Just Eight Months Old...

He blindly moved his hand to reach into the front pocket of his shirt, missed by an inch, then looked down and took out a black leather bifold wallet. He absently held it in her direction and flipped it open. Hannah stared at an FBI identification that bore an appealing snapshot of Chad, and identified him as a Special Agent. The plastic was cloudy, the leather holder old and cracked.

“What did you learn in Florida?” she whispered. “You never impersonated a fed before. Or if you did, I never knew about it.” He closed the ID then stuffed it back into his pocket. “Do you know you’re committing a crime? This is fraud against the federal government. Do you have any idea what kind of penalty that carries?”

“Two to ten,” he said, clearly distracted by a burst of mimicking sounds from Bonny in the back seat. “But it doesn’t matter because I don’t intend to get caught.” Chad stared at his watch, then shifted to fuss with his tie. Hannah noticed his movements were jerky, anxious, not the usual smooth, easy Chad moves. A couple of cars approached, apparently night-shift workers gaining access to the underground parking area.

“I thought you earned facts and clues the honest way,” she said.

“For what it’s worth, this is the first time I’ve impersonated a fed.”

Why didn’t that make her feel any better? “Trust me. Nothing’s going to happen,” he said in a preoccupied monotone. “I’m going to take a look at Persky’s and Furgeson’s personnel files. The feds…” he trailed off.

“The feds,” Hannah prompted. He glanced at her, apparently trying to recover his train of thought. “The feds will never know.”

Hannah wasn’t sure if her agitation sprang from his lack of work ethics, or from his obvious ignorance of his connection to Bonny, who rhythmically kicked her car seat with the back of her shoes.

“Do you have any better ideas?” Chad asked and rubbed the back of his neck. “Because if you do, I’m all ears.”

“Does it still hurt?” she asked quietly.

He stared at her. “Huh?”

“The bump you took at Persky’s house.”

He dropped his hand back to his lap.

She resisted the urge to check the wound herself. Touching Chad again would not be a smart move, no matter what the reason. “Anyway, I do have another idea. I say we get a move on to Atlantic City and see if that woman in the matchbook we found at Persky’s exists.”

“And what if she doesn’t? What if it’s like I said and she was a one-nighter, a nooner, a quickie whom Persky never saw again?”

Hannah decided she’d liked him better speechless. She grimaced and tucked her hair behind her ear. “I love your vocabulary, Hogan. Do you care to share any more of your colorful language with me and Bonny?”

“Forget my word choices for a minute here, Hannah, and give this some thought. Let’s say we go to Atlantic City and turn up a big, fat zero? What then? Do we turn back to N.Y. and start from scratch?” His gaze lingered on Bonny and he slowly shook his head. “We don’t have the time. I’m going in here, getting what I need, then we’ll go to Atlantic City….”

His words trailed off. Hannah practically heard his unspoken question. Would the baby be going with them?

“I don’t have anywhere to leave her,” she blurted, disappointing herself. The last thing she wanted was to appear desperate. But desperate was exactly what she was, wasn’t it? Her regular baby-sitter couldn’t keep Bonny because she had plans for the weekend that couldn’t be broken. And with no family to speak of, unless you counted Victor Marconi, and a distant aunt in Montana, she was in a jam.

“I didn’t exactly expect to take this case, Chad. Don’t worry, Bonny won’t cause any trouble. And I certainly don’t intend to put her in any danger. This is a routine case with an unusual time constraint, that’s all. We’re tracking white-collar criminals, not violent armed robbers.”

He touched her hand where it lay against her leg. An instant rush of awareness startled her at the feel of his warm fingers on her cold ones.

“Hannah, I didn’t say anything about Bonny causing problems,” he said softly.

She tugged her hand away from his and worried it in her lap with her other. “No, you didn’t. But I could always read your thoughts, Chad.”

His gaze was probing. “Did you ever stop to think you couldn’t read me as well as you thought you could?”

She stared at him wordlessly. Could he be right? Was she misjudging him? Had she misread him in the past?

She watched the guard wave another car into PlayCo’s parking area.

“She’s beautiful,” he said so quietly she nearly didn’t hear him.

The statement took her breath away. She searched for a response, but couldn’t seem to match words to the emotions coursing through her. She almost said “She looks like you,” but caught herself.

She swallowed hard, relieved when he shifted the car into First. He pulled it around, heading straight for the guard still sitting in his shack next to the entrance to PlayCo Industries.

Chapter Four

Shell-shocked. That was the closest Chad could come to describing how he felt. No. That’s exactly how he would describe it. Having served with the Marines in Kuwait, he knew what it was like to hear sniper fire and not know where it had come from. The strange thing was that in this situation no one else had noticed the shot. Around him life went on as normal.

In the personnel office of PlayCo Industries, the nondescript, white-collar-to-the-bone comptroller Robert Morgan hung up the telephone then began fingering through a filing cabinet to retrieve Persky’s and Furgeson’s employment records. Outside in the hall a couple of second shift workers laughed, presumably on their way back from break. In another room across the way, a telephone rang on, with no one around to pick it up.

Even as he registered every sound, placed every person, he remained apart from them. The shot he’d taken hadn’t come from an unknown sniper’s gun; it had come from Hannah. Hannah and that precious baby girl whose veins carried his blood.

Thrusting his fingers through his hair, he glanced toward the open door, anxious to get out of there. To get back to the car and start seeking some answers that might help him make sense out of all this.

He’d never thought he’d be a father again. He’d sworn another child wouldn’t be born with the stigma of his name attached. It seemed like another lifetime since he’d even been around a baby. So long, he was unprepared for the instinctive surge of parental protection, of unconditional love that overtook him the instant he understood Bonny was his.

Still, it was all so hard to believe….

Just last month marked the fourth anniversary since the last moment he’d held his infant son, Joshua. Right before Joshua had been taken from him.

Scenes twisted through his mind. Images of misshapen metal, of an empty car seat lying in the middle of the road. Of his wife’s purse still sitting on the floor of the front seat.

His family.

A highway patrolman had tried to pry him from the scene when, at some point in the long nightmare, law officials had been contacted. And Chad had hauled off and slugged him, desperately needing to hold on to his family, though they were already gone. Their faces were burned forever into his memory, haunting him in the dark hours of the morning, taunting him whenever he experienced anything close to happiness…serving as a constant, caustic reminder that he didn’t deserve to be happy.

A torrent of emotion ripped through Chad’s gut. He focused on the back of Robert Morgan as he began copying the files he’d taken from the cabinet, but Chad really didn’t see him.

They’d argued that day, him and Linda. He winced from the memory of her packed suitcases, Joshua’s stuffed blue elephant hanging half out of a blue diaper bag, his son’s lashes bearing remnants of tears. Linda had accused him of putting his career above his family, an argument she’d made often. But that night she’d had enough. She was leaving him. Going home to her parents in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And there was nothing he could do to stop her.

Chad eyed the door, needing to escape. It was an accident, a voice in his head shouted. He resolutely refused to listen. It was no accident. He was to blame. He had killed his family as surely as if he’d driven them off that mountain road.

The experience had been more than Chad Hogan, Special Agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigations, had been able to handle. He’d quit the Bureau, and never told anyone about his work there, not even Hannah. Too many bad memories. It was better to let her think that ID he flashed was bought somewhere in Florida. After he quit, he’d taken odd jobs as a skip-tracer to cover the basic necessities, and resolved to serve out a life sentence in which he wasn’t allowed to move past the guilt, the grief.

Then came Hannah.

The instant he met her, the shadows that dogged him began to recede. With all that curly red hair, those lively freckles and infectious laugh, she had loved life and lived to love. He’d been drawn to her like an addict was drawn to drugs. Okay, so maybe he hadn’t deserved her. He’d known that, too. But he’d been helpless to stop himself.

She had my baby and I didn’t even know it.

“I wish there was something I could do to help you.”

Chad blinked away the images crowding his head and stared at Robert Morgan who held out two blue file folders in his direction. He took them and cleared his throat. “I understand. This is fine.”

Morgan smiled and pushed up dark-rimmed glasses. “I have to admit, I still don’t know what all this is about. Your associates told me it didn’t concern PlayCo so I shouldn’t worry, but I can’t help it.”