbs said. ‘He's the link to whoever is behind this. Although whenever you talk dope, it's a chain, and it can be a long one. That's why narcotic's operations take forever; you're always trying to work your way back as high up as possible. This Marky guy and whoever's bossing him around are just two links, the dead kids are the final link.'

‘Here's the part that's gnawing at me,' she said, ‘and it's so way out you're going to think I'm certifiable.'

‘As opposed to your normally sane behavior of running into crack houses and getting abducted by sociopaths?'

‘Cute … Here's the deal. All these kids were products of the DFYS system.'

‘So, them and tens of thousands more?'

‘What if someone within the department gets it into their head that these kids have real value … as dealers, maybe even as fodder for the sex trade or even white slavery? They're disposable, don't have families that care …'

‘We've been here,' Hobbs said, ‘what's the leap to our perp or perps?'

‘I think they made a mistake when they broke into my office, because it was a big tip of their hand. It had to be someone high enough up who would know that I'd been Jerod's doctor, who would have access to a key card, know where my office was, and … Call me paranoid, but the person that leaps to my mind is my boss.'

‘The commissioner? That is a leap.'

‘She used to be the Commissioner of DFYS, and years back she set up a string of drop-in centers that did good work with the kids on the street. So maybe not her directly, but someone close to her … like Hugh Osborn. Or …'

‘Or?'

‘I go to this conference … I have no choice, Janice lets me know if I don't show it'll be considered insubordination and finally give her the grounds she needs to get rid of me. So I show up and this ridiculously handsome young guy sits next to me in the auditorium. Turns out he's something of a golden child for the DFYS, and … was also one of Janice's patients when he was a kid growing up in foster care.'

‘OK, connections, but still not off the chart.'

‘Yeah, but something happened when she saw the two of us together. Almost a complete personality shift, and this is the weird thing, after making such a big deal about my being there, she was fine with me taking off in a cab … with this Chase guy.'

‘Really? And what exactly were you doing getting in a cab with him?'

‘He said he had some kind of emergency back at his office and offered to split the cab … course he knew that I worked uptown …'

‘It's still weak, but maybe there is something. Much as I hate dealing with these top agency types, it's time for a chat with your boss … It might be good for you to be there, kind of keep it informal, less of an investigation and more of a, “By the way do you think anyone in your old department might be preying on their clients?”'

Barrett glanced at her watch. ‘I can't.'

‘Because …'

‘I sort of have dinner plans.'

‘The ridiculously handsome guy you think might be a white slaver and drug lord?'

‘Yuh.'

‘You are a piece of work, Barrett.' Hobbs did not sound happy and he shook his head. ‘I guess this gives you your chance to see if he's all that he seems.'

‘I suppose,' she said, unable to shake the intimacy of Chase's smile, his amber eyes, and the way those eyes seemed to drink her in. Her gut told her he was bad news, but another piece of her was flattered and knew how easy it could be to fall for such an attractive man. She glanced at Hobbs; he was looking out her living-room window, the scarred side of his face turned from her. Why was he suddenly so cold? She had to change the subject. ‘You never told me who you were dating.'

‘You don't know her; she works in IS … What time's your date?'

‘I wouldn't call it that, but eight.'

‘You better get ready,' he said briskly. ‘If you think there might be a connection with these murders, see if he knew Bobby, Ashley, or that Carly girl. I'll let you know if I find out anything from your boss … Have fun.'

Before she could say anything else, he'd crossed her living room, retrieved his gun from the coffee table, and was out the door.

‘Crap,' she muttered, and listened as the door shut behind him. It didn't slam, but she felt an accusation in it. She watched from behind the linen curtains as he got into his Crown Vic and drove off. She hated the way her relationship with Hobbs had turned into a landmine of bad feelings, his … hers. She felt the impulse to run after him, to call him. But what would she say? ‘He's seeing someone else. Let it go.'

But he had given her an idea. She booted up her laptop and with her security clearance as a facility director had access into the databases of all the state's social-service agencies, including DFYS. Sitting cross-legged on her couch with the computer in her lap, she logged onto their website and then into their client files. She typed in ‘Carly Sloan' and was confronted with hundreds of electronic encounter records, essentially a history of all services provided to the girl who'd left the agency's custody less than a year ago. The information was limited, just what service was provided and by whom. But one name snagged her attention, Chase Strand, dozens and dozens of counseling sessions that stretched back over two years. She then typed in ‘Bobby Dix' and scrolled through his history. No sign of Chase being connected. Then she typed in Jerod's name, and because he'd left the department a few years back, and the computer system was relatively new, there was minimal information and no sign of Chase. Again, the connection to Carly Sloan could just be another coincidence, but there were too many.