Suzanne Ellison - Blazing Star

His imagination was speaking to him now.

“I don’t know if ol’ Brick could stand sleeping with that porcupine. Talk about whips and chains! Can you imagine—”

“My point,” Brick said firmly, uncomfortable with the tone the men’s jokes were taking, “is that the oath I swore when I became a police officer means I have to obey her...at least when I’m on duty.”

Steve shook his head. “You can’t mean you’re just going to roll over and play dead, Brick! You can’t mean you’re just giving up.”

Brick’s lips tightened as he thought about the job that was rightfully his. But Karen’s rank required his public respect, and to his surprise, her honesty this morning commanded his personal respect as well.

Swallowing his own apprehensions, he insisted, “As long as she’s the captain, she’s the captain. No matter how bitter this pill is to swallow, in the line of duty we’ve got to give her the same allegiance we’d give any other cop.”

Orson Clayton said, “Hell, Brick, I’d like to strangle that broad, but that doesn’t mean I’d ever forget she’s a fellow cop when the chips are down.”

“Neither would I,” agreed Steve. “Neither would any of us. But I can’t see her rushing to an officer-in-need-of-assistance call if she’d scheduled the afternoon to dictate some damned memo.”

A day-shift guy said, “It’s just not fair.”

Another growled, “Dammit, we can’t count on her out there! I don’t want to get shot just because she does something stupid.”

Brick wondered, as the men shuffled out of the room grumbling, if Karen’s worst-case scenario might someday come to pass. What if she gave an order in a crisis and they all looked to Brick instead? Professional prudence would dictate that he relay his captain’s commands no matter what his own judgment told him. But his career wouldn’t be worth a damn to him if he ignored his own conscience and one of these fellows ended up dead.

* * *

BRICK LOOKED uncomfortable, but not surprised, when Karen asked him to give her a tour of the town later in the morning. Their odd encounter in the bathroom seemed to have cleared the air. She decided to ignore his whimsical farewell—bunkie, indeed!—and he seemed willing to give the illusion of respect during their encounters at the station house. There was a difference in the other men this morning also. They didn’t look quite so sullen and shocked as they had the day before.

Karen usually drove the first time she got in a car with a man, just to set him thinking of her in an equal light. This time, however, she decided that she needed to listen and observe. It was Brick’s town and Brick’s beat. She sat on the passenger side of the cruiser as he effortlessly took the wheel and filled her in on all the subtle things that a police officer needs to know about a new town. She couldn’t remember everything, but she made mental notes and a few written ones, too...especially on everything that pertained to Judson Ingalls.

As he drove, Brick recounted the highlights of Tyler’s history: tall tales of a Winnebago burial ground, stories of the original German and Swedish settlers, the beginnings of the now-fading tradition of dairy farming. When he told her a funny story about a local man who’d lost his favorite cow and found her in the middle of the town-square fountain, Karen was inspired to regale him with the highlights of her own disastrous first day as a rookie. They shared a hearty laugh together, and a little more ice was broken.

“This is the poorer side of town,” Brick informed her as they cruised to the south after riding for half an hour. “Not that any part of Tyler is really slummy. We’re not rich, we’re not poor. We’re just heartland.”

Karen took the opportunity Brick had unwittingly given her to probe into the subject of her secret investigation. “Does that go for the Ingallses, too?”

He raised an eyebrow. “What do you know about the Ingalls clan?”

“Not a whole lot,” she replied vaguely. “Your aunt and uncle were talking about them last night at dinner. Tisha was bringing me up to speed about a lot of things.”

“Tisha!” He laughed. “You’d be surprised how many tips we get from her. Not that anybody confesses to her, you understand, but she’s a shrewd observer with some experience in these things.”

“What kind of experience?”

Brick shrugged. “The story’s a bit cloudy, but I understand she used to be a gangster’s moll.”

“You’re kidding! And she lives under our roof?”

“Captain, give her a break. It was a long time ago. Besides, Tisha’s a good person at heart. She’s just...distinctive. I’d rather have a woman like that than one who’s colorless.”

Karen wondered if he was talking about her. She did her best to appear colorless on the job—she didn’t dare come across as sexy, especially with men under her command—but that didn’t mean she wanted a hunk like Brick Bauer to think of her as a dishrag. Her potent response to him this morning didn’t change the fact that their professional situation precluded even the most subtle of flirtations.

Before Brick could divine her thoughts, Karen asked, “So when Tisha comes across some evidence, does she report it to the station?”

He rolled his eyes. “Of course not. This is Tyler. She deliberately drops some seemingly innocent remark over dinner that no one can ever trace to her. I put two and two together and go check things out. Sometimes it doesn’t add up to anything, but sometimes I make an arrest based on her tips.”

Karen watched him closely. “Is that the way you carried out investigations under Paul Schmidt?”

Now his eyes narrowed suspiciously. “That’s only one part of the picture, Captain. I use every tool. There’s doing it by the book, and there’s doing it by the seat of your pants. Sometimes you need both approaches.”

Karen took a deep breath before she asked carefully, “Which one is helping you find out the identity of that woman they found out by Timberlake Lodge?”

Brick turned a corner and waved to a toddler digging a hole in the front yard before he nonchalantly observed, “That’s not really an active case, Captain. We figure she was either Margaret Ingalls or one of Margaret’s out-of-town guests. Nobody local was reported missing around that time, and we’d have no way of knowing who all was invited to those wild bashes.”

“The Judson Ingalls I met at the Schmidts didn’t seem like the partying type.” Tall, gray-haired, still robust, he hadn’t seemed like a candidate for Worthington House, but he’d given Karen the impression that he’d just as soon spend his Saturday nights at home.

“He’s not. That’s one reason Margaret left him. But before she did, she often brought her Chicago crowd back to Tyler.”

“You’d think Margaret would have noticed if one of her friends had disappeared,” Karen observed, certain that some names could be unearthed with sufficient legwork. “Judson doesn’t remember her mentioning anybody?”

“No,” Brick replied unhappily. “He doesn’t like to talk about Margaret. His daughter is one of Aunt Anna’s best friends, and she says she’s almost never heard him mention Margaret since she walked out on the two of them.”

The words struck Karen hard. A father and daughter, left alone by a high-flying mother: this she could understand.

Ashamed of the tightness of her voice, she asked, “How old was Alyssa when that happened? Was she grown?”

“Oh, no. She was a little kid. It was a long, long time ago.”

“About the time that woman they found near the lodge probably died?”

Brick did not answer at once. When he did, his tone seemed more guarded than before. “Yes, it was, and yes, we checked to see if anybody had ever seen Margaret again. The answer is no. But we can’t find her dental records, to check them with what’s left of the body.”