When he had it ready, he had a few more things to do, then he’d get back to his true purpose—his need to punish the reverend.
“So what’s the deal with you and the preacher?” O’Shea settled his ample backside in his desk chair and talked around a mouthful of meatball sub.
Keren kept her head down by sheer force of will. She was seeing double from hours of going over Caldwell’s phone records—the phone records of the six cell phones he’d stolen so far—his bank records before he cleaned out his accounts, and the videos taken of the crowds at the park. She knew the exact time she’d felt the demon there and she checked her time against the videos. But all the suspects were there and they all walked away together right at that time. It made her even more certain it was one of them, but there was no way to eliminate anybody.
The task force had met again. They’d traced the car to Murray… who had reported it stolen. Fingerprints of three of the men—the ones they could catch up with—had turned up nothing interesting. Dyson had come up with a new profile, but the man seemed real cranky about the generalizations. They’d heard every detail of what Higgins had found about Francis Caldwell’s childhood. Which wasn’t much. His parents were both deceased. Nothing about either death had raised red flags at the time, but now Keren had to wonder.
She made herself very busy fussing with a stain on the report in front of her. It needed to be cleaned up immediately.
She rose from her seat. “I’d better get a damp cloth. We don’t—”
“Sit,” O’Shea barked.
Keren didn’t sit. “You don’t give me orders, Mick.” They’d received a sketchy report that couldn’t be confirmed of a homeless woman, known on the street as Lupe, being snatched. Paul hadn’t been in. There was no report of a phone call. No threat to blow something up. Keren missed talking the case over with him, but she couldn’t stand dragging him back into the investigation.
“Sure I do.” O’Shea smirked. “I’m senior officer around here, and you’re just a little baby girl cop.”
The waiting was driving her crazy. She didn’t need to look up and see double of O’Shea. And she sure wasn’t going to answer his snoopy questions.
Keren resisted the urge to slug him. O’Shea was trying to distract her with his obnoxiousness so she’d quit watching her mouth. “You’re not senior when it comes to asking me questions like that.”
O’Shea took another huge bite of his sandwich and chewed. Way before all the food was swallowed, he asked, “You know what I think?”
“Don’t know. Don’t care.” Keren enjoyed the tiny flash of caution in O’Shea’s eyes. He’d heard that sweet tone before. He knew his potential for becoming a victim of assault and battery was high and increasing by the moment.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t quite scared enough. “I think you’re hot for each other.”
“Mick!”
“What?”
“Don’t talk like that. Hot? He’s a man of the cloth for heaven’s sake! And what about me? You know I don’t… I mean no man’s gonna… I mean… oh, you know what I mean.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.” O’Shea held up both hands to defend himself, one clutching the half-eaten sandwich. “Okay, pick another word.”
“Well, I’d say we’re…” Keren caught herself. She’d spent plenty of time with O’Shea in the interrogation room, and she knew how good he was. He could make people admit to crimes they’d just thought about committing. Sometimes the lawyers, who were sitting in on the questioning, broke down and confessed to crimes they’d committed, unrelated to the case at hand. He didn’t usually use his talents on her, though.
She switched to attack mode just to even the playing field. “What’za matter, Mick, your pathetic life so boring you have to entertain yourself by making stuff up about me?”
O’Shea nodded, studying her like she was a menu at Burger King. “Good girl, I almost got you, but you recovered. So…” He returned to his sandwich and the beginning. “What’s the deal with you and the preacher?”
Keren rolled her eyes. She decided the statute of limitations was up on O’Shea’s order to sit, so she plopped back into her chair. “There’s no deal.”
“C’mon, honey, give. This is your old buddy Mick talking. I’ve seen the way you look at each other when you think no one is watching.”
“How does he look at me?” Keren caught herself again. Man, he was good. “I mean, not that you’re right, but tell me, just so I know what you’re imagining.”
O’Shea laughed.
Keren’s cheeks heated up.
O’Shea had, in many ways, stepped in and become a father to her since her own parents had started going to Fort Lauderdale for the winter and traveling extensively in a Winnebago year-round—except she’d have never talked so rudely to her father.
“Is there any chance you might choke to death on a meatball?”
“You don’t have that kind of luck.”
Finally, just to shut him up, she said, “Have you noticed that the preacher man is turning back into a cop?”
“Yeah, and it’s driving him nuts.” O’Shea nodded. “He falls into the lingo, changes his tone of voice and the way he holds himself. His whole attitude changes. Then he freezes up when he says something particularly cold blooded, and I can see the guilt. The poor guy’s struggling.”
“He asked me for a gun the night LaToya was dumped.”
“That was enough to make anyone fighting mad,” O’Shea said grimly.
“He asked for the gun in the heat of the moment, and he regretted it afterward,” Keren continued. “Then, only days later, when we went into Caldwell’s apartment building, he asked again. And this time he meant it. It wouldn’t surprise me if he shows up with a piece at the next dump site.”
“Does he have a license?” O’Shea, ever the cop, asked.
Keren shrugged. “They usually let former cops have one. I don’t know about concealed carry. That’s a little tougher.”
“They’d give him one,” O’Shea said with certainty. “Wanting to blow someone away has gotta be tearing him up inside. The day we first met him, in the hospital, I got the idea he was kind of meek. Strong in his convictions, but no dynamo, if you get what I mean.”
“Well, you were wrong—as usual.” Keren waited for O’Shea to turn red. He obliged her, then she laughed in his face. “He’s a tough cookie, even in preacher mode. But now he’s losing it. He’s a decent guy who left the hassles of law enforcement behind, and now it’s like he’s being taken over by it.”
“Is that admiration I hear?”
“Of course I admire him. He’s…” Keren caught herself again and fell silent.
“He could rejoin the force,” O’Shea said. “I’ve asked around. He was a good cop. As good as it gets.”
Keren shook her head. “I’d hate to see him do that. He has such peace in his life at that mission.”
“ ‘I did not come to bring peace, but a sword,’“ O’Shea said.
Keren was always startled when O’Shea came up with something Christian. She knew he was a man of faith, and she’d especially liked him because he respected her own strong beliefs, but he didn’t wear it on his sleeve.
“And we’re the sword, is that what you’re saying?” She was used to the idea that she battled evil, but she’d never heard it put quite that way before.
O’Shea hunched one shoulder. “On this case, with Caldwell, I’d say for sure we’re the sword. Somebody’s gotta be the sword, cuz this guy needs a sword taken to him—bad.”