Criminal Intent (MIRA) (6 page)

“So,” she said, still beaming, “how’s the new job going?”

Not so good,
he wanted to tell her.
Pete Morin’s gunning for my ass, and if he has his way, I’ll probably get canned.
But he didn’t say it. “Fine,” he said instead.

“There’s something I’ve been worried about,” she said. “I thought you might know what I should do about it.”

“Sure, Gram.” He raised his glass of milk to his mouth. “What is it?”

“Alien abductions.”

He almost choked on the milk. Coughing, he set down the glass and reached for a napkin from the plastic holder in the center of the table. “Alien abductions?” he said, blotting his mouth. “Where the hell did you hear something like that?”

“From Elsa,” she said ingenuously. “She read me a story about it from the
National Enquirer,
about people living in rural areas being abducted at night by aliens. They take you up into their mother ship and run all kinds of oddball medical tests before they let you go. I live all by myself out here, and to tell you the truth, it scares me to death. I thought since you’re a cop, you could tell me how to protect myself.”

Elsa Donegan was the young woman he’d hired to come in three times a week. She did light cleaning and grocery shopping, made sure Gram’s medications were in order, kept her company and read to her, since Gram’s diabetes had left her blind in both eyes. He’d have to have a chat with Elsa about her choice of reading material. “You shouldn’t let her read that crap to you,” he said. “You know it’s all made up.”

“What do you expect her to read, Tolstoy? Good God, David, I’m eighty-six years old. That’s enough reason to be depressed without reading about people throwing themselves under
trains. I want a little entertainment. There isn’t a thing worth watching on TV since they took
Friends
off the air. All they have on nowadays is cheap sex and reality shows. Paris Hilton and Donald Trump and a bunch of people nobody knows. I don’t get it. But Ross and Rachel, now that was entertainment.”

He had a headache coming on. He could feel it starting to pound, just behind his left eye. “Gram,” he said patiently, “don’t be losing any sleep worrying about aliens. You have a better chance of winning the Megabucks. By the way, these cookies are terrific.”

She beamed. “It’s my secret ingredient,” she said, aliens, Paris Hilton, and
Friends
already forgotten. “Ever since I’ve been using it, my friends all say my cookies are better than theirs.”

The cat padded in from the living room, made a soft
chirrup
and leaped into his lap. He could have easily strangled the creature, but it wouldn’t have earned him any brownie points. Instead, he rubbed behind its ears. The cat dropped and rolled onto its back, purring loudly.

“Gram,” he said, “I really have to go now. I’m right in the middle of a woodworking project. And I have to work in the morning.”

“Of course,” she said, her voice trembling slightly. “I should never have called you out here over something so trivial as a lost cat. You have much more important things to do than humor an old lady.”

His headache got worse. The cat sat up on his lap and favored him with a baleful stare, then haughtily dropped to the floor and stalked out of the room. “Come on, Gram, that’s not fair,” he said. “You know I don’t mind coming over if you have a problem. I just can’t stay and chitchat right now. We can visit some other time.”

“That’s what your sister says every time I call her. I don’t suppose
you’ve talked to her lately? It’s been so long since she’s visited.” Her lower lip wobbled ever so slightly. “The kids are growing so fast. Little Abby’s just a baby. I’m afraid she won’t even remember me the next time she sees me.”

Goddamn Dee. Maybe he should strangle her instead of Gram’s cat. He was tired of making excuses for his sister, especially when his grandmother could see right through them. He did it again anyway. “You know how busy she is, Gram. The kids keep her running, and when she’s not chasing after them, she’s at work. I’m sure she doesn’t mean to neglect you.”

“If that good-for-nothing husband of hers would get off his duff and get a decent job, maybe she wouldn’t have to work so much. All he does is sit around all day drinking beer and playing video games.”

Despite the fact that his opinion on this particular subject happened to coincide with hers, he kept his mouth shut. Gram had never been known for her discretion. Anything he said was likely to get back to Dee. His relationship with his sister was already rocky enough. He didn’t need to give her any more ammunition. “I’ll talk to her,” he said. “I promise.”

“Would you, David? That would be wonderful! Now, you run along and get back to your work. Koko and I will be just fine. Elsa’s coming in the morning, and we’re going for a drive. But I’ll be home all day Wednesday. You make sure and tell Dee that when you talk to her.”

Davy kissed her dry, papery-thin cheek and climbed into his car, sitting there for a minute before he started the engine. The old girl was clever, he had to give her credit for that. She’d worked him over so smoothly, he hadn’t realized what was happening until she was done.

The wooden kitchen table was so beat up that the guy at the secondhand store had thrown it in for free. The scarred oak
looked as though it had been regularly battered with a sledgehammer. At some point in time, an enterprising lover had carved his or her romantic sentiments into one corner of the tabletop.
TJ and LS 4-ever.
Annie wondered if TJ and LS had gotten their happy ending. Probably not. There weren’t very many happy endings any more. Maybe there never had been.

She’d paid five bucks apiece for the mismatched wooden chairs. Two of them, one for her and one for Sophie. Annie sat in one of them now, sipping cheap supermarket wine from a green-stemmed goblet while she squinted at the screen of her Gateway notebook computer. Above her head, the kitchen light, one of those circular fluorescent things that dated back to the 1950s, flickered and hummed. Sophie had finally fallen asleep an hour ago in the saggy twin bed they’d bought this afternoon. The poor kid was exhausted, wiped out, totally fried.

She wasn’t the only one. It was past eleven, and Annie was going on twenty hours without sleep. It was time to shut down the computer and crawl beneath the blankets on the lumpy couch that was the best Trader Moe’s Used Stuff had to offer. But she was wired, restless, not yet ready to sleep. She’d opened the bottle of wine in the hope that it would relax her enough so she could shut down for a few hours. So far, it had failed in its mission.

A soft breeze fluttered the curtain at the window, and she sat up straight and scraped the damp hair back from her forehead. The air felt so good. Leaning back, Annie closed her eyes, the wineglass dangling loosely from her fingers. She liked it here, liked the small-town feel of it already. It would be a good place to raise her daughter. Better than Detroit, better than Las Vegas. Cities made her feel stifled, anxious. Too many people, too much noise, too much traffic. Just plain
too much.
But the state of Maine, with its miles of pine forests, sprinkled here and there with small towns, felt like home.

Roots,
Annie
thought.
You have to put down roots. Build credibility.

On the computer screen in front of her the online version of the
Atchawalla Journal-Constitution
sat open. It was a presumptuous name for a small daily newspaper in an even smaller town. Still, Annie read it daily, obsessively, every word of it. In search of…what? She wasn’t sure. But if she missed a day, surely she’d miss something of consequence.

Tonight, she’d hit pay dirt. The headline, hidden away in the local news section, had grabbed her attention immediately.
District Attorney Tapped for Bench. Feldman Likely Successor.

Wineglass in hand, Annie hunched over the laptop and clicked on the link. The story about Luke Brogan’s brother was brief. Just a handful of sentences, but she read them carefully, read them twice, then a third time, just to be certain that what she saw was real.

Rachel
Feldman. How interesting. Annie’d never met the woman, but she knew of her. Knew her story, knew that Mac had liked and respected her. A graduate of Columbia Law School, Rachel Feldman was young and eager and smart. Smart enough, Mac had said, to keep her mouth shut and her eyes open, smart enough to know that she’d been hired to appease the gods of Equal Opportunity. As both a woman and a Jew, Feldman had managed to fulfill two criteria at once. The good old boys must have been dancing a jig the day her application arrived in the mail. There was just one thing they hadn’t counted on when they hired her: Rachel Feldman turned out to be one crackerjack attorney.

A tenuous flicker of hope sprang to life inside her, and Annie struggled to tamp it down. It was too soon, too premature, for anything as tangible as hope. But for the first time, there was possibility. The possibility that, with Marcus Brogan out of the way and Rachel Feldman sitting in the D.A.’s office, this nightmare might actually see an end. Justice might be done. Luke Brogan might end up where he belonged—behind bars—and Annie might be able to reclaim the life he’d stolen from her.

For Sophie’s sake, she had to find a way out of this mess. She didn’t worry so much about herself. No matter what happened, she would never return to Mississippi. She’d made that decision the day she left. She had chosen to live in Serenity and she was putting down roots. No matter what the future brought, she had every intention of staying here.

But it was different for Sophie. A young girl her age needed a future that was wide open. It wasn’t fair to hobble her to a muddied past and a fictitious present. Certainly staying alive, staying ahead of Brogan, was their main priority. But for Sophie, it wasn’t enough. There had to be more. And there was only one way Annie could ensure her daughter’s future
happiness. She had to bring Luke Brogan down. Maybe, somehow, Rachel Feldman could help.

Her cell phone, a gift from Uncle Bobby, rang. Annie hesitated for a moment before she answered it. There was only one person who had the number, and if he was calling her this late at night, it wasn’t with good news.

“Did I wake you?” Bobby asked.

“No. I’m just sitting here, trying to wind down. It’s been quite a day.” While he listened with interest, she proceeded to fill him in on the day’s events. It was her way of stalling, her way of avoiding hearing what he had to say until she could avoid it no longer.

Finally, she ran out of things to say. “I’m calling,” he said, “because I thought you’d want to know about the rumors I’ve been hearing.”

She clutched the phone more tightly. “What rumors?”

“Some private investigator’s been sniffing around, asking questions about Robin Spinney.”

Oh, shit.
Annie squeezed her eyes closed against the sudden dizziness that overtook her.

“Annie? You all right?”

She took a deep breath. “I’m all right. I’d hoped…well, you know what I’d hoped.”

“That he wouldn’t come looking. Yeah, I know. But you knew he would. We expected this. It doesn’t mean a damn thing except that we read him right. He can’t find you. You did a fine job of covering your tracks.”

Such a fine job that even Bobby didn’t know where she was. All he had was a cell phone number and the nebulous knowledge that she’d bought an old motel in a small town somewhere in the Northeast. It was better that way, for both of them. “I hope you’re right,” she said.

“So tell me about the video store.”

“It’s nothing to write home about. I have a couple of part-time
high school kids and one very pregnant full-time employee who looks like a flake but seems to be able to run the place with one hand tied behind her back. It’s hard to say how much revenue it’s bringing in. Mike Boudreau gave me some figures, but I suspect he may have inflated them. We’ll see.”

“What about the motel? You got any ideas yet about what you want to do with that?”

She toyed with the stem of her wineglass. “It’s in pretty rough shape. I haven’t had time yet to look at the guest rooms. But if it’s feasible, I’m considering converting it into apartments. No matter where you live, there’s always a need for housing. If I could convert the place into three or four apartments, it would give Sophie and me a regular income aside from whatever piddly amount the video rental brings in.”

“Not a bad idea.”

“And it would be a good way to settle into the community. Put down those roots you talked about.”

“Remember what I told you. Don’t act like you have anything to hide. People will see it if you do. Make nice with the neighbors, get to know your friendly checkout clerk at the local supermarket. You’re just an average, middle-class, thirty-something single mother starting out fresh in a new place. It’s ninety percent attitude. You believe you’re who you say you are, they’ll believe it, too.”

“I’m scared, Uncle Bobby. What if I can’t pull this off?”

“’Course you are. You’re also strong and resourceful. You’ll do fine. Just remember why you’re doing it. Listen, you got enough money to get by?”

“I do. I’m very frugal.” He’d already done so much for her—in terms of financial and emotional support—that it was staggering to think about. She owed him so much, she’d probably never be able to repay him. She had to take it from here without his help.