Truth & Lies: A Queen City Justice Novel (10 page)

Dana didn’t know what to make of that.

It took only fifteen minutes to pull up to the two-story brick house in the old Blue Ash neighborhood, but it felt like much longer with the heavy weight of Elena’s identification crushing Dana’s spirit. Sherwood knocked on the door, and a thirty-something man with receding brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses answered the door.

“Jeff Wilson? I’m Special Agent Andrew Sherwood. This is my colleague, Special Agent Dana Yenichek.”

“Come inside.” He motioned them in to a tidy living room filled with mid-century modern furniture that kept the look just this side of kitsch. Dana sat next to Sherwood on a gray upholstered couch, while Jeff Wilson sat in a retro black armchair across a kidney-shaped bamboo coffee table. “My wife is making coffee. She should be here any moment.”

Nada Wilson wasn’t traditionally pretty, but there was something kind about her face. Her genuine affection for her husband showed in the way she smiled down at him. She handed Jeff the first cup of coffee, then offered cups to Dana and Sherwood before sitting in a chair that matched her husband’s.

“I wished I had time to make kremšnita,” Nada said.

“My wife’s kremšnita is to die for,” Jeff said.

“What is that?” Sherwood asked, shifting impatiently on the couch.

Dana suspected he asked entirely out of courtesy, but she answered him to start the conversation. “It’s a cake made of vanilla custard on top of puff pastry.” She remembered being a little girl of seven or eight and standing on a chair in front of the stove with her mother, carefully stirring the egg mixture as it cooked so it wouldn’t get lumpy, and folding in the whipped cream as it cooled. “My mother used to make it. I’d almost forgotten.” Her throat felt tight as she blinked rapidly.

“We don’t want to take up too much of your time just before the holiday. I’m trying to track down some information about a few other women who came into the States at around the same time you did, Mrs. Wilson.”

Nada Wilson had arrived in January. Sherwood and the team had spoken to a number of women who’d arrived in the last year. None of those interviews had turned anything up, though. “Could you start by describing how you came to be in the United States?”

She gave a nervous glance at her husband, who nodded. “I was from a town called Vukovar.” Her voice was accented but not difficult to understand, and she clearly had a good grasp of the language.

Dana jumped in. “Vukovar never really recovered after the war.”

She nodded. “Before the war, Serbs and Croats lived side by side. It was common to have a Serbian household next to a Croat next to a mixed family on the same block. Afterward…” She shook her head. “So much hate. So many people out of work. It just wasn’t the same.” She took her husband’s hand and squeezed. “My cousin told me about the bridal service. We took the bus to Dubrovnik. They said I was lucky because I spoke good English—my father was serious about us learning it and speaking it well—and it wasn’t too long before I started writing back and forth with Jeff.”

She glanced over at Jeff, who looked at her with genuine affection in his gaze. “There was something about his letters.” She shrugged and grinned self-consciously at Andrew and Dana. “I would guess that’s not what you meant,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting to fall for him, you know? I expected to do this to get out of a bad place where there was no work, and instead, I got…
him.
”

Dana had never fallen for someone, believing they were
the one.
Never really expected to. And absolutely wouldn’t with a certain wounded cop who hated liars.

“I got my fiancée visa and came to the States. We were married a couple of months later.”

“Who picked you up at the airport?” Andrew asked.

“Jeff.”

“Did you meet any other women when you came over?”

Nada nodded. “Yes. There was actually another young woman I met on the plane.”

“What was her name?”

She bit her lip and looked up as if trying to recall. “Elena, maybe? I remember she had a really common family name…” She squinted. “Kováč, I think.”

Dana felt heat at the back of her eyes, and she blinked rapidly before tears could form.

“Have you seen her since?” Sherwood asked when Dana didn’t respond.

She shook her head.

“Do you know who picked her up?”

“Yes. I felt really bad for her because her fiancé wasn’t able to meet her, so someone from the service picked her up.”

“And you used Prava Ljubav?”

She nodded.

“Do you know if
she
did?”

“I think so, but it’s been almost a year ago.”

“Thank you so much for your time,” he said, standing up.



Thursday, November 27— 10:00 a.m.

Oakley Neighborhood, Cincinnati, Ohio

Deck woke early on Thanksgiving morning. He owed it to his houseguest to make her first Thanksgiving something to remember.

Dinner wouldn’t necessarily be fancy, but he could pull off roasting a small turkey, mashing some potatoes, and making green beans and Stove Top stuffing.

He’d been awake for a while when she finally wandered down. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade was playing on the TV, the turkey was starting to heat up in the oven, and it was smelling very Thanksgiving-y in his little firehouse, which felt a lot more like home with someone else in it. A fact that might have shocked him a couple of weeks ago.

“What is this?” she asked.

“Thanksgiving.”

“What is that?”

“Originally…it was a celebration of …” He started to explain it, then decided a history lesson on the atrocities European settlers heaped on the natives wouldn’t be much for setting the mood. “Never mind. It’s about family, food, giving thanks for what you have…and football.”

“Football?”

“Mostly it’s about the food and family.”

Her eyes showed a spark of sadness. “You must miss your family,” she said.

He’d have been fried before admitting it. The anger he felt at his mom’s lies was still felt fresh five years later. But a small part of him missed holidays with his family. He desperately missed his father. And Mike always went to their mother’s house for holidays, which left him working or home alone, cooking for one. This year would be different, and he refused to analyze how that made him feel.

“Do you cook?” he asked.

“Ah. I try. My baka was good cook in my family.”

Some look he couldn’t interpret crossed her face. It was sadness, and possibly a little fear, which didn’t make sense. The look was gone before he could do more than acknowledge it.

“What was your favorite thing that she makes?”

“It is…funny you ask. I think about this yesterday. My mother make custard cake, called
kremšnita
. It was so good. Baka’s recipe.”

“You’re kidding.” Deck couldn’t stop the grin that formed.

“No. Why?”

He opened the refrigerator and pulled out a pastry box from an Eastern European deli. He’d driven to Clifton before shift the day before to pick it up.

He set the box on the island. “Open it.”

When she opened it and saw the
kremšnita
, her eyes met his and she placed her fingers over her lips as if she might be trying to stanch emotion.

A tear leaked out of the corner of her eye.

“What is it?”

“This is so sweet.
Hvala!
Thank you!” She came around the island and wrapped her arms around his waist.

He let himself be wrapped in her appreciation. He sniffed her hair and closed his eyes. He couldn’t remember having such an instant connection with anyone before. She was the wild card in the super-crappy hand he’d been dealt nine months ago, and he didn’t know how to feel about that.

He certainly hadn’t been in the market for a mail-order bride when he’d signed up for the service, but now he’d begun to wonder if maybe fate had had a hand in her sudden appearance in his life.



Friday, November 28—5:00 p.m.

Oakley Neighborhood, Cincinnati, Ohio

“What are you doing?” Deck asked as he came into the kitchen. His hair and face were damp, and droplets of rain darkened his snug dark blue T-shirt. He’d only run over to the convenience store for milk. It must be coming down harder than she realized. She peeked out the kitchen window. Torrents of rain fell from dark gray skies and streams trickled down the window pane.

Finally, she remembered his question. “Cooking?” she asked.

“It concerns me that that sounded like a question,” he said.

She’d asked rather than told because she was fairly certain that the contents of the pot on the stove would prove lethal within seconds of consumption.

“
What
are you cooking?”

“It says ‘easy,’” she said, holding up the empty package of five-minute rice.

Deck made slow progress across the kitchen and opened the lid on the saucepan.

“Uh, Dana…” He shook his head.

She could understand his confusion. It looked like burned glue. “I’m a bad cook.” However, she had to do
something
to avoid going nuts at the lack of progress on this case…and her lack of involvement in that progress.

“After yesterday, that’s not a newsflash,” he said, softening his words with a grin. She recognized that Thanksgiving had been saved only because Deck was fairly handy in the kitchen. Dana’s culinary expertise was not in question. She had none.

“In your profile, you said you were a good cook.”

Given his hatred of liars, she had to tread softly here. “I
want
to be a good cook. Baka was good cook. My mother was good cook. I hoped to make it come true.”

“Maybe we can eat it,” he said, sounding as if that might be the last thing on earth he wanted to do.

She raised an eyebrow at him.

“Okay. Maybe not.” His grin was rueful. “There are still a lot of leftovers from yesterday. We can reheat that for dinner.”

“Not mad?”

“Of course I’m not mad.” He lightly rubbed her between her shoulder blades with his fingertips, and it took everything in her not to lean into his touch.

“I want to show you something.”

“What?” she asked.

“Follow me,” he said, tipping his head in the international sign for “this way” and began making his way across the kitchen to the door to the garage. He opened the door and stepped out of the way.

Dana’s eyes immediately tracked to a trembling mound huddled on the bare concrete floor. It was a dirty white mop sporting black eyes nearly hidden beneath a matted clump of hair on its forehead and a black button nose. The mop shuddered and began to slowly swish its tail against the floor.

The dog—and she used the term loosely—appeared to have a smattering of terrier and maybe Bichon Frise and probably about eight or nine other breeds. The ears definitely shouted cocker spaniel. It continued to tremble on the floor until Dana knelt down, and then it launched itself into her arms, all wriggling excitement and bad smell.

It—or rather
he,
she realized—licked her chin in greeting and she stopped caring about the smell. “He’s so—” She cut herself off. She’d been about to say that he was precious, but that was a word she shouldn’t know. She was definitely off her game. Whether it was the look and touch in the kitchen or the fact that he’d brought her a sweet, if moth-eaten, dog, it didn’t matter. She needed to pull it together.

“He ran out in front of the car,” Deck told her. “I barely missed him. It doesn’t look like he has an owner. I called the shelter, and they can’t come get him until tomorrow, and they’re closed for the evening. I just couldn’t see leaving him out in the rain all night. It’s supposed to get down near freezing.” He shrugged beside her. “We can take him in the morning.”

“Shelter?” she asked, horrified. They’d take one look at this scruffy little thing and he’d be sitting on doggie death row.

“It’s where we send unwanted animals,” he explained as if she didn’t understand the concept.

It was moments like this she wished she had full use of her vocabulary. “You no want?”

He leaned against the doorframe and gave her a long look. “You being the exception, I don’t normally collect strays.”

Dana pretended not to understand.

“He’s very sweet,” she said, letting the dog nuzzle her neck.

“He smells like a toxic dump.”

“I give bath,” she said reasonably.

He closed his eyes and shook his head, and she knew he was caving in to keeping him.

“Oh, all right.” His tone indicated a level of bemused frustration that meant he wasn’t entirely all right with it. Or at least he didn’t want anyone to know about it. “I’ll run back out and get him some dog food. Maybe once we clean him up, we can post fliers, and his owner will come for him.”

“
Hvala!
” she said, scratching the dog under the chin and looking up at Deck.

Anything was better than the pound. And even though she knew she wouldn’t be able to keep an animal after she left here—not with her schedule—she couldn’t help but think that maybe a dog was just what Deck’s lonely soul needed.



Friday, November 28—6:00 p.m.

Oakley Neighborhood, Cincinnati, Ohio

Deck couldn’t believe he was headed back out into the frickin’ rain for frickin’ kibble. Who in the frickin’ hell had he become?

Evidently, a
pet owner
.

One who was becoming too easily suckered by a pair of gingerbread eyes and dimples, that was for sure.

The rain had started coming down even harder, if that were possible. He got back into the car, wrinkling his nose at the lingering smell of wet dog and a few other things best not identified.

PetSmart was still open, so he pulled in, grabbed a cart, and headed to the dog department. He grabbed a small bag of Iams for small dogs and then rolled his eyes at himself. Who was he kidding? He put the small bag back and picked up the economy-sized bag.

He was a sucker.

He picked out a matching water dish and food bowl. He found a nice nylon collar in red and then a matching leash. Even as he placed the items in his cart, he convinced himself he was under the influence of a powerful hallucinogenic. Even the pain meds the hospital gave him at the height of his injuries weren’t as mind-altering as a mass of freckles and a pair of dimples.