Dust To Dust (18 page)

Panic exploded like a bomb in her chest. Shards of it wedged in her throat, making her gasp for breath. It tore down through her stomach like shrapnel.The muscles in her arms and legs spasmed at the shock. Run!

He raised both hands and let go of something as she started to come up off the mattress. She saw it coming as if in slow motion: the thick, twisting body of a snake.The colors of it were very clear to her: the creamy underside, the brown and black pattern on the back.

Arms flailing, she launched herself up and forward. For a split second, confusion tipped her brain this way and that.The world went pitch-black. She couldn't see. She couldn't feel. Her feet didn't seem to be under her, though she was running as hard as she could.

Something hit her on the side of her right eye and cheek.The force was like a sledgehammer connecting to her skull. Her neck snapped back and she thought she might have cried out. Then all motion stopped and she realized the thing that had hit her was the floor.

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Oh, my God, I've broken my neck. He's still in the room.

I can't move.

She felt consciousness ebb away like a slippery thing. She clawed at it with her will, forced her brain to continue functioning.

If she could move her legs ... Yes. If she could move her arms . ..Yes.

She pulled her arms in tight to her sides and slowly pushed up from the floor. Her head felt as heavy as a bowling ball, her neck as fragile as a broken toothpick. She sat back on her knees, cradling her face in her hands, pain coming like a pulse. Realization blinking on and off in her mind. Neon bright, then blackness. Neon bright, then blackness.

It wasn't real.

It didn't happen.

It hadn't been a dream, though, not really. More like a hallucination. She had been awake but not conscious. Night terrors, the experts called them. She was an expert by experience.Years and years of it.

Now came the familiar wave of despair. She wanted to cry but couldn't. The protective numbness had already begun to set in. She didn't welcome it, merely resigned herself to it, and slowly, unsteadily rose to her feet.

Still holding her head in one hand, she turned on the lamp on the dresser. There was no one in the room. The light reflected a warm glow off the creamy tone-on-tone striped wallpaper. The bed was empty, the curved upholstered headboard naked of its usual pile of Pillows. She'd thrown the pillows to the floor on either side of the bed, and had knocked her water glass off the nightstand. A wet stain darkened the ivory rug. The alarm clock lay on the floor near the empty glass: 4:39 A.M.

Moving carefully, in pain, she went to the bed and pulled the covers off. There was no snake. In the logical part of her brain, she knew there had never been, yet her gaze scanned the floor. She half expected to see the dark, slender shape disappearing beneath the closet door.

She worked on regulating her respiration, the exercise nearly as familiar to her as breathing. Her head was pounding. Pain was like a kmife in her neck. She felt sick to her stomach. She gradually became aware of a stickiness in the hand that cradled her head, and knew it was time to assess the damage.

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Amanda Savard stared at herself in the bathroom nurror, dinily taking in the surroundings reflected around her image. Soft, elegant, feminine: the environment she had created for herself to give a sense of security and belonging. The same words generally described the image she presented the world, but now she looked as if she'd gone five rounds in a boxing ring. The area around her right eye was swollen from the impact of the falls and bright red where skidding across the rug had burned her skin. The color blazed against the pallor of her face. She pressed two fingertips gently around the wounds, fee ling for fractures, the pain making her breath hiss through her teeth.

How would she explain this? How could she hide it? Who would believe her?

She took a washcloth from the linen cupboard, wet it with cold tap water, and touched it to the raw spots, gritting against the urge to wince. She took three Tylenol and went back to the bedroom. Awkwardly she stripped off the nightshirt she'd sweat through, and pulled on an oversize sweatshirt and a pair of leggings.

The house was silent. Everything was normal according to the security system panel on the wall beside the bedroom door. She'd gone through'her nightly ritual, checking locks before going up to bed. And still the sense of danger lingered. She knew from experience the only thing to do was to walk through the house and prove there was no intruder.

She took her gun from the drawer in the nightstand and went out into the hall, moving like a minety-year-old woman. Room by room, every light in the house was turned on, every room checked, every window, every lock. All of the lights remained on. Light was a good thing. Light chased away the ghosts in the shadows.Those ghosts had been haunting her for so long, it was a wonder they still possessed the ability to frighten her. They were as farmiliar as farmily, and as deeply hated.

In her office, Kenny Loggins; came on at the flick of a switch on the bookcase stereo system. A quiet, gentle song about the holidays and memories of home. The emotions it evoked in her were emptiness, loneliness, sadness, but she left the song on anyway.

She liked this small room at the back of her house. The space was cozy and felt safe, and looked out on her backyard, which was very private and dotted with birdfeeders. She lived in Plymouth, a suburb that bent and twisted around marshes and woods and Medicine Lake.

It wasn't uncommon to see deer nosing around the feeders, though none was braving the security light tonight.Three photographs she'd taken of them through the window hung in small frames in the office. One held a ghost image, her own reflection in the glass superimposed over the animal as it stared at her.

She closed the blinds, too edgy to expose herself to the outside world. She needed to feel enclosed. Her bedroom was her sanctuary when she had to get away from work. The office was her sanctuary when she had to escape the shadows of her life.

There was no escape from anything tonight.

Her desk was neat, the shelves and cubbyholes above it well organized. Bills and papers properly filed, paper clips in a magnetic dish, pens in a cherrywood cup. There were no photographs and only a few mementos, including a badge kept in the far upper-right-hand nook of the shelves. Her constant reminder of why she had become a cop in the first place. She rarely looked at it, but she picked it out now and held it in her hand and stared at it for a long while, acid burning in her stomach.

Spread on the otherwise uncluttered surface of the desk was a copy of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, open to the pages most people skipped on their way to the sports. The piece that interested her was an inch long, stuck down near the bottom. DEATH PULED ACCIDENTAL. There wasn't even a photo.

That seemed a shame, she thought. He'd been so handsome. But to most of the metro area, he would never be anything more than a few lines of type, skimmed over and forgotten.Yesterday's news.

"I won't forget you, Andy," she whispered. How could I? I killed you.

Her hand closed tightly on the badge until the edges bit into her fingers.

DARKNESS STILL CLOAKED Minneapolis as Amanda Savard arrived at city hall. Most of the lights that shone in office windows facing the street were left on overnight. No one came in at this hour, which made it the perfect time for her to sequester herself in her office without being seen. The longer she could avoid that, the better. Though there would be no ducking the funeral in the afternoon. At least she would be able to get away with dark glasses for the occasion.

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Even now, with little chance of running into another human, she wore black sunglasses with frames just large enough to cover the damage she'd done to herself She had swathed her head in a

'de black velvet scarf that wrapped around her neck and trailed, w

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dramatically back over her shoulders. Drama had not been her goal. Hiding was.

Her footfalls echoed in the empty hall, boot heels ringing against the old floor.The distance to Room 126 seemed to stretch out before her. Inside her gloves, her hands were sweating. She gripped her keys too hard. The adrenaline from the dream had never entirely burned off, the residue leaving her feeling both jittery and exhausted. Dizziness swam through her head at random moments. Her legs were weak and her head pounded. She couldn't turn her neck to the right, and she felt nauseated.

She put the key in the lock and pulled up short, the skin prickling on the back of her neck. But the hall was empty-what she could see of it. She passed through the Internal Affairs outer office without bothering to turn the light on, and went directly to her own office, where she'd left on the desk lamp.

Safe. For an hour or two. She hung the scarf and her coat on the wall-mounted rack near the door, and went around behind the desk. She slipped the sunglasses off to check her reflection in the mirror of her compact. As if there had been some chance of a miracle between home and here.

The burns around the right eye looked angry, red, shiny with antibiotic gel. There had been no hope of covering them with makeup, and no way to keep bandages in place.The area directly around the eye was puffy and bruised purple and black.

"That's a hell of a shiner."

Savard bolted at the sound of the voice. She wanted to turn her back, but realized it was too late. Embarrassment and shame flooded her. Anger and resentment rushed in their wake. She grabbed the sunglasses and put them back on.

Kovac stood Just inside her door looking like something out of a Raymond Chandler novel: long coat with the collar turned up, hands stuffed in the pockets, an old fedora slouching down over his forehead.

"I suppose getting popped in the face is a common hazard of working IA."

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"If you want to see me, Sergeant, make an appointment," she said in the chilliest tone she could manage.

"I've already seen you."

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Something about the way he said it made her feel vulnerable. As i f he had seen something more than just the physical evidence of what had happened to her, something deeper and more important.

"Did you go to a doctor for that?" he asked, coming closer. He pulled the fedora off and set it on her desk, then ran a hand back over his short hair. His gaze was narrow and zoomed in on the damage she'd done to herself "Nasty."

"I'm fine:'she said, glad to have the desk as a buffer. She moved to the far end of it on the pretext of putting her compact away and stowing her purse in a drawer. The dizziness swirled through her and she kept one hand on the desktop to steady herself

"And I should see the other guy, huh?" Kovac said. "There was no other guy. I took a fall."

"From what? A three-story building?" "It's none of your business."

"It is if someone did that to you."

He was paid to protect and serve, as the saying went. It was nothing personal. She shouldn't have wanted it to be.

"I told you-I fell."

He didn't believe her. She could see that. He was a cop, and a good one. She'd made it her business to find out. Sam Kovac had years of experience listening to the nuances of lies. And while she wasn't exactly lying, neither was she exactly telling the truth.

She watched Kovac's gaze slide to her left hand, in search of a ring. Wondering if there was an abusive husband. The only ring she wore was on her right hand. An emerald that had been passed down through the women in her mother's family for a hundred years.

"Believe me, Sergeant. I'm the last woman who would let a man get away with this," she said.

He weighed the idea of saying something more, drew breath for it, then stopped himself

"You didn't come here to see about my well-being."

"I ran into Cal Springer last Might," Kovac said. "You'll be proud to know he's still sweating bullets over your investigation."

"l have no interest in Cal Springer. I told you, the Curtis case is closed. The investigation was full of mistakes, but none of the

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allegations of impropriety bore fruit. None that would stand up in court, at any rate."

"Incompetency is Cal's forte, but he's too big a chickenshit for impropriety. What about Ogden? I hear he threw down Curtis's watch atVerma's place."

"Can you prove it?"

"I can't. Could Andy Fallon? Ogden was on the scene when my partner and I got to Fallon's house on Tuesday."

"No, he couldn't prove it. We closed the case," she said, struggling to keep her focus over another wave of unsteadiness. Pain pounded her head like a hammer. "He was moving on to other assignments." Not by choice. By order. Her order.

"Did Ogden know that?"

"Yes, he did. What was he doing there atAndy's?" "Sightseeing.
"

"That's ghoulish."

"Stupid too, but I don't think he's the brightest bulb in the chandelier to begin with."

"Have you questioned him about his presence at the scene?"

"I have no right to question anyone, Lieutenant," Kovac reminded her. "The case is closed. A tragic accident. Remember?"

"I'm not likely to forget."

"I assumed Ogden and his partner responded to the radio call. I had no reason to think he'd have any other motive to be there. Silly question-was there bad blood between him and Fallon? Had Ogden threatened him?"

"Not that I'm aware of. No more animosity than the usual, I should say."

"You're all used to having people hate you." "So are you, Sergeant."

"Not my own kind."

She let that pass. "Resentment comes with the territory. People who do bad things don't like to suffer the consequences of their actions. Bad cops are worse than criminals in that respect. They have the idea they can hide behind the badge.When it turns out they can't ...

"I can check the case file," she said, letting out a long, carefully measured breath. She felt hot and clammy with sweat. She needed to sit down, but she didn't want to show weakness in front of him, nor