3rd Degree

Chapter 21

Lucille Cleamons had exactly seventeen minutes left on her lunch hour to wipe the ketchup stain off Marcus’s face, get the twins to the day care clinic, and catch the 27 bus back to work before Mr. Darmon would start docking her $7.85 per hour (or 13 cents a minute).

“C’mon, Marcus,” she sighed to her five-year-old, who was sprouting a face full of ketchup. “I don’t have time for this today.” She dabbed at his white, collared dress shirt, which had taken on the look of one of his messier finger paintings, and—damn—none of the stain was coming off.

Cherisse pointed from her chair. “Can I have an ice cream, Momma?”

“No, child, you can’t. Momma’s got no time.” She looked at her watch and felt her heart stab. Oh God…

“C’mon, child.” Lucille crammed their Happy Meal boxes onto the tray. “I got to get you cleaned up fast.”

“Please, Momma, it’s a McSundae,” Cherisse cried.

“You can buy your own McSundae or whatever you like when it’s your dollar sixty-five going across the table. Now both you come get yourselves cleaned up. Momma’s got to go.”

“But I am clean,” Cherisse protested.

She dragged them out of the booth and hurried toward the bathroom. “Yes, but your brother looks like he’s been in a war.”

Lucille pulled her kids along the back corridor leading to the bathrooms. She opened the door to the ladies’ room. It was McDonald’s. No one would mind. She raised Marcus on the counter and wet a paper towel and started to rub at the mess on his collar.

The boy squirmed.

“Damn, child, you want to make the mess, you got to own up to the cleaning. Cherisse, you got to pee?”

“Yes, Momma,” the girl replied.

She was the cleaner of the two. They were both five, but Marcus barely knew how to pull down his own zipper. Some of the ketchup was starting to come off.

“Cherisse,” Lucille barked, “you going to get on that toilet seat, or what?”

“Can’t, Momma,” the child replied.

“Can’t? Who’s got time for this, young lady? Just drop your stockings and pee.”

“I can’t, Momma. You gotta come see.”

Lucille sighed. Whoever said time is on your side sure never had twins. She took a quick glance in the mirror, sighing again, not ever a single second for herself. She helped Marcus to the floor, then went to open Cherisse’s stall.

She said impatiently, “So what you crying about, child?”

The little girl was staring at the toilet.

“My God.” Lucille took a breath.

On the toilet seat, wrapped in a blanket in a bassinet, was an infant.

Chapter 22

Once in a while there are moments in this job when everything works out for you. Finding the Lightower baby at McDonald’s was one of those times. The entire Hall seemed to breathe a deep, grateful sigh of relief.

I got Cindy on the line and asked a favor. She said she’d be delighted to put a little pressure on X/L.

I hung up with Cindy, and Charlie Clapper was knocking on my door. “Nice bust, Boxer.”

“That’s a little sexist, even from you,” I said with a smile.

Clapper laughed. His Crime Scene team had spent the better part of the past day and a half picking through the bomb site. Charlie looked exhausted.

“FYEF, darlin’,” he said, motioning with his head for me to follow. “For your eyes first. They’re a whole lot cuter than Tracchio’s.”

“Knew I earned this gold shield for something.”

Charlie took me to his office down the hall. Niko was in there, from the Bomb Squad, leaning back in Charlie’s old hardwood recliner and picking something out of a Chinese food container.

“Okay, we’ve pieced together an idea of the explosive device.” Charlie threw out a chair for me. On a poster board, someone had drawn a floor plan of the Lightowers’ town house. “Traces of C-4 were all over the place. Half a pound’s enough to blow a jet from the sky, so from the size of the blast, I figure this was about five times that. Whoever did it put it inside something like this”—he took out a black Nike sport bag—“and placed it in one of the rooms.”

“How do we know that?” I asked.

“Easy.” Clapper gri

“Any luck you could scrape a few prints off the bag?” I asked hopefully.

“Sorry, honey,” Clapper snickered, “this is the bag.”

“It was triggered by a fairly sophisticated device,” Niko explained. “Remote detonation. Blasting cap was hooked up to a cell phone.”

“There’s a market for C-4, Lindsay. We could look into any construction-site thefts, missing military inventory,” said Charlie Clapper.

“How are you with babies, Charlie?”

“If they’re eighteen or over,” the CSU man said, gri

If Clapper were a foot taller, fifty pounds lighter, and hadn’t been married for thirty years, I just might take him up on his little flirtations one day. “Sorry, this one’s a little younger.”

“You mean the Lightower baby?” Charlie scrunched his face.

I nodded. “I want her dusted, Charlie. The kid, blanket, bassinet, anything you can find.”

“Been thirty years since I changed a diaper.” Clapper let out a breath, looking a little squeamish. “Hey, I almost forgot.…” He pulled out a coded evidence bag from underneath a pile of papers on the desk. “There was a room down the hall from the nursery. Someone spent the night there. Someone who isn’t accounted for now.”

The au pair, I was thinking.

“Don’t get excited,” Charlie said, shrugging. “Everything was cinders. But we picked up this by the bed.”

He tossed me the plastic bag. Inside was a small, twisted canister about three inches long.

I held it up. Didn’t have the slightest idea what it was.

“Everything must’ve melted.” Clapper shrugged. He fumbled behind him through his jacket draped over the chair. He came out with something that looked similar.

“Proventil, Lindsay.” He took the cap off his own device and fit it neatly onto the one from the evidence bag. He pressed the mouthpiece twice. Two puffs shot out into the air.

“Whoever slept in that bed had asthma.”

Chapter 23

Jill Bernhardt sat in her darkened office long after everyone else had left.

A law brief was open in front of her, and she suddenly realized she’d been staring at the same page for ten minutes now. On nights when Steve wasn’t traveling or working late, she had taken to staying at the office. Doing anything she could to avoid him. Even when she wasn’t preparing for trial.

Jill Meyer Bernhardt. Super lawyer. Everybody’s alpha dog.

She was afraid to go home.

Slowly, she massaged the bruise on her backbone. The newest bruise. How could this be happening? She was used to representing women who felt like this, not hiding a secret in the dark herself.

A tear wound its way down her cheek. It was when I lost the baby, she thought. That’s when it all started.

But, no, the trouble with Steve had started long before that, she knew. When she was just out of law school and he was finishing up his MBA. It started with what she would wear. Outfits that weren’t his taste or showed her scars. Di

You can’t do it, Jill. She had heard that since she met him. Jesus Christ, she dabbed her eyes with the heel of her hands. She was the top assistant D.A. in the city. What else did she have to prove?

The phone rang. The sudden ring made her jump. Was it Steve? Just the sound of his voice made her sick. That creepy, oh-so-concerned, oh-so-solicitous tone: “Hey, honey, watchya doin’? Come on home. Let’s take a run.”