Price of Innocence

by Patricia McLinn

“But then how the hell—? Son of a bitch.”

  Nobody ever said Landis was slow.

  “The son of a bitch is listening in to the break room. And I felt sorry for him. What’s been on Oz’s podcast, it’s all been talked about in the break room. Terrington being pissed off about not being second. You supposed to be on vacation. The shrink with legs. Jamie being alive… Son of a bitch. That was me. On the phone with you. Me—”

  A bug.”

  “How—? The food? It’s gotta be. Delivery guy never comes up to the bullpen. But if it’s in a box… We throw them out. Must cost the turd a fortune, which would warm my heart if I weren’t so pissed.”

  “I was thinking that container of napkins. They keep sending wads of napkins, we drop the new ones into that basket and keep using it.”

  “Yeah. Yeah. Going to stomp that sucker to bits, right after—”

  “We get forensics to confirm it without warning him we’ve figured it out and we’re coming for him.”

  “I was going to say right after stomping that piece of shit podcaster, but your timeline works, too.”

  * * * *

  Jamie woke from a deep sleep to darkness where dawn was only an idea, knowing he wasn’t in the other bedroom. He had been when she’d come down from the office and gone to bed. She heard his voice.

  Too low for words, but it had been oddly reassuring, even in her own room with her door closed, too.

  But now, he wasn’t in the guest room and she was awake.

  She opened her door and listened. Heard a faint creak. It sounded like… But the back door was louder.

  Then she realized when she heard that creak she was usually beside the door, not at this distance.

  She put her phone in the pocket of her robe, cinched it tightly around her waist and, barefoot, started down the old back stairs.

  Wearing only a pair of running shorts, he stood in the open doorway to the patio, one forearm resting on the doorframe. The other hand held the t-shirt he’d been wiping his neck and chest with. Beyond him the light from the back hall fixture spread into a diffused rectangle, swallowed by threads and swirls of vapor rising from the ground.

  Power. The shadow and light revealed the topography of his back’s musculature, but that wasn’t where the sensation of power came from. Ford Belichek’s power came from heart and lung, and maybe from soul. It was packaged in sleek lines and tempting hollows. It frightened her a little.

  But not enough.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE

  She was a shadow in the hallway beside her bedroom door.

  He turned his back to her, stopped in the doorway to the guest room.

  “Go back to bed, Jamie.”

  He’d given up on sleep an hour ago. Retrieved running gear from the kit he’d brought in from his car. But he couldn’t run fast enough and he wouldn’t run far enough to make a difference. So he came back, with nothing changed.

  He knew when she hesitated. He knew when she started toward him.

  He waited until she stood behind him, until the heat of her body breathed against his back.

  She laid her palms to his waist, slid them forward.

  A cool touch against his heat, raising a fog that bent and diffused his reason.

  “This isn’t…”

  But what it wasn’t evaporated before the strength of what it was.

  “I’m about to break my promise, Ford. I’m throwing myself at you, because I was wrong about you,” she said. “You don’t solely focus on the evil. You try to help people. Me. You’ve helped me.”

  He turned to her.

  “I’m no do-gooder.”

  She slid her palms over the stubble of his jaw, then to his cheeks. She stretched up, her head tipped back to look at him.

  He watched her.

  “You do good, Ford.”

  “Don’t fool yourself, Jamie. I’m not like you. My job’s finding the bad guy. Get them off the street so they can’t hurt anybody else. It’s their victims I’d help if I could. But it’s too late when I know them.”

  She slid her fingers into his hair, giving her purchase to draw his face down to hers, to draw his mouth down to hers.

  “It’s not too late. You know me. And you do good.”

  Then she kissed him.

  He didn’t let himself hold her, but he took her mouth, angling, gliding, delving, returning. Panting.

  She put her palms on his chest, not pushing him away, but connecting.

  “I want to know I’m alive, Ford.”

  If her voice hadn’t cracked, just a thread of a shiver, he might have made it. But it did, and he didn’t.

  He covered her mouth and pressed against her body in a single, desperate move. A man diving into ice-cap water all at once before he lost his nerve — or regained his sense. Only it was heat he dove into. Heat and scent and sensation.

  He’d make her know, at the most elemental level, that she was alive. He just couldn’t let himself…

  “Let me touch you, Ford.”

  “No.”

  But her robe was gone. In his hands, then released to fall wherever. She wore nothing under it.

  His chest hurt as if he’d run beyond his endurance and kept going.

  She had her hand inside his shorts, feather-touching the scar on his hip, bunching the material as she slid forward, finding him, sliding the material away, until she held him. Completely.

  She was trying to guide him into her right there. He turned them both, going down to the bed, trying to regain control. Not all of it — that was gone — but enough to protect her. He achieved that at a cost of restraint.

  He entered her.

  She screamed.

  He angled himself up to look at her. “Jamie. God, Jamie. Are you okay?”

  “No.”

  “I hurt you.” He should pull out. He couldn’t move. He was that close.

  “No. You didn’t hurt me. That wasn’t pain. You asked if I was okay. Okay is not the word.”

  He dropped his forehead to hers. “You scared the hell out of me.”

  “Belichek,” she started in a low, fierce voice, “if you don’t move — now — I’ll do worse than that.”

  Then she moved her hips, tilting them back a fraction of an inch, taking a fraction of an inch more of him inside. Shattering his stillness, becoming their movement.

  Still propped above her, he watched a tear slip from the corner of her eye. If it hadn’t been for that tear and the scare she’d given him, he’d have gone with her, or maybe beaten her there. Instead he watched, awed, frightened, humbled. Feeling her body under him, around him…

  She opened her eyes. No guile, no defense. Totally open. To him.

  She accelerated the echoing pulses of her body, drawing on him.

  He closed his eyes. Pumping, her arms and legs around him.

  Coming…

  He’d never before wanted so badly he couldn’t say no.

  Yet his wanting was nothing compared to the need to meet hers.

  * * * *

  Jamie drifted.

  Their legs entwined, her head on his shoulder, his arm around her, her hand on his heart, his face into the top of her head.

  “You said you needed to be the sunshine for your folks, when you were little.”

  She blinked, feeling the drag of her lashes against his skin. “Mmm.”

  “Did you notice what your mom said when we were leaving Fredericksburg?”

  It felt a million years ago. “Be careful?”

  “She said they had to be realistic, you had to be realistic.”

  She heard her mother’s voice. We have to be realistic. You need to be realistic.

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “You told her not to worry. It was all a mistake.”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “She didn’t believe that. And she worried more because she thought you might.” His voice was dragging. She could hear sleep sliding over him, could feel it in the beat of his heart under her hand. “You don’t have t
o always be the sunshine, Jamie. You can let it rain.”

  A sound vibrated low in her throat. She couldn’t have said if it was acknowledgment, resistance, or acceptance.

  As he slept, she thought of all three.

  And of the man who’d come to know her from the journals she’d never thought would be read by another human being.

  Of Celeste saying Jamie was sharp with Ford.

  She slowly, carefully disentangled her body from Ford’s and slid out of the bed to climb up to her office and write in her journal to discover the truth of herself.

  * * * *

  Landis lightly tapped his water bottle on the table.

  “Oz, we know how you got most of your supposed scoops. But you did not hear about Jamison Chancellor being the target — still being a target as you said on your most recent podcast — through your snoop food. So—”

  “I prefer the term Trojan pizza.” Oz’s smirk faded under Landis’ stare.

  Clearly the guy couldn’t help it.

  “I’ve told you everything. A guy recognized me at the Red Hill Street scene the night the body was found and asked about the podcast, a guy who said right, right a lot. You know, like a habit.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX

  He woke up reaching for her.

  She wasn’t there.

  In the same instant he realized her robe wasn’t in the room, either, he saw the light from the big office window above lighting the patio and the roof of the garage visible from this room’s window.

  She was upstairs. Reading her journals? Maybe writing in the new one. Either way, in private.

  He stretched and put his hands under his head.

  Landis’ voice came into his head for no reason he could think of. Something about motive…

  He sat up.

  He pulled on the shorts and retrieved his phone.

  Landis answered with his name.

  “We’ve been looking at this the wrong way. We’ve been looking at it from my eyes — hate as a motive. We should have been looking at it from Jamie’s eyes — love as a motive.”

  “The killer loves Jamie? Are you confessing, Belichek, because I’ll want to record this.”

  He wasn’t derailed by his partner. “For hate, I thought the two guys were Xavier—”

  “Obvious.”

  “—and York. Despite not wanting to see it, she felt resentment from him — because she wasn’t Vivian, because she headed the foundation, because she wasn’t his daughter. But flip it. The guys who love her.”

  “Not our friend Oz, who definitely loves himself the most.”

  “Agreed, but what made us really dig into Zeedyk, Landis?”

  “That podcast about a source telling him Jamie was going to die after all.”

  “Yeah. The guy you said Zeedyk calls Mr. Right, Right. Easy vocal tic to throw in. So obvious it can sound made up. What if the reason was to focus attention on Zeedyk?”

  “You’re thinking the real guy we’re after is also Zeedyk’s so-called source? In that case we’re back to the love motive. Say, Arbendroth — though he, too, seems to love himself more.”

  Belichek’s head came up. “Adam Delattre as the second. Though he loves the foundation more. Jamie said it, whether she knows it consciously or not. She said Hendrickson York and Celeste were protective of her, but Adam Delattre is protective of the foundation.”

  The sound of Landis slapping the desk came through. “The donations that jumped up with the news Jamie was murdered… But he’s the only one who didn’t have a current key. Because he stayed with Jamie before she changed the locks because of Phil Xavier.”

  Belichek swore with low-voiced vehemence. “Last night — I almost had it last night when Jamie let me in. The way she was back-lit so I couldn’t see much detail and the way she backed up from the door when she saw it was me. Bethany Usher could have let the shooter in and then backed up. It didn’t have to be the shooter getting in with a key and meeting her in the hall. I got too hung up on all those keys floating around. The killer never needed a key.”

  Landis took a beat. “And what are the chances Adam knew all about Usher before he supposedly checked into it because of weirdness between her and Hendrickson. Those computer searches on her, what did our guys say? They were almost miraculously on point. Because Delattre already knew what to look for? If he’s stashed away even more equipment, he could have done those searches earlier, then recreated them on the foundation computer so we’d find them.”

  He was tapping at his department phone. “This is Landis, homicide. That search history on Bethany Usher you found—? Yeah, the Sunshine Foundation computer. You said the guy never took a step wrong. How common is that? … Uh-huh. … Uh-huh. … Okay. Thanks.”

  He clicked off and came back to Belichek. “Not common. In fact, it pretty much doesn’t happen that somebody doesn’t hit a single dead end and have to back up. I’m pulling Adam Delattre in for questioning right away.”

  “I’ll talk to Jamie. There might be more she can fill in.”

  “She’s going to love that. Tightening the noose on one of her people.”

  “Yeah.”

  * * * *

  Belichek had his foot on the bottom stair to the third floor when he heard a tread above him that made him stop.

  Then Jamie’s voice.

  “Adam? What are you—? How did you get in here?”

  “I got your key. Your new key. Just the way you told Celeste that Bethany got your old key. Took it out of your purse, got it copied. But you must have heard me come back in and try to return it…”

  Belichek eased back to the bedroom for his weapon and to call Landis in a whisper.

  “He’s in the house. Third floor office with Jamie.”

  “Armed?”

  “Have to assume he is. I am. No lights, no sirens. With her up there, nobody spooks him. Understand? Sniper shot from Enderbe’s best bet. I’ll leave my line open but mute you. I’m going up.”

  “Bel—”

  He muted his partner’s warnings of caution.

  “…barely got away before all those emergency vehicles showed up. And then had to wait outside here for hours and hours before I could get in here without you hearing me.”

  Adam’s tone held reproach. That fell away with his next words.

  “I had to do it, Jamie, I had to. For the Sunshine Foundation. To make it greater. You understand, Jamie. I know you do. You’re the one who taught me how important the foundation is. More important than any of us, more important than anyone. Sacrifices have to be made. You said that. I heard you telling Hendrickson. Sacrifices had to be made for the foundation to reach the next level, to do all the good it can do. That’s the most important thing.”

  “That was about a job title, not about killing someone.”

  Belichek heard such horror in her voice. Would she crack under the weight of it?

  “It’s about the foundation.” That was rougher than he’d heard Adam before. He was on the edge. Jamie needed to bring him back, to keep him from unraveling completely.

  Hold on, Jamie.

  Belichek crept up, pressed against the side of the stairwell.

  He saw a shadow of Adam, standing in the bathroom, mostly obscured from this angle by the half-open door. Adam pointed a shotgun toward the easy chair.

  That must be where Jamie was, though Belichek couldn’t see her.

  “I don’t want you to get hurt, Adam. Please—”

  “I won’t get hurt. I have the gun,” he said simply. “Anyway, I don’t matter. If I die, that’s okay. Someone else can do what I do at the foundation. But nobody else can make everyone in the world aware of the Sunshine Foundation the way your tragic death will.”

  “I want to live, Adam.”

  Good. Remind him of the person you are, not an abstraction.

  Belichek came up another stair.

  “But you will live, don’t you see? You’ll live forever. It’s the perfect story. The beautiful young woman who
’d wanted to help other people. Then tragically dies. Twice, I guess.” He gave a little giggle. “That’s what I was trying for the first time. No one would ever forget you. No one would ever forget the Sunshine Foundation. It could do more and more and more good. Like you wanted.

  “I’m sorry that didn’t work. But now it will. Everybody will remember you, the good you did in your life and your tragic death. Before, I thought that’s what would happen, but I didn’t know for sure. But now I do. More donations to the foundation than ever. All the stories about you.

  “Only when you came back, there weren’t as many donations. We need them so we can do more good.”

  “Adam, what…? Open your eyes.”

  “No. No. I can’t open my eyes. I couldn’t before and I can’t now.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Belichek came up two steps, still below the level of the floor, keeping his weapon out of sight, but with no protection from someone aiming down.

  “He’s talking about—”

  Adam gasped and swung the gun toward him.

  Still calm, but with greater urgency, Jamie said, “Ford, go downstairs. Adam—”

  “—shooting Bethany in the face. But—”

  “—and I are talking foundation business.”

  “Don’t move,” Adam shouted. “Don’t move or I’ll shoot.”

  Belichek kept talking. “—you didn’t have your eyes closed, did you, Adam? You knew where to shoot. You knew where the face was. You thought you were looking at Jamie’s face when you shot. The woman who helped your family, who gave you a job, who helped you so much.”

  The shotgun’s barrel waggled with the shaking of the hands holding it.

  Belichek took some of the pressure off by not addressing Adam directly.

  “That’s why he didn’t know he’d shot Bethany Usher instead of you. She answered the door —the light backlights anyone standing there — and she probably stepped back, either to let him in or in surprise—”

  “Surprise. Oh. Oh. How did you know?” Adams falsetto jarred every taut nerve. “She said that when she answered the door. I didn’t remember until later. I remembered the words, but I couldn’t remember the voice. It could have been Jamie’s. I thought it was Jamie’s. Asking how I knew she was home. That’s what I thought for those weeks. But I wasn’t sure. Not totally sure. And then when Jamie came back… I knew it was Bethany. Then I could remember it was her voice, not Jamie’s. I don’t know what she meant. But that’s what she said before…”