But then, when a woman looked the way Natalya Pulaski did, if she hadn’t stuck in his mind he would have seriously had himself checked over for a pulse.
So now he was stuck with a fictitious romance his mother was sure to ask about. He glanced at the phone. He had to admit he was surprised that it wasn’t ringing, that his mother wasn’t calling for more substantial details. He could only hope that the others would keep her busy.
Two weeks. He was going to give the “romance” two weeks and then tell his mother that they broke up. She’d respect his space for a while, giving him sympathy and sending his brothers over with food, the way she had when he’d stopped seeing Brenda. With any luck, it would buy him a reprieve for about a month or so.
Emptying his pockets, Mike tossed his wallet and keys onto the coffee table. A somewhat crushed card was peering out of his wallet.
Her card, he thought as he picked it up. She’d given it to him so that he could call if there were any new developments. For a second, he just held the card, debating. And then he shrugged. What the hell? One way or the other, there was nothing to lose.
Going with impulse, something he placed a fair amount of faith in, Mike dialed the cell phone number Natalya’d written on the back of her card.
He counted off five rings and was about to hang up when she picked up. “Hello?”
Her voice sounded low, sexy, moving in waves over the phone. “Doc?”
He could almost hear her snapping to attention. Belatedly, he realized what she probably thought. “Did you find anything?”
Feeling a little guilty he replied, “No. I was just wondering if you were up for a cup of coffee, or a nightcap.” When there was no response, a smattering of awkwardness seeped in. It was an entirely new sensation for him and it took effort to shut it down. “Never mind, bad idea.”
“No.” The single word crackled as it shot out of her mouth. “Not a bad idea.” The volume of her voice lowered again. “A good idea.” She hesitated a moment, as if undecided whether or not to admit something. “I was actually thinking about calling you.”
Maybe this wasn’t a mistake after all. “Oh?”
“Yes, I just remembered a piece of information that might be able to help you.”
A vague disappointment stirred through him. This wasn’t what he’d expected her to say. “Oh.”
If Natalya didn’t know better, she would have said that was disappointment in his voice. Probably her hearing playing tricks on her. She really wasn’t sure of anything anymore. Ever since they’d discovered Clancy’s body, everything felt as if it had been turned on its ear.
“Where do you want me to meet you?” she asked.
He didn’t want her standing on some corner, waiting. “I’ll pick you up,” he told her. “Do you need to get ready?”
“Excuse me?”
He didn’t mean to imply that she should do something special, but he was accustomed to his sisters’ behavior. “My sisters always needed time to get ready. Whenever they had to go anywhere, they spent an average of forty-five minutes in the bathroom first, with hair dryers, makeup and an armload of clothes.”
Her laugh was almost musical. “I just got in. I’m ready now.”
“Just got in,” he echoed. Mike picked up his helmet on his way out the door. “Had an emergency?” It seemed a logical assumption, given her profession.
Was that his way of feeling her out to find out if she’d come back early from a date? No, she was giving this too much weight, Natalya upbraided herself.
But then what kind of weight should she be attaching to this invitation that had come out of the blue?
Not into playing games, she gave him an honest answer. “My family is many things, but I never quite thought of them as an emergency.”
Talk about a small world. “You went to see your family?”
She couldn’t quite make out his tone. Was it amusement? “Yes, why?”
Mike shifted his phone from one hand to the other, suspending his helmet strap around his wrist as he slid his jacket back on. “Nothing. It’s just that I just came home from seeing mine.”
That would explain the amusement. “We have something in common.”
Natalya sank into the deep cushion of the sofa she and Sasha had picked out together when they’d first began to furnish the apartment. She tucked her legs beneath her seat.
“I guess we do,” she heard him say. “Your mother nag you about being single?”
In response to his question, Mike was rewarded with a rich laugh. The sound spread through his veins like warm honey mixed with brandy as he made his way down the stairwell.
“Every so often. With Sasha getting married,” she confided, “the pressure’s off a little.”
He could relate to that. “Yeah, I know what you mean.” He’d reached the ground floor and pushed the door open. His bike was parked close to his building. “I’m going to need both my hands now.”
He did throw things at her out of left field. “Excuse me?”
“My motorcycle.” He got astride it as he explained. “It requires two hands. I never got a Blue-tooth attachment. Don’t like anything hanging on my ear,” he told her before she could ask. “I’ve got to hang up. See you in ten.”
Ten minutes? Natalya sat up. “Just how close are you to my apartment?” she wanted to know. But she was asking the dial tone. Mike had terminated the connection.
Flipping her phone closed, Natalya got up off the sofa. She glanced toward the bathroom. Maybe a once-over wasn’t such a bad idea.
If he was right, there were only nine and a half minutes left.
He wound up taking her to a coffee shop located a few blocks from the apartment she shared with her sisters. Expecting it to be packed, she was pleasantly surprised to find the Saturday night crowd had thinned out.
Mike steered her toward a table with a view of the sidewalk, but away from the door and the draft that was created when it was opened.
Setting down the small tray he was holding, he took a seat and looked at Natalya. Most of the tables were for two, which allowed them to create an illusion of intimacy within the surrounding din of noise and moving bodies.
As she sat down, their knees touched. The wave of attraction that had been filtering between them intensified.
Taking their oversized cups from the tray, he slipped it under the table, balancing it on its edge against the central table leg so that they had more room.
It was time to get what was on her mind out of the way so that whatever it was that was humming between them could have room to flourish.
“All right,” Mike began genially, “so what was it that you suddenly remembered and were going to call me about when I beat you to the punch?”
She’d had time to roll it over in her head. When she did, it had sounded a bit melodramatic, but then it had come from Clancy and Clancy had a tendency toward drama. And it could mean something. No stone unturned, she told herself.
Natalya leaned forward so he could hear her without her having to raise her voice. “A few weeks ago Clancy began hinting that he was on to something underhanded going on at the mortuary.”
“Underhanded,” Mike repeated. She nodded. “Did he tell you what?”
This time, Natalya shook her head. “I asked him but he wouldn’t go into detail. Which was strange for Clancy,” she admitted. “He said that he wanted to be sure first before he told me anything else.” She could see that she was losing him. She was quick to add, “But he made it sound as if he thought it was big.” A sliver of guilt pricked at her now. She should have pressed Clancy, made him elaborate. “I thought that he was just imagining things because he didn’t like the funeral director and this was a way of putting himself in a more favorable light.”
For a second, she paused, wrestling with a feeling of disloyalty. But she had to tell the detective everything so that he had the whole picture. “Clancy had a tendency to be a little melodramatic at times.” She sighed, wrapping her long finger
s around the cup, absorbing its warmth. “I didn’t pay attention, but maybe if I had, he’d be alive now.”
He didn’t want her blaming herself. Nothing useful came of it. “You can’t know that.”
Oh, but she could. She did. Natalya raised her eyes to his. “Ever have a feeling, Detective? Something deep in your gut that tells you something even though your common sense says something else?”
He looked at her for a long moment. So long that it took her breath away. “Sometimes,” he allowed.
It took her a second to draw air back into her lungs. She focused hard on what she was saying, nearly losing the thread. He’d made her mind go momentarily blank, taking her somewhere that had nothing to do with what she was trying to say.
“That’s how I feel about this,” she finally continued. “Clancy’s death is because of something that’s going on at the mortuary.”
Chapter 7
“Such as?” Mike pressed when Natalya didn’t elaborate on her statement.
With a frustrated sigh, Natalya was forced to shrug helplessly, a condition she had little use for and absolutely hated. As far back as her memory would take her, she’d always been a doer, someone who struck immediately, quickly, taking care of whatever needed doing. Despite her outwardly carefree attitude, she liked to burrow into the heart of a problem and work her way out, learning and solving as she went.
But here, when it involved someone she cared about, she was at a loss.
“I don’t know,” she finally admitted ruefully, holding the container in both hands and moving it absently back and forth between her palms. And then she began to theorize. Her eyes became a little brighter as she talked. “Ellis Brothers isn’t that far from Our Lady of Patience Memorial Hospital. We send them our John and Jane Does, people the city ambulance brings us who don’t make it and haven’t been identified. Clancy told me that the mortuary has a contract with the city and handles the burials. Sometimes he’d be the one to come and pick up the bodies.”
He’d pop in, first in the pediatric wing, then, if she wasn’t there, in her office across the street. He always looked so happy to see her.
She was never going to see that bright, smiling face again, she realized for the dozenth time. Natalya banked down the wave of sadness that came a beat after that first thought.
It was getting a little noisier. A crowd of six entered the small shop. Mike leaned forward. “Where’s this headed?”
Natalya wasn’t sure just yet. She continued using him as a sounding board. “Maybe there were some irregularities—the mortuary overcharging the city, charging for handling bodies that ultimately were identified on their premises but whose funerals weren’t handled by the mortuary. Or maybe the mortuary was even charging for handling bodies that didn’t exist.”
It struck her as a viable theory. Maybe, if Clancy had stumbled across it, he’d been killed to keep him from talking.
Oh, God, Clancy, why couldn’t you have just left well enough alone? Or told a cop? If she knew Clancy, he would have gone to Tolliver and told him he was exposing him just for the satisfaction of seeing horror on the man’s face.
The more she thought about it, the more she was sure she was on the right track. “You’ve got people who could look into that, right? Computer experts.”
She looked so eager, so intent on helping, that Mike caught himself suppressing a smile. “Yes—”
“Because if you don’t,” she continued, the tempo of her voice rising as the flow of words from her lips became faster, “Kady is dating an accountant who knows someone that used to work at the IRS and she could ask him to look—”
“Kady?” Mike repeated the name, stopping her in midflight.
“Leokadia.” She gave him her sister’s full name, even though no one, not even her parents, called her that. “My younger sister. Or one of them,” she clarified, since there were three. “We call her Kady because it’s a lot easier on everyone’s tongue.”
He’d never heard the name before. But then, with so many different nationalities coming into New York every year, that was becoming more of the norm. “Yeah, I’d imagine it would be.”
Natalya fell back into her narrative. “Anyway, Kady could ask Henry if—”
He had to stop her before she literally ran him over with her rhetoric. “No need to ask Henry anything.” Whoever Henry was, he thought. “We’ll handle it from here.”
She took a breath. Did that mean he was convinced this was a homicide and that the blame lay with the mortuary? “Good.”
Given what he’d seen of her take-charge nature, he hadn’t expected her to surrender so easily. He proceeded with caution, feeling his way around.
“Glad you approve.” His eyes slid over her face. No doubt about it, the more he looked at her, the more beautiful she seemed to become. How was that possible? He decided to take the next viable step forward. Caution on a case was something he was accustomed to. Caution with a woman was something else. Something new. “So listen, are you in the mood for dinner or something—”
Her pager went off before he had a chance to finish his question. It was clipped to her belt and she immediately glanced at it. Her answering service number pulsed in bright blue relief.
More than a tinge of disappointment slipped over her, surprising her by its unexpected appearance.
“Looks like we might have to shelve ‘dinner or something,’” she murmured. Taking out her cell phone, Natalya called her service. A short exchange of words had her jotting down the home number of one of her patients.
He waited until she terminated the call. “Do you have to leave?”
Natalya shook her head. “Don’t know yet.” She tapped out the number the service had given her. The phone was answered on the first ring. Mike could hear the tone of the voice on the other end of the line. It sounded distraught. Whoever it was was sobbing.
“Slow down, Mrs. Cummings,” Natalya told the woman, her own voice deadly calm. “Now, what did you say were the symptoms?”
Mike sat back and observed Natalya. Her exuberant tone had gone down several notches as she said what she could to calm whoever was on the other end of the line.
She was pretty good under fire, he thought. He liked a woman who could think on her feet and who could change gears so quickly. Only seconds ago, she’d sounded so impassioned when she was talking to him about her friend and why she thought he’d wound up being killed.
“Bundle Stacey up and bring her over to Patience Memorial. I’ll meet you in the emergency room in twenty minutes. No, she’s not going to die, Mrs. Cummings, I give you my word,” she assured her with feeling. “I know. These things can be scary. Right. Twenty minutes.” Ending the call, Natalya closed her phone with both hands, as if she were applauding. And then she looked at him. There was genuine regret on her face. “I have to go.”
He nodded as she tucked her cell phone away. “I heard.”
She hadn’t fully realized how much she wanted to spend time with this man until the opportunity was taken away from her. “Sorry.”
“Hey, part of the job.” His mouth curved a little. She found it incredibly appealing. “I know all about having to dash away from something because of a phone call.” Mike rose to his feet.
Natalya glanced at his cup. He hadn’t finished his coffee. “You don’t have to leave on my account.”
The smile widened. “It was kind of on your account that I was here to begin with,” he reminded her. “C’mon, I’ll take you to the hospital.”
She didn’t want him to be put out. “You don’t have to. I can catch a cab.”
But Mike had already gently taken hold of her arm and was now guiding her toward the door. Another wave of people had come in and there was now a line to the counter. “My father always told us to leave with the girl you brought.”
She moved before him as he held the door open for her. The sudden shift of cold air was a bracing surprise. “I think that refers to going to a party.”
He looke
d down at Natalya for a second. “You mean this wasn’t a party?”
She opened her mouth to make a disclaimer, then shut it again. Her lips formed a smile. She had no idea what “this” actually was.
Maybe “this” was just a nice interlude. Or maybe it was the beginning of something nicer. She couldn’t tell. She also had no idea if she wanted it to be the beginning of something more serious.
But there was definitely something about the detective that was unraveling her, something that made her understand why moths flew into flames even though, somewhere along the line, they had to know it was inherently bad for them. The attraction was there. For both her and the moth.
She forced herself to focus on what was really important. The small patient on her way to the E.R. with her parents. “We’d better hurry. I told Mrs. Cummings twenty minutes.”
“I heard,” he acknowledged, amused.
She mounted the motorcycle behind him, her arms going around his waist. He allowed himself a half second to savor the feeling that flashed through him and then he took to the road.
They made it there in under fifteen minutes. Her cheeks were stinging and her fingers felt icy from hanging on to his waist. The night was crisp and clear and the wind was cold this time of night. The smell of November was definitely in the air.
As she got off the motorcycle, Natalya slid the helmet from her head and handed it to him. “Well, thanks again.” She expected him to say something pleasant and rev the engine up a notch before disappearing into the night. Instead, he got off and locked the helmets into the saddlebag. She stared at him in minor confusion, aware that the parking valet to her right was staring at the bike with unabashed adulation. “You’re coming with me?”
Mike nodded. “I’m always open to learning about things.”
She looked at him skeptically, trying to interpret his comment. “You’ve never been to a hospital before?” It was more of a semimocking statement than a question.
The city had more than a handful of hospitals and at times it felt as if he’d been to most of them. But Patience Memorial had not numbered among them. He glanced up at the back of the edifice. “Not this one.” And then he looked at the woman he’d escorted here. “Not with a personalized tour.”
Diagnosis: Danger Page 7