BAD GIRL
MICHELE JAFFE
BALLANTINE BOOKS • NEW YORK
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Bad Girl
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Other Books by Michele Jaffe
Copyright
Loverboy
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Epilogue
About the Author
Other Books by Michele Jaffe
Copyright
To Dan. For not changing the locks.
There is nothing either good or bad
but thinking makes it so.
Hamlet, Act II, Scene ii
CHAPTER 1
She couldn’t get the sign out of her head.
CLAIM YOUR OWN BAGGAGE.
It hung over the luggage carousels at the Las Vegas airport, huge letters. It seemed disingenuous, she thought, for a city like Las Vegas where people came to leave the baggage of their lives behind.
CLAIM YOUR OWN BAGGAGE.
No. She wouldn’t. Defiant, she had left her bag there. Marched out of the airport and left it to circle around and around on the carousel, her underwear, three sample tubes of lipstick, two favorite T-shirts, a pair of jeans, a photo in a silver frame, and a young girl’s jewelry box, all neatly packed. Her luggage, her past, abandoned.
As if it were that easy.
The next day she was back at the airport, offering the clerk at Lost and Found a lame excuse, a smile. He handed her the bag and it seemed to have gotten heavier overnight. By then she had already begun to realize what was now, three months later, painfully clear. That no matter what you do, how many possessions you sell off, how often you move, how much therapy you pay for, your baggage will always be waiting for you to claim it.
By then she had begun to realize why she had come to Las Vegas. Why she had to come.
Be good, she heard her father’s voice say.
And saw the sign, CLAIM YOUR OWN BAGGAGE.
It’s not always as easy to be good as you want, Daddy, she thought as she sat in her car across the street from the house.
Every thirty seconds the clock on the dashboard made a tiny clicking sound. Be good. Click. Claim your own baggage. Click. Saabs had to be the only car in America that didn’t have a digital clock in the dashboard, she thought. She had only been sitting in front of the house for ten minutes this time but the clicking was starting to drive her crazy. Click, click, click, like a metronome, flipping her back and forth between present and past.
Be good.
Click.
Claim your own baggage.
Lights were on in every windo
w of the house, almost. Shadows moved in front of the one in the bottom right-hand corner, the den off the living room, a tall silhouette, the oldest boy, and a shorter, rounder one.
The mother.
Behind the shadows the air flickered, like someone had turned on a TV. Probably they were watching it together as they waited for the boy’s brother and sister to get home. The older boy was about fourteen, his younger brother eleven. He was at his clarinet lesson. The sister was fifteen. She went to the gym Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and didn’t get home until 5:30 P.M. As soon as she did, they sat down and had dinner. Together. Sometimes Dad joined them too, but not tonight. He was working late. Big business dinner. He’d worn his fanciest suit to the office that day.
For a moment the woman in the car wondered what would happen if she rang the bell and asked if she could join them for dinner. They did not know her, they were complete strangers to one another. At least, they knew nothing of her. She knew all about the Johnson family. Quick sketches of their faces covered the pages of the pad on the seat next to her. Despite herself, she could not stop watching them.
Be good.
Click.
Claim your own baggage.
A man strolled by on the street walking a fluffy white dog, and his eyes met those of the woman in the car. He looked familiar, she thought, then realized it was not him, it was here. Everything was familiar here, this was the curse of her baggage, what she needed to free herself from. The man with the dog was the icon for everything she came to purge, everything she couldn’t escape.
Hands tightening on the steering wheel, she watched the dashboard clock click one more time. The little brother got dropped off, music under one arm, clarinet case sticking out the top of his red and blue Spider-man backpack. He used his key on the small gate next to the driveway, closed it carefully, stepped over the hose the exterminator left there to finish the job the next day, and entered the house by the side door. The door went into the back hallway, the woman knew, next to the laundry room; farther down was the kitchen. She could see them all in her head.
Ten clicks of the clock later, a beige Jeep Wrangler pulled to the curb opposite and the sister got out. The woman in the Saab watched the girl go through the gate, and into the house the same way her brother had. She had perfect thighs.
She was not as careful as her younger brother, though, and the gate didn’t close all the way. It hovered slightly ajar, an invitation. Come on in. Pay us a visit. See our perfect home from the inside. Carve out a place for yourself in our family.
Don’t do it! the woman’s head screamed. Leave now. Be good. Now isn’t the right time. She glanced at the clock and saw that was true. Not the right time. She had to get to work. It was almost the dinner hour. She started her engine and pulled out, heading toward the Strip.
CLAIM YOUR OWN BAGGAGE.
But she’d be back. She wasn’t done with the Johnson house yet.
CHAPTER 2
“Man, you trying to bore me to death?” Roddy Ruiz asked, shaking his head. “I tole you already. I kidnapped her, brung her in through the back door, had sex with her, then, like, killed her when I was done.”
“Why did you kill her?”
“She was giving me some trouble, like I said, cabrón. Why do you keep digging at me, man?”
“What kind of trouble, Roddy?” Detective Nick Lee asked. “We need to get the details down.”
His partner, Detective Bob Zorzi, offered, “Did she challenge your manhood?”
Roddy’s eyes narrowed, hard street stare style. “You wanna talk about my manhood, hijo de puta? You take these cuffs offa me I’ll show you—”
Detective Lee said, “Just tell us what happened.”
“Chinaman, you tell your partner there ain’t no problem with my manhood. That bitch, she was sat-is-fied. She was begging for it. That big dick asshole of her boyfriend, he don’t know nothing about pleasing a woman. That’s what she tell me. She say ‘oh papa please take me.’ Them white women, they love a little Mexican love taco. Why you think they call me Hot Rod?”
Chicago “Windy” Thomas, new head of the Las Vegas Metro police department’s criminalistics bureau and thoroughly exhausted mother of a six-year-old just over the stomach flu, leaned her forehead against the cool one-way glass panel, half to get a closer look at the suspect in the interrogation room, and half to calm her raging headache. She had only been in her position for two weeks, had only been in Las Vegas for a month and a half, but she thought she could recognize Roddy. Not him so much as something inside him. Insecure boys playing at being tough men shared characteristics no matter where you went.
Roddy Ruiz’s file said he was fifteen years old, which in street years made him about forty-five. He looked eleven. He was small, with big ears, brown eyes, close shaved dark hair, and a faint line of fuzz on his upper lip and chin that Windy was sure he’d call a mustache and beard. No parents, lived with his uncle. He’d refused a lawyer, confessed to murder, and now leaned back in his chair, tapping his white K-Swiss sneakers on the floor to the beat of a song in his head, moving his shoulders. There were large rust-colored stains on his jeans and Tommy Hilfiger T-shirt where he’d tried to wash blood off, but they didn’t seem to bother him. He was a badass, his unconcerned posture said, nothing they could do to the Hot Rod that he wasn’t ready for.
The two detectives were jumpier than Roddy, from lack of sleep and excitement. To Windy, even the stenographer who had gone in with them looked smug, like the cat who had swallowed the canary. They’d caught Roddy less than forty-eight hours after he attacked and killed the daughter of a California billionaire in the bathroom of a tiny Las Vegas apartment while his uncle watched the Shop At Home Channel in the other room. Less than forty-eight hours was a good capture time, made better by his confessing it up front, and the cops knew they could count on a lot of accolades from the higher-ups, not to mention a lot of attention from the media. The Shop At Home Channel had been founded by the girl’s father, it was how he’d made his billions, and no news executive around the country could resist the irony—although they used the word tragedy—that if it had not been on the television in the next room, Roddy’s uncle might have heard something and been able to save the girl. Even the national networks had sent crews, so there were more than the normal handful of reporters hanging around the press room, ready to make this week’s heroes out of the men who had worked the case.
They deserved that, the attention, the praise, Windy thought. Everyone deserved it. Everyone should feel important and special. It was the lack of those feelings that created individuals who could beat a billionaire’s daughter to death and then pose her pornographically in a bathtub. No, attention and praise were good, which was why Windy felt like crap about what she was about to do.
She took a deep breath, slid the manila folder from the ledge in front of the one-way glass under her arm, and knocked on the door of the interrogation room.
Four faces turned to her as if annoyed by her intrusion.
She thought she heard Detective Zorzi mutter, “crap” under his breath when he saw her. “How can we help you, ma’am?” he asked, trying to be polite but really, she thought, to remind her who was in charge.
The suspect whistled low, leaned back in his chair, and spread his legs wide under the table. “You shouldn’t have, officers. A stripper, all for me. And they say the cops are assholes.” Roddy licked his lips appreciatively. “Honey, you tell ’em to get these cuffs offa me and we can get the party started right.”
Out of the corner of her eye Windy saw Detective Lee almost choke with embarrassment. “She’s not a strip—”
Ignoring him, Windy walked over to the table and sat down facing Roddy.
“Mr. Ruiz, I’m Chicago Thomas,” she said. “I’m here to save your life.”
The first thing Roddy noticed about her was the way she pronounced her name, Thomás, with the accent on the last syllable, trying to act like she was Latino. Bond with him. Man, these cop
s must think he was dumb. He took her in, caramel-colored hair, light green eyes, and sneered. “You trying to get down with me, mamacita, saying your name all slick like that, act like from my ’hood? You think you’re J. Lo? What part of Mexico you from, honey? You know, Texas don’t count.” He winked, man to man, at the detectives but they just stared at him. Cop bastards.
“My family is from Chile,” the lady cop said. “But I was born in the States.”
“What kind of a name is Chicago?”
“The name of the city where I was born. What kind of a name is Roddy?”
“A sexy one.” Roddy winked. “They call you Chicago? Or just Chica?”
“My friends call me Windy.”
“No shit. I used to have a dog named Windy. On account of him farting all the time.”
Windy looked at him wide-eyed. “Really? You’d be amazed at how many people have that same pet. Now tell me about yourself. Where were you born, Roddy?”
“Man, I was born the day I saw you.”
She smiled, but more like a mom would. Made Roddy nervous. Then she said, not to him, but to the detectives, “I’d like to have Mr. Ruiz’s guardian here for this, please. That’s his uncle, I believe?”
“No need to involve Mr. X,” Roddy told them. “I got my shit under control myself.” He leaned across the table. “You sure you ain’t a stripper, lady? You could make good money, you know, tits and face like you got. You dead sexy even if you got a fucked up name. Now I know this club, I can set you up, me and the manager, we—”
But the dirty blonde wasn’t even looking his way. “Please bring in Mr. Xavier,” she repeated. “I believe I saw him in the west hallway.”
Roddy watched as the taller detective left the room. Man was at least three times the size of the lady, but there he went, doing what she said, and not taking his time about it either. She must have some power, something, to get him hopping like that. He looked at her more closely. She was wearing a gray business suit, all the cops wore suits, idiotas, trying to look professional, but hers was something a little special. Sort of cool and classy. Underneath she had on a shirt like a man’s that buttoned down the front, gold with white pinstripes, the top two buttons open, and a tie, but not wearing it like a man, wearing it inside the shirt, sort of like a scarf, so it was sexy. Roddy had to hand it to her, the woman could dress. She looked like something out of one of the fancy magazines with the foreign sounding names, Elle or Glamour, that he looked at while Mr. X was getting manicures. Finally he said, “You a lawyer or something, lady?”