Evil Without a Face (21 page)

Had he left Nikki behind?

University of Chicago Hospital

All hospitals smelled the same to Payton—a medicinal tang mixed with odors he didn’t want identified. Joe Tanu had been admitted to an area medical center with burns and a broken leg that required surgery. Med staff had him hooked to an IV and a machine for him to administer a dose of morphine at the push of a button. His leg had been propped up and bandaged. Between the flight from Alaska and what happened last night, neither one of them had gotten much sleep over the last two days. It was beginning to show.

As Joe rested in a fitful sleep, Payton kept watch in a chair by his bed, dosing himself with bad coffee laced with liquor from the minibar at his Oak Brook hotel room. He’d cleaned out the stash of tiny bottles and brought a handful with him after making a taxi run to his hotel to clean up and scour the grime off. Even though he’d taken a long shower, he still smelled the smoke from last night. And unfortunately, looking more human, he got attention from hospital staff and others after he returned to the medical complex. Many recognized him from the time he’d played for the Chicago Bears. It surprised him to see how many remembered him in a favorable light, but the
critical armchair sports fanatics were more vocal than casual fans.

He had too much on his mind to care one way or the other. He had copies of the pages Jessie Beckett had given him at the textile plant fire, and while Joe was in surgery, Sam made sure he got a set for Jessie. By the look of desperation in her eyes last night, he knew they meant something to her, but he’d gone bleary-eyed trying to decipher their meaning. The puzzle had been a distraction from the futility of his grief for Nikki. But to him, the pages looked cryptic, nothing more than columns of numbers with vague numeric headers.

He wanted to punish the men who had taken and killed Nikki, but making them pay would not bring her back. One thing dominated his mind most of all. He had no idea what to tell Susannah. None of what he’d say would lighten her load. How do you prepare a mother to hear the kind of news he had to deliver? And how would he help his sister let go of her only child?

When he looked up, Joe was awake and had been watching him. Even if he wanted to keep secrets from his friend, the man would see right through him.

“I can smell the alcohol from here.” Surprisingly, Joe kept his disappointment in check, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t feeling it. “And I thought I was the one needing a crutch.”

The man never minced words and always knew how to get his point across—his version of a verbal bat upside the head.

“I had to take the edge off. Don’t give me a lecture.”

“Living is dealing with edges, Payton. And until we know for sure about Nikki, this ain’t over.” Joe winced with pain. Knowing Tanu, he’d refuse to push his morphine button even if he were gut shot.

First and foremost, Joe had the blood of a cop coursing through his veins. When he talked about “knowing for sure”
about Nikki, he meant until recovery crews found and identified her remains. Being a pragmatic man, Joe dealt with the raw truth. It was his nature. Had he been a glass-half-full kind of guy, he might have taken comfort in Joe’s words, that there was an outside shot Nikki was still alive. But these days, he didn’t feel like a lucky man, and his only fleeting comfort came from single malt scotch and the bottoms of many an empty glass—honesty and truth be damned.

Before he had a chance to respond to Joe, Detective Sam Cooper walked into the hospital room.

“Hey, Joe. How are you feeling?” she asked.

The man shrugged. His eyes had lost their sheen and his dark skin looked pale under the hospital lights. “If it weren’t for the pretty nurses, I’d go stir crazy.”

“How’s Jessie?” Payton asked her.

“She had some pretty deep cuts that needed stitches, but no skull fracture. She got lucky for once, but they’re keeping her under observation for the concussion.” Sam pointed over her shoulder. “She’s on this floor, far corner. I’m sure she’ll want to see you, but they’ve got her on pain meds. She drifts in and out.”

With the copied pages for Jess in his hand, Payton got up to leave.

Sam stopped him. “This morning she told me she wasn’t thinking clearly last night…about turning over the original documents. She figured that if she’d taken something off the premises, it might put me in the middle and compromise my job. Guilt by association, I guess. But Payton, I’m already in the middle. Jess is like family to me.”

Sam smiled. “If there’s anything I can do to help, you let me know. She’s not always the most objective when it comes to dealing with scum like this.”

Payton wondered what she meant but didn’t want to pry into Jessie’s life. He understood the need for privacy. And he certainly appreciated the necessity for leading a solitary life.

“When can I go out there?” he asked. “I gotta know.”

The detective didn’t have to ask him what he meant. She knew he wouldn’t rest until they found Nikki’s body. It would be hard on him and Susannah, but they would both need closure.

“Fire crews are still working the scene, making sure it’s safe for investigators and searching for—” She stopped herself and shifted her gaze to Joe—a knowing look—cop-to-cop.

“And they’ll be searching for bodies,” Payton pressed. “That’s what you were going to say, right?”

She nodded. “The textile factory is a crime scene. You won’t be able to go beyond the barricade, but I’ll let you know if…you’ll be the first to know.”

“Thanks, Sam.” Before Payton left the room, he looked over his shoulder at Joe. “After I see Jessie, I’m gonna get some coffee. Catch you later.”

By the expression on Joe Tanu’s face, he had received the message loud and clear. Without saying it, Payton had assured him he would sober up—for now. No guarantees how long his good behavior would last. And if they found Nikki’s body, all bets would be off.

When Payton entered Jessie Beckett’s hospital room, she had been asleep. He thought about giving her privacy and coming back later, but at some point he lost control of his will to leave. He studied the woman, really seeing her for the first time, minus the desperation and pain of last night. Her pale skin looked flushed, tinged with color that was a perfect contrast to her dark hair. And under the faint scar near her eye, which gave her face character and grit, her lips and the contour of her cheeks gave her a striking vulnerability, a contradiction he hadn’t expected.

Her muscular athletic body mirrored the hardness of the scars she bore, yet the soft fleshy curves of a woman’s figure were there too. Jessie had the total package, plus an intriguing edge of raw sensuality. Of all people, he had an apprecia
tion for imperfections, both inside and out, and knew there would be more to her story. But for this woman to let him in, it would take patience and time, and he wasn’t sure he had either. He felt too messed up to take on a strong woman, and someone like Jessie deserved better. Still, he found himself wondering what it would be like to be with her—to feel capable of returning what she had to give to a man.

When she opened her dark eyes, she gazed at him with all the intimacy of a waking lover. He should have turned away and ignored how she made him feel, but couldn’t bring himself to do it.

“Hey,” he whispered. Leaning over her bed, he stroked a strand of hair away from her cheek. “Can I…get you anything? Water, maybe?”

Payton could tell that it took a moment for Jessie to focus and recognize who he was. He’d taken too much liberty with someone he’d barely met, and he knew it, yet it felt right to be alone with her—a feeling he couldn’t explain even to himself.

When she nodded and tried to sit up, he helped adjust her pillow and raise the bed before he fixed her a small cup of shaved ice. Her bedside table had been stocked with the stuff. But when he attempted to feed her a spoonful, she clutched at her hospital gown, reminding him they were nothing more than strangers. And oddly enough, that bothered him.

Damn it, Archer! What the hell were you thinking?
He offered her the cup of ice and spoon, for her to take care of her own needs.

“Thanks,” she said. “How’s your friend?”

Waking up to find Payton Archer so close had unnerved Jess. She took the cup and spoon from his hand, getting a sudden rush when their fingers touched. By refusing his spoon-feeding, she’d wanted to set a clear boundary between them. But she didn’t know if the boundary was meant for his benefit or hers.

“Joe had surgery to set pins in his leg,” he said. “Guess when he flies home, he’ll be setting off security alarms at the airport.”

She smiled as she melted ice in her mouth. Payton probably thought she found humor in his remark, but the man had a subtle and undeniable charm. He shared more on Joe’s condition, and everytime she caught him staring at her, he turned away and pretended it hadn’t happened…until the next time. His subtle game came as such a surprise that she had to smile. He had an inherent sensuality that he didn’t seem to be aware of, a quality she always found seductive.

“You know,” she said, “I remembered you from before…when you played for ‘da Bears.’”

His sudden change of expression told her she’d said the wrong thing. Idle chitchat was never her gig, especially when she was nervous.

Payton winced and said, “Ancient history. Off the field, I’d sooner forget those years. I wasn’t…” He thought about what he wanted to say. “I wasn’t ready for…success like that. My ego was cashing checks my head and heart couldn’t handle.”

In typical guy fashion, he left most of his meaning between the lines, leaving her to fill in the blanks. When she was younger, she might have been tempted to do that, but these days, she took a man at face value without donning rose-colored glasses. Still, Payton’s candor and his willingness to talk about old wounds with a perceptive honesty had hooked her. She definitely wanted to know more about the man—and not just what she remembered from newspaper headlines.

“Sam told me she gave you copies of the pages I got from the control room.” When he handed her the document copies, she tried a grin, but failed miserably. Her head ached with a vengeance. “She was right to preserve the evidence and process for prints. I wasn’t thinking my best last night. Guess I was pretty out of it.”

Payton filled her in on what had happened after the fire. For the time being, he avoided any talk of his niece Nikki, but she knew he would get to it when he was ready. As he talked and paced her hospital room, she listened to what he had to say—to a point.

Jess felt completely vulnerable, confined to a hospital bed wearing nothing but a hospital gown that resembled a hankie with ties. Her battered appearance, both old scars and new, would have made her feel self-conscious around anyone, but being in this small room with Payton Archer compounded her awkwardness. She couldn’t remember ever feeling this ridiculous around a man. She found herself counting the steps he took as he paced the floor near her bed and how many times she caught a glimpse of a dimple.

Get over yourself, Jess! He only cares about his niece.

If she thought dismissing him would help her cope, she might have tried faking indifference, but Payton Archer was hard for a woman to ignore. He looked damned fine in those jeans, with his broad shoulders and narrow hips, which only the NFL could produce. He wore his hair long and straight, far too appealing for her taste, the glistening blond streaks giving him the look of a beefy surfer on steroids. And worse, the fierce blue of his eyes against tanned skin had a way of stifling her breath, giving her the heady startling sensation of jumping into the deep end of a pool filled with nothing but ice water. Those eyes could be downright lethal. Yet what surprised her most was the gentleness of his voice when he spoke. It had the drizzle of honey mixed with the gravel of sultry Kentucky bourbon.

Unfortunately for her, he didn’t fit the picture of an overindulged self-centered jock, except his breath smelled of alcohol. And at this time of morning, that made him entitled to full membership in the barely functioning walking wounded club. But she knew she wasn’t one to judge, being a charter member herself.

No doubt about it, Payton Archer spelled pure trouble. His quiet appeal triggered something she had thought was dead in her. And the fact that he had been in a desperate search for his niece made her want to get to know him all the more. He pushed all her buttons and some she didn’t even know she had.

“It took a lot of guts for Nikki to reach out to me, especially when she was so scared,” she told him. Despite fighting a burgeoning headache, she set the cup of ice aside and broached the touchy subject of his niece, waiting for him to open up to her.

Sam had told her about Payton’s breakdown at the scene after her delirious outburst about Nikki being left in the control room. She had no way of knowing for sure what had happened, and he couldn’t have done anything about it in the midst of an explosion, but logical reasoning wouldn’t stop the pain of grief. And by the look on his face, he would have a long road toward becoming whole again.

“I don’t know what I’m going to tell my sister.” He shut his eyes and took a deep breath. “I haven’t called her yet, but no sense in putting it off. She has to know. Guess I was hoping this was a nightmare. That I’d wake up and it wouldn’t be true. Any of it.”

“None of this is your fault…or your sister’s. These predators know how to manipulate little girls like Nikki. And…” She could have gone on but stopped herself, knowing he wasn’t ready to hear her tirade or her recollections of the last minutes of Nikki’s life. “When you’re ready to hear it, I’d like to tell you…about Nikki.”

He stared at her a long moment, trying to decide what he was prepared to hear. Eventually he nodded and let it go. Jess hated watching him struggle with the unresolved grief, but sooner or later he’d have to come to terms with what had happened to Nikki.

“So how did you find me in the fire?” she asked. “I don’t remember much after the Russian slugged me over the
head.” By his reticent reaction, she wondered if she had pushed too much. But she wanted to open a door for him. “If you don’t want to talk about this, that’s okay too.”