Guilty (16 page)

"Okay." He paused to scribble something in his notebook while her nerves stretched taut as piano wire. "You said he pushed you down. How did you land? " Kate must have frowned because he elaborated almost immediately. "Stomach, back, side ..."

Oh, God, get this over with. Please.

"On my butt. I landed on my butt and saw the gun. I knew Rodriguez was getting ready to shoot me, so I grabbed it and just pointed it and pulled the trigger." She took a deep breath, both for effect and because she really, really needed the oxygen. "And I shot him."

"Where was he? Rodriguez?"

Kate could feel sweat trickling down her spine. Her antiperspirant had already given up the ghost. Luckily, her jacket would hide any telltale rings under her arms.

"Near the wall, the back wall where the phone is. He was facing me." Kate tried to picture the scenario she was creating again. Could she have grabbed a gun, aimed, and fired it while Rodriguez was just standing there with his own weapon? In a word, no. "He ... he dropped his gun, and bent to pick it up. I didn't think I'd ever get a better chance. So I... went for it. The gun on the floor."

Braga wrote something down. Then he looked up at her again.

"So Rodriguez dropped his gun, and while he was picking it up again you grabbed the gun you saw on the floor. Had he recovered his gun when you shot him? What position was he in?"

Forensics. Mustn't forget about forensics. They'll he able to tell what position Rodriguez
—
and I
—
was in when the fatal shot was fired from the trajectory of the bullet.

If they cared to go to that much trouble. But she had to assume they would.

"He was holding the gun, lifting it. He was standing again. I think ... I'm pretty sure he was getting ready to shoot me." She took another deep breath, because she needed it and because she was pretty sure at this juncture one would be considered an appropriate response to remembered stress. A picture of Mario shooting Rodriguez came crystal clear into her mind's eye. She tried to put herself in Mario's place. "I was on my feet by that time. We were both on our feet when I shot him."

"So let me see if I have this straight: He was standing facing you. his back to the wall, and you were standing facing him when you pulled the trigger."

Kate nodded.

"Was the safety on?"

That caught her by surprise, but she hoped she didn't show it. Her eyes didn't widen. Her mouth didn't tighten. Her body didn't stiffen. She stayed perfectly composed, perfectly relaxed—but it cost her big-time. As a prosecutor, she had been trained to read body language as one part of an arsenal of tools to judge if someone was lying. She was absolutely certain that homicide detectives looked for the same things.

Accordingly, she frowned slightly, as if trying to remember. Her stomach felt like butterflies were doing somersaults inside there. She could hear her pulse beating against her eardrums. She had to fight the impulse to swallow hard.

But a slight, thoughtful grimace was what appeared on her face, while, she hoped invisibly, her mind raced.

The thing was, she hadn't actually worked out in her mental recreation of events the exact physical details of how firing a gun under such circumstances would have gone down. She'd fired one before, both in her misspent youth and later, at a practice range, with a fifty-dollar special she'd bought for protection, but the thing was, she didn't know that much about pistols in general. Thinking fast, she tried to see the possible pitfalls attached to each answer—for example, Braga could say,
Show me how you did it,
and hand her a gun identical to the one she'd supposedly used, and she would have to locate the safety—and came up with what she considered the safest response.

Her frown cleared. "No." Her voice was confident, her face serene.

Bravo.

He nodded, and wrote that down, too. So simple. So easy. So why was she sweating fricking bullets?

Her phone rang, and she jumped a mile.

C h a p t e r 12

KATE DIDN'T KNOW WHY that startled her so. Just the sheer unexpectedness of the noise when she was so tense, she supposed. It was her cell, and it was a normal,
brriing
type of ring. After yesterday, she'd had enough of custom ringtones to last a lifetime.

But for whatever reason, her heart had picked up the pace until it was now threatening to beat its way out of her chest. Braga and Fischback were watching her, both of them curious, expectant.

Never let them see you sweat.
Even if beneath her clothes she was wringing with it.

"Excuse me, I have to take this."

They nodded.

It was Ben. She knew it as soon as she came back to earth after that first alarming ring, even before she retrieved the phone from her briefcase and saw the number crawling across the screen and answered it. To begin with, the phone in her office had been routed through Mona for the day, because it had been ringing off the hook from the moment she arrived at work that morning. And only a few people Ben and the people connected with him in some way—had her cell number. Anyway, Ben always called her as soon as he was in Suzy's car, so she would know he had been safely picked up from school.

So she wouldn't worry.

Get real. You always worry.

"Hi, pump—Ben," she said, remembering in the nick of time that "pumpkin" was a no-no.

"Hey, Mom. I'm on my way to the Perrys'."

"Did you have a good day?"

"It was okay."

She imagined him sitting there in the backseat of Suzy's Blazer. The music would be blaring—Samantha liked loud music—and the three Perry kids, plus Suzy, would be grooving to it. But not Ben. He'd be hunched against his door to get as far away from the noise as he could, probably with a finger in his ear while he talked on the phone.

She sighed. In a perfect world, she would get to pick up her own kid. Unfortunately, there was no such thing.

"I'll be there to get you as soon as I can. Probably a little early today. Grab a snack. Have fun. Do your homework."

"Yeah, right."

Kate had to smile. That last had been thrown in there as a kind of parental Hail Mary pass. Homework almost never got done at Suzy's, which was a place for hanging out with Samantha. Homework was for home—and for Mom to help with.

Which made for some grueling evenings when both parent and child were tired, cross, and mutually stumped by fourth-grade math. Still, when it came right down to it, Kate wouldn't have it any other way.

Braga and Fischback were still watching her. Braga's eyes were dark and unreadable. Fischback's were bright with curiosity. Kate became aware of the smile that still lingered around her lips, of the lessening of the tension in her neck and shoulder muscles.

Hearing Ben's voice, picturing him on the other end of the phone, had both calmed her and given her a renewed sense of purpose.

She was going to get them through this with their lives intact, whatever it took.

For Ben.

"Got to go, sweetie," she said into the phone.

"Mom, "
he protested the endearment. Then, "Okay, bye."

"Bye," she echoed, even as the sound of him disconnecting reached her ear. Closing the phone, she placed it on her desk.

"That your son?" Braga nodded at the photo of Ben on her desk. It was a standard-issue school photo, taken the previous year. Ben was looking solemnly at the camera—he'd been missing a front tooth, and thus had refused to smile—and had a big chunk of hair missing from the front of his shaggy blond bangs where he'd taken a pair of scissors to them in a do-it-yourself effort to remove a splash of red paint he'd gotten in his hair in art class. At the time she'd been horrified. Now it made her smile.

Kate nodded. "Yes."

"Cute kid."

"Thanks." Talking to Ben, realizing all over again what was at stake, had done the trick. She had her nerve back and her guard up. Placing her hands flat on her desk as if she was getting ready to stand up, she looked at the two detectives with cool inquiry. "If there's nothing else?"

"No." Braga flipped his notebook closed and slid it and his pen into his pocket, then stood up. Fischback was a second or so behind him, and Kate rose with Fischback. "I think that's all."

"You've been a big help," Fischback said, and smiled at her. "We have a whole lot of new areas to explore."

Kate refused to allow herself to read anything into that.

"If you think of anything else, you know where I am." Her tone was brisk. She held out her hand, first to Braga and then to Fischback, then walked around her desk to escort them to the door (with much more eagerness than she hoped was apparent).

"We do," Braga agreed, pausing to glance over his shoulder at her as his partner went ahead of him into the hall. He was just inside her open door when he stopped, and, having been mentally pushing him along, she was right behind him when she had to stop, too. In her flat shoes, her head just topped his shoulders, and she revised her estimate of his height upward by an inch or two, to, say, six-two-ish. From her fresh vantage point behind him, his shoulders really were impressively broad. His black hair was short, but not so short that it couldn't curl at the back of his collar. Seen in profile, his forehead was high, his nose was long, with a faint curve to the bridge, his lips were a little on the thin side but well-shaped, his jaw was square, and his chin was determined. He looked tired, and a little older than she'd first thought. The good looks were still abundantly apparent, but there was a cynicism to his eyes, a hardness to his mouth, a grimness to the set of his jaw, that reminded her that this was a veteran detective with years of experience in digging through bullshit. As their eyes met, the thick black slashes of his eyebrows slanted toward his nose, and she saw that he was frowning at her.

She frowned herself, nervous all over again and hoping it didn't show.

"Was there something else?" she asked.

"I just want you to know, I wasn't sure you were going to make it out of there yesterday. I'd had dealings with Rodriguez before: You took out a real bad dude."

Kate swallowed before she could catch herself, then realized her reaction was perfectly appropriate given all the bad memories that would naturally attach to what he thought had gone down.

"That makes it a little easier," she said, because it was clear that he was trying to ease some of the guilt he thought she might be feeling over having taken a human life. "And by the way, in case I didn't say it, thanks for trying to save my life yesterday."

He smiled a little, his eyes crinkling at the corners. "All in a day's work."

Then he walked on out of her office.

Fischback was waiting in the hall, and the two of them headed toward the elevators together, moving with easy synchroneity without ever once looking back. As far as Kate could tell, they didn't talk. Mona's door was open, but she was either on the phone or in some other way preoccupied, because she didn't pop out for one more attempt to hit on Braga, which Kate knew she would have done had she been able.

When they were far enough along the hall so that she was pretty sure they were really, truly gone, Kate closed the door at last and pressed her back to it, leaning limply against the cool paneled wood, her hand still on the knob. The contact, which flattened her T-shirt against her skin, made her unpleasantly aware of how clammy she was. Her heart was still beating way too fast. Her knees threatened to give out at any second. She had to fight the urge to slide down until she was sitting spraddle-legged on the floor. Closing her eyes, regulating her breathing, she fought off the mini-breakdown she could feel coming on.

Stay strong.

"PRETTY LADY." Fish's voice was reflective. They were riding the elevator down, just the two of them in the car.

"Yeah." Tom was leaning back against the wall, his arms folded across his chest, his eyes on the numbers over the door as they blinked successively lower. Kate White
was
pretty, exceptionally pretty, even if she was a little on the skinny side for his tastes. Ordinarily, he didn't like overly thin women. Probably something to do with the Italian blood in him.

"You catch an off vibe there?"

"Just a little one."

"So, what do you think?"

There was a
ping
as they reached the ground floor and the doors started to slide open. Both of them moved forward to exit the elevator at the same time, with Tom, because he was at the back of the car, bringing up the rear.

"Good question," he said.

There were maybe a dozen people milling around the lobby, plus a quartet of security guards whose job of the day was to keep the press at bay, so the conversation was suspended until they were through the double doors and out on the sidewalk. The narrow strip of concrete fronting this busy commercial block was crowded, with a tight little knot of people huddled around a TV reporter conducting an interview with some poor fool just to the left of the building's entrance and pedestrians curving around them in both directions. Without a word, they cut straight through the flow toward Tom's car. The Taurus was parked at the curb to the right, illegal as hell because the only open space had been in front of a
No Parking Anytime
sign, but something, either good timing or the police tag Tom had hung from his rearview mirror in hopes that a passing meter maid might see it and take pity, had kept them from getting a ticket. In Philly, parking was a problem. The city was laid out like a municipal designer's wet dream, in neat grids: Broad Street runs north and south, Market Street runs east and west, everything else runs parallel to those two. The only problem was, back when it was Billy Penn's city, cars hadn't been invented. Now that they were, there was no room for them. Most of the city's residents had accepted the truth of that long since, and rode the trains with grim resignation.

"Looks like this is your lucky day," Fish observed as he opened the passenger door. Tom followed his gaze to see the familiar three-wheeled meter maid truck, its white, bullet-shaped hood gleaming in the bright sunlight, a blue-uniformed woman aboard, rolling slowly along the row of parked vehicles toward them.