A Man Without Love

by Beverly Bird

  There was no reason to place the call now.

  And there was every reason in the world.

  He picked up the phone, looking at his watch only after he had punched in his calling-card number. Twenty past six. Was there a time change involved here? He didn’t even know what city she had come from. Was it L.A., where it was an hour earlier?

  The line rang and there was a click on the other end as it was picked up. Too late now.

  “Mr. McDaniel,” he demanded.

  The responding voice had a definite if fading brogue. It was also hard-nosed and suspicious. “I should hope like hell not. Died twenty years ago, God rest his soul.”

  Jericho pulled the phone away from his ear and looked at it a moment. Okay, so McDaniel hadn’t been real then, either. “Who are you, then?” he asked.

  “Hold on, boy. I have a pretty pertinent question of m’own. Who are you?”

  Boy? How long had it been since anyone had had the courage, the audacity, to call him that? Jericho waited for his temper to surge—and heard himself laughing.

  Catherine was alive. Finally, the full magnitude of that sank into him. His air left him slowly. Emotion rushed in to fill the void, sweet and tangled, warm and unimaginably wonderful.

  He found his voice. “I’m calling because of your daughter.” He remembered then that the man had a slew of them. “Catherine.”

  There was a long moment of silence. “Cat,” Paddy said softly. “Would you be a saint or the devil?”

  “Plenty of folks’ll tell you it’s the latter.”

  The man didn’t miss a beat. Jericho found himself liking him.

  “So it goes, it does. Where is she, then?” Paddy answered.

  “The hospital, but she’s okay now.”

  There was a pregnant pause as this sank in. “Saint Mary’s?”

  Saint who? “No. University.”

  “Never heard of it. Here in Boston?”

  Boston. So that was where she had come from. But why didn’t Paddy know she was in New Mexico?

  Jericho felt himself losing the thread of clear communication again. “Albuquerque,” he responded warily.

  “What’d she be doin’ there?” Paddy was just as cautious.

  It came to Jericho slowly. Her father didn’t even realize Catherine was performing an externship on the Res. Why? He filled him in.

  “And then how’d she come to be in a hospital?” Paddy demanded.

  Jericho chose his words carefully, putting it together in his mind as he spoke. “We’ve got a bug out here. The Indian Health Service was grasping for externs, residents, anyone willing to come out here and risk contagion to practice. She was running from something. Guess she thought the risk was worth it. She caught it, but she’s resting comfortably now.” He thought of telling him about the wolfman and her spirit, and decided against it. Something told him this man already knew all about her spirit anyway.

  Paddy absorbed this. “If she’s so comfortable, how come it’s not her I be talking to?”

  Both of Jericho’s brows lifted. The man didn’t miss a trick. “She’s asleep.”

  “Not holding grudges?”

  Grudges? “How long since you’ve spoken to her?”

  Paddy let lose with some colorful swearing that had Jericho’s brows going up, and he wasn’t easy to shock. “Four years, I guess it’d be now—since she married the s.o.b.,” he rasped.

  Married. The single word punched into him hard, robbing his air all over again. Through everything he had imagined, through everything he had feared, such a possibility had never occurred to him. Married?

  “Is his name Victor?” he asked tightly, trying to control the rage that wanted to choke him.

  “Victor Landano.”

  “He’s trying to kill her.” A few more pieces were coming together, finally, jaggedly, fitting the only way they could. “I think he’s already tried. So she came here, hiding. Told everyone she was Lanie McDaniel.”

  “Good name, that,” Paddy mused. It was clear his own thoughts were spinning.

  “I need to know about Victor,” Jericho said. “I need to know why he’s coming after her.”

  Paddy cleared his throat. “Haven’t the foggiest. Why don’t you ask her?”

  Because for all those times I thought she was a broken bird, I was the one who was really a coward. Because when I had the chance two nights ago, I shied away from it...shied away from losing her.

  He wondered what she might have told him about Victor Landano if he had let her talk then.

  “I’m not sure there’s time,” he said finally.

  “Umph,” said Paddy. “So what do you know about her?”

  Jericho thought about it. “She’s got a temper and it can cut a man clear to the bone—sort of a wild thing that just gets away from her sometimes. She laughs when you don’t expect it, and she’s stubborn and stronger than she has a right to be. She handles a gun like a vigilante, and she takes things in stride even when they make her stumble. She plays by the rules—too religiously. It’s almost like her first instinct is to tell authority to kiss her sweet little Irish butt.”

  “That’s m’girl. Never liked Victor myself,” Paddy added, suddenly congenial and talkative. “She met him her last year in medical school, and somehow he talked her out of finishing. Damned hardest worker you’d ever want to see, that girl. Can’t figure how he made her do it.”

  Jericho did. Suddenly he remembered the pallor of her skin that day they had fought, the way her hands had clenched. Victor had given her orders and ultimatums.

  Paddy sighed. “He’s a rich guy, slick good looks. I didn’t like his hands—too soft. Looked like he hadn’t worked a day in his life. You can’t trust a man with soft hands. Personally, I always thought he was the Maf-ee-a.” He spat the word like a long, drawn-out curse, accentuating every syllable.

  Jericho felt his blood chill again. He thought of the depth of her fear, of the meticulous care she had given her secrets. It made sense.

  “I think she was just starstruck by him,” Paddy continued. “He went after her hard and swept her off her feet, he did. Seems like she was ashamed, ‘cause she wouldn’t face me after that. Guess she might of thought I’d blow my stack again, too. ‘Cause I sorta did, there in the beginning, but that’s what fathers are for. You gotta blow up now and again to make a girl think twice of what she be doin’. I guess Cat thought and did it anyway, then she didn’t come around the house again. You say she’s sleepin’ now? And she’s doing her doctorin’ again? She gonna call me herself now, you think?”

  Jericho wondered. He could hear the depth of the man’s longing clear across two thousand miles—a longing he knew instinctively he’d never tell his daughter about. Stubborn Irish tempers could go a long way—on both sides. He imagined Paddy’s “sorta” blowup had been something to see, and Catherine wouldn’t have taken such a thing quietly.

  Then he caught sight of the gargantuan nurse waddling back toward the emergency desk. He thought briefly of the discomfort of having another man fight his battles for him and decided he didn’t mind if it got him where he needed to be.

  “I’ll pass on the word, but I need you to do me a favor,” he said suddenly.

  “It’ll have to reach a way,” Paddy answered. “This here’s long-distance.”

  “It’ll reach. There’s someone here I need you to talk to. They won’t let anybody into Catherine’s room unless they’re kin. Guess you just got yourself an ambassador.”

  Paddy laughed loudly, a good burst of sound. “Put ‘em on the phone.” Then he sobered. “Victor ain’t gonna get to her again, is he?”

  “Not if I have anything to say about it.”

  Jericho waved the nurse over. She approached distrustfully and disdainfully. Jericho handed her the phone and headed for the swinging doors.

  She shouted after him, but he ignored her. He pushed through the doors and waited for a moment, but security didn’t come after him. Having taken a good read on Paddy,
he didn’t really expect them to.

  He poked his head into each room until he found Catherine’s. It was a busy hospital with few available beds. They hadn’t moved her upstairs yet. He sat in a chair by the window and stretched his long legs out in front of him to wait.

  She finally stirred around breakfast time. He bided his time until she focused on him fully.

  “Welcome back to the land of the living, Mrs. Landano.”

  Chapter 16

  Catherine’s first reaction was shock. It galloped through her briefly, then she was furious.

  She grabbed a glass of water from her bedside table and hurled it at him without thinking. He ducked quickly sideways and it missed him, but the glass shattered against the radiator and the water splashed across the wall.

  “Feeling better?” he asked dryly.

  “First of all, I told you to call him if I was dying.”

  “You were.”

  She ignored that. “Secondly, if you’re going to jump all over me for something, if you’re going to close me out and get that hard, hateful look on your face, then it seems to me there’s plenty I’ve legitimately done to make you angry, that you don’t have to reach for things that aren’t true.”

  “I’m not hateful.”

  “And I’m not married, you stupid, mule-headed—”

  His face got hard, and she choked on her voice.

  “Go on,” he urged darkly.

  “Never mind.” She clenched her jaw and shut up.

  He rose from the chair, turning his back on her to look out the window at another sun-swept day. But he knew that if he touched the glass, it would be cool now. Winter was coming, a time when everything died.

  “I’m ready to listen now,” he said finally, too quietly.

  Catherine blew out her breath. Everything was unraveling. Nothing made any difference anymore, and she would have told him even if it had. Somewhere along the line it had become painful, an ache, to keep it all from him.

  She just didn’t know where to start.

  “I was married,” she breathed.

  “Gathered as much.” He nodded at the sky.

  “It was a mistake...I knew that almost from the beginning, but my family never believed in divorce.”

  “The pope again.” Still, he didn’t turn.

  “That’s right. So I stuck with it. And then one day in August I sent my car over to the garage for a tune-up. Victor was in his study. He saw my car leave, but apparently he didn’t realize I wasn’t driving it. He was on the phone and I went to ask him what he wanted for lunch. And I...heard something.”

  His eyes came back to her sharply, almost as though he knew this was the place where she was inclined to keep holding back. Catherine swallowed carefully. No more. No more secrets. Victor wouldn’t stop to ask how much Jericho knew. If he were so inclined, he would kill him—regardless of what she did or didn’t tell him.

  “Senator Davies had opposed Victor on some business deal. So Victor had him killed. That was what he was talking about, where to...oh, God...what to do with the body. Someone had screwed up and it wasn’t where it was supposed to be and Victor wanted it moved.”

  There was no appreciable change on Jericho’s face. Catherine rushed on.

  “He didn’t see me and I went back to the kitchen, but I was shocked, didn’t know where I was going, what I was doing. I had a pot of soup on the stove and I dropped it and he came into the kitchen. I made some kind of an excuse, didn’t let on that I’d heard anything. But he knew...he knew.

  “The next day I went to the cops and they notified the FBI. I called them myself from a public telephone in town and thought I could just tip them off or something, like in the movies. But it didn’t work that way. The next thing I knew I was there in their field office and they wanted me to go back to that house, to keep living with him, to try to get him to talk about it. They wanted me to pretend that everything was fine between us, that what he’d done didn’t bother me. They said they could protect me, that nothing would happen. I gave them permission to wire the house so they could listen in on everything and tape it. They said they needed ‘direct evidence’ and that everything I’d told them so far was just hearsay. They needed to hear it for themselves.”

  She paused, shuddering a little, remembering. “They said that if at any point I was in danger, they’d hear it and come running. They...kept saying they needed proof. They said they’d take care of an annulment for me, quietly and simply and fast—trying to stay married wasn’t even an issue for me at that point. The pope doesn’t approve of murder either. And since Victor essentially married me under false pretenses, not telling me of his true background or what he really did for a living, an annulment was all I needed. They said it wasn’t necessary for me to go through all the messy red tape of a divorce.”

  She’d given the single explanation he’d needed so much to hear. Divorce, annulment—it didn’t matter which. She was no longer Victor’s woman. Jericho’s eyes narrowed as he waited for the rest, already knowing, hurting for her in a place he hadn’t known he had. Just going through the motions.

  Catherine sighed, thinking. “All I had to do was live there a few more weeks. Then they said they would help me disappear. But it didn’t work that way. I mean...I got the annulment, but Victor knew something was wrong. I’m not good at hiding my feelings.”

  “No,” he agreed, and her eyes flashed to him. She gave him a sick smile.

  “Sex had always been...sporadic between us. I realized so early on that I didn’t really love him, and I tried to avoid it. But after I knew what he had done, what he was—I just couldn’t stand it anymore, couldn’t bear for him to touch me at all. So he knew something had changed and he knew what it was, and he tried to kill me.”

  “He shot you.”

  “I had some warning. I was in the pool, doing laps. If he had just come up to me and pulled the trigger, I...wouldn’t be here talking to you. But Victor isn’t like that. He has a very strong ego. He had to make sure I knew why I was dying. He just stood there, holding the gun, explaining it to me like he was discussing the weather. I ran into the house and that was stupid, but I made it upstairs and locked myself in a bedroom and by the time he shot the lock out I had gotten a window open. The pool was right there on that side of the house so I dove in.”

  Jericho’s brows arched and he felt fresh horror, new disbelief, another sense of awe shimmy through him. “From the second floor?”

  “I’m a good swimmer.”

  “You could have broken your neck.” Suddenly, he remembered the doll.

  Catherine nodded. “Of course I could have. But if I was going to die, I was damned well going to do it on my terms. I was going to go out fighting.”

  Laughter escaped him, a harsh, short bark that got cut off as she went on.

  “So much for the FBI’s protection,” she said bitterly. “I couldn’t go to Paddy, not even to warn him. I couldn’t go to any of my family, because I figured Victor would look there first. I was alone. The only chance anyone had was if they were completely in the dark. Maybe Victor wouldn’t hurt them if he was genuinely sure I hadn’t told them anything.”

  “But he shot you. When’d he shoot you?”

  “He came back downstairs and caught up with me just as I pulled myself out of the pool. I got as far as his car. The keys were in it, thank God. He always left them there, as though no one would dare steal it from him.” She thought about that. “He was probably right. I think I was the only one in the world who hadn’t ever suspected who he was...who his family was.” She shook her head. “Anyway, he shot just as I was scrambling into the car. I was sliding sideways at the time and the bullet just sort of grazed my hip, and I hit the gas and drove. I knew from med school that it wasn’t fatal, just a flesh wound. So I kept pressure on it until I got into Connecticut, and I saw a doctor there. I used a charge card to buy some clothes—I figured Victor would follow the paper trail, but by then I’d be gone. And I had about a thousand d
ollars I’d managed to squirrel away after I talked to the FBI the first time. I figured I was going to need every penny I could get my hands on when the time came that I could finally leave that house.”

  He was looking at her oddly. “When’d you grab the money?”

  She scowled as if he were missing something very elemental. “Before I jumped in the pool.”

  “Victor was chasing you with a gun and you stopped to get the money you had saved to run with?”

  “I would have been in a fix without it.”

  He didn’t know if he was shocked or if he wanted to laugh again. What had he told Paddy? She takes things in stride even when they make her stumble.

  He looked at her again. His heart hurt. “So what happened in Connecticut?”

  “I checked into a sleazy motel—you should have seen the people going in and out of there.”

  He nodded. He could imagine.

  “And somewhere along the line I bought a Boston newspaper to see if there was anything in it about the FBI charging Victor. There wasn’t, but there was a blurb in the national section about the Mystery Disease. It was like...serendipity.” She hesitated, watching him carefully now. “You know the rest.”

  Not entirely. “Who were you calling from Shiprock?”

  “The FBI. I abandoned Victor’s car because I didn’t trust anyone anymore and I thought it was best if I just tried to disappear into thin air. But then there was the owl and that doll, so I figured someone had followed me anyway. I had to find out what was going on, where things stood, if Victor could possibly have put someone on my tail.”

  “And?” Jericho asked shortly.

  Fear moved inside her again, like a snake winding its way coldly through her vital organs. “They say he’s still in Boston. And I guess they got the proof they needed,” she said quietly. “They should charge him with racketeering and on Senator Davies’s death any time now. They don’t think Victor will come after me until then.” No, that wasn’t entirely true. “Actually, they said that once it’s a fait accompli, they don’t think the family will send anyone after me at all. But they’ve been wrong before.”