To Love a Cop (25 page)

He stared. “Ethan likes
you
?”

“You don’t have to make it sound so unlikely.”

He shrugged awkwardly. “I didn’t mean it that way. I just—”

“Never expected your mother to date again?” she said lightly.

Her son scrunched up his face. “I mean, does he kiss you and stuff?”

Definitely
and stuff
. Laura grinned at him. “Yep. Someday you’ll understand.”

He didn’t say anything for long enough that she began to worry. She started setting the table even though she usually had him do it, keeping an eye on him the whole while, waiting for...what? Hurt feelings?

Finally he burst out, “Are you guys going to get married?”

After setting down a cork-backed tile in the middle of the table, she straightened and made sure to meet his eyes. “I don’t know. It’s a little soon to say. I really like him, but...I guess I still have some qualms about the gun thing. You know how I feel about that.”

He nodded.

“And I haven’t dated at all since your dad died, so this is a big step for me.” She hesitated. “Would you mind?”

After a minute he shook his head, but he wasn’t looking at her, either. And then he asked, “So...what if you break up?”

Of course that was what really worried him. She couldn’t blame him.

“We’ve talked about that. Ethan says he’ll be there for you no matter what. Honestly, that was another one of my qualms. Ethan’s good for you. I don’t want to mess that up. But he swears he won’t let it, and...” She hesitated.

“He means what he says,” her son said with certainty.

She smiled at him. “That’s what I think, too.”

“I hear him!” Jake said suddenly, and took off like a shot for the front door.

As she heard him wrench it open, Laura turned on the burner to heat water for noodles, and realized she felt light as air. Her own words echoed in her head.
He means what he says.

She truly believed that.

The fact that she did shouldn’t have been a surprise, but still somehow was. She had become so guarded, trust wasn’t a natural response for her.

Her phone rang, making her jump.

Dinnertime, she thought in exasperation. Probably a sales call.

But she recognized the phone number that showed on the screen, even though she had deleted the names of the people who went with it from her contacts list.

Bruno and Palma Vennetti.

Which was calling? But she knew. Papa Vennetti did nothing without Mama’s permission. He barely spoke.

Ignore it.

But sharp anger had her picking up the phone. “Hello.”

“Laura?” Mama’s voice was unusually hesitant. “This is—”

“I know who it is.”

This pause gave her a savage sense of satisfaction.

“Emiliana said you wouldn’t talk to her.”

“I did talk to her. Long enough to make it clear that I have no interest in hearing from anyone in the family again.”

The front door opened and closed again. Jake’s excited voice played counterpoint to Ethan’s bass rumble. Laura headed for the sliding door to the deck. This wasn’t a conversation she wanted to have with Jake in earshot.

“If you were a churchgoer the way you pretended to be,” Mama Vennetti chided her, “you would understand forgiveness.”

“Oh, that’s funny.” Laura slipped outside, only distantly aware of the drizzle, and slid the door closed behind her. When she looked back, Ethan raised an eyebrow. She pointed to the phone and he nodded. “Gee, how long did it take you to forgive a five-year-old boy? Or am I jumping to conclusions? Maybe you haven’t.”

“I have called to tell you how deeply I regret my own behavior,” Mama said as if she hadn’t heard a word Laura said. “We made the mistake of letting Matteo think we didn’t love him—”

Laura interrupted with a snort. “You mean, you abandoned him. Your own son. And your grandson, too.”

“Marco was also our grandson.”

“Yes.” She turned her back on the house and gazed at the backyard without seeing anything but the past. Acid ate at her stomach. “Do you know how much
we
loved Marco? He spent more time at our house than at yours. He was...he was—” Her voice broke. “His death left us all bereft. It scarred us all. That does not excuse what you did to Matt and Jake. Jake lives with the belief that he is responsible for his father’s death, too. But you and I both know that isn’t true, don’t we? If you had said, ‘Matteo, this was an awful thing, but we love you,’ he’d still be alive. I hope you ask God’s forgiveness. He may be better at it than either of us is.” Breathing hard, she ended the call, and then stayed where she was, shaking.

Oh, God
, she thought.
Did
I
ever say anything like that? I didn’t leave him, but...

The door slid open behind her. Not Jake. Please not Jake. She couldn’t make herself turn.

The long arms that closed around her were Ethan’s. He pulled her back against him and rested his cheek against her head.

“Something’s wrong.”

“I think I’m a hateful person,” she whispered, and turned to wrap her arms around his torso and press her face against his broad chest. He must have felt her tremors, because his hands moved soothingly up and down her back.

Resting against him, drawing strength from him, she finally grew calm enough to say, “That was Matt’s mother.”

“Mama.” After a minute, he said, “The family rolled out the big gun, then,” and she gave a choked laugh.

“Yes. Although the family had nothing to do with it. Mama makes the decisions.”

“She’s the general.”

“The Pentagon’s loss,” she mumbled into his shirt, then lifted her head. “What did you do with Jake?”

He smiled slightly. “Persuaded him to dive for cover.”

She laughed again, her body starting to relax until she got to remembering. “I was really awful, but she deserved it, too. Do you know what she said?”

He shook his head, his eyes so kind she could have wept.

“That she regretted letting Matt think they didn’t love him. Think! Can you imagine?” Outrage tightened her throat anew.

“Implying that of course they did love him? And he should have known it?” His grunt satisfied her vengeful side.

“The conversation didn’t get off to a great start when she chewed me out for my lack of the Christian virtue of forgiveness.”

“Hypocrisy in action,” he murmured.

“Yes, except—” Laura searched his face. “She’s right.
Should
I forgive them?”
Have I forgiven Matt, even now?

Tiny creases deepened on his forehead. “I don’t know, Laura. Maybe you’ll be ready someday but this is too soon. Maybe they don’t deserve forgiveness. As crummy as what they did to Matt is, I’m even more pissed that they couldn’t see how alone you and Jake were after losing him.”

She bumped her forehead lightly against that solid chest. “By then...I’d probably have told them where to stuff any apologies.”

He bent to kiss her head. When she lifted her face to his, his mouth moved softly over her temple, her cheek, her mouth. “Warning me not to piss you off?” he murmured.

He had a gift for making her laugh even as she closed her eyes and savored the gentle touch of his lips. He wasn’t asking anything of her, just...giving.

“I told Jake,” she said.

“Mmm.” He nibbled on her lower lip. “Told him what?”

“About this.” She turned her head to try to capture his mouth. “That we’re dating.”

“Dating?” he teased, his voice rich with amusement.

“I also said you’re my boyfriend, and that sounds even sillier, so don’t smirk at me,” she said tartly even as she repressed her own smile. “And that was
your
suggestion, if you may recall.”

“Huh.” His smile grew to an open grin. “So it was.”

“Did he say anything to you?”

“Just now? No, but I thought he was looking at me funny.”

“That’s because you kiss me and stuff. And he can’t figure out why you’d want to.”

He squeezed her ass with one big hand. “Oh, he’ll understand sooner than he thinks. Give him another year.”

Laura made a face at him. “Gee, good to know.”

“I’m trying to remember when a guy starts having wet dreams.”

“Eww!” She pushed him away. “I don’t want to know. Ever! Is that clear?”

Laughing helplessly, he held up both hands in acknowledgment and surrender. Only then the smile slid away, leaving tenderness. “You okay now?”

“Yes.” She gasped. “Oh, no! The water’s boiling.”

As she reached to open the door, she felt him right behind her.

“Maybe I could sneak back in tonight after he’s gone to bed.”

“Dream on,” she told him, then turned to narrow her eyes. “And not a word about what kind of dream.”

He laughed so hard she shut the door in his face.

* * *

T
HE NEXT TWO
weeks were good. So good, Ethan was suspicious. Jake hadn’t once begged to have a chance to shoot at the range. He hadn’t thrown a temper tantrum, at least not one Laura had mentioned. Maybe the counseling was helping, Ethan found himself thinking, or could be they were in the eye of the storm.

He was happy with how things were going with Laura, too. Which didn’t mean he was ready for this.

Now parked outside the counseling center where she took Jake, he frowned as he looked at the building. He didn’t want to be there. It felt like a commitment he’d sworn he wouldn’t make yet.

Dr. Randall Lang had requested the favor of his presence. So, okay, Ethan could understand that; apparently, Jake talked about him a lot. Well, of course he did—Ethan saw Jake at least three days a week, sometimes more.

This, though—this felt like something bigger than the therapist wanting to meet Jake’s mother’s boyfriend. Were non-family members usually included? It wasn’t as if he lived with them.

Although he was beginning to wish he did. His apartment felt increasingly bare and lonely. When he wasn’t having dinner with Laura and Jake, he’d taken to mostly grabbing a meal out. Cooking just for himself exacerbated the feeling of loneliness. In restaurants, well, at least there were other people around or he ate with fellow cops.

Shaking his head, he got out, locked up and started across the parking lot. He deliberately distracted himself by thinking about his morning.

Pomeroy and Clayton had thrown up their hands and agreed to a plan Ethan had cooked up. Beginning tomorrow, the three of them would spend a few hours every night keeping watch on a potential next victim of the swastika arsonist. He was uneasy waiting even that long; this had been a long break between attacks. But Pomeroy had had to fly to Seattle and wouldn’t be back until late afternoon tomorrow, and Clayton had a personal commitment. Ethan had had no choice but to concede that tomorrow night would be good.

Neither Pomeroy nor Sam Clayton totally bought into his theory, but when they looked at a map with pins stuck in to indicate where incidents had occurred, they could all see the pattern. Ethan strongly suspected they’d find the perpetrator lived smack-dab in the middle, were they to draw a circle taking in every attack.

What they’d done was search for people with Jewish names who lived within that circle—and a few blocks outside it—and chose the next three that struck them as likeliest. They eliminated some who were in apartments or town houses, unlikely targets. Two houses were brick, tough to set on fire without breaking in. Of course, the attack might take a different form if one of those people was the point of all this...but Ethan was betting not. He thought the fires were going to keep getting bigger, and that their guy had started this whole thing because he knew whoever it was he really hated would be vulnerable to fire.

The three had pretty well drawn straws. Every incident had taken place between one and three in the morning. Midnight to three, they planned to be out there. Another bonus was, if dispatch called, they’d be the first to arrive on any new scene. Pomeroy was taking the Fromels, Clayton the Gartenhaus family, and Ethan the Gelfmans, who by chance lived only ten blocks from Laura and Jake.

And, yeah, pretty close to the middle of the imaginary circle.

One of the things he’d done that morning was research the Gelfman family. What he’d learned had his radar humming. Michael Gelfman had lost his wife to cancer close to ten years ago. He’d remarried three years ago, this time to a Gentile woman who already had a child, a boy who was now seventeen. In the past year, young Austin March had been arrested twice—once for assaulting a teacher, the other time for a fight with another boy that ramped up when Austin pulled a knife.

Gelfman’s stepson was an angry kid likely to have made enemies. He could well be the ultimate intended victim. But the stepfather struck Ethan as target material, too; there had been two potential domestic violence calls to the address since Gelfman married Austin’s mother. In both cases, responding officers hadn’t been satisfied but had had to leave, unable to confirm anything criminal had happened.

A troubled household interested Ethan a great deal in this context.

With a grunt, he put the Gelfmans out of his mind and strode into the counseling center without letting himself hesitate. Laura and Jake were already seated in the waiting room. At the sight of him, both their faces shone with relief and pleasure. They wanted him there. He wanted to be there for them. Of course it was right that he be part of this. Whatever had had him jumpy settled.

“Hey,” he said, kissing Laura on the cheek when she stood to greet him. “I was afraid I was late.”

“No, this is perfect.” She smiled at him. “Thank you for coming. I know getting away during the afternoon can be a problem for you.”

“Nothing that exciting was happening today.”

True enough; except for the meeting—and Pomeroy had come to him and Clayton rather than the other way around—Ethan had spent his day thus far glued to his computer and phone. That summed up a lot of his days, come to think of it. Mostly he gathered information. Thrills and chills were rare. His mother, experienced wife of a law enforcement officer, had breathed a sigh of relief when he left patrol for the detective gig.