Джеймс Паттерсон - The Red Book

A few minutes later, the officer returns, looking at a clipboard flipped over a few pages, holding the cell phone against his chest. “Your mother told us you were at work when it happened.”

A slight edge to his voice, more suspicion. The initial shock has worn off. Maybe something the detective said to him on the phone.

“That’s what I told my mom,” Latham rushes to say. “She didn’t know about this video. I didn’t want to get her involved. I was, y’know, scared—”

“Can we talk to your mom?”

“I mean, you can call her at work if you want. She doesn’t get back till six, six thirty tonight.”

The officer returns the phone to his ear and retreats into Latham’s bedroom.

Latham drums his fingers on the kitchen table. Did he just get his mother in trouble? “My mom didn’t lie or anything,” he says to the cop when he returns to the kitchen.

“No, I got that, I got that.” The cop, the name BOSTWICK tagged to his shirt, pulls out a notepad. “Okay, so who else has this video?”

“Nobody,” he says.

“Who else knows about it? Anybody else we can talk to?”

“Nobody else knows about it,” he says.

Bostwick gives him a stare, cocks his head.

“Nobody,” Latham insists.

The cop nods. “Okay. You have it on your camcorder and that disk drive stuck into your laptop.”

“Yeah.”

“Nowhere else? You sure?”

“I’m totally sure.” One lie on top of another on top of another.

“All right. I’m gonna need to take those with me.”

It’s what Latham figured. It was the whole reason he told the cop he used the old camcorder, not his new, hidden one. He figured he might never see it again, at least not for a long time.

“Can you…can my name be kept out of this?” he asks.

The officer sighs. “We’re gonna try. The detective, he told me, those videos speak for themselves. It doesn’t really matter who took them. But really, it’s up to you, Latham. You sure you haven’t told anybody about this?”

“I’m sure, yeah,” he says.

“Okay. So I’m gonna need you to come downtown with me.” Bostwick raises his hand. “Don’t worry, they just want to interview you. You can drive your own car if you don’t want to be seen in the patrol car. So go ahead and clean up, get your things together. I can wait.”

Latham sighs. He picks up his bowl of cereal and takes it to the sink. So far, so good, he supposes. What the cop said makes sense. The video shows what it shows. It doesn’t matter who took it. He grabs a plastic bag from under the sink and drops in the camcorder and the mini disk.

He looks around. Where’s the officer?

“Latham!” Bostwick calls out. Shit . He’s in Latham’s bedroom. “You got a lot of cameras and equipment in here.”

Shit!

“Yeah, it’s mostly old stuff,” he says quickly, scurrying toward the bedroom. He’s ready with a whole explanation when he walks into the bedroom.

He’s not ready for Officer Bostwick, holding a handgun, extended by a suppressor.

“Sorry,” says Bostwick, his hand shaking as he pulls the trigger.

Chapter 34

THE FIRST time I ever met her was in court.

I had to testify in a drug case. I was a second-year, still green enough to find the whole thing exciting. Especially when the prosecutor prepping me told me that the public defender on the case was one of the best in the building.

I took my seat, got sworn in. When the lawyer at the defense table stood up, I forgot everything about the case. I could barely speak. I felt like someone had turned on a heat lamp inside my chest cavity. I suddenly wished I’d checked myself in the mirror before I came in, finger-combed my hair or something.

Her navy-blue suit, athletic figure, dishwater-blond hair pulled back with a few strands refusing to comply, falling to her cheeks. Normally, a woman who looked like that, my first instinct would be picturing her naked, writhing in bed under me. But this wasn’t carnal lust. The warmth in her eyes, her easy smile, a confidence that was quiet and nonthreatening. I knew it instantly. She was kind. She cared. And if I fought her, she’d fillet me like a fish on the witness stand.

Didn’t catch her last name, but her first name was Valerie.

“Hey, sunshine.” Sosh snaps his fingers at me. “You drifting off on us?”

“Paperwork may not be fun,” Rodriguez joins in, “but it’s an important part of what we do here, Detective Harney.”

I snap out of my trance. It’s probably just sleep deprivation. Or too greasy of a lunch, to help with the hangover. Or meeting with my union rep over the officer-involved shooting.

“No word back on the recanvass?” I ask.

“Haven’t heard,” Carla says.

“Still don’t get why we’re recanvassing,” Sosh contributes. “You need to look up the word solved in the dictionary.”

“They’re called unanswered questions,” I tell him.

He makes a face. “I got unanswered questions about my second marriage,” he says. “You don’t see me calling up my ex to chat.”

“I know. It’s a real mystery why she wouldn’t have stuck with a prize like you.”

“Detective Harney?”

I turn at the sound of the woman’s voice. This must be the FBI agent who called an hour ago, Special Agent Clara Foster. I force my bag of bones out of my chair and shake her hand.

“Good to meet you,” she says. She has a low voice and a no-nonsense approach. Some of these FBI agents are okay, but most of them take themselves way too seriously and look down on us Chicago cops. Agent Foster doesn’t give off an impression either way, which probably means she’s good at her job.

I introduce her to the other detectives. I offer her a chair, but she prefers to stand.

“We got the DNA sample and prints of your Jane Doe,” she says. “Along with the photos. No hits on the prints or the DNA. Best we got from DNA is that she’s from eastern Europe.”

From a visual standpoint, it’s surprisingly hard to determine things like nationality with dead people, even if they’re recently dead. It’s like the things that made them human drain away almost instantly upon death. The young white woman dead on the porch was from eastern Europe? That could work, yeah.

“What’s it to the Bureau?” asks Sosh. Lanny Soscia views FBI agents much as my father used to view the boys my sister, Patti, brought home—he doesn’t like them and trusts them even less.

“I’m on a joint task force with the county,” says Foster. “Human trafficking.”

“Human trafficking,” I say. “You think that’s what we have here?”

“Good chance,” she says. “Nobody’s claimed her?”

“Nope. She could be a runaway. She’s probably old enough to be emancipated.”

“Could be,” but her tone tells me she likes her idea better. “Pretty girl. Agreed?”

“Yeah, I’d say so.”

“Undernourished? Drugs in her system? Track marks on her arms?”

“All of the above,” I say.

Agent Foster smirks, not in a good way. “Sounds like a ‘lost girl.’”

“A lost girl.”

“Someone smuggled over here. No record of her. Forced into prostitution. Hooked on drugs.”

“Then what was she doing with the K-Street Hustlers? They’re into that?”

She takes that question almost as a joke, though none of us is laughing. “Human trafficking is everywhere. A neighborhood street gang wouldn’t be smuggling girls into the country, if that’s what you mean. But they could be protecting the trade. Maybe even getting a little taste of the action. Some of these traffickers bring the girls in and run them, pimp them out. But others sell them as soon as they arrive.”