Night Sins

by Tami Hoag

  Somehow, he was going to have to rally in time to take his daughter to the parade. His mother-in-law had called to suggest she and Jurgen take Jessie, saying Jessie was, after all, staying with them for the weekend. Besides, she thought it might upset Jessie to go with him now, what with all this terrible business going on and policemen walking into the classrooms at school, frightening all the children.

  Mitch had lost his temper. Joy tried his patience in the best of times, and this was hardly the best of times.

  “Are you saying my daughter should be frightened of me?”

  “No! Not at all! I'm just saying—”

  “You're just saying what, Joy?”

  “Well, that Kirkwood boy was taken right off the street.”

  “Trust me, Joy, someone tries to take Jessie off the street while I'm standing there, I'll blow his fucking head off.”

  “Well, you don't have to take that tone—”

  “I get a little testy when you suggest my daughter isn't safe with me, Joy.”

  “I never said that!”

  But she thought it. She thought it all the time and she slipped those thoughts under his skin like poisoned slivers, so clever, so subtle. She had trusted him with her daughter and her daughter was dead. She had trusted him with her grandson and her grandson was dead. She blamed Mitch entirely and she kept that blame inside her, never saying a word outright, letting that blame grow and metastasize like a malignant tumor.

  He knew because he did the same thing.

  He rubbed his hands over his face. A part of him wished he could just go to sleep until the nightmare was over, but he got a nightmare either way. Awake, there was the case. Asleep, he dreamed of drowning in a sea of blood.

  “Couldn't you just pick up those few things on your way home?”

  “Allison, I've been on the job eighteen hours. I've got three hours to come home, sleep, eat, shower, and shave before I've got to be in court. The last thing I want to do is stop at the goddamn 7-Eleven. Can't you stop on the way to T-ball?”

  “I hate that store on the way to the park. That's a rotten neighborhood.”

  “For Christ's sake, you won't be in there five minutes. It's broad daylight. Those places get hit at night, when there's no one around.”

  “I can't believe we have to have this argument at all. Why do we stay here? Every day it gets worse. I feel like a prisoner in my own home—”

  “Jesus, don't start that now. Can we wait until I've slept thirteen or fourteen hours before we have this fight again?”

  “All right. Fine. But I want to have a real discussion, Mitch. I mean it. I don't want to live this way.”

  As his wife's last words echoed in his mind, he fingered the gold band that circled his finger.

  There was no justice. No logic. There was no justice in Hannah Garrison losing her son to a faceless phantom whose only explanation was a cruel taunt. The joke was on the people who thought life should make sense.

  And while Mitch stole these few moments for the futile exercise of punishing himself and shaking his fist at an unjust world, the clock ticked, each second adding to the sense of desperation inside him.

  He needed to clear his mind and center himself, focus. Tightly gripping the arms of his chair, he tried to draw in a deep, calming breath the way the department shrink in Miami had tried to teach him. Focus the mind on a single thought and breathe slowly and deeply. More often than not, Mitch had focused on the idea of beating the ever-loving shit out of the psychologist, the pompous, condescending ass.

  “If he's back here, he damn well will see me!”

  The voice was unmistakably Megan's. Unmistakably furious. Punctuated by Noga's thundering footfalls.

  “But Miss O—Agent, he said he didn't want to be disturbed.”

  “Disturbed? How about dismembered?”

  She was through the door before Mitch could do more than stand up. She stopped halfway into the room with her hands on her hips, her oversize coat falling back off her shoulders. The long gray scarf she could never quite seem to manage was slithering down over one shoulder, trailing nearly to the floor.

  Noga appeared behind her. “Sorry, Chief, I couldn't stop her.”

  He had been able to stop Division I defensive linemen in college, but he couldn't stop Megan O'Malley. Somehow that made perfect sense to Mitch. He waved the patrolman off.

  “My turn, Chief,” Megan snapped as the office door closed behind her. “Why wasn't I told that Olie Swain drives an eighty-three white Chevy van? Why was I not informed that you spoke with Olie Swain about this van last night?”

  “I don't answer to you, Agent O'Malley,” he said, tossing her own words back at her. “You don't outrank me. You're not my boss.”

  “No, you don't answer to anyone, do you?” she spat out angrily. “You're Matt fucking Dillon and this is Dodge City. Your town. Your people. Your investigation. Well, it can be on your head when someone finds this kid's body in a Dumpster and it turns out Olie Swain did the job.”

  Megan could almost feel him tense as he took that blow. Good. He needed to be hit over the head—figuratively if not literally.

  “At least Steiger is up front. I knew he was an asshole the minute I laid eyes on him. You cooperate when it suits you, and when it doesn't, you pick up your toys and tell me to go home.”

  “All right,” he said in that cutting, deceptively soft tone. “Go home. I'm operating on a real lean mix here, Agent O'Malley. I'm in no mood to listen to you whine that I don't play fair.”

  “In no mood—” Megan broke off, choking on her fury. For an instant she contemplated launching herself at him across the desk. She wanted to shake him until his teeth rattled. Instead, she glared at him.

  “Your mood notwithstanding,” she continued sharply, “I think we had better get a few things straight here. This is an investigation and I am a part of this investigation. Therefore I am entitled to know when someone I consider a suspect turns out to have a van matching the witness's description.”

  “Nothing came of it,” Mitch snapped. “Helen Black couldn't identify the van. Olie has an alibi—”

  “Which no one has substantiated absolutely—”

  “There was nothing inside the van—”

  “You looked inside that van without a warrant?” Megan exclaimed, incredulous. “God, of all the stupid—”

  “I had his verbal consent—”

  “Which doesn't mean shit!”

  “If I'd seen anything, I could have had the van towed on a parking violation and we would have ended up with a warrant. I saw nothing whatsoever that could link Olie or the van to Josh's disappearance.”

  “You can see fingerprints, Superman?”

  Her sarcasm stung in ways she couldn't know. Anger was his automatic response against the pain. “You couldn't have gotten a warrant on the van, Agent O'Malley,” he said, advancing on her. “There's no way in hell you could have dusted it for prints or vacuumed it for fibers or sprayed it down with luminol, looking for traces of blood. We don't have anything on Olie Swain.”

  “The fact remains,” she said, “you know I consider the man a suspect. I should have been notified—if not last night, then at least this morning.”

  “It didn't come up.” Mitch knew damn well he should have told her. He had known she would find out. She had hit too close to home with the Matt Dillon line. He wanted control of the game and the players. In a way she couldn't understand, Deer Lake was his town, his haven. He hated having it pointed out to him that his sense of control was just an illusion.

  “We're working this investigation together, Chief,” Megan said. “I'm not here for window dressing; I'm here to do a job and I don't appreciate being left out of the loop.”

  That was the source of much of her anger: She had been excluded. Everyone had known about Olie and his van before her. The old-boy network had pulled another end-around and left her feeling like a fool, like an outcast. It wasn't the first time and it wouldn't be the last, but that didn
't mean she had to like it or take it lying down.

  He backed away from her slowly and turned away. The desk lamp hummed softly. The ringing of the telephones in the squad room barely penetrated the walls, the distant sound only adding to the sense of isolation.

  “All right,” he conceded. “I should have told you and I didn't. Now you know.”

  It was as close to an apology as he was likely to give. Megan knew enough to take small victories when she could get them. She let some of her own tension go and looked around the office as if seeing it for the first time since she had come in.

  “Why were you sitting here in the dark?”

  “I was just . . . railing against fate,” he murmured. “I prefer to do that in private, if you don't mind.”

  “It doesn't do much good, does it?”

  A statement of fact. A confession of sorts. Mitch heard the empathy. They were a lot alike, he supposed. As odd as that sounded. As cops, they had been through the same grind, seen too much, cared too deeply. She had his sense of justice, it just wasn't as tarnished as his. That truth made him feel old and battered.

  He stared out the window behind his desk, through the open slats of the vertical blinds. The night looked as black as ink, cold, unwelcoming.

  “You can't blame yourself, Mitch,” Megan said, easing closer to him without realizing they had shifted out of one quadrant of their relationship and into another. She hadn't called him Chief.

  “Sure I can. For a lot of things.”

  She took the final step, closing the distance between them, and looked up at him. They stood at the edge of the lamplight, near enough that it revealed lines of strain and old memories that etched deep into his face. He looked away, frowning, the scar on his chin shining silver in the pale light.

  “For what?” she asked softly. “Your wife?”

  “I don't want to talk about it.” He turned toward her, his expression hard. “I don't want to talk at all.”

  He pulled her against him roughly, dropping his head down to touch his face against her cool, dark hair. It smelled faintly of jasmine. “This is what I want from you.” He tipped her chin up and found her lips with his.

  The heat of the kiss was searing. The kiss was rough and wild, pure raw sex that sparked a hot, elemental response. Megan kissed him back, trembling at the need it unleashed. The need to let go of her control and be swept away on this tide of fundamental need. She focused on the taste of him, the warm male scent of him, the contrast in their size and strength, the feel of the muscles in the small of his back, the erotic sensation of his tongue thrusting against hers.

  A small sound of longing escaped her, and he responded to it instantly, hungrily. The arm he banded around her back tightened and lifted her against him. His other hand closed boldly over her breast and Megan gasped at the feel of his fingers kneading the sensitive globe, his thumb brushing across her nipple, teasing it through the fabric of her sweater.

  “I want you,” he growled, dragging his mouth from hers to plant kisses against her cheekbone, her brow. “I want to be inside you. Now.”

  Megan shivered at the images his words evoked, at the sensations that rippled along her nerve endings. She could feel him against her belly, hard, ready to make good on his statement. And she wanted him. God, she ached with wanting him. She wanted to feel the full power of this desire unleashed, to know what it was like to let go completely of the control that ordered her life.

  But they were in his office. He was the chief of police and she was an agent of the BCA. They would see each other in this office, conduct business in this office. And what happened when this fire between them died and they still came to this office every day?

  “I—we can't,” she murmured, breathless, her body humming with the need to say yes.

  “The hell we can't.” Mitch caught her chin in his hand and forced her to look at him. His gaze was hot, glittering with passion and the determination to lose himself in it. That was what he wanted—to sink into her and into some kind of white-hot oblivion where there was no guilt and no burden.

  “It's sex.” He tightened his hand against her back, letting her feel him against her. “We won't be wearing badges. Or maybe that's what you're afraid of?”

  Pushing against his chest, Megan tried without success to back away from him. “I told you, I'm not afraid of you.”

  “But are you afraid to be a woman with me?”

  She didn't answer him. She couldn't, Mitch thought. If she said yes, she admitted a vulnerability. If she said no, she committed herself to sleeping with him. She was too wary to box herself in that way. And not without good reason. He doubted he was the first cop to come on to her in her ten years on the job. He remembered the way it had been in Miami, the locker room bets on who would be the first to score with the new skirt on the squad. And he knew what it meant when it happened. The woman lost any respect she might have had from her fellow officers. Respect was everything to Megan. The job was everything to Megan. It would take more than simple lust to get her to cross that line, and Mitch reminded himself that he didn't want to give more.

  Slowly, reluctantly, he let her go. “It's probably just as well,” he muttered as he turned away to grab his parka off the coat tree.

  Megan stood back, incredulous, as she watched him shrug into the heavy coat. He could kiss her like that, then calmly turn away and dismiss it as if it had been nothing. The idea made her want to kick him, but she didn't. And she swallowed back the scathing words that burned on the tip of her tongue. He had made an overture, she had declined. Simple.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I promised Jessie I'd take her out to McDonald's and to the torchlight parade.”

  “Oh.”

  Mitch glanced at her as he clipped his pager to his belt. Her dark hair had escaped its barrette altogether and fell like a wild horse's mane around her shoulders. Her eyes were wide and showing more than she would have allowed. She looked like the girl who never got asked to dance at the high school sock hop.

  “You game for a Big Mac and some frozen Shriner clowns?” he asked, surprising himself.

  Megan narrowed her eyes in suspicion. “Why are you being nice to me?”

  “Jeez, O'Malley. It's McDonald's, not Lutèce. Come or don't.”

  “You're so gracious, I can hardly resist,” she said dryly, “but I wouldn't want to intrude.”

  He smiled a little at her rancor. “Aw, tell the truth,” he said. “You were on your way to Grace Lutheran Church for the annual Snowdaze lutefisk supper.”

  Megan wrinkled her nose. “Not in this lifetime. I make it a point never to eat anything that can take the finish off a table. Besides, I think lutefisk is one of those foods people used to have to eat because there wasn't anything else and it somehow became a tradition by mistake.”

  “Yeah, no wonder Scandinavians are so morose. If I had to eat boiled cod soaked in lye solution, I'd look like Max von Sydow too.”

  They shared a laugh that eased them back into the friends division of their relationship again.

  “Big Mac?” Mitch asked, raising his brows.

  She wanted to. But she really should go back to the office . . . call DePalma. A grim evening.

  “Come on,” he said. “I'll spring for the fries. What do you say, O'Malley?”

  “Okay, let's go, Diamond Jim.” She twisted her scarf around her neck. “You get the fries, I'll get the Tums.”

  CHAPTER 16

  * * *

  DAY 3

  6:16 P.M. 23°

  Jessie was dubious about having an extra dinner partner. She gave Megan a long, hard look as they sat in their booth, waiting for Mitch to return with their supper. Megan said nothing, taking that time to size up Mitch's daughter. Jessie Holt was a darling little girl with big brown eyes and a button nose. Her long brown hair had been carefully combed back and plaited into a single thick braid that fell halfway down her back. Two Princess Jasmine barrettes had been added in odd places at odd angles
that suggested they were Jessie's own touch.

  “Are you my daddy's girlfriend?” she asked baldly, looking none too pleased with the prospect.

  “Your dad and I work together,” Megan replied, neatly sidestepping the issue.

  “Are you a cop, too?”

  “Yep. I sure am.”

  Jessie mulled this over, sitting back in the seat and crossing her arms. She wore a white turtleneck dotted with tiny colored hearts. Over that was a sweater knit in bright blocks of primary colors. On the front of the sweater was an appliqué of the face of a girl with freckles and braided yarn hair. She took hold of one of the braids and tickled the end of her nose with it.

  “I never saw a girl cop.”

  “There aren't very many of us,” Megan confessed, leaning her elbows on the table. “My dad was a cop, too. Do you think you might be a cop when you grow up?”

  Jessie shook her head. “I'm gonna be a beterinarian. And a princess.”

  Megan contained the laugh that threatened. “That sounds like a plan. What does a beterinarian do?”

  “She helps aminals when they get sick and makes them better.”

  “That's a good job. I like animals, too. I have two cats.”

  Jessie's eyes widened. “Really? I have a toy cat named Whiskers. My grandma says I can't get a real cat 'cause Grampa's 'lergic.”

  “That's too bad.”

  “I have a dog, though,” she added, scooting ahead on her seat. She laid her arms on the table in an imitation of Megan's pose. “His name is Scotch—like butterscotch. He's older than me, but he's my dog. Daddy says so.”

  “What Daddy says goes,” Mitch said, setting the heavily laden tray down on the table.

  Jessie grinned. “Goes where?” She scrambled into his lap as he sat down. She tipped her head back and looked at him upside down.

  “Goes to Timbuktu!”

  He made a goofy face, wrapped his arms around her, and pretended to tickle her. Jessie giggled and squirmed. They had obviously been through the routine many times before.