Love You More (Tessa Leoni, #1)(114)

I did shoot and kill Hamilton’s mistress, Bonita Marcoso. The woman had been assaulting my child. I had to use deadly force.

As for the lieutenant colonel … In killing him, Bobby Dodge had saved my life, I informed D.D. And I wanted to go on record with that. If not for the actions of state detective Bobby Dodge, Sophie and I both would probably be dead.

“Investigated and cleared,” Bobby informed me.

“As it should be. Thank you.”

He flushed a little, not liking the attention. Or maybe he simply didn’t want to be thanked for taking a life.

I don’t think about it much myself. I don’t see the point.

So there you have it, I wrapped up for D.D. My husband was not a wife beater or child abuser. Just a gambling addict who’d gotten in way over his head. And maybe I should’ve done more about that sooner. Cut him off. Kicked him out.

I hadn’t known about the credit cards he’d opened in Sophie’s name. I hadn’t known about his skimming of union funds. There was a lot I hadn’t known, but that didn’t make me culpable. Just made me a typical wife, wishing fruitlessly that my husband would walk away from the card tables and come home to me and my child instead.

“Sorry,” he’d told me, dying in our kitchen. “Tessa … love you more.”

I dream of him, you know. Not something I can tell Detective Warren. But I dream of my husband, except this time he is Good Brian, and he is holding my hand in his and Sophie is riding ahead of us on her bike. We walk. We talk. We are happy.

I wake up sobbing, which makes it just as well that I don’t sleep much anymore.

Want to know how much the lieutenant colonel made in the end? According to D.D., internal affairs recovered one hundred thousand dollars in his account. Ironically, a mere fraction of what he would’ve received in legitimate retirement benefits if he’d just done his job conscientiously, then taken up fishing in Florida.

The lieutenant colonel had ordered my husband’s death, and lost money in the process.

They hadn’t been able to recover the rest of the funds. No record in Shane’s accounts and no record in Brian’s. According to D.D., internal affairs believed that both men had gambled away their illicit gains at the casino, while Hamilton had saved his share of the scam. Ironically, their bad habit meant Shane and Brian would never be charged in the crime, while Hamilton and his girlfriend Bonita—who’d been positively ID’d as the female who’d closed out the shell company’s bank account—would posthumously shoulder the blame.

Good news for Shane’s widow, I thought, and good news for me.

I heard later that Shane was buried with full honors. The police determined that he must have agreed to meet with Purcell in the back alley. Purcell had overpowered him, then killed him, maybe to eliminate Shane, just as he’d eliminated Brian.

Purcell’s murder remains open, I’ve been told, the weapon having yet to be recovered.

As I explained to Detective D. D. Warren, I don’t know nothing about anything, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.


Sophie and I live together now in a two-bedroom apartment just down the street from Mrs. Ennis. We’ve never returned to the old house; I sold it in about three hours, because even if it was once a crime scene, it still has one of the largest yards in Boston.

Sophie does not ask for Brian, nor speak of him. Nor does she talk about the kidnapping. I believe she feels she’s protecting me. What can I tell you—she’s a chip off the old block. She sees a specialist once a week. He advises me to be patient and so I am. I view my job now as building a safe place to land for when my daughter inevitably lets go.

She will fall, and I will catch her. Gladly.

I made Brian’s funeral arrangements alone. He’s buried with a simple granite marker bearing his name and relevant dates. And maybe it was weakness on my part, but given that he died for Sophie, that he knew, standing there in our kitchen, the decision I would have to make, I added one last word. The highest praise you can give a man. I had etched, under his name: Daddy.

Maybe someday Sophie will visit him. And maybe, seeing that word, she can remember his love and she can forgive his mistakes. Parents aren’t perfect, you know. We’re all just doing the best we can.

I had to resign from the state police. While D.D. and Bobby have yet to connect me to Shane Lyons’s or John Stephen Purcell’s deaths, there’s still the small matter of me breaking out of jail and assaulting a fellow officer. My lawyer is arguing that I was operating under extreme emotional duress, given my superior officer’s kidnapping of my child, and should not be held responsible for my actions. Cargill remains optimistic that the DA, wanting to avoid too much bad publicity for the state police, will agree to a plea where I serve a probationary sentence, or at worse, house arrest.

Either way, I understand my days as a police officer are over. Frankly, a woman who’s done the things I’ve done shouldn’t be an armed protector of the public. And I don’t know—maybe there is something wrong with me, an essential boundary missing, so that where other mothers would’ve cried for their child, I armed myself to the teeth and hunted down the people who took her instead.

Sometimes, I’m scared by the image that greets me in the mirror. My face is too hard, and even I realize it’s been a long time since I’ve smiled. Men don’t ask me out. Strangers don’t strike up conversations with me on the subway.