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.
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.
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
J.J. swore under his breath. No wonder the name had seemed familiar to him.
“The reason I said
“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.
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.
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.
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.
No wonder Rachel had lit out for parts unknown, even nine months pregnant and probably already in early labor. She’d been running for her life.
J.J. swore, blaspheming in a way that would have made his mother weep. Even Katie, who’d probably heard a whole lot worse in her lifetime, was staring at him openmouthed. He didn’t stop to apologize.
“Get Ridgecrest Hospital on the phone,” he snapped at her, at the same time he was taking his backup piece out of the desk drawer he’d put it in when he’d first arrived at the Lost Mine Sheriff’s Station five months ago. He checked it over, then shoved it inside his boot. It was the first time he’d carried it since he’d left Homicide Division. “Tell them to put extra security on Rachel Delacorte and her baby.”
His sense of urgency was like an electric current pulsing through his body. He had to figure Delacorte would be
