Backlash

by Paula Gosling

  Cops could cover the streets with one less thing to fear – but only one less. The city was still full of evil. He wished he felt more like taking it on. Maybe after a rest, he would. He might.

  He felt very alone, standing there.

  Tos was still in the hospital. Maybe they’d visit him on the way home. Where Stryker and the doctors had failed, his mother had succeeded. One good scolding from her and Tos had stopped arguing and done what he was told. There was a residual weakness in his left leg and arm that required physiotherapy. A week more in the hospital, then working out at home, would probably bring him back on to the strength in a month or two.

  He said if they’d asked him he could have told them about Eberhardt and solved the whole thing, easy.

  They’d told him to shut up and keep doing the exercises.

  Pinsky was at home, bruised and battered and surrounded by wife, kids, dog (still doing tricks), and a fresh supply of books from the library. There was also a Sherlock Holmes series running on Channel Ten. He was happy. He’d be back at work in a week.

  Neilson? Neilson was on vacation. Bemused, protective, as cautiously gentle as a newly trained elephant with an egg, he was looking after Dana. She was letting him. They weren’t thinking much beyond that.

  And here I am, thought Stryker.

  Someone named Kate is going to come off that plane. I haven’t the least idea who she’ll be – only that she’ll be different from the Kate I waved goodbye to, seven days ago.

  It seemed to take a long time between the plane setting down and the moment when Kate emerged from Customs and flew into his arms. He tried not to grunt too loudly when she hugged him, and when they at last let go of one another, her eyes were shining.

  ‘A man got on the plane in Boston with a newspaper. You caught the sniper!’ She squeezed his arm – fortunately, the good one.

  ‘Sure thing – all by myself, too! With my toy water pistol.’ He gazed at her in delight, undid the button on her jacket, then did it up again, before things got out of hand.

  ‘All right, all right.’ She knew enough about him by now to realise her mistake. She straightened his tie. ‘I see the team has caught the killer,’ she said, carefully.

  ‘Not soon enough, but, yes.’ He brushed her hair back from her temples.

  ‘And it was a woman – really, a woman?’ She stroked his ear.

  ‘Afraid so.’ He kissed her chin.

  ‘Was she insane?’ She smoothed his cheek.

  ‘Afraid so.’ He grinned down at her. They were both so glad to see one another that nothing else seemed to have any real substance.

  ‘It’s not funny,’ she reproached him.

  He nodded and sighed. ‘You’re telling me.’

  They gathered together her luggage and, fortunately, found a trolley to put it on. As he reached for the larger case, she stepped ahead of him. ‘Better let me do that, you might start your shoulder bleeding,’ she said, hefting it off the carousel and on to the trolley.

  He stood there, staring at her, while her smaller case went off on another circuit of the carousel. ‘My shoulder?’ he said, idiotically.

  She grinned and watched her small case disappear around the curve. ‘After I talked to you, I called Nell Pinsky, of course. She told me everything that was in the papers and on television, about Tos, about you, everything.’

  ‘Is that why you didn’t call again? Why you haven’t called for the past two days?’

  She nodded, then leaned down and snatched the case from the carousel before it got away again. ‘You said you could handle it, so I let you handle it.’

  ‘Kate . . .’

  She dropped the case on to the trolley and looked at him. ‘No, it wasn’t easy, and yes, I hated doing it, and yes, I still hate what you do. But I had to see if I could do it, if I could stand not knowing. If I could trust you not to get yourself . . .’ She couldn’t actually say it. She didn’t have to. Her eyes said it all. ‘I love you. I’m supposed to be intelligent, but that doesn’t seem to apply to loving you. I haven’t been doing it very well. However, I do know that if I tried to change one thing I might change everything and then you wouldn’t be you, would you?’ Her eyes were filling with tears. He put his good arm around her and drew her close. ‘And anyway,’ she said, her voice muffled into his shoulder, ‘I thought a lot while I was away. I realised I could get along without you very well – but I didn’t want to do it. I had a long talk with Nell – just wait until you see the phone bill – and she’s going to give me lessons about being a police wife. Okay?’

  Better Nell than Carla Rivera, Stryker thought, but he didn’t say it. All he said, softly and gratefully, was ‘Okay’.

  As they walked along, pushing the trolley ahead of them for all the world like a strolling couple pushing a baby buggy, he told her about the case. It was easier than trying to find the words about loving her that always seemed to start out well and come out stupid. He could show her that he loved her, but she deserved more. She walked beside him, her hair gleaming in the sun, the curls tossed by the wind, her mouth soft, her eyes wide and a little pink, still, with tears. He decided to try and read more poetry.

  ‘Okay,’ Kate said. ‘Start at the beginning.’

  Stryker made a face. ‘It starts with cops being human and making mistakes. None of them so terrible in themselves, but all to do with the same person, and all adding up to a chain of trouble.’ He gave her the background on the victims.

  ‘And when Eberhardt finally killed, as he probably would have even if none of those mistakes had been made, he happened to pick the son of a cop – David Rivera.’

  ‘It must have been terrible for them. The last thing they would have expected.’

  ‘It was terrible. The most terrible thing about it was that we couldn’t get him convicted for it. Maybe that was the worst mistake – and it was mine. Mine and Tos’s.’

  ‘You did your best.’

  ‘Yes, we did. Better than our best – but it wasn’t good enough. Not for Carla, anyway. When Eberhardt murdered her son, Carla Rivera didn’t take it like Mike. He had faith, he accepted what he saw as God’s decision. It humbled him, made him want to be a better person. But she was angry. Her bitterness was directed as much at the Department as at the killer. She knew what an ideal cop would be – she’d nearly been one herself. She’d won citations for bravery and initiative, she had trophies for marksmanship same as Mike did, Downtown had an eye on her right from the Academy. She knew how it all should be done. She knew opportunities to stop Eberhardt must have occurred again and again, and had gone by. As her bitterness grew, her judgement wasted away. She became obsessive about “good cops” and “bad cops”, and she decided that any men who had let Eberhardt continue on the road that led to her son’s death were as much to blame as he was. She went to a Department psychiatrist before she resigned, but it didn’t do much good. In her eyes, those men had killed her son. It was all she could think about. She left Mike, and then there was no balancing factor to keep her steady. As time went by, her rage took over. Eventually there was nothing left of Carla Rivera but rage – and the ability to apply it.’

  ‘But how did she find out about all of them? And why didn’t you find out sooner?’

  Stryker looked bleak. It was a question they had asked themselves again and again. ‘In a working week, your average cop may have occasion to face dozens of situations, not all of them criminal by the book. If they are clearly criminal, he has to go by the book or the DA can’t make a case. A lot of situations are borderline, maybe not criminal at all – like domestic arguments, for instance – and the cop on the scene does the best he can to use his common sense to settle them there and then. So a lot of situations never result in arrests. Even so, he will arrest a lot of offenders, ranging from traffic offences right up to homicide. Over a working life, his arrests can number thousands. And we were looking
at the working lives of seven cops, Kate, some short, like Santosa’s, and some long, like mine. Each time an incident occurs, we have to make a report, and all the reports and so on go into the files. Now, the thing about computers is that they do exactly what you tell them to do. We told it to look at arrests. We didn’t tell it to look at the ones who got away, because we figured the ones who got away would carry no grudge, right?’

  ‘I guess not,’ Kate allowed.

  ‘There were thousands, literally thousands, and we were in the process of checking them all out. Each new death brought a whole new set to follow up. We were also looking for arrests that all of the victims had in common, which slowed things up even more, because not all of us arrested the little bastard. Plus which, all the time, we were looking at it ass-backwards. If you knew what to look for, and at, it was all there in the computer. If you looked at Eberhardt’s record, including all the reports that related to him, whether they resulted in an arrest or not, you would find the names of all the cops involved in his life. Carla Rivera started out with Eberhardt – we started out with the cops who were killed. We were looking for what they had in common, and not what someone else – Eberhardt – had in common with them. You see?’

  ‘Yes. I see. And Carla Rivera did that?’

  ‘When her boy was killed they thought it would be better if she came off the street for a while,’ Stryker said. ‘They assigned her to Records.’

  ‘Oh Lord.’

  ‘Yeah. Apparently she was real good in Records. Used to work overtime. They were sorry when she left the Department, they said.’

  ‘Where is she now?’

  ‘In a hospital, with a lot of psychiatrists talking to her. From what I hear, she’s not doing any talking back. They say that in her eyes she’s perfectly well adjusted. She has accomplished what she set out to do. What happens now is irrelevant to her.’

  ‘That poor woman.’

  He glanced at her. ‘That “poor woman” nearly killed me, babe, remember? And did kill six people, including Eberhardt. Don’t you have any hate in you?’

  ‘No,’ Kate said.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Hate is where it all goes wrong for a cop. Or a cop’s wife.’

  They had reached the car. ‘You know the worst part?’ he asked, reflectively. ‘It was when Mike Rivera arrived at the precinct where we were holding his ex-wife. Mike stood there, shaking his head and crying and asking her “Why?” and Carla stared right through him, as if Mike were not there at all. As if he didn’t exist, maybe as if he’d never existed. And yet David had been his child, too. That got me, Kate. That was bad.’

  She reached out and took his hand. After a moment he came back from wherever he’d gone and smiled at her. ‘The crazy thing is, it was something Rivera himself said that finally put us on the right track.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah. He told Ned Pinsky that it’s the things we don’t do that are often the most important.’

  Kate looked sideways at him, then looked around for a litter bin. From the depths of her big flight bag, she dug out a new-looking book, entitled Seductive Semantics. On the back, a photo of Richard Cotterell, handsome and brooding, stared out. She dumped the book into the bin and came back to her impossible policeman.

  ‘He’s so right,’ she said.

  If you enjoyed Backlash don’t miss out on the third book in Paula Gosling’s Jack Stryker trilogy:

  RICOCHET

  A loved professor is found shot dead in her home. Her student is murdered whilst he’s working at the hospital. And Jack Stryker’s partner Kate is being secretly harassed. Can he get to the bottom of this dark mystery in Paula Gosling’s third and final Jack Stryker novel?

  Whilst the professor’s case looks like a domestic homicide and the student’s looks like a mugging gone wrong, nothing is really as it seems in this intense and puzzling thriller.

  Stryker’s instincts seem to be leading him awry but could the two barbarous murders be interlinked? Jack Stryker follows a dangerous trail to find out in Ricochet.

  Turn the page to read the captivating

  first chapter now . . .

  ONE

  In Kate Trevorne’s office in New State Hall the phone rang. Absent-mindedly, her concentration on the essay before her unbroken, she reached for the receiver. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I know about you and Michael Deeds,’ said the voice at the other end. ‘You should be ashamed.’

  She sat up straight, her mind suddenly focussed. ‘What?’ she asked, not quite sure what she had heard.

  ‘You heard me. I know about you and Michael Deeds.’ The words came in a metallic, nasty, pinched little voice. If a cockroach could talk, she thought, it would sound like that.

  ‘Who is this?’ she demanded.

  ‘Aha . . . wouldn’t you like to know. You are a slut, did you know that? You are a disgrace to the profession. If you don’t stop poaching students, I will take what I know to the Dean. And you know what that will do to your chances for tenure, don’t you?’

  ‘I haven’t the least idea what you are talking about, and I resent the impli—’

  ‘I’ve had him here in my office. He told me all about it. Your tender little relationship. The money you paid him to keep quiet. Oh, just everything. I must admit I was very, very shocked.’

  ‘You are insane,’ Kate snapped. ‘There was no “relationship”.’

  ‘That’s not what Michael says.’ There was now a singsong kind of glee in the voice. Childish, smug, savouring it all.

  Kate stared at the phone with distaste.

  Michael Deeds.

  Her partner Jack hadn’t liked him at all and told her so at the time. But the boy was so promising, had such talent for writing. And she had felt sorry for him. When he was thrown out of his digs for non-payment of rent, she had taken him in, temporarily, only for a few nights. Until he could find alternative accommodation.

  But the few nights had become a week, much to Jack’s annoyance. Then there was the night that Jack was away on duty, and Michael came in drunk and had made a pass at her. Not a big pass, an almost sweet little-boy pass, but he had turned a bit nasty when she summarily rejected him. He hadn’t hurt her and was easily evaded. Indeed, she had ordered him to bed like a naughty child, and he had gone, eventually. She had locked her bedroom door, much to Jack’s confusion when he came home in the early hours.

  She had been rattled, but had handled it, and the next morning she told Michael he had to leave. When he pleaded that he couldn’t find a place without a rent deposit, she had given him some money just to get rid of him. She knew she had made a mistake allowing the boy to stay so long and she wanted him out of her private life. He went. Sorted.

  If Jack had ever found out about the pass, he would have . . . would have . . . well, she didn’t quite know what Jack would have done, but she preferred to deal with things herself. She and Jack were partners, she was not a wife, not a possession. She had her own professional life, quite apart from their relationship.

  But if she was truthful, she was ashamed of the episode, too. She could have handled it better, more maturely. She had just panicked and made the boy get out of the house immediately.

  What the voice on the phone was accusing her of was nonsense. True, Michael had dropped out of her course after that – for all she knew he had dropped out of university. She was sorry, but there were many reasons students left – and money was a big one. She had simply thought he had been unable to continue for financial reasons and had written off the loan as money unwisely spent. Certainly when he had left that morning he had shown no sign of acrimony. On the contrary, he had been shamefaced and apologetic about the incident.

  Now this. What had the voice said? ‘I have had him in my office and he’s told me everything’? What everything? There had been nothing to it, nothing at all, and certainly no ‘tender relations
hip’. Had Michael’s talent for creative fiction been extended?

  The threat was a real one, though. Sexual relations between a faculty member and a student were strictly forbidden, and the threat of charges of sexual harassment hung over female faculty as well as male. She was vulnerable and the voice on the other end of the phone knew it.

  Without saying anything further, she hung up the phone and went back to the essay she was marking, trying not to think about what the voice had said.

  Two minutes later the phone rang. She picked it up.

  ‘That wasn’t very nice,’ said the insinuating voice.

  In nature, autumn is a time of ending. Leaves change colour to blaze briefly and drop. The air turns colder. Night comes sooner. In scholastic and academic circles it is a time of beginning: new term, new notebooks, new pencils, new textbooks, new subjects.

  In law enforcement, however, it is no different from any other time of year. People rob, cheat and kill each other just the same. All it means to a cop is more paperwork. Or, in this modern world, computer time. Detective Lieutenant Jack Stryker was up to his ears in it and getting nowhere.

  He was muttering balefully to himself when Sergeant Toscarelli came through the door. ‘It’s not healthy to grind your teeth,’ Tos informed his friend and superior officer. ‘You could get temporal mandibular misalignment and you wouldn’t like it. My cousin Ralph has it and he can make his jaw click like a castanet, plus he gets headaches—’

  ‘I already have a headache, thank you,’ Stryker growled.

  ‘Well, there you go, it’s probably already started,’ Tos said, settling down in the chair facing the desk. ‘Just goes to show.’

  Stryker looked up. ‘Show what?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just goes to show what?’

  ‘What does?’

  ‘Funny, you don’t look like either one,’ Stryker said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Abbott or Costello.’

  Toscarelli sighed and inspected his socks, pulling one back up. ‘You need a break. Some action.’