Maybe now, he thought, Ryan and Clyde would decide to have a family. Or not. Whatever they did, he felt more than sufficiently blessed.

He felt lucky, too, that in the process of raising the girls, he and Dallas and Scotty had grown as close as any brothers ever were. They'd run a tight household, and had taught the girls as many skills as they could.

Turning in through the wide parking area that served the Molena Point courthouse and the PD, moving in between its gardens and oak trees, he parked in a reserved slot in front of the station, then turned to look at her.

" Dallas said you still have Carson 's clothes and personal possessions?"

"I've kept everything that was in his apartment-clothes, books, even the kitchen things-everything but the furniture. After the police were finished with the apartment and the office, everything they didn't hold for evidence was given to his mother. When she died, four years ago, she left a simple will that gave those things to me. I put it all in a small storage locker here in the village.

"I had to come up from L.A. to claim it, and I didn't want to ship it down there. Didn't want it handled any more than necessary. I thought that someday the police might want to look at it all again."

Mike swung out of the car, and before he could move around to open her door, she was out and on the sidewalk. He caught a glimpse of the two of them approaching the glass door to the station, and was startled by the rightness of the reflection, his lean build and her slim, long-waisted figure seeming to cleave together naturally. Watching the reflection, he felt as if they had never broken off their relationship.

He held the door for her, and when he looked up, Dallas stood in the foyer, beside the dispatcher's counter, watching them with that unreadable, dark-eyed gaze that would intimidate the hardest felon. The Latino detective was freshly shaved, his short, dark hair newly cut, and was dressed for the party in jeans, a white turtleneck, and a tweed sport coat. The look on his face, as he studied Lindsey, gave Mike pause. It was a look of interest that Mike seldom saw in his brother-in-law's eyes- Dallas 's warm Latin temperament embraced his good hunting dogs in a far more constant manner than it had ever done with any of his short-lived love affairs.

Mike tried not to bristle at Dallas 's interest as they moved down the hall to the detective's office where Dallas made Lindsey comfortable in the leather easy chair and offered her coffee, which she refused. There was a brief discussion of what the cold file contained, and they made an appointment with her for late Monday morning, at the station, the morning after the wedding. If not for Dallas 's watchful interest, Mike might have asked her to join him for breakfast before they were to meet. Dallas rose first, to escort Lindsay out to the front. Watching the two of them walk down the hall together, Dallas's broad, tweed-covered shoulders and dark hair, Lindsey's slim, graceful walk in the pale, faded jeans and sweater, the two of them looked, he thought, startled, as if they had known each other for a long time-maybe it was a trick Lindsey had that he'd never before noticed, maybe her way of bonding with a man.

Or maybe her compliance was totally unconscious. Whatever the case, the effect was charming-or, in this instance, damned annoying.

He didn't want to be at cross purposes with Dallas, certainly not just before Ryan's wedding. He watched Dallas escort Lindsey out, then he and Dallas headed for the party, saying little on the short drive, their silence not their usual easy quiet, but tense-they were, for the first time he could remember, at odds over a woman.

But as they pulled up in front of Clyde's house, he looked at Dallas and grinned, and they put their bristling aside and went in, wisecracking and looking for a beer.

6

AFTER THE BLOODLETTING, as Joe Grey thought of his stress-filled donation of vital bodily fluids, the tomcat lay safely on the couch in Dr. Firetti's private office snuggled among Dulcie, Kit, and Charlie, listening to the doctor's voice from the surgery and the occasional sound of instruments clicking against the metal table-and thanking the great cat god that he was out of there.

"How did it go?" Charlie said, gently stroking him. "You seem a bit pale."

Joe glared up at her. "How can a cat look pale? You can see beneath my fur?"

"Your expression is pale. Wan," she said. "Inside your ears is pale."

In truth, he felt pale. Felt wiped out. His paws were still sweaty, and he could still feel the cold metal table under him, where he'd lain half blinded by the harsh hospital lights reflecting off the table and the bright metal instruments and glass tubes; he could still feel that huge needle going into his little cat vein-he'd tried to be macho when his foreleg was shaved, his sleek gray fur stripped away to pale, naked skin and blue veins and then that huge needle was plunged deep in and his lifeblood drawn from his body into a syringe big enough to bleed a cart horse.

How could a heretofore kind and caring doctor cold-heartedly remove all his life-sustaining juices? As Firetti had drawn the plunger back farther and farther, extracting more blood than any cat could have inside him, Joe had resisted a terrible urge to claw and tear at the doctor. In fact, though, with the needle in him, he'd been afraid to move at all and cause himself further damage-but then, when he'd glanced across at Kit expecting to see her trembling and cowering, what he saw had shattered him.

There she lay on the next table, calmly purring while she was shaved and the needle was inserted and her blood burbled out into the vial. Purring. As mindlessly relaxed as a stuffed teddy bear-her cool nonchalance had left him furious and shamefully embarrassed.

The fact that Firetti had said he'd take less than sixty cc's had no meaning for Joe. And it wasn't Firetti's blood.

At least Dulcie hadn't seen his cowardice, she hadn't been in the operating room; she'd been out here with Charlie lounging in Dr. Firetti's office, supplied with catnip, a bowl of turkey tetrazzini gourmet cat food, a cuddle toy, and a soft blanket.

Now, listening to Firetti's and his assistant's voices resonating softly from beyond the closed door against the harsh sounds of metal on metal, he pictured scalpels and other sharp cutting instruments, and he felt sick and hurting for poor Sage-every alarming TV show he'd ever seen featuring veterinary surgery came back to him. Why had he ever watched that stuff? He vowed never to watch again. He was glad Clyde and Ryan's taste in TV ran to turning off the set and snuggling before the fire or opening a good book. Beside him, Charlie was still fussing over him, stroking him way too gently.

"You want more custard, Joe, to get your strength back?"

"I've had three."

"I expect Kit seemed braver," Charlie said, as if reading his mind. "I expect she seemed more stoic in the matter of blood and needles?"

Joe stared coldly up at her.

"Human males are the same," Charlie said. "It's in the genes, that sudden weakness at the sight of blood."

"Cops can handle blood," Joe said irritably, wishing she'd mind her own business.

"Cops get used to it early, they have to. Anyway, you don't shrink from mouse blood."

"Mouse blood is not my blood."

Beside him, Kit had begun to squirm, as nervous as a rat on a hot stove, pawing the blanket one minute and deadly still the next. She didn't take her eyes from the inner door to the surgery. Her tortoiseshell ears were sharply forward, picking up every faint sound, her whole being focused on the young tomcat lying in there under the knife. Joe had seldom seen her so distressed; he watched her uneasily.