Carly Bishop - No Baby But Mine

by No Baby But Mine(Lit)

  He gave a small snort, shaking his head.

  "Imagine these guys getting busted by a baby monitor. Which, by the by, I'm no expert, but what was Christo still doing with one of those things? He's four years old, isn't he?"

  She felt immediately on the defensive. Ginny had asked her the same thing, with the same result, but Vorees somehow made her feel worse.

  "Do you have any idea how insensitive that sounds, Detective?

  Particularly since there are bogeymen across the street. "

  "Those guys wouldn't hurt a kid" -- "But that's not the point, is it?"

  "No," Vorees admitted.

  "You're right. I didn't mean to be such a clod.

  To be honest, Calder tells me I'm beyond redemption. " He made a rueful face.

  "I think she means it, too."

  Kirsten smiled briefly. If he qualified himself one more time with "to be honest," she was going to scream.

  "I'm... I'm probably much too touchy."

  "Not at all, as it turns out. You're right."

  He took off then and she spent several hours on the phone calling around to every mutual acquaintance of Burton Rawlings she could think of.

  She had no luck.

  If Rawlings had intended to hand off evidence to her for safekeeping or any other of a half-dozen possible reasons, he'd apparently abandoned the idea.

  At seven o'clock that third night, Kirsten was finishing up the dishes from the spaghetti she'd prepared for Garrett, Ross, J. D. and Matt.

  Their talk had turned surly, enacting the behavior of men who'd come a long way for nothing, speculating as to whether she'd managed somehow to warn Burton Rawlings off contacting her again. Or to run.

  Maybe he wasn't even in Seattle anymore. Maybe he'd bolted, slunk out of town. And that would be her fault, now, wouldn't it?

  She'd snapped, "Oh yeah. That's what I did." No one blamed her; the talk was all for the sake of what was being heard across the street.

  Still, it grated on her, wearing her thin, making her feel frenzied inside, on edge all the time. Just that much more realistic.

  "You're right. I warned Burton Rawlings because his life is more important to me than getting my son back."

  Standing at the sink, she understood well enough that the charade must be playing well across the street. By the talk they heard from the bugs Matt had planted, Loehman's henchmen believed, hook, line and sinker, that she was completely at the mercy of the precariously unstable nutcases from Tri Cities The kidnapping had fooled them.

  They believed Garrett and his men were traitors to the cause, willing to do anything to gain the leverage necessary to wrest control of the Truth Sayers from Chet Loehman.

  But the situation was growing nasty. On the premise that Rawlings might try to approach her if she were alone, Garrett's team was considering the possibility of sending her looking. On the other side, the boys in the band contemplated rescuing her, believing that she was in fact holding out on Christo's kidnappers. That she'd give it up for them out of gratitude for saving her from the thugs holding her captive now.

  She drained the dishwater, and scrubbed the stainless-steel sink to its less-than-sparkling best, thinking how dangerously clueless they were. If they "rescued" her, what did they think might become of Christo?

  Garrett walked into the kitchen. Her heart began to thump. There was so much left unsaid between them, so many hours gone by the wayside, taken up with trying to find Burton Rawlings. She didn't know what to expect, but it wasn't that Garrett would come into her kitchen and make sure the switch was nipped so their conversation could be monitored by the vigilante cops across the street.

  "You about done here?" He pulled milk out of the refrigerator.

  Draining the contents straight from the carton, he tossed the empty into the plastic-lined trash.

  "That's disgusting."

  "When I want your opinion, lady, I'll take the trouble to ask for it."

  But he winked at her and her heart squeezed tight with the image of Christo squinting both eyes in similar attempts to con her out of fussing at him.

  "Don't worry. Without a man around the house, your kid won't pick up crude habits like that."

  Her chin went up, her heart squeezed tighter. Though his tone slapped her down--and unwittingly, all the harder because he was the man who belonged around the house--his smile invited her to lighten up.

  "You're wrong."

  "Yeah? About what?"

  She felt silly, making a case for crude habits.

  "My son doesn't need a man with bad behavior to emulate. He's perfectly capable of inventing his own."

  Garrett grinned, that lopsided grown-up version ofChristo's.

  "Like what?"

  Her eyes searched his. She wouldn't be joking or sharing the smallest details with real kidnappers.

  "He belches just like any other little boy, he scoops raspberry jam straight out of the jar with his fingers, he-" "But then, he's only four, right?" He made some distinctively appreciative male noise that could have been a chip-off-the-old-block pride in his son, if only he'd known.

  "I want him back." Her eyes watered. Her head dipped uncertainly. She turned her attention back to wiping the counter. The oddly misplaced moment of shared intimacy vanished, and she was back to being a mother dealing with lunatics who'd kidnapped her child because the man to whom he belonged wasn't coming round to discussing it.

  "I want my son back."

  "And I want Burton Rawlings," he returned, in his role again as well.

  He took the dishcloth from her hand.

  "I have to go to a meeting.

  You're coming with me. Get outta here and go do something with your face. "

  "What kind of meeting?"

  "A meeting," he snapped.

  "If you needed to know more, I'd let you know. Go."

  He followed her up the stairs and into the sink and vanity alcove of her room, flipping on the clock radio as he went by it. She stood, uncertain of what he was doing or why he'd followed. He pulled out a vanity drawer and began digging through her makeup, choosing a small compact of sage and forest green-colored eye shadow.

  Flipping on the mirror lights, he rubbed his thumb over the powdery cake of color, then turning her face to the light, gently stroked the eye shadow to her cheek, applying it as well to the outer edges of her eye socket. When he was done, she saw that along with the illusion of tenderness for her, he'd created the one of an old bruise.

  He stood behind her, too close. She refused to look into his eyes reflected in the mirror because the pleasure that had unfurled in her like some hothouse orchid at his touch, no matter how briefly or wholly contrived to blacken her eye, left her confused and frustrated.

  She started to drag her brush through her hair. He reached around her and picked out a banana clip from a basket full of scrunchies and barrettes and clips of different sizes and handed it to her. Swaying ever so slightly to the love song coming from the radio, his lips so close to her ear that she felt his warm breath, he told her to put it in.

  Heat flashed through her, lightning scorching a path down a grounding rod that was her nervous system. The words were so innocuous. Put it in the oven. Put it in the car, put it in the envelop, put it in the cupboard, put it in, put it in. Ten times a day, a hundred, anytime but this the words would only mean what they meant, barely noticed or unnoticed altogether.

  But the meaning she took, the one that came to her first, last and shockingly fast, was another, fraught with a fierce intimacy, edged in desire, prickling with needs she'd forgotten ever having.

  Their eyes met in the mirror and she became for that lone instant all woman again, a sexual creature, more than Christo's mother or the object of an evil man's pursuit. She was the woman to whom he'd been making love that night, and the awareness of that, out there between them now, changed everything.

  She lifted her arms to gather up her hair, taking overlong, exposing her breasts beneath the rosy-pink sweater she
wore to the gaze and hands, if he chose, of her baby's father.

  He expelled a breath with such harshness, she knew the same desire was hard on him. His hands settled to her hips, his thumbs stroked up her sides toward the curve of her breasts. Her eyelids fluttered shut as a tension, a pleasure more keen than any she could ever recall thrummed through her.

  She watched him watching his own large hands moving over her belly, moving ever so slightly down, coming together. Her womb clenched and the breath in her expired. Sensation between her thighs returned to her with a vengeance and heat flowed from her. Then his hands strayed up, under her sweater, up her bare torso to touch her breasts, and what she saw reflected in his eyes was the thirst of a dying man too long in a desert wasteland.

  "Kirsten." His breath on her bare neck came hot and damp and harsh with an overwhelming frustration. He took his hands off her, backed a little way away. A very little.

  Bereft of his touch, as lit up and deprived of satisfaction as he, she stared at him in the old mirror with splotches of its silver missing.

  His voice too low to be picked up by surveillance, he croaked, "The hair clip, Kirsten."

  She swallowed and pulled back her hair and planted the clip. He picked up the eye shadow and rubbed color onto the skin of her neck and throat to mimic proof of other abuses, then tossed the small compact back into her drawer. Turning abruptly away, he walked out of her room.

  matt guiliani came with them. Kirsten sat in the back of her own car.

  On their way through the northern suburbs up 1-95, safely away from the bugs in her house, the white van following at a distance of three or four car lengths, Garrett told her they were headed to what they believed to be a meeting of local Truth Sayers As in the park when she hadn't seen him coming, she could no longer recognize him for the man in her mirror.

  "These are the members we've confirmed." He passed a file folder back to her. Inside it, by the light of passing street lamps she found candid shots of half a dozen men and a couple of women.

  "The guy in the photo on top," he said, "runs the show--Derek Feder.

  When I got the call from Vorees that you were at the police station, I was undercover on a demolition site. The same guy runs that job. He'd decided after a couple of weeks that he and I were like-thinking men. He'd been hinting around about bringing me into the fold. "

  "Do you need him as a way to Loehman now, after all this? Or is it just that you can't afford to blow your cover?"

  "Partly. But there was some urgency about this meeting, Kirsten."

  "Everything's urgent now, isn't it?" Urgent kidnapping, urgent meetings, urgent needs left unfulfilled because there was no place for them among all the other urgent matters.

  He looked at her in the rearview mirror. There could be no way for him to be certain of her meaning, but there it was, lingering between them in the dark.

  "The point of all this," he said, switching lanes, squinting against the glare of oncoming headlights, "is that a stakeout on your house is not an isolated operation. It's in the service of a larger goal, which is what we're trying to uncover."

  She understood this was the essence of being an undercover cop.

  Unending hours of tedium followed by bursts of urgent activity in the wake of connections searched for and unearthed where none were apparent. Wringing the significance from every piece of information no matter how inconsequential it seemed. Exploiting even the unlikely, most threadbare opportunities.

  Garrett's lifeblood. Despite those skills, in his own regard, he couldn't add two and two together and come up with four. She couldn't spell it out to him. The sting of it, made worse by Matt's perception, wasn't going away.

  "I don't understand why you want me with you."

  "Ordinarily, I wouldn't." He gave her a rueful glance in the rearview mirror.

  "In this case, my own credibility is riding on it. This is my own cleverness coming back to bite me in the butt."

  "I don't get it."

  "In undercover ops, everything's at least half- improv. You never know, going in, how you're going to make yourself fit in, so you adjust. You have to have excuses in place that'll be tolerated if you have to take off. I knew that Feder had a 911 called in on him about a year ago for domestic violence, so my story was that my uppity wife had run off with my kids, and I was waiting to hear she'd been found."

  "So if anyone needed you," she asked, "you could legitimately leave?"

  "Exactly. I had to go retrieve the little wife to get my kids back.

  Now that I've supposedly got the little ingrate back in my clutches, I'm not quite ready to let her out of my sight again. "

  Kirsten made a face, understanding now why he'd made her look bruised and battered.

  "That's sickening." The caveman mentality turned her stomach. But the more subtle, chilling image besetting her was that Garrett had in fact been called away to a meeting with the mother of a son whose very existence had been kept from him.

  Garrett was not the kind of man he'd led Feder to believe he was. She knew that. And whatever similarity she thought she saw to his cover story only reflected her own derelict state of mind. It wasn't the same thing at all as being his wife and stealing his children.

  Except that in all the ways that counted, it was too nearly the same.

  Garrett took the next exit off the highway, followed the street for a couple of miles, then turned right and right again, putting them into a middleclass neighborhood.

  A porch light shone, lighting the house number. Garrett pulled to the curb one house beyond Feder's and parked.

  "Show time. Remember, Kirsten, you're better off not having a thought in your head. You're scared, you're bullied, you've been slapped around. You probably won't need to say two words."

  He opened the driver's door, got out and opened hers. Matt followed.

  The bi-level house was in a newer subdivision of houses all in a row, every fourth design the same. Derek Feder opened the door to Garrett's knock. Holding open the glassed screen door, he took in the presence of a second man, Matt, then his oily gaze slid to Kirsten and meaningfully back to Garrett.

  She disliked him on sight.

  "Guess everything is back to normal, huh?" Feder said.

  "Little woman back at home." He backed inside to let them in, sticking out a hand to shake when Garrett introduced Matt as his brother.

  "Missed you at work, bub. Good thing you called in. I was beginning to think you'd skipped."

  "With three weeks' pay coming?" Garrett joshed, gripping Feder's hand.

  "No way. Honey,"

  he said to Kirsten, "this is the boss, Derek Feder. Derek, my wife-- Kirsten."

  "Mr. Feder." Garrett's honey made her feel like snarling. She transposed the impulse into a timid smile. Keeping her hands tucked into the pockets of her jacket, she refused the offer to take her coat.

  "Thanks all the same. I'm a little cold. I think I'll keep it."

  "Suit yourself." Bestowing a comradely look on Garrett and Matt, Feder led the way into the lower- level family room. Four of the eleven men present were ones in Garrett's file photos, along with three other women.

  Feder briefly introduced them around. Matt sat in a folding chair Feder's wife provided. Garrett took the end of the sofa, leaving Kirsten nowhere to sit but at his feet.

  Feder called the meeting to order. She sat through an hour of those eleven earnest men, normal, working-class men talking about making the country safe again. She was doing her best to appear as if she hadn't a thought of her own in her head, the cowed, chastened little wife.

  What made the men so scary, so dangerous, was that their goals weren't unreasonable or unworthy. Who could argue against safer city streets or an environment where children weren't murdering each other or their parents?

  But then Garrett made the move she recognized instinctively he'd come here to make.

  "You know what the real problem is, don't you?" he demanded.

  "It isn't the lowlifes y
ou guys are talking about. It's the lawyers. Get rid of the mouthpieces, and we might have a chance. Old Shakespeare had it right.

  Wasn't it him said, "Kill all the lawyers'?"

  Feder jumped on it like a shot.

  "Exactly. And speaking of lawyers," he said, pulling a folio from the plaid fabric pocket along the side of his lounger, "here's one for the money."

  His coarse, ruddy features twisted unpleasantly as he sat staring at what appeared to Kirsten to be a handful of reprints, then looked up.