Games of the Heart (Crimson Romance) (19 page)

His voice was raspy. He looked away, but not before I saw his jaw tighten in barely concealed anger. When he looked back it was gone, and he was the logical cop again, fully in control of his emotions.

“It’s the ones who are rejected that end up as drug runners or hookers. If they live,” he added. The guy was a marshmallow inside, and I consider that a fine quality in a man.

Christy stuck her head around the corner. “Boss? I’m going to take Mikel and the dog into the lounge. The strangest thing happened. The boy said something to the dog, which I suppose was ‘sit,’ and the dog did it. Then he said something which probably was ‘stay,’ and the dog did that, too. The kid’s got the dog doing tricks.”

“What’s this about, Jane?” Tom asked, as if I knew anything more about Tuffy than he did.

“I can find out. I’m meeting the woman soon who happened to be his former owner. You remember her from that afternoon we met? Yeah, figured. She’s not all that evil apparently, since she’s arranged to have a star-studded event to benefit my youth group. We need about two million dollars for a new youth center at church, and she’s offered to help raise it. Along with Delta Cheney.”

With the mention of the PSA’s executive, Tom’s smile flat lined.

“My bet’s that the dog had a Polish trainer,” I said.

“What’s your answer?” came the grumble.

“Sure, I’ll ask about the trainer. Oh, about working with the department. Would I be with you?” I tried, actually prayed, that I didn’t sound too eager, no drooling allowed.

“Us. The team.”

“Oh, absolutely.” I chug-a-lugged the bottle of water. “I have an appointment with Delta Cheney to adopt a child.”

He blinked five times, and yes, I counted. “You’re serious? Or snooping?”

I held up my hand. “Wait, I’m a minister. I want to see what’s there for myself.”

“After all you know? After seeing that skinny little guy playing with the Polish therapy dog? Oh, I get it. You’re kidding me. Okay. Right. So if I’d planned to put an undercover cop in their reach, I couldn’t have done better, Jane, but only if you’re ready to roll on this. Deal?” He stuck out a hand, and I grabbed it. It was more to touch him than agree. He tossed his empty bottle in the recycling bin and said, “When you see the Cheney woman tomorrow, Jane, ask about ‘pre-birth’ adoption possibilities.”

“What? I don’t know what pre-birth adoption is, but it stinks like gray-market babies, infants produced the traditional or even new-fashioned way on order for a customer.”

He was watching my eyes, apparently, because he filled in the blank stare. “Yeah, hmm, you didn’t hear that one? Rumor has it, from something the Feds slipped, that the PSA has a community of women in some Eastern European nation, Albania they think, who continue to produce babies on demand. The sick part? The Feds seem to think the women are there without their consent.”

“Sex slaves. Baby machines.” I breathed the bitter words.

He frowned so deeply he could frighten small children, dogs, criminals, and possibly preachers. “You realize this has international implications. That’s why the Feds are involved, but they’re allowing us regular cops on the beat to snoop around, too. So, Jane, can you ask about that? You’re a preacher. It’s your moral duty.”

Could I actually ask Delta Cheney how babies were made? Could I sleep at night if I didn’t?

Tuffy and I got back before Gramps and Harmony. The pooch hit his designer-style water bowl, lapping like he’d crossed the Sahara rather than just East Sahara Boulevard on our way back to the condo, then did three twists and belly flopped on the kitchen floor. I knelt down and petted his well-cut doggie trim, scratching him around the ears. “So you understand Polish, my mutty pal? What if Mikel could talk to you? Would he tell you what happened? Could what he knows stop the black-market adoptions and those gray-market babies? Would he ever tell anyone?” Tuffy licked my fingers, sighed deeply, and closed his eyes in dog bliss.

I headed to the refrigerator. A girl has to eat when she’s befuddled, and I was befuddled. Sex slaves. Baby machines. Faith-based swindlers breaking the very golden rule I held dear while the PSA stayed lily white.

Where were the disenchanted customers? There had to be some, someplace. And why no legal charges? Did the PSA somehow blackmail those who returned handicapped kids?

Why wouldn’t anyone come forward? What power could Delta Cheney hold? Were they embarrassed or made ashamed, like rape victims of years past?

I wanted to commit gastronomical suicide. But everywhere I looked, from the freezer to see if there was any Ben & Jerry’s left (there wasn’t), to the vegetable drawer (for carrots, but I passed on them), I saw Mikel’s sapphire-colored eyes, saw the tentative smile when he was hugging Harmony’s dog, and cringed with his limp as he ran with Tuffy to get the ball.

What heartless scumbag could have dropped the child off in the middle of a sweltering city like this, most likely thousands of miles from anyone who spoke his language?

Pastor Bob Normal, good and faithful pastor to Desert Hills Community Church, boasted of his connection with PSA. He had created a mega church out of a tiny group of believers, built a campus that was getting bigger by the year. Was the church built with funds from PSA? How was Ab Normal connected?

I snapped up a bag of Oreos and headed to the living room. Using at least two hundred calories to open the confounded plastic sleeve, I licked the frosting out of five, then systematically crunched the cookies. It helped, for a second or three.

Then there was that tasty and sweet Carl Lipca. Could he be working with the Feds? Or for a story? I’d seen some journalists wave their First Amendment rights like banners, and some were tossed in jail because they wouldn’t reveal their sources, yet Carl didn’t seem the type. Was it all an act with Carl just to impress Petra? Guys have been known to do more for full-body contact. Or did he want to be there when the Feds cracked this open like a watermelon being tossed from the top of the MGM Grand Hotel?

Maybe Monica Wainwright-Dobson, my brand-new BFF, would know something. I wondered, too, if my senator pal Geraldine had sniffed stuff on the PSA in Washington D.C. If anyone could get some dirt on them, it would be Gerry.

WWJD? In case you missed this, it’s “What would Jesus do,” the hip Christian saying of the 90s, but bam. It really meant “What would Jane do?” Not in any lifetime would I keep my nose out of this. Listen, if I could do something about women being sold as sex slaves and children produced and sold much like trendy shoes from Jimmy Choo, you betcha I would.

I was in bed when Gramps and Harmony returned and pretended to be asleep. I didn’t want to talk about what I’d learned, not yet.

So for a five hours I flipped from one position to another blaming it on the cookies, pizza, a handful or three of chips, and that carrot. Darned vegetables. You just cannot mix junk food with produce without problems. I woke with a smashing headache and a raspy cough. As I sat on the edge of the bed, snot poured from my pink little nose, and I knew the germs came straight from those kids at VBS.

But buck up I did, because there were no substitutes for the weary. At about eleven I was standing in Vera’s office as a volley of sneezes knocked me on my knickers.

Vera scooted her typing chair away from me at warp speed. “Your fault, you know.” She rubbed on hand sanitizer, reapplied lipstick, and brushed more blusher on her apple-colored cheeks. “You get close to those rug rats, those kids, and they’ll gladly share their germs.”

I mumbled, “Ah be fine.”

“Yeah, like fun you’ll be fine. Hey, here’s the deal.” Vera stood and patted my head as if I were a child, then withdrew and used hand sanitizer. “Got to take the offerings to the bank. Pastor limped off to a city council planning meeting today. So could you fill in for me, and I’ll cover for you this afternoon so you and that bulbous nose can sniffle out of here?”

I mumbled it was allergies and added, “I’ll be okay. Why don’t you get lunch, too?”

“Might,” she said, jumping back after another round of sneezes, and grabbed her purse. “There’s some of that non-drowsy allergy stuff in the middle of my desk drawer or in the storeroom, upper shelf. Take two. You’re disgusting.”

I slumped at her desk, answered the phone a few times, swallowed pills, and was holding my head when Carl Lipca came in around the corner with a mission in mind or a bug in his boxers. He squealed to a stop when he saw me at Vera’s desk.

“Carl. Morning.” I shoved snot away, flipped a tissue, my last, in the trash.

“Vera here?” He had the look of a deer in the headlights.

“Da bank.” Which meant “at the bank,” and because mucus waterfalled over my top lip at that second, I covered my nose and mouth with my hand as I dug into Vera’s desk drawers for tissues.

“Ah, oh, I’ll come back.”

“What do you need? Are you here to see Pastor Bob?” Still no tissues. I was now heading into the storage room, filled with paper, copies of Sunday bulletins, stacks of church manuals, heck, even a secreted away Hershey’s dark chocolate bar, but no stinking tissues. A roll of paper towels or a sheet of sandpaper would have done the job. Heck, a sleeve would have been good, but I was wearing a sleeveless shirt with a ruffled collar that buttoned in a V at my cleavage, and that ruffle was looking mighty handy. I sat down again at the desk, exhausted as the germs began to take over my entire body.

He pulled a chair up close to the desk and lowered his voice. “Vera and I have coffee and chat sometimes. What do you know about that Polish social club?”

“With Petra? You’re still a couple? Did you talk about the issues of trust?” I sniffed and once more tried to yank open the small cabinet next to Vera’s desk. But of course, they were still locked. The situation was speeding from simply disgusting to a downright downpour.

“I never tried. I know in the club there are these women, grannies that I interviewed for an article I’m doing on second careers. They’re a wild bunch, and my mom is one of the ringleaders. At first I thought they were pulling my leg, you know how older ladies can be.”

Not one stinkin’ tissue in the place. I pinched my nostrils, which was as helpful as that Dutch kid and the dike. Snot spilled over my fingers. “Wait, Carl. Hold that thought.”

Pastor Bob’s office door was open. “Tissues,” I muttered. “So much for those stupid allergy pills.” I flopped in the pastor’s overstuffed chair and swung around to the credenza, opening and slamming the cupboards. Okay, this was an invasion of privacy, but frenzied situations require frenetic measures. With great buckets of snot cascading down my chin, or so it felt, common sense wasn’t cutting it.

Then I spied them. Tissues. Straight back in a nook to the left was pay dirt, a jumbo box, and as I pulled it out, along with it came a stack of papers. I honked until geese flew overhead looking for mates, and scuttled down to snatch the scattering of papers.

“Jane, are you okay in there? Did you find the tissues?”

I choked, gasped, and wheezed, not from snot, but from the words on the papers. “Achoo. Be right there,” I managed.

These weren’t everyday, ordinary scraps of paper. They were promissory notes from low-end casinos. No degree in rocket science needed to see that. One Horse Club, Hearts and Clubs, Pete’s Gulch and the Last Chance Saloon. Bob Normal was a dude in debt.

He owed way more than I could make in the next thirty years, with IOUs ranging from a few hundred, to wait, $25,000 at Harrah’s in Laughlin, a hundred miles south of Las Vegas. I skittered under his desk, snatched the last promissory note, swallowed hard, snagged more tissues, and then tried to stack the notes and the tissues back as they had been.

And just in time. Carl filled the doorway. He was chunkier than I remembered, and his eyes scanned the room. Could he know what was on the shelf? Was he here as a friend of Vera’s or a snoopy journalist? “You better?” Carl asked as I walked to Vera’s desk and plopped down.

“No, worse,” I said, but at least I had a wad of tissues, even if I’d gathered up a wad of troubles. Big time.

Carl was talking. His mouth moved, I heard noise, but my brain could only focus on all those zeros on the promissory notes.

“Back to the grannies. Could you focus, Pastor? The Buscia Brigade, that’s what these grannies call themselves. They had all sorts of questions for me. Mind you, I thought I was going to get to interview them.”

“Oh?” I said. “Frankly, Carl, I don’t get what that has to do with me.”

“Yeah, they know a lot about the PSA and your Ms. Cheney. More than they told me. There’s some bucks going in and out of that organization. Makes me wonder who’s doing the laundry there.”

“She’s not ‘my’ Ms. Cheney, Carl.” But the guy had gotten my attention. Was my good pastor gambling to somehow support the PSA? The only way to double your money, I had heard, was to fold it over, but there was plenty more going on here than my folksy ideas.

“You don’t look so good,” he said, reaching into his L. L. Bean briefcase to hand me two mini tissue packets. In the next move, he withdrew a notebook from his pocket and dropped a bomb. “You heard how they’re killing unsuspecting children by leaving them penniless in cities around the country when they can no longer place the kids up for adoption?”

I faked a sneeze to cover the gasp. He knew. “Sounds like a plot for a movie.” I willed my mouth to stop moving.

“You’re smart, Jane. Think that Delta Cheney could be involved in this sort of unsavory business? She’s socially connected in the community, and she’s known around here as one of the biggest philanthropists Vegas has, right?” A pen hovered over his tablet but he wrote nothing. “Petra clams up when I want to know, even though we’re … well, um, getting romantic.” He winked.

I wanted to retch. Way TMI. I snorted snot and asked, “Have you talked with the right people, Carl?” And most likely those “right people” were me because unless I shut up, I was certain my direct quotes would be in the
Journal
.

“Even my mom won’t let this go. I’m a no-account journalist, not one of the talking heads on FOX or CNN.”