Alex shook her head and squeezed her eyes shut, hoping that somewhere in heaven or hell there existed a justice system that was truly just. She thought about the guy she'd taken down yesterday. At least she was making a difference. If nothing else, she could keep some of these fuckers off the streets.
On a legal pad, she had listed the names of the criminals Loeffler had prosecuted. She had twelve already, and she had gotten through only one of his three file drawers. A child killer, two hit-and-runs, three pedophiles—one a day-care professional, one a teacher, one an uncle, all people with access to children. That's what they always said about pedophiles. She thought about her little nieces and nephews and wondered about their day-care professionals, their teachers.
Six parental abuse cases. What disgusted her most was the number of children who had to stand up in court against their own parents, children whose anguish and pain had been brought to light by strange bruises caught in school or unusually frequent visits to the ER. And when the arrest was made, the child screamed for his or her Mommy or Daddy—screamed for the very same person who had broken their bones and blackened their eyes.
months, she had seen battered children, heard the lame excuses parents gave her for their children's horrible injuries—burns and belt marks, the marks of adult hands bruised into their tiny thighs. It was sick, demented, and it was her job to stop it. But it wasn't up to her to think about what the children would suffer after the abuses had ended. The family psychologists, people like Brittany and Judith Richards, had to pick up the pieces and reform the broken child.Don't get involved, Kincaid. She knew better. In only six
She couldn't do that—wasn't trained to do it. Certainly not if she wanted to keep her objectivity, which was what made her a good police officer, would make her a strong witness in the courtroom. It was her job to gather the facts, not make judgments. Judges made those.
Still, somehow a crack had started to develop in the strong metal cover she thought she had secured around her emotions. She had to find the leak and seal it before it began to interfere with work.
Picking up the class picture again, she stared at it before setting it in its own pile. Nothing she had come across so far could explain either the child porn tapes or the strange photograph. Maybe she would have better luck tomorrow.
Lombardi appeared at the door, his lucky coat pulled to his chest as though he gained comfort from its proximity. Maybe she ought to get a lucky coat. Based on her week so far, she could use one.
She gathered her legal pad and notes and brushed her pants off, taking a last look around the room.
"It'll look just like this tomorrow," he said.
She smiled. "I know. I'd like to keep going—"
He shook his head. "Save your energy. I hope you can think of better things to do with yourself this evening."
Of course she could, couldn't she? As she headed out the door, she thought for a moment. Sad thing was, nothing came to mind. She had canceled her date with Tom. Her empty house flashed before her, and suddenly she wondered if Tom had made other plans. He would at least get her mind off work. She stared at her empty wrist. "Shit," she cursed. "What time is it?"
"Five to six. Late for a date?"
"No, a guy's coming to fix my window." As soon as the words had spilled from her mouth, she wished she could steal them back.
Lombardi's gaze fixed on hers, and blood rushed to her cheeks. "What happened to the window?"
"A kid hit a ball through it," she lied.
Lombardi stared at her a moment too long.
She stared back. It wasn't her style to flush. Her ancestry seemed to stop at her forehead. Though she had red Irish hair and occasionally the fiery Irish temper, she didn't have freckles or the naturally ruddy complexion that was typically Irish.
Thankfully, Lombardi didn't comment, turning abruptly and heading for the front door. "I'll drop you at the station, then."
Exhaling, she followed him and chastised herself for not watching her mouth.
Alex arrived at her house just as the glass truck pulled away. She honked for him to stop as she parked at the curb. The repairman had long graying frizzy hair, the thinning strands pulled into a low ponytail and bound by a rubber band. His wiry eyebrows came together when he frowned. Heavy jowls wobbled as he growled, "You're late."
She nodded apologetically. "I know, I'm sorry. I got caught at the station."
His frown lifted slightly as he lumbered out of his car and slammed the door. "You on the radio?"
Leading him toward the back door, she shook her head. "Police station. I'm a cop."
Though she didn't turn around to see his expression, she thought she could imagine it. It was probably the same one she had seen at least two hundred times, especially from men. But even the women eyed her head to toe and said things like "A cop? But you're so small," or "I thought cops had to be strong." She stopped at the door and pointed to the broken pane. "The window's right here."
Silently, he pulled a tape measure from his tool belt and measured the sill.
After studying the window another minute, he said, "Just need some tools from my truck."
While the repairman worked on the window, Alex waited impatiently. She wanted him to be done so she could put the incident out of her mind. She wanted the window to be the end of it. Sitting herself on the couch, she looked around the downstairs for something to do. She dialed Tom's number and waited for an answer. When she heard the familiar greeting on his answering machine, though, she hung up. Another night in.
The click and clack of the repairman's tools finally stopped.
"All done," he said.
With a deep breath, she looked at the window and nodded. "Thanks."
"No problem."
It was over. She exhaled. Thank God.
"Just be easy on the door the next twenty-four hours or so."
"Will do." Relieved that sixty dollars was enough to erase the incident, she retrieved her checkbook and paid him. She shut the door gently and locked the bolt.
Tomorrow was another solid day of work and she wanted to be sharp for it. The phone rang and she stared at it through two rings, cursing herself for pausing. Gathering her courage, she snapped it up.
"Alex," the older female voice said.
"Yes," she said, after a moment's hesitation.
"It's Judith Richards."
Alex exhaled. "Thanks for calling me back."
"No problem. What can I do for you?"
"I wanted to talk to you about something that happened on the job."
"James called to tell me a little about it."
"Of course."
Judith hesitated. "It's department policy for a captain to call before the officer does. James was just doing his job."
"Normally you would have heard from my captain, then, instead of James. But I did want to set up a time to meet with you." She paused to shift the conversation away from James. "Brittany told me you used to come over for coffee and cookies after school and we'd talk about my dreams."
"You sound like you don't remember."
"I remember your visits, but not the dreams specifically."
"That's not unusual. It was a long time ago. You used to have nightmares. I think your mother was more worried than she needed to be. Most kids I talk to have nightmares. Plus, I've dealt with much, much worse than that."
"I heard something about your patients who shot each other."
"Now that was the strangest situation I've ever had. And the scariest. I do some work with people recently released from prison. Brittany probably told you about that." It was a statement, not a question. "She was always fascinated by that story. I sometimes wonder what kept her out of law enforcement while you and James became officers." Judith paused. "Anyway, as I said, your mother used to have me over, but that was ages ago."
"Were my nightmares more frequent than normal?"
Judith laughed. "I just think you had more lung capacity than most kids. They heard you on the nex
t block."
"Do you happen to remember when they stopped?" Alex asked, growing intrigued.
"Not exactly. Your mother said you just seemed to outgrow them. I'd guess you were about eight or nine."
"I'd be curious to hear more about them, if you remember."
"I'm sure I can dredge up some of it," Judith offered. "It's a little unorthodox, but why don't you come to the house on Friday for dinner and we'll chat. Mad Dog Schroeder is driving me a bit nuts with extra work, and I hadn't planned to go back to the station until next week if possible. Does that work for you?"
"Perfect."
"Great." Judith recited directions to her house in North Berkeley and Alex wrote them down along with the date and time. She wondered how much would change in three days.
Alex thanked her and hung up. Starving, she hunted for something to eat. She found a box of penne then checked the refrigerator for pasta sauce. Besides the milk, of which she polished off almost a gallon a week, there was little else in the refrigerator. She had tried to keep vegetables, but even carrots couldn't survive long enough for her to get around to eating them. Moving the milk aside, she pulled out a jar of Classico four cheese sauce.
She ate quickly, as she always did, leaning over the counter in her kitchen. She didn't find food relaxing, so she made meals the way she did everything else—efficiently and with purpose.
Ready for some much-needed sleep, she brushed her teeth and flossed, something she rarely remembered, then was headed for her bedroom when the phone rang. She glanced at her bedside clock, thinking this was about the same time the phone had rung last night.
It was him. She was ready. She let the machine click on and picked up the receiver as soon as it had started to record. "Hello?"
The line was dead.
She set the phone down and took two steps before it rang again. He wasn't going to wait for the machine. Impatient, she snatched the phone up.
"Kincaid," she answered, in an attempt to sound tough despite her pounding heart.
"Kincaid now, is it?" came the same spitting voice.
This time she was prepared, though, and her anger rushed up. She was not playing games.
The caller laughed in her ear, his voice cracking into high squeals of delight.
Her stomach tied in a knot of metal, Alex forced the fear from her veins. She had to be in control. "This will be your last call. I'm having this number disconnected after we hang up. So why don't you go ahead and say whatever it is you called to say? Then, you can crawl back into whatever hole you came out of."
"Oh, that's not nice, Kincaid."
"You have five seconds." She wanted to hang up, but curiosity at what he knew won out. "One."
"Well, if that's how you want it, we might as well cut to the chase."
Something sour rose in her throat and strangled the words as they escaped from her mouth. "Two," she continued.
"Having the glass replaced won't make me go away. I know what you're thinking. I could see it in your eyes when you paid the glass guy and sent him on his way. It's not that easy. You haven't even found the presents I left you."
"Presents?"
"Presents," he repeated. "One of them is kind of fun..."
"And the other?"
"Is just nasty. And whoever finds that one is going to want to put little Alex behind bars."
"You're full of shit," she snapped.
"Try another cup of tea, Alex. Maybe that will help jog your memory."
Alex thought about the tea she'd had in her bath. He'd been watching her back then. The thought gave her chills. She spun to the window. "Listen, you son of a—" But the line was dead.
Furious, she slammed the phone down and ran to the door. Throwing the door open, she stared in both directions down the dark street. He could have been anywhere—in a parked car or behind a bush or tree—watching her. The thought attacked her like a thousand pins, sending stabs of panic through her chest.
Back inside, she closed and locked the door and proceeded to shut the curtains. He would be smiling, she thought, but she didn't care. With the curtains shut, she dialed *69 and again heard the error recording.
"Damn," she croaked, slamming the phone down.
Marching to the center of her kitchen, she paused and then turned in a slow circle. "Tea," she said out loud. "Tea." She opened the cupboard where she kept the tea bags and searched through them one by one. Nothing appeared strange. Lifting one to the light, she stared through it, wondering what he could've replaced the tea with. But it just looked like tea. Put little Alex behind bars, he'd said. She looked for a tea bag she didn't recognize, thinking maybe he'd planted marijuana, but there was nothing.
Next, she rummaged through the drawers where she kept the tea strainer, opened the teakettle, emptied out the teapots that had been her mother's, sitting high on shelves. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
What the hell present was he talking about? She pushed her bangs off her forehead and flinched at the bruise, still tender beneath her hand. Determined, she decided to make herself a cup of tea just like she had the other night before her bath.
She filled the kettle with water, scanning the area around the sink. Then, opening a canister where she kept some specialty teas, she searched through it and found one cranberry craze. Nothing appeared out of the ordinary. She opened the cupboard and pulled down a mug and set it on the counter. As she did, she frowned and looked back up at the shelf that housed her eclectic collection of mugs. Two back, she spotted one she didn't recognize.
Pulling up a chair, she took a dishcloth and reached for the unfamiliar mug. Touching it only along one edge to avoid destroying fingerprints, Alex lifted it off the shelf. She twisted it until she saw a photograph that had been scanned onto one side of the mug. She'd seen similar mugs being sold in souvenir shops. It was a casual snapshot of a man and a woman on a beach. She stared at the woman. She wasn't familiar. Turning her gaze to the man, she gasped. The teakettle whistle blew and Alex spun around, the mug leaping from her hand and making a loud popping sound as it broke on the floor.
Alex didn't move, listening to the screaming kettle as though it were her own voice. From a jagged piece of broken mug, William Loeffler stared up at her.
Chapter 9
Alex closed the paper bag containing the pieces of the coffee mug and put it on the shelf next to the bags containing the caller's fingerprint and the fragments of her window. Then, taking a last look around her kitchen, she climbed the stairs toward bed. She thought about the first call and then the break-in. She'd been stupid not to report it. It was unprofessional.
A cop should always obey the law to the letter. She knew that's the way James would see it. And as soon as she'd realized someone was in her house, a smart cop would have called the police. Why hadn't she? She tried to get inside her own mind, remembering the morning before, waking up in her car, then seeing Loeffler. Because she didn't know what had happened that night. And someone else did. What if she'd done something bad—something terrible. Could she have killed Loeffler? No. It was impossible. She couldn't have killed anyone. She refused to believe it. But she wished she'd handled the situation differently.
There was nothing she could do about the past now. She could hardly call the police about a break-in that had happened over twenty-four hours ago. Better to just keep it to herself. If it got out now, it would look like she had something to hide. Plus, she needed to follow this through. It was personal now, and she'd be taken off the Loeffler investigation. Loeffler wasn't someone she knew. How had she suddenly been thrown into a dead man's life? With that thought echoing through her head, she lay down and tried to sleep.
* * *
Sleep had not been kind. Behind her eyelids, all she had pictured was Loeffler's face. The way it had looked on the mug, the way it had looked when he called her by her first name at Noah's, and the way it had looked in death flashing back and forth. When morning came, it was almost a relief. But even as she drove to Loeffler's house the next mo
rning, she pictured his face on that mug. The woman beside him was dark-haired and round-faced and their expressions held the simple satisfaction that marriage seemed to give to some people.
Lying in bed last night, she'd gone through her affiliations: grade school, middle school and high school in Berkeley. It was hard to remember grade school, but Loeffler wasn't in her high school yearbook. She searched for his wife, too, under her maiden name, Sandy Bree. Alex had gone to Cal, Loeffler to Stanford. She'd walked through her sports, friends, the academy, L.A., the club where she'd worked, friends of friends, classes she'd taken down there. Nowhere could she come up with a William Loeffler. And she was good with names and faces. If she'd seen either Loeffler or his wife before, she would have remembered them.
Maybe the killer had seen her at the house, and had somehow found out she was a cop. Maybe he was just screwing with her. Why stick around to torment her? It seemed too risky. Unless her reaction was part of the game. Had he stumbled upon her sleeping and just followed her? She shook her head. It depended on too many variables, too much coincidence. She didn't buy coincidence. What had he taken from her house? And, more importantly, where was it going to end up?
Today was a second chance to find out what possible connection there was between her and Loeffler. And since she still hadn't heard back from Elsa, this was all she could do. When Alex arrived at Loeffler's house, the yellow crime scene tape and a standard patrol car greeted her. Waving to the officer, she hurried up the stairs and found Lombardi in the den. Another detective, whom she recognized from the station, stood beside him, and she hesitated in the doorway until Lombardi waved her forward.
"Look more like a detective today," he said.
She looked down at her jeans and sweatshirt. "Yeah, no uniform."
"That, and the circles under your eyes are becoming a permanent feature. All you need is a lucky coat and a potbelly and you're set."
Ruthless Game (A Captivating Suspense Novel) Page 8
