The last time Jessica had been to San Quentin she had been visiting Jake Trelles, the Silver Lake Killer. The case that had begun it all. She’d had little hope of the man speaking to the cop who had put him away for the unsolved disappearances of women going back a decade, women like Bernice Beauvoir. Young, pretty, full of plans and ambitions, women walking to their cars in darkened parking lots or taking short cuts between backstreets, the kind of women who had been fodder for serial killers seemingly forever. As she’d predicted, Trelles had stonewalled her on questions she still had about the case.
Now she put her gun, wallet, phone and hire-car keys in the same coin-operated locker in the visitors’ centre and took her badge and ID to the bored yet sceptical women running the processing centre. It was outside of visiting hours, and staff had been specially called in from the prison to see Jessica through. Routines broken. Rules bent. They didn’t like it. Jessica stood with her arms outstretched as a guard ran the body scanner wand up and down her more times than was really necessary.
Jessica had been to San Quentin to talk to inmates maybe five times in her career. The prison was an hour and a half’s drive from the airport. Three hours of driving, one hour for a standard visit, and two hours’ worth of delays across arrival and departure – waiting on the tarmac, getting coffee at the airport, getting through security, hiring and returning the car. She asked herself why she hadn’t recognised the pattern as soon as she saw the times attached to Dayly’s airline tickets. Jessica consoled herself that without the letters from John Fishwick, Dayly’s trip to San Quentin had been impossible to guess.
She followed a yellow painted stripe on the sidewalk towards death row. To her left, San Francisco Bay sprawled beyond the fences and watchtowers, glittering and thrumming with life under a hard blue sky. Ferries leaving Alcatraz, crab boats bringing in their loads, followed by enormous black seals. She showed her ID again at the heavy double doors to the row. The long room she entered was empty. The two lines of steel cages where full-contact visits were held were silent and still, their folding chairs stacked neatly against the inner walls of bulletproof glass and steel mesh. Vending machines hummed against one wall. The last time she had come here, she’d stood aside to make room while a little old woman carried a massive tray of snacks towards a cage where a man in his forties, presumably her son, sat waiting in his prison denims in the furthest cage, a pink party hat strapped on his head.
Jessica took a stool that was bolted to the ground near one of the glass visitation windows, as directed by a guard. When John Fishwick arrived he was not cuffed, and his pale denim shirt was rumpled. He was taller than Jessica expected, broad shoulders pulling the front of the shirt tight, a head of silver hair slicked back against the sides of his head. Jessica had only seen pictures of Dayly Lawlor, but she thought she recognised the girl’s long, thin nose and deep, thoughtful brown eyes in the man’s weathered visage.
‘Well, this is a novelty,’ John said when he picked up the intercom handset. He took a packet of cigarettes from his back pocket, lit one and blew smoke against the glass as he looked over what he could see of Jessica’s body. ‘Visiting outside of hours. Cop or fed?’
‘Cop,’ Jessica said. ‘West LAPD. I’m here to talk about Dayly.’
‘That’s a long way for a cop to come to investigate an assault charge,’ John said. ‘So I assume it’s not that.’
‘What?’
‘She came here and visited. I assaulted her. That’s why I’m in here and not out there, where I usually am.’ He pointed through the glass to the cages over Jessica’s shoulder. ‘I lost my contact privileges. Won’t get them back for a couple of years now, I suspect.’
‘Why did you assault her?’ Jessica asked stiffly.
‘She wrote to me asking if I’m her daddy, telling me she’s all messed up about her life and this and that.’ He shrugged. ‘I didn’t care. I kept her on the line after I saw her picture. She was a little honey. Most girls who write to death-row inmates are real warthogs. I wanted to see if I could get a piece of that ass.’
‘You didn’t stop to think that she might actually be your daughter?’ Jessica scoffed.
‘No. I guess I didn’t think too much about it.’ John rubbed his nose on the back of his tattooed hand. ‘A man takes what presents itself.’ Jessica noticed a deep, jagged scar on the inside of his wrist, no doubt a suicide attempt on the inside. They were frequent on the row, she knew.
‘So what are you here for, if not the assault?’ he asked. Jessica saw a flash of something in his eyes. Genuine interest poking through the false bravado, the practised boredom, like a thorn hiding in a knitted sweater. ‘I haven’t heard from her in a couple of weeks. What’s going on?’
‘She’s missing,’ Jessica said.
‘Oh,’ John said. Jessica watched carefully, but the wall had gone up again. The corner of his mouth twitched, and nothing more. ‘Missing how?’
Jessica described the circumstances of the crime scene at Dayly’s apartment, Al Tasik’s bust on a car full of Crips with Dayly riding in the back. John listened, smoking, staring at his tar-stained fingernails.
‘Maybe these Crip fellows found out about me,’ John said. ‘Knew she was coming to see me. Maybe they bought in to all the bullshit about the hidden money and threatened her.’
‘So there is no further hidden money?’ Jessica asked. ‘I’ve read your letters to Dayly. You hint at it pretty strongly.’
‘Yeah. See, that’s what you’ve got to do to get them here.’ John smirked. ‘The women. Chicks want to come here and visit, but they don’t want to look like sickos. They don’t want to tell their friends they’re in love with a death-row inmate they’ve never even met yet, so they need a reason to visit, at least initially. They need a story. It’s called a Pull. The serial killers – they’re the most popular. Women write to them from all over the world. So their Pull is that they’ve got extra victims they want to confess about. Then the girls have a respectable reason to come here, you know, so they can solve a crime. Help the victims’ families. You pull them in, and then you get your grabby-grabby.’
‘Grabby-grabby?’ Jessica said.
‘Yeah.’ John flashed his full set of teeth, at least half of them gold. ‘There’s a guy in here. The Silver Lake Killer. You heard of him?’
‘I might have.’ She didn’t know if Fishwick knew she’d arrested Trelles, but she wasn’t going to take the bait if he did.
‘He told this woman lawyer from San Jose that he has a partner out there somewhere to this day, a guy still killing girls. The lawyer started visiting on the regular, and within a few weeks she’d forgotten all about the whole partner story. She visits once a month now and pays a guard a hundred bucks for that end cage there, the one behind the pylon. Two years she’s been coming here to give him a blow job and stock up his commissary account. They’re getting married, end of the year.’
‘Awesome,’ Jessica said. ‘That’s really wonderful. I’m so pleased you told me that.’ She gave him a big, sarcastic smile.
‘I had my fun with Dayly while she was here. Shame I won’t be seeing her again,’ John sighed. ‘Maybe I forced her a little, but I was sure she’d be thinking about it some, later on, maybe when she went to bed that night. She’d be back.’
Jessica took a moment to swallow her revulsion. ‘Was it really worth it?’
He shrugged. ‘I could die tomorrow. I’m a highly desirable target in here. I killed a kid. All the other inmates have got a hard-on for me. So I’ve got to get what I can get, while I can get it.’
‘You’re a real loony tune, aren’t you?’
‘Your face is classic.’ John thumped the steel tabletop in front of him in hilarity. ‘You’re so horrified. You know, I didn’t even catch your name.’
‘It’s Jessica.’
‘Jessica. Pretty. You’re Latina?’
‘Dayly is gone, and her activities in the past few weeks have been strange,’ Jessica said. ‘We know that she was trying to hire a plane. You said in your letters that she wanted to “fly away” into a new life. Those things together suggest to me that you had her pretty convinced that the money was real. Did she leave here knowing it was all a Pull?’
‘I don’t know,’ he yawned. ‘I don’t really remember. I was pretty distracted during the visit.’
Jessica sighed.
‘The first one was real enough. Burying the cash in Pasadena, that was a mistake,’ John continued. He leaned back on his stool, cupped his hands at the back of his head and stretched. ‘I didn’t think about who might get access to it. You’ve seen the reports. You know a bunch of construction workers found it.’
‘I do,’ Jessica said.
‘Yeah, well, those guys should have just split it. Instead they handed it in. Can you believe that? Now the government’s got it. It’ll go to paying these idiots’ wages.’ He nodded through the glass at two guards walking by behind Jessica. ‘Maybe I ought to send in some requests for how it’s spent. I mean, it’s my money. I got one pillow in my cell and it’s storm grey. It’s six years old.’
‘Uh-huh.’ Jessica nodded. ‘Almost as old as your youngest victim.’
‘Ooh.’ John smiled. ‘A smart-ass. I like smart-asses.’
‘If there’s nothing else you can tell me about Dayly’s disappearance, I’ve got to go.’ Jessica stood and smoothed down her shirt.
‘I’m sure if I’d thought about it more at the time, I’d have realised hiding the money like that where just anybody could come find it was a mistake,’ John said. ‘But I was pressed for time.’
‘Uh-huh,’ Jessica said again.
‘Maybe if I’d needed to hide a second stash, I’d have found a way to make sure I could control who got the money, if it couldn’t be me.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah.’ He smiled. ‘I’d make sure I could choose my beneficiary.’
‘You know what I think’—Jessica leaned on the table—‘I think you’re trying to pull me in now. Trying to make me believe there really is more money. Or maybe you’re trying to goad me into thinking Trelles had a partner who’s still out there, and that I have unfinished business. Let me guess: he’ll only talk to me through you. You want to give me a reason to visit you. To keep visiting. Eventually you’ll have me pressing my tits up against the glass for a few years until we can get into the cage together and you can have your grabby-grabby.’
John laughed, a hard, unexpected laugh that broke into coughs. ‘Now there’s a great idea!’
‘A good plan,’ she said. ‘I guess all you’ve got to do in there all day is plan things. But, like your career as a thief, it’s doomed to fail. I’m pretty revolted by you, as I am by most of the men I’ve met in your position. And if there is money, and you did try to pass it on to Dayly, that plan hasn’t worked either. In fact, it might just be the thing that’s got her killed.’
John sat quietly, a little of the bluster and bravado gone from his posture. Jessica waved and walked away, turning towards the guard station at the end of the room.