by Karen Leabo
“No, I mean you, personally. Knowing everything you know, not just the stuff that will get into court.”
“Let’s just say you’re not like most of the felons I’ve dealt with. I have a hard time believing you’re a criminal. My opinion and a buck will get you a cup of coffee,” he added. “Some places, anyway.”
She would have to settle for that, she supposed. It was better than the cold condemnation he’d treated her to the previous day. She allowed herself to fantasize about what it would be like to have Michael Taggert on her side of the fence, supporting her a hundred percent. The idea made her warm all over.
“You’re blushing again,” Michael said.
“It’s hot,” she fibbed, reaching for the van’s air conditioner controls. They were stopped at a light on the fringes of downtown, so she leaned down to study the unfamiliar switches, dials, and buttons. Could they make it any more complicated?
The moment she ducked down, a deafening crack made her ears ring. She jumped and raised up to see that her windshield had shattered. A rock must have flown up and hit it.
“I can’t believe it!” she cried. “A brand-new van and the windshield can’t take a little rock—”
“Get down!” Michael shouted, grabbing her by the neck and pushing her head practically into his lap. He didn’t stop there, though. With lightning-fast motions he unbuckled both of their seat belts, slid off his own seat, and dragged her to the floor of the van. Her foot couldn’t help but leave the pedals.
“What are you doing?” she demanded. “We’re moving!”
“It’s okay, traffic will stop.” He grabbed the cellular phone with one hand while pinning Wendy down with the other. She heard three blips and realized he was calling 9-1-1.
Another loud crack, and Wendy’s headrest exploded into fluff. She figured out what was happening about the same time Michael verbalized it over the phone.
“This is Sergeant Michael Taggert,” he said urgently into the receiver. “I’m in a green and white van at the intersection of Harry Hines and Pearl, and I’m under fire!”
She was amazingly calm, given the circumstances. Someone had shot at them with, like, real bullets. Horns were blasting at them from all sides, but no more shots were fired.
Michael released Wendy with a curt order for her to stay where she was. She turned her head just enough so that she could watch him. A gun had materialized in his hand—funny, she hadn’t thought about him carrying a gun before. From his cramped, crouched position on the floor of the van, he raised up slowly, pointing his weapon in a sideways arc 180 degrees.
“Be careful,” Wendy said, as if he wouldn’t be at a time like this. As the van rolled to a stop, he unbent a little more, peering out first one window, then another. “Couldn’t we wait for reinforcements?”
“They’re here.”
Wendy heard sirens—lots of them. Jeez, the whole force turned out when one of their own was threatened. The passenger door flew open and a red-faced cop peered inside.
“What the hell’s going on in here?”
“We were shot at,” Michael explained, flashing his badge.
“Oh, sorry, Detective Taggert, didn’t realize it was you. You’re causing one hell of a traffic jam. Do you think you could move the van—”
“She’s not moving,” he said, nodding toward Wendy, “till the area’s been searched for the sniper. I’m pretty sure the shots came from that building.” He pointed in a direction Wendy couldn’t see.
Michael had put her safety first, which caused her already rising estimation of him to ratchet up a couple of notches. But he climbed out of his makeshift foxhole, seemingly without a care for his own well-being.
“Michael! Stay with me,” she said, figuring an appeal to his protective instincts would work better than insisting he watch his own back.
But he was already out of the van. “You’ll be fine,” he said. “Just stay where you are.” With a natural authority, he ordered one of the uniformed officers to stay with her. “Bender, get a couple of men and come with me. I’m gonna check out that building.”
It seemed an eternity that Wendy waited in that uncomfortable position on the floor of her van. As the seconds and minutes ticked by, she gradually became aware of a sharp pain at her temple. She rubbed at the sore spot. Her hand came away with blood on it. She must have been cut by flying glass.
“More blood,” she grumbled. “This is my day for blood.” She wasn’t alarmed by the minor injury itself. If it had been serious, there would have been a torrent of blood, not this little trickle. But as she probed the wound, she realized it wasn’t glass that had cut her. She’d been grazed by a bullet. If she hadn’t chosen that moment when the bullet flew through her windshield to study the air conditioner … if Michael hadn’t chosen the previous moment to point out that she was blushing … if she hadn’t chosen the moment before that to fantasize about Michael … The possibilities made her woozy.
“You’re bleeding,” her bodyguard said.
“Just a little. It’s no big deal.”
“Hey, we’re gonna need an ambulance,” the cop called. “The lady’s injured.”
Michael and the patrol officer named Bender had discovered nothing of interest in the building where Michael thought the shots had come from. He was forced to revise his opinion—the shots had probably been fired from a car. His mind raced, fitting puzzle pieces in place. At least two cars would have been necessary to set up the operation, one to follow and report the van’s location and direction, and the other to maneuver into position to make a clean shot possible.
A sophisticated job. Unless this was a random drive-by shooting, which he doubted, not when Wendy had been nearly run down earlier. Someone was out to get her, someone who didn’t want her to talk. Maybe she knew more than she thought she did.
Now that, he thought, was good, hard evidence in Wendy’s favor. It was already pretty obvious, even to those who wanted to roast her, that she hadn’t acted alone. But now it seemed he could make a convincing argument that she hadn’t been in charge. If she was knowingly involved at all—and that was a big “if”—she was an underling, a pack mule. From there it was only a short step to the conclusion that she’d been an innocent dupe.
The first Michael knew about Wendy’s injury was when he saw an ambulance pull up to the intersection where the van was still blocking traffic. The scene was bedlam, yet somehow the ambulance got through.
Michael quit ruminating about evidence and sprinted toward the van. Wendy was now sitting in the driver’s seat. A cop was holding something to her head. Michael had to stop himself from dragging the cop out of the way.
“What’s going on? Wendy?”
“It’s nothing, Michael, just a scratch,” she said, though she looked pale in the afternoon sunlight.
“Looks like she was grazed by a bullet,” said the cop who was ministering to her. “There appears to be a slug in the side panel, and one definitely went through the headrest. But what I want to know is, what’s all this blood in the back seat?”
“It’s a long story,” he replied. “But I was here, and it has nothing to do with a crime.” He figured the whole story would come out later. Hell, it might even cast Wendy in a more favorable light. Today she was a true heroine, not a criminal.
Michael almost laughed, knowing what the cops must be thinking about the blood. But the sight of Wendy with that gauze pad held to her head kept him sober. He was more worried about her welfare, he realized, than he should be about a mere suspect. But then, his relationship with Wendy had advanced far beyond cop/suspect. He knew it; he just didn’t want to admit it.
He liked her. He felt more alive when he was around her. In truth, he couldn’t get enough of her.
“I don’t want to go in the ambulance, Michael,” she said. “Please. It’s not necessary. The bleeding’s already stopped.”
“Let the paramedics take a look at her,” he said to the cop, softening. If she went to the ER, it would take
hours, more than she could spare. “Maybe they can treat her here.”
He wanted to stay with her, but there were other pressing matters. Predictably, Lieutenant Katz from Crimes Against Persons had shown up. Though no one had been killed, shots fired in downtown Dallas in broad daylight constituted a big crime. Front-page news. And Katz loved to see his name in print.
“What the hell’s going on here, Tagg?” the wiry Katz asked in his typical no-nonsense fashion. His voice sounded as if it were being forced through a cheese grater. “Some shooter have it in for you?”
“Not me,” he said quickly. “Her.” He pointed to Wendy, who was now outside the van with two paramedics hovering over her.
Katz’s eyes narrowed. “She that Deco Museum suspect everyone’s been talking about?”
Michael nodded.
“Why would anyone be trying to kill her? Come on, Tagg, it was you they were after. You’ve been working on that string of burglaries in Oak Cliff. That’s gang related. You’ve interrogated a half-dozen kids from the Pythons.”
“The bullet was meant for her,” Michael said again. It hadn’t occurred to him that anyone would doubt Wendy was the intended victim. “She’s the one who got hit.”
“Since when could gang shooters aim straight?”
The lieutenant had a point there, Michael reluctantly conceded with a nod. He was willing to entertain the possibility that the bullet had been meant for him, but just barely. Wendy’s earlier brush with being a hit-and-run statistic was still fresh on his mind.
“What would you say,” he asked Katz, “if I told you this wasn’t the first attempt on her life?” Now he had Katz’s attention, so he briefly outlined the morning’s events.
To his credit, Katz gave the matter some thought. Then he shook his head. “I don’t buy it. You know the old saw. Look for the simplest explanation. It doesn’t make sense for some hit man to go after a beautiful woman who fences jewelry.”
It made sense, Michael retorted silently, if someone has a lot to protect. Michael was beginning to think Barnie Neff, or whoever he was, had more skeletons in his closet than a few burglaries. Word had gone out that Wendy was cooperating with the police. Someone, somewhere, wasn’t happy with that.
Now that the adrenaline was wearing off, Wendy’s head hurt. But she refused to go to the hospital. There were detectives waiting to talk to her, and she was determined to get the interrogation over with. The sooner she cooperated, the sooner the cops would find the real criminal, and she could put this whole mess behind her.
Michael had disappeared, but the nice cop who’d been assigned to watch over her offered her a ride to the station, which was only a few blocks away. She accepted, wondering what would happen to her once-shiny new van, wondering how she would get her work done without transportation.
Of course, if they didn’t like her answers about the new burglaries she’d been accused of, she might not have the opportunity to work the next day. She might be in jail—again.
Could they arrest her a second time, when she’d already made bail once? It hardly seemed fair to string out these accusations, forcing her to deal with them one by one, springing a new nightmare on her just as she was coming to grips with the last one. She should call Nathaniel Mondell, she realized.
“Been a helluva day for you,” the nice cop said. At least he’d let her ride in the front seat. “Didn’t you just get out of jail this morning?”
This morning seemed like a lifetime ago. Since her release from jail there’d been Yoda, the near hit-and-run, the police artist, delivering a baby, an almost kiss, and getting shot. “I’ve had a pretty full day,” she told the cop, making the biggest understatement of the year.
Her mind drifted back to the almost kiss in the hospital. Funny, but of all the events of the day, that one seemed to stick in her mind most vividly. Everything else seemed like a fuzzy, surreal movie, but she remembered the feel of Michael’s hands on her, the warmth of his breath on her face, the fire in his eyes, and the answering fire in her core.…
She realized the cop had said something else to her. “Um, I’m sorry. What did you say?”
“I said we’re here.”
They were in a parking lot behind the municipal building, which housed the main police station.
“Lieutenant Katz will want to question you about the incident.”
Which incident? Wendy wondered. There’d been so many.
“Aren’t I supposed to talk to some burglary detective?” she asked. “They think I ripped off some of my clients.”
“Wow. Sounds like you’ve been busy.”
“I didn’t do any of the stuff they think I did,” she snapped. “It’s just a big misunderstanding.”
“Yeah, that’s what they all say,” the cop said affably. Suddenly she didn’t think he was so nice anymore, and she realized he hadn’t been assigned to her as a courtesy, but as a security measure. They still thought she was going to flee.
She ended up talking to both a CAPers—Crimes Against Persons—detective and a couple of men from Theft, compatriots of Michael’s, no doubt. It took the rest of the day. She’d hoped Michael would turn up again, but she didn’t catch even a glimpse of him during all the arduous hours she spent answering questions.
She did manage to get hold of Nathaniel Mondell, who made everything take twice as long because he wouldn’t let her give a straight answer to anything. Sometimes she thought she would be better off without him and his confrontational attitude. He tended to get the cops’ ire up by his very presence. But she knew so little about her legal rights that she decided to bow to his judgment. The mayor had recommended Mondell highly, so he must be good.
The burglary guys were about done chewing her up and spitting her out. She hadn’t fared too well during the interrogation. She’d checked her organizer for all of the dates on which the burglaries had occurred. All had been on weeknights, and, as it turned out, she hadn’t spent any of those nights with James. She didn’t have an alibi for a single one.
“Home alone, all by yourself. No phone calls? Pizza delivery, maybe?” one of the detectives had said with a sneer.
“I’m usually asleep, alone, at two in the morning,” she’d ground out, seeing no need to bring up James now that he couldn’t do her any good. “I don’t talk on the phone or eat pizza in the middle of the night!”
Mondell had shaken his head slightly, indicating she needed to get control of her emotions. Losing it wouldn’t help her case, and that’s exactly what the detectives were after.
She’d forced herself to be calm, only to get worked up again when they’d tried to pressure her into giving up the names of her associates, or partners in crime, or bosses, or whatever. Shades of the Salem witch trials, she thought, and asked when they would break out the thumb screws.
“I wonder how many suspects blurt out any old name just to get you guys to ease up?” she asked. “For the last time, I don’t know any thieves or criminals or fences or burglars. The only person I know is Barnie Neff, and I’ve told you everything I can think of about him.”
That was when Michael finally showed up with a sheaf of papers in hand, and she’d never been so glad to see anyone in her life, though she wasn’t sure why. She supposed it was because he was the only person around who didn’t look at her as if she were a piece of gum on the underside of a theater seat.
She leaped out of her chair with the full intention of throwing her arms around him. Only when he gave a barely imperceptible shake of his head did she realize what she’d been about to do. Embracing the detective who’d first arrested her would have looked very strange.
One detective who’d been interrogating her—Smythe, she thought his name was—gave Michael a nod. “You have anything to add to this, Tagg?”
“Yeah. I think the lady’s been set up.” He handed a piece of paper to each of the other detectives. “This guy look familiar to either of you?”
Smythe snorted. “This is the artist’s composite?”
“Yeah,” Michael said.
The other detective, whose name escaped Wendy, set the drawing aside with hardly a second glance. “Could be anyone. Hell, he even looks a little bit like Captain Patterson, except for the chin.”
Smythe brayed like a donkey at that suggestion, and even Michael fought a smile.
“I’m glad you all think this is so funny,” Wendy said. “But that drawing isn’t of just anyone. It looks like Barnie Neff. Don’t you guys have some books of mug shots or something I could look through?”
The levity receded.
“That’s an excellent suggestion, Ms. Thayer,” Michael said. She hated it that he’d reverted to such a formal title for her. It made her feel like the closeness they’d shared that day was somehow wrong, that they had to deny it, hide it from the world. Granted, they couldn’t become involved, but was there some law that said she couldn’t become friends with a cop who was investigating her?
She supposed there was. He’d already gone out of his way to help her. Not that he would ever suppress evidence or do anything unethical to get her off the hook, but if he cozied up to a suspect, it wouldn’t reflect well on him.
Mondell spoke up again. “I’ve been suggesting that Ms. Thayer look at mug shots since yesterday,” he said huffily. Wendy didn’t remember any mention of mug shots until now, from him or anyone, but she’d give him credit for turning every possible circumstance their way. “Could it be that once you have a suspect, you’d rather not have any more leads to follow? Makes it hard to railroad an innocent person into jail if there are unanswered questions, other suspects, right?”
“This investigation is proceeding like any other,” Smythe said, rising to Mondell’s bait. “First the questions, then the mug shots. I can’t speak for what happened last night, since I wasn’t here.”
Just then Wendy got a whiff of popcorn from someplace, and her stomach growled. She realized she hadn’t eaten since that lousy dinner they’d fed her in jail the night before. As fast as she burned up energy, she didn’t do well without a regular intake of calories.
