Turn or Burn (14 page)

“All right.” Jess set down her box of takeout. “I used to see them a lot. We all knew each other pretty well. They were good girls, especially Erica. Lucy was kind of quiet, but Erica was real nice to me.” She stuck a forkful of food in her mouth.

She continued. “They was always working up on the corner of Spring and Fifth, working that route, and they had a few regulars. I recognized the same cars. Then one day, they didn’t come back. I figured they’d gotten a longer job. Sometimes guys take us for a week or more. That’s what I figured, but I never saw them again. I always kept an eye on ‘em because they were getting more work than most of us. I was jealous, I guess. Even us street girls lose biz in a bad economy. I guess men go back to screwing their wives, even though they know we’ll take care of ‘em better.”

I pictured the worst. And I made the decision right there that this girl was done doing tricks. I was going to help her out, whether she liked it or not. Whether that meant tracking down her parents or putting her in jail, either way, I was going to get her out of all this. It just wasn’t right.

She looked at me, and I got a good look at those blown-out, lost eyes. “Don’t judge me. I can see you doing it. I’d rock your world, baby. You don’t even understand. God gave me a gift.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“Don’t even bother with him,” Francesca warned. “You wouldn’t enjoy it.”

Jess smiled and I looked at Francesca, thinking,
what the hell does that mean?

Francesca ignored me and said to Jess, “So did you see who took them that last time? Do you remember anything?”

“Yeah. I saw his face. Big, thick glasses. White beard.”

“What was he driving?” I asked.

She blew air out, frustrated, like I’d asked her to give me a bite of her food. “Do I look like a car girl?”

“Call girl or car girl?”

“Please don’t listen to him,” Francesca said, dismissing me with a hand. “Do you remember what color? Was it an SUV, a truck?”

Shaking her head, she said, “It was a little car. Like a two-door something. It was green, I think.”

We waited for more, encouraging her to talk with our silence, but she kept quiet and started looking around. Like someone was watching us. I turned too, wondering what was up. I didn’t see anything out of the norm.

“What’s up?” I asked. “You see something?”

She shuddered a little but shook her head no. In a much quieter tone, she said, “I think that’s all I want to say. I want you to leave.”

“Five more minutes,” Francesca said. “I’ll give you another eighty. We just want to know more about what he looked like.”

She started getting up, leaving her food on the concrete. “I want you to leave me alone. I don’t know anything else.”

“Please, Jess.”

“Leave me alone!”

“All right, all right,” I said, standing up, too.

Then her head ripped back and her body fell hard. I never heard the shot. Her blood painted the brick wall behind her. I turned toward Francesca. She was pulling her gun. I did the same. Lana was running away, screaming.

Then, an overwhelming case of tunnel vision hit me. Too much for me to control. I completely lost all balance and thought. Started falling.

Next thing I knew, I felt Francesca pulling me behind the dumpster. I shook my head, trying to wake myself from this dumb stupor. Through squinted eyes, I saw Jess’s body lying there. Her blood was following a stream down into a rut in the concrete.

The next few minutes were hazy. I found out later Francesca thought I was shot. I guess that’s how I was acting. She felt for a wound but never found one. She slapped me hard, trying to bring me back. The shooter was trying to get us. Couldn’t hear the shots, only the impact of the bullets against the steel of the dumpster and the cracked concrete below. I could feel my body wanting to go to the fetal position, but I fought it, trying to get a grip.

Francesca slapped me again. I started to come back. “
Get with it, Harper
!” she was shouting. “Get with it!”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m with it.”

Another bullet hit the ground near us, but the shooter had no direct line. I saw Lana disappearing down the other end of the alley. I moved to a squat.

“He’s just around the corner there. I think we wait him out. No sense running and giving him a shot.”

Reality was coming back. I didn’t know what had hit me. Like Ted had said, I had been under the impression that my PTSD would diminish if I got back into a war zone, but that wasn’t the case. Stress seemed to be invoking some sort of involuntary reaction. I didn’t know what the hell was going on, but I needed to get a grip.

“I’m trying not to fire,” she said. “We don’t need to leave any signs that we were here. They’ll have a hard time finding evidence in the rain, but they could find a bullet.”

“Okay.”

“Hopefully Lana will keep her mouth shut, but we can’t count on it.”

We both tucked up against the dumpster, the dead girl near our feet. I fought some thoughts off about how maybe she was better off this way. That certainly wasn’t my decision. But I knew we’d pretty much killed her.

We waited right up until we heard the police cars coming. Then we made a run for it. The shooter had taken off, too. You can’t last long walking around downtown with a rifle during the day.

“What the hell was that back there?” Francesca asked in an accusatory tone.

“What?”

“Don’t waste my time, Harper. I’ve seen this before. What the hell happened to you? You could have gotten killed. You could have gotten
me
killed.”

Not something I wanted to talk about. That was for sure. I let some time pass before I said anything. “There’s a reason I don’t work much anymore. The last few tours messed me up.”

She shook her head, avoiding some kind of nurturer role. “What the hell are you back in the business for?”

“That’s a good question. I missed it. I thought it might help. You pick the excuse. Right now, I’m wondering the same thing.”

More silence.

“Well, I’d say we’re onto something,” she finally said, letting me off the hook for a minute. “We know what the man looks like. Sort of.”

Trying to avoid the scars of what just happened, I said, “Yeah, I wonder how far Detective Jacobs is from the same info.”

“He’ll be standing over Jess’s body within twenty minutes.”

“No doubt about it. A green car. White beard. Thick glasses. Not a lot to go on. It’s something, though. There have to be more people like her out there.”

“Right, but I don’t want to end up on the wrong end of a murder trial. We’re a little too close to the action right now…and you’re falling apart on me.”

“I’m fine.”

She pulled into a self-service car wash on Elliot. I pushed in some coins and started spraying the car. Then, inconspicuously, I began to clean the blood off me. She did the same.

Back in the Range Rover, both in wet clothes, she said, “I think we keep beating the piñata. There’s a reason Lucy and Erica didn’t come back that night. And didn’t come back, ever. Didn’t show up until yesterday. Someone picked them up and…”

“And what?” I asked, agreeing with her thoughts.

“And paid for something long-term.”

“I think that’s a good possibility. But how does that turn them into murderers?” I started answering my own question. “Only two ways I see it. Just like we were talking about earlier. They were paid to do it. Somehow fooled into thinking they would escape or that their time in prison would be worth it. Or,” I said, raising a hand, “considering the marks on their skin and the cyanide, maybe we’re dealing with some kind of gang…or even a cult. A Charles Manson déjà vu. Maybe Erica and Lucy were brainwashed. Seems far-fetched, but how else do you explain the triskelion? I think we’re looking at some kind of cult twist. Either way, this group is extremely dangerous.”

“And we will hear from them again.”

“I’m sure of it.” I wiped away a bead of water rolling down my face. “Where do we go now?”

“A thrift store. I can make myself look like a hooker in ten minutes. I’m going to work the street tonight. See what I can find. Maybe I’ll see or hear something. I’ll try to find out more about this guy.”

“I like your style, Daly. That’s not the worst idea in the world.”

Well, Capitol Hill was for those that don’t want to be judged. The ones that want to be free of any sociological divide. Let me tell you…you could be who you want to be. With that type of population comes a cutting edge vibe that I dig. Great cocktail bars, great vegetarian food, great people watching, and great thrift stores.

We found one quickly. Francesca worked her way through the racks and then disappeared into the dressing room. She took her time but eventually walked out. I turned and then did a double take.

“How do I look?” she asked.

I nodded, trying not to give too much away. “Not bad,” I said. “That should work.” In truth, she was stunning. Even in those rags. I suddenly wanted to cancel everything and go back to the hotel.

I drove this time. We crossed over I-5 back to downtown and pulled up near Fifth and Pine, the homerun of people watching. As she opened her car door, I said, “Keep in touch with me, Francesca.”

“Okay, Papa. I’ll be a good girl.”

“I’m serious.”

“Are you worried about me?”

“A little.”

She reached over and pinched my cheek. “I’ll be fine,
bambino
.”

“Ted would want me to watch out for you.”

“Ted would want me to watch out for
you.
” With that, she disappeared into the light rain and coming darkness.

I was starving and decided to pop into this little vegan place back on Capitol Hill called Plum Bistro. Man, I was in the mood to eat some plants. After one heck of a good meal and a glass of the House of Independent Producers Merlot, I decided to go by Dr. Kramer’s house. Maybe she’d have something new to add. From what Ted had told me earlier, she’d turned down protection, so she might be easy to get to.

I drove up the west side of Lake Union. Dr. Nina Kramer lived in a turn of the century home right across the street from Green Lake. I got close and started looking at street signs. It was dark by then. Right about the time I found her house, I saw the police cars. Something told me it wasn’t a coincidence, and I was right. I parked nearby and walked over to the scene. Three police cars and an ambulance were on-site. Another three black and whites were pulling up. All the lights on top of the vehicles lit up the night. An officer was just finishing up marking the scene with yellow tape. I tried to get by and he stopped me.

I stood with the tape pressing against my waist and watched as they lifted a body out of the water. A crowd was collecting behind me. I saw the blonde hair and knew it was Kramer. I watched for a couple more minutes. Looked like she was wearing running shoes. They zipped the body up in a body bag and lifted it up into the ambulance.

I turned, shaking my head, thinking I was right…she was easy to get to.

Sitting on the floor, I tried closing my eyes and locking into some mindful meditation, just like I’d learned from Thich Nhat Hanh’s book, but it was pointless. Even he, the powerful Buddhist monk, might have had trouble at that moment if he’d been in my shoes. My mind was in overdrive and no amount of slow breathing and images of pebbles floating to the bottom of a river was going to slow it down.

I gave up and started going back through the arrest records. Each page had a mug shot on the top left corner along with name, last-known address, work history, and then the arrest history. What else could I be missing? Someone on those pages knew something.

I stared at each picture. At the arrests. Looked for patterns and reasons. Saw a few things that were certainly worth looking into. Wrote down some names. Then something smacked me in the face. I’d been so shaken up by the blood and death of late that I hadn’t listened to what the young prostitute, Jess, had said.
Thick glasses. A white beard.
I was looking at the guy. One Jameson Taylor. He had a thick white beard and a cauliflower nose. He wasn’t wearing glasses, but sometimes they make you take them off for the mug shot. I could see little marks on his nose that could be from glasses.
Could be something.

Jameson Taylor. Born in Wichita, Kansas. Never arrested before. Released the morning after the protest on bail. “Are you my guy?” I asked out loud. “I think you have to be.”

I thought about Detective Jacobs and wondered if he’d come to these same conclusions.

I had the last-known and it wasn’t too far away. I needed to go pay this guy a visit. Should I wait on Francesca? No, I think not.

The lady staring back at me from the front door of his last-known address looked at me with confusion. I was in Renton, WA, a little blip on the radar south of Seattle, standing outside one of the many circa-1972 brick ramblers I’d passed along the way.

“He doesn’t live here anymore,” she replied. She had to be pushing sixty and wore pajamas and slippers that were way too big.
Were they his?

“And are you Mrs. Taylor?”