Devils Among Us (Devin Dushane Series Book 1) (14 page)

It came as no surprise to Shane that Devin refused to be
admitted to the hospital once she had been checked over. He was surprised,
however, that she wanted to question Henry. Not visit, question.

“Devin, don’t you think he’s kind of had a rough day?” Shane
was trying to reason with her as her IV was being removed. “Maybe you should
let him rest up a bit.”

She cocked an eyebrow at him. “Yeah, and my day’s been a
real peach.” Her once-white shorts and tank top were now grey with streaks of
black, which at least matched her skin and hair, what she hadn’t been able to
wash off in the tiny sink in her ER cubicle. She scowled. “Why are you here
again?”

He used his sparkly smile. “You need a ride.”

She grumbled under her breathe as the nurse taped her up.
“I’m sure someone would take pity on me, or I could walk, or hitchhike.”

“That’s illegal.”

“Then you’re just going to have to wait until I’m done
talking to Henry.” She began scribbling an illegible signature across the
bottom of her discharge papers. “Everywhere I’ve poked in the case has brought
me back to the fact that no alibi was ever documented for Henry, and even
though charges were brought and then dismissed, an alibi was never mentioned.
Even if he’s not involved, there is something significant about that. Not to
mention that the very night I’m to have dinner with Henry, he gets knocked out
and his house set on fire, and someone deliberately shuts that dog in the back
room to ensure we’d be drawn back in.” Devin finished the last signature with a
flourish, tossed down the pen and yanked off her hospital bracelet. “Let’s go.”

“Devin, I really think you’re reaching here. I see your
point with the alibi thing, but a whole conspiracy to do Henry in? Come on.
He’s an old man. Accidents happen.”

She stopped so abruptly that Shane had to sidestep to miss
her, nearly knocking over a rolling computer stand. “I inhaled smoke Shane. Not
weed. This didn’t all come to me in some dream. Henry’s wound was to the back
of his head, yet he was lying face-down in the doorway to the dining room. What
did he hit his head on? Are you telling me that a 65-year-old man in perfect
mental health laid a kitchen towel on the stove while frying pork chops and was
so alarmed by the fire that he fell backwards and hit his head, and in a daze
got up and wandered into the dining room without leaving a blood trail and then
turned around and face planted in the kitchen? Does that sound plausible to
you, Shane?”

Devin rocked back on her heels and smirked until she caught
the wide eyes of a little girl staring at them as she passed by with her
mother. They must be quite an odd pair arguing in the middle of a hospital
hallway. She looked like she had climbed up a chimney on the way to the beach
and his trendy jeans and pressed, button-down looked like he could be on a
date. This realization washed over Devin like the tide.

“Where were you when you came to the fire?”

“Uhh, what? Where? I was just hanging out.” His eyes had
gone wide when she asked and a light shade of pink was creeping above his
collar. Bingo.

“Where were you hanging out? The Lucky Ox? You got to
Henry’s awfully quick.”

He slid his hands in his pockets and shrugged his shoulders
innocently.

“Naw, The Stone House does great wings during their happy
hour on Friday evenings. It’s right on Main, so I trucked on over there pretty
quick.”

Devin took in his words and expression for a moment. She
didn’t think he was lying, exactly, except maybe by omission. Like it mattered
to her anyway if he’d been on a date. It was a free country. She shrugged one
shoulder and rolled her eyes as she pushed opened the door to Henry’s room.

“Whatever.”

Devin had known Henry for a week, but he looked years older
in just one afternoon. Framed in the hospital bed, he looked gray and fragile,
not the vital man that was going to cook her dinner. Then his bright blue eyes
opened and his face lit up.

“Hey, good lookin’ what’s cookin’? Cuz it’s not your
dinner!”

Devin snorted. “You’ve been waiting for me to come in this
whole time just so you could say that, haven’t you?”

He gave her his heartbreaker grin. “For at least an hour,
but what’s life if you don’t make at least one pretty lady smile every day?”

She flopped down in the chair next to the bed. “We’ve got to
get you out of here before you’re chasing all the nurses around.”

Shane leaned against the wall. “Come on, Devin, let him live
a little. Just one nurse?”

She just shook her head and covered her eyes with her hand.
“If I weren’t so tired I’d smack you.”

Henry’s brow scrunched over his crystal eyes. “Why aren’t
they keeping you? Are they sure you’re ok?”

“Don’t worry about me I’ve been triple checked and given the
all clear. I’m fine.” She used her warm, reassuring smile that was reserved for
small children and victims who were testifying.

“Actually she threw a bed pan across the ER and threatened
to yank out her own IV if they didn’t get her a refusal of treatment waiver.”
Shane chirped in.

Devin gave him the full on glare of black death. “Oh, now
you want to be Mr. Responsible?” Before Henry could start a barrage of
questions, she reached out, took his hand and laid the wide chocolate eyes on
him.

“Henry, I’m fine, really. They’ve checked out my lungs,
throat, heart and treated any small burns. There is nothing wrong with me, but
there is something I need, and you can help me with that.” Henry was nodding
vigorously, eyes bright with unshed tears, prepared to give her a kidney, bone
marrow, anything at all.

“I need to know where you were the night Laney was
murdered.” His mouth fell open with a little popping sound, and he became even
paler if that was possible. He tried to pull his hand away, but Devin wouldn’t
let him. “I don’t believe you had anything to do with her murder, but there are
several missing pieces from that night, and if I can put them all together, I
might find a clue we wouldn’t have seen otherwise.”

Henry stared at the end of his bed for a long time. His
voice was heavy as if draped with lead when he spoke. “I was at The Summit the
whole night. I never left the lake. I was in my car for a while, around eight
o’clock with a girl and then I was back in the parking lot around nine o’clock
with some of the boys. When I went back under the pavilion Beth was looking for
her. That’s all I’m going to say, and that’s all you need to know.” He clamped
his jaws down like a pit bull, as if they would try to physically drag the
words out of his mouth.

Shane spoke slow and easy from his position against the
wall, trying not to spook Henry any further. “Could we have the names of some
of the people you were with in the parking lot? Maybe they could broaden our
picture. How about the girl you were with?”

A bolt of righteous indignation animated Henry, returning
some color to his gray cheeks. “Certainly not. It was a poor decision on both
our parts, but certainly hers. I would never sully her reputation that way.”

Shane’s mouth was hanging open. “You were charged with
murder! You wouldn’t give yourself an alibi to murder because of a girl’s reputation?!”

Devin cut him off with a look she tossed over her shoulder.
“Henry, that was very chivalrous of you, but I’m more interested in the guys
you were with around 9:00. Will you tell me any of
their
names?”

The pit bull was back. “I’m sorry, Devin. I owe you my life,
but I absolutely won’t do that.”

Shane dropped his head against the wall muttering about
ungrateful, senile, old men. Devin just leaned in against the rails of the
hospital bed.

“How about tonight? What do you think happened this
evening?”

Henry grinned. “Well I know I’m glad I don’t have any kids,
because they’d be trying to ship me off to some assisted living facility
thinking I burned my own house down.”

“So is that what happened? You had a senior moment?” Her
eyes were twinkling, because it was hard to keep a straight face thinking of
Henry as being senile.

“Heck, no! One minute I’m setting the table, and I go back
to the kitchen to get the roses I cut out of the garden, and the stove is on
fire! Before I can do anything, I see this movement out of the corner of my eye,
but I just think it’s Bo, and then whack! Everything goes dark, and I wake up
on the front lawn with the house on fire.”

Devin turned around and mouthed “I told you so” to Shane,
but his brow was drawn in concentration. She frowned as he pushed off the wall
and started to question Henry

“Henry are you sure you couldn’t have slipped when you made that
dash into the kitchen? Or tripped over Bo? If you hit your head, you may have
forgotten something or things may be a little fuzzy. Are you one hundred
percent sure things happened that way? Heck, can we really be a hundred percent
sure of anything in this life? ”

“I’m pretty darn sure, Shane, but I guess with a head injury
there is a chance things could have been different.”

Tendrils of ice slid down Devin’s spine, followed by white-hot,
all-encompassing rage. With one phrase Shane had just filled her in on who he
really was. Lying by omission hardly covered it. She said her good-byes to
Henry with assurances that she would look after Bo. Shane kept up steady
chatter all the way through the hospital, but Devin kept her mouth drawn in a
tight line. She didn’t dare open it for fear that if her anger was unleashed in
these tight corridors, innocent bystanders might be injured. Once they had
cleared the hospital doors by a good twenty yards she rounded on him.

“You’re a lawyer!” She hurled the words at him like a weapon
snarling with fury. “What’s worse, you’re a defense attorney! You’ve studied in
Richmond. I can tell. Did you practice there, too? Ever defeat one of my cases?
Or did your firm specialize in tax evasion?” Her questions continued to come
fast and furious, and her anger only intensified. Shane held his palms up and
backed away, trying to keep a bench between them at all times.

“Hey, easy now, before you go jumping to any conclusions,
let’s talk about this. For one thing, how did you just figure that all out?”
From her murderous expression, he must have gathered she wasn’t in a sharing
mood at the moment. “Okay, we’ll come back to that. Most importantly, I never
wanted to be a lawyer. My daddy was a lawyer my granddaddy was a lawyer, and so
forth and so on. It was expected of me, so that’s what I did, but I hated it. I
spent a year in New York being a peon in the D.A’s office and bored out of my
skull. When the budget got cut and they transferred me to the public defender’s
office, I was done. My family here needed the help, and there was an opening
for a sheriff’s deputy. That’s all there is. I’m not some slick defense
attorney, so get off your high horse.”

Devin was taking long, slow breaths to calm down. She knew
her reaction wasn’t proportionate to the situation, but hearing those exact
words again took her back to a court room scene she didn’t want to see. A
confident witness that was suddenly shaken and confused. A solid case that
unraveled and murderers walked free. One more slow breath. Her voice was tight
now but under control.

“So you went to law school in Richmond,” she paused for him
to confirm, “and you had a professor named Gabriel Dallon.”

Shane was so stunned he forgot for a moment to maintain a
safe distance and leaned across the back of the bench, his words not so much a
whisper as a breath. “How can you possibly know that? Yes, I did have him as a
professor. He was a pompous jerk, and I nearly flunked his class. Devin, what
the hell is going on?”

The surge of anger receded just as quickly as it had come,
but it left Devin empty and shaken with harsh memories rather than satisfied vengeance.
She looked ghostly in the moonlight, she had gone so pale that the traces of
soot made harsh bruise like patterns on her skin. She didn’t answer him immediately.
Instead sinking into the memories that were her own personal demons, the
screams and the blood that still kept her up at night, the trial that had
fallen apart. Finally she shivered in the evening breeze and it brought her
back to Shane’s concerned blue eyes and his outstretched hand. Apparently she
was starting to sway a bit, the effects of the day taking their toll. She
ignored his hand and steadied herself on the back of the bench. When she spoke,
she kept her tone even and matter-of-fact.

“You were questioning him like a defense attorney, trying to
create doubt.” Devin offered up a small tired smile. “There should have been an
objection—you were leading the witness.” Shane just huffed with a roll of his
eyes. “I heard Dallon defend some street-scum gang members on a case once where
there was an ironclad eye witness, but he had her so confused by the end, she
wouldn’t have testified to her own name.” She looked into Shane’s eyes and kept
her gaze steady. “He kept using that exact same line about being 100% sure
about anything in this life.”

Shane looked back at the hospital and nodded. “That’s a
patented Gabriel Dallon line. He used to say it so often, it became a drinking
game. Someone would record his lecture and that night at a party, we’d play it
back and every time he said it, the whole group did a shot. Needless to say,
fifteen minutes into the lecture everybody was hammered. Ughh!” Shane rubbed
both his hands across his face and then brought his fingertips together at his
lips. “I can’t believe I used a sleazy Gabriel Dallon line. I feel like I need
to go wash my mouth out with soap.”

Devin laughed. “Do you want liquid or a bar?”

“I think I need both to get rid of the taste.” His grin lit
him up. He was thrilled to be inching back into her good graces. He offered her
his arm as they headed for the parking lot, but she sauntered off without him.
Undeterred he kept pace beside her. “So was it one of your cases that Dallon
ruined?”