Innocent Prey (A Brown and de Luca Novel) (10 page)

The old man—and that was what he looked like, just then, an old, old man—kept his eyes glued to the black bag. “I have to see for myself.” He moved past the chief, who gave a nod to the EMTs. One of them unzipped the bag and folded it open as the judge approached. I stepped away from them. I didn’t want to risk touching her again, not yet.

I was still shaking like a leaf from whatever the hell had just hit me.

Okay, I’d had some weird shit happen before. I got donated corneas and wound up with some kind of mental link to the people who’d gotten other organs from the same donor. I’d had dreams and visions and premonitions. But it all had a physical reason that the believers of the world called cellular memory and the scientists of the world called bullshit.

It was the only answer I had, so I decided science would catch up later.

This, however, was different. I had no connection to this girl. I didn’t have any of her organs in my body. So why that flash?

A little buzz in my brain told me to get out of my own head and pay attention. Judge Howie, who’d told Mason he’d never heard the name Venora before, was looking at the dead girl’s face. He frowned hard, then looked closer. Something was going on. I closed my eyes so I could feel him. Mason had thought he was lying when he said he didn’t know the name.

“Who is she?” he asked. Not because he wanted to know the name, I thought. Because he wanted to verify or nullify something his brain was telling him.

“We think her name is Venora LaMere,” Mason said.

And a jolt went through the judge. I felt it.

“You
think?
” the judge asked. “What do you mean, you think?”

I need to know for sure,
my whatchamacallit translated. (I’m working on a name for it, I swear.)

“Show him,” I said, because I wanted to feel his reaction.

I felt Mason’s eyes on me after I said it, and I knew the chief and the judge were staring at me, too, with “who the hell are you to even be here?” looks on their faces. I didn’t need to see them to know. “What do you gain by not showing him?” I asked.

“Whatever it is, show me.” The judge made it an order.

I heard the zipper move lower, so I knew they were complying. Someone must have lifted the blouse, because I heard the sharp breath the judge sucked in. “What the hell does this mean?”

“We don’t know for sure yet, Howard,” Chief Sub told him.

“Bullshit. You, Brown, what do you think it means?”

I sharpened my senses. I can’t tell you how I do that, but it’s like aiming your satellite dish in the right direction. I was completely attuned to the judge’s frequency, whatever the hell that means.

Mason said, “I think it means that this girl was held somewhere with your daughter and the other girl. Lexus Carmichael. The wounds are recent.”

“Jesus.” And my brain whispered,
Something big is coming for him. Something bad. Freight train.

“Judge, have you ever heard of these other girls before? Venora LaMere? Lexus Carmichael?”

“No. Never.” I felt the lie right to my toes. Then he added, “Not to my recollection, at least. Do you know how many girls like them come through my courtroom?”

“Girls like them?” I said it without breaking my concentration or changing position at all. Mason knew what I was doing. He knew and appreciated it. I felt that, too.

“How did she die?” The judge had apparently decided to ignore my question.

“She was shot—at very close range, I think,” Mason said.

The freight train hit. It felt like a baseball bat to the skull. I opened my eyes, brought my head up fast.

Judge Howie was looking even grayer than before.

“You need to sit down,” I said, but the chief was talking over me.

“The case is official now, Howard,” he said. He put a hand on the judge’s shoulder, and urged him to turn and start walking away. “Stephanie’s in trouble. We need to bring every possible resource to bear on this so we can get her home safely.”

The judge nodded.

“Mason, something’s happening,” I said. I didn’t even say it quietly. The EMTs heard me. So did the chief and the judge, and even Rosie, who had finished up with a pad and a pen and the jogger, and was crutching toward us.

Mason pulled me into step behind the two older men. “If there’s anything you haven’t told us, Judge,” he said, “now would be the time.”

The two men stopped walking and turned to look at him, the chief with a kind of furious “how dare you?” expression, and the judge with one that might as well have been a neon sign flashing the word
guilty.

“Dammit, Mason, that’s not what I meant. Something’s
happening
to him.” I looked at the judge. “Shit, it’s a stroke. You’re having a stroke.”

He opened his mouth to say something, and then he just dropped. You know how it looks when they demo a building, the way it collapses straight down, dropping its rubble into its own basement? That’s how he fell. Like his legs had dematerialized underneath him. And it happened the instant I was reaching for him. If I’d lived in the Dark Ages they’d have burned me as a witch.

The chief crouched beside him, hands on his shoulders, rolling him onto his back. Mason shouted, and waved at the ambulance that had just finished turning itself around behind us.

It sped over to us, and the EMTs jumped out and took over.

“It’s a stroke.”

“How do you know that, ma’am?”

“If she says it’s a stroke, it’s a stroke,” Mason barked. Then he encircled my shoulder with one arm and moved us out of the way, to where Rosie stood on the trail.

The chief was pushing a hand through his hair as he walked over to join us. “Why the hell would you accuse him like that?”

Mason started to defend himself. “Chief, I—”

“Because he was lying when he said he’d never heard of Venora and Lexus.”

Then one of the EMTs shouted at the other, “She’s right, he’s stroking out. We’ve gotta transport STAT.”

Chief Sub’s anger changed to fear. I felt it. He looked at me, then at Mason. “She
psychic
or something?”

“Or something,” he said.

“I am
not
fucking
psychic.
” And just like that I knew what to call my extra-sharp intuition. NFP. Not Fucking Psychic...ism. Hey, I didn’t say it was perfect.

My attention shifted back to the EMTs as they moved the body bag onto the floor of the ambulance and dragged the gurney over for the judge.

* * *

Stevie sat on her bunk, reliving what had happened, trying to figure out what the hell she’d done wrong. Everything, she guessed. Who the hell was she to make escape plans and lead attacks? Who was she to lead anything or anyone? She couldn’t even see!

Over and over the whole thing played out in her mind, and in her mind she could see it. Her and Venora and Lexi, jabbing and stabbing at their captor. The way he’d shoved her away, and then that punch to the face. She’d hit the floor but scrambled up again and flung herself back into the tangle of people, and the gun went off, and she thought her ears would bleed from the sharp crack of it.

She’d hit the floor and then searched her own body with her hands, sure she was shot. Until she felt the warm blood on the floor, flowing toward her, not away. Lifting her head she said, “Lexi?”

“It’s Venora. Bastard shot Venora!” Lexi screamed, then she yelled again, but facing away from her this time, probably shouting through the bars. “You fucking asshole! You shot her, you bastard! You come back in here again I’m gonna eat your liver, you spineless son of a—”

“Venora.” Stevie said her name softly as she crawled to where the girl lay and put her hands on her shoulders, and then tried to put her hand on her heart to feel for its beat. But she felt a small hole instead, and the steady pulsing way the blood rushed from it with every heartbeat. “It’s okay, Venora. It’s okay.”

“Yeah,” Venora whispered. “It is.”

“Lexus, get the new girl untied before she hyperventilates and passes out!”

Lexus pounded on the bars one more time, but then Stevie heard her working on freeing up the new girl, who apparently got a look at Venora as soon as her blindfold came off, because she said, “Oh God oh God oh God.”

Stevie got Venora’s head up into her lap. She had her hand pressed to the wound, but she didn’t expect it to do any good. That beating pulse. The spot where the bullet was. It had to have gone into her heart.

“I’m sorry,” Stevie told her. “We shouldn’t have tried that. It’s my fault.”

“I...was going out either way, Stevie. I told you, I knew I was. I’m glad I died fighting.”

“You’re not gonna die.” The pulsing stopped. Just like that.

Stevie frowned and bent closer to listen for Venora’s breath.

She exhaled the words “I’ll save you,” warm and soft on Stevie’s cheek, and then...nothing.

She didn’t breathe again.

The door opened down the hall. Stevie heard more than one set of footsteps outside the cell. Lexi roared, “You come on in here, you sons of bitches! You come on in he—”

There were three quick soft sounds. Something stabbed into Stevie’s arm, and she heard Lexi fall to the floor and the new girl gasp, all at once. And then she passed out as a voice that was distorted and came from very far away said, “Get rid of the body and clean this mess up. Make it fast. We gotta move them. Someone might’ve heard the fucking shot.”

7

C
hief Sub tossed his keys to Rosie after we walked across the weed lot to where we’d all parked. The ambulance had trundled on ahead of us and was out of sight on the highway now, heading for Binghamton General. I felt bad for Rosie. He’d managed to keep up with us, his sense of urgency and commitment to his job bigger than his common sense, if you asked me. He was walking on that sprain and hurting like a bitch. And no, I didn’t need NFP to know it.

“Take my wheels, Jones,” the chief said. “Get back to headquarters and start looking for a connection between these girls. Including Rachel’s assistant, Amy Montrose.”

With a nod, Rosie headed for the big SUV.

“Keep your weight off that ankle,” I called after him. “And when you get to your office, for crying out loud, put it up and ice it, okay?”

Mason frowned at me.

“Nieces. Varsity basketball.
Real
familiar with ankle sprains,” I explained.

The chief frowned like he didn’t know quite what to make of me. Yeah, I get that a lot. Then he went right back to business. “Mason, you’re driving me.” He started for Mason’s car. Front seat. Passenger side. Aka my spot.

“Sure, Chief. Where to?”

“The hospital. I need to be there.”

Nodding, Mason opened the back door for me. I’d just as soon have gone home, because I needed to think about what had just happened out here today. Okay, picking up on the judge’s impending medical crisis was the kind of thing I’d normally do. But that flash when I touched Venora LaMere’s hand was just...freaky.

Mason held the door for me. “You look shaky,” he said when I slid past him into the car.

“I’m good,” I said with more conviction than I felt. Because he had a job to do, and seeing to my needs wasn’t a part of it. I could handle that myself, thanks. As soon as there was an opportunity to go home, I’d go. Until then, I wasn’t going to turn into a fragile wilting flower who couldn’t handle looking at a dead girl. A dead girl who was less than two years older than my nieces.

Mason’s look lingered. He knew me too damn well, and his cop sense was as good as my NFP. No, that wasn’t true. Not anymore. My NFP was hopped up on crack or something. But before. It was just as good before. And he knew I wasn’t okay, but he also knew there was nothing he could do about it right now. And he’d better also know that I had a handle on it and didn’t need his help.

Mason drove faster than he normally would have, but that didn’t bother me. We both liked to cut loose on deserted stretches of pavement every now and then. My T-Bird hadn’t been souped-up like his Monte Carlo had, but I could do a pretty decent burn.

So he drove, and the chief called the judge’s wife and told her to meet us at the hospital. Poor woman had barely been holding it together with the runaway daughter. Now she had to deal with a stroked-out husband and her runaway kid being upgraded to kidnap victim.

After the chief hung up with her, he and Mason went back and forth with each other about the case, and I sat there and tried to figure out what the hell I’d seen in that flash of mine. I mean, yeah, I was shocked by it, and completely confused, but I also knew what to do with it. Just like in the other visions or dreams or whatever the hell I’d had in the past, I had to revisit it. Look for details. Figure out what they meant.

But for the life of me, all I kept getting was the springs of the bunk above Venora’s, and the sight of her belly, all trailed in ruby lines, and her hand dragging that piece of metal across her skin.

We were at the hospital before I knew it, parked in back and headed for the emergency-room entrance, even though that wasn’t protocol. Chief Sub got his badge out and used it like Moses’s staff to part the waters ahead of us as we ran through. He accosted the first nurse he saw. “Judge Howard Mattheson. He was just brought in.”

“Yes, we have him. Are you family?”

“No. I’m the chief of police. I was with him when he—”

She put a hand on his shoulder, stopping his stream of words. “Call his family.” Her tone was saying a lot more than her words. Jeez, the judge might not pull through.

And how the hell was he going to tell us what he’d been holding back if he died?

Don’t worry, you seem to have some kind of a line to the dead.

Fuck you, Inner Bitch.

Mason said, “Look, there’s the waiting room. Let’s get out of the way, Chief.”

The chief nodded, a little spaced out, I thought, and I found myself taking him by his arm like he was my grandpa or something. If he’d been himself he’d probably have resented that. As it was, though, he didn’t even seem to notice as I guided him into the waiting room. He found a chair and sank into it. I went to the vending machines. One for soft drinks, one for coffee and one for snacks. I leaned on the snack machine and looked through the glass at the selections inside.

Then I heard a woman’s voice. “My husband,” she said. “Howard Mattheson.”

“Marianne!” Chief Sub sprang out of his seat and hurried out of the waiting room in her direction.

I no longer knew what I was looking at, and my head sort of lowered itself between my outstretched arms.

Mason came up behind me and put his hands on my shoulders, rubbing like a pro. “You okay?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What happened back there?”

I brought my head up, shook it. “Damned if I know, Mace. I got some kind of flash when my arm brushed across her hand.”

“Flash?” His hands on my shoulders stilled, and he turned me around. “Like before?”

“Yeah, except I wasn’t sleeping and I don’t share an organ donor with this kid. Or maybe I do. I don’t know. Maybe she got a bone graft or something from your brother?”

He was watching my face like it was going to tell him the secret of life. “We’ve both seen the recipient list. The name Venora LaMere wasn’t on it. We’d have remembered if it had been, even if Amy hadn’t heard it. It’s an unusual name.” He took a breath, then asked, “What did you see?”

“Her, cutting her belly with a piece of wire. The lines of blood on her skin. And a bunk above her.”

“Bunk above her,” he repeated.

“Yeah. She was lying on her back, on a narrow bed, and there was a bunk above her. I could see the springs, sagging down in the middle.”

“So someone was in the bed above her, then?”

My brows went up. “I don’t know. Maybe it was just old.”

The chief came back, Marianne Mattheson tucked within the circle of his arm. She was shaking her head and crying softly. There wasn’t a hell of a lot I could do, so I offered to get them all some coffee from the cafeteria, which had to be better than what the machine had to offer.

By the time I got back with it, Marianne’s sister had arrived to be with her. Marianne seemed to be getting hold of herself and was urging the chief to go back to work trying to find her daughter. I didn’t think he’d told her yet that it was pretty certain Stephanie had been kidnapped, or that one of her fellow abductees had been found shot to death. If he had, I figured, she’d have been on a stretcher herself.

* * *

I felt about as comfortable at the Binghamton Police Department as a Muslim going through U.S. airport security. I didn’t have a damn thing to hide, but I was sure everyone there thought differently. Or anyone who recognized me, at least. A celeb—even a minor one like me—at a police station was high test fuel for the gossip machine. And when you were known as a lifestyle guru, your own life was always a juicy target for the naysayers.

Besides, I’d given the people here a pretty hard time when my brother, Tommy, had gone missing last summer. Especially the woman at the information desk, who looked almost exactly the way my mind-camera had projected her on my inner private viewing screen. She was heavy, with thick glossy ringlets in her hair and a snotty expression on her face when she looked my way. I could hear her expression loud and clear.
You again?

I shrugged and said, “I don’t like it any better than you do,” as I followed Mason and the chief past her desk like a trained puppy.

The hospital had been kind of a useless detour, but I understood the chief’s need to see his friend in good hands at the E.R. and talk to the worried wife before he could focus again. He seemed like he’d bounced back. Worried, yeah, but he didn’t look lost anymore. He was back to being large and in charge.

“Mason?” I needed to go home. I’d done my duty, but I was done now.

He turned to look at me just as Rosie appeared. “Glad you’re back.”

Rosie had a doughnut in one hand and a very badly stained
The Cleveland Show
ceramic coffee mug in the other. I had to bite my lip hard to keep from laughing, because “Cleveland” and Roosevelt Jones bore more than a slight resemblance.

He fell into step beside us, and we all wound up in the chief’s office. I had no idea why I was being included in this inner-circle huddle, but there didn’t seem to be a way to get out of it gracefully, so I tried to stand unobtrusively near the office door and keep my mouth shut.

The chief was sitting behind his desk, and he looked right at me and said, “Close the door, please.”

“Look, guys, I don’t really need to be here for this, so, um—”

“Stay put. I wanna talk to you. And close the door.”

I closed it. The chief was hard to argue with.

“Rosie, where are we on finding a connection between the four girls?”

“I only found one connection, sir, but it’s a big one. Venora LaMere and Lexus Carmichael were both wards of the state. Foster care.”

The chief frowned. “That’s too odd to be coincidental. But I don’t see how Stephanie could be connected to two girls in the system.”

“Maybe ’cause her father’s a family court judge?” I said. “Which begs the question, why did he lie about knowing the names? I mean, who’s gonna forget a name like Venora?”

Mason blinked at me like I’d just suggested that Jesus was a pagan.

“
What?
Like it’s not obvious? Or do we just pretend not to notice things that look bad for the guy because he’s in the hospital and a friend of the chief’s?”

Rosie looked at his shoes, and Mason said, “Rachel...”

The chief held up a hand. “No, she’s right.” Then he looked me in the eye. “Sit down, Rachel.”

The words
I don’t work for you, so don’t fucking tell me what to do
were on the tip of my tongue, but I bit them back. He was being bossy, but he’d been through a lot and I’d just sort of insulted his friend. So I sat. I imagined Mason was about to fall over dead and ask the chief how the hell he did that, but now wasn’t the time.

“What made you think the judge was lying about not knowing those names?”

I heaved a giant sigh, and looked at Mason and then at Rosie, who sort of knew about my...quirks. Neither of the men flanking me were any help, though, so I complied. “Look, Chief, I was blind for twenty years.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“When you’re blind, you depend on your other senses. Mine got really strong. I can tell a lot about people by hearing them talk.”

“Tone of voice. Pitch. Steadiness. I get that,” he said.

“Mason thought he was lying, too,” I said. “His cop instinct. It’s a lot like that.”

“So how did you know he was about to have a stroke? You hear that in his voice, too?” He was watching me like I watch a dwindling bowl of M&M’s.

I didn’t know how the hell to answer him, so I went with the truth. “I felt it.”

“You felt it. Like an...intuition?”

“More like a baseball feels a home run hit.”

He blinked once, then shot an accusing look at Mason. “She’s a fucking psychic.”

I sprang out of my chair. “Don’t call me that! I’m not a fucking psychic!”

“That’s how she helped you nail the Wraith?” The chief went right on, undeterred by my most menacing tone. “With E-S-fucking-P?”

“I’m standing right here and can speak for myself, and it’s
not
ESP.”

“Then what the hell is it?” Chief Sub demanded.

“I don’t know.
You
try being blind for twenty years and then you can tell me what it is, how’s that sound?”

He glared at me. I glared back.

“You don’t like me,” I said, my tone low and even. “You don’t like people who don’t back down when you roar, and you especially don’t like it from women. You like it even less that I think your friend the judge might be up to his elbows in some kind of kidnapping ring, and you’re kind of freaked out by someone who’s more perceptive than any cop on the force.” I sent Mason and Rosie a quick look. “No offense, guys.”

“None taken,” Rosie said.

I barely paused, ’cause I was on a tear. It doesn’t happen often, but, baby, when it does...

“The thing is, Chief, I don’t fucking care what you think of me. I don’t even want to be here right now. I have no interest in being an amateur sleuth, and if it’ll make you feel better, I’ll swear on a stack of chocolate chip pancakes not to get mixed up in any more of your cases. That work for you?”

He opened a drawer, rifled around until he pulled out a sheet of paper, then slapped it on top of the mess on his desk. “No, I’m afraid it doesn’t. Scribble your name and social on there and sign it. I’ll fill in the rest.”

I looked at the paper but didn’t reach for it. “What is it? A restraining order?”

“It’s for the W-4 I have to file to make you an official police consultant.”

“I just said I didn’t want—”

“Yeah, I got that.” The chief was completely calm but deadly serious. “Fact remains you’re needed here. If you can help us get those girls back alive—and after what I saw today, I think maybe you can—then you’ve got to. You know that as well as I do, don’t you, de Luca?”

I closed my eyes, not to feel anyone but to block out the big fat guilt trip being heaped on me by Chief Soulful-When-They-Wanna-Be Eyes. It didn’t work. I leaned forward, picked up the paper.

“As far as anyone needs to know,” Chief Sub went on, “we’re using you because you can give us a unique perspective on Stephanie Mattheson’s situation due to your years of blindness. No one is to use the phrase
police psychic.
Ever.”