With Child. Janice Johnson Kay
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didn’t say a word of what he thought. Instead, he snorted. “What makes you think I don’t like you?”
Okay, maybe the not-too-bright part wasn’t true. She looked at him with knowing, sad eyes.
He found himself amending. “It’s not that I don’t like you.”
She kept waiting. Or maybe she had lost interest in any answer and was just staring into space he happened to occupy.
“I didn’t think you and Dean were a good match.”
Anger flared in her voice. “And you were the expert…why?”
“I knew Dean a hell of a lot better than you did!”
“And me not at all.”
His jaws knotted. “That might be because you were too busy giggling and flirting with Dean to hold a rational conversation.”
“I didn’t know I was required to present my credentials to you.”
They glared at each other.
Then, as quickly as their petty argument began, it ended. Her face crumpled. Her voice drifted. “Oh, what difference does it make?”
After a moment of struggle, she regained control, sipped juice and went back to glancing vaguely around the kitchen. Eventually, her gaze reached the address book and phone at his elbow.
“Have you already called some of Dean’s friends?”
“I called everybody.”
“Everybody?” Her gaze lifted to his face. “Shouldn’t I have done that?”
“You didn’t seem up to it.”
She was starting to look mad again. “You mean, I wasn’t willing to do it today, before Dean’s body is even cold.”
“Did you want his friends to find out he was dead from the six o’clock news?”
“No.” Emotions waged war on her face. “Will it be…”
“On the news? Damn straight. He was a cop.”
“Not anymore.”
“As far as we’re concerned, he was one of us. Reporters will see it the same.”
“You could have said…”
Sharper than he had meant to be, Quinn said, “Murder makes the news. I didn’t know I had to tell you that.”
Resentment smoldered in her eyes and made her lips pouty. She even looked childish.
“I read The Times. I don’t watch much TV. And following local murders is not my hobby.”
Which part of The Seattle Times did she read? he wondered uncharitably. The comics?
“Dean’s murder will be in the morning papers, too. I thought the news would better come from one of us.”
“So you just took over.”
A headache began to bore into his skull. “I took over when you decided to spend the day napping.”
She rose to her feet, looking anguished, furious and completely grown-up. “When I spent the day grieving! Instead of worrying about whether somebody Dean played golf with once in a while found out in the first twenty-four hours that he was dead!”
The doorbell rang.
Quinn shook his head and went to answer it. He half expected that by the time he got back to the kitchen, she’d have retreated to the bedroom. Instead, she stood at one of the French doors looking out, her back to Quinn.
Quinn wondered, though, how much she could see through her own reflection in the glass. Maybe nothing; maybe she was studying her own haunted face.
“Dinner,” he said, lifting the sacks.
“I did love him, you know.”
Pain squeezed his chest, roughened his voice. “I know.”
He hadn’t been sure, not when Dean was alive. Now, he was beginning to believe she did.
“Just so you believe that much.” Sounding incredibly weary, she turned from the view of the garden and came to the table.
He got plates and silverware and dished up. She waited docilely, her head bent as if she found the weave of the place mat fascinating. He wondered if even the slight effort of spooning moo goo gai pan and kung pao beef onto her plate would have stopped her from eating. But once he put food in front of her, she picked up her fork and took a bite.
Like this morning, neither of them ate much. But they tried. When she pushed her half-empty plate away, he did the same.
“Why,” he said, trying to understand, “won’t you call your mother?”
She gave a seemingly indifferent shrug. “We’re not that close.”
“Doesn’t she live around here?”
“Issaquah.”
Fifteen, twenty minutes away.
Mindy stood. “Excuse me. I have to…” She fled.
Staring after her, Quinn wondered what he’d said wrong. Or did she just hate Issaquah, the mecca of up-scale shopping with the chic shops that made up Gilman Village? Mama, he concluded, must have money to live in Issaquah. Somehow that didn’t surprise him. He added spoiled to Mindy’s list of sins.
He turned on KOMO news and watched as the camera panned “the storage business where in the early hours of this morning a former Seattle Police detective was struck down, allegedly by two young men trying to steal this travel trailer.” The camera focused on the white pickup truck with Fenton Security emblazoned on the door, then zoomed in on the Fleetwood. When Quinn was gravely told that “a source informs us that the young men may have been manufacturing methamphetamine in this trailer,” he used the remote to turn the damn TV off.
Quinn’s stomach roiled. Too vividly he saw Dean’s body sprawled on the pavement, the blood in his mouth, the glazed eyes. Why had Dean decided to confront the two punks? Why in hell hadn’t he waited for the cops?
Quinn’s fist hit the table so hard the dishes jumped and a shockwave of pain ran up his arm.
He heard a small sound and looked up through the blur of tears to see Mindy staring at him from the doorway. He knew what he must look like, his lips drawn back from his teeth in an agony of anger and grief.
After a moment, she turned and left him to mourn alone.
Quinn let out a harsh sound. The two people who Dean had loved most couldn’t stand each other. Pretty goddamn sad.
CHAPTER THREE
ON A SUNNY MAY DAY, hundreds watched Dean Fenton be laid to rest at the cemetery. Endless tears rolled down Mindy’s face. Struggling with grief that balled in his throat like a jawbreaker that was trying to choke him, Quinn remained rigidly conscious of his dignity. Mindy, apparently, didn’t care.
She looked inappropriate for her role as grieving widow to begin with. With a suspicion she’d have nothing to wear, Quinn had suggested a couple of times over the week that she go shopping or order something online. She’d ignored him, of course, and now wore—well, he guessed it was a business suit for a twenty-something, which meant the skirt hugged her butt and left a long expanse of leg bare while the jacket was form-fitting over what seemed to be a camisole, the lace showing at the V. It wasn’t even black, but rather white. Call him old-fashioned, but in his opinion a widow shouldn’t go to her husband’s graveside wearing clothes that advertised her body.
Naturally, she hadn’t thought ahead enough to bring tissues, and had turned to him with wide-eyed desperation earlier at the church when tears and snot had begun to run down her face. Wasn’t that a mother’s job? he’d wondered, but he