left, right, left, and back into her mouth again. Then she nodded. “You must think I'm stupid,” she said. And of course that thought had crossed my mind fleetingly once or twice, but it didn't seem politic to say so. “But you got to remember,” she went on, “I'm a full detective, and this is Miami.
How do you think I got that, huh?”
“Your looks?” I asked, giving her a dashing smile. It never hurts to compliment a woman.
She showed me her lovely set of teeth, even brighter in the high crime lights that lit up the parking area. “That's good,” she said, and she moved her lips into a strange half smile that hollowed her cheeks and made her look old. “That's the kind of shit I used to fall for when I thought you liked me.”
“I do like you, Detective,” I told her, perhaps a little too eagerly. She didn't seem to hear me.
“But then you push me on the floor like I'm some kind of pig, and I wonder what's wrong with me? I got bad breath? And it hits me. It's not me. It's you. There's something wrong about you.”
Of course she was right, but it still hurt to hear her say so. “I don't— What do you mean?”
She shook her head again. “Sergeant Doakes wants to kill you and he doesn't even know why. I should've listened to him. Something is wrong about you. And you're connected to this hooker stuff some way.”
“Connected— What do you mean?”
This time there was an edge of savage glee to the smile she showed me and the trace of accent snuck back into her voice. “You can save the cute acting for your lawyer. And maybe a judge. 'Cause I think I got you now.” She looked at me for a long hard moment and her dark eyes glittered. She looked as inhuman as I am and it made a small shiver run across the back of my neck. Had I truly underestimated her? Was she really this good?
“And so you followed me?”
More teeth. “That's right, yeah,” she said. “Why are you looking around at the fence? What's in there?”
I am sure that under ordinary circumstances I would have thought of this before, but I plead duress. It truly didn't occur to me until that very moment. But when it did, it was like a small and painful light flashing on. “When did you pick me up? At my house? At what time?”
“Why do you keep changing the subject? Something's in there, huh?”
“Detective, please—this could be very important. When and where did you start to follow me?”
She studied me for a minute, and I began to realize that I had, in fact, underestimated her. There was a great deal more to this woman than political instinct. She really did seem to have something extra. I was still not convinced that any of it was intelligence, but she did have patience, and sometimes that was more important than smarts in her line of work. She was willing to simply wait and watch me and keep repeating her question until she got an answer. And then she would probably ask the same question a few more times, wait and watch some more, to see what I would do. Ordinarily I could outwit her, but I could not possibly outwait her, not tonight. So I put on my best humble face and repeated myself. “Please, Detective . . .”
She stuck her tongue out again, and then finally put it away. “Okay,” she said. “When your sister was gone for a few hours and no word where, I started to think maybe she's up to something. And I know she can't do anything herself, so where would she go?” She arched an eyebrow at me, then continued in a triumphant tone. “To your place, that's where! To talk with you!” She bobbed her head, pleased with her deductive logic. “And so I think about you for a while. How you're always showing up and looking, even when you don't have to. How you figure out those serial killers sometimes, except this one? And then how you fuck me over with that stupid list, make me look stupid, push me on the fucking floor—” Her face looked harder, a little older again for a moment. Then she smiled and went on. “I said something out loud, in my office, and Sergeant Doakes says, ‘I told you about him but you don't listen.' And all of a sudden it's your big handsome face all over the place and it shouldn't be.” She shrugged. “So I went to your place, too.”
“When? At what time, did you notice?”
“Naw,” she said. “But I'm only there like twenty minutes and then you come out and play with your faggot Barbie doll and then drive over here.”
“Twenty minutes—” So she hadn't been there in time to see who or what had taken Deborah. And quite probably she was telling the truth and had simply followed me to see—to see what?
“But why follow me at all?”
She shrugged. “You're connected to this thing. Maybe you didn't do it, I don't know. But I'm gonna find out. And some of what I find is gonna stick to you. What's in there, in those boxes? You gonna tell me, or we just going to stand here all night?”
In her own way, she had put her finger right on it. We could not stand here all night. We could not, I was sure, stand here much longer at all before terrible things happened to Deborah. If they hadn't already happened. We had to go, right now, go find him and stop him. But how did I do that with LaGuerta along for the ride? I felt like a comet with a tail I didn't want.
I took a deep breath. Rita had once taken me to a New Age Health Awareness Workshop which had stressed the importance of deep cleansing breaths. I took one. I did not feel any cleaner after my breath, but at least it made my brain whirl into brief action, and I realized I would have to do something I had rarely done before—tell the truth. LaGuerta was still staring at me, waiting for an answer.
“I think the killer is in there,” I told LaGuerta. “And I think he has Officer Morgan.”
She watched me for a moment without moving. “Okay,” she said at last. “And so you come stand at the fence and look in? 'Cause you love your sister so much you want to watch?”
“Because I wanted to get in. I was looking for a way in through the fence.”
“Because you forget that you work for the police?”
Well there it was, of course. She had actually jumped right to the real problem spot, and all by herself, too. I had no good answer for that. This whole business of telling the truth just never seems to work without some kind of awkward unpleasantness. “I just—I wanted to be sure, before I made a big fuss.”
She nodded. “Uh-huh. That's really good,” she said. “But I tell you what I think. Either you did something bad, or you know about it. And you're either hiding it, or you wanna find it by yourself.”
“By myself? But why would I want that?”
She shook her head to show how stupid that was. “So you get all the credit. You and that sister of yours. Think I didn't figure that out? I told you I'm not stupid.”
“I'm not your slasher, Detective,” I said, throwing myself on her mercy and now completely confident that she had even less than I did. “But I think he's in there, in one of the storage boxes.”
She licked her lips. “Why do you think that?”
I hesitated, but she kept her unblinking lizard stare on me. As uncomfortable as it made me, I had to tell her one more piece of truth. I nodded at the Allonzo Brothers van parked just inside the fence.
“That's his truck.”
“Ha,” she said, and at last she blinked. Her focus left me for a moment and seemed to wander away into some deep place. Her hair? Her makeup? Her career? I couldn't tell. But there were a lot of awkward questions a good detective might have asked here: How did I know that was his truck? How had I found it here? Why was I so sure he hadn't simply dumped the truck and gone somewhere else?
But in the final analysis LaGuerta was not a good detective; she simply nodded, licked her lips again, and said, “How are we gonna find him in there in all that?”
Clearly, I really had underestimated her. She had gone from “you” to “we” with no visible transition.
“Don't you want to call for backup?” I asked her. “This is a very dangerous man.” I admit I was only needling her. But she took it very seriously.
“If I don't catch this guy by myself, in two weeks I'm a meter maid,” she said. “I got my weapon.
Nobody's gonna get away from me. I'll call for backup when I have him.” She studied me without blinking. “And if he's not in there, I'll give them you.”
It seemed like a good idea to let that go. “Can you get us through the gate?”
She laughed. “'Course I can. I got my badge, get us through anywhere. And then what?”
This was the tricky part. If she went for this, I might well be home free. “Then we split up and search until we find him.”
She studied me. Again I saw in her face the thing I had seen when she first got out of her car—the look of a predator weighing her prey, wondering when and where to strike, and how many claws to use. It was horrible—I actually found myself warming to the woman. “Okay,” she said at last, and tilted her head toward her car. “Get in.”
