Maternal Instinct (19 page)

"Right now … yeah." He rubbed his chest with his open hand. "Right now, I feel bitter as hell."

John's grin was wry but real as he slapped his little brother on the shoulder. "Hey. You've got us."

Connor gave him a light punch, too. "He's right. It could be worse."

"I need an antacid," Hugh said, apropos of nothing. He smiled ruefully. "Okay. I've got you."

"Not to mention
Zofie
,
Maddie
, Evan, etcetera."

"Right."

"So I suggest," Connor continued, "that you come back in the house instead of storming off."

Sunday dinner was tradition. In this family, honeymoons, funerals and work were the only excuses for begging off. Hugh nodded reluctantly.

"Next week," Connor remarked, as they walked up the drive together, "dinner is at my house. Why don't you bring Nell?"

What would they all make of his feisty fiancée? Hugh wanted to be no more than curious, but found his gut knotting at the idea that they would dismiss her as easy or unworthy of him in some way because she'd had sex with a man she wasn't even dating.

"Be nice."

His brothers exchanged satisfied smiles. "Count on it," Connor said.

Nell's mother
was delighted. "And here I thought you lived like a nun!" she crowed over the phone. "So, you finally found a guy."

Sitting on the edge of her bed, having shut herself in the bedroom to make this duty call, Nell gritted her teeth. She had spent a lifetime—Kim's—trying to convince her own mother that 'finding a guy' was not even a secondary goal in her life plan.

"I'm getting married because I'm pregnant and Hugh wants to help raise his child. Besides, it makes Kim happy."

"Oh, she likes him, does she?" Mom sounded satisfied. "She has good taste."

"Her boyfriend has blue hair this week," Nell said acerbically.

Mom ignored her. "When's the wedding? Oh, this is going to be fun! Can we go shopping?"

Unbelievable. "I'm pregnant, Mom. I won't be sweeping down the aisle in flowing white."

"Pooh! No bride is a virgin anymore." Not in Mom's world, anyway. "You'll only have one wedding." She giggled. "Or no more than two or three, since you're not starting until late. So make the most of it!"

"It'll be a small ceremony," Nell continued doggedly. "I'll wear … something I have." Blue jeans? an inner voice taunted. Her uniform? Her businesslike charcoal suit? "We're doing it in three weeks. Probably the Saturday. I'll let you know. If you're free to come."

"Are you kidding?" caroled Mom. "I'll be there with bells on my toes." She paused, then added sadly, "No shopping?"

Her mother always looked chic, Nell had to give her that. "Maybe," she conceded with a sigh. "If you can come a few days early?"

Mom squealed.

Nell winced. This was worse than she'd expected.

But not worse than giving the news to Captain Fisher, who reacted with predictable anger at the indisputable discovery that two of his officers were human and therefore fallible.

They'd waited a week, as much as Nell thought they dared. That Monday morning, they stood shoulder to shoulder in parade stance before his desk, expressions as blank as they could make them.

He gave them hell, assigned Nell to desk duty, and ordered Hugh out to patrol with a few, choice, last words about showing judgment—if he knew how.

The brush of Hugh's shoulder was a conduit to let Nell feel Hugh's repressed frustration and resentment. Her fault, she thought, knowing it wasn't true—they'd both made a baby—but feeling responsible anyway. This one case mattered to him. She didn't fully understand why—it wasn't as if he had to prove himself, he had been the one to turn down promotions to detective. But it mattered, and she wanted to give him something.

"Sir," Nell piped up. Her voice squeaked, but she forged on. "We were completing interviews regarding the missing weapon. Perhaps we should finish those?"

Hugh, who had been backing toward the door, paused.

The captain's small eyes narrowed. "You mean, perhaps you should pursue your theory about a second gunman, despite orders to drop it."

"Uh…" Nell took a deep breath. "Yes, sir."

He rumbled, but didn't erupt. "Why should I let you?"

"The gun has to be accounted for. Sir."

His hard stare held hers until she blinked, then transferred to Hugh. "I shouldn't let you work together."

"We're not married," Hugh said. "Yet."

The captain's fingers drummed on his desk. "All right," he said abruptly. "But, damn it, stay out of trouble! You understand me?"

Both nodded. "Yes, sir!"

"Go!" he snapped.

Hugh carefully shut the door behind them and then grinned jubilantly. "Damn,
Granstrom
! That took guts!"

Pleased, Nell smiled. "I figured he wouldn't actually hurt me, when I'm already wounded."

He grabbed her hand. "Let's go, before he changes his mind."

She squeezed back, then wriggled her fingers free. How would it look, two cops holding hands? The fact that he apparently didn't care gave her a warm glow right under her rib cage, though.

In the parking garage, he went straight for the driver's side. "Who first?"

Happy to be able to forget—or pretend to forget—that her partner was also her affianced husband, Nell whipped out her notebook. "Dermot Eaton. His office is across the hall, two doors down from Ryman's."

Behind the wheel, Hugh sobered. "They're back at work, you know."

"I heard."

"Morale is a little … off."

Who could blame them? she wondered, as she and Hugh rode silently up in the elevator not long later. Just a few weeks ago, this elevator had disgorged a killer who spattered the halls of the Joplin Building with blood.

"They stripped the carpet from all three floors," Hugh told her in a low voice as they stepped from the elevator. "Filled holes, painted. Rush job."

The company had gone for a different decor, she saw, carpet in a nubby warm brown
berber
and walls painted in pale peach instead of the cream she remembered. Even so, she involuntarily stepped around the spot where the gunman had died.

"If I were them, I would have rented new office space," she whispered.

"I hear Greater Northwest looked, but Port Dare doesn't have many options, and they didn't want to pull out of the community after this kind of tragedy. So they opted for the redo."

Nell shivered, glancing at the closed door to Jerome Ryman's office. "Did people quit?"

"I don't know."

Employees gazed curiously from offices. When Nell and Hugh reached Dermot Eaton's, the portly graying man told them to come in.

"You two back again?" They'd interviewed him in the initial days in his home. He gestured for them to sit down. "You cops ever going to go away and let us forget?"

"Can you?" Nell asked.

For a moment his face looked haggard. "What do you think?"

She nodded.

"What can I do for you?" He ignored his ringing telephone.

They knew from the first time they'd talked to him that he had been part of the panicky huddle in the hall. He hadn't noticed Ryman going back to his office in apparent disdain of the mass fear.

"I wasn't sure I believed any of it," he said now, gazing into the past. "Things like that don't happen here. But I scattered with the rest when the elevator dinged before it opened. Better to feel foolish than to be dead."

He hadn't noticed the sequence of shots. Like the others, he'd instinctively gone to ground in his own office. "Stood behind the door, with my bowling trophy ready to bash him over the head. Marble base," he added, nodding at the two-foot-high trophy that held pride of place on a shelf.

Was Ryman the kind to confront a man with a gun?

Eaton hesitated. "He was cool," he said finally. "I've never seen him show any emotion at all. I'd be surprised if he looked up from his work long enough to notice that he was going to die."

"Was he generally disliked?" Nell asked.

"What the hell does that have to do with anything?"

Hugh smoothly gave their stock answer, that they were trying to understand why Gann had gone only for Jerome Ryman on this floor before killing himself. "We're wondering if they'd had past contact."

"Can't imagine." He shook his head. "Ryman didn't deal with individual insured, only with company account reps."

"Was he good at his job?"

"Damn good. I'm retiring in September, and he was up for my job."

He explained that he dealt with major corporations rather than smaller employers and therefore his accounts were more substantial. Additionally, he supervised half a dozen employees, including Ryman and his office mate, St. Clair.

"Was he likely to get your job?" Hugh asked. "Where does his death leave the company?"

"He was only one of several candidates. St. Clair or Margaret Bissell will be promoted."

When asked if employees were jumping ship, he admitted that a number had quit. "Not in this department. People downstairs were pretty traumatized. Some couldn't face coming back to work."

Privately, Nell couldn't blame them. Even as a cop, she'd blanched that day. What if she was a young claims examiner or file clerk who'd never seen even a dead accident victim?

Eaton answered a few more questions about the competition for his job, although he did so with increasing suspicion and restiveness.

Nell thought it was time to turn the subject to the gun.

"I didn't see anything. You cops hustled us down the hall the other way, to the stairs," he said, nodding in that direction. "I didn't even know what was happening."

It was true, one of the reasons Nell didn't believe a fleeing worker had scooped up the gun. He or she would have had to do so earlier, emerging from an office without knowing what the silence after only two shots meant, whether the gunman still wandered the hall. And for what? To snatch up a souvenir?

Hugh asked Eaton not to discuss anything they or he had said with colleagues, thanked him for his time, and followed Nell to the next office.

This one was shared by a middle-aged woman and a guy in his mid- to late twenties. Nell asked the woman to go out to the chairs in the lobby to talk to her, while Hugh interviewed the man.

Margaret Bissell was an attractive, assured woman who had been among the more composed during the first interview. She had also been alone in her office during the massacre; the young man who shared her office had taken a personal day to go sailing and missed the horror. Hugh was hoping for hearsay and impressions about individuals, not recollections.

Margaret sat neatly, knees together, appearing comfortable despite the regal pose. Her black suit skirt was short enough to display legs Nell envied. Short-cropped dark hair was elegantly styled, and she wore only gold studs in her ears, yet her lipstick was a rich, sensual crimson.

"You have more questions?"

Nell said that there was some confusion over what gun had killed Ryman and that they'd like to know why he alone on this floor had been targeted.

The woman's brow crinkled. "I understood that Gann had made a claim for a back injury that was denied after an investigation showed he was faking. Isn't that right?"

"That's the only contact with Greater Northwest we've uncovered," Nell admitted. "His marriage had broken up, and it appears he just didn't want to go to work. He'd have been given leave without pay, but with the split, he couldn't afford it."

"So the insurance company was supposed to give him mental health time."

Nell nodded. "Instead, you snapped photos of him playing a solitary golf game. As a result, he lost his job and his soon-to-be ex demanded the child support he hadn't been paying."

"That sounds simple enough, if pathetic." Margaret Bissell gazed at her calmly. "And highly unlikely he would have known Jerome."