Guilty (27 page)

The elevator rocked to a stop.

"Well. I guess I'll let the mayor sort this one out." Buchanan patted her arm. "Congratulations, by the way. See you next Friday."

She did her best not to look appalled as he exited the elevator.

"You don't seem too thrilled about getting a Shining Star award," Bryan observed as they got under way again. Glimpsing her reflection in the brass plate around the floor buttons, Kate saw what he meant. She was pale and big-eyed, and if she had to describe her expression in a word it would be
hunted.
"The award's a good thing. To begin with, it could really raise your profile around here. Get you on the fast track to the top."

Once upon a time, that would have been music to her ears.

"I don't have anything to wear," she said faintly, coming up with the only halfway logical objection she could think of on the spur of the moment.

Bryan chuckled. "Now
that
sounds familiar. My wife says the exact same thing every time we get ready to go anywhere. I'm sure you can find something."

"Yes, but..." The elevator
pinged
on nine, and as she followed Bryan through the opening doors onto their floor, Kate decided to give it up for the moment. She had more than a week to come up with a good reason why she would not be attending the fund-raiser. If worst came to worst, she could always plead illness. Anyway, at the moment she had more pressing concerns. Like Mario being in the wind. He could show up anywhere, at any time, and the thought made her sick with dread. How much of a threat was he really, in a physical sense? That was the question.

Unfortunately, she didn't really have an answer.

Waving absentmindedly back at Cindy the receptionist, who was talking on the phone as she wiggled her manicured fingers at them in greeting, Kate fell into step beside Bryan as he headed down the hall toward their offices. The ninth floor was, as usual, a beehive of activity. Phones rang with discordant insistence, copy machines whirred, a rolling coffee cart making its way among the paralegals' cubicles clattered over the hardwood floor, and a hodgepodge of simultaneous conversations raised the background noise level to a near roar. Employees flitted from desk to desk and office to office with an unusual sense of urgency. The late afternoon sun was too low in the sky now to provide much in the way of natural light, so if it hadn't been for the whitish fluorescents overhead, the hall would have been positively dark. The smells of coffee and microwaved pastries followed them. Ordinarily, the smell would have made her hungry, but today she was too tense for such a mundane bodily reaction. In fact, she was too tense to eat: Lunch had consisted of half an apple and a nibble of a peanut-butter cracker.

"How are you doing?" They had almost reached his office when Bryan glanced at her. His tone made it clear that he felt slightly awkward about asking. "I mean, are you holding up all right? Lord knows what happened Monday was traumatic as hell, and as far as I can tell you haven't missed a beat."

If only you knew.

"Working helps," Kate said. "I try not to dwell on it, you know?"

"That's probably good." Brian paused, and cut his eyes at her again. "There are counselors available. If you should need one, I mean. Just to talk. It would be totally confidential, with no record that you ever even visited one. There should be a memo about it in your e-mail, along with a number to call to make an appointment. Plus, there's a notice on the bulletin board in the break room."

"I'll keep it in mind," she promised. Monday had been traumatic—
way
traumadc—and she could probably use all the counseling she could get to deal with it. The problem was that since she couldn't tell the truth about her experience, she didn't think counseling would be of much use. "How are
you
doing? You were traumatized, too."

"I was scared shitless, you mean." Bryan gave her a quick sheepish grin. "I've already seen a counselor. Yesterday. And it helped. But keep that on the down-low, would you? "

"You got it." Since they were talking about Monday, there was something she realized she badly needed to know.

"Let me ask you a question," she said. "Is there a gang or some kind of group that you know of that uses a dragon as a symbol, or a dragon tattoo as a way to mark its members?"

Bryan frowned.

"Why do you want to know?" They had reached his office. Opening the door, he gestured at her to precede him inside.

As she walked past him she shrugged, elaborately casual as to her reason.

"I've heard some things," she said vaguely, and plopped down in one of the two chrome-and-leather chairs in front of his desk. His office was almost identical to hers, except the furnishings were a little nicer and it was bigger and had two windows.

"There's the Black Dragons." Setting his briefcase down, he settled in his chair behind the desk, leaning back, his arms resting comfortably on the armrests. "They came in here about four years ago from Baltimore and D.C., mostly. At first they just mixed it up with the other gangs and we didn't really pay all that much attention, but then they started turning up in relation to some pretty heinous crimes. Remember that tenement fire last year that killed sixteen people? That was the Dragons, in retaliation for a drug deal gone bad. There was a family—parents, two kids, grandma—killed in a home invasion a few months back because the dad didn't want to be a Dragon anymore. Lots of things like that. They're a gang like the Crips and the Bloods, only even more vicious and with ties to organized crime. We're trying to uproot them before they get too strong, run them out of Philly. Every time one gets picked up, we make it a point to throw the book at em.

Not reassuring. And if that's so, how the hell did Mario get out of jail?

She felt her panic level start to climb.

"You prosecuting a case involving a Dragon?" Bryan frowned at her. "Probably not something you want to take on alone just yet."

Kate shook her head. "I was curious, is all. I saw a dragon tattoo on an inmate at the detention center the other day and I thought it looked like something that might be gang-related."

"You were right." Bryan started to say something more, but then his phone rang. After a glance at the caller ID and a quick "Sorry" to her, he picked it up. As he said "Chen here" into the phone, she stood up to leave. He waved good-bye to her. Closing his door softly behind her, she headed toward her office.

Only to have her steps falter as she spotted Mona. Her administrative assistant was partly visible as she stood half in the hall and half inside Kate's open door, one hand on the knob, clearly talking to someone inside Kate's office.

Mona's ensemble of the day involved a neon-green long-sleeved T-shirt with a peacock-blue skirt that ended in ruffle around her ankles. She was wearing green tights and green, wooden-soled shoes with four-inch heels. A neon-green-and-peacock scarf looped around her neck tied the look together.

Sort of. Or maybe not.

Mona glanced her way just then, and her face lit up as she saw Kate. Kate distinctly heard her say "Here she comes now" to the person waiting in her office. Accompanied by a huge smile, that bright observation filled Kate with misgivings. Then Mona stepped into the hall, and moved quickly toward her, her gaze focused on Kate, her lithe body radiating excitement, her expression ripe with news.

Defeated, Kate resumed walking her way.

"Who is it? " Kate whispered when Mona was close enough.

Widening her eyes theatrically, Mona mimed fanning herself as if she were dying of heat stroke.

"The hot cop," she mouthed. Then, as Kate walked by her, she added in a voice meant for public consumption, "Detective Braga is here to see you."

Kate shot her a speaking look over her shoulder. Walking backward now, Mona grinned and gave her two thumbs up.

Then Kate reached her office.

Braga stood in front of the window, facing the door. His head was bent as if he were studying something on the floor in front of him; his hands seemed to be clasped behind his back. He looked up quickly as she entered, and she saw instantly how small her office was, because he seemed to take up so much of its available space. His left elbow brushed the ficus; his broad shoulders blocked most of the window. A quick, comprehensive glance told her that he had showered and shaved since she had seen him last—she tried not to remember that it had been that morning, leaving her house after spending the night on her couch, and that he'd glimpsed part of her ridiculous pink nightshirt on the way out—but a significant degree of stubble had reappeared, darkening his lean cheeks. His black hair was rumpled, as if he'd recently run his hands through it. His face was unreadable, although he still looked tired.

The thing was, she felt a little pang of what she hated to recognize as gladness upon seeing him. As if he were a friend or something.

Which, as she had to keep firmly fixed in her mind, he definitely was not. Last night's sleepover notwithstanding.

C h a p t e r 19

"HEY," Braga said in greeting. His gaze tracked Kate as she walked around behind her desk. "Busy day?"

Her eyes narrowed at him. There was something in his demeanor ...

"Is this a social call?" she asked, as she set her briefcase down on the floor, almost sure it wasn't. Straightening, squaring her shoulders, she looked directly at him. Standing behind her desk, her hands curling around the smooth leather back of her chair, she braced herself for whatever he was about to throw at her. "Because if it is, I don't have the time. I have a few more things I have to do before I can leave, and I don't like to be late picking up Ben."

"This'll only take a minute." His hands came out from behind his back. He was holding a thin white plastic grocery bag that bulged with whatever was in it. "I brought you something."

"You brought me something?"
Not
what she had been expecting. Kate reached out to take the bag, mystified, glancing from it to his face just in time to catch an almost imperceptible spasm of harshness that appeared briefly around his eyes and mouth as its possession transferred from his hand to hers.
What's that about?
She frowned as she tried to make sense of the fleeting expression.

"Actually, it's for Ben." There was absolutely no intonation whatsoever to his voice now. "A basketball. I happened to run across one that has hands printed on it to show him the correct shooting position. I thought it might help."

Kate peeked in the bag. There was a basketball in there, all right. Orange leather, with small magenta hands tooled into it. A training ball for beginners? Because that's what it looked like to her.

Her eyes met his.

"Thank you," she said, and meant it. Because it was for Ben, because he'd thought of Ben and the problem her son must have told him he was having in gym, the gift touched her. She smiled at him, a slow, sweet, and charming smile of the sort that she almost never directed at anybody these days.

He nodded brusquely in response. His feet were braced slightly apart, his expression was inscrutable as he met her gaze. No trace of an answering smile. In fact, if she had to characterize the vibe she was getting, he almost seemed angry.

Okay, so much for being nice. She set the bag down beside her briefcase and looked at him again, this time minus the smile.

"Is there anything else?"

"Yeah, there is."

Then he moved, crossing the room in two quick strides and closing the door while she watched with growing surprise. With the door closed, he came to stand in front of her desk, looking at her across it with that unreadable poker face that she was beginning to learn meant he was in full cop mode.

Uh-oh.

"What?" She glanced at him, trying not to seem nervous, although nervous was starting to feel like her middle name.

"I need you to clarify something for me. About how you shot Rodriguez. Go over that one more time for me, would you please?"

Her heart started thudding like a kettledrum. A hard knot formed in her chest. Her mouth went dry. All instant, spontaneous physical reactions that she couldn't control.

Oh, God. Could he tell? Could he see?

Get a grip,
she told herself.
He's a cop, not a psychic.

"I don't want to talk about it anymore. Talking about it upsets me."

His lips tightened. Placing his hands flat on her desk, he leaned toward her. That put their eyes almost on a level. Sexy eyes—or at least they would have been if they hadn't been boring like lasers into hers.

"You're going to have to talk about it with somebody sooner or later. If I were you, I'd choose me. And now."

She gripped the back of the chair hard and lifted her chin at him. As a lawyer, if there was one thing she knew, it was her rights.

"I don't have to say a word. It's my legal right not to answer your questions, or anybody else's."

"That's right, it is. Are you exercising it?"

They both knew that an ADA such as herself refusing to answer the legitimate questions of a homicide detective investigating a case she was involved in would raise all kinds of red flags throughout the Philly legal and law-enforcement communities, including with her bosses. In short, they wouldn't like it. In shorter, it would seem suspicious, as if, perhaps, she were trying to hide something.

Go figure.

"No." It was all she could do not to sound sulky. What good were all those constitutional protections if you couldn't use them when you needed to? "What do you want to know?"

Like she didn't remember. Like he hadn't zeroed in on the one thing she most feared being questioned about. Like the lie she had told wasn't burned into her soul.

"How you shot Rodriguez. And I'm sorry if the question calls up painful memories."

Kate curled her lip at him. He didn't sound sorry. He didn't look sorry. He looked tense.

Like he was waiting for her to mess up.

What, exactly, did he know? Was this about the second man in the security corridor again? Or something different?