by Julie Miller
Mac closed his eyes and mentally sorted through the files of information he stored in the recesses of his mind. “He’s that advertising wiz who claims his stepson was kidnapped? He paid a ransom, but the people who did it were never caught?”
“Right. Allegedly, the child was a victim of abuse, by either the mother or Sanchez himself.”
Mac ignored his emotional reaction to the memory of the toddler’s body, half-buried in the woods southeast of the city. He’d worked that crime scene himself. Gruesome didn’t begin to describe what he’d found. But he’d conquered the urge to punch his fist through a tree or toss the contents of his stomach by remembering that if he did his job right, he could nail the son of a bitch who had hurt such an innocent child.
Just like then, he concentrated on maintaining an objective, routine discussion of the work. He chose his words carefully, not wanting to alarm the three women gathering in a semicircle around him, eavesdropping on the conversation. “The D.A.’s case is based on the idea that Sanchez covered up the crime by staging the kidnapping himself.”
“Oh my God.” He reached his hand out toward the pleasing, home-cooked smells that identified his mother. When she latched on to his hand, he held on, offering whatever strength and comfort her handicapped son could provide.
“That missing child’s name was in the news for a week last winter.” Barbara seemed to be explaining the tragic story to Julia.
“How awful.” Julia’s response came from beside his left shoulder. He hadn’t had time to ask why she’d decided to come back. Even if her reasons weren’t personal—maybe she’d forgotten her toothbrush or some other inane thing—he was glad she was here. Despite the distraction of her clean, sweet smell, her presence enabled him to think more clearly. He’d ask the whys later.
He refocused his attention on Mitch. “Do you know the status of the trial?”
“Powers is out for blood on this one. Ever since he lost his own kid, this is the one type of case he refuses to lose.” Mitch paused, probably working past the same anger that Mac and every other law enforcement official dealt with when facing such an injustice. “What’s your interest?”
“I found fibers that place Sanchez at the scene with the body.”
“I remember. That’s why the D.A.’s office went ahead with the indictment. Combined with the ex-wife’s testimony, they’ll put him away for a long time.”
“But if that circumstantial evidence is missing—”
“What do you mean, ‘missing’?”
“—Sanchez could walk.”
“Is that what that man just took from here?” Martha echoed the same shock and anger as her nephew.
“What’s Martha saying?” asked Mitch.
Mac sucked in a deep breath and counted to five before releasing it. “Internal Affairs just found those fiber samples in the back of my bathroom closet.”
Mac held the receiver against his chest, muffling the fluent string of curses that answered him.
The vertigo that spun through his imagination seemed to be taking a very real turn. He carried the phone back up to his ear. “I didn’t take that evidence bag, you know that.”
“I know.” Mitch’s gruff expression of faith spurred him on.
“I need you to do me a favor, Mitch.”
His cousin’s response got lost in the static that suddenly erupted into Mac’s ear.
“Mitch, you there?”
“…name it.” The static cleared for an instant.
“Mitch?”
Mac jerked the phone from his ear at the decibel-breaking screech that reverberated across the line. His sensitive ears waited for the noise to fade before attempting to speak again.
“Was that from your end?” Mac whispered.
Don’t you feel like you’re being watched?
Julia’s question jumped into his mind as if she’d just repeated it out loud.
He knew the answer with sudden, chilling clarity.
“Jules. I need your cell phone.” There was a beat of hesitant silence before she moved. “Mitch, I’m calling you on another line.”
He pressed the off button and ran his fingers along the rectangular perimeter of the phone, searching for the seam where the outside casing joined together.
“Here’s my cell.” Julia touched the phone to the back of his hand. He grabbed it and held it out to his mother. “Ma, call Mitch again.”
“What’s going on?” Martha asked as she took the phone from him.
“I’m not sure. But I don’t want to take any chances. Call.”
With a pair of working eyes, he would have had the advantage over an inanimate object that refused to cooperate with him. “I need a screwdriver.”
“I’ll get one.” He heard the quick swish of Julia’s jeans as she dashed into the kitchen. Thank God she was here. Maybe he was just going stir-crazy, imagining conspiracies where none existed. But with Julia, sensible and competent in so many ways, here, he’d soon have his answers. Then he could either apologize for being an idiot and send her on her way, or he could thank her for standing by him just as she had last night when Wade Osterman had let himself into the house uninvited.
“Let me.” She took the phone from his hand. “What am I looking for?”
“Open it up.”
He heard the strain of plastic bending and resisting, and then he heard a pop. Mac found her shoulder and leaned over it, anxious to know what she’d found. The soft curls of her hair caught on his nose when she turned to speak. She took an abrupt step away, but made no comment. “There’s something inside. Is it a listening device?”
The idea that she found his proximity so discomforting was as frustrating as not being able to see what she was talking about. Maybe he should tell her that her scent and sound kept her from being as anonymous as she’d like to be.
But this wasn’t the time to challenge her on it.
“Let me hold it.” Julia laid a tiny box, no bigger than a pencil eraser, in his palm. He curled his hand around it and explored it with his fingertips. The size was right. But how could he be sure? “Describe it to me.”
Julia possessed the same penchant for observing details that he did. “It’s a small square of grayish plastic with some short wires sticking out of it. It has several silvery crisscrossing lines on it, like a computer chip.”
Mac squeezed the traitorous device in his fist. “It’s a bug, all right.” Government issue. Like cops or district attorneys or anyone buying government surplus might have access to.
“Here’s Mitch.” Martha thrust the phone into his right hand.
“What’s going on, Mac?”
He didn’t know the big picture yet, but he could answer the immediate question.
“My house is wired.”
“I don’t like the smell of this.” Mitch’s suspicions matched his own. “Any idea who or why?”
Mac ran down the list of visitors he’d had in the past twenty-four hours. Any one of them could have planted the bug and the evidence bag from the Sanchez case. Hell. A stranger could have come in at anytime. Julia had already proved how easy it was to get around a blind man’s defenses. “I can give you suspects, but I don’t have any motive.”
“I’ll send someone to do a sweep for other bugs.”
“Someone you trust,” Mac insisted.
“He’ll be handpicked and he’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
“I owe you.”
“Pay me back by finding the truth.”
By the time he’d hung up, Mac had already begun a mental list of what needed to be done to ensure his safety and eradicate the susceptibility of being set up in his own home.
“What can we do?” asked the two moms.
He didn’t want them or their good intentions in any potential line of fire. “Don’t touch anything.”
“Jules,” he went on, “I need you to get rid of those beakers. Flush the contents, one at a time, down the toilet. Then I want to find out where Osterman got his key—
”
“Mac.” Martha’s cautious fingers touched his arm. “Julia was leaving. Remember?” Barb and I are here to take care of you until we can hire a replacement.”
The bottom dropped out of his world for a heartbeat. “I…forgot.”
“It’s okay, Martha.” He heard a rustling sound, denim on denim, that was distinctly Julia. She was already moving to carry out his demands. He only wished her answer sounded a little less fatalistic when she added, “I’ll stay.”
WITH THE KNOWLEDGE that his own mother had removed her spare key to his back door and left it in the kitchen drawer for Wade to find, and the promise that he would, indeed, eat the casserole she’d brought and call whether he needed anything or not, Mac listened to Julia close and lock the front door behind Martha and Barbara.
She’d had a brief conversation with her own mother and he’d tried not to eavesdrop. But with his acute hearing, he’d picked up a few words like sacrifice and debt and will you ever be able to tell me what happened in Chicago?
Was staying on as his nurse the sacrifice? And what debt, what favor, was she so determined to repay that she was willing to make that sacrifice?
And what the hell had happened to her in Chicago? Clearly something serious enough to worry Barbara. Unexpectedly, that same unknown factor worried him.
Jules had been such a cool kid growing up. He hadn’t known her all that well, but she’d always held her own with the boys that Cole had run around with. How many high-school girls had he known who could throw a man out at the plate, then turn around and discuss geometric proofs with a college student?
Mac blinked his eyes and tried to snatch the afterimage of a memory that hovered at the fringe of his conscious mind. He’d been that college student. Strolling down the sidewalk on Market Street with Julia at his side. A lot of years ago. She’d have been too young for them to have been on a date, but he’d walked her home.
They’d discussed geometry, Royals baseball and the color of her eyes.
Why couldn’t he remember the color of her eyes?
The scars of his body seemed to have worked their way into his brain, destroying random remnants of his past. He remembered enough of that one night to make him curious enough to want to remember it all. Mac forced his eyes open. He remembered enough to make him suspicious. Was that her debt? Was something about that night the favor she felt she owed him?
As Julia’s crisp scent drifted through the living room toward his position in the kitchen archway, Mac snapped back to the present. He decided the direct approach would be the best way to assuage his curiosity.
“Why did you come back?”
She pushed past him into the kitchen. “Your mother’s not going to get any other help under these circumstances.”
“What circumstances are those?”
“A police investigation. Those two Internal Affairs detectives are after you, not Jeff Ringlein.” Judging by the sounds she made, she was putting the casserole in the oven. Working. The woman always seemed to be working. While he admired her ethic, it wasn’t a crime to take a few moments to relax. Unless…
“Do they make you nervous?”
He understood the “duh” in her sigh and almost smiled. “They think you’re part of whatever Jeff was involved with. And somebody’s doing their best to make it look like you are.”
“They might just be doing their job, and whoever was blackmailing Jeff is using the opportunity of his death to pin the missing evidence on me.”
Her movements stopped, and Mac got the feeling she had turned to face him. “That evidence bag wasn’t there when I cleaned yesterday morning.”
“I know. I’m being set up.” Part of him wanted to go to her and soothe the helpless concern he heard in her voice. But a more rational part of him saw her vulnerability as a chance to get some answers. “Why did you change your mind about leaving? What favor is so important that you feel you have to get mixed up in this?”
An awkward rush of activity followed the silence after his question. “Niederhaus and Masterson showed up. I wasn’t comfortable with them when they were here yesterday. I wouldn’t be a very good nurse if I left my patient—and our mothers—to deal with them on their own. So I parked in the alley around back and came in to check on you.”
Mac called her on her noble excuse. “Just to check on me?”
“I couldn’t leave you in danger.” The atmosphere in the room suddenly changed. The racket stilled on the heels of her surrendering sigh. “You never left me.”
“Remind me what happened that night.” He took a step toward her, but sensed her drawing away. “Yes, I remember some of it.” Mac patiently retreated, and tried to negotiate a deal, instead. “C’mon. I’ll even let you doctor my eyes if you’ll talk to me.”
He interpreted her shaky laugh as a hopeful sign and sat at the table. Taking off his glasses, he turned his chair and tilted his face toward the ceiling, exposing that rawest, most damaged part of himself as a gesture of sincerity and trust.
An interminable moment passed when he thought she might refuse. But the professional in Julia—if not her good heart itself—couldn’t pass up the opportunity to tend to her patient.
After washing, she went to work, hesitantly at first, but then with the sure movements of those beautiful hands. At first there was only the work as she gently rinsed his wounded eyes and tipped his head back to administer antibiotic eyedrops.
Maybe there was something in the vulnerability of his own position that finally prompted her to speak. “My first date in high school was my only date. I mean, I always had friends who were guys, but no one special. You know.”
Whether he did or didn’t, Mac chose not to answer. He didn’t want to say or do anything to stop her from telling the story. With her fingertips gently massaging the scarred skin around his eyes, she used a cotton swab to apply an ointment. It was a pungent medication she assured him would stave off infection as well as keep the healing tissue soft and pliable.
“I was chosen to be part of a senior prank, called a ‘dogfight.”’ Mac grit his teeth together when she leaned over him, brushing a full, rounded breast against his temple as she doctored the other side of his face. There was nothing honorable in the way she pronounced ‘chosen’. “That’s where a group of boys challenge each other to bring the most homely date to a party.”
Oh God. Mac cupped one hand around the generous flare of her hip and pushed her back a step. He knew where this was going. But no way in hell could he reconcile this sensual beauty with the remembered emotions exploding inside him like a lit box of fireworks.
“Ray Wozniak.” He remembered the young man’s name. Not a man. A jerk. A piece of scum. An adolescent nitwit who wouldn’t have recognized a lady, much less known how to treat one.
“Good ol’ Ray.” Her self-deprecating laugh hurt. Mac settled a hand at the other side of her waist. Supporting her. Apologizing. Wishing like hell he hadn’t brought this up. “I was so flattered that he had asked me out. So naive. I had braces and freckles and I was built like a linebacker. I should have known he wasn’t really interested in me.”
Julia’s curves flexed within his grip as she reached across him to pick up the gauze strips that would eventually cover his eyes. “I was walking home from the bus stop after class,” Mac recalled. A frisson of the fear, the anger, he’d felt then coursed through him now, making his breath come in erratic gasps. “He had you backed up against a brick wall. Your mouth was bleeding.”
Now she stood stock still between his hands. “You remember that?”
He felt the tremor in her voice all the way down to his fingertips. “He wasn’t too pleased that you wised up and walked out on him. You cost him a bet.”
“A hundred dollars. That’s what I was worth to him.” The tremors danced beneath his fingers again, deeper and more rapid. “He said I owed it to him one way or another. I was so stupid.”
“No.” She couldn’t really think that, could she? “You were young and tr
usting, and he took advantage of that.” Mac trailed his right hand up along her arm and neck and found her face, flushed with heat. He patted his fingertips across her cheek and discovered the feverish moisture in the corner of her eye.
Ashamed that his intellectual curiosity had caused her this emotional distress, Mac tugged with his hands and pulled her into his lap. He wound his arm around her waist and pressed her cheek into his shoulder. Offering such comfort was foreign to him, but he did all he could think to do. He brushed his fingers against her hot skin and rocked her back and forth.
“I shouldn’t have asked,” he apologized again, turning his lips to the wispy curls that framed her face. “I remember it now. He was kissing you. No—he was assaulting you when I walked up.”
“You asked me if I wanted to be there, and I said no.” He hugged her tighter at her stuttered breath. “You made him leave me alone.”
Melanie Ringlein had wept buckets of tears that morning, and he’d hurt for her. But he hadn’t felt…compelled to take her in his arms and offer her any kind of comfort beyond words. But with Julia—he didn’t think he could stop himself from touching her.
Maybe he felt guilty at causing her pain. Or maybe he was reacting to some base, dormant, male need bred into him by genes, but awakened by the press of Julia’s soft, sexy, womanly curves against his harder shape. The utterly feminine mound of a breast flattened against his chest. The bright scent of her teased his nose. And the absolute softness of her skin and hair teased his fingertips and made him remember the lessons his mother and father had taught him.
Respect a woman.
Treasure her.
Those same values had stopped him that night. He’d sent that bully Wozniak running with a few succinct threats and some serious intimidation. Then he’d draped his jacket around Julia’s shoulders and walked her home.
He’d treated her far better that night than he had since she’d come back into his life yesterday morning.
To repay a favor.
“I’m not a hero, Jules.” He apologized in a raspy whisper against her temple. “I’m just a man. I’m not even very good at that anymore. You don’t owe me anything.”