Killing Bliss

by EC Sheedy

  Impressed as hell by a thirteen-year-old girl with enough wit and know-how not to be held back by a locked door, Cade nodded, said, "What about Frank?"

  "After he walked out that bedroom door with Belle, I never saw him again. And never want to." She shuddered and massaged the knee she had propped on the sofa. "Not long after my trip to the bathroom, I saw Wayne Grover's car pull up outside."

  "You must have called from the window. Didn't he hear you?" The question was a throwaway, because he knew they hadn't connected with Grover. If they had, things would have turned out differently.

  She gave him an odd look. "We didn't call."

  He frowned. "I don't get it."

  "Belle Bliss was a prostitute, Cade. Men came to the house at all hours of the day and night. Grover came oftener than most."

  He hoped the shock pummeling his brain didn't show. "You sure about that?"

  "Sure enough. Belle wasn't the kind to be quiet about things, and Gus saw—Well, he saw enough to prove it."

  "Which was?"

  "You're not going to let this go, are you?" She sounded annoyed, as if he were shoving her down a path she'd rather avoid.

  "I'm having a hard time accepting that an experienced social worker like Grover placed kids with a practicing hooker."

  Her eyes narrowed. "Who said he was 'experienced'?"

  "If he was your and Beauty's caseworker, he had a track record of some kind—had to have. They generally don't hand runaway teens to the new kid in the department." Nice rally, Harding.

  She eyed him a moment, then shrugged. "Maybe not, but I'm telling you Belle was a prostitute, and she had the whips and chains to prove it."

  "Come on."

  "I'm not kidding. She called them her 'tools of the trade,' showed them to Gus—she was always coming on to him—asked if he was interested in a demo. He told her to fu—He blew her off."

  "And you think Grover was a customer."

  "Do I know for sure? No. But why else would he put kids with her? Because we certainly weren't the first. It had to be some kind of payoff. Maybe she gave him free... whatever, in exchange for a monthly government check." She bunched her shoulders. "That's what Gus figured. Anyway, we weren't about to take any chances on the guy who'd put us with Belle in the first place. That would have been stupid. What we planned to do was run, get out of there. Go as far and as fast as we could." She drained the last of the water from her bottle, set the empty on the maple coffee table. "All Grover did was complicate things."

  "How so?" Cade asked, but only half listened. His mind raced, struggled to morph the harassed but helpful social worker he'd met over lunch into a man who used the DSHS to fund his sexcapades. God knew, anything was possible when it came to sexual appetites—and the ways people appeased them.

  "When he got out of the car, he was carrying a baby—maybe a year or two old. The idiot was bringing Belle another foster child."

  At the mention of Josh Moore, Cade's heart slowed. Again, Addy had his full attention.

  "A little boy," she said, then went dead quiet.

  Tension snapped around the room like an invisible lightning storm. Addy got up from the bed and paced the cabin before coming back to stand in front of him.

  "I never heard his name, never even saw him," she added. "He was gone when—" She stopped abruptly, rubbed her hands down her denim-covered thighs. "Grover didn't stay long, because a few minutes later his car pulled out of the driveway. Belle, with the baby in her arms, was smiling and waving at him like"—she frowned as if the image needed weight—"like one of those homemaker types in a fifties magazine ad, like it was any old normal day, and there weren't two kids upstairs, one bleeding all over the room, beaten half to death by her, and the other raped by her sicko son."

  "Seems to me there were three kids up there—one who'd seen more than any thirteen-year-old should have."

  "Me? I was fine. Scared, but fine." She looked at him, her eyes bright and sad. "And I was lucky. At least I was all in one piece. Beauty patched up okay, but Gus..."

  One piece? Cade didn't see it that way, but didn't argue. What he saw was that the events of the afternoon of the murder had provided plenty of motivation for Vanelleto and Beauty, aka Dianna Lintz, to kill Belle Bliss—and try to kill her son.

  "And the boy, what about him?" he asked.

  Her expression bleak, she said, "He never stopped crying from the second Grover left. Belle did her usual thing, shoved him into her room—there was a beat-up crib in there—and ignored him. Her bedroom was off the living room at the bottom of the stairs, and the stairway hall magnified every cry. I heard her yelling at him, telling him to 'shut up, or she'd do it for him.'"

  She shook her head. "Can you imagine? Yelling at a baby. He must have been hungry and awfully frightened. All alone like that." She closed her eyes a moment. "I wanted to go downstairs, do something, but Gus wouldn't let me. He said he was afraid I'd run into Frank, that he'd do to me what he'd done to Beauty. He said he'd take care of the boy on our way out.

  "We were going to take off that night the first clear chance we got, but things went wrong." She tugged an earlobe. "Belle and Frank were drinking. A lot. The baby was crying. The TV was blaring. Brett came home, turned on the stereo, and right away started to fight with Frank, I think about Beauty. Brett kind of liked Beauty, I think. When Frank laughed, shouted something about 'doing me' next, Brett must have gone for him. We heard stuff breaking, lots of cursing, and Belle screaming—shrieking really—at both of them. It got crazy down there. I think Brett left, because I heard the door bang a couple of times." She cupped her hands over her ears as if to mute the din from that long-ago night, then dropped them to her sides and clenched them into fists. "But that didn't stop Belle and Frank. They kept right on yelling at one another, over the stereo, the TV, the crying baby. Then Gus said it was 'now or never,' that while there was so much noise, and they were busy hollering at each other, they'd never miss us. He wanted us to wait upstairs while he went down to check things out. I think he meant to get Belle's keys, take her car. I'm not sure." She shrugged. "Beauty, of course, wouldn't let him go without her."

  "And you?"

  "Gus told me to stay behind, pack some of our stuff. He said he'd call me when it was safe. By the time he did—"

  "Belle Bliss was dead," He finished with his own assumption, then asked the question he was loath to put into words. "Did you see it happen? Did you see who killed the woman?" He forced himself to stay seated, resisted the urge to go to her.

  Silence, dark and heavy, shrouded the air between them. "No. At first I wasn't even sure the shots I heard were real. Thought they might be from the TV—there was so much going on down there. But, no, I didn't see anything. Gus called up the stairs, and I came down. By then, it was all over... except for the bleeding Belle was on the floor—" She shuddered.

  "What about Gus? Beauty?"

  "Beauty told me later they'd been hiding in Belle's room, that while they were there she'd calmed the baby down. She said she didn't see anything, either."

  "When Gus went downstairs, did he have a gun?"

  She looked stunned by the question. "No."

  "Logical question," he said calmly.

  "We might have been street kids, but that doesn't mean we were armed and dangerous."

  "Then what?" he asked, shifting away from the gun talk—and not so sure about the armed and dangerous part, considering what he'd heard about Vanelleto.

  She glared at him a while longer, then said, "Gus yanked me into the bedroom, then nearly threw me out the window. Beauty was already gone. He said he'd be right behind us, but he never came. We waited—a long time—then we took off together, stuck together, too, for over a year before she moved on. Actually, coming to Star Lake was her idea. Gus? He disappeared like smoke. He was good at that."

  "And the boy? What happened to him?"

  "I don't know." She shook her head, the gesture weary. "I didn't even see him. Gus got me out the window so fast...
All I know is he wasn't crying anymore."

  "Beauty was in the room with him for a while with Gus. What did she say?"

  She hesitated, then again rubbed her forehead. "She said he was sleeping in the middle of Belle's bed, which was probably why I didn't see him."

  Cade's logic denied the sleeping scenario. Through the sound of gunshots? All that racket? Damned unlikely.

  Bliss's police statement reared up in his brain. Gus did the killing; the girls egged him on...

  Someone was lying: Addy to protect her friends, or Frank Bliss to protect himself. The thought unsettled him, and he reminded himself—again—he wasn't here to solve a murder. But no matter how much he denied it, the murder and Josh's disappearance were a sealed unit—Josh, a box within a box—with the odds of finding him alive lessening with every word Addy said.

  Damn. He shouldn't believe a goddamn word out of her mouth. He wasn't sure she believed herself when it came to what happened to the boy. He shouldn't care about a young girl who'd found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time, whose loyalties were probably skewed by too many nights sleeping on a cement mattress.

  He should be the hard-nosed skeptical cop.

  But then, he'd always been a lousy cop.

  Addy stared morosely out the cabin window, as if lost in the pain and horror of that long-ago night, as if talking about it had emptied her.

  He stood, walked to her. "You miss your friends," he said, lifting her chin, and deciding to, if not change the subject, change the course of it.

  She pulled back, but not right away. "Yes. We took care of each other. We were family, you know. Loved each other. Like you and your... wife."

  I don't have a wife, not anymore. The pain in his chest was sudden and sharp, but not a dagger this time, more like the thorn on a rose. "That I know," he said.

  She raised a hand to her face, brushed at what he expected was a tear. "You know those should-haves we talked about? That little boy is one of mine. Always will be. I shouldn't have listened to Gus. I should have gone downstairs when I wanted to, took that baby, and put him somewhere safe. Then at least I'd know for sure I'd done something." She turned back to face the lake, added. "Other than run away."

  "You were a scared kid."

  "Yeah, I was that all right."

  The silence in the room grew, and he sensed the woman in front of him, looking out over Star Lake, was emotionally drained. He knew the feeling. He also knew the past was an unstable place, the disconnect between then and now irrevocable, only as clear as drifts of memory allowed. And when the past was shaped by fear and violence, as Addy's was, the effort to retrieve something of value from the confusion, denial, might-have-beens, and endless should-haves was exhausting. And it hurt like a son of a bitch.

  He touched her nape, gripped her shoulders. Tension, transformed into knotted sinew and compacted muscle, ridged hard and high along her shoulders. When she tried to pull away, he held her tighter. "Don't," he said, pressing his thumbs into the base of her neck under her short hair, kneading gently. "You don't have to say any more. Not right now, at least."

  "I should—"

  "—do nothing except relax," he whispered close to her ear.

  A dark silence filled the room, and Addy stood quietly, and very, very still, the tension in her shoulders unyielding under his massaging fingers. It was like trying to make an oak tree bend in a breeze. He leaned close to her ear. "I'm not going to hurt you."

  Her answer, after a long pause, was a nod, then a long bone-loosening shudder. Feeling her soften under his hands, her muscles mellow under his thumbs, was a gift. A gift he'd won with a lie—because he knew in the end he would hurt her, and the thought of it settled on his brain like a burr.

  "I don't want to have sex with you, Harding," she murmured, letting her head fall forward so he could run his fingers up to her hairline.

  "I know. You've made that sadly clear." He bent to kiss her neck, and she sighed. "And believe it or not, I'm okay with it."

  "Good thinking. Smart men avoid sex with women wanted as accomplices to murder."

  He spun her around, lifted her chin, and forced her to look at him. "Did you kill anyone, Addy?"

  Her expression darkened, moisture gathered in her eyes. "No, but I should have done something for that little boy, and..."

  "And?"

  "I wanted to kill someone." The words came in a low halting rush.

  "Who?"

  "Frank Bliss, for what he did to Beauty. Belle Bliss, for what she did to Gus."

  "I wanted to kill the dry cleaner who ruined my graduation suit, but I didn't."

  She surprised him by leaning into him and wrapping her arms around his waist. "Yeah, I get your point. There's a world of innocence between the wanting and the doing." She recited the last with the resignation of a child forced to repeat the instructions of an overbearing parent.

  "Someone tell you that?"

  "Lund Baylor—when I first came to the lake." She raised her eyes to his, her expression open and stark. "You asked if I killed anyone, and because I'm going to ask you for your help, I'll say it again. No. I did not kill anyone—and I didn't help anyone else kill anyone, either. And it's important to me that you believe that." She looked up at him, her gaze fearless, but slightly baffled, as if she couldn't believe what she'd said.

  He touched her chin with his knuckles. "I do believe you," he answered, and despite it going against all his logic and experience, his years of training, and the cynicism he'd nurtured as a cop, he meant it—which made him as baffled as she was.

  Her gaze settled on his mouth, and he recognized the longing that misted her eyes, felt the same way. "I should go," she said, not moving an inch.

  He ran a finger along her jaw. "You should stay."

  "I don't want to ha—"

  "—have sex with you, Cade," he finished for her.

  She smiled, but it wouldn't hold. "I mean it. There's more to tell, and sex will make things... messy."

  "Sex does that all right." He touched her crazy ragged hair. Amazingly soft. Then he reached behind her to turn off the lamp beside the chair. The room went into half light, some of it slanting through the open door of the bedroom. "I still think you should stay." He ran a finger around the curve of her ear. "First, because you have a story to finish, and second, because I don't want you to go."

  The second reason was the critical one, the truest one, the one that would, in the end, cause the most trouble.

  He took her hand, led her to his bedroom.

  Chapter 16

  Addy let him lead her to the side of his bed, but once there she stopped, scanned its even surface with an expression part curiosity, part terror. "I wasn't kidding, you know. Sex really isn't my thing."

  "Sex is everybody's thing, but not tonight." He turned on the bedside lamp, tossed the quilt back, and looked over his shoulder to where Addy stood, rigid as a steel girder.

  She looked at him, looked at the bed, looked at him again. The light from the lamp, casting downward, showed the polish of the maple cabinet it sat on, but did little to illuminate her face.

  He sat on the edge of the bed, offered his hand. "Come here."

  She took his hand, and he pulled her down to sit beside him. "That wasn't so tough, was it?" He smoothed some hair back behind her ear. When it sprung free again, he repeated the move, stroking her soft cheek with the back of his hand on his way back.

  When she closed her eyes, he eased her back onto the bed, stretched out beside her, and pulled her into his arms. She was tense, but she didn't protest. After a few moments, she shifted closer to him, and he kissed her hair, careful to hold her loosely.

  Neither of them spoke, until Addy broke the silence. "I guess you're pretty good at it, huh?"

  "At what?"

  "The sex thing."

  "Okay... given the necessary inspiration." He kissed her hair again, and she nuzzled under his chin. Her breath, breezing hot and low across his neck, currently provided all the inspi
ration he needed. He kept that flash to himself.

  "I bet."

  No response required, so he didn't give one, and the silence deepened.

  "Can I ask you something?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "Do you think there's something wrong with me?" she asked, her voice low and serious. "I mean, because I don't, uh, want it."

  "No."

  She pulled from his arms and sat up lotus-style on the bed to look down at him, her expression intense, deeply curious. "Then why don't I? Want it, I mean?"

  He put one arm under his head. "Probably because you've got a damned skewed idea of what it's all about. I'm sure life on the street and Beauty's rape didn't help. Add in a couple of unsuccessful trial runs with summer tenants you probably didn't care about, and from your point of view, what's to like?" He reached out his hand, tugged her earlobe. "That kind of experience makes a wheelbarrow full of dirt and a good day's work beat sex hands down."

  "What made you so damn smart, anyway?"

  "That's not smart, it's common sense." He shifted his head to look at her more directly. "Which doesn't stop me from wanting you, by the way."

  She picked at the sheet, did a bit of lip chewing, then said, "Even if I'm a loser in bed."

  "Even if." He propped himself up on one elbow. "Though I seriously doubt—if you had the right partner—you'd be a loser. In anything."

  She rested her elbows on her thighs, cupped her face in her hands, and stared at him. Whatever her thoughts were, she kept them to herself. And whatever they were, they didn't make her happy. She looked edgy and annoyed.

  He patted the bed beside him. "Don't over think it. Let it go."

  "I don't think I want to. Let it go, I mean." She took her hands from her face and clasped them loosely between her knees. "When I finish what I started tonight, when you know all I know about Belle Bliss's murder, it's going to change everything. You might not feel... what you're feeling now. I mean about wanting me." She sighed. "Which means I might never have this chance again." She looked at him then, with her own delicious mix of innocence and courage. "I think we should make love, Cade. Because"—she faltered—"because I trust you. And because you make me feel like... like an ice-cream sandwich under a hot sun."