That was way too perceptive for comfort or for Newman’s safety. The last thing I wanted him to do was try to talk to Olaf for me. “Like you said, Newman, I handled it.”
“I’d say you could handle yourself with any man on the planet, but . . . Jeffries is a scary motherfucker.”
It made me laugh. I wasn’t sure why.
“Why was that funny?” Newman asked.
“I think I’ve just never heard you cuss,” I said.
“I was a cop for four years before I became a marshal. Not much spooks me, but Jeffries does.”
“I’m glad, Newman. I’m glad you understand he’s scary. Whatever else we say here and now, I want one thing clear between us: Under no circumstances do you play white knight and talk to Otto for me. One, it will undermine me in his eyes, and I can’t afford to look weak to him. Two, I’m not sure what he’d do to you if he thought you were somehow in his way.”
“If it was anyone else but you and him, yeah, I’d be having a man-to-man talk with him about professional conduct,” Newman said.
“But it’s him and me,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. He rolled his hands over the cool plastic smoothness of the steering wheel and watched them move as if it were important. I think he was just giving himself time to think. I sat in silence and let him gather his thoughts. “I really thought you would have been louder in the restaurant if anyone touched you like that.”
“If it had been almost anyone else on the planet, I’d have probably dumped my water in their lap or made a scene at the table, but I don’t want to humiliate Otto. I don’t want to back him into that kind of corner ever.”
Newman gave a little shiver, settling his shoulders deeper into his jacket. “Please don’t, because I’d feel like I had to protect you, and I really don’t want to fight him.”
“I already covered this, Newman. Under no circumstances are you to try to protect me from Otto.” There was a hard-tight feeling in the pit of my stomach at the thought of Newman being all gallant on my behalf with Olaf. I did not want Newman dying to protect my honor. If anyone was going to do that, I would do it myself.
“Are you telling me that if he gets out of hand with you, you want me to just leave the two of you alone? I know you’re tough, Blake, one of the toughest people I know, but . . . I couldn’t leave you alone with him if I thought he might . . . hurt you.”
“I appreciate that, Newman. I truly do. But I don’t want you getting hurt or worse because you stepped into Otto’s crush on me.”
“Is that what it is, a crush? That sounds like you’re in junior high, and he wants to ask you out to the school dance. Whatever Jeffries wants with you, it’s nothing that innocent.”
Newman looked at me, and there was something in his brown eyes that was part pain, part knowledge of really bad things. He might not have seen everything I’d seen, but he’d seen his share. It was there in his eyes, raw. He was either honoring me by letting me see it, or he couldn’t hide it in that moment. Either way, I’d treat it like the important thing it was. You don’t parade your pain for just anyone in our line of work.
“You’re right. It’s not.” Then I told him the lie that Edward had created to keep me safe from Olaf.
“So Forrester isn’t your boyfriend?”
“No, but we let Otto think he is, because he respects Ted. Most of the cops that notice this whole dynamic, we let them think what they want to think about Ted and me, because we can’t risk them telling the truth to Otto. If he ever finds out that Ted and I lied to him about being lovers, I don’t know what he’ll do, and I don’t want to find out.”
“Why can’t you just say no and make it stick?” Newman asked.
It was a great question, and I didn’t know how to answer it without telling Olaf’s secret. It would be like giving away the secret identity of the Joker, if he had one. I’d have been okay with that, except Olaf, like any good villain, had made it clear that if his secret identity went up in flames, he’d make sure Edward’s did, too. Burning Olaf was one thing. Destroying Edward’s life with Donna and the kids was something else entirely.
“It’s complicated,” I finally said, and even to me, my words sounded lame.
“You’ve said no, haven’t you?” he asked.
“I have.”
“I really thought if any woman alive could make her ‘no’ stick, it would be you.”
“So did I.” Put that way, I hated it even more. I hated that Olaf was manipulating me into dating him, or at least manipulating me into manipulating him into thinking I’d date him.
“What aren’t you telling me, Blake?” And again, Newman was too perceptive for comfort.
“Okay, I’ll be as blunt with you as I can be. I don’t want to have to kill Otto just to keep him from wanting to date me.”
“Do you think it will come to that, seriously?”
I shrugged. “I think it might.”
“Jesus, Blake, just report him to the higher-ups. They’ll tell him to back off.”
“You were a cop, right?”
“Yeah.”
“How many women did you see that died with a court order of ‘leave me the fuck alone’ in their purses?”
Newman went back to looking at the steering wheel. “More than I want to remember.” There was so much emotion in that one sentence that I could tell it had ghosts attached to it: all the people he couldn’t save. That’s the hardest lesson as a cop: You can’t save everyone.
“I’ve decided that I’m a big grown-up marshal, and I’ll handle Otto without going through channels.”
“You let Forrester help you,” Newman said, and looked at me again, the anger in his eyes still raw.
I almost asked, Who couldn’t you save? Whose death are you remembering and blaming yourself for? But I didn’t. You learn early on not to ask certain questions.
“Ted is my mentor. I’m your mentor. I’m not letting my apprentice take this one for the team. It’s tricky enough without me having to worry about you, Newman. I want to make sure that you and that fiancée of yours get to the altar.”
“Are you saying that Jeffries would kill me?”
“Are you saying he wouldn’t?”
“He’s dangerous, yes, but I think he’d rape before he’d kill.”
I had to fight to keep my face blank, because Newman was closer to the truth than I wanted him to be. “Well, you know the saying ‘pillage first, burn second.’”
“Don’t make a joke, Blake.”
“I don’t know what else to do, Newman. You offered help. I’ve refused it. If you keep helping me, then you’re taking my agency away. You’re in effect telling me that I am a helpless victim that needs you to rescue me, and that is not true.”
“If Jeffries were into men, hell, Blake, I might take your help to rescue my ass.”
The phrasing made me want to laugh, but I fought the urge off. “I appreciate you admitting that, Newman, but I’m a woman, and I had to get used to dealing with shit like this around puberty.”
“That is a sad fucking statement, Blake.”
“It’s a sad fucking truth. Now, unless you want to explain to Jeffries where we’ve been all this time, you need to start the car and get us moving to meet up.”
He started the car but didn’t put it in gear. “I don’t like this, Blake.”
“I don’t like it either, but we have a crime to solve and a life to save. We’ll worry about the other shit later.”
Newman put the car in gear. “Fine. What next on the crime solving?”
“I think it’s time to talk to the only other person that was in the house when the murder occurred.”
“You mean Jocelyn Marchand?” He started out of the parking lot and onto the only road through town.
“Yeah.”
“There had to be more than just her and Bobby in the hous
e with Ray, because the footprints don’t belong to any of them,” Newman said.
“Okay, let’s go question the only other person who we know was in the house when the murder occurred.”
“We could just go do that?” he said.
“You mean, leave Otto out of the crime solving?” I asked.
“Why not?”
“One, he’s actually a good man in a fight, and he sees things at a crime scene that no one else will see. If he wasn’t good at his job, I wouldn’t put up with the other shit.”
“So you think he’ll be helpful.”
“I do. I wish I didn’t, but I do.”
“Well, you are my mentor, so let’s go get the big scary fuck and head to the hospital.”
“Damn, Newman, you’re even beginning to sound like me.”
That made him laugh. My phone let me know there was a text. It was from Nicky. “Landed. Will head your way as soon as we get rental car.” There was a heart emoji and a purple smiley face with horns after the brief message. The devil emoji made me smile, because it was so him. If it had been Nathaniel, the message would have been longer with way more emojis or a GIF. Micah would have just done lots of hearts. Jean-Claude wasn’t big on texting.
I sat there staring at my phone, wondering who the we in the sentence were. I knew that they wouldn’t include any of those three men, and they would include more bodyguards, because I’d texted Micah that we needed more muscle when I gave him the heads-up that Olaf was here. Nicky was a werelion, and he had the size and training to go up against Olaf if it came to that. I trusted Nicky and Micah to have sent the right people for the task.
“You smiled, and now you have a look on your face. Are you okay?” Newman asked.
“Yeah, Nicky and the rest of his people landed at the nearest major airport. They’ll head this way once they get the rental car.”
“Duke is going to be pissed.”
“Tell him that I needed a booty call.”
“More pissed,” Newman said, smiling.
“Tell him I wanted more Therianthropes to help control Bobby.”
“That, he’ll believe.” Newman looked at me, eyes narrowing. “You didn’t just want me to invite the Coalition in to help with the case. You wanted more people to run interference between you and Jeffries.”
“That last part is true, but I asked you to invite the Coalition in before Otto got here. Remember?”
“I remember, but it’s still more backup for you with Jeffries.”
“Ted will probably get here first, but yeah.”
“Normally I’d either feel insulted or like you were manipulating me, but extra lycanthropes—Therianthropes—between us and Jeffries sounds like a great idea.”
I agreed. He put the Jeep in gear, and we went to pick up Olaf.
35
WE GOT GOOD news when we pulled into the hospital parking lot. The judge had agreed to add another eight hours to the warrant of execution, thanks to Kaitlin’s footprint evidence, but unless we had another name to put on the warrant by then, when the time limit was up, Bobby Marchand had to die. There would be no more extensions, so we had to find a clue and bust some crime. Newman had also given Bobby the name of the lawyer Micah had recommended. If all else failed, maybe the other branch of the law could come up with a delaying tactic.
Jocelyn Marchand lay against her snow-white hospital bed like the princess from a racially diverse cast of Sleeping Beauty. The pictures at the house had shown her as having grown up into a beautiful young woman, but they hadn’t done her justice. She looked like her mother had cloned herself. I mean, I’d known she looked like her mother from the pictures, but when I saw her up close, the resemblance was almost eerie, or maybe it was her own beauty that was disturbing. Her skin was perfect without a drop of base makeup to hide flaws, though as far as I could see, there were no flaws to cover. Her hair lay in near perfect ringlets around her face. I’d never been able to get my curls to be that well-behaved. The only way to come close was for someone else to use a very narrow curling iron over and over until every curl was tamed and hung like bouncy spiral magic. Her hair wasn’t black like the pictures had shown, but a nearly reddish brown. It looked natural, but you don’t go from black to that without an expert dye job. I couldn’t imagine what they’d done to take all that dark out of her hair to make it nearly auburn. Her eyelashes lay on her cheeks like thick black lace, as dark as the perfect curve of her eyebrows.
Olaf leaned in to whisper between Newman and me so that we could both hear. “She is awake.”
Newman whispered back, “How do you know?”
I looked away from her face to her body and realized that she was feigning the deep, even breathing of sleep. The pulse in the side of her neck beat against her skin like it was racing. She was nervous, maybe even scared. Why?
“Pulse rate and breathing are wrong,” I said.
Newman nodded and then said, “Jocelyn, I’m sorry but we have to talk to you.”
She tried to keep pretending to be asleep, but the pulse in the side of her neck was beating so hard, it looked like a butterfly trapped under her skin and beating its wings to escape. Her chest stopped trying to rise and fall but went to something shallower.
“Jocelyn, you can’t just pretend we’re not here. I’m really sorry, but we have to talk to you,” Newman said.
There was movement at the door behind us, and both Olaf and I turned toward it as a tall nurse stepped through the door. It hadn’t been movement inside the room that had alerted me. I’d have sworn I sensed movement, but maybe it had been Olaf reacting to hearing her in the hallway that had made me turn. Whatever. He and I looked at the nurse as she came through the door.
She was well over six feet tall. I personally knew only one woman taller, and that was Claudia back home in St. Louis. Claudia was also a serious weight lifter, so she was the most physically intimidating woman I knew. The nurse looked to be in good shape, but she was as slender as most people her height. Words like willowy came to mind. Her pale brown hair was cut very short around a face devoid of makeup. She had high sculpted cheekbones and a wide mouth that made her brown eyes look smaller than they actually were. She wore a pink smock with little kittens on it as if it would disguise her size and make her more approachable, or maybe she just liked kittens.
“I’m sorry, but she’s still sedated,” the nurse said.
“She’s feigning sleep,” Olaf said.
“What he said,” I said.
“We really do need to speak with Jocelyn. I’m sorry that it can’t wait,” Newman said.
“I’ll get the doctor,” the nurse said like someone who was going to tattle to your parents, as if the doctor would be able to convince us that Jocelyn was asleep when a mere nurse could not. She left in search of a doctor.
“Hi, Jocelyn. I’m Marshal Anita Blake. This is Marshal Otto Jeffries. We really need to speak with you.”
Newman leaned over the bed and said, “Jocelyn, I’m sorry. I know you’ve been through a lot, but I need to talk to you.”
She kept her eyes closed as she said, “Leave me alone.”
“I would if I could, but it’s a matter of life and death,” Newman said.
That made Jocelyn open her eyes. She looked so much like her mother that her eyes being brown instead of extraordinary green was almost jarring. Until I saw her eyes, I hadn’t realized just how well I knew her mother’s face. I’d grown up seeing her mother in tabloids at the grocery store and on the celebrity gossip shows that my stepmother, Judith, had loved. It was almost like having a friend show up with the wrong eyes.
“What do you mean, Win? No one else could have died. It was just . . . Dad.” The flicker of pain in her eyes when she said that last word was hard to watch, and I’d just met her. It had to be even harder on Newman.
“No, no one else is dead, and I’d like to ke
ep it that way,” Newman said.
“What do you mean?” Jocelyn asked.
Her voice was breathy and sounded far younger than I knew she was, or had I been expecting to hear the deep contralto of her mother out of that so-similar face? I hated to think that was it, but after my reaction to Jocelyn’s eye color being different, I couldn’t rule it out. I hated that I might be trying to put her mother over the top of her like a mask that she was supposed to wear, but if I kept the idea in mind that I might be doing it, maybe I could avoid actually doing it. I wasn’t even sure that made sense really, but I’d lived as the ghost of my own dead mother for most of my life. Except for having my father’s pale complexion, I looked like my mother’s clone, too.
“We need to ask you about what happened, Jocelyn,” Newman said.
“I told the police already.”
“I know, but I wasn’t there for the initial interview, so I need you to tell me . . . to tell us,” he said, glancing behind himself at Olaf and me.
“I don’t want to have to talk about it again, ever. It’s done, over with. Dad . . . is dead and Bobby’s dead. Everyone but me is dead,” she said. Tears sparkled in her eyes; her fingers dug into the sheets like she was trying to find something to hold on to.
“That’s just it, Jocelyn. Bobby isn’t dead.”
She stared up at him, eyes going wide, which made the tears slide down her cheeks. “He killed our father. You were supposed to kill him for what he did to Dad.”
“And if he did kill Ray, then I’ll do exactly that. But before I do something that I can’t undo, I want to be absolutely certain that Bobby is guilty.”
“What are you talking about? He did it. I found the body. I saw what his”—she made a gesture in the air like she was tearing at it—“claws did to my father . . . our father! How could he do that to Dad? How could anyone do that to their own father?” Her breathing was erratic, eyes too wide, pulse rising. She looked like she was on the verge of a panic attack.
I thought Newman would back off, but he didn’t. He asked one of the questions we’d come here to ask. “Bobby said he was with you that night, that you left him in his bedroom about to pass out after shapeshifting. Is that true, Jocelyn?”
Sucker Punch Page 26
