Jodi Compton - Sympathy Between Humans

“You make a hell of a case for it, Pribek,” Kilander said. “If it makes you feel any better, I believe you when you say something’s screwy out there. But even if you’re correct on every single point, I just don’t see a courtroom in this family’s future.”

That afternoon,my onetime partner John Vang called me. He was investigating a rape case, but the 16-year-old victim had been nearly monosyllabic in front of a male detective. Vang thought follow-up questioning by a female investigator would help. Was I available?

It took me nearly thirty minutes to break down the wall the girl showed to Vang. Later, I almost wished I hadn’t. Three assailants, all known to her, in an apartment-complex laundry room. Five separate assaults, three vaginal, two rectal. I left feeling numb in the bright sunlight of midafternoon.

My conversation with Kilander, too, still weighed on my mind. I knew he was right, but it was at times like these that the system truly baffled me. I wasn’t sure what anyone could have done differently, yet the world had pretty clearly failed Aidan. I knew there were plenty of child and family programs that put a great deal of money and time into their efforts to protect the young, but sometimes it seemed like rain falling directly onto the ocean, nothing getting where it needed to go.

My cell phone rang. I picked it up, one hand on the wheel.

“Detective Pribek? This is Lou Vignale at the First Precinct.”

“Hey, Lou,” I said. “What can I do for you?”

“I’ve got a girl here who says she’s one of your informants. Her name’s Ghislaine Morris.”

“Ghislaine?” It wasn’t a name that had been on my mind for a while. “Yeah, I know her. What’s the arrest for?”

Vignale hadn’t specifically said she’d been arrested, but I’d had a premonition. Nothing else that had happened today was wholesome or inspiring.

“Shoplifting,” Vignale said. “She was at Marshall Field’s, jamming stuff under the blankets in her baby stroller. But she says she’s helping you on something, and you’d want her released.”

“She said what ?” I ran my free hand through my hair. This, on top of everything else… Maybe Shiloh was right, and I shouldn’t even have kept her phone number.

“Ghislaine is confused, ” I said. “She is not helping me at the current time on anything.”

“She said you might say that,” Vignale said. “And she said to remind you about the guy in the Third Precinct. Some kind of doctor?”

I opened my mouth to speak and then closed it again, thinking, Oh, hell. Ghislaine was manipulative, but she wasn’t stupid. Now I had my work cut out for me.

“Field’s caught her in the store, right?” I asked. “So they got all the items back undamaged?”

“Right, but they want to press charges.”

That was fairly common procedure- department stores always like to discourage shoplifters- and trying to dissuade the manager from pressing charges probably wouldn’t be easy, but it would have to be done.

“I’ll be down to get Ghislaine as soon as I talk to the store manager,” I said. “Tell her to sit tight, okay?”

“Uh- huh, ” Vignale said. There was more than a little wry disapproval in his voice, but he said no more, except “I’ll tell her.”

Forty-fiveminutes later, I was waiting at a side door while Officer Vignale went back to retrieve Ghislaine.

The heavy door swung open and Ghislaine came out. Despite her everyday clothes- a T-shirt and cutoffs and bright plastic flats- she smelled of an only-for-evening scent; she’d been sampling at the perfume counter.

“Bye!” she said brightly to Vignale, who did not respond. Ghislaine turned to me. “Thanks for coming down so fast, Sarah.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said pleasantly. “Where’s Shadrick?” All Ghislaine had with her was a bag from Sam Goody.

“Oh,” she said. “My friend Flora lives near here. I got her to pick him up for me and take him home.”

“Did you take the bus down here?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“You need a ride home, then?”

Ghislaine gave me a slanted look. She sensed that my generosity was out of place, given the circumstances. “Really?” she asked.

“I’m going that way anyhow,” I lied.

“That’d be great,” she said, her good humor bubbling up again.

As we headed out of the station, she hefted the Sam Goody bag at her side, and said, “Don’t worry, this stuff’s legit.”

“I know,” I said. “Generally, shoplifters don’t bother to steal the bag.”

“Oh, listen to you,” she mocked, opening the car door to slide inside. “The stuff at Field’s was, like, chickenshit, not even a hundred dollars’ worth of stuff. Otherwise you wouldn’t have been able to fix it.”

We pulled out into the street and began to navigate the one-way interchanges of downtown Minneapolis. I headed toward Ghislaine’s neighborhood- Cicero’s, too- but I took us down several side streets, moving away from the city’s center and from streets on which the buses ran.

“This isn’t the fastest way to my place,” Ghislaine said, flipping down the sun visor to look for a mirror.

“I know,” I said. “I thought we could use an extra couple of minutes to talk.” I damped down the noise from the radio.

She glanced over at me. “About what?” she asked, shifting in her seat.

“We need to talk about what you told Officer Vignale, about you being my informant and helping me with the ‘doctor’ in the Third Precinct.”

“Well, that was true,” she said.

“Right. I asked you about him, you told me what you knew, I compensated you. That was the extent of your help. You’re not assisting me on an ongoing basis.”

Ghislaine looked ahead, as if the traffic were fascinating.

“So unless I’m mistaken, when you told Officer Vignale to ‘remind’ me of it, you were threatening to give up Cisco unless I came down and bailed you out.”

Mixed feelings flickered in her eyes; insecurity turned to a determination to counterattack. “Well, I just thought it was interesting,” Ghislaine said, her voice rising in imitation of harmless surmise, “that I never heard anything about him getting arrested. I was like, ‘I told Sarah about him, I wonder what happened.’ So I thought maybe I should tell someone else.” Ghislaine smiled, all innocence. “I mean, what better place for an agoraphobic guy than prison? He wouldn’t have to go outside for years.”

“ Cicero ’s not agoraphobic,” I said.

“ Cicero?” Ghislaine repeated, and there was a world of speculation in the one word. Oh, hell, I thought. I hadn’t meant to use his real name.

“What is this guy,” she went on, her tone brightly insinuating, “your new best friend?”

Ghislaine had seen me around the neighborhood; I knew that from our encounter on the bus. And she heard things, which was what made her a good informant. I wondered how much she really knew about my repeated visits to the towers. Obviously she knew enough. She’d guessed that threatening Cicero would get her what she wanted, and I’d unwillingly confirmed it by fixing her shoplifting bust.

I pulled to the curb.

“What are you doing?” she asked, looking around at the side street we were on, brown brick apartment buildings on each side.

“This is where you get out,” I said.

“But we’re a mile from where I live!” Ghislaine protested.

“Yeah, I know,” I said. I turned in my seat, one elbow resting on the steering wheel. “You could use the walk, Ghislaine. You need some time alone to get your head straight and think about how smart it is for you to try to jerk me around.”