“I told Ashley to ease up, dogg. W.T.M.I. Way too much information.”
“So you don't know who the older man is?”
“Naw. But I know who the newer man was gonna be.”
“Who?”
“Me, braw. She invited me on over to her crib for some, y'know, oral action. Saturday night. But then-she got kidnapped and all like that….”
“I find it hard to believe that a girl like Ashley-.”
“Ceepak?” I say.
“Yes?”
“Saturday night? I was at The Sand Bar. This guy was in there too. Doing Jell-O shots.”
“Go on.”
“He received a call on his cell phone.”
“That's right….” The kid finally has enough brain cells functioning to remember stuff.
“I heard him tell his friends he was, and I quote, ‘late for a blow job.’”
Ceepak winces.
“That was Ashley! Why do you think I left my boys at the bar and raced all the way down to her place? I thought I was finally gonna get me a little somethin'-somethin’. She's a real chicken-head, braw.”
Ceepak looks to me to translate one more time.
I wish I didn't know what the kid was saying.
“He's suggesting that Ashley enjoys performing oral sex acts.”
The chief was right.
Sometimes the truth really can ruin your day.
CHAPTER FORTY
Ceepak radios for Jane Bright to join us at The Playland Arcade.
Jane spent a good deal of time with Ashley on Saturday morning. Ceepak wants Jane to ride into the city with us. He thinks when we get there, Ashley may need to talk to someone like Jane.
“Bring the photos,” he tells her. “Right. Ashley in the sundress. From when we found her in the street. Thank you.”
Ben Sinclair is nursing another Sprite, replenishing his fluids in an attempt to stop his brain from banging against the insides of his skull. I hope it doesn't work.
Mayor Sinclair is on his way over to, once again, rescue his son from the long arm of the law.
Ceepak looks at Sinclair and shakes his head.
“Wha-?” Ben asks, seeing the headshake.
I can tell he's had enough Ben Sinclair to last months. The kid disgusts him.
“Come on, Danny.”
We head for the door.
“Hey, she's laughing at you too, you know.” All of a sudden, Ben's dropped the whole gangsta act. He's just a whining, spoiled brat.
“Excuse me?” Ceepak says, one hand on the doorknob.
“This morning? On the phone? When she dumped me? She was all giggly and goofy and did like this nursery rhyme making fun of you guys, you pigs.”
“You mean us ‘bacon'?” Ceepak's a quick study. “What'd she say?”
“I dunno.”
“Tell me. I'm extremely interested.”
“Tough titty, po-po.”
Ceepak slams the door shut, rattling the glass in all the windows- and this office has a whole wall of windows.
“ What the hell did she say?’
I think he'll probably tell us what Ashley said now.
He probably won't call us pigs or po-po again, either.
“It was that Gingerbread Man deal … you know: ‘run, run, fast as you can,’ this is so lame….”
“Finish it.”
Ben shrugs.
“‘Cops can't catch me, I'm with the I–I-A, man!’”
“What's the IIA?” Ceepak asks.
“I dunno.” Ben sips his drink. “She's just wack.”
“Think harder,” Ceepak says. Ben looks at me.
“Time Crisis Three,” I say. “The International Intelligence Agency. IIA.”
“What's that?”
“It's a video game. I play it all the time. They have one here.”
“Show me.”
The first time I played Time Crisis Three was in the lobby of a multiplex movie theater while we were waiting for The Stupid Lame Comedy of the Week to start.
The game is huge. It has two video screens, both about as wide as a car door, set up inside these hulking black boxes. Two people can play at once. You get to pretend you're these good-guy super agents with the IIA, the International Intelligence Agency, and your job is to basically shoot as many of the bad guys as you can. The bad guys are these thugs who pop up all over the place-behind rocks and cargo crates, out of gopher holes and jeeps and this helicopter-type air-plane-and you have to make them go boom before they do the same to you.
It's extremely cool.
And extremely violent.
We leave the manager's office and go to where two kids are blasting away at the doublewide screens. They're knocking down the enemy, racing through a clip of ammo strung across the screen in a bar graph of bullets.
Their time runs out.
The one on the left must've done pretty good. He gets to enter his initials in the game's flashing list of top scorers.
He'll be number ten.
Another high scorer occupies spots one through nine: H-A-H.
“Harriet,” Ceepak says. “Ashley is her middle name. Harriet Ashley Hart.”
Seeing the letters stacked on top of each other, running down the screen in a list (HAH, HAH, HAH), I can hear Ashley laughing at us.
Ceepak turns his back on the machine.
“This must be where they sent her for target practice.”
I'm a little slow to follow, and my face shows it. He explains.
“Ashley is our shooter. This was her pistol range.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
We're driving up to the city.
Ceepak's riding shotgun, studying the Polaroids of Ashley in her blood-spattered sundress.
Jane Bright is in the back seat, gazing out the window.
I'm up front, wondering what kind of kid kills her own father.
We're on cruise control, doing 85 up the parkway. No sirens or lights, but no state trooper's going to pull over a speeding cop car, even if it is painted turquoise and pink.
I have plenty of time to wonder about the old guy messing around with Ashley. Who was it? Who would do that kind of stuff with a girl her age? I mean, is she even thirteen? Was it the chief? Did he have some kind of mommy-daughter three-way deal going on?
I look up into the rearview mirror and catch Jane's gaze.
“Officer Bright? Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“If some old man was really forcing himself on Ashley, would she even be interested in doing anything with boys like Ben?”
“You mean would she be ‘loose’ like he claims? A hoochie-mama?”
“Yeah. Wouldn't she be sick of sex? Or even anybody, you know- touching her?”
“Many sexually abused children become promiscuous. It's how they've been taught to seek attention. If the abuse has been ongoing, it might be the only way the child knows to earn someone's love.”
Anybody who does this kind of sick stuff to children? I'm starting to think Ceepak should be allowed to shoot them in dark hotel rooms with his sniper weapon system.
“It's why there were no palm prints on her side of the safety bar,” Ceepak says to the stack of photos in his lap.
“Hunh?”
“At the Tilt-A-Whirl. There were no bloody prints on the safety bar. Remember the splatter pattern?”
“No” is probably the wrong answer, so I choose to remain silent.
“Like a flicked paint brush? But only on the bar in front of Mr. Hart. Nothing on Ashley's side.”
Oh, yeah. That. Forgot about that.
All I really remember is the bucket of blood dripping down Ashley's face and dress.
“It's why she was so soaked,” Ceepak says, reading my mind.
I glance over and see that he is re-enacting the shooting as best he can while riding in the front seat of a car. He puts his hands together and aims an imaginary pistol at the windshield.
“She was covered with blood because she stood in front of her father and fired a full clip. If she had been sitting next to him, as we initially chose to believe, only one side of her dress would have picked up the spray. The other side? It would have remained relatively clean.”