And he shouldered his way through the door and out into the bustling streets of Chinatown.
Rathe lurched to his feet, thinking to give chase even though he knew it was no use. Then the cell phone rang again, and a name leaped to lightning-sharp focus in his mind. Nia!
The bastard knew their names and their purpose. What if he’d already gotten to her?
He slapped the phone open. “Nia? Are you okay?”
“McKay. What the hell are you doing?” The booming voice on the other end of the line was familiar, though it certainly wasn’t Nia.
“Jack,” Rathe held the phone to his ear and jogged back the way he’d come. “I’m glad it’s you. We have a problem.”
The elevator was slow in coming and he waited impatiently, telling himself she was fine. She was in her office. Safe. This was Boston, not Tehru, damn it.
Wainwright’s voice was sharp. “You’re damn right we have a problem. Nia French says you told her to quit.”
Rathe stepped into the elevator and stabbed a button. Forced himself to breathe evenly. She was fine. He was overreacting. He wasn’t going to let this happen again. “Yes, I did. There’s something going on in this hospital. Something bad. I want her out of here before she gets herself hurt.”
“You’re ditching the assignment?”
Rathe scowled into the phone. “Of course not. You know better than that, Jack. I’m staying, but I want Nia out of danger.” The service elevator let him off in the lobby, and he transferred to one of the brushed-steel lifts that would carry him up to the Transplant Department.
Wainwright’s grumble vibrated on the airwaves. “It’s her job to be in danger, McKay. Remember?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Rathe retorted. “She quit.”
“No. She didn’t quit. She phoned me and threatened to sue both our asses for sexual discrimination.”
“She did what?” Rathe ignored the curious stares of the two white-coated researchers sharing the car with him. He supposed the image was incongruous—a rumpled janitor shouting into a phone boasting technology that hadn’t yet transitioned from the military to the public.
“You heard me.” Wainwright’s voice dropped to a threatening hiss. “Fix this, McKay. I don’t care how you do it, but fix this. She’s one of the best young M.D.s I’ve got. I will not lose her, do you understand?”
The doors slid open and Rathe stepped out of the car. He glanced around to make sure he was alone, then lowered his voice and grated, “She’ll be lost for good if you don’t pull her off this case, get it? I just tangled with one of our suspects and he called me by name. Worse, he knew her name, too.”
There was a beat of silence. Then Jack sighed. “Proceed with caution, McKay. That’s all we can ever do in these situations.” He paused. “You’re in contact with the local police?”
Rathe gripped the phone so tightly his knuckles cracked. “Damn it! Haven’t you heard a word I’ve said? Nia is in danger, and I want her off the case. Now.”
“This isn’t your call, McKay. I don’t want a harassment suit on my hands, and more important, I want Nia French in Investigations. She’s a brilliant doctor and she has no fear. I want you to train her, Rathe, not protect her.” There was a heavy silence. “If you can’t handle it, then I’ll pull you off the case and give her to someone who can. Jacobsen is free right now, or maybe Roscoe.”
Rathe cursed in Russian, his favorite language for profanity. “Jacobsen is practically a rookie himself, and Roscoe is—” too jaded, too handsome, too slick with the ladies and just a little bit careless “—not right for this case.” He lowered his voice further as a group of med students filed by in the wake of Director Talbot, who frowned as though wondering why his undercover operative was skulking near the elevator. “Please, Jack. Take her off this case. I’ll train her on another job, I swear it. Just not this one. I’ve got a bad feeling.”
Wainwright’s voice gentled, as though he knew something about the things Rathe preferred to keep hid den. “She’ll be fine. She’s smart and she’s tough. Just watch her back. That’s all partners can ever ask of each other.” And the line went dead.
“Damn it!” Rathe jammed the phone back inside his coveralls and strode to Nia’s borrowed office. “You’d better be at your desk, Nia French,” he muttered. “You’d better be okay, because if you’re not…”
Just watch her back, Jack had said. Well, Rathe hadn’t been watching just now. Not well enough.
He slammed through her door, which hung slightly ajar, and froze. Tension boiled like bile in his stomach.
She wasn’t there. And the office was a wreck.
Chapter Four
Emergency!
The call crackled over the intercom, and the hallway was suddenly filled with the noise of running feet as nurses and doctors rushed to answer the call.
In a supply closet nearby, Nia heard the commotion and felt her eyelid twitch. She shoved a box of syringes back onto its shelf, jammed the inventory list into her pocket and slipped into the corridor, hoping her tic was wrong.
She wanted a break in the case, yes, but not at the expense of a patient.
“Marissa! I told you to call me if she deteriorated!” Logan Hart shouldered Nia aside without apology and pushed his way through a knot of scrub-clad nurses into the patient’s room.
“I’m sorry, Dr. Hart. It happened so quickly, I didn’t—” The dark-haired nurse trailed off when she realized the handsome young doctor wasn’t listening. She made a face and turned away, then frowned when she saw Nia had witnessed the break in protocol. Her eyes flickered to Nia’s badge and she winced. “I’m sorry, Dr. French. That was unprofessional of me.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Nia answered automatically, though her attention was on the crowded doorway.
Inside the room Hart’s voice barked a string of commands and the chaos gained a sense of order. From the hallway she could just see one of the patient’s hands peeking out from beneath the sheet.
Marissa grimaced. “We’re all tense these days, especially when we’re monitoring one of the high-risk transplants. Like Julia here.” Her voice softened on the name, saddened.
High-risk. It connected in Nia’s head with an almost audible click. She turned to the nurse, who stared at the still figure on the bed with shadows crowding her broad face. “I’m sorry.” Nia touched the other woman’s arm when the tension inside Julia’s room swung from hectic to frantic. “I’m sure you did your best. Rare-tissue-type patients don’t have the best of prognoses to start with.”
It was a fishing expedition cloaked in sympathy, and it made Nia feel faintly slimy. But this, like danger, was part of the job.
The nurse shook her head. “Julia was one of the lucky ones—or she should have been. She was rare type, but they found a match quickly. A really good match.” In the room frantic turned to desperate, and Hart barked one order atop the next, sending nurses and junior doctors scrambling. But the bloodless fingers didn’t move.
A vise tightened around Nia’s lungs and heart. “She’s rejecting?”
“She’s dying,” the nurse said flatly, turning away. “If you’ll excuse me, I have other patients to tend.” She hurried away and didn’t bother to glance back as she slipped into a nearby ladies’ room.
Nia understood. She always preferred to mourn in private, as well. But it wasn’t the time to grieve for a stranger named Julia, or for the memories of another such room. It was time to do her job. Squaring her shoulders, she eased into the patient’s room, grabbed a surgical mask and held it to her mouth as she slid along the back wall. As a visiting doctor she had the right. As an investigator she had the duty.
And as the woman bent on solving this case in spite of Rathe McKay and his outdated chauvinism, she had the need.
“Come on, Julia, don’t quit on me now!” Hart’s expression remained determined, but there was hopelessness in the faces around him as the Boston General staff worked to save the young, carrot-haired woman. Her skin
was gray blue, the monitors around her nearly flat. Over the taint of antiseptic, Nia could smell death long before Hart called it.
“Time of death, thirteen-forty. Damn it.” He stripped off his gloves and tossed them in the direction of a hazardous-waste bin. He stalked past Nia without acknowledging her.
She tried to move, but her feet wouldn’t budge.
She should follow him. Talk to him. Confirm what Marissa and her ticking left eyelid had suggested, that this transplant patient was one who—on paper, at least—shouldn’t have died. But Nia remained rooted to the spot, staring at the orange-haired girl on the bed and the nurses working on the still figure, moving slowly now that there was no rush.
But it wasn’t a stranger’s face Nia saw in the bed. It was her father’s.
Her own.
Pain sliced into her lower back, sharper than it had been in the five years since the operation. She bit back a cry, pressed a hand to the scar on her belly, bolted from the room—
And crashed into Rathe.
RATHE GRABBED HER by the upper arms and felt terror morph to anger in an instant. He shook her. “Where the hell have you been?”
She didn’t fight back, just sagged against him, which he found more unsettling than Cadaver Man’s whispered threat. When an attendant shuffled out of a nearby patient’s room and gave them a strange glance, Rathe muttered a curse, kicked a nearby supply closet open and dragged her inside. He flicked on the lights, shut the door and took a long, hard look at her, still not sure what had taken place in her office, what had happened just now.
She was pale. Her eyes were dark, stark holes in her head, and one hand was clamped to her side.
“You’re hurt.” It came out as more accusation than sympathy, and when he advanced with hands outstretched to check the wound, Nia backed away, sudden color flooding her cheeks.
“I’m fine.” When he reached for her, she batted his hands away and snapped, “I said I’m fine. See? No blood.” She lifted her dark, businesslike blazer to show him that the shirt beneath, wrinkled and smeared from when she’d been attacked in the lobby, bore no red stains.
She was unhurt. All the images that had raced through his mind when he saw the ransacked office bled away, leaving frustrated anger in their wake. She was okay. And he’d panicked needlessly. Unprofessionally. The knowledge sent him forward a step. “What do you think you’re doing?”
The question brought her chin up, though the vulnerability lingered in her eyes. “What am I doing still working our case, do you mean? I’m working it because I’m staying, as you very well know.” She lowered her voice and her color flared higher. “Don’t blame me for calling Wainwright. You forced my hand.”
“I’m not talking about bloody Jack Wainwright!” Rathe barked, advancing and feeling a spurt of triumph, or maybe shame, when she backed away. “I’m talking about here. Now.” He cursed and scrubbed a hand over his short, spiky hair. Lowered his voice. “You weren’t in your office.”
And thank God for that.
“No, I wasn’t.” She sighed as though defeated. “I’m not going to hide there and wait for the case to solve itself, Rathe. I’m here to investigate, and I’m going to do my job with or without your help. Got it?”
He wasn’t sure whether to kiss her or lock her in a supply closet for the duration. The bloody woman made no sense, had no idea of the size of the tiger she was tweaking—either in him, or at Boston General.
“I got it,” he snapped, “but I’ve got something else, too.” He took her arm, opened the closet door, and ushered her none too gently out into the hall. “Come on. Into your office.”
She balked. “We shouldn’t be seen together.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he replied, half dragging her down the hall. “Our cover’s blown.”
“What do you—” She stopped spluttering the moment he opened her office, urged her inside and locked the door behind them. She froze. Her color drained again. “What happened in here?”
“That’s what I’d like to know.” Now that he knew she was safe, Rathe felt the adrenaline leak out of him, leaving his chest empty and aching.
He brushed the tattered remains of a cheerful travel poster off the desk and sat, briefly wishing he was on that tropical island. Alone. Or perhaps with a woman who looked like Nia but didn’t have her guts. Her lack of respect for seniority.
Her hell-bent determination to succeed in a dangerous profession.
“When did you find this?” She turned in a full circle, and he saw her eyes light on her gutted handbag and the empty envelope that had contained Talbot’s lists of missing drugs.
“Five minutes ago, maybe less. I ran into your Cadaver Man downstairs and he called me by name. I came up here and found your office trashed.” Remembered panic flickered at the edges of his mind, memories of the images his consciousness had drawn—Nia bound and gagged. Beaten for information she didn’t have. Shot dead and left in a jeep outside HFH local headquarters as a warning. A taunt.
“I’m not her.”
“What?” Rathe jolted his focus back to the ransacked office and found Nia watching him, her dark eyes steady and filled with a compassion he wanted no part of.
“I’m not Maria. This isn’t Tehru. I can take care of myself.”
Anger lashed through him, anger that she’d seen into him, anger that she knew what had happened to Maria and still couldn’t tell that it was exactly the same. The danger was the same. “Is that what you call this?” He swept a hand toward shattered bookshelves. “Taking care of yourself? Just what were you doing while your office was being tossed? And why the hell didn’t you lock the door?”
Her eyes narrowed. “I did lock the door. And for your information, I was watching a woman die. A rare-type kidney transplant rejected her organs and died, even though she was a high-risk case. She was young. Healthy. They found a donor quickly…”
Yet still she had died. Rathe felt a stab of sorrow for the patient, a slice of remorse for having manhandled Nia right after she’d run from the patient’s room looking as if she’d seen—
What? A ghost? Something else?
He sighed. “Listen, Nia—”
“No, you listen, Rathe. I’m staying on this assignment no matter what you say. Our cover’s blown? Then we’d better figure out how it happened. My office is trashed and my files stolen? Then let’s start asking why someone doesn’t want me to have Talbot’s information, and how they got a key. A woman is dead?” She faltered and took a deep breath before continuing, “Then we’re damn well going to figure out how and why, so we can stop it from happening again. Got it?”
He frowned down at her. “Pretty speeches won’t get the job done, Nadia.”
“No, but I will. And don’t call me Nadia.”
She walked to the corner of the office and stared down at her pillaged handbag. When she bent to retrieve it, he stopped her with a quick, “Leave it. We’ll want Talbot and the detectives to see the mess.”
She straightened. “Does that mean you’re still on the case? You’re not going to ask Wainwright to reassign you?”
“I’m on the case.” Rathe scowled. “We’re on the case. On one condition.” He reached for the doorknob, needing to be somewhere, anywhere that wasn’t two feet away from Nadia French.
Her eyes lit with a hint of the excitement he hadn’t felt in a long, long time. The thrill of the hunt. “What condition?”
He stared at the blank wood of the door. “Don’t mention Maria to me again. Ever.”
FIVE MINUTES LATER, after she’d mastered both her irritation with Rathe and her grief for a stranger named Julia, Nia went in search of Logan Hart. She found the doctor in his office and tapped on the door frame. “Dr. Hart?”
He looked up from his paperwork, and his frown tilted up at the corners. “Dr. French, come in, please. And call me Logan.”
“Then I’m Nia.” As she sat she was surprised to realize that Logan Hart was actually quite attractive in a clean-cut, unlined
fashion. Though he appeared only a few years younger than Rathe’s chronological age, a decade or more could have separated them.
Of the two, Nia found Rathe far more attractive in a completely wrong-for-her sort of way.
He’d pushed her away seven years earlier, when she would have followed him anywhere. He’d abandoned her, and worse, he’d abandoned her father.
Given that, why did she still want to grab on tight and kiss him until he admitted there was something between them?
“Nia? Is everything okay?”
Flustered and suddenly warm, she waved a hand at Logan. “I’m fine. I’m just…” Just what? And why did it seem as though she’d spent the past three days assuring everyone she was fine?
“Still recovering from that nasty scene down in the atrium?” He leaned back in his chair, concern evident in his eyes. For some reason the expression didn’t grate on her as it would coming from Rathe.
She inclined her head. “That, and someone trashed my office while I was watching you work on your patient Julia.”
Hart jolted. “You what? Who?” He lurched halfway to his feet then sat back down. He took a deep breath and pressed his palms to the desk. “Was anything taken?”
“Some of my working files.” Nia shrugged, hoping he wouldn’t ask why she’d kept her notes in the office. Rathe hadn’t crucified her for the lapse, but she knew it had been a mistake. If the intruder had any doubt about her involvement in the case, those files had provided proof. “They’re replaceable. My pocketbook was upended but nothing was taken.”
“Which means it wasn’t robbery.” When she cocked an eyebrow, he shrugged. “It happens. This is a big hospital.” He glanced at her, and Nia knew he was seeing the smudges on the collar of her once-white shirt. The wrinkles she’d tried to brush out and failed. “You’ve had a hell of a day, haven’t you?”
His expression invited her confidence, but something held her back. Maybe it was the smoothness of his cheeks, marked with neither stubble nor character. Maybe it was the feeling that something was slightly…off in Hart’s office. Or maybe it was the sudden realization that she’d made a grave tactical error. He’d been shocked by her earlier announcement, but he’d hidden it quickly. Naturally she’d assumed he was reacting to news of the break-in.
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