Chasing the Dime

15

Pierce had to give her name. His own lies had left him no other way out. He told himself that Renner would eventually get to her on his own anyway. Lilly Quinlan's site was linked to hers. The connection was inevitable. At least by giving Robin's name now, he might be able to control things. Tell them just enough to get out of there, then he would call her and warn her.

"A girl named Robin," he said.

Renner shook his head once in an almost unnoticeable way.

"Well, well, another new name," he said. "Why doesn't that surprise me, Mr. Pierce? Tell me now, who is Robin?"

"On Lilly Quinlan's web page she mentions the availability of another girl she works with. It says, 'Double your pleasure.' The other girl's name is Robin. There is a link from Lilly's page to Robin's page. They work together. I went to the page and called Robin's number. She couldn't help me very much. She said she thought Lilly might have gone home to Tampa, where her mother lived. So later on I called Information in Tampa and got phone numbers for people named Quinlan. Eventually, that led me to contacting Vivian."

Renner nodded.

"Must've been a lot of names. Good Irish name like Quinlan's not too rare."

"Yes, there were."

"And Vivian being at the end of the alphabet. You must've called information in Tampa quite a few times."

"Yes."

"What's the area code for Tampa, by the way?"

"It's eight one three."

Pierce felt good about finally being able to answer a question without having to lie and worry about how it would fit with other lies he had told. But then he saw Renner reach into the pocket of his leather bomber jacket and pull out a cell phone. He opened it and punched in the number for 813 information.

Pierce realized he would be caught directly in a lie if Vivian Quinlan's phone number was unlisted.

"What are you doing? It's after three in the morning in Tampa. You'll scare her to death if you -"

Renner held up a hand to silence him and then spoke into the phone.

"Residential listing for Tampa. The name is Vivian Quinlan."

Renner then waited and Pierce watched his face for reaction. As the seconds passed it felt as though his stomach were being twisted into a double helix formation.

"Okay, thank you," Renner said.

He closed the phone and returned it to his pocket. He glanced at Pierce for a moment, then withdrew a pen from his shirt pocket and wrote a phone number down on the outside of the file. Pierce could read the number upside down. He recognized it as the number he had gotten out of Lilly Quinlan's phone book.

He exhaled, almost too loudly. He had caught a break.

"I think you are right," Renner said. "I think I will check with her at a more reasonable hour."

"Yes, that might be better."

"As I think I told you earlier, we don't have Internet access here in the squad, so I haven't seen this website you've mentioned. As soon as I get home I'll check it out. But you say the site is linked to this other woman, Robin."

"Exactly. They worked together."

"And you called Robin when you couldn't get a hold of Lilly."

"Right again."

"And you talked on the phone and she told you Lilly went off to Tampa to see momma."

"She said she didn't know. She thought she might have gone there."

"Did you know Robin previous to this telephone call?"

"No, never."

"I'm going to take a shot in the dark here, Mr. Pierce, and say I'm betting Robin is a payfor-play girl. A prostitute. So what you are telling me is that a woman engaged in this sort of business gets a call from a perfect stranger and ends up telling this stranger where she thinks her missing partner in crime went. It just sort of comes out, I guess, huh?"

Pierce almost groaned. Renner would not let it go. He was relentlessly picking at the frayed ends of his statement, threatening to unravel the whole thing. Pierce just wanted to get out, to leave. And he now realized that he needed to say or do anything that would accomplish that. He no longer cared about consequences down the road. He just needed to get out. If he could get to Robin before Renner, then hopefully he could make it work.

"Well… I guess I sort of was able to convince her that, you know, I really wanted to find her and make sure everything was all right. Maybe she was worried about her, too."

"And this was over the telephone?"

"Yes, the telephone."

"I see. Okay, well, we'll be checking all of this with Robin."

"Yes, check with her. Can I -"

"And you'd be willing to take a polygraph test, wouldn't you?"

"What?"

"A polygraph. It wouldn't take long. We'd just shoot downtown and get it taken care of."

"Tonight? Right now?"

"Probably not. I don't think I could get anybody out of bed to give it to you. But we could do it tomorrow morning, first thing."

"Fine. Set it up for tomorrow. Can I go now?"

"We're almost there, Mr. Pierce."

His eyes dropped to the statement again. Surely, Pierce thought, we have covered everything on the form. What is left?

"I don't understand. What else is there to talk about?"

Renner's eyes came to Pierce's without any movement of his head or face.

"Well, your name came up a couple of times on the computer. I thought maybe we'd talk about that."

Pierce felt his face flush with heat. And anger. The long ago arrest was supposed to have been erased from his record. Expunged was the legal term. He had completed the probation and did the 160 hours of public service. That was a long time ago. How did Renner know?

"You're talking about the thing up in Palo Alto?" he asked. "I was never officially charged. It was diverted. I was suspended from school for a semester. I did public service and probation. That was it."

"Arrested on suspicion of impersonating a police officer."

"It was almost fifteen years ago. I was in college."

"But you see what I'm looking at here. Impersonating an officer then. Running around like some kind of detective now. Maybe you've got a hero complex, Mr. Pierce."

"No, this is totally different. What that was back then was I was on the phone, trying to get some information. Social engineering -I was soshing out a number. I acted like I was a campus cop so I could get a phone number. That was it. I don't have a hero complex, whatever that is."

"A phone number for who?"

"A professor. I wanted his home number and it was unlisted. It was nothing."

"The report says you and your friends used the number to persecute the professor. To pull an elaborate prank on him. Five other students were arrested."

"It was harmless but they had to make an example of us. It was when hacking was just getting big. We were all suspended and got probation and community service but the punishment was more severe than the crime. What we did was harmless. It was minor."

"I'm sorry but I don't consider impersonating a police officer to be either harmless or minor."

Pierce was about to protest further but held his tongue. He knew he would not convince Renner. He waited for the next question and after a moment the detective continued.

"Says in the records you did your community service in a DOJ lab in Sacramento. Were you thinking of becoming a cop then or something?"

"It was after I changed my major to chemistry. I just worked in the blood lab. I did typing and matching, basic work. It was far from cop work."

"But it must have been interesting, huh? Dealing with cops, putting together the evidence for important cases. Interesting enough for you to stay on after you did your hours."

"I stayed because they offered me a job and Stanford is expensive. And they didn't give me the important cases. Mostly the cases came to me in FedEx boxes. I did the work and shipped it all back. No big deal. In fact, it was kind of boring."

Renner moved on without transition.

"Your arrest for impersonating an officer also came a year after your name came up on a crime report down here. It's on the computer."

Pierce started to shake his head.

"No. I've never been arrested for anything down here. Just that time up at Stanford."

"I didn't say you were arrested. I said your name's on a crime report. Everything's on computer now. You're a hacker, you know that. You throw in a name and sometimes it's amazing what comes out."

"I am not a hacker. I don't know the first thing about it anymore. And whatever crime report you are talking about, it must be a different Henry Pierce. I don't remem -"

"I don't think so. Kester Avenue in Sherman Oaks? Did you have a sister named Isabelle Pierce?"

Pierce froze. He was amazed that Renner had made the connection.

"The victim of a homicide, May nineteen eighty-eight."

All Pierce could do was nod. It was like a secret was being told, or a bandage ripped off an open wound.

"Believed to have been the victim of a killer known as the Dollmaker, later identified as Norman Church. Case closed with the death of Church, September nine, nineteen ninety."

Case closed, Pierce thought. As if Isabelle were simply a file that could be closed, put in a drawer and forgotten. As if a murder could ever really be solved.

He came out of his thoughts and looked at Renner.

"Yes, my sister. What about it? What's it got to do with this?"

Renner hesitated and then slowly his weary face split into a small smile.

"I suppose it has everything and nothing to do with it."

"That doesn't make sense."

"Sure it does. She was older than you, wasn't she?"

"A few years."

"She was a runaway. You used to go look for her, didn't you? Says so on the computer, so it must be right, right? At night. With your dad. He'd -"

"Stepfather."

"Stepfather, then. He'd send you into the abandoned buildings to look because you were a kid and the kids in those squats didn't run from another kid. That's what the report says.

Says you never found her. Nobody did, until it was too late."

Pierce folded his arms and leaned across the table.

"Look, is there a point to this? Because I would really like to get out of here, if you don't mind."

"The point is, you went searching for a lost girl once before, Mr. Pierce. Makes me wonder if you're not trying to make up for something with this girl Lilly. You know what I mean?"

"No," Pierce said in a voice that sounded very small, even to himself.

Renner nodded.

"Okay, Mr. Pierce, you can go. For now. But let me say for the record that I don't believe for a moment you've told me the whole truth here. It's my job to know when people are lying and I think you're lying or leaving things out, or both. But, you know, I don't feel too bad about it, because things like that catch up with a person. I may move slow, Mr.

Pierce. Sure, I kept you waiting in here too long. A fine, upstanding citizen like you. But that's because I am thorough and I'm pretty good at what I do. I'll have the whole picture pretty soon. I guarantee it. And if I find out you crossed any lines in that picture, it's going to be my pleasure, if you know what I mean."

Renner stood up.

"I'll be in touch about that polygraph. And if I were you, I might want to think about going back to that nice new apartment on Ocean Way and staying there and staying away from this, Mr. Pierce."

Pierce stood up and walked awkwardly around the table and Renner to the door. He thought of something before leaving.

"Where's my car?"

"Your car? I guess it's wherever you left it. Go to the front desk. They'll call a cab for you."

"Thanks a lot."

"Good night, Mr. Pierce. I'll be in touch."

As he walked through the deserted squad room to the hallway that led to the front desk and the exit, Pierce checked his watch. It was twelve-thirty. He knew he had to get to Robin before Renner did but her number was in the backpack in his car.

And as he approached the front counter he realized he had no money for a cab. He had given every dollar he had on him to Robin. He hesitated for a moment.

"Can I help you, sir?"

It was the cop behind the counter. Pierce realized he was staring at him.

"No, I'm fine."

He turned and walked out of the police station. On Venice Boulevard he started jogging west toward the beach.