Powers of Arrest

by Jon Talton

  For the first time in so long, his mind wasn’t regretting the past or fearing the future. He was there in that space and moment, under the golden light of the fountain, feeling her heart beat wildly inside her chest.

  She raised her head and looked at him straight on. Her eyes were wet but fierce. “Don’t make me regret that decision, Will Borders.”

  He pulled her in and held her close, whispering, “Never…never going to hurt you…never going to let you down…” again and again. The splash and murmur of water, the song of this river city, under the statue’s outstretched arms, consecrated their moment.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  They walked back to his car in silence, still holding hands. Cheryl Beth felt strangely free and light after telling him. She felt safe with him knowing. It was as if a new world had opened at her feet. He started slowly up Vine Street, past Piatt Park where the murdered President James Garfield looked out on the city from his statue, past the public library and Scotti’s Italian restaurant with its red-and-green neon sign and red door. After Central Parkway and the monotonous Kroger tower, Vine would enter Over-the-Rhine and then climb into Clifton, back home.

  “Let’s go to your place.” Her voice sounded normal again.

  “Do you think that’s a good idea?”

  She put her hand on his knee. “Yes. It’s a wonderful idea.”

  “Me, too.”

  She had never even seen the little street that held Will’s townhouse. It was a block from the mishmash of wide Liberty Street, but it was quiet and secluded. The townhouse itself must have been more than a hundred years old and yet it looked to be in good shape. The interior was completely restored and modernized, even if the granite kitchen countertops weren’t quite to her taste.

  “Is this your son?” She held up a photo of a tall, dark-haired young man. He smiled awkwardly at the camera.

  “Stepson,” Will said. “His biological father showed back up, rich in Boston, and now my ex has remarried. The kid doesn’t want for fathers.”

  She liked it that he had an old Baldwin upright piano, a bookshelf with titles that looked as if they had actually been read, and on the wall was a framed movie poster from The Violators. Will explained how he had bought the townhouse from a P&G guy who had done the rehab as he showed her though the downstairs.

  “Play something for me.”

  “I can’t really,” he said, embarrassment clouding him. “I tilt now.”

  “I’ll sit next to you.”

  So they did. His fingers tentatively began The Blue Danube, gathering confidence as he went. It was all wrong: he couldn’t use the pedals. “I played this by ear when I was six. It made my mother think I was some kind of musical genius. Hardly.”

  “I love it,” Cheryl Beth said.

  Then he tried “Isn’t It Romantic” from memory. She leaned into him. It felt like magic.

  He left on a low lamp as they walked back into the living room. She mock-pushed him onto the sofa and straddled him. Now the dress was much shorter and she didn’t mind. She felt his hands on each side of her face as he pulled her in close for a kiss. It was easy to respond to his lips and she kissed back, using her tongue, too. He was a good kisser. Then his hands were on her hips, pulling her closer. But his eyes held a wariness.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she whispered and kissed him deeply.

  “I worry…”

  “I have worries,” she said. This confession didn’t keep him from nibbling on her neck, which set many nodes of her nerves into a delighted alert status.

  He whispered, “What?” His mouth again met hers again and their tongues danced around together.

  “I worry you won’t be a legs-and-butt man and you’ll want a 44-D woman.”

  His face gave up a broad smile. “I am a legs-and-butt man, all the way, lifelong. You couldn’t be more attractive to me, Cheryl Beth.” His hands were moving up her legs inside her skirt. It had been a very long time since she had felt this, and he had a light, teasing touch.

  She leaned back and touched his nose. “Then don’t worry. Remember what I told you after your surgery when you were still in the hospital?”

  “You told me to stick out my tongue and wiggle it. I did. And you said, ‘You have all that any man needs to satisfy a woman.’ ”

  He lightly licked her wrist, ran circles around it with his tongue, and kissed the inside of her forearm. She sighed happily. “Oh, you do remember that. I had said that to so many patients, but with you I was very…”

  “You turned red.”

  “Yes, I did, because I was attracted to you, Detective.”

  “And I was to you, pain nurse.” Will pulled her in for more kissing. It had been so long since he had been with a woman. And this woman had been on his mind for so long. Part of him could barely believe it was happening, that he could be doing this after his surgery and with the day-to-day of his disability. But all of him was enjoying it, with every kiss, touch, and pressure of body on body sweeping away his apprehensions.

  As she rocked against his pelvis, she let out a moan.

  Still, he felt an obligation, almost like the need to give her a Miranda warning. “What if I get another tumor and end up in a motorized wheelchair or dead?”

  She felt heat spreading down to her feet. “What if I get hit by a bus tomorrow?” she whispered.

  Then she was taking off his tie, unbuttoning his shirt. “So stop worrying. Anyway…” Her hand was playing with the fly of his slacks. “Something’s happening down here.”

  “Mmmmm?”

  “Now relax, sir, I’m a nurse.”

  ***

  They lay together in his bed upstairs, the room dark except for pale blue light filtering in from the street. Cheryl Beth looked forward to taking in the view Will’s balcony displayed, but they had other things to do when they first came up to the room. His suit and her black pantyhose were downstairs. She felt spent and completely content. His face looked almost boyish, his hair curled up on the pillow, and his sleepy eyes barely open.

  He stuck out his tongue.

  She smiled. “You’re a very good bad boy, Will Borders.”

  Slipping on his dress shirt, his only piece of clothing that made it upstairs, she stepped out on the narrow balcony.

  “This is beautiful,” she called back inside. To her left, she could see the back of Christ Hospital.

  “Down below is Jackson Hill Park,” he said. “It’s where the old Mount Auburn incline ran. Most people don’t even know that park exists. I wish they wouldn’t have torn out all the old inclines.”

  She stepped back inside, closed the door, and lay beside him again.

  “By the way,” he said. “You have perfect breasts.”

  She ran a hand down his chest. “I’m glad you like.” She had always thought they were too small.

  “And legs and mind and face and…”

  “What was that clicking on your radio after we turned off the light downstairs?” she asked. “It was like, click-click, then a pause and it happened again.”

  “Oh, those jerks. They were only messing with me.”

  “I hope they couldn’t hear us.” She giggled, not really concerned.

  Will explained how a double-click of a mic button could signify “okay” or “affirmative.” After the second double-click, a dispatcher had come on to tell the units to keep the channel clear.

  “You guys are as bad as nurses,” she said, nestling her head into his shoulder. The sheets smelled like Will, and now like both of them, and that made her happy. His heart was beating normal sinus rhythm. That made her happy, too.

  His right leg suddenly thrust up in a crooked position.

  “Did you do that deliberately?”

  “No, it’s the spasticity. It usually kicks in an hour or so after I lie down. Then I have to sit up and shake my leg until it calms down, or I fall asleep in the chair and have bad dreams. Whine, whine, whine.”

  “Poor baby.” She kissed his right thigh. It
was remarkably muscled up compared with the left. “Here.” She pushed it down and it immediately pulled back up. “Going to be stubborn, eh?” She rose up from beside him and swung across his leg, sitting on the quads. The muscles fought her but gradually eased up.

  “Better?”

  “It feels great.”

  Cheryl Beth felt a little sizzle from pressure of his quads between her legs, and managed, “Uh-huh.”

  She was about to come again when the phone rang.

  Late-night phone calls were never good. As a pain nurse, Cheryl Beth knew they meant something was wrong with a patient, that she would have to throw on clothes and rush back to the hospital. She felt Will’s body tense beside her but he made no attempt to answer. In a few seconds, a voice came on his machine. The voice sounded distorted, like a robot out of an old sci-fi movie.

  “Detective Borders, are you fucking with me? ‘Cause of death unknown…may be suicide.’ Are you not taking me seriously? If your situation didn’t interest me, I would immediately release the truth about my deathscapes to the public. Let the police be shown for fools. Let the city live in fear. I know you’re there, detective. I know you can hear me. Don’t assume you or the pretty nurse are safe…”

  Will grabbed for the handset, nearly sending Cheryl Beth tumbling off the bed.

  “Gone,” he said and cursed. He spoke into his hand-held radio. “He called a minute ago. Did you get it on the land-line tap?”

  “Affirmative, 7140. Too short for a trace. Sounded like the voice distortion machine you can buy in any spy shop.”

  “He’s watching my house.”

  “It’s all clear out here. He may have seen you at Fountain Square or the symphony.”

  Will set the radio back on the bedside table and pulled her close to him. She laid her head on his big chest and listened to his heart slowly stop its race. She could feel her own, whacking away under her sternum.

  “He knows I’m a nurse,” she whispered.

  “Oh, baby, I’m so sorry I got you into this.”

  “You didn’t.” She liked it that he called her “baby.” She said, “He killed three of my students. For all I know, I was in this before you were.”

  He stroked her hair and thought about that. Then: “Do you know how to handle a pistol?”

  “My daddy taught me.”

  “Good. I won’t let anyone hurt you.”

  “I know.”

  He started to speak again, but she held her hand against his cheek, “Now, hush,” gently, and they held each other, skin on skin from face to toes, the best feeling in the world, no matter what waited tomorrow, what waited outside the bricks of the wall. She felt a brave peace.

  Saturday

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Lieutenant Fassbinder called an all-hands meeting for ten. Everyone was fueling up on coffee and in a bad mood for being brought in on the weekend. Once again, Will was back on the fifth floor of 800 Broadway, sitting at his old desk. He was the only one not in a bad mood, and the reason, Cheryl Beth, was sitting in the waiting room.

  “Ideas, people,” Fassbinder was saying, pacing a trench in the floor. His voice was businesslike, but his hands kept clenching and unclenching. “I need ideas. The brass are on me like white on rice and that means I’m going to be kicking every little turd from them right down on you. Ideas!”

  “We need somebody with Cheryl Beth,” Dodds said.

  Fassbinder stopped and gave Will a stare so filled with anger that no one would have been surprised if he had started foaming at the mouth. “I think Borders has that covered. Don’t you, Detective Borders.”

  Dodds persisted. “Starting Monday, she’s going to be back on the job. She’s a target. Do you want me to replay…”

  “No, I don’t want you to replay the goddamned recording. We’ve heard it five times.” Fassbinder stalked to Dodds’ desk and rapped his fist on it. “Do you know how much overtime this is costing?”

  “The chief said we could have unlimited overtime,” Will said.

  Fassbinder fixed him with the suppressed homicidal look again. “Well, your friend the chief doesn’t cut me that kind of slack, Borders. My old man wasn’t killed in the line of duty. I don’t limp with a fucking cane. It’s a week since Gruber’s death and we don’t have shit. That’s the world I live in. The only thing Covington has is your goddamned son as a person of interest. Your son!”

  “John only stepped on the boat,” Will said. “After the murder took place. He voluntarily came forward as a witness.”

  The lieutenant ignored him. “Do you know we have eleven open homicides this year besides Gruber and this kid in the graveyard with his cock cut off? Last year, we had seventy-two and half of them are unresolved.” He wheeled back around and continued pacing. “Skeen. You play nurse, starting Monday.”

  “I hope it’s as much fun as playing doctor,” she said, but no one laughed.

  That gave Will some piece of mind. So did arming Cheryl Beth. He had given her his old backup weapon, a snub-nose .38 Chief’s Special. It was small, lightweight, and lethal. When he handed it to her, butt-first, she immediately opened the cylinder to make sure it wasn’t loaded. Then she hefted it and did some dry-firing. Will had kept it clean and oiled for years, and the mechanism worked like new. She had been taught well by her father. He loaded the revolver and she gently slid it into her purse.

  Fassbinder kept talking, “I’m bringing in narcotics and Central Vice to help tail Borders.” Everyone groaned and cursed. There was a long-standing feud between narcotics and homicide. Several years ago, a narc had tossed a firecracker into the homicide office. One of the old homicide detectives, now retired, had fashioned a bomb from a printer cartridge filled with shredded paper and set it off in narcotics as retaliation. It took them years to get the burned paper off the walls and desks. Unfortunately, Fassbinder had come over from narcotics four years before. So no one took it further than assorted “fucks” and “shits,” spoken in the tone of members of the police department’s most elite and seasoned unit.

  “What do you want me to do?” Fassbinder said. “I need homicide detectives working this homicide case, not tailing Borders.”

  “What if the killer is on the force?” Dodds said. “Whoever wrote that note knew Will was working the case. We need to keep this in-house, inside homicide.”

  “No.” Fassbinder said. “What are you still doing on Gruber, Borders?”

  “I’m going though her old arrests and I have a disk off her hard drive with twenty-one-hundred photos, give or take.”

  “Hand off the arrest records to Kovach,” Fassbinder said. “He’s the new liaison with Covington, too. You’ve got a conflict of interest. Dodds, make sure you have the Gruber casebook from Borders. He can go through the pics while he’s sitting at home.” He wagged a finger at Will. “And that’s what you will do when you’re not on a PIO call. Now, people, listen up: I don’t want to get distracted with this Oxford homicide. Focus on Gruber. What do we know?”

  Will said, “Lieutenant, Gruber is connected to the Oxford murders, and sooner or later somebody is going to put this together and it’s going to be public. We have four murders in four days committed by the same guy. Jack the Ripper only killed five in two months, and then he disappeared forever. What if this guy does the same? Covering our asses will be the least of our worries.”

  “Oxford P.D. and Butler County have agreed to sit on our story for now,” Fassbinder said. “Nobody’s mourning Noah Smith and calling the media about him.”

  “These killings are all connected,” Will said. “We need to go public.”

  A long, furious silence sat in the room. Finally Will went through Kristen Gruber’s last twenty-four hours. She had worked day shift out of Central Vice a week ago Friday, made eight routine arrests, nobody resisting or making threats. She went off duty and spent Friday night with her sergeant friend at her condo. They had breakfast at First Watch at Rookwood Pavilion on Saturday morning a week ago. At 2:38 p.m., she
withdrew a hundred dollars from an ATM. Sometime after that, she took her boat out from the marina. Nobody saw her leave. Not one tip had a witness placing her on the water; therefore, they didn’t know who was on the boat with her.

  Fassbinder said, “I want something real, and I goddamned want it before Sunday night.” He called out names and assignments, and Will knew springtime weekend plans with families were being demolished.

  Will tried to stay in the zone of the previous night, with Cheryl Beth sitting astride him on the sofa and lying beside him in bed. He could still feel her sweet breath on his eyelashes. He said quietly, “I want to bring in Kenneth Buchanan for an interview.”

  The room was silent for a good minute. Even the radio monitoring eight police frequencies didn’t make a sound.

  Will made his case: the attorney gave a false story about his whereabouts a week ago Saturday night; he was Kristen’s estranged lover who said he was jealous of her other men, jealous enough to fight with her about it. He moored his boat next to hers at the marina, he phoned her on Saturday afternoon, and a middle-aged bald man had stalked one of the Oxford victims. Kenneth Buchanan was a middle-aged bald man.

  “Are you out of your mind?” Fassbinder said. “He’d call every city councilman, the mayor, the chief, and have a harassment lawsuit filed first thing Monday.”

  “He said he was with his wife Saturday night. He wasn’t. She told a thousand people last night that she was at the symphony last Saturday night, listening to Jeremy Snowden play for the last time, and then she went to a party with the musicians. So either he was with her, and he lied to me about going to the symphony, and why the hell would he do that? Or he lied because he wasn’t with her. He was on the river. Let’s bring him in.”

  Fassbinder shook his head. “You call that probable cause? You’re crazy, Borders. We can’t do that.”

  “Why not?” Dodds said. “Because he’s white? Because he’s rich and lives in Indian Hill? If we had the same P.C. against some black kid in Avondale, he’d be in jail.”

  “Don’t.” Fassbinder aimed a finger. His face was nearly crimson.