All That Remains

by Janice Kay Johnson

  “Detective Lontz,” a gruff voice in his ear said. “What can I do for you?”

  Alec introduced himself and explained Wren’s situation. “The boyfriend lives in Seattle. I’m hoping you can send someone to find out whether the guy is where he ought to be. That would give her some breathing room.”

  “Arkansas,” the Seattle cop said thoughtfully. “I’ve been reading about the floods. Your county had trouble?”

  Alec laughed, although the sound was grim. “Yeah. I spent most of the last week in a twelve-foot aluminum boat plucking people off rooftops. In fact, the lady I called about got stuck in it. Her rental car is still underwater, all her belongings are gone, and she gave birth in the attic of an abandoned farmhouse.”

  “I’ll see what I can do. You got a name?”

  “James Vincent Miner.” He gave the address, phone number and name of employer that he’d extracted from Wren. “Any history on him would be good, too.”

  “You’re taking this seriously.”

  “He stopped her from running once before. Hurt her pretty bad, kicked her belly presumably to try to kill the baby. You should have a domestic call on that one.” He paused, knowing he hadn’t really answered the unspoken question. With the best will in the world, cops couldn’t devote a lot of attention to threats from stalker ex-boyfriends and husbands. There were enough crimes happening now, resources tended to be stretched to their limit without wasting them on future maybe/maybe not assaults.

  “I delivered her baby,” he said, reluctantly.

  “You’re taking this personally.”

  “I guess I am.” He braced himself.

  “I can spare time to run a check on this guy. What’s the best number to reach you?”

  Alec gave his cell phone number and thanked him.

  He was frowning into space when he realized someone was standing in front of his desk. His sergeant, a wiry little guy with thinning red hair and the personality of a blow fly—loud, persistent and capable of hurting you.

  “Nice to know you’ve got time to put your feet up.”

  Alec only raised his eyebrows. Never let ’em know you’re afraid. “I’m thinking. That’s what you pay me to do.”

  “Right now what I’m paying you to do is head down to Carter’s Computers and Cameras. Everybody else is tied up. We’ve got a report of looters.”

  Alec grunted and swung his feet to the floor. Nothing like general misery to bring the termites crawling out of the woodwork. “Do I need a boat?”

  Sergeant Pruitt shrugged. “Probably not. Hipwaders, maybe.”

  In other words, he would be getting wet again. Damn, but he wanted his corner of the world to dry out again. Heading for the door, he had a wistful image of spring with the dogwoods and hawthorn blooming and the yellow honeysuckles that grew along creeks releasing their sweet scent. Leaves coming out on the oak trees, the smallmouth bass spawning in creeks and rivers burbling gently within their banks. Alec didn’t look forward to the sweltering heat of summer, but spring… That was something else.

  Two hours later, he was booking the one looter he’d gotten his hands on—a seventeen-year-old kid who kept claiming he was just looking around even though there were three high-end digital cameras in his backpack. Despite the rubber boots Alec had worn, his jeans were soaked to his thighs—he’d had to go into the restroom to dump the water out of his boots and wring his socks out—and he was pissed. He knew the kid’s family, which made it worse; they were decent people.

  That was how the day went. Bodies were found, most probably drowning victims, but the coroner would have to make that determination. One had a bullet hole in his back. He might have drowned, too, but he’d had a little help on the way. Unfortunately, he had no ID on him and the body had been in the water for two days or more. Alec couldn’t help wondering if he’d been a looter trying to run for it. People didn’t take kindly to someone taking advantage of the misfortune Mother Nature had already visited on them. Until the body was identified, there wasn’t a damn thing he could do.

  He shouldn’t have had a minute to think about Wren, but that’s not how it worked. She seemed to be simmering in the back of his mind most of the time, waiting to pop out front and center when he was incautious.

  He worried that she’d get it into her head that she ought to leave. Maybe think she shouldn’t be accepting help from him. He figured her for more sensible than that, but he couldn’t be sure. He also couldn’t afford the time to check on her. Last night he’d loaded up on groceries, grateful that the store’s generator had kept the freezer cases frozen and the milk cold. The shelves were stripped of bottled water, flashlight batteries and a host of other practicalities, and produce was skimpy since new deliveries weren’t making it into town yet. But he’d been able to buy enough diapers for a week or more, milk because he had a vague feeling a nursing mother ought to be drinking it, meat and eggs and cereal and even some staples like flour, because Wren said she would like to do some baking what with all the time she had on her hands.

  At odd moments he wondered what she was doing with her time. He pictured her kneading bread dough, her small hands working it, flour dusting her arms and a sprinkling of white joining the freckles on her cheeks. Or holding that baby of hers, smiling with so much love shining out of her it shut down something inside him. Feet curled under her as she sat in his rocker, nursing Abby.

  That was the hardest thing of all for him to picture.

  It seemed as though with every day that passed, he was seeing her increasingly in a sexual light. That first day, at the Maynard house, he’d been okay. She was nothing but a tiny dab of a thing with that enormous belly being squeezed with vicious power. He’d heard the agonized moans and seen the sweat, astonishing determination and resilience. She was giving birth in terrifying circumstances. She’d needed him.

  She still needed him, but now it was different. Now he was having to avert his face when she lifted her shirt to expose her breast, because he wanted too much to look. She had possibly the world’s prettiest breasts, crowned with dainty nipples and aureoles more pink than brown. He groaned at the thought of touching them, then stole a look around to make sure nobody had noticed. Given the general chaos of the police station, he’d have to do a lot more than give a low groan to get attention. A good, heartfelt obscenity didn’t do it, either. Some major bloodshed, maybe.

  With a sigh, he pushed back his chair. He would drive a few blocks that had suffered some looting, make sure everything was quiet, then go by the hospital to see whether Doc Bailey had yet looked at the stiff with the bullet hole. That would get his mind off of Wren.

  He was creeping down Chestnut, craning his neck to see in storefronts, when his attention was caught by a group clustered in front of Slater’s Guns & Ammunition. His foot tapped the brake and he eased to the curb, though he recognized two of the five men.

  Unfortunately, one of them was his brother-in-law, Randy Young.

  Tension tied some new knots in Alec’s neck and shoulders. This was where he would expect Randy to be, beer in hand, laughing with some buddies at the gun shop. Randy was real fond of hunting and fishing.

  Because he’d already stopped, Alec rolled down the passenger window to exchange abbreviated greetings with the men. The first to appear in his window was Dan Slater, who’d taken over the business after his father had suffered his second heart attack.

  “Much damage?” Alec asked, although he knew most of the street had gotten off lightly, maybe a foot of water making it inside the businesses fronting it.

  Slater propped a forearm on the door. “More than you’d think. I’m going to have to take all the cases out and tear up the floor. It’s a mess in there.”

  Alec nodded. Water alone would have been bad enough, but the flood had deposited muck and debris everywhere it had gone.

  “Don’t carry flood insurance,” Dan added with a grimace. “I thought we were high enough.”

  “Lots of folks in the same boat.”


  “Bet you’re keeping busy, too.” After Alec had agreed that he was, Slater nodded and stepped back.

  Randy took his place. “Sally’s been bitching because you haven’t been to see her yet.”

  Alec worked hard to keep his expression blank. “I talked to her. She says you stayed dry.”

  “Water came up to the top porch step. Yard’s a goddamn mess, and she’s fussing about her garden.” He shrugged. “We got off easy, though.”

  “She says she took the kids to a shelter.” Without her husband.

  “Yeah, I was trying to help some others out,” Randy said, winking. “Hear you’ve been tied up yourself.”

  “You could say that.”

  “Darcy at the hospital says you’ve got a pretty lady at your place.”

  Anger flared in Alec. “I’d appreciate it if word didn’t get out about that.”

  Randy gave one of those big, loopy grins that had rubbed Alec the wrong way from the beginning. “Maybe in St. Louis folks don’t talk about an unmarried man and woman living together, but it’s different here.”

  Between gritted teeth, Alec said, “She has a three-day-old baby, lost everything in the flood and has nowhere to go. I’m giving her refuge for a few days.”

  “I’m surprised Sally hasn’t already been over there, looking her over.”

  Oh, hell. He hadn’t thought of that.

  Alec looked hard at his brother-in-law. “I mean it. I don’t want people talking. This girl’s got some trouble. It would help if nobody remembers seeing her and has no idea where she went if they did.”

  Randy raised his eyebrows. “Best you talk to Darcy, then. She brought us a six-pack earlier and told everyone about how you brought them this woman wearing nothing but a man’s wool socks and an old flannel shirt to her knees. Cute baby girl, too, she said. And she says you didn’t just bring her, you took her away again.”

  Alec cursed. “I’ll talk to her. I’m on my way to the hospital now.” He frowned. “I suppose the mill’s shut down.”

  “Yep. Got myself a vacation.” Randy didn’t sound too bothered, although Alec couldn’t imagine the mill would be able to pay workers for the time off and Sally sure couldn’t work, raising three kids as she was.

  For his sister’s sake he bit off what he wanted to say, only lifted a hand, rolled up the window and pulled away. In the rearview mirror he could see his brother-in-law rejoin his buddies. One of them opened a cooler and tossed Randy another beer, which he caught one-handed. He’d been a catcher in high school, spent a year in the minors before they let him go, so there was one, useless thing he was good at.

  At the hospital, Alec did corner Darcy, who handled admissions at the front desk. He tried to make his tone friendly when he said, “I should have asked you yesterday to keep quiet about that woman with the baby I brought in.”

  She smirked. “Looked like you knew her well.”

  “Not until I delivered her baby,” he said grimly. “She’s got a man stalking her. I was hoping to slip her in and out of here quietly. If anyone comes looking, nobody’s ever heard of her. Okay?”

  Her face got serious. “You mean, like an ex-husband or something?”

  He left her assumption intact. As Randy had intimated, this part of the country was still conservative. There were people who wouldn’t approve of her having a baby out of wedlock. And no, those same people wouldn’t approve of her staying with him, except nobody would raise any eyebrows right now with so many people homeless and her in obvious need with a newborn.

  “Yeah. Not a nice guy.”

  “Oh,” she said, eyes wide. “Well, I’ll make sure everyone here knows.”

  “Thank you.”

  He went to the basement, where Dr. Elijah Bailey was leaving the autopsy room. Even though he’d already stripped off gown and gloves, the odor wafted out after him. Alec had stood through plenty of autopsies, but he never had gotten used to that smell. His stomach did an unhappy roll, but he didn’t let the weakness show.

  “Detective, I was just going to call you.”

  Bailey had dug a .44 bullet out of the body. A .44 Magnum cartridge was common locally, used in rifles for hunting as well as handguns. It would have passed right through if it hadn’t slammed up against the breastbone. “He was dead before he hit the water,” he concluded. “Hardly any in his lungs. You can’t blame drowning.”

  Alec nodded. They talked about trajectories and Alec accepted the bullet in an evidence bag. He’d send it to the state lab, for what it was worth.

  Bailey couldn’t tell him much about the guy that Alec didn’t already know. Caucasian, best guess twenty-five to thirty-five years of age, a few fillings but no major dental work, a scar in one knee—he’d had some cartilage damage, typical of a sports injury—and nothing especially distinctive about him. Dark blond to brown hair, hazel eyes, average height. Fingerprints had gone off for ID, but who knew when any results would come back?

  “All right,” Alec said. “With luck someone’ll call looking for him, although it may be weeks before we determine who’s actually missing. Or we might get lucky and find a car and no driver to go with it. Or stuff left in a hotel room.”

  They talked about two other unidentified bodies, both also male and Caucasian. One, forty-five to fifty-five years old, had suffered a blow to his head that Dr. Bailey thought preceded his drowning death. The other, approximately the same age as the shooting victim, had simply drowned, although the body had gotten battered in the ensuing day or two in the water. He, too, had had arthroscopic knee surgery at some point.

  “High-school sports,” Dr. Bailey said with a disapproving shake of the head. Come to think of it, Alec had never seen him approve of anything.

  The doctor further expressed the hope that they wouldn’t have to wait on fingerprints to put names to all three corpses, as they were filling three drawers in his small morgue.

  When they parted, Alec didn’t offer to shake hands; call him squeamish.

  It was nearly six o’clock now. He would drop off the bullet at the station, then go home. He was disconcerted by how much anticipation he felt. It had been a long time since he’d looked forward to anything. And in this case, he had no right. He wasn’t returning to a woman of his own. Although a dinner he hadn’t put together himself, that was something to appreciate—assuming she’d cooked. Any more hopes than that, he was just setting himself up for a fall.

  He turned the key in his department-issued Chevy Tahoe. He didn’t want anything from Wren. He was too mixed up to be thinking about a relationship, even assuming she would be interested, which he couldn’t imagine she was. Running from an abusive man, with a newborn baby and a less than solid childhood…none of that sounded like a woman who would be wanting a man for anything but protection.

  Having a woman in such close proximity was all that had set him to wishing a little. Remembering what he’d lost.

  He didn’t ever want to hurt that way again. Bad enough lusting after his brown-feathered Wren. She came as a package, though, and he didn’t want anything to do with that little girl.

  He would help Wren get on her feet. It was an act of kindness. Perhaps a form of redemption. There had been so much he couldn’t fix, but maybe he could fix part of what was wrong with Wren’s life. Then, before he knew it, she’d be gone, and he wouldn’t have to find ways of not noticing her smile or the delicacy of her bones or her small but perfectly shaped, pink-tipped breasts.

  His stomach growled as he put the Tahoe in gear. It had been years since he’d walked in the door to the smell of fresh bread from the oven. That would be better even than home-cooked dinner on the table.

  WHY IT HAD FELT SO NATURAL sharing the cramped space in the attic with Alec, and so different sharing a house with him, Wren didn’t fully understand. But it was different.

  Maybe it was because this was so weirdly normal, except for the fact that they hadn’t known each other a week ago and were still, in many ways, strangers. In that attic, nothing was nor
mal, so it was okay to be sleeping with the kind stranger’s arms around her, his heartbeat comforting her.

  He’d been so pleased with the homemade bread and pot roast last night, she slipped downstairs before him this morning to start breakfast, and soon heard the shower running upstairs. Coffee was ready to pour and bacon was sizzling in the cast-iron frying pan when she heard footsteps on the stairs.

  “You didn’t have to get up,” he said.

  She turned from the stove with a smile that probably belonged on the face of a Stepford wife, bright and sunny as though she cooked for him every morning. “I was already up. Didn’t you hear Abby?”

  “I heard her during the night.” He sounded wry.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Wren saw him stroll toward her and take two mugs from the cupboard. The gun and badge he wore on his belt disconcerted her anew, making him somehow more intimidating. One more thing to remind her how broad and solid and muscular he was; how male.

  “She made it almost three hours last night,” she said, putting the bacon on a plate and soaking up grease with a paper towel.

  He only nodded. “You ready for coffee?”

  “Thanks.” She held an egg over the pan. “Fried okay?”

  “Sure.” But his assessing gaze was critical. “You shouldn’t be up. You can’t take care of Abby if you don’t rest when you can.”

  She was tired, and maybe that’s what made her snappish. “Don’t you think I can decide that?”

  His eyebrows rose.

  “Anyway, cooking is the least I can do.”

  “I don’t expect payback.” He sounded exasperated.

  Wren cracked another egg. She couldn’t bring herself to look at him. “That doesn’t mean I can’t try to do something good for you while I’m here.” What did he think, she was going to lounge around watching soap operas all day? Yes, her whole body hurt, she was cramping and she felt like crap, but she hadn’t felt any better in bed than she did up and about. He’s being nice, she reminded herself. She was unbelievably lucky that he’d insisted on bringing her and Abby home with him. The last thing he deserved was her to be grouchy. Deliberately easing her tone, she said, “Although we can’t have eggs every day, it’s not good for your cholesterol.”