Sucker Punch

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  “If Bobby was hiding pictures from her, seems like he wouldn’t want her to have the lock code to his phone.”

  “Bobby told her that he loved her so much that he changed his code to her birth date.”

  “Very romantic,” Edward said.

  Helen pulled her hand out of his, her face offended. “Not if it’s your own brother, it isn’t.”

  “I’m sorry, Helen. Of course you’re right on that.”

  “Now you know that Jocelyn is telling the truth.”

  “It looks bad for Bobby,” Newman said.

  Helen’s face clouded up, some emotion I couldn’t read crossing over her face. Her moods were like clouds on a windy day, fast changing. “I hate the thought of him dying, but I’ll feel safer when the animal inside of him is dead.”

  “The animal and the man are one and the same,” Olaf said, still leaning against the wall.

  Helen glanced at him, then away quickly, as if she didn’t want to stare at him longer than necessary. Either she had good instincts, or she was just naturally intimidated by a man of his size. “I cannot believe that Bobby is the same thing that killed his uncle.”

  “You cannot kill the beast without killing the man.”

  “I know that,” she said, sounding defensive.

  “Do you?” Olaf asked, and he gave her a long look out of his hooded dark eyes.

  She didn’t try to hold the look but found the tabletop much more interesting.

  Edward turned around with a smile. In a thick Ted accent, he said, “Why don’t the two of you go talk to Bobby about those awful pictures? We’ll join you in a few minutes.”

  His eyes were not nearly as friendly as his tone. I think he thought Olaf was making Helen nervous, and he didn’t want the big guy talking to Bobby on his own, so . . . I got to stand in the hallway with him. Great, I was Olaf’s battle buddy. What could possibly go wrong?

  58

  OF COURSE, EDWARD wasn’t sending me out to stand alone with Olaf. There was still plenty of company in the outer office. Nicky was sitting at one of the empty desks with a chair angled so he could see us coming down the hallway from the interrogation room. He also had a view of the rest of the office, the front door, and the cells down their little hallway. It made me smile just to see him sitting there. He smiled back.

  I wanted to go to him and kiss him so badly. It was just wrong to walk into a room and not touch someone you loved, but we were going to cool the PDA while we were working. Nicky and I would be sharing a room tonight, so we’d catch up on the displays of affection in private.

  “That was fast on the rooms,” I managed to say without going close enough to touch him.

  “Ethan and the others are handling it. We all decided it would suck if you needed help keeping your prisoner in human form and none of us was here to help.”

  Deputy Frankie was on the landline phone. She put the receiver to her shoulder to say, “Everyone else is out on calls. I’m manning the phones and guarding the prisoners.”

  I realized the door to the cell area was open so she could be at the desk and see into the other space, though maybe there was more than one reason she wanted a good view.

  I could hear Angel’s voice. She was sitting in the little hallway on the chair that Frankie had been using when she was on guard duty earlier. She was leaning forward and talking to either Bobby or Troy; it was hard to tell which from a glance. Angel laughed at something that one of them said; she used a very feminine laugh that usually meant the joke wasn’t nearly as funny as it was meant to be. Either a lot of women are socially conditioned to laugh at men’s jokes, or they’re flirting. I’d never been socially conditioned as a girl for much of anything, and I’d never been able to fake a laugh, and I made it a rule not to fake anything else, but I could recognize when others did.

  Deputy Frankie hung up the phone and glanced back into the hallway. Maybe Angel’s flirting wasn’t really aimed at the men in the cells. Angel dated both men and women, so you never knew which way she’d swing. Maybe she had a thing for women in uniform?

  “We need to ask Bobby a few more questions,” I said.

  The phone rang, and Frankie waved us through the open door while she took the call. Angel stood up as we walked into the cellblock. Did two cells count as a block? She smiled at Olaf and me. Some lingering energy from the flirting seemed to cling to her, or maybe it was the extra wiggle she put into her hips as she swayed toward us in her pencil skirt.

  “I know the rules: The sheriff lets us sit with Bobby, but we’re not allowed to be in on any official police business like questioning the prisoners.” Angel wiggled her eyebrows as she said the last word like it was something naughty.

  Olaf and I frowned at her as she left. I don’t know what he was thinking, but I still didn’t like her and Pierette making themselves bait for him. I closed the door between us and the office for what privacy it offered. Everyone outside except for the deputy was a wereanimal. The door was thick, but I wasn’t sure it was that thick. Since I’d have let Angel stay in the room, I really wasn’t worried about it. I’d closed the door because I’d made the deal with Leduc that only the people with official badges would be involved in official businesslike interrogations.

  Bobby and Troy were sitting as close as the cells would allow, visiting through the shared cell bars. They looked at Olaf and me as we walked in, and there was something in their expressions that told me they were on the same side. The whole cop-and-criminal thing didn’t seem to apply anymore. Maybe it was their shared history, or maybe they’d bonded because one of them had nearly killed the other one. Men can bond over some strange stuff. Of course, maybe they were just bored, and they didn’t have anything else to do but talk to each other, and I was just overthinking it. Yeah, probably that.

  “What’s wrong?” Bobby asked. He started moving to the front of his cell.

  “Why do you think anything is wrong?” I asked.

  “You look grim.” He stopped moving toward us and just stood looking at us. He went pale, and his voice was a little breathy as he asked, “Are you going to kill me now?”

  I shook my head.

  He let out a long breath, or maybe he just breathed again. I thought for a second he was going to go to his knees, but he managed to back up and sit on his bunk. “I keep thinking every time one of you comes in here that it will be the last time.”

  I had no honest comfort to offer him, because he was right. I could kill when people were trying to kill me, when I had to protect others, or even when I was sure that someone had murdered others and would do it again, but this . . . this wasn’t right.

  “You’re right, Bobby. We’re running out of time, so I’m just going to ask you what I need to ask. I’m sorry that we don’t have privacy, but the interrogation room is full.”

  “I understand that you want to help me, Anita, so just ask. If Troy tells anyone my secrets, I’ll tell everyone what happened at our senior prom.”

  “Oh, dude, that is low,” Troy said.

  Bobby smiled at him. “Just reminding you that I know where your bodies are buried, too.” Bobby frowned and looked at us. “Wow, that sounded way better in my head. Now it just sounds creepy.”

  “About that kind of thing,” I said, “you say that you and Jocelyn had a consensual relationship.”

  “We’re in love,” he said.

  “Okay, then, why do all the pictures on your phone look like stalker pics?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “She looks asleep in all of them, like you snuck into her room and took them without her knowing. That’s not what couple pictures look like, Bobby.”

  He looked angry, embarrassed. “This sounds so weak, but she didn’t want any pictures until after we went public with the relationship. She was adamant about no intimate pictures.”

  “So, you did sneak int
o her room at night and take the pictures?”

  “No, we’d make love and she’d fall asleep and then I’d take a few pictures. I loved her so much—I love her so much—that I wanted something to prove to myself that it was real. I know that’s not a good excuse for promising not to take pictures and then taking them anyway, but they’re not all like that. I have some of her smiling at me during the day, and those are good.”

  “We didn’t find any pictures of her except the ones you took when she was asleep and the one video.”

  He frowned at me. “I have dozens of pictures of her smiling and talking to me. I took them before she told me to stop.”

  I glanced up at Olaf, and he nodded, which I took to mean that Bobby smelled like he was telling the truth. So either Bobby was truly delusional, or Jocelyn had found time to open his phone and delete the other photos. We needed to know if Helen Grimes had seen Jocelyn do it, or if Helen had left the phone alone for any length of time with the other woman. Jocelyn hadn’t been able to hear her own voice on the video, so she hadn’t known to erase it. If we hadn’t heard that one bit of evidence, we’d have had to believe that Bobby was truly delusional about her and probably had killed the only dad that either of them had ever known. But we’d all heard her voice inviting him into the shower for sex, so he wasn’t crazy. Jocelyn might have been one of the most cold-blooded and manipulative people I’d ever met. Considering some of the people that I’d dealt with over the years, that was saying something.

  “Okay, Bobby, we’ll double-check the phone. Maybe we just missed them.”

  I didn’t believe we’d missed them. I believed Jocelyn had made them disappear. A good computer forensic person could probably find them again with some techie magic, but since we were supposed to kill Bobby soon, they’d never have time to find the other photos, and once he was dead, so was the case.

  I went for the door, and Olaf followed me like a big pale shadow.

  “Anita, wait,” Bobby called.

  I turned back to look at him. He was at the bars at the front of the cell, holding on to them. “How long do I have until . . . you know?”

  I gave him the countdown. “We’re really trying to find another way, Bobby.”

  “I believe you and Win are, Anita. I do.” He licked his lips as if his mouth was dry.

  “You want some water or something?”

  “No, Frankie made sure we had something earlier.”

  “Hang in there, Bobby. We won’t just walk in here without telling you that we’re out of options. Okay? You don’t have to freak out every time we come through the door.”

  “Do I get a last meal or request or anything?”

  In all the years I’d been doing this, it had never come up, because I’d never had anyone be alive and in custody this long before execution. I glanced up at Olaf and he looked at Bobby. “We could arrange something.”

  “I’ll think on it. I mean, what the hell do you have for your very last meal?”

  “It won’t come to that, Bobby,” Deputy Troy said from the neighboring cell.

  “You tried to kill him recently, Deputy. I don’t think you are in a position to help the situation.”

  “You’re right. I’m an idiot, and I’ve probably ruined my career or my whole life. But if you let me out of this cell, I won’t run. I just want to help Bobby. I want a chance to make up for what I tried to do to him, please.”

  “You’re Leduc’s problem, not ours,” I said, and went for the door again.

  This time no one called us back, and we went back to the interrogation room. I did the soft knock, which is the only time police don’t knock on a door like they’re trying to scare the hell out of someone inside the room.

  Edward came to the door and stepped outside. I told him what we’d learned from Bobby. “Do you want to ask her or let me do it?” I asked.

  “I’ll do it, but you can be in the room. Otto needs to wait out here.”

  “I make her nervous,” Olaf said.

  “You do.”

  “She’s not as naive as she sounds,” I said.

  Olaf shook his head. “She doesn’t know what I am. She is simply afraid because I am tall and male and do not flirt with her.”

  “I don’t think your style of flirting would work for Helen,” Edward said.

  “No, it would not,” Olaf said.

  “You can get coffee or something,” I said.

  “I will get ‘or something,’” he said, and walked back toward the office area.

  We went back into the room, and Edward went to work, trying to charm Helen into telling things.

  Helen didn’t know she was supposed to hide things from us, so she told the truth. “I gave the phone to Jocelyn so she could make sure he hadn’t changed the code or deleted the evidence. She was afraid no one would believe her if the pictures were gone.”

  “And had he changed the pass code?”

  “No, it was still her birth date.”

  “Did you leave the room for any reason, Helen?” Edward asked.

  “Jocelyn needed more water. She’d pushed the call button for the nurse half an hour before I arrived, and no one had checked on her. Can you imagine, a half hour and no nurse?” Helen was indignant about the nurses ignoring Jocelyn. It never seemed to occur to her that Jocelyn might not have pressed the button at all and had just wanted Helen out of the room so she could maybe delete some pictures.

  “Thank you so much for all your help, Helen,” Newman said to her.

  “I know it’s awful, but can I go back and tell Jocelyn that she doesn’t have to be afraid anymore, that you believe her and you’re going to do what needs to be done?”

  Newman blinked at her and then put a smile back on his face. It almost reached his eyes. “Are you going back to the hospital from here, Helen?”

  “Yes, Jocelyn is going to be discharged. I told her I’d help her get home.”

  “That’s very kind of you.”

  “Well, she doesn’t have any family left now.”

  “I guess she doesn’t,” Newman said.

  Helen got up and asked her question again. “Can I reassure Jocelyn that you believe her, and it will be all right now?”

  “Let me take this one, Newman,” I said.

  “Be my guest, Blake.”

  “You can tell Jocelyn that we will follow the letter of the law, and she can be certain that we will do our job.”

  Helen smiled at us. She’d heard what she wanted to hear. She left still smiling and reassured. Edward gave me a look that said he’d understood exactly what I’d meant.

  Newman shut the door behind her and turned to me, frowning. “What the hell did that even mean?”

  “You heard exactly what I said.”

  “You cannot be thinking that you would harm Jocelyn.”

  “If you have to kill Bobby, don’t you want to make sure that whoever is responsible for that pays the price?”

  “If we have to kill him, then it’s over. We’re done.”

  I shook my head. “The warrant gives us the latitude to kill anyone involved in the crime.”

  “Are you seriously implying what I think you’re implying?”

  “I’m saying that if Bobby Marchand dies because we couldn’t prove it wasn’t him, then I want whoever killed Ray Marchand and used us to kill Bobby to pay.”

  “Once Bobby is dead, the case is finished, Anita.”

  “Are you going to be able to pull the trigger on him?”

  Newman looked away and then back at me. His hands were in fists at his sides. “If he was trying to kill me or someone else, yes, but shooting him through the bars of a cage . . . I don’t think I can do that.”

  “Then sign the warrant over.”

  “I was going to until this conversation. Now if I sign it over to you, I’m afraid you’ll
use it to kill Jocelyn and Bobby.” He looked at me. I met his gaze and held it. He was the one who finally looked away. “Fuck, Anita, just fuck. I need some air.” He opened the door and pushed past Olaf.

  “What is wrong, Newman?” he asked.

  “I had to tell him that there’s no Santa Claus,” I said.

  “I do not understand.”

  “She overshared. Now he’s spooked, and he won’t sign the warrant over to any of us, Anita,” Edward said.

  “That isn’t what I meant to happen.”

  Edward sighed. “You’re used to working with me, or Olaf, or Bernardo. You can’t talk that plainly in front of the other marshals, especially not the new ones that come through traditional police channels.”

  “What did Anita say to him?” Olaf asked.

  We told Olaf, and he smiled a smile so big, it filled his black eyes with good humor. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen him look so genuinely happy. “Do you truly mean to kill the girl?”

  “If she is only hiding the affair with her brother out of shame, then no, but if she is behind the frame job on Bobby, then if he dies, she dies.”

  “Only if Newman gives the warrant up,” Edward said.

  “Damn it, Ted, this is so wrong, all of it. Jocelyn or someone is using us like a murder weapon.”

  “We’ll figure it out, Anita. We always do.”

  “Usually we figure out how to find and kill the monster, but the monster is locked in a cell awaiting execution like a model citizen.”

  “We are hunting the beauty this time, not the beast,” Olaf said.

  “Poetic,” I said.

  “Thank you.”

  “Fine. Let’s go find a bevy of beauties at the strip club and see if Jocelyn’s alibi holds up,” Edward said.

  “Save the beast. Kill the beauty,” Olaf said, and smiled again. “I like it.”

  “It was poetic the first time. Now it’s just creepy,” I said.

  His smile didn’t dim, but his eyes slid back to a more predatory happiness, less kid on Christmas morning and more serial killer. “You are not the first woman who has said that to me.”