For the Sake of Their Baby (22 page)

He walked into the day room that served many duties. This was where they gathered to eat the meals they prepared for themselves, and indeed, each shift had its own refrigerator lined up against the wall along with an extra fridge full of soft drinks. However, the room also served
as the heart of the station. A place to socialize and conduct meetings, it also housed the equipment to run videotapes used in training. There was a table nearby painted with city streets, topped with moveable wooden structures and vehicles to mimic Ocean Bluff. Visiting kids loved this table, but it also came in handy when used to plot courses through town or refine fire fighting strategies.

This morning, the room held three men Alex had once counted as brothers. Actually, given the fact he hadn’t seen his own brothers in several years, closer than that. Dave was there as well as Mike Sinclair and Drew Soffit. Dave’s smile froze on his affable face. The other two men crossed their arms and gave Alex a chilling look that said he wasn’t welcome. Considering the circumstances and the cloud of guilt under which he’d left, he didn’t blame them. With identical scowls, they both left the room.

“I need to talk to Montgomery,” Alex told Dave with a wistful look at his former friends’ backs. Hopefully, soon enough they’d learn the truth and this awful feeling of having lost a second family would leave. He faced Dave and said, “Please, Dave, I need your help again. I’m sorry to do this to you. Is Montgomery here?”

Dave nodded, then shook his head. “I don’t think you should have come.”

“I know you don’t. Is he here?”

“He doesn’t want to see you, Alex.”

“I guess that should matter more than all the other problems I have right now including a bum murder charge, a pregnant wife with misguided loyalties who seems to attract danger like some kind of magnet, a neighbor in jeopardy, friends going haywire, but you know what? It just doesn’t.”

“If you want your job back here someday—”

“I want my life back,” Alex interrupted. “I want my wife safe. I want to see my kid be born. Now, is Montgomery here or not and will you help me see him or not?”

Dave took a couple of steps toward Alex. “On one condition. If I help you see him, then you have to tell him what you told me, about Liz and the scarf and what you did, the whole nine yards.”

Alex nodded. Thinking of Liz’s disclosures to Ron the night before, he grumbled, “It’s not like he’ll be the first to know.”

C
HIEF
M
ONTGOMERY
was a fit-as-a-fiddle, flat-stomached forty-three-year-old man who wore his dark-blue uniform with unmistakable pride. In the past, he’d all but taken Alex under his wing, letting him know that he expected great things and Alex had been willing to work hard to prove Montgomery right. He had looked forward to working his way up the ladder. All that seemed impossible now.

Because he and the battalion chief had been relatively close, Alex could only imagine the depth of Montgomery’s disappointment when Alex confessed to the murder of his wife’s wealthy uncle. It would be an uphill climb to win him over.

He entered the chief’s office behind Dave, but as he was a head taller, the chief’s eyes went from Dave to him immediately. Montgomery had been at his usual position in front of the computer, keeping an eye on all the 9-1-1 calls that came in over the line, both police and emergency.

“Sullivan,” Montgomery said, his small blue eyes
piercing. “What’s the meaning of bringing
him
in here?”

“He needs to talk to you,” Dave said. “It’s important.”

“I don’t need to talk to him,” the chief said calmly.

“Just listen to him, Chief.”

Alex decided to be blunt and direct. He said, “I didn’t kill Devon Hiller.”

Montgomery got to his feet. “You confessed.”

Dave patted Alex on the back and left, closing the door firmly behind him.

“I confessed to save my wife,” Alex began. “When I found Hiller’s body, I jumped to the wrong conclusion. Believe me, I’m paying for it. The trouble is that now Liz is in danger. There has been at least one attempt on her life in the last few days, perhaps two. Can I sit down and talk to you? Will you listen?”

Montgomery drilled Alex with his stare. Finally he said, “Liz is in danger? You’re not making this up?”

“I’m not making this up.”

Montgomery motioned at a chair close to his desk. “Tell me what’s going on,” he said.

With a curt nod of thanks, Alex sat down.

L
IZ LEANED
close to the computer screen. Unless she was mistaken, there was something a little untoward about the way her uncle had acquired the land for his latest strip mall. The property had been zoned residential when it first came on the market but it was difficult to develop—too close to poor neighborhoods and highways, no view, little sunlight. As such it had languished for years until her uncle bought it for a song. The zoning magically changed within weeks of her uncle’s acquisition. He’d built the mall immediately.

Could that be what Kapp had on her uncle? Had Uncle Devon paid off the planning commission and had Kapp found out about it?

Hmm…

As she’d been doing at odd moments, she turned her attention to the bundles of her uncle’s letters that had been mixed in with her childhood keepsakes. She’d scanned the biggest group over the past few days, hoping to find an old grudge having to do with some nefarious business scheme, but had come up dry. Now, a little excited, she started in on the personal letters, the first few from her own father. They were all very short and she was soon disabused of the notion that she would uncover new and fascinating details about the father she’d adored. He’d put very little of himself into his letters. One notified Uncle Devon that Liz had broken her arm, a fact she’d all but forgotten, another discussed selling a house, a third canceled a meeting with their lawyer, the fourth dealt with the funeral arrangements for Liz’s grandmother. It was easy to see her father and uncle had not been particularly close.

With a sigh, she set those aside, thumbed through a half dozen from distant relatives including an irate cousin who berated Uncle Devon for not lending him the cash to hospitalize his late wife, and at last picked up the final letter, this one in a plain envelope with no return address and a San Francisco postmark of April 10th, 1969.

It was short, too, and she read it fast, then reread it.

Devon,
it began without salutation or endearment.
The baby is a girl and she is healthy. I received the money order you sent. As you say, no looking back. Irene.

Who was Irene? And where had Liz recently heard that name? She drew a blank and moved on. A baby?
Was it possible her uncle had a baby? She almost laughed at the thought. Irene could be anyone. The baby could have been anyone’s.

Interesting, though. Mighty interesting.

Alex would be home pretty soon and she’d run it by him if he was talking to her. A flash of irritation was replaced by the realization that they didn’t have time to bicker. Perhaps this letter would give them a new place to start looking. After lunch they were going to her uncle’s house to retrieve her scarf and check the place out, and after that, perhaps they could figure out a way to research birth announcements in San Francisco for April of 1969.

The thought of lunch reminded her that there still wasn’t a thing in the house to eat. She grabbed her purse and car keys with the intent of rectifying that.

It was the first time since Alex had returned that she’d been shopping alone, and she celebrated by choosing all his favorites. It wasn’t until she found herself bagging Satsuma oranges that a question popped into her head. Was this her way of apologizing to him? With food? Was she ready to admit that her trust in Ron somehow compromised her loyalty to Alex?

No. Yes. She wasn’t sure.

She was surprised to find Emily’s car in the driveway when she returned home. The front door of the house stood ajar, and Liz thought of the cold drizzly air circulating through her house. For a second she was annoyed that Emily had failed to shut the door, and then she remembered what kind of shape Emily had been in when she’d seen her last.

Should she have been behind the wheel of a car? Maybe Ron had driven her over…

Juggling the bags, Liz managed to carry everything
into the house in one load, pushing open the door with her hip, calling out Emily’s name.

The call died in her throat. Emily sat in the middle of the sofa, gazing at nothing, her hands lost in the folds of her heavy wool skirt.

“I used the key you gave me to get in,” she said, her voice an odd monotone. “I waited and waited for you.”

Shutting the door with her knee, Liz said, “I’m sorry, Em. I didn’t know you were coming. Give me a second to put the ice cream in the freezer.”

Emily nodded.

Liz deposited the groceries in the kitchen. Sinbad sat up in his enclosure, square in the middle of his sandbox, eyes huge but oddly silent as though he, too, was aware of the tension emanating from the distraught woman in the living room. She dug out the ice cream and slipped it into the freezer, but the kitchen was so cold she knew the meat and milk would be fine for a few minutes. Emily, on the other hand, didn’t look as though she had a few more minutes in her.

A
LEX FOUND
himself thinking Montgomery could do quiet like no other man on earth. A rock had nothing on this guy.

He’d listened, he’d asked two or three questions, and now he was thinking. At last, he took a deep breath. “So let me get this straight. Sheriff Kapp is convinced you’re guilty, you can’t get him to look anywhere else unless you compromise Liz, Liz is in danger from some unknown person, you suspect Hiller was blackmailed by Kapp.”

“You got it.”

“And now you want me to tell you why I used the word blackmail with Kapp.”

“Yes.”

Montgomery thought some more. “I assume Mike told you about this.”

Alex shook his head once.

“You’re trying to keep Mike out of it.”

Alex didn’t reply.

With a heavy sigh, Montgomery said, “Kapp is a pompous, arrogant jerk.”

Hearing Montgomery label Kapp as arrogant less than twelve hours after Kapp had used that word on him, made Alex feel vindicated in a way. The fact that the chief was talking to him spurred a flame of hope. Alex said, “I’m up against a wall. Kapp is determined to hang me out to dry. I can’t prove he’s a blackmailer. If you can’t tell me what he said to you, will you just confirm that the man approached you? Maybe that would be enough.”

Montgomery got up from his desk. “And maybe it wouldn’t. Let me tell you what I know.” The chief perched himself on the broad windowsill and looked thoughtful. “You’re not a dad yet, but you’re pretty darn close. Someday that baby of yours will be all but grownup. You won’t still think of him or her as a baby, say, when you take them to college, but you will still feel protective. It comes with the territory.

“Well, my last baby is seventeen years old and we took him off to school down in L.A. a few months ago. The boy is smart as a whip, graduating a year early from high school but maybe that wasn’t a good idea. He’s immature. He started drinking to fit in and then he drove a friend’s car into an old lady’s front window. The friend ended up with a broken leg. The old lady had a stroke. Now my kid’s got a DUI and trouble with the law.”

“I didn’t know.”

“No one up here did, but Kapp found out. He even got hold of a picture of my kid taken at the scene, obviously three sheets to the wind and obviously belligerant. Now pay attention, because this is the way Kapp’s mind works. Kapp knows I’m looking to become fire chief when Purvis retires. He offered to keep my son’s trouble off the front pages of the paper if I agreed to enlighten him about a rumored affair Purvis had with an underage girl. He wants the power to threaten Purvis’s marriage so Purvis will endorse him come re-election time. Purvis is an out and out critic of the sheriff’s, so there’s no way that endorsement will come without coercion. Kapp figures I want to protect my son. He even hinted that I won’t stand much of a chance for promotion if Kevin’s debacle is front page news and maybe he’s right.”

“So Kapp tried to blackmail you to blackmail Purvis.”

“Yep.”

“And you then accused him of trying to blackmail you.”

“I did indeed. He balked at that, told me it was ‘business,’ not blackmail. He said I should just scratch his back the way old man Hiller had.”

Alex sat up straight. “He mentioned Hiller and blackmail in the same sentence?”

“He mentioned Hiller and business in the same sentence, but with him, it’s all the same.”

“I can’t figure out what he had on Hiller.”

“I gather he had a lot on Hiller. I have no proof. I have a feeling this is business as usual for Kapp and that he’ll pretty much do anything he wants in this county for as long as he wants. It galls me, and frankly I have
to admit that I don’t see how any of this will get you closer to Hiller’s murderer.”

Alex shook his head. “I don’t either. But the whole thing is like a puzzle. Who knows which piece will be the one that makes all the others fit?” He stood up and held out his hand. “Thank you for being so frank,” he said.

Montgomery stared at Alex’s hand, stood and shook it. “Best you stay away from here until this is all resolved,” he said firmly. “When it is, come see me if I’m still around.”

Alex nodded. “Yes, sir. If you don’t mind me asking, what’s Kapp going to do about your kid?”

“Ruin him. Ruin me.”

Alex left the station preoccupied.

Kapp was a class one scoundrel—was he also a murderer? He heard his name called as he walked to his truck and turned to find Dave under the protection of the station overhang. “Tell me what happened,” his friend said, handing him a steaming mug of coffee and taking a sip from his own mug.

As much as Alex longed to return home to Liz and make up for the tensions of the morning, he knew he owed Dave an explanation. Leaning a shoulder against the building, Alex started talking.

L
IZ SAT
in the rocking chair and looked anxiously at Emily. “Are you okay?”