Page 91 of Devil and the Deep Blue Fish

“We were her spies,” Otto said. He looked away, and Jackson felt a terrible pang in his chest. “She’d… hold food in front of our faces and make us do things—trick kids into coming into the house, trap kids, get information….” His voice trailed off, and Jackson wondered whom Otto had betrayed for a hamburger because his stomach had been gnawing away athis conscience, at his personhood, like a rabid weasel. “We… we ratted out other kids so she’d feed us.”

“You did what you needed to, to survive,” Jackson told him, waiting until the boy met his eyes.

Otto nodded once and swallowed, and Jackson had wondered how long it would take to untangle the secrets harbored in that thin chest.

“I told her,” he whispered. “Where Caleb was hiding, after he and Cowboy escaped. She….” His voice broke. “I hurt my leg falling out of the window when we tried to escape, and she had medicine for it, and she wouldn’t give it to me unless I told her where he was hiding.” He wouldn’t look at Danny and Enrique. “My leg hurt so bad,” he said on a sob. “And I didn’t know… didn’t know she was going to… to make him make that sound.”

“Otto….” Jackson didn’t know how to comfort him.

“And then when I could, I escaped, but I didn’t know where I was. I was out, but she always fed us just enough to keep us coming back….” He put his face in his arms then and sobbed, and Aileen had given Jackson a speaking glance and taken the boy back into one of the bedrooms to work with him.

Jackson’s heart hurt for the kid. Food or loyalty. Integrity or pain. Hard enough choices for a man to make, but for a kid who’d had his identity broken down for weeks beforehand?

He hoped Aileen had a cure for self-hatred in her child advocate’s bag of tricks, because Otto would need one.

“Also,” Jackson went on, hoping to shake the terrible sadness of a stick-thin, barely adolescent boy named Otto. “We know that, as suspected, Twitty answered to a higher power.”

Next to him, Cody made a disgusted sound. “One she… how did Enrique phrase it?”

Jackson breathed out through his nose and quoted, “She would have sucked his dick through the phone if she could have.”

And Enrique had been their font of information on that front. Enrique’s superpower, Danny had told them bitterly, was his ability to pass for whatever adults needed.

His parents had thought he was straight until they’d caught him with the neighbor’s boy, and he wasverygood at looking like he had his head down and was doing menial tasks in the office when, in fact, he was picking up all sorts of “stupid, gross information.”

As Danny called it.

Information like the fact that Valerie Trainor still talked to her ex-husband like Renfield talked to Dracula. And he still called her “Mel,” which meant she went by three different names in the compound.

Jackson, who knew Ellery and his mother would spend part of their morning poring over all of the documents he’d sent Ellery the night before, had made a mental note to text Ellery to keep their eyes open for a combination of all three names—Melanie, Valerie, and Twitty—along with Schmitt, Trainor, and Schnarf, in any combination.

And Schmitt’s aliases too.

The thought of that made Jackson’s head ache fiercely, but then, it was supposed to. These were not honest people. The more names, the more LLCs, the more properties and charities and businesses and organizations they owned, the more chances to launder, sucker, and process money without ever getting noticed.

But that wasn’t all they’d learned.

Gannett Hoover’s wife was a “whining, puling bitch” who, according to Schmitt, needed to “get with the program.”

Retty was in hot water for whatever had happened to Caleb, and Piper Lutz had been assigned to “reorganize” the “off-campus residents.” Which was why Piper had been so hot to recruit Otto for Molotov cocktail hour.

And, Enrique knew, Piper was in trouble now because Otto had not returned.

“I wonder,” Jackson had speculated as Enrique spoke, “what kind of hornet’s nest is going on back at the Moms for Clean Living mansion.”

The two boys snorted with pure meanness, and the sound did something to heal Jackson’s soul a little.

“Who do you hope is getting chewed out the worst?” he asked. He was expecting to hear Retty, Twitty, or even Piper named, but the answer surprised him.

“Those two jagoffs who keep coming in to bother the girls,” Danny snarled. “Fuckers. The women know too. I heard that Piper twat laugh about ‘heterosexuality hour’ when the guys came up. I hope they get their heads broken open like cantaloupes, just like Caleb.”

The silence at the table was electric.

“Otto thinks Retty did that,” Jackson said softly.

“Otto was hiding behind the building and didn’t have a fucking second-story-window view, did he?” Danny retorted bitterly. “Not that Retty wouldn’t have fucking done it—don’t get me wrong. She talked about splitting our heads open all the fucking time. But the two guys—Jo-Jo and Teddy—they’re not as afraid of Gannett Hoover and that… that fucking enforcer he brings with him when he comes. The one who gropes Twitty all the time and then looks at her like she’s shit.”

And hello, Conway Schmitt.

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