Dangerous Reunion

by Marilyn Pappano

  She offered to take her car. Ben said he would drive.

  The silence was excruciating. All she could see was Brit’s stricken face. All she could hear was her heartbreaking plea. I’ll be all alone. As they turned onto First Street, she drew a breath, willing to talk about anything to get that memory out of her mind. “How is your family?”

  Ben didn’t look surprised that she wanted conversation. He rarely looked surprised at anything, and he well understood the value of taking one’s mind off one’s troubles. “Good. Mom’s thinking about expanding the restaurant again.”

  “Not into the family room.” The large private dining room was the only space in the building to expand into. She’d eaten a few meals there with Ben and various relatives—not as a couple, just grabbing a meal while they worked on a case together. She’d loved the idea of family gathered around a table full of good food, talking and joking and teasing, loud and boisterous and always affectionate—had thought that someday she would have a right to be there. That someday she would be part of that lively, loving bunch.

  That was before the Lloyd Wind case had come along.

  “She says we can eat in the kitchen.” Ben’s voice was implacable, as if thought of the restaurant or the family held no connection whatsoever to her. She always felt a pang of loss when she passed the Creek Café. Probably the only pangs he felt were hunger.

  “She says better yet, we can eat at home. Save the café the cost of feeding us all on a regular basis.”

  “Your mother lives to feed her family.”

  “That’s what we tell her. She says she lives to feed families who pay. A nice tip afterward is exceedingly appreciated.”

  The SUV bounced over the railroad tracks. “I always tip nicely,” she remarked. That earned a glance from him.

  “You still eat there?”

  “The best place in town?” she asked with a lightness she definitely didn’t feel. “Having to live without your mother’s food would have been cruel and unusual punishment.”

  And living without him? No less than she deserved.

  The silence came again, and this time she let it linger. They followed the western leg of the same highway she lived on to the municipal golf course, where Ben slowed to make a right exit onto an older, narrower road. Longtime residents of Cedar Creek called her road New 66, though it was closing in on seventy years old. Not a youngster, but still nearly three decades newer than the section of Old 66 they now traveled.

  They rattled across Rock Creek Bridge, its steel trusses the color of rust. It was as old as the road, making her wonder about the structural integrity of every one of its 120 feet. Brit and Theo had loved it when they were kids, and Ben still did. He appreciated things that lasted. He’d told her once, the most serious he’d ever been, that he intended for them to be a thing that lasted.

  They hadn’t, of course. Good things didn’t last—not for her, at least.

  When he slowed for the final curve before the house, Yashi’s breath caught in her chest. She didn’t want to do this, but she would. She could face anything that might help get Lolly and Will and Theo back.

  The number of police vehicles there had diminished, but there were three vans from Tulsa news stations parked alongside the road. The reporters perked up when Ben parked in the driveway, heading their way with their photographers before he even turned off the engine. Yashi appreciated that he didn’t tell her to say nothing. She hadn’t faced a journalist in a long time, but in her last go-rounds with the media, after Lloyd Wind’s conviction had been overturned, she’d perfected the stoic face and stony silence.

  “Detective Little Bear, can you tell us—”

  Yashi shut out the question, the voices, and fixed her gaze on the house. She’d come here a thousand times, and nothing had changed. The trees had grown taller, the roses wilder, a little more lawn carved out of the surrounding woods. The five of them had built a gazebo in the side yard; she’d helped Lolly plant her full-acre garden. They’d had dinners and cookouts and parties; she’d babysat so Will and Lolly could have alone time; they’d just hung out, doing nothing special but doing it with the people they loved best.

  Nothing had changed, except that the happy family that lived here had been shattered. Please, God, let it be temporary.

  “Hey, you’re Yashi Baker, aren’t you?”

  The sound of her name jerked her attention back to the media, to a tall, lanky photographer with red hair in a ponytail longer than her own.

  “The assistant DA who wrongly convicted Lloyd Wind in that homicide case.”

  In her head, she politely pointed out that the jury convicted Wind, not her. In reality, she kept her mouth shut, careful not to clench her jaw, and her face blank.

  Recognition lit a female reporter’s eyes. “Last week he received a $7 million settlement from the state because of you. You want to comment on that?”

  She continued walking, passing Lolly’s minivan, and Ben stepped in behind to block her from their view. “Seven million,” she muttered. She’d seen the headlines, of course, about the settlement, but she hadn’t yet made herself read the stories. The biggest case of her career. The one that ended it.

  “Considering he was in prison four years, it’s not so much,” Ben muttered back.

  “He wouldn’t have made a fraction of that working for four years.”

  “But he would have been free, not locked up for a crime he didn’t commit.”

  “That’s a matter for debate.” Yashi said it quietly, unsure whether he heard, grateful he didn’t respond. Thinking about that case made her head hurt, and she already had enough going on today. The sun was bright enough to scorch the dandelions, but it couldn’t dissipate the moisture in the air. The humidity was heavy, a wet blanket that hugged everything and made breathing an effort. It was too hot and miserable for anything besides lazing with a cold drink.

  She stopped at the bottom of the porch steps, Ben still right behind her. It would be cool inside the house. Cool and empty and ugly and threatening.

  Don’t worry about me, Brit had said.

  “Don’t worry about me,” Yashi repeated, the words nothing more than a few puffs of air.

  Theo, Will and Lolly. Those were her only worries.

  Chapter 3

  Yashi’s back was rigid, the muscles in her neck bunched, when she walked inside the house. She moved far enough to allow Ben to close the door, shutting out the smallest glimpse a telephoto lens might capture from the road, then stopped. She took short, shallow breaths, then her jaw clenched a couple times and she began breathing through her mouth. Had she caught the faint tang of blood on the air?

  Crime scene techs still worked while Sam, just visible through the kitchen door, thumbed through the calendar hanging on the wall there. He let the pages drop and joined them, bringing booties and gloves. “I’m really sorry, Yashi, but I appreciate you doing this. We’ll start in Brit’s room.”

  She nodded stiffly before fixing her focus on the protective coverings. She made a point, Ben noticed, of not looking toward the living room, of not letting the painted message on the front door edge into her vision. When Sam nodded toward the stairs, she led the way to the second floor, walked straight to Brit’s room and went to stand in the center, beneath a glass light fixture painted with clouds on a clear blue day. “Did the lab guys find the note?”

  “We assume he took it. Probably because it was something personal, something she’d touched.” Sam let that sink in before he went on. “JJ—Detective Logan—packed a bag for Brit—clothes, makeup, that sort of stuff, and the lab bagged her electronics. Do you see anything else that’s missing?”

  Moving carefully, Yashi walked around the room, opened drawers, looked in the closet, scanned the bulletin board above the desk. After a while, she gave a terse shake of her head and moved on to the next room.

  By the time th
ey went downstairs, Ben was feeling the stress of the day all over, every nerve and blood vessel and muscle throbbing. All he’d wanted was one day to relax. Not a kidnapping. Not a potential triple homicide. And damn well not Yashi back in his life.

  And damn it, that last part made his head hurt worse. He should be worried about the victims. His focus should be one hundred percent on Will and Lolly. His heart should be hurting for Theo, who was likely terrified, probably injured or possibly dead, and for Brit, who was definitely terrified because her entire world had just been upended. Not because his ex was standing three feet away, looking lost and vulnerable and grief stricken.

  He did hurt for Theo and Brit. But he could hurt for Yashi at the same time. Hurt because of her.

  In the kitchen, full of cream-colored cabinets and honeyed walls, Yashi studied the refrigerator a moment. “There’s a picture missing.” She stabbed her gloved finger at a spot on the right side. “It was from a vacation we took a few years ago in Arkansas. We were hiking across a creek, and I fell in. Lolly took the shot after Brit and Theo helped me out. I was soaked, and they were hysterical. She stuck it on the fridge in a plastic sleeve with a magnet.”

  They spent an extraordinary amount of time in the kitchen, given that she’d seen everything within a few minutes, but still she lingered, and they let her. After it would come the dining room, and then the living room. Nobody wanted to go into the living room.

  Yashi stood at the kitchen table, staring out the window at the garden. Lolly spent a lot of time in the garden, and her crops showed it. At least once a week, she gave Ben baskets of tomatoes, corn, cucumbers and squash, radishes and okra and whatever else was flourishing. She shared with others, too. Right now an old table on the porch held filled baskets with ribbons tied to the handles, tagged JL, KA and SB. Before he could ask, Yashi said, “I don’t know who they are. She loves giving stuff away as much as she does growing it. Where is Detective Harper?”

  The sudden change of subject made Ben blink, but Sam didn’t. “He’s interviewing the neighbors. When we’re done here, Ben, give him a call. He’s saving Kenneth Brown for when you’re with him.”

  Ben nodded. Every jurisdiction had its quirky people, and after a while, an officer learned the precautions for each one. Kenneth Brown was angry, argumentative, uncooperative, as quick to throw a punch as he was to run his mouth and threatened lawsuits over every run-in. In dealing with him, backup was advised.

  After another moment or two, Yashi turned and walked back down the hall to the dining room. Brightly lit, small, sparsely decorated, the room couldn’t sustain more than two minutes of scrutiny.

  Mouth set, hands fisted at her sides, she paused just out of sight of the living room. Sam touched her arm, murmuring, “Are you sure?” She nodded grimly and took a step, then another.

  After seeing her own little house, Ben could recognize similar touches to this room: the soothing blue-green walls, the golden oak flooring, the light, fluttery curtains at the windows. Instead of shelves for an entitled cat, this room held a fireplace tiled in opaque glass. Instead of double duty for every space, this room was large, the furniture oversize, the soft, plush area rug wider than Yashi’s whole house. There were plenty of shelves and tables to display art made by the kids, photos, plants, fresh flowers. There was no paring down here. Lolly and Will had a lot of space to fill with everything that meant anything to them.

  Yashi stared at the bloodstains for a long, painful moment, then picked her way toward the couch. Wine had dripped a deep purplish-red stain onto the cream rug, and the milk on the coffee table was thick. She bent as if to pick up a pillow on the floor, remembered where she was and straightened again before detouring to the fireplace.

  “There’s a picture missing here, too,” Sam said quietly. He pulled a bagged item from an evidence bin and held it for her to see. A picture frame, glass shattered, the frame itself twisted and warped. “Do you know what?”

  Her mouth barely moved. “It was a family picture. All five of us. Brit thought we needed a formal portrait for our family history so her great-grandkids would have something to look back on. We had it taken last—last month.” After a moment to control the wobble that had entered her voice, she asked, “Can I go out back? I need some air.”

  Sam nodded, and she walked with deliberate calm out of the room and down the hall. Ben was pretty sure her speed picked up dramatically as she neared the back door off the kitchen.

  Ben scowled. “So the guy took a note Brit wrote and two pictures that included her but left a lot of pictures of just her.”

  After returning the evidence bag to the bin, Sam shrugged. “Something about those two spoke to him. He probably has tons of pictures of her already. He’s probably been at this awhile.”

  At this. Obsessing over a fifteen-year-old girl. Did he actually know her? Did he understand the true nature of the relationship, if any, between them? That he was one of Dad’s business associates, the husband of one of Mom’s friends, the father of one of her own friends. A guy not important enough to register amid the everyday drama of a fifteen-year-old’s life.

  A guy who meant nothing to her while she apparently meant so much to him that he would do anything to claim her.

  Sounded like a mental health issue, but Ben knew better than to assume that. In her dealings with the Cedar Creek PD, Morwenna’s psychiatrist mother frequently reminded them of two facts: people with mental health issues had a history of mental illness, while criminals had a history of criminal behavior. The two groups did overlap, but not nearly as much as people wanted to believe. Truth was, people with mental illnesses were far more likely to become the victims of crime rather than the perpetrators.

  But that overlap was there. The serial killer who’d tried to add both Sam and Mila to her trophies had had a list of psychiatric diagnoses as long as her criminal offenses. The stalker who had brought Daniel back together with his ex-fiancée, now-wife Natasha, had been a true-blue psychopath.

  But they were exceptions. The rest were just bad people who did bad things. Like the woman who killed JJ’s friend, not because she couldn’t control herself. She was competent as all hell. There’d been no mental demons driving her. Just good old jealousy and greed. And the boyfriend who’d helped...too lazy to hold a job and clinging to an unshakable conviction that he deserved an easy and luxurious life.

  “You gonna stand here awhile or check on Yashi?”

  Ben blinked before focusing on Sam. “Today’s my day off.”

  Sam snorted. “You know days off are exceptions, not rules. Besides, if I told you to go home, you wouldn’t do it. You and she used to be friends, didn’t you? Before she left the DA’s office. So go check on her. I’ll let Daniel know you’re available.”

  An innocent word, available. Perfectly good in the context Sam used it. But add Yashi and friends to it, and all the innocence leaped off the nearest roof. This was a difficult time for both him and Yashi. She couldn’t help being vulnerable, but he could stop himself from being affected by it. He could summon up his famous control, could handle this like the capable detective he was. Professionally. Rationally. Unemotionally.

  Sure, he could.

  * * *

  Yashi was sitting on the steps that led into the backyard, chin resting on her knees, hands loosely clasped over her ankles. Water dripped from the roof, the giant oak, the black locust tree. It ran in tiny streams down the pillars that supported the porch roof and made quiet little plops on the mulch when it fell from the plants. With that much rain in this kind of heat, Lolly insisted she could actually hear the cornstalks growing. Yashi had been listening, but all she heard were Brit’s tears, and all she felt was the ice inside herself that wasn’t going away soon.

  When the back door opened, she knew it was Ben. Not that it would be unusual for Sam to come and talk to her, but her body had never reacted to Sam’s proximity. He was a gorgeous guy, c
ompassionate and honest and just really super all-around good, but her hormones preferred a different all-around good guy.

  Ben towered over her for a moment before taking a seat as far to the left as he could. She’d known people made uncomfortable by his sheer size, but it had never bothered her. It took more than size to make her cower. She wasn’t sure how much more, because she’d never let herself do it since she went out on her own at eighteen. She’d come closest this morning.

  “Will’s an accountant,” she said after a moment. “His clients are mostly businesses, though of course he does a lot of taxes when the season comes around. He’s been an assistant coach for both Theo’s and Brit’s soccer teams the last few years. He’s been doing some running with Theo to help improve his speed on the field. He’s on the building committee at church and also handles their books. He belongs to one civic group and was on the planning committee for the new soccer complex.”

  She was rambling about things Ben probably already knew, but saying them out loud helped organize her thoughts. “Lolly’s been taking classes at OSU-Tulsa, one or two a semester. She’s planning to go back to work when Theo starts junior high. She wants to teach elementary school. She’s active with the kids’ school and sports. She’s taking classes to become a master gardener, and she belongs to a knitting group that meets at the park on pretty days and at the coffee shop on bad days. She volunteers with the election board, she loves antique shopping and she’s trying to find time to take a basket-weaving class with Louise Pickering.”

  When she paused for breath, Ben took the chance to speak. “We aren’t going to fixate on the idea that this is tied to Brit. We’ll look at everyone, everything. We know the message on the door and the photos could be misdirection. Do they have any enemies?”

  She had asked that question of people before, about their loved ones. She’d never imagined it being asked of her. “Maybe a few soccer parents who want their kids to have more time on the field. A client or two wanting to fudge their taxes.” Finally she turned her head to gaze at Ben. His black hair gleamed in the sun, and a thin sheen of perspiration dotted his forehead. She was as wrung out as the kids after a hard-fought soccer game. He looked as if, yeah, it was a little warm today, but nothing he couldn’t handle.