Sensations, irritating and unwelcome, intruded nonetheless. The floor was damn cold under his bare ass. His penis slipped from her, however he willed it to keep them linked. He became aware of a few places that stung. Her nails must have dug into his back and shoulders. He had a memory of her head banging against the door. God. Was she hurt?
Bruce groaned muzzily and raised his own head from the floor enough to allow him to see her face. Her cheek was slack. A lock of hair lay across it and trailed into her mouth. As he watched, she scrunched her face up, as if trying to regain muscle control.
“Are you okay?” It came out as a mumble. Hell, he hadn’t been sure he could talk at all.
“Um…” Karin wet her lips. “I think so.” She sounded uncertain, but suddenly, she lifted her head so she could see him better. “You?”
“Alive,” he allowed.
Anxious eyes searched his. “Do you think we ought to get up?”
“Probably.”
They didn’t. Her head sagged back to his chest. He managed to make one hand move so he could stroke from her shoulder blades down the length of her spine to the swell of her buttocks. Vertebra to vertebra. Muscles quivered as his hand passed. He felt a stirring in the groin. Could he get aroused again?
Yeah, it seemed he could. But this time the urgency was lacking. He continued to stroke, not moving otherwise. Karin shifted against him finally and said, “I’m too old for the floor.”
A laugh rumbled from deep in his chest. It delighted him that he could laugh.
When they finally did get up, man, things hurt. He felt as if he’d been beaten up. He also saw the shadow of new bruises on her white flesh, but she said something he thought was “Pshaw” when he began an apology, and drew him by his hand into her bedroom.
The bed was a hell of a lot more comfortable than the hardwood floor had been. They lay down and touched, carefully this time, tenderly, as if seeing each other and exploring for the first time. Sex this time was slow and sweet and, yeah, damn it, loving.
But still he shied from the word. He didn’t say it and she didn’t say it. Maybe it wasn’t necessary.
Or maybe, he thought at one point, studying her face, which seemed to him exquisitely shaped, maybe he was still afraid.
A lifetime’s conditioning…Not so easily overcome.
Yeah. He was still afraid.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
BRUCE SPOTTED Wade DeShon before Wade noticed him. They’d agreed to meet at Dick’s near the Key Arena. Already sitting down, Wade had a drink and a bag in front of him, presumably containing his burger, but he hadn’t started eating.
His head turned, and the two men exchanged stares, then brief nods. Bruce got in the too-lengthy line and inched forward. He didn’t once glance back.
Why did Wade want to talk to him without Trevor around?
He’d been the one to call Bruce, not the other way around. Since the scene with Karin on Saturday, Bruce had stayed away. He still wasn’t sure he bought her theory about Wade, the one that conceded him permission to smash the kid’s favorite picture of his mother right in front of him. But Bruce had had to concede that he hadn’t been prepared to give Wade any slack at all. And yeah, people screwed up. So maybe he’d jumped to a conclusion.
Which wasn’t to say that he trusted the guy any more than ever.
The call, though, had been from out of the blue. Hearing the reason for it was going to be interesting.
He carried his own order to the table and sat facing Wade. Deliberately, in no hurry, he uncapped his coffee and stirred in the creamer, then opened the sack and removed the bag of fries and wrapped burger. Then he looked up.
“So, I’m here.”
Wade set down his burger and wiped his hands on a napkin. To his credit, he didn’t beat around the bush.
“Trevor told me he talked to you about my breaking that picture.”
“Yeah. He did.”
“I wanted to explain.”
Bruce took another bite, chewed slowly. Not until he’d swallowed did he say, “Then explain.”
“He kept saying he knew something bad had happened to his mom, because she would have come home otherwise. He said she’d never have left him that way if she could help it.”
Bruce hadn’t intended to step in this quick, but he said, “I think that’s true.”
“MaryBeth loved Trevor—I won’t deny that. But she wasn’t any kind of perfect mother, either.”
Speaks the perfect father.
On the heels of the snide judgment, Bruce could imagine Karin pinning him with an exasperated stare. Listen to him, she would say.
So he did his best to hide his hostility and kept eating.
“I boozed, but she liked uppers. It made me mad that she used back when she was pregnant with Trevor. I’m not excusing myself. Not for my drinking, not for hitting her. But our fights weren’t all me, either. Trevor doesn’t remember that.”
Wade would say that, Bruce reflected cynically. But he still kept quiet because he remembered that from the first time he’d met MaryBeth, he’d known she had a problem. Plus, while men did abuse women who never fought back—Bruce’s mother was one of those—that wasn’t what Trevor had described. He’d told of raging battles between MaryBeth and Wade.
“I have this feeling you’ve already made up your mind.” Wade shrugged, looking defeated but determined, too. “I’m going to say this anyway. I got mad because she let him down so bad. I let him down, too. I know I did. But I saw him crying, and I thought he was doing all right without me, but having his mama just disappear like that…Him having to go to a foster home, and then come live with me when he doesn’t even know me anymore…I could see in his eyes how scared and sad he was at that moment, and I lost my temper. I wasn’t mad at Trevor. Not even just at MaryBeth. I was mad at myself, too. And I grabbed that picture and threw it before I thought, even though I believed I’d learned better. But I want you to know I wouldn’t hurt him. I’d never hurt Trevor.”
“Am I supposed to be moved by that little speech?”
Wade stared at him in frustration, then crumpled his wrappers in a little ball and started to stand. “Forget it.”
“Sit down.” Bruce put some snap in his voice.
After a hesitation, the other man complied.
“Maybe you mean that right now, but what happens the next time you crave a drink?”
Wade held Bruce’s gaze, a mask dropping enough to reveal torment. “I crave a drink every day. Sometimes it’s all I can stand not to have one. Just one, I tell myself. Only, I know better. So I don’t have it. I haven’t had one in over two years. If I can resist temptation that guts a man’s soul for that long, what makes you think I’d give in to it now, when I finally got my son back?”
Bruce shoved the remnants of his lunch away. Despite himself, this time he was moved. Wade had been more eloquent than he would have expected. Karin had been right; Bruce didn’t want to be impressed. But he was anyway.
“Why are you telling me all this?” he asked. “Why are we having this conversation?”
Wade looked back at him with a man’s version of Trevor’s thin, earnest face. “If you don’t trust me, Trevor won’t, either. At first, I was jealous.” His mouth twisted. “But I don’t have any right to be. The thing is, my boy admires you. So I guess I’m asking you to support my right to be his father. Let him see that you do.”
He was begging, and last week that would have given Bruce satisfaction. He would have enjoyed the acknowledgment that he came first with Trevor. He might even have liked the idea of Wade crawling to him for help with his son.
Suddenly, he felt sick, ashamed of what just a few days ago he would have felt. Trevor wasn’t his son. He could have been; if Bruce had been willing to make that commitment, trust himself, he could have been licensed as Trevor’s foster father and fought any effort to reunite Trevor with his father. But Karin was on the mark. He hadn’t had the guts to admit he loved the boy.
And no
w, because he loved him, he had to admit that Trevor was better off with his father. A kid that age needed to know that his parents, whatever their failings, loved him. That Wade had resisted the temptation to take that drink for more than two long years, even though he wasn’t allowed to see his son, was a testament to how much he did love him. He’d kept calling, kept trying even when those calls weren’t all that welcome. It was right that he get that second chance to show Trevor how much he mattered to his father.
“Do you want me to talk to him?” Bruce asked.
“Maybe. Or maybe just let him see that you approve of him living with me.”
After a moment, Bruce said, “I have a friend who is a psychologist. She’s been talking to me about her belief that people can change if they want to bad enough.”
Wade was watching him, maybe wondering where this was going, maybe already knowing. “She’s right. I’ve got to believe she is.”
“I thought she was wrong. Just recently, I’ve started to change my mind.” He paused. “Trevor didn’t want to admit it, but back when you used to call, it meant something to him. He pretended he didn’t care, but he did.”
Wade lowered his gaze. He rubbed a hand over his face, pressing his thumb and forefinger to his eyes as if to make sure they didn’t leak. At last, he cleared his throat. “I appreciate you saying that.”
“I’ll talk to Trevor.” Bruce shifted in his plastic chair.
“I hope you don’t mind if I keep getting together with him now and again. He’s a great kid.”
“Of course I don’t. You got him through some bad times. I owe you.”
They eyed each other a little uneasily, dangerously close to emotions Wade probably didn’t welcome any more than Bruce did. Finally, Bruce nodded and finished wadding up his garbage.
Wade thanked him for agreeing to meet and they walked out together. They even shook hands beside Wade’s car, sealing their agreement.
We will both make things right for Trevor.
BRUCE REMAINED thoughtful as he spent the remainder of the afternoon dropping off flyers with photos of Carlos Garcia and Roberto Escobar at Hispanic grocery stores in south King County. His fluency in Spanish was handy now. At each stop he talked for a few minutes, reassuring the proprietors that he had no interest in the immigration status of anyone who came forward with information. He wanted only to find the children. He talked about Lenora’s heartbreak, drawing a picture of the distraught woman in the hospital bed begging him to find her little ones, of the circle of her family waiting to regather the children into their arms.
The storekeepers all nodded and promised to post his flyer and point it out to their customers. None cried, “I know that man!”
He’d done the Seattle metropolitan area one day, Snohomish County another day and the agricultural and heavily Hispanic Skagit County on yet another day. His lieutenant was becoming impatient with the time he was expending. As newspaper interest in the search for Anna and Enrico Escobar cooled even further—and therefore pressure from the public and from the politicians—so, too, did Bruce’s ability to remain focused on the case.
His last stop of the day was in Kent, at a tiny store where several customers and the proprietor at the checkout were carrying on an animated conversation in Spanish, all gesticulating, until he entered. The moment the bell over the door rang and they saw him, they all fell silent and studied him covertly.
The atmosphere wasn’t quite hostile, but almost. One of the men said loudly, “We can’t even buy tortillas without showing our papers?”
“I’m not from Immigration,” Bruce said, unoffended. He understood the unease in the Hispanic community. Recent immigration raids had angered many. Mothers in the country illegally had been torn from their children born in the U.S.—thus citizens—and deported. “I’m from the Seattle Police Department,” he told them. “I’m investigating the murder of Julia Lopez and the attempted murder of Lenora Escobar. I am hunting for Lenora Escobar’s young children, taken by her husband.”
Their expressions changed. They’d all read about the case, talked about it among themselves.
“This man—why would we here know him?” asked the storekeeper, a short, stout, dark-skinned woman who had to be Mayan.
“We have no idea where he went with the children. It could be this area. I brought a picture of Roberto Escobar. But I’m also looking for the man beside him in the picture.” He handed it over to her. “He is a friend of Escobar’s. Not a suspect. But he might know where to find Roberto Escobar and the children.”
All nodded interestedly and crowded closer to study the flyer. The storekeeper handed it across the old-fashioned counter holding a cash register that was probably an antique. With murmurs and clucking sounds, they passed the piece of paper around. It was greeted with shakes of the head.
No, no, they had never seen those men. What a shame. Those poor children! So the mother had awakened? They hadn’t read that in the papers. It was true?
Answering their questions, he caught an interesting reaction out of the corner of his eye. It was from a woman, one of the last to look at the flyer. She composed her face immediately and shook her head like the others. But there’d been something there. Perhaps just niggling recognition, but she’d definitely known something and chosen not to say I might have seen this man before.
Question was: Which man had she recognized? Carlos? Or Roberto himself? And how to find out?
He grabbed a bottle of grape Fanta, paid and then stood in the shade outside, guzzling it until the woman emerged from the store with a younger woman—her daughter?—and her groceries.
“Buenos días,” he said civilly.
“Buenos días,” they chimed in return.
“You’re certain you don’t know either of those men?” he asked. “That Roberto Escobar…We think he’s loco. Those two little kids aren’t safe with him.”
“No, no,” the young woman said, and her mother nodded.
“If you should see either, will you call me? My phone number is on the flyer.”
Sí, sí. Of course they would. The older woman’s gaze evaded his. She hustled her daughter away. They loaded their groceries in the back of an old Chevy and drove off. Bruce jotted down the license number.
When he ran it from his car, he found that it was registered to a Vicente Sanchez at an address on the outskirts of Kent. Bruce debated with himself whether it would be worth following her home and talking to her husband and any other family who lived with them, then decided not to. The woman hadn’t seemed secretive so much as unsure. He’d give her time to think about the flyer and why the face had seemed familiar, to imagine how she’d feel if her children or grandchildren were snatched from her.
The odds were good that she’d be calling him.
“Yeah,” he muttered, putting his car in gear, “assuming she doesn’t get home and realize that Carlos resembles some distant cousin of her husband’s, the one who still lives back home in the Dominican Republic, and that’s why she thought for a minute she might know him.”
Feeling the stirrings of hunger, he detoured to a small Mexican restaurant down the street and had a chicken chimichanga. He left a flyer there, too. The waitress, who had been flirting with him, promised she would hang it prominently by the cash register. Sí, sí.
He made it back to Seattle in time to meet Molly at A Woman’s Hand to teach their last self-defense workshop. Karin engaged as fully in it as the other women participants did, her expression often fiercely concentrated. He suspected that seeing Lenora brought down with one swing of the tire iron had made her aware of her own vulnerability in a way she never had been. It had occurred to her that she might have to defend herself someday, too.
Three weeks, and no progress at all in finding Roberto Escobar or the children.
After escorting the women safely to their cars, he, Molly and Karin went out again for coffee. He was glad Karin and Molly seemed to like each other so much. He’d had his doubts three years back when M
olly, newly promoted, was assigned to him, but she’d proved herself with smarts he’d come to believe complemented his own because she was a woman and therefore thought differently. As plainclothes homicide officers, the two of them rarely had to chase suspects or pull a weapon. Her ability to bring down a violent suspect holding a knife on them wasn’t often put to the test. But Molly had learned every trick to compensate for her lack of height and muscle bulk. Underestimating her was a mistake.
Friendship had grown between them. She’d hung out with him and Trevor a few times. Trevor’s shyness hadn’t lasted long with her. Molly wasn’t girlie. She ate with gusto, took pride in her belches and employed a wicked elbow on the basketball court.
“Did you ever play basketball?” he asked Karin.
Both women turned their heads to stare at him.
“Uh…sorry. Did I interrupt?”
“Yeah,” Molly told him. “Good to know you were hanging on our every word.”
“I actually did play varsity in high school,” Karin said. “I went to a small school, and we were pretty lousy, but I can dribble the ball and I used to have a pretty decent jump shot. Why?”
“Oh, just thinking.” He shrugged. “Molly and I play a little one-on-one sometimes.”
“Really?” Karin raised her brows and looked at his partner. “You’re short.”
Molly’s blue eyes narrowed. “Bet I can take you.”
Karin laughed. “No fair! I haven’t played in fifteen years.”
Bruce sipped coffee. “You didn’t play in college?”
“Too busy by then. And really…I was no more than okay.”
Walking her to her car later, Bruce murmured, “You may stink on the court, but you have other talents.”
She rolled her eyes at him. “Gee, thanks. Like guiding people toward understanding their own behaviors?”
“That’s what I was talking about,” he agreed, straight-faced.
Her elbow in his ribs was damn near as sharp as Molly’s.
The Man Behind the Cop Page 15
