Dangerous Disguise (3 page)

By the look on Max’s face as the other man scrutinized him, Jared figured it was a safe bet that Max didn’t care for competition in his kitchen. Or maybe there was another reason he looked annoyed at having someone new on the premises. New people were liabilities. The competitive thing could have been just an angle, so much camouflage. It bore looking into.

In any event, Jared decided to make it a point for the man not to feel threatened by his presence.

“Heard your résumé was pretty impressive.” Each word out of Max’s mouth was a challenge.

Jared could have sworn he heard the strains of “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better” as the other man spoke. He all but expected him to pick up a ladle and draw a line on the concrete floor.

He kept his expression mild. “Where did you hear that?”

The man’s nostrils flared, growing wider. Any second now he was going to start pawing the ground. Dislike oozed from the man’s every pore. “Maren told me. If you think you’re coming in to take over—”

“Just want to put in my time, learn from the best, and go home.” Jared offered Max his most genial, innocent smile. The one that could, with a little effort, look as if it bordered on dim-witted.

“Oh.” For a moment it appeared that the wind had deserted Max’s sails. Unchallenged, Jared had a hunch that Max could be a fairly decent man, if somewhat conceited. “Okay, then.” He seemed placated. “Hand me some saffron.” Eyes on the boiling pot, Max wiggled his fingers in the general direction of the spice table. A wealth of containers were arranged on it in a system known only to Max.

Thank you, Uncle Andrew,
Jared thought as he selected the glass jar that contained what appeared at first glance to be red, long-legged spiders. Though he had always been talented in the kitchen, the names of various spices and sauces, as well as elaborate food preparation had mystified him. But then the assignment had come up and Andrew had taken him under his wing. His eyes were opened. Food became cuisine and he had discovered that there were more spices than he thought possible. Andrew had drilled him until he knew each one by name, description and sight.

Which, Jared saw, now turned out to be extremely fortunate.

Handing the jar to Max, the latter proceeded to undertake a running commentary on what he was doing. Unlike Andrew, Jared thought, Max sounded extremely full of himself.

“You have to hold the slotted spoon just so as you stir the spaghetti or—”

A particularly loud
thwack
resonated behind them, at the table where he had left April chopping celery. Celery, it was apparent, wasn’t the only thing that April had chopped.

For the second time in the two days since he’d made her acquaintance, April screamed. Unlike the scream she’d let out yesterday, which had only been filled with surprise and a touch of fear, this one had a blood-curdling quality about it.

“What the hell?” Max exclaimed. The sentence abruptly terminated, to be replaced by, “Oh my God,” as Max looked in April’s direction. The next moment, he was clutching his less than strong stomach, a gurgling sound escaping his lips.

“My finger!” April shrieked, staring at the blood as it gushed with horrified eyes. “I cut my finger! Oh my God, my God, I cut my finger off. I—”

Instantly alert, ignoring the gagging sounds behind him, Jared grabbed one of the small white towels that seemed to be placed on every flat surface in the kitchen not directly in the way of a flame. He only glanced at it to make sure it was clean. The bleeding had to be stopped at all costs.

He almost collided with Maren, who had raced out of her office to see what the excitement was this time. “Sorry,” he bit off. Even as he said it, he was wrapping the towel around the bleeding digit. Finished, he raised April’s hand up high over her head. All the color had drained out of her face.

“Hold it up,” he ordered.

But the second he released her hand, it sank down, as if all the bones inside of it had liquefied. “I can’t,” April wailed. “I…think…I’m…going to…pass…out.”

“No, you’re not.” There was no nonsense in his voice, an order issued to a subordinate.

For a second his command seemed to jolt her to her senses. April attempted to do she was told. But the sight of her own blood, coupled with the trauma of the event and fear had her sinking against him like a bag stuffed with used tissues.

Frustrated, Jared raised April’s arm and held it up high, his other arm wrapped around her waist to support her. He looked around for help and saw Maren. He didn’t hesitate. “Get some ice and something to put the severed part in. We have to pack it and get her to the hospital right away.”

With every word he uttered, April looked as if she was getting weaker and weaker. The next thing he knew, her eyes had rolled to the back of her head and she sank bonelessly against him. He had no choice but to scoop her up into his arms, balancing her so that he could keep her one hand up in the air.

The next thing he was aware of was Maren returning to his side. She held a bag crammed with ice in her hand.

“You’re going to have to put her finger in there,” he instructed.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Max backing away. Jared was fully prepared to have Maren turn squeamish on him, as well, protesting that she couldn’t bring herself to touch the severed fingertip. In his experience, most people did not react well to handling body parts, even small ones.

He saw her grow pale.

Maren could feel her stomach rising up to her throat, threatening to spill its contents. It took effort to block out the sensation and not give in to it. She wasn’t any good with blood. But this wasn’t a time to think about herself. She knew that every second counted. They needed to get April and her finger to the hospital and have them rejoined within the hour if the young woman was to ever regain use of that part.

Taking a breath, Maren picked up the finger from the edge of the butcher block and deposited it into the plastic bag. She tied off the end of the bag tightly.

“I’ll drive,” she told Jared, nodding toward the rear entrance where she’d left her car parked. “I’m going to need you to carry her into the E.R.”

Max deliberately avoided looking at the bag in her hand. “Want me to call 9-1-1?” he offered.

Maren vetoed the idea. “It’ll be faster if I just drive her there.” She turned toward Jared. “C’mon, let’s go.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he murmured, a little surprised. Somehow, the woman had managed to take the command away from him.

Chapter 3

“T
hat’s my car.”

Maren pointed her security device at a light blue Toyota coupe. The vehicle squeaked in response as its four doors unlocked simultaneously.

Moving ahead of him, Maren opened the rear passenger door before hurrying around to the driver’s side. “Get in.”

Jared angled April into her seat before slipping in next to her. The woman had regained consciousness. Hysteria was quick to follow, and she began screaming again. He did his best to calm her.

He took her wrapped hand and held it up while securing her seat belt around her with his free hand. He left his own seat belt open, something he hoped he wouldn’t regret as Maren pealed out of her spot and hit the road. Hard.

The woman wove in and out of traffic as if she were in hot pursuit of a fleeing vehicle, flying through lights that had begun to turn red. Jared braced his body as best he could.

“It’s going to be all right,” he assured April, repeating the phrase over and over again until he’d finally managed to calm her down.

There was a plea in the young woman’s eyes that begged him to tell her the truth. Jared knew he had a gift for convincing people of his sincerity in the face of contradiction. He used it on April. She seemed to vacillate between wanting to believe him and being terrified that she was going to remain maimed by her own carelessness.

“But I cut it off,” April cried just as he thought she’d finally gotten herself under control. “I saw it just lying there—”

“Maren packed it in ice.” He nodded toward the woman in the driver’s seat. “They’ll reattach it. They can work wonders these days. Six months from now, you won’t even remember which finger it was.”

A brand new fear entered the girl’s brown eyes. They darted from Jared’s face to the back of Maren’s head. “I didn’t sign up for the insurance. I couldn’t afford it. They won’t—”

“They will,” Maren told her firmly.

She took another turn. Because he’d failed to brace himself, Jared hit the back of the front seat. He fumbled for his seat belt clasp, trying to anchor himself before there was another turn. Maren’s eyes met his in the rearview mirror.

“Sorry about that,” Maren murmured before glancing in the mirror to look back toward April. “The accident happened at work. Everything’ll be covered under workman’s compensation. Don’t worry about the cost.”

April’s sobs subsided in volume, then finally faded. She hiccuped, wiping away her tears with the back of her good hand. “Are you sure?”

“I’m positive,” Maren told her with the kind of authority that would calm the worst of fears.

They’d reached St. Luke’s Hospital in record time. After making a left onto the newly renovated compound, Maren pulled into the first available space she saw. The parking lot behind the E.R. entrance was small in comparison to the others, but for once it was relatively empty.

Maren jumped out of the front seat, rounding the hood and hurrying to April’s side of the vehicle. The man she’d had misgivings about hiring beat her to it. He already had April’s door open and now picked April up as if she weighed nothing. It was cold out and he’d rolled up the sleeves on the shirt he was wearing. She saw his biceps bulge as he turned from the car with the girl in his arms.

Maren led the way into the E.R. room. The electronic doors sprang open the second she stepped in front of them. The area was filled with personnel, none of whom seemed to notice them coming in. Looking around, Maren was just about to grab an older-looking nurse when Jared called, “I need some help here!”

Redirected by the entreaty, the nurse Maren was about to buttonhole terminated her conversation with an orderly and focused on the situation.

“What happened?” the matronly looking woman asked Jared.

He rattled off the particulars of the incident quickly and crisply, ending by saying, “Her fingertip was packed in ice.”

The dark-skinned woman whose badge proclaimed her to be Rowena O’Brien looked expectantly from him to Maren. “Where is it?”

“Right there.” Jared nodded toward Maren. The latter quickly produced the plastic bag out of her purse.

Pleased, the nurse nodded her approval. “Good work.” Scanning the area, she pointed toward the first empty bed that came into view. Long floor-to-ceiling curtains separated each bed from its brethren. “Put her right there,” the nurse instructed.

Maren noticed that Jared placed the girl on the gurney as if he were handling something delicate and precious. His compassion impressed her more than the way he conducted himself in an emergency situation.

April clutched at his arm as he began to withdraw. A fresh wave of panic had entered her eyes. “Are you going?”

Jared paused to squeeze her good hand, communicating support and comfort as best he could. “We’ll be right outside,” he promised. “In the waiting room.”

The nurse indicated outer doors that would take them there. It was only as he followed Maren through them that he realized he was still wearing his apron. He slipped the loop off his neck and took off the apron, bunching it up in his hand like an unwanted appendage. He dropped it in the first empty chair he came to.

They had their choice of places to sit since the waiting room was largely empty.

“I take it you’ve been here before.” Maren took the seat beside him.

She looked restless, he thought, as if she didn’t want to be here. Two of his cousins hated hospitals. His uncle Mike had died in one, Aurora General. A bullet to the chest in the line of duty had taken him permanently away from them.

He shrugged in response to her question. “One emergency room is pretty much like another.”

A note of interest entered her eyes. “What was the matter?”

He caught himself thinking that her eyes were beautiful. So blue if you stared at them for any length of time, they could make your soul ache. For a second, he lost the thread of the conversation. “What?”

She wanted to distract herself. Papa Joe had been in a place like this. She was eighteen at the time, about to go off to college, to stand on the brink of new horizons, when he’d been in a car accident. She remembered how terrified she’d been, praying in the small chapel on the premise that he wouldn’t die and leave her alone. One moment he was this big, larger-than-life man, the next, she was facing the possibility of his being taken from her. The edifice of her confidence was never the same again because she’d discovered that the foundations were built on sand.

She’d spent the spring nursing him back to health and the summer arguing with him that she wasn’t going to college, that she couldn’t leave him alone. Eventually he prevailed upon her to go, that he was fine.

Being here brought it all back to her; the fear, the uncertainty. She needed something to get her mind off that. So she turned to the man beside her, hoping for some kind of respite. “Why did you need to go to the emergency room?”

Because my partner was shot buying drugs off a dealer we spent two months setting up. Two cops wandered in, thought we were junkies. Messed up the sting.

It wasn’t the kind of explanation he could give her. Jared thought for a moment, digging around in his past for something plausible that he would remember in case she asked about it later. “My sister had appendicitis.”

A family threat. Instantly she related to it. “Did you get her there in time?”

It had been his father who’d brought Janelle in, but he let that part go, nodding instead in response. “The appendix burst on the operating table. Doctor said it was touch and go at the time.”

So this wasn’t an isolated incident. Maren took new measure of the man beside her. “You’re pretty cool under fire, aren’t you?”

The smile he offered her was almost shy. Maren felt herself warming to him despite resolutions not to. “Don’t see much point in losing your head. Just makes things that much worse.”

She liked that. The man didn’t fold under pressure. So many people stood back, waiting for someone else to do something, never wanting to be the first. Maybe hiring him was not such a bad thing, after all. “Your sister, how old is she?”

He found it safest and easier to stick as close to the truth as possible. Lies had a way of tripping you up. He’d played so many people since he’d joined the force, the various names were hard to keep straight. If he’d added a different life for each, it would have been impossible. Besides, something told him that Maren Minnesota reacted well to tales of hearth and home. “Younger than me by a couple of years.”

“Just the two of you?”

He was right, he thought. There was more than just mild curiosity in her voice. It was as if she was hungry for information. Almost as hungry as he was, but for an entirely different reason. His job was to find out as much as he could about everyone there and to see how they figured into this tale of money laundering that had been brought to the department.

“Four,” he corrected. “I’ve got two more brothers.”

Her blue eyes became almost animated. “Younger? Older?”

He thought of Dax and Troy, both were detectives in the Aurora police department, although neither had ever gone under cover. “One of each.”

He watched in fascination as a smile literally lit up her face. “Must be nice.”

“It has its moments,” he allowed. It was no secret that they were close. All the Cavanaughs were now that they had reached adulthood. “But when we were growing up, my mother would have given us away to the first person with stamina who came to the door.”

She laughed and he found himself reacting to the sound. It was soft, like wind tiptoeing through rose petals. He pulled himself back. The important thing was that the ice between them had been broken. He couldn’t have done this any better than if he’d planned the scenario.

Shifting in his seat, he looked at her. “What about you?”

He could all but see the edge of the curtain as it began to come down again in her eyes. Maren’s smile remained, but it became a little more formal. She didn’t give her trust easily and he wondered if she had secrets. Was she involved in any part of the money laundering if those allegations turned out to be true?

“What do you mean?” Maren asked as she rose to her feet again.

“Do you have any siblings?” Jared watched as she began to move restlessly around the area.

“No.”

There was a note of longing in her voice. Which would explain the wistful look in her eyes when he’d mentioned his siblings. He turned as she drifted toward the TV mounted on the wall in the far corner. “You’re an only child, then.”

The shrug was casual, dismissive. “As far as I know.”

It was an odd thing to say. Unless she was an orphan, he realized suddenly. April had alluded to a relationship between Maren and Joe Collins. He knew the bookkeeper was a lot older. Was Maren looking for a father figure?

Rising to his feet, he crossed to her. She looked a little uneasy when he came up behind her. “Sorry, I tend to talk before I think.”

Maren relaxed a little. “Nothing to be sorry about. Not everyone comes from a large family.” A trace of a fond smile slipped over her full lips. “I have no complaints whatsoever. It wasn’t as if I ever really lacked for anything. Papa Joe saw to that.”

He cocked his head. Was she talking about the bookkeeper or was there someone else who shared the first name? Joe was about as common a name as you could get, other than John. “Papa Joe?”

Her mouth curved more generously. The phrase about someone lighting up a room occurred to him. “Joe Collins,” she clarified, then added, “He’s the bookkeeper at Rainbow’s End.”

“He’s your father?” There hadn’t been any mention of that in any of the notes. He was going to have to get his hands on a more detailed summary of the people at the restaurant.

She crossed her arms in front of her, as if to hold a chill at bay. Instead of looking at him, she’d looked away. “Only father I’ve ever known.”

Which meant that biology didn’t have anything to do with it. If it had, she would have said yes and left it at that. He went back to his revised theory and took a shot at it. “You were adopted?”

She was about to say yes, but caught herself. The antiseptic word didn’t begin to describe what had actually happened to her all those years ago in that Minneapolis back alley.

“I was found,” she corrected. And then she stopped abruptly. Her eyes narrowed like morning glories closing before the approaching dusk. “You always wheedle information out of people this way?”

He grinned, as if she’d discovered his secret. “I like finding things out about people, what makes them tick.” He tried to coax a little more out of her. “Helps pass the time. Everyone’s got a story to tell.”

“Well, mine’s over right now.” Glancing at her watch, she took in the time. They’d already been here over an hour. Maren took her cell phone from her pocket. “I’d better call and tell Max to be on the lookout for the wine delivery.”

A short, dark-haired man wearing nurse’s scrubs looked at her reprovingly as he was about to exit the room. “I’m sorry but you can’t use that in here.” He nodded at her open cell phone. “It interferes with some of the equipment.”

Maren sighed as she flipped the cell closed. Dropping it into her purse, she looked around the area. “Is there a pay phone around here?”

“Right outside those doors.” The nurse pointed toward the ones leading into the main wing of the hospital. Turning back, the man paused to look at Jared. His eyes narrowed as he studied his face. It was obvious that he was trying to place him. “Excuse me, do I know you?”

Everything inside Jared went on high alert, although he made sure that his anxiety didn’t register on his face. Being under cover, he lived daily with the threat of being recognized, being exposed. Of having his cover blown.

The nurse had looked vaguely familiar. And then it hit him. The man had been on duty in the E.R. over at Aurora General the night he’d brought in his partner.

“Sorry.” Jared shrugged casually. “But I don’t think so.”

But the nurse wasn’t ready to retract his question just yet. The man looked at him intently. “You sure?”

“Positive. You must be thinking of someone else.” Aware that Maren was listening, Jared kept his response friendly, low-keyed. “I just moved here a few weeks ago.”