The Novels of Nora Roberts, Volume 4

by Nora Roberts

  “If I said that to you, you’d tell me you can take care of yourself, that you’re not stupid or reckless.” He raised his eyebrows when she said nothing. “Why don’t we skip the part where I say it back to you, we both toss around the same arguments.”

  The good nature faded from his eyes, turned them that chilly green. “The son of a bitch came at me, Reena. He blew up my goddamn truck. You think I’m walking away?”

  “Please. Just a few days then. Three days. Give me three days to . . .” Her voice began to hitch.

  “No. Don’t cry. It’s hitting below the belt, and it won’t work.”

  “I don’t use tears to get my way, you stupid ass.” She dashed at them with the backs of her hands. “I can put you in protective custody.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Don’t you see, I can’t handle this.” She pushed away from the table, stalked to the window over the sink, stared out.

  “I can see you’re not handling something.”

  “I don’t know what to do.” She pressed her fist between her breasts as her heart shuddered. “I don’t know how to be. I don’t know how to deal with this.”

  “We’ll figure it out.”

  “No, no! Are you blind, are you stupid?” she demanded as she whirled around to him. “I can handle the case. You work it, you just work it. It’s a puzzle and all the pieces are there. It’s just finding them and putting them in the right place. But this? I can’t . . . I can’t handle this.” She thumped her fist between her breasts. “I’m . . . I’m . . . ”

  “Asthmatic?” he said when she just stood there wheezing.

  She stunned them both by grabbing a mug off the counter and hurling it against the wall. “You blithering idiot, I’m in love with you.”

  He held up a hand as if to ward off another mug, though hers were empty. “Minute, okay. Just a minute.”

  “Oh, screw this.” She started to charge out, but he grabbed her hand, locked her down.

  “I said wait a damn minute.”

  “I hope you have a seizure, and it makes you stumble all around the room so you cut your feet to ribbons on broken glass.”

  “Love comes in many forms,” he muttered.

  “Don’t make fun of me. You started this. All I did was walk out my own back door one day.”

  “I’m not making fun of you. I’m trying to catch my breath.” His hand stayed firm on hers, and he stayed planted in the chair with a bag of frozen peas defrosting over his bruised knee.

  “When you say you’re in love with me, is that upper- or lowercase L? Don’t you hit me,” he warned when he saw her other hand fist.

  “I have no intention of resorting to physical force.” But it had been a close one. Now she forced her hand, her arm, then her body to relax. “I’d appreciate it if you’d let go of my hand.”

  “Fine. Then I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t go storming out of here so I have to get up and limp after you, perhaps have a seizure and cut my feet to ribbons on broken glass.”

  Her lips twitched. “See? Damn it, that’s got to be why this happened to me. You’re no pushover, Goodnight, but you make yourself so damn affable it’s easy to think you’re pushable. And you’re accommodating, right up to a line you’ve drawn in your head. It would probably take dynamite to blast you over that line once you’ve drawn it. My mother was right. She’s always right.”

  On a sigh, she walked to his broom closet, got out the broom and dustpan. “You’re like my father.”

  “I am not.”

  She smiled and began to sweep up the shards. “I never got really serious about anyone before you because they never made the cut. They never measured up for me to the one man I admire most. My father.”

  “You’re right. We’re exactly alike. Separated at birth.”

  “It was lowercase, and that was disconcerting enough. Then this morning, you opened the door and it was a big, fat, shiny capital L. And look at you. Your hair’s all stupid.”

  He lifted a hand in response, felt it. Grimaced. “Shit.”

  “And your underwear’s falling apart.”

  He hitched at the ragged waistband. “It’s got plenty of wear in it yet.”

  “You’re all bruised up and scowly. And it doesn’t matter. I’m sorry about the mug.”

  “Your brother mentioned you guys throw things. I’ve been in love with you since approximately ten-thirty P.M., May ninth, 1992.”

  Her smile stayed soft as she dumped the shards in his trash can. “No, you haven’t.”

  “Easy for you to say. It was lowercase,” he continued while she replaced the broom. “With a lot of fantasy sparkling over it. Took on a different kind of glow after I actually met you, but it was the lowercase deal.”

  “I know. I’m going to be late,” she said when she looked at her watch. “I’m going to have a couple of cops assigned to you until—”

  “It grew up.”

  She dropped her hand, said nothing.

  “It grew up, Reena, so I guess we’re both going to have to figure out how to handle it.”

  She stepped to him, laid her cheek on the top of his head. She felt, actually felt her heart settle. “This is the strangest thing,” she told him. “And I can’t stay. I can’t stay any longer.”

  “It’s okay. It can wait.”

  She bent down until her lips met his. “I’ll call you later.” She kissed him again. “Be careful.” And again. “Be safe.”

  Then hurried out, dashing to the front door before he could lever out of the chair.

  So he sat where he was, in the morning light coming through the windows, with a can of warm Coke on the table. And thought what a strange, strange ride life was.

  He’d barely finished off the Coke when there was more banging on his door. “For God’s sake.”

  He got up, decided the pills and the peas had helped, and headed out. He was going to have to give the woman a key, he could see that coming. And that was the next thing to living together, which was cousin to the all-powerful M word. And he just didn’t want to think about that yet.

  When he pulled open the door, his arms were immediately filled with female. But it wasn’t Reena.

  “Bo. God, Bo!” Mandy squeezed him hard enough to have his bruises weeping. “We came right over, as soon as we heard.”

  “Heard what? We who?”

  “About the bomb in your truck.” She jerked back and her eyes raced over him. “Oh, you poor baby! They said minor injuries. You’re all banged up. You’ve got a bandage. And what is wrong with your hair?”

  “Shut up.” He scrubbed at it.

  “Brad’s parking. You have to go on safari for a parking place in this neighborhood. And they’ve got the front of your house blocked still.”

  “Brad.”

  “I didn’t hear sooner because I turned off my cell by mistake and I wasn’t home, so the paper couldn’t reach me. We didn’t know anything until this morning. Why didn’t you call?”

  “Brad?” He wasn’t slow, even if he was working on about five minutes’ sleep. “You and Brad? Together? My Brad?”

  “Well, God, it’s not like you were going to sleep with him. And it was completely unplanned. Come on, let me help you sit down.”

  He waved his hands like a traffic cop. “Wait, wait, wait. Am I in Bizzaro World?”

  “It’s not so bizzaro. We’ve known each other for years. We just hooked up, decided to go get something to eat, maybe see a movie, and one thing, another thing.” She grinned, wide and bright. “It was great.”

  “Shut up! Don’t tell me.” He clamped his hands over his ears, made loud noises with his mouth to block her out. “My brain cannot withstand the data. It’ll implode.”

  “You’re not going to be one of those jerks who’s like, ‘I used to sleep with her so now none of my friends can be interested,’ are you?”

  “What? No.” Was he? “No,” he decided after another minute. “But—”

  “Because we really connected. Now, let m
e help you . . .” Her face went dreamy, and when Bo followed the direction of her gaze, he spotted Brad coming down the street with the male version of dreamy on his face.

  Bo turned away, hands clamped to his skull. “My head, my head. You guys, my best friends in this life, are about to finish the job that son of a bitch started last night.”

  “Don’t be silly. And in case you haven’t noticed, you’re parading in the doorway in your underwear. Ratty underwear. He’s okay,” she called out to Brad.

  “Man, scared ten years off us.” Brad jogged up the steps. “You’re okay? Did you see a doctor? Want us to run you in for X-rays?”

  “I saw a doctor.” He grunted when Brad wrapped his arms around him.

  “We were worried sick, came right over. What about your truck?”

  “Toast.”

  “Damn good truck. What can we do? Want me to leave the car for you? Or we can hang, take you anywhere you need to go.”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t pulled it together yet.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Mandy told him. “You want to stretch out? I can make you something to eat.”

  Despite the fact that he saw their hands sneaking together, Bo realized they were there for him. Just like always. “I’ve got to take a shower, get dressed, clear my head.”

  “Okay, I’ll make breakfast while you do. We’ll both take the day off, right, Brad?”

  “Sure.”

  “And when you come back down,” she added, “we want to know what happened. Everything.”

  Reena rubbed her eyes to clear them, then refocused on her computer screen. “Pastorelli Senior’s been swinging in and out of the system most of his life. Assaults, drunk and disorderly, assault with intent, the arson, petty larceny. There are four questioned-and-released in his file on suspicious fires. Two before the one at Sirico’s, two after he was released from prison. Last known address is in the Bronx. But his wife’s in Maryland, just outside D.C.”

  “The son’s been working on following in his father’s footsteps,” O’Donnell told her. “A couple stints in juvie before he hit sixteen.”

  “I know about those. John kept up for me, when I asked him. They took him away,” she told him. “Like they took his father. The night Joey killed his dog and left it burning on our steps.”

  She rose, walked around to sit on the corner of O’Donnell’s desk so their conversation was less hampered by the backchat of the squad room. “He killed his own dog, O’Donnell. They said it was a violent acting out, a result of having his father arrested because of the fire. A troubled child, a confused child from an abusive home life. Because his father used to tune his mother up regularly. And knocked the kid around from time to time, too.”

  “But you’re not buying that.”

  “No. I saw the way he ran after the car when they arrested Pastorelli. He worshipped his father. A lot of kids in that sort of atmosphere do. His mother was weak, ineffectual. His father ruled. And look at his pattern,” she added, turning so she could see the readout on O’Donnell’s screen. “Arrests for assault, sexual assault, vandalism, grand theft auto, parole violations. Not just following, outdoing his father.”

  “There’s no fire on his record.”

  “So, maybe he’s more careful, or more lucky, in that area. Maybe he and his father have some sort of tag team going. Maybe he saved his fire-starting for me. But one or both of them is behind this.”

  “No argument.”

  “One or both of them killed Josh Bolton.”

  “It’s a big step up from what’s on their sheets to murder, Hale.”

  She shook her head. “There might be others, and they just haven’t been caught. It goes back to me. Straight back to the day Joey assaulted me. Sexual assault, that’s what it was, but I was too young to get that.”

  But she could remember it still, and very well, the way he’d grabbed at her chest, her crotch, the names he’d called her. And his face, the wildness on it.

  “He jumps me, and my brother, a couple of his friends hear me screaming—run him off. I tell my father, and he goes straight over, gets in Pastorelli Senior’s face. I’ve never seen my father like that. If some of the neighbors, some of the people in Sirico’s, hadn’t come out, broken it up, it would’ve gotten bad. Seriously bad. My father threatened to call the cops, and people who were there, hearing what went down, were behind him.”

  “And that night Pastorelli torches Sirico’s.”

  “Yeah. Get in my face, you bastard, here’s what you get. Sloppy job. Drunk and sloppy, and no thought to the family who lived upstairs. The place could’ve burned down around them.”

  “But you saw the fire.”

  “I saw the fire. Back to me. So we had a mess on our hands, but nobody was hurt. Insurance would cover it, and the whole neighborhood ready to lend a hand. You could tip it one way and say the fire actually benefited the family. Built loyalty, gave my parents a chance to expand, renew.”

  “That’s a pisser for somebody who wanted to make trouble.”

  “And gets caught. His dog barked, O’Donnell. That was one of the things I told John. The dog barked in their backyard, where he kept his shed, where they found the gas can, some of the beer he’d stolen, the shoes he’d worn.”

  “Kid kills the dog.”

  “Yeah. You could twist it so the dog played a part in the chain. Damn dog helped ruin his father.”

  “Dog has to die.”

  “Yeah, and more, the dog has to burn. Kid goes away, evaluation, juvie, in the system. He gets out and his mother pulls him up to New York. He gets in trouble up there, but he’s still a kid. Hard for a kid to get from New York to Baltimore to cause me or my family any grief. And see.”

  She tapped the screen. “He does a short stint himself. But they were both out when Josh died. Joey’s not a kid anymore. Joe’s mopping floors. Hell of a comedown.”

  She could feel it now, feel the truth of it in her belly, in her throat. These were pieces of the puzzle.

  “But Sirico’s is doing fine. Our family’s doing fine. And the little bitch who caused all this is in college, screwing some jerk. Joey puts hands on her and she screams, messes everything up. But she lets this guy do her, no problem. Time for payback, some serious payback. I’d been with him that night, with Josh that night, after Bella’s wedding. One of them killed that boy, set him on fire. Because I’d been with him.”

  “All right, if we take that angle, why didn’t he, or they, just deal with you? You were there. Why not kill both of you?”

  “Because it wasn’t enough. Kill me, it’s over. But make me suffer, hurt me, use fire against me again and make me wonder. Pastorelli Senior had an alibi for that night. John checked it out. But it could’ve been bogus. Joey was supposed to be in New York, and there were people who said he was. But people will. And look, three months after Josh’s death, Joey goes up for the car boost. In Virginia, not New York.”

  “I’m not saying people don’t hold on to grudges or obsessions for twenty years. But twenty is a long stretch.”

  “There have been shots along the way. There might’ve been things I passed over, didn’t connect. There was an incident right after I came on the job. Firefighter I was seeing casually was killed. He was on his way to North Carolina—long weekend deal. I got hung up, so I couldn’t go with him, but Steve and Gina and I were going to head down the next morning. They found him, in his car, in the woods off a back road. He’d been shot, and his car set on fire. It looked like he’d been carjacked, robbed, killed, and the fire set to cover it. It was eleven years to the day after the fire at Sirico’s.”

  O’Donnell eased back. “Hugh Fitzgerald. I knew him some. I remember when he was killed. I didn’t know you were connected.”

  “It was casual. We’d gone out a couple times, and he was a pal of Steve’s. Steve and Gina were an item. It looked, seemed, random. And the locals put it down as such.”

  So had she, she thought, raking her fingers through her hair. Sh
e’d never looked beyond the surface.

  “One of his tires was flat, late at night, dark country road. They figured he flagged down the wrong person, or somebody came along, tried to shake him down. Kills him. Pushes the car into the woods, lights it up, hopes the fire covers the tracks. Which, essentially, it did. The case is still open.”

  She drew a breath. “I never made any connection, not on the surface. Hell, my uniform buttons were still bright and shiny. Who was I to question seasoned cops just because I had a sick feeling down in the belly? We’d gone out a couple of times, and we were both thinking it might lead to more. But we weren’t a couple. He was killed in North Carolina. Arrows weren’t pointing at somebody who’d fired up my father’s restaurant a dozen years before. I should’ve seen it.”

  “Yeah, too bad your crystal ball was on the fritz that day.”

  While she appreciated the sarcasm and the sentiment behind it, it didn’t cool her blood. “Fire, O’Donnell. It’s always fire. Josh, Hugh, Luke’s car and now Bo. It’s always fire. There might have been more, things I didn’t focus in on. Case is still open.”

  “Difference is, now he wants you to know.”

  25

  Laura Pastorelli worked the counter at a 7-Eleven near the Maryland/ D.C. line. She was fifty-three, and carried the years poorly on a rickety frame. Lines, dug deeper by worry and sorrow than by years, scored her face. Her salt-and-pepper hair framed it without style. Around her neck was a silver cross. That and her wedding ring were her only jewelry.

  She glanced up when O’Donnell and Reena came in, and her gaze passed over Reena without recognition.

  “Help you?” She said it without interest, something she said by habit dozens of times a day.

  “Laura Pastorelli?” O’Donnell showed his badge, and Reena saw the instinctive flinch before Laura’s lips thinned.

  “What do you want? I’m working. I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “We need to ask you a few questions regarding your husband and your son.”

  “My husband lives in New York. I haven’t seen him for five years.” Her fingers crept up her skinny chest to fondle the silver cross.

  “And Joey?” Reena waited until Laura’s gaze shifted to her face. “You don’t remember me, Mrs. Pastorelli? I’m Catarina Hale, from the neighborhood.”