How could she have done something so stupid, so humiliating, so…undignified?

Nell stood under the shower, letting the hot water beat over her head. How could she face him again? How could she work with a man she’d let…

She moaned aloud at the fresh realization of exactly what she’d let him do. Never mind what she’d done.

She could only pray he was embarrassed, too, but what were the odds of that? Hugh McLean had a reputation with women. Nell knew painfully well that she wasn’t even close to being a looker. But she was a woman, one more notch in his belt.

She flushed hot and cold. Her behavior had been so alien for the woman she’d become. It was as if too many beers had thrown her back to the wild teenager she’d been sixteen years ago, before she learned her lesson the hard way.

Would Hugh keep his word and not tell anyone? Nell didn’t know him well enough to be sure.

As she got out of the shower, dried and dressed, Nell’s thoughts raced in vicious circles. Then, in the kitchen, she discovered a note from Kim, saying that she was going out with her boyfriend.

Great. Wonderful. Her sixteen-year-old daughter was spending the day with her too-ardent boyfriend. What Nell wouldn’t give for year-round school.

Dear Reader,

As the parent of teenage girls, I all too frequently fuss about what they could do that would upset me the most. A teenage pregnancy, of course, is right up there on the list. In a mildly malicious mood one day, I pondered instead what I might do that would shock and upset them the most. I didn’t have to think long. If their unmarried mom had sex with a guy she wasn’t even dating and got pregnant, they would be horrified.

It was easy to click into story mode. What if my fictional mom has reason to worry that her sixteen-year-old daughter might get pregnant? And what if she herself gets pregnant and can’t bring herself to tell her daughter? Hey—this girl will never listen to Mom’s moralizing again! Of course, I had to think of a good reason my heroine would be so careless…. But I won’t give that away.

I love multigenerational stories, as you’ve probably noticed by now, so this one plays on a common theme—we often repeat the mistakes of our parents. We are what we were raised to be—unless we overcome our childhood lessons, which is a challenge worthy of a novel!

I’ve become fond of the McLean brothers, and perhaps of Hugh the most. I could hardly wait to introduce him to his match—a woman who might be pregnant with his child, but isn’t all that anxious to marry him.

Enjoy!

Janice Kay Johnson

Maternal Instinct
Janice Kay Johnson

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Maternal Instinct

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 ONE

SHOULDERS BACK, head high, braced for the worst, Hugh McLean waited for the dreaded assignment.

Damn Riley, he thought bitterly. His partner was on leave with back pain doctors told him might keep him flat in bed for months. Had he hurt himself tackling a bad guy? In a crash during a car chase? Hell, no. He’d tripped over his kid’s plastic blocks and tumbled down the stairs in his own house.

A bulldog in his fifties with a gray crewcut, Police Captain Fisher looked up from Hugh’s open personnel file. “You know Granstrom? She’s been partnered with Wensson. He’s moving to Scottsdale, Arizona—can you believe it?—because of his wife’s allergies.” His dry tone suggested wifey should have kept blowing her nose. “I’m putting you with Granstrom for now.”

Hugh groaned and his shoulders slumped. “Not Granstrom! Anybody but Granstrom.”

Behind the desk, his captain gazed at him coldly, without favor. “What’s wrong with her?”

She was a damn woman, that was what. Hugh liked women; they were even okay on the police force. He’d worked with ones who didn’t think like a woman, and he got along just fine with them. Nell Granstrom was not one of those.

“Our styles clash,” he said from between clenched teeth.

Captain Fisher grunted. “Funny, she doesn’t like you any better.”

That jolted. “What?”

“She’s not enthusiastic. I can’t help either of you.” He slapped Hugh’s file closed. “You’re the only two at loose ends right now. I’m not going to break up established partnerships to accommodate your personality clash.”

Desperate, Hugh lied, “It’s not that. I swear. We just work differently.”

“Yeah, yeah. Your styles.” The captain’s gaze was unsympathetic. “Here’s my advice—mesh ’em.” He looked over Hugh’s shoulder. “Ah. Here’s your new partner now.”

Hugh didn’t turn when the door with the glass inset opened. He knew well enough what Nell Granstrom looked like, all five foot ten of her. She had a model’s build: leggy, skinny, fine-boned despite her height, and a face memorable principally for warm brown eyes and a rosebud mouth. Her hair…hell, he didn’t know what color it was. He almost turned around to remind himself.

“Captain,” said Granstrom, voice expressionless.

“I won’t ask for ‘I do’ from either of you.” Captain Fisher’s grin was sharklike. “Let’s consider this a shotgun wedding. You’ve got each other to have and to hold from this day forward, until Riley gets his ass out of bed. You got problems with each other,” he finished briskly, “I don’t want to hear them.”

A rap vibrated the glass hard enough to bring even Hugh’s head around. “Captain!” Framed in the doorway, the normally imperturbable Lieutenant Nyland looked shaken. “We’ve got reports of shooting at the Joplin Building. The woman on the phone says a gunman is mowing everybody down.”

The captain was on his feet. “Confirmation?”

“Multiple 911 calls from offices on the floors below.”

“Units on the way?”

The lieutenant nodded. “Sir.”

“Call out the SWAT team.” The captain brushed by Hugh and opened his locker. “Gentlemen—and ladies—let’s get suited up and moving.”

Hugh was able to avoid looking at Nell Granstrom as he raced toward the locker rooms. “I’ll drive,” he snapped over his shoulder. Start as you mean to go on.

Both wore black jackets over bulletproof vests when they met at his squad car, she on the passenger side, he on the driver’s. She’d apparently chosen not to argue. Over the car roof, their eyes met for a fleeting second of mutual antipathy and disbelief before both leaped into the car.

Her hair was not quite blond, not quite brown.

Behind the wheel, Hugh joined a caravan of emergency vehicles tearing out of the parking garage, all flashing lights and sounding sirens.

Under his breath, he muttered an obscenity. “We’ll probably find out some jackass let off firecrackers.” Nonetheless, his hands were tight enough on the wheel for his knuckles to show white. If this was a legitimate call, it would give his mother nightmares.

Beside him, Nell Granstrom said in an odd voice, “I hear the dispatcher claims the woman was…‘mewling in fear.’ Her words. She was under her desk, whispering. Dispatch could hear bang, bang and yells.”

He shot her a disquieted glance. “Where’d you get this?”

Her shoulders moved. “Another dispatcher in the women’s locker room.”

Hugh swore again and forced his attention back to the road. Adrenaline surged, taking him to that hyper state any cop knew well. “Do we know how many shooters?” he asked.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her shake her head. She was looking tense, craning her neck to see ahead where a cordon was already being set up. Hugh wondered if she was scared. He hadn’t heard rumors about her cracking under pressure, but any time a guy had to hook up with a new partner, he wondered. Especially when that new partner was a woman who liked to understand the psychology of the scumbags she arrested, who had sympathy because of their tough beginnings.

She and Connor would get along fine, he thought. His brother had abandoned police work for graduate school at the University of Washington in psychology. Having finished his master’s degree a year ago, Connor McLean now counseled kids, specializing in those who’d been sexually abused.

Hugh figured people more interested in the complex inner life of victims or perps than in justice probably belonged out of uniform. Connor had been a good cop, but he’d always had worrisome leanings. The way he’d met his wife had toppled him right over. It was just as well he was off the force.

The convoy had slowed to a crawl, using the middle lane to bypass the blocked civilian traffic that clogged the streets. Downtown had turned into a circus of honking horns, yelling commuters, blaring sirens and flashing lights.

One of the officers on the scene waved Hugh to a place inside the cordon. He and Granstrom got out and crouched behind the back bumper, weapons drawn. They weren’t alone. Forty cops or more, all heavily armed, were ready to go in.

If some idiot had set off firecrackers, he was going to be damn sorry.

The Joplin Building housed The Greater Northwest Insurance Company, Windermere Real Estate and a title company. Greater Northwest took up the top four floors of the stylish six-story building erected in the twenties and remodeled for new tenants just a few years back. Hugh couldn’t hear any gunfire over the sirens and shouted voices out here. Sunlight glinted off windows. The July morning was already hot, and he was sweating in the vest.

Becoming impatient, tension building to an unbearable pitch, he rose to a bent-over position. “I’ll go find out the word,” he said, relieved to have an excuse to leave his new partner.

She nodded, her frowning gaze trained on the Joplin Building. Irrationally, he was annoyed that she didn’t seem to like to look at him any more than he did at her.

He hadn’t gone two steps before orders came down the line that SWAT team members were moving in, and other officers were to play backup. Dispatch said the woman on the phone thought the gunman had left or killed himself. She hadn’t heard shots for the past four or five minutes. She’d been advised to stay under the desk and keep quiet.

Going back to crouch again behind his car, Hugh said tersely, “We get the side door to the north. Let’s move.”

Two teams of ten cleared the first two floors, checking empty offices, evacuating the silent, dark, locked rooms where terrified secretaries and computer entry clerks huddled. They were sent scuttling down the halls and out the exit doors to run sobbing for the police cordon.

The two teams formed again at the north and south staircases that led up to the third floor, where The Greater Northwest Insurance Office’s reception area was. Hugh led one group, which moved silently up the north staircase, pausing at the steel door painted with a large numeral three.

At his nod, Granstrom yanked it open and he went in, weapon at the ready. The long hallway was eerily silent. Four doors down, a body lay sprawled halfway out. It was a woman in a white blouse soaked with blood, her eyes wide and staring.

Nobody said a word, but Hugh felt the wave of shock. His father had died like this, some crazy opening fire and taking out a bunch of people at the bank. Hugh remembered his mother’s grief and impotent anger at a failed police investigation better than he did his father. Yellowed newspaper articles collected in a scrapbook had been his childhood bible.

Thou shalt be a cop, and do it better than it has been done.

He gave his head an irritated shake. He was on the job, no place for emotion.

Granstrom covered him when he went into the first office. Empty.

The second one, she went into first. He heard a whispered imprecation as he followed. He couldn’t even blame her. The man behind the desk had taken multiple shots to the face. The result was hideous.

In the next office he heard a sound. “Police. Come out,” he said in a taut voice.

A sob was muffled. Silence built, thick enough to make air hard to breathe. Terror did that.

Hugh and his new partner exchanged a glance.

“We’re police officers,” Granstrom said, her voice soft. “You’re safe now.”

Still silence. Then the door to a metal cabinet quivered, inched open. A woman, face soaked with tears, stared wild-eyed from a fetal position inside.

Nell Granstrom gently drew her out and ushered her from the office. A backup team led her away.

The next hour had a nightmarish quality. They found body after body, all shot. Weapons had been discarded as the ammunition was spent. An AK-47 lay in the hall, an M-2 carbine converted into a full automatic weapon was just outside the elevator on the fourth floor. The smell of death was sickening, the wounded, keening in agony, more upsetting than the dead. Each grisly new sight overlaid the last. His mind took snapshots he knew he’d never be able to discard: the way the blood beaded and pooled on the oatmeal-colored berber carpet, the look of a man shot in the face, the whimpering primal terror of a young woman being helped outside, the blank, shell-shocked expressions on the faces of his fellow cops. And the sounds…God, the sounds. The screams, the bubbly breaths torturously dragged into a ruined chest, the tiny rustles or whimpers that gave away survivors.

Hugh had seen terrible deaths on Highway 101. The worst was a whole family—mother, father and two kids—killed by a drunk driver who hit their little foreign car head-on. But the drunk hadn’t killed them one at a time, looking into their eyes, soaking in their fear. He hadn’t meant to hurt anyone.

Someone here had meant to hurt as many people as possible. He hadn’t cared about the widows he made, the kids who would grow up without a mother or father.

Hugh and Nell did their job grimly, silently, not stopping long enough to react or think, because they might not have been able to go on. He kept expecting to see a dead face he knew. What if some of the cops had family or friends who worked here?

On the fifth floor, they found no injured and only two bodies, the first just outside the elevators with a single small caliber hole in his temple. A Beretta lay near the middle-aged man in a business suit. In one of the first offices another worker was dead, sprawled over his desk as if he’d been standing behind it. This one had been killed by a handgun as well. Had the shooter been running out of ammunition? Hugh wondered. He’d expended a firestorm to get this far. Where was he?

A rustling sound brought Hugh whirling to face a partition. Damn it, he was getting careless. He jerked his head, and Granstrom silently circled the room to where the movable partition met the wall.

Standing behind a metal filing cabinet, Hugh said, “Police! Come out.”

“Is—is he gone?” The man’s voice cracked.

“Please come out where I can see you.”

After a long pause, a disheveled man in the ubiquitous white shirt and tie edged around the partition. Sweat dripped down his face and his gaze darted around the room. He flinched at the sight of his colleague.

“God!” he whispered. “I heard the shot….”

“Did you see the shooter?” Granstrom asked.

He shook his head. A sob wracked his body. “I hid. God help me, I hid. I should have tried to do something.”

“Unless you were armed, there wasn’t anything you could do,” Granstrom said quietly. “Hiding was smart. Now, sir, I’m going to ask you to exit the building. Officers in the hall will take you down.”

After one last shocked look at the corpse, he stumbled out docilely.

Granstrom rejoined Hugh, her face set. “Sixth floor, here we come.”

He grunted. “I can hardly wait.”

Thou shalt do it better, but he hadn’t. None of them had, or history wouldn’t have replayed itself.

NELL SWAYED, almost falling out of the booth onto the tavern floor. Her new partner saved her, his grip drawing her back to his side.

He was a good guy, she thought woozily. A really good guy. Today they’d gone through hell together. Or was it yesterday? She couldn’t remember. Just like she couldn’t remember why she’d hated him yesterday. Or was it the day before?

Didn’t matter. She laid her cheek against his arm. She’d been wrong. Hugh McLean was the best man ever. She nodded solemnly and tipped slowly forward toward the tabletop.

“Whoa,” he said, setting her upright again.

Best man ever. She could tell he felt the same. Why else would he keep putting his arm around her? Maybe they’d stay partners forever. A vague image of them chasing a bad guy, both of them toddling along with walkers, struck her as hilariously funny. She told him, and pretty soon he was laughing, too. Both of them howled until they were crying and lying in the corner of the booth, with her half atop him.

Their drinking mates, Officers Redding and Gardner, gazed at them in bleary approval.

“Don’t know wha’ was so funny,” one of them remarked. “But it musht have been real good.”

The other nodded solemnly.

Nell and Hugh laughed harder.

“I think I want to go home,” she tried to say, but it came out all slurred.

Up close, his blue eyes were brilliant. Maybe a little bloodshot, she thought critically, but then they’d both been awake for…almost a whole twenty-four hours. She thought. She was trying very hard not to remember why.

Some part of her knew she was going to be very sorry tomorrow that she’d had so many beers. But right now she didn’t care. So what if she got sick, Nell thought defiantly. It was better than…Well, than something. She didn’t let herself think what.

“Me, too,” he agreed. “But whosh gonna drive ush home?”

Her forehead furrowed in thought. “We could go get in the car,” she suggested.

“Okay.” He didn’t move, and she continued to lie comfortably on him. “You feel good.”

She thought about that, too, and nodded. “I feel good. You’re right. But howz…how do you know?”

“You feel good here—” he squeezed her butt “—and here—” his other hand cupped her breast. “Thash how.”

“Oh.” She listened to his heartbeat. “You feel good, too. Right here.” She laid a hand on his chest. She used to not like him, but he’d always had a good chest, broad and well-muscled and, she knew now, hot to the touch.

“Lesh go to the car.” He heaved them both upright. “Good night, good morning, good day,” he told Redding and Gardner. Enunciating clearly, he added, “We’re going home.”

“Don’t drive drunk,” Redding said, which set them to laughing so hard Gardner was banging his forehead on the table.

They wove their way among tables of cops, some coming on shift and drinking coffee, staring incredulously at the others. The parking lot was dark, but paler light tinted the skyline. Dawn. Last dawn, she’d been heading into the station to find out who her new partner would be. By 8:30 a.m., he and she had been in the squad car, lights on, heading to…

A barrage of images flickered behind her eyelids. Pools and splatters of blood. Body bags. Faces contorted in agony. A faceless…

No! She stopped dead and said carefully, “Maybe I need another beer.”

“We’re going to the car,” Hugh reminded her.

“Oh.” They were, weren’t they? That’s why they were standing in the middle of the parking lot. “Where’s the car?” she asked.

He frowned and turned in a slow circle. “Don’t know.”

“I have a car,” Nell said. She did remember that much. They’d returned to the station and left separately, in their own vehicles, they and a dozen others agreeing to meet at the Green Lantern after their debriefing to drown their hideous day.

“Where?” Hugh asked.

She thought. “Don’t know. Let’s jush…just look.”

They found his in the alley, next to the Dumpster. He produced keys from his pocket and unlocked the Explorer, boosting her into the passenger side. His hands lingered on her bottom, a pleasant sensation.

Inside, he pushed the automatic lock. “Can’t drive,” he said, after gazing in apparent perplexity at the ignition and dashboard.

“No,” she agreed.

“Got a blanket in back.” He looked delighted at the recollection. “We could sleep.”

She was getting sleepy. Very sleepy. Only, every time her eyelids closed, she saw…She widened her eyes. “Maybe,” Nell said doubtfully.

“Or cuddle.”

Cuddling sounded nice. “You feel good,” she told him.

He hoisted her between the seats. Her hips got stuck, and while he was pushing his thumbs exerted delicious pressure between her legs. She almost pretended to stay stuck.

He fell on her when he followed. Crushed on the seat, his weight on her, Nell contentedly wrapped her arms around him. After a while, his mouth moved on her cheek. “Feel good,” he murmured.

“Mm-hm,” she agreed.

Somehow his lips found hers. Normally she didn’t like the taste of beer on a man, but now she tasted of beer, too, so it was all right. This was a good kiss, slow, sweet, exploratory. She was able to close her eyes and think about the sensations his lips and tongue created in her instead of seeing those images she prayed she could forget.

The tinted windows of his Explorer created a dark, private world, a bubble enclosing just the two of them.

The kiss heated, and she tugged his shirt free from his pants and reveled in the sleek contours of his back. Muscles danced under her hands. She liked provoking a reaction. When she moved her hands around to his chest it was even better.

He had unbuttoned her shirt, she discovered with approval. He was making pleased sounds at the sight of her bra, a tiny scrap of lace that helped her feel feminine even in the unbecoming uniform styled and cut for men. She worked at unbuttoning his shirt while he suckled her breasts.

Nell was beginning to feel somewhat less fuzzy. A new urgency replaced the lazy abdication of responsibility. But when her hips pressed up against his, there was a clanking sound and she cried, “Ouch!” when something sharp-edged dug into her thigh.

“Damn,” he muttered, and pulled back. He looked down at her, his face taut in the faint streetlight coming through the windshield. “We have to take off our belts.”

Both wore the thick regulation leather belt that held an array of equipment: holster and handgun, pepper spray, flashlight, handcuff case, baton, radio and extra magazines.

He unbuckled, then said hopefully, “We could just take off our pants.”

In answer, she reached for his zipper. He groaned as her fingers grazed him as she slowly worked it down.

A cautious voice in her head tried to say, Wait! Nell refused to listen. Hugh was a good guy. They felt so close right now. She wanted to be closer yet. Her body was intensely alive, and she needed that to form a shield against the grisly images of death she couldn’t will away.

This was the right thing to do.

His mouth sought hers again even as he eased her trousers off. Through half-closed eyelids she saw the two of them tangled, her legs long and pale, Hugh with his pants half-down, his dark hair tousled, his every breath a rasp.

It seemed the most natural thing in the world when he parted her legs and entered her. She banged a knee against the door; he made another rough sound and readjusted their positions so that she half sat and he knelt between her legs. She looked down at where they met and realized that he was deep inside her, part of her. The past twenty-four hours were erased in the glorious flood of sensations as Hugh moved slowly, leaving her bereft, then filling her. She gripped his shoulders and rode him as he thrust harder, more desperately. Tension built and spiraled until Nell pleaded with him in a high, needy voice.

“Let go, sweetheart.” He gripped her hips and drove into her. “Let go.”

She went still in wonder as pure pleasure poured from her belly through every vein in her body. “Oh-h,” she breathed.

“Yes!” With guttural triumph in his voice, he thrust hard and fast one last time, jerked and groaned, then collapsed on top of her.

Nell wiped inexplicable tears on his bare shoulder. “Thank you,” she whispered, and didn’t know if he heard her.

HUGH AWAKENED to an aching body and head. His mouth was dirt dry and it took him a moment to work it closed. He opened his eyes, squinted against the brilliance, and, stabbed by pain, squeezed them shut again.

Damn, his neck hurt. It was bent at a weird angle, his head wedged into a corner. Where the hell had he fallen asleep? Or had he been unconscious?

An explosion. Maybe there’d been an explosion and a ceiling had fallen on him. That would explain the weight holding him down and the headache he felt waiting to erupt the second he moved the tiniest bit. He wasn’t on the bomb squad, not being suicidal by nature, but if some crazy had set one…

In a sickening wave, he remembered what the crazy had done. He lurched, his head fractured into a million atoms of pain, and somebody else gasped and shoved an elbow into his gut.

He swore and opened his eyes. A wild woman was staring up at him. Her eyes were big and brown and bloodshot, her face was puffy, her lips as dry as his mouth, and her dishwater blond hair was a snarled mess.

“Oh, my God!” she said in stricken tones.

His head clunked back against the car door and he shut his eyes.

Nell Granstrom. Naked. Lying on top of him. They hadn’t…Had they? God help him, images wormed their way through the shattering pain behind his eyes. He saw her uniformed ass sticking up between the seats, his hands on it. Him falling on her. Slow hungry kisses. Him on his knees like a horny teenager at a drive-in movie, squeezing her buttocks, slamming into her. And the single best orgasm of his entire life. He did remember that.

She was apparently frozen in the same frantic effort to remember. Or maybe horror held her paralyzed. He didn’t know. Just that all of a sudden she was scrambling to get off him, and to hell with which body parts she damaged on her way.

“I’ve got to get dressed,” she said in a high frenzied voice. “Where’s my bra? Oh, God. Where’s my bra?”

A faint memory of tossing it tickled at him. “Try behind the seat.” His voice sounded thick. Tongues needed to be lubricated to do their job.

She rose above him, and something stirred in him as he took in her long slender body and high, pale breasts. Unfortunately, she saw him looking, and she recoiled as if he were a monster.

“What are you…Oh!” Hands shaking, she put on the bra, tugged on a shirt, realized it was his and threw it in his face.

By the time he wrestled free, she was buttoning up her own, hiding the nest of dark blond curls at the juncture of her thighs.

“Get dressed!” she hissed. “You look…you look like hell!”

He reached out and fingered a mat in her hair. “Isn’t that the pot calling the kettle black?”

She swatted away his hand. He caught one more forbidden glimpse as she arched to pull on her trousers and panties in one go. “Oh,” she groaned. “I’m going to be sick.”

That galvanized him. “Not in here, you’re not.”

She got open the door of the Explorer and half fell out into the alley. As he slowly, painfully pulled on his own clothes, he heard her retching. His stomach lurched in sympathy, and he gritted his teeth against a wave of nausea.

Wiping her mouth, she reappeared in the open door. The captain wouldn’t have recognized his cool, disciplined officer in this unkempt woman with a half-buttoned, wrinkled shirt, tangled hair and red-rimmed eyes. “I’m going to find my car.” She swallowed. “If—if I left anything…”

“Get in,” he said. He climbed between the seats to get behind the wheel.

She was still standing there staring.

“Get in,” he repeated, wincing at the sight of himself in the rearview mirror. “You don’t want anybody to see you. I’ll pull up right next to your car.”

Pride made her neck long, but after a reluctant moment, she did climb in and close the door.

Hugh found the keys wedged in the crack between the center console and the seat. His head was going to fall off. He knew it was. But he’d rescue her from possible humiliation first, like the gentleman he preferred to think he was.

Turning to look over his shoulder was undiluted agony, but he managed to back up, get turned around and cruise slowly into the tavern parking lot proper. “What do you drive?”

“It’s right there.” She indicated a cherry-red Subaru wagon.

He got up close, his Explorer blocking any sight of her from the tavern or the sidewalk. Not that there was any traffic at…

“Oh, hell,” he growled.

“What?”

“It’s noon.”

She half rose to look over the seat at his dashboard clock. “Aren’t we supposed to be back on duty at three?”

“That’s my memory.”

The word that came out of her mouth was fitting, if not a nice one for a lady to say.

“Go home and shower,” he said. “You’ll feel better.”

She cast him a look of disbelief.

“Or not,” he conceded.

Nell Granstrom opened the door again, climbed out, then stopped. “This never happened.”

He had to turn his head to look at her. “What?”

“It never happened. Last night.” Her eyes met his square, but red washed her cheeks. “This morning. You and me. I—I don’t usually drink.”

He wasn’t much of a drinker, either, or his head wouldn’t be detonating this morning.

“Do I have your word?” she asked fiercely. “You’ll never tell a soul? You’ll never refer to it again? You’ll forget it ever happened?”

The forgetting part Hugh wasn’t so sure about. The rest…

“I will never say a word.” He sketched a cross in the air. “On my honor.”

She sagged, bit her lip. “Thank you.”

“After what we saw…maybe we needed it. Since neither of us is married…”

Her eyes sizzled. “You said not a word. We won’t talk about why. It never happened.”

“Fine,” he said tightly. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’m kinda looking forward to getting home.”

She gave a nod, flinched as if she regretted it, and slammed the door of his Explorer. He waited until she was in her Subaru and had started it. Running his hand over his unshaven jaw, he watched in his mirror as she exited via the alley. Smart.

Too bad that after a couple pitchers of beer neither of them had been smart this morning. No, what was really too bad was that his own personal history had escalated his reaction to an already horrific tragedy. Otherwise he wouldn’t have had those damn beers in the first place.

Working with a woman he didn’t like would have been bad enough, Hugh thought. Working with a woman he didn’t like but had had drunken sex with was going to be next door to hell.

CHAPTER TWO

HOW COULD SHE have done something so stupid, so humiliating, so…undignified?

Nell stood under the shower with her face upturned, letting the hot water beat over her head as though it could cleanse her inside as well as out.

How could she face him again? How could she work with a man she’d let…

Nell moaned aloud at the fresh realization of exactly what she’d let him do. Never mind what she’d done.

Her head throbbed and she tilted it sideways to let the shower spray hit first one temple and then the other. The pressure didn’t help.

Nell reached for the soap and sudsed herself for at least the third time. Then she shampooed again as well. The rinse water was turning lukewarm. She’d been standing in there for an eternity.

But not long enough.

All the while she dried, got dressed and forced her self to eat a sandwich and drink a glass of milk, Nell’s thoughts raced in vicious circles.

She could only pray he was embarrassed, too, but what were the odds of that? Hugh McLean had a reputation with women. Word had it he had a different cute, petite blonde on his arm—or in his bed—every few weeks.

“A redhead once in a while,” Joe Redding had said admiringly. “But, damn, he picks lookers.”

Nell knew painfully well that she wasn’t even close to being a looker. But she was a woman, one more notch in his belt. Hey, he was drunk and in the mood, and she’d been handy. Handy? Who was she kidding? Randy, was probably more the truth.

There in her own kitchen, she flushed hot and cold. Her behavior had been so alien for the woman she’d become. It was as if too many beers had thrown her back to the wild teenager she’d been sixteen years ago, before she learned her lesson the hard way. Forget consequences, enjoy the now.

You feel good.

She whimpered and set down the half finished glass of milk. Her stomach was not enthusiastic about even something as innocuous as milk.

Would he keep his word, and not tell anyone? Nell didn’t know him well enough to be sure either way. The few times she’d had to work with him, they’d butted heads. She thought he was a sexist, macho jerk. Please, she prayed, let him also believe in old-fashioned chivalry.

She went back to the bathroom, brushed her hair into its usual severe, workday chignon, and carefully applied enough makeup to disguise some of the puffiness and blotches. Two more painkillers, teeth brushed and she’d done everything she could short of donning a mask.

Back in the kitchen she belatedly discovered a note from Kim carelessly tossed on the counter. It read, “Mom, Colin’s taking me to the spit. Call his cell phone if you won’t be home for dinner. I can eat with him. Bye.”

Nell crumpled the note. Great. Wonderful. Her just-turned-sixteen-year-old daughter was spending the day in the wilds with her entirely too ardent boyfriend. And what in hell could she, the single mother, do about it? Forbid a sixteen-year-old from dating? Hardly. Sign her up for summer camp? Uh-huh.

“What I wouldn’t give for year-round school,” Nell told the kitchen, and went out the door.

She was one of the last in the crowded briefing room at the station, for which she was grateful. She was able to stand in the back, unnoticed.

This wasn’t the usual beginning of her shift. She and McLean had been assigned, along with ten of the others present yesterday, to work this case. Four detectives from Major Crimes stood behind the captain. One, she was interested to note, was John McLean, Hugh’s older brother. He must have spent the night at the Joplin Building, because tiredness wore lines in his face that she knew weren’t always there, and his expression was bleak.

Nobody would mistake the relationship between the two men, although subtle differences in facial structure made Hugh handsome and his brother plain in a blunt, masculine way. Hugh’s bone structure was more defined, his nose thinner, his cheekbones more pronounced. Both shared imposing height and powerful shoulders and arms.

“The dead guy right outside the elevator on the fifth floor is our shooter,” the captain was saying.

While she was deciding which brother was sexier. Feeling a flush creeping up her face, Nell made a determined effort to block out awareness of Hugh McLean, sitting in the front row.

“A dozen witnesses have positively identified him.” Tiredness showed in the deepened lines on Captain Fisher’s face, but hadn’t succeeded in relaxing his military carriage or the iron in his voice. “He died of a self-inflicted shot to the head. As you all know, he’d been shedding his arsenal as he went. It appears right now that he used up his automatic rounds on the lower floors. He started down the hall, shot one more victim, then headed back to the elevator. He might have heard sirens and realized he couldn’t walk out. Hell, maybe he intended all along to end it that way.

“His name is Jack Gann. He was not a former or current employee of Greater Northwest. We don’t know yet what the association was. We’re guessing he was pissed about a denied claim, but, hell, it could be something else. One of the victims may be an ex-wife, the boyfriend of his ex…. It’ll be your job to find out.

“At this point, we believe he was acting alone. We can’t yet be certain of that, either. His car is in the lot, but so are ones belonging to a lot of other people who won’t be driving them home, either.

“The coroner has wrapped things up at the Joplin Building. You know the drill. We need accurate floor plans, drawings, notes.” Captain Fisher paused, his penetrating gaze traveling from one of his officers to the next. “You will be acting under the direction of the detectives. When you’re done, I want to know every step the son of a bitch took. How did he get to the third floor that heavily armed without being noticed? Who did he shoot first? Second? Third? Why those victims? Were they the ones who didn’t hide fast enough, or were they chosen?” His voice became softer, colder. “I don’t just want to know what he did, I want to know what he was thinking.”

Nods all around. “Sir.”

“These are your assignments.” Like a school-teacher, he stepped from behind the podium and passed out papers. When he’d reached the back of the room and Nell, he added his usual roll-call closer. “Do your jobs and do them carefully.”

Nell was praying she and McLean had been assigned to hunt background on the shooter. Her stomach roiled at the idea of going back into the Joplin Building, of seeing again where the bodies had fallen.

No such luck. She and her new partner—her temporary partner—would be part of the team securing, searching and recording the crime scene.

She waited in the hall for him. He was one of the last out the door of the briefing room, presumably having stopped to talk to his brother. He’d hidden this morning’s excesses better than she had, Nell thought in disgruntlement, watching him approach. With his dark hair, vivid blue eyes and well-defined cheekbones, he was as rakishly handsome as ever. Right now his mouth was set in a hard line, but his jaw was clean-shaven, his eyes clear and his hair slicked back from his face. His crisp uniform fit his tall, muscular body the way it was designed to, a fact that she resented.

She tried very hard not to let pictures of the body beneath the uniform flash in her mind.

His expression was unrevealing when he reached her. “Ready?”

“Naturally,” she snapped. Did she look that bad?

“Do you want to drive today?”

Big of him, she thought uncharitably. They had to go—what?—ten blocks to the Joplin Building. No chance she’d screw up a chase or even a trivial traffic stop.

“You did fine yesterday,” she said waspishly, then was annoyed at herself for being weak enough to display sulkiness. Why give him a weapon?

He lifted a brow. “Fine.”

As they followed the rest of the officers down the hall, she wondered miserably what he was trying not to remember when he looked at her. Or, worse yet, what he was letting himself remember with secret pleasure.

Her cheeks heated in humiliation. Was he instead wondering how many beers he’d had to make him pull down his zipper for her? Flagpole tall women with no figure and hair of undetermined color had never heated his blood before.

She gave a stiff nod when he held open a door for her. Walking into the shadowy parking garage, she hated her awareness of his gaze on her back as he followed.

Damn it, she didn’t want to excite Hugh McLean, Nell thought fiercely. She didn’t like him. Last night—this morning…It was nothing. The stupid behavior induced by inebriation. The true embarrassment was discovering her behavioral control—her common sense!—could be so easily subverted.

Not until they were in their unit and pulling out of the garage did either speak again.

“Feel okay?” Hugh asked.

She felt like hell. “I’m all right.” After a too discernible pause, she added, “You?”

He shrugged. She looked away.

“Oh, hell,” he said suddenly.

“What?”

He hit the flashers and took a sharp left. “Idiot ran the red light.”

The driver of the low-slung Buick ahead had apparently not yet noticed the flashing lights. Nell radioed in the location and license tag number to dispatch.

“Violation?” dispatch asked.

She continued to give information while Hugh hugged the rear of the Buick and finally, briefly, gave a blast of the siren. For a moment the driver seemed to be giving thought to not stopping, but at last grudgingly pulled to the shoulder—without signaling. Hugh had a few choice things to say under his breath as he got out to go to the driver’s side window.

He came back shaking his head. “That woman is ninety if she’s a day. She called me ‘sonny.’”

His chagrin improved her mood. “You probably look like a kid to her.”

He held the license as though it were poison ivy. “Can you believe she still has one?” he said, passing it to her. “Doesn’t she have kids or grandkids to ride herd on her?”

“Would you let yours tell you what to do?” Nell asked, picking up the microphone.

Grandma—or Great-Grandma—turned out to have a dozen unpaid traffic tickets and outstanding warrants. Out of curiosity, Nell strolled back with Hugh to get a look at the feisty eighty-eight-year-old. So tiny she could barely see over the dashboard, she had delicate skin crumpled like tissue paper and vague blue eyes that sharpened when given the news that she wouldn’t be driving away from this stop.

“I drive just fine!” she snapped. “That light was yellow when I started across the intersection. You’re the one who needs your eyes examined, sonny.”

Hugh beat an undignified retreat, Nell hiding a grin as she followed. In the car, they waited for a patrol unit to arrive and finally handed her over with intense gratitude.

“I can’t throw a woman her age in jail,” the patrol officer was whining as they waved and pulled away.

Hugh’s hands relaxed on the steering wheel. “I need more sleep to cope with senile old ladies.”

“I feel sorry for her,” Nell admitted. “She’ll lose her license this time for sure.”

He gave her an incredulous stare. “She’s a menace with that damn boat of a car.”

“But that car is her freedom.” Nell caught his gaze and interpreted it correctly. “Of course we have to take her license. I’m not arguing! I’m just saying I sympathize with her. Who wants to wake up one day and say, ‘Gosh, I’d better not get myself to the store or the doctor anymore. I’ll just depend on other people’s kindness from now on.’”

Hugh squeezed the bridge of his nose. “Can’t we just make a traffic stop without delving into the life problems of everyone we ticket?”

She opened her mouth, closed it. Opened it again. “I’m just saying…”

“I know what you’re saying,” he snapped. “I heard you.”

They drove the five blocks to the Joplin Building in thick silence.

“Oh, hell,” said Hugh again, as it came in sight. The sidewalk was thick was reporters who surged toward the police car before it came to a stop.

“Were you on the SWAT team that first went in yesterday?” reporters yelled. A forest of microphones surrounded Hugh and Nell as they moved grimly toward the front steps. “Can you describe the scene?”

“Was there one killer? Can you confirm rumors that he’s dead?”

“We’re working a crime scene,” Hugh said. “I’m sorry, we can’t comment.”

They broke out of the crowd and gratefully ducked under yellow tape, Nell a little shaken by the shoving bodies, the heavy TV cameras and the urgency of the demands. Port Dare had catapulted into the national news.

The instant they walked into the lobby, Captain Fisher stalked toward them. “Where the hell have you been?”

“Old lady ran a red light right in front of us,” Hugh said expressionlessly. “Sir.”

“Goddamn it, you’re not on patrol!”

Hugh said nothing; of course they couldn’t have let a serious violation like that slide.

He scowled, looking more than ever like a bulldog. “Get the hell upstairs for your assignment!”

They were able to ride one of the elevators; the second was still disabled until the evidence techs were done with it. Alone with him, Nell stared straight ahead as if she were enclosed with a stranger and meeting his gaze was bad manners if not dangerous. But when the doors began to open, she hesitated, not in any hurry to offer her memory banks a second glimpse of the horrors she’d gotten drunk to forget.

It seemed to her that Hugh hesitated as well. His back looked rigid when he went ahead of her. Nell took a deep breath and made herself buck up—she was a police officer. Which didn’t prevent a wash of relief when she saw that the receptionist’s body no longer slumped over her broad desk.

A bagged body on a gurney was waiting to be wheeled onto the elevator.

“What’s the count?” Hugh asked a lieutenant, nodding at the gurney.

“Twelve.” His mouth twisted. “Another one died this morning at Mercy.”

Nell let out a breath. To have miraculously survived the carnage and then die on an operating table or in a hospital bed seemed unbearably cruel.

“Three others are in critical condition.”

“All for what?” Hugh asked. He made a sound in his throat. “Let’s get busy.”

They spent the next hours running tape measures, sketching rooms and hallways and the angles at which bodies had fallen or weaponry had been abandoned. No mysteries in the blood spatter patterns—all were consistent with the victims having been shot with automatic fire at close range.

Nell remembered to call Kim—via the boyfriend’s cell phone—to inform her that she wouldn’t be home for dinner.

“Is Colin taking you out?” she asked.

“Mrs. Cooper said I could have dinner with them,” Kim told her. “We’ll be chaperoned, Mom.”

Nell ignored the sarcasm. “Be sure and thank her.”

“Mo-ther.”

She sighed. “Sorry.”

Her daughter’s voice became tentative. “Are you at the Joplin Building?”

Hugh, waiting a few feet away, watched her, which made Nell edgy.

“Unfortunately.”

“Is it…is it really gross?”

Nell’s gaze was inexorably pulled to the dark stain down the hall. She stripped her voice of emotion. “That’s one way to put it.” She rubbed the back of her neck. “I’ve got to go, Kim. I won’t be in until late tonight. I assume we’ll be back on regular shifts tomorrow.”

“Okay,” Kim said, sounding subdued. “I love you, Mom.”

Tears stung her eyes. “I love you, too.”

Hugh’s astonishingly blue eyes met Nell’s as she stowed her cell phone. “Your kid?”

“Daughter. Kim’s sixteen.”

“Do you have others?”

Was he really interested? She couldn’t imagine.

Nell shook her head.

“You’re divorced?”

“Never married.” Let him make of that what he would.

She felt him studying her, but he didn’t pursue the subject. “I’m glad you can draw better than I can,” was all he said. “I seem to have two thumbs.”

She couldn’t keep a sardonic note from her voice. “Lucky thing women have some useful skills besides empathy.”

“I didn’t say—”

She cut him off. “I know you didn’t.”

The afternoon and evening passed in a blur. Flashes burst on the edges of her vision as the photographers worked. Grey fingerprint powder added its dour presence to the rust-brown stains on the carpet and papered walls. Nell’s head pounded and she worked in dogged silence. One office looked like the next, one hall turned into another. They were going to be here for weeks, she could see already. This was a crime scene of a size so far beyond anything they’d ever managed, it would be a miracle if they were done that soon. And if they didn’t screw up the preservation of evidence.

Not that there’d be a trial, Nell reminded herself wearily. This was all an academic exercise. The killer was dead, already executed by his own hand. So why go through all this?

She knew the answer, of course. At its deepest level, they were after the truth. Without all the puzzle pieces identified and locked into place, they would never have it.

More practically, the possibility still existed that there had been accomplices, or even that Gann had been misidentified and the real killer had walked out with the survivors. Terrified people weren’t the best witnesses. Nell remembered the body outside the elevator upstairs. The man had been middle-aged, middle height, brown haired, ordinary. Bizarrely, considering his mission, he’d worn a business suit indistinguishable from those worn by his male victims. Could a frightened claim rep diving for cover behind her desk be positive that Gann was the one spraying the office with automatic fire?

The captain let them go just before midnight and sealed the building. A smaller cluster of press still camped out on the sidewalk, but he waved his officers toward the lot and faced the oncoming horde. “It’s been a tough two days,” he said. “Sleep in an hour tomorrow. See you in the briefing room at eight sharp.”

“Big of him,” someone muttered behind Nell, on the way to the squad cars.

“I, for one, am going to be damn glad of that extra hour,” Hugh said, close beside her.

“Me, too,” she admitted, stifling a yawn, too tired to care that she could feel him breathing down her neck.

He opened his door, but paused to look back at the dark bulk of the Joplin Building. A crescent moon floated above it. Camera flashes went off as the captain apparently made a brief statement in front.

“I feel like a condemned man,” Hugh said, in an odd voice. “We’re going to spend half our working lives in there.”

She nodded, although he wasn’t looking at her. “The atmosphere is so…oppressive. No, creepy.” She shivered. “They say tragedies can soak into the walls and leave a trace presence. Do you believe that?”

He turned and stared at her over the roof of the car. “No. Damn it, don’t you know better than to let yourself think like that?”

She scowled back. “You can’t tell me this one didn’t hit you hard, too. Why else did you—” She almost strangled herself as she swallowed the rest of that sentence. Why else did you get drunk? Screw me? Forbidden topic.

“Of course it was upsetting.” His brows met in a forbidding line. “Contrary to your opinion of me, I do feel some normal human emotions. But I’ve seen too many crime scenes to start imagining shock and terror soaking into walls, for God’s sake.”

“There are places,” she defended herself.

They were damn near alone in the dark parking lot now.

“This isn’t on the scale of Auschwitz. Let’s not kid ourselves.”

She gritted her teeth. “Then what were you talking about? Feeling like a condemned man?”

“We’re grunts in there. You and I aren’t even cogs in the machine. We’re oil that makes the cogs turn a little smoother. We aren’t doing anything. Not anything useful. I want back on the street. I like action. If I’d chosen to spend my life with a tape measure in my hand, I’d be a carpenter.”

Why had she, for even a second, thought him capable of sensitivity to suffering or nobility of purpose? He was a five-year-old boy, who wanted to be outside bashing his toy trucks into each other.

As tired as she was, she wanted to throw up her hands and get in the car. Stubbornness made her argue. “But this is important. It’s the biggest crime that’s ever been committed in Port Dare. That ever, God willing, will be. Don’t you want in on that?”

“The slug is dead. There’s nothing to solve.” He shrugged and got in behind the wheel.

She climbed in and buckled her seat belt. “Is it? Are we so sure this Jack Gann was the shooter?”

“We’ve got so damn many witnesses, we don’t know what to do with them.”

“They were scared.”

Rocketing out of the parking space too fast, he said, “Captain says half a dozen pointed their fingers.”

“When showed a dead man who looked like the assailant.” Why was she arguing? There wasn’t any good reason to think this Gann wasn’t the shooter. She just believed in being sure. “Did you notice how little there was to distinguish him from half the men pouring out of an office building like this at five o’clock? I saw his face yesterday. I can hardly remember it now.”

“We were all shell-shocked by then.”

“So were those witnesses,” she reminded him. “Worse.”

He was quiet for several blocks. When she stole glances at his profile, it was to see his deep frown relaxing. “Yeah, I’ve thought about all that,” Hugh admitted. “Fingerprints will settle it for us.”

“I guess they will. Once Ballistics figures out which guns killed which victims.”

He grunted agreement. “I don’t envy them, but at least they’re doing something meaningful. I still say you and I are grunts. We’d do more good preventing the next crime.”

They pulled into the dark concrete garage beneath the station. Tires squealed somewhere on the floor above them.

“Where’s your car?” Hugh asked. “I’ll drop you off.”

She was reminded uncomfortably of the last time he had done this, but chose not to make an issue of it. “Back corner.”

He braked behind the Subaru wagon. “See you in the morning.”

Another yawn cracked her jaw. “Night.”

“You didn’t want to work with me, did you?”

The unexpected question startled her. Halfway out, she twisted around to see his face in the light from the overhead lamp. Nell considered and discarded several answers, but was too tired to prevaricate. “No,” she said. “We haven’t exactly hit it off.” Except in the back seat of his Explorer. “I can’t have been your first choice, either.”

“No. I don’t like to analyze everything.”

“Whereas I don’t want to be the kind of cop who blindly follows orders and doesn’t understand that he or she sometimes has moral decisions to make.”

He grunted. “Like letting an old lady drive away even if she is going to kill somebody sooner or later?”

“No.” Her patience was ebbing. “But how can we serve if we don’t try to understand the people we’re serving? How do you negotiate a way out of a domestic call gone bad if you don’t have a good idea what’s going through the guy’s head, or the wife’s? What’s she going to do? Why’d he go off the deep end right now? What’s riding him? You won’t make detective if you’re unwilling to explore human nature.”

“Detectives sit behind their desks,” he said carelessly. “I’ve turned down promotions.”

Disgusted, she said, “Yeah, I forget. You have connections.”

His eyes narrowed and his voice went silky quiet. “My brothers have nothing to do with my career. They know better than to interfere.”

“Then what? You want to ride patrol for the next forty years? Walk into holdups at convenience stores for your big excitement?”

Something she hadn’t expected to hear from him, of all people, was real passion. But there it was, a vibrant thread in his voice, despite the lateness of the hour and his hoarse tiredness. “What we do is real police work. We’re the ones first on the scene, the ones who come when people call. I care about what I do. I don’t see it as an unpleasant duty on the way to better things.”

Stung by the scathing tone of the last, she said quietly, “I don’t either.”

“No?”

“I’m curious,” she admitted. “I haven’t been involved in a murder investigation before. So I’m a grunt. I can see how the detectives work.”

Suddenly he shook his head. “I don’t know why I started this. Go home.” He looked ten years older than he had nine hours ago.

Nell hesitated, then got out of the squad car. “Good night,” she said stiffly, and slammed the door.

The car didn’t move, and she realized he was waiting chivalrously until she was safely in her Subaru and had started it. Pulling out her keys, she thought maybe he was gentleman enough to keep his mouth shut.

Her drive home wasn’t half a mile. Five years ago, she’d managed to save enough to put a down payment on a 1920s era two-story house in Old Town. The lot had consisted of weeds and a rotted picket fence; the house hadn’t been updated since the fifties. She’d paid for new wiring and plumbing and converted the top floor into a separate apartment, rented out to cover the mortgage. Friends had helped, but most of the labor of stripping woodwork, sanding and painting had been hers. She was proud of her little house. Single mothers didn’t have it easy.

Especially ones who gave birth at sixteen and had no support from the baby’s father. The day they released her from the hospital and handed a swaddled Kim to her, she’d gone home to her mother’s, but she’d known she couldn’t stay. She had never in her life, before or since, been so scared. Sometimes life wasn’t a bed of roses, but every single time she pulled into her driveway she felt a surge of pride that she’d come this far.

Owning a house was a symbol to her of the life she’d built from nothing.

The front porch light was on, as was the light over the stove in the kitchen. On the stovetop lay another note written in her daughter’s still childish hand: “If you’re hungry, Mrs. Cooper sent home a bowl of spaghetti. I told her you don’t take meal breaks when you’re into work. Also, I got bored tonight and made some banana bread. See, I even cleaned up! Love you, Kim.”

More tears threatened. Nell grabbed a paper towel and blew her nose firmly. She was an emotional mess today. Not that it hurt to appreciate what a good kid Kim was. Despite all of Nell’s worries, she knew her daughter was unselfish, kindhearted and mostly sensible.

After throwing away the paper towel, Nell took the plastic bowl of leftover spaghetti out of the fridge and stuck it in the microwave. She was starved. She just hadn’t realized it. Hugh hadn’t suggested a meal break and it hadn’t occurred to her that she needed one. At some point her stomach had settled its differences with the beer, thank goodness.

She sliced banana bread, buttered it and poured a glass of milk while she waited for the microwave to beep.

What a day, she thought, carrying the heated spaghetti to the table a moment later.

She tried not to think about the night before. It had been stupid, but she was human. Lesson: no more than one drink. Ever.

Better yet, don’t drink at all.

While she ate, her mind flitted from the crime scene and the shooter with the hole in his temple to the half a dozen minor arguments with McLean that had filled any empty nook in their shift. Why him? she asked herself in disbelief. Why not somebody, anybody, else? She hadn’t liked him by reputation, and she’d liked him even less after they’d worked together a couple of times.

Nell wanted to conclude that she didn’t like him any better now, but believed in strict honesty. He’d been…decent today. No leers, no innuendoes, no murmurs and grins with his buddies. He’d let her see a few moments of vulnerability, he’d been considerate in driving her to her car that morning, and he’d been efficient and fair-minded on the job even though he had apparently been chafing at their roles.

Maybe she’d survive their partnership. Maybe she could even forget what had happened in the back seat of his Explorer. Thank God there was no reason Kim would ever even guess that her mother had done something so impulsive, so rash, so wanton!

A little flicker of anxiety sparked in her chest. Kim wouldn’t ever have to know unless…

Nell froze with the fork halfway to her mouth. As if the spark had found gas fumes, it exploded into a painful ball of terror that immobilized her.

He hadn’t used a condom, had he? He was drunk, too.

Why had it taken her this long to worry?

Nell tried to breathe slowly, in through her nose, out through her mouth. Her period was due any day. Certainly by next week. Wasn’t it? She didn’t keep track, but she knew it must be. It was surely too late in the month for her to get pregnant. And what were the odds after one time anyway?

She didn’t have to worry. All those years ago, she and her teenage boyfriend had had sex for several months, sometimes using birth control, sometimes not, before she got pregnant. They had challenged the fates, instead of just flirting briefly with them.

She could not possibly be so unlucky.

Nell made herself take the next bite, but the worry had taken root and would not be pulled out until she had proof of her escape from calamity.

CHAPTER THREE

IVY MCLEAN HAD aged shockingly in the past two days. When she arrived at Connor and Mariah’s house for dinner, the sight of her stooped carriage and the deepened lines in her face had all three brothers shooting to their feet. Hugh knocked over his chair and had to mutter an apology to his sister-in-law, Mariah. His big brothers beat him to their mom.

“Let me take your coat,” Connor said smoothly, the furrows in his brow betraying his perturbation. He cuddled his four-month-old daughter against his shoulder.

“What is it, Mom?” John asked more bluntly.

“What is what?” she retorted, tone cranky but rustier than usual. The voice of an old woman, which at barely sixty she wasn’t.

With a warning flash from her eyes at John, Mariah took over. “In their tactful way, they’re trying to say that you look as if you haven’t been sleeping well. Here, have a seat. Dinner will be on the table any minute,” Mariah said before heading back to the kitchen.

“How can I sleep, after such a terrible thing?” Ivy demanded querulously. “I expected John and Hugh to be too busy to come tonight, even if Connor can’t do anything useful.”

Her addendum didn’t need to be spoken aloud: And why aren’t you? The dig at Connor didn’t go unnoticed, either. Mariah touched his arm, but didn’t say anything.

“We’ve been working straight for two days.” The tiredness on John’s face was visible. “We have to eat, say hello to our families.” His gaze rested briefly on his wife, Natalie, who was feeding their one-year-old daughter a green glop Hugh presumed was pureed vegetables.

His mother sat heavily, as if she hurt. “Think of the women who won’t see their husbands again.”

John’s jaw clenched. He and Mom had always butted heads.

Figuring it might be well to intervene, Hugh bent and kissed her cheek. “We’re doing everything we can. Do you have any idea how many witnesses there are to interview? Besides, the son of a bitch is dead. All we can do is hope hell is a lot uglier than the pen.”

Her eyes beseeched him. “You’re sure he’s dead? The TV news is still hedging.”

“We’re sure.” Hugh’s voice was rock hard.

She sagged. “How can this happen again? Why would anybody do such a terrible thing?”

Connor, having put Jenny in the playpen, set a glass of wine in front of her. “We know better than anybody that there aren’t any answers.”

“Grandma!” Evan said from behind his uncle. “What’s wrong?”

“Is that all anybody can ask?” Her back stiffened. “I’m sure I haven’t changed at all.”

“You look sad,” the ten-year-old said. “Are you missing Grandpa more because of the shooting?”

Hugh laid his arm over his nephew’s shoulders, prepared to deflect the acid rejoinder he expected. Instead, her eyes filled with tears.

“Yes.” Her voice broke. She cleared her throat. “Yes, I suppose I am.”

“I’m sorry.” Evan left the shelter of his uncle’s casual embrace and went to his grandmother. He gave her a quick, awkward hug. “I wish I’d known him.”

She actually made the effort to smile, although her lips trembled. Unnoticed, tears overflowed. “I wish you had, too. You and all his grandchildren.”

Hugh’s gaze met Connor’s and then John’s. All three brothers backed unobtrusively away. As though sensing the need, Mariah appeared from the kitchen with a huge bowl of salad. She set it down, saw her mother-in-law, and exclaimed, “Mom! Let me get you a tissue.”

Within minutes, their mother had firmly blown her nose, mopped up the tears, and tried to insist on helping bring food to the table. Her two daughters-in-law squelched her, but did allow her to settle Jenny in her high chair.

Once everyone but Maddie, who was away at a soccer tournament, sat and began dishing up, Mom pinioned first John and then Hugh with a stern look more familiar to them than were her tears.

“Haven’t you learned anything?”

Evan and nine-year-old Zofie, Mariah’s daughter, listened with wide eyes.

“You know we can’t talk about it,” John said.

She sniffed. “Surely, with the press haunting your every move and talking to those same witnesses, nothing you discover will remain a secret for long.”

“True enough.” John grimaced. “Okay, here’s the bare facts. We know the shooter made a fraudulent claim. An insurance investigator found him out and the claim was denied. That’s the only motive we’ve determined.”

The pathetic part was, the claim had only been for a few thousand dollars. The fraud was petty, the claimant’s loss nothing that would ruin his life. He’d been incapacitated for a back injury, supposedly; the investigator had snapped photos of him playing an early morning round of golf at the county club. Why getting caught had enraged him to such a violent degree, nobody knew.

Yet.

“That’s all?” their mother asked in disbelief. “He was angry?”

John only nodded.

“And you’re certain he was by himself? He wasn’t used by a terrorist, or…” She groped for another villain, another explanation, and failed to come up with one.

“Most murder isn’t that sinister or purposeful,” Hugh said quietly. “It’s committed by troubled people who crack. Not by psychopaths or assassins or terrorists with causes. You know that, too, Mom. You’ve heard us talk over the years.”

“But…so many people,” she faltered.

“Another one died in the hospital an hour ago.” John’s jaw knotted. “A twenty-one-year-old filing clerk whose only sin was working in the claims department.”

Hugh had heard. The others reacted with pity and anger.

He withdrew from the conversation, brooding over his bad mood, a product of lack of sleep, frustration with how useless he felt on the job, and stunned disbelief at his own idiocy in screwing his new partner.

What irritated him was that he now had to watch every word, every glance, every nuance. He’d fouled up big time; he couldn’t compound his sins by being caught enjoying the sway of her hips in snug uniform trousers, by being crude or foul-mouthed, by criticizing her softheartedness.

And what a time to have to be on his best behavior! Hugh hadn’t lied to her: he had turned down promotions to detective several times. For the first time, he regretted it. If he were in Major Crimes, he’d have been doing something today, not laying out tape measures and making poor sketches.

His mother had every reason to be disappointed in him.

After dinner, John drew him aside. “You and Granstrom are on this again tomorrow?”

Hugh nodded.

“We’re going to pull a team off to interview witnesses. You interested?”

Remembering his outrage at Nell’s suggestion that he had been offered promotions only because of his brothers’ pull, Hugh looked back at John with a conspicuous lack of expression. “Doing a favor for your kid brother?”

“What in hell are you talking about?” John exploded.

“Why me?”

“Because you’re the best cop I know. Because I trust you. Why the sensitivity?”

Impatient with himself, Hugh shook his head. “No reason,” he muttered. “Sorry.”

“Granstrom okay? I don’t know her.”

Hugh opened his mouth to complain, but after an obvious pause closed it. “She’s fine,” he said shortly.

“Can she do the job?”

“She can do it.” He hoped.

“Then you’re with me in the morning.” John cuffed his shoulder roughly, nodded and rejoined his wife.

Hugh watched him hoist his daughter out of the high chair and into the air. She laughed joyously, and he laughed back with pleasure as uncomplicated.

A man could almost be jealous.

If he weren’t also feeling claustrophobic surrounded by Family, with a capital F. Men casually wrapping their arms around their wives, who fussed over Mom, kids everywhere, McLeans by birth or marriage. Hugh loved every one of them. The only loner, he also felt as if he didn’t quite belong.

As if he maybe never would.

He made his excuses, kissed his mother and escaped with intense relief.

KIM APPEARED, sleepy-eyed, as Nell was setting her coffee mug and cereal bowl in the dishwasher. Even with bed hair, puffy eyes and creases on her cheek, she was beautiful, with the innocent sexuality and bloom worshipped by the youth-crazy culture. Her hair was the color of honey shot with sunlight, her eyes were a sparkling blue, her pouty mouth sensual, her forehead a high smooth arch, her walk a leggy saunter.

Nell longed to see a hideous red pimple. Something, anything, that would repulse the boyfriend.

“What are you doing up?” she asked, with quick suspicion she tried to disguise.

Kim yawned prettily. “Colin and I are going to Lake Crescent today. Remember?” She saw that, no, Mom did not. “His uncle’s going to take us water-skiing?”

“Oh.” That did sound familiar. Wonderful. A long drive, just the two of them, and then Kim would strip to her tiny bikini. Colin would be panting to rip it off her by the time lake water beaded her warm skin. “Sorry,” Nell mumbled. “I forgot. It’s been a bad…” She clamped her mouth shut. “When will you be home?”

Kim ran her hands through her hair and yawned again. The hem of her T-shirt nightie rose alarmingly. “I don’t know,” she said with a shrug. “I suppose we might grab a burger on the way home.”

Nell glanced at the clock. She had to go or she’d be the last to roll call again. Maternal anxiety held her in place.

“What’s happened to all your other friends?” She tried to sound casual. “You haven’t seen Polly in ages, have you?”

Kim opened the cupboard and studied the row of cereal boxes. “We talked yesterday.”

“You’re spending an awful lot of time with Colin.”

Her daughter chose a sugary, marshmallow studded cereal. “So? We’re having fun. It’s summer.”

“You’re together all day. Every day.”

“Mom, don’t worry.”

“How can I help it?” She gave another desperate glance toward the clock.

Kim saw. “You’re late. Go. I won’t get pregnant today. I promise.”

It had to do. Nell kissed her cheek and said, “Have fun. Just…”

“Not too much,” her sixteen-year-old finished for her. “Jeez, Mom.”

Kim was patient with her, Nell had to give her that. They had a good relationship; Kim listened to her.

So why did that not feel like enough?

Because Kim was a teenager, with all that entailed. Nell remembered far too well what that had been like. How her scope had narrowed until now mattered more than tomorrow. Her boyfriend hadn’t called, so her life must be over. Amid the great tragedies looming in this fantasy landscape, she had never considered the one that had befallen her mother and would bring her down in turn: teenage pregnancy. Nothing that had happened to her mother could happen to her, she’d thought dismissively. Nobody got pregnant just because they did it once. Or twice, or a dozen times. After all, they used a condom sometimes. Most of the time.

She could see the same recklessness, the same disregard, in Kim’s eyes when she soothed her mother’s fears. Kim must feel as if she’d heard it a thousand times. She would be tired of hearing it. Grandma had gotten pregnant when she was sixteen. Mom was stupid enough to do the same. What did that have to do with her?

Besides, she and Colin were in love. Like Romeo and Juliet. The forever kind. His calls, his laugh, his smile, his frown, were what mattered. Making love was as inevitable as the creeks swelling in the spring with snowmelt. She and Colin could do it once, or a few times. They’d be careful.

Oh, yes. Nell knew exactly how her daughter was thinking.

What scared Nell most was that Kim might look at her and decide that an early pregnancy wasn’t so bad. After all, Mom had a cool house and a good job. Kim didn’t remember the hard times, when Mom was skin and bones because she bought baby food with her coupons and paid the rent with her puny earnings and didn’t have enough left for food for herself. Or the nights they’d once spent in the car, shivering inside blankets, Nell terrified by every footfall on the sidewalk, because she had fallen behind on the rent and had too much pride to go home to Mom again.

Sometimes she wished Kim did remember.

In the station parking garage, Nell leaped out of her Subaru and raced across the concrete floor toward the elevator.

Disheveled and breathing hard, she slipped into the room just as the captain began to speak. He saw her, gave her a hard look. A flush of embarrassment joined the heat rushing had already brought to Nell’s cheeks.

Captain Fisher sent the patrol officers out first, then brought the Joplin Building crew up to date, ending with, “Granstrom and McLean, you’ll be with the detectives today. Everyone…do your jobs and do them carefully.”

Had Hugh pulled strings after all? Nell wondered, waiting for him out in the hall.

“What’s up?” she asked quietly, when he joined her.

His jaw flexed. “John chose us,” he said curtly.

“You don’t sound happy.”

His icy eyes met hers. “I’ll do my job, either way.”

She had to scuttle to catch up with his long stride. “Hey!” He didn’t slow down. “Why do you have a burr up your—”

Hugh stopped so suddenly she slammed into the hard wall of his back. He swung around, teeth set, and gripped her upper arms. Eyes glittering, he said, “I knew exactly what you’d think. No, I didn’t ooze up to my brother and beg to be given a choice detail. He came to me. End of story.”

“I didn’t say—”

“You thought.” He released her so suddenly she staggered.

“We have a briefing,” he said unemotionally, and stalked off.

Profane and even obscene descriptions of her new partner presented themselves for her tongue’s pleasure, but she had the self-control not to speak a one. Instead, she marched behind him into a smaller conference room, where John McLean and his partner had charts spread over the large table. Others were crowding in, too.

“Welcome Officers Granstrom and McLean,” Hugh’s brother said, with a brisk nod. “Okay, here’s where we’re at, folks. Four hundred and forty-two people work in the Joplin Building. We’ve managed so far to talk to fifty-four. We need detailed recollections, before they’ve all watched so damn much TV they start telling us what they heard and not what they experienced themselves.”

More nods; everyone knew the tricks memory played.

“We’ve broken them down by where they worked in the building, so that by luck you can track the son of a bitch’s progress down the hall, spot any anomalies. Did he backtrack? Why? It would be good to know whether he targeted individuals, or just shot whoever showed up in his path. Did he track anyone down? If you get someone who wasn’t at her desk, get the story, then pass it on to whichever officer is handling the part of the building where she was during the shooting. Meet here at the end of the day and report anything interesting. Questions?” He looked around. “Then let’s hit the road, folks.”

Nell was getting tired of playing the little woman trailing her man down the halls, but saw no alternative short of making a scene. Why, of all the officers on the Port Dare force, had Fisher assigned her to work with Hugh McLean?

Okay, he was more complex than she’d guessed when she first developed a dislike for him. That didn’t mean she liked him one iota better.

In the car, her riding shotgun again as though it were a given—me man, me belong behind the wheel—he reached for the ignition, then let his hand drop.

“I’m sorry,” he said abruptly. “I was a jackass up there.”

Okay, he’d surprised her again. “Yes, you were,” Nell agreed.

He gripped the steering wheel, fingers flexing. “I didn’t sleep well.”

With a woman friend, she would have asked why. With him, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know. Nell only nodded.

“I guess you hit a raw nerve, suggesting I’ve gotten where I am because of my brothers’ influence.”

Nell bowed her head and stared fixedly at her hands on her lap. “I shouldn’t have said that,” she admitted. “I was just being…bitchy.”

His glance was tinged with humor. “I bring that out in you?”

Among other things. Heat touched her cheeks again. “Apparently.”

He cleared his throat. “I’ll try not to.”

“I’ll do better, too.”

He gave a brief nod, started the car and backed out. She stole a look at his face while he was preoccupied with checking over his shoulder. The earlier tension was missing; his mouth was relaxed, his eyes a more vivid blue than the wintry hue chilled by anger.

How like a man, Nell thought. Situation dealt with, he was satisfied and had moved on. All forgiven and forgotten.

Including, she wondered, the drunken, bawdy interlude in the back seat of his SUV? Had it occurred to him that he hadn’t used a condom? Or did he assume such worries were hers?

Worry did indeed stir like a coiled asp, necessitating a few slow, deep breaths to calm herself. Fate couldn’t be that cruel. She wouldn’t be pregnant. Focus on the job, quit agonizing over nothing.

Thank God on bended knee that Kim never would know how foolish her mother had been. If she ever found out…Nell shuddered. All of those talks about maturity, impulse control, looking to the future, might as well have been given to herself in the shower, to swirl down the drain with the water that had been sluicing her body.

Of course, those very same—no, not lectures, she tried hard not to be autocratic—those very same mother-daughter talks, might be useless anyway. Teenage love, lust and sense of invincibility were powerful opponents to a mother’s word and common sense. What if, right this minute, Kim was letting Colin slip his hand inside that skimpy bikini top, his mouth hot and hungry on hers, his urgently whispered, “Come on, we love each other,” filling her heart with a glorious need to show him how much she loved him?

Nell must have moved, because Hugh asked, “Something wrong?”

She surfaced to see that they were turning into a neighborhood she knew well from patrolling.

“No…yes. I don’t know.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “You were a teenage boy. If you had a girlfriend, did you respect her desire to wait for sex until—oh, not marriage, but until she was older?”

“Respect her for wanting to wait? Maybe.” The car paused at a stop sign, and his eyes met hers. “But I still tried to get down her pants. That’s what teenage boys do.”

She whimpered.

“Your daughter?”

“She’s sixteen. I told you that, didn’t I? She seems to be spending every day with her boyfriend this summer. What can I do?” Nell begged.

“Cuff her and lock the door.”

“Thanks,” she said dryly. “I thought about sending her away to summer camp, but she’s a little old for that.”

“Isn’t she working?”

“Part-time at the library. She’s a page during the school year, too. She didn’t want to quit that to work full-time at some fast-food joint, and I figured, hey, she’s still a kid, let her enjoy one last summer.”

“There was your mistake.” He frowned. “Damn it, I thought Vista Drive was right here.”

She shook her head. “Another couple of blocks. I patrolled this neighborhood for a year.”

“All rentals?” he asked.

“Yup. I got on-the-job training in domestic disturbances. Couple a night, sometimes.”

Not that the neighborhood was a slum. The houses were decent but low-end in price, which meant they were starters for young couples or owned by landlords. Clearly thrown up by one builder, the ranch and split-level houses varied little except by color and orientation—garage doors might be on one side or the other so that bedroom windows didn’t line up. Lawns were already turning brown in a neighborhood where homeowners didn’t bother sprinkling. Most were too busy trying to scratch out a living.

A kid in baggy cargo pants burst from between parked cars on his skateboard. Hugh braked and muttered a curse as the boy gave one push with his foot and rocketed away without any realization of how close he had come to getting hit. Nell saw up the next cul-de-sac that a group of older kids was playing basketball with a backboard on wheels, while younger girls threw pebbles and took turns with a chalk hop-scotch grid drawn on the sidewalk. Now that she was paying attention, there weren’t many adults around, but there were plenty of children: skateboarders in the next cul-de-sac soaring over a jump erected in a driveway, more girls jump-roping, a war with squirt pistols on a front lawn.

Mostly latch-key kids, Nell guessed. Rather like Kim had been for too many years. As she herself had been. Family patterns that played themselves out, generation after generation.

Please not the next one, she prayed.

“Here we go,” Hugh said with satisfaction, pulling to the curb in front of a ranch house with a row of rosebushes blooming beside the driveway.

“I didn’t look at who we’re interviewing,” Nell said. “What floor did we get assigned?”

Hugh showed her the map of the wing of offices on the fourth floor. “Gann’s last stops. We’re to interview everyone working along this hallway, and then the people upstairs where the last victim was, too, if we finish these in time.”

Nell nodded.

On the walk up to the front door, she paused to inhale the heavy fragrance of a huge, fiery red bloom.

The interior of the house was shadowy, but a tinny woman’s voice cried, “How could you? I trusted you!”

Over the ring of the doorbell, the man’s deeper murmur was indistinguishable. Music cued dramatically, followed by the familiar jingle of a television commercial.

A young woman came to the door immediately. She was pretty, no more than twenty-one or -two. A blonde who wore her hair in a ponytail, she wore shorts and a skimpy tank top that outlined high, full breasts.

“Officers. Please, come in.” Her smile wavered. “They said you’d be coming.”

“Thank you.” Narrow-eyed, Nell stole a glance at her partner. He’d damn well better not be checking out their interviewee, who reminded Nell uncomfortably of Kim.

But he only nodded courteously and gestured for Nell to go ahead. Ladies first. She had mixed feelings about his gentlemanly instincts. She was counting on him being chivalrous enough to keep his mouth shut. On the other hand, cops with old-fashioned attitudes generally didn’t like the idea of the little woman under gunfire. Frowning, Nell reminded herself that they’d functioned like a well-practiced team in the Joplin Building.

Watching the young woman turn off the television set, Nell rubbed her temple. A headache, and well deserved. Why in hell was she obsessing about Hugh McLean, she wondered irritably. They were stuck together temporarily. That was all. They could stand each other for a few months. Who cared what made him tick, or what he thought about her?

Stick to your real worries, she advised herself. The unprotected sex she’d had, and a teenage daughter with overactive hormones.

Like her mother’s, apparently.

Nell winced before realizing that Hugh was looking at her.

He raised his eyebrows.

She gave her head a small shake before smiling at the young woman. “You’re Carla Shaw?”

“Yes. I don’t know that I can tell you very much.” She swallowed and then squeezed her hands together. “Um, would you like to sit down?”

“Thank you.”

They chose opposite ends of the couch, facing the TV, while Ms. Shaw sat in an old upholstered rocker.

She rushed into speech, her voice tight with anxiety. “I didn’t actually see very much, you know.”

“That’s fine,” Hugh said, more gently than Nell would have guessed him capable. “We just want to know when you figured out someone was shooting, what you did, whether you saw him at all.”

“I…” She shivered, her face pinched. “I got a phone call from a friend downstairs. Becca is in Accounting. You know, down on the third floor? We’re roommates. Her bedroom is at the end of the hall.” She gestured vaguely. “Only she’s in the hospital. Doctors say she’ll live, but…” A shudder rolled through her body. “Excuse me, I think I’ll get a sweater. I thought it was going to be a hot day, but…” She jumped up and ran from the room.

“Should I follow her?” Nell whispered.

“I think she’ll be back.” Hugh shifted. “It’s already stifling in here.”

Nell nodded. Mid-July, she almost wished the police department had summer-weight uniforms, like the post office did. Except that an officer of the law wouldn’t garner much respect if a pair of shorts showed knobby knees.

Carla came back, looking small inside a baggy sweatshirt. “I’m sorry.”

Hugh’s smile warmed and softened his saturnine face. “Don’t be. You’re still in shock.”

“Maybe.” She bit her lip.

“So, your friend called,” he prompted.

Nell held her pencil poised to take notes.

Carla Shaw’s friend Becca had called and said she heard gunshots and screams and she didn’t know what was happening. She’d let Carla know more when she did. Carla had hurried to the nearest office to tell other people, but she stayed in earshot of her phone. Only Becca didn’t call back. Everybody discussed whether they should phone 911 or what, and finally one of the claims adjusters, a man, of course, had stood.

“Hell, I think I’ll go down there and check it out.”

“I tried to stop him,” Carla said, staring at them with big, haunted eyes. “But he wouldn’t listen. He had to be macho. He went down the stairs. And…um—” her mouth worked “—now he’s dead.”

Nell dropped her notebook and went to the young woman, not so much older than her daughter. Kneeling, she covered her hands with her own. “I’m sorry.”

Tears filled Carla’s eyes. “He was kind of a jerk. But mostly just a guy. You know?”

Nell nodded wordless agreement.

“Why would somebody shoot him?”

“I don’t know,” she said softly.

Carla freed one hand from Nell’s and wiped her wet cheeks. “We couldn’t really hear anything. Only then the elevator doors opened, and everybody stuck their heads out of the offices, because we thought it must be Kyle.” She was shivering uncontrollably now. “Only it wasn’t. It was that man. He was shooting as he walked out. I had just the one glimpse, and then I ran back in my office and locked the door and squeezed behind some filing cabinets. I don’t know how I was strong enough to move them.”

“Did he come into your office?”

“The glass insert in the door exploded, and I think maybe a spray of bullets hit the filing cabinet, because it jerked—really, almost jumped, like somebody had slammed into it. But I couldn’t see out, and later, when the police came, the door was still locked. So I guess he didn’t bother coming in, even though he could have just reached in and opened the door.”

Her eyes showed that she wondered why. Had she hidden so cleverly he thought no one was in there, or did he not want to bother hunting? Had her prayers to God been answered? Or had she just been lucky?

Nell remembered a story she’d heard once about a soldier in Vietnam who’d awakened one morning and discovered that his entire platoon lay dead around him. Every single man had had his throat slit during the night. Every one but him. He spent his life haunted by the question: why? Why him? Why not the friend who had slept beside him, or the guy he didn’t like, or the captain? Why was he chosen to survive? Did his life have some yet unknown purpose? Or had he been chosen at all?

Carla and all the others would live with some of the same questions.

Hugh did the note-taking. They got the names of the others she had clustered with, two of whom had died under the barrage of submachine-gun fire within seconds. Nell comforted as best she could once they had wrung everything Carla knew from her.

In the end, they left her staring at a soap opera on television, still huddled inside her sweatshirt as though the temperature was sixty instead of eighty inside the small house. Walking silently down the driveway under the hot sun beside a tall, grim Hugh, Nell smelled again the heavy scent of the roses.

They would hear this story again, and again, Nell realized. Today, tomorrow, perhaps for weeks. She knew from experience that by the end of the day, they might be able to hear it and minutes later climb into the car and crack a joke, or talk about dinner plans, or a movie one of them had seen last weekend. They might even think themselves inured, but the horror would be lurking deep in their psyches, the reminder of the sprawled bodies, the acrid scent of blood, the remembered terror on every face.

How would she get through this summer, working this horrific case, worrying about her daughter, worrying about herself? she wondered in a kind of daze. Partnered with a macho jerk who could smile like that?

A man who, insane though the very idea was, would be the father of the unborn child she might be carrying, if the fates chose to teach her a lesson.

CHAPTER FOUR

“HOW DO YOU KNOW when you’re in love?”

Nell turned her head sharply.

Kim lay sprawled on the couch, the remote control in her hand, the videotape she’d been playing on pause. She still gazed dreamily at the TV, as though an imagined movie continued in her mind’s eye.

Carefully, Nell set down her book. “Nobody your age can really, truly be in love.”

The dreamy look vanished, replaced by clear resentment. “Why won’t you even talk to me?”

“I am talking.”

The movie burst into life with a cacophony of street sounds. Kim froze it again with an impatient punch of her thumb. “You’re not talking, you’re putting me down.”

Was she? Maybe, Nell admitted ruefully. She was lucky Kim was still willing to ask what she thought.

“I don’t mean it as a put-down to say that you’re too young to know real love.” She shifted to tuck one foot under her. “Part of growing up is that you’re always reaching for the next stage of development. You’re getting physically mature now, but you don’t have quite your full height or curves yet. You don’t resent that.”

“I resent being told I’m incapable of deep feelings,” Kim declared, mouth sulky. In loose drawstring flannel pajama bottoms and a tiny tank top, she was the quintessential child-woman. “Does that mean I don’t really love you, either?”

Had she been this touchy at that age, Nell wondered.

Duh.

“Love for your parents is part of your makeup from the moment you’re born. Having that love—or need—reciprocated means survival for a baby. You’re barely reaching the age when that same kind of attachment between you and a man is part of your biological drive.”

Kim rolled her eyes. “You sound like a sex-ed film.”

“Are they necessarily wrong?”

Her daughter shrugged, staring moodily at the television again. “People used to get married by my age. Romeo and Juliet weren’t even sixteen.”

“Maybe physical development was compressed. Remember, they were old by their thirties.”

Interest sparked on Kim’s face. “You mean, you’d be an old lady?”

“Hey!” Nell protested. “I’m only thirty-two.”

“You said—”

“Okay.” She made a face. “Yeah. I’d have passed my prime childbearing years, assuming I hadn’t died in childbirth. For sure, you’d be giving me grandkids.” She couldn’t suppress a shudder.

Kim chortled. “You are so paranoid! You couldn’t even say that without freaking!”

“You know,” Nell said quietly, “I do have reason to be paranoid.”

“You think no teenager should ever fall in love or have sex, just because you got pregnant. Lots of my friends have sex, and they don’t get pregnant.”

Lots of her friends. Nell almost whimpered.

“Do they use birth control?”

“I guess.” Kim shrugged, as if it didn’t matter. “You’re just so old-fashioned! It’s not like I’d be ruined if I turned seventeen and I wasn’t a virgin anymore.”

Nell had always tried to be honest with her daughter. Now she admitted, “No, of course you wouldn’t be. But what if you did get pregnant? Remember, no method of birth control is one hundred percent effective. Would you be comfortable getting an abortion? Maybe some of your friends have.”

Kim was silent, head bent, a curtain of hair hiding what she knew.

“Is Colin prepared to marry you?” Nell continued relentlessly. “To pay child support? Are you willing to drop out of school, or switch to the alternative school, so you can be a mother?”

“It’s like, all you think about is pregnancy!” Kim burst out, lifting her head defiantly.

Familiar fear cramped Nell’s belly. If only Kim knew. This morning, three weeks and two days had passed since Nell’s drunken idiocy. Three weeks, and no period.

Don’t think about it, she ordered herself. Not now. Right now, think about Kim.

Holding her daughter’s gaze, Nell said, “I can’t change who I am. Grandma wasn’t ready to be a mother when I was born. I always knew that. And then I had you, which changed my life profoundly. You know I’ve never regretted having you, but I won’t lie—I’ve wished I’d been ten years older. That I could have finished high school like my friends, gone to college, dated. I missed all that, because I had a baby. If I seem obsessed, well, there’s a good reason.” She silenced Kim with a shake of her head. “Yeah, okay, I’m worried. That’s because you and Colin are spending so much time together, and because you ask me things like, ‘How do you know when you’re in love?’ But, see, I know what happens when you get pregnant at sixteen. I know what you feel when Colin is kissing you, or when you’re afraid he might find someone else if you keep saying no. And I love you. I want you to have what I didn’t.”

Kim flung herself off the couch and onto her mother’s lap, her face wet. “I’m sorry, Mom! I hate knowing that I worry you!”

Her own eyes damp, Nell kissed Kim’s forehead. “That’s what being a mother is all about.”

Sniff. “Am I crushing you?”

Nell gave a watery chuckle. “Yeah. But that’s okay.”

Kim burrowed deeper. “I just get confused. Sometimes I feel older than you were at sixteen!”

Wasn’t every teenager positive that she was more mature at every age than her parents had ever been? But Nell said gently, “I remember feeling that way, too. It’s part of believing the bad stuff won’t happen to you. But it does. It can.”

Kim was silent for a moment. Then she gave her mom a convulsive squeeze and wriggled off her lap. “Can I go on birth control, just in case?”

Nell’s heart sank. She tried not to show the intensity of her dismay. “I’d rather you did that, if you’ve decided to have sex.”

Chin defiantly high, Kim asked, “You’d give permission?”

“Yes. Which doesn’t mean I think you’re ready.”

The teenager pressed her lips together and gave a jerky nod. “Okay.”

“Just…let me know. If I need to sign something.”

Kim nodded again, averted her face, and went back to the couch. A second later, the movie blared into life.

Nell waited for a few minutes, staring blindly down at her book, before she set it down casually and stood. Not until she had left the room did she hurry. At the back of the house, in her own bathroom, she crumpled onto the toilet seat and buried her face in her hands.

She couldn’t be pregnant. Please, God, don’t let me be.

Her period had always been irregular. Just because she’d vaguely thought it was due didn’t mean anything. She didn’t pay that much attention. It might start tonight, tomorrow, next week. She had no cause to panic yet.

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