Acquainted With the Night (15 page)

Alex gave her a crooked smile. “I can’t imagine,” she said, dryly. “Better than we were before? Seems impossible to me.”

* * *

Alex was sorting through a box of CJ’s belongings. The box had been stuffed in the back of the closet in the spare bedroom, and Alex had never looked through it before. She pulled it out into the middle of the room and sat on the floor to go through it.

She found what she was looking for, a couple of photo albums. She pulled the first one out and opened it up.

These were family photos, beginning with a chubby baby CJ in a studio portrait. There was another studio shot, a year or so later, of CJ with her older brother. He looked sturdy and solemn in his suit with short pants, narrow bow tie underneath his double chin, his blond hair carefully combed. The toddler CJ was laughing into the camera, and it made Alex happy to see her.
Thirty plus years later, that grin hadn’t changed much,
she thought.

She paged through the photos. There was a family shot of the four St. Clairs. Her father, the physician, looked aristocratic but friendly in his seersucker suit, the very picture of the trusted family doctor. Lydia St. Clair was tall and aesthetic looking, carefully dressed, her dark red hair looking as though it had been dyed. Clay was casual in T-shirt and shorts, still a chunky, towheaded boy. CJ was also dressed for summer in shorts and a sleeveless blouse, her bright red hair in a single braid down her back, her smile revealing a missing front tooth.

Alex smiled back at six-year-old CJ, who looked like a happy little girl. Each parent had a hand on her shoulder, and Alex could almost tell from everyone’s expressions what was going on. CJ was a daddy’s girl. Clay was no one’s favorite, and he had a slightly surly expression that said he knew that already, even at age nine.

CJ’s mother somehow managed to convey that she didn’t approve of her daughter’s scraped knee or her muddy shoes.

“Oh, sweetheart,” Alex muttered aloud to CJ’s photograph, “it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”

She paged through the rest of that book, watching CJ and her brother grow up, seeing her parents age. Her father’s hair got white, her mother’s more and more aggressively red. Clay got broader. There was one picture of him in a high school football uniform, another of him in a University of Georgia football uniform, the surly expression still firmly in place. There was a nice photo of CJ and her date to some dance, maybe the senior prom. CJ looked stunning to Alex, voluptuous in an emerald gown with spaghetti straps that showed off her shoulders and décolletage. The young man with her looked stiffly uncomfortable in his summer tuxedo, handing the wrist corsage to CJ in the shot. As usual, CJ looked happy.

There were a few more snapshots, CJ in her dorm room as a college freshman, a shot of her standing outside her sorority. Then there was an abrupt end to that book, the last couple of pages blank. Alex set it aside and tackled the second album.

The next volume was only about half-filled, but there were no more family photos. There were some of CJ with people Alex didn’t know, classmates, sorority sisters. Then the pictures began to feature another woman, and Alex knew she was looking at Laurel Halliday.

Laurel was an attractive woman, a few years older than CJ. In every shot, she looked cool and composed. In the pictures of the two of them together, Alex saw the adoration on CJ’s face as clearly as the sun shining, but Laurel’s expression never varied—she inevitably looked proud of herself.

Proud of having landed CJ? Alex wondered. She pulled out a good close-up of Laurel by herself to give to Frank and Chris.

A page or two later, the content changed. There were, not to Alex’s surprise, a few photos of CJ with Vivien, one at what looked like a friend’s shower, the women all wearing bows from packages in their hair. The unadulterated joy of the pictures with Laurel was gone, but CJ still looked as if she were having a good time.

She turned yet another page, and saw CJ with Stephanie. They had actually made a nice-looking pair, Stephanie’s dark looks and angular body contrasting nicely with CJ’s red hair and curves. But Alex could see, beneath CJ’s smile, slight signs of strain around her eyes, clues that told her that something between them hadn’t been right from the beginning.

Something about Stephanie felt off to her. She couldn’t imagine CJ staying with Stephanie if she had been physically abusive, but there were other ways to be abusive in a relationship that were less obvious.

She finished going through the book. The next-to-the last page had a picture of CJ with Rod and Ana Chavez, and another of CJ in a Roosevelt County Sheriff’s uniform getting the medal for the shooting incident when she was on loan to the Feds.

The last page had only one photograph, centered on the middle of the page. It was a picture Nicole had taken of the two of them in her backyard when they’d only been dating a few months. CJ was sitting on a lawn recliner on the back deck, Alex sitting in front of her, between her legs, with CJ’s arms wrapped around her.

Alex was looking away from the camera into the yard, at Charlie, probably. But CJ was looking at Alex, and Alex saw the difference between this expression and the ones she’d seen directed at Laurel and at Stephanie. CJ’s face was open, relaxed, joyful, just like the little six-year-old girl she’d been years before.

It was the last photo in the book, as if CJ had finally ended the journey. Alex knew it was just the fact that everyone had switched to digital cameras, and that CJ had dozens of photographs of them on her laptop, but looking at the picture touched her softly, somewhere deep.

We’ll get it back
, Alex promised CJ, promised herself.
I promise we’ll get us back, somehow.

The telephone rang, and Alex had to hoist herself up, reminding herself that she might be just a bit too old to sit on the floor for an hour. She grimaced when she saw the caller ID, but punched the phone on.

“Hello, Tony,” she said.

“Alex,” he said, sounding weary. “What the hell are you doing?”

“At this precise moment, I’m talking on the phone,” Alex replied.

“You know what I mean,” he said, his voice turning truculent. “I had two of your detectives in my office asking me a million questions about you, CJ, our relationship and where the hell I was half of last year. What the fuck is going on?”

“I’m guessing they actually explained to you at the time what was going on. Did you find their explanation inadequate?”

“Don’t play stupid games with me, Alex,” he snapped. “How dare you put me on some suspect list?”

“Just exploring all the possibilities,” she said calmly. “Somebody murdered David, tried twice to kill me and threatened CJ. You’ve at least got a motive.”

“What are you saying, for crissakes?”

“That you actively dislike CJ, you hate that I married her and you would do anything to end our relationship.”

“Married!” he snorted. “As if two women—”

“Don’t,” Alex said very sharply. “You have no idea what you’re talking about, so keep your ignorant, bigoted opinions to yourself. Are we done now? Because I have many, many other better things to do than to talk to you.”

She heard him breathing heavily for a moment. Finally he said, “Look, I had nothing to do with any of this. I can’t say I’m surprised CJ took off, but I didn’t do anything to cause it. And believe it or not, I have no interest one way or another whether you’re with CJ or not. I’m…I’ve been seeing someone. It’s getting serious.”

“A woman?” Alex couldn’t help herself.

“Fuck you, Alex! Of
course
it’s a
woman
. We’ve been dating for a while and—well, I’m thinking of asking her to marry me.”

Alex sorted through a jumble of emotions: surprise, relief, skepticism. “I hope it works out for you, then,” she said.

“Do you, really?”

Yes. Because then maybe you’ll leave us the hell alone.
“I do, actually, Tony. I hope you’ll be very happy.”

“And you’ll call off your dogs?” he pressed.

“Are you making an harassment complaint?” she retorted.

“Well, no—”

“I didn’t think so,” Alex said crisply. “In that case, let’s just let my detectives investigate their case, all right? If you have a legitimate complaint, you know where to find me.”

She punched the phone off.

Chapter Fourteen

Alex was in her office, ostensibly reading arrest reports, but in reality going over the murder case. By midmorning, the bullpen was sparsely populated, most of her detectives out on calls or interviews. She watched Kelly Porter say something to Jo Adamcyzk, who nodded. They both headed toward the elevators. Frank was at his desk, with Chris leaning over his arm, both of them looking at something on his computer monitor. Gonzales was at his usual place by the coffeepot, surveying the morning’s leftover blueberry breakfast crumb cake, homemade by Jennifer Morelli, who sent Frank in with baking once a week. Alex had eaten a small piece herself and it was up to Jennifer’s usual high standard.

She pulled out her photocopy of the crime scene report on David’s murder. Twenty-six bullets were fired in less than a minute. About half had been nine millimeter, the others thirty-eight caliber. Was there one shooter, switching guns? It seemed unlikely. The car hadn’t stopped moving long enough for one man to empty two clips and drive at the same time.

So, two shooters then. And they’d gotten away so quickly that no patrol unit spotted them. That meant they’d hidden the car somewhere close to the park and escaped in another vehicle, or on foot. And later, somehow, they had returned to get rid of the car they’d used in the shooting, probably chopping it up for parts.

All in all, a well-planned operation, but clumsily executed. It seemed to her as if there were two sets of hands on the crime. Good strategy, poor tactics. The killers should have driven straight to the pavilion, stopped the car and taken a moment to aim. Neither she nor CJ had been armed that day. It would have been the world’s easiest assassination.

Instead, they had started shooting too early. No one could have mistaken David for her—they had simply fired wildly at everyone in the picnic shelter.

Whoever had planned this, Alex realized, hadn’t been in the car that day. She seriously doubted that Laurel, Stephanie or even Tony had the knowledge and ability to steal and hot-wire the car that had run her off the road in March. And she simply couldn’t see any of them stealing a car and taking a dozen potshots at her family.

“They hired somebody,” Alex said aloud. Why hadn’t she thought of this before? She seriously doubted Laurel or Stephanie had the connections to find a local hit man, but Tony, on the other hand…he had an entire office full of file folders with the location of a variety of criminals, from whom he could pick and choose.

Oh, that was absurd. Tony is a slimy toad, she thought, but he’s hardly going to go through his case files to find a handy contract killer.

Her thoughts were interrupted by her telephone. “Ryan,” she answered.

“Captain, thank God,” a panicky male voice said.

“Who is this?” Alex demanded.

“McCarthy, down in Internal Affairs,” he said breathlessly. “Jesus, Captain, get the hell out of there!”

“Slow down. What’s happening?”

“I just interviewed Fullerton. He got up in the middle of the interview and said he was going to have this out with you personally. He’s on his way up there!”

Alex stood up and said, “Listen to me, Sergeant. Call Deputy Chief Duncan, and if you can’t get him, call Chief Wylie. Tell whoever you get what you just told me. Did Fullerton take the elevator or the stairs?”

“I don’t…oh, wait, the elevator.”

That gave her an extra thirty seconds. “Was he armed?”

“I don’t know. I mean, you got him to turn his service weapon in when he was suspended, but he might have a backup gun—”

She didn’t waste time on another word. She ran into the bullpen and barked, “Gonzales, go downstairs and notify the watch commander we have a situation. Fullerton is on his way up here. He may or may not have a gun. Take the stairs. Go!”

The startled detective sprinted toward the stairs.

Frank and Chris were already on their feet. “Elevator?” Chris said.

“Yes. Frank, go around the corner by the restrooms where he won’t see you. Chris, you wait in the door to the stairwell. I’m going to meet him at the elevator and see if I can calm him down.”

“Is that a good idea?” Chris asked grimly, already moving toward the hall.

“Maybe so, maybe not,” Alex conceded. “Get in position.”

She pulled her backup revolver from her ankle holster and stuck it in the back waistband of her pants. It was against regulations, but she wanted it very handy and invisible in case Fullerton was intent on violence.

Alex could see Frank just around the corner to her left. Chris had the stairwell door slightly cracked open to her right. Her heart was pounding, but it made her feel better to know she had two backups on her side.

She carefully positioned herself far enough away so that he could step out of the elevator without getting too close to her. She didn’t want to either be forced to back away from him, or to invade his personal space.
Please just don’t let him open fire right away…

The elevator doors slid open. Roger burst out, then halted as he saw her. The surprise was clear on his face.

“Roger,” Alex said calmly. “You were looking for me?”

“McCarthy must have been shitting in his pants,” he snarled. “Had to call his mommy, huh?”

Alex could smell the alcohol on him from a yard away. She kept her voice low and calm. “Roger, it seems you may have had your interview while you were impaired.”

She couldn’t believe Chad McCarthy had interviewed Fullerton in this condition. CJ would have chewed her sergeant up and spit him out for that. Actually, McCarthy wouldn’t have done the interview at all if CJ had been there.

“I’m not fucking impaired. I’m pissed off. What the hell are you doing, trying to ruin my career?”

“Roger, why don’t you let me get somebody to drive you home? You can sleep it off, and reschedule the interview for when you’re feeling better.”