A Killer Past (10 page)

T
HE
TENSION
M
ARY
had felt when she heard the doorbell disappeared the moment she looked through the peephole and saw just the top of a head, the white hair peeking out from under a purple bandana short and curly. Ella Williams might be considered a nosy neighbor, but she certainly wasn’t a gang member out for revenge.

‘Ella,’ Mary said, smiling as she opened her front door. ‘What brings you out in the cold?’

‘I’ve been talking to neighbors,’ Ella said, a shiver in her voice as she pulled at the sides of her red wool coat in an effort to cover her rounded hips and stomach. ‘About the Neighborhood Watch.’ She glanced past Mary. ‘May I come in? I thought you’d want to hear what’s up.’

‘Of course.’ Mary knew, whether she wanted to or not, she was going to hear what Ella had been doing. ‘Come on in.’

She closed the door and waited as Ella removed her scarf and gloves, stuffed them into a pocket, and finally shrugged out of her coat. ‘I can’t believe how cold it is,’ Ella said, rubbing her hands together.

‘A cup of tea should help,’ Mary offered, placing Ella’s coat on a peg next to her own black windbreaker, before leading the way to the kitchen.

A few minutes later, they were both seated at the table with mugs of hot tea and slices of a pound cake that Mary had bought on the way home from the gym. ‘I called the police department this morning,’ Ella said after a bite of the pound cake. ‘They’re supposed to have one of the officers contact me.’

‘You’re serious about this, aren’t you?’

‘Aren’t
you
?’ Ella frowned. ‘Sometimes, Mary, I just don’t understand you. Here we are, two widows living by ourselves. It could have been one of us attacked the other night.’

‘And you think a Neighborhood Watch would have stopped what happened?’

‘Maybe. Maybe we’ve all been too complacent. Didn’t you say you saw a strange car hanging around on Halloween?’

‘Which may have belonged to a parent.’ Not that Mary truly believed that.

‘Fine. Maybe it did, but if we knew our neighbors and what cars they drove, we’d know for sure, wouldn’t we?’

‘OK, maybe you’re right.’ Mary studied her friend. In the thirty-five years she’d known Ella, she’d never seen the woman so enthusiastic about anything … other than her cats. ‘But are you sure you don’t simply want to know what our neighbors are up to?’

The moment the words were out of her mouth, Mary knew she’d said the wrong thing.

‘I am not a nosy gossip,’ Ella said, sitting back in her chair, her double chin lifted and her mouth puckered. ‘No matter what George Figer says.’

Mary didn’t think it wise to mention that Ella seemed to know a lot about everyone in the neighborhood and didn’t hesitate to pass the information on to anyone who would listen. ‘I take it George wasn’t receptive to the Neighborhood Watch idea.’

‘Said he wasn’t spying on his neighbors, not like some people he knew.’ Ella snorted. ‘Looked right at me when he said that.’

‘I wouldn’t let him bother you,’ Mary said, feeling a little sorry for Ella. ‘He’s always been the neighborhood grouch. So how many people have you talked to?’

‘Everyone up and down our street.’ Ella relaxed her shoulders and took a sip of tea before going on. ‘I didn’t try anywhere else today. I’m a little afraid about going over onto Archer Street after what happened to those boys last week. Maybe if you went with me…?’

Mary heard the implied question and shook her head. She was not going anywhere near Archer Street, not as long as there was the
possibility someone might remember seeing her there the night the boys were attacked.

‘Why not?’ Ella asked. ‘Some of those people might recognize you from that newspaper article, might be more willing to talk to you than they would me.’

‘Ella, I’m not going around talking to people. I’m sorry I even talked to that reporter.’

‘I don’t see why,’ Ella said. ‘It was a good article. It’s about time people realize we’re not all sitting around in our rocking chairs, knitting, and watching games and talk shows.’ She chuckled. ‘Well, maybe I do, but you don’t. That was a good picture of you.’

Which was the worst part of the article, in Mary’s opinion. She’d agreed when the reporter asked if they could take a picture of her on the treadmill. Mary had even suggested they take the picture from a distance, to show the variety of exercise machines available to seniors. Then, as the photographer took his pictures, she kept her head turned slightly, so her face wasn’t clearly visible. Which may have been why they didn’t use any of those shots. Instead they used a picture Mary hadn’t known they’d taken. One that clearly showed her face as she lifted barbells. All she could hope was her white hair, sagging chin, and wrinkles would keep anyone from her past from recognizing her.

‘I’m not going around talking to people,’ Mary repeated.

‘OK, OK.’

Head down, Ella took another bite of her pound cake. Mary said nothing, simply waited for Ella’s next request. She didn’t have to wait long.

‘Do you still have that fancy printer Harry bought before he died?’

‘I still have it.’ Even though Robby had longingly eyed the printer/scanner/copier after his father’s death, Mary had decided to keep it, along with Harry’s PC.

‘Would you be willing to make some copies of fliers I could pass out?’ Ella asked. ‘I mean, I’d pass them out. You’d just have to make the copies.’

‘Sure.’ Mary couldn’t see any harm in that.

‘We’ll need them to let people know when our first meeting will
be … and where.’ She looked toward Mary’s living room. ‘I guess we should meet somewhere other than a house. I mean, if we have a lot of people come, we wouldn’t have enough room in someone’s house.’

‘Have you checked with any of the churches?’

‘Not yet.’ Ella finished her last bite of cake and took one more sip of tea before she pushed herself back from the table and stood. ‘I guess I’d better do that next.’

Mary walked with Ella to the door. As she waited for her friend to put on her coat, scarf, and gloves, she let her fingers play over the grooves on the kubotan in her pocket. She didn’t think about what she was doing until Ella asked, ‘What’s that you have in your pocket?’

‘My pocket?’ Mary jerked her hand out of her pocket. ‘Nothing.’

Ella’s eyebrows rose suspiciously.

‘It’s just a stick.’ Mary knew Ella’s curiosity would be worse than showing her the kubotan, so she pulled it out. ‘It’s just something I picked up. I liked the shape.’ She smiled, hoping her voice sounded natural. ‘I’ve been using it like one of those worry stones. It makes me feel a little safer.’

Ella glanced at the wooden stick, then back at Mary. ‘See, even
you
worry about your safety. We really do need this Neighborhood Watch.’

‘D
ID YOU GET
anything helpful?’ Wally asked.

Jack looked up, shrugged, and closed the Rodriguez file. ‘He said he’s Jose’s cousin, but he wasn’t about to admit he was on his way to see Jose.’

‘Anything in the car to connect the two?’

‘Nothing obvious. Our boy Pedro had some fast-food wrappers and a throwaway phone, but that was it. The Sheriff’s Department had already gotten a warrant for the phone, but the only number
Pedro had called that immediately checked out was to his mother. They’re working on the others.’

‘Any to this area?’

‘One, but it must have been to another throwaway.’ Which didn’t surprise Jack.

‘Any chance this cousin might turn?’

‘Would surprise me if he did.’ Jack remembered the look on Pedro’s face. ‘Guy’s scared.’

‘Probably just a mule. Like the phone, a throwaway.’ Wally shook his head. ‘Sometimes I feel sorry for these guys. They don’t realize the risk they’re taking. Some don’t even know they’re transporting drugs.’

‘Oh, he knew he had drugs. He fessed up to the crack cocaine they found in the car. The spare-tire section had been modified, and the rocks were hidden under it.’

‘Why hide those and not the kilo?’

‘No idea.’

‘Was this guy an illegal?’

‘Looks like it. Driver’s license was fake. But I wouldn’t feel sorry for him. He spoke good English, and he told me exactly where to find the rocks.’

‘Damn.’ Wally started to walk away, then turned and came back. ‘Jack, we have got to find something on Rodriguez. Anything that would give us a reason to raid his place. In all the years I’ve been here, we’ve never had drug and gang problems like we’ve had since that bastard arrived.’

‘I’ll keep on it,’ Jack promised, then remembered something else that had been on his mind. ‘You’ve been here a lot of years, Wally.’ Thirty-five years, as far as Jack knew. ‘You ever hear anything about a woman being put here under the Witness Protection Program?’

‘Witness Protection?’ Wally shook his head. ‘No, not that I’ve heard of.’

‘Would have been back about forty-four years ago.’

‘Way before my time.’

‘And mine,’ Jack admitted. ‘But wouldn’t you have been given something when they made you chief? Some kind of file that would include information like that?’

The way Wally scrunched up his forehead, Jack knew he was thinking, but then Wally shook his head. ‘Hell, it’s been more than ten years since I was promoted to chief. If there was any such file, I sure don’t remember where it might be. Why? Do you think we have someone under that program here in Rivershore?’

‘It’s sure looking like a possibility.’ He quickly summarized his request to his son and John’s call to him that morning. ‘I checked my messages when I got back here, and I didn’t have anything, but from what my son said, it sounds like you or I will hear from someone. The only possibility I can think of is Mary Smith Harrington is under that program.’

‘I’ll look through the old files, see if I can find anything.’ Wally gave a grunt. ‘Think we’ve been harboring someone famous all these years?’

‘Maybe infamous.’ Though Jack couldn’t quite imagine Mary Harrington fitting that category.

Eleven days after having been attacked by the two gang members, Mary wished she still had the resources that had been available to her when she worked for ADEC. Although computers were barely coming into being when she left, she was sure the agency would now have the latest tech available. The computer she had was three years old and already outdated, but up until now it had been all she needed.

It wasn’t as though she used the computer a lot. Although she had an email address – Harry had talked her into getting one – and belonged to Facebook – Shannon had begged her to be a ‘friend’ – Mary had kept the amount of personal information available about her to an absolute minimum. No pictures, no accurate date of birth, nothing that would have linked her to her past. She had gone on the Internet occasionally for a new recipe or to look up a word for a crossword puzzle, but up until two weeks ago she hadn’t done a lot of research, not like she’d done lately.

Day after day, she’d been learning about gangs, about tattoos, about the wearing of colors, and gang hierarchy. She’d even started asking complete strangers what they knew about gangs: the librarian, the grocery store clerk, and anyone at the gym who looked
young enough to know about gangs or who might have children who would know. By the end of the week, her head was full of facts but nothing concrete.

Growing up in San Francisco, she’d known gangs. There were the Italians who visited the neighborhood and hired her mother as a ‘hostess’. For the most part they treated her nice, called her a cute
ragazza
, and said they were just borrowing her mother for a little while and to be good while she was gone. Her mother liked the Italians, said they paid her well, but there were times when her mother came home with cuts and bruises and swore she would never do business with one of those wops again. And she might not have if she hadn’t been hooked on the drugs they could provide.

The gang wars in high school were the Negros against the Chicanos, as the Latinos were called back then. It was important to know who ‘owned’ a street, whose turf she was on. For her, hooking up with Raphael after her mother died was for protection as well as a way to make money. If she hadn’t gone with Carl after Raphael died, she would have been vulnerable.

She hadn’t thought about gangs when she moved to Rivershore. Oh, there’d been groups of kids that formed what might have been called gangs, but for the most part they came and went with the seasons. When Robby was young, there were very few blacks living in Rivershore – there simply wasn’t enough work to bring a large number of them to the area – and most of the Mexicans who worked in the fields were migrants, here when the crops ripened and gone after the harvest. She did, however, remember one year when Robby was in high school that he complained about a group of black kids that had harassed one of his friends.

When Robby called Wednesday night – her son’s usual phone call to see how she was doing – she asked him about that incident.

‘You mean Ethan?’ Robby said in response to her question. ‘Yeah, he had a lot of trouble with those black kids, and all because he turned a girl … one of their girlfriends … in for cheating on a test.’

‘So what did he do about it?’

‘He moved,’ Robby said, matter-of-factly. ‘Don’t you remember, Mom, how upset I was? He was one of my best friends.’

‘Why didn’t he stay and fight back?’

Robby scoffed. ‘What, and get himself killed? I never told you
everything
they did to him, but it was scary.’

‘Like what did they do?’ Robby was right. He’d never told her any of this.

‘Slashed the tires on his mom’s car and threatened Ethan’s little sister. I think it was when Ethan’s dad found a dead cat on their doorstep that he decided to ask for a transfer and took that job in Ohio. Ethan felt so guilty.’

‘Why didn’t you ever tell us this?’

‘And what would you and Dad have done? Told them to go to the police? They did, and the police did nothing.’

Mary could hear the disappointment in her son’s voice and knew he was right, Harry would have suggested Ethan’s family go to the police. She also knew the problem with law enforcement was they had to enforce laws, which meant they had to have proof of a crime. If the gangs in Rivershore were anything like the Mafia, they either scared witnesses so much no one would testify against them or they left no witnesses.

‘I might have been able to help,’ she said, even though she knew that wasn’t true. She wasn’t like the super heroes in comic books. She couldn’t fight crime in a costume and be viewed as a typical housewife and mother in her day-to-day clothes.

‘It turned out all right, I guess,’ Robby finally said. ‘Ethan did well at his new school, got into Harvard, and now works for Google.’

‘What about Shannon? Has she ever been bothered by gangs?’

‘Not that I’ve heard about.’ Robby snorted. ‘You’ll have to ask her. Lately she barely talks to her mother, and with me it’s always, “Everything’s fine, Dad.”’

‘I will ask her,’ Mary said, hearing her son’s frustration. ‘It will get better, Rob. She’s just trying to figure out what she wants to do with her life.’

‘Go to college, that’s what she’s to do,’ he said firmly, and Mary understood why Shannon rarely talked to her father.