The Woman Who Wasn't There

by Marie Ferrarella

  For a moment, Delene’s attention was still on what Troy had just said. “I sincerely doubt that,” she muttered under her breath.

  He heard her. And grinned. It was yet another assault.

  ***

  Lights from passing cars played along the interior of his car before they faded out again. He slowed down as he came to a light. After they had dropped off Shirley back at her motel room, he’d once more tried his hand at coaxing Delene out for a drink. Or just a little unstructured conversation at a nearby coffee shop.

  She’d said yes to neither. He didn’t press any further, but walked her to where she’d parked her car. As he was about to hold her door open for her, a sudden sound from the street had made her cry out and jump. It turned out to be just a car backfiring and she’d regained her composure quickly enough. But just for a split second, he could have sworn he’d detected more than a small trace of fear in her eyes.

  What was she afraid of?

  Had one of Mendoza’s men threatened her? Or did the threat come from one of the myriad hard cases she handled? Someone unhappy with the way she’d interfered with his or her life?

  He’d started to ask, but Delene’s expression had cut him dead. She was in her car, pulling away before he could get another word out. Almost ran over his feet, he mused with a shake of his head.

  His questions were growing more demanding. But the answers still eluded him as much as they had to begin with.

  But not for long, he promised himself.

  There wasn’t a riddle he couldn’t solve or a woman whose defenses he couldn’t eventually break down, using patience and charm. A little like how he imagined gentling a mustang. It took time, but it was an endeavor that was well worth the effort in the end.

  He glanced up at the next sign and realized that he wasn’t driving home. He’d driven toward Federal Plaza. The tall buildings that clustered there were sporadically lit. Whole floors were dark, highlighting the scattered lit offices.

  One of those offices was near where his sister worked, he thought. Without hesitation, he turned his car toward the central parking lot.

  Anytime there was midnight oil burning, his sister would be sitting by it. He showed his identification to the security guard at the ground floor desk.

  Troy then pressed for an elevator. A car arrived almost immediately.

  Once in, he pressed for the twenty-first floor, where the D.A.’s offices were located. Janelle needed a life, he thought. Right now, his sister was young, vital and in his opinion the prettiest of all the Cavanaugh women. But she needed to make the most of it. Time had a way of disappearing on you.

  His father had said that more than once and they all knew he was thinking about the wife that fate and cancer had taken from him.

  “Enjoy every minute,” he’d counseled his four children. “You’ll never have it again.”

  Troy smiled to himself as the doors yawned open and he got off. He knew his father was talking about not just enjoying the day, but finding a special someone to enjoy it with. In his case, more than a few women had made his life pleasurable, although just recently work had absorbed most of his time. But he had the capture of a serial killer to show for it.

  Janelle, on the other hand, seemed to have lost the knack for fun, he thought as he quietly made his way down the hall until he came to the broom closet she called an office. Because air was scarce, she had the door open.

  Several heavy tomes were scattered on her desk, one cover layered over another. Janelle sat, one leg tucked beneath another, her head propped up as she glanced from one page to another. She was frowning.

  Definitely lost the knack for fun, Troy thought.

  “Can’t they chain someone else to the desk and have them do that?”

  She looked up as if she’d expected him to come by all along. Very few things startled Janelle. She’d always been the cool one in the family. The one he hated to play against when they played poker.

  “They stopped looking once they got to me.” Putting down the pen, Janelle rubbed her brow directly above her eyes. There was a knot forming. One that had “headache” written all over it. “Now that we lost that witness we were counting on, we’re back to square one with Mendoza.” She sighed, turning her chair around to face him. She’d come in early, just before seven. It had been a very long day. “Everyone’s too scared to talk. Afraid of being ‘taken out,’ too.”

  Troy crossed to her desk and leaned a hip against the side. Janelle scooted some of the books over, away from him. “Mendoza claims he had nothing to do with the murder.”

  She didn’t look as if she quite believed that. Neither did he. “Doesn’t really matter who pulled the trigger, Troy. Petrie’s just as dead.”

  “Matters to me.”

  He was right. Was she really getting to be this jaded? she wondered. Or was she just tired? “Yes, well, it’s supposed to matter to you. You’re the bright, shining young police detective. You can’t have them putting one over on you.”

  He grinned at her description. “And the bright, shining young assistant district attorney can?”

  “Hell no.” She nodded at the textbooks on her desk. “The bright, shining young assistant district attorney is desperately searching for a way to stitch this case together even without the testimony of the late, less than great Clyde Petrie.”

  He studied her for a moment, then glanced down at the opened textbooks. “You gonna find it tonight?”

  She sighed. “I wish. No,” she finally said when she realized that her brother was still waiting for more of an answer.

  “Then go home.” He straightened, then crossed to the coat rack and got her coat for her. “Better yet, let me take you out to dinner.”

  She turned around, letting him help her on with her coat. They’d come a long way as brother and sister, she thought, remembering back to when they lived to get one up on each other. “What happened? Someone cancel on you?”

  He thought of Delene, then decided not to go there with Janelle. She’d only ask a thousand questions. It was in her nature. “Didn’t ask anyone to have them cancel.”

  Turning, Janelle touched her fingertips to his forehead. “Nope, not burning up. You sure you’re my brother? Now that I look—” she pretended to glance behind him “—I don’t see that endless line of girls following you.”

  “There was never an endless line of girls following me. The line was finite,” he said, fighting to keep a straight face.

  “Even if your ego wasn’t.” She laughed. She looked one last time at the notes she’d been making. Troy was right. There was nothing there that wouldn’t keep until morning. Maybe morning might make them look better. “Okay, you’re on, Troy. But you’re paying.”

  “Wouldn’t have asked if I wasn’t going to.”

  She hooked her arm through his, then paused to turn off the lights. “Just making sure.”

  * * *

  Chapter 8

  There were times when Delene felt as if she were running inside a hamster wheel with her foot caught in a spoke, madly trying to just keep up.

  No sooner had she banished the demons from her head and closed her eyes than she had to get up again. There was another raid to conduct.

  Happily for her, this one did not end in a call to Homicide. Not so happily for the subject of the raid. He was caught in violation of the terms of his probation. Jail time loomed in his future.

  Jorge was quick to get out the cuffs. The man whose home they raided, once an up-and-coming CEO of a major company, now reduced to far lesser circumstances, looked at the uniformed trio who had descended upon him. Panic quickly banished disbelief.

  “It’s just a little weed, man,” Ted Addison cried, gesturing at the offending item, which Delene had carefully bagged and tagged. He was standing in his boxer shorts, his knees all but knocking together. Addison glanced from Adrian to Jorge before settling his pleading gaze on Delene. “I just needed it to calm my nerves.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “W
hat do you have to be nervous about?”

  “Raids like this.” It looked to Delene as if panic had tightened his throat so that he’d had to squeeze the words out.

  He was a man trapped by his own excesses. He had no one to blame but himself for being here, she thought. That still didn’t keep her from feeling sorry for him. “Kind of a catch-22, isn’t it?” She did her best to sound distant. “You know the rules. No consorting with known felons—”

  Still not cuffed, he waved a hand at the bag she was holding. “I got that from a kid in high school. A friend of my son’s.”

  She continued reciting the terms of his particular probation. “—No drugs. And weekly meetings of Gamblers anonymous.”

  “I’ve been going to the meetings,” the man said, his tone desperate. “Twice a week. Sometimes even three when I’m feeling weak.”

  Delene tried again. She knew the others were right behind her. Trouble was, she didn’t like the position she had to take. “The law says we have to bring you in, Mr. Addison.”

  “Please?” Addison pleaded with her, as if sensing she was the heart of the group. “Please,” he repeated. “I won’t do it again.”

  Delene wavered. Ninety-nine percent of the time she operated by the book. But no one would dispute that Ted Addison definitely had enough on his plate. His wife had left him because of his gambling obsession, taking his sons with her. He was addicted to betting on the horses, had been for a number of years. He’d lost his house and was living in a part of town he would have never even dreamed of visiting before he was laid low by his addiction.

  But he still had his job and was honestly trying to turn his life around. He’d been placed on probation when he’d been brought up on charges of check fraud, which in his case translated to bouncing checks. Many of them. To his credit, Addison hadn’t attempted to embezzle the money he needed to pay off his debts from his employer. She’d made it a point to check that angle out carefully on her own time.

  Sometimes she cared about the people in the files that came across her desk more than they cared about themselves.

  Feeling more than a little weary, she blew out a long breath. She made up her mind to take a chance on Addison. Just this one time. “Put the cuffs away, Jorge.”

  The big man eyed her grudgingly as he tucked the steel bracelets into his back pocket.

  “Oh, thank God,” Addison cried, his voice hitching in a suppressed sob.

  She regarded at him coldly. “The next time we come—and there will be a next time, Mr. Addison—you’d better be so clean, you squeak.”

  He held up his hand. It was trembling, as was he. “I promise.”

  Delene handed the small bag of evidence over to Jorge while Adrian looked on. “Flush that down the toilet, Jorge.”

  He took the baggy from her, looking at first it, then her dubiously. “You sure about this?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure.” She knew that Jorge would go along with her. So would Adrian. She wanted both men to understand her reasoning. “He only had the one joint.” They had tossed the premises pretty thoroughly. “Can’t see ruining a man’s life and sending him to jail over something so minor.” In some states in the country, with the right condition, Addison would have been written a prescription for the substance. And after all, it wasn’t as if the man was dealing, she thought.

  Addison grasped her hands between his. If she’d allowed him, he would have kissed them. “Thank you. Thank you.”

  She drew her hands away. “You have one chance, Mr. Addison. Don’t blow it,” she warned.

  Once they left the premises and were back on the street, Adrian broke rank. He was the first to the car parked by the curb.

  “I could have stayed in bed,” he complained. He yanked open the passenger door behind the driver’s seat.

  Delene watched Jorge open his side before she got in. She was riding shotgun today. Jorge had the driver’s side. They made it a point to rotate for each raid.

  “Then we wouldn’t have put the fear of God into Addison and who knows, in a couple of weeks or more, he might have gone on to something bigger, something worse,” Delene pointed out.

  Jorge stuck his key into the ignition as Adrian leaned forward, his hands on the back of Jorge’s seat. “Got an answer for everything, don’t you?”

  She only wished, Delene thought. “Yeah,” she answered cheerfully, “I do.”

  ***

  The phone rang five times before she had a chance to reach for the receiver and pick it up. Hip-deep in paperwork she’d neglected, she mumbled an almost belligerent “D’Angelo.”

  “Thought you might want to know that we might have a name for Petrie’s girlfriend.”

  Instantly alert, her back went ramrod straight. She recognized his voice instantly. It went through her like a stream of hot water, warming everything in its path. “Someone recognize the sketch?” she heard herself asking. Not bad for a woman who felt as if she’d been struck dumb.

  “Actually, I did.” Troy thought of toying with her a little, drawing out the moment, but he knew that she wouldn’t appreciate it. He backtracked a little before explaining his answer. “Petrie’s room was dusted for prints. Latent almost went crazy because there were so many given the type of room it was, but one of the partials they came up with belonged to a Kathy Springer. Seems she’s in the system. Convicted of prostitution when she was eighteen, then again when she was twenty.” It was a sad history, but not an unusual one given the area they were dealing with. “She’s pretty much fallen off the radar after that. When I pulled up her picture, she was a dead ringer for the drawing that neighbor had our man compile.”

  Something inside Delene cheered. “No known address?” She knew it was almost too much to hope for.

  “Nothing current,” he confessed. “We’re still working on it.” Silence met his answer. “You still there, Agent D’Angelo?”

  She was trying to piece things together. “This Kathy has a daughter. Kids need to see doctors. Which means that Kathy and the girl might be on Medicaid.”

  Troy laughed dryly. “Last I checked, they weren’t issuing health care cards to street prostitutes.”

  A child made a difference in a person’s life. At least some of the time. “Maybe she cleaned up her act long enough to apply for public assistance.”

  “Worth a look,” Troy agreed. There was a short pause on the other end of her line, as if he was waiting for something. And then she heard him say, “This is where you’re supposed to say ‘You done good, Detective Cavanaugh.’”

  “‘You done good, Detective Cavanaugh,’” she parroted, but he was almost positive he heard a smile in her voice. It was enough to have him press his next move.

  “So, does this earn me a cup of coffee?”

  She pressed her lips together, holding back an unexpected laugh. She couldn’t say why his relentlessness tickled her. At least part of the time. “You can have coffee anytime you like.”

  She knew what he meant, Troy thought. But since she gave no indication that she was about to make the offer, he said, “With you.”

  He made it sound as if he’d done this strictly for her. She knew better. “Aren’t you just working on your own case, Detective?”

  “Yes,” he allowed, “but nowhere does it say that I have to share my findings with an agent from the County Probation Department.”

  “No,” she agreed slowly, “it doesn’t.” She paused, debating. In a way, she did owe him for this, even though it had been her idea to look for the girlfriend to begin with and she’d had a different reason to go searching for the woman. But she didn’t like owing anyone. “Okay, I suppose it can’t hurt.”

  She heard him laugh. “I promise it’ll be utterly painless.”

  Delene sincerely had her doubts about that. But she gave him instructions as to where to meet her anyway.

  ***

  “Am I boring you?” Troy finally asked when she yawned again.

  They had met in a coffee shop a block away from t
he building where the County Probation Department was housed. So far, by his count, she’d yawned three times and he hadn’t even finished his cup of coffee.

  A soft shade of pink he found endearing entered her cheeks as Delene waved away his question with her hand. “Sorry, I didn’t get much sleep last night and I had a raid this morning.”

  A lot of people were inside the coffee shop, and it felt as if the air supply had been depleted. That and the press of warm bodies made her struggle to keep her eyes open.

  She’d just trampled on his ego she thought as she set her cup down on the saucer.

  Troy studied her for a moment, leaning in to be heard above the din of voices and the shuffle of feet and chairs. “That a pretty regular thing?”

  She shrugged. “To a fair extent.”

  “You should get hazard pay.” His smile faded a little to be replaced by a look that resembled concern. “Why are you having trouble sleeping?”

  “I didn’t say I had trouble sleeping,” she pointed out tersely. “I just said I didn’t get much sleep last night.”

  He had a feeling that he’d phrased his question correctly despite her protest, but he wasn’t about to push it. He played along. “Okay, what was different about last night?”

  Nothing, she thought. It was like every other night she’d spent these past five years. She would come home after a long day, make sure all her windows were locked, then would look into her closet and under her bed like a paranoid ninety-year-old woman. After which she’d have a meager, lackluster meal and flop into bed. Where she would lie awake, magnifying every single noise she heard until sometime during the night she’d fall into a fitful sleep. Last night the nightmare had come again, in a slightly different form, but all the basic elements had been the same. Enough to make her afraid long before she opened her eyes.

  But Cavanaugh was waiting for an answer and she sure as hell wasn’t going to give him the truth. “I was just preoccupied with finding Clyde’s daughter while juggling the rest of my case files. That takes a lot out of you.”