Page 158 of Beware of Dog

She jerked upright, and saw spots. Whoa. Bad idea. For one sightless moment, she thought the pain would render her unconscious. She clutched tight to his hand, blinked hard – someone touched her back, right at the base of her neck, steadying her – and her vision settled, and the pain settled, andthere was Shep, haggard and exhausted, but with his eyes slitted open, and a smile tugging at the near corner of his mouth.

“Hi, babydoll,” he croaked. “Should you be outta bed?”

“No,” Raven said, up close, clearly the one supporting her, hand gentle at the top of her spine. “But she’s as stubborn as you.” Her voice caught a moment, but didn’t break, and there was an audible smile in it when she said, “You’re a good match that way, the two of you.”

~*~

“Thanks, John. I’m here in front of One Police Plaza where I’ve just spoken to the lead detectives on the case. They tell me that based on forensic evidence, young Sigmund Blackmon shot his father in the back, most likely as he was attempted to flee the house through the front door, and then turned the gun on himself. He died by suicide. Both of the Blackmon men bore signs of restraint, and duct tape was found at the scene.”

~*~

Dr. Leslie Lawrence, trauma surgeon, and Melissa’s best friend, had been the one to operate on Shep. When she’d walked into the room during her rounds, and found Cass slumped in a wheelchair beside the bed, stroking his strong, square knuckles, her brows had jumped and she’d exhaled in a long, slow rush. “Ah. So you’re my transferred patient. Lucky for you, we’ve got an empty bed.” Shep’s room was a double-occupancy, and they got Cass set up in the second bed, and Leslie checked her bandages and stood watchful and stern while she swallowed down some morphine tabs.

She fell asleep to the steady beep of Shep’s heart monitor, and woke to find two men in suits with badges on their belts standing just inside the door. Detectives.

Still swimmy from the drugs, Cass hitched herself up carefully against the pillows, trying to keep her movements slow. The pain was still a dull throb under her skin, but she knew it would sharpen as alertness returned.

A turn of her head revealed that Shep was awake, head of his bed elevated, and he was frowning at the detectives.

Raven stood in front of them, hands on her cocked hips, and her voice was the crisp, officious one that powered her through the fashion industry. “They’re resting. You’ll have to come back later. Both of them have been through an ordeal, and I won’t have you setting their recovery back for the sake of dead men.”

The older of the two, handsome in a square-faced, Central Casting sort of way, frowned. “Ma’am, it’s important that we—”

“It’s okay.” Cass’s voice was weak and unsteady, but loud enough that everyone at the door turned.

The detective’s gaze flicked up and over Raven’s head, and Raven turned, brows notched with concern, face lined with fatigue. “Darling,” she began.

“I can talk to them.” Cass wriggled up a little higher, grateful the dregs of the morphine kept the sensation in her shoulder tamped down to a slight twinge. “Might as well get it over with.”

“Cass,” Shep cautioned from the neighboring bed. He looked and sounded much more awake than the last time she’d seen him, and she wondered how long she’d been asleep.

She glanced at him, and she saw in his gaze that he wanted to take up the mantle of protector, even with a gut wound. He wanted to handle the cops, to be her man, even if he was laid up in a bed.

But Cass thought that this was a case where her femininity would work better. She looked like death warmed over, smalland injured, eyes doubtless red from all the crying. Shep was a terrible liar. But Cass was Devin Green’s daughter.

When she glanced back toward the door, Raven’s brows lifted.Are you sure?

Cass said, “Detectives, please come in.”

~*~

The story played at the top of the hour on all the local news stations, and then hit the national primetime shows later that night. The shot was a tight one, the backdrop a window in an alcove of a hallway in Cedars Sinai, the subject at the center Cassandra Shepherd, young, her face pale and her eyes sunken from pain and exhaustion. She wore a baggy sweatshirt that slipped off one shoulder, the edges of white bandages visible. Her hair was greasy and unwashed, tied back in a haphazard ponytail, but her blue eyes were clear, and her voice was steady when she spoke.

“I was set to testify at Sig’s trial,” she began, expression heavy with what looked like remorse. “I was an outcry witness for my friend, Jamie. She told me back in February that he took her to his family’s house, and when she said no, he forced himself on her. I wasn’t there, obviously, but I believed my friend, and wanted to support her.

“I don’t know what sorts of business dealings Sig and his father had going,” she continued. “But I know that my friend Jamie called me and said that she wanted to drop the charges because there were men, in her words, who looked like gang members, casing her house, parked on her street, frightening her and her parents.

“It’s always upsetting to hear about something like this, but I’m not surprised that Sig and his father were killed. The scene at their townhouse was found just one day after my husband and I were shot.” Her throat bobbed as she swallowed,and her eyes turned glassy. She blinked and pressed on. “It was our wedding night, and we walked away from the party and up to the cabin where we were going to spend the night. We paused…” And so did she, reaching to adjust the collar of her sweatshirt, wincing. “I was wearing heels, and the path was steep. We stopped for a minute and I heard the shots, before I felt them.”

She blinked rapidly as more tears brightened her eyes. “I don’t remember what happened next. I was in a lot of pain, and I lost consciousness. My husband ended up grappling with one of our attackers. He was stabbed. Um…” She bit her lip, gaze falling to her lap, and was silent a long moment.

Then she dragged in a shuddering breath and said, “The police have told me they found shell casings at the scene where we were attacked. At my family’s farmhouse in Albany. Obviously, no one has told me for certain, but it wouldn’t surprise me if those shell casings matched some of those found at the Blackmons’ townhouse.”

The scene cut back to the studio, where a serious-faced reporter said, “Mrs. Shepherd’s guess about the shell casings is of course just that: a guess. We’ll wait for official word from the NYPD…”

Thirty-Nine

It was almost ninety degrees on the beach, but much cooler in the shade of the tall, interlaced palms that ringed the pool deck. A breeze rocked the hammock, a gentle side-to-side motion that kept her perched in the pleasurable space between asleep and awake. She could doze off if she wanted, or crack her eyes and watch the waves lap at the white sand; see the shimmer of heat mirages where the gulls argued over tidbits of crab.

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