Mary's Child

by Ramin, Terese

  He paused, then held the cloth so it almost touched the tip of her nipple and let it drift lazily up and down. “What about you?”

  She looked at him, trying to stay coherent inside exquisite torment. Still, even knowing that she should, she didn’t attempt to push Joe away, or the cloth he wielded so erotically.

  She couldn’t, truth be known.

  “However this feels to me, I’ve got your daughter in my arms and she needs to finish feeding. In the meantime, you’re going to quit torturing me and go do your recon. Gil Sanders is catching tonight. I told him you might call.”

  Thoughtfully, Joe bunched the cloth into his hand and sat back on his heels to regard Hallie. She’d told him physically and verbally that she liked his touch, but he knew her better than to accept her directness at face value. She did her best lying when she was telling him the truth.

  “Finish feeding Maura,” he agreed neutrally. “I should do recon. Right.”

  “Exactly,” Hallie said, relieved by his easy acceptance. She hiked the nursing-bra cup back over her exposed breast, shifted Maura into her opposite arm, re-covered them both with the blanket, and reached under her shirt to undo the other cup. If she tried really hard, maybe she could convince herself she hadn’t felt anything when she’d let Joe play with her.

  At this stage of the game, pretense was all.

  “Those kids need you to find them,” she urged him now. “You’ve got a job to do. Go do it.”

  “And take my house keys with me and you’ll see me in the morning,” Joe suggested dryly.

  “Works for me,” Hallie agreed.

  “I thought it would.” He rocked back and got to his feet in one smooth movement. “Trouble is, it doesn’t work for me, so I’ll go take care of my business and be back.” He pulled the blanket aside to smile down at his daughter, trace a light finger over her arm. Thoroughly occupied with her meal, she nevertheless rolled her face as far in his direction as she could without losing suction, found nothing of greater interest and rolled back into Hallie’s embrace, mmm-ing her content. “Behave, stinkpot,” he told her wryly. “When I get back we’ll find out if dads are good for something, too.” Then he dropped the blanket into place, leaned over and placed a kiss on Hallie’s temple. “I’m takin’ your house keys, not mine,” he said in her ear, “but don’t even think about tryin’ to get the locks changed while I’m gone. I also want you to get a brown-and-white parked in front of the house until—”

  “If you don’t leave now and trust me to take care of myself and this kid the way I’ve been doing since you left almost a year ago,” Hallie whispered, interrupting him, “I swear to you that as soon as Maura’s done nursing I’ll be on the phone with my father telling him where to find you. And believe me when I say, he’s a lot less happy with you than Zeke or Frank or your brothers will ever be.”

  Joe sniffed, thought about it, grimaced.

  “Point taken,” he said He straightened, headed for the phone in the front hallway. “Okay, I’ll call for the brown-and-white, you feed the kid and we’ll both get on with—”

  The throw pillow she pitched at him caught him in the back as he stepped out of the room.

  Chapter 8

  It took a while for Joe to make the arrangements he wanted. Hallie watched him covertly as he did it, her mind racing, hormones pumping, thoughts a frantic mess.

  Trying to sort herself out, she let Maura distract her.

  Unusually obliging, Maura proceeded to be the poster child for why-people-have-babies. She smiled. She kicked her feet and waved her fists, gurgled and was thoroughly engaging.

  She lay on her tummy on a blanket on the floor, raised her wobbly head and looked around. She grabbed presented fingers, played startled baby and started to cry when Joe dropped the phone book on the hall tiles; made silly faces and stopped crying when, before Joe could react, George rolled to his feet and plodded across the floor to lie down beside her, snuffling and comforting. In short, she was everything that made women forget why they’d decided not to have another one after the last baby outgrew diapers.

  She was also everything that had made Mary envy Hallie, Joe’s sisters and sisters-in-law, and any other woman with a child.

  In some way, Hallie supposed with regret, Mary’s pregnancy envy was only natural. She’d grown up in a small, somewhat-dysfunctional family, had found Joe and married into his large, loving, rambunctious one where the competition, from Mary’s point of view, must have appeared fierce. She’d wanted family, needed the unconditional love and support that surrounded him, his friends, and perhaps Hallie in particular. Hallie was, after all, not only his best friend, but his first lover, and his partner, sharing more with him, perhaps, than a wife could possibly share. And while Mary certainly had been part of the society of “significant others” that surrounded the county’s deputies and police officers, Hallie was part of the brotherhood.

  Hallie was also part of the sisterhood.

  Joe’s sisters and sisters-in-law got pregnant and dropped babies with astonishing frequency and ease, and so did Hallie. Mary hadn’t. The natural functions of a woman’s body had eluded her—which hadn’t mattered to Joe, as he’d often told her, and tried to show her. It had mattered only to Mary. And Hallie supposed that the year-after-year of teasing and questioning, the When-are-you-and-Joe-going-to’s, and then finally the sympathy would have gotten to be too much for anyone, but especially for Mary.

  And whether she’d meant to be or not, Hallie had probably contributed her own inadvertent fuel to Mary’s desire to have a child at any cost—including betraying Joe.

  It didn’t excuse her, but no woman—no person—needed the kind of pressure Mary must have put on herself to succeed at something that was beyond her biological capabilities. For the first time in retrospect, Hallie saw it clearly: when it came to the ability to have babies, Mary had been as competitive as Hallie had been as a young tomboy around the boys. Surrounded by a growing extended family full of women birthing babies at the drop of a hat, Mary must have felt impotent, less of a woman.

  One of nature’s freaks.

  And if what Joe thought about the pictures and Mary’s killing was true, her attempt at finding her own solution to her impotence was the key to her disaster.

  But it didn’t quite explain the pictures left in Joe’s truck this afternoon.

  Thoughtfully Hallie picked up Maura and carried her into the dining room. Automatically swaying, she held the sleepy infant to her shoulder with one hand, used the other to sort through the photos on the table, looking for a pattern.

  Due to the fact that both sets were primarily stills from video, it wasn’t particularly difficult to arrange them frame for frame—which she did: the pictures of Mary alive across the center of table, then the pictures of herself and the kids lined up beneath them. Set out this way, a certain similarity became evident in the kinds of pictures the photographer had chosen to leave for Joe. If there was a picture of Mary loading groceries into her car, there was one of Hallie doing the same. Mary leaving or entering work; Hallie, too. Mary at home; Hallie and the kids at home. And so on. The differences in the groupings lay in the inclusion of Hallie’s boys and Maura, the shots that focused on them alone.

  Which was, of course, what bothered Hallie most.

  She picked up each of the pictures of the kids individually, angled it into the light, studying it. Threat or bait, that was the question. In other words, were the snapshots some sort of concealed warning to Joe against returning to Cuyahoga or, if he hadn’t coincidentally turned up, would they have been used to lure him here?

  A tempered step on the dining room’s hardwood floor brought her around to find Joe standing behind her.

  Wondering eyes on Maura’s “oh”-formed mouth and sleep-peaceful face, he said softly, “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”

  Hallie nodded and returned the snapshot she held to the table, smiled a little at his awe. As many times as she’d watched babies sleep herself, the marv
el never faded. “Yeah.”

  He glanced once more at Maura, then down at the floor, back up into Hallie’s face. And took a deep breath. “Thank you,” he said.

  Hallie nodded, sadly wary. “But,” she said. It might have been a question; it wasn’t.

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “But.” He took another swallow. When you grew up, became an adult, a parent, things were supposed to make sense, Joe thought. You were, like your parents before you seemed to, supposed to know everything, but especially what to do. Unfortunately, things neither made sense, nor did he know what to do. Not knowing what the future held was difficult enough. And not knowing the future, but knowing that he couldn’t have one without considering Maura was downright scary.

  Hallie made it easy for him.

  “You think you have to take her,” she told him quietly. “You don’t. And until I can get her weaned, you can’t. At least not easily. If you try, I’ll fight you.”

  “I know. But I can’t leave her.”

  Hallie looked at him, eyes eloquent and direct. “Then don’t leave her, Joe. Finish the job you came to do and stay. You can always come back to the department, you know that.”

  “Easier said than done.” He swept a hand to indicate the pictures she’d organized on the table. “And I’ve got this to handle, too.”

  “You think you’re going to haul Maura through this, Joe?” Hallie viewed him, aghast—and scornful. “Not to mention, you macho jerk, no one said you had to do it alone. I’m involved here, too.” She poked him hard in the chest, demanding his attention. “So’s everybody else in the department. They’ve all got a stake in your daughter. Cat Montoya almost took a bullet trying to make sure I wouldn’t get gut-shot right after I told the team I was pregnant, and never mind I was nowhere near the line of fire at the time. Frank drove me to the hospital when I went into labor at the office. Zeke and your sisters took turns as my labor coach.”

  She huffed a gee-whiz breath. “Heck, Maura was born in the birthing center, so practically everybody we’ve ever known—your family, my family, Mary’s family, Zeke, the boys, Zeke’s family, and over half the department—was either there or stopped in as soon as they heard.”

  “You want guilt from me, Hallie, because they were there and I wasn’t?” Joe waved a hand. “You got it. I shoulda been there, I wasn’t Get over it.”

  “I don’t want guilt from you, Joe. You’ve got enough on your conscience without me adding to it. No—” She shook her head. “What I want from you is for you to wake up and smell the teamwork. I mean...” She made an earnest but futile gesture in the air between them. “Jeez, Joe. We went out there together, we were magic. We were on the job together, it happened for us. You know darn well it did.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” Joe ran a hand through his hair, caught up in his druthers, in his past—in the things he knew he could live with and those he couldn’t. He shrugged. “But that was then, Hal. That wasn’t this. It wasn’t personal. And I can risk me on ‘personal,’ Hallie. Maura’d be fine without me. Look at her. She’s healthy and gorgeous because of you. Which means I can’t—and I won’t, damn it—risk you.”

  Furious, Hallie retorted, “You don’t have a damned choice.” Then, when Maura squirmed fitfully against her shoulder, she breathed deep through her nose, blew out the breath slowly, beckoning Calm. When Maura settled, she continued quietly, but with no less passion. “Do you ever listen to what you say, Joe? You’re not leaving here without Maura, but you know she needs me. You can’t risk me because of Maura, but you’re going to take her from me if you can. Bottom line here is I’m the only partner you’ve ever had who knows what you’re going to do before you do it and I’m already at risk, Joe. So are Maura and Sam and Ben. Which means we bring in the department and I don’t stay out of it, understand?”

  Momentarily silenced, Joe stared at her. Put like that, it was impossible not to understand. It wouldn’t matter what he did, she would be there either one step ahead of him taking point, or one step behind, watching his back. And just like always, since the time they were kids, because they were friends first, he’d have nothing to say about what she did. And God in heaven, he realized suddenly, clearly, he’d wanted to have something to say about what she did and with whom since the dawn of time. He’d just been uncharacteristically noble—when he wasn’t embarrassed by his feelings—and politely put aside what he wanted when Hallie found Zeke.

  There was also the point that, since he’d been chasing this cryptic photographer for not quite the full twelve months he’d also been chasing Mary’s killer, since he’d seen the pictures that weren’t on the table....

  For reasons beyond those he was prepared to identify, the very thought of Hallie winding up anywhere near this shooter scared him to death.

  In the end, in the interests of speed and efficiency, they reached a compromise Joe hated: since fugitives in Cuyahoga County were decidedly Hallie’s purview in her capacity as Lieutenant Sheriff Thompson of the Fugitive Apprehension Team, she would leave Maura at the house in the care and protection of Deputy Cat Montoya, who’d sat with Maura on other occasions, and Cat’s sometimespartner Leroy Crompton. Between the two of them and George, Hallie reasoned, the sleeping baby should be better cared for than Fort Knox. That would then leave Hallie free to work Joe’s bond-jumper reconnaissance with him and—Joe’s demand in this compromise—keep Frank from Joe’s throat.

  Joe’s thought was that with Frank Nillson on board, he’d have at least one other person besides himself determined to keep Hallie out of trouble.

  Hopefully, having Frank along would also give them the added manpower to clean up Joe’s most immediate job in one night, instead of dragging it out over two or three—and probably increasing the danger to the justifiably paranoid target’s children.

  While Frank made contact with the unmarked car that Joe had already requested to surveil the area, Joe and Hallie cruised the neighborhood street behind the target’s elderly uncle’s house taking stock of exits, possible blind spots and danger points. The area was definitely small-town, full of older homes in dissimilar sizes and styles, with garages and sheds, large yards and mature trees—which meant any number of places for one person with a single hostage to hide. Small-town also meant neighbors who’d notice new people or strange goings-on—and be willing to talk about it. Still, of the options Joe had discovered his quarry had, this one had seemed to him the best and most obvious bet.

  Let the feds pursue the other directions the guy might have run with his kids; Joe’s experience with large families left him with the knowledge that a guy trying to hide three kids would do it in plain sight because there was simply no other good way to do it. People would tend to notice a man traveling with three kids by himself. Matronly women would offer sympathy and help. They’d remember him. Whether he accepted or rejected the offers, women would remember the kids.

  And then there was the “reason” this guy had wound up killing his ex in the first place: because she’d kept his kids from him.

  From all accounts Joe’s prey—while hardly, uh, mentally fit—was obsessively fond of his children. And Joe’s bet was that the guy would want to give those children his own version of a “normal” life: in a small town, and not too far from where Dad had grown up an abused child in a supremely dysfunctional family. Hence, despite more reasonable available guesses, Joe’s gut told him to check out the old uncle’s home where the father had spent one moreor-less-tranquil summer as a kid.

  The fact that the uncle’s home was in Cuyahoga County, that the time of year was closing in on the anniversary of Mary’s death, both repelled Joe even as it attracted him to the case. But his own possible personal conscious and subconscious reasons were entirely beside the point at the moment. The only thing that mattered now—besides the waytoo-potent-and-disturbing taste of Hallie in the truck beside him—was locating the kids, making sure they were safe, then taking down their father.

  If, that is, Joe was right about where they were. />
  He was.

  The house in question was a small, single-story bungalow with a fenced yard and only two exits from the home: side and front doors. The windows were old-style metal casement and not designed for easy escape by adults—even paranoid self-preservation instincts had their limits.

  The plainclothes officers already on the scene had completed a quiet door-to-door across the street and to either side of the house in question, showing photos of both the children and their father to the neighbors. Responses were unhesitatingly uniform: the elderly uncle had canceled calls from his visiting nurse, stopped seeing his neighbors and attending his card club, and essentially quit going out, period. Drapes usually open during the day were now always pulled. Only one person came or went—the nearest neighbors to either side of the uncle thought it was a woman, but couldn’t be sure——and this generally occurred at dusk when visibility was at its worst.

  The neighbors also reported seeing small children once or twice at windows or doors. They were pulled quickly back into the shadows, but certainly what little these neighbors saw of the kids seemed to match the photos and ages the plainclothes deputies provided. The neighbors were also quite certain they’d never met any of the uncle’s relatives in the past, nor had there ever been children in residence at his house before.

  While certainly not proof that Joe’s subjects were inside the residence, the evidence was plenty enough for him—and Hallie.

  Tight-lipped, she eyed the house for a long moment, watching the mere slits of light visible along the edges of the almost too-closely-drawn drapes. Then she moved.

  “No,” Joe said, a fraction of a second too late, stepping after her quickly and reaching for her arm.

  She anticipated the grab and sidestepped him. “You and Frank take the side door,” she advised. “Gina and Tom go ’round the back. That’s gotta be where the kids and the uncle are. Try to isolate them if you can. Gina’s thin enough to fit through those casements, I’ve seen her do it before. If you can get her inside and get the kids out without waking the neighborhood dogs, do it. Otherwise just try to stay between them and the action. Oh—” A chopping motion of whoops, almost forgot in the air. “And dump your badges. We don’t have a warrant, but Joe’s got retrieval papers. We’re his partners on this one, period.”