Читать книгу The Once and Future Father - Marie Ferrarella, Marie Ferrarella - Страница 9

He’d thought he could contain it. Contain the question and just move on from there. Pretend it didn’t even exist. But it did exist and he hadn’t counted on it ebbing and flowing within him like a living force of nature, rising up like a tidal wave and threatening to wash over him and sweep him away entirely.

There was nothing he could do to stop it.

“Who’s the father, Lucy?” he asked.

Just crossing the threshold leading out of her room, Lucy faltered. Though she’d known she would have to face the question from him soon enough, she hadn’t expected it to be put to her so bluntly, without a preamble.

She kept her face forward, concentrating on her goal—the farthest corner of the nurses’ station’s outer desk. “Just someone I knew.”

Every word stung him, leaving behind a mark even though he told himself it shouldn’t. After what had happened between them, how could she have gone on to someone else so quickly? “That casual?”

One step after another, she chanted mentally, watching her feet. “There was nothing casual about it, but it’s over.”

“He’s not in your life anymore.” It wasn’t exactly a question, but an assumption. One he was very willing to make, though he knew it was selfish of him.

She wished he’d stop asking questions. He hadn’t the right. “Not where it counts.”

“Does he know about the baby?”

She thought of lying, but there were enough lies to keep track of. “No.”

He never could leave things alone, he thought. Even when they were the way he wanted them. “Don’t you think you should tell him?”

She spared him one glance before looking away again. “No. There’re enough complications in both our lives without bringing that in, too. He’s better off not knowing about the baby.”

He couldn’t believe that Lucy would keep something like this a secret. It seemed out of character for her. “Don’t you think you owe it to Elena to let her father know she exists?”

There was anger in her eyes when she looked at him, reminding him of the passion he’d once seen there. Passion that had belonged to him at the time.

If she could have, she would have pulled her arm away from his. But she felt too unsteady to manage the gesture. The words, though, she could manage.

“So that he can knowingly reject her? I don’t think so. Better for that to remain a question than a fact.” It cost her dearly to pull her shoulders back, but she did. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore, all right?”

She had a right to her privacy. He’d always insisted on his. They’d been lovers for less than two-thirds of a year, but she’d never known anything about his family other than the few vague answers he’d given her. “All right.”

She made the next few steps in silence, nodding at the nurse who walked by them and smiled. Lucy knew from experience that Dylan could keep his own council indefinitely. “But I do want to talk.”

He heard the note in her voice and knew what it was about. “I figured.”

“Tell me about Ritchie.” Though it hurt to think of her brother being dead, she forced herself to ask. “How did he die?”

She was still weak. Otherwise, he knew she wouldn’t be hanging on to him so tightly. He didn’t want to add to what she was already going through. “Lucy, this isn’t the time—”

She wasn’t going to let him put her off any longer. And she had a right to know what had happened to her brother. “It’s never the time to hear that someone you loved is dead.” Lucy turned her face toward Dylan. “How did he die?”

“He was shot. At close range. They found him in an irrigation ditch near the farmland,” he said.

The city stood on the site of what had once been a huge farming estate owned by the Bedford family for several generations. Now there were only small, sporadic patches left. Located in the western end of Bedford, they were still coaxing forth crops of corn, strawberries and, in a few places, oranges.

Lucy looked at him, the halting progress she was making temporarily aborted. “Farmland? Ritchie would have never been there. He never liked anything remotely rural.”

Dylan tended to agree with her. The Ritchie he knew was far more likely to be found in clubs and wherever there were bright lights.

“He was killed somewhere else, then dum—left in the ditch.” Dylan caught himself at the last minute, steering clear of the detached language he usually used in referring to victims and suspects. It served to maintain his perspective. Attachments only got in the way of judgment.

But in this case, he couldn’t let himself be clinically detached. To be that way was disrespectful to the friendship he and Ritchie had once had, however fleeting.

Besides, he didn’t really need to be detached here, it wasn’t his case to solve. Only to relate. So far, in his opinion, he was doing a damn poor job of it.

“According to the medical examiner, Ritchie died sometime around seven-thirty this morning. Do you know where he was supposed to be at seven-thirty?”

Lucy’s expression froze. She knew exactly where he was at seven-thirty this morning. She knew because he was doing it for her. “He was going in to work early so that he could get the time off to take me to the doctor.”

Dylan knew what she was thinking. Separation hadn’t dulled his ability to read her thoughts. “It’s not your fault.”

“Isn’t it?” Her eyes filled with tears, which she kept from spilling out through sheer force of will. She didn’t deserve the comfort of tears. Ritchie had died because of her. “If he hadn’t gone in early for me, maybe he’d still be alive.”

“And maybe he would have just been killed later.” He wanted to shield her, but at the same time, he wanted to strip away her guilt. He told her the rest of it. “Lucy, Ritchie was shot execution-style.” One bullet to the back of the head. It seemed surreal when he thought about it. Who could Ritchie have run afoul of for that to happen? He saw the horror in Lucy’s face and pressed on. “That means it was done on purpose. He didn’t just wander in on a burglary gone awry, or a car-jacking that went sour. Somebody meant to kill him.” Impatience clawed at him. There were too many people around. “Can we go back to your room? This isn’t the kind of thing to talk about strolling through the hospital halls.”

“I wouldn’t exactly considered this strolling,” Lucy answered evenly.

She was trying very hard not to let her emotions break through. Inside, it felt as if she had a pressure cooker on, full of steam, ready to explode. Digging her fingers into his arm, she turned around to face the long trip back to her room.

The pace was getting to him. He’d never been one to hurry things along normally, but there was nothing normal about this. “Why don’t I just carry you back? It’d save time.”

Lucy blocked his hand as he moved to pick her up. “No,” she snapped. “I can do this.”

She didn’t want him holding her. Not if she could avoid it. If he held her now, she would lose her strength and just dissolve against him, sobbing her heart out. She’d encountered enough setbacks in her life today as it was. She wasn’t about to set herself up for more.

Annoyance at her stubbornness warred with a grudging admiration for her grit. Dylan managed to curb his impatience until they’d returned to the door of her room. But once he opened it, he swept her up into his arms and carried her the rest of the way.

“What are you doing?” She was almost too exhausted to offer a protest.

“Cutting about forty minutes off the trip back to your bed.” Dylan caught himself thinking she still felt as if she weighed next to nothing.

He had her back in her bed in little more than four quick strides.

“Everything all right in here?”

Turning around, Dylan saw a nurse with salt-and-pepper hair in the doorway, peering into the room. She looked from him to Lucy.

“Fine,” Lucy assured her. “I just got a little tired. It was my first time out of bed.”

The nurse nodded knowingly. “Shouldn’t try to do too much first time up.” And then she smiled, her eyes washing over Dylan before they came to rest on Lucy. “A lady could do worse than have a handsome man carry her around.”

With a wink aimed at Lucy, she left, closing the door behind her.

Dylan moved back from her bed as she slowly toed off the slippers from her feet one at a time. The effort almost drained the remainder of her energy. She moved her legs under the covers, relieved to be lying down again.

With a sigh, she looked up at him. “Do you think you’ll catch whoever killed Ritchie?”

He didn’t answer her directly. “It’s not my case.”

She didn’t understand. “Then why…?”

He was asking himself the same thing. “I thought it might be easier on you, hearing the news from me.” Dylan shrugged carelessly. “Obviously I miscalculated. I hadn’t figured on you being pregnant.”

The coldness in his voice sliced through her. Defenses locked into place. “We can’t always factor in everything. So, who is handling Ritchie’s case? Do they have any leads?”

“Detectives Alexander and Hathaway, and they’re not even sure where he was killed, yet. There was no blood at the crime scene, so he was moved.” He went with the obvious first. “You said Ritchie was working. Where?”

“At a restaurant. He’s a—was a waiter.” Her mouth curved slightly. “He said they call them servers now.”

Yeah, they did. Another attempt at depersonalizing everything, Dylan thought. He would have said it was a good thing, but there were times he wasn’t sure. Being anesthetized was close to being dead, and he’d felt dead for a long time.

Except for the time he’d spent with Lucy.

But all that was over now. He’d made his peace with the fact. He just had to remember that, that’s all.

“Do you know where Ritchie worked?”

She nodded. “It’s called Den of Thieves.” He was staring at her. His face was impassive, but she could see that she had caught him by surprise. She wanted to know why. “What?”

It was a hell of a coincidence. “Are you sure that’s where he worked?”

Why did he doubt her? “Yes, I’m sure. A friend of his got the job for him.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know, Ritchie didn’t give me a name. Just someone he knew.” She should have pressed harder for an answer. She should have done so many things differently. Her eyes met Dylan’s. “Someone he said owed him a favor and this was his way of paying him back.” And then she remembered something. “I don’t know if this means anything or not—”

His eyes pinned her down, the detective in him coming out despite efforts to the contrary. “Let me be the one to decide.”

She tried to get the words just right. “A couple of days ago, Ritchie told me he was on to something. Something that would put us in the money and on the right side of things for a long time to come.” Taking a dim view of his schemes, she’d told him to forget about it then. But Ritchie had been too stubborn to listen.

“Did he say what?” Dylan asked.

She shook her head. “You know Ritchie, he gets—got—excited over things.” It was so hard to think of him in the past tense. She wasn’t sure just how she could bear it. “But he always played them close to his chest if they weren’t completely aboveboard. He said there was no reason for me to know, too. That’s what made me think it was dangerous.” She bit her lip, taking a deep breath. It didn’t ease the ache in her chest, or the one in her throat. “I told him that I didn’t want him doing anything illegal and he said he wasn’t the one standing on the wrong side of the law.” Despite her best efforts, a tear spilled out, followed by another. She brushed them away with the back of her hand. “That’s what got him killed, wasn’t it?”

He curbed the desire to wipe away her tears. The word no hovered on his lips, but he tried to avoid lies whenever possible. The only lie he’d ever told Lucy was that he didn’t love her.

“Possibly.”

He was going to have to get back to Alexander and Hathaway on this. As well as Watley. Den of Thieves was suddenly one man short. The task force could use this information to their advantage. Could plant one of their own men inside.

The fact that he was using this tragedy as a tool to further the investigation disgusted him, but he knew that ignoring it couldn’t help Ritchie now. And there was far more at stake here than just a dead man’s sister’s feelings and his own personal code of ethics. Other people’s lives were involved. Innocent people.

“What exactly did Ritchie say to you?” He saw that she didn’t understand where he was going with this. “Did he physically have something, some kind of evidence that he was going to blackmail someone with?”

Things began to crystallize in Dylan’s mind. A few weeks ago, the accountant for Den of Thieves, Michelson, had approached the local D.A., saying that the restaurant was a front for money laundering. But the man had vanished without a trace before any sort of case could be made. If for some reason the person Ritchie was looking to blackmail was Alfred Palmero, the owner of the restaurant, it would go a long way toward explaining things.

Lucy shook her head, frustrated. “I don’t know. He wasn’t specific.”

Dylan wondered how much he could tell Lucy about this, then decided that for her own protection, and that of the child she’d just given birth to, she needed to know at least some of it.

Because he knew he had a tendency to be far too blunt, Dylan tried to pick his words more carefully this time. “If he was looking to blackmail his boss, Alfred Palmero, your brother made the mistake of getting in over his head.”

“Your brother,” she echoed, looking at Dylan with disbelief. Could he really be that cold? Of course he could. Why did the fact keep surprising her? “You make it sound as if you didn’t know him.”

Damned if he did, damned if he didn’t. “Lucy, I was just—”

But she was tired and angry and more than a little fed up. With him, with everything. All the hurt she felt finally made her temper snap.

“Keeping your distance, yes, I know. The way you do with everything. With me, with him, with life. You’re very good at that. Keeping your distance. Protecting yourself at all costs.” She was through crying over him. “Look, I don’t need you coming into my life right now, disrupting everything. Thank you very much for coming by, for helping me, but I’d really just rather not see you again, all right?”

Dylan felt his own temper fraying. But he knew she had a right to what she was saying. “Sure, fine. I understand.”

The thing of it was, he thought as he walked out, that he did understand. He would have probably played it the same way she had and for the same reason. For self-preservation.

But he still couldn’t shake the image of Lucy’s expression from his mind.

He supposed that it was exactly that image, playing itself over and over again in his mind’s eye, that made him drive past his own apartment complex and keep right on going until he found himself turning down her street.

Though he tried to shake himself free of it, he felt as if he needed to make some sort of atonement. The least he could do was bring Lucy her suitcase. A woman needed things at a time like this. Things to make her feel less depersonalized, more human. Like her own nightgown and her own slippers.

Dylan couldn’t give her anything else she needed, but at least he could give her a little of her outer dignity back. The hospital gowns certainly did little to preserve it.

Admittedly flimsy, it was the excuse he fed himself. It was the best he could do on short notice.

Holding on to it, Dylan parked his car in her driveway. The automatic sensors he’d insisted on putting up for her when they were still together turned on, illuminating his path. Feeling in his pocket for what he thought of as his skeleton keys, he noted a fresh oil slick on the asphalt beside his vehicle. He’d parked in the street earlier. The slick hadn’t been there then. Dylan wondered if the ambulance had an oil leak and if someone had alerted the paramedics to it.

The front door wasn’t locked.

The door gave the moment he inserted the thin metal wand into the keyhole and gave it the slightest bit of pressure.

He distinctly remembered shutting the door behind him this morning and hearing the tumbler click into place. As a cop, he’d been careful not to leave the house susceptible to invasion.

Something wasn’t right.

Very slowly, Dylan turned the knob and then released it, clearing the doorsill. He moved the door away by inches, simultaneously feeling for his service revolver. Drawing it out, he took off the safety as quietly as possible and entered the house.

The living room looked as if a tornado had been through it.

Moving from room to room at an even pace, his gun poised, ready, Dylan took it all in. If at first glance he’d entertained the thought that this had been a run-of-the-mill break-in, the fact that the television set and audio equipment had been left behind quickly squelched the supposition. Lucy’s house had been systematically tossed.

From all appearances, someone had wanted something very much. Since every room had been ransacked, Dylan’s guess was that they hadn’t found what they were looking for.

Satisfied that whoever had done this was long gone by now, he holstered his gun. All he could think of was that he was grateful Lucy and her baby hadn’t been here at the time.

“What the hell were they looking for, Lucy?” he murmured to himself. “And what was it that Ritchie had on them?”

He realized that he’d made a leap in judgment, but his gut told him that there was a connection here between where Ritchie worked and what had happened to the house. His gut instincts were rarely wrong.

The question still remained. What?

Lucy was going to have a fit when she saw this, he thought, pressing the numbers on his cell phone that would connect him to the precinct. Maybe forensics would come up with a few answers for them.

Hanging up a few minutes later, he looked around for the suitcase he’d come for originally. He found it in Lucy’s bedroom, its jaws yawning wide open, its contents scattered in a rude semicircle around it. He’d have to wait for forensics to go over the crime scene before he could remove the suitcase and the few things he judged had been in it. With a sigh, he made himself as comfortable as possible.

“Your timing is perfect, she just finished her dinner,” Lucy said, looking up from the sleeping infant at her breast. Expecting to see the nurse, her smile faded when she saw Dylan entering her room. Primly, she covered herself, her mouth hardening. Why couldn’t he leave her alone and let her heal?

“I didn’t expect to see you again.”

Her voice was cool, distant. He couldn’t blame her. Dylan nodded at the suitcase he was holding, telling himself that the sight of Lucy nursing her baby didn’t effect him one way or another.

“I thought you might need some things.” He placed it at the end of her bed.

“What are you trying to do to me, Dylan? Why are you being nice to me one minute, then the next…?”

Abruptly, Lucy caught hold of herself, breaking off her words midsentence. There was no point in upbraiding him, and she refused to lose her composure in front of her daughter, no matter how young the girl was. She had to be strong and this wasn’t the way.

With effort, Lucy regrouped, then looked at the suitcase as he flipped open the locks. Maybe, in his own way, he was trying. At least she could be civil toward him. “Thank you.”