The Undercover Affair

by Cathryn Parry

  John stared at her.

  She needed to make up another lie to fool him. One lie after another—it seemed to never end. She put her palms against her flaming cheeks. This work is important, she reminded herself.

  She took a deep breath. “I walked home because something is screwy with my car engine. It stalled out, so I just left it there. John, I’m so tired...”

  His shoulders relaxed. “Yeah, that’s partly my fault. Let me put you to bed. I’ll let you sleep. We’ll figure out something with the car in the morning.” He reached for the light switch.

  “No! Please don’t turn on the light. My eyes hurt. Honestly.”

  Incredibly, a low beam of light shone on the stair tread.

  “You brought a flashlight?” she asked.

  “I’m always prepared.” He took her arm and led her upstairs. “You know how you told me you love me today?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I wanted you to know that I do, too.”

  She blinked at the wonder of it. His declaration was unexpected. It made her feel happy to the core of her heart.

  But she shook herself. Though it was great for her personal life, it was horrible timing for a professional stakeout. “Thanks, John,” she said quickly. “Can we meet up in the morning?”

  “Yeah. Can I lie down with you for a while? We’ll just sleep. I’m tired, too.”

  No! No, we can’t sleep!

  They were at the door to her bedroom lair, over the front porch. She didn’t know how to handle John’s request. Nothing in her training explained how to back out from her own cover story.

  A loud noise like a chain dropping sounded outside on the driveway.

  She leaped forward, beelining to the window. From here she had the perfect view to the porch below.

  The person standing before the door was a shadow. A slight shadow.

  As slight as Patrick Reilly.

  “Are you expecting anyone?” John stood beside her, peering out the window.

  “No. Are you?”

  “No.”

  The shadow moved. It appeared he’d entered the house, though she couldn’t hear anything so she wasn’t sure.

  She needed to get John out of this guest room. There was only one exit to it and no lock on the door. She took her own penlight from her pocket—she was prepared, too—and lit the way. “Let’s move to the master bedroom,” she said in John’s ear. “Now.”

  “No. It’s better that I go downstairs and see what—”

  Another loud noise sounded—a loud thump—and this from inside the house. It sounded like it was coming from the hallway just below them.

  “Do as I say, John,” she hissed, “I know this house better than you.” She literally pulled his arm and jerked him across the hall to the master bathroom they’d fixed together, during what seemed like ages ago. To his credit, he dropped to a crouch and moved like a man who’d had military training, holding up the rear as in stealth platoon formation.

  Good. She was glad he was listening to her. Deftly, they entered by the bathroom entrance, and she reached for the key to the locked master bedroom by feel, as she’d practiced this afternoon.

  The door opened noiselessly. Thank you, John, for fixing the sticking door, she silently praised him. Together, they crept inside the bedroom and stood on the plush carpet he’d dried out for her. He silently closed the door to the hallway behind them and locked it.

  His phone screen lit up the darkness. She took his phone from him and turned it off. “No, I’ll call the police,” she instructed in a low tone. “On my phone. This is my job at the MacLaine house, and I want it protected.”

  The muscles on his arms were tight. She knew he wasn’t happy with her brusque actions—she wouldn’t be, either, in his shoes—but it couldn’t be helped.

  He went over to crouch at the entrance by the hallway. She retreated into a closet and pulled out her task force phone and called Pete’s number. “Don’t come,” she whispered when he picked up. Their prearranged signal that meant, yes, do come.

  “I’m on my way,” Pete replied. “I’m watching the cameras, and I saw the perps. There are two of them, one small, one large. No weapons that I could see.”

  “I’ll stay on with you until you’re here,” she said. “I’ll leave the phone on, on the floor in the upstairs bedroom, so you can hear what’s going on.”

  John came back and nudged her. She could see him by her cell phone light. “Is there something valuable in this room?” he whispered. “Because it sounded like they drilled out a safe or something downstairs, and now they’ve come up the stairs and are right outside the door.”

  “Yes. There’s a safe in here, too, in the other closet.” They were crouching together in Kitty’s closet, and she pointed to Congressman MacLaine’s closet with the safe.

  He nodded and took up his position again behind the other locked door, the one that led directly to the hallway. If anyone entered they would encounter him first.

  Of course she couldn’t let that happen. Marine veteran or not, he was still a civilian, and she was the police officer. She had protocol to follow.

  As she considered the situation, it might be safer to go downstairs and arrest the two perps immediately. She had them on breaking-and-entering charges. However, she’d wanted to catch them red-handed before she declared herself. If she was going to end her cover identity in Wallis Point with an arrest, then she wanted a good arrest, one that bore fruit.

  Swallowing, she went over and crouched beside John. He spoke close to her ear. “I know this is your design job, but let me take the lead.” He said it as a command. “I’ve fought in urban warfare. You haven’t.”

  “And here I thought you were a nice, steady bartender,” she quipped.

  He made a low, faint chuckle in the heavy silence.

  “Sorry, John, but I’m overruling you. I have the gun. When they attempt to enter this room, I’ll draw on them and you stand out of the way.”

  He chuckled again. “In your dreams, darling.”

  Was she going to have to out herself to John before she made the arrests?

  It was looking that way.

  John’s chuckling stopped. In the hallway on the other side of the door, there was a louder murmuring of voices. Men, she guessed. Two of them, as Pete had said.

  John nudged her. He appeared to be holding up two fingers. It was hard to see him—it was just so dark. The phone was flat on the floor beside her, still on, but the light suddenly dimmed. Her Glock grew slippery in her sweaty hands. She wasn’t planning on shooting anybody tonight, but she’d been through enough drills and police academy training simulations to know that crazy things started happening when adrenaline and firearms and criminal behavior were mixed together.

  The door handle was moving. She heard the faint rattle of metal in the lock. Whoever was out there, they were attempting to break inside. A flashlight turned on—she could see the sliver of light along the cracks that outlined the door. Strangely, she felt calm.

  “I’ll take the first one,” he whispered into her ear. “I’ll hammer him fast. You use your weapon to train it on him while I handle the second man next.”

  “No,” she whispered back. Unfortunately, to do her job correctly she was going to have to overrule a trained combat veteran. She took a deep breath to deliver the most difficult words she’d ever spoken to John Reilly:

  “I am Officer Lyndsay Fairfax of the New Hampshire State Police, Seacoast Burglary Task Force. I order you to follow my lead.”

  He didn’t respond. Whether he was stunned or simply ignoring her, she couldn’t tell in the darkness. “Don’t test me on this,” she whispered. “You stay back, stay safe, stay out of this operation. That is a direct order.”

  He gave absolutely no reaction that
she could perceive in the pitch-black and sweaty bedroom.

  All of a sudden, two headlights coursed across the hallway outside the bedroom. She recognized the movement and color of the light even under the doorway. It meant that a vehicle had pulled into the driveway outside.

  Was it Pete? Her heart pounded. Her thighs were aching from being in a crouching position. Her muscles cramping. And she honestly didn’t know what John was going to do.

  There was absolute silence in the hallway. The flashlight switched off. She and John waited again in inky darkness.

  And then the doorbell rang.

  “Expecting someone?” John hissed in her ear.

  “It’s not my backup partner ringing the doorbell,” she murmured. “That’s not how he rolls.”

  “Well, it isn’t the Girl Scouts,” John muttered sarcastically. Obviously, he was angry with her. But she couldn’t do anything about that right now.

  “It’s Andy,” she decided aloud. “Or Moon. If he noticed me walking back from my car, then maybe he’s investigating.”

  Just then, the house alarm went off. A loud, piercing shriek sounded. What was happening? It had been a silent alarm before. Maybe Kitty had called the alarm company to change the security settings.

  At the same time, a light in the hallway started flashing. Over and over again. It was chaos. She also knew that in the background, the Wallis Point Police Station would be alerted. Soon, a cruiser would arrive. Lyndsay had noticed that the congressman’s property seemed to receive widespread attention in his hometown.

  But that wasn’t the worst of it. A loud shout came from the front door area, followed by a male scream.

  She and John leaped up together as one. John tore the door open and was halfway down the stairs, damn him, while she was still running across the balcony landing.

  “Police! Freeze!” she boomed in her most authoritative voice. “Get down on the floor! Put your hands on your heads! All of you!”

  But John was already midflight, tackling the beefier of the two assailants. They rolled on the floor, trading punches.

  The second, skinny assailant kept running, looking back at them, which made him smack directly into the armoire she’d moved to block the sliding glass door. He hit the wood hard, then collapsed into a heap on the floor.

  Lyndsay ran over to him, checked his pulse, and then took a pair of plastic handcuffs from her back pocket and slapped them on him. Clearly now, she could see that he wasn’t Patrick. He looked to be about Patrick’s age—nineteen or twenty—with dark hair and a sparse beard.

  Sighing, she stepped over him and approached John and the beefy perp. The two were on the floor, grappling and throwing punches at each other. Shining her flashlight in their faces, she boomed, “Police! Hands on your heads, both of you! Now!”

  John, on top of the perp, reluctantly rolled off him and did as she’d ordered. Groaning, the perp followed suit.

  She knelt beside the perp and slapped the cuffs on him. Then she proceeded to read him his rights. Huge, stocky, his head shaved bald, the perpetrator looked like a mean character. However, he moaned and closed his eyes, rolled over, and groaned again. It appeared he needed medical attention, as did the second perp, still passed out on Kitty’s living room floor.

  The wail of a police siren sounded, adding to the cacophony, and blue lights bounced across the living room, now brightly lit and flashing, the home burglar alarm still wailing. Lyndsay took out her police badge and clipped it at her waist, waiting for them.

  “Freeze, police! Put your guns down!” Officer Phil Pierce, the big, ripped, Wallis Point cop stood in the doorway, feet planted in shooting position, both his hands on his service revolver.

  “I am Officer Fairfax of the New Hampshire State Police, Seacoast Burglary Task Force,” she boomed back at him. “I’ve handcuffed two perps and arrested one. Call for three ambulances.”

  He lowered his revolver. “Will do, Officer Fairfax.”

  A second Wallis Point officer joined them, one she didn’t recognize, a detective in plain clothes. He wore his badge pinned to his belt as she did.

  “I’m Officer Fairfax,” she shouted to him over the cacophony.

  The alarm suddenly stopped and the lights stopped flashing. In the blessed silence, she spoke in a lower tone. Pete, striding in through the front door, joined them, as well. He, too, had his badge displayed at his waist and wore his holster visible at his hip.

  “About time you joined us,” she said jovially, feeling better now that the perps were in custody and the chaos controlled. She’d made a good arrest, and she was pleased.

  “He’s my partner,” she explained to Officer Pierce and the unnamed detective.

  Clearly, her investigative work had paid off. The two paintings of Kitty MacLaine had been taken down and were stacked against the wall. A knife lay beside them, but the burglars hadn’t yet used it to cut naked Kitty from the frames. Instead, the safe behind the upper painting was drilled open and empty. And upstairs, the two men had been attempting to gain entry to the master bedroom with the other safe and Justin’s watercolors. They had clearly committed theft and attempted theft.

  Once the burglars were deemed medically fit, the task force would have these two perps to interrogate about the details of the larger burglary ring.

  Pete glanced around, taking it all in. The two handcuffed perps, one knocked out, one dazed. The evidence of the thefts in process. “Good job,” he said to Lyndsay. But then he glanced at John, sitting on the floor, face marred with blood and cold, hard anger, and Pete cocked an eyebrow at her.

  “A civilian was present?” he murmured in her ear.

  She saw how it would look to Commander Harris. “It couldn’t be helped,” she murmured back.

  John wiped the blood from his mouth. Gazing at her, he didn’t bother to hide his disdain.

  The uniformed officer was radioing in, repeating her name over the air. Pete gave him the cut sign. “Don’t mention her name,” he said. “She was undercover.”

  The plainclothes detective approached her. “I’m Detective Michael Donovan,” he introduced himself. He glanced at John. “What’s with John Reilly? Is he part of the task force, too?”

  “You two know each other?” she asked, surprised, even though she shouldn’t be. Wallis Point wasn’t a big city.

  “I know his brother’s court officer,” Detective Donovan answered.

  John just scowled and turned away.

  Personal Lyndsay had a very big problem here, and Professional Lyndsay had a slightly smaller one. In both cases, she realized that the less said in John’s presence for now, the better.

  She pulled Detective Donovan aside. “John is a civilian who happened to be caught in the action,” she murmured in a low tone.

  “An informant?” he asked.

  In a strict sense, that was how Commander Harris would interpret John’s role. And from the standpoint of the investigation to follow, she wanted John dealt with as an innocent party, not as a suspect.

  “He’s involved in the arrest,” she murmured. “Yes.”

  John sat facing away from her. He didn’t give any indication that he wanted anything to do with her, now that he knew who she really was.

  She couldn’t help John’s hurt and anger toward her, not now. Her main concern was to process the perps, and her other concern was to get all three men medical attention. Blood marred John’s face, and she was sure that he was hurting. Hopefully, he wasn’t seriously injured, but they couldn’t know until he saw a doctor.

  From the front windows, Lyndsay saw an ambulance with lights flashing rounding the corner of the drive and pulling past the police line at the street. A second ambulance followed close behind.

  “We need an ambulance for John Reilly, as well,” she told Detective Donovan.

 
“I’m fine,” John said gruffly. He stood, back against the wall, but even in the dim light she could see the blood on his cheek.

  “You should be checked out at the hospital,” she said to him. “You could have a concussion.”

  “I said I’m fine.” He spoke with clenched teeth and could barely look at her.

  “Are you refusing transport, John?” Detective Donovan asked him.

  “I am,” John replied stubbornly.

  “You’ll have to come to the station with us,” Pete informed him. “We need to interview you and take a statement.”

  Inside, Lyndsay bristled. She hadn’t wanted John to be involved in this way, but Pete was right—he’d been at the scene. Still, she wished that Pete would let her handle it.

  Pete got on his phone to call in Simon and Wesley. The scene needed to be secured; a team needed to accompany the two perps to the hospital. As soon as the doctors cleared them, the arrests needed to be processed and interrogations would begin. Her mind whirred again, and she saw meetings with state’s attorneys, the eventual plea bargains, trials, sentencing.

  She thought of that fiery spark plug, Kitty MacLaine. Lyndsay glanced around. Despite the fighting, her interior decorating job had held up. Somewhat. She would leave it to Kitty’s husband to explain to her what had happened with Lyn Francis. She sincerely doubted that a final meeting with Kitty would be authorized now.

  Pete pulled her aside. “Commander Harris wants to meet you at the Wallis Point police station,” he informed her, tucking his phone into his pocket. “You’re to stay there and wait for him before you go anywhere else. He said he wants to keep your name and contribution to the case under wraps as much as possible. I’m ordered to take the lead here now.”

  She sighed. “Understood.”

  “It was good detective work and a good arrest, Lyndsay. Don’t fall into the trap of discouragement just because you’re ordered to take a back seat now.”

  “Does Commander Harris have a problem with John being present?”

  “He may punish you a bit. Don’t be surprised if he takes his sweet time getting down here to see you.”