Butchers Hill (34 page)

Another tight little nod from Herr Doktor.

"He's not going to let
it go," Jackie said. "He's going to find
a way to get back at me, if only because he's
humiliated."

"No, he's
not," Judith said emphatically. "After all, you
have an alibi. You were never here."

"Oh yeah? Where was I?"

"Across town, at a crab feast with
twenty other people."

Tess looked at her mother. She had always
thought her ability to lie, to think on her feet, must come down on
Patrick's side, but maybe it was a Weinstein trait as well.

"I don't get
it," Jackie said. "Who would do that for
me?"

"Your daughter's
family," Tess said.

Judith drove Tess's car back to
the Monaghans', while Tess piloted Jackie in her white Lexus
for the second time that day.

"You shouldn't have
stolen my gun," she chided, once they were alone.

"Next time, don't leave
it untended," Jackie said, not at all repentant.

"You scared me to death. I thought
you were going to kill yourself, or them."

"Why would I destroy my life like
that after all the work I put into recreating it? I wanted to hurt
them, and money was the way to do that. Probably the only way with
people like them." Jackie laughed, pleased with herself. For
the next mile or two, they didn't say anything, but it was a
comfortable silence. The kind of silence that friends can endure.

When Jackie spoke again, her voice was soft
and tentative. "I was hurt and I wanted to hurt someone else.
You know, I started off by wanting to hurt you."

"Hurt
me
?"

"Why do you think I hired you in
the first place? I wanted to get back at you for being the girl on the
other side of the soda fountain, the one who had the real childhood,
while I had to work my way through high school, then college."

"Poppa meant to pay for your
tuition. Gramma was the one who wouldn't let him."

"She knew?"

"So it seems."

"Poor woman."

"Poor woman? She forced Poppa to
renege on his promise to you."

"Well, how would you like to be
the woman whose husband comes home and says, ‘Remember that
eighteen-year-old girl I knocked up? I think we should send her to
college.'"

Jackie had a point. For all her anger, she
could always see the big picture, see things outside herself. Tess
should learn to do the same. She smiled. Truth be told, it cracked her
up, the image of Jackie sitting across from the Beckers at her little
extortion tea party, reeling off her facts and figures about the
welfare system. Only Jackie would make a revenge scheme so didactic.

"Hey, that stuff you said about
the economics of the system. Was that made up, or was it
true?"

"Oh, I may have been off on the
actual numbers, and everything's different since welfare
reform. But the proportions were right. People pay thousands to adopt
babies, welfare mothers get pennies to keep them."

"And the foster parents receive
bigger stipends than the mothers?"

"Oh yeah. But they also have to
meet higher standards than the welfare mothers—separate
bedrooms, stuff like that. Remember, that's why they took Sam
away from those folks. Why are you suddenly so interested?"

"Just doing some math in my
head."

C
hase
Pearson's office in Annapolis was far grander than Tess would
have expected. His was an insignificant job, after all, an appointed
position that would evaporate like the dew once the current governor
was gone. The special secretary for children and youth. But how foolish
of her, how naive. There were no insignificant jobs in the state
capital. No small parts, no small actors.

And no small crimes.

"Miss Monaghan," Pearson
said. She didn't even rate a flash of his bad teeth at this
point in their relationship. Whatever his future plans, he had
apparently decided he could get by without her vote. "I
thought I had made it clear that I did not wish to hear from you
again."

"You made it clear I'd
be arrested if I tried to go to Penfield, so I came to see you here.
That's okay. You can answer far more of my questions than Sal
ever could."

Pearson leaned back in his chair.
"Speak," he said, in a tone suitable for addressing
a dog, or a trained seal. Seeing as Tess was neither, she roamed his
office, inspecting the plaques that lined the wall, checking out
Pearson's view. It wasn't very good, just some
Annapolis rooftops, not even a sliver of the Chesapeake Bay.

"‘To Chase
Pearson,'" she read from one of the largest mounted
certificates. "‘In honor of his work for
Maryland's children.' Now was this award for your
current do-nothing job, or the one before, the do-nothing task force on
young men and violence?"

"I don't consider saving
the next generation a matter of insignificance."

"Neither do I, neither do
I," Tess assured him. "But don't you
think you accomplished more as a front-line social worker?"

"Beg pardon?"

"A social worker. That is how you
started, isn't it? I had a friend pull your resume this
morning from the
Beacon-Light
's
files, and there it was. Eighteen whole months in the trenches. Very
noble, in the Pearson tradition of community service, but your
generation really couldn't afford to be so civic-minded, I
gather. About five years ago, just before the mayor appointed you to
that task force. What was it that you did for DSS, exactly?"

"I was in the Social Services
Administration."

"Right, the division that oversees
foster care." Tess smiled at Pearson's discomfort.
"As it happens, I've recently had a crash course in
the various divisions at the state Department of Human Resources. I
know all the acronyms now. DHR, SSA, DSS, CAP, AFDC. This morning, I
even learned the wiggly words you guys use for abuse and neglect
investigations. ‘Indicated' and
‘Unsubstantiated.' I have to say, those are the
best CYA words I've ever heard, and I've heard a
lot in my time."

"CYA?"

"Cover Your Ass. The worker
can't be faulted either way, you see. Indicated or
unsubstantiated. If the child turns up dead, the worker isn't
held accountable."

Given that Pearson always looked vaguely
disdainful, it was hard to say that his expression was responding to
anything specific Tess had said. But a corner of his upper lip seemed
to lift slightly. "Such half-baked cynicism often tries to
pass as sophisticated policy analysis. Did you go to Baltimore City
schools, Miss Monaghan?"

"Yes, but I can still do math in
my head and pounce on the occasional dangling modifier. Or, in your
case, the dangling fact."

"Dangling fact?"

"Donnie Moore's mother,
Keisha, she would have been ‘indicated' for
neglect, right?"

"I wouldn't
know."

"That's funny, because
you knew exactly what I was talking about the night Keisha Moore was
killed. ‘She always did keep bad company.' That was
never part of the public record, how Keisha lost Donnie. But
Donnie's social worker would know all about the company
Keisha kept."

Pearson's chin moved. It
wasn't even a nod really, just a slight tilt of his chin, a
sign that he was still listening.

"You placed Donnie in the
Nelsons' home, didn't you? Donnie, Destiny and
Treasure, Eldon and Sal. Five kids in a three-bedroom house. Five kids
who never had nice clothes and looked as if they didn't get
enough to eat. Except Eldon. The Nelsons made at least twenty-five
hundred dollars a month on that arrangement, possibly more if any of
the children were classified as ‘special needs.'
Where did the money go, Mr. Pearson?"

"You'd have to ask the
Nelsons that question."

"Now see, this is where I get
confused. Because I'm pretty sure it was
your
job to ask the Nelsons that question. You were in charge of making sure
these children were cared for properly. You were one of those
reform-minded young workers recruited by the system after the lawsuit.
Why would you ignore the rules to put five kids in a run-down house in
a terrible neighborhood? What was in it for you?"

Pearson's desk was devoid of
props. His hands crept across its surface, looking for something to
occupy them, then retreated to his lap.

"The Nelsons were loving, caring
foster parents," he said. "Do you know how hard it
is to find young, vigorous foster parents still in their thirties? The
Nelsons believed they could provide a setting few foster parents could,
even if they didn't have much in the way of material things.
I believed in their vision."

"How much did they pay you for
that particular belief?"

Pearson was cooler than she thought he would
be, much harder to rattle. "You're dreaming up
conspiracy scenarios again, Miss Monaghan. It's an
interesting theory, I grant you. Social worker places children in home
in return for kickbacks. I can see how it might happen. In
theory."

"It's not that
complicated. A fourteen-year-old could figure it out. A
fourteen-year-old did figure it out. Sal Hawkings put the pieces
together and shook his old worker down until he arranged for a
scholarship to Penfield. Of course, you wouldn't pay for it
out of your own pocket. Even now, when you're making good
money, you're still kind of tight, aren't
you?"

She could hear Pearson's knee
knocking at the underside of his desk as he jiggled it. "Go
on," he said. "I want to see where you're
headed with this little story of yours."

"I'm going back to a
night five years ago. A boy is killed in front of his four friends.
It's a horrible thing, terrifying even for street-hardened
kids. But their social worker and their foster parents aren't
worried about the fallout from that trauma. All they care about is
splitting the kids up as quickly as possible, getting them in new homes
so the reporters won't have time to focus on how weird it is
for five foster kids to be living in some tiny little rowhouse in a
rotten neighborhood where they receive virtually no
supervision."

"The compromises made in order to
remove children from truly harmful environments are sometimes difficult
for laymen to understand," Pearson said. "You
can't imagine the conditions that these children had endured.
The Nelsons' home was paradise to them."

"Right."

"The twins had an addict for a
mother, you know. They lived in a basement without electricity or
plumbing. They were assigned to me when she almost burned the place
down with a candle. They were ecstatic to live in a three-bedroom house
with a toilet.

"Donnie—well, you know
what his mother did, how she left him alone for days while she went off
to Atlantic City. Then there was Eldon. His father caught him hitting a
dog with a stick and decided to administer the exact same punishment to
Eldon with the same stick. At least, that was the story
Eldon's father told the Foster Care Review Board when he
petitioned to get him back. My guess is he beat Eldon first, and Eldon
turned on the dog. You know, that's actually a good indicator
of violence in a family, violence against pets. As it happens, child
abuse laws in this country were derived from the old anticruelty
statutes. Until the late nineteenth century, there was no legal
prohibition against harming one's children."

Pearson's voice trailed off. He
had veered almost automatically into a bureaucratic set piece, the kind
of statement he might make before a Senate committee, then remembered
his audience. He stared out the window at his undistinguished view.

"What about Sal?"

"Sal?" He looked
genuinely confused, as if he couldn't place the name.
"Oh, Sal. He was different, a true orphan, which is rare now.
His parents were killed in a car accident when he was eight, and there
was no other family, no place for him to go. He was sent to one of our
best homes, run by a wonderful woman. A saint, an absolute saint. We
could have used a thousand like her. But she suffered a stroke when Sal
was eleven, and I had to find a new placement for him. He was the first
child I put with the Nelsons." He paused. "I always
liked Sal, you know. I would have helped him with Penfield under any
circumstances. I even gave him a book once, one of my childhood
favorites."

The Kipling, Sal's precious
Kipling.

"Did Sal ever tell you?"

"Tell me what?"

"What the children saw on Butchers
Hill the night Donnie was killed? Why they had to lie, never mention
the car, or the other gunshots?"

Pearson looked at her with something almost
like pity, except he didn't like her enough to truly feel
sorry for her. "Miss Monaghan, give it a rest. Yes, the
Nelsons and I had a mutually advantageous financial arrangement, not
that you'll ever be able to prove it. That doesn't
mean Luther Beale didn't kill Donnie Moore or the twins. Face
facts. A man who fires a gun at a group of children is capable of
anything."

"Why don't you call
Penfield and tell them we're headed there to talk to Sal?
Maybe if I threaten to send his benefactor away to prison,
Sal's memory will get a lot better."

"If I do this for you—if
I convince Sal to tell the truth, whatever it is, you'll
leave us alone?"

"Yes." Tess figured it
wasn't a binding promise. Chase Pearson's fate
could be decided later. "You can put him on the speaker
phone, if you like, right now, and I'll be out of your life
sooner rather than later."

Pearson reached for the phone and dialed.

"Chase Pearson. Would you find Sal
and ask him to speak to me? I know it's the last day of
classes, but it's terribly urgent."

Several minutes passed. Tess thought of
Jackie's shoe store analogy—the longer someone had
to look for something, the less chance there is they'll find
it. Finally, there was a torrent of mumbling on the other end, rushed
and high-pitched.