Donuts and Handcuffs

by Haley Travis

  Above all else, I knew that it would not be productive to jump to conclusions. But my mind instantly began racing, analyzing every possible explanation.

  If Bailey had fled across the country to escape an evil ex-boyfriend, she might have taken a few things around the house with her. So her ex might also have these envelopes, and could be working with the alleged arsonists. Perhaps he wanted to stop the owners from continuing with these arsons, for fear that Bailey would be hurt.

  There could be a chance that Bailey’s ex was involved with these criminals, and dropped by her apartment to check on her. Perhaps she stole the evidence and gave it to the police.

  Of course, the envelopes could be a complete coincidence, because I was obviously not a paper expert of any kind.

  Yet there was something else tickling around the edges of my brain. Like a sneeze that was just starting to gather energy.

  Bailey had a lot more security than the average shop owner in a relatively safe neighborhood. She might know exactly how far our cameras reached, and could have been the one to throw the envelope. She had been hiding in an alley with a weak explanation that didn’t quite sit right with me.

  “Hey, Clarkson,” I asked when he next walked by. “That anonymous evidence that just showed up. What’s the address of the office of these alleged criminals?”

  He looked at me strangely. “Trying to work my case, Hill?”

  I chuckled, trying to appear casual. “No, I just figured since I’m often cruising around the neighborhood I might as well keep an extra eye out.”

  He nodded. “Can’t hurt. It’s at 810 Berkeley, near the corner of Dundas.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I really want to get this bastard caught before he kills somebody.”

  Detective Clarkson nodded. “That’s for sure.”

  With trembling hands, I called up a map to double check. The alley where I had run into Bailey was half a block south of that building.

  My stomach churned. There was no way that she could be involved in something like this. I just couldn’t even allow that thought to formulate. She was such a wonderful, good person.

  In fact, she was so considerate of everyone around her… The idea that she might break into a building to steal evidence to help out? It was still just too outrageous.

  Sure, she knew about security systems, apparently. Perhaps locks as well. I recall being slightly surprised at one of the unusual deadbolts on the door of her apartment, from an obscure German company. Some people used systems from other countries, so any local burglars would be unfamiliar with them.

  Bailey was a baker. She was a culinary wizard, a magician of flavors and textures and all sorts of food. The odds of my would-be girlfriend being a cat burglar of any kind would be ridiculous.

  Sipping my coffee, I stared into space. The night I had met her in the rain, she tripped, but instead of stumbling forward on her hands, she tucked into a forward roll so that she could spring up onto her feet immediately. Perhaps she used to be a gymnast.

  Her fear of needles could simply be natural. But it could also go one or two other ways. Either she had many needles as a child and became phobic, or she had absolutely zero needles as a child and became phobic.

  I didn’t know a single thing about her childhood. Replaying every conversation we’d ever had over in my mind, I tried to remember. I recalled myself mentioning a favorite TV show from when I was little, some favorite childhood foods, a normal amount of little things. But Bailey hadn’t mentioned anything about her childhood or her parents. The only time she mentioned anything was that her grandmother taught her to bake. If we talked about movies, she only mentioned things from the past five years. The same with books. Television shows. Pretty much everything.

  My stomach lurched again as I realized how little I knew the woman I absolutely adored.

  Finishing up the rest of my work for the day, I thought maybe I should simply drop in on Bailey and have a casual chat. I didn’t want to interrogate her, because I knew my paranoid mind was being completely insane.

  I just needed to hold her, and ask her one tiny question about her childhood. Anything. Just to make me feel that she didn’t appear out of thin air.

  As I trudged over to Bailey’s apartment feeling like a complete asshole, I wondered if having to see bad people up close so often was making me jaded. Bailey was seeing people at their best every day. I was seeing people at their very worst. Did this make us too incompatible? What kind of life did I have if I was actually suspicious have a gorgeous lovely girl like her?

  Shaking my head, I started to cross the street, knowing that I was being completely insane. Perhaps I should just tell her the truth, so that she could have a good laugh with me. Strange envelopes were not a good reason to poke holes in what was becoming, I hoped, a wonderful relationship.

  I looked up to see Bailey as she disappeared through her apartment door, followed closely by a tall man. His chin was tucked into a scarf, and there was a hat low over his eyes. But as he turned his head to dart through her doorway, I saw a distinct half-moon scar on his cheekbone in line with his ear.

  Her body language stated that Bailey was relatively relaxed, as was he. She had said that I was the only person she’d had in her apartment. So either she was lying, or this was his first visit. We had never discussed exclusivity, but I didn’t get the impression that they were together in that way. For one thing, there was no way he would be walking behind her without checking out Bailey’s perfect curvy ass. And he hadn’t been, at all.

  My gut reaction was to race over there to make sure that she was okay. Or at least call her. Text her. But I knew that would come across as overbearing and overprotective. Since I still didn’t know what kind of situation her ex-boyfriend had put her through, I could not go charging in like a jealous freak.

  Darting back into the station before she could see me out the window, I went back to my desk. I didn’t have access to all of the search databases, so I called in a favor from Kevin, one of our best investigators. I sketched out the scar, and described the man as best I could.

  Then I forced myself to go home, eat dinner, and go to sleep quickly before my mind could run around on the hamster wheel of stress any further.

  Dark thoughts were not productive if there was no evidence for them. There was no reason to freak out until I had some sort of evidence.

  When I woke up in the morning, my first instinct was to text Bailey, knowing that she had probably been up baking for at least a few hours. But now I wasn’t sure how to behave around her. I didn’t feel right pretending that everything was fine when there were so many questions hovering in the air.

  Racing to work early, Kevin had emailed me the files. There were seven known criminals in the database with a similar sort of scar on record, but one glance told me which one I had seen entering Bailey’s apartment.

  Stewart Lake. From the somewhat well-known Lake family of burglars, robbers, and petty criminals. His brothers, Jim, Ricky, and Leon, had all either done time, or had various charges dropped. But somehow Stewart had never quite been convicted. He and his wife Marsha moved every couple of years, so they could never be tracked. There were a few leads with vehicle registrations, but they always seemed to be nearly a year behind wherever the family was actually living.

  Looking into the records of Stewart’s brothers, there was a wide variety of crimes, but most of them were only misdemeanors, such as tampering with security systems, trespassing, petty theft. They were many instances of suspected crimes such as breaking and entering, but there was never quite enough evidence to convict them. It was almost as if they were the ones who prepared a site before a robbery. It also looked like they targeted small local banks, jewelry stores, and hotels. Places with good security, but rarely perfect.

  What the hell was Bailey doing with this guy? I know that she moved here from out of town, but she wouldn’t say where. How could she know him? And if she knew him, did she know that he was a criminal?

&nb
sp; Probably not.

  My mind swirled into a tangle of possibilities. Maybe this guy had gone straight, and he was her security consultant. Maybe that’s why she had such an elaborate video surveillance set up, and industrial locks.

  Maybe it was completely unrelated, and she was simply friends with his wife or something, with no idea who he was.

  Then I checked his age. Fifty-one.

  Digging through his files, they were very few photos of him. The one that identified his scar was from an incident where he testified on behalf of Jensen Jones, who went to jail for ten years for stealing and stripping cars just over a year ago.

  There was also a surveillance photo taken twenty-one years ago when Stewart was under investigation for yet another robbery. He was walking through a park with what appeared to be his wife and daughter. The little girl was a toddler, perhaps three or four. They were all dressed in black and dark browns, as if completely blending into the shadows.

  There was instantly no doubt in my mind that the little girl was Bailey. I had no idea how I could be so sure of something from a grainy photo of a tiny tot reaching her hand up to her father. There was something in the way she tilted her head. I just knew.

  I wanted to be wrong. How could my precious darling Bailey come from a criminal family like this?

  Then my head fell into my hands. I didn’t want to be judged by my father’s actions either. No wonder she didn’t mention it.

  There was still a chance that I was wrong, but I didn’t think so.

  I had to wonder if she was ever going to tell me. If she was ever going to fully let me into her world. Or could she be trying to keep her distance because she knew I was a sort of person to ask a lot of questions?

  This was all too much to process, so as I went out on patrol, I tried to clear my mind, simply taking care of the problems at hand.

  As always, my partner Dave and I joked about the complete lack of parking skills of some drivers. We checked a faulty alarm that had gone off a few times this month at a local store, but this time the security company assured us it would be fixed once and for all.

  We drank coffee. We ate subs. I tried to have a normal day. All the while, the back of my mind was screaming that I needed to talk to Bailey.

  Although Dave and I often drove while patrolling, sometimes it was nice to go for a walk around the neighborhood, so that everyone was reminded that we were a friendly police presence. Walking by the local high school, we high-fived some of the kids we knew and gave a wave to the teachers.

  Checking the time, it was only twenty minutes to go on my shift. As we turned a corner, we heard raised voices, and instantly glanced at each other. Dave nodded, and I increased my pace.

  There was a tone of shouting that we had learned to read. Excitement, anger, frustration – there were many reasons for a person to shout occasionally. But there was a certain tone of rage mixed with a bit of hysterical desperation that meant someone was out of control.

  Barging into a convenience store at full steam, I grabbed the wrist holding the knife and twisted it crisply. The weapon clattered against the counter at the same moment his arm was being pinned behind his back.

  Dave was already cuffing him and reading him his rights, as I scanned the store. Mr. Welsh, the owner, was rattled but fine. There were no other customers. Probably just another guy with a drug problem needing some instant cash.

  I held the door as Dave marched the would-be thief out onto the sidewalk, and I told the owner we’d be back shortly for his statement.

  Unfortunately, this wasn’t the first time we’d all been in this exact situation, but I was thankful this time the guy was clumsy and only armed with a knife.

  Three steps from the store, something barreled into my back. I spun to see a thin woman with wild, glassy eyes trying to take a swing at me. Her size compared to mine was ridiculously small, but she was obviously not in her right mind.

  She wouldn’t quit, her fists windmilling crazily as I kept a hand on her shoulder so they couldn’t connect.

  “Get your hands off him,” she screeched. “He didn’t do anything wrong.”

  Then she tried to reach for something in her pocket. Her arm twisted behind her back as her shoulder met the brick wall carefully, as I kept her face away from the stone. Once her arms were pinned, the fight drained out of her as she realized I was much larger, much heavier, and easily able to snap her in half if I wanted to.

  But I would never actually hurt her. Even as I used my biggest booming tone to state, “Freeze. You are under arrest for assaulting an officer.”

  That took the last of the spark out of her, as I held her steady against the wall, tapping her ankles out with my foot so that she was properly pinned and unable to kick me. Reaching for my cuffs, I looked at Dave, who was already escorting his suspect into the back of a cruiser.

  Glancing in the other direction, I saw Bailey’s wide eyes as she backed away from me slowly.

  She was carrying two grocery bags, her cheeks slightly pink from the chilly breeze as she watched me holding a tiny woman’s face to the wall.

  She turned and ran so fast it wasn’t even worth calling after her. I cuffed the woman, sending her off in the cruiser while warning those officers that she was definitely high on something.

  I joined Dave back in the convenience store to get a statement from Mr. Welsh, trying to focus.

  Every question I had about Bailey flew out of my mind for the moment, except one. Did I frighten her? Did she think that I was being too rough with that woman? Did she see how careful I was, that I was just restraining her in my usual methodical way?

  I went home after my shift with a tightness in my chest. Knowing that I may have upset Bailey was completely disturbing. My stomach was in knots. It felt like my pulse wouldn’t remain steady. Having the woman I was falling for disappointed in me hit me harder than I would have ever anticipated.

  It was disgusting that I had been accustomed to that feeling with my ex, Ashley. She was always disappointed that I couldn’t take vacations when it was convenient for her, or go out dancing till all hours because I had an early shift. It truly bothered her that I wouldn’t put her ahead of my job.

  It told me that she had no respect for my position, or for me. But it also illustrated the fact that she was a selfish, spoiled little brat, with no sense of responsibility.

  That was one of the things I adored about Bailey. She understood that sometimes work comes first. And she was obviously a very hard worker. I admired her for that.

  I knew it was far too soon to have feelings of this magnitude for a girl I barely knew, but it was out of my control. The tingling feeling of warmth that caressed my soul every time I thought of her had overtaken me.

  The decision was made before I’d even thought it through completely. We just needed to talk. Whatever was going on, I would listen with an open mind. I believed in her.

  Pulling out my phone, I sent a text. “Bailey – I’m so sorry that you saw me restraining that woman today. Please know that I was as gentle with her as possible, even though she was trying to punch me in the teeth. Can we talk about this?”

  The next twelve minutes felt like an eternity. Then I got a response.

  “That was surprising to see. But some other things are going on as well. I think I’m going to need a day or two to get my head together. Then we’ll talk.”

  My breath caught in my throat. It felt like every heartbeat echoed through my chest, making strange, hollow noises. After taking a few moments to compose myself, I replied. “Okay. Please know that I’m right here for you. Let’s talk soon.”

  Once again, I went to sleep early because I couldn’t stand being awake any longer. The tumbling of questions in the back of my mind had become even heavier, clanking around like steel shrapnel. My unease was deafening. I wished that Bailey was in my arms. Even if we didn’t speak, I wanted to be the one to warm her. To hold her so that she knew that she was safe.

  If that had indeed been
her father, I wanted her to know that I would still protect her, even from him. If she’d run this far from him, she likely wasn’t wrapped up in his life. I had to believe that Bailey truly was the good woman I was falling completely in love with.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The next morning, I noticed that my hands were shaking as I was rolling out the dough to make cookies. Baking had always created a gentle, happy atmosphere where I disappeared into the work, and every problem I had was filed away in a different section of my brain for me to deal with later.

  Even after making up a new recipe for lemon-lime mint sugar cookies with caramel drizzle, I couldn’t stop thinking about Daniel.

  I’d been raised with rough men. My father and my uncles were always throwing each other around when they were joking and burning off that weird adrenaline that seemed to overtake them when they were getting ready for a job.

  But Daniel hadn’t looked rattled like that. He looked calm. He was restraining that woman, but there must have been a good reason. It was his job. Maybe she was some kind of psycho.

  Seeing him actually doing his job as a cop was a strange bucket of cold water over the feelings I had for him that had been running wildly out of control.

  He was a police officer. And even though I had never been directly involved, I was aware of too many crimes to count. Even if I was just a child through most of it, and it wasn’t my fault, it may have been in my nature.

  I knew that someone with my messed up childhood should be in therapy, but there was no way I could start a session by saying, “So, I come from a family of criminals, got messed up with a car thief, and please don’t ever ask me for my real last name or what city I’m running from.”

  Sure, there was a doctor-patient confidentiality arrangement, but I wasn’t about to trust a stranger with my life. I wouldn’t even trust a witness protection program. I was fairly certain that nobody from my past would ever come after me, but I wanted to be as far removed from all of that as possible.