The Timer Game (32 page)

“Have the postcard?”

She shook her head.

“What did it say?”

“It had his photo—Warren Pendrell’s—shot as he was leaving the multibillion-dollar business he founded. The angle looked like it was taken in the parking lot. A knife was embedded in his chest, drawn in ink with spatter blood drops.”

“Any leads on the ink?”

She thought of what Marcie had said about the ink used in the note attached to the bloody doll. “Part of a shipment that went into four million pens sold in six Western states.”

He was taking notes now. “Any words?”

This part, at least, was true. “‘He’s coming for you, the Spikeman.’” The same message that Eddie Loud had given her right before she killed him.

“So you think it’s somebody inside? We haven’t made handmade paper in three years. We only tried it for six months. Besides, they sold it in the prison gift shop. Somebody could have come in, paid cash for it, walked out the door and never left a trace.”

“Maybe it’s somebody with a grudge who’s out now. Who thinks he’s been ripped off in some way by this sale.”

Syzmanski swiveled in his chair and stared out the window. The sky was darkening and a velvet canopy of lights outlined the prison.

“Spikeman. It’s not a name I remember hearing. I share a secretary with another AW and she won’t be in until tomorrow. I’m not equipped to do a full-out computerized search of AKA’s until tomorrow, but I did pull a list of inmates who’d worked at the print shop on that paper detail during the six months of time it was in operation. You can see if anything pops out.”

He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a computerized printout and slid it across to her. There were eight names on the list. She recognized two names, both infamous killers, but none of them, she was almost certain, had passed through her lab on their way to life sentences.

“You keep checking your watch. You late?”

“I’m flying back to San Diego with my sponsor in an hour or so, out of Mather Field.” She rechecked the list so he wouldn’t see the shock on her face when she’d checked the time. She needed to be back in the car in less than an hour. Where did her life and Warren’s intersect? That was the key. She wasn’t seeing it. “It’s—I don’t know.”

Syzmanski pushed his chair back. “I don’t know how else to help you.”

She thought of something. “Is anybody on this list a scientist or researcher?”

He shook his head. “Don’t think so.” He took the list back and scanned it standing up.

“Or doctor. Maybe a medical doctor.”

He stopped reading. “That narrows it down.”

He punched the intercom on his desk and leaned in. “Yeah, Sean. Could you send the van around, and alert B facility to take Benny Jingelston out of his cell and have him waiting upstairs in an interview room?” He listened to a garbled response. “I copy. Thanks.”

He walked around the desk and opened the door. “He’ll be there in ten minutes.”

“Thank you,” she said simply.

He nodded and turned off the light, locking the door as they stepped into the hallway.

“Who’s this guy again? Benny? What’s he in for?”

Syzmanski looked away. “Kidnapping, distribution of pornography, and murder.” His eyes were flat. “Benny ran a child porn ring.”

Chapter 35

All Hallows’ Eve, 7:03 p.m.

Benny Jingelston stared up at her as the door opened and his eyes went carefully down the length of her before settling back on her chest. She fought the urge to cover herself with her arms as she took the seat across the table from him.

He had a doughy face mottled with scars. His feet were small in blue canvas shoes. He was wearing blue pants and a blue chambray shirt. His fingernails were neat and he smelled sweet, like talcum powder. He gel-combed his sparse hair over a pink scalp.

She and Syzmanski had ridden a bright blue van over to the B facility, and come in through a sally port, two secure electronic doors, neither opened at the same time. The guard was watching their progress on banks of video monitors as they climbed the metal stairs to a locked door at the top. They waited as the guard upstairs electronically buzzed them through.

Now Syzmanski stood outside the interview room, glancing through the glass window occasionally to make sure she was okay. Two guards paced in the hall, ready to escort Benny to his cell. Benny clasped his small hands on the table. Leg shackles clanked as he shifted.

“Do you know who I am?” According to her watch, she had exactly forty-two minutes. Forty-two minutes to get what she needed and be back in the car.

He shook his head and smiled. “A pretty lady in a hurry. What’s your hurry?”

“Answer the question.”

He hesitated and then shrugged. “Grace. Grace Descanso. Guard told me on the way over. The name who’s calling me out. That’s the last freebie, by the way.”

“Does it mean anything to you?”

“Should it? Do you know who
I
am?” His dentures clicked.

“A killer. A child killer.”

He rolled his eyes and looked away. “So harsh. I was in the business of marketing children, yes,” he said matter-of-factly. “And sometimes things went awry.”

His eyes found her again, his gaze cold and unblinking. “Why are you here?”

“You worked in the paper-making shop. Did you keep paper for your own use? Give it to special people on the outside?”

“You can do better than that. Ask me a specific question.”

“What kind of doctor?”

“Did you bring anything?” He held out a small moist palm.

“Anything.” Her mind blanked.

“Barter. Did you bring anything.”

She pulled from her bag the mashed Snickers bar she’d purchased at the convenience store where she’d gotten directions to DeeDee’s almond farm. Benny snatched the candy bar up and sniffed it, taking his time.

“Smells like, well. You know what it smells like.” He closed his eyes a long moment, inhaling. He exhaled, opened his eyes, and smiled. “I’ve been in here over three years but you never forget. Children, now, have a smell all their own. Like sweet grass.”

Her heart skidded. He carefully ripped the wrapper off and set it aside.

He looked at her and smiled, his lips loose and rubbery. “There’s a lot of pain in your face. You know that.” He said it conversationally.

She was silent. He slid a finger along the length of the candy bar and licked the digit. He kept eye contact. She held it. He was testing her, she knew, on some primitive gamesmanship level. She didn’t react. Finally, he picked up the candy bar and took a generous bite.

“Thoracic surgeon. I did heart transplants. On kids.”

Her stomach felt sudsy. She was certain she’d never worked with him or seen his name but she had to be sure. “Did you ever work at the Center?”

He pursed his lips and chewed. It took a long time swallowing. “The Center.”

“The Center for BioChimera.” She thought back further. “Or back east at Johns Hopkins. Did you ever work there?” A humming started in her ears.

He shook his head and took another bite, tilting his head and biting delicately, avoiding his front teeth. “L.A. Their parents loved me. Loved me. I found—ways—of moving their darlings up the lists. Ways of providing the right heart at the right time for the right price. You can phony up transplant forms. On the Internet, you can download just about anything.”

The humming was getting louder now, a thin whine reverberating through her head, up her neck. “Did you know Warren Pendrell?”

“I don’t know why you’re bothering. Wasting my time. This is simple information you can download off of any computer.”

Except she didn’t have time. No access. No time.

He finished the candy bar and sucked his fingers clean, wiping the saliva on his pants. “The simple answer’s no. What else do you have to trade?”

She pulled out the pack of Camels and ripped off the cellophane, pulling one out. She slapped it onto the table, out of reach. “Kids you targeted for the pornography. How did you find them?”

Benny eyed the cigarette. “The usual. Single mothers. Distracted. Irritable. Kids not well supervised. Needing a male role model.”

She stared at him. He motioned impatiently for her to release the cigarette. She rolled it over to him.

He tamped the cigarette and stuck it in his mouth. “Light?”

“You can’t smoke in here, Benny, you know that.”

“What are they gonna do? Arrest me?” He took the cigarette out. The paper was damp on the end that he sucked.

She took the matches out and put them on the table out of reach. “How did it work?”

“I can tell you what the ideal combination is. Not that I did it this way.” He stared at a stain on the wall. “You snatch the kid. Have somebody who can do the video part, and somebody else to—recycle the product when it no longer serves a useful function.”

Grace looked at him. She wanted to kill him. Snap his neck. Smash his windpipe. Do a fraction to him the harm he’d done to others, except then she’d never find Katie.

“Is your operation still viable?”

He motioned for a cigarette and she took another one out and flicked it across the table at him with such force it bounced into the air and sailed off the table.

“Easy,” he said mildly, catching it midair and pocketing it in his shirt. “Viable. I don’t run things from the inside, but I hear things.”

“What kind of things?” She tossed him another and he stowed it behind his ear.

“About how easy it is in San Diego to grab a kid, drug her, dye her hair. Matches.”

He waited as she slid the matches across. There was something, right on the edge of consciousness, if she could find it. He tore off a match.

“Things about people—bad people—oh, so bad—taking pictures of kids in—shall we say—
awkward
positions? And then there are those children who are simply not as—
tractable
—as one would wish and so they’re—sent on—to perform a more useful function.”

She grew very still. A numbness was closing her throat, making it difficult to breathe. “Who? I need a name.”

He looked at her and for the first time laughed. Syzmanski’s face appeared in the glass viewing window and she waved him away. It was stronger now, the knowing. Something was off, something just out of reach. He struck the match and held it to a cigarette, inhaling deeply.

“Do you honestly think a candy bar and a couple of smokes can buy you that?”

She stared across the table at him and it clicked, the thing right on the edge of awareness.

“San Diego.”

“What’s that?” The pungent smell of smoke filled the air.

“You said San Diego. You knew where I was from before I told you.”

Benny took a long drag on his cigarette and tamped it out on the candy bar wrapper, not looking at her. “I heard from the AW.”

“Bullshit.” She lunged across the table at him. His arms were surprisingly hard under his shirt. “He was with me the whole time.”

Benny yanked his arms back and banged on the table. The door burst open. Syzmanski stood with the guards.

“I’m done.” Benny clambered to his feet. “I want to go back to my cell.”

“You know something,” she cried. “What is it?”

The two guards grabbed his arms and he shuffled out the door and down the hall.

“He’s not going to tell you anything else,” Syzmanski said quietly.

The sally port opened and the electronic gate clanged shut.

“Who has access to him?”

“You mean outside?” Syzmanski stepped into the interview room and picked up what Benny had left behind, the candy wrapper and the burned match, and stowed them in his pocket. “His lawyer. The ACLU’s getting involved. Just their kind of pond scum, a doer of kids. How are you, timewise?”

She glanced at her watch. “I have to be in the car in twelve minutes.”

He relocked the interview door and they walked toward the guard station at the far end of the hall, both of them picking up their pace.

“He has to call collect, right? You have a log or what?”

“We record everything,” Syzmanski said. “But it’s recycled. It depends on how far back the call was made as to whether or not we still have it.”

“I need that information. I need it now.”

“I can’t, Grace. Not today. There’s a limit to what I can accomplish here.”

She waited as the upstairs sally port guard surveyed the bank of video monitors showing the two guards hustling Benny toward a cell block across the yard.

“I have to know who he’s been in contact with.”

The guard nodded to Syzmanski and pressed the electronic buzzer, opening the upstairs sally port. The door slid closed behind them and the stairwell opened. Grace and Syzmanski kept talking as they made their way downstairs, their footsteps clanging on the metal steps.

“Tell you what, tomorrow I can have somebody go through the tapes and see if he made a recent call.” Syzmanski’s voice was placating.

“You don’t understand.” Her voice rose. “By tomorrow, it’s too late.”

Syzmanski stopped walking. “You’re right, I don’t understand.”

They were being watched on all the video monitors. She stopped talking and waited as they were electronically buzzed through into the sally port downstairs.

“The list,” she said quietly, as they stepped outside into the night air. “Can you get me the list of people approved to see him? The visitors’ list.”

She was already walking toward the Admin building. She wasn’t going to wait for the van to return. The temperature had dropped while they’d been inside. A cold wind bit her neck. “Any name in particular?”

“The whole list, but particularly any San Diego connection.”

“I thought you were in a hurry.”

“I am.”

He left her at the guardhouse outside the prison and went back to his office. The guard gave her a cup of coffee and disappeared into the warmth of the guard shack. The carton warmed the tips of her fingers but it did nothing to take the chill out of her heart. She braced herself and reached deep into her bag and pulled out the timer.

Katie’s smile was almost gone. The eyes still beamed at the camera, wide and trusting. She pressed her hand against the face. She sighed. She took her time putting it away, lingering over how she placed it in the bag, adjusting it, making sure it was secure, as if—as if, she suddenly thought, she were preparing a body for last rites.