Never Too Late (9 page)

“Just wondering. Trying to figure everything out. I like to have all the pieces of the puzzle in front of me so I can see how they fit. I guess it’s the detective in me.”

He thought for a moment she wasn’t going to answer him. She took a deep, steadying breath, the fingers of her left hand clenched on the armrest. He couldn’t see her eyes behind her sunglasses but he thought he could guess at the emotions in them. Remembering her past obviously wasn’t a gleeful skip down memory lane.

“Seven. I was seven years old.”

“You spent four years with her then, after you were kidnapped from the McKinnons’ front yard.”

“Right.” Her voice was terse.

“Why then, do you think? Why keep you only four years?”

“It wasn’t like she made some kind of conscious choice in the matter. She went on a three-day bender and left me alone in a motel room with no food or running water. After two days when I couldn’t bear the hunger pains anymore, I finally ventured out looking for something to eat. A cop found me rooting through a garbage can outside a doughnut shop.”

Hunter’s own stomach twisted at the cool, almost clinical way she described what must have been a terrifying childhood, full of hunger and fear and uncertainty.

“It was a stupid mistake,” she went on in that same eerily calm voice. “I knew better than to go anywhere near a cop hangout. Brenda taught me early to avoid cops and social workers and anybody else who might ask too many questions. When I grew old enough to figure out that wasn’t normal behavior, I just thought it was just because of our transient lifestyle. But knowing what I do now, I can’t help thinking there was likely a more sinister explanation. She was probably afraid of someone finding out about Charlotte McKinnon being kidnapped and somehow link the two of us together.”

She spoke about her true identity as if Charlotte McKinnon was a completely different person. He supposed in a way, she was.

“What happened after you were removed from her custody?”

She shrugged and adjusted her sunglasses higher on her nose. “Foster care. I moved around a lot at first. Nine placements in five years.”

His own childhood hadn’t exactly been easy, but he couldn’t imagine what it would have been like never knowing stability. Even when his mother was at her worst shortly before her death, he always knew he had a home. The same four walls, the same bedroom furniture, the same grandfather clock ticking away in the hallway.

The Judge had been a harsh, autocratic father in many ways, but Hunter had never doubted his father loved him, even if that love had been more controlling than kind most of the time.

He couldn’t imagine being seven years old, living with strangers, shuffled from place to place.

“Why so many?”

“My fault, mostly. I was confused, angry. Unmanageable. I guess you could say I didn’t play well with others.”

“Why not?”

“What did I know about other kids? Brenda always kept me away from anybody close to my own age. I didn’t have any friends and of course I never went to school.”

“At all?”

She shook her head. “Teachers and principals tend to ask nosy questions. We were never in one place long enough for school officials to come after us and drag me to class. So there I was a seven-year-old kindergartner. Luckily I’d taught myself to read—cereal boxes, mostly. The Kellogg Corporation was responsible for most of my nutrition during those years. Thank the Lord for fortified cereal.”

“You must have caught up, education-wise. You’re only, what, twenty-six, and you’ve already finished med school.”

“I skipped a couple grades later and finished my under-grad work in three years. Those first few years after I was removed from Brenda’s custody were tough, though. I had no idea how to interact socially with others. I lied, I stole from my foster parents, I beat up other kids at school and at home. And that was on my good days.”

He couldn’t quite swallow the idea of delicate, lovely Kate Spencer battling it out on the schoolground.

“Hey, don’t laugh,” she said at the amused look he sent her. “I was a tough little scrapper. I made up for what I didn’t have in size in sheer evil ingenuity. One time I was mad at a foster mom for making me pitch in and help with laundry so I gleefully emptied a whole gallon of bleach on four baskets of clean clothes. That little tantrum of mine ruined just about every stitch of clothing in the house. Not a pretty sight. I was out of there by dinnertime.”

“You were in pain and children in pain lash out.”

“Oh, I lashed out with a vengeance.” Her features softened. “Finally when I was twelve I got lucky. I was placed with Tom and Maryanne Spencer. They were an older couple who never had any children of their own. I was the third foster child they had taken in. The other two were both in college when they accepted me.”

“They were good to you?”

Her smile was soft, tender, and gave her such an air of fragile beauty that Hunter had to remind himself to keep his eyes on the road. What he really wanted to do was bask in the glow of that smile, even if it wasn’t directed at him.

“Wonderful. Maryanne is the most gentle, patient woman I’ve ever known. No matter how hard I scratched and clawed and fought to keep them away, she always returned my anger with love. And Tom’s a doctor. Family medicine.”

“That where you got the bug?”

“Yeah. I guess so. Whenever I had a day off from school, he would take me to his practice with him to file paperwork or stock supplies. The summer before my senior year in high school he took me on a three-week medical mission to central America. It was an incredible experience to watch this humble, unassuming man change people’s lives. I watched the rapport he had with his patients, both in Central America and in his regular practice, and knew I wanted to be just like him someday.”

“Looks like you’re on your way.”

She shook her head. “I have a long journey ahead of me if I want to follow in the footsteps of Tom Spencer.”

“They must be proud of you. Taylor told me you went on your own medical trip to Guatemala last month.”

“Whatever I’ve become, I owe to them. I don’t know where I would have ended up if not for them. Probably just like Brenda—an addict on the streets. They saved me.”

She didn’t give herself nearly enough credit, he thought. All the best intentions in the world mean nothing if they don’t find receptive ground to take root.

Despite the insecurity and trauma of those years with Brenda Golightly and her first few years in foster care, Kate had become a remarkable woman. He wanted to say so but the words clogged in his throat.

“You still keep in touch with the Spencers?” he asked instead.

“Oh, yes. We e-mail all the time and I go back to St. Petersburg as often as possible. I spent Thanksgiving with them a year ago but I haven’t been able to schedule another visit in a while.”

“Maybe if we have time, we could stop on the way back through.”

She lowered her sunglasses for just a moment but the delight in her eyes sent warmth trickling through him.

“That would be great!”

He was in trouble, Hunter thought as they once more lapsed into silence. Deep, deep trouble. Every moment he spent with her not only added fuel to the fire of his growing desire for her but made him think all kinds of tender thoughts he had no business entertaining.

She had been through enough in her life. She didn’t need the added complication of a bitter ex-con who had no idea where he fit into the world anymore.

To her relief, her few answers about her history seemed to satisfy Hunter’s sudden curiosity. He turned his attention back to the road and the easy, rolling hills of West Texas. After a while she pulled out her brother’s book again.

She was having a harder time focusing today. Despite Wyatt’s intricately crafted story, the words seemed to blur on the page and she couldn’t seem to concentrate. Images from the past seemed to crowd everything else out and she once more felt like that skinny, frightened seven-year-old with an empty stomach and a two-day-old bear claw in her hand, facing down that bald, fatherly looking cop.

What she had told him was ugly enough but she wondered what Hunter would say if he knew she had whitewashed some of it.

She hated thinking about that time in her life before she went to live with the Spencers.

Kate was sure all the well-meaning social workers thought they were rescuing her from a horrible fate when they took her from Brenda Golightly. She had no doubt they were, but some of the situations she had been thrust into during those first five years in foster care had only been slightly less terrible.

Ugly things could happen to a young girl with few social defenses, things that made her feel sick inside to remember.

In her first foster home, a fourteen-year-old sexual predator-in-training had seen a frightened little girl as a convenient victim.

The first few times he touched her, she had been too stunned and sickened and too afraid to do anything to defend herself. The next time he came to her room, she had been ready for him with a kitchen knife she had carefully hidden in the folds of her nightgown when she went into the kitchen for one last glass of water before bed.

When the little bastard tried his funny stuff again, she had pulled the knife out from beneath her pillow and stabbed him in the leg. She hadn’t been strong enough to shove the blade in very deep but he had screamed and cried and bled all over her room until his parents came running to the rescue.

Nobody believed her version of events, of course. Why should they? She was just the white-trash troublemaking kid of a junkie who attacked an innocent boy without provocation.

After that, she was labeled a Problem Child. And she had done her best to live up to that reputation. She became suspicious, wild, angry, rejecting anybody who tried to reach out to her.

The Spencers had been her final chance, the last-ditch whistlestop before she was shipped to juvenile detention. She fought their efforts to help her as hard as she had everyone else but they never gave up.

For a long time, she thought she deserved everything that had happened to her. The abuse, the beatings, the vicious cruelties that children—and sometimes adults—show to anyone weaker than they are.

As far as she knew, she was Katie Golightly, the bastard kid of a junkie and a whore who had basically thrown her away.

After she finally came to trust the Spencers, counseling had helped her shake off that victim mentality. She had worked hard to put those dark, ugly years behind her, to see herself as more than the sum of where she had come from because that was the way the Spencers saw her.

She wasn’t sure even the best counseling in the world would help her now.

Her anger was like sulfuric acid eating away at the edges of everything she had worked so hard to become. She had lived through hell not because she’d been born to it but because someone had stolen her away from something else and thrust her into it.

If not for Brenda, she would never have been scavenging through Dumpsters or fighting off fourteen-year-old perverts with a kitchen knife. She would have been safe, happy, loved, living a far different life with the McKinnons.

She couldn’t seem to get that image out of her head of a loving father and mother and two older brothers she knew would have fought to the death to protect her.

Brenda had taken all of that from her. Family vacations and Christmas mornings and Fourth of July picnics. She had taken an innocent little girl from her happy life and shoved her into a nightmare, and, damn it, Kate wanted to know why. She
had
to know why.

Maybe then she could finally put that past behind her and move forward.

Chapter 8

R
ain found them in Oklahoma and followed them across Arkansas where they had stopped for the night, and now to northern Mississippi.

Kate didn’t mind. She found the steady, hypnotic rhythm of the windshield wipers and the rain sluicing under their tires soothing, relaxing. It was almost cozy driving along through the rain, safe and warm in their car with B. B. King and Buddy Guy wailing out the blues on the stereo.

“Good choice,” Hunter had said when she’d dug through her CD collection for her favorite bluesmen that morning when they’d passed the Arkansas state line an hour or so earlier.

“We have to listen to the blues in Mississippi. I think it’s the law.”

“If it’s not, it should be,” he had answered. She could swear he had almost let loose with a smile that time, but he’d poker-faced it before she could be sure.

He smelled wonderful, as usual—soap and expensive aftershave and just-washed male. In the close confines of the SUV, she couldn’t take a breath without inhaling the scent of him. She found it erotic and disturbing at the same time.

What would he do if she closed her eyes for the next few hours, just listening to the rain and the music and filling her senses with his smell?

Oh Kate. What a fine mess you’ve gotten yourself into
.

The ultimate goal of this trip was certainly something she wanted, to make her peace with what had happened to her, or at least to gain understanding. As she had feared, though, she was discovering an unfortunate side effect.

Hunter.

More precisely, her feelings for him.

For all of the five years she had known him, Hunter had been making her pulse skip and her insides quiver. Though she knew it was hopeless—and embarrassing, when it came right down to it—she had long ago accepted the fact that she had a powerful crush on the man.

Now, after more than two days of being with him constantly, she had finally faced the grim, inevitable truth. Her feelings for Hunter Bradshaw ran much deeper than a simple crush.

If she wasn’t careful, she would find herself headlong, foolishly in love with the man.

That would be disastrous, she knew. All she would get from him would be a shattered heart. Though there might be some physical attraction stirring between them—and she still wasn’t sure whether that had only been one-sided—that was as far as things went.

If anything, her revelations the day before about her life in foster care seemed to have given him a definite disgust of her. After they had talked about her history, he’d said little throughout the afternoon and evening, and had barely made eye contact with her when they’d stopped at a motel off the freeway in Little Rock close to midnight.

She was only glad she hadn’t told him the whole of it.

Kate tried not to let his reaction hurt, but she wasn’t succeeding very well. With every centimeter he withdrew further into himself, tiny sharp barbs lodged under her skin.

A big baby, that’s what you are,
she chided herself.
The man is doing you a huge favor. He doesn’t need you making a fool of yourself over him.

Still, as they drove southeast across northern Mississippi with rain clicking against the windshield, she listened to B.B.’s mournful guitar and you-treat-me-bad songs and thought she could write a few pretty decent blues songs of her own right about now.

“Belle is probably ready for a run to work off her breakfast,” Hunter said after only a few hours on the road. “Thought I’d stop in Tupelo for gas.”

“Great. I need to stretch my legs too. At least the rain looks like it’s letting up.”

By the time they took the exit east of town, the rain had slowed to a drizzle, then stopped altogether.

Hunter pulled up to the pump at a busy truck stop. Really busy, Kate thought. The convenience store inside was full of people, about twenty or so. She wondered at it until she saw a Greyhound bus pulled up to one of the diesel pumps on the other side of the building.

By now, she knew the drill. He started to fill up the tank while she opened the cargo door, hooked the leash on the dog and let her out of her crate.

Hunter scanned the bustle of activity inside. “There might be a wait if you need to use the restroom.”

“I’m good. I’ll just take Belle for a little walk around the block. We’ll be back in a minute.”

“Be careful. It looks like a safe enough neighborhood, but you never know.”

She mustered a smile. “I’ll keep my guard up, Detective.”

She was warmed by his concern, even though she knew he was the kind of man who would show that same solicitude to anyone. Tempting as it was, she couldn’t let herself read anything more into it.

She walked away from the truck stop and took off down a small cluster of businesses. The air was cool and misty, but she didn’t mind. Compared to the bone-numbing cold of the Utah December they had left, she found this milder weather refreshing.

Belle kept up a fast clip as they walked through the largely industrial area. Kate didn’t mind that either—her cramped muscles welcomed the activity. Maybe a little vigorous exercise would take her mind off the futility of her feelings for Hunter.

A few more days, she thought. They would probably reach Miami late that night or the next morning. If all went well, they would find Brenda quickly, shake some answers out of her and then be back in Utah by the end of the week.

She would be ready for her next rotation, Hunter would figure out what he wanted to do with the rest of his life, and their paths would probably rarely intersect, only through their connections to Taylor and Wyatt.

Her hand tightened on the leash and she forced herself to keep walking, even though she suddenly wanted to stop and have a good cry.

When they were about half a block from the truck stop, Belle suddenly spied a convenient tree at the mouth of an alley. As Kate slowed to wait for the dog to mark territory she would likely never see again, she heard voices and saw a trio of people standing a dozen yards away.

An older black man was deep in conversation with a couple of white boys who looked to be about fifteen.

She raised a hand in greeting and was about to say a polite good morning when Hunter’s words echoed in her mind.
Be careful
. Something didn’t sit right about the scene. She couldn’t quite put a finger on what—maybe just a subtle vibrating tension in the air.

The three hadn’t noticed her yet. She was going to keep on walking when Belle suddenly growled low in her throat, something so rare for the dog that for a moment Kate could only stare.

She shifted her gaze back to the group down the alley at the same moment the sun found a thin spot in the heavy layer of dank gray clouds. A shaft of light caught on the men and flashed off something silvery in one of the boy’s hands.

A knife! One of the boys was holding it close to the man’s side!

Kate caught her breath; her fingers tangled in Belle’s leash. Every instinct urged her just to keep walking. This was not her business and the last thing she needed right now was to jump into the middle of somebody else’s trouble. She had plenty of her own to deal with.

Even as she thought it, she knew she couldn’t walk away. Two young, muscled, shaved-head little punks against one frail old man just wasn’t fair, and the tough little scrapper she’d been at seven urged her to help even up the odds.

The smaller teen must have heard Belle’s growl. He turned, a triple row of earrings swaying in his ear. He looked tough and wiry, with a pierced lip and a jagged scar above one eyebrow.

He nudged the other boy—the one with the knife—who shifted his gaze from the old man to her, his eyes small and mean.

Unlike his companion, this one had no earrings or scars, but a tattoo of a hissing snake slithered up his neck, the forked tongue licking his jawbone.

They both looked rough and scary, though she saw they were heartbreakingly young, maybe only fourteen or fifteen.

For just a moment, Kate stood in the alley, her nerves buzzing and her mind working frantically to come up with a plan. She had to do something and fast, so she went with the first thing that came to her.

“There you are!” She stepped into the alley, dragging a bristling Belle along with her. “Where have you been?”

As she continued moving toward them, all three males looked at her as if fireworks had just started shooting out of the top of her head.

“We’ve been looking everywhere for you!”

She reached for the elderly man’s elbow as if he were her best friend. He was bony and slight and she wanted to punch both of these little punks for terrorizing an old man.

“Come on, let’s get some lunch,” she said to the stranger. “You know how your blood sugar dips if you don’t eat on a regular schedule.”

The man frowned in her direction though his eyes didn’t make contact with hers. As soon as he stepped away from the building with a baffled kind of look, she realized why. In the heat of the moment, she had missed the white-tipped cane resting at his feet.

He was blind!

All the more reason to intervene. What kind of evil spawn preyed on a blind man? She reached for the cane, shaking with the urge to whack these two young delinquents over the head with it.

One of the teens—Snake Boy—slid a combat boot over the cane so she couldn’t pick it up. “Stay out of this, lady. This ain’t none of your business.”

“What isn’t? I’m just here to take my friend back to the car.”

“Don’t try to play us, bitch. He ain’t your friend. He walked off the Greyhound, same as we did. You weren’t nowhere on there.” His cold eyes scoured her from head to toe, a suddenly dangerous light in them. “Believe me, I’d a noticed a li’l hot thing like you.”

Now what? Even as adrenaline pumped through her, her mind felt slow and dull. “Um, we were meeting up here to take him with us the rest of the way. Come on, Grandpa.”

The two punks seemed to think that was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. “Here that, old man?” Snake Boy said. “This little white girl says you’re her grandpa.”

“Hi honey.” The blind man smiled in her direction. “I was wondering when you’d get here.”

Charmed by him and grateful he was willing to play along, Kate smiled even though she knew he couldn’t see it. She tucked his arm firmly in hers. “I’m right here. Now let’s go on and get some lunch. I know how you love that chicken-fried steak they serve at our special place.”

She started to drag him toward the street, hoping sheer cojones would get them out of the alley, but the boys weren’t having any of it.

The twitchy little one stepped forward and grabbed the man’s other arm. He produced a knife of his own and Kate’s heart sank.

She had an awful feeling that two tough punks with knives against a woman, a dog and a blind man wasn’t a scenario that was likely going to end happily.

“You ain’t going anywhere, Grandpa, until you hand over that roll we saw you flashin’ around back there.”

“Okay. Okay. I’ll give you what you want. Just don’t hurt the young lady here.”

“You ain’t calling the shots here, Grandpa. We’re the ones with the pig stickers.” As if to emphasize his point, Snake Boy started to grab for Kate.

Kate wasn’t exactly sure what happened next. Belle barked, protective of her, as Kate tried to wrench her arm out of the punk’s grasp. In the confusion, the elderly gentleman stumbled a little—right into the nervous boy holding the knife.

He grunted with pain then staggered and fell to the ground. Kate took a lurching step forward, a strangled cry in her throat and her hold on the leash going slack.

Belle took advantage of her newfound freedom and escaped the thick tension between humans, running out of the alley with her leash trailing behind her like the tail of a comet.

Panic spurted through Kate as she rushed to the fallen man but she did her best to push it away. She had to keep a level head. One of the first lessons in med school was how to stay calm in a crisis.

The kid holding the bloody knife looked like he was about to cry. “Damn! I didn’t mean to stick the old dude! He fell right into my knife.”

“His own frigging fault.” Snake Boy scratched his tattoo, his eyes cold. “If he’d a just handed over his stash, everything would have been cool.”

She would have expected them to take off but they loitered there in the alley as if not quite sure what direction to run, while she assessed the man’s injuries.

Kate pulled the elderly man’s crisp blue dress shirt from his slacks and lifted it free of the wound, a two-inch puncture just below his rib cage. She had just finished her rotation in the emergency room of a level-one trauma center. Stab wounds had been an everyday occurrence and this one looked cleaner than most.

The old man grimaced as she probed the wound. To her relief, it looked as if the knife had glanced off the rib.

She didn’t think he would have any internal injuries, but the wound was bleeding copiously.

“Kid made a mess of my best suit,” the man said in a disgusted voice. “I’m probably bleeding all over it, aren’t I?”

“We want to help you keep as much of your blood as possible inside, for your sake and for your suit’s. I’ll do my best to keep the damage to a minimum,” she promised.

“One of you will have to go for help,” she told the teens. “We need an ambulance to take Mr….” She stopped, realizing she didn’t know the man’s name. “To take my grandpa here to the hospital.”

Snake Boy raised an eyebrow. “You can forget that, lady. We’re out of here.”

“You might want to reconsider that.”

The deep voice from the alley’s mouth was the most welcome sound in the world. She looked up from applying a makeshift pressure bandage from her sweater to find Hunter standing there, Belle right behind him.
Good girl,
she thought.
Way to go for reinforcements.

As the cavalry, Hunter was perfect. He had never seemed so big, so mean, so dangerous.

“Screw this.” Snake Boy didn’t look intimidated. “Come on, Juice.”

Hunter moved farther into the alley and, for the first time, Kate noticed he carried a gun.