“It did go well,” she assured him. “I can’t tell you what was said after you left—” he knew about her legal restrictions with regard to medical confidentiality “—but it went well. Marie asked me to tell you thanks. She feels much better knowing that you’ll be adding extra drive-bys to the ones the police are already going to be doing.”
Tad’s next comment was angry. “Devon Williams should be in jail.”
“Agreed. But since he hasn’t actually physically hurt anyone—that we can prove—since Marie dropped those charges against him last year, and still insists that her current bruising comes from a fall, there’s not a lot the prosecutor can do.”
He knew that, too. Santa Raquel’s assistant prosecutor was a new member of the High Risk Team.
“At least the judge granted her restraining order,” Miranda added, wishing she was only thinking about the woman who’d just left her office. Truth was, she saw more abused children and their mothers than she’d like. She suspected that at least five of the fifty families she saw on a regular basis dealt with that insidious disease.
“And you know as well as I do that those orders are ignored more than forty percent of the time in these kinds of cases,” Tad countered.
And often victims invited the abuser back into their lives. Yeah, Miranda knew that, too. Which was part of what made the situation that much more frustrating.
Unknown to Tad, though, she wasn’t just aware that it happened, she understood how it happened. In the most personal way possible.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “How can a woman marry a man after he’s already abused her? It makes no sense to me.”
He was talking about Marie, whose boyfriend had hit her a couple of times back in high school. Once, he’d also shoved her up to a wall with his hands around her neck.
He’d also loved and adored her when no one else had, making her vulnerable to him, and he’d scared her into thinking that marrying him was the only way to keep herself safe. And happy.
The incidents had been isolated. She’d understood that he hadn’t been himself for various reasons—usually involving alcohol. But she’d believed him when he promised never to lift a hand to her again when she’d dropped charges against him the previous year.
She’d hoped.
Right up until he’d been thundering behind their son, trying to catch up to him to give him a spanking for not packing a suitcase as he’d instructed. He’d panicked Danny, who tore out of their house so fast he’d tripped and fallen on a stake she’d just put up in her garden.
“Our job is to follow the safety plan and do what we can to see that Devon doesn’t have a chance to hurt either of them again,” she reminded him. “You heard Chantel. As soon as he violates that protection order, his ass is in jail.”
Chantel Harris Fairbanks, a Santa Raquel detective on the High Risk Team, might be married to a millionaire banker and live in one of the town’s most impressive mansions, but she was all cop when it came to her job. Even to the point of keeping her previous small apartment in town so she didn’t ever lose sight of who she was and what she knew. So she wouldn’t ever forget where she came from.
Miranda envied her—being able to keep her old self alive. Nothing about Miranda’s former self lived on with her. Not even her name.
“And then the prosecutor can call for a dangerousness hearing,” she said. It wasn’t technically called that in California, but it meant that if Devon was arrested and was considered a danger, he could be held without bail.
The man had threatened to kill his wife. Twice in the past eight weeks since she’d told him she wanted a divorce. He’d actually told her how he’d dispose of her body. He’d been drinking again. And quit his job. When he’d gone to their house the week before to insist that Danny come to his apartment and stay with him for the weekend, the boy suffered his fall. And then he’d blamed his wife for that, too, taking his anger out on her face. On a list of nineteen risk factors pointing to the danger of death, Devon Williams ranked at thirteen. It only took eight for the case to be referred to the High Risk Team.
Marie was changing her routine, her working hours. Her newly married sister and brother-in-law were moving in with her for a while. She and Danny were going to stay around crowds when they went out. She wouldn’t be going to her usual church, grocery store or hairdresser. Not until Devon was under control.
It wasn’t just to keep her and Danny safe, but because she truly wanted Devon to succeed. She wanted him to come through this. To find a good life for himself. To be happy.
She loved him.
And that was the part Miranda got that many others, most others, couldn’t. How a heart could still feel love for someone who beat them.
The secrets she held close inside kept her emotions in check during that afternoon coffee with Tad Newberry though she desperately wanted to talk to him about them.
She couldn’t. She wouldn’t.
No matter how badly she hurt.
Ethan’s life depended on her keeping her secrets to herself.
And the second she’d given birth to him, his life had become more important to her than her own.
Chapter 2
Miranda was fine right up until Tad walked her out to her car. His, an older-model black SUV, was parked down the street. He’d bought it used, he’d told her during one of their coffee sessions with a couple of others after a High Risk Team meeting. He was only in town for a year while he was on leave from his detective job back east. Michigan, she figured. That was where he’d said he’d grown up. A suburb of Detroit.
He was using his time off, he’d said, to learn more about the High Risk Team with the thought that he could help implement a version of it in his hometown.
Other than that, she knew so little about him.
And wanted to know much more.
Almost as soon as they drew up to her car, that vision of his pants around his ankles hit her again—like there was some kind of mental video player attached to her vehicle. Maybe she should buy a new car; maybe that would fulfill her wants, if not her needs. The inane thought came and went.
To be replaced by a sense of panic. Tad was different from any man she’d ever known. The way she responded to him was different.
But she couldn’t be an honest half of a partnership. Any partnership.
When she’d run, the idea of having a lover, or a boyfriend, or anything along the lines of a male companion, hadn’t even entered her mind. She spent two years in a women’s shelter outside of Santa Raquel before moving to the city four years ago, and it hadn’t been a problem since.
But now it was.
She didn’t want to live the rest of her life alone.
Did she have a choice?
“Ethan’s, what, six?” Tad asked, startling her out of her reverie.
“Yeah,” she said. She must be tired. Working too hard. Spending too much time identifying with Marie.
The woman’s case spoke to her on a personal level more than most. Probably because of Danny.
“He’s in the first grade,” she said, forcing herself back into the moment. Tad had met Ethan twice. Brief introductions both times.
After the second time, her son had teased her, saying she should go out on a date with Tad. They’d run into Tad at the grocery store one evening and she’d stopped to chat. Ethan’s reaction had surprised her. She’d never thought of her son as thinking about her personal situation. She was Mom. That was all.
But maybe it had been her son’s grinning little push that was her problem here. Was he missing a male figure in his life? Had that prompted his teasing remarks?
And was her current fascination with Tad merely reaction to that?
Just thoughts that Ethan’s comment had put in her head?
Yeah, if life were that simple.
“Could I take the two of you out t
o dinner?” Tad asked, while her mind continued to fly off course.
Her stomach flip-flopped. She almost dropped her keys. Struggling to find a way to say no when what she wanted to do was ask how soon, she said nothing as he continued. “I’d like to spend some time with Ethan, since he’s so close to Danny’s age. Just to observe. It would help me get a better feel for things. In case I ever need to speak with Danny again. Dropping my drawers was a little extreme and I don’t think it would work a second time.”
She nodded, trying to school her features—feeling she managed, at best, a cross between a frown and the grin that was trying to break through.
Dinner was all he’d asked. To observe her son. No big deal.
And complicated as hell.
“I’m sorry about that, by the way,” he said when her feelings continued to flay around inside. “The dropping of the pants thing. And thank you for not mentioning it.”
“It was unconventional, not to mention unexpected, but I thought the idea was brilliant,” Miranda spoke the complete truth. Probably because she could. Her tongue needed to fly along with her brain waves, but most of them weren’t traveling in the same atmosphere.
“And... I like you in blue.”
What? Had she lost her mind? I like you in blue?
Oh my God. She was flirting with him?
Dinner was definitely out.
“I’ll keep that in mind.” Tad’s tone was so easygoing, her raging blood settled a little. A lot, actually. She felt completely put in her place.
Which meant that... “Dinner would be fine,” she said, sane again. He needed her help with Danny. And Ethan would be with her. She was clearheaded every second of every day that she was with her son. She was all he had in the world, and she was conscious of that fact first and foremost. “When?”
“Tonight? Unless you have other plans? I’m already on Danny duty and am eager to get what help I can so I don’t blow it with him.”
His “duty” entailed a few minutes a few times a day, driving by wherever the boy was, according to the schedule Marie would text him each week, with nightly changes if there were any. Marie could call or text him if she got in a bind. Miranda knew, because she’d been sitting at the table when the plan was devised. She knew what every participant in the plan was doing—including their medical office. They were all on alert. And careful to make sure that only handpicked personnel were alone with Danny any time he was in for treatment.
That brought her back to this morning. Tad in the examining room.
She was dying to know what had happened to him in the past. The details.
But she didn’t ask. Instead, she agreed to meet him at Uncle Bob’s, a hamburger diner on the beach with a sandbox for kids to play in, at six.
She didn’t have time to stand around and chat right now. Ethan would be out of school in ten minutes, and unlike Marie, she didn’t have a team of experts watching out for her son.
Because, unlike Marie, she’d escaped her past. She was safe.
As long as she kept her mouth shut.
* * *
In his rented apartment with a view of the ocean, Tad took a long, hot shower, turning the water to cold when the heat failed to relax him.
He was supposed to be recovering, and in the interim, doing a man he respected a favor as a private way of repenting for the wrong turn his career had taken. He was supposed to be getting his shit together, not losing it over the woman he’d been sent to find.
Pulling on a pair of black jeans one size larger than he normally wore, to accommodate the thigh that was still painful sometimes and had a tendency to swell, he took a T-shirt from the top dresser drawer. He followed that with a button-down white shirt from the closet, careful to line up the empty hanger in its proper place, and yanked open the little side drawer on the dresser for a pair of socks.
The arrangements in his apartment weren’t all as he would’ve preferred them, but the place had come furnished and that was what he cared about. His clothes back home in North Carolina were in the house he’d purchased the previous year in an upper-middle-class neighborhood.
Reaching inside one of the socks he’d retrieved, he pulled out the burner phone that had traveled across the country with him six weeks before. Fridays were call days. North Carolina was three hours ahead of California and he didn’t know how late he’d be out.
“Chief O’Connor.” North Carolina’s newly appointed state chief fire marshal always picked up on the first ring.
“Just checking in, sir. I told you she’s working as a physician’s assistant in a pediatric office and I had a chance to see her in action today. Like you, she’s not afraid to think outside the box. I think you’d be proud of her.” Maybe it made him a bit of a wuss that he always tried to find a way to comfort the older man during these conversations, to make him feel less alone.
But if it wasn’t for Chief O’Connor’s quick thinking at a scene that hadn’t even required his presence, Tad and a couple of his fellow officers could well be dead.
“And the boy?”
“Other than those two brief meetings I told you about, I haven’t seen him.” He’d meant to tell the chief about his dinner engagement. Didn’t.
Wondered why the hell not.
He didn’t like the predicament he was putting himself in.
“Yeah, best to go slowly.” The older man’s voice came firmly over the wire. “The last thing I want to do is tip her off...”
“I was going to ask you about that. With her ex gone, is there really a need for this secrecy?”
The question had been bothering him for a while, particularly since the Marie Williams case had sprung up that week. Miranda Blake, real name Dana O’Connor, had no way of knowing that she was out of danger. Surely she’d welcome the knowledge—and the chance to go home to the friends and family she’d been forced to leave behind when she’d changed her identity to escape a madman.
“I know my daughter, young man. This is my operation. My call. Dana doesn’t like change. She doesn’t like having her world upended. If she’s happy there, in that life, I want to know about it. I’ll need to figure that into how I approach her. And I’ll need to figure out how I might fit into that life so I can make the transition easier for her.”
Okay. Sure. But...
“Her ex...he might have family,” the chief went on. “Someone who’d want contact with the boy. I’ve got a guy looking into that. Good investigator. I need to be absolutely certain, before I have any contact with her, even through you, that I’m not putting her in any danger or in any way making her life more difficult than it’s already been. I’m not going to put my selfish need to have her back in my life ahead of her needs.”
Nodding, respecting the man all over again, Tad wandered into the living room, to the window looking out toward the Pacific Ocean two streets in the distance.
“I’d be more than happy to check into any in-law family that might exist.” His detective skills had earned him the right to make his own calls on the job—until he’d made a call based as much on emotion as skill, one that was so far from protocol that he’d almost gotten himself and others killed.
He’d saved the girl, though.
There was that. Always that. Every single time he relived the horror of that morning three months before.
“Forgive me for being set in my ways, but I learned a long time ago not to put all my eggs in one basket,” Chief O’Connor said. “I have someone else following that lead. Someone who has no idea that you, or your job for me, even exist. I’m paying you to use your highly touted skills to find my daughter and grandson, which you’ve done, and to be fully focused there, to keep me informed. It’s been years since I’ve had any word of my daughter and these weekly calls of ours...well, let’s just say they’re the best moments I’ve had in all those years. And I won’t risk having any searches for
her coming from the town in which she lives. There can’t be anything connecting our investigation too close to her.”
Tad nodded, understanding. He’d succeeded in tracking her down, via the access he continued to have to law enforcement databases of various kinds. He’d learned a great deal about her.
But he still wasn’t satisfied. He didn’t even know Dana’s ex’s name. The cop in him needed to be certain, especially after witnessing from the sidelines the Devon Williams nightmare that week, that he was working with complete and accurate information.
In his entire career, he’d always double-checked facts himself. He wasn’t a “rely on others” kind of guy.
“You’re one hundred percent certain her ex is dead.” His voice could be intimidating, too, when necessary.
“Yes. I have definitive proof. I give you my word on that.”
Then there was nothing more to be said. He’d accepted the job. He respected the man. Hell, all of North Carolina respected him if such a thing was possible. Heroes didn’t come around every day, and when they did, they didn’t shine as often or as brightly as Brian O’Connor had. Again and again, over the course of a lifetime, he’d risked his life, and volunteered his time, too, to save and enrich the lives of those in his community. And his state.
If he’d grown a little eccentric over the years, Tad figured that was his right.
He owed him the news that Tad would be having dinner with his grandson in a few minutes. That he could call back later with a report the chief had been waiting for.
He owed him. And he reneged.
He’d figure that one out later.
First, he had a date to keep.
In a manner of speaking...
Chapter 3
“So...are we like...on a thing?” Ethan glanced between Miranda and Tad, his eyes rimmed by the dark-framed glasses he’d chosen because he thought they resembled the ones worn by Clark Kent, Superman’s alter ego—the Superman of earlier days that Miranda had shared with him. If her son had been grinning, teasing, she might have been able to brush the moment aside.
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