Chapter Nine
John went straight to his kitchen, fished through the cabinet next to the refrigerator, and finally located his mega-size bottle of aspirin. He spilled three into his hand and downed them with a glass of water, trying to get rid of the headache that had been pounding his skull ever since he’d pulled out of Winslow.
He collapsed on the sofa in his living room, trying to remember exactly what the penalty was for harboring a fugitive. Whatever it was, it undoubtedly took a quantum leap if the person doing the harboring was a cop. As he sat there, he tried really hard to convince himself that it wasn’t a damn fool thing he’d just done, but that was one hell of a hard sell.
His descent into bad judgment had started when he hadn’t restrained Renee at Harley’s when he’d had the chance. He’d sunk lower when he called her by her phony name. Then he’d hit rock bottom when he made that right turn onto Wilmont Avenue instead of heading to the station.
He had no idea what he was going to do now. If anyone—anyone—found out he was keeping her there instead of turning her in, his career was toast. But right then, when he needed to take her to jail, all he could think about was what had happened between them out in the woods only a few hours ago. It had been an experience so hot, so intense, so downright unforgettable that senile dementia would have to set in before the memory would ever dim.
Then he thought of his father.
Without a doubt, Joseph DeMarco was watching him from the great beyond and regretting that the boundary between life and death kept him from collaring his wayward son and beating some good old-fashioned common sense into him. First John had flipped out over that little scumbag’s not-guilty verdict, and now he was keeping an armed-robbery suspect handcuffed to his bed. In either case, the extenuating circumstances wouldn’t have swayed his father in the least.
I don’t want to hear your explanations, he’d heard his father say so many times while he was growing up. There are no explanations. There’s only right and wrong.
He’d never bothered with an excessive number of words—he got right to the point, then right to the belt. John remembered the night when he was sixteen years old, when he’d violated his curfew because he’d helped a friend jump-start the dead battery in his car. Late was late, his father said, and John had caught hell for it.
His brothers, Alex and Dave, had found ways to cope with such a narrow definition of right and wrong—Dave by passive resistance and stoic tolerance of whatever punishment he received, and Alex by becoming just like his father so that he rarely got punished in the first place. John had never managed either of those things, spending his teenage years loving and hating his father all at the same time and wondering if the day would ever come when he could live up to his expectations.
So far, the answer was no.
A couple of times John almost decided to march back into his bedroom, grab Renee, and take her in. Then he’d think, What if she’s innocent? and immediately he’d counter with, That’s not your decision to make.
No matter how many times he told himself to do his job and get it over with, he finally came to the conclusion that there was only one way he’d be able to take her to jail with a clear conscience. And that was if he was certain beyond a reasonable doubt that she was guilty.
She’d wanted to talk on the way out of that forest. To tell her story. To plead her case.
Maybe it was time to let her do just that.
Renee looked around John’s typical bachelor’s bedroom. It came complete with clothes thrown in the middle of the floor, an unmade bed, and furniture that looked like early flea market, topped off by a coat of dust on the dresser that told her that housecleaning was at the bottom of his to-do list.
On that dresser were several framed photos. Three were studio shots, one of an older couple, one of an attractive, dark-headed woman of about thirty or thirty-five, and another a group picture that had to have been taken some time back because John was in it and he looked at least ten years younger. Surrounding him was a group of smiling people.
Family pictures.
Renee had the weirdest feeling as she looked at them, suddenly realizing that this man with whom she’d been at war for the past twenty-four hours had an actual life. A family. A history. She’d started to believe he’d just shown up on Earth one day a full-grown cop ready to save Tolosa, Texas, from the bad guys, but here was proof positive that he really was a human being.
She looked at the pictures for a long time, and she found herself wondering if he carried any in his wallet. Then she thought about what her own wallet contained, the one that had undoubtedly been confiscated by the manager of the Flamingo Motor Lodge. He might have found her eight hundred and fifty dollars there, but what he hadn’t found were photographs. There was that silly one of her and Paula they’d taken in a photo booth at the Texas State Fair a couple of years ago, but other than that, nothing. Wallet pictures were to remind you of your family when you couldn’t be with them. But when her entire family consisted of an angry, alcoholic mother, was that someone she really wanted to remember?
She leaned against a bed pillow, her arm uncomfortably restrained by the cuff, and sighed with exhaustion. That fifteen-mile walk had really taken it out of her. Thoughts of escape filtered through her mind, but fatigue prevented her from forming them into a cohesive plan she could put into action. She’d caught John unaware last night. She wouldn’t be getting that kind of chance again.
Sleep. That was what she needed.
She’d almost drifted off when the bedroom door squeaked open. She sat up suddenly to see John’s broad-shouldered body filling the doorway.
“Are you hungry?” he asked.
She felt a grumble in her stomach and realized that the answer to that question was yes. “Yeah. A little.”
He unlocked her from the handcuff. “I heated up some soup. Come eat.”
Yes. Eating would be good. Unfortunately, it was all she could do to lift herself off the bed. She came to her feet, wobbling a little, every muscle screaming in agony.
“But first,” John said, “here are the ground rules. When you’re not locked up, you don’t leave my sight. If you do, I’m taking you in. If someone comes to my door, I’m locking you up in the bedroom. If you make any sound at all, I’m taking you in. If you pull any of the kind of crap you pulled while we were walking through those woods, I’m taking you in. Simply put, if someone finds out you’re here, I could lose my job, not to mention having charges brought against me for harboring a fugitive. I’ll do anything to make sure that doesn’t happen. Anything. Do you understand?”
Renee swallowed hard and nodded.
“And in the event that I do take you in and you mention any of this to anyone, I’ll deny every word of it, then do everything humanly possible to ensure that you’re convicted of that robbery. Do you understand that?”
By now Renee was so shaken by his no-nonsense tone that her heart was thudding like a bass drum. But it was okay. She could do rules. She could do captivity. She could eat worms and stand on her head in the corner if it meant staying out of jail.
“Yes. I understand.”
John gave her a curt nod, then led her to the kitchen. With his permission, she washed her hands at the sink, and then they sat down at the table, where he’d set out bowls of chicken noodle soup. It was absolutely surreal, the two of them sitting there and eating as if it were the most normal thing in the world, when Renee had never experienced anything more abnormal in her life. Nothing broke the silence except for spoons clinking against bowls. When they’d both finished, John took their bowls and deposited them in the sink. He returned to the table and sat down beside her again, one bare foot resting on a rung of the chair on the other side of him. This time he was carrying a pad of paper and a pen.
“Okay,” he said. “The night of the robbery. I want you to tell me your side of the story.”
Renee stared at him with surprise. “You…you actually want to hear what I have to say about it?”
He scowled at her. “I said I did, didn’t I?”
“Well, yeah, but—”
“All the way out of the woods you wanted to talk, and now suddenly it’s a problem?”
“No! No problem. Absolutely no problem at all.” She took a deep breath and tried to look innocent, though she wasn’t really sure what innocent looked like to a cop.
She put her elbows on the table and tried to clear her weary brain to think, wishing she’d had some sleep before he decided it was interrogation time.
“Okay. That night I’d just found out that I’d gotten a promotion at the restaurant where I work. The owner made me the assistant manager. I’d wanted that job forever, and when I got it, I felt like celebrating. So I left a little early. I went home and called my friend Paula. But then I remembered that she’d gone to the Hilton for one of those weekend-for-two things with her no-good boyfriend, Tom. So I was stuck celebrating by myself.”
“What time did the robbery occur?”
“Apparently it was about ten fifteen.”
“Which convenience store?”
“The Handi-Mart down on Griffin Street. It’s only a few blocks away from my apartment.”
John made a few notes. “And where were you when the robbery occurred?”
“Home.”
“Did you see anybody? Make a phone call? Anything?”
“No. I stayed in my apartment and watched some sappy old movie on TV.”
“But then you left your apartment?”
“Yes.”
“What time did the cop pull you over?”
“A little after eleven.”
John wrote down the time. “What were you doing going out at eleven at night?”
Renee sighed. “Getting ice cream.”
“Ice cream?” He looked at her disbelievingly.
“Yes. Ice cream. I know it sounds dumb now, but that’s where I was going. Ben and Jerry were the only ones around I could celebrate with.”
“So you didn’t see anyone from the time you got home after work to the time you left again.”
“That’s right. Well, except for Steve Garroway.”
“Who’s he?”
“My ex-boyfriend. We broke up a couple of months ago.”
“Did he come to your apartment?”
“No. I saw him in the hall.”
“What time?”
“It was almost eleven.”
“Forty-five minutes after the robbery.”
“Yes. He was coming out of Tom’s apartment—”
“Tom?”
“Paula’s boyfriend. The one I told you about. Tom lives down the hall from me.”
“Does Steve live there, too?”
“No. He used to, but he moved out a couple of months ago. He still lives in the same apartment complex, though, but in a different building. Steve and Tom are cousins.”
“So what was he doing at Tom’s apartment?”
“Feeding the cat while Tom and Paula were gone. He does that sometimes.”
“Did you speak to Steve when you saw him?”
“Yes.” Renee stared down at the table. “Or, rather, he spoke to me.”
“What about?”
“Do we really have to go into this?”
“No, Renee. We don’t have to go into anything. I can take you down to the police station and you can answer their questions instead.”
Renee’s stomach turned upside down at the mere mention of the police station. At that moment she’d have told John her entire life story if he had asked.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Steve is a very charming man. Smart, attractive, but he’s got a character flaw or two that I just can’t deal with.”
“Such as?”
“He’s got no ambition. He DJs at some of those clubs down on Colfax Street during the week when they don’t have live bands. He always told me that those jobs were just temporary until he could get a real job, only I figured out pretty soon that the DJ gig was his real job and he had no intention of ever doing anything else. And whatever money he gets hold of he gambles away, so there’s no way he’ll ever amount to anything.”
She hadn’t always felt that way about him. She and Steve and Paula and Tom used to get together on summer evenings at Paula’s apartment to watch the Rangers play, since Paula had an enormous TV and made the best nachos on the planet. Renee wasn’t the biggest sports fan in the world, but those evenings had been a lot of fun. Then she’d realized that Tom was freeloading off Paula and cheating on her at the same time, and that Steve’s main goals in life were to play music and get laid. Things hadn’t been quite the same after that.
“Is that why you broke up?” John asked. “Because of what he did for a living?”
“Eventually it would have come to that.”
“But that wasn’t the reason?”
Renee paused, wondering why any of this was relevant. “No. The real reason we broke up was that after two months he thought I ought to sleep with him. I declined. Once he realized I was serious, he was gone.”
John made a note on his pad, and she wondered what she’d just said that he deemed to be noteworthy. That she didn’t sleep around? Given the accusations he’d thrown at her out in the woods, he’d probably find that hard to believe.
“So what happened between you that night?”
“Steve started talking to me about getting back together again. I couldn’t believe it. He said he’d been a fool, that I was the best thing that had ever happened to him. I knew he was lying, but he sounded so sincere that I almost believed him.”
“Almost?”
“Right up to the time he suggested we go back to my apartment and…talk about it.”
Renee said those last three words with a lilting, suggestive tone, which was exactly the way Steve had said them as he backed her up against the wall and stared down at her, that hungry look in his eyes that said his current girlfriend, Rhonda the drug-addicted bimbo, must have brushed him off that evening, and he was looking for sex wherever he could get it.
“The last thing he wanted to do was talk,” Renee said. “He was looking to get laid. He had a lot of nerve thinking that I’d even consider it.”
“What did you do then?”
“Let’s just say that God gave women knees for a very good reason. He was still bent over double by the time I got on the elevator.”
“So you didn’t exactly part amicably.”
“You could say that. Why are you asking me all this? It has nothing to do with the robbery.”
“No, but it has to do with your alibi. I want to know if Steve would be likely to speak positively on your behalf. But after a knee to the groin, I assume he might not be so inclined.”
“It doesn’t matter. My attorney said Steve can’t be my alibi. The robbery occurred about ten fifteen. I didn’t see Steve until almost eleven.”
“How long did you talk to him?”
“Only a few minutes.”
“You say he lives in a different building. Would he have to cross the parking lot where your car was parked to go into your building?”
Renee thought for a moment. “Yes.”
“Okay. If he was coming and going from your apartment building that night, he might have seen something. Somebody in the parking lot. Somebody near your car. Was he interviewed after the robbery?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Didn’t you tell them he was the closest thing you had to an alibi?”
“Yes, but nobody wanted to listen,” she said bitterly. “They had their suspect. And my attorney said it didn’t matter anyway, since the timing was all wrong.”
“If Steve had seen something, would he be vindictive enough to withhold information?”
Renee shook her head. “I don’t know. I mean, we’ve had our disagreements, but I don’t think he’d do anything to deliberately hurt me.”
“Even though you gave him a knee to the groin.”
“He deserved it.”
“That’s not the issue. Would he withhold information? Yes or no?”
Renee sighed, wishing now that she’d gotten her point across with something a little less extreme than a full-frontal testicular attack. “I really don’t know.”
“Okay,” John said. “How do you think the stuff got in the back of your car?”
“It’s like I told you before. My door locks don’t work. Anyone could have put it there. And think about it. What kind of a moron would I have to be to drive around with a gun and all that money in plain sight? If I were going to be an armed robber, don’t you think I’d be a smarter one than that?”
John didn’t respond. He hadn’t really responded to much of anything, except to quietly grill her, and it was driving her crazy.
“Do you know any women who might want to frame you for a crime? Blonde women in particular?”
“Frame me?”
“In other words, Renee, do you have any enemies?”
Rhonda came to mind—Steve’s new girlfriend. She had bleached-blonde hair and a silicone-enhanced body that screamed cheap slut with every move she made. Rhonda had never been able to understand why Steve had once preferred Renee over her, and consequently she still saw Renee as a threat. The truth was that Rhonda didn’t have a thing to worry about where Steve was concerned. As long as she continued to give him sex whenever he snapped his fingers and didn’t gripe at him about his crappy lifestyle, he was hers forever.
Still, Rhonda’s jealousy and vindictiveness were legendary. When Renee and Steve had been dating, she’d once dropped four red socks into a batch of clothes Renee had in one of the washers in the laundry room, turning all her whites to a putrid shade of pink. But would the little hussy go so far as to commit a crime and implicate her? Renee didn’t think so.
“Steve’s new girlfriend, Rhonda, doesn’t like me. She’s still afraid I’m going to want Steve back and she’ll be out in the cold. But I really can’t see her doing something as awful as armed robbery and then framing me for it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Well, yeah. Isn’t that kind of a drastic thing to do to get a romantic rival out of the way?”
“People kill to get romantic rivals out of the way. Is she blonde?”
“She’s Nice ’n Easy’s color of the week.”
“Would she have any other motive to commit robbery?”
“You mean, beside the fact that she’s a perpetually broke cocaine addict?”
“Casual use, or habitual?”
“She never leaves home without it.”
John made a note or two, then looked back up at Renee. “Let’s broaden this a little,” John said. “Are there any other blonde women in the building who might resemble you enough for somebody to mistake you in a lineup?”
“The only ones I can think of are the hookers on the third floor.”
John raised an eyebrow.
“At least I think they’re hookers. Lots of men come and go from their apartment, and they always leave with smiles on their faces.”
“What’s the apartment number?”
“Three seventeen.”
Then he asked her for the location of her apartment complex, and she gave that to him, too.
“Do you think they might have had something to do with it?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You seem to think it might have been somebody in my apartment complex who committed the robbery.”
“It’s within a quarter mile of the convenience store. Robberies are generally committed by people who live near the place they rob. If it happened as you say and the loot and gun were dropped in your car at that apartment complex, then it’s possible the crime was committed by someone who lives there.” He paused. “Or it could have been somebody who lives a hundred miles away.”
Or it could have been you. He didn’t say that, but the words hung in the air between them just the same.
John stared at his notes a moment more with intense concentration, as if looking at a puzzle he couldn’t quite solve. Finally he blew out a weary breath. “Anything else?”
She heard the real meaning of those words. Give me some reason why I shouldn’t yank you up right now and deliver you to the police station like I should have done an hour ago. Give me some reason to believe you.
And she had nothing.
“I-I don’t know what else to say,” she murmured.
He tap, tap, tapped his pen against the tabletop. For several long, excruciating moments it was the only sound in the room, with the possible exception of her heart, which was booming so hard inside her chest that seismographs in California had to be picking it up.
“I’m going to ask you one more question, Renee,” he said. “And I want the truth.”
She waited, her heartbeat reaching eight point five on the Richter scale. He tapped his pen a time or two more.
“Back at that cabin. Why didn’t you shoot me when you had the chance?”
Because she hated guns. Because merely picking one up had scared her to death. Because she couldn’t have hurt John, no matter what the circumstances.
Because she was innocent.
“John, if you didn’t know the answer to that question,” she said, “I don’t think I’d be here.”
He stared at her long and hard, and all at once she thought she’d made a huge mistake. Not good enough, Renee, she heard him saying, and for a few horrible, distressing moments, she pictured him standing up, dragging her out to his car, and heading straight for the police station.
Instead, he tossed his pen down and stood up. “Okay. That’s enough for tonight. If you want to take a shower, use the bathroom off my bedroom.”
Renee felt a whoosh of relief. “So I’m…I’m staying here tonight?”
“Yes. Tonight.”
He didn’t offer more, and she didn’t ask for more.
“Don’t get any ideas. The bathroom window’s painted shut. And shattering glass makes a lot of noise. I’d be able to hear it even over the shower. And don’t lock the door, or I’m breaking it down.”
“Okay.”
She’d have agreed to anything. After all, she was getting more than she’d ever thought she’d have right now—a place to stay tonight that didn’t involve metal bars and non-private toilets.
“John?” she said carefully. “What’s going to happen to me now?”
“We’ll talk about that tomorrow.”
“But—”
“Tomorrow.”
Renee clamped her mouth shut. You’re here instead of in jail. Don’t push it.
He led her to the bathroom. She looked down at herself, at her dirty jeans and the dead pine needles clinging here and there. “Do you have a washing machine?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“These are the only clothes I have. Would you mind running them through?”
He looked at her with utter disbelief. “This isn’t a luxury hotel.”
“Come on, John! Look at me.”
He squeezed his eyes closed painfully. “Just hand them to me out the door.”
“I’m going to need something to wear when I get out of the shower.”
With a heavy sigh, John fished through his closet and pulled out a worn flannel shirt and gave it to her. She went into the bathroom and closed the door behind her.
John waited outside the bathroom door, wondering at what point in time he’d become her personal valet. Bringing her here had been insane enough. Now he was doing her laundry?
A moment later the bathroom door opened a crack and she thrust her jeans and sweatshirt through the opening.
He grabbed them and started to walk away.
“John, wait!”
He turned back to see a pink satin bra and a pair of matching panties dangling from her hand. He just stared at them.
“John?”
She wiggled the undergarments. He watched the satin dance around for a moment, then took the unmentionables from her hand, trying not to think about the fact that this meant she was standing naked on the other side of that door.
She peered through the crack. “Be sure to separate the light stuff from the dark. Don’t put the jeans in hot water or they’ll shrink so much I won’t be able to get into them. And make sure you wash the undies in cold water. There’s a lot of static electricity now that it’s getting cooler. If you use a little fabric softener—”
“No fabric softener. No separating anything. Your clothes will have to fend for themselves.”
“Really, John. How hard is it to—”
He gave her a nasty warning stare.
“Oh, all right.” She twisted her mouth with disgust, then shut the door.
He took her dirty clothes and tossed them into the washer, intending to let the cycle go tonight and then dump it all in the dryer in the morning. Then he happened to think about his cell phone. He plugged it in to recharge it. Then he returned to the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed, waiting for Renee to get out of the shower.
He looked around the room, at the layer of dust on everything, the piles of junk mail on his dresser, his unmade bed. He thought about how his sister Sandy harped at him constantly about the condition of his house, telling him that any woman he dated who came here would throw up and leave, and then where would he be? Forty or fifty years old and unmarried, she said. That was where he’d be.
Suddenly, with Renee there, he felt self-conscious, but he didn’t know why. Probably because she was the only woman who’d ever seen the inside of his bedroom. Whenever he dated a woman, he always went to her place when sex was on the horizon because it was a whole lot easier for him to make a hasty exit. And it always seemed to come to that.
But Renee wasn’t a woman he was dating. Far from it.
He heard her turn off the shower. A moment later a loud whirring noise emanated from the bathroom, and he realized she must have located that old blow-dryer he’d stuck under the sink. A little while later she came out of the bathroom, and his heart just about stopped.
She was at least five eight, so the tail of his shirt fell only to the middle of her thighs, allowing a good portion of her long, tanned legs to protrude from beneath it. She’d rolled the sleeves up, the bulky fabric at her elbows a sharp contrast to her slender forearms. Her hair was soft and full from blow-drying, a lustrous shade of honey blonde that glinted in the dim light of his bedroom.
Since her bra and panties were in the washer, she had to be wearing absolutely nothing under his shirt right now. The thought of her shifting in the night, of that shirt falling away to expose way more of her than he really ought to be looking at, made a little tremor of heat run right up his spine.
He motioned to the bed. “You can sleep here. But I have to lock you back up.” He pointed. “Sit.”
She came around and sat dutifully on the edge of the bed. He picked up the cuff dangling from the headboard, took her wrist in his hand, and looped the cuff around it. It was such an incongruous sight—that warm, delicate wrist inside the cold metal handcuff. He clicked the cuff shut, reminding himself that she was a prisoner, not a woman he’d invited to spend the night, no matter how attractive she might be. No matter how fresh and pretty she looked. No matter how wonderful she smelled, with fresh scents of soap and shampoo and…
And spearmint toothpaste.
“Damn it, Renee, you did it again, didn’t you?”
“What?”
“Used my toothbrush!”
She looked at him with dumb disbelief. “You really are anal about that, aren’t you?”
“Fine. Consider that one yours. I’ll use my travel toothbrush, which, of course,” he said, grimacing, “you’ve already used, too.”
“I guess this isn’t a good time to tell you I shaved my legs with your razor.”
He glared at her. “Just keep your hands off my stuff!”
He stalked over to his closet, grabbed an old pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt, then went into the bathroom and peeled off his dirty clothes. After a quick shower, he took his dirty clothes out to the utility room, then returned to the bedroom and pulled back the covers on the other side of the bed from where Renee lay.
“Are you sleeping here, too?” she asked.
“It’s the only bed in the house. I have exercise equipment in the other bedroom.”
“So the answer is yes?”
“Do you have a problem with that?”
She shrugged. “No. No problem.”
“It isn’t as if we haven’t occupied the same bed before.”
“I know.”
“We’re just sleeping, Renee,” he said sharply. “Nothing else.”
“I think you made the ‘nothing else’ quite clear already today.”
“There’s not going to be any repeat of what happened out there in the woods. Do you understand?”
“Yes, John,” she said, a note of exasperation in her voice. “I get the picture. This is a no-sex zone. I wouldn’t think of violating it.”
“See that you don’t.”
She stared at him a long time, then raised a single eyebrow with a look that seemed to say, Who are you trying to convince, John? Me or you?
For a moment, John felt positively transparent, as if she could read every thought he had. He crawled beneath the covers with his back to her, then turned out the lamp and settled his head against the pillow, acutely aware that she lay beneath the covers only a foot away—half naked, blonde, and beautiful.
Less than six hours ago, she’d been willing to have hot, steamy, down-in-the-dirt sex if he hadn’t called a halt to it. Was that why she’d asked where he was sleeping? Because she wanted to do something more than sleep?
No, dammit. Get that out of your mind. Where Renee is concerned, it’s hands off. Period.
Several minutes passed. John was hovering on the edge of sleep when he heard Renee’s voice.
“John?”
He sighed drowsily. “What do you want?”
A long silence passed between them. Then she shifted a bit and he heard her voice again, floating tentatively to him across the darkness.
“Why didn’t you take me to jail?”
That was a really good question. Why was she sleeping here instead of on a cot in the county jail? Why had he brought her to his house, for God’s sake? Why was he risking his career for a woman he didn’t even know who just might be guilty after all?
He would have liked to have given her some cop-like answer to shield himself, something like, The evidence is inconclusive, or It’s my professional prerogative to get to the truth in any way I see fit, or even Just consider yourself lucky and shut up.
But he couldn’t.
He turned to face her. And that was a big, big mistake. With only the light from the streetlamp outside filtering through the blinds, he couldn’t make out the color of her eyes, but their luminescent quality was apparent nonetheless. Had a criminal ever been born who had eyes like that?
The late hour, the darkness, the way she’d whispered the question as if she were terrified of the answer—all those things seemed to make it impossible for him to speak anything but the truth.
“You’re here because I have some doubts about your guilt.”
“Then you believe I didn’t do it?”
“I never said that. I said I have doubts. That’s all.”
“Enough doubt that you’re risking your job?”
“Make no mistake, Renee. If it ever comes down to you or my job, you’re going to jail.”
He turned his back to her and pulled the covers up over his shoulder in a gesture of dismissal. He didn’t need to be looking at her anymore. He was having a hard-enough time maintaining his tough-guy demeanor when he wasn’t completely sure she deserved it.
She’d told him nothing conclusive to lead him to believe she might be innocent, but he still couldn’t get over the feeling that there was something more to this than an open-and-shut case. Could she be the victim of a random drop of the weapon and the cash from the robbery? Possibly. But what about the eyewitness who’d picked her out of a lineup? What were the odds of refuting that testimony?
Despite the overwhelming evidence against her, doubt still lingered in his mind. And he knew the only way to get rid of that doubt was to do a little investigating of his own.