Twice A Hero, Always Her Man

“Son of a gun,” he muttered in disbelief. The guy had almost run him over. “Dispatch, I see the vehicle in question and I’m pursuing it now.”

Turning his wheel sharply, he made a U-turn and proceeded to give chase. Despite his adrenaline pumping, he hated these chases, hated thinking of what was liable to happen if the utmost care as well as luck weren’t at play here.

He held his breath even as he mentally crossed his fingers.

After a short time and some rather tricky, harrowing driving, he pursued the thief right into a storage-unit facility.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he muttered under his breath. Did the guy actually believe he was going to lose him here? Talk about dumb moves...

He supposed he had to be grateful for that. Had the thief hit the open road, he might have lost him or someone might have gotten hit—possibly fatally—during the pursuit.

As it was, he managed to corner the man. Colin jumped out of his car and completed the chase on foot, congratulating himself that all those days at the gym paid off. He caught up to the thief, who had unintentionally led him not only to where he had planned on hiding this painting that he’d purloined but to a number of others that apparently had been stolen at some earlier date.

It took a moment to sink in. When it did, Colin tried not to let his jaw drop. Things like this didn’t usually happen in Bedford, which, while not a sleepy little town, wasn’t exactly a hotbed of crime, either.

“Wow, you’ve been quite the eager beaver, haven’t you?” Colin remarked as he snapped a pair of handcuffs on the thief’s wrists.

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” the thief declared. “Never saw these other paintings before in my life,” he swore, disavowing any previous connection.

“And yet you came here to hide the one you stole this morning,” Colin pointed out. “Small world, wouldn’t you say?”

“I never saw these before!” the slight man repeated loudly.

Colin shook his head as he led the thief out to his waiting car. “Didn’t your mama teach you not to lie?” he asked.

“I’m not saying another word without my lawyer,” the thief announced, and dramatically closed his mouth.

“Good move,” Colin said in approval. “Not much left to say anyway, seeing as how all these paintings speak for themselves.”

Desperate, the thief made one last attempt to move Colin as he was being put into the backseat. “Look, this is just a big misunderstanding.”

“Uh-huh.”

Panic had entered the man’s face, making Colin wonder if he was working for someone else, someone he feared. “I can make it worth your while if you just look the other way, let me go. I’ll leave the paintings. You can just tell everyone you found them.”

Colin smiled to himself. It never ceased to amaze him just how dumb some people could be. “Maybe you should have thought of the consequences before you started putting this private collection together for yourself.” He saw the thief opening his mouth and sensed there was just more of the same coming. “Too late now,” he told the man.

With that, he took out his cell phone and called in to the station for backup to come and collect all the paintings. There were going to be a lot of happy art owners today, he mused. They wouldn’t be reunited with their paintings immediately, since for now, the pieces were all being kept as evidence, but at least they knew the art had been recovered and was safe.

He glanced at his watch as he waited for his call to go through.

It was just nine thirty, he realized. Nine thirty on a Monday morning. His week was off and running.

Chapter Two

Maizie put as much stock in fate as the next person. She didn’t, however, sit back and just assume that fate would step in and handle all the small details that were always involved in making things happen. That was up to her.

Which was why she was on the phone that morning calling Edward Blake, an old friend of her late husband’s as well as a recent client she’d brought to Theresa’s attention. The latter had involved Edward’s youngest daughter, Sophia. Theresa had catered her wedding reception at less than her usual going rate.

Maizie used that as her opening when she placed her call to the news station’s story director.

What had prompted her call was a story she heard on her radio as she was driving into work. The opportunity seemed too good to pass up. That, she felt, had been fate’s part. The rest would require her help.

“Edward,” she said cheerfully the moment she heard him respond on the other end of the line, “this is Maizie Sommers.”

There was a pause, and then recognition set in. “Maizie, of course. How are you?”

“I’m well, thank you,” she replied as if she had all the time in the world rather than what she assumed was a clock ticking the minutes away. She knew how the news world worked. “I just called to see how the newlyweds were doing.”

“Fine, fine,” Blake asserted in his booming baritone voice. “They’re not looking for a house yet, though,” he told her, obviously assuming that was why she was checking in with him.

“No, I wouldn’t think so,” she answered with a laugh. “It’s much too early to start thinking about dealing with things like escrow and closing costs and homeowner associations.” She paused for just a beat, then forged ahead. “But I did call to ask you a favor.”

Their friendship dated back to the final year in college. Edward had been a friend of her late husband’s. They had pulled all-nighters, helping each other study and pass final exams. “Name it.”

“That news reporter you have working for you, Elliana King,” Maizie began, then paused so that the woman’s name sank in.

“Ah, yes, great girl, hardest worker I’ve ever had,” the station manager testified fondly with feeling. “What about her?”

“I just heard about what could be a good human-interest story for your station and thought you could send the King girl to cover it.”

“Go on,” Blake encouraged, intrigued. He genuinely liked and respected Maizie and was open to anything she had to pass on.

“According to the news blurb, a police detective in Bedford chased down this supposedly small-time art thief and wound up uncovering an entire cache of paintings in a storage unit that had been stolen in the last eighteen months. I thought you might want to send someone down to the precinct to interview this detective.” And then she played what she felt was her ace card in this little venture. “So little of the news we hear is upbeat these days.”

“Don’t I know it,” Blake said with a sigh. And then he chuckled. “So you’re passing on assignments to me now, Maizie?”

“Just this one, Edward.”

There was more to this and he knew it. Moreover, he knew that Maizie knew he knew, but he played his line out slowly like a fisherman intent on reeling in an elusive catch than a station manager in a newsroom that moved sometimes faster than the speed of light. “And you think I should assign King to follow up on it.”

“Absolutely,” Maizie enthused, adding, “She has a nice way about her.”

“Oh, I agree with you. She definitely has a rapport with her audience,” Blake said. When he heard nothing more illuminating on the other end, he asked, “Okay, what’s really going on, Maizie? Is this some kind of a matchmaking thing?”

“I have no idea what you mean, Edward,” Maizie told him in far too innocent a voice.

“Right. Belinda told me what you and your friends are up to in your spare time,” Blake said, referring to his wife. And then he became serious. “If you think you’ve found a way to get the pain out of King’s eyes, go for it. You’ve got my vote.”

Relieved that the man was so easily on board, Maizie tactfully pointed out, “What we need is your assignment, Edward.”

“That, too. Okay, give me the details one more time,” he instructed, pulling over a pad and pencil, two staples of his work desk that he absolutely refused to surrender no matter how many electronic gadgets littered his desk and his office. His defense was that a pad and pencil never failed.

* * *

“Don’t get too comfortable,” Jerry Ross warned Ellie just as she sank down behind her desk in the overly crowded newsroom.

The six-two onetime linebacker for a third-string minor-league football team strode over to the woman he followed around with his camera a good part of each day, sometimes successfully, sometimes only to see his footage ignobly die on the cutting room floor.

“Up and at ’em, Ellie,” he coaxed. “We’ve got ourselves an assignment.”

Ellie had just begun to sit down but instantly bounced back up to her feet again. She was more than ready to go wherever the assignment took them.

Two years ago it would have been because each story represented a fresh opportunity to put her stamp on something that was unfolding. Now it was because each story necessitated her having to abandon her private thoughts and focus on whatever the news report required from her. The first casualty was her social life, which she more than willingly surrendered. She really didn’t have one to speak of now that Brett was no longer in her life.

“Where to?” Ellie asked.

Jerry held up the written directive he’d just received for them. “Blake wants us to do a story about this police detective at the police station.”

“Blake?” she questioned, puzzled. She fell into step beside her cameraman as he went out of the building and to the parking lot where their news van was waiting for them. “You mean Marty, don’t you?” Marty Stern was the one who handed out their assignments, not the station manager.

“No,” Jerry insisted, “I mean Blake.” It had struck him as odd as it did her, but he’d learned not to question things that came from on high. “This assignment came down from Edward Blake himself.”

She hurried down the steps into the lot without even looking at them. “Why?”

Reaching the van, Jerry shrugged as he got in on the driver’s side. He glanced over his shoulder to check that his equipment was where he had put it earlier. It was a nervous habit of his since there was no place else his camera and the rest of his gear could be. The cameraman always packed it into the van first thing on arrival each morning. But checking on its position was somehow comforting to him.

Satisfied that it was there, he turned forward again. “That’s above my pay grade,” he told her. “I’m just relating the message and telling you what he said he wanted.”

After putting the key into the ignition, Jerry turned it and the van hummed to life.

“All I know is that this detective had just swung by Los Naranjos Elementary School to drop off his kid—a niece, I think Blake said—and he almost tripped over the thief. Who cut him off as he raced by.” Jerry told her with disbelief. “Anyway, when the detective followed the guy, he wound up cornering him in a storage unit. Guess what else was in the storage unit.”

Ellie was watching the cluster of residential streets pass by her side window. The tranquil scene wasn’t even registering. She felt more tired than usual and it was hard for her to work up any enthusiasm for what she was hearing, even the fake kind.

“It’s Monday, Jerry. I don’t do guessing games until Tuesday,” she told the cameraman as if it was a rule written somewhere.

Undaunted, Jerry continued his riveting edge-of-her-seat story. “The detective found a bunch of other paintings stored there that, it turns out, had been stolen over the last eighteen months. It’s your favorite,” the cameraman pointed out. “Namely, a happy-ending story.”

“Not for the thief,” Ellie murmured under her breath.

Jerry heard her. “That’s not the lede Blake wants us to go with,” he told her. “Turns out that this isn’t this detective’s first brush with being in the right place at the right time.”

“Oh?” Ellie did her best to sound interested, but she was really having trouble raising her spirits this morning. She’d resigned herself to the fact that some mornings were just going to be worse than others and this was one of those mornings. She needed to work on that, Ellie told herself silently. Jerry didn’t deserve to be sitting next to a morose woman.

Maybe coffee would help, she reasoned.

“Yeah,” Jerry was saying as he navigated the streets, heading for the precinct. “I didn’t get the details to that. Figure maybe you could do a follow-up when you do the interview.”

She nodded absently, still not focused on the story. Out of sheer desperation, Ellie forced herself to make a few notes. Something had to spark her. “What’s the detective’s name?”

Jerry shrugged. “Blake said we’re supposed to ask the desk sergeant to speak to the detective who uncovered the stolen paintings.”

“In other words, you don’t have a name,” she concluded.

The curly-headed cameraman spared her an apologetic look. “Sorry. Blake seemed in a hurry for us to get there. Said the story had already been carried on the radio station. Wanted us there before another news station beat us to it.”

Well, that was par for the course, Ellie thought. She sighed. “Why is it that every story is the story—until it’s not?”

She received a wide, slightly gap-toothed smile in response. “Beats me. All I know is that all this competition is good for my paycheck. I’ve got a college tuition to fund.”

“Jackie is only five,” she reminded him, referring to the cameraman’s only child.

Jerry nodded, acting as if she had made his point for him. “Exactly. I can’t let the grass grow beneath my feet.”

Jerry stepped on the gas.

* * *

The police department was housed in a modern-looking building that was barely seven years old. Prior to that, the city’s core had been domiciled in an old building that dated back to the ’50s and had once contained farm supplies. People still called the present location the new precinct. Centrally located, it was less than five miles from the news station. They got there in no time flat, even though every light had been against them.

Ellie got out first, but Jerry’s legs were longer and he reached the building’s front entrance several strides ahead of her.

“Ladies first,” the cameraman told her, holding the door open for Ellie.

She smiled as she passed him and headed straight for the desk sergeant’s desk. She made sure she took out her credentials and showed them to the dour-faced man before she identified herself.

Even so, the desk sergeant, a snow-white-haired man whose shoulders had assumed a permanent slump, presumably from the weight of the job, took his time looking up at the duo.

The moment he did, Ellie began talking. “I’m Ellie King and this is my cameraman, Jerry Ross.” She told him the name of her news studio, then explained, “We’re here to interview one of your detectives.”

White bushy eyebrows gathered together in what seemed to be a preset scowl as the desk sergeant squinted at her credentials.

“Any particular one?” he asked in a voice that was so low it sounded as if he was filtering it over rocks.

“Detective,” he said a bit more loudly when she didn’t answer his question. “You want to interview any particular one?” His voice did not become any friendlier as it grew in volume.

“The one who caught that art thief,” Jerry answered, speaking up.

The desk sergeant, Sergeant Nolan according to the name plate on his desk, scowled just a tad less as he nodded. “You wanna talk to Benteen,” he told them.

The moment Nolan said the name, it all but echoed inside her head.

It couldn’t be, Ellie thought. Breathe, Ellie, breathe!

“Excuse me,” she said out loud, feeling like someone in the middle of a trance. “Did you say Benteen?”

“Yeah. Detective Colin Benteen,” the desk sergeant confirmed, acting as if each word he uttered had come from some private collection he was loath to share with invasive civilians. Nolan turned to look at a patrolman on his right. “Mallory, tell Benteen to come down here. There’re some people here who want to talk to him.”

Having sent the patrolman on his errand, the sergeant turned his attention to the people from the news station. “You two wait over there,” he growled, pointing to an area by the front window that was empty. “And don’t get in the way,” he warned.

“Friendly man,” Jerry commented, moving to the space that the sergeant had indicated. When he turned around to glance at Ellie, he saw that she’d suddenly gone very pale. A measure of concern entered his eyes. “You feeling all right, Ellie?”

“Yes,” she responded. Her voice sounded hollow to her ears.

It was an automatic response, but the thing was that she wasn’t all right. She’d recognized the name of the detective, and for a moment, everything had frozen within her. She tried to tell herself it was just an odd coincidence. Maybe it was just a relative. After all, Benteen wasn’t that uncommon a name.

It had been a patrolman with that last name who had come to the scene of the robbery that had stolen Brett from her. This was a detective they were waiting for.

Because of the circumstances that had been involved and the fact that she had removed herself from the scene, Ellie had never actually met the policeman who had arrived shortly after Brett had foiled the robbery. The patrolman, she was later told, who’d tried—and failed—to save Brett’s life.

But she knew his name and at the time had promised herself that as soon as she was up to it, she would seek out this Officer Benteen and thank him for what he had tried to do—even if he had ultimately failed.

But a day had turned into a week and a week had turned into a month.

After several of those had passed, she gave up the notion of finding the policeman to thank him for his efforts.

After a while, the thought of talking to the man who had watched Brett’s life ebb away only brought back the scene to her in vivid colors. A scene she was still trying, even at this point, to come to grips with. She honestly didn’t think that she was up to it. So eventually she avoided pursuing the man altogether.

Jerry was watching her with concern. “You don’t look fine. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that you look like you’re about to break into a cold sweat.”

“Jerry, I already have a mother,” she told him, an annoyed edge in her voice—she didn’t like being read so easily. “I said I’m fine.”

He was not convinced and was about to say as much when she turned away from him and toward the man she saw walking toward them. The expression on her face had Jerry turning, as well. If anything, she appeared even paler than she had a moment ago.

“You look like you’re seeing a ghost,” he remarked uneasily.

The universe was sending her a message, she thought. It was time to tie up this loose end.

“Not a ghost,” she answered. “Just someone I never got to thank properly.”

The moment she said that, Jerry knew. The name the desk sergeant had said had been nagging at him. He knew it from somewhere...

“Oh God, you mean that’s him?” Jerry cried. “The policeman who...?”

She waved the cameraman into silence, her attention fully focused on the tall, athletic-looking man in the navy jacket, gray shirt and jeans who was walking toward them.

He had a confident walk, she noted, like someone who felt he had the angels on his side. Maybe he did, she thought.

Ellie unconsciously squared her shoulders as the detective drew closer.

It was time to make up for her omission. The only thing that was left to decide was whether she would do it before they began the interview so she could get it out of the way or wait until after the interview was over so that it wouldn’t make the man feel awkward or uncomfortable. Viewers were always quick to pick up on awkwardness and she didn’t want to cause the detective any undue discomfort. It didn’t make for a good segment, and after all, wasn’t that why she was here?

Ellie made up her mind. The information as to who they were to one another could wait until after she finished talking to him, for the benefit of the home audience.

It took a great deal of effort for her, but by now she was used to playing a part.

Ellie forced a welcoming smile to her face and put out her hand to the detective as he came forward. Her entire attention was now on making the hero of the moment feel comfortable.

“Hi,” she greeted him. “I’m Ellie and this is Jerry, and we’d like to ask you a few questions about those paintings you uncovered.”

Chapter Three

The woman standing by the front window next to the pleasant-faced hulk with the unruly hair was cute.

Beyond cute, Colin amended. There was something appealing about her that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. As best as he could analyze it, he sensed an intriguing combination of sadness mixed with an undercurrent of energy radiating from her.

And, more startling and thus far more important, he realized that for the first time in months, he found himself both attracted and interested.

There’d been a time when his older brother, Ryan, had called him a ladies’ man, a “babe magnet” and a number of less flattering but equally descriptive terms. And at the time, they had all been rather accurate.

But all that had been before life had abruptly changed for him. Before his brother and sister-in-law, Jennifer, had been involved in that freak skiing accident that had resulted in their being swallowed up by an avalanche. Who could have predicted this outcome when Ryan and Jennifer had gone on a last-minute spur-of-the-moment vacation because a late-season unexpected snowfall had occurred and they were both avid skiers?

Just like that, in the blink of an eye, he suddenly found himself the only family that their only daughter, Heather, had left.

His personality, not to mention his priorities, had changed overnight. He hadn’t been on so much as a date since he’d had to fly to Aspen to identify Ryan and Jennifer’s bodies and to pick up his niece. Heather had been in bed asleep when it had all happened. Her parents had opted to sneak in a quick early-morning ski run before she woke up—not thinking that it would be the last thing that they would ever do.

Stunned, Colin had never thought twice about assuming this new responsibility. He turned his entire life around, then and there, vowing that Heather would always come first.

He couldn’t give up what he did for a living—he’d worked too hard to get to where he was. It came with its own set of dangers, and that couldn’t be helped. But he could definitely make sure that any time outside his job would go to being with Heather, to making sure that she wouldn’t be permanently scarred by the loss of her parents. He’d vowed that he would always be there when Heather needed him to make the night terrors go away.

But just for a moment, this petite woman standing before him took Colin back to the man he had been before all of this had happened to change his life. It made him remember just how he’d felt when a really attractive woman crossed his path.

“Detective?” Ellie prodded when he didn’t seem to have heard her, or at least wasn’t attempting to respond to her greeting.

“Sorry,” Colin apologized, rousing himself out of the temporary mental revelry he’d fallen into. He flashed a smile at her that one of his former girlfriends had called “naturally sexy.” “I got distracted for a moment.”

She was about to ask him if it was because he recalled who she was, but then she remembered that she had given him only her first name. Even if she’d told him her full name, that wouldn’t necessarily mean that the detective would remember her husband and that fatal night at the convenience store.

Or even if he did recall every moment of that night, there was no reason to believe that he would make the connection between her and the man he couldn’t save. King was, after all, a common enough name. Most likely, Benteen probably hadn’t even gotten Brett’s name after everything had gone back to normal—or as normal as it could have gone back to, she silently corrected.