Redemption (A Joe Burgess Mystery, Book 3) (46 page)

As Goodall spoke, Burgess saw that still, wet figure lying on the dock. Saw Dr. Lee's fingers reach out and sweep back the mat of graying hair. Saw Reggie's face. Cold. White. Dead. He shouldn't be in here. Someone else, someone objective, should be listening. He couldn't breathe past his anger. Couldn't summon his objectivity. He flexed his hands, trying to still their urge to wrap around Goodall's neck and squeeze.

The second Goodall concluded with "until he was finally dead," the door opened. Kyle, who'd been observing, saying, calm as anything, "A minute, Joe?" Nothing on his face that said he was there to prevent another death. To keep a superhero from crashing and burning.

Burgess, famous in the department for exploding when someone interrupted an interview, went meek as a lamb. Soon as the door closed behind him, he was down on his knees, retching. Melia wanted to call an ambulance. When he could speak, Burgess refused. He wasn't missing a single, painful word. He was here as Reggie's witness, and the story wasn't done.

They switched places, Kyle finishing the interview, while Burgess watched on the monitor in Melia's office.

When they'd sent Goodall back to the jail, Melia said, "Almost lost it back there."

"It was unprofessional. I'm sorry."

"Working the case was unprofessional."

Burgess shrugged. "We brought in the bad guys."

"What if you'd lost it in there? Gotten your hands on him? What would that have done for our case?"

Thinking about what he'd wanted to do, Burgess said, "Given us one less suspect to prosecute? Saved the state time and money?"

"How about given the state one
more
person to prosecute—you. And cost me one senior detective. How would that have served your friend?"

Burgess's shoulders felt like he was carrying boulders. "Everybody fucks up."

Melia just gave him a look. "I've got a department to run, Joe. A city to protect. So I'm giving you two choices: go on leave immediately and go see a shrink, or hand the rest of these interviews off to Terry and Stan."

Melia and an army couldn't have put him on leave. Shrinks worked at the pace of snails and always wanted him to talk about how he felt. Right now, that could be answered in a sentence: He felt like killing people. Which left option two.

"I can still watch?"

"Can you control yourself?"

Burgess stared down at his clenched hands. Tried to breathe with a chest that didn't want to expand. "Sure," he lied.

Star Goodall was predictably impossible, changing her story more often than starlets change their outfits. She tried to pin the blame on everyone, including Reggie, claiming she wasn't in her right mind because of her childhood molestation by Reggie and Clay. Despite having admitted that she'd had lunch with Reggie, and the evidence that it was a trick to lure him there so that her ex-husband and Dugan could force him into the truck, she claimed to have been unaware of their intentions. She wouldn't agree to a polygraph. At least, interviewing her here, they were safe from her potions. Still, Burgess, observing, felt a chill when she narrowed her eyes and said they'd be sorry, and pain, as though her long, white fingers had deliberately shifted that knife in his gut.

At one point, Kyle, waking from a between-interviews catnap on the floor of the conference room, snarled that it was like something from Agatha Christie. That brought Perry out of his own personal funk—he'd been skulking behind his screen, hiding his bruised face—long enough to ask who Agatha Christie was, and whether she'd been charged yet.

Burgess was hunched over his keyboard, typing one-handed and trying to hold a pounding headache at bay until he finished his initial reports, when he received the predictable visit from Cote. The captain pursed his duck's-ass mouth and quacked like a goddamned duck about how much he resented being kept in the dark, where were their reports, and why had it taken three men and so much overtime to catch the suspected killers of one homeless man. Cote avoided the fact that he'd told them not to investigate at all and to stay away from the Mercers, and for once didn't raise the subject of kid gloves. These, Burgess supposed, were small mercies.

They eventually put together all the details of Mercer's involvement in what had become such a total, pathetic, hideous cluster fuck. Some of it from Joey. More from a surprise visitor.

Burgess was at his desk, trying to ease the ache in his head and the one in his chest, and feeling as miserably grouchy as he ever had in his life, when one of the secretaries approached him warily. She was followed by someone he took for a child until she slipped past her guide and held out a hand. "Dana Lyndemann, Detective. I hope I haven't come at a bad time?"

"Up to my ass... I mean... we're pretty busy. What can I do for you?"

"Looks like I can do something for you," she countered, taking some white pills and a bottle of water from a capacious purse. "And then I'd like to talk to you about Mercer Metals."

Burgess took the offered medicine, found her a chair, and waited.

Responding to his puzzled look, she said, "I went back through my files... found that friend of Reggie's. I treated him back in the spring. And it was in my notes that he'd worked at Mercer Metals." She shook her head ruefully. "So I went out there. Saying Mercer wasn't happy to see me was an understatement. He was sure you'd sent me. Then he started to lecture me. Told me I didn't understand the challenges a businessman faced. The necessity to make hard choices. Like those men's deaths didn't matter at all."

She shook her head angrily, a lot of fierce energy in a compact package. "When I told him I was going to report him, he got right up in my face and said if I did, I'd ruin him and put a lot of good people out of work. In his words, before I was done, I'd have the EPA, public health, OSHA, and a dozen other alphabet acronym agencies on his back and he'd be filing for bankruptcy. He said poorly paid public servants like you only understand black and white, while so much of business is in the gray areas. And that I'm a naïve crusader who ought to stay behind her desk minding her own business where she can't do any harm."

She popped up out of the chair, hands on her hips. "He told me it wasn't easy to run a profitable business. It took hard choices. A man had to be ruthless. Like practicing medicine and treating terribly sick people is just a walk in the park."

"Balancing your books on the backs of disposable men," Burgess said. He could taste the bitterness in his voice.

"It gets worse," she said, a woman who'd seen so much, yet could still be amazed. "Mercer said he was doing those men a favor. They'd been abusing their livers for years. They would have died anyway. He was just substituting a fast death for a slower, more painful one, so why did I care?"

"Practically a saint," Burgess said. In the land of the hateful, Mercer had been king.

"I shouldn't say this, but I'm not sorry that he's dead. He was so evil he scared me, and I feel like I wrestle with the devil pretty often."

She started to explain the science of the chemicals Mercer had exposed the men to, and how they were used in the business, but it was beyond him at the best of times, and he was far from his best. Burgess held up a hand. "Can you write it out for me? For the files. For the lawyers. I know you're very busy, but would you?"

"Glad to. I know you're busy, too," she said, lasering him with her eyes like she was reading all the aches and pains in his body and his heart. For a moment, her small, cool hand rested on his forehead like a blessing. "Take care of yourself, Detective, please. We need some people on the good guys' side."

They kept at it as long as they could, catching catnaps, brief nights of sleep, and meals on the fly, until they'd done all they could do—warrants, searches, interviews, more interviews, and processing all the evidence. Then, utterly exhausted, they went home to sleep.

Chapter 38

By the time they picked their heads up, it was almost Halloween. Fall's warmth had given way to chilly gray. Kyle was looking forward to an evening with his girls—one fairy princess and one growing-up-too-fast Miley Cyrus. Perry looked forward to a night of overtime in the Old Port, keeping drunk teens and drunk bikers from getting into too much trouble. Maybe breaking a few heads. Burgess was planning to sleep, get groceries, do laundry, and spend a mindless evening answering the door, handing out treats, trying not to think about Reggie. Or—worse—about Chris.

He wouldn't expect to find Chris home during the day, yet knowing she was gone gave the place an empty feeling. Warm afternoon sun touched the gleaming floors. The pot of orange and yellow chrysanthemums still bloomed on the bookcase. Her clothes were still in the closet, her scent on the adjacent pillow. He wondered when she'd realize that he was nothing but an ugly, irredeemable bundle of black anger, give up on him, and come back for her clothes. How long it would take for her scent to fade?

He'd warned her getting involved with a cop was a risky business. No one had warned him that opening his heart would be equally risky. He stripped off his clothes in the bathroom and showered. His body felt beaten and tender, red in a dozen places where his clothes had chafed, one side of his chest a huge pulpy bloom of purple. His knee was swollen. His eyes were red, the lids at half-mast. He stumbled naked into the bedroom, fumbled in the drawer for underwear, and finally had to face his side of the bed. The bourbon. And the letter. Again.

He folded the letter, put it back in the envelope, and carried it, and the bottle, into the kitchen.

The soft mattress and fresh sheets were like a goddess's embrace. He was asleep before his eyes had finished closing. He didn't move. He didn't dream. It was dark when the phone woke him, an insistent shrilling that years on the job had left him unable to ignore.

He stuck a hand out from beneath the warm covers, grabbed the receiver, and grunted a rough, "Burgess."

"If you don't want
us
, I can understand that," a small voice said, very slowly and distinctly, "me and Neddy are used to that. But Chris loves you and you are breaking her heart. She won't stop crying. You've got to do something."

"Nina?"

He got a shaky and uncertain "yes," the expectation that he would yell at her carried in that single word. He marveled at the courage it had taken for her to make this call. Yes, she knew him, and yes, they'd spent a lot of time together. She was a gutsy kid and one with a strong sense of virtue. She was also a bit afraid of him, and had to be intimidated by the idea that while Chris was eager to adopt Nina and her brother, Ned, Burgess was not. He wished half the adults he knew had her courage.

"Where are you?"

"We're with Chris. Me and Neddy. At Doro's house."

Doro was Dorothy, Chris's mother.

"And Chris is crying?"

"It's pretty terrible, Joe. Hold on. Doro wants to talk to you."

"Nina... wait." But Nina had given the phone to Dorothy.

"That poor little girl," Dorothy said. "I told her to leave you alone. We've all been reading the paper and watching the news. I told her that you needed to sleep. But Nina's got that stubborn sense of right and wrong. When she sees that something needs fixing, there's no stopping her. You were asleep, weren't you?"

"I was."

"Go back to sleep, Joe. This thing can wait. If you and my daughter are supposed to be together, another day won't matter."

"Doro..." His voice was feeble, an old man's voice. "I just don't... did Chris tell you what's going on?"

"With your personal life, you mean? About the letter? About your son?"

"Yes."

"I'm in no position to advise you, Joe. I've got to be on my daughter's side. I want Chrissy happy this time. You make her happy, and..."

There was a silence. "Understand me, I'm not saying this to put any pressure on you. But I think she makes you happy, too. I think you two have got that thing that makes relationships worth having. Together you're more than you are apart."

"But Doro... me and kids... I'm just not... I'm not nice enough. I don't have the patience." How many times in the past week had he longed to do violence?

"Listen, don't think I blame you for your hesitation about that. Chrissy has had a rescue complex since before she was Nina's age. She's always rescued things. Birds, chipmunks, stray cats. Once she married a doctor without a soul, hoping to find him one. This time it just happens to be you, and Nina and Neddy. Excuse me."