MONICA
I breezed toward the stairwell, portfolio pressed to my chest, and unlocked the door with the key card in my hip pocket.
Lehman dashed out of the meeting room on my heels, fumbling a folder, his phone, and a set of car keys. He caught the door just before I let it swing shut on him. “Hey, all good?”
“Yeah, fine,” I lied. “Ready for The Abbey?” I headed down the stairs, my shoes pounding every step as if to punish them.
“Yes, ma’am.” I heard his fingers paging through the folder and pictured the sheets and colored sticky notes protruding in every direction. “Knowing how you’re allergic to moss on your rear, I thought to grab everything I needed ahead of the meeting.”
“Finally, some efficiency around here!” I spat back. The vitriol, of course, was not intended for him. But he was a convenient target.
I threw myself against the door at the bottom of the stairs and spilled out into the light of the July day.
Two men and one woman dressed in business casual were waiting, one with a TV camera on his shoulder, the others with digital cameras around their necks and notepads in their hands. Their swag was from three different media outlets. “Detective, a word!” They crowded toward me, starved dogs to an already-picked carcass.
“Jesus Christ,” I muttered.
I felt Lehman behind me and heard him whisper in my ear. “Meet you at the car.”
I took his offer of escape and pushed through the reporters, stiffening my back to warn them against messing with me.
“I’ll take your questions,” Lehman said, drawing their attention. Communicating with the media was his job anyway. But still, I owed him a solid for getting them off my back. While the media storm had died down in the week since the bombing, some hangers-on stuck like leeches, positive we were concealing information the public desperately needed to know. Turns out, setting off a bomb in a popular tourist town is a juicy story.
Over my shoulder, I heard them launch questions in rapid fire.
“Is there any connection between the bombing and the recent spate of murders?”
“What’s the condition of the five individuals injured during the explosion?”
“Is there any evidence yet that Bud Weber murdered the bomber’s sister?”
I huffed a sigh—then nearly walked head-first into a large woman stepping out from a park bench under a tree.
“Detective Steele,” she cried in a ragged voice tarred by cigarettes, “I’ve been calling you all week.”
I know, I almost replied, but bit my tongue.
Delilah Beacon’s greasy hair hung in gray tatters around the shoulders of her drooping tee shirt. Her eyes were red with tears, and she reached for me with a crumpled tissue in her palm.
“Detective Steele, I buried my son yesterday,” she went on. “I buried my Jimmy. I couldn’t even have an open casket. They wouldn’t even let me see my baby.”
She wouldn’t have deserved one anyway. When we asked her who her son spent time with, hoping to find a connection to The Man Upstairs, she couldn’t give us a single name. She literally didn’t know who her son’s friends were. Turned out, he barely had friends at all. And she hadn’t known that, either.
“Please, detective, why didn’t you stop him? He was a good boy, really.” Even as she spoke, her eyes flickered to the media and their cameras, a hungry look in her expression.
I bit back my rage. You never cared a wit about your son, you attention whore. Her son had been a child genius—isolated by his brilliance. But Delilah Beacon was incapable of being a mother long enough to notice. When we’d come to search her house, she’d told us we were welcome to take him. She couldn’t wait for him to be off her hands. How did such a woman deserve the name of mother?
The familiar pain stabbed through my belly again. The long years of waiting. Of wanting. The soul-sucking thief—infertility. The child that was finally, beautifully mine, but whom I turned against on the same day I learned of her, for the sole sin of being her father’s daughter.
I never would have hesitated to support another woman pursuing an abortion after her husband cheated on her. But never in a million years had I seen me making that choice. It was for other women with other problems. Not me. My marriage was beautiful. My life was promising. My family was finally going to be complete… And then I was slapped in the face with reality. Suddenly, I was “other women.”
A woman who was hurt in the deepest way possible by the love of her life.
A woman who grabbed her choice feverishly and wielded it like a club.
But I was the one who took the blows.
Self-loathing pointed a gnarled finger in my face. You’re no better than Delilah Beacon. The pain shot up my core into my face, twisting my mouth and brow.
One of the reporters glanced our way. Delilah didn’t miss it. She grabbed my shirt and fell to her knees, like a saint from a Renaissance painting. Like she had a halo over her head and rivers of light pouring around her.
The feel of her body glued to mine shot terror up my back. What was wrong with me? How had I allowed her into my personal space? Every training video I’d ever watched of cops being grappled and killed flashed through my mind. I put one hand to my gun to head off the chance of her disarming me and tried to break away.
She wouldn’t let go. My shirt tugged on my shoulders. “He didn’t mean to,” she wailed. “He was my son.” I could almost feel her throwing an inviting wink to the reporters.
“Back off!” I said in a commanding tone, still trying to step away. I didn’t dare touch her. The last thing I needed was a picture of me in the papers attacking the bomber’s mother.
A manila envelope appeared out of nowhere, bristling with a rainbow of sticky notes. It slipped between me and Delilah Beacon.
“Hey, hey, hey,” said Lehman. He firmly removed her hands from my shirt. “This is called assaulting an officer of the law. You can’t do that.”
Mrs. Beacon looked up at him with tearful eyes, hands clasped in prayerful innocence. “Are you going to arrest me, officer?”
Why did I think she would be delighted? Lehman clearly saw it, too, and wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction.
“You harass Detective Steele one more time, and you will give me no other option. Now go about your business.” He put a hand on my back and steered me toward the car. “Let’s go.”
I didn’t waste time arguing. But I couldn’t help looking over my shoulder. Mrs. Beacon was making a show of struggling weakly to her feet, wiping tears from her eyes. Meanwhile, the reporters were closing in on her, slow but eager, no one wishing to break propriety, no one wanting to be the last to a juicy source. In the end, they all arrived at the same time.
“Are you James Beacon’s mother?” one of them asked.
She blinked tearfully, looking them up and down as if she hadn’t noticed them until now. “I am,” she said, twisting her tissue in her fingers.
“May we ask you some questions?”
“You have to understand, I’m still grieving.” She dabbed her eyes.
The man with the video camera pushed to the front. “My channel will pay for an exclusive interview.”
The other man shot him a dirty look. The woman reporter simply dug in her pocket. “My paper will pay, too! We’ll give you a thousand dollars!”
And with that, the bidding war began. Delilah Beacon smiled. I knew in my gut she would take the highest bidder—then call the others later, claiming the deal had fallen through. She would collect her fee from them all and make bank off her son’s story. And behind the reporters’ backs, she would boast that Jimmy’s death was the best thing that had ever happened to her.
“My God,” I swore.
Lehman took my arm and forced my attention forward. “Just walk away,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do.”
I clenched my fists and pushed a guttural scream through my teeth. Lehman was right, but that wasn’t going to stop me from venting. Women like her didn’t deserve to be mothers.
But neither did I. Given a second chance at motherhood? I would walk away. I had proved I wasn’t deserving. Children didn’t exist to be used by adults.
Lehman moved to the driver’s side of our SUV, pulling keys out of his pocket. I crossed to the passenger side, scanning my surroundings as I reached for the door handle. I’d let my guard down, allowing myself to be surprised twice in a row, first by the press, then by Mrs. Beacon. I wasn’t going to give Lehman the opportunity to rub my nose in that fact. Neither was I going to let it happen again.
That’s when my gaze landed on a woman standing on the sidewalk across the street. Her eyes were hidden behind large sunglasses, but her whole face was centered on mine. Her skin was brown, her hair long and black. She wore a breezy white top and pale pink shorts. Her wide straw hat matched her straw handbag, which matched her beaded sandals.
I know you, my brain said. I squinted. Where do I know you? I met hundreds of people in my line of business, and it was vital I remember them all. Any one of them could prove an ally or an enemy at the drop of a pin. It disturbed me when I couldn’t remember if I’d returned a person’s stolen purse or called them because their kid was purse-snatching.
Moments passed, and she didn’t look away. Her mouth remained a concrete line. Definitely an enemy, then. That made it all the more imperative I remember her name. And soon.
The engine turned. Lehman rolled down the window beside me. “Monica? You coming?”
I glanced at him. Hot air rolled through the window, hurried along by the AC Lehman had cranked up. “Yeah, coming.”
I looked again, but the woman was walking down the street as if nothing had happened. I climbed into the passenger seat. I had the drive between here and The Abbey to try to remember who she was.