Caroline’s brow knit. “Would my father?”
“The superintendent? I would imagine he’d have access to every file in the system.”
“I know his user ID and password. He’s used the same ones for everything for years: hellraiser and grangier. Both with a
q
at the end. No caps.”
“Holy hell,” he said, staring at her, awestruck.
She shrugged. “Hellraiser was the name of his first boat, and grangier is his mother’s maiden name. He puts a
q
on the end of both of them because he thinks nobody will ever figure that out.”
“He may be right.” Reed watched with some fascination as she started typing into the phone: Caroline continued to surprise him. “What are you doing?”
“If I can get Internet access—” She broke off, frowning at the small screen, then said
yes!
in a jubilant way under her breath before continuing—“which I just did, I think I can get into the files. I used to work part time down at police headquarters when I was in college. I spent a lot of time inputting information into the computer system.”
Reed’s respect for her knew no boundaries. “I’m impressed.”
She flicked a look at him. “You should be.”
Since there wasn’t anything he could do except watch, he got up and started to clear the table.
He had everything finished except taking the trash and the remains of the food outside when she said triumphantly, “Look at this. An arrest report for Hollis Bayard was filed by Officer Sean Stoller.” She glanced up at him as he moved behind her and bent to look at the phone over her shoulder. “Do you know him?”
Her eyes were bright with interest. The green tinge in the hazel was pronounced, which he had noticed happening before when her attention was fully engaged. Framed by those long, sooty lashes, they were breathtaking eyes, and he found himself getting lost in them. Beautiful, sexy, smart: the woman was something special. Not that it made any difference to anything at all, he reminded himself sternly. He looked down at the phone, shook his head. “Good work. Does he have a partner?”
“Hang on a minute.” A minute of flurried typing later, she said, “Officer Eddie Rice. Want to see their pictures?”
She held up the phone. Reed took it from her. The officers’ ID photos were on the screen: Stoller had short dark hair. Rice was bald as an egg. Stoller was six feet, 200 pounds; Rice was six one, probably around 205 pounds. Big, burly dudes.
“Holly nailed it,” he said. “Wonder who sent them after him?”
“I can find out the chain of command,” she offered. “Plus do a search for associates.”
“Cher, you are a wonder.”
“Remember that,” she told him, and, taking the phone back from him, starting typing again.
“Want more coffee?” he asked, and when she nodded he took her cup and refilled it. She was so engrossed in what she was doing that she barely looked up when he set it in front of her, and he smiled a little wryly as he glanced down at the top of her glossy dark head bent over the phone. Leaving her to it, he took the trash and the pot full of scraps outside. The trash he dropped on the burn pile, although considering that putting up smoke was probably a bad idea under the circumstances he didn’t light it up. The remains of the bread and crayfish he dumped for the fish. There was a brief feeding frenzy, and then the scraps were gone.
The afternoon had grown downright sultry. The sun was out, shining down through a steamy haze as misty tendrils of condensation from the recent rain floated up toward it. The bugs were bad, and the smell of muddy water was strong, but still he was in no hurry to go back inside. Having Caroline’s help was both a blessing and a curse. Without her, there was no way he could have gotten access to those files. Hamstrung as he was by not being able to physically go anywhere near headquarters or any police station, he might never on his own have discovered the names of the officers who had arrested Holly. At least now he had gotten hold of a string he could pull to unravel the skein of tangled yarn, which, thanks to his grandmother who’d been an avid knitter, was how he always visually pictured his more complicated cases. On the other hand, knowing that Caroline was now actively on board and working to help him figure this thing out felt good. Like he could count on her. Like she had his back. Like they were partners, almost. Which was bad.
The last thing he needed was to get any more involved with Caroline.
That thought was sliding through his mind when he walked back into the shanty to find her standing in front of the armoire. Above the massive piece of furniture’s four bottom drawers were two doors that opened into a compartment that had been designed to hold something like a small TV. Caroline had opened those doors. As soon as he saw that, he stopped dead. His heart started to slam against his ribs. His gut clenched.
She turned to look at him. Her eyes were big and dark. Her face was utterly white.
In her hands she clutched a bloodstained blue plush teddy bear.
It was all he could do to breathe.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
“I
—I WAS LOOKING
for another shirt. I spilled coffee on myself.” Caroline knew she was stammering, but she couldn’t help it. The coffee had splashed down her right side: she had a ridiculous urge to point to the wet streak as proof. Reed stood immobile just inside the door. He looked big and tough and formidable, and he was standing absolutely still. The expression on his face was truly awful. He looked as if he’d just taken a powerful body blow. His eyes—she could hardly stand to look into his eyes. The raw pain in them was indescribable. “I’m so sorry, Reed.”
Of course she shouldn’t have touched the teddy bear. If she had realized sooner what it was, what she was looking at, she would have closed the compartment’s doors and pretended she had never looked inside. But she
had
opened the doors, and there the bear had been, just sitting inside the upper portion of the armoire, a plump, pale blue toy with a white belly and a blue satin ribbon around its neck. Its presence in the armoire, in the shanty, was so unexpected that she’d succumbed to curiosity and picked it up before she’d thought it through. She’d just been noticing the pictures arranged behind it—maybe half a dozen framed photos of a chubby-cheeked little boy with curling black hair and a wide grin—when Reed had walked through the door.
In that horrifying split second as she’d turned her head toward him, she’d realized what the teddy bear and the pictures had to mean: she was looking at Reed’s private shrine to his dead son. It was so personal, and at the same time so heartrending, that she felt like she had been punched in the stomach.
“I’m so sorry,” she said again, her voice faltering. He hadn’t moved, and his very immobility conveyed more than any words could have. That, and those anguished eyes.
She watched him take a breath. Watched his eyes flicker and some kind of protective shield come down, hiding the pain from view.
“It’s okay,” he said, and closed the door. He came toward her, treading lightly, his hard, handsome face as unreadable as if it had been carved from stone.
Caroline hadn’t realized that she was still holding the teddy bear until he took it from her.
“Reed.” She put her hand on his arm. “Can you talk to me about it?”
His eyes met hers. The shield was up, but she’d already seen past it. The teddy bear was like a spear thrusting through the barrier he’d erected around his emotions.
“There’s no big secret. This was Brandon’s.” Brandon was his son, Caroline knew. She also realized that she had never heard him say the child’s name before. His tone was conversational, almost casual. It didn’t fool her for a minute. She could feel how much he was suffering with some kind of new internal radar that seemed to be attuned specifically to him. “He loved this thing. He called it Blueberry. It was tucked into the car seat with him when he died.” He glanced down at the bear in his hands, and Caroline followed his gaze. His long fingers, tan and strong looking against the pale blue, were digging into the soft plush. She saw a few small brown stains marring the fur on one side, and wondered with a sickening feeling if they were indeed what they looked like: spots of blood. Her heart lurched as she made the connection: if the spots were indeed blood, they had in all likelihood come from his son. “By the time they gave it to me, it was too late to put it into the coffin with him, or I would have. But he was already buried.”
Reed’s voice didn’t break. But Caroline’s heart did. A lump rose in her throat. A knot formed in her chest. She could feel the sting of tears rising in her eyes. She didn’t say anything. What was there to say? All she could do was listen to whatever he chose to tell her.
“I gave it to him the Christmas before he died,” he continued. “After that, I almost never saw him without it. I brought it out here with me after the funeral. I stayed out here for a while, did some work on the place. I still come out here when I can. It seemed like a good place to keep it.”
“I’m so sorry,” she told him again helplessly as he put the bear back inside the armoire, setting it down with a tenderness that tore at her heart before closing the doors on it.
“I know.” He sounded perfectly normal, perfectly composed. She knew he was not. “It’s all right. It’s been a few years now. I’m over it. At least, most of the time.”
He walked away, heading for the opposite side of the shanty. She followed him, knowing that he was hurting, knowing that nothing she could do could change anything. When he stopped beside the kitchen table, gripping the back of the chair she had so recently been sitting in, looking down at her coffee cup and the phone on the table without, she was almost sure, seeing either, she took one look at the unyielding set of those hard shoulders and came up beside him and put a hand on his back in wordless sympathy. The softness of the well-washed T-shirt did nothing to conceal the rigidity of the muscles beneath.
“I don’t imagine anyone ever really gets over something like that,” she murmured.
“There are good days and bad days. Christmas is hard.” Reed’s tone was still just as emotionless as if he were discussing the weather. “His birthday’s hard. He was killed three weeks before his fourth birthday. I was getting him his first bicycle, this little red thing with training wheels. He’d been begging me for one every time he saw me. His mother said he was too young, that we should wait until he was five or six, but I bought it anyway. It’s still in my garage.”
“You must have been such a good father to him.” She rested her cheek against the firm muscles of his upper arm, offering what little she could by way of comfort. She could feel him fighting his grief, trying to reel it back into whatever closed-off place it must normally dwell in, and her heart ached for him.
The sound he made then might have been meant as a laugh, but there was no amusement in it at all. He shook his head. “Not really. I married his mother—Susan—because she got pregnant. We fought all the damned time. When she left me—she hated my hours, hated how little I got paid, basically hated me being a cop—I would have counted it as my lucky day except for Brandon. Not having him around all the time—it was tough. I’d been drinking quite a bit before we split up, and after that I started drinking more. I mean, it never interfered with my work, never really interfered with anything, but I could—and did—put it away upon occasion. Anyway, one night I’d had plans to take Brandon out—nothing special, basically McDonald’s and the park—and when I showed up to pick him up they weren’t there. Susan was always doing that to me, ‘forgetting’ when I was supposed to have him, making plans that conflicted with stuff he and I were scheduled to do together.
“That night, for some reason, it just really pissed me off. There was a restaurant down the street, so I walked down there and got something to eat and waited for Susan to bring him home. Of course, I knew she wouldn’t answer her cell phone—by that time, she never would answer when I called—so I sat down there eating my burger and knocking back a few beers and getting more and more pissed until finally, around ten o’clock, I saw Susan’s car scoot past the window. By the time I got back down there she’d parked the car in the driveway—she was staying with her mother, but that night her mother wasn’t home—and was getting out. Well, she and I had the mother of all arguments right out there on the driveway. Brandon was still in the back, in his car seat, hugging Blueberry and watching us and listening to every damned word. Finally she said, ‘I’m not going to talk to you anymore, you goddamned drunk,’ and jumped back in the car. Hell, I was buzzed but I wasn’t drunk, and that pissed me off even more, so I called her a few choice names and she peeled rubber out of there. I can still see Brandon waving good-bye to me as they left.” His head dropped forward. Caroline could feel the tension in his long body, see the rigidity in his wide shoulders, see in the whiteness of his knuckles how hard he was gripping the back of the chair. “I was so mad at Susan, I fucking didn’t even wave back. Twenty minutes later they were dead.”
“Reed.” Caroline slid a hand down his back. Her throat was so tight that it hurt to swallow. But she had to swallow before she could get another word out. “There wasn’t anything you could have done to save them.”
He slanted a look at her. There were lines bracketing his eyes and mouth that she had never seen there before, and his voice was harsh as he said, “It was my damned fault. If I hadn’t waited around to have it out with Susan, she would have taken Brandon in the house when she got there and they would have been fine.”
Her stomach twisted. Her eyes prickled with tears. She couldn’t bear that he was taking such guilt on his shoulders. The pain on its own was bad enough. “It was
not
your fault. You had no way of knowing that would happen. You would have done anything to have made it turn out differently.”
“You’re right, I would have. Anything. But that doesn’t make it any less my fault.” He took a deep breath, grimacing, and she could feel him working to ratchet his emotions back down again. She watched as he let go of the chair, slowly and deliberately, as if he had to consciously order his fingers to release their grip. “You know what I’ve never been able to get out of my head? The last time my kid saw me I was pissed and buzzed.” His eyes were bleak. “I haven’t had a drink since that goddamned night, but that doesn’t change a thing.”