McQuaid's Justice Read online

  He laced his hands behind his head. The heat felt good on his damaged leg as well, but his heart was sore and his groin ached, unrelieved from an hour ago when he’d kissed Amy good-night at her door down the corridor from her father’s room, and ended up, somehow, with her blouse half-off and her bare breast filling his hand. Not a wise move when the judge had barely retired to his rooms some fifty feet away.

  His instinct must still have been fairly blunted. He didn’t even see Amy in the doorway to his room till she’d been standing there for quite a while in her long black satin nightgown, watching him.

  He lowered his arms. There wasn’t much he could or cared to do about his bare chest or boxers bulging. Nothing was going to happen here tonight. “You shouldn’t be here, Amy.”

  Her gaze took in the length of his body. She looked flustered. There was no way she didn’t know what condition he was in, but she stood her ground. “Can we talk?” she signed.

  “No.” Maybe she could. He couldn’t.

  She closed the door and locked it behind her. “I know about Seth.”

  His heart squeezed tight. She must’ve taken herself off to her daddy’s file cabinet and pulled out the report her uncle provided her father on him. He thought if anything would have eased the constant ache in his groin it’d be that, but he was wrong. That she knew, that she was here when she knew the worst there was to know about him made his need still more urgent, made him harder and hungrier for wanting the kind of woman who would persist in the face of it.

  He wanted to ask if her uncle’s report had happened to mention he’d gone without a hint of an arousal for close to four years now, but he still couldn’t talk. Locked in the pit of his mouth, his tongue wouldn’t work.

  “He was trying to kill himself on his motorcycle, wasn’t he? Before you even met him.”

  “And that’s relevant because...?”

  “He had more disappointments in his life than your guardianship falling through.”

  “Yeah.” Abandoned at three when it became obvious he wasn’t going to be a talking baby, in and out of foster homes for the deaf for another twelve years, the kid was screwed from the get-go. “That broken promise was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

  “It wasn’t your fault, Cy.”

  “Whose fault was it, Amy? You read between the lines. You tell me who else was accountable.”

  “Does someone have to be accountable? Isn’t it just possible he hurt too much? My God, Cy! Why don’t you ask yourself instead who did more for Seth. Who—”

  “I made him believe he could count on me, Amy. It sure as hell wasn’t his idea.”

  “Who do you think you are, McQuaid? God? Did you think if only you loved Seth enough he wouldn’t try it again?”

  “Yeah,” he signed fiercely. “Me and my God complex, that’s what we thought.”

  “Could you have loved him any more?”

  Jesus, Lord, what did she want from him? His eyes burned. “Get out, Amy.”

  She shook her head. “No. I want an answer. I deserve an answer.”

  “Then figure it out for yourself,” he snarled, getting to his feet, his tongue, though not his sex, loosened by anger. “Obviously, I could have loved the kid more.”

  She came toward him. “And you know that because if you had loved him more he wouldn’t have had to go kill himself.”

  “Yeah. That’s how I know.” He swallowed. His throat jammed, thick with emotion. “You want to twist the knife a little deeper?”

  “Sure,” she signed, toe-to-toe with him, her hands all but crying aloud. “Let me twist the knife a little more. What about this, Cy? What if Seth was a hearing boy? Could you have loved him that little bit more then?”

  “No.” His gut wrenched, a god-awful sound came out of him. It wasn’t true. He’d thought it was, but when she put it like that—

  “Is that what you’re telling me?” Tears filled her eyes. “You didn’t love Seth enough because he couldn’t hear you say it?”

  “No. Goddamn it, Amy, no! I loved him—”

  “As much as if he were your own child?”

  He shook his head. He gritted his teeth, he couldn’t help it. “More.”

  “Then at least have the balls to admit that there wasn’t enough love in the world to keep that child going, Cy, because if you don’t, it’s the same as saying he wasn’t in more pain than he could stand. For a little while, you made a difference in his world, but you couldn’t make his world over or right again.”

  He dragged a hand over his head. He thought he would explode, break down, cry. He swallowed. Shoved the words past his lips. “Amy, why are you doing this?”

  “Because I’m afraid.” A small sob escaped her. “Because I’m in love with you. Because if you don’t love me,” her fingers stumbled, “I need to know it now. And if you do, I need to know that too so I have a fighting chance.”

  He stood there cramped in his arousal and the pain of wanting her, loving her, needing there to be a chance. He couldn’t move, but only run the heel of his thumb against his swollen flesh and the scar tissue stretched too tight so nearby, to ease the excruciating throb.

  A moment of fiercely indelicate awareness hung between them like the scent of scorched air. He closed his hand tight and endured, then opened it and said the words in her language. I love you, Amy. I love you.

  He reached for her hips to draw her closer. She rested her forearms on his and sank to the floor with him, to their knees. His strong, powerful, callused hands pulled her bottom tight against him. She cried out with no understanding at all what her cry meant to him, only a fathomless instinct for moving brilliantly against him, shifting her hips, arching, offering, intoxicating, splaying her hands where his haunches gave way to the backs of his legs, the very tips of her fingers teasing the root and most tender, distended parts of him.

  He thought he would die then and there.

  She brought her lips to his breast and let her lips dawdle, back and again, light as the stroke of a butterfly kiss over the thick, curling black hair that covered his chest. She touched her long-silenced tongue to his nipple. He groaned deep inside, and folding his arms about her, he cradled her head to his chest. For long, exquisite moments, by the tenderness and care and delay of his own pleasure, he held her like that and she knew this language was the language of their common ground and he had told her God’s own truth.

  Cy McQuaid was in love with her.

  He withdrew to cup her sweet face in his hands, to say again that he loved her, to kiss her madly. He dragged his thumb along her cheek to her jaw to the hollow at her throat to the top of her breast to a nipple as taut and tender as he had found his own flesh.

  She lifted her gown and he lowered his boxers. She saw his ravaged, shiny flesh then, where a terrorist’s bullets had sent him into his years of pain-racked and uncertain wilderness, Seth’s years, the ones that had schooled Cy in the fine art of understanding her language. Her touch, there, alone, made the years a more bearable thing. The homage of her lips drove the shadows from his soul and he was not lost in his wilderness anymore, but found.

  HE NEVER SLEPT past five, but across the time zones in D.C. that meant seven. By the time Cy had showered his deeply satisfied body, shaved his happier face, dressed and gone downstairs, the judge sat alone in the breakfast alcove. Already done with his grapefruit, eggs and toast, he sat with his cup of coffee, scanning the morning newspapers.

  He looked up, met Cy’s gaze and set his papers aside. “Mr. McQuaid.”

  “Sir.”

  “Please. Sit down.” He rang a small bell to summon his housekeeper who appeared at the door as if she had been waiting behind it. “Mrs. Childers, Mr. McQuaid,” he said, his eyes never leaving Cy.

  “Ma’am. I’m pleased to meet you,” he acknowledged the introduction. He took one of the other two settings at which a grapefruit had already been placed. The slight, middle-aged woman nodded, smiled, rolled her eyes out of the judge’s view and duck
ed behind her door.

  “She thinks I don’t know she rolls her eyes,” the judge said. “It’s Childers’s way of putting my guests at ease in my august presence.”

  Cy grinned. “It works.”

  His look suggested perhaps Cy shouldn’t be so quickly put at ease. His heart thumped hard in his chest, but it was her father who looked away first. Cy cut into a section of his fruit.

  “One of your colleagues rang up twenty minutes ago.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Ted Wilms. One of the Bureau’s crime-lab directors. Seems there was no response from you to his repeated pages last evening around midnight. Ten o’clock, your time, or so he thought.”

  Cy swallowed the chunk of grapefruit whole. He’d been with Amy then.

  “I thought I heard my daughter stirring outside her room about that time. I thought I might share a few private moments with her. Perhaps fix her a mug of warm milk to help her sleep.”

  He paused.

  Cy put down his spoon.

  His heart pounded. It was in Reeves’s power to make him wish he’d never been born. His whole life, certainly his career, hung in the balance. Twisting in the wind from a thread no more substantial than a spider’s silk, but he would not insult Amy or her father’s intelligence with denials, or apologies he didn’t mean.

  “What? You’ve nothing to say in your own defense?”

  “I’m not on trial, sir. And what happens between Amy and me is not in your jurisdiction.”

  “In my house—”

  “Or anywhere else.”

  The judge scowled deeply. “Will you not even give lip service to thinking you’re falling in love with her?”

  “That wouldn’t be necessary. I do love her.”

  The judge fell back against his chair. Sunlight slanting in the east-facing windows glinted off the brass fixtures of his suspenders. “It’s not often I find myself at a loss for words, McQuaid. I’m obliged, as her father, to say that if you hurt Amy, you’ll have me to deal with, but the truth is, my daughter is far more likely to be the heartbreaker than the heartbroken.”

  Cy nodded. He’d never suffered illusions about the emotional gauntlet Amy represented.

  The doorbell rang as Mrs. Childers served his eggs and toast. She scurried off to answer the summons.

  “That’ll be Wilms, I expect.”

  Cy frowned. “We had an appointment later—”

  “We did,” Wilms said from the door. “Ted Wilms. Good to meet you, McQuaid.” He shook hands with Cy, then Reeves, then took a seat where there was no service setting. “Trouble is, I’ve been called to a Florida crime scene, and I wanted to talk to you myself. Please. Eat. I’ll keep it short and sweet.”

  Amy came into the room, dressed in her usual black, today a long slender woolen skirt, a deep V-neck sweater, dress boots.

  Cy rose, followed by her father and Wilms.

  “This is my daughter, Amy. Amy, Ted Wilms of the FBI labs.”

  “Very pleased to meet you,” she signed, no need of interpreting her warmth.

  They all sat once again, and Wilms started in directly. “Here it is. We were able to perform some spectral analyses on the autopsy slides from Dr. Courson’s files. I won’t go into all the science involved. Suffice it to say that we have certain experience now that we didn’t have twenty-five years ago. Experience,” he clarified, “with the effects of oxygen deprivation in deep sea diving, space exploration and the like. When we ran computer simulations to achieve the effects generated by the analyses on the slides, it became a virtual certainty that Julia Reeves lost consciousness as a result of oxygen starvation prior to the blow to her head. She was severely asthmatic. If she exceeded the limits of her ability to breathe, or her medication to keep her air passages open?” Wilms shrugged. “Blackout followed by death.”

  Wilms looked pleased, or rather, as if they should all have been very heartened by proof that a crime had not in fact been committed. It meant Byron Reeves was on an unimpeded course to his place on the bench of the Supreme Court.

  But of the three of them, only Amy’s father looked in the slightest relieved. Cy said nothing. Eventually the judge asked, “Does this new evidence put your suspicions to rest, Amy?”

  She straightened. There was a brittleness around her eyes and lips Cy couldn’t read. “It must, mustn’t it, Daddy?”

  CY PULLED RANK and got himself and Amy first-class seats on United out of Dulles to Denver International Airport earlier than their confirmed flight. He felt caught between a rock and a truly hard spot.

  It wasn’t that he had any blind faith that the Bureau labs were infallible. Even Wilms had admitted when Cy walked him out to his car that the meaning of the evidence still depended on the spin.

  Seen one way, Julia Reeves had gone out after Byron and her son, finally succumbed to the thin mountain air, fainted and cracked her head in a fatal blow against a rock.

  Seen another way, all one had to do was keep her asthma inhaler away from her till she lost consciousness. With no attempt to revive her, no adrenaline, no steroids, no CPR, her oxygen-deprived brain would not function.

  However refined and ultra-high-tech the methods of analysis used, the tissue slides couldn’t reveal intent to kill, and if Perry Reeves had done it, as Amy believed, he was still going to get away with it.

  Justice was sometimes blind, and in Cy’s experience, if you didn’t roll with the losses, they’d crush you, body and soul.

  But as their flight continued, he could see that Amy’s feelings only grew more raw, more aggravated. He was the only one who believed in her, and he was fading fast, or at least accepting the inevitable. He knew by now that she needed time to work things through. They spoke hardly at all until the meals had been served and the service removed afterward.

  She accepted a second glass of wine instead of coffee, and turned to him. “Do you want to know what Takamura believes?”

  “If Hank Takamura has an opinion on this, I’d like to know what it is.”

  She nodded. Takamura’s reputation for insight was no secret from the world. “It was the morning you came. I told him about what Fiona had said to me, what she believes. When I tried to brush off knowing anything about what was going on,” she went on, signing, “he asked me this question.” She proceeded slowly, because with Takamura’s question, the difficulty lay in following him exactly. “He said, ‘When a child hears what no child should hear, and when she then knows what she knows but she is told she knows nothing of the sort, what do you suppose becomes of her?”’

  Cy could only stare at her as the meaning of Takamura’s question sank in. When the truth was turned on its head, what choice would Amy have had but to buy into the lies and accept the insistence of her grown-ups that black was white, up was down, in was out... That everyone loved her dearly, that her brother didn’t mean to push her down some nightmarish hole in the ground... That mommy had an accident, fell down and died, and no one who loved Amy had anything to do with it.

  But if she wasn’t quite strong enough at five to hold out against the lies, maybe her only option was to refuse to hear them ever again.

  That Amy had heard her grandmother Fiona’s music boxes had been a powerful tip-off, but Takamura’s take on the meaning of Amy’s ordeals blew Cy away.

  He sucked down the last half of his own Merlot. “Amy, was he suggesting that things were so dangerous for you that it was easier to go literally deaf than to hear anymore?”

  “Not easier,” she signed. “This,” signifying a terrifying silence by her hands clapped tight over her ears, “is not easier. Only safer. Takamura believes I will never split one arrow with the second until I overcome this...not knowing. Now, at least, I have an idea of what it is I don’t want to know.”

  Cy couldn’t conceive of Amy choosing, even subconsciously, to be deaf rather than hear what she heard in that house, but he had no idea what it was like to be five and so mercilessly threatened. Takamura believed she had chosen it, if his q
uestion meant anything, but the possibility stretched Cy’s personal credulity.

  Like splitting one arrow with another.

  But what he saw clearly was that Amy was being asked yet again to accept a lie in place of the truth. To believe that the evidence proved no harm, no foul. Her father was a man who accepted or rejected evidence on its fundamental merits, and he was already predisposed to disbelieve his brother could have committed so heinous an act as murder on his behalf.

  Therefore, Amy must be wrong.

  If Takamura was right, she had defended against the lies at the unimaginable expense of her hearing. Again, the evidence proved there was no physical basis for her to have gone so utterly, stone-cold deaf, but the truth still hinged on what Amy knew as a five-year-old child.

  THEY DEPLANED into the B terminal at DIA at 6:45 p.m. A heavyset woman well into her thirties walked right up to Amy, and the two of them embraced.

  Amy introduced her to Cy as Jessie Verdell, her assistant and translator at Sykes & Bladestone, and her friend. “Jess,” she signed, “is something wrong?”

  Jessie nodded. “Your renovation was vandalized sometime last night. Nothing too serious, but the police called the office and left a message. The back door had been forced open and a lot of obnoxious graffiti was spray-painted on the walls.”

  Cy grimaced. “Did they catch whoever did it?”

  “No. The neighbors spotted the back screen door hanging open this morning. Anyway, I had one of our runners take your car over a couple of hours ago. I thought if your brother wasn’t here to pick you up and Mr. McQuaid didn’t mind, I’d drive you into town and—”

  “Her brother,” Cy interrupted. “Why would he pick her up?”

  Jessie looked uncertain. “Didn’t he reach you at your father’s place?”

  “No.” Amy sent Cy an irritable look about letting her ask her own questions. “I don’t understand.”

  Jessie described Brent’s call to their office the day before. “I had the impression he wanted to talk to you—that he’d be here to meet you, but then this thing came up with your renovation and I thought you’d want to know right away. The police want to talk to you ASAP also. They’re meeting us at the house at eight o’clock, and the new locks should already be installed. A triple bolt, I told them.”