Sandra Brown - Ricochet

“Cato Laird lied to us.”

She dropped her hands from her head. “I thought we were discussing Savich.”

“Now we’re discussing the Lairds.”

“You learned something yesterday after sending me away from the country club, didn’t you? You fibbed when you told me nothing came out of your locker room chat with the judge. Waste of time, you said.”

He’d called her on his cell phone from the taxi he’d taken from the club to his town house. “Yeah, I fibbed.”

“How come?”

“Because I wanted to take an evening off.”

“Look how that turned out,” she said drolly.

“I knew if I even hinted that I’d learned something potentially important, neither of us would have had a night off, and in my estimation, both of us needed one.”

“I could kill you,” she snarled. “But not before you tell me what you found out.”

“He lied to us about Meyer Napoli.”

He recounted everything Judge Laird had told him about hiring the private investigator to follow Elise. “He’s so crazy in love, he doesn’t care that their marriage has cost him the respect of friends and associates. Possibly even his next reelection. They share a passionate sexual appetite for each other. Even though she had an affair, he loved her too much to confront her with it. It’s over. History. The marriage remains intact. Everyone’s happy.”

“She doesn’t know that he hired Napoli?”

“He says she doesn’t.”

“So the lady was telling the truth when she claimed she’d never heard of him.”

“I guess.”

“And the judge is convinced the affair is over?”

“Oh, it’s over, all right.”

DeeDee looked at him quizzically.

“Mrs. Laird’s lover was Coleman Greer.”

THEY WENT TO BREAKFAST IN A DOWNTOWN COFFEE SHOP NEAR the Barracks. DeeDee ordered an egg white omelet with fat-free cheese, fresh tomatoes, and whole wheat toast. Duncan had two eggs over easy, fluffy grits with melting butter, sausage links, and biscuits with gravy.

“That’s so unfair,” DeeDee remarked as she watched him dunk a piece of sausage into the gravy. “I’m having a voodoo doll made of you. Every time I have to eat low-cal, I’m going to poke a needle into it.”

“It’ll catch up with me one of these days.”

“I doubt it,” she muttered. “It’s genetic. One of God’s meanest jokes on the human race is that you get to see what you’re going to become. Have you seen my mother’s butt? Broad as a barn.”

“But she’s not wrinkled.”

“Because her face is as round as a pie plate. I’m seeing them today.” Visits with her parents always put her in a bad and self-critical mood.

“You’ll eat well there.”

“But not until we’ve gone to the cemetery and paid homage to precious Steven.” Then she placed her palm against her forehead and rubbed it hard. “Listen to me. My brother is dead, I’m alive, and I’m resenting him? What kind of person does that make me? A terrible person, that’s what.”

“Look, if you’d rather have this conversation with yourself alone, I can leave and come back later.”

She shot Duncan a wry smile. “Sorry. But you know how I hate those pilgrimages to Steven’s grave. Mom sobs. Dad turns as silent as the headstone. As we leave, he looks at me and I know what he’s thinking. He’s thinking why, if he had to lose one of his children, it had to be Steven.”

“That’s not what he’s thinking.”

“Oh, yeah? Then why does he make me feel like I’m a colossal disappointment?”

“He just doesn’t know how to show you how proud he is. He loves you.” This is what Duncan always told her, but he knew she didn’t believe it. He wasn’t sure he believed it himself.

DeeDee’s brother had been killed in a car accident a week before his high school graduation. DeeDee, several years younger, had taken it upon herself to fill her brother’s shoes, or try. Two decades after the tragedy, her parents were still mourning him and she was still trying to make up for their loss and win the love they had lavished on her dead sibling, their fair-haired child.

Her father had been a career military man. So straight out of college DeeDee had joined the Marines. She’d had a perfect service record, but it had failed to impress her father. She declined to reenlist when her stint was up and signed on with the SPD instead. Working her way up through the ranks, she’d made detective in record time, asked for VCU, and got it.

She had a natural aptitude for police work, and seemed to thrive on it. But Duncan often wondered if her career choice was yet another attempt to prove to her parents that she could do a difficult job as well as, or better than, any man. As well as, or better than, Steven could have.

Her goal-setting and overachieving were admirable. But the quest for excellence that made her a good cop also made her a discontented individual. Never satisfied with her performance, she was constantly striving to do better. She worked to the exclusion of everything else. She had few friends and took even fewer occasions to socialize. She scorned the very idea of a romantic relationship, saying that it wouldn’t be worth the effort required to make it work, and if by some miracle it did work, it wouldn’t coalesce with her career.

Many times Duncan had pointed out how lopsided her life was and urged her to give it some balance. But obsession was a tough adversary to argue against. Once a person became that grafted to something, it ruled her life, governed her decisions, and ultimately could lead to calamity.

His mind stumbled and fell over that last thought.

Whose obsession had he been thinking about? DeeDee’s or his own? He’d been dangerously close to obsessing over Savich. Now, Elise Laird.

“ Duncan?”

DeeDee jarred him out of the disturbing introspection. “Huh?”

“I said let’s talk about Elise Laird’s affair with Coleman Greer.”

Swell.

“That hunka hunka burning love,” she said, in tune to the Elvis song.

“I didn’t know you were such a fan.”

“Duh.”

“Good ballplayer.”

“Good? All-Star, Duncan. For the three seasons he was with the Braves.”

“I know the statistics. Better than you, I bet,” he added, wondering why he was suddenly feeling so cross with the world, and with DeeDee in particular. Could it be because she thought Coleman Greer was a hunka hunka burning love, and, apparently, so had Elise?

“What are your thoughts on their affair?” DeeDee asked.

Stalling, he signaled the waitress to refill his coffee cup. The question went unanswered until their plates had been cleared away and he was sipping the fresh brew.

“It hasn’t been confirmed that they had an affair.” Even as he said that, he knew DeeDee’s reaction would probably be volatile. It was.

“Oh, please! Give me a break. A woman has secret meetings with Coleman Greer, and you don’t think they were doing the nasty thing? What else would they have been doing?”

He couldn’t think of a plausible alternative to the nasty thing.

She said, “Let me tell you what I think.”

“I never doubted that you would.”

“I think the chances are very good that Mrs. Laird lied when she said she’d never heard of Meyer Napoli. No, let me finish,” she said when she saw that he was about to interrupt. “She copped that innocent act for our sake as well as for her husband’s. I think she somehow discovered that Napoli was following her. She figured it had to have been her husband who hired him to do so. And she confronted Napoli.”

“You’re outdoing yourself, DeeDee. Jumping to conclusions without having anything to back them up. Zilch. Zero.”