Sworn to the Night (The Wisdom's Grave Trilogy Book 1) Page 6

  “Do you have any better leads?” Marie asked them.

  “Nothing you need to worry about,” Helena said. “It’s not your case.”

  Marie honed in on the stress in her voice. “You do. What? You identify the shooters?”

  “No.”

  Jefferson smiled with pride. “I IDed the torture vic, though.”

  Helena slapped him across the shoulder, giving him a glare that could melt steel. Marie got in front of him and stopped him in his tracks.

  “Dish. Who is he?”

  “Jefferson,” Helena said, “swear to God—”

  “Errand boy for the Five Families. Small-time scumbag, occasional messenger.” Jefferson held one of his tacos like a gun, firing off an imaginary round. “Occasionally, messages written in lead. Or delivered with a baseball bat. Guy was a five-time loser, spent more time inside Rikers than out of it.”

  Helena leaned in on him. “Do you want to get us in trouble with IAB? Because this shit is exactly how you do that.”

  Marie ignored her. She tapped her wrist. “What about the tattoo? That didn’t look like a Mafia thing.”

  “No idea.” Jefferson finished scarfing down a taco. He crumpled the foil into a ball and pitched it into a waste bin on the corner. “Ran it by Gang Crimes, but they didn’t have a match in their system. He probably just thought it looked cool.”

  “Working theory is that the mob is running the ink pipeline,” Marie said. “They killed one of their own guys? Why?”

  “Well, if you ask me—”

  “Nobody fucking asked you,” Helena said, “because we’re not here and we’re not having this conversation. Marie, go home. You can put your career on the line if you want, but don’t drag us down with you.”

  She grabbed Jefferson by the sleeve of his twill jacket and gave it a hard yank, pulling him past Marie. As they walked away, leaving her behind, Marie caught the words Helena fired at her partner in a low hiss.

  “Don’t encourage her,” Helena muttered. “Everybody knows she’s fucked in the head.”

  Marie stood by the trash can, her half-eaten dinner getting cold in her hand. A gust of wind kicked across the street, carrying the smell of truck exhaust and smoke, ruffling her ragged hair. She forced herself to put on a smile and pretend that nothing could hurt her. Then she went home.

  * * *

  “You sure the sound isn’t bothering you? I can put on headphones.”

  Marie and Janine sat on opposite ends of the futon, each of them engrossed in their laptop screens. Janine was streaming a sitcom, but the words and the laugh track barely registered in Marie’s consciousness. She was a million miles away, staring at the vast white plain of her word processor and the expectant blink of a waiting cursor. Pecking slowly at the keys, she typed: Baby Blue, Revised Timeline. 1. Eddie Li is last confirmed customer. Says she refused money to stay the night, scheduled for sex party at house in Monticello. Per Li, her pimp was unaware.

  “It’s fine,” she told Janine.

  “Whatcha working on?”

  “Just…trying to get some things straight,” she said. “I’m missing something here, I know it.”

  She typed: 2, per initial interview with pimp, she stopped answering his texts. Waited 48 hrs, filed missing-persons report.

  “Did you see that therapist, so you can go back on duty?”

  “I put it off,” Marie said. “Couple of days, I’ll get around to it. Doesn’t matter until Internal Affairs clears me anyway.”

  Janine curled her lip, biting at the corner of her mouth as she looked at Marie.

  “Yeah, but…I mean, I know you have to go, but maybe…you might want to? I mean, it could help. Having somebody to talk to.”

  “I’ve got you. And Tony.”

  “Yeah, but…a professional.”

  Marie kept typing. 3, Baby Blue was indigent, living at transient hotel, paid cash. Search of her room turned up $20 in small bills, no other known resources.

  “I’m just saying,” Janine said, “you’ve got some stuff to work through.”

  Marie didn’t look up. The crisp black Courier font hovered in front of her, the letters becoming a labyrinth.

  “I defended myself in the line of duty. It happens. I’m not happy about it, but they opened fire on us. It was either him or me and Tony. I’m fine.”

  “That’s not the stuff I mean.”

  Now Marie looked at her.

  “I don’t talk about that. Ever.”

  “I know,” Janine said. “I think you need to.”

  For one shaky heartbeat, Marie’s world went sideways. And she was gone.

  Hiding under her bed, hands clamped over her head, looking at the open doorway. Feet, dirty shoes, tromping past. From downstairs, her mother’s scream.

  “Where the fuck is it?” shouted a man with a guttural voice.

  “I don’t know,” her father groaned. “I don’t know who you think we are—”

  “Do you want me to start cutting on this bitch? Is that what you want?”

  Marie squeezed her eyes shut. She took a deep breath. One hand patted the futon, patted the loose keys of her laptop, reminding herself. I’m here now. She got up and strode to the kitchen nook and ripped through the cabinets. Glasses clanked as she shoved them aside, slamming drawers shut.

  “Where the fuck is the Glenlivet?”

  “We drank it last night,” Janine said. “Remember?”

  Marie froze. She blinked. Then she walked back over, dropped down, and slumped on the futon.

  “Yeah.”

  Janine stared at her, silent.

  “What?” Marie said.

  “I’m worried.”

  “About what?”

  Marie picked up the laptop and typed, 4. Sex parties for big $$ on the side? No evidence, no money. So, a lie, or was that her first time, first trip to house in Monticello?

  “You’ve done this as long as I’ve known you. You get…fixated on things. Obsessed. But it’s been getting worse.”

  “It’s called doing my job,” Marie said. She squinted at the screen, looking for a hidden sign between the letters.

  “Tony’s my friend, too, you know,” Janine said. “He isn’t like this. None of your cop buddies are like this. You push yourself until you drop, over and over again. Like you blame yourself for everything.”

  “Told you, it’s my job,” Marie murmured. She traced a fingertip across the screen, drawing invisible lines between points she couldn’t see.

  “And you get these…rages. I mean, you’re fine, then all of a sudden it’s like…” Janine trailed off. Hesitant, before finishing her thought in a softer, smaller voice. “I’m afraid you’re really going to hurt somebody, Marie.”

  Marie glanced away from the screen. For the first time, she noticed Janine’s tight body language, the look in her eyes, the way she hung at the far end of the futon, out of arm’s reach. She’s afraid of me.

  Everybody knows she’s fucked in the head, she remembered Helena muttering.

  “You don’t think I’d hurt you,” Marie said. “Do you?”

  Janine gave a tiny shake of her head. “No.”

  Marie wished she could believe her.

  “Will you do something for me, Marie?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  Janine pointed to Marie’s bedroom door.

  “Go to sleep? It’s late, you’re exhausted, I can see it all over your face. Are you really going to solve any mysteries tonight?”

  The words on Marie’s screen twisted and flickered, taunting her like electronic serpents. Marie rubbed her eyes. Then she shut the laptop.

  It would keep. For now.

  * * *

  Tossing, turning, restless, Marie’s dreaming mind pulled her into a desert. It was a wasteland of hard, cracked earth. As far as the eye could see, nothing but rust-red dirt under the glare of a green-tinged sun.

  She rode on the perch of a wagon, reins loose in her hand, a rifle slung over one shoulder. The creatures
pulling her along weren’t horses. They were hairless, pale and lumpy beasts, cadaverous and skeletal, bloated with tumors the size of softballs. If they were in pain, it didn’t show. They gamely marched along, bony hooves crunching the dirt.

  Marie’s clothes were ragged. Her worn overalls had been patched and mended a dozen times. She wore a plastic pauldron on one shoulder, like a football player’s pads. Her rifle was a piecemeal contraption of copper tubing, PVC pipe, and duct tape, and it stank of dirty gunpowder.

  “You’ve been quiet,” Nessa said from behind her.

  She looked back. Nessa wore a gown of midnight black, accented with lace, sitting cross-legged in the wagon under a black crepe parasol. A heavy book lay open in her lap. The pages were inlaid with diagrams and symbols that made Marie’s eyes blur.

  “I had a strange dream,” she heard herself say.

  “Dreams can be portents. Tell me, what did you see?”

  “I dreamed of the before-time,” Marie said. “Before the fires, before the cities died. It felt so real.”

  “I’ve read you stories of the before-time,” Nessa replied, placidly turning a page in her book.

  “No, but…I was me. At the same age I am now. I wasn’t even born then. I had another life. I had a home.”

  “Interesting. And what were you, hmm?”

  “A woman of laws,” Marie said. “Not a bounty hunter, but a…I don’t know the right word for it.”

  “Perhaps you were. I’ve long theorized that there are other worlds than this. And if there are other worlds, might we not have lived in them?”

  Marie turned back to the pulling beasts. Her hand tightened on the reins.

  “A world that lived?”

  “Or just died later. Time is a fiction, Marie. Something our brains invent so everything doesn’t happen at once. And where the veils are thin, worlds and times can overlap. Tell me, did you enjoy this other life?”

  “You weren’t in it yet,” Marie said.

  “A lamentable tragedy.”

  “I had…it’s hard to remember now, some kind of problem. A puzzle to solve. And a woman was going to die if I couldn’t solve it.”

  Nessa snickered. “Ever the crusading knight, even in your dreams. Too bad I wasn’t there. I could have helped.”

  Marie looked back again over her shoulder as Nessa turned another page. She recognized the symbol in Nessa’s book at once. The same jagged, looping glyph as the tattoo on the dead man’s wrist. She tried to speak, to ask what it meant, but the words wouldn’t come out. She was a passenger inside her own head, and a different question altogether emerged from her lips.

  “Do you think we could get back to Wyrmont before the summer months? It’s cooler there. They have water in Wyrmont, water for everyone.”

  Nessa looked up from her book, arching an eyebrow in annoyance.

  “It’s on the far side of the Cheshire lands and the mad-tribes are in heat. No. Not without an armed caravan, and we’ve no scrap to trade for passage. We’ll summer in the Low Salt. It’ll be fine.”

  Marie’s shoulders sagged. “I hate the Low Salt. Everything is foul there. We could make real scrap in Wyrmont.”

  “Well,” Nessa told her, “as soon as you figure out how we can get there without a penny in our purses, let me know, hmm? I’ll be looking forward to your discovery. For now, my scarlet butterfly, hold the reins fast. We’ve miles to go before sundown.”

  Marie’s eyes snapped open.

  Her hands gripped sweat-cold sheets. The stucco ceiling of her bedroom swam in hazy light, drifting in around the edges of her curtained window. The sound of early morning traffic rose up from the street outside.

  She threw back the sheets and strode into the living room. Her laptop was right where she’d left it on the futon’s edge. She powered it up, tapped in her password, and read the numbered list she’d written the night before.

  “Got you,” she breathed.

  Nine

  Back in his hometown of Abilene, Kansas, Beau Kates would have been a regular Al Capone. By New York City standards, he was barely qualified to be a bottom-feeder. He’d gone down a few times for pimping and pandering, once for stolen goods, and once on a drug-possession charge. He’d managed to plead out by dropping a dime on his dealer. The last couple of years he’d spent coasting under the radar. Running girls out of his “modeling agency” and collecting the money they earned on their backs made up the bulk of his cash flow. Then Baby Blue disappeared, which put him back on the NYPD’s list.

  Worse for him, it put him on Marie’s list.

  She had reluctantly bought his alibi, his claim of being worried about Baby Blue—after all, he’d filed the missing-persons report himself. Now, in the hard light of a new morning, she wasn’t so sure.

  Marie ducked under an open bay door and into a garage teeming with faded black cars. There were a few limos, mostly town cars, a couple up on lifts and missing their wheels. A grinder whined at the back of the garage and spat a shower of sparks across the oil-stained concrete. The cherry-red sign out front read A+ Motor Services. The boss of the show was a hard-eyed woman named Jackie, with kerchief-wrapped hair and fifty years of nicotine stains on her fingers.

  “Knock, knock,” Marie said, standing in her office doorway.

  Jackie’s eyes narrowed. “You again? I thought I answered all your questions last time.”

  “Just a quick follow-up. One of your drivers, Harlow: I need to see his vehicle log.”

  “You got a warrant?”

  Marie stepped into the tiny, cluttered office, with a window overlooking the garage floor. She shut the door behind her. The stagnant air stank of stale smoke and engine exhaust.

  “Do I need one?”

  Jackie snorted. “Yeah. You can’t pry through my books, I know my rights.”

  “You want to take a second, think that through?”

  “I already thought about it.” She nodded to the door. “Get out.”

  Marie didn’t budge. She gave Jackie a thin and humorless smile.

  “Jackie, Beau Kates is your best customer. Something like seventy percent of your drivers more or less work for him. Shuttling sex workers all over the city, all hours of the night.”

  Jackie shook a cigarette out of a crumpled foil pack. She cursed under her breath as her thumb flicked her cheap plastic lighter, kicking three times before she finally got a spark. She held the cigarette to the feeble flame, a faint tremor in both of her hands.

  “Prove it in court,” she said.

  “You don’t think we can? Beau’s out on bail, pending trial. You apparently don’t know his history: he upholds a proud tradition of diming out his co-conspirators at the drop of a hat. Conspirators. As in conspiracy charges, which is what you’re looking at right now.”

  Jackie’s hand fumbled. She nearly dropped the lighter, caught it, then slapped it down on the desk like she’d meant to do it. “What are you talking about?”

  “Beau Kates operates a criminal enterprise. You are instrumental in supplying vehicles and drivers in support of that criminal enterprise. Were you under the impression that’s a slap on the wrist? In New York State, owning or managing a prostitution business is a class D felony. And if Kates goes down on felony charges, you’re taking the elevator down with him. You could be looking at seven years in prison, Jackie. Seven years, and you’re not exactly a healthy woman. Do you really want to die behind bars for that asshole?”

  It was a bluff. Kates was bending over backward to cooperate, seven years was the far, far end of a class D, and even if they could prove Jackie knew what she was doing for him—knowing she knew and proving it in court being two very different things—she’d be looking at reduced charges, probably a year’s probation at worst.

  But Jackie didn’t know that. And from the haunted look in her eyes, she was vividly imagining her future in prison orange.

  Five minutes later, Marie was leafing through a handwritten driver’s log. Harlow was Baby Blue’s regular escort�
�her driver, and if a john got rough, impromptu muscle. He’d taken her on her last date with Eddie Li.

  And he’d made one more trip, later that same night.

  “He didn’t list a destination, or a client.” Marie tapped her finger on the two empty lines.

  “Yeah,” Jackie said, standing at her shoulder. “And until such time as I get an explanation, he’s not doing any more driving for me. I raised all kinds of hell when I saw that. The odometer’s right, though.”

  At the edge of the blank spaces, a pair of numbers in black ink and initials were scribbled. Marie glanced back at her. “How do you know?”

  “Odometer gets recorded at every vehicle turn-in. That’s for keeping on top of maintenance, tire rotation, oil changes—I got religion about that. Hell of a lot cheaper to stay on top of maintenance than it is to replace a blown engine. Odometer readings are done by me, or the manager on duty if I’m not here.”

  Jackie took an unsteady drag from her cigarette. Acrid smoke clouded the air between them, and bits of ash fell like dirty snow onto the logbook as she gestured at the initials.

  “That’s my manager. No idea where Harlow took the car—I got no record of a call coming in, and he’s still pretending he ‘doesn’t remember,’ but I guarantee that number’s right.”

  Marie knew where he took the car.

  Baby Blue barely had a dime to her name. Kates made sure of that. Keeping his girls utterly dependent on him was the cornerstone of any pimp’s game. There was no evidence that she used ride-sharing apps, and like over half of the people in New York City, she didn’t own a car. Nessa’s words from the dream drifted back to Marie. As soon as you figure out how we can get there without a penny in our purses, let me know, hmm? I’ll be looking forward to your discovery.

  The night Baby Blue went missing, Harlow’s odometer read 99,486. The check-in after that, it was up to 99,702. Two hundred and sixteen miles. Just about the distance from New York to Monticello and back again.

  “I’m going to need Harlow’s home address,” she told Jackie.

  * * *

  “I already told you everything,” Harlow said.

  He was a big man with fat cheeks and tiny eyes. Tiny eyes that roved like they were trying to escape his head. Like they’d bounce out of his skull and roll across the grimy linoleum floor of his Bronx kitchenette, if it meant they could avoid Marie’s gaze.