Robards, Karen (38 page)

.Grace thought of the circle of scraggly, dead-looking rose bushes in the backyard of the house they were standing in.

“Are they here?” she asked.

He nodded. “Once in a while I remember to water

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them, but they’ve never bloomed since I moved them. I ought to dig them up and throw them away, but I can’t bring myself to do that to-Pachel’s roses.”

if there was a slight break in his voice before he said his daughter’s name, that was all.

“Oh, Tony …” Paradoxically, it was Grace who had tears in her eyes as she looked up at him. Going up on tiptoe, she kissed his cheek and then his mouth, her lips soft and comforting. He wrapped his arms around her, and for a moment, without speaking, he held her tight.

Then she felt his hold shift and realized that he was looking at his watch.

“It’s 12:54,” he said, letting go of her and taking the picture from her hand to place it back on the mantel. “If we leave right now, you’ll only be a few minutes late.”

“Oh, gosh.” He seemed okay, or at least as okay as it was possible to be under the circumstances. But she hated to just rush away, when he might need to talk or something.

“I’m fine,” he said firmly, apparently getting some inkling of what she was thinking from her expression as she looked at him. “Let’s go. You’ve got a courtroom of people waiting on you.”

But he wrapped his arm around her waist and kept it there all the way to the car and, Grace thought as she returned the favor, to heck with what nosy Mrs. Crutcher Inlight think.

HAT ARE YOU DOING HERE in the middle k.
of the day?” It was a little after three. Dominick, having apparently just arrived at the station, stopped by Tony’s desk on the way to his own. Traffic in the squad room was light at that time of the day, with only one other detective, Joe Gonzalez, at his desk. “You’re on night duty. You’re supposed to be home sleeping.”

“Working on something.” Deeply absorbed in what he was doing, Tony was slouched in his chair, his chin resting on one fist, and he barely glanced up at his brother. In fact, he was comparing fingerprints on his computer screen. A thumbprint taken from Grace’s house was on the left. On the right, a series of thumbprints flashed past as the computer trolled for a match. He had already run through the files of drug-related arrests associated with Hebron High School with no luck. Now the computer was comparing prints taken from the files of individuals who had appeared before Grace in court over the past two years. Of course, not

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everyone who had appeared before her had fingerprints on file, and a number of other people who might have a reason to want to scare her or Jessica probably also didn’t have fingerprints on file, but still the exercise was necessary.

Detective work, Tony had discovered, was largely a process of elimination, assisted by common sense and luck. His standard operating procedure was to rule out everything he could, then go with what was left.

Over the years, it had proved to be a surprisingly successful strategy.

“How’s the girlfriend holding up?” Dom asked. Wary of what the brother who knew him so well might be able to read in his eyes in answer to that, Tony didn’t even glance up.

“Fine.” If he had hoped the monosyllable would deter Dom, well, he hadn’t really expected it to. Dom laughed and said, “Mama likes her.”

“She told me.” “Did she?”

“At length.” Tony did glance up at his brother then. “What do you two do, gossip about me over the phone all day long?”

“Nah. No more than fifteen minutes a day, at the most.” Dominick was grinning.

Despite his displeasure over being the subject of his family’s interested speculation, he had to smile at the picture thus conjured up: his mother and Dominick with telephone receivers pressed to their ears, yakking away.

Dominick was getting more old-womanish all the

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time. Tony told his brother so and received a punch in the shoulder for his pains.

“Afternoon, gentlemen.” Gary Sandifer walked into the squad room, the tan trench coat that was his trademark swirling around his legs as he moved.

“Captain,” Tony and Dominick both said. Under his breath, Tony added to Dom, “Good God, is everybody coming in early now?”

“We’re short-handed, what with you and Penick and Baer having been pulled out for the babysitting gig. Lots of things are going down.”

“Yeah?” Tony glanced at Dom with interest. Before Dom could reply, Sandifer stopped by his desk.

“How’s the judge Hart thing coming?” he asked. “It’s coming, and that’s about all I can say.” “Tell me what you got.”

The computer continued its endless blinking as Tony held up his fingers, counting off points as he enumerated them.

“Number one, I got an allegedly stolen and recovered teddy bear, no prints, no nothing. Number two, I got oil on a mirror, pure mineral oil, generic, no recoverable prints on the mirror but one unidentifiable one lifted off the bedroom doorknob. I’m trying to find a match for it. Number three, I got a cake made by Holliman’s Grocery in Westwind Shopping Center, telephone order placed by a ‘Stanley,’ according to the bakery’s records, with a phone number that turned out to be a fake. It was a distinctive cake that one guy remembers decorating. Nonpoisonous, standard ingredients, no crime committed in ordering it or purchas-382

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ing it, no reason for the clerk who rang it up to remember anything about the person who picked it up. It was paid for in cash. Number four, I got a dead hamster on ice at the morgue, drowned in a plastic bag. City water. No fingerprints on the bag. Some fibers on the animal that we have not been able to match to anything. “

“In short, you got zilch.” Sandifer sounded resigned.

“But,” Tony continued, “this morning we caught a break. Number five, the bozo left a no-longer-functional key to the house stuck to the kitchen door with chewing gum.”

Sandifer looked at him with an arrested expression. Tony nodded. “Yep. Whoever this guy is, he made a mistake. Now we got DNA. From the saliva in the gum.”

Sandifer frowned. “That’s not going to help you run him down.”

“No, but it means we’ll be able to make a positive ID when I find him.”

“Sure you’ll find him?” “Positive.”

“Hurry this up as much as you can, then. We can’t keep judge Hart and her daughter under guard indefinitely. The powers that be tell me that the D.A.’s already started bitching about the costs. And we need you back on the job.”

“We’re going after Lynn Voss,” Dom said.

“Jesus, I want to be in on that.” Tony griwaced. Much as he wanted to get Voss, he wanted Grace kept safe more. The only problem was, he wasn’t sure in his

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own mind that she orJessica was actually in any physical danger. It was possible that they were, but it was more likely that the perp would turn out to be nothing more than a crank. He’d exaggerated his sense of their imperilment for the sake of obtaining the protection that Grace wanted.

Tony meant to do his best to see that the guy had the book thrown at him when he was caught. Especially if, because of him and his antics, he missed out on the operation that would finally nail Voss.

“Keep at it,” Sandifer said, and moved on toward his office.

“Hey, at least your babysitting job has perks,” Dom said suggestively, prodding Tony’s shoulder with an elbow.

“Don’t you have work to do?” Tony shot his brother a quelling glance.

“Yeah.” Dom grinned, and headed for his desk. Tony returned his attention to the flashing fingerprints. Nearly an hour later, he still had nothing. No

matching fingerprints. No lab report on the DNA in the chewing gum, although they’d promised to rush it. He’d even run a check on that attorney, Colin Wilkerson, who had been giving Grace trouble, and had come up empty.

Not that he had expected anything else. His gut instinct still told him the perp had to be a kid. But he would have liked it to have been Wilkerson.

He stood up to leave.

“See ya,” he said to his brother, who was busy working the phone.

Dom looked over at him, receiver to his ear, his

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finger poised over the keypad. “Hey, you wanna shoot some baskets for a little bit before you go?”

There was a basketball goal set up at one edge of the parking lot behind the station house. He and Dom had shot a lot of ball there over the years.

Tony shook his head. “No, not today. I’ve got to go take care of my girls.”

It was only as he saw the arrested expression on Dominick’s face that Tony realized what he had said. He turned and walked out before Dom could comment.

If his brother made a joke, he would throttle him. The last time he’d said that-my girLs-had been about ten years ago.

Then, he’d been referring to Glenna and Rachel. My girls: that’s what he had called them, with easy, affectionate familiarity. The phrase had been part and parcel of the lost, bright years before his life had been consumed by pain.

He couldn’t believe he’d used it again. For Grace. And Jessica.

My girls.

ONY HAD SOMETHING on his mind. Over the —/rnext few days, Grace could sense the difference in him, although there was no outward change in his behavior. He was there every day when she and Penick arrived at the house. If he and Jessica weren’t playing ball in front of the garage, they were in the backyard with the dogs, or in the kitchen starting supper. True to his word, Tony was a good cook, and Jessica, to Grace’s astonishment, proved to be an eager and an apt pupil. As basically a noncook herself, Grace was surprised but pleased to discover this latent talent of her daughter’s.

Tony picked Grace up every day at around eleventhirty, and every day, without even bothering to discuss it, they adjourned to his house for what he termed, with a teasing grin, “lunch.”

The sex was fantastic, and in the evenings, when they did no more than talk about everything and anything, he was a charming, interesting, and sensitive companion.

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Sometimes they went over different facets of the investigation, twisting and turning possibilities like pieces of a puzzle as they tried to make the facts fit into certain scenarios. Sometimes they talked politics. He was no admirer of Bill Clinton, whom he called “the president after Bush,” laughing when it took several repetitions for Grace to get the joke. Sometimes they talked about one of Tony’s cases, and sometimes they talked about one of Grace’s.

Grace told him about her marriage. The reason for the breakup-Craig’s infidelities-no longer hurt, but his increasing lack of interest in Jessica infuriated Grace. She, too, had been the child of a father who had started a second family and subsequently lost all interest in the children from his first, so she knew what it felt like. As a consequence, she did her best to fill in the gap left in her daughter’s life by Craig’s lack of interest. But the one who suffered, of course, was Jess.

Tony talked about his wife, Glenna, but only briefly. The last time he had seen her had been at Rachel’s funeral, and he would be perfectly content never to see her again. Her mother’s defection in the face of Rachel’s illness had been a pain that she should not have had to suffer. Tony would never forgive Glenna for it. Grace didn’t blame him.

They talked about books and TV shows and movies, and public personalities, and the foibles of their relatives, particularly in-laws. No matter what the topic was, they never seemed to run out of things to say.

Grace realized that the fear she had lived with since finding Mr. Bear by the road had largely dissipated. At night, with Tony in the house, she felt completely and

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utterly safe. Her main continuing source of anxiety was Jessica. She could not help but worry when her daughter was away from her during the day. But she trusted Gloria Baer. So far, thankfully, no attempt had been made to bother Jessica at school.

She worried, too, about the origin of the circled horoscopes, although she tried not to. Convincing herself that they had to be pure coincidence had been difficult, but to a large degree she had managed it. Stamping out the niggling “what if” factor entirely, though, was proving almost impossible.

If it had not been for the threat of danger to Jessica, whose safety she valued more than her own life, she would have been content to let the investigation drag on forever.

Because when it was over, Tony would move out of her house.

Thinking about that, Grace realized that she didn’t want it to happen.

Tony’s presence was something she had come to

count on.

He fit into the fabric of her life, and Jessica’s, as seanilessly as if he had always been a part of it.

She did not want him to go away.

But there was something on his mind, something bothering him. Grace could see it in his eyes when he looked at her, hear it sometimes in the timbre of his voice. Once she had even asked him if anything was wrong. Of course, being a man, he had denied that there was.

She knew better. But she didn’t know what it could be, or how to pry the truth out of him.

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On Wednesday, they had fantastic news: Jessica made the varsity basketball team. The roster was posted on the school bulletin board at the end of the day, and Jessica called her mother from the school office before she and Gloria even started home.

Grace had interrupted the case she was hearing to take the call on her cell phone-Jessica never called her at work unless it was an emergencyand rejoiced with her daughter when Jessica told her.

Emily Millhollen made the team, too.

Finally, at the end of the conversation, Jessica had said something startling.

,, I want to call Tony, too,” she said, as casually as if calling Tony with her good news was the most natural thing in the world for her to do. “Do you have his number?”