The Off Season (34 page)

Do
you
think that’s what I want to hear?
“So this
kidnapper
,” Harris asked her, “he made you drop off Lilly. At a place where you had reason to think she’d be safe.”

“That’s right,” she said, her voice quavering a little as she scooted back another couple of steps, retreating to the solid flooring that must have comprised the former living quarters. “Because he didn’t want her. But then my sister showed up and he—he grabbed her, too, and—I think he meant to, you know, rape us. But then—then Christina fell, and I guess he panicked.”

“Annie, stop this. Okay?”
At least until I’ve gotten you in an interview room, where I’ve read you your rights and the conversation can be recorded.

“Stop what?” she asked nervously.

“Let’s just stay focused now on helping Christina, shall we? Come back down here, will you, and hold her hand.”
So I can see where you have both of yours.
“While I call for the right help to get her to a hospital. You want to her to be all right, don’t you? You want her to forgive you.”

“For-forgive me?” Panic threaded through her words. “For what?”

“Well, for getting her kidnapped,” he said, not wanting to escalate things any further, though he was keenly aware of the SIG Sauer he’d laid on the step, and the covered handcuff holster on his belt. “That
is
what you said, right? Not purposely, of course. I know you’d never want to hurt her, as close as you two are.”

“Were,”
came the whispered response—not from Annie but from Christina, who was pushing herself into a more comfortable position. “Not—not anymore. She—Annie was the one who—”

“No! You can’t!” her sister shouted, leaning back to grab something from the floor behind her. Something that in the dim light looked to Harris like a rifle or shotgun as she swung it into place to—

Practice, training, and the instincts of a man who’d learned to trust them came together, his left hand grasping and raising the pistol as adrenaline blazed a hot path to his brain. Raising and firing, the deafening reports of two shots ringing off the curved brick, before Annie could silence the woman he would gladly give his life for.

Christina jolted, pushing herself upright, her shrill screams mingling with her sister’s as his hearing returned. As the long-barreled object slid from Annie’s hands, he lunged to grab it, only to realize, as she slumped, that she’d grabbed bolt cutters rather than a firearm . . .

And only realizing, as he attempted to stand, that just one of the hollow-point bullets he’d fired had struck Annie Wallace.

The other must have ricocheted off either brick or the steel railing—only to bounce back and hit him in the throat.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Since they wouldn’t let him leave the hospital—not after the surgery to repair the artery ripped open by a red-hot fragment of the .40 round that had nearly killed him—Harris gradually refashioned the room into Command Central. Three days after the shooting, he was strong—or at least stubborn—enough to use his laptop and his cell to read reports and issue orders, and causing more than one of the nurses assigned to his floor to roll her eyes in irritation.

Though his memories from the first twenty-hour hours were foggy, he was aware that most of his officers and staff had come by to check on him—except for Aleksandra Zarzycki. Alex, as everyone was now calling her, had been released and was now recovering in an extra bedroom at the home of Marco Del Vecchio’s mother, since she had no family of her own to help her out. Yesterday, however, Alex had called to ask how he was doing and assure Harris, her tongue firmly planted in her cheek, that “I’m not letting my pretty-boy partner’s rotten shooting scare me out of coming back to work.”

“Don’t be too hard on the guy.” Though the Millville cops had cleared Marco of all wrongdoing in an act that had certainly saved Ashley Paxton’s life, Harris knew he was racked with guilt about it. “In a confined space, heat of the moment like that—”

“This, coming from the chief who managed to shoot his own damn
self
,” she’d said, causing Harris to laugh so hard, he’d had to ask for morphine for the resulting neck pain.

As he was settling in to read a witness statement for the fourth time, Stella Bradford came in, dressed in a colorful jogging suit that had surely never seen athletic service. Plump as she was short in stature, the mayor’s blue eyes danced as she raised a silvery eyebrow.

“What happened to the sexy gown, Chief?”

He smiled, feeling a hell of a lot more comfortable in the jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt one of his guys has brought him. “Nurses kept complaining there was too way much testosterone on the floor.” When Stella laughed, he added, “Seriously, I’m getting discharged in about an hour. Just waiting on the paperwork.”

Grinning, she pulled a large green bottle from the tote she carried. “Then I guess we have two things to celebrate.”

“Is that
champagne
?”

“Relax, you prude,” she said. “It’s just a nonalcoholic screw-top. But I thought this moment deserved some bubbles.”

“What moment?” Closing the lid of his laptop, he set it on the wheeled tray table.

She cracked open the bottle, then poured some of the pale gold beverage into a pair of plastic flutes and pressed one into his hand.

“The moment I tell you that Reginald Edgewood’s just resigned from the city council to,
ahem
, spend more time with his family.”

“Really?”

“Hell no. That’s just what he’s telling people to save face, letting them think he’s dedicated to looking out for his poor wife’s health and getting his son back on track, now that Eric’s out on bail.” She tossed back her glass and drained her drink with gusto.

But Harris waited, sensing there was more to come.

“I’m sure it’s just coincidence,” she said happily, “that word’s just come down that the great Reg Edge has been indicted by a federal grand jury—for trying to bribe his way around those permit problems on his development.”

Harris snorted and raised his glass.

“Oh, come on,” Stella said. “I thought that’d get a smile out of you, at least. Your job’s safe—as it sure as hell should be, after solving the worst crime wave Seaside Creek’s ever known. Or is it—” She frowned as she appraised him. “You aren’t in pain, are you?”

“It’s not that. I was just thinking about Christina Paxton.” The witness whose statement he kept rereading, and whose absence weighed on him more heavily with each passing day. “Everything she’s been through, everything she’s lost. She saved my life, you know—making that pressure bandage from her shirt to keep me from bleeding out on the spot. But I can’t help thinking, if that fragment hadn’t nailed me, if she hadn’t had to work on me, she could’ve—could’ve somehow—”

“Saved my sister?” asked Christina as she stepped through the door. “I’ll never know that. I think not, but . . .”

She shrugged as if it didn’t matter, though the haunted look in her eyes told him that it always would. Along with the fact that his other round had struck Annie’s chest dead center. A bullet he had fired after mistaking the bolt cutters for a gun.

As Stella’s eyes darted between the two of them, her ebullient mood faded visibly. “I—I’m so sorry for your loss—your
losses
, Dr. Paxton.”

“This is Mayor Bradford, Christina,” Harris said quietly, feeling the thud of his own heartbeat.
Has she come to say good-bye?

She nodded at the older woman. “Thank you. I’m afraid I’ve b-brought a lot of trouble to your town. So you—you might be glad to know, my daughter and I won’t be staying.” Christina glanced at Harris before she dropped her gaze. Her cheeks went pink, the only color in her otherwise pale face. “Too many ghosts here. Too much—I
can’t
.”

“Christina,” he said, the emotion in the single word drawing a look of surprise from Stella.

“From everything I understand,” the mayor said gently as she turned her attention toward the younger woman, “not a bit of this was your fault. If you change your mind at any point, home will always welcome you—”

“Thank you for that.” Christina’s voice was flat and lifeless, the light in her once-warm brown eyes gone cold. “But the memories alone—” Shaking her head, she cut herself off before repeating, “Thank you.”

Stella responded politely, then abruptly remembered an appointment back in town. After an awkward good-bye, she gave Harris one last look, one silver brow raised, before closing the door behind her.

She knows.
The realization jolted him.
Am I really that easy to read—as pathetically obvious as Del Vecchio is around Zarzycki?

“How are—how are you feeling?” Christina asked him.

“You came,” he said, smelling the faint vanilla scent of body wash. Though she wore not a trace of makeup, and her hair hung straight past her shoulders, he was struck by how beautiful she was as she stepped into the soft winter sunlight coming through the window.

Or was he only memorizing every detail out of fear that he would never see her again?

“I thought I should,” she said, shrugging off her jacket. Underneath she wore a soft-blue sweater with a pair of darker jeans. “I wanted you to know I don’t—it wasn’t your fault, about Annie.”

“I was sure she meant to hurt you. To shoot you—the light in there was—”

“I know. And she would have—would have beaten me the way she did our—our mother. Her voice, her face—she wasn’t the person I thought I knew.” She crossed her arms as if to hug herself. “Or maybe she was, if I’d only been willing to see it.”

“I’ve read the statement you gave, and I’m sorry.”

“People keep saying that, but what does it mean?” she asked. “What do I do with it when my family, my whole family—”

“Lilly—Lilly’s all right?” he asked, though he knew she’d recovered from the drugging unscathed, just as he’d learned that Christina had refused to be admitted the night they’d been brought in, though she’d been warned that she might have a concussion.

“She asks for Annie all the time. She says she wants to hear more stories about Katie.”

“Who’s with her now?”

“Kym’s watching her.”

“You trust her?” he asked.

Christina nodded. “This has been as big a shock to her as anyone, but I think that helping us is helping her in some way, and maybe one day she’ll forgive herself for not seeing what we both missed.”

“People hide things,” he said. “They get damned good at it. And Annie was carrying a lot of secrets for a long time.” If what he’d read in Christina’s statement was true, she’d carried her adoptive father’s deathbed confession for more than two years in silence before she’d finally snapped.

Christina nodded. “Until those secrets broke her somehow. Or maybe she was always broken . . .”

She moved close to his bedside, close enough to touch him. Yet only her eyes reached his, a flicker of warmth in them like a memory of summer. “You never told me how you’re feeling.”

“Alive, thanks to you.”

“Beyond that?”

“Could be better,” he said, aching to reach out to her, to drag her close enough to pull her into his arms. But when he pushed aside the wheeled table, she tensed visibly, convincing him to take things slower. Much slower, or she’d bolt like a startled deer, leaving him forever.

“But I’ll be fine—at least I’m heading home,” he continued. “I’m a lot more worried about you.”

“Renee came by to see me last night.”

“Did she?” he asked carefully, still mulling over what Renee stopped by the hospital to tell him yesterday. What she’d gone to his house to confess the night he shot Annie Wallace. “What did she say?”

“She begged my forgiveness for letting Zach Fulton charm her into passing you my private information.”

“He didn’t
charm
her into it. He played on her vanity. Then, when that quit working, he flat- out bribed her,” Harris said, still furious that his ex had allowed herself to be drawn into a relationship with the most manipulative young psychopath he’d ever come across, who had, according to Ashley Paxton, set up the grocery meeting after spotting her coming out of the Victorian where Christina was living. It could have ended up a lot worse, he knew, having learned from the Millville police chief that Ashley had been used and badly abused by Fulton when she had tried to put the brakes on his increasingly dangerous behavior. Once she recovered from her stab wounds, Ashley faced serious charges—charges that could range all the way up to accessory after the fact in the murder of Frank Fiorelli.

Whether she would be convicted was another story. From what he understood, her mother had hired a team of high-priced lawyers to paint her as another victim. And maybe in a way she was. That was for a judge and jury to decide. Harris was just grateful that Zach Fulton had been put down like the mad dog that he was.

“Renee fed him information, too,” he told Christina, “about your schedule, where you went, even the key code to get into the garage door that night he messed up your car—”

“She told me all of that, too. Told me how ashamed she was, that she didn’t deserve my forgiveness.”

“That may be the most honest thing she’s ever said.”

Christina blew out an audible breath. “I’ll never be her friend again. I could never pretend her betrayal hasn’t hurt me. But she’s still your son’s mother—a good mom, a mom Jacob loves and needs. I wouldn’t take her from him.”

“You mean you’re—”

“I don’t want her charged for what she did. She doesn’t need to go to jail.” The barest of smiles lifted the corners of Christina mouth. “Besides, it’ll grate on her forever having to live with knowing I’m the bigger person.”

With a smile of his own, he nodded. “Especially now that we’ve all seen her at her smallest.” He didn’t doubt for a moment that this would prompt her to accept the job she’d been offered—and would be free to accept if she wasn’t facing charges. It would mean a longer drive to see his son, but Harris was more than willing to put in the miles.

“Besides, what does it matter now?” Christina said. “As soon as I get past the—the funerals and figure out what to do about my mom’s house and her business, I’ll be heading back to my old job in Dallas.”

Unable to restrain himself, he reached out and captured her hand, squeezing it tight in his. “Please don’t, Christina. Don’t let them win by driving you away.”

Her hand began to shake, and he saw her blink back tears.

“It’s not anything to do with winning,” she said. “They’ve already lost, all of them. Even my mom and dad, who thought they could protect us by—”

“They were wrong—of course, they were wrong—but they clearly wanted you raised with love and care, to grow up to be—”

“And look how well that’s worked out for us.” Pulling her hand free, she wiped her eyes. “Annie gone, my parents, even that sad wreck of a woman who abandoned us. And me—will I ever stop seeing it in my head—my mother dead? My sister dying? If I—if I wasn’t crazy before, how will I ever find my way through this without screwing up as badly as they did? How will I ever do this, Harris?”

Unable to hold back any longer, Harris climbed from the bed and went to her. Enveloping her in his arms, he bent his head to press a kiss just above her ear. And lowered his voice to whisper, “With someone who will always love you at your side . . . if you’ll only let me.”