Protector’s Temptation

by Marilyn Pappano

  But there were other, uglier things he had to do first.

  “Are you meditating? Praying? Hoping the wood-stripper fairies visited while we were gone?”

  She glanced at him. “Just seeing how much is left to do.”

  “You don’t have to do it.”

  “It keeps me busy.”

  “I figure doing everything for me is keeping you busy enough.”

  “I don’t have to do everything. You got dressed by yourself.” She crouched in front of the can of stripper, unscrewing the top and wrinkling her nose delicately. “You’ve been going to the bathroom by yourself.”

  “Thank God for small blessings,” he muttered.

  She tugged on a pair of heavy-duty gloves, then began applying the stripper to a shelf. “It’s actually kind of relaxing, especially now that I know it won’t be Dr. Cate’s office.”

  He looked at the shelves she’d finished, at all the hard work she’d done on a space she’d thought would belong to another woman. No way he would’ve put out all that effort on a room for some other guy in her life to use. “This thing with Cate—”

  “Is none of my business.”

  “Yeah, right. You were sure as hell curious before it ended.”

  She acknowledged that with a shrug. “However, earlier this afternoon…”

  Three simple little words to send heat spreading through his body and turn his voice rough. “You mean when I kissed you.”

  She glanced at him, her lips pursed to control a smile. “Actually, I meant when you were standing in the kitchen saying, ‘I want to talk.’”

  “Huh?” He’d had a buzz from the pain pills, but not so much that he couldn’t tell she’d responded to the kiss. She hadn’t pushed him away or said anything along the lines of no, we shouldn’t. She’d liked it. She may have thought it was a bad idea, but she’d still liked it.

  She was waiting for him to say something more. He leaned against the wall, repositioned his sling, then scratched behind his ear. It would have been an easier topic to pursue three hours ago, when the narcotics were pumping through his veins, when anything he said or didn’t say could be blamed on them. Now he took a deep breath.

  “You’re right, Mas. It was too neat. I made a mistake. I want—” He broke off, feeling anger and guilt and reluctance and nausea and disloyalty, like a lousy friend and a lousier partner. The best way to deal with all that knotted in his stomach was to go ahead and do whatever the hell it was he dreaded, so he took a deep breath, then said flatly, “I want to know what you’ve got.”

  He half-expected some show of triumph or smugness from her. Instead, she looked serious and…he didn’t know, maybe touched. “Thank you,” she murmured.

  She turned back to the shelf, testing a patch, then carefully scraping off the stripper and layers of gunk. Had she learned that meticulousness from her mother, who spent her days moving mountains of dirt and rock with a soft brush and a trowel, to find the fragile secrets buried beneath?

  Silently he scoffed. He wasn’t sure Carmen Leal had taught her daughter anything besides the lesson that she wasn’t important in her mother’s life.

  And yet, good or bad, she’d always been important in his life.

  The task done, she removed the gloves and left the room, passing close enough for him to feel the air stir. He followed her into the kitchen, where she unzipped the computer case, set the laptop on the counter and powered it up.

  “Everything I have has been input or scanned into the computer,” she said quietly. “I’ve got original documents stashed in a safe deposit box, and there are copies of this file at my office, on the Internet and in my post office box.”

  “And with Donovan.”

  She nodded.

  “They’ll expect copies.”

  “They’ll also expect anyone who finds one to be too afraid to do anything with it.”

  Maybe that would have been true…before now. If they’d killed her, what were the odds Donovan would have pursued the case? Would he have risked his life against cops who killed to achieve their goals? Maybe, maybe not.

  But AJ would. He would make it his life’s goal to see them punished.

  Her hand hovered over the keyboard. He knew her too well—knew she was second-guessing. Was it enough to her that he was willing to listen, that he was considering the possibility that his buddies were guilty? Was she thinking that the less he knew, the safer he might be?

  He laid his hand over hers, stilling the tremors. “Don’t back out, Mas. It took you eight years to get me to this point. Show me what you have.”

  She curved her fingers around his for a moment, then pulled free and opened the password-protected file. Leaving it open on the screen, she went to the stove to check on dinner. “You know the theory: Teri was leaving town, and she told Rodriguez. He didn’t like to let his women go, they argued and he threw her off that rooftop. Witnesses placed them together just before the murder, on a street corner and at a diner, and he was stopped a few blocks away shortly after.”

  AJ nodded. Myers had called him, and he’d gone to the scene, arriving in time to see the paramedics cover Teri’s body. He’d watched the initial interview with Rodriguez and stayed updated on the following investigation.

  “According to the reports, there were nine people in the diner, but Donovan called only one, the cook. I tried to interview the others, but the information the police had gathered on them was incomplete—the wrong addresses for four, none for another. No phone numbers for three of them. Two were common names that belonged to dozens of people in the Dallas area, and had no identifying information to narrow it down. The two waitresses both quit their jobs after the murder and left with no forwarding addresses. When I interviewed their families and friends, they wouldn’t even admit that the women existed.”

  While she talked, she melted butter and stirred in cocoa, then added it to flour and other stuff. Now she stirred in walnuts and miniature marshmallows before buttering a foil pan, then scraping it all in. Brownies had always been one of AJ’s favorite desserts, especially Masiela’s brownies. He’d missed it when she stopped baking them for him.

  He’d missed a hell of a lot because of his hardheadedness.

  He refocused on the conversation. “You know the neighborhood where that diner was, the kind of customers they get—the kind that don’t like to get involved with the cops. The waitresses both had records. The customers probably did, too.”

  “Probably. Which doesn’t justify the officers’ failure to properly ID them.” After sliding the brownies into the oven, she removed chicken wings from the broth on the stove and dumped in a bag of frozen dumplings. “We both know people lie, that not everyone has a driver’s license or carries ID. But failing to identify six out of nine witnesses?”

  She stopped what she was doing, meeting his gaze squarely. “How often does that legitimately happen, Decker?”

  Chapter 10

  Decker didn’t answer. Instead, he sat staring at the computer screen, but he wasn’t reading the text there. He was still listening, though, and Masiela was grateful for that.

  She gave the dumplings a stir, then faced him across the counter. “Did you ever go in the diner? It isn’t one of those where the kitchen is open to the dining room. It’s in back, with a pass-through window. You don’t have much of a view of the tables through that window. And yet, with eight people who were actually supposedly in the room with Rodriguez and Teri, the only witness Donovan called was the one who wasn’t.

  “I finally found one of the waitresses working in Houston. She wouldn’t contradict the cook’s testimony, but she wouldn’t confirm it, either. Two years after the trial, and she was still scared. She insisted she didn’t know anything about that night, and when I went back to talk to her again, she was gone. Again.”

  “What about the people who saw them arguing on the street?” His voice was grim, not argumentative, not hostile, just flat and stiff, asking for answers he knew he wasn’t going to like. />
  “Phyllis Jackson and Manny Guzman. They were standing on the corner, waiting for a friend to pick them up. They were good witnesses. They told exactly the same story every single time. At best, they rehearsed it. At worst, they were given a script to memorize.”

  It wouldn’t have been hard for the detectives to find people willing to lie for them. Honesty wasn’t a big deal to most of the people they dealt with. Some told little lies; others, with the right incentive—the right reward, the right threat—would tell really big ones.

  “It took me a long time to find out that Jackson wasn’t Phyllis’s real name. It’s Watson, and Troy Watson is her older brother. You remember him.”

  The corners of Decker’s mouth pinched. “Hell, I only busted him four, five times.”

  Like Rodriguez, Watson ran prostitutes, but he also dealt drugs on the side. Besides the business competition, there’d been some personal hostility between them, too. With Rodriguez out of the way, Watson had expanded his business and, presumably, gotten payback for the personal issue, as well.

  Finally Decker looked up at her. He was clearly trying hard to control his expression and keep it blank, but he couldn’t tamp down the emotion in his eyes. Anger, regret, disappointment, disgust. “What else?”

  “The police stopped Rodriguez a few blocks away from the murder scene. Routine traffic stop for a broken taillight.”

  Decker nodded. “He claimed he’d gotten a message from one of his girls to pick her up over there. She denied it.”

  “Yeah. A thousand-dollar deposit was made to her mother’s bank account the week after she testified. Mom claimed she didn’t know where it came from, and unfortunately, daughter died of an overdose a few days later.” She began stripping the small chunks of meat from the chicken wings, dropping them into the stock pot. “As for the guy Rodriguez said delivered the message, I couldn’t locate him. He’d disappeared immediately after the murder. Dopers go missing, you know. Either they turn up after a while or they don’t. No big loss.”

  For a few minutes she worked in silence, and Decker let her. They both knew the best—or worst, depending on point of view—was coming, and neither was in a rush to get there. So far, everything she’d told him had merely pointed to a sloppy investigation. The next part pointed to his friends.

  She stripped the last wing, then washed and dried her hands. Slowly, she circled the peninsula, sat down next to Decker and opened the media player on the computer, then clicked on a video file.

  “Three months ago I found him. He’s been living in California all these years. This is what he told me.” She didn’t click on the Play button, but waited, hands clasped, for Decker to do it. It took him a minute, but finally he did.

  Brian Brown was only twenty-six years old, but they’d been a tough twenty-six years. He was a recreational drug user, back when he’d gotten caught up in Teri’s murder, but since then it had become hard-core. He slept in shelters or on the streets, ate at soup kitchens, stole whatever else he needed and blew the occasional money sent by his more respectable sister on drugs, booze and parties. It was only the sister getting fed up with his choices that had enabled Masiela to find and interview him.

  She sat through the interview, asking questions, and had watched it a dozen times since. She didn’t watch now, but closed her eyes and listened to the voices—hers quiet and calm, his edgy. He was always edgy, except when he scored.

  “They picked me up the night before and said—”

  “Who picked you up?” she interrupted.

  “Them three cops that was always hanging out together. One of ’em was named Myers, and another was Taylor. The other one, he always shaved his head and wore these mirrored sunglasses. Anyways, they picked me up and said they was takin’ me in, and I told ’em, I ain’t done nothin’ wrong, and that one with the sunglasses, he said, ‘Hell, son, you was born doin’ somethin’ wrong.’ But he says maybe I can do ’em a favor this time, and I wouldn’t have to go jail.”

  “What kind of favor?”

  Brown squirmed in his chair. The interview had taken place in her L.A. hotel room, with a poorly done still life on the wall behind him. Even though the room was midprice and nothing special, he looked distinctly out of place.

  “Wasn’t nothin’ much. They just wanted me to take a message to Izzy the next night—tell ’im that Shawna got stuck over on Rosetta and needed a ride. That was all.”

  “And in exchange for that, they wouldn’t arrest you?”

  His head bobbed.

  “Anything else?”

  “Officer Myers, he give me a bus ticket to Chicago. Said he knew I had family there. And Taylor, he give me five hundred dollars. To make a new start, he said. Far away from Dallas. The ticket weren’t in my name. They give me a fake ID, too. Charles Carter.”

  “So you went to Chicago?”

  “Hell, no. You think I wanna lie to Izzy, then have them cops know where I was? I sold the ticket and the ID and come out here. It’s a lot harder to find someone in a place like L.A., and I did not want them cops or Izzy to find me.”

  Decker stopped the video, got to his feet and paced across the room, his footsteps heavy and slow. He pivoted into the kitchen, stared down at the bubbling chicken and dumplings, then bleakly faced her. “Why Teri? Why not one of the other girls?”

  Everyone believed Rodriguez had killed another of his girls for trying to leave him, and Teri had been planning to do the same. Decker had known it, and he’d told Masiela. It was pretty good odds that he’d mentioned it in front of Myers and company. They all worked together; they were buds; they had no secrets.

  At least, that Decker had been aware of.

  “I think she was just convenient. In the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “They just needed one of Rodriguez’s girls, and she was there? She could make a pattern for them?” He dragged his hand over his hair. “Jesus, did I tell them she was quitting? Did I cause—”

  “No. Decker, you weren’t the only person Teri talked to. Others knew she wanted out. Hell, it’s a fair bet that all of them want out at some point. But the only people who bear any blame are the ones who threw her off that roof. No one forced them to do it. They had their own reasons, and they chose their actions.”

  He looked so disillusioned that she wanted to circle the counter and wrap her arms around him. She stayed where she was, though, watching him, waiting. He was trying to turn off the emotion, to take a step back, forget his connections to the victim and the detectives and look at the case as nothing more than a case. To some degree, he succeeded.

  “So…with only one witness out of nine telling the prosecution’s story, the whole diner thing is questionable,” he said quietly, thinking out loud more than talking to her. “Phyllis Jackson’s relationship to Troy Watson makes her testimony less than reliable, and Manny Guzman’s relationship with Phyllis discounts his. Brown’s story supports Rodriguez’s, but it’s a doper’s word against three cops. There’s no proof.”

  “Other than the fact that a Charles Carter did take the bus from Dallas to Chicago on the date Brown says he was supposed to.” She leaned back in the chair and folded her arms across her middle. “There’s no smoking gun. I can’t put those cops on the rooftop with Teri. I can’t prove they killed her, but I think I can prove reasonable doubt that Rodriguez killed her. And, with the phone threat from Kinney and the other stuff, I think I can make a decent case that, for whatever reason, they don’t want me to clear him.”

  The timer went off, beeping loudly while she and Decker held gazes. Finally, she went to take the brownies from the oven. Using a dish towel for a pot holder, she set the pan on the back burner to cool, then turned off the heat under the dumplings. “Dinner is ready. Think you can stomach it?”

  AJ smiled weakly. “I can always eat.” It was something every homicide detective learned, to leave a gruesome murder scene, put the violence out of mind and grab a meal before going out again.

  Despite his words, thoug
h, when they sat down, for the first few minutes they both just picked at their food.

  Finally, AJ put his fork down and locked gazes with her. “What about motive? Why would they want to frame Rodriguez badly enough to kill Teri?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it was because they could never nail him on that other murder. They took it personally that they couldn’t make a case against him. They didn’t give a damn about justice for the dead girl. They just wanted to beat Rodriguez. They wanted another check in the ‘closed’ column.” She picked up her glass in both hands, appreciating the cool damp against her fingers. “Maybe they did it just because they could. Just to prove to themselves that they could commit a murder, frame someone else for it and walk away heroes for having solved it.”

  “Maybe Rodriguez is the one who happened to be convenient,” AJ said. “Maybe their problem was with Teri. Maybe she knew something that made her a threat. They decided to get rid of her and saw a chance to get Rodriguez, too. Payback for that other case.”

  “There are any number of possibilities,” Masiela agreed. “Probably the only people who know for sure are Myers, Kinney and Taylor, and they’re not eager to share.”

  Decker picked up the fork again and ate for a time, spearing dumplings too fat and slippery for a spoon. He made an appreciative gesture—this guy with the cast-iron stomach who would eat pretty much anything anyone made for him—and a faint flush of pleasure warmed her. She knew she was a good cook, but she loved every bit of flattery.

  After a moment, he stopped for a drink of pop. “The trial ended six years ago. Why did you keep looking into it? Why didn’t you let it go?”

  “Because I believed my client was innocent.” She took a bite and chewed it thoroughly before finally, ruefully adding, “Because I had serious problems with the detectives. You were right. I didn’t like them, I didn’t trust them and I wanted to prove that they’d lied.”

  It was the first time she’d ever said it out loud. Granted, the weaknesses of the case had caught her attention, and she’d done her best to find answers before the trial. But she had to admit, it wasn’t merely justice for Rodriguez that had kept her going; it was also the fact that getting justice for him meant exposing the detectives for the arrogant, corrupt bastards they were.