VIP Protector

by Patricia Rosemoor

  The operating system brought the computer up to speed and Tony went straight to the word-processing program, straight to a folder named Heartland. Just like the halfway house.

  A no-brainer.

  “Too easy, Doc,” he muttered, opening the folder and finding a file on each of the dozen residents.

  Eager to get the dirt on the other ex-cons living in the dump—something that could give him leverage if not cash—he nevertheless couldn’t resist the file named Vargas. What had O’Rourke said about him?

  No need to wonder. He opened the file and skimmed the notes about himself. Basically, a shorthand transcript, these were from their last session only. Yada, yada, yada. Big deal. Only the final entry made Tony raise his eyebrows and curse himself for not learning to keep his mouth shut.

  Then he snorted and shook his head. What did it matter what Dermot O’Rourke knew? He was bound by therapist-patient confidentiality. Kind of like that seal-of-the-confessional thing they’d had going years ago.

  But he wanted to sell the laptop on the street, so getting rid of evidence against himself would be the smart thing. Wouldn’t do to let someone have the goods to blackmail him. Before he could exit the file to delete it, however, the doorknob rattled.

  Rattled himself, Tony shoved the still-running laptop out of sight under the bed. “Hey, Bingo, that you?” he called, wanting to believe his roommate had torn himself away from the television downstairs this early.

  “Open the door, Tony.”

  Recognizing the voice, Tony cursed softly, then trying to appear as if nothing were wrong, made for the door and opened it. Far more casually than he was feeling, he asked, “Hey, what’s happening?” His mouth was spitless and the words tumbled out in a rush.

  “Did you think you could get away with it?” his visitor asked, pushing Tony back inside and locking the door. “Did you think I wouldn’t know it was you?”

  “Hey, it was a joke. I didn’t mean—”

  “Didn’t you learn anything in that cell?”

  Tony backed away nervously, gaze glued to the hands twisting a purple velvet rope like the ones holding back a crowd from a club entrance… or inside a church. He used to put velvet ropes in place outside the confessional at St. Peter’s, part of his job as an altar boy.

  Tightening his hands into fists so he wouldn’t make the sign of the cross and betray his fear, he asked, “Wh-what are you gonna do with that thing?”

  A rhetorical question.

  No one had to tell him he was a dead man.

  Chapter One

  “Tony knows better than to try blackmail… has a death wish…” Detective Mike Norelli looked up from the transcript. “What about it, Doc?”

  Dermot O’Rourke sat back in his creaky wooden chair in the pasty-green Chicago Police Department interrogation room and took in the Violent Crimes tag team assigned to Tony Vargas’s murder. Norelli and his partner, Detective Jamal Walker, were as different as night and day. Middle-aged and beefy, Norelli wore a bland, dark suit, white shirt and forced smile. Younger and fitter, Walker apparently had more interest in being a snappy dresser than friendly. Both men leaned over the table toward Dermot like two vultures ready to pick at carrion.

  Not that he was officially under arrest.

  Not yet.

  But Dermot knew how this could go down. He was no stranger to the system, and they knew that. He’d done a couple of rounds in Juvenile Detention—the last time just for physically protecting himself from a rival gang member. That experience—added to knowing that next time he would be treated like an adult—had been enough to scare him straight.

  If the Vargas case went bad, he wouldn’t be so lucky this time around.

  “What about it?” Dermot finally echoed. “I enter abbreviated session notes on the laptop to be more fully written up later for my files.”

  “Do you always threaten your patients?” Walker asked, pushing his dark face closer.

  Dermot didn’t so much as flinch. “I don’t like your innuendo or your tone, Detective. Maybe I should call my lawyer?”

  He was bluffing, of course—he didn’t trust lawyers any more than he did cops. Too much bad experience. But he figured the threat sounded good.

  “Do you have reason to need a lawyer?”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Norelli said with a cheesy smile, apparently playing good cop. “We just need to know what you know about Tony Vargas. No accusations here.”

  Maybe not, but there certainly were implications Dermot didn’t like. They hadn’t asked him to come to the Area office simply because he’d counseled Tony, the little thief. They could have interviewed him at Heartland House where he donated his time to help ex-cons get back on their feet.

  He hadn’t wanted to go back to the old neighborhood—ever—but he’d gone to Heartland as a favor to Father Padilla, the priest who’d helped him out of the gang wars and set him on the road to a decent life. He’d figured one night a week in the Pilsen neighborhood wouldn’t kill him.

  Hah!

  If he was arrested and found guilty…

  “Be specific, then,” Dermot gritted out. “What do you need to know?”

  “The reference to blackmail in your notes on the laptop. Who was Tony’s target?”

  “I wouldn’t know. He never told me.”

  “And if he had, would you tell us?” Norelli asked.

  Dermot didn’t respond to the baiting. One wrong word and he could be inside.

  “You’re not a priest no more,” Walker said. “No seal of the confessional here.”

  He never really had been a priest, Dermot thought, though he’d worn the cloth for a short time—a huge mistake on his part. He never had what it took. Not the calling, anyway. But guilt had proved to be a great motivator.

  “No, only therapist-patient privilege,” he said so much more calmly than he felt. “But in this case, with my patient dead, I would tell you what I knew if I knew anything that would help catch his killer.”

  “Unless you don’t want the killer caught.”

  “If this was even a murder. How do you know it wasn’t suicide?”

  Dermot knew he was reaching. Tony had never seemed the type, but if he’d gotten himself into enough hot water that he was desperate…

  “Wollensky walked into the room and found him swinging from the chandelier,” Norelli said. “He went downstairs, called 9-1-1, then waited for the uniforms to go back into the room. They figured suicide, but when one of ’em picked up the overturned chair Vargas’d been standing on, the officer spotted the laptop. Guys in halfway houses don’t have computers unless they steal ’em. So the officer grabs the laptop, thinking he’ll run the serial number and see who it belongs to, but it’s still running. And what does he see but your note about blackmail.”

  “Come on,” Walker joined in. “What was that secret you and Tony shared?”

  Dermot started. “Secret?” Nothing in his session notes with Tony indicated they’d shared a secret.

  “Don’t play dumb, Doc. Wollensky was real talkative. He told us the two of you had something you couldn’t talk about—said Tony bragged he had this one thing over you. He thinks you offed Tony to keep whatever it was hush-hush.”

  Trying to appear relaxed when his gut was suddenly tied in a knot—a too-familiar feeling he’d thought was in his past—Dermot said, “I wouldn’t take Bingo Wollensky’s word for anything, Detectives. He, like most of the residents of Heartland, has a problem with the truth.”

  “Do you?” Walker asked.

  And Norelli followed up with, “Let’s look at your situation, Mr. O’Rourke. We find your laptop under Tony’s bed—”

  “He was a thief.”

  “—his roommate says you shared a secret, the guard on duty saw you in your office barely a half hour before the estimated time of death, a parishioner saw you at St. Peter’s the night before—the same night the velvet rope used to hang Tony Vargas from the chandelier base disappeared from its stand near the confession
al. Furthermore, not only was Tony your patient, but a decade ago, he was your altar boy. He must have known a lot about you, right?”

  Dermot couldn’t keep the irony from his tone. “Why don’t you gentlemen spell it out for me.”

  “This business Wollensky brought up won’t let me go,” Norelli said. “I keep thinking, what if Tony knew something about ‘Father Dermot’ from the old days? Something that—if brought to light now—could ruin your very nice shrink career, if not put you in the slammer? What would you do to keep that secret… well… secret?”

  “Did you kill Tony to keep him quiet?” Walker demanded to know.

  “You’re barking up the wrong tree, Detectives.”

  But they didn’t look convinced.

  Sweat trickled down Dermot’s spine. He knew they were only doing their job. But he also knew he was innocent. And sometimes innocent people landed in jail. What a weird coincidence—his going to confession at his old church the night before, the same night the unique murder weapon had disappeared.

  “Look, I can’t tell you what you want to know. I didn’t share any secret with Tony, but I was his confessor. Maybe that’s what he was referring to. Anything you want to know about our sessions as therapist and patient—you’ve got it. I already told you that. But anything he admitted to in the confessional is off-limits.”

  Dermot feared he knew what the ex-con had been jawing about. As a priest, he had listened to Tony’s confession years ago… had offered him absolution… but he’d never repeated what Tony had told him to a living soul, though he’d tried his best to make things right.

  Unfortunately, the seal of the confessional didn’t end simply because a man realized the vocation he’d chosen was a mistake he couldn’t go on making.

  Even now Dermot was bound to silence.

  ***

  Wishing she was a fly on the wall inside the interrogation room, Detective Stella Jacobek paced the chipped, old ceramic-floored hallway outside. As an Area North detective, she had no business being here, even though she’d known Tony Vargas for most of his scummy life.

  But how could she not be here when Dermot O’Rourke was in trouble?

  She’d hardly been able to believe it when she’d heard Dermot was being brought in for questioning for something they’d found on his laptop. She’d used her contacts to find out when he would be in the station. He might have been a hellion in his youth—how many times had she heard older parishioners say he’d been bad to the bone and were still shocked he’d become a priest?—and she might not have seen him for nearly a dozen years, but she owed him and meant to cover his back.

  No matter how torn she was about seeing him again, she would put her doubts aside.

  Even if Dermot had means, opportunity and a so-called motive—not to mention a violent past—Stella didn’t believe he would kill anyone. Though he’d turned in his collar, he was an activist for social change and a therapist, and as such, continued to help people, even as he had helped her get through the darkest hours in her life. Now their roles were reversed and she could do no less for him.

  Dermot O’Rourke was not a killer—on that, she would stake her life.

  The interrogation room door snapped open and a voice drifted out to the hall. “You’re free to go, Mr. O’Rourke. For now. In the meantime, don’t leave the city.”

  And whether or not she was ready for him, Dermot was suddenly there. He didn’t see her at first as he gathered himself together after what must have been an emotionally exhausting session, but she saw him, all six foot one of lean muscle encased in a tailored taupe suit, his dark reddish-brown hair punctuating a scowl that hardened his otherwise handsome face.

  Her insides fluttered and she did her best to tamp down the old longing, with little success. Pushing a strand of golden-brown hair back into its loose knot at the nape of her neck, she wished she was wearing something other than her usual slacks and jacket with an open-necked blouse. Something more feminine. Attractive.

  And then he saw her. Recognition instantly hit him, and he did a double take.

  “Star Jacobek, is that really you?”

  “Detective Stella Jacobek,” she corrected him, though she didn’t mind him calling her by the old nickname.

  “I’m impressed.”

  He appeared impressed. His thick burnt-brown eyebrows arched over amazing green eyes. “It’s good to see you, if not under these circumstances. Your boys made a mistake.”

  Just then, Norelli and Walker left the interrogation room. She knew them well enough to know they weren’t going to like her getting cozy with their only suspect. Walker spotted her with Dermot and whacked his partner in the arm to look. Both detectives glared at her.

  Ignoring them, she concentrated on Dermot. “Can we get outta here? We need to talk in private.”

  They agreed to meet at Brew Station, a café a few miles east, near the University of Illinois Chicago campus, a location on the way home for them both.

  The ten-minute drive down the Eisenhower Expressway and through the expanding university area gave Stella some time to pull herself together, to remind herself she wasn’t nineteen anymore. That’s how old she’d been when Dermot had come to St. Peter’s as a young priest and first heard her confession.

  And that’s how old she’d been when he’d literally saved her life.

  Though he’d been from the neighborhood, he was older than she, so Stella hadn’t known him before he’d come back as a newly ordained priest. She’d heard about his youthful reputation and his stints in juvie—older parishioners hadn’t kept the gossip to themselves—but she’d never actually seen that side of him. Not at first. He’d been a little rough around the edges compared to the other priests she’d known, but he’d come through for her when she’d needed help.

  Now she was a cop. A new detective. And this time Dermot needed her help rather than the other way around.

  All she had to do was convince him of that.

  It wasn’t going to be easy. Not convincing him. Not dealing with the renewed connection for her, either. She’d put the past behind her and just seeing Dermot stirred it all up again in her mind.

  But she had to do it. Had to pay her debt.

  Norelli had the reputation of being like a dog with a bone. He thought he smelled a murderer and he would do his best to get Dermot convicted unless they found another viable suspect.

  “What’s going on with you, Star?” Dermot asked once they settled into the café. “How has life been treating you?”

  She heard the concern in his voice. That aspect of him certainly hadn’t changed. And he was the one with the problem.

  “A lot better than in the old days,” she told him. “Police work agrees with me.”

  “I can see that.”

  The way he looked at her made her flush.

  But then he asked, “What is this? A little undercover work? You getting me to confess?”

  The heat in her face doubled. “You can’t believe that, Dermot.”

  “Then what is it you want from me?”

  “The truth.”

  “And that differs from getting a confession…how?”

  “I want to hear it from you that you didn’t murder Tony.”

  Dermot stared at her evenly and said, “I didn’t have anything to do with his death.”

  “Okay.” She’d told herself he couldn’t have done it, but having him say it made the tightness she’d been feeling inside relax. Her gut instincts made her a good detective, and she was going to trust them now. She would swear he was telling her the truth. “Then I want to help you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I owe you.”

  “You owe me nothing.”

  Before she could argue, the waitress came and took their orders.

  Then, before Dermot could try to dissuade her, she asked, “What did Norelli find on your laptop?”

  “Session notes with Tony. My observation that blackmail could get him killed. They suggested it was perso
nal. And before you ask, it wasn’t.”

  “I wasn’t going to ask.” If she’d thought it possible that Dermot could be guilty, she wouldn’t be here. “Any idea of who Tony might have been blackmailing?”

  “His associates were criminals.”

  Stella remembered Tony liked to dance around the truth. “What about this secret Wollensky said you had?”

  “Wollensky was just mouthing off like Tony did to him. Trust me, there is no secret. You remember how Tony liked to puff up his importance.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  Why did she get the feeling there was more to it? That Dermot wasn’t telling her everything?

  Or maybe being this close to him simply unnerved her and she was imagining things. She white-knuckled her coffee mug and prayed her weakness didn’t show.

  They sat in upholstered chairs before the unused fireplace—it was warm for late October and the air-conditioning was still on. A buzz surrounded them, voices of laughing and talking patrons, mostly students, but it was white noise to her, stuff she could let fall into the background, while she made her proposal clear.

  “You don’t really understand what Norelli and Walker are gonna do to you, Dermot. They’ll probe every aspect of your life.”

  “I already feel probed.”

  “They’ve barely started. They’re already talking to your friends, your neighbors, your relatives. They’ll go through your finances to see if there’ve been any big additions or withdrawals lately. They’ll be looking for anything to tie you in personally to the victim.”

  “But they won’t find anything, because there’s nothing to find.”

  “Even the implication of guilt will make headlines, and what do you think that’ll do to your professional life?”

  Stella had done her homework and knew Dermot worked for a national activist organization that helped people in low-income communities repair their lives and improve their communities. His work depended on grants, and grants depended on goodwill, and goodwill depended on reputation. If his went south, then so would his job.