49
IT WAS PROBABLY EXACERBATED BY THE PAIN PILLS coursing through my system, but my mind was going a mile a minute in tangential directions. Sure, it was wonderful to think that the bad guys, both Arno and Rod Devlin, had been caught. It was also terrifying to think I’d been so close to being killed. What was really bothering me, though, was the feeling that I’d somehow screwed things up between Steve and me.
Although his boss, Staff Superintendent Keller, had been scathing in the talking-to he had given me after the fact and had made some snide comments about “women’s intuition” which had me on a slow burn, it was Steve’s silence that really was scaring me. It wasn’t as if I’d been acting behind his back, which he somehow seemed to think. He had been out of town, and I had acted on impulse. Heck, how many times had he told me that he wasn’t on the case, anyhow?
Perhaps he was feeling a bit threatened by me having even a peripheral part to play in his world. I wasn’t willing to push the theory to the extreme; I didn’t want to paint him in the same boat as a creep like Arno Maltzan. I just wasn’t able to be so open emotionally with someone who could compartmentalize his job from his personal life—especially as I had been involved, albeit peripherally, in that job. If he could shut me out there, where else might I find a locked door? Furthermore, was I really important to him, or merely useful to him as bait for bad guys? That wasn’t actually fair, since I had placed myself in the trap without any help or encouragement from Steve, but I was not feeling logical. I was feeling wounded. I’d worked myself up into a proper funk by the time he knocked at my door.
I had to give him points for sensitivity. It took him all of a minute to gauge my mood. He helped me back to my chair and pulled up the edge of the coffee table to sit on, holding my hand.
“You’re pissed at me,” he acknowledged.
I shook my head ruefully. “I don’t even know if I have a right to be.”
“You do. I’ve been thinking about it all day. You have every right to doubt my reaction. I can’t believe it myself. I thought I was a sensitive New Age kind of guy, but when I knew you were in danger, I went sort of caveman. I am ninety percent certain that I reacted because I was worried about you, and not because you were poking your nose in a police investigation where you had no business.”
I had to laugh. At last we could turn the lanterns off in daylight, Diogenes. I had found an honest man.
“Is that what you’re worried about?” I asked. “That I want to horn in on all your cases? Don’t worry about that, honestly; I have no desire to be subjected to pain, and I’m not out to change the world.”
Steve sighed, and pushed back some loose hair from my face with a fingertip. “Randy, you and I both know that your curiosity and sense of fair play are a terrifying combination. But you’re right. I do have to keep some things from you, and anyone for that fact. I can’t tell you things about an ongoing investigation. It’s in the rules, and besides you wouldn’t want to know. I know you’re ticked off at me for keeping you in the dark about some things, just as much as I’m ticked off at you for putting yourself into such a potentially dangerous situation. There was nothing I could do about it, though. For instance, most of the work on this murder case was done in conjunction with the Fort McMurray RCMP, who have a record of violence on Devlin a half-inch thick. Everything from hockey fights to neighbors reporting a few black eyes for Gwen. We found a copy of the newspaper article on the letter-writing, along with her “Dear John” letter to him, and some uglified photos in his house. It took a bit to get the warrant, but we managed to justify probable cause. Your comments on Gwen’s essay were on the money, but that wasn’t going to cinch it. We had enough circumstantial evidence to make Gwen’s therapist open her files, and after that it didn’t take much to tie up the time sequence of Devlin taking time off work and the mileage on his truck. We even found someone on 117th St. who complained about his truck being parked in front of her house without a neighborhood parking pass.”
“But you’d never have found Jane without my help!” I couldn’t help interjecting.
“We’d have got the journal a whole lot sooner if you and I hadn’t been mixing up romance with a case, though. That journal is what put you in far too much danger for my liking.”
“Well, I feel as if you’re trying to excuse yourself for keeping things from me at the same time as you’re scolding me for being involved in the first place. It hurts not to be trusted, Steve.”
“I wasn’t keeping things from you because I thought you’d blab or screw things up. Randy, the world I see is so damn ugly, do you think I want to see it all over again when I look in your eyes?”
The man was good, and I was relenting. He noticed this, and pressed his advantage.
“I value your insights and I love you, but I want a relationship, not a work partnership. Is that all right with you?”
I shook my head, marveling at his ability to see through me.
“I guess I was reading too much Tommy and Tuppence, or Nick and Nora into all this,” I admitted. “It’s not as if I really wanted that, either, I guess I just don’t know what to expect from this particular volume. If I’m going to live in a sub-literary genre novel, I at least want to be the intrepid girl detective, not the victim.”
“There is nothing sub-literary about you, my dear. And besides, fiction is only that,” Steve agreed. “Sometimes you have to fly without a script.” He leaned forward to kiss me.
I kissed him back, releasing myself momentarily to a world without words. Ironic really, since it had been words that had begun it all. Words that stung, words that killed, words that destroyed. Regardless of how good it felt just now to have lips on mine, keeping them still, I wasn’t going to underestimate the potency of words. But for now, I would bow to a greater mind, a much better writer. “The rest is silence …”
Sticks and Stones Page 23
