Guilty as Sin

by Tami Hoag

  He was still sitting by the window when she returned to the living room. Lily had lost all interest in the movie and was busy dragging toys out of the toy box.

  “Josh, honey,” Hannah said, laying a hand on his shoulder, “I've got something for you. Will you come sit with me on the couch so I can give it to you?”

  He looked up at her, away from the window and the dark view of the lake, then gathered up his backpack and went to the couch. He sat back in a corner, the pack on his lap, his arms around it as if it were a favorite old teddy bear. Hannah took the opportunity to close the drapes, though she left the stool he had been using. Sitting next to him, she resisted the urge to pull him close. Dr. Freeman had impressed upon her the need to give Josh a little breathing room, even though what she wanted most to do was hold him twenty-four hours a day.

  “Remember your Think Pad and how it got lost?” she asked.

  Josh nodded, though his attention seemed to be caught on the baseball cap Lily had discarded on the floor.

  “I remember how you used to draw and write in it all the time. All the neat pictures you used to do with spaceships and everything. And I got to thinking you probably still miss it. I mean, that sketch pad you got is pretty cool, but it's sort of big, isn't it? You can't really carry it around. It won't fit in your backpack. And so . . . ta-da!” She held out the new notebook in front of him. “Josh's New Think Pad.”

  Hannah held her breath as he looked at it. He made no move to take it at first, but his gaze traveled the cover from top to bottom, taking in the stickers of the starship Enterprise and football helmets and Batman. Slowly he uncurled one arm from around his backpack and reached out with his forefinger. He touched one sticker and then the next. He traced beneath the title, then dragged his fingertip down to the bottom of the page. To Josh From Mom. He opened his hand and stroked the line, his expression wistful and sad.

  “Go ahead, honey,” Hannah whispered around the lump in her throat. “It's yours. Just for you. You can write down whatever you want in it—stories or secrets or dreams. You don't ever have to share it with anyone if you don't want to. But if you want to share it with me, you know I'll listen. Anything you want to tell me, you can, and it'll be all right. We can work out anything because we love each other. Right?”

  His eyes filled with tears as he looked at the notebook, and he nodded slowly, reluctantly. Hannah wished she could have known what part of her statement made him hesitate. Was it that he didn't believe he could tell her or that he didn't believe they could work it out? She had no way of knowing. All she could do was offer him support and reassurance, and hope to God the promises she made him weren't empty.

  As he took the notebook from her, she pulled him close and kissed the top of his head.

  “We will work it out, Josh. However long it takes. It doesn't matter,” she whispered. “I'm just so happy to have you home, to be able to tell you how much I love you.” She pulled back from him a little and made a goofy face at him. “And get mushy all over you.”

  A tiny smile of embarrassment hooked one corner of his mouth and he rolled his eyes. Like the old Josh. Like the boy who loved to kid with her and laugh. “It's okay, Mom,” he said in a small voice.

  “It better be,” Hannah joked. “'Cause, you know, even when you're a grown-up and the star quarterback in the Super Bowl, I'll still be your mom and I'll still get mushy.”

  Josh wrinkled his nose and turned his attention back to the notebook. He ran his finger over the stickers one by one, naming each one in his head. He recognized them all from Before, when he had been a regular kid, when life had been simple and his biggest secret had been kissing Molly Higgins on the cheek. He wished he could go back to Before. He didn't like secrets, didn't like the way they made him feel inside. But he had to keep them now. There could be no telling. He had been warned.

  So he chose not to think about the secrets at all. He would think about other things, like his new pen and how it looked like something astronauts might use, and his new Think Pad. Blank pages just for him, not for sharing with strangers or anyone. Blank pages that were like part of his imagination—space for thinking and storing thoughts away. He liked that idea—taking thoughts out of his head and storing them away where he didn't have to think them anymore.

  He slipped the notebook into his backpack and carried it to his room.

  CHAPTER 17

  Ellen pulled her glasses off and rubbed her hands over her face, unconcerned about her makeup. Her makeup was long gone. There was no one around the office to see her anyway. Even the cleaning people had come and gone. Ellen had done the reverse—she had gone to Campion and come back.

  At Campion she had run the gauntlet of reporters and stood in the windswept parking lot of the Grain and Ag Services on the edge of town, where Dustin Holloman's boot had been found in the cab of an employee's pickup.

  “Doesn't this confirm Dr. Wright's innocence?”

  “Will you try to delay next week's hearing?”

  “Is it true Garrett Wright was never a suspect before his arrest?”

  “Is it true Wright plans to sue for malicious prosecution?”

  “Is the owner of the pickup being questioned? Is he a suspect?”

  The questions came at her like lances. The reporters swarmed around her, their eyes bright and feral.

  The parking lot was a rough sea of ice, rutted and polished by truck tires. Under the sodium-vapor security lights it took on a pearly glow. The buildings and huge metal bins of the grain elevator made an austere backdrop, Shaker-plain and simply functional, unlit, unwelcoming. Clouds had taken the daylight early and snow had begun to fall. Small, sharp flakes hurled down from heaven on a frigid, unforgiving wind.

  The BCA mobile crime lab was parked at a cock-eyed angle twenty feet away from the lone pickup truck. Evidence technicians swarmed around the truck, working in the brilliant light of portable halogen lamps.

  “They're taking their time,” Mitch said. “They don't want to miss so much as a hair—which is all well and good, but the guy who owns the truck raises cattle and his dog rides around with him in the cab. They'll be here all night getting hair off the goddamn seat cover.”

  Ellen squinted against the pelting snow and the glare of the lights. “Who owns the truck?”

  “Kent Hofschulte. He works in the office here.”

  “Any connection to the Hollomans?”

  “Casual acquaintance, I hear. You want details, you'll have to talk to Steiger.”

  She stepped a little closer to the truck just as an evidence tech moved aside from the open driver's door. Dustin Holloman's boot sat on the bench seat of the truck, center stage under the halogen spotlight. A single winter boot, the purple-and-yellow nylon of the upper portion too bright in this bleak setting.

  She had returned to the office because she had more cases than Garrett Wright's on her schedule. There were loose ends that needed tying, and then there were Quentin Adler's endless questions about the two cases she had handed over to him. But she had appetite for neither the work she needed to accomplish nor the turkey sandwich she had picked up at Subway for her supper. All systems were crashing due to lack of fuel, but the thought of food turned her stomach.

  Out of practice. When she had worked in Minneapolis, she had got to the point where she could go from a murder scene to dinner and not think twice about it. The mind was an amazing machine, able to develop what defenses it needed. But it had been a long time since she had needed defenses.

  “Call it a night,” she murmured, checking the clock. Nine-fifteen. Poor Harry wasn't seeing much of his mistress these days. At least he had Otto. Otto Norvold, her neighbor and fellow dog lover, who didn't mind seeing to Harry when Ellen had to put in a late night.

  She sorted through the stack of files in front of her, taking those pertinent to Wright and two other cases she would have to deal with the next day—a burglary for which she expected the defendant to cop a plea, and a DUI she fully intended to put in jail f
or as long as she could. The files went into her briefcase; then she set about her daily ritual of arranging everything left on her desk in precise order. She had learned long ago that her office was the one place in her professional life where she could always be guaranteed order and control. She exercised the ritual with religious dedication and found it much more calming than the pointless raking of a Zen garden.

  Satisfied with the task, she pushed her chair into its cubbyhole, dug in her coat pockets for her gloves. Her mind was already halfway out the building, wondering how much snow had fallen in the two hours since she had come back. Four to six inches was predicted. The road back from Campion had already begun to drift over in spots.

  She dug her keys out of her purse, slung the bag over her shoulder, and started for the door just as the telephone rang.

  “What now?” she muttered on a groan, fearing the worst behind the screen of annoyance.

  “Ellen North,” she said into the receiver.

  Nothing.

  “Hello?”

  It was Monday night all over again—the heavy sense of a presence on the other end of the line, a silence that seemed ominous. Her stomach churned as the line from last night's call played through the back of her mind. “The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.”

  “If you've got something to say, then say it,” she snapped. “I've got better things to do with my time.”

  A breath. Soft and long. It seemed to come out of the receiver and curl around her throat like a snake. “Ellen . . .”

  The whisper was little more than thought. Androgynous. As thin as gauze.

  “Who is this?”

  “Working late, Ellen?”

  She slammed the receiver down. Mitch had set up a caller-ID tracer on her home telephone, but there was nothing on the office phones, and she questioned the legality of installing anything.

  The call had come in on her direct line, a number that was not listed in any public directory. Did that mean the caller was someone she knew or someone who had been in her office without her knowledge? Business hours were long over. Had the caller caught her here by chance or was he aware hers was the only office light on in the building?

  “The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. . . .”

  “Working late, Ellen?”

  She cast a glance at her window. Even with the blinds drawn, the light would be visible from outside. Lifting the blinds away from the glass at one side, she tried to peer out, but there was nothing to see except the weird mix of night and swirling snow.

  “Your boss needs to have a word with someone about security. This is a highly volatile case you've got here. Anything might happen. . . .”

  “Ellen . . . you're a likely target. . . .”

  “The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. . . .”

  The blinds clattered back against the window glass. Ellen grabbed up the receiver and punched the number for the sheriff's department in the adjacent building. For two years she had worked in this building without fear. She had never felt a need for a security guard, had never turned a hair walking the halls alone at night. That sense of calm was one of the things she had come here looking for. In Deer Lake she could walk her dog along the lake at night, she could leave her bedroom window open and go to sleep with a cool fall breeze caressing her face. Now she was calling for a sheriff's deputy to escort her to her car.

  The deputy who appeared at the office door five minutes later was Ed Qualey. Pushing sixty, he was lean and sinewy with a pewter-gray flattop and piercing blue eyes. He had testified in court for Ellen from time to time. A good, solid cop.

  “I hope I didn't pull you away from anything too important,” she said as they headed together down the dimly lit hall.

  Qualey shook his head. “Naw, accident reports is all. Nothing much more than fender benders going on around here tonight. I'm on light duty, anyway. Banged up a knee playing hockey. I guess all the action tonight was over in Campion, huh?”

  “Mmm.”

  “Well, I don't blame you for wanting a walk to your car. Everyone's a little edgy these days. A person just don't know what to expect anymore.”

  “I used to have a motto,” Ellen said. “‘Expect the worst, hope for the best.' ”

  Qualey frowned as they started down the stairs. “We're sure getting more of the one than the other lately. You parked on the side?”

  “Yes.”

  They cut across the rotunda, the sound of their foot-falls soaring up three stories. A sharp crack rang down one of the dark corridors, and Ellen flinched, then scolded herself. The building had a century's worth of creaks and groans.

  “Too bad about Denny Enberg,” Qualey said. “He was a decent sort for a defense attorney. Everyone says it looked like suicide.”

  “Looked like. We'll see what the ME has to say.”

  Qualey hummed a noncommittal note. It struck Ellen that people would have much preferred Dennis to have stuck a gun in his mouth and ended his own life, as terrible as that would have been. They would rather he had been so crushed by the weight of his problems that he saw no other way out, because then the madness was contained to one man. Something to lament, but not contagious. The alternative was vulnerability, and no one wanted any part of that.

  Ellen's Bonneville was the only car in the courthouse lot. Sixty yards in the other direction, adjacent to the sheriff's department and county jail, a dozen or so vehicles were clustered together like a herd of horses, snow mounting on their backs.

  The wind swept in from the northwest, wrapping itself around the contours of the buildings, creating small powdery-white cyclones that skittered across the unplowed parking lot. The sidewalk had disappeared. Streetlights took on the hazy glow of tiny moons. The streets themselves were all but deserted. Residents had chosen to hole up for the evening, to wait for the ten o'clock news and the predictions for the morning commute to work and school.

  “Thanks, Ed,” Ellen said, waving him off as they neared the car.

  “No problem. Stay warm.” Hunching his shoulders, he started up the slight grade toward the sheriff's-department entrance.

  Ellen hit the button on her remote that unlocked her car doors and brought the interior lights on. Her gaze swept the area, seeing it in a far more critical light than she had when she had parked here in Rudy's personal spot two hours ago. The spot that was close to the building, that had looked so handy, that shortened her walk through the weather, now struck her as a stupid choice. Better to have parked in the second row, away from the building—where shadows and shrubbery could offer cover—and under a security light.

  Still, no deadly figure darted out of the darkness along the building. She had almost begun to relax as she rounded the trunk and came up along the driver's side of the Bonneville.

  The momentary letdown made the instant burst of fear seem all the more extreme. A gasp caught in her throat as she jumped back, the deep, new snow grabbing at her boots like chilled quicksand.

  Scratched into the paint of the driver's-side door in large, irregular letters, was a single ugly word—BITCH.

  CHAPTER 18

  The weapon of choice was a switchblade knife, conveniently left behind—plunged to its hilt in the left front tire.

  “There won't be no patching that,” Officer Dietz said. Lonnie Dietz was fifty, a decent officer with a bad Moe Howard toupee, which was covered tonight by a towering fake fur hat that made him look as if he had a pack of weasels nesting on his head. “You got a spare?”

  “Just that little doughnut thing,” Ellen said, hugging herself, her eyes on the knife.

  The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. . . .

  “You have any ideas who might have done this, Ms. North?” Officer Noga asked. Noogie Noga was roughly the size of a grizzly bear. A native of Samoa, he had come to Minnesota on a football scholarship and stayed even after a bum knee had ended his NFL hopes.

  Ellen shrugged. “Specifically? No. But I've been getting
some odd phone calls.”

  “Related to the Wright case?”

  She nodded. “I just got another one before I came down. That's why I had Ed here walk me down.”

  “What did the caller say?” Noga asked, pencil poised against his notepad.

  “For a long time there was nothing, then he said my name, asked if I was working late.”

  The three cops looked at one another blankly, and frustration knotted in Ellen's chest. She couldn't blame them for thinking she was overreacting. Stated flatly, the call lost all its darker, disturbing qualities.

  “The call that came last night after two in the morning said, ‘Let's kill all the lawyers,' ” she added, hugging herself a little tighter. She felt as if she were being split in two, half of her the cool professional, the other half a panicking creature.

  “Shi—oot,” Noga muttered as the import hit. Every-one on the job had heard the gruesome details of Dennis Enberg's death.

  “But you don't have any idea who's making these calls?” Dietz asked.

  “I can't recognize the voice. It's too soft, indistinct. I'm not even sure if it's a man or a woman.”

  “And no one's threatened you outright?” Qualey asked.

  “There are plenty of people unhappy with me for prosecuting Garrett Wright, but none of them have made an overt threat to my face.”

  She listed the names for Noga, the faces floating through her head like puzzle pieces. Wright was out on bail, but he would never risk such a foolish gesture himself, and she doubted Costello had let him out of his sight. Then there was Todd Childs, and Christopher Priest. Karen Wright. Paul Kirkwood, who blamed her for Grabko's decision on bail. The students who had taken up Wright's cause on the picket line in front of the courthouse.