Monday
Night
Johnnie Cotton was already in Interrogation Room 1 when Keri got to the station. She'd dropped Ray off at his car by Denton Rivers' house and expected him to arrive any second. Hillman wasn't around but Detective Cantwell caught her in the hall outside the room and told her that Hillman had put her back on the case and that she was authorized to question Cotton. He said it flatly, without emotion, but beneath that she could sense the veteran detective's disdain. She chose to ignore it.
While she waited for her partner to arrive, she stared at Johnnie Cotton through the one-way mirror of the interrogation room. Since they'd tried to avoid him back at his place, this was her first real chance to get a look at him.
He didn't look like the stereotype of a pedophile. His eyes didn't constantly water. His chin wasn't especially weak. His shoulders didn't slope. He wasn't particularly pudgy or pale. He was just a regular-looking guy-dark hair, medium build, maybe a little pimply-faced for a thirty-year-old man, maybe a little short. But on the whole, he was mostly unremarkable, which was, of course, far more troubling. It would have been preferable if these types were easily identifiable.
He stood in the corner of the room, his hands cuffed in front of him, with his back pressed against the wall. She suspected that had been his default position in prison just to survive. Pedophiles weren't popular there.
Keri made a snap decision. She wasn't going to wait for Ray. There was something about this guy that made her think he'd just shut down if confronted by her partner's looming presence. She'd use it if necessary, but later. She walked into the room.
Cotton's eyes darted at her when she walked in, then twisted away almost immediately.
"Come over here," Keri said. The man complied. "Now follow me."
She led him outside the interrogation room, into the hallway. Cantwell and Sterling, who had been chatting in the hall, turned to them, stunned.
"Locke, what are you doing?" Sterling demanded.
"We'll be right back."
With that, she led him down the hall and into the women's restroom, as her fellow detectives watched with astonishment.
"Wait here," she told them, then closed the door and focused on Cotton.
"There are no cameras in here. There are no microphones in here." She unbuttoned her blouse, exposing her bra and stomach, and said, "I'm not wearing a wire. Whatever you say, it's just between you and me. Tell me you want a lawyer."
The man looked at her, confused.
"Say it," Keri said. "Say, 'I want a lawyer.'"
He complied.
"I want a lawyer."
"No, you can't have one," Keri said. "Do you see what just happened? If this place was wired, which it isn't, nothing you say could ever be used against you now because I just denied you your constitutional rights. The bottom line is that we're alone. I'm not here to hurt you. I'm not here to trick you. Do you understand?"
The man nodded.
"The only thing I want is Ashley Penn." The man opened his mouth to speak but Keri interrupted him. "No, no, don't say a word yet. Let me just set the groundwork a little more. Earlier this evening, I broke into your house, looking for Ashley. You weren't home. I saw the shoebox in your closet. I saw all the pictures."
A bead of sweat glistened on the man's forehead.
"When you came home, you saw that they'd been disturbed. Am I right?"
He nodded.
"You knew someone had seen them. You took them somewhere and destroyed them before you were arrested. Am I correct?"
"Yes."
"Well, between you and me, that's not going to work. I saw them and I can testify that I saw them. My testimony will be more than enough to revoke your probation. All I have to do is say the word and you're going straight back to prison. Here's the deal. I get Ashley Penn back and you keep your freedom."
The man paced.
Then he said, "Those photographs, I never wanted them. They just show up in the mail."
"Bullshit."
"No, it's the truth. They just show up."
"From who?"
"I don't know," he said. "There's never a return address on the envelope."
"Well, if you don't want them, why didn't you just burn them?"
He shrugged.
"I couldn't."
"Because you like them too much?"
He exhaled.
"I know it's hard to understand," he said. "I think someone's setting me up. They wanted them in my house. They knew I wouldn't be able to just get rid of them. They wanted the police to find them. They want to send me back to jail. And now here it is, actually happening. I should have burned them all the second they showed up."
"You can still get out of this," Keri said. "Where's Ashley Penn?"
"I don't know."
Keri frowned.
"Tell me what you did with her."
"Nothing."
"I don't believe you, Johnnie."
"Honest to God," he said. "According to the news she got taken after school, right? In the middle of the afternoon?"
"Yes."
"Well, I was at work," he said. "I work down at Rick's Autos in Cerritos. I was there all day. I didn't leave until after five. You can call Rick and he'll tell you. He warned me that if I missed any more time, he'd fire me."
"You miss a lot of time lately?"
"I'll skip a day here and there. But Rick warned me so I was careful to stay the whole day. Besides, they have security cameras there. You can see me in the lot all day long. I never left, not once, not even for five minutes. I even ate my lunch in the break room. Check it out. Call him, he'll tell you."
Keri felt a growing unease. His alibi was so specific that it would be easy to poke holes in it if it wasn't true, which meant it probably was.
"All day?" Keri asked.
"Yeah. At one point, I got a call around two from some dude wanting make a…purchase-"
"Don't worry, Johnnie, I'm not looking to bust you for dealing. Go on."
"Well, he wanted me to meet him in the Cerritos Mall parking lot. But I didn't know the guy and like I said, Rick-"
"Warned you, I know. So if you were there, then who had your van?"
"No one. It was with me all day."
"Someone had it."
"No, no one," he said. "I had it parked right there on the lot. I was literally walking around it all day long. It was right there."
"We have it on videotape taking Ashley."
"That's impossible. It was with me. Go look at Rick's cameras. You'll see."
Keri took Cotton back to the interrogation room. When she stepped out, Ray was waiting for her.
"I can't leave you alone for a second," he said.
"Follow me," she told him, not feeling playful.
They headed to the garage where Cotton's black van was being processed. Keri typed the plate number into the computer. To her astonishment, it didn't match the van. The plates on Johnnie Cotton's van were registered to a white Camry owned by someone named Barbara Green from Silverlake.
"What the hell's going on?" Ray asked, equally stunned.
"You want my theory?" Keri said.
"Please."
"Whoever took Ashley Penn was trying to frame Johnnie Cotton," she said. "He used a black van for the abduction, same make and model as Cotton's. He stole Cotton's plates so that we'd be able to ID him eventually but covered the front one so it would look like Cotton was being sneaky."
Ray joined in.
"And he replaced Cotton's plates with Barbara Green's so the guy likely wouldn't notice the difference until it was too late."
"Exactly," Keri agreed. "And I'm willing to bet that whoever did all that also sent Cotton those pictures of the little girls. Cotton claimed they just showed up in the mail, no return address. Whoever it was knew the guy wouldn't be able to toss them and that we'd find them when we searched the house, making him look even guiltier."
"So Cotton's not our man," Ray said.
"No. But that's not the worst of it. Whoever our guy is has been planning this for a while. He knew Cotton was Denton Rivers' dealer. He knew he was a pedophile. And he actively tried to undermine Cotton's alibi by trying to get him to meet at the mall."
"So we're right back to square one," Ray said.
Keri shook her head.
"Worse than square one," she said. "We've wasted the one thing Ashley Penn doesn't have: time."
