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СКАЧАТЬ looked around. “What do the rest of you think? Should he answer the telephone when he’s alone?”

      All sorts of small, high voices chimed in with a variety of negatives. No way. Their parents said…

      “But his mom wants to make sure he’s home safe. So she has to call, right? And he has to answer.”

      It was the little redhead who said solemnly, “He could call her instead. I call my friends all the time.”

      “Could you do that instead?”

      The kid had lost his bravado. “She doesn’t really like me to call her at work.”

      “Would she make an exception for one call every day?”

      He hung his head and shrugged again.

      Jack touched the boy’s shoulder and said, “Mrs. Stewart will hand out pamphlets for all of you to take home today and show your parents. Maybe that will make it easier for you to talk to them about things that scare you when you’re alone.”

      A few minutes later, he strode out to his squad car. He so rarely wore a uniform these days, he felt conspicuous. But that was the whole point: he still liked to do some of these school talks to keep from becoming a remote political figure in Butte County, a politician quoted in the newspapers. He wanted kids to go home and talk at the dinner table about Sheriff Murray as a real guy. This was his first visit of the new school year; nights were growing cold, but leaves had already turned and the bright yellow school buses were flashing red lights on every narrow country road morning and afternoon.

      Jack grunted with faint amusement, thinking what Ed Patton would have had to say about a sheriff spending an hour talking to eight-year-olds: a pansy-ass waste of time, is what the Elk Springs police chief would have said.

      But then, Ed Patton had been a grade-A son of a bitch.

      As he headed back to the station, Jack’s mind reverted to the redhead’s mother. Lord only knew how many domestic disturbance calls he’d been on. Hundreds. But he still remembered the first, when he’d been a rookie in Portland.

      It was also the only time he’d ever had to shoot anyone. He and his partner had been called out to a nasty argument reported by a neighbor. Working-class neighborhood, a cluster of folks standing within earshot of a modest, neatly painted house from which crashes and vicious obscenities came. The siren brought a man in his undershirt to the door. His nose was bleeding and one eye was swelling shut. He wiped blood from his nose and told them to get the hell out of there.

      Jack’s partner had been walking ahead of him up the cracked cement driveway. So fast it was still a blur in Jack’s memory, the man had a rifle in his hands and was shooting, just spraying bullets and screaming the whole time. The nosy neighbors dived to the ground and behind parked cars. Jack’s partner went down with a bullet to the chest and this look of shock on his face. Jack shot the man, didn’t even think about it, just shot. Then he had to listen to the wife calling him a murderer while he held his dying partner and listened to the faraway sound of sirens.

      To this day, every time he went to a house where a husband and wife were arguing, he thought about that afternoon. He never went casually, never assumed anything. There was nothing deadlier than a man and woman who hated and loved each other at the same time.

      But the faces of the women had run together in his memory. The eyes were all stricken, the bruises stark, the body language the same. In recent years, when he thought of an abused woman, he saw his high school girlfriend, Meg Patton, lying about her broken arm or the yellowing bruises.

      So why hadn’t Beth Sommers joined the anonymous company? Why hadn’t she become another chink in the wall of guilt he’d built since he found out how badly he’d failed Meg?

      Why did he keep thinking about this woman of all others? Why did her face keep coming back to him?

      Okay, it was partly because she was pretty, tall and slender, with a long graceful neck, a mass of mahogany brown hair and bright blue eyes. She was the kind of woman who could wear capri pants and a tank top and still look as good as any fifteen-year-old. But that wasn’t all of it.

      In some ways she was typical of the women he saw in the same situation. The jackass who threw the tantrum might be her ex, but she was still defending him, still insisting he didn’t really mean it. But the way she protected her children, the way she tried to let them keep some respect for their father, wasn’t typical at all. Divorce, especially from an abusive man, was an ugly thing. There weren’t too many women who were able to resist the temptation to use their kids as a battleground.

      Beth Sommers was a gutsy woman who reminded him of Meg Patton in this way, too. Meg had put her son first, had done what was needed to protect him from her own father. Jack had learned to respect her for the hard choices she’d made, although those same choices had cheated him of seeing his son grow up.

      Like Meg, Beth Sommers was determined to take care of herself and her children, too. He admired that, even if he did think it was stupid. She might be a successful businesswoman, but she was still vulnerable in a way a man wouldn’t be. Damn it, she was fragile! Jack didn’t like thinking about that. He didn’t want to see her with a bruised face and broken bones and defiant terror in her eyes.

      He’d driven by her house several times himself. He had made a point of being there Sunday afternoon, but apparently that hadn’t been one of the girls’ weekends with their dad, because Jack saw the older one in the bay window, just sitting on the window seat with her arms wrapped around her knees, staring out. Her head turned when she saw the police car, but he was too far away to see her expression.

      Jack remembered the relief on the little girl’s face when her mother said that their father was just throwing a temper tantrum. He didn’t think the older one—who was maybe eleven, twelve—had been convinced. He wondered what their visits to their father were like.

      And he wondered about the mother. What did she do weekends, when her daughters were with their father? She’d been quick to tell him she had no brother or father to be there when she needed him. It had seemed a little too pushy to ask if she had someone else, a man who for other reasons would put himself on the line for her. Did she date?

      Or was Beth Sommers so soured by her ex-husband, she wasn’t interested in men?

      Jack hadn’t gotten any further than thinking about her. He hadn’t tried to find out yet. If he did, he wasn’t sure what he would do about the knowledge. It would be asking for trouble, dating a pretty woman whose ex-husband didn’t want to let go of her. Sommers wouldn’t like any man dating his ex-wife.

      Jack figured he could handle Ray Sommers. He half wished Beth lived outside the city limits so her problems were his business. The scene he’d walked in on wasn’t the first between them, according to neighborhood gossip, and it wouldn’t be the last. One of these days, she’d be calling the cops. Unfortunately, she wouldn’t be calling him.

      Irritated at himself, Jack accelerated when a street-light turned green. Instead of daydreaming about being her personal hero, he ought to be worrying about her. Figuring out how to get her some help even if she didn’t believe she needed it.

      Gut instinct told him somebody should intervene. Before the ex-husband who both hated and loved her tipped a little too far toward hate, and a hell of a lot more than a few plant pots were broken.

      CHAPTER TWO

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