Buyer's Remorse

by Lori L. Lake

  When Leo exited the police station, the heat felt suffocating. She squinted into the mid-afternoon sun, wishing she were already home. Before her eyes could fully adjust, a man's voice said, "Didn't expect to see you hanging around, Reese."

  She raised a hand to her brow to block the bright sun. "Oh, hello, Hannen."

  "You here begging for your patrol assignment?"

  His tone was so condescending that Leo had to bite back a smart remark. Instead she said, "Just working out. I hope you're treating my team well."

  "Heh. Well, they're my team now."

  "Don't get too comfy. I've got seniority over you, not to mention experience."

  "Tick-tock, tick-tock. Every day you're away, my seniority increases. Too bad you came on the force six months before me. Big deal. While you're off contemplating your navel, won't be long before my active duty time will match or exceed yours."

  She smiled sweetly. "Obviously, Bobby, you've misunderstood the circumstances." He hated being called Bobby, so she rubbed it in. "Didn't anyone tell you I'm working investigations full-time, Bobby? Every hour, every day counts toward my career longevity. You're never going to catch up."

  "Oh, yeah, I will. I heard your squeeze over at the courthouse one day talking about having kids. You'll eventually get knocked up, and your maternity leave will do it."

  She'd like to knock him upside the head, but she merely tightened her fist around her workout bag and continued to smile. "We'll see about that. You have a nice day, Bobby." She sauntered off, clenching her teeth with every step. The thought of that pigheaded, sexist jerk supervising her squad infuriated her. But what could she do? He was the kind of cop who knew how to suck up to the brass, but out in the field he was a petty tyrant. He'd covered for her a few times when she'd been off-duty, and she knew her team, particularly the women, were uncomfortable with him.

  She'd avoided thinking about her eye treatment options all day, but as she drove out of the lot in the oven of her car, she felt panicky. What if she had to have surgery and was off work for months? Could Hannen actually catch up with service dates? He was one mean and miserable man, and though it was a minor point, she didn't want him to exceed her seniority.

  Back to her eye. She agonized over what she should do, especially since she couldn't avoid making a decision for much longer. More than anything, she wanted to go home and find Daria there. They could dial down the lights and cuddle on the couch with good strong drinks. She'd be able to pour out her fears and with any luck come to a decision.

  But when she arrived home, the garage was empty. She'd expected that but had hoped she might be wrong. She parked and stopped in the backyard to note that the flowers lining the walk were droopy. She got the hose out and spent time watering the beds around the house, all the while fretting about the pain behind her eyes. The thought of losing an eye was enough to make her want to throw up. Would she be disabled? If she was having trouble shooting now, what would it be like without her dominant eye? She'd always squinted her left eye nearly shut, sighted down the barrel, and been an accurate shot, an expert marksman in fact. Could she retrain herself to sight with the left eye?

  She shut off the hose, went inside, and transferred her workout clothes from her bag to the laundry basket. The house was cool and quiet, but she felt restless. In the kitchen, she picked up the half-filled watering can and wandered through the main floor to douse the various plants. She hadn't paid any attention to them for days, and the fern was particularly bedraggled. She upended the can and let the last drips trickle on the fern, picked a few leaves off the table, closed the blinds on the west side of the living room, and returned to the kitchen.

  Why did it have to be Sunday? Nothing on TV; nothing interesting going on. She considered calling Kate, but thought if she did, she'd only whine about how much she missed Daria, and she didn't want to do that.

  In a perfect world, she'd have brought home all the notes and reports for the Rivers' Edge case, but she'd expected to spend time with Daria, so she'd left it all behind. Stupid of her. Again. That'd be the last time she'd do that. From now on, she was carrying her deskwork with her. She refilled the watering can, set it on the counter, and stood staring out the window.

  Who would murder little old ladies for their money? What kind of people committed such heartless crimes? She hadn't known Callie Trimble nor had she met any of the family of Celia Deveaux, but being acquainted now with Eleanor—not to mention Nettie, Jade, Willie, and Agnes—she couldn't see how anyone would want to harm them. Those women were the quintessential cliché, the salt of the earth.

  In a decade on the police force, she'd seen the aftermath of a lot of despicable crimes: a pregnant lady stabbed, drive-by shootings that killed innocent children, robberies gone bad where thieves clubbed homeowners to death. She was often asked why she stayed, given all the ugliness, but amidst the violence and occasional horrors, an undercurrent existed that sometimes approached a kind of beauty. Or maybe she would call it the sublime. At no time was this more apparent than a couple of months earlier, before the Zack Littlefield shooting, when she and a rookie trainee had been called to the scene of a house fire in a shabby part of the east side of Saint Paul.

  She and Mike Minton had beat the fire department there, but the neighbors had arrived before the police. In the light of the raging fire, three men in pajamas, two in their underwear, and the rest in jeans or khaki pants all stood below a window trying to coax a young girl to jump.

  "Jump," they hollered over and over. "We'll catch you!"

  The girl screamed. Flames burned above and behind her. Leo counted eight men under the window and several women standing back comforting a sobbing figure who was on her knees, arms around two small children.

  Leo ran to the trunk of her cruiser and pulled out a blanket. "Minton! Let's use this."

  They ran toward the group below the window. Before Leo had a chance to say anything, a stocky man wearing nothing more than his BVDs grabbed the blanket.

  "Guys, grab hold," he said. "Like this. Get your elbows under for extra strength." He gripped the edge and pulled his fists up to his face, his elbows out under the blanket.

  Minton joined the others and grabbed on. They stood below the window, the blue cloth a taut square of safety.

  Leo waved to get the girl's attention. "Hey! Look here."

  The woman on her knees cried out, "Her name's Allie."

  "Allie," Leo yelled. The girl met her eyes for a brief moment. "It's safe, Allie. Jump into the trampoline now. Now!"

  With a shriek, the girl launched out the window, her nightgown on fire. She fell and fell, plummeting as though in slow motion. Leo watched her squirm in the air, the fire arcing behind her, and then she was lost inside the circle of men.

  For a moment, all was silent. To Leo, it seemed that even the fire ceased to crackle for an instant. And then a great roar of excitement went up.

  Moving as one, the men set their bundle on the ground oh-so-gently. A deep voice shouted for help. Where were the paramedics? She heard sirens whining—why weren't they here yet?

  Leo dashed over. The girl, long-legged and terrified, kept screaming, "Mama, Mama," over and over. Up in the window, she'd seemed older, but now Leo didn't think she was more than seven or eight. A substantial section of her pink and white nightgown was burned, but the plunge into the blanket must have put it out.

  The woman with the two children scurried over, and suddenly it was pig-pile on the blue blanket. The three kids sobbed all over one another, and the mother was a wreck.

  Leo leaned down. "Ma'am, is everybody out?"

  "Yes, yes. Thank you."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Oh, my God, yes, thank you."

  The fire department arrived. Firefighters jumped off the truck before it came to a stop, and suddenly the yard and street were crawling with cops, medics, and half a dozen of the fire crew dragging hoses.

  Leo stepped back and scanned the crowd. All the guys in the impromptu blanket bri
gade were pumping fists in the air and stomping around as though they'd just scored the winning touchdown at the Super Bowl. Their excitement, their glee was contagious. She grinned and looked for her rookie. Minton stood, arms folded over his chest, and watched silently. His eyes glistened. She took up a post at his elbow so he could have some privacy in the midst of strong emotion.

  "Sweet Jesus," Minton whispered, "this is why I became a cop."

  In that one simple sentence, Minton had said it all. Neighbors soothing frightened youngsters. Men in their underwear dancing around a yard, celebrating the saving of a child's life. A community of public servants racing to help. Above all, the overwhelming tide of emotion, of people connected by invisible links. People caring about others who were strangers.

  No newspaper article, no TV news spot could capture the euphoria. A person had to be there to fully understand, and few police officers could do justice to explain it either. But this was why Leo liked the street, why she didn't want to ride a desk. Investigators cleaned up after the mess was unavoidably permanent; patrol cops sometimes prevented those disasters. Sometimes they had the opportunity to save a life.

  So she loved the job. She loved preparing other young officers for it. Law enforcement felt like a calling to her.

  What would she do, and who would she be, if she no longer qualified for patrol? She was still young and fit and strong. She didn't feel ready to give it up, so what would become of her if they bounced her right off the job?

  She couldn't bear to think of it.

  With tears smarting, she turned away from the kitchen window and went upstairs to the fourth bedroom, which she'd set up for her storage, office work, ironing, and sewing. Her off-season clothes and uniforms went into the walk-in closet, along with a couple of boxes of memorabilia and old tax records.

  Skirting the ironing board, she went to a table in the corner and flipped on the desktop computer. While it hummed into action, she sat slumped in the chair, wondering if she should call Daria and see how she was doing. Before she could decide, the computer powered up, and she opened a browser and typed in "Rivers' Independent Living Minnesota."

  When she found the proper page, Martin Rivers grinned from a full-color photo. She read that Rivers had kicked off construction and planned to open a new facility in Lakeville shortly and another in Crystal in the spring. In the photo, he wore a hard hat and held a shovel as he broke ground for a new site. Next to him stood a swarthy, bow-legged construction worker. Next to Rivers, the guy looked like Gimli the Dwarf from the Lord of the Rings movies.

  Farther down the page was a close-up of a smiling elderly man holding a newspaper and peering up over half-moon glasses. His teeth were so straight and so blindingly white that they had to be dentures. Next to his picture, printed in bold royal blue, was the business's logo: "Zestful Living and Independence with Exceptional Focus on Your Comfort."

  If murder could be considered "Zestful Living" to the survivors, she supposed the logo would do.

  She did a search for Saint Vladimir's Church. Reverend Trent's photo on the main page showed him as a younger-looking man with no gray in his beard. She clicked over to the staff page and found names listed alongside thumbnail photos. A middle-aged bald fellow was James R. Lucas, and a young blond pastor was named Matthew Frawley. The lay minister, Jo Ellen Wiesniak, had a hearty, windswept appearance. Her face was broad, her blue eyes small. Thom was right. She wasn't someone you'd call pretty, but she had a solid, friendly look about her.

  On a hunch, Leo got out the phone directory and found a listing for Wiesniak, J. E., at an address six blocks from the church. She also found Frawley's name, but there were over a dozen Lucas, J's.

  She signed off the computer and headed for the car.

  JO ELLEN WIESNIAK lived in a bright-yellow Craftsman-style house with overhanging eaves, a low-slung gabled roof, and a tiny front porch. The house nestled into a narrow lot bursting with plants and flowers. Some of the houses on the street looked a little worse for wear, and every third or fourth house needed the grass cut, but the Wiesniak yard was immaculately groomed.

  Leo admired the pinkish-red bloom on the sedum. Purple, pink, and white asters contrasted with big bunches of mums in white, yellow, gold, lavender, and burgundy. The heliopsis stood tall in between bushy, purple Russian sage plants.

  And her roses made Leo smile with pleasure. Bloodred, buttercup yellow, and a lovely deep shade of pink, they were open and still blooming.

  In the front yard, in the midst of all the color, a woman kneeling on a thick blue pad was weeding a flower bed next to the porch. When Leo called out her name, she dropped a miniature garden hoe, shaded her eyes from the sun, and rose.

  She was heavyset, but she'd sprung to her feet quickly and looked strong and fit. Her tan arms stuck out of a sleeveless blouse. She wore loose Capri-style pants that hit her mid-calf and a pair of white canvas shoes that Leo's mom used to call tenny-runners. Leo guessed her age to be around forty. After introducing herself officially as from the State, Leo asked if she could take ten minutes of her time.

  "Let's go sit in the backyard shade," Ms. Wiesniak said. "I've got some drinks in an ice chest." She slipped off her garden gloves, wiped her face on her forearm, and went around to the side of the house. Leo followed her through a gate on a cement path that was edged perfectly. Climbing ivy grew abundantly along the fence that separated her house from the neighbor's.

  Every step took them closer to an Eden-like garden. The backyard was a riot of colors, and Leo commented on how beautiful the plants and flowers were.

  "This is my one major hobby. I love gardening." She led Leo to a patio table and gestured to a chair. Adjusting the umbrella overhead to block the sun, she said, "Reverend Trent told me about your visit to church this morning. I sort of wondered how long it would take you to track me down." She opened an ice chest under the table and rummaged around. "I've got Sprite, A&W Root Beer, and Diet Coke."

  Leo accepted a can of Sprite, popped the top, and took a sip.

  The other woman flopped into a chair and sucked down several gulps of Diet Coke. She let out a sigh. "Gosh, it's hot."

  "Especially since you've been weeding in the sun."

  "I meant to do it in the morning before worship service, but things have been too crazy at the church lately."

  "In what way?" Leo didn't know why, but a strange kind of electricity in the air gave her a feeling of tense expectation. She felt wired, but in a good way, as if she was about to discover useful information.

  "It's been very bad lately."

  "Tell me about it, Ms. Wiesniak."

  "Please, call me Jo Ellen." She took another sip.

  Leo noted that Jo Ellen's double chin contributed to a merry face, used to laughing. But she wasn't laughing now.

  "Things have been wrong for quite some time," Jo Ellen said. "Then the roof was damaged, and suddenly it all got even worse. It's close to seventy thousand dollars to replace such a large and complex roof, and we didn't have anywhere near that in the treasury. I kicked off a fund-raising campaign the likes of which the church has never seen. We've got some older parishioners who've been extra careful with their money, and I worked hard to get some of them to part with a smidgeon of their fortunes—whatever they thought they could afford. I was doing well, and then along came Victoria Bishop, spinning her nasty little web."

  "Victoria Bishop?"

  "Yes. Her." Jo Ellen said it with disdain. "She's such a lovely woman, everyone says so. She's comes off so intelligent and caring, and she has many experiences that she is more than willing to share, ad nauseam, with anyone willing to listen. She's been everywhere, done everything, seen it all."

  "But she's a fake?"

  "Well, I don't know. I tried to like her, but from the beginning, from the moment when she joined the church, I couldn't trust her. There was something off, something strange in the way she scrutinized me, as though I were a bug under a microscope, and she was ready to pull off my wings. She tri
es to be all warm and friendly, and she's sure made friends with a lot of people. Most of the members think she's God's gift to the parish."

  "But she's been less than pleasant to you?"

  "I don't know if it's that I'm overweight or because I haven't done a good enough job in the lay ministry. I really can't say. All I know is that she undermines and sabotages me at every turn. The roof is a good example of it."

  "I understand it was her donation that helped meet the target goal."

  "Yeah, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if she mugged old ladies and stole from babies."

  Leo jerked up straighter in her seat. "What do you mean by that?"

  Jo Ellen put the soda can against her forehead and closed her eyes. "I'm sorry. That wasn't very Christian-like of me. But she's a nasty, cruel, heartless woman, and I must be going nuts because I'm just about the only one who can see it. It's been absolutely crazy-making."

  "I don't think you're crazy. Make me understand why you believe this."

  "Okay." She opened her eyes and set the soda can down with a thwack. "I kicked off the fund-raising with a big bang. Called for donations for a raffle. Made plans for a White Elephant rummage sale. Got the teens involved with sales of Christmas cards and wrapping paper. We sent out a letter to all four-hundred-plus members. The secretary and I spent hours cutting out the letter in the shape of a church just to catch people's eyes. We were getting checks and lots of moral support, and then out of the blue, old man Mueller demanded an audit of the funds that had come in the door. He's on the church council now, along with Victoria Bishop and seven others. We started with about ten thousand in the bank, and we'd already raised over nine thousand more, and suddenly there's a rumor going around that I've got a gambling problem and have embezzled funds. I tell you I was shocked."