Tumbledown (8 page)

“One piece.” She handed Alex the toast. “And you eat it slowly. Then you can take your pain meds.”

“I’m very proud of you, and I love you,” Alex said, nibbling on a corner.

“You love toast.”

“I do also love toast.”

In spite of herself, Sarah started to laugh. “Alex, if you’re going to wink at me, try doing it with the eye that isn’t swollen shut.”

The phone rang, cutting off Alex’s comeback. Recognizing the number on the caller ID, Sarah passed it straight to her with a muttered “Quinn.”

Only privy to one side of the conversation, Sarah watched her slowly put her toast down as Quinn spoke. When she hung up, her face was pale, with no trace of humor left.

“Emerson’s been suspended, pending an investigation,” she said. “He pretty much admitted to only opening the doors of the first two offices. He told us they were clear, but he hadn’t gone inside and searched them properly.”

“Jesus.” Sarah shook her head. “Where was the guy who assaulted you?”

“Came out of the second office.”

“What the fuck was Emerson thinking?” The crockery on the tray rattled as she spoke, and it was only then that she realized she was shaking.

“I’m not sure.” Unlike Sarah, who felt ready to throttle Emerson with her bare hands, Alex sounded more bewildered than angry. “He was scared. Maybe that made him sloppy.”

“He could have got you killed.”

“I know.” She was staring blankly into the darkened bedroom.

For a terrifying moment, paranoia gripped Sarah. “Do you think he meant to?”

“No.” Alex answered quickly, but when she turned to Sarah, she looked uncertain and very tired. “I don’t know,” she said.

The admission hung between them, its implications too deep for Sarah to fathom after so little sleep and so much stress. Hand in hand, they sat in silence. It was Alex who eventually spoke.

“Maybe we should call Castillo.”

Alex eyed the small pink pills with disdain.

“Come on. Down the hatch,” Sarah said. Her hand was cool from the water, her touch light against Alex’s aching head, and Alex took the first pill just to prolong the moment. It didn’t make anything worse so she chased the second down with a gulp of water.

“Oh bugger,” Sarah muttered. The advice leaflet from the medication was on the bed, spread out in front of her.

“What? Am I allergic?” Alex might have felt alarmed, had she not been so damn tired.

“No. Well, I don’t think so.” Sarah studied her, her expression quizzical as she tried to remember. “I thought beetroot was the only thing you were allergic to.”

“Those pills were awful pink.”

The worry on Sarah’s face softened as she smiled. “Unlikely to be beetroot flavored, though.” Her finger rested on a section of the leaflet. “It’s this warning: ‘may cause drowsiness.’”

She must have had a point to make, but Alex couldn’t discern it. Blinking at her, she tried not to yawn. “That gonna be a problem?”

“We need to phone Castillo.” Sarah sounded as if she were speaking to a child: slow, careful, ensuring that Alex could follow her. “That means I need to know what happened last night, and everything you have on Emerson, because I don’t think you’re going to be in a fit state to speak to anyone in an official capacity.”

Alex nodded in a manner she hoped was serious, but found she had concerns of a far more pressing nature. “Can I have your toast?”

Sarah swore beneath her breath, but passed the spare piece of toast over before taking a notepad and pen from the bedside table.

“Scott Emerson,” she said, flipping the pad to a blank page. “Go.”

“He doesn’t like me,” Alex ventured. For some reason, that made her feel incredibly tearful, and chewing the toast was the only thing keeping her bottom lip from quivering. “I don’t know why. He gives me all the crappy jobs to do.”

Sarah made a “carry on” motion with her hand; she hadn’t written anything down yet. “Do you know anything that might help Castillo look into his background?” she said. “His home address? Is he married?”

“He lives out on Pike Road, right up the top end. I think he’s single. There was cake in February.” Something gave a twinge in Alex’s injured wrist and she instantly forgot why her last point had been salient. “There was cake in February.” She looked up at Sarah helplessly. “I can’t…”

“Think his birthday might be in February?” Sarah asked gently.

“I guess. I don’t remember the day, but he’s thirty.”

The notepad page was half-full of scribbles.

“You’re doing fabulously,” Sarah assured her. “Does he have any distinguishing marks? Tattoos?”

“Not that I’ve noticed.” Since being held hostage by Deakin’s gang of racist thugs, they had done their research. Tattoos were a notable feature of many white supremacist groups, but Emerson would have to have been insane to display any such markings, given his choice of profession. “I’ve never heard him say anything out of line, either,” she said. “He seems like a decent officer, metip, meticul…” She stumbled over the word, her teeth and tongue getting in each other’s way.

“Meticulous?”

“Yes. And last night, the look on his face—Sarah, he looked terrible.”

Sarah paused in her writing, the pen hovering over the page. “Terrible because you were hurt or terrible because he was in deep shit and you weren’t actually dead?” She made no attempt to temper her bitterness, and there was a flush creeping upward from her chest to her neck.

Alex closed her eyes, uncertain exactly what she had seen before her head smacked into the wall, or how to interpret it.

“He tried to stop me from bleeding,” she said. She remembered that much, remembered Tobin being useless in the background while Emerson pressed his bare hands against her wound. But that could have been tactical as well; the wound obviously wasn’t going to prove fatal, so he had to be seen to be helping his fallen colleague. Didn’t he?

When she opened her eyes, the tray was gone and Sarah was rearranging the pillows behind her.

“Come on. Lie down,” Sarah said, and her voice was like a balm, kind and lovely.

“Did you get enough to tell Castillo?”

The pillow was soft beneath Alex’s head, urging her deeper into it.

“I got enough.” Sarah pulled up the sheets and tucked her in. “I’m going to call him now. You need anything?”

“’M good, thanks.”

“I’m right next door,” Sarah said, and clicked the room into darkness.

*

Given the late hour, Sarah was surprised to catch Castillo on his office number. He answered by stating his official title, but he sounded as if he were chewing a mouthful of food. The familiarity of his voice, and the sense of security that it evoked, made her feel calmer.

“You eating a load of bloody rubbish again?” she said in as broad a northern English accent as she could muster. She heard him chuckle in recognition and then slurp something that was probably a milkshake.

“Who are you, my mom? Sorry,
mum
,” he countered cheerfully, before his tone became more serious. “Good to hear from you, Sarah. Everything okay up there?”

He already knew the answer to that because he was always the one who phoned them. They were only supposed to initiate contact in the event of a problem.

“Alex got hurt,” she said, and all of her preparations, her notes, and her carefully constructed arguments were lost in the aftermath of that short statement.

“Is she all right?” He sounded closer somehow, as if concern were making him speak more directly into the phone.

“She will be.” Sarah managed to steady her voice. “Something went wrong on a raid at a warehouse. She got slashed with a knife and ended up with a concussion.”

She could hear him breathing, but he didn’t interrupt so she continued.

“There’s a sergeant she works with. He…We don’t know. He screwed up, caused Alex’s injuries—”

“And you don’t know if he acted intentionally,” Castillo finished the thought for her.

“Yeah, it crossed our minds,” she said. “He’s been really weird with her since she started. He could just be a homophobic prick…” Castillo snorted at that. “But something about it doesn’t feel right.”

“Yeah, no point being a homophobic prick if your target doesn’t know that’s why you hate her.”

“Exactly.” She found herself smiling. “We’re so bloody eloquent, darling,” she said affecting the clipped tone of a BBC newsreader.

There was a pause, during which he seemed to be blowing bubbles into his milkshake.

“Okay, that’s less eloquent, more disgusting,” she said.

“Helps me think.” She could practically hear him shrugging. “What details do you have on this guy?”

She gave him everything she had gleaned from Alex and extrapolated on the events at the warehouse. He seemed to be typing the information directly onto his computer; keys clacked rapidly as she spoke.

“Two problems with this,” he said once she had finished. “One: there’s not a lot to go on. Two: once I track this guy down, a thorough background check is going to be tricky. I’ll have to disguise the origin and purpose of any file requests, or I’m going to have the Avery PD wondering why the hell I’m investigating one of their men.”

She rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. They felt gritty and swollen with exhaustion. “Can you do it?”

Castillo’s answer was laden with caution. “Yes. It’ll just take time. We could be talking more than a week before I know anything concrete.”

She tried hard to keep the disappointment from her voice. “Any advice for us until then?”

“Keep your heads down.” His response was automatic. “If this guy is dangerous and he’s suspended from work, he has a whole lot of time on his hands.”

“Yeah.” That was something she had already considered.

“We are watching them,” he said. He didn’t need to be any more specific; she knew he meant the remaining members of the Deakin family and those from the Church of the Aryan Resistance who had so far escaped criminal charges. His reassurances would have been more effective, though, had he not already told them the outcome of the FBI’s surveillance review meeting three months previously. With no sign of a credible threat, the budget for the surveillance had been reduced in spite of his arguments, leaving it little more than a monthly exercise in checking the criminal records of everyone on the watch list and ensuring they were all still living where they should be.

She rested her head against the receiver for a moment and then forced cheerfulness into her voice.

“Listen, thanks, Mike. It helps just to chat, y’know.”

“No problem, honey. I’ll check in with you in a week or so. I’m gonna make a start on the paperwork, okay? Tell Alex I said hi.”

“I will.”

“I’ll be in touch.”

She didn’t want to hang up, but reluctance to put the onus on him made her end the call. The phone gave a tinny beep as she returned it to its charging unit, and she saw Tilly’s ears prick up.

“Shh, girl, everything’s fine.”

Tilly lay back down, taking her at her word. The absolute trust made Sarah smile sadly; she wished she could be so easily convinced.

*

Lying as still as she could, Sarah listened to Alex mutter unintelligibly in her sleep. A touch on her arm and a few whispered words were all it took to soothe her, and she turned over without waking. Sarah watched the drapes sway in a breeze that didn’t reach the bed and wondered whether this was what people meant when they said they were too tired to sleep. She was too hot, too restless, and no matter how hard she tried not to move, something unreachable would itch as soon as she thought about it. The stark red display of the alarm clock told her that over twenty-four hours had passed since she last slept.

Unable to lie motionless any longer, she inched herself out of bed and wandered into the living room. Three sets of glinting eyes tracked her progress, but none of the animals seemed inclined to leave the sofa. She envied their drowsy, untroubled state. With nowhere comfortable left to sit, she poured herself a glass of water, added ice, and took it out onto the back porch.

She had grown to love the darkness that night in the middle of the forest brought. Above her, there was nothing but a waning moon and the tiny pinpricks of millions of stars. She wrapped a thin blanket around her shoulders, curled up on the bench, and let the coldness of the glass in her hand numb her fingers. Her eyes were growing heavy and her head was beginning to nod when something suddenly flew down from the eaves, its rapid wingbeats so close that she felt them stir her hair. She jumped, making water slosh from the glass. Even when the creature flitted past again and she realized it was a bat, her hand still trembled.

“Jesus,” she whispered. She pulled the blanket closer, unsure whether to laugh or cry. “Jesus Christ.”

She looked out across the yard, toward the point where the trees thickened and crowded around the edge of the land she and Alex had cultivated. Leaves and undergrowth rustled as creatures stirred, but she couldn’t see what was moving out there, and the sound of her heartbeat thumping in her ears quickly obliterated any further noise. Fear made her clumsy; she banged her thigh on the arm of the bench as she stood and turned to go back inside. She shut the porch door behind her, turned the light on in the kitchen, and systematically slid every one of the locks into place. It should have been enough to make her feel safe, but doubt still nagged at the back of her mind. She walked through the living room and stood in front of a painting she and Alex had bought at a market stall in Lhasa. It was a gorgeous, stylized riot of color; they had spent so long trying to arrange for it to be couriered to Ash and Tess in England for safekeeping that they almost missed their train departing. Sarah reached up and removed it from its hook, exposing the safe behind it.

For the first time in months, she entered the four-digit code into the keypad. The lock disengaged with a smooth click and the weight of the safe door swung it open slightly. There were two cases inside, both black and solid with grip handles and individual locks. She slid out the upper case, set it on the table, and unlocked it. The Glock 17 nestled snugly in its molded foam interior, along with two full magazines. She eased the gun from the case and spent several minutes familiarizing herself with its weight and features. Technically, both of the guns belonged to Alex, but soon after they moved to Maine, she had arranged tuition for Sarah at a local shooting range, lessons to which Sarah had agreed with considerable reluctance. Despite the history that she and Alex shared, she was still uneasy having the weapons in the house.