Moving in with Elizabeth Ascot had been a big mistake.
Exhausted, John pulled up in front of their Cary Street row house as the sun dipped low over the horizon. As he got out of the car, he could hear the smoke alarm from the street. On the porch, something acrid and bitter burnt his nostrils before he even got his key in the lock. He swung the door open, and the screech of the smoke alarm shattered his eardrums.
The horrible stench of burning plastic bit his nose and throat and stung his eyes. He coughed.
A fearful whimper and the clatter of cooking implements drifted from the kitchen along with a smoky haze of blue vapor inching across the ceiling. His girlfriend bounded by on impossibly long legs, wielding a black spatula and using the other hand to plug one ear.
John stepped in and looked down the hallway. Lizzie jumped at the smoke alarm unit attached to the high ceiling and whacked it with her spatula. The noise went on and she jumped at it again. Whack! Whack! Her third try must have knocked the battery loose, because the noise stopped.
"Whew!" Lizzie dropped her arms, whirled around, and saw him. "Oh, shit," she said.
The smell and the smog grew worse by the second. John charged into the kitchen to find his brand-new combination grind-and-brew automatic coffee machine scorching on top of a red-hot burner. Beside it sat a cold pot of water and a half-opened box of whole wheat spaghetti noodles.
John twisted the burner knob to "off" and lifted the coffee machine. Strings of liquid black plastic stretched like taffy behind it and fell back onto the glowing coil, scorching to a shriveled crunchiness that would take time and a putty knife to remove. The bottom of the coffee machine was ruined. John laid it on its side at the edge of the sink so any dangling strings of cooling plastic wouldn't stick forever to the cheap Formica countertop.
The smell was drilling right into his skull and making his sinuses ache. He headed into the living room and started raising Venetian blinds and opening the windows.
Lizzie stood looking at him with the forlorn expression of a little girl. With her clean-scrubbed face and her short wavy hair sticking out around her ears, the look fit her, even though she stood almost six feet tall.
"I'm really sorry, Johnny!" she blurted. "I turned on the wrong burner."
"Couldn't you turn the burner off before you worried about the smoke alarm? This cost over two hundred bucks!" He waved his hands at her, stifling the impulse to wrap them around her throat and squeeze.
"Yeah, I know that," she snapped. "And now you're gonna tell me how many months you saved and shopped around for it. Why did you leave it on top of the stove anyway?"
"Why do you think?" John spread an arm to indicate the dirty pots and pans that took up the one sink and half their meager counter space. Creased sections of the morning paper from the past three days, Lizzie's clear plastic zipper case with six different shades of pantyhose, assorted dirty glasses and mugs, and an eyelash curler took care of the rest of it. After weeks of cleaning the kitchen half the night when she had been home all day, John had gone on strike.
"I'm sorry, Johnny." Her amber-hazel eyes rolled up at him like a puppy's. "I'll owe it to you. I'll buy you a new one, I promise. I've got several jobs next week."
"Like you owe me your half of last month's electric bill? And the phone bill?" She had made her half of the rent, which was considerable on a Cary Street row house, but just barely. Hard to believe she had earned top dollar modeling in New York just eighteen months ago.
"I told you I'd apply for a regular job! You said no." Her eyes flashed and her professionally arched brows rushed together over her nose.
"And what was the other half of that discussion?" John reminded her. "Have you actually taken any work in D.C.? Once. Have you casted for any shows in Pennsylvania at all? No!"
"I told you I don't have to waste all that money. All I have to do is send them my book."
"You told me the agency took care of that already." He strode to the kitchen door and waved an arm at the crumb-laden carpet and the dirty clothes strewn about the furniture. "All you do is lie around all day. Jesus!"
"Excuse me, I shot an editorial last week!" she snapped. "And I had four callbacks before that, for commercials. I am not doing nothing!"
"Other models run rings around you, Lizzie. I run rings around you."
The smoke detector started up again in an ear-splitting shriek.
"Oh, God, I hate that thing!" whined Lizzie, and ran past with the spatula again. Whack! Whack! resounded from the hall like someone cutting down a tree.
John escaped to the bathroom. The entire day—no, make that the entire year—all rolled into a pressure-spiking tension that sent the blood hammering in his eardrums. Pain pounded at his temples and the back of his neck in a dull, steady beat. He closed the door and locked it behind him, downed two aspirin, and sat on the toilet lid, eyes squeezed tight shut, fingers in his ears.
After a moment he opened his eyes again. He kept his fingers in his ears.
He hoped this afternoon wouldn't be the end of his and Mike's friendship. Could he have done anything other than force him into medical leave? He didn't think so. Could he have broached the subject differently? Yeah, maybe. Probably. If he saw Mike tomorrow, he'd say so; if he didn't, he'd call him. Yeah.
He unplugged his ears to a blessed silence. Probably Lizzie had knocked the smoke detector off the ceiling by now. He let out a breath and got up. Might as well get a shower. He started pulling off his clothes.
The phone rang and stopped. Lizzie rattled the doorknob. "Johnny? The phone's for you. It's some police captain in Hampton."
John trudged out to the phone in his socks and underwear. "Detective Robin."
"Detective John Robin?"
"That's me."
"This is Lieutenant Steve Davenport, Hampton PD. We've got a bit of a situation with your mother I wanted to let you know about."
John's mother Evelyn had ended years of bored, timid, snippy housewifery by joining a gym and shedding almost a hundred and fifty pounds close to three years ago. After ending up on one of People magazine's "They lost 100 lbs!" covers, she had started teaching fitness classes at her gym and even landed a weekly column on weight loss and healthy living in John's old hometown newspaper. Finally, he had started to think that maybe he could stop worrying about her.
He sat down on the couch, instantly feeling like he'd swallowed a brick. "What's going on?"
"I don't know if you were aware that her column has recently been pulled from the paper here."
"Uh, no," said John, and looked at Lizzie. Surely Ma would have called; why hadn't Lizzie told him about a call like that?
"Well, it was, and your mother has been sending letters to her former editor. Not threatening letters, but numerous phone calls, getting friends of hers to call and write, things like that. Recently he's noticed her turning up at work and outside his house, and he came in to file a stalking charge. She explained that you're a police officer. He's willing to drop the complaint. He just wants the communications and the stalking to stop. If you think you can intervene, we'd like to not pursue the matter."
The newspaper editor had spent two years dealing with Ma; John had spent almost thirty, and he could well imagine what the man was dealing with.
"Thank you for calling me," said John. "I can't get a personal day tomorrow, but I can drive down there the day after that. Can you hold off a day or so?"
"We can do that."
"I'll talk to her, then I'll come by and talk to you, because I didn't know anything about this."
"That'd be fine. I'll have someone call you with a time to meet. Thanks for your help on this, Detective."
"Thank you, Lieutenant. I really appreciate you calling me."
He hung up. Lizzie stood before him, all twenty-two-year-old innocence in short shorts and a lace-trimmed pink T-shirt, with wide, amber-hazel eyes. "What's wrong, Johnny?"
John stifled the urge to throttle her.
***
He walked into the squad room the next morning bracing for another showdown. The last thing he wanted to do was rat Mike out to Arlene, but if he had to, he would. He couldn't just let yesterday and everything before that slide.
Mike's desk stood empty.
Arlene appeared like magic in the doorway of the squad commander's office at the back of the room. Gray pantsuit, short gray curls, glass-blue eyes peering over gray-rimmed glasses. "John! I need to see you a minute."
John strode in behind her and she closed her door. "Little's on medical leave starting today. I don't know for how long." She sat down in her desk chair behind stacks of papers and folders and an ancient computer monitor and stared at him through her glasses like an owl. "Is there anything you want to tell me about yesterday?"
"No, Ma'am," said John. Not unless I have to.
"I want your report from that call before you do anything else today."
"It should already be there."
"I'll come find you if it isn't."
He wasn't expecting the next words. "Oh, we're off the Pride case as of this morning. It's officially a cold case now."
"What? You can't do that!" John spread his hands in supplication.
"I have to do that." Arlene sat back in her seat. "It's been months, we don't have dick, we're busy, and now we're a man short."
John felt his face heat. "We're not gonna let this drop! This is Bill Pride we're talking about!"
Arlene tightened her lips, carefully glossed in pink. "Don't you think I know that? I remember that every time I sit in this chair."
John stopped; of course, she knew that. A few feet away, just outside the door, hung the photo of Pride in dress uniform from the memorial at the Academy. Arlene had requisitioned that and hung it there after Pride's official painting was completed.
He had no idea where the lie came from that left his lips next. "You might not want to do that just yet, Sarge. I might have something on that George Clay name we were wondering about from Pride's phone records."
She folded her hands on the desk and leaned forward. "Oh, yeah?"
"Yeah. Hampton PD pulled in somebody who said Clay has a girlfriend in the Chesapeake Gardens area."
She sat back again, doubt pursing her lips. "And you know this how?"
"I grew up there. Not in the projects in Newport News where he's from, but the Buckroe Beach area. My mother still lives there. Actually, I've had contact with Hampton PD lately. Unofficially. My mother's had some trouble with a complaint over there. We've been in contact over that. I have to go down there tomorrow."
"And that contact is how you heard about this?"
"Yeah."
"So, if I let you run with this, you could produce an actual lead."
"I hope." Wrong word. "I think." Not good enough. But Arlene was sinking back in her chair. He could see her wanting to hope: Just give me something reasonable enough to tell the boss.
So he snapped his head up and down once and said, "Yeah. Definitely. Just give me a day or two to go down there before you pack it in."
"All right," said Arlene. "You got it. But no more than that."
John heard himself saying, "Fine. That's all I need." And a freaking miracle, he added to himself.