Part 11 (1/2)

”Yes.” He looked at each and every one of them before saying, ”The prints match.”

”So what are we waiting for?” Shaw was on his feet, ready to jump into his car and drive to wherever his mother was. ”Why don't we go up there and get her? Why isn't she here already?”

Rayne's voice cut him off. ”Because she doesn't remember us.” She looked at her brothers and sisters, anguish in her eyes. ”She looked right at me and didn't know who I was.” Rayne's eyes s.h.i.+fted to her father's face. ”That's it. Isn't it, Dad? She doesn't remember any of us, does she?”

”So? We'll make her remember,” Clay said.

Callie shook her head, always the most practical one. ”You can't force this kind of thing.”

”So what?” Clay demanded. ”We're just going to let her stay up there?”

”No,” Andrew's voice quelled the rising tension. ”We're going to give her time. I talked to her,” he told his children. ”Showed her photographs of all of you. Of our life.”

”And?” Shaw wanted to know.

He held nothing back. ”She seemed afraid. Afraid to try to remember.” Each word wounded him, but he couldn't dwell on that now. He had to think positively. ”I'll go back up there in a few days and try again.”

Clay blew out an impatient breath. ”Dad-”

”Let him handle it,” Teri ordered, cutting off her twin. The words came out a little more forcefully than she'd intended, fueled by the emotions that ricocheted everywhere inside of her. ”He knows what's best.” It hurt to be here, to speculate. In its own way, this was almost as bad as not knowing if her mother was alive or dead. She rose from the table. ”Look, Dad, I've got to go.” Feeling like someone in a trance, she crossed to her father and brushed a kiss against his cheek. ”It's going to be all right,” she whispered against his ear.

Andrew smiled into her eyes, knowing exactly what she was going through. Because he was going through it himself. ”Funny, I was going to say the same thing to you.”

She hardly remembered saying goodbye to the others before she left.

Her mother was alive.

Alive.

But if she didn't remember them, was it really her mother or just her empty sh.e.l.l?

What if she never remembered, never wanted to come back? What then?

Teri pressed her lips together to keep back the sob that suddenly rose in her throat. She didn't know what to do with it, what to do with what her father had just told them or with what she was feeling right now. So she just pushed it all aside until she could deal with it, clamping down a giant lid on it all.

She wasn't talking.

For once, the car wasn't filled with her endless, ebullient rhetoric. The car was silent, except for occasional static from the scanner.

Hawk frowned.

Cavanaugh had been like this since he'd first seen her this morning. Atypically quiet, withdrawn into herself the way he'd never seen her.

And it was driving him crazy.

It surprised him that he didn't find comfort in the silence. He'd always liked silence. But having it all but surrounded him except for an occasional word seemed almost unnatural. Not to mention disturbing.

They'd been on the road all day, going from one burglary victim on their list to another, asking them to try to remember their habits from five or four years back. Some had been more than a little surprised to be contacted after all this time. A few took it to mean that at least some of their things had been recovered. All had seemed irritated by what they obviously deemed irrelevant questions.

He'd left the smoothing out of ruffled feathers and sympathy up to Cavanaugh. She always handled that kind of thing well, a h.e.l.l of a lot better than he could have. But as he watched her, as he listened, he had the definite impression that she was just going through the motions. That she was really somewhere else even as she mouthed the right words.

It didn't quite click into place the way it normally did.

As he began to listen more closely, Hawk thought he detected something in her voice, in her manner. It should have bothered him a great deal that he found himself so in tune to a person he was trying to keep at arm's length. But he told himself he was just being a good detective and noticing things like that was all part of the job.

If the excuse was somewhat thin, he pretended not to notice.

As the day progressed, it only got worse, not better. Cavanaugh hardly said a word over the quick sandwiches they grabbed at a take-out window. There was no annoying chatter the way there usually was, no using him as a sounding board. Nothing. She sat and ate her lunch, her eyes a million miles away.

And now, on their way back to the precinct, she made no comment that they had discovered each and every one of the victims they had visited had used a valet service to park their car within a month of the burglaries. Ordinarily, she would have been hooting over that. After all, it was her theory they'd just substantiated.

”You seem a little off today,” he finally said. ”Something wrong?”

She looked at him, stunned, despite her mental stupor. She didn't think there was much that Hawk could do to surprise her, but she was wrong. This definitely came under that heading. She would have bet that she could have come to work naked and as long as it didn't have any bearing on the case they were working, he wouldn't have noticed.

”No.” She could feel him looking at her, as if he knew she wasn't telling him the truth. As if he expected her to own up. She wouldn't have thought that he'd cared one way or another.

”Some people are born liars.” He looked back at the street. ”You're not one of them.”

She stared straight ahead at the darkened road. ”What makes you think there's something wrong?”

He laughed at the absurdity of the question. Anyone who had ever met her would have known there was something wrong. ”Well, for one thing, you're not talking a mile a minute. You're not talking at all.”

More surprises. If she hadn't known better, she would have said he sounded annoyed. ”I thought that was what you wanted.”

He wished she'd stop blocking him like this. ”Not when it means there's something wrong.”

She turned to look at him, resentment coming out of nowhere and taking hold of her. ”Since when do you care if there's something wrong or not?”

”Since you're my partner. As my partner, you're supposed to have my back and I have yours. That's not going to go according to plan if your head's somewhere else.”

”My head's right here,” she snapped at him.

If he hadn't thought something was wrong before, he would have now. ”I thought you were the poster girl for sharing.”

Why was he doing this to her, pretending as if he cared? ”I thought you burned posters like that.”

Never a patient man, he seemed to have an incredibly small supply of patience available to him at the moment. It went up in smoke. ”You don't want to tell me, fine. But work out whatever's bothering you fast because right now you're deadweight.”

She set her mouth hard. What else could she have expected from him? ”Very compa.s.sionate of you.”

That did it. Hawk pulled the car over to the side and threw it into park. He turned to face her. ”I asked. You wouldn't tell. What the h.e.l.l do you want from me, Cavanaugh?”

The temptation to haul off and hit him came galloping out of nowhere and it took everything she had not to act on it. What she wanted was for the world to stop tilting on its axis and straighten up again. What she wanted was to have her world back in order.

What was going on inside of her now felt just like it had when she'd heard that her mother had died. Except now the woman had been resurrected.