All characters named in this chapter were created by Janet Evanovich, Except Helen a.k.a. Elena created by AutumnDreaming and Charlie created by Charles Martin in the novel "When Crickets Cry".
When I returned to Rangeman, I thought I was about as angry as I could get. Then I saw Tank waiting for me, and I knew I could actually get a little angrier. He was giving me one of those looks that I never liked to see. It could only mean trouble.
"I didn't know if I should show you this tonight, but I'm not sure it can wait," Tank said, leading me to my office.
I sat down behind my desk and took a look at the pictures on my computer screen.
Apparently, at the same time I was having trouble with Jean Ellen, Morelli was having a similar battle with an equally sexy and dangerous associate named Terry Gilman. Not only is Terry his former girlfriend, she holds a high-paying position in the Vito Grizolli group.
"You have got to be kidding me," I said. "He knows I'll kill him, right?"
"You'd think," Tank agreed.
I was looking at pictures of Terry and Joe eating together at a candle-lit Italian restaurant, sitting way too close in a small semi-circular booth. Terry didn't look like she had her hand in her own lap, and Morelli certainly wasn't responding like a man who was engaged to another woman. Terry was whispering to Morelli and he was whispering back. He was so close his lips were on her ear and neck. I was trying hard to give him the benefit of the doubt. There was a slight chance that it was top-secret, work-related whispering. Morelli had worked with Terry on mob-related cases in the past. I knew he was probably working on the Grizolli murder cases, trying to scrape up all the evidence he could. But with Jimmy Voran - the prime and only suspect - on the run, I had to wonder what Morelli was doing with his hands on Terry instead of trying to get his hands on Jimmy. If I knew about the party tonight, Morelli knew about it too.
One of two things appeared to be going on. Either Terry and Morelli were still involved, or Terry was pretending be working on the case in order to keep Morelli away from Jimmy. I wasn't happy with either of those scenarios. Regardless, Vito would be hard a work on his latest paving project by now. There was something big going on in the Grizolli family, and I was going to get to the bottom of it.
Morelli knew all of my guys, but he hadn't met Elena. The problem was going to be getting Elena to agree to help me get the goods on a Trenton PD Homicide Detective. Somehow, I was going to have to get inside her head and melt The Ice Queen, at least a little.
It bothered me that she didn't mind her unofficial title. In fact, she seemed to be encouraging it. I sat back in my chair and pulled up the computer image of Elena working in the garden again. I knew she was kind, but her kindness seemed to have been taken advantage of one too many times. She wasn't really cold. We all knew that. She would bend over backwards to please and to make sure she was never a burden to our operation. But she had drawn a line in the sand that wasn't to be crossed. She could turn on the chill like flipping a switch.
It was this pattern of predictable behavior that I was counting on. I planned to throw her off balance to see if I could find a crack in her façade.
At 3:00am, Elena's Mt. Holly neighborhood was silent except for a dog barking a few blocks away. I had entered her house through a basement window, easily by-passed the alarm on the basement door, and was soon sitting in a chair in the corner of her bedroom watching her sleep. She had a cat in her arms, and she was snoring just faintly. She wasn't going to wake up until I wanted her to. I looked around the room, and decided that an eye-to-eye surprise might be more startling to her, so I got up and walked over to her dresser, and slid down to the floor, with my back to the dresser, so that I was facing Elena as she slept on her side. If she opened her eyes, she would be looking right at me. I had one leg out in front of me and knee up, with my arm stretched out over my knee, my fingers dangling casually.
I waited till it seemed like she had finished dreaming, and I made a soft noise. She opened her eyes only slightly, not even picking her head up off the pillow. She was literally looking at me sideways. She looked at me for a full minute, and I sat still, looking back at her. Finally, with a soft "huh" sound, as if she must be having a weird dream, she closed her eyes and drifted off again.
I didn't want to touch her or call her name to wake her. That hadn't been my plan. I had a better idea. I left silently, ran to the 24-hour grocery store and bought a bouquet of mixed flowers. I returned, pulled the petals off, stuffing them in a deep pocket so there would be no rustling of paper or plastic, and went back into the house. I sprinkled the petals over Elena as she slept and then left a note asking "Sleeping Beauty" to call me when she woke up. I signed it "R". I wanted her to know I had been there, and nothing bad had happened. It sounds like a bizarre way to build trust, but it works.
I looked around the room quickly before leaving, making mental notes of the room's contents again, what might have been moved since last time I was here, and what the light was like from room to room. In the living room, I saw three blank pages of cardstock and a small notebook sitting on the end table where she had been working on something. There was a piece of hinged stainless steel and what looked like a stitch ripper from a sewing kit. As I picked up the notebook, my finger ran across the card stock, I felt the raised bumps on the paper and suddenly realized what I was looking at. The metal piece was an old Braille writing guide. She was writing a letter to a blind person. I read the letter from the notebook but there was no name. When I was done reading, I felt the bumps on the top page of the letter for the salutation. The name was Charlie. There was no address, but I recognized a reference to a waterway in her notebook as being in Georgia. Now I had what I came for.
Elena called at 7:00 a.m.
"Yo," I answered.
"You broke into my house," she said, steamed.
"I stopped in for a visit," I said.
"Why didn't you wake me up?" she demanded.
"You were sound asleep. It could wait."
"You drove all the way to my house and broke in for something that could wait till morning? I don't think so. What's going on?" She was suspicious again.
"I have a job for you. A job only you can do for me." I tried to convey how important this was.
"This isn't about that party, is it? Did you get your man?" I could just see her shuffling around her house barefoot in her faded, cornflower blue bathrobe, stifling a yawn and trying to find something for breakfast.
"No. He got away," I said. "I ran into some interference. I would have had him if you had been with me." I thought I would see if guilt would get me anywhere.
"I told you no, and I meant no."
"I could have made you change your mind, if I wanted to."
"How's that?" she asked, almost playfully, curious to know what I was going to say.
"All I would have needed was 10 minutes alone with you," I said, as if that were a promise.
"That better be a threat to kick my ass," she asked haughtily. I could hear the smirk on her face. She wasn't mad. But she didn't let me answer. "So now what? You want to try getting your hands on Jimmy Voran again?"
"We could talk about it." I didn't honestly think there was a snowball's chance of getting my hands on Jimmy now, but I was open to her ideas.
"Hold it," she said, a little more awake now. "You said you had a job for me, so you already have something in mind. Spill."
"I need you to deliver a box of Girl Scout cookies."
There was silence for a beat. "I sincerely hope that's code for something."
"Yes and no. But first, I need you to do something else."
"What's that?"
"Open your front door. I have breakfast."
The door opened a moment later, and she clicked her cell phone closed. The porch light was on a timer, and it clicked off as I was stepping in the door. She was indeed in her robe and her hair was a disaster. She didn't seem to care that I was there, and shuffled back to the kitchen where the coffee was almost done brewing.
She pointed to the kitchen table, and I opened the bag and placed two bagels on the plates. We smeared fat-free cream cheese from little silver condiment packets onto the fresh bagels, and we ate and drank in silence for a few minutes, waiting for the coffee to kick in.
"OK," she said, with half her bagel gone. "What's the job?"
"You actually are going to deliver some Girl Scout cookies. I need you to find a way to leave a pen inside the house. It has a bug in it. If this guy writes you a check, give him the pen and don't ask for it back. If that doesn't work, pretend to be writing an order and tell him the pen is out of ink. Ask if he has another one, and put the pen where it points into the room, preferably towards or in the kitchen, hidden if possible."
"Ranger, you broke into my house. Why don't you just break into this house? I know you can. I've heard the stories."
"It wouldn't be smart to break into a cop's house." Especially this one, I thought. She choked and tried to swallow. "If you just happen to leave an ink pen after being invited in, we would have a lot less risk of being detected than if I send one of my guys to sit on a rooftop across the street to install a mic."
"You're nuts!" she said, almost knocking her coffee cup off the table.
"You have no idea, Sunshine." I gave her a dangerous look. She had been about to laugh, but changed her mind abruptly, sensing that I was actually quite serious.
"Ranger, what is going on? What are doing?"
"I need you to trust me." I held her gaze, my eyes boring hard into hers. "There is a life at stake, and I need you to do this for me."
She looked uncomfortable, squirming a little in her seat.
"I know that I've been gone most of the time you've been at Rangeman, and we haven't had a chance to get to know each other." I wrapped my hands around my coffee cup. "Elena, I see you keeping everyone at arms length, and sometimes I feel like you're keeping me at arms length with both arms." She nodded understanding, and I continued. "I don't want you to ever feel like you have to do that. You don't have to be afraid at Rangeman. I know you would never act in a way that would inappropriate. I trust you. And I trust my men. I have to trust them with my life, and I'm careful about who I have on-board in the control room and living in the building."
Elena nodded again. "I know, I've been too hard on them," she said, rubbing her forehead, her voice cracking slightly. She blew out a sigh, and shook her head as if she had failed once again. No one was harder on Elena than she was. She was her own worst enemy.
"I'll tell you what," I said, softening to her. "Let's try something new. Let's do something together that neither of us have ever done before."
She looked at me suspiciously again. "What do you mean?"
"People like you and me act like we're always at war." I looked down into my coffee. "I learned the hard way not to confide in anyone, especially a woman. It could cost me my life." I paused, and looked up slowly. "Elena," I said, finding myself on a precipice, hesitating. "Lately, it's occurred to me that because of that, I haven't got a life to lose. I have become my job. I always thought I was more…" I shook my head slowly. "But, I haven't been more for a very long time. I haven't had anything more in my life to share with someone else."
She cut her eyes to me for a second, gauging whether I was going to go on before she spoke. "What about Stephanie?"
I shrugged. "This was going on before Steph. This…" I made an empty gesture with my hand. Then I reached across the table for her hand. Slowly, she gave it to me. "I know what you're made of, Sunshine. And I'm willing to trust you. We need something real that we share between us. I'm willing to trust you, and I'm asking you to trust me."
"I don't know what you mean," She said, looking at our hands. I rubbed my thumb over the back of her hand.
"I don't just want to share a secret. I want you to do something with me that you've always wanted to do, but never have."
"Like what?"
"You'll know."
She sat back in her chair. "Before we get too deep into this trust thing, I have a confession to make," she said. I suspected she was aiming at levity.
"Sounds serious," I said playfully, trying to lighten the mood.
"I am serious," she assured me. "I have been trying to figure out a way say this to you. I guess while you were gone, I just conveniently forgot about it, but it's bothering me again, so I better just get this over with." She gave me a tiny shrug and then pulled her hand away from me. "When I caught you on my video camera, I watched you for a long time, trying to figure out what you were doing in front of my house." She paused, as if she had just made some dramatic confession.
"I photograph pretty well," I said, giving her a full-on smile.
"I didn't turn you in because you were acting suspicious." She swallowed hard. "I turned you in because I wanted to find out who you were." She looked down, shaking her head. "It was so stupid of me, and I'm really sorry I did that. It wasn't right. I don't know what I was thinking." She covered her eyes with her hands in shame, and quickly cut her eyes to me again, checking my reaction.
I grinned down at her. "I have that affect on women."
"I've noticed," she grudgingly admitted, laughing at herself.
"Well, I'm glad you did turn me in, or we wouldn't be here now."
"You're really not mad?" She asked apologetically.
"No," I said. "I'm not mad."
I took her hand and stood. I moved to pull her to me, but she shook her head no, and pulled back, but still held my hand. I touched her face, her temple, her hair. She closed her eyes and let me. She squeezed my hand a little.
"I just get lonely sometimes," she said, her voice breaking again. I knew that if she opened her eyes I'd see tears.
"Me too, Sunshine. Me too."
To be continued…