Night Sins (33 page)

“Why won't you answer my question, Agent O'Malley?” Paige pressed. “What are you afraid of?”

Eyes blazing, Megan turned back to her adversary. “I'm afraid I'm going to lose my temper, Ms. Price, because your line of questioning is not only irrelevant but the answer is none of your damn business.”

She regretted the words the instant they were out of her mouth. She had just as much as admitted her guilt. It didn't matter that what she said was true, that it was nobody's business. She had given just enough answer to pique imaginations. God, what a nightmare. She felt as if she had stepped into a tar pit and was being sucked in deeper with every move she made in an attempt to extricate herself. Now there would be no graceful way out. She couldn't tell the truth and she doubted anyone would swallow an edited version.
We were discussing the case and we just fell asleep. Honest.
Right. She felt like a teenager who had been caught coming home after curfew. The analogy nearly made her laugh out loud as she recalled Mitch's words of the night before—
Let's make out. Like when we were in high school . . .

Paige put on her righteous-crusader-for-the-First-Amendment face, internally vowing to wring Garcia's neck if he didn't get a long shot of it. “At three
A.M.
, while your prime suspect in an unsolved child abduction was committing suicide, you were reportedly in the home of Chief Holt with all the lights off. If your priority is not with the case, the public has a right to know, Agent O'Malley.”

“No, Ms. Price,” Megan retorted, her voice trembling with cold rage. “The public has a right to know that I and all the other cops on this case have been working virtually around the clock in the attempt to find Josh, to get just one good lead on the piece of human garbage who stole him. They have a right to know that no one could have known what Olie Swain had done before he came here, that what happened to Josh was an isolated act of senseless violence and not the first sign of anarchy. They have a right to know that your job hinges on your ratings and your ratings hinge on sensationalism and exploitation. They do not have a right to follow me after I've spent eighteen hours on the job. They do not have a right to know what flavor of ice cream I like or what brand of tampons I use.

“Am I making myself clear, Ms. Price? Or do we need to discuss how you came to find out about the stakeout on Olie Swain's house the other night? Perhaps you, in your patriotic, open-minded spirit, can see that the public has a right to know how it came to pass that you and your news crew interfered with an investigation and ultimately ruined our chances of possibly finding Josh Kirkwood that night.”

Momentum, fickle bitch that she is, swung heavily away from Paige. She felt it go. She felt the jealous admiration of her fellow journalists cool like a hot iron in the snow. She felt the eyes of volunteers bore into her back, felt their sense of betrayal and their anger. She would lose their trust, which meant she might lose potential sources. Worse than that, she would lose viewers, which meant she would lose leverage in her contract negotiations. She took her seat, her gaze on Megan O'Malley, burning with hate.

D
ePalma is going to skin me alive and make a desk set out of my hide,” Megan muttered. She paced the length of an antique fire truck, shaking, not from the biting cold of the old garage, but from shock.

The press conference was over, but the trouble had just begun. The match had just been touched to the fuse—and the fuse was attached to the dynamite that would blow her out of Deer Lake. “Dammit, I knew something like this would happen! I knew better!”

“Megan, you didn't do anything wrong,” Mitch said. He sat on the running board of the old truck, freezing his balls. He was too drained to care. “You said so yourself in there. You made your point very sharply.”

Megan stared at him in disbelief. “You think that's going to make a difference? You think that pack of jackals in there is going to say ‘Oh, yeah, she's right, it's none of our business who she sleeps with'? What turnip truck did you fall off?”

“I'm saying there are more important things to focus on here. For them and for you.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean? You think I care more about my career than I care about finding Josh?”

Mitch rose. “I don't hear you ranting about the fact that our only suspect is dead. You took that in stride. But somebody takes a poke at you and it's the end of life as we know it.”

Beyond words, Megan could only gape at him. Then she looked away, rubbing a hand across her forehead, muttering to herself. “I guess I should have expected this. A man is a man is a man.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean, you don't get it,” she snapped, wheeling back around on him. Every muscle in her body was rigid with anger, her hands balled into white-knuckled fists at her sides. “My authority and integrity have been compromised. Once this hits the airwaves, my credibility is suspect and my effectiveness on the job suffers. Provided I still have a job. The Vatican likes scandalous publicity more than the BCA does.” Phantom images of DePalma's angry face floated through her head. Nixon as the grim reaper, the face of doom.

“Do you know how I got this job, Mitch?” she demanded. “I got this job by working twice as hard and being three times better than any man in line for it. I fought tooth and nail for it, because I believe in what we do.

“There is
nothing
I want more than to find Josh Kirkwood. I have given over all that I am, all that I know, every ounce of will and determination I have to find Josh and stick his abductor's head on a pike. And now I'm very probably going to be denied the satisfaction and this investigation is very probably going to lose one damn good cop because I was stupid, because I broke my own cardinal rule and slept with a cop.”

“Stupid?” he said in a deadly quiet voice. “That's what you think about us?”

“What
us
?” Megan asked sharply. She would have liked to believe they had something special, but she had no faith in that being true. She wanted to think he was holding out the chance to her now, but she wouldn't trust him. Love didn't happen this fast. Love didn't happen at all for her. Life had taught her that lesson a long time ago.

“There is no us,” she said bitterly. “We had sex. You never made any promises to me. My God, you never even bothered to take off your wedding ring when you took me to bed!”

Instantly, Mitch's gaze dropped to his left hand and to the thick gold band he wore out of habit. He wore it to punish himself. He wore it to protect himself from women who might want more than he was willing to give. And it worked like a charm, didn't it?

Megan stood there in front of him with her feet braced apart, shoulders squared, ready to take a blow—physical or metaphorical. So tough on the outside, so alone on the inside. She had more than made her priorities clear: the job, the job, and then the job. But there was still hurt in her eyes and behind the pride that kept her chin up. He had coerced her into breaking her rules, gave her sex, offered her nothing, and now she would pay the price.

What does that make you, Holt? King of the shitheels.

He blew out a long breath. “Megan, I'm s—”

“Save it.” She didn't want to hear the word. Bad enough to see it written all over his face. “We both should have known better.” She told herself it wasn't Mitch who was hurting her, that it was the injustice of a double standard that would punish her for attempting to have a private life.

“You won't have to worry, of course.” She forced a sharp, unpleasant smile. “Everybody knows boys will be boys. And I'm used to going through my professional life with an ax hanging over my head. So, hey, this is nothing new.”

“Megan . . .”

He reached a hand out to touch her cheek. She slapped it away.

“Goddamn you, Mitch Holt, don't you dare pity me!” she said through her teeth. She had no defense against tenderness. She backed away from him, jaw set, her mouth pressed into an uncompromising line. “I'm a big girl. I can take care of myself. Hell, I've been doing it my whole life. Why stop now?”

Chin up, she walked past him, wondering if there was any hope of getting her coat from the press room without being seen.

“Where are you going?”

Megan stopped a foot from the door, but she didn't turn around. She didn't need a man in her life. She didn't need anyone. To be a good cop—that was all she had ever really wanted. She ignored the hollow ring of those words inside her.

“I'm going to work,” she told him. “While I still have a job.”

CHAPTER 25

D
AY
8
1:42
P.M.
         -25°         
WINDCHILL FACTOR
: -50°

O
lie Swain had no known associates. He had no friends. He was, as they were so fond of saying on the nightly news, a loner. He did his job and kept to himself. According to the ink stamp on the inside covers, he bought most of his books at The Pack Rat, a secondhand shop near Harris College.

The store was empty except for a clerk who would have looked perfect selling love beads out of the back of a Volkswagen van with a psychedelic paint job. Tall and lean as a stick of beef jerky, he parted his rusty blond hair in the middle and pulled it back into a bushy ponytail. What passed for a beard on his chin more resembled the thin wad of loose hair Megan periodically cleaned out of her hairbrush. He wore a tie-dyed T-shirt with a rumpled plaid flannel shirt open over it. Baggy jeans clung precariously to his skinny hips, held in place by a length of clothesline cord. His name was Todd Childs and he was a psych major at Harris who had been spending some of his free time working in the volunteer center.

Megan let her gaze roam around the store as they chatted about the case. Housed in an old creamery building, the place was jam-packed to the rafters, a treasure trove of outdated textbooks and clothes, “decorative” pieces that cycled between trendy kitsch and unwanted junk, pennants and pompoms and other assorted memorabilia from Harris. Behind the counter, an ancient electric heater that looked like a fire hazard groaned in its effort to supplement the clanking furnace.

Todd tapped a forefinger to the thin gold rim of his glasses. “Observation is the key to insight,” he said slowly. He propped his bony elbows on the counter and leaned across it to stare into Megan's eyes. His pupils were dilated to the size of dimes and the scent of burning hemp clung to his clothes. “For instance, I'd have to say you're very tense.”

“Comes with the territory,” Megan said.

“Yeah . . .” He nodded in slow motion. “Seeking justice in an unjust world. Trying to plug the dam with chewing gum. Most cops are control freaks, you know. That's not meant to be an insult; it's just an observation.”

“And what did you observe about Olie?”

“He was weird. He never wanted to talk to anybody. Came in, bought books, left.” Todd stood back and sucked down half a Marlboro Light 100. “We were in the same class a couple of times,” he said on a cloud of smoke. “He never spoke to the other students. Never.”

“He was actually taking courses at Harris?”

“Just auditing. I don't think he could spring for tuition. He was way into computers, you know. I think he felt more comfortable with machines than people. Some folks do. He sure didn't strike me as the kind of guy who likes to fuck with people's heads. You know, with that note business and that phone call and everything.” He shook his head, inhaled a quarter of the cigarette, and blew the smoke out through his nostrils. “I don't see it, unless he had a multiple personality disorder, and that's pretty unlikely.”

“I guess he was leading a secret life,” Megan said, pulling her mittens on.

Todd gave her a dreamy look. “Don't we all? Isn't that what everyone does—build camouflage walls around our inner selves?”

“I guess,” she conceded, clamping on her earmuffs. “But most of us don't have inner selves who molest children.” She tapped the business card she had left on the counter. “If you think of anything that might help, please give me a call.”

“Sure thing.”

“Oh, and Todd?” She gave him a look as she tossed the end of her scarf over her shoulder. “Don't smoke dope on the job. You never know when a cop might come in.”

From The Pack Rat, Megan hurried next door to a small turquoise clapboard house that had been converted into a coffee place called The Leaf and Bean. The tiny front porch was crowded with snow-crusted bicycles apparently waiting out the winter. Inside, she took a seat at a tiny white-draped table near the front window and ordered latte and a chocolate chip cookie from a girl dressed like Morticia Addams. What few other customers there were sat back by the old wooden counter in what had probably once been a dining room, perusing the newspaper and chatting quietly. An alternative rock station was playing on the radio behind the counter, filling the emptiness with Shawn Colvin's spare, evocative lyrics to “Steady On.”

The walls of the place were chalk white and hung with old black-and-white photographs in plain black frames. The windows were curtainless, allowing cold bright sunlight to pour in. Megan left her sunglasses on, to discourage eye contact and to block the light. She sipped her latte and nibbled absently on her cookie as she stared down at her notebook.

She needed to find a thread that would tie the random bits of information together, but there didn't seem to be one. All she had were theories. Olie had acted alone. Olie had an accomplice. Who? He had no friends. Olie had computers no one could get into, but his printer was dot matrix and the note found in Josh's gear bag and in the back of his notebook had come from a laser printer. Olie had photographs of naked boys, but they were years old, from his life in another place.

For someone who knew so much, she knew very little.

ignorance is not innocence but SIN
i had a little sorrow, born of a little SIN
Blind and naked ignorance . . . blind
and naked ignorance . . .

Mind games. Mitch had said Olie didn't seem the type for mind games. Olie had been lying in his own blood when the call had come to Mitch's house.

Blind and naked ignorance

She had looked up the quotation in
Bartlett's
. It was from Tennyson's
Idylls of the King
.
Blind and naked ignorance delivers brawling judgments unashamed.

Someone's way of telling them they had the wrong man? Or was it Olie's partner, unaware that at the very moment he called to torment them his cohort was slitting his wrists with the shards of his porcelain eye?

The theories swirled through her mind, making her head ache. And in a separate swarm were the fears for what would happen to her career if someone decided to make an issue of her involvement with Mitch. At best, she would lose face with the men she worked with. Worst ranged from losing her field post to ending up as a security guard at a shopping mall someplace. No. Worst would be not being able to close this case, she decided as she looked down at her copy of Josh's photograph.

He smiled up at her, so full of life and enthusiasm and bright-eyed innocence. For just a second she let her guard down and wondered how he was, what he must be thinking, how frightened he must be . . . provided he was still alive. She had to think he was. Believing kept everyone going.

And beneath all the other thoughts was the acute awareness of every passing second.

“We're doing the best we can, Josh,” she whispered. “Hang in there, scout.”

Tucking the photograph back into her folder, she forced her gaze to focus again on the notes she had made.
Olie—computers.
Olie—audit courses—Harris College.
Instructors?

Christopher Priest was head of the department. Maybe he would have an idea what Olie kept locked away inside his machines. Maybe he would have an idea of how to get at it.

She paid her tab and went back out into the deep freeze with her file folder and notebook clutched against her as if they might afford some protection from the wind. The Lumina started grudgingly and the fan belt shrieked like a banshee all the way back to the station.

The only good thing about the extreme cold was that it discouraged the press from hanging around outside the station doors. Having been banned from the hallways of the law enforcement center, they congregated in the main entry to the City Center building or sat in their cars in the parking lot with the motors running. Megan pulled into the slot designated for Agent L. Kozlowski behind the building and ducked in the door before any of the vultures could alight from their perches.

Her message light was blinking when she let herself into her office, but the call was from Dave Larkin, not DePalma. She hoped the silence meant the dirt from the press conference had yet to hit headquarters. She debated the wisdom of beating them to the punch, calling DePalma herself and giving him the laundered version of what had gone on—she and Mitch had been discussing the case; exhausted from the hours they had been putting in, they fell asleep sitting in front of his fireplace; then came the call . . .

Calls. Plural.
Blind and naked ignorance.
The voice played through her mind as she hung up her coat. Whispery. Low. Eerie. In her mind's eye she saw the message scrawled in blood on the white wall of Olie's cell—
NOT ME.
What if he were innocent? What if they had wasted all this time chasing down a red herring while the real kidnapper sat back and watched them, laughing?

The what-ifs spun around and around in her head. She needed to put her thoughts back on track methodically, one by one. They had followed their leads. Olie had the record, he had the opportunity. His van matched the witness description. His van had traces of blood in the carpet.

“Larkin,” she murmured.

Snatching up the receiver, she punched in the number and prayed he would be at his desk. He picked up on the sixth ring.

“Larkin.”

“Dave, it's Megan. What have you got for me?”

“Condolences on the passing of your suspect. Man, Irish, talk about bad breaks.”

“Yeah, if it weren't for bad luck, we'd have no luck at all,” she said. “Have you heard anything else from this end?” she fished.

“Like what?”

“Nothing. Never mind. Did you get the reports on the blood?”

“Yeah. I personally went over there and hounded them. I figured I'd get back to you quicker than they would.”

“Thanks. You're a pal, Dave. What'd they find?”

“It wasn't human.”

Megan let out the breath she'd been holding. “God, I don't know if I should be relieved or disappointed.”

“I know. I'm sorry, kiddo. I wish I could give you something to go on, but this blood ain't it. It probably came from some poor Bambi and it was probably in that rug for years. There were no sporting rifles or shotguns, no guns of any sort found in your guy's house. I'll fax you the report, and the minute I hear anything on the trace evidence, I'll call you.”

“Thanks, Dave. I appreciate it.”

“Don't mention it. And chin up, Irish. When you crack this thing, dinner's on me.”

Megan didn't bother to tell him he would be dining alone. No cops. Never again.

She wondered what would happen to the easy camaraderie she shared with Dave Larkin when Paige Price's story hit the grapevine. She had kept his amorous advances at bay with her rule of not dating cops. He enjoyed kidding around about the subject, but he had always respected her boundaries. How would he feel when he found out she'd been sleeping with Mitch? Would he try to understand or would his ego inflate between them like an air bag?

She cursed herself for the hundredth time. She had compromised so much, and for what? A few hours of intimacy with a man she barely knew.

Other reasons whispered through her mind. Excuses and half-formed wishes. The physical attraction was stronger than anything she had ever known; she hadn't known how to fight it. He had been persistent, persuasive. She had felt a connection with him that awakened within her the desire for things she had never had—closeness, companionship . . . love.

She closed her eyes and shook her head. She was tough enough to break the testosterone barrier and make detective on the Minneapolis force. She was strong enough to fight for her right to this field post with the BCA. She had taken down characters as bad as any cop ever had to face. And all of that was forgotten in a heartbeat for a little scrap of tenderness and the chance to feel that she mattered to a man as a woman.

The fax machine behind her beeped. Megan swung around on her desk chair, expecting to see the lab report on the bloodstains. Instead, the cover sheet was from the DMV regarding the routine trace on Olie's van. Using the manufacturer's vehicle identification number, they had traced the van's life history in the state of Minnesota from first owner to last. According to the report, the title had been transferred in September 1991 to Lonnie O. Swain. The previous recorded change of ownership had occurred in April 1989. The lucky owner: Paul Kirkwood.

Goose bumps rippled down Megan's body. The van Paul Kirkwood hadn't wanted to tell her about was Olie Swain's van.

2:14 p.m.

T
he council members are really upset here, Mitch. They can't understand how something like this could happen. I mean, how did he get hold of a knife? You don't give those guys table knives with their suppers, do you?”

Mitch stared across his desk at Mayor Don Gillen, trying to manufacture patience from stress and stomach acid. “He didn't have a knife, Don. He didn't have a weapon of any kind. He cracked his glass eye and slit his wrists with the pieces, and if you can find me anyone on the town council who could have foreseen that happening, I will gladly pin my badge to their chest and retire from law enforcement.”

“Jeez,” Gillen muttered, horrified. His blue eyes blinked behind his gold retro spectacles. In addition to his position as mayor, he held an administrative position with the Deer Lake Community Schools. Pushing fifty, he still tended to dress like a yuppie on the cutting edge of fashion, flashy ties and suspenders being his trademarks. “Jeez, Mitch, that's ghoulish.”

Mitch spread his hands. “I'd rather you didn't tell anyone but the council members.”

“Yeah, sure.” Gillen shook his head as he rose from the visitor's chair. “So, you think it's nearly over?” he asked hopefully. “That Olie did it and killed himself because he felt guilty or couldn't face going back to prison?”

“Honestly, I don't know, Don,” Mitch said, rising. “I just don't know.”

Gillen started to say something, but cut himself off as a sharp knock sounded against the door. Megan stuck her head in the office without waiting for an invitation.