Fatal Hearts

by Norah Wilson

  Boyd took a deep breath and exhaled, unclenching his fists. “What about other people at the park? You say lots of people eat their lunch there and it must have been pushing eleven thirty or quarter to twelve. No one saw anything unusual?”

  Morgan shook his head. “Nothing. Which suggests if he was in distress, it couldn’t have been too acute or he’d have attracted attention. Seems like it might have happened once he was in the car. Of course, maybe something started outside the car, but, being a man, he didn’t want anyone to witness him having a weak spell or something, and he hid it until he got in the car.”

  “That’s possible,” Boyd acknowledged. “Have you gone back to the scene around that eleven to twelve time frame to try to catch the people who frequent the park?”

  “Every day for a week,” he confirmed. “We talked to everyone coming or going or just hanging around during that hour, hoping to find someone who saw something.”

  “It came to nothing, I guess?”

  Morgan shook his head. “Nothing. Unless you count the tip about the man who is supposedly practicing mind control on the ducks.”

  Boyd snorted. That was a new one on him. There were always a few reality-challenged folks who surfaced when you talked to a broad cross section of people like that. He knew better than to dismiss them, as did Morgan, no doubt. Just because they saw things a different way didn’t negate that they saw things. But it sounded like the guy’s attention was firmly fixed on the duck pond, not the parking lot or the trails.

  “What about Josh’s car?”

  “Like I told you in one of our earlier conversations, we had it examined to make sure there was nothing wrong electrically, but everything checks out.”

  “What about friends, associates, coworkers? Have you talked to them?”

  “A few key people,” Morgan said. “His landlord, Sylvia Stratton, some friends, coworkers who shared adjacent space. No one saw any hint of a health issue.”

  “Anyone think Josh had made enemies here? Or that his search for his birth parents might have stirred up a hornet’s nest?”

  “No known enemies. But the other thing—the fact that he was trying to find your parents—doesn’t seem to have been a secret. I think just about everyone we interviewed knew that. Nobody raised it as something potentially risky. Since we’re not working a homicide per se, we didn’t go too hard after people. We asked if they knew about his investigation, and, if so, had he told them anything about recent developments. No one seems to have known he figured it out.”

  “Or if they did, they’re not saying.”

  “Right.”

  Boyd tried to relax his jaw before he cracked a molar. “Did any of them know our adoption was an illegal one?”

  “A couple of them know about the . . . uh . . . irregularities.”

  “Irregularities? I’ll say. As in no actual record of our birth having been lodged with vital statistics, at least not in the name of Holbrook, which was the surname on the birth certificates our adoptive parents were given.”

  “I still can’t get over that,” Morgan said. “Kinda defeats the idea of a closed adoption.”

  “Exactly. Ella and Frank McBride should never even have seen those documents, let alone been given copies of them. And when Josh petitioned the courts to open any sealed adoption records pertaining to the infants Holbrook, there was no record to be found under that name. Presumably because those birth certificates were forged in the first place.”

  “Why do you suppose your parents were given those birth certificates? They certainly wouldn’t have needed them. New birth certificates would have been issued in the McBride name when the adoption was approved, and the original birth record sealed, right?”

  “My best guess is that it was to misdirect us, to prevent us from ever finding our birth parents if we decided to look.”

  Morgan shook his head. “Either some horribly incompetent civil servant made the mother of all screwups or the adoption was outright illegal.”

  “The latter, I’m sure.” Boyd’s jaw tightened again. “And I appreciate your department’s discretion. The last thing I want to do is embroil our adoptive parents in a serious investigation three and a half decades later, one they don’t deserve to be subjected to. No matter how shadily—or maybe incompetently—the adoption might have been handled from this end, I can promise you that Frank and Ella believed it was completely aboveboard.”

  “I do believe that. And I also take the point I presume you were making, that someone might not have wanted his investigation to succeed. If someone went to great lengths to bury the adoption years ago, who knows what lengths they’d go to now?”

  “Exactly.” Boyd massaged his temple. “I’m sorry, I kinda sidetracked the conversation. You said a couple of folks knew about the irregularities?”

  “Yeah, two of them. To one extent or another. That would be Dr. Hayden Walsh and your brother’s landlord. But that makes sense. I gather he was pretty close to Dr. Walsh, and, of course, he met Sylvia Stratton in the course of his investigation, so she’s known from their first contact, before Josh ever took up residence.”

  “Of course. There have to be others out there who know, though. Josh has been investigating this for almost six months. Somewhere along the way, he had to have told other people.”

  Another nod from Morgan. “Seems he couched it as a clerical mistake, not a flat-out illegal adoption, or so I gather as I quietly work my way through the list of obstetricians in the city in an effort to reconstruct Josh’s search. Your brother’s standard line was that he thought the ob-gyn in question had delivered you guys, but that the birth record was inexplicably mixed up with another set of twins. That was apparently good enough for most of these guys, who had their staff check their records for the period in question. So far, they’ve all told us they didn’t deliver any twin boys who could have been you or whose records could have been confounded with you.”

  Boyd’s lips thinned. “And a doctor would never lie.”

  Morgan sighed. “There’s that. But for what it’s worth, I’ve been talking to these docs myself. I’m not holding myself out as a human polygraph, but I do tend to have a pretty good feel for when I’m being bullshitted.”

  “And you believe them?”

  “So far.”

  “You know I’m going to be out there talking to people too, right?”

  “I figured. And more power to you. If you can bring me something that lets me ramp up reasonable and probable grounds, we’ll be all over it,” Morgan said. “So long as you’re not out there showing us up.”

  Boyd nodded. “Shouldn’t be a problem.” He almost added “as long as you’re doing your job right,” but he thought better of it. From the glint in Morgan’s eyes, it appeared he didn’t have to say it out loud.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing, McBride.”

  “Well, if I don’t know what I’m doing by now, I’m in trouble.”

  “I mean, have you considered that if you go poking around, you might not like what you find?”

  Boyd just raised an eyebrow.

  “Off the top of my head, the person who might have the most to lose from your brother’s investigation might be your birth mother.”

  “The thought had occurred to me.”

  “But you’re not going to leave it alone?”

  “Would you?”

  Morgan ran a hand through his hair, which fell back into perfect place. “Just remember, be discreet. Because if I get any complaints, your officer in charge back home is going to hear from my boss. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  Morgan flipped the file closed and stood.

  Boyd rose and extended his hand. “Thanks, man.”

  “No problem. For what it’s worth, I really want to help you out. My wife, Grace, works for the same local paper as Josh did, and she really liked y
our brother. Says she learned a lot from him over these last months, and she’s still really broken up about his death. Hell, I met him a couple of times over drinks, and I liked him too. Even had him and Hayden over to the house for dinner. It was a damned shame.”

  Boyd blinked. “I didn’t know. That he worked with your wife, I mean. You didn’t mention it last time.”

  Morgan shrugged. “You had enough on your mind. And I’m telling you now so you’ll know that even if I didn’t have you breathing down my neck, I honest to God could not go home at night if I wasn’t busting my hump to get to the bottom of this. I couldn’t look Grace in the eye if I wasn’t doing everything I could.”

  Boyd looked at Ray Morgan and saw the fierce love he bore for his wife blazing in his face. The kind of love Josh had believed in and had been holding out for. The kind he had hoped he’d one day find with Hayden. It still pained Boyd to remember that months-ago conversation with Josh and his confession that he loved Hayden. But she was married to her career. She’d shut him down just like she apparently shut down everyone else, but Josh had never been a quitter. He’d said it was a matter of timing for Hayden. She needed to achieve her goals and feel more secure before she could open herself up to romance. He’d been banking on her eventually coming to love him back, when the timing was right. But now his brother would never have that chance, never have a woman he could love as ferociously as Ray Morgan loved his wife.

  He nodded. “Understood. And thank you.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Hayden spotted Boyd at a table near the back of the restaurant. He sat studying papers he’d spread across the tabletop, and she caught her breath at the wave of grief that washed over her. God, he looked so much like Josh. Then he glanced up.

  There was nothing of Josh in those eyes as he watched her. Her friend’s gaze had been warm and welcoming. His brother’s, however, cut through her like a laser beam, as if he could see straight to her soul.

  She couldn’t remember the last time someone had had such a profound effect on her. She couldn’t deny there was something about Boyd that drew her to him.

  It’s just because he’s Josh’s brother and both of you are grieving. Squelching her nervousness, she made her way to his table. He stood, pulling out a chair for her. Apparently Mr. and Mrs. McBride had raised their sons to display good manners. Something that had been severely lacking in other men she’d dated.

  Not that she and Josh had dated. And her dinner with Boyd certainly wasn’t a date.

  “Thanks for coming, Hayden.”

  “Happy to help if I can.”

  She took her seat, and he started gathering up the papers. Medical records, she saw.

  “You got the records already?” She gestured to the material. “They must have bumped your request right to the front of the line.”

  He pushed the papers back into the envelope bearing the hospital’s logo and set it on the unused chair to his right. “Charlotte was very accommodating.”

  “Wow.” Her brows shot up. “You’re on a first-name basis with Mrs. Trecartin?”

  He smiled, lifting his shoulders in an easy shrug. “I work fast.”

  Apparently the man was capable of being charming when he chose to be. Not that she’d seen any evidence of that herself. Pretty much all she’d seen from him so far was serious intensity. “It must be hereditary.” She laughed, shaking her head. “Josh could charm the birds out of the trees too.”

  His face sobered immediately, and she regretted raising Josh’s name. And how stupid was that? Josh was the reason she was here after all.

  A waiter appeared to take their drink orders, and she asked for her usual, a Picaroons Blonde Ale.

  Boyd quirked his brow. “Picaroons?”

  She nodded. “Local microbrewery. It’s good.”

  “Then bring me one too.”

  When the waiter left, Hayden picked up the menu and started studying it, even though she pretty much knew it by heart.

  “Do you eat here often?” he asked.

  “More often than I like to admit,” she confessed. “I hate cooking just for myself.”

  He looked up from his menu. “So no boyfriend, then?”

  “Lord, no. I don’t have time for romance.”

  “But you had time for my brother?”

  She closed her menu. “Like I told you before, Boyd, I don’t date. I’ve seen too many med school students and residents wind up dating someone in the city where they’re training. Next thing you know, they’re getting married, buying a house, adopting a dog from the local rescue, and settling in. I’ve seen it again and again, and I promised myself that would never be me. I just won’t do that—won’t constrain my career choices that way. Josh and I were friends, but that was it.”

  “Interesting.” He studied her with those tawny eyes.

  She felt a flush creeping up her neck, but she held his gaze. “Very uninteresting, actually,” she said. “But it’s the way it has to be. I have plans.”

  “Of course you have plans. Medicine isn’t the kind of career you fall into. But no dating? No romance? No sex? Isn’t that a rather radical choice for someone so young?”

  “I’m not nearly as young as I could have been.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “For this point in my career, I’m almost two years behind the cohort I started out with. Two years that I threw away on a relationship. I let myself get dragged off course. When I dusted myself off and got back into a medical program, which I was damned lucky to be able to do, I swore it wouldn’t happen again. I’m not going to throw away my tomorrow for a relationship today. A relationship that would only tie me down to someone else’s expectations.”

  “Did Josh know that? I mean, about you dropping out of med school?”

  “Of course.” She frowned. “He was a great guy, my friend, not some jerk in a bar. I owed him more than just the standard I-don’t-date line. You think I’d have rebuffed his overtures without explaining?”

  “Of course you wouldn’t. Sorry.”

  She sagged in her chair. “No, I’m sorry. It was a simple question. I shouldn’t have jumped down your throat.” She pushed the weight of her hair back. “I told him the whole sad story. We actually talked about it a few times, how not all men were controlling jerks and that when the time was right, the perfect guy would turn up, et cetera. Of course, I told him the same would happen for him. He’d solve the riddle of your birth parents, go back to the big city, meet an amazing woman who wouldn’t be nearly good enough for him, but he’d fall in love with her anyway, and that would be that.”

  She glanced up to see that his face was contorted with pain.

  “Oh, Boyd, I’m sorry. You don’t need reminding of all the things he’ll miss out on.”

  “But it’s true, isn’t it? He never got to hold the woman of his dreams, make love to her. Never got to marry, have children, grandchildren.”

  Her chest constricted with grief. Poor Josh! If ever a guy deserved those things, it was him. For all the pushback he’d given their happily married friends about not wanting to join their ranks just yet, he’d have made a wonderful husband and a loving father. Maybe she should have been pushing him too, urging him to find that woman. Instead, the two of them had banded together to fight off their matchmaking friends.

  God, she missed him. How much worse Boyd must feel, losing his only brother. His twin. The thought had her on the verge of tears, and she had to blink rapidly to clear them.

  She heard him stifle a curse.

  “I’m sorry.” His voice was low, gruff, vibrating with his own grief. “I’ve upset you.”

  She gave him a gentle smile. The softness—the sadness—in those golden eyes had her reaching across the small table to place a comforting hand on his forearm. She felt his muscles tense under her fingers and withdrew her hand.

  “It’s not yo
ur fault. And I started that line of discussion, if you’ll remember.” She hugged her arms around herself. “Besides, I agreed to come here. I agreed to talk about Josh. It’s just still so . . . fresh, you know?”

  “I know.”

  The waiter approached the table with their beers. “Are we ready to order, or do you need a few more minutes?” he asked.

  “I’m ready.” Hayden handed him her menu. “I’ll have the New Orleans salad.”

  Boyd closed his menu, having given it the briefest of glances. “Grilled salmon, but can you give me extra vegetables instead of a starch?”

  “Certainly, sir.” The server took the menus and disappeared.

  After a fortifying sip of beer, Hayden returned to the subject of Josh. “So, what is it you think I can do for you?”

  He picked up his beer and took a drink, then a larger one. “Nice. Great recommendation,” he pronounced. Then he put the mug down and met her eyes. “I want to know more about his life here. You said you two gravitated toward one another? How so?”

  “Well, at first, it was over little things. TV shows we both liked. Movies we both wanted to see. We both liked jogging. Then the more we talked, the more we realized we liked talking.”

  “Talking.” He smiled wryly. “Of course.”

  “Also, like I told you earlier, all of our married friends kept trying to throw us together for different reasons. The whole matchmaking thing.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “I bet.”

  “We both thought it was funny. I mean, Josh was a good-looking guy, so it’s not like I couldn’t see why a girl would be attracted to him.”

  His eyebrows went up even higher. “Really?” That’s when she realized that by saying Josh was good-looking, she was also saying Boyd was good-looking. She felt herself blush and took a quick sip of her beer to help hide it.

  “Well . . . yes. I guess.”

  “When did he make his move on you? Before or after you became friends?”

  “After,” she said. “If he’d done it up front, without knowing anything about me, I doubt we ever would have become friends. I have a low threshold of tolerance for men who see a woman and try to ‘hit that’ right out of the gates.”