Beauty and the Badge

by Lyn Stone

  “Well,” Mary said, closing up the roll of cookies and reaching for both cups, “what are the plans for today?”

  Getting to know you better, Ford decided. Somehow, he had to come to a decision he could live with. Either he would keep Mary hidden and throw all his energy into proving her innocence, or turn her over to Blevins and do what he could to get her a reduced sentence.

  He knew he was playing judge and jury here, and without any objectivity at all. Maybe if he ignored the beauty that all but struck him dumb, and pushed aside the memories of fantastic sex with her on the window seat, he could discover the real Mary Shaw.

  Would he find a little rich girl, battling the boredom of the straight and narrow by indulging in grand larceny? Or, as he hoped, would she turn out to be exactly what she appeared to be and what he devoutly hoped she was?

  Ford clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, shook his head sharply, and puffed out a breath of resignation. He didn’t think he had ever wished the role of victim on anyone before, but he did it now. He prayed Mary was a victim of circumstance, caught up in all this by chance.

  “Got any games?” he asked, deliberately forcing his mind from the games he’d love to play with her. “You know, cards, board games? Something to pass the time?”

  “Of course!” She brightened like a kid on the way to recess.

  She found several upstairs and brought them down to the study. They settled on the floor on opposite sides of the coffee table. He rejected an unrecognizable game with a French title, another in English that he’d never played, and settled on an old standard, guaranteed to kill a few hours.

  After a couple of rounds of Monopoly—which he had always hated—Ford established the fact that Mary cheated shamelessly. But she did so poorly, and fairly openly. And crowed with delight when she won.

  It proved nothing, Ford told himself. Everybody did it. He’d done it himself once after Molly had creamed him for the third time in a row. Thinking about his sister brought family to mind. Maybe if he learned more about Mary’s, it would give him a clue what she was really like.

  “Enough of that. How about pictures?” he asked, dumping the play money back into the Monopoly box without separating it. “Got any photo albums?”

  This time, she didn’t appear all that enthusiastic. “Why?”

  “Just curious. Want to see what you looked like without your front teeth, whether you had freckles on that classic nose when you were nine.”

  Mary smiled and rolled her eyes, causing his breath to catch and his chest to tighten. Among other things. “You would leave me no pride,” she complained.

  “None at all,” he agreed, laughing. “C’mon, be a sport.”

  “You asked for it,” she said, rising and striding languidly to the bookshelves near the corner of the room,

  Ford watched, enjoying the way she moved. Like a runway model, only not so theatrically. Her hips thrust forward just the least bit, giving her walk a grace and balance most women didn’t possess. That wonderful posture of hers made her seem taller than she was, too. And elegant. Probably learned all that in charm school with a stack of books on her head, he thought.

  She brought back a thick leather-bound album with her name engraved on the front. Mary Vanessa Ellington-Shaw. At his questioning look, she wrinkled her nose and explained, “Mother felt compelled to hyphenate, but she got over it.”

  Together they turned through the pages and reviewed her infancy and early childhood. The only thing Ford learned was that Mary had always been beautiful. For her, there had existed no awkward and ungainly phase like what his sister and her pals had suffered. But then, the photos stopped at age twelve.

  Ford took the album from her and went to return it. Another rested next to the vacant spot and he pulled it from the shelf. “Now!” he insisted, shaking his finger at her cry of protest. “Now we get at the truth, right? I’ll bet your first boyfriend’s in this one, and he looks like Eddie Munster.”

  “No, he’s not in there,” she said, her reply subdued. “Would you excuse me?”

  “What’s wrong, hon?” he asked as he laid the album down on the table and sat beside her. Without thinking, he took her hands in his and leaned forward, his face only a few inches from hers.

  She pulled away and stood, one hand massaging her forehead. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to take a nap. We didn’t get much sleep last night, and suddenly I feel sort of wrung out.”

  “Sure,” Ford said, thinking guiltily about how he had disconnected the phone lines in anticipation of something like this. “Go ahead. Why don’t you go upstairs where you can sleep in a real bed for a change. It’s okay during the day when I’m keeping watch.”

  “Thanks,” she mumbled and left the room. Her walk to the door looked more as if she were making a trip to the gallows. But still, in all, Mary had taken things in stride when it counted. Anybody would be a little bummed out after last night’s escapades.

  Ford left the album on the coffee table, sat cross-legged on the floor, leaned back against one of the sofas and opened the second book.

  Five minutes later, he slapped it shut, then immediately opened it again, unable to resist seeing the rest.

  “Baby Rambo,” he mumbled, and added an expletive for good measure. He looked up as if his wondering gaze could reach through the ceiling and into her upstairs bedroom.

  How in hell could he equate these pictures with the woman he had thought Mary was? Smuggling diamonds would seem like kid stuff compared to what someone had caught her doing on film.

  Chapter 9

  Mary awoke cold, thirsty, and in the dark. Just in time, she remembered not to switch on the lamp beside her bed. Only in the study did Ford allow that. Why hadn’t he wakened her earlier, she wondered?

  She stumbled into the bathroom, splashed water on her face and ran a comb through her hair, even though she couldn’t see what she was doing. Then she felt her way back through her bedroom and headed downstairs. She shivered, as much a result of nerves as the sudden drop in temperature.

  Hopefully, her decision to come upstairs had distracted Ford from looking at the album. That had been her intention, anyway. Snatching it out of his hands would have made him even more curious and determined to see it.

  Gran ought to have gotten rid of it years ago. Mary understood why she hadn’t Her father would want the pictures since they were the last ones taken of her mother.

  The questions Ford would ask and the memories those pictures would summon, were not what Mary needed to face right now with all the other things going on.

  The moment she entered the study, she knew her tactic to divert Ford’s interest had failed. His expression made her feel defensive. “Will you stop looking at me as though I’d grown two heads?”

  He cut that piercing gaze of his toward the coffee table bearing several sandwiches and two bottles of cranberry juice. “Sit down and eat first.”

  Mary laughed bitterly. “First? Before the inquisition?” But she sat and ate anyway, needing fuel, and needing to postpone the inevitable. She knew he’d require an explanation, but couldn’t imagine what would have made him angry when he saw the pictures. He looked ready to chew nails.

  To his credit. Ford did wait until she had finished before he began.

  “Why the act, Mary? Simple schoolteacher who swoons over a preacher. Demure little rich girl who never gets her hands dirty. Scared of guns. That was a lion you shot, for Chrissake! A lion!”

  He picked up the album and slammed it on the table between them. “Explain it to me! Tell me that’s your evil twin or something!”

  “It’s my evil twin,” she said, deliberately stretching her arms out across the back of the sofa as though she hadn’t a care in the world. She drummed her fingers on the leather, looking at him from beneath lowered lids, challenging him to get even angrier than he was—so angry that he would walk out on her.

  She thought for a moment he might just up and leave, but he sucked in a deep breath a
nd glared at her. When he did speak, his calm voice belied the fact that he looked ready to explode.

  “When was this?” He turned a couple of pages. One long, tanned finger stabbed at a picture of her at fourteen, holding her father’s bolt-action Webley, her booted foot resting on the carcass of the giant cat he had shot in defense of their native guide.

  Mary shrugged. “That was on safari in Kenya. I didn’t kill the animal. Dad just thought that would make an interesting picture.”

  “Right,” he bit out, flipping to another page. “And this—this must be trick photography?”

  He tipped the book so she could see the photo of her hanging by a rope, feet toed against the vertical rock, fingers clinging in the narrow fissures. Her mother braced below her in the same position, waving up with one hand. Her father had reached the top and aimed straight down to get the photograph, capturing the full depth of the gorge below them. Mary’s insides quaked, just looking at it.

  She quickly averted her eyes.

  Could she ever make him understand? Why should she try? It was none of his business what she’d done, and not her fault that he thought he’d misjudged her.

  She sighed. “Well, they certainly weren’t going to climb the kiddie face just because I was with them!”

  A look of confusion almost replaced the one of anger. Quickly he turned through the album, thankfully skipping over the skydiving and shark studies, and looked at the last page. “How old were you in this one?” he demanded, showing her the photograph on the last page, one similar to the other shot, but on a more difficult climb in another location.

  “Fifteen,” she infarmed him curtly.

  Thank God there were no photos of her last excursion. “Not long after that, I came to live at Gran’s.” Ready for a straitjacket she didn’t add.

  “I can’t wait to see what you graduated to as an adult, though I’m afraid I already know! That climbing experience must come in pretty handy when you scale tall buildings. I gotta wonder how many of your jobs are on the books unsolved! Ever worked Miami, Palm Beach? We’ve got a couple hanging there we can’t connect yet. I should have guessed when you dressed the part so well last night.”

  “Don’t be an ass, Ford,” she snapped. “I couldn’t climb to a second-story balcony if my life depended on it. Not now.”

  He smirked. “Yeah, well, you did okay on that fence behind your house, didn’t you? You sure didn’t need my help when you went over it the first time.”

  Mary shrugged. She couldn’t deny it.

  “So where’s the next volume?” he asked. “I couldn’t find that one.”

  She looked away. “There is no next Mother died and Dad sent me home to Gran’s.”

  For a long time, he said nothing. Quietly, he closed the book and laid it aside. “I’m sorry about that. I didn’t know. What happened?”

  Mary pushed up off the sofa and picked up the album. Only when she had carefully replaced it in its niche on the shelf, did she turn and speak to him.

  “It was off a relatively easy face in Oregon near a friend’s ranch. Just a practice climb. Didn’t anchor her belaying pin well enough and fell a little over a hundred feet. Lived about forty-five minutes.” Forty-three, to be exact. In agony, with no rescue expected and only a teenage basket case for comfort.

  Ford looked upset. She felt nauseous herself, just thinking about it. For years she had tried to forget what had happened and had succeeded for the most part.

  “Well, that’s that,” she said, trying to shake off the image of her mother’s broken body and her own hysteria. “So, what you see is what you get now. Supergirl retired.”

  He watched her as though he thought she might crumble, but Mary knew she wouldn’t. That had already happened a long time ago.

  “If you say so,” he said doubtfully. After a long pause, he added quietly, “I want you to pack your things, Mary. We’re leaving in the morning.”

  She raised one eyebrow in question.

  “I’m taking you in,” he said, his voice as flat and unemotional as she had ever heard it. “I’ll do whatever I can for you, but I need some distance to do that.”

  Mary nodded. No point in arguing with him. She could see that Ford had made up his mind.

  Seeing those photos had given him ideas she hadn’t even considered. Explaining about her mother’s death was what she had dreaded. His supposition was far worse.

  He had obviously decided that if she had gone to such great lengths to deceive everyone about the kind of woman she was, then she must be lying about everything else. What other reason would she have to make herself over into someone she was not? A cover, of course, for her life of crime.

  The notion would be downright funny if it were not so plausible to Ford.

  He wouldn’t believe the mental wreck she was after that last fateful summer with her parents. A summer that had turned an all-or-nothing, cocky, athletic teen into a cringing crybaby who couldn’t face anything as risky as a ride on a Ferris wheel. Only Gran had understood. And now there was no one left who would.

  Mary went into the bathroom off the study to gather the things she had hand washed yesterday. Her travel bag contained everything else she had brought with her from the house in town.

  Returning to the study she stuffed the few items in one of the side pockets and set the bag on the sofa beside her purse. “I’m ready,” she said.

  “We’ll stay the night here,” he said. “That will give Blevins time to arrange...accommodations.”

  Mary wondered whether she would see Ford again after tomorrow morning. Of course she would see him, she thought with a huff of resignation. He’d probably testify against her at her trial.

  “Grand theft” and “accessory to murder,” he had said. With the tape of her conversation with Antonio, Ford’s certainty that the diamonds were in the dolls, and the empty doll boxes in her purse, they’d probably have enough to get her arraigned.

  Why wouldn’t Agent Blevins just put her in jail tomorrow and be done with it? Or maybe that was the plan, and Ford didn’t want to tell her yet. A dauntless daredevil like herself might try an escape, Mary thought wryly. Well, why not?

  Mary contemplated it. She could go to Mr. Knobtett’s and get him to give her a ride to the airport before Ford even knew she was gone....

  “Don’t even think about it,” Ford said, a look of grave disappointment darkening his features. “A little free advice, Mary. Don’t ever play poker.”

  So much for that. Now she’d erased any chance of convincing him she was innocent. Mary sank onto the sofa and closed her eyes, deliberately relaxing the muscles of her face into a non-expression while she tried to think of an alternative plan.

  Ford couldn’t believe he had been so gullible. From the moment he had seen Mary sitting on that cushion reading a storybook to the kids, maybe even before that when he first saw her photo in the file, she had skewed his thinking. Helpless, my foot, he thought.

  She had altered her appearance and attitude drastically. It didn’t take Einstein to figure out why, either.

  He decided that physical risks, merely pitting herself against the forces of nature, must have paled for her, so she’d gone for something a lot more daring. Federal offenses, at that; not small stuff like shoplifting. The possible penalties would have to be disastrous to get her interest.

  Building her cover must have taken a while. That in itself would have excited her. Ford knew. He had experienced that himself, getting ready for undercover gigs.

  He understood the anticipation she would have felt preparing, waiting for the job to begin, the itchy inner need to throw herself into something that could result in either immense satisfaction or total, maybe fatal, failure.

  Ford shook his head and puffed out a harsh breath, recalling the rush that excitement provided. Mary was hooked on it, as surely as if it were hard drugs. A danger junkie. It took one to know one.

  Ford admitted to himself that he hadn’t kicked the crav ing yet or he certainly wo
uldn’t be where he was, doing what he was doing right now—not as hair-raising as some of his exploits down in South America, but then the job wasn’t over yet.

  Mary’s alterations certainly succeeded. If he hadn’t seen her caught in the acts on film, he would never have believed Mary capable of such feats. Just looking at the damned pictures of the things she had done made him cringe.

  Though she hadn’t looked overtly muscular in those photos taken with her parents, she had given the impression of sturdy youth, fearless and lithe, ready for any challenge. Now here was this willowy, graceful example of feminine vulnerability. Remarkable.

  She’d taken him in, all right. He wondered just how long she had worked on this false image. Long enough to get herself in a mess of trouble, that was for sure.

  Even now, with all he had just learned about her, Ford knew he would go to just about any length to keep her out of jail, and certainly to keep her alive.

  But he couldn’t stay here with her and do that. He had to trust the rest of his team to put her somewhere safe so that he could eliminate Perry; so that he could find some way to explain away the evidence against Mary. Right now, it was nothing more than highly circumstantial. Not even that, officially, unless he added his two cents’ worth.

  They only had the recording of her little talk with Antonio. Ford could add her admission that the man had given her dolls, probably stuffed with the gems. He could tell them about Mary’s opportunity to phone an accomplice to pick them up, and then he could produce the empty doll boxes.

  If he volunteered this information about her thrill-seeking exploits, they would have a motive in addition to any monetary gain. She hardly needed that last reason to get involved, her attorney could argue. But a lawyer couldn’t refute those pictures. She sought danger. Thrived on it.

  Was all this a recent lark? Or would he find out that she had helped organize the whole thing, maybe even participated in robberies they hadn’t connected to the ring yet?