The Chilling Spree (30 page)

The headline was every bit as incendiary as
the photo of a private moment.  Crevan warned me that Belle
had a habit of saving her incendiary tidbits of information for
when they would inflict maximum damage. I just never imagined that
what I did to anger Danny Datello, that little hint of a kiss to
Johnny at Don Weber’s press conference last month, would come back
to bite me in the ass so quickly – and in such an
unrelated-to-anything kind of way.

Johnny seemed oblivious to everything but my
reaction.  He yanked the newspaper from Briscoe’s hand and
swiftly enveloped me without actually touching me.  Think
human shield.  I was whisked away before Maya had time to
comment or Briscoe could gloat over my misfortune.

Little else registered in my brain.

OSI, Downey priorities shift while victims
die.

The damned paper might as well have been
printed in blood.

Vituperation hissed through my vocal chords.
“I will fucking kill her!  I’m gonna hunt her down and make
her eat her words!”

“Helen, take a deep breath and get it under
control.  I know you’re pissed off, but this isn’t the end of
the world.  You know how these vultures are.  It isn’t as
bad as it looks.”

Naturally, he was wrong.  Neither one
of us had gotten to the substance of her fine journalistic
integrity, the scathing libel printed for all the city to
read.  I suspected that it would make the photo and headline
pale in comparison.

I jerked the pulpy lies from Johnny’s
fist.  The cemetery faded away, and everything else along with
it including Johnny, but not the blood red tinge that suddenly
bathed my reality.  Did Rick piss me off before I killed
him?  In the grand scheme of comparison, that would be a fat
hell no
. 

My eyes devoured the gist of her smear
campaign.  Not only were Johnny and I more concerned with
libido than the alleged pile of barely legal murder victims
stacking up like the dead at Auschwitz, but I was also engaged in
some kinky sort of affair with Devlin.  I don’t know how that
wretched creature unearthed her so-called leads, but someone had
been more than willing to divulge that Dev and I were far beyond
work-friendly at the Pan Demon concert on New Year’s Eve.

My heels dug into the frozen earth beneath
them.  One-eighty.  A bulls eye morphed between Tony
Briscoe’s eyes.  “There’s only one leak of information,
Johnny.  And I’m gonna plug it.”

“Helen, stop it.  If I have to throw
you over my shoulder and drag you away from here, I’ll do
it.”  Sparks shot from his eyes. 

Tears sprang to mine.  The floodgates
opened.  “She called me a whore, and you’re defending
her?”

“No.”  His fingers bisected my arm in
an iron grip.  “What I’m defending is your dignity.  The
last thing you’re gonna want is a scene in front of hundreds of law
enforcement officers who are soaking up your tantrum like a
sponge.”

Moisture dripped from my chin.

“Put your head down, and let’s get you
home.”

“I can’t drive like this.”

“Clearly,” his voice dropped an
octave.  Strange the way it soothed me.  “Baby, I’m not a
whole lot happier with Belle than you are right now, but we’ll
figure it out.”

He steered me toward Chris’s sedan.

“Where are we –?”

“Hush.  I’m assuming you’d rather have
this moment in private with me rather than explain to Mackenzie
what’s wrong.  Chris can drive him home in the
Expedition.  We’ll take the long way home in Chris’s
car.  Deal?”

I nodded.

He had me settled inside a minute later,
crouched beside the open passenger door.  “Doc, look at
me.”

My chin burrowed closer to my chest.

“Honey, don’t pull away now.  We’re in
this thing together or we’re not.  Now’s the time to
decide.”

I peeked through tear-spiked lashes. 
“I love you, Johnny, but this hurts right now, and I’m not very
good at sharing this part – at least not until I’ve had a chance to
process it.”

“You’ve got three minutes to get
there.  Chris is waiting with Devlin.  I’ll be right
back.”

I watched the exhaust from my Expedition
snake into the cold winter air while Johnny strode toward it. 
If there’s such a thing as a walk that could kill, Johnny mastered
it.  He rapped his knuckles against the window.  Air
fogged from his lips in terse little bursts when the window
opened.  There wasn’t enough time between what he said and his
departure for anything less than a clipped order.  Something
like,
take Detective Mackenzie to the house.  Helen and I
will follow in my car
.

It was more like two minutes before he was
beside me again.  Johnny didn’t speak for a long time. 
We headed for the western outskirts of Downey.

“Where are we going?” I finally asked.

“My house.”

“Johnny, I’m much calmer now.  I’m
sorry I lost my temper.”

“Well I’m glad for that, but I’m still
pissed off.”

“You haven’t even read the article yet.”

“If you felt like she called you a whore
because I kissed you goodnight, that’s enough for me.  And
don’t get me started on the fact that it’s none of her goddamned
business what we do on our own time.  Bodies aren’t piling
up.  Not unless Belle’s making a confession.”

“A confession?”

“Sure, why not?  She hates gays more
than anyone I can think of at the moment.  How hard would it
be for her to figure out who and what Goddard and Tippet
were?  Maybe this is her grand scheme to expose my best friend
and destroy his career.”

“Isn’t that a little dramatic?  So
Crevan is gay.  Thinks he’s gay.  To hear him tell it,
he’s lived almost forty years without acting on his urges. 
What if he’s wrong?  What if marriage to that lying,
duplicitous bitch merely confused him and made him think doing a
guy had to be preferable to women?”

Johnny chuckled softly.  “Well, there’s
always that possibility.  I can’t say that I disagree with the
theory at the moment.”  His fingers tiptoed across the front
seat and brushed over my knee.  “Are you really all
right?”

“Getting there.  Thanks for not letting
me make another scene back there.”

“Any time, sweetheart.  What did she
have to say, other than showing the world our unparalleled
chemistry?”

“Allow me.”

I got as far as the nasty innuendo
concerning my relationship with Devlin and his discharge from MSUH
straight to my house and Johnny’s temper exploded.  The
reverberation from his fist against the steering wheel rang with a
low hum so loud, it hurt my ears.

“I take it back,” he snarled.  “Let’s
go kill her.”

Tempting as that sounded, Dad’s life was an
example of why certain activities had to remain solo.  “Should
I regurgitate your advice?”

“I know,” he grumbled, “but she’s gotta know
that OSI won’t take this shit and turn the other cheek.  Chris
is gonna go ballistic.”

It sort of begged the question.  How
many officers in Darkwater Bay read the morning edition before they
went to Ned’s funeral?  There were no icy stares, no snickers
when I walked through the church on Devlin’s arm.  Nothing
from anyone that could’ve been remotely construed as out of the
ordinary.

Except for Tony Briscoe.  The hint of a
notion that he was behind this smear campaign fanned the flames of
my simmering temper again.  This time, I had enough
rationality to keep my thoughts quiet.  Part of me knew that
if I ever had hard evidence that he set this ball into motion that
the consequences would be dire.  For both of us.

“Doc, your silence is screaming things I
really wish you wouldn’t consider.”

My eyes snapped into focus on his
profile.  “I’m not considering anything.”

“Damned if I know how I know this, but I
do,” he said.  “Don’t blame Briscoe.  Even if he turned
Belle onto the link between our murders – which I highly doubt
because I think he hates her more than you, me and Crevan combined
– we need evidence, and if we get it, there’s a process that deals
with this sort of thing.”

“He convinced you that I would’ve really
murdered Mitch Southerby in cold blood, didn’t he?”  The
accusation hung between us like a great chasm that could never be
bridged.  “How can you possibly believe that you care about me
if you think I could do something like that?”

How indeed.  He not only answered that
question beyond my comprehension last October, but I feared he was
on the cusp of remembering that very act that proved how far he’d
go to protect me.

“There’s a huge difference between the heat
of passion and premeditation.  Southerby was a reaction
because he hurt me.  This is different.”

“I said you’re wrong.”

“And I believe I’ve told you many times that
I know you, Doc, inside, outside, all the dark little corners in
that mind of yours where maybe you’re even too afraid to
glimpse.”

“You’re right.”

“I know I am.”

“Not about me,” I said.  “You’re
crazy.”

“I never said I was crazy.  I said I
don’t know how I know it, but I do.  Let me handle
Briscoe.  Let me get to the bottom of how this happened. 
Let the brass discipline him if this was a malicious attack aimed
at embarrassing you, me, the department and the integrity of the
police in general.”

“Fine.”

“I promise you.  If he so much as
hinted that you’ve been unfaithful to me with Mackenzie, we’re
done.”

A knot swelled in my throat. 
“Why?  You know I wasn’t –”

“I meant Tony and me.  That’s a step
too far.”

Of course it would be – in insane jealousy
land.  He missed the point, one which I thought I had made
abundantly clear to him long ago.  Memory loss is a bitch, I
guess.  I reached for his hand and peeled it away from the
steering wheel.  There was no struggle. 

My lips grazed the ridges of knuckles. 
“I know I told you that there are parts of our history that I’d
rather stay lost, Johnny, but this isn’t one of them.”

The car slowed and swerved toward the curb
on the residential street near Johnny’s childhood home before it
rolled to a stop.  Glazed eyes turned on me.  “What’s
that, baby?”

“I asked you once if you were turned off by
my lack of sexual experience.”

He swallowed hard.  “You were married,
Helen.”

“Yeah, but there wasn’t anyone before my
husband, and only one after him.  One wouldn’t be missing the
mark too far if they said that Rick and I didn’t share a very close
marital relationship.”

Blue eyes burned hotly into my flesh. 
“Then I suppose the salient question is the identity of guy number
two.”

“He was you, Johnny.  So when she
called me a whore, she was so far off the mark –”

He jerked me into his arms and speared one
hand through the back of my hair.  “Only me?  Me and some
fool who didn’t have the sense to appreciate what he had?”

“You’re assuming that Rick loved me. 
He didn’t.”

“What an idiot,” he murmured.

“Johnny, I’d really like to talk about
something else.  You were planning to fill me in on the
developments this morning.  The Tippets?”

“I’d rather –”

“And God only knows if Belle Conall is
hiding in the bushes with a photographer snapping more
photos.  We could be looking at tomorrow morning’s sensational
response from OSI and Downey Division.”

He released me with a reluctant sigh. 
“I suppose this means I can’t ever touch you in public again,
because heaven forbid someone might see us.”

“What happened with Randy and Joanne
Tippet?”

Johnny grinned.  “I love the way you do
that without even saying the words.”

“Yeah, yeah.”  My focus is apparently
unrivaled in this neck of the woods.

“It was disturbing at best,” Johnny sobered
and began to fill in details I had only imagined.  Truth they
say, is stranger than fiction.  It comes as no surprise that
it dwarfs what horrors my literal mind can conceive.

“There were no tears, no demands for
justice.  They simply sat there and stared at me like I told
them somebody ran over a squirrel that dashed out of their front
yard into the street.  It freaked me out to be honest. 
So I asked if they had any questions about what happened.”

“Oh boy.”

“Yeah,” he shook his head slowly. 
“Tippet said it didn’t really matter what transpired since in their
eyes, Robert Tippet died when he was seventeen years old.  The
notification by the police was little more than long overdue.”

“They didn’t blame Alex?”

“That’s where the emotion entered the
equation, and was the main reason I missed the service at the
church.  Joanne Tippet went nuts.  She said that any
righteous God would’ve taken both of them out at the same time,
that whatever tool God used to erase Robert’s existence had missed
a golden opportunity to remove the root of evil from her precious
family, to erase the stain that was the last remaining blot on her
otherwise flawless life in the eyes of this God that I really hope
doesn’t exist.”

“None of them do,” I muttered.

“Helen, we don’t all worship that vengeful
sky monster.  Some of us actually believe that God loves us,
that he gave us free will as a gift, but in doing so requires that
we accept the consequences for less than stellar choices.”

Christ – no pun intended – but if Johnny
really felt that way, he must’ve believed that I couldn’t have
killed Rick.  He’d expect me to accept the consequences just
like anyone else.

“Not the point, but whatever.  Why did
that make you late?”

“I sent a team from the state police out to
pick him up.”

“Who?”

“Waters,” Johnny said.  “Correct me if
you disagree, but that statement sort of bumped the Tippets to the
top of the suspect list.  I’d rather not see the next headline
insinuate that someone died because I ignored a threat to his
life.”