Guilty

by Karen Robards

  Unfortunately, she didn’t really have an answer.

  Waving absentmindedly back at Cindy the receptionist, who was talking on the phone as she wiggled her manicured fingers at them in greeting, Kate fell into step beside Bryan as he headed down the hall toward their offices. The ninth floor was, as usual, a beehive of activity. Phones rang with discordant insistence, copy machines whirred, a rolling coffee cart making its way among the paralegals’ cubicles clattered over the hardwood floor, and a hodgepodge of simultaneous conversations raised the background noise level to a near roar. Employees flitted from desk to desk and office to office with an unusual sense of urgency. The late-afternoon sun was too low in the sky now to provide much in the way of natural light, so if it hadn’t been for the whitish fluorescents overhead, the hall would have been positively dark. The smells of coffee and microwaved pastries followed them. Ordinarily, the smell would have made her hungry, but today she was too tense for such a mundane bodily reaction. In fact, she was too tense to eat: Lunch had consisted of half an apple and a nibble of a peanut-butter cracker.

  “How are you doing?” They had almost reached his office when Bryan glanced at her. His tone made it clear that he felt slightly awkward about asking. “I mean, are you holding up all right? Lord knows what happened Monday was traumatic as hell, and as far as I can tell you haven’t missed a beat.”

  If only you knew.

  “Working helps,” Kate said. “I try not to dwell on it, you know?”

  “That’s probably good.” Brian paused, and cut his eyes at her again. “There are counselors available. If you should need one, I mean. Just to talk. It would be totally confidential, with no record that you ever even visited one. There should be a memo about it in your e-mail, along with a number to call to make an appointment. Plus, there’s a notice on the bulletin board in the break room.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind,” she promised. Monday had been traumatic—way traumatic—and she could probably use all the counseling she could get to deal with it. The problem was that since she couldn’t tell the truth about her experience, she didn’t think counseling would be of much use. “How are you doing? You were traumatized, too.”

  “I was scared shitless, you mean.” Bryan gave her a quick sheepish grin. “I’ve already seen a counselor. Yesterday. And it helped. But keep that on the down-low, would you?”

  “You got it.” Since they were talking about Monday, there was something she realized she badly needed to know.

  “Let me ask you a question,” she said. “Is there a gang or some kind of group that you know of that uses a dragon as a symbol, or a dragon tattoo as a way to mark its members?”

  Bryan frowned.

  “Why do you want to know?” They had reached his office. Opening the door, he gestured at her to precede him inside.

  As she walked past him she shrugged, elaborately casual as to her reason.

  “I’ve heard some things,” she said vaguely, and plopped down in one of the two chrome-and-leather chairs in front of his desk. His office was almost identical to hers, except the furnishings were a little nicer and it was bigger and had two windows.

  “There’s the Black Dragons.” Setting his briefcase down, he settled in his chair behind the desk, leaning back, his arms resting comfortably on the armrests. “They came in here about four years ago from Baltimore and D.C., mostly. At first they just mixed it up with the other gangs and we didn’t really pay all that much attention, but then they started turning up in relation to some pretty heinous crimes. Remember that tenement fire last year that killed sixteen people? That was the Dragons, in retaliation for a drug deal gone bad. There was a family—parents, two kids, grandma—killed in a home invasion a few months back because the dad didn’t want to be a Dragon anymore. Lots of things like that. They’re a gang like the Crips and the Bloods, only even more vicious and with ties to organized crime. We’re trying to uproot them before they get too strong, run them out of Philly. Every time one gets picked up, we make it a point to throw the book at ’em.”

  Not reassuring. And if that’s so, how the hell did Mario get out of jail?

  She felt her panic level start to climb.

  “You prosecuting a case involving a Dragon?” Bryan frowned at her. “Probably not something you want to take on alone just yet.”

  Kate shook her head. “I was curious, is all. I saw a dragon tattoo on an inmate at the detention center the other day and I thought it looked like something that might be gang-related.”

  “You were right.” Bryan started to say something more, but then his phone rang. After a glance at the caller ID and a quick “Sorry” to her, he picked it up. As he said “Chen here” into the phone, she stood up to leave. He waved good-bye to her. Closing his door softly behind her, she headed toward her office.

  Only to have her steps falter as she spotted Mona. Her administrative assistant was partly visible as she stood half in the hall and half inside Kate’s open door, one hand on the knob, clearly talking to someone inside Kate’s office.

  Mona’s ensemble of the day involved a neon-green long-sleeved T-shirt with a peacock-blue skirt that ended in ruffle around her ankles. She was wearing green tights and green, wooden-soled shoes with four-inch heels. A neon-green-and-peacock scarf looped around her neck tied the look together.

  Sort of. Or maybe not.

  Mona glanced her way just then, and her face lit up as she saw Kate. Kate distinctly heard her say “Here she comes now” to the person waiting in her office. Accompanied by a huge smile, that bright observation filled Kate with misgivings. Then Mona stepped into the hall, and moved quickly toward her, her gaze focused on Kate, her lithe body radiating excitement, her expression ripe with news.

  Defeated, Kate resumed walking her way.

  “Who is it?” Kate whispered when Mona was close enough.

  Widening her eyes theatrically, Mona mimed fanning herself as if she were dying of heat stroke.

  “The hot cop,” she mouthed. Then, as Kate walked by her, she added in a voice meant for public consumption, “Detective Braga is here to see you.”

  Kate shot her a speaking look over her shoulder. Walking backward now, Mona grinned and gave her two thumbs up.

  Then Kate reached her office.

  Braga stood in front of the window, facing the door. His head was bent as if he were studying something on the floor in front of him; his hands seemed to be clasped behind his back. He looked up quickly as she entered, and she saw instantly how small her office was, because he seemed to take up so much of its available space. His left elbow brushed the ficus; his broad shoulders blocked most of the window. A quick, comprehensive glance told her that he had showered and shaved since she had seen him last—she tried not to remember that it had been that morning, leaving her house after spending the night on her couch, and that he’d glimpsed part of her ridiculous pink nightshirt on the way out—but a significant degree of stubble had reappeared, darkening his lean cheeks. His black hair was rumpled, as if he’d recently run his hands through it. His face was unreadable, although he still looked tired.

  The thing was, she felt a little pang of what she hated to recognize as gladness upon seeing him. As if he were a friend or something.

  Which, as she had to keep firmly fixed in her mind, he definitely was not. Last night’s sleepover notwithstanding.

  Chapter 19

  “HEY,” Braga said in greeting. His gaze tracked Kate as she walked around behind her desk. “Busy day?”

  Her eyes narrowed at him. There was something in his demeanor. . . .

  “Is this a social call?” she asked, as she set her briefcase down on the floor, almost sure it wasn’t. Straightening, squaring her shoulders, she looked directly at him. Standing behind her desk, her hands curling around the smooth leather back of her chair, she braced herself for whatever he was about to throw at her. “Because if it is, I don’t have the time. I have a few more things I have to do before I can leave, and I don’t like to be l
ate picking up Ben.”

  “This’ll only take a minute.” His hands came out from behind his back. He was holding a thin white plastic grocery bag that bulged with whatever was in it. “I brought you something.”

  “You brought me something?” Not what she had been expecting. Kate reached out to take the bag, mystified, glancing from it to his face just in time to catch an almost imperceptible spasm of harshness that appeared briefly around his eyes and mouth as its possession transferred from his hand to hers. What’s that about? She frowned as she tried to make sense of the fleeting expression.

  “Actually, it’s for Ben.” There was absolutely no intonation whatsoever to his voice now. “A basketball. I happened to run across one that has hands printed on it to show him the correct shooting position. I thought it might help.”

  Kate peeked in the bag. There was a basketball in there, all right. Orange leather, with small magenta hands tooled into it. A training ball for beginners? Because that’s what it looked like to her.

  Her eyes met his.

  “Thank you,” she said, and meant it. Because it was for Ben, because he’d thought of Ben and the problem her son must have told him he was having in gym, the gift touched her. She smiled at him, a slow, sweet, and charming smile of the sort that she almost never directed at anybody these days.

  He nodded brusquely in response. His feet were braced slightly apart, his expression was inscrutable as he met her gaze. No trace of an answering smile. In fact, if she had to characterize the vibe she was getting, he almost seemed angry.

  Okay, so much for being nice. She set the bag down beside her briefcase and looked at him again, this time minus the smile.

  “Is there anything else?”

  “Yeah, there is.”

  Then he moved, crossing the room in two quick strides and closing the door while she watched with growing surprise. With the door closed, he came to stand in front of her desk, looking at her across it with that unreadable poker face that she was beginning to learn meant he was in full cop mode.

  Uh-oh.

  “What?” She glanced at him, trying not to seem nervous, although nervous was starting to feel like her middle name.

  “I need you to clarify something for me. About how you shot Rodriguez. Go over that one more time for me, would you please?”

  Her heart started thudding like a kettledrum. A hard knot formed in her chest. Her mouth went dry. All instant, spontaneous physical reactions that she couldn’t control.

  Oh, God. Could he tell? Could he see?

  Get a grip, she told herself. He’s a cop, not a psychic.

  “I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Talking about it upsets me.”

  His lips tightened. Placing his hands flat on her desk, he leaned toward her. That put their eyes almost on a level. Sexy eyes—or at least they would have been if they hadn’t been boring like lasers into hers.

  “You’re going to have to talk about it with somebody sooner or later. If I were you, I’d choose me. And now.”

  She gripped the back of the chair hard and lifted her chin at him. As a lawyer, if there was one thing she knew, it was her rights.

  “I don’t have to say a word. It’s my legal right not to answer your questions, or anybody else’s.”

  “That’s right, it is. Are you exercising it?”

  They both knew that an ADA such as herself refusing to answer the legitimate questions of a homicide detective investigating a case she was involved in would raise all kinds of red flags throughout the Philly legal and law-enforcement communities, including with her bosses. In short, they wouldn’t like it. In shorter, it would seem suspicious, as if, perhaps, she were trying to hide something.

  Go figure.

  “No.” It was all she could do not to sound sulky. What good were all those constitutional protections if you couldn’t use them when you needed to? “What do you want to know?”

  Like she didn’t remember. Like he hadn’t zeroed in on the one thing she most feared being questioned about. Like the lie she had told wasn’t burned into her soul.

  “How you shot Rodriguez. And I’m sorry if the question calls up painful memories.”

  Kate curled her lip at him. He didn’t sound sorry. He didn’t look sorry. He looked tense.

  Like he was waiting for her to mess up.

  What, exactly, did he know? Was this about the second man in the security corridor again? Or something different?

  Don’t panic.

  Instead, she tried to concentrate on recalling the story she had told exactly the way she had told it. Consistency, that was the key. As an ADA, what she always looked for was somebody telling three different versions of the same event. Because sure as she found it, that somebody was telling a lie.

  Deep breath. No, wait, that’s too revealing. Just stay cool.

  “So?” he asked.

  Kate’s fingers tightened on the back of the chair until her nails were digging into the leather.

  “He pushed me down. I saw a gun on the floor. He dropped his gun. I grabbed the gun on the floor and jumped up and shot him. The bullet hit him right in the middle of the chest.”

  Kate gave a very real shudder at the very real memory of Rodriguez being shot. She was almost positive she had the sequence of supposed events right. She even remembered claiming that the safety had been off. Was that what this was about? Had they somehow determined that the safety had really been on? If so, she could . . .

  “Which hand were you holding the gun in when you fired it?”

  For Kate, for a split second, everything stopped. This was an “aha” moment if she had ever had one. It was almost as if in that instant of realization, her life passed before her eyes. This was what he was after. This was the discrepancy. Because as vividly as she had ever recalled anything in her life, she suddenly recalled that Mario had been holding the gun in his left hand when he shot Rodriguez. That Mario was left-handed. That was why she hadn’t noticed the dragon curling around his right wrist in the security corridor. Because he had been using his left hand.

  “My left.” She only hoped her expression hadn’t changed as the awful truth had unspooled through her mind. She didn’t think it had; the whole process had been too quick. But even if she was wrong, a changing expression was a hard thing to base an indictment or anything else on.

  “You’re right-handed, aren’t you?”

  Something about the surety with which he said it made her frown. Then it hit her. Of course. The basketball—he had handed her the bag containing the basketball. And she had taken it from him. With her right hand. Easily and automatically, because she was indeed right-handed.

  He had done it deliberately, as a test.

  The knowledge burst on her like fireworks exploding in the night sky.

  She glared at him, pointed at the door. “That’s it. Get out.”

  He straightened, clearly surprised. “You haven’t answered the question.”

  “And I’m not going to. This conversation is over. And I want you to leave. Right now.”

  Because she’d been touched at his gift, because she’d thought for a moment that maybe they were friends, because she had allowed herself to imagine that he cared in some small way for Ben and for her, because she’d been wrong and tricked, and it hurt worse than she had ever guessed it could. Stepping out from behind her desk, she stalked toward the door, meaning to open it for him and stand there beside it until he left. But he caught her arm as she went past, swinging her around to face him.

  “You’re right-handed, Kate.”

  She jerked her arm free. He was very close, so close she had to look up to meet his eyes. They were dark and angry. His mouth was set in a thin, hard line. His whole expression was grim—which was fine with her.

  Grim was a puny thing compared to how savage she felt.

  “Keep your hands off me. Get out of my office.”

  “If there’s an explanation for why a right-handed woman would shoot a man with her left hand, I
’d like to hear it.”

  Fuming, she resumed her march toward the door, flinging her response over her shoulder. “Then I guess I’d have to say you’re shit out of luck, Detective, because I’m not answering any more of your questions.”

  “Kate . . .”

  Reaching the door, she flung it open and turned to face him. “Get out!”

  His face was hard. “I’m not the only one who’s going to be asking.”

  “I said, get out!”

  Mona popped out of her office, her eyes wide, her expression startled as she stared down the hall. Behind her, a couple of paralegals who’d been crossing the hall just then turned to look, too. It was only then that Kate heard she was yelling.

  Don’t cause a scene.

  “Is something wrong?” Mona said. Braga was already moving toward the door.

  “Detective Braga was just leaving.” Ice dripped from Kate’s voice. Mona arrived, panting at her elbow, her wide-eyed gaze shifting to the man now practically looming over Kate.

  He was so close that Kate could see the fine-grained texture of his skin. His eyes swept her face. She returned his gaze stonily.

  Leaning into her, his mouth almost brushing her ear, he whispered, “Just for the record, you’re a lousy liar. Your face gives you away every time.”

  Then, as she sucked in an infuriated breath, he left.

  “I have to say it: That man is fine.” Mona was still wide-eyed as she and Kate both watched him walk away down the hall. “I wish he was whispering in my ear.”

  Kate quit watching Braga to glare at Mona, who flung up both hands.

  “Sorry.” Mona grimaced apologetically. She cast one more regretful glance after Braga before focusing once again on Kate. “So, what was that all about?”

  “Nothing.” Mona’s expression told Kate that more was definitely required. Unfortunately for Mona, that was just about all she was going to get. “He just overstayed his welcome, is all.”

  “Uh-huh.”