Playing Dead

by Allison Brennan

  Everything would work out, Jeffrey told himself. Problems like Lora Lane and Frank Lowe and Claire O’Brien were bumps in the road. They happened every once in a while. He would control this situation, win the primary, and everything would be just fine.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Mitch rushed through the emergency room doors carrying Claire. Steve was driving Lowe to FBI headquarters in order to print and interview him. Lowe wanted a written guarantee of protection before he talked, and Meg was already working on it.

  Mitch went to the nurse’s station and said, “I have an emergency. This woman was drugged and crashed into the river.”

  “Are you her significant other?”

  He couldn’t reach his badge. “Special Agent Mitch Bianchi, Federal Bureau of Investigation. My badge is in my wallet.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.” The triage nurse walked around to Mitch, bringing a gurney with her. “Put her down here. I have some paperwork for you to fill out.”

  “Can’t you just see what’s wrong with her?”

  “We will, but I still need to know her name, any medications she’s allergic to, health insurance.”

  “She lost her identification in the river,” he said. “Her name is Claire O’Brien. She works for Rogan-Caruso Protective Services, I’m sure she has insurance through them. She’s twenty-nine. I don’t know if she’s allergic to anything.”

  “What kind of drugs was she taking?” the nurse asked, shining a light into Claire’s pupils.

  “Stop that!” Claire exclaimed and batted at the nurse’s arms.

  The nurse said, “I’ll need to restrain her. If she’s on PCP or—”

  “She wasn’t taking any drugs,” Mitch said, taking Claire’s hands in his. “Claire, honey, hold tight. This nurse wants to help find out what’s wrong.”

  “Don’t leave,” Claire said, her eyes frantic. She looked like a trapped and frightened animal, ready to bolt.

  “I’m not going anywhere. I promise.” He said to the nurse, “Someone drugged her. I don’t know what with—it was probably something slipped into a drink.”

  “Has she been drinking?”

  “Half a beer, a couple hours ago.” He thought back to their argument at the Rabbit Hole. “She was rubbing her head as if she had a headache, but I don’t know if that means anything. She passed out while driving, has been alternately lethargic and intensely paranoid. Her muscles were stiff when we first brought her out of the river, her hands like this.” He made his own hands into claws. “And she’s been shaking the entire time.”

  While Mitch talked, the nurse examined Claire’s vitals and eyes, then put an oxygen mask on. Claire had a bump the size of an egg on the front of her head, likely from when she hit the steering wheel, and small scrapes and cuts from Mitch pulling her from the car and hauling her up the slope. He took her hand. Claire was not a woman he ever expected to see in a hospital looking disorientated. Claire had far too much life and energy in her.

  “You’ll have to leave us—” the nurse began.

  Claire shook her head back and forth and tried to talk, but the oxygen mask prevented it. She squeezed Mitch’s hand, her eyes fearful and wild.

  “Do a tox screen for psychotics, LSD, or Rohypnol. I think they’re detectable in the urine,” Mitch said.

  The nurse eyed him suspiciously. “Do you know something more?”

  “I’ve been in either the military or law enforcement for nearly twenty years. I’ve seen this kind of reaction before.”

  “I’ll add the tests. I need to undress her to finish the preliminary exam and then send her to X-ray to make sure she doesn’t have any internal injuries. If you could please step out—”

  Claire moaned, “Noooo.”

  “Let me stay, please,” Mitch said. “She had a terrifying experience in the river.” So had he. Unwillingly, a picture of Claire, dead and bloated, trapped underwater in the truck, hit him and he became queasy. She’d been drugged, unable to fight back, unable to do anything but die . . . and she would have if they’d been five minutes later. The truck would have sunk and he would have passed by, unaware that Claire was drowning . . .

  He pushed the image from his mind, stared at Claire’s scared blue eyes, squeezing her hands. They were so cold. But she was alive.

  The nurse handed him a stack of papers. “Fill this out while I get her ready for the doctor. You can do it in triage.” She wheeled the gurney around a corner, then pulled a curtain around Claire.

  “No wonder you’re so cold, sweetie,” the nurse said. “Your clothes are soaking wet.”

  Mitch scrawled the information he knew—Claire’s name, address, birth date, employer . . . he skipped what he didn’t know.

  “There’s a patient here about to go to surgery. It’s her dad. They need to talk before he goes on the table.”

  “I’ll see what I can do, but I can’t promise anything,” she said. “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know, wherever they prep someone for surgery.”

  “Name.”

  “Thomas O’Brien.”

  “I’ll check.”

  The nurse had put Claire in a gown, and wrapped her in blankets from a warmer. “I’ll be back.”

  Mitch sat next to Claire. “Do you remember what happened before you went into the river?”

  “River?” she mumbled through the oxygen mask. She squinted, then pulled the mask off.

  “You should—”

  “I can breathe.” She was still shaking, her skin ghostly. “Everything is too bright.” She kept her eyes squeezed shut.

  “You’re in the hospital.”

  “I know.” She took a deep breath. “It was strange. I knew something was wrong, but I couldn’t do anything about it. I didn’t even panic. It was like I was out of my body. That sounds so stupid.”

  “Did anyone have the opportunity to drug your drink?”

  “Drink? I wasn’t drinking. I didn’t even have half the beer—” She stared at him and it was as if her memory returned and she remembered who he was and that he’d lied to her. Her entire expression changed, from worried and confused to guarded.

  She averted her eyes. “I want to go home.”

  “The nurse is getting the doctor. We need to find out who drugged you and why. Why’d you go to Isleton in the first place?”

  “You think I’m going to tell you?”

  “We’re on the same side.”

  “Are we?”

  Sitting next to her, Mitch spoke softly. “I told you my father was a prosecutor. I had tried to please him, never did. And then—” Mitch took a deep breath. “When he died, I went home to help my mom clear out his office. I went through his private files. Found information that he knowingly prosecuted three innocent men.” He remembered that weekend. Everything he’d believed about his father, a man of honor and truth and justice, vanished. He’d been trying his entire life to understand why he and his father were constantly at odds, feeling guilty that he didn’t want to follow his dad into law. The arguments they used to have about everything!

  “I got two of the men out of prison by turning over the information to the new D.A. But one of the men was already dead. He’d spent ten years in Corcoran for a murder he didn’t commit, because, according to my father, ‘I knew he was guilty of other felonies, but we didn’t have the evidence.’ ” All the lectures about the Constitution and the rights of individuals and government, all destroyed after Mitch read that.

  “I think your father is innocent. I don’t know how, but everything doesn’t add up. I think you have more information than we do. Why’d you go to Isleton today?”

  “I was trying to find out what got Frank Lowe and Taverton killed. I thought that would lead to their killer. Did you talk to Professor Collier?”

  “We have agents working all airports, monitoring his passport and credit cards. We’ll find him.”

  “Unless he’s dead. I found out something else about Collier. He worked for the same law firm tha
t represented my father fifteen years ago. Then, while doing pro bono work for the Western Innocence Project, he reviewed the case files and determined that the Project shouldn’t get involved.”

  “That sounds like a conflict of interest.”

  “Not legally, but ethically, yes. Thing is, Randolph Sizemore didn’t believe me at first. He said Collier would have recused himself.”

  Claire rubbed her forehead, closing her eyes. “Oh, God, my head hurts.”

  “I’ll get the nurse—”

  “I’ll be okay.”

  She still looked like death warmed over, her hair damp around her face, but she was no longer shaking.

  “I talked to the cop who arrested Lowe back then,” Claire said. “I planned on talking to the judge who arraigned him, because Abrahamson thought he’d be most likely to have been privy to a plea agreement with the D.A.’s office. But the biggest puzzle so far is the missing coroner’s reports.”

  “What missing coroner’s reports?”

  “Taverton and my mom. They’re gone. No hard copies, no electronic copies. They were replaced by blank pages. And the tech who headed up the autopsy left right after the trial for another jurisdiction. I have a friend at Rogan-Caruso tracking him down.”

  “He’s not going to confront him—”

  “No. She isn’t a PI or a cop. She’s going to call me, and then—”

  “You’re not—”

  Claire interrupted. “I’m giving you this information because I know my father’s innocent, and if you’re actually telling me the truth, and you also believe he’s innocent, then you can help prove it. But don’t tell me what I can or can’t do, and don’t pretend that you care.”

  His chest tightened. “Claire, you need to listen to me. Believe me. Befriending you started out as a job, but it became more than that. You know it. The way I feel—”

  “I don’t care how you feel, Mitch. You lied to me. I don’t love you. I loved who I thought you were.”

  The nurse came in with a doctor. “Agent Bianchi, you’ll have to leave for a while,” the doctor said. “I need to examine my patient.”

  “I’m not staying here all night,” Claire stated emphatically.

  “Let’s see what we have here before we decide that.”

  “You can’t keep me against my will,” she said. “I’m feeling much better.”

  Mitch reluctantly left. He leaned against the corridor wall and rubbed his eyes.

  “Well, that was interesting,” a familiar female voice said only feet away from him.

  He looked at Meg. It was rare for him to see her like this, silky blond hair hanging loose down her back, devoid of makeup, looking young and beautiful and like the woman he’d fallen in love with all those years ago.

  “You heard.”

  “Oh boy, I heard.”

  Mitch didn’t even try to explain. “Can you fire me tomorrow? I’m really beat tonight.”

  “I’ll take it under advisement. It’s hard to fire someone whose instincts are dead-on ninety-nine percent of the time. Still, even you surprised me this time. Unless . . .”

  “Just say it.” He really was tired. Physically and emotionally. He felt like he could sleep for a week.

  “You really did fall for her.”

  Mitch didn’t answer. What could he say? He wasn’t going to talk to his ex-wife about the woman he’d fallen in love with.

  “Where’s O’Brien?”

  “Getting prepped for surgery. As soon as the doctor clears Claire, I’m bringing her up to see him.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “Pretty much everything you told me. He also filled us in on what the fugitives were doing after the earthquake, how they evaded authorities. He could teach a master’s class on stupid law enforcement stunts, particularly in the twenty-four hours after the disaster.”

  “What do you think?”

  “About?”

  “His innocence.”

  “I don’t think anything right now. Matt’s trying to figure out what Taverton had been working on. He’s on his way to meet Steve at headquarters to interview Frank Lowe. You think he drugged Claire?”

  “He denied it. I honestly don’t know. He sounded sincere, and he’s not hiding the fact that he knows exactly why Taverton was killed. He just refuses to talk about it until he has something from us in writing.”

  “Why don’t you head to headquarters and sit in?”

  Mitch glanced at Claire’s closed door. “What about a guard on Claire? Someone tried to kill her tonight.”

  “I’ll call someone in.”

  “Until then—Steve and Matt are perfectly capable of handling Lowe.”

  The doctor opened the door. “I’m running tests to confirm, but I think I know what Ms. O’Brien was drugged with. Rohypnol.”

  Steve realized he had a tail as soon as he exited the Capital City Freeway at Auburn. He was less than two miles from headquarters.

  “What’s wrong?” Lowe asked from the back.

  “Sit tight.”

  Steve floored the gas as he merged onto the bypass exit ramp, but it was too late. The tail swerved into the breakdown lane and drew parallel with them.

  “Down!” Steve yelled at the same time as he saw the gun in the driver’s hand.

  The killer didn’t hesitate, fired three shots into the back of Steve’s car. Heart racing, Steve slammed on the brakes while turning the wheel. The killer fired at him through the windshield.

  Steve ducked before the blast, but a bullet hit him in the upper shoulder. He overcompensated and went into a tailspin, stalling the car on the opposite side of the road.

  “Frank!”

  There was no answer from the backseat. Steve spared a glance in the rearview mirror. There was a lot of blood against the rear passenger side window.

  “Shit, shit, shit!”

  The killer did a 180 at the T-intersection and passed Steve as he escaped back onto the freeway.

  Steve leapt from the car, gun out, blood pouring from his wound. Traffic had stopped on the major thorough-fare, and a scream pierced the air. From this angle, he couldn’t see which of three possible directions the killer went.

  The entire hit took seventy seconds.

  Steve could smell gas leaking from his car. He crawled over to the door, opened it. Frank Lowe fell out, blood pouring from his chest and a head wound. Steve unlocked the handcuffs, pulled him away from the car. He stripped off Frank’s shirt, assessed the damage. Two holes, one next to the other, in Frank’s upper chest. The bullet to his head had taken off one ear and a chunk of his scalp.

  “Come on, Frank!”

  Frank was breathing too rapidly, his pulse racing. Steve applied pressure to the wounds, but blood seeped through his fingers. Frank was trying to talk, but couldn’t. Then his body convulsed and he was gone.

  Steve stared at the dead witness. No, no, no!

  A car skidded behind his. Steve held his gun on the driver.

  It was Matt Elliott, the county’s district attorney.

  “Donovan!” Elliott ran to the bloody scene and felt for Frank’s pulse. His lips tightened, and he turned to Steve. “You need to lie down.”

  “He came out of nowhere.”

  “You’ve been shot.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Did you see the shooter?”

  Steve ran through those seconds. “He wore a mask. Ski mask in the middle of May. Late-model Ford Tempo. Black. 5THH. I didn’t catch the numbers. There was an 8, but I don’t know in which spot.”

  “That’s good. We’ll find the car. Lie down.”

  Matt forced Steve to the pavement and applied pressure on his shoulder wound. Steve was fading. The last thing he heard was the D.A. calling for an ambulance and backup.

  The last thing he thought was I fucked up big time. I got a witness killed.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Tom looked at Nelia. “Is she coming?”

  “She said she would be here.”

 
He needed to see Claire. He might die tonight, and he wanted to see his little girl one more time.

  “Nelia?”

  “I’m right here.”

  “I love you.”

  “I know. I love you too, Tom. You’re going to be fine.”

  “I don’t know.”

  He’d been in more pain than he’d told her. He hadn’t wanted her to worry, but this morning he couldn’t walk. His right leg was nearly paralyzed. He could feel everything, but he couldn’t move it. She’d been indignant that the FBI had interviewed him while he was being poked and prodded and subjected to X-rays and a multitude of tests. But Tom didn’t mind. They were listening to him. Really listening, and that meant everything. Someone cared about the truth.

  The doctor said the bullet had been lodged in muscle near the spine. It had slowly moved over the past few months until it impinged on the nerves to his right leg. If he didn’t have surgery immediately, he’d be partially paralyzed, and in the coming weeks he’d be dead since, as the bullet shifted, it had moved precariously close to his liver.

  “Tom.”

  He turned to Nelia. She stared down at him with love and compassion and worry.

  “They believed you,” she said.

  A weight lifted off his chest. “You think so?” he whispered.

  She nodded, ran a hand over his forehead as if he were a child. “They know you’re innocent. Be strong in there. I need you.”

  He clasped her hand. “I love you. If—if it doesn’t work, tell Claire I’ve never blamed her for any of this, that I love her.”

  Nelia’s voice cracked. “I will.”

  “Mr. O’Brien?” The doctor came in. “We’re ready.”

  “Five more minutes?” he asked.

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “I’ll be here when you’re done,” Nelia said.

  The nurse injected something into his IV, shifted the bed he was on, and started rolling it out of the room, down the hall . . .

  “Wait!”

  That sounded like Agent Elliott, whom he’d spoken to for more than an hour earlier.

  The gurney stopped. A moment later, Tom heard, “Daddy.”

  Claire.