by Nora Roberts
Because Ethan smiled at that, her lips curved. “Well, he made me so mad. Claims he’s only doing his job, and his manner’s mild as skim milk. But it bothered me, especially when he asked if I knew anything about Seth’s mother or where he’d come from. I told him I didn’t and that it didn’t matter. Seth was where he was supposed to be, and that was that. I hope I did the right thing.”
“You did just fine.”
Her eyes were the color of stormy seas now, as emotions churned through her. “Ethan, I know it’ll hurt if some people talk, if some of them say things they’ve got no business saying. It doesn’t mean anything,” she continued and took his hands in hers. “Not to anyone who knows your family.”
“We’ll get through it.” He gave her hands a quick squeeze, then didn’t know if he should hold on to them or let go. “I’m glad you told me.” He let go. But he kept looking at her face, looked so long that the color began to rise in her cheeks. “You’re not getting enough sleep,” he said. “Your eyes are tired.”
“Oh.” Embarrassed, annoyed, she brushed her fingertips under them. Why was it the man only seemed to notice if something was wrong with her? “Aubrey was a little fussy last night. I’ve got to get back,” she said quickly and gave the patient Simon a quick rub. “I’ll be by the house tomorrow to clean.”
She hurried off, thinking hopelessly that a man who only noticed when you looked tired or troubled would never pay you any mind as a woman.
But Ethan watched her walk away and thought she was too damn pretty to work herself like a mule.
The inspector’s name was Mackensie, and he was making the rounds. So far, his notes contained descriptions of a man who was a saint with a halo as wide and bright as the sun. A selfless Samaritan of a man who not only loved his neighbors but cheerfully bore their burdens, who had with his faithful wife beside him saved large chunks of humanity and kept the world safe for democracy.
His other notations termed Raymond Quinn a pompous, interfering, holier-than-thou despot, who collected bad young boys like other men collected stamps and used them to provide him with slave labor, an ego balm, and possibly prurient sexual favors.
Though Mackensie had to admit the latter was more interesting, that view had come from only a scattered few.
Being a man of details and caution, he realized that the truth probably lay somewhere in between the saint and the sinner.
His purpose wasn’t to canonize or condemn one Raymond Quinn, policy number 005-678-LQ2. It was simply to gather facts, and those facts would determine whether the claim against that policy would be paid or disputed.
Either way, Mackensie got paid for his time and his efforts.
He’d stopped off and grabbed a sandwich at a little grease spot called Bay Side Eats. He had a weakness for grease, bad coffee, and waitresses with names like Lulubelle.
It was why, at age fifty-eight, he was twenty pounds overweight—twenty-five if he didn’t tip the scale a few notches back from zero before he stepped on it—had a chronic case of indigestion, and was twice divorced.
He was also balding and had bunions, and an eyetooth that ached like a bitch in heat. Mackensie knew he was no physical prize, but he knew his job, had thirty-two years with True Life Insurance, and kept records as clean as a nun’s heart.
He pulled his Ford Taurus into the pitted gravel lot beside the building. His last contact, a little worm named Claremont, had given him directions. He would find Cameron Quinn there, Claremont had told him with a tight-lipped smile.
Mackensie had disliked the man after five minutes in his company. The inspector had worked with people long enough to recognize greed, envy, and simple malice even when they were layered over with charm. Claremont didn’t have any layers that Mackensie had noticed. He was all smarm.
He belched up a memory of the dill pickle relish he’d indulged in at lunch, shook his head, and thumbed out his hourly dose of Zantac. There was a pickup truck in the lot, an aging sedan, and a spiffy classic Corvette.
Mackensie liked the looks of the ’Vette, though he wouldn’t have gotten behind the wheel of one of those death traps for love or money. No, indeed. But he admired it anyway as he hauled himself out of his car.
He could admire the looks of the man as well, he mused, when a pair of them stepped out of the building. Not the older one with the red-checked shirt and clip-on tie. Paper pusher, he decided—he was good at recognizing types.
The younger one was too lean, too hungry, too sharp-eyed to spend much time pushing papers. If he didn’t work with his hands, Mackensie thought, he could. And he looked like a man who knew what he wanted—and found a way to make it so.
If this was Cameron Quinn, Mackensie decided that Ray Quinn had had his hands full while he was alive.
Cam spotted Mackensie when he walked the plumbing inspector out. He was feeling pretty good about the progress. He figured it would take another week to complete the bathroom, but he and Ethan could do without that little convenience that much longer.
He wanted to get started, and since the wiring was done and that, too, had passed inspection, there was no need to wait.
He tagged Mackensie as some sort of paper jockey. Jiggling his memory, he tried to recall if he had another appointment set up, but he didn’t think so. Selling something, he imagined, as Mackensie and the inspector passed each other.
The man had a briefcase, Cam noted wearily. When people carried a briefcase it meant there was something inside they wanted to take out.
“You’d be Mr. Quinn,” Mackensie said, his voice affable, his eyes measuring.
“I would.”
“I’m Mackensie, True Life Insurance.”
“We’ve got insurance.” Or he was nearly sure they did. “My brother Phillip handles those kinds of details.” Then it clicked, and Cam’s stance shifted from relaxed to on guard. “True Life?”
“That’s the one. I’m an investigator for the company. We need to clear up some questions before your claim on your father’s policy can be settled.”
“He’s dead,” Cam said flatly. “Isn’t that the question, Mackensie?”
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
“I imagine the insurance company’s sorry it has to shell out. As far as I’m concerned, my father paid in to that policy in good faith. The trick is you have to die to win. He died.”
It was warm in the sun, and the pastrami on rye with spicy mustard wasn’t settling well. Mackensie blew out a breath. “There’s some question about the accident.”
“Car meets telephone pole. Telephone pole wins. Trust me, I do a lot of driving.”
Mackensie nodded. Under other circumstances he might have appreciated Cam’s no-bullshit tone. “You’d be aware that the policy has a suicide clause.”
“My father didn’t commit suicide, Mackensie. And since you weren’t in the car with him at the time, it’s going to be tough for you to prove otherwise.”
“Your father was under a great deal of stress, emotional upheaval.”
Cam snorted. “My father raised three badasses and taught a bunch of snot-nosed college kids. He had a great deal of stress and emotional upheaval all his life.”
“And he’d taken on a fourth.”
“That’s right.” Cam tucked his thumbs in his front pockets, and his stance became a silent challenge. “That doesn’t have anything to do with you or your company.”
“As it bears on the circumstances of your father’s accident. There’s a question of possible blackmail, and certainly a threat to his reputation. I have a copy of the letter found in his car at the scene.”
When Mackensie opened his briefcase, Cam took a step forward. “I’ve seen the letter. All it means is there’s a woman out there with the maternal instincts of a rabid alley cat. You try to say that Ray Quinn smashed into that pole because he was afraid of some two-bit bitch, I’ll bury your insurance company.”
Fury he thought he’d already passed through sprang back, full-blown and fang-sharp. “I
don’t give a good goddamn about the money. We can make our own money. True Life wants to welsh on the deal, that’s my brother’s area—and the lawyer’s. But you or anybody else messes with my father’s rep, you’ll deal with me.”
The man was a good twenty-five years younger, Mackensie calculated, tough as a brick and mad as a starving wolf. He decided it would be best all round if he changed tactics. “Mr. Quinn, I have no interest or desire to smear your father’s reputation. True Life’s a good company, I’ve worked for them most of my life.” He tried a winning smile. “This is just routine.”
“I don’t like your routine.”
“I can understand that. The gray area here is the accident itself. The medical reports confirm that your father was in good physical shape. There’s no evidence of a heart attack, a stroke, any physical reason that would have caused him to lose control of his car. A single-car accident, an empty stretch of road on a dry, clear day. The accident-reconstruction expert’s findings were inconclusive.”
“That’s your problem.” Cam spotted Seth walking down the road from the direction of school. And there, he thought, is mine. “I can’t help you with it. But I can tell you that my father faced his problems, square on. He never took the easy way. I’ve got work to do.” Leaving it at that, Cam turned away and walked toward Seth.
Mackensie rubbed eyes that were tearing up from the sunlight. Quinn might have thought he’d added nothing to the report, but he was wrong. If nothing else, Mackensie could be sure the Quinns would fight for their claim to the bitter end. If not for the money, for the memory.
“Who’s that guy?” Seth asked as he watched Mackensie head back to his car.
“Some insurance quack.” Cam nodded down the street where two boys loitered a half a block away. “Who’re those guys?”
Seth gave a careless glance over his shoulder, followed it with a shrug. “I don’t know. Just kids from school. They’re nobody.”
“They hassling you?”
“Nah. Are we going up on the roof?”
“Roof’s done,” Cam murmured and watched with some amusement as the two boys wandered closer, trying and failing to look disinterested. “Hey, you kids.”
“What’re you doing?” Seth hissed, mortified.
“Relax. Come on over here,” Cam ordered as both boys froze like statues.
“What the hell are you calling them over for? They’re just jerks from school.”
“I could use some jerk labor,” Cam said mildly. It had also occurred to him that Seth could use some companions of his own age. He waited while Seth squirmed and the two boys held a fast, whispering consultation. It ended with the taller of the two squaring his shoulders and swaggering down the road on his battered Nikes.
“We weren’t doing anything,” the boy said, his tone of defiance slightly spoiled by a lisp from a missing tooth.
“I could see that. You want to do something?”
The boy slid his eyes to the younger kid, then over to Seth, then cautiously up to Cam’s face. “Maybe.”
“You got a name?”
“Sure. I’m Danny. This is my kid brother, Will. I turned eleven last week. He’s only nine.”
“I’ll be ten in ten months,” Will stated and rapped his brother in the ribs with his elbow.
“He still goes to elementary,” Danny put in with a sneer, which he generously shared with Seth. “Baby school.”
“I’m not a baby.”
As Will’s fist was already clenched and lifted, Cam took hold of it, then lightly squeezed his upper arm. “Seems strong enough to me.”
“I’m plenty strong,” Will told him, then grinned with the charm of an angelic host.
“We’ll see about that. See all this crap piled up around here? Old shingles, tar paper, trash?” Cam surveyed the area himself. “You see that Dumpster over there? The crap goes in the Dumpster, you get five bucks.”
“Each?” Danny piped up, his hazel eyes glinting in a freckled face.
“Don’t make me laugh, kid. But you’ll get a two-dollar bonus if you do it without me having to come out and break up any fights.” He jerked a thumb at Seth. “He’s in charge.”
The minute Cam left them alone, Danny turned to Seth. They sized each other up in narrow-eyed silence. “I saw you punch Robert.”
Seth shifted his balance evenly. It would be two against one, he calculated, but he was prepared to fight. “So what?”
“It was cool,” was all Danny said and began to pick up torn shingles.
Will grinned happily up into Seth’s face. “Robert is a big, fat fart, and Danny said when you socked him he bled and bled.”
Seth found himself grinning back. “Like a stuck pig.”
“Oink, oink,” Will said, delighted. “We can buy ice cream with the money up at Crawford’s.”
“Yeah . . . maybe.” Seth started to gather up trash, with Will cheerfully dogging his heels.
Anna wasn’t having a good day. She’d started out the morning running her last pair of hose before she even got out her front door. She was out of bagels, and yogurt, and, she admitted, almost every damn thing, because she’d been spending too much time with Cam or thinking about Cam to keep to her usual marketing routine.
When she stopped off to mail a letter to her grandparents, she chipped a nail on the mailbox. Her phone was already ringing when she walked into her office at eight-thirty, and the hysterical woman on the other end was demanding to know why she had yet to receive her medical card.
She calmed the woman down, assured her she would see to the matter personally. Then, simply because she was there, the switchboard passed through a whining old man who insisted his neighbors were child abusers because they allowed their offspring to watch television every night of the week.
“Television,” he told her, “is the tool of the Communist left. Nothing but sex and murder, sex and murder, and subliminal messages. I read all about them.”
“I’m going to look into this, Mr. Bigby,” she promised and opened her top drawer, where she kept her aspirin.
“You’d better. I tried the cops, but they don’t do nothing. Those kids’re doomed. Going to need to deprogram them.”
“Thank you for bringing this to our attention.”
“My duty as an American.”
“You bet,” Anna muttered after he’d hung up.
Knowing that she was due in family court at two that afternoon, she booted up her computer, intending to call up the file to review her reports and notes. When the message flashed across her screen that her program had committed an illegal act, she didn’t bother to scream. She simply sat back, closed her eyes, and accepted that it was going to be a lousy day.
It got worse.
She knew her testimony in court was key. The Higgins case file had come across her desk nearly a year ago. The three children, ages eight, six, and four, had all been physically and emotionally abused. The wife, barely twenty-five, was a textbook case of the battered spouse. She’d left her husband countless times over the years, but she always went back.
Six months before, Anna had worked hard and long to get her and her children into a shelter. The woman had stayed less than thirty-six hours before changing her mind. Though Anna’s heart ached for her, it had come down to the welfare of the children.
Their pinched faces, the bruises, the fear—and worse, the dull acceptance in their eyes—tormented her. They were in foster care with a couple who was generous enough and strong enough to take all of them. And seeing those foster parents flanking the three damaged boys, she vowed she would do everything in her power to keep them there.
“Counseling was recommended in January of last year when this case first came to my attention,” Anna stated from the witness stand. “Both family and individual. The recommendation was not taken. Nor was it taken in May of that same year when Mrs. Higgins was hospitalized with a dislocated jaw and other injuries, or in September when Michael Higgins, the eldest boy, suffered a broken hand. In Novembe
r of that year Mrs. Higgins and her two oldest sons were all treated in ER for various injuries. I was notified and assisted Mrs. Higgins and her children in securing a place in a women’s shelter. She did not remain there two full days.”
“You’ve been caseworker of record on this matter for more than a year.” The lawyer stood in front of her, knowing from experience it wasn’t necessary to guide her testimony.
“Yes, more than a year.” And she felt the failure keenly.
“What is the current status?”
“On February sixth of this year, a police unit responding to the call from a neighbor found Mr. Higgins under the influence of alcohol. Mrs. Higgins was reported as hysterical and required medical treatment for facial bruises and lacerations. Curtis, the youngest child, had a broken arm. Mr. Higgins was taken into custody. At that time, as I was the caseworker of record, I was notified.”
“Did you see Mrs. Higgins and the children on that day?” the lawyer asked her.
“Yes. I drove to the hospital. I spoke with Mrs. Higgins. She claimed that Curtis had fallen down the stairs. Due to the nature of his injuries, and the history of the case, I didn’t believe her. The attending physician in ER shared my opinion. The children were taken into foster care, where they have remained since that date.”
She continued to answer questions about the status of the case file and the children themselves. Once, she drew a smile out of the middle boy when she spoke of the T-ball team he’d been able to join.
Then Anna prepared herself for the irritation and tedium of cross-examination.
“Are you aware that Mr. Higgins has voluntarily entered an alcohol rehabilitation program?”
Anna spared one glance at the Higginses’ pro bono lawyer, then looked directly into the father’s eyes. “I’m aware that over the past year, Mr. Higgins has claimed to have entered a rehabilitation program no less than three times.”