by Susan Stoker
Erin nodded and turned to go to her bedroom. She was worried, but she was also extremely curious. She knew Conor well enough to know he wasn’t a man who acted without thinking. He wouldn’t be a good officer if he did. So she had no doubt that whatever he’d done had been after he’d thought about the consequences. And one of those was obviously her being upset with him. But he’d still done it. That told her he’d felt it was important.
She’d give him the benefit of the doubt and hear him, and their friends, out.
Their friends. Erin liked that. She hadn’t really thought about the men and women who hung out at The Sloppy Cow as her friends before, but they were.
She quickly changed, her curiosity getting the better of her. Not only about whatever mysterious thing Conor had done, but for her present. She loved the photo his parents had given her, but somehow she knew that whatever Conor had planned would blow that out of the water.
12
An hour later, Conor held Erin’s chair for her as she sat. They were at a small restaurant near Fire Station 7. He’d chosen it partly because the owners were incredibly grateful for the firefighters and police officers who frequented their establishment, but they were also more than willing to go out of their way to make whatever dishes he and his friends wanted…whether they were on the menu or not.
He’d talked with them earlier and had arranged for Erin’s meal. He’d done a lot of research over the last couple of weeks about gastric bypass surgery and had learned a lot about what kinds of foods were best for patients who had gone through the procedure, even a decade later.
He’d tried to keep the lunch to the minimum number of people needed to tell Erin what they’d found out about her dad, but when word had gotten out amongst their friends what was going on, everyone wanted to be involved. So instead of an intimate lunch with four or five people, there were eleven.
Dax and Cruz were there, as they’d done a lot of the initial investigation, but Mackenzie and Mickie also insisted on coming with their boyfriends. Beth had also agreed to come, which was somewhat unusual. She had done an amazing job in dealing with her agoraphobia, though she still struggled some days. But she was there, as was her man, Cade. Not only that, but when Sophie had heard about what was going on, she’d insisted on being there to support her friend. TJ also showed up, along with Calder.
Conor was touched and pleased with the support both he and Erin had, and was glad the rest of the gang hadn’t also joined them, but he was worried about how Erin would handle the large group.
On the outside, she looked completely relaxed, but Conor knew her well enough to know she wasn’t as stoic as she appeared. One hand was clenched in her lap while the other fiddled with a fork on the table.
Conor placed his hand over hers on her thigh and squeezed. “Thank you everyone for coming. It means a lot to me, and I know to Erin as well.”
“It’d mean more to me if I knew why I was here,” Erin said a bit snarkily.
“You want to discuss business first, or eat?” Dax asked.
“Dax,” Conor warned, but Mackenzie beat her boyfriend to the punch in responding.
“Conor, you can’t expect the poor woman to sit there and make nice with everyone while she’s worried about what we’re going to talk about. Not to mention trying to eat. I mean, if it was me, I’d probably choke on anything I tried to shove down my throat. We get that you want to protect her, believe me, all your threats to us about spilling the beans before you can explain to Erin made that more than clear, but seriously, I vote we talk about it, get it out of the way, then we can relax and have lunch.”
Conor sighed. Mackenzie made sense, but he was still irritated. He turned to Erin and was surprised to see a small smile on her face. “What?” he asked.
She gestured toward the woman who’d come to her defense. “Just…she’s just so…Mackenzie.”
Conor knew what she meant. Mackenzie was one of a kind. She could ramble on and on and on about just about anything.
“I agree,” Beth piped up. “And not because of anything more than the fact that I want to go home.”
“Oh,” Erin said on a surprised breath of air.
“Not because I don’t like you or anything,” Beth reassured her in a tone that sounded pretty monotone. “I just didn’t have a good night. Cade didn’t even want me to come today, but there was no way I was missing this because I knew Conor would screw up the explanation somehow.”
“Hey,” the man in question protested.
Beth waved a hand dismissively. “I took an extra pill this morning, and while it’s dulled my anxiety, I’ll feel better if I can hole up in our house again. So don’t take it personally if I don’t stay for lunch. Okay?”
“No problem,” Erin told her. Then she turned to Sophie. “You know what this is all about?”
The other woman nodded.
“Am I going to be mad?”
Instead of immediately nodding or shaking her head, Sophie thought about the question for a long moment. Finally, she said softly, “M-Mad? No, I don’t think s-so. S-Surprised? Yes. Upset? M-Maybe. But I s-suspect you’ll also be relieved too.”
“Oh Lord. Can someone just get to it?” TJ grumbled. “Jesus, you’re stressing me out and I know what the fuck is going on.”
Conor held up his hand, then turned his chair to face Erin. He reached out and turned hers too, so they were facing each other and their knees were touching. He grabbed both her hands in his and leaned forward.
“Here’s the deal. After you told me about your dad, I asked Dax and Cruz to look into his disappearance. I wanted you to have the closure that you obviously didn’t have after he left. I wanted you to be able to know once and for all what happened.”
Erin stared at him with her mouth open, obviously in shock.
He tightened his grip on her hands when she tried to pull away from him. “I gave them what basic information I had, that you’d told me, and they went from there. They asked Beth to help when what they found was highly suspicious. You may or may not know, but Beth is an expert on finding information on the Internet.”
Erin turned her head to look at Dax, Cruz, and Beth, then turned back to him. “Did she find him?”
“Yeah, bright eyes. We think she did.”
“Can I see him?” Erin asked. “Does he know I’m looking for him?”
Conor took a deep breath. He hated this. He really did. “Cruz checked through government records with his contact at the FBI…and your dad hasn’t submitted any kind of tax returns since the year before he disappeared. Then Dax searched the Texas database for any John Does who hadn’t been claimed.”
“No,” Erin whispered, obviously understanding what Conor was trying to tell her.
Calder spoke up, preventing Conor from having to tell her the bad news.
“As a medical examiner, I have legal access,” he emphasized the word, and raised his eyebrows at Beth when he did, “to all autopsy reports. I searched through the reports for all male bodies that were brought in and never identified. Beth sent me your dad’s stats from his driver’s license, and his medical records. Erin…a body was brought into the Houston medical examiner’s office three years after he disappeared. I identified him using dental records and x-rays that were taken at the morgue. I’m so sorry, Erin. It was your father.”
Conor watched as Erin’s eyes filled with tears and spilled down her cheeks. She gripped his hands as if he was the only thing holding her together.
If he could’ve kicked his own ass, he would’ve. He shouldn’t have brought her here to tell her. He should’ve sucked it up and told her by himself at her place. Where she’d have the privacy to fall apart.
“How’d he die?” she asked softly. “Do you know?”
“The autopsy revealed that he’d been shot several times,” Calder said equally as softly. “Once in the chest. Twice in his head.”
“Shot?” Erin asked in confusion, turning to Conor.
He nodded. “The report st
ated that it looked like it was the second shot to his head that killed him.”
Conor hated what that report meant. It meant that Erin’s dad hadn’t died right away. The first shot in his chest had knocked him down, made him vulnerable. The second had missed, merely grazed the side of this head. But the third, in the middle of his forehead, was definitely deliberate…and deadly.
Erin’s eyes met Beth’s, then Dax and Cruz’s. “You’re sure?”
All three nodded solemnly.
Conor had no idea what was going through Erin’s head. He wanted to pull her into his arms, but he needed to be able to see her face. Gauge her reactions. Figure out if he needed to whisk her away so they could deal.
She turned back to Conor. “Where did they find him? Calder said the Houston medical examiner. We lived near there.”
“To the east of the city is a large body of water called Lake Houston. A group of college-aged kids were partying in the area. They saw what they thought was a skull on one of the remote banks. They called the police. They were right.”
“When?”
“When what, baby?” Conor asked.
“Calder said his body had been brought in three years after he left. When did he die?”
This was the hard part. “They can’t be sure. Because of the water and the heat, there wasn’t much left to be able to tell when exactly he died.”
“Erin,” Beth interrupted. Her voice was monotone, but Conor knew it wasn’t because she didn’t care. It was more because of the anti-anxiety pills she’d taken. Cade had told him how, when Beth had found out the information she was probably about to tell Erin, she’d lost it. Cried for all that Erin had lost. “There wasn’t any clothing found with the body, but whoever put him in the lake didn’t expect he’d ever be found. They weighed him down with chains and several construction blocks. But this is the thing—construction companies don’t like it when their material is stolen. For years, they’ve marked their building materials so if they’re taken, they can possibly be returned if found.”
Erin’s eyes went to her friend’s. “Marked?”
“Yeah. With the date and location of where the construction project takes place. The blocks found with your dad were dated the month before he disappeared.”
Erin bit her lip. “What does that mean?”
“It means,” Conor said, turning Erin’s face to him with a finger under her chin, “That your dad didn’t leave you, bright eyes. He was murdered.”
Erin’s eyes widened.
Conor repeated himself. “He didn’t willingly leave you. He loved you, Erin. I have a feeling you were the best thing in his life.”
“He didn’t leave me,” Erin said softly. Then she turned to look at the table of people sitting around her. “He didn’t leave me,” she repeated louder.
The women around the table smiled at her. The men continued to scowl, but the lines around their tense mouths eased a bit.
“We’ve turned all the information we’ve gotten over to the investigators. It’s unlikely they’ll ever prove who killed him, but the bottom line is that your dad didn’t abandon you,” Cruz said as gently as he could.
Erin sat up in her chair and faced the others around the table. “My mom told me my dad left because I was ‘an annoying little shit.’ She said he told her he didn’t want anything to do with me anymore. She let me think the reason he left was all because of me. For years, every time I did something she didn’t like, she’d tell me it was no wonder my dad had left.”
Conor couldn’t stand it anymore. He pulled Erin onto his lap, even as she was still talking.
“When I started to gain weight, she said my dad would’ve been embarrassed by me. When I graduated from high school, she didn’t bother to come to the ceremony. She said I didn’t deserve to have anyone there supporting me because I’d made her husband leave her. The more I think about everything…the more likely I think it is that my mom probably killed my dad. She never liked how much attention he paid me. Never liked it when he would take me camping. Never liked it when we spent time together. I think she’s a jealous bitch of a woman who probably got so mad that she couldn’t control him, she killed him. Then, out of spite, she made my life a living hell for the rest of the time I lived with her.”
Silence greeted her words, but Conor couldn’t have been prouder of her than he was at that moment.
“Are you pissed at us?” Beth asked. “I mean, Conor went behind your back and told Dax and Cruz about your dad’s disappearance, and how mean your mom was to you. Then I dug deeper to find out more info about your dad so we could try to find him for you.”
“Jesus, Beth,” Conor complained. “Lay it all out, would ya?”
“Erin’s not s-stupid,” Sophie said quietly. “S-She knows that Daxton and the others would need as m-much information as possible to find her dad.”
“You know about me, too?” Erin asked Beth.
Beth met her eyes straight on. “Yeah. I know about you.”
Erin kept her eyes on the woman across the table from her. It was more than obvious to her that Beth had looked into her history. She probably knew everything about her. If she was as good at finding information as the others said she was, she most likely knew about her being fired from her first job after college and all about her surgeries.
After everything else she’d learned today, the thought that Beth knew about her didn’t seem so awful anymore.
Conor ran his hand up and down her back.
She took a deep breath—and did something she’d never done before in her life. Talked about herself with a group of friends.
“I thought it was my fault my dad left. I coped by eating. I gained a lot of weight. So much that I couldn’t walk very far without being out of breath. Things came to a head when I lost my job, and I made the decision to change my life. I had gastric bypass surgery and when all was said and done, I lost three hundred pounds.” The words were said in a rush, as though, if she didn’t hurry up and say them, she’d chicken out. Erin huffed out a breath and leaned back into Conor, feeling his lips touch her temple as if rewarding her for her bravery in opening up to her new friends.
“I think it’s so cool,” Mackenzie said, sitting back in her chair and crossing her arms over her chest. “I mean, if you think about it, you lost about three people from your frame. It’s amazing and freaky and I bet your dad would be so darn proud of you right now, he’d bust.”
“Proud?” Erin asked.
“Yup. Proud. You had to deal with his bitch of a wife, and she treated you like shit. You did what you had to in order to protect yourself—eat. Which I get, by the way. I mean, what woman doesn’t indulge in chocolate, ice cream, and junk food when she’s upset? But you had like, ten years of being upset and not having anyone to talk to about it. It’s not surprising you gained all that weight. But you didn’t just lay down and die. You fought back. You had the surgery, but it’s not like that would’ve done anything if you hadn’t changed the way you ate. You had to completely change everything about how you coped with shit thrown your way…and that’s a hard thing to do. I admire you, Erin. You’re my hero.”
Erin stared at the other woman, obviously stunned.
“You haven’t thought about yourself that way, have you?” Conor asked softly.
Erin shook her head.
“Right. Now that M-Mack has word vomited all over the table…who’s hungry?” Sophie asked dryly.
Everyone laughed, and just like that, the tension was broken. They started talking at once about what they wanted to eat and what they had going on for the rest of the day.
Conor kept his eyes on Erin, trying to gauge where her head was at.
“Did the subject of how much I used to weigh seriously just get brought up then dismissed just like that?” Erin asked Conor quietly.
He grinned. “Yup. You see, bright eyes, all the women in our circle of friends are strong. They see you as being one of them. Strong enough to overcome the shit life throws at
you. Even if you gained back all the weight, they wouldn’t see you any differently. In fact, Mackenzie would probably gain weight in commiseration so you wouldn’t feel so bad about it.”
“Is this what it feels like to have friends?” Erin asked him.
“As if you could rip off all your clothes and dance naked on the table and they’d not only not laugh at you or call the police, but they’d take off their own clothes and join in so you wouldn’t have to spend the night in the pokey by yourself? Yeah, this is what it feels like to have friends,” Conor finished with a big smile.
It grew when Erin grinned back at him. He relaxed for the first time under her. “Are you upset that I went behind your back?” he asked.
She immediately shook her head. Her fingers wrapped around the nape of his neck and she leaned into him. “No. Some people would tell me I should be, but you gave me the best gift I’ve ever received. My dad didn’t leave me. You have no idea what that means to me. I’m angry and sad that he was murdered, but all I can think of at the moment is that I wasn’t the reason he left.”
“The best gift you’ve gotten until later today, when I give you your belated Christmas gift,” he teased, more thankful than he could ever say that he was actually joking with her right now instead of pleading with her to forgive him.
Erin leaned her forehead on his and they stayed like that for a moment before Calder interrupted. “Hey, you guys gonna order? I’m starving. All this drama really worked up an appetite.”
Conor pulled back and looked Erin in the eyes. “Trust me?”
“Yes.”
“Enough to let me order for you?”
She hesitated, but finally nodded and said, “For you, food is love. I trust you.”
Conor wanted to stand up with her in his arms and take her directly home to his bed and make love to her right then, but he refrained, barely. He turned to the waitress and said, “The cook knows what my order is. Just tell him to make what Conor asked for.”
The young waitress didn’t even blink. She simply nodded and turned to head into the kitchen to place their orders.