Believing Again: Book 5 in the Second Chances series (Crimson Romance)

by Peggy Bird

  Still, Danny wondered if she should tell L.T. about her relationship with him. Riding the light rail to work that morning she’d debated whether she should ask Sam for advice. He and Amanda had first gotten together when Amanda was suspected of actually being a perp in one of his homicides. But she also knew that giving her partner any more information about her involvement with Jake would fuel his curiosity and make him ask questions she might not want to answer.

  During the ride to the clinic in Old Town, she took a chance and broached the subject.

  “Sam, do you think L.T. needs to know that Jake and I are … that we’re … well, you know.”

  Sam grinned. “Actually I don’t know exactly because you won’t tell me. But I can guess. And my imagination’s running wild.”

  Danny began to regret her decision to ask his advice.

  Then he redeemed himself. “Seriously, I wouldn’t worry about it. We’ve cleared Jake of any involvement in this other than as a source of information. I’d tell you to be careful with what you say to him about what we find but I know you’d do that with anyone you were with.”

  “Yeah, I would.” She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. “It must have been pretty complicated getting involved with Amanda when she was suspected of murder.”

  “Complicated hardly begins to describe it. But it worked out okay. I mean, how could she resist falling for the man who was not only the best looking guy she’d ever seen but who kept rescuing her from the guys who wanted to make her take the fall for them? I even took a bullet for her.”

  “That part I know. I was there, remember?” She snorted trying to suppress a laugh. “I wonder if Amanda would answer the question the same way?”

  “She better. But let’s get back to the original question — I only told L.T. about Amanda and me after she became a suspect. This thing with Jake and you isn’t anything like it.”

  “Thanks. That makes me feel better.”

  “You’re welcome.” He was driving and glanced over at her.

  She was sure he was about to say something else but a parking space opened up near the clinic and he turned his attention to pulling into it.

  The clinic was in an old storefront and was obviously a bare-bones operation. The waiting area they walked into had an jumble of mismatched folding chairs and plastic patio chairs full of people waiting to be seen, institutional-green paint on the walls, chipped and cracked vinyl floor covering, and curtains on the side windows that hung limply with the exhaustion of too many trips through the washer and dryer. The large front windows were bare.

  In what passed for an office, created by a couple folding banquet tables and a few file cabinets, sat a frazzled-looking, middle-aged woman behind the only new-looking piece of equipment in sight — a computer. In addition to working on that, she was juggling two phones and the demands of people who, Danny assumed, were staff members who wandered in and out of her workspace ad lib, dropping charts and notes into her inbox.

  It didn’t take Danny long to see that Jake was there. Dressed in a white lab coat over jeans and the cable knit sweater which seemed to be his uniform for working at VMSC, he was hunkered down to listen to an old man in a wheelchair tell what seemed to be a long and involved story. He didn’t hurry the man along even though the front area was full of people waiting their turn to see someone.

  The two detectives walked up to the receptionist’s table and Sam showed his badge and introduced himself. “We’d like to talk to some of the staff,” he explained, “one at a time. In a place where we have some privacy.”

  The receptionist snickered. “Yeah, right. So would I. But we’re slammed right now. You’ll have to come back another time.”

  From behind them, Jake said, “I don’t think that’s how it works with the police, Greta.” Looking over her shoulder, Danny saw the huge grin on his face. “Nice to see you again.” There was no mistaking that he meant Danny but he hurried to include her partner by asking, “How can we help you, Sam?”

  “We’re on a fishing expedition,” Sam said. “We’re about ninety percent sure the cardboard in the camps came from here. But no one we’ve talked to seems to know how it got there. They all say it just appears. We think someone here might be the conduit, wittingly or not. So, we’d like to talk to your staff and see if anyone here knows anything. It’s the only lead we have so we’re following up on it.”

  “Greta’s right,” Jake said. “The medical staff is slammed right now. But I can rustle up a couple volunteers for you to talk to and one or two of the support staff who can give you a few minutes. If you can make do with that for about twenty minutes, when the lunch line opens at the soup kitchen down the street, our patients will magically disappear and the medical staff will be available to talk with you. That work?”

  “Works for me,” Sam said. Jake directed him to the staff coffee room which no one was using because they were so busy and sent in the man who was in charge of handling the recycling and other waste.

  When Jake returned to the waiting area, his eyes lit up with an amused expression as he said to Danny, “Now, what shall we do with you, Detective Hartmann? Got any good ideas?” In a lower voice, he added, “If you don’t, I have a few.”

  The innuendo in his voice sent a shiver up her back and peaked her nipples. Thank God she had on a sweater and jacket that hid her body’s instant reaction to him. “How about giving me a small private space and someone else to talk to. That should do it.” She fought to keep from smiling. “At least for the time being.”

  “You know,” he said, his voice even more quiet, “we never talked about what we were doing this weekend.”

  “I noticed. We were too busy doing things other than talking.”

  “Detective Hartmann, you are an astute observer.”

  “Comes with the territory, Doctor Abrams.”

  “So, this weekend? Saturday?”

  “How about at my house this time. I can’t cook as well as you can but you won’t starve.”

  “It’s not your food I’m hungry for, baby, believe me.” By now he was whispering.

  She looked around and was relieved no one seemed able to hear them, although one woman who averted her eyes when Danny caught her may have been watching. “Okay, then. Saturday at my house at six-thirty,” she whispered back.

  While Jake went off to find a space for Danny to use, she went over a clinic roster Greta provided for her. She was amazed by the number of people who worked there. The paid staff was small — an office manager, a doctor, a physician’s assistant, and Greta, a jack-of-all-jobs with the title of “clerk.” But over two dozen volunteers — doctors, nurses, medics, PAs, and others who did office work — made up for those small numbers. And that didn’t count the board, composed of prominent doctors and local business people who set policy and raised money for the clinic. It was an impressive operation.

  Their interviews with a couple volunteers brought out nothing new. When the waiting room cleared out as their clients went for lunch, the administrative and medical staff went, one by one, to talk to Danny or Sam. Only two bits of information seemed of interest. First, there was a division of opinion about the move to treat more patients with PTSD, which had occurred when Jake brought in two volunteer doctors with experience in that area. A few staff members wanted those patients left to the Veterans’ Administration to treat — mainly, it seemed, because of the long-term nature of the treatment. Everyone assured the detectives the difference of opinion had been professional and in the past but still, everyone also mentioned it.

  Sam reported the second bit of information. In his interview with a woman named Barbara Black, who identified herself as the CEO of the clinic (her actual title was office manager), she waxed eloquent on the skills of Adam Burns, the staff doctor who she referred to as “her doctor,” and complained he’d been relegated to mere support staff — her words — when Jake and his two colleagues had joined the volunteer team. Black believed that PTSD patients were b
est left to the VA for treatment because VMSC had fewer resources, very little time to give, and more people who wanted care than they often had staff available to treat. She blamed Jake and his colleagues for what she described as “straining the clinic’s resources” with their program.

  In interviews with Danny, several people acknowledged that Jake and Black had gone head to head at first about the changes he wanted to make, especially in the treatment of patients with PTSD. The personality clash between them was downplayed as just the result of a long-time administrator who had ruled the roost until a Young Turk had come along. It had all been settled long ago and no one thought anything about it now.

  Danny was curious about why the patients came to VMSC when there was a VA hospital on the hill near the Oregon Health and Sciences University. When she asked one of the volunteer physicians, he laughed, then described the experience several of his patients had when trying to qualify for care there. The men were eligible on paper, but somehow the system refused to accept them. After a dozen trips up Pill Hill to stand in long lines and argue with a bored clerk only to be refused treatment, they came to VSMC where no vet was turned away.

  Others of their patients had received a less-than-honorable discharge — some, ironically, because of PTSD-related behavior — which made them ineligible for VA care. Some preferred being treated for minor illnesses and injuries close to where they lived or bedded down. And then there were some who’d had a bad experience being treated in a VA hospital and swore never to return.

  It was easy to tell when the lunch kitchen closed at the mission down the street. The waiting area of the clinic was again inundated with people. Their access to clinic staff and volunteers now cut off, Danny mentioned to Sam that she was going to ask Jake to join them for a quick bite to eat, to run some information by him — although she recognized it was an excuse to be with him. So did Sam, if the raised eyebrow look when he agreed was any indication.

  But Jake had to leave for patient appointments at the other clinic, the one where he actually got paid for what he did. Danny had to settle for lunch with her partner.

  At least she knew she’d see Jake on Saturday. She began to plan the dinner she would cook as Sam negotiated through downtown traffic to his favorite hole-in-the-wall burger joint, swearing Danny to secrecy, as he always did, so his wife didn’t find out how often he ate there.

  Chapter Nine

  Unfortunately, nothing about Danny’s plans for dinner worked out the way she wanted. The grocery store didn’t have the halibut she’d planned to serve so she had to rework the menu to center on the salmon steaks that were available. Then the pears she poached for dessert fell apart in the pan, probably because she’d misjudged how ripe the fruit was and cooked them too long. She made the from-scratch gingerbread she’d planned to serve with the pears and, after she got the pan out of the oven, ran to the grocery store yet again to get more pears only to find they were all too ripe so she had to substitute ice cream.

  After that, the vacuum cleaner hose broke as she was getting the place presentable and the dust bunnies she was sucking up escaped back into the wilds under her couch. That she couldn’t fix right away and it took longer to mop and dust the non-electric way.

  It didn’t take too long. Her apartment was much smaller than Jake’s townhouse. It was all on one floor. The front door opened into a small living room with a smaller dining room behind it. Further back, a teeny kitchen was on the left and two bedrooms with a bath between them were on the right. The beauty of the place was that the original woodwork was still there, unpainted and in lovely condition. Danny had built-in bookshelves flanking an old coal fireplace — now converted to gas — in the living room and leaded glass over yet more shelves on both sides of the French doors between the living room and dining room. Several of the light fixtures were also original in the Arts- and-Crafts architectural style she loved.

  She’d furnished it mostly from Ikea, which seemed odd to some of her purist friends who would have pushed for Mission-style furniture, but it worked for her — the clean lines of the pale furniture she selected lightened the overwhelmingly dark wood original to the house.

  After changing the sheets on her platform bed in anticipation of Jake’s spending the night, she softened the pristine, virginal white of the bed with a brightly colored blanket, brought in a dozen candles, and put out clean towels in her bathroom.

  When everything was finally set, she picked up a book and headed for a long soak in the tub, only to get a phone call late in the afternoon that changed it all. Another vet had been shot, and Danny was the first cop called, since it was the weekend Sam had his two sons from his first marriage with him. On her way to the scene, she called Jake to warn him their evening might be a bit different from the one they’d planned. He told her he’d meet her at the camp.

  • • •

  Because it was a cold and rainy day, most of the people in the camp under the Burnside Bridge were in their shelters to get out of the weather. Apparently, the gray clouds and dusky sky had made the shooter brave. He’d stopped in the middle of the camp, stuck a weapon out the car window — the same weapon used in the other murders, from the looks of the shell casings — and fired randomly. Panic had ensued both under and above the bridge, where hundreds of people were wandering through the Saturday Market.

  Everyone scattered. Only a few people took the time to look at the car. Again, the description was of a dark sedan but this time there was agreement that it was black with an H symbol on the back. Danny walked away from one heated — and slightly drunken — argument over whether the H was upright and therefore a Honda or slanted and therefore a Hyundai. License plate ID was even less sure. One person said it was MLS, another MIS, a third MLC. No one remembered numbers.

  That questionable identification, the shell casings, and muddy tire tracks were the only real information Danny got. There wasn’t much to go on about the perp. He wore a dark Balaclava mask and a dark turtleneck, and was in a dark car on a gray day.

  The victim had not been hit in the random firing. He had been hit running away from the shooter after the people in the camp began to scatter. Danny was sure the perp had fired to get people moving then singled out his target and shot him before speeding away.

  Once again the dead man was a patient of Jake’s at the clinic.

  Obviously distressed that yet another of his patients had been shot, Jake stayed the whole time she was working on scene. He went from shelter to shelter, patching up men who’d been hurt in the melee, checking on those he knew had PTSD and might be having flashbacks from the gunfire, making sure there were no more wounded.

  Finally, about nine P.M., after all the interviews were completed and everyone who needed to be had been treated, Jake walked with Danny to her car.

  “I’m sorry our evening got screwed up like this,” she said.

  “No more than I am. But we still have a few hours of the evening left,” he said.

  “I’m afraid I’m too tired to cook dinner.”

  “I was thinking we’d go to my house, which is closer anyway, and I’d heat up the Hungarian mushroom soup I made this afternoon for my lunch. I have leftovers. Then maybe a soak in the spa tub.”

  “You have a hot tub in your yard?”

  “A spa tub in my bathroom. Didn’t you notice it last weekend?”

  “No, I can’t believe missed it. Maybe I don’t deserve to be a detective after all.”

  “Well, we were pretty busy with other activities.” For the first time since he’d arrived, his sexy grin made an appearance.

  “So, you have homemade soup. You have a hot tub in your house. What other services do you offer, Doctor Abrams, for the wet, tired, and cold women you pick up under bridges?”

  He circled her shoulders with his arm. “I may have a few ideas. I’ll let you know when you get to my house. You remember how to get there?”

  • • •

  The soup was delicious. Danny sopped up every last drop
with the French bread Jake served with it. When they were finished, he directed her to the master bathroom where, in a large room adjacent to where the shower and sinks were, there was a huge spa tub that looked big enough to have a party in.

  She turned on the water to fill the tub then took off her boots and started to undress. No, she decided. Jake had made a point of saying that was his job. She’d wait for him. Although she couldn’t figure out what was taking him so long. Was he doing the dishes? Should she have stayed and helped?

  When he answered the question by arriving with an armload of candles, she said, “Candles? You’re a secret romantic?”

  Jake looked startled, maybe even hurt. “Is that bad? I thought … but if you don’t want … ”

  She reached for two of the candles and put them on the ledge above the tub. “You’re sweet, Jake. And it’s not bad, it’s wonderful. You surprise me, that’s all.”

  “That’s a change. So far, it’s been the other way around.” He started lighting the candles.

  When he was finished, he opened a cabinet, brought out a stack of fluffy looking towels, and turned off the overhead lights. “I’m sorry we missed our dinner at your house,” he said as he took her in his arms, “but I loved watching you work. You’re very good at your job, aren’t you?”

  “It’s more than just my job, Jake. It’s who I am. Like being a doctor is who you are. And I can say the same thing about you — seeing you with those guys at the clinic really showed me the kind of man you are.”

  “And did you like what you saw?”

  “Oh, yeah. I liked it very much.” She stood on tiptoes and reached around his neck with one hand, pulling his mouth closer to hers. She set the pace for their kiss, urging his lips apart with her tongue, exploring his mouth when he complied. His hands slid down over her waist and hips to cup her bottom and pull her closer to him, to where she could feel the beginnings of his erection.