“Nice talk. Look, we’ve got you on auto theft, hit-and-run-enough charges to put you back in Hickey for several months, if not central booking at city jail, where people are staying up to forty-eight hours these days before they even see a judge. But we’re reasonable people. You can make a deal.”
“I DON’T TALK TO COPS!”
“You don’t have to talk to anyone but me. For now.”
“Where?” Whitney asked, ever practical. “Your house?”
“Yours. I’ll drive your mother’s car back to her while you take mine.” She thought she should be behind the wheel of the Mercedes if Lloyd did anything unpredictable. “Plus, your house is so remote that he can’t run away that easily. Even if he gets away from us, he won’t get far.”
Once at Whitney’s house, Lloyd came out of the luggage compartment feetfirst, aiming straight for Tess’s midsection. Again, she had expected nothing less and needed nothing more than a simple sidestep to avoid the blow. Still, without Whitney to help her, she would never have been able to subdue the young man. Thin as he was, he had a feral strength, twisting and turning in their grasp, cursing them all the while. The two women ended up straddling him, so his face was scraping the gravel in the driveway.
“Fuck you, bitches,” he said. “The minute you get up, I’m going to kill you both.”
Tess pulled out her gun, just to remind him that she had one-and he didn’t have any weapon at all. Not even a knife, based on her inexpert pat-down, for all his talk of cutting people.
“You ain’t gonna use that on me. That’s not your way.”
“What do you know of my ways?”
“All I did was try to steal your car. White folks like you don’t shoot you for shit like that.”
“You’re right.” Tess put the gun away and pulled out her cell phone. “Calling the police is more my style. County police. I’ll tell them that Whitney and I caught you trying to break into her carriage house out here and that you attacked her. You want to get picked up by county police on attempted rape and burglary?”
“That won’t hold.”
“It will hold long enough for someone to beat the crap out of you in an interrogation room in Towson.”
Tess didn’t actually believe that county cops would automatically brutalize any black teenager in their custody, not even one accused of an attack on a Valley resident. But she thought the threat would be credible to Lloyd-and it was. He allowed the two women to escort him inside, where Whitney produced a length of rope.
“What’s that for?” Tess asked.
“To tie him up. He doesn’t have the best record for staying put.”
“Fuck you.” Lloyd spit on the floor and started to writhe in Tess’s grasp. Whitney dropped the rope and grabbed his other arm.
“Look,” Tess said, forcing Lloyd to make eye contact. “We’ll give you a chance to sit and talk to us. If you run, we call the police. It’s that simple. The driveway is a mile long, Lloyd. By the time you get to the end, a squad car will be waiting for you. And if you try to cut across the property, you’ll find that picturesque fence is electrified.”
He considered her offer.
“I’m hungry,” he said at last. “You got any food or soda?” Then, as a hasty afterthought, as if remembering the chipotle muffins that had so distressed him: “I mean normal food.”
“Well, there are several bags of those cookies, although they’re now broken into pieces,” Whitney said. “Other than that, I think I have some olives. And maybe some gin.”
Lloyd settled for a glass of tap water and a bag of the shattered lemon cookies.
“When you were at my house, you saw a photograph of Gregory Youssef,” Tess began.
“Who?” He wasn’t very good at faking ignorance-or masking the nervousness that the name always seemed to inspire in him.
“Don’t be coy, Lloyd. Youssef is the federal prosecutor who was killed the night before Thanksgiving. You knew that a federal prosecutor had been killed, because the dealers in your neighborhood were pulled in for questioning. You knew Gregory Youssef’s name. But the two weren’t linked in your mind. Who was Gregory Youssef to you?”
“Never met the man.”
He seemed sincere, but Tess had already observed that Lloyd had a knack for technical truths that sidestepped larger ones.
“How do you know his name, then? And why do you try to avoid the subject when it comes up? Are you scared?”
“I ain’t likely to be scared of you.”
“Not of me. But definitely of someone, something. Someone who can link you to Gregory Youssef. And perhaps indirectly to his murder.”
Lloyd finished a bag of lemon cookies and started in on the chocolate chip ones. Tess couldn’t help envying his metabolism. She had once been able to eat that way, but that had been on the other side of thirty.
“I didn’t know anything about no murder,” he said. “Not a bit of it. All I was told is there was a guy and he’d crossed some folks, and they were going to scare him a little, take his money to show that they could, that he was a fool to think he was a player. Guy gave me the card and the code, told me when to use it and where.”
“A guy?”
“I ain’t naming names. I don’t know a name to give. He was just some guy, an associate of a man I know.”
Tess didn’t believe Lloyd, but she let it go. “What about the security camera? Didn’t you realize you’d show up on it?”
“I wore a hoodie pulled up tight so hardly any of my face showed.” He demonstrated with his hands, cupping them around his face so only his eyes and the bridge of his nose were visible. “My North Face jacket was over it, but it got stole that very night. Which is why…well, that and the fact that I didn’t get no money…”
“You’re losing me, Lloyd. Take it step by step, minute by minute. When did you get the card?”
“Around eleven that night. Near Patterson Park.”
“And who gave it to you?”
He shook his head. “There were no names. I don’t know his, he don’t know mine.”
“Really?”
“Uh-uh. Just a friend of a friend of a friend.”
“Okay, but he gives you the card and the code, tells you an ATM and a time. Right?”
“Yeah, I was to hit this machine on Eastern Avenue at exactly twelve-thirty A.M. So I did. And I get rolled like fifteen minutes later, guys take my jacket and the cash. And I’m thinking-” He stopped himself. “I’m thinking the guy who hired me done fucked me over, told his boys what he had me do, so he could get the money that was s’pose to be mine. They got my jacket and the cash, but I still had the card in my back pocket. And I was hungry. So I go to an all-night deli, use the card to buy a sub and a bag of chips.”
“The deli had an ATM machine?”
“Just for purchase, but it takes Independence Cards and shit.”
Tess had to fight the urge to tell Lloyd that “and shit” was not equivalent to “et cetera.” Listening to Lloyd was like some hip-hop version of The King and I.
“Does the deli have video surveillance?”
“Don’t think so. Korean’s too cheap. He got a baseball bat instead.”
“Even if he did,” Whitney put in, “he would have reused the tape by now. Most of those places recycle the tapes every twenty-four hours if nothing happens.”
Tess knew this to be true. “What time was this?”
“Like going on two.”
Tess made a note. Youssef’s killer had been tracked by E-ZPass along the I-95 corridor about the same time. Investigators must have noticed that discrepancy-Youssef’s car in the northern reaches of Maryland, perhaps already in Delaware, his ATM card still in Baltimore. By using the card when he did, Lloyd had raised the possibility that there was an accomplice, a key fact the police had managed to hold close.
Tess wondered if Lloyd understood he would be seen as just that-an accomplice. His ignorance of the larger plan would be of no protection to him. He could be turned into a scapegoat, an easy arrest to assure the public that some progress had been made.