by Dana Mentink
Noelle arched an eyebrow.
Tyler pressed on. “I’ll ride along as a civilian escort. Dusty needs an outing, especially after her grooming. She can’t stand grooming days.”
She was still frowning. “If Gavin finds out...”
“Tell him Tyler forced you to take him at gunpoint,” Caleb said as he headed for the door. “We’ve already covered that.”
Tyler held up his hands. “I promise. I’m riding along only. Purely a civilian thing.”
Noelle laughed. “That’s how you spend your day off?”
“If it gets Ivan Holland off the streets, I’ll happily sacrifice. Can we stop at the training center and get Dusty?”
“No problem.”
Tyler jerked a look at Penny. “I’ll meet you outside in ten, Noelle. Got to check on something.”
Noelle and Liberty walked outside. Noelle’s brow was furrowed, and he understood her determination. Capturing Ivan Holland was personal.
Penny was still at her desk, staring at her screen.
She gave him that cheerful smile again, but he noticed the slight pinch of her lips.
“Doing all right?”
She nodded. “Bradley is going to have my cell-phone number changed. I’ll be okay now. No more texts hopefully.”
If only Randall’s threats could be neutralized so easily.
“Is there anything I can do? Something you need?”
She fired a bright smile. “Not a thing. I’m surrounded by cops with a guard dog on my feet. Perfectly safe.”
He wanted to press further, but she was already staring at her screen, typing with amazing dexterity.
“I’ll be back in a couple of hours, well before you leave. At quitting time, I’ll take you home, all right?”
Her fingers paused on her keyboard. “No need. My brother will escort me.”
He wondered if she was still stinging from his “silly” comment. Or was she merely hanging onto the formalities of work because it kept her from thinking about other things?
It suddenly occurred to him that he himself had come into the office, to the comfort of work and routine, when he could just as easily have accomplished his discussion with Caleb over the phone. Then he’d inserted himself into a police assignment with Noelle. So who was clinging to the comfort of a work routine now?
He cleared his throat. “You have my cell-phone number, but if anything changes and your brother isn’t available, call me, okay? Or, you know...if you want to talk or anything.”
Pink suffused her cheeks. “Thank you. I will call you if I need to.” He saw the muscles of her throat convulse as she swallowed. “That’s very kind.”
Still, he could not make himself walk away. “Promise me you won’t leave without me or Bradley?”
“Yes, I promise.”
“All right. I’ll see you later.” He’d cleared the counter, willing himself not to turn and look at her again, when she spoke.
“Tyler?”
He stopped. “Yes?”
“Randall has been at large for twenty years. What...?” He heard the hesitation in her voice. “What are the chances you are going to catch him this time?”
“This time?” He locked on her soft brown gaze. There was such vulnerability there, raw emotion shimmering in her irises. “One hundred percent.”
Her whispered follow-up split his gut in two.
“Before or after he kills me?”
He walked back to her desk and kneeled there, earning a nose poke in his thigh from Scrappy. Pulling her hands away from the keys, he forced her attention to his.
“Penny, we are going to put Randall away before he hurts you or anyone else again. I know it’s hard to believe, but now we know his identity and we will get him soon, very soon. You just have to hold on and trust.”
The brown of her irises softened to a lighter café au lait. “Honestly, I don’t know if that’s possible. I’ve not really trusted anyone but Bradley since my adoptive parents passed.” She paused, her mouth pulled into a thoughtful bow. “But I will try.”
Without thinking, he pressed a kiss to her hand. “I won’t let you down.” And then he strode out, not wanting to detect any shock in her face from his gesture that had shocked him plenty.
Kissing her hand? Promising that he would keep Randall from ever hurting her again?
And strangest of all, feeling deep in his soul that he desperately meant to keep that promise, no matter what the cost.
FIVE
Penny walked Scrappy at lunchtime in the grassy area provided for the police K-9s. He pranced and sniffed, enjoying the cold autumn breeze. She was reassured by the constant parade of cops and dogs. They all checked on her solicitously.
She kept a smile fixed in place as she responded politely and later forced herself to eat her peanut butter sandwich in the break room. When she went to fill a glass with water, she returned to find the remainder of her sandwich gone. Scrappy swiped the crumbs from his lips with a satisfied slurp.
“You are a naughty dog, Scrappy,” she scolded.
She grinned and caressed him. “How about tomorrow I bring you a chew bone so we can have a lunch break together, okay?”
She got a tail wag of agreement. Tummy full and energy depleted, he settled under her desk for a nap while she tackled the outstanding paperwork and ordered a box of supplies for the open house. By late afternoon, she’d almost forgotten the terrible text from Randall. A glance out the window told her that evening was coming. The growing darkness sent a chill cascading down her spine. She wasn’t afraid of the dark, was she? No, not the dark, just the man hiding in it.
Bradley called a little after four.
“Sis, I’m stuck on a stakeout.”
Her heart began to pound.
His voice cut through her fear. “Tyler’s almost there. He’s bringing your phone with the new number.”
She swallowed and forced a calm tone. “But he’s off duty.”
“He grumbled so much that Sarge said he could take over your detail when I’m not around.”
She remembered Tyler’s kiss on her hand, a warm spot she imagined she could still feel. “But he’s got Rain to take care of. I’m sure I could ask another officer...”
She looked up to find Tyler striding in with Dusty. He twirled a key ring around his finger. His eyes were shadowed with fatigue, she thought, or maybe frustration. The hunt for Ivan Holland had not yielded any results. Or perhaps he’d begun to regret his decision to be her babysitter.
She covered the phone. “Bradley told me you were coming, but really, it’s fine. I can get...”
He shook his head, which seemed to make him wince. “No, I want you with me, but I have to pick up Rain from day care. Do you mind? I figured we can get some dinner at my apartment before your brother comes home.”
He said it so matter-of-factly, but the very idea whipped up her nerves. Dinner? At his apartment? “Um, well, I’ve got Scrappy. Maybe I should...”
“My building has a dog run. We can stop with the dogs before it gets too dark.”
Dark. Again, her stomach flipped. Go home, lock the door and hide until morning, her mind yelled. But she would not live that way. She’d spent too long hiding in the shadows and fought too hard to make her way out of them. She forced back her shoulders.
“Okay.” She ended the conversation with Bradley and disconnected. “I’ll get my purse.”
Her knees only shook a tiny bit as she left the secure station and stepped into the darkness with Tyler, Scrappy and Dusty. They walked quickly to his vehicle. Tyler’s sharp gaze traveled along the street and between the vehicles.
Looking for Randall, she thought with a shiver. Gratefully, she slid into Tyler’s civilian vehicle, an SUV.
She watched as Tyler settled into the driver’s seat. The interior was meticulously cl
ean except for a lone bag of fishy crackers lying on a car seat in the rear.
“Better grab that bag,” she told Tyler, as Scrappy hopped in, nose quivering. “He’s not very reliable around food. I found that out the hard way.”
Tyler chuckled. “Neither is Dusty, but she does a great job tidying up anything Rain has dropped.”
He turned on the engine and immediately a preschool counting song began to blast through the speakers. Tyler’s face turned scarlet. “Oh, sorry. Uh, that’s Rain’s favorite at the moment. Something about turtles and goldfish.”
Penny could not prevent her giggles from spilling out.
He quirked an eyebrow. “I don’t think I’ve heard you laugh before. Not for a long time, anyway. It’s nice.”
Now it was her turn to blush. He paid attention to her laughter at work? He was always so focused, moving too quickly and purposefully to pay any mind to her, she’d thought.
They traveled the Belt Parkway at a snail’s pace through the traffic until he pulled up to a four-story building with a yellow sign for Happy Tot Day Care stuck on one of the doors. Through the front window she could see small children climbing on a plastic play structure and playing with toy cars. High-pitched squealing floated through the air.
And in an instant, the long-ago sadness returned. A dull pain bloomed behind her ribs as her mind traveled back into the past. She recalled being the last child left at day care, her four-year-old nose pressed to the window in search of parents who had forgotten about her again. One by one the other children had been picked up until the facility went quiet. Penny had stayed among the abandoned toys, trying not to notice the lengthening shadows or the agitated pacing of the teachers. She recalled Miss Deborah’s brightly painted fingernails clutched around the phone, a combination of annoyance and pity in her voice.
“How could they forget their own kid?” she’d whispered. “And they don’t even wash her clothes or brush her hair. They probably don’t feed her breakfast before they dump her off here, either.”
It was the truth. Bradley, barely fourteen, was the one who toasted bread for her, cut it into triangles and added butter, if there was any in the fridge. He packed her after-school snack, too, a hastily assembled collection of whatever he could find instead of the neatly partitioned containers brought by the other children who shared her day care. She remembered the laughter of the other kids when she’d found half a baked potato in her bag for snack. She would have been perfectly content eating that potato, but she’d gone hungry rather than face the laughter of her peers.
Sometimes it was Bradley who’d come to retrieve her after he returned home from a full school day and a couple of hours at his part-time job to discover her missing. She remembered those long afternoons, looking into the eager faces of the parents as they’d hugged their children and hastened them to cars, admiring their crayoned pictures.
She’d tried taping her own painstakingly drawn pictures on the front of the dented refrigerator, hoping it would help her parents think about her, remember her...want her. If the pictures were good enough... If she just tried hard enough...
She heard Randall’s words again. Your parents didn’t love you. Tyler’s touch on her shoulder made her jump.
“Sorry. You looked sad there, for a moment.”
She blinked. “I...spent a lot of time in day care. Randall was a handyman and he did some work at the place. That’s how he met my parents. They got into some bad things, together. Planned some thefts and scams and such.”
Tyler listened intently, though he was no doubt privy to all the facts, anyway. For some reason, she felt the need to say it aloud. “Randall knew... I mean, he noticed my parents, uh, forgot about me sometimes. That’s part of the way he justified killing them.” She gulped. “He said they were bad parents and I suppose he was right. It took me a long time to understand that it wasn’t my fault that they neglected me. I always thought if I was different, more appealing somehow, prettier, smarter...”
Tyler took her hand. His fingers were long and warm as he gently squeezed. “I’m sorry. None of that should have happened to you, or any child for that matter.”
She shrugged, garnering strength from his big palm. “It’s okay. I have a great brother, and my parents did what they could with what they had. Plus I had two amazing adoptive parents.”
He still held her hand, warming it between his. “But you still have some past scars to work through, right?”
“I know my biological parents’ behavior wasn’t because of me, but sometimes the feelings creep up and I have to give myself a stern talking-to. I guess with Randall coming back it’s natural I’d start to stew about things again.” She flashed a smile at him, but his face remained grave. She gave his hand a jaunty wiggle before she let go. “Really, it’s okay.”
“I wouldn’t have brought you here if I had known it would be so painful.”
“It isn’t. I’m all right.”
His face still showed uncertainty.
“Well, Detective,” she said, voice bright. “Since I know you aren’t about to let me stay in the car, let’s go get Rain. Scrappy and Dusty can hang out now that the fish crackers have been secured.”
He paused, azure eyes troubled. “If it’s too hard to go in there maybe I can have someone bring her out to me. I’ll just make a phone call.”
Warmth tickled her tummy at his thoughtfulness. “No. It’s good for me to see all the kiddos at pickup time. It reminds me how families are supposed to be, how God made them to be.”
He nodded, and she wished she had not shared something so deeply personal with him. He was, after all, only babysitting her.
Gulping in a deep breath, she walked with him into the day care.
* * *
Tyler carefully placed the still soggy finger paintings in the trunk area after strapping Rain into the car seat next to the two eager dogs. The artwork was a mishmash of yellow, all yellow. The teacher had said she could not be persuaded to try any of the other colors. Funny how that small girl knew exactly what she wanted. He wished he had such clarity.
Rain delighted in the new doggy, whom she called “Sappy.” Since she insisted on her counting music, he turned up the sound and Rain and Penny sang together. He chimed in at the chorus for good measure, which earned him a brilliant smile from Penny.
That smile had to be a million watts and it left him speechless for a moment. What a splendid thing to possess so much joy when she’d endured a mountain of hardship. He resolved to try to coax a smile from her again soon.
On the drive back, he kept a wary eye out for Randall, but there was no one tracking them that he could detect. When they reached the brick apartment building, he parked and they let the dogs out for a rollick in the fenced dog run. Again, there was nobody around who shouldn’t be.
He led the way to their third-floor apartment. “My mom lives downstairs,” he explained in the elevator on the way up. “She joins us for dinner. Hope that’s okay. I think the Friday-night dining tradition started as a way to ensure I was not poisoning her only grandchild with my cooking.”
He was unlocking the door when his mother appeared in the hallway, a covered dish clutched between two pot holders. “Well, hello.” Her eyes went wide as she took in Penny with the eager Scrappy at her shin. “I didn’t know you had a dinner date, Ty.”
Tyler grimaced as he let Rain inside. Scrappy and Dusty beelined in. “Not a date. Mom, you met Penelope McGregor at the hospital. She’s Bradley’s sister. You know, my buddy who manages to be over here every time you make fried chicken?”
“Of course. I always make a couple of extra pieces figuring Bradley will eat a few.” He discerned a calculating look in his mother’s eye that gave him pause. “So nice to see you again,” she said as she walked after them and put her casserole dish on the counter. Pausing to clasp Penny’s hand, she said, “You have the most lovely red ha
ir, Penelope. Just the most attractive shade, like an autumn sunset.”
Though he had a feeling his mom was about to meddle, he agreed. Her hair did remind him of a glorious sunset. He blinked.
“Thank you, and please call me Penny. But the red hair comes with a maddening amount of freckles, which got me teased plenty in school.”
Rain brought Penny a stuffed rabbit. The toy’s face was discolored by a set of ink eyebrows that she had drawn on after discovering a marker in Tyler’s desk drawer. She bent and took it. “Who is this?”
“Babby,” Rain said solemnly.
“Babby the rabbit. Shall I take care of him for a while?”
Rain nodded.
Penny cradled the bunny like a baby and Rain trotted off in search of another toy.
His mother beamed. “Rain must really like you, Penny. She doesn’t hand Babby over to just anyone. Babby is her right-hand rabbit. Did you see that, Ty? Look how she’s taken to Penny.”
“Yes, Mom, I saw,” he said. “Thanks for making the lasagna. It smells great.”
“Tyler is the world’s worst cook. If I left it up to him, Rain would starve or turn orange from an overdose of mac and cheese. I suppose that might be my fault since I was always the chief chef and bottle washer when my husband was alive. He always had to have things just so and I never wanted my boys to feel the pressure of trying to cater to his food whims.” She paused for breath. “Do you like to cook, Penny?”
Tyler sensed again how the wind was blowing. His mother was shifting into full matchmaker mode. “Mom, would you mind setting the table while I fix a salad?”
“Oh, sorry, Ty. I can’t. I have to run along.”
He stared. “You’re not staying for dinner?” He couldn’t remember the last time they’d eaten Friday dinner without her.
“Nope. I’m so busy. I’ve got a zillion things to do.”
Like what? he wanted to ask, but the door was already closing behind her.