Guilty (22 page)

On the other hand, if she had nothing to hide, she might just tell him to go to hell.

Instead, she glared at him. "Are you trying to intimidate me?"

"Absolutely not."

"Mom!"

"I'm coming!" she called. Then she looked back at Tom. Her hands curled into fists at her sides. Her face was tight with displeasure. "Fine. I'll be upstairs for about half an hour. Please, make yourself at home until I come back."

Sarcasm practically dripped from that last sentence.

"Thank you," Tom said gently. Then he watched as she stalked toward the stairs, rounded the newel post, started to climb, and disappeared from sight, all with her back rigid and her head held high.

She was a beautiful woman, no doubt about it. Those eyes of hers alone were big, blue pools deep enough for a man to drown in if he wasn't careful. Her mouth was soft and alluring, even when it was telling what he was almost sure was a pack of lies. Her silken blond hair and delicate features and smooth, white skin would have been right at home on a Christmas tree angel. Her body—well, no need to go there. Suffice it to say that if he let himself, he could have the hots for her big-time.

Plus, she had a kid she obviously doted on, who just as obviously loved her a whole lot in return.

None of which, under the circumstances, added up to anything good.

Tom found himself wishing she had told him to go to hell.

C h a p t e r 15

PANIC TASTED SOUR and vinegary in the mouth, as Kate had already discovered. Some forty minutes after she had left Braga waiting downstairs for her like a fat spider crouched in the middle of its sticky old web, she was in the small, utilitarian bathroom off her small, utilitarian bedroom, brushing her teeth vigorously to rid herself of the taste. A glance in the mirror told her that she was pale and big-eyed, with her hair—she'd pulled out the coated elastic that had held her ponytail while she'd read to Ben, in the vain hope that her headache could be blamed on a too-tight ponytail—tangled around her face and her lips gone dry and devoid of color.

She looked like she was scared to death, and for a very good reason: She was.

How had Braga known there was a second man in the secure corridor?

Even considering the possibilities made her heart pound. The security camera had been shot to hell. She remembered it clearly, dangling above the door over her head. Could there have been another one that she had missed? Thinking back, she wasn't one hundred percent certain either way. But as she considered it, she grew increasingly sure that Mario and company wouldn't have been so careless as to have missed a security camera—unless, of course, it was hidden and they hadn't seen it.

She had never heard of anything like that in the Justice Center, which didn't mean it wasn't possible.

At the thought of the cops possessing a tape of everything that had happened in that corridor, she started to sweat.

If Mario had been caught on tape, you wouldn't have been visiting him in the detention center because he would have been taken into federal custody so fast smoke would have been coming out of the windows.

Okay. Deep breath.

Which left another possibility: She wasn't the only person who had made it out of that corridor alive. Charlie Braga had survived, too. Maybe he had seen something. Maybe he had seen Mario.

Kate's stomach knotted as she thought about it. In the glimpse she'd gotten of him, Charlie Braga had looked dead. But maybe he'd been conscious the whole time, and just playing possum. Maybe he'd seen Mario before he'd been shot. Maybe—maybe ...

You can drive yourself crazy with maybes.

Anyway, he couldn't have seen her with Mario. He couldn't have seen Mario shoot Rodriguez and then force her to take the gun. He couldn't have overheard anything she and Mario had said. Given Charlie Braga's position on the floor of the holding cell, it was impossible.

Almost
impossible.
Wasn't it?

Yes, she thought it was.

Therefore, Tom Braga couldn't
know
anything, she tried to reassure herself as she rinsed her mouth clean. Not for sure. If he did, he'd already have put her under arrest. He might be scarily on target with his accusations, but he could only be bluffing, trying to see if he could rattle her into making some kind of damaging admission. She had seen cops do it time after time after time.

But she'd never been on the receiving end of it before. She'd never known how truly frightening the technique could be.
Especially if you 're hiding something.

But Braga didn't know that, either. If he did, she would be sitting in one of the interrogation rooms at the Roundhouse at that very moment, with more cops buzzing around her than bees around a trash can. She would already have been read her rights. Her life would already have been destroyed.

As it was, right now everything that mattered to her, everything that she'd worked so hard to build, was still intact. But it was a very specific guess.

Specific enough that something or someone had to have put him on the right track. Though trying to figure out who or what would take longer than she had to spare right now, if she could even do it with any certainty.

The bottom line was, Braga clearly didn't
know
anything, and unless and until he did, she could still hold everything together if she just kept her cool.

That conclusion should have made her feel better, Kate thought bitterly as she ran a quick brush through her hair and slicked a little pink gloss on her lips to give them some color before heading back downstairs to face the enemy. But it didn't. She still felt sick to her stomach, cold to the bone, and absolutely wretched. She felt guilty. Turning off lights was second nature to her, to save on the electricity bill. She clicked off her bathroom light, then her bedroom light, and stepped out into the small landing at the top of the stairs that, with the shade pulled down on its single window, was now so dark she could barely see into the cavelike gloom that was Ben's room on the other side. She paused to quietly close his door before heading downstairs, because if he should wake up—he never did, he slept like a rock, but just in case—she didn't want him to overhear any part of her conversation with Braga. He'd fallen asleep to a chapter of
A Wrinkle in Time,
which they were currently reading, and as she'd pulled the covers up around his shoulders and kissed his cheek—proof positive that he was asleep, because he would have protested otherwise— she'd felt an overwhelming surge of love for him, and with it a strengthening of her resolve, a rush of renewed courage.

She was all Ben had in the world, and she would do what she had to do to keep him safe.

Including lying to Braga as often and as convincingly as necessary.

Despite the cold, hard knot that felt like a rock in her stomach.

Standing outside Ben's door, she looked down the stairs toward where she knew Braga was waiting for her, and took a deep—and she hoped heartening—breath. She tried to summon that fresh upsurge of resolve and courage again, but despite her best efforts, it wasn't happening.

All I feel is scared. And alone. And even if I do manage to get Braga off my back, there's still Mario to contend with.

With that happy thought, she gave up.

One crisis at a time.

Braga was first.

Conscious of her heart knocking against her ribs with every step, she headed down the shadowy stairs toward the pool of soft lamplight below. Halfway down, part of the coffee table and the couch came into view.

Kate found herself looking at a pair of long, unmistakably masculine legs in navy pants that ended in boat-sized feet in black wingtips, with sturdy ankles in black socks bridging the gap between the two. The ankles were crossed, the feet were propped up on her coffee table, and the legs bridged the gap between the table and the couch.

She frowned. Braga had his feet up on her coffee table, and she didn't like that. Except that actually, under the circumstances, she did like it, because it gave her something to yell at him about, and thus she could begin their forced tête-à-tête by putting him on the defensive.

Taking heart a little at that, tightening her mouth and narrowing her eyes with what she hoped was clear disapproval, she proceeded on down the stairs.

Only to discover as she reached the bottom that Braga had fallen asleep on her couch.

The discovery took her aback. What was she supposed to do now? She moved toward him, meaning to wake him, then stopped when she was near. For a moment she stood on the other side of the coffee table, eyeing him across it, thinking the situation through. He was definitely soundly asleep. He was sitting up, his broad shoulders stretching across fully a third of the couch, his feet propped on her coffee table, his long body, still completely dressed, even to his jacket, relaxed. His head was tipped back against the rolled top of the couch. His exposed throat looked very brown against the open collar of his white shirt. Black stubble roughened his throat and the chiseled line of his jaw. His eyes were closed; his lashes formed stubby black crescents against his cheeks. His lips were slightly parted, revealing a hint of even, white teeth. Lamplight bathed his olive complexion in a warm, golden glow, smoothing away some of the lines she had noticed in his face earlier, picking up blue highlights in his black hair.

Unwillingly, she registered it: Even asleep, he looked sexy.

A slight snore issued from between his lips.

Still.

Kate thought about waking him up. But if she did, she would have to answer his questions. Her gaze slid to the cable box on top of the TV. According to the digital numbers there, the time was 10:06. If she left him alone for an hour, or an hour and a half, and then woke him, she could immediately send him on his way, pleading the late hour and her own need for sleep.

Sounds like a plan.

Leaving Sleeping Beauty where he was, she quietly picked up the coffee mugs and empty saucer, carried them into the kitchen, and loaded them and the other dishes into the dishwasher. She put the remaining groceries away, tidied the kitchen, and made sure everything was set out for the morning. Then she turned out the light and returned to check on her unwelcome guest.

He was still sleeping like a baby. As far as she could tell, he hadn't so much as twitched since she had last looked at him. A sideways glance told her that it was not quite ten-thirty. For optimum results, she needed to let him sleep at least half an hour longer. An hour longer would be even better.

Okay, she had work to do anyway. With one last careful look at the man snoring away on her couch, she quietly turned off the lamp farthest from him—she was afraid that turning off the one at his elbow might waken him—then went into her office, which, since it was the former dining room, was connected to the living room by a glass-paned door that was located on the other side of the fireplace from the TV. The other door in the room was an open archway that led into the kitchen. Her office was a small room that she hadn't bothered to try to decorate, with plain white walls, cheap white tab-top curtains covering the single double-hung window, and Ben's artwork from school stuck up everywhere with poster tape. Her desk and chair, along with a wastebasket and unopened boxes of books and mountains of files, were the only furnishings. Her cluttered desk was a Goodwill special, a scarred oak monstrosity that she thought probably had once been a teacher's desk. It sat in the middle of the floor facing the living room so that she could, when seated behind it, see Ben in the living room as he watched TV. Her briefcase waited unopened on the desk.

So get to work.

A sudden, vivid memory of Mario's friend appearing in her dark yard earlier popped without warning into her mind, and she glanced quickly toward the window, relieved when the plain white fall of the curtains blocked her view of the night beyond. Then she looked closer. Was there a sliver of space between the thin panels where someone might be able to see in?

Yes.

Her heart started to pound as her eyes fixed on the gap. Crossing quickly to the window, she tugged the panels together, making certain they overlapped. Still, she felt exposed. It was almost as if she could sense a presence beyond the curtains, beyond the glass.
Was
someone out there? She could not bring herself to part the curtains again, to look. Even if she did, as dark as it was outside, all she would be able to see would be the night crowding close around the house, she told herself.

All you're doing by dwelling on what happened earlier is freaking yourself out.

Turning away from the window required a real effort of will, but she did it. The open doorway to the kitchen was dark; beyond it, the kitchen itself was thick with shadows. The only illumination came from the single lamp that still burned in the living room. Except for the low hum of various appliances, the house was silent. Spookily so. Kate shivered in spite of herself, and was conscious of a kind of sneaky gladness that she and Ben were not alone in the house.

Even if Braga was almost as dangerous to them in his own way as Mario and company.

Don't think about it. Any of it. Put it out of your mind.

Sitting down in the blue-upholstered office chair that was also courtesy of Goodwill, Kate deliberately ignored the fact that once she scooted the chair up to her desk she could see Braga sprawled out on the couch anytime she cared to look through the glass door. She
didn't
care to look. She didn't care to think, either, about anything except work. Instead, she got busy, clicking on the small lamp on her desk, opening her briefcase, and plunging deliberately into the minutiae of her upcoming cases. Details of beatings, robberies, aggravated assaults, and attempted homicides were spelled out in the most graphic terms in the files in front of her. Many of the worst cases were "twofers," where the victim had as long a rap sheet as the alleged perpetrator. Those were the most difficult to try, because it was an uphill battle working up sympathy for the victim among the jurors. Genuinely innocent victims, on the other hand, were what a prosecutor lived for, and there were a few of those in the mix, too. Usually, the hardest thing for Kate was to remember not to let certain cases and victims invade her heart. Tonight, though, with her own life threatening to come apart around her, the hardest thing was just to concentrate.