Melissa watched the Porsche pull out of sight, and she set her glass in the sink. “No, I really need to get going. First day on a new job.”
Both Jake’s and Lynda’s expressions sobered, and they glanced at each other. “Listen, you be careful, okay?” Lynda said more seriously. “If you need me . . .” She reached into her purse for a card, and handed it to Melissa. “Here’s my office number. Paige Varner is my secretary, and if I’m not there, she can help you.”
Jake took the card and jotted his own number on it. “Or call me here. And if I’m not here, I’ll be at the hospital in physical therapy.”
Melissa blinked back the tears in her eyes. “You guys are so sweet. You don’t even know me.”
“But we know enough about you to worry,” Lynda said. “You know, if you wanted to skip this job and just stay here for a while, you don’t have to worry about money. Sometimes it’s best just to hide out.”
It sounded tempting, but Melissa couldn’t forget the bills she had piling up. “That’s sweet of you, but I really do need the money,” she said. “Thanks anyway. And don’t worry. I’ll be all right.”
But as she left the house, she wasn’t sure that she really felt that way.
When Larry came in that morning, running late, he found Tony on the telephone, hunched over his desk with a somber look on his face. Larry had spent the past hour driving around the neighborhood of Pendergrast’s apartment. He’d found several gray Toyotas that fit the description of the second car Pendergrast’s neighbor had seen him driving, and he had written down the tag number of each of them. Now he was ready to check them all out.
Larry slid into his chair and turned on his computer just as Tony hung up, then looked down at his desk, obviously deep in thought. After a moment, Tony picked up the big manila envelope on his desk, pushed his chair back, and headed for Larry’s desk. “What’s going on?” Larry asked.
Tony looked down at the envelope he carried. “We need to talk,” he said.
“Okay, shoot.”
“In private,” Tony said.
Something told Larry that this was going to be another one of those conversations he would regret, but he got up and nodded toward the vacant interrogation room.
Tony followed Larry in and plunked the manila envelope down on the table. It was a hot room, kept that way on purpose so that the suspects brought here would be uncomfortable. Now, Larry wished there was a thermostat they could turn down.
“What’s that?” he asked, gesturing toward the manila envelope.
Tony sat down on the mahogany tabletop and looked at his friend. “It’s some stuff I found out about Melissa.”
Larry stiffened. “What kind of stuff?”
When Tony didn’t answer right away, Larry picked up the envelope and pulled the contents out. “Her employment file at the FBI?”
“That’s right,” Tony said. “And her transcript from college. I ordered them a few days ago. Just came this morning. Since then, I’ve been on the phone with people who knew her.”
Larry’s face reddened as he pulled out a chair to sit down. “All right. Sounds like you have some kind of bomb to drop.”
Tony slid off the table and dropped into a chair. “She’s lying, Larry. Right across the board.”
Larry felt his defenses swing into place. He shook his head. “Evidence,” he said. “You’ll need some substantial evidence to prove it to me.”
“Okay.” Tony reached for her college records and consulted the notes he’d taken. “I spoke to two of her professors in criminal justice at Florida State. They both said the same thing: She had an obsession with her sister’s rapist. One of the professors pulled his file on her and described some of the papers she wrote for him. Check these out: One involved how to avoid dropping the ball on search and seizures in rape cases, another one was on forensic evidence to tie rapists to the crime scene. There was one on subsequent crimes of rapists who were set free; one analyzing statistical data on repeat crimes; one on profiles of known rapists, MOs, motivations—”
“Okay, okay,” Larry said, getting up and walking to the two-way mirror. He stood in front of his own reflection, but didn’t see it. “If your sister was raped and the guy walked, you’d be a little obsessed, too.”
“One of her professors said that she showed a lot of promise,” Tony went on behind him. “He’s the one who helped get her the job at the FBI, and he was surprised when she up and quit just a few months later.”
“She decided she didn’t like that kind of work.”
“He thinks differently.”
Larry didn’t like where this was going. He turned back to his partner. “Okay. What does he think?”
“He thinks now, and he thought then, that she had an agenda. That she was going to find this guy somehow and catch him at something. He told me all this, and I never uttered a word to him about her rape. Excuse me—about her alleged rape.” Larry shot him a cutting look. “I just told him that she had been a victim of a crime we were investigating, and I needed some information on her.”
“Still doesn’t mean anything,” Larry said.
“I’m not finished.” Tony turned his notes around so that Larry could read them across the table. “This guy—Mark Sullivan. He was her supervisor at the FBI. She had a real peon job— you know, entry level. He said that if she hadn’t quit when she did, she probably would have gotten fired.”
“What for?”
“She was caught using one of the computer systems when someone was away from their desk. Without clearance, she broke into a program that could track people by their Social Security numbers. Sullivan says he caught her himself, and asked her what she was doing. She tore off the printout, shoved it into her pocket, and told him that she had just borrowed the computer to type something up. She tried to turn it off before he could see what she was doing, but he saw the program and stopped her. Guess who she was doing a search on?”
Larry didn’t want to know. He just waited for Tony to finish.
“Edward J. Pendergrast. Mark remembered because he had an uncle named Pendergrast, so it stuck in his memory. He volunteered it before I even asked. I hadn’t told him anything about the case.”
Larry was beginning to feel sick. “Did she find anything on him?”
“Oh, a thing or two. Like the name he was using now, where he lived, where he worked . . .”
Larry sank back down into a chair and covered his face with his hands. A siren outside blared as a squad car sped out of the garage and past the window.
Tony’s voice softened as he said, “One more thing. She said she saw the job advertised in the paper. I called her boss today, and asked him. He said he couldn’t remember if he’d advertised or not. He just remembers her coming in with a resumé and asking for a job. He gave me her starting date, though, and I called the newspaper. There wasn’t a job advertised for that company anywhere around the time she started working for them.”
“Then how did she know there was an opening?”
“He says her resumé was so diverse that she would have fit a lot of the jobs there. It just happened that someone had just had a baby and had resigned. She fit right in. Oh, and he faxed me her resumé. Here it is.”
Larry took it. It said nothing about a degree in criminal justice, or a job at the FBI. Instead, it listed bookkeeping, secretarial, and receptionist jobs in other towns. Jobs, he suspected, that could not be verified.
“You’ve been busy today,” Larry said, looking at his partner with tired eyes.
“I felt an urgency,” Tony said.
Larry sighed and shoved the papers back across the table. “And what urgency was that?”
Tony rubbed his tired face, putting off saying it. “Last night, when you were with her, worried about her, I could tell that this wasn’t just any case. You’ve got feelings for her.”
Larry couldn’t meet his eyes.
“Now, I know that you’re a Good Samaritan kind of guy, that you always go that extra mi
le. But I’ve never seen you so blinded by a pretty face. I’ve never seen a case where you haven’t wanted to find the truth—but you just don’t want to see the truth in this one. Not only are you buying into a lie, but you’re letting her manipulate you.”
Larry couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Tell me something,” Larry said, finally meeting Tony’s eyes. “Have you ever known me, in all the years we’ve been partners, to ever try to cover up anything?”
“Never,” Tony said.
“And have I ever had a gut feeling about something, and been completely wrong?”
The door opened, and a lieutenant stuck his head in. Both detectives shot him scathing looks, and he shrank back. “Sorry,” he said. “I thought the room was empty.” He ducked out and closed the door.
Larry turned his angry eyes back to Tony.
“So what’s your gut feeling here, Larry?”
Larry sighed. “That—that she’s a good person. That she’s been victimized. Violated.”
Tony leaned forward, his eyes riveting into Larry’s. “The question is: Was she raped?”
Larry hesitated again, perspiring a little. Phones rang on the other side of the wall, and printers buzzed. Another siren wailed by the window.
He wished he could be any place in the world but here. “So what do you want to do?”
Tony breathed a mirthless laugh. “What do I want to do? We’re both go-by-the-book cops, Larry. It’s not a question of what I want to do. If I had my way, I’d let Pendergrast go to jail for the rest of his life. With three rape arrests, the guy’ll probably wind up there anyway, eventually. But we both know that’s not the point here.”
“Then what is the point?”
“The point is that perjury is a felony.”
“No, it’s not,” Larry argued. “It’s a misdemeanor.”
“Not in a grand jury hearing, pal. It’s a felony of the third degree. If Melissa Nelson sat on that witness stand and lied to a grand jury—”
Larry couldn’t listen to the rest. “I’ll find out.”
“When?”
“Today!” he said. “Now.”
“And what if you don’t like what you hear?”
Larry shook his head helplessly, hopelessly. “I already don’t like what I hear.”
“Can you do the right thing, Larry? Because if you’re in too deep with her, if your feelings are going to distort your thinking, I can take over from here. Completely leave you out of it.”
“No,” Larry said, swallowing back his emotion. “I can’t be left out. I have to see this through.” He looked up into Tony’s eyes. “You don’t have to worry about me doing the right thing.”
But as he headed out of the interrogation room and back into the symphony of ringing phones, raised voices, and profanities flying from those being booked for assorted crimes, Larry had to ask himself: The right thing for whom?
And he prayed that God would enable Melissa to give him some answers that would clear all this up to both Larry’s and Tony’s satisfaction. Because if she didn’t, he didn’t think he’d be able to live with himself—regardless of what he chose to do.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The temp agency had assigned Melissa to a busy insurance company. She had been hired to collate and staple what seemed like thousands of booklets—a big step down from the jobs she was qualified to do. But she felt safe in her little cubicle at the back of the big room.
It wasn’t quite eleven when her supervisor buzzed her. “There’s someone here to see you, Melissa.”
Clutching the phone to her ear, Melissa stood up and peered over her cubicle. “For me? Are you sure?”
“Positive,” the woman said. “He’s been waiting awhile because no one knew who you were. Listen, if you need to take lunch now, go ahead.”
She hung up and tried to see over the cubicle again. There were too many people—she couldn’t find him. But a terrifying certainty overwhelmed her as she reached for her purse.
Pendergrast had found her.
Was he waiting to surprise her in front of an office full of people? To cause her to react hysterically and to lose this new job? Was this part of his game?
She rushed out of her cubicle, looking for a back exit. Maybe there was one she didn’t know about near the rest rooms. She started toward them, walking as fast as she could, rounded a corner in the hallway—and someone grabbed her arm.
She gasped and swung around.
Larry let her go as though she had burned him. “Melissa—it’s me.”
Tears sprang into Melissa’s eyes as she fell into his arms. “Larry! I thought you were Pendergrast. I thought he had found me.”
“Shhh. It’s okay. How would he have found you?”
“The same way you did,” she said. “How did you, anyway?”
“I went by your agency,” he said. “But my badge carries a lot of clout. He doesn’t have one.”
She took in a deep breath and wiped her face. “You scared me to death.”
“I can see that,” he said. “I’m sorry. Come on. Let’s go somewhere.”
She held his hand and let him lead her back through the maze of cubicles to the front door.
The sunlight assaulted her, making her feel vulnerable and exposed. “I only have an hour for lunch,” she said. “But I’m not very hungry.” She looked up at Larry, and for the first time noted how sober he looked. “Is everything all right? Did something happen?”
He stared off into the breeze coming from the Gulf just a couple of blocks away. “Let’s walk down to the beach.”
They were both silent as they walked down the sidewalk that led from the insurance building to the park behind it. Ahead, Melissa could see the Gulf, blue-green and majestic. On the sand near the water, two little girls sat with their parents, giggling as they shared a picnic. They looked like Sandy and her, years ago, when there were still things to laugh about.
She looked up at Larry as they reached the edge of the beach and headed across the sand, their feet leaving indentations behind them. Larry took off his windbreaker and slung it over his shoulder, revealing his shoulder holster. He was pensive, squinting into the breeze coming off the water, watching the waves and the seagulls as though they might give him some peace.
“Larry, what’s wrong? You didn’t track me down at work for a walk on the beach.”
Larry stopped then on a little hill of sand, and dropped onto it, setting his forearms over his knees. “I heard some things today. Things about you. They don’t add up with what you’ve told me.”
She didn’t sit down. Instead, she stood stiffly over him, looking down with sad eyes. “What did you hear?”
He shook his head and avoided looking at her. “Melissa, Tony’s a good cop. He digs. He doesn’t leave any stones unturned. And he got some background on you. He talked to your college professors.”
“So?”
“So, one of them said that you were obsessed with Sandy’s rape. That that was the primary focus of all your studies. That all of your papers had something to do with what happened to her.”
“That’s true,” she admitted. “I did try to apply everything I learned there to her case. It was my only point of reference. There were mistakes made in her case, and I didn’t want to make those same kinds of mistakes when I got into law enforcement. I’m not trying to hide it, Larry—she was the main reason I went into criminal justice. The thought of things like that happening all the time was more than I could stand.”
“Well, I can relate to that. I feel the same way. But—”
“But what?” She lowered herself onto the sand next to him.
“But that professor seems to think you had a plan. That you were going to get Pendergrast on something. That you were waiting to get even somehow.”
Her gaze drifted to the waves lopping over the sand. “That was Dr. Jessup. He was worried about me. Thought I needed counseling.”
“Maybe you did.”
“No,” she said. “I didn
’t need counseling.”
“What did you need, then? Closure?”
The frown on her face betrayed her pain as she brought her eyes back to him. “What are you saying, Larry?”
He couldn’t say it. Not yet. He looked away. “Tony also talked to your supervisor at the FBI. He said you were caught using a computer you didn’t have clearance to use.”
“Give me a break.” She rolled her eyes and threw up her hands. “I sat at someone’s desk and used their computer for a minute. I didn’t break national security, for heaven’s sake.”
“He said you were looking up information on Pendergrast.”
The indignant expression faded. “That’s not true.”
“Melissa, it is. Tony didn’t ask him about Pendergrast. He volunteered it. He remembered the name.”
For a moment she stared, incredulous, at him. “Oh, now I get it.” Angry, she got up and started walking away.
Larry got to his feet and followed her.
“Melissa, I need answers! I need to know what you’re doing.”
“I reported a crime, Larry! And now people are digging into my past, trying to make sense of a few years there when nothing really did make any sense. I didn’t do anything wrong!”
“Proffer hadn’t advertised for that job, Melissa! How did you know about it?”
“I—I didn’t! I put my resumé in a lot of places. He’s the one who hired me.”
“What other places, Melissa? Can you name them?”
“No!” she shouted. “I don’t remember!”
“Why not? It’s only been a few weeks.”
She started to cry and began walking faster, but he kept up with her.
“Melissa, why did you leave your college degree and your FBI work off your resumé? Why did you make up all that bookkeeping and receptionist and secretarial experience?”
“I didn’t make them up, Detective ,” she said, spinning around to face him. “Tell your friend Tony he needs to dig a little deeper. I had several jobs in college. I included them all.”
“But you didn’t mention the FBI. Or your degree.”