“Pantyhose cost twenty dollars?” Iggy asked.
Byrne stuck his face an inch from Iggy’s face. Iggy shrunk measurably. “Are you saying my partner doesn’t deserve the best?”
Trembling, without another word, Iggy dug around in his pockets, came up with a wad of damp bills, counted them out. Fourteen dollars. He flattened them on the table, stacked them, then handed them to Jessica, who took them without hesitation, even though she wondered where the hell they had recently been.
“You could, you know, come back for the rest later,” Iggy said. “I get paid today. I’ll have the rest later.”
“Come back?” Byrne said. “What makes you think you’re not coming with us?”
This had not occurred to Iggy. “But I didn’t do nothing.”
Byrne laughed. “You think that matters to someone like me?”
This also had not occurred to him. But the implications were far more serious. Iggy stared at the floor, remained silent.
“Now, my partner is going to speak to you,” Byrne said. “I want you to give her your full attention and your full respect.”
Byrne stood up, held the chair. Jessica sat down, her right knee poking through her torn pantyhose, thinking, Does anything look skankier than this?
“I’m going to ask you some simple questions,” Jessica said. “And you’re going to tell me the truth. Right, Iggy?”
It was clear that Ignacio Sanz had no idea what was coming his way. After a lifetime of crime, courts, cops, public defenders, jail, parole, probation, and rehab, it could be anything. “Yes, ma’am.”
Jessica reached into her portfolio, put a folder on her lap.
“First of all, we know all about you and Caitlin O’Riordan,” Jessica said. “So don’t even think about insulting our intelligence with a denial.” The truth was, they didn’t know anything of the sort. But with people like Iggy, this was the best approach. “This is not even an option.”
“Who?”
Jessica took out a photograph of Caitlin. She showed it to Iggy. “Caitlin Alice O’Riordan. Remember her?”
Iggy looked at the picture. “I don’t know this girl.”
“Look a little more closely.”
Iggy did, opening his eyes wide, perhaps believing this would let in more information. He shook his head again. “No. I’ve never seen her. She could be anybody.”
“No she can’t. That’s not possible. She has to be this person. She is this person. Or at least she was. You follow me?”
Iggy bug-eyed for a few seconds, then nodded slowly.
“Good. Here’s the 411. We have you, Iggy. We have you in Philly in May, out on the street. And the icing, the part with the little candy sprinkles, is that we also have a beautiful set of your fingerprints on something Caitlin had in her backpack.”
Iggy reacted as if he had just grabbed a hot copper wire. He rose slowly from his chair, shuddering with panic. “Whatever she says I did, I didn’t do it, man,” he pleaded. “I swear on my mother’s eyes. My mother’s grave.”
“Caitlin’s not saying anything. That’s because she’s dead. She’s been dead for four months. But you already know that, right?”
“What?” Iggy screamed. “Oh no, no, no, no. Uh-uh.”
“Well, here’s what I’m willing to do for you, Iggy. First off, I’m willing to cut your hospital stay by a hundred percent.”
Iggy, already hyperventilating, began to breathe even faster. “My hospital stay?”
“Yeah,” Jessica said. “What I mean by that is, if you don’t sit down right now, I’m going to break both of your arms. Sit… the fuck …down.”
Iggy complied. Jessica picked up the magazine cover in the clear plastic evidence envelope. She held it up.
“Tell me why your prints are on this magazine, Iggy. Start right now.”
Iggy’s eyes darted side to side, vibrating, like a lemur’s. “Okay, okay,” he said. “I remember. It’s embezzled in my mind.”
“Embezzled?”
“Yeah. I found that magazine.”
Jessica laughed. “So, let me ask you, did you find it in the big pile of guns, knives, crack, jewelry, and wallets, or the small one?”
Iggy mangled his face again. Huh?
“Where did you find it, Iggy?”
“I found it in my house. It was my mother’s.”
“This was your mother’s magazine?”
Iggy shook his head. “It was her house. It was my sister’s magazine.”
“This magazine belonged to your sister? She gave it to you?”
“Well, no,” he said. “But we share, you know? We family and everything. I like to look at this magazine.”
“Because there are teenaged girls in it?”
Iggy just stared.
“How did this magazine get into Caitlin O’Riordan’s backpack?”
Iggy took a few moments, apparently calculating that this next answer was going to be crucial. The smell of hot, fishy grease began to fill the back room. The Shrimp Dock was gearing up for lunch. “I don’t know.”
“We’re going to need to talk to your sister.”
“I can help you with that,” Iggy said, snapping his fingers, suddenly full of vigor. “I can most definitely help you with that.”
Jessica glanced at Byrne, wondering if they would spend the rest of the day driving around Camden in ninety-degree heat, looking for a phantom.
“You’re saying you know where we can find your sister right now?” Jessica asked.
“Absolutely,” Iggy said. He smiled. Jessica immediately wished he hadn’t. In addition to the five-car pileup that was his dental work, she caught a blast of his breath: a combo of menthol cigarettes and deep fried hush puppies. “She’s standing right behind you.”
THIRTY-NINE
FRANCESCA SANZWAS THE girl they had seen at the front counter. Standing closer to her, Jessica could now see she was not a mid-teenager, but rather eighteen or so. Coral lipstick, blue eye shadow. Street pretty. She was also four or five months pregnant.
Jessica told the young woman why they were there, giving her the bare minimum of details. Jessica then showed her a picture of Caitlin O’Riordan. While Byrne called in a request for Francesca Sanz’s wants and warrants, Jessica and the young woman sat across from each other in a booth.
“Have you ever met this girl?” Jessica asked.
Francesca scrutinized the photo for a few moments. “Yeah. I met her.”
“How do you know her?”
Francesca chipped at a nail. “We were friends.”
“You mean school friends? She was from the neighborhood? Something like that?”
“Nah. Not like that.”
Francesca did not elaborate. Jessica pressed. “Then like what?”
A hesitation. “We met at the train station.”
“Here in Camden?”
“Nah,” she said. “In Philly. That real big one.”
“Thirtieth Street?”
“Yeah.”
“When was this?”
“I don’t know. A couple of months ago, I guess.”
“A couple?”
“Yeah,” she said. Jessica noticed that the girl had a tattoo on her right wrist, a tattoo of a white dove. “You know. A couple. Maybe more.”
“I need you to be a little more specific about this, Francesca. It’s very important. Was it June? April?”
Silence.
“Could it have been May?”
“Yeah,” Francesca said. “You know. It could have been.” She did a little air math—counting something with her fingers in front of her face. “Yeah. May sounds right.”
“So you’re saying you met her at the Thirtieth Street station in May of this year?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay,” Jessica said. “Why were you at the train station? Were you going somewhere, coming from somewhere?”