Dead Wrong (7 page)

He got up, turned his back on her, and walked from the room. Annie heard him in the kitchen, heard the refrigerator door open, then slam. When he came back in, he was taking a long draw from a bottle of beer. He didn’t offer her one.

“Still out on medical leave?” she asked to change the subject. That other horse had been flogged sufficiently.

“Oh, come on, Annie. You’re still active in the Bureau.” He sat back down on the sofa. “Don’t act as if you haven’t been checking up on me.”

“Someone has to.”

“No one has to.” He took another long swallow.

“Any thoughts of getting back to work soon?”

“I haven’t thought about it.”

“Of course you have.” She called him on the lie. “You think about it every day.”

“What if I do?” He stood, trapped, looked as if he was about to pace, but the room was too small for his long legs to go more than three or four strides in any direction.

“What’s stopping you?”

“What’s stopping me?” He rubbed his chin. “Well, let’s start with the fact that there’s no way I will ever pass the physical.”

He raised his index finger and began to count off his infirmities. “I can’t run worth shit. I got enough metal in my one leg to build a small plane. I can’t hold a gun in my dominant hand, and I have had blackouts. That’s four. What do you think my chances are of passing the FBI’s physical, Dr. McCall?”

“There are other things you can do.”

“No, Anne Marie. There is nothing else I can do.” His voice dropped a full octave. “I was a special agent for the FBI, just like both of my brothers, like my father. There is nothing else for me.”

“Not
was
. You still
are
.”

He glared at her.

“So you’re just going to hide here in this apartment until you can go on active status?” Her fingers began a soft tap on the arm of the chair.

“We both know that isn’t going to happen.”

“We both know that you stopped going to physical therapy four months ago.”

“I didn’t see any point to it.” He ran an impatient hand through his too-long dark hair. He needed a cut, badly.

“Just like you didn’t see any point to following through with the counselor.”

“Yeah. Just like that. You shrinks don’t always have the answers, you know.”

“It didn’t occur to you that maybe talking it out . . .”

“You want me to talk it out? Okay. Let’s talk it out.” He crossed his arms angrily over his chest. “My brother and I were undercover to establish ourselves as major heroin dealers. Somehow, someone found out we weren’t. We were ambushed. My brother was killed. I was shot up. There. I talked it out. Do I feel better?” He all but spit. “No. Not a damned bit.”

Annie had watched his face etch with pain and grief. As a psychiatrist, she could assess his need to deal with emotions he’d done his best to bury. But as Dylan’s lover, she understood the depth of Aidan’s loss all too well. She knew just how close the brothers had been.

“Don’t think for a minute that I don’t understand. That I don’t know how deeply you hurt . . .”

“Don’t you miss him, Annie?” Unexpectedly, his face softened and the challenge faded from his eyes.

“Every day. I can’t begin to tell you . . .” How could she explain, even to his brother, what Dylan’s loss had done to her life? How she still reached for him every morning. How she fell asleep holding his pillow every night. How she often found herself weeping for no reason at all. How food had lost its flavor and how she was just beginning to learn to laugh again.

“Just tell me how you get up every day and just keep doing what you do.”

“What are my choices?” she whispered.

They stared at each other for a long time, grief reaching for grief silently across the room.

Aidan sat back down on the sofa, his arms resting on his thighs, but still they did not speak.

Finally, she said, “I need a favor.”

“Sure. I told you I’d always be there for you, Annie.”

“Don’t be so quick.” She attempted a small smile. “It will require you leaving this apartment.”

“To go where?” he asked warily.

“I need you to keep an eye on my sister.”

He frowned, trying to remember her sister’s name. “You want me to watch Mary?”

“Mara,” she corrected him. “Her name is Mara. And yes, I want you to watch her. I want you to watch her like a hawk. I’m afraid someone is going to try to kill her.”

CHAPTER
FOUR

A
IDAN
S
HIELDS STRAIGHTENED SLOWLY AS HE GOT
out of his car—the white 1963 Corvette that had been the pride and joy of his late brother, Dylan—then rolled his shoulders to work out the tension that had set in during the two-and-a-half hour drive he’d made from Rehoboth, Delaware, to the small college town of Lyndon, Pennsylvania. To say he was uncomfortable—on all fronts—would be an understatement.

For one thing, his left leg hurt like hell, having been positioned in an odd angle next to the steering wheel of the Vette. The odd angle was the result of his sitting in a manner that caused most of his weight to fall on his left hip in order to spare his bad right hip from undue pressure.

Then there was the fact that it had been close to a year since he’d been more than forty minutes from his home or spent more than an hour in the company of anyone who wasn’t one of his doctors. And it had been a while since he’d been to see any of them.

Then there was the matter of Annie’s sister.

Annie had waited until that morning to tell Aidan that Mara wasn’t exactly expecting him.

“What does that mean, exactly?” he’d asked pointedly into the phone. “That she’s not
exactly
expecting me?”

“It means she’ll be fine about it, once you get there,” Annie had assured him.

“Is she not fine about it now?”

“She’s just not sure that she needs to have someone living in her house, that’s all.”

“You never mentioned that I’d be living in her house.” Aidan had frowned. He’d assumed he’d be staying in a nearby hotel. These days, he wasn’t very good company. Even for himself.

“How can you possibly keep an eye on her if you aren’t under the same roof?” Annie had sounded tired as well as exasperated. “Look, I’m going into a meeting right now. I’ll catch up with you at Mara’s later this afternoon. In the meantime, just keep in mind that my sister is the only member of my immediate family who’s still living. I need to keep her that way.”

Aidan locked the car door and paused at the trunk, then changed his mind about bringing his suitcase in with him. If Annie’s sister was adamant about not having a live-in guest, he wasn’t going to push himself on her. God knows he wouldn’t appreciate a stranger moving into his apartment just because someone else thought it might be a good idea. Even if that someone was Annie.

As a matter of fact, now that he thought about it, he couldn’t come up with one good reason why he would let someone else move in with him, even on a temporary basis. It had been hard enough for him to leave his apartment on those rare occasions he ventured out, and most of his outings had consisted of solitary walks along long stretches of deserted beach. He was physically and emotionally uncomfortable around more than one or two people at a time these days, and lately he’d noticed that the more time he spent in his apartment, the less he wanted to leave. He didn’t even try to delude himself into thinking this was a healthy thing, but at the same time, he couldn’t seem to help himself. His own company was all that he could bear at times. And some days even that was pushing it.

Right now, Aidan could count on the fingers of one hand the number of people he’d welcomed—and that was a relative term—into his apartment since Dylan’s death. His brother Connor—the oldest of the Shields brothers—had stayed for ten days after Aidan’s release from the hospital and Dylan’s funeral, which had been postponed until Aidan had recovered enough to attend. Then there’d been his boss, John Mancini, who’d driven from Virginia on several occasions to check up on him. And then, a few days ago, Annie, for the first time in several months.

If anyone other than Annie had asked this of him, he’d have told them to go to hell. But Annie would have been Aidan’s sister-in-law by now if Dylan hadn’t been killed, and so, as far as Aidan was concerned, she was family. He was very much aware that Dylan had loved her completely. His heart and his soul, Dylan had called her one night when he and Aidan were on a stakeout on the rainy streets of D.C. If Annie needed help, Aidan would move heaven and hell to do whatever had to be done. If her sister was in danger and Annie needed someone to look out for her, well, then, Aidan was Annie’s man. Whether he liked it or not.

And frankly, he didn’t like it at all.

For one thing, he wished he’d had a little more notice. Just to get used to the thought of leaving the comfort of his home—such as it was—and coming to a strange place to bunk in with a strange woman. Of course, given enough time, chances were he’d have found a dozen reasons why he should have turned down Annie’s request.

But then again, it was Annie who’d done the asking. And he’d promised her he’d always be there for her. . . .

Yeah, yeah, well, he was here now, and in just a peachy frame of mind.

Aidan paused and looked ahead at the house that rose from a stone and mortar foundation at the end of the brick path. The house was neat and trim—a little too neat, maybe—the front door set back into a little porch with an overhang that carefully mimicked thatch. The overall appearance was Tudor in style, the stucco a medium shade of tan and the wood trim a darker brown. Purple and yellow primroses—a bit too cheery for his taste—spilled over the sides of a large clay pot that was set to one side of the top step, and pewter hummingbirds danced and twirled around wind chimes that hung from a nail on a rafter directly over the flowers. All in all, Annie’s sister’s home looked snug and homey and not at all in need of protection.

Aidan rang the doorbell, knowing full well that things were not always as they seemed.

He turned toward the street as he waited, stepped back a bit when the dog on the other side of the door began to bark. Aidan could hear its nose tracing along the floor, sniffing wildly, trying to register the scent as known or unknown. Deciding the stranger was one who needed to be frightened away, or at the very least put in his place, the dog began to bark and growl until Aidan stepped back off the porch. The last thing he needed was for someone to call the local police and report that a strange man was trying to get into the home of one M. Douglas.

Aidan walked across the grass and around to the back of the property. A garage that architecturally matched the house stood at the end of the drive. The backyard was totally fenced in and had a large maple tree smack in the middle. Off the rear of the house was a small deck that held a table, four chairs, and a grill that was still covered over from winter.

A flat of dark blue pansies sat at the foot of the deck steps as if forgotten. At the far side of the yard, alone in beds that had been lightly mulched with last year’s grass clippings but neglected since, a few random red tulips bloomed as if afterthoughts. The yard had no other color, save for patches of spring grass.

“Can I help you with something?” A woman’s voice came from behind, close enough to make him startle.

“You can if you’re Mara Douglas.” He turned to find a petite and pretty dark-haired woman in a black suit standing about ten feet away. Behind her was parked a dark blue Jetta.

“I am.” She took a step backward, almost unconsciously, at the admission.

“Aidan Shields.”

“Of course. Dylan’s brother. Annie mentioned that you might be swinging by one day this week. I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you at first.”

“It’s been a while. And to tell you the truth, I didn’t recognize you, either.”

The woman who stood before him could just as well have been a complete stranger. The last time he’d seen her had been at Dylan’s funeral. Over the past few days, whenever he had tried to call up her face, the only image that appeared was that of a tired-looking, serious woman with haunted eyes.

“I suppose I should invite you in. Since you’re going to be stopping by from time to time, I guess you should get the lay of the land, so to speak.”

Stopping by from time to time?

Apparently one of them did not have a clear understanding of what Annie had in mind. Aidan had a feeling it might be Mara.