Sacred Sins by Nora Roberts Page A

involved with destroying his life to see it. The phone call had resolved nothing. But then, conversations with alcoholics on a binge rarely did. He'd just wept at the mention of his son and slurred a promise to phone tomorrow.
    He wouldn't, Tess thought. Odds were he wouldn't even remember the conversation in the morning. Her treatment of Joey hinged on the father, and the father was glued to the bottle—the same bottle that had destroyed his marriage, lost him countless jobs, and left him alone and miserable.
    If she could get him to an AA meeting, get him to take the first step… Tess let out a long breath as she dropped her hands. Hadn't Joey's mother explained how many times she'd tried, how many years she'd devoted to prying Joseph Higgins, Sr., away from the bottle?
    Tess understood the woman's bitterness, respected her determination to resume her own life and bury thepast. But Joey couldn't. All through his childhood his mother had protected him, shielded him from his father's illness. She'd made excuses for the late nights and the lost jobs, believing the truth should be hidden from the boy.
    As a child Joey had seen too much, heard more, then had taken his mother's explanations and excuses and built a wall of lies around his father. Lies he was determined to believe. If his father drank, then drinking was okay. Okay enough that at fourteen Joey was already being treated for alcohol addiction. If his father lost his job, it was because his boss was jealous. Meanwhile Joey's grades in school slid down and down as his respect for authority and himself diminished.
    When Joey's mother had no longer been able to tolerate the drinking and the break had come, the lies, broken promises, and years of resentment had poured out. She'd heaped the father's faults on the son in a desperate attempt to make him see the mistakes and not to blame her. Joey hadn't, of course, nor had he blamed his father. There was only one person Joey could blame, and that was himself.
    His family had broken apart, he'd been taken out of the home he'd grown up in, and his mother had gone to work. He'd floundered. When Mrs. Higgins had married again, it was Joey's stepfather who had pressed for counseling. By the time Tess had begun to see Joey, he'd had thirteen-and-a-half years of guilt, bitterness, and pain to wade through. In two months she'd barely made a dent in the armor he wore—in their private sessions or the family counseling twice a month with his mother and stepfather.
    The rage swept through her so quickly, she had to sit for several minutes and fight it off. It wasn't her function to rage, but to listen, to question, and to offer options. Compassion—she was allowed to feel compassion, butnot anger. So she sat with the anger backing up in her, fighting against the control she'd been born with then honed to a professional tool. She wanted to kick something, hit something, strike out somehow at this hateful sense of hopelessness.
    Instead she picked up Joey's file and began to make further notes on their afternoon session.
    Sleet had begun to fall. She picked up her glasses, but didn't look out of the window, didn't see the man across the street standing on the curb and watching the light in her apartment. If she had looked, had seen, she would have thought nothing of it.
    Just as when the knock came she thought of nothing but the annoyance of being interrupted. Her phone had rung incessantly, but she'd been able to ignore that and leave it to her answering service. If one of the calls had been a patient, the beeper beside her would have sounded. The calls, Tess had guessed, had all been connected with the article in the evening's paper, linking her to the homicide investigation.
    Leaving the file open, Tess walked to the door. “Who is it?”
    “Paris.”
    A lot could be gleaned from the tone of a voice, even in one word. Tess opened the door, knowing she opened it to a confrontation. “Detective. Isn't it a little late for an