She could only imagine. There was no turf war like an interagency turf war.
“Okay, he couldn’t get to the defendants. Then why didn’t he kill me outright? Or keep Mrs. Chang indefinitely and just have Franklin do whatever he needed done going forward?” The questions chilled her, but she had to know the answers.
“He’s not really a street thug. He’s in middle management or its criminal enterprise equivalent. He just wanted a way into the system. He didn’t want to get his hands any dirtier than he had to, and he’s smart enough to know subcontracting wet work is an excellent way to get dimed out as part of a bigger deal somewhere.”
“No honor among thieves,” she muttered.
“Exactly. He knew he could exploit Franklin, so he decided to handle it himself. But he also couldn’t hold Mrs. Chang prisoner forever. He just needed a temporary fix. You should be glad he didn’t post another job on Silk Road.”
“You keep talking about Silk Road. I assume it’s not a reference to the Chinese trade routes from the Han Dynasty.”
He shook his head. “Where’ve you been? It’s an Internet black market. We keep shutting it down; it keeps popping up again. Mainly it’s a place to buy and sell drugs, but a little murder-for-hire or prostitution isn’t unheard of.”
Prostitution. She wondered fleetingly exactly how Tereshchenko had gotten to Joe at the bar. She pushed it from her mind
“Rosie figured this all out?”
“Some of it. But the rest is coming straight from the horse’s mouth. The local cops around here are no joke. They had blockades set up faster than even we could have done it. They nabbed Tereshchenko coming out of the forest. He’s in custody and very interested in cutting a deal.”
“He’s talking? Won’t his bosses kill him?”
“Probably, but he’s a dead man either way. He’s facing a list of charges in Ukraine. If we extradite him, he’ll be killed before he’s out of the airport, and he knows it.”
“So we got him.”
“You got him.”
“Um . . . Does that mean Sid’s not mad anymore?”
Mitchell bit his lip. Then he said, “He’ll calm down, but he’s not going to let it go, Aroostine. You failed to appear in court. He’s already placed you on unpaid leave for conduct unbecoming an attorney.”
“Conduct unbecoming? No exception for extenuating circumstances?” She blinked up at him. Was he joking?
He looked away. “Yeah. I’m sorry.”
She closed her eyes and tried to focus on all the good news. Joe was alive. Mrs. Chang was alive. She was alive. A truly evil man was in custody. But the news of her suspension still stung.
“Aroostine?” he asked in a gentle voice.
She opened her eyes. “Yeah?”
“For what it’s worth, I think you did the right thing.”
He moved closer to the bed and lifted her hand from the sheet.
His hand was warm on hers and his eyes bored into hers with an intensity that made her heart race.
“That’s worth a lot.”
He rubbed her palm with his thumb.
Her breath hitched in her throat.
“I’m glad,” he said, leaning close.
She breathed in, gathering herself, and then exhaled slowly. She kept her voice soft. “I love my husband.”
Pain flashed in his eyes, but he didn’t release her hand. “I know.”
“Okay.” She looked pointedly at his hand.
“You still need friends, though,” he said in a careful voice.
He smiled down at her, and she grinned back at him.
“That’s true.”
Then she felt someone watching her from the hallway. Her door was propped open, and Joe stood on the other side, dressed in his smoke-blackened street clothes. A bandage peeked out through his shirt collar.
They locked eyes for a long moment, and then he turned wordlessly and walked away.
“Uh-oh,” Mitchell said, following her gaze and dropping her hand. “I’ll go talk to him.”
She shook her head. “Don’t. It’s okay.”
She might still be in love with Joe, but he’d made his feelings clear when he filed for divorce.
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
He frowned at that, but after a few seconds, he settled back into his chair. She leaned her head back against the hard pillow. She’d worry about Joe later.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Two days later
Aroostine pedaled her bike along the trail to Mt. Vernon. She locked it up and hiked to the rock overlooking the Potomac River in the predawn light and settled in with her thermos of tea to await the sunrise and a new day.
She didn’t know exactly how long she’d been sitting there when the shadow fell across her rock.
After all, she wasn’t there to keep track of time. She was there to track the flight path of the birds overhead, the way a blade of dry grass wavered in the wind, the telltale gravel disturbance that a rabbit left behind when it ran through the brush.
She shielded her eyes against the sun that had climbed high in the cloudless sky and turned toward the shadow, expecting to see a park ranger wanting to make sure she was all right, or maybe a hiker in need of directions.
It was Joe.
And time, which had expanded and slowed its pace while she’d sat there, suddenly increased its tempo to keep up with her racing heart.
She found her voice and said, “How did you find me?”
Joe smiled the knowing half grin of a husband who knew every inch of his wife’s body and every corner of her soul.
“Piece of cake. When you came out here over the summer to interview for the job, we hiked up here the morning before we left. Don’t you remember?”
She didn’t, actually. The long weekend they’d spent together—the first and last time Joe’d spent any time in the city with her—seemed like a lifetime ago. And, if she was being honest, she’d stuffed the memory out of mind because it was too painful to address.
But now that he was standing there, two feet away, it came rushing back. Their hand-in-hand walk along the National Mall, stopping to ride the carousel with all the sun-kissed toddlers, dinner at a tiny noodle shop where the steaming bowls of pho were both fragrant and filling and the tables were so close together that her legs brushed up against the woman sitting at the next table when she stood up to leave.
And the picnic. The simple lunch they’d shared on a boulder very much like this one, followed by the surprise that Joe had produced from the picnic basket—a bottle of champagne and two plastic flutes. He’d toasted her future—their future—in halting, heartfelt words that had left her giddy and flushed with excitement at the new chapter in their life together.
She blinked back the tears that threatened to overflow from behind her eyes.
“I haven’t been back here since then. What made you think I’d be here now?”
He searched her face.
“I knew you’d need to find a quiet place to think. A place where you could see the sky and the water. I followed a hunch.”
She managed a tremulous smile. “Good tracker instincts.”
He grinned back. “I learned from the best.”
They looked at one another for a moment, and she let herself enjoy the warmth of their banter.
Then she tilted her head and said, “I thought you left town.”
He averted his gaze, looked out over the water, and said, “I was going to. I saw you with . . .”—he paused and tripped over the name but managed to get it out—“Mitchell in the hospital. You were holding his hand.”
Aroostine’s heightened emotions went flat. She was suddenly deflated, tired. “He’s a friend. A friend who helped me save your life, don’t forget. And if you have to know, I was telling him that I st
ill love you.”
Her pride was screaming at her for making that confession, but she ignored it. She wasn’t going to let her desire for dignity blot out the truth. Joe wanted to make a life without her? Fine, she couldn’t prevent that. But she could make sure he made his choices with complete knowledge of what he was leaving behind.
She raised her chin and met his gaze levelly and unblinkingly.
His eyes reflected the pain she felt.
“I know that now, Roo. Your bossy friend, Rosie, read me the riot act.” He reached out and stroked her hair. “I love you, too.”
Her breath caught in her chest and, for a moment, hope fluttered in her belly. Then she remembered.
“Right. So much that you filed for divorce.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Really?”
He sighed. “Really. We had a good thing going. We built a life. You were the county’s most-respected lawyer. My business was good. We had Rufus, the house, our friends. Weekends out at the lake. Skiing in the winter. Fishing in the summer. But that wasn’t enough for you.”
She opened her mouth to protest, but he kept talking. “I tried, I really tried to support what you want. But I can’t.”
Tears stung her eyes. “I just want to do some good, Joe. You know, make a difference. Change the world. Don’t you have those big, secret dreams?”
He smiled at her, a crooked, sad kind of smile.
“No, Warrior Girl. I don’t. My dreams are pretty humble, and they aren’t exactly a secret. Love my wife. Love my work. Maybe make a couple of little Jackmans to play with. Raise them right so maybe they can change the world. That was enough for me. That is enough for me.”
He reached into his pocket. He pulled out a crumpled white envelope and pressed it into her hands.
She peeked inside. It was filled with gray ashes.
“What’s this?”
“The divorce papers. I called my lawyer and told him to withdraw it. Then I burned my copy.”
She stared down at the fine, burned particles for what felt like several hours and listened to her heart hammer in her chest.
“What does this mean, Joe?”
She looked up into his eyes. He held her gaze.
“What do you want it to mean?”
She wanted it to mean that her marriage wasn’t dead, that they could start fresh, that the mess she’d made of her life wasn’t permanent.
“I never wanted a divorce.”
“I know, Roo.” He dug his foot into the hard earth and kicked at a clump of clay with the toe of his boot. “Will you come home?”
He wanted her back. Her entire body went limp with relief. She saw herself curled into his side on the couch, snow falling soft and deep outside, Rufus trying to snuggle in between them, flames dancing in the fireplace.
But.
She’d be admitting she couldn’t hack it at Justice. Proving Sid right. Could she really live with herself if she took off under a cloud of conduct unbecoming an attorney? Slinking out of town with Joe was tantamount to saying she didn’t have what it took to be a federal prosecutor.
She’d worked too hard to concede defeat. Hadn’t she?
Her relief dissolved into a puddle of dismay, and she felt utterly sick, like that time she wolfed down a corndog and then rode the Round Up at the county fair.
She remembered how Joe had held her hair back and rubbed her shoulders while she vomited into a rusty trash barrel conveniently positioned just outside the gate at the ride’s exit.
He watched her now with sad, resigned eyes.
“You won’t, will you?”
She closed her eyes and called up another image, this one of their wedding. A hot July Saturday. Bees hummed in the wildflower-dotted field behind their farmhouse. Her smooth cotton sundress, the daisies woven into her hair. His pressed slacks and the robin’s egg blue shirt that made his eyes sparkle like the clearest ocean. They’d recited their vows full of hope, and love, and joy. It seemed so long ago and, at the same time, it could have been just last month.
The sun-kissed memory dissolved, replaced by a sharp, clear picture of the beaver.
It stood on its hind legs in a small stream. Long grass grew on the hilly bank, and an old elm shaded the water.
She knew that stream. It ran behind the barn where Joe had his workshop. She and Rufus loved to wade through it and look for frogs after she finished her work for the day and locked up the small office on the square.
Are you telling me to go home? She formed the question silently in her mind.
The beaver turned its silver eyes and stared at her wordlessly. A bird swooped low just above its head, and the wind carried it away over the hill. The beaver didn’t move; its eyes were locked with hers.
“Aroostine?”
Joe’s voice jolted her back to reality, away from the stream in Pennsylvania, to the craggy boulder in Virginia.
She’d spent most of her life distancing herself from her animal spirit guide and everything it meant. She’d ignored her nature to fit into the larger world. Was she now really going to let an imaginary beaver tell her what to do?
She looked at Joe for a moment before she slid down from the rock.
She stepped forward and slipped her hand into his.
“Let’s go home,” she whispered.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My heartfelt thanks to the Thomas & Mercer team, especially Alison Dasho, Ben Grossblatt, Jamie Pierce, and Nicole Pomeroy, who were instrumental in bringing ‘Roo to life. Special thanks also to my husband and children, who had to fend for themselves around my deadlines and who managed beautifully.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2012 Frances Civello Photography
Melissa F. Miller is a USA TODAY Bestselling Author of more than a half-dozen novels, including the Sasha McCandless legal thriller series. She is also a commercial litigator. She and her husband now practice law together in their two-person firm in South Central Pennsylvania, where they live with their three young children, a lazy hound dog, and three overactive gerbils. When not in court or on the playground, Melissa writes crime fiction. Like many of her characters, she drinks entirely too much coffee; unlike any of her characters, she cannot kill you with her bare hands.
Critical Vulnerability (An Aroostine Higgins Novel Book 1) Page 21