Once a Father. Marie Ferrarella

he made a point to shed the events of the day along with his uniform when he left the station house. It was the only way he’d found he could survive.

      But not this time.

      This time, he could see Jake’s face, could see his burned and bruised little body, could even smell the smoke that had surrounded the boy like a malevolent envelope every time his mind began to stray.

      In an attempt to free himself and put the whole incident behind him, Adam decided to see what he could find out about Jake having any next of kin who would take him in.

      A cursory effort had yielded nothing. Getting off duty, he’d stopped by the country club and asked a still very much shaken Bonnie Brannigan if she could give him the Andersons’ address, since it had to be on file in the membership listing. Once he had the address, he’d gone to the Andersons’ neighborhood and knocked on the doors of several of their neighbors. No one knew anything. The Andersons had been gregarious people, but neither had ever mentioned any extended family. A woman who lived across the street from them had told him that Meg had once mentioned that she and her husband were both only children. And apparently nobody had ever seen any grandparents pulling up into the Andersons’ driveway to pay a visit during any of the holidays.

      Facing a dead end, he’d dug a little deeper.

      Adam had just gotten off the telephone with a friend of his whose sister worked in the social services department that would have jurisdiction over Mission Creek. He hated calling in favors, but for reasons he didn’t want to examine, this had become important to him.

      He encountered the same dead end he’d found by going to the Andersons’ neighborhood. There was no next of kin. No doting grandparent, no busy long-lost uncle or vivacious aunt to come to Jake’s aid and take him in.

      According to Rick Foster’s sister, Jenny, the preliminary investigation indicated that the Andersons seemed to have no family whatsoever except for some distant second cousin.

      Adam had no reason to doubt Jenny Foster’s findings. She’d been at her job over ten years and knew the system inside and out.

      The system.

      That’s the way that lady doctor had referred to it. The system. He didn’t want the boy to be eaten up by the system, with no one to care for him, no one to make the night terrors go away, the way he had for Bobby when his son had woken up in the middle of the night, screaming and shaking.

      Adam sat down at his small kitchen table, picking up the roast beef sandwich he’d haphazardly thrown together for lunch just before his phone had rung. He bit into it, his mind reviewing the meager facts. The only relative Jenny had come up with was a distant cousin on Meg Anderson’s side. A forty-three-year-old twice-divorced anthropologist who was currently on a dig somewhere in Africa, nobody knew exactly where.

      Maybe he could be persuaded to take the boy, but Adam doubted it. It was a long shot at best and besides, Jake needed someone now. Mayonnaise leeched out of Adam’s sandwich on one side, taking a piece of lettuce with it. It fell on his paper plate with a glop, but he didn’t notice. He was too busy thinking.

      He didn’t like the idea of the boy facing all this alone.

      This was Adam’s downtime. Like any firefighter, he worked two days on, two days off. What he normally did during this time was unwind, put his professional life as far out of his mind as possible. But Jake’s eyes wouldn’t let him. Try though he might, Adam couldn’t seem to separate his thoughts, couldn’t shove them into the neat little cubicles where he always pushed them in. Despite his best efforts, it had happened.

      His professional life had seeped into his private life.

      There was no denying it. The boy he had rescued from the Lone Star Country Club fire had gotten to him.

      He needed to do something to work this out of his system. With no set plan for the day, Adam decided it might be a good idea to pay a visit to the hospital to see how Jake was coming along.

      Maybe if the boy was mending well, he could stop thinking about him so much.

      Stone paced around his office. He was beyond angry. It had been a simple, simple plan. Nothing was supposed to have gone wrong. And yet, everything had. And it threatened to continue to go wrong, bringing down everything around him. It was like when you pull an apple out of the bottom row of neatly arranged fruit—an avalanche resulted.

      He couldn’t have that. Wouldn’t have that.

      Swinging around, he looked at the man who was the latest recipient of his foul mood. Ed Bancroft. The man responsible for leaving the security room door ajar while they were transferring the sacks of money. The sacks were normally retained in the back closet of the security room after the money arrived from Central America, but before the purchase of non-traceable money orders.

      Simple. Yet in jeopardy now.

      He’d had his doubts about bringing Bancroft on. The man was weak enough to be malleable, but he had the one thing that had made many a scheme run afoul: the remnants of a conscience.

      He just had to see to it that he kept Bancroft too intimidated to even think of allowing that conscience to dictate any of his actions.

      “I want to know what that kid saw, understand?”

      Bancroft had been the one to look up and see the boy peeking into the security office just as the green canvas bags were being loaded onto the truck.

      “The bags were closed, Chief. There’s no way anyone could have known what was in them. Besides, I saw the kid before the ambulance took him away. He was in pretty bad shape. He might not make it. And even if he does, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to see him.”

      It was the wrong thing to say. Anything beyond “Yes, Chief” would have been. Stone’s eyes reduced to small, malevolent slits.

      “What are you, a complete cretin? We’re talking about some six-year-old kid—”

      “Five,” Bancroft corrected automatically, then instantly regretted it. The chief didn’t like being corrected.

      “Five,” Stone spat out. “You’ve got a badge. That gives you access to anybody. We’re supposed to be investigating the bombing, remember? I’m heading up the task force.” Which was the ultimate joke, seeing as how he’d been the one to set the wheels in motion. But that was what made his position so sweet. Since he had control over everything that went on in and around Mission Creek, he could squash anyone who might interfere with his operation.

      Like he should have been able to squash that damned aging commando, he thought darkly.

      Gathering his thoughts together, he tried to remember which of the men in the Lion’s Den were currently available. He didn’t trust Bancroft going out alone.

      “I want you to take Malloy with you and go question the kid.” He nailed the tall, narrow-chested man with a look. “And don’t scare him, just get him to tell you exactly what he saw. Maybe things aren’t as black as they seem.” But Stone doubted it. He’d been born a pessimist and hadn’t been disappointed yet. “And next time, make sure the goddamn inner door is closed before you start moving the bags out.”

      Bancroft made a fruitless attempt to absolve himself. “It wasn’t my fault, Chief. I wasn’t anywhere near it and I wasn’t the last man in—”

      “Doesn’t matter whose fault it was.” Other than the fact that he was going to make the miserable bastard pay, whoever it was, Stone thought. Taking a step, he got directly into the other policeman’s face. “Know this. If one of us goes down, we all could go down. Do I make myself clear?”

      Like a newly recruited marine trying not to buckle before his drill sergeant in boot camp, Bancroft squared his thin shoulders. “Yes, sir.”

      “Good, now get going.” Stone pushed the other man toward the door. “The sooner I know where we stand, the better.”

      In the doorway, struck by a bolt of either duty