Stay Close (10 page)

“I try not to brag,” Broome said. “What’s going on here, Harry?”

“She’s nearby. She wants to talk to you. But before she does, there are a few ground rules.”

Broome spread his arms. “I’m listening.”

“First of all, this is all off the record.”

“Off the record? What, you think I’m a reporter, Harry?”

“No, I think you’re a good and somewhat desperate cop. Off the record meaning just that. You don’t take notes. You don’t put this in the file. As far as anyone knows, you never talked to her.”

Broome considered that. “And if I say no?”

Harry Sutton stood and reached out his hand. “Good to see you again, Detective. Have a nice day.”

“Okay, okay, no need for theatrics.”

“No need,” Harry said with a bright smile, “but why not throw them in if I can?”

“So it’s off the record. Bring her in.”

“A few more rules first.”

Broome waited.

“Today is a one-time exclusive. Cassie will talk to you in my office. She will answer your questions to the best of her ability in my presence. Then she will vanish again. You will let her. You won’t try to learn her new name or identity—and more important, you won’t try to find her after this meeting.”

“And you’re going to just trust me on that?”

“Yes.”

“I see,” Broome said. He shifted in the chair. “Suppose I think she’s guilty of a crime.”

“You won’t.”

“But suppose.”

“Tough. When she’s done talking to you, she goes home. You don’t see her again.”

“And suppose, after I investigate some more, I stumble across something new I need to ask her about.”

“Same answer: Tough.”

“I can’t come to you?”

“You can. And if I can help, I will. But she makes no commitment to do so.”

Broome could argue, but he had no leverage here. He was also a one-in-the-hand, don’t-look-a-gift-horse-in-the-mouth kind of guy. Yesterday he didn’t have the slightest clue where Cassie was. Now, unless he pissed off her or Harry, he could talk to her.

“Okay,” Broome said, “I agree to all your rules.”

“Marvelous.” Harry Sutton picked up his cell phone and said, “Cassie? It’s okay. Come on in now.”

D
EPUTY
C
HIEF
G
OLDBERG JUST DIDN
’
T
give a damn anymore.

He was a year from retirement with full pension, and it wasn’t enough. Not even close. Atlantic City might be a cesspool, but it was a costly one. He had alimony payments up the wazoo. His current love interest, Melinda, a twenty-eight-year-old porn star (they were always porn “stars,” Goldberg noticed, never just “actresses” or, as in Melinda’s case, “the lesser girl in the three-way”), was sucking him dry (and he meant that in two ways, snicker). But, man, was she worth it.

Yep, slice it any way you want, but in the end Goldberg was a cop on the take.

Normally he could justify it easily enough. Bad guys are like one of those mythological beasts where you cut off one bad guy, two
more just pop up in its place. Or, better the devil you know—the one you can somewhat control and who won’t knock off real citizens and who will give you some dough—than the devil you don’t. Or, removing the sleaze from this city was like emptying an ocean with a tablespoon. Whatever, Goldberg had a million of them.

But in this circumstance, justification was even easier: The guy slipping him the Ben Franklins seemed, at least on the surface, to be on the same side as the angels.

So why was Goldberg hesitating?

He dialed the number. It was picked up on the third ring.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Goldberg!”

Reason one for his hesitation: The guy’s voice gave him the heebie-jeebies. The man—he sounded really young—was unfailingly polite and spoke in exclamation points, as though he were trying out for an old-time musical. The sound chilled Goldberg. But there was more to it than that.

There were the rumors about this guy. There were stories of violence and depravity done by this guy and his partner, the kind of stories that make grown men—big, tough, world-weary, seen-it-all men like Goldberg—stay up at night, pulling the covers just a wee bit higher.

“Yeah,” Goldberg said. “Hi.”

Even if the rumors were exaggerated, even if a quarter of the whispers were true, Goldberg had gotten in on something he wanted no part of. Still, the best course of action would be to take the money and shut up. In a sense, what choice did he have? If he tried to back out now or return the money, he might anger that voice on the other end of the phone.

The voice said, “What can I do for you, Mr. Goldberg?”

In the background, Goldberg heard a noise that was making his blood freeze.

“What the hell is that?” he asked.

“Oh, nothing to worry about, Mr. Goldberg. What did you want to tell me?”

“I might have another lead.”

“Might?”

“I’m not sure, that’s all.”

“Mr. Goldberg?”

“Yes?”

What the hell was that sound in the background?

“Please tell me what you know.”

He had already leaked them whatever he could on the disappearance of Carlton Flynn. Why not? He and his partner were interested in finding the missing guy too, and the pay was pretty damn sweet.

The last thing Goldberg had leaked was what he learned from Broome: Carlton Flynn had a stripper girlfriend who worked at La Crème.

There was whimpering in the background.

“Do you have a dog?” Goldberg asked.

“No, Mr. Goldberg, I don’t. Oh, but I had the best dog when I was a kid! Her name was Ginger Snaps. Cute, right?”

Goldberg said nothing.

“You seem reluctant, Mr. Goldberg.”

“It’s Deputy Chief Goldberg.”

“Would you like to meet in person, Deputy Chief Goldberg? We can discuss this issue at your house, if you’d like.”

Goldberg’s heart stopped beating. “No, that’s okay.”

“So what can you tell me, Deputy Chief Goldberg?”

The dog was still whimpering. But now Goldberg thought that maybe he heard another sound too, another whimpering maybe, or something worse, underneath the first—a terrible, pain-stricken noise so nonhuman that paradoxically it could only come from another human being.

“Deputy Chief Goldberg?”

He swallowed and dived in. “There’s this lawyer named Harry Sutton.…”

T
HE DOOR TO
H
ARRY
S
UTTON
’
S
office opened, and Cassie walked in.

She looked pretty much the same.

That was the first thought that hit Broome. In those days, Broome had even known her a little, seen her at the club, and so he remembered her. She’d changed her hair color over the years—she’d been more platinum blond, if he recalled correctly—but that was about it.

Some might wonder, if she hadn’t changed very much, why Broome hadn’t been able to find her in the past seventeen years. The truth was, disappearing is not as hard as you might think. Back in those days, Rudy didn’t have even her real name. Broome had eventually found it. Maygin Reilly. But that was where it ended. She had gotten a new ID, and while she was something of a person of interest, it hardly warranted a nationwide APB or its own episode of
Most Wanted
.

The other change was that she looked wealthier and more—for a lack of a better term—normal. You could dress a stripper down, but you could always see the stripper. Same with the gambler, the drinker, heck, the cop. Cassie looked like a classic suburban mom.
A fun one maybe. The one who gave as good as she got, who flirted when the mood struck, who leaned a little too close when she had a few drinks at the block party. But a suburban mom just the same.

She sat next to him and turned and met his eye.

“Good to see you again, Detective.”

“Same, I guess. I’ve been looking for you, Cassie.”

“So I gathered.”

“Seventeen years.”

“Almost like Valjean and Javert,” she said.

“Like in
Les
Misérables
.”

“You’ve read Hugo?”

“Nah,” Broome said, “my ex dragged me to the musical.”

“I don’t know where Stewart Green is,” she said.

Cool, Broome thought. She was skipping the preliminaries. “You realize, of course, that you vanished at the same time he did?”

“Yes.”

“When you both vanished, you two were seeing each other, right?”

“No.”

Broome spread his arms. “That’s what I was told.”

She gave him a half-smile, and Broome saw the sexy girl from years ago emerge. “How long have you lived in Atlantic City, Detective?”

He nodded, knowing where she was going with this. “Forty years.”

“You know the life. I wasn’t a prostitute. I was working the clubs, and I had fun doing it. So, yes, for a while Stewart Green was part of that fun. A small part. But he eventually destroyed it.”

“The fun?”

“Everything,” she said. Her mouth tightened. “Stewart Green was a psychopath. He stalked me. He beat me. He threatened to kill me.”

“Why?”

“What part of the word ‘psychopath’ confused you?”

“So you’re a psychiatrist now, Cassie?”

She gave him the half-smile again. “You don’t need to be a psychiatrist to know a psychopath,” she began, “any more than you need to be a cop to know a killer.”

“Touché,” Broome said. “But if Stewart Green was that crazy, well, he managed to fool a lot of people.”

“We are all different things to different people.”

Broome frowned. “That’s a tad trite, don’t you think?”

“It is.” She thought about it. “I once heard this guy give a friend some advice about dating a girl who appeared really normal but, well, underneath it all, she was tightly wound. You know the type?”

“I do.”

“So the guy warned his buddy, ‘You don’t want to open that big ol’ can of crazy.’”

Broome liked that. “And that’s what you did with Stewart?”

“Like I said, he seemed pretty cool at first. But he became obsessed. Some men do, I guess. I’d always managed to joke my way out of it. But not with him. Look, I read all the articles after he vanished about what a great family guy he was, the loving wife he nursed through cancer, the young kids. And working where I was, I had seen it all. I didn’t judge the married men who came in to blow off a little steam or look for… whatever. Three-quarters of the guys in the club were married. I don’t even think they’re hypocrites—a man can love his wife and still want some side action, can’t he?”

Broome shrugged. “I guess he can.”

“But Stewart Green wasn’t like that. He was violent. He was crazy. I just didn’t know how much.”

Broome crossed his legs. What she was telling him about the beating and violence—it sounded a lot like Tawny’s description of Carlton Flynn. Another connection maybe?

“So what happened?” he asked.

For the first time, Cassie looked uneasy. She glanced over at Harry Sutton. Harry had his hands resting on his belly, his fingers interlocked. He gave her a nod. She looked down at her hands.

“Do you know the old iron-ore ruins by Wharton?”

Broome did. It was maybe eight, ten miles from Atlantic City—the start of the Pine Barrens.

“I used to go there sometimes. After work or whenever I needed just to unwind.”

Unwind
, Broome thought, managing to keep his face blank. A lie. Her first? He couldn’t be sure. He was about to follow up with the obvious question: Why were you
really
there? But for now he left it alone.

“So one night—well, my last night in this town—I was up in the park by the ruins. I was pretty distracted, I guess. Stewart was getting out of control, and I really didn’t know how to handle it. I had tried everything to get him to back off.”

Broome asked her the same question he had asked Tawny. “Didn’t you have a boyfriend or anything?”

Something crossed her face. “No.”

Another lie?

“Someone you could go to for help? How about Rudy or a friend at the club?”

“Look, that wasn’t the way we worked. Or I worked. I took care
of myself. People might suspect I was in over my head, but I was a big girl. I could handle it.”

She looked down.