kind to them? Or had the system failed them, just as their own parents had?
He’d met them all recently, but they’d danced around the tough issues. One of these days they were going to have to face the past together and deal with the mess their parents had made of all their lives. It wasn’t as if he and Patrick had emerged unscathed, not once they’d discovered the truth.
Patrick had taken it even harder than Daniel had. He’d left home and hadn’t spoken to their parents since. Nor had he been in touch with Daniel until recently, when he’d set up that first meeting with Ryan, Sean and Michael. He’d expected Daniel to have explanations by now for what had happened all those years ago, but Daniel was still as much in the dark as everyone else.
Oh, he’d tried his best to make sense of what had happened, but beyond revealing the existence of the three older boys, his parents had said precious little to try to justify what they had done. Even though Daniel had maintained contact with his parents, that didn’t mean he’d worked through his own anger and guilt over having been one of the two chosen to be kept.
He supposed he owed his folks in one respect. Had it not been for the discovery of their betrayal, he might not have found the kind of work that he was doing now—saving kids in trouble, fighting for their rights, mending fences between them and their parents or finding them loving homes. The caseloads were heavy, the hours long, but it was important, meaningful work. And it could break a man’s heart on a daily basis.
He coped by adhering strictly to the rules, by reducing messy emotions to black-and-white regulations. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t. Gazing into Kendra Morrow’s haunted eyes, he instinctively knew that this was one of those times it wouldn’t work. The girl was a heartbreaker. He hoped to heaven she was in someone else’s jurisdiction, where she’d be found safe.
He sighed when his phone rang, relieved by the intrusion into his dark thoughts about a world in which kids ran away when they were little more than babies, too young to understand the risks.
“Devaney,” he said when he’d picked up the phone.
“Daniel, it’s Joe Sutton at police headquarters. Have you seen that poster for Kendra Morrow?”
“It’s on my desk now.”
“I was just having lunch over in Widow’s Cove,” the detective told him.
The mere mention of Widow’s Cove was enough to make Daniel’s palms sweat. And there was only one place in town worth going to for lunch…Molly’s. “Oh?” he said as if his heart wasn’t thumping unsteadily.
“I think Kendra Morrow’s hanging out at Molly Creighton’s place on the waterfront,” Joe reported. “You know the one I mean? Best chowder on the coast?”
“Yeah, Jess’s. Are you sure it was Kendra?”
“If it wasn’t her, it was her double. I’d just seen the poster before I went over there.”
“Then why didn’t you pick her up?” Daniel asked, surprised by the lapse from a cop who was usually quick to nab runaways for their own protection. He and Joe had handled more than their share of these cases together, and he respected the older man’s instincts.
“Because I looked through the file earlier, and something’s not quite right. I thought you might want to have a chat with the girl, while I do some checking into why she ran away in the first place. You know as well as I do that sometimes these things aren’t as cut-and-dried as they seem at first glance. If I’d thought she was at risk, I’d have brought her in, but she’s not going anywhere. Molly will see to that. I didn’t see any point in uprooting her until I have all the facts.”
This time Daniel’s sigh was even heavier. He and Molly got along like a couple of tomcats fighting for turf. Their relationship had been passionate and volatile for years, even before he’d let her down so damn badly. After what had happened the night she’d told him she was pregnant, the relationship had cooled to a degree that a glance between them could freeze meat. He regretted that, but he’d accepted it. He’d been a stubborn fool, and he didn’t deserve her forgiveness.
Out of respect for her feelings, it had been a few years now since he’d set foot in that bar she’d inherited from her grandfather. He stayed away in part because Patrick tended to hang out at Jess’s, but mostly because he couldn’t bear the look of justifiable contempt in Molly’s eyes.
“Can you take a run over there?” Joe pressed.
Daniel hesitated for just an instant, but when it came to work, he always did what he had to do, no matter how delicate the situation or how uncomfortable it made him.
“I’m on my way,” he promised, folding the fax into quarters and stuffing it into the pocket of his jacket. “I’ll check in with you later. You sure you don’t want me to bring her over, if it is Kendra? If she figures out we’re on to her, she could run again.”
“Just alert Molly, in case she doesn’t know anyone’s looking for the girl. She’ll keep her safe enough.”
“She has a thirteen-year-old working in a bar,” Daniel reminded him, an edge of sarcasm in his voice. It was just like Molly and her soft heart to take in a runaway kid and to hell with the consequences. Had she even once considered how desperate the parents might be or how many laws she might be breaking?
Joe chuckled at his comment on Molly’s lack of judgment. “Loosen up. The kid’s serving chowder, spilling more of it than she’s serving, to tell the truth of it. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Something tells me it’s the best place she could be right now while we figure out what drove her to run away. The note she left didn’t tell us a damned thing. I don’t want to turn her back over to her parents and then find out there was some kind of abuse going on.”
Daniel had his own opinion about this bending of the rules, but he bit his tongue. It was Joe’s call, at least until the court got involved. Then Daniel would have quite a lot to say about a woman who put a teenage runaway to work, no questions asked, without reporting her presence to the authorities.
“The man you were talking to before, he was a cop,” Kendra told Molly, her face pale and her eyes filled with panic. “I can spot a cop a mile away.”
“It was Joe Sutton and, yes, he is a detective, but he’s a good guy,” Molly reassured her. “He drives over every few weeks for my chowder. If he’d been here to look for you, he would have said something. Besides, he’s gone now, so obviously he didn’t recognize you.”
“Maybe he forgot his handcuffs and had to go back for them,” Kendra said.
“Sweetie, he wouldn’t handcuff you. You ran away. You’re not a criminal. You have nothing to fear from Joe.”
The words were barely out of her mouth when the door opened and Daniel Devaney came striding in as if he’d arrived to conquer the world. In her opinion, Kendra had a lot more to worry about with Daniel than she ever would with Joe Sutton. Daniel was a rigid, by-the-book kind of guy when it came to situations like this. How he and his twin brother, Patrick, had come from the same gene pool was a total enigma to her.
“Go in the back,” Molly ordered the teenager, maneuvering in an attempt to keep Kendra out of Daniel’s view. “And stay alert in case you need to get out of here in a hurry.”
Kendra paled
