The nurse and the orderlies stepped around, adjusting IVs, the machine that monitored AJ’s vitals. A top sheet was folded to expose his right leg, which was encased from the top of his thigh to his foot in a compression bandage. He was unshaven, and his face under the stubble was bleached of color. His cheeks were sunken. He looked gaunt, wasted, as if he’d lost weight. But he was alert. His gaze jumped around, searching the room. Until he found Shea. He teared up when he saw her, his jaw shook, and his mouth pursed in an effort to keep his composure. Dru’s heart wobbled.
Shea pressed her fingertips to her mouth, holding AJ’s gaze. The medical team left, and she glanced at Lily, ready to defer, but Lily made a little shooing motion toward her son.
She was more generous than Dru would have been. She crossed her arms, fighting an urge to grab Shea and run with her out of the room.
At AJ’s bedside, Shea was tentative, hands fluttering about his face, his shoulders. “Are you okay? Do you hurt?”
“Not now,” AJ said, and, raising his untethered arm, he grasped Shea’s hand gently, as if it were a terrified bird, and, bringing it to his lips, he kissed the back and then her palm, inhaling deeply as if he might take her very essence into himself. Lily and Dru exchanged a glance, and Dru saw that Lily was wondering the same thing: whether they should leave the room, leave these two alone, but they both, along with Jeb, seemed unable to walk away.
“I was so scared I would never see you again,” Shea said softly.
“There was no way I wasn’t coming back to you.” AJ’s voice was husky with emotion—with love.
Even Dru couldn’t deny that he loved Shea. But was he good for her? Would he be good to her? Was he really innocent?
“It doesn’t matter what we think.” Lily spoke softly at Dru’s elbow.
“No,” Dru agreed, readily enough. She watched as Shea cupped AJ’s cheek, bent to kiss him. Her jaw tightened. She wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t that she didn’t want Shea to be happy. She wanted that for Shea more than anything.
“AJ would never hurt Shea.”
Dru glanced at Lily. She would have sworn that was true of Rob, too, before he put a shotgun in her face.
“It could have been a lot worse,” AJ said, and he included everyone in his glance.
“That’s what Dr. Matthews told us,” Lily said, walking around the foot of the bed to the side opposite Shea. Lily touched AJ’s shoulder. She laid her hand on his brow. “How are you, honey?”
“I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you and Granddad, that’s for sure.” He looked from his mom to Jeb, who had joined her.
“Your granddad is the one who knew where to find you,” Lily said.
“You have one of your hunches?” AJ asked, grinning.
“Ha. Yeah. At least some part of my brain still works.”
Jeb Axel seemed abashed somehow. Dru felt her heart reaching out in sympathy, and it disconcerted her. She’d never liked the man, his arrogance, his egotism, his cowboy swagger.
“I’m sorry to barge in, folks.”
Dru looked up as Clint Mackie walked into the room.
“I need to ask AJ some questions.”
Jeb said, “No, Clint, what you need to do is get the hell out there and find whoever did this.”
“I know who it is, Granddad,” AJ said, and as happy as he had sounded before, there was misery evident in his voice now. “Help me sit up?” AJ asked Shea.
She adjusted the bed, the cushion under his leg, and when she was finished, he captured her hand again.
“So, tell us, son,” Mackie said. “Who shot you?”
“Erik. Erik Ayala.”
“What?” Shea and Lily spoke together.
Dru’s breath stopped, but it was Jeb’s reaction—the way he jerked upright, looking stunned, as if he’d been sucker punched—that kept Dru’s attention. She heard AJ say he couldn’t believe it, either, then Lily and Shea were talking. Lily saying she’d seen Erik yesterday: “He fixed lunch in my kitchen.” And Shea saying Erik had called her looking for Kate: “He wanted to know if I’d heard from her when he knew, knew she was . . .”
They didn’t notice it when Jeb walked around the foot of the bed, returning to stand at the window. Perhaps he felt Dru’s gaze, though, because he looked at her, and he was gray-faced. He might have aged ten years in the space of ten seconds. She couldn’t fathom his expression; some kind of anguish, what might have been a plea for help, haunted his eyes. Dru looked away, doubting what she saw, but the sense of her foreboding was real enough, an icy finger tapping up her spine.
“Why? Why would Erik hurt those girls?” Lily asked.
“Why would he hurt you?” Shea looked at AJ.
“Erik hates me. I mean, he really hates me, as crazy as it sounds. I’m not sure why I’m still alive.”
“You want to start at the beginning?” Mackie wasn’t really asking.
AJ asked for water, and Shea poured it into a cup from the pitcher of ice water the orderlies had left behind. She fed it to him, holding the cup, guiding the straw, and while the gravity of the situation was apparent, there was also an intimacy in the moment; there were notes of merriment and teasing in their attention to each other. AJ didn’t need Shea’s help to drink, but it was their pleasure to pretend.
They might have been alone in the room, in the world, Dru thought.
Mackie pulled out his cell phone. “You don’t mind if I record this, do you? I’ll want to get a formal statement later, but I’d like this on the record.”
“Whatever you need,” AJ answered. “Where do you want me to start?”
“You worked your shift at Café Blue on Tuesday, right?”
“Yeah. We weren’t busy, so I left early.”
Shea said, “The detective in Dallas tried to tell me you weren’t there at all.”
“They said the same thing to me.” Lily was staring at Mackie.
“Well, I was there. You can check my time card.”
“We did that already. Initially the DPD was misinformed.” Mackie was perfunctory. “So, after you got off, what did you do?”
“I called my girl.” AJ glanced at Shea, squeezing her hand. “I think it was about ten thirty, then I drove to my apartment. I was whipped, and all I wanted was a hot shower and bed. But when I walked in, I saw Erik at the kitchen sink. The water was running. I didn’t really register at first what he was doing.” AJ spoke slowly.
He seemed bewildered, Dru thought, as if he was trying to connect the dots. He hadn’t reacted to the mention of Kate’s death. Maybe he already knew, or maybe in all the turmoil, he hadn’t registered the reference.
Mackie asked him what happened next.
“Erik was like, ‘Oh, man, I’m glad you showed up.’ He said he’d had an accident. I saw he had blood all over him and figured he’d cut himself. I was like, ‘God, what did you do?’ But then I saw his eyes. They were—I can’t even describe the look. Cold. Empty, like nothing was there.”
“Go on,” Mackie prompted.
“He told me he’d done something bad and asked me to come with him to the bedroom. When we got there, I couldn’t figure out what had happened. There was this body on the bed and blood splattered everywhere, and my knife, my Shun chef’s knife—” AJ twisted his head, hunting his mother’s glance. “The one out of the set you gave me?”
Lily nodded. “We found it, Granddad and I did, in your truck.”
“You found my truck? Where?”
Lily told him. “It was burned,” she said. “I guess Erik was trying to destroy evidence.”
The shared moment of silence was astonished, sickened.