Twice a Hero, Always Her Man Read online

“Where to?” Ellie asked.

  Jerry held up the written directive he’d just received for them. “Blake wants us to do a story about this police detective at the police station.”

  “Blake?” she questioned, puzzled. She fell into step beside her cameraman as he went out of the building and to the parking lot where their news van was waiting for them. “You mean Marty, don’t you?” Marty Stern was the one who handed out their assignments, not the station manager.

  “No,” Jerry insisted, “I mean Blake.” It had struck him as odd as it did her, but he’d learned not to question things that came from on high. “This assignment came down from Edward Blake himself.”

  She hurried down the steps into the lot without even looking at them. “Why?”

  Reaching the van, Jerry shrugged as he got in on the driver’s side. He glanced over his shoulder to check that his equipment was where he had put it earlier. It was a nervous habit of his since there was no place else his camera and the rest of his gear could be. The cameraman always packed it into the van first thing on arrival each morning. But checking on its position was somehow comforting to him.

  Satisfied that it was there, he turned forward again. “That’s above my pay grade,” he told her. “I’m just relating the message and telling you what he said he wanted.”

  After putting the key into the ignition, Jerry turned it and the van hummed to life.

  “All I know is that this detective had just swung by Los Naranjos Elementary School to drop off his kid—a niece, I think Blake said—and he almost tripped over the thief. Who cut him off as he raced by.” Jerry told her with disbelief. “Anyway, when the detective followed the guy, he wound up cornering him in a storage unit. Guess what else was in the storage unit.”

  Ellie was watching the cluster of residential streets pass by her side window. The tranquil scene wasn’t even registering. She felt more tired than usual and it was hard for her to work up any enthusiasm for what she was hearing, even the fake kind.

  “It’s Monday, Jerry. I don’t do guessing games until Tuesday,” she told the cameraman as if it was a rule written somewhere.

  Undaunted, Jerry continued his riveting edge-of-her-seat story. “The detective found a bunch of other paintings stored there that, it turns out, had been stolen over the last eighteen months. It’s your favorite,” the cameraman pointed out. “Namely, a happy-ending story.”

  “Not for the thief,” Ellie murmured under her breath.

  Jerry heard her. “That’s not the lede Blake wants us to go with,” he told her. “Turns out that this isn’t this detective’s first brush with being in the right place at the right time.”

  “Oh?” Ellie did her best to sound interested, but she was really having trouble raising her spirits this morning. She’d resigned herself to the fact that some mornings were just going to be worse than others and this was one of those mornings. She needed to work on that, Ellie told herself silently. Jerry didn’t deserve to be sitting next to a morose woman.

  Maybe coffee would help, she reasoned.

  “Yeah,” Jerry was saying as he navigated the streets, heading for the precinct. “I didn’t get the details to that. Figure maybe you could do a follow-up when you do the interview.”

  She nodded absently, still not focused on the story. Out of sheer desperation, Ellie forced herself to make a few notes. Something had to spark her. “What’s the detective’s name?”

  Jerry shrugged. “Blake said we’re supposed to ask the desk sergeant to speak to the detective who uncovered the stolen paintings.”

  “In other words, you don’t have a name,” she concluded.

  The curly-headed cameraman spared her an apologetic look. “Sorry. Blake seemed in a hurry for us to get there. Said the story had already been carried on the radio station. Wanted us there before another news station beat us to it.”

  Well, that was par for the course, Ellie thought. She sighed. “Why is it that every story is the story—until it’s not?”

  She received a wide, slightly gap-toothed smile in response. “Beats me. All I know is that all this competition is good for my paycheck. I’ve got a college tuition to fund.”

  “Jackie is only five,” she reminded him, referring to the cameraman’s only child.

  Jerry nodded, acting as if she had made his point for him. “Exactly. I can’t let the grass grow beneath my feet.”

  Jerry stepped on the gas.

  * * *

  The police department was housed in a modern-looking building that was barely seven years old. Prior to that, the city’s core had been domiciled in an old building that dated back to the ’50s and had once contained farm supplies. People still called the present location the new precinct. Centrally located, it was less than five miles from the news station. They got there in no time flat, even though every light had been against them.

  Ellie got out first, but Jerry’s legs were longer and he reached the building’s front entrance several strides ahead of her.

  “Ladies first,” the cameraman told her, holding the door open for Ellie.

  She smiled as she passed him and headed straight for the desk sergeant’s desk. She made sure she took out her credentials and showed them to the dour-faced man before she identified herself.

  Even so, the desk sergeant, a snow-white-haired man whose shoulders had assumed a permanent slump, presumably from the weight of the job, took his time looking up at the duo.

  The moment he did, Ellie began talking. “I’m Ellie King and this is my cameraman, Jerry Ross.” She told him the name of her news studio, then explained, “We’re here to interview one of your detectives.”

  White bushy eyebrows gathered together in what seemed to be a preset scowl as the desk sergeant squinted at her credentials.

  “Any particular one?” he asked in a voice that was so low it sounded as if he was filtering it over rocks.

  “Detective,” he said a bit more loudly when she didn’t answer his question. “You want to interview any particular one?” His voice did not become any friendlier as it grew in volume.

  “The one who caught that art thief,” Jerry answered, speaking up.

  The desk sergeant, Sergeant Nolan according to the name plate on his desk, scowled just a tad less as he nodded. “You wanna talk to Benteen,” he told them.

  The moment Nolan said the name, it all but echoed inside her head.

  It couldn’t be, Ellie thought. Breathe, Ellie, breathe!

  “Excuse me,” she said out loud, feeling like someone in the middle of a trance. “Did you say Benteen?”

  “Yeah. Detective Colin Benteen,” the desk sergeant confirmed, acting as if each word he uttered had come from some private collection he was loath to share with invasive civilians. Nolan turned to look at a patrolman on his right. “Mallory, tell Benteen to come down here. There’re some people here who want to talk to him.”

  Having sent the patrolman on his errand, the sergeant turned his attention to the people from the news station. “You two wait over there,” he growled, pointing to an area by the front window that was empty. “And don’t get in the way,” he warned.

  “Friendly man,” Jerry commented, moving to the space that the sergeant had indicated. When he turned around to glance at Ellie, he saw that she’d suddenly gone very pale. A measure of concern entered his eyes. “You feeling all right, Ellie?”

  “Yes,” she responded. Her voice sounded hollow to her ears.

  It was an automatic response, but the thing was that she wasn’t all right. She’d recognized the name of the detective, and for a moment, everything had frozen within her. She tried to tell herself it was just an odd coincidence. Maybe it was just a relative. After all, Benteen wasn’t that uncommon a name.

  It had been a patrolman with that last name who had come to the scene of the robb
ery that had stolen Brett from her. This was a detective they were waiting for.

  Because of the circumstances that had been involved and the fact that she had removed herself from the scene, Ellie had never actually met the policeman who had arrived shortly after Brett had foiled the robbery. The patrolman, she was later told, who’d tried—and failed—to save Brett’s life.

  But she knew his name and at the time had promised herself that as soon as she was up to it, she would seek out this Officer Benteen and thank him for what he had tried to do—even if he had ultimately failed.

  But a day had turned into a week and a week had turned into a month.

  After several of those had passed, she gave up the notion of finding the policeman to thank him for his efforts.

  After a while, the thought of talking to the man who had watched Brett’s life ebb away only brought back the scene to her in vivid colors. A scene she was still trying, even at this point, to come to grips with. She honestly didn’t think that she was up to it. So eventually she avoided pursuing the man altogether.

  Jerry was watching her with concern. “You don’t look fine. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that you look like you’re about to break into a cold sweat.”

  “Jerry, I already have a mother,” she told him, an annoyed edge in her voice—she didn’t like being read so easily. “I said I’m fine.”

  He was not convinced and was about to say as much when she turned away from him and toward the man she saw walking toward them. The expression on her face had Jerry turning, as well. If anything, she appeared even paler than she had a moment ago.

  “You look like you’re seeing a ghost,” he remarked uneasily.

  The universe was sending her a message, she thought. It was time to tie up this loose end.

  “Not a ghost,” she answered. “Just someone I never got to thank properly.”

  The moment she said that, Jerry knew. The name the desk sergeant had said had been nagging at him. He knew it from somewhere...

  “Oh God, you mean that’s him?” Jerry cried. “The policeman who...?”

  She waved the cameraman into silence, her attention fully focused on the tall, athletic-looking man in the navy jacket, gray shirt and jeans who was walking toward them.

  He had a confident walk, she noted, like someone who felt he had the angels on his side. Maybe he did, she thought.

  Ellie unconsciously squared her shoulders as the detective drew closer.

  It was time to make up for her omission. The only thing that was left to decide was whether she would do it before they began the interview so she could get it out of the way or wait until after the interview was over so that it wouldn’t make the man feel awkward or uncomfortable. Viewers were always quick to pick up on awkwardness and she didn’t want to cause the detective any undue discomfort. It didn’t make for a good segment, and after all, wasn’t that why she was here?

  Ellie made up her mind. The information as to who they were to one another could wait until after she finished talking to him, for the benefit of the home audience.

  It took a great deal of effort for her, but by now she was used to playing a part.

  Ellie forced a welcoming smile to her face and put out her hand to the detective as he came forward. Her entire attention was now on making the hero of the moment feel comfortable.

  “Hi,” she greeted him. “I’m Ellie and this is Jerry, and we’d like to ask you a few questions about those paintings you uncovered.”

  Chapter Three

  The woman standing by the front window next to the pleasant-faced hulk with the unruly hair was cute.

  Beyond cute, Colin amended. There was something appealing about her that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. As best as he could analyze it, he sensed an intriguing combination of sadness mixed with an undercurrent of energy radiating from her.

  And, more startling and thus far more important, he realized that for the first time in months, he found himself both attracted and interested.

  There’d been a time when his older brother, Ryan, had called him a ladies’ man, a “babe magnet” and a number of less flattering but equally descriptive terms. And at the time, they had all been rather accurate.

  But all that had been before life had abruptly changed for him. Before his brother and sister-in-law, Jennifer, had been involved in that freak skiing accident that had resulted in their being swallowed up by an avalanche. Who could have predicted this outcome when Ryan and Jennifer had gone on a last-minute spur-of-the-moment vacation because a late-season unexpected snowfall had occurred and they were both avid skiers?

  Just like that, in the blink of an eye, he suddenly found himself the only family that their only daughter, Heather, had left.

  His personality, not to mention his priorities, had changed overnight. He hadn’t been on so much as a date since he’d had to fly to Aspen to identify Ryan and Jennifer’s bodies and to pick up his niece. Heather had been in bed asleep when it had all happened. Her parents had opted to sneak in a quick early-morning ski run before she woke up—not thinking that it would be the last thing that they would ever do.

  Stunned, Colin had never thought twice about assuming this new responsibility. He turned his entire life around, then and there, vowing that Heather would always come first.

  He couldn’t give up what he did for a living—he’d worked too hard to get to where he was. It came with its own set of dangers, and that couldn’t be helped. But he could definitely make sure that any time outside his job would go to being with Heather, to making sure that she wouldn’t be permanently scarred by the loss of her parents. He’d vowed that he would always be there when Heather needed him to make the night terrors go away.

  But just for a moment, this petite woman standing before him took Colin back to the man he had been before all of this had happened to change his life. It made him remember just how he’d felt when a really attractive woman crossed his path.

  “Detective?” Ellie prodded when he didn’t seem to have heard her, or at least wasn’t attempting to respond to her greeting.

  “Sorry,” Colin apologized, rousing himself out of the temporary mental revelry he’d fallen into. He flashed a smile at her that one of his former girlfriends had called “naturally sexy.” “I got distracted for a moment.”

  She was about to ask him if it was because he recalled who she was, but then she remembered that she had given him only her first name. Even if she’d told him her full name, that wouldn’t necessarily mean that the detective would remember her husband and that fatal night at the convenience store.

  Or even if he did recall every moment of that night, there was no reason to believe that he would make the connection between her and the man he couldn’t save. King was, after all, a common enough name. Most likely, Benteen probably hadn’t even gotten Brett’s name after everything had gone back to normal—or as normal as it could have gone back to, she silently corrected.

  No, if the detective was distracted on her account, he was probably trying to place where he’d seen her before.

  As if the presence of a cameraman wasn’t enough of a clue, she thought wryly.

  “No problem,” Ellie told the detective. In her opinion, that was a throwaway line that blanketed a lot of territory. She just wanted to do this story and move on. “Your CO told us we could take up a little of your time and ask you about the huge coup you just scored.”

  Colin looked at her puzzled, not quite following the sexy reporter. “Excuse me?”

  “The paintings,” Ellie prompted. “The stolen paintings that were in the storage unit you found.”

  Colin nodded in response but said nothing.

  “Well?” she asked, waiting for him to start speaking. Talk about having to pull words out of someone’s mouth. The detective was either exceptionally modest
or exceedingly camera shy.

  “That about covers it,” he told her.

  She could see by the look that Jerry gave her that he had the same thought as she did. This wasn’t going to film well, not unless she could find a way to make this detective come around and start talking. She had a feeling that he would engage the audience once he got comfortable.

  “You’re being modest,” she said, her voice coaxing him to elaborate.

  He surprised her by saying, “Bragging rights aren’t a part of this job.”

  Okay, she thought. He did need to be coaxed. A lot. She had to admit that this wasn’t what she’d expected. Some people, once they got in front of a camera, wouldn’t stop talking. This one seemed reluctant to even start.

  “Still, I’m sure that it’s not every police detective who gets to take down an art thief who’s been plaguing the city.”

  “I really can’t take any kind of credit for what happened. It’s not as if this was the result of long hours of planning.” He shrugged. “This was all actually just a big accident,” Colin told her.

  The job had made her somewhat cynical. It wasn’t anything that she was particularly proud of, just a fact. But Ellie was beginning to believe that the detective was being serious. He was the genuine article. And because of this, she found herself trying to reach out to Benteen.

  “There’s that modesty again,” she said. “I tell you what—why don’t you walk me through exactly what happened and we’ll go from there?”

  She could see by the look on the detective’s face that he was about to dismiss the whole incident. It made him a rare find in her book. Most men couldn’t stop talking about themselves. But the station manager obviously was expecting a story and she wasn’t about to come back empty-handed. It wasn’t advisable.

  “Word for word,” Ellie urged again. “Paint a picture for me, so to speak.”

  Colin glared at the camera in Jerry’s hands. It was clearly the enemy. “Are you going to film this?”

  “That is the idea,” Ellie said breezily. “Jerry’s just going to keep on filming and when we’re done, it’ll be edited down to about a minute of airtime. Two, tops,” she promised. She could see that the detective was wavering. All he needed was a little push that would send him over to her side. She felt she had just the thing. “You get final say on the footage.”