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“Wait, wait,” Savannah warned.
“Down on the ground!”
“No, no! It’s okay. It’s okay. Fred!” she yelled as Clausen threw the guy onto the porch face-first. “He didn’t do anything. Really. I’m okay. He didn’t do anything!”
Clausen quickly zip-tied his hands behind his back, and when the man didn’t resist, he helped him to his feet.
There was a red scrape on his cheek, but the man murmured, “Unto us a child is born,” smiling beatifically, his eyes closed as he rocked from side to side. “The baby Jesus come to save us all.”
“Are you all right?” Clausen demanded of Savannah, never taking his gaze from the man.
“I’m fine. He didn’t hurt me. I think he was . . . congratulating me.”
Clausen’s eyes narrowed on the bedraggled man as he continued to mutter and chant. “He for real?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“What’s your name?” Clausen asked him loudly. The man kept swaying and murmured something that sounded like a song. “You’re trespassing. Broke a window in the back. That’s breaking and entering, you understand? Sir? What’s he saying?” Clausen demanded, throwing a quick glare at Savannah.
“I think it’s ‘Jesus loves me! This I know.’”
The man suddenly opened his eyes and gasped, his gaze turning to Savannah. “You’re having a boy! Is he the savior? Are you Mary?”
“She’s not even the mother,” Clausen growled, snapping a pair of cuffs on the nut job’s thin wrists. “C’mon, pal. Let’s get you outta here. Lucky you didn’t burn the place down.” To Savannah, he said, “He had the fireplace crammed with trash and driftwood. It was spilling over the hearth and onto the carpet.”
Clausen marched him to his Jeep, but the guy kept twisting around, trying to see Savannah.
“You are his mother,” he said over his shoulder. “You are!”
There was no way she could explain to him that technically, no, she wasn’t. She walked back to her Ford Escape, the vehicle she’d traded in her Jeep for earlier in her pregnancy. There were only so many black and yellow department vehicles available, thank God; it was the only good thing about the budget cuts plaguing the state and counties. As she climbed inside, she felt Kristina and Hale’s boy kick one insistent foot under her right ribs. He had gone head down early and had been bicycling merrily away for the past few weeks. She laid her hand on the spot and smiled. A moment later she reminded herself that he wasn’t hers. Her smile dropped, and she put both hands on the wheel and drove away from Bancroft Bluff.
She arrived at the station a couple of minutes behind Clausen and the vagrant. They both pulled into the back lot and headed toward the rear door.
“His name’s Mickey,” Clausen told her as she let him lead the suspect in ahead of her.
“Last name?” Savannah asked.
“Haven’t got that far yet.”
She watched them head down the department’s back hall, and as they turned the corner that led to the holding cells beyond, Mickey was in full voice, singing, “Cuz the Bible tells me so!”
There was something eerie about his obsession, and Savannah tried to shake off the feeling as she glanced straight ahead across the wide room, which ran north/ south and offered a full-line view from rear door to front. To her left was the back hall where Clausen had just taken Mickey, a deceptively short walk to the warren of offices and holding cells that took up the western side of the building.
“Who was that?” May Johnson, the dour officer who manned the department’s front desk, asked from across the room. It was damn near impossible to scare a smile out of the woman, though she liked Savannah well enough.
“Mickey,” Savannah said, her eye turning to the puddle of water growing beneath her own feet from the rivulets of water falling off her jacket.
“Getting nasty out there,” Johnson observed, frowning as she glanced out the front windows.
“Yep.” The misting rain was now starting to come down in buckets. As Savannah unbuttoned her jacket and shrugged out of it, she finally noticed the woman seated on the wooden bench in the waiting area, by the front door. She wore a long blue dress with a high collar trimmed in unbleached white lace, and her hands were folded in her lap. Her blond-gray hair was pulled back in a bun, and she had a way of sitting stiffly that spoke of rigidity in nature. Savannah recognized her immediately.
“Miss Rutledge?” Savannah asked. Catherine Rutledge was the mistress of Siren Song. Savannah had already met her a number of times. Walking toward her with an extended hand, she introduced herself again in case Catherine couldn’t remember her name. “Savvy Dunbar.”
Catherine shook her outstretched hand, but her gaze traveled to her protruding belly, and Savannah inwardly sighed. It wasn’t the pregnancy that she minded as much as the explanations that invariably followed.
“Detective,” Catherine said, seemingly distracted by the evidence of her pregnancy. The last time they’d met, Savannah had been just entering her second trimester. Now she was close to delivery.
“Are you here to see Detective Stone?” Savvy asked her. The mistress of Siren Song and Langdon Stone had a history—one of those relationships built on basic mistrust and grudging respect—because Lang had been the detective in charge of several investigations that involved Catherine and her brood at the lodge. Lang was about the only man Catherine trusted within the Tillamook County Sheriff’s Department, even though she had known Sheriff Sean O’Halloran for years. But circumstances had turned Lang into her current go-to guy whenever there was some new crisis at Siren Song, which happened more often than one would think.
