Butchers Hill (26 page)

But Jackie wanted her. She was—did
Tess dare say it, say it out loud, whisper it here on the
water—family. There would be time enough to deal with how
this fact made her feel. For now, the important thing was finding
Jackie's daughter. Poppa's daughter. A
thirteen-year-old timebomb sitting out there somewhere, ready to
detonate with a blast that could destroy her family. Tess had to find
her, if only to protect everyone else from the fallout.

Maybe that's what Jonathan Ross
was trying to tell her. Maybe he simply wanted her to go ahead and
become a real grownup, seeing as he wasn't going to get the
chance.

A medium-sized media clot was outside
Tess's office when she arrived that morning. Fucking Jackie.
She had sold her out, gone public with her daughter's
paternity, decided to destroy the whole family.

"Have you spoken to your client
today, Miss Monaghan?" asked a breathless young brunette.

"My dealings with clients are
confidential," she snapped, unlocking the door and jerking on
Esskay's chain. Although the greyhound had already received
more than her share of media attention, she was always eager for
additional exposure. She faced the cameras delightedly and opened her
mouth as if ready to issue a statement.

"But Luther Beale is your client,
isn't he?" a man's voice called after
her. The pack stayed on the sidewalk, savvy enough not to trespass.

"Luther Beale?"

"The Butcher of Butchers Hill, now
a suspect in the deaths of two twins."

"Two twins? As opposed to three
triplets or four quadruplets?" Tess was smiling, and not just
because of the reporter's redundancy.
Luther
Beale
. Thank God. She had forgotten most of the
tele-weenies were so new to Baltimore that few of them knew there had
ever been a Weinstein's drugstore chain. The only way her
grandfather could make news today was if he fathered
Madonna's baby.

"Again, that information is
confidential," Tess called back. "I'm
sure you can appreciate that. After all, you wouldn't want me
to tell you if the spouse of one of your general managers had hired a
private investigator to find out why he's spending so much
time cruising prostitutes. Word is, he's been tooling along
Patterson Park every night. And it's not even sweeps
month."

"Are you
saying—?"

Tess walked back to the door, mindful that
she might be able to get some free publicity out of this.
"I'm saying Keyes Investigations is a discreet
firm, where all clients are assured of absolute confidentiality. As
I'm just an associate here, it's impolitic for me
to speak for the firm in any event. I do know Tyner Gray is
representing Mr. Beale. As for any questions about the agency, you
should probably call the owner, Edward Keyes."

"How do we get in touch with
either of them?"

"Well, as seasoned investigative
reporters, you probably have your own methods. Me, I'd try
the phone book." Tess smiled and waved at the cameras, while
Esskay poked her nose around the door, wagging her tail in best
"Hi, Ma!" fashion. They probably wouldn't
make the news—it would have been a much better shot if Tess
had ducked her head and run past them. But if they did use the sound
bite, viewers would know that Keyes Investigations was scrupulously
tight-lipped, pathologically smart-assed, and equipped with a
remarkably friendly watchdog.

Tess tried Jackie's pager number
and got the voice mail. "I'm in," she
told the empty air. "I don't know how I'm
going to help you, but I am going to try. But it's a new
deal, a new contract, according to my specifications." She
then dialed her Uncle Donald's number. Another machine.
Underemployed as he was, Uncle Donald made it a point to never answer
his phone and to carry a clipboard with him as he roamed the halls,
from coffee pot to men's room and back again. It was more
important to look busy than be busy, as he had once explained to his
niece.

"Favor time," she told
the machine. "A big one." Uncle Donald would
understand she was going to ask him to do something that was,
technically, illegal. He just wouldn't know it involved his
own father. That was her new deal. Instead of charging Jackie a fee for
her services, all Tess wanted was the guarantee of her silence. Once
the girl was found, Jackie had to get out of her life forever.

Esskay's ears, more sensitive than
hers, suddenly stood straight up. Tess heard it, too, a creaking sound
from the bathroom. Nothing unusual there. The old building often sighed
and moaned as it settled. But this sound was unlike any she had heard
before. Quietly, she slid her gun out of her knapsack. Perhaps her
burglar had come back. Just as quietly, she started to slide her gun
back into her knapsack. What if the burglar were bigger than she, or
better-armed? The gun might provoke him to shoot when he had no
intention of doing so. People burgled because they disliked
confrontation. Otherwise, they'd be robbers.

She took a dog biscuit out of the cookie jar
on her desk and threw it down the hall, just past the bathroom door.
Esskay took off, sounding suitably ferocious. She heard a muffled,
involuntary cry, the sound of something falling in water, the whine of
a window opening too quickly.

A brown topsider was floating in the toilet
and a pair of khaki-clad legs was about to disappear through the window
when Tess caught her intruder by his sodden ankles. He twisted and
fought in her grip, but succeeded only in bumping his head, first on
the window sash and then on the old-fashioned bathtub. The second hit
gave Tess the opportunity she needed to grab his backpack, which she
used to flip him over and straddle him.

"Am I bleeding?" Sal
Hawkings asked.

T
here
was, in fact, quite a bit of blood on Sal Hawkings, which made Tess
nervous. What if she had knocked out a tooth or two in the mouth of
Maryland's best extemporaneous speaker? But the blood came
from a gash on his forehead and although there was a lot of it, the
wound was superficial. She gave him a wad of paper towels to stem the
flow, but it was too late to save his white shirt and navy blazer.

"Shouldn't you wash
it?" he asked worriedly. "That bathroom floor was
pretty dirty. I could get an infection."

"What do I look like, the school
nurse?"

"No, she's fat, wears
bright red lipstick, and spends most of her time smoking on the loading
dock behind the dining hall."

Very charming
.
Or would be if Tess was amenable to being charmed just now. She folded
up another wad of paper towels and passed it to Sal.

"I could take you to a hospital
emergency room if you like. After I call the police, of course, and
Penfield. You're AWOL, I assume?"

"Why would you drop the dime on
me?" Must be hard, keeping up with the current slang while
ensconced at Penfield. Tess wondered if Sal tried to impress his
well-heeled classmates by playing the part of the savvy street kid. If
so, he really ought to be a little more current.
Drop
the dime
. She figured if she knew a term, it was
long out of date.

"You broke into my office, second
time in a week that's happened. Someone was in here over the
weekend, too. Maybe it was you."

"I didn't even know you
existed until you came to my school Tuesday morning."

"Chase Pearson knew who I was,
though. I wonder—is it possible he started working on my
little dossier before I called him? He pulled together quite a bit of
information in a short time."

"You'd have to ask
him."

"Perhaps I will. But for now,
you're here and he's not."
Sal's knapsack was sitting on her desk, a much nicer, newer
version of the one she carried. Its leather wasn't as scarred
or stained. She pulled it into her lap and undid the shiny brass buckle.

"That's illegal search
and seizure."

"Only if you're a
cop." Tess pulled out a notebook, two pens, a small leather
case that carried a set of screwdrivers, and an old, thick book bound
in faded green cloth. The letters on the spine had almost been rubbed
off over the years.
The Kipling Compendium
,
the book Sal had been reading in the library.

"What are the screwdrivers for?
Just burglary, or boosting cars, too?"

Sal scowled. "I take wood shop.
The screwdrivers were a gift from Mr. Pearson. Besides, I told you, I
wasn't here this weekend. You can check with Penfield if you
don't believe me."

"You definitely were here this
morning." Tess gestured to his soggy topsider, dark with
water, drying in a patch of sun on the windowsill. "Quite a
little Cinderella act."

"I wasn't breaking in
exactly."

"No, you appeared to be breaking
out
.
Which raises the question of how you got in to begin with. I
didn't go to Penfield, but I think that follows logically.
What goes out must have come in."

Maryland's best extemporaneous
speaker, middle school division, was briefly silent. Tess picked up the
telephone and dialed 311. Busy, of course, so she faked getting a
connection. "Eastern District—I have a burglary
I'd like to report on—"

Sal reached over and depressed the
disconnect button. "Mr. Pearson came to school the day before
yesterday and told me they were going to take Luther Beale
in."

Going
to take—Chase Pearson had good sources. He had known about
Beale's arrest before it happened. Tess said nothing, just
put the phone back in the receiver and waited, hoping Sal would keep
talking if she didn't.

"I know Beale hired you to find
all of us. You found me. You found Treasure. You couldn't
find Destiny because Beale had already killed her."

"That hasn't been
established, Sal. Far from it."

"Sure." He gave her a
superior look, as if she were hopelessly naive. It was strange to be on
the receiving end of a look like that from a seventeen-year-old kid,
but Sal almost carried it off.

"What do you want, Sal?"

Here came the charm again—the
bright eyes, the eager smile. "I was wondering if you know
where Eldon is. Of all us who lived at the Nelsons', we were
the closest. I mean, everybody was close, living in a three-bedroom
house like that, but Eldon was my special buddy, you know. We were
tight. I wrote him letters for a while, after they split us up, but he
never wrote back. Eldon wasn't much for writing."

Sal Hawkings looked so rueful that Tess
almost felt sorry for him. After all, she knew what it was like to have
a best friend who didn't write. Whitney was given to
beautiful gifts and the occasional hour-long phone call out of the
blue, but she wouldn't sit down and compose a letter with a
gun pointed at her bright blond head. The written lines of
communication between Bond Street and Tokyo had been decidedly one way.

"Eldon's trail is pretty
cold," she said. "According to records,
he's wanted on a bench warrant because he failed to show up
for a hearing. That was about seven months ago. My guess is he left the
state. He's probably taking great care not to be
found."

"Eldon's only seventeen,
two months younger'n me. How'd he end up in the
adult system?"

"I guess he was so precocious they
skipped him ahead."

Sal Hawkings wasn't amused.
"Hey, Eldon's good people. If he ran,
it's probably because he didn't even do it, but
doesn't know how to get anyone to believe him. He just
doesn't know there's any other life, okay?
He's just trying to get by."

"You learned there was another
life, though. Think about it, Sal. Five kids living in the
Nelsons' house on Fayette Street. One was shot. One took
drugs, one turned tricks, and now one is a felon on the run. You got
out because Chase Pearson helped you, but Pearson wouldn't
have helped you if you hadn't started winning all those
public speaking awards. What made you different, Sal? What separated
you from the others?"

Sal scowled, folding his arms tight across
his chest as if to keep Tess from peering into his heart, his soul.
"Now you sound like the psychologist at Penfield. Everyone
always poking at me, wanting to know why, why, why. Some dude from the
University of Maryland even wanted to write a paper on me.
‘Sal H. A Success Story in Spite of the
Odds.'"

"Did he?"

"Hell, no. Mr. Pearson said he
wasn't going let them turn me into some damn syndrome.
I'm just a kid, just myself, you know. You can't
take me apart and find the answer to all the world's
problems. They made me feel like some freak." Sal put on a
Massachusetts accent, in apparent mimickry of someone, and stroked his
chin. Was he playing the social worker, the psychologist, or just some
generic busybody? "My God—a black male who thinks!
Who wishes to better himself! What could it possibly mean?"

"They meant well," Tess
said, somewhat defensively. After all, she had been asking the same
thing in a slightly different fashion. "If they can figure
out why you succeeded, maybe they can help other kids."

"Sure." He gave her the
superior look again. "Maybe I succeeded because I'm
special. Isn't that an option?"

"Oh you're very special.
Public speaker, star student, and a little burglar in training, hanging
halfway out my bathroom window."

"I told you. I wanted to know
where Eldon was."

"Yes, but did you come down here
to ask me, or to search my office for that information? If you really
wanted to see me, you could have made an appointment."

"I don't think Mr.
Pearson would let me see you."

"Probably not. How did you get
away from Penfield, anyway?"

"We had a field trip to the
National Aquarium and the Columbus Center this morning. I grabbed a cab
and came over here. When I saw all those reporter types out front, I
decided to go around the alley way."