Criminal Intent (MIRA) (4 page)

It irked him. Pete Morin didn’t have to like him. But as Interim Police Chief, he was Pete’s direct supervisor. Like it or not, they were stuck with each other, and if Pete wasn’t cooperative, it was going to make the next two months seem more like two years.

Taking a quick left onto the River Road, Davy drove past side street after side street lined with triple-decker tenements built as housing for mill workers during the latter part of the 19th century. Pete maintained his stony silence as they left civilization behind and hit the 45 mph speed zone along the lonely stretch of highway that followed the contours of the river. Hands placed neatly at ten and two on the wheel, Davy said, “You have something to say to me?”

“Be better if I kept my mouth shut.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. I like to get things out in the open. Clear the air. If we have to work together, we need to be straight with each other. So I’ll go first. You don’t like me much, do you, Morin?”

“It’s nothing personal.”

“Is that so?”

“No. It’s
just—” Pete leaned his head back and sighed. “Ah, hell, who am I kidding? Of course it’s personal.”

“Let me guess. You think it should’ve been you who took Ty’s place while he was gone.”

“Damn right, I think that. But that’s not all of it.”

“Care to tell me the rest?”

“I’ve been a cop in this town for ten years,” Pete said. “When Buck retired and Ty got his job, I kept my mouth shut, even though I’d been with the department longer. I figured what with nepotism and all, I didn’t stand a chance of getting the job anyway. And there was a certain rightness to the chief’s job being passed down from father to son. Besides, Ty had something I didn’t have—a degree in criminology. So I figured the job was his by rights.” Pete shifted his bulk, stretched his long legs and crossed one ankle over the other.

“That doesn’t mean I was happy about it,” he continued. “But I took it like a man. And after I’d worked for Ty for a while, I forgot I ever had a problem with him. He’s a good cop, a good man, a good boss. Has his feet planted on the ground, right where they should be. He’s steady and dependable. If he tells you the sky just turned green, you’d best be believing him. I’d trust him with my life. See, Hunter, that’s the thing.” The accusation in Pete’s eyes was unmistakable. “I don’t trust you. You royally screwed up. You got Chelsea killed, and you almost got Faith killed. How the hell am I supposed to trust you after that? How the hell am I supposed to believe that if I need you to cover my back, you won’t be getting me killed?”

It was a valid question. Davy had botched a case, and the consequences had been tragic. How could he defend himself against Pete’s accusation when it was the truth? He’d fucked up. People had died. In the end, he’d pissed off everybody, from the local citizens to the Serenity police to the freaking DEA. “I don’t know, Pete,” he said. “I honestly don’t know.” It wasn’t much of a defense, but it was the truth.

Pete’s
response was a loud, undignified snort. Davy signaled for a right turn and wheeled the cruiser into the rest area along the riverbank, tires crunching in the hard-packed gravel. They sat for a while in silence, both of them looking at the river, both of them contemplating the fact that Chelsea had died here after her car plunged into the rain-swollen Androscoggin. “Look,” Davy said, “we have to work together. It’s only for a couple of months. Then you’ll be rid of me.”

“As far as I’m concerned, it can’t come soon enough.”

“Here’s a big surprise. I’m no happier about it than you are.”

Jaw set, Pete turned to look at him. “Yet you’re the one sitting in the chief’s office,” he said, “in the chief’s chair, staring at a framed eight-by-ten of the chief’s wife. Just how, exactly, do you explain that?”

“It’s not my fault. I tried to turn down the job. You know Ty. He doesn’t like to take no for an answer. He completely ignored what I said and just went ahead with his plans anyway.”

Pete muttered a curse under his breath. “What’s done is done,” he said. “I guess now we have to live with it.”

“Exactly. So where do we stand? You and I?”

“I’m not taking you to the senior prom, if that’s what you’re asking. Look, I like my job, I have three kids to feed, and my wife likes to buy expensive things. I can’t afford to mutiny. But I’ll be watching you, Hunter. The first time you fuck up, I’ll be calling the Board of Selectmen.”

“Fair enough. So is this a truce?”

Pete sighed. “It looks that way.” Scowling, he added, “For now, anyway. But I meant what I said, Hunter. Watch your step.”

“So are we supposed to, like, pinky swear or something?”

Pete Morin didn’t laugh at his pathetic attempt at a joke. He
just maintained that unflinchingly stony face. “You’re an idiot,” he said.

Davy put the cruiser into gear and pulled back out onto the highway. “Tell me something I don’t already know.”

T
he
second-story apartment was bare, but surprisingly cozy. Light poured in through the matching pair of large windows that faced the highway. Although the carpet was standard-issue beige and the room empty of furniture, the walls were papered with a pink-and-yellow rose pattern that gave the place a homey feel. The living room was big and square, opening onto a kitchen complete with a full-size range and refrigerator, and—could it be possible? A dishwasher! Annie’s heart beat a little faster in appreciation. The appliances were outdated, but appeared to be in working order, and the homemade white wooden cabinets seemed adequate.

A note was tacked to the refrigerator door with a magnet. Annie crossed the room and took it down.
Thought you might be hungry,
it said.
There’s a casserole in the fridge. Heat at 350 degrees for twenty minutes. Sorry we missed you. Cheers! Yvonne Boudreau.

Yvonne Boudreau and her husband Mike were decent people, what her mother had always referred to as salt of the earth. They’d left for Florida yesterday, and although Annie had spoken on the telephone with both of them after they’d inked
the deal for the Twilight, she’d never met them face-to-face. She had a feeling she would have liked them.

“They left us lunch,” she said.

Sophie had already disappeared from view. Her voice floated through a door off the living room. “Who left us what?”

“The Boudreaus. They left us a casserole. Wasn’t that nice of them?”

“Whatever.” Annie could hear her daughter opening and closing doors. “Geez,” Sophie said, “this bedroom gives new meaning to the word ugly.” There was a pause, and then she said, “Um…Mom?”

“What?” Annie opened the refrigerator to check out the macaroni-and-beef casserole and the six-pack of Pepsi that Yvonne Boudreau had left for them. The fridge was immaculate, as was the rest of the living space.

“There’s only one bedroom.” Sophie emerged looking scandalized. “This whole place is just two rooms and a bath. Where the hell are we supposed to sleep?”

Annie closed the refrigerator door. “You, my dear, will sleep in the bedroom. I’ll bunk on the couch. And watch your language.”

“We don’t have a couch.” With a disparaging glance around the room, Sophie added, “Or a bed, for that matter.”

“Oh, ye of little faith. We will. There’s a secondhand furniture store in town. I bet if we’re really nice to them, they’ll deliver.”

Her daughter didn’t look convinced. Instead, she raised her chin and said, “Are we really staying this time?”

It was a valid question. They’d moved around so much. Every time Sophie had started to settle into a new home, started to make new friends, Annie had dragged her away yet again.

But you couldn’t spend the rest of your life running. Sooner
or later, you had to stop. The odds against their being found in this out-of-the-way little town were astronomical. They had new names, new birth certificates, new social security numbers. Annie had a new driver’s license, courtesy of the state of Nevada. Sophie had spent long enough in the Las Vegas school system to accumulate a brief academic history which Annie prayed would satisfy the Serenity school department. Neither of them had ever been to Maine before. They had no friends or relatives here, nothing to point a pursuer in this direction, and they were far enough from home so it was highly unlikely that anyone from Mississippi would accidentally stumble over them.

Annie had chosen Serenity because it was off the beaten path. There were no sites of historical significance in the area, no campgrounds, no ski areas or beaches. Nothing to draw tourists. Just a quiet, insular little town that had been built on a nineteenth-century economy and was now struggling to survive in a vastly different twenty-first century.

For the first time since she’d begun running, she felt almost safe. Almost. “We’re really staying this time,” she said.

Sophie stepped away from the bedroom doorway and into her mother’s arms. They shared a hard, emotional embrace, made more poignant because these days, physical contact between them was a rarity. Fiercely, Annie said, “This is where we start a new life. We’re safe here. You trust me, don’t you, Soph?”

Her daughter avoided meeting her eyes. “I guess,” she said.

She stroked Sophie’s hair. It was still baby-soft, in spite of the dye job, and Annie was reminded of the two-year-old her daughter had once been. Time moved so quickly. In another couple of years, Sophie would start looking at colleges. Where had the time gone? It was all a blur of family vacations and PTA meetings, Saturday morning cartoons and soccer
practice, and all the little day-to-day things that made life so precious. They’d had their squabbles, as all families do, but for the most part, Sophie had been a joy to raise. She’d been an easy baby and an easier child. At least she had until adolescence had reared its ugly head. Annie could only pray that once the current hormonal madness was over, Soph would turn back into a regular person, a bright, sweet young woman with a good head on her shoulders.

She planted a kiss on top of the aforementioned head. “Well, then, Miss Muffet—” Sophie groaned at the old family nickname “—what do you say we start unloading the car? Then we’ll take a drive into town and see if we can find that furniture store.”

“Okay, but if we’re really staying this time, I want to get a job.”

“Oh, Soph.” Her heart took a sudden and unexpected plunge. “We’ve talked about this before.”

“And every time we talk about it, you refuse to listen to me!”

“You’re only fifteen years old. Right now, you should be concentrating on being a kid. Keeping your grades up, enjoying life, going to school dances and football games and parties. A job would interfere with that. You’ll be in the working world soon enough.” She brushed a wisp of hair away from her daughter’s face. “Why rush it?”

“It would only be until school starts. Think about it, Mom. I’m stuck all summer in the puckerbrush in this dead little town where I don’t know anybody. What am I supposed to do with myself all day if I don’t have a job?” Sophie sent a disparaging glance around the empty room. “I’ll go nuts if I have to sit around this place all the time.”

Sophie was right. She hated to admit it, but her daughter had a point. Still she was afraid to give in. It wasn’t just her reluctance to see Sophie growing up too quickly that concerned
her. There was more to it than that. Ever since the day they’d fled their hometown with little more than the clothes on their backs, she’d been terrified to let her daughter out of her sight. Sending her to public school had been torture. Even though there was no way the school, or anybody else for that matter, could connect Sophie Kendall of Las Vegas with Sophie Spinney of Atchawalla, Mississippi, still Annie had lived in terror that they’d be found, that something unspeakable would happen to her daughter. A parent’s worse nightmare.

She knew she was being paranoid. She knew that sooner or later she would have to relinquish her rock-solid maternal grasp. It wasn’t good for Sophie. Wasn’t good for either of them.

But not yet. Not when they hadn̻t even had time to unpack, let alone acquaint themselves with this place. “Maybe you could work for me,” she said. “In the video store.”

Sophie’s look of horror would have been comical if she hadn’t been so serious about it. “Yeah, right, Mom. Do you have any idea how lame that would be, working for my own mother? I don’t think so. I want a real job, one that’ll allow me to get out of this dump once in a while.”

Annie sighed. “I’ll think about it, Soph. But not until we’ve had time to get settled.”

The police cruiser thumped down the rutted driveway hard enough to knock Davy Hunter’s teeth together. He really ought to get the damn driveway taken care of. Fill in the potholes, spread some new gravel. Live a little less like some backwoods hillbilly. At one time, he’d planned to build a house here and have the trailer hauled off to its eternal rest. But after Chelsea died and he left the DEA, making improvements to the property had seemed pointless. Why bother to put money into something he didn’t give a rat’s ass about? Why bother when he had nobody to share it with? For most of
the last fourteen months, he’d been so apathetic that his car could have disappeared completely into one of those potholes and he wouldn’t have even noticed.

Maybe, now that Jessie was here, that would change.

Davy pulled up beside Jessie’s car, parked in front of the ugly little green trailer he called home. The thought of her behind the wheel at sixteen was almost enough to give him a coronary. At least Ty had bought her a car that was a tank, and easy to maneuver on snowy back roads. The four-wheel-drive Jeep Cherokee might not be the most fashionable vehicle in the student parking lot at Serenity High, but it was one of the safest.

Having her here for the summer was worth whatever bull-shit he had to wade through as interim police chief. She could have gone with Ty and Faith to New York. Hell, she probably should have. Broaden her horizons. Get out of this one-horse town where nothing ever happened. But her friends were here, and her job was here, and she’d opted to stay.

By some miracle, she’d opted to stay with him.

Buddy, Jessie’s enthusiastic mixed-breed mutt, greeted him at the door, and Davy patted the dog on the head. Technically, Buddy was Faith’s dog, but once he’d adopted Jessie as his human, there was no separating them. Taking him to NewYork for the summer hadn’t even been an option. It had simply been understood, by all parties involved, that wherever Jessie went, her dog went, too. It was going to take some adjusting all around, especially for Davy’s eight-year-old cat, Sir Lancelot, who’d been an only child until Buddy arrived on the scene. Even though Lance wasn’t familiar with dogs, instinct had taken over when he was greeted by a curious wet nose and a lolling tongue. He’d arched his back and hissed, and as far as Davy could tell, he’d been hiding under the couch ever since. At night, while his evil adversary was asleep, Lance came out to eat and drink and use the litter box before scurrying back to his hiding place.

Jessie
had tried to coax him out, first with soft words and later with an open can of cat food, but Lance had refused to budge. Davy was secretly proud of him for holding out even when temptation, in the form of a particularly aromatic can of mackerel, was waved right under his nose. Lance was no weenie. He was a tough guy, a man’s man, a feline who’d rather starve than betray his principles.

His stepdaughter, dressed in a conservative white T-shirt and jeans, was moving about Davy’s tiny kitchen, putting last-minute touches to dinner. At sixteen, Jessie was so cool, so self-assured, it was scary. He sure as hell hadn’t been that way at her age. As he recalled, at sixteen he’d been an unruly mess of stringy hair and raging hormones and as-yet-unrequited love for her mother. Dish towel in hand, Jessie bent to open the oven and check on the main dish. Whatever was in there smelled heavenly. “Hi,” she said. “How did your day go?”

“Peachy. A laugh a minute. Listen, Skeets, I don’t expect you to cook for me.”

“Are you kidding? I love to cook.” She left the oven door open a couple of inches, stretched to turn off the heat, then picked up a big spoon and stirred whatever was boiling on the back burner. Turning, she gave him a killer smile that nearly stopped his heart. “I’ll have you know that I’m a world-class cook. You just happen to be the lucky recipient of my talents.”

Jessie had come a long way from the shy, mousy little girl she’d been when her mother died. She and Chelsea had been closer than Siamese twins, and he’d been fearful about how her mother’s death would affect Jess. But she’d gotten through it far better than he’d expected. Far better than he’d gotten through it himself. Over the course of the past year, Jessie had come out of her shell, had blossomed and thrived.

The credit for that belonged exclusively to Ty and Faith. It couldn’t have been easy for them, starting out married life with
a teenage foster daughter. Especially when neither of them had a clue about raising kids. But they’d taken Jessie Logan to their collective bosom as though she’d been their own. Exposed to their special brand of love and discipline and nurturing, Jessie had flowered, and for that, he would be eternally grateful.

Not that he had any right to be grateful. He had no rights to Jessie at all. Chelsea had made that abundantly clear, had reminded him as often as possible that he wasn’t the man who’d fathered her daughter. It had been the biggest bone of contention between them. With her customary tunnel vision, Chels had failed to see how much it hurt him to be reminded that another man had sired Jessie. Or maybe she’d seen, and simply hadn’t cared. Chelsea Logan had been a self-centered woman. He’d loved her in spite of it.

But biology be damned. In every way that mattered, Jessie was his kid. Over the course of the past sixteen years, he hadn’t yet noticed any other guy stepping forward to take responsibility for her existence on this planet. After Chelsea died, he would have taken Jessie, kept her with him, if Chels hadn’t made her wishes known long before the will was even written. If anything ever happened to her, she’d told him time and again, she wanted Faith to have Jessie. End of discussion.

“Did you have to deal with a lot of idiots today?” Jessie said now.

It took him a minute to regroup. “Idiots?”

She stood there in his kitchen, her long, dark hair flying every which way, and studied him with an indulgent little smile that was more adult than adolescent. “Ty’s always complaining about the idiots he has to deal with.”

“Oh. Those idiots. Yeah, I saw a lot of those today.” Darkly, he added, “Several of ’em right in my own department.”

Jessie’s eyes widened, and then she giggled, a sound that reduced her instantly to the barefoot ten-year-old she’d been just
a day or two ago. “That I want to hear about. Supper will be ready in ten minutes. I just need to set the table. You have time to change if you want to. Then you can tell me about the idiots.”

Supper was a low-key affair. He entertained her with stories about his day—the ones he could repeat to her—and she talked about her summer job renting videos at the Twilight. “I talked to Faith today,” she said.