by Tami Hoag
Disgusted with herself, she jerked her gaze away and did a quick survey of the office. Neat and tidy, it was devoid of mounted fish and bowling trophies. More curious, there was no ego wall of certificates and commendations. A cop of Mitch's stature and longevity would have accumulated a boxful by now. But the only frames that hung on the walls contained photographs of a little girl with long dark hair and a big yellow dog with an in-line skate in its mouth.
“Earth to O'Malley,” he said, waving a hand. “What's the printout?”
“The known offenders,” she replied, kick-starting her brain. “I've been trying to cross-reference with reports of recent incidents in the vicinity and DMV records when there was a vehicle sighted or involved on the off chance that something might eventually match up. Narrow down the possibilities, then if we get a break . . .”
“Find anything?”
“Not yet. I also called Records and ran a check on your boy Olie Swain—or tried to. They don't have anything on him. The guy doesn't have so much as a traffic ticket.”
Mitch took another bite out of the sandwich and wolfed it down. “Olie? He's harmless.”
“You're that close, you and Olie?” she asked, holding up crossed fingers.
“No, but he's been here longer than me and we've never had a serious complaint against him.” He washed the turkey down with warm, flat Coke and grimaced.
Megan sat up straighter. “Does that mean you've had complaints that weren't serious?”
He shrugged. “One of the hockey moms got a little bitchy about him hanging around the kids at the rink, but it was nothing. I mean, hell, his job is at the rink. What's he supposed to do—hide out in his cubbyhole all day and night?”
“Did she allege anything specific?”
“That Olie gave her the creeps.”
“Gee, imagine that.”
“She also accused the Cub Scout leader of the same thing, told me I ought to send someone undercover into St. Elysius because everyone knows priests are homosexual pedophiles and accused her son's second-grade teacher of subverting the minds of children by reading Shel Silverstein books aloud to the class and displaying the illustrations—which any Christian person can see are filthy with phallic symbols.”
“Oh.” She sank back down in her chair, chagrined.
“Right. The kids have never complained about Olie. The coaches have never complained about Olie. What set you off?”
“He gave me the creeps,” she said sheepishly, scowling at her banana as she peeled back the skin. She took a bite and chewed, regrouping mentally. Olie Swain still gave her the creeps. Unfortunately, that was not considered probable cause for running someone in and taking their fingerprints. “He seemed evasive last night. Nervous. I got the impression he didn't like cops.”
“Olie's always nervous and evasive. It's part of his charm,” Mitch said, practicing a few evasive maneuvers of his own, shuffling papers as an excuse to keep from watching her wrap her lips around that banana. “Besides, I ran a check on him myself when Mrs. Favre made her complaint. Olie keeps his nose clean.”
“If no other part of his anatomy.” Megan wrinkled her nose at the remembered aroma of ripe body odor. “You don't think he had anything to do with Josh disappearing?”
“He'd never have the balls to steal a kid, then stand there and look me in the eye and tell me he didn't know anything about it.”
“He looked you in the eye? With his real eye or the fake one?”
He shook his head at her as he leaned over to hit the button on the buzzing intercom. “Yes?”
“Christopher Priest to see you, Chief,” Natalie announced. “Says he might be able to help with the investigation.”
“Send him in.”
Mitch dumped the remnants of his lunch in the trash and scrubbed his hands with a napkin as he came around the desk. Megan stood, too, and tossed the last of her banana. Adrenaline shot through her at the possibility of a lead.
The man who let himself into the office didn't look like anyone's savior. He was small, slight, his body swallowed up by a blue and white varsity jacket from Harris College. Even with the jacket, no one would ever have mistaken him for a jock. Nothing short of a truckload of steroids could have delivered the professor from his computer-geek looks. Christopher Priest had the pale, fragile look of a man whose most dangerous sport was chess. Megan put him in his late thirties, five feet nine, mousy brown hair, dirt brown eyes behind a pair of glasses too big for his face. Unremarkable.
“Professor,” Mitch said, shaking hands. “This is Agent O'Malley with the BCA. Agent O'Malley, Christopher Priest, head of the computer science department at Harris.”
They shook hands—Megan's firm and strong, a hand that could hold a Glock 9-mil semiautomatic without wavering; Priest's a thin, collapsible sack of bones that seemed to fold in on itself. She had to fight the urge to look down and make certain she hadn't hurt him. “Your name seems familiar to me,” she said, scanning her brain for filed information. “You do some work with juvenile offenders, right?”
Priest smiled, a mix of shyness and pride. “My claim to fame—the Sci-Fi Cowboys.”
“It's a great program.” Mitch motioned Priest into a vacant chair as he went back around behind his desk. “You should be proud of it. Taking kids off the wrong track and giving them a shot at getting an education and having a future is more than commendable.”
“Well, thanks, but I can't take all the credit. Phil Pickard and Garrett Wright put in a lot of time with the kids as well.” He settled into the chair, his oversize jacket creeping up around his earlobes, making him look like a cartoon turtle ready to pull his head into his shell. “I heard about Josh Kirkwood. I feel so terrible for Hannah and Paul.”
“Do you know them well?” Megan asked.
“We're neighbors of a sort. Their house is the last one on Lakeshore Drive. Mine is behind them, in a manner of speaking, a quarter of a mile or so to the north through Quarry Hills Park. Of course, I know Hannah. Everyone in town knows Hannah. We've been on several charity committees together. Has there been any word?”
Mitch shook his head. “You thought you might be able to help—in what way?”
“I heard you had set up a command post. That serves as a clearinghouse for leads and information, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I remember reading the newspaper reports during the search for that young girl in Inver Grove Heights. The police talked about the volume of information they had to deal with and how cumbersome it was. Things got left out, some jobs were repeated several times due to lack of communication, it was time-consuming to cross-reference facts and so on.”
“Amen to that,” Megan said, fanning the pages of her known-offenders printout.
“I'd like to offer a solution,” Priest said. “My department has plenty of personal computers available. With winter break, I'm short on students at the moment, but I know those who are still in town would be more than willing to help out. We can put everything you want on our computers, give you the ability to pull specific information, cross-reference, whatever you need. We can also scan in Josh's photo and send it across the United States and Canada on electronic bulletin boards. It would be a good project for my students and save you guys a lot of headaches.”
Mitch sat back and swiveled his chair as he thought. One of the things he missed most about being on a big-city police force was the access to equipment. The Deer Lake town fathers had seen a need for a pretty new building to house their jail and police department, but they were having a harder time seeing a need for up-to-date computer equipment. At present the department had half a dozen PCs from the Stone Age. Natalie brought in her own personal laptop to do her work.
“I don't know,” he said, scratching a hand back through his hair. “The students might be privy to confidential information. They're not sworn personnel. That could be a problem.”
“Couldn't you deputize them or something?” Priest asked.
“Maybe.
Let me check with the county attorney and I'll get back to you.”
The professor nodded and pushed himself up out of his chair. “Just give me a call. Moving the equipment is no problem; we have access to a van. We'd be set up in no time.”
“Thanks.”
They shook hands again and Priest moved toward the door. He hesitated with his hand on the doorknob and shook his head sadly. “This has been a bad week all the way around. Josh Kirkwood abducted. Now I'm off to the hospital to visit a student who was involved in that terrible car accident yesterday. My mother always said trouble comes in threes. Let's hope she was wrong.”
“Let's hope,” Mitch murmured as the professor went out, closing the door behind him.
“It would be great to have those computers,” Megan mused. “It'd be even better if we had a lead or two to put in them.”
“Yeah. I haven't heard anything but lame excuses all day,” Mitch grumbled. “I wish I were out there myself. Sitting around here is getting old in a hurry.”
“So let's go,” Megan said impulsively. She kicked herself mentally the instant the words came out. There was plenty of work to be done in the office, and it made no sense to pair herself with a man who could distract her by doing something so innocuous as chewing his lunch.
“I mean, I thought I'd go over to the command post and then join one of the teams for a couple of hours,” she backpedaled smoothly. “You could do that, too. Not with me, necessarily. In fact, it would probably be better if we split up.”
Mitch watched the color rise in her cheeks. His sense of humor was running low, but a smile of wry amusement curled up a corner of his mouth. It was a relief to think of something besides the case for a minute. The cool and collected Agent O'Malley blushing seemed as good a diversion as any.
He rose and strolled around the desk with his hands in his trouser pockets, his gaze pinning Megan to her chair. “You're blushing, Agent O'Malley.”
“No. I'm just hot.” She winced mentally at the implications. “It's warm in here.”
He prowled a little closer. “You're hot?”
He looked into her eyes, his gaze shrewd and predatory. It seemed a prudent time to snap off a sharp retort and get her ass away from this fire. But no retort formed, no words came out of her dry mouth. Her muscles tightened, but she didn't move quickly enough. He read her thoughts and in a heartbeat was leaning down over her, his big hands gripping the arms of the chair as she jerked her own hands back.
“What's making you hot?” he whispered, forgetting his pledge to not want her. He liked the little rush of excitement. It made him feel alive instead of weary, made him feel anticipation instead of dread. “Are you afraid to ride in the same car with me, Agent O'Malley?”
“I'm not afraid of you,” Megan whispered, grabbing ahold of her pride and wielding it like a sword. She didn't like this insidious desire that drifted in and out of their relationship like smoke. Elusive and intangible, it obscured boundaries, altered expectations. She didn't trust it, and she didn't trust herself when it came over her like a boiling tide. “I'm not afraid of anything.”
Mitch watched her resolve harden in the deep green of her eyes. She would let him pursue the attraction just so far and then she started pushing back. Just as well, he told himself. Just as well for both of them. Wrong time, wrong place, wrong people. She had a chip on her shoulder the size of Gibraltar.
“Don't sell yourself short,” he murmured as the old weariness came washing back through him, dousing the spark. “We're all afraid of something.”
CHAPTER 10
* * *
DAY 2
5:16 P.M. 17°
Through the long hours of the day Hannah gained a new sympathy for the family members who sat in the hospital lounge waiting while their loved one underwent surgery. She could do nothing but wait and pray. There was no control. There was no participation. There was no energy to distract herself with menial chores—not that anyone would have allowed her to attend to menial chores. All she could do was wait and listen to the unearthly sound of helicopter blades beating the air as the search choppers passed slowly back and forth over the town. Giant vultures hovering over the rooftops, scanning the ground with electric eyes for any sign of her son . . . or his body.
Her house was full of interlopers. Strangers from the BCA, watching her telephone as if waiting for a vision. Friends from the neighborhood and from around town, watching her as if they all had money riding on the exact time she would have a nervous breakdown. They attended her tag-team fashion, one person hovering and fussing, denying her even the small comfort of tending to Lily's needs, while another did her laundry or scrubbed the soap scum out of her bathtub. Every hour or so they would switch jobs, and Hannah caught herself wondering which was considered the worst duty.
She knew which she hated most. She would rather have been cleaning her tile grout than sitting in the family room with watcher number two, a truth that clearly demonstrated how desperate she was feeling.
Paul would have readily testified that she had no affinity for housework. She managed the basics, but took no enjoyment in them. They were nothing but chores that seemed to need doing again the moment she had finished them. They took away time she would rather have spent with her children. She cursed every second she had spent vacuuming the carpet instead of playing with Josh. She cursed Paul for guilting her into continuing the thankless jobs. She would have long ago hired someone to come in and do the cleaning and the laundry and bake fresh cookies once a week if it hadn't been for Paul and his little digs about her lack of domesticity.
His mother's house always smelled of lemon oil and wax from polishing the furniture. His mother always spent Saturday baking bread and sweet rolls and cookies. Hannah had pointed out to him once that he hated his mother, never went to see his mother, had married his mother's opposite and therefore had no right to complain.
“At least I knew she was my mother. At least my father knew she was a woman—”
“You'd know I was a woman, too, if I weren't so exhausted from trying to keep this house up to your lofty standards—”
“The house? You're never in the damn house! You're at the hospital day and night—”
“I happen to think saving lives is a little more important than dusting and baking coffee cakes!”
It was a wonder she remembered the angry words so well; there had been so many of late.
Sighing, she rose and crossed the family room to the big picture window that looked out over the lake. A crooked arm of ice, Deer Lake was seven miles long and a mile across with half a dozen small fingers reaching into the wooded banks. Normally the view brought her a sense of peace. Today it only made her feel more restless and alone.
Cars hung precariously on the snow-packed shoulder of Lakeshore Drive. Reporters camped like hyenas on the fringe of a lion's fresh kill. Waiting for any scrap of news. Waiting for her to emerge so they could pounce on her and tear at her with their questions. A green and white patrol car sat parked in the driveway, a guardian sent by Mitch, God bless him. A mile to the north, ice-fishing huts dotted the public access area of the lake like multicolored mushrooms. No one had come to fish today. What little light the day had offered was fading away. Lights winked on in the houses that ringed the banks. School was out. There should have been children out on the ice, on the end of the lake that had been cleared of snow for skating. There were no children tonight. Because of Josh.
Because of me.
Like ripples in a pond, the effects reached out and touched the lives of people she didn't even know. Everyone was paying for her sin. It seemed such a small thing, a moment's slip, a forgivable lapse. But no one would forgive her, least of all Hannah herself. Josh was gone and she was sentenced to this punishment—to stand and do nothing while her neighbors cleaned her house and a cop sat at her kitchen table reading a paperback novel.
“The waiting is the worst.”
Hannah turned and stared at the woman from the missing childr
en's group. Another of the unwanted entourage. She didn't know which was worse—pity from friends or from strangers. She hated the woman's I've-been-where-you-are-and-emerged-a-better-woman-for-it look. The woman stood beside her, the picture of upscale suburbia in a knit ensemble of hunter and rust, accessorized in brass, her deep red hair cut in a smooth shoulder-length bob.
“I went through this two years ago,” the woman confided. “My ex-husband stole our son.”
“Were you frightened for his life?” Hannah asked bluntly.
The woman frowned a little. “Well, no, but—”
“Then I'm sorry, but I don't think you can possibly know what I'm feeling.”
Ignoring the woman's expression of shock, Hannah walked past her and into the kitchen.
“It was still a trauma!” the woman exclaimed, outrage ringing in her voice.
The cop glanced up from his book, looking as if he wanted no part of this scene. Hannah didn't blame him. She wanted no part of it, either.
“I have to get some air,” she said. “I'll be just outside if the phone rings.”
In the mud room she pulled on the old black parka Paul used for weekend dirty work. As she grabbed mittens off the shelf she visualized the sniping match that would go on if he came home and caught her wearing his coat.
“You have coats of your own.”
“What's the difference? You weren't wearing this one.”
She wouldn't try to explain to him that it somehow made her feel safer, protected, loved to wear something of his. It made no sense—would certainly make no sense to Paul—that she could draw more comfort from his clothing than she could from him. She could never explain to him that the clothes were like memories of what they had once shared, of who he had once been. They were the shrouds of ghosts, and she wrapped herself in them and ached for what had died in their marriage.