by Tami Hoag
Lily peeked around the side of the chair, turning an impish smile up at her mother, her blue eyes wide, her golden curls tousled around her head. The notebook caught her eye and she gave a little squeal of delight, pointing a finger at the figure of Snoopy on the cover.
“Mama! Josh!” she declared. Giggling, she reached for the notebook.
Mitch caught the end of the plastic bag and lifted it away from her. Megan took the bag from him. “I'll give this to my guy,” she murmured. “It'll be in the lab first thing in the morning.”
Mitch remained behind to offer empty words of little comfort and less hope. Hannah seemed dazed. A blessing, he supposed. He left her sitting in the wing chair with Lily on her lap and a cop in her kitchen.
Megan waited for him in the Explorer. She had come to the elementary school in a squad car with Joe Peters, the officer who had been helping her interview the youth hockey crowd. They had yet to return to City Center, where her Lumina was parked.
The search of the school grounds had been an exercise in futility and frustration. The notebook could have appeared by magic for all anyone could discern. The school staff had all been in the cafeteria with Mitch—no witnesses. It would have been simple enough to drive up alongside the Explorer and place the book on the hood. The perpetrator wouldn't have even had to get out of his car. Slick, simple, diabolical.
Fury curdling like sour milk in his stomach, Mitch climbed into the truck and slammed the door shut.
“Mother-fucking son of a bitch!” he snarled, pounding a hand against the steering wheel. “I can't believe he just plunked it down on the hood of my truck. Here, chump, get a clue! Fuck!”
Like throwing down the gauntlet, he thought, and the thought sickened him. It turned a crime into a game. Catch me if you can. A mind that worked that way had to be black with rot and soaked with arrogance. So sure of himself he believed he could drop evidence in their laps and calmly slip away—which was exactly what he had done.
“I want this bastard,” he growled, twisting the key in the ignition.
Megan took his temper and his language in stride. Neither were anything new to her. In his position she imagined she would have been saying the same things. The kidnapper had shown him up, made him feel like a fool. It was difficult not to take that personally, but personal couldn't enter into the picture. There was too much potential for distorting perceptions.
The notebook was the only lead they'd picked up since the night before. Nothing had been turned up by the teams in the field. The volunteer ground search had been called for the day. Teams of Deer Lake police, the county boys, and Megan's agents-on-loan from the St. Paul regional district continued on, checking vacant and abandoned buildings, warehouses, the railroad yard; patrolling the streets and side roads for signs of anything remotely suspicious; following up on anything promising picked up by the flyboys in the search choppers, scrambling from point to point like participants in a macabre scavenger hunt.
The BCA and State Patrol helicopters would continue through the night, creeping over every inch of Park County again, their rotors breaking the quiet peace of the winter night. But unless they found something to go on, they would not be coming back the following day. They had covered a territory of two hundred square miles with nothing to show for it and no clue as to which direction to expand the search.
At the command post the hotline phones had been ringing off the hooks—mostly calls from concerned citizens wanting to check up on the progress of the search or express their fears and anger about the abduction. No one had seen a thing. No one had seen Josh. It was as if an unseen hand had reached out of another dimension and plucked him off the earth.
And the clock was ticking. Twenty-six hours had passed, the sense of urgency and desperation increasing with every one of them. Twenty-four was the magic number. If the missing person wasn't found in the first twenty-four hours, the odds against finding the victim went up with every passing minute.
Night had fallen around them like a black steel curtain. The wind was starting to pick up, whipping mare's tails of snow along the white-blanketed ground. The temperature kept dropping, aiming for a nighttime low of ten degrees. Cold, but January nights could get colder. Ten below zero, twenty below, thirty below. Brutal cold. Deadly cold. In the back of everyone's mind was the fear that Josh's abductor might have left him somewhere, alive only to die of exposure before anyone could get to him.
“We need to go over these pages,” Megan said, looking down at the stack of photocopies on her lap, copies of every page in Josh's think pad. “I can't imagine the kidnapper would have left anything truly incriminating in it, but who's to say.”
Mitch turned toward her. In the glow of the dashboard lights, his lean face was all rough angles and shadowed planes, the deep-set eyes hard and unblinking.
“What about the big question?” he asked. “Where and when did our bad guy get the book? It's been missing nearly two months. If he's had it all that time, we're looking at a crime with a lot of premeditation.”
“And where did he get it from? Josh's locker? That could implicate a school employee—”
“Anybody can walk into that school at any time of the day. The halls aren't monitored. There are no locks on the lockers.”
“Josh might have dropped the notebook walking home,” Megan offered. “Anybody walking down the street could have picked it up. Anybody coming into the Kirkwood house might have taken it, for that matter.”
Mitch said nothing as he backed the Explorer out of the drive and headed it south on Lakeshore, then east on Ninth Avenue. He ran through the mental list of new complications created by the notebook.
“We'll have to find out if any school employees were missing from that meeting tonight, find out if anybody's been fired in the last six months, get a list of everyone who has been through Hannah and Paul's house since mid-November—friends, neighbors, service people . . .”
The idea of the manpower, the tedium, the paperwork, was daunting. The irony made him see red—that their perpetrator had handed them a clue and in doing so had built a bigger haystack to hide the needle in.
Mitch swore. “I need some food and a bed.”
“I can offer the first,” Megan said cautiously. “You're on your own for the bed.”
It wasn't that she wanted his company, she told herself. It had nothing to do with the hollow feeling that came with the thought of sitting alone in her apartment that night. She had spent most of her life alone. Alone was no big deal.
Josh's image floated through her mind like a specter as the glowing green numbers of the dashboard clock marked another passing minute. Alone was a very big deal. Like most of the cops on the case, she would have worked around the clock if she could have forgone food and rest, but the body needed refueling. So she would pull herself off the streets for a few hours and lay in bed staring at the dark, brooding about Josh while the clock ticked. And Mitch would do the same.
“We can go over these pages without any distractions,” she said.
“Do you have utilities?” Mitch asked, his thoughts following the same line.
“I'm hopeful, but as a born cynic I took the precaution of calling for a pizza on your cellular phone while you were talking to Hannah.”
He arched a brow. “Using police equipment for personal business, Agent O'Malley? I'm shocked.”
“I consider the need for pizza a police emergency. And so will the delivery boy if he knows what's good for him.”
“Where are you living?”
“Eight sixty-seven Ivy Street. Drop me off at my car and I'll lead the way.”
“We go back to the station now, we've got reporters to face,” Mitch said. “My temper is too short for one more asinine question.”
“Then I guess I won't ask you if you're a mushroom man or strictly a pepperoni guy.”
“My only requirement tonight is that it isn't alive and it doesn't have hair. We'll eat, take a look at these pages. With any luck, by the time we get ba
ck to the station the press people will have given up for the night.”
They rolled past the turn for downtown and City Center. Mitch hit the blinker when they reached Ivy Street and eased the Explorer in along the curb. The three-story house on the corner was a huge old Victorian that had been cut up into apartments. The wraparound porch was lit up invitingly, the lack of natural light hiding the fact that the house was in need of a coat of paint. A Christmas wreath still hung on the front door.
They climbed the creaking old staircase to the second floor and wound their way down a hall. The sounds of television sets and voices drifted out of apartments. Someone had fried onions for supper. A mountain bike was propped in the hall with a sign taped to the handlebars—RIGGED TO BLOW. THIEVES, TAKE YOUR CHANCES. Then they turned onto another flight of stairs and left the neighbors behind.
“I've got the third floor to myself,” Megan explained, digging her keys out of her coat pocket. “It's big enough for only one apartment.”
“What made you pick this place instead of one of the apartment complexes?”
She shrugged off the question a little too easily. “I just like old houses. They have character.”
A blast of heat hit them as she opened the door. Light banished the darkness as she hit the switch.
“Behold utilities!”
“God, it must be eighty degrees in here!” Mitch declared, peeling his coat off and tossing it over the back of a chair.
“Eighty-two.” Megan gasped for breath and gave the thermostat a twist. “Guess there's a trick to this. I had it set for seventy-two.” She sent Mitch a wry look as she shrugged out of her parka. “You ought to like this, you're from Florida.”
“I've acclimated. I own snowshoes. I go ice fishing.”
“Masochist.”
She tossed the stack of photocopies on the table and disappeared down the hall and into what Mitch guessed was a bedroom. He stood in the center of the living room and surveyed the apartment, trying to find clues to Megan O'Malley as he rolled up his shirtsleeves.
The kitchen and living area flowed together, divided only by an old round oak table surrounded by mismatched antique chairs. The kitchen cupboards were painted white and looked as though they had been salvaged out of another old house. The walls were a soft rose pink and, while he knew Megan couldn't have had time to paint them herself, he thought they suited her. He also thought she would deny it if he said so. The color was too feminine. That was a side she didn't show to the public. But he had caught glimpses of it.
The furniture in the living room was all old, and what he could see of it was lovingly well kept. Boxes were piled on every available surface. Books, dishes, quilts, more books. It looked as if nothing but the bare essentials had been unpacked.
“Just move the boxes anywhere if you want to sit down,” she called.
She emerged from the bedroom rolling up the sleeves of a flannel shirt three sizes too big for her. The heavy sweater and turtleneck were gone. The black leggings remained, hugging her slim legs like a second skin. A pair of shorthaired cats wound themselves around her ankles, begging for attention. The larger one was black with a white bib, white paws, a crooked tail, and a complaining voice. The smaller one, a gray tabby, flung himself on the rug in front of her and rolled on his back, purring loudly.
“Beware the watchcats,” she said dryly. “If they mistake you for a giant hunk of Little Friskies, you're a goner.” She turned for the kitchen and they trotted after her with their tails straight up. “The black one is Friday,” she said, popping open a can of food. “The gray one is Gannon.”
Mitch smiled to himself. She would name her cats after the characters on Dragnet. Nothing soft and fuzzy, no Puff, no Fluff. Cop names.
“My daughter would love them,” he said. Guilt nipping him, he checked his watch and realized he'd missed Jessie's bedtime for the second night in a row. “We've got a dog and that's enough animal life for our house. She's been begging her grandparents to get a kitten, but her grandfather is allergic.” Or at least that was Joy's excuse. Dump the blame on Jurgen. Mitch suspected it was more a matter of Joy being allergic to changing litter boxes and brushing hair off her furniture.
“You're lucky to have someone to look after her,” Megan said. She tossed the empty can in the trash and bent to dig through a brown Coleman cooler on the floor next to the refrigerator.
“Yeah, I guess,” Mitch said, taking the bottle of Harp she handed out to him. “I'd rather be with her myself.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really,” he answered defensively, trying to decipher the expression in her eyes. Surprise? Vulnerability? Wariness? “Why wouldn't I? She's my daughter.”
She lifted a shoulder but dodged his eyes, dropping her gaze to her hands as she twisted the cap off her beer. “Raising a child alone is a burden a lot of men wouldn't want.”
“Then there are a lot of men who shouldn't be fathers.”
“Well . . . that's a fact.”
Mitch stood with the beer bottle dangling from his fingers, his attention sharp on Megan as she tossed the cap in the wastebasket and took a long drink. The offhand remark had a sting of truth in it, an old thread of experience.
“You said your dad was a cop.”
“Forty-two years in the blue.” She leaned back against the counter, crossing her ankles, crossing her arms. “Got his sergeant's stripes and never went any higher. Never wanted to. As he says to anyone who will listen, all the real cop work is done in the trenches.”
The touch of humor didn't quite cover the bitterness. She heard it, too. He saw the flash of caution in her eyes. Setting her beer aside, she turned to the window above the sink, opened it a crack, then stood back and stared out at nothing. Mitch moved to the end of the counter, just close enough to read her, just close enough to feel her tension.
“Got any brothers?”
“One.”
“He a cop, too?”
“Mick?” She laughed. “God, no. He's an investment broker in L.A.”
“So you followed in Dad's footsteps instead?”
He didn't know how true that was, Megan thought, staring out at the night as its cool breath whispered in through the open window. It had begun to snow lightly, fine, dry flakes sifting down from the clouds, shimmering like sequins under the streetlight. She had spent much of her life dogging her father like a shadow, unknown, unseen. What a sad, stupid cycle of life.
In the corner of her eye she could see Mitch standing there, tie loose around his neck, top two buttons of his shirt undone, sleeves rolled up neatly, exposing muscular forearms dusted with dark hair. The pose was nonchalant, but there was a certain tension in the broad shoulders. His expression was pensive, expectant, the dark, deep-set eyes locked on her, studying, waiting.
“I like the job,” she said flatly. “It suits me.”
It suited the image she presented the world, Mitch thought. Terrier-tough, tenacious, all business. It suited the image she was trying to present to him. He should have taken it at face value. God knew, she was trouble enough as the first female field agent the bureau had ever inflicted upon the unsuspecting county cops of rural Minnesota. He didn't need to look deeper. He didn't need to understand her.
Still, he caught himself moving toward her, close enough so he could feel the electrical field come to life between them, close enough that she narrowed her eyes in subtle warning. But she didn't back away. She wouldn't. He was probably a fool to let that please him, but he didn't seem to have any say in the matter. His response to her was elemental, instinctive. She was a challenge. He wanted to crack the tough-cookie façade. He wanted . . . and that surprised him. He hadn't wanted a woman since Allison. He had needed and he had succumbed to that need, but he hadn't wanted. It amazed him to want now, to want her.
“Yeah, the job suits you,” he murmured. “You're a tough cookie, O'Malley.”
Megan lifted her chin a proud notch, not taking her eyes off him. “Don't you forget it, Chief.�
�
He was standing too close. Again. Close enough that she could see the shadow of his evening beard on his hard jaw. Close enough that some reckless part of her wanted to lift a hand and touch it . . . and touch the scar that hooked across his chin . . . and touch the corner of his mouth, where it pulled into a frown of concentration. Close enough that she could see into the depths of the whiskey-brown eyes that looked as though they had seen far too much, none of it good.
Her heart beat a little harder.
“We have a case to discuss,” she reminded him. He raised a hand and pressed a finger against her lips.
“Ten minutes,” he whispered, lifting her chin with his thumb. “No case.” He leaned down and touched his lips to hers. “Just this.”
He parted her lips and slid his tongue between them, into her, as if he had every right; plunging deep and retreating slowly in a rhythm that was primal and unmistakable, blatantly carnal. She rose in his arms, into the kiss, answering with a hunger of her own.
His hands slid over her back and he pressed closer, trapping her between the cupboards and his body. For just this sliver of time there was nothing but need between them. Simple. Strong. Burning. His body was hot and hard, muscle and desire, undeniably male. And she was melting against him, on fire.
With his hands at her waist, Mitch lifted her easily and set her on the counter. She let her knees part, let her stocking feet hook around behind his thighs as he stepped in close. As he found her mouth again, she speared her fingers back through his thick hair and ran them down the muscles of his neck to his big, hard shoulders. He cradled her face in his hands as the kiss grew wilder, more urgent. Her barrette clattered into the sink and her hair spilled around her shoulders, mahogany silk he sifted through his fingers and combed back from her face.
Even as the cool night air streamed in through the window, the heat around them and between them intensified. The back of his shirt was damp with it. It burned the breath from her lungs. A bead of perspiration pooled in the hollow at the base of her throat and trickled down. He chased it with his lips. Her head fell back. Her eyes drifted shut. She could feel his knuckles against her chest as he thumbed the buttons of her shirt free. Then the flannel dropped back off her shoulders and his mouth was on her breast.