‘Fuck off. I know how much you pay informers, I also know you’ll have a nice little stash that you’ll divvy out between you and your pals at the end of each month, filling in fictional names and places. I know, Billy. Fifty bucks a day. I can go on the streets, into the bars, the clubs. I’ll find someone with information. Like you said, I was good.’
Rooney got up and crossed to his window. He stood playing with the blind. ‘How long you been sober?’
‘I told you, a year. Call my husband, he’ll tell you. Call my room-mate, she’ll tell you. I’m straight, Bill.’
He picked at his nose — it was a habit. No wonder it was always so red, Lorraine thought.
‘You’ll call in every day?’
‘I’ll call in on the hour, if that’s what you want.’
‘Yeah, it is,’ he said quietly, and opened his wallet.
Lorraine couldn’t believe it: he was going to pay her there and then. ‘Is there any way I can get copies of the statements you got to date?’
Rooney nodded, counting out a hundred bucks. ‘This is it, Lorraine, and believe me when I say I’ll have you brought back in here so fast if you mess me around. I need information.’
‘I’ll also need photographs — everything you got so far.’
Rooney looked at her, suddenly uncertain.
‘I got to know what’s going on, Bill.’
‘Yeah. I guess you do.’
Rooney watched Lorraine walk out of the building and flag down a taxi before he let the blind flip back into place. He told himself he must be nuts, especially as he’d not even got her to sign for the cash. Added to that, he’d handed over copies of the case files. He had a moment of blind panic: if she was to take it to the press he’d be screwed to the floor. Then he relaxed; he was almost nailed there already. He checked the time and put in a call to Andrew Fellows.
‘Ah, Captain, I’m so sorry not to have got back to you since you gave me this new stuff on Hastings. Reason is, I’ve not had too much spare time, I’m on a lecture tour.’
‘I’d appreciate your input as soon as possible,’ Rooney rumbled.
‘I’ll get back to you soon as I’ve got a moment to go over the file, but I’m up to my ears right now.’
Rooney listened to the drawling voice, half smiling at the ‘ears’ line, waiting for what he suspected was coming. It came.
‘I don’t suppose there’s some way you could finance me, is there? Only it does take up a considerable amount of my time.’
Rooney said he would run it by his chief and dropped the phone back on the hook. The chief would, no doubt, arrange payment — it had been his idea to bring Fellows on board, so let him budget for him. Rooney was stretched and he was not about to pay Fellows out of his own pocket, not like Lorraine.
He remembered finding her on the floor in the old precinct, looking into her face in the patrol car when he held that poor kid’s Sony Walkman under her nose. She’d given that half-dazed smile. He remembered that moment now. That kid would’ve been alive if it wasn’t for that bitch. He wanted to be deeply angry, but he couldn’t, and it confused him. She had to be pretty tough to have survived, to have got herself back together. At least he hoped she was: that she wasn’t right that moment walking into a bar with his case file in one hand and his cash in the other. If she was, then he would make sure, no matter what else he did, that she paid a high price.
Lorraine read through the files all night. Her concentration blanked out Rosie and her television shows. When Rosie went to bed, Lorraine continued working, sifting through every statement, studying each photograph, jotting down notes. It was four in the morning when she stretched and got up. She had sat with her legs tightly crossed, just the way she had when she was working in the old days. She massaged her thighs, easing out the cramp, then sat staring into space. Rooney was right, they had nothing: no witnesses but herself. If only he knew! Lorraine had seen the killer — had almost gone down on him, had almost got herself killed. And she also had a clear memory of the killer’s cufflinks. She wondered if Norman Hastings had ever bought or owned a reconditioned vintage car. From what she had read so far, she doubted it — but, then, everyone had been wrong about him being the perfect family man.
Lorraine didn’t go to bed until almost five, and by then she was so wired up she was unable to fall asleep. The sofa bed was uncomfortable and too soft, her back ached and her legs still felt as if they were going to cramp up. She was in the half-dream state when suddenly she had a vivid image of the boy. She saw him running, saw the flash of the Superman striped jacket.
‘Freeze!
She sat up, wide awake now. She didn’t want to see him, didn’t want to see herself, didn’t want to see the boy’s jerking body as the bullets tore into him. She flipped over the sheet, got up and drew back the curtains. She forced herself to think about the murderer, remembering exactly where he had picked her up. Was he local? Somehow she doubted it — he was too flashy, too well dressed. Again, Murphy, the only suspect, did not tie in. Lorraine closed her eyes and visualized his face: the rimless, gold-framed glasses, the blue close-set eyes, the sharp nose and the wide, wet, thick-lipped mouth. She conjured up a picture of his hands, went over exactly what he had said, how he had picked her up, how he had reached into the glove compartment. She wasn’t scared, she just let the killer move into her mind. And just as she had done with the Laura Bradley murder, she repeated to herself, over and over again, her voice a soft whisper: ‘I’ll get you.’
Chapter 9
Rosie was so immersed in the horror of the statements and pictures she didn’t hear Lorraine walking into the bedroom.
‘That was private, Rosie, you shouldn’t be reading it.’
Rosie looked up and hunched her shoulders apologetically. ‘It’s those mortuary shots that get me — really close up, aren’t they? I didn’t know you looked like that when you were dead, how they can clean them up...’ She held up Helen Murphy’s photograph. ‘This is her when they found her, and this is her at the morgue and this is her — I mean, she looks like she’s sleeping.’
Lorraine walked into the bathroom. ‘They had her face fixed up with plaster for an ID. Made-up, that’s all. The only suspect they got is her husband, a trucker, but they’re way off, he’s not the killer.’
Rosie shut the file. ‘I doubt if anyone’ll grieve over these women, they look like they’re all pretty shot up — in fact some of them look happier dead, know what I mean? Well, not the little blonde girl, she’s sort of cute.’
Lorraine leaned on the bathroom door. ‘Yeah. She doesn’t fit in, does she? All the others are older, worn out, hard...’
‘You know what I think?’ Rosie licked her lips. ‘I think he picked you up. You were hit on the back of the head but somehow you got away from him. The taxi brought you back here and... I remembered it was the seventeenth of last month.’ Then she shrugged her heavy shoulders. ‘It couldn’t have been you, though, could it?’
‘Why not?’
‘Because that was the day Norman Whatcha-call-it was done — they found him in his own car, right? So he wouldn’t have been whacking you over the head and killing somebody else, would he?’
‘I fell on the pavement, Rosie.’
‘Yeah — and I’m Sharon Stone’s lookalike.’
Lorraine walked into the shower and pulled the curtain round her. Rosie surprised her — not that she had said anything intelligent, or especially intuitive even: Lorraine had been cracked over the back of the head in exactly the same manner as described not once but eight times in the files. But it was the simple dismissal of the possibility that the man could have killed Hastings and then an hour later attempted to kill again. Lorraine made a mental note to check through the exact times and dates of each murder.