She turned to Vich, gripping his arm as her vision swam. “I’ve got to get to Z.”
“He’s on his way to UCSF.”
Dizzy and nauseous, she tried to balance.
“We need to get you there, too,” Vich said, putting his arm around her back. She wrapped her arm across his shoulders, using him as a crutch. They made it back onto the campus grass before they met the paramedics pushing a gurney. In its wake was Travis Steckler. “Get her up on the gurney,” he instructed the paramedics. He took her hand. “I came to get Amanda and heard what happened.”
Jamie let them lift her. Her head hit the hard surface, and she was freezing.
Steckler was talking gibberish about pulse and blood pressure.
“Z,” she whispered.
Steckler didn’t answer.
She grabbed his hand. “Please. Z.”
He leaned over her and pushed her hair out of her face. “He’s fine. I saw him first. The bullet only grazed him. Took out a tiny chunk of skin from his bicep but no muscle tissue.”
Z was okay. A chunk of skin. No muscle.
“He’s not nearly as tough as you are.”
The gurney bumped across the campus. Jamie focused on her breathing and the smooth skin of Travis Steckler’s hand on hers.
Chapter 42
Roger was studying the evidence from a hit-and-run case that was going to trial. As the prosecutor’s key witness, Roger would be called to testify. It meant he had to go back through every piece of evidence and know where it was found, how it was interpreted, and how it supported the DA’s case that the family of four had been killed by negligence on the part of the defendant. He was due to meet with the DA and two of her assistants in the morning. He should have been prepping himself on the case for weeks, not half an afternoon.
He stood from his desk to stretch and saw the image Vich had sent him. Red lines crisscrossed the page. Charlotte’s grandfather was tracking his daughter and her husband. Now that tracking devices were cheap, it probably happened more often. Drones flying through the air taking pictures. Tracking devices. GPS in cell phones. George Orwell’s 1984 might have been a few decades off, but he had gotten a lot of it right.
The image was an overview of Gavin’s movements during a two and a half-hour conference call. The images showed two lines across the screen. Roger couldn’t be certain, but he’d suggested that there were likely two devices. Or one device with two antennae.
Now, he reached his hands behind his back to stretch out his shoulders. Chase was pacing in front of the fingerprinting chamber.
“That doesn’t make it go faster,” he commented, returning to his chair.
“Helps me though,” Chase said.
“If you think so.” Personally, pacing made him uncomfortable. It made him think of someone waiting to hear if a loved one was dead. A hospital waiting room. That was where people paced. He stared down at the image again. Then, back up at Chase, pacing across the room.
It was totally wrong.
He dialed Jamie. When she didn’t answer, he left a message with his cell phone number. Then, he looked at the clock. It was after 8:00, and he wasn’t halfway through the evidence on the hit-and-run case. He would be there all night.
Chapter 43
On a gurney in the emergency department, Jamie watched Travis Steckler work on her leg. From her position, she couldn’t see the wound, which was fine since it looked like a little bomb had detonated there. No bullet though and that was a good thing. In fact, Jacob hadn’t technically shot her. He’d shot the ground where the bullet struck a piece of granite from the baseball diamond. Acting as its own little bullet, the granite embedded in her skin. A few stitches and she’d be good as new. Steckler was there to pick up Amanda from choir and insisted she and Z be brought to UCSF.
Jamie refused to be treated until Z was stitched up.
“Can it wait?” Vich asked. “She’s bleeding a lot.”
“It can wait,” Steckler said. “If I was worried, I’d hold her down and put her under myself.” He said this with a big smile.
Vich seemed to think it was funny, too.
She lay on her gurney and watched Steckler sew up Z’s arm.
“You sure she’s okay?” Z said to Steckler more than once.
“Your mom’s fine,” Steckler said. “She insisted we stitch you up first.”
“Are you the only doctor?” Z asked.
“Just the best,” Steckler said with a wink.
She wasn’t letting Z out of her sight for a month, but she hadn’t told him that yet.
“Nothing you need to do. Stitches will disintegrate on their own,” Steckler told him.
“How long will it hurt?” Z asked with a grimace as he moved his arm.
“You’ll be sore for a couple weeks. After that, the pain should be gone and there’s no reason you can’t go back to playing ball.”
“Really? Two weeks?” Z complained.
Jamie interrupted before the two of them could start plotting ways to get him back on the field. “We’ll see how it goes.”
As Steckler finished her sutures and bandaged her leg, Vich arrived back with her phone, which one of the officers had found in the woods.
“Looks like Charlotte is coming out of her coma,” Vich said.
“They called me about an hour ago. She started bucking the ventilator.”
Jamie sat up, still dizzy. “Bucking what?”
“They removed the breathing tube.”
“Is she awake?” Jamie asked Vich.
“In and out,” Vich said. “Not ready to talk to us yet.”
“We’ve got security on her?”
“Three patrol officers on her floor. Only family allowed in. Her parents are with her now.”
Jamie winced as Steckler put pressure on her wound. She lifted her phone over her head and saw a missed call from Roger.
She hit the call back button on the off chance he was at the lab. She hated voicemail.
“Roger here,” he said.
“What are you doing there at 10:00 at night?”
“Waiting for you to call,” he said.
“What?”
“No. Studying for a trial. Did you get my message?”
“No.”
“You should really listen to your voicemails.”
“I’ll put it on my New Year’s resolutions,” she said.
“It’s April.”
“Right. Next year’s resolutions.”
Roger chuckled.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“I’ve been staring at this picture that Vich sent. The tracking one.”
She put the phone on speaker. “Vich is with me. What about the image of the tracking?”
“Have you seen Gavin pace?” Roger asked.
Jamie glanced at Vich. She thought about the first time she’d met him, in the hospital room. Then at his house. “Not really.” She glanced at Steckler.
“Me, neither,” Vich added. “Why?”
“What’s weird about this tracking is that he paces all across the room,” Roger said. “You look at the picture, it’s really a multilayer star pattern. Like random pacing but almost mathematically perfect randomness because he touches almost every place in the room. In fact, if the tracker captured his location more than once a minute, I think we’d be looking at a solid red blob.”
Jamie turned to Vich. “Do you have that image on your phone?”
Vich scrolled through the images.
“Hang on, Roger.”
Finally, Vich handed her his phone. The red crossed the entire room. “You’re absolutely right.” She sat up, pulling her leg free from Steckler’s hands.
“Hey, I’ve got to get it bandaged.”
“The only void we see is his desk,” Roger said.
“Roomba,” Jamie shouted.
“What-a?” Roger asked.
Jamie pushed herself off the gurney. “Roger, you’re brilliant.”
“I’m not done
yet,” Steckler said.
Vich stared at her. “What?”
The bandage came loose and started to fall off her leg. She was already moving. “What room is Charlotte in?”
“Six nineteen,” Steckler said. “But you have to wait. You’re going to pull those stitches out.”
Jamie didn’t stop. “Vich, call 9-1-1. Get those patrol officers into that room. Gavin’s in there with Charlotte.”
The two men followed her out of the emergency department and down the hall.
“What’s a Roomba?” Vich asked.
“It’s a robotic vacuum cleaner,” Steckler said. “It bumps all around the room at random.”
Vich caught up to her. He lifted his phone to his ear but tucked the mouthpiece under his chin. “You think he attached his phone to a Roomba and went out and threw his daughter down a flight of stairs?”
“Yes. Only he thought it was Sondra. Remember how angry he was at her? He acted like it was inappropriate to let Charlotte wear her clothes.” Jamie jabbed the elevator button again. Nothing. “I think he was really angry because he actually mistook Charlotte for Sondra.” She saw the door to the stairs. Blood was running down her leg. “Damn it.”
“Which means Gavin knew about the tracking,” Roger said, still on the line.
Jamie started up the stairs. “Yes.”
Behind her, Vich was speaking to Dispatch. “Alert the patrol officers on the Borden assignment that they need to remain inside the room until we arrive. No one should be left alone with Charlotte under any circumstances.”
Jamie huffed up the first level and rounded the stairs to the next.
Chapter 44
Sweating, in pain, Jamie hobbled onto the sixth floor with Vich on her tail and scanned the walls for room numbers, signs. A nurse walked past. “Six nineteen,” Jamie demanded. “Where’s six nineteen?”
The nurse pointed down a hallway and moved on quickly.
At Charlotte’s room, Jamie pushed through the door without hesitation. Inside, two patrol officers stood as sentries on either side of the door. Sondra sat at her daughter’s bedside. Opposite her—on the far side of the bed—was Gavin.
“What is going on?” Sondra demanded.
Jamie and Vich moved into the center of the room.
“These officers insist on being here,” Sondra continued. “Not outside but in this room. We are waiting for our daughter to wake up. Can’t we have some privacy?”
Jamie shook her head, wiping her brow with the back of her hand. Sondra glanced at her pant leg, which was crusted with blood. “You found the boy who did this?”
“We found the boy Charlotte was dating behind your back,” Jamie said slowly. “And we know how Charlotte went down those stairs. But they are two separate things.”
“What do you mean?” Sondra said.
Jamie studied Gavin. “Would you like to explain it to your wife, Mr. Borden?”
Gavin shifted slightly but held his ground. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Mrs. Borden, I noticed the Roomba at your house.” She spoke to Sondra but held her gaze on Gavin.
The nodule at the base of Gavin’s throat gave away his silent intake of breath. She had him already.
Sondra frowned.
“The vacuum cleaner that moves across the room,” Jamie continued.
“Yes,” she agreed. “Gavin bought that. But what does it have to do with Charlotte?”
“Does your husband have a Roomba at his office?”
“I’m not going to stand by and listen to this,” Gavin said, rounding the hospital bed.
The patrol officers took hold of Gavin.
“Please check his pockets,” Jamie said.
The officers frisked him. One of them stopped on his pocket and drew out a large syringe, still in its packaging.
“That’s mine.”
“What’s in it?”
“Nothing,” Gavin said proudly. “It’s an empty syringe.”
Vich nodded to the IV beside Charlotte’s bed. “Injecting air into an IV is a pretty good way to kill someone. Excruciating way to die though.”
Though Gavin’s jaw dropped, his eyes narrowed. Instead of shock and outrage, what Jamie saw was pure anger.
“What are they saying, Gavin?” Sondra crossed to her husband. “Why do you have that syringe?”
When he didn’t answer, she shoved him. He stumbled back. “What have you done?” she screamed.
“Me?” he charged, spit flying through the air. Only the police officers’ hold kept him from launching himself at his wife. “You did this. All these years, Sondra. One after another. Why the hell did you marry me if what you wanted was to be with one of them?”
Sondra gasped.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve known about them. Peter the sculptor. Andre. Those were before Charlotte. Did you know I had a DNA test done when Charlotte was four months old?” He let the question sit. Sondra grew smaller. “I had to have my infant daughter tested because I didn’t know if she was mine.” The words cut through the room like a scythe.
Jamie wished she could be anywhere else.
Sondra held her hand to the base of her throat. Her long delicate fingers, her thin regal neck, were suddenly so fragile. She struggled to maintain her composure. “You were following me? All this time?”
“I didn’t need to follow you, Sondra. Your father was doing it for me. He’s been tracking us for years. All I had to do was get the username and password and log in to your father’s tracking. Guess how hard that was? Your birthday is his password.”
“But why hurt Charlotte? If you were so angry with me, why would you—” Sondra halted. Pressing both hands to her mouth she began to sob. “You thought she was me.”
She pressed trembling fingers to her lips. “That’s why you were so angry,” she went on. “She had borrowed my clothes that day. I let her drive the Mercedes. You weren’t mad because of the clothes or the car, but because you thought it was me. You went there to throw me down the stairs.”
“No,” Gavin said without conviction. “It wasn’t like that,” he said. “I was so angry. How many times had I logged in to that stupid system to see that you’d been with someone? Heath Brody and Jack Coleman before that. And the others.” He sank into the chair. “So many others. Sometimes I followed you. I thought things with Brody were ending.” He set his head in his hands. “It was such a relief when they ended. But then your car went to that new place. I thought you were starting something up again. So soon after Brody. I couldn’t bear it, Sondra. Not another one.”
“So, you left your phone on the vacuum in your office,” Jamie interjected. “How do you manage to be on the conference call if your phone was in your office? Was it a burner phone?”
“I had the call forwarded to a disposable phone,” Gavin admitted.
“Bishop made it sound like he had been tracking you another way, too,” Vich said. “Not just your phone.”
“My watch,” Gavin said. “My car.”
“So, you left your watch on the vacuum, too,” Jamie said. “And you borrowed Tiffany Greene’s car.”
Gavin gave the slightest shrug.
“Mom?” Charlotte whispered from the bed.
“Oh, sweetheart.” Sondra ran to her. “Oh, baby. Thank God, baby.”
Gavin didn’t approach the bed. Tears streamed down his face, his arms at his sides. Defeated.
“Dad?” Charlotte whispered.
Jamie watched Charlotte look at her father. She didn’t seem afraid. Had she seen him attack her?
Gavin rounded the bed to her side. His expression held such relief. Had he really intended to hurt her?
“What happened?” Charlotte whispered.
“She doesn’t remember?” Vich whispered to Jamie.
“Head injury. Who knows?”
“Would be a blessing,” Vich said.
Jamie nodded.
“You’ll be okay,” her mother whispered. “Everything’s going t
o be okay now.”
Charlotte looked much younger awake than she had in the coma. There was no alarm in her features. Just confusion. Exhaustion. Nothing to suggest she had any memory of her father throwing her down the stairs. The three whispered for a minute or two before Charlotte’s eyes drifted closed again.
Clutching their daughter’s hands, Sondra turned to her husband. “You weren’t really going to hurt her, were you?”
Tears streamed down his face. “No. Of course not. I couldn’t. I was so afraid. I was so, so afraid.” He reached out to take his wife’s hand, but Sondra pulled away. Angry. Cold. All the times she had met Sondra, Jamie felt that they were different creatures.
But right then, it was like she could feel the exact emotions that were coursing through Sondra.
“What now?” Sondra asked.
“Mr. Borden will need to come with us,” Jamie said. The pain in her leg making it difficult to remain standing.
Gavin reached for his wife again. “It was an accident, Sondra.”
Sondra said nothing.
“Please read Mr. Borden his rights and take him into custody,” Jamie directed the officers.
“How could you think I’d hurt her?” he charged at his wife.
The officers stepped forward and led Gavin away from the hospital bed. “Mr. Borden, you have the right to remain silent…”
“This is your fault!” he screamed at his wife.
The officer continued the Miranda warning.
Charlotte began crying and Sondra leaned down over to whisper to her.
“You have the right to an attorney…”
“You made me do it, Sondra. You broke me. All those years—” As they passed Sondra, Gavin launched himself toward her. “Sondra!”
The officers grabbed him back, pushed him through the door. “Do you understand these rights as I’ve explained them to you?” the officer repeated again.
Gavin silenced. His head dropped. “I understand.”
After they’d taken Gavin away, Jamie left Charlotte in the arms of her mother. There was more to discuss. They hadn’t charged Gavin Borden with the death of Brandon Shambliss or for his part in the death of Michael Delman. She didn’t ask Sondra if she had been prescribed phenothiazine for postpartum depression. Jamie suspected that they would be able to tie the medication used to drug Michael Delman back to Gavin Borden as well. There was time for that later, when Charlotte was well, when the girl didn’t have to hear every detail.
Everything to Lose Page 29