Carly Bishop - No Baby But Mine

by No Baby But Mine(Lit)

  She went back and sat on the side of her bed, waiting, staring at the monitor on her nightstand. She switched off the lamp. Moonlight bathed the corner of the bed and the floor with a silvery flash of light, and in the same instant, a voice, a man's voice, came with perfect clarity through Christo's baby monitor.

  "No, this can't wait." An angry, impatient man. Her eyes began to adjust to the faint moonlight slanting through the windows. There followed a long silence, then, "Well, you tell him for me that I am not taking the flak for this one."

  She sat stock-still, huddled in her flannel nightgown, trying to think what kind of fluke this was. The voice sounded tough and harsh, muttering a small succession of obscenities.

  Then, "No, well..." Crackling again, "tell string of events here."

  She knew what she heard was jumbled, interrupted, making no sense.

  "He'd better order a hit now, before this little worm figures out what's going down and gets us all fried." Another pause.

  "Yeah, the cops have got squat for brains. That's mostly the damned problem, isn't it?" Static.

  "Y'all have yerselves a nice night, too."

  Then a clicking noise of a broken connection came as clearly through the monitor as through a phone receiver.

  The obscenities alone were dismaying; the content scared her, and she wasn't easily scared. This was different. Ugly. She stood, wrapping her arms around herself, clutching her shoulders, pacing. How many ways could "put out the hit" be taken? There was no other interpretation save a murder.

  An assassination plot.

  She couldn't pretend otherwise, or that she didn't understand, or that she wished she'd never heard anything at all. Even if she weren't the daughter of a cop, even if she hadn't done a stint in undercover hell herself, even if she hadn't taken and examined thousands of crime- scene photos, she would know what this was--and have the duty of any citizen to report the threat of violence.

  This vile, creepy stuff coming through the baby monitor was not something she could ignore or wish away. Someone, some "worm" was in very grave danger.

  But dear God, why her? Why now? On top of losing Sam and Ginny to the wilds of Wyoming, she didn't need this. Her head began to throb.

  But as her dad, bless his black Irish soul, would say, the poor, sorry sap with the bullet in his head would gladly have traded her the headache.

  But of course, ugly and dangerous as the threat was, it gave her reason enough to postpone even thinking about looking for the man who was Christo's father.

  Chapter Two

  Garrett Weisz had no idea how long the pager in the pocket of his Levi's had been vibrating. He'd been manhandling a jackhammer for the past thirty minutes, tearing out the concrete on a demolition project near the wharf.

  His whole body felt numb. His hands ached. His teeth felt as though they'd been rattled loose, and his ears, despite the plugs, were still ringing. All this undercover fun and games for a crack at a guy Garrett had reason to believe was uniquely positioned in the new and renewed Truth Sayers

  The guy, his target, was Garrett's boss on the demolition crew. Smart, tight-lipped. The kind who played his cards close to the vest, but who, deep in his heart, longed to be tight with other right-thinking men like him. The kind of secret fanatic, Garrett thought, without a shred of tolerance for anyone who didn't think exactly as he did.

  He was a hairbreadth from counting Garrett into his secret vigilante club. So close Garrett could smell it. He'd made a backhanded comment about

  Garrett coming along for a "meet" with the others on Wednesday night.

  Shutting down the pneumatics on the jackhammer, Garrett lowered the bandanna that covered his nose and mouth. He'd downed a quart of water before he realized his pager was vibrating. He tugged off a sweaty leather glove and dug the thing out of his pocket when the boss man moved in behind him.

  "That it? They find your female?"

  Garrett nodded. His cover story was that he had to carry a pager because his wife had bolted and run off with his kids. For a touch of the plausible, he held up the pager so the boss man could see that it was indeed the Seattle police paging him.

  "You take off, then. I'll give you the whole day's pay. You probably earned that already. Get things settled at home an' I'll see you back here in the morning." He stuck out his hand for a show of male solidarity. Disgusted, Garrett shook hands.

  All in a day's work.

  He walked off the job to a battered old pickup parked at the perimeter of the job site. He stuck a hand under his arm and pulled off the other glove, then hopped in, fired up and pulled out into the late morning traffic. He flipped on the switch of a police radio that looked like an ordinary trucker's CB.

  Some detective named Vorees came on within a thirty-second hold.

  "Weisz?"

  "Yeah. Who am I talking to?"

  "Ross Vorees, Division Seven Detective Squad."

  "Reporting to who?"

  Vorees named his chief, finally a name Garrett recognized.

  "What have you got?"

  "Kirsten McCourt, cooling her heels in my conference room. Name ring a bell?"

  A distant one.

  "One of Grenallo's people, four, five years ago? The woman whose husband was murdered?"

  "That'd be the one."

  "Why is she there? What's happened?"

  "She's reporting she overheard half of an interesting dialogue where String's name came up." He paused.

  "Get this. She heard it over a baby monitor."

  Garrett's pulse picked up.

  "What the hell is a baby monitor?"

  "One of those radio transmitters you put in a kid's room. Look, Weisz.

  I'm aware this is a political hot potato. String's name popping up in any conversation makes it your territory. But I'd like to be in on this one, and"-- " That's negotiable. " He didn't quite grasp the concept of a transmitter in a kid's room, but the rest suggested to Garrett that Kirsten McCourt's house must at least be in the neighborhood of action he wanted to penetrate. More than he had wanted anything in a real long time.

  Among the Truth Sayers "String" was the most recent code name for Chet Loehman. The man was a murderer and worse. His malignant influence on others--inducing hate-crime tactics, inveigling fear, discouraging freethinking under the banner of real law and order-- struck at roots deep in Garrett's heart and mind and history.

  String's moniker alone jerked Garrett's chain. It went with the territory that the success of an undercover cop depended absolutely upon his ability to think the way his enemies thought. If you couldn't do that, you couldn't begin to imagine how twisted a mind could become, how black a heart, how ugly the rationalizations.

  Garrett knew how String thought, so he knew the name was an allusion to stringing people along like lemmings or lambs to the slaughter.

  Otherwise, people were generally too stupid to grasp the threats to their freedom from left-wing bleeding-heart liberals who made criminals of armed, concerned citizens and let the real criminals go free every time.

  Garrett pulled to a stop behind an RV at the intersection of his turn south and forced himself to focus on the present moment, winding up the call with Vorees.

  "I'll be there in fifteen, twenty minutes.

  Whatever you do, make sure the McCourt woman doesn't walk out of there. "

  "Done."

  His next call was to his own office. His hands were just about recovered enough from wielding the jackhammer for his fingers to move.

  He was pounding cement dust off his jeans when J. D. Thorne, one of his undercover team, answered. He relayed the essentials, had J. D. page Matt Guiliani, the third member of his team, to the station house where Vorees was sitting on McCourt.

  "And, J.D." have someone check out the area where McCourt lives. See who's new to the neighborhood. Also, find out if anyone followed her to the station house. "

  "What do you want, kemo sabe? A car-to-car search?" J. D. gibed. J. D. was a lone ranger. He'd rather
have been running this undercover operation from the get-go, and it was a constant source of tension between them that the leadership had fallen to Garrett.

  "Come on, Thorne," he cajoled, downshifting around a corner.

  "Use your imagination. I know you've got one locked up inside that prickly exterior somewhere."

  Garrett skipped the fond farewells. He respected the hell out of Thorne, but they'd be butting heads till one or the other of them found a different arena.

  He pulled into a gated entrance of the station house and worked his way to Vorees's desk.

  Vorees looked up.

  "Weisz?"

  Garrett didn't bother confirming.

  "Where's the McCourt woman?"

  Vorees stood, rising to his full six-three.

  "This way." He led Garrett down the hall to the observation window looking in on the interview room.

  "The redhead," Vorees explained on the way, "is one of our detectives, Ann Calder. The other one is Kirsten McCourt."

  Garrett turned the corner, glanced at the window, then through it, then began to hear his own pulse throbbing in his ears as he stared at Kirsten McCourt.

  His hands felt clammy, his feet, suddenly, impossibly riveted to the floor. She wasn't what he expected, only he didn't know what it was he'd expected or why he was reacting to her as though he hadn't ever seen a woman before.

  She wasn't smiling. A pretty smile was the first thing he would have said he looked for in a woman. She wasn't happy.

  He wasn't attracted to unhappy women. She was pacing, but she wasn't tall with legs that went on forever. Still, he couldn't take his eyes off her, or slow his heartbeat, or move his feet or find his balance.

  Vorees was watching him, he knew. He creased his forehead and pretended to study her, as if to discern her game, when in fact it was his own game he needed to make sense of. He flashed on a night years ago, another time, when he'd been so enamored of a woman he didn't even know, that he couldn't see straight.

  The night of the day he'd buried Margo.

  It was the same with this woman, with Kirsten McCourt. The Wild Turkey might have had something to do with it that night, with that woman.

  Not now, with this woman. Unsmiling and unhappy, and still he was drawn to her. He needed to get a grip, needed a few moments to collect himself before he talked to her.

  He forced himself to turn, lean a shoulder into the window and regard Vorees, acting as if he'd about summed her up.

  "What's your take?"

  Vorees shrugged.

  "She's no flake-case. She thinks she's done her civic duty. She wants out of here."

  "Guiliani and Thorne here?"

  "In Tactical." Vorees led Garrett to a small room with maps covering all the available wall space, several fax machines, computers and printers.

  "It's impressive," he said, "the information they've already managed to pull together."

  Garrett expected nothing less. They were a crack team, the three of them, always outdoing themselves. He never minded dealing with whatever agency or bureaucrat cried foul over their tactics.

  Garrett trusted both men on his team implicitly, but he realized now how vulnerable he was. They knew him too well. They would see through him, see that something about Kirsten McCourt had gotten under his skin.

  He came up between Guiliani and Thorne, who were standing over a computer monitor displaying a neighborhood map of Queen Anne Hill, six streets in both directions.

  "Where are we?"

  Thorne tapped a pencil eraser against the screen.

  "McCourt's house.

  Utility main--here, telephone switching--here, typical neighborhood demographics, maybe a little older population than you'd expect. "

  "Any newcomers?" Garrett asked.

  "Wouldn't you know," Thorne responded, again bouncing a pencil eraser off the screen.

  "Here, across the street, one house down, converted to a rental property four months ago."

  "And we know that because..."

  "The owners are out of state," Vorees answered.

  "Phone number's the same, the account name is the same, but the bills are being paid in cash. Same with gas and electric. Usage is way above what it always has been. Somebody's living there, eating up electric, and it isn't the owners."

  Gratified, he nodded. He tried to reassure himself that what had happened to him at that two-way mirror hadn't happened, and then confirmed that his other requests had been handled as well.

  "Okay. What about McCourt?

  What do we know of her activities since she left the U. S. Attorney's office? "

  Matt Guiliani answered.

  "She teaches at a private high-school academy.

  Has a son named Christo, four years old. Quiet life, no indication from her that she suspects anything beyond having heard an anonymous threat. She's just being your good citizen, and she isn't very happy about being kept waiting. "

  Vorees added, "She's never heard of String. When she repeats what she heard, she doesn't give the word the emphasis you'd give if you knew it was referring to a person."

  " Where's the little kid now?" Garrett asked.

  "Some day-care operation" -Garrett looked up at Vorees, who knew before his lips clapped shut that his answer was vague and therefore useless. Vorees went to the door and bellowed for Ann Calder, the first detective to have heard Kirsten's report. Calder, Vorees informed the group, hadn't made any note of the name of the daycare center in her report.

  Ann hurried in. A thin, pretty redhead, she answered crisply.

  "The day care is the Gingerbread House." She walked to the map and pointed out the location, roughly halfway between Kirsten's home address and the private academy.

  Looking up from the faxed report of Kirsten McCourt's employment record, Garrett waited, frowning.

  "Can you spare someone to keep a watch on the Gingerbread House?" Garrett asked.

  Calder blanched.

  "I didn't even think about McCourt's kid being in any danger"

  Garrett handed off the fax to J. D. " who was watching Calder with a little more intensity than was strictly necessary. Et to? Garrett thought.

  "If he were your kid?" J. D. asked softly. Another interesting reaction.

  Calder nodded.

  "I'd want someone there."

  Garrett sighed heavily.

  "Me, too. Probably overkill, but better safe than sorry. I'd like someone covering Gingerbread till it closes--or we figure out how we want to handle this." He smiled, pulling out the stops. He'd get his way without leaking charm, but he preferred to leave happy campers in his wake.

  "Those places do close at night?"

  "Most of them." Calder smiled back, reaching for a phone, her eyes lingering a second too long with J. D. "I'll take care of it right now.

  But if you don't get in there, you're going to lose her. "

  Fifty minutes after they'd stashed her in the conference room, Kirsten sat down and turned her chair to face the door. She pulled out a nail file and began working on a ragged edge. She'd give them nine more, not one minute over an hour. She'd promised Christo time to feed the ducks with day-old bread from the Scratch Bakery, and she wasn't waiting beyond that.

  At fifty-eight minutes she heard a rush of movement outside the door and saw through the small glass-and-wire window several men milling around.

  At fifty-nine minutes she rose to go open the door herself and invite them all to have their little confab without her, but then the door opened and a man walked in, dressed in Levi's, heavy steel-toed work boots, a dusty gray canvas jacket and a black paisley bandanna.

  On the hour, she sank back into her chair, clutching at its arms. The face was the same as the one on the high-tech colored graphics printer beside her computer in the small home office next to Christo's room.

  His father.

  she had an image, in her heart, of her world having stopped. Just. stopped.

  Time no longer ticked. The globe ceased turnin
g. Her world would never return again to its faithful path in the heavens.

  Kirsten sat looking up into the eyes of a man who didn't recognize her, didn't know her from Eve, didn't see or remember. But because of Christo, he was as intimately connected to her as it was possible for a man and woman who didn't know each other's