Harper Allen - Protector With A Past

“But she is your responsibility. She’s our responsibility.” The husky voice behind her held a thread of incredulity. “Dammit, Julia—don’t you realize who she is?”

When she’d been a child she’d had a kaleidoscope. It had been the old-fashioned kind, with bits of colored glass that tumbled noisily every time she twisted the metal cylinder, and there had always been a slight delay between the sound of the glass rattling into place and the jewel-like pattern bursting into existence in the dark tube in front of her eyes.

It was as if she heard Cord’s words clicking into place inside her brain, but for a moment she couldn’t see what they meant. Then everything suddenly made a terrible kind of sense. Julia whirled around to face him, her unhurt hand flying to her mouth as if to hold back the words that spilled from her lips.

“Dear God—she’s Lizbet, isn’t she?” She searched his expression apprehensively, and the pain she saw on his features sent a chill through her. “Paul and Sheila—are they all right? What happened, Cord? Were they in an accident?”

Her voice had risen steadily on each unanswered question, and with two strides he was in front of her, pulling her to his chest and holding her tightly. He smelled of the whiskey she’d spilled, she thought incongruously. Her mind skittered away from the terror it already sensed was about to envelop it and frantically tried to busy itself with irrelevancies.

He was wearing a blue chambray shirt that she was almost sure she remembered from before. Blue had always looked good against the coppery tan of his skin and the blue-black sheen of his hair. His jeans still rode low on his lean hips, and her head still came to the exact place on his chest where she could hear his heart beating. She felt his hand on her hair.

“It’s as bad as it can be, Julia. Get ready for it.” His breath was warm against her temple, and his voice shook slightly. She felt the icy dread coalesce into a stomach-clenching certainty, and she cut him off before he could continue.

“I didn’t recognize her at first. She’s grown so fast, Cord! She must be four—no, five now. Remember when we went to her third birthday party, and the clown tried to give her a balloon and she started crying? And you’d just gotten King for me, and she gave him cake under the table and Sheila and I put a party hat on him and took pictures of him and Lizbet, both with their hats on and both of them with icing smeared all over their faces?”

She was babbling into his chest, her words tumbling over one another. Her throat felt as if it was constricting, and she raced on, refusing to meet his eyes.

“Remember when she was baptised and she wore the same antique lace gown that Sheila had worn, and her mother and grandmother before her? And you said that you wanted to be around when it was brought out for Lizbet’s firstborn, and Paul said he wasn’t planning on letting her start dating until she was thirty? And we all started laughing, and then when the priest called us forward to make our vows as her godparents I started—I started crying and I couldn’t—I couldn’t—”

Her throat had closed up completely, and the torrent of words came to an enforced stop. Inside her an intolerable pressure was building, desperately seeking release, but at the same time it felt as if her rib cage was being squeezed tighter and tighter by some cruel, gigantic hand.

She raised her head from his chest, unaware of the tears streaming down her face. Her eyes slowly met his. Her pupils were enormously wide, as if they were attempting to find and collect a glimmer of light where there was none.

“They’re dead, aren’t they?” With the harshness of ripping silk, her hoarse whisper sliced through the silence.

She’d never seen him cry before but now his skin was wet, and even as she watched, the shimmer at the outer corners of his eyes spilled over into slow silvery tracks that gleamed against his tan. He held her gaze and didn’t attempt to hide his tears or brush them away.

“I like your version better,” he said. “I like thinking about them the way they were when we were all together. But yes. They’re dead.” His voice cracked and his grasp on her tightened painfully. “They were killed, Julia. Somebody killed them.”

“No!” The cry burst from her before he’d finished speaking.

“All the way up here I was trying to think of a way to break it gently. There isn’t any.” His eyes were shadowed and the faint lines around his mouth that hadn’t been there two years ago deepened, but she was beyond noticing. She shook her head in refusal and tried to push herself away from him. He didn’t release his hold on her.

“Cord, you—you’re crazy! You show up here with some insane story about our best friends being killed and expect me to believe it? What the hell are you trying to do?”

In the corner by the door King looked up worriedly, aroused by her tone. “I won’t accept it. It’s all some crazy lie or you’ve got your information wrong or—or something! Paul and Sheila murdered? Things like that just don’t happen!”

“Things like that do happen. Before you left the force you used to see it every working day of your life, Julia.” His words were low and intense. “They’re not supposed to but they do. I saw them myself, just minutes—” He stopped, and a muscle worked in his jaw. “Just minutes after,” he continued bleakly. “I was just a few minutes too late.”

She’d known from the first that it was true, but denying it was a way of keeping Paul and Sheila Durant alive for the space of another heartbeat or two. She hadn’t seen them for years, Julia thought wrenchingly. She hadn’t been able to see anyone. But in the back of her mind she’d always known that they were there—Sheila, with her glorious mass of red hair and her wicked sense of humor, and Paul, as far from the conventional conception of a cop as possible with his glasses continually slipping down his beaky nose, his gangling frame giving the impression of clumsiness and his wryly self-deprecating attitude never completely concealing the overwhelming pride he felt in his beautiful wife and the daughter he adored.

It had been enough to know that they were still a part of her universe, even if the probability of her picking up the thread of their old relationship was about as remote as the stars she stared at, sitting on the dock during those long nights when she was afraid to fall asleep.

And now they were gone—all Sheila’s fire, all Paul’s steady warmth, extinguished. Her world had suddenly become a colder, darker place.

This time when she drew away from his embrace Cord didn’t attempt to stop her. She unwound the bulky dish towel from her hand and stared at the cut on her thumb as if she had nothing more important to occupy her mind and saw with dull surprise that it had stopped bleeding—which was strange, she thought hazily, since somewhere deep inside her she felt as if she was hemorrhaging.

As Cord walked over to the window and looked out into the night, his shoulders sagging with weariness and pain, she got a bandage out of the small first-aid kit she kept under the sink for emergencies and covered up the small wound. It was a clean cut. It would heal without a scar.

“Tell me what happened.” She pressed the edges of the bandage down neatly, smoothing them carefully and methodically and keeping her attention focused on the trivial task. Her hand was trembling.

“The killer was after Lizbet, too.” Fatigue made his voice grainy, but if he was surprised that her initial denial of what he’d told her had been replaced by an unwilling acceptance, he didn’t show it. “Paul had been doing some renovating in the basement, and at the first shot from upstairs he put her in the crawl space behind the newly installed drywall and told her not to make a sound. Then he went upstairs and was killed himself. After that second shot Lizbet apparently heard the shooter going through the house room by room, calling her name, but she did what her father had told her and stayed silent. I’m not even sure if she knows exactly what happened to her parents, but she’s one terrified little girl.”

“Whoever did this knew them?”

She’d thought there was no new horror to come. It seemed she’d been wrong. Julia choked back the bile that rose in her throat and as Cord turned from the window to face her she saw that the same conclusion had already crossed his mind.

“Well enough to know they had a daughter and what her name was.” He met her stunned gaze. “Paul phoned me yesterday and told me that he’d had the feeling someone had been following him the last few days. Added to that, Sheila had been getting weird calls on her cell phone and one of the teachers at the summer day camp Lizbet was going to in the mornings had told them that all her artwork had been slashed—none of the other kids’ work was touched. He was worried enough to ask me to fly out and stay with them for a while.”

“But why not just alert the local authorities? For God’s sake, Cord, when a police officer’s family is threatened that’s priority one with his co-workers! Why was his first impulse to call you in all the way from California?”

His eyes darkened. They glittered like black diamonds in the tan of his face, and all of a sudden she saw the hard-edged, implacably committed detective he’d been when they’d both worked together so long ago—the detective he still was.

“He knew he could trust me. He couldn’t be sure about anyone else, since whoever was phoning Sheila had to have gotten her cell phone number from the precinct. You know why she carried that damn phone. Only his work had the number, and it was only ever to be used for one reason.”

“I pray it never rings, Julia. But if anything happened to Paul and they couldn’t get in touch with me I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself for not being with him. I carry it all the time—just in case…”

It had been the only time Sheila had confessed the fear that lurked beneath her wholehearted support of her husband’s career choice. She’d been haunted by the worst-case scenario that every cop’s spouse tried not to dwell on—that one day the man she loved would go to work and never come home alive.

Instead, Paul had been killed in his own home. And Sheila had been taken down first. The thought that one of his fellow officers might have had something to do with it seemed the most monstrous betrayal of all.

“I caught the first flight available.” His words came out with an effort. “As soon as I got to their house I knew something was wrong—the front door was open wide. I ran in with my gun drawn and the first thing I saw was Sheila’s body in the hall. She’d been killed instantly.”

“Thank God she didn’t suffer, at least,” Julia whispered brokenly. She held back the tears that were threatening again and bit her lip to keep the sobs from rising to her throat.

“Paul had been shot at the top of the basement stairs. I found him half in and half out of the doorway, but he’d been rolled over onto his back.” Cord’s mouth tightened grimly. “He’d been stabbed in the chest, as well.”

And the hits just keep on coming. Julia swayed and felt behind her for the familiar solidity of the countertop.

“I don’t want to know any more.” Her voice was barely audible. A sliver of panicky urgency ran through it. “They’re dead—isn’t that enough? I hope whoever did this to them is caught and brought to justice, but even justice won’t bring Paul and Sheila back. There’s nothing we can do to make it right again, Cord—absolutely nothing—so what’s the use of going over every terrible detail?”