A Raging Dawn (14 page)

He surprised me with a blush. He knew full well I invited no one to my apartment. Not Jacob, not Ryder, no one. After a lifetime of having every aspect of my life dissected and aired in public by my family—what has Angela done now?—I finally set some boundaries. Well, one boundary. Maybe just a flimsy lock on a flimsy door, but it was my lock on my door.

“I told Ryder I’d keep an eye on you,” he said. “Grab your fiddle. We’ll play a set together before it gets busy downstairs.”

An image flashed in my vision: a night last month, before everything that had happened at Thanksgiving. Jacob, beads of sweat dripping from his brow as his entire body wrestled his bow against his violin. His eyes were shut, his foot tapping in time with the beat, his entire being absorbed by the music.

When he had something on his mind, he’d pick up his violin, sit and play it for hours until he had the problem worked out. Like me, music was his solace, his safe haven—the one place he’d been able to retreat to as a child, escaping his domineering father.

“You should’ve kept that one,” Jimmy had told me back then, setting a glass of ice water at my elbow. “Could’ve done a whole lot worse.”

It was the truth. But I’d learned during those years with Jacob that you could love someone and still not be able to live with them.

“Angie?” he asked now, still stopped on the steep, well-worn steps.

I shook off the memory—a regular memory, thank goodness, not a fugue—and continued up to the second floor. It was strange, the only people who had any clue that I was sick, other than Louise, were two men who’d just come into my life: Devon and Ryder. The thought brought with it a twinge of guilt. Along with the reminder that I needed to tell my sister so she could be tested.

If Evie also had fatal insomnia, it would kill our mother. Patsy and I had never had a normal mother-daughter relationship after my father died and I came to live here with Jimmy’s family. But she and Evie were more than family. They were each other’s best friends as well.

Jacob and I reached the top of the steps. I hesitated outside my door, Jacob hovering uncomfortably close behind me. Before I could put my key into the lock, the door swung open, and I was staring into the faces of my family.

Could this day get any worse?

<<<>>>

AS MUCH AS
he despised them, Ryder was good at stakeouts. It came from his years as a soldier, learning how to handle dragging hours of boredom, how to stalk the enemy, and learning how to develop the patience needed to wait and watch without losing focus. Right now, shivering in his car, eating a stale protein bar and washing it down with vintage water that had been stashed under the passenger seat for Lord only knew how long, he was stalking a stalker: Eugene Littleton.

So far, Littleton had led Ryder on a merry chase through the city streets. First, Gena Kravitz had driven him home. Curbside service. Only the best for her clients. Ryder wondered how the lawyer could stand being in the same vehicle as Littleton after seeing what he’d done to Tymara. Lawyers…If he’d had a partner, coming up with new adjectives or swapping bottom-dweller jokes would have chewed up a nice chunk of time, relieved the monotony.

But Ryder was alone. Sad thing was, he was actually starting to like it that way. Just as he had lost his patience with departmental politics, he’d also lost the knack for small talk. Guess that meant he was getting old. Or growing up. Some damn thing.

After being chauffeured home, Littleton left his lousy apartment building to stroll through the twilight shadows. Littleton lived a block north of the Tower, making it the second-worst neighborhood in the city. He’d gone to the corner grocery store, returning home with his arms filled with food. No side trip to the liquor store even. Ryder thought he might stay in after that, but no, Littleton surprised him, emerging a short while later, now dressed in a respectable-looking suit. Going out on the town? Picking up another “girlfriend” to terrorize? Or off to meet his partners in crime?

Littleton had hopped into a gypsy cab—real cabs didn’t come to this part of town—and away they went. To, of all places, an elementary school on Second.

Nothing in Littleton’s record indicated he had any ties to children. He had none of his own, had never been convicted of any crimes against children. Ryder pulled up the school’s website to see if there was some kind of evening event. There was. Nothing involving children. A Narcotics Anonymous meeting being held in the school cafeteria.

Trolling an NA meeting for his next victim? Seemed like the kind of vulnerable prey a guy like Littleton might gravitate toward. Except, he didn’t go inside. Instead, he waited in the cold and dark, conveniently standing beneath the spotlight over the front entrance so Ryder could see every move he made.

A bit too convenient for Ryder’s taste. He scratched the back of his neck, kept checking all his mirrors, wary of an ambush. This wasn’t right. A guy like Littleton, in county lockup for six months, spending his first night of freedom freezing his balls off in front of a school instead of picking up a hooker or going to a bar?

This was wrong, wrong, wrong.

Littleton seemed impervious to the cold, didn’t appear anxious or impatient as he waited. Instead, he was calm, relaxed. What the hell was going on here? Every instinct that had kept Ryder and his squad alive in Afghanistan was alerted, prepared for battle.

Despite the weathermen calling for snow later tonight, the sky was clear. The temperature was falling fast, leaving Ryder facing the classic cop’s stakeout dilemma. Sit in an unheated car until the windows fogged, leaving you blind? Or turn the engine on for a few minutes to thaw out and run the defogger?

Either way, you were bound to be noticed. So Ryder took the third option. He grabbed a ball cap from the back seat. People tended to fixate on details like hats, forget to notice the face below them. He wrapped his scarf up over the lower half of his face, as much for warmth as for disguise, and left the car. He had to keep his overcoat unbuttoned so he could reach his service weapon, the wind from the river pushing it open, and his gloves, thin enough to fire his weapon if need be, weren’t much use. But, between Littleton acting abnormally
über
normal and the cold, he was at full alert.

People began to arrive for the meeting. Littleton, damn the man, greeted each and every one, shaking their hand and saying something to them as if he knew them. Which he couldn’t. There was nothing in his case file about him ever attending NA. He sure as hell hadn’t gone to any meetings held while he was in lockup. He didn’t even have any drug collars on his sheet. Instead, his record consisted of several criminal trespassing charges, gross sexual imposition, terroristic threats, and one stalking charge. He’d pleaded out and entered a diversion program, receiving shock probation and intensive counseling rather than serving any jail time.

What the hell was going on here? Was this all an act for Ryder’s sake? He sidled closer. Difficult to do, since the streets were empty except for the people straggling up Second to enter the school. He considered joining them. It’d be warm inside. Coffee and doughnuts as well.

He wasn’t going anywhere without Littleton. Ryder took a position in a storefront doorway, out of the wind. As he watched and waited, his feet tapped out a rhythm. Not just to keep the blood flowing. It was a tune Rossi had played last night. A fiddle-playing, dying doctor. Who could have seen that one coming? But somehow, when he watched her play, the way the music came to life—and brought her to life—he forgot about the “dying” part. Forgot about everything except the woman.

If he were honest with himself, he could pinpoint the exact moment when he’d fallen for her with no hope of recovery: Three weeks ago, right after he got out of the hospital, she’d been alone onstage, the bar almost empty, and she’d played a song. Not a real song, Jimmy had told him, but something improvised there on the spot. The music was rich, complex, filled with longing and despair, yet also joyful. Her entire body had surrendered to it: head flung back, hair flying wild, her hands never ceasing movement as they coaxed the notes from her fiddle.

By the time she’d finished, tears had wet his cheeks. Jimmy’s as well.

Rossi’s song returned to him now. It wasn’t as good as being with the woman herself, but somehow he didn’t feel as vulnerable or alone. That was the magic of Rossi. Unlike the victims Ryder served now, or his squad that he’d led back in the war, he didn’t feel as if he had to take care of her. Instead, each filled a void the other hadn’t even realized existed.

Ryder banished his fantasies of Rossi as one last woman approached Littleton before entering the school. They spoke for a few minutes. Longer than he had with anyone else. Littleton’s body language was also different. He clasped the woman’s hand in his while also grasping her elbow in his other hand as they bowed their heads together, talking earnestly.

Ryder shifted position to get a good look at the woman’s face. Then she vanished inside.

Littleton remained at his post outside, although now he seemed restless, casting looks at the door behind him, a little boy eager to open his Christmas presents—or at least shake them. He paced back and forth, then trailed around in a circle, obviously waiting. For what?

After almost fifteen minutes, Ryder’s hands about numb from the cold, his eyes burned dry by the frigid wind, he was ready to head back to the shelter of the car. A crack like a lightning strike slammed through the night. Ryder startled. A gunshot. From inside the school.

In the gleam of the spotlight, Littleton smiled. More than a smile, a smirk. Aimed directly at Ryder as Ryder raced across the street, his weapon drawn, his phone in his other hand.

“Shots fired,” he told Dispatch. “Second Avenue Elementary. Send back up.”

THEY WERE ALL
there. Waiting inside my apartment. Jimmy, my cousins, Evie. And the queen of the clan, my mother, sitting at the head of my table. Colorful mounds of pills and capsules were arranged before her, offerings to a goddess.

“Care to explain this, young lady?” she asked before I crossed the threshold.

Jimmy held the door open. Since my door had no peephole, he must have been listening, waiting to pounce when I arrived. My cousins slouched on my couch, poorly hidden smirks dancing across their face, Ozzie on the floor between them. The dog at least bothered to stand up at my arrival, his tail thumping the floor, one person happy to see me.

It was Evie I couldn’t face. She sat at my mother’s side, her manicured nails sparking in the light as she clasped her hands and somehow managed to appear both elegant and worried.

Anger at the intrusion swamped me, and I shifted my stance, ready to bolt. But…Evie. She needed to know. Without my cousins gawking at her. I stepped inside and turned to face them head-on. “Jimmy, take the boys downstairs. This is no concern of yours.”

My cousins were older than I am, but just as I would forever be the girl who got her father killed—no matter what Louise’s tests proved—they’d always be “the boys.”

Jimmy opened his mouth to protest, but my mother raised her head and nodded to him. “Go on, Jimmy. I’ll handle this.”

He jerked his chin at the boys, and they left. Jacob stood awkwardly at the doorway, still not stepping across the invisible barrier to my inner sanctum. His face was a question too painful for him to voice. Was he still family or not?

I sighed and reached for his arm. “Come inside. You should hear this as well.”

He stepped across. I’d never seen him so frightened. I closed the door and let him hold my hand as we moved past the couch to the table where Evie and my mother waited.

“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t call the police,” my mother started, waving her hand over the collection of pills, scattering a few across the table to the floor.

I resisted the urge to scramble for them. Instead, borrowing Jacob’s strength, I stood quiet, focusing on controlling my fury.

“Uppers, downers, enough to choke a horse. How could you? What if the police found these? What then? Jimmy could lose everything. You’re under his roof. And how would it look to Jacob’s new boss? Bad enough all that mess you got twisted up in last month. I won’t tolerate behavior like this. It’s an embarrassment to the entire family!”

Evie kept her gaze focused down, color flushing her pale skin. She was as light as I was dark. I took after my father’s Italian side of the family, but Evie mirrored the strawberry-blond, peaches-and-cream of the Kiely clan, like my mother.

“Does Ryder know?” Jacob asked in a low, serious voice when my mother paused for breath.

His question rattled me. “Yes…no…kind of.”

“I knew that man was no good,” Patsy screeched.

“Shut up!” My own voice surprised me. And her. She jerked, her mouth hanging open, lipstick feathering into wrinkles I’d never noticed before. “While you were sneaking through my things, did you happen to notice I have prescriptions for all of those?”

Jacob’s hand tightened on mine, but it was Evie who spoke. “Prescriptions? Are you sick?”

I slid my sweat-slicked palm free of Jacob’s. Stood alone and faced them all. “I’m dying.”

Silence slithered through the room, an oily fog of disbelief. Patsy’s body went rigid. Only Evie managed to look up and meet my gaze, her eyes wide. Jacob reached again for my hand, but I stepped farther away from him. I had to do this alone. Even Ozzie was affected, lumbering over to press his body against my legs, offering support.