GUILTY SECRETS

by Virginia Kantra

  Joe felt the anger cruise through his veins. Anger and fear. The taste of it was sour in his mouth. He wasn't carrying a lot of money. He didn't care much about his life. But the woman with him…

  He crushed his cigarette underfoot, damning his unsteady balance, and put Nell firmly behind him.

  The gang members prowled closer, making no attempt to be silent or subtle. Light gleamed from their chains, their belt buckles, their eyes. Joe shifted his weight to take their attack.

  And then Nell's clear voice piped behind him, "Benny? How's your mother? Are her bunions still bothering her?"

  The two boys in front of Joe stopped, confused. Nell stepped forward, smiling, and took Joe's arm.

  "Benny's mother works in retail sales," she explained. "So she's on her feet all day. She was in a lot of pain when she first came to the clinic."

  She smiled again at the taller of the two toughs blocking the sidewalk, holding Joe's arm tight against her breast so he couldn't swing, couldn't move without hurting her. He could feel her heart pounding against his arm.

  "How is she?" she asked again, her tone relaxed and solicitous. "Are those new shoes helping?"

  The young man looked down at the sidewalk and over at his friends. "Yeah," he said finally. "She's doing okay."

  "Good," Nell said. "You tell her to come see me if she has any more problems. She can come after work. We're open until seven Mondays and Thursdays."

  The gangbanger shuffled his feet. "Yeah. Okay."

  "You'll tell her?" Nell pressed.

  The tough standing next to him, the one with the tattoo on his cheek, snickered.

  Benny silenced him with a glare. "Yeah. I'll tell her."

  Nell nodded. "All right. Good night, then."

  She started forward, still hugging Joe's arm so that he had no choice but to fall into step beside her. Pain lanced his ankle every time his foot hit the pavement. He could feel the faint tremor of Nell's body as she pressed against his arm.

  But her steps never faltered. In the orange glare of the streetlights, her red cape gleamed like a military cloak, like an archangel's wings. No one followed them.

  Joe shook his head. It was almost enough to make a man believe in miracles again.

  * * *

  Chapter 3

  « ^ »

  Melody King turned twenty-four today, and the nurses were throwing her a party on their lunch break. The office manager had had few opportunities to celebrate in her young life, and few people to celebrate with. A runaway at seventeen, an addict at eighteen, pregnant and in rehab at twenty, Melody had come to Nell straight from community college.

  Nell had known she was taking a risk in hiring the inexperienced single mother. But, fresh from her own humiliation at the hospital, Nell had been determined to provide the younger woman with a second chance. And today, watching Melody's thin face light in the glow of a single candle, Nell prayed her gamble had paid off.

  As Melody cut her cake, Nell kept an eye out the window for the police. After checking and rechecking the lists last night, she'd called them herself this morning. But what would her discovery mean to the nurses crowding around Melody's desk? What would her decision cost her? "Cake?" offered Billie.

  Nell's stomach lurched uneasily. "No, thanks."

  "Nice flowers," Lucy Morales said, nodding at the daisy bouquet by Melody's computer. "Who are they from?"

  Melody blushed. "Dr. Jim."

  James Fletcher, volunteer pediatrician, acknowledged stud muffin and all-around good guy. His offering raised eyebrows and knowing grins around the nurses' circle.

  "It's not like that," Melody insisted with quiet dignity. "He's just being nice."

  "Bet that's your favorite present, though," teased Lucy.

  Nell came to the office manager's rescue. "No, her favorite present is from her other admirer. Show them, Melody."

  Proudly, Melody showed off the birthday card her three-year-old daughter had made at day care.

  "Pretty," Billie approved. "Trevor's nine, and I swear that boy still can't be trusted with scissors."

  Billie's nephew Trevor had sickle-cell disease. His mother couldn't afford health insurance, and Billie brought the boy to the clinic for treatment.

  While the nurses oohed and aahed over the card, Nell asked quietly, "How's Trevor doing?"

  Billie smile was strained. "He's managing. That's all we can hope for, right? We all manage."

  A black-and-white police car pulled to the curb by the fire hydrant. Nell's pulse kicked up.

  One of the nurses glanced out at the flashing lights. "Wow. This is turning into quite a party."

  "I've got it," Nell said.

  "If they're cute, offer them some cake," Lucy called.

  Nell hurried to open the front door as two officers—solid, uniformed, with matching gaits and haircuts—climbed out of the car and approached.

  "How's it going, Nell." The first cop wiped his brow with his forearm before resettling his checkerboard hat. "Heard you had a little problem."

  "Hi, Tom." She smiled. One of the beat cops, Tom Dietz had worked with Nell on a domestic-violence awareness program last year. She liked him.

  "Nell Dolan," she said, offering her hand to the younger man looming beside him. She didn't remember meeting him before, but his rugged good looks were vaguely familiar. A definite cake candidate. "And you are…?"

  The second officer's grip was warm and firm, his smile friendly. "Mike Reilly. Nice to meet you."

  Her mouth dried. He couldn't be.

  They think you're a cop, she'd said to Joe Reilly yesterday.

  Not me. My brother.

  Nell's heart banged against her ribs. She could deal with this, she told herself. She could deal with anything.

  "Nice to meet you, too," she said faintly as she led them away from Melody's birthday party and back to her office cubicle, crammed in behind a wall of filing cabinets. "I think I know your brother."

  "Yeah?" The young cop looked delighted. "Will or Joe?"

  Her last hope wheezed and died like a patient taken off the respirator.

  "Joe," Nell said. "The reporter?"

  Mike Reilly beamed. "That's Joe. He was with the Seventh Marines when they entered Baghdad. Did you read his—"

  Tom Dietz rolled his eyes. "When you're done with the stories from the front, Reilly, do you mind if we take a preliminary statement?"

  The young man flushed. Nell smiled at him.

  Joe Reilly's brother. Oh, dear.

  The last thing she wanted compromising her PR efforts was an investigation into drug theft. The last thing she needed complicating an investigation was lousy PR. The police and the press, working together, could piece together a picture of her past that could destroy everything she'd worked to create.

  Tom leaned against an overflowing file cabinet and pulled out his notebook. "Why don't you tell us what's missing?"

  Nell took a deep breath. "Drugs. I wrote out a list." She fumbled in her pocket and offered it. The page trembled. "Schedule Three and Four painkillers, mostly. Narcotics. Darvon, Vicodin, a lot of Tylenol with codeine… I wrote them all down."

  Mike Reilly took the paper and studied it, his face suddenly hard and not so young.

  "Any Schedule Twos?" Tom asked.

  Methadone, he meant. Morphine. Oxycodone, rapidly becoming the most abused drug on the planet. An eighty mg tablet had a street value of up to eighty dollars.

  "We don't keep any methadone in stock." It was a relief to be able to offer some good news. She hadn't done anything wrong, Nell reminded herself.

  "And we keep such small quantities of Oxycodone that any theft would have been noticed immediately."

  Tom wrote that down. "When did you notice the other stuff was missing?"

  "Ed Johnson—our pharmacist—suspected a discrepancy in the inventory last night. I checked the supply records and called you this morning."

  "Okay. We'll need to talk to him. Who else has access to the pharmacy?"

&
nbsp; Nell wiped her hands surreptitiously on her lab coat. This was where things got sticky. "Ed and I are the only ones with keys. Sometimes, when Ed is gone and I'm tied up with a procedure, one of the nurses will come in to get medication for a patient."

  "You loan them your keys," Mike Reilly clarified, his voice expressionless. He sounded like his brother.

  Nell winced. It was hard to explain how habit and convenience created trust among members of a medical team. Harder to admit, even to herself, that such trust could have been betrayed. "Yes. But they don't have access to the narcotics cabinet."

  Tom rubbed his forehead. "They've got the keys."

  "The cabinet has a punch lock," Nell explained. "It can only be opened with a three-digit code."

  "And who knows the code?" Tom asked.

  Fear, bitter as bile, rose in Nell's throat. She swallowed hard.

  "Ed," she said steadily. "And me."

  Mike Reilly shifted his seat on the edge of her desk. "Could be a tailgater," he said to Tom.

  Nell looked at them hopefully. "What's that?"

  "Somebody walks by, looks over your shoulder while you're punching in the code," Mike explained. "It's easy enough to pick up."

  "You got a security camera on the inside?" Tom asked.

  "No," Nell admitted. In the acute-care room, an older woman was moaning, disoriented and in pain. Nell heard Billie's attempts to comfort her, to make her lie still for an exam.

  "A larger pharmacy with a walk-in narcotics vault would have a camera monitoring the inside. But we just have the cabinet. And the camera is positioned to record people approaching the pharmacy window from the outside."

  "Okay." Tom closed his notebook. "We'll take a look. In the meantime, you might want to change the code sequence on that punch lock."

  A crash sounded from across the hall. Billie yelled for help with the restraints. Mike Reilly looked uncomfortable.

  "We don't want to keep you," Tom said. "I'll give you a call in a couple of days, do a follow-up."

  Nell blinked at him. Surprised. Deflated. "That's it?"

  "We'll file a report," Tom assured her. "Let the assignment sergeant know in case your theft fits a pattern in the area. He might send out a detective. But the amounts you're missing… We'll check, but it's not an index crime. Looks to me like you've got a problem with personal use."

  Nell went cold.

  "Not you, personally," Mike Reilly said. "Just, you know, somebody with access. You didn't notice if the doors or locks were tampered with?"

  "No," Nell said faintly. Her heart pounded. Her mind raced. Somebody with access. Ed, whom she'd promised a job? Melody, whom she'd promised a second chance? A volunteer doctor? A nurse? "Nothing like that."

  "Well, we'll look into it," Tom said. "Want to show me that security camera? Even with the bad angle, you might have something on tape."

  He sounded doubtful but kind, like a surgeon explaining a patient's chances of surviving a risky operation.

  Nell led the way toward the pharmacy feeling numb. Someone she worked with, someone she trusted, someone she'd helped was stealing drugs from the clinic pharmacy. For personal use, Tom had said.

  She turned the corner. Joe Reilly stood in the work aisle, leaning over the counter to talk to Melody King.

  And things teetered from bad and slid to worse.

  "Joe?" Mike Reilly sounded pleased, but puzzled. "What are you doing here?"

  Joe pivoted stiffly on one leg.

  Nell took a deep breath. She was not going to panic. Yet.

  She forced herself to compare the two men, as if she could assess the threat to her clinic on the basis of their family resemblance. They didn't look alike. Mike Reilly was bigger, blonder, broader than his brother. Beside him, Joe looked lean and tough and scruffier than ever. But something—the shape of their heads, the angle of their jaws, the set of their shoulders—marked them as brothers. And something else, a weariness, a watchfulness, marked Joe as the older one.

  "Hello, Mike," he said quietly.

  "He said he had an appointment," Melody piped up.

  Both men ignored her.

  "You listening for my car number on your police scanner again?" the cop asked. If it was a joke it fell flat.

  Joe shook his head. "I didn't know you were here. What's going on?"

  Tom Dietz pushed up his hat brim with his thumb. "Nothing you need to worry about. Police blotter stuff."

  "Yeah, you stick to the big stories," Mike said. "Are you here to see Nell?"

  Nell started. She'd told Mike Reilly she knew his brother. But that was all. Had the young officer somehow picked up on the tension between them? Or was he just used to his big brother hitting on every woman that breathed?

  I thought the purpose of this dinner was to get to know one another better.

  If that's what it takes.

  Joe's face was impassive. "I'm here on a story."

  Tom looked from Joe to Nell. "What kind of story?"

  Nell stepped forward. The less the two Reilly brothers compared notes, the better. And yet something about Joe's careful lack of expression tugged at her heart. "I contacted the Examiner to ask if they would send a reporter to profile the clinic. With all the recent budget cuts, we could use the publicity."

  Mike's eyes widened. "You're doing a—"

  "Feature piece," Joe supplied grimly. "For the Life section. Yeah."

  "Oh." Mike shifted his weight, clearly uncomfortable.

  Because he'd assumed Joe was having a personal relationship with his subject? Nell wondered. Or for some other reason?

  "Well, that's great," Mike said finally, heartily. "You're lucky," he told Nell. "Joe's a great writer. He won an AP award for his series on the looting of Baghdad, you know."

  She hadn't known.

  "Nell isn't interested in my résumé," Joe said.

  But Mike continued as if his brother hadn't spoken. "After he got hurt, he laced up his boot and kept right on reporting."

  Nell felt a flutter of concern. "You were injured?"

  "It wasn't a war wound," Joe said. "I fell."

  "Some looters pushed him down a hospital stairwell," Mike explained. Nell sucked in a distressed breath. "That didn't stop Joe, though."

  Joe thrust his hands into his pockets. "Yes, it did. It just took me a while to wise up to it."

  "He was in the hospital for a couple of weeks when he got back," Mike confided. "Getting his ankle patched up."

  A couple of weeks? For a broken ankle?

  Nell glanced at Joe. He was clearly not enjoying this turn of the conversation.

  "Sounds serious," she said.

  "Tedious," Joe corrected. "I'm fine now."

  "You will be when you get that other surgery," his brother said.

  "I'm fine," Joe said again, flatly.

  A long, loaded look passed between the two men.

  Mike snorted. "Yeah. Fine. That's why you're in Chicago writing PR copy for a cut-rate health clinic instead of overseas covering the action."

  Nell stiffened at the good-natured insult.

  Joe's face didn't reveal any reaction at all.

  "O-kay," Tom said. "We're about done here. I'll just have a few words with Ed in the pharmacy and let you folks get back to—"

  Writing PR copy for a cut-rate health clinic.

  "—your business," Tom finished. "Mike?"

  "Gotcha." He said goodbye to his brother, winked at Nell and sauntered after his partner.

  "Are you all right?" Nell asked.

  Joe's mouth twisted. "Weren't you listening? I'm fine."

  That wasn't what his brother had implied, but Nell figured this was a poor time to point that out.

  "What happened?" she asked.

  "My baby brother just shot his mouth off."

  "I didn't mean here. I meant over there."

  Joe rocked back and stared down his nose at her. "I thought I was here so you could give me a story."

  Nell's heart beat faster. "I will. You go f
irst."

  "Everything I have to say I wrote for the paper."

  She put her hands on her hips. "Are you really going to make me dig up back issues from a year ago?"

  But instead of grinning, Joe shook his head. "Why should you care?"

  She was surprised enough to tell the truth. "Because you were hurt, I guess. Because it's my job to observe and to care, and I didn't even notice."

  He smiled then, and the sight of all those even, white teeth against his movie-star stubble weakened her knees. "I knew there was a reason I liked you."

  She blinked. "What?"

  "I get tired of being treated like the walking wounded all the time." He looked directly into her eyes. "I don't want you to see me as one of your patients, Nell."

  Her breath clogged. The moment stretched between them, fine and strong as suturing thread.

  Until he snapped it by saying, "Unless you'd have sex with me out of pity. I'm okay with that."

  Disappointment made her cross. "Are there any circumstances in which you are not okay with sex?"

  He considered, then shrugged. "Nope. Can't think of any."

  Nell drew herself up. His crudeness could be a deliberate attempt to set some distance between them.

  Or he could be a jerk. And she was an idiot for imagining that he was something else, that he felt any corresponding connection with her.

  "I'll give you that clinic tour now," she said.

  That was a close call, Joe thought as he tagged behind Nell to the acute-care room. Her shapeless white lab coat swayed with her walk.

  Sex was one thing. Sex was good. Sex dulled the pain for a while.

  But the exchange in the hall had forced him to face that Nell Dolan was not a woman he could simply have sex with. She was perceptive and funny and caring as hell.

  She wouldn't accept a relationship that was all about sex. She wouldn't let a relationship be all about her. She would want—God help them both—to know about him. And eventually, all the get-to-know-you stuff that usually kicked off a relationship would lead her to figure out that he was hanging on to a job he hated by the edge of his fingernails. And she would demand to know why.

  The thought made him shudder.