Shattered (16 page)

"You look--tired. I'll be--fine here. Really."

Martha's short white hair fanned out against the pillow like a bird's ruffled feathers. Her paper-thin skin seemed to have developed a myriad of new wrinkles overnight. Her eyes as they met Lisa's were red-rimmed and puffy, and had a disoriented look to them that Lisa found alarming.

"You know I'm not going to leave you."

"Annalisa." Martha managed a small smile. "I'm so--glad--you came home. When you were gone--I missed you--so much."

"I missed you, too," Lisa said softly, her heart aching. She'd been so young and self-involved when she went away to college that she had never even considered what it might have cost her mother to simply smile and let her go. Now that she'd grown up enough to realize this, she wished with all her heart she could go back through time and call more, visit more, come back sooner. But there was no changing the past; all she could do was be here for her mother now.

A quick knock on the open door made her look around in time to see a balding, fortyish man in a white lab coat step into the room. Nodding briskly at Lisa, he moved to her mother's bedside.

"Hello, Mrs. Grant, I'm Dr. Metz, Dr. Spencer's associate. Let's take a look at you."

Dr. Spencer was her mother's regular physician. "Where's Dr. Spencer?" Lisa asked.

"He's on vacation. He'll be back on Monday."

When the brief examination was over, her mother closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and seemed to fall almost instantly asleep. With a worried look at her, Lisa rose and followed the doctor out into the hall. They stopped in the busy corridor, and as hospital life went on around them Lisa regarded him anxiously.

"How is she?"

He shook his head. "We're still running tests. We won't know for sure until some of the results come back."

"She doesn't seem to be thinking clearly. Half the time she doesn't know where she is or remember that our house burned last night."

"Some confusion is probably normal under the circumstances. She suffered a trauma when your house caught fire, and then there's the ALS, which is complicating the diagnosis a little bit. My best guess is that last night she suffered a transient ischemic event"--Lisa looked at him questioningly--"basically a small stroke, which would account for her lapsing into unconsciousness at the scene and her confusion today. I'll be able to tell you more when the test results come back."

"And that will be?"

"Later today, possibly, for some of them. Others may take a little longer."

The cell phone in Lisa's pocket went off. It was her phone, which fortunately she had left in the workout room the night before, allowing it to survive the fire. Robin had brought it to her at the hospital, and Lisa had been so glad to see it that she had almost cried. So much else had been lost that it had suddenly seemed as precious as a recovered treasure. While she fished for it, Dr. Metz, giving her another nod, took the opportunity to escape. Of course he must be a busy man, with lots of patients to see, but she didn't feel that she knew much more than she had when he'd come into her mother's room. Certainly she didn't feel reassured.

"It's the Rink," the caller identified himself when Lisa, frowning after Dr. Metz with some frustration, said hello. "Uh, I gotta ask you something: Did you make off with that file we were looking at yesterday? The one where you're, like, the victim's twin?"

Lisa grimaced.
Busted so soon.
"Yeah, I did."

"Thought so." Rinko sounded relieved. "When I got to work this morning and it wasn't here, I freaked for a minute. Looked everywhere. Then it occurred that you might have taken it home to look at it some more. No biggie. Although you probably ought to be getting it back in here."

"Yeah, it is a biggie." Lisa leaned back against the wall and sighed. "Our house burned last night. I'm afraid the file burned, too."

"Oh, man." Rinko was silent for a moment, as if to let the news sink in. "I'm sorry about your house."

"Thanks."

Glancing up, she discovered Scott walking down the hall toward her, looking tall, broad-shouldered, handsome, and very much the big-shot DA in a navy suit, white shirt, and red power tie. He'd left the hospital at about three a.m. shortly after she'd been pronounced fine but not before telling her to take as many days off as she needed to deal with what had happened. Now, for whatever reason, he was back. As her eyes fastened on him, Lisa felt an instantaneous tingle of sexual awareness followed by a warm little glow that roughly translated to
Hey, I'm really glad to see you.
This was the first time she'd ever felt that particular combination of reactions to his presence, and they came as a not-unpleasant surprise.

Then she saw that he wasn't alone. In full lawyer mode--black skirt suit and pumps, blond hair pulled back, carrying a briefcase--Kane was with him, saying something to him, nodding earnestly at his reply. There was another suit-clad lawyer with them, too, a man--thirtyish, thin, glasses. Hendricks, that was his name. Like Kane, he was an ADA. As Lisa watched, Scott said something to his companions and made a "give me a minute" gesture. As the two of them obediently stopped with the obvious purpose of waiting for him out of earshot, he continued to stride toward her.

In that instant while she watched him walking toward her, an image flashed into her mind: Scott bare to the waist, as he had been last night after he had whipped off his shirt so that she could wear it to the hospital. At the time, she'd been too preoccupied to do more than subconsciously register the sight. Now she remembered vividly how muscular his shoulders were, and that his arms were as big and brawny as if he continued to do a lot of physical labor--or, alternatively, worked out. His chest was wide, with a wedge of dark brown hair and well-developed pecs that gave way to flat abs. It tapered down in a classic V to narrow hips, where his pants had interrupted the view.

She'd seen him bare-chested before--fairly frequently, actually--when they'd been kids. But there was a difference: Now he was a full-grown man.

Their gazes met. Lisa's pulse, which was primed to quicken, wasn't put to the trouble.

Ouch,
she thought.
Reality bites.

Whatever she might have thought she'd seen in his eyes for her last night was nowhere in evidence as she met them today. There was nothing personal in his expression at all. In fact, he looked like his usual maddening self again, hard and purposeful, all business, every inch the successful lawyer and her boss. If he was, as she'd so briefly enjoyed imagining, lusting for her body, he gave no indication of it now.

Clutching the phone tighter, she gave him a cool look in r etaliation.

"Um, Buchanan's here," she said in a lowered voice to Rinko. "I'm going to have to go."

"Oh, crap. Well, if it helps, you can tell him that we already uploaded everything that was in that file. All that was lost was . . ."

"The original documents," Lisa finished for him in a dry undertone as Scott reached her. Then, louder, she said, "Thanks. You're a prince."

"Who's a prince?" Scott asked as she disconnected. His gaze slid over her, and his impatient look was leavened by a flash of amusement. "Like the T-shirt."

She was suddenly conscious that without makeup and with her hair knotted into a haphazard bun at her nape, she was looking something less than her best. The reason she was conscious of it wasn't so much Scott, who'd seen her just about every which way there was to see her many times before this, but Kane, who from her spot some two doors away was eyeing her up and down. With dislike. That's when the other shoe dropped: The reason Kane was so consistently hateful to her was because of Scott.

Of course.

Obviously Kane had a thing for him. Interesting to realize that she felt Lisa might be a threat to that. Less interesting to acknowledge was her own instinctive spurt of antagonism toward Kane.

So, what does that tell you?

The short answer was: Nothing she cared to think about at the moment.

Strictly for Kane's sake, Lisa summoned a warm smile for Scott.

"Thanks. And the prince is Alan Rinko. He's a law student, and he's been working for you in Siberia since May."

Scott's brows rose. "Siberia?"

"Where you sent me yesterday. The basement, to sort through the cold-case files. Everybody in the office calls it Siberia, because you banish people to it when you're mad at them."

"First time I've ever heard it called that."

"I'm not surprised." Her voice turned tart. "They're all too afraid of you to say it to your face."

"What? That's not true."

"Want to bet? For your information, Mr. Boss Man, the whole office tiptoes around on eggshells when you're in a bad mood. Which the word is you have been quite a bit lately."

"Who says?" He sounded faintly defensive.

"Think I'm going to start naming names? No way."

"If you're not naming names, Princess, it's because it's not true."

"Believe what you want. And don't call me Princess." She gave him a blistering look, then shook her head and gave up. "So, what's happening with your dad? Did you get him out of jail yet?"

"I got him a lawyer, and I'm staying out of it. Listen, I don't have time for chitchat. I'm on my way to a meeting. We've got an informant who's apparently ready to spill his guts on McDonnell and Coley." As everyone in the office knew, McDonnell, a prominent local businessman, was under investigation for bribing Circuit Court Judge Arthur Coley to return a favorable ruling in a case involving McDonnell's divorce. It had the potential to be a very big, and very messy, case. "I just came by to give you some news."

"What news? No, wait, there's something I have to tell you first." Determined to put her transgression behind her, she wanted to get it out there and over with. "There was a cold-case file I came across yesterday that interested me. I took it home last night. Um, I'm afraid it probably burned in the fire."

His face tightened. If she hadn't known him so well, she thought, she probably would have started quaking in her boots about then, because he looked displeased, to say the very least.

"There's a rule about taking cold-case files out of the building."

"I know."

"You did it anyway." It wasn't a question.

"Yes."

"You get permission from anybody? Sign it out? Anything like that?"

"No."

"You know anybody caught taking cold-case files out of the building without permission is subject to being fired, right?"

"So, are you going to fire me?"

He hesitated, then looked disgusted. "What, and make it twice in two days? Are you going for some kind of record?"

"Scott . . ."

"You are a major pain in my ass, you know that? You want to tell me why you took that file?"

"The woman looked like me."

"What?"

"A local family disappeared about thirty years ago. Mother, father, two children. There was a picture of them in the file. The mother looked enough like me to be my twin. You should see it, the resemblance is amazing." She tried a small smile, which elicited no comparable re sponse.

"I'm never going to see it, am I? Because it just burned up."

"There's a copy," she said with dignity. "The good news, as Rinko just informed me, is that the file had already been uploaded to the system when I took it. Everything in it was copied before it was destroyed. Including the picture."

She was almost sure.

"Wonderful. In fact, that'd make everything just peachy keen, except, number one, the file was not supposed to be removed from the building, and, number two, if by chance we ever get enough evidence together to identify a culprit and take the case to trial we'll need the original documents to get a conviction. Copies don't actually count."

"I know. I'm sorry. So, you're not going to fire me?"

He gave her a glinting look. "Consider this strike two."

This time Lisa's smile was genuine. "As in, one more and I'm out?"

"Fuckin-A, baby. And I mean it, so you'd best take care." His frown lightened fractionally. "So, how's your mother doing?"

"They think she may have had a stroke. Most of the time she doesn't seem to remember that the house burned last night."

"Which reminds me--"

He broke off as his cell phone began to ring. Fishing it out of his pocket, he identified himself and listened. As he did, he rolled his eyes toward the ceiling and looked harassed.

"Okay, I forgot all about them. Give me a minute here while I try to come up with something they can do. I'll call you back." Pressing a button to end the call with Adams, whose barely heard voice Lisa was certain she recognized, he frowned at Lisa, who was regarding him questioningly. "You wouldn't happen to have a suggestion for what I can do with a bunch of high school kids, including my dumbass nephew, who I caught partying in my old man's house last night, would you? Instead of busting them, I told them to meet me in my office this morning, thinking I'd come up with some kind of a junior-grade pretrial diversion program before they got there. But what with one thing and another"--as in, she thought, his rescue of her from a burning house, subsequent hours spent at the hospital, and whatever else he'd been doing in the meantime--"I forgot all about them, and now I've got somewhere I have to be and I'm drawing a blank here about what to do with them."

"Wait a minute. Let me get this straight. You caught some kids in your father's house last night? Before or after the fire?"

"Before. Right after I talked to you on the swing. That's why I was still around when the fire broke out."

"Oh." It hadn't even occurred to her to wonder about that, Lisa realized. Having Scott there at the exact moment when she had needed him had seemed so completely unremarkable that she hadn't thought to question it. "What do you mean 'partying'?"

"What do you think I mean? Smoking pot and drinking beer. Six of them, fifteen and sixteen years old, with Chase--my nephew--the ringleader."

"You didn't call the cops."

Remembering her own teenage partying days, she felt a residual tickle of gratitude. Knowing Scott's own attitude toward that kind of underage fun--he was agin it, to put it mildly--his restraint surprised her.