“Fuck it, Maddocks! Are you serious? You going to say that every time? Who in the hell am I going to tell anyway? Send out a tweet? Blog it from my social media desk?”
He clenched his jaw, and his pulse kicked up a notch. A little warning began to whisper inside him that maybe he should hold information back from her, but he told her anyway, about the interview with Zaedeen Camus and the plea bargain. The muscles in her neck grew taut as she listened. When he finished, she reached for her glass and took a heavy, hard swig, then sat for a moment staring at the fire. “So the Hells Angels and the Russians?” She cursed softly. “Who went up to Wilkie with you?”
“A prosecutor and Holgersen.”
She snorted, refusing to meet his eyes. “So, Kjel Holgersen,” she said so softly it was almost inaudible.
“He’s a good cop.”
“Yeah. Right. He can hardly string three coherent words together, but at least he doesn’t go emptying clips into the faces of bad guys. At least he doesn’t try stabbing his partners.”
Maddocks stared at her, the memory swirling through him—her blackout after they’d questioned the Catholic priest during the Baptist investigation, her trying to stab him outside the downtown cathedral.
“Angie—”
She surged abruptly to her feet. “I need sleep. It’s late. And I have a decision to make.”
The unspoken hung between them. She wanted to sleep and think alone. He was not welcome. Not part of this big decision in her life, as much as he’d been a part of the lead-up to it. A cold feeling sank through him. Maddocks slowly got to his feet. He picked up the envelope he’d brought. “Open it.”
She hesitated, then took it from him. She lifted the flap and took out a voucher.
Surprise showed on her face. “These are for a lodge, up north, in the wilderness?”
“For us. To spend some time together, far away from everything. As soon as we can.”
The hard emotion in her eyes softened. She swallowed.
He reached out and cupped her cheek. “You don’t have to do everything alone. Don’t lock me out, Angie. Don’t.”
Her jaw tensed.
He nodded slowly, dropped his hand, and reached for his coat, which was draped over the back of a chair. He gave a sharp whistle. “Jack-O—it’s time to go, boy.”
He shrugged into his coat as Jack-O roused himself and hobbled over. Maddocks hesitated, then turned quickly, bent down, and gripped Angie’s face firmly between two hands. He gave her a hard kiss on the mouth. He felt her stiffen, resist, then yield to his kiss. It sent a punch of relief to his gut—she still responded, still wanted him. Their connection remained, at least on some level. He broke the kiss, held her gaze. “Sometimes you do need to stop fighting.”
He scooped Jack-O up under his arm and made for the door. It was past midnight as he and Jack-O rode down in the elevator. He knew there was no way Angie Pallorino was going to sleep. She would not be able to resist the siren call of those boxes on her table. This was going to be a rough ride. On all counts.
He also remembered all the things he loved about her—her independence, strength. Her beauty inside and out. The fire that burned inside her to help the vulnerable. How she could be so gentle if she wasn’t so afraid. Their sex. All reasons he still wanted this to work.
CHAPTER 14
THURSDAY, JANUARY 4
The door snicked shut behind Maddocks and Jack-O. Angie dragged both her hands over her damp hair. What in the hell was she doing? Trying to sabotage this delicate thing between her and Maddocks before it even had a chance to grow? Before he could leave her? She was not being fair to him—this was her problem. The fact he was still working on their case while she’d saved his life and ended up on probation—it was her fault, not his. She needed to own that. She’d dug her own grave because she could have saved him and Ginny without using excessive force in killing Spencer Addams.
Nevertheless, Maddocks’s compassionate, calm, commanding presence just seemed to rub salt into her own feelings of inadequacy and failure.
You don’t have to do everything alone.
Well, yeah, you do have to do some things alone. You come into this life alone, and you go out alone. At the end of the day, it’s just you.
Angie reached for her glass, swigged back the last of the dregs. She then scraped her hair back, tied it up with a hairband, snapped on a fresh pair of crime scene gloves, and returned her attention to the box holding the evidence packets.
Setting the bag with the teddy bear to one side, she lifted out the next bag. It was marked as containing a purple women’s cardigan. Angie paused as she caught sight of a binder tucked down along the inside of the box. She placed the bagged sweater onto the table and reached for the binder, opened it. The front page itemized everything that was supposed to be inside this box.
She scanned the list.
One teddy bear. One girl’s dress. One pair of girls’ underwear. A purple women’s sweater. Dried and vacuum-packed blood samples, ABO blood-type analysis, preserved biological stains taken from the sweater, mounted slides of hair evidence—some short ash-blonde hairs and some long dark hairs. Photographs of bloodied patent fingerprints and handprints from the scene. Images of dusted latents. Photos of Jane Doe’s contusions and mouth wound. Rape kit. Ballistics report. Angie’s blood grew hotter and hotter as she read. This was a breakthrough.
If there was hair in here, while a trace examiner might have said in the eighties that there was either a match or no match, given new technology, hair samples as small as two millimeters could now be tested for mitochondrial DNA and eventually compared with known individuals. Hair as old as four decades had been successfully tested.
And preserved samples of blood, semen—if the evidence had been adequately processed and stored, she might get DNA profiles. She should not open another thing. Given that there was indeed preserved biological evidence in this box, she needed to get it straight into the hands of a good forensics lab without further contaminating it. First thing tomorrow she’d call Dr. Sunni Padachaya. The MVPD crime lab head was renowned for her early starts to the day and her late finishes. She’d once informed Angie that she had no life apart from her lab work. Angie got Sunni. Because she didn’t have much of a life apart from her work, either. Which was why it sliced so deep to be put on probation, to risk losing her career.