The Off Season (22 page)

“I’m so happy one of us, at least, is entertained,” she said dryly. But there was a spark or something in her eyes that told him her pulse was racing just as his was, that she felt the wild energy arcing between them, brighter and hotter with every time they came into contact.

That it was a good thing, a damn good thing, that they’d found some way to break the growing tension other than the one he couldn’t stop himself from picturing in excruciating detail.

He couldn’t risk touching her again, he told himself, getting any more involved with a woman who was at the center of a critical investigation. But not even that would stop him if he didn’t get the hell out of this house soon.

And the way she was looking up at him, her lips slightly parted and her eyes glazed with awareness, assured him she had the same need pulling at her, the way the moon called to the tides.

“I—I’d better go now,” he said, though he had more to discuss with her.

“That would—that would probably be best. Before I—” Closing her eyes, she shook her head. “I have a lot to think about.”

“Since your—since your sister took off, how ’bout if I run to the store for you. Pick up dinner. And you’ll need dog food, too, right?”

She nodded. “I’d appreciate that so much. I’ll have to pay you back, though, if that’s okay. I’m sure it’ll take me a few days, at least, to get a new bank card and ID.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Just tell me what you’ll need. And don’t be shy about it, either.”

“You’re a godsend. Thanks,” she said before giving him a brief list. “I’m afraid you’ll need to stop by the vet’s office—Dr. Olsen’s clinic—to pick up Max’s food. I’ll call ahead and make sure they have it ready for you.”

“I know where that is, sure, but that reminds me, I forgot to give this to you earlier.” Slipping his hand into the inner pocket of his jacket, he came up with her cell phone. “I found it the night of the fire, underneath the porch roof. The light helped me to find you.”

“It’s still working?” she asked as she reached to take it from him.

“Corner of the screen’s cracked, but it’ll do you,” he said before handing her a wound-up white cord. “I found an extra charger lying around the station, too, so I plugged it in awhile for you.”

In the interests of his investigation, he might have done more than simply charge her cell phone, but he’d been unable to figure out Christina’s passcode. He’d been almost relieved she’d secured her private data, since the idea of going through her texts and e-mails without permission had bothered him a lot more than it should have.

If he was thinking straight, it wouldn’t have, especially now that he knew she’d been withholding more information from him. What more was she hiding? And how could he break down her barriers without losing his fragile grip on his own self-control?

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

As Harris left, Christina stood inside the entryway. With her hand splayed against the front door’s cool wood, she catalogued her symptoms—the dry mouth and palpitating heart—but couldn’t quite come up with a diagnosis.

Relief,
she told herself. That had to be it, because she had no doubt, none at all, how close the two of them had come to using sex as a release valve for the pressure they were both under.

Would it really be so terrible,
countered that portion of her brain still throbbing with frustration,
if I trusted him for a short while, with my body, not my heart?

Shock rippled through her at the idea. The very
dangerous
idea, she quickly realized, knowing that if she and Harris ever came together, there could be nothing casual about it. For one thing, she wasn’t wired that way. She’d learned that lesson years before. Learned it from the boy who’d left her wary of men for years.

But that boy had grown to manhood, into a loving father, a shift she’d witnessed with her own eyes, despite Renee’s aspersions.

There was more to it than that, though. He was a shrewd investigator as well, one Christina knew would stop at nothing to find the person who’d murdered Officer Fiorelli and burned a piece of Seaside Creek’s cherished history almost to the ground.

She wanted this person caught as well and would not be able to rest easy until he or she was behind bars. But her stomach knotted with the worry that in uncovering this criminal, Harris might publicly expose her sister’s relationship with this local loan shark, a man that Christina intended to pay off herself as soon as possible.

Leaving Max behind to snore on the sofa, she headed to the second floor to look in on Lilly.

“Hey there, button,” she said as she walked into the small bedroom she’d slept in as a child. At her adult height—five seven—Christina had to duck a little in order not to bump her head on the inward-sloping upper walls. Somehow, rather than seeming confining, the room felt like a cozy refuge. Or maybe it was the familiar furnishings, which her mother had recently repainted in a crisp white that looked great against the sea-green walls, and the handmade quilt on the single bed that comforted her, along with the knowledge that Annie’s nearly identical bedroom lay just across the hall.

Picking her way among the toys to reach the slightly rumpled bed, Christina shut off the movie playing on her mother’s iPad and knelt down by her daughter, who sat with legs crossed on an oval braided rug on the warm golden maple floor. There, Lilly had spread the contents of the box of toys around her, where she was happily organizing them into groupings based on some criteria Christina couldn’t decipher.

“Mommy play?” Lilly pleaded, picking up the scattered pieces of a simple plastic toy set known as Tiny Family and raising them like offerings.

“Okay,” Christina said, folding herself into the awkward space. “But only if I don’t have to be the mommy.”

Lilly laughed at this outrageous suggestion, thrusting the mother figure toward her, with its yellow plastic hair and benign, painted smile.

“This the mommy,” she insisted, smiling with two pearl-like rows of tiny teeth. “Kaydee-Mommy.”

Of course it is.
Nausea churning in her stomach, Christina stared, unable to accept the figure. And terrified of whatever her daughter might say next.

“Who told you that?” she asked, assuring herself that someone must have. There could be no other explanation—certainly not the one that Annie had floated for Harris. It was just one of those offbeat ideas her sister got in her head sometimes, probably from Kym or one of her other New Agey friends.

“Kaydee-Mommy tell me,” Lilly answered, picking up a child figure with the other hand and showing her how
Kaydee-Mommy
whispered into the little girl’s ear.

Christina tried to ignore the cold waves that swept over her. “Can Katie’s mommy—can she talk to me, too?”

Lilly looked up at her, her eyes as blue and guileless as the strip of January sky peeping between the curtains. But in her mind’s eye, Christina saw points of red reflecting in the pupils, then shrinking down to nothing.

Raising the mother toy, Lilly moved it, clearly pretending it was speaking, “They kill me, Katie.”

Right hand shaking uncontrollably, Christina picked up a dark-haired daughter figure and had it enter into the conversation. “Who did?”

“Bad people,” Lilly said through the mother toy. “Why they do that, baby? I only want to see”—she crawled nearer and came up on her knees before pushing an index finger into Christina’s chest—“you.”

Christina felt the thumping of her heart beneath that tiny finger. Felt the tears in her eyes, hot and stinging, and wished to God she’d gotten the medical history that she was after. Because this couldn’t be real.

But mental illness certainly was. Hadn’t she seen the evidence pass through her ER countless times? Hadn’t she experienced it for herself, a situation that she’d been warned might put her at risk for more hallucinations under the wrong conditions?

Yet on she went with the charade, as if she were living in the world of Annie’s fairy tales instead of the real one, where an educated woman, a woman who had always put her faith in science and learning, considered the possibility that her daughter really could be speaking to, or for, her dead grandmother.
Channeling
her, as Annie had so sheepishly suggested. “Where are—where are you now?”

“Silly Mommy,” Lilly said, crawling into her lap and snuggling against her. “I here now, with you. Here with you forever.”

As Harris left the historic district, he turned onto the main route tourists used to reach the shore. Instead, he headed inland, along a plowed but nearly empty road, so often bumper-to-bumper during the summers. He passed business after business shuttered for the season: pizza joints, bars, frozen-custard stands, bicycle-rental outfits, “seaside chic” boutiques, and half a dozen gift shops. A few concerns, like the tattoo parlor, a deli, and a small convenience store with gas pumps remained open, each of them run by one or two employees.

Turning onto a heavily wooded county road, Harris headed for Christina’s vet’s office. As the Tahoe jounced over the rutted surface—torn up from years of road salting and last winter’s freezing temperatures—he crossed a small bridge spanning Seaside Creek and the tidal marsh that flanked it, its tall, gold-brown winter grasses mashed down in places by the snow.

As the land began to rise again, the marsh gave way to stunted trees that obscured many of the older cottages and aging singlewides that made up his old stomping ground. Despite Creekbend’s grinding poverty and sporadic violence, and the painful childhood memories he would never completely shake, Harris couldn’t help but appreciate how beautiful the area looked with the snow covering the rooftops and rusting cars—many of which hadn’t been on the road in years—and clinging to the north side of every straight, gray tree trunk. He spotted a bright-red cardinal, swooping among the low branches of a holly, and a trio of whitetail deer pawing icy clumps to browse whatever they could find beneath the surface.

Or maybe it was only beautiful because the snow had hidden the ruins of the broken-down bungalow where he’d lived as a kid. Had blanketed the painful history that had shaped him.

Another mile down the road a short time later, he was just leaving the veterinary clinic when his phone buzzed with a call from the station.

“Bowers here. What d’you got?”

“Finally figured out Fiorelli’s e-mail password,” said Zarzycki, who’d clocked in early to work on the old desktop computer the patrol officers sometimes used to write reports or look up information. Though most of the younger officers used mobile devices, Fiorelli had preferred hanging around the station, sucking down coffee and dragging out his paperwork. “Should’ve figured it would’ve ended up being something gross.”

“I’m trying to rise above the temptation to ask.”

With a snort, she told him, “Bimbo69.”

Harris sighed and shook his head.

“Turns out Bimbo’s his dog’s name,” she elaborated. “Found it written on the back of a picture he had pinned up on the bulletin board, a shot of the two of ’em riding around in that old convertible of his. A ’69 Camaro.”

It bothered Harris more than he would’ve thought that he would never again see that familiar sight around town. Never again give the asshole a halfhearted wave, only to have Fiorelli flip him off, then tip back his head and howl with laughter, affectionately rubbing the giant Newfoundland’s thick, black scruff as they passed.

“Good work putting it together,” said Harris before changing the subject. “So what about those e-mails? You find anything of interest?”

“Actually, I did. There’s a couple of messages from the owners of area security companies. A list of current and recently departed technicians working for them.”

“Yeah. Frank was investigating the vandalism cases, looking to find any possible link between the security techs and the homes that were hit.”

“And he didn’t mention that he’d found one?”

“He did?” asked Harris.

“The message was already open when I checked it. He had to have seen it.”

“When was that?”

“It was sent two days before—before he died.”

“And this link?” asked Harris.

“An ex-employee of First-Rate Security who’d gone to work for the competition. And his employment dates correspond to client incidents.”

“Any info on why he left the first company?”

“Not in the e-mail, but when I called First Rate’s owner, he told me this guy was a newer employee, and he was let go after two of their clients had their houses broken into and trashed not long after this kid had worked on their systems. Owner figured he was just incompetent, but now he says he wonders if it was more than that. Especially when I told him the kid had gone to work for Secure-Shore, the company used by the owners of some of the other damaged houses, including the old guy who was assaulted.”

“Mr. Gunderson,” he corrected her. The poor man, now too scared to live alone, deserved the dignity of his name.

“Right. Walt Gunderson,” she said, as if it had only slipped her mind for a moment.

“So what’s this employee’s name? We got an address on him?”

“It’s Eric Edgewood, at 49 South Bluefish—”

“Oh, for—the city councilman’s son?” Harris choked back a curse, Reg Edge’s sneer springing to mind.

“Which would make him—”

“Fiorelli’s nephew, yeah,” Harris said, picturing a handsome twenty-something with thick, black hair and an ever-changing cast of girlfriends. High school wrestling champ and homecoming king a few years back, when Frank had shown off pictures and boasted about how clearly the kid owed his good looks to his favorite uncle. But the bragging had stopped abruptly around the time that Eric unexpectedly left college amid rumors of a cheating scandal and moved back home to run deliveries for a family member’s deli.

“And he still lives at home.”

“With my biggest fan, yeah.” Harris sighed, thinking of how, since Frank’s death, Edgewood had lost no time blaming his family’s tragedy on Harris’s failure to get a handle on the vandalism problem. Next week, there was going to be an emergency council meeting to discuss what was being termed “the current crisis.”

Harris had only heard about it when a still-friendly council member had forwarded him a text about it, noting how odd it was that the current police chief hadn’t been invited to attend.

“So . . . you want me to go pick Eric up?” Zarzycki asked. “Take a little of the heat off you?”

“Thanks, but no thanks, Aleksandra. Good rookies are too hard to find for me to let you paint a target on your back, too.” Not that he bought that she was really a rookie. The more he saw of her work, he’d be willing to bet money that the three-year gap in the work experience on her résumé had nothing to do with a period of postmilitary unemployment, as she’d claimed. And the less he cared about whatever secret he sensed lurking in her background, as long as he could keep her on the Seaside Creek force. “I’ll track down Eric myself a little later.”

“They’re sure to think it’s some kind of retaliation. The city council, I mean.”

Harris winced, remembering that day at the hospital right after Jacob had been injured, how he’d told Edgewood,
I
hope to hell you never have to see your son lying helpless when there’s not a damn thing you can do.
“They can think whatever they want to. But I intend to do the questioning myself.”

Keeping his job might matter to him, but only if he didn’t have to do it hamstrung. Because his real responsibilities, to his officers and his community, mattered a hell of a lot more than any paycheck.

By the time he made it back to the Cape Cod about an hour later, the silvery winter sky had faded to a dusky gloom. Soon, it would be fully dark, but Christina had turned on the front porch light, which bathed the snow-covered front yard in a welcoming glow.

When she answered his knock, he could see that her eyes were damp, and she was holding something, a book maybe, tucked beneath her left arm in its sling. But with a thirty-pound bag of dog food over one shoulder and three plastic grocery sacks hooked over his bad arm, he held off on any questions as she waved him inside.