Fish on the Surface
“ELLERY,” HIS mother asked as he was piloting the Lexus through traffic, “did you forget product in your hair?”
It took every bit of concentration Ellery had to not wreck the car. “Did I do what?”
“I’m simply saying,” she told him as though commenting on the weather. “You’re usually impeccably groomed, and while you’ve shaved and plucked and bathed and combed and done all the usual things, your hair appears… unruly.”
Ellery actually felt a little sick. He and Jackson had emerged from the shower, and he’d done the usual things, but… but… he’d been planning to put on casual clothes afterward, and he’d forgotten to put product in his hair. It had been water-combed, but not… not sealed to his head.
“My God,” he said, shaken. “It’s like I’m wearing mismatched shoes.”
She laughed a little and pulled something from her purse. “Don’t worry, dear. I have some. You can comb it through when we park.”
“Thanks, Mother,” he said, feeling humble.
“You’re nervous,” she said, as usual cutting through to the heart of things.
“I’m scared,” he amended. “Jackson is out there doing scary things, we’re talking to the DOJ and getting the FBI involved, for God’s sakes, and we have”—his voice trembled—“no idea. No idea how far this goes or how bad this is.” Which was why they’d discussed the FBI’s involvement after Jackson had hung up. No, Jackson didn’t know about it—and he probably wouldn’t approve. But this was kidnapping, and it spread across more than one county, and the FBI had a claim on jurisdiction. Add in the prominence of Gannett Hoover—and the ex-con who’d been paroled in Ohio and turned up in California with a different name—and the FBI was their best bet for law enforcement.
But that didn’t mean getting their approval or their help would be easy—or timely.
His mother let out a long breath. “I… I don’t know if this will help to know, Ellery, but this particular case is a special sort of awful. I know you and Jackson have dealt with some bad guys—the Dirty/Pretty killer brought you together, for sweet heaven’s sakes. But this…. There is a heartbreaking sort of evil here, the kind that preys on children, that seeks to break all the bones in their soul and rebuild them, like how in some cultures, women were required to bind their feet, starting at a very young age. This is the same thing, but worse somehow. They’re requiring young people to bind their identities.” She took another breath. “All I can tell you is that this started when you and Jackson wouldn’t stand by and just let things happen when your friend got hurt. And when you discovered he was collateral damage in a larger war, you didn’t just hunt down your one soldier. From what I can see, Jackson had a chance to bring in Henry’s assailant, and he didn’t. You never questioned him on it either.”
“We needed to see where the kids were being kept, like Cowboy said, and we needed to see if Caleb was really dead, and if he was the only one, and—”
“And you needed to stand for people whom nobody knew about, because they had nobody else to stand for them,” she said with a small, pained smile. “Is it any wonder I want to work in your office, son? That I love throwing myself so much into your battles? I am a very good lawyer, Ellery. I have done some things I am very proud of. But you and Jackson, working in concert, are a true and mighty force, and yes. I will stick my unwanted mother-in-law nose into anything you’ll let me so I can be a part of it, because I have done things working with the two of you that feel almost magical. Don’t be nervous, Ellery. You walk in there and own the room, because the state’s attorney general and the FBI are here to protect the public, and your tiny law firm has been doing their goddamned job for them. It’s time they pony up.”
Ellery felt his spine stiffen and his chin lift as his mother spoke, and just in time because parking was full in front of the DOJ and he had to negotiate the parking by the levy. First, though, he dropped his mother off so she could start the meeting on time if he couldn’t find any, and as she stepped out of the vehicle, he leaned over so she could hear him.
“Mother?”
“Yes, dear?”
“I love you dearly, which you know. But you should also know that Jackson adores you and is secretly grateful for every moment you spend embroiled in our cases.”
She thew her head back and laughed as she was slamming the door behind her.
He was in no way discouraged—it had needed to be said.
Parking really was a bear midday, and Ellery hustled up in time to be ushered into the AG’s office along with his mother, and he tried to control his breathing.
“You’re barely out of breath,” his mother remarked.
“I have to run in the morning with Jackson,” he reminded her, keeping his voice low. “Keeps us both in shape.”
“Mm.” And then, as though flipping a switch, his mother’s head tilt, her smile, the way she held her shoulders, even the way she wielded her briefcase, all of it assumed the fearsome edges of a shark’s tooth, a steely sharpness that drew the attention of every eye in the room.
The AG—a tall sixtyish woman wearing a wide-legged gray pinstriped pantsuit, with her gray hair pulled back into a smooth twist—swung toward them from her desk, her hand extended.
“Taylor Cramer!” she said, delight oozing from her very pores. “I have heard so much about you, but I never thought I’d have the pleasure.”
“Maudie Arthur,” Ellery’s mother said, her tone set on “polite enthusiasm.” “I’m so glad our paths have finally crossed. I’ve heard quite a bit about you as well.”
Ellery kept his own polite smile on his face, but while he didn’t speak “female catfight” that well, he had a feeling his mother and Maudie Arthur were in the process of exposing their claws and inspecting each point for sharpness.
“And is this your son?” Ooh…. Ellery heard it then. The hint of condescension, as though Ellery was a third grader at “take your child to work” day.
“Ellery Cramer,” he said, sticking out his hand with the assumption she would shake it. “Of Cramer, Rivers, and Henderson. It’s a pleasure.”
She shook his hand, her own cold and bony, and regarded him with some sharpness. “Oh,” she said, as though just putting two things together. “I have heard of you. The Dirty/Pretty killer? That Russian mob thing this summer? And, wait….” She gnawed her lower lip. “The city DA who had to resign last fall, and the sniper at the college. It seems as though your law firm had a hand in all those situations, didn’t it?”
“We try to stay busy,” he said blandly.
“You try to stick your fingers into everybody’s pie,” she said, sounding sharp, and his chin went up in defense.
“I’ve been taught not to let injustice slide by because fixing it gets my hands dirty,” he said. “That Russian mob thing, by the way, restored a busload of trafficked children to their parents—”
“And put you and Jackson in the hospital,” his mother added.
“You are fucking welcome.” Ellery smiled with all his teeth, his irritation at the woman making his hackles rise.
Nobody was more surprised than he was when she actually took a step back.
“No disrespect intended,” she said, blinking slowly. “Who’s Jackson?”
Ellery couldn’t explain it. It was like being a bird of prey and ruffling his feathers—or being a dragon and puffing up his mantle, ready for the attack. What he wanted to scream was, “Keep his name out of your whore mouth!” and he was grateful for his mother when she spoke instead.
“The PI at his firm.”
Ellery didn’t dart his eyes to meet hers. The fact that she hadn’t said, “My son’s fiancé,” with full parental pride, told him that this woman had set her hackles in place as well.
“Well, my goodness—I hope you’re giving him hazard pay.”
“He’s very dedicated,” Ellery said blithely, “and it’s been lovely to take a trip down memory lane, but we have some rather urgent business today. I’m sure you’ve been briefed?”
“Your mother has given me a bare-bones explanation of why you’re interested in Gannett Hoover’s property, but I fail to see the urgency of the request. Why can’t you wait one more day—or even a week—before you search his property?”
Ellery needed a yoga breath, but he didn’t have time, and he definitely couldn’t appear weak in front of this woman.
“My mother explained to you the links between the Moms for Clean Living and Gannett Hoover’s advisor, Newton Dwayne, who lives on Mr. Hoover’s property, am I correct?” Ellery asked, trying to keep his pulse from roaring in his ears.
“Yes—I understand the director of the service group—”
“Hate group,” Ellery said grimly. “Moms for Clean Living is in the process of being classified as an alt-right hate group.” He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a folder. “Here are copies of documents with which they claimed they were taking custody of—and I quote here—‘recalcitrant students’ from parents, in order to ‘school them in Christian methods.’ And here,” he pulled out the folder of faxed reports from the child advocates who had been placing children and intervening with parents and counting bruises and atrocities since eight o’clock the night before, “is a folder full of what was actually done to those children when they were supposed to be ‘in school.’”
“These are all notarized,” the state district attorney said numbly.
“They are,” Ellery confirmed. “And they’re horrible.”
“But Gannett Hoover—”
“And here,” Ellery said, pulling out the copies of the property that Jackson had copied the night before. “These are copies of the holdings controlled by Moms for Clean Living, Valerie Trainor, Newton Dwayne’s ex-wife, as chief signatory on the first line.”
“Which means—”
“And this holding, specifically,” Ellery said, pulling out the specially annotated copy, littered with Post-it notes, most of which had big black arrows on them. “Which is the property Gannett Hoover lives in and calls ‘his California ranch’—”
“In spite of the fact that he still owns a house in the Midwest,” Ellery’s mother added helpfully. For some reason, that had burned them both.
“So that’s a problem for the election board—” Maude Arthur tried to interject.
“Be that as it may,” Ellery said smoothly, “it establishes a direct connection between Valerie Trainor’s criminal child abuse in Sacramento and the potential for the same sort of child abuse in Sonora. And here,” he reached into his briefcase once again, and Maude Arthur was beginning to eye the battered leather receptacle with a great deal of dread, “is the list of children unaccounted for from the Moms for Clean Living so-called school.” Fetzer and Hardison had come through in a big way. Apparently they’d put their entire squad room on a phone canvass, and he hoped this folder would be much smaller in a few hours. “We rescued nine last night―”
“Rescued?” she asked, seeming to pounce on the word.
“As they are quoted many times saying in the course of the advocate reports,” Ellery replied, his voice hard. “So we rescued nine, we know of the whereabouts of two more, but I have a folder here with over forty names. Now, some of those kids may live on the streets—the child advocates are compiling a list—and some of them may have returned to their homes.”
“We have people working right now on calling the parents’ homes,” Taylor Cramer said, and Ellery nodded, giving thanks for Jade, Crystal, and AJ, who compiled the contact numbers for the police to use. “But so far, there are at least eight children unaccounted for there.”
“What makes you think that they might be in Sonora?” Maude Arthur asked, and it was clear she’d been caught in the web of logic, so Ellery hoped he could close his case.
“Besides the personnel overlap,” Ellery said, “we have this.” And with that, he pulled out his tablet, opened to the small news story about finding the bodies of three adolescent boys in an abandoned mine off Old Ward Road. “This is less than fifty yards from the property line of Gannett Hoover’s residence. We have two men and a cadaver dog up in the hills at this moment, checking similar locations.”
Maude Arthur’s face swept bone white. “Bodies?” she said faintly.
“Yes, ma’am. We were hoping to go up to Hoover’s place and gain entry, look around, and see if we can discover any places for another ‘school’ like the one in Sacramento.” He paused. “Or worse.”
She stared at him. “What could be worse?” she asked faintly.
Ellery had saved this last as the cherry on the shit sundae. “Gannett Hoover’s chief advisor is his old pastor and choir teacher, formerly known as Conway Schmitt. Mr. Schmitt—Valerie Trainor’s ex-husband—served five of fifteen years for sexually abusing his choirboys, of which Gannett Hoover was one. Given that the bodies found in the mineshaft were adolescent males—”
“Oh dear God.”
It was not his imagination. Maude Arthur looked like she was going to throw up.
“Do you need a trash receptacle, Maudie?” his mother asked solicitously.
Arthur shook her head and took a hurried sip of water, and then another, seeming to get herself under control. “Yes,” she said, her voice weak. “You need FBI backup—”
“We’d prefer it if they waited on the edge of the property,” Ellery said quickly. “We’d rather obtain evidence and, you know, snoop around a little. My law partner is coming. We would like to question Gannett about the property and the holdings—my partner studied the deeds and seems to think the LLC apparatus that binds them is particularly unsavory. It appears very… money-launderingey to Mr. Henderson, and he’d like to take a look around.”
Arthur nodded, not apparently listening, which was why Ellery wasn’t stressing too much about making “money laundering” into an adjective.
“Of course,” she murmured. “Whatever you need. Just….” She stared up at Ellery’s mother with bleak eyes. “Taylor, you should know. These people—the Moms for Clean Living—donated heavily to my campaign. I will give you all the manpower you need, and all of the backup I can, but….” She glanced around the office, which was nicely appointed in cream and chrome, with wood accents and a plethora of houseplants dominating one sunlit wall.
She had made this place hers, Ellery realized, and for a moment, he felt remorse for what he and his mother had just done to her, without realizing they were firing a killing shot into her career.
“Yes,” she said with a sigh. “But better to go down doing the right thing. I just might not be able to help you once this gets out and my constituents demand my head.”
“We’ll take whatever help you can give us,” Ellery said, slightly less cold than he had been a moment ago. “But if you’re going to call in a special agent in charge and put a unit together, I’m afraid it’s got to be now. If our search party finds anything, they’re going to need us there.”
“Oh Lord,” Maude Arthur whispered. “Yes.” She gave a soft little sound of surrender. “Let’s get this done.”
SAC GERALD Manning was not happy about being given fifteen minutes to assemble a team—and even less excited to be told they were to “wait outside” the fences of the mansion’s extensive grounds while Ellery, Taylor, and Galen went inside to question the congressman and his chief of staff.
“Why even call us?” Manning was a squat, muscular, very bald man in his fifties who wore his disgruntlement like a Halloween mask. It was possible this man had six kids and spent his weekends grilling by the pool, but Ellery didn’t want to ever be invited to that pool party.
The thought made him miss Jackson, and he remembered the other thing he had to tell Manning that he wasn’t going to like.
“We don’t have a warrant yet,” Maude Arthur said, her cell phone held to her ear. “I’m trying to get hold of a judge who will issue one, but it’s going to take a lot of talking and a lot of presenting the case.”
“So why go now?” Manning asked.
“Because we have reason to suspect there are young people in danger there,” Maude Arthur told him bleakly. “And we have statements taken by licensed advocates that indicate the people at the estate are engaged in active child endangerment, if not actual harm.” Her eyes slid to Ellery’s mother’s implacable face. “Don’t say it, Taylor.”
“I wasn’t going to,” Ellery’s mother replied, but Ellery could hear a thousand position papers these two women must have been mentioned in about how damning rhetoric and demonization of vulnerable communities could result in real-life harm.
Ellery’s mother believed firmly that hate speech caused irrecoverable damage, and the case they’d both laid out in front of State Attorney General Maude Arthur proved her right.
“Wait a minute….” Gerald Manning cocked his head. “Does this have anything to do with the teenagers who were rescued from that weird Karen-compound in the middle of the city?”
“Moms for Clean Living,” Ellery said dryly. “Our paralegal has forbidden the use of the appellation ‘Karen’ in deference to the very nice women named Karen that she knows.”
“Are you that afraid of your paralegal?” Manning asked, frowning at him.
“Yes,” Ellery and his mother said in tandem.
Manning took a hasty step back, and Ellery tried to clarify. “She’s my future sister-in-law.”
Manning’s eyebrows went up. “Oh,” he said. “Then I fully understand. Is the bride working for the firm as well?”
“No,” Ellery said, hating this conversation in this moment with so much else at stake, “but the other groom is. In fact, we need to get this show on the road now , because he and our other PI are currently chasing down leads with a cadaver dog on the federal property right outside of our target in Sonora.”
Manning stared at him. “Who are you people?” he asked, and there went Ellery’s last nerve.
“Us? We’re the people who took down the Dirty/Pretty killer,” he snapped. “And the guy who made him. We’re the people who helped bring in a busload of children about to be trafficked by the Russian mob. We’re the people who weeded out the choirboys, that group of corrupt police officers who tried to get an undercover agent to commit murder and then beat up a disabled man in a public park. We’re the people who found kids being abused in the name of God and got them the fuck out of there, and we’re the people who are perfectly willing to walk into the goddamned lion’s den to help you get your hands on some real fucking psychopaths, but nobody will get a goddamned move on !”
Manning gaped at him, and so did Maude Arthur, and so did his mother.
For a moment, all Ellery could hear was the ringing in his ears.
“Is there anybody else you needed on this little jaunt?” Manning asked, seemingly out of the blue.
“My law partner and my sister-in-law,” Ellery said grimly.
“Go arrange to have them meet us here,” Manning replied. “You can have two SUV’s in your entourage, and they will stop, as you requested, outside the grounds. We can equip you with listening devices so you’ll never be without backup. And as soon as you get what you need—or Ms. Arthur here gets a go-ahead on a warrant—we’ll get you out of there. Is that good enough?”
Ellery blinked. “Well, uhm, yes . Thank you. That’s exactly what we needed. Thank you.”
Manning shook his head in what looked like disbelief. “Am I really gonna meet the other guy who helped you take down the Dirty/Pretty Killer? Because my behavior analysis coordinator is going to think I’m a total badass.”
“He’s the guy out with the cadaver dog and its handler,” Ellery said weakly. “If you’ve got something more fitting for tramping through the wilderness than that suit, you can help him yourself. We’re meeting up before Mother and I go through the front door.”
“Is there anybody else you needed on this little jaunt?” Manners asked, seemingly out of the blue.
“My law partner and my sister-in-law,” Ellery said grimly.
“Go arrange to have them meet us here,” Manners replied. “You can have two SUV’s in your entourage, and they will stop, as you requested, outside the grounds. We can equip you with listening devices so you’ll never be without backup. And as soon as you get what you need—or Ms. Arthur here gets a go-ahead on a warrant—we’ll get you out of there. Is that good enough?”
Ellery blinked. “Well, uhm, yes . Thank you. That’s exactly what we needed. Thank you.”
Manners shook his head in what looked like disbelief. “Am I really gonna meet the other guy who helped you take down the Dirty/Pretty Killer? Because my behavior analysis coordinator is going to think I’m a total badass.”
“He’s the guy out with the cadaver dog and its handler,” Ellery said weakly. “If you’ve got something more fitting for tramping through the wilderness than that suit, you can help him yourself. We’re meeting up before Mother and I go through the front door.”
Manners—who had displayed an impressive poker face until now—perked up. “Really? Let me go alert my unit.”
—who had displayed an impressive poker face until now—perked up. “Really? Let me go alert my unit.”
He left, and Ellery tried to control the whirling of the room—and recent events—as he pulled out his phone. He was about to tag Jade and tell her what was up when he caught his mother staring at him in fascination.
“What?” he asked grumpily. “Was that too ostentatious?”
“Not at all,” she said, giving him a pleasant smile. “I’ve just never heard you list your resumé like that before. Between you and Jackson, you really are badasses.”
Ellery snorted. “Leave the badassery to Jackson,” he muttered. “I’ll be waiting for my medal for lawyering to arrive in the mail for the rest of my life.”
“I’ll have one made for you as a wedding gift,” she said with a straight face, and he gave her a sour look before hitting the Call button.
Jade picked up before the first ring had even finished, and they were on the move.