Always Watching (21 page)

“
Tell me what
happened.”

I explained what I could without divulging
any details of our ongoing investigation.

“
Is he dead?”

“
Danny?”

“
No,” Celeste shook the
blonde curls around her shoulders.  “This agent.  Is he
dead?”

“
Yes,” I said
softly.

“
Did you kill
him?”

“
That wasn’t my
intention.  I only wanted to stop him so I could get help for
Danny.”

Tears rolled silently.  “Thank you,”
Celeste lips formed the words without sound.  “I’m glad you
did it.”

She hugged her baby to her chest and began
rocking back and forth.

“
Mrs. Datello,” Devlin
said, “we can’t be sure that this rogue agent was acting
alone.  The recent abduction of your baby, the threat that was
made to you this week –”

“
You think Danny’s uncle
is behind this?”

“
It’s a possibility,” I
said without divulging the details of Joel Soule’s presence at the
hospital when Danny died.  “Bay View Division has agreed to
post officers outside your penthouse and the casino while we look
into this matter very closely.  If Sully Marcos is behind it,
we will make sure that the threat is eliminated.  I don’t want
you to worry.  You’re probably safer here than you would be
anywhere else.  At the same time, we want an extra level of
security.  We
owe
you at least that much.”

“
Destiny is staying with
me indefinitely too,” Celeste said.  “She’ll know what to
do.”

“
She’s acting CEO for
Danny’s business?”

“
Yes.  She had his
power of attorney.  He didn’t want me worrying about money or
managing all of the businesses.  Danny wanted me to be a
mother to our daughter.”

“
It may be helpful to our
investigation if we had access to some of Danny’s business records,
Celeste,” I said.  “It might uncover a link that would point
back to Sully and his desire to hurt your family.”

“
Anything you need. 
Just talk to Destiny.”

Destiny
.  What a stupid name.  I looked up and saw the
aforementioned CEO of Datello’s empire lurking in the
shadows.  It was not exactly the picture of cooperation in her
eyes.

Chapter 17

When we got back to the house, Johnny
promptly deposited me in a steaming hot bath with bubbles up to my
chin.  He skipped the merlot and opted for a cup of steaming
hot tea instead.  The scent of chicken soup wafted into the
bathroom and induced a low rumble in my belly.

Johnny held out a towel.  “Up.”

“
I can do this myself, you
know,” I said while he carefully patted me dry.

He pressed his lips just below my navel,
kneeling in front of me.  “I know.  If you can’t accept
that I want to do this for you, allow it because I need it for me
too.”

He dressed me in my favorite warm comfort
clothes, the softest sweat suit known to man, and scooped me up
into his arms.

“
And I suppose
you
need me not to walk
from here to there, too,” I chuckled.

He tucked me into bed.  “Don’t argue
with me, Doc.  You’re exhausted, and I already warned you that
you’d have to endure my overbearing pampering for the duration of
the evening.”

“
I’m too tired to
complain,” I sighed.

Johnny ignited the gas fireplace in the
bedroom before he disappeared.  When he returned, it was with
a tray.  Chicken noodle soup, and dry toast with the crust
removed from the bread.

“
You really do remember
everything, don’t you?”  I reached for a slice of toast, but
his hand intercepted mine.

“
Ah-ah.  I’ll do
that.”

“
I’m too weak to feed
myself?  Johnny, even when I really was sick you at least let
me do a couple of things on my own.  Like shoveling food into
my mouth.”

“
I didn’t get a salty
breeze at midnight under a brilliant full moon.  Humor
me.”

“
So this is your idea of
romance?”

“
I think” Johnny tipped
the spoon to my lips, “that this is a very nontraditional way of
self-soothing.”

“
Mmm, good soup.  So
you’re telling me this is really all about you.”

“
This is about calming the
nerves that haven’t gotten past the terror that you’d been shot
again,” Johnny said.  “This is about beating myself senseless
over that stupid fight this morning.”

“
Johnny, we’re
fine.”

“
It’s because I want you
to know that I love you without reservation, and whether your
answer had been yes or no, nothing changes that.”

“
Good to know.”

The spoon hung between my mouth and the
bowl.  “You haven’t changed your mind, have you?”

“
No,” I leaned forward and
slurped the soup off the spoon.  “Have you?”

Johnny snorted.  “Like anything could
ever make that happen.”

“
Even my off the cuff
comment about taking a kill shot with Preston this afternoon
instead of merely trying to wound him?”

“
I am capable of
recognizing when you’re frustrated, Helen.”

I reached for the toast.  This time, he
didn’t stop me.  “I know I saw a look,” I said.  “For a
moment, that comment worried you.  Tell the truth.”

“
I wasn’t worried that you
really meant it.  Sometimes I wish you’d censor those
thoughts, hold them back until we’re alone.”

“
Because of Tony
Briscoe?”

“
I’d have to say that the
truce you’ve shared for the past couple of months has come to a
screeching halt, Doc.  He’s pretty upset about that attack at
the bay last night.”

“
I wasn’t trying to kill
him.  I did want him to shut his big, offensive
mouth.”

“
Helen, I know
you.”

“
Hmm,” mumbled around a
torn of chunk of toast.  “What’s that supposed to
mean?”

“
You snapped last
night.  I can only imagine that your reaction at the hospital
when I was seizing and you didn’t know if I would live or die was
similar.”

“
More,” I
muttered. 

“
So that’s twice that Tony
has witnessed your loss of rationality.  This is not a good
thing.”

I stopped eating and shredded the toast into
a pile of bite sized morsels.  “I know.  I could promise
to try harder to mute that impulse, but I think we both realize
that it’s something I can’t really…”

“
Control?”

I nodded.  “I try, Johnny. 
Sometimes… it’s hard to explain.  The world sort of turns
reddish black.  I can’t see anything but whatever is right in
front of me, usually something I see as an obstacle to where I need
to go.  It isn’t my intention to hurt people.  At least
it wasn’t last night.  I think I could’ve killed Southerby for
what he did to you.  I just wanted to make Tony stop talking
last night.  He has no idea how some of these things… they
trigger something inside me that I don’t quite understand.”

“
I get it with
Southerby.  He hurt me, and you didn’t know how much
yet.  Of course, it was the deep and abiding love for me that
prompted that outburst.”

I chuckled.  “Such humility.”

“
Do you deny
it?”

“
No,” I said softly, “but
when you say it that way –”

“
You needed to
laugh.  I’m humbled that you love me, Helen.  I don’t
feel like I did anything that entitles me to it.”

“
Now that, I understand
completely.”

“
I don’t understand what
it was about the case last night that got you to the point of
losing control, Helen.  I’d like to understand it, if you
think you can talk about it now.”

“
He said some ugly things,
implied that because that little girl wasn’t white that it didn’t
matter to me how she died or that somebody threw her body away like
she was nothing.  I’ve never, not one time, cared what race or
religion or even sexual orientation our victims are.  I worked
so hard to find the guilty and bring them to justice – even for a
man like Reverend Napier in January.  You know I couldn’t
disagree more with someone who practiced a homophobic dogma like he
did.”

“
I see.”

“
Do you?  Johnny, I
don’t think you could possibly understand what the last decade was
like for me.  The job… at first it was thrilling.  I was
out there making a difference.  I was stopping people who
wanted to hurt others.”

“
I get it,
Helen.”

“
But then you start
getting called in to work cases that are tougher and tougher. 
You’re asked to crawl into criminal’s brains and think like someone
who does things that defy comprehension.  Why does someone
beat a baby’s head to a bloody pulp?  Why does a parent duct
tape his children’s hands and feet together and store them in a
suitcase?  Why does a mother allow her ten year old daughter
to be raped and strangled by casual acquaintances, and then
dismember the child in order to cover up a crime she didn’t even
commit?  Why would a mother keep her small child in a garbage
bag in the trunk of her car until the stench becomes so unbearable
that the police can smell it on the street and pull her over to
search the vehicle on the basis of what they can smell alone? 
How does a person willingly try to understand the psychopathy that
makes a mother cook her child in a microwave oven?”

“
I don’t know,
sweetheart.”

“
They wanted me to
understand it.  They required that I spend time talking to
these monsters so that next time, maybe we’d get answers
faster.  We’d recover bodies before evidence was lost due to
decomposition and the predation of wild animals who unearth and
consume human remains. 

“
Johnny, these victims,” a
single tear sluiced down my cheek, “they weren’t adults with
problems, people who intentionally annoy and provoke others into
crimes of passion.  They were babies.  Nobody loved
them.  Nobody nurtured them.  The people that were
supposed to protect them preyed on them in such horrific ways, I
wish I could wipe the memories out of my mind.”

He thumbed the dampness from my cheek.

“
And it was a monster who
raised me,” I whispered.  “Even he wasn’t that
depraved.”

“
Baby,” Johnny
whispered.  “He loves you so much.  I’ll never condone
what Wendell Eriksson did, but in his own way, I think he wanted to
make the world a safer place for you, for other children
too.”

I nodded.  I knew, or at least had a
very strong suspicion, that my father was guilty of more crimes
than law enforcement ever uncovered.  The morning where he
read the paper about a child snatched from her bed one night and
was never found, weighed heavily on my mind, at least
subconsciously, since Sofia Datello was abducted.

My memory was that Dad
wasn’t particularly upset that this child was missing.  All he
said to me was,
hell of a thing, Sprout,
to lose your child like that.  I don’t think I could bear it
if anyone ever took you.

In hindsight, I remembered other missing
children who elicited little more than a snort from Dad, a shake of
the head, maybe a comment in some cases that the children were
better off.

Then I found his cryptic records in a safety
deposit box inside his bank in the Caymans.  Some of the names
triggered more memories than the dates.  I knew that my father
had taken children from their parents and put them elsewhere. 
How could I reconcile that with what I knew now?  How was he
sure he was making a child’s life better?  More so, what on
earth gave him the right to decide that people wouldn’t change,
wouldn’t wake up and do better?

It warred with the other knowledge that I
possessed.  Some people are born with heads full of bad
wiring.  I chewed mechanically while Johnny continued to fill
my empty stomach with food.  Was it merely a simple twist of
fate that he was born to good parents and I was born to bad
ones?  How had my father been so evil on one hand, but so
absolutely good and incorruptible when it came to his relationship
with me?  Surely he was the cast drawn upon for the philosophy
of the duality of man.

“
I think we should take a
trip when this case is closed.”

“
Moonlight and balmy sea
breeze?”

“
I was thinking parkas and
wool mittens.”

“
Johnny, I’ll take a
vacation with you, but I’d prefer we avoid winter.”

“
Maybe they’re
experiencing a pre-spring thaw in upstate New York,” Johnny
said.

I stopped chewing and stared at him.

“
I think it’s time that
you see for yourself how much he loves you, Doc.  Even David
agrees.  There’s no reason you can’t see him and talk. 
He’s your father.  It’s not wrong to love him, even if he is
in prison for the rest of his life.”

“
What if he’s upset that
we’re still together?”

“
Well, maybe he’ll figure
it out.  I’m not leaving you, no matter what.  I love
you, and we belong together, Helen.  You deserve a life with
love and happiness and peace.  It might take a little while
for people around here to resist the urge to turn to you every time
we get a crime that leaves us scratching our heads, but we’ll get
there.”