right arm, however. We’ve reset the bones and applied a fiberglass cast to just above the elbow. She’ll need to wear the cast for at least four weeks.”
“Can I see her?” Briar asked.
“Check with the nurse at the front desk in the E.R.—she’ll tell you what room she’ll be in.” The doctor smiled, gave Briar a comforting pat on her shoulder and left the waiting room, moving at a clip.
“Good news,” Dalton murmured.
Briar turned her gaze toward him, her eyes narrowing. “You’re still here.”
“Yes, I am,” he said, not taking offense. He knew he was making a nuisance of himself by coming here at this hour of night to bother her, but it couldn’t be helped. She might hold the key to his uncertain future without even realizing it.
“I have to go check on my aunt.” She turned away from him and crossed to where Laney sat, murmuring something before she handed off her son to the other woman.
Dalton watched her straighten her back and leave the waiting room with her shoulders squared and her chin up, like a soldier readied for battle. It struck him, in that brief glimpse of her steel core, that Briar Blackwood was a woman who thrived on challenges that made other people collapse.
Could that trait of hers be useful to him?
As Dalton started out the door after her, Doyle Massey rose from his chair and moved into his path. He was smiling as he did so, in that charming snake-oil salesman way of his, all teeth and beach tan and ulterior motives.
“Where are you going?” Doyle asked.
“That’s none of your business.” Dalton tried to take a step around him, but Doyle shifted, staying in his path.
“I don’t know what you’re up to or why you’ve suddenly taken an interest in my newest recruit, but don’t drag our bad blood into it.”
Dalton couldn’t help smiling at the chief’s choice of words. “Bad blood, huh?”
“Dana and I get that you don’t want to be part of our family, and you know, we can live with that. But don’t think that means we’ll let you screw with our lives and the lives of people around us.”
“Your faith in my integrity is touching.”
“I have no faith in you at all,” Doyle snapped back, dropping all pretense of friendly civility. “What brought you here tonight?”
“A case.” Dalton lifted his chin, daring the chief to start a fight.
“Which case is that?”
Dalton glanced to his right as Walker Nix rose from his seat and headed for the waiting room door. Off to see after the Blackwood widow and her aunt, he guessed. Maybe take the older woman’s statement.
He’d wanted to be there for that statement himself, but clearly the chief had other ideas.
“Why don’t you both try being straight with each other?” Laney rose from her chair and moved to turn their tense twosome into a threesome.
They both looked at her, and she lifted her eyebrows in response.
Doyle looked back at Dalton, his eyebrows mimicking his fiancée’s. “Well? What case are we talking about?”
Dalton was tempted to just leave without answering. But with so much on the line—not just his own ambitions but the safety of all the people he’d sworn justice for—he couldn’t afford to let his emotions muck up the works.
“I’ve been trying to piece together a conspiracy case against the people we suspect were involved in the Wayne Cortland crime network,” he said finally, lowering his voice by habit. “You know that Blake Culpepper has been fingered as one of the people involved.”
“And you come here in the middle of the night to a hospital waiting room to ask Blake’s distant cousin questions about his criminal activity?” Doyle sound unconvinced.
“Not about Culpepper.” Dalton tamped down a smile at the thought that he actually knew something his know-it-all half brother didn’t. “I came here to ask her questions about her late husband.”
“You have questions about Johnny? Why?”
“Because odds are good he was part of Cortland’s organization.”
Chapter Two
Briar had never liked hospitals, even before her mother’s death from breast cancer. The antiseptic smells, the dim artificial lights, the rhythms of machines that beat like the pulse of some giant predatory beast—they were alien to the life she knew, a life of fresh air, changing seasons, the loamy essence of earth and trees and the feel of wind in her hair.
In the white-sheeted hospital bed, her aunt looked like a thin, sickly child instead of a strong, wiry woman in her late fifties. Her shiny silver-streaked black hair looked dull and brittle beneath the single light shining over her bed, and when Jenny turned her tired gaze to Briar, she looked as if she’d aged a decade overnight.
The cast on her right arm was bulky and the color of old paper, not quite white, not quite yellow. “Does it hurt?” Briar asked, resting her hand on the rough-textured surface of the cast.
“Not at the moment.”
There was a knock on the door behind her. Then it inched open and Walker Nix’s face appeared in the opening. “Is it okay to come in?”
Briar looked at her aunt. “I think Walker wants to ask you some questions about what happened.”
“Of course.” Jenny flashed the detective a wan smile as he entered and came to stand at the foot of her bed.
“How’re you feeling?” he asked Jenny, briefly squeezing Briar’s shoulder before dropping his hand to his pocket to pull out a notebook.
“I’m not feeling much of anything at the moment,” Jenny admitted, making Briar smile. “I guess you want to know what I remember.”
“As much as you can.”
Briar’s aunt lifted her left hand to her brow. “I’d just put Logan to bed when there was a knock on the door.” Jenny’s gaze slanted to meet Briar’s. “I know you say never to answer the door at night, but the person on the other side said he was Doyle Massey, and you know that light on the porch went out night before last.”
Briar gave herself a mental kick. “I meant to put a new bulb in before I left tonight.”
“You can imagine what I was thinking.” Jenny reached out to Briar, clasping her hand when she offered it. “It was your second week on the police force, and here was the chief of police knocking at the door in the middle of the night....”
It had been a ruse guaranteed to get Jenny to open the door, which meant the intruders were familiar enough with her life to know it would work, Briar realized with a shudder of dismay.
“Did you get a good look at the intruders?” Nix asked.
