13. Damned Cookie
THIRTEEN
Damned Cookie
Harry
T he next morning, Harry dropped the tin of cookies in the staff kitchen.
It was light a few, the ones he and Lillian had eaten the night before, and the ones he’d put in a Stasher at home.
After his run that morning, he’d had eggs, bacon, and a thick slab of Lillian’s bread, lightly toasted and slathered in butter. He took one bite and added grape jelly, because that flavorful, chewy bread needed jelly.
And right then, he walked down the back hall toward his office, and it wasn’t lost on him his thoughts were light, as was his step, because he’d started his day shitty yesterday, and he could compartmentalize, he could get on with things, but no cop could escape the fact you carried a hint of every tragedy you processed or investigated with you. And in the beginning, after they’d just happened, they weighed heavy.
But Lillian took it from him, she cuddled with him, she fed him, she made him laugh.
She didn’t erase it, but by damn, she sure as hell made it better.
He hadn’t walked into this station feeling this unburdened since he lost his wife.
Two dates (or, he smiled to himself, in Lillian’s estimation, four) and she gave him that.
Oh yeah, they were exploring this because she wasn’t just gorgeous, soft, generous, a great cook with fantastic taste in movies and television who was strong and smart and tasted fantastic.
She didn’t get loaded down with his job.
In the days before Winnie, he’d dated, and he’d done it while he was a deputy. He’d had colleagues share it took a certain kind of woman to marry a dedicated cop. And he’d learned that quickly when his job got in the way of him paying attention to them.
It was early days with Lillian, but she didn’t throw a fit when he showed way later than they expected, and she’d noticed immediately the toll that crash had taken on him, and she set about doing something about it.
So yeah, fuck yeah, he hadn’t felt this unencumbered coming to work for years.
And he fucking liked it.
So yeah again.
They were going to explore this.
To the fullest.
He shrugged off his jacket, hung it on a hook, settled behind his desk, turned on his computer, and Polly strolled in with his Aromacobana.
“Just so you know, I have to pay attention to catch you coming in, and then I have to bring you your coffee in your office,” she griped in a roundabout way about the sign in the front being gone and Harry now parking out back.
“You used to watch for me to show out front, met me at reception, and now, I walk right by your office, and it’s right next to mine,” he pointed out, and added, “I’ve also told you repeatedly you don’t have to buy me a coffee, but if you insist on doing it, I could just walk into your office and get it so you don’t have to walk to mine.”
“If I don’t go to the front, I can’t look over the boys and girls and make sure they’re getting themselves settled and taking care of business,” she retorted.
He usually arrived around morning shift change, and Polly was always in first, so he saw she’d want to do this, because Polly kept her finger on all of their pulses.
He should have known there was a method to her madness.
Even so.
“I’m not putting the sign back up,” he warned.
She rolled her eyes.
Rus showed at the door carrying his own Aromacobana cup.
“Hey, Pol,” he greeted her.
“Heya, Rus,” she replied, then sashayed out.
Rus’s attention came to Harry. “Know you just got in but wanted to know if you saw that file on Clifford Ballard.”
Harry motioned for him to come in, Rus did and sat opposite Harry as Harry pulled out the file.
“At the time Ballard died, his mother came in and had a dustup with Dern. She left, shouting that he was a piece of dirt,” Harry told him, plopping the case file between them.
“You good with me poking around?”
Rus was ex-FBI, just like Cade. But whereas Cade was a profiler, Rus had been a field agent, and a celebrated one. He hunted down the Crystal Killer, aka Richard Sandusky, even if, in the end, the man had essentially turned himself in.
During this, Rus had fallen for a local, so he left that life and started a new one in MP.
One could say, even if there was always someone doing some punk-ass shit in every corner of the country, things were a good deal quieter and less challenging in Fret County than working for the FBI.
In other words, Rus needed something to sink his teeth into, and he was raring to do it with the Ballard case.
“I’d start with his mom and then retrace Dern’s steps with the friends who reported Ballard was showing signs of depression,” Harry suggested. “Those read hinky to me.”
Rus reached for the file. “They read the same to me.”
“Also, if you got time, sniff around the Dietrichs.”
Rus angled his head in question. “The Idaho bodies?”
“I don’t know, but my gut tells me yes, and if it is a yes, I want to hit the ground running.”
“’Spect you know, the station and the entire town are talking,” Rus reported, referring to Lillian.
And that was Rus.
He didn’t get up in Harry’s business. But he’d be right there if Harry needed to share that business.
“I know,” Harry sighed.
“Hear word she’s gorgeous, hard-working, no-nonsense, sweet,” Rus noted.
“Correct on all accounts.”
Rus’s gaze got intense. “Pleased for you, buddy.”
“Thanks, man,” Harry replied.
They both looked to the door when Polly filled it.
And neither of them liked the expression on her face.
“There’s someone here who would like to talk to you, sheriff,” she said.
She only called him sheriff if things needed to be official.
Rus immediately stood.
Harry nodded his head at Polly.
Rus left after exchanging a look with Harry, and he took the Ballard file with him.
Polly led an attractive woman in who Harry would peg being in her mid to late forties.
“I’ll just leave you two to talk,” Polly stated, surprisingly not introducing the woman.
She closed the door behind her.
Harry stood, rounded his desk and offered his hand. “I’m Harry Moran.”
She took his hand but said, “I’m not going to tell you my name, because…”
She didn’t finish that, and from her nervous demeanor, Harry didn’t push it.
He swung out an arm to indicate she should sit. She did, and he resumed his own seat.
She started it. “I heard you’re looking through old files. Dern’s files.”
His interest was already piqued, but it got even more so with that opener.
“Yes,” he confirmed.
“Because you’re, uh…looking into Dern, I, well my friends told me that I should come in and tell you something.”
“And what would that be?” Harry asked casually, not applying too much pressure, even though he really wanted to know.
“I work in an…office. I…a while ago, I got a divorce. After I did, Leland Dern would come to my office, like…”—she shifted anxiously —“ repeatedly . It made me uncomfortable. I was a single mom. But back then, I had a four-year-old, he’s, erm…older now.”
She rolled her shoulders and clenched her jaw.
Harry sat and waited, his gaze steady on her, keeping his hands from forming fists because he sensed where this was going.
Part of the mess that got Leland Dern’s ass put in prison was not following through with the investigations of two deputies who had complaints of sexual coercion lodged against them.
Though, Dern doing anything of that nature himself was new.
He was not surprised at Lillian’s report of her mother catching Dern’s eye, and Dern throwing a tantrum because he got his feelings hurt, even to the point of instigating a frameup.
That was just the kind of guy he was.
But this kind of thing was ballsy, blatant…
And worst of all, it hinted at a pattern.
Being attracted to a woman you couldn’t have was one thing. Being butt-hurt she didn’t like you back came with the territory. It was just Dern who would act out egregiously on something like that.
Criminally stalking another one and using your deputies to help you was a-fucking-nother.
She continued, “It seemed like he was on the make. No, it didn’t seem like it. He was. I mean, I met him only once, at the Hideaway. I didn’t even really process it at the time, except he was kind of…skeevy.”
Dern was all kinds of skeevy.
Harry nodded encouragingly.
“I don’t know how he found out where I worked, but he did. The more he showed, the more I tried to put him off, the more he seemed to come after me, until I didn’t have a choice. I’d had enough, so I told my ex-husband about it. Obviously, we didn’t get along, but we shared our boy. Even if we didn’t get along, he wasn’t happy about it either.”
“All right,” Harry said quietly.
She swallowed visibly then kept talking.
“Darrin…I mean, my ex, he went to speak to Dern to make him back off. But this only caused Dern to…well, he…” she trailed off.
“He’s not here anymore, ma’am,” Harry reminded her. “And I worked here for a decade when he did. I’m not sure there’s much you’ll say that will surprise me. But it might be something I need to know as we go about the business of cleaning up after him.”
“Okay,” she whispered, and it sounded almost pained.
Harry felt bile rise up his throat.
“Right, so after my ex had a word with him, things got really bad,” she relayed. “Both me and Darrin would have deputies following us, pulling us over for the slightest infractions, like, they said Darrin had a broken taillight, when he didn’t. They said I was supposedly going over the speed limit, when I swear I wasn’t. Stuff like that.”
Harry felt a muscle in his jaw jump, but he just nodded.
“And he was still coming to my office. My boss got sick of it, and she waded in. She went to Dern herself. I don’t know what she did or said, but after she talked to him, all of it stopped.”
“Can I ask your boss’s name and if I can talk to her?” Harry requested.
The color ran out of her face, and she shook her head.
“He doesn’t have that power anymore,” Harry said quietly.
“You don’t know. You’re a guy. You’re a cop. But all that lasted months. It was really scary, sheriff. Utterly terrifying .”
That muscle jumped in his jaw again.
“I got back together with Darrin,” she shared. “I mean, it wasn’t like I did it because I had to because of what Dern was doing. Dern messing with us reminded us of the connection we’d lost. Who we used to be. And Darrin is super protective. But that’s beside the point. I hope we’d find our way back to each other anyway. It’s just…Dern is not the kind of man you get on his bad side. And now Darrin and I also have a daughter, and it was just… Sheriff, it was just very, very scary.”
“Leland Dern was tried for his abuses of office, and he served a year sentence and is now living somewhere else, so we can’t try him again,” Harry informed her. “If you’d go on record, it would just be more we’d have on him if something else springs up with this case audit. You absolutely do not have to make an official statement or lodge a complaint. It’s your choice. But I’ll be here if you change your mind.”
“Lodge a complaint?”
“It’s up to you, totally up to you, but we can investigate this, Dern and the former deputies who were involved in it, and we can press charges if there’s evidence to support them.”
“Now?” she asked. When he nodded, she noted, “But that was years ago.”
“If a victim is too afraid to come forward to report a crime, the clock starts when the crime is reported.”
“Whoa,” she mumbled.
“I can promise you, I will investigate this to its fullest if that’s what you want. It might not lead to anything, but I have a feeling there are a number of former deputies that are more than a little concerned about what our audit will bring, and it’s a little bit of poetic justice when they used their position to terrify a woman and her husband, that they get some of that back. And I can assure you, if anyone did anything to you, you’d have the full force of this department at your back.”
She rolled her lips together, but her eyes lit.
“Think about it,” he urged.
She nodded. “I will. I’ll think about it, and I’ll talk to Darrin about it.”
“I’m here, whatever you decide.”
She studied him a beat before she declared, “You’re so not him, it’s not funny.”
“Best compliment I could get,” he replied.
A hesitant smile formed on her face before she stood. Harry stood with her, and he escorted her to the front door.
Once she was out, he prowled to Polly’s office, entered and closed the door behind him.
“You know who she was?” he demanded.
Polly shook her head. “But I can guess.”
Harry was thinking about that woman, who was still scared even though Dern no longer lived in their county, or any of the ones bordering it.
He was also thinking about Avery Rainier.
“How often did he pull that shit?” Harry asked.
“There were things he hid from me, Harry, and the boys did too. Just like he hid them from you. So I don’t know. He scared them so bad, they wouldn’t come to me. They’d not even go to Pete so Pete could come to me, and no one’s afraid of talking to Pete.”
Pete was her husband. He owned the Double D. And he, like Polly was a mom, was a dad to anyone who knew him.
“But I’d hear murmurings,” she continued. “Some of the men, it went against the grain. But if your boss tells you to do something?—”
“If your boss tells you to terrorize a woman and her husband because he wants to get into her pants and she won’t let him, you quit, and then you report that boss to someone who can stop his shit,” Harry ground out.
“I’m not excusing them, I’m explaining. And you’re transferring, because of Av and your feelings for Lillian.”
“Fuck yeah, I am,” he clipped.
“He’s gone, Harry,” Polly said gently.
“You can’t ever get that kind of stain out. She wouldn’t make an official statement because she’s still scared of Dern.”
Polly’s lips thinned.
“Fuck,” Harry muttered.
“Go have a cookie,” Polly suggested.
Christ.
“You run. You lift weights,” she reminded him. “You’re generally active all the time. You can have a cookie when it isn’t Christmas, Harry Moran. You won’t get a gut. Food is soothing.”
“It’s just when you think food is soothing, you get a gut.”
“Not if a pretty woman made you cookies, and you eat just one, for heaven’s sake.”
Harry scowled at her.
“Go on, get a cookie and then get to work,” she ordered.
Polly was totally the boss of this station, he just held the title.
Harry left and he didn’t go to his office.
He went to get a damned cookie.
And fuck him, after he ate it, he felt better.