Mission Road (Tres Navarre #6)(57)

“You’ve got the nerve—”

“You were off duty the night of Franklin’s murder. You had reason to hate the Whites. A cop nightstick was the murder weapon. Someone is desperate, Kelsey. Someone tried to frame Ralph, then Titus Roe. How long before they try to frame you?”

His face was pale and yellow, like something belonging in the light of the evidence basement. “That’s enough, Miss Lee.”

“Show me you’re on the right side,” Maia said. “Give that printout to Internal Affairs. Postpone the arrest warrant against Ralph.”

Kelsey picked up the paper. He crumpled it into a ball, kept it tight in his fist. “Listen to the news tomorrow morning, Miss Lee. And if you have any influence with your boyfriend, get him in here tonight.”

“You really want the media involved? You want them to hear about my visit to the evidence room?”

“What visit, Miss Lee? You said yourself—you’re not on the logbook. As far as I’m concerned, you were never here.”

He opened the interrogation room door.

He didn’t bother escorting her out.

If you have any influence with your boyfriend . . .

Before she was even out of the building, Maia had her phone in hand and was punching the number.

Chapter 14

AS CAGES GO, MY BEDROOM IN THE WHITE MANSION WAS a nice one.

Spanish Colonial bed. Oak bookcases. Fireplace. Saltillo tile floor with a Guatemalan rug. Disregard the surveillance camera mounted on the wall, the armed guard outside the door, the iron bars on the window, and it might’ve been a room at the Palacio del Rio.

I had to look hard to find evidence that the room once belonged to Frankie. In the back of the closet was a box of football trophies, pictures and an Alamo Heights Olmos yearbook from 1985. There was Frankie’s Mules jersey, his football helmet, baseball bat, water polo ball. His senior letter jacket looked very much like the one I had torched in a fit of angst during my college years.

Frankie’s collection of stuff creeped me out. I could’ve been looking through my own mementos. The same shots of friends, the same parties—there were even a few group pictures with me in them. If I had died at age twenty-one, my closet might’ve been preserved like this. His legacy and mine would’ve been hard to distinguish.

The only thing different in Frankie’s stuff was a nine-by-twelve framed sketch—a portrait of Madeleine White, twelve years old, her face done completely in shades of blue pastel. The likeness was unmistakable, yet the blue tint made her look different from the little girl I remembered. She stared out with a lost expression, like a shadow that had gotten separated from its owner. The inscription at the bottom, in childish letters that didn’t go with the expertly drawn portrait: To Frankie, From Maddy. Xmas, 1986.

I put the portrait back at the bottom of the box.

I searched for clothes that would fit me, but there were none in the closet. Madeleine’s goons had repossessed my suit, taken my phone, left me nothing but silk pajamas and no shoes, just to be sure I wouldn’t try running anywhere. The only footwear options in Frankie’s closet were a too-small pair of cleats and some enormous teddy bear-shaped slippers—a joke birthday gift, maybe.

I wasn’t that desperate.

I paced across the cold Saltillo tile floor.

Sleep was out of the question.

I tried the bars on the windows, just out of principle. They were fast.

The guard Virgil outside my door was still there all three times I opened it. He said he would not be willing to get me a glass of water. The third time, he locked the door from the outside.

I threw Frankie’s letter jacket over the surveillance camera, just to be petulant, and crashed on what used to be his bed.

I looked up at the exposed oak beams on the ceiling.

Outside, party music was still going, though the sound of voices was getting softer. The bedside clock glared 11:52.

I wondered if Zorro felt like this, trapped in the alcalde’s hacienda. I wished I had a black mask and a sword.

Mostly, I wished I had Maia Lee. If I pretended hard, I could imagine her lying next to me, warming the right side of the bed. I listened for her breathing—that deep sigh she makes sometimes in the middle of a dream.

I thought about her expression at the party. I have to tell you something.

I thought about that a lot.

She had mentioned her mother, who died having Maia. Maia had told me the story only once, and I’d gotten the message that she was not willing to share details. I knew Maia’s uncle had raised her after her father got sent away to a Communist reeducation camp. Her parents, Maia assured me, were not an emotional issue for her. She had never known her mom, never been close to her dad.

Which did not explain why she was thinking about her mother now.

I closed my eyes.

One of the photographs from Frankie’s closet bothered me. It was a fuzzy snapshot of Ralph and Frankie on graduation night, still in their electric blue AHHS graduation robes, drinking tequila in the Skyride at Brackenridge Park. I knew the location because I’d taken the picture. It was the last time I’d seen Frankie White alive.

For reasons that would only make sense to drunken teenagers, we’d bribed the Skyride operator a hundred dollars of Frankie’s money to let us take an after-hours trip above the park.

The Skyride was in its last years of operation. The cables were loose. The motorized winch smelled of burning oil. The Skycar itself, a canary yellow box just big enough for three people and a tequila bottle, had a rusted floor and creaky seats and a door that didn’t quite close. The operator stopped the ride for us at the top, a hundred feet in the air, so we could sway in the night wind and savor the possibility of plunging to our deaths on graduation night. When you’re eighteen, such things sound like great fun.