The Burden of Desire

by Natalie Charles

  She knew he ate his lunch late and that he liked the food from the Spicy Thai truck down by the park. She overheard him talking to a coworker about his holiday plans—Christmas in Connecticut with his family—and how he’d spent the past weekend completing the ramp she’d helped him begin. By ignoring him, she’d managed to carefully catalog a host of interesting facts and tidbits, as if it was some dysfunctional dating ritual to know so much about her mate that she could calculate exactly where he would be at any given time so she wouldn’t run into him. Which, by default, meant she knew his schedule. As if she were some crazed, creepy stalker. Which she was not.

  Like right now, for instance, she’d have a clear path to go into the kitchen to grab a cup of coffee, except that her stomach couldn’t handle coffee anymore. Just the thought of it... She closed her eyes to scrub her mind of the sensory memory. No coffee. No water, either. The thought of a big glass of water made her want to lose her breakfast...at least, it would have if she’d managed to choke anything down that morning. Tea sounded good, she decided. Herbal tea, preferably mint.

  She settled at her desk minutes later with a steaming mug of peppermint tea and inhaled the vapors, feeling better already. She took a careful sip and waited for her stomach to settle down again. When she looked up, Ben’s lean figure was darkening the doorway.

  Her heart thundered and her gaze flew to the clock on her desk. Seven minutes after eight. He was early today. “Hello, Ben.”

  “Sally.” He stepped farther into her office without waiting for an invitation. His eyes were lit with excitement. That scared her. “I have something for you.”

  She pushed her tea aside with deliberate slowness. “I’m afraid I’m not available for whatever help you’re looking for. I have a full caseload, and now that you’ve finished your report on the Kruger case, it’s time for us both to return to business as usual.”

  He cocked his head. “You’re upset with me.”

  She started. “What? No. Why would I be upset with you?” She paused. “Are you upset with me?”

  “No.” He smiled disarmingly. “But I think we can both admit there’s been some awkwardness between us lately, and last time we spoke, we’d agreed to be friends.”

  Yes, she remembered that well. She’d been half hoping that when she suggested they be friends, he’d look hurt or angry or give her some other indication that he vehemently disagreed with that path. He hadn’t. She’d gambled and lost, and that had stung. “Fine, let’s be friends.” She smiled tightly. Friends who’d had hot sex. Nothing awkward about that.

  “As a friend, I’m telling you that I’d love to help you with whatever little project you’re about to propose, but I don’t have the time. Sorry.”

  That was meant to be dismissive, and she’d just turned her eyes to her computer when he said, “I didn’t mean I had work for you. I have a gift.”

  He was close to her desk, his waist hovering suggestively at eye level—was he doing that on purpose? She rolled her eyes at him and gathered her thoughts, trying not to reveal how breathless his unexpected appearance had made her. She should come up with something clever, some smart comeback that would let him know he was still on thin ice and he’d better tread carefully. “Whatever.” She groaned inwardly. She was so lame.

  “I’ll take that as willingness to hear me out,” he said, stepping closer to her desk.

  He leaned forward and brazenly took her right hand from her tea, cupping it in his and dropping something in her palm. An electric current darted up her arm at the contact. “What—”

  “Look at what I found this morning.” He stepped back, taking his warm, strong hands with him and looking very pleased with himself. It was almost adorable.

  Sally examined the necklace. It was silver and delicate, enclosed inside a small plastic bag, and her heart lurched at the thought that he’d actually gone out and purchased a gift for her. “I—I don’t get it,” she stammered, terrified that she’d have to remind him that they were a two-time thing only. Completely finished. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

  “Turn it over.” He gestured with his index finger. “It’s engraved.”

  Her breath snagged in her lungs, but then she saw the letters. “MAH.” She released a breath, feeling like an idiot. Of course he hadn’t bought a gift for her. “I still don’t understand—”

  “Mary Ann Hennessy,” he interjected. “Ronnie Kruger’s sister. I’ve been following Mitch Kruger for a couple of weeks now, trailing him on his way to and from work, just to get familiar with his routine, see where he goes.” Ben helped himself to a chair without waiting to be invited. “You can set your watch to this guy. He’s backing out of his driveway at the same time every morning, only to return at the same time every night. Orderly doesn’t begin to describe it. But this morning he threw me for a loop. He stopped at the reservoir, and when I investigated immediately after he left, I found that.”

  Sally knew she was staring at him. She probably looked as if she’d lost track of her faculties, with her eyes wide and her mouth hanging open as she tried to process this information. “You’ve been following Mitch Kruger,” she said quietly. Then, “Wait a minute. You’ve been following Mitch Kruger?”

  “Yes, I just told you that.”

  Sally placed the necklace on her desk blotter. “But why? I mean, don’t you see how insane that is?” She rubbed at her temples with both hands. “You must be, what? Parking outside of his house? Following him to work?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Ben.” She leaned forward and drilled her index finger against her desk to make a point. “Stalking a suspect? That’s something crazy people do. Unless they have a warrant, in which case it’s something the police do. Not us.”

  He leaned forward, undeterred. “And why not us, Sally? Why not? When the police have bungled this case and made it clear they aren’t going to go any further without a body? Why can’t we do a little investigating of our own?” He shrugged. “I haven’t broken the law. I’ve just observed anything that anyone else could have observed.”

  “First of all, there’s no ‘we’ about any of this. ‘We’ aren’t investigating, you are investigating.” That was number one, but she was so distracted by the flurry of thoughts in her head that she hadn’t thought ahead to number two. Ben had been conducting his own private investigation of Mitch Kruger, even after he’d handed in his report to Jack? “And number two, aren’t you done with this case? Aren’t we both done?”

  She’d been reluctant to even think about the case for weeks now, ever since she’d spoken to James Kruger in the interrogation room at the police department. “I’m done,” Sally continued without waiting for Ben’s response. “I spoke with James, you know. The day they picked him up for smashing my windshield.”

  Ben was maddeningly nonplussed by her confession. “And?”

  “And I asked him to tell me all about his aunt Mary. Mary and Ronnie were only fifteen months apart in age and grew up to be very close. So close that when Mary Ann developed cancer about five years ago and needed a bone marrow transplant, Ronnie was the donor.”

  “So they were closer than we realized,” Ben mused. “That’s interesting.”

  “It is,” she agreed carefully, “and it also gives me pause. The sisters were close, or at least not as distant as we thought, although James mentioned something about an argument a few years ago. Still, it’s possible Mary came to visit Ronnie before whatever happened to precipitate this entire case. That would make the hairs on the area rug less suspicious, wouldn’t it?”

  He eyed her, sizing up the situation. “Sure. The reason the hairs on the rug are suspicious is that we thought Mary wouldn’t be seen anywhere near Ronnie.”

  “I’ve been wrong before, Ben. Horribly, publicly wrong, and I can’t make that kind of mistake again.” Sally swallowed. “Pride goes before a
fall and whatnot, and I can’t let my pride get in the way of my common sense. We’re grasping at straws, tortured theories and gut feelings when we say that Mary was killed. Everything about this case tells me I should back quietly away and move on.” She avoided eye contact, not wanting him to realize that she included Ben in that “everything.” “I thought I was doing something good at one point, bringing a murderer to justice, but I can’t fight something I don’t understand.”

  “But you were right. Did you read my report?” The intensity of Ben’s cobalt-blue eyes sent her heart racing into a traitorous overdrive. “You were correct. Whatever her relationship with her sister, Mary Ann Hennessy is gone. She’s vanished, and no one has seen or heard from her in almost a year. She had tickets to go to Hawaii, but only boarded the plane to San Diego. After that, she was never heard from again. You know what that means, right?” He leaned still closer. “Ronnie took that plane ride. That’s how she got to Vegas. Sally, Mitch Kruger got away with murder, but we got him on the wrong victim.”

  She felt her anxiety mount. “And so what? Without a body, there isn’t a damn thing anyone is going to do about this.” She brushed her hair back. “I’m frustrated, too, believe me. But investigations take time, and sometimes they take luck. We’ve been unlucky so far, and enough time hasn’t passed to turn our fortune around.” She sighed. “It’s not the right time for this. And it’s not a good idea to follow Mitch Kruger. If you really believed he had committed murder and gotten away with it... The man is dangerous.”

  Ben leaned back in his chair with the calm air of a man in full control. “Sally, if I didn’t know any better I’d think you were concerned for my well-being.”

  Her throat tightened, her face flushed and her mind went racing with all kinds of inappropriate memories of the last time he’d leveled that maddening confidence in her direction. Dammit. “Of course I’m concerned,” she said, recovering as best she could. “I care about my colleagues, and I wouldn’t want to see any of them turn up missing.”

  She could tell that hadn’t been the answer he’d expected.

  “But this locket proves that we’re getting somewhere, and that my hunch is right,” he said.

  “And what hunch is this?”

  “He knows we’re looking for Mary Ann, and he’s got trinkets linking him to her that he has to dispose of.” Ben shrugged. “Maybe he’s even got her body stashed somewhere, waiting until the coast is clear and hoping we’d all be so relieved that Ronnie Kruger is alive that we’d call the whole thing a domestic dispute and move on.”

  That was Sally’s feeling, as well, but she wasn’t quite ready to verbalize it. “We don’t even know that this locket belonged to Mary,” she noted. “MAH could be lots of people’s initials.”

  He shook his head. “It’s not even dirty, so it hasn’t been outside or exposed to the elements. My guess is Mitch intended to throw it into the woods and instead it bounced off a tree and landed back in the parking lot. That would be quite a coincidence if it belonged to someone else, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she mumbled. “That would be a coincidence.” She traced her finger against the plastic bag, outlining the locket. “You could’ve talked to me these past weeks, you know. I’m not the enemy.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him adjust his posture, shifting slightly. “We were both feeling...strongly.”

  If that wasn’t the understatement of the year. This was the problem with Ben, and with them, that she swung between wanting to rip his clothes off and wanting to slam the door in his face and never see him again. Except that lately, she leaned toward wanting to rip his clothes off. It was like she had no self-control. She lost her head when he was close by, thought things she didn’t intend to think. Maybe those were only the pregnancy hormones speaking. She felt out of control in more ways than one these days.

  “This isn’t a reunion,” she said quietly. “What happened a few weeks ago—” a flush bloomed on her cheeks at the memory “—that can’t happen again.”

  He nodded. “I completely agree. That was a big mistake.”

  A mistake? Now wait a minute. “You... I mean...just because we’re colleagues, and if Jack found out anything... I mean, there’s nothing to find out. There can’t be. We need to get back to being somewhat normal. Normal for us, at least.”

  Even as she said the words, she knew that normal would never factor into what she felt for Ben. When she looked at him, all she could think of was the feel of him inside her, or the sight of him lying naked in her bed. Such memories were dangerous and problematic and needed to be smothered with things like cold stares and avoidance, except that cold stares and avoidance made something inside her ache. She couldn’t quite explain it. Then her breathing halted as she remembered the violent nausea that had just started to subside. Their relationship was irreconcilable with normal.

  “Normal for us?” He gave a short laugh. “Sally, what’s normal for us anymore?” he asked in a resigned tone. “Is it ignoring each other? Living on opposite sides of the planet?” He came closer, his eyes fixed on hers, each step heavy with significance. “Is normal for us pretending that nothing happened? Imagining that we didn’t experience the hottest night of our lives together? Don’t do that,” he said when she flinched. “Don’t pretend you weren’t thinking the same thing.”

  She brought her hands down against her desk. He was close enough that the spicy smell of his cologne gripped her senses and sent her stomach into a spiral. She recoiled, feeling a sudden flash of heat cross her skin. “Sorry.” She pushed back clumsily in her chair, covering her nose and mouth with one hand. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  His mouth pulled into a troubled frown just before she closed her eyes. She felt as if she was on a boat, swaying this way and that.

  “Are you all right?” He came around the desk and crouched beside her. Oh, there was the smell of his cologne again. Her stomach revolted. “I’m fine,” she managed to say through clenched teeth. “I could use some fresh air, though.”

  He was over to the window in an instant, pulling the panes down as far as they went to admit a thin stream of cold air. “Here,” he said, rolling her chair to the window. “Does that help?”

  The air was bracing, trickling across her skin like fingers of ice. The cold hit the back of her throat and then her lungs, but the effect was to soothe, not shock. After some time had passed, her stomach calmed and she nodded her head. “Yes, that helps. Thanks.”

  He plopped himself back into the visitor’s chair across from her desk. “You had me nervous for a minute there, Sally. You looked white, like you were about to pass out.”

  “I may be coming down with something,” she said, wiping her fingers across her forehead. She felt warm, but her skin was cool to the touch. “The flu, maybe.”

  He leaned forward in his seat, his elbows on his knees. “Maybe you want to take the rest of the day off and get some rest?”

  “No, I’m fine.” She smoothed her hair and cleared her throat. “Thank you for your concern. Let’s just keep it strictly professional from here on out.”

  He leaned back in his chair. “I got it, Sally. No problem.”

  Why was that so easy for him? And why did his casual agreement make her feel as if he’d just slammed her heart against the floor? “Great,” she managed to reply. “I suppose you should give the necklace to the police, though I’m not sure what use they’ll have for it.”

  “I told you, it’s a gift.” He dropped his hands on the armrests, easing back and splaying his legs in a wide stance. “It’s yours to give to the police. This is your case. I’m only second chair, and I don’t even think I’m that anymore. I want you to nail this bastard, Sally. Show them all how tough and smart you are.”

  The sincerity in his gaze trapped something in her throat. She sure didn’t feel tough and smart right now. She clutche
d the plastic bag protecting the necklace. “I don’t think I can do it, Ben. Not without a body.”

  “I know you, Sally. I know you don’t give up, and you don’t take no for an answer. When there’s something you want, you go for it.” He leaned forward until his elbows rested on his knees again. “I also know you don’t need my help. You never have. You don’t need anyone’s help. So I hope you understand that I’m only doing this because I want you to know how much I believe in you.”

  The space between them melted. He was so close to her, his gaze locked on hers, his eyes focused with a clarity she’d never seen from him. His words left her breathless and wishing she was as clever as he seemed to imagine.

  “I wouldn’t know where to b-begin,” she stammered. “How about that? I have a necklace, so what do I do with it?”

  The corner of his mouth twitched upward. “Are you asking for my help? Because I happen to have some ideas.”

  Of course he did. There it was, that maddening grin of his, except now it didn’t seem so maddening. This time, she found it endearing. “Yes, fine. I’m asking for your help.”

  “You’re an actress, whether you know it or not, but I think you know it. You have a flair for the dramatic.”

  She folded her arms across her chest, conceding nothing. “And?”

  “Dan Maybury has been actively trying to find Mary Ann Hennessy. He’s interviewed her relatives over the phone, checked flight manifestos and basically tracked down every lead he had. Now it’s all come to dead ends.” He held up a hand. “No pun intended.”

  She groaned. “I would hope not.”

  “I spoke to Dan just yesterday. He reiterated the official position of the department, which is that they aren’t moving until they have a body. They’ve exhausted valuable resources on this case and come up empty. They won’t go further without a break.”

  “And?”

  “Have you ever read Hamlet?”