Guilty (18 page)

He meant to find out.

"You planning on pulling an all-nighter?" Fish asked. Tom looked up from the notes he was cross-checking to find his partner standing beside his desk. Fish's suit coat was on, which meant he was getting ready to leave. A glance at the digital clock on his desk told Tom that it was a couple minutes after six. He was, he realized, dead tired. The previous night he had stayed all night at the hospital with Charlie, alternating between spending fifteen minutes every couple of hours with his unconscious brother (all that the ICU would allow) and the rest of the time hanging out in the waiting room with various combinations of his mother, sisters, sister-in-law, and the flocks of other assorted relatives, friends, and fellow officers who had descended to comfort the afflicted family.

"Nah." He put down his pencil, rolled his shoulders and neck in a mostly futile attempt to relieve some of the stiffness there, and stood up. His jacket hung on the back of his chair. He pulled it free and shrugged into it. "I'm out of here."

"I checked with forensics. The distance checks out," Fish said in a grudging tone as they headed out of the building together. "And her prints are all over the murder weapon. It's looking like your smokin' little ADA could have shot Rodriguez the way she says she did."

By calling Kate White
his
smokin' little ADA, Fish was deliberately needling him. Tom knew it, and so ignored the effort.

"Good to know," he said mildly.

They pushed out of the door, pausing on the sidewalk. Fish's car was in the lot behind the building, so that was the point where their paths diverged. Dusk was deepening into full night, and a few aggressive stars had already breached the deep purple-gray of the sky. The soft, white glow of halogen security lights illuminated the outside of the building and the surrounding parking lots. A slight breeze carried the smell of car exhaust.

"You wanna get dinner?" Fish asked.

Tom shook his head. "I'm going on over to the hospital."

"Want company?" Fish had come by the hospital last night, too, but the demands of the investigation had pulled him away. Just like the demands of the investigation had brought Tom to work today, leaving the rest of the family to hold down the fort with Charlie.

"Hell, my whole family's there. Last night there were cousins I've never seen in my life. At the hospital, I
got
company."

"Still, I'll probably stop by later."

Tom nodded, then lifted a hand in farewell as they both started walking toward their respective vehicles.

"Word of advice," Fish called back over his shoulder, and Tom looked his way inquiringly. "Before you get there, lose the jacket."

Tom looked down at himself, at the clump of threads where the button had been, and grimaced. Okay, so maybe—thanks to Fish— the jacket was a lost cause. He would have yelled, "Go to hell," after Fish, but he was afraid the TV types in front of the building might hear, and the next thing he knew a story about discord in the homicide unit would be on the air.

That wouldn't be good.

HALF AN hour later, still wearing the jacket because he needed it to cover his shoulder holster and he wasn't about to go home to get another one just to please Fish's
GQ
sensibilities, Tom walked into the crowded, brightly lit waiting room outside the ICU, and found himself, as he had known he would be, engulfed in relatives.

"Tommy." His mother stood up from the red vinyl couch where she'd been sitting with her sister Miriam and his middle sister, thirty-year-old Vicky, to embrace him. He hugged her back affectionately, breathing in the faint smell of the Shalimar perfume that she had worn for as long as he could remember. Christmases, his dad used to buy her a big bottle of the stuff, and after his death she had continued to wear it faithfully. Anna Braga was sixty now, short and pleasantly rounded, unlike her children, all of whom had taken after their father in build, with black hair (she dyed the gray) that she kept fashionably styled, and a soft, still-pretty face with very few lines. Today her hazel eyes were red-rimmed and less bright than usual from yesterday's tears, but her lipstick was a deep, defiant red and her cheeks were dusted pink. Just because she was a widow didn't mean she was dead, as she was always telling her children. She dressed well—today in a pale pink blouse and gray slacks—worked as a hostess at Rocco's in the Italian Market, and even occasionally dated. Her children, as she was also always telling them, were her life. "Charlie's better, praise God." She made the sign of the cross. "Have you eaten?"

"I grabbed a burger on the way over," he lied as his mother stepped back to look him over critically. His answer was pure self-defense. If he said no, his mother would dispatch somebody—probably his youngest sister, Natalia—to fetch him something to eat, and then watch him until it was consumed to the last crumb. Then she would tell him he needed to eat more, because he could stand to gain a few pounds.

"You've lost a button on your coat." Her disapproving gaze focused on the telltale dangling threads. She frowned, then looked up at him, shaking her head. "You need somebody to take care of things like that for you. A wife. A man doesn't think of such things."

It was all Tom could do not to roll his eyes. The only thing that stopped him was the certain knowledge that his mother would bop him upside the head if he dared. She'd been on this Tom-needs-a-wife kick for almost the last year, and it was starting to drive him insane. His gaze found twenty-nine-year-old Natalia, who was slim and attractive in jeans and an orange sweater, with her thick black hair cut boyishly short and the minimum of makeup—at least, that Tom could see—on her angular face. Seven years married, a stay-at-home mother of two, she was standing near the couch engaged in conversation with a woman Tom didn't know. As their eyes met she grinned at him, having clearly overheard their mother's harassment, and waggled her fingers at him in saucy greeting.

"So what's going on with Charlie?" He figured the best way to get their mother's attention off himself was to focus it on his brother.

"They've taken him off the ventilator. Terry's with him."

ICU rules allowed only one person in the room with a patient at a time.

"That's good."

"Hey, Tom." Vicky stood up and gave him a hug, too. The oldest of his sisters, thirty-two-year-old mother-of-three Tina, was not in the room, Tom saw as he hugged his middle sister back. Vicky was tall and thin, with long, black hair worn in a braid that hung down her back. She'd been married for ten years—the Bragas all tended to marry young and reproduce like rabbits—and had two girls and a boy. A kindergarten teacher and part-time artist, she wore a loose, ankle-length pale blue dress that was covered with tiny white flowers. She pulled out of his arms, looked at his face, and frowned.

"You poor thing, you've got bags. Have you gotten any sleep at all?" "For God's sake, don't get Mom started on that," Tom said to her in a low voice, casting an alarmed glance at their mother, who fortunately had her head turned as she said something to Aunt Miriam. "She'll have me napping on the couch here."

That made Vicky grin. And the reason it made Vicky grin was because she knew, just like Tom did, that it was absolutely true. Anna Braga worried about all her children, but Tom, because he was male and the oldest and had no family of his own, most of all.

"I think I'll just go look in on Charlie." Tom spoke a little louder as he sought to escape before his mother could discover for herself that he was looking tired. "Maybe Terry wants to take a break."

His sister-in-law, Terry, a short, athletically built, freckle-faced, redheaded, fiercely independent accountant whom Tom was convinced Charlie had been attracted to because she was the antithesis of the women he'd grown up being (s)mothered by, looked around when Tom opened the door of the ICU ward. Seeing him, she smiled, then rose from the chair she'd been sitting in and came over to him.

"I'm glad you're here," she said quietly, after they had exchanged hugs. "Go to him."

She came out, and he walked on inside the ICU, wrinkling his nose at the strong smell of antiseptics and who knew what else that reached his nostrils. The nurse on duty gave him a careful look as he moved toward where Charlie lay at the far end of the four-bed ward, but must have been satisfied that he was harmless because she disappeared behind a white curtain drawn around another patient's bed.

It was cold in the ICU, Tom thought as he stopped at the foot of his brother's bed, and eerily quiet. Except for the sounds of various life-saving machines, there was nothing: no voices, no telephones or TVs, no footsteps. It was like the patients were in limbo, caught in a white world somewhere between life and death.

His hands closed over the foot of Charlie's bed. A curtain separated his brother from whoever was in the bed next door, but it didn't extend all the way to the foot of the bed. Tom registered the machines blinking and beeping around the bed, the IV pole and myriad tubes attached to his brother's body, the white swath of bandages wrapped around his chest, and felt his gut tighten.

It could so easily have gone the other way.

Then he looked at his brother's face—something he'd been putting off, because seeing Charlie so unnaturally pale and still bothered him more than he liked to admit, even to himself—to find that Charlie was looking back at him.

C h a p t e r 13

"I MUST'VE GOT your genes," Ben said glumly as he watched Kate's shot smack into the brick above the garage a yard to the left of the goal, then go bouncing away. The bugs swooping around the rusty light fixture that illuminated a fuzzy circle at the top of the driveway scattered, then came looping back in. Their low drone never faltered.

"You say that like it's a bad thing," Kate panted, running into the dark front yard for what felt like the thousandth time to retrieve the ball. Trying to maintain her outward good humor at a little after eight-thirty P.M. on the day after she'd seen roughly half a dozen people murdered before her eyes and her life had gone to hell, when she was so scared she was sick with it and so frazzled she jumped at every unfamiliar sound, wasn't easy under the circumstances. Which were, to wit, she was out in her driveway after supper and homework were over, trying to help her unenthusiastic son practice for the basketball tournament that was scheduled for the following week in gym.

That was the thing about having a kid, Kate thought as she jogged across the yard in pursuit of the thrice-damned basketball: No matter what disasters were happening in your own life, your kid's regimen of school and homework and extracurriculars kept on keeping on, and you kid's problems did, too.

The yellowish glow Ben stood in only made the night beyond it seem darker. Overhead, a pale fingernail moon and a few shy stars played peek-a-boo with scooting clouds. Trees swayed and leaves rustled, stirred by the breeze that carried an autumn-ish hint of smoke on it. Black chiffon shadows undulated across patchy charcoal grass. The lingering moisture from the previous day's rain made the ground slightly squishy underfoot, and the leaves that had already fallen were treacherously slippery. As she spotted the ball in the line of scraggly bushes that marked the delineation between the yards and bent to scoop it up, the scent of damp earth filled her nostrils. Straightening, she stretched her back, in no huge hurry to return to the fray. She was wearing jeans, a ratty gray Phillies sweatshirt that she'd pushed up to her elbows, and sneakers, and her hair was caught up in a haphazard ponytail. Despite the fact that the temperature had dropped into the low sixties, she was hot, sweaty, and so tired she was drooping.

And as of now she officially really, really hated basketball.

"Was my dad any good at sports?" Ben asked wistfully, as Kate, carrying the ball, walked back into the light. They'd been out there for maybe fifteen minutes, shooting hoops and missing a good ninety percent of the shots between them, and she was getting a stitch in her side from chasing the ball. But Ben was so afraid that he was going to be the worst player in the class, that he was going to make a fool of himself and the other kids were going to laugh, that she was prepared to do whatever it took to try to make sure it didn't happen. Not that he had expressed his fears in so many words. He wouldn't. But she knew. When he had told her about the upcoming basketball week in gym as she had driven him home from Suzy's, she'd been able to read between the lines without any trouble. He'd been thinking of missing school for a week. She'd been thinking,
Not possible.
And so here they were.

And now he was breaking her heart anew with questions about his father.

"Yes, he was," she lied. As far as she knew, Ben's father, Chaz White, whom she had married at eighteen and who had deserted her at nineteen, two months after Ben's birth, had never played any kind of organized sport in his life. She'd met him in Atlantic City, where she'd fled after David Brady's death. He'd been a handsome street tough who'd worked as a bouncer in the casino where she'd been a cocktail waitress (complete with her own fake ID to match the underage customers). In the year that she'd known him, she'd learned that along with the abundant charm that had attracted her in the first place, he had a violent temper and a nose for trouble. Less than a month after their split, he had died in a drive-by shooting. And she had read the handwriting on the wall, grabbed Ben, and run again, this time to Philly, where she had been working her ass off ever since to give her precious son a better life. Not that she meant to tell Ben any of that, at least not for many, many years. And some of it she would never tell him.

"He was good at lots of things, including sports. Hey, you know what? I think he was even pretty good at basketball. But I remember he told me that he wasn't very athletic until he got to high school. He had to grow into it."

She bounced the ball to Ben as a way of distracting him from asking more questions about his father.

"Are you telling the truth?" Holding the ball in both hands, he looked at her hard, his voice laced with suspicion.