Mary's Child

by Ramin, Terese

  “Yeah, I guess so.” She blinked guilelessly at him. “What, you didn’t like it? You wouldn’t want me to do it again?”

  Amazing woman. So painfully shy with him yesterday morning, such a hedonist this one.

  “Hell, yes.” He bent and kissed her, deeply, warmly, thoroughly. “If that’s the result, you can experiment on me any time you want, if—” He paused significantly.

  She narrowed her eyes and took the bait. “If?” she asked. It was a question, not the out-and-out agreement he sought.

  He grinned. Never give ground you can make them take, he thought. It was the way his Hallie had always been.

  And he would worry about courting the type of disaster thinking of Hallie as his could bring later. Right now he had his beautiful blonde all to himself, eager for him to fill her. And he had his own powerful hankering to take his own sweet time doing so.

  “If...” He dipped his head and his murmur was a sensual caress at her ear, his fingers gentle invaders ridding her of her underwear, sliding back up the length of her thighs. Pausing to delve her secrets, draw the wetness from her. Slipping from her channel to moisten and tease the swollen pearl above it. Leaving her in glorious agony, arching her hips upward in mute request for more when he glided his fingers higher up her body still, along the line of her belly, tracing each breast without actually touching either, drawing a line through the hollow between them. He watched them pebble painfully tight, plump high toward his mouth above Hallie’s ribs, begging for attention. “if...”

  “Joe, please,” Hallie pleaded, reaching to draw his head down. “You’re making them crazy. You’re making them hurt. They’re full. Please, please. They have no baby to—oh—” Disgusted. She might be needy, but he didn’t need to have her spell out what Maura being gone meant. “Never mind. If what?”

  He bent to flick his tongue across one nipple, then the other; chuckled when she moaned and arched into that small caress. For all her ability to find his vulnerabilities and milk them for all she was worth, sometimes she could be so transparent.

  “If—” he whispered again, against her mouth, teasing. She fumed vocally when he pulled away from her and reached for a condom, forgave him immediately when he presented it to her like a gift on his return, and unwrapped it at the instant.

  It was his turn to suck air and sigh when she clothed him in it. To take a minute to collect his thoughts.

  “If you let me experiment with you in return.”

  “Oh, well.” She spread her arms and legs wide, leaving herself entirely open to him. “Absolutely. Experiment away. Just bear in mind that if you torture me, however pleasantly, I will be forced to torture you back.”

  “I look forward to it,” he muttered. Then he rolled one of her nipples with his thumb, opened his mouth over her other breast and laved it with his tongue until she hooked her fingers in his hair and demanded relief.

  He gave it with relish, stroking and suckling, alternating back and forth between them to relieve the ache, then working his way down her body, demonstrating his own “techniques” until she was liquid, mindless—a hot volcano at the point of constant eruption, the epicenter of an emotional earthquake; a collection of recurrent aftershocks that exploded again and again when she finally sobbed her need and succeeded in dragging Joe up her body.

  He entered her gladly, scooped her into his arms and took her mouth—once, twice; hungry, bruising, passionate. The third time he brought his mouth down, she whispered it against his lips so he wasn’t sure he heard it.

  “I love you, Joe.”

  He almost tried to pull back, to question at that point, but Hallie didn’t let him. Instead she wrapped her arms around him, opened her mouth to his and gave herself up to him. To silent screams of pleasure and the deep-seated tremors of passion and the unspoken wiping out of last night’s terrors. And Joe, experiencing his own sudden and desperate need to affirm life, assure himself of Hallie’s life, his unwritten claim on it and her, pounded with her into sweet oblivion.

  When it was done, they spoke little, instead remaining joined, holding tight, communicating with sighs and caresses and kisses. Wondering, though neither would acknowledge it, if this was all there would be. Wondering if it would be enough.

  Determined, without words, to make it so.

  And so, more than once that morning, the springs of Hallie’s bed squeaked under the assault of life claimed, life affirmed. And neither one of them cared who waited downstairs for them.

  Or who heard.

  November 27, 2:48 p.m.

  “Later” came with its attendant concerns, but not before Hallie managed to bring Joe to near-hysterical laughter and a plea for mercy when she finally explained to him where Sam’s and Ben’s fascination with Mary’s mother’s throat frog came from yesterday.

  It was, as she pointed out, a simple misunderstanding of phraseology to be blamed on Hallie’s mother, who’d always asked her wiggly grandsons if they didn’t have frogs in their pants when they couldn’t sit still. The euphemism had stuck—unfortunately—and had been used by grandma and grandsons alike throughout potty training, becoming something of a family joke between Zeke and Hallie. When she set about demonstrating—in supremely adult fashion—what their innocent, too-literal, ever-curious minds must have been unable to imagine, Joe’s laughter turned into other sounds—gasps and groans and harsh-throated demands—as his body verified yet again his insatiable desire for Hallie.

  But that was earlier, before they’d dressed and come downstairs.

  Before they’d reentered the world of broken glass and stalkers and PVC bullets and files that cross-checked nowhere.

  “We’re looking in the wrong direction.” After four hours of fruitless record combing, Hallie jammed her hands through her hair, frustrated. “Even if there’s nothing connecting directly with me, there’s got to be a link somewhere between you, Mary and the killer, at least. Something you missed or forgot about. Something Mary hid someplace else. Something that’s not here.”

  “You’d think.” Joe pushed away from the computer keyboard, stretching full length in his chair to unkink muscles held in one position too long. “I looked everywhere I could think of. No safe deposit box, no storage or buslocker keys. No home safe or anything left for safekeeping at her mother’s—or at least nothing Clara would admit to. Hell, the only reason I found what I found is because Mary saved every stinking shoe box that ever came through the door and you wanted her buried in those damned matching shoes.”

  “You looked—”

  “Yes,” he interrupted before she could finish. “I did. I pulled every blasted box out of every damned closet and dumped it. Her personal credit-card bills, motel receipts, phone bills, checkbook records—everything’s here.”

  “Can’t be,” Hallie stated positively.

  Joe gave her flat-eyed exasperation. “Is.”

  “When it was time to do the deed, where’d she meet her lover?” Hallie asked with deliberate callousness. “Car, house, motel, hotel, cabin in the woods?”

  She rose to pace. It was well past time to nurse Maura again and she was feeling more than a smidge uncomfortable. If she didn’t get some relief soon, she’d turn into one unhappy momma with a problem to express.

  Literally.

  She sighed. That was the real problem with nursing. Your entire life focused on the needs of your infant—which while occasionally inconvenient was not a relationship Hallie would exchange for the world—and one relatively small, but highly vulnerable area of your body. And unfortunately right now the ache in that area was distracting her from the task at hand.

  She felt Joe watching her, glanced at him to find him wearing what could only be described as a smirk of male satisfaction, as though he’d read the direction of her thoughts in her expression. He raised a brow and smiled come hither. She swore and turned her back, pulling her bra straps away from her chest.

  “Need any help?” Joe inquired innocently.

  Hallie glared at him
. “No, thank you.”

  “All right,” he said.

  “Go soak your head, Martinez,” she advised him.

  “Come with me,” he suggested.

  Across the room seated at the round library table covered with Zeke’s session records, Frank cleared his throat.

  “Case,” he reminded Hallie when she turned her glare on him. “You were going somewhere with stuff Joe—or one of us—” he added diplomatically when Joe eyed him pointedly “—might have missed.”

  “I was?” Hallie asked, trying to think. Damn Joe anyway. Knowing that she loved him made her brain soggy. “Oh, yes.” She brightened, relieved when the direction of her interrupted query came back to her.

  “We still haven’t figured out who he was, whether or, not Mary used her maiden name when she met him—any of that. Like, did he do the registering? Did they pay cash? What kind of records would she keep on sperm donors who were willing to personally deliver?”

  She paced away as less palatable thoughts occurred to her. Ran them through her mind and edited them as carefully as she could before presenting them to Joe. “How would she find out her... subject was fertile and disease free? What kind of access did she have to medical histories that we’re not seeing here? I mean, Joe—” She turned and spread her hands, an investigator at a loss. “All we’ve got here are nondescript data entries that, given Zeke’s characterization of her, could be phony. We’ve got no names, no specifics. Heck, for all we know without doing a DNA trace, her third miscarriage really was yours and she pretended to herself it wasn’t.” She stabbed the air with a finger. “You found her private records and got into her work files, Joe, but something’s not here.”

  His dark olive complexion paled slightly. “I suppose.” He considered for a long moment, shook his head. “I don’t know, Hallie. Maybe...” Another headshake, as if to clear it of images he couldn’t reconcile. “I suppose we could have the lab go through the video frame by frame, see if there’s anything in it that wasn’t obvious that we might have missed.” He hesitated again. “Has Zeke gotten the stalker profile back from his friend yet?”

  Hallie glanced at the clock. “Should have by now.” The sensation of fullness in the area of her chest increased. She needed to get out of here—gracefully—if it was the last thing she did. She crossed her arms, tapped her foot and eyed Joe. “Why don’t you call Zeke. Have him fax it over. I’ll go...” She hesitated, at a loss for an excuse. “I’ll go make a fresh pot of coffee and bring us some.”

  “Coffee?” Joe asked, skeptical. “You don’t drink coffee. At least not when you’re nursing.”

  “Bring it to us?” Frank asked. “Since when? What happened to all that hooey you’re always spouting about equal rights meaning equal trips to the coffeemaker for men and women?”

  “Oh, stuff a sock in it,” Hallie told them, very much on her dignity. “Do you .want the darned stuff or not?”

  “Absolutely,” Frank said.

  “Might never get me an offer like this again,” Joe agreed.

  Rolling her eyes and giving her head a disgusted whenwill-men-ever-grow-up shake, Hallie departed the scene, head high.

  Grinning, Joe watched her go, then reached for the phone. It rang beneath his fingers before he could lift the receiver.

  It was Zeke. Talk about great minds, coincidences and all that rot.

  “I got the profile,” Hallie’s ex said without preamble. “I’ll fax a copy, but...” He hesitated, clearly uncertain how to broach what came next.

  “Give me a preview?” Joe asked carefully.

  “Who’s around?”

  “Frank, four troopers who were nowhere near the house the last couple of days.”

  “Male or female?”

  Joe pulled the receiver away from his ear, eyed it as though he could send an expression of wordless curiosity and exasperation through the wires to his former friend. Then put it back to his ear. “Judas, Zeke, male. What the hell’s going on with you?”

  Zeke sighed. “Tim thinks your doer could be a woman looking for revenge for something that might have occurred at least a year before Mary was killed.”

  Chapter 16

  Everything inside Joe went cold. He stared at the computer screen in front of him. If Zeke was right, no wonder the files wouldn’t add up.

  “Say that again.”

  “You heard me the first time,” Zeke said, obviously irritated—perhaps with himself as much as with Joe or anyone else. “He said both the stalker and the killer are probably one woman. The murder was a little more violent than most women might pull, but the rest of the profile fits. The little hints and misdirections left for you. The kinds of pictures taken—women are a lot more patient about setting up revenge than men. That’s why your poisoners are usually women. They can wait it out and not give it away. But if the woman is military or either former law or on-the-job law, that could explain her choice of weapons and her use of violence.”

  Zeke paused, measured his interpretation of Tim’s opinions. “It can also explain the message to watch after the kids. She wants to hurt you and maybe Hallie by default, but even though she took pictures of ’em to get your attention, she doesn’t want the kids in the way when it goes down.”

  “I see.” Joe was numb. He should ask another question, but he couldn’t think what to ask. A woman, not a man. And one who’d been willing to kill Mary—and film it—and was already going after Hallie to get to him. The answer was there someplace, if only he could think.

  He forced his attention back to the moment. “You said, ‘When it goes down.’ Does that mean...? No.” He shook his head. Wrong direction. “Does, ah, what’s-his-name, Tim, think there’s a time frame on this?”

  Zeke’s silence was angry, palpable. “Yeah.”

  “When?”

  Another silence, this one brief. “Given the way she seems to be upping the stakes, Tim thinks probably within the next couple of days at the most. Sooner, more likely. Possibly it’ll coincide with some anniversary.” There was a pause, then the neutral question, “Wasn’t it just about exactly a year ago Mary was killed?”

  For an instant Joe’s heart and lungs seemed to stop. Then he swallowed, nodded even though Zeke couldn’t see him. “A year today.” He hadn’t precisely forgotten, but he had lost track of the date these past two days with Hallie.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Look, Zeke—” Joe’s mind whirled suddenly with possibilities he had to check out. “Fax that report. I gotta go. There’s somethin’ I’ve gotta look at.”

  “You’d better take care of Hallie,” Zeke told him seriously, “or the next person out for your head’ll be me. I don’t want to spend the next nine or ten months dippin’ bottles in chocolate frosting trying to get your kid to eat.”

  “Chocolate frosting works?”

  “Until she figures out she’s been duped, sucks all the frosting off and spits out the nipple.”

  Joe’s chuckle was bloodless. “Tell the little twerp to behave. And don’t tell Hallie about the frosting, okay?”

  “Take care of her, Martinez, or all bets are off.”

  “Yeah,” Joe agreed tightly. “I will.”

  Then he cradled the receiver with extreme gentleness and turned to Frank. “You follow that?”

  “Your half, which wasn’t much.”

  “Zeke’s friend thinks the person we’re looking for is a woman. Maybe someone on the job.”

  “No.” Frank’s denial was automatic. Bad cops happened, but it wasn’t something he liked to consider. Not here within the ranks of their own everybody-knowseverybody community, at least.

  Joe stared at him, offering no quarter. It took three minutes, but Frank backed down.

  “Damn,” he muttered. “Judas damn.” Then, “We switch genders, that give you any better idea who we’re looking for?”

  “Not yet.” Joe grimaced, a man who’d made a chauvinistic assumption he regretted more than anything else he’d done in his life.
“I went through all my cases last year, but I dumped any with women in ‘em. Never looked at any with cops. Didn’t seem to fit.” Another twist of his lips. “Maybe I didn’t want ’em to.”

  Frank nodded. “Yeah.”

  For a moment they stared at each other, two men in sync at last for the sake of a partner whose life might literally have been endangered by their blind spots. Joe rose, jaw working. Frank got up with him and grabbed his jacket.

  “Where to?”

  “Department,” Joe said. “Take a look at some old files. Anything dated around this time.”

  “Hallie?”

  “Tell your guys where we’re going and why, tell ‘em to tell Hallie. Zeke’s fax oughtta be here any minute anyway. She’ll see what’s up.” He turned to go after his own jacket, turned back. “Oh, and tell ’em to sit on her. Keep her here, don’t let her pull rank on them.”

  Frank’s response was a sarcastic, “Oh, absolutely. That’ll work.”

  “It had better,” Joe said grimly. Then he grinned slightly. “Besides, she’ll take it better coming from them than she would from either of us. She’ll pay attention, won’t take it out on them because they’re only following orders.”

  “There is that,” Frank agreed. “But will it work?”

  Joe eyed him, deadly serious. “When we get to the department, I’ll call here and beg if I have to. Tell her to hook up to the department and I’ll send her what we’re looking at while we’re looking at it.”

  “We can do that?” Frank asked, preceding him into the hallway.

  Joe pulled his jacket off the peg beside the front door. “If we can’t, but the public can, our tax dollars are goin’ for squat.”

  Impatiently he waited for Frank to leave instructions with the troopers on duty, then they both beat a hasty retreat before Hallie’s bathroom door could open.

  November 27, 5:09 p.m,

  Fuming at having been left behind by “the boys,” Hallie did everything she could think of to coerce her keepers into letting her chase after Joe and Frank, or to at least take her to the department after them. Immune to her orders by virtue of the fact that she had no jurisdiction over them, they gave her mild refusals, called her ma’am, and generally did their job better than Joe could have imagined possible.