When the raccoon let out a screech and came charging right at her across the garage floor, Des opened fire. Her first shot tore through the rabid animal’s chest. The damned thing kept right on coming, snarling with crazed fury, leaping at her as Des put two more rounds into its snout, her shots echoing loud in the enclosed space. It landed at her feet, where it scrabbled and twitched before it died, emptying its bladder directly onto her black lace-up boots.
Des kicked it aside, holstered her SIG-Sauer and checked herself over thoroughly to make absolutely certain the raccoon hadn’t managed to penetrate her uniform trousers. There was no torn material, no broken skin. Her thick wool socks were good and dry. She was fine, unless you counted her ruined boots.
She shoved her heavy horn-rimmed glasses up her nose and covered the dead animal with a tarp. Then Dorset’s resident trooper strode back out into the weak late-afternoon sun, leaning her body into the mighty wind that had blown in around lunchtime.
The lady of the house, Gretchen Dunn, was watching her from the kitchen window, eyes wide with fright. Des smiled at her reassuringly as she headed across the snow-packed driveway to her cruiser, where she radioed Jane Shoplick, Dorset’s Animal Control officer. It was Jane who had called Des about a possible rabid raccoon sighting at Dunn’s Cove Landing. Jane was up near Devil’s Hopyard at the time and couldn’t get there for at least an hour. That had left it up to Des.
She got there in five minutes, although she’d needed directions from Jane on how to get there. Dunn’s Cove Landing was not on any local map. Des hadn’t even known it existed. She was discovering that there were quite a few such hidden blue-blooded compounds in Dorset. Unless you knew the people, or had business with them, you would have no idea where they were. This was something entirely new for Des, who came from the outside world where those who had it, flashed it. Not so in Dorset. Here, they did not wish to be found, period. No street sign. No mailboxes. Just a turn-in on Route 156 up by Winston Farms with a tiny, discreet wooden placard that said “Private.” And a long, narrow driveway that twisted its way back through old-growth forest, where she saw half a dozen wild turkeys and a family of deer, then across a ten-acre meadow blanketed with snow. A stone bridge took her over a frozen river. There must have been a patch of open water because she spotted a mighty pair of bald eagles circling the river in search of food. Finally, Des had arrived at a cluster of a dozen Revolutionary War-era mansions and cottages that overlooked the Connecticut River.
The house she wanted was a rambling shingled place with a Subaru wagon parked in the driveway. A big golden retriever was locked inside it, barking furiously. The detached two-story garage had once been a barn. There were two big doors for vehicles, both closed. Also a people door, again, closed. This one had a cat door in it.
Gretchen Dunn had come out to greet her, wearing a duffel coat and stretch pants. She was a young mother with tiny girlish features and a blond ponytail.
“Is everyone okay?” Des asked as she climbed out of her cruiser.
“Just a little shaken,” responded Gretchen, who seemed pretty calm under the circumstances. “Make that a lot shaken. Ginny, my ten-year-old, was out in the garage putting down food for Herbert. He’s our outdoor cat-real tough guy, won’t come inside no matter how cold it gets. And Ginny walked in on this great big raccoon eating Herbert’s kibble. It screeched at her and chased her right on out of there. Fortunately, Casey was on the porch and he chased it back inside. He has a mighty big bark, and he’s real protective of the girls. I called Jane right away, then checked every single pore on Ginny’s body. She hasn’t got a scratch on her. She’s just fine. We’re having cocoa now.”
“I can see Casey. Where’s Herbert?”
“He took off across the meadow. What do you think, is it rabid?”
If a raccoon showed itself during daylight and behaved aggressively, then it most likely was rabid. Everyone in Dorset knew that. Just as Des knew what to do as soon she got the call from Jane.
“I think we can’t afford to take any chances. Please go back inside now.”
And with that, Des had moved stealthily into the garage, her SIG drawn and her eyes searching for the animal. She didn’t have to search for long-it came right at her from behind the trash barrels.
“Is it dead?” Gretchen Dunn asked her now, when Des was finished reporting in to Jane.
“It won’t bother you anymore.” Des popped her trunk, donned a pair of latex crime scene gloves and untied her ruined boots, which she bagged and tossed into the trunk along with the gloves. Then she stepped into her spare boots and laced them up. “Jane will be along soon. She’ll take it in for tests. Is Herbert up-to-date on his rabies shots?”
“I just double-checked my records. He had his last vaccine over the summer.”
“That’s good,” Des said, since the raccoon had been eating out of the cat’s dish. Rabies could be transmitted from one animal to another through their saliva. An alarming number of local people didn’t know this and didn’t bother to inoculate or, for that matter, neuter their outdoor cats-thereby explaining why Des and her friend Bella Tillis were constantly rescuing so many sick, sad kittens from the Dumpsters behind nearby markets and restaurants. They tried to find good homes for the ones they managed to nurse back to health. Presently, eighteen bright-eyed imps were bunking in Des’s garage and basement. “I’d throw out Herbert’s food and water dishes. And change his bedding, too.”
“I absolutely will,” Gretchen promised, wrinkling her cute little nose. “Can I offer you a cup of cocoa? We’re making ginger snaps, too.”
“Yum, sounds wonderful. But I have to be somewhere.” The Troop F Barracks in Westbrook, to be specific. Anytime she discharged her weapon, she had to file an incident report immediately.
Two grave, adorable little blond girls were waving to her now from the kitchen window. Des waved back at them.
“I should have been able to handle this myself,” Gretchen confessed, gazing at them. “But Shawn and I don’t like having guns around. I felt so helpless.”
“Don’t second-guess yourself. I’ve been trained to handle this kind of deal. You haven’t. Say you did have a gun, okay? Chances are, that raccoon would have taken a piece out of you by the time you got your shot off. And you’d be on your way to the emergency ward right now. You did right, Gretchen.”
“Well, thank you. And thanks for being such a, you know, good neighbor.”
This was the ultimate compliment in Dorset-to call someone a good neighbor. It was a compliment that no one had paid Des before. Gretchen Dunn was her very first.
Beaming, Des climbed into her cruiser and started her way back down the private drive to Route 156, positive that she could smell raccoon piss on her, although she could not imagine how this was so. As she lowered her front windows, freezing air be damned, it did occur to her that she’d just experienced her first genuine action of the entire winter. Until now, about all she’d been doing was filing one-car accident reports-weather-related, alcohol-related or both. Crime was way down from the peak summer months, when she’d had her hands full with bar brawlers and shoplifters. In fact, winter was so quiet here that Dorset scarcely needed a resident trooper at all. But it did need one, of course. Home break-ins would be rampant if she were not around. And the drug dealers would set up shop. And then Dorset wouldn’t be Dorset anymore.
It was past four now, and the sun had already passed behind the trees, leaving puddles behind on Route 156 where the sunlight had warmed the plowed, salted pavement. Those puddles would freeze back over real fast, so Des took it nice and slow, her hands light on the wheel, foot steady on the gas. She was a patient, humble driver when she was around ice. She did not tailgate. Did not make sudden stops or starts. She respected the ice.
But she hadn’t gone a mile down the narrow, shadowy country road before she came upon yet another fool who didn’t respect it. No, he’d been too busy listening to those TV commercials instead of his own common sense. And now he and his super-duper, manly-man’s Jeep Grand Whatever had gone skidding off the road into the ditch, where he was trapped inside a three-foot ice bank, his wheels spinning furiously as he tried to power his way out of there, pedal to the metal. God, how Des wished those damned commercials would stop showing SUVs conquering Mount Everest in third gear. In the real world, SUVs performed no better on ice than any other vehicle. But their dumb-assed owners flat-out refused to believe that. And so they disrespected the ice. And so Des spent half of her time rescuing them. In addition to the jumper cables and spare fuses that she carried year round, she had a winter ditch kit consisting of extra scrapers and blankets, two jugs of sand and a pair of eight-pound Snow Claws with hardened-steel teeth to slide under those spinning rear wheels. As she pulled over and got out, squaring her big Smokey hat on her head, she decided she just ought to go ahead and become a tow-truck operator. She’d make a lot more money.
He was young and burly and absolutely positive that if he just pressed down a little harder on that gas pedal, he’d be able to blow his way out of there. As she approached, he rolled down his window, glowering at her.
“Well, you’re good and stuck, aren’t you?” she called to him pleasantly over the angry whine of his spinning wheels. “If you’ll just ease off of the gas, I’ll see if I can help you-”
“Just leave me be,” he snapped at her irritably. “I already called Triple-A on my cell. I’m fine, okay?”
Des had encountered this before. A certain species of young male who refused to be helped by a woman, especially one of color. A point of pride with them or some fool thing.
“Suit yourself, sir,” she said, hoping the auto club was all backed up and he had to spend the next two hours sitting there. “But please put on your flasher, okay? We wouldn’t want anyone to plow into you.”
She climbed back in her cruiser and continued on to the Westbrook Barracks, reflecting on just how far she had managed to come in so short a time. It seemed like only yesterday that her smile had lit up the cover of Connecticut magazine. Back then, she had been the state’s great non-white hope, youngest woman in state history to make lieutenant on the Major Crime Squad, and the only one who was black. Within a year she’d moved right on up to homicides. Always, she had produced.
And now here she was, Master Sergeant Des Mitry, getting dissed by stranded mesomorphs.
This was the price she’d paid to pursue her dream, and she was willing to pay it. Happy to pay it. But there were moments, like right now, when it was growing dark and she was driving along in the middle of snowy nowhere, swearing she could still smell raccoon piss, that Des missed the action.
Even though that action had nearly torn her apart. Mostly, it was the faces of the murder victims. She could never seem to forget those faces. Especially the babies. The fact that her marriage to Brandon was falling apart certainly hadn’t helped. In order to cope with it all, she had brought home crime scene photos and started making drawings of them. Transferring the horror from her nightmares to the page, line by line, shadow by shadow. Injecting the images with fearsome emotional power. Turning them into one gut-wrenching portrait after another. Thanks to the twist of fate that had barreled her headlong into Mitch Berger, Des’s therapy became her salvation. Her portraits had gained her admittance to the world-renowned Dorset Academy of Fine Arts, where she was presently studying long-pose figure drawing two nights a week, thereby shining a light on every single weakness in her game. Still, a pair of her most recent victim portraits had been included in this month’s prestigious student show, and that was not shabby for a freshman. Des still had much more to learn, and she knew this. Yet she’d found herself getting itchy in class lately. Anxious to move on. She wasn’t sure where. She wasn’t sure why.
She wasn’t sure about Mitch, either. She could not imagine her life without him in it, even though they made no sense at all together. None. But lately her beloved, exceedingly chatty doughboy had grown strangely quiet and remote on her. Something was eating at him. He would not say what. All she had to go on was the lone grenade he’d lobbed at her across the dinner table a few weeks back-a cryptic, highly unsettling question that had instantly filled her with a million doubts. Doubts that Mitch had, thus far, done squat to assuage. Anytime it seemed that he was about to spill his guts he’d swallow hard and out would come… nada. His Great Big Fat Nothing Gulp, she’d taken to calling it. Des was terribly thrown by his behavior, more than she could have thought possible. In fact, Mitch’s strained silences were making her so tense that she was experiencing the recurrence of a dreaded nervous thing that she thought she’d said good-bye to back when she was a gawky, vision-impaired giraffe of a high school girl.
Still, she had to admit that he’d sounded like his bubbly old self on the phone this morning when he called to tell her they’d been invited to dinner at Astrid’s Castle. More excited than she’d heard him in weeks. So maybe it had passed, whatever the hell it was.
Then again, maybe it hadn’t.
She was tied up at the barracks for well over an hour filling out her incident report, requisitioning a new pair of boots from the quartermaster, and responding to one smirky male query after another about that pungent new perfume she seemed to be wearing. It was already six o’clock by the time she started home to her cottage overlooking Uncas Lake. Mitch was expecting to pick her up in twenty minutes. No way. She phoned him on her cell to say she’d have to meet him there. No problem. Mitch was used to her unpredictable work schedule.
Bella Tillis was busy whipping up an apple cake in the big open kitchen when Des got there. A round, fierce little Brooklyn-born widow in her mid-seventies, Bella Tillis was bunking with Des while she looked for a place of her own. Bella had been her next-door neighbor in the New Haven suburb of Woodbridge back when Brandon had ditched Des for Tamika, a U.S. congressman’s daughter with whom he’d started sleeping back when he and Tamika were classmates at Yale Law School. In fact, Brandon had never stopped sleeping with Tamika, not even after he’d married Des. Which had taught Des one very valuable lesson in life: Dont ever trust lawyers. And caused her to make one very solemn vow to herself: I will never get married again for as long as I live. Because no man on this planet was ever going to get the chance to hurt her that bad again. Never. Utterly shattered by Brandon’s betrayal, Des had stopped going to work, stopped leaving the house and stopped eating. Until, that is, Bella came barging in one morning, Tupperware tub of stuffed cabbage in hand, and recruited Des for her feral stray rescue program. They were best friends now. When Des relocated to Dorset, Bella unloaded her own big house and followed her. As far as Des was concerned, she could stay as long as she wanted. Bella was good company and a dynamite housekeeper and it was nice to have her there when Des felt like staying over with Mitch.
“Oy-yoy, Desiree, what is that awful smell?” she demanded when Des came charging through the back door into the laundry room, shivering from the wind.
“It’s raccoon urine,” Des replied as she stood there on the mud rug, unlacing her spare boots. Not an easy proposition when she had five house cats studying her socks with keen, busy-nosed interest.
Bella appeared in the laundry-room doorway, scrunching up her face. “Forgive me, it sounded like you just said-”
“You asked, I answered.”
“Take those socks off at once, tall person. I will not have you tracking that-that smell all over my clean floor.”
“Um, okay, I like to think of it as our clean floor.”
“Off!” she roared, hurling herself in Des’s path. Des towered over her, but Bella was as wide as a nose tackle.
“All right, all right.” She yanked them off and tossed them out the door into the snow. “Feel free to burn them.”
“Oh, I shall. Believe me.”
Barefoot, Des hurried across the kitchen toward her bedroom. When she’d bought the place she’d torn out walls so that her kitchen, dining room and living room all flowed together. Her studio was in the living room, which had floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the lake. “Bella, I am feeling so not glamorous right now. And I am late, late, late. Tell me what to put on.”
“Well, for starters, forget glamorous.” Bella went back to work on a Granny Smith with a paring knife, slicing it rapid-fire into a mixing bowl. “You’re not about glamour.”
Des stopped in her tracks, hands on hips. “Was that supposed to be a compliment?”
“No, that was honesty,” she replied, hurling cinnamon, brown sugar and nutmeg into the bowl with the apple slices. She made cakes just like Des’s granny did. Never measured, never used a recipe. Hell, there was no recipe. “Glamour is a facade, Desiree. Strictly for tsotskes who are trying to hide something. You don’t have to hide a thing. You’re the real goods.”
“Does that mean I should or shouldn’t wear a dress?”
Bella puffed out her cheeks in disgust. “Covering your tuchos with a dress is like putting a veil over the Mona Lisa. I forbid it.”
“Girl, I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“I don’t either, quite frankly.”
Des whipped off her uniform en route to her bedroom and jumped into the shower, toweling off while she searched frantically through her closet. She was not what anyone would call delicate. Des knew this. She was broad-shouldered, high-rumped and cut with muscle. Nor was she a girlie-girl. She kept her hair short and nubby, and wore no war paint or nail polish. But she did have alluring almond-shaped pale green eyes, and a dimply wraparound smile that could melt titanium from a thousand feet away. And Des knew this, too. She settled on her black cashmere turtleneck, gray flannel slacks and black boots with chunky two-inch heels.
By now it was a quarter to seven. She’d already reloaded her weapon at the barracks. She tossed it and her shield into her shoulder bag. Her cell phone and pager she wore on her belt. On her way out she shoved her gloves into a pocket of the hooded, buttery-soft shearling coat that she’d bought in Florence on her honeymoon. She loved that damned coat so much she’d worn it around their hotel room naked. Brandon hadn’t exactly minded. God, that was ages ago.
“Yum, what am I smelling?” she wondered, pausing in the kitchen to say good-bye.
“I already had the oven going, so I figured I may as well do my brisket, too. When I thawed it this morning I didn’t know you had plans.”
“Sure, we can have it tomorrow. Mitch loves your brisket.”
“Of course he does. This is a man of discerning tastes.”
“If that’s the case, then how do you explain his American chop suey?”
“This is also a man,” Bella replied, glancing at her. “What’s with you tonight? You nervous about meeting Ada?”
“Should I be? I don’t know her films.”
“She was one of my heroes when I was a girl,” Bella recalled, her face creasing into a smile. “So smart and gutsy and beautiful. Her husband, Luther, was a very fine playwright. The two of them were hounded out of the country by those thugs during the McCarthy era. That was a terrible time, Desiree. A girlfriend of mine whose father wrote for the radio, he ended up committing suicide.” She peered at Des shrewdly. “What is it then?”
“What is what?”
“You’re acting meshuga tonight.”
“Am not. I’m just in a rush.”
“Whatever you say,” Bella said doubtfully. “Have fun.”
“I’ll do my best.” Des was halfway to the door, car keys in hand, before she came back and said, “It’s Mitch. I think he has a problem with our relationship.”
“Tie that bull outside, as we used to say on Nostrand Avenue.”
“Bella, I have never understood what that expression means.”
“Well, what’s the problem-is it the lovemaking?”
“God, no. He’s still the Wonder from Down Under. But the man has something serious on his mind, Bella. He keeps getting all quiet and far away. Which I’m, like, he is never.”
“Maybe it’s that book he’s been trying to write. How is that going?”
“It’s not, near as I can tell.”
“Then that’s probably it. Men can get very strange when their work isn’t going well.”
“Men can get very strange come rain or come shine. But it’s not the book, Bella. His words say otherwise.”
“Why, what did he say?”
Des took a deep breath before she replied, “He said, and I quote, ‘I wonder if we’re getting in too deep.’”
Bella’s face dropped. “Oh, I see… And what did you say?”
“I said, ‘Why, do you think we are?’ To which he replied, and I quote, ‘It could certainly appear that way.’ To which I said, ‘Appear that way to whom?’”
“Hold on, you actually said to whom?”
“I did. This girl’s got herself a proper education.”
“And what did Mitch say to that?”
“Jack. Not one damned word.”
Bella considered this carefully. “Desiree, I’m not necessarily hearing qualms here. Mitch could simply be trying to engage you in a dialogue about your feelings.”
“No sale. If he’s not getting cold feet, then why raise it at all?”
“You do have a point,” Bella admitted, sticking out her lower lip.
“Besides, when we first got together we swore we’d never do this.”
“Do what?”
“There are two subjects we agreed that we’d never, ever obsess about-our slight cultural differences and our future. That’s written in stone, Bella. It’s a rule.”
“Tattela, we’re talking about a relationship here, not a nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Rules like that are made to be broken.”
“Not by me they’re not.”
“Okay, here’s a kooky idea-have you tried talking to him about it?”
“I can’t. I get all uptight and then I start feeling this horrible panic thing coming on that I haven’t had since I was fourteen. And, excuse me, but kooky?”
“So I’m not hip. Shoot me.” Bella furrowed her brow. “What kind of panic thing are we talking about?”
“We’re not talking about it.”
“Why not?”
“It’s incredibly embarrassing, that’s why not.”
“If you can’t tell me, who can you tell?”
“No one, I’m hoping.” Des stood there jangling her keys. “He’s met someone else, must be. Someone who he has more in common with. Maybe it’s another movie critic. No, no, that can’t be it. They all look like nearsighted mice. At least, that’s what he told me once. But maybe he was lying to me about that. Maybe they all look like Cameron Diaz. Or maybe he lilies nearsighted mice. Or maybe he…” Des stopped and came up for air. “I don’t know who she is, but when I find out I am going to hurt her.”
Bella shook her head at her. “Desiree, that man absolutely adores you, and he’d never give another woman so much as the time of day. He is not Brandon.”
“I do know that.”
“Do you? I don’t think so. If you ask me, you’re still schlepping your baggage around with you like Willy Loman with his sample cases.”
Des shot a hurried look at her watch. Past seven now. “Okay, then how do you explain the dead shark?”
“The dead what?”
“He made me watch Annie Hall with him last week-I’d never seen it before.”
“Did you like it?”
“It was okay, if you like watching white people whine for two hours. But there’s this scene with Diane Keaton on the airplane, when Woody says that a relationship is like a shark, it has to keep moving forward or it dies. ‘What we have on our hands is a dead shark,’ is what he says.”
“I remember the scene,” Bella said, nodding.
“Why did Mitch pick that movie for us to watch?”
“It’s a classic.”
“World’s full of them.”
“It’s very romantic.”
“Bella, it compares true love to a killing machine.”
“He screened Psycho for you a couple of weeks ago, did he not?”
“And your point is…?”
“Has he proceeded to hack you to death in the shower with a big knife?”
“No,” Des admitted. “Not yet, anyway.”
“Desiree, I want you to stop and listen to me very carefully,” Bella said sternly. “You have to believe in him. You have to believe in the two of you. If you don’t, you’re going to sabotage the best thing that’s ever happened to you, and you won’t have anyone to blame but yourself.”
“Bella, I’m not sabotaging anything,” she insisted. “And I’m not playing a head game. I know the signs. I know the man. I know where this is heading.” Des drew in her breath, her chest tightening. “Mitch Berger is getting ready to break my heart. And when he does, you may as well just dig me a hole and shove me in, because I am not going to survive. Not this one. I will die. Hear me? I will absolutely die.”