Detective Carson Ryder Thriller Series Books 4-6: Blood Brother, In the Blood, Little Girls Lost. J. Kerley A.

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       Chapter 7

      The next morning I entered the detectives’ room to a heavy smell of sweat and adrenalin. Bodies were moving fast, papers shuffling, phones ringing. Cluff was on the phone and staring down at his fax machine. I watched a heavyset detective cross the room with a cup of coffee, enter a cubicle a dozen feet away, start talking with a colleague.

      “Too freakin’ much,” the chunky guy said, laughing.

      “What?”

      “Len and me just got back from a condo in Tribeca. Ritzy place, owned by a husband and wife, the guy manages an investment firm. Good people, they keep a room for the wife’s brother, Gerald. Gerald’s forty-two, got a few head problems, mainly he’s paranoid-schizo. Gerald does OK until he skips his meds, then he weirds out, hides from the Feds, that sort of thing. The boys in blue track him down a couple times a year, bring him home.”

      “Conspiracy type?”

      “In spades. Seems Gerald came home last night, snuck in the husband’s office safe and grabbed forty-seven grand worth of Krugerrands the investment guy had stashed.”

      “Uh-oh.”

      “Yep. By the time Mr Investment finds the shiny coins missing this morning, Gerald’s given them away, plus twenty-six thou in cash. Said he was buying his freedom from the CIA.”

      A laugh. “Who’d Gerald give the stuff to? He say?”

      “Won’t say anything, except he’s finally free and they’re all safe. He’s a happy camper. Showed us some backward scribbles on a piece of cardboard, claimed it was his receipt from the CIA …”

      I shook my head and walked away, seeing Waltz arriving, opening the door of his office, tossing his hat to the corner of his desk. I crossed the floor, making my face benign, guileless. I had chosen duplicity over truth and there was no turning back.

      My fear of discovery wasn’t overwhelming. I’d gone to a fair amount of trouble to wall myself off from my past. Except for paying a computer-savvy friend to delete items from a college database, it was mostly legal, changing my name and spreading carefully chosen rumors. Unless the few who knew of my connection to Jeremy Ridgecliff pointed my way, anyone looking for the missing brother of a blighted family might think the guy boarded a steamer and fell beneath the horizon, never seen again.

      “What’s up, Shelly?” I asked, poking my head through his door.

      “Cluff dug up tax records from Ms Dora Anderson. She wasn’t born a realtor, it was a career change.”

      “From what?”

      “A social worker in Newark. It was years ago, but …”

      We were in Newark a half-hour later, in the city’s social services department. It resembled the detectives’ room at the precinct – a large space jammed with cubicles and filing cabinets and lined by small offices and conference rooms. Unlike the detectives’ room, the workers were predominantly women, the scent tending to perfume and hand lotions and other womanly nostrums. There were more pictures of families on the desks, fewer guys grinning beside large fish.

      We had been directed to Jonnie Peal, a fortyish woman who held her head sideways as she talked, looking away every few seconds, like someone was whispering in her ear a half-dozen words at a time.

      “Dora worked in the office all day. A mid-level administrator. Assignments, mainly, coordinating the schedules of our contact staff. I recall her having her realtor’s license back then. A part-time thing, weekends. One day she went for it full time. Guess she got tired of scheduling. Pay was better. Couldn’t be worse.”

      “No contact with clients?” I asked.

      Ms Peal nodded to a row of wide cubicles separated by tall gray dividers. “She worked in cubicle fourteen. Sat there all day long.”

      I looked at Waltz. Desk-bound workers rarely made enemies that mutilated your body. It was the caseworkers, the folks on the street who were avoided, jeered, cursed, spat on, and sometimes harmed as they thrust themselves into situations where they were neither understood nor wanted. Cohabitational situations were bad, toss in kids and things got worse. Though parents might allow an infant to wallow in filth for days, let a social worker suggest inadequate care and things could explode into violence. But Ms Anderson had been insulated from those situations.

      “That’s wrong,” said a voice. “Dora wasn’t always at that desk.”

      We turned to see a petite, sharp-dressed Hispanic woman a dozen feet away. She stood up from a desk where she’d been on the telephone. Her phone rang. I figured it rang all day.

      “Excuse me?” I said.

      She punched a button on the phone and walked over. “I’m Celia Ramirez. Been here twenty years. Dora started in Social Services as a caseworker when she was fresh from college. It didn’t work out, I guess. She was put in filing, worked her way to scheduling.”

      “She worked out of here? This office?”

      Ms Ramirez pointed to an adjoining annex. “Back then she worked in Children’s Services. You know what kind of nastiness they see over there?”

      “Yes,” I told her. “Unfortunately, I do.”

      We followed Ms Ramirez’s directions to the Child Welfare section of the department. It mirrored government offices everywhere: cubes, chairs, desks with piled-high in-baskets, cabinets. But I knew horrors lurked in the cabinets and case files, the seeds of serial murderers. Psychopathic killers are created in childhood. They come from backgrounds of physical and psychological abuse on a scale almost inconceivable to the normal American mind.

      No matter how childhood is stripped away, by sex or pain or perverse and relentlessly inventive combinations of the two, it leaves, or never begins. Many children СКАЧАТЬ