Between Love and Duty Read Free Page A

sure. Would he be home for dinner? She didn’t know, but doubted it.
     
    They talked for half an hour, until Lupe was ready to put dinner on the table and Jane realized she was in the way. She declined a polite invitation to join them and told Lupe she’d be in touch.
     
    She was almost out the door when Lupe said, “Oh! I forgot to tell you about the nice policeman who has been spending time with Tito. Do you think you’d like to talk to him?”
     
    Oh, yeah. She was definitely interested in hearing from him. Unless he was the father of a boy Tito’s age, Jane had to wonder how he’d gotten acquainted with Tito at all.
     
    “His name is Don…Can Mack…Lack…Land.” Lupe tried to sound it out carefully, but grimaced. “That isn’t right. I have it written down. Un momentito, por favor. ”
     
    She returned with a scrap of paper on which a bold hand had written “Duncan MacLachlan” along with a phone number. With a small shock, Jane recognized the name. Captain MacLachlan was regularly in the news. He was the unlikeliest of all mentors for a twelve-year-old boy.
     
    Jane copied the phone number and thanked Lupe, then, thoughtful, made her way to her car. Aside from the intriguing and possibly worrisome involvement of Captain MacLachlan, she wasn’t surprised by the visit, but she was dismayed. Clearly Tito couldn’t stay long-term with his sister. He might have been better placed in a foster home while his father was behind bars, but there were never enough good foster homes, and he’d been lucky to have a family member willing to take him. Lupe’s husband had probably still been around, too. Jane could understand why the placement had been approved, probably with a sigh of relief and a firmly closed file.
     
    She drove a couple of blocks, then pulled over to make notes while her impressions were fresh. She jotted questions and directions to herself, too. What about the other siblings—perhaps one of them was now in a better position to offer a home to Tito? Find out what friends he was spending so much time with. Imperative to talk to teachers. Did he go to the Boys & Girls Club? After-school programs? Probably not at his age. Any other community organizations? She had no record that he’d been in trouble with the law, but she’d find out. Reading between the lines of what Lupe had said, Tito was ripe for exactly that. MacLachlan? she wrote in the margin. Was Tito in a juvenile court-ordered program of which the family court remained unaware?
     
    The father’s release date was only two weeks away, and Jane wanted to have a good sense of other possibilities for the boy before then. And, of course, she would make the trip to Monroe to speak with Hector Ortez. She had to do all of this around running her own business, however.
     
    Lucky, she thought wryly, she had no social life to speak of.
     
    Driving home, she tried to recall what she knew about Duncan MacLachlan. She’d never read or heard anything to make her think he was “nice.” Although that wasn’t fair.
     
    In the department, he was only one step below the police chief. He was exceptionally young to be in that position, still in his thirties, Jane had read. He looked older, she’d thought when she saw his picture in the paper or brief segments from press conferences on the local news. That might only be because he was invariably stern. If he ever smiled, the press had yet to capture the moment.
     
    She was a little disconcerted by how easily she recalled his face. She did remember staring at a front page photo of him in the local daily. She’d left that section of the newspaper lying out on her table for several days for reasons she hadn’t examined but had to admit, in retrospect, had involved a spark of sexual interest. Not that she would have pursued it even if she’d met the guy in person—he was so not the kind of man she would consider dating even though courthouse gossip said he was unmarried. But that