The three boys were already working their way through the plate-sized donuts as Patrick rolled the top of the bag shut and picked up his coffee cup. “Don’t forget, four o’clock.”
Tommy tried to reply around a mouthful of donut, but the twins just nodded again, eagerly. Then they hurried away down the sidewalk, as if worried that Patrick might have second thoughts and take their treats back from them.
As he turned to continue heading home, he paused, shrugged, and then opened the bag back up to pull a donut out for himself. This was not his first rodeo, after all, and he’d bought more than he thought he’d need. . . .
By the time Patrick walked back into the house, the bag of donuts was already half empty, but he told himself that was still more than enough for Joyce and the others. The two that he’d eaten on the way home had been filling enough that he would probably only want one more, himself.
The house was filled with the smell of coffee brewing, and voices coming from the doorway to the kitchen. Hanging his jacket on its hook by the door and putting his pistol on a side table, Patrick walked into the kitchen to find that Izzie had taken over one end of the dinner table as her workstation, and was sitting in front of her laptop deep in concentration, with a legal pad at one elbow and a stack of papers and hardcover journals at the other. Daphne and Joyce were sitting across from one another at the other end of the table, each with a steaming cup of coffee, and were currently engaged in what seemed to be a fairly spirited discussion.
“Um, hey guys,” Patrick said. And then, when all three women turned to him with annoyed expressions on their faces, he held up the paper bag and added, “Anybody want a donut?”
Joyce sat back with her arms folded over her chest, fuming silently, while Daphne scowled as she took a sip of her coffee.
“What’d I miss?” Patrick sat the bag of donuts on the table and went to fetch some plates and napkins.
“Not enough.” Izzie straightened up and pushed her laptop away from her, a look of annoyance on her face. “For one thing, your wifi’s bandwidth is for crap.”
“Yeah, I always . . .” Patrick put the plates on the table, then turned to look at Izzie, raising an eyebrow. “Hey, how were you able to log in? I didn’t give you the password.”
Izzie sat back, rolling her eyes.
“For a cop, you’ve got a pretty lousy sense of security.” Izzie nodded in the direction of the wireless router in the corner of the room, sitting atop a rat’s nest of cords and cables. “I needed to do some research online and didn’t want to have to wait until you got back, so I tried the default password that the manufacturer printed on the back of the router, and was able to log in no problem.”
Patrick glanced over at the router and then back to Izzie, a blank expression on his face.
“You can reconfigure the router and choose your own password when you set them up,” she said. “You do know that, right?”
“Okay, okay,” he said, dismissing the criticism with a wave as he went to grab a cup of coffee for himself. “But I’m guessing that’s not why things seem so tense in here, right? Or did you all get in a disagreement about my substandard cyber security?”
“Look, if I seem tense,” Izzie shot back, “it’s only because these two won’t knock it off and let me concentrate on what I’m reading.”
She waved her arm at the far end of the table, indicating Joyce and Daphne, who were still staring daggers at one another.
Patrick finished pouring coffee from the pot into his cup—he was stuck with So Many Men, So Few Can Afford Me—and came back to the table, taking a seat between Joyce and Izzie.
“Well?” he said, looking over the rim of the cup while he took his first sip. “What’s the problem on this end of the table?”
“The only problem,” Joyce said, arms still crossed, “is that Little Miss FBI here can’t accept that some people have principles, is all.”
“Look,” Daphne snapped, leaning forward and slapping the table with the palm of her hand, “I wasn’t suggesting that you lie, okay?”
“No?” Joyce gave her an icy glare. “And what would you call falsifying official medical records then, hmm?”
“They wouldn’t be medical records . . .” Daphne began.
“Those file requests go into the official records.” Joyce shook her head, exasperated. “I keep telling you but you don’t want to . . .”
“Enough!” Izzie shouted from the other end of the table, slamming the lid of her laptop shut by way of punctuation. “I’m sorry I asked.”
Patrick looked from her to the bickering pair at the other end of the table and back again.
“I thought this didn’t have anything to do with you,” he said. He pulled a donut out of the bag, put it on a plate, and slid it across the table to Izzie.
She took a bite of the donut, sulking while she chewed, a frown lining her face.
“All Izzie is asking for is a little—” Daphne began, but Izzie interrupted her before she could continue.
“No,” she said evenly, remaining calm. “Joyce
