Secrets of Bella Terra

by Christina Dodd

  Rafe scratched his head. He had a goose egg back there, too, but he wasn’t going to tell her that. “It’s not that bad.”

  “It’s not like any of us need hospitalization,” Stefano said.

  Mrs. Marino cracked him across the brow.

  Brooke continued. “Do you really think I’m going to cuddle with you now? Now? When you’re all bloody and disgusting, and you stink of liquor and God knows what else? I don’t think so!”

  Rafe knew he should shut up, but he couldn’t stop himself. “Sometimes a fight is fun. If you ever hit someone, you’d know what I mean.”

  Brooke made a fist and slammed him in the solar plexus, right at the base of his breastbone.

  The force of the blow sent him staggering backward.

  “You’re right.” She smiled tightly. “That was very satisfying.” With a flip of her hair, she turned back to the papers on the counter before her and continued to fill them out.

  Eli caught Rafe’s arm and supported him while he gasped for air. “Be glad she didn’t use her foot. She teaches the kickboxing class with Jenna Campbell twice a week.”

  “She is a good girl, Rafe Di Luca, and you don’t deserve her. So leave her alone!” Mrs. Marino spun around, a dynamo who controlled her family with doses of terror, and half the town with well-applied blackmail. “Sheriff DuPey!”

  Bryan DuPey, medium height, wiry, with thinning brown hair and bloodshot eyes, removed his hat. “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Why are you letting these Di Luca boys go? You know they started the fight!”

  Slowly, patiently, he replied, “No, ma’am, I don’t know that. Accounts are conflicting.”

  Mrs. Marino advanced on him. “They were in my tavern!”

  “True. But that does not mean they started the fight. It just means they were thirsty.”

  Rafe began to have a previously unforeseen appreciation for DuPey’s imperturbability.

  “Who’s going to pay the damages?” Mrs. Marino asked.

  “We’ll pay half,” Eli said.

  “You’ll pay all!” Mrs. Marino insisted.

  Rafe didn’t know what made him do it. He’d had a few sips of wine and a couple of shots. So he wasn’t drunk. Maybe just a little too relaxed . . . “The whole bar isn’t worth a hundred dollars,” he mumbled.

  Mrs. Marino’s head came up. She fixed him in her pitiless gaze. While everyone scurried out of her way, she scowled and rolled toward him like a tank, and the only thing that saved him was his long legs and quick stride as he leaped like a gazelle out the door and into the cool night air.

  So at one in the morning, he found himself alone, sitting on the steps of the police station, listening to the distant music from a downtown bar, and looking up at the stars.

  Most of the time he survived on the edge of ugly: ugly men, ugly politics, ugly tempers. Men willing to kill and torture for money or cruel ideals or fun. Tonight had been a good night, a night to get back in touch with his brothers, with his roots: to remember that people lived to dance, to drink, to laugh and talk and fight and be.

  Now as he waited for Brooke and his brothers, and planned evasive action if Mrs. Marino came out first, he pulled his cell and took a look.

  No word from his men in Kyrgyzstan in the Kokshaal-Too Mountains. No word about the downed helicopter pilot and whether they’d broken her out yet.

  God. He hadn’t wanted to leave. He’d left his best men there, but no matter what, the chances of success were fifty-fifty. Sitting here, he knew he’d made the right decision. He had a responsibility to his grandmother, to the woman who had raised him.

  At the same time . . . Nonna had raised him to do the right thing, to fight injustice, and to save the innocents.

  How could he live with himself if Captain Stephanie Spence died in captivity?

  Mrs. Marino stomped out, her sons and nephew in tow. Stopping, she waggled that admonishing finger at him. “You! You go take care of your grandmother, you ungrateful wretch. Grow up, get married, have babies to make your Nonna happy. Behave like a man instead of a spoiled boy.”

  He stood. “Yes, ma’am. Thank you for the advice.”

  Primo grinned at him and pantomimed a chicken.

  “Primo!” Mrs. Marino snapped. “I changed your diaper. I can still spank your behind.” She headed for her car, the Marino boys trailing behind like dejected ducklings.

  Brooke came out next.

  He took a step toward her.

  She said, “Come near me and I’m leaving for Sweden tomorrow!”

  He didn’t even know what that meant but he stepped back.

  She stormed down the stairs.

  Noah and Eli came out next, and seeing her striding down the street, Eli called, “Hey, Brooke! Can we get a ride?”

  She turned to face them. “For all I care, you Di Lucas can sleep in the street!”

  The brothers watched her walk away.

  “What’s she sore about?” Noah asked plaintively.

  DuPey spoke from the door. “Come on. I’ll take you boys back to the resort.”

  “Great.” Rafe recognized an interview opportunity when he saw one. “We’ll buy you a drink.”

  DuPey came into the bar in the resort, accepted a glass of wine, and took a couple of sips before he said, “I’ve got to go. It doesn’t do for the chief of police to spend too much time in a bar, no matter how upscale.” He glanced at his watch. “Even if I am officially off duty.”

  Rafe pushed back his chair. “I’ll walk out with you.”

  The two men strode out onto the street.

  DuPey’s police cruiser was parked around the corner in the public lot; Rafe supposed it didn’t do for the chief of police to park in front of a bar, either. But the car sat under a streetlamp, and although the lot was full, no one was parked beside the cruiser.

  Rafe supposed most people hesitated to get too close to an officer’s car.

  DuPey pulled out his keys. “So what can I do for you?”

  No point in beating around the bush. “Do you know if Brooke Petersson is lying about shooting that attacker?”

  “What makes you think that?” DuPey slowly walked around the vehicle.

  Rafe recognized the move. DuPey was looking for signs that someone had tampered with the cruiser. Yes. The little town of Bella Terra was growing up, and not always in a good way. He followed DuPey, performing a second visual inspection. The cruiser looked a little battered on the underside from driving around vineyards, but other than that, fine. “I questioned her about it. No one kills a man for the first time and speaks of it so calmly. Not unless she’s a psychopath, and I can say with some assurance that she’s not.”

  “No. I wouldn’t call Brooke a psychopath.” DuPey finished his inspection, remotely unlocked the car, and suggested, “Maybe she’s told the story so many times it has lost its meaning for her.”

  “What the hell!” Rafe had heard that careful tone before. He knew what it meant. “You know she’s lying!”

  DuPey faced him, exasperation in every line of his body. “The trouble with talking to you, Rafe, besides the fact that you think you’re smarter than everyone else, is that you’re trained to read people.”

  “It’s one of those job requirements that helps me live a little longer.” Rafe considered all the angles and could come up with no good reason why the sheriff should shield Brooke from her actions. “So why are you covering for her?”

  For the first time, DuPey looked Rafe in the eyes. “I pay my debts. She did a favor for me once. I owed her.”

  Now they were getting to the core of the truth. “What did she do?”

  DuPey stood there, tossing his keys from hand to hand, eyeing Rafe and making his decision. Finally he asked, “Do you remember my old man? Police Chief DuPey?”

  “Are you kidding? He hated me. He used to terrorize me.” When Rafe had heard the son of a bitch died of a heart attack, he had rejoiced.

  “He used to terrorize me, too. I was the son of Bella Terra�
��s chief of police. No matter what I did, it was never good enough.” DuPey leaned against the hood, relaxed and resigned now that he’d decided to tell the story. “So, you know, I acted out.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “You were hot shit. You weren’t paying any attention to me or any of the lower classmen. But trust me, sophomore year, I was stealing cars.”

  “Wow.” Rafe leaned beside DuPey. “That is acting out.”

  “I had to do something. I couldn’t just cower. I couldn’t stand myself. I knew how to pick a lot of old car locks—Dad had the picks—and even better, I knew stupid people left their keys in the ignitions. So I hung around the convenience stores and the grocery store, waited until some woman walked in to grab something and left her car running.”

  Remembering the big, fat-bellied, mean-ass cop who had been DuPey’s father, Rafe said admiringly, “I didn’t know you had it in you.”

  “I wouldn’t have had anything in me if I’d gotten caught.” DuPey exhaled, long and slow. “I would have had the crap beaten out of me by my father, and by the time I got out of prison, I would have been a hundred and fifty years old.”

  “C’mon. Car theft isn’t good news, but not even your father would have had that much influence on a jury. You would have gotten one hundred years, tops.” Rafe tried to inject some humor, but he suspected he was failing miserably.

  “He wouldn’t have had to do much. Not when you added kidnapping to the charge.”

  Chapter 20

  “Kidnapping.” Had DuPey kidnapped Brooke? No, she would have told Rafe. In those days, she told him everything. “What did you get up to?” Rafe asked.

  “It was just after dark, about nine o’clock on a Saturday night. This girl, couldn’t have been more than twenty, drove up to the twenty-four-hour In and Out convenience store, hopped out of her car, left the motor running.” DuPey barked his account as if he still felt the pain and humiliation. “I pulled a woman’s stocking over my face, got in the car, drove off, got two blocks, heard a noise in the backseat, looked in the rearview mirror . . . and there was a baby’s car seat.”

  “Oh, my God.” Rafe broke into a cold sweat thinking about it.

  “Yeah. There was this little boy, maybe a year old, with big brown eyes and curly dark hair, and he looked at me like he didn’t know what to think. I pulled into the Safeway parking lot and bailed out. But I couldn’t leave that kid, and I couldn’t walk away. Or run away, either.”

  Rafe got a sick feeling in his gut. “This is where Brooke comes in.”

  “She was going to the store to get milk for her mother. I called her over. She sort of figured it out, figured me out, right away.” DuPey wiped his sweaty forehead with the flat of his palm. “Remember that line of trees that used to be beside the parking lot? She pushed me that direction, told me to hide, told me she’d take care of it.”

  “And she did.” When DuPey didn’t answer right away, Rafe began to dread the rest of the story.

  “She opened the back door and reached in to get the baby. She was talking to me, telling me she was going to take him inside the store and say he was in a car and she didn’t know where his parents were.” DuPey passed his hand across his eyes. “The sirens blared. The searchlights blazed. My father and his men had tracked the car and they nailed her as the thief. They pulled her out of the car, pushed her to the pavement, held her there, and searched her.”

  “You didn’t come out of the bushes?”

  DuPey shook his head.

  Whatever sympathy Rafe had felt for DuPey evaporated in a burst of anger. “What then?”

  “The mother showed up from the convenience store and screamed at Brooke, tried to attack her. My father cuffed Brooke’s hands behind her back, held her down with his foot on her neck. She wasn’t fighting, but he was always that kind of guy. Really brave when he was picking on women and children.”

  Rafe breathed hard, trying to subdue his fury.

  “I would like to think that I would have managed to stop cringing before he shoved her into the patrol car. But luckily for her, and for me, the manager of the convenience store showed up.” DuPey tried to smile, didn’t quite make it. “He’d seen the guy who stole the car. It was definitely a man, about twenty-five, about six feet tall with a beard.”

  “You were six feet tall?”

  “Yes. I took after my father.”

  “You had a beard?”

  “I could barely grow five hairs on my whole face. I believe the manager saw the stocking on my face and, in the crummy lights in their parking lot, he thought that was a beard. He was so adamant, my father had to let Brooke up. He took the cuffs off, asked her how old she was, asked her who her parents were. I know him; when she told him she had a single mother, and that mother wasn’t from one of the founding families, he was relieved. He gave her a lecture about coming out at night. She asked if she could get the milk for her mother.” DuPey laughed, a bitter burst of amusement. “I never saw my father look as discomfited as he did then. He tried to give her money for the milk. She backed away like he was offering her a bribe.” He laughed again, still bitter. “Which he was, of course. The old bastard. She had a bruise on her cheek.”

  A vision of the youthful Brooke’s scraped, black-and-blue face flashed across Rafe’s mind. “I remember that! She told me she fell down.” So much for his youthful conceit—she hadn’t told him everything.

  “Yeah, she did.” DuPey folded his arms across his chest. “Are you going to kick my ass? I won’t fight you if you do. I deserve it. Even after all this time, I deserve it.”

  “You sure as hell do. Your father never found out it was you?”

  “I’m still alive, aren’t I?”

  Rafe considered curing that. “This story—this is why you let Brooke tell you a lie during your investigation?”

  DuPey turned on Rafe in temper, then regained control. “Let me speculate here. The perp came at one of the women who works for Brooke with a knife. The woman, whoever she was, shot and killed him. I’m going to guess the woman has a criminal record? She had some sob story, because Brooke runs to type. She rescues poor pathetic losers like me. And you.”

  Rafe considered objecting. Decided against it.

  DuPey was looking smarter all the time.

  DuPey continued. “So when Brooke arrived on the scene, she sent the woman away, wiped down the pistol, put her own fingerprints on the weapon, and claimed responsibility for the crime.”

  “And you let her take responsibility?” That was what stuck in Rafe’s craw.

  “It was what she wanted.”

  “Because you owed her?”

  “Hey. At least I paid her back.” DuPey leveled an accusatory stare at Rafe. “Which is more than I can say for some people.”

  Rafe watched him get in his police cruiser and drive away, and wondered whether Brooke had told DuPey all that had happened between the two of them. But no, he knew she hadn’t; whatever DuPey knew, or thought he knew, was gossip and speculation. Damned good speculation; like Rafe, DuPey was good at reading body language. He knew guilt when he saw it, and Rafe was guilty about the way he’d treated Brooke. But she was better off without him. Wasn’t she?

  Wasn’t she?

  Chapter 21

  Sometimes it was easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission.

  Better still if I don’t get caught.

  The resort’s security room was at the end of a hall behind an anonymous door on the main floor of the main building. The lock was a good one, electronic and expertly installed, but Rafe had the gizmo to sneak through the program undetected. In less than five seconds, he was inside.

  The door shut behind him with a satisfyingly solid sound. Good: It was soundproofed.

  This security room was really more of a walk-in closet, five by eight, with a pressed-concrete floor. An old table retrieved from a guest room held the computer, converted from some other use to act as the server. Cables snaked from the plug-ins to the back of
the computer, to the monitor, to the keyboard and mouse.

  Rafe seated himself in the stained office chair, pulled his laptop and cable out of his briefcase. Following the written instructions from his own personal hacker, he plugged his laptop into the security server, typed in Darren’s access code, and when Darren’s youthful, pimply face popped up on the screen, he said, “You’re connected.”

  Darren glanced at Rafe, did a double take, and stared. “Man, what did you do to yourself?” Darren’s voice echoed in the bare room.

  “Shh!”

  Darren paid no attention. “You look like you went nine rounds with a grizzly bear. Man.” He grinned. “I thought you were the hawt king of self-defense.”

  Rafe gritted his teeth. This was the trouble with hiring a seventeen-year-old. He had no sense of what was appropriate, and no volume control. “I went out last night and had some fun.” Rafe refrained from touching his swollen ear, his split lip. “Can you access the program without a password?”

  “Wow. Your idea of fun doesn’t mesh with mine.” Darren was typing while he talked. “And sure. I’ll get through the firewall. It’s not like this server is highly protected, like a financial computer or something. It’s more on the level of the U.S. government. What did your grandmother say about your bruises?”

  Rafe started to ask how Darren knew he’d been to visit his grandmother, then decided against it. When the kid got interested, he knew everything, and the newly uncovered concept that his loner boss had a personal life seemed to fascinate him.

  “My grandmother looked at me and laughed.”

  “Really? So Nonna is cool?”

  “She’s very cool. She made us—my brothers and me—have a picture taken with her, because she said that way everyone would have to believe she’d been in a bar fight. Although perhaps she was subtly saying we were stupid to go looking for the kind of injury that put her in the hospital. . . .” Come to think of it, that was exactly what she was saying. “Her doctor came in about then and we had to leave.” So whatever she had wanted to tell him and his brothers had had to be postponed. Too bad, because Nonna clearly thought they needed to know, but she’d waved them away and told them it was old news and could wait one more day. “About that password—if you want, I can guess a few things Noah might have used. His birthday, his dog’s name, the usual.”