Читать книгу Twice A Hero, Always Her Man - Marie Ferrarella, Marie Ferrarella - Страница 11

Chapter Three

The woman standing by the front window next to the pleasant-faced hulk with the unruly hair was cute.

Beyond cute, Colin amended. There was something appealing about her that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. As best as he could analyze it, he sensed an intriguing combination of sadness mixed with an undercurrent of energy radiating from her.

And, more startling and thus far more important, he realized that for the first time in months, he found himself both attracted and interested.

There’d been a time when his older brother, Ryan, had called him a ladies’ man, a “babe magnet” and a number of less flattering but equally descriptive terms. And at the time, they had all been rather accurate.

But all that had been before life had abruptly changed for him. Before his brother and sister-in-law, Jennifer, had been involved in that freak skiing accident that had resulted in their being swallowed up by an avalanche. Who could have predicted this outcome when Ryan and Jennifer had gone on a last-minute spur-of-the-moment vacation because a late-season unexpected snowfall had occurred and they were both avid skiers?

Just like that, in the blink of an eye, he suddenly found himself the only family that their only daughter, Heather, had left.

His personality, not to mention his priorities, had changed overnight. He hadn’t been on so much as a date since he’d had to fly to Aspen to identify Ryan and Jennifer’s bodies and to pick up his niece. Heather had been in bed asleep when it had all happened. Her parents had opted to sneak in a quick early-morning ski run before she woke up—not thinking that it would be the last thing that they would ever do.

Stunned, Colin had never thought twice about assuming this new responsibility. He turned his entire life around, then and there, vowing that Heather would always come first.

He couldn’t give up what he did for a living—he’d worked too hard to get to where he was. It came with its own set of dangers, and that couldn’t be helped. But he could definitely make sure that any time outside his job would go to being with Heather, to making sure that she wouldn’t be permanently scarred by the loss of her parents. He’d vowed that he would always be there when Heather needed him to make the night terrors go away.

But just for a moment, this petite woman standing before him took Colin back to the man he had been before all of this had happened to change his life. It made him remember just how he’d felt when a really attractive woman crossed his path.

“Detective?” Ellie prodded when he didn’t seem to have heard her, or at least wasn’t attempting to respond to her greeting.

“Sorry,” Colin apologized, rousing himself out of the temporary mental revelry he’d fallen into. He flashed a smile at her that one of his former girlfriends had called “naturally sexy.” “I got distracted for a moment.”

She was about to ask him if it was because he recalled who she was, but then she remembered that she had given him only her first name. Even if she’d told him her full name, that wouldn’t necessarily mean that the detective would remember her husband and that fatal night at the convenience store.

Or even if he did recall every moment of that night, there was no reason to believe that he would make the connection between her and the man he couldn’t save. King was, after all, a common enough name. Most likely, Benteen probably hadn’t even gotten Brett’s name after everything had gone back to normal—or as normal as it could have gone back to, she silently corrected.

No, if the detective was distracted on her account, he was probably trying to place where he’d seen her before.

As if the presence of a cameraman wasn’t enough of a clue, she thought wryly.

“No problem,” Ellie told the detective. In her opinion, that was a throwaway line that blanketed a lot of territory. She just wanted to do this story and move on. “Your CO told us we could take up a little of your time and ask you about the huge coup you just scored.”

Colin looked at her puzzled, not quite following the sexy reporter. “Excuse me?”

“The paintings,” Ellie prompted. “The stolen paintings that were in the storage unit you found.”

Colin nodded in response but said nothing.

“Well?” she asked, waiting for him to start speaking. Talk about having to pull words out of someone’s mouth. The detective was either exceptionally modest or exceedingly camera shy.

“That about covers it,” he told her.

She could see by the look that Jerry gave her that he had the same thought as she did. This wasn’t going to film well, not unless she could find a way to make this detective come around and start talking. She had a feeling that he would engage the audience once he got comfortable.

“You’re being modest,” she said, her voice coaxing him to elaborate.

He surprised her by saying, “Bragging rights aren’t a part of this job.”

Okay, she thought. He did need to be coaxed. A lot. She had to admit that this wasn’t what she’d expected. Some people, once they got in front of a camera, wouldn’t stop talking. This one seemed reluctant to even start.

“Still, I’m sure that it’s not every police detective who gets to take down an art thief who’s been plaguing the city.”

“I really can’t take any kind of credit for what happened. It’s not as if this was the result of long hours of planning.” He shrugged. “This was all actually just a big accident,” Colin told her.

The job had made her somewhat cynical. It wasn’t anything that she was particularly proud of, just a fact. But Ellie was beginning to believe that the detective was being serious. He was the genuine article. And because of this, she found herself trying to reach out to Benteen.

“There’s that modesty again,” she said. “I tell you what—why don’t you walk me through exactly what happened and we’ll go from there?”

She could see by the look on the detective’s face that he was about to dismiss the whole incident. It made him a rare find in her book. Most men couldn’t stop talking about themselves. But the station manager obviously was expecting a story and she wasn’t about to come back empty-handed. It wasn’t advisable.

“Word for word,” Ellie urged again. “Paint a picture for me, so to speak.”

Colin glared at the camera in Jerry’s hands. It was clearly the enemy. “Are you going to film this?”

“That is the idea,” Ellie said breezily. “Jerry’s just going to keep on filming and when we’re done, it’ll be edited down to about a minute of airtime. Two, tops,” she promised. She could see that the detective was wavering. All he needed was a little push that would send him over to her side. She felt she had just the thing. “You get final say on the footage.”

“I do?” Colin asked, not entirely certain that she was on the level. He was aware of how badly some of his fellow detectives had been portrayed to the public. He wanted no part of that.

“Maybe this’ll convince you,” she said, trying again. “Your CO signed off on this because he knew this would create a positive image of the Bedford PD. And my station manager thought this would be a feel-good piece that would really go over well, especially since those pieces are so few and far between.”

“Well, I guess I’m sold, then,” Colin told her. What he was sold on, he admitted, was the way her clear blue eyes seemed to sparkle as she tried to convince him. That alone was worth the price of admission.

Ellie smiled at the detective.

“Good.” She glanced over her shoulder to make sure that Jerry had the camera in position. He did. “All right, just tell me what happened.”

“Tell you?” he asked, thinking he was supposed to talk to the camera.

“Just me,” she assured him. “Talk to me.”

That made it easier. She had a face that invited conversation—as well as a number of other stray thoughts. “I’d just dropped off my niece, Heather, at school—”

Her ears instantly perked up. “Is that a usual thing for you?” The man was beginning to sound like a Boy Scout.

“It is ever since I became her sole guardian,” Colin answered matter-of-factly.

As a human-interest story, this was just getting better and better, Ellie thought. She made a mental note to ask him more questions regarding that situation so she could annotate her commentary once the film had been edited.

“Go on,” she urged.

“An APB came on over the two-way radio about a B and E that had just gone down less than three blocks away from Heather’s school,” he said.

She wanted to get back to that, but first she wanted him to explain some of the terminology he’d just used. “An APB and B and E?” she asked, waiting for him to spell the words out. She knew what he was saying, but the audience might not.

“All points bulletin and breaking and entering,” the detective explained. He was so used to those terms and others being tossed around that it didn’t occur to him that someone might not know what he was talking about.

“Okay. Go on,” she said, smiling at him.

It was a smile he caught himself thinking he could follow to the ends of the earth.

But not anymore, remember?

“The homeowner called 911 to say that he’d heard a noise and when he woke up, he saw a man running across his lawn carrying off his painting. Apparently, the thief had broken in while the guy was still asleep.”

She nodded, focusing on the image of a thief dashing across a lawn with a stolen painting clutched in his hands.

“Definitely not something you see every day,” Ellie agreed drolly.

Colin nodded. “That’s when I saw this guy driving a van that matched the description dispatch had put out. So I followed him. Turns out it wasn’t all that far away,” he added. “He took the painting to a local storage unit. As I watched him, he stashed the painting he’d just stolen in an ordinary storage unit. When I came up behind him, I saw that he had what amounted to fifteen other paintings inside the unit.” Colin paused in his narrative to tell her, “There’ve been a rash of paintings stolen in Bedford in the last eighteen months.”

She looked at him, waiting for more. When he didn’t continue or make any attempt to brag, she asked, “And the paintings that you saw, were they the ones that had been stolen?”

He nodded. “One and the same.”

She tried to get more details. “Was this guy part of a gang?”

“Not from anything that I could ascertain,” Colin told her. “When I questioned him, he said he had taken all the paintings. I think he was telling the truth.”

“And he hadn’t tried to fence any of them?” she asked. It didn’t seem possible.

Colin laughed softly. “Turns out that the guy just likes works of art and he didn’t have the money to buy any of his own, so he came up with this plan.” Colin shrugged. “Takes all kinds,” was his comment.

It certainly did, Ellie silently agreed. “That almost sounds too easy,” she said.

“I know,” he replied. “But sometimes everything just falls into place at the right time and the right way. It doesn’t happen often,” Colin allowed. “But it does happen.”

“Well, apparently, it did for you,” Ellie observed. She all but expected to see the detective kick the dust and murmur, “Ah, shucks.”

Colin turned out not to be as clueless as she momentarily thought him to be. A knowing smile curved his mouth as he guessed, “You’re not convinced.”

The smile came of its own volition. “It’s my doubting-Thomas side,” she admitted.

“We’re checking the guy for priors,” Colin told her. “Right now he’s clean, but we’re not finished. I could give you an update later,” he offered.

“I would appreciate it,” she said, then turned toward something that she knew would interest her viewers. “Tell me more about your niece. How long have you been her guardian?”

The question caught him off guard. They were just talking about the thief’s lack of priors. “Is that important?” he asked, unclear as to why it should be, especially in this context.

If nothing else, Ellie knew her audience and how to make a story appealing to them. “The viewers love to hear details like that about selfless heroes.”

“I’m not a hero and I’m not selfless,” he told her, his manner saying that he wasn’t just mouthing platitudes or what he felt passed for just the right amount of humility. His tone told Ellie that this detective was being straightforward with her, which she had to admit impressed her. He could have just as easily allowed her to build him up without protest.

“Why don’t we leave that to the viewer to decide?” Ellie suggested. “Now, how long have you been your niece’s guardian?”

“Six months,” he told her.

Again, he didn’t elaborate or tell her any more than the bare minimum. Was he being modest? Or was that a highly developed sense of privacy taking over?

Either way, her job was to push the boundaries a little in order to get him to open up. “What happened?” she asked.

He didn’t look annoyed, but he did ask, “Is this really necessary?”

She was honest with him, sensing that the detective would appreciate it. “For the story? No. This is just me asking.”

That brought up another host of questions in his mind. “Why?”

She wanted him to trust her. She needed to know the kind of man her husband had spent the last seconds of his life with. Only then would she know if he had done all that he could to try to save Brett. She was aware that he had probably said he had and filled out a report to that effect, but she wanted to be convinced.

“Shut off the camera, Jerry,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at her cameraman. “We’ve got our story. I’ll meet you at the van.”

Jerry looked at her skeptically, still worried about her. She hadn’t told the detective of their connection yet, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t going to, and when she did, she might need someone there for her.

But he couldn’t say anything, because it wasn’t his place. And if he did say anything, he knew that Ellie would put him in his place because she refused to tolerate anything remotely resembling pity, even if it came in the guise of sympathy.

All he could do was ask, “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.” The words Now go were implied if not said out loud.

Shaking his head, Jerry took his camera and walked out.

“See you around, Detective,” he said by way of a parting comment.

Turning back to the detective, Ellie picked up the conversation where she’d left it. “You asked me why before.”

Colin had just assumed that she’d forgotten and would go off on another topic. That she didn’t raised his estimation of her. And he really had to say that so far, he liked what he saw. Liked it a lot. Maybe there was hope for him yet. At least, he’d like to think so.

“Yes, I did.” His tone gave her an opening to continue her line of thinking.

“Because I am one of those people who has to know everything,” she told him simply. “That doesn’t mean I repeat everything I hear or everything I know, but I need to know it. And once I have all the information and can process it, then I can move on.”

He looked at her and made a judgment call. “So this really isn’t for your ‘story’?” he asked.

“No. Not directly.” And then she qualified her statement. “That doesn’t mean that I won’t use a piece of what you tell me—but again, we’ll run it by you first. You’ll get the final okay.”

He had to admit that he thought it a generous way to proceed. “Is this your normal procedure?”

Ellie laughed. She had no idea that he found the sound captivating. “There is no such thing as ‘normal’ procedure. It is what it is at the moment.”

Colin paused, considering her words and if he believed her.

Like a lot of true dyed-in-the-wool detectives, he had “gut feelings.”

“Gut feelings” that saw him through a lot and, on occasion, kept him safe. His gut feeling told him that the woman with the deep crystal-blue eyes was telling him the truth.

He took a chance. “They died in an avalanche.”

“That had to be terrible for you,” she said. It was certainly different from the usual car crash or drive-by shooting. She managed to control her reaction so he wasn’t aware that what he said had affected her.

“It wasn’t exactly a walk in the park for Heather, either,” he pointed out.

“You were the one who broke the news to her?” Even as Ellie asked the question, she knew that he would have taken it upon himself to tell his niece. Benteen struck her as that sort of person. She was filled with empathy for both the detective and his niece, knowing what being told news like that felt like.

“I wasn’t about to let anyone else do it,” he said.

No, I wouldn’t have thought so.

Without her realizing it, her estimation of the detective rose up yet another notch.