Page 7 of Devil and the Deep Blue Fish

Ellery noticed that Jackson was sopping his bread in the broth and eating that and was actually sort of cheered. Whatever had been gnawing Jackson alive this last month, it seemed that having a case he could sink his teeth into really did improve his hunger.

“So,” he said, as the sound of cutlery and slurping died down slightly. “Tell us what you’ve got for us.”

“It’s disturbing,” John told him frankly after wiping his mouth. “And the source is a hungry, traumatized fourteen-year-old boy. But the boy was scared, and he targeted Galen and me as we left the church precisely because we were a couple—I’m sure of it. Think about that. Whatever hells of debaucheryweoffered, he was thinking at least we were safer than what he’d seen in the hands of the….” His freckled face screwed up in distaste. “Stepford Dragons,” he almost spat.

“So what did they do?” Jackson asked. “The Moms for Clean Living,” he offered to Ellery, which was good, because Ellery had almost forgotten the real name of the women’s group whose claim to fame was stripping school libraries of books about anybodynotstraight, white, and lithium levels of happy.

“Well let’s go back to when Cowboy woke up in their place. He said his mom told ‘the lying one’—those are his words—that he should go with her, so he ended up in a van with the logo on the side. So whatever is going on, plausible deniability is right out the window. After that he said he was transported to the place near the church and thrown into a room with four beds and a window, and the first thing he did was scale down the window. The part I hadn’t gotten to was that the four other kids in the roomjoinedhim. One stayed behind, one got caughtas they touched the ground, and another, according to him, was tackled by a security guard as they were running down the street.”

“And nobody said anything?” Ellery asked, incensed.

“The guard was shouting ‘Thief’ according to Cowboy,” John said with a weary shrug. “It was an easy enough mistake to make. So that left Cowboy and Caleb, and Caleb, it turned out, had been living out of dumpsters for a month before the Stepford Dragons got him the second time. He was savvy—led Cowboy toward two blocks of nothing but restaurants and nooks and crannies. The boys stayed there for a day, and they started to fret about the other two boys. They ventured back toward the compound…. Have you seen the place?” John asked suddenly.

“Yes,” Ellery said distastefully. “Compound is about right.” The building was an old Victorian style, as he recalled, with a stone façade that had probably been added in the sixties, when it was fashionable. The shaded wall was covered in jasmine, which is probably what the boys had climbed down, and the plain stretch of grass in the back was surrounded by a severe-looking but ultimately useless wrought iron fence. The grounds were big enough to cover the front and back of their strip on the block, although the block had been zoned and built to have two houses on either side.

It looked like a security compound, but Ellery had no trouble imagining a bunch of adolescent boys could escape easily.

He glanced at Jackson, who had finished his bread and was now drinking his soup broth with some unexpected zest, and thought of him as a scrawny, angry adolescent. There was no doubt in his mind that Jackson Leroy Rivers would have led a rebellion outside those walls.

John nodded. “So Caleb told Cowboy to stand back, to hide in one of the corners and get ready to run. Cowboy did, and whilehe was hiding, he saw a woman he called ‘Retty’ cross in front of his spot. He said he knew her because she’d been the one driving the van that brought him from his apartment to the compound.”

Galen made a sound of violence. “His mother kissed his cheek, told him he was going to camp, and they slammed the back door. He couldn’t see where he was going.Fucking.Cowards.”

Ellery had the feeling there would be a lot of rage going around that night. “Agreed,” he said. “So this Retty crossed in front of him and—”

Galen and John shared a troubled glance. “Cowboy gets fuzzy here. He started to cry and say she shouldn’t have done Caleb that way, and we asked him where Caleb was, and he… he said, ‘On the sidewalk, forever.’”

Ellery put down his spoon, suddenly not feeling so sanguine about food. “Forever?” he asked, horrified.

“Anything else?” Jackson asked. “A sound? Did Caleb say anything? Did Cowboyhearanything? A fight? A gunshot? A scream?”

“We couldn’t get that far,” John said sharply. “Jesus, Jackson—the kid was shaking. We brought him to Isabelle’s with the plan of stripping him down and shaving his head for lice and feeding him, which is all pretty fucking traumatizing, and suddenly he was practically fetal in the back of the sedan.”

“I shall have to have Henry take it to be decontaminated tomorrow,” Galen said, wrinkling his nose. “The boy… well, he’d been on the streets for a good month.”

Ellery shared his distaste. It was embarrassing to be thinking about cleanliness in the face of something life and death, but Jackson had come home often enough with clothes that should have been incinerated and not washed—and hair that had needed to be deloused—that at this point he was thinking solely of the hassle.

Jackson had set his bowl down, and he let out a long, slow breath. “So he needs to get his feet under him,” he said softly. “Let’s give him a night to decompress at least. I’ll have Ellery drop me off at Isabelle’s place tomorrow, and Henry and I can have a conversation. I’ll text him tonight.”

“This is… troubling,” Ellery murmured. “I-I hateeverything about this.These women are well off, they’re white, and they’re being driven by some very powerful money for right-wing causes. Jackson, you and Henry are going to have to be… well, your most dramatic selves, I think, complete with costumes and backstories if you go sniffing around the compound. I’m going to need to get Crystal to do a computer workup—”

“And have AJ go talk to his street contacts,” Jackson said. “AJ was under for a little while. You hear more on the street when you’re buying drugs or turning tricks. AJ will know who to ask about fake rich white ladies.”

Ellery grimaced. “You may have to ask AJ to do that, Jackson. I still scare him.”

Jackson chuckled. “Naw, I think he just envies your suits.” He shook his head. “But yeah, it’s a sensitive subject. I’ll ask him.”

“I’ll call Lyle Langdon,” Ellery said. “He’s got his finger on the pulse of politics around here—he hates them, but he usually knows who’s scratching whose back.” He frowned for a moment. “Maybe Arizona Brooks too….”

“Isn’t she your sworn nemesis?” John asked.

Well, sheisthe senior ADA, Ellery had to concede. “Yes, but she’s also aware of politics. In fact she might know the local politicians who want the Stepford Dragons to clean up the street.”

“And I can have Jade run down missing boys,” Jackson said, and then, more soberly, “or unidentified bodies.”

They all shuddered.

John was the one who broke the silence. “You guys ever think, I don’t know, that maybe Cowboy just got scared and Caleb ended up going back to his house as sort of a failed experiment?”

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