Night Sins (14 page)

“So let's go,” Megan said impulsively. She kicked herself mentally the instant the words came out. There was plenty of work to be done in the office, and it made no sense to pair herself with a man who could distract her by doing something so innocuous as chewing his lunch.

“I mean, I thought I'd go over to the command post and then join one of the teams for a couple of hours,” she backpedaled smoothly. “You could do that, too. Not
with
me, necessarily. In fact, it would probably be better if we split up.”

Mitch watched the color rise in her cheeks. His sense of humor was running low, but a smile of wry amusement curled up a corner of his mouth. It was a relief to think of something besides the case for a minute. The cool and collected Agent O'Malley blushing seemed as good a diversion as any.

He rose and strolled around the desk with his hands in his trouser pockets, his gaze pinning Megan to her chair. “You're blushing, Agent O'Malley.”

“No. I'm just hot.” She winced mentally at the implications. “It's warm in here.”

He prowled a little closer. “You're hot?”

He looked into her eyes, his gaze shrewd and predatory. It seemed a prudent time to snap off a sharp retort and get her ass away from this fire. But no retort formed, no words came out of her dry mouth. Her muscles tightened, but she didn't move quickly enough. He read her thoughts and in a heartbeat was leaning down over her, his big hands gripping the arms of the chair as she jerked her own hands back.

“What's making you hot?” he whispered, forgetting his pledge to not want her. He liked the little rush of excitement. It made him feel alive instead of weary, made him feel anticipation instead of dread. “Are you afraid to ride in the same car with me, Agent O'Malley?”

“I'm not afraid of you,” Megan whispered, grabbing ahold of her pride and wielding it like a sword. She didn't like this insidious desire that drifted in and out of their relationship like smoke. Elusive and intangible, it obscured boundaries, altered expectations. She didn't trust it, and she didn't trust herself when it came over her like a boiling tide. “I'm not afraid of anything.”

Mitch watched her resolve harden in the deep green of her eyes. She would let him pursue the attraction just so far and then she started pushing back. Just as well, he told himself. Just as well for both of them. Wrong time, wrong place, wrong people. She had a chip on her shoulder the size of Gibraltar.

“Don't sell yourself short,” he murmured as the old weariness came washing back through him, dousing the spark. “We're all afraid of something.”

CHAPTER 10

D
AY
2
5:16
P.M.
         17°

T
hrough the long hours of the day Hannah gained a new sympathy for the family members who sat in the hospital lounge waiting while their loved one underwent surgery. She could do nothing but wait and pray. There was no control. There was no participation. There was no energy to distract herself with menial chores—not that anyone would have allowed her to attend to menial chores. All she could do was wait and listen to the unearthly sound of helicopter blades beating the air as the search choppers passed slowly back and forth over the town. Giant vultures hovering over the rooftops, scanning the ground with electric eyes for any sign of her son . . . or his body.

Her house was full of interlopers. Strangers from the BCA, watching her telephone as if waiting for a vision. Friends from the neighborhood and from around town, watching
her
as if they all had money riding on the exact time she would have a nervous breakdown. They attended her tag-team fashion, one person hovering and fussing, denying her even the small comfort of tending to Lily's needs, while another did her laundry or scrubbed the soap scum out of her bathtub. Every hour or so they would switch jobs, and Hannah caught herself wondering which was considered the worst duty.

She knew which
she
hated most. She would rather have been cleaning her tile grout than sitting in the family room with watcher number two, a truth that clearly demonstrated how desperate she was feeling.

Paul would have readily testified that she had no affinity for housework. She managed the basics, but took no enjoyment in them. They were nothing but chores that seemed to need doing again the moment she had finished them. They took away time she would rather have spent with her children. She cursed every second she had spent vacuuming the carpet instead of playing with Josh. She cursed Paul for guilting her into continuing the thankless jobs. She would have long ago hired someone to come in and do the cleaning and the laundry and bake fresh cookies once a week if it hadn't been for Paul and his little digs about her lack of domesticity.

His mother's house always smelled of lemon oil and wax from polishing the furniture. His mother always spent Saturday baking bread and sweet rolls and cookies. Hannah had pointed out to him once that he hated his mother, never went to see his mother, had married his mother's opposite and therefore had no right to complain.

“At least I knew she was my mother. At least my father knew she was a woman—”

“You'd know I was a woman, too, if I weren't so exhausted from trying to keep this house up to your lofty standards—”

“The house? You're never in the damn house! You're at the hospital day and night—”

“I happen to think saving lives is a little more important than dusting and baking coffee cakes!”

It was a wonder she remembered the angry words so well; there had been so many of late.

Sighing, she rose and crossed the family room to the big picture window that looked out over the lake. A crooked arm of ice, Deer Lake was seven miles long and a mile across with half a dozen small fingers reaching into the wooded banks. Normally the view brought her a sense of peace. Today it only made her feel more restless and alone.

Cars hung precariously on the snow-packed shoulder of Lakeshore Drive. Reporters camped like hyenas on the fringe of a lion's fresh kill. Waiting for any scrap of news. Waiting for her to emerge so they could pounce on her and tear at her with their questions. A green and white patrol car sat parked in the driveway, a guardian sent by Mitch, God bless him. A mile to the north, ice-fishing huts dotted the public access area of the lake like multicolored mushrooms. No one had come to fish today. What little light the day had offered was fading away. Lights winked on in the houses that ringed the banks. School was out. There should have been children out on the ice, on the end of the lake that had been cleared of snow for skating. There were no children tonight. Because of Josh.

Because of me
.

Like ripples in a pond, the effects reached out and touched the lives of people she didn't even know. Everyone was paying for her sin. It seemed such a small thing, a moment's slip, a forgivable lapse. But no one would forgive her, least of all Hannah herself. Josh was gone and she was sentenced to this punishment—to stand and do nothing while her neighbors cleaned her house and a cop sat at her kitchen table reading a paperback novel.

“The waiting is the worst.”

Hannah turned and stared at the woman from the missing children's group. Another of the unwanted entourage. She didn't know which was worse—pity from friends or from strangers. She hated the woman's I've-been-where-you-are-and-emerged-a-better-woman-for-it look. The woman stood beside her, the picture of upscale suburbia in a knit ensemble of hunter and rust, accessorized in brass, her deep red hair cut in a smooth shoulder-length bob.

“I went through this two years ago,” the woman confided. “My ex-husband stole our son.”

“Were you frightened for his life?” Hannah asked bluntly.

The woman frowned a little. “Well, no, but—”

“Then I'm sorry, but I don't think you can possibly know what I'm feeling.”

Ignoring the woman's expression of shock, Hannah walked past her and into the kitchen.

“It was still a trauma!” the woman exclaimed, outrage ringing in her voice.

The cop glanced up from his book, looking as if he wanted no part of this scene. Hannah didn't blame him. She wanted no part of it, either.

“I have to get some air,” she said. “I'll be just outside if the phone rings.”

In the mud room she pulled on the old black parka Paul used for weekend dirty work. As she grabbed mittens off the shelf she visualized the sniping match that would go on if he came home and caught her wearing his coat.

“You have coats of your own.”

“What's the difference? You weren't wearing this one.”

She wouldn't try to explain to him that it somehow made her feel safer, protected, loved to wear something of his. It made no sense—would certainly make no sense to Paul—that she could draw more comfort from his clothing than she could from him. She could never explain to him that the clothes were like memories of what they had once shared, of who he had once been. They were the shrouds of ghosts, and she wrapped herself in them and ached for what had died in their marriage.

She pulled open the door to the garage and gasped at the dark figure of a man standing on the stoop with his fist raised.

“Hannah!”

“Oh, my God! Father Tom! You nearly gave me a heart attack!”

The priest offered a sheepish smile. He was young—mid-thirties—tall with an athletic build. Her nurse and friend from the ER, Kathleen Casey, always teased him that he was too good-looking to have taken himself out of the eligible bachelor pool—a joke that never failed to bring a little blush to Tom McCoy's cheeks. Hannah didn't think of him as handsome. The word that came to her when she looked at Father Tom was
kind.
He had a strong, kind face, kind blue eyes. Eyes that offered understanding and sympathy and forgiveness from behind a pair of round wire-framed glasses.

He had been the priest at St. Elysius for two years and was enormously popular with the younger parishioners. Hardliners found him a little too unconventional for their tastes. Albert Fletcher, St. Elysius's only deacon, was a vocal opponent to what he called “this New Age Catholicism,” but then, Albert was also against women wearing slacks and often hinted that Vatican II was the work of the Antichrist. Paul derisively called Father Tom's off-the-cuff homilies his “lounge act,” but Hannah found them refreshing and insightful. Tom McCoy was a bright, articulate man with a degree in philosophy from Notre Dame and a heart as big as his home state of Montana. On a day as black as this one, she couldn't think of anyone she would rather have as a friend.

“I thought it would be better if I came in this way.” A hint of the West accented his warm voice. “There are an awful lot of people watching your front door.”

“Yes, it's Eyes-on-Hannah-Garrison Day,” she said without humor. “I was just trying to escape for a few minutes.”

“Would you rather I left?” He stepped down to the garage floor, showing his sincerity, giving her the chance to answer honestly. “If you need to be alone—”

“No. No, don't go.” Hannah walked out onto the stoop and listened to the soft hiss of the storm door as it closed behind her. “Alone isn't really what I want, either.”

As her eyes adjusted to the faint gray light, her gaze wandered the cavernous garage, hitting on Josh's bike. Hanging on the wall. Abandoned. Forgotten. A fist of emotion slammed into her diaphragm. She had managed to cocoon herself in numbness all day, as the watchers and well-wishers and sympathizers came and went. But the sight of the dirt bike punched a hole in the gauze, punched a hole in her heart, and the pain came pouring out.

“I just want my son back.”

She sank down on the cold concrete step, her legs buckling as her strength drained away. She might have fallen to the floor if not for Father Tom. He was on the step beside her in an instant, catching her. He slid an arm around her shoulders and held her gently. She turned her face into his shoulder and wept, the tears soaking into the heavy wool of his topcoat.

“I want him back. . . . Why can't I have him back? Why did this have to happen? He's just a little boy. How could God do this? How could God let this happen?”

Tom said nothing. He let Hannah cry, let her ask the questions. He thought she didn't really expect answers, which was just as well, because he didn't have any answers to give. He himself had asked all the same questions of a higher power, and his ears still rang with the silence. He didn't know a better person than Hannah. So gracious, so caring, dedicated to her children and to helping others. Her soul was as good as they came. In a just world, bad things wouldn't happen to people like Hannah or innocent children like Josh. But the world was not a just place. It was a hard place full of random cruelty, a truth that always brought him to question God.
If the world is an unjust world, then is God therefore an unjust God?
The guilt that accompanied the question was heavy and cold inside him. Blind faith remained beyond his reach. Doubt was his cross to bear.

He couldn't offer Hannah answers, only comfort. He couldn't take away her pain, but he could share it with her. So he sat on the hard, cold step with his arms around her and let her cry, his heart aching for her, his own tears rolling down into the thick tangle of her honey-blond hair. When she had cried herself out he pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and pressed it into her hand.

“I'm sorry,” she whispered, edging away from him, lifting her face from his shoulder and turning it away. “I don't cry on people. I don't fall apart and make other people pick up the pieces.”

“I'll never tell,” he promised, gently stroking the back of her head. “I'm a priest, remember?”

Hannah tried to laugh, but the sound caught in her throat. She stared down at the handkerchief, her brows drawing together.

“It's clean,” he teased, giving her shoulders a squeeze. “I promise.”

She sniffed and tried to smile. “I was looking at the monogram. F?”

“Christmas gift from a parishioner. F for Father Tom.”

The naïveté of the gesture struck her as sad and sweet and squeezed another pair of tears from her eyes. She wiped them away with the linen and blew her nose as delicately as she could manage. They sat in silence for a while. Night had fallen. The temperature was noticeably dropping. The front security light outside had come on automatically and burned brightly against the dark, warding off danger. What a joke.

“You're entitled to fall apart, Hannah,” Tom said softly. “The rest of us are supposed to lift you up and hold you together. That's the way it works.”

He didn't understand, she thought. The lifting and the holding had always been her jobs. Now that she was the one in pieces, everyone just stared at her and didn't know what to do.

“Has there been any word?”

Hannah shook her head. “I feel so helpless, so useless. At least Paul can go out with the search party. All I can do is
wait . . . and wonder . . . This must be what hell is like. I can't imagine anything worse than what's gone through my mind in the last twenty-two hours.”

She rose slowly, went down the steps to the door that opened to the backyard, and stared out the window into the dark. Weak yellow light seeped out the kitchen window, staining the snow. Gizmo lay in the amber rectangle, a huge immobile lump of shaggy hair. Beyond the dog, the shadow of the swing set stood out, black on white, then the yard melted into the thick woods that wrapped around the north end of the lake, giving the neighborhood a sense of seclusion.

“I did my residency at Hennepin County Medical Center,” she said, her voice a flat monotone. “That's a tough ER, a tough part of town, you know. I've seen things . . . the things people can do to one another . . . the things people can do to a child. . . .”

The words faded. She stared out through the window, but Tom could tell she was seeing another place, another time. Her face was strained and pale. He stood beside her and waited quietly, patiently.

“. . . Unspeakable things,” she whispered. Even with the oversize coat, he could tell she was breathing hard, trembling. “And I think of Josh—”

“Don't,” he ordered.

She looked at him sideways and waited. There was no expectation in her eyes, no hope that he would say something that could brighten her perspective. Seldom in his years as a priest had he felt so impotent, so ill equipped to give anything of worth to someone who was suffering. She stared at him and waited, her eyes big and fathomless in the absence of light, her lovely face cast in shadows.

“It won't help,” he said at last. “You're only torturing yourself.”

“I deserve it.”