John wondered if Natalie would ask what he was thinking

She didn’t. Because she didn’t care enough? Because she didn’t feel she had the right?

Had she been the same with her husband? Or was he the one who’d taught her that what he didn’t choose to tell her was none of her business? The speculation seemed disloyal. Stuart Reed had been his partner.

The silence lengthened. John became aware of the quiet and darkness beyond the kitchen. He grabbed the edge of the counter. “Time to hit the sack.”

She did just what he was hoping to avoid. She touched him. “Are you all right?”

He couldn’t insult her by backing away. All he could do was wait until her hand dropped to her side. He sounded hoarse when he said, “Nothing a good night’s sleep won’t cure.”

Her expression relaxed. “I’ll see you in the morning.” Startling him, she brushed the lightest of kisses on his cheek. Then she left the room.

He stood frozen in her wake, conscious of the faint scent she’d left behind, something flowery that suited her.

Voice harsh and low, he said, “Damn, damn, damn.”

Dear Reader,

His Partner’s Wife was born out of the paranoia we all feel. (Come on, admit it!) One of the worst betrayals to us individually and as a society is a cop gone bad. Since I’ve been writing so much in the past few years about cops, it was perhaps natural for me to think of a creepy way one of them could use his power. I coupled his villainy with the story of a woman who, after her husband’s death, has to take a fresh look at her memories of him, understanding that he wasn’t the man she’d thought him to be. Bad enough to be widowed, but what if much of your life together had been a lie?

This story is the beginning of a trilogy, born because I had ideas for a number of stories that all had cops as heroes. If the cops were brothers, and had become cops because of a tragedy in their past, I had a whole, not just the parts. Interest sparked, I started to write.

I continue to write about police officers because their work holds all the drama, mystery, action and pathos so lacking in the everyday lives of, say, writers. They take unimaginable risks daily in every car stop, every domestic disturbance call. They’re heroes, and their motivations and emotions the stuff of novels.

Here’s hoping you find these brothers as compelling as I do.

Janice Kay Johnson

P.S. I love to hear from readers. You can reach me via www.superauthors.com

His Partner’s Wife
Janice Kay Johnson

www.millsandboon.co.uk

This one’s for Mom, starting on a new stage of life. Your strength and independence have always been, and still are, my inspiration.

Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER ONE

DINNER TABLE CONVERSATIONS about blood-spatter patterns and other minutiae of crime scenes didn’t faze Natalie Reed. Her deceased husband had been a homicide detective who talked about his job as if everyone hunted killers for a living.

The abstract, she discovered on the day when she found a dead man in her own house, was not the same as a gory here-and-now.

Nothing had been out of the ordinary at work. Natalie sold advertising space for the Port Dare Sentinel, a daily newspaper. The job would be easier, she suspected, in a larger city. Port Dare boasted fifty thousand citizens, but was relatively isolated on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Tourists from the urban areas around Seattle or Tacoma had a two-hour drive to Port Dare to catch the ferries crossing the Strait of Juan de Fuca for Victoria, British Columbia. Instead of being a suburb to a larger city, Port Dare stood alone, which was why it had a small-town atmosphere. In other words, you constantly tripped over your neighbor’s toes.

Today’s challenge had been persuading the annoyed owner of a sporting goods store that he’d be making a mistake to quit running his regular advertisement in the Sentinel out of ire because the editor had endorsed his opponent for the city council.

“Why the hell should I let you have my advertising dollars?” he’d asked sulkily.

“Because you get more bang for them with the Sentinel than you would anywhere else. Our rates are better than good. We’re focused—our market is yours. Your customers read the Sentinel.” She’d smiled wryly at him. “Come on, George. You were a businessman before you were a politician. The editor couldn’t make his decision based on advertising dollars, you know that. We would have had an unhappy advertiser whichever one of you we endorsed.”

He grunted and grumbled, but in the end grudgingly ran his standard insert in the Sunday edition.

It had been a close call, Natalie knew, so she was still metaphorically patting herself on the back when she parked in the driveway at home and locked the car. Thanks to her good mood, she felt only a tinge of annoyance at the fact that she couldn’t pull into the two-car garage. Stuart had filled the garage with so much junk long before she’d married him that not even her compact would fit. She kept meaning to do something about it, but Stuart had never thrown anything away, which meant she would be spending the next five years going through boxes of old magazines or clothes and drawers full of such useless flotsam as old receipts and stamps torn from envelopes. The garage was a low priority.

The house was quiet and fragrant with the smell of freshly baked bread. She had timed the bread machine to finish just about now. A warm slice would taste good with the leftover minestrone soup she planned to have for dinner.

First she intended to get out of her panty hose and suit and into jeans and wool-felt clogs. Dropping her purse on the entry hall table, Natalie headed up the stairs.

The house was a twenty-year-old tri-level: living room, kitchen and dining room on the ground level wing, a family room, unused by her, extra bedroom and the utility room down a few steps in the daylight basement, and above it the master bedroom and bath, her sewing room and Stuart’s den. Truthfully, Natalie still thought of the whole house as Stuart’s because he’d been so settled in it before their brief marriage. She had been trying very hard these past months to make first small changes and then larger ones that would put her stamp on what was her home until she chose to sell it.

The carpet muffled her footsteps. Taking out her hoop earrings, she started past her sewing room before pausing in exasperation. Darn it, the cat had obviously napped in the middle of the fabric and had torn the tissue pattern pieces she’d laid out and pinned. Clumps of long black fur clung to the material, too. Her fault—she’d meant to shut the door and forgotten.

Or had she? Natalie frowned. Strange. She’d have sworn… She gave her head a small shake and philosophically accepted reality. The door was open. The cat had undeniably napped, leaving plenty of trace evidence. Earrings in hand, she continued down the hall.

Natalie was two steps past the den before a wave of shock hit her. Terror smacked her next. She froze, her own accelerated heartbeat as loud as a snare drum through a thin wall. Had she really seen a man lying in Stuart’s den? With his head…

She didn’t want to think about his head.

Through the half-open door she could see into her bedroom. It lay still and empty, just as she’d left it. The bed was made, the pinwheel quilt without even a depression left by the cat. The closet doors were closed. What she couldn’t see was what lay—or stood—behind the door: her dresser, the second closet that still held some of Stuart’s things, the doorway to the master bath. Somebody could be in there, waiting, listening to her heartbeat, her choked breathing.

Somebody could also be hidden in the den with the body or in her sewing room, or downstairs, closing off her escape from the house.

Forward or back? Her mind felt as paralyzed as her legs. Think! she told herself fiercely.

The master bedroom door had a lock, if she dashed in.

A dumb little lock that she’d picked herself with a hair pin.

Back, then, she decided.

Natalie eased slowly down the hall, trying to watch the three partially open doorways and the downstairs at the same time. She checked only briefly at the den. Yes, a man lay facedown on the gray carpet, and the back of his head seemed to have…well, imploded. She shuddered.

This door, too, blocked her sight line to part of the room. She did not linger for more than the brief second she needed to be sure she hadn’t imagined the horror. Down the stairs. There she clutched the banister, white-knuckled, and scanned the living room and what she could see of the dining room. The familiarity comforted and jarred at the same time. If somebody had been murdered upstairs, why hadn’t the downstairs been tossed? If he was hiding in the kitchen, why was the morning newspaper open precisely where she’d left it on the table after breakfast? Why was the bread machine beeping as though nothing was wrong?

Natalie recognized that she was on the verge of hysteria. Now, she told herself, and ran for the front door. She was sobbing as she struggled with the knob, finally winning the right to stumble out. Slamming the door behind her, she raced to the car, grateful—oh, so grateful—that it wasn’t parked in the garage. She had the presence of mind to check the back seat before she fell in and locked all the doors. Cell phone…oh, God. It was in her purse, which sat on the hall table. There was no way she was going back in.

On another lurch of terror, she realized that, unfortunately, the car keys were in her purse, too.

She did not want to get out of the car. She also had no choice.

Her nearest neighbors on each side didn’t get home from work until nearer seven. The new people on the corner, she didn’t know. The Porters. She grasped at the thought of the couple, he just past retirement age, she the perpetual housewife. They’d be home. They were always home, nosy and dissatisfied with their neighbors’ conduct. Their ranch house with manicured lawn and unnatural edging of bedding plants was across the street and two doors down.

Natalie took slow, deep breaths, made herself unlock the car door with shaking hand and get out. Nothing moved behind the windows of her house. Whoever had been there was surely long gone.

At least, one of them was long gone. The other… She swallowed dryly. The other would leave in a body bag.

She didn’t quite run to her neighbors’, but she came close. Their doorbell gonged deep in the recesses of the house. For a moment, the silence made her fear the Porters were, unbelievably, not home. How could that be? Everyone in the neighborhood swore they never went out, even to grocery shop, although Mrs. Porter grumbled about Safeway’s produce and Thrift-way’s service, just as she did about the mail carrier—who threw the mail to the back of the box—and the new people on the corner who didn’t mow often enough. Natalie didn’t know what the Porters said about her. Right now, she didn’t care.

Please be home.

Above her heartbeats she heard a footstep, and then the rattle of a chain. Trust the Porters to bother, in a town that had yet to have a serial killer going door to door.

But there was that dead man in Stuart’s den.

The door opened; Mrs. Porter peered around it. The suspicion altered instantly and the door swung wider. “My dear! What’s wrong?”

“I…” For all the world, Natalie couldn’t seem to get further. Her mouth only worked.

Mrs. Porter, miraculously, drew her in and locked the door behind her. “Come in here and sit down,” she said firmly. “There you go.” She steered Natalie into the living room, eased her into a wing chair and patted her hand. “Can you tell me now?”

“What is it?” Mr. Porter asked from the doorway. He looked stooped, his hair whiter than Natalie remembered. It seemed as though he’d aged ten years in the one he’d been retired.

“Hush,” his wife said. “Give her a minute.”

“I…” Stuck again, Natalie closed her eyes. Big mistake. As though her mind had snapped a digital photo available for instant review, there he was. White bits of bone and brown hair matted with blood. Gray tissue. Her stomach heaved and she pressed a hand to her mouth.

“You’re ill.” Mrs. Porter half rose.

“No.” Natalie swallowed. She could not give in to the nausea. Not yet. “I…I just got home from work. And there’s somebody in my house.” Above their twittering, she finished. “Somebody dead.”

They were amazingly kind and efficient. Mr. Porter called the police. Mrs. Porter wrapped an afghan about Natalie’s shoulders and vanished briefly to return with a cup of tea. The warm, sweet brew settled her stomach as nothing else could have. Her neighbors waited with her, Mr. Porter stationed at the front window.

A color commentator, he peered through the crack between the drapes, announcing the arrival of a squad car. “No, two,” he corrected himself. “They’ve gotten out and they’re circling your house. Going in.”

Natalie pictured the uniformed officers, guns drawn. What if she had somehow imagined the corpse in Stuart’s den? No. She couldn’t have. She hadn’t known that was how a skull would look if bashed in. She wished she could have continued in blissful ignorance.

“There’s a plain car now,” her neighbor continued.

Sipping her tea, huddled in the afghan, comforted by the delicate, papery touch of Mrs. Porter’s hand patting her every few moments, Natalie saw the scene through his eyes: two big men in suits conferring with the patrol officer who had come out of the house. Both disappearing inside briefly, then reappearing. Glancing down the street, spotting the Porter’s house. She knew before the knock when they arrived on the doorstep.

Please, please, let them be friends, she prayed. Not strangers.

Most of all, she quite fiercely wanted John McLean. He’d told her of Stuart’s death, carried one corner of her husband’s coffin, scraped out the gutters on her eaves last January, painted the house this July. He was quiet, soft-spoken, solid, her bulwark. He had been Stuart’s partner and, she supposed, was watching out for her from a sense of obligation to her husband rather than from real friendship for her. Nonetheless, she couldn’t imagine what she would have done without him this past year. She wished she had told Mr. Porter to ask for him.

But Natalie knew that, even if she had thought of it, she wouldn’t have asked. She never called John, except a time or two to suggest he bring his children to dinner. Natalie refused to be the stereotype of a lonely widow, the kind of woman who needed a man at her beck and call, or at least wanted one. Her pride barely let her accept his help when he offered it.

The doorbell rang, and Mr. Porter went to let the officers in. On a rush of relief almost painful in its intensity, Natalie recognized the slow, deep voice of Stuart’s former partner before he filled the entry to the living room. At about six feet, John McLean wasn’t unusually tall, but his shoulders were broad and his build muscular. Mid-thirties, he kept his russet-brown hair short, as befitted a police officer. His face was pure male—not handsome, in fact undistinguished, she had always thought, except for compelling eyes.

“Natalie!” Gaze locking on her, he came straight across the room as if nobody else was here and crouched in front of the chair. Taking her hands, he said roughly, “You’re all right.”

“Yes.” She sounded tremulous and was embarrassed by the weakness her voice gave away. “Is whoever did it gone?”

“Afraid so.” His eyes were bluer than she’d realized. “We recognized the address from dispatch and burned rubber getting here. Who the hell got himself dead in your house?”

We. Of course he wasn’t alone. She tore her gaze from his to see another friend beyond his shoulder.

“Geoff.” She tried a smile. “I’d forgotten you two were working together.”

Perhaps ten years older than John McLean, Geoff Baxter was nearly of a height with John and perhaps a little broader, his waistline thickening and his hairline thinning. He and Stuart had been partners back in their patrol days, and had remained friends until her husband dropped dead of an unexpected heart attack at forty years old. Like John, Geoff had stayed in touch since Stuart’s death, even going so far as to offer to haul that “crap” out of the garage so she could use it. He’d wanted to install an electric opener, too, so that he wouldn’t have to worry about her.

She doubted even his darker worries had included a corpse inside her house. Natalie gave a shiver.

“You’re in shock,” John said abruptly. “I hate to ask you questions, but I have to.”

“I’m okay.” This smile was slightly more successful. “Really. I just had the daylights scared out of me.”

He squeezed her hands hard and stood, stepping back. Not only physically—he assumed an air of remoteness. “Tell us what happened.”

Mrs. Porter, still hovering, suggested they sit and offered coffee, which both accepted. After she’d brought in a tray, John thanked her and asked if they could speak to Natalie alone. With thinly disguised disappointment, the Porters withdrew.

Natalie took another sip of her tea. Both men had taken out the notebooks ubiquitous to police officers and held pens poised. Their expressions were still sympathetic, but also intent, razor sharp. This was their job. Natalie felt a chill at the realization. Suddenly they had ceased being friends and become detectives who, by nature, were suspicious of everyone.

Including her.

“I got home from work, parked in the driveway—”

“What time?” Detective Baxter interrupted.

She remembered looking at her watch. “5:35—I noticed before I got out of the car.”

Pens scratched on paper.

She described events: unlocking the front door—yes, she was sure it had been locked—setting down her purse on the hall table and going straight upstairs. The kitchen and living room had looked just as she’d left them that morning. She told of noticing the sewing room door open, then actually making it a couple of feet past the den before her brain accepted what her eyes had seen: a dead man in Stuart’s den. The tale of her flight felt ignominious, but she also knew she’d been sensible.

“You didn’t set foot in the den?” John McLean asked.

“No. I was afraid…” She clutched the afghan tighter against another shiver and finished softly, “Somebody might still be in the house. Besides, I could see his head. I knew he couldn’t be alive. My checking his pulse wouldn’t have done any good.”

“You didn’t recognize him?”

“I couldn’t see his face from the doorway. It never occurred to me that I might know him. I thought…” She didn’t know what she had thought. “That he must be a burglar or something.”

“Very likely.” John didn’t sound satisfied. “Two of them may have had a quarrel.”

“But why my house?” Was she asking them, or the Fates? “Stuart’s stereo is nice, I guess, and a burglar could have that big-screen TV with my compliments, but they’re both still there. I don’t know if anything was touched.”

“The scumbag might have panicked after bashing in his partner’s head and fled. Or run when he heard you opening the front door.”

“But how did he get in? And out?”

“The side door into the garage was unlocked.”

“But…” Disturbed, she looked from face to face.

“I always keep it locked. The one from the garage into the house, too. I’ve hardly set foot into the garage in weeks!”

“Neither door had very good locks.” A frown furrowed John’s forehead. “I should have replaced them for you.”

“You couldn’t possibly have predicted that anything like this would happen. Or that anybody would want to break into my house at all. Beyond his stereo system, about all Stuart had was the house and, gosh—” she waved her hand vaguely “—treasures like ten years of Field & Stream and Sports Illustrated packed in boxes. Totally intact, no issues missing.” Stuart had made a point of telling her that when he caught her about to recycle a copy of SI. He’d looked at her as if she were an idiot when she ventured to ask why he was keeping them all. “Heaven knows the house doesn’t exactly shout money,” she added now.

John grunted. “It’s a decent place in a decent neighborhood. These days, everybody has electronic equipment. Our Port Dare criminals specialize in stuff that’s easily turned over. None of them would know a piece of genuine artwork from a reproduction if it was labeled. Jewelry is always good, and I’m sure they would have hunted in your bedroom if everything had gone according to plan.”

“But the den?” Why was she arguing? She wanted murderer and victim to be common burglars, having nothing to do with her. Still… “Stuart’s computer is dated.”

“You might have had a laptop tucked away in there, a pager, an expensive calculator.” He shrugged.

“Yes. I suppose.” Now she was the one to feel dissatisfied, but it took her a moment to analyze her unhappiness with the scenario.

Why wouldn’t two burglars have immediately unplugged and taken the obviously expensive television and stereo equipment before exploring further? Her sewing machine was a fancy, electronic model that did everything but wash the dishes. Wouldn’t they have considered it worth taking? Besides… Now the discontent stirred anew.

“The cat had been napping in there.”

“What?”

She saw that she’d startled both men.

“It must not have just happened,” Natalie explained, thinking it through as she went. “I shut the door to my sewing room last night. When I got home today, that door had been open long enough for the cat to have taken a nap on the fabric I’d laid out in there. And Sasha wouldn’t have relaxed enough to take a nap in the open unless strangers were long gone. Which means I didn’t scare him away.”

Geoff Baxter looked doubtful at her logic.

John frowned thoughtfully. “The coroner hasn’t arrived yet. She’ll be able to give us a time frame.”

“I suppose it doesn’t matter what time he was killed.”

The two men stirred.

“I know it does to you,” Natalie conceded. “To your investigation. But to me… Actually, I’d rather think he wasn’t still in the house when I got home. The idea that he was standing behind one of the doors, listening to me, maybe even watching…”

John half rose to his feet, then seemed to force himself to sit back down. His face was grim.

Natalie hunched inside the afghan. “That gives me the creeps,” she concluded simply.

John made a gritty sound and slapped shut his notebook. “Damn it, you’re coming home with me tonight.”

She wanted nothing more, but her pride, so important to her, insisted she protest. “I have friends I can stay with.”

“Yeah, and I’m one of ’em.” He stood. “I’ll see if I can bail out your toothbrush and drop you at home right now.”

“But I can drive.”

“No.” His pointed gaze took in her knotted fists and the shiver she couldn’t hide. “You’re in shock. Mom’s with the kids. She’ll enjoy babying you.”

Ridiculous to feel disappointed. Of course he wouldn’t stay with her. He had a murder to investigate. She knew the drill: he would probably work for twenty-four straight hours, canvassing neighbors, supervising crime scene technicians, following up on the tiniest leads. The older the trail, the less likely that a murderer would be caught, Stuart always said. Homicide cops did not drop an investigation to take the night off and pat the little woman’s shoulder.

“I…that’s nice of you, but shouldn’t you ask your mother?” Natalie had only met Ivy McLean a handful of times, the first at Stuart’s funeral. John was divorced and his two kids lived with him. His mother must be baby-sitting tonight.

Geoff cleared his throat. “You know Linda will give me hell if I don’t bring you home with me.”

Natalie doubted his wife would go that far. The two women were casual friends because of their husbands, but they had so little else in common, they’d never progressed beyond the occasional invitation to dinner.

A tiny spark of bemusement penetrated the numbness she’d wrapped around herself as snugly as the afghan. “I do have women friends who can run me a hot bath and tuck me in. Really, you don’t have to…”

John’s hard stare silenced her. “Yes. I do. I’d rather know where you are.”

Because she was a suspect in a murder investigation? The thought shook her. John couldn’t really believe even for a second that she would do something like that, could he?

“Yes. All right,” she said, sounding ungracious but too discombobulated to figure out what woman friend would actually have a spare bedroom without putting a child out. She would have to explain, too, listen to exclamations of horror, perhaps endure avid curiosity. Ivy McLean was the mother of not just one son in law enforcement, but three. She would have heard it often enough before to imagine the scene without wanting the details. Natalie didn’t like the idea of putting out a near-stranger, but if she just took a hot bath and went straight to bed, she didn’t have to be much trouble.

“What else do you need?” John asked. “Are you on any prescriptions? What about a nightgown or clothes for morning?”

Morning would be Saturday, and she wouldn’t have to work, thank heavens.

“My purse,” she said, explaining where she’d dropped it. “The middle drawer in my dresser has jeans, and T-shirts are in the one below that. I left a sweater draped over a chair in my bedroom. Nightgowns are in the top drawer.”

“Underwear?”

She could rinse out the ones she was wearing. But she’d sound so missish if she suggested that, Natalie tried to match his matter-of-fact tone. “There’s a small drawer on top next to the mirror.”

“Good enough.” John left to go fetch her things. He and Geoff had a brief discussion she couldn’t hear at the door. A moment later, Natalie heard Geoff telling the Porters he needed to ask them a few questions.

In the living room, they sat side by side on the couch, Mrs. Porter clutching her husband’s hand. She sat very straight, a dignified, tiny woman whose dark hair was whitening in streaks, her husband a tall, thin man whose color was none too good. Her eyes were bright, his dull. Natalie remembered guiltily that she’d heard something about bypass surgery a few months back. Had anybody in the neighborhood brought meals or even just expressed sympathy? Their kindness today made Natalie feel terrible about the way she’d shrugged off the casually mentioned news.

Geoff’s questions were routine. Had they seen or heard anything out of the ordinary? Cars they didn’t recognize?

Shaking her head, Mrs. Porter said, “We grocery shopped this morning, then had lunch.”

So they did actually go out.

“This afternoon Roger mowed the lawn while I deadheaded the roses. I don’t believe a car passed the entire while. Did you see one, dear?”

He frowned, giving it careful thought. “No. No, I didn’t notice one.”

“Then we lay down for a quick nap,” his wife continued. “I’d just begun thinking about putting dinner on.”

Geoff thanked them gravely and closed his notebook. Natalie carefully folded the afghan and laid it on the arm of the chair.

Standing, she smiled even as she felt the hot spurt of tears. “You’ve been so kind. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t been home. Please, let me know if there’s ever anything I can do for you.”

“Oh, my dear!” Mrs. Porter stood and came to Natalie, taking her hand, hers dry but surprisingly strong. “We’ve wished we could help you since your husband died! All by yourself in that big house. You come see us anytime.” She turned a commanding gaze on the detective. “You will let us know when you catch the man who did such an awful thing, now won’t you?”

“It’ll be in the newspapers,” he promised.

“Assuming you do catch him,” she said acerbically, sounding like her sharp self for the first time tonight.

Geoff’s expression became wooden. “We’ll do our best, ma’am.”

“See that you do.” She gave Natalie’s hand a last squeeze. “Warm milk does help you sleep.”

“I’ll remember that.” Natalie was teary again as Geoff escorted her out. She must still be in shock. She wasn’t usually so emotional.

“We will catch him,” Geoff promised as they crossed the street. “Count on it.”

“I know you will.” Natalie paused on the sidewalk in front of her house and gazed at it, wondering if it would ever seem familiar and safe again. She felt again the sense of wrongness, and this time, it raised goose bumps on her skin. She rubbed her forearms.

“I only hope you arrest him soon. It’s going to give me the creeps to go home, wondering why they were in my house and whether he could get in again.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t go home.” Frowning, Geoff held open the car door for her. “Until we figure out for sure what they were after.”

She liked the way he worried about her. Even if his concern, too, was for Stuart’s sake.

“Yeah, but I don’t want to develop a phobia about my own house.” Natalie sighed and climbed into the passenger seat of the dark blue car. “We’ll see how it goes.”

He nodded, as kind in his way as the Porters had been. Voice gruff, he said, “Just remember, there’s a fine line between bravery and idiocy. Don’t push yourself to do something you’re uncomfortable with.”

“I won’t,” she promised.

John McLean emerged from the house carrying her overnight bag and purse. Both she and Geoff turned their heads to watch him cut across her lawn. She liked watching him move, with the discipline and grace of an athlete, his stride purposeful and long.

What would she have thought of him if she were a normal citizen who didn’t know the investigating officers? Natalie wondered idly. Would his physical bulk and the bulge of the gun he carried in a shoulder holster have intimidated her? She certainly couldn’t have known that he had a dry sense of humor or that his eyes often held a twinkle even as his mouth remained unsmiling. Or that this cop in a dark, well-cut suit would go home most days to cook dinner for his children, help them with homework, supervise baths and tuck them in.

Her mind roved further. If she’d never met Detective John McLean, if she weren’t a widow of barely a year, could she have been attracted to him?

Jolted, Natalie uttered a small, startled sound that Geoff, mercifully, seemed not to notice. Where in heck had that idea come from? For goodness’ sake, she’d known John for several years and never once thought of him in those terms! He was Stuart’s friend. Period.

No, not period. Of course he’d become her friend, too. Why else had she needed him so desperately today?

Of course she wasn’t attracted to him. She would have noticed before now.

No, Natalie knew perfectly well what she was doing. John was an excuse, that’s all. What she was avoiding thinking about was her house, and especially what—who—lay upstairs, or of the cleaning job she’d have afterward. Would she ever be able to go upstairs again without her heart pounding? Would she be able to stroll into the den—stepping just where the body now lay—and sit down to use the computer without a frightened consciousness of where blood had soaked into the carpet?

Natalie was grateful for the distraction John provided when he stopped by the open car door. At the same time she noticed that he carried a brown paper grocery bag in his free arm, she caught the whiff.

“My bread!”

“It seemed a shame to let it go to waste.” His rare smile relaxed his face. “I doubt we’re going to lift a fingerprint from your bread machine.”

“Thank you.” Those wretched tears threatened again. If one more person was nice to her, she was going to start sobbing. Natalie took the grocery bag and wrapped her arms around it, the delicious aroma and warmth almost as comforting as a hug. She blinked hard. “John, I almost forgot poor Sasha. She’s going to be scared by all the strangers trooping through.”

“Actually, I just shut her in your sewing room.” John cleared his throat. “She was, uh, somewhat annoyed. I doubt you want her in there, but we can’t have her in the den.”

“No, that’s fine.” The fabric could be washed again before she cut it out, the pattern pieces taped. “Her litter box is in the garage.” As if they wouldn’t find it.

“And her food in the kitchen. I saw it. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of the cat.”

As he’d taken care of her gutters and her Christmas lights and the rotten branch from the maple tree that had splintered a ten-foot stretch of the cedar board fence that enclosed her backyard.

“You’re always so nice to me.” She sounded watery.

The two men exchanged a look.

Seemingly galvanized, John slapped the roof of the car. “Geoff, you get started here. I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”

“Then get the hell out of here.” Geoff gave her a crooked smile. “Forget the warm milk. Raid the liquor cabinet.”

She laughed through her tears as he closed her door and John got in behind the wheel.

CHAPTER TWO

NATALIE FELT John’s searching gaze as he started the car.

“You okay?” he asked again, quietly.

“Of course I am!” She wiped wet cheeks. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Well, yes, of course I do. It shook me up, and I suppose I’m in shock, a little.”

“More than a little.” The car accelerated into traffic on Neah Drive. Speaking deliberately, John said, “The first time I saw a man who’d been murdered, I stayed cool long enough to get outside and around the corner of the warehouse where he’d been gunned down. Threw up everything I’d eaten in the past twenty-four hours. I went back in and did my job, but every so often I’d find myself looking at him and just being hit by it—that’s a guy like me, flesh and blood. That’s what my blood would look like spilling out.” He gave his head a shake. “Nothing brings your own mortality home like the sight of violent death.”

“I suppose that’s part of it,” she admitted. “I don’t like to think that my head…”

His hand closed briefly on her knee. “Most of us don’t walk into a crowbar.”

“No. I know.” She bit her lip. “But he was in my house. So maybe…”

When she hesitated, he finished for her. “Next time someone will take a swing at your head.”

Her nod was tiny and slightly ashamed. Shouldn’t she be grieving for the death of even a stranger, feeling—how did it go?—that the loss of any man diminished her? Instead she felt violated because he had bled out his life in her house.

And she was afraid.

“Natalie, look at me.”

Startled, she realized that they were stopped at a light in the old part of town. An enormous Queen Anne style turn-of-the-century house on one corner was now a bed-and-breakfast; across the street, an antique shop spilled onto the sidewalk from what had probably once been a carriage house. She had been blind to the view of the bay during the drive here, to the arrival of a ferry that had disembarked the long line of cars waiting to race up the hill toward the highway. John lived here in Old Town, just a few blocks away, in a more modest restored Victorian.

She turned her head to meet his frowning gaze.

“I will not let you be hurt.” His words had the power of a vow. “I promise.”

The idea panicked her. Natalie shook her head hard. “No. Don’t promise. How can you? At some point, I’ll have to go home even if you don’t make an arrest. What if he did come back? Are you going to abandon your children to hover in my shrubbery every night? No,” she said with finality. “I don’t want to be a weight on your conscience.”

A horn sounded behind them, then another one. For a moment John still didn’t move, his electric, brooding eyes holding hers. Then he blinked, shuttering the intensity, and flung an irritated glance at the mirror.

“Yeah, yeah, hold your horses,” he growled, stepping on the gas. He drove the remaining blocks in silence, but her stolen look saw the deep lines carved in his forehead. In front of his house, he set the emergency brake and turned off the engine. Turning a near-scowl on her, he said, “All right. How’s this instead? I’ll do my damnedest to keep you safe.”

“That,” she said, smiling shakily, “I can accept. Gratefully.”

SHE WAS GOING TO ACCEPT his help gratefully?

Driving away from his house, John gave a grunt of wry amusement. Oh, yeah. Sure.

The next moment, his brows drew together. No, he wasn’t being fair. Natalie would be grateful, all right.

She would just hate having to be.

Actually, he liked that about her. His mother excepted, the women John had known well had tended to be dependent on the men in their lives. They assumed a man would fix anything that was wrong.

Not that Natalie was the prickly type; far from it. She was warm, gentle, relaxed, a comfortable voice on the phone when he felt like talking out a day’s problems. But she was also determined—sometimes infuriatingly so—not to lean on anyone, even if she was a new widow.

No matter what he did for Natalie, no matter how trivial, she’d thank him gravely but with a troubled expression puckering her brow. Then he could count on her bringing a plate of cookies to the station, or sending a casserole home with him, or buying gifts for Evan and Maddie. She had to balance the scales. Always.

In John’s book, friends did each other favors. Natalie was on her own now, and he didn’t mind picking up some of the slack. He liked working with his hands, and if painting her house meant dumping the kids at their friends’ homes, heck, they’d have a better time with their buddies than they would if he took them out to the spit anyway. It wasn’t as if his five-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter didn’t get plenty of his attention. Except for work, he was with them most of the time.

He knew Stuart Reed hadn’t left any life insurance, and he was pretty sure Natalie didn’t make enough to be able to afford to put out fifteen hundred dollars or so to have her house painted. The very fact that she bit her lip, let him do the work and thanked him prettily told John that he was right: she needed him.

She just wished like hell that she didn’t.

Did she feel guilty at putting him out? Hate any hint of dependence? He didn’t know, hadn’t asked. John would have been over there cleaning out her gutters no matter what. She was his partner’s widow. Stuart would have done the same for John’s children, if he’d been the one to go.

Natalie seemed to understand and accept that. She’d let John hold her when he brought the news of Stuart’s death. He had stood beside her at her husband’s funeral, kept an arm around her as Stuart’s casket was lowered into the ground and the first, symbolic chunk of earth was flung down onto its shining surface. That was John’s place, and she hadn’t tried to keep him from it.

Huge dark circles under her eyes, she’d gone back to work a week after the funeral. She hadn’t asked to be held again, and wouldn’t. Admiring her strength, John had found himself talking to her as if she was another man.

He knew she was a woman, of course. Her ripe curves and leggy walk might have fueled a few fantasies under other circumstances. But that wasn’t how he thought of her. It was her laugh and her wisdom and her grave dignity that characterized her. He’d never been friends with a woman before, but somehow it had happened with her, perhaps because he’d known her for several years as his partner’s wife. That was another page out of John’s book: you didn’t lust after a friend’s wife.

The end result was that he’d quit noticing her looks. He liked talking to her. He’d call just to see how things were going, stop by casually to do small jobs around the house he figured she wouldn’t get to. She seemed to enjoy his kids. As far as he knew, she hadn’t begun to date. No possessive man had taken to hanging around questioning John’s presence. He and Natalie had an easy relationship that he savored. He didn’t know when—if ever—he’d been able to relax around a woman.

But she wasn’t going to like having new reason to be grateful, he reflected.

The damn ferry traffic was still bumper-to-bumper up the main drag. Drumming his fingers on the steering wheel, John strove for patience.

His mother had been just the right medicine tonight, he decided. Strong herself, Ivy McLean expected everyone else to be as well.

He’d left Natalie in his mother’s competent but not tender hands. Her brand of coddling, he suspected, would suit Natalie Reed fine.

Ivy McLean hadn’t been the most sympathetic of mothers when her three sons took turns being heart-broken by high school femmes fatales or suffering knee injuries on the football field. Get over it was her sometimes impatient message. Stand up tall, focus on what’s important. Football was not. Neither were teenage romances.

Swearing when he didn’t make it through an intersection before the light turned red, John grimaced. Come to think of it, not much that had mattered to seventeen-year-old boys had been truly important in Ivy MacLean’s eyes. Grades, she cared about. Living honestly and with integrity. Accepting the duty their father’s murder had laid on all three boys.

In Natalie Reed’s case, Mom would understand a degree of shock and would respect outrage. She would be kind in her brisk way, without encouraging an excess of tears or self-pity or fear. Hell, John thought ruefully, most likely Mom would buck Natalie up and have her ready to rip down the crime scene tape and move home tomorrow morning, to hell with the murderer on the loose.

Maybe this hadn’t been such a good idea.

Earlier, when Ivy had seen her son out, they’d left Natalie listening to Maddie chatter about a roller-skating party.

“You’ll find out what happened and why,” Mom said, chin set and gaze steady. It wasn’t a question. This was what counted. She’d raised her sons to believe that any one man could make the world a safer place and now she was expecting him to get on with it.

She hadn’t said, Make an arrest tonight, but she might as well have.

A frown stayed on his brow until he reached Natalie Reed’s tri-level house. The crime scene techs were here, he was glad to see. A flash popped upstairs. The coroner hadn’t yet arrived. She was probably stuck in ferry traffic. Every time one of the giant ferries docked, hundreds of cars poured out, clogging Port Dare’s narrow streets.

After parking behind the Investigations unit van, John got out of his car and stood on the sidewalk, making no move to go up to the door. He tried to put himself in the shoes of a stranger and see her house and this neighborhood with fresh eyes.

The paint job—forest-green with cream trim, his doing—didn’t look half-bad. All the same, 2308 Meadow Drive was not a showplace. It was an average house in an average neighborhood, one of many developments that had sprung up around the nineteenth-century port town. In this middle-income neighborhood, yards were generally well cared for but standard issue. Most of these were single family homes, owner occupied, not rentals. Bikes with pink tassels on the handlebars lay on their sides in driveways. Gardening was carried out in traditional flower beds mulched with bark, edging lawns that varied from the Porters’ velvet green to the shaggy, brown-spotted grass surrounding the corner house. The Porters, John was willing to bet, wouldn’t like those fluffy dandelion heads. Or the neighborhood eyesore that sat out in front of the same house, a rusting junker resting on blocks instead of wheels. Nonetheless, even at that house, a tricycle listed half off the driveway, and in the backyard a swing set shared pride of place with a barbecue grill. The lawn got mowed, just not often enough.

Ordinary people.

A neighborhood like this wouldn’t have crack houses or marijuana-growing operations in the spare bedroom. Nor did these houses suggest real wealth. The cops would get called here when a mountain bike was stolen out of an open garage. Teenagers committed the few break-ins. Maybe a car prowl from time to time. Serious burglaries would be few and far between. Murder? Never.

So why was there a dead man in Stuart’s den? Why had two people broken in, and why had one of them been killed? A quarrel mid-crime was the obvious answer, but then again, why Natalie’s house? Why hadn’t two burglars carried the obviously expensive electronic equipment out before they risked taking the time to check out the upstairs? Had they parked right in the driveway, a truck backed up to receive stolen goods?

Or were they after something else? Something small?

What? he wondered in frustration. He’d have to ask Natalie whether Stuart had any collections that might be valuable. Coins? Stamps? Hell, he’d collected enough junk to have lucked out and hit on something worth taking. Or did Natalie have jewelry? She hadn’t said, and John thought she would have. He remembered seeing her at the Policeman’s Ball, drop-dead gorgeous in a simple green velvet sheath, but the only jewelry he could picture were sparkly earrings. Diamond, maybe, but tiny, not ones worth killing over.

Figure out why murderer and victim were in this house and not the neighbor’s, and he could as good as snap those handcuffs on. Unfortunately, the why was the true mystery here. Murders happened all the time, even in Port Dare. Just not this kind.

He sighed. Better find out what the neighborhood canvass had turned up. Too bad the Porters hadn’t seen anything. According to Natalie, they were the only near neighbors who were stay-at-homes and nosy to boot.

Geoff shook his head when John tracked him down a block away.

“Nada. Zip. Nobody was home. Not even latchkey kids.”

“Why am I not surprised?” John rocked on his heels and looked back. Meadow Drive curved, and this was the last house from which anyone could have seen Natalie’s. “You get everybody?”

“A few haven’t come home yet.” Geoff glanced down at his notebook. “Four. No, three. The place down there is for sale, and empty right now.”

“What about the houses behind hers?”

“I sent Jackson. But what are the odds?”

Nada. Zip. Of course. But they had to try.

“Looks like the coroner is here. Shall we go hear what she thinks?”

Elected in this rural county, Dr. Jennifer Koltes was a pathologist at St. Mary’s, serving in addition as part-time public servant. Hereabouts they didn’t need a full-time coroner yet. John was counting on it staying that way.

A tall skinny redhead, Dr. Koltes was in her mid-thirties, married to a cardiologist. Currently, she was pregnant, easily six or seven months along. Maybe John was old-fashioned—okay, he undoubtedly was—but the sight of a pregnant woman checking the body temp of a corpse with a smashed skull struck him as jarring.

Hearing their arrival, she glanced up with a pleasant smile also at odds with the scene. “Detectives. Haven’t seen either of you for a whole day or two.”

The last body had been the result of a bar shoot-out. Neither victim nor shooter, both tattooed, black-leather-garbed motorcyclists, had been locals.

“Busy days,” John said laconically.

“Well.” She was already closing her bag. “Cause of death looks obvious from here, although you never know. We might be surprised when we get him on the table.”

“Weapon?”

“Something darned heavy. Probably smooth and rounded.” She pursed her lips. “A metal pipe, maybe. There are a few flakes caught in his hair that might be rust.”

“Time of death?”

“I’m guessing morning.” She groaned and pressed a hand to her lower back as she straightened from her crouch over the body. “Say, ten, eleven o’clock.”

Both men had both taken involuntary steps forward when she began to heave herself to her feet. Now they exchanged a glance.

“That’s consistent with what the home owner says.”

“Which is?”

Geoff told her about the cat that had napped on the fabric. “And the old couple down the street, the neighborhood snoops, would have been grocery shopping about then.”

“I wonder,” John said thoughtfully, “whether the Porters go grocery shopping every morning. Or the same morning every week.”

Geoff made a note. “Easy to ask.”

Dr. Koltes left after conferring with the uniforms who had been delegated to bag the body. “I can do the autopsy tonight,” she said, promising. “You’ll have my report tomorrow.”

Gazing with distaste at the corpse, John said, “Time to have a look.”

He checked back pockets—no wallet. Ditto for the pockets of the crumpled linen jacket. The jacket interested him. Men in Port Dare leaned more to denim or heavy flannel, maybe a dark suit if you worked in a bank or law office. This looked…hell, like Miami Vice.

He called for the paramedics, who put a collar on the neck to protect the bashed skull for Dr. Koltes’s benefit, and then rolled the body onto a gurney. Face-up, a man who could have been mid-thirties to forty tops stared sightlessly at the ceiling. Longish brown hair, brown eyes, a stubble of beard—this guy had stumbled out of TV land, John thought again. On a wrist that had been under the body was an obviously expensive watch, the kind that probably told you the time in Paris, the altitude and your heart rate.

Sinking back on his heels, John contemplated the face.

“Damn it, Baxter, he looks familiar.”

His partner nodded. “I was thinking the same.”

“If we know him, he’s probably not a realtor or the manager of the Rite Aid pharmacy.”

Geoff gestured toward the watch. “Drugs?”

“Could be.”

They stood back and let the photographer get full frontal pictures as well as close-ups of the face.

“I want those as soon as possible,” John said, and was answered with brisk nods.

“Fingerprints?” he asked.

“The victim’s,” he was told. “Half a dozen others. Mrs. Reed’s, presumably. We’ll need to get hers tomorrow.”

Feeling uncomfortable admitting it for reasons he didn’t like to examine, John said, “Mine will be here, too. I used that bathroom just last week when I was treating the back deck.”

To his relief, nobody gave sly or knowing glances. Nobody made an off-color joke about widows—one that would have been deeply regretted.

It helped when Baxter said, “Hell, mine’ll be here, too. Natalie had Linda and me to dinner Friday night.”

He and Baxter took their time studying the den once the body was carted out. It was a room that could have used Natalie’s lighter touch. John guessed that she stayed out of it.

Stuart had smoked cigars, or at least liked to have one clenched between his teeth curling noxious smoke into the air. The smell, faded with time, nonetheless still lingered in here. Walls were papered in a masculine navy-and-tan-striped paper. Bookshelves held Stuart’s favorite bedtime reading: Ken Follett, John Le Carré and the ilk.

A monster, the desk was one of those huge oak ones that had probably graced the office of a CEO in the 1920s. The finish was yellowing, the top covered with a blotter. In its own way, the computer that sat atop it was as much an antique, a 385, maybe a 485. Forget Pentium. No telephone line to it, which meant no internet access. No CD drive. In fact, the floppy drives were for the outmoded bigger disks. The keyboard was covered, the monitor screen a little dusty.

Using a handkerchief, John carefully opened drawers. The top one held nothing but paper clips, pencils that needed sharpening, a staple remover, markers and packing tape. The big drawer was set up with hanging files, all labeled: 1986 tax return. Ditto ’87, ’88, and so on through the year before last. MasterCard statements. Appliance warranties. Household receipts.

On the face of it, nothing of any interest to anyone but the IRS doing a back audit. And, damn, was Stuart ready. No midnight scrabbling for torn receipts for him. It was almost a shame the IRS had never, to the best of John’s knowledge, chosen to audit Reed.

The closet held boxes and plastic-wrapped clothes on hangers. A cracked leather aviator jacket, ski pants and parka, a high school letterman’s jacket. Some of the boxes were labeled: check stubs, photo albums, records. His turntable had probably given up the ghost, but he wouldn’t have given up the records. A faint musty odor lingered in here.

Baxter muttered a profanity. “Did Reed ever throw anything away?”

“Not so’s I can tell.” John eased the closet door shut again. “Nothing unusual in here, though. We all have crap like this.”

“We’d better look in those boxes.”

He grunted agreement, however much he disliked the idea. Mining every detail was their job, but usually what he learned about people’s lives was of academic interest. He made a mental jigsaw puzzle, slotting pieces in until every one fit. This time was different. Stuart Reed had been not just a fellow cop but John’s partner and friend. Even more, he hated the idea of intruding on Natalie’s privacy. “Tomorrow,” he said.

They tried the remaining houses on the street. One was still dark; at the two places where someone came to the door, shakes of the head were their answers. They’d been gone all day. Neither knew Natalie or, quite frankly, would have noticed a truck in her driveway if they had been home.

“I say we go back to the station and look for that face,” John said at last. “Even odds we have his picture in our books.”

“No point in waiting for fingerprint ID,” his partner agreed. “Tomorrow is soon enough to look hard at the house.”

Mug shots were arranged into books by theme: drug arrests, rape, B and E, and so on. That way, if a store owner was held up, say, he didn’t have to gaze at the face of every rapist or marijuana grower who had ever been arrested. He could concentrate on likely perps. This worked fine normally. In this case, however, the face could have been familiar for dozens of reasons.

John’s money was on drugs.

The next hour and a half was punctuated only by the slap of a cover closing, the abrupt departure of one man or the other for another cup of coffee, and a couple of trips down memory lane.

“Ha!” Baxter crowed once. “Remember our friend Jerry Canfield? Sending him to the pen in Walla Walla was one of the greater pleasures of this job.”

It was Geoff Baxter who found their victim. “Bingo,” he said softly. “I knew we’d met.”

John rotated his shoulders and waited until his partner shoved the book across the table. From the rows of mug shots, the sullen face jumped out at him.

“He was better looking alive,” Baxter said.

“Who isn’t? No, don’t answer that.”

Ronald Floyd had a lengthy rap sheet, starting with possession of cocaine when he was seventeen in Tacoma. Thirty-four the day he died, Floyd had stuck to his chosen career of dealing drugs and slowly risen on the ladder. The part that always amazed John was how little time a guy like Floyd ever served despite multiple arrests. The system was overwhelmed; he’d walked a couple of times because prosecutors had shrugged and decided he wasn’t worth the bother. John knew how the arresting officers had felt; after all, they’d bothered.

Memory nudged by the photo, he recalled being involved in Ronald Floyd’s last arrest, which had led to four years in the Monroe State Penitentiary. Acting on a tip, officers had been waiting when a cabin cruiser docked at the marina. The hold had been packed with plastic bags full of white powder. It had been a pretty good haul, by Port Dare standards.

Unfortunately, those standards were rising by the day. Half the border between Washington State and Canada was water: the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Puget Sound. The rocky, wooded Canadian Gulf Islands and American San Juan Islands made the waters a maze of spectacular channels and inlets. Pods of orcas tried to elude the ubiquitous whale-watching ships. Sailors and boaters were in paradise, with every island offering hidden coves. Green-and-white Washington State ferries plied the waters between islands and Canada and the USA, while the blue-and-white Canadian ferries carried traffic between Vancouver Island and the mainland.

Paradise for sailors was a nightmare for Coast Guard and law enforcement. Boaters didn’t respect customs laws or international boundaries. Smuggling was a breeze—literally, as it filled gaudy sails on blue waters. Officers couldn’t search every boat that docked at one of the marinas or anchored in the bay, even when they knew damn well some of them were here on business. Luck and tips led to the few big busts.

Ronald Floyd must have made an enemy, because a muffled voice on the telephone had set him up. Officers had waited in the nighttime shadows at the marina while the pretty white boat eased slowly in, water lapping against the pilings. Floyd himself had bounded from the bow to the dock with the first line. The Port Dare P.D. waited until the boat was tied bow and stern and the engine snuffed. Two other men joined Floyd, all wearing jeans, deck shoes and wind-breakers. They’d talked briefly, laughed. Then the spotlight froze them as a dozen police officers packing guns and a warrant surrounded them.

“Stuart cuffed Floyd,” John said slowly, remembering. “I got one of the others.”

“I didn’t make any of the arrests, but I was there.” Baxter ran a hand over his thinning hair. “So Stuart booked the guy. That’s not much of a connection.”

“But it’s something. I’ve been asking myself, why Natalie Reed’s house? Why not the one two doors down with the new sunroom?”

Baxter shrugged. “Chance.”

“Or maybe not.” Suddenly energized, John shoved back his chair. “What do you say we have a chat with some of our stiff’s buddies?”

CHAPTER THREE

NATALIE CAME DOWNSTAIRS in the morning to the sound of a girl’s laugh and a man’s deep voice.

She felt like the walking dead. She’d been able to snatch only bits and pieces of sleep from endless wide-eyed hours. She supposed she’d dreamed, but it was hard to separate unsettling scenes supplied by her unconscious mind from the gruesome images that played behind closed eyelids when she was awake. Last night, sleepless and still in shock, she had wished that today was a working day so that she would have something to do. This morning she was intensely grateful that she didn’t have to go into the office. Coaxing bad-tempered advertisers into agreeing that a check written to the Sentinel was money worth spending was beyond her in her current exhausted state. Maybe she could take Evan and Maddie down to the spit. If she found a warm, sandy spot, she could lean against a log and watch them build castles or splash in the water.

Or fall asleep at last, which wouldn’t make her much of a baby-sitter.

In the dining room, she found John and his children seated at their places at the table, which had been nicely set as if for company, with quilted place mats and cloth napkins. As a centerpiece, asters in bright colors made a casual bouquet in a cream-colored pitcher. French doors were closed against a gray, misty day.

She stood in the doorway unnoticed for a moment, feeling as if she were outside, nose pressed to the glass, looking in at a perfect family tableau. Father and children were laughing together, the affection, humor and patience so obvious she felt a pang of envy. For what, Natalie knew quite well. Stuart had squelched her first tentative suggestion that they think about having children. On their wedding day, she had just assumed…

It hurt still, remembering Stuart’s quick, thoughtless, “What the hell would we want brats for?”

She must have made a sound, a movement, because John’s head turned sharply, his grin fading.

“Good morning.” He searched her face with grave, intent eyes even as he gestured at an empty chair.

“Mom’s making bacon and eggs. She wouldn’t let us help.” A faint smile pulled at his mouth. “We’ve been complaining about how slow the service is. My tip isn’t going to be big.”

“Daddy!” His son giggled. “Grandma doesn’t want money!”

Evan McLean was a miniature of his father: russet, wavy hair, vivid blue eyes and big feet that suggested someday he’d match Dad’s size as well. Natalie wondered if John had had freckles, too, at five years old.

From the lines in his face, she doubted he’d slept any more than she had, if at all, but he had obviously just showered and shaved. His wet hair was slicked back, the auburn darkened by water. Despite the tiredness that creased his brow and added years, he crackled with energy and the grin he gave his son came readily.

“You don’t think Grandma would scoop up a buck if I left one?”

Evan looked crafty. “I bet she’d give it to me. Why don’t you leave a dollar and we’ll find out. Okay?”

“Greedy,” his sister scoffed. Maddie McLean had her mom’s blond hair and blue eyes of a softer hue than her father’s. Gawky and skinny at this age, she wasn’t pretty in a dimpled little-girl way, but Natalie was willing to bet Maddie would be a beauty by the time she was sixteen.

“Just to see,” Evan insisted.

“Uh-huh.” She rolled her eyes. “Like you’d give it back to Dad.”

Her brother bounced indignantly. “I would!” He stole a glance at his father. “If he said I had to.”

John laughed, although he still watched Natalie. “Let’s not put Grandma to the test, shall we?” The door from the kitchen swung open and he said, “Ah. Looks like breakfast is going to be served.”

“At last!” Evan said.

Carrying a plate of toast in one hand and a heaping bowl of scrambled eggs in the other, his grandmother bent a look on him. “Young man, that didn’t sound very polite.”

Even at five, he had the grace to blush. “I’m just awful hungry, Grandma.”

“Ah.” Still sounding severe, she said, “You need to learn to think ‘at last,’ not say it. That’s the secret to good manners.”

His forehead crinkled. “You mean, I can be really rude, just to myself?”

“That’s right.” A tall woman with beautiful bone structure and gray-streaked red hair cut very short, his grandmother headed back to the kitchen. Just before disappearing through the swinging door, she added, “Truly nice people, however, don’t think rude things, either.”

“Oh.” Looking very small, Evan beseeched his father. “Is that true?”

“Here’s a secret, bud.” John lowered his voice. “I can’t imagine a single person so saintly that he or she doesn’t think rude things once in a while. Just so you keep ’em to yourself, you can be a nice person.”

Maddie sat with a very straight back and head held regally high. “But you’re boys. Girls are lots nicer. Aren’t they, Natalie?”

Weary as she was, Natalie had to laugh. “Let’s see, what grade are you in? Third?”

Maddie nodded. “He’s only in kindergarten.”

So much for the illusion of family harmony she had seen like a shimmering mirage before she stepped into the dining room.

“Right. My point is, girls are lots nicer than boys at your age. I’m pretty sure boys reach their peak of awfulness in about fourth grade. But then they do start getting better.”

“Really?” both kids said simultaneously.

“I can be awful?” Evan sounded delighted at the prospect.

“You mean, they get worse?” his sister asked in horror.

“’Fraid so,” Natalie said sympathetically. “Or, at least, that’s my recollection.”

John was laughing as his mother returned with a plate of bacon and another with sausage.

“In case anyone would prefer it to bacon,” she said, slapping down the plate. “If that’s funny.”

The laugh still lingering on his mouth, John said, “Sit down, Mom. This looks fabulous. No, we were talking about the horrors boys are capable of. Fourth grade was definitely my peak of awfulness.”

Mrs. McLean didn’t hesitate. “For all of you. No,” she corrected herself, handing Natalie the bowl of scrambled eggs to dish up. “Hugh was slow maturing. Fifth or sixth grade was his worst. Do you remember that poor girl who had a terrible crush on him and sent him a poem she’d written?”

John paused with the plate of toast in one hand. A grin deepened the creases in his cheeks. “Oh, yeah. He wrote her a poem in return. Rhymed pretty well, too, as I recall. Actually—” he cleared his throat “—I helped. Just with the rhyming. Which, come to think of it, would suggest that I was still awful in…what would I have been?”

“A freshman in high school.” His mother sounded acerbic. “I can’t believe you helped him.”

“What did it say?” Evan demanded.

“Something about her stink and, um, why she had to pad her bra and her laugh sounding like…” He stopped. “Never mind.”

“Awesome,” Evan breathed. “Uncle Hugh?”

“It was not awesome,” his grandmother snapped.

“It was cruel. Hugh was unable to play Little League that year in consequence.”

Evan’s eyes grew big. “Oh.”

“What did you do, Daddy?” Maddie asked. “When you were in fourth grade?”

He layered jam on his toast and waved the bread knife dismissively. “Oh, I was just repulsive. My idea of falling-down-funny was a fart joke or tripping another kid or somebody making a dumb mistake in an oral presentation.”

“That’s what all the boys in my class are like!” Maddie exclaimed. “My own dad was like that?”

“Yup.” He tousled her hair. “I don’t have a single excuse, kiddo.”

“Gol,” she muttered.

“If your father had been here,” Mrs. McLean began, with a sniff.

A shadow crossed John’s face and was gone before Natalie was quite sure she’d seen it. “He was here, Mom. I was in fifth grade when he died.”

“Grandad was shot, right?” Enjoying the gory idea that he had a relative who had died a bloody death, Evan shoveled in a huge mouthful of scrambled eggs and chewed enthusiastically while he waited for the familiar answer.

That same snap in her voice, his grandmother said, “You know perfectly well that he was, young man, and it’s not something we discuss in that tone.”

He immediately seemed to shrink. “I didn’t mean…” he mumbled around his food.

His father laid a big hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay. We know.” The gaze he turned on his mother was cold. “Evan is five years old. Death is very academic to him. And he never knew his grandfather.”

Her nostrils flared, and her stare didn’t back away from his. “Hugh was barely older than Evan when he lost his father.”

Tension fairly crackled between them. “And he had to deal with it. My son doesn’t.” Deliberately he turned his head, dismissing her. “Natalie, once you’ve eaten, we should probably talk.”

Aware out of the corner of her eye that his mother had flushed, Natalie nodded. “Whenever you’re ready.” She looked apologetically at Mrs. McLean. “I’m not very hungry, I’m afraid. Although this is delicious.”

“A decent breakfast will make you feel better.”

“Yes,” she said meekly. “I’m sure. It’s just that I keep thinking…” She had to swallow on a bout of nausea.

Mrs. McLean’s face softened marginally. “Perhaps a cup of tea. With honey?” She stood, surveying everyone’s plates. “Children, please eat. Evan, smaller bites.” She swept out.

“I…” Natalie tried to think of something tactful to say. “She’s being very kind.”

“In her own way,” John said dryly.

John brought a cup of coffee and Natalie her tea when they left the children with their grandmother and retired to his home office.

Family obviously wasn’t checked at the door to this room with warm woodwork, white walls and floor-to-ceiling bookcases. Childish drawings filled a bulletin board, and some action figures lay on the hardwood floor in positions that suggested they had died rather like their grandfather. A one-legged Barbie lay among them.

John nudged at the doll with his foot. “My son is bloodthirsty,” he remarked ruefully.

“Aren’t most little boys? I know my nephew is.”

He sat rather heavily in his leather office chair, his tiredness suddenly visible. “Having known the reality, my mother isn’t very comfortable with that fact.”

“How could she be?” Natalie said with quick sympathy. “It must have been horrible to lose her husband that way, and to have to raise three kids by herself.”

He made a rough sound. “I only wish she could have let us forget, just now and again, how Dad died.”

Startled, Natalie asked, “What do you mean?”

John rotated his head as though his neck was stiff. Sounding impatient with himself, he said almost brusquely, “Never mind. It’s nothing. History.” He sighed. “Natalie, we identified the dead guy.”

In an instant forgetting his unusual sharpness toward his mother, she locked her hands together. Her voice came out breathless with the anxiety that suddenly gripped her. “Really? So fast?”

“Geoff and I both recognized him. We had to hunt through mug shots to come up with a name, but we’d been in on his arrest four years ago. Stuart was the arresting officer.”

Natalie sat silent for a moment, absorbing the news that her husband had once arrested the man who yesterday had died in her house, in Stuart’s den.

“What did he do?” she finally asked tentatively.

“Was it burglary?”

“His name was Ronald Floyd. He was a midlevel drug dealer.”

A drug dealer? She groped for understanding. “But why would he have been in my house? Did he think Stuart was still alive and he was, well, looking for revenge or something?”

John reached out and covered her knotted hands with his for a brief, reassuring moment. “I doubt it. This guy has been arrested half a dozen times before. Yeah, he got put away this time for a decent prison term, but it wasn’t because Stuart had hunted him down. We got a tip. A whole crowd of us was waiting when Floyd docked at the marina with a boat hold full of coke. The fact that Stuart cuffed and booked him was just chance.”

Perhaps it was lack of sleep that made her feel so stupid. “Then…what do you think?”

He shook his head. “I’ve got to tell you, I don’t know what to think. The fact that there’s a connection between Stuart and the dead man makes me curious. I don’t believe in coincidences, and it would be one hell of a coincidence if our guy, fresh out of prison for dealing, had just happened to decide to break into your house of all others. And, oh yeah, instead of walking back out, happy, with your TV and stereo, he instead gets himself killed in your husband’s office.”

During this speech, her anxiety had sharpened into a knife blade of fear. She dampened her lips. “Then he must have been looking for something.”

“That’s one possibility,” John agreed.

“But what?”

To her dismay, he shook his head again. “I wish I knew, Natalie. Any ideas would be appreciated. Stuart didn’t brag about collecting anything valuable, did he? Stamps, coins? He didn’t tell the whole world that he had his life savings stored as gold bullion in his house?”

She was shaking her head the whole time he talked. “He played golf. He liked old car shows. He did tear stamps off envelopes if he thought they were curiosities—there are a bunch of German ones somewhere because he had a cousin in Munich, but he didn’t know anything about stamps. Or coins or…” She couldn’t even think of what else he might reasonably have collected. “And his life savings, which weren’t all that much, were in a mutual fund and a twelve-month CD.”

So casually she knew he’d been waiting to slip the question in, John asked, “What about you? Antique jewelry Stuart might have bragged to someone else about?”

Again she shook her head hopelessly. “The closest thing to a valuable antique that I have is a set of early Nancy Drew mysteries. I can’t imagine that your drug dealer wanted The Secret of the Old Clock.”

“That does seem unlikely,” he admitted.

“Besides,” she pointed out, “Stuart and I hadn’t even met five years ago. So they couldn’t have chatted about my collection of Nancy Drew. And how would they have run into each other since, if this guy didn’t get out of prison until after Stuart was dead?”

“True enough.” He rubbed the back of his neck.

“I’m groping here, Natalie.”

She nodded, understanding. It was a form of brainstorming, like sessions they had at the paper.

“What will you do next?” she asked.

“Talk to Floyd’s friends or relatives. I’m heading for Tacoma this morning to tell his parents about his death and find out whether they knew a damn thing about what he was up to. Hell, maybe he wrote them letters about how he intended to rifle Det. Stuart Reed’s house when he was released. And, oh, yeah, his buddy Bill Doe wanted to help. We should be so lucky.”

She nodded.

“Then we’ll wait for fingerprint ID,” he continued. “Take a harder look at your house.” His tone changed, his eyes softened. “I’m sorry, Natalie. We need to see if we can find something Floyd might have been looking for.”

“I understand.” Strangely, the idea of him searching her possessions wasn’t all that disturbing. She had always found him a comfortable man.

If she had been more self-conscious around him yesterday and today, it was hardly surprising. Their roles had shifted; his job required him to consider even her as a suspect.

And somehow here in John’s home, she was discovering tensions she hadn’t known existed. He clearly harbored some resentment concerning his mother, for example. His protectiveness toward his children had seemed both natural and misplaced—except that she didn’t know why he was still angry at his mother. Once she would have said she could ask him anything, but the guard he’d snapped into place when she asked made her realize their friendship had been more superficial than she’d realized. There was so much about the inner man she didn’t know. And so much about herself she had never told him, including a biggie, considering he had been Stuart’s friend first. He had assumed her marriage was completely happy, Natalie knew, and she had never disabused him.

She came back to the present to realize that he was looking at her strangely. Had she been staring? Had he said something?

Rushing into speech to fill what must have been a peculiar silence, she argued, “But mightn’t the murderer have taken whatever it was?”

He grimaced. “Unfortunately, that’s a possibility, too. But what the hell could it have been?” Now he sounded frustrated. “You’ve surely looked through the records Stuart left. The files in the desk seemed orderly and totally uninteresting to anyone else. None of the boxes in the closet had been ripped open. Your place wasn’t ransacked. Had anything been disturbed that you noticed?”

“No.” She pressed her lips together. “It was strange, wasn’t it? The house seemed so normal. Untouched. Only, there was this dead man upstairs. It would almost have been easier if the house had been tossed. You know?”

“Violence should spread ripples,” he said unexpectedly.

She blinked. “Yes. Exactly.”

“I need to be on my way.” He didn’t move. “What are your plans today?”

“I hadn’t thought yet.” She hesitated. “I could watch your kids if that would free your mom to go home.”

His dark brows drew together. “I’m not going to use you. You’re a guest.”

Puzzled by the edge in his voice, Natalie said, “It’s nice of you to have me here, John, but it won’t hurt me to help out a little.”

“You always want to pay your way, don’t you?”

“Is that so bad?” she asked quietly.

He got to his feet and looked down at her. “Just this once,” he said, almost harshly, “do me a favor. Accept my help without baby-sitting my kids, bringing me cookies or knitting me a sweater. Okay?”

“I don’t—”

“Yeah. You do.” He reached out, touched her cheek, the most fleeting of contacts but enough like a caress to steal her breath. “Friends don’t have to be repaid.”

She found herself nodding dumbly. “Yes. Okay.”

“Do something self-indulgent today. Get a massage. Go to a movie. Hey, go back to bed.”

“I’m going horseback riding.” She hadn’t known she’d decided.

His quick, warm smile erased the harshness on a face made more angular by lack of sleep. “Good girl. Sounds like the right medicine. You probably don’t get enough chances.”

“I go two or three times a week.”

The one gift from Stuart that she truly loved was Foxfire, the bloodred Arabian stallion she kept stabled at a ranch just outside of town. He was probably too much of a handful for her. He wasn’t mean, but he danced and twisted and fussed over the smallest leaf blowing across the path. Despite his value, she’d considered having him gelded, but everyone who saw him thought she should put him up for stud. She’d pried out of Stuart the fact that he’d paid an outrageous twenty-five thousand dollars for the horse, and she was told she could maybe charge five hundred for each live birth. But to do that, she’d have to move him to a different farm where workers knew how to handle breeding, and she guessed if he was being regularly bred, with his blood fired up he might be even harder to handle. Since she did so love riding her elegant Arabian, it seemed more bother than it would be worth. She didn’t really need the money. Except that it made sense, of course, to geld him if she wasn’t going to breed him.

“You should come with me someday,” she suggested impulsively. “Have you ever ridden?”

“I seem to remember a pony ride at the Woodland Park Zoo when I was five.” He shook his head. “No, thanks.”

“Coward.”

A smile in his blue eyes, John said, “Haven’t you heard that discretion is the better part of valor?”

“That from a man who risks his life day in and day out.”

“We all choose our poison.”

“I’m sure we could rent a placid horse that wouldn’t break out of a walk,” Natalie coaxed.

“Maddie and Evan could go, too.”

He groaned. “Maybe. And don’t you dare go behind my back and prime them.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” she promised, crossing her fingers in her pocket.

“I’ve got to get out of here.” In passing her, he gripped her shoulder briefly. “Go ride. Then take a nap. I’ll try to be home for dinner.”

By the time she followed him out of the office, he had already disappeared toward the front of the house. She heard his voice, then the slam of the front door.

“Drive carefully,” she murmured.

THE WOMAN WITH SOFT, flyaway gray hair gazed at him with bewilderment and the beginnings of horrified understanding. “Ronnie is dead?”

This was the moment John hated most. There was no kind way to tell parents that they would have to bury the son or daughter who was supposed to long outlive them. Ronald Floyd might have been a scumbag, but he was still their son, a baby born in hope.

“I’m afraid so,” he said gently.

He stood on the front porch of the small frame house in south Tacoma, his vision of Marvella Floyd obscured by a screen door. She had briefly opened it, but when he told her why he had come, it had slipped out of her nerveless hand and snapped shut between them.

Now she clutched at the door frame, bewilderment still predominating. “But…what happened? Was it a car accident?” Hope made her sound eager. She wanted it to have been a tragic accident, the kind that could have happened to anyone. “He’d gone straight, you know. He said so. And even in his bad days, he never hurt anybody, not Ronnie.”

No, he just helped hook the youth of America on a relentlessly addictive white powder that replaced jobs, family, loved ones as the very reason for existence. And, oh, yeah, damaged hearts, destroyed nasal passages, and was generally a fun party favor.

“When you deal drugs, you’re coming in contact with some brutal people.” Understatement. “Ma’am, may I come in?”

“What?” She stared at him with dazed eyes. “Oh. Yes. Of course. I’m sorry.” She backed slowly inside the living room of the small frame house, leaving him to open the screen door and follow. When he did, she looked over her shoulder with apparent confusion, as if she’d forgotten where she was or who ought to be here.

“Is your husband home?” John asked. When she swayed, he reached for her elbow, expecting her to crumple.

Her worn brow crinkled. “I don’t know where he is.” She raised a voice that quavered. “Ralph!” Both she and John listened to the silence. “He was here a minute ago,” she fretted, completely focused on her husband’s absence rather than her son’s death. Denial was something John knew well. “Ralph?” she called again.

“Could he have stepped outside?”

“Oh!” Relief infused her voice. “I think he did. Tomorrow is garbage day, you know. That’s it. He was taking the garbage out, he said.”

“Why don’t you sit down,” he suggested, steering her to the couch. “Let me get your husband.”

“Oh, but…” She tried to rise again. “The kitchen is such a mess! We haven’t cleaned up from breakfast yet.”

“Don’t worry.” He smiled reassurance. “I’m a single father. You should see mine.”

She sat again but quivered with worry as he cut through the old-fashioned kitchen to the back door. It swung open before he reached it. A heavyset, balding man entered, mind on other things until he saw John and came to an abrupt stop.

“I’m Detective McLean,” John said, holding out his shield. “Port Dare P.D. Your wife let me in. Sorry to startle you.”

Worry settled on him, stooping his shoulders. “It’s Ronnie again, isn’t it?”

“I’m afraid your son has been killed, Mr. Floyd.”

He caught the implication immediately. “How?”

John told him.

Mr. Floyd shook his head. “His mother has always believed every word that boy said, but the last time he was here I knew he was going right back to the low road. That was Ronnie—always spoiled. If he could get it for nothing, that’s what he wanted.”

What child didn’t? John thought. Wasn’t it a parent’s job to teach the virtues of hard work and charity?

“He was our only boy. We have two girls. Good girls. They both have families now. One works for the county assessor’s office. I don’t know, maybe we’re the ones who spoiled Ronnie. But that boy. He was in trouble with the law by the time he was twelve. Shoplifting. It’s just been one thing after the other.”

“Ralph?” From the living room came his wife’s shaky voice. “Ralph, are you talking to that policeman?”

Moving wearily, feet shuffling, Ralph Floyd passed John and went to his wife. He sat beside her on the couch, patting her restless hands on her lap, and they both gazed with deep sadness and anxiety at John, who sat in an armchair facing them.

He explained again how Ronald Floyd had died. “I’m hoping you can tell me something that might help find his killer,” he said. “Can you give me names of friends? Was he working? Do you have his address?”

They did have that. His father gave the names of some friends from high school but shook his head when pressed for others. “He’d mention people in prison—Joe or Buzz Saw or some such nonsense, but I have no idea whether they’re still locked up or not. He wouldn’t have brought a cell mate home. He knew better than that.”

“Job?”

“Ronnie was working at a marina,” Mrs. Floyd said timidly. “He was good with boats, you know.”

Her husband nodded. “He always liked boats. He did say he had a job. I think he was taking out those whale-watching trips.”

John made a note.

“Was he angry about his arrest? Did he ever mention the officer who arrested him?”

Both shook their heads. “He said somebody had set him up, but a couple of years ago he mentioned that the fellow was dead. Said he would have liked to have punched his nose, and he guessed he wouldn’t get the chance now.”

“Did he give a name?”

They didn’t remember if he had. Pretty obviously, they didn’t know this son who mystified them. To his credit, he’d stayed in touch, but it came down to a few letters and phone calls a year, and one fleeting visit when he got out of the pen. The job was likely a fantasy. John only hoped the address wasn’t.

He promised to call them once he’d checked out the apartment, and to send any effects. They’d be in touch about the body, he told them.

“You’ll let us know?” Mr. Floyd asked at least three times. “When you find out why someone killed him?”

“I’ll keep you informed as the investigation progresses,” he agreed. After offering his regrets again, he left the couple standing on their front porch, their body language expressing the inertia, disbelief and grief he so vividly remembered his mother showing when his father was gunned down. But, because the Floyds knew in their hearts that their son had brought on his own end, they wouldn’t find relief in anger as John’s mother had.

As he crossed a sparkling blue neck of Puget Sound on the high span of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, John brooded about the visit. Forget the easy answers. Ronald Floyd had not spent his years in the clink planning how he could wreak revenge on Officer Stuart Reed.

On the other hand, he had left Monroe and gone right back to Port Dare. Less than a month later, he was killed in Natalie Reed’s house, which wasn’t tossed. There had to be a reason he was there, and a reason he died.

But what the hell was it?

And how safe was Natalie while they hunted for hard answers?

CHAPTER FOUR

ONE HOOF PAWED and the stallion’s wiry tail snapped viciously across Natalie’s face as she checked the girth. Cross-tied in the barn aisle, Foxfire had been in one of his twitchier moods from the minute she’d slung the saddle blanket across his back.

When she led him outside to the mounting block, however, he followed like a lamb and stood obligingly still for her to swing her leg over his back.

“You’re setting me up, aren’t you?” she muttered. Taking a deep breath, she sprang.

He might have caught her by surprise if he’d been just a tiny bit less docile. As it was, she was forewarned. The wretched animal bucked before her butt even hit the saddle.

She grabbed at the horn and her dignity, slapping his neck with her reins as she inelegantly shoved her toes into the stirrups. All the while he whirled and tossed his head and shivered his skin.

Pam Reynolds, the stable owner, shook her head as she watched. A once-pretty woman with a weathered face and a grip as callused and strong as a construction worker’s, she leaned against the white board fence, hands shoved into the pockets of the down vest she wore over dusty jeans and a denim shirt.

“That horse is going to come back without you one of these days.”

Natalie gave the stallion one more reproving whack on the neck. “Probably,” she admitted.

Pam continued critically, “That horse was not bred for trail riding.”

The stallion flattened his ears and hunched his back.

“No,” Natalie agreed, forcing him to tuck his chin and go into reverse.

He scrambled back so quickly he sank onto his haunches, then danced in place.

“I’d advise you to sell him.”

“I know you would.”

Pam’s grin gave her the look of an aging elf. “Of course, then I’d have to snap him up and risk my own life and limb, so maybe it’s just as well you keep him.”

Natalie laughed. “You know, you’re welcome to ride him anytime.”

The stable owner shook her head. “The damn horse is worth too much. I don’t want him breaking a leg on my watch.”

Foxfire spun in a circle.

Ruefully feeling as if she’d be seeing a chiropractor for whiplash, Natalie said over her shoulder, “I wouldn’t sue you. I’d know he had it coming.”

“You better get before he decides not to wait for you.” Pam jerked her head toward the gate. “But do stick to the trail so someone can find your body if you break your neck.”

Wincing at the idea of a body, even her own, sprawled on the mist-dampened ground, Natalie simply nodded. “I’ll be good.” She eased the reins and sat back only a minute amount, feeling the horse’s eagerness as he bounded forward. “Hey, guy,” she murmured, “this isn’t a race.”

He didn’t want to trot and, to punish her, managed a stiff gait that jarred her teeth as if she were driving a road that was wall-to-wall potholes.

Nonetheless, she held him to it, and as they left the gates of the ranch behind, Foxfire’s ears flicked forward and the ride smoothed. At best, Arabians had a bouncy trot, showy in the ring but not comfortable. They had been bred for endurance, for traveling all day in the arid desert without rest or water.

Once the trail intersected the broader one used by horsemen, runners and bicyclists, Natalie let the stallion stretch into an easy lope. The gray mist clung to treetops and hid the mountains from her, beading on long, autumn-gold grasses in the fields that sloped toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Foxfire’s hooves thudded on the damp earth in a rhythm, a mantra. The cool, moist air cleansed her; the power gathered beneath her gave Natalie an intoxicating sense of control and invincibility.

Illusory, of course, she was reminded when a small bird exploded from the underbrush to chase a hawk above, and the stallion shied, shaking his head and kicking his heels, twisting beneath her in momentary rebellion. She loosed the reins, urged him with tightened legs to go faster and, in his eagerness, he forgot his pique. The adrenaline rush made Natalie feel gloriously alive.

Best of all, she couldn’t afford for even a second to let her mind wander, to picture the body in the study, to wonder when she could go home or if she wanted to. The chestnut stallion demanded that every grain of her attention be on him. She needed to read his every quivering signal and search the glistening Oregon grape and brown fronds of ferns beneath hemlock and cedar for any creature or oddity that might spook him. Her body had to flow with his. Too much tension, and the next time he leaped sideways she’d be flat on her back on the trail, hard packed despite today’s mist, breath knocked out of her.

Oh, yes, her difficult horse and a damp day and the deserted trail had been exactly what she needed.

IT’S 11:02 p.m., do you know where your daddy is?

Weary to the bone, John pulled into the detached one-car garage off the alley and headed for the back door. The kids would be long since asleep, he hoped. Hell, even his mother rarely stayed up past ten. Natalie, he didn’t know about. Wondering heightened his senses slightly as he inserted the key in the lock. He didn’t hear voices, real or canned from the TV, and from the street he’d seen no light on in the living room.

He tried to be home for meals and to tuck his children into bed at night. Their mother’s diagnosis of multiple sclerosis was tough enough for them, since it meant losing her as a part of their daily lives, having to visit her in a place where illness couldn’t be forgotten and they were reduced to awkward kisses on her cheek and polite responses to her questions about school and friends. They needed to be able to count on Daddy.

But his job wasn’t nine-to-five, not in the first throes of an investigation. Some of the lowlifes he’d needed to talk to didn’t come out from under their rocks until after dark. He was lucky to be home this early.

His mother’s sporty Chevrolet was parked to one side of the driveway. Even as irritated as he’d been at her this morning, John was grateful that his kids had her and their uncles, that he wasn’t their only close family. But he was damned if he’d let her use chilly judgments and icy disapproval to hammer his son into the avenging angel she’d wanted her own sons to be. Hell, wasn’t that what they were, cleansing the streets of the devil’s spawn?

The house was quiet when he stepped in, one light left on in the kitchen, a note taped to the microwave. He crossed quietly. Even Natalie must be asleep.

Tidy block print read, “Leftover casserole in the refrigerator. Heat for five minutes. I don’t want to find it uneaten in the morning.”

He gave a rusty laugh. That was his mother all over. Caring but stern.

He should be hungry and wasn’t, but he obediently took out the plastic container, noted that it was one his mother made with cashews and Chinese noodles that he liked, and stuck it in the microwave. Five minutes.

Listening to the hum, he thought how idiotic it was at his age to have fleeting, wistful memories of the mother she’d been Before Dad Died. He always thought of it that way, in capital letters. She had changed in one horrific day, bewildering and terrifying her three boys. Instead of progressing through all the stages of grief, emerging at the end as the mother they knew, she’d seemed to get stuck part way, consumed by anger she still carried. More of an optimist then, he’d actually hoped, back when Debbie was pregnant, that in starting over with grandchildren his mother too could begin again. Better than Hugh and Connor, he remembered her as a woman who had patiently bandaged skinned knees and run breathlessly down the sidewalk holding up two-wheelers, and not cared if paint happily slapped onto butcher paper dripped off the edges onto the kitchen floor or table-top. Those memories of laughter and tenderness and easy hugs were fading these days.

But he was still lucky she was here for Maddie and Evan. They loved her, as much as she would allow.

Trouble was, he could foresee her getting harder and harder on Evan. Opening the refrigerator again to look for something to drink, John scowled. He’d been old enough when his father died to have some inner defenses. His brothers, especially Hugh, hadn’t been. His mother had messed with Hugh’s psyche but good, and he couldn’t let her do the same to Evan. He didn’t want to hurt her by cutting her off from the kids, but the day was coming when he’d have to find alternative baby-sitting—and either a tactful explanation of why he had made the change, or the guts to be blunt.

“Is something spoiling in there?”

He jerked and dropped the milk carton. Milk sloshed at his feet. Swearing, he bent to pick it up.

Natalie stayed in the doorway, eyes huge, dark curly hair tousled over her shoulders. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“No, no.” He grabbed a glass from the cupboard and poured the milk before it could all leak out the bottom.

“Do you have a pitcher you could put that in?” She came shyly into the kitchen.

“Uh, yeah. Somewhere.” He left the milk carton in the sink and banged cupboard doors until he found a plastic pitcher. He salvaged a pint or so, enough for breakfast cereal, anyway.

Natalie had taken paper towels and was mopping up the mess on the floor.

“I can do that,” he said, frowning again as he looked down at the top of her head and realized she wore a robe. She had probably been in bed when she heard him come in.

“It was my fault.” She didn’t even glance up.

“Besides, the microwave beeped. I think your dinner must be ready.”

John hesitated for a moment, then opted for the casserole. What was he going to do, hand-wrestle Natalie for a soggy paper towel?

“Come sit with me?” he asked.

Now she did look up, that same unexpected shyness in her dark eyes. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather be alone?”

“Positive.” He hooked a stool at the tiled breakfast bar with one foot and pulled it out. “Are you hungry?”

“Heavens, no! Your mother made me eat every bite at dinner.”

He gave the same rueful chuckle. “That’s my mom.”

Natalie wiped the floor again with a damp, soapy towel and then tossed it into the garbage under the sink. Straightening, she hesitated, pulled her robe more snugly around herself and then came to the bar.

John pushed a second stool out. “Join me.”

“I couldn’t sleep.” She scooted her rump onto the stool, keeping both hands on her robe so that it didn’t gape above or below the belt.

Of course, nothing was so calculated to make him wonder what she wore under it. He hastily turned his attention to his dinner. Damn it, he did not want to have sexual fantasies, however fleeting, about Natalie Reed.

“Did you nap this afternoon?” Maybe not a smart question, as it made him picture that curly hair spread on her pillow, her cheeks flushed like Maddie’s on the rare occasions when she would still lie down during the daytime.

Natalie shook her head. “I never do, you see. Going so against habit would have just made me think.”

He chewed and swallowed, washing the bite down with a slug of milk. “What did you do, then?”

“Rode.” The hand possessively clutching the robe at her bosom began to relax, as if she forgot she had to. “Then, believe it or not, I went shopping at the mall. A woman’s refuge.”

“Ah.” Debbie had shopped, too, whether the credit cards were maxed out or not.

“I wasn’t sure you could let me into my house. I bought some clothes for the next day or so.”

“You didn’t have to do that,” he said roughly. “I could have gotten what you needed.”

“No, that’s okay.” She bent her head and fingered the shawl collar of the robe, which he realized belatedly was his mother’s. “I hardly ever take the time to shop, and I can use some new jeans and…things.”

Panties? Bras? Another irritating, unsettling image of her lush body in dainty, lacy lingerie flitted through his mind. His brows drew together and he shoved another bite in, although the damn casserole seemed tasteless tonight.

She said quietly, “You looked angry earlier. And now you do again. Did something happen today?”

“What?” He realized he was glowering at her and wiped the expression from his face. “Sorry. No. Nothing happened. In fact, too little happened.”

She didn’t say anything. She never did probe. What he didn’t offer, she didn’t ask. Because she didn’t care enough? Because she didn’t think she had the right?

Had she been the same with Stuart? Or was Stuart the one who had taught her that what he didn’t choose to tell her was none of her damned business?

The speculation felt disloyal. Stuart Reed and he had been partners. Friends. Yeah, there had been moments when John hadn’t much liked him, but that was water under the bridge. Stuart was dead and buried. This was no time to question his character.

“I was thinking about my mother,” John said abruptly, as much because he wasn’t yet ready to admit he hadn’t made an arrest today, that Natalie couldn’t go home, that he didn’t have a damned clue.

“Like I said, she’s too hard on Evan especially. I’m just not sure what to do about it.”

“Have you talked to her?”

“I said something this morning.”

“Did you?” Her voice was soft, uncritical, but he got the point.

Okay. So what he’d really done was snap at his mother.

“Talking to her isn’t going to do any good.”

“I don’t understand.” Tiny crinkles formed in her brow. “I always thought you were close to her.”

John shoved his plate away on a sigh. “Yes and no. I stayed in town, I see her often. I appreciate what she did, somehow keeping us all together when she had no job skills and Dad hadn’t left any life insurance.” He didn’t usually talk like this. What he felt toward Stuart’s memory was nothing when compared to his fierce loyalty to family. But Natalie listened with those wide, compassionate eyes and no hint of judgment. He could use a sounding board.

“What did your mom do?”

“Worked two jobs. Apparently she’d learned to type in high school, and she managed to get a secretarial job even though she had no experience. Nights she cleaned office buildings.”

“But when did she sleep?”

The question took him by surprise. “I don’t know.” He grimaced. “No, that’s not true, of course. Whenever she got home in the middle of the night, maybe three o’clock to seven in the morning. A couple of hours after work in the afternoon.” Somehow he hadn’t thought about how sleep deprived his mother must have been all those years.

“What about you and your brothers? Did somebody take care of you when she was working?”

He shook his head. “I guess we were the original latchkey kids. We were all school age when Dad died. I watched Hugh and Connor after school until I started playing high school sports, and by then Con was old enough. Nighttimes she left us alone.” He frowned, trying to remember. “I’m not sure she had the janitorial job the first year after Dad was killed. I was probably in middle school by the time she started that. Old enough to be in charge.”

Still with puckered brow, Natalie studied his face. “Did you feel old enough?”

No. Hell, no.

The explosive quality of his realization startled him. Perhaps to disguise his quiet shock, John rubbed a hand over his chin, which felt bristly.

“You didn’t, did you?” She was too damned perceptive.

“I went through a stretch when I was scared to death at night. The cops never arrested the guy who shot my dad. Did I ever tell you that? Every night I’d imagine he was breaking into that crummy apartment we rented. The building creaked and whimpered all night long. I was old enough to know the locks were flimsy. If he’d been able to kill my dad, who seemed huge and strong to me, what could I do?” He shook his head. “I never told my mother how scared I was. What could she have done? She had to work. As it was, she went without anything for herself to make sure three boys growing by half-foot leaps had enough on the table, decent clothes and the chance to play sports like our friends.”

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