SULLIVAN'S MIRACLE

by Lindsey Longford

  “Maggie’s the one with the problem. You know you haven’t been yourself since November, Maggie. Now, I don’t want to insult you, but you look real stressed to me. You should think seriously about going back on sick leave. For a while. I didn’t want to bring it up in front of Barnett—might see it in the paper if I did—” he laughed “—but I’m real worried about you, girl.”

  Woman, Maggie thought, gritting her teeth. Had Jackson always made her edgy like this or had Sullivan colored all of her reactions?

  “Chief Jackson—” she rose and faced him “—I appreciate your concern. I always have. You’ve been a friend to me when I needed one. You’ve helped me make my way through some of the hassles of being a female cop. But don’t worry about me. I can take care of myself. I’m tired, not stressed, and I can handle Barnett.”

  Jackson raised his shoulders. “If you’re sure. I don’t want anything happening to you, Webster. You gave us all some bad hours. We want you well and back to your old self again.”

  “I’ll do my best. I came back because it seemed an opportune tune to make my position clear if I hadn’t, and to get some clothes out of my locker. I apologize if I intruded.”

  “You’re never an intrusion, Maggie. Don’t even think it.” He shook her hand. “Royal, why don’t you keep Maggie company and help her carry her things to her car?”

  Royal stood next to her, a shade too close at the moment, and she moved away as he opened the door. “I’ll touch base with you later, Johnny.”

  “Do that, Gaines. But take care of Maggie first.” In Jackson’s gravelly drawl it came out sounding like a threat.

  Maggie wanted to go home, escape this place that had been like a second home to her for years. No. It had been her home. She hadn’t had time for anything else except her work, and now that had turned against her. She didn’t know if she would ever truly feel comfortable around Jackson and Royal again.

  Once she’d clarified her thinking about what was happening to her, then she’d see how she felt about Jackson. The situation with Royal would take more thought. They had too much history between them for her to sort through it easily.

  She had too many secrets.

  Royal opened her car door and hung her uniform on the garment hook in back.

  “Thanks. Look, Royal, I feel terrible about the other night, but you’ve been wonderful. I’m relieved nothing has changed between us. That we can be friends.”

  “Things have changed, babe, you know that.” He shut the door behind her as she slid into the hot driver’s seat. “But we’ll get through this. So long as you don’t make a good friend out of Barnett.” His smile was teasing, but his green gaze stayed on her a beat too long for teasing.

  At that moment, Maggie wanted nothing more than to run away from her best friend and cry herself to sleep.

  In her rearview mirror, she saw Royal standing with his legs apart, his boots gleaming in the sun as he watched her leave.

  *

  Sullivan rang the doorbell of the modest concrete-stucco house. The house seemed empty in the late-afternoon heat, the doorbell echoing for a long time in the silence. He felt like a heel for showing up at Paul Reid’s house, but he had to talk with the man’s widow.

  Paul would have made copies of the records he’d taken to Seth’s Landing.

  Stalking away from Maggie at the police station, Sullivan had started hiking, too furious to do anything under the circumstances except walk his rage off. The walk had burned off his anger and left him able to think.

  Stomping down the hot highway, his boots beginning to pinch after three miles, he’d realized he had one chance of salvaging the story. One chance to recover the information. Notes. Records.

  He’d gone into a local liquor store and called a taxi. He’d gone straight from there to the courthouse, where nobody had yet spread the news about the death. Pretending to interview a secretary in the Recorder of Deeds office, he’d brought the conversation around to courthouse staff, letting her think he was going to do a sidebar on the people who waded through the mountains of records and papers. She’d supplied Paul’s name. His address.

  Sullivan had thought he might have problems, because he hadn’t bothered to change in his hurry to find the clerk’s identity and address before it was too late. The secretary obviously thought reporters were a seedy bunch. She hadn’t reacted to his Seth’s Landing garments. The press was clearly in trouble with its image.

  Sullivan had made a couple of stops before he went to the clerk’s house. He’d bought a remote starter for his car, and he’d gone home and cleaned up, embarrassed by the indifference to his appearance the secretary had shown. On the way to Reid’s, he’d driven in a circuitous, random pattern, watching to see if he was being followed. He hadn’t parked his car in front of the Reids’ home. He’d left it a block away.

  As the door opened, Sullivan hoped he wouldn’t have to break the news to Reid’s widow.

  He didn’t think he could bring himself to face the first moments of her grief.

  The door opened slowly.

  “Yes?” A tall, slightly chubby young woman scarcely out of her teens opened the door. A suntanned blonde, she was pretty in the way girls are, their youth lending a bloom of its own. Her red-rimmed eyes, though, were old with early grief.

  She might age well. Her face, though still unformed by life, had possibilities. It held strength. A strength that would be tested in the coming months, he thought, as an infant wailed drearily in the back of the house, distracting her.

  “Mrs. Reid? I’m Sullivan Barnett. Your husband and I had a project we were working on together. I’m more sorry than I can tell you about his death.”

  She nodded. She looked as though speech were too great an effort. He wondered what she’d been told about her husband’s death. Sullivan wasn’t going to fill in any blanks for her.

  He didn’t have the courage to make this girl-woman face any more reality today.

  “I wish I didn’t have to bother you, but I need to talk with you, if you don’t mind?” He stood waiting in the heat, glad he’d taken the time to clean up and put on his one pair of good pants and a shirt with a tie. He owed this child the formal trappings of respect. Life was going to be hard for her.

  “I have time.” Tears welled in her light blue eyes, pooling at the sides and dripping down her round cheeks. She wiped them away with the back of her hands. “Come on in, Mr. Barnett.” The tears started again and she hiccupped.

  “Look, Mrs. Reid, if you want to wait, I can come back. If this is a bad time?”

  “It’s a bad time, for sure.” Her voice was high and girlish. She would be a giggler in happier days. “But I can talk. I can’t sleep, so you might as well come on in. I’d be glad of the company.

  “You don’t have anyone with you right now?” Poor kid.

  “My ma and pa are coming down from Atlanta this evening, but they couldn’t get here any sooner. I called them right after the police came and told me about Paul. Wait here. I want to check on Paulie.” She shut the door and walked down a short corridor to the baby’s room. Humming in a tear-shaky voice, she patted the boy until his wails tapered to snuffles, much like his mother’s.

  Sullivan wanted to turn around and walk out of the clean little house with its carefully framed photos and pots of geraniums along the window ledges. He couldn’t do this.

  But she returned before he could call out that he was leaving, and he was trapped.

  She sank onto a burgundy-and-blue love seat. “What did you want to talk about, Mr. Barnett? Did Paul owe you money or something?”

  “Nothing like that.” Of all the interviews he’d ever done, this one was turning out to be the most difficult. The child-mother, the baby weeping the way the mother wanted to, and the memory of Paul Reid’s sightless eyes locked the words in Sullivan’s throat.

  “Were you a friend of his?” She wiped her eyes again, this time with a tissue she’d stuffed in the pocket of her skirt.

  �
�No, not exactly.” He cleared his throat uncomfortably. Impossible. What had he been thinking of to intrude on this child’s tragedy? A tragedy he held himself partially responsible for.

  “I think I remember Paul mentioning you.”

  “Did he say anything about the project, Mrs. Reid?” Sullivan hoped Reid had, hoped he hadn’t. One way got Maggie off the hook, the other—

  “Oh, no, Paul seldom talked about work. He said it wouldn’t be ethical to reveal anything about the records he saw. They were private. He was real conscientious about that.” Pride colored her girlish voice.

  “I’m sure he was.” Looking around, Sullivan didn’t see a desk in the tidy living room. “He had some material for me. Records of the project he intended me to have, but, unfortunately, couldn’t give me. Would he have left copies of those reports here? In your home?”

  “Paul was real thorough. We even keep receipts from the grocery store.” Her smile was watery. “I could show you where Paul keeps all his records. If that would help?”

  “It would be an enormous help, Mrs. Reid. You have no idea.”

  In the room designated as Paul’s study, his wife pointed out the computer and neatly arranged shelves, the file drawers with their computer-generated labels. “Go ahead and look through them. The detective who came went through them, too. He took some folders with him.”

  “What?” That had been fast work on somebody’s part.

  “He gave me a receipt. Was that right?” she asked in a worried voice. “Paul always took care of things like that. He liked to. And I liked fixing the house and gardening. He said it balanced out for now, but he wanted me to learn how to take care of the business end of our lives, too.” A full sob broke loose. “I’ll have to learn now. Excuse me, Mr. Barnett. I’ll be right back.” Sobbing, she left the room.

  Quickly, not expecting to find anything after the detective had beaten him to the punch, Sullivan thumbed through the remaining files, looking for anything relating to the material Reid had been holding. The eye of the computer stared silently at him, a stack of disks beside it.

  He turned on the computer and worked his way through its hard-disk directory, seeing nothing that set off a buzz in his brain. He would know what he was looking for when he saw it. Changing directories, he checked the five-and-a-half-inch floppies.

  Nothing on them except household records. As he stared at the stack, he realized suddenly that, though most of them were black, some were coded by color—red, blue, green, yellow. He was so used to using the utilitarian black ones himself, he’d missed registering the colors the first time through.

  Thoughtfully, he picked up the blue stack. One bore a smiley face on its label: Paulie.

  Paul Reid didn’t seem like the happy-face type. Or the type to be drawn to an array of colorful disks. Possibly Mrs. Reid had been. And possibly not.

  He inserted the happy-face disk. He’d only check its directory, not pulling up any files. Now that he thought about it some more, the label and the directory puzzled him.

  Why did Paulie’s disk have a directory of grocery stores and pharmacies? What would a proud new father keep records of? Surely the disk should contain records of Paulie’s weight, his feeding schedule, his visits to the doctor? That might be in the pharmacy file. But it seemed too vague in contrast to the carefully indexed and labeled folders in the file cabinet. His wife had made it clear that she hadn’t handled their records, so she hadn’t created the haphazard, cutesy disk in an excess of motherly pride.

  Calling up the directory again, Sullivan entered the first fide. Bingo. He didn’t need to enter the others.

  He’d been right about Paul Reid—a careful, conscientious, cautious man who’d wanted to make the world a better place for his new son. And so he’d fed Sullivan the information on Paulie’s disk, bit by bit.

  The information would be in the pharmacy file. Sullivan knew now how Reid’s mind had worked. He’d been a good man, and he’d deserved to see his son in that better world.

  Sullivan exited and turned off the computer.

  He found Reid’s wife curled up on her side on a twin bed in the baby’s room, the child tucked inside the shelter of her arm and facing toward the wall. Both were asleep. A hissing static came from the baby monitor on the wall.

  As much as he hated to wake her, he had to. “Mrs. Reid?” he said, pitching his voice low so as not to waken Paulie, who was suckling wetly on the minute thumb of one starfish hand.

  “Oh, Mr. Barnett, I’m so sorry.” Her voice was groggy and her eyes puffy as she struggled to wake up. “I lay down for a minute with Paulie and forgot all about you.”

  “Don’t get up. You need your sleep. So does the baby. May I take this?” He held up the Paulie disk. “I’ll write out a receipt for it and let myself out.”

  “Is it the project records?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Paul would feel real bad if he let you down.” Her head slumped back on the pillow next to the fuzzy yellow of her small son’s downy hair.

  “Don’t worry, Mrs. Reid, I don’t imagine Paul ever let anyone down in his entire life.”

  Closing the door of the house softly and checking to make sure it locked behind him, Sullivan looked back at the purple hydrangeas and the trailing vines growing on a trellis next to the fence. Paul Reid and his wife had made a good life for themselves. They should have had more time to play with their son in this shady, well-tended yard.

  They should have had all those years that had been stolen from them in the mud at Palma River.

  He couldn’t give Paul Reid’s son a father, but he could give him a hero to look up to. By the time he finished his series, Paulie Reid would know what his father had tried to do for him.

  It was dark by the time Sullivan returned to the cottage. He hadn’t gotten into his car until he’d searched under it, and then he’d started it with the remote control. Now, in the dark, he slipped as silently as a cat around the beach house, checking for lurking intruders. He didn’t enter the house until he’d examined the perimeters again with his flashlight, looking this time for signs of tampering.

  When he was finally inside, he switched on all the outside lights and double bolted the doors. Stripping out of his shirt and tie, he showered the kinks and knots out of his body, letting the water pound into him for the second time today. Then, bare-chested, he pulled on an old pair of gym shorts over his naked body and poured himself a stiff drink.

  It was going to be a long night.

  Taking the drink and a plate full of cheese, he settled himself in front of his computer in the bedroom. Regardless of what he found in Reid’s records, he was going to need additional documentation before the paper would run the story. Reid had had copies of the original deeds, transfers, work orders and checks, but those were gone.

  The originals might or might not be in their respective files. If he were involved in a plot of this size, he’d leave as small a paper trail as possible, considering the current mania for faxing and copying. And he’d make damned sure he didn’t leave any original papers around once they’d been copied and perhaps handed over to some investigator.

  But crooks weren’t always smart, no matter how bright they were. They might assume they had all the copies. They might be arrogant enough to leave the originals, figuring no one would be persistent enough to wade through all the documentation again.

  Going in armed with dates, numbers and names, he would be able to find documentation because he would know where to look, where to imply he had facts when he was still searching for them, where to exert pressure on someone already jittery with guilt. Thanks to the material Reid had collected, he would find the proof.

  He had the patience.

  And now he had the motivation.

  He would carry with him forever the sight of Paul Reid’s wife and son curled up together in that blue-and-yellow baby’s room that they’d furnished with such love.

  The cursor blinked its command, and Sullivan inserted the
disk, pulling up the file he’d skimmed earlier. Grocery Receipts. Reid had had a sense of humor. The file was a listing of land purchases with the original owner, the buyer, the sale price, the broker and the history of the parcel. Each purchase was indexed under the name of a local grocery store. Sullivan sipped his whiskey and scrolled through the detailed lists, looking for patterns, repeating names, names he’d seen before in other contexts.

  And he found them, as he’d known he would.

  Working his way steadily file-by-file, he was fascinated by the complexity of the manipulations. He could see how the situation had snowballed. So much easy money to be made. So easy to give in to the opportunity of a lifetime.

  The doorbell rang at the front door. He exited from the file, but left the computer booted up, its green cursor insistent on the monitor. Standing to the side of the door, he looked outside.

  Maggie Webster was the last person he would have expected to find on his doorstep. Wearing a green T-shirt dress that ended above her knees, she looked as delicious as lime sherbet.

  “Hello, Maggie.” He barricaded the doorway with his arm. “I told you I don’t like surprises.” He looked both ways down the dark road. “Where’s your car?”

  “Two streets over. I cut through the backyards.”

  “Very smart. If I were you, I wouldn’t leave my car parked in front of my house, either. I’m high on the list of really unpopular people.”

  “May I come in?” Her hair was piled up on top of her head, and huge gold hoops swung from her delicate earlobes. She was wearing lipstick.

  Sullivan blinked as he realized it was the first time he’d seen her wearing makeup. “I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

  “I want to talk to you.” One pale green shoe edged forward.

  He blocked it with his bare toe. “Well, Detective, I don’t want to talk to you.”

  “We need to clear the air, Sullivan.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” he said, watching her gold hoop earrings sway as she shook her head.

  “Please.” Her hands at her side, she waited. “I need to talk to you. I’ll leave after I’ve said what I have to.”