Protector - Laurel Dewey [7]
8:58. Jane slapped the button and shoved the heel of her boot into the closed elevator doors. “Come on, goddamnit!” she shouted. The elevator doors opened, as if in response to her barking order. Jane lunged in, punching the third floor button with her fist.
The elevator stopped on the main floor and a young Mexican woman in her late twenties got on, hand in hand with a terrified looking child who Jane figured was around eight years old. A front desk officer accompanied them. Without looking at the buttons, the woman quietly said “Third floor,” in broken English. Jane gave the button another hard whack. The doors closed and the officer stole a glance at Jane and her cigarette, tapping his finger on the “No smoking” emblem. Jane threw the cigarette on the elevator floor, crushing it with the toe of her boot.
The officer looked straight ahead. “You can’t leave that butt in here.”
Jane would have ripped him a new one if the woman and kid hadn’t been there. Instead, she picked up the crushed cigarette and threw it in her satchel.
The little girl turned her body to face her mother, burying her face in her mother’s stomach. “Tengo miedo,” the little girl muttered.
“Is okay,” the mother said, patting her daughter’s head and leaning down to kiss her. “Momma gonna make it okay.”
Jane suddenly felt that same disjointed sense of reality hit again. She tried to quash the mounting tension that bled across her shoulder blades but it was no use. “Tengo miedo,” meant “I’m frightened.” Those were two words Jane heard on a daily basis from children when she did her four-year stint in assault during the late 1980s and early 1990s. She hated every second of it but she made it through by maintaining emotional distance with the children and never getting close to the victims. She figured if she busted her ass and nailed some of Denver’s worst violators of women and children, she’d have a better chance of getting into homicide—the top of the heap, as far as she was concerned. Tengo miedo. So why was the little girl frightened? Jane noticed that the slim woman was a bundle of nerves. Her facial muscles twitched and she continually licked her lips as she fixed her eyes on the elevator door. A lifelong student of human behavior, Jane concluded that if this woman wasn’t a criminal, she was certainly planning to become one.
The elevator doors opened onto the third floor. The woman and child got off with the officer as he motioned to the left, “Assault’s this way, ma’am,” he said. Jane stopped for a second and watched how the kid clung to her mother. If Jane weren’t already late to Weyler’s office, she would have followed them down to assault to get the skinny on the story. But instead, she took a sharp right and another left into the homicide department.
Chapter 3
Jane forgot to prepare herself for the intense sunlight that filled the homicide department, radiating from the wall of windows that faced 13th Street. Between the piercing brightness and banks of fluorescent lights, Jane likened it to walking into the eye of a comet. To dodge the blinding light, she directed her attention down to the drab purple carpeting that ran the length of the cramped room. Ten desks, separated by wobbly partitions, filled the space. On this morning, they were empty.
Sergeant Hank Weiting, who was in charge of half of the ten detectives, was out of his office. Weiting, two months from retirement, was spending more time away. Several yards up from Weiting’s station was Sergeant Morgan Weyler’s corner office. The door was closed but through the slender window, Jane could see her partner Chris seated across from Weyler, engaged in conversation. Jane knocked before entering.
Weyler looked up at Jane. “9:05,” he said with an off-hand tone. “Well, I lost that bet. I told Chris you wouldn’t make it before 9:15.”
Jane slid into the empty chair, stashing the leather satchel underneath it. “That just proves you shouldn’t bet against me,” Jane said to Weyler, never once acknowledging Chris. Thankfully, her sense of