скачать книгу бесплатно
He examined the matchbook. “There’s no area code.” He flipped it over and stared at the cover. “Atlantic City.” Chad tossed the matchbook on top of the bureau, pulling the next drawer open. It yielded a handful of photographs. He silently thumbed through the photos. There was one of Eric Persky standing with Lisa Furgeson and another colleague inside what Hannah guessed to be PlayCo’s factory.
The next picture was of the house they were in. Placing that one under the others, Chad stared down at another.
“Do you think that’s the woman in the match-book?” Hannah asked.
The photo was of Persky and a woman. A pretty brunette in her early- to mid-thirties.
“If it is, the number isn’t local.” Chad pointed to the smock the woman wore. “I know that outfit. It’s one cocktail waitresses wear.”
“It’s almost too simple.”
Chad slipped the photo of the woman and the one of Eric and his colleagues into his front pocket. “What makes you say that? Chances are the woman in the picture was a one-nighter. Or they broke up months ago and she hasn’t seen him since.”
“My instincts tell me the name on this matchbook and the woman in the picture are one in the same. If we find her, maybe we’ll find Persky,” Hannah said. “Crooks are rarely as clever as they make them out in movies.”
“And if we find Persky, hopefully he’ll lead us to Furgeson.”
“That’s right. If Persky is with some woman in Atlantic City, then chances Lisa Furgeson is with him are slim.”
Chad eyed the cracked concrete sidewalk that separated him and the car from a four-story walk-up in Brooklyn Heights. After leaving Persky’s, he’d suggested they hit PlayCo next to see what the company’s personnel records held on the two bail-jumpers. But Hannah had driven them here instead, saying she had something to do first. Chad tapped the face of his watch for the third time, remembering the call she’d made at the police station. Could she be in there explaining things to the man who had replaced him?
A possessiveness he hadn’t known he was capable of burned through him. Certainly he hadn’t expected Hannah to wait around for him…. Or had he? Is that the real reason he didn’t hesitate when Blackstone gave him the perfect excuse to come back? He stared at the back-lighted screen door. If subconsciously he had entertained ideas of rekindling his relationship with Hannah, he suspected they were about to be squashed.
“Come on, Hannah,” he muttered, resisting the urge to lean on the horn.
He had half a mind to barge in there and drag her out caveman-style. The impulse stunned him. He shifted on the leather bucket seat. He and Hannah had happened a long time ago. She had every right to go on with her life…didn’t she? But no matter how logically his mind argued the point, his gut told him he wanted her, boyfriend or no boyfriend.
He reached for his duffel bag in the back. His hand bumped hard plastic and he twisted to stare at a large, gaily colored object fastened to the back seat. He didn’t know how he’d missed it before. Maybe because he’d been focused on other things when he’d first put his duffel on the floor. Perhaps because he’d sat in the passenger’s seat up until then, narrowing his line of vision when he got in and out of the car.
What was Hannah doing with a child’s car seat fastened in the back? Just how far had this new relationship of hers progressed? He hadn’t noticed a wedding ring. Then again, he knew better than anyone that appearances were deceiving. She’d been driving a sputtering old rust bucket when they met up outside of Blackstone’s. He knew she didn’t have any siblings, so a young niece or a nephew was out. Even if she’d had one, he doubted she’d keep a seat in her car—
Door springs squeaked, interrupting his rapid-fire suppositions. Breaking his gaze away from the object that posed so many questions, he turned his head to find Hannah coming out of the house—and his head filled with even more. He stared at the bundle she held in her arms. His throat tightened painfully, his breath froze in his lungs, and every curse he sought scrambled beyond his grasp. Hannah awkwardly opened the passenger door and released the seat so she could push it forward.
Chad sat staring at her from where he’d moved behind the steering wheel.
“Come on, sweetie, stop wiggling so Mommy can get you into your seat,” Hannah said.
It dawned on Chad that she had a baby seat in the car because she had a baby.
She patiently maneuvered the baby, wearing a pink, baggy jumpsuit into the back despite the fidgeting of chubby arms and legs and nonstop gibberish. “There you go. Now take this.” She handed the baby a donut-shaped, rubber thingy. Chad counted all of four, widely spaced teeth as the baby opened her mouth and chomped down on the item.
Chad’s gaze slid from mother to daughter, trying to get a handle on things and failing miserably.
Finally Hannah looked at him. Her soft blue eyes held a mixture of expectancy and…He couldn’t quite read the other emotion. The only sounds he could hear were the gurgling of the baby in the back seat, and the slamming of his own heart against his rib cage.
It didn’t take an MIT grad to do the math. There wasn’t a single, solitary doubt that the baby who even now regarded him with happy curiosity was his daughter.
His daughter.
Sweet Lord in heaven…. He cleared his throat. “Who—I mean, is that your…”
Finally he latched onto a curse and let it rip. Hope. He realized too late the other emotion in Hannah’s eyes was hope. He knew this, even as he watched it crushed by gray disappointment. But what in the hell had she been hoping for? Hannah climbed into the passenger’s seat, her stony silence more effective than any words could ever be. Chad blinked just to make sure he still could, and tried to shove his mind into working order. For a guy who prided himself on being quick on the uptake, who needed to think fast on his feet, he was lapsing at least two steps behind right now. And he had the sinking feeling he’d never completely catch up.
Like an echo from a lifetime ago, he remembered Hannah’s words earlier, her explanation why they shouldn’t work together, why they couldn’t get intimately involved again. Things have changed, Chad. Everything has changed.
He absently started the car, with no idea where he was going, or a clue what he was going to do.
“Chad, meet my daughter, Bonny.”
He stared again at the squirming baby in the back seat. The sparse-haired, drool-covered little imp stared back, chattering as if saying something directly to him, then holding out the toy she chomped on in his direction. He swallowed hard, his heart expanding, surging against the bands he’d wrapped around it so long ago. Her large eyes were open, so very trusting, her cheeks flushed, her entire face animated. She grunted. Chad blinked, then awkwardly moved to accept the offering, only it appeared she hadn’t meant for him to take it, merely to feel it. When he released the slobbery rubber, she gave a peal of laughter, then stuck it back into her mouth.
A grin edged its way across his face and he swore he could feel one of the intangible bands in his chest snap and begin to unravel. A car passed on the street. With every ounce of concentration he still had left, he watched it, trying hard to pull himself together. His grin waned and he looked at Hannah, too wrapped up in his own thoughts to respond to her wary expression.
Things have changed….
The bottomless feeling in Hannah’s stomach refused to budge, no matter how hard she tried to make it. She repeatedly clasped and unclasped her hands in her lap, not quite knowing what to do with them, and unable to do nothing at all.
Chad idled the Alfa Romeo across from PlayCo and she took in a shallow, uneven breath. He’d been conspicuously silent ever since they picked up Bonny, alternately staring at her, and her noisy eight-month-old daughter in the back seat, appearing so thoroughly dumbfounded Hannah felt the incredible urge to reach out and touch him. At one point she thought he’d murmured something like “things have changed,” but she couldn’t be sure, and couldn’t bring herself to ask him what he’d said. In fact, she could focus on little more than the weightless, expectant sensation in her stomach.
She cleared her emotion-clogged throat. Often in the past eight months, usually after Bonny had finally fallen asleep against her chest and her own eyes were heavy, she indulged in images of Chad learning about his daughter. Saw him knocking softly on the door, stepping directly to the eight-month-old and sweeping her up in his arms. The fantasies had been harmless, she’d assured herself, because there was no reason Chad would be showing up on their doorstep any time soon.
Now that he had come back…
She bit down hard on the flesh of her bottom lip. Dreams were one thing. Reality something completely different.
What had she expected him to do? Hold out his hands to lovingly take a child he should have instinctively known was his?
No, she realized. In reality, she had expected him to leap from the car and bid her a final farewell. At least she thought that was what he would do—until she picked Bonny up and hope had blossomed in her stronger than she would have imagined. Who could deny this little girl? Surely her father would take one look at her and…
And what? Push aside the past? Declare his undying love for her and Bonny? Offer her happily-ever-after?
Stupid.
She chanced a glance at Chad, trying to read his thoughts as he watched Bonny. In the light from the street lamp she could see his face. His eyes were wide, as if someone had done a Three Stooges eye-poking number on him. He met her gaze and she quickly turned away.
“Um, you’re going to have to go into PlayCo by yourself, for obvious reasons,” she said quietly.
They sat parked in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. A discreet white sign with blue lettering marked the ten-floor, foursquare building across the street as PlayCo Industries. Hannah eyed the watchman sitting in a lighted air-conditioned, multiwindowed guard shack next to the parking garage entrance.
“How old is she?”
Chad’s question caught her unaware. Hannah forgot about not looking at him. For a brief moment, he appeared so incredibly…victimized in the stiff white shirt and conservative striped tie he had fished from his duffel and put on, she nearly reached out to smooth the confused creases from his forehead. She blamed the instinctive impulse on her new role as mother and locked her fingers together in her lap.
“She’ll be eight months next week,” she said to the windshield.
She waited for his next question, but it never came. Instead he followed her gaze to the watchful guard in the shack and lapsed back into silence.
“So,” she began, injecting a businesslike tone into her wavering voice, “how are you going to get in there?”
He blindly moved his hand to reach into the front pocket of his shirt, missed by an inch, then looked down and took out a black leather bifold wallet. He absently held it in her direction and flipped it open. Hannah stared at an FBI identification that bore an appealing snapshot of Chad, and identified him as a Special Agent. The plastic was cloudy, the leather holder old and cracked.
“What did you learn in Florida?” she whispered. “You never impersonated a fed before. Or if you did, I never knew about it.” He closed the ID then stuffed it back into his pocket. “Do you know you’re committing a crime? This is fraud against the federal government. Do you have any idea what kind of penalty that carries?”
“Two to ten,” he said, clearly distracted by a burst of mimicking sounds from Bonny in the back seat. “But it doesn’t matter because I don’t intend to get caught.” Chad stared at his watch, then shifted to fuss with his tie. Hannah noticed his movements were jerky, anxious, not the usual smooth, easy Chad moves. A couple of cars approached, apparently night-shift workers gaining access to the underground parking area.
“I thought you earned facts and clues the honest way,” she said.
“For what it’s worth, this is the first time I’ve impersonated a fed.”
Why didn’t that make her feel any better? “Trust me. Nothing’s going to happen,” he said in a preoccupied monotone. “I’m going to take a look at Persky’s and Furgeson’s personnel files. The feds…” he trailed off.
“The feds,” Hannah prompted. He glanced at her, apparently trying to recover his train of thought. “The feds will never know.”
Hannah wasn’t sure if her agitation sprang from his lack of work ethics, or from his obvious ignorance of his connection to Bonny, who rhythmically kicked her car seat with the back of her shoes.
“Do you have any better ideas?” Chad asked and rubbed the back of his neck. “Because if you do, I’m all ears.”
“Does it still hurt?” she asked quietly.
He stared at her. “Huh?”
“The bump you took at Persky’s house.”
He dropped his hand back to his lap.
She resisted the urge to check the wound herself. Touching Chad again would not be a smart move, no matter what the reason. “Anyway, I do have another idea. I say we get a move on to Atlantic City and see if that woman in the matchbook we found at Persky’s exists.”
“And what if she doesn’t? What if it’s like I said and she was a one-nighter, a nooner, a quickie whom Persky never saw again?”
Hannah decided she’d liked him better speechless. She grimaced and tucked her hair behind her ear. “I love your vocabulary, Hogan. Do you care to share any more of your colorful language with me and Bonny?”
“Forget my word choices for a minute here, Hannah, and give this some thought. Let’s say we go to Atlantic City and turn up a big, fat zero? What then? Do we turn back to N.Y. and start from scratch?” His gaze lingered on Bonny and he slowly shook his head. “We don’t have the time. I’m going in here, getting what I need, then we’ll go to Atlantic City….”
His words trailed off. Hannah practically heard his unspoken question. Would the baby be going with them?
“I don’t have anywhere to leave her,” she blurted, disappointing herself. The last thing she wanted was to appear desperate. But desperate was exactly what she was, wasn’t it? Her regular baby-sitter couldn’t keep Bonny because she had plans for the weekend that couldn’t be broken. And with no family to speak of, unless you counted Victor Marconi, and a distant aunt in Montana, she was in a jam.
“I didn’t exactly expect to take this case, Chad. Don’t worry, Bonny won’t cause any trouble. And I certainly don’t intend to put her in any danger. This is a routine case with an unusual time constraint, that’s all. We’re tracking white-collar criminals, not violent armed robbers.”
He touched her hand where it lay against her leg. An instant rush of awareness startled her at the feel of his warm fingers on her cold ones.
“Hannah, I didn’t say anything about Bonny causing problems,” he said softly.
She tugged her hand away from his and worried it in her lap with her other. “No, you didn’t. But I could always read your thoughts, Chad.”
His gaze was probing. “Did you ever stop to think you couldn’t read me as well as you thought you could?”
She stared at him wordlessly. Could he be right? Was she misjudging him? Had she misread him in the past?
She watched the guard wave another car into PlayCo’s parking area.
“She’s beautiful,” he said so quietly she nearly didn’t hear him.
The statement took her breath away. She searched for a response, but couldn’t seem to match words to the emotions coursing through her. She almost said “She looks like you,” but caught herself.
She swallowed hard, relieved when he shifted the car into First. He pulled it around, heading straight for the guard still sitting in his shack next to the entrance to PlayCo Industries.
Chapter Four
Shell-shocked. That was the closest Chad could come to describing how he felt. No. That’s exactly how he would describe it. Having served with the Marines in Kuwait, he knew what it was like to hear sniper fire and not know where it had come from. The strange thing was that in this situation no one else had noticed the shot. Around him life went on as normal.
In the personnel office of PlayCo Industries, the nondescript, white-collar-to-the-bone comptroller Robert Morgan hung up the telephone then began fingering through a filing cabinet to retrieve Persky’s and Furgeson’s employment records. Outside in the hall a couple of second shift workers laughed, presumably on their way back from break. In another room across the way, a telephone rang on, with no one around to pick it up.
Even as he registered every sound, placed every person, he remained apart from them. The shot he’d taken hadn’t come from an unknown sniper’s gun; it had come from Hannah. Hannah and that precious baby girl whose veins carried his blood.
Thrusting his fingers through his hair, he glanced toward the open door, anxious to get out of there. To get back to the car and start seeking some answers that might help him make sense out of all this.
He’d never thought he’d be a father again. He’d sworn another child wouldn’t be born with the stigma of his name attached. It seemed like another lifetime since he’d even been around a baby. So long, he was unprepared for the instinctive surge of parental protection, of unconditional love that overtook him the instant he understood Bonny was his.
Still, it was all so hard to believe….
Just last month marked the fourth anniversary since the last moment he’d held his infant son, Joshua. Right before Joshua had been taken from him.
Scenes twisted through his mind. Images of misshapen metal, of an empty car seat lying in the middle of the road. Of his wife’s purse still sitting on the floor of the front seat.
His family.
A highway patrolman had tried to pry him from the scene when, at some point in the long nightmare, law officials had been contacted. And Chad had hauled off and slugged him, desperately needing to hold on to his family, though they were already gone. Their faces were burned forever into his memory, haunting him in the dark hours of the morning, taunting him whenever he experienced anything close to happiness…serving as a constant, caustic reminder that he didn’t deserve to be happy.
A torrent of emotion ripped through Chad’s gut. He focused on the back of Robert Morgan as he began copying the files he’d taken from the cabinet, but Chad really didn’t see him.
They’d argued that day, him and Linda. He winced from the memory of her packed suitcases, Joshua’s stuffed blue elephant hanging half out of a blue diaper bag, his son’s lashes bearing remnants of tears. Linda had accused him of putting his career above his family, an argument she’d made often. But that night she’d had enough. She was leaving him. Going home to her parents in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And there was nothing he could do to stop her.
Chad eyed the door, needing to escape. It was an accident, a voice in his head shouted. He resolutely refused to listen. It was no accident. He was to blame. He had killed his family as surely as if he’d driven them off that mountain road.
The experience had been more than Chad Hogan, Special Agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigations, had been able to handle. He’d quit the Bureau, and never told anyone about his work there, not even Hannah. Too many bad memories. It was better to let her think that ID he flashed was bought somewhere in Florida. After he quit, he’d taken odd jobs as a skip-tracer to cover the basic necessities, and resolved to serve out a life sentence in which he wasn’t allowed to move past the guilt, the grief.
Then came Hannah.
The instant he met her, the shadows that dogged him began to recede. With all that curly red hair, those lively freckles and infectious laugh, she had loved life and lived to love. He’d been drawn to her like an addict was drawn to drugs. Okay, so maybe he hadn’t deserved her. He’d known that, too. But he’d been helpless to stop himself.
She had my baby and I didn’t even know it.
“I wish there was something I could do to help you.”
Chad blinked away the images crowding his head and stared at Robert Morgan who held out two blue file folders in his direction. He took them and cleared his throat. “I understand. This is fine.”
Morgan smiled and pushed up dark-rimmed glasses. “I have to admit, I still don’t know what all this is about. Your associates told me it didn’t concern PlayCo so I shouldn’t worry, but I can’t help it.”
