Father Christmas (28 page)

“
Aren’t you gonna read me
my rights?” she asked as they escorted her outside to the car. She
turned up the collar of her pea coat and dug her hands into the
pockets.

“
You haven’t been charged
with anything,” Bud explained. “We just want to question
you.”

“
Yeah, well I know my
rights.”

“
Good for you,” he said as
John helped her into the back seat and shut the door.

“
I’m not talking without a
lawyer,” she warned as they took their seats in front of her. “I’m
just telling you that. I know my rights.”

John noted that she hadn’t asked what she
was being brought in for questioning about—which implied that she
already knew. She knew because she’d been the one to send her
husband to the hospital with a gunshot wound to his thigh. If she’d
shot him there, she’d probably been aiming at his groin. Scorned
women were awfully predictable sometimes.

But all his hunches weren’t going to get her
behind bars. Procedures had to be followed. She’d have to be
questioned, and if she wanted a lawyer, she’d get one.

Back at the station house, they ushered her
through the lobby, refusing her the chance to admire the tree. They
escorted her up the stairs, through the squad room and into an
interrogation room. The last time John had been in this particular
room, he’d been grilling two pint-size bank thieves. He had a
feeling this interrogation wasn’t going to be quite as much
fun.

“
I want a lawyer,” Sheila
Hampton reminded them, as if they could have forgotten.

“
I’m going to get a search
warrant,” Bud whispered to John. “You deal with her.”

John shrugged. He hated doing the paperwork
necessary to secure a warrant, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to
spend his morning with this phony redhead. He waited until Bud had
left the room, then said, “Who’s your lawyer?”

“
I don’t have one. You’re
supposed to provide me with one. I know my rights.”

“
Okay.” He left the room,
locking her in, and asked one of the clerks to contact the Public
Defender’s office. Then he returned to the interrogation room. “You
want some coffee?” he asked Sheila.

“
Yeah. Cream and sugar.
Lots of sugar. Three packets.”

Strolling down the hall to the coffee lounge
and preparing a cup of coffee for her ate up a few minutes. He
brought her the steaming drink, then sat across from her at the
painted wood table. It was an ugly thing, the surface scratched and
the legs scuffed, but it was indestructible. John knew this from
personal experience; more than once, he’d seen perpetrators kick
the table, hit it, and attempt to lift it to throw at him. Sheila
Hampton didn’t have enough meat on her to try anything like that.
The table probably weighed more than she did.

“
So,” he said casually,
letting her sip her coffee. “Do you have a job?”

“
What do you mean, do I
have a job?”

“
Well, it’s almost eleven
o’clock. I was just wondering if your boss might be expecting you
at work.”

“
I called in sick,” she
said, then took another sip, looking extremely proud of
herself.

John kept his expression
blank, but inside he was grinning. Why would she have called in
sick? She obviously wasn’t ill. She’d planned to take the morning
off for a reason. The word
premeditated
flashed through his brain.

“
What kind of work do you
do, Mrs. Hampton?” he asked.

“
I’m a
secretary.”

“
And your husband? He
works in a bar on East Fifteenth, doesn’t he.”

Her gaze darted away. “I’m not saying
another thing until you get me a lawyer.”

He was grateful for the light rap on the
door. Shoving back from the table, he opened the door and found
himself face to face with a compact woman with straight blond hair
and hazel eyes, wearing a grim gray suit and carrying a bulging
leather briefcase. She seemed to flinch when she saw him. Then she
regrouped and glared at him, her gaze bristling with hostility.
“You have someone in there for me?” she asked, her voice level
enough for John to know that her hostility had nothing to do with
his being a cop and her being a defender.

Her hostility had to do with him. “Hello,”
he said, unable to push a smile past his uneasiness.

“
We need to talk,” she
snapped, then eased the door fully open. “Later. Right now, I’d
like to confer with my client.” She entered the room, right hand
extended toward Sheila. “Hi. I’m Gail Saunders from the Public
Defender’s office.” After shaking Sheila’s hand, Molly’s sister
turned and reached for the door knob. She sent a final, lethal
stare across the threshold to John, then slammed the door, shutting
him out.

***

BY THE TIME Bud returned to the station
house with the gun he’d found in Sheila Hampton’s apartment, John
was worn out from one of the most fruitless interrogations he’d
ever conducted. The only glimmer of information he’d gotten out of
Sheila was that her husband was a satyr, though she pronounced it
“say-der,” like the Jewish meal at Passover.

“
A sadist, you mean?” he’d
asked.

“
No, a satyr. You know,
one of those old goats that’s always humping up against ladies.”
But she vehemently denied shooting him. “If I was gonna shoot
anyone, I’d shoot the lady that messed with him,” she offered
before Gail Saunders told her to shut up.

Gail was the reason the interrogation was
fruitless. She muzzled her client, censored her, interrupted
whenever Sheila seemed on the verge of saying something useful.
Once ballistics determined that Sheila’s gun matched the slug the
surgeons at Arlington Memorial had cut out of her husband’s leg,
she was booked on the charge of attempted murder. Not once in the
course of the afternoon did she inquire as to her husband’s
condition.

John watched as she was cuffed and escorted
through the squad room, destined for the detention cell in the
building’s basement to await her arraignment. He’d seen perps walk
that path many times before, and it always left him feeling bleak.
He ought to be euphoric whenever he nailed one of the bad guys.
He’d done his part to get a dangerous person out of circulation; he
should savor the moment. But there was something pathetic in the
sight, a feeling that in that bad guy’s tiny corner of the
universe, things had fallen apart disastrously, the mechanisms had
failed, the balance had been thrown off. It was sad, and he’d
witnessed it enough times to be left with a bitter aftertaste.

Turning from the stairway, he started toward
the coffee room. Gail Saunders blocked the hall, her lips pursed
and her eyes narrowed on him.

He was tempted to ask her to kindly step out
of the way. But he knew she was waiting for him. She told him they
had to talk; he only wished he had a hint about what they had to
talk about.

He gave her a tentative smile. “You want
some coffee?” he asked.

“
No, but I would like a
few minutes of your time.”

“
Fine.” He shrugged and
gestured toward the coffee room at the other end of the hall. “I’m
getting some coffee.”

She fell into step beside him, accompanying
him into the lounge. He filled his ceramic cup with the sludge left
in the nearly empty pot, then motioned to one of the vinyl chairs
placed around the small room. She remained standing, projecting
height and mass even though she was no more than an inch or two
taller than her sister. She gripped her briefcase in one hand and
let the other hang at her side. Only someone trained to pick up
clues through body language would have noticed the tension in her
furled fingers.

He wasn’t sure why she seemed to resent him,
unless it was because she’d been unable to crack him with her
cross-examination when he’d testified during that murder trial a
couple of weeks ago. But whatever the reason, he didn’t want to
alienate her. She was Molly’s sister.

He took a sip of coffee, laboring not to
grimace at its burnt flavor. Leaning against the counter, he
watched her. She was the one who wanted this conversation, so she
would have to begin it. He wasn’t going to.

She bought a minute by gazing around the
lounge, skimming the jumble of messages tacked to the bulletin
board on one wall, glancing up at the buzzing fluorescent light,
making note of the antiquated refrigerator and the worn linoleum
tiles checker-boarding the floor. Then she turned her attention
back to him. “I had dinner with Molly last night,” she said. “She
told me she spent the weekend with you.”

John saw no need to confirm or deny it. If
Molly wanted to talk about it with her family, he wasn’t about to
object.

“
I’m her sister, and I
love her,” Gail continued. “I want to know what’s going
on.”

“
Don’t you think that’s
her business?” he suggested, granting Gail a point for loving Molly
but deducting a point for her nosiness.

“
I’ll tell you what I
think, Detective Russo. I think Molly is awfully naive when it
comes to men. I also think cops have the ability to induce trust
where it might not be warranted or deserved.”

Her words were like an assault. He held
himself still, trying to tamp down his anger. But inside, he was
seething. Who the hell was she to be making such absurd
generalizations about cops?

She was a public defender, which—he
supposed—gave her certain access to cops. They were her
professional adversaries, arresting and testifying against the scum
it was her job to defend. But that had nothing to do with his
private life or her sister’s.

“
I think Molly is a lot
smarter than you’re giving her credit for,” he said quietly,
filtering the indignation out of his voice. She could bait him all
she wanted. He wasn’t going to bite.

“
I know Molly is smart,”
Gail retorted. “I also know she’s a soft touch. You’re a single
father with a kid, and she can’t resist kids.”

“
You think she spent the
weekend with me because of my son?” he asked, quirking an
eyebrow.

Gail pursed her lips, obviously not a fan of
irony. “I think she spent the weekend with you because she loves
you. She has no idea who you are or what you are, or whether you
can think past tomorrow. I know cops better than she does,
Detective. I know it’s part of your creed to aim at a target and
fire. You set your sights on a woman like Sheila Hampton, who’s
been in an abusive relationship, who’s been through hell with her
husband and now she finds herself charged with attempted murder.
You don’t care about who she is or how she got from there to here.
You don’t interview anyone who knows her, or go out in search of
other possible suspects. All you care about is making an arrest and
getting your collar.”

He wasn’t going to get into a debate with a
public defender about the way he did his job. “What does that have
to do with Molly?”

She opened her mouth to speak, then
reconsidered and sorted her thoughts. “My experiences with cops
have not been good, Detective Russo.”

“
I know we’re opponents on
the job, but—”

“
I’m not talking about the
job, Detective Russo. I’m talking about my life. My experiences
with the police don’t dispose me to trust you. You’re welcome to
change my opinion, if you can. Promise me you’re going to take good
care of my sister, and never hurt her. Promise me you’re not just
going to enjoy her for a while and then send her on her
way.”

He closed his eyes and sighed, knowing
damned well that he couldn’t promise Gail Saunders any of those
things. He might have argued that neither he nor Molly—nor Gail
herself—could see into the future. For all any of them knew, Molly
might choose to dump him before he even figured out where he was
going with the relationship.

But even if he said as much to Gail, he
couldn’t overcome the truth in her words. He couldn’t promise that
he would never hurt Molly. He couldn’t promise it to himself. He
certainly couldn’t promise it to Molly’s sister.

“
Life doesn’t come with a
guarantee,” he reminded her. He’d tried to be a good husband and
he’d failed. He was trying to be a good father, but the jury was
still out on that one. Saturday night with Molly, he’d been as good
a lover as he could be, minus a fully functional hand. But he
couldn’t tell Gail what she was demanding to hear: that he would
always be good to Molly, always good for her.

Gail nodded. Her nod didn’t express
agreement so much as confirmation. She looked as if she’d decided
that John was every bad thing she’d expected, and he was going to
destroy her sister without mercy. He couldn’t begin to guess where
the enormous chip on her shoulder came from. Even after toiling a
few years in the Office of the Public Defender, she didn’t have the
right to be more cynical than he was, after his ten years in the
police department.

“
I appreciate your caring
so much about Molly,” he said, acknowledging that he hadn’t done
himself any favors by being honest.

“
I wish I could say the
same about you,” Gail muttered. She pivoted on the stack heel of
her sensible shoes and headed toward the door leading out to the
hallway. “Have a good night, Russo. I’ll be spending it fighting
for reasonable bail for Sheila Hampton.”

He watched her stalk out of the lounge. She
had fire in her, just like Molly. And she was pretty like her
sister, although the resemblance between the two women wasn’t
obvious. They were both smart, and quick on their feet, and not
afraid to speak their minds.