FOR THE BABY'S SAKE (9 page)

Chapter Eight

“Sawyer, please,” she said. “Let it go.”

It was the look in her eyes that stopped him. She didn’t want a scene. Sawyer gave the men a look, and they had the good sense to take an interest in their eggs. He turned, walked another ten feet and slid into the empty booth at the end of the row. He faced the door. “They’re stupid,” he said.

“Agreed,” she answered.

“You should wear pants,” he lectured her. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s not fair.”

She waved a hand. “Nor practical. It’s going to be a hundred degrees today.” She picked up the plastic-covered listing of the day’s specials.

“I imagine women get tired of men acting like idiots.”

She sighed. Loudly. “Yes. Especially when they have dirty hair, food on their faces and bellies that hang over their pants.”

It didn’t take much for him to remember how he’d ogled those same legs last night. Yeah, his face and hair had been clean and his stomach still fairly flat, but that didn’t make him much better than those creeps.

“How much farther?” she asked.

“We’re twenty minutes east of Madison. Then it’s another hour or so north to Wisconsin Dells. Our first stop is Clover Corners.”

She shook her head, apparently not recognizing the name. “Why there?”

“Like I said earlier, we look everywhere. But there are a few places that seem more logical than others, so we start there.”

“I’m not sure I understand the logic.”

“I know Mirandez. He’s a low-profile kind of guy. That’s what has kept him alive so long.”

“I thought you said he was twenty-six.”

“You meet very few middle-aged gang leaders.”

“I suppose. What kind of fishing would a low-profile type of guy do?”

“He’d look for a place where he could stay, eat and buy his bait without ever having to venture out. Especially because he probably can’t go anywhere without dragging Mary with him. People notice pregnant women.”

Liz nodded in agreement. “Last week when I went shopping with her, four people stopped to pat her stomach. Four complete strangers.”

He didn’t want to talk about Mary’s pregnancy.

“It’s like her stomach has become community property,” Liz continued. “I told her she should get a sign for around her neck.”

Despite himself, he wanted to know. “What would it say?”

“Something along the lines of Beware of Teeth. Then they wouldn’t be able to sue her when she bit their hand.”

There’d been a couple times that Mary had looked as if she wanted to bite him. Maybe a quick couple of nips out of his rear.

“But the really sick part is that I—”

“Two coffees here?” A waitress on her way past their booth stopped suddenly. She dropped a couple menus down on the corner of the table.

“Just water, please,” Liz replied.

“Coffee would be fine,” Sawyer said. Liz hadn’t shared in the car. She’d been too busy being mad at him.

The waitress walked away. “What’s the really sick part?” Sawyer asked.

Liz leaned forward. “Sometimes, I just can’t help myself. I just have to touch their stomachs. I always thought that a pregnant woman’s stomach would be soft, like a baby is soft. But it’s this hard volleyball. It’s so cool.”

It had been cool. Cool and magical. His girlfriend had been thin. She hadn’t actually showed for the better part of four months. And then one day, her flat little stomach had just popped out. And suddenly the baby had been real. He’d had no trouble at all suddenly visualizing what his son or daughter would look like, how he or she would run around the backyard at his parents’ house, how he or she would hold his hand on the first day of school.

Even though he was just a kid himself, becoming a dad hadn’t scared him.

He’d been too damn stupid to be scared.

He hadn’t even considered that his child would be born weak, suffering, too small to take on the world.

He’d learned the hard way. Babies weren’t tough at all.

The waitress came back with their drinks. “What can I get you this morning?”

“A bagel and cream cheese, please,” Liz said.

“That’s it?” Sawyer frowned at her.

She nodded.

Well, hell. He couldn’t force her to eat. “Ham, eggs, hash-brown potatoes, and a side of biscuits and gravy,” Sawyer said. The waitress wrote it down and left.

“Work up an appetite driving?” Liz asked.

Yeah, but not for food. But he wasn’t going there. He’d managed to pull back last night. It had cost him. He’d spent most of the night mentally kicking his own butt. It hadn’t helped that he knew he’d done the right thing. No, he’d been wound too tight, been too close to the edge. He’d wanted her badly.

But he couldn’t sleep with Liz. Not with the possibility that he was going to have to arrest Mary. He knew that once he slept with Liz, once he let her into his soul, he’d be hard-pressed to be objective about Mary. And he couldn’t afford to let up on the pursuit of Mirandez now. Not when they were so close.

“You may be sorry,” he said. “We’re not stopping again until lunch.”

“It’ll be okay. If I get hungry, I’ll gnaw off a couple fingers.”

“Mine or yours?” The minute he said it, he was sorry. He didn’t need to be thinking about her mouth on any part of his body. “Just remember,” he said, working hard to keep his voice from cracking, “the per diem reimbursement rate is $50 a person per day. They actually expect us to eat.”

“Last of the big spenders, huh?”

“Big spender? The city? No. They barely buy us office supplies.”

She put her elbows on the table and rested her chin on her hands. “Did you always want to be a cop, Sawyer? Was that your dream?”

His dream had been to raise his child. “No.”

“How did you end up wearing a badge?”

It had seemed like the only thing to do. “I didn’t go on to college right out of high school. I worked for a while.” He’d worked like a dog when he’d found out Terrie was pregnant. He’d been determined to provide for her and his child. It was afterward, when he faced the truth that Terrie had continued to use drugs during the pregnancy, that he thought he’d worked too much. He’d been so focused on providing for his child that he’d neglected to protect him.

“But then...things happened, and I decided I wasn’t going to get anywhere without an education. I started at the junior college and then went on for a bachelor’s degree. I’ve been a cop for fifteen years. I don’t know how to do much else.”

“You haven’t been in Chicago for fifteen years.”

“How do you know?”

She looked over both shoulders and leaned forward in the booth. “Like Mary said,” she whispered, “you talk funny.”

“I do not. You people in the north talk funny.”

“I wouldn’t say that too loudly. A body can go missing in the woods for a long time before somebody stumbles upon it.”

“Duly noted.”

“Why Chicago?”

“Why not?” He took a drink of coffee. That was probably all he needed to say, but suddenly he wanted to tell her more. “My father died two years ago. My mom had passed the year before. With both of them gone, there was no reason to stay in Baton Rouge.”

“Aha. Baton Rouge. I had guessed New Orleans.”

“I spent some time there.”

She settled back in her booth. “Drinking Hurricanes at Pat O’Brien’s? Eating beignets at Café du Monde? Brunch at the Court of Two Sisters?”

He’d been working undercover, mostly setting up drug buys with the underbelly of society. “Sounds like you know the place.”

“I did an internship there when I was working on my doctorate. I loved everything about it. The food especially. After I left, I dreamed of gumbo.”

“I can do a crawfish boil better than most.”

She sighed. “Don’t tease me. You don’t really know how to cook, do you?”

His mother had believed that cooking was everybody’s work. In the South, family meant food. Hell, maybe when this was all over, he’d have Liz over for dinner.

Maybe they’d eat in bed. He’d feed her shrimp creole and drizzle the sauce across her naked body.

Lord help him. He reached for his water and knocked his silverware on the floor.

She scooted out of the booth and reached over to the next table to grab him a fresh set. He saw the smooth, tanned skin of her back when her shirt pulled up.

He did a quick look to make sure the two goons in the middle booth weren’t copping a look.

Nope. It was just him.

“No other family there?” she asked.

“What?” He shook his head, trying to clear it.

She slid the silverware toward him. “Do you have other family in Baton Rouge?”

He’d brought Jake with him. That had taken some doing, but there’d been no other option. “No.” She was getting too close. He needed to change the subject.

“How about you?” he asked. “Did you always want to be a social worker at OCM?”

“No, I worked in private practice for several years. Sort of chasing the American dream. You know, a fancy house, a new car, trips to Europe, three-hundred-dollar suits.”

He knew that much. He wanted to know why she’d left it all behind. “Doesn’t sound all that bad.”

“It’s not bad. Just not enough.”

He let her words hang. When she didn’t continue, he jumped in, not wanting the conversation to die. “Just decided you’d had enough of living in the lap of luxury?”

She smiled, a sad sort of half smile. “You got it. Decided I couldn’t take any more caviar and champagne.”

He thought about pushing. Over the course of his career, he’d persuaded street-smart drug dealers, high-priced hookers and numbers-running bookies to talk. Some had been easier than others. But he rarely failed.

But he didn’t want to pry or coerce Liz into offering up information. Maybe it was as simple as she made it sound. Maybe she just got tired of the fast lane. If so, no doubt it would lure her back, sooner or later. She’d get tired of slugging her way through the day at OCM, the hours filled with fights with belligerent teens.

If she didn’t want to talk, okay with him. He didn’t care what had driven her to OCM.

Right. He wanted to know. Wanted to know everything about her. Might have asked, too, if the waitress hadn’t picked that moment to slam down their breakfasts in front of them. He picked up his fork, dug into his eggs, grateful for the diversion.

They didn’t speak again until they were both finished eating. “I’ve got a picture of Mirandez in the car,” Sawyer said. “It’s a good shot, shows his face really well. When we get to each place, you can go into the office and show Mary’s picture as well as Mirandez’s.”

“And if they haven’t seen them?”

“We move on. But leave a card. Put my cell-phone number on the back.” He reached out, tore off a corner of the paper place mat and wrote down the number. “Oh, by the way—” he tried for nonchalant “—when I was doing my internet searches, I got us a place to stay.”

Liz was glad she had finished breakfast. Otherwise, she might have choked on her bagel. He made it sound so married-like. As if they were on vacation and he’d taken care of the reservations:
Hey, honey. We’re going to the Days Inn.

Problem was, they weren’t married and this was no vacation.

“Where?” she managed to ask.

“Lake Weston. It’s on the west side of The Dells. It’s centrally located to the search. There weren’t a lot of vacancies. I guess this is prime vacation season. Everybody’s here with their kids, a last fling before school starts.”

Please, Liz, let me come before school starts.
Jenny had called her at work. It had been a crazy summer for Liz. One of the other partners had been gone from work for months. He’d had a heart attack, and Liz had worried that the rest of the staff would have one, too, if they kept up the pace. Everyone was working six days a week, twelve hours a day. But still, when Jenny had called, she’d agreed to let her come. Jenny, at sixteen, loved the city. Its diversity, its energy, its passion for music and art.

Liz had managed to squeeze out time to shop, to go out to eat and even for a concert at Grant Park. Four days after she’d arrived, Liz had kissed Jenny goodbye and sent her home on the train. Three months later, Jenny had been dead.

“What are you thinking about?” Sawyer asked. “You look like you’re a million miles away.”

Liz debated whether she should tell him. Even after three years, it was difficult to talk about Jenny and the hole that her death had made.

“My little sister used to visit me in the summers. She told me it was better than a weekend at Six Flags.”

Sawyer laughed. “Not bad. You edged out an amusement park. How old was she?”

“Sixteen.” She’d always be sixteen in Liz’s mind.

“Wow. A lot younger than you. Second marriage for one of your parents?”

“No. Just a bonus baby. I was thirteen when she was born.”

“She in college now?” Sawyer asked.

“No.” Liz gripped the edge of the Formica-topped table. “She’s... Jenny’s dead.”

She could see his chest rise and fall with a deep breath. “I’m sorry,” he said. “What happened?”

“She killed herself. In the bathroom of my parents’ house. She bled to death in the bathtub.”

He didn’t know what to say. “Did she leave a note?”

“No. I’m not sure if that makes it more or less horrible.”

“Do you have any idea why?”

“She was eight weeks pregnant. According to her best friend, the father of the baby had taken back his ring just two days before.”

Sawyer shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

He was sorry, and she hadn’t even told him the worst part. The part that had almost destroyed her until she’d found OCM.

“I guess I understand why it’s so important for you to help Mary.”

He had no idea. “Let’s just say I don’t want another girl to fall through the cracks.” It was the same thing she’d told Jamison. There wasn’t really a better way to sum it up.

“Right.” Sawyer folded up his paper napkin. “You know,” he said, his voice hesitant, “Mary might be hiding in one of those cracks. She and Mirandez. She had the chance to point the finger at him. But she wouldn’t.”

“I don’t know why,” Liz said. “Maybe she’s afraid of him?”

“If she’s smart, she is. If she’s lying about him being the father, maybe she’s trying to get him to marry her? Maybe he’s a meal ticket?”