In Graywolf’s Hands

by Marie Ferrarella

  Lukas studied her for a moment before saying anything. “So you went into the family business.”

  She looked up at the door as a man in a lab coat walked in. “So to speak.” Lydia set down her mug. She was wasting time with small talk. “Look, is there any way to bring him to consciousness?”

  Yes, there were ways, but Lukas thought it best to take a conservative approach. “We prefer to let nature take its course.”

  As far as she was concerned, that was nothing more than a convenient excuse. “Nature didn’t operate on him last night, or pump him full of drugs.”

  “Nature needed a little kick start,” he told her mildly. “But if it makes you feel any better, in all likelihood Conroy should be waking up in another couple of hours, although I don’t think he’ll be up to answering any questions. His mind will most likely be too fuzzy.”

  He had been giving her the runaround. “Why didn’t you say so to begin with?”

  “And miss the scintillating conversation we’ve just had? Not likely.”

  Lydia pressed her lips together to keep from telling him what she thought of him. “You know, I’m not sure I like you, Doctor.”

  He looked at her knowingly. “But I’m making you think, aren’t I?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Among other things.”

  The sound of his resonant laughter curled into her empty stomach. Reminding her that she hadn’t had breakfast yet.

  Lydia rose to her feet. It was time to go. “Thanks for the coffee.” She tossed the words off as she walked out through the swinging door.

  Trevor Patrick, an eye surgeon and the other doctor Lukas had initially recruited to take part in his annual medical trips to the reservation, took the opportunity to sit in the seat Lydia had just vacated.

  “Harrison was right.” Lukas raised a brow, waiting for Trevor to explain. “That is one fine specimen of womanhood, Lukas.”

  “That she is, Trevor, that she is. But don’t let her catch you saying that.”

  “Why?”

  “Long story.” Lukas rose. “And I’ve got patients waiting at the office. See you around.”

  Trevor watched him leave, a thoughtful expression on his face.

  Chapter 5

  Elliot looked up, surprised to see Lydia pushing the door open and briskly striding into the field office.

  “What are you doing here?” He half rose in his chair in anticipation, ready to roll. “Did the suspect finally wake up?”

  With more than a touch of disgusted disappointment, Lydia shook her head. Elliot sat again, silently repeating the first question he’d put to her by the way he looked at her.

  With a fresh wave of adrenaline coursing through her veins thanks to both the coffee from the doctors’ lounge and in a minor way, she supposed, from the doctor himself, Lydia had given John Conroy exactly fifteen minutes to wake up. When he hadn’t, she’d renewed her previous instructions to the special agent on duty to call her the second the unconscious man moved so much as an eyelash and then left the hospital.

  “Suspect,” she echoed Elliot’s term with contempt. “I hate calling him that when we’ve got the guy dead to rights.”

  Elliot wasn’t all that crazy about the label himself, though he did acknowledge the need for it. “Makes everything equal,” Elliot told her as he made himself comfortable behind the computer. The back injury that had sent him under the surgeon’s knife and then to rehab for six weeks was beginning to act up. He reached for a painkiller.

  Lydia noticed but pretended not to. “Not hardly,” she muttered. “No, Conroy’s still out. But I need to do something more useful than grow roots in the vinyl floor covering.” She nodded toward the open door and the offices that were laid out down the corridor. “How’s the crime scene investigation coming?”

  Wondering the same thing, Elliot had just gotten off the phone with the head of that department of the Bureau less than ten minutes ago.

  “They’re still bringing the pieces in. I hear they’ve got enough fragments tagged to keep a team of five busy from now until Christmas.”

  Lydia frowned. Seeing as how it was September, that didn’t sound overly promising.

  “Great,” she muttered under her breath. “How about something new on the man himself? Anything?”

  “Nothing new, just the usual.” He indicated the file he’d just compiled from various pieces of information he’d lifted from the local police database. “John Conroy’s a wizard with explosives. The service loved him, then things went a little sour when he decided to be a maverick. Peacetime is hell for militant types. Didn’t obey the rules, barely avoided a dishonorable discharge.”

  It was an old, familiar tune, one she’d heard more than once during her time with the Bureau.

  “From the looks of it, he couldn’t really find a niche for himself in civilian life.” Elliot held up what looked to be a résumé. “He held down a string of jobs as a guard, which he got on the strength of his service record.

  “His domestic life is a shambles, probably because of his beliefs. Divorced twice, most recently a year ago. Here’s a tidbit you might find interesting.” He swung the folder around one hundred and eighty degrees so that she could see for herself. “Says that his only daughter ran off with some guy she hooked up with from New Mexico. She died of a drug overdose this spring. The guy was Native American and ‘daddy’ highly disapproved.”

  “Seeing as how the New World group believes that only White Anglo-Saxon Protestants deserve to live in this country, I can see why. I guess the Native American exhibit sent him off the deep end.”

  Elliot knew she was just talking out loud, not looking for his input. “More than likely. But if it hadn’t been that, he and his group might have set off a bomb in Little Tokyo, Figueroa Street, or for that matter, Knotts Berry Farm. I hear they have Native American dancers performing ritual dances every day.” He took the folder back. “You never know with types like that.”

  But it was their job to know, to crawl into the minds of terrorists, be they foreign or domestic, to discover what it was that started the whole dreadful process by which lives were lost and property destroyed. In the back of the mind of every special agent attached to the terrorist division was the specter of another World Trade Center or Oklahoma City bombing.

  “Find out everything you can about Conroy. Who his friends in the service were, who he hangs around with. Somewhere in there has to be the names of the people responsible for this.” She knew she was asking him to find needles in a haystack, but they needed those needles. “Put everything down, no matter how small.” She smiled as she recalled something he had said to her on their very first investigation together. “No information is extraneous in the long run, remember?”

  Elliot sighed. “I’ve got to learn to keep my mouth shut around you.”

  She laughed. He’d been her partner for four years, she’d been to his house for dinner countless time, played with his children, kept vigil and comforted his wife when he’d gone under the knife to correct a back problem. There was a bond between them that transcended their professional relationship. She knew him inside and out. As he did her.

  “Never happen. You’d explode.”

  Elliot looked over the rim of the glasses he’d only recently been forced to wear for close-up work. “A little respect for your elders.”

  “Ten years does not make you my elder, Elliot,” she scoffed, rising. “It just gives you more candles to blow out on your birthday cake, that’s all.”

  He turned his chair to get a better view as she paused in the doorway. “And just what are you going to be doing while I’m doing all this mind-numbing research and legwork, Oh fearless leader?”

  She jerked her thumb down the corridor just beyond the door. “Well, for one thing, I’m going to see what the diligent people at the bomb investigation unit have come up with for me. Maybe we’ll get lucky and can trace where he bought the detonating devices. Better yet, maybe he didn’t buy it and one of his group did.
Oh, and one more thing.” She paused in the doorway. “See if you can get a line on your snitch.”

  “So far, I haven’t been able to contact him.”

  “Keep trying.”

  He nodded. There was no question that Lydia worked harder than any three people he knew, but that didn’t stop him from pretending to complain about his own workload. “Next time Zane asks for lead, remind me to raise my hand first.”

  “Next time,” she echoed with a nod of her head as she walked out.

  As someone who had suddenly become aware that they had fallen asleep without meaning to, Lydia realized that her mind wasn’t on her work. Somehow, while she had been trying to understand the lengthy technical data reports spread out in front of her, her thoughts had strayed to the tall, imposing surgeon who had been able to pull Conroy through.

  It wasn’t like her to not focus on her work, but then, maybe she’d been too focused and this was her mind’s way of telling her she desperately needed a break. The data had begun to swim before her eyes.

  Exhausted, Lydia rose from behind the cramped computer desk where she was sitting and stretched. She needed air and food, and she wanted to feel a little like a human being again rather than some kind of a machine that processed information, searching for the piece that would pull everything together.

  What she needed most of all, she thought grudgingly, was a break in this case. She was always dogged about her assignments, but this one was going to haunt her for a long time. The boy was already dead when she’d reached him, but his eyes seemed to have looked straight at her. It may be cliché, but she felt as if his spirit wouldn’t rest until she brought all the people involved in the bombing to trial.

  To make things worse, Elliot still hadn’t been able to reach the man who had provided them with their lead in the first place. She had a very bad feeling about that.

  Just as she rose to her feet, feeling an annoying stiffness in the shoulder that had been wounded, her pager came to life. Glancing at it, she recognized the number on the screen. Rodriguez.

  “You going somewhere?” Elliot asked as he walked in with two huge, covered, containers of coffee he’d just bought at the new café on the next corner. The chain of coffee shops, he’d commented to her earlier, seemed to be multiplying like rabbits, with stores springing up all over.

  “Rodriguez just paged us.” Grabbing the jacket she’d long since discarded, she pulled it on while simultaneously digging out her cell phone. She didn’t want to waste any time calling Rodriguez from the office when she could do it on her way to the hospital. “The ‘suspect’ is either awake, or dead. In either case, it’s a change.”

  Elliot set the containers down on his desk. “Want me to come with you?”

  Elliot was beat, she could see that. He still hadn’t fully recovered from the surgery that had landed him on a six-week medical disability leave, and the hour was late. “I can handle it. You close up for the night here.” She was already at the door. “I’ll call you later if there’s anything to report.”

  Elliot had been with the Bureau for more than fifteen years. He didn’t like being maneuvered into the background, even when he knew the motive behind it. “You don’t have to baby me, Lyd.”

  In a hurry, she paused in the doorway to look at her partner. She hadn’t meant to wound his pride. “I know, that’s Janice’s job.” There was affection in her voice. “Go home and let her do it.”

  “And who’s going to baby you when the time comes?”

  Lydia was grateful that he didn’t know about the wound Graywolf had sewn up for her. There was no question in her mind that if he did, Elliot would pull seniority and go in her place.

  “The person hasn’t been born who’s man enough for the job,” she called over her shoulder before she finally hurried out.

  Elliot could always make her smile, she thought. And he was right, she was babying him. She would have balked if anyone had tried it with her. But there were extenuating reasons for that. She was determined to stand up for herself. This was still, by and large, a man’s world and she had to work twice as hard to get one half the respect a man would get. That meant being on top of things and finding the answers first.

  And never letting her guard down, the way her father had for that split second that had cost him his life, she thought darkly as she hurried into the parking structure for her vehicle.

  He’d died on a day like this, dark and rainy. Died on a day like this and was buried on a day like this. Rain always made her feel sad and lonely.

  She tried to shrug off the feeling as she got behind the wheel of her ’99 silver Honda.

  The mild drizzle was a full-fledged storm by the time she’d driven her car out onto Santa Ana’s city streets. Logically, she knew that after several dry years, they could certainly stand the rain, but that didn’t mean she had to like it. Besides, for the most part, native Californians always acted as if rain was some kind of plague sent down to chastise them for transgressions, and they drove as if they were trying to escape the drops as quickly as possible. Accidents always doubled on rainy days.

  Tension infused her body as she drove to the hospital. She decided to postpone calling Rodriguez until she was almost there. No sense in taking unnecessary chances.

  Despite the unexpected storm, Lukas found the day to be uneventful and tranquil. There’d been no life-saving surgeries to perform, no patients to rescue from the jaws of death. The most exciting thing he’d encountered in his day, he had to admit, had been the special agent with the attitude. Thinking of her made him smile.

  As he filled out his reports, he thought of another determined, dedicated woman—his mother. He decided to take time during his lunch period to call her.

  A far more dutiful son now that he had entered his third decade of life than he had been during the other two, especially his early teen years, Lukas had begun to understand his mother more and more and to appreciate the sacrifices she’d made to give him the kind of life he’d aspired to and ultimately achieved.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked the moment she’d recognized his voice on the phone. “Are you sick?”

  If he closed his eyes, he could see her sitting in the tiny office that served as a teachers’ lounge and principal’s office all in one. Her thick black hair, still without any flecks of gray and plaited in two long strands, reached almost to her waist. Very much the modern woman, she was most comfortable in her native dress and always taught school that way.

  “Don’t worry so much, Mother. If I was, I could heal myself. I’m a doctor, remember?”

  “Remember?” Juanita Graywolf laughed softly. “How could I forget? It took my holding down two jobs for twelve years to get you there.”

  He fully appreciated that and wished she would let him take care of her now. Or at least have her agree to slow down. Her concession to his entreaties had been to relinquish her second job and retain only one. The one she adored. Teaching at the reservation school.

  Before he could say anything else to her, she repeated, “Why are you calling?”

  “Do I need a reason?”

  “Need one, no. Usually have one, yes.” He heard a bell ringing in the background. Lunch was over. The children would be filing into her small classroom soon. “So, what’s up?”

  It was good to hear her voice. It occurred to him that he hadn’t seen her in some time. How did life keep getting so busy? “Nothing, I just ran into someone who kind of reminded me of you, that’s all. Stubborn, plows right through everything, knows best.”

  There was a smile in her voice. “Sounds like a lovely woman.”

  “I didn’t say she was a woman.” But he might have known she’d figure it out.

  “You didn’t have to. You said the person reminded you of me. If it had been a man, you wouldn’t have thought to call.”

  “Maybe I would have,” he countered, absently looking at his calendar. September. What happened to his summer? “I’m overdue.”

  “Yes, I know.
And right now, so am I.” He could hear voices behind her. Young voices. “Call me tonight. Or better yet, tomorrow night. Your uncle’s going off on a fishing trip and I’ll be alone. It’ll be nice to hear another voice.”

  “You’ve got it, Mother,” he promised. “Talk to you then.”

  “I’ll hold you to that.” There was a slight hesitation. “Lukas, nothing’s wrong is it?”

  “No, nothing.” He could probably never cure her of worrying. But then, he’d given her a great deal to be worried about when he was younger: running with the gang on the reservation, collecting him at the local jail for joyriding in a vehicle that, unknown to him, one of the other boys had stolen. “Really.”

  “Good. I’ll be waiting tomorrow night.” With that, she hung up.

  Lukas smiled to himself as he returned the receiver to its cradle and reached for his umpteenth cup of coffee. Pulling it closer, he settled back to dictate the notes he’d made while examining Mrs. Halloway. Eighty-seven years old and the heart of a young cheerleader. She made a semi-annual pilgrimage to his office at the insistence of her children and grandchildren—and to flirt with him. He only hoped that he was half as energetic when he reached her age.

  He paused when he realized that he’d dictated “Wakefield” instead of “Halloway” into the machine. Lukas rewound the tape to the point where he’d made his mistake. He was accustomed to strong, powerful women who took charge as if it were their God-given right. Coming from a matriarchal society, Lukas had encountered women of Special Agent Wakefield’s persuasion since he’d begun walking and talking. He’d learned how to integrate his own life with theirs without losing any of his own self-respect or his convictions, or surrendering any of his masculinity. Rather than waste time butting heads, he chose other ways to get things done his own way.

  He had to admit, though, that he hadn’t encountered someone like Lydia since he’d left the reservation for good. There hadn’t been anyone quite like her in the large world he’d been moving through since he graduated from medical school and earned his position on Blair Memorial’s staff.