Except that he had alibis. Or so it looked on the surface, Tony thought.
“Maybe,” he agreed. “Why don’t you dig a little deeper, make sure that our boy didn’t hire someone to do his dirty work. Check into his finances, see if any large sum of money moved out of his accounts recently. Hit men don’t come cheap. Maybe—” Tony stopped abruptly as he saw Harry Ackerman walking into the squad room.
Leaving his thought, and Henderson, hanging, Tony got out of his chair and crossed over to the detective. The latter obviously hadn’t seen him and was walking to the rear of the squad room, to the captain’s office.
“Hey, Ackerman,” Tony called. “What’s up? Why aren’t you with Dr. Pulaski?” And then a partial answer occurred to him. His expression drew deadly serious. “Something happen?”
Ackerman stopped walking. He frowned. The jowls on his face resembled that of a well-fed hound dog. “Yeah, something happened. The doc told me to tell you that she’s decided to refuse police protection.”
“What?” That was a stupid move and Sasha did not strike him as a stupid woman.
“She told me to tell you she’s decided to refuse police protection,” Ackerman repeated a little more slowly. He knew better than to flippantly ask Santini if he was going deaf.
Tony waved an impatient hand at Ackerman. He could feel Henderson staring at him. It just served to heighten his annoyance. What the hell was going on here? Why would the woman suddenly decide to play hero?
“I heard you the first time.” His eyes narrowed as he looked at Ackerman. “What did you do to make her change her mind?”
Ackerman straightened, like a man bracing himself for a blow. “Nothing.”
“You must have done something,” Tony insisted, doing his best not to lose his temper. He’d never been on the easygoing side but lately it felt as if all his emotions were closer to the surface than they’d ever been. Ready to explode. “Everything was all right last night when I left you there outside her apartment.”
Ackerman moved his wide shoulders in a hapless shrug. “Don’t look at me. It wasn’t my idea. She said I scared her patients. I offered to stay in her reception area, but she didn’t think that was good enough, or far enough away,” he added, annoyed himself.
The man wasn’t exactly warm and cuddly, but he wasn’t Frankenstein either, Tony thought in exasperation. Pulling out his cell phone, he punched in Sasha’s number. He listened to the phone ring five times before her voice came on. But as he began to speak, he realized he was talking to a pre-recorded message.
Tony bit off a curse as he waited for the beep as instructed.
“Listen,” he said into the phone after the beep had sounded, trying to ignore the fact that he was conversing with a machine, something he hated, “you don’t get to call off police protection. Only I get to do that. Damn it, I hate talking to machines,” he shouted.
It was the last thing he said into the phone before terminating the call.
When Tony started striding through the squad room, heading toward the exit, Henderson was quick to follow. He was only a step behind the primary investigator as they walked out into the corridor.
“Okay, so what’s the plan, Santini?” he wanted to know.
The plan. He hadn’t anything as clear-cut as a plan. He was back to flying by the seat of his pants—and following his gut. And his gut told him that Sasha might be the next target.
“I’m going back to the hospital. The key to all these murders has to be there. Maybe I can get the administrator to have one of her people cross-reference all the patient records against the staff they interacted with.” If the woman refused because of some doctor-patient privilege, he had a few other options to try that weren’t quite so much on the straight and narrow. But he’d learned to give protocol a try whenever possible. “Maybe there’s a connection there.”
“No more bodyguards?” Henderson wanted to know.
“I didn’t say that,” Tony bit off. His tone told Henderson to back off.
Henderson was very good at picking up on tones. It was part of the secret of his longevity on the force—and why he’d managed to survive for as long as he had with Tony. He knew better than to rock the boat.
“No, no, Dad, I’m okay. We’re all okay. You don’t have to come out of retirement. Really,” Sasha insisted. The second she’d seen the story on Tyler Harris’s murder, she’d been expecting her father’s call. She’d already had one from her mother.
She was beginning to think of the cell phone as an evil invention, meant to bedevil her.
“I have already made up my mind, Sasha. Conrad has been after me to join the security firm he is running. Now I have a reason.”
Conrad Zemanski was her father’s oldest and best friend. Both had served on the police force together. Conrad had taken early retirement after having been wounded on the job. A small inheritance from his wife’s uncle had given him enough money to start his own security firm. A firm her father seemed dead set on joining now.
“Daddy, even if you do become a guard, that doesn’t mean that you’ll automatically be sent over to PM. Conrad might not even have a contract with the hospital.” She crossed her fingers as she said it.
“Yes, he does,” her father’s voice boomed in her ear. “Conrad’s firm has a contract with many of the hospitals in the area. I told him what was happening, and your hospital is looking for more security even as we are talking.”
Sasha closed her eyes, searching for strength. “Daddy, you don’t have to do this. Detective Santini’s already assigned a bodyguard to me.” And I got rid of him, but you don’t have to know that.
“Why? Why just you? What is it you are not telling me?”
She realized her mistake too late. “I always tell you everything, Daddy. And I’m not the only one getting a bodyguard. There’re several other doctors as well.” It was a white lie, but under the circumstances, she could be forgiven, she thought. She was only out to give her parents peace of mind. Instead of losing her own. “So you see, I’m fine. You can stop worrying.” The sun, she knew, would stop rising sooner than her father would stop worrying, but she was bound to go through the motions.
“Sasha, you know that I—”
She could smell an argument coming. “I’ve got to go, Daddy. I’m being paged. Oops, that’s Mrs. Miller. Twins,” she told him hurriedly. “Babies don’t wait to be born. Love to Mom.”
She disconnected the call before he had a chance to make another protest or mount another argument. With a sigh, she leaned back in her chair, eyes closed.
“It’s not nice to lie to your father.”
Startled, Sasha swung her chair around to face the doorway. Her pulse accelerated when she saw Tony standing there. She drew in a long breath to steady it, hoping that she hadn’t suddenly become flushed. Flushed was for teenagers. Not even teenagers, she amended.
She watched Tony enter the room. It was more as though he took possession of it. “What are you doing here?”
His expression was unreadable. “Listening to you lie to your father.”
She straightened her shoulders defensively. “I wasn’t lying.”
“Oh?” Crossing his arms before him, he leaned a hip against her desk. Parking his torso much too close to her. “What do you call untruths in your world?”
“I call it making him feel better.” She loved her father, but he was the poster child for the overprotective dad. “If he had his way, my sisters and I would all be wrapped up in cotton batting and stored in some large closet.”
“The man was a cop,” Tony reminded her. He felt a smile attempting to curve his lips. She had that effect on him, he thought as he banked it down. “He knows better than most what could happen.”
“All of life’s a risk. By definition,” Sasha added with emphasis. She deflected the conversation back toward him. “Now, what are you really doing here?”
The smile faded on its own. “Why did you send Ackerman away?”
“I told h
im why. I can’t do my work and have him looking over my shoulder. My patients expect privacy and rightly so.”
She was smarter than that, he thought. Ackerman wasn’t going to be standing two inches away from her while she was in her office. He was supposed to provide protection for her as she went from one place to another.
“He’d keep out of your way,” he told her.
A good number of her patients were pregnant right now. Which meant that their hormones and emotions were in flux. It didn’t help to see a hulking man sitting in the waiting room.
“None of my patients are going to suddenly pull out a gun on me.”
“No.” He did his best to keep his temper, but there was no denying that he was wasting time trying to convince her of something that he felt was necessary. “But someone else might.”
She didn’t want to think about that. “Did you check out the husband?”
Tony nodded. “He’s clean. Nasty son of a bitch, but clean.”
She smiled, storing her frustration for a moment as she touched his face.
Sasha felt stirrings. Too fast, too intense. She dropped her hand, needing to get a handle on this before it overwhelmed her.
“Maybe it was just a coincidence, all the victims being in the O.R. with that patient.” She shrugged ruefully. “My fault for thinking there was something to it.”
They both thought there was something to it. “I don’t believe in coincidences.”
“But if the husband’s clean…”
“Maybe we didn’t dig deep enough,” he countered. He surprised himself by letting her into his thought process. “You remember ever being in the O.R. with them on any other occasion?”
She shook her head. “No. We interacted, saw each other in the halls, but our fields of expertise didn’t bring us into the O.R. together—except for that one occasion.”
“I’ve got Henderson at the hospital, having Lauren James dig into the records, cross-referencing them to see if the victims ever had any joint dealings with any other patient. You might not even figure into the equation,” he added.
Her eyes met his. He didn’t really believe that, she thought. But for the sake of argument, she said, “Then I really won’t be needing police protection.”
Tony looked at her for a long moment. “Don’t be so quick to refuse police protection.”
“Do I get to choose which detective I have protecting me?” she said playfully.
She already had the answer to that, he thought. “I’ll be by later to take you home. You’ll be here?”
“Here or at the hospital.”
“You’ll be here.”
This time, it wasn’t a question. It was an order. She felt herself bristling slightly. And then the buzzer on her telephone went off. “That’s Lisa,” she told him, referring to her nurse. “She gets on my case if I start falling behind.”
“I’ll let you get back to your work,” he told her, crossing to the threshold. He paused for a moment longer. “Don’t leave without me.”
The order made her feel simultaneously protected, rebellious—and nervous. For a whole barrage of reasons.
Chapter 14
Tony finally got Sasha to agree to let him bring her home when she was finished. And then he was faced with waiting for her day to end. He discovered that she actually kept worse hours than he did.
Long after his own workday was officially closed—and for once, there were no calls on his cell—she was still on the job. The moment he finished the last of his paperwork at the precinct, he called Sasha to make sure she was still at her office. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her, but he’d learned in a very short matter of time that the woman was unbelievably headstrong. Willful even as she flashed that innocent smile at him.
Lisa had left for the day and Sasha answered her own phone, just in case it was one of the mothers-to-be. Her voice grew warm and intimate the moment she recognized his voice.
“I’m just heading out to the hospital to make my rounds before I go home,” she told him. “Barring an emergency, I should be done in about half an hour or so.”
“Wait for me,” he instructed.
She could hear movement on the other end of the line and could almost see him slipping on his jacket, heading for the door. Trying to outrun her.
Sasha smiled. “Tony, I am perfectly capable of crossing the street and walking into the hospital on my own.”
He knew she’d say that. Knew, too, that it was useless to argue with her. She’d do what she wanted to do. All he could hope for was compromise. “Don’t take any shortcuts.”
He heard the smile in her voice and could envision her giving a mock salute. “Yes, sir, Detective, sir. Only long cuts.”
He wondered if she actually thought this was a joke, or if she was doing this for his benefit. “In plain sight, Sasha.”
“Does Dr. Palmer get this kind of up-close-and-personal service?” she wanted to know.
“No.”
“Why?” she teased.
There was a long pause on the line before she heard him say in a low whisper that fairly raised goose bumps on her flesh, “I haven’t slept with Dr. Palmer.”
“Good to know. See you at the hospital.” With that, she broke the connection.
She’d made a joke in response to his answer because the implications of his words might have been serious. The trouble was, she wanted them to be serious. But she couldn’t afford to go there just in case they weren’t. Just in case he was only talking and nothing more.
Sasha sighed as she went down in the elevator. She didn’t want to open up her heart and risk having it snatched out of her chest again. Loving a man had taken its toll on her, had had its price. Allowing love to take her prisoner again, well, she didn’t know if she was up to that.
As if she had a choice, she thought ruefully, hurrying across the street to the hospital entrance.
Love, her mother had once told her, although not in these exact words, was not like a faucet that you could turn off and on. It happened of its own accord and you could chose to follow your heart or not, but you couldn’t dictate who you did or didn’t love. It just wasn’t that easy.
And nothing about Detective Tony Santini was easy, she thought later that night as he brought her not just into her building, but to her apartment door. The man would have made the word hello difficult.
She paused at her door just before she began the search for her key. “Would you like to come in?”
More than you’ll ever know, he thought. And his professional responsibility had nothing to do with it. Interwoven into his investigation, into all the reams of facts and databases he’d gone through, had been thoughts of this dark-haired, blue-eyed doctor. Of the night they’d spent together. Of the nights to come that he wanted to spend with her.
This wasn’t like him, he berated himself. He had ironclad control over his feelings, over his thoughts.
Or at least he had had.
Until he’d taken on this case. And her.
He shrugged at her invitation, trying to appear indifferent. Trying, without success, to maintain a professional relationship. “I thought I’d just, you know, stay in the car for the night.”
It was downright cold tonight. He’d freeze sitting in his car and he couldn’t leave the heater on all night. The fact that he didn’t want to remain in her apartment told her that maybe she’d misinterpreted the signals he’d been sending.
She looked up into his eyes. Trying not to get lost. “I thought we decided that I don’t need a bodyguard.”
He shook his head in response. “No, you decided you didn’t want someone looking over your shoulder while you worked. There were no actual decisions made about you not having a bodyguard.”
She made one more attempt to bow out gracefully. “I’m safe,” she insisted. He raised one eyebrow, obviously waiting to hear what led her to this conclusion. “My sisters are probably in the apartment. The murderer only kills his victims, no collateral damage.”
>
“So far,” Tony was quick to point out, his tone indicating that it was just a matter of time. “Our boy’s not a serial killer, he’s a dedicated executioner. We’re not dealing with an obsessive-compulsive. He could easily change his pattern just to get what he’s after.” He pinned her with a penetrating look that went clear back to her spine. “You want to take that chance with your sisters’ lives?”
He knew he had her there.
“If you’re going to be my bodyguard, then you can stay in the apartment.” She raised her chin. Her breath skimmed along his skin. “Closer to the body you’re supposed to be guarding.”
He found himself only an inch away from her. And wanting even that distance to melt away. Tony felt his belly tighten. “How close?”
She smiled at him, knowing she was going to regret this in the morning. Or the next morning. Or the morning after that. But right now, she didn’t have enough willpower to push him away. To hold herself in check. Nor did she really want any.
“As close as you like.”
He knew how close he’d like. But that would require his putting his very job description on hold and he just couldn’t afford to get distracted. Her life might depend on it.
Besides, her sisters were inside the apartment and he wasn’t one of those people who could block out the world and allow himself to indulge in his fantasy. But, if he were being honest with himself, he’d been blocking out the world, standing on the outside, for most of his life.
There was a war going on inside of him and no matter which side won, he’d lose.
Framing Sasha’s delicate face with his hands, he brought her mouth closer to his and then he kissed her. Slowly. As if they had all the time in the world instead of a finite amount, after which he would return to his duties, his world, and she would go back to hers.
But the kiss satisfied nothing.
It only made him want more. Made him want her more. So much that he felt desire become almost overwhelming in proportion.
Her Lawman on Call Page 15