Criminal Deception

What else could make a reasonably intelligent woman chase after a man she was well rid of? Love, he supposed, though he’d rather not think of Liz in love with his brother.

A knock on the plate glass window drew his gaze outside, and he waved. Anamaria Calloway, dressed in red with a bright Caribbean print shawl wrapped around her shoulders, was pushing the stroller that held young Will. The baby was sucking a pacifier and surveying the world around him with a lazy certainty that he was the center of its existence. He got both laziness and certainty, along with blue eyes, from his daddy and everything else, they hoped, from his ma—

He jerked his gaze back to Liz. “You aren’t—You didn’t—”

She looked from him to the baby, then back to him with nothing less than horror on her face. “Have a baby? With Josh? Dear God, no.”

Joe didn’t want to examine just how relieved he was by the answer. Knowing Josh had a kid would be tough enough. Knowing that he had a kid with Liz…Of all the things his brother had done in the last thirty years, that one would be the deal breaker. No more contact. Ever.

“I would never be so careless,” Liz said, her tone gone from shock to huffiness.

“People forget. They have accidents.”

“Not me. Never.”

“You never get so carried away that you don’t remember, or you don’t think it’ll be all right just this one time?”

“Never.”

Joe wasn’t smiling because he liked the emphatic nature of her answer. It wasn’t really a smile at all. He was just letting some of the tension ease from his muscles. “Do you ever wonder if maybe you’ve been sleeping with the wrong guys?”

Again, she blinked, but this time there was no tinkling laugh to follow it. “I think we got off track.”

“From the day we met,” he muttered. He couldn’t tell whether she’d heard. Her cheeks were flushed and she was looking just a bit disconcerted. Good. Making her lose her emotional balance might help him keep his.

“We were talking about the odds of my finding Josh here.”

“We hadn’t gotten to odds yet, but I’d guess they’re about a million to one against you. You familiar with the phrase ‘gone to ground’? Because Josh is. He’s had regular hideouts since he was three, and ‘with me’ has never been one of them, so you might as well move on.”

“You haven’t seen him.”

“Not since the day I got shot.”

“You haven’t talked to him.”

He shook his head.

“No e-mail. No contact with him at all.”

He held her gaze but didn’t speak. If she took his silence for a negative, if he’d deliberately misled her, well, that Thou shalt not lie stuff was between him and God. Certainly not him and Josh’s ex-maybe-wannabe-again-girlfriend. Besides, an unsolicited envelope in the mail with no return address didn’t count.

“See those two guys over there?” He gestured to the table closest to the door. “That’s Detective Tommy Maricci and Lieutenant A. J. Decker of the Copper Lake Police Department. If Josh showed up here, they’d be the first people I’d call. And he knows that. I’m fresh out of excuses, sympathy and family ties. He’d have to be beyond desperate to come to me because I’m not risking my ass for him ever again. So…” He shoved his chair back with a scrape. “You’re wasting your time hanging out here.”

“Well, it’s my time to be wasted, isn’t it?”

He couldn’t argue that point with her, so instead he picked up her cup and spoon and headed for the counter.

It was her time, Liz reflected as she stood up. And though she was there for the job, it left her an awful lot of nothing to do. Watching Joe chat with the two police officers he’d pointed out, she strolled across the café, then outside. The morning air was cool and damp and tinged with the promise of later heat. She could walk around the square and familiarize herself with the area. She could meet Joe’s business neighbors and see what they had to say about him. Most people, she’d found, told strangers way too much about others. Usually there was no malicious intent; they just forgot that they couldn’t trust strangers anymore.

How long had it been since she’d been so naive? She’d had a wonderful upbringing; there was no doubt about that. She’d loved her parents and her brothers, and they’d loved her. But discussions at the family dinner table had revolved around law and order, crime and punishment. She’d thought all little girls’ daddies wore suits, guns and badges to work; that all little girls’ mommies put bad people in prison; that all kids, even the good ones, borrowed Dad’s handcuffs for show-and-tell at least once and chained the prissiest girl in class to the teacher’s desk.

Your family’s weird, her best friend had told her in third grade, and Liz had put her in a wrist lock, forced her to her knees and made her apologize.

It had taken some time for her to realize they were different. With a grandfather and a father who were deputy U.S. Marshals, two uncles with the FBI, an aunt in the DEA and a mother who was a criminal court judge, they hadn’t been the typical Midwest family. Her grandfather was retired, and her father was close to it, but now her brothers were working with NCIS, ATF and the U.S. Attorney General’s office.

She walked to the end of the block, passing neatly kept storefronts, a flower shop that smelled heavenly through the open door and Ellie’s Deli, with enticing scents drifting through her open door, too. The cold lo mein she’d had for breakfast seemed a long time ago, so Liz climbed the old-fashioned porch and stepped inside.

The place was charming: old to its very bones, with fresh paint and reproduction fabrics and a few good antiques. Even though a fair number of tables were occupied, the bulk of the deli’s morning rush centered on the takeout counter, a wavy-glassed cabinet that looked as if it might have displayed pies and pastries once upon a time.

“Table or takeout?” a waitress asked on her way to the kitchen with an armload of plates.

“Table, please.” Right in the middle of the gossips, if you don’t mind.

Instead of leading her toward the dozen old men sharing a country-fried breakfast and their opinions on everything, the waitress turned toward the back of the building. The broad hall opened into a smaller, quieter dining room. Only two tables were occupied there: one by the pretty black woman with the baby stroller and a man Liz assumed, by their matching gold bands, was her husband and the one person in town, after Joe, who most interested Liz.

Natalia Porter’s attention was riveted outside, where the two puppies, restrained by leashes attached to the fence, were digging furiously in the dirt. The tan one created a hole deep enough to plunge her entire head into it, withdrawing only to snap at the fuzzy one when he tried to join her. Chastened, he went back to his own digging, shifting position just enough that the dirt his paws sent flying landed on the sleek puppy’s back.

Natalia laughed out loud before abruptly realizing that Liz was standing at the next table. For an instant, sullenness crossed her face, then her expression went blank.

“They’re adorable,” Liz remarked. She pulled a chair from the table so both Natalia and the puppies were in easy view. “Do they have names yet?”

“No. Joe has to name them.”

“So they’re well and truly his.”

Surprise darkened the girl’s eyes—today, sapphire blue at the outer rims, radiating in to pale gray—then she nodded. “Naming things helps form attachments.”

Natalia certainly had an attraction to Joe, even though he’d obviously not been part of her naming. Liz would like to know what that attachment was, how deep it ran and whether it was one-sided.

For business reasons, of course. Everything she knew about a subject added to her investigation. She wasn’t allowed to have a personal interest. That had never been a problem for her before. But now…

The waitress came for her order. After glancing at Natalia’s plate—ham, biscuits and gravy, hash browns with cheese, and hotcakes—and her stick-slender body, then thinking about her own curves that could so easily become dangerous, Liz asked for a fruit plate and unsweetened tea. Natalia remained silent, looking away from the dogs only to take a bite of food.

After Liz’s fruit arrived, she asked the girl, “Been a long time since you’ve had pets of your own?”

Natalia glanced at her. “I never have had,” she said flatly, then looked off as if she’d given away too much about herself.

Instead of questioning her, Liz speared a piece of pineapple on her fork. “I grew up with three brothers. We always had dogs, cats, turtles, fish, spiders and snakes. The snakes were for my benefit. My brothers liked to sneak them into my bed when I was asleep. One morning I woke up with one of the snakes looking me in the eye, smiling this damn smile while it flicked its tongue at me. Once my terror receded, I put it in a box, waited until that night when Mom’s boss came over for dinner and set it loose on the table. He was freaked out, his wife and daughters were in hysterics, and the next day all the snakes were out of the house for good.”

Natalia shuddered. “I hate snakes.”

“Me, too. But I couldn’t let my brothers know how much they scared me, or they would have won. You know?”

Slowly Natalia nodded and something in her expression said she really did know. She’d faced something that scared her, had hidden her fear and stood up to it, because she’d needed to win.

Liz couldn’t help but wonder what; it was her nature to want answers. An abusive father? A violent boyfriend? A threatening boss?

It would take more time than either of them had for Liz to gain her trust and find out. Instinct told her that Natalia Porter was a woman, despite her waifish look, who had little truth to tell and less trust to give.

“Have you always lived here?” she asked before sliding a piece of sweet melon into her mouth.

Natalia’s expression was torn, as if she’d rather pretend Liz wasn’t there but had already figured out that wasn’t the way to get rid of a nosy person. “No. Just a few months.”

“Where did you come from?”

Her only answer was a shrug.

“What made you choose Copper Lake?”

“Luck of the draw. The road went left, right and straight. I went straight, and it brought me here.”

“There are worse ways to decide where you’re going to stay awhile.” Like providing security to someone who couldn’t make up his mind whether he wanted or needed it. Liz had worked protective custody before, but never with someone as difficult as Josh.

“I don’t have to ask why you’re here, do I?” Natalia pushed her plate away, the luscious cheese-covered hash browns untouched, and shifted in her chair to face Liz. “Because of Joe. Are you and he…?”

Liz signaled the waitress for a refill. “We know each other.”

“Duh. Like that wasn’t obvious yesterday. How well?”

Not well enough. Thanks to Josh, they would probably never get to know each other well enough. Either the older Saldana twin would be dragged out of the hole he’d hidden in and would testify against the Mulroneys, or the trial would come and go without his input. Either way, Liz would go on to a new case, and Joe would go on with his new life, and she, for one, would have a whole lot of regrets.

“I used to date Joe’s brother,” Liz said evenly.

The relief that flashed through Natalia’s eyes was intense, there and gone, and generated a similar intensity in Liz’s gut. The look that replaced it was flatter, blanker than usual.

Like those adoring teenagers in the coffee shop yesterday, Natalia had a thing for Joe. The big question was what he felt for her. Was it mutual, or was she hanging around waiting for him to finally notice that she was a very pretty woman with porcelain skin, delicate bones, eyes big enough to drown in and a perfect Cupid’s bow to shape her lips?

Liz would like to believe Joe was as oblivious to Natalia’s crush as he’d been to the teenagers’, but that would be naive, and she tried to never be naive. Joe and Natalia were friends; they lived next door to each other. She was enough of a regular at his shop to merit her own mug. He’d noticed she was beautiful.

Saldana men always noticed beauty, Josh had often bragged.

“So…are you and Joe…?” Liz hoped for the same sort of dear-God-no reaction she’d had to Joe’s suggestion that she’d gotten pregnant by Josh.

Natalia showed no emotion at all. “Would it matter to you if we are?”

Like hell, and that was a problem. Federal agents did not get romantically involved with any subject in an investigation—not suspects, not witnesses, not victims, not other agents. Not, not, not.

How did you stay uninvolved when you’d lost control? When your brain and logic and reason and ethics screaming no couldn’t be heard over the pounding of your heart?

The first thing you did was lie. To others. To yourself.

“Joe’s life is none of my business. I’m just looking for Josh.”

Natalia’s Cupid’s-bow mouth took on a pinched look. She didn’t believe Liz.

Which was only fair, because Liz didn’t believe herself.

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