School of Fish (Fish Out of Water #6) - Amy Lane Page 0,52

have vowed to make an effort to dress better when he represented the firm—and Ellery—but even Ellery conceded that he could wear whatever he wanted when it was just the two of them alone in their home late at night.

But looking at Ellery working so desperately for order, trying to make the world a better place—one in which the bad were punished proportionately and the good were allowed to make their living—and seeing that he lived his life that way, gave Jackson faith.

“I couldn’t see you defending anybody who would hurt a child,” Jackson said honestly. “But even abuse and neglect—those are terrible, don’t get me wrong. But sometimes they’re crimes of desperation, of poverty. Latchkey children who are unsupervised because their parents are working to put food on the table and pay rent. The parent who’s desperate over both those things and loses his or her temper. Those crimes can be… I don’t know. They’re awful and cyclical and all of those things, but they are at least functions of being human. Desperately flawed human beings, but human beings.”

Ellery nodded meekly, and Jackson was struck by his vulnerability. It hit him—perhaps for the first time—that Ellery’s insistence on order, on wearing the right clothes for the right function, on following sometimes inconvenient rules, was a defense against the fear of the things he couldn’t control.

“These people,” Ellery said softly. “Whoever would take Tage’s brother and sister and traffic them, whoever would set him up, would try to steal Ty’s future and slit James Cosgrove’s throat….”

They both shuddered.

“Monstrous,” Jackson said after a moment. “Tim Owens was monstrous, but I could see into his brain. I could see the human inside the monster.” Tim Owens had been a serial killer who’d worked for the police force under an assumed identity for years. But Jackson could still remember following his twisted logic, his obsession with Jackson, with the “dirty/pretty” people just fallen into life on the streets. “Martin Sampson’s father—I got it. It was ugly, and it was awful, and it turned my stomach, but I got it.” Sampson Senior had molested his son and then, when Martin refused to sell drugs or recruit his friends anymore, killed him. “But this? This is organized, and it’s far-reaching. Tage Dobrevk was a kid in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I’m hoping he’ll be alive when we get there in the morning to spring him. Ty Townsend was the same, but he was engineered to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And don’t get me started on Tage’s siblings. And we only have one face to it, Ziggy Ivanov, and he feels like a front man. He’s not small change, maybe—a mover and a shaker—but he’s not a mastermind.”

“What makes you say that?” Ellery asked, the directness of the question sharpening his features. Maybe he needed to make sense of it as much as Jackson did.

“Because a mastermind wouldn’t have been breaking into our office,” Jackson mused. “That’s desperation. That’s ‘Oh shit! Our guy didn’t get to the file at the PD’s office. We need to get where it was going!’ Stabbing Sean wasn’t planned. He was literally on his way out the door. But….” Jackson bit his lip, remembering the two bodies colliding, Sean staggering back holding his hands over his stomach.

Ziggy’s footsteps pounding down the pavement before Jackson had realized what that meant.

“He’s no stranger to violence,” Jackson said. “He probably killed James Cosgrove.” He grimaced. “God, poor No Neck. It would be nice to know why.”

“Loose end for setting Ty Townsend up,” Ellery hazarded.

“Yeah.” Jackson chewed his lower lip. “But maybe not. I mean, No Neck would have been an in. Whatever they were doing, Ziggy had the cop equivalent of a CI in a population he was interested in manipulating. Why kill him?”

“Good point,” Ellery said. “But you know what we really need to know is—”

“What in the fuck are they doing!” Jackson burst out. “Drugs, human trafficking. Is it all of the above? Is it just a massive move on the streets to saturate a particular neighborhood with mob contacts…?”

He stopped and looked at Ellery in surprise.

“It’s a massive move on the streets to set up the mob so deep they can’t be unearthed,” Ellery said, as stunned as Jackson to find he was right.

“There’s an epicenter,” Jackson said in wonder. “There’s a…. We can’t see it yet, but Ziggy, the poor bastard in the ER, Tage and his family—all of this is