by Tami Hoag
“Is it true the boy's mother simply forgot him at the ice rink?”
His face tight with anger, Mitch drew a bead on the Pioneer Press reporter. “There's nothing simple about this. Dr. Garrison was trying to save a life in the emergency room. She did not simply forget her son and should in no way be made to feel responsible for his abduction.”
“What about the father's statement that rink management and the hockey coach should be held responsible?”
“What about you, Chief Holt?” Paige stood. “Do you hold yourself responsible?”
He met her eyes without blinking. “In a manner of speaking, yes. As chief of police, it is ultimately my responsibility to keep the citizens of this town safe.”
“Is that strictly your professional philosophy or are your feelings tainted by the guilt related to your personal—”
“Ms. Price,” he ground out her name between his teeth. “I believe I made it perfectly clear last night that this case should in no way be tied to any other. We're here to talk about Josh Kirkwood and the efforts being made to find Josh Kirkwood. Period.”
Megan watched the exchange, her attention focused on Mitch. She thought she could feel the anger vibrating in the air around him. Something about the defensive set of his shoulders, the taut line of his mouth, made her feel as if Paige Price had hit below the belt. Megan told herself it was just her sense of justice that responded, nothing more than the loyalty she would feel toward any other cop. She pushed to her feet to draw the fire away from him.
“On behalf of the BCA I would like to put extra emphasis on what Chief Holt is saying. It is essential that we keep the focus here on Josh Kirkwood. It is essential that we keep the focus of your readers, listeners, and viewers on Josh. We need him in the hearts and minds of everyone we can reach. We ask especially that his photograph receive maximum exposure. For you radio people—detailed descriptions of Josh and what he was last seen wearing. If there's a chance that anyone has seen him, we need to do everything possible to make certain those people recognize Josh as the victim of an abduction.”
“Agent O'Malley, is it true yesterday was your first day on the job in Deer Lake?”
She gave Henry Forster a cool look and cursed herself for volunteering that information to Paige Price the night before. “I fail to see how that pertains to what I've just said.”
He shrugged without apology. “That's news, too.”
A number of heads nodded agreement. Not to be outdone by her rival, Paige rose again.
“Miss O'Malley, can you tell us how many women hold positions as field agents with the BCA?”
“Agent O'Malley,” Megan corrected her firmly. This was all she needed—a bitch with nightly airtime on her case. She could already imagine Bruce DePalma's blood pressure skyrocketing. She drew in a slow breath and struggled to find a diplomatic way of saying fuck off.
“There are a good number of female agents with the bureau.”
“At headquarters, in office jobs. What about in the field?”
Mitch nudged Megan away from the mike. “If none of you have any more questions in direct reference to the abduction of Josh Kirkwood, we'll have to end this now. I'm sure you all can appreciate the fact that we have a great many more important duties to attend to. We've got a child missing, and every second we waste could make a difference. Thank you.”
He switched off the mike and nodded Megan toward a side door that would get them out of the room without having to pass through the swarm. Megan went readily, noticing that both Steiger and the county attorney remained behind to catch any leftover attention. The reporters rushed forward to snatch one more statement, one more sound bite. Paige snagged the sheriff, beating Forster to the punch. She turned her big phony blue eyes up at Steiger with an expression of interest-touched-with-awe, and the sheriff's chest puffed up a notch.
“She didn't waste any time catching herself a consolation prize,” Megan muttered as Mitch opened the door.
“Better him than me.”
“Ditto.”
They both heaved a sigh. Megan leaned back against the wall, grabbing a moment's peace. They had escaped into the garage that had once housed Deer Lake's entire fleet of fire trucks, all three of them. One remained, a round-fendered antique. Taking up most of the floor space now were a pair of hay wagons tricked out as parade floats. The near one featured a gigantic fiberglass trout leaping from a puddle of blue fiberglass water. Chicken wire had been stapled around the sides of the wagon and stuffed with blue and white paper napkins to form a decorative border. The glittering sign that rose at the back of the wagon invited one and all to CATCH SOME FUN at Trout Days, May 6, 7, 8.
The creation of the Deer Lake Trout Unlimited club was a far cry from the professionally designed floats of St. Paul's Winter Carnival. It was quaint and tacky and the club members who had put it together in their spare time were probably enormously proud of it. The thought struck Megan unexpectedly, hitting a vulnerable spot, reminding her of the innocence and naïveté of small towns. Things that had been shattered in a single ruthless act.
ignorance is not innocence but SIN
Josh's image floated up in her memory, and she blinked it away before it could undermine her focus on the job.
“Steiger isn't going to be a problem, is he?” she asked, glancing at Mitch.
He mimicked her pose—shoulders back against the wall, arms crossed. He looked weary and dangerous despite the fact that he had obviously showered and shaved before coming back in. The rugged lines of his face were set like stone, deeply etched, weathered and tough. He looked at her sideways, his dark eyes narrowed.
“How do you mean?”
“That I-am-the-field-general shit. He isn't going to go territorial on us, is he? We don't need a loose cannon on a case like this.”
He shook his head a little, pulled a roll of Maalox tablets from his pants pocket, and thumbed one off. “Russ is okay. He has to worry about the next election, that's all. He'll grab press time and I'll be glad to let him. I thank God daily my job isn't decided in a voting booth.”
But his reins were held by the town council, and Mitch had the sinking feeling that he would have to answer to each and every member before the day was out.
He rolled onto his left shoulder and gave Megan a wry look. “I thought you were the loose cannon.”
Green eyes blinking innocence, she touched a hand to her chest. “Who, me? Not me. I'm just doing my job.”
Mitch frowned at the reminder. “Yeah. And I should have listened. Maybe if I'd moved as fast as you wanted to—”
“Don't,” Megan ordered, reaching out as if she meant to lay her hand on his arm.
The gesture was out of character and she caught it and pulled it back quickly. She wasn't a touchy-feely person. Even if she had been, the job would have cured her of it. She couldn't afford to make overtures that might somehow be misinterpreted. Image was everything to a woman in this business—her edge, her armor, her command for respect. Still, she couldn't simply dismiss the guilt in Mitch's face. In the back of her mind she could hear Paige Price's honey-smooth voice—are your feelings tainted by the guilt related to your personal . . . What? she wondered, and told herself it didn't matter. She couldn't let another cop second-guess himself when it wouldn't matter, that was all. Really.
“We were too late before we even knew,” she said. “Besides, it's your town. You know it better than I do. You reacted accordingly. You did your best.”
Their voices had softened to whispers. Their gazes held fast. She looked so earnest, so sure that what she said was the absolute truth. Her green eyes glowed with it, and with the determination to make him see it. Mitch wanted to laugh—not with humor, but with the cynicism of someone who was too intimate with life's more twisted ironies. Apparently Megan hadn't seen enough to be jaded, hadn't failed enough to quit trusting herself. She would believe that good was good and bad was bad with no gray zone in between. He had believed that, too, once. Live by the rules. Do the job right. Fight t
he good fight. Toe the line and reap the rewards of a righteous man.
His mouth twisted in a sad parody of a smile. One of life's crueler jokes—there were no rewards, only random acts of good and madness. A truth he had tried to run from, but it had found him here, found his town, reached out and struck at Josh Kirkwood and his parents.
He touched Megan's cheek and wished he could lean down and kiss her. It would have been nice to taste some of that sweet certainty, to believe he could drink it in and heal the old wounds. But at the moment he felt he was tainting her enough as it was, so he tried to content himself with the feel of her skin warming beneath his palm.
“My best wasn't good enough,” he murmured. “Again.”
Megan stared after him as he walked away, her fingertips brushing the side of her face, her heart beating a little too hard. Just a show of support for a fellow officer. Nothing personal. The covers slipped off to show those lies for what they were. Somewhere in that moment the lines of distinction had blurred. That was a dangerous thing for someone who needed to maintain a clear vision of the world and her place in it.
“Just so it doesn't happen again, O'Malley,” she whispered, refusing to acknowledge her lack of hope as she started for the door.
The office of the late lamented Leo Kozlowski resembled Leo as much as a room can resemble a person. Square and plain, it was an unkempt mess of rumpled papers and coffee stains, ripe with the aromas of stale cigars and Hai Karate.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Megan muttered. She ventured slowly into the room, wrinkling her nose at the state of the place and at the vicious-looking dust-covered northern pike mounted on the wall with a cigar stuck in the corner of its toothy mouth. A monument to Leo's fishing skills and Rollie Metzler's taxidermy talents, she guessed.
Natalie scrunched her entire face into a look of utter disgust as she pulled the key from the lock. “Leo was a hell of a guy,” she reiterated. “Didn't know shit about housekeeping, but he was a hell of a guy.”
Megan reached into an abandoned doughnut box with a pencil and stabbed a cruller that was well on its way to petrification. She lifted it out and dropped it into the wastebasket. It sounded like a shotput landing in an oil drum. “Good thing he didn't die in here. No one would have noticed.”
“I would have sent the cleaning people in after Leo passed on,” Natalie said. “But we didn't want anyone touching anything until the new agent was assigned.”
“Lucky me.”
Megan pulled a brass nameplate out of her briefcase and set it along the front edge of the desk, staking her territory with the present she had bought herself to celebrate her new assignment. Her name was engraved in bold Roman type on the front: AGENT MEGAN O'MALLEY, BCA. On the back side was the motto TAKE NO SHIT, MAKE NO EXCUSES.
Natalie eyeballed both sides. She gave a crack of laughter as loud and abrupt as an air horn. “You might just be all right, Agent O'Malley.”
“If the fumes don't get me first,” Megan said dryly.
She started sifting through the debris on the desk, shoving the paperwork into haphazard piles; discarding candy wrappers, enough empty foam coffee cups to put a hole in the ozone the size of Iowa, two glass ashtrays overflowing with cigar stubs, and a half-finished Slim Jim. She unearthed the telephone just as it began to ring.
Natalie laid the key on a square inch of bare space on the corner of the desk and backed out the door, promising to send someone from maintenance with a Dumpster and a case of air freshener. Megan waved her thanks and snatched up the receiver.
“Agent O'Malley, BCA.”
“The ink hasn't even dried on your transfer and already we've had no less than a dozen calls from reporters asking about you.”
At the sound of DePalma's voice, she closed her eyes and thought uncharitable thoughts about reporters and what they should do with their laminated press passes.
“The issue is the abduction, Bruce,” she said, sinking down into the old snot-green desk chair. The seat had been beaten into a sorry state by Leo's big behind, and listed sharply to the left. The upholstery was worn smooth in some spots, nubby in others, and spotted all over with stains of dubious origin that made Megan grimace. “I'm doing everything I can to keep the reporters focused on the case instead of on me.”
“You had damn well better be. The superintendent doesn't want a spotlight put on the bureau. He sure as hell doesn't want you making headlines. Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir,” she answered with no small amount of resignation. The ghost of her headache was coming back to haunt her. She reached up and rubbed at it with two fingers.
“How's the search coming?”
“Nothing yet. We're praying for a lead. I don't expect the note to get us anywhere.”
“It's a tough deal—a child abduction,” DePalma said quietly, the professional concern melting into something personal. DePalma had three boys, one of them not much older than Josh. Megan had seen the family photograph on his desk many times. They all looked like Bruce, poor kids, miniature Nixon masks on gangly bodies of varying heights. “I worked the Wetterling case,” he continued. “It's tough on all concerned.”
“Yeah, it is.”
“Do your best and keep your head down.”
Mitch's words echoed in her mind as she hung up the phone and sank down into Leo's battered chair—my best wasn't good enough . . . again. She couldn't allow herself to wonder what he had meant by again. Their collective best had to be good enough for Josh.
The line from the note came back to her. She found a clear spot on the blotter between the coffee stains and phone numbers for local takeout restaurants and printed the message out in ink: ignorance is not innocence but SIN. Ignorance of what? Of whom? The quote was from Robert Browning. Was that significant? Her mind shuffled possibilities like a deck of cards. Ignorance, innocence, sin, poetry, literature— Books. She stopped on that card as the memory came and a dozen other questions rapidly branched off from it.
Her brain buzzing, she grabbed the phone and punched out the number for BCA records division. Sandwiching the receiver between her shoulder and her ear, she dug through her briefcase for the printout of known offenders and began scanning the list of names and addresses.
“Records. This is Annette speaking, how may I help you?”
“Annette, it's Megan O'Malley. Can you run one for me yesterday?”
“Anything for our conquering heroine. What's the grease spot's name?”
“Swain. Olie Swain.”
The morning was an endless barrage of phone calls and impromptu appointments. As predicted, Mitch had the town council members calling and Don Gillen, the mayor, in his office, all of them expressing their horror, their outrage, and their blind faith in Mitch's ability as chief of police to make it all better.
With the start of Snowdaze just a day away, there was much discussion over whether the event should be cancelled or postponed. On the one hand, it seemed ghoulish to proceed with the festivities. On the other were economic considerations, courtesies to the high school bands bussing into Deer Lake and the tourists who had already booked the hotels and B&Bs full. If they cancelled the event, would they be surrendering to violence? If they went on, would it be possible to use the event to the benefit of the case by amassing fresh volunteers and holding rallies to show support and raise money?
After twenty minutes with the mayor, Mitch washed his hands of those decisions. Don was a good man, capable, concerned. Mitch appreciated his problems but made it clear that his time had to be spent on the case.
In addition to Josh's disappearance, there were daily duties that couldn't be ignored—rounds of the jail, logs to review, paperwork to be dealt with, an ongoing investigation into a series of burglaries, a bulletin from the regional drug task force, a call from the administrator at Harris College about the criminology course Mitch was to help teach this semester. The tasks were the ordinary daily course of life for a small-town police chief. Today each one felt like a stone in an avala
nche, all coming down on him at once.
Natalie stormed in and out of his office, relieving him of as much of the menial stuff as she could. He could hear her phone ringing almost without cease and silently blessed her for passing through only the most pressing of the calls to him. At twelve-fifteen she delivered a takeout bag from Subway. At two-fifteen she scolded him for not having opened it.
“You think the calories are going to jump out that bag and be absorbed into your body through the air?” she demanded, snapping a pen against the bag. “You and my Troy ought to get together. He thinks just being in the same room with his advanced algebra book will be enough to make him into a mathematical genius. You all could start a club—the Osmosis Gang.”
“Sorry, Nat.” Mitch rubbed a hand across his eyes as he paged through six months' worth of reports of prowlers and Peeping Toms, looking for anything that might connect to Hannah or Paul or Josh or children in general. “I just haven't had two seconds.”
“Well, take two now,” she ordered. “You won't get through this day running on empty.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“And share some of those potato chips with Agent O'Malley,” she said, pulling the door open. Megan stood waiting on the other side. “She looks like a stiff wind would blow her to Wisconsin.”
“I brought my own, thanks,” Megan said, holding up a banana.
Natalie rolled her eyes. “A whole banana? How will you ever finish it?”
“I'll be lucky if I get to peel it, let alone take a bite,” she muttered, slumping down into the visitor's chair. She dropped a sheaf of computer paper onto the desk and deposited the banana on top of the pile.
“A little light reading?” Mitch asked, digging a turkey sandwich out of the Subway bag. He took a big bite and chewed aggressively, his eyes on Megan.
Her gaze fixed on his mouth, and a strange heat crept through her, which she put down to being overdressed. He ate like he didn't want to waste calories chewing, devouring the sandwich in huge bites. A small comma of mayonnaise punctuated his chin, shadowing his scar. He wiped it away impatiently and licked it off the pad of his thumb, an action that seemed to have too much influence over her pulse.