Father Christmas (9 page)

If she was, she hoped he
would forgive her. Because right now, more than anything else,
Michael needed to believe that it
was
all right, that when he ran out of tears his life would be a
little bit better. If she could give him nothing else, she would
give him her lap and her arms, her consoling murmurs and the hope
he would need to keep going.

***

JOHN HOOKED HIS FINGER over the knot of his
tie and tugged, loosening it enough so he wouldn’t choke. A quick
glance in the mirror above the sink revealed the face his Santa
whiskers had hidden for most of the day. It also revealed a bemused
smile. He’d caught the ATM thief—or, more accurately, the thieves.
Given their ages, he almost thought they’d respond better to
interrogation if he kept the Santa suit on.

But it was hung neatly on a wire hanger on
one of the wall hooks in the squad’s locker room. Interrogation or
no, John was glad to be back in his civilian clothes, without that
bulging pad strapped to his waist and without the fuzzy white wig
itching his forehead. Maybe the kids would show a bit more
contrition if they were questioned by someone dressed like a
man.

He adjusted the straps of his holster on his
shoulders, then left the locker room. Muriel, the squad’s
administrative assistant, grinned up at him from her desk. “They’re
in room two, with their father,” she told him. “Coffey says to
handle this one delicately. You know who their father is, don’t
you?”

John moved to his own desk and picked up his
notepad. “Dennis Murphy?”

“
The
five-hundred-dollar-an-hour attorney.”

“
If that’s what he pulls
down, it’s funny his kids have turned into bank
robbers.”

Muriel shook her head and
laughed. “Go easy on them, Russo. They’re petrified. And their
father’s a tough
hombre
.”

“
Right.” He lifted his
note pad and a pen and headed down the hall to the interrogation
rooms. At room number two, he knocked on the door and then opened
it.

Two pairs of worried hazel eyes peered up at
him from two extremely worried seven-year-old faces, one male and
one female. The Murphy twins were in deep doo-doo, and to their
credit they knew it. John wasn’t so sure about the mastermind of
the heist: their baby-sitter, the fifteen-year-old son of the woman
whose account was being illegally emptied via the ATM.

The mastermind and his mother were in
another interrogation room with Lieutenant Coffey. John had won the
honors with the Murphy twins and their tough-hombre lawyer father.
The kids looked cherubic, but John wasn’t fooled.

The hot-shot lawyer strode briskly around
the table and gave John’s hand a bruising shake. “Dennis Murphy,”
he introduced himself. He was tall and fit, with a full head of
dark blond hair and a direct stare. His suit looked unobtrusively
expensive, but his tie, like John’s, was loosened at the
collar.

“
Detective John Russo,”
John said, nodding toward the children. “I’ve already met Sean and
Erin.”

The twins shot each other a nervous look and
then studied their hands intently.

“
Would you care to fill me
in?” Murphy asked. “I got a call at my office that the kids had
been arrested.”

“
Brought in for
questioning,” John corrected him. “They’ve been accomplices in a
series of ATM robberies.”

Murphy narrowed his gaze on John for a
moment, then turned to his children. “Start talking,” he said.

“
It was Todd’s idea,” Erin
explained feebly.

Murphy frowned. “Todd?”

“
The
baby-sitter.”

John smiled privately. Maybe he wouldn’t
have to interrogate the children; their father would do his job for
him. “Todd who?” Murphy asked, making John wonder why a father
wouldn’t know the name of his children’s after-school
baby-sitter.

“
He lives across the
street from us,” Sean volunteered, punctuating his statement by
exchanging another nervous glance with his sister. “Mom asked him
to watch us.”

“
And he talked you into
robbing a bank?”

“
We didn’t know that was
what he was doing,” said Erin. “He was just giving me a shoulder
ride, I thought.”

John leaned against the door and folded his
arms across his chest. The twins were speaking the truth. He’d
observed them during his Santa stake-out, two tykes, cute as all
get out, walking down the street with a tall, indolent teenager in
a lined denim jacket, baggy jeans, a spiky hairdo and a
diamond-chip earring, the vision of adolescent chic. Just before
entering the bank, the teenager—Todd—had swooped Erin up onto his
shoulders. Then the threesome had entered, and Todd had positioned
himself in the ATM vestibule so that Erin’s navy-blue jacket
blocked the lens of the surveillance camera. Then Erin’s brother
Sean had pushed the buttons on the ATM, removed the cash and handed
it to Todd.

“
He told me what buttons
to push,” Sean said earnestly. “He said it was his money. I liked
pushing the buttons. It was cool, Daddy, you know? Like on a space
ship or something. All these buttons.”

“
He wouldn’t let me push
the buttons,” Erin complained.

“
You got the shoulder
ride,” Sean countered.

“
Where the hell was your
mother in all this?” Murphy asked, his voice a low
growl.

“
Out,” Erin
said.

“
With her boyfriend,” Sean
added.

John took it all in without reacting. Murphy
scowled and turned to John to explain. “My ex-wife has custody,” he
told John. “ I had no idea this was going on. I mean—I know she’s
got a social life. I just didn’t know she was leaving the kids in
the care of a criminal punk.”

“
Todd’s nice,” Sean
argued. “He let me push the buttons.”

“
Todd,” John clarified,
“was robbing money from his parents. That wasn’t his money. It was
theirs. He was withdrawing money from their account, with his
mother’s ATM card.” The card was currently marked as evidence. John
had recovered it when he’d arrested the threesome. “Do you know how
Todd got his mother’s card?”

“
Was that the little
credit card?” Sean asked.

“
The card you put in the
machine before you pushed the buttons.”

“
He said it was his
card.”

“
Did it have his name on
it, or his mother’s?”

Sean studied his hands again. “I don’t
know.”

“
Did he tell you how he
got the card?”

Sean shook his head. John directed his gaze
to Erin, who shook her head, too.

“
He stole it,” John told
them. “He stole it from his own mother.”

“
That wasn’t very nice of
him,” Erin said quietly.

“
And then he took his
mother’s money while you blocked the bank camera.”

“
I didn’t know,” Erin
said, then glared accusingly at John. “And you know what? I think
it’s very mean of you to pretend you’re Santa Claus. I think the
real Santa Claus wouldn’t like that at all. I think he’d be very
mad at you.”

Unable to come up with a defense, John
laughed. “You’re right. But I’d explain to Santa that as a police
officer, I’m doing a good thing by making sure Todd stops robbing
his mom. And I think Santa would forgive me.”

Erin looked dubious. Sean eyed John
curiously. “Is that a real gun?” he asked.

“
Yes.”

“
Do you ride in a car with
the lights and the sirens?”

“
Not usually. I can put a
light on the roof of my car, but mostly it’s just a plain
car.”

“
If I was a policeman,”
Sean said, “I’d want a siren.”

“
Look, what are we talking
about here?” Dennis Murphy broke in. “Are the kids going to get
charged? Where are we going with this?”

John had no intention of charging the Murphy
twins with anything. All he wanted from them was enough information
for him to get Todd qualified for juvie supervision, counseling,
whatever it took to straighten him out before he ruined his life.
If John was very lucky, the twins would have had the shit scared
out of them so badly they’d never get in trouble again.

“
I’m going to release your
children, Mr. Murphy,” he told the father. “I think we’ve got
enough to get the baby-sitter into juvenile court and under
supervision. He’s a minor. If he can get back on track, he should
be able to avoid jail. It’s a first offense. It’s a first offense
for you guys, too,” he added with a stern look toward the twins.
“It had better be your last offense.”

A smile of gratitude crossed Murphy’s lips.
“I appreciate how you’ve handled this, Detective. I think my kids
stumbled into something they didn’t understand. Which doesn’t
exonerate them, but I think it would be better dealt with at
home.”

“
You might have a word
with your ex-wife about who she’s hiring to watch the kids,” John
suggested.

“
Oh, I’ll do that,” Murphy
muttered grimly. He removed a small leather folder from an inner
pocket of his jacket, and pulled from it a business card. “Let me
know if you need anything. I’ll make sure the kids understand how
serious this situation is.”

John nodded and slipped Murphy’s card into
his shirt pocket.

“
What was Erin talking
about, that nonsense about Santa?”

John smiled. “Ask her.” He opened the door
and stepped out into the hall. It was a quarter past five, the
windows already dark with the early approach of evening. He’d have
to do his paperwork quickly so he could pick up Mike from preschool
by six.

So, he thought, watching Murphy usher his
children through the squad room and down the stairs, Erin Murphy
thought the real Santa would be mad at him. Maybe she was right.
Maybe Santa didn’t like having detectives prending to be him. Maybe
Santa would be even less pleased than John to learn that, thanks to
his successful bust of the pick-pocket that morning, John was going
to get stuck pretending to be Santa again.

The weeks leading up to Christmas were
usually a period of increased street crime. People carried more
money with them, and their minds were on shopping, parties, all the
joys and stresses that accompanied the holiday season rather than
on their personal safety. Coffey had decided that John could help
keep downtown Arlington safer during the holiday crush by going
undercover as a street-corner Santa in various downtown
neighborhoods over the next couple of weeks, watching for muggers
and shoplifters, thieves petty and not so petty.

John wasn’t crazy about the idea, but
helping people like Mr. Rosenblatt to hang onto their wallets was
part of his job. If that was what he had to do, he’d do it.

He wasn’t sure how he was going to get
through the holiday crush himself. Molly Saunders had warned him
that Mike was ready to snap, and John was hardly in the mood for
Christmas this year. But maybe if he kept dressing up as Santa, a
little of the season would rub off on him. Maybe if he donned the
padding and the wig, the hat and the bright red suit, he’d get some
idea of how to survive the next few weeks, how to make them good
for his son.

MOLLY AND HER TEACHERS took turns serving
late duty, staying at the school until the last full-day students
at the Children’s Garden were picked up by a parent or guardian.
Shannon was on late duty that evening, leaving Molly free to go.
But she had chosen to remain at her desk until at least one of the
children—Michael Russo—was picked up.

By six o’clock, the sky had grown almost as
dark as midnight, and flurries dusted the air. Given the snowfall,
she should have been eager to head for home while the roads were
still clear and dry. But she wanted to make sure that Michael was
fully recovered from his emotional meltdown of that afternoon. She
wanted to see him safely delivered into his father’s hands.

Sure. As if the hope of seeing Michael’s
father had nothing to do with Molly’s reluctance to leave the
school. As if she had no interest whatsoever in John Russo, the
Dudley Street Santa.

His arrival was announced with a gust of
chilly air as he pushed open the door and stepped into the
building. Molly glanced up from her papers, saw him—and felt the
impact of his presence like a blow to the gut. Or maybe a blow to
her soul.

She was in trouble. John Russo was
too...attractive. Too sexy. Too dangerous. He was a man who didn’t
even need a gun to overpower people. He’d overpowered a pick-pocket
with his bare hands. All it took for him to overpower Molly was a
mere hint of a smile.

He was dressed in regular clothes now, no
padding, no baggy red pants and fluffy white wig. His thick, black
hair shimmered with droplets of water where snowflakes had melted
on it, and a burgundy scarf was slung carelessly around his neck,
inside the collar of an unzipped leather bomber jacket. Smelling
the cold scent of winter on him reminded her of the colder scent of
fear she’d inhaled that morning when she’d witnessed him chasing
after that street thug, throwing the thug against the brick wall of
a building and twisting the thug’s arm behind him. John Russo was
not a peaceful man.

No wonder his son wasn’t a peaceful
child.

Instead of walking directly down the hall to
get Michael, he paused by her desk, his eyes meeting hers above the
sprawl of paperwork on her blotter. They were infinitely dark and
unreadable. All she could guess from his gaze was that at that
moment, she was more important to him than his son.