Never Too Late (15 page)

The familiar restless dark mood crept up to the edge of his psyche. Hunter knew it was there, just waiting to take over, but he pushed it away. Tonight he wasn’t going to give in. Tonight he had a beautiful woman on his arm, they were in a tropical paradise, and he was a free man. He intended to do his best to enjoy every minute of it.

“I’m in the mood for some key lime pie,” he said suddenly. “What do you think?”

She smiled. “Sounds great.”

They found a sidewalk café where Belle could rest at their feet and they could enjoy the sights and sounds of the warm night.

After they placed their order for pie, he told Kate of that convention in New Orleans when he’d been a rookie detective and how pathetically eager he had been to return to the clear, sweet mountain air of Utah when it was over.

She told him of her culture shock after moving to Utah from St. Petersburg but how she had learned to embrace some of the state idiosyncrasies.

Throughout their conversation, he was aware of her, of the way she tucked a stray tendril of honey-blond hair behind her ears, how she fingered that jade butterfly in the hollow of her neck, the absent way she sometimes reached down to pet Belle.

He was crazy about her. Everything she did.

He wanted this moment to stretch on forever.

He was so busy watching Kate, he almost missed a couple of drunks across the street when they staggered out of a bar, drinks in hand. He only noticed them when one started hassling a couple of women walking by.

“Come on, baby. Lemme buy you a drink,” one said, loud enough to draw more than just Hunter’s attention.

They looked like college boys who hadn’t yet learned their limits, he thought. It was months too early for spring break but maybe they decided spending the holidays drunk in Key West would be a hell of a lot more fun than stringing popcorn back home with Mom and Dad.

The women quickly walked past but the frat boys were just warming up. Hunter watched as they accosted two or three more groups of women. He was just about to get up and tactfully urge them along when he saw a middle-aged man walking with what looked like his wife and teenage daughter.

The college boys said something to the daughter that had the man bristling. He could see by the alarming red of the father’s face that whatever the drunks said had been offensive.

With a growing sense of inevitability, he watched the confrontation escalate and a moment later, the older man poked one of the boys in the chest with his finger.

Hunter half rose, then forced himself to sit down again. Not his problem. He wasn’t a cop anymore and he wasn’t responsible for policing the whole damn world.

The frat boy apparently didn’t like being dressed down by this stranger anymore than he probably did from his own father. When the man continued to get into his face, he cold-cocked him with a hard right.

The women screamed as the older man went down, clutching his nose, now spurting red.

In an instant, Hunter swore, handed Belle’s leash to Kate and ordered her to stay put.

He managed to reach the trio before the outraged father came up swinging. As much as he understood and applauded the man’s need to defend his women, these two cocky little bastards would beat the crap out of a pasty-white tourist like him.

“Bring it on, dude. Let’s see what you got.” The slightly bleary-eyed college kid stood over the tourist, baiting him to defend himself.

Hunter moved in between the two before the tourist could stagger to his feet.

“That’s enough,” he said in his best prison-yard tough voice. “Let’s all just cool off now.”

Frat Boy Number One blinked at him as if Hunter had just beamed in from the planet Zorcon. “Who’r’you?” he slurred.

Hunter ignored the question and turned to the tourist, whose wife and daughter fluttered around him like a couple of quail protecting their nest.

“Sir, are you all right?”

“Little bugger broke my nose.”

Hunter was remarkably unsurprised when Kate disobeyed his order to stay out of harm’s way and pushed her way through the crowd that had begun to gather. She handed Belle’s leash to a bystander and knelt at the man’s side. “Let me take a look at it. I’m a doctor.”

Drunk far past the point of reason or discretion, Frat Boy Number Two leered at Kate kneeling there in her sexy little black dress and grabbed at his crotch. “Hey doc, I got something right here that hurts. Want to kiss it better?”

Hunter let out a disgruntled sigh, wondering why trouble seemed to follow them around like a greasy dark cloud, then he stepped forward, grabbed the punk by his shirtfront and shoved him into the other boy. Both of them went sprawling against the wall, amid widespread applause from the crowd.

The first kid came up swinging and managed to sneak an uppercut into Hunter’s gut but the punch was so wimpy he barely felt it. He dodged the next one and returned it with a hard blow that knocked the college boy to the ground. He groaned but didn’t get back up.

The other kid—the one with the dirty mouth—started to scurry away but his retreat was stopped by a couple of uniform cops on bicycles who had been drawn by the commotion.

“Why are we always in the wrong place at the wrong time?” Hunter muttered twenty minutes later when they finally returned to the café and their uneaten pie after giving their statements to the bike cops. The cops had hassled him a little about shoving the frat boys, but after they heard from various witnesses that Dumb and Dumber had started the altercation and had repeatedly accosted various women, they backed off.

The two college boys were on their way to face drunk-and-disorderly charges and the tourist’s injuries had been treated at the scene.

“I think we’re always in the right place at exactly the right time,” Kate said.

She hadn’t stopped looking at him with that soft light in her eyes, as if he were some kind of hero or something. He wanted to tell her to cut it out, that they were just a couple of drunk kids and he hadn’t done anything, but he would rather just see the whole thing dropped.

She picked up his hand where his fist had been scraped a little on the kid’s tooth in the altercation. “We’d better get this cleaned up. We should have had the paramedics look at it when they were helping Mr. Coletti. We can go back to the resort for my bag or I can see if the restaurant has a first-aid kit.”

“It’s fine, doc. Just a couple of scraped knuckles.”

“Humor me, okay? Human bite wounds can be nasty.”

She grabbed their waiter on his next go-round. A few moments later he brought a first-aid kit. Hunter stoically endured her fussing over him, washing off his knuckles and bandaging the worst scrape.

Not for all the world would he admit he secretly enjoyed her nurturing. It had been so long since he’d had this kind of softness and caring in his life, and he found himself soaking it up.

“There you go,” she said, rubbing a finger over one of his uninjured knuckles. “Good as new.”

Now if she could only do the same to his heart, but he was afraid it would never be the same.

They finished their remaining few bites of pie, then left a hefty tip for the waiter who had held their table for them during the street scene.

“Have you given any more thought to what you’re going to do when we return to Utah?” Kate asked as they walked up the beach toward their lodging.

Besides try to live in a dull, colorless world without her? He hadn’t managed to move beyond that. He shook his head. “Some. I haven’t figured anything out yet.”

“I think you should go back to being a cop.”

“Don’t you think I’ve been punished enough?”

She made a face at him. “It’s not a punishment. It was a joy for you. I know it was.”

He gazed at the moonlight shimmering on the water. “Maybe three years ago. That was a different lifetime ago. I was a different person.”

“I saw you tonight as you handled those drunks. You were perfect—not vicious, just firm. Exactly what a good cop does.”

“A good cop doesn’t punch a couple of drunk kids just for talking trash.”

“You didn’t. You shoved them a little but you didn’t throw the first punch. They did when they hit Mr. Coletti. You didn’t start it, you just ended it, which was exactly what needed to be done. Exactly what a good cop would do.”

Hunter was silent as Belle sniffed at a sand crab scuttling for something to eat. “A cop needs to know his brothers and sisters on the force have his back,” he said quietly. “Mine didn’t when I needed them most. I can’t go back to the Salt Lake Police Department.”

“So go somewhere else. The county sheriff’s department can always use deputies or one of the smaller incorporated areas in the valley would probably love to have someone with your experience. Or you can even go further afield. If you were willing to move out of Salt Lake County, I’m sure there are a hundred small communities in the state who would be eager to add a seasoned veteran to their departments. Who knows, you might even find you prefer small-town crime fighting.”

Hunter was stunned by the idea. He had been so consumed with anger at his department for not standing by him that he’d never even thought about moving to a different division.

“You also have an interesting perspective that most cops never get,” Kate went on when he said nothing. “You know what it’s like on the inside. I believe what happened to you—your wrongful conviction and imprisonment—would only make you a stronger detective, even more dedicated to finding justice. True justice, not just easy justice.”

Hunter stared out to sea as her suggestion seemed to settle inside himself. Definitely something to think about.

He had thought his days as a cop were over. He had grieved over it but hadn’t seen a way past his bitterness. He was angry at the system for failing him, but the bulk of his anger was against the officers and detectives he had worked with who had done a sloppy job investigating Dru’s murder. They had focused on the most obvious suspect—him—and ignored any leads that pointed in other directions.

For the first time since his release, he felt a tiny flicker of hope that maybe he could move on, do something worthwhile with the rest of his life.

“What about you?” he asked Kate. “Where do you see yourself settling when your residency is done? Will you come back to Florida?”

The breeze off the Gulf lifted her hair, caressed her skin as he would like to be doing right about now. “I’m not sure what I’ll do. I thought about returning to Central America for a while. There is so much work that needs to be done there. I don’t know. With Utah’s birthrate, there’s always a need for family doctors in the state, especially in those smaller towns I was talking about.”

“Cops and doctors can always find something to keep them busy, I suppose,” he said.

“Unfortunately, sick people and crime seem to be universal.”

“Well, wherever you decide to practice, your patients will be lucky to have you,” he said gruffly.

She stopped walking and he could see her eyes soften in the moonlight. “Sometimes you say the sweetest things,” she said. “Thank you.”

Before he could tell her he meant every word, she leaned on tiptoe and kissed him.

They stood there in the sand with only their mouths connected and Hunter felt something deep and elemental shift inside him.

“Anyway, I don’t want to think about the future or the past,” Kate murmured. “For tonight, can we just focus on right now?”

He pulled her into his arms.
Right now
was just about the best moment of his life so he wasn’t about to argue.

Chapter 13

T
wo days later, Kate woke sometime in the reverent hush before dawn. Outside the bedroom window, the sky was just beginning to lighten to a pale, silvery pink and the world seemed peaceful and still.

Hunter had pulled her to him sometime during the night and he slept on his side facing her, one arm casually flung across her rib cage.

With each breath, she could feel the soft brush of hair on his arms against her skin.

She could watch him sleep all day. At rest, he lost the hardness, the edginess, he wore as a shield against the world.

Really, when she thought about it, during this entire trip he had been lowering that protective shield inch by inch and letting the real Hunter out a little more.

These few days they had spent together in Key West had been so wonderful. It was as if all the dark shadows that had hovered around her since finding out about Charlotte McKinnon couldn’t pierce the bright sunshine of the Key.

For two days, they laughed and talked and kissed and she had watched with delight as Hunter truly began to relax, as if he were slowly waking from a long, terrible nightmare.

She wanted to stay here forever, wrapped in this quiet, elusive peace—tangled together with him while the world outside this tropical paradise ceased to exist.

If only things were that simple. She could feel the pressure of all she had left behind begin to crowd in on her again. She shifted her gaze to the ceiling fan overhead, its plump leaf-shaped blades spinning slowly.

She had to face her past today. She had put it off too long but time was running out. Both of them needed to return to Utah. She had to start the next rotation of her residency bright and early Christmas morning, and Hunter needed to begin the process of picking up the pieces of his life.

She sighed, her heart already constricting at the pain she knew waited for her there.

She wasn’t foolish enough to think they could remain in this idyllic bubble of passion and tenderness when they returned to the mountains and real life.

Hunter had given her no words of tenderness, had offered her nothing but the momentary comfort of his arms.

He was attracted to her, she had no doubt about that, and on some level he cared for her. She knew he did. But even when he made love to her, he kept a part of himself separate.

He didn’t love her. She couldn’t fool herself into thinking otherwise. No matter how she might wish it, she couldn’t turn what they shared here into some kind of sweet happily-ever-after.

Lost in her thoughts, she was startled when she suddenly felt a wet nose nudging at her. Belle stood on the other side of the bed, her eyes deep and mournful.

“You need to go out, honey?” she whispered. “Just a minute.”

Though she hated leaving this warm, soft bed, she slipped out of Hunter’s arms, holding her breath for fear she would wake him. A frown twisted those hard, lean features for a moment, then he rolled over.

Kate slipped on shorts and a T-shirt, found the pair of bright-purple flip-flops she had bought at a souvenir shop the day before and grabbed Belle’s leash.

The hard-partying nights on Key West tended to make early mornings quiet. She didn’t mind the lack of company at all as she and Belle walked down to the deserted beach. Kate enjoying the pale beginnings of sunrise while Belle marked her temporary territory then raced around for a while chasing the surf.

They walked until Belle’s tongue lolled out from running and she started looking thirsty.

Back at the cottage, Kate made as little noise as possible while she filled the dog’s water dish then carried it out to the porch.

She sat on the rocker, able to catch just a small glimpse of the surf through the lush growth.

“Next time, wake me up to take care of Belle.”

Startled by the sudden deep voice, she turned to find Hunter standing in the doorway. He wore only a pair of jeans, the top button undone, and his hair was tousled from sleep, but she had never seen a more gorgeous sight.

She swallowed and tried to rearrange her suddenly scattered thoughts. “I didn’t mind. I was up anyway. We took a little walk on the beach and watched the sunrise.”

“I was worried when I woke and found you gone, until I saw the empty crate and figured out Belle must have been bossing you around again.”

“She’s pretty good at getting her message across, isn’t she?”

He returned her smile briefly, then turned serious. “I only reserved two nights here, Kate, which means we’re supposed to check out today. I need to let the management know if we’re staying longer.”

She knew what he was asking. Though the sun was already climbing the sky, she was sure the morning suddenly seemed darker.

“It’s time,” she finally said. “Past time.”

“Are you sure?”

She wasn’t sure of anything except the inevitability of her heartbreak, but she forced herself to nod.

A strange light sparked in his eyes, one she couldn’t read. He stood in the doorway looking strong and masculine and gorgeous.

“You won’t be alone. I’ll be right there with you.”

She tried to smile. “I know.”

He moved out onto the porch and pulled her to her feet and against that hard, wonderful chest. “We don’t have to go yet,” he murmured. “We still have a few hours.”

She lifted her mouth for his kiss. The shadows could wait while they stayed in paradise a little longer.

For all her bravado earlier in the morning, Hunter could see Kate’s nerves were stretched as thin as a strand of hair. She sat beside him with her hands folded tightly in her lap and her shoulders stiff as he drove the short distance from their bungalow to the Key West Terrace long-term care facility.

The building overlooked the Atlantic and was white brick with terra-cotta roof tiles and a blooming tropical garden out front that gave it the look of a Mediterranean villa.

Though it was broad daylight, he could see holiday lights strung across the small gated yard. Inside, poinsettias in bright gold pots were arranged in a cone shape approximating a Christmas tree.

The tanned, perky young receptionist behind the glass information booth registered surprise when Kate asked for Brenda Golightly’s room, as if not very many people asked that particular question.

“Are you friends or family?” she asked in a syrupy southern accent.

Kate seemed frozen by the question. She didn’t answer, only gave him an anguished look that sliced at him worse than any prison shiv.

He stepped forward, his best charming-cop smile in place. “Something like that,” he said.

The receptionist preened a little, like a turtledove. “Well, Ms. Golightly will be absolutely
thrilled
at the company, I’m sure. She’s in the north wing, room 134. Just take the hallway to the left of the elevators. Follow that hall as far as it goes and Ms. Golightly’s room is on the right. You can’t miss it.”

The halls had more holiday decorations, garlands of looped green and red paper, a smiling plastic Santa Claus pulling a sleigh and eight reindeer, and even a life-size poster of the Grinch.

Kate didn’t appear to notice anything about their surroundings. The closer they walked to room 134, the more her color faded, until he was afraid she would disappear against the whitewashed walls.

He stopped outside a plain wood door devoid of ornamentation. “You don’t have to put yourself through this, Kate. I can go in and interview her alone.”

She seemed to steel her shoulders like a soldier heading into a firefight. “No. I appreciate the offer but I have to be there. I have to face her. After all these years, I
have
to.”

Watching her battle her own fears was humbling and made him grieve for a blond little girl stolen from all she knew and thrust into a world where she knew no peace.

“Have I told you I think you’re one of the strongest women I’ve ever met?” he asked, his voice low.

Her mouth parted a little in surprise but then he saw gratitude blossom in her eyes.

His words seemed to steady her, calm her. She drew in a deep breath and pushed open the door.

In contrast to the holiday gaiety in the hallway outside, room 134 was spartan, cheerless. His grandmother Bradshaw had spent the last year of her life in a nursing home. She’d died when he was in his early teens, but he remembered her room as an extension of the prissy, orderly house she had lived in before, with frilly doilies on the bedside table, lacy curtains and her favorite oil painting of a mountain sunset.

This room was like dozens of other hospital rooms he had seen in his life. Sterile, bland, and wholly lacking in personality.

A single bed with nobby blue institutional bedding dominated the room. A TV mounted high on the wall was playing a soap opera and the room smelled of antiseptic and the faint ammonia of urine.

The bed was empty. He wondered if they had come to the wrong room until he saw Kate’s attention was focused on the window, where he now realized a woman sat in a wheelchair staring out.

She had dirty-blond hair with glaring bald patches. It wasn’t unkempt, just long and unstyled. An oxygen line tethered her from a nasal cannula to the wall and she wore a sweat suit the color of kiwi fruit.

As he looked closer, he saw a face worn down by the grim ravages of time and a harsh life. She had a two-inch scar on her chin, a quarter-size pockmark on the other and she was missing a tooth.

There was a blankness to her features, an emptiness, and Hunter’s heart sank.

Kate’s brother was right, this was likely a wasted trip. How could this pitiful creature tell them anything?

Kate’s eyes, blue and stormy, gave away some of her tumult as she stared at the faded shell of the woman she had both loved and hated. He saw she had reached the same grim conclusion he had—that their mission was doomed to failure—but still she drew a deep breath and walked into the room.

If he hadn’t already loved her, he would have tumbled at that moment, hard and fast.

“Hello.” Kate walked in and sat in one of the vinyl armchairs near the wheelchair.

Brenda Golightly narrowed her eyes then blinked rapidly several times as if coming awake from a long sleep. “Do I know you? I don’t think I know you. Are you a new nurse? I don’t like new nurses. Jane is my favorite nurse. She brings me extra pudding. Do you like pudding? I like pudding.”

For all its singsong pitch, her voice was rough and raspy—from the oxygen or from her life choices, Hunter couldn’t tell. Her speech was slightly slurred, rounded a little at the vowels.

At least she was verbal, he thought wryly, as she went on for several moments longer about her favorite kind of pudding.

He was certainly no developmental expert but she seemed more like a child of seven or eight than a woman in her fifties. He found it rather disconcerting to hear inane, innocent chatter from someone who looked so world-weary and hardened.

After a moment, Kate put a hand on Brenda’s knee to distract her from her soliloquy. “I’m not a new nurse. I…it’s me. Kate. Katie.”

At first, Hunter didn’t see any visible reaction on Brenda’s features and he wondered if she had even heard the words, then Brenda gave Kate a furtive, wary look out of the corner of her gaze.

After a moment, she gave a sharp, raspy laugh. “You’re not
my
Katie! My Katie is little! You’re all grown up.”

Kate knotted her fingers together, obviously disconcerted.

“No.” She cleared her throat, her eyes so distressed Hunter wanted to bundle her up and carry her out of here. “It’s me, M-Mama. Katie.”

Brenda smiled at something Hunter couldn’t see. “I have a little girl named Katie. She’s so pretty. Her hair is blonde like yours, but she’s just a little girl. She likes pudding too. She has a doll named Barbara. Her doll has brown hair and freckles. I wish I had a doll named Barbara. Do you have any dolls?”

“Um, not anymore.” Kate’s attempt at a smile just about broke his heart. He couldn’t stand the defeated devastation he saw in her eyes as she listened to Brenda and absorbed the true extent of her brain injury.

He saw all her hope for answers slip away like her childhood and he knew he couldn’t sit by and watch it go.

He pasted on a smile he was far from feeling and stepped toward the two women, pulling a second armchair over to them.

“Hi, Brenda. I’m Hunter.”

She studied him solemnly but said nothing. As he tried to formulate a strategy for questioning her, he noticed a couple of crayon drawings taped near the bed. Simple pictures of flowers and houses and trees, but he saw one that looked like a little girl with blond curly hair.

“Do you have any pictures of your little girl?”

He thought for a moment she wasn’t going to answer him, then Brenda nodded. “I drew some.”

He pointed toward the pictures by the bed. “Is that one?”

Her reserve melted like an ice-cream cone under the hot tropical sun and she nodded more vigorously.

“It’s nice,” he said.

“I have more. Do you want to see?”

“Sure.”

She pointed him toward a drawer in the bedside table. He opened it and stared at the contents. Stacks and stacks of drawings showed the same little girl in a pink dress with yellow-crayon hair and huge blue eyes.

He took a few out and showed them to Kate, who looked stunned and baffled.

“These are very good.”

“Told you she was pretty.”

“You were right. Brenda, where is Katie?”

“Right there, in the pictures.”

“No, where’s the real Katie?” he asked gently.

Brenda blinked at him again then her eyes suddenly filled up with tears. “Gone. She’s gone.”

“Where?”

“They took her. It’s not fair. They took her.”

“Who took her?”

“The bad people. They said I wasn’t a good mama but I was. I was!” The tears vanished as quickly as they had come. “I took care of her. I brushed her hair. I gave her animal crackers and dressed her in pretty pink clothes. I was a good mama but they took her and hid her from me.”

Her eyes darted to his with a sly, sidelong look. “But I showed them. They hid her from me but I was smart and I found her. I found her and I stole her back.”