Sweet Violet and a Time for Love Page 20

  “Leon, what—”

  The elevator stopped with a sudden thud between levels one and two. The power went out.

  “Sienna.” He pushed me behind him, reached for something in his pants. Did he have another gun?

  “Leon, what’s going on?”

  I felt sweat pooling through his polo shirt as I pressed close against his back.

  “Shhh,” he quieted me as the elevator returned to life, the soft whir returning, accompanied this time with a slight clicking sound. We reached the ground floor and the elevator stopped with a shiver and a bounce. The door seemed to hesitate before opening, but it finally did with a loud squeal.

  We were in the underground garage of the hotel. A single light bulb flickered on a nearby wall casting shadows on a small parking area that served the private penthouse suite. As we stepped onto the parking pad, Leon kept me behind him, his eyes scanning over every corner of the enclosed parking space. A metal garage door was partially open at the end of a short ramp.

  “Stay here,” he commanded.

  “Leon, you have to tell me something. What’s going on? Who’s after us and are you positive it has nothing to do with Sweet Violet?”

  “We’ll go over details later.”

  “So you’re not positive.”

  “Sienna, please,” he begged as he crept along the side of the cement wall. Though he had motioned for me to stay behind, I was right up on his heels.

  I was not trying to be left alone anywhere, especially since I didn’t know what was going on.

  The garage felt humid, clammy. A loud drip echoed through the cavernous space.

  “You have to tell me something,” I whispered as we neared the partially opened garage door.

  “I need you to trust me. Look, nobody said that we were in danger. The incident back at the shop, they think it was a robbery gone wrong. The would-be robbers thought the place was closed and got spooked when they realized that it wasn’t. That’s what’s being investigated.”

  “Leon, you know that’s not the case. It doesn’t make sense. They said a reliable source called in a hostage situation. You were set up. How can you not—”

  “Sienna, I have a feeling about something and you’re going to have to trust me.”

  “So, we follow your gut feelings and completely ignore mine. I’m just supposed to follow blindly behind you while you shoot down any thoughts or insights I have.”

  “Sienna, not right now.” His whisper was borderline yell.

  “I don’t know how, and I don’t know why, but I firmly believe that all of this, the murders, the court case, the incident with Roman, the shooting, your arrest, all of it is somehow tied to that woman. You know that my instincts are good, so I don’t understand why you keep brushing me off, or demanding my silence. I should have just told the authorities from day one about Sweet Violet instead of listening to you telling me not to do so.”

  Leon stopped in his tracks and turned to face me, the glint of his gun visible in his right hand. “I need you to trust me. Trust me.”

  I looked in his brown eyes and I saw panic in them.

  Rare.

  Frightening.

  “Leon.” I wanted to tell him that I did trust him, but that I needed him to trust me too. We were a partnership, right? We married each other because we valued each other’s strengths, abilities, and perspectives, right? This is what I wanted to tell him, but something else took over the situation.

  The garage door of the penthouse parking pad, which had already been partially open, began a slow, loud wind upward. The metal rattled and groaned in a sudden jolt. An alleyway was visible through the opening, but what had both silenced me and stiffened Leon’s body was the pair of black boots standing on the other side.

  Chapter 28

  “Should we go back to the elevator?” I could feel my heartbeat in my throat as the door continued to lift. Leon, for his part, though standing taut, looked very much in control, calm. He didn’t answer me as he kept his feet planted. The boots on the other side gave way to tan khakis, black gloves. Leon positioned his gun at the opening, both hands ready, cocked.

  Just as the door fully extended, Leon jumped forward.

  “Police!” he yelled, tackling a man who charged toward us. A streetlight at the end of the narrow alley provided the only source of illumination making the man a mere shadow in the darkness.

  “Wait, wait!” the man exclaimed. The two were a jumble of arms, legs, and fists as I stood frozen. I realized I was instinctively both shielding my stomach and stifling a scream. What do I do? I panicked.

  “Wait, Leon!” the man hollered again. The confrontation was over in seconds, both men now sitting separately on the ground, panting. Leon’s gun was still in his hand, and a badge lay next to him by a clump of weeds that had broken through the alleyway pavement.

  A badge?

  The surprise on my face was echoed on Leon’s but for different reasons.

  “Mike, what are you doing here?” Leon jumped to his feet, wiping a trail of blood from off his lips. He looked at the red streak left on his palm as the other man, Mike Grant, jumped to his feet as well.

  “I was just making sure she was safe, like you asked, man. You need to calm down with the jumpiness, brother.” Mike straightened up his shirt, brushed some loose gravel off of his elbows. “I followed her here.” He pointed to a black sedan with tinted windows parked behind a large Dumpster. Between the lack of light and its well-conceived hiding place, the dark vehicle was nearly invisible.

  “You’ve been following me?” I stared at the sedan. That car! I knew I wasn’t crazy. That had to be the one I saw speeding away when I entered the subway station earlier that day. Shavona and Mike had shown up at Yvette’s house not long after I did, I recalled. He was helping to keep me safe? I tried to make sense of it all.

  But that car . . . I was almost certain it was similar, if not the same one, that I’d seen Delmon Frank using months ago. No, that would not make any sense. Leon saw the confusion on my face, shook his head, and sighed.

  “Don’t try to figure all of this out, Sienna. I’ll explain what I can to you, but we need to get out of here first.” He and Mike began jogging toward the sedan.

  “Shavona is still at Sienna’s sister’s house. One of the people there will see her home since I told them I was leaving to help you out.” Mike spoke next and both he and Leon glanced back at me.

  I caught up with them as my heartbeat tried to settle back down from my throat and resume in my chest. “But . . . but . . .” I pointed to the badge Leon had picked up from the ground. It hung from his fingers. “Leon, are you . . . I don’t understand. You’re not a cop anymore, so why do you have a badge?”

  He and Mike looked at each other.

  “I told you I need your trust, Sienna. Things aren’t always as they appear.” He looked again at Mike, who nodded back at him. “Look, Sienna,” Leon continued as he opened the rear door of the sedan for me. I got in, and he followed, sitting next to me in the back as Mike got in to play chauffeur for the second time that day.

  “You know that I came back to Baltimore to open my bakery. My heart is there, not only because I get to bake my grandmother’s old recipes, but because I can offer a way out for the young people caught in the streets. You know from your social work experience that breaking that cycle is hard. I saw it with my brother, who was shot and killed despite my best attempts to save him. I saw it with my niece.” Leon had never said much about his niece in Houston whom he’d gone to help and who he’d left after only a year of assistance.

  “The more I’ve seen and the more I worked with some of those kids at my shop, the more I knew I had to do more than teach them how to bake cookies. I wanted to get to the root of the matter.” Though we were moving, Mike had not yet turned on the car lights, I noticed.

  “You’re a social worker so you go about things your way: counseling, programs, that kind of thing,” Leon continued. “I’m a cop by training, so I kne
w that I had to go about things the way I know: get the bad guys, shut down their operations at the highest levels. Mike told me months ago about a need for an undercover officer to help investigate some matters, and I was in a perfect position to take the job on. The department wouldn’t have to train a new recruit, and nobody would suspect anything about my actions since I had the shop.”

  “So is that why things haven’t been taking off at the bakery? Your attention is divided?” I had many questions, many, many questions, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about him not telling me any of this. “What exactly are you investigating?”

  His and Mike’s eyes met in the rearview mirror. “Baby.” Leon squeezed my hand. “I can’t get into any of that right now, but just know that when I pleaded with you not to get involved in all these cases, I had my reasons.” He looked at me. “I couldn’t tell you any of this because we couldn’t afford to have your perspective or testimony influenced about the cases.”

  “Drugs,” I concluded. The state’s attorney’s office, the investigators, had all stated that the murders were drug related. If Leon was so passionately against me being involved as it affected whatever he was doing, that was the only type of investigating I could think of that he’d be involved in. It made sense, too; if his concern was reaching kids who were going off track, most of the offtrack roads in Baltimore began and ended with the illegal drug industry.

  His silence at my assertion confirmed my line of thought.

  “Delmon Frank drove a car like this one.” I could not ignore the certainty I felt about my memories. He’d gotten into a black sedan with tinted windows the morning Ms. Marta was killed. And, though it had been dark and it had been at a distance, I was pretty certain that same car he drove was the one I’d seen parked near a streetlamp when I dropped Sweet Violet off at the shelter in the dark hours of the morning.

  I still had a lot of questions.

  “He’s undercover too, babe.” Leon’s eyes looked straight as Mike drove through alleyways and narrow side streets to get out of downtown.

  “What? Who? Delmon is a cop?” I did a double take.

  “Are you a cop?”

  I recalled wanting to laugh when he’d asked me that. Dressed in church clothes and on a social work mission, I knew I looked the furthest thing from a woman in blue when I approached him on that street by the original crime scene. Leon was right: everything was not what it seemed.

  “He’s undercover, but was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and blowing his cover, even now with the trial, would be fatal to years of investigative work. I can’t get into details, Sienna, but we’re close.”

  “That’s why the trial was so speedy. I didn’t think a triple homicide case would turn around in the court system that quickly. That makes better sense now, but Alisa Billy is dead. What happens next? Did she know? Who else knows? And what would have happened if he was found guilty?”

  “I know you have a lot of questions, but I really can’t, I really shouldn’t, get into it all right now.” He looked at me as the car veered onto 83. “Frank’s own defense team doesn’t know the truth. His lawyer, as I understand it, has no idea that he’s really an undercover. It’s a sticky, delicate, dangerous situation, with a fine, shaky line dividing the good guys from the bad. That’s why I didn’t want you getting involved in any of this. That’s also why I’ve been staying close to you.”

  “Armed and ready.”

  “Of course; you’re my wife and the mother of my soon-to-be-here child.” He reached out a hand, patted my stomach. “I will always, always protect you.”

  “Wait. Alisa Billy is dead, so the case is on indefinite pause. Was that supposed to happen? That wasn’t part of the plan to keep Delmon’s identity protected, was it?”

  “Of course not. Her death was off script and only complicates matters. She didn’t even know the danger she was in. Her assistant, Joe Koletsky, was supposed to be protecting her, but that call she got to come back to the courthouse immediately took her out of his reach.”

  “So, she didn’t just overdose on prescription drugs.” I wasn’t asking. I already knew the answer.

  “Of course not.” Leon leaned forward as Mike turned onto an exit. “But this is a very public case handling a very private, dangerous affair. For the integrity of the case, the public needs to think no foul play was involved. If they thought otherwise, the media would begin asking too many questions of the wrong people.”

  I sat quiet for a moment, letting these new details absorb, knowing that my questions and conclusions would only increase as I thought more about it all.

  We turned onto Maryland Avenue. It was dark, way past eleven o’clock at night. Traffic was light, the car lights finally on as we zoomed through the neighborhood of Charles Village.

  The route looked familiar.

  “We came this way earlier today when you dropped off Roman.”

  “Safe house,” Leon answered my unspoken question.

  “So Roman knows everything?”

  “No. He knows very little. Except what was absolutely necessary for him to know.”

  “There was something he wanted to ask me,” I remembered. I also remembered the five dollars and eleven cents that had been found on his person. “Everything is all related.”

  “Sienna, I really don’t want you worried about this. You have incomplete information and it needs to stay that way for the time being.”

  “Why were we shot at? Why is Alisa dead? I need some kind of answer, Leon. This is crazy. Obviously, we are in danger. You can tell me only half a story and think I’m going to stay calm about it?”

  “Sienna, you are nearly eight months pregnant with our child. This entire pregnancy has been filled with one disaster after another. I need you to stay calm. I need you to know that I am taking care of things. For once in your life, you need to let go of your desire to control things and let me handle this. Please, just trust me.”

  “So that’s it, that’s the real reason why you don’t want to share more details with me, because I’m pregnant. Yes, I’m pregnant. That doesn’t mean that I’m helpless. Maybe you’re forgetting that I’ve spent the last twenty years being a strong, independent woman capable of completing projects, helping clients, starting a business, even helping to capture a person who was a national threat.”

  “Sienna, of course I know you are a strong, independent woman. I know that being pregnant does not change the essence of who you are; but right now, I’m asking you to accept some dependency, to trust me enough to take care of matters that extend far beyond what you know or think in regard to this case. I’m not asking you to be less of the woman you are; I’m simply asking if you can accept fully the man I am.”

  “Do we need to turn back around and go to that prayer circle at Yvette’s house?” Mike chuckled from the front seat. “Y’all gettin’ serious up in here.” The car pulled to a stop in front of a towering bow-front row home on Maryland Avenue. From the looks of things, no lights were on. I closed my eyes, tried to breathe. Anger, worry, confusion had all combined to make me feel sick.

  “You think we should go around back?” Leon asked. Mike complied, turning the car into a narrow alleyway behind the row of white-painted brick homes. The car’s lights were back off. Mike eased to a stop in a parking space partially hidden by a large oak tree and a series of evergreen bushes. At last, he shut the engine.

  “Wait.” Leon grabbed my shoulder as I reached for the door. A few seconds passed and then a tiny prick of light, like that of a penlight, filtered through some miniblinds covering a basement window.

  “Okay.” Leon pulled at the car door handle. “Let’s go.”

  I followed Leon and Mike out of the car and down a stairwell that took us to a basement door. Maybe I’d watched too many movies or TV shows, but despite the old home’s historic outward façade, I expected to walk into a high-tech room filled with the latest gadgets and all things digital.

  Instead, the basement looked and smelled like, well,
an old, mildew-filled basement in desperate need of a makeover. The walls were colorless cinderblock, the floor old black linoleum. A concrete wash basin covered with dust sat in a corner next to a washing machine that looked like it had seen better days back in the eighties. A large brown carpet square sat in the middle of the open space and on it was a cheap futon and a desk with a computer, printer, and several closed-circuit TVs.

  An older white man with thick black glasses and a dead cigarette butt hanging out the corner of his mouth sat in front of the desk. A stack of papers and a half-eaten club sandwich sat in front of him.

  I recognized him immediately.

  Detective Sam Fields.

  Years ago, I’d gotten mixed up with some twin sisters who had a vindictive and deadly mother. The two had gone into hiding without a trace and the man in front of me was the detective who had made their disappearance possible. I never did fully understand how his one-man operation worked—the business cards he’d given me back then led me to a pizza shop—but he must be good. I realized then that those twins, who at one time had been five o’clock breaking news features, had left the media radar without a trace.

  His presence both encouraged and frightened me.

  Why is he here?

  “All right, the passports are ready and a doctor’s note for her to board the plane is in this envelope.” He patted the stack of papers. “Happy anniversary.”

  “Passports?” Leon’s face wrinkled. “We don’t need passports for Miami.”

  “Your itinerary has changed. You are indeed flying to Miami as planned so as not to raise any suspicions. However, once you get to MIA, you’re going to transfer to a private charter flight to Freeport. You should be happy. Not many newlyweds get to spend their first anniversary in a private villa in the Bahamas.”

  What?

  “Um, Leon, what is he talking about? Are we supposed to be flying to another country when I’m this close to my due date? This seems a little extreme. Is it really necessary? What is going on?”