The Once and Future Father

by Marie Ferrarella

  Lucy blocked his hand as he moved to pick her up. “No,” she snapped. “I can do this.”

  She didn’t want him holding her. Not if she could avoid it. If he held her now, she would lose her strength and just dissolve against him, sobbing her heart out. She’d encountered enough setbacks in her life today as it was. She wasn’t about to set herself up for more.

  Annoyance at her stubbornness warred with a grudging admiration for her grit. Dylan managed to curb his impatience until they’d returned to the door of her room. But once he opened it, he swept her up into his arms and carried her the rest of the way.

  “What are you doing?” She was almost too exhausted to offer a protest.

  “Cutting about forty minutes off the trip back to your bed.” Dylan caught himself thinking she still felt as if she weighed next to nothing.

  He had her back in her bed in little more than four quick strides.

  “Everything all right in here?”

  Turning around, Dylan saw a nurse with salt-and-pepper hair in the doorway, peering into the room. She looked from him to Lucy.

  “Fine,” Lucy assured her. “I just got a little tired. It was my first time out of bed.”

  The nurse nodded knowingly. “Shouldn’t try to do too much first time up.” And then she smiled, her eyes washing over Dylan before they came to rest on Lucy. “A lady could do worse than have a handsome man carry her around.”

  With a wink aimed at Lucy, she left, closing the door behind her.

  Dylan moved back from her bed as she slowly toed off the slippers from her feet one at a time. The effort almost drained the remainder of her energy. She moved her legs under the covers, relieved to be lying down again.

  With a sigh, she looked up at him. “Do you think you’ll catch whoever killed Ritchie?”

  He didn’t answer her directly. “It’s not my case.”

  She didn’t understand. “Then why…?”

  He was asking himself the same thing. “I thought it might be easier on you, hearing the news from me.” Dylan shrugged carelessly. “Obviously I miscalculated. I hadn’t figured on you being pregnant.”

  The coldness in his voice sliced through her. Defenses locked into place. “We can’t always factor in everything. So, who is handling Ritchie’s case? Do they have any leads?”

  “Detectives Alexander and Hathaway, and they’re not even sure where he was killed, yet. There was no blood at the crime scene, so he was moved.” He went with the obvious first. “You said Ritchie was working. Where?”

  “At a restaurant. He’s a—was a waiter.” Her mouth curved slightly. “He said they call them servers now.”

  Yeah, they did. Another attempt at depersonalizing everything, Dylan thought. He would have said it was a good thing, but there were times he wasn’t sure. Being anesthetized was close to being dead, and he’d felt dead for a long time.

  Except for the time he’d spent with Lucy.

  But all that was over now. He’d made his peace with the fact. He just had to remember that, that’s all.

  “Do you know where Ritchie worked?”

  She nodded. “It’s called Den of Thieves.” He was staring at her. His face was impassive, but she could see that she had caught him by surprise. She wanted to know why. “What?”

  It was a hell of a coincidence. “Are you sure that’s where he worked?”

  Why did he doubt her? “Yes, I’m sure. A friend of his got the job for him.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know, Ritchie didn’t give me a name. Just someone he knew.” She should have pressed harder for an answer. She should have done so many things differently. Her eyes met Dylan’s. “Someone he said owed him a favor and this was his way of paying him back.” And then she remembered something. “I don’t know if this means anything or not—”

  His eyes pinned her down, the detective in him coming out despite efforts to the contrary. “Let me be the one to decide.”

  She tried to get the words just right. “A couple of days ago, Ritchie told me he was on to something. Something that would put us in the money and on the right side of things for a long time to come.” Taking a dim view of his schemes, she’d told him to forget about it then. But Ritchie had been too stubborn to listen.

  “Did he say what?” Dylan asked.

  She shook her head. “You know Ritchie, he gets—got—excited over things.” It was so hard to think of him in the past tense. She wasn’t sure just how she could bear it. “But he always played them close to his chest if they weren’t completely aboveboard. He said there was no reason for me to know, too. That’s what made me think it was dangerous.” She bit her lip, taking a deep breath. It didn’t ease the ache in her chest, or the one in her throat. “I told him that I didn’t want him doing anything illegal and he said he wasn’t the one standing on the wrong side of the law.” Despite her best efforts, a tear spilled out, followed by another. She brushed them away with the back of her hand. “That’s what got him killed, wasn’t it?”

  He curbed the desire to wipe away her tears. The word no hovered on his lips, but he tried to avoid lies whenever possible. The only lie he’d ever told Lucy was that he didn’t love her.

  “Possibly.”

  He was going to have to get back to Alexander and Hathaway on this. As well as Watley. Den of Thieves was suddenly one man short. The task force could use this information to their advantage. Could plant one of their own men inside.

  The fact that he was using this tragedy as a tool to further the investigation disgusted him, but he knew that ignoring it couldn’t help Ritchie now. And there was far more at stake here than just a dead man’s sister’s feelings and his own personal code of ethics. Other people’s lives were involved. Innocent people.

  “What exactly did Ritchie say to you?” He saw that she didn’t understand where he was going with this. “Did he physically have something, some kind of evidence that he was going to blackmail someone with?”

  Things began to crystallize in Dylan’s mind. A few weeks ago, the accountant for Den of Thieves, Michelson, had approached the local D.A., saying that the restaurant was a front for money laundering. But the man had vanished without a trace before any sort of case could be made. If for some reason the person Ritchie was looking to blackmail was Alfred Palmero, the owner of the restaurant, it would go a long way toward explaining things.

  Lucy shook her head, frustrated. “I don’t know. He wasn’t specific.”

  Dylan wondered how much he could tell Lucy about this, then decided that for her own protection, and that of the child she’d just given birth to, she needed to know at least some of it.

  Because he knew he had a tendency to be far too blunt, Dylan tried to pick his words more carefully this time. “If he was looking to blackmail his boss, Alfred Palmero, your brother made the mistake of getting in over his head.”

  “Your brother,” she echoed, looking at Dylan with disbelief. Could he really be that cold? Of course he could. Why did the fact keep surprising her? “You make it sound as if you didn’t know him.”

  Damned if he did, damned if he didn’t. “Lucy, I was just—”

  But she was tired and angry and more than a little fed up. With him, with everything. All the hurt she felt finally made her temper snap.

  “Keeping your distance, yes, I know. The way you do with everything. With me, with him, with life. You’re very good at that. Keeping your distance. Protecting yourself at all costs.” She was through crying over him. “Look, I don’t need you coming into my life right now, disrupting everything. Thank you very much for coming by, for helping me, but I’d really just rather not see you again, all right?”

  Dylan felt his own temper fraying. But he knew she had a right to what she was saying. “Sure, fine. I understand.”

  The thing of it was, he thought as he walked out, that he did understand. He would have probably played it the same way she had and for the same reason. For self-preservation.

  But he stil
l couldn’t shake the image of Lucy’s expression from his mind.

  He supposed that it was exactly that image, playing itself over and over again in his mind’s eye, that made him drive past his own apartment complex and keep right on going until he found himself turning down her street.

  Though he tried to shake himself free of it, he felt as if he needed to make some sort of atonement. The least he could do was bring Lucy her suitcase. A woman needed things at a time like this. Things to make her feel less depersonalized, more human. Like her own nightgown and her own slippers.

  Dylan couldn’t give her anything else she needed, but at least he could give her a little of her outer dignity back. The hospital gowns certainly did little to preserve it.

  Admittedly flimsy, it was the excuse he fed himself. It was the best he could do on short notice.

  Holding on to it, Dylan parked his car in her driveway. The automatic sensors he’d insisted on putting up for her when they were still together turned on, illuminating his path. Feeling in his pocket for what he thought of as his skeleton keys, he noted a fresh oil slick on the asphalt beside his vehicle. He’d parked in the street earlier. The slick hadn’t been there then. Dylan wondered if the ambulance had an oil leak and if someone had alerted the paramedics to it.

  The front door wasn’t locked.

  The door gave the moment he inserted the thin metal wand into the keyhole and gave it the slightest bit of pressure.

  He distinctly remembered shutting the door behind him this morning and hearing the tumbler click into place. As a cop, he’d been careful not to leave the house susceptible to invasion.

  Something wasn’t right.

  Very slowly, Dylan turned the knob and then released it, clearing the doorsill. He moved the door away by inches, simultaneously feeling for his service revolver. Drawing it out, he took off the safety as quietly as possible and entered the house.

  The living room looked as if a tornado had been through it.

  Moving from room to room at an even pace, his gun poised, ready, Dylan took it all in. If at first glance he’d entertained the thought that this had been a run-of-the-mill break-in, the fact that the television set and audio equipment had been left behind quickly squelched the supposition. Lucy’s house had been systematically tossed.

  From all appearances, someone had wanted something very much. Since every room had been ransacked, Dylan’s guess was that they hadn’t found what they were looking for.

  Satisfied that whoever had done this was long gone by now, he holstered his gun. All he could think of was that he was grateful Lucy and her baby hadn’t been here at the time.

  “What the hell were they looking for, Lucy?” he murmured to himself. “And what was it that Ritchie had on them?”

  He realized that he’d made a leap in judgment, but his gut told him that there was a connection here between where Ritchie worked and what had happened to the house. His gut instincts were rarely wrong.

  The question still remained. What?

  Lucy was going to have a fit when she saw this, he thought, pressing the numbers on his cell phone that would connect him to the precinct. Maybe forensics would come up with a few answers for them.

  Hanging up a few minutes later, he looked around for the suitcase he’d come for originally. He found it in Lucy’s bedroom, its jaws yawning wide open, its contents scattered in a rude semicircle around it. He’d have to wait for forensics to go over the crime scene before he could remove the suitcase and the few things he judged had been in it. With a sigh, he made himself as comfortable as possible.

  “Your timing is perfect, she just finished her dinner,” Lucy said, looking up from the sleeping infant at her breast. Expecting to see the nurse, her smile faded when she saw Dylan entering her room. Primly, she covered herself, her mouth hardening. Why couldn’t he leave her alone and let her heal?

  “I didn’t expect to see you again.”

  Her voice was cool, distant. He couldn’t blame her. Dylan nodded at the suitcase he was holding, telling himself that the sight of Lucy nursing her baby didn’t effect him one way or another.

  “I thought you might need some things.” He placed it at the end of her bed.

  “What are you trying to do to me, Dylan? Why are you being nice to me one minute, then the next…?”

  Abruptly, Lucy caught hold of herself, breaking off her words midsentence. There was no point in upbraiding him, and she refused to lose her composure in front of her daughter, no matter how young the girl was. She had to be strong and this wasn’t the way.

  With effort, Lucy regrouped, then looked at the suitcase as he flipped open the locks. Maybe, in his own way, he was trying. At least she could be civil toward him. “Thank you.”

  He picked up the lid for her, opening the case. “I wasn’t sure if you needed anything else.”

  Her eyes narrowed as she looked into the contents. Instead of the orderly packing she’d done, everything was jumbled up inside, as if it had been through a spin cycle in a dryer. Why had he gone through her things? “What did you do to it?”

  “Nothing.” It wasn’t going to be any easier to tell her this part than it had about Ritchie, but he struggled to find a way. “I just threw in what I thought you could use.”

  She raised her eyes to his, confused. “I don’t understand. I packed my suitcase two weeks ago.” A day before her due date, she remembered. “How did it get like this?”

  “Someone unpacked it.”

  “You?” The accusation was impossible to miss.

  “No.” He blew out a breath, wishing that for once in his life, he had another way with words than just spitting them out like an automatic weapon. But nothing came to him except the naked truth.

  “Lucy, somebody broke into your house and ransacked it.”

  Chapter 5

  His words made her feel vulnerable and naked. Completely defenseless and at the mercy of a whimsical fate that was not known for its kindness.

  For a long moment, only the soft sound of Elena’s even breathing as she slept disturbed the silence that hung heavily in the room.

  Lucy shook her head in disbelief. “You know, I’m really beginning to dread seeing you walk in. First you tell me that Ritchie’s dead, now you tell me my house was burglarized—”

  “No,” he said, quick to correct her, “not burglarized, broken into. As far as I could tell, they didn’t take anything.”

  Maybe she still wasn’t connecting all the dots after what she’d been through, but that didn’t make any sense to her. “But then why…?”

  “It looks as if they were looking for something.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. At first glance, it doesn’t look as if anything was taken, but only you could be the judge of that.” Although, he did have his suspicions as to what was the object of the search. Even though everything within her house had been thrown into complete chaos, he’d noticed that particular attention seemed to have been paid to her videotape collection. Each one of them had been ripped from its cover.

  Her confusion came to a skidding halt as her thoughts converged on the only plausible explanation she could come up with.

  Lucy bit her lower lip. Almost reflexively, her arms tightened around her sleeping baby. “Ritchie?”

  “Probably.” Pulling the lone chair in the room closer to her bed, he sat down next to her. “Whatever he had on someone, it looks like he might have had physical proof.” Hesitating, Dylan made a judgment call. It wasn’t the way the captain would have wanted him to play it, but the captain didn’t know Lucy the way he did. It was time to tell her a few things. “Ritchie was working for a place that’s being investigated.”

  This was all beginning to sound hopelessly farfetched. Things like this didn’t happen in real life, only the mysteries she used to love to lose herself in. “Investigated by whom? The police?”

  He nodded. That’s the way it had begun. Now it was a joint venture. “And the Justice Department.”


  “But why? Drugs? Illegal firearms?” None of it made sense to her.

  “You’re better off not knowing that” was all he said to her. She knew by the set of his mouth that she’d get no more out of him. Lucy was surprised he’s said as much as he had.

  “You’re serious about this, aren’t you? About there being something dangerous going on.” Even as she voiced her skepticism, she saw her answer in Dylan’s expression.

  “Very.”

  She’d been to the restaurant on several occasions in the short time Ritchie worked there. To pick him up from work when his car was in the shop and once to celebrate his birthday. It had seemed like a nice place and she’d been impressed by it. It was built to look like something out of the Arabian Nights, the interior was bright and trendy. On Ritchie’s birthday, the owner, Alfred Palmero, had come out to personally wish him a happy birthday and slip him a little something in an envelope. It had been a check for a hundred dollars. It had seemed a little out of place to her at the time, but people took to Ritchie and she thought it wasn’t anything more than that. Palmero had seemed genuinely fond of her brother. On that night, he’d told her that he had plans for Ritchie’s advancement.

  Ritchie had looked a little uncomfortable at the time, but she’d thought that was because he never liked being confronted with anything permanent. Ritchie liked moving from job to job as well as from woman to woman. Nothing held his interest for very long. That was what had made him Ritchie.

  She couldn’t believe what Dylan was telling her. “And you think that the people there are somehow involved in Ritchie’s death?”

  Dylan had no proof of any kind, just a vague statement, acquired secondhand, a few too many coincidences by his count and a gut feeling he wasn’t about to ignore. It wouldn’t have made a case in front of the feeblest of juries.

  He went a little farther out on a limb. “A few weeks ago, the restaurant’s accountant asked for a private meeting with the D.A. The allegations he made were pretty much what was already suspected. But he added that he had the proof to back him up.”