Bear Claw Lawman

by Jessica Andersen

  But was that a role, a manipulation? He had promised to be himself with her, after all. And, damn it, he didn’t know the answer to that one, because wasn’t acting a fact of life? The moment somebody else came into the room—or on the phone, the video chat, whatever—the people involved were acting, juggling agendas, trying to get their end results.

  The way he saw it, it wasn’t so much about putting on a role, but about how much effort it took.

  Heck, that was one of the things he’d liked about their time together—he hadn’t had to think about his performance. It had just flowed, felt easy, felt right.

  And this, too, felt right, though there was an edge of danger to the rightness, as if something inside him was warning that this wasn’t smart, even though it seemed it should be.

  Ignoring those warnings, he nodded. “Yeah. I’d like to hear about it, if you wouldn’t mind telling me.”

  The look she shot him suggested he wasn’t the only one who wasn’t sure this was a good idea, or why they were even doing it. They had agreed to move on, hadn’t they? He didn’t take it back, though. And after a moment, she nodded, pushed away the pad Thai, refilled her wineglass and said, “Okay. Here goes.”

  * * *

  “YOU KNOW THAT I’M A WIDOW, that I was married to a SWAT cop,” Jenn began. “Terrence Prynne. Terry. We met through my father, of course, and clicked right away. We kept things pretty casual at first, because I was still in school—he was six years older and already established on the force. Once I graduated, though, and got my job—he helped out there, though I didn’t know it for sure at the time—we got more serious. He asked me to marry him on Thanksgiving, in front of my family.” She paused. “At the time, I thought it was because he knew how important they were to me.” Later she had realized he enjoyed playing to an audience. “We had a June wedding and a perfect marriage…at least it seemed that way to me.”

  It had been a long while since she’d thought about those days, and this was the first time since his death that she could remember thinking back without being furious. She was still angry, yes, but it had mellowed to disillusionment rather than ire. He was gone, after all. He couldn’t apologize or make amends—which he probably wouldn’t have done, anyway—and she couldn’t tell him what she thought of him.

  She just needed to let it go.

  Realizing that made it easier for her to continue. “Looking back, I probably should have seen the signs—the way he could buy a boat, a fancy car and all the boy toys he ever wanted, and still had enough money for us to have a nice house in a nice neighborhood. We had separate accounts. I bought the groceries and staples, he handled the mortgage and utilities. At the time, I thought it seemed like a reasonable division of the finances. It wasn’t until later, when I was on my own, that I found out I didn’t have any real credit history of my own because he’d been paying the big bills. More, he was hiding money.”

  She stalled, wondering whether this was enough. Wondering whether it was too much. Wondering whether it was the wine talking, and if she would regret all this in the morning.

  Nick nudged the pad Thai back toward her. “You should eat more. You’ve had a hell of a day.”

  She didn’t know why she obeyed, or why taking a bite and pausing a moment to chew and swallow made it easier for her to speak. “We’d been married almost four years when it happened. We had been talking about starting a family, but I was hesitating. I’d like to say it was because something deep inside me knew things weren’t right between us, but that would be a case of hindsight being twenty-twenty. The truth is, I loved my job and I wasn’t sure I was ready to cut back on overtime and curtail things in order to be a mom.”

  It occurred to her then that maybe she was more like Nick than she’d wanted to admit, at least in that regard. She hadn’t wanted Terry’s baby enough to rearrange her life, especially knowing that she would be the one cutting back her hours, organizing the day care and being the full-time parent along with a full-time job. Meanwhile, he would keep going out on calls, keep leaving her up late at night, waiting for him to call or, worse, for one of his buddies to knock.

  “I didn’t want to be a single parent,” she said softly, realizing for the first time that it had been as simple as that, and as complicated. “Anyway, things were fine when he left that morning. I kissed him at the door and headed to work, not having any hint that my life was about to blow up.” It hadn’t been a phone call or a knock on the door, after all. She had been in the lab, heard the hot call go out on the dispatch radio they kept turned low…and twenty minutes later, she’d heard the shout of “officer down”…and then Terry’s name. “I knew things weren’t ever going to be the same after that. I just didn’t know how bad it was going to get.”

  She went for another bit of pad Thai, was surprised to find the carton empty.

  “Here.” Nick nudged his orange chicken in her direction.

  “I’m not really hungry anymore.” She took a nibble, though. “Losing him was the worst thing I’d ever been through, bar none. He left that morning with everything fine, and then…he wasn’t there anymore.” She had forgotten that part, she realized. Or it had become so much less important given what followed. “The last thing I said to him was about garbage day and recycling, because we’d missed the week before and I needed his help lugging a dead AC to the curb.”

  Little things. Normal things.

  How had her life felt so real and solid when there had been so many lies going on underneath the surface? Anger kicked, as it always did, along with self-disgust.

  “Anyway,” she said. “It wasn’t until a few weeks later, after the funeral, that the bad stuff started to come out.” She had been back at work by then, enduring her coworkers’ painful sympathy, her parents’ helpless

  comfort.

  “He was on the take,” Nick said quietly. “Wasn’t he?”

  She cut him a sharp look. “I thought you said you didn’t crack the files.”

  “Tucker mentioned it, asked if I wanted the story. I turned him down.”

  She nodded. Of course Tucker would’ve said something, especially once she and Nick got involved. No doubt the whole department knew some version of the story—she hadn’t kept it hidden. She had only told her version of it to Matt, though. And now Nick. She didn’t know why she was telling him, really. Just because he’d told her the truth about their breakup, that didn’t make them friends.

  “Terry had sold out,” she confirmed, surprised that it still hurt a little to say. Not just because she’d fallen for his lies, but because he’d been a SWAT cop, a hero. And heroes weren’t supposed to do things like that. “It turned out he’d been taking bribes all along, a little at a time. He’d tip off a raid, slow down a hot call, make sure there was a way out for one of his people… . And I didn’t have a clue. I’d never suspected it for a second.” She shook her head, disgusted all over again at both of them.

  “You loved him.” Nick’s voice was inflectionless.

  She didn’t try to read his expression. “That, and I trusted him.” Which she’d learned were two different things. Love came from the heart, trust straight from the gut. And after Terry, she’d stopped believing in both of them, by far preferring less complicated, safer things like desire and companionship.

  Nerves stirring at the thought that those, too, had gotten complicated for her, she continued, “It got worse, though, because there weren’t just payoffs to him…some were made to look like they had gone to me.” She took a deep breath as his eyes darkened. “And they coincided with times the evidence failed in big investigations.”

  “Failed?”

  “Sometimes science isn’t…well, a science. Tests can bomb. Contamination can make good-looking evidence useless. More, it’s not an analyst’s job to connect the dots, at least it wasn’t back in the big city.” In Bear Claw, they were far more involved in the actual cases. “We gave our findings to the detectives and they took it from there. But sometimes the way an analyst w
rites a report can influence what the cops take away from it. There were questions.” Accusations. Dark looks in the hallway and whispers around every corner.

  “You didn’t do it.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Of course not. I’m here, aren’t I?” Irritation flashed quick and bright. “Matt wouldn’t have hired me if I had messed with evidence.”

  “That wasn’t what I meant.” A grim-faced Nick looked like he was slowly simmering now, like he wanted to take a piece out of Terry.

  She could relate, even appreciate the sentiment, but she couldn’t deal with the way it made her want to lean into him, lean on him. Not when they were sitting at her breakfast bar and she’d just polished off his orange chicken and her second glass of wine.

  So she said simply, “No. I didn’t do it. Terry was working with two other guys in the department—a detective and an analyst. They had been covering for each other for years, and when Terry…died…” Why did she still have to pause before saying that? “Well, when things started coming out, they went into damage-control mode and shifted things around to make it look like Terry and I were working together as a team, that there wasn’t anybody else involved. They almost got away with it, too.”

  She didn’t want to remember the suspicious looks, the men and women she’d considered friends avoiding her eyes in the halls, as if they were afraid they might catch crooked copping.

  “Anyway, Internal Affairs investigated, of course, but Terry’s partners were very good at covering their tracks. Meanwhile, the defense attorneys were dog piling on our old cases, trying to get everything I had ever touched thrown out.” That had been the worst, thinking of all those criminals getting a pass because of something she hadn’t even done, something only her parents believed her innocent of. Swallowing hard, she made herself keep going. “I got to keep my job because of my father—not just because he was the chief’s fishing buddy, but because of his not-too-subtle hints that we would sue if they fired me outright. So they didn’t. They turfed me to admin.” Another basement, this one with no posters, no friends, at a time when she had badly needed them. “Things were…difficult.”

  “Hello, understatement,” Nick said matter-of-factly, as if he realized she didn’t want sympathy right now, couldn’t have handled it.

  He was right, of course. It had been hell, and she had been sorely tempted to give up, walk out, go hide somewhere while the investigation ran its course. But she had refused to blacken her father’s reputation any further, refused to let her mother see her quit. So she stuck it out, even though some days it had taken everything she had just to get out of bed and go to work.

  She hesitated, knowing it’d be safer if she just stuck with the facts and let him read what he wanted to—or didn’t want to—between the lines. There was a new tension in the air, though, one that reminded her of earlier on the roof, making this feel more important than she had expected, even though their boundary lines had been drawn.

  Aware that he was waiting, fiddling a little with one of the fortune cookies that had come with their meal, she finally said, “It was awful. I hated going to work, hated waking up in the morning and knowing I was going to have to sit through another day of looks and whispers, and probably more questions from IA.” She paused. “I didn’t get to grieve, really, because I didn’t just lose Terry, I lost all the good memories of him and the two of us together. It had all been lies, after all. When we were together, he was the perfect husband, the perfect partner…but the rest of the time he was someone else. Not just a cop—I get that they need to have a poker face, maybe more than one—but a crooked cop. How many roles was he playing?”

  Nick shifted. “I don’t—”

  “I used to wonder whether that was part of why he married me,” she said, not letting him finish. Not wanting to talk about the parallels between him and Terry right now. “Whether I was part of him looking respectable. Heck, they were talking about him being chief someday.”

  “Sounds like you weren’t the only one he fooled.”

  She nodded, swallowing past the sudden lump in her throat. “True enough. But I was the one closest to him. At least I thought I was.” And how wrong she had been. “When IA finally cracked the case, it turned out there had been other women, too. Classy women, singles who’d thought he was a businessman of some sort. He used them for cover, for sex, for…hell, I don’t know. He used them, used me, used all of us. He was gone, though, which meant I never got to blame him for it, not really. And by the time IA figured it all out and busted his real partners, the damage was done. The department was in shambles, the crime lab and all its cases broken open…and even though I’d been cleared, most everybody still treated me like it was my fault. Like I should’ve seen what was going on with Terry, should’ve blown the whistle myself.”

  And maybe they were right.

  “So you left.”

  “At least my father’s name was cleared.” Though it hadn’t really mattered in the end, as her parents had left town soon after she did, driving a leased RV and claiming they’d always wanted to see the rest of the lower forty-eight. “But, yeah, I left. I moved, got paid a ridiculous amount to manage a paternity testing lab, and hid out, licking my wounds. It took six months before I started waking up, a year before I was bored senseless.” With the work, the people, the city. “And now I’m here.”

  She looked around her apartment, which she’d chosen for its view of the skyline and the distant ski slopes, invisible now in the darkness but gorgeous from dawn to dusk. Just now, the city lights twinkled like a giant stretch of holiday lights, making her think of all the people out there who lived in Bear Claw, depended on it being as safe as the cops could make it.

  “It’s a good place,” he agreed, though they both knew he meant a good place for her, not him.

  “You’re right,” she said, forcing aside the pang. “It’s a good place, and I want to stay here. I’m grateful that Matt gave me the chance, grateful that Alyssa and the others not only okayed my hiring, they’ve embraced me, made me one of their own. Even this.” Her gesture encompassed Nick, then the street below. “I know they’re hoping the Investor will come after me, and I don’t mind. But it matters that everybody is being so protective of me. Even you.”

  The last two words hung there for a moment, suddenly seeming to mean more than she’d intended.

  “Jenn…” he began, then trailed off.

  “It’s okay,” she said too quickly. “You don’t have to say anything—it’s been over for a long time, and for the most part, I’ve moved on. I guess I wanted you to know about Terry so you’d understand why I’m so attached to Bear Claw…and why it bothers me to see you change from one minute to the next, putting on different faces depending on who you’re dealing with.”

  He reached out and took her hand in a clasp that sent a rush of heat through her body. His eyes were a deep, vivid blue, his hair free now of its tieback, falling loose to his shoulders in thick waves, his expression a mix of anger and regret. “I’m sorry as hell that you had to go through that. Part of me wishes he hadn’t died, because then I could track him down and take some payback out of his worthless skin.”

  It shouldn’t have made her feel better to picture it, to know that he would have beaten up Terry if he could.

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said, not letting herself acknowledge the little lift beneath her heart. “What’s past is past, and it made me the person I am today, put me in the place I’m in right now. Besides, this is me, remember? I can handle myself. Except maybe when it comes to homicidal drug lords—then I’m going to need your help.”

  “You’ve got it. Hell, you can have whatever I can give you, Jenn. I just wish…”

  “Yeah,” she said as that little moment of almost happiness slipped away, lost to the reality of the situation. “Me, too.” She wished she wasn’t stuck here with him, trying to pretend that everything was okay when they both knew it wasn’t. She wished she could remember the Investor’s face, wi
shed this was already over, that he was in jail and she could go back to making a life for herself, here in Bear Claw. Alone.

  Suddenly unable to sit still any longer, she rose and started clearing the cartons from their dinner. “Well, it’s getting late.” Not that she was tired. She just didn’t want to sit out there with him anymore, wishing for the impossible.

  “Yeah. I’ll probably work for a bit, then turn in.” He didn’t call her on the cowardice, though the look in his eyes said they both knew what was going on.

  She hesitated, glancing at the couch and remembering all too well that he didn’t fit on it. Not horizontally, anyway.

  Following her gaze, he lifted a shoulder. “It’ll be fine.”

  “You’ll be in agony.”

  “I’ll crash on the floor.”

  “Like I said.” She looked back at the bedroom, felt her head spin a little and knew the second glass of wine had caught up with her. “We could share. Platonic. Separate blankets. That sort of thing.”

  “Jenn…” He stared at her, but he didn’t say no.

  “We’re both adults, and I’d say we’ve covered a lot of ground today.” Had she really woken up in the mountains? God, that seemed like forever ago. Since then, he had saved her, kissed her, pushed her away, apologized and promised to protect her. Was it any surprise she was having trouble walking away from him now?

  That, and she was a little drunk. Drunk enough that she didn’t stop herself from saying, “Please? I really don’t want to be alone tonight.”

  Chapter Nine

  Nick’s pause was long and telling, so long that Jenn knew he was trying to find the right words to turn her down.