Criminal Intent (MIRA) (21 page)

“You need to understand,” he said, then stopped when words failed him. He thought about it, tried again. “Sex is…it’s like this…this incredible…uh…physically, you know…there’s just nothing to compare it to. And when it’s right—when the two people are right—it can be so much more than that. I mean, there’s this spiritual element to it that—” Christ, this sounded lame, even to him. How must it sound to her? “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not very good at this.” He ran a hand through his hair, silently cursed her mother for leaving this crucial aspect of her upbringing to someone else. “I think you have to experience it to understand. I—” He stopped abruptly as the appalling thought struck him that at sixteen, Jessie
might well have experienced it. In his day, at least kids waited until they were in high school. Nowadays, they were starting at twelve or thirteen. He cleared his throat. “I—you haven’t—oh, shit.”

“No!” she said, reddening. “I’m waiting for the right guy to come along. So far, I haven’t seen him anywhere.”

“Thank God. Look, Skeets, what I’m trying to say is that two people can like each other a lot, they can have great sex together, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they love each other. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”

“I’m trying to follow, but you’re taking a really roundabout route to get to where you’re going.”

“All right. How about this? People confuse love and sex all the time. But they’re two very different things. Don’t let anybody convince you otherwise. Boys will tell you they love you. They’ll tell you that if you really loved them, you’d do it. It’s all bullshit. Teenage boys will say anything to get a girl to spread her legs. I know what I’m talking about. I used to be one.”

“Are we going to reach the point soon?” Jessie said agreeably.

The point. Christ. What was his point? Somewhere along the way, he’d lost track of it. Not only was his body falling apart, but now he was having senior moments. “My point,” he said, hoping he sounded as if he knew what he was talking about, “is that yeah, I slept with Annie. And I might sleep with her again. But please don’t be thinking that means wedding bells are around the corner. Real life just doesn’t work that way.”

“Okay,” she said, with just enough indulgence in her voice to make him wonder which of them was the kid and which one the adult.

“And…if any boy tries to talk you into doing something you’re not a hundred percent sure you want to do…what are you going to tell him?”

Arms
still crossed, she gave him a heart-stopping grin. “That I have a stepfather who carries a gun to work?”

It wasn’t precisely the answer he’d been looking for. But it worked for him.

A
nnie
woke up alone. The sun was shining brightly, and her body ached in places she’d forgotten it could ache. She stretched and glanced at the clock, saw that it was nearly nine-thirty.
Eek!
Sophie could come home at any minute, and the last thing she needed was for her daughter to come in and find her sprawled out on the floor, naked as a jaybird, all sticky and smelling of sex. It wasn’t exactly the kind of example she wanted to set for an impressionable adolescent daughter. Annie scrambled to her knees, gathered up the clothes that were flung haphazardly around the living room, and wrapped the comforter around her.

Hunter had left a note on the table. She scraped back her unruly hair, wadded up the comforter, and padded over to read it.
Thanks,
it said.
For everything. I’ll call. D.

Annie crumpled it up and buried it in the trash so Sophie wouldn’t see it and ask questions she didn’t have answers to. Wrapping the comforter more tightly around her, she trudged to the closet she and Sophie shared, gathered up clean clothes, carried them to the bathroom and set them on the john. Dropping the comforter, Annie studied herself critically in the mirror. Her body was in decent shape for a woman in her midthirties
who got her exercise the natural way, by working hard instead of working out. She was still taut and toned. No paunch, no saddlebags, no sagging skin beneath her arms. Her stomach was still flat, and her breasts weren’t yet showing signs of succumbing to gravity. Her eyes were still the same clear, bright blue, her hair still the sunny blond of her childhood, in spite of the fact that she was approaching forty. She wasn’t a bad-looking woman, but the strain of the past six months had taken its toll on her. She could see it in her eyes, in the shadows beneath them, could see it in the tiny vertical lines that bracketed the corners of her mouth, lines that hadn’t been there six months ago. The running, the lying, were making her old, and she was tired of it. Tired of hiding who she was. Tired of pretending to be somebody she wasn’t.

Staring into her own eyes, she wondered if Annie Kendall and Robin Spinney were truly one and the same, or if they were distinct, separate people. Last night, with Davy Hunter, the sex had been so—
oh, God.
She closed her eyes, remembering it. Lush and wild and uninhibited, so hot that just thinking about it brought a heated flush to her face. She’d never had sex like that. If she’d been asked, she probably would have said that Robin Spinney didn’t know how to have sex like that. Yet Annie Kendall hadn’t seemed to have any problem following Hunter’s lead last night. He’d brought out a side of her that she didn’t know existed, one so startling that this morning, she’d almost expected to see a stranger looking back at her from the mirror. But all she saw was the same familiar face that had been looking back for thirty-six years.

That wasn’t what worried her, though. Once they’d gotten the screaming out of their system, once that initial, frantic urgency to mate had been sated, their lovemaking had taken on a totally different aspect. It was that second time around that worried her. It had been the kind of slow, sweet, dreamy sex they wrote about in romance novels. The dangerous kind of sex, dangerous
because it tricked unsuspecting women into believing it Meant Something. Knowing this was true should have rendered her immune, but it hadn’t. She was as weak, as susceptible, as any other woman who believed in the fairy tale, and that was what scared the living shit out of her.

He was a needy man, dark and hungry and compelling, and she suspected he’d been denying that need for some time. Last night, he’d shown her a glimpse of his dark side, and she’d responded to his need. Somehow, she’d let him get to her. Somewhere between his twenty-three days of sobriety and the tenderness he’d displayed toward his grandmother, Davy Hunter had hooked her and reeled her in like a fish on a line.

What that said about her, she wasn’t sure. That she was a sucker for needy, troubled, damaged men? She’d never shown any indication of it in the past. Mac had been a normal, average guy. So had the few boyfriends she’d had before Mac came along. Her teenage crushes had been equally innocuous; she’d been more into Rick Springfield than Ozzy Osbourne. Plain vanilla all the way. Until now. That meant the news wasn’t good. It wasn’t needy men, plural, for which she had a weakness. It was just one particular needy man.

She stepped into the shower, turned it on as hot as was humanly bearable, and washed Davy Hunter off her body. Ruthlessly, coldly, adamantly, without an ounce of compassion, she scrubbed away every trace of him, erased the night before as though it had never happened. It had been a mistake, one she couldn’t afford to repeat, and the sooner she forgot about it, the better. If he called, she wouldn’t answer the phone. What they’d started last night was an impossibility. It didn’t matter how much she might yearn for him, didn’t matter that last night had been about so much more than just sex. Didn’t matter that the thought of not seeing him again brought scalding tears to her eyes, tears that she stubbornly squeezed into submission. Being with him was an impossibility, and that
was that. She didn’t love him, and he didn’t love her, and it was a damn good thing, wasn’t it? A damn good thing she could put a stop to this before it went any further, before one or both of them got hurt.

She was fully dressed, the bathroom door open wide to let out the steam, brushing her hair with hard, vicious yanks of the brush when she heard Sophie’s voice. “Mom?” her daughter called out. “Are you home?”

“In here.”

Sophie came in and sat on the edge of the tub, hands grasping the lip for balance. “You’re just getting up?” she said with some surprise.

“I had a late night, Soph.”

“Yeah. I heard.”

Annie pulled her wet hair back and upward into a ponytail, gave it a neat twist, and folded the twist against the back of her head. “Hand me that barrette, kiddo.”

Sophie got up, grabbed the oversized barrette, and handed it to her mother. “Have you eaten?” Annie said as she clipped the twisted hair to the back of her head.

“Jessie and I stopped at McDonald’s on the way here.”

Which meant that they’d actually driven past the Twilight, eaten breakfast, and then backtracked. “Is she a careful driver?” Annie said.

“She’s a careful everything. Little Miss Goody-Two-Shoes.”

“I see.” Hazarding a final glance in the mirror, Annie turned to look at her daughter. Sometimes it still shocked her to see how tall Soph had gotten. Slender as a colt, with legs to match. Pretty soon she’d be taller than Annie. It was a discomfiting thought. “A little too boring for you, is she?”

Her feet tapping rhythmically against the floor, Sophie tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Actually, she’s okay. For a nerd. She plays the violin.”

“Oh?”

“She
played it for me. It was okay.”

Coming from Sophie, that was high praise indeed. “Well,” Annie said, “maybe the two of you can be friends.”

“We’ll see.” Sophie grew quiet for a moment, then said, “Do you have to work today?”

Surprised, Annie said, “I have to finish painting the shop. Why do you ask?”

Sophie shrugged and stared down at her shoes. “I just thought…maybe we could go to the mall.”

“But, Soph, my car’s not fixed yet.”

Sophie looked back up at her, animated for the first time in a while. “So? You could take Mr. Crowley’s truck. He wouldn’t mind. Mrs. Crowley said we could keep it as long as we needed it.”

“I know, but—that’s asking a lot. And it would probably cost me forty dollars to drive it to Portland and back.”

Sophie’s face closed up, grew dark and sullen again. “We used to do mother-daughter things all the time,” she said bitterly. “We don’t any more.”

A pang of guilt stabbed her directly in the heart. Sophie was right. They’d always been close, had always spent time together at the mall, at the movies or the beach, or sometimes just hanging out. She’d cherished those times with her daughter, and in the past six months, there had been far too few of them. The lapse hadn’t been intentional; at first, she’d stayed indoors for fear that Brogan, or one of his emissaries, would spot them on the street somewhere. That was her own paranoia at work. She understood that now. But the distance between them hadn’t been all her fault. Lately Sophie hadn’t wanted to spend much time with her. It was uncool to hang out with your mother, and Soph was at that crucial age where the opinions of her peers mattered more than those of any parent.

But
things were different now. They’d made a new start in Serenity, and part of that new start would be mending their torn relationship. She could paint the damn walls later. How long would it take to slap a paint roller on the wall and cover up what was there? “Get ready,” she told Sophie. “I’ll call Jack Crowley and make sure he doesn’t mind.”

It was the right decision. The look on Sophie’s face told her that. Sleep deprivation be damned; what mattered was spending quality time with her little girl—who wouldn’t be a little girl much longer—on this beautiful day when summer was in full bloom and the world was lush and green.

They took back roads from Serenity to Portland. Tall grasses waved gently in the breeze as they drove past, and wildflowers dotted the roadsides and the meadows. They drove with the windows down and the radio cranked, even managing to compromise on a radio station they could both tolerate.

Portland was an appealing city. Not too big, not too small, with a modern skyline, energy to burn, and an old-world charm characteristic of New England. They spent a couple of hours at the mall, where they splurged on Godiva chocolates and tried on every silly hat that Macy’s carried. With money she’d saved from her allowance, Sophie bought a white T-shirt and jeans at Abercrombie & Fitch.

“Don’t get any ideas,” she told her mother. “Just because I bought white instead of black, it doesn’t mean anything.”

“Of course not,” Annie said.

But she secretly wondered if Soph might be nearing the end of her Goth phase. Maybe Jessie Logan would be a good influence on her. After all, underneath the black clothing and the stringy hair and the spooky makeup, Sophie was a great kid. She just didn’t want too many people figuring that out, because at fifteen, being a great kid wasn’t exactly cool. Soph was just experimenting, trying to find herself. Trying on a different
persona to see how it fit. And wasn’t that what most of us were doing, most of the time? Figuring out just who we were and where we fit into the greater scheme of things? Which meant that the daughter Annie’d been so worried about was actually quite normal.

After they left the mall, they picked up deli sandwiches and drove through the Old Port, with its cobbled streets and boutiques and art galleries, eventually stopping to picnic at a waterfront park, amid dozens of other sun-worshippers who’d come out to play Frisbee, exercise their dogs, and just veg out to a cool sea breeze and the sight of bobbing boats on the water. Stomachs full, she and Soph lay on the grass, listening to the cry of gulls and watching the jets come and go overhead.

When it was time to leave, Annie was as reluctant as Sophie. The last six months had been fraught with fear and tension, and this was the first time she’d allowed herself to simply relax and forget her troubles. The first time she’d been able to laugh and joke and just be with Sophie, like a normal mother and daughter. Once they got back to Serenity, she knew reality would close in on them and they’d be back in the hypervigilant mode that had been forced on both of them.

As she clutched and shifted and steered Jack’s pickup truck through the city traffic, she pondered their situation for the eleven-hundredth time. Was there something she could have done differently? She could have stayed and fought, the way her dad thought she should. She could have reported what she knew to the authorities. But who would that be? Brogan was county sheriff and his brother was district attorney. That pretty much took care of the authorities for Atchawalla County. Certainly, she could have gone further. To the state police, perhaps. Even to the governor, if it came to that.

But even she had to admit that the accusations she was leveling at Luke Brogan sounded far-fetched. And his brother was
a powerful individual. Who knew how many equally powerful people he had in his pocket? It was said that politics made strange bedfellows. How far would Marcus Brogan go to protect his brother? If she’d turned to anybody else, she might have been signing her death warrant. Look at what had happened to Boyd.

Stop doubting yourself. You did the only thing you could do.

But still the doubts gnawed at her.

She stopped the truck at a red light. In the lane to their right sat a bright red Mini Cooper, trashy music pouring like solid waste from its open windows. The kid behind the wheel glanced up at Sophie and flashed her a grin. The light turned green, and he sped off.

“Did you see that guy?” Soph said. “I think he was flirting with me.”

Annie wasn’t ready for randy young men in foreign cars to be flirting with her daughter. “I don’t want to know,” she said. “He had to be at least twenty-one. You’re only fifteen. I can’t go there. I can’t even think about going there.”

But Sophie was immeasurably cheered by the incident. She hummed along with the radio all the way home. She was still in an expansive mood when they reached Serenity. To Annie’s amazement, Sophie turned to her in the cab of the pickup, right there in plain sight of the world, and gave her a bone-squeezing hug. “Thanks for the day, Mom,” she said. “It was great.” And, grabbing a plastic bag with the Abercrombie logo, she hopped out of the truck and sprinted up the stairs to the apartment.

Annie watched her dig in her pocket for her door key, then insert it into the lock. When the door slammed shut behind her, Annie sat there, stupefied, for a full thirty seconds before she had the presence of mind to gather up her purse and her shopping bags and begin the trek up the stairs.

Louis
picked up the tail a couple of blocks from his motel.

At least the guy was being consistent. But was he so arrogant, so sure of himself, that he thought Louis wouldn’t notice him? Maybe the guy simply thought he was being clever. After all, he’d changed cars since last night. But then, so had Louis. He’d returned the rented van first thing this morning, then walked across the airport terminal to a different rental agency, hands in his pockets, whistling all the way, and picked up the champagne-colored Saturn he was now driving. There had to be a million of the things on the road, so many of them that people’s eyes glazed over when they passed by. For sheer invisibility, you couldn’t do better than a Saturn, not since Ford Motor Company stopped making the Tempo.