Janice Kay: Because Of A Girl

Todd shook his head. “A friend of her daughter’s, from the sound of it. Man. If Kelly turned up pregnant at fifteen, I’d chain her to her bed.” He seemed to mull that over, for good reason since his daughter had just turned thirteen. “Maybe I should chain her now.”

Laughing, Jack started in motion again. The low, swinging door closed behind him.

“The lady you’re looking for is off in that corner.” The sergeant jerked his chin that direction.

Lady? More like a teenager. Jack assessed the thin, anxious-looking girl who stared fixedly at the entrance. Because she wanted to run? Or because she was afraid of who might come through the doors?

When he stopped in front of her, she jerked and swung a panicky look at him.

He introduced himself. Then, although there was enough privacy for them to have talked out here, he suggested they go back to his desk.

She jumped to her feet. “Thank you.”

When he asked what worried her, she said, “If some friend of his sees me, I’m dead.” Once he had her seated in front of his desk, Jack bought her a cold can of Coke and made friendly conversation until she loosened up a little. At this time in the evening, they had the detective unit to themselves, although there were still occasional passers-by in the hall. He left the door open to avoid alarming her.

Sometimes he could tell just from looking at someone that her life hadn’t been easy. Robin Buckley was classic: too skinny, with rounded shoulders and stooped posture. She gazed down at her hands on her lap more than she did at him. Nobody had ever taken her to an orthodontist. Even so, she might have been pretty if hopelessness wasn’t so apparent in her eyes.

At last, she sneaked a desperate look at Jack and said, “This is all my fault. If I’d waited for him...”

Waited? “Why don’t you start at the beginning?” he suggested. “You know who committed the robbery and carjacking.”

She nodded, face pinched. “He’s my boyfriend. Was my boyfriend, I guess. I mean, I was living with him, but now I don’t know what I’ll do.” She took a deep breath. “His name is Dustin Tackett.”

“You told the desk sergeant you saw the carjacking.”

She pressed her lips together and nodded.

“Tell me how that came about,” he asked gently. He’d chosen to half sit on the front of his desk, one foot braced on the floor, rather than plant himself behind it like a stern principal judging a wayward student. The technique seemed to relax people.

The story came out in fits and starts. She’d driven the boyfriend to the convenience store and waited in the car while he went in. What he hadn’t told her was that he carried a gun under his denim shirt and planned a holdup. Through the glass front of the store, she saw him pointing the gun at a young clerk. Scared and shocked, she’d put the car into Reverse, rocketed out of the parking spot and accelerated away. He came racing out and chased her to the street before apparently deciding he wouldn’t catch her.

“He was so mad,” she said softly.

To her horror, he jumped into another car idling in front of the store.

“I stopped because, well, I thought maybe it would be better if I didn’t leave.” She bowed her head, lank brown hair veiling her expression. The hopelessness he’d seen in her eyes leaked from her voice. “Because I didn’t know where to go.”

Jack had to clench his teeth together or say something he shouldn’t. Something that wouldn’t be at all helpful right now. She wasn’t the first person and wouldn’t be the last he’d dealt with who was so entirely on her own, she couldn’t imagine any real refuge. He’d be willing to bet she’d grown up in an abusive home and had therefore gravitated toward an abusive man, unable to believe in any other reality.

She continued her story in the same soft, almost expressionless voice. The boyfriend had punched the young woman driver, then flung her, unconscious, out onto the pavement like garbage.

“She...she sort of flopped.” She did shudder there. “I don’t think he saw that I’d pulled over to the curb. He drove past, going really fast.”

The victim’s Chevy Malibu had been found two hours later, about ten miles out of town, on a dirt road graded for farm machinery between a vineyard and a wheat field. Pure chance anyone had noticed it so soon. It was currently in an impound lot. The department’s crime scene investigator was going over it with a fine-tooth comb.

Presumably, a buddy had picked up the scumbag.

“You think he’ll come after you,” Jack said.

“I know he will!” she flared. “He’ll kill me!”

He had to ask, even though he knew the answer. “Has he hurt you before?”

Hands writhing on her lap, she finally nodded. “He burns me,” she whispered.

“Show me.”

After a brief hesitation, she swiveled in her chair and lifted her T-shirt in back.

For all that he’d seen on the job, Jack cringed and then swore. A couple dozen small, round burns showed on skin that should have been smooth. Some were long-healed scars; a few, likely infected, seeped.

It was damn lucky for Dustin Tackett that he wasn’t there at that moment. Lucky for Jack’s career, too, he realized, anger sizzling his nerves like an electrical surge.

“We need to get you to the ER to have those looked at and documented,” he said, voice deceptively composed. “Once we pick him up, he should be charged for what he’s done to you as well as the holdup and carjacking.”

Robin protested, but not very hard. He guessed she was used to being obedient to a stronger will.

He asked some questions designed to find out whether she’d really seen the boyfriend at the store, since reporting him could be a revenge ploy. But she gave details she’d have had no way of knowing if she hadn’t witnessed events.

She also had a good idea where Dustin would be holed up. He had a best friend who was the same kind of scum. She knew, more or less, where this buddy lived. Jack ran him and came up with an address that matched her recollection.

While he was behind the computer, he ran her, too, and was sorry to see that she was older than she looked, barely twenty-one, which limited the resources available for her.

He drove her to the community hospital, where a woman doc went silent and grim upon seeing the damage. After talking quietly to the doctor, Jack called the founder of a battered women’s shelter here in Frenchman Lake and explained the circumstances. Without hesitation, she said she was on the way.

ICU was his next stop. There he was told the carjacking victim had yet to regain consciousness. Nobody was quite sure whether the punch had done the damage, or the skull-concrete collision.

Finally, Jack called out the combined county/city SWAT team, and set out to make an arrest that was going to give him a whole lot of satisfaction.

* * *

MEG HARPER COULDN’T settle to work or read or even just sit after her maddening visit to the police station Friday evening. Her worry consumed her. Her anxiety ran in a loop, replaying every few minutes.

Her truly awful week had started with the phone call from the police department Tuesday night letting her know that Emily and Sabra were being detained after a noisy kegger had been raided. And on a weeknight! Worse yet, the two girls were supposed to be at a friend’s house working on a project for school. In other words, Meg’s own, formerly reliable daughter had flat-out lied to her face so she could get drunk and... Please not have wild sex or do drugs.

To her shame, Meg wanted to blame Sabra, who had to be leading Emily astray. Right? And, yes, Emily’s best friend was pregnant, which meant she had already gone astray, so to speak. But Meg had a suspicion she had been hiding her head in the sand. Yes, Sabra was pretty mixed up right now—thus getting kicked out of her own home and needing refuge in Meg’s—but Emily was rebelling in her own way, something Meg had foolishly believed would never happen.