Good Morning, Killer - April Smith [75]
“Call for backup!” Jason hissed, fingers twitching toward the radio.
“Not yet.” I wanted this takedown all for myself.
“Right, right. We don’t want to look like idiots.”
“Move your butts,” the woman was saying.
Two young boys and a teenage girl climbed out. One of the boys started for the apartments.
“Stay here,” called the mother.
“I’m tired.”
“So am I,” she said.
“I want to go to bed.”
“Get your sleeping bag. Help out.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Get your sleeping bag. I don’t want to say it again!”
The boy kept going toward the building.
“If you don’t get your sleeping bag right now,” said the mother, “you can sleep on the floor.”
She tossed the cup into the street and started pulling stuff out of the van.
The teenage girl was saying nothing. She had an oval face, ordinary, wore low-riding jeans and was emaciated-thin, tiny breast buds pointing through a tank top too slight for this fifty-degree night. She was holding a plastic laundry basket filled with toys and clothes, a cigarette between two fingers. She had no affect. She just waited.
“Is that someone else in the van?” I said. “On the passenger side?”
We strained to see in the greasy lamplight.
“If Brennan comes out,” I said, “I will approach him and you back me up.”
Jason waggled in the seat.
We had shifted into high alert. I was aware of the pounding of my heart. I wondered if the camouflage cave was still intact in the back of the van, if the woman was complicit, kept the kids in handcuffs on the long drive to the religious retreat.
“Roxy,” she called, sliding the doors shut, “go get your brother.”
The girl pivoted obediently on one hip.
“Come back here, cootie head,” she said lazily, “or I’ll beat your brains in.”
The little brother taunted back. “You’re ugly. You wear stupid shoes.”
“Mom,” she repeated with the same lackadaisical scorn, “he called me ugly.”
I tried to see in the shadows. Were those bruises around the girl’s neck?
The mother did not answer, nor did she attempt to discipline the son, who had ducked inside the apartment building, but heaved a knapsack over one shoulder and picked up two duffel bags. Used to defeat, to carrying the burdens.
The passenger side door of the van opened and a muscular young man climbed out.
“Go for it,” I ordered, but as we made for the door handles someone right outside my window said, “Special Agent Ana Grey?”
I jolted off the seat.
A heavyset man wearing a sport coat and tie was holding up a badge.
“Please identify yourself,” he said.
Jason was already out of the car, demanding, “Who are you?”
“Chill,” I said, looking back and forth to the van.
“Are you Special Agent Grey?” he repeated.
“Excuse me,” said Jason. “What’s the problem? We are FBI and that is very possibly our suspect getting out of the van.” He’d flipped his badge open and held it out impatiently over the roof of the car. “Are you here to help, or to screw everything up?”
“Take it easy,” I told Jason. “I am Special Agent Grey. What’s the problem?”
Across the street the man, about thirty years old, wearing baggy pants and an undershirt, was peering at us nervously from the other side of the Dodge, shifting on the balls of his feet.
“Sergeant Pickett, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, special team. Agent Grey, you are under investigation for attempted murder. We have a warrant for your arrest. Please keep your hands in plain sight. Are you armed?”
“What the fuck?” Jason wanted to know.
“Put your hands out the window.”
“We’re working a kidnap case,” I said. “The Santa Monica kidnapping, did they inform you of that? We are looking at a rape suspect—”
“Ana?” Jason asked, drumming the roof, twisting toward the suspect. “What is going on? I thought this guy was—”
“She’s under arrest for trying to kill her boyfriend,” said Sergeant Pickett, adding venomously, “He’s a cop.”
“You guys are nuts,” Jason was insisting. “This is Special Agent