Running Hot (30 page)

“You didn’t violate their rights in the legal sense.”

“No, but I sure as hell did in a very real sense.”

“You accomplished a lot of good, Luther. Putting bad people away. Getting justice for the victims. Those are important to a civilized society.”

“That’s what I told myself for several years. But I found out the hard way that the vigilante thing carries a load of bad karma.”

“Your two broken marriages?”

“Among other things. I also managed to freak out so many partners that eventually no one wanted to work with me. I got a reputation for being a lone wolf. That’s not good when you’re a cop. You’re supposed to be part of a team. I tended to make the people around me very uneasy.”

She frowned. “Did the other detectives you worked with ever realize what you were doing?”

“They knew that I almost always got results but they didn’t know how I got them. Hell, they didn’t
want
to know. A few concluded that I was somehow hypnotizing the suspects. Turns out no one wants to work too closely with a guy who may be able to hypnotize you without you knowing it.”

“I can see where that might be an issue,” she said.

“I went through partners the way the Dark Rainbow goes through dishwashers. Some of the other guys had enough natural sensitivity of their own to wonder if there might be a paranormal explanation for my string of confessions. They didn’t like that idea any better than the hypnosis theory.”

“Because it made them question their own mental health?” she asked.

“Most successful cops have a fair amount of intuition when it comes to dealing with the kind of folks who lie, cheat and kill. They’re usually happy to admit that they have good instincts.”

“Aren’t good instincts viewed as an asset in the police world?”

“Sure. But no cop wants to get slapped with the psychic tag. The woo-woo factor can kill a career real fast.”

She studied him intently. “You just walked away from the job?”

“There was what I guess you could call a final straw. An incident. People died. I walked away after that.”

“What happened?”

He watched the sunlight flash on the waters of the cove.

“There was a man,” he said. “His name was George Olmstead. He walked into the office one day and said he’d just killed his business partner. Turned over the gun. It had his prints on it. He claimed he and the partner had quarreled over whether to sell the business. He said he was desperate for the money but the partner refused to go through with the deal.”

“You didn’t believe him?”

“He seemed calm enough but there was something spiking in his aura. I talked to him for a while. Pushed a little. It came out that he wasn’t the one who had shot the partner. Olmstead was covering up for his daughter.”

“She was involved with the partner?”

“They’d had an affair,” he said. “She was twenty-five years old. She had been seeing a shrink since she was in high school and she was on medication. The partner belatedly started to realize that she was very unstable. He tried to end things. She went crazy and shot him.”

“And then went running to her father?”

“Who told her that he would handle things. He wanted to protect her. He saw that as his job. He’d been doing it all her life. She was his only child. The mother had died years earlier.”

She nodded. “Did he know about the relationship between his daughter and his partner?”

“Yes. He’d encouraged it because he thought marriage would give his daughter some emotional stability. After the murder, he was convinced that the whole thing was his fault so he was eager to take the blame.”

“But his story fell apart.”

“Because of me. When we arrested his daughter, he felt he had failed in his duty as a father. The daughter committed suicide in jail. Olmstead went home, stuck a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.”

“Thereby proving that he was just as unstable as his daughter,” Grace said quietly. “But you felt responsible.”

“I was responsible. I should have called in the department shrinks and let them handle it. Instead, I went ahead and prodded the weak points on Olmstead’s aura until I got my answers. Another case closed for the lone wolf.”

“It was your job to get the truth,” she said calmly.

“Sure. It was just too bad a couple of people committed suicide because I was so good at doing my job.”

“Yes, it was too bad. But it was not your fault. One of those two people murdered a man and the other tried to cover up the crime. You were not responsible for their actions.”

“Maybe not technically.”

She brandished her half-empty bottle of water. “Hold it right there, Malone. You were not responsible technically or otherwise. You used your talent, a natural ability that is as much a part of you as your eyesight or your hearing or your sense of touch, to do your job and to bring some justice into the world.”

“I told you, the bad guys were broken losers for the most part. I rolled over them like a train.”

“Works for me,” she shot back. “They were bad guys, remember? Just their bad luck they ran into someone who could see through their lies.” She paused, lowering the water bottle. “But I do understand why you felt you had to quit the force.”

“Yeah?”

“You’re stuck with the instinct to protect and defend. It’s part of who you are. But like I keep telling you, you’re also a hopeless romantic. You want to go after what you consider fair game. Working for J&J gives you that satisfaction. You get to go up against bad guys who possess talents that are the equivalent of yours. You’re doing your hunting on a level playing field now.”

“I think of it more as a level jungle.”

She smiled. “Good visual.”

THIRTY-NINE

The following afternoon Luther suggested they close the restaurant for a couple of days. Petra and Wayne didn’t have any issues with that decision.

“Could use a break,” Wayne said. “Some of the tourist customers are startin’ to irritate me. I think I’m losin’ that aloha spirit.”

“Same here,” Petra said. “Been a long time since we took a vacation.”

It was four o’clock, the lull after the lunch rush. They were all standing around in the Rainbow’s kitchen. Grace looked at the three of them and felt a sudden, inexplicable urge come over her.

“I think I found something important in the classified J&J files today,” she said. “It’s a long story. What do you say we have dinner tonight and I’ll tell you all about it. I’d like to get your thoughts before I contact Fallon Jones.”

Petra grinned and clapped Luther on the shoulder. “Looks like you’ve got yourself a date.”

“No,” Grace said. “All of us. At Luther’s place. I’m cooking. You know, like a family dinner.”

. . .

SHE BORROWED THE COOKWARE she needed from the Rainbow’s kitchen and hauled it back to the apartment in the Jeep. She made lasagna—a vegetarian version with feta cheese and spinach—and served it with a big bowl of Caesar salad and a loaf of warm, crusty bread.

Bruno the Wonder Dog’s ferocious barking announced the arrival of Petra and Wayne. Luther opened the front door to let them in and handed around some bottles of beer.

They drank the beer and talked about unimportant things, saving the serious stuff until after dinner. The balmy night air was warm and comforting against Grace’s skin. A faint breeze stirred the magnificent green canopy of the banyan tree.

When she brought out the large pan of lasagna, Luther, Petra and Wayne gazed at it as if it were the Holy Grail. She used a spatula to serve large slices.

“Can’t remember the last time I had lasagna,” Petra said reverently. “My mom used to make it when I was a kid.”

They all looked at her.

“What?” she said.

“Hard to imagine you as a little kid,” Luther said. “With an actual mom.”

Petra used her fork to cut off a large bite of the lasagna. “Everyone has a mom.”

“Where is she now?” Grace asked.

“She died when I was sixteen. Cancer.”

“Forgive me,” Grace said. “I shouldn’t have pried.”

“Don’t worry about it. Been a long time. After she died I went to live with my dad and his second wife, but we didn’t get along so good. He kicked me out when I was seventeen. Don’t blame him. I’d have done the same. I was not in a good place. He said I was a bad influence on his other kids, the ones he and his new wife had.”

“I had a mom, too,” Wayne said around a mouthful of bread. “She didn’t cook much, though. She was more into martinis and pills. Called ’em her little mood elevators. She used to hide the bottles around the house so my dad wouldn’t find them.”

“That had to be hard for you,” Grace said. She reached for the salad tongs and told herself she would not ask any more questions.

“Dad knew about the pills and the booze,” Wayne said. “He told me a few years later that was why he took off with his secretary when I was eleven.”

“You’re not supposed to call ’em secretaries anymore,” Petra informed him with an air of authority. “They’re administrative assistants or somethin’.”

“I knew that,” Wayne said.

She should definitely change the subject now, Grace thought, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself from asking one more question.

“What happened to your mother, Wayne?”

“Pretty much what you’d expect.” He shrugged. “A few months after Dad split, she took a lot of pills and made a really big pitcher of martinis. I found her dead on the sofa the next morning.”

No one said a thing. Petra and Luther concentrated on the lasagna on their plates. They all knew one another’s stories, she thought. And now she knew them, too. It was one of the ways they were linked together.

On impulse she set the tongs aside.

“I’m so sorry you had to be the one to find her,” she said quietly.

“Like Petra said, it was a long time ago.”

She realized all three had stopped eating. They were staring at Wayne’s heavily tattooed forearm, which happened to be resting on the table next to her. She looked, too, and saw that her palm was resting on his warm, bare skin in a comforting gesture that partially covered a portion of a skull and crossbones.

“Why can I touch you?” she asked. Slowly she raised her hand and held it in front of her face. “Why can I touch all of you without pain? After that incident with the housekeeper, I should have been sensitive for at least a week or longer.”

Petra’s expression tightened in a knowing look. “When did you get burned the first time?”

Her first impulse was to say she didn’t want to talk about the past. But they had shared their stories with her. They had a right to know; she
wanted
them to know.

“In a foster home,” she said, automatically putting both hands out of sight under the table. “I was . . . attacked. When the bastard touched me I sort of . . . touched him back. He died.”

Petra nodded, unperturbed. Wayne looked equally unconcerned. He forked up another bite of lasagna. Luther drank some beer and waited.

“How old were you when you did the guy in the foster home?” Petra asked.

“Fourteen,” she said, wincing a little at the expression “did the guy.”

“You would have been just coming into your talent,” Petra said. “The Society shrinks believe that a traumatic event during that time can really screw up your senses, sometimes for life. My guess is the shock of the attack together with the psychic jolt you must have got when you whacked the SOB who tried to rape you left you with a real delicate sensitivity to touch.”

Luther looked at Petra. “You talked to a Society psychologist?”

“Wayne and I both went for a while after we retired from the agency,” Petra said. “We were having trouble sleeping and some other problems. The doc explained a lot of stuff to us.”

“That’s right,” Wayne said. “She told us that, what with our dysfunctional childhoods and the kind of work we did for the agency, we both had a lot of issues. Said she couldn’t cure us but she kept us from eating our own guns.”

Petra turned back to Grace. “Thing is, what with having been a foster kid and then having a couple of little psychic incidents, you’re probably a tad messed up, too.”

Grace clamped her hands very tightly together in her lap. “Little psychic incidents? I
killed
two people with my aura.”

“And I used a rifle,” Wayne said. He ripped off another chunk of bread and reached for the butter knife. “Doesn’t matter how you do it. Sooner or later, you’re gonna have to pay for it in the psychic zone. Looks like, in your case, your sense of touch was permanently affected.”

She stilled. “Then why is it I can touch Luther and you and Petra without having to brace myself?”

Petra smiled. Light glinted on the gold ring in her ear. “I’m no expert, but I’m thinking that’s because you feel comfortable with us. You know us for what we are and we know you.”

“Survivors,” Luther said.

“Yeah, that’s right.” Wayne nodded. “One way or another, we’re all survivors. We understand each other. When we’re together, there’s no need to hide. No need to pretend you’re not damaged.”

“No need to be afraid,” Luther said, watching her.

The sudden rush of tears startled her. She blinked them back.

“Family,” she said.

“Yeah,” Petra said. “Family. Can I have another slice of lasagna?”

Grace gave her a misty smile.

“Yes,” she said. “You may have as much as you want.”

“Don’t tell her that,” Wayne said quickly. “She’ll eat the rest of it. Luther and I haven’t had seconds yet.”

“Nobody likes a whiner,” Petra said. “You know, maybe we should put lasagna on the menu at the Rainbow. Got a hunch the regulars would go for it. It’s not fried, but it’s not bad.”

FORTY

After dinner Petra and Wayne washed and dried the dishes. Grace put the clean things away in the cupboards while Luther made coffee. They took the mugs into the living room and sat down while Grace brought them up to date on her genealogical research.

“Mr. Jones granted me access to the confidential files,” she said. “I found only one record of a singer J&J knew for certain had killed with her voice.”

“Who?” Luther asked.