Twilight, page 10
“Something that might help the Chicago police with their case,” he said. He turned to Kate, as if to appeal to her more reasonable nature. “We like to cooperate with other departments whenever we can.”
“Assuming that a search of my husband’s office was critical to the investigation,” Dana shot back, “do you have any idea why it took them over a month to get around to it?”
“They didn’t share that with me. They sent an officer and I came along for the ride.”
“What a prince,” Dana said sarcastically. Between this man and Rick Sanchez, her normal good nature had taken a serious beating. She was turning into a first-class bitch. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the time to worry about correcting that shift in her personality. She had a hunch getting a few straight answers would eventually take care of the problem, anyway.
“Tearing things up around here must have made your day,” she accused.
Mrs. Fallon swallowed hard and sank into the chair behind her desk. She looked as if she feared Dana’s arrest was imminent. After working for a man as even-tempered and gentle as Ken, seeing Dana in action had to be a shock.
Dana glanced at Kate and saw that she looked just the teensiest bit shell-shocked herself, although her state seemed to have more to do with the detective than with Dana’s behavior. She took her own survey of O’Flannery. She supposed that someone with eyes that blue and mussed hair the color of coal might have that sort of effect on some women. It was a pity Kate was one of them.
“Did you find anything?” Kate asked in a breathy voice that Dana had never once heard come out of her mouth before.
Detective O’Flannery was either a sucker for a smitten woman or just plain relieved to have someone address him in a friendlier tone than Dana had. He beamed at her.
“Why don’t we all sit down?” he suggested. “Let’s talk about this.”
“Did you find anything?” Dana snapped.
“Sweetie, I think he was just about to tell us,” Kate soothed. She latched on to Dana’s hand with a warning grip so tight Dana’s wedding ring dug into her finger.
“Fine,” Dana said, but she refused to sit.
Her stubbornness seemed to amuse the detective. He and Kate exchanged commiserating glances. Dana concluded she was going to have to fire her new assistant investigator, since her hormones seemed to be getting in the way of her better judgment.
“Did you find anything in my husband’s office?” she repeated in a more patient tone.
“Nothing conclusive,” he equivocated.
“Meaning that you found nothing or that you found something, but you just haven’t figured out yet what it means?”
He seemed taken aback by the question. Maybe he hadn’t figured she had the intelligence to realize there was a difference.
“Very good, Mrs. Miller,” he praised.
There was that condescending tone again. Dana gritted her teeth and forced herself not to fly off the handle again. “Which is it?” Just in case he couldn’t manage to answer a direct question, she tried another angle. “Did you remove anything from the office?”
“Your husband’s calendar,” he conceded grudgingly.
There was no need to ask why. If Ken had had meetings in the hours or even days immediately preceding his murder, it was entirely possible that one of those might point toward a killer. She should have thought of that herself right after his death, but she’d been too distraught then. She’d been thinking like a grieving widow, not like an investigator.
Given his overall attitude, she gathered there would be little point in asking Detective O’Flannery what names were on the calendar. It wasn’t necessary, anyway. Mrs. Fallon kept a duplicate schedule on her desk. A quick glance in the secretary’s direction drew a subtle nod, indicating that she knew precisely what Dana was thinking and that she was still in possession of the second calendar.
Dana returned her gaze to the detective. “I assume my husband’s calendar was in the middle of his desk, where he always kept it,” she said blandly.
He nodded. “I believe it was.”
“Then would you mind telling me why the hell you had to tear the office up to find it?”
He regarded her blandly. “We didn’t go in specifically looking for a calendar.”
“What, then? What else were you hoping to find? What was on the warrant? I assume you had one.”
“We had one,” he said grimly. “Mrs. Miller, really, why don’t you just leave the investigation to the Chicago police? Let them do their jobs.”
“If one more person suggests that, I’m going to scream. If they were doing their jobs, they’d have the killer behind bars by now. Even a halfway decent cop knows that leads start turning cold after a few days. It’s been weeks now, and the Chicago cops have done diddly-squat, as far as I can tell. Now, are you going to tell me what you were really looking for in my husband’s office, or am I going to have to sue you for violation of his civil rights, trespassing and anything else I can come up with?”
He exchanged another look with Kate, but for once Kate didn’t appear overly sympathetic. He sighed heavily.
“Okay, you asked for it. We were looking for drugs, Mrs. Miller. And, yes, indeed, the search warrant mentioned drugs specifically, in case that was going to be your next question.”
If the idea had not been so totally preposterous, Dana might have grabbed the vase of flowers off Mrs. Fallon’s desk and cracked it over his thick skull. As it was, she laughed.
“You think my husband, a respected minister, had drugs in his office? His church office? Are you out of your mind?” she inquired.
“The Chicago police had a tip from a very reliable source that your husband was dealing drugs and that Yo, Amigo was the front for his operation.”
Speechless, Dana sank onto a chair.
“You’re a liar!”
Rick Sanchez’s voice cut through the already charged air like a whip. Dana hadn’t heard his approach. She doubted if any of the others had, either. Grateful for once to see him, grateful to have such a vehement ally, she didn’t flinch when he put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed reassuringly. In fact, she found the murderous glint in his eyes rather satisfying. Let these two males go mano a mano for a while and see which one came out the winner. She’d put her money on Rick.
“Who are you?” Detective O’Flannery asked in a quiet tone clearly meant to defuse the rapidly escalating situation.
“I’m Rick Sanchez, the coordinator of Yo, Amigo. And this source of yours better have a name, or I’ll start by suing you personally for slander.”
Mrs. Fallon, who hadn’t spoken since they’d been seated, rose unsteadily to her feet and walked over to the detective. She barely came to his shoulder, but that didn’t seem to intimidate her one whit.
“Young man, I will not allow you to come in here and defame the name of a decent, kindhearted man. It was bad enough that you tore the place apart, but saying such things about Reverend Miller puts you in cahoots with the devil, as far as I’m concerned, and I won’t stand for it.”
“Amen, Mrs. Fallon,” Kate said.
Dana observed that Detective O’Flannery was looking considerably less sure of himself than he had been when he’d walked in. He appeared to realize that he’d lost his sole ally.
“I know that all of you admired and respected Reverend Miller,” he said gently. He looked at Dana. “And you loved him. But no one knows everything there is to know about another human being. I’ve talked to parents whose child has just committed murder, and they will give testament that no child of theirs would ever do such a thing. It’s a defense mechanism. We don’t want to see evil in those we love.”
Dana shot out of her chair at that. “My husband was not evil, Detective. If you think we’re biased on the subject, then ask any member of his congregation. Ask the kids in Chicago whose lives were turned around because of him. Ask the patients in the hospital who sat beside their beds when they were ill? Ask some of our elderly parishioners whom they called in the middle of the night when some noise frightened them? It wasn’t the police, dammit. It was my husband. If you think that man could ever, ever sell drugs, then you are so delusional you’re a danger to the community.”
“Amen,” Kate said again.
Detective O’Flannery looked more distressed by Kate’s defection than by Dana’s actual tirade.
“I’m just telling you what was in the warrant,” he said defensively.
“Was the source named in the warrant?” Rick asked. “I’ll bet I already know the answer to that. He wasn’t. Because he was too much of a coward to come forward publicly with such ridiculous charges. He would have been laughed out of town. I could give you a list, though. There are half a dozen people in Chicago with the clout to convince a judge that what they’re saying should be taken seriously enough to justify a search warrant in another jurisdiction. We could start with the mayor. Now, there’s a man worthy of a police investigation.”
The detective held up his hands. “Whoa, let’s not start throwing mud around.”
“Excuse me?” Dana protested. “Did I hear you correctly? You come in here slandering my husband, and now you’re worried about a little mud being splattered on some other good citizens?”
“Settle down,” the detective said sharply. “All of you. First of all, I don’t know who the Chicago source was. Second, I didn’t say I bought into the theory. I was just telling you what was in the warrant. That’s one reason I came along. The charge didn’t match anything I’d ever heard about Reverend Miller. I wanted to see that everything was done by the book.”
Dana gestured toward Ken’s office. “You call that doing things by the book?”
He shrugged. “Thorough searches get messy.”
“Not when I do them,” Dana countered.
His gaze narrowed at that. “Meaning?”
She decided it might be best if he didn’t know that she was launching her own investigation and that it had gotten more urgent in the past half hour.
“Nothing,” she said.
He didn’t look as if he believed her, but he apparently decided to let it pass.
“I know you want to believe in your husband, Mrs. Miller. The rest of you, too, but the truth is, it looks as if the Chicago police were onto something.”
“What?” all four people in the room chorused in disbelief.
“You can’t be serious,” Rick said.
Dana felt a huge knot forming in the pit of her stomach. Something was going on here, something dark and dangerous and far more complicated than she’d ever imagined.
“What did you find?” she asked softly.
“Traces of marijuana, a small amount of cocaine and evidence that he’d had crack tucked away, too,” he said unhappily. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, sweet heaven,” Mrs. Fallon murmured, and sank back onto her chair.
“It was planted,” Kate said with absolute certainty.
“You bet your life it was,” Dana agreed. She shot a venomous look straight into Detective Dillon O’Flannery’s eyes. “You said traces of drugs were found. How much?”
“Not a lot,” he admitted. “Just enough to prove it had been there.”
“Not enough to cost anyone big bucks, right? Not enough to put a dent into a real drug operation?”
“No.”
“Just enough to make him look guilty of some crime,” she concluded. “If that doesn’t suggest planting, I don’t know what would. And I intend to prove it, or die trying.”
Despite her trembling knees, she managed to stand and then to walk out the door, head held high. She would not cry in front of Detective O’Flannery. She would not let him see how deeply she was shaken by what he’d said. The thought of so much as a trace of all those drugs in Ken’s office made her sick to her stomach.
She felt Kate slip up beside her.
“Are you okay?” she asked in a hushed voice.
“I will be,” she said stiffly. “As soon as I see them all in hell for what they’re trying to do to my husband.”
10
As soon as they were out of sight of Detective O’Flannery, Dana whirled on Rick and slapped him with all of her might. Frustration, blind rage, hurt all went into that slap. The force of the blow felt exhilarating. Rick’s eyes widened with surprise, but to his credit he held his temper, even as a red mark in the shape of her hand took form on his cheek.
“Mind if I ask what that was for?” he inquired.
“You’re the one responsible for this,” she accused, refusing to massage her stinging hand or to apologize for using it to strike him. “If Ken had never gotten involved with you, he wouldn’t be dead and none of this would be happening.”
She was tempted to smack him again, but Kate apparently sensed her intention and slipped an arm around her waist as they walked into the house and began murmuring soothing reminders about using honey, not vinegar, to catch flies. The comment was practical, so very much Kate, that Dana managed a faint smile. Her temper calmed. A vague hint of embarrassment stole over her. She had never resorted to physical assaults in her life, but she’d slapped Rick twice now. Obviously, the man did not bring out the best in her.
“Okay, okay, no more physical abuse,” she promised.
“Glad to hear it,” Rick said, gingerly touching his jaw. “Are you ready to go into Chicago now?”
Dana had forgotten all about the plans that had obviously brought him to the church in search of her in the first place. She wanted to tell him that she wasn’t going, that she was going to stay right where she was and think about what the detective had told them, but she couldn’t. The answers, including those to this latest twist, were still at Yo, Amigo. They had to be. Someone there, possibly even Rick himself, had set her husband up. With the police adding up false information, suppositions and planted drugs, finding the truth was more critical than ever.
“Just let me freshen up,” she said to buy herself a few minutes to compose herself. She couldn’t spend five minutes alone with Rick in her current frame of mind or, despite her very recent promise, they’d wind up in a ditch somewhere with her trying to pummel him to death.
“If you’d like,” she told him, “you can put the cameras and other equipment in the car. Everything’s by the front door. I’m afraid I never made it to the drugstore to get extra memory cards, though.”
When he saw the gathered photographic supplies, he seemed surprised that she’d done as much as she had. “No problem. We’ll stop on the way.” He glanced at Kate. “Are you coming along?”
Kate looked toward Dana, as if awaiting some sort of signal. Dana said, “No, she can’t. She has things to do here.”
Rick nodded. “Good to see you again, Mrs. Jefferson. Dana, I’ll be in the car, whenever you’re ready.”
As soon as he’d gone outside, Kate whirled on her. “What things do I have to do here? Are you sure you ought to be alone with that man? There are enough sparks flying between you two to light up downtown Chicago. Why can’t you just meet the man halfway?”
“I just can’t, that’s all. I don’t trust him,” Dana said defensively. Nor was she willing to admit that she feared letting down her guard for so much as a second around him. Right now, thank goodness, she wanted to kill him, not sleep with him. She wasn’t so sure that would last forever, though. At the moment, she’d be grateful just to get through the rest of the day without making a fool of herself.
“Okay, so don’t trust him. Just be nice.” At a sharp look from Dana, Kate held up her hands. “Okay, okay, what do you want me to do?”
“Finish going through that list of church members and check off anyone whose name sets off any sort of alarms.”
“Such as?”
“Rumors about a sudden change in lifestyle, nasty tempers, shady business dealings, whatever. Anything you’ve heard that might seem remotely suspicious. If you finish that, try going to the newspaper morgue to see if any of the names show up in articles related to any kind of corruption, drugs, excessive parking tickets, whatever.”
“I take it we can exclude those receiving media accolades.”
Dana thought about that. “Not necessarily. If they’ve gotten any kind of positive publicity, maybe they’d go to some extremes to avoid having their reputation tarnished.”
“That’s pretty twisted logic,” Kate said.
“We’re dealing with a pretty twisted mind. This person not only killed a minister, but he’s trying to frame him in a drug conspiracy and throw the police offtrack.”
“Okay,” Kate agreed, accepting the theory. “I’ve got it. What time do you want to get together?”
Dana thought of the trip to and from Chicago, the class she was scheduled to teach. They were already running late. As much as she wanted to know what Kate learned tonight, she knew she’d be too exhausted to absorb it.
“Unless you stumble on something urgent, come over in the morning,” she suggested eventually.
“I’ll leave a message for you if I find out anything that can’t wait until morning,” Kate promised. “Now run along. It’s not good to keep an impatient man waiting.”
“If it were up to me, he could wait until hell freezes over,” Dana muttered. But she turned and left just the same.
She slid into Rick’s car without speaking. Despite her earlier fury, she felt a renewed surge of guilt when she saw that his cheek still bore traces of her slap. She had never believed that violence solved anything. She had never, ever resorted to it herself. She’d never even gently swatted one of her kids to make a point.
She could blame her behavior on stress, but that would be excusing the inexcusable. She vowed then and there to do as Kate had asked and force herself to give Rick Sanchez a break. She was lucky that he was still speaking to her after the way she’d treated him. He could have reneged on his promise to help her earn the trust of the kids at Yo, Amigo and she would have had no one to blame but herself. There were plenty of allies in the world who didn’t like each other. She supposed the two of them could fit into that category.
