Technically he hadn’t walked; he’d sent her back to her father. Somehow that had been worse.
“This has nothing to do with ancient history,” he snapped, though Nia swore that, for a moment, his eyes dropped to where her snazzy leather jacket hung over her breasts. Heat climbed her cheeks as he continued, “Nothing!”
“Then what is it about?”
He paused for a moment, seeming to struggle with the answer. Then he exhaled noisily. “You’re a woman, Nia, and I don’t work with women. You know that.”
It was one of the stories her father hadn’t told her, one she’d overheard her parents discussing late at night. Rathe’s partner, Maria, had been killed while they were on assignment. Not long after the incident, he had come to live with Nadia’s family for a few weeks. Gaunt and sad-eyed, he hadn’t spoken much. He’d spent most of his time sitting down by the beach with an empty sketchpad on his knee.
At eighteen, Nadia had known him only from her father’s stories. Though Tony had told her to leave Rathe alone, she had found excuses to wander down by the water. She’d sat on the steps above him, each day bringing a different book, until he’d finally turned around and asked, “What are you reading?”
She’d blushed and shown him the cover of a travel book about Bateo, wishing it were something more sophisticated. A text from her advanced P-chem class maybe, or a mature story about unrequited love.
“I’ve been there, you know,” he’d said.
And though she knew he’d been to Bateo—from the story entitled “The Time Rathe Stopped an Outbreak of Blood Fever”—she had shaken her head and asked him to tell her about the island. He’d described the way the light slanted down between the leaves high above, and how the bugs were bigger, the animals meaner, and the natives tougher than any she’d see in the States.
As he’d talked, his eyes had glowed a molten silver, his shoulders had squared and his back had straightened until he looked like the man she’d expected to meet, not the sad, hollow figure who’d sat down by the beach and sketched nothing.
The next morning he was gone. Inside her heavy book bag—she’d been in her third year of college by then—she’d found a sheet of paper folded inside the book on Bateo. On it was a pencil drawing of a jungle scene with some of the prettiest leaves, biggest bugs, and meanest-eyed creatures she could imagine.
After that he’d sent her presents once or twice—a colorful feather arrangement and a cowrie shell necklace she’d kept in a carved box beside her bed. Then he’d come back the year she turned twenty-one, and everything had changed.
And changed again.
Now she angled her chin up at him. “Yes, I’m a woman, but I’m also damn good at my job. Just ask Wainwright.” She knew full well Rathe had already called their boss, just as she knew he’d pushed to have her yanked from the case and been turned down. “Even better, open your eyes and see for yourself.”
“It’s not that.” He pinched the bridge of his nose.
“Yes, it is.” She stepped into the empty elevator car, bracing an arm across the opening to keep him out. “And for your information, I’m not quitting. If you can’t work with me, you’ll have to take yourself off the case.”
A large part of her hoped he would do just that. A smaller, more feminine part hoped he wouldn’t.
He scowled. “Damn it, Nia! Let me come up. We need to talk about this.” The air around him vibrated with tension, and his eyes seemed to shoot silver sparks, but she wasn’t afraid of him.
Not physically, at least.
She stepped back and pulled her finger off the open-door button. “No. We’ll talk about it tomorrow. Meet me in the coffee shop at seven.”
The doors tried to slide shut. He blocked them with his shoulder and glared at her. “Fine. But promise me one thing. Promise you won’t snoop around the hospital again tonight. Leave that to me, okay?”
Nia might have taken offense at the request, but she was too darned tired to do more than collapse into bed. And there was something in his frustration, in his suddenly human gaze, that told her the request wasn’t just the primary asking his junior investigator not to interfere.
Her father might have called it “The Time Rathe Asked for a Favor.”
Confused, stirred up and weary beyond words, she simply nodded. “Fine. I won’t go back to the hospital tonight. I’ll see you in the morning.”
A glint that might have been relief, might have been triumph, flashed in his eyes and he let go of the elevator doors. “Tomorrow, then.” He turned and walked away as the panels slid shut.
This time it was Nia who slapped a hand to keep them open. “Rathe!” He stopped and looked back without turning. She felt suddenly foolish, but something compelled her to call, “Be careful.”
Maybe he smiled. Maybe he winced. But after holding her eyes with his for a heartbeat, Rathe simply inclined his head and turned away.
Nia let the doors slide shut and resisted the urge to press her suddenly hot face against the cool metal wall.
THE NEXT MORNING Rathe leaned back in an uncomfortable booth and watched Nia enter the hospital coffee shop. A restless night was etched in the deep circles under her eyes. Her skin was tinted with makeup, but the hollows remained. And, damn it, they didn’t detract one iota from her beauty.
Her dark hair curled around her face, adding mysterious shadows to eyes that already knew him too well. A faint blush stained her high cheeks, and her full, sensuous lips drew into a flat line as she sank down opposite him, both hands wrapped around a cup of coffee. She grinned at him, though the expression didn’t quite reach her eyes. “Okay, Bwana. Teach me how to investigate.”
Rathe frowned but didn’t argue. During the long night, he’d acknowledged he would have to teach her some basic survival skills, since she seemed determined to see this through. He would walk her through a safely edited version of an in-hospital covert job, and try like hell to convince her it wasn’t what she wanted to do with her life. He just couldn’t picture her in the Investigations Division, all five-foot-something of her pitted against the ugliness that lurked beneath the underbelly of the medical community.
Why? He wanted to ask. Why are you so set on investigations? Your father would’ve hated it. You could be hurt. Killed. Why?
But that was personal, not business. So instead he pushed a sheet of paper across the table to her. “Let’s start with the laundry room. Why did you follow those men out to the loading dock?”
“What’s this?” She picked up the paper, scanned its contents and answered her own question, “It’s the pickup timetable for the linens. There was a team sched uled for the one-to-three shift the other morning.” She glanced up at him. “Why wasn’t this information in our background packets?”
Rathe shrugged. “Who knows? I copied it from the schedule in the maintenance office…” among other things that she didn’t need to know about. He would tell her enough to do her part of the job and no more. He’d pass along enough to satisfy her, plus a little disinformation to keep her away from the dangerous parts.
Though the case seemed simple on the surface, Rathe had a feeling it was anything but.
“So how do you explain the bed and all the equipment we saw in that so-called laundry van?”
“I didn’t see it.” When she raised an eyebrow, he shrugged. “I didn’t get there until after the door was shut.”
There was no need to tell her that he’d been nearly panic-stricken to see the tiny, furtive figure of a woman heading for the departing van. In an instant he’d been back in the Tehruvian jungle, seeing Maria wave from a rebel army transport.
And that was before he’d realized the shadow in the laundry room belonged to Nadia French.
“Why were you there, anyway? We weren’t supposed to start work until later that morning.” She pursed her lips and blew across the top of her coffee. Sipped. Swallowed.
Rathe looked away. He had to keep this professional. Mentor and student. Senior and junior. The way it
should have been from the very first day he’d noticed his best friend’s daughter watching him from the beachfront stairs.
“I was looking around,” he replied, not mentioning the gut feeling that had drawn him down to the subbasement. He tapped the paper that now lay on the table between them. “Unless you have a compelling reason why you followed those two, I think we should move on.” Rather, she should move on and leave the subbasement to him.
“You’re going to disregard what I saw in the van?” Her fingers tightened enough to dent the cardboard cup.
“No.” Rathe shook his head. “Not disregard. File and continue.” He held up a finger. “Rule one—Don’t fall in love with your own theory. When that happens, you’ll overlook clues that don’t fit.”
He waited for the argument, but she surprised him by nodding. She sipped, then gestured to encompass the hospital. “It’s like making a diagnosis. Don’t pick a disease until you’ve gathered all the facts.”
“Right. Only, think of the entire hospital, or maybe the Transplant Department, as the patient. As a doctor, you’re already used to that sort of investigation. This is simply on a grander scale.” A more dangerous one, though he was determined not to let her experience that firsthand. In the wee hours of the morning, when he’d tried to catnap in the basement break room, he’d decided on that course, with one addition: he was going to do his damnedest to convince her that HFH in general—and investigations in particular—wasn’t for her.
It was what Tony would’ve wanted him to do.
“So our symptoms are as follows,” she began, ticking the points off on her fingers. “First, there’s an in crease in transplant deaths. Second, supply shortages are reported to Transplant Director Talbot and Assistant Director Hart.”
Rathe thought she might have lingered on the second man’s name and he scowled. That was another thing about working with women. They couldn’t keep their minds on business.
She blew on her coffee again, and Rathe forced himself to glance around the near-empty café. They weren’t being overheard. And he was a hypocrite, watching her make love to a cardboard cup while he preached to himself about women and their inability to focus on the job.
He gritted his teeth and gestured for her to continue.
“They’re missing antirejection drugs. Suture kits. That sort of thing.” Another finger joined the first two. “And third, I saw two men leave Transplant with a full laundry cart, even though the linens hadn’t been changed out. They loaded the cart into a van rigged with life support and then…” She glared at him. “Thanks to you, I don’t know what happened to the hamper from there.”
Annoyed, Rathe fired back, “Thanks to me, you didn’t break your neck trying some damn fool stunt in an attempt to—” He stopped himself. “Never mind. We’ve already covered that and you promised not to go down there again without me.” He fixed her with a look. “Right?”
“Sure. Whatever.” She glanced at her watch. “I’m scheduled to observe a rare-type kidney transplant in a little less than an hour. If we’re done here, I’m going up to my office to read over the rest of the material Talbot left for me.”
Done? They hadn’t even started yet, but Rathe didn’t argue the point. It was probably a good thing their covers would keep them separated for the most part. At night he could investigate the depths of the hospital, where he was positive the real machinations were occurring. During the day, he could keep watch over her and make sure she didn’t get too close to the danger he could feel fermenting below the surface of this case.
And sleep? He’d never needed much of that. Like Tony had always said, I’ll sleep plenty when I’m dead.
“Dream well, old friend,” Rathe murmured to himself, forgetting for the moment that Tony’s daughter sat opposite him.
“What was that?”
Rathe shook his head. “Nothing.” He stood. “We’ll meet after the transplant, compare notes and divvy up which one of us will follow which line of inquiry. That’ll save us from duplicating efforts.” And allow him to keep her on the outskirts of the heavy lifting.
“Fine.” She tipped her head, considering. “But we shouldn’t meet in public again. It would look strange, don’t you think?”
Irritated that he hadn’t thought of that first, which just went to show that mixed-sex partnerships were needlessly distracting, Rathe scowled. “You’re right. There’s no reason for a visiting lecturer to socialize with a janitor.” He tried not to let their respective roles annoy him, but Jack Wainwright had no doubt laughed long and loud when he’d decided on their cover stories.
Rathe McKay, legend-turned-janitor.
Oh, well. That made it a hell of a cover.
“We could meet in my office this afternoon,” she suggested tongue in cheek. “You could bring your mop and pretend—”
“I got it,” he growled, trying not to see the absurd humor in it. “But your office won’t work every day—it’ll look suspicious. Why don’t we meet at your apartment at change of shift, instead?”
“No. Absolutely not.” She tipped her chin down, eyes suddenly dark.
Rathe shrugged, trying not to care. “Fine. We’ll figure it out later. You go do your thing, Doc. I’ll be around.”
He watched her walk away and saw a hint of the young woman who’d once sat down beside him on the beach and showed him a book about Bateo. Like that teenager, Nia was still unsatisfied with who she was, where she was, always looking for the next thing that was just out of reach.
They were, Rathe acknowledged with a wry grimace, entirely too alike.
He swept her empty coffee cup off the table and crumpled it in one hand as he hesitated at the café door. He could return to the warren of corridors and small rooms in the basement that were the realm of the maintenance workers, the laundry crews and the other tradespeople who came and went through the large hospital. Rife with gossip and the occasional scoundrel, that was where he’d find the information he sought. He was sure of it.
He glanced over at the big bank of brushed-steel elevator doors that would carry him up into the ivory towers, to the wide, straight corridors and large airy rooms of the treatment and research floors where Nia belonged.
He muttered a curse and turned his back on the temptation. She would have to keep herself out of trouble for an hour. She could do it. She was a big girl now.
Or so she kept insisting.
OVER THE NEXT HOUR, Nia couldn’t cobble the information into a decent theory no matter how hard she tried. The failure grated on her as she shut and locked her office and headed down to the café. She barely had time to grab a quick snack before she observed Dr. Talbot transplant a healthy donor kidney into a young woman who had been born with small, subfunctional organs.
Nia rubbed at the faint scar above her hipbone while she waited for the elevator, her mind still on the mystery she was supposed to be unraveling. She had plenty of questions, but her theories were anemic at best.
The missing supplies made some sense—almost any medical item could be sold on the black market. And it was possible, if not likely, that the laundry hamper was being used to transport the pharmaceuticals down to the loading dock and out of the hospital. That would assume at least one thief had access to the locked supplies. Short Whiny Guy and Cadaver Man were her first guesses. Surely she and Rathe could find the pair.
Rathe. No, she refused to think about him. They had agreed to leave the past where it belonged. He hadn’t wanted the family that had loved him as a son, and he hadn’t wanted the woman who had loved him as a man. In the seven years since she’d last seen him, she had outgrown both her love and her desire to follow in his footsteps across the globe and back.
She’d decided to blaze her own trail instead.
“Focus,” she told herself sternly, glad she was alone in the descending elevator. “This isn’t about you or Rathe. It’s about the patients and the hospital.”
But none of this added up. How did the missing supplies account for the i
ncrease in transplant deaths? Were the two even related?
The doors slid open, and Nia stepped out into the big, open atrium at the center of the hospital, where all the wings intersected. A flash of navy blue caught her eye and she glanced over, half expecting to see Rathe waiting for her, ready to tell her where she could go, who she could see and what she could do.
But it was someone else, a stoop-shouldered old man in a janitor’s dark-blue uniform, listlessly swabbing at a puddle of something she didn’t care to know about.
Ignoring the single twitch of that restless muscle at the corner of her eye, Nia hurried to the café and bought a muffin to make up for the breakfast she’d been too keyed up to eat. She reversed direction and headed back to the elevators, biting into the muffin as her stomach growled.
A heavy blow from behind drove her to her knees.
“Gonna getcha, bitch!” The high-pitched, almost giggling voice near her ear lodged quick panic in her throat.
She hit the floor, the muffin bounced away, and her left eye nearly locked itself shut. Her attacker followed her down and lay crosswise atop her.
Nia squirmed desperately and tried to scream, but the huge, smothering weight drove the breath from her lungs. Faintly she heard cries of alarm. Running feet.
Her heart hammered in her ears, and terror sweated from her palms. Every self-defense move she’d learned was useless. She had no leverage. She pushed against the floor, but to no avail.
“Where’s your money? Where is it?” Rough hands groped at her pockets, at her body. She fought back, jabbing with her feet and elbows whenever her attacker’s weight shifted enough to allow it. But her blows sank into heavy, hot blubber and she still couldn’t breathe.
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