Criminal Intent (MIRA) (8 page)

Just two more years, he reminded himself. If he could hold on for just two more years, he’d have his thirty years in, and he could retire with full benefits while he was still young enough to enjoy it. Buy himself a little houseboat down on the Gulf and spend his golden years fishing. If Robin Spinney didn’t fuck it up for him.

A cloud crossed the face of the sun, momentarily turning the surface of the river a steely gray. So much blood on his hands. So many lives disrupted, destroyed, in a ripple effect that Luke Brogan could never have imagined if he hadn’t seen it played out right in front of his own eyes. Even if he wanted to stop it now, it was too late to act on any regrets he might have. Once set in motion, the ripple was irreversible. There was only one possible conclusion to this scenario: when he found Robin Spinney and her daughter, he would kill them. Maybe once they were dead he could stop looking over his shoulder and start sleeping again.

The oil barge was far upriver now, headed for Memphis or St. Louis or wherever the hell it was going. From her perch atop the Civil War cannon that graced the small park, Annabel waved to him. He waved back. She hopped down, and with another of those billion-dollar smiles, she came loping across the grass with all the grace of a three-legged hippopotamus. Flinging herself onto his lap, she said, “Can we get an ice cream, Gramps?”

“Well, now, I don’t know,” Brogan said, settling her on his knee. “Your mama will likely skin my hide if I let you spoil your lunch.”

She
wiggled her bony little rump, trying to find a comfortable spot on his leg. “Mama doesn’t have to know.”

“I suspect she’ll notice if you don’t eat your meat and potatoes.”

She wrinkled her nose. “I don’t like meat and potatoes. I like ice cream.”

“Tell you what. How about we share an ice cream? I’ll help you eat it. That way, you can leave room for lunch.”

The little girl studied him with solemn brown eyes. “Peppermint stick?” she said hopefully.

He didn’t much care for peppermint stick, but he knew Annabel loved it, and he hadn’t yet figured out how to say no to her. “My favorite,” he said. “Let’s go, sugarplum.”

She slid down off his knee. He folded the investigator’s report and pocketed it. Hand in hand, they headed off across the park in search of peppermint stick ice cream.

The floor at Grondin’s Superette tilted like a ship’s deck in a gale-force wind. Her shopping cart kept listing to the left, and Annie had to struggle to keep it moving in a straight line down the center of the produce aisle. Stopping beneath a sign that advertised FRESH PRODUCE, she picked up a head of lettuce. The outer leaves were wilted and had started to turn brown around the edges. Annie put it back and began searching for something a little fresher. Sophie careened around the corner, arms loaded, almost bumping into a young mother with two toddlers in tow. “Sorry,” she breathed before dropping her plunder into the cart. Annie eyed the bag of potato chips, the jar of sweet pickles and the twin boxes of Frosted Flakes and said, “I see you’re on a health food kick.”

“Be right back. Geez, this place smells like rotten bananas.”

Annie watched her daughter disappear again. With a sigh, she tossed a marginally acceptable head of lettuce into the cart. Sophie
was a picky eater who had a habit of getting onto these food binges when she’d eat the same bizarre item day after day after day. For the longest time it had been Marshmallow Fluff on Ritz Crackers. Annie had tried everything she could think of—threats, coercion, pleading—to get her daughter to eat something else. But nothing had worked. Then one day, seemingly out of the blue, Sophie had abandoned the Ritz Crackers and Fluff for canned peas and tuna fish. At least the tuna had protein.

By the time they reached the checkout, Annie had bought enough food to feed an army. When the cashier rang up the total, she gulped. But it couldn’t be helped. Setting up housekeeping in a new place was expensive. She’d had to buy staples, had to stock up on milk and butter and toilet paper. Next time around, she’d spend a more reasonable amount.

They loaded the groceries into the back of the Volvo, and Sophie returned the cart to its corral. Annie started the engine and they quickly cranked down their respective windows. Not for the first time, she thought wistfully of the new SUV she’d sold in Detroit for half of its Blue Book value. The vehicle had been loaded: four-wheel-drive, CD player, air-conditioning, pushbutton everything. But beggars couldn’t be choosers. The Volvo was sturdy and dependable, in spite of the 200,000 miles on its odometer. The FM radio played just fine, and she and Sophie were fully capable of rolling their own windows up and down. So what if her T-shirt was sticking to a giant wet spot between her shoulder blades? So what if her hair felt limp and frizzy and totally unmanageable? The Volvo had gotten her all the way here from Las Vegas, and in the greater scheme of things, its lack of air-conditioning was nothing but a minor irritant.

She was halfway home, on a deserted stretch of road that ran alongside the river, when without warning, steam began to pour out from beneath the hood. Annie silently cursed the idiot
lights that should have warned her there was a problem, lights that had probably stopped working some fifty thousand miles ago. She steered the car onto the shoulder and rolled to a stop. “What’s wrong?” Sophie said.

“I don’t know. The car’s overheating.” Annie turned the key and pumped the gas. The engine cranked, but the car didn’t start. It was probably her fault for mentally praising the Volvo’s dependability. She’d probably jinxed it. “Come on,” she muttered, cranking it again. But the battery was old, and with each successive attempt, it grew weaker and weaker.

She thought about the gallon of milk in the back, about Sophie’s Popsicles and the small piece of sirloin she’d picked up for dinner tonight. She calculated the distance home, recalculated it in terms of distance divided by walking speed, then factored in the temperature and the weight of the groceries they’d bought. It wasn’t even remotely feasible. Even if they only carried the perishables, it was at least a mile in ninety-degree heat. Then they’d have to find a way to get back to pick up the rest of the stuff. It wasn’t going to happen, not in this lifetime.

“Well, shit,” she said.

I
t
had been one hell of a morning.

He’d been dragged out of bed at the crack of dawn after Andy Kavanaugh’s kid missed a curve on his way to work and wrapped his car around a tree. Miraculously, the kid had survived the accident with only a few broken bones. He’d been LifeFlighted to Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston because the local hospital was woefully inadequate, and Davy could only hope he’d learned that when the speed limit sign said forty-five, it didn’t mean sixty-five. Not on Maine’s bumpy, winding back-country roads. The Kavanaugh kid had been lucky. It could have been a lot worse.

Cleanup had taken a big chunk out of his morning. When he got to the office, he found a three-inch stack of paperwork sitting on his desk, waiting to be read, signed, and approved. He spent a good hour working his way through that, ending with the report that Officer René Bellevance had filed on a domestic dispute he’d handled last night out at Aube’s Trailer Park. Danny Veilleux had downed a few too many Budweisers while watching the Red Sox game. When his wife Patricia, who’d had more than a few herself, had the audacity to turn off the TV so he’d pay attention to her instead of the game, all
hell had broken loose. Danny had thrown the remote control at her, hitting her on the temple, and she’d gone after him with her great-grandmother’s cast-iron skillet.

Fortunately, the neighbors had dialed 911 before they could kill each other. Patricia had come out of it with a black eye from the remote and a sprained pinky from clobbering Danny with the frying pan. She’d slept it off in lock-up. Her husband hadn’t been so lucky. He’d received a concussion and ten stitches, and he’d spent the night in the hospital. They were both due in district court tomorrow morning to answer charges of D&D and assault.

He’d just finished initialing René’s report when he got called out to Roy Kimball’s place, where he spent forty-five minutes talking Roy out of pressing charges against the Henderson kids for trampling his prize begonias. Again. Apparently there’d been a long-running feud going on between Kimball and the Hendersons ever since the young couple moved in next door with their three rambunctious boys. The kids didn’t mean any harm. They were just boys, doing what boys do. Roy, the stubborn old coot, refused to put up a fence to keep them out. And Davy was caught in the middle. What was he supposed to do, arrest the three boys, ranging in age from five to eight, for trespassing? It had taken some doing, but he’d finally managed to calm Roy down, smooth things over, avert disaster. At least until the next time.

And he had no doubt there’d be a next time.

Squabbling neighbors, domestic disputes, lead-footed drivers with no concept of the term
speed limit.
He wondered how Ty did this, day in and day out, year after year, without going absolutely apeshit. If he had to put up with two months of this crap, he’d probably end up in a rubber room somewhere. It didn’t help that he’d stayed up too late last night, staining the damn table. He was overtired and cranky, it was past his lunchtime, and he’d skipped breakfast. At this time of
day, Lenny’s Café would be filled to overflowing. There wouldn’t be a free booth in the place. His best bet was probably the McDonald’s across the river. It was three miles out on the state highway, but their drive-through was usually pretty quick. He could pick up a Big Mac and a Coke, and eat right there in the car.

Davy reversed direction, crossed the old iron bridge, and headed north along the river. He passed the cutoff to Gram’s house, passed Aube’s Trailer Park, where his sister lived. Passed the old one-room schoolhouse his parents had attended back in the 1950s. It was deserted now, a ghost of its former self, weeds growing around the foundation, all the windows long since broken out, graffiti spray-painted on the doors. A haven, he imagined, for squirrels and woodchucks and God only knew what else.

He was on the lonely stretch of highway three-quarters of a mile out when he saw her standing by the side of the road, a little bit of a thing in jeans and Hard Rock T-shirt, gazing balefully at the plume of steam rising from beneath the raised hood of an ancient blue Volvo. Nearby, a bored-looking teenage girl sat in the grass with her arms folded around upraised knees. The kid was dressed all in black, with shoulder-length black hair that could stand a good combing, black lipstick, and a matching pair of oversized safety pins in her earlobes.

He knew who the woman was. Everybody in town knew who she was. Annie Kendall was new in town, and he had it on good authority that she’d just bought Mike Boudreau’s run-down motel and video store. What the hell she could possibly want with that sorry-assed piece of real estate, he couldn’t imagine. But he’d heard it from the horse’s mouth down at Lenny’s. Mikey had sold the Twilight to her lock, stock, and videos, and he and the missus had loaded everything they owned into their RV and retired to Florida, where a man didn’t have to shovel snow or wear long johns nine months out of the year.

His
stomach growled, and Davy silently told it to chill out. With a sigh, he glanced into his rearview mirror, signaled, and pulled onto the shoulder. He wheeled the cruiser around in a tight U-turn, back in the direction from which he’d come, and pulled to a stop behind the broken-down Volvo. Activating his blue flashers so some dumb-ass wouldn’t plough into him—not that flashing blue lights would necessarily prevent that—he unfastened his seat belt.

It looked like the Big Mac would have to wait.

“Um…Mom?”

Annie glanced up, and her daughter pointed a slender, black-clad shoulder toward the rear of the Volvo. Stepping out from beneath the hood, Annie peered down the side of the car. Parked directly behind her was a white Crown Victoria with blue lights flashing. She’d never even heard it pull up; the hiss from the escaping steam had drowned out the sound of the cruiser’s engine. This was great. Really great. All she wanted was to blend in and be invisible. Instead, twenty-six hours after she hit town, she’d already attracted the attention of the local cops.

Good going, Kendall.

She wiped her hands on her jeans and stood her ground as he opened his door and emerged from the patrol car.
God,
she prayed,
please don’t let him be one of those small-town Nazi types.
As a cop’s wife, she’d seen more than her share of men who let the badge go to their heads. The last thing she needed was some redneck bully giving her a hard time.

He had long legs. They didn’t move quickly, but with each step they covered a lot of ground. The rest of him was tall and rangy, with dark blond hair that fell neatly to a spot just above his collar. As he drew nearer, she guessed that he was somewhere near forty. His eyes hidden behind polarized lenses, he wore the starchy, spit-shined look and the smooth confidence of every cop she’d ever known.

“Ma’am,” he
said. “Mind if I take a look?”

Annie tucked her hands into her pockets so he wouldn’t see that they were trembling. “Officer,” she said. “By all means.”

He moved past her, leaned over the engine, and poked around. Checking belts, hoses, all the things she’d already checked. The back of his neck was several shades paler than the rest of him. Either he always wore a collar, or his haircut was very recent.

A trickle of sweat ran down her spine.

It didn’t take him long. “Looks like your radiator’s shot,” he said, rubbing his hands together and emerging from beneath the hood. It was the same conclusion she’d already reached; it didn’t take an Einstein to figure it out. “You have AAA?”

It had been one of the first things she’d done, even before she bought the car. One more legitimately acquired piece of ID, one step closer to cementing her new identity. Who would question the validity of an AAA card? “Yes,” she said.

“If you’d like, I can give Sonny’s Towing a call. He’ll haul her in and have her fixed up in no time.”

“That won’t be necessary, Officer. I can call AAA myself.”

He adjusted his sunglasses. “Yeah,” he said, “you probably can. But I can save you time if I call Sonny directly. We went to high school together.”

Ah, yes.
The insidious old boys network. A hard nugget of resentment sprang to life inside her. She opened her mouth to argue, then realized it wasn’t worth the effort. “Thank you,” she said stiffly. “Let me get my card.”

He followed her, stood waiting by the driver’s door while she fumbled clumsily for her wallet. He took the AAA card without speaking, walked back to his patrol car, and got in.

“Mom?” Sophie whined from her perch by the roadside. “What about my Popsicles? They’ll melt if they don’t get home pretty soon.”

“If
they melt, I’ll buy new ones.”

The cop climbed back out of his patrol car and returned to where she stood with her arms folded across her chest. Handing her the AAA card, he said, “Sonny’ll be along in about a half hour. Meantime, you should probably get those groceries home. You help me load ’em in the cruiser and I’ll give you a ride.”

“There’s no need for you to do that, Officer—” she focused on his name tag “—Hunter. There must be taxi service in Serenity.”

“I can’t let you do that, ma’am.”

“I—why, for God’s sake?”

“There’s only one taxi in Serenity, and you’d be taking your life in your hands. Believe me, you’re better off riding with me.”

Was this his attempt at being charming? She couldn’t see his eyes behind those dark glasses, and it increased her irritation, because she had no way of gauging his sincerity. Or lack thereof.

“You don’t even know where I live,” she said. “For all you know, I could be just passing through.”

“I know where you live.”

Her pulse began a slow, steady thrum. “How, exactly, is that possible?”

His face, chiseled from hard stone, relaxed into a semblance of a smile. It erased ten years from his age. “Serenity’s a small town,” he said. “When an attractive blonde driving a blue Volvo with Nevada plates buys a run-down motel and video rental store, everybody in town hears about it.”

So much for blending in and being invisible.

Sophie and the groceries took up the back seat, so Annie rode up front with Hunter. He wasn’t the type to make small talk. Instead, he sat silent and aloof, both hands on the wheel, eyes
steady on the road ahead, all business. Annie took the opportunity to study him from the corner of her eye. His profile was chiseled to stone-cold perfection, his chin firm and unyielding, his nose long and straight. She suspected he didn’t smile often. Above the blue collar, his Adam’s apple was clearly visible.

She’d always drummed it into Sophie’s head that policemen were her friends. After all, Sophie’s father had been a cop. Annie had always trusted them implicitly until she’d been given a reason not to. What a bizarre turn her life had taken. She’d been married to a cop for a dozen years. Yet now, sitting beside this cop in the front seat of his patrol car, her palms were sweaty, her heartbeat irregular. Fear did the damnedest things to a person.

She wondered what color Hunter’s eyes were, hidden away behind those dark glasses. Blue? Brown? There was an aura of mystery to him that piqued her interest. The glasses provided excellent camouflage. Did the uniform do the same? What other secrets might he be hiding?

Estelle was standing in the doorway of the shop when they pulled up. “Davy,” she said to the cop, and he acknowledged her with a silent nod of his head. “What happened?” she asked Annie.

“Busted radiator,” Annie said, scrambling to follow Hunter’s long legs up the outside staircase to her apartment. He stepped aside and she squeezed past him on the narrow landing, fumbling to get the key in the lock. They set the groceries on the kitchen counter and went back for a second load. Estelle, looking cool and bright in a lime-colored blouse and yellow plaid pants, leaned against the door frame and watched them.

“I’d help,” she said, “but…”

“You’re pregnant,” Annie said. “You shouldn’t be carrying heavy things.”

“Can
I get that in writing so I can shove it in Boomer’s face?”

While Annie waited, Hunter leaned into the back seat of the cruiser. He gathered up a couple of bags, turned and loaded them into her arms without speaking. The next two bags were Sophie’s. She groaned when they came her way. “This living on the second floor,” Soph said, “is really going to suck.”

Annie shot her a lethal look. Her daughter scowled, but she knew when it was time to shut up. Sophie hoisted the bags high and headed back up the stairs.

Hunter closed the door of the police car and followed Annie up the stairs. They set the last of the groceries on the kitchen counter and stood there in an awkward silence. “Before I forget,” he said, “you’d probably like Sonny’s phone number.”

“Oh. Yes. Of course.” Annie dug in her shoulder bag, came up with a pen and a scrap of paper, scribbled the number he gave her and then read it back to him to make sure she’d copied it down correctly. He reached up to adjust the glasses, and for an instant, she thought he was going to take them off. She waited, her breath held at bay. But he lowered his hand.

“Don’t let Sonny take advantage of you,” he said. “If his price doesn’t sound reasonable, insist on seeing a written estimate. You’re a woman, and you know how that can go.”

Capping the pen, she said briskly, “Thank you. For everything.”

“Just doing my job,” he said. “Have a nice day.” And he nodded politely in Sophie’s direction.

Annie followed him to the door and watched him walk back down the stairs and fold his lanky frame into the police cruiser. The Crown Victoria started with a powerful roar. He adjusted his seat belt, tugged on it to make sure it was secure, then glanced up at her, still standing in the open doorway. Their
gazes met, and he stared straight at her through those opaque glasses that revealed nothing. Then, turning his attention elsewhere, he spoke into his two-way radio, wheeled the car around, and pulled out onto the highway.

“Mom? Stuff’s melting all over the counter.”

Ah, to be fifteen again, and totally helpless. Dragged back to reality by her daughter’s voice, Annie realized she was still clutching the phone number to Sonny’s Towing. Folding the piece of paper, she tucked it into the pocket of her jeans, closed the door, and headed back to the kitchen to salvage what was left of her perishables.