The Man Behind the Cop

by Janice Kay Johnson - His Best Friend's Baby

  Bruce scowled at her. “I can’t decide if I like your relentless determination to be fair-minded and logical, or whether I really hate it.”

  Her mouth curved. “You must like it, or you wouldn’t be here.”

  “Maybe I’m here because I think you’re sexy.”

  She gave him a saucy smile. “That’s okay, too.”

  She fetched the pot of chili and the bread, and then they sat down. As they ate, Bruce talked some more about Trevor: his unhappiness, how much he must be worrying about his mother, his renewed pleas and obvious feeling of betrayal that Bruce couldn’t take him in.

  “I felt like scum last night after I dropped him off.”

  “You should have called me.” She flushed. “I mean, unless you had someone else you could talk to.”

  His focus on her was absolute. “No. I just went home. It was pretty late.”

  Tilting her head, Karin observed, “You really love him, don’t you?”

  “Love?” His dark eyebrows rose. “That’s a strong word. I don’t know that I’ve ‘loved’ anyone since I was a kid and still bought into the idea that’s how you should feel about your parents.”

  Karin could only gape. “How can you never have loved anyone? Haven’t you been in love? What about your friends? Don’t you call that love?”

  His face, formerly expressive, had become impassive. “I hadn’t thought of friendships quite that way, no. There’ve been women, but nobody that serious. I made up my mind by the time I was ten years old that I wouldn’t ever marry. I never wanted to have the right to rule and terrorize and hurt the way my father believed he did.”

  Never marry? Karin struggled to hide her shock. Did that mean she would be a fool to fall in love with him? Or a worse fool if she already had?

  Thank goodness her work as a therapist had given her plenty of experience in hiding dismay and, instead, asking reasoned questions.

  “You’ve surely met people since who are in happy marriages, starting with the police officer who was your mentor.”

  “Yeah, I have. But I’m too much like my father.” He paused, turning the wineglass in his hand, his expression bleak. “I look like him. I could be him at this age.”

  “Who you are inside has nothing to do with how you look.”

  “His genes made me,” he said flatly.

  Karin shook her head. “No. They’re part of you. But if he’d been raised differently, would he have been the same man? What about Enrico? Do you believe he’s destined to be like his father, no matter how he grows up?”

  She saw that he didn’t.

  “Or Trevor?” she continued, trying to sound merely persuasive and not desperate. How could he believe something so terrible about himself, discounting the day-to-day proof of what kind of man he really was? “You couldn’t feel the way you do about him if you thought he was doomed to be a violent alcoholic.”

  “For both Trevor and Enrico, their mothers have had a powerful influence. Mine was a victim. She never protected us kids. Far as she was concerned, he had a right.”

  Imagining the devastation of the boy he’d been almost broke Karin’s heart. What was truly astonishing was how he had escaped his father’s mold. The tragedy was that he’d done something so extraordinary, yet couldn’t recognize he had.

  “You are not your father,” she repeated, having no idea what else she could say. How often would he have to hear it to believe it?

  After a minute, his mouth twisted. “No. I know I’m not. I’ve spent a lifetime making damn sure I’m not. But I’ve also been careful to avoid putting myself in a spot where the instinct is to repeat what I heard.”

  “Parenting.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Trevor knows in his heart he can trust you. It’s sad that you doubt what he can see so easily.”

  He just looked at her, and she could tell he wasn’t really hearing.

  “Hey,” he said. “I promised the caseworker I’d pretend to Trevor that this was a great idea, and I did. Wade DeShon will out himself quickly enough if he’s still the same drunken son of a bitch. When that happens, he’d damn well better not hurt Trevor.”

  When. Not if.

  Karin found herself hoping quite passionately that Trevor’s dad truly had changed. Maybe his redemption would have some impact on Bruce’s pigheaded determination to believe the past shaped him.

  But she, too, worried that Trevor might end up hurt. Her chest felt tight at the thought of so many children so much at the mercy of parents they ought to be able to trust. Every day, she saw both women and children wounded by someone who had promised to love them.

  In her own way, she had as many doubts as Bruce did. She didn’t know if she could ever trust in something so fragile, so often shattered. Thinking about the near violence with which Bruce had taken her was enough again to awaken disquiet. Did it mean he had something of his father in him, despite her attempts to persuade him otherwise?

  Karin didn’t believe it. Couldn’t believe it. Yet the unease she’d felt about him reawakened.

  Man or beast? Wasn’t that how he’d posed the question?

  Karin was struck by a terrifying realization. She was attracted to both sides of him. She wanted to make love with him again, whichever he was.

  What does that say about me?

  “Let me help clear the table,” he said.

  “No.” Her voice came out oddly. “Let’s not bother right now.”

  He went very still, his eyes darkening. “After what I said about never marrying, I thought you’d boot me out right after dinner.”

  “Where did you get the idea I want to get married?”

  Karin heard herself in astonishment. She did want to love forever; she’d always believed, with all her heart, that someday she would marry, and her marriage would last forever. But however powerful the dream, right now it meant nothing compared with her need to have this man hold her again, become part of her again.

  His chair rocked as he stood. She wasn’t even aware of rising, and yet somehow she and he met at the foot of the table, and kissed as if they had both been starved for each other.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE SECOND SELF-DEFENSE workshop had a very different tone from the first. Bruce and Molly arrived early and stood, deliberately conspicuous, in positions to intercept anyone entering the parking lot besides the participants. Still, the women all scurried into the clinic, their body language fearful.

  Inside, heads bent together, and Karin heard the murmurs.

  “Were you still here…?”

  “Have they caught him?”

  “Someone told me…”

  After Karin thanked them all for coming and Bruce had introduced his partner, he had the sense to tell them briefly, gravely, about the assault and about the murder of Lenora’s aunt and abduction of Enrico and Anna. He was honest about the lack of progress in finding Roberto, about Lenora’s coma, about fears for the children. That honesty seemed to reassure the women in a way that platitudes wouldn’t have. Heads nodded, backs straightened, and Karin sensed the renewed determination to learn what he had to teach.

  Molly Beckstead might as well have been a college student as a woman who was almost thirty. Her eyes were bright blue, she had a snub nose and dark hair and she couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and fifteen pounds. After being introduced, she apologized for missing the previous week’s session and told them about her new niece.

  She was still talking when Bruce grabbed her from behind. In a flurry of movements so blindingly fast Karin couldn’t separate them, she had him flat on his back, one arm bent at an excruciating angle.

  “Pax,” he said, and she laughed and let him up.

  He climbed to his feet with an exaggerated groan that delighted the participants.

  Much of this session was spent with the women paired up, earnestly trying out the releases Bruce and Molly demonstrated.

  Watching the women gain confidence as they succeeded in breaking even Bruce’s g
rip filled Karin with triumph and a feeling of achievement. When Tonya, a shy eighteen-year-old who’d been raped, beaten and left for dead, swung around and planted a knee in Bruce’s groin, then gasped and clapped her hand over her mouth as he crumpled to his knees, Karin stepped forward. But he mumbled something, Tonya giggled behind her hand, then beamed with shining satisfaction as the others laughed.

  Instead of scurrying out the way they’d come, the women departed in a block, marching shoulder to shoulder as they escorted one another to their cars. Perhaps being guarded by Molly and Bruce made them feel secure, but Karin suspected it was more: at least as a group, they felt courage they’d lost, and she actually had tears burn in her eyes as she watched them wordlessly work together to be sure they all got safely on their way home.

  Afterward she went out with Bruce and Molly for coffee, and she had so much fun it was nearly midnight before she could tear herself away. She’d be tired tomorrow, but it was worth it. Molly, she thought, might become a friend, and Karin began to question all her reasons for not socializing with cops. With friends, she’d always preferred to escape the grim stories she heard all day, but laughing at a macabre yet also ludicrous tale Molly told of a man who was determined to rob a convenience store and died from sheer idiocy, it struck her how much she pretended with most people.

  I’m a professional, she went out of her way to convey. My days are like yours. But her days weren’t like a dentist’s or a nurse’s or a computer programmer’s. They weren’t like anyone else’s she knew. Tonight, she’d felt herself relax in a way she usually couldn’t. There was a freedom to being able to laugh without shame at a story that would have horrified most people.

  Bruce gave her a quick kiss on the cheek when they parted at their cars. Karin saw Molly’s startled and then speculative glance, and realized he hadn’t told her he and Karin had a relationship. Weren’t Molly and Bruce close enough friends to confide in each other? Or did he not consider it that important?

  Karin rolled her eyes and fastened her seat belt. She was worse than a lovesick teenager, wondering whether he didn’t really like her after all, or whether he was embarrassed to have it known he was dating her.

  “You’re a grown woman,” she muttered, and turned the key in the ignition.

  As the week went on, Karin talked to Bruce at least twice a day. They saw each other whenever they could, and it seemed impossible for her to get enough of him. She felt a cramp of longing at the very sight of him, and her body would soften and yearn in a way that should have embarrassed her but somehow didn’t. As far as she could tell, he was as insatiable for her; whenever he spotted her, his gaze would find her face with a hungry intensity she understood.

  It was scary to feel so much, to be so obsessed, about a man who’d told her bluntly that he’d never as an adult felt love for anyone and that he didn’t intend ever to marry. Was what they had now all she could hope for? When she was with him, she thought it might be, but at night after he left and she’d gone to bed alone, she knew she was lying to herself. She wanted to be loved, and by a man as fully committed as she was. She wanted someone who would be beside her at night, across the breakfast table in the morning, not just ready to come when she needed him, but already here, part of every day.

  With Monday night the exception, she did spend at least a little time every evening at Lenora’s hospital bedside. Karin wasn’t completely sure what drove her, but guilt was clearly part of the mix. She knew she wasn’t really at fault. On one level, at least, she knew. If Roberto hadn’t tracked his wife to the safe house—and how else had he found her that evening?—Cecilia was right when she said that the attack had been inevitable. At a different time and place, even more people might have been hurt. What if Cecilia had been walking right beside Lenora, for example?

  But Karin finally understood why her patients were so slow to let go of unwarranted guilt. There were too many ways to blame yourself. If I’d done that, thought of this, planned instead of proceeding thoughtlessly… She could travel the twisted paths of second thoughts well into the night. Rationally, she was convinced that the assault wasn’t her fault, but down deeper, she kept blaming herself.

  And as Lenora became more restless day by day, Karin’s incipient sense of doom deepened. She dreaded Lenora’s waking, and dreaded the possibility that she wouldn’t.

  She tried talking to Jerlyn, one of the two remaining founders of the clinic. Now in her fifties, Jerlyn might have been an aging hippie, her dark hair graying and invariably worn in a braid wound atop her head, her feet shod in Birkenstocks or Earth Shoes, her skirts from India, the necklaces and long, dangling earrings she liked African or Indonesian. Jerlyn’s gentle face hid a sharp mind and a heart filled with compassion.

  What was disturbing was how little good the talk did Karin. She’d counseled too many women herself, and she recognized Jerlyn’s strategies instantly, understood the tenor of her questions, knew what answers were expected. She found herself feeling sulky and then resistant. She wanted to say, Can’t you talk to me as a friend instead of a therapist? To see how ingrained that style of relating to people was in a woman she’d viewed as a mentor stung a little. Did she do that to people, too? She remembered Bruce asking once whether her “hmm” was the counselor speaking or the woman, and winced.

  Thursday, Bruce called to inform her that he and Molly had “caught” another homicide. The powers-that-be thought the trail was cold on the Escobar investigation. And after all, the FBI was working the abduction of the children, as well.

  Her heart sank. “You won’t give up?”

  “No. I’m just going to have less time to work on finding him.” In the background someone spoke to him, and he muffled the phone. A minute later, he was back. “Got to go. But don’t worry. Every department from Blaine to San Diego is watching for them. Sooner or later, someone will spot him.”

  Would they? she questioned bleakly, ending the call. Roberto and the children had seemingly vanished. Bruce’s attention wasn’t the only one that would be waning. Crimes happened every day. All police departments must be flooded with notices asking them to be on the watch. Inevitably, the most recent notices would be at the forefront of their minds. How easy for a Hispanic man and two small children to pass unnoticed at a season when migrant workers were traveling the West Coast.

  She wanted to have faith, but that, too, was waning.

  “CAN I GET A HOT DOG, Dad?” Trevor asked.

  Both men, one on each side of him, turned their heads, but at the crack of a bat striking the ball looked back toward the field. The baseball shot outside the line, foul, and the momentary excitement in the crowd at SafeCo Field settled back to an anticipatory hum.

  It was a nice day, only a few cumulus clouds visible, and the retractable roof of the stadium was open. This was the first Mariners game Bruce had made it to this season, but it wasn’t baseball that had drawn him today; the sport on the field could have been curling for all he cared. Damn it, he’d intended to spend his Saturday with Karin. But he couldn’t say no to this chance to assess for himself Wade DeShon’s fitness to have his son.

  Bruce had to admit it was decent of Wade to suggest he join Trevor and him at the game. Or maybe it was just smart. Bruce had no idea what Trevor had said about him, but Wade must be able to guess that Bruce wouldn’t be enthusiastic about this father-son reunion.

  When he picked them up, he’d been startled by their resemblance, for a moment not sure what to feel. He’d come simmering with hostility, but it was hard to hate a man with Trevor’s face.

  Bruce had always thought of Trevor as taking after his mother, since they were both brown-haired and slight, but the kid’s features and hazel eyes were unquestionably his dad’s. His father wasn’t a big man, Bruce noticed, but he must be five foot nine or ten, so there was hope for Trev.

  The two men had shaken hands warily, feigning cordiality for the twelve-year-old’s sake. Trevor was really excited, not seeming to notice the way Bruce assessed Wad
e, or the way his dad stiffened.

  Fortunately, the game had been a good one, tied up in the seventh inning at two runs each.

  Now, settling back in his seat, Wade said with mock dismay, “You’re hungry already?”

  “Yeah!” Trevor claimed.

  “A hot dog sounds good,” Bruce said. “I’ll go out with him. Time to visit the john.”

  Wade reached for his wallet.

  “I’ll get it,” Bruce said.

  The other man’s jaw tightened, but after a minute he gave a clipped nod.

  “You want us to bring you something?” Bruce asked.

  “Ah, hell, if everyone else is having a dog…”

  He put in his drink order, too, and Bruce and Trevor stepped over legs to the aisle. Walking up the stairs, Bruce laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “How’s it going with your dad?” he asked.

  They’d talked a couple of times on the phone, but Trevor had mostly mumbled, “He’s okay.”

  Now he said again, “He’s okay,” but with more animation, as if he meant it. “He’s being really nice. He told me how bad he feels about what a jerk he was. That’s not the word he used, but he said I shouldn’t say what he did.”

  Bruce suppressed a grin. “Probably a good idea.”

  They used the bathroom, then got in line at the concession stand. Bruce persuaded Trevor to talk about his new school, which he really liked.

  The boy scrunched up his face, adding with more typical pessimism, “So far.”

  Bruce laughed this time, and they carried their tray of drinks and bag of hot dogs back to their seats.