Protecting Her Son

by Joan Kilby

  She didn’t need to spell it out. She’d literally been asleep on the job, her wire off so she could have sex with the crim under investigation. What evidence she’d gathered had been enough to put Moresco away for only seven years instead of fifteen or twenty.

  No wonder she felt ashamed.

  Poor Paula.

  “You’ve spent the last seven years beating yourself up over that night,” he said. “Do you think you deserve a longer sentence than Moresco got?”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  PAULA PACED HER bedroom, steeling herself to make the phone call to Nick. Strength was the only way to deal with him. Strong wasn’t how she was feeling, though.

  Riley’s grilling this afternoon had stirred up memories she’d been trying for seven years to forget. All day she’d been eaten up with guilt and shame.

  Riley was right, she didn’t deserve to suffer more than Nick. He was a criminal. She was a cop, on the side of law and order. Right now she had to put her past behind her and concentrate on the plan to take Nick down.

  Picking up her phone, she dialed the number. “Hello, Nick?”

  “Paula.” Nick recognized her voice instantly. “I’ve been waiting to hear from you.”

  “I’ve thought about your request.” She softened her voice. “In fact, I’ve been thinking a great deal about you. And Jamie.” She let a beat go by. “And me.”

  She paused again, letting that sink in, and crossed the hall to Jamie’s room to double-check he was asleep. Sure enough, he was on his back, eyes shut, limbs sprawled over the twisted covers. His breathing was regular and deep. He was safe.

  “You intrigue me,” Nick said. “Go on.”

  Quiet jazz played in the background on his end of the line, reminding her of late nights and smoky bars. Where did he live now? At the trial it had come out that his penthouse apartment was registered in his mother’s name, as were most of his assets. The penthouse, she knew, had been sold.

  “I’d like to talk in person,” Paula said. “We can meet at the little park next to the shopping strip in Summerside. You come alone. I’ll bring Jamie.”

  “I’ll be there. What day and time?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon at four-thirty. On one condition,” she warned. “Jamie isn’t allowed to know you’re his father.”

  Nick let loose a few words in Italian. He’d come to Australia in his late teens but he conversed with his family and friends in Italian. Paula had studied the language as prep for her undercover role. She’d forgotten most of it, but she didn’t need to be fluent to tell that what he’d said wasn’t complimentary.

  “Take it or leave it.” She yawned to make herself sound bored. “I don’t want to hear you whine.” Soft then hard, keep him guessing.

  “I’ll take it,” Nick said. “You and Jamie only. No one else.”

  Paula clicked her phone off and sank onto her bed. Perspiration bathed her underarms and adrenaline had left a sick feeling in her stomach. Yet at the same time she was charged up, excited. She was a detective again, finally getting a chance to redeem herself.

  Riley’s final words of their conversation came to her. Do you think you deserve a longer sentence than Moresco? Why was she so wracked with guilt? She’d made a blunder, sure, but screw-ups happened all the time during undercover crime investigations. She hated that Riley despised her for sleeping with a crim. Thing was, she didn’t blame him. As for his accusation that she’d wanted to sleep with Nick, well that was plain absurd. She’d been playing a role. She was glad Nick wasn’t a troll—that would have made it a lot harder. But she hadn’t been in love with him.

  She was too agitated to sleep or watch TV or even read a book so she went to her sewing room and sat down with her quilt and pieces of fabric.

  She studied the edge of the quilt then sifted through the fabric scraps for a yellow patterned piece. Ah, there was a sleeve from a dress she had years ago. It was cotton blend, a yellow background covered in tiny red strawberries. She’d worn this dress to accompany Nick to his box seat at the Grand Prix.

  For a moment she hesitated, wondering whether to use the scrap because of its associations. Then she thought about Jamie asleep across the hall.

  Like it or not, Nick was already woven into the fabric of her life.

  She measured the gap in the quilt, marked the scrap with tailor’s chalk, then cut out an irregular shape. While the iron was heating she found a reel of yellow thread in her sewing box. She turned back a narrow hem on the scrap and pressed it flat then sat down again to pin it to the quilt.

  With the needle threaded, she shone the gooseneck lamp on her work and began to sew the scrap to the quilt with tiny even stitches.

  With Riley she hadn’t needed to pretend. She’d wanted him. She still wanted him. Sex wasn’t the problem. If it was only lust, she might have had a discreet affair.

  No, the problem was, she was starting to fall in love with him. She loved his keen intelligence coupled with the lame jokes, how handy he was with a hammer and screwdriver. The way he never let her get away with bullshit. She loved his battered soldier’s body, and that he’d befriended an Afghani teacher and cared about girls getting an education.

  The way Riley related to Jamie was the icing on the cake, like a dream come true. She could almost see a piece of blue flannel taking its place in her quilt.

  The needle pushed through the layers of cloth and pricked her finger. Paula sucked away a tiny bead of blood.

  Riley was wonderful in many ways. Except…

  She hated feeling as if she was always looking over her shoulder, waiting for him to flip out over some trigger he hadn’t seen coming. She’d taken a chance sending Jamie to the hardware store with him and it had turned out fine. Next time they might not be so lucky. If anything happened to Jamie… She couldn’t contemplate such a thing without feeling hollow.

  There was an old joke—how many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one, but the lightbulb has to want to change.

  Riley was a troubled soul. He had problems he wasn’t addressing without coercion. When—if—she got serious about a man, he would have to be a stable father for Jamie.

  * * *

  RILEY’S GAZE FOLLOWED the small green light flashing from left to right, then back again, every two seconds. He was seated in a comfortable chair in a light-filled room, holding the photo of Nabili loosely in his hands. Tears streamed over his cheeks, trickled under his jaw and down his neck. He made no move to wipe them away.

  Simone Richards, a calm middle-aged woman with shoulder-length brown hair, sat opposite him on a straight-backed chair. A psychotherapist with twenty years experience, Simone had asked him many probing questions about his life since being discharged from the army. Sleep patterns, physical health, relationships, general state of mind, et cetera. To Riley’s chagrin, she confirmed Paula’s amateur diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder.

  Simone hadn’t bought his belief that he was cured, either. She’d said positive reinforcement could have caused his symptoms to go into remission but that the root cause of his problems hadn’t been addressed. Or some such psychobabble mumbo jumbo.

  Now she was employing Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing or EMDR to treat him. Damned if he could see how following a green light with his eyes while talking about the explosion in Kabul would fix his panic attacks.

  “Where do you feel it?” Simone had her pen poised above an open notebook.

  She meant the unpleasant sensations triggered by looking at Nabili’s photo and remembering how she’d died. The idea was to invoke the stress response—occurring in a primitive part of the brain devoted to emotion—and at the same time focus the thinking part of the brain onto the flashing green light.

  Apparently this somehow defused the emotive power of the trigger. So far, it wasn’t wo
rking.

  “In my chest. It’s tight. It…hurts.” He flinched as a shaft of pain pierced his right temple. “And my head. My eyes. Everything hurts.”

  “What do you see?”

  Riley stared at the flashing green light, but his mind’s eye was focused inward. “It’s bright, blinding. Like looking into the sun.”

  “What is happening?” Simone asked.

  “There’s a loud noise, an explosion. People are screaming. Children are—” Riley broke off, sweating. His heart raced. His arms and legs felt heavy. He needed to run but he couldn’t. Something was flying toward him.

  Oh, good Lord. It was a hand.

  He shut his eyes, taking refuge in blackness.

  “Keep looking at the light,” Simone reminded him. “Go back to the moments before the explosion. What’s happening?”

  “I can’t.” Eyes still shut, he gripped the chair arms, breathing hard. “I can’t remember.”

  “We’ll stop there for today,” Simone said. “Take a moment. Just relax. Go to your safe place.”

  Before they’d started the treatment Simone had gotten him to think of a safe place, somewhere he felt happy, comfortable and at ease. Riley sat with his eyes closed, blocking the final image with his safe place—Paula and Jamie around the dinner table. The laughter, warmth and acceptance were a balm to his pain. Gradually the visions and sounds receded. His heart slowed.

  He opened his eyes. The green light was off. Simone was writing in her notebook.

  Seeing him stir she glanced up. “Okay?” He nodded. “Can you tell me more about what you experienced in Kabul? What was your last recollection of Afghanistan?”

  “Waking up in the hospital with a broken pelvis, three broken ribs and a punctured lung. Lacerations to the face and hands.”

  Simone tapped her pen against her notebook. “There must be records of where you were that day, what you were doing. Was anyone else injured?”

  “My partner, who I was on patrol with that day, is still in Afghanistan. He knows what happened. I believe Nabili is dead, as are most, if not all, of her students.”

  “You believe. Don’t you know?”

  Riley unclenched his hands from the arms of the chair and flexed his fingers, getting the blood circulating again. “I never asked.”

  “Why do you think that was?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe you didn’t want to know.”

  He moved his palms over his jeans. “What I don’t understand is why the PTSD symptoms didn’t come on right away,” he said. “I’ve been out of the army nearly twelve months and I only just started getting headaches and nightmares.”

  “That’s not uncommon. PTSD can occur years or even decades later in some cases. Usually an incident triggers the return of the memories. Think back over what you’ve been doing since you left the SAS. Has something different happened recently?”

  “I was working at a nightclub in Frankston for the first three months. Then I trained for the police force and joined Summerside P.D. and moved back to Summerside.”

  “Are you living on your own or with family?”

  “On my own, in my childhood home.”

  “There’s no tension between you and other members of your family?”

  He shook his head. “We all get along. I’m close to my younger sister. I see my father and stepmother regularly. They helped me move in. My dad is coming over this weekend to help me install new appliances.” He smiled wryly. “It’s going to be great to have a working stove again. I’m renovating.”

  I tore down my mum’s kitchen.

  “What is it?” Simone asked.

  “Nothing.” He shook his head. His mother had died twenty plus years ago. He’d come to terms with his loss. “I’m thinking ahead to stuff I have to do. It has nothing to do with Afghanistan.”

  Simone regarded him seriously. “Yet you thought about it now. There are no coincidences.”

  He glanced up, startled. “I beg your pardon?”

  She glanced at her watch. “Our time it up for today.”

  “Who said that about coincidences?”

  “I think it was Agent Mulder.” She thought a moment. “Or it could have been Scully. Neither of them would have liked coincidences.”

  “I thought you were going to say Freud, or Jung.”

  “Do you want to schedule another session? I can do Tuesday, same time.”

  “I’ll have to get back to you on that.”

  “Whatever it is you’re blocking, you should search for it.” Lightly she added, “The truth is out there.”

  Just what he needed, a shrink with a penchant for sci-fi. Riley shook her hand. “Thanks, doc.”

  Simone walked him to the door. She touched his shoulder. “Riley, this treatment often works quickly, with only a few sessions. But you have to be prepared to re-experience some painful memories. Possibly come up against some things you might not be expecting.”

  Yup, she was really making him want to come back.

  “We confirmed the source of the PTSD, didn’t we? Witnessing the Afghani pupils and Nabili getting blown up was the trauma. Then seeing the children at my sister’s school was the trigger for my PTSD.”

  “Maybe,” Simone said. “It could lie deeper.”

  Riley walked out of her clinic and put a hand up to shield his eyes against the bright sunlight. He’d done what John and Paula had asked of him, but he had no intention of repeating that experience. As far as he was concerned, he was in working order. If he was blocking something, it was probably the gory details of dying children. Who wouldn’t block such a memory?

  As he walked past the pub he looked through the big bay window. Darcy Lewis was pulling beers for a couple of tradesmen wearing overalls and sitting at the bar. Now there was therapy, a pint or two to decompress from what he’d just been through.

  He pushed through the door into the brass and wood bar. “Hey, Darcy. What have you got on tap?”

  Darcy angled a glass under the tap and pulled. “Try this Tassie lager. It’s pretty good.”

  Riley slid onto a stool and reached for the foaming glass. He took a long deep draught. He’d met the beast within and faced up to it. Finally, he could stop thinking about it all and just enjoy a beer with a mate.

  * * *

  “THE MEETING BETWEEN me and Moresco is arranged for this afternoon,” Paula told the group assembled in the Incident Room the next morning.

  John, Riley and Detectives Leonard and Cadley from Frankston P.D. Drug Unit Investigation were present. She passed around a photo of Nick she’d taken one day when they’d walked along the pier at St. Kilda.

  “This picture is seven years old. He’s got more gray around the temples and a few more wrinkles but looks otherwise the same.”

  Paula had eaten a banana at 6:30 and nothing since. Riley had chosen today to bring in a box of goodies from the bakery. The smell of the warm pastries was making her salivate.

  She ignored her stomach. John was going over the arrangements with the detectives from Frankston. “We’ll have a wire on Constable Drummond. You two will be set up in an unmarked van in the Safeway parking lot half a block away, listening in.”

  Riley spoke up. “What’s my role?”

  “You’ll be off duty.” John scanned the room. “Any other questions?”

  “My understanding was that I would be part of the team if I fulfilled your…requirements,” Riley said. “Officer Drummond needs backup. She won’t be packing so she’ll need someone to protect her if things turn ugly.”

  Paula glanced at John. They’d discussed this privately and she’d asked that Riley not be present, in spite of his session with the psychologist. She didn’t want to worry about him having an episode when all her attention should be focused
on Nick. It wasn’t just the delicate negotiation involving the sting that she needed to concentrate on. She also had to make sure Moresco didn’t renege on his bargain not to tell Jamie he was his father. After witnessing her ex-colleague at the Melbourne police station grapple with the randomness of his episodes and the devastating impact on those around him, she didn’t want anything like that happening to Riley in a situation where her son could potentially be harmed.

  Riley saw the exchange and stiffened, clearly recognizing he was being sidelined but unable to do anything about it. Nor could he say anything in front of the Frankston detectives. Paula felt badly, but Jamie was too important. She couldn’t afford to take chances.

  “Things won’t turn ugly,” she said. “Whatever else Nick is, he’s not violent to those he considers part of his family. That includes Jamie, naturally, and also me, as Jamie’s mother.”

  “You think?” Riley said, skeptically.

  “Moresco is more likely to get nasty if he thinks he’s under surveillance,” Paula insisted.

  The meeting broke up shortly afterward, with Detectives Leonard and Cadley heading off to organize the stake-out van. John walked them out, leaving her and Riley.

  “Almond croissants, my favorite.” Paula reached for a pastry and took a bite. She swore she could feel the sugar go straight to her bloodstream. “Bribery will get you five to ten.”

  Riley was silent. Stormy emotions played across his face. Undoubtedly he was offended, hurt, angry and bewildered.

  She’d done that to him. Paula set her croissant down carefully and licked the sugar off her fingers. “How did your session with the shrink go?”

  “Yeah, good.” His fingers drummed the table, a frown dragging at the corners of his mouth.

  Paula sipped her coffee. She wanted to get going but she couldn’t leave Riley like this. “It’s for the best.”

  “I care about Jamie, too.”

  She’d expected to hear about how he was her partner and a cop, too, how his PTSD wouldn’t interfere with his job. How he was part of this sting and she shouldn’t cut him out. She hadn’t expected him to want in on the operation because he cared about Jamie. She knew he liked her son but that much?