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But her steps never faltered. In the orange glare of the streetlights, her red cape gleamed like a military cloak, like an archangel’s wings.
No one followed them.
Joe shook his head. It was almost enough to make a man believe in miracles again.
Chapter 3
Melody King turned twenty-four today, and the nurses were throwing her a party on their lunch break. The office manager had had few opportunities to celebrate in her young life, and few people to celebrate with. A runaway at seventeen, an addict at eighteen, pregnant and in rehab at twenty, Melody had come to Nell straight from community college.
Nell had known she was taking a risk in hiring the inexperienced single mother. But, fresh from her own humiliation at the hospital, Nell had been determined to provide the younger woman with a second chance. And today, watching Melody’s thin face light in the glow of a single candle, Nell prayed her gamble had paid off.
As Melody cut her cake, Nell kept an eye out the window for the police. After checking and rechecking the lists last night, she’d called them herself this morning. But what would her discovery mean to the nurses crowding around Melody’s desk? What would her decision cost her?
“Cake?” offered Billie.
Nell’s stomach lurched uneasily. “No, thanks.”
“Nice flowers,” Lucy Morales said, nodding at the daisy bouquet by Melody’s computer. “Who are they from?”
Melody blushed. “Dr. Jim.”
James Fletcher, volunteer pediatrician, acknowledged stud muffin and all-around good guy. His offering raised eyebrows and knowing grins around the nurses’ circle.
“It’s not like that,” Melody insisted with quiet dignity. “He’s just being nice.”
“Bet that’s your favorite present, though,” teased Lucy.
Nell came to the office manager’s rescue. “No, her favorite present is from her other admirer. Show them, Melody.”
Proudly, Melody showed off the birthday card her three-year-old daughter had made at day care.
“Pretty,” Billie approved. “Trevor’s nine, and I swear that boy still can’t be trusted with scissors.”
Billie’s nephew Trevor had sickle-cell disease. His mother couldn’t afford health insurance, and Billie brought the boy to the clinic for treatment.
While the nurses oohed and aahed over the card, Nell asked quietly, “How’s Trevor doing?”
Billie smile was strained. “He’s managing. That’s all we can hope for, right? We all manage.”
A black-and-white police car pulled to the curb by the fire hydrant. Nell’s pulse kicked up.
One of the nurses glanced out at the flashing lights. “Wow. This is turning into quite a party.”
“I’ve got it,” Nell said.
“If they’re cute, offer them some cake,” Lucy called.
Nell hurried to open the front door as two officers—solid, uniformed, with matching gaits and hair-cuts—climbed out of the car and approached.
“How’s it going, Nell.” The first cop wiped his brow with his forearm before resettling his checkerboard hat. “Heard you had a little problem.”
“Hi, Tom.” She smiled. One of the beat cops, Tom Dietz had worked with Nell on a domestic-violence awareness program last year. She liked him.
“Nell Dolan,” she said, offering her hand to the younger man looming beside him. She didn’t remember meeting him before, but his rugged good looks were vaguely familiar. A definite cake candidate. “And you are…?”
The second officer’s grip was warm and firm, his smile friendly. “Mike Reilly. Nice to meet you.”
Her mouth dried. He couldn’t be.
They think you’re a cop, she’d said to Joe Reilly yesterday.
Not me. My brother.
Nell’s heart banged against her ribs. She could deal with this, she told herself. She could deal with anything.
“Nice to meet you, too,” she said faintly as she led them away from Melody’s birthday party and back to her office cubicle, crammed in behind a wall of filing cabinets. “I think I know your brother.”
“Yeah?” The young cop looked delighted. “Will or Joe?”
Her last hope wheezed and died like a patient taken off the respirator.
“Joe,” Nell said. “The reporter?”
Mike Reilly beamed. “That’s Joe. He was with the Seventh Marines when they entered Baghdad. Did you read his—”
Tom Dietz rolled his eyes. “When you’re done with the stories from the front, Reilly, do you mind if we take a preliminary statement?”
The young man flushed. Nell smiled at him.
Joe Reilly’s brother. Oh, dear.
The last thing she wanted compromising her PR efforts was an investigation into drug theft. The last thing she needed complicating an investigation was lousy PR. The police and the press, working together, could piece together a picture of her past that could destroy everything she’d worked to create.
Tom leaned against an overflowing file cabinet and pulled out his notebook. “Why don’t you tell us what’s missing?”
Nell took a deep breath. “Drugs. I wrote out a list.” She fumbled in her pocket and offered it. The page trembled. “Schedule Three and Four painkillers, mostly. Narcotics. Darvon, Vicodin, a lot of Tylenol with codeine… I wrote them all down.”
Mike Reilly took the paper and studied it, his face suddenly hard and not so young.
“Any Schedule Twos?” Tom asked.
Methadone, he meant. Morphine. Oxycodone, rapidly becoming the most abused drug on the planet. An eighty mg tablet had a street value of up to eighty dollars.
“We don’t keep any methadone in stock.” It was a relief to be able to offer some good news. She hadn’t done anything wrong, Nell reminded herself. “And we keep such small quantities of Oxycodone that any theft would have been noticed immediately.”
Tom wrote that down. “When did you notice the other stuff was missing?”
“Ed Johnson—our pharmacist—suspected a discrepancy in the inventory last night. I checked the supply records and called you this morning.”
“Okay. We’ll need to talk to him. Who else has access to the pharmacy?”
Nell wiped her hands surreptitiously on her lab coat. This was where things got sticky. “Ed and I are the only ones with keys. Sometimes, when Ed is gone and I’m tied up with a procedure, one of the nurses will come in to get medication for a patient.”
“You loan them your keys,” Mike Reilly clarified, his voice expressionless. He sounded like his brother.
Nell winced. It was hard to explain how habit and convenience created trust among members of a medical team. Harder to admit, even to herself, that such trust could have been betrayed. “Yes. But they don’t have access to the narcotics cabinet.”
Tom rubbed his forehead. “They’ve got the keys.”
“The cabinet has a punch lock,” Nell explained. “It can only be opened with a three-digit code.”
“And who knows the code?” Tom asked.
Fear, bitter as bile, rose in Nell’s throat. She swallowed hard.
“Ed,” she said steadily. “And me.”
Mike Reilly shifted his seat on the edge of her desk. “Could be a tailgater,” he said to Tom.
Nell looked at them hopefully. “What’s that?”
“Somebody walks by, looks over your shoulder while you’re punching in the code,” Mike explained. “It’s easy enough to pick up.”
“You got a security camera on the inside?” Tom asked.
“No,” Nell admitted. In the acute-care room, an older woman was moaning, disoriented and in pain. Nell heard Billie’s attempts to comfort her, to make her lie still for an exam.
“A larger pharmacy with a walk-in narcotics vault would have a camera monitoring the inside. But we just have the cabinet. And the camera is positioned to record people approaching the pharmacy window from the outside.”
“Okay.” Tom closed his notebook. “We’ll take a look. In the meantime, you might want to change the code sequence on that punch lock.”
A crash sounded from across the hall. Billie yelled for help with the restraints. Mike Reilly looked uncomfortable.
“We don’t want to keep you,” Tom said. “I’ll give you a call in a couple of days, do a follow-up.”
Nell blinked at him. Surprised. Deflated. “That’s it?”
“We’ll file a report,” Tom assured her. “Let the assignment sergeant know in case your theft fits a pattern in the area. He might send out a detective. But the amounts you’re missing… We’ll check, but it’s not an index crime. Looks to me like you’ve got a problem with personal use.”
Nell went cold.
“Not you, personally,” Mike Reilly said. “Just, you know, somebody with access. You didn’t notice if the doors or locks were tampered with?”
“No,” Nell said faintly. Her heart pounded. Her mind raced. Somebody with access. Ed, whom she’d promised a job? Melody, whom she’d promised a second chance? A volunteer doctor? A nurse? “Nothing like that.”
“Well, we’ll look into it,” Tom said. “Want to show me that security camera? Even with the bad angle, you might have something on tape.”
He sounded doubtful but kind, like a surgeon explaining a patient’s chances of surviving a risky operation.
Nell led the way toward the pharmacy feeling numb. Someone she worked with, someone she trusted, someone she’d helped was stealing drugs from the clinic pharmacy. For personal use, Tom had said.
She turned the corner. Joe Reilly stood in the work aisle, leaning over the counter to talk to Melody King.
And things teetered from bad and slid to worse.
“Joe?” Mike Reilly sounded pleased, but puzzled. “What are you doing here?”
Joe pivoted stiffly on one leg.
Nell took a deep breath. She was not going to panic. Yet.
She forced herself to compare the two men, as if she could assess the threat to her clinic on the basis of their family resemblance. They didn’t look alike. Mike Reilly was bigger, blonder, broader than his brother. Beside him, Joe looked lean and tough and scruffier than ever. But something—the shape of their heads, the angle of their jaws, the set of their shoulders—marked them as brothers. And something else, a weariness, a watchfulness, marked Joe as the older one.
“Hello, Mike,” he said quietly.
“He said he had an appointment,” Melody piped up.
Both men ignored her.
“You listening for my car number on your police scanner again?” the cop asked.
If it was a joke it fell flat.
Joe shook his head. “I didn’t know you were here. What’s going on?”
Tom Dietz pushed up his hat brim with his thumb. “Nothing you need to worry about. Police blotter stuff.”
“Yeah, you stick to the big stories,” Mike said. “Are you here to see Nell?”
Nell started. She’d told Mike Reilly she knew his brother. But that was all. Had the young officer somehow picked up on the tension between them? Or was he just used to his big brother hitting on every woman that breathed?
I thought the purpose of this dinner was to get to know one another better.
If that’s what it takes.
Joe’s face was impassive. “I’m here on a story.”
Tom looked from Joe to Nell. “What kind of story?”
Nell stepped forward. The less the two Reilly brothers compared notes, the better. And yet something about Joe’s careful lack of expression tugged at her heart. “I contacted the Examiner to ask if they would send a reporter to profile the clinic. With all the recent budget cuts, we could use the publicity.”
Mike’s eyes widened. “You’re doing a—”
“Feature piece,” Joe supplied grimly. “For the Life section. Yeah.”
“Oh.” Mike shifted his weight, clearly uncomfortable.
Because he’d assumed Joe was having a personal relationship with his subject? Nell wondered. Or for some other reason?
