Guilty Page 8
That’s what she would have done herself.
She knew what the right thing to do was. And she had no intention of doing it. Not if there was any possible way to avoid it.
What she needed, all she needed, before all the official stuff kicked in was just to buy herself a little time in which to calm down, assess the situation, and think everything through.
Fortunately, she had the perfect excuse: Ben was sick and needed her. Who could blame a mother for rushing to her son? The truth was, though, right now she probably needed him more. Since the moment of his birth, he had been her rock, her anchor, her touchstone in a hard, cruel world. His dependence on her was the engine that had brought her this far, and remembering that she was all he had gave her the strength to gird her loins and face the need to work through one more crisis one more time.
I thought it was all over.
What she was feeling was grief. A profound sense of loss made her chest ache. The happy, hopeful future she had been building for the two of them had just been popped like a soap bubble.
So cry me a river, she told herself grimly.
Hanging on to the banister, being careful because the steps were damp and slick from all the people running in and out and she didn’t want to slip and delay her exit and maybe even end up needing another EMT, she reached the bottom of the enormous curved staircase without attracting any undue attention. But even before she took the first step across the lobby toward the contingent of cops now guarding the entrance she saw, through the tall windows and banks of revolving doors, the pandemonium going on in front of the building, and stopped in her tracks.
Her eyes widened.
It looks like the entire city’s out there.
Ambulances and fire trucks and police cruisers with their red and blue lights exploding like fireworks on the Fourth of July jammed the narrow street for as far as she could see. Dozens of specialty units, including an armored SWAT vehicle and the bomb-squad truck, filled the lawn. On the sidewalks, crowds of onlookers holding a motley collection of umbrellas and shopping bags and newspapers over their heads to protect them from the rain gaped at the action while jostling the police officers charged with keeping them back. Closer, on the wide concrete walkway that led to the Justice Center’s front steps, TV trucks with their antennae and satellite dishes jockeyed for position. A blond reporter—Kate couldn’t be sure from the back, but she thought it might be Patti Wilcox from station WKYW—stood beneath an umbrella at the top of the wide front steps, talking excitedly into a microphone as a cameraman under another umbrella a couple of steps below filmed her. More reporters talked into cameras from various spots on the steps. Thick black cables snaked downward, shiny in the rain.
Oh, no.
Frozen no longer, Kate turned and padded quickly across the bustling lobby to the hallway where the public restrooms were located. A small smoking room furnished with a couple of card tables and chairs and a plethora of ashtrays had been elbowed in next to the ladies’ room. As she had hoped, it was empty. At the far end of it was a little-used side door. On the stoop outside stood a tall, stocky cop planted foursquare with his back to her, almost certainly stationed there to prevent unauthorized persons from entering. The stoop must have been covered by a roof, because the area where he stood was dry, while around him the rain fell like a gently undulating silver curtain.
She stopped, eyeing his uniformed back uncertainly.
He’s there to keep people out, not in. Just walk on past.
Easy to say, but her heart thumped wildly as she approached the heavy glass door. From guilt, she knew. Guilt combined with fear to tighten the hard knot in her chest, ramp up the queasiness in her stomach, increase the dryness in her throat.
You’re a lawyer, remember. A respectable, upstanding citizen.
A shiver went down her spine at the thought. She felt like—no, she was—a fraud. And it seemed to her in that moment as though the truth of what she really was should be so obvious that anyone could see it at a glance, like Hester Prynne’s scarlet A.
Keep going, damn it.
The door was unlocked. When she pulled it open, the cop glanced around in surprise, then registered her apparent harmlessness before stepping aside to make room for her. As she stepped out onto the stoop beside him he nodded a greeting, and she nodded back. Shrieking sirens assaulted her eardrums, their impact muted only slightly by the dull roar of the rain. More cop cars crept into view, strobe lights flashing, moving super-slowly as they jolted over sidewalks and curbs in an effort to get around the ever-increasing crowd.
Momentarily, she was glad for the pandemonium. It gave her a legitimate excuse to look anywhere but at the cop.
She could feel his gaze on her face.
A rush of cool air, redolent of damp earth but innocent of the terrible smells of cordite and blood and death that permeated the Justice Center, swirled around the stoop, catching stray strands of her hair and reminding her that it now hung loose. She was also shoeless and disheveled, she realized nervously. Maybe she even had blood on her somewhere. Would he notice? And what would he do if he did? She breathed in greedily, sucking in the smell of the outdoors, trying to purge the other smells from her system, even as her gaze slid warily toward the cop. He was young, younger even than she was, she guessed, a beat cop with a square, earnest face and dark hair shorn high and tight in an unbecoming military-type haircut that made his ears seem to stick out.
“Terrible thing.” With his voice raised to be heard over the commotion, he made small talk with her, shaking his head.
“Terrible,” Kate agreed, heart thumping, and kept walking.
“You’re going to get wet,” he warned.
“I don’t have far to go.”
Just as easy as that, she moved past him and out into the rain, squinting as the rain came down, her hand sliding along the slick iron handrail as she went down the quartet of narrow metal steps to the sidewalk below. The concrete felt wet and rough beneath her feet. Water rushed by in the gutters. She was almost instantly soaked, and had to push her hair back from her forehead to keep wet strands from straggling onto her face. The downpour was merely chilly rather than cold at first, but as the moisture quickly worked its way through her clothes to her skin, she was suddenly freezing. Ordinarily, she would have gone right, then headed straight down Fulton Street. But then, ordinarily there was not a mob of police and reporters and onlookers blocking the way that she would have to fight her way through. Some of whom would surely recognize her. Some of whom might try to stop her, or ask her questions.
She shivered, from a combination of the cold and the prospect of being stopped and questioned. Turning left away from the front of the building, she stayed on the sidewalk, which put her some six feet in front of the surging throng that was being allowed no closer than the weeping, golden-leaved linden trees lining the curb, and walked steadily in the opposite direction. Two cops in navy rain slickers with PPD emblazoned on their backs strung yellow crime scene tape in front of the crowd; the whole building was being sealed off.
Using her briefcase as a shield, ostensibly from the rain but mostly to keep from being recognized by anybody who might know her, Kate ducked her head and hurried past another stream of newly arriving law enforcement and crime scene types rushing down back-streets toward the Justice Center. The emergency vehicles’ flashing bubble lights were reflected in windows and puddles and shiny car bumpers, providing a distraction, making the scene surreal, like it was being lit by a revolving disco ball. The noise was deafening. The tension in the air was palpable. The good thing was, with so much going on she was just one among hundreds, and no one noticed her.
“Kate!” she thought she heard a woman yell, but she didn’t look around. She didn’t even slow down. There were lots of Kates in the world, anyway. The call probably hadn’t even been meant for her. And if it had been—well, she didn’t want to know.
Her feet splashed through the freezing, shallow stream the rain had turned the sidewa
lks into as the street sloped slightly downhill. Her briefcase kept the brunt of the downpour out of her face. She was glad to gradually leave the insanity behind, glad to turn one corner and then another through the narrow colonial lanes with their boxy, modern buildings before finally emerging some five minutes later onto the busy corner near Benington’s Department Store.
From there it was easy to hail a cab.
“Wait! What do you think you’re doing? You can’t get in! You’re all wet.” The driver, a young man with dreadlocks and a goatee, turned around to look her over with horror as she slid into the backseat, thankful to get in out of the driving rain at last. “You gonna get the seat wet. Next customer not gonna want to sit on a wet seat.”
He had a point: She was oozing water like a squeezed sponge.
“Out, out.” He made shooing motions with his hands toward the closed door. Kate stared at him.
I don’t believe this.
Considering her other problems, this one was almost ludicrous. Kate thought about informing him that it was illegal to refuse a fare, and never mind whether terminal wetness actually qualified as a legitimate reason under the law, but she didn’t have the energy for the argument she was sure would ensue.
“The seat’s vinyl,” she pointed out, glancing down at the worn black surface. It was an old yellow cab that had clearly seen years of service. Its interior smelled like moldy pine, and she saw the reason—a tree-shaped air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror. “A little water won’t hurt it. Anyway, I’m already in, which means the seat’s already wet, which means it’s too late. How about if I tip you five dollars on top of the fare?”
And there goes more of the last of this month’s money.
But under the circumstances, being broke till payday was the least of her problems.
“Okay,” he agreed, his eyes lighting up, then turned around and pulled out into traffic.
If only all my problems could be solved that easily.
Giving the address of the parking garage next to the DA’s office—she’d ridden to the Justice Center with Bryan that morning, leaving her own car at work—Kate slumped in the seat. She was soaked and freezing, and the interior of the cab felt as cold as a refrigerator, so she tried to cope by folding her arms over her chest and squeezing her legs together and curling her wet toes in their shredded nylons in an effort to warm herself up a little.
Her eyes closed. Instantly, images of the carnage in the courtroom began replaying against the screen of her closed lids. Judge Moran, the deputies—they had all gone to work that morning just like she had, and now they were dead. It was unbelievable. Horrible.
It was almost me.
Her shivering intensified. She had to clench her teeth to keep them from chattering. The families of the dead would have been notified by now. Picturing police officers arriving at each victim’s door made her stomach turn over. If she had been among the victims, they would have gone to tell Ben at school. . . .
Stop that, she told herself fiercely as her heart started to pound. It didn’t happen. And it won’t. Whatever it takes.
Which brought her right back to the nightmare she didn’t want to face.
What am I going to do?
Panic clawed at her insides. As the cab progressed in fitful starts through the gridlocked streets, her mind raced, frantically searching for a stratagem, a loophole, any possible means of escape from the new nightmare in which she was trapped. Gritting her teeth, clenching her fists, she finally faced the terrible truth.
Her past had caught up with her.
And now that it had, there was no stuffing the genie back in the bottle. She was just going to have to deal.
Her stomach knotted. She swallowed hard. Her eyes opened but remained blind to the mix of old and new, ornate and plain, mid-rise and high-rise stores and office buildings and condominiums shoehorned into every downtown block. Likewise, she did not register the crawling, honking traffic, the changing traffic lights, the dripping, autumn-bright trees, the sheets of rain.
Instead she saw, through the mist of years, the crowd she’d hung with once upon a very bad time.
Chapter 8
SHE HAD ALWAYS DISLIKED Mario Castellanos. As a teen, he had been a loudmouthed braggart and a bully. A thug. A lowlife. Bad news in a big way.
As far as she could tell, he hadn’t changed a bit. Except now he was bigger. Badder. Way scarier. The street punk had morphed into a hardcore criminal.
Who held her life—and Ben’s life—in the palm of his meaty hand.
There had to be some way out, but if there was, she couldn’t see it. Right now the best she could come up with was that she was going to have to do exactly what he said, because there just wasn’t any other choice.
Which sucked. In fact, recognizing the awful truth and facing it for what it was made her stomach feel like it was being turned inside out.
Claiming that she had shot Orange Jumpsuit was just the first step down a road that, in the worst way, she didn’t want to take. Doing it terrified her. She wouldn’t face any legal liability over the killing—if ever there was a case that screamed self-defense, shooting the man who had taken her hostage at gunpoint would have been it—but the lie shook her. Her life wasn’t about lies anymore. That was all over, all in her past.
Or at least it had been.
“Long time no see,” Mario had said, smiling, after he’d told her who he was immediately after murdering Orange Jumpsuit right in front of her eyes. Orange Jumpsuit was slumped dead at his feet. The shot that had killed him still echoed in the narrow corridor. The smell of cordite and blood and death and fear—hers—had hung heavy in the air.
Her eyes, wide with shock and disbelief, had met Mario’s. She could see the swaggering teenage boy she had known thirteen years before in the steroid-pumped man standing in front of her. He would be thirty-one now. The bulk of him, the bald head and deep tan and facial hair, the automatic depersonalization of the orange jumpsuit, the sheer unexpectedness of the encounter—all had combined to keep her from recognizing him until he had called her by her old nickname: Kitty-cat. Then she had known him at once, with a certainty that was as painful and shocking as an unexpected blow to the gut.
I didn’t get far enough away. I should have kept running, to Florida maybe, or California.
Looking at him once she knew, she realized that his eyes were the same, a warm spaniel brown that belied the casual cruelty that had disgusted her more than once. His thick nose still bore the crescent-shaped scar from where Roger Friedkin’s grandmother’s poodle had bitten him. The dog had disappeared not long afterward, a coincidence that Kate had not questioned until months later. Mario’s mouth was still thin-lipped and tight, so that even when he smiled he looked mean.
He had been unpredictable and dangerous then. She had no doubt at all that he was even more unpredictable and dangerous now.
“I just saved your life,” Mario had added when she didn’t say anything. “You owe me.”
Her pounding heart beat like a drum in her chest. Her mouth went so dry she had to swallow before she could speak. She tried to breathe normally, tried to stay cool. Tried to ignore the fact that a still-warm corpse was bleeding out at her feet, and one of the monsters that had haunted her nightmares for so long had crawled out from under her bed at last to terrify her by the hard, cold light of day.
“Thank you,” she said.
He laughed, a low, genuinely amused sound that sent a chill racing down her spine. She’d known he was after more than her gratitude, just like she’d known that had it been in his best interests to do so, he would have let Orange Jumpsuit kill her without so much as turning a hair. Mario didn’t give a flip about her. The only person she’d ever known Mario to give a flip about was Mario.
“Thank you’s not gonna cut it, Kitty-cat.” His tone was playful, and he reached out to tug on a strand of her hair, which had given up the ghost and fallen from its neat bun to spill over her shoulders sometime back.
“Out of jail. And I want you to get me out.”
He squatted down and began wiping the gun on the hem of Orange Jumpsuit’s pants. The dead man’s face was gray now. His eyes were still open but glazed over. Blood still trickled sluggishly from his mouth, and the blossoming stain on his chest was still spreading. He sat in an expanding scarlet puddle. Kate looked because she couldn’t help it, then deliberately averted her gaze to Mario. He was still wiping down the gun. The fact that he didn’t feel the need to hold her at gunpoint, didn’t even feel the need to keep his bulk between her and the door, told her that he didn’t fear she would make a run for it.
And he was right. Their shared past held her in place like invisible, unbreakable strands of spider silk.
“I can’t do that.” Her tone was abrupt. No need to pretend they were friends. They had never been.
“Don’t give me that.”
Apparently satisfied with his cleaning efforts, he let the murder weapon slide to the floor beside Orange Jumpsuit’s leg without touching it again. Then he picked up Orange Jumpsuit’s dropped gun in its place. He stood, his size menacing in such tight quarters. He held the gun negligently, not pointing it at her, but still . . .
She had always been ninety-nine percent certain that it had been Mario who had pulled the trigger.
Kate had to fight the instinctive urge to step back a pace. That was Kate’s natural reaction to a thug with a gun, anyway. But Kat—and she had once been Kat—had never backed down from anybody in her life. And it was Kat, who she discovered in that instant was still alive and well and functioning inside her body all these years later, who kept her standing tall, standing her ground.