Criminal Intent (MIRA) (27 page)

She squeezed his hand. “Two-and-a-half years ago,” he said, “I was working in D.C. for the DEA. There was a big drug problem here in Serenity, and it was getting worse. This little nowhere town was becoming a major distribution center for heroin that was being sent all over the state. The agency sent me in undercover to try and plug the hole it was trickling through. It was a perfect setup. I’d grown up here, so people were used to me. And when I started hanging out with rejects from the local cesspool, nobody was surprised. Most of ’em figured I’d never amount to anything anyway.

“Then Chels came back from a couple years of wandering up and down the Eastern seaboard. Somehow, she managed to snag a job as a reporter for the
River City Gazette.
The damn newspaper’s a joke, but you’d have thought it was the
Washington Post
and she was going for a Pulitzer, the way she acted. One way or another, she got a bug up her ass about the dope dealing, and she started digging around. Pretending she was some big-time reporter. I couldn’t tell her the truth; if she found out I was DEA, it would’ve jeopardized my whole case. I guess I thought I was some hotshot cop or something. So I didn’t tell her. I put the confidentiality of the case ahead of her safety. I tried to rein her in by throwing cold water all over her enthusiasm instead. But all it did was piss her off. I’d forgotten that the only thing worse than Chelsea Logan’s stubbornness was her temper. I should’ve remembered, considering that she unleashed it on me with amazing regularity.”

Quietly, Annie
said, “What happened?”

“I pleaded with her to stay out of it, and she ignored me. It doesn’t really matter how it happened. We were both at fault, both too stubborn to give even an inch. She got too close to the truth, and she ended up dead.”

“I’m so sorry.”

Darkly, he said, “I don’t want your goddamn pity.”

“How about compassion? What, then? Why’d you tell me all this, Hunter?”

“I wanted you to know. I wanted you to understand why I’d be bad for you. Why getting involved with me would be a mistake.”

She removed her hand from his. Sounding peeved, she said, “Isn’t that my decision? My mistake to make?”

“Don’t you understand? I’ve never had a normal relationship with a woman. I was Chelsea’s patsy for twenty years. It’s all I know how to do. I don’t even know what normal’s supposed to look like. How the hell can I pull it off when I don’t even know where to start? You want to know what really bites? Tonight, when my brother was talking about his live-in relationship, I was jealous. It sounds to me like Bri and Alec got it right, and I wonder if either one of them even has a clue just how lucky they are.”

“So, basically, what you’re telling me is that, out of the goodness of your heart, you’ve decided to save me from myself by scaring me away before I’ve even made up my mind about you. Thanks so much for the favor.”

He rubbed a hand over his eyes. “It’s not that bad,” he said. “You make it sound absurd. I’m doing this for—”

“My own good. Yes, I get that. You know what, Hunter? You are one pathetic, fucked-up mess.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

“You’re also an idiot.” He thought he heard tears in her voice, but he couldn’t be sure. Sounding suddenly weary, she said, “Your eleven minutes are up. I’m going to bed.”

She
opened the door, and the dome light came on. He snatched at her wrist, held on to it to prevent her from escaping. “You’re pissed off at me again,” he said. “Damn it, Annie, why are you always pissed off at me?”

She peeled his fingers away, one by one, and freed her wrist. Rubbing it, she slid away from him to stand in fuzzy slippers on broken pavement. Just before she shut the door in his face, she said, “You have all the answers, Hunter. Figure it out for yourself.”

Luke Brogan was having a bad night.

This was his third trip to the bathroom since midnight. 3:00 a.m., and here he was on the hopper again, with the worst indigestion he’d had in years. His doctor had told him to stop eating all that fried food, and Luke had tried. He’d really tried. But this was the South, where everything was deep-fried and served with gravy. Around here, people didn’t understand any of that low-fat, low-carb, artificially sweetened bullshit. That was yuppie food. If a dish wasn’t loaded with sugar or swimming in fat, it was considered suspicious, and folks avoided it the way a rooster avoided a swinging axe.

Maybe his problem was just nerves. The last two years hadn’t been easy on him, and he hadn’t slept through an entire night in the six months since Robin Spinney found that envelope with its damning evidence. Now, because of the judicial appointment, Marcus was on his ass, poking and jabbing and tossing his weight around, and the stress was starting to get to him. He’d tried calling Louis Farley a couple of times yesterday, but Farley hadn’t picked up. He’d left messages on Farley’s voice mail, but the investigator had never called back. If he didn’t know better, he’d think the little asshole was avoiding him.

Meanwhile, Marcus’s deadline loomed ever nearer. He’d tried to keep his brother out of it, had tried to convince Marcus
to let him handle it. He’d been the one to make this mess, and he damn well intended to be the one to clean it up. But their sibling rivalry hadn’t faded with age. Their relationship was still all about which one of them had the bigger dick.

He thought he’d handled the situation pretty well. After all, he’d taken care of Mac Spinney and Boyd Northrup, hadn’t he? Marcus had no reason to squawk about the way he’d dealt with those two. It was that damn Robin Spinney who was proving to be more of a challenge than he’d expected. He could tell that Marcus was starting to get antsy. Luke wasn’t sure why. When Northrup had come whining to him about the contents of that envelope, he hadn’t said a thing about Marcus. And Northrup had read every word that Mac Spinney’d written. If he’d seen anything that pointed in Marcus’s direction, he would surely have said so. No, the evidence, putrid and utterly damning, pointed the finger of guilt directly and solely at Lucas Anthony Brogan.

Which probably accounted for the fact that he was sitting here at this time of night with his stomach tied up in knots.

He flushed the toilet, and was just pulling his pajamas back up when he heard a noise. It sounded like a footstep in the living room. A stealthy footstep. But who the hell would be stupid enough to break into his house in the middle of the night? Everybody in town knew he lived here, and everybody in town knew he kept an impressive gun collection. It would take a half-baked retard to think they could get away with robbing the county sheriff while he slept.

Except that he didn’t have a weapon handy. His loaded service revolver was locked away in the gun safe he kept in a kitchen cupboard. Annabel spent a lot of time at his house, and kids and firearms were a bad combination. Luke didn’t take any chances with his granddaughter. He kept his weapon locked up, safely away from curious fingers.

Outside the bathroom door, he heard a second noise.
Goddamn
young punks,
he thought as he strode to the door.
Who the hell do they think they are?
Prepared to do battle, Brogan flung the door open, and came face to face with the man standing on the other side.

“Marcus?” he said in astonishment. “What in the name of all that’s holy are you doing skulking around my living room at three in the morning?”

Dressed all in black, his brother wore a grim expression. “You were supposed to be in bed,” Marcus said. “Why the hell aren’t you in bed?”

“I had an upset stomach. What are you doing here? You almost gave me a heart attack. Isn’t it a little late to be slumming?”

“I couldn’t do it,” his brother said evenly, as though they were discussing the weather. “I just couldn’t take the chance.”

Luke didn’t understand. Even when the black-gloved hand raised the gun in slow motion, it took him a second or two to get it. And then Luke Brogan’s bowels, already disturbed enough, turned to liquid. “Christ, Marcus,” he whispered. “You’re gonna kill me over this thing? You’re gonna kill your own brother?”

“You were never any brother of mine,” Marcus said. “As far as I’m concerned, Daddy should have snapped your neck like a toothpick the day your mother brought you home from the hospital. You’ve been nothing but an embarrassment to me since I first laid eyes on you. But this—getting me involved in this mess of yours—was the last straw. I’m tired of cleaning up after you, big brother. And I’m not about to let your idiot mistakes destroy my life.”

“It was an accident,” Luke said. “I didn’t intend for it to happen. You know that. I was drunk. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

Marcus held the gun steady, without so much as a tremor of his hand. “You can whine all you want,” he said, “but it won’t help you.”

“I
have Farley on the case. He’ll find her any day now, Marcus—”

“You’re incompetent, Luke. You know what that word means, or should I explain it to you? You and that Farley person.” Marcus snorted. “I bet you don’t even know where he is tonight. When was the last time he reported in to you? Did he tell you he’s in Portland, Maine?”

Luke tried to cover his surprise, but wasn’t quite quick enough. “That’s what I thought,” Marcus said. “Farley’s going to lead my man right to Spinney. In a matter of a day or two, it’ll all be over for Spinney and her daughter. And for Louis Farley. It’ll be worth the staggering fee I had to pay to make sure they’re all neatly taken care of. As for you and me and our little friend here—” Wiggling the gun barrel, he smiled, slow and easy. It was a charming smile, a smile that effectively camouflaged the piranha beneath. “Remember that liquor store robbery over in Bentley last month? The one where they shot the clerk dead and ran off with all the money?”

“It’d be hard to forget,” Luke said.

Smoothly, Marcus said, “This is the same gun that was used in that robbery. You never did find out who did it. That’s what I mean by incompetence, Lucas. You’re a black mark against the Brogan name, one that I can’t afford, now that I’m going to be sitting on the bench. So while my man’s taking care of Farley and the Spinneys, I’m taking care of you.” He paused, his dark eyes glittering hard and cold in the dim light. “What a shame that sometime in the wee hours before dawn, those same unnamed robbery suspects broke into the house of Atchawalla’s esteemed chief of police and shot him in cold blood with the same gun they used to shoot the liquor store clerk.”

Luke was starting to sweat, in spite of the ice water that raced through his veins. “Christ, Marcus, don’t do this. I’ll back off. I’ll call Farley and pull him off the case. I’ll let you take
care of it. Just like you asked me to in the first place.” He heard the pleading in his own voice, heard the weakness there, and hated it.

“Sorry. It’s too late for that. Now that I know what a coward you are, and you know just how far I’d go to guarantee my future, well…it just wouldn’t work, that’s all.”

Nausea pushed hard at the back of his throat. “Marc, for God’s sake, we were kids together. Brothers. The same blood runs in our veins. You wouldn’t do this to your own brother, would you?”

“Absolutely,” Marcus said. And he pulled the trigger.

The rental car was about what he’d expected, but the hotel in downtown Portland was a delightful surprise, a far cry from the low-budget motel where he’d stayed in Detroit. Louis slept hard, and woke feeling refreshed for the first time in days. The place didn’t come cheap, but he deserved a night of luxury to celebrate his success before he took off for the Maine woods. God only knew what he’d find there besides Robin Spinney, but he’d heard the legendary stories of mosquitoes so large that the Maine State Legislature had considered replacing the chickadee with the mosquito as state bird.

But those were just stories, and he suspected the truth was a little less daunting. So far, he’d found Maine more than welcoming. Breakfast in the hotel dining room was hearty and delicious, and he lingered over his second cup of coffee while he read the headlines in the local newspaper and pondered the possibility of retiring to Maine. He still had years to go before he needed to make that kind of decision, but it was something to think about. Of course, he didn’t have to wait for retirement. As long as he had a telephone line and a modem jack, he could do his job from anywhere in the world. He could relocate at a moment’s notice with hardly a blip on his occupational radar screen.

The
waitress, a sturdy, middle-aged woman who was both brisk and efficient, headed his way with a pot of coffee in her hand and a smile on her face. Louis waved her off, folded his paper, and took out his wallet. Pulling out a ten-dollar bill, he dropped it on the table, tucked the newspaper under his arm, and headed toward the hotel lobby.

The elevator whisked him silently to the seventh floor, where two hotel maids were busy changing linens. Their laundry carts parked in the corridor, they chatted back and forth through open doorways in a singsongy language that might have been Vietnamese. Louis strolled past and continued down the corridor, past somebody’s room service tray, piled high with dirty dishes and left outside their door. These big hotels, no matter how elegant, were always a bland, confusing maze of adjoining hallways and doors that all looked alike. He reached the end of the corridor and, guided by the signs on the wall, turned left. If he remembered correctly—and it was difficult to remember with all these twists and turns and crazy angles—his door should be the third one on the right.

As he approached, he saw that it was slightly ajar, the hinged latch folded out to keep it from locking. Irritated because he’d clearly left the Do Not Disturb sign hanging on the knob, he double-checked the number on the door, then took a second glance at his key card. It was definitely his room, and he’d definitely left it locked. Damn those maids. He was going to have to complain to the hotel management. There was no excuse for this. If the hotel couldn’t hire domestic help who could speak English, they had no business taking in guests at all.

Suddenly jittery, Louis hesitated for an instant before he placed a hand on the door and swung it inward. He took a quick glance at the bathroom, directly to his left, but it was empty, his dirty towels right where he’d left them, draped over the
rim of the bathtub. The bed was still unmade, his used drinking glass still sitting on the night stand, his bags lined up neatly at the foot of the bed. Everything was just as he’d left it. That was odd. Why would the maid have left the door open if she hadn’t started working on the room?