by Em Ashcroft
“We’ve made progress,” he said.
“In what way?” Reilly lifted her chin defiantly.
“How do you feel about the victims?”
“I’m sorry for them, of course.”
He paused. “Don’t you want to know who it was buried underneath your floor?”
That sounded odd, as if knowing would make a difference. Someone was murdered. Wasn’t that enough? “I’ve only just arrived in Goldclaw. I couldn’t have known her.”
“I think you’ll find that you could. She wasn’t from here. She was from Chicago, and she worked at the same hospital as you did.”
In a voice shaking with shock, Reilly asked, “What was her name?”
“Cara Corwin.”
Chapter Eleven
Alarm pierced Brennan when Chris appeared and beckoned to him. He’d let Reilly out of his sight reluctantly, and now he’d been proved right. While he was waiting, he’d called the lawyer who worked with them on the property business and got a recommendation for a good defense lawyer in Houston. Just in case. He was convinced of Reilly’s innocence, but she might need some help before this thing was done.
Chris didn’t look happy, but he rarely did when he was working. “She wants you,” he said.
“Are we done here?”
“We’ve only just started.”
As he said the words, Seth came around the corner, two paper cups of coffee in his hands. After taking one look at his breed partner’s face, he abandoned the coffees on the nearest surface and strode quickly to his side. “What’s up?”
Brennan spared him a glance. “I don’t know yet. Come on.”
They followed Chris to his office. He’d turned the blinds so nobody could see in from the street, but light still filtered in. Enough for him to see Reilly sitting in the chair before the desk with a tissue in her hand.
Her pain speared through him. It only took one glance at Seth to see he was equally affected. He squatted down to her level, grabbed another tissue from the box on the desk, and wiped her tears away. “It can’t be that bad,” he murmured. “You’re here, you’re alive. What else is there? Tell us.” He glanced at Chris. “What did you do?”
Chris spread his hands in a gesture of peace and took his seat behind his desk.
“Can’t you give us a minute?” Seth demanded, anger in his voice.
“Nope,” Chris said. “This is police business. I told Ms. O’Neill that the two murder victims were killed by bullets from the same weapon, the same as a model that she says she once owned. I also told her the name of the woman left in her store. Cara Corwin, a nurse from the hospital in Chicago where Ms. O’Neill worked. After she left Chicago, she took a job in Houston. Ms. O’Neill says she wants to tell me something but refused to do it until you were here.”
Her creamy complexion had gone stark white, the sprinkling of freckles across her nose standing out in relief. Her lovely eyes were moist with unshed tears and shock was spread over her mind. Brennan wanted to take her home and hold her. Instead, he meekly sat in the chair Seth brought for him while his breed partner remained standing on her other side, his hand on her shoulder. Brennan kept hold of her hand.
“Cara was a work colleague, a nurse from the agency. I didn’t know her very well. I’d visited a wine bar with her and a bunch of others, but that was about it. I never went out much.” Brennan’s heart ached for the lonely woman she’d been. No more, he vowed. She would never be lonely again.
She was telling her story in fits and starts, but nobody tried to rush her. Whatever she had to say, it was difficult. “Working in the ED of a big hospital isn’t like the TV programs. It’s blood and vomit and confusion. We get people coming in with strep because they have nowhere else to go, and RTAs with multiple casualties. It’s not a place to get friendly with people. So, although Cara and I worked there, I didn’t know her well. We only worked on one case together.” She paused again and stared at her hands, which she’d clasped tightly together in her lap. Brennan stayed perfectly still. So did Seth, but neither man intended to go anywhere else anytime soon. “You get used to it, you know?” She sounded lost. Brennan wanted to hold her, to make it better, though he knew nothing would. He couldn’t undo what she’d seen and done, and it was people like her who kept the world turning. He was so proud of her. “They bring in dying people and all you can think about is clearing the bed and getting the next patient sorted out,” she said.
“Yeah.” Chris cleared his throat as if dealing with emotions. “I’ve been at those scenes. In an RTA, sometimes all you want is to get the road clear and the traffic moving again.”
Her head jerked up, and she met Chris’s eyes with a look of pure understanding. “Of course you’ll have been there.”
“I didn’t always work in Goldclaw.”
“So you came here before you burned out,” she said, and nodded.
That was too good a guess to be accidental. Had Reilly felt she was burning out?
Chris was also a shape-shifter, which couldn’t have helped. In places where shifters were a minority, they never felt completely at home.
“Tell us more,” Chris said gently. “There might be something there.”
She nodded. “I knew I was exhausted, and I was already thinking about taking a break. When they brought people in, people who might not live, all I felt was weariness. That’s wrong. Moving away from the ED might have helped. Maybe specializing in cardiology. I’d assisted in a few open-heart procedures in the ED. The hospital didn’t always have the beds, and sometimes we had to perform a life-saving procedure.”
Brennan thought his heart would burst, he was so proud of her now. She spoke in a matter-of-fact way, as if it was normal to save lives every day. Not in his world it wasn’t.
“Tell me about the case you worked on together,” Chris said. “Perhaps there’s something we can explore.” Relief flooded Brennan. It appeared they weren’t regarding Reilly as a shoo-in candidate for the murders. But then, Chris was a good cop, and he wouldn’t jump to conclusions.
Reilly took a moment, and then began her story. She closed her mind off, and her expression was equally shuttered. By now, Brennan knew her well enough to realize that she was deeply disturbed by what she was about to tell them.
She swallowed. “It happened about six months ago. When they brought a patient in, it was business as usual. The woman had been shot. It was around six pm, and she’d been taking her son to the movies. The cops thought it was a drive-by, maybe a kid with a gun feeling big, that was all. They never caught the perpetrator. It was one of those neighborhoods where things like that happened. Senseless, but then many big city deaths are, aren’t they?” She was dry-eyed, but her sorrow tore through her, breaking her self-imposed isolation. It transmitted itself to Brennan. Did she know she was broadcasting her distress to her lovers? Brennan glanced at Seth and, stony-faced, he nodded. He felt it, too.
They would help her through this. Her grief seemed fresh and new, unabated. She needed to move on. Brennan, who tended to let life take its own course, decided to push it along a little in this case. Reilly needed closure.
Reilly sucked in a deep breath and continued her story. “The shooter got the woman and the kid. They were both fighting for their lives when they got here. The kid was worst off, so we attended to him first. A team worked on the woman after that.”
“What was her name?” Chris said.
She paused. “I guess it’s breaking no confidences since the story was headlines for days. Justine Waverley-Dixon. Her kid was called Tristan.”
Chris made a note, and then sat back again. “Go on.”
“They both died. There wasn’t much we could do for the boy. He was seven years old, and the bullet got him in the head. If he’d lived he wouldn’t have had much of a life, but that didn’t stop us trying to save him. He had a chance. The woman was another story. She had a real chance. After the boy died, we all worked on her. The secondary team had stanched the blood flow, and that
gave us time to repair. The paramedics had scooped and run. She’d taken one in the chest and the other on her neck, narrowly missing the carotid. We were worried it had affected her spine, so we kept her on the board the paras had put under her. Our job was to stabilize her, to get her upstairs to the operating rooms, but they were all occupied that day. There was a backlog from an RTA in another part of the city. The emergency room was chaos, but that was normal for us. I still can’t think of her as Justine. To me she was an object, something to be repaired. I was already looking at the next patient along.
“We’d fixed the chest wound well enough to move her, and the neck wound was ready to go, too. Then they said we had to give them another half-hour at least.”
She paused, swallowing nervously before she continued. “That was when we found the third wound. It was in her back. The police said it was probably the last one she took. The chest was the first, the neck second, and the back the third, as far as they could tell from a rough reconstruction of what had happened. She’d gone back from the impact of the first bullet, and then turned instinctively to her child in the passenger seat. The car hit a fire hydrant, but the airbags deployed and the impact didn’t cause them a lot of damage.”
She stopped and spread her hands. “That was it. They both died. If we could have gotten Justine upstairs, they might have discovered the back wound earlier. Or if we’d followed protocol instead of handling the wounds in an ad-hoc way. But what do I know? She died, and that was it. Only—afterward I couldn’t get that one out of my mind. It kept coming back to me, bothering me. I decided I had battlefield exhaustion or something. I couldn’t go on, even if I moved to another department. It was time for me to move on and do something different.”
She stared at her hands again. “I couldn’t face going back to work. Justine Waverley-Dixon’s case became a local scandal, all about inadequate hospitals and poorly qualified or inexperienced medical staff.” Looking up, she met Chris’s eyes. “That was true, but not many people worked there for long. The place had a reputation as the hardest-working hospital in the city, and our statistics weren’t good. We were used as scapegoats. We did the best with what we had, but we were always bottom of the barrel when it came to handouts and staff. I stayed because I enjoyed the challenge, and after a while, it became routine. I didn’t move on because I could cope, and I got plenty of overtime. But I couldn’t go back there, and I couldn’t go to another hospital. I supplemented my income with—parties.”
Chris’s head jerked up, and his eyes blazed. “What kind of parties?”
She shook her head disconsolately. “Probably not the kind you’re thinking of. I wasn’t the main attraction. I was an agent for an adult toy company. You know the kind of thing. I used to do ladies’ nights in the more upmarket areas. Most sex toys are on the tacky side, but these were quality items.” A faint tinge of pink colored her cheekbones. “Nothing illegal. Most of it was the naughty kind, rather than hard core. Sexy lingerie, novelty condoms, that kind of thing.”
Oh yes, Brennan knew all about those.
“You kind of relieve me,” Chris said. “We looked at your luggage. I thought all that stuff was too much for one.”
“I planned to revive it here,” she said. “I mean, this is a honeymoon town, right? With the ranch providing a wedding venue, there had to be a market for naughty toys.”
If she said “naughty” once more in that tone of voice, Brennan would have to adjust his jeans. They were far too tight now his cock had decided to wake up. Seth moved slightly so he stood mostly behind Reilly’s chair. Brennan wasn’t the only one suffering. He felt bad that she’d aroused him so fast. Only a few minutes ago he’d decided to pamper her and be gentle, now he wanted to fuck her like a randy schoolboy, without finesse or care.
The inappropriateness of his erection staggered him, but he wouldn’t deny his need for her.
“I don’t think they have anything to do with this case,” Chris said. The edges of his ears were tinged with red. Interesting.
A tap at the door heralded the entrance of a blonde woman with glasses perched on her nose. She handed a sheaf of papers to Chris, who glanced at them. “You were expecting these,” she said.
“Thanks, Mildred.” He examined the papers while Mildred turned to the trio before the desk. “Can I get you folks something to drink? Are you hungry?”
“Coffee would be great,” Brennan said, giving Mildred his best smile. “Thanks.”
Mildred returned with four coffees before Chris had finished his reading. Catching her name in bold letters at the top, Brennan decided to keep quiet and let him read what was obviously a report on Reilly. He didn’t like it, but if it got her out of here sooner, he’d put up with other people knowing Reilly’s business.
Chris leaned forward, clasping his hands on the desk. “Okay, Ms. O’Neill, you can go. It’s unlikely you committed the murders. The man in the room next to you was killed at a time that you had an alibi.” He glanced at Brennan, who nodded back. Why should he be ashamed of what he did with Reilly that night?
Chris flipped the top sheet of paper over and sighed. “You’d think, in these days of electronic this and that, that they’d put it on the computer and have done. I don’t doubt it’s there, too, but Mildred is a big believer in hard copy. So she types it into the computer and then prints it out. We must get through more ink and paper than any other police station in the country.”
He tapped the paper. “Once we ascertained that the same gun killed both victims, I was doubtful you were involved there either. But I needed more. You could have done it. It was still possible. However, with the evidence I have, I’m happy to release you, as long as you have no plans to leave the district.”
“So what happened?” Seth demanded.
“We estimated the times of death of the two people we’re interested in. Ms. Corwin had been dead for more than a day. Although Reilly was alone for some of that time, we traced her credit card transactions and looked at her journey here.” He met Reilly’s gaze. “You checked into a hotel in Houston for your last night, and the management remembers you. They have you on camera, too. You checked in, didn’t go out and didn’t have any visitors. We haven’t found a trace of your DNA on either body.” He flicked a glance at Seth. Yeah, Seth had almost fallen on top of it. He could have left traces. It was just as well she didn’t stumble on it.
“Why did you put her through that shit in the interview room?” Seth demanded. He took the back of Reilly’s chair in a death grip.
Chris touched the papers on his desk. “I wanted no distractions when I read her.” He shook his head when Brennan started to his feet. “No, not a deep read, just a skim, to sense her reactions. For all I knew that was our final interview. We still have the problem of the gun. The store Reilly bought it from and then sold it back to when she’d done was burglarized recently. The Ruger was one of the weapons taken, or so the proprietor claims. That piece of evidence pointed at her. I’d thought she might tell me she didn’t know the weapon, or she’d never owned a gun, which we already knew was false because we have a copy of the permit.”
He’d kept them here waiting for news on the gun. Brennan’s blood ran cold. Chris could have arrested her on suspicion of murder. Then where would they be? Up shit creek, that was where.
Although the wrist bands hadn’t arrived yet, Brennan was increasingly sure that they’d bonded with Reilly. He was okay with that. Better than okay, really. He’d wanted her from the start, and that was just another sign they were meant for each other as far as he was concerned.
Seth, of course, ever cautious, always reluctant to let any woman into their lives for more than a couple of months, was more doubtful. With every day that passed, he believed they’d dodged the bullet.
For the first time in his life, Brennan wanted to get shot.
“So Reilly is no longer a suspect in either murder,” Seth said.
Chris dropped his last bombshell of the day. “Not under serious suspic
ion, no. But she is connected to the murders in some way. It’s no coincidence that the man in the room next to hers was killed. Nor is it chance that she knew the woman and the murderer chose her store for his dump. He never meant Cara Corwin’s body to remain hidden. That was why the nails weren’t replaced.”
Seth was the first to comment. In a voice that sounded strangulated, he said, “You mean that if she isn’t a perpetrator, she’s a target?”
“Yes, and we have a pretty shrewd idea who it is.”
* * * *
Seth’s hands clenched on the back of the hard chair where Reilly sat until the knuckles turned white. “Go on,” he said in a voice so tight it didn’t sound like his.
Chris leaned forward, his shrewd gaze never leaving Reilly’s. Seth didn’t like that, but he tried to relax. The man was only doing his job.
“It’s one of two people,” he said. “We found the common denominator between Reilly and the woman under her floor. Although they both worked in Chicago at the same hospital, they were only involved in one case together.”
Seth knew which one. It was the one that had driven Reilly away from her job. She regarded the affair as her personal failure, although as far as Seth saw it, she’d only been doing her job. He gave a terse nod.
Chris’s mouth settled into a grim line. “The woman and child in the accident were being stalked by her estranged husband. He caused the accident. He is the first suspect. John Rainer, by name, but he’s been living on the streets, and so he’s hard to track.”
“And the second?” Brennan said quietly. When easygoing Brennan used that tone of voice, somebody was in trouble.
“The doctor in charge of the mess. It was a mess, but it was judged his fault, and he lost his license.”
Reilly gasped. “I didn’t know that!” Her face was one of utter shock, eyes wide, mouth open. She stared at the police chief. “Dr. Moretti?”
