The Lullaby Girl (Angie Pallorino Book 2)

by Loreth Anne White

  Uciekaj, uciekaj!

  Run, run!

  Wskakuj do srodka, szybko.

  Get inside.

  Siedz cicho!

  Stay quiet!

  Her world spiraled—as though she was driving into a blizzard at night, her car headlights bouncing off dizzying snowflake asteroids. Then came that haunting, tinny, horrorlike nursery rhyme tune.

  A-a-a, kotki dwa … Ah-ah-ah,

  two little kittens,

  There were once two little kittens,

  two little kittens,

  they were both grayish-brown.

  Shock—deep, seismic—gripped her and began to shudder her body. Banging sounded inside her head. Louder. Angie couldn’t breathe. Breathe, breathe, Angie …

  More banging. Faster. Harder.

  “Angie!”

  She jerked herself back, and her gaze flared to her door. Someone was knocking—trying to get inside? Terror gripped her by the throat.

  Siedz cicho!

  Stay quiet!

  Disoriented, she stared at the door, struggling to pull reality into focus. No one had called up to be buzzed into the building. Was it one of her neighbors?

  More pummeling. “Angie? I know you’re in there. I saw the Nissan in your parking space downstairs.”

  Maddocks?

  Panic leaped through her. Her gaze darted around the apartment.

  “I’m going to let myself in, okay? I’m coming in.”

  Keys—she’d forgotten that she’d given him a set of keys to the building and to her apartment. With trembling hands, Angie tried to stuff the bear back into the evidence bag. But the shiny bead eyes held hers. She was suddenly incapable of putting the bear’s head back inside its dark prison. She took it out again.

  The door opened. Angie froze, bear in gloved hands. Maddocks loomed in her doorway, all six foot four of him. Black coat. Ruffled blue-black hair. Red tie against a crisp white shirt. The day had stubbled his jaw, put shadows beneath his eyes and fatigue into the lines of his face. Under one arm he held Jack-O. In his other hand was a bottle of red wine and an envelope. His dark-blue eyes pierced hers.

  “Angie—you okay?” He stepped into the room. His gaze shot first to her table, then flicked up to her whiteboard. “What’s going on?” He shut the door with the heel of his shoe and set Jack-O down. The three-legged animal hobbled over to the doggie bed that Angie had positioned near the gas fireplace for when Maddocks came to visit. The pooch curled onto his bed and eyeballed her suspiciously. Maddocks approached the table. His gaze dropped to the blood-stiffened bear in her hands, and then slowly he raised his deep-blue eyes to meet hers. Compassion filled his features.

  A little voice rose inside her. You don’t deserve him, a man like this. You’re too jealous of him professionally. He will hurt you. You will hurt yourself by screwing this up. Better to walk first, before he does.

  “This is old evidence?” he said. “From the cradle case? You got it from the VPD?”

  Angie cleared her throat and slipped the bear properly back into the evidence bag. She resealed it. “You shouldn’t have come—I told you not to come.”

  His mouth firmed. He went over to her kitchen counter, set down the bottle of wine and envelope, and took off his coat. He hung it over the back of a chair and began opening her cupboards. He found two glasses, which he placed on the granite kitchen countertop. “Give me a chance to at least apologize for dinner and to raise a glass for your birthday.” He uncorked the wine as he spoke, then poured two glasses. He brought them over and held one out to her.

  She declined to accept the drink. She turned her back on him and snapped off her gloves. “I need you to leave, Maddocks.”

  He set the glasses back down on the counter, then placed a hand on her shoulder. It was large. Warm. Solid. Like him. She stilled.

  “Tell me about the IIO investigation. What did they say?”

  She didn’t trust her voice suddenly. Inside her belly she started to shake again. He turned her around slowly. She looked up into his eyes.

  “I’m so sorry that I wasn’t there for you today, Angie.” A pause. “What … was the ruling?” He cupped the side of her face. She ached to lean into his touch. But at the same time, she did not want his compassion or pity. That’s how her colleagues would see her when they found out about her probation—as pitiful. Some, like Harvey Leo, would even derive glee from her fall to the social media desk. She had no intention of playing to their hand, would not become the victim, the disgraced detective back in uniform, the abused little girl left in a cradle with a sliced face and a bloody teddy bear and semen on a sweater.

  He caressed the line of her jaw with his thumb. And something fierce and angry erupted inside her—a desperation to burn down her own insecurities, to kill the pain, to blind herself to the fear of what her own memories might reveal, the realities that she might have to face about what had happened to her in childhood. She grabbed his tie and yanked him closer. Drawing his head down, she reached herself up and pressed her mouth hungrily to his. His lips were cold from outside. He hesitated a nanosecond before suddenly cupping her buttocks and jerking her hips tightly up against his pelvis. His mouth bore down on hers, forcing her lips open. He slid his tongue inside, met hers. Lust blinded Angie as she felt his erection stiffening against her belly.

  Desperately, furiously, she shoved him back against the wall near the door, oblivious to the pain in her arm. A picture crashed to the floor. Kissing him hard, their tongues slipping, tangling, mating, she hurriedly undid his fly and slid her hand into his pants. He was hot and hard against her palm. The big-shot homicide cop, the ex-Mountie who’d saved her ass by not reporting her mental collapse. The lover who’d broken her down and built her back up. The man who’d shown her how to submit, how to trust during sex. The man who lived on an old yacht he’d been trying to salvage like his sinking marriage and family dreams. The father whose life she’d saved along with the life of his daughter. A man she believed she could come to love—if only she’d let herself.

  He moaned deep in his throat as she took his penis in her hand, working him. He attempted to move away from the wall, to back her toward her bedroom, but she resisted, instead pressing him harder up against the wall, pulling his pants down around his hips. “Now. Here,” she growled against his mouth as she wiggled her own pants down over her hips, tangling them in her Ugg boots. She kicked off one boot and freed herself of one pant leg before lowering him fully to the floor.

  His eyes, intense, held hers as he allowed her to pin his wrists above his head against the floor. Angie straddled his hips and slid the crotch of her skimpy panties aside. Widening her knees, parting her thighs, she sank down onto the hot, hard length of him. With a bliss-filled sigh she spread her thighs farther, making him go deep, deeper. And she began to rock her hips, creating friction deep inside the core of her body. Her breaths came fast, faster. She rocked harder. She became slick around his erection. Her body began to tingle. A hot, raw anger exploded, ripping through her gut, driving her wilder. She closed her eyes, put her head back, mouth open wide, panting, her skin going damp. And she rode him hard and fast and half-clothed, forcing her mind back, mentally reliving that very first night she’d spent with him at the Foxy Motel. She gasped suddenly, froze, then cried out as muscle contractions slammed through her in rolling waves, taking control of her body.

  CHAPTER 13

  Maddocks sat beside Angie on the sofa in front of her gas fire. Sipping wine, he listened as she told him first about her meeting with Vedder and Flint, her discipline, then about her trip to Vancouver and her discovery of the case files. She smelled good, fresh from their shower, and she was bundled in a soft white robe, hair damp. Rain ticked against the windows as the clock edged toward midnight. Foghorns sounded balefully out over the water.

  She spoke with a toneless voice, and her complexion was wan, her eyes circled with the darkness of fatigue. She was corralling her emotion again. Only letting it escape through fierce, ang
ry, controlling sex.

  While their coupling had been exhilarating and his orgasm mind-blowing, a disquieting sensation lingered in Maddocks. It reminded him of their first sex together at the Foxy Motel when she’d cuffed him to the bed, straddled him, and ridden him to her heart’s content and then gotten off him before he could come. He’d thought she was going to leave him there, naked and bound to the bed with an aching hard-on. It had made him ravenous for more. He’d wanted to get to know this woman named Angie who’d picked him up in the club expressly to screw him and leave him.

  But he now knew that dominant sex was Angie’s coping mechanism, her addiction. They’d gone beyond that first night. Well beyond. They’d found something tender and vulnerable based on trust. But this … given what she was going through right now, it was a sign of regression. He worried what it might mean for their fledgling and as yet fragile relationship.

  “I can’t do it, Maddocks,” she said, setting her wine glass firmly down on the coffee table next to the envelope she had not yet opened. “Putting on a uniform every day, driving a desk nine to five for an entire year? Preaching to schoolkids? Social media—me?” She cursed softly and stared into the flames. “It’s humiliating,” she said quietly.

  He leaned forward. “If you don’t suck it up, if you quit now, there’s no way you’ll ever get a letter of reference. You’ll never work as a cop again, Angie.”

  Her jaw tightened. She refused to look at him.

  “Hey.” He touched her hand. She tensed and pulled away, reaching instead for her glass. He inhaled deeply. “Listen,” he said softly, “twelve months will go faster than you think. It’ll be over before you know it. And—”

  She swung round to face him. “Don’t. Do not patronize me, Maddocks. Ever.”

  He held her gaze. “It’s still policing work of value—building bonds with kids, creating awareness in young women. It’s an opportunity to get in touch with our constituents, our community. You could teach self-defense. You can make it work, Angie, I know you can. You’re just fighting it on principle right now.”

  “That’s all very well for you to say, Mr. Hot-Shot Homicide Cop who’s leading the task force—an investigation I should be working. Have they offered you Buziak’s job full-time yet? You going to be the big overall MVPD homicide boss now?”

  His gaze pinned hers. The undercurrents of her words swirled dark and potent between them like a lethal undertow. With it surged his own feelings of guilt. She’d done it for him—disobeyed direct orders. Still, there’d been no need to overkill Addams like that. Emptying her clip into Addams’s face, her use of excessive force, was wrong. And the evidence of rage and a blackout—those were worrisome issues. As a boss he could not justifiably overlook the fact that this woman could put other officers in jeopardy in a crisis situation. She’d gotten off lightly. And she needed to visit that police shrink in order to get to the bottom of her hair-trigger rage. Her issues probably stemmed from buried childhood trauma and the more recent tragedy of losing her previous partner on a call, but that didn’t make her safe. It didn’t make the way she’d shot Spencer Addams okay.

  “Let me help you, Angie,” he said, voice low, firm. “We can work through this together. And if you do the probation, it will give you evenings and weekends to work through Voight’s case files. If you stay on the job, you’ll have access to law enforcement databases. By next Christmas this will be over. Four seasons. That’s all.”

  She swallowed. Emotion glittered in her eyes, hard like diamonds. “You can’t help me,” she said softly, coolly. “You’re too busy. What happened today, anyway? Why were you at the correctional center? What kept you from our date?”

  “Between you and me—”

  “Fuck it, Maddocks! Are you serious? You going to say that every time? Who in the hell am I going to tell anyway? Send out a tweet? Blog it from my social media desk?”

  He clenched his jaw, and his pulse kicked up a notch. A little warning began to whisper inside him that maybe he should hold information back from her, but he told her anyway, about the interview with Zaedeen Camus and the plea bargain. The muscles in her neck grew taut as she listened. When he finished, she reached for her glass and took a heavy, hard swig, then sat for a moment staring at the fire. “So the Hells Angels and the Russians?” She cursed softly. “Who went up to Wilkie with you?”

  “A prosecutor and Holgersen.”

  She snorted, refusing to meet his eyes. “So, Kjel Holgersen,” she said so softly it was almost inaudible.

  “He’s a good cop.”

  “Yeah. Right. He can hardly string three coherent words together, but at least he doesn’t go emptying clips into the faces of bad guys. At least he doesn’t try stabbing his partners.”

  Maddocks stared at her, the memory swirling through him—her blackout after they’d questioned the Catholic priest during the Baptist investigation, her trying to stab him outside the downtown cathedral.

  “Angie—”

  She surged abruptly to her feet. “I need sleep. It’s late. And I have a decision to make.”

  The unspoken hung between them. She wanted to sleep and think alone. He was not welcome. Not part of this big decision in her life, as much as he’d been a part of the lead-up to it. A cold feeling sank through him. Maddocks slowly got to his feet. He picked up the envelope he’d brought. “Open it.”

  She hesitated, then took it from him. She lifted the flap and took out a voucher.

  Surprise showed on her face. “These are for a lodge, up north, in the wilderness?”

  “For us. To spend some time together, far away from everything. As soon as we can.”

  The hard emotion in her eyes softened. She swallowed.

  He reached out and cupped her cheek. “You don’t have to do everything alone. Don’t lock me out, Angie. Don’t.”

  Her jaw tensed.

  He nodded slowly, dropped his hand, and reached for his coat, which was draped over the back of a chair. He gave a sharp whistle. “Jack-O—it’s time to go, boy.”

  He shrugged into his coat as Jack-O roused himself and hobbled over. Maddocks hesitated, then turned quickly, bent down, and gripped Angie’s face firmly between two hands. He gave her a hard kiss on the mouth. He felt her stiffen, resist, then yield to his kiss. It sent a punch of relief to his gut—she still responded, still wanted him. Their connection remained, at least on some level. He broke the kiss, held her gaze. “Sometimes you do need to stop fighting.”

  He scooped Jack-O up under his arm and made for the door. It was past midnight as he and Jack-O rode down in the elevator. He knew there was no way Angie Pallorino was going to sleep. She would not be able to resist the siren call of those boxes on her table. This was going to be a rough ride. On all counts.

  He also remembered all the things he loved about her—her independence, strength. Her beauty inside and out. The fire that burned inside her to help the vulnerable. How she could be so gentle if she wasn’t so afraid. Their sex. All reasons he still wanted this to work.

  CHAPTER 14

  THURSDAY, JANUARY 4

  The door snicked shut behind Maddocks and Jack-O. Angie dragged both her hands over her damp hair. What in the hell was she doing? Trying to sabotage this delicate thing between her and Maddocks before it even had a chance to grow? Before he could leave her? She was not being fair to him—this was her problem. The fact he was still working on their case while she’d saved his life and ended up on probation—it was her fault, not his. She needed to own that. She’d dug her own grave because she could have saved him and Ginny without using excessive force in killing Spencer Addams.

  Nevertheless, Maddocks’s compassionate, calm, commanding presence just seemed to rub salt into her own feelings of inadequacy and failure.

  You don’t have to do everything alone.

  Well, yeah, you do have to do some things alone. You come into this life alone, and you go out alone. At the end of the day, it’s just you.

  Angie reached for h
er glass, swigged back the last of the dregs. She then scraped her hair back, tied it up with a hairband, snapped on a fresh pair of crime scene gloves, and returned her attention to the box holding the evidence packets.

  Setting the bag with the teddy bear to one side, she lifted out the next bag. It was marked as containing a purple women’s cardigan. Angie paused as she caught sight of a binder tucked down along the inside of the box. She placed the bagged sweater onto the table and reached for the binder, opened it. The front page itemized everything that was supposed to be inside this box.

  She scanned the list.

  One teddy bear. One girl’s dress. One pair of girls’ underwear. A purple women’s sweater. Dried and vacuum-packed blood samples, ABO blood-type analysis, preserved biological stains taken from the sweater, mounted slides of hair evidence—some short ash-blonde hairs and some long dark hairs. Photographs of bloodied patent fingerprints and handprints from the scene. Images of dusted latents. Photos of Jane Doe’s contusions and mouth wound. Rape kit. Ballistics report. Angie’s blood grew hotter and hotter as she read. This was a breakthrough.

  If there was hair in here, while a trace examiner might have said in the eighties that there was either a match or no match, given new technology, hair samples as small as two millimeters could now be tested for mitochondrial DNA and eventually compared with known individuals. Hair as old as four decades had been successfully tested.

  And preserved samples of blood, semen—if the evidence had been adequately processed and stored, she might get DNA profiles. She should not open another thing. Given that there was indeed preserved biological evidence in this box, she needed to get it straight into the hands of a good forensics lab without further contaminating it. First thing tomorrow she’d call Dr. Sunni Padachaya. The MVPD crime lab head was renowned for her early starts to the day and her late finishes. She’d once informed Angie that she had no life apart from her lab work. Angie got Sunni. Because she didn’t have much of a life apart from her work, either. Which was why it sliced so deep to be put on probation, to risk losing her career.