He pried loose one of the larger stones from the pathway and used it to break a window in the kitchen door. He wasn’t worried about an alarm system; the very last thing his brother would have wanted was to have the police responding to his house when he wasn’t there. He’d told Dante more than once that while his brother was welcome in his house, the cop was not. And certainly not that ugly, drooly thing he called a dog, Agostina always added.
He knew he was thinking about those things to avoid fixating on the images that were etched into his mind, probably permanently. When he’d first reached into the crumpled vehicle to touch his brother, he’d already known. The unnatural angle of Dominic’s head had warned him, and when he’d been unable to find a pulse, it only confirmed what his gut was already telling him. And one look at his sister-in-law had told him there, too; Agostina must have hit the windshield hard. She’d always hated seat belts, for they wrinkled her elegant clothes. And even becoming a mother, having two innocent souls depending on her, had made no difference.
So you avoided wrinkles but ended up blood-soaked.
He shook his head sharply as the kitchen door finally swung open. He stood just inside for a long moment, simply listening. The house was quiet.
Dead quiet.
He looked around the kitchen, hoping to find a notepad or something, maybe with a helpful phone number. No such luck. He repeated the action in the large room adjacent, which looked more like a museum than a home. He made his way to where he knew Dominic’s office was; there, at least, his brother had refused to allow his wife’s taste to dominate. It was a functional room, with a large desk holding a computer and a file cabinet behind it. He could only imagine what might be in there. Dominic wasn’t stupid enough to keep paper records of his illicit activities, was he?
He walked to the desk, again looking for some kind of clue that might tell him where his nieces were. Nothing.
He sat down, booted up the computer. It was, as he’d expected, password protected. He tried the obvious ones first—names, birthdates, including the twins’. No luck. There did not appear to be any password-generating software present, although it didn’t have to be on the machine itself. He was sure Katie Parsons, the RRPD’s tech whiz, could crack it in a matter of hours, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to go there yet.
Right now all that mattered was finding the girls. Once he knew where they were, that they were safe, he’d be able to think straight. It would be something to focus on, something productive. He and Dominic had no other family left—at least not out of prison—except an elderly uncle and some cousins back in New York. Now he just had to—
The knock on the front door was faint all the way back here, but definite. It was followed by the loud clang of a doorbell that sounded disconcertingly like church bells from a cathedral. He made his way carefully, watchfully down the hall and through the drapery-darkened living room to the rather grand foyer. A glance out a window had told him there were no police cars in sight, but then, a good cop wouldn’t park in view anyway. And he still didn’t believe Dominic would have risked a burglar alarm, and there had been no control panels visible anywhere in the house.
The sidelight windows next to the door were a rather garish stained glass portrayal of...something, but they enabled him to see onto the porch, although distortedly. A short someone, with a frizzy-looking shock of gray hair. And a rather shapeless dress.
He put a hand on his weapon, and with the other pulled the door open. An older woman stood there, and her expression when she saw him was one of surprise. He saw her eyes flick to the K9 unit patch on his jacket.
“Oh! I knew it was the police, I saw the car...but you’re Dominic’s brother, aren’t you?”
“I... Yes.”
“I thought so. I recognize you from the picture, although you look very different out of uniform.”
Picture? Dominic had a picture of him? Somewhere this woman would have seen it?
“Who are you?” he asked carefully.
The woman smiled briefly, and in that moment she looked like someone’s kindly grandmother. “I’m Louise Nelson. I live next door. But I’m very glad you’re here. I got a phone call a while ago, and my daughter is ill. I have to go to her.”
“I’m...sorry,” Dante said, not sure what else to say, or why she was telling him, a total stranger, about this. Then, because it was his nature as well as ingrained, he asked, “Can I do anything? Drive you somewhere?” With my luck she’ll say yes and the daughter lives in Sioux Falls, about as far east as you can go and still be in the state.
She looked startled. But then she smiled again, and it was steadier this time. Worry, he realized. She was worried. “No, but that’s so sweet of you. You’re as nice as Dom said you were.”
It was his turn to be startled. “He...did?”
“Oh, often.” She hesitated, then added, “He said sometimes you were too nice for your own good.”
Well, that was his brother, all right.
Had been.
He wondered how long it took to start thinking in past tense.
But she was frowning now. Looking at his hands. He’d pulled his jacket on over his bloodstained shirt, but the cuffs still showed. “I was...at an accident scene a while ago,” he said, and she seemed to relax. And thankfully did not put his sudden appearance at this house he never visited together with that bit of information and realize who was in that accident. It was not something he wanted to talk about. He hadn’t even begun to process it himself.
And he needed to find Zita and Lucia, that was the most impor—
“So can you come over and get the girls?”
He blinked. “What?”
“I’m really sorry, but I have to leave as soon as possible.”
“You have the twins?” he asked, feeling a little slow on the uptake.
“Yes. I watch them now and then. I enjoy having little ones to take care of again for a while.” She smiled again. “My husband’s with them now, so they’re all right, but he’s hopeless with babies beyond keeping them from getting hurt.”
“I’m afraid so am I,” he admitted. Hopeless, meet helpless. What the hell am I going to do?
“Oh, you can’t be that bad. Otherwise Dom wouldn’t have told me to call you if anything happened and I couldn’t reach them.”
And again he felt a little slow. Shock, maybe? “He told you to...call me?”
She nodded. “He said you were the reliable one in the family.”
He almost laughed. Except he wasn’t sure there was any laughter left in him.
A few minutes later, he was staring down at two impossibly small humans, sleeping snuggled up to each other in a single crib.
“They’re doing so well for being born early,” Mrs. Nelson was saying. “They’ll be caught up soon. They’re so cute.”
She
