“Another death?” he asked as she strode through the room, dragging off her sleep shirt and not seeming to care that she was gloriously half-naked in front of him.
“No.” She dug a sheer white bra out of a drawer and yanked a white button-down shirt from the closet. “They’ve arrested Logan Hart.”
Chapter Ten
“There’s nothing here.” Hours later Nia pushed away from Logan’s office computer and blew out a breath.
“Of course not, or he wouldn’t have agreed to let us search.” Rathe’s words were muffled by the half-open closet door. Instead of coats, the tiny space contained stuffed-to-the-brim file cabinets. But nothing incriminating. The police hadn’t found anything, and neither had the HFH investigators.
Yet.
“I don’t think he’s guilty. He brought it up last night, and I have to admit I believed him.” To Nia, the awards dinner seemed a lifetime ago. So much had happened since the night before, since even that morning…
She’d rather forget that morning. She wasn’t sure where all the emotion had come from, and the sharp sense of disappointment that had pierced her when she’d realized how wrong things had gone between them.
In his work, Rathe was fearless. The superhero she’d always imagined him. But over the past few days she’d realized he took the emotional easy way out. Blaming himself for Maria’s death was a crutch. His seeming misogyny was a front. Even his promise to her father was a convenience.
He liked to believe he’d done her a favor by sending her away, but he’d really done it for himself. Leaving her had been the easier option, turning it into the story entitled “The Time Rathe Hadn’t Cared Enough.”
She hadn’t needed her father to tell her the story. She’d lived through it firsthand.
“You can’t argue the evidence, Nia.” It took her a moment to remember they were discussing Logan Hart, not their relationship.
“I’m not trying to. I’m trying to make it fit.” She opened a bottom desk drawer and rifled through it. “The blue sedan was his—they know that because of the VIN number, right? But the plates belonged to a stolen car of the same general description.” Which explained why the police hadn’t made the connection immediately.
“Right.” Rathe closed the closet door and turned his attention to the glossy, wooden bookshelf. He pulled each thick tome off the shelf, flipped through it and returned it to its place.
“So why bother?” Nia turned her attention to Logan’s address book, an old-fashioned leather binder. Black, of course. “If Cadaver Man and Pockmark had already stolen the other sedan, why switch plates? Why not use the stolen car?”
She found a card tucked into the back flap of Logan’s little black book. In discreet gold lettering, it spelled out the name of a local matchmaking service. Nia raised her eyebrows.
It seemed Assistant Director Hart needed some help in the social department.
Then again, she wasn’t exactly a poster child for having a life, either, so perhaps she shouldn’t judge. She’d had just two unimpressive-and-almost-not-worth-the-effort affairs since—
“Find something?”
She blushed and tucked the card away. “Nothing relevant. How about you?”
“No. But that’s a good question about the car. You got any ideas?” Rathe dropped into the desk chair and pulled the bottle of ibuprofen out of his pocket. By Nia’s count, he’d already doubled the daily recommended dose, mute testimony to his pain. She felt a flash of healer’s empathy. A moment of womanly desire to soothe.
She banished her urges and the confusion they brought, and focused on the job.
“Well, I can think of two possibilities. One, Logan is innocent and Cadaver Man’s boss is trying to set him up.” She leaned against the wall, as far away from Rathe as she could get and still be in the same room. “Or two, he’s guilty and has reversed the frame, so we’ll assume he’s innocent.”
Rathe looked unconvinced. “I think—”
“Dr. French?” Marissa poked her head through the door. “Can I talk to you for a moment? I— Oh! I’m sorry, Dr. McKay. I didn’t see you there. Never mind.”
Nia’s left eyelid quivered as the woman disappeared. “Logan said something yesterday…” She hesitated, not wanting to sling accusations but needing to know the truth. For the sake of the patients. Her father’s memory. Her own fears. “I’m going after her.”
He stood and met her at the doorway, crowding her and reminding her that he was physically stronger than she. Or maybe that wasn’t his intent. Maybe that was just her body’s awareness of him, of his presence and warmth. Maybe it was his scent, spicy and male through the tang of hospital air.
And maybe she needed to get a grip.
“Excuse me.” She tried to brush him aside, but he didn’t budge.
“Nia. I’m sorry.”
And with a woman’s intuition, she knew he was talking about their earlier relationship, not the case. I’m sorry. Two little words she would’ve given anything for at one time. Now perhaps too late.
She looked up at him and saw beyond the bruises and scrapes to the man beneath. The man she’d once loved, though she’d barely known him. She’d known enough, or so she’d thought.
“Sorry for what?”
“I’m sorry I didn’t come when you called. All other things aside, Tony was my friend and he deserved better.”
If he’d apologized for making love to her, or for leaving, Nia could’ve armored herself or dismissed it. Though part of her had long ago realized that the situ ation wasn’t as simple as she’d wanted it to be, she could still blame him for his choices. But he’d unerringly found the core of her anger.
Being angry for herself was selfish. Being angry for her father was her right.
“Yes. He deserved better. And so did I.”
He held her eyes, and for a brief instant she could see confusion, desire…and regret. So much regret.
Or maybe that was a reflection of her own thoughts.
“I was at the funeral.”
“I know.” She’d sensed him, though at the time had thought it was wishful thinking. “I saw the plant.” A single spindly juniper tree left beside his grave the next day. Sad amongst the blooms and fancy arrangements, it had best represented her father—a man who’d rather sink in his roots than venture abroad.
She had planted the tree beside his headstone, knowing it had come from Rathe. Then she’d waited for him to come to her.
He hadn’t.
“It wouldn’t have been right,” he said, as though she’d spoken aloud. “I couldn’t drag you into my world.”
“No. I dragged myself.” She pushed away and reached for the door. “And now I’m going to do my job. You should try doing yours.”
He caught her wrist, and the contact shimmered through her like the dawn, though she cursed herself for the weakness. “Nia. I’m sorry. I swear it.”
“Fine.” She nodded, and damned the tears that suddenly swam in her eyes. “Apology accepted. Now let me go.”
She closed Logan’s office door behind her, crossed the hallway and pressed her forehead to the cool glass of a picture window while she willed her heartbeat to slow, willed the tears to subside, willed the memories away.
“I’ll be darned,” she murmured after a moment. “He’s right. Men and women can’t work together without it getting personal.”
Or maybe it was just her and Rathe.
Sighing, she straightened and pushed away from the window. Heartsore or not, she had a job to do.
It took her a half hour to track down Marissa, mostly because everyone she passed in the Transplant Department wanted to stop her and defend Logan Hart—sometimes quite vehemently—as though she’d been solely responsible for his arrest. It bothered Nia to have so many venomous looks directed her way.
And it made her further question Logan’s guilt. Thirty character witnesses couldn’t all be wrong, could they?
Sure. Especially when not one of them could suggest
an alternative suspect. The nurses, doctors and technicians melted away when she asked, more comfortable with confrontation than suspecting one of their own.
She finally cornered the dark-haired nurse in a patient’s room. “You wanted to speak with me?”
Marissa nearly dropped the IV bag she’d been changing. Her eyes shot to the door and the hallway beyond, then back to Nia. “Not here.”
Excitement thrummed through Nia’s veins. This was important. She could feel it. “Where, then?”
The other woman lowered her voice to a near whis per, as though the walls were listening. “Outside. I’ll meet you in the doorway of the photo shop across the street in twenty minutes.”
“I’ll have Dr. McKay with me.” When the nurse hesitated, Nia pressed her. “Nine patients have died, Marissa. Two men have been murdered and both Rathe and I have been attacked. I’m not going anywhere without him.”
Though she didn’t trust him with her heart, she trusted him with her life. He’d proven himself more than capable of protecting her. And if that was all she could depend on him for, then so be it.
Marissa nodded. “Fine. Twenty minutes. Now go, before someone sees you in here!”
But as Nia left the patient’s room, the prickling at the nape of her neck told her it was already too late.
“YOU’RE SURE SHE SAID twenty minutes?” Rathe glanced at his watch again, though there was no need. His internal clock said they’d been waiting for more than a half hour.
“Something’s wrong.” At his side, Nia shifted uncomfortably. They were pressed together in the small inset doorway of the photo shop, huddled out of the rain, as neither had thought to bring a jacket.
When she turned to face him, their bodies bumped intimately. Her scent, moist and exotic, rose from her damp skin, causing Rathe to tense as his mind whirled from their earlier confrontation.
He was no coward, emotional or otherwise. He’d owned his mistakes. Apologized for them. Been forgiven.
So why did he feel even worse than before? His chest ached hollowly, a deeper pain than the surface bangs and bruises, and at odd moments he found himself wishing for…what?
He wasn’t even sure anymore.
For so long he’d been sure of his choices, his opinions. Maria’s death had shaped so many of his decisions, from choosing partners to taking assignments. He’d told himself it was solely to protect other HFH operatives from meeting the same horrible end she had. But what if that had been, as Nia said, an excuse? What if he’d been using her death as a way to avoid changing, to keep from moving forward?
No. Impossible. He shook his head and shoved the thought aside.
But it lingered, leaving him wondering What if?
“Good, you waited.” Marissa joined them, pressing close into the small space even though she carried an umbrella. Her eyes flickered to the passing crowd, to the windows of Boston General towering high above the street. “I’m sorry, I had to—” she paused “—I was delayed.”
Instinct flared in Rathe’s gut, mercifully blunting the emotions as he wondered what had delayed the woman. An emergency at the hospital? Or something more sinister?
“You wanted to talk to us?” Nia’s gentle voice soothed the nervous woman. “We can help you. We can keep you safe, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Something sparked in the nurse’s dark brown eyes, then was gone just as quickly. “No. Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine.” She pulled a folded piece of paper from her pocket. “Here, take this. I found it in Dr. Hart’s trash the day Julia died.” She pressed it into Rathe’s hand and looked directly at him for the first time. “I hope it helps.”
She handed him the umbrella, flipped up the collar of her sensible tan raincoat and darted out onto the sidewalk, where she merged with the flowing lunch crowd. Without the umbrella, she was instantly anonymous. Perhaps that had been her goal, Rathe thought.
“Well, that was strange.” Nia tugged the paper from his hand. “What do you think made her so late?”
“I think someone got to her.” He folded the umbrella and leaned it up against the wall, instincts humming. “I think she’s in this up to her neck.”
“Her and Hart both.” Nia handed him the paper. “Or so someone wants us to think.”
He skimmed the printout, which was a list of Transplant Department supplies with check marks next to a number of them—many of which had gone missing. It told them nothing new and seemed more than a little suspect. He paused when he reached the end of the page. “What’s with the drugs written in at the bottom?”
The pen was red, the handwriting distinctly feminine, with a downward slant that suggested the writer was left-handed. Like Marissa.
“Recognize them?” Nia said.
Rathe reviewed the short list in his head. FK506. Cyclophosphamide. Prostaglandin. “They’re antirejection drugs, aren’t they?”
“Exactly.” Though her agreement didn’t sound one hundred percent sure. “So why did Marissa write them in at the bottom of the page?”
Was it information she’d been told to plant, or was this an addition, something she wasn’t supposed to tell them? Rathe suspected the latter, but wasn’t sure what to do with the data. His frustration kicked up a notch at how muddy the seemingly simple investigation had become, how complicated his partnership with his trainee was destined to remain.
He scowled and focused on the paper. “They’re antibiotics and immune-suppressors designed to fool the body into accepting an organ transplant.” He shrugged. “But it beats me why she wrote them in.”
“Me, too.” Nia frowned. “Shoot. And I thought we’d caught a break.” She jerked her chin back toward Boston General. “Come on, let’s have the detectives bring her in for questioning.”
Rathe nodded. It seemed the next best step.
Farther up the street, almost directly opposite the main hospital entrance, there was a scream. A thud. A squeal of tires and a chorus of horns blaring in discordant harmony.
Rathe’s heart kicked with adrenaline.
“Damn it!” He bolted toward the sound, registering the motionless tan lump in the middle of the road, the dark blue sedan speeding away.
Nia reached the woman first and dropped to her knees on the pavement, heedless of the traffic snarled around them and the shouts and beeps of the drivers. “Marissa!”
Rathe slapped for his cell phone, remembered it was gone and grabbed Nia’s out of her pocket to call for help. Moments later a pair of E.R. orderlies and the on-call surgeon flew through the side doors pushing a gurney.
Technically they were supposed to wait for an ambulance and paramedics to transport the patient the three hundred yards to the E.R. But Rathe didn’t give a damn. He’d called straight to the front desk.
“Sorry.” Marissa was barely conscious, her limbs twisted at awkward angles. A thin trickle of blood ran from her mouth, suggesting anything from a bitten tongue to internal injuries.
“It’s okay, Marissa.” Nia stroked dark hair from the woman’s forehead. “We’re here. We’ll keep you safe.”
Rathe’s second call went to the detectives. “Peters, get over here right now. And bring an officer. We’ll need a guard.”
They lifted Marissa to the gurney. The trickle of blood became a river. Before they could wheel her away, she reached out and grabbed Rathe’s wrist with surprising strength.
“It’s zero—”
And she passed out.
“Take her.” He jerked his head at the E.R. staff. “And keep her alive. We’re going to need her.” They gave him a filthy look, as if to say, We always do our best to keep our patients alive. And then they were gone, sucked back into Boston General.
The image gave him pause.
Nia nudged him onto the sidewalk. “What did she say?”
“She said ‘zero.’”
“Zero what?”
“Darned if I know.” He moved to scrub his hands across his face, then paused, remembering the sore places and the
scabs. He let his hands drop to his sides, his chest echoing with defeat. Because of them, a woman was on her way to surgery.
If she hadn’t met with them, hadn’t given them the information on the folded piece of paper…
“Come on.” Nia touched his arm as Detective Peters pulled into the ambulance bay and parked illegally. “Let’s see if they’ve gotten anything useful out of Hart. And we’re supposed to meet with that sketch artist to describe Cadaver Man.” She touched his arm again, let her fingers linger. “We’re close, I feel it.”
Yeah, he felt it, too. But he wasn’t sure whether they were close to solving the case, or close to self-destructing and taking a number of innocent lives with them.
He feared the latter.
SKETCH ARTIST was something of a misnomer, Nia soon learned. She’d pictured an artsy type with a pile of charcoal and a half-dozen gum erasers. Instead they were introduced to a computer whiz almost two years her junior who stroked his keyboard like it was his lover.
“Eyes?”
“Yes,” she answered automatically, then winced at Rathe’s snort. “Sorry. Narrow. Pale blue, almost gray.” A pair of light-blue eyes appeared on the flat picture of a disembodied head. She frowned and tried to remember the man she’d seen pushing a canvas laundry cart. “Narrower, and tilted down at the edges.”
It took them a solid half hour to agree on the composite, during which time Nia relaxed a bit. The police station felt safe. Protected. Peters phoned in to report that Marissa was in critical condition but alive.
She hadn’t yet regained consciousness, so they were no closer to understanding what ‘zero’ meant. Zero gravity? A zero-point-one CC dose of something nasty? What?
“That’s him. Or close enough.” At her side Rathe nodded and winced. He reached for his pocket and frowned.
“I took them when you weren’t looking.” Nia touched his cheek with the back of her hand and told herself she was checking for fever. “You’re no good to me if you make yourself sick with an ibuprofen overdose.”
His sour look was scant thanks, but it was more of a response than she’d gotten from him since the hit-and-run. He’d withdrawn into himself and she wasn’t sure how to follow.
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