The Baby’s Guardian

by Delores Fossen

  “The baby’s boxing this morning,” she joked.

  Shaw leaned down so he could press his ear to those thumps. He couldn’t hear them, but he could still feel them. “I think she needs some breakfast.”

  “She can hear you, you know. So, if there’s anything you want to say to her…”

  Shaw looked up at her, and his eyebrow slid up. “She can hear me?”

  “It’s true. I read nursery rhymes to her.”

  Shaw got a clear image of Sabrina doing just that. While she was wearing that flimsy gown that showed off her breasts. But then, he thought of another image. His baby had heard those gunmen. The shots. All the violence.

  And that riled him to the core.

  No baby, especially his baby, should have that kind of start in life.

  “Hang in there,” he whispered against Sabrina’s belly. “Daddy’s not going to let anything bad happen to you, sweetheart. Promise.”

  He looked up at Sabrina again, but her smile had faded. Her eyes were shiny as if she were about to cry. “Do you think she’s really a she? Or is it a boy?”

  He thought about the offer the doctor had made to tell them the baby’s sex. “Honestly, it doesn’t matter.” And it didn’t. “The baby’s gender has never been part of this dream family I have in my head. I’d be happy with either. I just want him or her to be healthy.”

  Her eyes watered even more, and Shaw decided to put a stop to that.

  “You need to get your things together,” he instructed. “We’re moving to a safer place this morning.”

  She nodded, blinked hard and turned to start collecting her toiletries. Shaw was about to help her, but his cell buzzed. It wasn’t O’Malley but another of his lieutenants, Joe Rico. Yet someone else Shaw trusted.

  “Captain Tolbert, one of my men just brought in Danny Monroe. I thought you’d like to know.”

  “Danny Monroe,” Shaw mumbled. The brother of the man who’d tried to kill him and kidnap Sabrina. Oh, yeah, Shaw wanted to know about this. “Where is he?”

  “I had him taken to the interview room just up the hall from you. I also have a preliminary report on him that my lead investigator just handed me. I thought you’d like to see it. I also thought you’d want to be the one to question him.”

  “You bet I do.” But he glanced at Sabrina. He didn’t want to leave her alone in the flop room, so she’d have to come with him. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “They found Danny Monroe?” Sabrina asked the moment he hung up.

  “They did, and I’m about to question him. Are you up to being in the same room with him?”

  “Absolutely.”

  She seemed certain enough, but Shaw wasn’t so sure. He didn’t want to create more stress for her, so he’d keep the interview short and let Lieutenant Rico dig into the details.

  If there were any details to dig into, that is.

  He waited for Sabrina to slip on her sandals, and they walked up the hall. Not far. Just a few steps, and he saw Lieutenant Rico waiting outside the interview door. The lieutenant handed Shaw the preliminary report he’d mentioned.

  “There’s nothing in the report we can use to hold him,” Rico explained. “But he doesn’t have a solid alibi for the hostage incident. He claims he was at his apartment, sick with the flu.”

  Shaw glanced through the report. First the biographical details and then the criminal record. Danny had one, all right. Breaking and entering when he was a juvenile. As an adult, there was a drug charge, but he’d pled down and was on parole for two years. There were others, including an assault in a bar fight and resisting arrest.

  But the common denominator in all the incidents was that Danny had been with his older brother, Burney.

  “Thanks,” Shaw told the lieutenant. He left Rico outside and led Sabrina into the room.

  Shaw noticed the resemblance right away. Danny was a younger version of the dead man Shaw had seen lying on the floor of the hotel room.

  “You’re the cop who killed Burney?” Danny immediately accused.

  Danny had been sitting behind the metal desk but jumped to his feet. He was visibly upset, with the veins bulging in his neck, and Shaw whispered for Sabrina to stay near the door. He wanted to get her out of the room fast if there was any sign of trouble.

  “No. Another police officer shot your brother while he was committing a felony. He tried to kill me, and he tried to kidnap Ms. Carr.” Shaw tipped his head to Sabrina.

  “So says you.”

  “So says me and Ms. Carr and the other officer who witnessed it. Burney broke down the door to a hotel room and fired a shot at me.” And those were all the details Shaw intended to give him. “Now, where were you yesterday morning and the afternoon before?”

  “I already told that other cop—I was home sick in bed.” He coughed as if to prove his point.

  Shaw wasn’t ready to buy the cough or the story. “I don’t suppose you have anyone who can verify that?”

  “Just Burney. He called me on my cell night before last, right about the time you cops say he was holding all those women hostages.”

  “Good. Then we can use phone records to verify that.” He cracked open the door and asked Lieutenant Rico to run the phone records immediately.

  Danny only shrugged. “I could be mistaken. Maybe it wasn’t night before last when he called. Maybe it was some other time. Maybe he didn’t call me on my cell after all. Like I said, I was sick and in bed. I could have dreamed it.”

  “Don’t worry. Lieutenant Rico will get it straight. He’ll learn when your brother called and where he was when any calls were made.” Shaw made sure it sounded like a threat, because it was.

  Danny opened his mouth. Closed it. Then, opened it again. “Look, I don’t want you trying to pin anything on me. I already have to deal with my brother’s death, and I don’t need you guys breathing down my neck.”

  “If you’re innocent, you have nothing to worry about.” Shaw sat down across from him. “Talk to me about your brother. Why would Burney want to take those women hostage?”

  “Who said he did?” Danny fired back.

  “For argument’s sake, let’s say he did. Why would he have done that?”

  Danny shrugged again and began to fidget with a hangnail on his right thumb. “I don’t know. All I know is I had nothing to do with any of this.”

  Shaw pushed harder. “Then guess why Burney would have gotten involved in a hostage situation.”

  The fidgeting continued. “It might have had something to do with an old friend who called him last week out of the blue.”

  Now this sounded promising. “This old friend got a name?”

  Danny swallowed hard. “Gavin Cunningham.”

  Sabrina made a soft gasp. Shaw did some mental cursing. He didn’t like that Gavin’s name kept coming up in this investigation.

  “Keep talking,” Shaw ordered.

  “Gavin wanted Burney to help him prove the identity of his birth father. Gavin was all worked up about it, said it was really important.”

  “Did he say why?”

  The fidgeting moved from his thumb to his jaw. Danny scrubbed his hand over his day-old stubble. “He didn’t say, but Burney thought it might have something to do with money. I mean, it’s usually about money, isn’t it?”

  Not always.

  And especially not in this case.

  Did Gavin and Burney conspire to tamper with the DNA so it wouldn’t prove that the missing child was Gavin’s and therefore connect him to the murder of the baby’s mother?

  Or was there something else going on here?

  “I didn’t have anything to do with those hostages or with what happened yesterday when you say Burney tried to kill you,” Danny insisted. He looked Shaw straight in the eye. “And I think it’s time for me to call a lawyer. I know my rights, and that means this chat session is over. If you want to hold me here, you have to arrest me.”

  Shaw considered it, especially since Danny would perhaps ca
ll Gavin. After all Gavin was an attorney, and he wouldn’t mind seeing how the men interacted. Still, he didn’t have enough to hold Danny.

  But that didn’t mean he couldn’t have Danny followed.

  Danny didn’t wait for Shaw’s approval. He hurried out ahead of them and rushed down the hall. Shaw made a call to dispatch to request that a tail be placed on the possible suspect. Maybe, just maybe, Danny would go to the person responsible for all of this.

  Shaw caught Sabrina’s arm so he could lead her back into the corridor where Lieutenant Rico was waiting. The lieutenant was holding some papers that had been stapled together.

  “These are Burney Monroe’s phone records,” Rico announced. “We’d already started to run them before Danny Monroe came in.” The lieutenant wasn’t smiling, but it was close.

  Sabrina glanced at the records, then back to the lieutenant. “Please tell me those records put Burney on the fourth floor of the hospital when I was being held hostage.”

  “Not quite. He probably used a prepaid cell when he was there. He had one in his pocket when he was killed, but it was brand-new. My guess is he threw the old one away just in case he was caught. These records are from his regular cell phone, the one he has an account for.”

  So, no giant smoking gun.

  “But there is a call from Burney to Gavin Cunningham,” Rico explained. “He made it three days before the hostages were taken. And the call lasted nearly an hour.”

  “Interesting,” Shaw mumbled.

  “Yeah, but not as interesting as these.” Rico pointed to the three calls that had been highlighted. They were all the same number.

  “Who did Burney call three times?” Shaw wanted to know.

  The lieutenant smiled. “One of the richest men in the city, and the very person Gavin Cunningham claims is his father. Wilson Rouse.”

  Shaw gave that some thought and then handed Rico back the phone records. It wasn’t proof of Rouse’s guilt, or Gavin’s for that matter, but maybe this could finally bring things to a head.

  If Shaw bent the truth a little.

  And for Sabrina and his baby’s safety, he would bend the truth. He would do whatever it took.

  “Use this to get a court order for a sample of Rouse’s DNA,” he instructed Lieutenant Rico. “I want it compared to Gavin’s, just in case that connection turns out to be relevant to this investigation. And then I want you to do one more thing.”

  Shaw paused, gathered his thoughts and fine-tuned how this could work.

  “I want it leaked that we’ve found some DNA from the missing baby whose mother was murdered,” Shaw continued. “Say that we got the DNA from the baby’s pacifier that we found near the crime scene, and we’ve been able to extract enough to do a DNA comparison so we can identify the birth father.”

  “Comparison to whom?” Rico wanted to know.

  “To Wilson Rouse, Gavin Cunningham, Danny Monroe, his brother and Officer Keith Newell. Leak it that whichever one is the father, he’ll be arrested for capital murder and about a dozen other charges.”

  Rico nodded, then paused. “You do know how to stir up a hornet’s nest, Captain.”

  Yeah. Now, Shaw only hoped he and Sabrina weren’t the ones who got stung.

  Chapter Eleven

  Sabrina followed Shaw through the maze of corridors that, according to the signs, led to the parking garage.

  She was actually thankful to be on their way out of headquarters because it’d taken nearly three hours for Shaw to tie up some details about the shooting and the hostage investigation before they could finally leave. There’d been one call after another. Several reports to be read. Questions that couldn’t wait for answers.

  Shaw had taken all those calls, read the reports and listened to the updates while they were in the flop room, again. It hadn’t been easy for her to sit there and wait. Waiting only gave her too much time to think about the danger.

  “You think Rouse will fight the DNA court order?” she asked as they walked.

  “Of course. He won’t want his good name linked to any of this, but the more he fights, the more it’s linked. I’m hoping that will spur him to confess what took place in those three conversations he had with a dead gunman.”

  She hugged her spare clothes and the plastic bag of toiletries to her chest. “Could he have hired Burney Monroe to steal the missing baby’s DNA sample and delete the file?”

  “Maybe.” Shaw shook his head. “Rouse would certainly have had a lot to lose if this dead woman, Misty Martinez, had named him as her baby’s father.”

  “Because it would confirm his extramarital affair?”

  “There’s that. But let’s just say she wasn’t exactly in his circle of friends. She was a cocktail waitress at a seedy bar downtown. From all accounts, she was beautiful but with some questionable habits. She also became a criminal informant after she was arrested for drug possession.”

  This wasn’t painting a very pretty picture of the dead woman, but she still didn’t deserve to be murdered. “When did you learn all this?”

  He lifted his shoulder. “I had the report on her brought to me last night.”

  Which meant he hadn’t gotten much sleep. Those naps he’d mentioned earlier had no doubt been very short with lots of work in between. Maybe when they got to this so-called safer place, she could prod him into resting the same way he’d been doing to her.

  “This dead woman, Misty Martinez, was a police informant,” Sabrina commented. “Did she also have a connection to Officer Newell?”

  Shaw paused at the door that led to the parking garage and glanced around, probably to make sure no one was close enough to hear them. Sabrina checked, too. But she didn’t see anyone within earshot.

  “It’s possible there’s a connection,” Shaw explained in a whisper. “She had some information about a hostage case that got botched last year. Newell was partly responsible for that botch.”

  The wild ideas started to fly through her head. “So, maybe Newell blamed her in some way and then killed her.” But then she shook her head. “That really isn’t much of a motive for murder and stealing a child.”

  “Unless Newell fathered the woman’s baby. He wouldn’t have a sterling reputation to tarnish like Rouse, but it wouldn’t make him look good in the department’s eyes if he was sleeping with a criminal informant.”

  True. But then, it probably wouldn’t look good to Gavin’s high-end law partners, either. Of course, that left Sabrina wondering where was the baby now?

  Shaw opened the door, and they went into the parking garage. He stopped by the dispatcher who was in a small cubbyhole office attached to the back of the main building, and retrieved an envelope. When he opened it and looked inside, she saw a key.

  “It’s for the place where we’ll be staying,” Shaw whispered to her. He put it inside his pocket.

  He also got the keys for an unmarked car. Probably because he didn’t want to use his own vehicle to drive to the new location. It was yet another security precaution that she hoped would pay off.

  Shaw put his hand on the small of her back, and as quickly as she could move, he got them away from the dispatch office and into the open parking lot. He hurried toward a black four-door sedan that was in the center row, amid dozens of cars. Some were cruisers, some designated for SWAT and other special units, and there were other unmarked vehicles, as well.

  He unlocked the car with the keypad, and threw open the door. Sabrina leaned down to get inside when she heard the sound.

  A blast tore through the air.

  It took her a moment to figure out what the sound was. It was so loud that it was like an explosion. But it wasn’t.

  Someone had fired a shot.

  Shaw shoved her onto the passenger seat, and she dropped the clothes and toiletries onto the ground. In the same motion he drew his gun from his shoulder holster. His gaze rifled all around them. So did Sabrina’s. But she couldn’t see who’d fired that shot.

  “Get in the car,” Sa
brina insisted. She was partly covered, but Shaw was literally out in the open.

  He stayed put, still looking around, but he did crouch lower next to the seat where Sabrina had hunkered down.

  “Captain Tolbert, did you fire that shot?” someone called out.

  Sabrina peeked over the dash and saw the dispatcher peering out from the covered area. He, too, had his weapon drawn and ready.

  “No,” Shaw answered. “It wasn’t me. Get a visual on the shooter.”

  The response had no sooner left his mouth when there was another blast. Sabrina hadn’t seen where the first bullet had landed, but she saw this one because it tore into the top of the car door just inches above Shaw’s head.

  She grabbed him to pull him inside with her, but he shoved aside her attempt and dropped even lower to the ground. It still wasn’t low enough.

  He was a sitting duck.

  The gunman fired again, and the bullet shattered the glass in the passenger-side door. Sabrina automatically shielded her eyes, but the safety glass stayed intact. However, another shot sent a chunk of that webbed glass dropping right onto Shaw.

  “The shots are coming from the top of one of the buildings,” Shaw shouted to the dispatcher. Oh, mercy.

  There were a lot of buildings around them. Headquarters was right in the middle of downtown, and there were tall office buildings and hotels on all four sides. They were surrounded, and the shooter could be up on top of one of them, ready to deliver the fatal blow.

  But who was shooting?

  She tried to imagine the person behind the trigger. Gavin? Rouse? Newell? Or maybe this was just another hired killer. Someone whose job it was to make sure she and Shaw didn’t get out of this parking lot alive.

  The next shot blasted through the car and took out the back window. The bullet that followed gashed through the roof. Even though the sun hadn’t fully risen, she could still see the light spearing through that slashed metal. It was a vivid reminder of just how little protection the car actually was.

  Sabrina got onto the floor space between the dash and the seat. There wasn’t much room, but she squeezed in somehow, and she put her hands over her belly in case those shots made it to her.