Just Eight Months Old... Read online

  Chad idled the Alfa Romeo across from PlayCo and she took in a shallow, uneven breath. He’d been conspicuously silent ever since they picked up Bonny, alternately staring at her, and her noisy eight-month-old daughter in the back seat, appearing so thoroughly dumbfounded Hannah felt the incredible urge to reach out and touch him. At one point she thought he’d murmured something like “things have changed,” but she couldn’t be sure, and couldn’t bring herself to ask him what he’d said. In fact, she could focus on little more than the weightless, expectant sensation in her stomach.

  She cleared her emotion-clogged throat. Often in the past eight months, usually after Bonny had finally fallen asleep against her chest and her own eyes were heavy, she indulged in images of Chad learning about his daughter. Saw him knocking softly on the door, stepping directly to the eight-month-old and sweeping her up in his arms. The fantasies had been harmless, she’d assured herself, because there was no reason Chad would be showing up on their doorstep any time soon.

  Now that he had come back…

  She bit down hard on the flesh of her bottom lip. Dreams were one thing. Reality something completely different.

  What had she expected him to do? Hold out his hands to lovingly take a child he should have instinctively known was his?

  No, she realized. In reality, she had expected him to leap from the car and bid her a final farewell. At least she thought that was what he would do—until she picked Bonny up and hope had blossomed in her stronger than she would have imagined. Who could deny this little girl? Surely her father would take one look at her and…

  And what? Push aside the past? Declare his undying love for her and Bonny? Offer her happily-ever-after?

  Stupid.

  She chanced a glance at Chad, trying to read his thoughts as he watched Bonny. In the light from the street lamp she could see his face. His eyes were wide, as if someone had done a Three Stooges eye-poking number on him. He met her gaze and she quickly turned away.

  “Um, you’re going to have to go into PlayCo by yourself, for obvious reasons,” she said quietly.

  They sat parked in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. A discreet white sign with blue lettering marked the ten-floor, foursquare building across the street as PlayCo Industries. Hannah eyed the watchman sitting in a lighted air-conditioned, multiwindowed guard shack next to the parking garage entrance.

  “How old is she?”

  Chad’s question caught her unaware. Hannah forgot about not looking at him. For a brief moment, he appeared so incredibly…victimized in the stiff white shirt and conservative striped tie he had fished from his duffel and put on, she nearly reached out to smooth the confused creases from his forehead. She blamed the instinctive impulse on her new role as mother and locked her fingers together in her lap.

  “She’ll be eight months next week,” she said to the windshield.

  She waited for his next question, but it never came. Instead he followed her gaze to the watchful guard in the shack and lapsed back into silence.

  “So,” she began, injecting a businesslike tone into her wavering voice, “how are you going to get in there?”

  He blindly moved his hand to reach into the front pocket of his shirt, missed by an inch, then looked down and took out a black leather bifold wallet. He absently held it in her direction and flipped it open. Hannah stared at an FBI identification that bore an appealing snapshot of Chad, and identified him as a Special Agent. The plastic was cloudy, the leather holder old and cracked.

  “What did you learn in Florida?” she whispered. “You never impersonated a fed before. Or if you did, I never knew about it.” He closed the ID then stuffed it back into his pocket. “Do you know you’re committing a crime? This is fraud against the federal government. Do you have any idea what kind of penalty that carries?”

  “Two to ten,” he said, clearly distracted by a burst of mimicking sounds from Bonny in the back seat. “But it doesn’t matter because I don’t intend to get caught.” Chad stared at his watch, then shifted to fuss with his tie. Hannah noticed his movements were jerky, anxious, not the usual smooth, easy Chad moves. A couple of cars approached, apparently night-shift workers gaining access to the underground parking area.

  “I thought you earned facts and clues the honest way,” she said.

  “For what it’s worth, this is the first time I’ve impersonated a fed.”

  Why didn’t that make her feel any better? “Trust me. Nothing’s going to happen,” he said in a preoccupied monotone. “I’m going to take a look at Persky’s and Furgeson’s personnel files. The feds…” he trailed off.

  “The feds,” Hannah prompted. He glanced at her, apparently trying to recover his train of thought. “The feds will never know.”

  Hannah wasn’t sure if her agitation sprang from his lack of work ethics, or from his obvious ignorance of his connection to Bonny, who rhythmically kicked her car seat with the back of her shoes.

  “Do you have any better ideas?” Chad asked and rubbed the back of his neck. “Because if you do, I’m all ears.”

  “Does it still hurt?” she asked quietly.

  He stared at her. “Huh?”

  “The bump you took at Persky’s house.”

  He dropped his hand back to his lap.

  She resisted the urge to check the wound herself. Touching Chad again would not be a smart move, no matter what the reason. “Anyway, I do have another idea. I say we get a move on to Atlantic City and see if that woman in the matchbook we found at Persky’s exists.”

  “And what if she doesn’t? What if it’s like I said and she was a one-nighter, a nooner, a quickie whom Persky never saw again?”

  Hannah decided she’d liked him better speechless. She grimaced and tucked her hair behind her ear. “I love your vocabulary, Hogan. Do you care to share any more of your colorful language with me and Bonny?”

  “Forget my word choices for a minute here, Hannah, and give this some thought. Let’s say we go to Atlantic City and turn up a big, fat zero? What then? Do we turn back to N.Y. and start from scratch?” His gaze lingered on Bonny and he slowly shook his head. “We don’t have the time. I’m going in here, getting what I need, then we’ll go to Atlantic City….”

  His words trailed off. Hannah practically heard his unspoken question. Would the baby be going with them?

  “I don’t have anywhere to leave her,” she blurted, disappointing herself. The last thing she wanted was to appear desperate. But desperate was exactly what she was, wasn’t it? Her regular baby-sitter couldn’t keep Bonny because she had plans for the weekend that couldn’t be broken. And with no family to speak of, unless you counted Victor Marconi, and a distant aunt in Montana, she was in a jam.

  “I didn’t exactly expect to take this case, Chad. Don’t worry, Bonny won’t cause any trouble. And I certainly don’t intend to put her in any danger. This is a routine case with an unusual time constraint, that’s all. We’re tracking white-collar criminals, not violent armed robbers.”

  He touched her hand where it lay against her leg. An instant rush of awareness startled her at the feel of his warm fingers on her cold ones.

  “Hannah, I didn’t say anything about Bonny causing problems,” he said softly.

  She tugged her hand away from his and worried it in her lap with her other. “No, you didn’t. But I could always read your thoughts, Chad.”

  His gaze was probing. “Did you ever stop to think you couldn’t read me as well as you thought you could?”

  She stared at him wordlessly. Could he be right? Was she misjudging him? Had she misread him in the past?

  She watched the guard wave another car into PlayCo’s parking area.

  “She’s beautiful,” he said so quietly she nearly didn’t hear him.

  The statement took her breath away. She searched for a response, but couldn’t seem to match words to the emotions coursing through her. She almost said “She looks like you,” but caught herself.

  She swallowed hard, relie
ved when he shifted the car into First. He pulled it around, heading straight for the guard still sitting in his shack next to the entrance to PlayCo Industries.

  Chapter Four

  Shell-shocked. That was the closest Chad could come to describing how he felt. No. That’s exactly how he would describe it. Having served with the Marines in Kuwait, he knew what it was like to hear sniper fire and not know where it had come from. The strange thing was that in this situation no one else had noticed the shot. Around him life went on as normal.

  In the personnel office of PlayCo Industries, the nondescript, white-collar-to-the-bone comptroller Robert Morgan hung up the telephone then began fingering through a filing cabinet to retrieve Persky’s and Furgeson’s employment records. Outside in the hall a couple of second shift workers laughed, presumably on their way back from break. In another room across the way, a telephone rang on, with no one around to pick it up.

  Even as he registered every sound, placed every person, he remained apart from them. The shot he’d taken hadn’t come from an unknown sniper’s gun; it had come from Hannah. Hannah and that precious baby girl whose veins carried his blood.

  Thrusting his fingers through his hair, he glanced toward the open door, anxious to get out of there. To get back to the car and start seeking some answers that might help him make sense out of all this.

  He’d never thought he’d be a father again. He’d sworn another child wouldn’t be born with the stigma of his name attached. It seemed like another lifetime since he’d even been around a baby. So long, he was unprepared for the instinctive surge of parental protection, of unconditional love that overtook him the instant he understood Bonny was his.

  Still, it was all so hard to believe….

  Just last month marked the fourth anniversary since the last moment he’d held his infant son, Joshua. Right before Joshua had been taken from him.

  Scenes twisted through his mind. Images of misshapen metal, of an empty car seat lying in the middle of the road. Of his wife’s purse still sitting on the floor of the front seat.

  His family.

  A highway patrolman had tried to pry him from the scene when, at some point in the long nightmare, law officials had been contacted. And Chad had hauled off and slugged him, desperately needing to hold on to his family, though they were already gone. Their faces were burned forever into his memory, haunting him in the dark hours of the morning, taunting him whenever he experienced anything close to happiness…serving as a constant, caustic reminder that he didn’t deserve to be happy.

  A torrent of emotion ripped through Chad’s gut. He focused on the back of Robert Morgan as he began copying the files he’d taken from the cabinet, but Chad really didn’t see him.

  They’d argued that day, him and Linda. He winced from the memory of her packed suitcases, Joshua’s stuffed blue elephant hanging half out of a blue diaper bag, his son’s lashes bearing remnants of tears. Linda had accused him of putting his career above his family, an argument she’d made often. But that night she’d had enough. She was leaving him. Going home to her parents in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And there was nothing he could do to stop her.

  Chad eyed the door, needing to escape. It was an accident, a voice in his head shouted. He resolutely refused to listen. It was no accident. He was to blame. He had killed his family as surely as if he’d driven them off that mountain road.

  The experience had been more than Chad Hogan, Special Agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigations, had been able to handle. He’d quit the Bureau, and never told anyone about his work there, not even Hannah. Too many bad memories. It was better to let her think that ID he flashed was bought somewhere in Florida. After he quit, he’d taken odd jobs as a skip-tracer to cover the basic necessities, and resolved to serve out a life sentence in which he wasn’t allowed to move past the guilt, the grief.

  Then came Hannah.

  The instant he met her, the shadows that dogged him began to recede. With all that curly red hair, those lively freckles and infectious laugh, she had loved life and lived to love. He’d been drawn to her like an addict was drawn to drugs. Okay, so maybe he hadn’t deserved her. He’d known that, too. But he’d been helpless to stop himself.

  She had my baby and I didn’t even know it.

  “I wish there was something I could do to help you.”

  Chad blinked away the images crowding his head and stared at Robert Morgan who held out two blue file folders in his direction. He took them and cleared his throat. “I understand. This is fine.”

  Morgan smiled and pushed up dark-rimmed glasses. “I have to admit, I still don’t know what all this is about. Your associates told me it didn’t concern PlayCo so I shouldn’t worry, but I can’t help it.”

  “They were right. You shouldn’t worry, Mr. Morgan.” He tucked the files under his arm and shook the other man’s hand. “Thank you for your help, sir.”

  “My, but you’re the independent one lately, aren’t you? Want to test your boundaries, is that it?” Hannah gave in to Bonny’s earnest attempts to escape her hold. She put her down in the driver’s seat, disappointment niggling at her that Bonny didn’t want to be held in the way Hannah needed to hold her after what had just happened—and didn’t happen—between her and Chad. She glanced around the interior of the underground parking garage. Chad had gotten them this far with a flash of his fake ID and a capable disposition, but her apprehension wouldn’t ease until they were out of the artificially bright parking area and well away from PlayCo Industries. And until he made it clear how he felt about having a daughter.

  Bonny curled her stubby fingers around the door handle. Hannah realized her little girl wanted to follow Chad.

  She reached into her purse and took out a bag of cheese crackers. Gaining her daughter’s attention, she tried to feed her a cracker only to have Bonny balk and take the fish-shaped snack away so she could feed herself.

  Hannah laid her cheek against the leather headrest. It wasn’t too long ago when she had wanted to follow Chad, too. Everywhere. Anywhere. She smoothed back Bonny’s tufts of red hair, reveling in the feel of the baby-soft strands against her skin.

  “This whole situation is surreal somehow,” she said quietly. “It’s so outside the norm, isn’t it, Munchkin?” Bonny just smiled and took another cracker. “Right about now Mommy would be feeding you dinner, wouldn’t she? In our cozy little yellow kitchen with the sunflowers on the wallpaper.” Right now their apartment in Little Italy couldn’t have seemed farther away. Hannah vaguely noticed the mess her daughter was making and reached for a wet towel also stashed in her purse.

  As she cleaned Bonny, she checked the rearview mirrors and saw nothing but rows of parked cars, not a person in sight.

  “What else have you been up to in the past fifteen months, Chad?” she said, earning her Bonny’s full attention. If she didn’t know better, she’d think the eight-month-old already recognized her father’s name.

  Stuffing the towelette in a garbage bag on the door, she hoisted Chad’s duffel bag from the floor of the back seat. Glancing at the lobby door he had disappeared through twenty minutes earlier, she loosened the pull string and coaxed open the leather mouth. Bonny grunted.

  “What is it, Bon-Bon?” she asked. “Don’t worry. Mommy’s just going to take a harmless look. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?”

  The baby stared at her, her soft brows knitting together.

  Hannah laughed shakily. “Good thing you can’t talk yet, huh?” She returned her attention to the bag. “You’d likely tell your—” She caught herself, shocked she had nearly said “your daddy.”

  Of course, if Chad caught her…

  Her job included rummaging through other peoples’ belongings in order to get a handle on their mindset, put together a profile of who they were and where they might be heading. Rifling through Chad’s things, however, was something entirely different. She felt naughty at best, and traitorous at worst, neither emotion comfortable.

&n
bsp; Still, her need to know outweighed her moral code.

  Hesitantly pushing aside the T-shirt he had exchanged for the white shirt he now had on, packages of new socks and briefs, she sought the bottom where she hoped to find a clue to what he’d been doing since leaving her and New York. If she didn’t immediately find something, she’d take it as a sign and stop. The back of her hand hit something solid. She curled her fingers around the smooth object and pulled out a half-full bottle of vodka. Her heartbeat slowed. Chad didn’t drink. At least not that she ever knew. She briefly closed her eyes and pressed the bottle against her chest. What was Chad doing with a half-full liquor bottle in his duffel?

  Making sure the cap was screwed on tight, she slipped the bottle back into the bag, then stuck her hand down further, until she hit the leather-covered bottom. Nothing. Okay, maybe she’d just allow a little side-ways movement…. Her fingers at once found something flat and cool. Carefully fishing the item out, she stared at a professional studio picture of a woman and an infant she hadn’t seen before. His wife? Stuck into the corner of the frame was a strip of photographs of Chad and her taken at one of those coin photo booths at Coney Island. She ran her fingertip over the grainy black-and-white, completely unflattering pictures. The photos easily could have been of another couple for all the connection she felt seeing them. If not for the love so obviously written on her face in the snapshots; a love she feared still resided in the secret recesses of her heart.

  A clang echoed through the garage. Hannah put the photo back into the bag and thrust both onto the back seat floor. Where had the noise come from? She lifted Bonny and maneuvered over the emergency brake and stick shift to the driver’s seat. Bonny protested as Hannah put her down in the passenger’s seat.

  The faint squeal of tires against concrete told her a car was coming. Instinctively she slid down in the seat, relieved Bonny was small enough not to be seen from the outside. She watched a blue four-door sedan pull in front of the door to the lobby of PlayCo two rows away. Four suited men exited the car in unison, the sound of closing doors feeding the acidlike dread in her stomach.