Touch of Evil (9 page)

There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.

—George Bernard Shaw

“Right here.” Ross gestured toward a twin bed covered with a denim comforter, the centerpiece of a neat, boyishly blue room.

Justine’s father brushed a kiss over his grandson’s temple as he set the boy down. Perched along the bed’s edge, Noah whimpered, clinging to his grandfather before allowing his thin arms to slip down to his sides.

Noticing Ross for the first time, the boy stiffened. “No go hos-pit-al,” he insisted. “No touch. Bad touch.”

Ross lowered himself to his knees on the braided oval rug to bring himself down to Noah’s level. Though the child’s eyes were swollen and his nose streamed, his color looked good, and Ross could see no blood, nor any obvious signs of physical distress.

“That’s right, Noah. No hospital for now, if you can help me right here. Your grandpa will be staying with us, and we’ll do things nice and easy.” Ross hoped he could keep his word, prayed he would see nothing that would force him to traumatize this child further.

“No touch.” Sobbing loudly, Noah ducked his head and covered his face with shaking forearms, exposing the bruises Justine had mentioned. Bruises that appeared to be the fingerprints of a grown man.

The sight resurrected a memory of the saddest duty Ross had ever performed as a physician: a rape exam on a four-year-old boy, with a female police detective serving as a witness. He’d wanted to quit that day, probably would have if the detective—the woman who would later become his wife—had not convinced him that the two of them were helping, that if they could not bear to do it, a greater wrong would take place and the child could not begin to heal.

Where are you now, Anne, when I need you?

“Can you take your shirt off for me?” Ross asked gently.

Noah shook his head, his body so tense that the move looked puppetlike, his troubled expression reminding Ross of Justine’s.

“Your buttons don’t match up, son,” Ed Truitt said offhandedly. “And anyway, it’s dirty from all that crawling around back in the feed room. How ’bout let’s put something clean on. You like to feel clean, don’t you?”

Though Noah didn’t respond, he looked down to see his buttons were askew and started pulling at them, clearly agitated.

His grandfather took a couple of T-shirts on hangers from the closet. “You want this one or the blue one?”

But Ross’s attention was completely focused on Noah as he pulled off his shirt…

To reveal the rough hemp loop that dangled like a pendant around his neck.

When her father insisted on riding in the ambulance with Ross and Noah, Justine was too stunned to protest, too numbed by horror to do anything but gather her insurance information and mutely climb into the passenger seat of Gwen’s car.

“By now, Noah’s already sleeping from the sedative,” Gwen reassured her. “And he’s in the best of hands.”

But Justine had had all the placating she could handle. “Just whose hands was he in this afternoon, Gwen? And where the hell were you while some lunatic took my son?”

Gwen’s gaze jerked away, but not before Justine caught the gleam of moisture in her blue eyes.

“I’m sorry.” Justine brought a fisted hand up to her forehead. “So sorry. I’m mad at myself, that’s all.
I’m
the one who’s responsible for Noah.”

“You’re frightened and upset. Anger’s only natural,” Gwen said, reminding Justine that the younger woman had studied psychology at a private college that cost more in annual tuition than the average salary of a deputy. Which was only one of the factors that made Gwen Bollinger ridiculously overqualified for the position she’d accepted.

“That doesn’t make it right,” Justine told her.

“Apology accepted,” Gwen said. Still, she looked relieved when Roger Savoy intercepted them near the emergency room’s entrance and pulled Justine aside.

“Any news yet?” Justine’s hand trembled as she shoved a loose lock from her ponytail behind one ear. A sign of nervousness, she knew, a weakness Roger could exploit. But with her mind crammed with fear for her son, she couldn’t bring herself to care.

The deputy shook his head, then ushered her into a small lounge, a private room donors had furnished with sofas, plush chairs, and a television set. Barely inside the doorway, Justine balked, remembering the way the moss green walls had closed in on her after Lou died. Remembering that this was where the hospital placed the families of their most seriously ill patients. Where they parked those most likely to create a disturbance.

“You need to sit,” Roger urged her. “You’re in no condition to—”

“Noah’s my son,” she said. “My place is with him.”

Before stepping inside the ambulance, Ross had laid his
hand on her arm and reassured her that Noah’s preliminary exam had uncovered no sign of severe physical trauma or sexual abuse. But what of the emotional? What of the damned
noose
Ross had shown her draped around her son’s neck and hidden beneath his shirt? She flashed onto the image, nausea coiling at her center.

Savoy’s grave look deepened. “You’d be better off waiting here now. You’re upset.”

“People keep freaking telling me that. You figure maybe I’ve forgotten?”

Savoy shook his head, the white patches at his temples looking as if they’d claimed more territory lately.

“Can’t figure much of anything about this,” he admitted. “Why anybody would go after first you and then your kid. How it might connect up to these suicides.”

“Suspicious fatalities,” Justine corrected. “Maybe we do have a killer. A killer clever enough to stage the deaths of three grown men.”

Roger met her gaze and held it for several seconds before nodding. “Has to be considered. Or reconsidered, in this case.”

“And crazy enough to come after both me and my kid.”

“What I can’t understand is why. With two of the three deaths already ruled suicides, why would he risk calling attention to—”

“I don’t give a damn why.” Once more, Justine pictured her finger squeezing the trigger of a gun shoved beneath a thickly whiskered chin. “All I want to know is
who.
”

Roger stepped back, alarm dawning in his blue eyes. “
Justine.
Sheriff Wofford.”

Confused, she stared back at him.

Roger cleared his throat and said, “You might want to pass me that weapon. Before…before you scare somebody.”

It was only then that she registered that her hand was clutching the grip of her gun. It remained in her holster,
which she must have strapped on while Ross and her dad were in the bedroom with Noah. But she had no memory of doing so, no more than she had any conscious recollection of reaching for it as she spoke to Roger.

Yet she
did
remember something. A different conversation with her second-in-command at yesterday afternoon’s crime scene.

Suicides tend to cluster like that,
he had told her.
Lectured
her, as insufferable as ever.
Not uncommon to see a group of running buddies do themselves in, one by one.

Except this one’s no suicide,
she heard herself answer, the memory so clear and true she didn’t doubt it for a second. Even though she couldn’t recall why she’d spoken those words with such conviction.

Shock rolled through her mind like thunder, long and ominous. She’d known for months that Roger despised her, known he was waiting for her to make one final misstep that would leave the department in his hands.

“Why?”
she demanded. “Why did you ask yesterday, after I came to, if I’d informed Dee LeJeune of her son’s
suicide
? Why, when you knew damned well I was looking at this one as a murder?”

Rather than answering, Roger stared mutely at her gun hand, a dew of sweat erupting on his upper lip.

More than that, she saw the tightening of the muscles in his neck and shoulders. The tell, she thought, remembering what Lou, an unrepentant poker junkie, would have called it.

Savoy was readying himself to use force—or maybe simply to defend himself against her.

Was this what their professional rivalry would boil down to? With Noah a short distance away, needing her to offer comfort and stability, was she going to let this months-long pissing contest come to a head now?

Guilt shafted through her, swift and shocking as a bolt out of the blue. This was insane.

“Let’s both of us calm down,” she said. “Discuss this like adults.” Relaxing her own right hand, she waited for her deputy to follow suit.

Except he didn’t.

“You going to do the right thing?” A warning rattled through his voice. “You going to hand over that weapon before somebody gets hurt?”

She thought of how he’d spin the story of her “breakdown” later, how he’d use it to have her removed from office. And a new question flickered into being, a question of how far Roger might have gone to reclaim what he saw as his turf. How far anger and humiliation might have pushed him.

“I’m fine.” She forced her jaw to unclench, deliberately slowed her voice to speak in the tone of a professional. A superior issuing a warning of her own. “No need to worry, Deputy. About anything but your job.”

“This would’ve made Lou sick.” He shook his head, his words dripping with disgust. “
You
would, running his department down the fucking tubes like you have.”

“You’ll want to stop now, Roger. This isn’t the time or place to have this conversation, not with my son—”

“It’s your own damned fault. Can’t you see it? On the old man’s watch, no lowlife in this county would’ve dared to touch anyone in the department. And not even the lowest of the low would’ve ever
dreamed
of going after any lawman’s kid.”

Justine said nothing, thinking that it wouldn’t have happened during her father’s tenure, either, that criminals had had a healthy respect for both Lou Wofford and Ed Truitt.

“But why should anybody be afraid of you?” Roger’s face grew red as he spoke. “You’re not only miles out of your league; you’re
stupid
enough to get caught taking bribes.”

“But not stupid enough to listen to another minute of this,” she said bluntly. “You have pushed and pushed things, Roger, but this time you’re finished. Whether you want to resign
or face termination for deliberately misleading me about a homicide investigation, your ass is gone. From
my
department, from this moment forward. I’ll need your badge.”

For several stunned seconds, he merely stared at her. “You…you can’t.”

“You may remember that you serve ‘at the pleasure of the sheriff,’” Justine said. “And this one’s not into masochism.”

His shock turned to a sneer. “You think for one damned minute you can handle it, handle those men and that department without me running interference? I’d like to see you—”

“Far as I can see, you’ve
been
the interference. And the others are either going to accept me or make it a hell of a lot easier to figure out which jobs I’ll have to cut to make the budget.” She imagined reassigning some of the deputies from the jail, the ones she’d have to lay off if she were forced to privatize it, to take the troublemakers’ places. They’d be grateful, their loyalty to her rather than a dead man who had planned to cut them. “Now I’ll ask
you
to take your damned hand away from that gun.”

She saw Roger’s tell a second time, saw such hatred in his eyes that some dark, self-destructive corner of her made Justine want to push him. Tempted her to see if she could provoke him into blowing her away.

Be aware that a halo has to fall only a few inches to be a noose.

—Dan McKinnon

Funny how it caught on, this idea of asphyxiation as an aphrodisiac. Back when hangings were a public affair, before recent, bullshit notions of political correctness pushed it underground, folks were embarrassed, or more likely titillated, by the discovery that about a third of men who got the noose offered the staring crowd one final, in-your-face salute.

(I’ve found that figure about right so far. Hart Tyson, no. Caleb LeJeune, no, but Jake Willets, feeble as he was, unmistakably yes. Not that I went out of my way to look.)

But then the strangest thought took hold, the crazy notion that half strangling yourself while taking care of business could heighten the experience, in more ways than one.

(That couldn’t be what you thought, with your pretty halter top, your short shorts, and your strappy golden sandals, was it?)

Thanks to this urban legend, something like a thousand poor suckers a year are found hanging dead and naked in showers or from scarves wrapped around their closet rods or doorknobs, a lot of these “victims” dumb-ass kids who never stopped to consider that they could actually die from such a pastime.

If they’d asked me, I could’ve told them they had the whole thing backward. Because it isn’t being hanged that’s so damned exciting; that’s only delusion.

There’s far more pleasure to be found in the touch of evil, in putting the noose around another human being’s neck, or better
yet, inviting him to do it, and pushing the poor bastard off that final precipice.

Ross tapped at the door to the hospital’s family room. When no one answered, he gave a second rap and pushed it open.

Looking in, he stopped short and glanced from Justine to Savoy and back before fixing his gaze on the deputy. Or more precisely, on the hand now drifting away from his gun’s grip.

What the hell?
It was all Ross could do to keep from thrusting himself between them—or doing something even crazier, such as taking a swing at an armed man.

“May I have a word with the sheriff?” Hostility honed his question to a razor’s edge. “A
private
word.”

With a shrug, Savoy sneered, saying, “She’s all yours, Doc,” as he strode toward the door.

“Your badge, Roger,” Justine told him. “You’ll need to leave it with me.”

His expression seething, Savoy jerked it from his uniform. “You want the goddamned thing? Then take it.”

Without another glance at Ross, Roger tossed the badge at her feet.

“And the gun,” she added. But it was too late. Roger was already slamming the door behind him.

“What’s going on?” Ross asked, his heart still pounding. “I could’ve sworn your deputy was about to shoot you.”

He reached for her, but she avoided his touch.

“Tell me about my son.” Flat and hard, Justine’s expression was a stop sign. Anyone else might have missed the desperation haunting her eyes, but she couldn’t fool him. “
Justine.
He might have killed you.”

“Forget him and tell me about Noah. Please.”

“Sound asleep for the next few hours, with your father watching over him. We’d like to keep him overnight for observation, but he doesn’t appear hurt physically, not beyond the bruising on his arm where he was grabbed.”

“You’re sure he wasn’t…that no one touched…?”

The pain in her voice prompted him to say he was sure, since this was primarily, though not one hundred percent, true. As relief flashed over her expression, he pulled her tight to his chest.

He felt her sharply indrawn breath, the way her body stiffened, her tension betrayed only by the slightest quivering beneath the surface of her skin. But an instant later, she was weeping, this strong woman he had never seen cry, as if his touch had melted away the levies holding back her tears.

Clutching him tightly, she sobbed quietly, stress pouring off her in hot waves. And of all things, Ross felt grateful—grateful that she’d trusted him enough to let him see her fall apart.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispered, barely knowing whether he was expressing compassion for what had happened with her son or apologizing for sending her away three and a half months earlier.

Some of the longest months of his life. Months that had convinced him she was wrong, dead wrong, when she’d claimed it had never been anything but sex between them. Sex with no hope of anything more.

She stopped crying, yet her trembling increased, as if she stood soaked before a cold wind. As if it took everything she had to stay silent.

Hugging her to him, he kissed her cheekbone. “Noah’s going to be all right.
You’ll
be all right.”

“Ross. It’s been so…” She looked up at him, her damp eyes speaking for her.

“I’ve missed you,” he admitted. “Missed you more than I ever believed I…”

He bent his head and kissed her, convinced it was his only chance to keep from saying the wrong thing again. His only chance to keep her from pulling away and rushing off to her
child and her duties, or telling him she meant to dig up enough evidence to haul Laney straight to jail.

Instead of shoving him away, as he more than half expected, Justine made a small sound of surprise. Then, in an instant, all the tension he’d sensed knotted inside her exploded into the hot press of her wet mouth, the hard, sharp edges of her nails digging into his flesh. The press of curves he’d missed so damned badly against his instantaneous erection.

Forgetting where he was, Ross deepened the kiss and cupped her breast with one hand. Squeezed and heard a moan start deep in her throat, a sound that nearly brought him to a climax then and there.

But he wanted more, so much more. Wanted the unimpeded glide of bare skin against bare skin, the taste of her on his lips, the sound of his own name as she screamed it.

Wanted to forget these last few months had ever happened, that a wild leap in his chest could be anything but pure excitement.

The door cracked open. “Dr. Bollinger?”

Debbie Brown’s eyes widened, probably because one of his hands had found its way under Justine’s shirt.

“
Oh!
Excuse me.” The charge nurse’s face blossomed with color as she averted her gaze. “I just…I thought you’d want to know…”

“Oh, shit.” Justine extricated herself, her own face flushing. “What in God’s name are we…Ross? Ross, what is it? Are you—”

“Nothing.” Moisture beaded over his lip and his pulse thrummed like a helicopter in his ears. “I’m fine. We’re fine.”

With a guilty glance at Debbie, he added, “The sheriff and I just need a little privacy. To finish talking.”

His breathing shallow, he struggled to steady himself, hating the way both women looked at him as if he might keel
over any second, as if he might add another generation’s worth of ammunition to the rumor that the men of his family were all doomed to die young.

Looking at the nurse, Justine said, “I’d really appreciate it if you wouldn’t mention this to anyone. It was just…I was upset, and Dr. Bollinger, he, um, he hugged me to calm me down.”

Lame, lame, lame.
She could have kicked herself.

With a glance at Ross’s hand, Debbie raised one reddish eyebrow, a wry commentary on the fact that he’d been touching Justine’s breast. But Justine stared down the nurse, who frowned briefly and nodded.

“Sure,” the nurse said. “I didn’t see a thing.”

Turning crisply, Debbie Brown retreated, disapproval trailing in her wake. And Justine wondered if she had made another enemy.

“She won’t spread it around, will she?” Justine asked.

Ross winced, then shook his head. “More likely she’ll just give me hell about it later.”

Justine breathed a sigh. “Be sure, please, Ross. Talk to her if you need to. I can’t have this going any farther.”

He hesitated, looking uncharacteristically uncertain of himself. “Are you sure about that, Justine? Because maybe if it weren’t such a big secret, maybe then we could—”

She shook her head. “Right now I don’t have energy for anything except my son.”

For a moment, she thought he might press further. Instead, he nodded, leading her down the corridor and jabbing the elevator button with what looked like excessive force. “Of course, Noah’s your priority.”

“Noah and these murders. Because there has to be a connection.”

At the sound of a soft chime, the elevator doors slid open.
They stepped inside, and Justine wrinkled her nose at the harsh odor of institutional disinfectants. Ross pushed the button for the second floor.

“So you’re admitting now they’re murders?” Ross asked as the elevator lurched into motion.

Justine nodded and shrugged. “Whatever they are, they’ve certainly got my full attention. And until I have them solved—until I figure out who the hell was messing with my child, I can’t afford distractions. Any distractions.”

“I’m sorry. I never should have…” He looked at her, misery radiating from his gray eyes. “It won’t happen again.”

She felt the welling of regret, the loneliness that had yawned before her like a black chasm since Lou’s death. But she couldn’t give in to it, couldn’t afford the distraction—or risk dragging Ross down, too.

Or having him die on me.

The elevator doors whooshed open, and Ross gestured for her to precede him.

“You shouldn’t even want to,” Justine told him as they walked, “not with your health the way it is. And not with your cousin wrapped up in this.”

“My health’s not the issue,” he growled. His voice softening, he added, “but I understand. We both have family obligations right now.”

He stopped and gestured toward a closed door. “Would you like me to come inside with you?”

“Do you need to check on Noah?”

He shook his head. “His pediatrician’s taken over his care.”

She gave him a long look. “Then I’m sure there are other places you should be.”

He nodded. “Nowhere more important.”

“Thanks, Ross. I appreciate your coming to the house more than I can say, and everything you’ve done for Noah—it’s
wonderful.
You’re
wonderful. But I think it’s better if we don’t push this, under the circumstances…I think you had it right when you said it wasn’t working.”

“It wasn’t working the way things
were
,” he told her, “but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t ever. Not if we went about things differently. Started over, on the right foot, in full view of everybody.”

The way he looked at her made her want to take back what she’d just said. Made her wonder what she’d thrown away, all in the name of preserving the sinking ship of her career.

Turning from her, he retreated down the corridor, his footsteps—and his presence—fading from Justine’s life. Leaving her feeling as desolate as the lunar landscape, marked forever by the man who had once sought to stake his claim.

As Ross finished Noah’s chart, Debbie Brown slipped behind his elbow and leaned forward.

“I expected better of you, Doctor,” she whispered. “Far better.”

Ross grimaced. Since she’d caught him with Justine an hour earlier, the nurse had been treating him to the tight-lipped, laser-eyed disapproval she normally reserved for “Dr. Doper,” as she so often called Kenneth Fleming behind his back.

Ross turned around to face her. “Please don’t tell me I’m stuck now with ‘Dr. Groper’ for a nickname.”

Though he’d hoped for a smile, Debbie’s mouth only tightened in response. She reached up to adjust the clip holding back her auburn hair, snapping its fanged jaws neatly into place.

“Listen to me, Debbie. It’s not as if I’d—” Ross cut himself off. He liked Debbie, worked well with her, and hated letting
her believe he would be sleazy enough to take advantage of a patient’s mother. Better to confide, he thought, though Justine wouldn’t like it. “We’ve kept it quiet to this point, but Justine and I…we were close at one time. And I still…I care very much about what happens to her and her family.”

“That woman?” Debbie shook her head, looking even unhappier with this new idea. “Are you crazy?”

Ross smiled. “I’ve been asking myself that for months. But it’s over now.”

Debbie snorted. “That little scene I walked in on,
that
did not look over.”

It hadn’t felt over to Ross either. Still didn’t feel that way, though he suspected Justine wouldn’t have participated if she’d been in her right mind.

Had he been in his?

“That woman’s not what you think,” the nurse said.

Ross frowned at her. “Why do you say that?”

Debbie shook her head, her expression radiating distaste. “For one thing, everyone’s saying she’s a damned crook, handpicked for office by the powers that be. But then, you’re a Bollinger. Could be you know more about that than I do.”

Ross shook his head. “My family’s not into politics as blood sport. We retired from that field of battle a couple of generations back.”

Ross’s lumber-baron grandfather might have spent a lifetime trying to run the county with his money, but his descendants limited their public involvement to funding worthy local causes through the auspices of the Chester R. Bollinger Foundation. Even so, Ross was uncomfortable with Debbie’s reminder of Justine’s reputation. It had been the great black hole in their relationship, a void into which his questions fell, never to be answered.

“Even if you don’t care if she’s crooked,” Debbie told him, “I’ve seen that woman at work, right in this ER. Interviewing
wounded suspects, jackhammering her way into their heads. She’s relentless. Reminds me of a shark, with those flat, black eyes.”

Shuddering, the nurse rubbed her arms.

“She has a job to do. A tough job.” But even as Ross said it, he thought of how Justine had been with his cousin. Seemingly sympathetic, in that case, but nonetheless unyielding. Cruel almost, considering Laney’s recent trauma and the break-in.

Debbie shook her head. “I know that personality. I’ve lived with it myself. People like that never question their goals, never think twice about doing whatever they have to do to achieve them. And they don’t give a damn who they have to barrel over, if you get in their way.”