But not tonight. All that awaited him at home was an empty bed in a lonely house. Here, there was JJ. Her expressions could change lightning quick, from grim to grinning to somber to ridiculous. Being happy and funny and friendly came naturally to her, the way it used to be for him. She didn’t know about Linny or his demotion, so there was no tiptoeing around like everyone else did.
He envied her. Felt more normal with her than he had in a long time.
That empty bed in that lonely house... It was his bed. His house. It hadn’t always been empty or lonely. He had tons of memories there, good ones, funny ones, sad ones, of Linny and himself, their families, their friends. Happy ones, sexy ones, breath-stealing ones. Angry ones, boring ones, just plain old normal ones. He missed normal.
Grieving was hard. Carrying anger and loss and bitterness and guilt were hard. They were easy ruts to fall into, but damned if they didn’t require a whole lot of energy to stay there. Wouldn’t it be easier to wake up some morning and think, This is going to be a good day? Wouldn’t it be better if he reached a point where he could remember the happiness of life without concentrating so hard on the sorrow? Did things have to be so damn bleak forever, or could he change them?
Was he sure he wanted to?
After the talk about Maura’s offer, JJ had taken responsibility for most of the conversation. She’d told stories about her parents, her sisters and her nieces, who made his own nieces seem like mature, rational human beings in comparison. She’d talked about her days in the academy and how many times she’d wanted to give up but was just too damn stubborn, and she’d also told him about her ex-fiancé.
It struck him as too important that there hadn’t been regret, longing or grief in her voice. Once Ryan had been part of her life. Now he wasn’t. She was fine with that. Quint was totally fine with it. Obviously, the guy hadn’t deserved her, hadn’t respected or truly loved her. He didn’t deserve any long-lasting place in her heart. She deserved someone much better.
She’d fallen into silence a few minutes ago. He didn’t kid himself for a second that she’d run out of things to talk about. Maybe she was getting her thoughts in order for the main subject they hadn’t talked about. Maura. He decided to broach it first.
“What was your impression of Maura this afternoon?”
She fingered one of the large buttons on her sweater. It was her favorite garment ever, and the color really did bring out the reds in her hair and the greens in the her eyes. It was called a boyfriend cardigan, she’d told him, and her mother had knitted one for each of her single daughters. Not long after, first Kylie, then Elle had gotten married. They now teasingly referred to them as their husband cardigans, and their mother lamented that JJ would never be part of the joke.
“It wasn’t what I expected,” she said at last. “I saw her with her parents more times than I can count. My family’s not rich by any means, but my dad’s a surgeon. Our parents belonged to the same country club, went to the same church, a lot of the same parties. Maura and her parents were close. A blind man could see that she loved them dearly. She respected them. They and her godparents may have been the only people in the world she ever did respect. And now she’s calling Mr. Winchester a nosy old bastard? Calling her parents selfish for getting murdered?”
“Maybe she’s just angry and doesn’t know to deal with it.” Quint chose his words carefully. “Losing someone you love is never easy, especially when it’s unexpected. With old age or disease, at least you have a warning. You have time to prepare. But a car crash, a home invasion, a cop or a doctor saying, I’m sorry...” His breath caught, the pain as raw for an instant as it had been that long-ago day. He raised his hand instinctively to his chest, closed his eyes tightly and wished he was someplace other than here. Maybe nowhere.
But he’d been nowhere a very long time, and it wasn’t as comfortable as it used to be.
Acutely aware of the curiosity JJ was directing his way, he opened his eyes and shrugged as if he’d just gotten off track for a moment. He kept his gaze, though, focused somewhere around her mouth. “Based on what you’ve said, Maura doesn’t have the skills to cope with the violent murders of the two people she loved most in the world. She was a kid when it happened. She didn’t try to cope; she just took off running. And she was a spoiled kid with endless amounts of money and zero responsibilities. Now her parents have left her to deal on her own, her godfather’s refusing to give her endless amounts of her own money, she’s disappointed about not receiving the trust on her last birthday...”
When he did finally let himself look into her eyes, he saw the curiosity he’d felt a moment ago. He saw sympathy, too, gentle and sincere. She was a detective. Of course she’d realized he was speaking in part from personal experience. His face heated, his jaw setting grimly. He should be better about keeping things hidden from strangers who would be leaving his life as quickly as they’d come into it.
Especially ones who didn’t feel very much like strangers after such a short time.
“You’re right—” JJ cleared her throat to erase the emotion that made her voice husky. “You’re right about the shock and the coping and all that. And blaming her parents for not being here when she needs them most—I can see that, too. But as far as thinking she would get the entire estate when she turned twenty-five? Evanston has quite a few trust fund kids. They all know who’s getting paid how much and when. ‘Oh, I get this amount when I turn eighteen, this when I’m thirty, that when I’m forty.’ Maura knew she would have only the allowance until her thirtieth birthday. It became a tradition in her family after a great-uncle received $15 million at twenty-five and blew through it before he hit twenty-eight. Being angry about that with her parents and blaming Mr. Winchester just doesn’t make sense.”
“Remember? Spoiled rich kid,” he said drily. “Doesn’t get that things have to actually be done.”
The reminder of their earlier discussion made JJ smile, and that somehow made it easier for him to breathe. To ignore the ache in his chest. To push the sorrow away and just let go of it for a time.
“Right. Why am I expecting sense from someone who thought, when she graduated from high school, that flying her fifty closest friends to Fiji for a party couldn’t possibly cost much more than having said party around the backyard pool?”
“Seriously?” Quint wasn’t sure which he was confirming: a teenager who thought flying fifty people anywhere was reasonable or one so clueless about money that she truly didn’t understand its value.
“Scout’s honor. This is a girl who never in her life had to ask how much something cost. If she wanted it, she got it, and someone, possibly the money fairies, paid the bill. The summer I babysat her, she thought I was teasing when I said I couldn’t afford something. She knew how buying worked. You put that little plastic card in the machine, and snap! Cash appeared in your hand. Or you gave it to a peon and dinner, a movie ticket, smartphone, new car—it was yours.” JJ picked up her coffee cup, looked at the liquid inside, then set it down again. “Her parents didn’t do her any favors. Of course, they didn’t expect to die so young, but they didn’t even try to teach her self-sufficiency. They assumed, with their fortune, that there would always be someone around to take care of her, to know the things she doesn’t, to make sure she doesn’t follow in the footsteps of her great-uncle and go broke. They didn’t realize that the money they left to take care of her makes her an incredibly easy target for the wrong someone.”
Hence the lawyer’s professional concern. “Do you think that’s what the money issues are about? That she’s hooked up with someone who’s manipulating her? Maybe the person upstairs today that she lied about. Maybe he or she thought Maura would get all the money on her last birthday and that was why she asked Winchester for it.”
JJ reached for the dessert bag pushed to one side, ran her fingertip along the folded edge, then pushed it away. She’d insisted she was too full to eat it
when she ordered it, but she was starting to look a little tempted. “Do you think it could be Zander Benson?”
Though Zander’s upbringing had been 180-degrees different from Maura’s, they did share some traits. Though he lacked the means to excel at entitlement, like she did, he still expected someone else to provide. Neither of them gave a damn about anyone who didn’t make their lives easier. Neither saw any reason to work or make a contribution to society or do anything productive. Maura would cling to her privileged status with her dying breath, and Zander would give his left nut to share that privileged status.
“It could be. If not, he may know who. We can go and talk to him tomorrow.” Tracking down a Benson was usually frustrating, sometimes interesting and on occasion an exercise in futility. And Quint knew that from his own experience in trying to question or arrest every damn one of them. “What are you going to tell Mr. Winchester in the meantime?”
“I’d like to say that Maura’s fine and just going through a phase, as usual.” Then JJ’s brows drew together. “I don’t think she’s fine, but I don’t have anything concrete to base it on. She was rude to us, but that’s part of who she is. She looks underfed and overindulged, but I wasn’t sent here to evaluate her eating, drinking and sleeping habits. She lied about her guest, but she’s twenty-five and pays the rent. It’s not my business who she lets stay over. But...”
“You don’t feel comfortable telling Mr. Winchester that everything’s okay.”
“No, I don’t.”
Quint’s gut instinct agreed that Maura’s situation deserved further investigating. It agreed that JJ should dig a little deeper.
It especially agreed that she should stay longer, and it had nothing concrete to base that on, either.
Just that it didn’t have a damn thing to do with the job.
* * *
When JJ’s phone rang on Wednesday morning, she groaned into her pillow before flinging a hand out to search blindly for the cell on the night table. It rang again, somewhere closer, forcing her to actually open her eyes and lift her head.
Ugh, she’d snuggled in bed last night to review Maura’s financial records and to savor every last bite of her dessert, and apparently, after licking the container clean, she’d fallen asleep. The plastic spoon sat on top of the phone, vibrating slightly with the next ring.
“Hullo,” she grumbled, pressing it to her ear with one hand, shoving her hair from her face with the other. A faintly icky feel to her skin reminded her she hadn’t removed her makeup before getting in bed last night. She’d meant to. And to brush her teeth and put on her pajamas and pick up her clothes and make neat notes of any pertinent information she found in the records. Judging by the blank pad near the empty file folders, she hadn’t done that, either.
“Are you asleep?”
“Not anymore.” She looked at the window, but with the drapes closed, it was impossible to guess at the time. She checked the clock, but it was turned away from the bed and she couldn’t reach it. “What time is it?”
“Seven fifteen.” The voice was annoyingly male, irascibly Southern and irritatingly familiar. “I’d expect you at work any minute now if you were here, but apparently you don’t feel the need to maintain a schedule when you’re out of my sight.”
“Chief Chadwick. It’s an hour earlier here.”
“Huh. I get up at five thirty every day.”
Of course he did. He needed an early start to get in all the belittling, nitpicking and fault finding that occupied his day.
Of course, she didn’t say that. She didn’t say anything. Chadwick didn’t like silence. Whenever he picked on someone, he wanted them to fall all over themselves in apology, explanation, information. So she waited. Sure, she was sociable, but when circumstances required, she could also be passive-aggressive. Or even aggressive-aggressive.
No noise came from Chadwick’s end of the call. She imagined him sitting at his big desk in his big office, waiting for his subordinates to coordinate his day for him. He would be tilted back in the leather chair—oversize for an oversize man—and he would face the windows that looked out over the central hub of the station. Taking out the solid wall and replacing it with glass had been one of his first acts. How could he correct his employees if he couldn’t see them?
And the glass was bulletproof, of course. The chief of police couldn’t take too many precautions, now could he?
Yeah, it seemed likely to JJ that the biggest threat to the idiot came from inside his own station.
“Well?” he finally demanded. “What’s going on out there? Are you actually getting any work done or are you just enjoying your little holiday on the city’s dime?”
Still ticked about him forbidding her to contact the local police, then doing so himself, she politely corrected him. “Actually, it’s Mr. Winchester’s dime.”
Chadwick mumbled something probably impolite, certainly unprofessional. “Have you found out anything about the girl? If she’s there, what she’s doing, if Travis is right to be concerned.”
She couldn’t imagine the formal and proper Mr. Winchester inviting Chadwick to call him Travis. Dipstick thought his position as police chief and his gender entitled him to liberties he hadn’t been offered, and he took them as if he owned them.
“I can cc you on the report I’m sending Mr. Winchester later this week.”
A moment of surprised silence came over the line, then he said stiffly, “You can cc him on the report you send me. Better yet, you just send that report to me, and I’ll decide whether he needs to see it. You remember, you work for me. For the time being.”
He was seventy-two and unhealthy, she reminded herself, and she was stubborn as hell. She could outlast him. She would, damn it.
“Why, of course, Chief,” she said as innocently as she could manage when her face was screwed into a snarl and ugly images of dancing on graves were filling her head. Let him think she was agreeing to cut Mr. Winchester out of the loop. Let him believe she was giving him another chance to make her look bad on the job, or that she cared about that warning for the time being.
Seventy-two and unhealthy. He couldn’t dog her forever.
“I’ll expect it by noon.”
“I’ll send it when it’s finished. Tomorrow, possibly Friday.”
Another silence. This time she imagined his face screwed into a snarl. If he didn’t put her in her place, as soon as he hung up, he would go looking for some other poor soul to unleash on.
She sent silent apologies to the folks in the station, reached across and knocked three times on the night table, and said, “Sorry, Chief, I’ve got to go. You have a good day.” She was pulling her phone away before she got the last words out and disconnected the call before dropping the cell. It landed with a crinkle on the container that had held dessert. She picked it up, hoping for a single slice of banana or a spoonful of custard, but, woefully, it was empty. Very cleanly empty.
Settling back under the covers, she gazed at the patterned ceiling. She’d had a nice time last night. There had been a few times when things had been so comfortable that she’d almost caught herself thinking of it as a date. Quint may not have actually asked her to dinner, but that had been the point of his visit to the hotel, so she could count it if she wanted. They’d shared their backgrounds and experiences and worldviews. Though, as with most cops, those sharings had tended to revolve around cop stuff.
Such as the times during their training that they’d both gotten tased. The first naked person they had each arrested. Their most memorable time up and close and personal with a sick-as-a-dog drunk. The assaults they’d been subjected to or had successfully evaded. Their most ridiculous calls and the silliest situations they’d intervened in.
He had come as close to laughing as she’d ever seen when she’d told him about her probationary period, straight out of the academy but not yet allowed on the street al
one, when a jerk weighing a hundred pounds more than her had taken a swing at her. She’d ducked, and the guy had broken his hand on her six-four training officer. Sadly, the next time someone had swung on her, her training officer had been on the other side of the room.
She needed to stay in Cedar Creek long enough to see Quint really, truly laugh. She could tell he’d done it a lot in the past. Those weren’t scowl lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth, or hadn’t been originally. She wanted to hear him do it again. She wanted to see how breathtakingly gorgeous he was when he was happy.
She’d seen how heartbreakingly sad he’d been last night. Losing someone you love is never easy...a car crash, a home invasion, a cop or a doctor saying I’m sorry...
Her own heart had hurt at the grief that etched his face, at the trembling hand he’d placed on his chest, at the exquisite sorrow in his eyes the instant before he closed them. She was convinced that Mystery Woman hadn’t left him, not in the traditional sense. Their romance hadn’t been a love/hate sort of thing. It hadn’t been that they couldn’t stand to be together and couldn’t bear to be apart.
She had died unexpectedly, with no time for either of them to prepare. That was the only explanation that felt right. One day, going about their lives as usual, everyday normal in every way, and poof. The next thing he knew, a cop or likely a doctor was telling him, I’m sorry. He’d probably been thinking about dinner, how they would spend the evening, what they would do with the upcoming weekend, never even imagining that the vibrancy and life and love he needed so much was seeping away.
He grieved hard. It was a given that he’d also loved hard.
JJ had pushed the matter to the back of her mind last night and wished she could stuff it back there again. That kind of sorrow should be reserved for people her grandparents’ age, when they’d had an entire life together, when they’d had time to accept that the end was coming. She was like a teenager in that she didn’t like to contemplate death. She was too young, right? Not yet forty. Had her entire life ahead of her. Even though she investigated other people’s deaths, she hadn’t come to peace with the notion of her own or her loved ones’ deaths.
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