Beverly Bird - In The Line Of Fire

Molly turned her key in the last lock and stepped away from her door. Her booted feet got tangled up in the newspaper there and she nearly twisted an ankle. “Whatever the art is to walking in heels, I’ve yet to discover it.” She bent to swipe up the paper and held it over her head in an effort to divert some of the rain coming down.

“Good afternoon, Molly.”

“What?” Her gaze shot to the street where the custodian for the apartment complex was busily clearing the gutter. “Hi, Warren. It’s not afternoon yet. It’s only eleven…” She pushed up the sleeve of the navy-blue blazer she’d tossed on. Her watch read 12:05.

“Well, isn’t that just fine?” What would the task force think when she strolled in at a quarter past twelve? Not a thing, she decided, not once she wowed them all with her brilliance.

Still carrying the newspaper, she jogged along the walkway to the parking lot tucked off to one side of the complex. She was behind the wheel of her ten-year-old Camaro when she succumbed to an urge to pull the paper out of its protective plastic. She opened the reasonably dry pages against her steering wheel, then she saw the date at the top.

Year after year, memory after memory, it always happened to her the same way.

Her heart stopped for half a beat, then it raced. Something airy and light filled her limbs, then her head. And hot tears came unbidden to her eyes, though she refused to let them fall. It was February fifteenth. “Well, happy birthday.” Molly swallowed hard.

It was the day she had been born thirty years ago, the same day Mickey had died seventeen years later. Molly’s hands fumbled as she crushed the newspaper into a large, wadded ball. She tossed it into the passenger seat and shot the key into the ignition, revving the Camaro’s engine. She drove out of the lot, turning south onto Mission Creek Road.

This was not a day to dwell on the past, not this year. This February 15th she was going to find out what her future might hold.

It held three fellow officers who did not seem exceptionally overjoyed by her presence, Molly discovered ten minutes later.

By the time she stepped into the task-force war room, the rain had her hair zinging all over the place again. She blew a couple of damp locks out of her eyes and looked around. Chief Stone had converted the old lunch room for the task force’s efforts. The three Formica-topped tables had been jammed back against the far wall in a line. Some chairs were situated in front of them; others were littered about the empty room as though a band of rowdy children had suddenly abandoned a game of musical chairs.

The table farthest to the left supported a computer that was whining with a high-pitched hum that told Molly it might be about to exit this world. Beside it were photos from the bombing scene. Joe Gannon and Paulie McCauley stood there, flipping through them. The table in the middle held the crime book and a lot of pages and reports yet to be filed. She thought she could make herself useful there. It would be an excellent way to bring herself up to speed on what the task force had achieved this past month without her.

But first she went to the table on the right. It held the coffee machine, an empty box of donuts and a solitary slice of pizza abandoned in its super-size box. Molly lifted the lid to inspect the pizza. The cheese had hardened into yellowish-white nodules and the edges were curling.

Detective Frank Hasselman was standing there talking into a cell phone. His pale eyes lifted to her face at Molly’s expression. “Not to your liking, Officer?”

Molly gave a weak grin. “Not particularly.”

“Then find another restaurant.”

Her spine stiffened. Deliberately she lifted the slice from the box. “This’ll do.”

His brows climbed his forehead. “You’re not seriously going to eat that.”

“Watch me.” She bit in. Once, when she had been ten, Mickey had talked her into swallowing an earthworm. She reasoned that nothing could be worse than that.

She was wrong. Molly fought valiantly to swallow. At least the pizza didn’t curl in on itself on her tongue the way the worm had. “Yummy.”

“You’re crazy.” Hasselman put the telephone back to his mouth and turned away from her to continue talking.

“I’m tougher than I look,” she muttered. And she knew that she was going to have to be to get ahead here. After two years she was still the new kid on the block—which, in all honesty, perplexed her somewhat. It hadn’t taken her this long to break in back in Laredo when she’d been fresh out of the academy.

She poured herself a cup of coffee to wash down the truly bad pizza and went to the table in the middle. She pulled out the chair there and dragged a pile of filing toward her as she sat.

“What are you doing?” Hasselman said, disconnecting his call.

“The grunt work. Somebody has to.”

“She knows her place, got to give her that,” said McCauley.

“Ease off her,” Joe Gannon warned from the other table. At forty-three, he was pretty much the elder statesman of the task force. She’d looked into all fourteen officers and detectives who comprised the team. Gannon was two years from retirement.

Molly fought the urge to sigh in relief. He might be an ally…sort of.

Gannon placed a photo into a pile and came to the middle table to join her as McCauley and Hasselman left the room. “Do you know what you’re doing?” he asked, frowning.

“Oh ye of little faith.” She glanced up at him as she began sorting pages. “I worked a task force in Laredo. Double homicide.”

“Don’t tell that to the others.”

Molly frowned. “They’ve got a thing about me coming in from Laredo? Is that what it is?”

“It’s part of it.”

“What’s the other part?” She slid the last of the pizza surreptitiously into the trash can beneath the table and thought she saw him grin fleetingly.

“Beats me.”

“That’s not helpful.”

“Best I can do.” Gannon shrugged. “Plus they don’t trust anybody who wanted to be on this detail so bad she’d do it without pay.”

“Word spreads fast.”

“Start filing. Earn Brownie points. That’s my best advice.” He moved away from the table again.

Forty minutes later, Molly knew scarcely more than she had when she’d started. It was appalling how little information this team had gathered in the month since the bombing, and how disorganized it was. Fourteen cops, four weeks and the crime book was only about two inches thick. She rubbed her forehead, feeling a headache coming on.

The bomb had gone off behind the Men’s Grill, in its kitchen, at the Lone Star Country Club. The task force had gathered statements from everyone dining there at the time with the exception of Daniel and Meg Anderson who’d had the misfortune of being seated closest to the point of detonation. They were dead. Their little boy, Jake, was not. He’d been on his way to the bathroom that afternoon when he’d made a wrong turn near the kitchen. He’d seen a couple of men moving large green canvas bags outside into a car. Molly noticed from some handwritten notes—not even typed—that there were those on the task force who thought the bags had contained the explosive device.

No matter how she tried, she couldn’t envision a bomb being transported in numerous green canvas bags. And besides, according to little Jake, the bags had been heading out of the country club, not in. It took no thought at all to rule out the theory, so why were the notes included without a disclaimer and why had it been awarded five useless interviews with the kitchen personnel?

Molly wanted to talk to Jake Anderson. He was currently living with Adam Collins, one of the firefighters on the scene that day. He and his fiancée, Tracy Walker, a burn specialist at the hospital where Jake had been treated, had already set the wheels into motion to adopt the little boy. What shape were these bags that he’d seen? That was important, but apparently no one had bothered to ask him. Had they been smooth, compact…or bumpy and bulging with knobby angles? Jake had said that something about them made him think of Santa Claus.

Molly made a note to herself to contact Adam Collins and see how the boy was doing. It might be too stressful for him to talk to her just yet. Whoever was behind the bombing had obviously thought Jake knew too much because he’d been kidnapped along with Tracy Walker no more than a week ago. They were both safely home now, but on top of losing his parents…Molly shook her head and decided she’d wait a few weeks on Jake.

But the boy brought to mind the matter of Ed Bancroft. Molly sat back in her chair and dug the heels of her hands into her eyes. He and another guy, Kyle Malloy, were the ones who had kidnapped Tracy and Jake, but neither of those men were going to be talking about it. Malloy had been killed when he was apprehended, while Bancroft had been slapped into a holding cell here at the police station. As soon as she had heard about it, Molly had rushed over to see if Bancroft would talk to her, even thought she wasn’t part of the task force. But she’d found him swinging in his cell from an overhead fixture, courtesy of his belt.

Bancroft and Malloy were—had been—cops.

Then there was a nagging little something that had been bothering her ever since she’d gone to the scene that day of the bombing. Nine-tenths of the Mission Creek Police Department had responded to that call, most—like herself—whether they had been on duty during that shift or not. Granted, Mission Creek was a smaller, more intimate community than Laredo and they didn’t see this kind of trouble very often. But still…that was a lot of cops.

Molly didn’t like what she was thinking. She felt nauseous, but maybe that was just the pizza. She pawed through the papers and reports on the table that she had yet to file and found notes pertinent to Bancroft. The general consensus was that he and Malloy had been sucked in by Carmine Mercado and his boys into moonlighting for the Texas mob. It felt right to Molly. Green canvas bags, she thought again. Weapons, drugs, something being moved through the country club’s kitchen. And whose domain were those things in South Texas? The mob’s, of course. If Malloy and Bancroft had kidnapped Jake Anderson in order to keep him from talking about what he’d seen, they’d done it on orders from whoever was responsible for the blast. That indicated that the organized crime network had owned them.

It always upset her when a cop turned. She thought about all the officers at the scene again. Were Bancroft and Malloy the only ones? Or had some of the others had a staked interest in that explosion?

There were other theories. Heaven knew the Wainwrights and Carsons had been going at each other’s throats for the better part of a century now, but Molly couldn’t see two of Mission Creek’s elite families blowing up the spectacular and lavish club they had jointly established generations ago. There were rumors around town about the involvement of a South American terrorist group, but as far as Molly was concerned, that just smacked of pulp fiction. What would terrorists want with Mission Creek, Texas? Mission Creek already had its own bad boys in the form of Carmine Mercado and his mobsters.

Molly finally pushed her chair back and stood. She’d only gotten halfway through organizing the book, but a glance at her watch told her that it was time to move on to the rec center. She turned away from the table to find Paulie McCauley standing in the door watching her, his arms crossed over his fairly significant chest.

“Solve the case yet?” he sneered.