Colton's Twin Secrets

by Justine Davis

  So you avoided wrinkles but ended up blood-soaked.

  He shook his head sharply as the kitchen door finally swung open. He stood just inside for a long moment, simply listening. The house was quiet.

  Dead quiet.

  He looked around the kitchen, hoping to find a notepad or something, maybe with a helpful phone number. No such luck. He repeated the action in the large room adjacent, which looked more like a museum than a home. He made his way to where he knew Dominic’s office was; there, at least, his brother had refused to allow his wife’s taste to dominate. It was a functional room, with a large desk holding a computer and a file cabinet behind it. He could only imagine what might be in there. Dominic wasn’t stupid enough to keep paper records of his illicit activities, was he?

  He walked to the desk, again looking for some kind of clue that might tell him where his nieces were. Nothing.

  He sat down, booted up the computer. It was, as he’d expected, password protected. He tried the obvious ones first—names, birthdates, including the twins’. No luck. There did not appear to be any password-generating software present, although it didn’t have to be on the machine itself. He was sure Katie Parsons, the RRPD’s tech whiz, could crack it in a matter of hours, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to go there yet.

  Right now all that mattered was finding the girls. Once he knew where they were, that they were safe, he’d be able to think straight. It would be something to focus on, something productive. He and Dominic had no other family left—at least not out of prison—except an elderly uncle and some cousins back in New York. Now he just had to—

  The knock on the front door was faint all the way back here, but definite. It was followed by the loud clang of a doorbell that sounded disconcertingly like church bells from a cathedral. He made his way carefully, watchfully down the hall and through the drapery-darkened living room to the rather grand foyer. A glance out a window had told him there were no police cars in sight, but then, a good cop wouldn’t park in view anyway. And he still didn’t believe Dominic would have risked a burglar alarm, and there had been no control panels visible anywhere in the house.

  The sidelight windows next to the door were a rather garish stained glass portrayal of...something, but they enabled him to see onto the porch, although distortedly. A short someone, with a frizzy-looking shock of gray hair. And a rather shapeless dress.

  He put a hand on his weapon, and with the other pulled the door open. An older woman stood there, and her expression when she saw him was one of surprise. He saw her eyes flick to the K9 unit patch on his jacket.

  “Oh! I knew it was the police, I saw the car...but you’re Dominic’s brother, aren’t you?”

  “I... Yes.”

  “I thought so. I recognize you from the picture, although you look very different out of uniform.”

  Picture? Dominic had a picture of him? Somewhere this woman would have seen it?

  “Who are you?” he asked carefully.

  The woman smiled briefly, and in that moment she looked like someone’s kindly grandmother. “I’m Louise Nelson. I live next door. But I’m very glad you’re here. I got a phone call a while ago, and my daughter is ill. I have to go to her.”

  “I’m...sorry,” Dante said, not sure what else to say, or why she was telling him, a total stranger, about this. Then, because it was his nature as well as ingrained, he asked, “Can I do anything? Drive you somewhere?” With my luck she’ll say yes and the daughter lives in Sioux Falls, about as far east as you can go and still be in the state.

  She looked startled. But then she smiled again, and it was steadier this time. Worry, he realized. She was worried. “No, but that’s so sweet of you. You’re as nice as Dom said you were.”

  It was his turn to be startled. “He...did?”

  “Oh, often.” She hesitated, then added, “He said sometimes you were too nice for your own good.”

  Well, that was his brother, all right.

  Had been.

  He wondered how long it took to start thinking in past tense.

  But she was frowning now. Looking at his hands. He’d pulled his jacket on over his bloodstained shirt, but the cuffs still showed. “I was...at an accident scene a while ago,” he said, and she seemed to relax. And thankfully did not put his sudden appearance at this house he never visited together with that bit of information and realize who was in that accident. It was not something he wanted to talk about. He hadn’t even begun to process it himself.

  And he needed to find Zita and Lucia, that was the most impor—

  “So can you come over and get the girls?”

  He blinked. “What?”

  “I’m really sorry, but I have to leave as soon as possible.”

  “You have the twins?” he asked, feeling a little slow on the uptake.

  “Yes. I watch them now and then. I enjoy having little ones to take care of again for a while.” She smiled again. “My husband’s with them now, so they’re all right, but he’s hopeless with babies beyond keeping them from getting hurt.”

  “I’m afraid so am I,” he admitted. Hopeless, meet helpless. What the hell am I going to do?

  “Oh, you can’t be that bad. Otherwise Dom wouldn’t have told me to call you if anything happened and I couldn’t reach them.”

  And again he felt a little slow. Shock, maybe? “He told you to...call me?”

  She nodded. “He said you were the reliable one in the family.”

  He almost laughed. Except he wasn’t sure there was any laughter left in him.

  A few minutes later, he was staring down at two impossibly small humans, sleeping snuggled up to each other in a single crib.

  “They’re doing so well for being born early,” Mrs. Nelson was saying. “They’ll be caught up soon. They’re so cute.”

  She kept talking, but Dante had tuned out. Because one of the babies had opened her eyes and looked at him. And smiled. It gave him an odd, melting feeling inside.

  It was followed by an icy chill.

  She didn’t know that her short life had just changed forever.

  Chapter 4

  “Well, now there’s a sight fit for a horror movie.”

  Dante didn’t get angry at Carson Gage’s comment as he walked into the Red Ridge PD building. In fact, he almost welcomed it; everybody else wanted to pour out sympathy he didn’t want. But then Gage had lost his own brother, a brother he hadn’t been close with, to the Groom Killer, so if anyone knew about walking in these shoes, it was Gage.

  Besides, the detective was right. What else would you call a guy with eyes the color of an overripe tomato, hair that had yet to see even his fingers run through it, a jaw that was more stubbled than usual, and under his jacket with the unit logo, a T-shirt he thought he’d probably pulled on backward in his bleary-eyed haste this morning?

  The fact that this character out of a horror flick was also lugging two baby carriers, occupied, only made it all scarier. To him, anyway.

  “Longest night of my freaking life,” he muttered to Gage.

  “I can see that.” And Gage was looking at the twins warily. They stared back, wide-eyed and uncertain. “Uh...what are you going to do with them?”

  “Hell if I know,” Dante muttered.

  One of the girls made a string of sounds that—purely coincidentally, he was sure—had the same cadence and number of syllables of his muttering. He groaned inwardly but made a mental note to watch his language. He had no idea when babies started to talk, but he didn’t want their first words to be swear words they’d picked up from their uncle.

  He stared down at the two innocent faces. He had no idea when babies started to talk. He had no idea when they started to walk.

  He had no idea, period.

  Not to mention that the twins had gone through most of the bottles Mrs. Nelson had provided, and he had no i
dea what to do when the food ran out.

  His desk phone rang. Since it was practically behind her head, Lucia gave a start. Her face scrunched up in the expression he’d learned during that long night meant she was about to erupt into a screeching wail. Quickly he reached into the bag Mrs. Nelson had sweetly packed for him and pulled out a bright pink stuffed rabbit. The moment Lucia saw it, her expression changed. The wail became a coo. And after a moment she moved a tiny hand toward the toy.

  Breathing again, Dante tucked it in beside her and answered his phone. “Mancuso.”

  “Hey, Dante, it’s Frank.” Dante cradled the phone between ear and shoulder as Frank Lanelli, the day-watch dispatcher, spoke. “I’ve got a caller on the main PD line asking for you by name, but with everything—I’m really sorry, by the way—I thought I’d check with you before I put him through.”

  “Thanks,” he said, meaning it, and appreciating the businesslike approach. “Who is it?”

  “Name’s Fisk. He’s a lawyer.”

  Dante frowned. Rarely did a lawyer’s call mean good news for a cop. “Any idea what he wants?”

  “Maybe,” Lanelli said, and for the first time Dante heard hesitancy in the efficient man’s voice. Frank had been with the department for decades and was the solid linchpin that kept things moving, keeping more in his head at one time than Dante would have thought possible.

  “Hit me,” Dante said with a sigh.

  “He says he’s your brother’s lawyer.”

  “Damn.” His eyes flicked to the twins as soon as the word slipped out. But Lucia seemed happy with her rabbit, and Zita was merely watching him with apparent interest. “All right, put him through.”

  While he waited a freight train of possibilities barreled through his mind. Criminal lawyer? Was there some case pending? Was his brother a suspect in something? Had Dominic been arrested and he just hadn’t heard about it yet? Oh, God, had they been fleeing a scene when the shooter had hit them? They had been careful about where they did their thing; Agostina had always said you didn’t dirty your own pool.

  But you never minded dirtying someone else’s, did you? You always—

  The click of the call going live cut off his fruitless thoughts.

  “Mancuso,” he said again.

  There was a brief pause before the caller spoke. Startled by the name? That he was still using it, despite the connotations his brother had hung on it? Believe me, I’ve thought more than once about changing it. But he’d chosen to keep the name. Both as a reminder of growing up dirt-poor and wanting, and maybe, in some crazy way, thinking he could clean it up a little.

  “This is James Fisk,” the caller said. “I’ve just gotten word about your brother. My condolences.”

  “Thanks,” Dante said shortly. If the guy was really Dominic’s lawyer, he probably already knew he and his brother weren’t close. And he didn’t have time to waste on words he didn’t want to hear anyway. “What did you need?”

  “It’s more what you need.” Dante nearly smiled at that. He’d lived most of his life in a determined effort never to need a lawyer. So far he’d succeeded. “I have your brother’s will.”

  “Oh.”

  “I don’t know if he told you—”

  “He didn’t.” Whatever it was, Dominic hadn’t told him. Because he never did. And Dante was happier with it that way, because it let him hang on to the tiny bit of brotherly feeling he still had.

  “Well. Then. Everything is left to his wife, or if she is also deceased, to his daughters.”

  “Of course,” Dante said, although he couldn’t help wondering how the girls would feel if they ever realized how said property had been obtained, with the proceeds from a career of criminal activity.

  “You understand, then?” the man said, sounding relieved.

  “Understand?” Dante asked, puzzled about what could be confusing about this. Then it hit him. He almost laughed. “Wait, you think I expected my brother to leave me something? No way in—”

  He cut it off with another glance at the twins, who were being rather cooperative, both having apparently gone back to sleep.

  Why not, after all? They were awake most of the night...

  “Well, he did, in a way.”

  Dante frowned again. “In what way?”

  “The children.”

  “What?”

  “I’d say making you their legal guardian is leaving you something, wouldn’t you?”

  Dante sank down into his desk chair. He had no choice—his knees had suddenly gone weak. “What?” he repeated numbly.

  There was a long, silent pause. “He never told you?”

  Dante searched for words and finally said, very carefully, “My brother made me the twins’ guardian?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?” It came out as bewildered as he was feeling. “We weren’t... We didn’t...”

  “He told me you were the only one he would trust. Because, he said, you were the only one who would see to them properly.”

  What the hell did that mean? “Look, Mr. Fisk, I can’t—”

  “I understand things are a bit...chaotic at the moment. I’ll send you a copy of the relevant portions of the will, but there are some other papers to sign and be filed. So if you could manage to come in to my office, or I can meet you somewhere, if that’s impossible.”

  This is all impossible.

  “Give me your number,” he said, almost automatically. He scrawled it down and hung up without saying anything other than goodbye. Stared at it for a moment. Then looked at the sleeping girls, the picture of innocence now, nothing like the twin demons who had kept him running all night.

  What the hell did he know about babies? Nothing. He knew nothing about little kids, either. And half the time—more than half, in fact—he was convinced he understood absolutely nothing about the female of the species at all, so how was he supposed to raise two of them?

  A flood of images rushed through his mind, of toddlers wreaking mayhem, emotional teenagers doing the same. Girls. Clustered in packs, whispering. God, that time of the month. Warning them about that kind of boy.

  Teaching them how to put that boy on his knees? Now that might be something I could contribute.

  But the rest? No. No way.

  Why, Dominic? Why me?

  He couldn’t do this.

  He had to.

  ...the only one who would see to them properly.

  What the hell did that even mean?

  It was too much. Panic filled him. He couldn’t be responsible for this. He could deal with thieves, armed robbers, murderers, the scum of the earth. But he couldn’t be responsible for seeing that these two helpless babies had a good life.

  Zita opened her eyes again. Smiled again. He pictured handing her over to some stranger to raise. Or worse, refusing the task and handing her over to the system. He knew too well, better than a civilian, that no matter how well meaning, there were too many gaps, too many holes in that system. Holes big enough for these two to fall right through.

  “They kinda look like you.”

  Dante jerked out of his swirling thoughts to stare at Gage. “What?” Seemed like the only word he could manage lately.

  “When they’re frowning, anyway,” Gage gibed at him.

  He started to make an insulting hand gesture, a reflex among cops who had worked together awhile. But he stopped before it formed. That, too, would have to stop.

  He remembered at Mrs. Nelson’s, looking down at...he wasn’t sure which one it had been, now, Zita or Lucia, who had opened her eyes and looked at him, but he remembered thinking how her life had changed forever and she didn’t even know it.

  But now he knew something else.

  So had his.

  * * *

  “Maternal instinct,” Gemma said rather huffily as she stared d
own at the artistic pattern worked into the surface of her latte.

  “What?”

  She raised her gaze to her brother’s face. And she couldn’t help but smile. She’d been terrified Blake was going to die just two months ago, after that horrible incident at the train station. And she’d already missed him while he’d been off building his fortune, but she completely understood his need to prove something to their father.

  But now he was almost recovered, and much, much happier as he, Juliette and their daughter were building a life together. She envied but didn’t begrudge him, because she loved him. She’d even come to like the bright, clever little girl who was his daughter. She didn’t mind children at that age, where they were beginning to talk and you could communicate with them.

  An ounce of maternal instinct...

  Devlin’s words came back to her. Her jaw tightened. Just because she didn’t want children yet didn’t mean she had no instincts. And there had to be a way to convince Dev of that. That she could be what he wanted.

  “Gemma, what’s wrong?”

  She blinked. Blake had gone out of his way to meet her for coffee—the least she could do was pay attention. They were still finding their way in their own relationship, after his five-year absence.

  “Sorry. Just...distracted. How are Juliette and Pandora?” That would do it, she thought. And the smile that warmed Blake’s face, that lit his green eyes, proved her right.

  “Besides wonderful?” he asked.

  “Already knew that,” Gemma said with a wave and a grin. “How about Sasha?” Juliette’s K9 partner, a clever beagle, had been instrumental in the case that had brought them all together.