Glen stepped up to Ann’s bedside, said a few comforting words to her, and then jerked his head, indicating the detective should step outside. Once they were in the corridor. Glen erupted. “You’re about the biggest asshole I’ve ever met. I care about her, even if you and her son refuse to accept me. Not only that, I’m an assistant district attorney. Have you forgotten that?”
Reed just shrugged his shoulders. “I’ll take the kid home myself. Wouldn’t want you to put too many miles on that fancy Rolls-Royce of yours.”
Glen shuffled his cowboy boots on the linoleum. “That’s the most childish thing I’ve ever heard of. Reed. The car’s twelve years old, and I bought it at a damn auction for twenty grand, for chrissakes.”
Reed stepped right in the attorney’s face, his breath hot and foul. “What did you see out there? You were at the scene right after it happened.”
Hopkins was just as hard in return. “Your partner already took my statement. Ask him. And you’d better take a close look at your big hero. Reed,” he said nastily. “Jimmy Sawyer’s a drug dealer. He may be your suspect.”
“Sawyer a suspect?” Reed said, his mouth opening in surprise. “You’re joking, right?”
Glen spun around and stomped down the hall, glancing back over his shoulder at the detective. Then he yelled down the hall, “Joking? I don’t think so. Reed. You guys are like the fucking Keystone Kops. Get your act together or I’ll have you removed from this case.”
Tommy Reed narrowed his eyes and glared until Hopkins turned the comer and disappeared. Sawyer, he wondered, the guy who saved her? He’d have to ask Abrams what he’d made of the guy. Seemed like a pretty poor suspect as far as Reed was concerned, no matter what Ann’s hotshot D.A. thought. People don’t put a bullet in a woman and then rush right over and try to save her life. If anyone needed to get his mind set straight, Reed decided, it was Hopkins. This wasn’t the Wild West, here—this was Uzi country, sawed-off-shotgun land, 9mm heaven. Around here, people shot you for no reason at all, and they sure didn’t hang around to administer first aid.
Several nurses passed in the hallway, and one smiled at the detective. He smiled back, waiting until they rounded the comer to break out laughing. Hopkins was a fool, threatening to get him yanked off the case, strutting around as if he thought he was the one wielding the big stick and the detective was nothing but a lousy cop. Mama’s boy, as far as Reed was concerned. Mama probably did all his homework in law school.
Go ahead, cowboy, he thought as he headed to the waiting room to get David, get me removed from the case. The captain had already officially assigned the case to Abrams, claiming Reed was too close to Ann. That was fine with Tommy. The less paperwork he was responsible for, the more time he would have to conduct his own investigation, and he had more contacts on the streets than anyone in the department.
“Hey, kid,” he said, sticking his head into the waiting room. David was sitting straight up in the chair, his head dangling forward onto his chest. The boy was sound asleep.
Chapter 3
Ann was in bed with five or six pillows propped behind her. She had been released from the hospital after only six days, and at the end of the second week she was approaching full recovery. David was munching potato chips and shuffling through his baseball card collection on the floor by her bed. “One of these days I’m going to save enough money for a Mickey Mantle,” he told his mother. “Freddy’s grandfather bought him a Mickey Mantle last year. Can you believe it? Freddy doesn’t even like baseball.”
Ann laughed at the irony of her son’s statement. His friend had no interest in sports, but was, like David, a collector. Being surrounded by his favorite objects made David feel secure, and if there was one thing he needed, it was a sense of security. He still wet his bed several times a week, and worried constantly that one of his friends would find out. After years of therapy since his father’s disappearance, David was still a disturbed young man.
“It’s time for you to get to bed,” Ann told him, smiling. “And no more chips, honey. Do you know how many calories are in one potato chip?”
If she had done the shopping, there would be none in the house. Glen had dropped by the house earlier with three bags of groceries in his arms. Ann appreciated his kindness, but she’d failed to tell him not to bring over junk food. In the past two weeks, David had packed on another five pounds.
They were a strange pair, this mother and son. David turned to food for comfort. When Ann was under stress, however, she couldn’t eat.
“Here,” he said solemnly, handing his mother the bag of chips. “Maybe you’d better keep these in here so I can’t get to them.”
Ann got out of bed, meaning to walk him to his room. She was shoving the bag of chips into her night-stand drawer when she thought better of it and handed them back to him. “Things have been pretty tough lately. You can go on a diet next week, okay?”
While David changed into his pajamas in the bathroom, Ann ran her hand over his sheets, brushing away a sprinkling of cookie crumbs. She sniffed, checking for the odor of urine. The sheets were still fresh from two days ago, and she was relieved. If David could only make it an entire week, the therapist thought, he might break the bed-wetting pattern.
The tiny bedroom was unbearably cluttered, in contrast to Ann’s. The kid was a virtual pack rat. When he was about nine, he’d saved every scrap of aluminum foil he could find, making a silver ball more than a foot in diameter. As there was barely enough space in his room for his twin bed and his small pine desk, Ann had snatched the horrid ball of foil and tossed it into the trash one day while David was at school. This was a pattern. In order to keep his room inhabitable, his mother had to wait until his interest in one set of junk waned and then secretly dispose of it before another set took over the room.
She glanced at the bookcase along his bed. She hoped the model planes would go next. They were impossible to dust, and David hadn’t asked for a new model kit in years, not since he glued his finger to his nose with Krazy Glue.
Then a strange sight caught her eye. Since his father’s disappearance, David had picked up every book, magazine, and newspaper article he could find relating to UFOs. Although he didn’t voice his opinions out loud, Ann knew that he had harbored his own theory that his father had been kidnapped by aliens. It was certainly more agreeable than thinking his father had been viciously murdered and left somewhere in an unmarked grave. If an alien took his father, David must think, an alien could return him.
Since his mother’s shooting, however, he had been forced to deal with reality. Yes, she thought sadly, seeing the posters of flying saucers crumpled up on the floor by the trash can. He never voluntarily removed something from his room. “You really want to throw these away?” Ann asked when he returned from the bathroom. “I mean, if you don’t, you’d better put them in the closet or they’re on their way to the dump.”
“Yeah, get rid of them,” David said, flopping on the bed once Ann stood. “There’s no such thing as aliens. And spaceships are dumb. Freddy says they’re just trick photography.”
Stroking his hair, Ann bent down and pecked him on the cheek, her heart heavy with emotion. His father had been murdered and his mother had been shot. No child should have to deal with such harsh realities. Guns, Ann thought, shaking her head, eyeing the wall above his bed, lined with sports pennants. When were people going to wake up and get rid of guns? How many more people would have to die before adequate gun-control laws were passed?
“You don’t have a Raiders pennant,” she said, crossing her arms now and giving him a stem look. “Why did you do that to Glen, refuse to accept the one he bought you at the stadium? That was cruel.”
“The Raiders suck,” David said, turning on his side in his bed. “I just went to the game to be with Tommy, and then he had to come along and ruin the whole day.”
Ann sighed. It was useless to get into another argument over Glen. At the door, she looked back at her son and smiled. “You liked the choc
olate chip cookies he bought for you, though. I saw the evidence in your bed. Remember what I’ve always told you, David: don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”
Abruptly he sat up in bed, a look of urgency on his face. “Mom, don’t go back to work tomorrow. Please,” he begged. “What if they shoot you again?”
Ann braced herself against the doorframe. “We went over all this, honey. It was a drive-by shooting. They didn’t care if they shot me or someone else. That’s good, see. That means it will never happen again.” She started to go to him, make another attempt to assuage his fears but she didn’t know anything else to say. “Go to sleep now. Everything will be fine. I love you, honey.”
Ann padded down the long hall and flopped on her back in the bed, reaching up to touch her sore shoulder. Being in the house the past week had left her surrounded by painful memories of Hank. She glanced around the room, trying to remember what it had looked like when he’d been alive. Her husband had always kept everything freshly painted and repaired.
Now the paint was chipped and peeling from the walls, and the roof was shot. But Ann had heeded people’s suggestions and tried to make it her room now that he was gone, redecorating the year before in soft pastel colors and floral prints. She didn’t like clutter, so there were no knickknacks, but she had purchased lovely cotton fabrics and used them to cover the scratched dresser and nightstand that had once belonged to her parents. Then she’d made dried arrangements with sunflowers and lilies, the same flowers used in the prints, placing them around the room in wicker baskets.
Next to the fresh flowers Glen kept bringing her, though, the artificial ones looked faded and tacky. The ones on the nightstand he had brought over just today. Ann inhaled their fragrance. Since the shooting she had been pleasantly surprised by the attorney’s thoughtfulness and concern. Many men were attentive when things were running smoothly, then conveniently got lost at the first sign of trouble. Glen had proved that he wasn’t that type of person. Ann was grateful, and her feelings for him had deepened.
He wasn’t anywhere near replacing Hank, though. Right over there, she thought, looking at the dresser, was where Hank used to toss his gun and shield when he crept into the bedroom after a late-night shift. Ann used to have a big ceramic bowl there for just that purpose. Every morning when she got up, she’d pick up his uniform off the floor, checking to see if he could get one more day’s wear out of it before she had to send it out to be cleaned. Then she would retrieve his gun from the bowl and lock it in the small floor safe in one comer of the room.
Old habits die hard, Ann told herself She still caught herself stopping by that one spot on the floor sometimes, just staring down at the place where Hank’s uniform used to be. The old safe was covered now with a ruffled print tablecloth and shoved under the window, but Ann still kept her own firearm in it. Probation officers in Ventura County did not carry guns. Since the shooting, she had left the safe unlocked so she could get to the gun in a hurry if she needed it. So many years had passed, David probably wasn’t aware the safe was even in the room.
Looking up at the ornate crown molding along the ceiling, she tried to recall the exact age of the house. According to her father, they’d moved here when Ann was three years old. She’d forgotten through the years to ask if the house was new when her parents purchased it, so without a look at the tax assessor’s files, she had no way of knowing if other families had ever lived in it. It would seem strange if they had, since the house seemed exclusively her own. Having inherited it from her father when he passed away, Ann and her new husband had moved in right after they got married.
Ann’s mother had died when she was eleven years old. She knew firsthand the agony David had suffered over losing his father. But unlike her son, she had known her mother was dying, and she knew where her mother was buried. It made accepting her death a lot easier.
The house had been a sore spot between Ann and her husband. Letting her eyes close, she recalled one fractious time in particular. They’d gone house hunting and found a beautiful four-bedroom home, a new one over by the freeway. David had been two or three years old, and he ran through the empty house making like an Indian on the warpath.
“It’s gorgeous,” Ann said, running her hands over the tile countertop in the sparkling kitchen, so different from her father’s house with the chipped and stained counter she could never seem to get clean. “And look at this, a real walk-in pantry.”
“Want to make them an offer?” Hank said, his eyes dancing with excitement.
“What do you mean?” Ann answered, the excitement contagious. “We can’t afford a place like this, not on our salaries.”
Hank swept her up in his arms, whirling her in the air the way he did David. “Put me down,” Ann cried just before she started laughing.
“Okay,” he said, setting his wife gently back on her feet. “I’ve figured it all out. We can get a loan from the credit union for the down payment, then I’ll get an extra job working security somewhere on the weekends. We can do it, honey,” he said, smiling. “I’m going to buy you this house.”
Ann loved it when her husband smiled. His cheeks were full and he appeared almost jolly, not hard and cold as he did once the uniform and badge came out.
For the next ten minutes, Ann walked around the house, looking in all the closets, checking out all the shiny new fixtures in the bathrooms. “We could put our bed right against that wall,” she told Hank in the master bedroom. “Then we could put the television over there. You know, that fourth bedroom would be great for a study. Can you imagine, a real study? I could have a desk and everything.”
“Right,” Hank said, beaming. “And I could get some guys from work to help me put in a hot tub in the backyard.”
Ann let her gaze drift out the window to the yard, and the excitement began to recede. Nothing but dirt out there. No fence, no yard, no drapes. They’d need more furniture to fill up all the rooms. Ann could see the dollar bills adding up in her mind, see herself sitting at the dining-room table as she did every month paying bills—but if they bought this house, she wouldn’t have enough money to pay them.
“No,” she said, connecting with his eyes. “We can’t. Hank. We barely make enough as is, and we don’t even have a mortgage. The payments on this house would be close to a thousand a month.”
Hank Carlisle was not a money person. Before he’d married Ann, he’d spent every dime he’d made and had nothing now to show for it. Ann’s philosophy was diametrically opposed. People should never spend money they didn’t have. It was the first thing her father had taught her.
Hank’s face fell. “So what? I told you I’d work a second job. That alone would make the payment.”
“You’re not being realistic, honey,” Ann said to him. “They take out taxes, withholding. You can’t possibly make enough to cover the payment working a few shifts on the weekends. And you hate your job with the highway patrol. You’d detest being a security officer, even if it was only a few hours a week.”
Hank moved close and pulled her against him. “I want to buy you this house, a brand-new house, a house no one but us has ever lived in. I hate being a cop, baby, but only because I can’t buy you all the things you deserve. I don’t want to live the rest of our lives in that run-down shit hole of your daddy’s. It even smells old.” He stopped and raised his eyebrows humorously. “Also, you know, David’s getting older, and his room is right next to ours. We won’t even be able to have sex without him hearing us.”
“It’s not that bad, Hank,” Ann pleaded. “Please, we don’t want to go into debt, get in over our heads. We’d need extra money just for the move, and then there’s furniture, curtains, higher property taxes, God knows what else. No, Hank, we can’t.” And he would want even more goodies, like the hot tub he’d just mentioned. Ann knew her husband—he liked nice things. She pulled away in order to pin him with her gaze. “We can’t afford it. Hank. You don’t make enough money.”
Propped up against the pillows,
Ann winced at what had come next, wishing she could block the bad memory out of her mind. A few seconds later, the phone rang and she grabbed it, more than ready to set the past aside. It was Tommy Reed.
“Did you know no one’s covering my caseload while I’m out?” she told him when he protested her return to work the next day. “Claudette’s even been trying to handle some of the cases herself.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that,” Reed said. “Just worry about your health.”
Ann appreciated all the expressions of concern, she really did. Reed was only the sixth person who had made that statement: just worry about your health, get well, everything will work out. Sounds good, feels nice to say it, not so awful to hear it. Glen had even gone so far as to insist that she take David and go away for a few months, even told her he would foot all the expenses. But for all the good intentions, the people offering words of comfort weren’t looking at the situation through Ann’s eyes. For the past two weeks she’d been expending carefully guarded sick time with the agency—her paid leave. The county awarded her only a few days paid leave every month, and she had to stockpile it for emergencies. The situation was simple: Ann had no choice but to go back to work.
“Don’t worry about me,” she said to the detective, mustering up her customary bravado. “I’m going stir-crazy in the house anyway. Say, what do you think about that probationer stopping to help me? Jimmy Sawyer. They say if he hadn’t known first aid and stopped the bleeding, I might have bled to death. Of all the people, huh?”
Turning off the bedside light, she tossed the extra pillows on the floor, then turned on her side to talk in the dark. “I promised I’d take Sawyer back to court and get his probation switched to summary so he doesn’t have to report every month. Sort of like a reward.”
“Oh, yeah?” Reed said. “I don’t think that’s going to work out too well. That’s what I called you about. Glen Hopkins is preparing a warrant right now for his arrest.”
First Offense Page 5
