Running Hot (The Arcane Society #5)(64)
Author: Jayne Ann Krentz

“You didn’t violate their rights in the legal sense.”

“No, but I sure as hell did in a very real sense.”

“You accomplished a lot of good, Luther. Putting bad people away. Getting justice for the victims. Those are important to a civilized society.”

“That’s what I told myself for several years. But I found out the hard way that the vigilante thing carries a load of bad karma.”

“Your two broken marriages?”

“Among other things. I also managed to freak out so many partners that eventually no one wanted to work with me. I got a reputation for being a lone wolf. That’s not good when you’re a cop. You’re supposed to be part of a team. I tended to make the people around me very uneasy.”

She frowned. “Did the other detectives you worked with ever realize what you were doing?”

“They knew that I almost always got results but they didn’t know how I got them. Hell, they didn’t want to know. A few concluded that I was somehow hypnotizing the suspects. Turns out no one wants to work too closely with a guy who may be able to hypnotize you without you knowing it.”

“I can see where that might be an issue,” she said.

“I went through partners the way the Dark Rainbow goes through dishwashers. Some of the other guys had enough natural sensitivity of their own to wonder if there might be a paranormal explanation for my string of confessions. They didn’t like that idea any better than the hypnosis theory.”

“Because it made them question their own mental health?” she asked.

“Most successful cops have a fair amount of intuition when it comes to dealing with the kind of folks who lie, cheat and kill. They’re usually happy to admit that they have good instincts.”

“Aren’t good instincts viewed as an asset in the police world?”

“Sure. But no cop wants to get slapped with the psychic tag. The woo-woo factor can kill a career real fast.”

She studied him intently. “You just walked away from the job?”

“There was what I guess you could call a final straw. An incident. People died. I walked away after that.”

“What happened?”

He watched the sunlight flash on the waters of the cove.

“There was a man,” he said. “His name was George Olmstead. He walked into the office one day and said he’d just killed his business partner. Turned over the gun. It had his prints on it. He claimed he and the partner had quarreled over whether to sell the business. He said he was desperate for the money but the partner refused to go through with the deal.”

“You didn’t believe him?”

“He seemed calm enough but there was something spiking in his aura. I talked to him for a while. Pushed a little. It came out that he wasn’t the one who had shot the partner. Olmstead was covering up for his daughter.”

“She was involved with the partner?”

“They’d had an affair,” he said. “She was twenty-five years old. She had been seeing a shrink since she was in high school and she was on medication. The partner belatedly started to realize that she was very unstable. He tried to end things. She went crazy and shot him.”

“And then went running to her father?”

“Who told her that he would handle things. He wanted to protect her. He saw that as his job. He’d been doing it all her life. She was his only child. The mother had died years earlier.”

She nodded. “Did he know about the relationship between his daughter and his partner?”

“Yes. He’d encouraged it because he thought marriage would give his daughter some emotional stability. After the murder, he was convinced that the whole thing was his fault so he was eager to take the blame.”

“But his story fell apart.”

“Because of me. When we arrested his daughter, he felt he had failed in his duty as a father. The daughter committed suicide in jail. Olmstead went home, stuck a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.”

“Thereby proving that he was just as unstable as his daughter,” Grace said quietly. “But you felt responsible.”

“I was responsible. I should have called in the department shrinks and let them handle it. Instead, I went ahead and prodded the weak points on Olmstead’s aura until I got my answers. Another case closed for the lone wolf.”

“It was your job to get the truth,” she said calmly.

“Sure. It was just too bad a couple of people committed suicide because I was so good at doing my job.”

“Yes, it was too bad. But it was not your fault. One of those two people murdered a man and the other tried to cover up the crime. You were not responsible for their actions.”

“Maybe not technically.”

She brandished her half-empty bottle of water. “Hold it right there, Malone. You were not responsible technically or otherwise. You used your talent, a natural ability that is as much a part of you as your eyesight or your hearing or your sense of touch, to do your job and to bring some justice into the world.”

“I told you, the bad guys were broken losers for the most part. I rolled over them like a train.”

“Works for me,” she shot back. “They were bad guys, remember? Just their bad luck they ran into someone who could see through their lies.” She paused, lowering the water bottle. “But I do understand why you felt you had to quit the force.”

“Yeah?”

“You’re stuck with the instinct to protect and defend. It’s part of who you are. But like I keep telling you, you’re also a hopeless romantic. You want to go after what you consider fair game. Working for J&J gives you that satisfaction. You get to go up against bad guys who possess talents that are the equivalent of yours. You’re doing your hunting on a level playing field now.”

“I think of it more as a level jungle.”

She smiled. “Good visual.”

THIRTY-NINE

The following afternoon Luther suggested they close the restaurant for a couple of days. Petra and Wayne didn’t have any issues with that decision.

“Could use a break,” Wayne said. “Some of the tourist customers are startin’ to irritate me. I think I’m losin’ that aloha spirit.”

“Same here,” Petra said. “Been a long time since we took a vacation.”

It was four o’clock, the lull after the lunch rush. They were all standing around in the Rainbow’s kitchen. Grace looked at the three of them and felt a sudden, inexplicable urge come over her.