Season of the Wolf

by Summers, Robin

  But if she was honest, the battle over whether Jordan would or would not buy the cabin was not the real reason she had not told her mother and Henry of her plans. The truth was, she had avoided telling them because she knew they would both see through all her cleverly crafted rationales to the one that really mattered: she was running away.

  The theme music to Murder, She Wrote played on Jordan’s phone. She smiled at the distinctive ringtone and answered. “You playing hooky again?”

  Henry laughed from the other end of the phone line. “As often as I can.”

  Jordan stood at the living room window, watching the wind rustle through the trees. “Yeah, right. You haven’t played hooky in twenty years.”

  “You haven’t known me twenty years.”

  “No, but I do know you.”

  Henry laughed again. “That you do.”

  Max came up beside her and nuzzled her hand, like he knew it was Henry on the phone. Of course, since Henry was the only one who ever called her—apart from her mother—it wasn’t really much of a guess.

  “Uncle Henry’s on the phone,” she told the dog. He whined softly and gave her hand a swift lick. “Max says hi,” she said, to Henry this time.

  “Give him a good scratch for me. You change my ringtone yet?”

  He’d been demanding she change it for over a year. “Why would I? It’s perfect for you.”

  “Yes, because I am the spitting image of Angela Lansbury.”

  This time it was Jordan who laughed. “So, what’s up? It’s not like you to call me during the workday.”

  Henry didn’t answer right away. “I’ve got a case.”

  This time it was Jordan who fell silent.

  “Jordan? You still there?”

  She turned and sat on the ledge of the large bay window. “I’m here.”

  “On the surface, it’s pretty cut-and-dried, but…”

  “But your gut is talking.”

  “Something like that.”

  “I’m not a cop anymore, Henry.” They’d had this conversation before.

  His answer was instantaneous. “You’ll always be a cop, wherever you are. But you should be here.”

  Jordan stiffened, angry with him for bringing it up and angry with herself for knowing he was right. “If this is what you called about—”

  “No, no. No. Not really,” he said quickly. She could practically see him backpedaling. “I need your help.”

  She started to tell him again that she wasn’t a cop anymore, but she knew that would get her nowhere. They’d go round and round like they always did, each repeating their point and neither conceding. She pushed it down, swallowing her pride and the bile that rose with it. Henry rarely asked for her help. He was always too busy trying to help her to let her help him. Even after Ella’s death seven months ago, it was all about Jordan.

  “She made me promise to take care of you, Jordan.”

  They stood beside Ella’s coffin, the sky blue and crisp above the cemetery. But even the sweet scent of spring couldn’t erase the death that hung in the air.

  “What about you, Henry? Who’s going to take care of you?”

  “Don’t you worry about me. We had thirty-two wonderful years together. She’s with God now.”

  “But Ella—”

  “Ella’s finally out of her pain,” he said. Ella had fought a long, hard battle against kidney cancer. By the end, the vivacious force of will that was Ella Wayne had been reduced to a mere shell of herself, though even in her weakened state, she was still one formidable woman. “And she’ll kick my butt all the way from heaven if I fail to keep my promise.”

  “Not everything’s about me, Henry.”

  “Maybe it should be.”

  “Maybe I can’t be saved.”

  “Who said anything about saving you?” Henry turned to her, brown pools twinkling in grief and hope. “If I tried to save you, you’d kick my butt.”

  “Probably. Definitely.”

  “So maybe the trick is to help you save yourself.”

  Henry hadn’t had much luck in that regard. But he kept trying, and Jordan kept fighting him, though over the last few months he had been getting through more than she cared to admit. She shoved that thought aside and focused on the here and now. Henry had asked for help, and she wasn’t about to ignore such a request.

  Jordan sighed. “What kind of help?”

  “We’ve got a double homicide. Husband and wife—waitress and cook who owned a diner.”

  Henry quickly sketched out the details, including the account of the waitress who’d discovered the bodies, Devon James. It sounded straightforward enough, but Henry wouldn’t have called if it were that simple.

  “You think there’s more to it.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “Something isn’t adding up about Devon’s story,” he said.

  “You think she’s involved?”

  “No, nothing like that. I mean, yeah. Kind of.”

  “Okay, now you’ve got me confused. You think she is or isn’t involved?” She heard the phone shuffle in Henry’s hand, and the once-distinct voices in the background became muffled. A few seconds later, Henry was back, speaking a little more quietly.

  “I don’t think she was involved in the murders. But I do think she knows more than she’s telling.”

  “So why not bring her in? Question her further?”

  “I did. She’s here. But she’s still not telling me everything. In fact, she’s totally shut down.”

  “You think she’s protecting someone? The killer?”

  “Someone, yes. The killer, no,” he said. “I think she’s scared.”

  Henry was one of the best investigators Jordan had ever known. He always seemed to know the right play, the right amount of pressure to put on a witness. His gut was rarely wrong, and he could ferret out the truth like a bloodhound in a swamp.

  “What haven’t you told me?”

  She could practically hear him smiling. “You haven’t lost a step,” he said. “I checked her record.”

  “And?”

  “Spotless. Of course, she didn’t actually exist before ten months ago.”

  That added a whole different dimension to things. Henry had to have checked more deeply into the woman’s background than they usually did on a basic witness, which meant he’d had some inkling that her story was off before he’d run the check. And his gut had been right. As usual.

  She’d seen this kind of thing before, once or twice, and heard tales of it beyond her own experience. Someone with no history would cross the path of an investigation, no evidence of his or her name or existence prior to some point a few months or years earlier. It was almost always a woman, usually a battered wife who had run away from her abusive husband. Jordan wondered if that was the case here. In her experience, battered women were often the hardest to break.

  “If I let her go, the truth goes with her. She’s going to run,” Henry said.

  “If she runs, you’ll find her.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Jordan sighed again. Odds were Henry was right. If this woman had run before, chances were she knew how to disappear. “What do you want from me, Henry?”

  “I need your help.”

  “You said that already.”

  “I need you to do what you do best. I need you to help me find the truth.”

  “You don’t need me for that.”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  Jordan was growing frustrated. “There are a dozen detectives there who could break her. Why me?”

  “Because breaking her isn’t what’s going to get her to open up. She needs to trust somebody.”

  “She can trust you.”

  “Yeah, but she doesn’t. At least not enough to talk.”

  “But you think she’ll trust me. Why?”

  Henry didn’t answer. Silence crawled across the line for endless moments. Finally, he said, “Because I think she’s broken. Just like you.”

  He
nry’s words sucked the air out of Jordan’s chest like she’d just been sucker punched. Tears welled as a little boy’s face filled her vision. She tried to block out the image but it remained, burned into her sight as if it had been branded on the insides of her eyelids.

  “Jordan? You still there? I didn’t mean—”

  “I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”

  She hung up without saying good-bye, knowing Henry would forgive her rudeness but not particularly caring at that moment. Max sat up at her feet, where he had been lying throughout the conversation. She smoothed her hand over the soft fur of his scalp.

  “Well, boy. Looks like I’m walking back into the fire.”

  *

  Devon waited in the conference room, biding her time until Lieutenant Wayne came back from wherever he’d disappeared to twenty minutes earlier. She waited for him to return, waited for him to ask her more questions she had no intention of answering, waited for the floor to dissolve into a deep black hole from which there was no escape.

  Or maybe it already had.

  She stared at the wooden conference table, watched her fingers trace aimless patterns over the scarred surface as she tried to figure out how she’d ended up trapped in a police station, caught within a web of lies of her own making. She glanced at the door, wondering what would happen if she just got up and walked out of that room and out of the police station. She wasn’t under arrest. She’d seen enough movies to know they had no reason to hold her, and her own experience backed up that knowledge. The only crime she’d committed was related to how she obtained her social security number, but she didn’t think they’d had enough time to track that down, which meant they had nothing. She was free to leave at any time.

  And yet she stayed in her chair, imprisoned by choice. Years of hard-won experience cried out for her to run, and yet she was so damn tired of running. Of hiding. Of living only half a life.

  Lieutenant Wayne knew she was living a lie, had confronted her with that knowledge, but he knew only a fraction of the truth. There was so much more to tell, and for the first time in too many years to count, something inside urged her to tell it. She thought she could trust the lieutenant. He was clearly good at his job—he’d backed her into a corner she hadn’t even known was there—and maybe he was even a good man. He had led her into a trap, but she hadn’t sensed any malice in his intent or perverse enjoyment in his actions. He seemed to want the truth, to stop the man responsible for killing Sally and Chuck. Maybe, just maybe, that meant she could tell him…

  But she had done that before, and the police had not believed her. The pain of that betrayal stung sharply all these years later. They hadn’t believed her, just like Lieutenant Wayne wouldn’t believe her. And then what? She’d be lucky if they didn’t throw her into a psych ward somewhere with only her pain to keep her company—her pain, and the certainty that if she stayed in one place for too long, even locked away from the world, he would find a way to get to her. There was no escaping him. She knew that now.

  No, it was better to stay quiet, to keep it to herself, like always. Eventually, Lieutenant Wayne would tire of her silence and would have to let her go. Then she could move on to the next place, the next name, and the next half a life.

  *

  Jordan shoved her car keys into her pocket, asking herself for the eleventh time what in the hell she was doing. She leaned her back against her SUV, staring up at the three-story station house. She hadn’t been inside its walls in fifteen months. She wondered if it had changed at all but knew instinctively that it hadn’t. She imagined that in fifty years it would still be there, a little older, a little more decrepit, but still standing. A last refuge in a world gone mad. The thought both comforted and saddened her.

  She stuck her thumbs in the pockets of her jeans, a seemingly casual move that was anything but. Jordan called it her fake-it-till-you-make-it stance. The first time she’d done it was right after her father’s funeral. Jordan had been fourteen when he’d died of a heart attack. It had come without warning and without reason. His heart had simply…stopped.

  Where Jordan’s mother had taught her to be compassionate, her father had taught her to be self-reliant. He had been a kind man, but he had also been a survivor. He’d lost his two older brothers in the Korean War, had fought in Vietnam, and had lost his job and means of earning a living when the steel industry collapsed in the early ’80s. He had survived all that and come out stronger, a trait he had been determined to pass on to his daughter.

  She hoped he could not see her from heaven, because he would be sorely disappointed in her in that regard.

  After his funeral, Jordan had found it hard to focus, and she’d isolated herself from everyone. She had always been a bit of an outsider, a bit of a tomboy, though she’d always managed to find friends. No one messed with Jordan when she had a group of people behind her, but after she’d pushed her friends away, some of the boys sensed weakness. For a while Jordan took their bullying, unable to feel anything other than numb. She had no energy to fight, no strength to stand up for herself.

  But things changed the day one of the boys made a comment about her dad. Jordan was filled with a sense of despair so deep it nearly brought her to her knees. She was overwhelmed by it but knew she couldn’t allow herself to be a victim. She had to stand up—for her father, and for herself. Even consumed by grief and pain and fear, she forced herself to pretend she wasn’t. She stood taller, straightened her shoulders, and widened her stance. She stared the boys down, never looking away, barely even blinking. Then she stuck her thumbs into her front pockets, like she couldn’t have cared less what they thought of her. Like she knew she would win—even though she knew no such thing.

  The boys had left her alone after that. They wouldn’t admit it, probably not even to themselves, but they had a certain amount of respect for her after that, and maybe even a little bit of fear.

  Since then, the thumbs-in-pockets ritual of faking confidence made her actually feel confident, banishing the insecurity from her soul and giving her the courage to face things head-on. It always worked. Or at least it had, until a little boy named Jacob had died.

  Come on, Jordan. Enough with the introspective bullshit. Stop being a coward and get your ass moving.

  She pushed off her SUV at last, forcing herself across the street and into the precinct. The station was its usual hive of activity, with officers and detectives buzzing back and forth in a vain attempt to save the world. She bypassed the elevator in favor of the stairs and tried to ignore the looks of astonishment on many of the faces she passed on her way up to the homicide division. She nodded to a few people she knew and was warmed by several genuine smiles of welcome. Jordan didn’t stop to talk to anyone, partly because she knew Henry was waiting, and partly because she just wasn’t ready. She wasn’t back permanently, after all, and she feared what would happen to her heart if she fully let this place and these people in.

  Jordan spotted Henry immediately, his back turned to her, talking to a man she didn’t know. The man’s gaze drifted over her, initially with no reaction. But five seconds later, his attention jumped back to her, his eyebrows lifting. Henry turned, breaking into a blinding smile.

  “Well, well. Looking pretty good there, Jordan.” He walked over swiftly and enveloped her in a giant bear hug. “Welcome home.”

  She shut her eyes against the onslaught of emotions. She would not let this place in. She would not.

  “What have you done to my unit?” she demanded in mock accusation.

  “Your unit? I do believe I outrank you.”

  “Since when has rank mattered to me?”

  Henry laughed. He turned to include the man standing next to him. “Jordan, this is—”

  “Wow. The famous Detective Salinger. I’ve heard a lot about you,” the man said, completely sincere.

  “I’m sure it was all bad,” she said, praying she wasn’t blushing.

  “Nah,” he said with a laugh. “Everyone knows you�
�re a hero.”

  The compliment felt more like an accusation to Jordan. As if sensing her discomfort, Henry tried to introduce the man for the second time.

  “Detective Jordan Salinger, meet Detective Martin Lawson. He’s my rookie.”

  “Your rookie? What am I, property?”

  Henry and Jordan answered at the same time. “Yes.”

  “So, what brings you back, Detective? I thought you were on indefinite leave?”

  Jordan looked to Henry. They hadn’t exactly talked about her status.

  “The great thing about indefinite leave is that it can end very definitely. Like when she walked through the door,” Henry said meaningfully.

  “I’m not back, Henry,” Jordan corrected.

  “Maybe not, but you are here,” Henry said. “And for that, I’m grateful.”

  Though Lawson hadn’t asked, Henry offered him an explanation. “I asked her to help out on the diner murders. I think she’ll have better luck with Ms. James than I did.”

  Understanding flashed across Lawson’s face. “Got it.”

  Jordan expected Lawson to object. Young detectives were always eager to prove themselves, and Jordan expected Lawson would jump at the chance to demonstrate his interviewing prowess. But Lawson asked no questions. He simply accepted Henry’s judgment. It seemed to Jordan that Lawson’s acquiescence stemmed from respect for Henry, not just respect for Henry’s authority. Jordan liked him for that.

  Henry turned to Jordan. “We’ll get the paperwork squared away later. But for now, you’re acting under my authority.”

  “Are you sure? I don’t want you getting in trouble because of me.”

  Henry smiled reassuringly. “I’m sure. Technically, as your lieutenant, I have the authority to take you off leave. We can work it out officially when the captain comes back.”

  “I’m still going to have to get used to calling you lieutenant. You were just another lowly detective when I left.”

  “Honestly?” Lawson leaned closer and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Him and the captain are the only things keeping us all from being shipped off to parking enforcement.”