The Man Behind the Cop

by Janice Kay Johnson - His Best Friend's Baby

  Another dead end. Bruce thanked him for his time and left.

  It was now eight in the evening. The blue of the sky was taking on deeper tones. Good. Time to recanvass the neighbors up and down the street from A Woman’s Hand. Some had either not been home or hadn’t answered their doors last night. A second round today had caught a few of those at home, but none who’d heard the squealing tires or noticed a speeding vehicle. This was the perfect time of night to get the last few.

  Once again, cars were wedged in every available spot along the street. Street parking was at a premium. Many of these older homes had narrow driveways and single-car, detached garages. He left his own car in the clinic lot, pausing only momentarily where the bloodstain was still evident. He’d noticed when he picked up Karin for lunch how careful she’d been not to look that way as they’d walked out. It would be a long time before she could come to work and not think about what happened. Like the victims she counseled, she would never feel quite as safe again.

  Bruce checked his list of who had been interviewed and who hadn’t, and went to the first door. The porch light came on, and a gray-haired, paunchy guy opened the door.

  Last night? No, he and his wife had had dinner at their daughter’s and hadn’t gotten home until about eleven. Missed the excitement, although they’d heard about it from neighbors. Sorry.

  No answer still at the next place.

  At the third on his list, two houses down from A Woman’s Hand, a man in his thirties answered the doorbell. He wore a uniform, and raised his brow in surprise when Bruce held out his badge.

  “Cop, huh? I work security for Reliant. I’m on the night shift. I was just finishing dinner.”

  “Sorry to interrupt it,” Bruce said. He explained his errand.

  The guy was nodding before he finished. “Yeah, this jerk parked right in front of my driveway last night. I went out to go to work, and I could tell I wouldn’t be able to get out. I’d gone in to call for a tow truck, when I looked out the window and saw him come running. He jumped in, did a U-turn, bumped over the curb across the street and just missed a parked car—” he nodded that way “—and then was gone.”

  Bruce flipped open his notebook. “Can you describe the vehicle?”

  He could and did. Aging Buick, medium blue, must get shit for mileage, some rust on the right side door, dented front fender.

  Without having written down the license plate number, he couldn’t have more accurately described Roberto Escobar’s car.

  He hadn’t heard screams. He’d presumably been inside during and immediately after the assault. Also, he admitted with some embarrassment, he’d had his iPod on. Shortly after the car sped away, he’d gone out again and left for work.

  Bruce confirmed the time of the incident and had him describe the man he’d seen to the best of his ability. Bingo. Bruce took down his name and thanked him. “You’ve been a big help.”

  So. At least they now knew they were looking for the right car. That was something. Not enough, but something.

  Back in his own car, undecided about his next move, Bruce thumped his fist on the steering wheel. How in hell had someone like Escobar gone so successfully to ground? However cold-blooded he was, he had to have been rattled. And, damn it, he was towing two preschool-age kids along with him!

  Short of driving by cheap motels himself, Bruce couldn’t think of a single other thing he could do tonight. He hated hitting this moment in an investigation. Ideally, the bastard should be behind bars by now. Failing that accomplishment, Bruce wanted to keep working. He was still on hyperdrive. He detested this sense that every direction he turned he banged into a blank wall.

  I could go by the hospital.

  Uh-huh. And that served what purpose? He’d have gotten a call if Lenora Escobar had either died or stunned everyone by opening her eyes and asking where she was and what had happened.

  It was nine o’clock. Chances were Karin had gone home by now, even if she had indeed spent part of the evening sitting with Lenora.

  Still. He could find out, couldn’t he? Talking to her might quell this restlessness.

  He’d started the car and was driving before he had consciously made a decision.

  Any excuse to see Karin Jorgensen again.

  KARIN SAT in a dreamlike state, her hand on Lenora’s. The beep and hum of monitors were oddly comforting, a mother’s “Sh, it’s all right” murmur translated to a technological age.

  Karin knew better, of course. A steady heartbeat, air pushed in and out of lungs meant nothing if Lenora’s brain never regained conscious function.

  The swelling was subsiding, doctors said. She wasn’t brain dead. There were reflexes.

  Karin had to take their word on faith. The hand beneath hers was utterly still. Her monologue awakened no response.

  Maybe because she wasn’t saying what Lenora needed desperately to hear: We’ve found the children. They’re fine. Instead, inspiration at a low ebb, she’d been talking about the weather and how she loved spring.

  “I’m turning into a gardener,” she said. “Did I ever tell you that? It’s funny, because I used to roll my eyes when my mother went outside and spent hours and hours grubbing in the dirt. When I was about fifteen, I’d be embarrassed if I had friends over to our house and Mom would come in sweating and filthy and triumphant because the trillium had appeared. ‘They’re hard to establish, you know,’ she’d say. She showed me the three trilliums that had popped up, and they were these funny little plants on a thin stalk with three leaves at the top. Not what you’d call a thriller.” She laughed softly, although given the time and place, there was very little humor in the sound. “But me, I wasn’t interested. Until I bought a condo, and every year I filled a few more pots with annuals. I knew I was in trouble when I took a class at a nursery so my flower baskets would be unusual instead of just cheerful, with the usual geraniums or pansies. And then I bought a house, and it was all downhill. It looked so bare under the trees in the backyard, and I thought, Just a few woodland plants. Then the lawn in front and the single flowering cherry tree weren’t that interesting. So I dug out a bed along the fence. I have a white picket fence. Hmm. There must be something psychological in that, do you think?” She paused as if for answer, but didn’t need one. Yes, indeedy, there was something psychological in the classic symbol of home: a white picket fence. “Anyway,” she continued into the silence that lay beneath the sounds of the hospital, “now I’m digging out two more beds to each side of the front porch. I’ve gotten hooked on old roses, and I want room for more. The worst part? When I got excited this spring because my trillium had spread in back. I called Mom—she lives in Portland—and begged forgiveness for every time I sneered. Mom just laughed.”

  Maybe this wasn’t the best topic, she thought, disconcerted. Because in the end, her story had been about family and home, and not plants or spring as she’d intended. But maybe it was okay, because she wasn’t talking about children, which she did not have, and which to Lenora had been all important.

  Karin would have left Roberto the first time he’d hit her. But then, she wasn’t poor, uneducated and just delivered of her first baby. She had options Lenora had never had.

  Options Karin had wanted so much to give her.

  “Should I have encouraged you?” she whispered. “You knew him. I didn’t. I just…guessed.”

  And had been frightened, she reminded herself. She’d had that much sense.

  She remembered a wistful voice: I wish we could join the witness protection program or something like that.

  What had she told Lenora in return? Oh, yes. Just disappear.

  Was that what Lenora had done, faced with the unbearable? There was more than one way to disappear.

  A throat cleared behind her. “Hey.”

  Startled, she turned.

  Detective Bruce Walker stood a few feet from the bed, seeming to fill the cubicle with his broad shoulders and tough presence. His posture was relaxed, his gaze resting thought
fully on her face.

  She felt a flush creep over her cheeks. How long had he been standing there? “Um…Have you been eavesdropping on my inane chatter?”

  “I heard something about trillium,” he admitted.

  “And then you whispered.”

  “The whispering part I should have left out.” She squeezed Lenora’s hand, which could have belonged to a mannequin. “Lenora shouldn’t be worrying, not now. She has to concentrate on getting better.”

  He nodded and stepped closer to the side of the bed, where he wrapped his hands around the metal railing and said, “Hi, Lenora. Bruce Walker. I’m the guy who taught the self-defense workshop. I’m…feeling pretty bad that I didn’t say anything that would have helped you. But you’re going to defeat Roberto by opening your eyes and by walking into court to testify against him. You’re going to be one of the lucky women who sees your abuser sent to prison for a long time. So long you’ll be able to quit worrying about him. Feel safe. Raise your kids. That’s the ending we’re waiting for, when your head quits hurting the way it does.”

  Karin stared at him. How did he do that—say the right thing so effortlessly? She’d been tiptoeing all around the assault, not wanting to upset the unconscious woman if she was making sense of any of the words spoken to her. But this cop had in essence told her, Survive and you win. What could be a more important message to send?

  He lifted his gaze and studied Karin. “It’s getting late. Have you been here all evening?”

  “Oh, not that long.” Almost, but what else was she supposed to do? Go home and watch sitcoms? “Yolanda spent most of the day here. I made her leave. Her husband and kids need her, too.”

  He nodded acknowledgment. “Why don’t you say good-night,” he suggested. “I’ll buy you a cup of coffee on your way out. Or warm milk—” a smile crinkled his eyes “—depending on how quickly you want to hit the sack.”

  Her answering smile took more effort than she’d thought she had it in her to make. “Warm milk it is, then.” She stood, her knees protesting, and bent to kiss Lenora’s thin cheek just above the tube carrying oxygen. “He’s right, Lenora. I’d better get some sleep so I can give my best to my clients in the morning. I’ll come back tomorrow night. I hope by then you can interrupt me when my stories drag on too long.”

  She waited just a fraction of a second, unable to quell her human faith that someone who looked so alive must be listening. Then she gave what she knew to be an awkward little nod, picked up her purse and walked out.

  She said good-night to the nurses, who smiled and assured her that her company had been important to the patient.

  Only if she could hear me.

  Once through the swinging doors that separated the hushed ICU from the rest of the hospital, Bruce said, “Trillium?”

  She loved his voice. It had gravel in it, not so much as to make him sound like someone who’d had his throat damaged; no, just enough to make her toes curl. As if she was going to walk barefoot across him? Through him?

  Beside him?

  Now, why did that last thought make her shiver?

  “The cafeteria should still be open,” he said, taking her arm as if he’d done it a hundred times already and steering her to the left, rather than straight down the corridor. “I doubt a cup of coffee will do more than keep you awake long enough for you to make it safely home.”

  She suspected he was right. She just hoped sleep didn’t elude her tonight, too. “You know your way around the hospital. I suppose the cafeteria here is your home away from home.”

  “One of ’em,” he agreed.

  They got coffee. Karin shook her head when he took a cinnamon roll and looked inquiringly at her. He insisted on paying, as he had at lunchtime.

  The dining room was deserted except for a clearly weary couple who sat at a table near the window, eating but not conversing, their gazes turned inward. They were numb, she thought. Neither even glanced over when Bruce and Karin scraped chairs back from a table.

  “Did you have dinner?” he asked with a frown.

  “Dinner?” She had to think. “I went home and changed clothes.” She indicated her chinos and sweater.

  “I stuck some vegetables and cream cheese in a pita. What about you?”

  “Uh…” He couldn’t answer because he was wolfing down the sticky bun.

  “Honestly.” She shook her head. “They had salads in that glass case.”

  “I didn’t realize I was so hungry. If you don’t mind waiting…?” He sounded sheepish.

  She tried to assume a stern expression.

  His mouth tilted up, and he went back into the cafeteria.

  While he was gone, Karin sipped coffee, grateful he’d stopped by. He was the one person she wanted most to see and talk to right now. Jerlyn, the mother figure at A Woman’s Hand, had stopped her earlier and said quietly, “If you want to talk, day or night, you know where to find me.” But Karin hadn’t felt any impulse to spill her powerfully suppressed turmoil to Jerlyn, no matter how much she usually valued her input. This time, she would simply have to live with the guilt and second thoughts and, oh, memory of that terrible sound.

  But she couldn’t deny that she kept trying to spill her anguish to the man who wended his way back between tables with a tray that held a wrapped sub, a salad and, yes, another cinnamon roll. And each time he just nodded, unsurprised, making her realize he’d heard it all before, probably felt it all before. And that was why she felt so comfortable with him. His life was like hers in that he would have had no job were it not for other people’s tragedies. Only, he saw those tragedies one step closer. The psychological aftereffects were her vocation, the physical his.

  Sitting down, he unwrapped the sandwich. “So. Trillium?”

  “It’s a flower.”

  “I vaguely knew that. Why did it make your mother laugh?”

  Then he’d arrived at the end of her monologue, not the beginning.

  So Karin told the silly, but no doubt deeply revealing, story again, and enjoyed his smile at the end.

  “You need a T-shirt. ‘I’m my mother.’”

  She made a face at him. “Are you your father?”

  Something closed on his face. Bang! Sealed like a vault. “God, I hope not.”

  What had his father done to make him sound so appalled? Would it be an awful intrusion if she asked?

  He swallowed and met her eyes, his face still expressionless, and she had her answer. Yes.

  So she bit her lip. “I assume you didn’t come tonight to tell me you’d found Roberto and the kids.”

  He grimaced. “No such luck. I do know now that he was still driving his own car when he attacked Lenora. And, uh, that he did use the tire iron on both Julia and Lenora.”

  She took that in. “Then the children almost had to be in the car.”

  “Yes, but now I know where he parked it while he assaulted his wife. Anna and Enrico couldn’t have seen what happened.”

  “Oh.” Her voice failed, and she whispered, “Thank God.”

  He was watching her. Seeming satisfied, he said, “Otherwise, I’m stymied. Where the hell is he?”

  She shook her head and cradled the coffee cup in her hands.

  “I kept thinking about you today.” He still appeared relaxed, his long legs outstretched under the table, but there was something not quite happy in his voice.

  “In a bad way?”

  “Huh? Oh. No. Just wondering what you’d say about this, how you’d read that. If you can get into his head better than I can.”

  Absurd to feel disappointed. What else had she thought he meant? That he’d been mooning over her?

  “I think,” she admitted, “that I get into women’s heads better than men’s. Which might be why I’m unmarried and, well, unattached.” Now, why had she said that? Did she want to sound pathetic? “You have an advantage over me where Roberto’s concerned.”

  At her revelation, his eyes had narrowed, just for a beat. But he let that go. “Maybe, bu
t I have a problem where Roberto’s concerned.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He reminds me unpleasantly of my father, which makes it hard for me to evaluate him dispassionately.”

  Oh. That was why he’d hated the idea that he might be like his father. Considering how little he’d wanted to talk about it, just a minute earlier, she was left wondering why he’d chosen to bring the subject up now.

  She judged that sympathy wasn’t what he wanted. So she said only, “To find Roberto, do you have to understand in what ways he might be different from your father?”

  He cracked the plastic top from the salad and frowned down at it. “If I know him better, I can take more accurate guesses at what he’d do in any given circumstance. He’s smart, or we’d have found him by now.”

  She nodded. “He thinks more clearly than most of us would under similar stress. Rage and pride are his primary emotions. But Lenora used to talk about how he’d blow up, beat her and then walk away calmly, as if nothing had happened. He’d turn on the TV, tell her to bring him a beer, call his mother. In his view, nothing had happened, because he couldn’t empathize with her fear or pain.”

  “So, cold and careful, except when he’s in the midst of a rage.” He shook his head. “No wonder everybody disliked him.”

  “I suspect it was the coldness that made them uneasy. We unconsciously look for signals from other people, appropriate responses to what we’re saying or doing. He wouldn’t be giving them.”

  Bruce abruptly pushed away the barely touched salad. “Come on. Let’s get out of here. You must be beat.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  His gaze flicked to her face, and there was sudden heat in his eyes. “You’re the most beautiful exhausted woman I’ve ever seen.”

  He might as well have zapped her with a lightning bolt. Her blood heated, and her lower belly cramped with longing. She couldn’t look away from that glint in his eyes.

  She’d known, of course, that she found him attractive. But she’d been distracted enough not to react sexually. He’d just changed that. Karin wasn’t sure how she felt about that. She was unnerved enough to regain a semblance of self-control.