Bring On The Night (3 page)

Brandon made his way to the end of the bar, taking the empty stool next to Gonzalez. “Buy you a beer, Henry?” He signaled the bartender.

“Crap, Ellis!” Gonzalez growled. “Don’t talk to me in public. What are you trying to do to me?”

Brandon laughed. “I thought you didn’t care what your fellow officers thought of you anymore?”

Gonzalez raised an index finger. “I said I don’t care what the brass says. There’s a difference. Just because I don’t care if the flashy cases are given to people like Robbins, doesn’t mean I want to have to listen to everybody in the department bust my chops for talking to you.”

The bartender, more engrossed in the Cubs game on TV than anything else, slowly poured a couple of beers from the tap and set them in front of the two men. Brandon took a drink, making an effort not to wince. He wasn’t much of a beer drinker. He took a small notebook and pen from his inside jacket pocket and turned to face Gonzalez. “What did you mean by, ‘people like Robbins?’”

“Oh no,” said the cop. “You’re not pulling me down that road.”

“Hey, hey, what road?” Brandon kept his voice light, amused, but he still pushed. “What do you mean, Henry? I’m just curious what you meant.”

Gonzalez sat in silence for a long moment, his eyes on the game. When he finally spoke again, it was in a quiet voice guaranteed not to carry to anyone hoping to listen in. “People more interested in drinks with the brass after hours than doing their job, people too arrogant to know when they’re in over their heads.”

Brandon edged closer, keeping his voice low and his gaze on the TV. “So no calling in the FBI?”

Gonzalez gave a slight shake of his head.

“Back to drugs and gangs?”

This time, a nod.

“I thought they were past that. I mean, this town knows what drug and gang violence looks like, and this... This is nothing like it. What the hell are they thinking?”

“They’re thinking the last body to turn up belonged to a girl who was a hooker and a mule for a guy in Johnny Watanabe’s organization. And you know the jones Commissioner Rifkin has for Watanabe.”

“Rifkin’s wanted Watanabe behind bars since before he was commissioner.”

“And if Robbins can tie Watanabe to these killings, or someone in Watanabe’s organization who might tell tales on Watanabe...” Gonzalez finished with an indistinct motion of his hand.

“You and I both know this isn’t gang-related. This is a serial killer. Robbins could put Watanabe and his whole organization behind bars, and it wouldn’t stop these killings.”

“Look, kid.” Gonzalez sighed, finishing his beer in one long drink. “Everybody’s pretty high-strung right now. You keep poking them with a stick, they’re going to circle the wagons. Rifkin’s already been complaining to your editor.”

Brandon laughed. “That’s like getting a gold star on my report card.”

Gonzalez gave him a quick grin. “You know, they got beat cops out all over the waterfront with mug shots of Watanabe’s people, asking every hooker, homeless person and runaway about gang activity, drug activity. Not even asking anyone if they’ve seen anyone else...anything out of place. It’s all Watanabe, all the time.” There was a hint of something in the older cop’s voice, a hint of a suggestion.

Brandon thought for a moment. “People like that don’t volunteer much information to cops, especially information the cops aren’t even looking for.”

Gonzalez turned to him and gave him a significant look. In a louder voice, he said, “Next time spring for some buffalo wings too, cheapskate.” He rose from his stool and with a hard clap on Brandon’s back, ambled out of the bar.

Brandon watched him go with a deliberately sour look on his face.

The bartender approached and pointed at Brandon’s barely touched beer. “You’re not drinking the rest of that, are you?”

Brandon shook his head. “Uh, no.” He rose, pulling money out of his pocket to leave a tip.

The bartender nodded slowly. “Sissy boy. Stick to lattes, why don’t you.”

Brandon froze, incredulous.
I hate this bar
.

* * * *

Jessie looked at her watch. Eleven o’clock, plenty early. She’d left her car at the hotel and walked across town to the waterfront. She wore jeans, a black t-shirt, boots and a lightweight black canvas jacket. Keys in her pocket, she didn’t need a purse, and no need for any hidden weapons, either. Wearing the jacket was more of a habit than a necessity and, besides, in a place like the waterfront, the less skin she showed, the less attention she attracted. She hoped.

The warm summer air caressed her face and the back of her neck and riffled her ponytail. Smells came to her on the wind, of food from bars and restaurants, alcohol and the tang of pot smoke, as well as sweat, blood and urine, and general mortal funk. Added to that was the fetid, dirty, polluted water of this bend in the river, industrial stench and decay. Would she be able to find some place to buy some flowers to make up for this overload of stink?

As Jessie reached an intersection, she checked out the street signs, pulling the small notebook from her jacket pocket where she’d made notes on the murders, another block to the site where the latest body had been found. She waited for the light to change then crossed the street.

It turned out to be a long block, not to mention a fine example of urban blight. The few streetlights that were intact were intermittent. Trash littered the street. Curiously, though, no one slept on the dilapidated benches or in the boarded-up doorways. In a place like this she would have expected to see that, but then she realized all the street people were probably congregating somewhere brighter, somewhere safer.

Yellow police tape flapped like streamers in the breeze, leading to an alley between two abandoned buildings. She approached slowly, senses alert, finding no one, mortal or otherwise, nearby. Jessie entered the alley, taking note of the dried blood still staining the concrete ground and splashed on the nearby dumpster. In this part of town, she figured nobody was too concerned about cleaning up. White chalk outlined where the pieces were found, spreading to halfway up the alley. The stench of death still covered the area like a heavy blanket. She walked around to take a closer look, careful where she stepped. She didn’t want to bring too much of this smell with her.

Jessie remembered details from the police report and newspaper coverage of this one: a young female, known to have worked as a prostitute and a drug mule. The newspaper article seemed to suggest she’d been a runaway. The police had a street name for the girl, but no other ID yet, some silly thing like Lynx or Minx. Nobody on the street admitted to knowing her real name. She was just another shadow in the night, insubstantial, evanescent, like a wisp of smoke curling in the air and melting away.

She shook her head, trying to snap out of her reverie, kneeling to get a better look at the chalk outlines and the blood spatter. Somebody had thrown themselves a real party here. Her stomach clenched. The alley desperately needed a good rain to wash away the reminders.

Eager to leave the scene behind, she rose and headed back to the sidewalk. Jessie had a roll of bills in one pocket. Spreading them around would be the easiest way to get information. Would the king see the humor in her sending him an itemized expense report? She left the area in search of some of those brighter, safer places, to find people to talk to.

* * * *

“Did you guys know her real well?” Brandon asked.

The boy shrugged, cramming his cheeseburger into his mouth as hard as he could.

The girl took a drink of soda and answered, “Not real well. You know how it is.”

They were seated at a table in the back of a fast food restaurant. Brandon had finally found two kids willing to talk about Minx, the latest victim in the Waterfront Murders case, but only if he fed them. It was money well spent, in more ways than one. These two kids, neither one of whom wanted to give him their name, lived on the streets. Both had the too-lean, slightly feral look of having been on the streets too long already, even though both were clearly underage. Brandon knew they could get at least one fairly decent meal a day down at the Joshua Mission, but one good meal a day was not enough, especially for kids.

The boy polished off the cheeseburger and started in on his mega-sized order of French fries. Keeping up a continual sweep of their surroundings, he rarely looked at Brandon directly. He said softly around a mouthful of fries, “You know who she worked for, right?”

Brandon’s muscles tensed and he tried to keep his face bland. “Uh, yeah. One of Johnny Watanabe’s guys.”

The girl leaned across the table, the dark roots of her self-dyed red hair marking a large swath over the middle of her head. “She worked for Nico. You know who that is?”

Brandon nodded, and she continued.

“I heard Nico was real torn up. He’s not mean like some of Johnny’s crew. He’s okay, you know?”

“So you don’t think he had anything to do with this?”

She shook her head. “He put the word out, he wants whoever did Minx, and he’ll pay for information.”

“When did he do that?”

She shrugged. “I heard it today at the mission.”

“Did you guys have anything to tell him?” He kept his voice neutral. He didn’t want them to think he’d be mad if they admitted to scamming him for a meal.

The kids stayed silent, neither of them looking at him. He’d pegged it right. He looked from one to the other, at their ragged, ill-fitting clothes, the fear below their surface of toughness. This is no way to grow up, he thought. “I gotta get going,” he said. He handed a bill to the girl. “Why don’t you guys get a couple of shakes or something?”

She took the money without looking at it. “Are you gonna talk to Nico?”

It was Brandon’s turn to shrug. “Do you think he’d talk to me?”

The boy snorted but said nothing.

The girl said, “I hope Nico gets them. She was sweet, you know? I liked her. Everybody did.”

Brandon didn’t know what to say, so he just nodded. “You guys got a safe place to crash until this is over?”

“Yeah,” she said. “We’re cool.”

He bade them good night and left, out of sorts. He thought of his own bland middle class suburban upbringing, comparing it to some of the things he saw covering crime for the
Post
. He saw so much ugliness, but nothing as ugly as what kids like those two lived through every single day.

He paused at an intersection, trying to decide what to do next. He wasn’t sure exactly how to find Nico, but he did know where to find someone else who might have some information, or at least some insight. He thought for a moment about the safest route to the Joshua Mission, and headed in that direction.

* * * *

“What did you say your name was?”

“Lisa,” she answered, the name bubbling up from somewhere in her memory. She’d given a different name at the hotel. “Lisa Taylor.”

“And you’re a reporter?”

Jessie nodded.

“I don’t know how much help I can be. I already told the police everything I knew about her, not that it was much.”

His name was William Kirkbride,
Reverend
William Kirkbride, though he certainly didn’t look like a minister. He looked more like the Marine Corps veteran he was, tall, good-looking in a severe sort of way in his mid-thirties with short dark hair and intense blue eyes. He held himself with an attitude she recognized instantly as military and spoke to her with a professional courtesy. She convinced him to talk to her by asking first about the shelter he ran. When she brought up the murders, he became instantly guarded. Not suspicious, exactly, but careful.

“Reverend Kirkbride, I’ve done stories on homeless kids before, on what their lives are like when they’re forced to live on the streets. By shining a light on this, on the help these kids need, on the work you’re trying to do, I may be able to help you.” She knew it was reporter BS, and he would recognize it as such, but there was also some truth there, or would be, if she were actually a reporter.

They were standing in the kitchen in the back of the shelter. He rinsed off several pots and pans before placing them in the industrial dishwasher. He seemed to be considering how much to cooperate with her. Finally, after he started the dishwasher, he spoke.

“She never told me her real name. The kids rarely do. I did get a state out of her—Ohio. She wouldn’t talk about her family. I know she worked for a pimp and a drug dealer named Nico and she would share with younger girls, a little cash, food, clothes. Whatever.” He paused, and she could see his thoughts turn inward.

Knowing she had to ask this, because a reporter would ask the question, she said, “Do you think her pimp killed her?”

His eyes flashed to her face briefly, then looked away. “There are worse monsters out there than pimps.”

If you only knew
. “Do you think her murder was related to the other killings?”

He faced her again. The intensity in his blue eyes might have scared her, if she were mortal.

Kirkbride spoke with a strangely flat tone. “Yes, I do, but I don’t think the cops will catch who did it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some more work to do.”

Jessie suddenly got the feeling it might not be a good idea to press the issue with this man. He might decide to ask her questions—the entirely wrong sorts of questions. With a nod she said, “Thank you for your time.”

She showed herself out of the kitchen, walking through the front of the shelter where two- or three-dozen kids gathered, some sleeping or sitting around talking with others. There was enough of a hum of noise she would not have been able to hear a child in a cot against the far wall crying, were it not for her unnatural senses. As Jessie reached the door, she looked around, her stomach tightening. She decided she would tell the king about this place. He had plenty of wealth to spread.

She left, grateful to be back out in the night.

* * * *

Mickey knew he needed to hide. He felt it, like tiny fingers scratching at the edge of his senses. He needed to get in out of the night, out of the dark, out of the buffet, because he knew what the night really was, an all-you-can-eat buffet for predators. Someone like him, small and weak with a limp in one leg, would make a pretty easy meal for someone, or something. He’d heard the talk, gangs and drugs and all that gangster movie stuff, but it wasn’t real. It was just talk, like the sodium arc of a streetlight letting people pretend they were safe. The false light should be enough to keep the monsters at bay, but it wasn’t. The monsters knew what they were doing, knew how to slither through the spaces of darkness between the false light. It would hardly be any trouble at all at for them to reach out and snatch him as he left the nimbus of one false light on his way to the next. Mickey knew that. Mickey saw things as he hid in the night, peering out from his safe places and watching the hunt. That’s what the monsters did, hunt. Oh, some knew the truth. Mickey wasn’t the only one. Like the others, he kept his mouth shut. The ones who told themselves stories about the false light of gangsters, trying to keep the night monsters at bay, didn’t want to hear the truth. Mickey didn’t tell anyone what he’d seen. He kept to himself and went about his business.