She dragged the purse across her lap and was reaching inside when she jerked her hand out with a start as bare knuckles rapped loudly on the window glass.
"Help you?" Male. Deep voice. The rain obscured a decent view of him.
Swish, swoosh, the rubber blades did the only dance they knew. Rain coming down hard now, like pebbles cast into a pond.
Knock, knock. Again. "Can I give you a hand?"
Strong-his voice told her that much. She didn't want to look at him because she knew that eye contact empowered the attacker.
She silently begged for John to hurry up. Her fingers crept back into the purse, though nervously this time, as if she might get caught.
"No, thank you." Too soft-spoken, she raised her voice. "NO, THANK YOU! ALL SET." She thought to add: "SOMEONE'S
ON THE WAY!"
"I'm good with cars."
Fixing them, or breaking them? she wondered. "I'm all set."
"Put it in neutral," the deep voice instructed. "Let me at least get you out of this lane."
It was, in fact, a lousy place to have come to a stop, halfway across two lanes. Small tendrils of terror began in her crotch and rushed up through her. "NO, THANK YOU." How many times did she have to say that?
His rapping on the window bothered her. She wanted him to go away. "Stop it!" she bellowed. She didn't mean to say that, didn't mean to sound scared. Predators fed on such fear.
"I'm trying to help," came the male voice. "You're gonna get hit sticking out like this!"
She cracked the window less than an inch, just enough so there would be no mistaking her words or her tone. "I'd like you to leave now, please."
"Lady, I'm trying to help here."
"Go away now!" She used too urgent a tone, too frantic. She didn't want to give him that. She rolled up the window and looked straight ahead.
"Lady!" Shaking the car, he pulled on the driver's door handle.
"Put the damn car in neutral and let me get you out of the road."
Her right hand, now inside her purse, touched the butt end of the handgun. Her left hand joined her right and she chambered a round, still out of sight.
He shouted, "You're going to get yourself hit sticking out like this!"
A huge sound erupted all at once, and she jumped. She thought she'd been rear-ended. The Good Samaritan's belt buckle pressed up to the window glass, the fly to his pants at eye level. She briefly considered firing her weapon at that target.
"Leave the lady alone, asshole."
Although she couldn't see her rescuer, she recognized the voice as that of Nathan Prair, and a trickle of dread ran through her. Which was the spider and which was the fly?
"Do not pass Go! Do not collect two hundred dollars." This time, it was LaMoia's wisecracking voice she heard, unmistakable and welcome. It must have been to Prair he said, "You're a long way from home, sailor. You wait over there."
In her lap, the mobile phone's timer continued to count the seconds: 3:07, 3:08 ... She had never disconnected the call. LaMoia had heard the entire exchange with the man who'd stopped to help her. Words were traded out there. Tempers were flaring.
A metal clicking of handcuffs so familiar to any police officer.
LaMoia informed the stranger, "The woman asked you to back off and leave her alone. You refused, which means you're under arrest for harassing a police officer."
The stranger's astonished voice said, "A police officer?"
"You have the right to remain ..."
Matthews threw her head back. The dull off-white of the ceiling fabric formed the sky above her. The gun's knurled grip warmed in her hand. A throbbing pushed at her temples, a membrane ready to explode.
Prair's arriving on the scene had triggered a whole series of thoughts. She caught sight of his flashing roof lights in her rearview mirror, wondering when he'd turned them on and why she hadn't seen them until then.
The sound of the rain and the three men arguing filled her ringing ears. The rain shook the car. Prair had hidden that he'd known-or at least had met-Mary-Ann Walker prior to her murder. Why? And what impact did it have on the case? On Daphne Matthews?
Unable to take the isolation, she climbed out into the rain and glanced toward the side of the road, from where Nathan Prair looked back at her, out the side window of his cruiser. The rivulets of rain cascaded down the gray glass, looking like rows and rows of tears on his face. Prair stared at her, as cold a look as she could recall. Had he read her thoughts? Her fear? Did he sense that they knew his dirty little secret? She wanted the truth-such a simple thing to ask, so difficult to attain.
Prair rolled down the window. The tears disappeared. "I was trying to help," he called out.
She nodded. Some rain came off her hair, sparkling in the glare of LaMoia's headlights. She said back to him, "I've been getting a lot of that lately."
If the Shoe Fits
"Is this waiting really necessary?" an uncharacteristically impatient
Daphne Matthews asked LaMoia, the two of them watching the detainee through the interrogation room's one-way glass.
LaMoia said, "You know the drill."
Yes she did: The waiting allowed the suspect time to comprehend the severity of the situation, and police the time to collect as much information on the individual as possible, but she'd never waited out that time as a victim before, and the resulting anxiety owned her.
"What about Prair?" she asked.
"What about him?"
"You let him go."
"Let him go?" LaMoia asked. "He's a cop who responded to a situation. Under normal circumstances, he'd be considered something of a hero for helping you."
"Hardly. Are we going to talk to him?"
"Not formally," he answered.
"But the ticket... his having known Mary-Ann ..." She felt exasperated, everything turned on its head.
"We don't show that card until we can back it up with something.
It'll send him so deeply underground we'll need to dig through five layers of lawyers to know what clothes he's wearing."
"He lied to us."
"Not on the record, he didn't. He's a cop, Matthews. However he's involved in this, he knows exactly how we're going to play it. We do the dance or we lose him-it's as simple as that."
"I want to pressure him," she said. "Tonight, tomorrow, as soon as we can. I know the way this one thinks, John. If we squeeze him we stand the most to gain."
"You going to pull rank on me?"
"Is it going to come to that?" she asked.
The two studied each other.
LaMoia said, "Okay ... But he'll talk his way out of it, and we won't have squat."
"I'm being impetuous?"
"You're reacting to a tough situation ... that wasn't easy out there. You're lashing out at all available parties."
"Who's the psychologist and who's the detective?" she asked.
He nodded okay. "You want the detective? Your fuel line was crimped, probably with a pair of pliers."
"And maybe it was a rock that one of the tires kicked up." She'd overheard this preliminary report from the police garage; she didn't want LaMoia making it worse than it was.
His annoyance manifested itself as flaring nostrils and a worried brow. LaMoia's level temper was one of his most valuable qualities-she'd heard that when he lost that temper things could "get a little wild," as a patrolman had once put it. She had no desire to be the object of that display.
"The guy we arrested wears clodhoppers with monster soles. It's entirely within the realm of possibility that this asshole frequents empty construction sites. I can detain him on harassment charges at least until the Tl is back on-line and we know for sure whether he has a record or not."