“I enjoyed your company.”

Tony hadn’t expected to say that when he’d opened his mouth. This was much too personal and revealing.

“So did I.”

Whatever else Sasha might have said was interrupted by the insistent buzz emitted by his pager.

“You thought right, Henderson. Now call for backup.” Tony closed his phone. His expression was sober. “They found another body.”

She stared at him, her eyes widening in horror. “I’m coming with you.”

“This isn’t exactly according to the rules,” Tony said.

“Neither is death,” she answered softly.

She had him there, Tony thought. As he glanced at her direction, he wondered why he was really letting the doctor talk her way into coming along.

Her Lawman on Call
Marie Ferrarella

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MARIE FERRARELLA

This USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award-winning author has written over 175 books for Silhouette Books, some under the name Marie Nicole. Her romances are beloved by fans worldwide. Check out her Web site at www.marieferrarella.com.

To Dr. Tonia Marralle, who delivered my children and gave me an idea to work with.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 1

T here was something about a parking structure that always made her feel vulnerable. In broad daylight, she found them somewhat confusing. Most of the time she had too many things on her mind. Squeezing in that extra piece of information which identified where she had left her vehicle was usually one piece too many. Finding her car when that happened turned into an ordeal that lasted for what felt like an eternity.

At night, when there were fewer vehicles housed within this particular parking structure, she felt exposed, helpless.

And déjà vu haunted her.

It was a completely irrational reaction, she was the first to acknowledge it as such. But it changed nothing.

She wanted to run, but chose to move slowly, retracing steps she’d taken thirteen hours ago, when her day at Patience Memorial Hospital had begun. The lighting down on this level was poor. One of the bulbs was out, leaving the resulting shadows to threaten one another.

The air felt heavy and clammy, much like the day had been. Typical New York City autumn, Sasha thought. She picked up her pace, making her way toward where she thought she remembered leaving her car, a small vintage Toyota that had seen more than a handful of design changes come and go.

Dr. Sasha Pulaski stripped off her sweater and slung it over her arm, stifling a yawn. She felt exhausted. By rights, she should have left for the apartment she shared with her two younger sisters more than two hours ago. She’d actually been on her way to the elevator when Angela had called out to her. Angela Rico was a nurse on the floor, but more than that, she was a friend. Angela told her that the young woman who’d given birth less than two hours ago had suddenly started hemorrhaging. Sasha doubled back quickly. It had taken her less time to cauterize the tiny broken vein than it had to calm down her patient, who was convinced she was going to die.

But eventually, she’d managed to get the situation under control. By the time she left, her patient was doing much better and was arguing with her husband about the name they had chosen for the baby. A name, Sasha gathered, her patient no longer liked.

She eased out of the room before her patient or her husband could ask her to weigh in on the matter. As she passed the nurses’ station, she saw that Angela had left for the night. Probably in a hurry to see her little girl before she fell asleep, Sasha mused.

Once upon a time, she’d thought that was going to be her life, too. Until the unspeakable had happened.

She forced herself to think of something else. Anything else before the loneliness took her prisoner.

God, but she felt drained. If she was lucky, she could be sound asleep in less than an hour. Never mind food, she thought. The urge for food had come and gone without being satisfied, fading away as if it had never existed. Now all she wanted was just to commune with her pillow and a flat surface—any flat surface—for about six hours.

Not too much to ask, she thought. Unless you were an intern. Those days, mercifully, were behind her. And still in front of her two youngest sisters. Five doctors and soon-to-be-doctors in one family. Not bad for the offspring of immigrants who had come into this country with nothing more than the clothes on their backs, Sasha thought. She knew that her parents were both proud enough to burst.

A strange popping noise sounded in the distance, breaking her train of thought. Instantly, Sasha stiffened, listening. Holding her breath. Memories suddenly began assaulting her.

One hand was clenched at her side, the other held tightly onto the purse strap slung over her shoulder. She willed herself to relax. More than likely, it was just someone from the hospital getting their car and going home.

Or maybe it was one of the security guards, accidentally stepping on something on the ground.

Several people had been robbed in and around the structure in the last six months and the hospital had beefed up security. There was supposed to be at least one guard, if not two, making the rounds in the structure at all times.

That still didn’t make her feel all that safe. The hairs at the back of her neck felt as if they were standing at attention.

As she rounded the corner, heading toward where she hoped she had left her vehicle, Sasha dug into her purse. Not for her keys, but for the comforting shape of the small can of Mace her father, Josef Pulaski, a retired NYPD police officer, insisted that she and her sisters carry with them at all times. Josef fiercely loved his adopted country, but he had no illusions about the safety of the streets, not where his girls were concerned.

Her fingers tightened around the small dispenser just as she saw a short, squat man up ahead. He had a mop of white hair, a kindly face and, even in his uniform, looked as if he could be a stand-in for a mall Santa Claus.

The security guard, she realized, her fingers growing lax. She’d seen him around and even exchanged a few words with him on occasion. He was retired, with no family. Being a guard gave him something to do, a reason to get up each day he had said.

The next moment, her relief began to slip away. The guard was looking down at something on the ground. There was a deep frown on his face and his body was rigid, as if frozen in place.

Sasha picked up her pace. “Mr. Stevens?” she called out. “Is something wrong?”

His head jerked in her direction. He looked startled to see her. Or was that horror on his face?

Before she could ask him any more questions, Sasha saw what had robbed him of his speech. The body of a woman lay beside a car. Blood was pooling beneath her head, straying toward her frayed tan trench coat. A look of surprise was forever frozen on her pretty bronze features.

Recognition was immediate. A scream, wide and thick, lodged itself in Sasha’s throat as she struggled not to release it.

Angela.

Horror vibrated through Sasha’s very being.

How?

Why?

She wasn’t sure if she’d only thought the questions or if she’d actually said them out loud until Walter Stevens answered her.

“I don’t know. I just found her like this. I think she’s dead,” he added hoarsely. Walter’s watery eyes looked at her helplessly, as if he was waiting for her to do something about that.

Sasha dropped to her knees, pressing her fingertips against Angela’s neck, frantically searching for a pulse.

There was none.

“Call the police!” she ordered the hapless guard.

Tossing her sweater and her purse aside, Sasha began a round of CPR that she already knew in her heart was useless. But she had to try because, despite everything she had been through, despite Adam’s death, she still believed in miracles.

But there were no miracles for Angela Rico tonight.

By the time Sasha rocked back on her heels, finally giving up her efforts to bring the maternity-ward nurse around, more than a few of the people who worked at the hospital had gathered around her, drawn by the sounds of approaching sirens and the security guard’s frantic call for help.

The murmur of voices went in and out of her head. Everyone was horrified. Angela had been one of their own. Everyone had always liked her.

In a daze, hating that it had already been too late to help Angela before she’d even got there, Sasha looked down at her hands. They were covered in blood.

Just as they had been once before.

With almost superhuman effort, Sasha fought hard to keep the dark shadows of the past from smothering her. Exhausted, she made no such effort to curtail the tears that came to her eyes.

Detective Anthony Santini was not very happy about getting the call that roused him from a sound sleep upon the sofa where’d he’d collapsed earlier. Today was supposed to be his day off.

On days off, a man could do what he wanted and what Tony had wanted to do was court oblivion. Especially today of all days.

Because today was his third anniversary.

Would have been his third anniversary, he corrected tersely in his head. If Annie were alive.

But she wasn’t.

Annie hadn’t been numbered among the living for the last ten months and nineteen days and the hole her death had created in his life just kept on getting deeper and deeper instead of closing up the way that know-nothing police shrink had told him it would when their paths had crossed. Involuntarily on his part. He placed no faith in shrinks. No faith in anything now that Annie was gone. All he had left was his work.

On days alone, he needed something to dull the pain and nothing seemed to work except a few hard drinks.

But tonight, his attempts to trample down his memories had been shattered by the phone.

Tony’d initially cursed at it, but it wouldn’t stop ringing. Not until he’d finally answered it. Captain Holloway was on the other end, asking him to check out the homicide at Patience Memorial Hospital. The captain’d had the good grace to apologize, saying that everyone else was either busy tonight, or out sick.

Tony had felt like calling in sick himself, given the way his head was throbbing. But now that his sleep had been summarily disrupted, he knew that he wouldn’t be able to get back to it. The best he could hope for was tossing and turning the remainder of the night away. So he might as well lose himself in his work. It didn’t ease the pain that haunted him night and day, but it did give him a reason to go on.

Sometimes.

Pulling into the parking structure from the street entrance, he drove down the winding path until he saw the crowd of people clustering together and staring at something on the ground. Tony parked his car to one side and got out.

The crowd, judging by the uniforms and lab coats, were all from the hospital. He hoped that they knew better than to trample the crime scene. Holloway wasn’t here, but he’d sent in several patrolmen as well as Bart Henderson, a tall, strapping man with fading red hair and a handlebar moustache straight out of another era. The man should have retired years ago.

There were times, like now, that Tony saw himself in the man’s ruddy face. It didn’t improve his mood.

Moving forward, Tony saw the body on the ground first. And the pale woman with blood on her clothing second.

Something about the woman brought to mind a line from an old fairy tale. For a second, it eluded him, and then he remembered. It was the description of Snow White. Skin pale as snow, hair black as night.

It went on, but he couldn’t remember the rest of the description. However, from what he could remember, the woman who was standing beside the body could have posed for the fairy-tale princess.

Tony took out his badge and held it up as he approached. The crowd parted, letting him through, some asking him questions he didn’t bother answering.

“Detective Anthony Santini,” he told the pale woman. “You were with her when she was killed?”

His tone indicated that he made no final assumptions, waiting for her to answer one way or another. His dark gray eyes took precise measure of her, looking for some kind of sign, a “tell” as the poker players called it, to show him whether she was lying.

The woman’s voice was low, soft, but strong as she replied, “No. She was already shot when I saw her. Mr. Stevens was standing over her—he was the one who found her.” She took a breath, as if trying to put that between herself and the memory. “I tried to revive her. I’m a doctor,” she added belatedly.

Tony nodded, keeping his eyes on her face. “Then she was still alive when you came?” It didn’t seem likely, given that the victim was shot in the middle of her forehead, but he played along, waiting to see what the woman would say. “Did she try to say anything?”

Sasha moved her head from side to side, still trying to come to terms with what had happened. “There was no pulse,” she told him, her voice devoid of emotion, as numb as she felt.

“But you still tried to revive her.”

She couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic, or just pressing her for information. “Sometimes, you can bring them back,” she replied quietly.

The hurt was beginning to burrow its way into her. Death was a terrible, terrible thing. In her head, she could still hear Angela’s voice.

I’ll see you Friday, Angela had said.

Except now, she wouldn’t, Sasha thought. Who was going to tell Angela’s little girl her mother wasn’t going to be coming home anymore?

“But this wasn’t one of those times,” she heard the detective saying.

Sasha looked at him sharply. But there was no humor, no sarcastic twist to his mouth. After a moment, she shook her head.

“No,” she whispered more to herself than to the tall, dark-haired detective with the attitude, “this wasn’t one of those times.”

The woman looked, he thought, genuinely shaken up and he wondered why. Was she close to the victim? Did she know more than she was saying? Like the popular cult icon from a few years ago, Fox Mulder from The X Files, Tony’s initial approach to a case was always the same: “Trust no one.” Every word needed to be verified or supported before it became a viable piece of the puzzle.

Tony looked at the small, heavyset man in the dark navy-blue uniform standing beside Dr. Snow White. A quick glance would have had someone labeling the older man a policeman. Only closer scrutiny would have taken note of the differences in uniforms. But there was one unsettling similarity.

“You have a gun,” Tony observed.

One ham-like hand immediately covered the gun butt as if to acknowledge the weapon’s existence.

“I’ve got a license,” Stevens said quickly. “The agency pays more per hour for guards who have gun permits. And there’ve been muggings…” With a sigh that seemed to come from his very toes, Stevens’s voice trailed off as he looked down again at the slain nurse.

Tony was aware that there’d been reports of people being accosted late at night in the hospital’s parking facility.

“But none of them were fatal,” he pointed out to the security guard.

“No. Not until now,” Walter Stevens agreed heavily. Looking at the police detective, he blew out a shaky breath. “It’s my fault.”

Tony’s eyes narrowed. Confessions didn’t usually come this early in the game and in his experience, never without some sort of prodding and usually in trade for a lessening of the ultimate sentence. Taking that into account, he truly doubted that the guard was about to make life easy for him.

Drawing on his rather limited supply of patience, Tony asked, “How’s that?”

Scrubbing a hand over his stubbled chin, Stevens rendered his confession. “I usually make my rounds earlier. If I’d been here five, ten minutes sooner, who knows? The nurse might still be alive.” He looked down at the prone figure. “I might have been able to stop whoever did this.”

Moved, Sasha placed her arm around the man’s shoulders. At five-seven, she was approximately an inch taller than he was. “You don’t know that,” she said in a comforting tone. “Whoever it was might have shot you, too.”

One of those, Tony thought, scrutinizing the woman again. A perpetual spreader of sunshine. Someone who felt called upon to lift burdens and cheer people up.

They had their place, he supposed, but preferably not in his investigations. Frowning, Tony focused on what was important.

“Why were you late in making your rounds?” The question was sharply asked, pinning the security guard to the proverbial wall.

If the attack had actually been planned, someone would have gone to a lot of trouble learning the guard’s rounds and when he passed areas of the complex. For the nurse to have been slain when she was, it had to have been an unexpected attack, without any previous knowledge of the security guard’s route. Maybe this was just a crime of opportunity and the young nurse had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or someone could have followed her without giving the guard any thought at all, which meant that he or she was unfamiliar with the hospital’s policy.

There were a great many things to consider before they could feel that they were on the right path to solving the crime.

He looked at the guard expectantly.

“Something I ate,” Stevens told him, pressing his wide hand to his less-than-flat midsection. “Been to the men’s room three, four times so far tonight.” He offered a sheepish smile. “Throws off my timing.”

“I’ll bet.” Tony cut him off before the man could get more graphic. He glanced toward the doctor. “I didn’t get your name, Doctor.”

“Sasha Pulaski.”

“Sasha,” he repeated. “Is that Russian?”

“Polish,” she corrected. “My parents are Polish.”

He noticed, even though she still looked shaken, that there was a touch of pride in her voice. He wondered what that was like, to be proud of who you were, where you came from.

His eyes swept over the doctor and the guard. “I’d like to take you both down to the precinct for a formal statement.”

Stevens looked a little uncertain about the turn of events. “If I go, there’s no one down here to cover for me,” he protested, concerned. “I’ll lose my job and I can’t afford to have that happen. I have bills—”

The guard sounded as if he was just getting wound up. Tony put his hand up to stop the flow of words before they started.

“Henderson,” he called over to his partner. The older man was consulting with one of the forensic investigators. “See if we can get one of the patrolmen to fill in for the security guard here until I get him back from the precinct.”

“Why don’t you just take a statement from Mr. Stevens right here for the time being? It might save you both a lot of time and effort,” Sasha quietly suggested.

That caught him off guard. Tony thought about the solution she’d offered, or pretended to. He didn’t like having anyone poke around in his investigation unless he asked them to, but the truth of it was, she was right. The patrolman could be put to better use canvassing the immediate area instead of taking the guard’s place. And unless the guard had something significant to offer, such as having seen someone fleeing the scene just before the body was discovered, taking him down to the precinct would be a waste of time.

Mainly a waste of his time. In his experience, most security guards with night beats were not overly observant and spent most of their working hours just struggling to stay awake.

“Does that go for you, too, Doctor?” Tony asked, shifting his attention to her. “Do you want to just give your statement here and then go?”

There was something abrasive and off-putting about the detective, Sasha thought. And he was doing it on purpose. Why? she wondered. Was he trying to create distance between himself and the people he considered suspects, or was he just trying to keep everyone at arms’ length, in which case, again, why?

Had he seen too many dead bodies and had that hardened him, or had he started out that way?

She thought of her father. All the years that Josef Pulaski had been on the job, he never once allowed it to affect him, to influence him once he was home. She knew that her father had made a conscious decision to draw a line between what he did in order to put food on the table and the time he spent with the family he did it for. When he walked across that threshold and into their house, it was as if that other world where he spent so much time each day didn’t even exist.

She supposed not all policemen could be like her father. And that, she knew, was a real pity because her father was a great cop and an even greater father, the kind who sacrificed his own comforts for his children.

“That’s up to you,” she told the detective, her eyes meeting his. She sensed that Detective Anthony Santini had no respect for the people he could successfully intimidate. “If you want to question me about what I saw just now, you’ll find yourself on the receiving end of a very short interview because I didn’t see anyone or anything—until I came up to Angela’s car.”

She’d set up an obvious question and he obliged her by asking it. “And why did you come up to the victim’s car?”

“Because mine is parked right over there.” Sasha pointed toward the light-blue vintage Toyota.

He nodded. There was more and she’d left it unsaid. “And what would make for a longer interview?” he wanted to know.

“If you want to ask me what I know about Angela.”

The way she said it, Tony thought, indicated that the doctor knew something. Whether or not that “something” was what had gotten the nurse killed had yet to be discerned. But then, that was his job, separating the fool’s gold from the genuine article.

“All right.” He looked at the security guard, making up his mind. “You can give me your statement here—for now,” he qualified, then turned to look at the tall, willowy physician. “As for you, I think you had better come down to the precinct with me for that longer statement.” The crime scene investigator stepped away, finally having gotten enough photographs of the dead woman. Tony immediately stepped forward. “But first I want to take a closer look at the body.”

“Angela,” Sasha told him. There was tension vibrating in her voice as he turned to her. “Her name is—was,” she corrected herself, “Angela. Angela Rico.”

Tony nodded, allowing the doctor her feelings even if he couldn’t allow himself to have any of his own. Not that in his present state he even thought that he was capable of having any of his own. They’d all been burnt out of him the day he had to view what was left of Annie’s mangled body.

“Angela,” he repeated with a slight incline of his head.

Squatting down beside the inert body, careful not to disturb the pool of already drying blood, Tony noted that the young nurse’s right hand was fisted. Had she been trying to punch her assailant when she’d been shot? It didn’t seem very likely.

Tony narrowed his eyes, focusing. As he examined more closely, he saw that there was just the tiniest hint of some sort of piece of paper peeking out between the second and third knuckle of her hand.

“Peter,” he beckoned to the investigator with the camera, “come here.”

“Perry,” the man corrected as he came forward.

Impatient, Tony ignored the correction. He tended not to remember names, only faces. “She’s got something in her hand. Take a picture,” he instructed.

The investigator aimed his camera. The shutter clicked twice.

Very carefully, using the tweezers he kept in his pocket, Tony extracted the paper from Angela’s hand. When he unfolded it, he found four words printed on it: First Do No Harm.

Chapter 2

T he frown on Tony’s lips deepened. He turned his head slightly in Sasha’s direction so that his voice would carry to her.

“I thought you said that she was a nurse.”

“She was.”

Was.

The single word vibrated in her brain. God, it felt so strange, using the past tense about a person who, only two hours ago, still had a future ahead of her. Angela had told her that she wanted to make something more of herself, to continue up the ladder, so that her daughter would be proud of her. Now, she wouldn’t have the opportunity. And, at three, her daughter was too young even to have any decent memories of Angela. It just wasn’t fair.

Tony continued looking at the note he held with his tweezers. Something didn’t add up. “Then it looks as if our killer’s confused. Correct me if I’m wrong, Doctor, but isn’t this the first line of the Hippocratic Oath?”

Sasha looked over his shoulder at the paper the detective held up. Her knees bumped against his back, and something self-conscious shimmied through her. She took half a step back. “It is.”

“Then why would the killer shove that into her hand?” Tony thought out loud.

“Maybe he didn’t. Maybe it was something Angela shoved at the killer before he shot her.” Sasha thought it over for a second. It made about as much sense as anything, she supposed. “Maybe that’s why he killed her.”

Tony rose slowly to his feet and turned around to look at the woman who’d been standing behind him with interest. “Do you know something, Doctor?”

She could almost feel his eyes penetrating her skin. As if he was expecting some sort of a confession.

She met his gaze head-on, refusing to give in to the urge to look away. “I know a lot of things. But nothing that’ll do any good here.” And that made her feel frustrated and helpless.

She had guts, he’d give her that. Most people looked away when he looked at them. “Maybe I should be the judge of that,” he told her.

He glanced over to where the other detective was standing. The man had over twenty years on him, but the Captain had placed Henderson under him, a situation anyone else but Henderson would have been annoyed at. Not very much ever bothered Henderson. The older detective was talking to the hospital staff members who were clustered over to one side. Henderson didn’t have much use for the crime scene investigators—said all the lab work got in the way of his gut instincts.

“You okay here, Henderson?” Tony asked.

Watery green eyes looked at him from beneath bushy eyebrows. “Haven’t I always been?”

Sasha half turned her body so that the other detective couldn’t see her lips. “He doesn’t sound as if he likes you very much,” she observed.

Turning the paper over to one of the forensic technicians for evaluation, Tony indicated to the doctor where his car was parked.

“Nobody does,” he said as she fell into step beside him.

Sasha looked at the unsmiling detective, wondering if Santini was putting her on or if he was serious. His expression made her lean toward the latter, but she found it hard to believe that he would be so unaffected by what he’d just volunteered.

“Doesn’t it bother you?” she asked, grateful to turn her attention to something other than Angela’s body on the garage floor.

“No.” Sparing her a glance, he raised one eyebrow in silent query. “Should it?”

On second thought, he didn’t seem like the type to stay up nights losing sleep because he thought someone disliked him. “Most people like being liked,” she pointed out.

“Most people need to be liked,” he corrected. “It’s an overt manifestation of insecurity.”

“And you’re not insecure.” It wasn’t really a question so much as an observation on her part. The man was the picture of confidence, and yet, there was no conceit evident. She would have said that was hard to pull off—until she’d met Santini.

“Nope.” He opened the passenger-side door for her. “Watch your head,” he instructed.

The words made her smile. It was something she knew that policemen said to the suspects they ushered into the back of their vehicles. Her father must have said the same phrase hundreds of times.

“Force of habit?” she asked.

He realized what she was referring to and shook his head. “Small car.”

She was surprised that the department let him drive this little sports car. She waited for Santini to get in behind the wheel. “Regular car in the shop?” she guessed.

Starting the engine, Tony glanced at her waist, to see if she had buckled the seatbelt. Annie had never liked using it. Always said it wrinkled her clothes. In the end, it was her undoing. The first officer on the scene had told him if she’d used her seatbelt, there was a good chance she would have survived the crash.

God, but he wished he could see her just one more time, clothes wrinkled all to hell.

Tony banked down the ache and shoved it away into the darkness. He couldn’t let himself think about Annie.

“This was my wife’s car.” She’d used his car that day, because hers was in the shop. He’d caught a ride to work from his partner. He should have insisted he needed the car and made her stay home.

Married. The man was married. Sasha tried to picture that and couldn’t. Couldn’t envision the man sharing himself with anyone. And, obviously, since he’d used the past tense, he was no longer doing it.

“Let me guess, you got this in the settlement.” The moment the words were out, she regretted them.

A muscle twitched just above his jawline. “I got this at the funeral.”

She’d never heard a tone so devoid of emotion. Or sound so incredibly empty. Beneath that emptiness, she had a feeling there was an endless abyss filled with pain. Guilt tightened her stomach.

“I’m sorry,” she apologized. “I didn’t mean to sound so flippant.” Sasha spread her hands, feeling restless. “I do that when I get nervous.”

She saw him slant a glance at her and it took everything she had not to shift in her seat. “Do I make you nervous?”

Sasha knew he was asking not as a man, but as a cop. She supposed he had to rule out everyone.

“No. But seeing Angela like that did. Does,” she amended, since she was still fidgeting inwardly. “Everybody loved Angela.”

“Obviously not everybody,” he pointed out. “Someone killed her.”

She couldn’t bring herself to believe it was on purpose. Angela had never hurt anyone. But her purse was still beside her body, so robbery hadn’t been a motive. If the killer had stolen Angela’s purse, Sasha thought, he would have found very little in it. A single mother who doted on her daughter, Angela was always struggling to make ends meet. That was why she was hoping to become a nurse practitioner.

Sasha pressed her lips together as they emerged out of the structure. There was no moon out tonight, but the streetlights made up for it. “Maybe it was just an accident.”

There was something in her voice that caught his attention. “You do know something, don’t you?” He looked at her as he turned right at the end of the next block. “Was there an ex-boyfriend in the picture?”

“An ex-husband,” Sasha corrected. Alex was his name. Angela didn’t have time for a boyfriend. Her daughter and the hospital took up all her time. And then, because she knew the detective would find out, she added, “Angela had a restraining order against him.”

“Why?” He fired the question at her before she was even finished.

Angela had confided in her and telling the detective felt as if she was breaking a trust. But death had changed the guidelines.

“Because he couldn’t see his way clear to letting her leave him, even after the divorce papers went through. But he’d never hurt her,” she added quickly. “Not like that.” If you loved someone, you couldn’t just put a bullet in the center of their forehead, she argued silently.

The light turned red. Tony looked at her, his voice steely. “What way would he hurt her?”

She remembered the black eye, the bruises that Angela had tried to pass off as clumsiness until she’d finally been convinced that she was setting a bad example for her daughter by remaining. “He hit her a couple of times. That’s why she left him.”

Tony nodded, doing a little math in his head. “Doesn’t take much for abuse to escalate into something lethal.”

Something in his voice sent a chill down her spine. “You speaking from experience?” she heard herself asking even though it was none of her business. She fully expected him to say as much.

He didn’t.

“Yes.” And then he looked at her as they came to another red light. “I’m supposed to be the one asking questions,” he informed her mildly. “Not you.”

She couldn’t help herself. Ever since she’d been a little girl, she had always pushed the envelope a little further than it was supposed to go, always wanted to know everything about everything. And to help if she could. It was in her nature. In her genes. Nothing had changed with age.

“Who did you abuse, Detective?”

“I didn’t,” he told her tersely.

And he never would. Not after growing up in a house where abuse was as regular as the seasons. Not after having his father beat his mother. He’d jumped to her defense, hitting his father over the head with a frying pan, then calling 911.

After his mother’s death a few days later from the severity of the abuse, he and his brothers were propelled into the quagmire that was the state’s foster-care system, moved around from house to house like unwanted pieces of furniture until his mother’s Aunt Tess came forward to take them in.

“Your father—?” Sasha guessed, only to have him cut her off. More with his expression than with anything he actually said.

“I’m not one of your patients, Doc.”

There was a warning note in his voice, a warning that told her if she continued to cross the line he’d drawn in the sand, there would be consequences to pay.

Instead of retreating, she flashed a smile. The first she’d felt capable of mustering since she’d seen Angela lying on the ground, dead. “You couldn’t be. I’m an OB-GYN. You’re the wrong gender.”

“First time anyone’s ever said that to me,” he quipped.

Sasha glanced at Santini’s rugged profile as he signaled for another turn. That, she thought, she could well believe.

Sasha sighed as she let herself into her small three-bedroom apartment. It was just a few minutes after one o’clock in the morning and she was beyond exhausted at this point. A second wind had come and gone and so had a third. At the moment, her energy was totally depleted, leaving her feeling barely human and incredibly sad.

The handsome detective with the permanent scowl on his face had wound up asking her more questions on their way down to the precinct than he actually did once he was at his desk and typing out her responses. In reality, there wasn’t all that much more she could tell Santini beyond what she’d already said. What that amounted to was that as far as she knew, Angela Rico had no known enemies. Yet someone had deliberately killed her. Executed her, she thought, numbed by the thought.

Dutifully, she had given the detective the name and address of Angela’s mother. Selena Cruz watched Rita, Angela’s three-year-old, while Angela worked at the hospital. She assumed that Angela’s mother might be able to give the detective information about Angela’s ex, although she still didn’t think Alex Rico could have killed his wife. If he had, he would have killed himself as well, because he maintained that he couldn’t live without Angela.

Walking across the threshold, Sasha closed the door behind her. The single twenty-five-watt bulb they always left on for one another in the hallway cast dim pools of light on the floor beneath it. She yawned and sighed, debating just falling on her face on the sofa. Her bedroom seemed to be too far away.

A click vaguely registered in the back of her mind and suddenly, the apartment was flooded with light.

Sasha covered her eyes, blinking several times until she got them acclimated to the brightness. “You’re blinding me,” she accused whichever sister had turned the light on.

“My God, are you operating in the middle of the night now?” Natalya wanted to know.

Dropping her hand, Sasha saw Natalya coming into the living room, frowning at her. She and Natalya, eleven months her junior, shared high cheekbones and a passion for healing. Beyond that, they were as different as night and day. Natalya was shorter, with more curves and medium-brown hair that brushed against her shoulders. Her sister’s eyes were brown, not blue, and right now, they were fixed on Sasha’s clothing and filled with confusion and concern.

“Sasha, you’re covered in blood,” she cried. “What happened?”

She’d forgotten about that, Sasha thought. But before she could answer, another light went on, this time from the bedroom on the right. Leokadia, barefoot, her eyes half closed, stumbled into the room. The oversized T-shirt she had on indicated that of the three, she’d been the only one who had actually made it to bed tonight.

She didn’t look any the more cheerful for it. “You two want to hold it down? Some of us are actually trying to get some sleep around here. You do remember sleep, don’t you?” Kady looked accusingly at her sisters. “It’s—oh my God, what happened?” Her mouth dropped open as she stared at her oldest sister. “Are you all right?” she cried, rushing toward Sasha. “Are you hurt? Whose blood is that? Sash, sit down,” the petite blonde ordered, pointing to the sofa. “Can I get you something? Do you want—?”

In an effort to get her own word in edgewise, Natalya put her hand over her younger sister’s mouth. She looked at Sasha, who everyone else had always regarded as the rock of the family. “Whose blood is that, Sasha?”

“Angela’s. Angela Rico’s.”

Pressing her lips together, Sasha paused for a moment, struggling with her emotions as the reality of the situation finally sank in. The next moment, she offered her sisters a halfhearted smile of apology. At times it was hard to remember that although they all worked at the same hospital, Patience Memorial, or PM as everyone who worked there affectionately referred to it, they all had different areas of expertise. That meant that their spheres didn’t always cross, which, in turn, meant that they didn’t always know the same people.

She cleared her throat and tried again. “She was a nurse on the maternity ward.”

Natalya nodded. “I’ve heard you mention her.” Her voice was soft, gentle. It was unnerving for them to see Sasha like this. Except for when her fiancé had been mugged and fatally stabbed, it was generally believed that Sasha had nerves of steel.

Coming up on her other side, Kady placed her hand on Sasha’s arm. “What happened to her, Sash?” she asked softly.

“Someone killed her in the parking structure.”

Very slowly, her hand now on Sasha’s wrist, Kady was drawing her over to the sofa. “Do the police have any idea who?”

Numbly, Sasha shook her head. Her legs seemed to give out from beneath her just as she came to the sofa. “I was just at the precinct.”

“Precinct?” Natalya echoed. “You? Why?” she wanted to know. She was quick to become defensive and protective of her family.

“Because I found her,” Sasha answered, her voice hardly above a whisper. The entire time she’d spent with the detective, she’d done her best to be clear-headed, sharp. But here, with her sisters, she let herself grieve. And it felt awful. “Actually, the guard did. Walter Stevens,” she added. Neither of her two sisters probably knew who she was talking about. She was the one who always stopped to talk to people. “But he looked so upset and confused…” Sasha slid her tongue along her lips, but they continued to feel like two pieces of dry sandpaper. Just like her insides felt. “I tried giving Angela CPR, but…”

Natalya took her hand. “You can’t save everyone, Sash,” she said compassionately. “Mama always says there’s a time for everything, remember? A time to be born and a time to die.”

A semismile curved her lips. “You start singing, ‘Turn, Turn, Turn’ and I’m leaving.”

“I won’t sing,” Natalya promised. “Not tonight.”

“You want me to draw you a hot bath?” Kady offered. When things got to her, she always sought refuge in a hot bath.

Not waiting for an answer, Kady was on her feet and halfway across the room, heading toward the bathroom before Sasha could open her mouth.

“Wait,” Sasha cried. “Stop. Stop.” Kady skidded to an impatient halt and turned around to look at her, waiting for further instructions. Sasha shook her head. “The way I feel right now, Kady, I’d probably drown in the tub. I’m too tired for a bath. I just want to get these clothes off and fall into bed.”

“That can be arranged,” Natalya said as she took her sister’s hand and helped Sasha to her feet again.

Sasha felt a laugh bubbling up in her throat. It was a welcome sensation, even though there was such a thing as too much help.

“Thanks, but I can still undress myself, Nat. I’m not that out of it.” She sighed. “It’s just that…” Sasha’s voice trailed off as her sisters looked at her, waiting, not wanting to interrupt. She dragged her hand through her hair, loosening pins. A few rained down on the light-gray rug. “God, what a waste.”

Her sisters both nodded, even though neither one of them had actually known the dead woman. But each had already seen death, been touched by death’s sharp talons, and knew instinctively what Sasha was going through right now.

Or thought they did, Sasha amended silently.

Right now she was just incredibly sad. And tomorrow, Sasha promised herself, or rather today, she amended, glancing at the digital clock on the coffee table, she was going to get up early and go to Angela’s mother. She should have gone tonight, with that detective, but she couldn’t face the woman with Angela’s blood on her. But tomorrow, she was going to offer to do anything she could.

As if that could somehow help, she thought sadly. She felt powerless, and hated that feeling. Hated being imprisoned by it.

“If you need to talk, Sash,” Natalya was saying as she began to leave the room, “you know where to find me.”

“Me, too,” Kady added.

They both meant it. They were both willing to give up their night to sit up with her, holding her hand both physically and emotionally, until she no longer needed comforting. Until the shock had passed and the pain was manageable.

Sasha could only think, not for the first time, how very grateful she was that she was not one of those poor souls who walked the earth alone. How grateful she was that she had her family to fall back on. Not just Nat and Kady, but Marja and Tatania as well.

And, of course, her parents.

Her wonderful, loving parents who always gave and never took. What would she have done if they hadn’t been there for her when Adam had been slain eighteen months ago? She doubted very much if she would have been here today if not for them. They thought of her as the strong one, but they were her strength.

She looked from one sister to the other. “It’s not that big an apartment. I’ll find you.”

Chapter 3

T ony leaned back in his chair. The frown on his lips deepened. Nothing. Granted, he’d expected as much, but he had still held out a smattering of hope.

The trouble these days was that anyone with half a brain now knew how to cover up their trail, thanks to all the different forensic programs on the airwaves. With everything but an intense, flash-of-anger crime of passion, perpetrators knew how to make reasonably sure that their prints didn’t turn up on the things they’d handled while committing the crime.

And even with crimes of passion, if the suspect took a moment to think about his actions telltale prints would be wiped off.

Sighing, Tony stared at the crime lab report the tech had just delivered to him. The note extracted from Angela Rico’s hand had only Angela’s prints on it. To compound the disappointment, the note had come from a printer that had nothing remarkable about it to set it apart, no quirky imprint to separate it from the thousands of other printers he would find in the area if he were to look. The note had been produced by a standard color printer, not a laser, not the old dot matrix, which might have made things easier if the suspect had access to it.

And that was another thing, Tony thought, his annoyance growing. Their only viable suspect in Angela Rico’s murder had an alibi. A substantiated alibi. At the time of his ex-wife’s murder, Alex Rico was in Atlantic City, hoping he would have better luck at the blackjack tables than he had in love.

As it turned out, Angela’s ex was a loser in both but no longer a murder suspect.

“Not unless he hired somebody to do it,” Henderson volunteered wearily, ending a discussion that had been halfheartedly under way between the two of them.

They were the only ones in the immediate area. Everyone else, including Captain Holloway, had gone home for the night.

Tony glanced in his partner’s direction. Together a little over two years, he and Henderson hadn’t hit it off all that well. But then, to be fair, he hadn’t hit it off with too many people. He preferred working alone.

Preferred everything alone, actually. Alone, there was no one else to disappoint you but you, he thought.

The notion brought a cynical half smile to his lips.

“If he hired somebody, what’s the note about?” Tony asked.

The note bothered him. A lot. He felt as if it was pointing to something, but to what, he hadn’t a clue.

Henderson shrugged his wide shoulders haplessly, the unironed shirt moving stiffly with the gesture. Without thinking, he scratched his neck.

“To throw us off?” he guessed.

Tony’s half smile looked a bit sarcastic. “Alex Rico strike you as particularly clever?” Tony asked.

It was a rhetorical question. Still, Henderson considered it. “No, just grief-stricken. And mad. Very mad.”

Tony thought of the victim’s ex, and the rage that he’d viewed in the man’s eyes, just behind the grief. “If Rico’s innocent, we might have some trouble from him when we catch who did this.”

“You meant if,” Henderson pointed out.

“No, I mean when,” Tony repeated.

Although he regarded the rest of his life with a jaded, negative eye, it never occurred to Tony that he wouldn’t catch his quarry. Otherwise, there was no point in going through the motions. He’d taken the job, the badge, to make a difference. You didn’t make a difference by not catching the bad guy.

Henderson nodded, backing away from a confrontation. “Cross that bridge when we come to it.” With that, he switched off his computer and pushed his chair back. The legs scraped along the scarred vinyl floor that had long since needed replacing. The current budget couldn’t handle it. “I’m calling it a night,” he said needlessly. “Maybe something’ll turn up fresh in the morning.”

“Maybe,” Tony murmured under his breath.

He scrubbed his hand over his face and tried to recenter his thinking. The pretty doctor had been right. Everyone had loved the victim. At least, everyone he and Henderson had talked to in the last week.

Pushing back his own chair, he began to rise when the phone on his desk rang.

“Looks like it might not be a night yet,” he said to Henderson as he reached for the receiver.

Déjà vu.

It had never been one of Sasha’s favorite words or sensations. As far as that went, it was way down on the list.

At the very least, it encompassed a teasing sensation that tormented her until she could finally recall what, where and when she’d done “this” before, whatever “this” might be. Most of the time, the answers to the questions that occurred to her never materialized as she struggled to recall an elusive memory that would put things in perspective for her.

This time, she didn’t have to try to recall. The memory that had sent the sensation rippling through her was still sickeningly fresh in her mind.

Angela, lying in a pool of her own blood on the concrete floor beside her car.

Since the discovery, Sasha hadn’t stopped parking in the structure. It was either that or resort to taking a cab or some mode of public transportation. Although the city had probably the best public transportation system in the world, Sasha was possessed of an independent streak that fairly demanded she be in charge of deciding how she came and went. Subways and buses left you depending on others.

Besides, she loved that little ten-year-old Toyota. The vehicle had been her parents’ gift to her when she’d graduated medical school. They could hardly afford to splurge the way they did, even though they’d bought it used. And, since they did buy it for her, not to use it would be tantamount to insulting them.

Entering the level where she’d parked this morning, Sasha realized she was holding her breath as she made her way down a deserted row.

She was too old to be afraid of the dark, she scolded herself.

It wasn’t so much the dark that frightened her, actually, as it was who might be hiding in that dark.

Sasha glanced around to see if Walter Stevens was around somewhere. But if the security guard was on duty, he was making rounds on another level of the structure. There was no sound of anyone walking around here. No sound at all, really.

And then she heard it.

Every nerve ending in her body tightened as she listened.

A moan? A gasp? She couldn’t make it out.

Sasha looked over her shoulder toward the elevator doors. For a second, she thought about running back. And then she became annoyed with herself. There were still cars here. Probably just someone going home for the night. Or coming on for the night shift.

“Hello? Is anyone there?” Sasha called. But even as she asked, she was hurrying over toward where she’d parked her car this morning before making her rounds.

There was a prickly sensation traveling along the back of her neck. It refused to go away, refused to be blocked.

And then she saw it.

Her breath caught in her throat, threatening to suffocate her. A scream escaped her, vibrating amid the trapped air. There was a figure on the ground, sprawled out like a mutilated doll. Like Angela, there was a pool of blood beneath her. Like Angela, there was a bullet hole in the center of her forehead. Her eyes were wide open, unseeing as they stared at the ceiling.

This couldn’t be happening. Not twice. She was having some kind of hysterical hallucination, Sasha silently argued. Any second now, the figure would disappear.

But it didn’t.

Legs no longer made of lead, Sasha broke into a run. But it was too late. The figure on the ground was not moving. The gray-haired woman had surrendered to death the moment the bullet had found her.

And then another sound came. The sound of screaming. Sasha did not immediately realize that it was coming from her.

She was never going to get warm again.

The iciness that surrounded her went clear down to her soul, despite the blanket that someone had draped over her shoulders.

Sasha was sitting in her car, on the driver’s side, her feet planted outside the vehicle on the concrete floor as she faced the activity that was going on just a few feet away.

What were the odds? she wondered. What were the odds of this kind of thing happening twice? Two women, nurses, both shot execution style. And both times her car was parked close enough to the scene of the crime to be touched by the killer.

She shivered and took another long sip from the hot container of coffee the detective had shoved into her hands. It was half-consumed. Only belatedly did it register that he must have drunk out of it before he’d given it to her.

Whether it was meant to warm her hands or her insides, she didn’t know. The no-frills coffee—black no sugar—failed to do either. But the jolt of super-strength caffeine did help her focus. Did help her hear his questions rather than just drift numbly away from the scene in a desperate act of self-preservation.

Her lashes felt moist. Was it the steam from the coffee, or was she crying? Sasha didn’t know. She couldn’t tell. Everything seemed so surreal.

“The hospital has signs up in the staff lounge advising women to go into the parking structure in pairs,” she said hoarsely, more to the container in her hands than to the detective she knew was staring down at her.

“So why didn’t you?” he asked her quietly.

The question surprised her. She had been referring to the dead woman, to the fact that if the grandmother of two had heeded the advice, maybe she would have escaped being the center of another homicide investigation.

Another homicide at PM.

It seemed absurd. They had above average success in keeping their patients from dying within their walls, whether they were brought here for surgery or because of some extensive illness.

But it’s not the patients who are getting killed, it’s the staff, a voice in her head whispered.

Why?

Sasha looked up blankly. The detective—Santini, wasn’t it?—was looking down at her. There was a frown on his lips. It seemed like there was always a frown on his lips, she thought.

But then, murders were nothing to smile about.

“What?” she finally asked him.

“Why didn’t you?” Tony repeated patiently, aware that she could be going into some kind of shock. “Why didn’t you take someone with you? Why did you go into the parking structure alone?”

She shrugged. One side of the blanket slid down her shoulder. Tony moved it back into place, his fingers brushing against the side of her neck. They felt rough, as if he worked with his hands when he wasn’t being a cop.

“It was late,” Sasha replied.

“All the more reason,” he pointed out. When he’d taken the call that brought him back to the location where he’d been just two weeks ago, canvassing the area, he hadn’t expected to find the doctor at the center of the scene again.

The sensation that had shimmied through him was a surprise as well.

Sasha thought for a second. She supposed, to the detective, it must have appeared stupid. In hindsight, she had to agree. But she’d been going alone to the parking structure every night since they’d found Angela’s body. Besides, she didn’t think of herself in terms of mortality.

Sasha’s hands tightened around the container. “No one else was leaving when I left and I don’t like inconveniencing people.”

His eyes met hers. “Murder is the ultimate inconvenience,” he commented. Satisfied that the woman could understand him and process his questions now, he began by asking the obvious one. “Did you know the victim?”

Sasha bit back a sigh. She nodded. “Her name’s Rachel Wells. She’s a nurse. And a grandmother.” Sasha suddenly realized where he was going with this. “I didn’t know her well. Just to nod to, that kind of thing. She once showed me a photograph of her grandchildren. It was a Christmas-card photo,” she added.

Santini gave no indication that he was pleased or displeased with her answer. She didn’t like faces she couldn’t read. Everything that any of her family felt was right out there for everyone to see.

“Did the other victim know her?” he wanted to know.

The feeling of helplessness swaddled her. She hated being useless, but there wasn’t anything useful she could tell him.

“They were both nurses. I suppose they knew each other, but I really couldn’t say for sure.” Did he think there was a serial killer out there, focusing on PM’s nurses? She narrowed her eyes. “Why?”

“I don’t know yet,” he told her simply, even though as a rule he didn’t like having questions about his methods being put to him. “I figure if we ask enough questions, we might wind up finding an answer that’ll tell us something.”

That made sense. Right now, it was difficult to pull her thoughts together coherently. “Do you think this is some kind of a serial killer, going around murdering nurses for some twisted reason?”

He didn’t answer at first. “What do you think?”

Sasha looked at the detective sharply, her mind kicking in for the first time since she’d looked down to see her second victim in a little more than two weeks. Was he toying with her? Baiting her? She raised her chin slightly.

“I don’t know what to think.”

Tony inclined his head, as if in agreement. “Neither do I,” he admitted mildly.

That was a crock. She didn’t buy it for a minute. Detective Anthony Santini looked like the kind of man who knew exactly what he thought at all times. Moreover, he looked like a man who was on top of everything, be it situations or people, and he undoubtedly made it a point to remain that way.

And then she saw a spark enter his eyes. His interest seemed to sharpen, as if a new idea had just occurred to him. Sasha wasn’t sure if she wanted to know what it was.

The next moment, she decided that she had to know what it was. If she didn’t find out, she knew she would have no peace.

“What?”

Tony pointed out the obvious, straddling a fence, as if to see which side he was going to climb down on. “You found both bodies and both victims were holding the same note.”

For the first time, she felt something other than grief for the victims and the family members who were left behind. Was he actually saying he suspected her of being the one who’d killed both women? How could he possibly even think something so stupid?

“The guard found Angela,” she reminded him. “But technically, I guess you could say that, yes,” she allowed. Her stomach felt as if it was on its way to meet her throat. Dear God, she hoped she wouldn’t wind up doing something stupid, letting her nerves get the better of her. “Why?”

This doctor might or might not be the common thread here, he thought, since they had no other viable lead. It seemed an incredible coincidence that she was in the same vicinity as both of the victims.

“Do you know anyone who might be doing this to get your attention?”

It took her a second to absorb the question.

“My attention?” she repeated incredulously.

“You know, like a cat coming into the house and laying whatever they’ve killed down by your feet.” He saw the revulsion enter her eyes. He’d thought doctors didn’t become grossed out. “To them, it’s a flattering gesture, not a sickening one.”

Sasha pressed her lips together. Someone was killing their nurses and this man was talking nonsense. “No, I don’t know anyone who would bring me dead bodies as a gift.”

The ghostly pallor was receding from her cheeks, he noted. He was getting her angry. Righteously, or was that bravado? “You said you were a female doctor?”

How archaic did that sound? “I’m an OB-GYN,” she corrected.

His eyes never left her face. “Lose any mothers or babies lately?”

Did he think some deranged husband or parent was killing innocent people because they were trying to get back at her?

“You are crazy,” she told him, taking umbrage for her patients and their families.

He never batted an eye. “Part of the job, ma’am.”

Tony glanced over toward the yellow taped-off area. As he’d instructed at the first homicide, one of the crime scene investigators was scanning the area with a video camera. He wanted to compare tapes, see if anyone who had come to the first homicide turned up at the second. Besides the good doctor here.

He turned his attention back to her. “I’m afraid I’m going to need you to give me a statement again.”

She’d expected as much when she’d placed the 911 call to report the murder.

And then something suddenly dawned on her. “Do you think I did it?”

“I think everyone did it,” he answered. “Until I can weed the non-suspects out, one at a time.”

This seemed just too fantastic for her to absorb. That someone would think she was a murderer boggled her mind.

“Why would I kill Angela and Rachel?”

His eyes met hers. She’d never seen such serious eyes in her life. “If I had the answer to that, this would be easy.”

“Then I’ll give you an answer,” she told him heatedly. He was wasting his time with this line of thinking and the sooner he moved on, the closer he would get to catching Angela and Rachel’s killer. And maybe preventing another murder as well. “I didn’t kill them. I didn’t kill anyone. I don’t even step on bugs.”

There was just the barest hint of amusement evident. “Maybe you should. Their population is really exploding these days. Had to move out of my last apartment because the roaches reclaimed the building.”

Sasha shook her head. “You’re insane.”

“So you already pointed out,” he told her, unruffled. He took the empty cup from her and saw her stiffen indignantly.

“If you want my prints,” she told him tersely, “you just have to ask. My DNA, too.”

He laughed softly, humorlessly. “Everybody’s a CSI wannabe.” Glancing around, he beckoned over a policeman. “Sergeant, take the doctor down to the precinct. We need to get her statement.”

“I can do it,” Henderson volunteered, pocketing the small notebook he always used to take down information that came his way.

“I need you here,” Tony told him. “I’ll have a patrolman drive her in.” He spared a glance at Sasha. “I’ll see you at the station.”

“Doesn’t matter where you’ll see me,” she informed him, “the answers will still be the same.”

He merely nodded, walking away to speak to one of the patrolman. “Good, means you’re not lying.”

Sasha felt a flash of temper. She opened her mouth and then closed it again, feeling it more prudent not to say anything until she had more control over what could come out. All she knew right now was that the detective was getting under her skin at an amazing speed and rubbing her completely the wrong way.

Chapter 4

“C an I get you anything?”

The voice came from behind her. Sasha twisted around in the hardback chair to see Tony approaching her in the squad room. She’d been sitting beside his desk for the last fifteen minutes, waiting for him to make an appearance. She couldn’t help wondering if he was making her wait on purpose.

“A time machine,” she quipped, turning back around to face him as he moved his chair out.

Tony sat down and turned on his computer. A low grinding noise began to hum through the office as it went through its paces.

“Why?” he asked. “How far back would you go?”

“Two weeks.”

He looked at her. Two weeks was the amount of time separating the two murders. Was she making a backhanded confession?

“And maybe I’d start taking the bus to work,” Sasha added, thinking out loud. “Coming across one victim was bad enough. Two…” Her voice trailed off as she shook her head.

Then she raised her eyes to his and Tony found himself thinking that he’d never seen eyes quite that shade of blue before. Intense. Beautiful. And pretty damn hypnotic if he allowed them to be. Mentally, he pulled himself back.

“I know you’re overworked here and under-staffed,” she said, edging closer on her chair, “but you must have some kind of a lead, a clue, a hunch—”

Tony regarded her with mild interest. People didn’t usually attribute human frailties to the police department. They expected tireless, around-the-clock vigilance. And crimes to be solved in a timely fashion—as in yesterday. All the best crime dramas on television made it seem easy.

If only.

“How do you know we’re overworked and under-staffed?” he wanted to know.

Was the man born antagonistic, or had he just acquired the habit along the way? She was trying to be nice here.

“Well, aren’t you? Why should you be any different from the rest of the world? Besides,” she sighed, sitting back again, “that’s the way it always was when my father was with the two-six in Queens.”

She’d succeeded in getting his attention, Sasha thought. The look in his eyes changed. “Your father was on the job?”

Tony noted the way she smiled before she answered. Pride mingled with memories. A family girl, he thought. He should have realized that. Because of his own situation, he had a tendency to think of people simply as detached individuals. He wasn’t close to either one of his brothers, even though they both lived in the city and worked for it, Joe as a detective in Brooklyn and Tim as a firefighter in Staten Island. But for all the contact they’d had in the last five years, they could have just as well have been spread out all over the country.

“Twenty-six years,” she told him. Definitely pride there, he thought. It was audible in her voice. “Josef Pulaski. He made detective before he retired.”

Just like his father had been, he thought. Except that he was willing to bet that was where the similarity ended. If he’d ever been proud of his father, that had changed a long time ago—by the time he could understand what was going on behind his parents’ closed door.

He nodded in response to her words. “So that makes you more aware of procedure than most of the people who’ve sat in that chair.”

She couldn’t tell if he was attempting to extend an olive branch or not. “If you mean do I know that you have to rule me out as a potential suspect before you can move on, yes.”

Maybe she wasn’t going to give him trouble after all, he thought. The computer sat, ready, its grinding noise reduced to a soft, constant hum. Time to get started.

“No run-ins with—” Tony paused, referring to his notes. The victim’s name had momentarily escaped him.

“Rachel,” Sasha supplied before he could flip to another page. He raised his eyes to hers. “No, no run-ins. I don’t know all that much about her, actually,” she warned him. She and the older woman hadn’t been friends by any stretch of the imagination, although their paths had crossed a number of times. “Only that she was past retirement age.”

The woman had looked it, Tony thought. “Then why didn’t she retire?” In his experience, retirement was the carrot people coveted. “She love the job that much?”

Sasha thought of the couple of times she’d overheard the slain nurse complaining about conditions at the hospital, or about a supervisor who was riding her. “I think it was more of a case of her tolerating the job.”

“Then why—?” Tony left it to her to fill in the rest.

“The same reason a lot of people stay at a job they don’t like. Money. She needed the money,” Sasha emphasized. “Rachel had two grandchildren to raise. Her son’s sons. Eight and ten I think.”

She was making his job easier for him.

He raised his eyes to hers for a second. “Where’s the son?” he asked, tapping slowly on the computer keyboard. He typed like someone who had no knowledge of where the letters were arranged.

Sasha shrugged. “Ran off somewhere.” She tried to remember what the hospital gossip had been. “I don’t think she knew where.”

He stopped searching for keys. “So this son took a powder, leaving his kids high and dry, and Rachel stepped in?”

Sasha nodded in response to his question. “According to what I heard, he left the boys with her for the weekend two years ago. Mailed her a letter a month later, said he couldn’t handle being a father. Rachel complained about it.” To anyone who would listen, she recalled. “But she said she couldn’t just let the county raise the boys.”

Her words struck a chord. Aunt Tess had said something similar once. Tony shut down the momentary flashback.

Staring at the keyboard, he hunted and pecked in the new information. “Anyone else in the picture?”

He typed so slowly, she had the urge to push him aside and take over. Sasha knotted her hands in her lap. “Her husband. He’s a handyman. I think he does work for the apartment complex where they live.” She stopped trying to remember bits and pieces and looked at the detective who was engaged in a hopeless duel with the keyboard. “Why are you asking me this? Wouldn’t you get more information from PM’s Human Resources Department?” They all had forms they’d had to fill out when coming to work for the hospital. PM was extremely careful about who they ultimately hired.

“You’re doing just fine.” Hitting the period that brought the last sentence to an end, he sat back and regarded her for a second. “For someone who didn’t know the victim, you have a lot of information at your disposal.”

Was it her imagination, or was that a veiled accusation of some sort? Sasha could feel herself growing defensive. “I pay attention when people talk.”

The look he gave her was very pointed. “So do I.”

Except, she thought, in his case, what he listened to was probably all related to his work. Detective Santini didn’t seem the type to be concerned about people as people, the way she was. Concern was what had brought her into medicine in the first place. It was her overwhelming desire to heal, to fix, to make things right if she could that had made her decide to become a doctor. She’d gone into obstetrics because there she also had the added thrill of seeing new life coming into the world.

It helped balance out the times when she couldn’t fix things or make them right again.

“A man who listens. Your wife must be a lucky woman.” It was a flippant, sarcastic thing to say, but she was edgy and wired and heartsick all at the same time. She’d forgotten that he’d told her he was widowed.

Santini looked at her sharply. Had she been standing, Sasha thought, she would have reflexively taken a step back, like someone on the receiving end of a physical blow. Obviously, the wound was still very fresh. It wasn’t like her to have forgotten something like that, even if he was a stranger. She attributed it to the fact that she was very shaken.

“Sorry,” she offered.

His voice was completely dead when he responded. “Nothing to be sorry about.”

The silence hung between them, thick, uncomfortable. At least, it felt that way to her. Sasha took another stab at making amends. “I got personal and I shouldn’t have. It’s a habit I have.”

His eyes met hers again. “Talking first and thinking second?” he guessed.

That stung. “Your turn to apologize,” Sasha said after a beat.

A small, faint smile played along his lips before retreating. She had guts, he thought again. Brains, beauty and guts. On a good day, she was probably a very dangerous lady to tangle with. “I guess that makes us a couple of sorry people.”

She didn’t know if he meant it as a joke, but she gave him the benefit of the doubt and smiled anyway.

Tony asked her a few more questions, including inquiring about her immediate whereabouts around the time of the murder and if there was anything further she could tell him about the victim.

She noticed that he used the word victim rather than Rachel’s name. It made it sound so impersonal, so detached. But, she supposed that was probably a defense mechanism on his part. Otherwise, after all the horrible things he’d undoubtedly encountered as a homicide detective, he would have become completely paralyzed emotionally.

She wasn’t completely certain that he wasn’t now.

Taking a breath, Sasha told him everything she could remember.

“Rachel didn’t stay after hours and socialize,” she told him. “At least, not that I know of. She came, did her work, and went home.” Rachel never tried to get away with anything, but neither did she feel the need to give more than she was being paid for. She wasn’t one to go the extra foot, much less the proverbial mile.

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