Nora Roberts - Sacred Sins

Slowly, she fastened the earring again. She’d been promised anonymity. That had been part of her deal with the mayor’s office. No media, no hype, no comment. The mayor had given her his personal guarantee that she would be able to work without pressure from the press. No use blaming the mayor, Tess reminded herself as she rose to pace to the window. It had leaked, and she would have to deal with it.

She didn’t care for notoriety. That was her problem. She liked her life simple and private. That, too, was her problem. Common sense had told her the whole business would come out before it was over, but she’d still taken the job. If she’d been advising one of her patients, she would have told him to face the reality and deal with it one step at a time.

Outside, rush hour traffic was starting to heat up. A few horns blasted, but the sound was muffled by the window and distance. Joey Higgins was out there, riding for Chinese takeout with the stepfather he refused to allow himself to trust or love. Bars were ready to serve the let’s-have-a-quick-one-before-dinner crowd. Day care centers were emptying, and throngs of working mothers, single parents, and frazzled daddies were packing up preschoolers and threading their Volvos and BMW’s through packs of other Volvos and BMW’s with one thought in mind: to get home, to be safe and warm behind the doors and windows and walls of the familiar. It was unlikely that any one of them gave any real thought to someone else who was out there. Someone with a small, deadly bomb ticking away inside his head.

For a moment she wished she could join them in that easy nightly routine, thinking only about a warm supper or the dentist bill. But the Priest file was already in her briefcase.

Tess went back and picked up her briefcase. The first step was to go home and make sure all her calls were screened by her answering service.

“Who leaked it?” ben demanded, and blew out a stream of smoke.

“We’re still working on it.” Harris stood behind his desk, studying the officers assigned to the task force. Ed slouched in a chair, passing a bag of sunflower seeds from hand to hand. Bigsby, with his large red face and burly hands, tapped his foot. Lowenstein stood beside Ben with her hands in her pockets. Roderick sat straight in his chair with his hands folded in his lap. Ben looked as though he would bare his teeth and snarl at the first wrong word.

“What we have to do now is work with the situation. The press knows Dr. Court is involved. Instead of blocking them, we use them.”

“We’ve been getting hammered in the press for weeks, Captain,” Lowenstein put in. “Things were just starting to ease off”.“

“I read the papers, Detective.” He said it mildly. Bigsby shifted, Roderick cleared his throat, and Lowenstein shut her mouth tight.

“We’ll set up a press conference for tomorrow morning. The mayor’s office is getting in touch with Dr. Court. Paris, Jackson-as heads of the team, I want you there. You know what information we’ve cleared for the press.”

“We don’t have anything new for them, Captain,” Ed pointed out.

“Make it sound new. Dr. Court should be enough to satisfy them. Set up the meeting with this Monsignor Logan,” he added, shifting his gaze back to Ben. “And keep this one under wraps.”

“More shrinks.” Ben ground his cigarette out. “The first one hasn’t told us anything we didn’t know.”

“She told us he’s on a mission,” Lowenstein said quietly. “That even though things have been quiet for a while, he isn’t likely to be finished with it.”

“She’s told us he’s killing young, blond women,” Ben snapped back. “We’d already figured that out.”

“Give it a break, Ben,” Ed murmured, knowing the temper would be deflected on to him.

“You give it a break.” The hands in Ben’s pockets balled into fists. “That sonofabitch is just waiting to strangle the next woman who’s in the wrong place at the wrong time, and we sit around talking to psychiatrists and priests. I don’t give a damn about his soul or his psyche.”

“Maybe we should.” Roderick looked to the captain first, then to Ben. “Look, I know how you feel, how I guess we all feel. We just want him. But we’ve all read Dr. Court’s profile. We aren’t dealing with somebody who’s just out for blood, for kicks. If we’re going to do our job, I think we’d better understand who he is.”

“You get a good look at the morgue photos, Lou? We know who they are. Who they were.”

“All right, Paris. You want to let off any more steam, you go down to the gym.” Harris waited a moment, drawing the room together with his sense of authority alone. He’d been a good street cop. He was a better desk cop. Knowing it only depressed him occasionally. “Press conference is being set up for eight A.M., mayor’s office. I want a report on the meeting with Monsignor Logan on my desk tomorrow. Bigsby, you keep working on where those damn scarfs came from. Lowenstein, Roderick, go back and work on the family and friends of the victims. Now get out of here, go get something to eat.”

Ed waited until they’d signed out, covered the corridors, and were crossing the parking lot.

“It’s not doing you any good to take out what happened to your brother on Dr. Court.”

“Josh has nothing to do with this.” But the pain was still there. He couldn’t say his brother’s name without it hurting his throat.

“That’s right. And Dr. Court’s just doing a job, like the rest of us.”

“That’s fine. I don’t happen to think that her job has any connection with ours.”

“Criminal psychiatry has become a viable working tool in the-”

“Ed, for Christ’s sake, you’ve got to stop reading those magazines.”

“Stop reading, stop learning. Want to go get drunk?”

“This from a man carrying sunflower seeds.” There was still tension along the back of his neck. He’d lost one brother, but Ed had come along and nearly filled the void. “Not tonight. Anyway, it embarrasses me when you have them pour all that fruit juice in with the vodka.”

“A man’s got to think of his health.”

“He’s also got to think of his reputation.” Ben opened his car door, then stood jingling his keys.

It was a cool night, cool enough so that you could just see your breath. If it rained before morning, as the starless skies indicated, it would come down in sleet. In their tidy, high-ceilinged row houses, Georgetown’s affluent would be setting logs in the fireplace, sipping Irish coffees, and enjoying the flames. The street people were in for a long unpleasant night.

“She bothers me,” Ben said abruptly.

“A woman looks like that, she’s bound to bother a man.”

“Not that simple.” Ben slid into his car and wished he could put his finger on it. “I’ll pick you up tomorrow. Seven-thirty.”

“Ben.” Ed leaned over, holding the door open. “Tell her I said hi.” Ben shut the door the rest of the way then gunned the engine. Partners got to know each other too well.

Tess hung up the phone, and with her elbows on the desk, pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. Joe Higgins, Sr., needed therapy as much as his son, but he was too involved with destroying his life to see it. The phone call had resolved nothing. But then, conversations with alcoholics on a binge rarely did. He’d just wept at the mention of his son and slurred a promise to phone tomorrow.

He wouldn’t, Tess thought. Odds were he wouldn’t even remember the conversation in the morning. Her treatment of Joey hinged on the father, and the father was glued to the bottle-the same bottle that had destroyed his marriage, lost him countless jobs, and left him alone and miserable.