“Is that what happened with the Spence family?”
Scanlon shrugged. “Look, it’s not inside knowledge or anything. Everyone in town saw it happen. The bank foreclosed on that whole block practically overnight, and the houses that didn’t have mortgages got condemned. Next thing you know, the fences went up, and Town Hall was handing out a construction permit to Utkin to put up Mallard Park. Maybe the foreclosure wasn’t entirely aboveboard. Maybe some people who didn’t deserve to lose their houses did. But no one was asking questions because Utkin was going to give work to over a hundred people, one way or another.” He stopped ripping up the cup and brushed the shreds off the table into his hand. “But yeah, the Spences were one of the families who lost their house. That was about four months before.”
Scanlon jabbed his finger against the paper hard enough to make it slide over the table toward Tancredi. He waited a second, as though he expected them to say something. When they didn’t he cleared his throat uncomfortably and started again.
“Anyhow, the mother had been kicking up a fuss about the foreclosure. She wrote letters, she’d turn up at Town Hall meetings with her kids in tow—the baby and the little boy—and ask questions, and she’d yell abuse at the crews on the construction site. Eventually they got sick of it. So when they found her on the site one night, they had her arrested. It was the weekend, so you know, they figured it would keep her out of their hair for a while.” He stopped and swallowed hard. The self-justification of it being an accident, of it being nobody’s fault, really was starting to flag. “They didn’t know that she’d been sleeping in the car, you see. Her and the kids. It was parked in the parking lot, and… she had the child lock on, so they couldn’t get out and wander off.”
“She didn’t tell anyone?” Tancredi asked. “Didn’t tell the cops to get her kids?”
Scanlon shook his head. “Not at first,” he said. “I guess she thought she’d get out in a couple of hours, enough time to get back to them, and she didn’t want to risk having the children taken away. I guess by the time she realized that they weren’t going to let her out… no one was listening.”
Or if they heard her, they didn’t believe her. People shoved in the cells overnight came out with a lot of reasons why theyhadto get out. Cloister had closed his ears to enough of them. If it had been his arrest, he couldn’t swear he wouldn’t have assumed Hettie’s children were as imaginary as the drunk’s Hollywood job interview. “How long?” Cloister asked.
“Saturday night. All day Sunday,” Scanlon said. “The foreman parked next to the car when he came in Monday and saw the boy in the car. He called it in.”
“Then you lied.”
“Yeah,” Scanlon said. “Look, it wasn’t Utkin’s fault. Who leaves their kids locked in a car in California? In the middle of Santa Ana season. They didn’t know. It’s not like they’d have left the little girl to die. She just did, so… they just asked me to move the car out into the street. So that when the news hit the press, the development wouldn’t be blamed. I mean, it wasn’t their fault. Not criminally. It was just a favor. What harm did it do?”
It was Tancredi who lunged to her feet. The chair skidded back and hit the wall. She grabbed the report, crumpled it in her hand, and shook it in his face. He cringed back from her.
“What harm?” she said. Her voice shook on the edge of a shout. “A little girl died. Her mother committed suicide because she got the blame, because she blamed herself, and what happened to that little boy?”
Scanlon looked affronted. “I got him out of that car,” he yelled back at her. “I got him to the hospital. If it weren’t for me, he’d have died as well.”
“If it weren’t for you? If—”
Cloister caught Tancredi’s arm before she could finish. “Can you give me a minute, Deputy?” he asked.
She irritably jerked her elbow free but nodded.
“If you’d just give me a moment, Mr. Scanlon,” she said.
He shrugged and wiped his hand over the back of his neck. There was sweat on his high forehead and drops of it caught in his receding gray hair. “I still don’t see what this has to do with my son,” he said.
Neither of them enlightened him before they left the room. Cloister, at least, was tempted. He closed the door behind him. Tancredi stalked down the hall with her hands clenched and her shoulders hunched. She got six paces away and turned to stalk back.
“Just kick a chair,” Cloister told her.
She snorted. “Is that what you do?”
He grinned at her. “I punch walls and tell Feds to go fuck themselves,” he said. “But you have ambitions and unbroken knuckles, so I’d stick to chairs.”
She glared at him but still turned and lashed a foot into one of the plastic chairs lined up against the wall. It went into the air and then dropped onto the other chairs. The metal legs tangled and scraped over the floor. Tancredi huffed out a sigh.
“That asshole,” she said. “That fucking asshole.” She sniffed and turned her back. “Goddammit,” she muttered with another sniff. “You tell anyone.”
He handed her a tissue. Some people cried, some people puked, and he punched things—the ones to worry about were the guys who didn’t feel anything. “Why do I know the name Spence?” he asked.
Tancredi scrubbed her eyes like she was punishing them and wiped her nose. “Fuck,” she muttered as she refolded the tissue to find a clean bit to wipe again. “Other than we were just talking about them?”
“I’ve heard it before,” he said. “I can’t place it, but it’s come up.”
She snorted ungracefully into the tissue and frowned. “You’ve gone through a lot of old case files,” she said. “Maybe it was in one of those? If this older boy is our ‘Hector,’ then maybe he got close to one of the other victims?”
Maybe. Cloister couldn’t refute the theory, but the context didn’t feel right. “I don’t think so. It was something else. Something….”
Tancredi blanched suddenly, and her mouth dropped open slightly. “Shit.”
