Her Lawman on Call Read online

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Tony looked thoughtfully at what he’d typed. “Except for tonight.”

  “Except for tonight,” Sasha repeated softly. And then she looked at him as a fresh thought struck her. “Who’s going to tell her husband? Who’s going to tell Arthur?”

  Arthur. That had to be the handyman husband, Tony thought. “I am.” He’d done it more times than he cared to remember, and he hated it each and every time, but someone had to and he was not one to shirk responsibilities. He rose from his chair. They were done here for the night. “As soon as I take you home.”

  She got to her feet as well. “To the hospital,” Sasha corrected. “My car’s still in the parking structure.”

  “Okay,” he agreed, mentally changing his route, “I’ll take you to the hospital. There are still patrolmen there.” Dropping her off would be safe.

  “Look, why don’t you take me to Rachel’s place first?” she suggested suddenly. Tony looked at her quizzically. Now what? “This is going to be a huge shock for her husband when you tell him. He’s not in the best of health. He had a heart attack just before the children came to live with them. You don’t want to chance that happening again.” She gave a half shrug. “Maybe I can help soften the blow.”

  Tony searched her face, looking for signs of logic, trying to understand her reasoning. “How do you do that, Doc? How do you soften death?”

  Was he insulting her? Sasha looked at him. “Are you always this abrasive, or do I just bring it out in you?”

  He didn’t answer. Not directly. “Actually, this is one of my better days.”

  Sasha rolled her eyes and shook her head. “God help the world.”

  “My thought exactly.” It was a droll remark at his own expense, she thought. Except that he was looking at her when he said it. “Okay, you want to come, come.” She was surprised he didn’t offer more of a resistance. “You can help with the kids if they’re up.”

  Sasha walked toward the doorway. “We seem to be on the same page, Detective.”

  “I wouldn’t get used to that if I were you.”

  She looked at Santini a second before she preceded him into the corridor. “I wouldn’t dream of it, Detective.”

  As it turned out, Rachel’s grandsons were not up and neither was her husband. It took a great deal of knocking and ringing before the sound of any sort of rustling was heard from within the first-floor apartment.

  Opening the door a crack, leaving the chain securely fastened and in place, Arthur Wells looked like a man who’d been pulled out of the arms of a very deep sleep. His eyes at half-mast, he resisted taking the chain off even after Tony held up his badge for inspection. It was only after he heard Sasha introduce herself and say that this was about his wife that he finally opened the door for them.

  “Rachel’s mentioned you, Doctor,” Arthur told her, gesturing toward his living room. “She worked with you in the ER once,” he recalled for her benefit, in case she didn’t remember. “Said you were something to watch under pressure. My Rachel doesn’t usually give favorable comments.” A smile quirked across his lips nervously, as if he was instinctively attempting to forestall something he knew he didn’t want to hear. He looked from her to the detective. “Can I get you something?” Arthur began to edge away toward the small kitchen. “Coffee? Water? I’ve got some soda in the refrigerator, but—”

  “Mr. Wells,” Tony began, his tone serious, his expression more so.

  Frightened, nervous brown eyes darted toward the detective, then toward her, silently imploring her not to allow any words to be said that couldn’t be taken back. Words that would ultimately shatter and destroy his small world.

  Sasha stepped in between the detective and Mr. Wells. Barefoot, he was shorter than she was, but almost as wide as he was tall. At the moment, he looked completely devoid of strength, as if every one of his years weighed heavily on his shoulders. She took the man’s hands in hers. They were large, capable and rough, reminding her of her father’s hands. There was nothing that her father couldn’t repair or build if he set his mind to it. She had a feeling Arthur was the same way.

  Her heart went out to the man. “Mr. Wells,” she began softly, “I am very, very sorry—”

  “No,” he moaned, tears springing to his eyes, “No, no, no.”

  The burly man began to sway. Sasha threw her arms around him and was just barely able to keep him from sinking to the floor. She looked over her shoulder at the detective. “A little help here.”

  Tony stepped in quickly, assuming the bulk of the sagging weight. Between them, they managed to get Arthur to the sofa.

  “Not the best bedside technique,” Tony commented, stepping back from the man.

  Obviously a case of the pot calling the kettle black, she thought. For the sake of the grieving man on the sofa, she bit back a more terse retort and merely replied, “Like you said, there’s really no way to soften a blow like this.”

  Arthur’s wide, florid face looked drained. He took two quick breaths to sustain himself before trying to speak.

  “Is she—is she—?” But he couldn’t bring himself to finish the question, to say the words that would acknowledge his final separation from the wife he’d loved and fought with for forty-three years.

  Tony delivered the news swiftly. To him, it was like removing a Band-Aid. You tore it off quickly. Anything else only prolonged the agony. “Someone killed her in the parking garage at PM.”

  Arthur’s eyes widened in confusion. “The parking garage?” he echoed, shaking his head as if there had to be some sort of mistake, some sort of mix-up. “We don’t even have a car.”

  “Then someone must have lured her there,” Tony concluded.

  Under what pretext? he wondered. Another piece of the puzzle that didn’t seem to fit anywhere. Yet. And instead of a single murder, or two, it looked as if they had a serial killer on their hands. Targeting nurses? All nurses, or just those from that particular hospital? Or was there something else entirely going on?

  “Who? Why?” Arthur cried, his voice cracking with each word.

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out, Mr. Wells,” Tony told him. He began to ask the man a question, but Sasha cut him off.

  “Do you have anyone we could call for you? Someone who could stay with you?” Sasha asked. She could feel Tony glaring at her, but right now, this was more important, making certain that the man didn’t remain alone in the first few hours of his grief.

  Arthur looked at her blankly, as if thinking was far too hard a process for him to cope with.
And then, just as she was about to repeat the question, he nodded. “Rachel’s brother. Her younger brother.” The words were tumbling out, disjointed. He was struggling not to cry. “Jerry. I can call Jerry.”

  Sasha was already taking out her cell phone. “Give me his telephone number, Mr. Wells. I’ll call him for you.”

  Arthur swallowed, nodding his head. It took him a few minutes before he could remember the numbers in the right order. But before she could begin pressing the proper buttons on the cell phone keypad, he caught her wrist.

  “Could you stay with me until Jerry gets here?” he asked brokenly. “If the boys wake up—oh God, what am I going to tell the boys?” He looked at her, stricken. “Their father and mother already walked out on them. How are they going to deal with this?”

  “Kids are more resilient than you think,” Tony told him before she had a chance to reply.

  Sasha looked at the tall detective, wondering what he had gone through in his own life that would make him say something like that. He didn’t strike her as the kind of man who would offer up empty platitudes in order to comfort anyone. She doubted if he knew how.

  “I’ll stay with you,” she promised, then pressed the keys that connected her to Rachel Wells’s brother. She braced herself for the ordeal.

  His hands shoved into his pockets, Tony waited until she finished talking to the victim’s brother. When she terminated the call, he took her aside.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  The blunt question caught her off guard. Didn’t this man have a clue about what people felt? “Because I hate to see anyone in pain,” she said simply. And that was it, the long and the short of it. The sum total of what motivated her.

  He glanced over toward Arthur, then back at her. “Look, I can’t—”

  She anticipated his words. “You don’t have to stay here with me. I can catch a cab back to the hospital and get my car after his brother-in-law gets here.” She paused for a second, trying to conquer the kernel of fear that threatened to erupt, then asked, “You’ve got patrolmen posted there, don’t you? I mean, it’s still a new crime scene, right?”

  “Right.”

  She was trying to mask it, but she was afraid. Fear was a good thing, it kept civilians from doing reckless things—something he didn’t put entirely past her. Tony blew out a breath. He didn’t like the idea of her going back to the parking structure alone. His men had swept through all the levels, but there were no guarantees in life about anything.

  “Hang on,” he finally said. “Let me make a call.”

  Before she could ask why he was even bothering to mention making a call to her, Tony had turned away, connecting to someone with a single press of a button. With a shrug o f her shoulders, Sasha turned her attention to the broken man sitting on the sagging sofa.

  He looked, she thought as she came over to him, as if someone had stolen his soul.

  Sitting down beside him, she placed her hand over his. “You need to stay strong, Mr. Wells. For your grandsons’ sake. They’re going to need you more than ever.”

  “What about me?” Arthur wanted to know, his voice breaking. “What about what I need?”

  “That comes later,” she said softly. “You do what you have to to get through a day, and then two days and then a week. A month…until there’s enough time between you and the pain for you to be able to attempt to handle it.”

  Arthur shook his head. A tear slid down, hitting the top of her hand. “I don’t think I can.”

  “You can.” Her voice was firm beneath the soft tone. “We’re all stronger than we think we are.”

  Numbly, Arthur nodded his head, staring straight ahead at the framed candid shot of his wife on the coffee table. She was laughing. He looked as if he never would again.

  Sasha could sense the detective’s eyes on her before she looked up to see him standing there. Santini was less than a foot away, looking at her with an expression she couldn’t begin to read.

  He flipped the phone closed. “I’ll stay with you until his brother-in-law comes.”

  There was no room for selfless protests so she didn’t bother making any. She welcomed the company.

  Chapter 5

  Bart Henderson hung up the phone with such force the resulting contact sounded as if something was being thrown. It caught Tony’s attention. He raised an inquiring eyebrow and looked in his partner’s direction. Of the two of them, the burly Henderson was the one who could be accused of being sunny, despite the fact that each morning, Tony could overhear him reviewing a litany of complaints about what offending part of his body hurt the most that day. He was usually exchanging the information with the other “old-timer” in the squad room, Harold Lincoln.

  Henderson usually didn’t display any evidence of a shortness of temper. As far as Tony knew, his partner’s temper had no end.

  Unlike his own.

  Henderson sighed, leaning back in his chair. The resulting breeze ruffled a few papers on his desk, bringing them precariously close to the edge. He moved them back where they belonged and narrowed his small eyes even further. They nearly disappeared beneath the tufts of fading red eyebrows as he looked at his partner.

  “That was the hospital administrator at Our Lady of Patience Memorial Hospital. Again,” he growled. “She wants to know if we’ve made any headway in our investigations.” The man glanced in his direction hopefully. “Have we?”

  Tony thought of the cool, tall blonde he’d interviewed the morning after the first body had been discovered, and then again when the second was found. In her late forties and slender, Lauren James had a chin that seemed to be permanently raised, giving her the appearance of looking down on everyone she dealt with. Her manner did nothing to change that impression.

  Tony shook his head. “Not unless there’s been a break in the case in the last five minutes that I don’t know about.”

  They’d been at this for three weeks now, fielding calls from well-meaning people that always led nowhere, interviewing everyone remotely associated with the two women and relentlessly going over the data that the crime labs sent up. So far, they were no further along than when they’d started.

  “Dunno why she’s calling me. You’re the one she talked to before.” Henderson looked at him over the top of his rimless glasses. “I guess maybe I look friendlier to her.”

  “Maybe,” Tony agreed, already retreating back into the file he’d been reviewing when Henderson had intentionally dropped the receiver.

  Restless, Henderson rocked in his chair. “She says the murders are bad publicity for the hospital.”

  “Murders generally are,” Tony commented, trying to block out the annoying sound made by Henderson’s chair. Certain sounds had a tendency to distract him.

  Just like certain thoughts did. And ever since he’d taken this case, he’d found that doctor, the one who’d been the first one on the scene both times, intruding into his thoughts at very odd, unforeseeable times. He didn’t know what to make of it yet.

  Maybe his mind trying to tell him something he’d missed. And then again, maybe not.

  Tony turned his chair and looked back at the bulletin board on the wall behind him. The actual board had a multitude of tiny holes, evidence of all the thumbtacks that had been driven into it over time, securing bits and pieces of other murders he’d solved. Or that had temporarily been left unsolved.

  The puzzles gave him no peace until he either solved them or something larger took their place. But once that was done, once the current case was put to bed, the old, unsolved cases would resurface to haunt him until he finally had all the pieces in the right place. Until he found the killer.

  Because of his junkyard-dog tendency never to let go, Tony had an unprecedented record for solved homicides within the precinct. Probably, he’d been told, within the country.

  Right now, the board had the photographs of both nurses and every scrap of information he and Henderson had gathered that stood out. The rest of the information existe
d within his notebook and the hard drive of his computer. A great deal of that overlapped.

  There wasn’t much to go on. Both victims were females, both were nurses, both worked at PM, but then the similarities ended. The two women had moved in different circles. One had been in her twenties, the other in her sixties, one was a single mother, the other a grandmother raising two grandchildren. They were both struggling to get by, but he didn’t see that as a strong connecting factor.

  At least, Tony amended, looking from one photograph to the other, not yet.

  And what did the note that they’d both been clutching mean? Obviously, it was from the killer. Was it someone who hated nurses in general and wasn’t educated enough to know that the phrase he’d typed referred to physicians and not nurses?

  Or was it more personal than that? More devious than that? Was there a clue within a clue that he wasn’t seeing?

  “You know,” he theorized out loud, “one of the murders could have been committed to cover the other.”

  Henderson pushed away from his desk and turned his chair to face him. “Come again?”

  Tony stood up and went to the board. “Someone had it in for either Angela or Rachel and kills the other one to make it look like some dumb serial killer is on the loose.”

  Henderson wrinkled his brow, trying to follow the reasoning. “Why dumb?”

  Tony glanced at the data beneath each photograph, summarizing the last few hours of each victim’s life. Nothing remarkable sprang out. “‘First do no harm’ is the beginning of the Hippocratic Oath, not a pledge a nurse makes.”

  “Maybe they should have.” When Tony looked at his partner, Henderson shrugged his wide shoulders beneath the hound’s-tooth jacket he always wore. “Maybe one of them—or both—did some harm.”

  Tony slowly nodded his head. It was a possibility. But only one of many. It carried no extra weight at the moment.

  For the time being, he mentally filed it away.

  “Nothing stands out, yet,” he told Henderson. And he could only sit at his desk, playing with papers, pecking his way along on the keyboard, for so long. He needed to be hands-on, to be out in the field. “I’m going back to the hospital to nose around. Talk to the security guard who found the first one.”