Maternal Instinct (9 page)

Kim burrowed deeper. "I just get confused. Sometimes I feel older than you were at sixteen!"

Wasn't every teenager positive that she was more mature at every age than her parents had ever been? But Nell said gently, "I remember feeling that way, too. It's part of believing the bad stuff won't happen to you. But it does. It can."

Kim was silent for a moment. Then she gave her mom a convulsive squeeze and wriggled off her lap. "Can I go on birth control, just in case?"

Nell's heart sank. She tried not to show the intensity of her dismay. "I'd rather you did that, if you've decided to have sex."

Chin defiantly high, Kim asked, "You'd give permission?"

"Yes. Which doesn't mean I think you're ready."

The teenager pressed her lips together and gave a jerky nod. "Okay."

"Just … let me know. If I need to sign something."

Kim nodded again, averted her face, and went back to the couch. A second later, the movie blared into life.

Nell waited for a few minutes, staring blindly down at her book, before she set it down casually and stood. Not until she had left the room did she hurry. At the back of the house, in her own bathroom, she crumpled onto the toilet seat and buried her face in her hands.

She couldn't be pregnant.
Please, God, don't let me be.

Her period had always been irregular. Just because she'd vaguely thought it was due didn't mean anything. She didn't pay that much attention. It might start tonight, tomorrow, next week. She had no cause to panic yet.

But she was. Dread slept beside her at night. She made excuses during the day to go to the bathroom to peek hopefully at her underwear. Every twinge in her abdomen sent relief flooding through her—cramps, at last! But the relief was always short-lived.

She should buy a home pregnancy kit. But buying one would imply that she needed to, that there was reason for concern, and until this minute, she hadn't been willing to admit there was. Of course she'd feel better when her period came, but it would. Nobody got pregnant from a one-night stand. And late in the month, too.

But now she admitted she didn't know if it had been late in the month. She couldn't for the life of her remember any event connected with her last menstruation that would let her pin it down to a time of the month. She, who knew better, hadn't wanted to believe she could get pregnant. She'd been as foolish as any teenager. Why hadn't she gone to the doctor and asked for a morning-after pill? There was such a thing nowadays, wasn't there?

What difference did it make? She was too late.

She stood, went to the sink, washed her face in cold water, then reached for her toothbrush. She might as well get ready for bed. The neighborhood drugstore was closed, and she didn't relish the idea of lying to Kim about where she was going and why anyway.

Tomorrow was soon enough.

Nell whacked
irritably at the alarm clock, missed it and swore when she banged her hand on the lamp base. Finally finding the button, she wondered who had ever thought waking to music was any more pleasant than to a buzz?

She closed her eyes and longed for sleep—sweet, sweet oblivion. Last night it had been elusive, but now drew her irresistibly into its embrace. Weighted eyelids refused to lift. She was losing the battle when her stomach gave an uneasy turn. Fresh panic did what the alarm clock hadn't, bringing her abruptly awake. Was she really sick to her stomach?

No, only mildly queasy. Which scared her worse.

Maybe the mayonnaise she'd used in last night's potato salad had been off. Or that guy she and McLean had interviewed two days ago—he'd said he wasn't feeling well. The flu. She was coming down with the flu.

Please.

Breakfast cured the queasiness, making her wonder if she'd imagined it in her fear. She hadn't suffered much from morning sickness in her first pregnancy, so why would she this time? Not that there was a this time. Heck, everyone had an upset stomach once in a while.

The drugstore wasn't open yet, and it wouldn't do her any good to carry the damn kit around all day anyway.

She might as well have been carrying it. The moment she saw Hugh in roll call, she became painfully self-conscious. Today he was leaning against a window frame on the far side of the room, talking to John. The moment she walked in, Hugh's vivid blue eyes met hers. He murmured something to his brother, who looked at her, too. Oh, good. She'd turned green.

It took an effort not to glance down to see whether her belly had swelled.

Mercifully, the captain cleared his throat just then and said, "Okay, people, stow the gossip and listen up."

He began the usual summary of the night's crime, outstanding warrants, APBs and the like. Nell only half listened, as she and Hugh weren't currently on patrol.

She waited out in the hall for Hugh, who nodded when he reached her. So why had he looked at her so oddly? They walked silently to the briefing room, where the team discussed yesterday's interviews and their plans for today. She and Hugh were starting today to interview the workers on the fifth floor, where only one victim and Jack Gann's body had been found. In the past ten days, they had learned little that was new, hearing variations on the same story over and over. The worst were the hospitalized wounded and those people who had seen a co-worker murdered. Horror was palpable as they talked, like a gas that seeped through the barriers the police officers had erected to protect themselves.

The briefing room was now papered with blueprints of each floor, showing Gann's progression, the location of wounded, corpses and discarded weapons. Notations from witnesses further tracked his every move. The sum of the story was simple: an angry man had walked into the Joplin Building with half a dozen weapons, bypassed the offices on the first two floors, then moved methodically up and down the halls of The Greater Northwest Insurance, shooting everyone he saw. He had made no apparent effort to distinguish individuals; among the dead were a client and a legal secretary from a law firm on the second floor. Nor had he wasted time hunting down the hidden. Gann must have known his time was limited.

"No surprises," Detective John McLean concluded somberly. He paced at the head of the table. "This week should wrap up the interviews."

On the way to the parking garage, Nell asked Hugh, "Relieved?"

"That we're almost done?" He seemed preoccupied. "Yeah. Sure. Aren't you?"

She let out a soundless sigh. "Yes. It's been … disturbing."

Male that he was, he only grunted. She took the sound as agreement.

"I want to drive today," she said.

He shot her a startled look, eyebrows raised. "Yeah?"

She asserted her right about once a week. Hugh was always surprised, and seemingly agreeable. Then he'd spend the day double-checking that lanes were empty, glancing at the speedometer, and stamping down on the floorboard if she didn't brake quickly enough to suit him.

It was easier to let him have the driver's seat, but not good for their working relationship, which was why she insisted often enough to keep him on his toes. Today she only wanted to have something to occupy herself. Otherwise, she'd brood.

"Who first?" she asked, buckling in.

He lifted the clipboard. "Donald St. Clair." He named an address in Old Town. "We've met him. He was in the first office on the left, the guy who was hiding while the last victim was gunned down."

She remembered: the rustling sound, the sudden start of fear at their carelessness. One more shell-shocked office worker had stumbled around the partition, scarred already by guilt because he hadn't done something heroic and suicidal to save his colleague.

Not all wounds, she reflected, were physical. Almost every local employee of Greater Northwestern would carry a remembered ache of some kind for the rest of their lives. She wondered if some were already planning a lawsuit against their employer, hoping riches would palliate the pain.

She drove quietly and efficiently, ignoring Hugh's jerks and exaggerated head turnings every time she changed lanes.

The street number belonged to an enormous Victorian mansion that had been skillfully remodeled into half a dozen condos. St. Clair's was on the top floor, boasting, it appeared from the ground, access to a wrought-iron enclosed widow's walk atop the roof.

Entering the marble-floored lobby, Hugh muttered, "This place must have cost a mint."

Nell looked down at the clipboard. "According to this, St. Clair sells insurance packages to employers. You know, convinces them to drop Blue Cross, that Greater Northwest will give them a better deal on employee medical coverage. Wonder if he's paid on commission."

Hugh called up, using a brass-plated intercom. A muffled voice told them to come ahead, and the elevator opened soundlessly.

A smaller lobby on the third floor had only two doors opening from it. A middle-aged man was waiting in one.

Nell couldn't have even said he looked familiar.

Shock and fear had distorted his face. She remembered the sweat beading his high forehead more than she did his eyes or the shape of his mouth.

He had a thin, ascetic face, a receding hairline and a tall, athletic build. In corduroy slacks and a sport shirt, he was an urbane, attractive man with a wry smile.

"Come in. We've met."

"If you can call it that," she agreed. "How are you, Mr. St. Clair?"

His smile faded. "A hell of a lot better than too many others." He gave an odd, abbreviated shrug. "I'm okay." He led the way into a living room that, while open to a dining alcove and the kitchen, still had the feel of the original house. Ceilings were a good ten feet up, windows were small-paned, and the creamy white walls were offset by gleaming wood floors and broad molding.

"Nice place," Hugh said, turning to take in antique rugs, leather furniture and art deco bronze statues.

"Just bought it last year." The owner glanced around. "They did a hell of a job, didn't they? I can give you the architect's name, if you're interested."

"Can't afford an architect on a cop's salary," Hugh said curtly.

"Ah." He seemed momentarily taken aback.

Nell gave Hugh a look. He obviously didn't like St. Clair, but he should know better than to show it.

Hoping to distract from her partner's rudeness—and, heck, succumbing to curiosity at the same time—she asked, "How do you get up to the widow's walk?" They shouldn't waste the time, but…

"Want to see?" St. Clair's expression was childishly delighted. "Come on."

The circular wrought-iron staircase climbed inside a rounded turret. Nell felt almost claustrophobic as she followed, but the spectacular view cured her the moment they stepped outside on the pocket-size terrace atop the roof.

"
Ohh
," she breathed, barely aware of Hugh so close behind her he could have laid a hand on her waist.

All of nineteenth-century Old Town sprawled below, the waterfront bustling as it must have when this house was built, and the first captain's wife stood here watching as her husband's ship embarked for China or a trip around the Horn to Boston. Morning mist receded over the strait. Out of it, a ferry emerged, horn sounding muffled.

Turning—carefully, so she didn't bump Hugh—Nell turned her back on the water to see modern Port Dare stretching like an ugly anachronism along Highway 101, and beyond the strip malls the dark-green wooded foothills and the snow-capped tips of the first peaks in the Olympic Mountains rising beyond.

"It's glorious," she concluded.

St. Clair smiled in satisfaction. "I have breakfast up here every morning when it isn't raining."

Hugh cleared his throat, his impassivity a damper. "Perhaps we should get started with our questions."

That same wryness appeared. "Certainly." He nodded toward the door behind Hugh. "After you."

In the living room, he offered coffee, which both officers declined.
Do not break bread.
Nell almost never accepted food or drink from civilians when she was on the job. Or off it—most of her friends were other cops, firefighters or dispatchers.

Hugh already had his notebook flipped open. "Please tell us when you were first aware that someone was shooting a gun in the building."

"I heard a babble of voices out in the hall. Jerome—" he swallowed "—Jerome and I went to see what was up. Figured the stock market was crashing, or—" He stopped. "Something normal. Something you
would
expect. You know?"