by Karen Rose
The mood walking back to the clinic was considerably more grim than it had been on the way to the diner.
Dani had a bad feeling about this. If everything had gone well, Kendra Cullen would have just told her so. Instead, her text telling Dani to bring the kids back had been curt and to the point. Too curt, and that wasn’t like Kenny at all. They’d known each other for years. That message had read like they were strangers.
And maybe I’m just imagining things.
She glanced up at Diesel, only to find his eyes on her. They shared a long look that spoke volumes.
He was worried too. And if there was one thing she knew about Diesel Kennedy, it was that his instincts were top notch. She’d be dead if they hadn’t been. He’d had a feeling she was in danger all those months ago and had been waiting behind the clinic, watching over her. He’d been right, because she’d been stabbed that day.
‘Thank you,’ she murmured.
He smiled down at her, making her heart stutter. ‘For what?’
‘Saving my life a year and a half ago. I don’t remember if I ever thanked you.’
‘You did.’ His expression became wryly self-deprecating. ‘The day I visited you after your surgery. The day you told me to find someone else. Very politely, of course.’
‘The day I told you that it wasn’t you, it was me,’ she said quietly, but firmly.
He shrugged his shoulder and she bit back a sigh. She’d lost count of the number of times she’d wished she could lean against that shoulder. Diesel was kindness and strength.
And he did need to find someone else.
‘We’ll finish this conversation later,’ he said as they reached the clinic door and pulled it open. ‘After you.’
Dani entered, Michael right behind her. Diesel brought up the rear, Joshua still clutching his hand.
Taking in the scene before her, Dani came to an abrupt stop. Kendra Cullen and Maddie Shafer, the social worker, were back. So was Maria, the interpreter. But they weren’t alone.
Adam and Deacon were there, too, looking grim. That wasn’t good at all.
None of them looked happy. This was so not good.
‘Michael, the man on the left with dark hair is my cousin, Detective Adam Kimble,’ Dani said calmly, signing as she spoke. ‘The man on the right is my brother, Special Agent Deacon Novak. Gentlemen, this is Michael Rowland and his brother Joshua.’
Adam stepped forward, his brows knit in a scowl. He started to speak, but before he could, Michael broke the silence.
‘Coach Kimble?’ he voiced thickly.
Adam opened his mouth and closed it again, looking even unhappier than he had before.
‘You know each other?’ Dani asked, surprised.
Michael nodded and went back to signing. ‘He coached my baseball team a few years ago. I joined up because he could sign. That doesn’t happen often.’ He sucked in a breath, his spine stiffening, sudden panic filling his eyes. He took a step back, his wild gaze swinging to Adam. ‘You’re a cop. Why are you here?’
‘That’s a very good question,’ Diesel said calmly. He gripped Michael’s uninjured shoulder with a steady hand. ‘Please answer, Detective Kimble.’
Adam seemed to brace himself as he met Michael’s gaze squarely. It was a small gesture, but Dani noticed it because they’d grown up together, much of their childhood sharing the same house. It was why Adam signed so well. Greg had been more like a little brother to him than a cousin. He still was.
‘We saw Officer Cullen and Miss Shafer at your house, Michael,’ Adam signed. ‘They were talking to your mother about her throwing the bowl at your head. We were there to talk to her about something else. Your stepfather’s remains were pulled from the river this morning.’
Dani gasped, her eyes on Michael.
Who didn’t look as surprised as he should have.
Oh no. Oh God.
Joshua, on the other hand, was frowning up at Diesel. ‘What’s remains, Coach Diesel?’
Diesel swung the little boy up into his arms and held him against his hip. ‘It means they found your stepfather’s body,’ he answered quietly. ‘It means your stepfather is dead.’
‘What?’ Joshua shook his head hard. ‘No. He went away. Mom said so. Like, on a trip. Not to heaven, like our real dad.’
‘Maybe you can take the boy into one of the offices, Coach Diesel,’ Adam said.
‘No!’ Both Michael and Joshua cried out at once. Michael clutched Joshua’s hand.
‘I’m not leaving Michael,’ Joshua added mutinously.
Diesel leaned his forehead against Joshua’s. ‘Then you need to listen, okay?’
‘Okay,’ Joshua whispered, but his eyes filled with confused tears. ‘Okay.’
Adam was regarding Michael levelly while Deacon stood silent in the background, watching everyone. Deacon was good at that.
‘You don’t look surprised,’ Adam signed.
Michael clenched his jaw. Then looked away and shook his head.
Adam came closer, hunching down a little so that he was at Michael’s eye level. ‘Why aren’t you surprised, Michael?’ he signed, so very gently.
‘I didn’t do it,’ Michael declared, his desperation clear.
And Dani believed him. She met Diesel’s worried eyes. He did, too.
‘We found the gun,’ Adam said. ‘Under your pillow.’
Gun? Shit. This was getting worse by the moment.
Michael swallowed hard. ‘I didn’t do it.’
Diesel held Michael’s shoulder again, turning him around to face him, then letting him go so that the hand not supporting Joshua was free. ‘Say nothing,’ he signed tersely. ‘Do not say another word. We’ll get you a lawyer. Do you understand?’
Michael’s eyes widened. Then he nodded, trembling.
Joshua was sobbing, his face buried in Diesel’s shirt.
Maddie Shafer stepped in to join the small circle, the interpreter trailing behind her to sign her words. ‘He is a minor, Detective Kimble. If you’re going to question him, we’ll do this right. Downtown, recorded, with his lawyer and me.’ She looked at Dani. ‘And his emergency foster parent.’ She pulled a folder from her bag. ‘Sign this, quick.’
Dani scanned the paper in the folder and signed on the dotted line. It was the standard form she’d signed many times before when fostering in an emergency.
‘Done.’ She handed the folder back to Maddie, then turned to Michael. ‘I won’t leave you. I promise.’
Four
Cincinnati, Ohio
Saturday, 16 March, 3.35 P.M.
The room had gone still, Adam having stepped back to stand with Deacon, leaving Dani to talk to Michael with as much privacy as they could allow.
Dani knew Adam and Deacon as well as she knew herself. Both her cousin and her brother were good cops. More than that, they were good men with integrity. They wouldn’t have come for Michael if there wasn’t a very good reason.
A dead stepfather and a gun under his pillow were pretty good reasons, but Dani’s gut was telling her to believe Michael’s claims of innocence. She wasn’t sure why, exactly, because her gut had failed her stupendously in the past, and believing the wrong man had done her life-changing harm. Believing her ex-fiancé had left her alone and HIV positive.
But this wasn’t like that. Not at all. Michael was not Adrian. Adrian had been a grown man who’d lied to her about his HIV status. Michael was a scared kid who’d been abused.
Dani held his eyes, hoping he could see her promise and that he believed her. ‘I won’t leave you,’ she repeated, her signs forceful. ‘Do you understand me, Michael?’
For a long moment, he just stared at her with hopeless fear. Then he nodded once. ‘What about Joshua?’
Diesel tapped Michael’s shoulder, waiting until the boy slowly lifted his gaze. ‘I’ll
watch over him,’ Diesel told him. ‘If that’s okay with you.’
‘It’ll be okay,’ Joshua promised, but he hadn’t stopped crying. Still in Diesel’s arms, the child held out a hand to his brother. ‘It’ll be okay,’ he whispered.
Visibly trembling now, Michael took Joshua’s hand and held it against his cheek. He turned to the social worker. ‘You won’t let him go home?’
‘No,’ she promised. ‘Dr Dani is his emergency foster parent, too.’
Michael swallowed hard. The teenager was trying to be brave and it was breaking Dani’s heart to watch. He let his brother’s hand go. ‘Our mother will clean up her act,’ he signed, as the interpreter voiced for him in a low murmur. ‘She’ll say all the right things. She’ll make you think she’s not on drugs anymore. But when you go away, she’ll go back to her old ways.’ He blinked back tears. ‘Don’t let her take him. Please.’
Maddie glanced at Kendra Cullen from the corner of her eye. Kendra gave the social worker a slight nod. Drawing a deep breath, Maddie said, ‘Officer Cullen arrested your mother for possession of heroin. She was obviously impaired when we arrived. She’ll be tested for drugs.’
Michael seemed to digest this. ‘So Joshua is safe for now.’
Maddie nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘But I’m not,’ Michael signed, dropping his eyes to the floor.
No one was able to refute that, and the room was silent for a long moment. Dani gripped Michael’s good shoulder gently. She hadn’t finished examining him, but she’d do so before he was taken into custody. On that she wasn’t budging.
She waited until Michael looked up at her. ‘We’re going to get you a lawyer.’
Michael swallowed again. ‘I don’t have money to pay a lawyer.’
‘You let us worry about that, okay?’ Dani looked up at Diesel. ‘Do you have the name of a good lawyer?’
‘I do. I’ll call him right now.’ Diesel lifted Michael’s chin. ‘Not one word, okay?’
Michael nodded shakily and said nothing.
‘Use my office,’ Dani told Diesel. ‘Joshua, can you stay with Coach for a little while?’
Diesel took a sniffling Joshua into the office to make the call, and Dani turned to Adam and Deacon. ‘Are you sure the body you found was that of Michael’s stepfather?’
Both men nodded, and she blew out a sigh. ‘All right then.’ She signed as she spoke. ‘Michael came to me for medical attention. Now that I’m his emergency foster parent, I can authorize this. I’ve already sutured the cut on his head and documented the injury. His shoulder is also hurt, and he may need to wear a sling to protect it. I’ll examine him now, before you take him downtown.’ She met Adam’s gaze, then Deacon’s, daring them to cross her. Neither man did, for which she was grateful. ‘Nurse Jenny will assist me. I assume we’ll need police presence during the exam?’
Both men nodded again. ‘We need to do this cleanly,’ Deacon said, also signing. He’d been rusty when he’d returned to Cincinnati two and a half years ago, but daily interaction with their younger brother Greg had quickly honed his ASL skills. ‘It’s also to protect you, Michael. Hopefully we can clear this up easily. If not, and if the prosecutor ends up pressing charges, we’ll want everything done according to procedure. That way no one can accuse you of having your story fed to you by your doctor.’
Michael’s eyes shot to Dani’s, filled with a mix of shock and . . . anger. ‘He thinks you’d do that? Your own brother?’
‘No.’ Dani offered him a smile. ‘But he thinks an over-zealous lawyer might try to make a jury think so. He’s protecting you. Would you be all right with him staying in the room with us?’
Michael’s eyes shifted again, but not before she saw the flash of panic. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, they were expressionless. ‘Can Officer Cullen do it instead?’ he asked.
God. Dani kept her own smile gentle even as his panic and his words made a terrible kind of sense. She’d seen that reaction before. Too many times.
Someone had hurt him. Someone male.
‘It’s fine,’ Deacon said softly. He’d caught the nuance, too.
So had Adam, even though her cousin said nothing. Only because she’d known him her whole life did she know that the twitch of his eye signaled guilt. He’d been Michael’s coach, she recalled. He would feel guilty that he hadn’t known – and hadn’t helped this boy. The guilt was unwarranted, but Adam felt things so much more deeply than most people knew.
‘Should I call Meredith?’ he asked quietly when Dani walked past him on her way back to the examination room. His wife was a child psychologist who specialized in treating traumatized kids. ‘I can ask her to meet us at the precinct.’
‘That’s a good idea,’ Dani murmured. ‘Thanks.’
Cincinnati, Ohio
Saturday, 16 March, 3.45 P.M.
‘That’s fu—’
‘Children,’ Diesel growled into the phone, cutting off his best friend before he could drop the F-bomb. Yes, it was fucked up. This whole situation was fucked up, but he didn’t want Joshua hearing that. It had been bad enough that Joshua had heard him recount the story to Marcus O’Bannion.
Marcus was technically Diesel’s boss at the Cincinnati Ledger. When he’d inherited the newspaper from his grandfather, it had been failing, but he, Diesel, and the rest of the Ledger’s investigative team had brought it well into the black. They’d broken a lot of high-profile stories. Sometimes to do so they needed an inside edge during an investigation, a peek at their target’s computer.
Computer sleuthing sometimes happened. That was where Diesel fit in.
‘Sorry.’ Marcus’s wince was clear in his tone. ‘I’m not on speaker, am I?’
‘No, but Joshua is sitting with me.’ Diesel had tried to put the child on one of the kid-sized chairs at the table in Dani’s office that was stocked with crayons and paper, but Joshua had clung, wrapping his little arms around his neck so tightly that Diesel had found it hard to breathe. So he’d relented, and Joshua now sat on his lap, cheek pressed to Diesel’s chest, small hand clutching his shirt. ‘Close enough to hear you.’
‘Sorry,’ Marcus said again. ‘Poor kid. What do you need me to do?’
‘Michael needs a lawyer. Can you call Rex Clausing and ask him to meet Dani at the precinct? She’s Michael’s emergency foster parent and will be present during any questioning. This kid really needs Rex’s help.’
‘I just texted him,’ Marcus replied. A little ding chimed at Marcus’s end. ‘And he just replied. He’ll be there. The kid’s last name?’
‘Rowland. Michael Rowland.’
‘Got it. What else?’
‘I need my laptop. Can you go by my house, get it, and bring it to me?’ Marcus was one of the few who had a spare key to Diesel’s house. They’d met in Ranger school seventeen years ago and had been friends from the get-go. There was no one Diesel trusted more to have his back, unless it was Marcus’s brother Stone. The entire O’Bannion family had made him one of theirs, and he was damn grateful.
‘I’m at Dani’s clinic right now, but I’ll take Joshua to the Ledger once Dani and Michael leave with Deacon and Adam.’
‘Which laptop?’ Marcus asked, because Diesel had three. One was for games, one was for email and bills, and the third was the machine he used for his less-than-always-legal searches. It was souped-up and powerful, its browsing history undetectable on the web.
‘The turbo.’ He glanced down at Joshua, who was staring up at him with wide eyes. But he didn’t say a word because Diesel had asked him to be quiet while he was on the phone. What a sweet kid. His mother should have been on her knees thanking God for her sons, not getting high and throwing bowls at their heads. ‘Michael didn’t do this, which means someone else did. I’m going to do what I always do.’
‘Follow the money,’ Marcus said grimly.
‘Yep
.’ Because it always came down to that in one way or another. ‘Also, does Gayle still keep a stash of candy in her desk?’
Joshua’s eyes lit up at that and Diesel smiled down at him, giving him a wink.
‘If she doesn’t, I’ll stop by the store and pick some up,’ Marcus said. ‘You want some crayons and stuff, too?’
‘Wouldn’t hurt. Thanks, Marcus. See you soon.’
Cincinnati, Ohio
Saturday, 16 March, 4.00 P.M.
Michael winced at the ball of fear lodged in his gut. It actually hurt. What was the doctor going to do? What was she going to ask?
He’d seen the understanding in her eyes when he’d asked if the lady cop could be the witness instead of one of the two men. Dr Dani knew.
Dammit.
He’d followed her into the same exam room he’d been in before. Sitting on the paper-covered table, he watched as the lady cop took position in the corner, her expression kind.
Shit. She knew, too. His face flushed hotter than fire. Now they’d all know. They’d tell the two men outside. They’d tell Coach Diesel. Everyone will know.
His stomach churned in misery as the nurse came in. She looked businesslike, at least. The interpreter came in last and met his eyes.
‘I’m here for you,’ she signed without voicing for the others. ‘I’m bound to confidentiality. You get that, right? I’ll never share what you say with anyone outside this room.’
He nodded. ‘I get it.’ It didn’t really help. She’d still know. And he wasn’t worried about her telling anyone anyway. It was the others who’d tell. Especially the cop. She had to report abuse. So did the doctor and nurse. They were required to by law. Just like teachers. Which was why he’d never told any of his teachers.
He fought the tears stinging his eyes. He would not cry, dammit. This was humiliating enough without him crying.
The interpreter closed the door and suddenly the room was very crowded. More crowded than it had been before, even though Coach Diesel had also been here, taking up more space than two of the women put together.
At least the social worker had stayed outside to talk to the two detectives, but this room was too crowded. Too many people. Michael’s chest began to hurt, his breath coming faster and faster, and he clamped a hand over his mouth, afraid he’d be sick. Fan-fucking-tastic.