by Dana Marton
She swallowed. “I am who I am because of my adoptive parents. They saw beyond the hard shell. Before them, my attitude pretty much kept everyone away.”
He tried to picture her as a little wildling and the image came easily enough. “What made you give them a chance?”
“It wasn’t any one particular thing.” She paused. “One foster mom had me play poker for money in a dingy basement at a friend’s house from time to time. I was good at it. Anyway, after the Bridges adopted me, Ellie found out I liked cards.
“She learned to play just so we’d spend time together. It was her way of communicating with me. She treated me as if I was her own daughter. She said, ‘Life is like a poker game. You get good cards and you get bad ones. Sometimes you get a lot of bad ones, one after the other. When that happens and then suddenly you get a good hand, some people think they don't deserve it and they toss it back.’”
She shook her head at the memory, a faint smile playing over her lips. “I told her throwing in a good card was stupid. And she told me how coming to their family could be a good card. It could be the winning card if I had the courage to pick it up.”
She paused again. “She talked to me like nobody talked to me before. Like she really cared about me and Emma. She said things I could relate to, made me think. I mean it wasn’t as easy as that, but somehow she gently nudged me onto the right path little by little. Anyway, I met a kid named Marcos Santiago in the system,” she continued. “Our lives kept crossing paths. Even after he aged out of foster care, we touched base with each other every once in a while.” She filled her lungs. “Then he was killed. I was there.”
He lifted a hand to stop her. “The Marcos Santiago?” He’d been a cop long enough for the name to be familiar to him, even if Santiago had operated on the other side of the country.
“You were there the night he was shot? By Rauch Asael.” As a cop, he kept track of the FBI’s Most Wanted list. He shook his head to clear it. “Asael is after you?”
Just saying the words stunned Murph a little. Did she even know how much trouble she was in? Asael was as nasty as they got, wanted on three continents. “Why aren’t you in witness protection?”
“I don’t trust the system.” She stretched the dough, working with quick, efficient movements.
Murph put the clean tomatoes into a bowl for her. “Rumor had it, Santiago wanted out, and his business partners didn’t like it. Why were you with him that night?” Kate didn’t strike him as a stone-cold criminal who’d run in those kind of circles. “I don’t remember the reports saying anything about a witness.”
“The FBI held that back.” She closed her eyes for a second. “I know Marcos wasn’t one of the good guys, okay? But he was good to me. We were with the same foster family once. The mother was okay, but when she wasn’t home, the father turned mean. He came after me once. Marcos put himself between us and fought the guy off. The lowlife claimed Marcos attacked without reason. Social Services believed him. They pulled Marcos and dumped him into a group home. He had it bad there. One of the older kids abused him.”
She made a helpless gesture with her hands. “The system failed him from the moment he was born, so he decided to work outside the system. I know it wasn’t the right thing to do. I told him that all the time. But he wasn’t a monster.”
Murph narrowed his eyes. “You were close?” Lovers?
“Friends,” she snapped out the single word, her eyes flashing with impatience. “That night he invited me over for drinks. I spilled something on my dress, went to the bathroom, took too long. When I came out—”
She swallowed hard. “He lay crumpled on the carpet. His throat was cut, but he was still alive. He was looking at me. I don’t know if he called out. He had the music turned up.”
She paused for a second, looking fragile for the first time since he’d met her. Even in the middle of the night with an intruder in her bedroom she hadn’t looked like this. She’d held a gun at his chest. Now her eyes filled with uncertainty and grief.
He almost reached out for her. He knew what it felt like to witness the death of a friend, to be helpless to do anything but watch the life drain out of him. But she pressed her lips together and gathered herself.
She was good at keeping her act together under duress, he was beginning to learn, even if they hadn't known each other all that long.
She pressed her lips together for a moment. “I saw a shadow moving toward the window. I caught a glimpse of the killer's face in the glass. He saw that I saw him. He started to turn.” She paused. “But then the twins came in the front door, so he just kept moving forward and he was gone the next second. He’d come down from the roof in the window cleaning box and cut a hole in the glass. That’s what the FBI said.”
“And you were the only one to see him?”
“The twins were just inside the door. The wall of the foyer stood between us. They were laughing as they came around. And then they were screaming, rushing back out.”
“What twins?”
* * *
Kate rubbed her arm. Marcos had gotten caught up in the whole living-larger-than-life thing. “The twins were his girlfriends.”
She didn’t think he’d ever taken a woman seriously. She was the only one he’d ever bothered to keep in touch with long-term, the only one who was outside the life of crime he lived. Marcos never wanted to settle down, never wanted a family of his own. Didn’t want to bring a kid into this messed up world, he used to say.
“And then what happened?” Murph brought her back to the story.
“Nothing good.” She had the dough thin enough so she slapped it onto the baking stone then brushed it with olive oil to make sure that the tomato sauce wouldn’t get it soggy. “About two weeks after the murder, the killer found me and put a bullet through the windshield of my car while I was driving to work. I was reaching over for my coffee mug at the same split second or I would be dead. I drove into a tree.”
“That’s where the scars come from.”
“Yes.” She touched a hand to her throat, then dropped it. “The FBI decided I should fake my death. If my funeral drew Asael, they could catch him.” She tossed on the toppings, then smothered everything in soft, moist mozzarella.
“But they didn’t,” Murph observed.
She pushed the pizza into the oven. Staying busy kept her going. “Somehow Asael figured out the trap. I took off. If nobody knows where I am, nobody can give me away.”
“How long do you plan on running?”
“Until they catch him. He’s going to run out of luck someday.” Basically, she was counting on Asael running out of luck sooner than she did.
Murph rubbed the side of his thumb over his lower lip. “That can’t be easy. Always watching, always wondering. It’s like that in the army, but we get to relax when we’re on base. There’s security there. A soldier can lie down and close his eyes in his barracks and feel safe. It balances out the intensity of being on patrol.” His expression turned somber. “But you don’t get a break.”
As she stared at him, she felt the old tightness inside her loosen a little. That he would understand so completely made her suddenly feel lighter. “It’s like a deathwatch. You know, when relatives gather to wait for someone to die? I feel like I’m always waiting for my own death. I’ve been to my own funeral, and now I’m doing my own deathwatch. It’s all backwards.”
She swallowed, refusing to let despair take over. She was still alive. And she was going to stay alive. She was going to do whatever it took. “If you could just give me a few weeks, I—”
“You can stay.” He shoved his hands into his pockets. “I’m staying with you. You can keep the bedroom. I keep the couch. I’ll do my best to keep you safe while you’re in Broslin.”
A stunned moment passed while she processed his sudden change of mind.
“Really? Okay. Thank you. You won't even know I'm here. I promise,” she rushed to say.
Then she relaxed for a moment, but the next
second she realized what she'd just done, and she tensed again. For the first time ever, she'd told someone her secret. Thing was, if she'd made a mistake trusting Murph, she probably wasn’t going to live long enough to regret it.
“I'm going to run out for a second to see about those boys from the alley,” he told her. “You keep that gun of yours close at hand and lock up behind me.”
* * *
Murph stood in the middle of the largest holding cell in the back of the police station. Harper was the only one in the office up front; he'd let Murph come back, gave him the key.
Eduardo and his buddies crowded in the farthest corner of the cell. They didn't look as sure of themselves without their knives, without an escape route, face-to-face with Murph. He could see the scruffy crew better in the neon lights, dirty jeans and wrinkled shirts, frayed sneakers except for Eduardo's steel-toe boots. Maybe he'd worked at one point during the day.
Murph pulled himself to full height, but talked in a calm tone, without anger. “I ever hear you get in any kind of trouble again, I'm going to make sure you're put away. This is your last free ride.”
The two short ones nodded hesitantly, eyes filled with fear. They knew that without knives, in a fair fight, he could take all three of them out without breaking a sweat.
“Now, Kate, the woman you were dumb enough to harass,” Murph got to the point he'd come here to make, “is a friend of mine. You so much as walk down the same street as she does, two things are going to happen. One, she's going to shoot your sorry asses. Two, while you're in the hospital, I'm going to come in for a visit. See how we're just talking here?” He paused. “That's not how it's going to happen next time. I'm not going to say a damn thing. This is your first and last warning. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” the two shorter boys snapped out the words.
Eduardo shrugged, hate boiling in his dark eyes. His pupils were pinpricks. Whatever he'd taken, hadn't worn off yet. He had his chin down, his hands clenched into fists.
Murph kept an eye on him. “Anybody tell you to go after her? Scare her a little?” If Asael was in town, he might have set her up to knock her off balance.
“Just wanted to have some fun,” the youngest of the three said gruffly, his nervous glance darting to Eduardo then back to Murph. “Bored, man. No money for nuthin'.”
Murph watched him for a moment. He didn't think the kid was lying.
Then, out of the blue, Eduardo charged with a high-pitched scream, kicking and punching wildly, fueled by drugs.
Murph deflected the attack. As pissed as he was at the boy, he didn't want to have to beat up a stupid kid. Eduardo kicked hard, but as Murph moved out of the way, the kid ended up kicking the cell's lock with his steel-toe boot. The bars rattled. Eduardo grunted in pain. Then went for Murph again. Kicked. Missed. The bars rattled behind Murph.
Enough of this.
“Stop,” he warned the boy. And when Eduardo kept coming, Murph dropped him with a single punch. He didn't have all night to mess around here.
Eduardo went down, stayed down with a stunned look on his face. Murph shook his head at the other boys in the corner, then walked out, locked the cell behind him. He had to work to make the key turn. The idiot had kicked hard enough to warp the metal. With some luck, the kid got at least a broken toe as a reminder to quit being stupid, Murph thought as he walked up front to the office.
He dropped the key off at Harper's desk. “You keeping them the full twenty four hours?”
Harper grinned. “Every minute.”
“You might want to put them into a different cell. The lock got a little bent out of shape.”
He drove home, thinking about the boys, about Asael, about Kate. Mostly about Kate. She was getting to him. He had to be careful with that. He strode into his house and inhaled the mouthwatering scent of baking pizza.
“Everything okay?” she asked as she put on a pair of yellow oven mitts.
“Couldn't be better.”
A pumpkin pie sat on the counter, defrosting. She must have pulled that from the freezer while he'd been gone. Odd how back when he’d left this house for Afghanistan, it hadn’t felt like home, but now it suddenly did.
Maybe the deployment made him appreciate it.
Or maybe the shift had to do with the beautiful disaster standing in the middle of his kitchen in yellow oven mitts, a voice in the back of his head suggested. Since he wasn’t comfortable with where that thought led, he shoved it aside and asked some questions instead.
“Is there any way Asael could track you here? Do you keep in touch with anyone from your past?” He was almost certain someone had been inside the house earlier, had messed with his duffle bag.
She hesitated as she pulled the pizza from the oven, putting the stone on the top of the stove. “I friended my sister, Emma, a few weeks back on Facebook. I made an account pretending to be someone we both knew a million years ago.” She turned off the oven and closed the door.
“Who?”
“One of the nicer social workers, Teresa. I was over ten years old, in and out of the system, by the time Emma was born. Nobody would take me, and I don’t blame them. But then Teresa said she'd only place us as a sibling pair, and people suddenly wanted me, because I came with a baby.”
She pulled off the mitts and put them back into the drawer. “We went to two other homes first. They wanted Emma, but wanted to give me back after a few weeks. Teresa insisted that we had to stay together. Then we finally went to the Bridges, and they didn’t just want the baby, they wanted me too.”
Murph’s jaw tightened. His mother had been no picnic, but he couldn’t imagine a childhood like hers. “What happened to your birth parents?”
“I never knew my father. My mother had boyfriends,” she said darkly.
He suspected there was more to the story there, but he didn’t push. He understood the concept of someone not wanting to talk about their past. “So if someone was watching your sister’s social media accounts, they might have somehow figured out that you were connecting with her.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know how they could do that. I was super careful. I’m not stupid.”
No, she wasn’t. “What else? What’s the one thing you couldn’t give up?”
She chewed her lip.
Okay, so something was there. He waited.
“The life books.” She sighed. “I keep online photo books for foster kids. It’s just a web site. My name isn’t even on there. I don’t charge any money, so there’s no income, no paper trail. Asael couldn’t have figured it out.”
“It never pays to underestimate the enemy. What do these life books do?”
“Kids don’t remember their early years. In functional families, there are stories and picture albums. In dysfunctional families there’s nothing. So you can be a foster kid say eight years old, and most of your life you can’t remember and there’s no proof of it, no pictures, no stories.”
She pressed her lips together, as if trying to figure out how to best explain it. “It’s almost as if you didn’t exist. It’s kind of scary and unsettling when there are so many scary and unsettling things going on around you already. You no longer know a single person who’s been part of your early life who can tell you about it. You’re with a new set of foster parents, the third or the fourth or the tenth. No roots, no connections. Kids need an anchor to their own lives.”
He’d never thought about that, but could see now how that might be, to not have anything solid to hang on to, to not have what everyone else took for granted: a past. “How do you give them a history?”
“Any foster parent can sign the child up, upload a recent photo, or as many photos as they have from social services. Then I do the thing that cops do when they age kidnap victims to show what they would look like years later, except I do it backwards. It's not very hard. There's an app that does that. I post a picture of what the kid would have looked like two years ago, four, as a baby. Put some fun backgrounds on their
page, like horses if that’s what they like, or fire engines.”
She smiled, relaxed for a change, excitement shining in her eyes instead of wariness. She was a pretty hot babe on her average day, but just now she was a total knockout and Murph suddenly found it hard to breathe as he watched her speak. This was how she should be, always, doing what she loved, and not running scared, he thought.
“I put up a time line with the pictures, big birthday cakes showing the birthdays. The kids love looking at their page. It helps them process their life and their losses. They have the account forever. Foster parents can keep up and keep adding photos and memories.”
As Murph watched her, it occurred to him that she was pretty remarkable. “You had a rough time as a kid.”
“I had good people coming into my life, and they made it okay. They made it better.” She shrugged, as if shaking off her dark memories. Then she busied herself setting the table.
He had a feeling she hadn’t meant to tell him as much as she had.
“The life books sound like a good idea. Something that’s needed.” He gave her credit. “How did you come up with something like that?”
“I took a business course in college and the final assignment was to create a business idea and make a business plan for it.”
She shrugged. “I got a C minus. The professor said there was no way to make money on it. He was right. The birth parents couldn’t care less, and the foster parents get so little money from the government it doesn’t even cover the basic necessities. But I knew I could make a difference for some of the kids, so eventually I set up the site and made it free.”
She was different from most women he knew. She gave up being with her family to keep them safe. Okay, most people would sacrifice for family, but she went out of her way for complete strangers, spent time helping kids she would never meet.
He felt attraction since he'd first laid eyes on her. Now it mixed with frank admiration. And, for the first time, Murph understood how or why a man could fall hard enough to give up his freedom.