First Offense (3 page)

Although he was concerned, she could see that he was also titillated by this public exposure. When she spoke, her voice was low but cutting. “I have a son. Glen. I can’t afford to carry on like this in public, subject myself to ridicule. Especially not here at the courthouse.”

He tried to take her in his arms, but she pushed him away and reached for the heavy fire door.

“Don’t you think David has been through enough?” she tossed out, her voice shaking. “He certainly doesn’t need to hear that his mother is screwing in the stairwell at the courthouse.”

“Ann,” Glen said, trying to get her to calm down, “even if someone did see us, it’s not going to get back to David. Aren’t you overreacting? So, maybe it was a risky thing to do, but it’s not a four-alarm fire.”

She sighed, letting the tension go. He was right. There were more serious things to be concerned about. David was one. “I just want him to accept you, get to know you, before he finds out we’re sleeping together. And he will. Glen. He might even suspect it now. He’s very observant for a twelve-year-old.”

Glen held up his hand, irritated. “It’s not like I haven’t tried,” he said.

They stood there facing each other without speaking. Ann felt sorry for him. He’d made every effort to gain her son’s approval. A week ago, she’d casually mentioned that Tommy Reed, a homicide detective and old friend, was taking her son to a Raiders football game. Glen had insisted on tagging along. Not only had the boy remained aloof, barely acknowledging Glen’s presence, but Reed and David had purposely excluded Glen from every conversation. Glen had even bought David a Raiders pennant, but when the game was over, David had left it on the stadium bench, telling Glen that he didn’t like pennants. Ann had scolded him, but beyond that there was little she could do.

Ann knew she had to give the man credit. Faced with a hostile kid and a woman recovering from the loss of her husband, most men would have walked away. “David will come around. Glen. We just have to give him time.” She glanced at her watch, reaching for the door handle again. “I’ve got to go.”

With that, she touched a finger to his lips in a mock kiss, smiled, and walked through the door.

Back in her office, Ann went into an interview room and dictated her report. By the time she finished and returned to her desk, most of the other probation officers had already left for the day. She thought of calling David and telling him she was running late, but after the frenzied coupling in the stairwell, she was in a strange mood—pensive, inert. Picking up her briefcase, she had decided to forgo the call and leave when her gaze landed on her husband’s picture on her desk. Setting the briefcase down, Ann brought the photograph close to her face. He would always look like this, she thought. No gray hair, no wrinkles, not a day older. Sometimes the only image she could remember was the one she was holding.

The time had come, she decided, sucking in a breath and then letting it out slowly. She opened her desk drawer and gently slid the glass frame inside, knowing this was a significant moment. Funny, she thought, sometimes milestones in a person’s life came and went in the most mundane ways. A picture placed in a drawer. A letter tossed in a mailbox. A key removed from a key chain.

Thank God for Glen’s persistence, she thought, grabbing her briefcase and heading for the elevators, feeling lighter and younger than she’d felt in years. Without Glen she would still be mired in the past, sitting home alone every night feeling sorry for herself. Seven times over the past year, the district attorney had asked her out, and each time Ann had turned him down. But he was patient and polite, expressing his concern for her and her son each time they spoke, and he continued to ask until she finally said yes.

“Yeah, sure,” Ann said, chuckling at herself as she pushed the button on the elevator to go down. Now that she knew him, she wondered if her repeatedly turning Glen down was what had fueled his interest. Who cares? she thought. Glen might be brash and a little wild in some ways, but he made her feel alive. Now all she had to do was get her son to let go and move forward with his life.

That could take some doing, though. The boy was as stubborn as his father.

A highway patrol officer. Hank Carlisle had been nicknamed “Bulldog” by his fellow officers. Although he had been six feet tall, his stockiness had made him appear closer to the ground. He had worn his light brown hair in a military-style crew cut, but the “Bulldog” handle developed because of his thick neck and small, cunning eyes. That and his explosive temper. Ann had accepted her husband’s fierceness as an assurance of security. Unlike the average police spouse, she hadn’t worried about him getting injured on the job. Of course, Ann’s father had been a police captain, and Ann herself had started her career as an officer with the Ventura police department. She wasn’t exactly the run-of-the-mill police wife.

She’d always seen Hank as indestructible. She even used to crack jokes around the office that it was the people on the streets that she worried about, not her husband.

Then, four years ago, the incomprehensible had occurred: Hank Carlisle had simply vanished off the face of the earth.

His police cruiser had been found abandoned alongside the interstate just beyond the Arizona-California state line—that long, dusty stretch of road highway patrol officers call no-man’s-land. The car doors as well as the trunk of the police unit had been left standing wide open, and no blood or other evidence was found in the vehicle. He’d made no radio transmissions the hour prior to his disappearance.

The investigators had put it together only one way. Sergeant Hank Carlisle had made a routine traffic stop that summer night four years ago, probably to issue a speeding citation. The motorist he’d stopped had been a wanted criminal. Knowing the policy of the highway patrol was to check wants and warrants on all traffic stops, the person or persons had jumped Carlisle as he walked back to his unit to use his radio. The most likely scenario was that he had been struck from behind with something heavy, the butt of a weapon perhaps. Then when he was unconscious, he had been disarmed, transported to some unknown location, and executed.

After months of digging in the miles of barren, sandy earth, the authorities had failed to locate the body. They’d used dogs, helicopters, and the most sophisticated aerial photography, and had canvassed the area on foot and in four-wheel-drive vehicles. But they had found nothing. No body, no evidence, not a single thread they could pursue.

Ann had suffered through grueling interviews from highway patrol investigators, question after question about their marriage, their finances, their friends and associates. They had to rule out everything, they told her, even the possibility that her husband had purposely staged his own disappearance for some reason they had as yet to uncover.

Thank God, Ann thought now, as she stepped off the elevator, the ruling of foul play had been officially entered in the file. The ruling was important for more reasons than her peace of mind. Although the department had been issuing Ann small checks each month from Hank’s retirement fund, it had not yet released his life insurance money. She could use that money to put David through college.

Ann reached her ‘87 black Jeep station wagon, nearly alone in the vast parking lot. Once she was in the driver’s seat, she turned the key in the ignition. There was only a click. “Damn,” she said, trying it again. Another metallic click; the engine wasn’t engaging at all. It couldn’t be the battery, she told herself, getting more annoyed by the second. She’d just replaced the battery last week. This time it had to be something even more costly—like the starter. She got out of the car, slammed the door, and stood there trying to figure out what to do.

Glancing back at the court complex, Ann thought of returning to call the emergency road service. For a few moments she just leaned back against the car and let the cool evening air brush across her face, telling herself that she mustn’t let little things like this get to her.

Her eyes rested on the windows of the jail, and she watched as shadowy figures moved around inside. The complex took up an entire city block, housing almost every official agency in the county. During the day it was next to impossible to find a parking place, though Ann estimated there were enough slots for five hundred or more cars. The county had also sprung for some decent landscaping. Oleander bushes formed a tall hedge all around the parking lot, filtering the noise from Victoria Boulevard, a major divided thoroughfare in Ventura. Ann thought the bushes were nice, since they softened the concrete and gave her a little greenery to look at from her window.

The road service could only tow her to the nearest garage if it was the starter as she suspected. She decided to walk home. It wasn’t that late, and David had probably snacked all afternoon anyway. In the morning she’d ask her supervisor’s husband if he would have someone look at her car. He was the service manager of a local car dealership and frequently had had Ann’s car repaired for free. Besides, she told herself, her house was only five blocks up Victoria. If she walked briskly, she could be home faster than if she returned to the building and called a cab.

Ann began walking toward the exit that she normally used when driving and then changed course. She’d spotted an opening in the oleanders in the far comer of the lot that would place her right onto the sidewalk for Victoria Boulevard. From there she could walk straight up the hill to her house.

Just as she reached the opening, Ann heard a loud pop and jerked her head around. It sounded like a gunshot. She scanned the empty parking lot and then peered through the foliage to the street. There was nothing. Steadying her nerves, she decided it must have been a car backfiring. People were always mistaking backfires for gunshots. As a cop, she’d responded hundreds of times to such false alarms.

Bending down, she ducked inside the bushes. As her heels sank into the mud, she scowled, thinking her shortcut might not have been such a good idea after all. The automatic sprinklers had just gone off, and the ground was soaked. “Shit,” she said, squatting down even lower to inspect her shoes. Mud was oozing out around them. She’d have to remind herself to clean off her shoes before she went in the house, or the carpet would be ruined.

Pushing back the branches of the tall shrubs, Ann was about to step out onto the sidewalk when she heard another loud crack.

Her shoulder…her left shoulder.

“Oh, God,” she cried. Her mind began spinning, and she couldn’t catch her breath. Instinctively her hand flew to the spot where the pain was, and she touched something wet. When she brought her hand to her face and saw the blood, she screamed. “I’ve been shot! God, help me…someone’s shooting at me!”

She heard an engine roar, tires squealing, and smelled the distinctive odor of burning rubber.

Get down, she told herself, but she was unable to move, paralyzed with fear. Stumbling forward, lashing out at the bushes with her hands, Ann fell forward onto the concrete sidewalk, her good arm cushioning her face from being badly scraped. “I’ve been shot! Someone help me! Please…get an ambulance…police….”

Even though Ann was desperately trying to scream and draw attention to herself, she could hear her own words mumbled against the sidewalk. Like boiling water poured over her back, she felt the hot blood spreading, dampening her blouse.

She tried to slow her racing heartbeat, tried to find strength inside the panic. The bullet could have struck an artery. Stretching her fingers forward, fighting against the pain and raging fear, she found them resting in a spreading puddle of her own blood.

As her life pumped out on the sidewalk, Ann could hear her internal organs with unnatural clarity: her lungs straining for oxygen, her heart pulsating and pumping, pumping, like the sound an oil rig made. She was going to die. But she couldn’t die. It wasn’t fair. She’d already paid her dues in suffering. Her precious child…he needed her. She was all he had in the world. If there was a God, He just couldn’t let this happen.

Cars were zipping by on Victoria Boulevard, the exhaust fumes choking her as she gasped for breath. Without success she tried to make her cries louder, attract someone’s attention before it was too late and she passed out. “Help me…please help me…I’ve been shot…”

Her face fell back to the cement, the coarse surface scraping her chin. Black spots were dancing in front of her eyes. She was nauseated, both hot and cold at the same time. I can’t pass out, she told herself. If she passed out, she would bleed to death for sure.

Gritting her teeth and pushing with all her might, Ann managed to get up on all fours. Then she collapsed again and had to struggle all over.

Ann could hear noises: cars passing, people’s voices and laughter, a siren somewhere in the distance, a jet streaking over her head. I’m right here, her mind kept screaming. People were all around her. Why couldn’t they see her, hear her? “Help me!” she cried again, this time louder. “Please help me!”

Turning her face toward the sound of voices, Ann realized the parking lot for Marie Callender’s was right across the divided parkway. People were walking in and out of the restaurant. She was so close—yet not close enough. The traffic, the wide divided roadway, and Ann’s position right outside the line of shrubbery made her all but invisible in the darkness.

“Help me!” she called again, fixing her line of sight on a couple with a young child who were about to get into a dark blue station wagon. The woman was laughing and talking to the man, the little boy’s hand clasped in her own. Just then the boy turned and looked across the street toward Ann. “I’m here…over here!” she yelled, lifting her head off the concrete. “I’ve been shot. Get help!”

While Ann watched in agony, the little boy’s mother jerked his hand. Not breaking stride, the family got inside their car and were soon pulling out onto the street. “No,” she cried, a pathetic wail. “Don’t…leave…”

She was going to die.

As the puddle of blood increased and the pain intensified, Ann tried to focus on the image of her son’s face, use it to fuel herself, give herself strength. Once again she tried to push her weakening body to her feet, blocking out the pain. It’s not an artery, she told herself. You’re going to be fine. Maybe it wasn’t even a bullet. Maybe she’d backed into a jagged metal wire…something sharp.