Sleepwalker by Karen Robards Page A

boat and his almost niece as a hostage. Add in his anger when he found out about the incriminating pictures, and the result wasn’t going to be pretty. The guys would pull out all the stops to capture the thief—and, as collateral, her—before he blew a gasket. In an effort to make that as hard as possible, her plan was to stay dark, go past the highly populated areas, then take the boat in at a remote dock. If she recalled correctly, there was a small dock connected to a boat launching ramp at Deer Ridge Park. It was used mainly by casual boaters in the summer and should definitely have been deserted now. It was sufficiently remote that its existence shouldn’t have occurred to any of Uncle Nicco’s guys or anyone else who might have been looking for them. She hoped.
    Having decided where to make landfall, she turned her focus to the problem of who to tell about what she now knew. The supposed murder/suicide of the Lightfoot family had been big news. Nate had been one of the homicide detectives on the case, and like the others he’d been convinced that Lightfoot had killed his family before turning his gun on himself. Now, tucked safely away inside the pocketof her flannel pants, she possessed definitive proof that that was not so in the form of three of the pictures, which she had folded up and tucked away when the thief hadn’t been looking. The only conclusion anyone seeing those pictures could come to was that Nate had been wrong. The other detectives had been wrong. The medical examiner had been wrong. Everybody who’d signed off on the case had been wrong. Being wrong on such a public case could hurt their careers. The resulting media firestorm would make both them and the department look bad. The backlash could hurt her career, too, because the brass in the Detroit PD had long memories. If she caused the department embarrassment, some of them would hold it against her forever. Nate might very well hold it against her forever. Not that she cared about that.
    Handing over the pictures would more than embarrass Uncle Nicco. From the look of it, at the very least he would be arrested and charged as an accessory to murder. Depending on how things shook out, he could be facing charges of Murder One.
    Uncle Nicco was as close to family as it was possible to get without actually being blood kin. Aunt Hope, Angela, his other children—they were practically family, too. She loved them. They loved her.
    At the thought of the pain she would inflict on them all, Mick felt heartsick. Tossing the pictures and keeping quiet about what she’d seen was an option, but she already knew that it probably wasn’t one she was going to be able to live with. That would amount to turning a blind eye to murder, multiple murder of an entire family to boot, and, aside from the fact that she was a cop who had sworn to uphold the law, that she just couldn’t do. Besides, it would be dangerous. Unless the pictures lied, Uncle Nicco clearly had been involved in the Lightfoots’ deaths. She now knew it, and he knew, or soon would know, she knew it. The easiest, smartest thing for him to do would be to kill the witness,namely her. Would he do it, or, rather, order it done? Even though he loved her like family?
    The conclusion Mick came to was that waiting to find out would be just plain dumb.
    Given that, then, the first thing to do was call her supervisor, Stan Curci. Tell him she had an armed robber in custody and needed backup at the Deer Ridge Park boat ramp like yesterday. Everything else she wanted to impart to him face-to-face.
    A slight hiccup to the plan was that she didn’t have access to a phone. Of course, the thief had one, but unless she managed to wrestle it away from him, she didn’t see him letting her use it, especially if he suspected she was calling for backup. Probably she could get him to do something like call a cab when they docked, if, that is, a cab could be persuaded to come that far outside the city at this time