What You See (9 page)

No sign of Jake. Either he hadn’t heard her phone or was too busy to check it out.

She took a calming breath, then another, balancing one hand against the warm cobblestones. She was fine. At least she had a moment to collect—

Her phone now vibrated like an angry bee in the side pocket of her tote. She looked up, scanning the alley in both directions. She turned the phone off again. Whoever it was would have to wait. The newsroom, no doubt. Some journalism realities never changed, no matter where she worked. Those people, cocooned safely in their buildings all day, had no idea what it was like in the field. They’d call every ten minutes asking what’s new. Well, if something were new, wouldn’t she be calling them? And all the time spent answering the phone was time she couldn’t spend getting the story.

Two hours ago she’d been discussing journalism theory with a pompous-ass news director. Now there was no more theory. Now there was reality. Baking sun, complaining thigh muscles, ruined suit, shredded heels, and a semi-twisted ankle. And a murder—maybe two—that was still a mystery.

DeLuca had told Jake to “haul it.” Why?

Was something wrong? Or was something right?

Two of the people back there were good guys, that she knew for sure. But that was all she knew.

13

Tenley felt the air change around her. So dumb of her to think about going into that alley. She’d been sitting in the same spot on the curb for several minutes, elbows on knees and chin in hands, eyes closed, trying to decide how to handle her feelings. Trying to disperse the shadows, like her therapist always advised her to do. When Tenley felt herself spiraling down, Dr. Maddux always said to let the sunlight in. Feel the touch of the breeze, open your eyes to beauty and possibilities. Tenley didn’t feel like opening her eyes to anything.

But the change in the air meant someone had sat down beside her. Part of Tenley’s brain said,
Leap up, run, don’t look back.
But that was silly. Figuring if she kept her eyes shut, no one could see her either? Like an ostrich? A million cops were here. She could open her eyes, and all would be normal and fine.

“Craziness, huh?” a voice said.

A female voice. A girl. Okay, then, not scary.

“What happened?” the girl was asking. “Did you see that ambulance come out of the alley? It was hauling ass.”

Tenley turned her head a fraction, enough to see a smiling girl with tanned skin. A little older than her.
Lanna’s age.
With short-short hair, a cascade of silver earrings, pretty cool, actually, cute, and a Nirvana T-shirt. Vintage. Her sister Lanna had one just like it, except this girl was half the size of Lanna. Lanna’d never fit into this one.
It wasn’t Lanna’s,
Tenley assured herself. Probably fifty million T-shirts like this one. And a million other cute girls Lanna’s age. People who were not dead.

“If you don’t want to talk, that’s cool.”

Tenley felt the girl shift her weight, as if she was going to stand.

“I know you, right? From school? No biggie. Sorry to bother.” Her jeans were like the ones Tenley usually wore when she wasn’t working, ripped knees and low-rise. Tenley saw a little of the girl’s creamy skin above the waistband and a tiny tattooed star disappearing beneath.

“No, it’s okay,” Tenley said. Did she know her? She could pretend she did until she figured it out. So many kids at school, and she hardly ever connected. “But I just got here. Kind of.”

“I’ve seen you on the bus in the mornings? Right? You work around here, too? I work over at…” She gestured across the street.

Quincy Market, Tenley guessed. Maybe at the Gap, or American Eagle. “Yeah, I work at—” Tenley began. The girl
did
look familiar. Kind of.

“I’m Brileen,” the girl went on, rolling her dark eyes. “B-R-I-L-E-E-N. I know, huh? Why-Try-Bry they always used to say back in middle school. Drove me nuts.”

She was sitting so close Tenley could see the glisten of her clear lip gloss, see the scattering of not-quite freckles across her cheeks.

“I’m named after an ice-skater,” Tenley said. Why’d she say that to this girl? To make her feel better about her name, Tenley guessed. Although there was no reason to do that. Except to be nice, right?

“Skater? Is it Nancy?” The girl guessed. “Oh, I know. Tanya. Kristi?”

“Tenley,” she said.

“Who?”

“Never mind.” Tenley’s mother had named her after some skater, now a doctor, who lived in Marblehead or wherever. “Tenley Albright was an ice-skater.”

“You skate?” Brileen asked.

“As if.”

“Looks like the cops are packing up. Did they talk to you?” Brileen stood, brushing off the seat of her jeans. “Hey. Wanna go get coffee? It’s my lunch hour.”

“Did they talk to
you
?” Tenley tried to keep up. Say what cool people would say. Did she? Want to go get coffee? “Coffee?”

Tenley looked up at City Hall, saw the white-globed camera just under the eaves, attached to the concrete below the mayor’s office window. If someone inside were monitoring the right screen, screen number seven, they might be watching her. What if her mother was looking out the window and saw her and wondered who she was talking to. “Tenley has no friends.” She’d heard her mom say those exact words to her father, not realizing Tenley, in the downstairs hallway, could hear every word.

Her father had said, “She’s got to start participating, Catherine, living in the real world.”

Like they agreed she was a loser.

She wasn’t a loser. She was—she felt her shoulders drop, felt the girl looking at her. Sad. She was
sad
. But maybe she didn’t have to be sad all the time.

“Yeah, coffee,” the girl repeated, smiling. “We can go to the Purple.”

“Sure,” Tenley decided. The Purple Martin, Brileen must mean, the coffee-shop-ish pub by the alley. “The Purple is cool.”

She had fifteen minutes—at least—before she had to return to the dungeon. And you know what? She would enjoy those fifteen minutes. She looked up at City Hall, even thought about waving.

See, Mom?
She telegraphed her message to the second window from the left.
You were wrong. Again. I
do
have friends.

*   *   *

“What the hell?” Jake barreled around the corner and into the dead end, alarmed by DeLuca’s yelling, prepared for the worst but not really expecting it. If D were in real danger, he’d have radioed via dispatch for extra backup, not called only for Jake.

Maybe he was wrong.

DeLuca stood, his back to Jake. From the looks of it, trying to referee two unhappy campers. And, from the looks of it, failing. Good thing Jane was headed in the other direction.

Calvin Hewlitt had his back against the brick wall, his face twisting in anger, spitting out his words. “That’ll teach you, you little—”

“You’re the total
jerk.
”

The kid with the camera? More precisely, the kid who used to have the camera. When the kid had first surprised him and D in the alley, Jake had almost shot him, thinking the camera was a gun. No matter now—what used to be the camera lay on the ground, shattered into pieces. A lens rolled toward the left wall, then caught, wobbling briefly, between two cobblestones.

“Hey—both of you!” Jake approached the adversaries, arms outstretched, palms out, peacemaking. He hoped. “Back. The frick. Off. Both of you. Now.”

Lucky for DeLuca, and for the kid, they hadn’t uncuffed Hewlitt. Otherwise, these idiots would no doubt be deep in hand-to-hand combat by now. The kid would be toast.

The kid picked up a silver piece of what once was a camera, waved it in Hewlitt’s direction. “It’s all
his
fault! Look at this! That camera was my—”

Hewlitt strained at his handcuffs like a pit bull on a chain. “Then you should have kept it out of my face, you—”

“Calm down, the both of you,” Jake ordered. Even with Hewlitt in restraints, his partner had been outnumbered. Good thing he’d called for Jake. Man-to-man defense was far more effective than zone.

“You have to be completely shitting me.” The kid stomped a foot. “I have a perfect right to—that moron kicked my camera! Right out of my hand! And now look at it. That camera cost big bucks.”

“You have no freaking right to take my picture, you punk.” Hewlitt took a step, aggressive. “If one picture of me in cuffs ever gets—”

“But he
kicked—
” the kid was saying.

“I’m serious, Detective, I’m an upstanding, innocent—”

“Enough!” Jake yelled. He pointed at Hewlitt. “You. Hewlitt. Not another word.”

“But—”

Jake looked at DeLuca, questioning. “He kicked the camera? Out of the kid’s hands?”

“Before I could, it went straight up in the—” DeLuca demonstrated with the flip of a palm. “I mean, who’da thought—”

“What
ever.
” Ridiculously, the damage made Jake’s life easier. Take this guy in? Now he had a perfect by-the-book reason to do so. “Calvin Hewlitt? You’re under arrest for malicious destruction of property, assault and battery.”

“For not wanting my picture in handcuffs on the damn front page?” Hewlitt rolled his head back, incredulous. “
I’m
under arrest?
Me?
”

“See?” the kid sneered at Hewlitt, derisive.

“Shut
up.
” DeLuca grabbed the kid by one arm, keeping him in place.

“See?” Hewlitt spat the word back at him, chin out.

There’d been a murder not two hours earlier, but now Jake was occupied in mediating a battle over a broken camera between a punk kid and a lawsuit-threatening potential suspect. This whole episode had totally gotten—

“But—” The kid was still trying to talk.

“And you, young man,” Jake interrupted. He’d get this under control, return to some semblance of sanity, bring Hewlitt in for questioning, and then move on.

“But there’s
pictures.
In that camera!” The kid kept talking, almost in tears, waving one hand at the shards of plastic and splinters of shattered glass strewn across the pavement. “Pictures of the
stabbing
! Now, because of
him,
they’re totally wrecked, because of this—this—”

The kid stood, his chest heaving, one finger pointing at the molded silver halves of the camera, now split apart, revealing what looked like a tiny green circuit board, some sort of black plastic spool, slivers of plastic. The flat black view-screen, Jake recognized it from his own camera, lay in a dark shaft of shadow by the kid’s foot.

And past that, the tiny green memory card, the postage-stamp-size heart of the camera, where all the digital information was stored. Keeping his eyes on the kid, Jake took a step toward it.

With any luck, and it was about time they had some, Jake’s photo unit could still retrieve the photos recorded there. Holy shit. Were they all he’d need?

“Mr.—” Jake paused.

“Land,” DeLuca said. “Bobby Land.”

“Land.” Jake kept his voice low, though his brain was in high gear. “You saw what happened? At the park?”

“The camera did, I think.” Bobby bent down, picked up the silver metal piece that had obviously been the front of the camera. He turned it over, examining it, the sun hitting the shiny surface. “I look through the viewfinder, you know?”

Jake felt DeLuca take a step closer to Hewlitt. Hewlitt was cuffed, and finally quiet, but he could still try to run. A random security type who just happened to be in the alley at the right time? Jake had his doubts.

But the kid hadn’t pegged Hewlitt as the stabber. And would have, right? If he’d seen him? Unless he was afraid.

Still, the kid was the key. They had a suspect—victim?—in custody, certainly now under armed guard at the hospital. They could get that suspect’s photo, put it in an array, show it to the kid, all by the book, bingo.

So much for the hordes of probably unreliable bystanders at the crime scene. So much for fingerprints. Even the kid’s testimony. That’d all be backup. The photos on this kid’s camera would not lie. “Did you photograph the person who did it? Could you identify him?”

“And it wasn’t me, right, punk?” Hewlitt called out.

“Was it?” Jake needed that answer, too.

“I’ve never seen that jerk before.” Bobby wiped his mouth with the back of one hand, then the other. “But the guy who did it, um…”

Jake could tell he was trying to decide. That was good. “No” was an easy answer. “No” was adios, I can’t help you, good-bye. “Yes” was more difficult. “Yes” meant maybe being branded a snitch, court appearances and cross-examination, the threatening possibility of retaliation and revenge. If Bobby Land was deciding, that meant the real answer was most likely yes, he could recognize the suspect. Yes was good.

*   *   *

Bobby felt the grit of street dust on the back of his hand, felt his mouth get drier and drier. Why had he told the cops he’d seen the person who did the stabbing?

The jerk bag against the wall, that’s who’d put him over the edge
. I mean, like, he was allowed to break my freaking camera? And get away with it? Who the hell was he, anyway?
The guy would get into even more trouble if he, like, had wrecked valuable evidence of the crime. Which could, in fact, be there. Bobby wasn’t totally sure.

Though now he was trapped. It was illegal to lie to the cops, everyone knew that, and if he couldn’t recognize the “suspect,” as this cop had called him, might he be in big trouble? And what happened to Jane Ryland, anyway? She’d been right behind him, she’d be able to help him explain, or get out of this. But Jane was gone. Crap. You couldn’t trust anyone.

Bobby ran his tongue across his dry lips, wishing he were anywhere else, wishing he’d never opened his—but wait.

The memory card. Over there, in the middle of one square of gray cobblestone. If there was a picture of the stabber, if he had actually gotten it, they might be able to get it from the card. Not definitely, but maybe. Then he wouldn’t have to identify the person at all. Would he? They could all go by what they saw in the photo.

The memory card was the key. All he had to do was get it.