Beyond Innocence Page 21

  “But it’s not simple at all.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so beautiful. But I guess I don’t have much to compare it to. I don’t remember very many sunsets.”

  “No. You’re right. It’s one of the most amazing sunsets I’ve ever seen.” She squeezed his hand, and wondered if it was the view or the company that had made it so.

  A haunting call echoed across the water. The notes were sweet and touched with melancholy—a fitting eulogy for the dying of the day and the ebbing of the colors in the sky.

  “What was that?” Luke’s voice was hushed and reverent.

  “A loon. It’s a bird. They live around water and they’re a little like ducks, but they’re sleeker with fine beaks and shiny black plumage.”

  “It sounds lonely and just a little sad.”

  “Yeah,” she said with a smile. “Yeah, it does. But he’s probably not alone. I think loons mate for life.”

  “Lucky bird.”

  She chuckled, but it was stifled as he slipped his arm around her shoulder. He rested his cheek against her hair. “I lied before.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I said that sunset was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.”

  “It’s not?”

  “No.” He shifted slightly and tipped up her chin with a strong finger. “I know you won’t believe this. I see how you dress, and pull your hair back, and hide behind those glasses. I saw how you seemed to fade into the woodwork whenever your mother or sister-in-law swept through the room today. I may still be naïve about a lot of things, but I’m getting to know you, Marina Grant.”

  She was mesmerized by his voice and by the blueness of his eyes that threatened to draw in her soul. “Luke, I—”

  “I know you don’t believe it, but you are beautiful.”

  She smiled weakly. “Like you said, you don’t have a lot of basis for comparison. And your vision is skewed because I’m your friend.”

  He frowned. “Of course, it is.” He dropped his hand to her chest, and she drew in her breath sharply when he placed his palm over her heart. “I know you’re beautiful inside, but it doesn’t stop there. You’re much prettier than your mother or that Karen.” He lifted his hand and brushed his fingers across her cheek. “I wish I had the words to convince you. Sometimes I know what I want to say but they still won’t come like I want.”

  She moved closer, and he enclosed her in a hug. She murmured into his chest, “I think you’re doing just fine.” No one had ever looked at her like that before. No one had ever looked her in the eyes and said with such conviction and sincerity that she was beautiful, or pretty, or attractive, for that matter. It was a very new and difficult concept to accept, and she still believed that Luke was hardly an objective observer where her appearance was concerned.

  But still, it was good to hear. It was nice to know that at least one person thought she had more to offer the world than a sympathetic ear and a helping hand. It was nice to believe, even briefly, that a man looked at her and saw something more than a friend or a colleague. Tomboy or not, it was nice to be thought of as a woman.

  A few stars popped out and the air off the water raised goosebumps on her arms. She finally steeled herself to break the spell and withdraw from his embrace. “We should go in and unpack. It’s a beautiful house. I always thought it suited the setting well.”

  He turned and really looked at the house for the first time. “Yeah. I think you’re right. I can’t believe we have a whole week here.”

  “We have one week for me to teach you how to ride.”

  “I promise I’ll be a quick study.”

  Marnie laughed. Of that she had little doubt.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

  Kyle raked stiff fingers through his hair, leaving the spiky auburn mop looking even more unruly than it had a moment before.

  “Do you actually use that gel stuff?” asked Pete as he studied the distinctive “do”.

  Kyle winked. “You’ll never know.”

  “Don’t be so sure. I’ve got snitches all over this city. Never discount the sordid tales a woman tells her stylist.”

  “You start teasing me about my hair and I’ll have to spread it around the squad room that you’ve developed a taste for double cappuccino with a vanilla shot.”

  Pete booted the door to their tiny office shut. “Keep your voice down. Jesus! Is nothing sacred with you?”

  Smiling evilly, Kyle opened a large manila envelope and dumped the contents onto his desk. “Not if I can help it. I was raised Catholic. I’ve had enough sacred to last me a lifetime.”

  “Nuns in school and the whole bit?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Pete let a grin slip across his lips. “At my high school the only praying we did was to beg God to get us home relatively free of bullet holes and knife wounds.”

  “Rough neighborhood?”

  “You could say that.”

  Kyle tapped his pen against the papers strewn over his blotter. “What made you become a cop?”

  “I figured it was safer than becoming a drug dealer. Not much, mind you, but a little.”

  To Pete’s amazement Kyle didn’t even bat an eye at that. “How about Sam?”

  Hearing that name cut like a scythe through the lighthearted mood of the afternoon. Pete felt the grin slide off his face as his heart settled firmly in his toes. “What do you mean?” Even his voice felt heavy.

  “Why did Sam become a cop? Why didn’t he manage one of his dad’s restaurants or go into business with his father-in-law?”

  Pete grunted. “Sam a maître d’ or a jeweler? That would be like stuffing me in a tutu and having me audition for the Bolshoi Ballet.”

  Kyle shook his head as he began flipping through the papers on his desk. “As appetizing as that image may be, that doesn’t really answer the question.”

  “I guess I don’t know, okay? Me and Sam didn’t exactly do a lot of soul searching. We were too busy trying to keep from getting shot.”

  Kyle continued perusing the papers, and Pete stifled the urge to ask him what that envelope related to. He knew Kyle would tell him in his own time.

  “Was it self-defense?” asked Kyle suddenly.

  Pete stared at his partner. “Was what self-defense?”

  Kyle finally raised his eyes from the paper he had been studying in detail. “When Sam shot that kid.”

  Pete’s teeth ground together so hard he could swear he could feel the enamel flaking off on his tongue. “You went behind my back and looked it up.”

  “It’s not exactly a big secret, you know. Internal Affairs has a full report on the incident. I looked into it because you’re trusting me to look into Sam’s and Tate’s family histories, and I thought I should have a little better picture of who Sam was. I’ve heard more about Tate than I have about your partner.”

  Pete rubbed at the tension in the back of his neck. The kid had a point. He’d been reluctant to talk about Sam simply because it was easier not to think about him than to face the memories—pleasant or otherwise. “The IA report doesn’t tell the whole story.”

  “So fill me in.”

  Despite the tension in the room and the knotted muscles in his shoulders, Pete leaned back and propped his feet up on the desk. He contemplated the toes of his boots for a few moments while he gathered his thoughts. “If you read the report you know that we were chasing after this fourteen-year-old punk that had just tried to knock off a convenience store in South Philly.”

  “Uh-huh. He had pulled a gun on the clerk, but the old geezer called his bluff and pulled out his own shotgun. The kid took off when the guy hit the alarm bells he’d had installed.”

  “Yeah. That was old Wyatt Johnson,” said Pete with a chuckle. “Guy was seventy-one and could still shoot the beak off a pigeon at forty paces.”

  Kyle nodded and smiled, but his finger tapped the blott
er impatiently.

  “Yeah…well…We happened to be right around the corner at a hot dog vendor when we heard the sirens wailing. We figured right away what had happened. Wyatt got hit about once a month, like clockwork, so it was sort of a standing call. We took off on foot, didn’t even wait for a call from dispatch. Wyatt was standing in front of the store, waving that shotgun and looking as wild as Grizzly Adams on angel dust. He pointed out the kid, who was just turning a corner down the street.”

  “Sam went after him alone,” offered Kyle.

  “Yeah. I stopped just for a minute to check if Wyatt was okay and find out exactly what had happened before we cuffed the kid. It couldn’t have taken more than a minute and then I was off after them.”

  “By the time you got there it was too late.” Kyle had obviously done his homework.

  Pete nodded. “I was running when I heard Sam shouting at the kid to drop his weapon.” He looked at Kyle for the first time since starting his narrative. “Five seconds later I heard the shot.”

  “Just one.”

  “Yep. That was all it took. He took a direct hit to the chest. When I got there Sam was already on his knees beside the kid.” Pete swallowed down the memories that were clogging his throat. “God, there was blood everywhere. I’ve seen lots of gunshot wounds, but this was one of the worst. I guess it seemed worse because it was just a kid. Whatever the reason, it hit me hard. But not as hard as it hit Sam.” He looked back down at the toes of his boots, but that didn’t feel right, so he let his eyes lift to Kyle’s again. “I kneeled down beside them and that was when I realized Sam had picked up the kid’s gun.”

  Right on cue, Kyle’s eyebrows went up. “There was nothing in the file about Sam’s fingerprints being on the kid’s gun.”

  “Let me finish.” Pete reached for an old cup of cappuccino that was sitting on the corner of the desk. Just for something to do, and because his throat was as dry as dust, he chugged back the tepid dregs. “Sam was in tears. I’d never seen him like that before. I didn’t know what to make of it, until he showed me the gun. It was plastic.”

  “What?”

  “It was a goddamn water pistol.” Pete could still hear the desperation in Sam’s voice—

  “Jesus Christ, Pete! It’s a toy. It’s a fucking water pistol. God! He’s dead. I-I don’t even know if he was really pointing it at me. He turned around and I caught a glimpse of that thing and— Shit! Shit! Shit! I panicked. Christ! He’s just a kid. He’s just a kid. Oh God, he’s just a kid.”

  Pete closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Up close it was obvious that it wasn’t real. It was big but even at thirty feet, under normal circumstances, it should have been evident. That was what tormented Sam. He felt like he should have known. He believed his life was being threatened, but he—”

  “Hang on. There was no mention in the IA file about a water pistol. It said the kid had a Smith and Wesson semi-automatic .38.”

  “I know that’s what the report said. That’s exactly what was found at the scene.”

  Kyle whispered. “Oh, shit.”

  “Sam was distraught, so I told him to go back and finish up with Wyatt and then wait in the cruiser until I called him back. I wanted to give him time to get control again.”

  “Didn’t he know you were going to make the switch?”

  “He suspected, I’m sure. But I wasn’t going to come right out and say it, because I knew he didn’t approve of the practice.” It was unofficial, as well as illegal, but it was common practice among many city cops to carry a spare sidearm. One that couldn’t be traced to the officer. One that could be dropped easily at a crime scene where the presence of a weapon by a perp’s body was expedient.

  “I’m surprised you do, Pete.”

  “Approve? Damn right, I do. I’ve seen too many good cops go down for one lousy mistake after twenty years of blemish-free service. You live with your life on the line every day. You get tense. You overreact. You panic. Usually the son of a bitch had it coming anyway.”

  “So that makes it okay to falsify evidence?”

  “Yeah. If it keeps a good cop on the streets, it does. Even with the gun being a toy, the odds were on Sam’s side. Sam thought it was real, that was what was important. But it still could have been dicey for him. The kid was black. Racial tensions were high. I just tipped the scales in his favor, that’s all.”

  Kyle curled in his lips and chewed on that for a while. His hazel eyes studied Pete as he sorted through the information. This was the moment of truth. Pete had waited on telling the story to Kyle until he was sure he could trust him. They had gotten to know each other and had already shared some heavy action. Even if Kyle disapproved, Pete was counting on his loyalty to his partner to persuade him to keep the secret. If he folded on Pete that could mean the end of Pete’s career. But if he didn’t—if he stuck by his partner even through this test of faith—then Pete had found a new friend and their bond had been cemented in trust.

  Sam wasn’t coming back. Pete had accepted that. Pete didn’t give out his loyalty or trust freely, but he was ready to trust somebody else, and he was beginning to believe Kyle might be that somebody.

  “Okay,” said Kyle at last. “So, Sam knew what you were doing and even though he didn’t approve he went along with it.”

  Pete breathed a sigh of relief. Kyle wasn’t going to blow the whistle. If he were, Pete would have seen the judgment in his eyes and Kyle would have already been out the door. His instincts had been right. Kyle was a keeper. “That’s what I thought at the time. He left, heading back toward Wyatt and the cruiser. I took care of things, and a few minutes later went to find him and call it all in. But he was gone.”

  “He ran?”

  “Uh-huh. He didn’t even stop at the store. He…” God, this one was hard. “He hot-wired a car and took off.”

  “Christ.”

  “I called it in. I didn’t have a choice anymore, but when they came I told them that another kid had threatened us and Sam had taken off in pursuit of him.”

  “You’re pretty good at lying, Pete.”

  Kyle said it with a twitch of his lips, so Pete decided not to beat the crap out of him for that one. “I’m pretty good at looking after my friends.”

  “Where was he?”

  “It didn’t take me long to track him down. I had a pretty good idea where to look. He had holed up in this vacant apartment we had been using for surveillance for the last month. It wasn’t too far, and I was the only other person who knew about it. I went there on a hunch.” Pete closed his eyes as he recalled the dank smell of garbage and human sweat that had pervaded every inch of that condemned building. “I walked in and found him already half-drunk and staring at his gun as if it held the secrets to the universe.”

  “He was considering suicide?”

  “I didn’t ask. But I suspected. He figured he had just thrown it all away. He couldn’t face what he knew I had done for him, and he didn’t believe it would work anyway. He was convinced they’d find out. He was convinced his career was over.”

  Kyle just sat there, watching him and listening and understanding. Pete had never told this story to another soul, and he was grateful for the freedom to vent. Ever since Sam’s disappearance he had felt like a simmering volcano. Maybe talking about Sam and letting off a little steam was just what he needed.

  “He said he couldn’t face Elsie after killing a kid like that. She was his whole world. He may not have shown it very well, but I could see it in his eyes when he talked about her. He loved that woman, and couldn’t stand the thought of disappointing her. When he finally lost her it just about killed him, especially because he knew it was his own fault.”

  “I believe it,” said Kyle quietly. “She’s a beautiful lady.”

  Pete nodded miserably. “They’d just had Scott. He knew what it felt like to have a child, and how could he face that kid’s parents knowing what they were going through, and that—that he’d had a choice.”

  “
But at the time he didn’t believe he did.”

  “That didn’t matter. He was busy convincing himself otherwise.” Pete picked up the empty cappuccino cup and began tearing away little bits of the plastic foam. “I didn’t realize the significance of it at the time but all this went down right on the heels of a big blowout between him and Tate. I think he was feeling pretty raw about it, and the shit with the kid just about put him over the edge.”

  “Something to do with The Pit?”

  “No. It was more personal. Sam was in and out of there all the time, hoping for a glimpse of something incriminating, and one day, about a week before this happened, I went in with him after work to grab a beer. Sam noticed Faye, Tate’s wife, looking like she’d been worked over pretty good. She had a black eye and a torn lip, and she was skittish as hell.”

  “A john?”

  “No. She may have started out that way, but we’re pretty sure she never turned tricks after she married Tate.”

  Kyle nodded slowly. “Sam figured Tate had done it.”

  “Uh-huh. He just about went through the roof. It was a good thing I was there or I think they might actually have killed each other that day.”

  “Hey, Barton,” sneered Sam.

  Tate took his time. He finished his conversation with the cute little bartender with the pigtails and the lavender eyes before acknowledging Sam’s existence. He turned around and leaned back against the bar, facing Sam and looking tired and bored. “What is it, Sam? Can’t you leave me alone for five goddamn minutes?”

  “I wanna know what happened to your wife.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “You know damn well.” Sam stepped in a little closer, until his nose and Tate’s were just inches apart. “The black eye, the bruises. You taken to beating up on women now too? Exploiting and using them isn’t enough for your enormous ego?”

  “You don’t know squat, Sam. Why don’t you mind your own business for a change, and let me run mine. Faye is none of your concern.”