by Ken Casper
“I’ll do my best,” Derek said, “but I can’t promise anything. The sheer volume of information—”
“This is important,” Jeff reminded him. “Yellowcake in the wrong hands—”
“Could make the twin towers look tame.”
“Provided, of course, Kelsey’s recollection of what happened is accurate.”
“She doesn’t lie,” Derek snapped.
“I’m not suggesting she does,” Jeff said, “but one thing you’ll learn in police work is that people’s memories are often flawed. Eyewitness accounts can be very unreliable, especially after they’ve been filtered through a traumatic series of events.”
“There’s nothing wrong with her memory.”
“I guess you would know.”
Derek’s expression hardened. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I understand you two were pretty close in school. Her mother tells me she expected you to get married. Why didn’t you?”
Years of interrogating bad actors or just trying to eke information out of unwilling subjects had taught Jeff that sympathetic silence often accomplished more than a direct question.
Derek slouched into the visitor’s chair. “I was waiting until the night of our graduation to give her a ring. I thought it would be more romantic. I guess I waited too long.”
“Do you think your proposal would have been unexpected?”
“No, we’d talked about getting married, having kids, even where we wanted to live. I couldn’t afford to buy a house in the Memorial district like her folks, and I’ll probably never make enough to own a mansion in River Oaks, like her grandparents, but we could have done all right.”
“She’s an heiress. She has money,” Jeff pointed out.
He shifted his jaw. “We’d already decided to live on our earnings, mine and hers, at least until we had kids.”
“Sounds like a good plan. So how come you didn’t ask her on graduation night?”
“She changed. She pushed me away, wouldn’t let me get close to her.”
“Why?”
The intensity in Derek’s dark eyes dimmed, as if he were searching inside, not out. “I don’t know. Maybe because she was ashamed of doing so badly in her finals. She was about to graduate magna cum laude, then.. .she barely passed her exams.”
“Did she often freeze up on tests?”
“Not Kelsey. She had one of the highest grade point averages on record. Then, in a matter of a week, she blew it.”
Catherine had mentioned Kelsey graduating cum laude. Jeff had been impressed with that; he hadn’t realized it represented a tumble from an even higher peak.
“So what happened?” Under other circumstances, Jeff might have conjectured that she’d met someone else, but her going into a convent seemed to nix that theory.
Derek shook his head. “I don’t know. But she went into such a depression afterward that she hid away from everyone. Including me. Especially me.”
“She didn’t explain?”
“Claimed she panicked, kept apologizing for letting everybody down. I was disappointed for her, but I didn’t care about her grades. She drove off after getting her diploma without telling anyone where she was going and didn’t come home that night. Her parents were as frantic as I was. Mrs. Tanner . . . The chief even put out an unofficial bulletin for her. Kelsey showed up the next day and announced she was going to become a nun. I found out about it from her father. She didn’t even have the guts to tell me herself.”
“Had she ever talked about doing this before?”
“Not once.”
“What was her father’s reaction?”
“He said to give her space, that she was obviously upset and needed time to calm down, sort things out and forgive herself.”
“Did you agree with him?”
He lifted his shoulders in a defeated shrug. “What choice did I have? I couldn’t very well climb the convent walls and drag her to the altar.”
Jeff chuckled, hoping to lighten the mood. “No. I suppose those days are gone.”
Derek’s face remained stern.
“Why do you think she bombed? Was she overconfident? Did she just not bother to study?”
“She studied all the time. The weekend before exams, she went to the compound to cram.”
“Compound?”
“The Tanner family retreat up at Lake Conroe. Kelsey took me there once. A dozen acres with a cabin.” Derek scoffed. “Hardship living by Tanner standards. Only three bedrooms, two baths, a kitchen and a living room. At least double the size of the place I grew up in.”
A note of bitterness crept into his words, a slip Jeff suspected was rare. Straightening his shoulders, the young cop added, “Anyway, she went there to study.”
“Did you go with her?”
“I told you, she went alone. I had exams coming up, too.”
Jeff smiled. “Yeah, being cooped up with a beautiful woman in an isolated cabin for a weekend, I wouldn’t get much studying done, either, except maybe anatomy.”
Derek sprang from his seat. “She’s not like that.” His hands were curled into tight fists.
“Hey, calm down, guy,” Jeff urged, baffled by the explosive reaction.
“I’ve never touched her, not that way. She’s a virgin,” Derek blurted out, then averted his eyes. “She said she was saving herself for our wedding night.”
Jeff nearly gaped. It was a rare admission and raised a plethora of questions. Kelsey may be a virgin, but he doubted the tough kid from the ghetto was. Did he seek physical gratification with someone else? Had Kelsey found out? Was that why she dumped him? If she’d been saving herself for him, as he claimed, catching him fooling around with some tramp could explain her depression.
Maybe Catherine ought to delve a little deeper into Derek Pager’s personal history. In the meantime, Jeff had a visit to make to city hall.
LATE THAT SUNDAY EVENING Catherine was finally able to get hold of Risa Taylor at home. She and Grady Wilson who was also a cop, had finally been able to coordinate their schedules so that they had several days off together. They’d spent them in New Orleans.
“It’s as hot and sticky there as here,” Risa said. “If we had any sense we would have gone north, far north.”
“But they wouldn’t have good Cajun food and mint juleps there,” Catherine pointed out.
“Yeah. Or the jazz. What’s up?”
“As a matter of fact, I want to ask a favor.”
“Anything, Chief, you know that.”
“I’m trying to find a vagrant by the name of Harvey Stuckey.” She gave a brief rundown of the story he’d told Abby and a rookie about seeing Jordan collapse.
“I assume you want this off the record.”
“Until I can talk to him personally and determine how credible he is. Abby’s convinced he’s telling the truth, but—”
“If he’s an alkie, his idea of truth may be different than yours,” Risa observed. “But I understand. I’ll ask Grady to put out a few quiet feelers, too, if that’s okay. Have you got anyone else working on this?”
Catherine wasn’t ready to out Jeff yet. That would come later. “I’ve already talked to Mei Lu, but working white-collar crime, she isn’t likely to run into this guy.”
“I’m supposed to meet with Lucy and Crista tomorrow after work for drinks.” Lucy worked in missing persons and Crista was on the Chicano squad. “Wish you could join us, but I know you have other things on your plate right now. Do you mind if I tell them about this and ask them to keep their eyes and ears open? All hush-hush, of course.”
“Thanks, Risa. That would really help. Unwinding with a cool one sounds wonderful. Maybe one of these days . . . I was getting ready to call them—”
“Consider it done.”
“I feel so bad about not keeping better in touch with the group. I guess the last time we were all together was at Jordan’s funeral.”
“Just remember we’re always here for you, Catherine.”
> It felt good to be called by her name instead of rank.
“That means a lot. Thank you.”
Catherine hung up the phone with a sense of longing for the days before she was made chief, when she and her female students from the academy had been tight, when they shared girl talk and sat around a table in their favorite watering hole, bitching about the male chauvinist pigs they had to work with.
The bond had faltered when Risa was accused of killing her partner. They’d mended the breach since then, but the old sense of “us against them” hadn’t been completely recaptured. Catherine’s position as police chief had prevented her from providing the kind of close personal support she’d wanted to give. Maybe this joint effort would help them close ranks again.
“WHAT DO YOU KNOW about Jordan’s last meeting with the mayor?” Jeff asked.
Fifteen minutes after Catherine arrived home from the office Monday evening Jeff had called to ask if he could come over. Of course she said yes, then changed her clothes with a strange feeling of anticipation.
Her crying jag in Jeff’s arms two days before had stirred needs she’d managed to sublimate till then. A year was a long time to go without physical contact, especially when the previous twenty-five had been filled with touching and being touched.
“It was to discuss coverage of the upcoming school board election.” she reminded Jeff. They were standing in the kitchen clutching cold soda cans.
“Jordan told you that beforehand?”
“He got a call from the mayor that morning while we were getting dressed. We were both running late.” Because we’d made love—for the last time. “I confirmed it with the mayor afterward. I wanted to know everything that happened to him that morning.” She moved over to the breakfast nook, sat down and peered up at Jeff. “I explained all this to you the other day.”
“Did you know Buster Rialto was also there?”
She gaped at him. “Rialto? No, I didn’t. Why? And how did you find out?”
“Sally, the mayor’s secretary, is an old friend of mine. It seems the school board issue was a subterfuge. The real purpose of the meeting was to mediate an agreement between Rialto and your husband for the Sentinel to hold off publishing the discrepancy in the amount of yellowcake stored in Rialto’s warehouse until an independent investigation could be completed.”
“Wait a minute. The editorial announcing that wasn’t published. How did the mayor even know Jordan was aware of the discrepancy?”
“Exactly.” He tipped his can. She watched his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed.
“Jordan would never have agreed,” she insisted, disconcerted by her reaction to Jeff, by the temptation to stare, to soak up the energy he exuded.
“Sally didn’t catch everything, but from what she did hear, Jordan flat-out refused, said it would take too long and get swept under the rug without media pressure.”
Catherine forced herself to turn away, to gaze out the bay window—at anything but the man standing a few feet away.
She wasn’t surprised the mayor had deceived her. Stan Walbrun was first and foremost a politician. Telling her what she expected to hear would be second nature to him. The growing feeling of being surrounded by conspirators was depressing.
“Do you mind if we go outside?” she asked. “I haven’t done any gardening in ages and I need the therapy.”
The sun was setting. Perhaps half an hour of decent light remained. She led him through the back door, onto the gray flagstone patio and around the corner to the potting shed she and Jordan had built together.
“Your yard is beautiful,” Jeff said.
“Thanks to Emilio. He’s in his late seventies and doesn’t move very fast, but somehow everything gets done.”
“Slow and steady. There’s a lot to be said for that.”
The innocuous statement suddenly conjured up the kind of erotic images she had no right to be contemplating.
From the workbench she picked up a flower basket and a plastic bucket containing garden tools and made her way to the rose garden outside her bedroom.
“The big question—” she cut a long pink hybrid tea “—is how Rialto knew Jordan was going to blow the whistle on the missing barrels one day after he’d met Summers, who just happened to fall off his roof that evening.”
“Could Jordan have discussed it with someone, someone who would relay the information to either the mayor or Buster Rialto?”
“I spoke to everybody who was at the editorial meeting that morning.” She snipped off dead heads and dropped them in the bottom of the bucket. “All they mentioned was the upcoming school board election and which candidates they would endorse. No one said a thing about yellowcake, the Superfund or the harbor cleanup.” She cut another rose and placed it beside the first.
“But you couldn’t specifically ask about it, either, since you didn’t know.”
“No, but I gave each of the staff adequate opportunity to introduce the subject. I spoke to them individually, so someone would surely have commented on it, unless they were all in on the conspiracy.”
Jeff picked up the basket and held it for her when she measured out another blossom, this one a cheerful yellow. “How about reporters? Jordan must have assigned this story to someone.”
“He might have given the story to Curtis Rainey, but Rainey was in Afghanistan at the time, covering the war. He wasn’t due back for several days.”
“Yet Jordan wrote the editorial,” Jeff observed.
“It wasn’t unusual for him to put his first thoughts down on paper, file it away, then refine it later when he had more definitive information.”
She added a rose to the growing bouquet, this time a velvety, bloodred Abraham Lincoln.
“Jeff, I’m convinced Jordan didn’t talk to anyone on the paper about this. So how did the mayor and Rialto get wind of it?”
He shifted the basket to the other hand. “Someone either had access to his computer or hacked into it.”
“The mayor isn’t above pursuing his own interests, including doing favors for friends and supporters—”
“People like Rialto.”
She nodded. “I can’t picture him being into high-tech spying, though. That would be more in Buster’s arsenal.”
“Maybe Derek can figure out if there’s still a tap on the editor’s computer. If Riallo’s the person responsible, chances are he didn’t remove the bugs just because the incumbent changed.”
Aware of how close he was to her, how easy it would be for them to touch, she moved on to another bush.
“So, as you see it,” he said, following her, “Rialto got wind of Jordan’s editorial, contacted the mayor and asked him to intercede.”
She selected a stem with three blossoms on it and clipped. “They could have then remotely deleted the editorial.”
Jeff shook his head. “Possibly, but I’d expect someone smart enough to hack through a firewall to know how to remove all trace of a file.”
“Unless Tyrone was the one who deleted it when he took over as editor.”
“Can you ask him?”
CHAPTER NINE
* * *
JEFF WATCHED HER tense up at the suggestion. No wonder, considering the attitude the Sentinel had taken against her since Jordan’s death. “I’d rather not tip my hand.”
“I bet Derek can tell us when the file was deleted. If it was in the middle of the night, chances are it wasn’t Tyrone.”
Jeff decided she was right. Puttering in the garden was good therapy for her. She moved with purpose and efficiency among her plants and shrubs, yet she had an innate grace that mesmerized . . . and aroused.
He’d never before encountered her intoxicating blend of strength, poise and vulnerability. Maybe that was why his marriage had failed, why he’d never stayed with one woman for more than a few months. With Catherine . . . he couldn’t imagine growing tired of being with her.
Shadows were lengthening, darkness crowding in. The night air, while still warm and t
hick, felt less suffocating, almost comforting. Catherine surveyed the yard, took a breath that came close to a sigh and slapped at a mosquito.
“We better go inside before we’re eaten alive,” she said.
He followed, not sure if the aroma he was inhaling was from the blooms he was carrying or the woman walking ahead of him. He had the definite feeling, though, that after tonight he would always associate the scent of roses with her.
She returned her gardening tools to the potting shed and relieved him of the basket. Their hands touched only briefly, but it was enough to provoke his awareness of the softness of her skin. The heat he felt now had nothing to do with summer temperatures. Her almost imperceptible hesitation suggested she too was conscious of their fleeting contact.
They entered the kitchen and almost shivered in the dry coolness of the air-conditioning.
“There’s another issue you’ll need to decide soon,” he said, as she placed the basket on the counter by the sink.
She removed a ceramic vase from a lower cabinet. “Going public.”
He raised his eyebrows, pleased that they were so closely attuned. He shouldn’t be surprised. They were both experienced cops, after all.
“I’ve been considering it,” she said.
“The mayor’s secretary will keep her mouth shut about talking to me, if only because she wants to keep her job. But I’ll need to contact other people, some of them on the force. I don’t think we can count on everyone being as cooperative as Sally. You’ll take flack when word gets out that I’m working for you.”
She arranged the multicolored roses in the vase. “I can handle it.”
He smiled. “I’m sure you can. but—”
“Be discreet, but not to the detriment of getting the job done.” She set the bouquet on the table. “When the time comes, I’ll hold a news conference if I have to.”
“I’ll keep it under wraps as long as I can.”
“Thirsty?” She swung around to face him. Their eyes met . . . and held. “I have tea, or something stronger, if you’d prefer.”
