Racing Against Time. Marie Ferrarella

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СКАЧАТЬ was thoroughly convinced that even Gandhi would have been tempted to at least temporarily turn his back on his well-publicized fast to sample a little of her father’s creations.

      But just as Andrew asked, the sound of a beeper going off framed his words. Five sets of eyes went to the appendages they kept clipped to their belts.

      A blue light highlighting a phone number was looking back at her. “Mine,” Callie declared.

      “And we have a winner,” Andrew sighed, shaking his head.

      Andrew knew she would be leaving momentarily. On the other side of the fence now, he felt the frustration that he knew his wife had had to endure every time he’d been called away from the table, or missed a meal because of the demands of his job.

      He glanced accusingly at the barely touched fare on his oldest daughter’s plate. The powder hadn’t even faded yet. “You haven’t had time to eat enough food to keep a hummingbird alive.”

      “They eat twice their body weight, Dad,” Teri informed him as she broke off a piece of what was to become her third serving of French toast. “You wouldn’t want Callie to roll out of here, would you?”

      “No chance of that happening even if she ate three times her body weight,” Clay, Teri’s younger brother by two and a half minutes, commented. Though they were twins, they hardly looked alike. Fair, with long blond hair, Teri looked like their mother, while Clay, though not as dark as Shaw, had their father’s black Irish look.

      Callie held her hand up for silence as she dug out her cell phone. She might as well not have wasted the effort. There was an annoying message on her LCD screen. She frowned. “No signal.”

      “Must be Clay’s magnetic personality, interfering,” Teri cracked. “Hey,” she protested as Clay helped himself to the remainder of her toast. She pulled back her plate, but it was too late. The right flank of her French toast had been victimized.

      Andrew pretended to shake his head. “Ah, the sound of squabbling children, how could I have forgotten what that was like?”

      All but two of his children had moved out, but the apartment Clay had been subletting from an aspiring actor had suddenly been reclaimed by its owner when the latter returned from the east coast. That left Clay without a place to stay. Temporarily.

      Temporarily had already woven its way into two months without any visible signs of terminating. And Andrew, secretly, couldn’t have been happier even though he said nothing out loud to confirm it.

      “Hey, if you didn’t want them coming around, Dad, you’d stop leaving food out for them to find,” Lorrayne pointed out.

      “Respect your elders, Squirt,” Shaw told her just before he drank deeply of his third cup of leaded coffee.

      Rayne lifted her chin defensively, her blue-gray eyes narrowing beneath her bangs. “Just who are you calling Squirt?”

      Knowing that the only way to quiet this crowd was to arm herself with a handful of tranquilizer darts and use them effectively, Callie crossed into the living room to get away from the din before placing her call to the number registered on her beeper. A glance at the screen told her the transmission signal had returned.

      Holding one hand over her ear as she turned away from the breakfast noise, she quickly hit the keypad numbers with her thumb.

      “This is Cavanaugh,” she said the second she heard someone pick up on the other end. “You paged me?”

      “Better get down here, Callie.”

      She recognized the voice. It belonged to the man she’d been partnered with until recently. Seth Adams. The man had made detective five years before she had and had resented being “saddled” with her. He’d thought nepotism had placed her where she was. He’d soon learned that it was aptitude that had gotten her her badge, nothing more, nothing less. Still, they blended together like oil and water. The captain agreed that a separation was in order.

      “What’s up?” she wanted to know.

      “We’ve got a dead woman on the sidewalk. Looks like she was struck and thrown by a car.”

      She waited for something more to follow. When it didn’t, she asked, “Hit-and-run?”

      “Absolutely.”

      It didn’t make sense to her. “Vehicular manslaughter. How’s that my territory?”

      Callie dealt with the living, not the dead. Specifically, with searching for missing persons. It was a department that was near and dear to her father’s heart. Fifteen years ago, her mother had gotten into her car and driven away. She never came back. The car was eventually found submerged in a lake twenty miles north of Aurora, but no amount of searching had ever turned up her body.

      Her father never gave up the hope that someday Rose Cavanaugh would come walking back into the house she’d stormed out of in the wake of an argument her father never stopped blaming himself for. In some small way, Callie felt that by working in missing persons she kept up her father’s hope that her mother was still alive.

      “She wasn’t alone, Callie. From all appearances, the woman had a little girl with her. The first cop on the scene went through the dead woman’s wallet. Delia Anne Culhane. Judge Brenton Montgomery’s housekeeper.” He paused for a moment, letting the words sink in. “The missing kid is his daughter.”

      A knot came out of nowhere and tightened itself in the pit of her stomach as she recognized the name.

      “I’ll be right there.” Hanging up, Callie turned around. Her father was standing just shy of the threshold, watching her. He couldn’t have gotten very much from her side of the conversation, she thought. She debated saying something to him. He knew Montgomery better than she did. Another time, she decided. “I’ve got to get going.”

      It was then that she noticed her father was holding a brown paper bag in his hand. Full if the bulge in the middle was any indication.

      He held it out to her. “Packed you a lunch.” He smiled, the character lines about his eyes crinkling. “In case you get hungry one of these days.”

      She knew he meant well, but she wasn’t thirteen anymore, being sent off to school. “Dad—”

      Taking her hand, he closed her fingers around the top of the bag. “Humor me. I’ve been both mother and father to this bunch for fifteen years.” His smile took twenty years off his age. “These parental urges get hard to fight sometimes.”

      As always, she retreated from the line of skirmish. She’d learned long ago to pick her fights, and this wasn’t worth more than a few words. She grinned at him, nodding at the bag. “Will I like it?”

      The expression on Andrew’s face was incredulous, as if he couldn’t believe she had to ask. “Is the pope Catholic?”

      “Last I checked.” She paused to kiss his cheek. “Thanks, Dad.” The words had nothing to do with the lunch he’d tucked into her hand, and everything to do with the care he’d spent raising her right.

      Embarrassed, Andrew waved her on her way. “Go. They’re waiting on you.” He guessed at the caller. “Tell Adams I said hello.”

      Callie СКАЧАТЬ