Marilyn Pappano - The Sheriff's Surrender

She took a breath, forced her fingers to uncurl, and lay the fork on her plate. Folding her hands tightly in her lap, she met his gaze unflinchingly. “The bottom line, Reese, is that Leon Miller walked out of the courthouse a free man that day because your department screwed up. Your fellow deputies failed to read him his rights and coerced his confession. From the first time they hit him, it was guaranteed that those charges were going to be dropped. It didn’t matter who his lawyer was or if he even had a lawyer. The judge had no choice but to dismiss the case. Your people set him free. Your people gave him another chance to kill his wife. Not me.”

His face was a few shades paler than normal, which heightened the color staining his cheeks, and his eyes were a few shades darker. He wanted to argue with her—she knew that from too much experience arguing just such cases in the past—but he didn’t seem able to get the words out. They would just be a waste of breath, just as all her words had been wasted.

He believed, as the rest of the Keegan County Sheriff’s Department had, that, to some extent, the end justified the means. When Leon Miller had given his wife the worst beating yet, they’d shown him what it was like to be brutalized by someone bigger, stronger and angrier. They’d gotten a confession and some small satisfaction, and had left the D.A. with no case.

Thankfully, Reese hadn’t been involved in that particular case, though he’d arrested Miller a number of times before. He hadn’t approved of the beating, but he’d understood it, and he hadn’t thought it a reason to let the man go. Well, hell, Neely had understood it, too. What woman, victim or not, hadn’t fantasized at least once about some tough guy coming along and teaching a wife-beating bully a lesson he would never forget? And if it had merely been some tough guy, she probably would have cheered him on and volunteered to represent him if he was arrested.

But they’d been deputies. The so-called good guys.

And their crime had been worse than any Miller had committed until that day.

“It’s an old argument that we may as well drop now,” she said wearily. “I can’t accept your point of view, and you won’t consider mine.”

“And what is your point of view, Neely? That fairness should always win out over justice? That Miller’s civil rights were more important than Judy’s life? That you can’t be held responsible for what your client does once he walks out of the courtroom? Because that’s all just so much bull. We don’t live in the courtroom. If you make it possible for your client to walk out of the courtroom, free to commit other crimes, you share the responsibility for every one of those crimes.”

Giving a shake of her head, she picked up the fork and took a bite of beans, shredded beef and cheese. Though she wasn’t hungry and felt queasy, she forced herself to eat. She needed the strength if she was going to make it through one more day with Reese.

How had they ever hooked up together when they were such different people? Had the intense emotions they’d called love merely been stronger-than-usual lust? Had they wanted love so badly that they’d fooled themselves into believing they’d found it in each other? Surely at some point they’d realized that they could never make the relationship work. They must have known it was only a matter of time before their differences became so great that they couldn’t be overcome.

But she didn’t remember realizing any such thing. She’d loved Reese with all her heart. She’d believed they would be together forever. She’d thought differences of opinion were inconsequential in the face of such love. Maybe they would have been, if the love hadn’t been one-sided. If he had been as committed to her as she’d been to him, they could have withstood anything.

But he hadn’t been. At the first serious challenge they’d faced, he’d folded. Turned away from her. Betrayed her. Broken her heart.

“All right,” she said flatly. “You’ve been damning me for nine years. I’ll accept your blame, and I’ll share it with Leon, with Judy and every one of the deputies involved in his confession, with the sheriff of Keegan County, the district attorney, and with you. There’s plenty of guilt to go around, and I’ll take my portion if you’ll take yours.”

Why shouldn’t she? Despite her protests this morning that she’d done nothing wrong, she’d been living with her own guilt all those years. In the early months she’d tormented herself with it. What if she’d refused to represent Miller? What if she’d persuaded him to plead guilty in spite of the civil rights violations? What if she’d made it clear to the D.A. and the judge that she wouldn’t raise any questions about the way the confession was obtained? That even though the state’s entire case was tainted, she would stand quietly by and let her client go to prison because, after all, there was no question of his guilt?

It wouldn’t have been fair, but it might have been justice. And it wouldn’t have cost her much—just a lifetime of living with the knowledge that she’d betrayed her client and herself. Her ethics, her morals, her self-respect—the very essence of who she was—all would have been destroyed.

But Judy wouldn’t have been killed, and Reese wouldn’t have left her…though eventually she would have left him because her love would have been destroyed, too.

She ate as much of her lunch as she knew she could keep down, then pushed the plate away and lowered her face into her hands, rubbing her temples and the ache that seemed to have settled there permanently. She’d eased a bit of the tension when Reese spoke and the mere sound of his voice brought it racing back.

“Do you need some aspirin?”

She felt the tautness as her faint smile formed. “I need a new life—a normal life, where the people who say ‘I wish you were dead’ are generally talking out of anger or rebellion and aren’t really intending to plant a pipe bomb in your car or redecorate your bedroom with bullet holes. But since a normal life doesn’t seem likely at the moment, yes, aspirin would help.”

He went to the cabinet next to the sink, then came back with an open bottle. He shook two tablets into her palm, then sat again. After she’d washed the pills down with pop, he quietly asked, “Did Forbes do that?”

For a moment she considered not answering, but those were quite possibly the only non-accusing, non-bitter, non-hostile words he’d spoken to her. Besides, she was hiding in his house. If Forbes found her, the next car bombed might be Reese’s, the next house shot up, this one. It was only fair that he know.

Managing another tight smile, she nodded. “The verdict’s not in on the bomb yet—whether it malfunctioned or their timing was simply off—but I wasn’t in the car when it exploded. As for the shots in the night, I was lucky. The first one woke me up and I managed to crawl to safety. But don’t worry. They say the third time’s the charm. Then I’ll be out of your life for good.”

His features darkened into a scowl. “I don’t want—” Clenching his jaw on the denial, he dragged his fingers through his dark hair, then gave a shake of his head, as if he knew he was wasting his breath. “Look, we’re stuck here until Jace makes other arrangements, and God only knows when that will be. If we don’t start acting like reasonable adults, it’s going to be the most miserable time of our lives. We can either stay in our respective corners, or we can negotiate a truce.”

Staying in their corners hadn’t worked very well so far, Neely admitted. She felt as if she’d gone five rounds with a much better opponent and couldn’t possibly survive another five. Compromise was the only reasonable action, though it held risks of its own. If Reese quit attacking her, if he let her forget for one moment that he despised her, she could be foolish enough to fall for him all over again. He was more handsome than ever, surely—with others, at least—as charming as ever, and she’d always been so susceptible. She’d built such fantasies around them.