by JoAnn Ross
He shrugged. “Technically, but it’s not that big a deal on Orchid Island, partly because we escaped all the wars and politics. Though, when Congress passed, and then President Clinton signed an ‘Apology Resolution,’ a hundred years after overthrowing Lili’uokalani, it meant a lot to us, because, like I said, family is everything in the islands…
“So, now tell me about Lucia.”
“She was a strong woman, like your ancestor undoubtedly was,” Tess said. “She was a woman of many causes: voting rights for women, access to birth control, fighting to make domestic abuse a crime, and prohibition, although that one, admittedly, didn’t turn out as she and the other advocates of the Nineteenth Amendment had hoped.
“She met my great-grandfather, who owned a sawmill in the northern part of the state, when he had her arrested.”
Nate tilted his head to look down at her in surprise. “Seriously?”
“Seriously. In those days it was illegal to distribute birth-control information. But since Lucia considered it a stupid law, she couldn’t see any reason for obeying it.”
Tess stopped her story long enough to take a sip of wine. The family might have been absolute failures when it came to love, but they certainly knew the wine-making business.
“Anyway, she was handing out leaflets instructing workers on their various options when Jeremy Wainwright decided that she was disrupting his employees.”
“Having her arrested wasn’t a very auspicious beginning for a romance.”
“From what I’ve been told, no one ever accused any of the Wainwrights of possessing a strong romantic streak,” Tess said. “At any rate, she was charged with tres-passing and distributing obscene material. But he dropped both charges after Lucia agreed to have dinner with him.”
Her smooth skin glowed in the light from the fire, and Nate’s inventive mind conjured up provocative images of Tess, her dark curls tumbling over bare shoulders, her gypsy eyes wide and luminous in the flickering light, her arms beckoning to him, her naked body so soft, so warm. So inviting.
“Nate?”
When he realized Tess was talking to him, he shook his head in a vain attempt to clear it. “Sorry,” he apologized sheepishly. “My mind has a bad habit of wandering.”
Tess smiled understandably. “Working on a new idea?”
“An old one,” he mumbled, wondering what it was about Tess that could cause him to suddenly feel like an oversexed, bumbling adolescent. Nate’s feelings for Tess had been intense and discomforting from the beginning. Even discounting Captain MacGrath’s still unexplained meddling, Nate had the feeling that the woman would have been able to distract him without any outside assistance.
“Speaking of ideas, why on earth would you want to make up such horrible things when the world is already filled with horror?” she asked.
“Now you sound like all those interviewers who are constantly trying to find a motive for my work. Was I frightened by some horrific incident as a child? Was my potty training particularly distressful? Was my mother frightened by a pack of wild wolves while I was in the womb?”
“And was she?”
Nate grinned. “Nothing that dramatic. I was always the kid who wiggled my fingers in front of the light bulb and created monsters on the wall. I suppose I’ve never gotten over the thrill of turning off the light and trying to jump into bed before the monsters lurking beneath it grab me.”
“So you were imaginative as a child.”
“All kids are. The problem is that life wears away at imagination, like the sea against the cliffs. Everyone needs to free their imagination from time to time. Even adults. It’s like vitamin C to ward off a cold. Fantasy, all kinds, even horror, is like vitamin C for the mind.”
“But you make the world sound like a giant box with a crank on the side. Turn the handle, the music plays, and before long, a murderous jack pops out, grinning a Machiavellian grin and waving a bloody axe in our faces.”
Nate grinned, enjoying her description. “Hey, when the reader turns to a horror novel, he knows it’s fiction.”
“Sometimes monsters are real,” she said softly.
Fuck. Way to screw up, Breslin. “I’m sorry. I was having such a good time I forgot.”
“You don’t have to apologize. It’s not as if I can remember that much about the abduction. Except for what others have told me.”
The therapist her parents had sent her to told her that was a good thing. That she should never be afraid to talk about what had happened if she did ever remember events of that time. Because talking about your fears was a good thing.
Tess hadn’t bought that idea then. And she didn’t now. She’d witnessed enough as a prosecutor to understand that amnesia was often a way of coping with something too terrible to contemplate. In that way, it could, she’d decided, be a blessing.
He took her hand, stroking her palm with his thumb. “That must be hard.”
She looked at him with obvious surprise. “Most people would consider amnesia of being held captive a positive.”
“I was wounded in Iraq when the Hummer ahead of mine drove across an IED. The wound obviously wasn’t fatal, but they did put me out to perform surgery. Even now, my memory is a blank between when we were ragging a guy for reading a romance his girlfriend had sent him and two days later when I woke up in the hospital, loopy on painkillers.
“I’ve filled in some of the blanks, but a lot of the time I wonder if my imagination is just creating stories from information I’ve read or seen of the incident. Whether the memories are real or false. It’s tough to sort out.”
“I’m sorry that you were wounded and were left with such a frustrating effect.”
“Hey.” He shrugged. “I came home alive and in one piece. Which is more than a lot of guys and women did. And I didn’t tell you that so you’d feel sorry for me, Tess. Just to let you know that although a couple days of lost memory obviously doesn’t equal what you experienced, we might have more in common than you’d think.”
Because he wanted to stay, Nate forced himself to call it a night.
But as he drove back across the mountains to the coast, he decided that things were finally looking up.
16
In Oregon’s Wild West territorial days, prior to statehood, most people accused of crimes were either hanged or pardoned. After the wooden Oregon Territory Jail, built in 1842, burned down, the territory relied on local jails for the housing of prisoners for another seven years until a site was selected for a new prison in Portland.
Which would have made Tess’s visits to the prison much simpler. Unfortunately, the two lots of land allocated for the prison were on opposite sides of Front Street and when the city refused to close or reroute the street, the prisoners were eventually moved to a new prison in Salem, which became the capital after a territorial battle with Corvallis.
Built of red brick and made to resemble a fortress in 1851, the Oregon State Penitentiary Tess was headed to was located on one hundred and ninety-four acres southeast of Salem. The facility itself consisted of ten acres, surrounded by a twenty-five-foot wall patrolled by armed guards.
Wanting to make her trip here go as quickly as possible, Tess had foregone wearing any jewelry or underwire bra that could set off the metal detector and locked her laptop in the trunk of her car.
Then she stood in line with the other visitors for the screening, which seemed to take longer every time she went through the process. She could have mailed the single-page statement to the inmate she was visiting, but since he held the key to her keeping the Russian mobster in prison for the rest of his life, she wanted to make sure her informant wasn’t getting cold feet.
“Hey, Tess,” the correctional officer manning the scanner today greeted her as she showed her district attorney’s office ID. “How’s your dad doing?”
A retired Portland Police Bureau detective, Bob Davis had belatedly discovered that his pension payments didn’t cover the cost of two daughters in college, and a third wh
o’d just had a destination wedding on Maui. Not wanting to go back into active police work, he’d moved to Salem and signed on at OSP.
“Great, thanks. His doctor says the bypass surgery went exceptionally well.”
“Glad to hear that,” he said as he opened her purse, checked it out for any contraband, ran it through the scanner, and quickly wanded her. “Tell Mike I’m looking forward to going fishing with him again when the salmon run the river next spring.”
“I’ll do that.” Her mind on her reason for being here, Tess flashed him an absent smile as she retrieved her purse and was escorted by another guard toward the visitors’ room.
Shortly before she reached the designated room, she was only vaguely aware of another inmate and guard passing as she paused for a moment, collecting her thoughts.
Borislav Krupin was already waiting at the table when she arrived. He was wearing the same denim pants as last time, but the blue chambray shirt had been changed out for a warmer navy sweatshirt. She doubted the sweatshirt was the reason he was sweating.
“Mr. Krupin,” she greeted him. “How are you doing?”
He glanced over at the guard, then up at the camera in the corner of the room. “How do you think I’m doing? I’m fucking scared to death.”
With good reason Tess thought, but did not say. “Are you considering changing your statement?”
“Nyet.” He shook his head and when he scowled, he looked like the criminal enforcer and drug dealer she knew him to be. “That mudak disrespects my girlfriend every time she visits. Calls her a nochnaja babochka!” Having heard the story that had brought her here the first time when Krupin had called the office, Tess knew that was Russian for hooker.
“Easy there, Krupin,” the guard warned as the man’s face turned beet red and he slammed his fist on the table.
He swore again, a harsh, guttural epithet Tess decided she didn’t really want to know. “No way do I want that govniuk getting out while I’m stuck in this shithole for the rest of my life for doing work he didn’t have the yaitsa to do himself.”
“All right then,” she said calmly, not needing a Russian-English dictionary to get the gist. She took out the single-page, double-sided printed paper and handed it to him. “This statement is what you’re willing to testify to?”
He read the statement she’d written down verbatim the last time she’d been here. “Da. That is right.”
“You supplied him with steroids that he intended to specifically use to increase his heartbeat in order to be taken to the infirmary?”
“Da.”
“So he could claim discrimination when there wasn’t a Russian-speaking doctor on staff at the time?”
“Da. Da. Da! What else do I have to say?”
The one thing Tess didn’t want to do was to antagonize Krupin enough that he’d be unwilling to help her. Better his anger stay focused on Vasilyev. “That’s all I need,” she said. “I appreciate you coming forward like this.”
He arched a shaggy black brow. “Enough to get my time cut back so I can be with my girlfriend sooner?”
“I can’t promise anything,” she repeated what she’d told him before. “But your cooperation in this case will be included in your file for consideration by any future parole board.”
“Good.” He nodded. “I will be out screwing my beautiful blond while that zhopa is being—”
“I get the idea,” Tess said, definitely not needing any details of prison sex, in Russian or English.
Her business done, she left the room and the prison. When she checked her phone, she had three messages. None of them from Nate Breslin.
Which was what she wanted, right?
“Da,” she murmured to herself.
Apparently not, she decided, tamping down her frustration as she drove back up the freeway to Portland.
17
Except for the occasional visit to the racetrack to watch the horses run, Mike wasn’t known to be much of a gambler. Nor a risk taker. Although he wouldn’t lie—he’d love to be one of those flashy detectives who got written up in the papers all the time and appeared on the news, even Nightline, and interviewed on the Today Show, his reputation was more of a plodding bulldog. Once he got a case in his teeth, he’d keep doggedly moving forward, putting all the pieces of the puzzle together, until the full picture fell into place. But dogged and stubborn didn’t make headlines, which had always been okay with him. So long as the bad guys ended up behind bars.
Rather than use the online government system, he’d decided that his newly established business would seem more “real” if he delivered the application to the Portland Licenses Bureau in person. Then, although he’d used a computer all the time at PPB, while he was in old-school mode, rather than Google detective agencies or download a copy of The Private Eye Business for Dummies, he found himself driving the six minutes to the library.
The red brick and stone building, which was the oldest library west of the Mississippi, was one of Mike’s favorite places in the city, partly due to the memories of weekly visits with Tess to check out books together and listen to story hour. With its towering walls that let in so much light, marble pillars, and central rotunda, although much of the interior had been modernized, the library remained a stately presence in the ever-changing city.
He was planning to head up to the business section when he saw the woman seated at the welcome desk. His first thought was that she reminded him a lot of Maureen O’Hara, who’d made a bunch of movies with John Wayne, including his favorite, The Quiet Man.
Her hair was a deep red that reminded him of the horse he’d bet on this past summer at Portland Meadows. The filly with the long piston legs he’d uncharacteristically and recklessly put a thousand dollars of pension money down on a strong hunch had surprised all the odds makers who’d had her coming in dead last, crossing the finish line two full lengths ahead of the second-place gelding. The win had given him the money he’d needed to open his own investigative agency.
He hadn’t realized he’d stopped to stare until she looked up from her computer terminal and smiled. As he took in her red-tinted lips and eyes as green as the Emerald Isle and bare left-hand ring finger (which his detecting skills immediately told him meant she was available) Mike was breath-stealingly smitten. An old-fashioned word, maybe, he thought as his suddenly addled brain tried to come up with an answer to her question about how she could help him.
But hell, although he knew he was a throwback in this brave new world populated by gazillionaire nerds and skinny-jeans-wearing hipsters, Mike wasn’t ashamed to admit he was an old-fashioned guy. He liked his Scotch neat, meat and potatoes next to each other on the plate instead of arranged into some fancy pyramid that looked like it should be in a museum, and his musical tastes tended to hover in the range of country, bluegrass, and blues. With some Sinatra on the side, because you could never go wrong with Old Blue Eyes.
“Are you looking for something in particular?” she asked.
You.
Old-fashioned he might be, but he wasn’t so much of a Neanderthal that he couldn’t realize that response that had ricocheted through his head was highly inappropriate.
“I’m looking for some information on running a business.”
“Ah.” She lifted a russet brow. “Those would be on the second floor. Are you interested in any particular type of business?”
“I used to be a detective for PPB,” he said, hoping that she wasn’t one of those people who had a knee-jerk negative response to cops. “I recently retired.”
“You must have a great many stories to tell,” she said. She tilted her head and studied him. “Perhaps you’d also like to check out the writing section? You wouldn’t be the first police officer to turn novelist. There’s Dorothy Uhnak, who served as a policewoman on New York City’s gritty streets before turning to writing. She won an Edgar for the first in her NYPD Detective Christie Opara novels.
“James Byron Huggins was on the Huntsville, Alabama, poli
ce force before writing his Christian thrillers, which were made into movies. John M. Wills retired from both the Chicago police force and the FBI to go on and write his award-winning novels and nonfiction work. And, of course, the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master and dean of police fiction, Joseph Wambaugh worked in Los Angeles.”
A little dimple winked at the corner of her red lips when she treated him to what seemed to be a personal smile, rather than a welcome-lady librarian one. “Readers could always use another voice in that genre.”
“You know the names of all those authors off the top of your head?” Mike figured with a memory like that she would’ve been a crackerjack detective.
“I like to read. Also, I’ve been a volunteer here for twenty-five years. Well, except during the years we were closed for renovation. Then I circulated around to the other libraries in the system and even drove the bookmobile for a while.” Her eyes warmed with the memory. Which, although it had been a long time for him, had him wondering if her eyes would gleam like that after making love.
“You enjoyed the bookmobile,” Mike said.
Her laugh was like warm brandy on a rainy, foggy, February night. “You must have been a very good detective to realize that…I did. I felt like Santa delivering presents. Or the Good Humor Man.”
“Woman,” he corrected.
The sparkling smile faded from her eyes as she met his gaze with a searching one of her own. “Well.”
When she blew out a breath, he had a fleeting feeling that the zing wasn’t one-sided. Then, when she squared slender shoulders beneath a silk dress the color of Lombardi Cabernet, he felt her returning to business mode.
“The business books are on the second floor. I think I know the ones that might work best for you.”
As he followed a step behind up the grand black granite stairway, watching the sway of her purple skirt, Mike decided that if he’d known librarians had such great legs, he would have been spending a lot more of his retirement hours in the stacks.
