Beyond Innocence Read online

  He was losing himself in the wonders of her when she drew away and mumbled for him to stop.

  Stop?

  That was crazy. This was right. Nothing had ever felt so right in his relatively brief existence.

  “Luke,” she breathed. “Please.”

  He relented, pressed his lips to her cheek and whispered. “I want you, Marnie. Do you believe me now?” He didn’t wait for a response but moved his lips closer to her ear. “You’re as fresh and beautiful as the mountains and the sky. I want to be with you and share in that.” He closed his eyes. “Believe me. Please believe me.”

  He opened his eyes and drew away reluctantly. He kissed the tip of her nose and propped himself up on an elbow. “So?”

  Her eyes were glittering and moist. “Okay, okay. You’ve convinced me.”

  “Good.” He grinned, feeling mischievous and more than a little sinful. “So, can I screw you blind?”

  She burst out laughing and sat up to smack him on the chest. “I didn’t think you remembered that kind of language.”

  “All kinds of things are coming back to me.” He waggled his eyebrows suggestively.

  She was still smiling and it was brighter than the sun. “We should get back.”

  “Is it this?” He raised his hand and pointed to the wedding band.

  She lost her smile and a hesitant finger reached out and touched the burnished gold ring. “It should be. I know it in my head. You obviously belong to someone else, but I also know that in your heart you’re free. You have no memory of a wife or a life with someone. And it would be ludicrous to tie yourself to a piece of jewelry.”

  “Then what is it?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe I’m just not ready.”

  “Are you a virgin?”

  The smile was back but this time it was uncertain and a little shy. “No. I lost that when I was twenty.”

  “To who?”

  “My college roommate’s boyfriend.”

  Luke’s eyebrows arched toward the sky. “You really are a sinner.”

  She giggled, and he stifled the urge to tackle her and kiss her silly. “They weren’t serious. In fact, I knew she was fooling around on him. He came over to see her one night when she wasn’t home. We got to talking and one thing led to another…”

  “Did he think you were beautiful?”

  The smile turned sad. “No. I’m pretty sure he just thought I was easy.”

  “Where is he so I can kill him?”

  “He’s a doctor in Edmonton. But, please, don’t kill him. He has three kids and a wife who sleeps around and has an expensive fur-coat habit.”

  Luke nodded approval. “Okay. It sounds like he’s paid for his mistakes.” But then he refocused on Marnie. “Was it a good experience?”

  “It was gloriously mediocre. It was exciting because it was forbidden, but I’m afraid that was the only thing about it that was.”

  “And since?”

  “Not much to speak of, and I’d really rather not.” She stood and motioned for him to follow. “You were right about one thing. We should get the horses back or I’ll lose my privileges.”

  Luke stood slowly and stretched out his muscles.

  “You’ve done really well today, but you’re going to be sore tomorrow.”

  “Oh, I don’t think it’ll be that bad,” he said as he bent to pick up the blanket and the remains of their picnic.

  Marnie walked away toward the horses and he heard her mumble, “We’ll see. We’ll see.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

  “Okay,” growled Pete. “We’ve all got coffee and pie and the kid’s got a shake.” They had requested a booth in the back of the greasy downtown diner. It was well past the supper hour so thankfully the crowd was thin. The staff was busily wiping off the chipped, yellowing tables and sweeping up the crumbs from the evening rush. “There’s enough sugar and caffeine on this table to hyperactivate an entire preschool. Now can we get to the damn story?”

  Faye cringed and, despite the heat, wrapped her hands around her mug as if she needed to draw warmth into her shaking hands.

  “Take it easy, Pete,” whispered Kyle.

  Pete ignored him. “Come on, Faye. You’ve come this far. You can’t choke on me now.”

  “I’m not backing out,” she said defensively. “It’s just…” She lifted the cup to her lips and barely managed to take a sip without spilling the scalding liquid on her red silk T-shirt. “It’s not easy to talk about.”

  “It’s a hell of a lot easier here than it would be in an interrogation room.”

  Faye shot him a look, and despite the bruising and swelling he could see the fire that had leapt to her eyes. “Don’t threaten me with that. I told you, the only way I’d do this is if it was off the record. Just us. No other cops, and no lawyers.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I—”

  “If you can’t stick to our deal I’m leaving. Calvin or no Calvin. I’ll run and you’ll never find your partner.” Her voice trembled, but whether from fear or rage he couldn’t say.

  “Okay, okay,” he placated. “I’m not reneging, already. I’m not exactly a by-the-book kinda cop. You know that. And besides, we’re here, aren’t we? Now, can we get on with this?”

  But still Faye hesitated. She glanced at her son, and Pete thought maybe he knew what was wrong.

  “Should Kyle take Tanner somewhere?” he asked quietly.

  But Faye looked at him over the rim of her cup and frowned as if she didn’t know what he meant.

  Tanner answered the question himself. “I’m not a baby. I know my daddy’s dead, and I wanna know what happened too.” He pressed his lips together and it was painfully obvious that he was fighting tears. He wasn’t a man and he wasn’t ready for this, but he wasn’t a baby anymore either, and Pete had to restrain himself from reaching across the table and wrapping his hands around Faye’s throat for exposing her son to this shit. He would reserve judgment on wanting to kill her for other reasons until he heard the whole story.

  “Okay,” said Pete as he shifted position on the worn Naugahyde bench. These damn booths just weren’t made for guys his size. But then again, the size of the booth probably had little to do with his discomfort. “Nobody’s around to hear, so let me get you started. Where did this happen?”

  She set down her mug and stared at it. “Calvin wanted to go someplace remote—you know, not a lot of people going by, so it would be ages before they found…” She took another sip. “Found the bodies. And he wanted it to be far enough away from here that even if they were found there’d be little chance of them being identified.”

  “So where are we talking about here? Antarctica?”

  “No. The Rockies. The Rockies in Banff.”

  Kyle’s empty cup clattered against the table. “As in Alberta, Canada?”

  “Yeah. Tate always had a thing for that region. He fell in love with it when he visited Calgary a few years ago. He went back at least four times since then.” She glanced uncomfortably at Tanner. “He was planning on taking Tanner with him next time. They were gonna go hiking and fishing and…” she shrugged heavily, “and all that stuff.”

  Pete saw a tear fill the corner of Tanner’s eye, but the boy didn’t acknowledge it. He was staring determinedly at his chocolate milkshake, which he had yet to taste.

  Pete gritted his teeth. “So, you knew he was heading up there, and you tipped Sam that he was up to something.”

  “Yeah, that’s pretty much it. Calvin disguised his voice and fed Sam some line that got his juices flowing and had him on a plane in a matter of hours. They both flew into Calgary. They weren’t expecting trouble, and once they were in the same city it was easy to…uh…incapacitate them and get them up into the mountains to a secluded spot that Calvin had picked out.”

  Pete was beginning to feel sick but he tamped down his emotions and tried to deal with the reality of this intolerable situation. “Kyle,” he said softly. “Take the kid fo
r a walk or something. This is ridiculous. We can’t—”

  “No!” Tanner’s voice was barely a decibel below a shout. “I won’t go. I’ll kick and scream. You know I will. I wanna hear it!” He dropped his voice to a harsh whisper. “I wanna hear how my bitch of a mom killed my dad.”

  Faye’s eyes closed, and the bruises stood out in painful contrast to the paleness of her skin.

  Pete swore under his breath in both English and German for a full minute before speaking again. “Okay, okay, kid. But don’t blame me if you have nightmares the rest of your life.”

  Defiantly, Tanner took a noisy slurp of his shake.

  However, in deference to the boy, Pete decided against asking exactly how they had incapacitated Tate and Sam. “So, how did you get them up there?”

  “In the back of a pickup truck that Calvin stole.”

  She stopped, so Pete prodded her, “Yeah? Get on with it.”

  She cradled her head in her hands, and when she spoke Pete had to strain to hear her. “Tate woke up first. He started to struggle in the back of the pickup just as we were getting to the first spot.”

  That reference confused Pete a little, but he let it go, hoping it would all come clear as the story unfolded.

  “Calvin was pretty worked up. He was high on coke and pumped on adrenaline. By the time we stopped Tate had almost undone his bindings. That pissed Calvin off, so he jumped in the back of the truck and…”

  Kyle prompted, “And what?”

  “He started beating on him with this heavy stick he had picked up off the ground.”

  Pete hazarded a glance at Tanner but allowed her to continue.

  “Sam started to come around as it was happening. He was yelling at Calvin to stop. He was screaming bloody murder but it only made it worse. Calvin got madder and madder.” She picked up her cup but then set it down again without taking a sip. “Finally, to shut Sam up, he shot him in the stomach with the revolver he had brought along.”

  “Christ,” whispered Kyle.

  Pete’s jaw ached with the force he was exerting on his teeth. He didn’t speak. He couldn’t—not without saying and doing things he would regret.

  Then he felt his eyes drawn to the kid. “Hold it.” Pete held up a hand to stay the proceedings. He had a sense of what was coming, and he didn’t like the implications. No matter how grown up Tanner thought he was or how much he deserved to know the truth, Pete just could not sit passively by while a ten-year-old boy listened to the gruesome details of his own father’s murder. Call him crazy, but if he did that he didn’t think he’d be able to sleep at night.

  He took a deep breath and fixed Tanner with a steely stare. “Okay, kid, I don’t care if you kick and scream. You can yell rape all you like and you can even dump that milkshake all over my brand new chinos. But you are not going to listen to this.”

  Tanner’s eyes were murderous but he said nothing.

  “Kyle is going to take you outside and you are not coming back in here until I come and get you. Is that clear?”

  They locked eyes in a silent battle of wills—a forty-year-old cop and a ten-year-old boy. Pete found himself wondering who would come out on top. Tanner had a hefty dose of his father in him. And maybe a bit of his uncle too. Pete wrenched his mind away from those possibilities. He had to focus on other things at the moment.

  To his relief, Tanner finally caved. He didn’t break eye contact but he did yield, with a condition. “Okay. But I want you to tell me about it after.”

  Pete shook his head. “That’s not for me to do, Tanner. That’s for your mom.”

  “No,” said Tanner with conviction. “It has to be you. She won’t tell me the truth. She’s a liar.”

  Pete glanced at Faye and saw the first real evidence of regret. A tear slid out of her battered eye, and she remained motionless, staring at her cup, not looking at Pete or her son. She didn’t deny the accusation, and she didn’t chastise Tanner for insulting her.

  Pete had to admit the kid was gutsy and smart. Maybe he deserved that much. “Okay. Deal. Now get lost.”

  Kyle stood and motioned Tanner out of the diner ahead of him. Pete and Faye were alone in the booth.

  Pete lit a cigarette in a hopeless attempt to still his frayed nerves and his raging temper. He sucked in a hearty dose of carcinogens. “Okay, Faye. You said that Calvin shot Sam in the gut to keep him quiet.”

  Faye nodded bleakly. “It worked. Sam was too busy moaning and bleeding to worry about Tate anymore. And pretty soon Tate wasn’t moving either.”

  “He beat Tate to death?” demanded Pete.

  “Not quite. He—” She closed her eyes as if reliving the scene. “He finished it with a bullet to Sam’s forehead.”

  Those words should have struck him like a brick wall. But confusion dulled their impact. He shook his head. “Sam’s? You were talking about Tate.”

  She blinked at him. “Yeah,” she muttered. “Sorry. That’s what I meant. I meant Tate.”

  Pete clenched his fists. “Let’s be sure we’ve got this straight. Who did Calvin shoot in the goddamn forehead?”

  “Tate!” Faye’s eyes were fierce. “I’m nervous, okay? It’s not easy talking about my husband’s murder. If you’d just stop hounding me…” She swiped at a fresh swell of tears.

  “All right,” said Pete as he forced himself to remain calm. “All right. I’ll keep it down. What happened next?”

  “Once Tate was dead Calvin turned his attention to Sam. He—”

  Faye pushed her half-empty cup away and pulled a tissue out of her purse.

  “Before I hear the rest of it, tell me one thing.” Pete needed a breather before he heard the details of his best friend’s death. He needed a few moments to get his bearings and prepare. As if one could ever be prepared for something like this.

  “Yes?”

  “What did Calvin want and why did you go along with it?”

  “Calvin was greedy. And he didn’t like that Tate was smarter and a better man than him. Calvin resented him, even though Tate had essentially saved his life.” She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “Tate found Calvin in New York. He was turning tricks for his next fix, and he’d been beaten within an inch of his life a few days before Tate found him. Tate brought him back, fixed him up, got him relatively clean, and let him become a part of the business.”

  “What?” This part of the story confused Pete more than anything before. “Why would Tate do that?”

  Faye frowned. “Calvin was a special case, but basically that’s how Tate got all his girls. I thought you knew that.” She regarded him quizzically but he just stared at her as he exhaled a cloud of smoke. She shrugged. “He found girls that were hooked up with bad pimps who were beating them, or girls who were living on the street and turning tricks on their own. Usually they were half-starved, sometimes beaten and sometimes frozen when he found them. He would bring them back and I would help him get them cleaned up and healthy so they could work for him.”

  The cigarette had soured in Pete’s mouth. He stubbed it out. “And he never beat them?”

  She shook her head miserably. “No. They had it damn good.”

  “But he was still using them.”

  “Maybe. But they had it a hell of a lot better than ever before. Tate had all kinds of rules to protect them, and they got paid good. They loved him. All of them.”

  “Did you?”

  She leveled her gaze at him, and for the first time since this meeting began Pete had the sense that she was being absolutely straight with him. “No. I was grateful to him, but I never loved him.”

  “You were one of his projects?”

  She nodded miserably. “I was the first. He rescued me from a junkie with a switchblade. And later he made the mistake of sleeping with me one night after he had a big fight with his dad. I got pregnant. So he married me. But he never made the mistake of sleeping with the wrong woman again.”

  How had he known? Pete couldn’t say for sure, but he had always got
ten this strange feeling that, despite his chosen line of work, Tate was a complex man who had a rigid, albeit skewed, sense of honor. Maybe that was another part of what had driven Sam crazy. Tate seemed to want everybody, including Sam, to think he was scum, when in reality his motives and his mission were far broader than anyone had guessed. Despite appearances, every once in a while that part of his personality would shine through, and that would confuse the hell out of Sam, eroding his sanity and feeding his obsession. The world of Tate Barton was a conglomeration of contradictions.

  “He never slept with any of his girls after that?”

  “No.” She shifted in her seat, apparently uncomfortable again. “I don’t think he ever slept with anyone else after we were married.”

  “Christ.”

  “So, can we get on with this?” she muttered. “I’d rather not stroll down memory lane anymore, if you don’t mind.”

  “Yeah, yeah, in a minute. You explained Calvin’s motives, but not yours. Why did you go along?”

  “Because I never loved Tate. And because he never loved me, and I was never good enough for him. Because his whores lived better than I did. And because I was high and stupid enough to listen to Calvin’s big plans and fancy ideas.”

  Pete nodded understanding. “But you took no active role in the murders?”

  “No. Calvin made me come along, but I just watched. I-I could never hurt Tate, or even Sam.”

  Pete’s eyes drilled into hers. She was lying. Just like her son had said, she couldn’t be trusted. But he let it pass. For now he was willing to hear the story as she wanted to tell it. They’d get to the truth eventually. He was sure of it. But at this point they needed the basic story, and they needed bodies. Faye was the only way they were going to get either.

  “Okay. What did Calvin do?”