Secrets and Lies Page 5

  “This is going to nearly kill Thena,” he mumbled. He couldn’t imagine being the one to tell her the body was gone. She had just found her mother and now she was missing again.

  “I did notice something in my unofficial once over. I can’t confirm it without an autopsy, but I think she was embalmed. It would explain the lack of serious decomposition”

  “You mean whoever killed her took the time to make nice and preserve her?”

  “No, I mean whoever killed her decided to be a complete bastard and embalmed her while she was still alive.”

  Thomas felt rage threatening to break his control. What a hellish way to go for anybody, but especially this woman. “I’m going to have to tell Thena the body is missing.”

  “I know. She should hear it from you and not the detectives. Although I don’t think they’re in a rush to tell her anyway.” He rolled his eyes and uttered several curses. “And Thomas…there’s more.”

  There was always more. No matter how messed up he thought a case was it usually had a way of getting worse. “Tell me,” he crossed his arms over his chest.

  “McNamara says the victim was probably involved in something illegal at the hospital before she disappeared. Evidence apparently points toward it and she thinks whoever Mrs. Davis crossed came back for the body to properly dispose of it before any evidence could be found to point to them.”

  “Tarnish the dead,” he had seen it before. Instead of working a case from every angle McNamara would always take the easy way out and the easy way usually meant writing the case off by tarnishing the deceased. He wouldn’t let it happen this time. He would find out what happened to Mrs. Davis, then and now. “If you find out anything about where the body vanished to give me a call.” Although he doubted Dustin would ever see that body again, let alone find out where it had managed to disappear to.

  “Are you going up to talk to McNamara?”

  He didn’t want to, but he would. He was a professional, even if she couldn’t be. “Yeah, I’m on my way up.”

  “You know she’s still pissed at you; right?”

  “Yeah, I know.” How could he forget? His constant rejection of her blatant attempts to get him into her bed had caused a rift between him and the department. Before that he hadn’t had an issue. Even when he need answers on a case that took him into their jurisdiction somebody would assist. Since his last rejection of her affection he would be lucky if he could even get a cup of coffee in that precinct.

  Phoebe was the commissioner’s daughter. Whether she was well liked or not wasn’t the issue. Everybody feared the havoc she could wreak on their careers. After what she had done to Detective Jameson…well, he understood why the others were afraid of her. He had one advantage over the guys in her precinct; he wasn’t on the city’s dime any longer. He didn’t have to play by their political rules. There was nothing McNamara could do to him, other than refuse to give him information—and even then he had his way. He would find out what he needed to know, with or without her help.

  It didn’t take long for him to spot Phoebe in the room. The paint was currently pealing off the walls. He chuckled; it was still the same as it had been the last time he stepped foot in this precinct—dusty, dirty, unkempt, but still habitable. He couldn’t understand how the condition hadn’t bothered anybody. They had one of the most beautifully old police station structures and they had all sat by and watched it go downhill…actually, they had helped it get there. A fresh coat of paint and a little more cleanliness could fix the place up. Instead, they were letting all four floors go to the dogs.

  He shook his head. It wasn’t his problem, never was. He wasn’t there to discuss décor and cleanliness with them. He was there to discuss his case. If the building fell down on their heads that would be their problem.

  He strode over to Phoebe’s desk. Her hair was an unsightly shade of bleached blond and she had cut it shorter. It was very close to her scalp, which was vastly different from the below shoulder length mess she used to walk around with. The cut didn’t suit her, but then he figured nothing ever would.

  It wasn’t that Phoebe was ugly. She wasn’t. She had what most men would go after in a bar. She had big breasts, blue eyes, long legs, slender curves and a way of flirting that would tell any man if she spent more than five minutes talking to him she definitely had plans to take him to bed. That kind of personality attracted some men, and turned others off. It had been a turnoff for him. Not that she was his type to begin with. Dating other cops had never been a good idea. When he worked SWAT he made sure he didn’t get involved with anybody carrying a badge. All the women at his precinct, and this one, knew his rule and while two or three had tried to convince him to have dinner, they had all backed off when he told them no. Phoebe…she was a different story entirely.

  He had been the unlucky guy to land in the nineteenth precinct when the commissioner decided it was mandatory to do a two week exchange. About ten of the men he worked with went to other precincts, while men from those precincts took their place. He got the unlucky draw of the nineteenth. The pats on his back and the reassurance that he’d survive the two weeks, “maybe,” they had said, should have been warning enough. They all knew what he didn’t know, but what he found out quickly enough, Phoebe McNamara, a woman who was quickly working her way up the ranks to detective, could tank a man’s career if she didn’t get her way.

  It wasn’t until she set her sights on him that he got the full story. She had gone after Detective Jameson, relentlessly pursuing the man despite his married with children status. He had refused her, repeatedly, and she did not like to be refused. The story he received told him just how far she would go, and just how far being the commissioner’s daughter could get her. Jameson lost his job, his pension, the career that he loved, and for what; a few lies and a massive cover up. The only thing he hadn’t lost was his family. His wife believed him, which had to count for something after everything he had been through.

  Fortunately for Thomas, two weeks was all he had to put up with, and even then he had made it clear if she put her hand on his thigh again he was going to break that hand off and shove it up her behind. Two weeks and he was out, back to his own precinct with his own squad—career still in tact. Never did he imagine he would have to make contact with Phoebe again, but here he was, making contact for a case. The few cases that had taken him to the Nineteenth were first and third floor department issues—Phoebe was on the second floor. The last time he had a brush with her had been in the parking lot, where once again he told her no. After that, most of the Nineteenth was like ice to him.

  He hadn’t been raised in Boston, but he always seemed to fit in. He grew up in the Midwest, along with his sisters until his father relocated to Boston for a job. He was nearly seventeen, which meant he had to move before he finished high school. That meant starting over at a new school, but he never had a problem fitting in and making friends, so he wasn’t worried. Gavin was lucky; he was already in the military by then so the move hadn’t impacted him as much as it had the others. Eve, the youngest McGregor, was just turning seven, not that anybody would think she spent a day in Boston because she didn’t have an ounce of the accent. Like their mother, Eve could turn on and turn off accents at the drop of a hat. Alyssa, the other McGregor, had been thirteen. She took it the hardest. She wasn’t a social butterfly and moving, leaving behind her friends, wasn’t easy for her. She always hated Boston, hated the area, the city, the environment. He imagined that hatred stemmed from her experience with the place, but at least she had family. The McGregor’s stuck together like overcooked rice. You hurt one, you hurt all, and that invoked a wrath very people had ever experienced. Alyssa nearly left Boston the second they put the diploma in her hands. Their parents had insisted she walk the stage at her graduation. Once she did that, she got in her little Volvo and hit the road, heading west. Thomas himself had left for life in the military, and after everything went bad he returned to Boston. He didn’t have a real reason to stay put
. His family had all moved away now. His mother out west, his baby sister in the south, Alyssa in Arizona and Gavin was now living the life in South Dakota with London. His father, the jerk that he was, had relocated to New York, New York. Still, despite not having his family situated in Boston, Thomas hadn’t ever thought of leaving. His business was there, established and strong; he wasn’t going to leave that behind to start over. If he did leave it he would probably move to where one of his sister’s was. He worried about them, maybe more than he should. He remembered how it felt, after he joined the Marines, to have his big brother always watching over him from a far. And then when he nearly died, it was like that was all the excuse Gavin needed to smother him with big brother protective love. He smiled. His brother was always his hero, the man he aspired to make proud, but sometimes he wished Gavin could see he didn’t need constant protection. Maybe Eve and Alyssa felt the same way about their brothers’ protective streak. At some point the chains of protection had to be loosened—at least a little. Who was he kidding? Eve and Alyssa were his sisters and he’d protect them until he died, no matter how old they got. He tore his attention away from his sisters, mentally reminding himself to give them a call. He put his attention back on his current reason for being at the Nineteenth.

  Thomas had no intention of leaving Boston so he would just have to learn to deal with Phoebe and the others at the precinct the best he could. He mumbled a curse under his breath as he made his way over to her desk. “McNamara,” he kept his voice professional and detached from the abundance of dislike he had for her. “I need to speak with you about one of your cases.” She smiled up at him. That smile sent a shiver down his spine. That smile told him she was assessing him, sizing him up once again, to decide just what she wanted from him in return for her assistance.

  “I’d be happy to discuss any of my cases with you over dinner,” her Bostonian accent and deep, raspy voice, was about as pleasant as a bomb going off. It wasn’t the tone, not even the accent, it was her words, her insinuation that her badge gave her the right to do whatever she wanted, legal or not.

  “My client, Thena Davis, you should know her, you all lost her mother’s body.” He saw the color drain from Phoebe’s face.

  “I can’t discuss an ongoing case with you.” She shuffled papers on her desk, hurriedly pushing lose papers into files and standing to leave.

  “So you are looking into who took the body? Since you haven’t alerted my client to the disappearance yet I assumed maybe you weren’t doing anything about it.” He watched her lips clamp tight. He could tell from the rigidity of her shoulders that she knew something more than what she wanted to tell him, and that something most likely was what happened to the body and why standard procedures had been avoided in this case.

  “Look, I could get in trouble for telling you this, but…well, it’s not our fault. I’ve done some research that suggests Neenah Davis was into some illegal stuff at the hospital.”

  “What kind of stuff?” His investigation, thus far, hadn’t turned up anything more than a straight-laced doctor who attended the University of Massachusetts, Boston Campus, on full scholarship, graduated with honors and was highly respected at the time of her disappearance.

  “Well,” she sat a file folder on the desk. “I don’t have all the facts yet, but drugs,” she said simply, the color coming back into her face just a little.

  “She was on drugs?” He didn’t believe a word she was saying to him. She was lying and he knew that. He also knew what she wasn’t saying—they were ready to taint Neenah Davis’ reputation to close their case.

  “No, not using, selling. She was stealing drugs from the hospital and selling them. Anyway, like I said it’s an ongoing investigation so I can’t really discuss it with you. But whoever killed her probably came to get her body. It’s not like it hasn’t been in the papers lately.”

  He refrained from pointing out yet another inconsistency with her story. Why let her know where her plot was full of holes when it would only give her time to fill them in. The news had only reported that a body was found. There was no mention of whose body, or how old the case had been. Everything was hush, hush, and thanks to the current political upheaval, the story hadn’t made the front page. It was buried so deep that only a person who read the paper from front to back would have seen it. The article was so short that nobody could have distinguished anything from it. He saw it himself, and the only thing it mentioned was that a body had been found in a quiet Boston neighborhood and that police were investigating. It hadn’t even mentioned the neighborhood, or the precinct that was investigating. There was nothing of substance. In fact, he wondered why the reporter had even bothered to write the two lines, and why the paper had felt obligated to print it.

  “So you think a killer, from twenty years ago, decided to risk being caught to come get a body—from your precinct?”

  She nodded. “That makes sense,” she seemed to be asking him, testing to see if her story carried any weight.

  “So where’s the body? You must have some idea.”

  She shrugged. “We heard mention that she may have been working with the O’Shea family. It’s possible you know, they are Irish Mob and they would have been into that stuff back then.”

  Thomas nearly laughed. The O’Shea family were Irish, but they sure as hell weren’t into drugs. They made their money on illegal imports and exports of things of greater value to rich collectors of antiquities. Drugs were never something the O’Shea’s dealt in. He knew this, half the Boston PD knew this, the FBI knew this, Customs and Boarder Patrol knew this; but she didn’t? What were they letting stay on the force these days?

  “Okay, so it’s the O’Shea family. Why don’t you go down to the docks and ask for the body back?” He heard the terseness of his own tone. She clearly had too, because she tensed up again.

  “You might not be a cop anymore, but even you should know we can’t just go in there without probable cause…”

  “But you just said you had probable cause.” He bit his jaw to keep from laughing. Watching the liar squirm was giving him a little too much satisfaction.

  “Well, we just can’t,” she snapped. “And that’s all I have to say to you.” She huffed. “And you can forget about dinner. I won’t be talking to you about this case again.”

  “I had no plans of ever having dinner with you, McNamara.” He said honestly, without a hint of subtlety. “I told you the last time we saw each other, you’re damaged goods, and I don’t do damaged goods. A man would have to be out of his mind to willingly give you a chance to destroy his life.” He turned, before she could try to think of another lie to tell him and he walked away.

  Now he was intrigued, more than he was before. Something was going on inside that building, something sinister, something he planned to figure out. He wanted Neenah Davis’ body back, and he wanted answers to his questions. He also wanted to know just how far up the command the rotten apples were, because his gut was telling him, the cops were involved in things now, and maybe even back twenty years ago. What he planned to do now, was find the detective who had started working the case, the one who was pulled off the case and later dismissed on trumped up charges of evidence tampering. He knew the guy lived in the western part of the state now, and he planned to drive out to see him and get some answers—at least he hoped he would get answers.

  His first course of action would be to check out some things. He needed to tell Thena about the direction the police were going. It would be wrong to let her hear it on the news, or read it in the paper. After he had a chance to talk to her he wanted to go down to the docks, do a little legwork of his own on the O’Shea’s. Of course nobody, not even a military vet, would just walk up to the O’Shea family and demand answers. He would have to do some covert work. After he had a chance to talk to Thena he would scope the area out under the cover of night. He could look around and see what he turned up. He thought about driving by there tonight just to get a feel for the level of sec
urity he was sure was there…maybe a quick pass wouldn’t hurt, he thought. He didn’t for one minute believe the O’Shea’s had taken Neenah Davis’ body, but there was a possibility that somebody had paid them, either in cash or in favors, to dispose of it.

  He cursed under his breath. This was not a conversation he wanted to have with Thena. How could he tell her what the cops thought her mother had been doing? How could he taint the memory of that ten year old girl? Because that’s exactly what Thena’s memories of her mother were; she had seen her through the eyes of a ten year old, and that view wouldn’t allow her parents to be anything less than perfect. He didn’t believe what McNamara had tried to spin his way, but that didn’t mean once the case was closed, that the report wouldn’t slap a bad reputation on a woman who wasn’t around to defend herself.

  He wouldn’t tell Thena tonight. She deserved to get at least one good night’s sleep. If he told her tonight she would do nothing but worry and he didn’t want that. He dialed her number and waited for her sweet voice on the other end.

  “Thena, it’s Thomas. I’m going to pick you up in the morning. I have some new developments on your mother’s case I’d like to discuss with you.”

  “You don’t have to pick me up; the Moped’s tire is all fixed and I can come to you.”

  “I really don’t want you riding that thing right now. It’s dangerous.”

  “No more so than a car.”

  “If somebody wants you dead and they run you off the road on that thing you have nothing to shield your body from the impact. Let me come pick you up so we can talk.”

  “Um…okay. If you think it’s best. But why don’t we just talk here. I’ll have breakfast ready when you get here.”

  “Thena—”

  “I have to eat, Thomas. If you don’t want any food that’s fine, but I’m having breakfast. Don’t get your shorts in a wad; I’m not trying to make a pass at you.”