Killing Ruby Rose (13 page)

CHAPTER 13

I let the weight of my backpack pull my shoulders down. I was really getting tired of this whole showing-up-at-my-house-unannounced thing. A voice in my head whispered,
Police harassment
. Another whispered,
Abuse of power
. Yet another whispered,
Stop whispering. Unless you’re building an insanity defense.

And then a voice screamed,
Hide the files
!

I hurried back into the bedroom and flung my backpack under the bed, considering whether to call my mom for backup. But I couldn’t just leave Liam down there all by himself with Detective Muscle-Head Martinez. I trusted Liam, but I didn’t exactly want his trust to be tested.

I hustled downstairs to join them.

“Detective Martinez, what are you doing here?” I asked, not even pretending to be pleasant. I was angry, and I wasn’t going to hide it.

“I came by to check on you,” he said, not doing me the same favor of making it clear how he really felt. He casually turned away from Liam and squared himself to face me coming down the grand staircase. His gaudy gold chain flashed in the light of the chandelier.

“Check on me?” I asked. “Why would you need to
check
on me?”

He gave me a knowing look, but what he
knew
I couldn’t guess. Maybe he knew I’d killed again. Maybe he knew that as we spoke, the CSI unit was meticulously analyzing the evidence off of four bodies that would put me away for good. Or maybe he just knew I was hiding something.

My foyer had turned into an interrogation room, and I was willingly waiving my right to counsel.

“Let’s just say I was worried about you,” he said, gesturing in Liam’s direction, as if playing the noble father-figure card.

Step 1: Gain trust.

“Home alone, are we?” Martinez asked.

Step 2: Open with an easy question.

“Yeah, and I’m pretty sure my mom would have your badge if she knew you were here questioning me without her presence or consent.”

“Whoa, there’s no interrogation here.” He held up his hands. “I only wanted to make sure you’re
fine
and that everything is on the up-and-up.”

Step 3: Reveal suspicion.

“Well, now that you know I am
fine
and things are looking
up,
you can go.”

He studied me, his eyes trailing up and down my body as if looking for physical evidence. He moved closer. “I know what you’re doing, Ruby.”

Step 4: Make an accusation to invoke admission of guilt.

My facade of confidence faltered for a second. But if he really knew what I was doing, he should just arrest me already.

Liam finally stepped between us. “I think you’d better leave now.” He didn’t take my hand or put his arm around me, but his closeness steadied me.

Martinez’s dark eyes left mine and narrowed on Liam. “Young man, you’d better be careful who you talk to like that.”

Step 5: Use physical intimidation.

Liam was bigger than Martinez, but his eyes still dropped as the detective moved even closer, erasing the space buffer between us.

“Do you still have the number I gave you?” Martinez asked, maybe ten inches from my face.

Step 6: ???

“No.” I pulled back my head. “My mom has it. You saw her take it.”

“Here it is again, then,” he said as he slid it into my hand and held it there a moment. “You just might need it one of these days. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” I replied, totally not understanding, but hoping my compliance would make him let go, even though I knew he was waiting until I made eye contact. Damn, I didn’t want to. But I wanted him gone. So I looked him dead in the eyes.

He blinked in acceptance of my token offering of surrender, and finally let go. He took one last look at Liam. “Remember what I told you.”

As soon as he crossed the threshold, I slammed the door. We waited for a few minutes, listening for the sound of his car starting in the distance and then pulling away. I wondered how he even got past our gate.

“What the hell was that?” I asked myself, trying to wipe away the feeling of his hand on the back of my shorts. “When I tell my mom about this, she is going to freak.”

Liam was strangely quiet. “What’s up with you?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“It doesn’t look like nothing,” I said. “It kind of looks like
something
. What’d he say to you before I came down?”

“That guy, he just…” He avoided my eyes, and grabbed the door handle. “Never mind. C’mon, I think we both need a fat milkshake after that kind of police terrorization.”

“Fine, just let me go get my backpack.” I turned to go, but I could tell Liam was shaken. Detective Martinez must have gotten to him before I came down. And I couldn’t help but wonder if sharing my research with Liam had been a big mistake.

Over the consumption of salt, fat, sugar, and near-illegal amounts of complex carbs, I continued to tell Liam the reasons why I couldn’t go to the police about everything that had happened. Most of them had to do with Detective Martinez. My mom said he was dangerous and not to trust him. Their affair ended badly. Of course, I was still waiting for that “talk” with her for more details on their past. But this much I knew: I didn’t like Martinez. If he could betray my father so deeply, then he could betray me if I confided in him about my Filthy Five.

Liam agreed we couldn’t trust him but tried to convince me maybe there was another friend from Dad’s SWAT team who would help. But I didn’t want to talk about my dad, or his department. I couldn’t go there. Not yet. They’d let me down and failed Dad by letting him die. All without giving me any kind of reasonable explanation.

Even Mathews, Dad’s so-called best friend and right-hand man, had ignored me since that terrible night. The dude (Dad’s replacement, by the way) had never even come to see me. And he used to be like a second father to me. In fact, he was the one who’d given me Smith for my Sweet Sixteenth. He said the laser sight would help me stop shooting like a girl. He used to love to tease me. Now, apparently, he loved to pretend like I didn’t exist.

I had no friends in SWAT.

Liam never really told me what Martinez had said to him before I came down. He only alluded to Martinez warning him to “be careful” with me. I didn’t press him because I had a feeling about what Martinez was really trying to do: use Liam against me. And yet Liam was inexplicably still here, despite the risks of being associated with me, enjoying a greasy picnic on the beach. Intermittently smiling and touching me, with a gentleness I’d never experienced.

“Did your parents say anything to you this morning?” I asked.

“My mom just asked why I came home so early. I told her I’d had a hard time sleeping and wanted to be in my own bed. She was cool.”

“What did your dad say?”

“I haven’t seen my dad in years,” he said quietly. “But since he was a drunk, I’m sure he wouldn’t have noticed or cared anyway.”

“Oh.” I paused, not meaning to bring up a hard subject. So he had lied about his “rich dad” ransoming us. “My dad drank a lot, too. But he noticed everything. Even when he was tanked, he could hear the scurrying of a cockroach. If he’d been here, I wouldn’t have had a chance of sneaking in like I did this morning.” I couldn’t believe I was talking about Dad again. I hadn’t been able to do this with anyone yet. At least, not without breaking down, cracking up, or shutting off. Maybe because I was trying to comfort Liam, it was OK.

“My dad was a mean drinker,” Liam clarified.

“My dad could be mean,” I countered. “He and my mom used to argue like a couple of rock stars in a hotel. Headphones came in handy on nights like those.” In hindsight, now that I knew about the affair, maybe it explained why he was so angry with her for so many years.

“Yeah, well, I wish arguing was all my dad used to do.” Liam pulled his hair over his ear again, and I longed to reach and out and touch him, reassure him. His dad must have given him that scar.

“I’m sorry,” I said, panicking a little. I wasn’t used to having real conversations about real things. I had trained myself to never talk about anything meaningful. Maybe Liam was right and I was completely unapproachable. “I never meant to bring up painful stuff—”

“It’s OK, Ruby.” He took my hand and soothed me. I must’ve had that about-to-self-destruct look on my face. “Before the sun goes down, let’s have a look at those files in your backpack.”

I looked up to the horizon. The sky was lit up like a melting bag of Skittles. Pinks and purples blended with yellows and oranges. We didn’t have much time left before the light went.

I let go of Liam’s hand and rummaged through my bag. “There are three guys left on my list,” I said, laying the files out on the blanket in front of me, like we were just two teens about to do some homework. “I’m pretty sure Mr. D. S. knows about my Filthy Five list—or he at least knows I was following these guys and is trying to set me up to kill them all.”

“Yeah, it seems that way.” Liam nodded. “But why?”

I thought about it for a second. A theory was taking shape, but it had some serious holes.

“I think it has something to do with my mom.”

“Uh-huh.” He egged me on.

“No one has ever told me anything about what happened to my dad. Not even his best friend, Sergeant Mathews. I have no idea if it was a drug bust gone wrong, a robbery, a hostage situation, a terrorist attack
…
nothing. I only know that he was ambushed on Grissom Island, up the coast in Long Beach. That’s it.” I stared up the shoreline. Even though it was a little more than fifteen miles away, the lights of the busy harbor twinkled in the distance. “What if someone is trying to hurt my mom? Someone she put away or double-crossed or whatever. Step one: Kill husband. Step two: Send only child to jail. Step three: Destroy her career.”

Liam didn’t respond right away, and I could tell he wasn’t convinced. He cocked his head like he was considering the theory. “But why not just kill her? That’s a lot of work—and a lot of killing—for
her
to remain alive in the end. Plus, I thought you said you looked through your mom’s cases and no one fits the profile of this guy.”

“That’s true,” I said, throwing a cold fry to a seagull.

“What if this guy is just some crazy psycho who gets off watching you kill? Like that Jigsaw guy from
Saw
. He believes these guys deserve to die, too, and he thinks this is some game. Maybe he has a connection to one of these guys and that’s what drew him to you. ”

Or maybe Liam watched too many movies.

He flipped through the third file. It was Father Michael McMullin’s. Seven suspected child molestations, two suspected child abductions, and five dropped charges. And that was only in the State of California. He’d been a priest in Michigan and Florida before that. District Attorney Jane Rose’s press release blamed the failure to convict on the witnesses refusing to testify.

I took the fifth file on Stanley “The Violent” Violet—a sadistic video game genius, porn addict, and lover of small women with even smaller self-esteem. His “alleged” crimes consisted of binding, torturing, and killing innocent college-aged women.

My dad had dropped Violet with a through-and-through shot to the shoulder seven years ago during a standoff-hostage situation in a mall parking lot. Violet had gotten sloppy and tried to force a freshman coed into his Lamborghini. A search warrant produced four thoroughly bleached trophy keepsakes (small trinkets of nondescript jewelry that couldn’t be linked to any missing person) from presumably four other victims who were never positively identified. His computer game success bought him a media-mongering hotshot attorney who convinced a jury that Violet was “legally insane and incapable of knowing right from wrong” because he thought he was in a video game. He got five years in a mental facility, then the bare minimum in parole supervision in the two years since he’d been out.

I glanced through the photos. I didn’t have one of those two-foot lenses, so the pictures I’d taken were pretty low quality—mostly shots of Violet going in and out of bars, strip clubs, gas stations, and the odd videogame store. I don’t think either Liam or I knew exactly what we were looking for, but it was better than doing nothing.

I opened the fourth file. Roger Vay—the worst of the worst. He’d literally gotten away with murder at least a dozen times. He was by far the smartest, slimiest, and scariest offender on my list. He studied his victims. He chose the isolated loners, the irresponsible partiers, and the professionals who worked long hours. By the time anyone noticed they were gone, so was any evidence connecting him to the crime.

The only reason we knew he was such an accomplished killer was his signature—a unique antique key he would later mail to the closest person in the victim’s life. Each victim had his or her own handmade key. The thought of Vay creeped me out to the core. And how evil to mess with the family’s minds, making them think that if they could just find the locked door to where their loved one was being held, maybe they could save them.

After years of fumbling around, the police finally figured out the glaring piece of “key” evidence and linked the cases—all twelve of them, spread out over twenty years. They started calling him the Key Killer.

Finally, someone got the idea to run a search on locksmiths in the criminal database, and they found the only one with an old rape arrest. They closed in on Roger Vay, gathered some damning forensic evidence tying him to the mailed keys, and put him on trial. During Prosecutor Jane’s presentation of evidence, another woman went missing and a copycat killer sent another key. It was enough to create reasonable doubt, and the real Key Killer was set free. The justice system at its finest.