Conviction of the Heart (5 page)

The reminders a warm ball of pride inside her, she scraped the vegetables off the wooden cutting board into the wok. They sizzled and danced in the olive oil as she stirred them. She hunted in the refrigerator, discovering leftover beef, which she tossed into the pan with some cooked rice, soy sauce and several cloves of garlic.

As the aromas blended and filled the small kitchen, Suzanne gathered the peels and tops to discard. In the wastebasket, she found an empty potato chip bag, a cereal box and three apple cores. She threw the garbage away and called the girls to come eat, shaking her head.

At least they had apples, she thought.

****

They ate at the dinner table, an unusual event in light of their busy schedules. Riviera laid out the plates, while Hope poured each a glass of milk. Suzanne served the main course, and the three dug in.

Settling back into her chair, Suzanne asked, “Anything I should know about happen at school?” She never believed, of course, that either girl would confess to a transgression. Asking a general question was the best way to find out from one girl what the other had done.

“No,” Hope said promptly. With her long dark hair delicately French-braided, and her face scrubbed clean, she looked as angelic as she wanted her mother to believe.

“Steve Jones got the flu at lunch and puked on Mr. Racine,” Riviera said, taking a huge bite of rice and vegetables. She was shorter and rounder than long-stemmed Hope, strawberry blonde hair straight to her shoulder blades, parted on the side. “It was so sick!”

“How was the geography quiz?” Suzanne asked her.

Riviera's fork hit the plate as she dropped it. “Mom, Mrs. Batt is such a jerk! She tested us on all this stuff that's in our next unit, and no one knew what she was talking about.”

“Did you ask her why?”

“After she collected the papers, she walked out of class before the bell rang. You couldn't ask her anything.”

“Would you like me to speak to her?”

Hope burst out laughing. “Good plan, Mom.” Sarcasm coated every word.

Simultaneously, Riviera blushed and cried out, “No way!”

Suzanne looked from one to the other. “What's wrong with your mother talking to the teacher if there's a problem?”

Hope asked, “Do you remember last year, when you talked to Mrs. Weber about her math?”

Riviera covered her face with her hands, her response muffled and unintelligible.

“What about it?”

“The teachers carried on afterward for a week. They're all afraid you're going to sue them about something. Mona Rheinfeld just eats it up. She even reminds them about you all the time so she can be class suck-up.”

“Fine,” Suzanne said, swallowing her frustration along with her rice, preparing for a good digestive mess later. “I just thought communication might be a good thing.”

“Mom, this is Mrs. Batt we're talking about. Remember my seventh grade year? She locked herself in the teacher's lounge and wouldn't come out until after school when the police came?”

Suzanne smiled. “Sounds reasonable to me. You couldn't pay me enough to do her job anyway.”

One worry she didn’t have—money. Even though she’d never received a dollar from the girls’ father, they were okay financially. She definitely understood her clients’ feelings as they traveled their own road of separation, custody and division of property. The anger, resentment, desperation and bitterness—she’d lived them all.

But she also believed her experiences made her a better advocate than some of her colleagues who had never faced a day's need in their lives. As a second year law student, she remembered eavesdropping on two young women chatting about money worries between classes. One complained she’d found shoes on sale for ninety-five dollars a pair and she couldn't buy two pair because she’d spent her allowance. At the time, Suzanne had twelve dollars and fifty cents in her pocket to cover all her living expenses for the next three weeks.

Fortunately, she didn’t have those worries anymore.

Several hours later, the dishes done, daughters in bed, Suzanne retired to her office to complete the work she’d brought home. She spread her materials out on the polished oak rolltop desk, one of the prized possessions of her sanctuary.

When the farmhouse had been remodeled, Suzanne had taken great pains to make this room as comfortable as possible, because she planned to spend a lot of time in it. The southern exposure held a bay window with a seat cushion matching the sage and mustard, large-flowered chintz draperies which fell from ceiling to floor, ruffling softly at the bottom. The room’s west window was filled with plants, hanging, potted, rooting, that benefited from the long hours of sunshine each day. Paintings of geraniums and other flowers hung on off-white walls. A conversation corner grouping of natural rattan with soft flowered cushions, ruffled pillows and a glass-jar lamp filled with sea shells completed the office.

Suzanne stretched out as she sat in the desk’s swivel chair, trying to clear her mind and get down to the files. But she couldn’t.

She kept reliving snippets of Maddie’s anxious interview, her mind juxtaposing those words with remembered moments of Gregory Morgan in public, philanthropist, concerned city father. In all likelihood, Maddie hadn’t shared with her the worst of the violence. Survivors seldom did at the first meeting. So the situation was worse, probably much worse, than she’d said.

She wondered, too, about Morgan’s capacity to make her own life difficult. The kind of brush-up she’d nearly had with Mr. Wachowski was fairly common. Litigants in divorce and custody cases were emotionally invested down to their souls. They were difficult cases. People didn’t always react well. But Greg Morgan was “connected” in a number of legal ways, and if the rumors were true, some not-so-legal ways, too. He had the potential to cause a great deal of trouble. Serious trouble.

And, perhaps this time, she wouldn’t have a champion waiting to ride in for the rescue. That police lieutenant. The one she didn’t want to think about.

In the years since John Taylor had abandoned her, she’d not been a celibate nun. She’d dated, very discriminately. Nothing serious. That’s the way she liked it. She could focus on her career and her girls. If her practice had taught her anything, it was that no woman “needed” a man.

Something about this man, though, warned her that she could be lost, if she wasn’t careful.

The feel of his lips on hers, the two kisses—different yet the same—stayed with her like a physical contact. Without her volition, her fingers went to her mouth. She experienced the sensation again, soft skin to soft skin, gentle when he kissed her, exploratory and yielding. When she’d initiated the kiss, she’d kissed him with a little more force, intending to make a statement. But that choice only reinforced the danger.

A small electric sizzle ran through her as she let her imagination rummage through possibilities, insinuating its way as if through smoke-filled halls inside her head. The task was easy: Nick Sansone was the quintessential “mystery man” the fortune-tellers pointed out in movies, tall, dark and handsome.

She knew by the breadth of his shoulders and the smooth movement of his muscles as he walked that he was strong. That baritone resonated right through her, its warm timbre melting something long frozen in her woman parts. She imagined how his voice would sound in a whisper, lips pressed against her ear, his breath stimulating the soft skin within…

A shiver shaking her whole body as she followed that thought to its conclusion, she jerked back to the room, shoving herself away from the desk and to her feet in one fluid movement.

None of that.

She rubbed a hand over her face, feeling more like she should slap herself, get control. Nick Sansone seemed like a good man, certainly well-intentioned. If she’d been inclined to seek a relationship, he’d certainly be the kind of man she’d want.
If.
But for now she had more important areas of focus: her girls, her clients. These things mattered to her on a day-to-day basis. These people needed her special attention, and she intended to give it to them.

She surveyed the desk, concentrated on the files there, then crossed back to her seat and sat again, opening the file on top.

Ah, the Remoun matter. She’d brought home the twenty-page appraisal on the value of the personal property in the parties’ large Southside home, their vacation home, and all the items the husband had recently stashed at his girlfriend’s house, hoping they’d been forgotten. There was a fine example of a man.

Back on track again, Suzanne plunged into dry figures and text, letting them cloud her mind once more. This was someone else’s life. Their pain was not hers. She was protected from committing errors that would cause herself trouble, as long as she kept those walls up.

With enough work, and enough discipline, she’d resist the temptation the handsome lieutenant provided.

Chapter Six

Nick Sansone scrutinized his domain just before Monday’s lunch hour, satisfied with the work he and the unit officers accomplished since the shift started at seven that morning.

The fluorescent lights were too bright, the floors grimy from the mud and dirt tracked in by the detectives, and the color which dominated the main office outside the supervisor’s cubicles was the slate gray of the officers’ desks. The phones rang incessantly. The room smelled of sweat and other things even less pleasant. But Nick loved it.

From his youngest years, Nick dreamed of being a detective. As he’d told Suzanne, he’d watched with wide, adoring eyes when his grandfather and his father dressed in their sharply-pressed blue uniforms, their pride shining bright as the polished pins that denoted precinct and rank.

“Every man’s got to give back, Nicky,” his grandfather used to say. “God’s given us so much. What we make of ourselves is our gift to God, our thanks.”

Nick firmly believed, just like his father, and grandfather, that the opportunity to be a police officer made them the man in the white hat, the knight in shining armor. They held the lives of the public in their hands, protecting them from the bad guys.

The mission wasn’t as easy as it had looked back in the days when Nick spent his time reading superhero comic books, especially Batman. The Dark Knight didn’t have any superpowers. What he accomplished, he did with the product of his own mind and hands. Like a cop. Sure, he used some fancy gizmos, but for the most part, he relied on his own inner strengths to get the job done. Nick tried hard to do the same.

Mid-morning re-assessment and assignment called for several detective teams to hit the street as assorted crime reports came in. Nick dispatched Crime Scene Investigation techs to meet his guys around the city as necessary and stacked the initial paperwork in a file basket marked “Pending,” until he had more information.

He observed through the glass windows of his ten foot square office as most of the squad members he’d assigned filed out of the communal room to their endeavors. His workstation looked much like every other supervisor on the floor, furniture too old, too piled with paperwork, too small to meet in, even if he could have cleared space for more than three people to sit down.

The budget office finally allotted him the funds to install blinds on the front windows of the cubicle, but the janitorial staff hadn’t found time to hang them yet. Admin forbade Nick to do it himself. So, he still waited.

He stretched weary legs, pointing toe and then heel to stimulate the circulation. Leaning down to rub off a scuff on one of his black shoes, he groaned at an ache in his back he’d first noticed earlier in the week. He was spending too much time at the supervisor’s desk.

He stood up, rotating his shoulders a bit, hoping to shake the tension in them. His dark blue jacket hung on a coat rack shoved behind the door. He’d gone to shirt sleeves by ten a.m. Police work was no nine-to-five day of looking fine and chatting at the water cooler during breaks, particularly in the detective division. All his guys worked hard, worked long, and Nick didn’t cut himself five minutes of slack more than they got. They deserved that much.

The overflowing basket of paperwork on his desk awaited his attention like a long-neglected wife, sullen and bound to be more trouble than it was worth. He knew officers who liked filling in the blanks, making sure all the t’s were crossed at just the right angle. He wasn’t one of them.

This particular trait seemed to bite him harder the farther up the promotion ladder he went. As a lieutenant, he’d discovered he now carried some responsibility for budget issues—at a time when both the federal and state funding streams were drying up faster than a flash flood in an Arizona wash.

There ought to be a penalty for hidden job descriptions, he thought. Clipping, at the least. Offensive holding. Certainly something offensive. He already didn’t have enough hours in his day. And now another distraction had raised her head—attorney Suzanne Taylor.

He still couldn’t believe she’d finally agreed to have dinner with him. Her decision must have had something to do with the guy with the crazy expression on the courthouse steps. Nick was sure he intended harm. But then, Nick always tended to lean toward a paranoid view. It’s why he was still alive.

A smug satisfaction settled over him as he realized he’d guessed spot on about her on many counts. Not surprising, exactly, because he read people pretty well. All the same, he was pleased he’d been right this time.

He returned to his seat and reached for the offending pile with a glance at the clock. An hour until lunch. If he screwed his determination to the wheel, he might be able to clear at least half the stack. His eyes wandered away from the columns of figures in the budget report before he’d spent five minutes on them, his mind recalling the faint musky scent of Suzanne’s hair. He’d never seen it loose till that night. He liked it.

What about her appealed to him so much?

He found it hard to divine an exact answer.

He’d lived on his own some twenty years. Over those years, he’d never found a woman he could marry, one to whom he felt he could pledge himself fully. Marriage, for him, meant what it had to his parents and his grandparents—a deep, thorough commitment that truly implied “forever.” He didn’t know Suzanne Taylor well enough to decide if she was the one. Not yet. But everything he’d seen so far whispered to him she might be.