I Shall Not Want (38 page)

She nodded. He remembered her kids. Made a point of looking at the clock on the wall. “Okay, you’re off duty. Stop bucking for overtime and go home.”

She nodded, her relief plain. She turned.

“Hadley,” Lyle said. “One more thing about de las Cruces.” She turned back, her face half curious, half wary. “Those tats he had on his fingers? They were gang markings. Which means that the guy you saw in the Hummer—”

“Alejandro Santiago.”

“That’s him. He and his crew have maybe hooked up with the Punta Diablos. The AGTF didn’t know that.” The grin on his face widened. “We actually got a thank-you for passing on that piece of information.”

Knox stared.

“Good work,” Russ added, to clarify.

She nodded, then vanished through the squad room door. They listened to her footsteps clatter down the hall.

“I don’t know about that girl,” Lyle said.

“Woman.” Russ picked up the sheets and shuffled back to the first one. “She’ll do fine. She’s coming along.”

“I got two kids older’n she is. That makes her a girl in my book.”

“Yeah? Your hunting rifle is older than Kevin. Doesn’t make him a Remington.”

Kevin quivered to attention. “Anything else, Chief? You want me to check out St. Alban’s for you?”

“No, thank you, Kevin. I’ll handle that myself.” He ignored Lyle’s huff of amusement. “See you tomorrow.”

Kevin left with a great deal more reluctance than Hadley Knox had shown. When it was down to just the two of them, Russ let his feet wander to the big worktable. He hitched himself up onto its top. “Sister Lucia’s van—” he stopped. Shook his head. “A van with a load of Hispanic men gets shot in April.”

Lyle crossed to the whiteboard and wrote it down.

“Also, sometime in March or April, Rosario de las Cruces is killed in Cossayuharie.”

“Or dumped there.”

Russ nodded acknowledgment. “In May, Hadley and Kevin run across a carload of Punta Diablo gang members.”

Lyle jotted on the board.

“End of June, Amado Esfuentes is kidnapped and his residence is searched.”

“If that kid was a gangbanger, I’ll eat my shorts.”

“We agree on that.” Russ tapped the circ sheets and arrest papers against his chin. “Maybe we’re looking at this from the wrong end. What if it’s not a power struggle?”

Lyle shrugged. “I dunno. I like that idea. It fits.”

“It fits de las Cruces. It doesn’t fit Esfuentes. Or the van shooting. What if what we’re dealing with is the fallout from an intergang rivalry? Something happened. Maybe involving the older, unidentified bodies. And now what we’re seeing is a hunt for witnesses.”

Lyle squinted at the ceiling for a moment. “Possible.” He glanced at the whiteboard. “A witness who has physical evidence. Money, the .357 Magnum, and this could-be list of distributors.”

“You think I’m barking up the wrong tree with that? They were just looking for money when they tossed Clare’s place?”

“Nope. Ten thousand’s a lot to you and me, but if we’re talking guys who import junk wholesale, it’s penny ante. Job money, for the driver.”

“Shut-up money?”

“Maybe. What’s the definition of an honest politician?”

Russ smiled a bit. “One who stays bought. I take your point.” He slid off the table. “I’m going over to St. Alban’s. Maybe I’ll find this mystery list and you and I can stop chasing our tails.”

Russ expected his deputy’s usual lazy assent and was surprised when Lyle stopped him with a hand to his arm. “We should call Ben Beagle tomorrow. Catch him up on some of this and tell him that we’ve searched the church and the rectory and come up empty-handed.”

“What? Why?”

“Because.” Lyle looked dead serious. “When the Punta Diablo boys figure out Esfuentes might have hidden something at St. Alban’s, they’ll be over there themselves.”

“What are we looking for?” Clare asked.

“I don’t know.” Russ frowned at the bookcase taking up one wall of her office. “Something that doesn’t have anything to do with Jesus or the Episcopal church, I guess.”

She pulled one of her Lindsay Davis mysteries off the shelf and handed it to him.

“Or Roman history,” he said. “Smart-ass.” He looked at her with a mixture of amusement and exasperation. He had been in what she’d have described as a fey mood since he arrived; restless, upbeat, talkative.

“It could be a journal or a diary or a notebook. I suppose it could even be a few papers stapled together.”

“We ought to start in the office, then. There are a lot more bits and pieces there.” She led him into the main office. He groaned when he saw the bookcase built into the wall. It ran from the doorway to the corner, ceiling to floor, filled with ledgers and books and file boxes and three-ring binders.

“It’s a church. What the heck do you do that generates so much paperwork?”

She almost laughed. “Let’s split the job. Do you want here or my office?”

“I’ll tackle this.”

She retreated back to her own bookcase, grateful for the space between them and resenting it at the same time. He shouted out questions now and then: “What’s a proposed canonical amendment?… Did you know you have minutes to meetings from 1932?”—while she worked her way across her shelves.

She had removed and replaced everything on her bookcase and was considering the feasibility of checking the coloring books and picture Bibles in the nursery when Russ charged up the hall with a spiral-bound notebook in his hand. He flipped it open to show her the printed entries: names, dates, numbers.

“Sorry,” she said, taking it from him. “This is the overflow baptismal registry.” She walked back to the main office and eased an oversized leather-bound volume from its place on the middle shelf. BAPTISMS was impressed in gold leaf deep into its cover. “We need to buy another one of these, but they’re ridiculously expensive.” She opened it. “See? Name of the baptized, godparents or sponsors, date, age at baptism. Celebrant’s initials.” R.H.D.D., in the entry she was pointing to. “Robert Hames, Doctor of Divinity,” she said.

He glanced at the notebook. It was arranged identically, although, without the example of the bound baptism record, the entries looked like strings of names. “C.F.M.D.” she said. “Clare Fergusson, Master of Divinity.”

“How come you don’t just put down your name? Or ‘The Rev. C.F.’?”

“I don’t know. It was the first time I’ve ever been in charge of a baptismal registry. I just copied what the last guy did.”

He snorted. “That’s probably the origin of half the traditions you Episcopalians are so gung-ho about. Just copying what the last guy did.”

“Mm-hmm. Which doesn’t sound like much until you try to do something differently. How many Episcopalians does it take to change a lightbulb?”

“Uh. I don’t know. How many?”

“
What
?
Change
the lightbulb?”

He laughed, which she appreciated, since it was a very old joke. “I didn’t find anything,” she went on. “We’ve got some odds and ends in the nursery. Do you want me to look there?”

“I guess.” He replaced the heavy old leather-bound book and then the fifty-cent spiral-bound version. He took the same care with each one.

“You guess?”

He made a noise in the back of his throat. “I don’t want to rule anything out. But let’s face it, sticking a list of dealers where any three-year-old might turn it into an art project isn’t likely.” He stepped back to size up the office bookcase again, almost knocking into her. He turned and grabbed her shoulders, steadying her. “Our best bet was right here. More loose bits and pieces. It woulda been easy for him to slide something in. If you or your secretary accidentally pulled it from its hiding place, you would have just put it back again as soon as you saw it wasn’t what you were looking for.”

He was right. She could picture Amado, vacuuming in here, maybe wiping the shelves and the woodwork with a dusting cloth. Reaching into his pocket and slipping something between the papers. Hidden in plain sight. She poked her hair into place. Tried to get her mouth around the unpalatable truth. “It’s not looking good for Amado, is it? I mean, if he was hiding something important from whoever snatched him.”

He looked at her. “No. It isn’t.”

She rubbed her arm. Once in a while, she wished Russ would sugar-coat things for her. “Why wouldn’t he just come to the police, if he had seen something illegal? Or come to me? I would have helped him.” She looked at her hands. Folded them up tight. “I could have helped him.”

Russ smiled a little. “You did everything you could, darlin‘. You gave him a job and a place to live and you beat the crap out of the Christies when they tried to attack him.”

“I defended myself,” she said. She brought her fists up, shoulder width, knuckles up and knuckles down, as if she carried an unseen oaken shaft. “I wish I had been there when whoever it was came to my house.” She looked up at Russ. “If I had only gone home an hour earlier—half an hour.”

She was shocked when he took one of her hands, folding his fingers over hers.

“Thank God you weren’t there. Because I know you, and I know you wouldn’t have let him go without a fight. And whoever has him, Clare, they’re bad people. I don’t know if you could’ve run them off with a cross and a candlestick.” He lowered her hand without releasing it. Tugged her closer. “Though if anyone could…”

“What are you doing?” She sounded like a high school girl behind the bleachers, breathless and naïve.

He caught her other hand. Forced her arms behind her back so easily it seemed as if it were her idea, as if she were stretching invisible wings, readying herself to fly. She bumped into his chest.

“What do you think I’m doing?” He bent his head toward her.

“We”—she swallowed—“we haven’t decided anything yet. We haven’t come to any sort of understanding.”

He laughed, a low sound that she had only heard once or twice before. “Clare. We decided everything about three days after we met.”

She could smell him, salt and sun and something unique to him. She felt dizzy.
You know when you’re captured
? Hardball Wright asked.
When you give up control in your head
. “Russ,” she got out, “I don’t think—”

“Good. Keep on not thinking.” He kissed her, kissed her right down to her foundations, kissed her until she was a cathedral burning: lead melting, saints shattering, not a stone left on stone. He lifted his hands, hers, pressed her against the bookcase, interlocking their fingers and
palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss
and the edge of the shelves bit into the back of her hands, hanging there with his sweet weight against her, nailed to the wood by her own reckless desire.

Then his hands were on her face, her jaw, sliding through her hair, plucking out the pins keeping it in place, tracing the edge of her collar. “How does this come off?” he asked, his voice like dusk against her ear.

“Uhn.” Thinking was like sweeping through cobwebs. “It buttons. In the back.”

The rub of his knuckle, a tug, and her collar came free.

“So it does,” he said. His lips slid over her neck and for a moment she couldn’t breathe, literally couldn’t breathe at the feel of his teeth and tongue. She let her head roll back, exposing her throat, while what passed for her brain wondered if they could make it to the loveseat in her office. The lumpy loveseat. In her office. In her church.

In her church.

She shoved him away. “Stop it,” she said. She could barely speak. “We’re not doing an Abelard and Héloïse.”

“What?” He sounded like her, dazed and winded.

“We’re not doing this here.” She inhaled. Eyed him where he stood, braced against the desk. Hair askew—had she done that?—eyes hot, his chest heaving as if he had been running the Independence Day 5K.

“Okay,” he said. “Your house.” He moved toward her again.

“No! Stop!”

“What?” His face creased with frustration, but he stopped all the same. “Not in the church. I got it. It’s sacrilegious. But don’t tell me there’s a problem with your house because it’s the rectory.”

“The problem’s not my house.” She rubbed her face. Wished she had some cold water she could splash on. Or dunk her head in. “The problem’s you. And me.”

“Oh, for—not that again. Look, let me point something out to you, okay? For two and a half, three years now, I never touched you. I didn’t kiss you, I didn’t”—his hands flexed as if he were grabbing hold of her—“I didn’t do anything. And let me tell you, it wasn’t for lack of thinking about it! Jesus, I used to go for weeks where I swear the only thing I could think about was having you. But I didn’t do anything about it.” He stepped closer. “I exercised self-control.” He enunciated every word. “Because I was married.”

He jammed one hand through his hair, making it stick up even farther.

“Now I can’t keep my hands off you. Doesn’t that tell you I’ve”—he cast around for the right word—“I would’ve never let myself while Linda was alive. Never.”

“I know that.”

“Then why the hell can’t we work with what we have? I love you. I want you. Why can’t you trust that to be enough?”

“Because it wasn’t enough before!”

He looked dumbfounded. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about last winter. I broke it off with you for the sake of your marriage. Do you have any idea what that felt like? To just give up everything and walk away?”

“Of course I do. You think it was any easier for me?”

“Yes! I do! You had someone you loved to console you. I had nothing! Then, when you found out Linda had been murdered, you came crawling right back—”

“Wait a minute—”

“—looking for help and understanding and sympathy and what all, using me like an emotional life-support system, to hell with whether it was peeling me raw or not—”

“
Using
you?”

“I gave, and I gave, and I gave, and what did I get in return? When that bitch of a state police investigator accused me of murder, you believed her!”

“I did not!”

“You did so! I was there! I saw you!”

“Christ, Clare, I thought about the possibility for thirty seconds. You’re going to hang me up to dry for thirty seconds? I’m sorry I’m not so perfect and all-giving as you are.”