Accidentally in Love (23 page)

Pressing both hands flat against the door, he pressed his forehead between them and forced a breath in and out. “Open the door, Ell. Please just open the door.”

The water had already shut off, but there were a couple of painfully long seconds of shuffling before the door finally opened. There she was, a thick green towel wrapped around her body and her hair dripping all over the floor.

“What the hell? How did you even get in here?”

Brett fell back against the wall, then slid down it until he was sitting on the floor at the top of the stairs, in the same spot where they’d played Scrabble.

“What’s wrong?” Worry etched across her face as she fell to the floor next to him. “Are you okay?”

“Am I—?” It took him a couple of seconds to catch his breath, and when he finally did, it came right back out of him in a roar. “You mean besides the fact that you’re going to give me a fuckin’ stroke? Yeah, I’m great.”

“What are you—?”

“Hale?” Boots sounded downstairs. “Hale!”

“Yeah. Up here.” He had to yell it twice for her to hear it over the alarm.

“You good?”

“No,” Ellie hollered. “I think he might need a doctor.”

Hudak got about halfway up the stairs, took one look at Brett sprawled against the wall and Ellie dripping all over the floor, and snorted.

“He’s fine,” she laughed, heading back down the stairs. “But we’re going to need you down at the detachment, Miss Palmer, so you might want to get dressed.”

“It has everything to do with anything and just answer the question please, ma’am.”

—Detective David Starsky,
Starsky and Hutch

Brett barely said two words to her on the drive back to the detachment, so all Ellie knew was that Kurt was in custody and it had something to do with Dickie. Once they arrived, he took her straight to one of the interview rooms and left her there with a cup of tea and some line about how he had to go but Constable Hudak would be in to talk to her shortly.

Shortly turned out to be almost half an hour.

When Tory finally showed up, she seemed a little surprised to find Ellie alone.

“I thought Hale was in here with you.”

“He had other things to do,” Ellie quipped, her confusion having long since turned to frustration. “He did bring me a cup of tea, though, so that was nice.”

Shaking her head, Tory snorted. “Figures. Okay, Miss Palmer, here’s what’s going to happen.”

After Tory explained the charges they had against Kurt, plus the other charges they were still working on, she had to run through a whole list of questions about the events that had taken place that afternoon, few of which Ellie could answer.

“Brett…Constable Hale…dropped me at home about ten minutes after you called him, so that would have been, what, two o’clock–ish? He did a search of the house and then left, so I unpacked, made some tea, and then checked my email like you told me to.”

“How long did that take?”

“I don’t know,” Ellie sighed. “I forwarded the one message I had from him, so there should be some kind of time on that, right? Right after I sent it to you, I double-checked the doors and the alarm and then went upstairs to shower.”

“Do you always shower in the afternoon?”

“What difference does that make?”

“Just trying to gather as much information as I can, Miss Palmer. If it’s part of a pattern with you, or—”

“No, I don’t normally shower in the afternoon, but I needed to relax, so…”

“So you were upset about something? Can you tell me about that?”

“I’d rather not; it’s personal. I would really appreciate it, though, if you would tell me how all this happened.”

Tory didn’t look happy about that, but after a second, she bobbed her head in a short nod. “The information we have is that Mr. Garner was out on his porch smoking when Constable Hale dropped you off.”

“Yes, I think he was.”

“After Hale left, Mr. Garner went inside but happened to look out as Mr. Neill walked past. According to the file, Mr. Garner had witnessed the same individual walking past your place the night it was broken into. At the time, when he saw Mr. Neill, he had no idea you’d been broken into, or who Mr. Neill was, so he had no reason to suspect anything, but once he realized something had happened, he mentioned the fellow to Corporal Monk and was able to provide a fairly good description.”

“I didn’t know that.”

Tory didn’t appear interested if Ellie had known it or not.

“The way Mr. Garner explains it, he wasn’t going to let Mr. Neill anywhere near you or your house again, so when he saw Mr. Neill today, he dialed 911 but didn’t wait to speak to a dispatcher. Apparently he’s seen enough police dramas on television to know we would track the open phone line and dispatch a member immediately, which is exactly what happened.”

Tory took a second to look down at her notebook, but she wasn’t reading it, just staring at it. When she looked back up at Ellie, she was actually smiling.

“Normally we wouldn’t condone Mr. Garner’s behavior, because it’s impossible to know what a suspect is going to do. In any event, Mr. Garner somehow managed to trap Mr. Neill on your back step and then carried him back over to his house.”

“He carried him?”

“We’re not exactly sure how that worked.” This time Tory did consult her notes. “Mr. Garner’s exact words were ‘I grabbed him up like the sack of shit he is and hauled his ass back to my place.’ Mr. Neill is looking to press assault charges on that, but we’ll see what happens there. Anyway, Mr. Garner kept Mr. Neill restrained until we showed up, a minute or so later.”

Ellie sat across the table from Tory, shaking her head in disbelief. “I had no idea any of this was even going on. How did I not know?”

“If you were in the shower, it’s unlikely you would have heard anything, since Mr. Garner tells us the suspect was very quiet in his movements. And from what we can put together, Mr. Neill was given the choice to either stay quiet while being transported from one house to the other, or Mr. Garner could help him stay quiet.” Tory glanced down at her notes again. “Mr. Neill opted for self-imposed silence.”

Even sitting in the interview room with all this information, knowing that Kurt was in custody, Ellie was having trouble wrapping her mind around it.

And then Tory threw her for another loop.

“Miss Palmer, I need to ask you some things, and to save us all time later, I’d like to have it on the record.” Without waiting for Ellie to respond, she set up the recorder and flipped to a new page in her notebook as she recited the file number and other pertinent details. “Sergeant Schilling has filed a report detailing Constable Hale’s role in this investigation. If you like, I can go over it with you.”

“No,” Ellie said, then cleared her throat and repeated it. “No. Brett…Constable Hale…explained it to me when this all started. It was his job to play the part of my ‘boyfriend,’ for lack of a better word. He was to keep an eye on me as much as possible, try to bait Kurt into incriminating himself, that kind of thing.”

“And did he do that?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” She took a second to line her pen up neatly beside her notebook. “Um, did he ever force himself on you in any way?”

“Who? Brett?! No!”

“Okay. What about sex? Have you and Constable Hale ever—and I mean since the day you first moved to town until this day, right now—have you ever had a sexual relationship with each other?”

“Oh my God.” Tory was obviously uncomfortable asking, but Ellie was too busy battling her guilty conscience to feel even an ounce of sympathy for her. “How can you even ask that? You’ve worked with him for years—does he really seem like the type of cop who’d jeopardize an investigation or his career for something like sex? God, what is wrong with you people? I mean,
look at him
—he could have sex with anyone he wants, anytime he wants!”

“So is that a no, then?” It was hard to tell with Tory’s head bent over her notebook, but it almost looked like she was smiling.

“Correct,” Ellie forced out. “That’s a no. Constable Hale and I have never had a sexual relationship.”

“Has he ever touched you inappropriately or have you ever felt that he used his role as your ‘boyfriend’ to get something from you, either sexually or emotionally?”

“Is this some kind of joke?” Ellie stared straight back at Tory, who clearly wasn’t joking. “Fine. That would also be a no.”

“Did he ever tell you he loved you?”

The question blindsided Ellie with the force of a locomotive, actually knocking the breath right out of her. She twisted in her seat, stretched her neck, and rolled her shoulders for a second, trying to get past the weight of that question.

“Miss Palmer?”

“No.” One word shouldn’t hurt that much. “No, he didn’t.”

“Did you ever say it to him?”

“No.”

“And you’re sure about that?”

“I think I’d remember if a man told me he loved me. Are we done here?”

Ellie was already on her feet, but Tory wasn’t quite finished.

“Just to confirm for the record, would you be willing to testify to these facts in court?”

“Yes. Can I go now?”

“One second.” Tory muttered into the recorder, then hit the Stop button and motioned back to the empty chair. “Please.”

“Look, Constable Hudak, I appreciate that you have a job to do, but you are out of your mind if you think Brett—”

“Ellie, please.”

It might have been the fact that she called her Ellie instead of Miss Palmer; it might have been the fact that her voice was soft when she said it, almost like she’d switched from cop to regular woman; or it might have been the fact that she actually smiled—in any case, something made Ellie sit back down. Even so, it took Tory a few seconds to say anything.

“Between you and me, there’s no one else in this detachment I trust more than Hale. We haven’t worked the same watch for a couple years now, but he’s still my go-to guy. I trust him with my life. Hell, I trust him with my kids’ lives.”

Ellie didn’t even know Tory had kids.

“But you need to understand that the media loves to nail us with shit—and some of it’s justified, no question—but because of that, we need to be very careful how we handle situations with our members, and we need to make damn good and sure everything is aboveboard, without any room for screw-ups.”

“Brett isn’t a screw-up.”

“Oh, hell, I know that. You think I wanted to ask you those questions? No, but we needed them on the record. If this dipshit Neill decides to plead not guilty and takes this case to court—which is within his rights—we need to be able to prove that there was no conflict of interest between the investigation and your relationship with Hale.”

When Ellie started to protest, Tory stopped her with a raised hand.

“I know, I know: nothing happened between you two, and if we need to prove that, we will. But he’s changed since this started, so I had to ask.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, like he smiles now,” Tory said, shaking her head. “I mean, he’s never going to star in a toothpaste commercial, but he’s smiled more since this started than I’ve seen in the last six years. What the hell’s up with that? And today…”

“Oh, God. What? Did he go after Kurt? I was worried that once you guys found him, he’d—”

“What?” Tory laughed. “God no, he didn’t go anywhere near him. It’s what happened after, the way he was at your place; that wasn’t the Hale I know. For a second there, when you said he’d need a doctor, I thought he’d hurt himself—then I saw him sitting up there fuming and you leaning over him in that towel, and I knew what was going on. Which reminds me: I’m supposed to ask you if you want to press charges against him for breaking in the way he did. They probably wouldn’t stick, but the fact is, we had Neill in custody, you weren’t in any immediate danger, and that Garner fella kept yelling that you were okay. But Hale was…I’ve never seen him move that fast.”

Head down, Ellie didn’t know what she was supposed to say, or if she was supposed to say anything at all, so she didn’t. Then Tory pulled her chair a little closer.

“So because Hale’s my guy and I can’t have shit going sideways for him, I’m going to ask you to answer all those questions again, off the record this time.”

It took Ellie a while to stop chewing her lip, and to look up at Tory, whose eyes were full of something Ellie had never seen on her before: empathy. And as soon as Ellie started talking, Tory leaned way back and grabbed the box of tissues off the shelf by the door.

“Everything I told you was the truth,” Ellie said, fighting to speak over the growing lump in her throat. “Up until this weekend, he never so much as held my hand unless I took his first.”

Tory huffed out a relieved sigh, then sat there tapping her fingers on the table as she studied Ellie’s face. “Well, holy shit, Palmer. You? And Hale?”

“What?” Ellie gasped. “No, I told you—nothing happened.”

“Yeah, I heard what you said, and I believe you’re telling the truth. But I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck, either—
you and Hale?
You hate cops!”

Laughing over a choke, Ellie jerked a tissue out of the box just in time to catch the first tear. “Yeah, well, you guys sort of pissed me off before.”

“Okay, fair enough.” Tory ducked her head a little and lowered her voice, even though no one else could hear them anyway. “So between you and me, how bad is it?”

That made Ellie choke harder. “Yeah, it’s pretty bad.”

“Bad like you’re in love with him bad, or bad like you’ve got one of those man-in-uniform-hero crushes going on?”

Even with the tissue pressed over her face, Ellie knew she wasn’t hiding anything, especially after the burst of guilty laughter bubbled out of her throat.

“Both.”

“Nooo,” Tory groaned, burying her face in her hands, but she was laughing, too. “That’s the worst.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Ellie laughed.

“And he doesn’t know? You haven’t told him?”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure he’s got it figured out.” She swiped the tissue under both eyes and gave up trying to hold her smile in place. “But what would be the point of telling him now, anyway? He’ll be gone in a few days.”

Tory didn’t say anything for a long time; she just sat there ripping apart a tissue, and handing Ellie a new one every once in a while.

“So what are you going to do?”

Inhaling deeply, Ellie pushed her hair back and finally managed another weak smile. “I hear Mr. October from the firemen’s calendar a couple years back is single again. Maybe I’ll give it a go with him.”

Tory’s head never stopped shaking from the second Ellie opened her mouth to the second she closed it.

“Goddamn men, am I right?” In a completely unexpected move, Tory covered Ellie’s hands with her own and squeezed. “We don’t even really need them. I mean, we’re perfectly capable of taking care of ourselves; we can change the oil in our cars, we can cut the grass and build stuff without any help from them.”

“I can even snake my own drains,” Ellie hiccupped.

“Exactly! So why does it hurt so much when these
things
we don’t even need walk away from us? Why do we even care?”

“I don’t know.”

“Neither do I,” Tory muttered. “But it’s crazy all the same.”

Brett called Jayne to come and pick up Ellie from the detachment. He could do a lot of things, but he couldn’t face her again until he could find a way to get himself back under control. And God only knew how long that would take, because in that moment, at the top of her stairs with her standing there in that towel, completely fine, not the least bit hurt, damaged, or bruised, he finally understood that he had to walk away.