Night Sins (47 page)

The close-up of Hannah faded into a shot of Josh. The school picture. Josh in his Cub Scout uniform. The gap-toothed grin. The bright eyes and unruly hair. The photo faded away and suddenly Josh was alive on the screen, thanks to videotape. Playing the part of a shepherd in a Christmas pageant, posing with Lily in front of the family tree. Linda Ronstadt's clear, sweet soprano voice sang out as the images shifted and changed. “Somewhere Out There,” the words poignant with longing, bright with hope.

Megan bit her lip hard. Damn, damn, damn. She could have made it through the interview—she had interviewed Hannah herself—but this was dirty pool. The song could just as well have been Josh himself calling out from the twilight into which he had disappeared ten days before. The video transformed him into a living boy, full of energy and idiosyncrasies and tenderness for his baby sister. His innocent face coupled with the childlike trust in the lyrics of the song swept the case far out of the realm of work and made it achingly, painfully personal.

The case that had been snatched away from her.

Never, never let it get personal, O'Malley.

Too late. The tough dictate couldn't override the emotions. Pandora's box had been pried open. She could only fight to keep all the feelings from flooding out of it. She blinked hard and clenched a fistful of the shirttail that covered her thighs. Maybe if she squeezed hard enough, she could keep from crying.

Then Mitch's hand settled on top of hers, enfolded it within his, tightened with a silent message of understanding and empathy.

Damn you, O'Malley. How can you be so stupid? Why do you have to give in? You ought to be tougher than this by now.

She took a shaky breath, her jaw rigid as she fought to keep her lower lip from trembling. “Dammit,” she said between her teeth. “I wanted to get that son of a bitch.”

“I know,” Mitch murmured.

“He's close. I can feel it. I want him so bad it hurts.”

But it didn't matter how badly she wanted it or how deeply Mitch sympathized. She was off the case. DePalma expected her to drop the ball and run back to headquarters so the superintendent could chew her out in person and then she could sit in a room with a pack of lawyers and endure their company while they made plans to do battle with Paige Price and her legal Dobermans. Just like that she was supposed to drop the life she had begun in Deer Lake. Forget about the people; they were only names on reports. Forget about the apartment; she hadn't been in it long enough to call it home. Forget about Mitch Holt; he was just another cop, and she knew better than to get involved with a cop. Forget about Josh; he was Spaniel Boy's responsibility now.

Josh looked out at her from the television screen, wide eyes and freckles, a gap in his grin where a tooth had been. What little control Megan had left snapped in the face of the frustration and fury. She shot up off the couch. Swearing, crying, she swung at a stack of paperbacks perched on top of a box, sending the books hurtling across the room. The cats scrambled down from their perches and streaked down the hall to hide. Megan turned and swung at another target. She turned again and swung her fist, connecting solidly with Mitch's chest.

“Dammit! Goddammit!” she shouted.

Mitch caught her by the upper arms and she fell against him. Her shoulders shook with the effort to hold back the tears.

“Cry, dammit,” Mitch ordered, wrapping his arms around her. “You're entitled. Let go and cry. I won't tell anybody.”

When the tears came, Mitch pressed his cheek against the top of her head and whispered to her and apologized for things that were beyond his control.

Everything was beyond their control. And all of it had been put in motion by a madman. In one moment, with one action, so many lives had been changed, and none of them could do a damn thing about it. She would lose her job, her home, her chance to belong . . . but she had this moment, and she didn't want to let it go.

She looked at Mitch, at the lines time and pain had etched into his face, at the eyes that had seen too much. She couldn't have him forever, but they could have this night. She could lose herself in his embrace, block out the ugly world with the haze of passion.

He slid his fingers into her hair, his thumb rubbing the tender spot on her forehead where the pain had been centered.

“You should go back to bed,” he whispered.

Megan felt her heart beat against him, felt the tempered strength and gentleness in his hands, saw the longing and regret in his eyes. She loved him. As pointless as that might have been. She had to leave. He hadn't asked her not to. He hadn't asked for anything, had promised nothing, had loved someone else so deeply . . . and no one had ever loved her. But she could keep those secrets in her heart, keep her love held tight and safe. This might be the last night they had.

“Will you take me?” she said softly, her eyes locked on his.

“Megan—”

She pressed two fingers against his lips, silencing his concern. Mitch looked down at her, so fragile, so pale, her incredible strength bowing beneath the weight of the world. He was falling in love with her. For all the future there was in that. In a day or two she would be gone to try to salvage the career that meant everything to her. He would be left to the life he had built here—orderly, empty, carefully blank. The life he wanted, safe and plain.

But they could have this night together.

He took her hand and kissed it softly. She turned and led him down the hall to her room, leaving the television on to mumble to itself.

She had left the bedside lamp on to cast a shadowy amber glow over the tangled sheets. It lit her from behind as she unbuttoned the flannel shirt and let it fall back off her shoulders and drop to the floor. It cast an aura around her dark hair and gave her skin an alabaster glow. She stood before him willing to bare herself if not her soul, willing to take as much of him as he would give her. She deserved more than a night. She deserved more than life had given her, more than
he
had given her.

His hands shook as he slipped the wedding band off and set it aside on the dresser.

Megan's heart caught and stumbled. The possibilities raced through her mind, foolish thoughts and hopeless wishes. She pushed them all aside to grasp the one truth she could manage: They would have the night with no shadows of past loves or past sins.

Taking his hand, she raised it to her trembling lips and kissed the band of pale skin the ring had covered. Then she was in his arms and his lips were on hers.

Megan pushed Mitch's shirt back off his shoulders and he flung it aside, impatient for the feel of her naked against him. He lowered her to the bed, dragging his mouth down her neck to her breasts. She arched beneath him, inviting him, begging him to take the tight bud of her nipple between his lips, crying out as he sucked strongly at the tender point. He swept a hand down her side, over her hip, pulling her leg around him, bringing the moist heat of her womanhood against the quivering muscles of his belly.

A deep animal groan rumbled at the base of his throat as she reached down and took his erection into her hands. He closed his hand over hers and tightened her grip, bent his head down and caught her earlobe between his teeth.

“That's how tight you are when I'm inside you,” he said, sending arousal singing through her.

Mitch watched her face as he entered her. Panic seized him at the knowledge that in a handful of days and nights he had fallen in love; at the knowledge that this would all be gone in a day, in a heartbeat.

Then the need overran the fear. He thrust into her fully, deeply, the tight wet heat of her gripping him, squeezing all thought from his mind. They moved together, straining together toward a fulfillment that obliterated the bounds between the physical and the emotional and the spiritual. They reached it, one and then the other. Breathless, shaking, holding tight.

I love you
. . . The words were on her lips. She held them back.

I love you
. . . He held the thought within his heart, afraid to give it away.

Then it was over and they were silent and still, and old doubts crept back from the corners of their banishment. The boundaries settled back in place, the guards went up again. Hearts in armor, beating separate and lonely into the night.

8:55
P.M.
         -25°         
WINDCHILL FACTOR
: -47°

H
annah sat in the dark in her room.
Her
room. How quickly the mind made those little alterations. Paul hadn't slept in this bed for two nights and already her brain had omitted plural references. She didn't want to think about what that meant for their future. She didn't want to deal with the feelings of guilt and loss and failure associated with the marriage she would once have called perfect. She had all she could do to shoulder the weight of the guilt and loss and sense of failure associated with Josh.

It would have been so nice to walk off the set of the interview and have the man she had married put his arms around her and reassure her and take her home. To know that she had his love and support. Instead, she had driven herself home. Kathleen Casey, who had volunteered to sit with Lily, was on the couch in the family room with McCaskill, the BCA agent, watching
The X Files
and eating popcorn. Paul was gone.

Paul is gone.
The Paul she had loved and married. She didn't know the man who had lied to her, hidden things from her, blamed her for the act of a madman. She didn't know the man who had all but courted the media, the man who had been asked to submit his fingerprints to the police. She didn't know who he was or what he might be capable of doing.

Unwilling to consider the possibilities, she forced herself out of the chair and began to undress. She concentrated on each menial task, unbuttoning buttons, folding, putting away. She chose her well-worn Duke sweatshirt and pulled it on over her head, shaking her hair back out of her eyes. The telephone on the nightstand rang as she reached for her sweatpants.

Hannah stared at it. Memories of the last call she had taken in this room rushed through her, pebbling her skin and filming it with perspiration. She couldn't just let it ring. She didn't want to pick it up. McCaskill and Kathleen would be wondering why she didn't answer it.

With a trembling hand she lifted the receiver.

“Hello?”

“Hannah? This is Garrett Wright. I saw the interview. I just wanted to tell you I thought you were very brave.”

“Uh—well—,” she stammered. It wasn't a faceless stranger tormenting her or Albert Fletcher spouting lunacy. It wasn't Josh. Just a neighbor. Karen's husband. He taught at Harris. “It was just something I had to do.”

“I understand. Still . . . Well, for what it's worth, I think you did the right thing. Listen, if you need any help getting through this, I have a friend in Edina who specializes in family therapy. I mentioned him to Paul when he was here the other night, but I'm afraid he didn't want to hear it. I thought I'd let you know. You can take his name and call him or not, but I thought you should have the option.”

“Thank you,” Hannah murmured absently, sinking down on the bed.

She copied the name and number down on the notepad automatically, her mind busy wondering what Paul had been doing at the Wrights' house and why he wouldn't have mentioned it to her. But then, a visit to a neighbor's house was the least of his secrets. She didn't want to know what the worst might be.

The thought lingered and echoed in her mind as she hung up the phone, and a terrible sense of loneliness and fear yawned wide inside her, threatening to swallow her whole. That was the hardest part of all of this—the feeling that no matter how the people around her wanted to help, on the most fundamental level she was alone. The one person who should have been closest was drifting farther and farther away.

She stared at nothing. When the phone rang again, she picked it up without hesitation and murmured a flat greeting. The voice that answered her was a low and gentle drawl, as welcome to her raw nerves as the kiss of silk on a sunburn.

“Hannah? It's Tom—Father Tom. I thought you might need to talk.”

“Yeah,” she whispered with a trembling smile. “I'd like that.”

J
OURNAL ENTRY
D
AY
10

As Shakespeare said:

All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players:

They have their exits and their entrances . . .

And we are the directors, the puppet masters pulling their hidden strings.

And so, from hour to hour we ripe and ripe,

And then from hour to hour we rot and rot,

And thereby hangs a tale.

Time for a new act and another fine twist in the plot.

We are brilliant.

CHAPTER 34

D
AY
11
9:45
A.M.
         22°         
WINDCHILL FACTOR
: 10°

O
n Saturday the temperature rose and the sky fell. A ceiling of fat clouds the color of lead hung low above the rolling wooded countryside, sifting down a fine powder of snow. In the wake of the deep freeze and the dark moods it had inspired, the radio weathermen had fled the state, leaving the storm predictions to the weekend deejays.

Megan listened with one ear. Blizzard? Maybe if it hit fast enough it could prevent her from driving to St. Paul. If she spent enough time driving around town looking for Albert Fletcher . . . If this old piece-of-shit car would conk out . . . A dozen different scenarios flashed through her mind, like a kid desperate to cut school. If she could just have today . . . But DePalma wanted her out of Deer Lake. He would never have called her in on a Saturday unless he was desperate himself. The lawyers wouldn't be there; the hell if the bureau would pay them time and a half. This was a simple case of snatching her out of town before she could do any more damage.

She would have to go if she was to salvage anything of her career. Go and kiss ass and repent and do penance. The idea stuck in her throat like a fur ball. She was a damn good cop. That should have counted for something, but it wouldn't.

She rubbed her mitten at the sore spot above her right eye. The headache lingered, threatening, then retreating in an exhausting fencing match with her tattered stamina. She should have stayed in bed, but she didn't want to be there alone. She had been driving around since dawn, her brain chewing on the mess she had made of her life.
Should have taken that FBI post, O'Malley
. She could have been in Memphis now, a thousand miles away from the cold and snow, a thousand miles away from a broken heart.

That heart still wished things could have worked out. Her head knew better. What could she offer Mitch? She wasn't wife material, didn't know anything about raising a five-year-old girl. All she really knew was being a cop. Thanks to her own reckless temper, that would be taken from her, too. Panic tightened in her chest.

Thinking she was asleep, Mitch had slipped out early. He had a manhunt to oversee. According to the snatches of information Megan was picking up on the police radio, there had still been no solid sign of Albert Fletcher. Citizens had been calling in sightings, but none had turned into anything. Deer Lake was crawling with police cruisers and county cruisers and state patrol cruisers. The choppers circled overhead like buzzards.

Megan shook her head in amazement. She had pegged Fletcher as weird right off, but she hadn't envisioned anything like what Mitch had finally described to her last night. No doubt about it, the deacon was a few beads short of a rosary. Crazy enough to kidnap Josh to be his own private altar boy? Yes, but he had to have had help. He'd been lecturing on sin and damnation at St. E's that night. She tried to picture him and Olie as compadres, but couldn't manage it. Fletcher was a loner. He never would have been able to hide his ghoulish secrets otherwise.

She drove slowly through the campus of Harris College, keeping her eyes open for the deacon. She wondered if Mitch had sent any men there. With classes resuming Monday, the buildings had probably been opened but would still be largely unoccupied. Fletcher could have found himself a nice hiding spot out of the elements.

Harris was the kind of college they didn't build anymore. Many of the classroom and administrative buildings were of native limestone and looked as if they dated back to the origin of the school in the late 1800s. Handsome and substantial, they sat back from the winding drive, the grounds around them studded with ancient oak and maple and pine.

The road wound past dormitories, their parking lots a third full, students tracking back and forth to the buildings to carry in the laundry they had done over the break and the books they had probably neglected. Goalposts sticking up out of the snow marked an athletic field that backed onto a vacant pasture, and suddenly Megan found herself in the farm country that ran on and on to the west.

She turned onto Old Cedar Road and headed south. If she remembered correctly, this eventually ran past Ryan's Bay and served as a back way into Dinkytown. She pulled over to the side of the road and put the car in park, letting the engine rumble on as she stared out the window at the bleak landscape. The naked hardwood trees like blackened matchsticks in the distance; the snow robbing the contours from the land, making everything look flat and one-dimensional; the sky hanging low above it all like slabs of slate. In a field beside the road, a pair of shaggy paint horses pawed listlessly at the dirty blond stubble of cornstalks. Up ahead, at a bend in the road, a rooster pheasant cautiously made his way out from under the low branches of a spruce tree to peck for gravel on the verge. A brown house sat back from the road on a rise, shades pulled, garage closed, looking vacant. The name on the mailbox at the end of the drive was Lexvold.

Lexvold. It rang a dim bell. Maybe she had seen it on a report. The paperwork on the Kirkwood case would put any blizzard to shame. They had interviewed dozens of people, taken countless statements of non-clues from citizens who wanted to be helpful or at least involved. Like ripples in a pond, the crime had touched them all.

Megan put the car in drive and eased back onto the road. The temperature might have climbed to twenty-two degrees, but the Lumina's heater was good to only about twenty-five, if it was any good at all. She needed something hot to drink, which would delay her even more in leaving for St. Paul. Then, if she drank enough, she would have to stop to go to the bathroom, stalling a little longer.

She was thinking of hot chocolate at The Leaf and Bean, when her gaze caught on the angry black skid marks that crisscrossed on the road ahead. Checking the rearview mirror, she pulled off on the shoulder again and sat with her foot on the brake.

Skid marks. Lexvold. Old Cedar Road. Car accident.

The scene blurred as her mind tried to shake loose what she needed.

The college kid. A patch of ice. A patch of ice the officer at the scene had felt was manufactured.

She slammed the transmission into park and climbed out of the car. She trudged back up to the curve and stood there with her hands tucked into the pockets of her parka, her shoulders hunched against the wind. To the north and east lay the Harris campus. To the south, farmland gave way to the sloughs of Ryan's Bay. Old Cedar Road intersected with Mill Road. To the east on Mill the spires of St. E's punctuated the sky above the treetops. She turned and looked up the hill at the brown house and attached garage.

She remembered Dietz in his Moe Howard wig sitting at the end of their booth in Grandma's Attic.
. . . looks to me like someone snaked a garden hose down the driveway . . .

“So where's the hose?” Megan murmured.

That kind of prank was usually borne of opportunity. If the Lexvolds didn't have a hose out, there was no opportunity. If there was no opportunity, that meant someone brought a hose to the party, which meant premeditation. Premeditation meant motive. What motive?

She turned back toward the road, an empty ribbon of asphalt. The only sounds were the wind and the hoarse cluck of the rooster pheasant, hiding now beneath the spruce trees, annoyed with Megan for interrupting his snack. Up at the drive into Harris, a red Dodge Shadow pulled onto the road and roared toward her, whizzing past with a pair of young men with wispy grunge-look goatees. Students taking the back way off campus. Like that kid the night of the accident.

The accident that had kept Hannah Garrison late at the hospital.

Megan pictured the time line taped to the wall of the war room. Everything started with Josh's disappearance. But what if the thing they had missed, the thing that had been there all along that they hadn't been able to see, had happened earlier? What if the accident hadn't been an accident at all?

Adrenaline surged through her as the possibilities clicked fast-forward through her brain. Students used the back road to the college. Anyone living around there would know that. Albert Fletcher, whose house was no more than a mile away. Olie Swain, who had audited courses at Harris. Christopher Priest, who had sent his student on an errand that night.

Priest. Megan tried to shake off the idea. The funny little professor with the bad fashion sense and limp-fish handshake? He was as unlikely a suspect as Elvis. He had no motive. He openly admired Hannah, had gone out of his way to help with the case. . . . Had installed himself in a position where he would be privy to all incoming news of the case, maybe even have access to confidential police information. He had known Olie Swain, had taught him. He was probably at this very moment communing with Olie's computers down at the station, ostensibly searching for clues. And she had put him there.
ignorance is not innocence but SIN.

Sin. Religion. Priest.
Christopher Priest.

“Oh, Jesus,” she muttered.

In her mind's eye she could see him bending over the glowing screen of a terminal in the room where Olie's equipment had been set up. She couldn't have put a possible suspect in a position to tamper with evidence. Her stomach rolled and twisted at the thought. She had wanted so badly to crack this case. It was the one that could make or break her career, but the stakes were so much higher than that and she knew it. She would have sold her soul for a nickel to nail the bastard who had taken Josh. If Christopher Priest was dirty and she had put him in that office with those machines . . .

The sound of a car rolling up snapped her back to the moment. A gunmetal-blue Saab had come to a halt in front of her. The passenger's window buzzed down. As the driver hunched down to see her, the fur collar of his navy wool topcoat crept up around his ears.

“Agent O'Malley! Are you having car trouble?” Garrett Wright asked.

“Uh—no. No, I'm fine.”

“Kind of a cold day to be standing out in the wind. Are you sure you don't need some help? I've got a cellular phone—”

“No, thanks.” Megan forced a polite smile as she leaned down into the window of the car. “I'm just checking something out. Thanks for stopping, though.”

“Still looking for Albert Fletcher?” He shook his head, frowning. “Who would have guessed . . .”

“No one.”

In the beat of silence his dark eyes went bright with the kind of embarrassed curiosity that fueled the fires of coffee-shop gossip everywhere. “So . . . is Paige Price really sleeping with the sheriff?”

“No comment,” Megan replied, forcing a wan smile, straightening away from the Saab. “You'd better move it along, Dr. Wright. We wouldn't want you to cause an accident.”

“No, we wouldn't want that. Good luck finding Fletcher.”

He gave her a salute as the window hissed upward, and the Saab rolled on. The purr of the motor faded into the distance, leaving her standing there listening to the wind in the pines, staring at the only visible evidence of the accident that had claimed two lives outright and possibly altered the lives of an entire community.

i
gnorance is not innocence but SIN.

10:28
A.M.
         22°         
WINDCHILL FACTOR
: 10°

W
here's Mitch?”

Megan burst into Natalie's office. Mitch's assistant stood behind her desk, the telephone receiver pressed to her ear. She gave Megan a scowl and picked up a copy of the
StarTribune
from her desk, holding it up to display Henry Forster's headline—
O'Malley Strikes Out: BCA's First Female Field Agent Told to Hit the Road.

“I'm sorry,
Mr. DePalma,
” she said pointedly into the receiver. “I've got to put you on hold.”

She punched the hold button and arched a thinly plucked brow. “Well, if it isn't the elusive Agent O'Malley. People in high places are looking for you, girl.”

“Screw 'em,” Megan snapped. “I've got more important things to do.”

Natalie gave her a long, measuring look, pursing her lips. “He's in the war room.”

“Thanks.” Megan pointed to the blinking red light on the telephone console. “I'm not here.”

“I never heard of you,” Natalie said, shaking her head.

Megan blew out a breath and turned for the door. “Natalie, you're the best.”

“Damn straight.”

H
e has to be somewhere.” Marty Wilhelm stated the obvious. He strolled up and down the time line with his hands in the pockets of his teal blue Dockers. “He hasn't been outside all this time. I'm guessing he's holed up wherever he has Josh stashed. We should check at the courthouse and see if he owns any other property in the area—a cabin or something.”

Mitch gave the agent an irritated look. “Been there. Done that. He doesn't.”

Puppy Boy went on, undaunted. “They haven't found anything useful in Olie Swain's computers—no mention of Josh or Fletcher. We should get Fletcher's phone records—”

“At the command post,” Mitch snapped. “Stevens and Gedney are going over them.”

He'd been on the manhunt himself since the crack of dawn, had come in to the station only at Wilhelm's request for a brainstorming session. So far the storm had been more of a light drizzle.

“Look, Marty, I've got to tell you, having you jump in here midstream is a real pain in the ass.”

Marty grinned that innocent-boy grin Mitch was growing to hate. “I'm doing all I can to get up to speed, Chief. By rights, this case should have been mine from the start. It isn't my fault that didn't happen. I guess I just don't look as fetching in a short skirt.”

The veneer of tolerance peeled away like dead skin. A dangerous look tightening his features, Mitch rose from his chair and advanced on Marty Wilhelm one slow step at a time until they were close enough to dance. Wilhelm's bright eyes widened.

“Agent O'Malley is a damn good cop,” Mitch said softly. “Now, Marty, for all I know, you can't find your dick in a dark room. But I'll find it for you if I hear you make another remark like that one. Are we clear on that, Marty?”