Night Sins (6 page)

Mitch clenched his jaw. “I promise. Give me a kiss good night, then let me talk to Grandpa.”

Jessie made a loud smacking sound over the phone, which Mitch repeated, turning his back to Megan so she couldn't see the color that warmed his cheeks. Then Jessie turned the phone over to her grandfather and Mitch went through the ritual explanation that wasn't an explanation—police business, hung up on a case, nothing major but it might drag on. If he told his in-laws he had to see about a possible kidnapping, Joy Strauss would burn up the phone lines whipping the town into a frenzy.

Jurgen didn't press for details. A born-and-bred Minnesotan, he considered it rude to ask for more information than the caller was willing to give. Aside from that, the routine wasn't unfamiliar to him. Mitch's job dictated a late night from time to time. The standing arrangement was for Jessie to remain with her grandparents, who looked after her every day after school. The routine was convenient and provided stability for Jessie. Mitch might not have been enamored of his mother-in-law, but he trusted her to take good care of her only grandchild.

He hated to miss seeing Jessie, to miss tucking her in and reading to her until her eyes drifted shut. His daughter was the absolute center of his universe. For a second he tried to imagine what it would feel like if he couldn't find her, then he thought of Josh and Hannah.

“He'll turn up in no time,” he murmured to himself as he hung up the receiver. The knot in his gut tightened.

Megan's temper dropped from a boil to a simmer. For a second there Mitch Holt had seemed vulnerable, not tough, not intimidating. For a second he was a single father who sent his little girl kisses over the phone. The word
dangerous
floated through her head again and took on new connotations.

Kicking the thought aside, she gave him a no-nonsense look. “I hope you're right, Chief,” she said. “For everyone's sake.”

CHAPTER 5

D
AY
1
9:30
P.M.
         19°

T
he last of the senior league hockey players were limping and shuffling their way out of the Gordie Knutson Memorial Arena when Mitch pulled his Explorer into the drive. Fifty or older, the senior leaguers still displayed an amazing amount of grace on the ice, as if they somehow shed the cumbersome stiffness of age in the locker room as they laced on the magic skates. They skated and passed and checked and laughed and swore. But when the game was over, the skates came off and the realities of age settled in with a vengeance. They inched their way down the steps, faces contorted in grimaces of varying degrees.

Noogie watched them with a grin as he stood leaning against his patrol car parked in the fire lane in front of the building. He gave them a thumbs-up, then laughed when Al Jackson told him to go to hell.

“Why do you keep playing when it does this to you, Al?”

“What kind of stupid question is that?” Jackson shot back. “Oh, yeah, I forget—you used to play football; too many knocks in the head.”

“At least we had sense enough to wear helmets,” Noogie goaded.

“You mean there's no excuse for that face?”

Noga growled and waved them past.

“What's going on, Noogie?” Bill Lennox asked, hiking up the strap on his duffel bag. “Caught Olie speeding on the Zamboni machine?”

They all laughed, but their gazes slid past Noogie to Mitch and Megan as they came up the sidewalk.

“Evening, Mitch,” Jackson called, raising the end of his hockey stick in salute. “Crime wave at the ice rink?”

“Yeah. We've had another complaint that your slap shot is criminal.”

The group roared. Mitch kept an eye on them until they were well out of earshot, then turned to his officer.

“Officer Noga, this is Agent O'Malley—”

“We've met,” Megan said impatiently, tapping a foot against the snowpack on the sidewalk for the dual purpose of releasing energy and trying to keep the feeling in her toes.

Her gaze scanned the area. The ice rink was at the end of a street, set well back from the residences. Located at the southeast edge of Deer Lake, it was half a mile off the interstate highway. Beyond the island of artificial light that was the parking lot, the night was black, vaguely ominous, certainly unwelcoming. On the other side of a wall of overgrown leafless shrubbery, the Park County fairgrounds stretched out across a field, an array of old vacant buildings and a looming grandstand. It looked abandoned and somehow sinister, as if the shadows were inhabited by dark spirits that could be chased away only by carnival lights and crowds of people. Even looking in the other direction, toward the town, Megan felt a sense of isolation.

“Is this about the missing kid?” Noga asked.

Mitch nodded. “Hannah Garrison's boy. Josh. She was supposed to pick him up here. I figured we'd take a look around, talk to Olie—”

“We should have uniforms canvassing the residential area,” Megan interrupted, drawing a narrow look from Mitch and owl eyes from Noga. “Find out if the neighbors might have seen the boy or anything out of the ordinary. The fairgrounds will be the likely place to start the search once we've secured this area.”

Mitch had tried to stick her with baby-sitting detail, suggesting she stay with Hannah and offer moral support while they waited for word of Josh. She had informed him that moral support was not part of her job description, then suggested they call a friend to come stay with Hannah and help make another round of phone calls looking for Josh among his friends. In the end Mitch called Natalie, who lived in Hannah's neighborhood.

His gaze hard and steady on her, he took a deep breath and spoke to his officer in a tone too even to be believed. “Go on inside and round up Olie. I'll be there in a minute.”

“Gotcha.” Noga hustled off, clearly relieved to be out of the line of fire.

Megan braced herself for a skirmish. Mitch stared at her, his jaw set, his eyes dark and deep beneath his brows. She could feel the tension coming off him in waves.

“Agent O'Malley,” he said, his voice as cold as the air and deceptively, dangerously soft, “whose investigation is this?”

“Yours,” she answered without hesitation. “And you're screwing it up.”

“How diplomatically put.”

“I don't get paid for diplomacy,” she said, knowing damn well that she did. “I get paid to consult, advise, and investigate. I advise that
you
investigate, Chief, instead of dragging your butt around, pretending nothing's happened.”

“I didn't ask for your consultation or your advice,
Ms.
O'Malley.” Mitch didn't like this situation. He didn't like the possibilities and what they could mean to Deer Lake. And at the moment he was nursing a strong dislike for Megan O'Malley just because she was there and witnessing everything and poking at his authority and his ego. “You know, old Leo wasn't much to look at, but he knew his place. He wouldn't stick his nose into this until I asked him to.”

“Then he would have been dragging his butt, too,” Megan said, refusing to back down. If she backed away from him now, God knew she would probably end up sitting around the squad room monitoring the coffeepot. It wasn't just a question of turf, it was a matter of establishing herself in the pecking order. “If you don't call in uniforms to question the neighbors, I'll question them myself as soon as I've had a look around.”

The muscles in his jaw flexed. His nostrils flared, emitting twin jet streams of steam. Megan held her place, gloved hands jammed on her hips, the muscles in the back of her neck knotting from looking up at him. She had ceased to feel her smaller toes as the cold leeched up through the thin soles of her boots.

Mitch ground his teeth as that fist tightened a little more in his belly and a voice whispered in the back of his mind.
What if she's right? What if you're wrong, Holt? What if you blow this?
The self-doubt made him furious, and he readily transferred that fury to the woman before him.

“I'll call for two more units. Noga can start looking around out here,” he said tightly. “You can come with me, Agent O'Malley. I don't want you running unchecked in my town, spooking everyone into a panic.”

“I'm not yours to keep on a leash, Chief.”

His lips curled in a smile that was feral and nasty. “No, but it's a great fantasy.”

He stalked off down the sidewalk and up the steps, denying her the chance for rebuttal. She hurried after him, cursing the slippery footing with every breath she didn't use to curse Mitch Holt.

“Maybe we ought to set some ground rules here,” she said, coming up alongside him. “Decide when you'll be enlightened versus when you'll be an asshole. Is that a matter of convenience or a territorial thing, or what? I'd like to know now, because if this is going to degrade into a fence-pissing contest, I'm going to have to learn how to lift my leg.”

He shot her a glare. “They didn't teach you that at the FBI academy?”

“No. They taught me how to subdue aggressive males by ramming their balls up to their tonsils.”

“You must be a fun date.”

“You'll never know.”

He pulled open one of the doors that led into the ice arena and held it. Megan deliberately stepped to the side and opened another for herself.

“I don't expect special treatment,” she said, stepping into the foyer. “I expect equal treatment.”

“Fine.” Mitch pulled his gloves off and stuffed them into his coat pockets. “You try to go over my head and I will be as equally pissed off with you as I would be with anyone else. Make me mad enough and I'll punch you out.”

“That's assault.”

“Call a cop,” he tossed over his shoulder as he jerked open a door into the arena and strode through it.

Megan cast a glance toward heaven. “I asked for this, didn't I?”

O
lie Swain had done most of the grunt work at the Gordie Knutson Memorial Arena for the better part of five years. He worked from three till eleven six days a week, keeping the locker rooms in order, sweeping trash from the seating areas, resurfacing the ice with the Zamboni machine, and doing whatever odd jobs needed doing. His real name was not Olie, but the nickname stuck with him and he made no effort to lose it. He figured the less anyone knew about the real him, the better—an attitude he had developed in childhood. Anonymity was a comfortable cloak, truth a neon light that directed unwanted attention on the unhappy story of his life.

Mind your own business, Leslie. Don't be proud, Leslie. Pride and arrogance are the sins of man.

The lines that had been hammered into him in childhood with iron fists and pointed tongues rang dully in the back of his head. The mystery had always been what he could possibly have to be proud of. He was small and ugly with a port wine birthmark spreading over a quarter of his face like a stain. His talents were small and of no interest to anyone. His experiences were the stuff of shame and secrets, and he kept them to himself. He always had, shrugging off what few concerns were expressed on his behalf, denying bruises and scars, excusing the glass eye as the result of a fall from a tree.

He had a clever mind, a head for books and studies. He had a natural aptitude for computers. This fact he kept mostly to himself as well, cherishing it as the one bright spot in an otherwise bleak existence.

Olie didn't like cops. He especially didn't like men. Their size, their strength, their aggressive sexuality, all triggered bad feelings in him, which was why he had no real friends his own age. The closest he came to having friends at all were the hockey boys. He envied their exuberance and coveted their innocence. They liked him because he could skate well and do acrobatics. Some were cruel about his looks, but mostly they accepted him, and that was the best Olie could ever hope for.

He stood in the corner of the cramped storage room he had converted into an office of sorts, his nerve endings wiggling like worms beneath his skin as Chief Holt's tall frame filled the doorway.

“Hey, Olie,” the chief said. His smile was fake and tired. “How's it going?”

“Fine.” Olie snapped the word off like a twig and tugged on the sleeve of the quilted flight jacket he'd bought at an army-navy store in the Cities. Inside his heavy wool sweater, perspiration trickled down his sides from his armpits, spicy and sour.

A woman peeked in around the chief's right arm. Bright green eyes in a pixie's face, dark hair slicked back.

“This is Agent O'Malley.” Holt moved no more than a fraction of an inch to his left. The woman glanced up at him, her jaw set as she wedged herself through the narrow opening and into the little room. “Agent O'Malley, Olie Swain. Olie's the night man here.”

Olie nodded politely. Agent of what? he wondered, but he didn't ask.
Mind your own business, Leslie.
Good advice, he'd found, regardless of the source. Early in life he had learned to channel his curiosity away from people and into his books and his fantasies.

“We'd just like to ask you a couple of questions, Mr. Swain, if that's all right with you,” Megan said, loosening the noose of her scarf in deference to the heat of the room.

She took in everything about Olie Swain in a glance. He was jockey-size with pug features and mismatched eyes that seemed too round. The left one was glass and stared straight ahead while the other darted around, his glance seeming to bounce off every surface it touched. The glass eye was a lighter shade of brown than the good eye and ringed in brighter white. The unnatural white was accentuated by the scald-red skin of the birthmark that leeched down out of his hair and across the upper left quadrant of his face. His hair was a patchwork of brown and gray and stood up on his head like the bristles of a scrub brush. He was probably in his late thirties, she guessed, and he didn't like cops.

That was, of course, a hazard of the job. Even the most innocent of people became edgy when the cops invaded their territory. And then again, sometimes it turned out to be more than routine jitters. She wondered which explanation applied to Olie.

“We're trying to find Josh Kirkwood,” Mitch said, his tone very matter-of-fact. “He plays on John Olsen's Squirts team. You know him?”

Olie shrugged. “Sure.”

He offered nothing else. He asked no questions. He glanced down at his Ragg wool half-gloves and smoothed his right hand over his left. Typical Olie, Mitch thought. The guy possessed no social graces to speak of, never had much to say, and never said anything without prompting. An odd duck, but there was no law against that. All he seemed to want in life was to do his job and be left alone with his books.

From his position in the doorway Mitch could see Olie and the whole room without moving his eyes. An old green card table with a ripped top and a paint-splattered wooden straight chair took up most of the floor space. On top of and beneath the table were piles of outdated used textbooks. Computer science, psychology, English literature—the books ran the gamut.

“Josh's mom was late coming to get him,” Mitch went on. “When she got here he was gone. Did you see him leave with anyone?”

“No.” Olie ducked his head. “I was busy. Had to run the Zamboni before Figure Skating Club.” His speech was a kind of linguistic shorthand, pared down to the bare essentials, just enough to make his point, not enough to encourage conversation. He stuck his hands in his coat pockets and waited and sweat some more.

“Did you take a call around five-fifteen, five-thirty from someone at the hospital saying Dr. Garrison would be late?” Megan asked.

“No.”

“Do you know if anyone else did?”

“No.”

Megan nodded and ran the zipper of her parka down. The little room was located next door to the furnace room and apparently absorbed heat in through the walls. It was like a sauna. Mitch had unzipped his parka and shrugged it back on his shoulders. Olie kept his hands in his jacket pockets. He rolled his right foot over onto the side of his battered Nike running shoe and jiggled his leg.