Running Hot

THIRTY-EIGHT

Luther watched Grace come out of the sea, removing the mask and snorkel as she walked through the light surf. Water spilled down her shoulders, breasts and hips. Her hair was sleeked behind her ears.

She had picked up the little black bathing suit at one of the boutiques on Kalakaua that morning. He had thrown the snorkeling gear into the backseat of the Jeep and driven her to the secluded little cove that he thought of as his private slice of paradise.

Wayne and Petra had sent them off with a couple of sandwiches, some bottled water and instructions not to come back until the dinner service. A real date, he thought.

Grace dropped lightly onto the towel beside him under the umbrella, looking fresh and vibrant, utterly feminine and wet. Incredibly sexy.

She gave him a curious look when she reached for a bottle of chilled water.

“Something wrong?” she asked,

He realized that he was staring at her.

“Nothing’s wrong,” he said.

“What are you thinking about?”

“Sex.”

“I hear men do that a lot.”

“What about women?”

“We think about it, too,” she said, “but it is possible that we have broader fantasy horizons.”

“Yeah? What else shows up on your horizon?”

“Shoes come to mind.”

They both looked at his bare feet.

“Shoes are sort of absent from my horizon,” he admitted.

“It’s okay.” She patted his bare leg. “You have very nice feet. Big and strong.”

“You like big, strong feet on a man?”

“To tell you the truth, I never paid much attention to male feet until quite recently.” She smiled somewhat smugly and slipped on her sunglasses. “But now I find them utterly fascinating.”

“Good to know.”

She lounged back on her elbows. “You never told me why you quit your job with the police department.”

He contemplated the frothy surf while he considered. He had known the question was coming. She had told him her story. She had a right to know his. More than that, he wanted her to know it. The exchange was part of the bond.

“I told you that my talent had its uses while I was on the force,” he said.

“Yep, the way I see it, you must have been the great neutralizer in any kind of dangerous situation. One stroke of your aura and the bad guy drops his gun and goes to sleep. Cool.”

“There were other things I could do with my talent.”

She tipped her head a little to the side. “Such as?”

“Get confessions.”

“Hmm. Confessions. Double cool.”

“Without laying a finger on the perp,” he said evenly. “I never touched your client, Counselor. Check out the videotape of the confession. Your guy couldn’t wait to tell us how he beat the victim to a bloody pulp.”

“How did that work for you?”

“Great. For a while. You’d be amazed how easy it is. Deep down a lot of them

wanted to tell me how smart or how macho they were. Robbing a convenience store is an adrenaline rush. Breaking and entering a house is a thrill. Murder is the ultimate power trip. Perps want to impress the cops. Show them how tough they are. So, on some level, yes, a lot of them wanted to talk. I just gave that natural inclination a psychic shove in the right direction.”

“I always assumed guilt was the motivating factor in a confession.”

“Sometimes it is.” He fished a bottle of water out of the cooler. “I can work with a bad conscience, too. With a few tweaks, a little nagging regret or anxiety about what your parents will think can become crushing guilt.”

“All it takes is a little subtle manipulation and the suspects suddenly can’t resist spilling their guts, is that it?”

“Get it on videotape, add a little hard evidence and you’ve usually got a case. No rubber hoses or misleading statements required.”

She looked at him very steadily, her eyes unreadable behind the glasses. “You must have been a very good cop.”

“I was,” he said. He drank some of the crisp, cold water. “Very, very good.”

“So you quit because you felt you had turned into some kind of psychic vigilante.”

He had known she would understand. What surprised him was the sense of relief that descended on him.

“Something like that,” he said. “It was never a fair fight. Statistically speaking, most of the perps I came in contact with were seriously messed up, the products of horrific parenting or no parenting at all. A lot of them had been abused as children. Many had some kind of mental illness. Nearly half the suspects I caught couldn’t even read a newspaper, let alone hold down a decent job.”

“You felt sorry for them?”

He smiled faintly. “I wouldn’t go that far but the truth is, the majority of the people I helped send away didn’t stand a chance against me. I could and did violate their right to due process without anyone else, including the suspect, knowing it.”

“You didn’t violate their rights in the legal sense.”

“No, but I sure as hell did in a very real sense.”

“You accomplished a lot of good, Luther. Putting bad people away. Getting justice for the victims. Those are important to a civilized society.”

“That’s what I told myself for several years. But I found out the hard way that the vigilante thing carries a load of bad karma.”

“Your two broken marriages?”

“Among other things. I also managed to freak out so many partners that eventually no one wanted to work with me. I got a reputation for being a lone wolf. That’s not good when you’re a cop. You’re supposed to be part of a team. I tended to make the people around me very uneasy.”

She frowned. “Did the other detectives you worked with ever realize what you were doing?”

“They knew that I almost always got results but they didn’t know how I got them. Hell, they didn’t

want to know. A few concluded that I was somehow hypnotizing the suspects. Turns out no one wants to work too closely with a guy who may be able to hypnotize you without you knowing it.”

“I can see where that might be an issue,” she said.

“I went through partners the way the Dark Rainbow goes through dishwashers. Some of the other guys had enough natural sensitivity of their own to wonder if there might be a paranormal explanation for my string of confessions. They didn’t like that idea any better than the hypnosis theory.”

“Because it made them question their own mental health?” she asked.

“Most successful cops have a fair amount of intuition when it comes to dealing with the kind of folks who lie, cheat and kill. They’re usually happy to admit that they have good instincts.”

“Aren’t good instincts viewed as an asset in the police world?”

“Sure. But no cop wants to get slapped with the psychic tag. The woo-woo factor can kill a career real fast.”

She studied him intently. “You just walked away from the job?”

“There was what I guess you could call a final straw. An incident. People died. I walked away after that.”

“What happened?”

He watched the sunlight flash on the waters of the cove.

“There was a man,” he said. “His name was George Olmstead. He walked into the office one day and said he’d just killed his business partner. Turned over the gun. It had his prints on it. He claimed he and the partner had quarreled over whether to sell the business. He said he was desperate for the money but the partner refused to go through with the deal.”

“You didn’t believe him?”

“He seemed calm enough but there was something spiking in his aura. I talked to him for a while. Pushed a little. It came out that he wasn’t the one who had shot the partner. Olmstead was covering up for his daughter.”

“She was involved with the partner?”

“They’d had an affair,” he said. “She was twenty-five years old. She had been seeing a shrink since she was in high school and she was on medication. The partner belatedly started to realize that she was very unstable. He tried to end things. She went crazy and shot him.”

“And then went running to her father?”

“Who told her that he would handle things. He wanted to protect her. He saw that as his job. He’d been doing it all her life. She was his only child. The mother had died years earlier.”

She nodded. “Did he know about the relationship between his daughter and his partner?”

“Yes. He’d encouraged it because he thought marriage would give his daughter some emotional stability. After the murder, he was convinced that the whole thing was his fault so he was eager to take the blame.”

“But his story fell apart.”

“Because of me. When we arrested his daughter, he felt he had failed in his duty as a father. The daughter committed suicide in jail. Olmstead went home, stuck a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.”

“Thereby proving that he was just as unstable as his daughter,” Grace said quietly. “But you felt responsible.”

“I was responsible. I should have called in the department shrinks and let them handle it. Instead, I went ahead and prodded the weak points on Olmstead’s aura until I got my answers. Another case closed for the lone wolf.”

“It was your job to get the truth,” she said calmly.

“Sure. It was just too bad a couple of people committed suicide because I was so good at doing my job.”

“Yes, it was too bad. But it was not your fault. One of those two people murdered a man and the other tried to cover up the crime. You were not responsible for their actions.”

“Maybe not technically.”

She brandished her half-empty bottle of water. “Hold it right there, Malone. You were not responsible technically or otherwise. You used your talent, a natural ability that is as much a part of you as your eyesight or your hearing or your sense of touch, to do your job and to bring some justice into the world.”

“I told you, the bad guys were broken losers for the most part. I rolled over them like a train.”

“Works for me,” she shot back. “They were bad guys, remember? Just their bad luck they ran into someone who could see through their lies.” She paused, lowering the water bottle. “But I do understand why you felt you had to quit the force.”

“Yeah?”

“You’re stuck with the instinct to protect and defend. It’s part of who you are. But like I keep telling you, you’re also a hopeless romantic. You want to go after what you consider fair game. Working for J&J gives you that satisfaction. You get to go up against bad guys who possess talents that are the equivalent of yours. You’re doing your hunting on a level playing field now.”

“I think of it more as a level jungle.”

She smiled. “Good visual.”