“Maybe you’d better. Before Regan Poole tells everybody in town you killed your boss because he wouldn’t marry you.”
She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think. “Is that what she’s saying?”
He watched her with flat, black eyes. “Close enough.”
Blood buzzed in Bailey’s head. “That bitch.” She stood jerkily and then sank down again when the floor tilted under her. “If anybody shot him, it would be her. I couldn’t. I didn’t. I . . .”
“Loved him?”
“No! But I knew him. I worked with him.” Her voice shook. Her hands shook, too. She clasped them together in her lap. “And it’s wrong if somebody killed him. How I feel about him doesn’t matter. I want . . .”
A void opened in her chest. She teetered on the edge, staring into the chasm that had swallowed all her assumptions, all her plans and dreams.
What did she want?
“Justice,” Steve suggested quietly.
She remembered his words that day at the bottom of her parents’ driveway.
You do justice to the victims by putting their killer in jail.
That was it. That was almost it.
“The truth.” She seized on the word with relief, held it like something hard and precious she’d found in the mud. “I guess I just want the truth.”
Steve stood over her, his hands in his pockets, his face unreadable. “Then we want the same thing.”
She looked up, surprised.
And he kissed her.
Soft, like love words whispered in the dark. Warm, like a salute. So good. Confusion and pleasure crashed inside her. His tongue touched her bottom lip, a promise of intimacy, a hint of heat, and withdrew.
He straightened, his breathing rapid and his dark eyes turbulent. Her hands fisted in her lap.
“Dad, can we play video games in Bryce’s room?”
Shaken, Bailey turned her head and saw Gabrielle and Bryce standing at the back door.
“For a little while.” Steve rubbed the back of his neck. “Don’t wake the baby if you go upstairs.”
“Okay.”
Her nephew galloped through the room.
Gabrielle dawdled, her gaze darting from Bailey to her father.
Bailey’s face burned.
“Did you want something?” Steve asked dryly.
His daughter grinned at him. “Maybe.”
Gabrielle’s convinced herself—or maybe my mother convinced her—that if I had a wife, we could all move back to D.C.
“Then go upstairs,” Steve said, and her grin widened.
“Hey, Bailey,” she called as she danced past. “Thanks for the freeze pops.”
Bailey scraped together her composure. “You’re welcome.”
The girl thundered upstairs, shouting at Bryce to wait.
But the world she brought in with her lingered in her wake, crowding the narrow, sunlit space, pressing on Bailey like the heat of the afternoon.
Did she and Steve really want the same things?
Aside from the accident of attending the same schools, of knowing the names of the same teachers and streets, what did they have in common?
Born in the same town, they might as well have sprung from different worlds. They were coming into this relationship—not that they had a relationship, exactly—with different expectations. Experience.
Baggage.
He had kissed her. Her belly quivered at the memory of his kiss. And her heart stumbled.
But still, she was way past the age when she could pretend a kiss could make everything better.
She looked at him, his impassive face and dark, hot eyes, and waited for him to say something.
“Guns don’t take prints well,” he said. “Anybody smart enough to shoot Ellis and set it up to look like suicide will have wiped the gun anyway.”
Bailey blinked. “What about . . . um . . .”
Cops learn to compartmentalize,
he had said.
Depersonalize.
Could she do that?
“What about the residue tests?” she said. “Won’t those at least prove whether or not Paul fired the gun?”
“On
CSI
? Sure. In real life—” Frowning, Steve reached for his cell phone. “I have to take this.”
“You go right ahead,” she said sweetly. “You want me to go upstairs and play?”
Oh God,
she sounded like her mother.
He shot her an annoyed look and flipped open his phone. “Burke.”
His body went utterly, unnaturally still, his face wiped of expression.
Her stomach pitched.
Bad news,
she thought.
“Condition?” His eyes were hard. “All right. We’ll meet you there.”
Her breathing hitched.
We?
“Not necessary,” Steve said into the cell phone. “She’s with me.”
Oh, God.
Bailey swallowed. “What is it?”
“No, I’ll handle it. Yeah. Fifteen minutes.”
He snapped shut the phone.
“What is it? Was there a—”
Oh, God
. “Was there an accident?”
“No. Your mother and Leann are fine.”
“Then . . .”
“There was a break-in at your parents’ house,” he said gently.
“A . . .” She worked moisture into her mouth. “But she wasn’t there, right? You said she was fine.”
“Your mother and Leann were still out shopping. But—”
Bailey froze in rejection. “No.”
She didn’t want to hear. She didn’t want to know. She was a writer. She knew the power of words. As long as he didn’t say it, it couldn’t have happened.
He said, still in that grave, calm, cop’s voice, “Your father was in the house. They think he came home when the intruder was upstairs.”
“Is he . . .”
Steve regarded her, a terrible compassion in his eyes. “He’s at the hospital. Is there someone you can call to watch the kids? I’ll take you there.”
SIXTEEN
S
TEVE hated hospitals.
Teresa had, too, which made it even more unfair she had ended her life in one. But at the end, she was too ill to resist him.
He was sorry for that now. Now that it was too late.
Compared to the chaos of Greater Southeast in D.C., the emergency department at Chapel Hill was almost orderly. The chairs looked more comfortable, too. But on a Saturday afternoon, the waiting area was full of people who couldn’t afford doctors or couldn’t wait for one. Phones rang, stock carts rattled, and babies cried under the invasive hum of the fluorescent lights. A white-faced teen in shin guards turned his face into his mother’s shoulder. An elderly man patted the arm of his mumbling wife, who kept making furtive attempts to stand. The air was sharp with disinfectant, thick with pain and patience and despair.
Bailey braced in a chair, still in the tank top and exercise pants she must have been wearing when Sherman picked her up this morning. The harsh lighting revealed the lines of strain around her mouth and the fatigue like bruises under her eyes.
His instinct was to take her in his arms and comfort her.
But after her first, involuntary protest, Bailey had rallied, calling Leann’s cell phone to break the news to her mother and sister, making arrangements with a neighbor to stay with her sister’s kids and Gabrielle. Making herself useful. Going through the motions, as if efficiency could hold disaster at bay.
She would have made a good soldier,
he thought.
Or a cop’s wife.
She glanced up as he approached from the nurses’ station.
“He’s conscious,” he reported. “They just let your mother go back to sit with him.”
“How is he?”
He gave her the best answer he could. “The nurse says he looks good. They’re waiting to see the doctor now.”
“Can I see him?”
“Maybe later. They only let one family member back at a time.”
“Leann?”
“As soon as she heard your father was stable, she went home to be with the kids. We probably passed her in the parking garage.”
“You should go get Gabrielle.”
And leave Bailey here alone?
Steve had worried Gabrielle might object to being left in an unfamiliar place. But she heard “hospital” and “father,” and went into Good Child mode.
“Don’t worry, Dad. We’ll be fine,” she had said before dragging Bryce upstairs for more video games.
Making herself useful. Going through the motions. Just like Bailey.
His heart ached for them both.
“My mom will be back from her trip soon. I’ll stick around until the doctor comes out to talk to you,” he said.
In case the news was bad.
Bailey frowned. “But he’s all right, you said.”
“Yeah.”
Probably. The triage nurse had thrown around a lot of big words and scary phrases like subdural hematoma and intracranial bleeding. But they didn’t actually know anything until the X ray results came back. How much should he prepare her? What did she need to know?
“He’s got a headache.”
“A headache? Or a concussion?”
Steve shrugged. “He was out for a while.”
“What does that mean?”
“You lose consciousness, you probably have a concussion.” Probably, his ass. For sure. “Happens to football players all the time.”
“My father wasn’t playing football,” she said sharply.
“No,” he admitted.
“Somebody
hit
him,” she said, like she was trying to make sense of it, to make what had happened fit the world she knew.
He knew how she felt. He’d felt that way, too.
It was his job to find answers, but explanations had failed him when he needed them most.
It was the sheer ordinariness, the unexpectedness, of tragedy that took your breath away, the accident on the road you drove every day, the bullet that shattered a window and killed the child sleeping in her crib, the cancer discovered during a routine physical appointment, the plane coming out of the clear September sky.
Random, senseless, unavoidable loss. You couldn’t stop it. All you could do was sort through the wreckage, searching for clues to comfort the survivors.
“We’ll find whoever’s responsible,” he said.
Her eyes, her wonderful, expressive eyes, focused on his face. “What happened, exactly?”
Maybe talking about the case would take her mind off whatever was going on beyond those double doors. Or maybe it would only help him.
“Near as we can tell, somebody walked through the back door while your father was at work. He left the hardware store about three o’clock. Neighbor heard her dog kicking up a fuss sometime around then, growling and barking. She finally looked out a back window, saw a man running away from the house toward the woods, and called 911. Chief Clegg was right around the corner, so he stopped by to check things out. Found your father’s car in the driveway and the back door unlocked.”
“The back door is always unlocked,” Bailey said.