by LS Sygnet
“Helen, stop it. If I have to throw you over my shoulder and drag you away from here, I’ll do it.” Sparks shot from his eyes.
Tears sprang to mine. The floodgates opened. “She called me a whore, and you’re defending her?”
“No.” His fingers bisected my arm in an iron grip. “What I’m defending is your dignity. The last thing you’re gonna want is a scene in front of hundreds of law enforcement officers who are soaking up your tantrum like a sponge.”
Moisture dripped from my chin.
“Put your head down, and let’s get you home.”
“I can’t drive like this.”
“Clearly,” his voice dropped an octave. Strange the way it soothed me. “Baby, I’m not a whole lot happier with Belle than you are right now, but we’ll figure it out.”
He steered me toward Chris’s sedan.
“Where are we –?”
“Hush. I’m assuming you’d rather have this moment in private with me rather than explain to Mackenzie what’s wrong. Chris can drive him home in the Expedition. We’ll take the long way home in Chris’s car. Deal?”
I nodded.
He had me settled inside a minute later, crouched beside the open passenger door. “Doc, look at me.”
My chin burrowed closer to my chest.
“Honey, don’t pull away now. We’re in this thing together or we’re not. Now’s the time to decide.”
I peeked through tear-spiked lashes. “I love you, Johnny, but this hurts right now, and I’m not very good at sharing this part – at least not until I’ve had a chance to process it.”
“You’ve got three minutes to get there. Chris is waiting with Devlin. I’ll be right back.”
I watched the exhaust from my Expedition snake into the cold winter air while Johnny strode toward it. If there’s such a thing as a walk that could kill, Johnny mastered it. He rapped his knuckles against the window. Air fogged from his lips in terse little bursts when the window opened. There wasn’t enough time between what he said and his departure for anything less than a clipped order. Something like, take Detective Mackenzie to the house. Helen and I will follow in my car.
It was more like two minutes before he was beside me again. Johnny didn’t speak for a long time. We headed for the western outskirts of Downey.
“Where are we going?” I finally asked.
“My house.”
“Johnny, I’m much calmer now. I’m sorry I lost my temper.”
“Well I’m glad for that, but I’m still pissed off.”
“You haven’t even read the article yet.”
“If you felt like she called you a whore because I kissed you goodnight, that’s enough for me. And don’t get me started on the fact that it’s none of her goddamned business what we do on our own time. Bodies aren’t piling up. Not unless Belle’s making a confession.”
“A confession?”
“Sure, why not? She hates gays more than anyone I can think of at the moment. How hard would it be for her to figure out who and what Goddard and Tippet were? Maybe this is her grand scheme to expose my best friend and destroy his career.”
“Isn’t that a little dramatic? So Crevan is gay. Thinks he’s gay. To hear him tell it, he’s lived almost forty years without acting on his urges. What if he’s wrong? What if marriage to that lying, duplicitous bitch merely confused him and made him think doing a guy had to be preferable to women?”
Johnny chuckled softly. “Well, there’s always that possibility. I can’t say that I disagree with the theory at the moment.” His fingers tiptoed across the front seat and brushed over my knee. “Are you really all right?”
“Getting there. Thanks for not letting me make another scene back there.”
“Any time, sweetheart. What did she have to say, other than showing the world our unparalleled chemistry?”
“Allow me.”
I got as far as the nasty innuendo concerning my relationship with Devlin and his discharge from MSUH straight to my house and Johnny’s temper exploded. The reverberation from his fist against the steering wheel rang with a low hum so loud, it hurt my ears.
“I take it back,” he snarled. “Let’s go kill her.”
Tempting as that sounded, Dad’s life was an example of why certain activities had to remain solo. “Should I regurgitate your advice?”
“I know,” he grumbled, “but she’s gotta know that OSI won’t take this shit and turn the other cheek. Chris is gonna go ballistic.”
It sort of begged the question. How many officers in Darkwater Bay read the morning edition before they went to Ned’s funeral? There were no icy stares, no snickers when I walked through the church on Devlin’s arm. Nothing from anyone that could’ve been remotely construed as out of the ordinary.
Except for Tony Briscoe. The hint of a notion that he was behind this smear campaign fanned the flames of my simmering temper again. This time, I had enough rationality to keep my thoughts quiet. Part of me knew that if I ever had hard evidence that he set this ball into motion that the consequences would be dire. For both of us.
“Doc, your silence is screaming things I really wish you wouldn’t consider.”
My eyes snapped into focus on his profile. “I’m not considering anything.”
“Damned if I know how I know this, but I do,” he said. “Don’t blame Briscoe. Even if he turned Belle onto the link between our murders – which I highly doubt because I think he hates her more than you, me and Crevan combined – we need evidence, and if we get it, there’s a process that deals with this sort of thing.”
“He convinced you that I would’ve really murdered Mitch Southerby in cold blood, didn’t he?” The accusation hung between us like a great chasm that could never be bridged. “How can you possibly believe that you care about me if you think I could do something like that?”
How indeed. He not only answered that question beyond my comprehension last October, but I feared he was on the cusp of remembering that very act that proved how far he’d go to protect me.
“There’s a huge difference between the heat of passion and premeditation. Southerby was a reaction because he hurt me. This is different.”
“I said you’re wrong.”
“And I believe I’ve told you many times that I know you, Doc, inside, outside, all the dark little corners in that mind of yours where maybe you’re even too afraid to glimpse.”
“You’re right.”
“I know I am.”
“Not about me,” I said. “You’re crazy.”
“I never said I was crazy. I said I don’t know how I know it, but I do. Let me handle Briscoe. Let me get to the bottom of how this happened. Let the brass discipline him if this was a malicious attack aimed at embarrassing you, me, the department and the integrity of the police in general.”
“Fine.”
“I promise you. If he so much as hinted that you’ve been unfaithful to me with Mackenzie, we’re done.”
A knot swelled in my throat. “Why? You know I wasn’t –”
“I meant Tony and me. That’s a step too far.”
Of course it would be – in insane jealousy land. He missed the point, one which I thought I had made abundantly clear to him long ago. Memory loss is a bitch, I guess. I reached for his hand and peeled it away from the steering wheel. There was no struggle.
My lips grazed the ridges of knuckles. “I know I told you that there are parts of our history that I’d rather stay lost, Johnny, but this isn’t one of them.”
The car slowed and swerved toward the curb on the residential street near Johnny’s childhood home before it rolled to a stop. Glazed eyes turned on me. “What’s that, baby?”
“I asked you once if you were turned off by my lack of sexual experience.”
He swallowed hard. “You were married, Helen.”
“Yeah, but there wasn’t anyone before my husband, and only one after him. One wouldn’t be missing the mark too far if they said that Rick and I didn’t share a very
close marital relationship.”
Blue eyes burned hotly into my flesh. “Then I suppose the salient question is the identity of guy number two.”
“He was you, Johnny. So when she called me a whore, she was so far off the mark –”
He jerked me into his arms and speared one hand through the back of my hair. “Only me? Me and some fool who didn’t have the sense to appreciate what he had?”
“You’re assuming that Rick loved me. He didn’t.”
“What an idiot,” he murmured.
“Johnny, I’d really like to talk about something else. You were planning to fill me in on the developments this morning. The Tippets?”
“I’d rather –”
“And God only knows if Belle Conall is hiding in the bushes with a photographer snapping more photos. We could be looking at tomorrow morning’s sensational response from OSI and Downey Division.”
He released me with a reluctant sigh. “I suppose this means I can’t ever touch you in public again, because heaven forbid someone might see us.”
“What happened with Randy and Joanne Tippet?”
Johnny grinned. “I love the way you do that without even saying the words.”
“Yeah, yeah.” My focus is apparently unrivaled in this neck of the woods.
“It was disturbing at best,” Johnny sobered and began to fill in details I had only imagined. Truth they say, is stranger than fiction. It comes as no surprise that it dwarfs what horrors my literal mind can conceive.
“There were no tears, no demands for justice. They simply sat there and stared at me like I told them somebody ran over a squirrel that dashed out of their front yard into the street. It freaked me out to be honest. So I asked if they had any questions about what happened.”
“Oh boy.”
“Yeah,” he shook his head slowly. “Tippet said it didn’t really matter what transpired since in their eyes, Robert Tippet died when he was seventeen years old. The notification by the police was little more than long overdue.”
“They didn’t blame Alex?”
“That’s where the emotion entered the equation, and was the main reason I missed the service at the church. Joanne Tippet went nuts. She said that any righteous God would’ve taken both of them out at the same time, that whatever tool God used to erase Robert’s existence had missed a golden opportunity to remove the root of evil from her precious family, to erase the stain that was the last remaining blot on her otherwise flawless life in the eyes of this God that I really hope doesn’t exist.”
“None of them do,” I muttered.
“Helen, we don’t all worship that vengeful sky monster. Some of us actually believe that God loves us, that he gave us free will as a gift, but in doing so requires that we accept the consequences for less than stellar choices.”
Christ – no pun intended – but if Johnny really felt that way, he must’ve believed that I couldn’t have killed Rick. He’d expect me to accept the consequences just like anyone else.
“Not the point, but whatever. Why did that make you late?”
“I sent a team from the state police out to pick him up.”
“Who?”
“Waters,” Johnny said. “Correct me if you disagree, but that statement sort of bumped the Tippets to the top of the suspect list. I’d rather not see the next headline insinuate that someone died because I ignored a threat to his life.”
“Flawless logic,” I said. “Then again, we’ll have to tie their motive toward Bobbi to Kyle Goddard’s murder.”
“It’s a no brainer, Doc. They blamed Kyle for corrupting Bobbi just as much as they blamed Alex for providing a roof over Bobbi’s head, clothes, food and most of all, a forum that let him ... how did Randy Tippet put it? – advertise his abomination publicly.”
“He used that word?”
“I’ve got it on tape,” Johnny said. “If I were to cite the real abomination, I’d call it on their conditional love. If I ever had a kid, I guarantee that he could’ve grown up to be Jeffery fucking Dahmer and I wouldn’t have abandoned him. There would’ve been consequences for sure, but he’d have known that I loved him and hated what he did.”
My gut twisted into ten knots. Yeah, I believed him. What baffled me was the sense that continued to grow that I hadn’t fooled Johnny one bit with any of my lies.
Perhaps it was the absence of evidence that prevented him from arresting me and putting all that tough love into practice.
The battle of brain and heart waged anew. Suddenly, keeping him close to me seemed like tempting fate or putting the final nail in a coffin whose existence I could no longer bear.
“Doc?”
“Yeah,” I said softly. The dark blue fabric of my skirt held an inexplicable fascination.
“Did you disagree with what I said?”
Wisely, I suggested we get back home. He had more potential witnesses to interview after all.
Chapter 28
It’s funny how love makes us do stupid things. As a species I mean. Honesty has never been particularly important to me, but I know how much Johnny values it. Therefore it means something more to me now. Hell, it seems like my entire circle of friends for my adult life has included people who lack the liar gene that I’m pretty sure Wendell passed on to me at conception.
When David Levine was my closest confident and mentor at the FBI, I had the presence of mind to keep him at arm’s length, to remain so detached that the boundaries were completely clear. He knew how far he could go pressing for a deeper level of confidence. Somehow, after Rick died, I lost that skill.
Religious folk would probably call it a reawakened conscience. I don’t doubt that it happened, but my initial instincts have so far remained intact. Lie. Run if necessary. Always have plan B in place, ready to disappear and assume a new identity if need be. If that day comes, I won’t be leaving under the old assumed name of Diana Farber. She died when I landed in Darkwater Bay, mostly because Johnny knows that lie. He doesn’t understand why she existed in the first place, and I was content to let him believe his assumptions were correct.
Next time I run, I won’t even be female. The idea occurred to me on the drive back to my house with Johnny after Ned’s funeral. What can I say? Real life continues to inspire the fiction I may require at a later date, especially if Johnny’s memories come flooding back and he can’t accept his role in covering up Rick’s murder. If Tippet and Goddard could successfully pass for women, I’ll cut off my hair and put on a bulky fat suit to pass for male in a New York minute.
One thing my conversation with Johnny made me realize. I don’t fear the consequences for the crime I committed half as much as I dread the disappointment in his eyes if he ever learns the whole truth. There’s still the matter of Danny Datello lying out there, an unuttered threat to my freedom. I doubt he knows anything that would truly implicate me in Rick’s murder, but coupled with Briscoe’s suspicions now, an accusation would damage me to the point of stirring up attention I don’t want again. Not just for me, but for Johnny too.
God forbid that anyone puts two and two together and realizes the mastermind behind Johnny’s crime couldn’t be anyone other than my father, who he visited mere hours before this alleged weapon used to kill my ex-husband was discovered. There’s coincidence, and then there’s compelling circumstantial evidence. I’ve seen criminals go down on theories much thinner and without as many dots that connect easily.
I suppose that’s why plan B is so prominent in my thoughts today, because these pieces are inextricably linked in my mind now, and I feel the hounds nipping at my heels. The growls might be indistinct to the rest of the world. In my all knowing ears, the message is more than clear. It’s just a matter of time before this very tenuous house of cards comes crashing down around me.
The focus that should be on the murders of Bobbi Tippet and Kyle Goddard is nonexistent. When Johnny dropped me off at the house this morning, I refused to discuss the matter of Belle Conall’s libel and its impact on the po
lice and OSI’s ability to investigate what shaped up to look exactly like a hate crime. Dev and Chris saw the morning edition of the Sentinel when they got to my place. I waved it off, kissed Johnny’s cheek and told him I trusted him to do whatever he thought was best.
You see, I have more pressing matters at hand. Love has dulled my life long education. I need to snap out of it and be prepared. That’s why I locked myself in the office and started working on building my escape identity.
God knows I love the MacBook I bought last spring to replace the one Lowe’s goons stole from my hotel room. It is going to have an unfortunate electrical accident just as soon as I’m done becoming whoever it is that will replace Helen Eriksson if I have to leave Darkwater Bay.
Head and heart. They are at battle harder than ever before. The only hope for a cease fire is for my brain to convince these sappy emotions that this is merely an insurance policy. All things being equal, there’s a pretty decent chance that nobody will put all of the pieces together and realize that the FBI was right to look at me for Rick’s murder. Let’s face it. Most cops are a little bit paranoid, but I dwarf them in that regard. Wendell’s lessons have kept me prepared for most of my life.
Johnny Orion’s influence has dulled that survival skill. I’m not sure how to remedy the situation, since something as small as eye contact decimates my resolve to keep him happily in the dark.
On one hand, the notion of a clean slate, telling him the whole truth and hoping that he loves me enough to keep my secret is a siren’s song almost too strong to resist.
Almost.
On the other hand, the last viable option to placate my heart is to perpetuate the Rick suicide lie I pedaled successfully in October. I don’t know if Johnny will ever reach the point where he’s willing to cloak my sins even with nagging doubt, but it’s one thing I cannot count on. Therefore, the lie might have to come before he remembers what he really thought back in the day.
He was pretty adamant about consequences, that they don’t erase love, but they don’t mitigate the circumstances either. Johnny doesn’t remember that he knows Datello was at my wedding to Rick, that I was little more than the mob’s insurance policy in the first place.
