Truth and Justice - Fern Michaels Page 0,6

a dozen firecrackers going off all at once.

The two young officers looked at each other. Captain Josell shook his head; Captain Kimball nodded. Captain Josell pulled out his cell phone, stepped away from Bella, and placed a call to a female officer back at headquarters to come join them. “This is a tough one,” he whispered into the phone.

Captain Kimball transferred the manila envelope he’d been entrusted with, the one he was supposed to hand to the grieving widow, from one hand to the other. No one said what he was supposed to do if she refused to accept it. Somehow, he just knew that if he did hand it to her, and she did take it, it would slip right through her fingers, and he didn’t want that to happen. Thus, he wasn’t sure what he should do with it. Hand it to her? Would she even accept it? Place it on one of the tables? He’d never been in this exact position before. He couldn’t even remember if there was a rule in the book for a situation like this. For sure, nothing like it had ever come up in his training classes. He looked over at his partner and raised his eyebrows. What now? Captain Josell just stared at him blankly. It was obvious that he didn’t know what to do, either.

Bella blinked away her tears and wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her shirt. She looked around, and said, “You look uncomfortable. If you aren’t going to leave, you might as well sit down. Are you supposed to talk to me? Are you going to tell me how my husband died? Or is a shrink on the way to do that for you?

“I don’t know what to do here. I’ve heard stories, seen movies, but I never thought I would turn out to be a leading character in one of those stories,” Bella said, her voice cracking with each word that came out of her mouth. “I guess I am now one of your statistics. Is there some special protocol we need to follow?” She knew that she was babbling, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself.

“Actually, Mrs. Nolan, there is a protocol of sorts. We usually follow the bereaved’s lead and do what they want, and go from there. Personally, ma’am, I think you should talk to the psychiatrist when she gets here. I think you’ll feel more at ease with a female,” Captain Kimball said.

Bella didn’t know what to say, and she didn’t know what to think. What did gender have to do with anything? Dead was dead. A man talking about it or a woman talking about it couldn’t bring Andy back to life. Maybe what she should do was call Mitchell Jones and ask him what to do. Lawyers usually had the answer to everything, or at least they would have you believe they did, and that’s how they justified billing you out the kazoo. Maybe Mitchell could undo the paperwork and recall the whole sorry mess, and she could go on with her life and pretend she didn’t file for divorce the very same day she was notified of her husband’s death.

She nixed that idea immediately because she realized that, papers or no papers, it was impossible to divorce someone who was already dead when the divorce papers were filed. Bella Ames Nolan was, for all eternity, the widow of Major Andrew Nolan, not the ex-wife of a man who had died serving his country.

How could this be happening? How? You file for divorce the same day you find out your husband is dead. All within the space of an hour. And all it took was a single hour. An hour, her mind screamed silently. Good God, how am I supposed to live with this? This is wrong. I need to sit down somewhere in a dark corner and howl my head off, Bella thought, as she knuckled her eyes to keep more tears from spilling down her cheeks. She needed to say something. Ask questions? Why? You couldn’t fix dead just like you couldn’t fix stupid.

Bella knew she had to do something, like right now, or these men were going to be in her apartment like mother hens forever.

“Did you . . . has anyone notified Andy’s sister? I know almost nothing about her, just that Andy told me he had a sister.” Something niggled at her concerning the sister, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. “I