Third Degree

Danny searched her face, but he saw no sign that she was lying. Maybe Shields had fathered the child.

“I told you,” Warren said, “it can’t be mine.”

“You said it was unlikely. Not impossible.”

Shields looked at the floor, then at his gun. Laurel was playing a dangerous game.

“Is it possible?” she asked softly. “Just possible?”

“Maybe,” he whispered. “But if it is…I don’t even know if you could keep it. My cells are so screwed up now from the chemicals and hormones, the risk of birth defects would be so high-”

“I don’t care,” Laurel averred, so firmly that Danny believed her. “If you’re dying, then we have to risk it. You’re going to live to see this baby born!”

Danny didn’t know whether she was speaking from the heart, but her eyes flashed with conviction, and her words rang with truth.

Warren’s face was glistening. Maybe he’s finally breaking down, Danny thought. Maybe the hope of something positive before his death was enough to lift Shields out of the hell he had lived in so long. Danny prayed that Sheriff Ellis was hearing this conversation-and holding Ray Breen on a tight leash.

Warren wiped his eyes, then looked back at his wife. “I want you to get a blood test. Will you do that?”

She nodded, but Danny saw that the idea had scared her.

“A DNA test?” Danny asked, thinking that this alone was proof that Shields saw them both alive in the future.

“No, that takes too long. Mark Randall can come in here and draw some blood, and they can have it typed at the hospital lab in thirty minutes.”

Danny felt dizzy. “You mean now?”

“Why not? Randall lives practically around the corner, on Sagramore Street.”

“Warren…we don’t have that kind of time.”

“Why not?”

“Because the guys outside are about to blow this house apart. You want them to sit around while you perform some kind of in-house paternity test?”

“I don’t see why that’s asking too much. It could resolve everything.”

“How far along is she?” Danny asked. “How could they even get a needle to the fetus without, I don’t know, ultrasound or something?”

Laurel spoke with a feminine power that made both men turn. “If you truly loved me, it wouldn’t matter whose child I’m carrying.”

Warren gaped at her.

Danny wondered why the hell she’d said that. Did she have a death wish? Asking a man to accept another man’s child from the woman he was married to…that was definitely outside the envelope. Wasn’t it?

“You don’t know what love is,” Warren said. “I see that now.”

“On the contrary,” Laurel replied. “It’s you who has no idea what love is.”

Danny was trying to think of a way to get her off this tack when a disembodied voice said, “Merlin has broken the password! It’s MAGIC!”

Danny nearly jumped out of his skin, thinking someone else from the TRU had slipped into the house. When no gunfire erupted, he figured Grant was playing a video game on one of the home computers. But when he saw Laurel’s face, he knew he was wrong. She was terrified.

A triumphant blast of trumpets echoed through the house. Then the voice repeated, “Merlin has broken the password! It’s MAGIC!”

Warren’s face was shining as though all his fatigue had suddenly melted away. “Everybody into the study!” he cried.

Waving his pistol, he herded Danny toward the back door to his study. Danny had little choice but to walk ahead. As he did, some of Warren’s words during their earlier negotiation came back to him:

“I’ve got another computer working on it.”

“What is it you’re waiting for?”

“The name, Danny.”

“What name?”

“The guy who was screwing my wife. Or still is, for all I know.”

Danny stopped in the study door, his heart banging in his chest. My name is about to pop up on his computer screen…. “Warren, if we go in here, one or all of us is going to die. They’ll see us on the thermal cam, and they’ll fire this time.”

“At least I’ll die knowing the truth.” Warren pushed past him with Laurel in tow. She brushed against Danny as Warren yanked her down the single step, and the scent of her pierced him to the core.

“You won’t live to read the screen!” Danny yelled.

“You’re free to go, Major. But not Laurel. Everything that’s happened today was leading to this moment.”

Danny couldn’t abandon her. He stepped down into the study, but he made sure that the men outside knew where he was. “If you’re set on committing suicide, all right. But I’m not giving up on you. Maybe they won’t fire if I’m in here with you.”

Seeing that Danny meant to stay, Warren gestured for him to stand on the far side of the desk, opposite the Aeron chair that faced the computer screen. Then Warren stood Laurel to the right of his chair-between himself and the study windows-and sat before his computer. His wife was now a human shield, one that had probably merged their two figures into one on the thermal camera outside. Shields’s ultimate goal might be suicide, but he meant to live long enough to discover who’d been screwing his wife.

“Merlin has broken the password!” the computer announced yet again. “It’s MAGIC!”

Warren laughed like a gleeful twelve-year-old playing a video game. As he began clicking his mouse, Danny flicked his eyes back and forth, working out the geometry of the room. He had to get Carl a shot, fast. If Warren pulled Danny’s name out of Laurel’s Hotmail account, he was a dead man. Shields had already shot a deputy and his medical partner. How hard would it be to shoot the guy who’d impregnated his wife?

Warren had set his pistol in his lap so that he’d have both hands free to work the computer. Laurel stood two feet to his right, with the desk separating her from Danny. Her eyes locked onto his, willing him to do something, anything, to stop her husband from opening her e-mail messages.

What’s Warren looking at now? he wondered. A list of old e-mail from me? Danny never signed his name to casual e-mails-notes about where and when to meet, like that. But the longer ones-those describing his feelings for Laurel-he’d always signed. And being a woman, Laurel had probably chosen to save exactly those for posterity.

“What do you see?” Danny asked, trying to stall.

Shields shook his head in wonder. “I’m reading a message telling my wife to meet her lover at the usual place. Strange, isn’t it?”

That one won’t be signed, Danny thought. But the next one might.

“And I’m waiting to find out who the father of my wife’s child is. This is a real red-letter day, wouldn’t you say?” Warren clicked the mouse again, probably moving to the next e-mail.

Laurel’s face twitched with fear.

Five more seconds could kill us both, Danny realized. Screw the risk, Carl has to shoot- “Warren, you’ve got to stop this! You’ve given Laurel the third degree all day long. They could blow you away right now! Right where you sit. You make an easy target because you’re sitting-”

Warren’s hand flicked out like a striking snake and grabbed Laurel’s right wrist. A split second later he was on his feet, jerking her hand out of her pants pocket.

It’s her phone, Danny realized. He’s seen her phone!

Danny started around the desk, but Warren’s gun snapped up, its black eye staring a hole in Danny’s chest.