by Kylie Brant
“No,” Gabe answered grimly, placing the heel of his palm on the door and shoving it wider. “I just had an overwhelming urge for the truth.”
Meghan stepped out of his way, his words painting her insides with a glaze of panic. There was no way he could know about Danny, she reassured herself. No way at all. But she watched him, wide-eyed, as he strode into the middle of the room and then turned his steely gaze toward her again. Swallowing hard she gave the act of closing the door more attention than it warranted. She’d known Connally would make a formidable opponent, but faced now with that menacing expression, she was certain that she’d underestimated him.
Her chin angled up in an outward show of defiance. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Well the thing is, Miss Patterson…” Both Gabe and Meghan acted as though they hadn’t heard Cal’s diffident words.
“I’m talking about D’Brusco and your sister. What was going on there? Did they have a relationship?”
The questions, and their rapid-fire delivery, left her speechless. Incomprehension warred with relief. Danny’s secret was safe. For now. “Who’s D’Brusco?”
“One of the men your nephew saw outside Favorite Things.”
She heard Cal’s words, but they clarified nothing. If anything, her mind grew more muddled. “What would he have to do with Sandra?”
“Exactly what we’d like to know,” Gabe said. “Why don’t you enlighten us? We found your sister’s phone number scribbled on the inside of a matchbook in D’Brusco’s apartment.” He watched closely, but could see no reaction on her part other than confusion. “So how did they know each other?”
Meghan walked slowly to the couch and sank down on it. “I have no idea.”
Keeping a watchful eye on his partner, Cal approached her. “Did your sister ever mention someone called Lenny? Was she seeing anyone in particular?”
“No. I mean, I don’t know.”
“You don’t know.” Gabe’s words were imbued with disbelief. “Are you saying you don’t know if she mentioned him, or you don’t know if she was seeing someone?”
The derision in his tone ignited irritation. Shoulders stiff, she retorted, “Both.”
“The thing is, Miss Patterson—” Cal sat down in the overstuffed chair next to the couch and leaned toward her “—finding your sister’s number in D’Brusco’s things was pretty unexpected. Anything you can tell us about your sister’s life those last few weeks, anything at all, might end up being really helpful to our case.”
Focusing on Madison’s sincere expression was a way to block out Gabe’s far more formidable one. “I wish I could help. I just don’t know anything.”
“Let’s start with what brought her back to town.” The emotion in Gabe’s voice was tightly reined in now. “I seem to recall the newspapers saying she’d been living somewhere in the South.”
Meghan traced the floral pattern of the couch with one index finger. “I really can’t say.”
With two quick steps Gabe was at the couch, and when he sat down he was far too close to Meghan for comfort. “Can’t? Or won’t?”
“Can’t!” she snapped. She hated this line of questioning, and she hated him for pursuing it. There were few things she detested more than dwelling on her relationship with her family. Any of them. “I don’t know where Sandra was before she came back to Chicago, but she never stays in one place for very long. I didn’t even know she’d returned until that news article was published about her involvement with Wadrell’s investigation.”
The silence that stretched after her words was almost worse than the questions themselves. She’d prefer to deal with the detectives’ disbelief than the speculation that would surely arise after her outburst.
“You’re saying that you and your sister were estranged.”
Meghan glanced at Detective Madison, tempted to laugh. Estranged. What a dispassionate word for a relationship fraught with conflict. With resentment. With fear.
“Yes.” She was aware of the irony lacing her voice, but was helpless to prevent it. “I only spoke to her once after the article came out.” She’d gone to Sandra’s apartment. It wasn’t until later that she’d thought about how easy it had been to discover her sister’s address. And how easily others could have discovered it, too, others with far more nefarious purposes in mind.
She shook off the memory when Gabe spoke again. “So you did speak to her once. What’d you talk about? Did she mention anyone in particular to you?”
“Our conversation didn’t last long.” Just long enough for Sandra to laugh at Meghan’s concerns about her involvement with the police. Just long enough for her sister to taunt her with reminders of how useful her talent was…didn’t Meghan remember how much she’d enjoyed mind games when they were kids? And then they’d been interrupted when a boy had entered the room, a little boy with golden hair who was unmistakably her sister’s son. The wonder of the discovery had been shattered with Sandra’s offhand introduction.
You’ll like my kid. He’s a freak, just like me. And we both know how you feel about freaks, don’t we, Meggie dear?
The memory, coupled with Gabe’s proximity, drove her to move. To give herself time to calm her jangled emotions, she crossed to the table where she’d left her purse, and slipped in the fund-raising sheet. But Gabe’s next words did nothing to ease her anxiety.
“Seems odd that you ended up as guardian to your nephew,” Gabe observed. “What with you and your sister not being close and all.”
Because it was far easier than confronting old ghosts, Meghan retreated emotionally. Barriers, long ago constructed, clicked neatly into place. “There’s no one else.”
“What about your mother?”
Cal slid a quizzical gaze at Gabe, one that was ignored.
“Based on previous history, I suspect my mother is prowling Europe, on the hunt for husband number six. At any rate, the courts thought Danny would be better off staying with me, so that’s the arrangement we arrived at.”
Gabe listened to her words, but it was what she didn’t say that intrigued him. There was far more to Meghan than she was willing to share, and despite his dislike for secrets, he had a healthy respect for privacy. He, better than most, realized how deep some wounds could scar.
So instead of pushing further, he said only, “Do you have a picture of your sister?” When she just looked at him, he explained, “Whether you know anything about it or not, we’ve got to investigate what connection D’Brusco had with her. We have to pursue all angles.”
After a moment Meghan rose. “I’m not sure how recent it is, but I have a Polaroid shot I can let you have.” She strode across the room and disappeared into her studio. Without a thought he followed.
Three photos were pinned to a cork board on the wall, beneath which sat a canvas. Meghan reached up and released one of them and turned to find Gabe there, staring hard at her half-completed work. “Here,” she said stiffly, thrusting the picture at him.
He took it, but his gaze never wavered from the unfinished portrait. “I guess that’s your sister.”
Meghan’s gaze followed his, then flicked away. “Yes. Danny’s birthday is coming up. Portraits aren’t really my thing, but I thought it would be nice if he had something for his room to remind him of his mom.”
“Yeah. Probably.” Looking carefully at the photos, he compared them to the work in progress. His first thought was that Meghan was being kind for the boy’s sake. Her rendering of her sister was far softer than the woman in the photos. Wadrell had said Sandra Barton had possessed a hardness, and that edge was apparent in the likenesses captured by the camera. And then in the next thought he wondered what it had been like for Meghan to find herself suddenly saddled with a kid she’d barely known; the son of a sister, who, from all appearances, she hadn’t cared for. What kind of woman would be able to get beyond old resentments and care about the feelings of the kid in question?
He didn’t know the answer to that. But he couldn’t den
y a growing desire to find out.
“You’ll need to leave now.” Meghan led the way back to the living room, and Gabe reluctantly followed. “It’s my turn to pick Danny and his friend up from kindergarten, and I don’t want to be late.”
“Do they both go to the same school?” Gabe asked. His mouth quirked. “The one with less thinking?”
Her gaze flashing to his, she remembered the careless remark Danny had made last night and her reaction to it. “No, Danny goes to a private school, but Alex’s is in the same neighborhood.”
She offered the information with little thought to the words; her attention was focused instead on the way the half smile transformed Connally’s expression. She’d seen him look forbidding, inscrutable and charming, by turns, and each persona of the man held a certain fascination for her. A fascination that tempted further exploration. One she would be wise to avoid.
“We’ll be on our way then, Miss Patterson. Thanks for your time. And for the photo.” Cal’s words jolted the other two from their silent exchange. Gabe joined his partner at the door.
She waited with a sense of relief as the men prepared to leave, and then Gabe turned to address her. “I’ll be in touch.”
As the door closed behind the two detectives, she hugged her arms across her chest in an unconsciously defensive gesture. She should have interpreted the man’s parting words as a threat.
Instead, they seemed imbued with a hint of promise.
Gabe ignored his partner’s methodical driving for a moment as he rifled through the glove compartment in vain. “Damn.” He slammed the compartment door shut. “Stop at a gas station, will you? I’m out of gum.”
Reaching into his pocket, Cal withdrew a package of breath mints and handed them to his partner. “If you have to have some sort of oral fix, try these.”
“You wouldn’t happen to have any with nicotine added, would you?” He raised his brows at the swift look Cal shot him. “Hey, just kidding.” And he was. Sort of. He took the package with a long-suffering sigh and withdrew a mint, popped it into his mouth and dropped the package into his pocket. Morosely he considered the difference of flavor between the mint and the smoke he craved. They didn’t even begin to compare.
“So do you want to tell me what that was all about?”
At Cal’s question, Gabe shrugged. “I never should have let you talk me into giving up smoking. Gum and breath mints just don’t cut it.”
“Nice try, Connally. I’m talking about Meghan Patterson, and you know it. What was that she was saying about you and lunch?”
“You know there’s a minimum speed limit, don’t you? Driving too slow is just as dangerous on these streets as excessive speed.” His words affected neither Cal’s driving nor his stoic expression. Recognizing the corner he was backed into, Gabe finally answered. “I took some Chinese over there last night. No big deal. I told you I’d be working on gaining her cooperation.”
“Couldn’t have proved it by the way you went after her this afternoon.”
Gabe considered the scenery that wasn’t flashing by nearly as quickly as he wished. “What are you talking about?”
Hands on the steering wheel at a precise ten and two position, Cal snorted, his eyes never leaving the street. “You jumped all over her at first, practically accused her of lying to us. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d kicked us out of the place. Maybe after kicking you first.”
“She wouldn’t have done that,” Gabe disputed, not nearly as sure as he sounded.
“It lacked your usual finesse. Mind telling me what was going on?”
Gabe drummed the fingers of one hand in a restless tattoo on his thigh. “It looked like she might have been keeping something from us, okay? Admit it. You were as stunned as I was when we traced that phone number to Sandra Barton.”
“That’s a twist in this case, all right.”
“So, I just thought Meghan…Miss Patterson, might know more than she said at first.”
“But you believe her now when she claims she didn’t know much about her sister’s life at all?”
“Yeah.” He believed her, at least about this. It wasn’t something he could put into words, but it was something he recognized. Family didn’t mean connection. Relationships didn’t mean intimacy. He knew that better than most. He recognized an aloneness in Meghan, a wariness that mirrored his own. And he observed the ability she had to shut others out, including him. Although he understood that quality, his reaction to it was totally unfamiliar. He wanted to shred those barriers she erected so effortlessly, to smash through them and bare the essential, fundamental woman inside. And the violence of that particular urge wasn’t something he was willing to discuss with his partner.
“So you thought she was keeping something from us. That’s hardly unusual in our line of work. Still doesn’t explain why you went off like that.”
Cal was right. For most of the people they encountered on the job, lying was habit. It was their task to rip away the lies they were handed and find the real answers beneath. For some reason he’d overreacted when he’d thought Meghan had deliberately withheld information from them. And he didn’t want to consider the reasons for that too closely.
“Why don’t we head over to the Sunrise Lounge and see what kind of response we get by flashing D’Brusco’s and Barton’s pictures around.”
Obediently Cal turned at the next corner and headed across town to the address on the front of the matchbook cover. “You wanna know what I think?”
Wearily, Gabe slouched down in the passenger seat, tipped his head back and let his eyes slide shut. “Yeah, I’m fascinated by what you think.”
Ignoring the sarcasm in his partner’s voice, Cal continued, “I think I witnessed…a thing…between you and this Patterson.”
“A thing.”
“That’s right, a thing. Don’t act stupid, Connally, you know exactly what I’m talking about. I had a hard time for a while, there, figuring whether I was going to have to stop you from arresting her or ravishing her.”
“Ravishing? You’ve been reading Becky’s romance books again, Cal.”
But the man wouldn’t be swayed from his argument. “I’m beginning to think you have more of an interest in the woman than gaining her nephew’s cooperation.”
Without opening his eyes, Gabe replied, “And I’m beginning to think there’s something seriously wrong with your imagination.” Meghan had promised to provide access to her nephew, who might be able to identify the guy with D’Brusco. And if they discovered a connection between Sandra Barton and D’Brusco, Meghan would be indirectly involved herself. That was as far as his interest in her went. As far as he would allow it to go. He had plenty of commendations in his attaboy file to credit his bravery on the job. But he tended to minimize risk-taking in his personal life. That’s why he stuck to women who were simple, uncomplicated.
And Meghan Patterson had complication written all over her.
The Sunrise Lounge was a trendy bar in a fashionable downtown neighborhood. Gabe followed Cal into the establishment and scanned his surroundings. A high-class strip joint, he surmised. The stage and runways were giveaways and from the decor it appeared that the usual customers would be more likely to wear suits than denim.
The place was nearly deserted. The men headed toward the bar, where the bartender slowly straightened from his conversation with a customer to watch their approach.
Although he knew they’d already been made as cops, Gabe pushed aside his coat to reveal the shield clipped on his belt. “Detectives Connally and Madison. We’ve got a few questions to ask. Are you the only employee here?”
The man shook his head. “Yvonne’s in back. Most of the others won’t show for another hour or so.”
“Then I guess we’ll start with you and Yvonne. Why don’t you get her out here?” suggested Gabe.
Instead of leaving the bar, the man turned his head and shouted, “Yvonne!” He turned back to the men and returned their regard stoically.
“Interesting technique,” observed Cal.
“Crude but effective,” Gabe agreed.
An attractive dark-haired woman came through the swinging door in back of the bar, saying, “I swear, Jack, if you don’t stop screaming for me…” The rest of her words tapered off as she saw the detectives. “Well, hello, gentlemen. What can I do for you?” Her walk transformed into a glide as she approached them. As she leaned forward against the bar, the detectives were treated to an eye-popping amount of cleavage.
“Your name, ma’am?”
Heavily mascaraed lashes fluttering, the woman purred, “Yvonne Basily. I’m the hostess here. Whatever you gentleman need, I’ll do my best to oblige you.”
Gabe reached into his coat pocket, withdrew the photos of Lenny and Sandra, and tossed them on the bar. “Oblige us by taking a look. Have you ever seen either of them?”
Yvonne studied each photo in turn, then tapped a long bright red nail against Lenny’s. “He’s a regular. Comes in every week or two. I’ve never seen the woman before.”
Gabe transferred his attention to the bartender. “How about you?”
He stepped forward for a closer look. “Same here. I know the guy.”
“Do you know him by name?”
“Lenny,” the woman said, and the bartender nodded.
“Didn’t know his last name, but I knew him to say hello to.”
“When’s the last time you saw him?” Cal questioned.
The woman pursed her glossy lips for a moment. “I’m not real sure. Not this week, for certain. But last week…” She glanced at Jack and he shook his head.
“I haven’t seen him for over two weeks.”
Further questioning provided very little additional information. Neither of them knew Lenny well, nor could they remember ever seeing him with anyone.
“He’d invite one of the girls over to sit with him, sometimes, buy her a drink after her act, something like that,” Jack said. “But he always came in alone.”