Because of a Boy Read online

  Kate pulled the phone away from her ear and sat in a chair in the pediatric floor break room.

  What Lissa Carter thought was no mystery. Neither were the regrets and pointless guilt Kate felt every time she spoke with the other woman.

  Lissa’s first call from Kate’s south-Georgia hometown had been after Kate’s brother, Martin, was wounded in the line of duty—a bullet lodged near his spine had left him with only partial feeling below the waist on his right side. Her estranged brother hadn’t wanted Kate holding his hand, but his girlfriend, Lissa, had begged her to come home.

  But the emotional chasm between Kate and Martin had been years beyond fixing. Her visit hadn’t changed a thing.

  Now her brother was in an emotional free fall.

  She pulled the silent phone back to her ear.

  “He won’t see me, Lissa. You know we hadn’t talked for years before the shooting. Me being a nurse just adds to the drama now. He moved up here for his own reasons. Reasons that I can assure you have nothing to do with me.”

  “He’s giving up on everything and everyone that used to matter to him. He was pushing too hard in rehab while he was still here. Lord knows what he’s doing up there alone. How can you sit by, knowing he’s hurting himself?”

  Kate resisted the urge to toss the phone across the room. Told herself to calm down.

  Lissa hadn’t left Martin’s bedside for more than a few hours the entire time Kate had been in Oakwood. A year and half later, Martin had moved two hundred miles away, and Lissa was still tenacious.

  Kate couldn’t help but respect loyalty that rare, that unconditional.

  “I’ve tried calling him a dozen times since he transferred to the police academy,” Kate explained.

  Her brother had hung up on her each time. The last couple of times, he hadn’t picked up at all.

  “Then stop calling and get your butt over there!” Lissa demanded. “He—”

  “Martin’s a grown man, and he has every right to make his own decisions, even if they’re the wrong ones.”

  How many times had Kate fought with Robert during their marriage, insisting on the same consideration?

  If I want help, I’ll ask for it.

  I’m not your problem to fix.

  “As long as he can take care of himself in that dive of an apartment he’s rented—” an apartment Kate had located as soon as she’d gotten his new address from Information “—and can live independently, I have no right to meddle.”

  “But if you could just get him to let you in.” Lissa’s voice quavered. “You know, get him to talk about—”

  “He doesn’t want to talk about it! He hasn’t wanted to hear anything I have to say since our parents died.”

  Since she’d insisted on dealing with the truth about their parents’ marriage, Martin had accused her of twisting things. Warping every childhood memory they shared.

  “Kate—”

  “Lissa, I know you love my brother.” The other woman’s pain was a bottomless sadness that warred with Kate’s determination to stay out of this. “And I know you have Martin’s best interest at heart. But sometimes we can take love so far we hurt the people we care about.”

  Silence.

  Kate checked the cell’s display to make sure the call was still connected.

  “What are you saying?” Lissa asked, tears obvious in her voice.

  “If Martin believes you’re not what he needs to get better—” Kate laced each difficult word with compassion, the same as she would if she were presenting a risky treatment option to a child’s family “—then maybe it’s time for you to let go.”

  “The same way you let go ten years ago?” Lissa demanded.

  Kate took a deep breath then said, “I did what I needed to, and Martin knows exactly why I left.”

  She’d made the right choice. She’d made the only choice she could.

  “We would have ended up hating each other if one of us didn’t leave, Lissa. And I was the one who couldn’t live there and just ignore the truth. If Martin’s feeling the same way, and you love him as much as you say you do, then you have to give him his space.”

  “NO WORD YET FROM the hospital?” Neal Cain asked from the doorway of Stephen’s office.

  The man’s customary well-cut suits and crisply ironed shirts didn’t soften his dangerous edge. Stephen’s boss, the founder of the Atlanta Legal Aid Center, had done five years of hard time—entering the adult penal system as a seventeen-year-old—for a manslaughter conviction he’d copped to, because he’d felt responsible for his best friend’s accidental death. His mission now was to make sure the innocents the center defended were safe from the horrors he’d survived.

  As soon as Stephen had briefed him on the Digarro situation, Neal had asked to meet the distraught father. Nothing beat the man’s instincts with people, and Neal’s gut had told him the same thing as Stephen’s—Digarro was hiding something, but he wasn’t responsible for Dillon’s injuries.

  Stephen pushed away from the desk. “Nothing official yet.” He rubbed the back of his neck, massaging the knots that never completely untied themselves at the end of each day. “I got in to see the kid for a few minutes. He definitely looks roughed up. I can understand the doctor’s concern.”

  “You starting to doubt the father?” Neal gave up lounging against the doorjamb and stepped into the shadows of Stephen’s office. It was hours past sunset. Only a desk lamp held back the darkness as Stephen replayed everything he knew about the case, including what he’d seen with his own eyes and as well Kate Rhodes’s certainty that Manny Digarro was a threat to the child.

  “No,” he finally said. “No way is Manny abusing his kid.”

  “But you don’t believe his whole story.” Neal sat. Wickedly smart and ruthless, he was responsible for the bulk of their behind-the-scenes work since convicted felons technically couldn’t practice law. He was a silent weapon, writing briefs and negotiating deals long before cases could get to trial. He read people better and faster than anyone Stephen had ever met, and he hadn’t been wrong about a client yet.

  “Digarro never touched his son.” Stephen was sure of it. “But that green card he showed us…”

  “Yeah,” Neal agreed. “It’s a forgery,”

  And now the Digarro kid was in the system, and the police were focused on the father, while the hospital ran its tests.

  “How long do you think we’ve got?” Stephen asked.

  “Before INS comes looking to join the discussion?”

  “Before Digarro disappears from Atlanta for good.”

  Illegal or not, Manny Digarro was fighting for a new start for his son. Stephen could help make it a legal one. There were ways to hold off the INS until the right visas could be obtained, loopholes to wrangle, giving the Digarros time to apply for immigration status and then citizenship.

  But deportation was the likeliest outcome if the INS swooped in. Dillon couldn’t travel until he was healthy, but his “abusive” father might find himself on the next bus back over the border, then turned over to Colombian authorities.

  “Manny’s next move depends on what we hear from the hospital,” Stephen reasoned. The man had disappeared as soon as he’d handed over the gift for Dillon. “If we’re lucky, he’ll wait long enough to be cleared of the abuse charges. But we won’t have the test results for several days, or so say the nurses answering the phone on the pediatric floor.”

  A rotating shift of nurses, that so far hadn’t included the protective Kate Rhodes.

  “And if he’s not cleared of the charges?” Neal asked. “Or if Immigrations becomes an issue? The Digarros are headed for a courtroom either way. You’ll work your magic, we’ll take our chances, but this one may not be winnable.”

  “We’ll figure something out.” Stephen rarely lost. When he did, he sacrificed lives to an unforgiving system. He wasn’t giving up on Dillon Digarro’s father. “We’ve still got some time. If we don’t hear anything by morning, I’ll—”
<
br />   “How many other cases do you have pending?”

  Neal knew how many, of course. He knew what was written on every scrap of paper that circulated the office.

  “No more than usual.” Stephen shrugged.

  “So, you’re backed up two weeks out?”

  The center’s normal caseload would have left the average lawyer struggling beneath mounds of briefs and pending motions, not to mention court appearances that ate entire days at a time.

  “I’ll handle it.” He always did.

  “I know. You eat, sleep and breathe this job, the same as I used to.” Married and settled now, Neal still beat Stephen into the office most mornings, and he was slaving away most evenings when Stephen headed home. “Look, if you’re going to hunker down with the Digarros, consider handing some of the everyday details to the rest of the team. Let Kelly do your research. Give the junior associates a crack at a few of your open cases.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Stephen agreed as Neal stood and walked toward the deserted outer office.

  Except Stephen didn’t do teams, and they both knew it. Just like he never got sucked too far into a case or let relationships with clients get personal. He stayed in control. Kept things light. He got the job done as quickly and efficiently as possible, and then he moved on.

  So why couldn’t he get the Digarros off his mind? And why had confronting one feisty nurse that morning so completely thrown him off?

  “AREN’T YOU SUPPOSED to be off duty?” a voice asked, intruding on Kate’s light doze.

  She jerked awake. Her foot slipped off her knee and fortunately planted itself on the floor. Otherwise, she’d have landed on her butt beside the chair she’d dragged next to Dillon’s bed.

  “Sorry.” Her ex stepped farther into the room. He grimaced. “I didn’t realize you were sleeping.”

  “No. It’s okay.” She wiped her chin, rubbed her eyes, felt her contacts shift threateningly and stopped. Blinking at Robert, she tried to keep the little beasties from rolling behind her eyeballs. “I was just going to hang out for a few minutes. I didn’t mean to doze off.”

  She stood and gently pressed her fingers to her sleeping patient’s wrist, checking her watch to track his pulse. Robert had brought the chart in from its holder on the door.

  “His vitals were recorded half an hour ago.” He leafed through the papers on the clipboard. “Everything looks good.”

  Kate kept counting. Satisfied, she set Dillon’s arm back on the mattress, then turned to find Robert staring at her.

  “You stayed in case that lawyer came back, didn’t you?” He knew her well enough not to need an answer. “Kate, there are six nurses on every shift. The staff’s been alerted to Creighton’s involvement with the kid’s father. I don’t know how he slipped in here in the first place, but it won’t happen again. What will your appointing yourself as some kind of bodyguard accomplish? You’ve been haunting this room ever since the boy was admitted.”

  “I’m simply following up on a patient’s—”

  “You have a lot of patients.” Robert laid the chart on the end of the bed. “You’re off the clock now, but I bet you spent most of your shift in here, leaving the rest of the staff to cover the floor.”

  “This is pediatrics, not neurology.” It had been a frequent argument during their marriage. Robert controlled his O.R. and his staff like a benevolent dictator. He was the master of his domain at Atlanta Memorial, and rightly so. But the pediatric wing was Kate’s turf. “One-on-one contact is crucial to a child’s recovery.”

  Robert nodded and picked up Dillon’s chart. “He has a broken arm, an ankle sprain and bruised ribs. Relatively minor injuries everywhere else. Regardless of how he got so banged up, or how weak he is in general, neglecting your other patients and your work at the shelter to hold one kid’s hand seems a bit excessive, and not just to me.”

  So, he knew she’d cancelled her volunteer shift at the Midtown Shelter. Normally, it wouldn’t matter to Kate how or why her ex had bothered to dig up that fun fact. Except—

  “What do you mean, not just to you?” she asked.

  “Doctors gossip more than nurses do. Isn’t that what you always told me?”

  “And?” She crossed her arms. Squared off toe-to-toe with the kind but infuriating man she’d shared five years of her life with.

  “And you have a habit of obsessing about ‘pet’ patients. Long before the Digarros, it was someone else, and someone before that. There’s always a reason for you to get more involved than is appropriate, to feel a responsibility for these kids that goes beyond the boundaries you should be keeping as their nurse.”

  “Some people would call that dedication.” Just not Dillon’s pediatrician, Dr. Roger-Every-Nurse

  in-Sight Floyd, whom she probably shouldn’t have called five times that afternoon. Harassing the head of pediatrics for test results was over the top, even for her. But the tests were supposed to have been ready that morning. The man just couldn’t be bothered to review them.

  The last time she’d paged Floyd, his secretary had threatened to tattle to the head pediatric nurse if Kate didn’t back off. Nurses simply didn’t stalk important doctors, who would get around to looking at test results once they were done with their weekly golf match with the chief of staff.

  The woman had actually used the word stalk.

  “So Floyd sent you down here to deal with me?” Kate demanded. Robert had never stooped to getting involved in hospital politics before. “I’m simply asking the man to work up the necessary interest to do his job, so we can document exactly how badly Dillon’s father has been mistreating him.”

  Robert glanced down at the bed. Dillon was thankfully still sound asleep, but Kate hadn’t known that. Openly bashing the boy’s father had been unprofessional, and she knew better.

  But she’d fed this child food at the shelter. She’d fed his smiling, abusive, no-good father. Her instincts had gone on alert each time. But Manny and Dillon had appeared to be a happy family. On the surface, there had been nothing wrong. Still, she of all people should have known that on the surface meant squat when the right kind of evil was festering beneath.

  Then she’d found Dillon crumpled in a heap at the bottom of the basement stairs, his father standing over him. Manny hadn’t called for help. He’d looked ready to hide. Or run.

  He hadn’t even come to the hospital with his son.

  “Kate?” Robert asked.

  She’d moved to the foot of Dillon’s bed. She was absently smoothing the blanket over his feet.

  Someone had been being abused right under her nose, and she’d shrugged it off. Done nothing.

  Again.

  “Let’s finish this outside.” Robert’s grip on her arm emphasized that he wasn’t asking.

  Kate followed, knowing he’d guessed why this case had hit her harder than any of her other pet patients’. Why else would he have agreed to handle her for Dr. Floyd? It was sweet in a way. Totally infringing on the freedom he’d refused to accept she needed—even after their divorce—but sweet.

  She pulled loose once they were in the hallway.

  “Fine, I’ll stop bothering Dr. Important and wait patiently like a good little nurse.” She lifted her hands in surrender. “Your job here is done.”

  She headed toward the break room and her locker.

  “Kate, wait,” Robert said.

  She turned around.

  “I didn’t come down here to bust your chops about nagging a man who’d rather be putting on the back nine than piecing a broken kid back together,” he said. “Though you might want to rethink how public you make your attitude about senior staff. Not to mention if you want your weakness for abuse victims to become common knowledge.”

  They seldom discussed her parents. The few times Robert had pried anything out of her, it had been traumatic for them both. There was no way she could feel better about what her father had done to her mother, and there was no way Robert could help.

  “Then what
did you come to say? Lay it on me,” she demanded. “I need to get some sleep.”

  He sighed.

  They both knew that no matter how tired she was, she’d stop by the shelter before crawling into bed. Working there was just as much of a compulsion as coddling her patients.

  “Roger caught me coming out of surgery.” Robert scratched his jaw. “He was bitching about you harassing him—that he didn’t have to answer to you and had no intention of taking time out of his day off to be at the beck and call of a nurse. But he did review the test results. He’d planned to phone the on-call pediatrician first thing in the morning.”

  “In the morning!” Kate gave herself credit for her indignant whisper. Screaming would have been a lot more satisfying. “He couldn’t have phoned me or the police with the high points over his two-martini lunch?”

  “I know. It’s hard to believe, after you’ve been so pleasant about asking for a favor.”

  Robert had a point.

  Kate hated when that happened.

  “I got Roger to tell me what was going on,” he added.

  And there were times she wanted to hug the guy senseless.

  “Thank you!” She squeezed his arm, then his concern registered. “What?”

  “They ran a full liver panel.” He hesitated, started to speak, then stopped again.

  “They wanted to rule out any metabolic reason for why Dillon’s so run-down and malnourished,” she prompted.

  Then Kate lifted a hand to her heart and glanced over her shoulder at the room where a battered child was safely sleeping.

  “They won’t know for sure until they do a full genetic workup.” Robert’s voice was gentle. Too gentle. “But it looks like there may be a medical reason for the abundance of badly healed breaks. Diminished bone density. Dillon has been sick for a long time, Kate. And without a proper diagnosis, there was no way his father could have known how to help him.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  A KNOCK ON STEPHEN’S office door caused him to slosh his morning coffee over its rim.

  “Ouch!” He sucked his throbbing finger into his mouth. “Damn, Neal. What—”