Her Lawman On Call

“Precinct?” Natalya echoed. “You? Why?” she wanted to know. She was quick to become defensive and protective of her family.

“Because I found her,” Sasha answered, her voice hardly above a whisper. The entire time she’d spent with the detective, she’d done her best to be clear-headed, sharp. But here, with her sisters, she let herself grieve. And it felt awful. “Actually, the guard did. Walter Stevens,” she added. Neither of her two sisters probably knew who she was talking about. She was the one who always stopped to talk to people. “But he looked so upset and confused…” Sasha slid her tongue along her lips, but they continued to feel like two pieces of dry sandpaper. Just like her insides felt. “I tried giving Angela CPR, but…”

Natalya took her hand. “You can’t save everyone, Sash,” she said compassionately. “Mama always says there’s a time for everything, remember? A time to be born and a time to die.”

A semismile curved her lips. “You start singing, ‘Turn, Turn, Turn’ and I’m leaving.”

“I won’t sing,” Natalya promised. “Not tonight.”

“You want me to draw you a hot bath?” Kady offered. When things got to her, she always sought refuge in a hot bath.

Not waiting for an answer, Kady was on her feet and halfway across the room, heading toward the bathroom before Sasha could open her mouth.

“Wait,” Sasha cried. “Stop. Stop.” Kady skidded to an impatient halt and turned around to look at her, waiting for further instructions. Sasha shook her head. “The way I feel right now, Kady, I’d probably drown in the tub. I’m too tired for a bath. I just want to get these clothes off and fall into bed.”

“That can be arranged,” Natalya said as she took her sister’s hand and helped Sasha to her feet again.

Sasha felt a laugh bubbling up in her throat. It was a welcome sensation, even though there was such a thing as too much help.

“Thanks, but I can still undress myself, Nat. I’m not that out of it.” She sighed. “It’s just that…” Sasha’s voice trailed off as her sisters looked at her, waiting, not wanting to interrupt. She dragged her hand through her hair, loosening pins. A few rained down on the light-gray rug. “God, what a waste.”

Her sisters both nodded, even though neither one of them had actually known the dead woman. But each had already seen death, been touched by death’s sharp talons, and knew instinctively what Sasha was going through right now.

Or thought they did, Sasha amended silently.

Right now she was just incredibly sad. And tomorrow, Sasha promised herself, or rather today, she amended, glancing at the digital clock on the coffee table, she was going to get up early and go to Angela’s mother. She should have gone tonight, with that detective, but she couldn’t face the woman with Angela’s blood on her. But tomorrow, she was going to offer to do anything she could.

As if that could somehow help, she thought sadly. She felt powerless, and hated that feeling. Hated being imprisoned by it.

“If you need to talk, Sash,” Natalya was saying as she began to leave the room, “you know where to find me.”

“Me, too,” Kady added.

They both meant it. They were both willing to give up their night to sit up with her, holding her hand both physically and emotionally, until she no longer needed comforting. Until the shock had passed and the pain was manageable.

Sasha could only think, not for the first time, how very grateful she was that she was not one of those poor souls who walked the earth alone. How grateful she was that she had her family to fall back on. Not just Nat and Kady, but Marja and Tatania as well.

And, of course, her parents.

Her wonderful, loving parents who always gave and never took. What would she have done if they hadn’t been there for her when Adam had been slain eighteen months ago? She doubted very much if she would have been here today if not for them. They thought of her as the strong one, but they were her strength.

She looked from one sister to the other. “It’s not that big an apartment. I’ll find you.”

Chapter 3

T ony leaned back in his chair. The frown on his lips deepened. Nothing. Granted, he’d expected as much, but he had still held out a smattering of hope.

The trouble these days was that anyone with half a brain now knew how to cover up their trail, thanks to all the different forensic programs on the airwaves. With everything but an intense, flash-of-anger crime of passion, perpetrators knew how to make reasonably sure that their prints didn’t turn up on the things they’d handled while committing the crime.

And even with crimes of passion, if the suspect took a moment to think about his actions telltale prints would be wiped off.

Sighing, Tony stared at the crime lab report the tech had just delivered to him. The note extracted from Angela Rico’s hand had only Angela’s prints on it. To compound the disappointment, the note had come from a printer that had nothing remarkable about it to set it apart, no quirky imprint to separate it from the thousands of other printers he would find in the area if he were to look. The note had been produced by a standard color printer, not a laser, not the old dot matrix, which might have made things easier if the suspect had access to it.

And that was another thing, Tony thought, his annoyance growing. Their only viable suspect in Angela Rico’s murder had an alibi. A substantiated alibi. At the time of his ex-wife’s murder, Alex Rico was in Atlantic City, hoping he would have better luck at the blackjack tables than he had in love.

As it turned out, Angela’s ex was a loser in both but no longer a murder suspect.

“Not unless he hired somebody to do it,” Henderson volunteered wearily, ending a discussion that had been halfheartedly under way between the two of them.

They were the only ones in the immediate area. Everyone else, including Captain Holloway, had gone home for the night.

Tony glanced in his partner’s direction. Together a little over two years, he and Henderson hadn’t hit it off all that well. But then, to be fair, he hadn’t hit it off with too many people. He preferred working alone.

Preferred everything alone, actually. Alone, there was no one else to disappoint you but you, he thought.

The notion brought a cynical half smile to his lips.

“If he hired somebody, what’s the note about?” Tony asked.

The note bothered him. A lot. He felt as if it was pointing to something, but to what, he hadn’t a clue.

Henderson shrugged his wide shoulders haplessly, the unironed shirt moving stiffly with the gesture. Without thinking, he scratched his neck.

“To throw us off?” he guessed.

Tony’s half smile looked a bit sarcastic. “Alex Rico strike you as particularly clever?” Tony asked.

It was a rhetorical question. Still, Henderson considered it. “No, just grief-stricken. And mad. Very mad.”

Tony thought of the victim’s ex, and the rage that he’d viewed in the man’s eyes, just behind the grief. “If Rico’s innocent, we might have some trouble from him when we catch who did this.”

“You meant if,” Henderson pointed out.

“No, I mean when,” Tony repeated.

Although he regarded the rest of his life with a jaded, negative eye, it never occurred to Tony that he wouldn’t catch his quarry. Otherwise, there was no point in going through the motions. He’d taken the job, the badge, to make a difference. You didn’t make a difference by not catching the bad guy.

Henderson nodded, backing away from a confrontation. “Cross that bridge when we come to it.” With that, he switched off his computer and pushed his chair back. The legs scraped along the scarred vinyl floor that had long since needed replacing. The current budget couldn’t handle it. “I’m calling it a night,” he said needlessly. “Maybe something’ll turn up fresh in the morning.”

“Maybe,” Tony murmured under his breath.

He scrubbed his hand over his face and tried to recenter his thinking. The pretty doctor had been right. Everyone had loved the victim. At least, everyone he and Henderson had talked to in the last week.

Pushing back his own chair, he began to rise when the phone on his desk rang.

“Looks like it might not be a night yet,” he said to Henderson as he reached for the receiver.

Déjà vu.