The Big Keep: A Lena Dane Mystery (Lena Dane Mysteries) (22 page)

Holding the phone in one hand, I did a few manic fist pumps with the other. “Yes, sir. His real name is Jason Anderson.”

“Hmph. Well, I suppose he may have written under an alias. I don’t, of course, but I understand it’s quite the fashion in Los Angeles.”

“Yes, sir,” I said again. “Would it be possible for me to come and speak to you in person? I’d really like to know more about your conversation with Ja—um, Mr. August.”

“Sadly,” Trevors replied, making a slight effort to actually sound sad, “I’m leaving town first thing in the morning for a conference in Atlanta. I’ll be back a week from Tuesday, though.”

“I see,” I said. “I was really hoping we might be able to speak a bit sooner than that.”

“You know, my book offers a great deal of insight into Chicago’s professional killers...”
 

Nice plug. “Yes, sir, I’ve already ordered it. But in the meantime, I’d appreciate if there’s any particular direction you could point me in now. What was Jaso—um, what subject was August most interested in?”

“Why, he wanted to speak to Mason Taper, of course,” Trevors said self-importantly. “I’m sorry, I thought you already knew that. I literally wrote the book on the man, so August was hoping that I might convince Mason to put him on the visitor’s list.”

Mason Taper. I had no idea who that was, but Trevors had said the name like I would just instantly recognize it; the same way you’d say “Jeffrey Dahmer” or “Ted Bundy.”
 

“Pardon me, sir, but I’m not really familiar...”

“Ah, of course,” Trevors said, as though just remembering he was talking to a toddler. “Well, the book really describes him best, but Taper was quite active in the 1960’s and 1970’s in the Chicago and Milwaukee areas. He was a bit different from most professional killers at the time, in that he generally tried to make the deaths he inflicted look like accidents. That’s why it took them more than ten years to catch him, and we still don’t know how many people he killed during his career.”

 
“And you’d talked to Taper before?” I asked.

Now Trevors’ voice grew a little uncomfortable. “Well, once, yes. He granted me an interview for
History of the Hitmen
, but I’m afraid it didn’t go very well.” He sniffed. “Some killers are better studied than spoken to, you know.”

I didn’t, really. “What happened when you interviewed him?” I said curiously.
 

I should have known better. Trevors coughed. “Nothing of any importance,” he said dismissively. “If you’ll excuse me, Miss, I’m afraid I need to-”

“Just a couple more questions, please,” I interrupted. “Did you do what August asked? Did you contact Taper for him?”

“No,” Trevors said shortly. “Mason asked me—very politely—not to contact him again. But your man may have found another way. When I interviewed Mason, I got the sense that he was almost...bored, I suppose, would be the word. Like a cat that needed a new mouse to play with.”

I hung up a few minutes later, trying to find a place for my shiny new piece of the puzzle.
 

I needed to go talk to Mason Taper.

Nate was running out of time.
 

The last couple months had been a little easier, since he knew there was no way to hide his situation much longer. Tom had been on a plateau for months, but in the last two weeks his condition had worsened very quickly, and now his oncologist had begun talking about hospice care. Tom was stubbornly holding out, though, insisting on staying in the house as long as he could. Nate knew Tom was doing that for him, to give Nate as much time in his old life as he could, and Nate felt gratitude and guilt in almost equal measure.
 

He could hold out for another couple of weeks, maybe, but then there was just no getting around the fact that someone was going to come and take him away. And Nate was going to lose everything: his home, the last of his family, probably even his “internship” with Lena’s dad. And the thought that kept haunting him was, if he didn’t have any of that...who would he be then? A number in a system?
 

With those thoughts clunking around in his head, it was getting harder and harder for Nate to give a shit about school. He was barely even going through the motions anymore, and when he did it was with maybe half his attention. On Thursday Nate managed to convince his biology teacher to let him turn in a paper two days late for no particular reason other than the fact that when he tried to research Mendelian genetics, he started thinking about Jason Anderson. Nate had started wondering if being his son meant that Nate himself was genetically inclined to pull the same shit on his own family.
The joke’s on you, genetics,
he thought bitterly.
I don’t have a family to abandon anymore.
 

When he got home from school that afternoon Nate let himself into the house quietly and slipped upstairs to check on Tom. He was sleeping feverishly, shifting every few seconds in his bed, sweat dampening his pillowcases.
Shoot
, Nate thought. He’d forgotten to run a load of bedding through the laundry. He loaded up a clothes basket and tiptoed back down the stairs to the little laundry alcove off the kitchen. On the way there he saw the red light blinking on the answering machine. Most of the kids at Nate’s school had cell phones by now, but Nate didn’t want one. He had this weird superstition that Tom wouldn’t die if he couldn’t get a hold of Nate first. As soon as he could be tracked down anywhere, Nate was sure that one of the home care nurses would call him to say Tom had died.
 

Nate pushed the button on the answering machine and heard Lena’s clear voice. “Nate, it’s me. Listen, I’ve finally got a solid lead on your—on Jason Anderson. While he was in town he visited a prisoner at Stateville Correctional, about an hour south of here. I’m going to go tomorrow and talk to the same guy, try to figure out what Jason wanted. I’ll call you after school and fill you in.”

Nate dropped the laundry and ran for his bus schedule.

27. Full of Talk

On Friday morning I stood found myself staring into my closet, wearing jeans and an overworked sports bra, trying to figure out what to wear to prison.
 

My stomach bump was too big to hide, but it was still small enough that under just the right kind of shirt, I looked garden-variety chubby instead of actively pregnant. I pulled on a tank top and covered it with a baggy button-down shirt of Toby’s that had shrunk in the wash. I put my leather jacket on over it, which was fine as long as I didn’t zip it—and checked myself in the mirror. Perfect. If one noticed the bump at all, it could easily be dismissed as just my winter chub. God bless the Midwest.
 

I left the building through the front—I’d parked on the street the night before, telling myself it was for convenience. Really, I knew I was still a little skittish about the parking garage, after finding the Jeep maimed a couple of months earlier. When I got outside I was glad for my leather jacket. June or not, it was a dark, overcast day, and the temperature hovered in the fifties. If there was such a thing as good weather for visiting a prison, this was probably it.

I looked up and realized that there was someone leaning against the Jeep. Someone with gangly limbs and a shock of red hair. “Nate?”

“Good morning, Lena,” he said, and handed me a cup of coffee in a paper Starbucks cup. “Decaf.”

“Thank you...what are you doing here?”

“I’m coming with you to Stateville.”

“What? No you’re not.”

“Yes, I am,” he said pleasantly.
 

“Nate, you’re fourteen, and you’re supposed to be in school.”

“I’ll be fifteen in a few weeks, and I already called myself in sick. If you tell the school, I’ll get in huge trouble.” He blinked innocent doe eyes at me.

I sighed, leaning back against my Jeep and taking a sip of the coffee. “Nate, why would you want to go visit a prison with me?”

His jaw worked, like he was on the verge of half a dozen different responses, but Nate just shook his head a little. Finally, he said, “I looked up his obituary last night, Jason’s.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Uh, okay.”
 

“That girl, Starla, she’s doing this little memorial service in LA, and one of the little newspapers covered it. They printed the day that he actually died.”

I saw where this was going and took a step toward him. “Nate-”

“Why did I put off calling you until the last minute?” he burst out. “If I’d hired you three days earlier, you would have found him in time. I would have a place to stay, and those two little kids would still have their father. He might have been a dick, but at least he’d still be alive.”

“Oh, Nate.” I set my cup down on top of the Jeep and reached out, pulling him in for a hug that surprised us both. “Honey, this wasn’t your fault, any of it. There was no way you could have known that Jason was going to die.”

He pulled back, gently but firmly. “No, but you don’t get it. I’ve known for months that Tom is terminal. I could have called you in anytime, and you could have fixed it.” Tears were welling in his eyes, and I wanted to hug him again.

“Nate, I’m not omnipotent,” I pointed out. “Even if you’d called me in before it might not have gone down the way you wanted.”

“You would have found him. You
would
,” he insisted, stubborn.

I winced. “Nate, I appreciate your faith in me, but things just don’t work out the way we want sometimes. And I’m sorry, but there’s no way I’m going to take a teenager into a maximum security super-prison.”

“I won’t even come in, I’ll just ride with you and stay in the car,” he pleaded.

“No. You belong in school, learning things, not playing Junior to my Dick Tracy. I work by myself, Nate.” There was little more sting into the last than I had actually intended, and Nate flinched, taking a step away from my car.

“He wasn’t a great man, Lena, but he was my father. Wouldn’t you want to find out what happened to your father?”

“That’s totally different. My father’s been in my life.”

“What about your mom? Didn’t you try to find out what happened to her?” I bristled, about to go off on him, but Nate’s face wasn’t stubborn or cruel, just sad. And, dammit, he had a point. My first day as a police officer, I had pulled my mother’s file.

“Please, Lena?” Nate pleaded. “I just want to see where he was. I want to know what he was doing, and why he died. Please?”

Crap.

Nate was quiet for most of the hour-long car ride, fiddling with my iPod playlist. When we were about 20 minutes away, though, he finally spoke up, “Lena? How did your mom die?”

The question startled me, more because he’d been so quiet than because I wasn’t expecting it. “Why do you ask?”

“I’m just wondering. You don’t have to tell me if it’s too personal.”

I blew out a breath. “It’s not really a big secret, Nate. My mom was kind of a rarity in the police department in those days – they had women cops by then, but it was still a boys club. You played by the boys club rules.”
 

“Uh huh. And if you’re anything like her, your mom didn’t play by the rules.”

I smiled faintly. “No, she didn’t. And twenty-five years ago, if the male officers didn’t like a female cop, they hung her out to dry – they sent her out on the worse calls, took their time coming in as backup, pulled little sexist pranks at the station...the idea was to get her to quit and go home to raise babies.” I paused, but Nate was silent and still, listening to every word. “One night she was working alone, and took a call on a burglary at a gas station. The bad guy used a hostage to get her to drop her service pistol. Then he shot the hostage anyway, and forced my mom,” I swallowed nervously. “Well, he assaulted her, you know, and shot her in the heart when he was done. Then he walked out.”

“I’m sorry.”
 

“It’s okay. It was a long time ago.”

“Did they catch the guy?”

I winced. “Sort of.” I said. “The officer who was supposed to be backing her up said he got there just as the bad guy was walking out. He shot and killed him.” I remembered how I’d felt sitting in the empty bullpen at the end of my first day as a cop, reading through the file. I’d thrown up in the wastebasket next to my new desk. That had been the real beginning of my disillusionment with the police.
 

Based on the timeline mentioned in the file, I’d also wondered if Patrick Griffith, the cop who was supposed to be my mother’s backup, had shot the right person. The twenty-one-year-old Hispanic kid he’d shot had no priors. It was possible that Griffith had just seen an easy way to clean up his mess. I would probably never know for sure.

“Did they...I mean, did anything happen to the backup cop?” Nate asked.

“There was an Internal Affairs investigation, and he was forced to retire, with full benefits.”

“That’s it? Wow.”

“Yeah.”

We drove on in silence.

There was a little more to that story, of course. Griffith had come to our house when I was in middle school, theoretically to apologize for not being there that night. He’d sat down in our living room, in the little apartment above the comic book store, and said he was sorry, that he had been a bad officer and a bad human being. His face was covered in broken blood vessels, and his fingers shook as he spoke. My kindhearted father said nothing, just escorted him out without a word. Rory started to cry, and I went back into the bedroom we shared and punched a hole in the wall. The day after that I’d found the boxing gym.

Stateville Correctional Facility was a gloomy, sprawling place: more of a campus than a single building, with no apparent pattern to the layout. The whole place was made mostly out of those big sand-colored bricks that somehow manage to leech away even the mild charm that red brick buildings usually muster. I hadn’t been there before, but there were signs everywhere outside the gates, and I managed to find my way through the chain link fence to the visitor’s parking area. I left Nate in the Jeep with a couple of magazines I’d scrounged from the backseat and Rory’s old copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting. If he wanted other reading material, he should have brought his own.