“Two of those patients have died due to complications following a high fever,” Rick fired back. “Whoever’s administering this stuff isn’t doing it out of the goodness of his heart. And let’s not forget about Deb Parker’s husband.”
“His autopsy didn’t confirm foul play.”
“Doesn’t mean our guy didn’t take him out.”
Zach let out a heavy sigh and set his coffee mug on the scarred end table. Tara wouldn’t be safe until whoever she’d startled in that hospital room was behind bars. The trouble was... “If those patients asked for the injections, whoever administered them isn’t exactly guilty of murder.”
“Murder, manslaughter, selling illegal substances. I’m not picky what we nail the guy for. I just want him stopped. I thought you’d be raring to rattle every cage you can find on this, since the sooner you wrap up this gig, the sooner you have an open field with your—” Rick cleared his throat in a we-all-know-what-I’m-not-saying kind of way “—informant.”
“I told you. There’s nothing going on between Tara and me.”
“Yeah, sure. Whatever you say.”
Zach threw up his hands. “Fine. Believe what you want.” The pain crushing his chest must’ve shown in his face, because Rick instantly sobered.
“Oh, man, I’m sorry. What happened?”
“I blew it. She thinks I’m only trying to recapture what I lost.”
“Are you?”
“No.” He raked his hands through his wet hair. “I don’t know. Maybe. She thinks when I figure out that I was only chasing a dream, I’ll dump her. So she dumped me first.”
“That’s it?” Exasperation pinched Rick’s voice. “You’re just going to let her go?”
“That’s what she wants.”
Coffee spluttered from his friend’s mouth. “Give me a break. Don’t you remember what you told me when I let Ginny walk out of my life?”
“Yeah, a love like Ginny’s comes around once in a lifetime.”
“Yup, and you know what?” Rick jabbed a finger into Zach’s chest. “You were wrong.”
“Great, thanks, just what I needed to hear. Not only is my love life a nonstarter, my buddy’s tossing in his.”
“That’s not what I meant. For eight years, you’ve thought you could never have another love like you shared with your wife. Am I right?”
Zach shrugged noncommittally.
“Maybe you’re right. Maybe you can’t. But that doesn’t mean the life you make with someone new—after we close this case—can’t be just as wonderful.”
Zach crossed his arms over his chest. “What? Now you’re my therapist?”
“It’s my turn. You were right about one thing when you told me to go after Ginny. You said that one day I’d wake up and realize that God wanted to give me so much more than I was willing to let Him.”
“Yeah, save the lectures.”
Rick clunked down his mug and headed for the door. As he twisted the knob, he gave Zach one last disgruntled glance. “All I’m saying is look in the mirror.”
That was the problem. Right from the start, Tara’s big, brown doe eyes, so much like his wife’s, had been what made his heart kick. She deserved better than a guy grasping at ghosts.
* * *
Tara headed to the nurse’s station and caught a whiff of the woodsy cologne Zach favored. Her stomach lurched. She couldn’t face him. Not yet. She reached for the nearest door. The knob turned easily, but when she tried to push inside, the door didn’t budge. Feeling the walls closing in, she smoothed the shirt of her scrubs with a damp palm. Okay, she had to play it cool and not let him see how much he affected her. Yeah, right.
She rounded the corner and pretended to be engrossed in an item on the bulletin board.
A moment later, an elderly man ambled past, leaving that woodsy fragrance in his wake.
Her breath left in a rush. What was wrong with her?
She’d done the right thing. Zach might love Suzie, but he didn’t love her. If he did, he would’ve tried to change her mind the other night. He would’ve refused to leave. He would’ve taken her into his arms and kissed her senseless, until she was thoroughly convinced that she was the only one he wanted to be with.
To think she’d actually contemplated whether she could be with him for Suzie’s sake.
If only she hadn’t invited Zach to dinner. If she’d just ignored his kindnesses for a few more days, they could’ve continued to work together to nail Whittaker, and then Zach would’ve been able to leave with no hard feelings.
Tara peeked around the corner. Not spotting any sign of Zach, she hurried to the nurse’s station.
Dr. Whittaker cut her off. “Where’s that file I asked for? I’ve been waiting in the patient’s room.”
“Sorry. I got sidetracked.” Tara thumbed through the files on the desk and retrieved Mr. Scott’s.
“You’ve been preoccupied a lot lately. It’s affecting your work.”
Tara raised her brows at his insinuation and crossed her arms. “Perhaps we can discuss the performance of all team members at our next department meeting.”
He stood his ground, his eyes narrowing.
She winced at the realization that he might assume she was preoccupied with suspicions of him. “Was there anything else?” she asked, her voice more in control than she felt. When he shook his head, she sat at her desk chair and forced her attention to the data she had to input into the computer, typing blindly until he walked away.
“What was that about?” Dr. McCrae hitched his thumb in the direction Whittaker had disappeared.
“A misunderstanding.”
“He’s been edgy a lot lately. Have you noticed?”
“Yes, now that you mention it.” She was sure McCrae knew more about Whittaker than he was saying. But he was probably worried that the extolled oncologist wielded the power to destroy his career.
Still, if she could coax McCrae to give them some solid proof, Zach’s job here would be done. He could arrest Whittaker, and life would go on as usual. Well, maybe not as usual. Arresting the namesake for the hospital’s new cancer wing was bound to cause some short-term chaos, but it couldn’t be any worse than what the close proximity to Zach was doing to her fragile state of mind.
She set aside a file, and pulled the next one toward her keyboard to give the impression of only casual curiosity as she asked, “Any idea what’s bothering him?”
Dr. McCrae ripped a requisition form from the pad on the desk. “I heard his drug trials were tanking.”
“Oh...those poor patients. Is that why you advised Melanie to seek other options?”
“Who told you that?”
Tara’s fingers stilled on the keyboard. Getting Dr. McCrae to implicate Whittaker was not going as she’d hoped. “Um, I think it was her fiancé.” At least she was pretty sure that’s who’d told Zach.
McCrae clicked open his pen, scrawled his name on the requisition form and then handed it to her. “Well, let’s hope he didn’t tell Whittaker. There’s nothing worse than doing a good deed and having it turn around and bite you.”
Tara’s thoughts veered to the attacks against her. “Yes, I know what you mean.” Her response came out harsher than she’d intended.
“I heard about the shooting. You’re a lucky woman.”
“No, not lucky. Someone was watching out for me.”
“Someone? You mean God?” McCrae snorted. “Then where’s He looking when people like Melanie Rivers are dying inch by inch?”
Too stunned to speak, Tara could only stare.
“Trust me,” McCrae added with a knock of his knuckles on the desk. “You’ll do better looking out for yourself.”
A few weeks ago, Tara would have readily agreed. But watching McCrae stride down the hall, Tara was
n’t so sure anymore. She’d been looking out for herself when she’d asked Zach to leave, and she’d never felt more miserable.
So much for coaxing info out of McCrae to hurry along Zach’s investigation. All she’d succeeded in doing was depressing herself.
“You getting that?” Alice’s voice cut into her thoughts.
“What?”
“The phone. It’s already rung three times.”
Tara’s gaze dropped to the phone, and the red blink of the line-two button snapped her out of her thoughts. She picked up the receiver. “D ward. May I help you?”
“This is the hospital daycare. Is this Tara Peterson?”
Tara’s pulse quickened. “Yes.”
“You need to come right away. It’s your daughter. Something’s wrong.”
EIGHTEEN
Zach rubbed his eyes. Looking at all these phone numbers was making his eyes go buggy. Not a single call on either Whittaker’s or McCrae’s home phone or McCrae’s cell phone matched the number of anyone from the biotech company, or any of the victims. Whether any number matched Samuel Adams, the blogger scheduled to meet their undercover “cancer patient” this afternoon, Zach couldn’t say, because he couldn’t find a record of a Samuel Adams anywhere in Ontario. Not that he’d thought for a moment the blogger would use his real name.
So, either McCrae and Whittaker were too smart to make incriminating calls that could so easily be traced, or Zach was wasting his time trying to prove a connection. Not that the clean records proved anything. The calls to the shooter had originated from the hospital. If only they could trace individual extensions, or find cell-phone records for Whittaker.
Zach checked McCrae’s email next, but his online activity was as nonexistent as Whittaker’s.
Zach thought of Whittaker’s list of patients and the threat Tara had overheard him make against her. The ache in the vicinity of his heart sharpened. He had to stop Whittaker before he got to Tara.
Zach pushed back from the desk he’d commandeered in a quiet corner of the hospital and headed to the lobby to buy a coffee. His mind whirred through options. There had to be something they could trace. Zach pulled out his wallet to pay for his coffee and found a dog-eared photo of his wife stuck to a five-dollar bill.
“Keep the change,” he said to the barista, his gaze fixed on the photo as he laid the bill on the counter. He sat at one of the tables and traced the outline of his wife’s face with his thumb. The photo was faded and worn. The first few months after Carole’s death, he’d pulled it out of his wallet a hundred times a day, but her big brown eyes still sparkled as brightly as ever. He squinted at her image.
Aside from sharing similarly shaped eyes, Tara and Carole actually looked nothing alike. He’d known that from the beginning, but Tara’s accusations had made him wonder.
Not even their eyes looked that alike. Carole’s radiated self-sufficiency and that infernal stoicism that had her comforting him near the end instead of the other way around. In contrast, Tara’s brimmed with determination not to accept the given, and a feistiness to fight the injustice thrown in her path.
Yet, beneath that hard, protective coat she wrapped around her heart, he sensed a quiet yearning to not have to go it alone. A yearning that had called to him from the first day they’d met.
Not that it mattered now. He tucked the photo back into his wallet. She wouldn’t even talk to him.
He didn’t blame her, either. Her fierce protection of Suzie was one of the things he admired most about her.
Zach sipped his coffee and forced his thoughts back to the problem of tracing McCrae’s calls. The man seemed to have no life outside the hospital. Although, from what he’d heard, that wasn’t uncommon for medical residents. Whittaker, on the other hand, had an active social life. As head nurse for the cancer ward, Tara had to have a number where she could reach him in an emergency.
Zach downed the last of his coffee with a fresh burst of energy. Asking Tara for the number was the perfect excuse to reopen the lines of communication.
He rode the elevator to the fourth floor and strode to the nurse’s station. Alice Bradshaw was the only nurse in sight. “Can you tell me where I’d find Miss Peterson?”
“Sorry, I haven’t seen her since I got back from break.”
The answer didn’t surprise him. Tara seemed to have a sixth sense of his vicinity and would duck out of sight before he could corner her. “Perhaps you could help me. I’m...uh, updating the system’s on-call database and I don’t have an emergency number for Dr. Whittaker.”
“Sure, it’ll be his cell-phone number. He prefers that to a pager.” Bradshaw ran her finger down a list taped to the desktop next to the phone. “Actually, the number listed here has been scratched out. I think I remember him saying he lost his phone.”
Or changes it frequently to keep the numbers from being traced, Zach mused.
Back at his desk, he rechecked both suspects’ bank records then pulled up Whittaker’s home phone list one last time. His mind drifted to Tara and Suzie and a thought flickered—a mother. A mother or father would do anything to save their child...even steal.
He scanned the list of the biotech company’s employees. One name stood out.
Zach pulled out his own cell phone and called Rick. “There’s a Patricia Campbell working at the biotech company. Find out if she’s any relation to Peter Campbell.”
“Who’s that?” Rick asked, the sound of computer keys already clicking in the background.
“One of the cancer patients on Whittaker’s list. A patient who’s been mysteriously getting better. If my guess is right, this patient’s sister or wife or mother has provided Whittaker with the Coley’s Fluids in exchange for treating him.”
“Mother!” Rick exclaimed. “Patricia Campbell is Peter Campbell’s mother. She’s worked at the company for twenty-three years. If anyone knew how to slip a case of drugs undetected out of that place, she would.”
“And chances are our Samuel Adams is really Peter Campbell.”
“Could be. Keep an eye on Whittaker, but whatever you do, don’t tip them off. Lucy Baker will keep her appointment this afternoon with Samuel Adams, and if he matches Peter Campbell’s description, we’ll arrest him on the spot.”
“Yeah, with all the charges you could throw at him, he’s bound to give up Whittaker in exchange for a deal,” Zach said drily.
“Sit tight. I’ll be in touch.”
Zach gathered his papers and headed back to the cancer ward. Tara might not appreciate him hanging around, but he wanted to be where he could keep an eye on Whittaker, just in case Campbell managed to tip the doctor off.
Finding no sign of either Whittaker or Tara on the cancer ward, Zach asked the first nurse he happened upon if she’d seen them.
The nurse, Beth, fluttered her hand in the direction of the elevator. “Yeah, I saw Doctor Whittaker tear past me a few minutes ago. Headed for the elevator, I think.”
“And Tara Peterson?”
“She ran out of here like a madwoman after the daycare called.”
Zach fought to keep his paranoia in check. “How long ago was that?”
“Ten, fifteen minutes, maybe. Not long.”
Zach slipped into the privacy of the alcove and checked the GPS coordinates for the transmitter he’d given Tara. The readout showed that she was in the vicinity of the locker rooms. Hesitating only a moment, he let himself in. The room was empty. But the readout was hot.
Checking her locker, he found the radio in the pocket of her sweater, hanging inside. He slammed the door shut and hurried to the elevator. He jabbed the button, but the light above the door didn’t move off six. Surely Whittaker wasn’t sick enough to use Suzie to blackmail Tara into silence. But that was exactly the fear strangling Zach’s throat.
He raced for the
stairs. On the ground floor, he blew out the door at a run and sprinted to the daycare entrance.
The woman who came to the door peered at the ID badge clipped to his shirt pocket. “May I help you?”
“I’m looking for Tara Peterson.”
“I’m sorry, sir. There’s no one here by that name.”
“Is Suzie still here?” He looked over her shoulder, trying to catch a glimpse of the children. “Did Tara pick her up?”
The woman’s fingers turned white where she gripped the door. “I’m sorry, sir. We can’t give out that information.” She pushed the door as if hoping he’d back away without a fight, while anticipating the worst.
He imagined he must look like a deranged ex-husband to this young child-care worker, but he didn’t have time to explain. “Please, I know she came to get Suzie. I need to find them.”
Another child-care worker approached carrying a ladybug raincoat. Suzie’s raincoat. She stopped short as her gaze lit on Zach. “Sorry, I thought you were someone else.”
Would Tara forget Suzie’s coat? Had Whittaker been pursuing her in his haste to the elevator?
The first worker nudged Zach’s shoulder with the door. “We’re sorry, sir. We can’t help you.”
He backed out, heartened by the thought that these women wouldn’t have permitted anyone other than Tara to pick up Suzie.
He tried Tara’s cell phone, but got an out-of-service-area message. She didn’t have a car. How could she be out of the area?
He keyed in Kelly’s number, flubbing it twice in his haste. At the sound of the automated voice message, Zach snapped shut his phone. Lord, where are they?
The thought of losing Tara and Suzie—really losing them—ripped through his heart like a bullet.
Zach raced to the hospital’s rear exit. Whittaker’s Maserati sat in the end lot. McCrae’s Jeep, too.
Zach ran to the security office and pushed through the door without knocking.
“Hey, you can’t be in here,” a burly officer said, hanging up the phone.
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