Raul finally got over himself enough to tell her, “Looks like we got us a social-worker perp.” She could hear his smirk.
“You’re smokin’ crack!”
“Not today.”
He always said that when she said that. This time she didn’t laugh. “I meant, ‘really’?”
“Yeah, really. Hits on underage males and females she’s doing therapy on.”
“What do you mean, hits on?”
His voice got weird—husky, a little breathless, raggedy. She felt a stirring in her own groin. Normal, she knew; occupational hazard. Still, it bothered her, made her vigilant about her own motivations. She hoped Raul was watching his. “Gropes minors,” he explained. “Tells them bullshit like it’s part of the treatment so they’ll ‘learn to trust.’ ”
“This one’s mine.” In her minuscule kitchen space, balancing a plate in both hands to keep from dropping it, she held her breath and focused her mind.
“Thought you might say that.”
“Fer shizzle.”
“Come again?”
“Oh, sorry, old dude. Yeah, sure, you’re right.”
“Any reason you can’t speak English?”
“Gotta be hip, Raul, my man. Gotta be cool.”
“High on my list.”
“Who’s the slimeball? Hopefully nobody I know.”
“Name’s Lords something.”
She went very still and repeated it the way he’d said it. “Lords?”
Audibly shuffling papers, he spelled it. “Lourdes Malone. You know her?”
“No,” she said.
She made lists and flow charts and went through the steps in the social-work problem-solving process up to “implementation.” She did not think about Lourdes’s hands, Lourdes’s laugh, Lourdes’s tongue.
The first thing she had to do was pick a fight and stage another breakup. That wouldn’t take much. The hard part was that if Lourdes was doing this stuff, they’d never make up.
Having to take a semester off school would have sucked even worse, so she was totally relieved to find out about the online option for three of her four classes. Good thing they didn’t use video, or even audio, because if she could get her voice to change enough she’d have to keep it that way until this was done. She recorded herself using higher and lower pitches, various bogus accents, a lisp, a horror-movie whisper. The cartoon squeak would be the easiest to keep going but it was also the most obviously fake. Finally she found a website with audios of voices and accents, played around with the kids’ ones until she came up with one that sounded kind of real and that she could manage, talked aloud to herself in it for days, and was happy when Raul called and thought he had a wrong number and she had to say code before he was convinced it was her. He was both pissed and impressed. Cool beans.
She dug out the rose cologne and the ginger lip gloss. In real life she didn’t love all that girlie stuff, on principle, but the job gave her an excuse and it was kind of cool, like Halloween, like a kid playing dress up.
Next was the hair. Without looking in a mirror she whacked it off—scraggly would be in character—and then dyed it what the box called “Mahogany Brown” but came out Carrot-Top Red. She told her reflection, “You are uuuuuugly, girlfriend, you know that?” She looked so different that she tried messing with her own mind, and couldn’t really tell if it worked or not, if she even got in. Could there be such a thing as autotelepathy? Probably—so far in her life she hadn’t run into very many totally impossible things.
Voice, hair, posture, gait, tics, breathing patterns, gestures—by now she knew how to do all that. A few hours’ practice to get them down, a little more time and effort when this was over to get rid of whatever she decided not to keep as part of her ever-evolving self.
Okay, all five of the regular senses were covered: she looked, sounded, felt, tasted, smelled different. But this was not exactly regular. This was Lourdes.
What would happen if Lourdes recognized her? There’d been some rough stuff, all in play, definitely consensual. But if Lourdes was really a pedophile, or if she wasn’t and she went off about being set up, what would happen? It seriously bit that this reading and screwing around with thoughts thing didn’t work worth crap from a distance.
For a day and a night she considered how much she was willing and able to do. A lot, it turned out. In a weird way she owed it to Lourdes not to hold anything back, not to underestimate either of them.
But there wasn’t enough time to lose or gain more than a couple of pounds or get Botox in her lips or get the very cool snake tat removed—after all the money and pain it had cost her she’d have hated to lose it, and Sammy’s artistic integrity would have been offended, but she’d have done it if she could. Hopefully things wouldn’t go far enough for Lourdes to find it.
Marina Abramovic, mutilating herself for art on YouTube, was one out-there chick, but fresh wounds would be suspicious. Same problem with actual surgery. She had to settle, uneasily, for blue contacts, lashes thickened and curled, a yellowy tan from hours under a lamp, a vaguely spider-shaped birthmark colored on the inside of her thigh, shaving all body hair and shaving it again for maximum smoothness, and wrestling her boobs into submission with an Ace bandage wrapped tight as a girdle. That last one was a big risk; Raul and his team better get right in there if kid nipples were what floated Lourdes’s boat.
When she showed up at the DA’s office in a lavender baby-doll dress and, just to stay in character, no underwear, Raul had no idea who she was. Even though that’s what she was after, it kind of hurt her feelings, which was weird.
To the giraffelike assistant DA at the desk, she introduced herself as Madison Smith, the preppy name she and Raul had finally compromised on. Behind her she heard Raul come up out of his chair. She probably could have just stirred up his thoughts so he’d believe her, but it was more fun to watch him do it himself. “Shit,” he said.
“Yup,” she said in the voice.
“Fuck.”
“Nope.”
“How’d you do it?”
“Trade secrets.”
“You’re taller.”
“That’s just shoes, dummy.” She showed him, careful not to lift her foot too high and expose herself.
His hand went briefly to her shoulder. Like every other time they’d touched—accidentally in passing, comradely fist bumps, brush of the hands maybe or maybe not flirtatious—she stiffened. Then he nodded. “It is you.”
“Whatever that means.”
“I take it,” Giraffe said dryly, “we’ve established that the disguise is convincing. Can we move on?” First, though, Giraffe had to brag about other child sex-abuse cases she’d prosecuted. “Sixty-nine years to life is what I got,” she told them about one particularly nasty one. The passionate, joyous pride in her voice and in her heart was really pretty creepy.
“Very good,” said Raul. Little Shit was getting a contact high from all this moral certainty.
“I’m telling you, section 85.67 of the penal code is a wonderful tool. No judicial discretion to get in the way of justice. When I know in my gut, as a person, that somebody should get life, I pick the charges and I make it happen.”
“Enhancements,” Raul said to Little-Shit-as-Madison. “Gotta get those enhancements.”
“Enhance like what?”
“GBI’s always good.”
“Great bodily injury,” Giraffe supplied, and she and Raul laughed.
“Double my rate.”