“Like winding up in a drunken stupor and getting your brother killed?”
She met his gaze. There was such suffering in those rich blue eyes, but all she could do was sit there while tears gathered in her own eyes and spilled over.
She didn’t want to know that he’d been in love with her, or that he and Paul had broken their word to her.
She didn’t want to know that he’d been blaming himself for his brother’s death for three and a half years. Or what that guilt had done to him.
She didn’t want any of it to be true. She didn’t want him to be hurting and she didn’t want to be hurting so much herself.
Yet she couldn’t find any words to help either of them.
“We’d better go,” Scott said. As he rose to his feet, his phone rang. Scott answered and pulled out his notebook. “Let me get that down,” he said, scribbling what looked like a phone number to Laurel.
Laurel felt ashamed at the relief she felt when, judging by the rest of Scott’s conversation, she knew they were going back to work.
* * *
“THAT WAS MURPHY,” Scott told Laurel, pulling out his keys and donning sunglasses as he held the door for her and walked beside her to the Blazer.
“Has he heard from Dennis?”
“No.” Scott’s jaw was set. “Nor has Arnett shown up for work. At this point, when he does, he’s fired.”
“So what do you think our chances are of having him show up for his appointment with Murphy this afternoon?”
“Slim.”
He wasn’t surprised that she’d been thinking the same thing he had. But it made him damned uncomfortable. After unlocking her door, Scott walked around to his side of the Blazer. She shouldn’t still be so much a part of him. Thinking like him. Touching him without ever lifting a finger.
“Murphy won’t do anything officially until Arnett doesn’t show, but he’s checking hospitals for me,” Scott told her after he’d climbed in and shut his door. He couldn’t look at her. Couldn’t stand to see the vacancy where once there’d been love in her eyes. Brotherly love, of course. “Arnett better hope he was in some kind of accident.” Staring out the windshield, Scott tried to think like a con man would. “Or he better hope he never gets found.”
Scott might not have grown up getting into trouble, being cared for by a rich older sister and brother-in-law, but he was pretty certain he could slip into Arnett’s mind-set enough to know one thing.
The man was up to no good.
“I have to make another call before we start our rounds of the houses again,” he said, beginning to dial. He had a hunch. And for once, it wasn’t one Laurel would be sharing with him. The thought brought a mixture of relief and sorrow.
He was going to be spending the rest of his life not sharing with Laurel.
“Who are you calling?” she asked. “Does it have anything to do with that number you wrote down?”
He nodded, and then remembered that she wasn’t looking at him, either. “Murphy had someone search Arnett’s phone records for me. There were a couple of numbers he couldn’t easily identify.” One had made the hair on the back of Scott’s neck stand up. It was for a call last Saturday.
“Can’t he get in trouble for that?”
“If he gets caught, maybe.”
“So what’s noteworthy about this particular number?”
“It has a New York exchange.”
He pulled out his notebook, checked to make sure he had Frank Quigg’s number right and hit Send. “I might be way off, but I have a hunch...”
“And another favor to call in?”
Not this time. But Laurel didn’t know about the connection between Dennis’s prison friend and Maureen Cooper.
He gave her an apologetic look, which she missed, staring straight out the windshield as she was, and then said, “Yeah, maybe.”