'Who?'
She waved her hand at me, trailing smoke, elegantly impatient.
'Luke's parents.'
'No.'
'No?'
'That's what I said. It's not my job.'
'You mean nobody's paying you?'
'Yeah, that's what I mean.'
'Who paid you for Bonnie Browne?'
'I wasn't paid for her— I was paid to find a photograph.' Paid by Strega, forever ago.
'And her husband?' The freak in the clown suit. The cops found him at the bottom of the stairs, his neck broken.
'The way I heard it, it was an accident.'
'You don't trust me.'
'With what?'
'I just don't want us to get in each other's way with this.'
'There is no 'this,' okay? You want something, spell it out.'
She ground out her smoke, opened her purse, took out a mirror, balanced it on her knees as she ran a comb through her hair. Put on fresh lipstick. A bit of it smeared as the cab hit a bump. She dabbed at it with a piece of tissue. Crossed her legs, looked back over at me.
'Vigilante. That's real popular now. People lose confidence in law enforcement, they start using self-help. But you…It's like your profession. What you get paid for.'
'That's not me,' I told her. Thinking: Who's a citizen in all this? Lily, Storm, Immaculata…even Wolfe, they were all over the line. I lived on the other side, they crossed over when they needed to…what was the difference?
'I think it is,' she said. 'You're known to half a dozen law enforcement agencies, and they all say the same thing. There's not enough to charge you with anything, but there's homicides going back to the last time you were in prison. And they all have one thing in common.'
'Dead people do.'
'It was always about children, that's the thread.'
'It doesn't tie to me, whatever it is. If I went around snuffing baby-rapers, I'd be on overtime— the city's full of them.'
'What're you saying?'
'You really want to know? A vigilante, he straps down, goes hunting. It's not personal. Me, you leave me alone, that's the end of it. I'm not a hunter. The newspapers, they got this vigilante thing all screwed up. A woman gets grabbed in an alley, pulls out a knife and stabs the guy trying to rape her, the press says she's a vigilante. She's not. Just someone defending herself.'
'And that's what you do?'
'I don't
She leaned forward, pale eyes not merging with the darkness in the back of the cab— a light of their own. 'I'm trying to tell you something, you want to listen,' she said. 'Lily doesn't have what you want— the CWA reports, the pedigree on the parents, last known address, associates, DMV, IRS. All that. She doesn't have it. I do.'
'So?'
'Usually, we'd share. My crew and Lily's. But…the way things started out with Luke, we didn't…'
'She shared with you now.'
'I know. But Lily's no investigator. I mean… she investigates inside children's heads, you understand? My people, we work outside. Like you.'
'Your people worked like me, I'd never get hired.'
'You're saying you're better at it than we are?'
'I'm saying…you can't use your kind of stuff with freaks. Especially when they run in packs. You can't use undercovers— they have an acid test. Like a day-care center where they're doing the kids. You suspect it, right? So you get somebody hired. Know what they do? They leave your guy alone in a back room with a kid. Wait to see what happens. Your guy doesn't start groping the kid, they know he's not one of them. Simple, right? You can have undercovers shoot up, snort some coke, help out in a heist, even turn a trick, that's what it takes. But you haven't got anybody who'd fuck a kid just for a credential.'
Thinking about what the Queen called me. When I hunted, it wasn't for evidence.
'Proof isn't what we need here,' she said. 'There's enough proof. They get brought in, I can get them indicted.'
I lit a cigarette, catching it for the first time. 'You've been looking for them all along, haven't you?'
She nodded.
