Melanie slept like the dead, and didn’t wake until eight o’clock on Saturday morning when she heard Maya chirping from her crib in the next room.
“Mama mama mama mama mama!”
She rushed into the nursery to find all of Maya’s stuffed animals on the floor and the little girl standing up holding on to the crib rail.
“How long have you been awake, pobrecita?” Melanie asked. “I’m so sorry. Mommy was really tired.”
“Toast!” Maya said.
“I’ll bet you’re hungry. Did you throw these poor babies down? Don’t do that, Maya. It makes them sad.”
Melanie bent over and started picking the animals up and tossing them back into the crib. Down the hall, the telephone shrieked, so she lifted Maya up and deposited her on the floor.
“Hold on, sweetie. I’ll change you in a sec,” she said, sprinting back to her room to catch the phone before the machine picked up. Melanie worried with each step that it was Susan calling to tell her she was fired. Susan had been very reassuring last night as they watched the eleven o’clock news together over the phone from their respective apartments. And in truth, not only had Clyde Williams’s press conference been better than Melanie had feared, but Duncan Gilmartin had restrained himself from playing the tape of her telling him to go to hell. Maybe he hadn’t liked the prospect of getting taken down a peg on national TV.
She swiped the phone from its cradle just in time. “Hello?”
“Melanie. Julian.”
“Julian,” she said, relieved. “What’s going on?”
“Good news. I popped your boy Miles Ortiz with enough product to put him away for a good long stretch.”
“How much?”
“Sixty grams of crystal meth.”
“Whoa. That’s a ten-year mandatory minimum.”
“He knows that. And now the man would like to talk.”
“Fantastic work. We need to hold a proffer session right away. Make sure you have him execute a Waiver of Speedy Arraignment first so we don’t have to take him to court today.” If Miles got arraigned in open court, his arrest would become public knowledge, and he’d no longer be useful to do undercover work for them.
“I’m not down with paperwork, sister,” Julian said. “Not my style. When you get here, you get him to sign whatever you want. I paged O’Reilly, and he’d like to participate in the debriefing, too.”
The mention of Dan’s name reminded her that she’d tried his cell phone three separate times last night to fill him in on what had happened at the museum, but with no success. She’d ended up leaving a curt message on his voice mail about how inconvenient it was not to be able to reach him, and he still hadn’t called back. Sitting awake last night in the chair in her bedroom with the phone in her hand, staring out at the sky, Melanie should have been worrying about the case or about her career. But instead she was in a panic over Dan’s mysterious disappearing act. If he’d been a different man—if he’d been Steve, certainly—Dan’s sudden change in behavior would be enough to convince her he was seeing someone else. That was the reason men made themselves unreachable, wasn’t it—to sneak off with other women? Given Melanie’s personal history, her mind naturally went there. But this was Dan O’Reilly, she told herself. He was incapable of infidelity.
As hard as she tried to believe that, Dan’s phone had kept on ringing. Finally, Melanie had dragged herself into bed and fallen into a dreamless sleep, blank and deep, hiding from her life.
“Where do you want us to meet you?” Julian asked, snapping her back to the present.
Before she could answer, Maya came toddling into the room, and another unpleasant truth dawned on Melanie. It was Saturday. Her babysitter didn’t work today. Steve was in L.A., and she hadn’t heard a peep out of him, and Sophie had more than done her duty by watching Maya while Melanie went to the fund-raiser last night. Melanie had an important suspect to debrief and her boss’s wedding to attend. But in order to do those things, she needed to find somebody to watch her daughter.
She picked Maya up and kissed the top of her dark head.
“I’ll see you at my office in an hour,” she told Julian.
An hour later, Melanie struggled out of a taxi in front of her office with Maya on her hip, her dress for the wedding draped over her arm, and a diaper bag full of toys, snacks, and videos hanging off her shoulder. Melanie’s mother, Carol, would take Maya starting at three o’clock and keep her overnight. Carol helped out when she could, but she had a job and an active social life to work around. For the hours between now and then, Melanie had come up empty-handed. Steve hadn’t returned from his business trip or made any arrangements for Maya’s care despite the fact that this was his weekend. Sophie Cho was working on a rush project all weekend herself. And Melanie’s glamorous sister, Linda, was on assignment in Miami for her job as an entertainment reporter with a Spanish TV network. That left Melanie with two options. Either she could bring Maya into the debriefing with Miles Ortiz, who was a thug, a meth dealer, and possibly a killer. Or she could leave her seventeen-month-old alone in a separate room where she couldn’t see her, with only a Barney video for company, at a moment when some psycho creep might or might not be stalking Melanie.
Signing in at the guard’s desk in the lobby, she saw that Shekeya Jenkins had come in an hour before. Beneath Shekeya’s signature, two other names were printed in childish letters—Khadija and Rashida, Shekeya’s little girls, who were seven and five. Melanie stopped on the Major Crimes floor on her way to the war room, and poked her head in to the chief’s suite to commiserate. Shekeya was at her computer. Her daughters sat on the floor nearby with their coloring books.
“Hey, girl. You brought reinforcements, too, I see,” Shekeya said, smiling at the sight of Maya.
Khadija, the older child, jumped up and ran over to Melanie.
“Can I hold the baby?” she pleaded. Melanie set Maya down. She immediately began giggling and running around in circles, which made Shekeya’s girls crack up.
“They’re getting so big,” Melanie said.
“I haven’t brought ’em into work in a while, so you haven’t seen ’em.”
“You’re working overtime?” Melanie asked.
“Actually, I’m filling out the application for the paralegal position. I waited till today so there wouldn’t be any chance of the boss showing up to look over my shoulder.”
“She’s getting her hair and makeup done, right?” Melanie asked.
“Mmm-hmm. I have the place to myself. By the way, thank you for the letter of recommendation. I know how busy you are, but you still found time to do it.”
“No problem.”
“What are you here for?” Shekeya asked.
“Proffer session.”
“You’re not bringing Little Miss Thang to meet your bad guy, are you?” Shekeya asked disapprovingly.
“I don’t have a choice. I got caught with no babysitting.”
“I hear you. Kwame’s working today, and my sister’s putting on a potluck at her church. That’s why I brought these two in. But leave Miss Thang here. We’ll watch her for you.”
“Seriously?”
“Sure. My girls love babies. Especially pretty ones with hair they can fix. You’ll make their day. Don’t be surprised if you get her back with a new hairstyle, though.”