Free Keepsake by Antoinette Stockenberg Page B

dead."
    "It makes a difference," Quinn said, almost wearily. "You're a son. You're a father. How can you not get it?"
    "Suppose we leave my family out of this."
    The chief's son Kurt had been one of Quinn's teammates: a fullback with good potential but with a chronic need to walk on the wild side. Quinn had heard (again from Mrs. Dewsbury) that after he and his dad fled Keepsake, Kurt Vickers had turned from alcohol to serious drugs—another casualty blamed on Quinn. The list kept getting longer.
    Quinn said, "How do I make my request official?"
    The chief snorted. "Not by bringing it here. Take it to the D.A. if you feel a burning need."
    Quinn stood up and took the plastic container back. "Okay. That's what I'll do."
    He was halfway out the door when Vickers said, "Francis Leary did it, Quinn. You just can't bring yourself to believe it, that's all. But the evidence is there. Alison confided to a friend that she thought your father was a hunk. He was seen staring at her just a little too keenly. The rope that hanged her came from his potting shed. Fibers from it were found in his truck. No one could corroborate his alibi for the time of death. And last of all, he ran. Innocent men don't run."
    "I repeat: horseshit. That's not even decent circumstantial evidence, and you know it."
    The two men locked gazes. Pete Vickers, lifelong townie, son of a policeman, father of a drug addict, the only active member of a police detail that would never live down the Keystone Kops reputation that Quinn's father had foisted on them—and Quinn himself, first stirring the pot, now lighting the fire beneath it.
    Vickers spoke first. "Go to hell."
    Quinn's eyebrows lifted in tacit acknowledgment that he might be headed that way. He sighed and said, "See you around, Chief," and walked past the dispatcher's desk and out to his truck.
    ****
    "I'll never be able to eat pastrami again," Olivia told Eileen over drinks on Saturday. "It was unbearable, sitting in his truck and trying to chew."
    "And he didn't take his trophies, after all that?"
    "No," said Olivia glumly. "I went back yesterday and boxed them all up again."
    She was still traumatized by the disastrous date. What had happened? She'd spent the last day and a half trying to figure it out. This much she knew: She was deeply attracted to Quinn, and he had seemed just as interested in her.
    "Almost as interested, anyway," she said. "There was incredible electricity. It started at Hastings House ... the way he just looked at me!"
    "The corset," Eileen said as she tore Boston lettuce into a salad bowl.
    "That's what I thought, too, at the time. I mean, really, what was not to like? He'd have to have been married, buried, or holy not to react. But the next day—you know what I wear to work—he was just as interested, if not more. Eileen, I'm telling you, something clicked. I don't remember ever enjoying myself as much with a man. Or as briefly, dammit."
    " The corset."
    "No , kismet." Olivia slid off the island stool in her sister-in-law's designer kitchen and ambled over to the Sub-Zero fridge.
    "When we were strolling down Main ," she said thoughtfully, "something changed in my life. I've never felt it before. It was like ... what was it like? Like I was a lock, and someone was turning a key in me." She smiled a faraway smile as she poured more tonic over her gin. She could still feel his arm linked through hers, still see the dimple on the right side of his face when he grinned.
    Oddly enough, she couldn't remember much about the episode on the sofa. That part she had pretty much blocked out. "Probably because it was Quinn who called a stop to it," she explained, "and not me."
    "Men don't normally do stuff like that."
    "Well! Consider where we were."
    "True. Can you imagine the look on Rand 's face if he'd walked in on you? Or your father?"
    Olivia shuddered, then bumped the fridge closed with her rear end. "It could easily have happened. I never thought to lock the front door. Thank God