by Kelly Irvin
The office smelled of old paper and books and something else. Something not good. Something that made her stomach turn over and her arms tighten around Mango. The cat squirmed and leaped from her arms.
The room smelled like blood.
Another whine. Behind the desk.
She started around it. Daffy sped past her and out the door as if her work were done. Peanuts crouched next to a long leg stretched out on the floor.
Her breath a hitch in her throat, Nina shot forward. “Dad?”
No answer.
The cocker spaniel whimpered, a sound that made Nina’s own throat ache. “It’s okay, boy, it’s okay.”
A bare foot next to a brown corduroy slipper. A silky, beige pajama pant had ridden up, revealing a leg covered with thick, black hair. Nina edged past Peanuts until she could see the rest of the body.
Her father sprawled on his back, hands clutched at his stomach.
Her legs trembling, Nina knelt. Blood stained his pajama top a deep scarlet. It pooled under him. A gun lay near his right elbow. Nina knew less than nothing about guns. This one was big and black. “Oh, Daddy.” His eyes didn’t blink and his face didn’t acknowledge her presence. “Dad? Geoffrey!”
She touched his throat. His skin was warm. Almost hot. Sweat streaked his face and something else. Tears? She pressed her fingers harder, seeking a pulse. “Daddy, talk to me, talk to me.”
No pulse. The voice that had spoken only seconds before had been silenced. Why hadn’t she come sooner? Why hadn’t she heard the shot? Daddy had always said she played her music too loud. “You’ll end up deaf.” He would never say those words again.
“No, no, no.” She tugged her phone from her pocket, surprised to see bloody prints on it when she tapped those three numbers they’d all been taught to see as lifelines. “Help, I need help.”
The 911 operator’s voice was kind. Yes, she would send someone. Yes, Nina needed to stay on the line.
Nina hit speaker and tossed the phone on the thick carpet he’d insisted on, saying wooden floors were cold even in a climate like San Antonio’s. The cold aggravated his arthritis. His joints ached and his fingers wouldn’t cooperate when he tried to hunt and peck on his laptop. Had that pain seeped away with the blood that ran from his wounds?
Nina bent over, getting close to his mouth, to hear his breath. He had to breathe. She’d lost enough people in her life.
She touched his neck again. Still no pulse. Skin cooling.
Come on, God. Come on. Hasn’t it been enough? Can’t I keep this one person? Can You see why I don’t trust You?
The pounding of her heart in her ears served as the only answer. As usual.
She gently moved his hands, sure any small adjustment would cause him pain. She began to push, up and down, up and down on his chest. Wasn’t that what a person did when someone’s heart stopped beating?
One should perform CPR. One, two, three, four, she counted silently, then aloud. “Five, six, seven, eight, nine . . .” As if counting aloud would make her efforts more powerful. His heart would start and he would open his eyes and tell her all about how this happened. How he ended up on the floor of his study. A gaping hole in his gut.
Sirens sounded in the distance, music to her ears for the first time in her life. Help was coming.
Nina paused, her head over her father’s, her long hair touching his still, white cheek. The only real father she’d ever known. The man who had taken Jan and her in and made them his daughters. He liked to say he’d chosen them, which was much nicer than the truth. The ugly truth. He’d been the one to tell her it was okay to call him Daddy, a word so foreign to her vocabulary it could’ve been another language.
“Breathe, Daddy, breathe. Please.”
His head lolled to one side, features slack. The sirens screamed. Whirling lights pierced the windows, lighting up the dark and ping-ponging on the walls in a crazy, unpredictable pattern.
It didn’t matter how fast they arrived. They were already too late.
2
CSI: San Antonio. A new location for the popular TV show franchise? Nina slipped past the Evidence Unit investigator who squatted, gloved hand on the chair railing, staring at something on the base molding along the wooden floor of the entryway. Dad wouldn’t like it. Pedestrian TV fare had no place in a district judge’s life. Nina didn’t intend to escape. She simply needed a breath of fresh air. Tuesday had dawned a gray, sunless day that promised more rain. She needed to clear the stench from her nose. She needed to clear from her ears the sound of voices murmuring words such as caliber and angle and entry wound. The clicking sound of a photographer taking photos made her long for her own camera. While at the newspaper, she’d learned to use the camera as a buffer between her heart and the accidents and homicide stories she’d photographed. She ached for that buffer now.
They wandered in and out of his study in such a casual manner. They couldn’t know she stayed out of this room as much as possible. The room where her father had always brought her to discuss transgressions and punishments. To get called to the study was to be in trouble. A-B honor roll meant ice cream sundaes and banana splits on the veranda. A grade dipped below a B, and it was time to discuss her study habits in his office. It didn’t happen often, but when it did, she never failed to feel she’d let the most important man in her life down. She shuddered. Even their last conversation in this room had been fraught with his disappointment and her stubborn refusal to acknowledge it.
The front door stood open. Half afraid someone would grab her shoulder and jerk her back in, she peeked out. The first detective on the scene, an older man with white hair and a craggy face, had asked her a few questions and then suggested with a gracious air that she should rest for a few minutes in the living room. Someone would be back to question her. Nothing in his manner suggested he would cuff her to a chair if she stretched her legs. She needed to do something, anything, not to think about Dad sprawled on the floor in another room and the indignities to which his body would be subjected now that he’d been the victim of the greatest indignity of all—murder.
She breathed in the rain-cooled air and rubbed eyes that burned with fatigue. Trying to ignore the marked media units and live trucks that lined the narrow street, she focused on the spacious front yard filled with antique yellow rosebushes and purple and pink petunias and other flowers her mother tended in a sporadic way that depended entirely on where she was in writing her latest book. Did she need time to think? She weeded. Was she mulling a sticky plot point? She dug out old plants and replaced them with new annuals.
“Nina Fischer. Nina!” Lou Briggs from News 4 screamed in that high-pitched voice that said she would never make it to a top-ten market no matter how aggressively she pursued her I-team investigations. “Can we ask you a couple of questions?”
Nina drew back, not wanting her face with its dark circles beneath her eyes and ratty, uncombed hair to show up on their noon newscast.
She understood better than most that they were just doing their jobs. They’d come out of the woodwork, their desire for the story no doubt driven by the announcement that a venerable four-term state district court judge had been killed in his own home a few hours earlier. She couldn’t give them fodder.
She turned and slipped along the hallway and out to the sunporch that ran along the side of the house. It was screened but gave her a view of the second rose garden her mother had planted. The porch was a perfect place to read in the evening or simply sit and watch the light fade over the masses of pink, yellow, and red flowers that mingled in massive disarray, tumbling up trellis after trellis, seeking sun and air.
“Nina, are you all right?”
Even if she couldn’t see him, Aaron McClure’s East Coast accent gave him away. No amount of time in Texas could mute it. His yellow rain slicker gaped open in the front, revealing a UT–Austin T-shirt tight across his broad, muscular chest. The hood had slipped down his back, allowing rain that had turned into a drizzle to dampen his
hair, already an untamable mass of auburn curls coveted by every woman he’d ever met.
Her best friend knew about her second-favorite spot in this house, second to her darkroom. He knew to pull along the side street and traipse through the alley if he wanted to avoid the police officers posted in the front yard, keeping his colleagues at bay. He had an advantage. He knew the layout.
Aaron strode through the wet grass, his boots making sucking sounds in the mud. A rain cover protected the camera he held on his shoulder.
Nina shrank back against the wall. He kept coming but slowed, his wet hair hanging in blue-gray eyes that reminded her of Cancun waters under a cloudy, late-afternoon sky. He had round cheeks and fair skin that spoke of an undiluted Irish ancestry. She always planned to grab some action shots of him working, but he did a good job of evading her lens. Like most photographers, he preferred to stay behind the camera. “You’re working.”
“The assignments editor called me in.” He stopped walking, rain from the porch roof dripping on his head. “She figured I’d know my way around on this story, and I figured the exhibit would be on hold anyway.”
“Claire knows we’re friends.”
“Yeah, she does, but she’s all about the story.” He shifted the video camera on his burly shoulder. “I’m sorry about your dad.”
“Thank you.”
Aaron put his massive free hand on the dark screen that separated them. His eyes told her how much he wanted to be on the other side of that screen, hugging her, comforting her. She loved those eyes. His gaze dropped to her shirt. She glanced down. Dried blood. Dad’s blood. “I’m sorry, but it’s my job. I gotta ask. What happened?”
She gazed over his shoulder at Melanie Martinez. The model-slumming-as-a-reporter held back, letting her photog take the first swing, knowing he had a better chance of getting a sound bite because he knew a member of the victim’s family. They were about to get the scoop on their colleagues who lined up outside the black wrought-iron fence out front.
Nina turned her back on both of them. “I’m not making any statements at this time.”
“Okay. I understand.” His husky voice filled with concern reminded her of the honey and lemon she liked in her tea when she had a sore throat. “Are you hurt? Did they let you call someone? I tried to call you, but it went straight to voice mail.”
“I’m fine.” She cleared her throat. “Like I said, I’m not making any statements.”
“Just between you and me, are you okay?”
Wiping at her face with the back of her hand, she swiveled and stared at him. He stared back. An electric current of warmth seemed to swell between them.
This couldn’t be just between them, as much as he might want it to be. He had a job to do. Tonight it would be just between him and a top-thirty-five TV market that covered the San Antonio metro viewing area, stretching from Fredericksburg to Del Rio to Lytle to Victoria. As a former newspaper photographer, no one understood that more than Nina did. Journalists did their jobs, no matter the circumstances. The story was sacred.
“Nina Fischer, in the house. Now.”
A tall, lean man, head bare, brown hair gleaming with raindrops, strode onto the sunporch. He wore a black, stylishly cut raincoat that made him look like a spy who hadn’t come in from the cold. He planted himself in front of her. “Y’all need to get back out front now.”
“He’s a friend.” Someone she counted on. Who was this guy in her family’s home, giving orders? “Who are you?”
The man swiveled and slid open the front of the coat. His badge flashed on his belt. “Detective Matt King. You’re not supposed to be out here. Carter told you to stay put.”
“I needed air.”
Detective King jerked his head toward Aaron and Melanie, whose olive skin darkened with a blush. “You needed to get your fifteen minutes of fame?”
“I told you, he’s a friend. A good friend.”
Even if he had no choice but to put his job first.
“Well, there’s no honor among journalists.” Detective King gripped Nina’s arm and steered her toward the door. “I’m surprised you didn’t know that. Your family’s in the news all the time.”
“Hey, don’t touch her!” Aaron looked as if he contemplated crashing through the screen to back up his words. He had twenty pounds of brawn on the detective. “A badge doesn’t give you the right to mistreat a family member of the victim.”
Nina tugged from his grip. “My father is . . . was a judge. He sat on the bench on some controversial cases.” She glanced back. Aaron hadn’t moved. And his camera was hot. “Don’t cause trouble, Aaron, please.”
Aaron backed away, still rolling. Melanie at his side back-stepped and scribbled in her skinny reporter’s notebook, a multitasking phenomenon. What did she have to write down? Aaron eased the camera back. “If you need anything, call me.”
“You’re on duty.”
“I’m still—”
“She said to beat it.” Detective King jerked his head. “Get behind the crime-scene tape now. If I have to tell y’all again, I’ll arrest you for interfering with a homicide investigation.”
Melanie raised her hand, fancy silver pen waving, as if in class. “So it is a murder? Not natural causes? What was the cause of death?”
“Contact the PD PIO.”
“Come on, Detective.” Melanie tried out that famous red-lipstick ten o’clock–newscast smile. “I asked nicely. Throw us a bone.”
“You’ll end up in the cell down the hall from this guy if you don’t go.”
Aaron eased toward the corner of the house. “Call an attorney, Nina. Don’t say anything to these vultures without an attorney. Call Rick.”
If he was suggesting she call Rick, Aaron was really worried about her.
“Hey, no reason to resort to name calling.” King’s grin held no humor. “There’s a photo of a vulture in the dictionary next to the word journalist, I know. I looked it up.”
He opened the screen door for Nina. “You’re like your mother, aren’t you?”
He looked as if she should be able to follow his train of thought. Too little sleep and not enough caffeine made that impossible. Her mother was famous. Nina was not. Her mother . . . wasn’t even really her mother. “Like my mother?”
“She’s in the news on a regular basis too, isn’t she?”
“She’s a bestselling novelist, so yes, she’s occasionally in the book section of the newspaper.”
“Lots of photos of you two, social-scene shots at parties.”
Her mother liked company when she went to Junior League events, Library Foundation fund-raisers, and book talks. Nina obliged her because it was the only way to spend time with Grace, who was always in the middle of writing a book, editing a book, marketing a book, or attending writing-related events. “What’s your point?”
“No point.” He flicked an index finger at a man in a gray suit with a spectacularly hot-pink tie and lighter pink shirt that contrasted nicely with his brown skin. “This is my temporary partner Manny Cavazos. Manny, why don’t you take a run at the neighbors, see if anyone heard anything or saw anybody. Surely there’s one nosy, old retired lady like they always have in the TV shows.”
Manny, who might be a year or two older than King, mumbled something about interviews. Nina caught her name.
“Newbies get all the plum assignments.”
King grinned at his partner, who gave a “whatever” shrug and headed for the door.
He ushered her into the living room as if he were the butler and she a guest. “Just speculating.” He picked up their conversation as if there’d been no interruption. “Little rich girl likes to be in the news.”
White heat burned through her, erasing the earlier chill. Her body went rigid. She’d been accused of many things in her life, but not that. She was neither rich nor a little girl. Nor did she enjoy being in the spotlight. People who knew her could attest to all three facts. “You obviously don’t know me.”
“I’m about to rectify that, Miss Fischer. Have a seat.” He pointed to a paisley print love seat. “I know you have a degree in journalism and creative writing—those two should fit together like hand and glove. You worked at the newspaper for a couple of years and then bailed to go freelance. You’re twenty-seven and you live at home with your parents.”
His tone was neutral, polite even, yet she saw something in his expression. He didn’t respect her choices. He didn’t know her, and he already didn’t like her.
“My father died this morning. I need to make arrangements. Call people. I need my cell phone.”
“Sit here. Don’t move. I’ll be back.”
“That’s what the last detective said. He has yet to make a reappearance.”
“Carter went home.”
“At the beginning of an investigation?”
King paused in the doorway. “Night CID turns cases over to the day Homicide. Budget cuts. No overtime allowed. Even for big-time, high-profile cases like state district court judges. This isn’t CSI.”
“It’s your public safety legacy costs that are eating up the general fund.”
An amused look spread across his face. “Little rich girl reads the newspaper.”
The assumptions he made about her could fill a wastebasket. “There’s no passing of the baton? No ceremonial high five?”
“No baton, but Carter did tell me two things.”
“And what were those two things?”
“Number one,” he held up one long finger, “there was no sign of forced entry.” A second finger immediately followed. “Number two, you were the only other person in the house when your father was murdered.”
Fear trailed its icy fingers down her spine, followed by a blast of anger.
He disappeared through the door before she could frame a retort.
3
The disembodied voice at the other end of the phone screamed in Rick Zavala’s ear. He threw his bare legs over the side of the king-size bed and rubbed his eyes. His boss might exude an icy calm in the courtroom. He might seem educated, well-mannered, even distinctly classy. But get Peter Coggins angry, like now, and the man spewed venomous obscenities like the lowlife he’d once been before the law degree, the high-society wife, the Mercedes, the diamond-studded Rolex, and the time-share in Cancun.