U. S. Marshall: Night's Landing Part 6

The elevator doors shut. An elderly doctor frowned at her in concern. "Are you all right?" he asked softly.

She nodded and brushed at her tears, relieved to be getting off Rob's floor, away from the able-bodied deputies. She needed something to eat, a break. She didn't want to feel sorry for herself. She wasn't the one lying in the I.C.U. And what kind of compa.s.sion did she expect from a bunch of armed federal law enforcement officers? They were doing the best they could.

The elevator doors opened again, suddenly, and Juliet Longstreet stepped in. She put up a hand to Sarah, stopping her before she could get started. "I'm a jerk. I'm sorry. What I said in the waiting room-it was stupid."

The older doctor moved to the front of the elevator car, letting Juliet take his spot. Sarah felt an immediate urge to ease some of Juliet's obvious guilt. "It's a difficult time for everyone."

But Juliet refused to cut herself any slack. "For you. You're Rob's twin sister. I'm only a colleague." She didn't mention their past relations.h.i.+p. "I was just trying to look tough in front of Nate. I'm sorry I mouthed off at your expense."

"No harm done."

"Sure there was. You must have felt like the kid sister at the big kids' party." She smiled crookedly. "I'd say belt me one, but you'd probably have a half-dozen marshals jump on the elevator and pin you against the wall in two seconds flat. We're all in rotten moods. But, hey, you see some of those guys? Very buff."

Sarah fought a smile of her own, her first, she thought, in many hours. "Nate Winter-I just met him."

"Yeah. I can tell. Most people run when they meet him. You're not the first. He's a total hard-a.s.s."

"You're very irreverent, aren't you?"

Juliet smiled, relaxing some. "Helps in dealing with things like two marshals getting shot in Central Park. At least the news on Rob is positive. Barring complications, he should be back on the streets before too long."

Sarah tried to let Juliet's optimism sink into her psyche, tried to visualize Rob back on his feet, with that lazy grin of his, that way he had of making people think he was a hundred percent on their side. "What about Deputy Winter?" she asked. "How's he doing?"

"He'd like to get his hands around the neck of whoever shot him."

"But physically?"

"Just enough of a wound to p.i.s.s him off."

The medical personnel all got off at the cafeteria floor, leaving Sarah and Juliet alone in the elevator. "I keep picturing the two of them leaving the news conference yesterday and walking into the park," Sarah said. "Why did they do that? Do you know?"

"No, I don't."

"The news conference-did a lot of people know about it in advance?"

"The world. That was the whole idea. It wasn't thrown together at the last second." Juliet frowned at her, then smiled gently. "Now, come on, don't you start. The best investigators in the country are on this thing. In fact, Joe Collins called me while you were in with your brother. He wants to talk to you."

"Why?"

"Are you kidding? After the bombsh.e.l.l you dropped?"

Sarah winced. "President Poe was calling as a friend-"

"Exactly."

"I almost wish I'd told you it was another Wes on the line."

"Nah. It's better this way. Get it out in the open. Your relations.h.i.+p with the president isn't something you'd want Joe Collins stumbling over on his own. He's in a private meeting room down the hall from your brother. He'll have food. Collins always has food." Juliet hit the b.u.t.ton for Rob's floor and sighed. "And you look as if you could use something to eat."

Neither of them had been in the mood to eat that morning at Juliet's apartment-actually, an apartment she was borrowing from a well-heeled friend, because, she'd explained, even as small as it was, she couldn't afford Manhattan's upper west side on her government salary.

"All right," Sarah said. "I'll talk to Agent Collins. Then, please, go back to your normal duties. I can book a room at the hotel where we were last night. Tell your boss it's what I want."

"You just don't like my plants and my fish."

Juliet hadn't exaggerated-her apartment was a jungle of plants and had at least four fish tanks. But Sarah shook her head. "Your apartment's great. I'm just used to being on my own."

"Now that I understand."

She sank back against the cool wall of the elevator and closed her eyes. "I don't want you here if I've got someone shooting at me."

But how could she go home? She imagined herself on her front porch, drinking her sweet tea punch and feeling the soft breeze as if nothing had happened.

Given her family's predilection for not leading quiet lives, she'd been prepared for anything when she returned to Night's Landing-but not this, she thought. Not her brother getting shot in Central Park. Not the possibility that he could become another Dunnemore who died an early, tragic death.

She stopped her negative thinking in its tracks.

Stay positive.

The elevator opened on Rob's floor. "Come on," Juliet said. "Let's go see Special Agent Joe and talk to him about your Tennessee neighbor."

Nate didn't follow Rob's sister, but he was tempted-and duty and chivalry had nothing to do with it. The feel of her slim waist when he'd grabbed her, the blond hair, the gray eyes, the tears.

d.a.m.n.

He stood next to Rob's bed. "Your sister's prettier than you are."

He was awake, but not by much. "Smarter, too. What time is it?"

"About nine in the morning the day after the shooting." Which Sarah Dunnemore had told him before she'd stepped on Nate's toes and ran off crying.

"I don't..." Rob's red-rimmed, bloodshot eyes tried to focus. "I don't remember."

The doctors had warned Nate that Rob might never remember the shooting. His body had poured all its energy into keeping him alive, not in remembering what had happened. "That's normal. How're you feeling?"

"Like s.h.i.+t."

"The nurses are going to get you up today if they can. They like to do that."

He wasn't paying attention. "Sarah should go back home." He coughed, shuddering in agony, his voice weaker, raspier, when he resumed. "She doesn't belong here."

His concern for his sister was palpable. "She's with Juliet right now." Nate a.s.sumed Longstreet would be trying to make amends for her ill-advised remark. "Just because you were shot doesn't mean she's in any danger."

"It wasn't random. The shooting. I was the target. He was after me."

"Rob-"

"I know it. I have...this certainty." He shut his eyes, and he seemed to sink deeper into the bed. "I'm sorry."

"Get some rest. Don't worry about anything."

Rob was done for. His mouth opened slightly as he fell back to sleep. He looked dead lying there in the bed. Nate checked the monitors, just to be sure. He glanced at the stone-faced guard, felt the dull ache in his arm where he'd been shot. He could have been the one shot in the gut.

But he wasn't. Rob, just four months in New York, was.

Nate had to stifle a wave of guilt and regret-he should have prevented this. Somehow, some way. He should have kept his and Rob's presence at the news conference quiet. They shouldn't have gone at all. He should have seen something in the park, sensed it, known they were in danger.

Dead-end thinking.

Better to concentrate on his anger. It was sharp, focused, explosive, not a slow burn, not a simmering kind of fury-and yet there wasn't a d.a.m.n thing he could do with it, except go home to Cold Ridge and climb mountains and eat Gus's orange eggs.

He thought instead he'd check on the gray-eyed sister and see if she'd forgiven Longstreet for being such an a.s.s.

Seven.

B etsy Dunnemore's daughter was attractive, but she, the mother, was beautiful-and she always had been. As he sipped his espresso and watched her coming up the cobblestone Amsterdam street, Nicholas Janssen remembered the day he met her more than thirty years ago, when they were both freshmen at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. She was beautiful, shy and nervous, although the campus was less than ten miles from her home in Belle Meade.

It was all such a lifetime ago.

She was pale now, clutching her red leather handbag as she threaded her way among the scatter of tables at the streetside cafe. She'd tied a red silk scarf over her hair and secured it with a knot to one side of her throat, and she wore black pants and a lightweight black-and-white sweater.

Every man at Vanderbilt had wanted her. Nicholas had been just one among many. They'd never dated, had only attended a few cla.s.ses together before he'd had to leave in the middle of his soph.o.m.ore year. Family problems, he'd told people, but that wasn't the reason. Money was. Always money.

When he'd transferred, everyone still a.s.sumed that Betsy Quinlan would end up marrying handsome, likable John Wesley Poe, who wasn't the best student or the worst but was, by far, the most ambitious. Instead, a month after graduation, Betsy married brilliant, eccentric Stuart Dunnemore, a childless widower twenty-two years her senior.

She inhaled sharply when she saw Nicholas and almost stumbled backward. He had deliberately chosen her favorite cafe not far from the apartment she and her husband had shared since agreeing to partic.i.p.ate in a special commission at the International Court of Justice at The Hague.

For a moment, Nicholas thought Betsy would run in the opposite direction, but she regained her composure and proceeded to his table.

She sat across from him and looked at him as if she might have just found a disagreeable insect on her table. But he could see the fear in her gray eyes, the strain of the past twenty-four hours. Amsterdam was six hours ahead of New York-it was late afternoon now. This time yesterday, she would have been just getting the news of the shooting in Central Park.

"Did you have anything to do with what happened to my son?" she asked, her voice low, intense, accusatory.

"Betsy. How could you think-"

She didn't back off. "Did you?"

Nicholas sipped his espresso and took a small bite of the cookie that came with it. It was a cool, windy afternoon. The cafe was uncrowded, although bicycles and people moved about in the streets. He was dressed casually in a brown silk sweater and trousers, trying not to call attention to himself, although he doubted a federal agent would jump out of an alley and kidnap him back to the United States. They had bigger fish to fry. Or so they believed.

People often underestimated Betsy Dunnemore. Because she'd married a man so much older, because she'd devoted herself to him and to raising her children. An educated housewife, an amateur art historian. The condescension had to be hard for her to take at times. But Nicholas had known her at eighteen, and he had never underestimated her-her intelligence, her determination, her grit. It was her steady devotion to her aging husband that had taken him by surprise. He'd seen it when he'd first contacted her last fall-another "chance" meeting-with the hope of maneuvering himself into her circle, the dream, even, of having an affair.

He remembered how much he'd wanted her at eighteen.

"I had nothing to do with the shooting." He kept his tone mild. "I've made my share of mistakes, but I'm not a violent man. You're upset. I understand that."

"Don't patronize me. Don't." She didn't yell, but she was tight with anger, an easier emotion for her, he thought, than fear. "You should turn yourself in to U.S. authorities and go home to stand trial. You're a fugitive, Nicholas. I don't want anything to do with you."

"My status is a complicated legal matter."

"It's not complicated. You're charged with felony tax evasion. You were supposed to appear for trial in a U.S. court of law. Instead you fled." She looked away from him, her lower lip quivering, a weakness she wouldn't want him to see. "You slipped out of the country to Switzerland-"

"I have a home there."

"You knew it would be difficult if not impossible for you to be extradited for tax evasion. I don't know about the Netherlands." She s.h.i.+fted, her gray eyes on him. "Is it safe for you here?"

"Don't get carried away. It's a trying legal matter. Nothing more."

"Did Rob see you at the Rijksmuseum last month?" She kept her voice low, but her sarcasm was knifelike. "Did he recognize you? Did you have him shot because of it?"

The Rijksmuseum. Nicholas recognized now that intercepting her at the renowned Amsterdam museum had been bad timing. He hadn't realized her son the U.S. marshal was in town. A critical oversight. But he'd only dared surface in the Netherlands for a short time-he wanted to strengthen the bond between them now that he'd reestablished contact with her. It had been a long, trying winter. Seeing her had renewed his sense of hope.

Yet when they'd stood together three weeks ago in front of Rembrandt's ma.s.sive, famous painting, The Night Watch, Betsy had told him-again-that she wanted nothing to do with him.

"Betsy. Please. I'm not here to argue with you. I made an effort to see you because you were a familiar face, an old friend." That was the truth, as far as it went. Nicholas smiled tenderly. "We had a pleasant visit when I was here last in November. A cup of coffee. A nice chat about old times. It was a chance encounter-"

"It wasn't chance. You arranged it. You manipulated me so that I'd run into you. I wasn't aware of your legal status, but I am now." She didn't soften. "And we were never friends."

He attributed her coldness and sarcasm to her desperate fear for her son. He let his gaze drift to the swell of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, the soft shape of her hands. He'd accepted that the chance of a s.e.xual affair was remote, at least while her husband was still alive. Nicholas was a vital man, wealthy, his hair silver now but his body taut, well-conditioned. Stuart Dunnemore was old. Just plain old. He was in his late seventies, but still a force in diplomatic circles, an expert-a visionary-in international conflict resolution. A realist, not a romantic. A pragmatist, not an ideologue. And a good man. He had humility, and he was kind. He'd endured terrible losses, a father dead in a logging accident at thirty-two, a brother killed on the beaches of Normandy, a wife he'd watched slowly waste away from multiple sclerosis.

Betsy would never leave him. But he wouldn't live forever, either.

Right now, Nicholas needed to play on her emotions-her sympathy for him as a former cla.s.smate, for the struggling eighteen-year-old she must remember. He was a self-made man. He'd worked hard. He had so much to offer the world. But he couldn't contribute if he was behind bars.

The Dunnemores were known for their compa.s.sion.

And they had the ear of the new president of the United States.

Betsy was right. It wasn't just friends.h.i.+p that had drawn him to her. Nicholas wanted to convince her to tell her friend, Wes Poe, that their old cla.s.smate deserved a break. He'd paid a price for his mistakes. He would use his wealth for good.

He wanted her to get him a presidential pardon. It would stop the legal proceedings against him dead in their tracks. A pardon wouldn't exonerate him, but it would keep him out of prison and buy him time to distance himself from his other activities before they, too, caught up with him. Time to take his profits and move on.

"How is Rob?" Nicholas asked quietly.

Her eyes glistened with sudden tears-a mother's tears. They made her seem vulnerable, even more beautiful. He'd wanted Betsy Quinlan for a long time. He had wanted the girl she'd been at eighteen, and he wanted what she could do for him now, as a woman, as a friend and confidante of President John Wesley Poe.

"Oh, Nicholas. d.a.m.n. I must be out of my mind. I don't approve of what you've done, but tax evasion-" She collapsed back against her chair. "It's not a violent crime."

"You're upset because of Rob. I understand."

Even in her early fifties, her skin was translucent, smooth and barely lined, her delicate bone structure the stuff of a man's dreams. Nicholas wanted to take her hand and comfort her, but he knew better, resisted the instinctive reaction to her tears. A mother's grief. She gulped in a breath. "He's holding his own. I want to be there now-" She broke off, biting back a sob.

"When will you go?"