Cover

Dedication

For Jonathan—the complete man, from A to Z
And for Lila and Oscar—hugs and kisses

CHAPTER ONE

THE PICTURES HAD photographed her swollen, battered, and bruised—a puffy lip, two black eyes, a bloated and bright face. Decker found it nearly impossible to reconcile those snapshots with the remarkable-looking woman who sat before him. Terry had changed in the fifteen years. She had morphed from a beautiful sixteen-year-old girl to an elegant, stunning woman. Age had turned her face softer and rounder with the fragile exquisiteness of a Victorian cameo. His eyes traveled from the picture to her face. He raised an eyebrow.

“Pretty bad, huh?” she said.

“Your husband certainly did a number on you.” If Decker squinted hard enough at her face, he could see remnants of the thrashing—a greenish tinge in certain spots. “And these pictures are around six weeks old?”

“Around.” She shifted her position on the sofa. “The body is a wondrous thing. I used to see miracles all the time.”

Being a doctor, Terry would know that information firsthand. How she managed to go through medical school and raise a kid while married to that maniac was a testament to her strength of character. It was hard to see her beaten down like this.

“Are you sure you want to go through with this? Meeting him here in L.A.?”

“I put it off about as long as I could,” Terry said. “It really doesn’t make sense to hide. If Chris wants to find me, he will. And it’s not me that I’m worried about. It’s Gabe. If he gets pissed off enough, he may take it out on him. I need to get him to adulthood, Lieutenant, before I make any decisions about myself.”

“How old is Gabe?”

“Chronologically, he’s about four months from fifteen. Psychologically, he’s an old man.”

Decker nodded. They were sitting in an elegantly furnished hotel suite in Bel Air, California. The color scheme was a soothing tone-on-tone beige. There was a stocked wet bar off the entry and a marble countertop for mixing drinks. Terry had curled up on the divan opposite a stone fireplace. He was sitting on her left in a wing chair with a view of the private patio lushly planted with ferns, palms, and flowers—an oasis for the wounded soul. “What makes you think that you’ll last until Gabe turns eighteen?”

Terry gave the question some thought. “You know how cool and calculating my husband is. This was the first time that he ever laid a hand on me.”

“So what happened?”

“A misunderstanding.” She looked at the ceiling, avoiding Decker’s eyes. “He found some medical papers and thought I had an abortion. After I finally got him to stop hitting me and listen, he realized that he had misread the name. The abortion had been for my half sister.”

“He confused the name Melissa with Teresa.”