Shield of Justice (24 page)

“Sorry to bother you, Frye,” the night dispatcher said, sounding truly apologetic. “I know you ain’t on duty—”

“It’s okay,” Rebecca interrupted, wide awake now. She sensed Catherine stir beside her and reached to touch her in the dark.

“I got a girl on the line who says she has to speak to you and nobody else. I should be so popular.”

“What does she want?” Rebecca asked, surprised. She had expected it to be Watts or one of the other Vice cops.

“Won’t say. I had to threaten not to call you unless she gave me a name. Sandy. She said you’d know—”

“Patch her through,” Rebecca instructed, sitting up in bed, every muscle tense.

“Frye?” a faint voice questioned.

“Yeah, it’s me, Sandy. What is it?”

“Anne Marie is missing. She was supposed to meet Claire and Rosie at the diner at one, and she never showed.”

Rebecca didn’t bother with the routine questions; she knew Sandy would never have called if there hadn’t been real cause for alarm. “When and where did someone last see her?”

“She was working the corner at Thirteenth and Comac, about eleven thirty.”

“I’ll meet you there in twenty minutes. In the meantime, try to find anyone who saw her with a john tonight. Ask around. See if anyone knows where she takes her clients. And Sandy…get the girls off the streets.” As Rebecca rose from the bed, Catherine sat up.

“What is it?” she asked, pulling the sheet up around her bare breasts.

Rebecca had arrived at her door at midnight, apologizing about the lateness of hour, a look of such hunger in her eyes that Catherine was surprised they had made it to the bedroom. She was even more surprised by her own swift arousal and the near-frantic need she had felt to touch Rebecca’s skin—to feel her heart beat, to take her, to
have
her—with no barriers between them. They couldn’t have been asleep more than half an hour when the beeper went off.

“Probably nothing.” Rebecca pulled her shoulder rig over a black turtleneck sweater and reached for her jacket.

For some reason, she couldn’t put voice to the dread that began churning in her belly the minute she’d heard Sandy’s voice. She’d had a bad feeling listening to Sandy’s story, and over the years she had come to trust those premonitions. She
wanted
to tell Catherine; she knew Catherine was waiting for her to speak. But she couldn’t talk about it, couldn’t say the words out loud, because then she would have to face the feelings. Feelings were dangerous things in her line of work. They tripped you up just when you needed to think clearly. And one misstep could be deadly.

“Rebecca?”

“I’m sorry the call woke you,” Rebecca replied, leaning down to kiss her swiftly. She had hidden her feelings from everyone for so long, she couldn’t change that now. “I just have to check something out, but I probably won’t be back tonight. I can have an officer come to stay with you.”

“I’d rather not, if it isn’t really necessary.”

Rebecca considered the situation. It was unlikely that the perp would try to approach Catherine in her home, and there were uniforms keeping a close watch on the immediate neighborhood. “Just don’t answer the door, all right?”

Catherine nodded, aware that Rebecca had avoided her questions. She sensed Rebecca struggling to bridge the distance between them, but knowing that she was trying did not make the silence any easier. She hoped she would have the strength and patience to wait until Rebecca trusted her. “Just be careful,” was all she said. “Call me when you can?”

“I will,” Rebecca whispered, kissing her again, grateful for Catherine’s calm acceptance. She turned to look back from the bedroom door, warmed by Catherine’s tender, caring gaze. She would carry that look with her into the night, a shield as important as any weapon she might wear.

*

“No one knows where she went,” Sandy said anxiously when Rebecca found her, shivering in a doorway near one of the busiest corners in the flesh-trade district. “But she always tricks somewhere close by. I can send some of the others around to ask.”

“No,” Rebecca said emphatically. “I don’t want them wandering around out here tonight. Do you have a cell phone?”

“Uh-uh,” Sandy chattered, still shaking, and it wasn’t from the unexpectedly cold night. She was scared, and the grim expression on the blond cop’s face wasn’t helping.

“Here.” Rebecca pulled hers from inside her jacket pocket. “Let me make a call, then you take this and go inside the diner,” she instructed, pointing to an all-night dive across the street that was a favorite hangout for the denizens of the street. She held up a finger signaling Sandy to wait while she dialed Watts’s number. Surprisingly, he grasped the situation quickly and said he’d start checking hotels in the area as soon as he could get dressed and make it downtown.

She handed the phone to Sandy. “Start making calls. Page your friends; I know most of them have pagers. Find out what you can about Anne Marie, and tell them all to head home. Tell them a raid is coming down any minute.”

“Is there?” Sandy asked, eyeing Rebecca suspiciously. She’d called Frye half expecting to get blown off, but she hadn’t known what else to do. She still found it hard to believe the cop didn’t want something from her, not that the idea of being with her was all that bad. She
was
hot.

“Just
do
it, Sandy,” Rebecca said, impatient to get to work. She gave Sandy her pager number and walked her to the diner. “Wait for me, okay?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Sandy said, feigning disinterest, but she was lonely—and scared—the minute the detective walked away.

Rebecca spent forty minutes checking establishments that rented rooms by the hour, favorite places for prostitutes to take johns to trick. Nobody admitted to remembering anyone that fit the description of the woman Sandy had given her. She was beginning to think that maybe this was a false alarm, and Sandy’s friend had just gotten lucky and hooked up with an all night trick. Hopefully, she was tucked away in some nice hotel for the rest of the night, her only worry being how to satisfy some salesman from Omaha. Then her beeper went off, and when she called from a pay phone, Watts answered.

“You ought to come on over to Twelfth and Locust, Sarge.”

“Right,” Rebecca responded, her heart turning cold.

She found Watts on the landing outside a numberless door in a nondescript hotel two blocks from the diner where Sandy still waited. “What have you got?” she asked curtly.

“The night manager thought the last girl to use this room didn’t come down,” he explained. “He was too deep into a bottle of Thunderbird to remember who she went upstairs with or when the john might have left.”

She watched his face while he talked, realizing by now that she couldn’t hurry Watts when he was telling a story. She didn’t need to hurry him, though. She already knew how this one ended. “Have you been inside?”

“Just for a minute,” he replied, his voice unusually heavy. “To be sure. Looks like our boy again.”

His characteristic nonchalance was absent, and if Rebecca didn’t consider it impossible, she would have thought he was upset. “She’s dead?”

“Yeah.”

Rebecca pushed aside her swift surge of anger at the senseless waste and at her own inability to put an end to it.
Later.
Silently, she shoved the door open.

A glance confirmed Watts’s impression that they were dealing with the same perpetrator. The victim, young and slender, was lying face down on the thin mattress, a pair of blue nylon shorts pulled down around her ankles. Her street clothes were neatly folded on the cane chair that stood forlornly against a bare, water-stained wall.

“Be sure to check if all her clothes are here after the crime scene team finishes,” she said. Watts grunted and made a note in his ever-present tattered notebook. “Did you get anything at all from the guy downstairs?”

“No, and I don’t think we will. He remembers handing her the key. He didn’t see the john go in or out. Didn’t hear anything either.”

“We’ll have to round up all the prostitutes for questioning. Chances are this guy has been around for a while and maybe started getting rougher as he’s come unglued. I’ll talk to her friends. One of them must have seen her with him.”

“I’ll get some uniforms on canvassing the hookers,” Watts responded.

“Let me use your cell phone?” she asked.

He handed it over as they leaned against the wall outside the crime scene, and she punched in her own number. She tried not to think about the quick surge of hope in Sandy’s voice when she asked the girl to meet them at the hotel.

“Just come on down, Sandy,” Rebecca finished. “I’ll explain when you get over here.”

Watts raised an eyebrow and Rebecca merely shrugged. “I’ve got someone who can ID her.”

The Homicide team and the CSI lab van pulled up as Rebecca and Watts were on their way out. Dee Flanagan stopped next to Rebecca in the hallway.

“You catching homicides now, Frye?”

“Stumbled on this one. Check what you get against a similar—four days ago at the Viceroy.”

“He’s getting greedy, isn’t he?” Flanagan remarked caustically, hefting her heavy crime scene case in her right hand. She started up the stairs, adding over her shoulder, “Yeah, yeah. I’ll call you.”

Rebecca turned at the sound of her name and saw Sandy at the bottom of the stairwell, a uniformed officer blocking her ascent. “She’s with me,” Rebecca said to the slim, dark-haired female beat cop. “You can let her up.”

The uniform turned in her direction, caught sight of the gold shield on her coat, and almost snapped to attention. “Yes, ma’am.”

Sandy gave the cop a haughty look and slid by her on the narrow stairs, brushing her breasts against the officer’s arm in passing. Startled, the cop took a step back. “Rookie,” Sandy muttered disdainfully, and for a second, Rebecca smiled.

Then she looked into Sandy’s eyes and saw her terror. She steeled herself for what she had to do, taking her elbow in a firm grip as she said, “I want you to come upstairs and see if you recognize this girl.”

Sandy didn’t protest or even question. She’d known the minute she’d turned the corner and seen the patrol cars and the cluster of uniforms around the entrance. Whatever it was, it wasn’t good. But then there was always a chance it wasn’t her. Maybe someone else’s number had come up unlucky.

Rebecca stopped at the door and called to Flanagan, “Can I bring in someone for an ID?”

Flanagan glanced up from where she was kneeling by the bed, peering at the dead girl’s body. From their angle she looked like she was praying.

“Yeah…carefully. You know the routine.”

“Don’t touch anything, and stay right next to me,” Rebecca instructed as she led Sandy to the bed.

The young woman stared motionlessly at the figure for a long moment, then turned away. “That’s Anne Marie,” she said, no hint of emotion in her voice.

“Come on, let’s get out of here,” Rebecca murmured, still holding her by the arm.

Sandy began to tremble as they descended the stairs, and by the time they reached the bottom, she was sobbing. Rebecca automatically put her arms around the shaking girl, whose street-hardened façade had finally crumbled. To the detective’s surprise, Sandy held on to her tightly, pressing her face to Rebecca’s chest.

“I’m sorry, Sandy,” the detective whispered, softly stroking her hair. “I’m sorry.”

“Never thought I’d like getting this close to a cop,” Sandy said after a minute, her voice wavering. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and straightened her shoulders. She looked into Rebecca’s eyes, read the undisguised pain in them, and said softly, “Thanks.”

Rebecca was aware of Watts watching them expressionlessly from the opposite side of the lobby, but she ignored his flat appraising observation. She motioned the young female officer over from where she still stood guarding the stairs and flicked a glance at her name tag. “Mitchell, I want you to take Ms. Dyer home.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Mitchell responded crisply, eyeing Sandy with just the slightest bit of uncertainty.

Sandy surprised Rebecca again by offering no complaint. She promised to call as many of Anne Marie’s friends as she could reach and to page Rebecca if she learned anything.

Rebecca and Watts headed back to the station to begin the long process of writing up the first-on-scene report. After that, there was nothing to do but wait for the preliminary findings from Flanagan’s crew. She drove silently, her jaw clenched so tightly it ached, struggling to suppress the pervasive sense of helplessness that surrounded the case. She didn’t think she could stand to see one more woman brutalized by this shadow of a man who continued to elude them. She sighed, gripping the wheel tighter, fighting the depression that would only make her less effective. She also ignored the insistent urge for a drink.

Mercifully, Watts was silent.

They had barely begun their paperwork when Captain Henry strode through the squad room and gestured with a quick nod of his head for them to follow. Rebecca glanced at the plain clock on the wall.

“It must be something big to get the captain in here at five a.m.,” she remarked to Watts as they stood.

“Or something bad,” Watts replied morosely.