Knowing (47 page)

Jane settled on a pair of brown slacks and a plain light blue oxford cloth shirt. She found one rough out western boot and uncovered its mate after overturning several discarded pizza cartons. 8:35. She was cutting it close as she walked down the dimly lit hallway and into the kitchen. After adjusting her shoulder holster and securing her Glock pistol, Jane lit a new cigarette on the dying ember of the last one before tossing the butt into the sink, amidst more discarded bottles of Jack Daniels, Corona and dirty dishes. Checking around the corner into the living room, she found the TV on with the sound muted. The bedding was still tucked into the couch where her brother, Mike, had slept the night before. No sign of him. Jane turned to the kitchen counter and found a note stuffed into the mouth of an empty Corona bottle. It read: “Tried to wake you up but you wouldn’t budge.” Jane’s eyes lingered on Mike’s version of the word “budge,” wondering when he was going to learn to spell. “Gotta work the early shift today. See you at his house tonight. 6 o’clock, right? Good luck at work! Mike.” At the bottom of the page, there was one more sentence, written in caps. “DON’T FORGIT THE BEER!”

Jane opened the refrigerator. A quick check resulted in the discovery of five-day-old milk, expired bacon and an assortment of decaying fruit — a get-well gift Mike delivered a couple days after the incident. Slamming the refrigerator door shut, Jane spun around and poured what was left in the coffee maker into a mug. She knocked back the cold, black liquid. The caffeine cut through her foggy head as an unexpected scene flashed in front of her. There was a little girl and the brief swath of navy blue. There was a gun — a Glock outstretched and the blitz of reflected light that blinded.

And there was unmitigated terror — the kind that chokes and paralyzes.

The images lasted only a second but burned like lye into Jane’s head. She felt as if she’d already experienced what she saw but there was no link to reality. There was a sense of merging…yes, fusion into another reality…or someone else’s reality. Jane leaned across the sink as a disturbing disconnection took hold. If this was what it felt like to go insane, she wasn’t up for it today. Gathering every last bit of mental reserve, Jane forced herself back into her body. “Not today,” she whispered, more as an order. Once settled, she collected several legal pads and scraps of paper. Stuffing them into her worn leather satchel, she grabbed her keys, opened her front door and faced the world.

Half a dozen plastic wrapped newspapers sat in a heap outside her doorway. She had given up on them after reading too many stories about the car bombing. The pathway that led from the front door of her drab, dirty brick house and to her car was about 30 feet — a distance that should ensure an uneventful journey. However, Hazel Owens, her 65-year-old next-door neighbor on Milwaukee Street was perched on her front porch, dressed in a chenille robe and sipping juice.

“Mornin’, Detective!” Hazel exclaimed in her over-the-top chirpy voice. “Happy first day back!” Jane stole a quick glance in Hazel’s direction, her dangling cigarette dropping ashes on her shirtsleeve. Hazel held up the front section of The Denver Post and pointed her arthritic finger toward the story featured above the fold. “You find the awful people who did this to that poor little child!”

Jane had no idea what the old woman was talking about. Sometimes she would respond to Hazel’s regular morning send-offs with a simple “Uh-huh” or “Yeah.” But the only acknowledgment the old broad would get this morning was a slight raise of the head and a quick turn as Jane tossed her satchel into her ‘66 ice blue Mustang. If she drove like a demon, she might be able to make the two-mile trip to Headquarters in Denver rush hour traffic in less than 10 minutes.

Jane peeled away from the curb as if the flag had been dropped at the Indy 500. Barreling down Milwaukee Street, past the neat rows of two story brick houses, she shoved Bob Seger’s
Against the Wind
CD into the player and turned up the volume on “Betty Lou’s Gettin’ Out Tonight.” She sped up to 13th Street and turned left onto the one-way, four lane thoroughfare. From there, it was a straight shot to the corner of 13th and Cherokee where the six story, barrack-like structure, better known as Denver Headquarters, stood. After weaving in and out of traffic like a skilled race car driver, she squealed into the underground parking garage. Seger sung the chorus of “Fire Lake” as she swung into a spot near the elevator. She downed another swig of cold coffee, grabbed her satchel, slammed the door shut and raced toward the elevator. 8:58. Jane slapped the button and shoved the heel of her boot into the closed elevator doors. “Come on, goddamnit!” she shouted. The elevator doors opened, as if in response to her barking order. Jane lunged in, punching the third floor button with her fist.

The elevator stopped on the main floor and a young Mexican woman in her late 20’s got on, hand in hand with a terrified looking child who Jane figured was around eight years old. A front desk officer accompanied them. Without looking at the buttons, the woman quietly said “Third floor,” in broken English. Jane gave the button another hard whack. The doors closed and the officer stole a glance at Jane and her cigarette, tapping his finger on the “No smoking” emblem. Jane threw the cigarette on the elevator floor, crushing it with the toe of her boot.

The officer looked straight ahead. “You can’t leave that butt in here.”

Jane would have ripped him a new one if the woman and kid hadn’t been there. Instead, she picked up the crushed cigarette and threw it in her satchel.

The little girl turned her body to face her mother, burying her face in her mother’s stomach. “Tengo miedo,” the little girl muttered.

“Is okay,” the mother said, patting her daughter’s head and leaning down to kiss her. “Momma gonna make it okay.”

Jane suddenly felt that same disjointed sense of reality hit again. She tried to quash the mounting tension that bled across her shoulder blades but it was no use. “Tengo miedo,” meant “I’m frightened.” Those were two words Jane heard on a daily basis from children when she did her four-year stint in assault during the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. She hated every second of it but she made it through by maintaining emotional distance with the children and never getting close to the victims. She figured if she busted her ass and nailed some of the Denver’s worst violators of women and children, she’d have a better chance of getting into homicide — the top of the heap, as far as she was concerned. Tengo miedo. So why was the little girl frightened? Jane noticed that the slim woman was a bundle of nerves. Her facial muscles twitched and she continually licked her lips as she fixed her eyes on the elevator door. A lifelong student of human behavior, Jane concluded that if this woman wasn’t a criminal, she was certainly planning to become one.

The elevator doors opened onto the third floor. The woman and child got off with the officer as he motioned to the left, “Assault’s this way, ma’am,” he said. Jane stopped for a second and watched how the kid clung to her mother. If Jane weren’t already late to Weyler’s office, she would have followed them down to assault to get the skinny on the story. But instead, she took a sharp right and another left into the homicide department.

It took Jane several seconds to get her bearings as she stared incredulously at Kit.

“I figured you’d be surprised to see me,” Kit said, closing the door. Jane attempted to sort out the scene in silence. Kit looked down and saw the handheld phone Jane had thrown in anger. She picked it up and placed it on Jane’s desk. “That must have been what I heard hit the door.” Kit dropped her tapestry satchel against the lone chair reserved for clients.

“Your face looks much better. I told you that Arnica works.”

“What in the hell is going on here?” Jane said, regaining control of her domain.

“Are you going to offer me a seat?”

Jane searched valiantly for words to match her confused thinking. “We talk outside the meeting and…what? What is this?”

“I guess I’ll offer myself a seat,” Kit replied, pulling the chair away from the desk and plopping her round frame into the cushion.

“Wait just a goddamned minute!” Jane said, coming to her senses.

“Sit down and I’ll explain everything to you,” Kit replied succinctly as she removed a series of envelopes and folders from her satchel.

A bolt of anger erupted inside of Jane. “No! I will explain it to you! You don’t follow me from a bar to my private turf outside an AA meeting and talk to me as if you’re one of us and then just waltz in here! That was sacred territory last night!”

“I understand and respect that,” Kit said in earnest.

“The fuck you do!” Jane yelled, feeling terribly exposed and vulnerable.

“Hell, I don’t care if you’re a recovering alcoholic! That doesn’t make you less of a person in my eyes. Frankly, it makes you more human. If you were all bravado and no vulnerability, then you couldn’t work from your heart, and I know you work from your heart. Last night, it was imperative for me to look into your eyes and really see you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You do the same thing with others before you agree to form a relationship.”

“Excuse me?” Jane said, in a semimocking tone.

“You did it with me last night! You looked into my center. You felt who I was.”

“Jesus….”

“Let’s not play games, Jane P. Time is of the essence, and I don’t have any desire to fill that time with bullshit.”

“Get out!” Jane ordered Kit, pointing toward the door.

Kit dug her backside into the chair and flipped her long, salt‐ and‐pepper braid over her shoulder in a defiant thrust. “No! I’m not leaving until you hear my petition.”

“If you don’t move your ass out of that chair—”

“What are you going to do, Jane P.? Take a pool cue and knock me across the forehead?” Kit let that statement sink into Jane’s ears.

Jane was dumbstruck. Kit had somehow witnessed the fiasco at The Red Tail the previous night. Grabbing a small digital clock, Jane slammed it on the desk. “Five minutes and then you’re out of here!” Jane sat down.

“Do you believe in fate?”

“Do I believe in fate?” Jane repeated with a wicked edge.

“Yes or no, Jane P.”

“You just chewed up twenty seconds of your time with a dumb question.”

“Oh, you’re going to play tough with me?”

Jane tapped the back of the digital clock. “Four and a half minutes, Kit.”

Kit angrily slapped the clock off Jane’s desk, sending it against the wall. “Scratch the badass cop act! That’s not who you really are!”

“You don’t know who the fuck I am!”

Kit sat forward. “Yes, I do! I followed the Emily Lawrence story very closely this past summer,” she said, referring to the high‐profile homicide case that had propelled Jane’s name into the public eye. “I was fascinated by the case and the way you so deftly solved it. When I found out you were going to be on Larry King Live, I taped the show.”

“What are you, a detective groupie?”

“Far from it. I’m deeply interested in any story that deals with a child and a murder. I saw you on Larry King’s show. I looked into your eyes and I saw a kindred spirit. You can stiffen your back and say ‘fuck you’ until the cows come home. I know it’s all a comfortable front to hide your pain and disarm stupid people so they don’t see how sensitive you really are.” Jane cringed at Kit’s backhanded compliment. Having her vulnerability exposed skewed her normal leveraging capabilities. “I don’t want you to think I’m sucking up to you, because I don’t suck up to anyone. Now, I do need to get to the point of my visit. It’s a matter of life and death and time is running out.”

Jane didn’t know what to make of Kit’s disturbing appeal. “Life and death?”

“I assume you’re aware of the breaking national news story of the moment?”

“What?”

Kit removed the Denver Post from her satchel and slid it toward Jane. “Charlotte Walker, age twelve, kidnapped from her hometown in Oakhurst, California.”

Jane stared at the photo of the hazel‐eyed child. “What about it?”

“I think I know who has her,” Kit replied in a shaky voice.

Jane furrowed her brow like a judge debating the sanity of a defendant. “Yeah?”

“I’m not 100 percent sure, but my intuition is a helluva lot sharper these days. And it does add up if you look at his pattern.”

“Whose pattern?”

Kit leaned forward and spoke with defining authority. “Lou Peters. He’d be thirty‐three years old now. He’s slim, has sandy brown hair, resembles a Greek god or Brad Pitt, take your pick. He’s utterly charming and smart. That’s who Lou Peters is. What he did was kidnap, rape, and kill my granddaughter, Ashlee, fourteen years ago in Northern California. Big Sur, to be specific. That’s where I used to live until I couldn’t live there anymore. Too many memories. Too much pain. I live in Boulder now.”

Boulder. To Jane, this pronouncement was akin to saying, “I’m a Leftist and proud of it!” When Jane was a member of the Denver PD—traditionally, a conservative band of folks—they delighted in a running jag of derisive comments about the 100 percent organic, free‐range‐thinking town that sat twenty miles northwest of Denver. Comments such as “He’s from the People’s Republic of Boulder,” “Welcome to Boulder, where the streets run red from all the bleeding hearts,” or “There’s only one age in Boulder: New Age” offered an example of what cops thought of the town.