Guilty as Sin

by Tami Hoag

  “Heading out, Ms. North?” Noga asked, reaching to open the door for her. The big man winced as voices barked in the dining room like the report of machine-gun fire.

  Ellen shook her head. “Yep, the testosterone level in there is getting a little deep for me. Good night, Noogie.”

  She stepped out into the cold, digging the keys to her loaner out of her coat pocket. The Manley Vanloon Pace Car, she called it. Never one to miss an opportunity to capitalize, Manley had given her a great, big rolling advertisement: an enormous white Cadillac with painted flames arching back from the tires. The front doors were emblazoned with the slogan “Vanloon Motors: Steal a Hot Deal from ‘Crazy' Vanloon.” The embarrassment was almost enough to turn her into a pedestrian.

  In her peripheral vision she could see someone had blocked the Cadillac in the driveway. She stopped in her tracks when she saw who it was.

  “Another long night, counselor,” Brooks said, easing out of the Cherokee. “Another long cold night. I'll say this for your weather—it's sure as hell conducive to long nights warming the sheets with a partner. Never thought I'd look at sex as a survivalist tactic. Does that take the fun out of it?”

  “I wouldn't know.” Ellen marched to the Cadillac.

  “We could find out,” he drawled. The hood of his parka framed his face, giving Ellen the impression of a wolf staring at her from inside its lair. His interest in her was self-serving, an idea that was degrading enough when applied to her professional capacity. That he would use her sexually as well touched every red button she had.

  “I'd sooner die of hypothermia, but I'd rather not do it here, so will you kindly get your truck the hell out of my way?”

  He leaned back in surprise, as if her verbal punch had hit him squarely in the mouth.

  “What are you doing here, anyway?” she demanded. “You didn't pick this up on any scanner.”

  “I followed Steiger. We were having a drink down at the Blue Goose.”

  “How cozy. If you want to get into bed with somebody, I hear he's not averse to getting screwed for a little information.”

  “He's not my type, thanks.”

  “Well, I've got news for you, Brooks. Neither am I. Did your friend Costello tell you differently?”

  “Costello? What the hell does he have to do with us?”

  “You tell me. No.” She held up a hand to forestall the answer. “I've been lied to and manipulated enough lately.”

  “I haven't lied to you.”

  “Semantics. You haven't told me the truth, not that I give a damn what you do. Move the truck. I'm going home.”

  She slid behind the wheel of the Cadillac and slammed the door shut, hoping she would catch some of his fingers. But he went back to his truck unmaimed and backed it out into the street. Headlights coming from the south heralded the arrival of the first media scavengers. In a matter of moments the street would be clogged with them. The noise would wake the neighbors. They would come out on their steps to investigate and watch for glimpses of themselves on the morning television news.

  The windows in the Wright house were dark. Was he sleeping, oblivious to the latest turmoil, or was he sitting in the dark, smiling?

  “You'll make a mistake eventually,” Ellen murmured. “All I have to do is get you to trial.”

  As she turned the corner onto her street, the headlights behind her followed. Brooks. Visions of vehicular homicide flashed through her head. She could nail Brooks and destroy this god-awful car in one stroke. She was tired, depressed, disillusioned—the perfect time for a confrontation.

  Get it over and done with. Get him out of your life before you can screw up again.

  She said nothing as she let him in. Harry trotted into the kitchen to greet them, took one look at her face, and beat it back to the bedroom.

  “Don't take your coat off, you won't be staying,” Ellen said, shrugging out of hers.

  “Do I get to hear the charges against me, or are we skipping straight to sentencing?”

  He leaned back against the wall, at ease, as if it would make no difference what she accused him of. He likely didn't care, she thought. He'd made his purpose clear up front. It wasn't as if he hadn't warned her. She was the one who had fooled herself, fooled herself into thinking she wouldn't make the same mistake twice, fooled herself into believing she was too smart, too savvy—the same way she had with Costello.

  “You went to Purdue on a baseball scholarship,” she began, reciting the information she had confirmed in the Newsweek article.

  “That's not considered a crime in most states, even if I couldn't hit a high inside fastball.”

  Ellen ignored his attempt at humor. “You stayed on at Purdue Law.”

  “Much to the dismay of my family. They could hardly show their faces at the Auburn alumni functions.”

  “Tony Costello went to school at Purdue.”

  He didn't so much as blink. “Small world, isn't it?”

  “You show up in town with an interest in this case. Then suddenly Wright fires his attorney and brings in Costello, an attorney he can't possibly afford on a professor's salary.”

  His eyes widened then, the amusement in them stoking the fires of Ellen's temper.

  “Are you implying I brought Costello in?” he asked. “To what end?”

  “You came here for a story. Maybe you had a particular ending in mind. Maybe you get off on manipulating people. Maybe you're no better than Wright, and it's all a game to you.”

  “Well, aren't I the criminal mastermind!”

  Ellen glared at him, advancing on him, her body rigid with rage. “Don't you dare be amused at me. I don't give a shit what your game is. All you need to know is I'm not playing anymore. No more view inside the prosecutor's office. Take that to Bill Glendenning if you want, but I don't think he'll be quite so starstruck after he considers the ramifications of involving you in this. He wants to run for governor. People in Minnesota won't take kindly to the idea that he traded a child's justice to bask in the glow of a dubious celebrity.”

  Brooks winced. “Ouch. That's a mean tongue you got there, sugar. You ought to have it registered as a dangerous weapon.”

  His gaze drifted to her mouth, and she realized that this time she was the one who had stepped too close. If he straightened away from the wall, they would be touching. But she refused to back away.

  “What would you say if I told you I don't know Costello from a sack of pig feed?” he asked.

  “I'd say I have no reason to believe anything you tell me.”

  “Hmm . . . We're having a little problem with trust here, Ellen.”

  “You can't have trouble with something that doesn't exist,” she said. “I don't trust you, and I sure as hell don't trust Costello.”

  Curiosity sharpened his gaze. “And why is that? What'd he ever do to win your animosity?”

  “He's a shark. He'll do whatever he has to do to win a case or anything else he happens to want.”

  “And did he want you?” he asked. “Is that what this is really all about, Ellen? Costello fucked you over figuratively and literally—”

  “Get out of my house,” she ordered. “I've said what I had to say. You know where the door is. Find it. Use it.”

  He caught her by the arm as she started to turn away. In one dizzying move Ellen found her back to the wall and Brooks leaning in on her, his face inches from hers.

  “I don't think so, counselor,” he said. “Not until I've had a chance to defend myself.”

  “This isn't a trial. You don't have any rights here. I don't have to listen to you. I don't have to deal with you.”

  “You damn well will listen to me,” he growled. “I've been accused of a lot of things in my life. Hell, I've been guilty of most of them. But I don't know Costello more than to nod and say hello. I met him once at an alumni dinner. He tried to sell me on doing a book about a case he was involved with. I declined. I have no interest in making Anthony Costello's career for him. I didn't come here loo
king to renew the acquaintance, and I sure as hell didn't bring him in.”

  “And you want me to believe it's just a coincidence you're both here?”

  “Believe what you want. I've had my say. I came here to watch this thing unfold; to get a story, not make one.”

  “Well, you're getting your money's worth, aren't you?” Ellen whispered bitterly.

  “And then some.”

  He held her gaze with his, his expression taut, intense. Dangerous. The word came back to her again and again when she thought of him. He was a threat. Professionally. Sexually.

  “You're a story all by yourself, Ellen.” He brought one hand down from the wall beside her head and traced his thumb across her chin and down the column of her throat. “I want to know more about you. I want to know everything. Hell, I just plain want you.”

  The admission triggered an automatic quickening in her body, one that brought a flash of embarrassment and shame. Nothing had changed. She still didn't trust him. He had nothing to gain by admitting collusion with Costello, plenty to lose. He had everything to gain by seducing her.

  “I'd take you right here, right now,” he whispered, settling his thumb in the V of her collarbone, his fingertips subtly kneading the tender area just above her breast. “If you'd let me.”

  She found her voice with great difficulty. The words came out thready. “I won't.”

  “No.” The look that came into his eyes was weary. “No. You're too smart, too careful, too neat and tidy. No room on the agenda for a wild card like me. I'm not some instant fire you can turn on and off with a switch. You get too close to me, you might end up getting burned. God forbid you should take a chance, make a mistake.”

  “This isn't about just me.”

  “Isn't it? If it weren't for this case, would we be in your bed right now?” he asked, his mouth too close to hers, his eyes too blue. “Would I be inside you right now, Ellen?”

  Her mouth had gone dry. “If it weren't for this case, you wouldn't be here.”

  That was the bottom line. She drew it unerringly. He couldn't argue. The truthfulness of it did nothing to assuage the ache of desire inside him. The foolishness of wanting this particular woman did nothing to change the fact that he did. It wasn't just sex; sex could be easily had. Women had always come willingly to his bed. But that wasn't his need. His need was for this woman, who was all the things he had never been—dedicated, good, the champion for justice sacrificing her own needs in her duty to others. He had spent his whole life shrugging off obligation, pursuing his own ends, justifying all means. He could put whatever face on it he liked, but in the end he was exactly what she had called him from the start—a mercenary, and a damn good one, worth millions. That it had ultimately cost him his family, his soul, was not self-sacrifice, but irony.

  “No,” he said at last. “But I'm here now. Will you try to redeem me, Ellen?”

  Would there be any point in trying? She didn't ask, afraid of what his answer might be. The look that had come into his face was a little stark, a little haunted, as if he were afraid of the answer himself. The look touched her in a way she couldn't afford to allow. Not now. Not when so much was riding on her shoulders. And after the trial was over, he would be gone, mission accomplished, on to someone else's tragedy.

  “If you want redemption, talk to a priest,” she said quietly. “You're not my responsibility, and I'm not fool enough to think you should be.”

  “No. You're nobody's fool.” He backed away from her and turned to the cherry hutch where she kept her meager supply of liquor. He helped himself to two fingers of Scotch, tossing it back in a single shot. “And I'm nobody's front man. I came here for my own reasons. I came here looking for answers.”

  She had the distinct feeling that the questions had little to do with Josh Kirkwood or Garrett Wright. That perhaps they were far more personal than professional. “And are you finding them?”

  He smiled sadly as he twisted the cap back onto the bottle of Glenlivet. “No. The questions only get harder. Joke's on me.”

  She followed him to the door, wrestling with the need to ask for the truth and the wisdom of letting it go. In the end she said nothing, and he seemed to know why better than she did.

  “You're right. Stick to the straight and narrow, counselor,” he said. “You're better off. I'm no good for anybody. That's a known fact.”

  He leaned down and kissed her good night, a tender kiss that tasted of longing and Scotch, and walked out into the night.

  The streets of Deer Lake were absent of life. Even stray dogs had more sense than to be out roaming in the middle of the night when the temperature was dipping to minus twenty and the windchill factor was doubly cold. A night for fools and cops. The patrols stayed on the roads to rescue the idiots who ran into ditches. The detectives came out for the latest clue in the ever-twisting case.

  Jay sat at the corner of Lakeshore Drive with the motor running, debating a return to the Kirkwood house. But the press had descended, and he knew that any opportunity he might have had to catch a fresh insight was gone. He found he had no hunger for it now, at any rate. The adrenaline rush that had come with the call to Steiger at the Blue Goose was spent. All he felt now was a restlessness and an emptiness that would make him avoid going to the house on Ryan's Bay.

  He drove away from Lakeside, took a right on Oslo, and headed to Dinkytown, where the businesses looked abandoned, the buildings decayed. A night clerk stared out the window of a garishly lit convenience store, an oasis beckoning no one.

  Lights still glowed in a few dorm windows on the Harris campus, but the class buildings stood dark. Even in the dead of night, Harris College gave the impression of tradition and money. The buildings were solid, substantial, erected in an era when college meant more than a means to higher earning. The grounds were parklike, studded with tall hardwood and pine trees.

  Garrett Wright claimed he had been working here in Cray Hall the night Josh had been taken, as did Christopher Priest. If they were partners in this madness, then why would they not have given each other alibis? It could have been part of the game, Jay supposed. It could have been a small bit of truth to help Priest fool the polygraph.

  Curiouser and curiouser, this case, he thought as he left the campus the back way, driving slowly south on Old Cedar Road. The secrets and sins that lay beneath the surface of seemingly ordinary lives had always fascinated him. The things no one suspected were going on behind facades of normalcy in picture-book settings like Deer Lake.

  Jay let the Cherokee roll to a stop in the middle of the deserted road, lit his last cigarette, and sat staring out the passenger window. A chunk of moon glowed down on the winterscape, giving the snow a silver cast, turning the bare trees to silhouettes of black against a starry sky of midnight blue. The land that ran west of the college was farmland and woodland, rolling hills and fields where stubbled cornstalks poked up through occasional thin spots in the snow. A setting of apparent peace.

  Running south, the road eventually skirted the eastern edge of Ryan's Bay, where Josh's jacket had been found nine days ago. According to Agent O'Malley's theory, this was where the game had been put in motion, along this strip of lonely county road. It was here that the car accident had taken place, the accident that had kept Hannah Garrison late at the hospital. Christopher Priest had sent a student on an errand. The student had taken the back way off campus, as students often did. His car had hit an unexpected—and, O'Malley speculated, a manufactured—patch of ice that sent him into the path of an oncoming vehicle. The elderly female driver of the other car had been killed instantly; a passenger in her car had died of a heart attack upon arrival at Deer Lake Community Hospital. Two other passengers had been transported by helicopter to Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis, where the student now lay in critical condition, having developed a bacterial infection that was threatening to take his life.

  So many lives touched or taken by this game. And if O'Malley was right, it had started here, in
this quiet, pretty spot on the far edge of town. Like a stone dropped into the lake, the effects had rippled outward in ever-widening circles.

  Cause and effect. The chain reaction of events. He wondered how much the master of this game had foreseen, how much he had known going in and how much had been twisted serendipity. He couldn't have known that Ellen North would get the case, or that the story would have been seized on by a writer from Eudora, Alabama, as an escape and an act of self-examination. Yet he had chosen an attorney who had ties, however oblique, to them both—Anthony Costello.

  The sense of being watched by brilliant dark eyes from a darker dimension sent a current of uneasiness down his spine.

  He was no longer an observer, but a player. Another one caught in the web of this crime.

  “It's your job—going from one set of victims to another. Does it get to you, or are you immune?”

  “Not immune; careful. I keep my distance. Don't let it get personal.”

  Liar.

  A chill tightened his shoulders, and he reached to turn up the heater only to find it cranked to high already. Damn cold place. And here he sat like a damn fool in a truck in the middle of nowhere. He would sure as hell rather have been in bed . . . with Ellen, who thought he was not only involved in this case, but playing some sinister role. Ellen, who didn't trust or respect him. Who shouldered the weight of winning justice for a child, for a family, for a cop, for a town.

  “You're just a regular damn prince, Brooks,” he muttered.

  He reached for another cigarette, finding the pack empty. Putting off the inevitable reality of a sleepless night and more introspection, he swung the Cherokee around and headed back through the Harris campus, taking the shortest route to the Tom Thumb. The clerk, a thick-bodied kid with volcanic patches of acne pebbling his red face, sold him a carton of Marlboros and made the usual tired, obligatory comment about the cold. Fresh out of small talk, Jay grunted an answer and pushed out the door.

  A lone car rolling south held him up at the edge of the Tom Thumb lot. Directly across the street squatted the Pack Rat secondhand shop where Todd Childs worked part-time when he wasn't concocting alibis for his mentor. No one had seen him since before Ellen's car had been vandalized. Rumor had him stashed in a Twin Cities hotel courtesy of the Costello team, who had leaked the information about his pending testimony. But it seemed just as possible that Childs was tucked away in a farmhouse somewhere, guarding Dustin Holloman and carrying out the legwork of Wright's demented scheme while Wright himself sat at home playing innocent.