“Straight up,” she said.
His eyebrows lifted.
“I don’t usually have a lot of time to stand around adding things to it,” she pointed out. “I’m lucky to have time to take a sip or two before it gets cold.”
“I thought Grier gave you one of those gadgets you put a coffee cup on to keep it hot,” he said. “For Christmas.”
“I don’t have a place to put it where it wouldn’t endanger the electronics at my station,” she said. “Don’t tell him.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.” He set out two mugs, pulled out a chair at the table and motioned her into another one. He straddled his and stared at her. “Why a raven?” he asked abruptly. “And why those colors for beadwork?”
She bit her lower lip. “I don’t know.”
He stared at her pointedly, as if he didn’t believe her.
She blushed. “I really don’t know,” she emphasized. “I didn’t even start out to paint a raven. I was going to do a landscape. The raven was on the canvas. I just painted everything else out,” she added. “That sounds nuts, I guess, but famous sculptors say that’s how they do statues, they just chisel away everything that isn’t part of the statue.”
He still didn’t speak.
“How did you even know it was me?” she asked unhappily. “The gifts were supposed to be secret. I don’t tell people that painting is my hobby. How did you know?”
He got up after a minute, walked down the hall and came back with a rolled-up piece of paper. He handed it to her and sat back down.
Her intake of breath was audible. She held the picture with hands that were a little unsteady. “Who did this?” she exclaimed.
“My daughter, Melly.”
Her eyes lifted to his. He’d never spoken of any family members, except his brother. “You don’t talk about her,” she said.
His eyes went to the picture on the table. They were dull and vacant. “She was three years old when she painted that, in pre-school,” he said quietly. “It was the last thing she ever did. That afternoon, she and her mother went to my father’s house. They were going to have supper with my father and stepmother. My father went to get gas for a trip he was making the next day. Cammy hadn’t come home from shopping yet.”
He stopped. He wasn’t sure he could say it, even now. His voice failed him.
Winnie had a premonition. Only that. “And?”
He looked older. “I was working undercover with San Antonio PD, before I became a Fed. My partner and I were just a block from the house when the call came over the radio. I recognized the address and burned rubber getting there. My partner tried to stop me, but nobody could have. There were two uniformed officers already on scene. They tried to tackle me.” He shrugged. “I was bigger than both of them. So I saw Melly, and my wife, before the crime scene investigators and the coroner got there.” He got up from the table and turned away. He was too shaken to look at her. He went to the coffeepot and turned it off, pouring coffee into two cups. He still hesitated. He didn’t want to pick up the cups until he was sure he could hold them. “The perp, whoever it was, used a shotgun on them.”
Winnie had heard officers talk about their cases occasionally. She’d heard the operators talk, too, because some of them were married to people in law enforcement. She knew what a shotgun could do to a human body. To even think of it being used on a child … She swallowed, hard, and swallowed again. Her imagination conjured up something she immediately pushed to the back of her mind.
“I’m sorry,” she said in a choked tone.
Finally, he picked up the cups and put them on the table. He straddled the chair again, calmer now. “We couldn’t find the person or persons who did it,” he said curtly. “My father went crazy. He had these feelings, like you do. He left the house to get gas. It could have waited until the next morning, but he felt he should go right then. He said later that if he’d been home, he might have been able to save them.”
“Or he might have been lying right beside them,” Winnie said bluntly.
He looked at her in a different way. “Yes,” he agreed. “That was what I thought, too. But he couldn’t live with the guilt. He started drinking and couldn’t stop. He died of a heart attack. They said the alcohol might have played a part, but I think he grieved himself to death. He loved Melly.” He stopped speaking and drank the coffee. It blistered his tongue. That helped. He hadn’t talked about it to an outsider, ever.
Her soft, dark eyes slid over his face quietly. “You think this may be linked to the body they found in the river,” she said slowly.
His dark eyebrows lifted. “I haven’t said that.”
“You’re thinking it.”
His broad chest rose and fell. “Yes. We found a small piece of paper clenched in the man’s fist. It took some work, but Alice Jones’s forensic lab was able to make out the writing. It was my cell phone number. The man was coming here to talk to me. He knew something about my daughter’s death. I’m sure of it.”
His daughter’s death. He didn’t say, his wife and daughter. She wondered why.
His big hands wrapped around the hot white mug. His eyes had an emptiness that Winnie recognized. She’d seen it in military veterans. They called it the thousand-yard stare. It was the look of men who’d seen violence, who dealt in it. They were never the same again.
“What did she look like?” Winnie asked gently.
He blinked. It wasn’t a question he’d anticipated. He smiled faintly. “Like Jon, actually, and my father,” he said, laughing. “She had jet-black hair, long, down to her waist in back, and eyes like liquid ebony. She was intelligent and sweet natured. She never met a stranger …” He stopped, looked down into the coffee cup, and forced it up to his lips to melt away the hard lump in his throat. Melly, laughing, holding her arms out to him. “I love you, Daddy! Always remember!” That picture of her, laughing, was overlaid by one of her, lifeless, a nightmare figure covered in blood …
“Dear God!” he bit off, and his head bent.
Winnie was wary of most men. She was shy and introverted, and never forward. But she got up out of her chair, pulled him toward her and drew his head to her breasts. “Honest emotion should never embarrass anyone,” she whispered against his hair. “It’s much worse to pretend that we don’t care than to admit we do.”
She felt his big body shudder. She expected him to jerk away, to push her away, to refuse comfort. He was such a steely, capable man, full of fire and spirit and courage. But he didn’t resist her. Not for a minute, anyway. His arms circled her waist and almost crushed her as he gave in, momentarily, to the need for comfort. It was something he’d never done. He’d even pushed Cammy away, years ago, when she offered it to him.
She laid her cheek against his thick, soft black hair and just stood there, holding him. But then he did pull away, abruptly, and stood up, turning away from her.
“More coffee?” he
