The Pediatrician's Personal Protector Read online

  “You’re skating on thin ice here, Delancey. I can’t defend you if anyone complains.”

  “Yes, sir. I understand that. Can I get the leave?”

  Mike scowled. “I’ll have to verify it with Jean-Marie. She’s working on the leave schedule for the holidays now. But if you’ll agree to work over Christmas, I can probably swing a week right now.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Why in hell are you getting mixed up with the October Killer’s daughter?”

  Reilly didn’t see any need to go into detail about why he became involved, so he just repeated the facts. “Yesterday, Christy Moser asked me to help her find her sister’s killer. Last night she was attacked by someone who threatened her life.” He set his jaw and looked at Mike Davis steadily.

  “I intend to make sure that the person who got close enough to Christy Moser to threaten her doesn’t get that close to her again.”

  CHRISTY SAT IN THE backseat of the taxi with her head against the seat and her eyes closed, trying to will herself to stop crying. It had been awful the day before, seeing her dad dressed in the ugly orange prison jumpsuit with his hands cuffed in front of him. But as bad as that had been, it didn’t hold a candle to seeing him lying in the cardiac care unit, with wires and tubes running everywhere.

  Her father was only sixty-two, yet he looked a decade older, if not more. He’d already seemed to age since his first heart attack, which occurred soon after he was arrested. But now, lying so still in that bed, in a mesh of wires and tubes, he looked ancient, shrunken, his complexion nearly as gray as his hair.

  His nurse told her they’d sedated him to keep him calm. He reacted when he heard her voice, but he didn’t respond. All he did was moan or mutter unintelligibly.

  Christy held her breath to keep from sobbing. The man in the cardiac care unit wasn’t the man who’d reared Autumn and her, who’d been so strong when their mother had died, who’d celebrated all their achievements and all their special moments with photographs and pages in the big family album he’d kept all their lives.

  “Ma’am?”

  Christy heard the voice and realized it wasn’t the first time she’d heard it. She opened her eyes. It was the taxi driver. The car was stopped.

  She squinted through the window. She was here. Her dad’s house.

  “Oh, thank you,” she said as she got out. “Please wait for me.”

  “Hey, lady. Fares are stacking up. I can’t afford to wait. You call the dispatcher when you’re ready to go. You owe me thirty-two dollars.”

  She handed him two twenties. As he pulled away, she reached into her purse and retrieved her key. Thank goodness the officer who’d caught her here the other day hadn’t taken it away from her.

  She walked up to the door, where new crime-scene tape had replaced the old, and unlocked it. She ducked beneath the tape and entered the house.

  The first thing she did was go to the kitchen to look for light bulbs. She was shocked at what she saw. Her dad had never been an excellent housekeeper. He usually ate takeout off paper plates and left them sitting on the kitchen table for days at a time. Often as not, when he made a pan of cornbread, he’d leave the skillet sitting on the stove.

  But today, to Christy’s shock, everything was spotless. The kitchen table had been wiped and polished. The stove was clean, the sink was empty and there was no old food or grease smell. Even the coffeepot had been cleaned.

  A profound sadness shrouded Christy. Her dad had known. He’d known he wouldn’t be coming back here. She could imagine him that morning. He’d cleaned up as best he could, because he’d expected to die that day. The day that he lied to her and told her he was making a pan of cornbread for his lunch.

  Christy moaned and dropped into a kitchen chair, giving in to a few minutes of helpless sobbing. When she was all cried out, at least for the moment, she got a glass from the cupboard and filled it with tap water and drank. Then she wiped the glass clean and put it back where it belonged. She didn’t want to mess up the kitchen her father had cleaned so meticulously. Or telegraph to the police that she’d been there.

  Wiping her eyes and pulling in a deep, sustaining breath, she retrieved a box of light bulbs from under the sink, then headed back through the living room and into her sister’s bedroom.

  She tried the overhead light and the lamp, expecting the bulbs to be burned out, but they weren’t. Maybe the police had added new bulbs while they were searching the house. Or maybe her dad had never turned on the lights in Autumn’s room since her death.

  Christy set the box on Autumn’s bedside table, noticing that the police had spread gray fingerprint dust here too. She surveyed the room. The bed had been pulled out from the wall, the drawers of Autumn’s dresser were standing open and clothes were piled and scattered, as if careless police hands had rifled through all of them.

  Tears welled in her eyes again, but she dashed them away with a swipe of her fingers. She didn’t have time to wallow in grief and guilt. She had to get back to the hospital before four-thirty. The rest of her day would go a whole lot easier if Reilly didn’t catch her showing up in a taxi, when she was supposed to be there waiting for him.

  She looked at Autumn’s closet, wondering how thoroughly the police had searched it. Not thoroughly enough, she prayed as she set her purse on the bed and braced herself for the task of searching through her sister’s things.

  First, she surveyed the racks of clothes and the shelf above the clothing rod. Autumn’s taste had always been eclectic, running from black and silver Goth outfits to wild tropical prints and skinny jeans. On the shelf were motorcycle boots sitting alongside sexy, strappy sandals. Her sister’s taste in clothes hadn’t changed much since Christy had left home when Autumn was sixteen.

  She eyed a pile of clothes in the bottom of the closet and wondered if they were Autumn’s discards or if they’d been dropped there by the police when they searched. It didn’t matter. Not anymore.

  Christy pushed the clothes aside and moved a couple of pairs of shoes and a single sock away from the interior wall near the left side of the door. Then she bent down and reached out to slip her thumbnail behind the baseboard.

  “Ow,” she muttered, pulling her cast-wrapped hand back. Her broken wrist did not want to bend in that direction.

  At that moment she heard a car door slam. She froze, not daring to breathe. After a few seconds she heard what sounded like a front door closing, probably across the street. She blew her breath out carefully as she glanced at her watch. She only had about twenty minutes before she needed to get back.

  She should have called the taxi back as soon as the grumpy driver left. She had no idea how long it would take to get a taxi out this way. But now that she thought about it, a taxi sitting in front of the house would cause questions. She certainly didn’t want the neighbors calling the police to report a suspicious vehicle.

  Quickly, she slid farther into the closet on her knees, maneuvering so she could use her left hand to pry the baseboard loose. Christy had never hidden things from her parents. Well, almost never.

  But from the moment Autumn could walk, she’d been a pack rat, saving little treasures and secreting them away. She’d been six when she’d discovered the loose baseboard in her closet and the hollow space behind it. She’d shown it to Christy and made her promise never to tell their parents.

  Christy never had.

  The baseboard fit tightly against the wall. No one would suspect it was loose. Christy slipped her fingernails between the baseboard and the wall and pulled gently. The board gave.

  Her heart jumped. Don’t get too excited, she warned herself. Autumn at six, twelve or even sixteen, hadn’t been the same person as Autumn at twenty-one. It could have been years since she’d hidden anything in her secret place. The chance that there might be something there that would give Christy a clue to who had killed her sister was minuscule.

  Christy pried the baseboard away from the wall, noting that the adhesive was a piece
of chewing gum. Chewing gum. She giggled and her heart twisted.

  She had to maneuver more before she could slide her hand into the empty space. She cringed, hoping no spiders had taken up residence in her sister’s hiding place.

  Her fingers immediately encountered a wad of rolled paper. She pulled it out and gasped. Twenty-dollar bills. A lot of them, rolled up and secured with a pink Cinderella ribbon. The sight of the dirty money wrapped with the innocent ribbon was heartbreaking.

  “Oh, Tum-tum,” she whispered, using the nickname she’d given her sister when Autumn was a baby. “What were you doing?”

  Reaching in again, she found a cardboard box. It was barely small enough to fit through the opening, and it took some fancy maneuvering with her left hand to get it out. It was taped up with duct tape. Setting it beside the roll of twenties, she explored the space one more time. In the farthest corner she could reach, she felt some coins and a length of what felt like more ribbon. She pulled them out. The dusty ribbon matched the ribbon used to tie up the bills.

  She looked at the coins. Two were Louisiana quarters. But the third disk wasn’t a coin at all. It was a button. A brass button, with a few navy-blue fibers attached to it with matching thread.

  Christy secured the piece of board back against the wall and crawled out of the closet. When she did, she spotted a cell phone charger plugged into the wall. She grabbed it. Autumn’s phone—the phone she’d used to call Christy the night she’d died—had never been found. Christy quickly searched the room, knowing she wouldn’t find it. The police had already turned the house upside down. She wondered why they hadn’t taken the cord. She looked at it, then put it in her purse, not really knowing why.

  She got to her feet and grabbed a tissue out of a box on Autumn’s bedside table. She didn’t know if it would do any good, since she’d already handled the coins and the button, but she wrapped them in the tissue and stowed it, the box and the roll of twenties in her purse. As much as she was dying to see what was in the box, she knew she needed to get out of there and back to the hospital.

  She headed back to the kitchen, set her purse down on the counter, washed her hands and dried them with a paper towel. Then she inspected her clothes. Her pants were covered with cobwebs and dust. Muttering a mild curse, she looked in the junk drawer. A roll of masking tape. Just what she needed. She took a strip of tape in both hands and slid the sticky side along the material of her brown pants, lifting away the dust and cobwebs. As soon as her clothes were halfway presentable, she’d call another taxi.

  With any luck, Reilly would never know she hadn’t been at the hospital the whole time.

  Chapter Five

  At four-thirty on the dot, Reilly parked in front of St. Tammany Parrish Medical Center and went inside to pick up Christy. She was nowhere to be found. The waiting room receptionist told him she’d called a taxi.

  “Damn it,” he muttered, heading back to his car. He should never have left her alone. He should have given her a half hour to sit with her dad and then made her go with him. But after her assault, her dad’s heart attack and the grilling Buford Watts had given her this morning, he’d figured she was too upset and exhausted to run off on her own. In fact, she’d almost leaned on him as he’d walked with her to the cardiac care unit earlier. Almost.

  He’d thought maybe she’d decided that it wasn’t so bad having him beside her. Well, she’d shown him. She’d given him the slip the first chance she’d gotten.

  Clever, Doc. But not for long.

  Hopefully, she’d decided to go back to her room and rest. He headed to the Oak Grove Inn to make sure she was okay. He’d get Ella to check on her, and if she was asleep, he wouldn’t bother her. Tomorrow was soon enough to fuss at her for not waiting for him. But a niggling voice in the back of his mind told him Christy Moser was not the type to spend an afternoon in bed.

  When he vaulted up the steps of the white clapboard main house at the bed-and-breakfast, Ella met him at the door, broom in hand.

  “Afternoon, Reilly. Watch out.”

  Reilly stepped back barely in time to miss being coated with the dirt and dust she swept across the threshold.

  Once Ella was done, she looked up, past Reilly. “Where’s Christy?”

  “She’s not here?” Reilly asked, not really surprised.

  “No.” Ella’s sharp bird eyes scrutinized Reilly. “D’you lose her?”

  He clamped his jaw. “No, I did not lose her.” He just didn’t know where she was.

  Ella gripped her broom like a weapon. “Well, shoo. Get back out there and find her. She doesn’t need to be running around on her own. She’s hurt and heartsick.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Reilly said as he backed down the steps, dusting off his pants. Okay, that was a waste of time. Think like her. As he got into his car and cranked the engine, it hit him.

  Her dad’s house. He muttered a string of curses. Of course. He’d bet six months’ pay that she’d taken a taxi to her childhood home. It was still cordoned off as a crime scene, but a few strips of yellow tape wouldn’t slow Dr. Christy Moser down a bit.

  As he backed out of the B&B parking lot, he speed-dialed Ryker’s number to get Albert Moser’s address.

  When he pulled up to the house, a taxi pulled up behind him. Reilly walked over to the vehicle and handed the guy a couple of twenties.

  “Thanks,” he said. “You can go on.”

  The driver shrugged and took off.

  Reilly walked up the steps and ducked under the crime scene tape. As he stepped into the living room, Christy hurried out of the kitchen, hiking her purse strap over her shoulder. When she saw him, she stopped and stiffened. “Oh,” she said.

  “Oh?” Reilly crossed his arms and leaned against the foyer wall. “That’s what you’ve got to say? Just oh?”

  “I—have a taxi coming.”

  “Not anymore.”

  She glanced past him at the door then back. “What are you doing here?” Amazingly, she managed to insert a note of righteous indignation into her voice, but the little quaver at the end of the sentence took the starch out of her effort.

  “Looking for my damsel in distress.” Reilly had to bite his cheek to keep from smiling. She was a tough one all right—on the outside. “The question is what are you doing here?”

  Her left hand tightened on her purse strap. “I just—I just wanted to see my dad’s house. He—” She paused. “He needs his reading glasses.”

  She was lying. She might as well have been wearing a sign. I’m a really bad liar.

  “Yeah? He’s feeling well enough to read?” he asked mildly.

  “Uh, no. Not yet. But I want to make sure he has them when he does feel better.” She nodded toward the table next to the big recliner. “They should be—right there, but—” She shrugged. “They’re not.”

  “Maybe the nurses put them with the rest of his things when they admitted him.”

  “No—” She stopped again, narrowing her eyes at him. “Maybe. I just wanted to help.”

  There was that note in her voice again. Tough, but underlain with a vulnerability, a note of doubt, as if she wasn’t quite sure what exactly she was trying to say. And again, the little quaver at the end. Reilly studied her. Was she on the verge of crying?

  He had a feeling she would not appreciate him seeing her cry. She already resented him for being there to help her when she needed help, whether she would admit it or not.

  He longed to take that quaver out of her voice, longed to offer her a shoulder. But she wouldn’t accept it or appreciate it. So all he did was step a little closer, close enough that she couldn’t ignore him. Close enough to be there if she chose to reach out.

  An odd sound came from her. Was it a smothered sob? She was looking down, so he bent his head slightly to meet her gaze.

  “It’s okay,” he said softly. “It’s okay to want to see your home. It must not have been easy, coming in here.”

  Her head shook slowly from side to side, but she sti
ll stared at a place on the hardwood floor, not meeting his gaze.

  “I’d have brought you,” he murmured. “You didn’t have to come alone.”

  “I didn’t know he was in such bad shape,” she moaned. “I didn’t know. I’d have come home. If I’d known he was so sick—I’d have—” Her words got swallowed up by a sob.

  Reilly didn’t want to make the wrong move, but he couldn’t suppress the urge to do something to comfort her. He took a step closer and put a gentle hand on her shoulder.

  When he did, she turned toward him. He slid his arm around her and exerted just the slightest pressure. It was enough. She came into his embrace and pressed her face into the hollow of his shoulder. Her breaths were hot against his skin, even through his shirt, and they came in little puffs. She was crying.

  It wasn’t easy—her crying. It was stifled, bottled-up, pitiful, like a kid trying to hold its breath and cry at the same time. It was obvious Dr. Christy Moser never cried.

  “Christy, it’s not your fault. What your father did. It’s not your fault.” He rubbed her back, aware that his resolve to be just a shoulder she could cry on was dissolving fast. Despite his good intentions, he couldn’t ignore how sexy her bony, feminine shoulders were. He lowered his gaze to the graceful curve of her neck and the little bump at the top of her spinal column. Even that was sexy as hell.

  He swallowed and closed his eyes. “Not your fault,” he whispered again and again as he basked in the feel of her slender, supple body pressed against his, and savored the damp warmth of her breath against his skin.

  Then, after what could have been a couple of seconds or a dozen minutes, Christy stiffened and pulled away. She turned her back on him and swiped at her eyes with her fingers.

  “Excuse me,” she said in a muffled voice and headed for the kitchen.

  Reilly moved to the kitchen doorway, just to make sure she was all right. And, he had to admit, to be sure she didn’t sneak out the back door. She turned on the water tap and splashed her face several times, then pulled a paper towel from a stand to pat her skin dry.