by TA Moore
Harry slapped the plate off the table and onto the floor in a jerky spasm of anger. The plastic plate bounced, and the sandwich came apart. One of Maureen’s little dogs—a wonk-eyed Maltese with an overbite—pounced on cleanup duty. Harry hunched in on himself as though he expected to be yelled at.
“When does he go away?” Clayton asked instead.
Harry sniffed and wiped his sleeve over his face. “All the time. Mom says it’s for work. She says he has to work hard for us, and I shouldn’t complain just ’cause he can’t come to my games and stuff. And I don’t care, ’cause I don’t even want him there. I just want Mom.”
His face crumpled for a second, and he looked miserable and snotty. He was just a little boy, and he was tired and scared. Not crying was hard.
“She’ll come back,” Clayton told him.
“But she’ll be in trouble,” Harry said. “For leaving me. Litty’s mom left her alone, and… and Litty had to go away and live with her grandma.”
“Grandmas aren’t so bad,” Kelly said. He shifted awkwardly in the doorway as he put his hands in his pockets. He guiltily slid his eyes away from Clayton’s glare. “Sometimes they’re good people.”
“I don’t know her. She doesn’t even live here,” Harry said with all the contempt a small child could muster. “I want to stay with Mom.”
The tears got away from him in an ugly rush. He folded his arms on the table and buried his head in them, and his shoulders trembled, and the back of his neck turned red as he sobbed.
Clayton reached over and put his hand on Harry’s shoulder. He could feel all the bones and misery.
“Your mom isn’t going to get into trouble,” he said. “I promise. This wasn’t her fault.”
Clayton was fairly sure that was true. Unless Nadine had done something particularly heinous over the last twenty-four hours, it would be more trouble than it was worth for the LAPD to expose itself in order to pursue a case against her.
That didn’t comfort Harry much. He just cringed away from Clayton and hiccuped out sobs as he dragged his T-shirt up to wipe his face. The little Maltese dog abandoned the crust of bread it was chewing and padded over to snuffle at Harry instead.
Harry reached down and patted it with rough affection that flattened its topknot. His fingernails were bitten down to the quick.
“Harry, we still want to help your mom,” Clayton said. He waved Kelly over, and Kelly abandoned his post by the door and awkwardly slid into a chair on the other side of the table. “But we need you to look at something for us. Do you recognize any of these men?”
Kelly put his phone on the table and slid it over in front of Harry, who rubbed his face on his T-shirt again, sniffed, and looked at the picture. He squinted and fumbled at the screen with snot-sticky fingers to enlarge the image.
“That’s my dad.” He poked his finger firmly against the phone. “I don’t know the others.”
Clayton glanced at the phone. Most of the men he didn’t know either, but there was silver-ginger Cole at the back with a dry smile, and the blonder Wilde was wedged in next to the man whose face Harry had picked out with a sticky fingerprint.
He looked like Kelly. He had the same open, roughly handsome face, the same pale eyes, and the same wide guileless smile. But Byron’s smile didn’t reach his eyes the way Kelly’s did, even though Kelly only had the one.
The thought made Clayton glance over the table. The light from the window caught the bruises on Kelly’s face and picked out the ones half-hidden under the stubble on his jaw. Last night Clayton had followed the path of the beating with his mouth, from shoulders to thighs.
Kelly hadn’t known.
That should have cooled Clayton’s temper, but he could still feel its sour tang in his stomach. He shoved it aside for later.
“What about the men who came to your house?” Kelly asked as he pulled his phone back. “Do you remember anything about them?”
Harry puckered his lips together as though he’d just tasted a lemon. He shook his head and hunched his shoulders in as he shoved his hands between his knees.
“You didn’t see them?”
“Uh-uh,” Harry mumbled through still-pinched lips. He shook his head in a quick, twitchy denial and kicked his feet against the legs of the chair.
Clayton debated whether it would help to push Harry. He was obviously lying, and he was obviously unhappy about it. In an adult, that would make it easy to break their story. Children were more difficult. They didn’t see right and wrong in the same way.
“You know, sometimes moms get things wrong,” Kelly said. “They might ask you to do something, but it’s not the right thing to do. When I was little, I got hurt pretty badly.”
Harry squinted at him. “Did you break your leg?”
“Something like that,” Kelly said with a quick grin. “My mom knew what happened, but she told me that it would cause too much trouble if I told everyone about it. She told me I didn’t remember what happened, and that’s what I had to tell everyone.”
Harry squirmed in the chair. “My mom says I should always listen to her.”
“Most of the time,” Clayton said. “But right now she isn’t here. We want to help. Did you see anything the night the men came to your house? The night that your mom got hurt.”
For a moment Clayton thought it had worked. Harry glanced up, eyes wet and haunted, and opened his mouth to say something. Then he closed it again and shook his head with a tight, desperate energy. He stared down at the table.
“I didn’t see,” he repeated in a small, breathless voice. He glanced up through tear-spiked lashes. “Just what Mom said.”
Clayton bit back frustration. He wanted to smack his hand down on the table, to make the glass rattle and everyone jump. It was effective. He remembered that from when he was a kid, the way his skin cringed across his shoulders as whatever man was there—the debt collector, his mom’s latest boyfriend, his grandfather before cancer won the fight with the mean old bastard—filled the sweaty, trailer kitchen with the smell of anger and the sound of flesh on Formica.
Just like him, Harry would know to heed that sound. It was like a snake’s rattle, that sound. The next thing they hit was always you.
Clayton swallowed the hot, angry words in his throat. This was why he didn’t like to get angry. It… bled… all over everything.
“Just think about it,” Kelly said easily. He braced his elbows on the table and shrugged loosely. “It’s never too late to tell us something, Harry.”
“I didn’t lie,” Harry muttered quickly.
“Maybe you just remembered something,” Clayton said stiffly, careful to keep his voice neutral. “Sometimes people don’t remember things directly after something happens. It takes time for the memory to come back. Nobody would be upset that you hadn’t remembered before.”
Harry squirmed in his seat and then blurted out, “I have to go pee.” He waited, knuckles white where he gripped the edge of his seat, until Clayton nodded. Then he scrambled down and dashed out of the kitchen. The little dog followed him, and its excited yap was audible even after the thud of Harry’s sneakers had faded.
“If Nadine wanted him to lie about what he saw, then he must have known them,” Kelly said after a second. “Jimmy—Byron—did a lot of business at the house. His associates were always over there. Maybe Harry recognized them from that?”
Clayton rubbed his fingertips over the hinge of his jaw. It was clenched so tightly he could feel the knot of muscle under his skin.
“Or she lied to us,” Clayton said. He lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “And in my experience, when a battered spouse lies to me, it’s usually to cover for their partner. It wasn’t their husband, the door did it.”
Dead anger tasted like cold tea in the back of Clayton’s throat. It wasn’t fair, but for most people, blood was thicker than water.
That was going to put him and Kelly on opposite sides, and it hurt more than he’d ever admit to Baker.
“Y
ou think Byron did—” Kelly shook his head. “No. He wouldn’t do that. Besides, she was already leaving him. There was no reason for her to cover for him anymore.”
Clayton shrugged. “She felt responsible, she felt guilty, she still loved him. It’s hard to leave an abuser physically, but it’s harder to leave them behind emotionally.”
Doubt flickered over Kelly’s face. It was more than Clayton had expected, but it wasn’t enough.
“I don’t…. No,” Kelly said. “Byron’s a lot of things, but he doesn’t lose his temper like that.”
“I hear that nearly as often as I do the door excuse,” Clayton said.
“If he did it, and I’m sure he didn’t,” Kelly said, “then where’s Nadine?”
Clayton got up from the table. He didn’t think there was any point in waiting for Harry. Pressure would only make it easier for the boy to stay mute. Let him think about it for a while. Maybe he’d remember something useful he could tell them.
“I don’t know,” Clayton said as he headed for the door. “Where are the guys that beat you up?”
The silence behind him managed to be deafening.
“GO HOME,” Baker had said when he finally got in touch. “Don’t let them know we’re onto them. Let me handle it.”
Clayton weighed his frustration at being called off as though he were Baker’s dachshund against the promise of banked anger in his mentor’s voice. It turned out he trusted Baker. He wasn’t sure when that happened or if he liked it, but he did.
So he left Kelly to keep an eye on his brother and went back to the office. At that point there hadn’t seemed much point in going back to his apartment. In the echoing silence of the nearly empty office building—twice a cleaner had rolled a cart to his door, nodded a surprised acknowledgment, and left again—Clayton worked out his frustration through hard work and professionally approved cruelty.
He finished eviscerating a settlement offer from an opposing attorney, drew up a list of special interrogatories for discovery on his “should have been divorced this morning” case, and sent a blunt threat to Declan Tate’s attorney to either finalize the divorce settlement or get ready to go to court. Some people looked at pictures of kittens or meditated. He took apart marriages for stress relief. It worked, but he supposed it didn’t make him a very nice man.
The closest he’d come was the few days when he entertained the notion that he could have a nice man.
Clayton snorted at himself and dropped the paperwork to arrange a witness summons into Heather’s email. Unless he resorted to busywork, his desk was cleared until tomorrow.
That just left him with his thoughts, and he wasn’t particularly interested in them. He stood up and stretched. There was a kink in the middle of his spine that refused to loosen, a dull knuckle of pain just under his shoulder blade.
Clayton twisted his arm around and tried to locate the knot with his fingertips. The long hours bent over the computer had been a mistake, but what the hell. It could accompany all the other mistakes he’d made lately.
He left the office—the cleaner would be relieved he could do his job next time he rolled past—and walked down to the floor’s narrow kitchen. It was packed up for the night. The yogurt bar was dry and the day-old pastries cleared up, but the fridge was still packed with rolls and the pods of coffee were always available.
Clayton had only come for coffee, but his stomach rumbled a reminder that all he’d eaten that day was pain pills and a stale cookie at Maureen’s. He grabbed a bagel and some salad and ate it as he waited for his espresso to perk.
“That’s not very environmentally friendly,” Baker noted from behind him.
The unexpected interruption nearly made Clayton choke on a mouthful of uninspiring greenery. He coughed his airway clear and turned to give Baker an annoyed look.
“Five years on, and that’s still not funny,” he said.
Baker looked tired. His tie was tugged loose from his wilted shirt collar, and he’d rolled his sleeves back. He made a point to fold them to show off the fancy print on the underside of his cuffs, but he still looked tired, and he summoned up a dry little smirk.
“You can’t begrudge me my one small pleasure,” Baker said. “You kids down here always forget that I’m the partner with a work ethic. Are you going to drink that?”
Clayton plucked the cup out of the machine and handed it over. He fed another pod in and hit the button to reset it.
“Thanks.” Baker used his foot to drag a stool out from under one of the high tables. He propped his hips on it and took an appreciative sip of the coffee. “I needed that. I’d forgotten how… unforgiving… criminal law could be.”
The bagel sat heavily in Clayton’s stomach. He balled up the quarter that was left and tossed it into the bin.
“Where do we stand?” he asked. “With Nadine? The police? Make that everyone.”
Baker took another drink of coffee and rubbed his index finger against the line creased between his eyebrows.
“Well, in retrospect, probably shouldn’t have called the DA a dried-out sack of cat turds when I quit before he could fire me. Insult to injury, literally. To be fair, though, once I’d danced a bit for him, he heard me out. The case got rolled over to Internal Affairs, who were not happy to find out one of their undercover cops was a wife-beating bigamist.” A sardonic grimace curved Baker’s mouth down, and he tossed back the rest of the espresso. “I suppose it’s cynical to assume their dismay has less to do with the bigamy and beatings and more to do with the fact that the wife has a very good lawyer?”
The second cup of coffee was finally ready. Clayton plucked it out of the machine, ignored Baker’s hopeful look, and found a spoon to stir in a dose of sugar.
“It’s cynical. Doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”
“They don’t want to let Detective Kelly—any of them—know that he’s under investigation, so for the moment, it’s just a missing person case,” Baker said. “Eventually, though, Detective Kelly will be in a lot of trouble, Clayton.”
“Good.”
Baker raised his eyebrows. “Is that going to cause trouble for you?” he asked. “With your Kelly.”
“He’s not my Kelly.” Clayton took a drink of coffee and tasted the graininess of not-quite-dissolved sugar on his tongue. “It’s his family, Baker. When push comes to shove, he’s going to back up his brother to keep the peace.”
“Maybe you’ve misjudged him.”
Clayton paused, coffee cup halfway to his lips, and gave Baker a challenging look. “When was the last time you misjudged someone?” he asked. “Because it’s been a while for me. Kelly can’t even pick a color for his living room without his family’s involvement. He’s not going to go against them on his brother’s reputation. And for what? A woman he doesn’t know and a man he’s fucked occasionally?”
The logic was unassailable. Even Baker seemed to admit that as he sighed and levered his long body back upright off the stool. He rinsed the cup in the sink, shook the water off, and left it upside down on the drainer.
“I don’t usually interfere in people’s lives,” Baker said. He acknowledged Clayton’s snort with a shrug. “Mocking isn’t interfering. Just… give him the chance to disappoint you. Even if he does, you won’t be the one who burned the bridge.”
“That’s not the advice you’d give a client.”
“Maybe I should.” Baker dried his hands and rolled his sleeves down. “Maybe I will. Right now I’m going to go home and see if my boyfriend has written me off or not. You should get some sleep. Nadine’s case is in the right hands, and tomorrow you need to finalize the prenup and the Tate divorce.”
He clapped Clayton on the shoulder and left. Clayton took a swig of too-sweet coffee and supposed he might as well follow suit.
The cleaner had been and gone while Clayton drank his coffee, and he left a tidy office and the scent of orange oil in his wake. Clayton grabbed his jacket, left his briefcase, and flicked the lights off on his way out.
> It was quiet as he left the building—quiet for LA anyway. The sound of traffic and people had dropped to a low murmur and the occasional burst of laughter in the background. Clayton paused to shrug his jacket on.
It was late but not too late to find someone to burn his bridges with. St. Felix wasn’t exactly a pickup joint, but that didn’t mean you couldn’t find company if you wanted it. He wouldn’t look out of place in his suit either.
A one-night stand with no complications, no ridiculously warm laugh, no parrot tattoo, and no crooked brother, would put his relationship with Kelly where he should have left it—six feet under.
It was that or go back to his apartment and think about how he’d rather be in Kelly’s bed, in Kelly’s warm, half-finished house with the baby monitors and the wall Clayton could talk him into painting red.
Playing house. Like he’d ever fit in that sort of life.
The bitter thought made up Clayton’s mind for him. He tugged his tie loose with one hand as he stalked toward his bike. His attention was focused on the night ahead, so he barely noticed the shadowy figure who lurked at the corner—not until they moved toward him.
Crap. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time he was mugged. He had already reached for his wallet—all he held was a couple of bills for tips and a credit card he could cancel in five minutes—when the figure stepped into the light and he recognized her.
“Nadine?” He jogged over to her and caught her by the shoulders. “Where have you been? Are you all right?”
She didn’t look it, but then she hadn’t before. He hadn’t counted her bruises, but her cuts were still stitched, and the cast on her arm was intact, if grubby. Her unplastered fingers dug into his wrist as she grabbed him. Her knuckles were bruised and skinned. At the safe house she hadn’t quite been ready to take the gaudy wedding set off. Someone had taken that out of her hands.
“I… I… that doesn’t matter,” she stammered out. “I don’t want a divorce. You have… you have to cancel it all. Okay? Just make it not happen. Please.”
“Why?” Clayton asked. “Who’s making you do this? Why do they care?”
