Beneath the Cracks

by LS Sygnet

  "I shouldn't have let her think about that case," I said. "I should've seen where it was going, that she'd start thinking about those poor bald girls on her autopsy table and relate it to what she's facing."

  He pressed his lips to the side of my head. "She's got a lot to process. What you said was true. She won't know how she's going to handle chemotherapy until it starts. And when that happens, she's got you and Ken and a heck of a lot of other people who care about her, Helen. She's not going to go through this alone."

  Kind of like how he managed to worm his way into everything and I no longer felt so alone. Part of me still wanted to protest. The other part, tired and still a little chilled and a lot hungry, was grateful for the companionship.

  "You're not thinking of dinner out, are you?"

  "Whatever you want."

  "Chinese," I leaned into his side. "I'm so tired, I don't think I'm up for public dining tonight. Actually, I planned on going home and rehydrating in the sauna after soaking in a boiling hot bubble bath for an hour. Tony and Crevan plan to check in later. I hope I'm still awake."

  "Where'd you park?"

  "Basement level. You?"

  "Around the corner down the street. How about if I walk you to the Expedition and you give me a ride to the Crown Vic?"

  "Sure."

  He held the door open for me when we reached my car, but swooped in for a quick kiss before I could climb in.

  "I think," he said softly, "that you've earned the night off, Doc. How about if you go home and have your hot bath and sauna, a nice glass of wine, some Chinese, and go to bed? I can stick around and talk to Tony and Crevan and get the update for you."

  "Oh."

  "Or better yet, I'll call them on the way home and tell them to let you rest tonight."

  I shrugged. "I guess."

  Johnny grinned. "Now I know you're exhausted. The day you're too spent to argue with me is one for the history books."

  We rode in silence out of the garage, around the corner until his car came into sight. Tentatively, I stroked the back of his hand. "Are you sure this is what you want tonight?"

  "I'm sure it's what you need. There's no crime in taking care of you, Helen. I could see how tired you were when you walked in Maya's room. Her feelings at the end seemed to zap whatever kept you going today right out of you. You should take the night off and recharge."

  "But I…"

  "You what?" He lifted my hand to his lips and pressed a soft kiss to my knuckles.

  "Nothing. You're probably right. A quiet evening, an early bedtime, it's exactly what I need."

  "Hey, you're not worried that I won't tell you what if anything Tony and Crevan have to report, are you?"

  "Of course not. It's not like I won't see them first thing in the morning anyway."

  A curious expression flitted over his face. "True, but I'd tell you anyway." Johnny leaned over for another kiss. "See you soon."

  The odd sense of deflation, disappointment even, lingered on the drive back to Beach Cliffs. It surprised me a bit how the idea of spending the evening alone didn't sit well with me at all, when less than a week had passed since my reluctance to have more than Maya in the sanctuary of my home.

  I stopped at the front gate and depressed the remote clipped to the sun visor. "Now what?" I groaned. Headlights followed me up the driveway. I drove to the garage before reality sunk in and I recognized the car, had just dropped Orion off at it half an hour ago.

  Melancholy transformed into fluttering in my belly. I opened the second of three doors on my garage and waited for him to park before closing them.

  Johnny rounded the car and swept me into his arms. "Hi."

  "Hi."

  "I have some good news."

  "Oh?"

  He nodded. "Joe called me. Remember the other night when we talked about his connections in Washington?"

  I already knew what he was about to say, but suddenly wanted to give him the pleasure of delivering the news himself. "Yeah…"

  "I called him about this Seleeby prick harassing you. He was not pleased. So, he called his pal, who immediately got their mutual friend on the phone, and wouldn't you know it, guess who left Darkwater Bay yesterday with his tail between his legs?"

  I was glad he told me. It gave me the chance to thank him for giving me a little peace of mind. My fingers danced down the front of his shirt. "Thank you, Johnny."

  "Joe said the director was so pissed off, Seleeby will be lucky if he's not following up on fertilizer sales in North Dakota for the next five years. It seems that there were quite a few people in the bureau who were not happy about losing you last spring."

  Other than David, I couldn't think of a single person who cared.

  "More than David," he said.

  Did I say that out loud? "Johnny –"

  "It's all right, Helen. I'm glad he stood beside you through that mess with your ex-husband. I'm not sorry that you left the FBI or that George Hardy finally did something right and wooed you out here, but I can't stand thinking about you going through all of that alone."

  I believed him, without suspicion, without an ounce of doubt. Johnny hooked his arm around my waist and opened the door to the house.

  "Why don't you go undress while I draw you a hot bath?"

  "You don't have to do that."

  He gripped my shoulders and steered me toward the dressing room. "I know, but I want to do it. It wouldn't kill you to be pampered for an evening. Who knows? You might find that you like it."

  I listened to the water running in the bathtub and Johnny's deep baritone hum while I deposited my suit into a bag for the dry cleaner and slipped into an enormous fluffy micro-fiber robe. The bathroom was empty when I stepped out of the dressing room. I was up to my chin in bubbles with the whirlpool thrashing the knots out of my muscles when Johnny came into the bathroom with a human-sized portion of red wine in a glass.

  In other words, it wasn't half a bottle poured to the rim of the deepest wine glass I own.

  He offered it to me and said, "Lean forward."

  My arms draped over knees, and Johnny started scrubbing my back gently with the long handled loofa brush.

  "Mmm…that feels nice."

  "If you're really good, and by good I mean do more than rearrange dinner and actually eat something, I thought you might like a long relaxing massage later."

  "That sounds fantastic."

  "If you eat."

  "I said I'm hungry. Or did you gloss over that part with all this plotting about how you planned to pamper me all night?"

  "Just making sure you didn't forget." The gentle circular motion of the brush slowed, dipped lower into the water. "I suppose I'll concede that I was a little more focused on getting you here and talking you into a little TLC than anything else."

  I peeked over my shoulder. "Honestly? I thought you were sending me home alone after we left the hospital, Johnny."

  His lips grazed the back of my neck. "And I told you that we'd get to a point where nothing could make me leave you. Remember?"

  "The famed point of no return, eh? You sure got there fast."

  Johnny's goatee tickled my shoulder and elicited a shiver. "I lied last night."

  "Really."

  "Uh-huh. I was already there, Doc. I've been there all along, just praying that at some point, you'd open your eyes and see it."

  I fell silent, letting the reality of my life and the inevitability of lies and misdeeds catching me no matter where I ran erode the illusion of happiness that Johnny wanted. There was one thing that would make him leave me. My throat tightened. No amount of lust or loneliness or fear could justify letting Johnny go down this path.

  His soapy fingers gripped my jaw and turned my eyes upward. "What's wrong, Helen?"

  "I can't do this to you," I whispered. "You're one of the truly good guys, and…you deserve better. You deserve someone who can –"

  "Shh. I don't want someone else. Honey, do you think I'm stupid?"

  "What?"
/>
  "Do you think I don't know what Seleeby was really doing out here, why you really left the FBI? I know, Helen. I know what they think you did."

  "And…and what if they aren't wrong?"

  His eyes bored into mine. "You didn't do it. Just because you bailed on the marriage doesn't make you responsible for what Sully Marcos did to him, Helen. You couldn't have stopped it if you tried. It was Hamilton's choice to climb into bed with crooks. It was his choice to lie to you."

  "Johnny, you don't –"

  "I do understand. I know why you're so guarded, and why you're afraid to let people get too close. I'm not afraid to love a woman who got duped by her mobster husband. I don't see that as your fault."

  Would he see it in the same light if the truth of my cold-blooded crime ever became exposed? Would he understand the kind of betrayal that ultimately pushed me over the edge and turned me into a carbon copy of my father? No, more likely, he'd hate me for being just like Rick. The irony was that I never loved Rick, and there was little doubt left in my heart that Johnny's feelings for me were genuine.

  He pried the wine glass from my fingers. "I'll turn the sauna on and go order dinner. No wine in there, okay?"

  I nodded.

  "And after dinner, you can turn in early."

  Tears started dripping from my chin. The urge to talk to someone, to tell Johnny the truth burned inside me. It warred with the ever present fear of being caught, or actually confessing the crime I committed. I wanted to dredge up every justification imagined by man, reasons to hold back, to keep the lie alive.

  In the end, there were only his eyes, and the soft words that were about to tear the truth out of me whether I wanted to tell it or not.

  "Hey," he murmured, "whatever it is, Helen, you can tell me. If you don't talk to someone, this is just gonna keep eating you up inside."

  Johnny slipped his hands under my arms and lifted me out of the tub. My fluffy robe wrapped around me, followed by his arms. "Talk to me. You can tell me anything. It won't make me love you less."

  "Ha!" the single sound barked from my parted lips. "That's what you think now, but it's not true, Johnny. You'd read me my rights and arrest me. You'd have no choice."

  Fingers tangled in the loose strands of damp hair that framed my face. Johnny peered intently at me. "Did you see him the night he was murdered?"

  I closed my eyes, felt the tears burn at the corners as they streaked out on a path dictated by gravity and guilt. Yes, that's what this was. Guilt. For killing Rick, for being less than people believed I was, for failing my father, for not having his strength to compartmentalize living the life of a good person from the things that must be done.

  Love makes people want to believe the best in others. They will dig for excuses and reasons to justify the worst of deeds. Johnny Orion must've been the president of the duped lover's club. He pressed his lips to my forehead.

  "What did he do to you, Helen? How could anyone who loved you ever hurt you this much?"

  I pushed the urge for honesty into the pit of my stomach. I sucked in a deep breath and perpetuated another half-truth. "Part of me is glad he's dead, Johnny. He got what he deserved."

  A large thumb brushed the moisture from one cheek. "Is that what's got you so torn up, that you aren't sorry Marcos had him killed?"

  For once, I didn't lie. I didn't confirm or deny. My head rested against Johnny's chest, arms clasped around him tightly. "Don't leave me, Johnny."

  In hindsight, I should've told him the truth.

  Chapter 17

  I thumbed through the photos of the dead John Doe victims – including the morgue shot of Detective Cox so we could maintain the illusion that he too was unidentified – on the way out to Dupree Farm. Frustration took up residence on the tip of my tongue. "It's going to be obvious that these men were victims of something. I mean, since when do three police detectives show up with a stack of morgue shots and it means someone died of natural causes?"

  "Somebody's gotta try to identify them. It ain't like we're goin' in and sayin' these men were murdered, Eriksson."

  "Tony's right, Helen. We're just going in to see if we can find names so next of kin can be notified. We're not divulging how these men died."

  "That's good, because it would be a lie," I muttered. "Since we don't know what caused the injuries that killed them."

  "What crawled up your –"

  "Tony," Crevan intervened quickly. "Let's just focus on finding this Tom Denton and asking him if he knows the names of any of these men. We need identities, regardless of whether it helps us find out how they died."

  I pondered Crevan's wisdom at keeping a cool head and wondered if my foul mood had really been the trigger that set Tony off that morning. I knew why I was irritated.

  Wendell was right. I should've never allowed myself to become attached to Darkwater Bay. He always told me that I needed to be willing to walk away from anything at a moment's notice. These are things, Sprout. They don't matter. We can always get more somewhere else. I broke the rule. I got caught up in my dream house, turning a place into something that was an emotional attachment. It didn’t help that my fantasy of killing Datello somehow got mixed up in every block of stone, every line of mortar, every fleck of paint so that the house came to represent my resolve to see the rest of the plan accomplished.

  And then I let the ultimate temptation waltz through the door and straight into my bedroom. Lies and anonymity don't blend well when the heart wants to settle down and wallow in the comfort and security of love. Even though the outcome of marriage to Rick was disastrous, he was still a better choice than Johnny Orion.

  Rick didn't love me any more than I loved him. What a jumbled mess my life had become.

  "I know why I'm in a foul mood this morning, Briscoe. What's your problem?"

  "Oh, I dunno, Eriksson. Why would I be in a bad mood? I can't seem to talk a speck of goddamned common sense into anybody."

  Crevan's eyes drifted to the scenery out the window.

  "Am I missing something here?"

  He snorted. "Yeah, you're missin' plenty, Helen. Maybe I should let you take a run at Puppy. Like you said, we divorcees got a club that opens our eyes to reality."

  A light clicked on in my brain. "What's the problem, Crevan?"

  "There is no problem," he muttered.

  "The hell there ain't! How can you let that woman blackmail you –"

  "Whoa, wait a minute. Belle is blackmailing you?" I perched on the edge of the back seat. "Crevan, that's a crime. If you have evidence that she's –"

  "It isn't blackmail per se," he interrupted and glared his thanks at Tony for dragging me into the conversation. "And I'm done talking about it."

  "Tony, what's he done talking about?" I tapped Briscoe's shoulder.

  "Belle told Crevan if he wants a quickie divorce so he can move on with his life, he's gotta basically give her everything. The house, half his pension, his life insurance payoff should the gold-digging harpy manage by some unjust twist of fate to outlive him, the whole shebang. I can't imagine what man in his right mind would roll over and take that, 'specially the pension thing. Hell, Crevan, you weren't even married three years, and she wants a pension that's been growin' since you were barely an adult? Tell me that ain't blackmail."

  "It's a private matter, Tony. I'm not discussing my reasons for going along with what she wants."

  My fingers brushed over Crevan's shoulder. "I know how difficult all of this can be, Crevan. If you need a shoulder, we're here for you. I think that's what Tony wants you to know."

  "You should take her up on that, Puppy. She's the guru in residence. I bet Eriksson could tell you how to survive this divorce without becoming a pauper in the process."

  "Maybe." The sullen gaze returned to fields of grain whizzing past us almost too fast to identify.

  Then again, I'm a city girl. I couldn't tell the difference between a lot of plants, the fruits they bear being my only exposure. "Are we getting close to this plac
e?'

  Briscoe grinned. "You did not just ask: are we there yet?"

  The tension dissipated in the car, much like the overhead cover faded to wispy clouds that barely covered a small patch of bright blue sky. The sun was shining outside Darkwater Bay, and I wanted to stay in its warmth forever.

  "What do they grow at this farm?"

  Briscoe chuckled. "Milk, Eriksson."

  "It's a dairy farm?"

  Crevan shifted in his seat and looked at me. "Uh-huh. It's the biggest dairy farm in the state, maybe the whole west coast. Over half of what they produce is organic now. It's really an interesting set up. They do have more than dairy cattle, but the crops produced are used for grain to feed the cows. It's a massive operation."

  "A corporate farm."

  "Yep," Briscoe nodded. His index finger extended over the steering wheel. "And there she is."

  I gazed at the impressive building rising up from the depths of green. Its mirrored windows reflected the sun, making it a beacon of civilization in the midst of grain as far as the eye could see. "Wow. I wasn't expecting it to look so…corporate."

  Briscoe chuckled and said, "Puppy, I think she was expectin' to talk to Auntie Em, the tin man, a couple of scarecrows and maybe a big ol' coward with the jowls of a lion."

  "Oh stop," I shook my head.

  "They've got their own research facility out here too, Helen," Crevan said. "Breeding a healthier milk cow from what I've read about the place."

  "Seriously?"

  "Uh-huh. Like I said, it's an impressive operation."

  "Who owns this place?"

  "Jean-Claude Dupree," Tony gagged out his best French inflection. Crevan snickered, and I even had to admit it was pretty comical.

  "I take it you don't like Monsieur Dupree?"

  "You speak Frog, Eriksson?" His bushy eyebrows waggled in the rearview mirror.

  "A bit," I grinned. Briscoe was adorably politically incorrect, but it was always tempered with humor and a distinct absence of malice. "A little background on Mr. Dupree might be helpful."

  "He's French Canadian," Crevan supplied. "Born and raised in Quebec City, got into the farming gig when he migrated south and helped overtake a whole lotta Midwest farms for the corporations about 20 years ago when they were being sold off piece by piece."