Holding the envelope and pondering whether or not he could justify opening it, he thumbed his radio on. “Katie, do you copy?”

“Yeah, J.J.” Katie’s voice was higher than normal and breathless with poorly suppressed excitement. “How is-”

“Everybody’s fine. Including me,” he added wryly, and got a chuckle in response. “Mother and son are fine-just dropped ’em off at Ridgecrest E.R. Ah…Katie, I want you to run a name for me. Put a rush on it.” He gave her the name. “You copy?”

“Copy that,” Katie said. “When you gonna be back in the office?”

“On my way,” J.J. drawled.

What he really wanted to do was go find a quiet spot and a nice cold beer and take an hour or two to ponder the events of the morning. After all, wasn’t every day he got to rescue a pregnant woman masquerading as a nun out in the middle of the desert and deliver her baby in the backseat of his patrol vehicle. But since his work day was barely half over, he stuffed the envelope-unopened-into the bag containing Rachel’s clothes and took everything inside to the E.R. reception desk. Back outside in the midday sun, he called to Moonshine-no dummy, she’d found a shady spot under a parked ambulance-got in his patrol vehicle and, making mental note to look for a car wash on the way, headed back to his own jurisdiction.


Once again, Rachel drifted. Somewhere in the back of her mind she knew there were things she should be thinking about, planning for. But for the moment, she felt no more capable of controlling the course of her life than a leaf caught in a river’s current. And for now, that current was benign, a placid and peaceful stretch after what had been a turbulent, hazardous, sometimes terrifying, sometimes exhilarating ride. For the time being, for the first time in more than two years, she was free of the Delacorte family. For the first time in six months, she was free from fear. Tomorrow, she would think about what to do next. For today, she could allow herself to drift.

I’m in a hospital. My baby and I are safe here.

Lying on her side with her cheek propped on one curled fist, she gazed at her newborn son, now sleeping peacefully, swaddled in a soft white blanket with blue and pink stripes around the edges, a blue stocking cap covering his head and most of his freshly washed silky black hair. A fine, strong, healthy boy, the doctor had told her. Seven pounds, five ounces. A beautiful baby boy. Which Rachel didn’t need a doctor to tell her; she could see her son was absolutely perfect.

Nicky, you have a son. You always said…

But her mind, drifting, sailed quickly, almost guiltily past images of Nicholas and settled instead, like a leaf caught in a skein of half-submerged grasses, on the fierce and whiskery face of Deputy Sheriff Jethro-J.J.-Fox.

Who could have imagined our baby would be helped into this world by a lawman? A sheriff straight out of the Old West, one who sounds a little like John Wayne?

She laughed without sound, and was disconcerted when the laughter made everything in her middle quiver like unmolded gelatin. She winced and rested her hand on her disappointingly still-swollen belly, trying to remember what the nurse had assured her: Everything would go back to its normal place soon. And nursing, the nurse had told her firmly, would help that happen faster.

With that memory, Rachel’s drifting mind bumped gently against another image: Sheriff Jethro Fox’s hands, one cradling her baby’s head, the other holding her breast, guiding the nipple to an eagerly seeking mouth. The backs of his hands had been tanned, she remembered, the hair on the wrists bleached golden by the sun, the nails clean and clipped short but not manicured, not like Nicky’s. Nicky had cared for his hands as meticulously as any woman.

She wondered why it wasn’t more unsettling, remembering the way a strange man had touched her breasts. Instead, she found it a comforting image, and it stayed with her until she dozed.


Katie aimed an accusing stare at J.J. across the tops of her glasses when he walked through the door. “What happened, Grizzly? I thought you were going to shave all that stuff off your face.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve been kind of busy.” He took off his hat and sailed it across to his own desk.

Katie held the stare for another beat, then broke out in a grin. “Well, congratulations, anyway.” She pulled a cigar out of where she’d been hiding it behind her computer screen and lobbed it at him.

He snagged it and grunted his thanks, as Daryl Fisher, another one of his deputies, pushed off from his desk and tipped his chair back.

“First baby, J.J.?”

J.J. snorted. “Yeah, it was. How many have you brought into the world?” Daryl was fresh out of police academy and liked to think he knew everything. And maybe he did-everything that could be learned out of a book, anyway, which in J.J.’s opinion wasn’t much.

Daryl made a scoffing noise and went back to his computer.

“He’s just jealous,” Katie said comfortingly.

“Yeah, right.” J.J. was wondering why he felt so damn crabby. Shouldn’t a little euphoria be in order? He nodded toward the computer monitor on Katie’s desk. “Anything on that name I gave you?”

Katie gave a little gasp. “Oh-my gosh. Sorry-kind of got caught up in the celebration.” She bit her lower lip to hold back what appeared to be sheer glee. “Hold on to that cigar, J.J., because you’re not going to believe this. Rachel Malone Delacorte-I’m guessing that’s the new mom?”

“That’s what I’m guessing.”

“Well, if it’s the same one, she’s married to Nicholas Delacorte-or was.” She waited a beat, and when J.J. just looked at her, gave an impatient huff. “Only son of Carlos Delacorte? Head of the biggest crime family in the entire southwest, if not the country? Plus Central America?”

J.J. swore under his breath. No wonder the name had seemed familiar to him.

“The reason I said was,” Katie went on, still full of herself. “Remember that shootout in the alley behind the Hollywood Bistro last year? The one where those two feds got killed? Well, you might remember, there was another casualty that night-none other than Carlos Delacorte’s little boy, Nicky. At the time, it was thought he might have just gotten caught in the crossfire, since no weapons were found on him. Meanwhile, the shooters, whoever they were, got clean away.”

“That case is still open,” J.J. said, frowning. It was coming back to him, now. “Didn’t witnesses say Delacorte was in the Bistro that night, with a woman?”

Katie nodded. “Presumably his wife, Rachel Delacorte. Supposedly she left the Bistro with her husband, but after the shootout she was nowhere to be found.” She turned the monitor so J.J. could see the screen. “So…is this her? Is this your new baby-mama?”

J.J. stared at the screen, and felt his vision field shrink and the world fall away. All sound seemed to be muffled, even his own voice. “That’s her,” he said.

The photo had been taken at some formal event, maybe a charity ball or premier, the couple posed the way celebrities do for the photographers on the red carpet. And they were as beautiful a couple as any J.J. had ever seen on any red carpet, he dashing in his tux, dark hair wavy to his collar and slicked back on the top and sides, she slender and elegant in a gown made of something shimmery that clung to every curve and left her shoulders, the tops of her breasts and most of her back bare. Her head barely topped her husband’s shoulder, even with her hair piled high on her head. Jewels-diamonds, most likely real ones-twinkled in the coils of her shiny black hair and at her ears and throat.

A far cry, he thought, from the woman in the borrowed nun’s habit, nine months pregnant and her hair wet and stringy with sweat. But there was no mistaking that heart-shaped face. Those eyes.

Katie was saying something. With an effort, he pulled his gaze away from the image of the woman on the computer screen and focused on her. “What?”

Her eyes were grave as they met his. “J.J., if that woman is Rachel Delacorte, then that means…”

“I just delivered Carlos Delacorte’s grandson.” He let his breath out in a gust.

Even before he said the words, their implications had rumbled over him like a landslide. Everything-Rachel, missing from the scene after the shootout that killed her husband, now turning up pregnant, alone in the desert in a borrowed car and nun’s habit, her face wearing the evidence of a brutal beating, afraid to trust anyone, even an officer of the law-it all made sense now. It was pretty obvious the woman had been held prisoner-virtual if not actual-by her father-in-law, notorious crime family kingpin, and had just made a desperate attempt to escape.

Why?

The possibilities turned his blood cold. Witnesses at the Bistro the night of the shootout said Nicholas Delacorte had been with a woman. Although witnesses wouldn’t confirm it, and no surveillance cameras could prove it, that woman would almost certainly have been his wife, Rachel. J.J. wasn’t familiar with the details of the case, but the wife of one of the victims would almost certainly have been questioned, along with everyone in the Delacorte camp, immediately after the shooting. Nothing had ever come of it, apparently, but if Carlos had been keeping his daughter-in-law under wraps, it would almost certainly have been because she knew too much, was possibly even an eyewitness to the shooting of her husband and two federal agents.

Why not just kill her?

Because she was pregnant, carrying Nicholas’s child, the only grandchild Carlos Delacorte would ever have.

And once the child was born…what then? The bruises seemed to indicate there was no love lost between Carlos and his son’s wife. Once the baby was safely delivered, he’d have no reason to keep a potential eyewitness to the shooting of two federal lawmen alive.