Tempting the Devil

by Potter, Patricia;

  She’d learned she had a talent for that, getting people to say more than they meant to say. She didn’t have many others, but she knew how to listen. And listening was the key to getting answers to the questions she really wanted to ask.

  It wasn’t calculated. She had an immense curiosity. She always wanted to learn as much as she could about everyone she met, and people responded—usually—to that interest and often divulged things they’d never intended to tell.

  Her mother used to scold her about it. “Curiosity killed the cat,” she’d always warned.

  “But a cat has nine lives,” Robin always responded.

  She wondered whether those police officers on the ground had felt the same way.

  chapter two

  Robin drove into Atlanta to write the story. She always thought better on a keyboard than on a phone.

  As soon as she arrived at her desk, she called the police chief’s office and discovered the officers’ names had been released along with their ages, the number of years they’d been with the department, addresses, and immediate family information.

  She wrote the story she’d already partially composed in her head and signaled to the city editor, who read it on the computer. He then gestured for her to come to his desk.

  “Damn good job,” he said. “Bob Greene’s calling the families and will do a sidebar on them. Your story will lead the front page.”

  A strange mixture of elation and guilt filled her. And relief. Relief that she wouldn’t have to call the families. Elation at the praise for her story and its placement. Guilt that she felt any elation at all.

  “You keep on the story,” he said. “Work with Bob, though. He has contacts with all the law enforcement agencies.”

  “So do I,” she reminded him.

  She went back to the desk. The story was finished for the first edition, but there would be others, and she would be expected to add to it.

  At eight, she left. Drained. Exhausted. Her leg aching like the devils in hell were pricking it with pitchforks.

  Poor Daisy. The big bushy black and white cat she’d rescued a year ago would be stalking through the house in search of food. She’d found Daisy as a kitten next to her tire one day, the kitten’s skin bare with mange and half her ear gone.

  The drive to her rented house in an old part of Atlanta took less time than usual, or perhaps she drove faster. She was anxious to get home, feed Daisy, have a glass of wine, and think about where she could take the story tomorrow.

  She parked in front of her home, a Victorian cottage. It was small and lacked a garage but was full of character. She loved every square foot of it.

  Her father had been military, an enlisted man who climbed to sergeant major. They’d lived in military quarters all her early years, usually small plain quarters that looked like every other unit, no matter which base. She’d never felt at home in any of them, nor had she ever made best friends. She knew she would be gone the next year. Or the next.

  But she’d decided when coming to Atlanta she would find her nest, no matter what else she sacrificed.

  The cottage always welcomed her, even on the worst of days. One day she hoped to buy it.

  The murder still very much on her mind, she locked the car and went inside. Daisy meowed and wormed her furry self against one leg, then another before jumping up onto the counter, meowing soulfully for her meal.

  Robin rubbed Daisy’s back for a moment, and the demand turned into a purr. It was amazing what an animal could do for you, particularly when loneliness wrapped around her like a shroud. It didn’t usually do that, but something about today, about death, made her want to feel alive.

  She thought about calling one of her two sisters, and dropped the idea. They had problems of their own. Lark was in the midst of a divorce, and Star—short for Starling—was near term with her first child. Their mother had loved birds, and Robin had always been grateful she hadn’t been named Tufted Titmouse or House Wren.

  She smiled at the joke she’d often shared with Lark and Star, then the loneliness closed in again. Their mother had died two years ago from a stroke. Home had always been where she was, and now there was no longer a place to go home to.

  Daisy’s purr turned into a demanding meow again, jerking Robin back to the moment. She opened a can of tuna, spooned the contents into a dish and watched Daisy’s greedy consumption. When the cat finished her meal, Robin poured herself a glass of wine and switched on a jazz CD. She took the glass outside and placed it on the table, then returned for her crutches.

  Few things were more important now than removing the brace. For good. She could walk now without the brace as long as she used crutches and kept her weight off the left leg. She unzipped the leg of her specially tailored slacks and removed the brace. Just taking off the brace and the ugly heavy shoes it required was a huge relief. She ran her hands along the scarred skin, then balanced herself on the crutches and went outside and sat in her wicker rocking chair.

  The sky was clear, the deep dark blue of dusk just lighting with stars. She took a sip of chilled wine, and wondered why she felt so lost. Usually a story of today’s magnitude excited her, stirred the competitive juices. But now she remembered her mother’s stroke, and her father’s death in a desert far away, and she knew the despair that three families felt tonight. It was much too close to home.

  She told herself to let it go. She was not often given to melancholy. She had always been an optimist, just like her chirping namesake. One of the older reporters—Jack Ross—called her his Holly Golightly, the fictional heroine from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. She’d rented the movie after that and wasn’t sure whether she was flattered or insulted.

  But all too quickly, the images she tried to banish returned. How could someone get so close to armed officers? She kept trying to remember the look in Sandy’s eyes. Anger. Raw anger. Or something else?

  She finished her glass of wine and went inside to the room she’d made into an office. She went through her Rolodex and found Sandy’s cell number. He had given it to her after learning that she often drove lonely roads at night; he’d told her to call him if she ever had car trouble.

  Robin looked at her watch. Nine thirty p.m. She found herself punching in the numbers.

  She was surprised when Sandy answered with a curt “Harris.”

  “This is Robin. I was hoping we could meet for breakfast somewhere tomorrow.”

  “I’ll call you back,” he said. “What’s your number?”

  She gave him her home number.

  Ten minutes later he called.

  “I can’t tell you anything,” he said.

  “I just want to understand more about the way the police department works there. You know, the difference between you guys and them.”

  Silence.

  “It would really help me,” she pleaded.

  A sigh. “I’ve been working since midnight and won’t leave here until morning. We’re all on double shifts. Interviewing everyone who lives within five miles of that road and stopping every car in hopes someone saw something last night.”

  “You’ll need to eat.”

  He paused, then said, “There’s a Waffle House in Gwinnett County.” He told her how to find it.

  “Gwinnett? Isn’t that a long way for you?”

  A silence on his side.

  “I’ll be there,” she said. “What time?”

  “Maybe around eight.”

  “I understand,” she said and hung up the phone before he had second thoughts.

  She looked at her watch and returned to the living room to turn on the news.

  It was all about the murders. No new information, but they had photos of the three patrolmen when alive. Some film on the homes where they lived. An interview with both the sheriff and the police chief.

  She thought about tomorrow. More phone calls to the sheriff and police chief, to plain citizens about how crime had hit their quiet community. Interviews with friends of the officers. Hopefully so
mething from the medical examiner.

  She wondered if breakfast with Sandy was worth the time. Yet she had an itch about him. He might well have scuttlebutt from the inside. And she’d always trusted those itches. They’d paid off for her in the past.

  The newscast went off, and she gently pushed Daisy from her lap and started for the bedroom.

  When she’d first moved in, she’d maneuvered clumsily around the house with the brace and crutches, but now she was stronger and more adept, and frequently didn’t use the crutches at all. When she did use them, it was like having extra legs. She could swing along a street faster than most people could walk. But the brace, though she hated it, helped build the muscles in her leg. Another three weeks and she shouldn’t need it. She would probably always have a limp, the doctor said, but it could have been far worse. She planned a brace-burning party.

  She’d had the accident hurrying across two states to her mother’s bedside after the stroke. She’d never made it, never had a chance to say good-bye. Instead she’d ended up in an emergency room with a crushed leg. It had taken several surgeries over two years to put the Humpty Dumpty leg back together again.

  That was one reason this story was important to her. She’d been a rising star at the paper when she’d had the accident. After nearly a year’s absence, she returned on crutches for six months between surgeries and was put on the city desk. When she’d returned after the last surgery, the city editor had wanted to put her back on the desk. She’d fought it bitterly and finally been sent to what she considered Siberia, a place where very little happened. Doing a good job—no, a great job—here would send her back to the action. She planned to prove she could do as good a job as anyone with two good legs.

  She was determined to break through that protective cocoon the management had placed her in.

  Robin put on a sleep shirt, then crawled into bed, placing the crutches next to it. Daisy jumped up and curled up at the end of the bed. Robin’s leg still ached, but it was free from the heavy brace and, gratefully, she stretched out.

  She thought about tomorrow. She needed sleep, though she knew it would come hard. She planned to be at that Waffle House no later than seven and that meant a five a.m. wake-up.

  That itch was getting stronger all the time.

  Ben Taylor turned on the news in his barely furnished apartment. He’d kept up with the story all day at his office, every fiber of his being wanting to go to the scene.

  Unfortunately, as yet, there was no jurisdictional reason for the FBI to become involved. Not yet.

  Not yet, but he sensed there would be. Hell no, not sensed. Knew it.

  No one killed three policemen unless there was a damned good reason. And nearly every one of those reasons meant that sooner or later his office would become involved. Drugs. Corruption. Interstate transportation of cars, people, goods.

  He had every lawman’s repugnance of a cop killer. And now there were three dead cops. The way they died was particularly repellent. He would bet his last dollar that they knew their killer. Maybe even trusted their killer.

  He’d asked his boss, the agent in charge of the Atlanta office, to go out there. But Ron Holland said no. Not until they were asked or there was undisputed jurisdiction. There was already too much friction between the office and local cops on the drug case they were currently working. Ron didn’t want anything to unravel now.

  Meredith County wasn’t involved in the case. But the Georgia Bureau of Investigation was, and unquestionably they would be brought into this murder. They probably wouldn’t appreciate the FBI stealing their thunder.

  If there was one thing Ben hated about the job, it was pussyfooting around other law enforcement agencies. Shouldn’t happen. They should all be after the same objective, but he knew some locals felt the FBI lorded over them, even when they were damn well trying not to.

  He went to the kitchen, took out a frozen pizza, and put it in the microwave. He would much rather have stopped somewhere but he wanted to get home to see the news and whether there was anything new.

  There wasn’t.

  He turned it off as he saw reporters crowding the yard in front of the home of one of the victims. Vultures. The whole bunch of them. Feasting off the tragedy of men and women trying to do a hard job.

  Ben had come to despise the whole breed in his fifteen years as an agent. On rare occasion, they’d helped in the past. Lost and stolen children had been found because of them. But he’d yet to find one that he could trust, that cared about anything but the damned story, and to hell if they destroyed a case—or a person—by printing what should have been protected information.

  One had destroyed his ex-wife in pursuit of a headline.

  To him, freedom of the press was more of a freedom to yell fire in a crowded building than to protect the citizenry.

  He took a beer from the fridge and strode up and down the room as the microwave nuked his pizza. Pasteboard with tomato sauce.

  He remembered the meals he’d once shared with Dani. He could still see her dark hair falling over her shoulders as she carefully chopped ingredients. She’d loved to cook.

  But she’d also loved the bureau. They’d gone through FBI training together and married two years later after being separated at different ends of the country. They had three good years together until she went undercover and became what she hated most.

  He still wondered how he’d missed the signs until it had become too late. She’d divorced him when he tried to help her, and since then he’d spent nearly every cent he had to help her. Though the love was long gone, the caring was not.

  Ben often wondered whether he hadn’t been part of the problem himself. He’d grown up in foster homes and trust had never come easily. Nor had sharing a part of himself. She’d told him enough times that he couldn’t relate to anything but a mystery.

  Now she was in yet another rehabilitation program, and he came home to a frozen pizza.

  He retrieved his pizza from the microwave and cut a slice. It tasted as bad as it looked. He ate it anyway, since he hadn’t had anything for lunch. He’d sat in a meeting, one of many concerning the joint force drug case under way with the DEA. They’d netted some lower-rung fish, but they couldn’t find the main source. They’d learned enough to know, though, that an organization had taken over much of the drug trade in and around Atlanta and sold everything from ecstasy to crack to black tar heroin. It seemed the dealers worked in cells, most of them unknown to the others, just like terrorists.

  He was growing frustrated, and the murder in a rural county forty miles from Atlanta nagged at him. Three policemen had stumbled onto something bad.

  It was too much a stretch to believe they were connected.

  Or was it?

  chapter three

  Robin walked into the designated Waffle House at seven.

  She didn’t want to take a chance that Sandy might arrive early and leave. She might not get anything but color, the details that changed fact into a real human story. But she hoped for more.

  “Coffee and wheat toast,” she said when the waitress arrived at her table. She couldn’t eat more. Her stomach churned this morning and she’d had precious little sleep. She unfolded the paper she’d picked up in a box at a gas station on the way. Her own had not yet been delivered by the time she’d left the house. Heck, the sun hadn’t even come up.

  The headline stretched across the width of the paper: THREE MEREDITH COUNTY OFFICERS MURDERED, EXECUTION-STYLE.

  Her story was accompanied by several sidebars, one of which gave a brief biography of each of the officers and another of other police slayings in the state. A large photo of the three slain officers on the ground made her wince, and she closed the paper.

  She flipped open her cell phone to call the sheriff’s office. He was unavailable. She asked for the chief deputy. He, too, was unavailable. Then she asked for the deputy who acted as department spokesman on occasion.

  “Sorry, Robin. Nothing new, but there’s a pr
ess conference this morning.”

  “Why a press conference if there’s no news?”

  “Because we’re being deluged by you people. The sheriff thought he would tell everyone at once that we have no news.”

  “Thanks for a preview,” she replied wryly.

  She then called the county police department, where she was told again that there would be a joint press conference at ten. She would go, of course, but she hated the mob mentality at press conferences. She would find a way to talk to the sheriff and police chief alone.

  She drank several cups of coffee, grateful to the waitress, who seemed to recognize her caffeine addiction, and opened the paper again, this time skimming over other headlines. But she stopped every time a car drove into the parking lot and the door opened.

  Her watch told her she’d been there an hour and a half, and the waitress was obviously tired of having one of the four booths occupied so long for coffee and toast. Robin ordered eggs and hash browns, then moved them around her plate.

  She was ready to give up when the door opened and Sandy walked in. His eyes were bloodshot, and stubble shadowed his face. He glanced around the diner until he spotted her. He hesitated, then walked to the booth.

  “I didn’t think you would still be here.”

  She didn’t reply, afraid he might run. Wariness was in every inch of his body.

  He slid across from her, and the waitress was instantly there, a cup in one hand and a coffeepot in the other. “Coffee, hon?”

  He nodded, and she poured coffee into the cup.

  “What’s your pleasure?”

  Robin listened in amazement as he ordered a slice of ham, eggs, potatoes, and a waffle.

  “Haven’t eaten since noon yesterday,” he said as the waitress left with the order.

  His eyes went to the headline on the front of the paper as he took a quick swallow of coffee.

  She waited as he nervously drummed the fingers of his left hand on the table. He radiated tension.

  She took a sip of her own coffee.

  He put the cup down. “Damn it, I don’t know why I’m here.”