“How come? First time I met you, I knew you were a square shooter.”
Mark appreciated the comment, but for all of Zeke’s cop instincts and years of experience, he was still basically trusting—at least where his brethren in law enforcement were concerned. “Alex once told me that in the old days the Rom men were the ones with the special abilities to see into the future and stuff. They were the original horse whisperers.”
Zeke nodded, listening. “Go on.”
“At some point, that changed. I don’t know why, but the women became the ones who read tea leaves and looked into crystal balls. Telling the future became a commercial enterprise. The men still had these gifts, but they forgot how to use them.”
“Oh…” Zeke said. “You mean Ernst could see things about you that most people couldn’t.”
“Right. The first time Alex brought me to the house for dinner, he said, ‘You know that adage about the apple not falling far from the tree? Well, what they don’t say is that the apple is bruised, and no good to eat.’”
Zeke didn’t say anything, but Mark saw his hands tighten around the wheel.
“I sorta laughed it off, but what he said stuck with me a long time. When Tracey told me she was pregnant, I decided Ernst was right. If I had a daughter, I wouldn’t want her stuck with spoiled fruit, either.”
Zeke punched the steering wheel. “That’s crap. You’re a decent man who made a mistake and afterward did the right thing—the honorable thing. Even Yetta admits that Ernst was way off base where you were concerned.” That was news to Mark. “I wish to hell I had a damn baseball bat. I’d—”
His rant was cut short by the cackle of a two-way radio. The backup unit was checking in. The second car had already been in place when Zeke and Mark had arrived and was positioned around back in case the suspects tried to slip out on foot.
Zeke confirmed that nothing was happening but ordered the pair to hold off sending one of the two for food. “Check-out time is one. I’ll have the front desk call the room to rattle their cage.”
He made a call on his cell phone then sat up, leaning over the steering wheel. Dropping his chin, he looked at Mark and said, “You know my daughter just had a baby, right?”
Mark nodded. Zeke had returned from Los Angeles, where his ex-wife and daughter lived, with a two-inch stack of photos. Mark had never seen his friend more energized. “Well, seeing her and this tiny new life made me realize that everything that happened in the past is gone. It’s done. We can’t change it and we can never really make up for it. We just have to deal with what’s going on now.”
“That’s pretty deep coming from you.”
Zeke’s hand shot out but the punch Mark expected didn’t come. Instead, he tapped Mark’s shoulder softly and said, “I’m a grandpa, now. I’m entitled. I just don’t want you to throw away something good because you feel guilty about letting Alex down in the past. If I’d done that, I wouldn’t have been there to hold the most beautiful little grandbaby in the world. Did I show you her picture?”
Mark roared, knowing Zeke was trying to lighten the moment. “Yeah, I’ve see her picture. But what about you, Dr. Phil? Do you just give advice or do you follow your own?”
Zeke’s smile turned into a scowl. “My case is different.”
“How?”
“Yetta isn’t Alex. She was married for thirty-plus years—to a freakin’ icon, thank you very much. You try competing with the Gypsy King, and then we’ll talk.”
“I have, and I lost,” Mark said. “Sure, Yetta married the man, but Alex worshipped him. She was Daddy’s little princess. And even though Ernst never said the exact words to my face, I knew he was thinking, ‘Oh, God, what a loser. That boy is nothing but trouble.’ Which is exactly what my father always said. So, of course, I had to go and prove him right.”
“You made a mistake. And part of that was Tracey’s fault. You think Ernst never made a mistake?”
“Not a life-changing whopper, like mine.”
Zeke didn’t speak for a moment, but when he did, his voice was low and serious. “Well, you’re wrong. I don’t know how much Alex knows, but Grace uncovered a pretty dark secret about her dad when she was helping us nail that lowlife scum Charles Harmon.”
“What kind of secret?”
“The Gypsy King broke the law. He took a bribe, and instead of giving half to the man who’d arranged it—ol’ Chucky boy—he kept the whole thing. Put the money into mutual funds for his daughters.”
Mark’s jaw dropped. “The money Alex used as her part of the down payment on the Hippo was illicit?”
“The seed money was. Apparently over the years, the trusts did very well. And there was never any complaint filed. The money came from some deep pockets behind one of the unions. We only have Harmon’s word on this. So, it’s never going to be made public.”
“Does Yetta know?”
Zeke nodded.
“Wow. That’s wild. I swear I thought the man walked on water.”
“Well, he wasn’t perfect, but that doesn’t mean his family loves him any less.”
Mark heard something in his friend’s tone and realized the same truth applied to Zeke and the daughter he’d reconciled with a few months earlier. “So, tell me again. Why are you waffling about dating Yetta?”
“Because I’m old, dammit. I’m getting ready to retire. What does someone like Yetta want with a gray-haired bum sitting around all day?”
“Who said you have to sit around? Let me ask you something. Say that nutcase boyfriend of my ex-wife’s mother’s blows out that door with a loaded 410 and puts a hole in your chest. Whose face are you going to see in your mind before you disappear into the light—or wherever you’re headed?”
Zeke’s growl didn’t include a name, but Mark knew whose name would be on his lips when it was his time. Alex. But what if the best thing he could do for her was leave her alone? She had a good life. She didn’t need the kind of bull that seemed to follow wherever he went. She deserved a sweet, unblemished apple.
A minute later, the second-floor door that they’d been watching opened. Two people walked out. A short, skinny man wearing a black cowboy hat, a soiled-looking denim jacket and sloppy jeans badly in need of a belt. The woman was dressed in shiny pink exercise pants and a fuzzy fake fur jacket that didn’t quite cover her sagging behind. There was no mistaking the fact that this was a May-December romance, but the way Odessa tugged on the younger man’s arm told Mark who was running the show.
The cowboy seemed to be having a little trouble walking.
“Stoned?” Mark asked.
“High on something,” Zeke murmured. He let their backup know that the subjects of their stakeout were moving, then he nodded at Mark to get out of the car.
The pair paid them no mind as they stumbled toward a beat-up Ford Mustang parked just a few cars away from Zeke’s unmarked patrol car.
Mark was unarmed, but he wasn’t worried. Odessa obviously had her hands full with lover boy, who might have had a gun under his bulky jacket but probably couldn’t see past his nose to aim and shoot.
“Odessa Mapes, LVMPD,” Zeke barked. “We need to talk.”
The pair froze. For a moment, Mark thought they might run, but the appearance of two uniformed officers took away some of their options. That didn’t keep Odessa from dropping her hold on her companion and advancing on Mark with her usual bluster.
“You,” she shrieked. “You cowardly piece of shit. What my worthless daughter ever saw in you—beyond a regular paycheck—is beyond me. I tried to talk her out of marrying you, but would she listen? Hell, no.”
Mark had heard the same recriminations and complaints for every year of his marriage—and after his divorce, too. Practically from the moment Mark and his mother-in-law had been introduced—after his and Tracey’s quickie wedding—Odessa had groused about him. “He’s too controlling, too hard, too cold-blooded.” The list had grown over the years.
“These gentlemen from Metro are her
e to take you in, Odessa. A small matter of a handgun that was found in my car, without my fingerprints on it. A gun that was used to kill the guy who supposedly named me as a murder suspect in your daughter’s death.”
Her companion let out a keening moan and started muttering something about Mexico. He was swaying on his feet so badly the backup team had to each take an arm while Zeke cuffed him.
Zeke rattled off the man’s rights and made him answer out loud that he understood. “Uh, yeah, sure. Whatever.”
His chin dropped to his chest, but a second later his head snapped back so hard his hat fell off. As the officers started helping him to the police unit, he began to struggle. “Wait. Odey,” he called to the woman standing a foot from Mark. “Baby, you’re not gonna let ’em take me in, are you? I thought we were going to Mexico, ‘member?”
Odey? The coffee in Mark’s stomach curdled slightly.
“Wait. Hold on, man. I gotta see. I gotta see which one is the dumb f—” The cop on the left jerked the man around, slurring the rest of his obvious epithet.
“Wait,” Zeke ordered the officer. To the suspect, he asked, “What do you want to see?”
“Which one is he, Odey? That dude? Is he the one who thinks he’s the brat’s dad?”
Odessa let out a string of swear words and would have inflicted bodily harm on the man if Zeke hadn’t held her back. “Not yet, you fool,” she shrieked. “Not till we get the money.”
Mark and Zeke looked at each other. “What money?”
She turned to face Mark. Her rheumy eyes were narrowed with spite and she practically spit the words at him. “The money you’re gonna pay me to keep quiet about who Braden’s real father is.”
Chapter Sixteen
In the week following Alex and Mark’s morning-after talk, Alex saw very little of Mark. He’d continued to allow Braden to attend the Dancing Hippo, but only put in an appearance himself at the end of the day when he picked up his son.
He was polite but distant. Alex thought he looked tired—defeated—but she was never given a chance to ask him anything personal. He made sure they were never alone.
Alex had worried that the tension between his teacher and his father would cause Braden to regress. Fortunately, that wasn’t the case. Although his stutter was still very pronounced, the little boy was slowly opening up—even speaking in the company of his friends, who never rushed or teased him.
When he wasn’t sequestered in some corner with Maya and Gemilla, Braden played video games with Luca. And she’d even seen Luca helping the younger boy with his math problems.
Braden was a smart kid—from the simple tests she’d put him through, she’d determined that he was on par with his grade level in math and even slightly above grade level in reading—but he rarely volunteered answers to the questions she’d ask him about the books he carried in his backpack. And when he did speak, his stutter broke her heart.
But she’d noticed today that his little brow seemed less furrowed, as if some weight had been lifted from his shoulders. Alex wondered if something had changed in school, maybe some accomplishment she wasn’t aware of.
“Braden, you’re smiling again,” Alex said, catching his hand as he passed by her desk on his way to join Maya at the snack table. He came to her willingly, but he didn’t crawl up on her lap as most of the children in her school would have. “Can you tell me why you’re so happy? Is it because Christmas is only five days away?”
He shook his head. “N-no m-ore…G-Grandma.”
Something had happened with Odessa? That was good news. Zeke had mentioned that the woman had been picked up, but he hadn’t elaborated and Alex hadn’t asked. She saw Mark every day. Shouldn’t he be the one to tell her what was going on?
“Did the judge tell her not to come here anymore?”
He shook his head from side to side.
“Did she move away?”
He nodded.
Thank God. She made a mental note to ask Mark when he came to pick up Braden.
As usual, the last two hours of her workday disappeared in a blur. She was more exhausted than usual and could barely keep her eyes open when six o’clock rolled around. A week of no sleep will do that to a person, she told herself.
Lately, her dreams teeter-tottered back and forth between a rosy picture of what her future might hold if she let Mark back in to share it and nightmares that featured a wicked grandmother carting a child off into the woods. Occasionally there were sexy dreams, too. Memories really. And she found the thought of spending the rest of her days without that kind of fire in her life utterly depressing.
“Ahem.”
Alex looked up from her keyboard where her fingers were resting lifelessly. “Mark. I didn’t hear you come in.”
His eyebrows framed a question. How is that possible? She didn’t have an answer, so she stood up and said, “I’m glad you’re here. I wanted to ask you a question. Braden told me his grandmother was no longer a problem. Could you explain?”
“Odessa is in county lockup for a fistful of speeding tickets and unpaid parking fines while the D.A. decides if there’s enough evidence to charge her with accessory to murder.”
“What?” she asked, trying to keep her voice under a shout. “Didn’t Zeke say she had an alibi?”
“Her boy-toy cowboy—” He winced apologetically. “Sorry. That’s what the jokers at Metro call him. He’s actually a forty-year-old druggie who has the IQ of a Barbie doll when he’s not high. Once he started coming down from whatever drug cocktail Odessa was feeding him, he claimed that she put him up to it.”
“Wow. No more threat of her stealing Braden. You must be overjoyed.” Although she had to admit, he didn’t look overjoyed. If anything, he looked worse than she felt at the moment.
He didn’t respond to her comment. Instead, he leaned down, obviously searching for the sign-in sheet, which she’d just filed. “You still want me to sign him out, right?” he said, glancing up.
You didn’t need Gypsy genes to know something was wrong. Very wrong. “Mark, what’s going on? Have you heard something about the arson investigation? Oh, my God, they’re not charging you with that, are they? Did that witch try to cut a deal?”
He reached out and touched her arm, obviously trying to quell her growing anxiety. “No. Nothing’s changed there. I was told our lab sent some residue to the state crime lab for analysis, but they still haven’t gotten back the results. It’s the holidays.”
His casual attitude angered her. “What do you mean it’s the holidays? So what? Don’t the people who work in those places realize a person’s life hangs in the balance?”
“Alex, the intensity of the fire means there weren’t a lot of clues to sift through. Even if the lab reports come back negative—meaning there was no trace of an accelerant beyond the normal chemicals found in a meth lab, that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a bomb. In fact, it could mean whoever set the fire was either an extremely clever arsonist—or someone who was good at investigating arson fires.”
Her stomach clenched in a way that brought back the nausea she’d been fighting most of the day.
“At this point, it’s my word against a dead drug addict’s,” he said solemnly.
“A guy your ex-mother-in-law had killed.”
“Supposedly.”
“Why’d she do that? Just so she could use the gun to frame you for his murder?”
He sighed. “Her boyfriend said the guy was threatening to recant his statement. Partly because the D.A. wouldn’t back off from his third-strike charges until he produced some kind of proof that I put a bomb in that house and partly because Odessa hadn’t paid him the money she’d promised him.” He threw up his hands. “These are people whose lives are centered on drugs—making, buying, selling, using. There’s no way for someone who isn’t part of that cycle to understand how they think.”
“Okay. I get that. But you’re not part of the cycle. So, why haven’t they cleared you as a suspect?”
“
Because Odessa is now the second person who claims I did it.”
“Why would they believe her?”
Mark looked toward where his son was sitting with Luca and Gemilla. Maya had left half an hour earlier with Rob, but Gregor apparently was running late.
“She’s given them some new information that supposedly speaks to motive.”
“Your motive?”
He nodded.
“What is it?”
He blew out an impatient-sounding breath and shrugged. “I’d rather not say. They’re running some tests. Nothing’s going to come of it, but I don’t want to talk about it until we get confirmation.”
She could tell that this was a serious, potentially life-altering test. She knew about those. She had one sitting on the bathroom counter. She just hadn’t decided whether or not to use it.
She’d bought the home pregnancy test kit months ago to have on hand when she started going through the in-vitro process. A bit prematurely, granted, but the gesture had made her feel as if the process was actually going to take place. All day long though, she’d been vacillating about whether or not to use it now. She wasn’t pregnant. She couldn’t be. But something weird was going on with her body.
“Okay,” she said. “I didn’t mean to pry. I just wanted you to know that most of the schools are doing a partial day on Friday. We’re going to have a whole-school party in the afternoon, and Braden is welcome to come. You are, too, of course.”
“A Christmas party?”
“A non-secular, all-inclusive, politically correct holiday party,” she said trying to keep her tone light. His raised eyebrow told her she’d failed. “Okay, it’s a Christmas party. We ask each child to bring a book—new or used, which we donate to battered women shelters.” She added in a whisper, “I have new books to replace the old ones. My gift to my students.”
He looked at her a moment then nodded. “He’ll be here.”
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, Mark and Braden were walking toward Mark’s truck, which he’d parked in front of the Hippo, when a man came charging across the cul-de-sac.
Alex’s cousin, Gregor, Mark realized once his initial police-trained reaction died down.
The Quiet Child Page 14