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“For what it’s worth,” she said finally, “I like the Mercado angle for this, too. Who else could they have been hooked up with?” She refused to think of Danny when she said it.
“The Mercados are our resident bad guys,” Harrison agreed. He snapped the locks on his briefcase.
He left and Molly sat down at the crime book desk, rubbing her forehead. It was nice to know that someone as powerful as Spence Harrison didn’t think she was nuts for her theory. But she still had questions. Who had supplied Bancroft with the belt he’d looped around his neck? Had Bancroft requested it? Or had someone convinced him that he wanted it?
Molly rose from the table suddenly. She left the war room and went to the records department.
Ten minutes later she had a copy of the official visitors log from the cell area for the day Bancroft had been brought in. She ran down the list of the man’s visitors as she stood in the corridor. Some list. She was the only one on it.
No attorney? Why hadn’t Bancroft called for legal counsel? Those sharks could be counted on to show up before the key turned in the lock.
She hadn’t supplied Bancroft with the belt. Therefore, Molly thought, someone else had visited Bancroft without being signed in. Which meant that whoever had been on desk duty that day hadn’t made an issue of the belt-carrying visitor. Whoever had been on the desk had just waved the visitor in. Because it was another cop?
Her stomach shifted. She’d have to check with personnel to find out who had worked the holding cell area during that shift.
She already knew from the autopsy report that Bancroft hadn’t been dead long when she’d found him. She’d gotten him down and had started CPR herself, to no avail. Bancroft had still been warm. His mysterious visitor could have been there within half an hour of her own sign-in.
Molly started to head back to the war room, then she hesitated. Don’t do it, don’t do it, an inner voice warned her. She stepped back into the records room. “I also need the file on a six-year-old convenience store hold-up.”
“Got a number? An exact date?” the clerk asked. She was a pretty, lithe, young blonde named Gale Howard. Most of the guys loved her.
“No, just a name. Daniel Gates.”
“I should be able to find it. Hold on,” Gale said. “Sign another request for me and I’ll go look.”
And stop running my name through the system. Danny’s voice shot back into Molly’s mind like acid, seeming to singe the edges of everything it touched. “Go away,” she said aloud. “Get out of my head. You’re messing with my kids at that center. I have a right to know.”
“Were you talking to yourself?” Gale asked, returning with the file.
“Uh, no. Well, not really.” Molly took the file and stepped away from the desk.
At some point or other, the store-robbing, gun-wielding, mobster jerk would have to leave the center, she decided, returning outside to her car. He couldn’t stay there twenty-four hours a day, could he? She decided to swing by the place again.
His car was still in her space. That was when Molly got her brainstorm. She went back to the police station and found Joe Gannon in the detective’s bureau. She told him what she needed. She could do it herself, but she would probably be questioned by the brass over it.
“What’s this about?” he asked, scowling.
“I volunteer there.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that. But that’s not a no-parking zone, is it?”
“Not unless we decide to make it one.”
“On what grounds?”
Molly thought about it. “That building is a firetrap.”
“Close to it, but it must have passed code or the fire department would have shut them down a long time ago.”
Ron was going to kill her for this. Still, principle was principle. And she wouldn’t be able to park there anymore, either, would she? Plus, it really would make the building safer. “We should probably have a clear path to the front door for…you know, firefighters. Just in case.”
“What the hell are you up to?” Gannon was staring at her as though trying to find the answer in her eyes, then he scratched his temple. “Okay. Who cares? I’ve got bigger fish to fry.”
“So do I. I just want to start with the minnows.”
“You’re going to owe me for this.”
“I always pay my debts, Joe.”
“A six-pack. Any import.”
“Consider it done.”
He nodded, then he called in the tow order for the ugly lemon Dodge in front of the rec center. “I’ll have a temporary No-Parking sign there by nightfall.”
Chapter 3
It didn’t seem possible to Danny that seventeen kids in any given city in modern America could not own gym shoes. Granted, the rec center families were mostly impoverished. But Anita’s tattoo, Cia’s leather and Lester’s boots had all cost money, so the kids were finding it somewhere.
He was being played for a chump, Danny decided. And where had these other eleven kids’ names come from, anyway? There’d only been six teenagers here yesterday.
“You,” he said to Jerome, “had sneaks on yesterday.” He sat at Ron Glover’s desk facing the boy who stood on the other side of it.
“They got stole last night.”
“Stolen.”
“What, now you’re an English teacher?”
“Whatever I have to be, pal, to get you into college.”
That broke Jerome up. “Me? Yeah, right.”
“You. Right.” Danny looked down at the handwritten list. At least the kids had sent Jerome back with it. That was something. Actually, it was more than he had hoped for. “Okay, here’s the deal.”
“I don’t do deals, man.”
He caught the boy’s gaze and held it. “My guess is that you do deals every day, just not with the likes of me. Now where was I? Right. I’m going to leave here and buy gym shoes for everybody who was here yesterday. These other eleven kids—whoever they hell they are—are going to have to make an appearance and personally request their own pair—after they’ve practiced with us at least five times.” In the meantime, Danny realized, he was going to have to try his hand at a little fund-raising. They’d need uniforms, too, and various other equipment, not all of which could come out of his limited bank account.
“Man, that’s lame,” Jerome complained.
Danny stood from the desk.
“Hey, what did you do time for, anyway?” the boy asked suddenly. “You didn’t tell us.”
Danny paused on his way to the door. He’d known it was coming and had already determined to be honest with these kids. He had a halfhearted hope that some of them might learn from his experience. “Money,” he told him. “They said I stole money.”
Jerome didn’t bat an eye. “Yeah, so you got plenty, right? You can buy us all shoes.”
“If I had money to buy you all shoes, would I be driving that scrap of metal out there at the curb?”
“Ain’t no scrap of metal there now, dude.”
“Sure, there is. Right out front.”
“Uh-uh. No more.”
Then, somehow, Danny knew.
He shot around the desk, opening Ron’s office door hard enough and fast enough to make it crack against the wall like a gunshot. He heard Jerome laughing behind him as he jogged outside.
His car was gone.
Danny drove his fist against a stop sign. The metal clanged. Then he realized that he was still holding the piece of paper with the shoe sizes. Swearing, he shoved it down into his jeans pocket and headed back to the center to call—again—for a cab.
He was going to kill her.
When Molly arrived at the center at two o’clock, the space in front of the center walkway was vacant. There was a no-parking sign there. She grinned to herself and started scouting around the block for another space. She found the Dodge around the first corner, deliberately taking up two spaces, half in each of them. Her grin vanished.
Oh, baby, this was war.
She had to park two blocks away this time. Molly locked her Camaro and headed back to the rec center on foot. She found Danny in the gym.
There were fifteen to twenty kids with him today. She’d never seen so many kids here at once in the whole two years she’d volunteered. What was he doing? Paying them to play basketball with him? She stalked across the court and approached the knot of them.
Danny looked up at her. “Good afternoon, Officer.”
“Same to you.” Then she added under her breath, “Inmate.”
He heard her. “Not anymore.” He nodded at the far basket. “Your end of the court is down that way.”
“It’s wherever I want it to be.”
“No, actually, that rule changed yesterday right around five o’clock. Now I’m assigning you one.”
He’d caught her in Ron’s office at five o’clock, Molly thought. She felt her temper spike even as her stomach squirmed with guilt. “No one promoted you to director of this place.”
“Nope. No one did.”
“Then I’d say rule making is a little out of your job description.” Where were the kids going? she wondered. A quick glance around told her that they were all easing back to the other end of the gym. “Her” end. Were they choosing up sides, determining to stick with her against him? Molly started to smile at that prospect then she noticed that Jerome and Fisk, Cia, Lester and Anita were all wearing new gym shoes. Cia wore hers with rolled-up white socks beneath a stretchy, skin-tight red skirt.
Molly picked out Bobby J. standing at the edge of the gym, watching the others the way he usually did. He wasn’t wearing new shoes. They sat on the floor beside him, still in the box.
“In any society, there tends to be a hierarchy,” Danny said.
She turned back to him quickly, her eyes narrowing.
“Hierarchy? Good word. You know, I’d heard they were starting to educate you guys in prison.” The barb hit its mark. She could tell by his face, and she almost felt ashamed of herself.
He shot a basket then jogged and caught the ball back. He was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt today. A muscle shirt. And he had the muscles to go with it. Really incredible muscles, she thought. His upper arms were corded, solid, and the sight made her wonder what it would feel like to have them around her.
Molly pressed her fingers to her temples. He was an ex-con. She was losing her mind.
“Hierarchy implies a sort of a totem pole effect,” he continued, dribbling. “First comes the director. Then there are the paid employees. Oh, wait. Let me rephrase that. Paid employee. There’s only one of us here, isn’t there?”
Molly glared at him.
“Then we have the bottom dwellers. They would be the volunteers. Are you following me here, pretty Molly? I think so. Those dazzling green eyes of yours are shooting sparks.”
Real anger shot through her. “Fran and Plank give generously—” Then she broke off and made a funny little sound in her throat.
Startled, Danny stopped playing with the basketball to look at her. Was she blushing? Why? Because he’d said she had dazzling eyes? She was a cop. She couldn’t be so naive and innocent that she couldn’t take a little pure male appreciation in stride. The possibility had something tightening suddenly across his chest. The effect started to spread to other regions before he clamped down on it.
Danny turned and shot the ball through the hoop again. “I admire all of you who donate your time here. All this is just an abject lesson on the authority-chain around here. And, no, they didn’t teach me words like abject in prison. I was actually a pretty good student. Before.”
Molly waited for him to say something else about before, then she realized that he wasn’t going to. She might have asked, but then he’d probably think she was interested or something.
“Bite me,” she grated.
“Oh, honey, I wouldn’t give you the pleasure.”
He turned back in time to see her face actually flame this time. That tightening-effect started to hit his body again, then it was doused by pure surprise. Danny dropped the ball, and it hit his foot, rebounding and rolling away.
“You lost something there, jock.” She looked smug now.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“About so big, round?” She held her hands up as though to grasp the basketball.
“Not the same something I was just thinking of.” He let his gaze coast up and down her deliberately.
It happened again, he realized. She had the most transparent face of any woman he’d ever met. But at the moment, Molly French’s heart was stamped all over her face. His innuendoes were really getting to her.
He took a step closer to her. She actually surprised him by holding her ground this time. One of her heels seemed to shift, but she stayed put.
“Get out of my space,” she warned. “Back off.”
“Molly, this is my half of the gym. I can step wherever I please. Volunteer…” He poked her gently on the chest, right beneath her collarbone. This time she jumped back skittishly. Then he tapped his own chest. “Employee. And by the way, volunteer, you owe me eighty bucks.”
“For what?” she asked, startled.
“That’s what it cost me to get my car out of the tow lot.”
“Your car got towed?”
She blinked with feigned innocence. He wanted to close his mouth over hers and take that smirk right off her lips, swallow it deep, keep it for his own. That rattled him. The suddenness of the urge had him stepping back of his own accord. “Get off my court.”
“You’re going to teach basketball now?”
