Anything but Mine (7 page)

“It’s your department and you don’t know enough to answer a couple of simple questions?”

Stanton stiffened at the sly insinuation and Autry rolled her eyes and leaned forward to tap his arm. “Talk to him. I’ll go up and grab what I need.”

He frowned at her over his shoulder. “I don’t think—”

“You’ll be right here,” she said, aware Ray listened with avid curiosity. “I’ll leave the door open and I won’t be but a second.”

His mouth thinned, but he nodded. “I’ll be straight up.”

With the male voices rumbling behind her, she hurried up the stairs and down the short hallway to her office. She flipped through the files on her desk, picking up everything concerned with the Schaefer trial. She stacked them in her briefcase and laid her notebook computer atop them.

The voices below stopped. She glanced around. What had she done with her planner?

Footsteps creaked in the hallway. Pulling her leather agenda from under a law encyclopedia, she dropped it in her briefcase. “Stan? I think I’m ready.”

The footsteps stopped at her open doorway and she glanced up.

The person standing in her door wasn’t Stanton and she froze. “What do you want?”

Her heart stuttered. She’d known Beau Ingler all her life—they’d gone to school together since kindergarten, his family attended the same church as hers, and five months ago, she’d cried as his sister was laid to rest.

“Beau, I—”

“How can you?” His face reddened, hands clenching and unclenching at his sides. Fear uncurled in Autry’s stomach. Was he the one? Oh Lord, where was Stanton? “Your mama and daddy raised you right. I know it. And you’re helping that…that piece of murdering trash. Why? For the money?”

That was laughable, but far from funny right now. The money? She was a public defender and most of her clients were indigent. She shook her head, wanting him calmed down and out of her office. “No, Beau. I’m doing it—”

“Because it’s her job,” Stanton said as he appeared behind Beau. His steady gaze caught hers for a moment and gratitude and warmth flashed through her. “Her duty.”

Beau looked between them, his features twisted with disgust. “You can’t agree with this. Oh hell, maybe you can. He was in your damn department—”

“Mr. Ingler, I understand you’re upset.” Firm authority laced Stanton’s tone. “But the system has to be allowed to work and Ms. Holton is only doing her job. Your harassing her about that is not going to help.”

“Harassing her.” Beau’s laugh was an ugly thing and Autry cringed. “She’s helping him get away with murder and you’re worried I’m harassing her.”

“Mr. Ingler, I’m asking you to leave.” Stanton didn’t move, but his posture remained alert. “Jeff Schaefer will pay for what he did. Let the system work.”

“Yeah, sure. Wish I could say it was good to see you again, Autry.” With one last disgusted look, Beau brushed by Stanton. His footsteps thudded on the backstairs.

Stanton moved into the office. “Are you all right?”

She nodded and clenched her hands to stop their shaking. “Yes, I’m just…”

To her absolute horror, she burst into tears. Sudden sobs tore at her throat and she buried her face in her hands. Residual fear trembled in her.

Strong arms came around her, pulled her close to an equally strong chest.

“Go ahead,” he whispered, stroking her back. “Let it out.”

She folded her hands into the soft cotton of his shirt. Her face against his throat, she cried harder. How was she supposed to function, never knowing who was threatening her, where he might be, what he might do next?

Stanton held her tighter. “It’s all right, baby,” he murmured into her hair. “I’m here. I won’t let anything happen. I promise.”

“L-look how easily he…he got up here.” She lifted her head, rubbing at her hot, wet cheeks. “Stanton, wh-what if he was the one? Anything could have happened and—”

“But it didn’t.” He cupped her head in his hands, brushing tears from her face with his thumbs. His eyes intense, he held her gaze with his. “And it’s not going to, because I won’t let it. I mean it, honey, I won’t let anyone hurt you. I swear.”

She pulled away, immediately feeling the loss of him, and pushed her hair back from her face. “You can’t be with me twenty-four-seven.”

He hooked his thumbs in his belt and studied her. “Why don’t we make the working out of my office thing permanent, at least until we make an arrest. You can forward your calls—”

“I don’t know. I can’t make that decision right now, okay?” She took a deep breath. If she gave him an inch, anything more than this one decision about where she was to work this afternoon, he’d take over completely. The scary part was right now she wanted to let him. “I have to get through today first.”

“All right.” He nodded toward her desk. “Ready to go?”

She rounded the desk to close her briefcase. “I’m ready.”

He took the case from her and escorted her downstairs, across the street and into the sheriff’s department. The whole way, Autry’s skin prickled as unwanted thoughts about unseen watchers followed her.

Stanton parked the unmarked unit behind Tick’s dusty pickup. As he walked up the brick path to the back porch, a breeze tossed a few stray pine needles down from the swaying trees. With Autry firmly ensconced in his office, he felt better, although the incident with Beau Ingler left a lingering tension at his nape. He passed a hand over the stiff muscles there. Letting her go up to that office alone, even for a minute, had been the height of stupidity.

He skirted a stack of two-by-fours, a sign of Tick’s constant renovating, to knock at the kitchen door. When he’d returned to the department, Lydia, with her usual unflappable aplomb, had handed him yet another pink message slip—this one from Tick, directing Stanton to pick him up at home.

No reason as to
why
he’d gone home in the middle of the day. Stanton cast a glance at the driveway. Falconetti’s vehicle was nowhere in sight. He rapped at the doorjamb again.

“It’s open.”

Inside, the house was neat as always. A few of Falconetti’s things had joined Tick’s, but the home still bore more of his personality than hers. The ironing board stood open in the kitchen, the iron atop it and plugged in.

“Hey.” A towel knotted at his waist, Tick strode from the bedroom, uniform shirt in hand. “I’ll be ready in a sec. I just need to run an iron over this.”

Stanton eyed Tick’s damp hair. “You come home for a nooner or what?”

“I wish.” Tick spread the shirt out and attacked it with the iron. “Ran up to El Vaquero’s to meet Cait for lunch. She ordered the gazpacho, and somebody’s rugrat ran into the server. I ended up wearing it—my shirt, my hair—man, it was even in my holster. I had to clean my gun, and my truck will smell like freakin’ pico de gallo for a month.”

A chuckle rumbled in Stanton’s throat, a welcome relief from the constant tension of the past few days. “You’re lucky she didn’t order fajitas.”

Tick set the iron aside, unplugging it. “Yeah. Be right back.” He took the shirt and disappeared into the bedroom. In a couple of minutes, he returned, tucking his shirt into a pair of crisp khakis. “So how’s Autry?”

Stanton darted a glance at him. There was that edge in Tick’s voice again. “A little shaken up. First that note, then Beau Ingler jumped on her case about the defense—”

“I meant physically.” Tick sat on the ottoman to pull on his socks and shoes. “The whole pregnancy thing. How is she?”

“She’s having a lot of nausea, I think.” Stanton ran a hand over his nape. “She has a doctor’s appointment this week. They’re doing a sonogram.” Tick nodded, staring at the tips of his polished duty shoes, and Stanton’s gaze sharpened on his face. “Tick? You okay?”

Tick dragged a hand along his jaw. “Yeah. All I could think about last night and this morning was what a flippin’ miracle this baby is. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way, you know. And then Cait saw Dr. Astin this morning and at lunch we got into all the things that could go wrong, if her uterus can’t take the strain and ruptures… You don’t want to hear this, do you, what with Autry and all.”

His ex-partner was right—Stanton didn’t want to think about all the things that could go wrong. But he knew Tick well enough to understand he wouldn’t have brought it up if he didn’t need to talk about it. “Are you borrowing trouble? What are the odds something could go wrong, according to the doctor?”

Tick ran a smoothing hand over his still-damp hair. “For the uterine rupture? About two percent. The normal risk is less than a half percent.”

“The normal risk?” He was missing something here, probably because he went out of his way to not discuss Falconetti with Tick. Not like Tick ever listened to him about her anyway.

“Hers is higher because of the attack.”

Attack? He was really missing something. “Tick, partner, I’m lost.”

“Don’t worry about it.” The sharp note was back. Tick blew out an audible breath and rubbed his face.

Annoyed, Stanton rested his hands at his hips. “If there’s something you need to say, out with it, Calvert.”

“Let it alone, Stan.”

Tick had obviously decided he was going to clam up. Stanton restrained himself from rolling his eyes. From long experience, he knew Tick wouldn’t talk until he was good and ready.

“You said two percent, right? That means you have a ninety-eight percent chance everything will go right. Focus on that.”

“Yeah.” Tick’s gaze dropped to his shoes again. “I know you’re right. It’s just that two percent, you know? A woman can bleed out from a uterine rupture. She could die if that happens under the wrong conditions.”

A shudder traveled down Stanton’s spine. He’d have a list of questions ready for Autry’s doctor’s appointment. “Yeah, and we could get hit by a chicken truck at the Stagecoach Crossroads. Greater odds that would happen. She’ll be fine.”

“She has to be.” Tick looked up, the dark depths of his eyes completely serious. “Because I can live without being a father, Stan, but I can’t live without her.”

Tick’s words stayed with Stanton during the drive out to Mildred Kinney’s neat brick ranch on Highway 112.

I can’t live without her
.

Stanton’s first instinct was to laugh off the statement, to point out Tick had managed the first thirty-five years of his life just fine without Caitlin Falconetti. Except that in the last five months, since Falconetti had come back to him, Tick had become someone different—still the intent law enforcement officer he’d always been, but somehow the constant simmering energy he’d always carried seemed more focused now.

Marrying Renee had not done that for Stanton. Neither had fourteen years of marriage.

Those few short months with Autry had, and it scared the hell out of him. He was starting to get an inkling of what Tick had meant—
I can’t live without her.
Tick could survive without Falconetti in his life, but it wasn’t really living. Stanton’s stomach squeezed. Is that what he’d been doing? Merely surviving without Autry?

He rubbed a hand over his face as Tick stopped the unmarked unit behind a run-down pickup. The rusted robin’s-egg blue Chevy leaned forlornly to one side, a sharp contrast to Mrs. Kinney’s manicured lawn and late-model Ford sedan.

“I think I went to high school with this guy.” Tick pushed the door open. “He’d have been a few years behind me, though.”

Unfolding from the car, Stanton glanced at the printout. “He was one of Autry’s first cases.”

“
The
first.” Tick fell into step beside him on the concrete walkway lined by neatly squared-off boxwoods. The corner of his mouth quirked up in a wry smile. “Mrs. Kinney is in Mama’s Sunday School class. She had Mrs. Kinney on her prayer list for months and I got a complete rundown of everything. He robbed the Tank and Tummy at gunpoint. The gun wasn’t even loaded.”

Stanton chuckled. “He’s lucky Jeanette didn’t take it and beat him to death with it.”

The pathway rounded the house’s corner. A neat backyard stretched to the pecan grove butting the property. A slight man, random streaks of silver glinting in his black hair, knelt at the patio edge and tinkered with a weed trimmer.

Stanton and Tick stopped at the path’s end. Stanton cleared his throat. “Mr. Kinney?”

“Yeah?” Kinney glanced up, his eyes a dull blue in the bright sunlight. Surprised, Stanton realized he was far younger than he first appeared—late twenties, maybe thirty—but his face, even his body, seemed prematurely aged. Five years in prison would do that.

“I’m Sheriff Reed, this is Investigator Calvert—”

“I know who you are.” Kinney wiped his hands on a greasy rag and pushed to his feet. “What do you want?”

“We need to ask you a few questions.”

Kinney’s chin lifted to a defiant angle. “About?”

“Where were you the night before last?”

“Here.” Anger flashed in his eyes. “And yeah, my mother can verify that.”

“Talk to us about Autry Holton,” Tick said.

Kinney frowned. “What about her?”

“She was your defense attorney, right? You went to prison for five years. A lot of guys would be pissed.”

“Because I paid the price for what I did?” Kinney straightened, thin shoulders tight under his shirt. “I made the decision to rob that store and I deserved what punishment I got. Probably deserved more, but Ms. Holton got me the minimum. She did right by me and I don’t hold any grudge against her.”

“That was successful.” A cynical grin twisted Tick’s mouth. He swung the patrol car into a left on Old Lonesome Road. “Did you believe his whole ‘I don’t hold any grudge against her’ bit?”

“Hard to say.” Stanton turned his attention to the scenery outside—peanut fields, tall pines, chicken houses. “He sounded sincere enough, but he fits the whole stalker-stereotype profile—unassuming, lives with his mother.”

Tick cleared his throat. “Speaking of profiles…I’ve been meaning to bring this up. I think we should get—”

“No.” Not no, but hell no.

“Stanton, it can’t hurt to have someone look at those notes and see if they can give us an offender profile.”

“Fine. Call the GBI.”

“I did. The backlog at the profiling unit is as bad as the one at the crime lab. They told me they could get to us in six to nine months. I’ll have a kid by then. So will you.”