On the other hand, the guards at Dave's hospital room door, the crowd of dark suits waiting to question him further about the dead man in the parking lot, and the seemingly fact-conflicting answers he'd given to their questions when he'd briefly roused in the ER …
That wasn't so good.
Sophia sought control over her hands, forcing them to stop shaking so that she could dial her phone. She had the private cell number of Jules Cas-sidy, who worked—high level—atthe FBI's Boston office. He wasn'tso much her friend as a friend of many of the other operators atTroubleshooters.
It rang and rang, but he finally answered, thank God. “Cassidy.” His voice was thick from sleep.
“This is Sophia Ghaffari, from Troubleshooters? I'm so sorry to wake you, sir,” she said. “But it's rather urgent.”
“I'm sorry,” he said. “Who is this … ?”
“Sophia—” she started.
He finished with her. “Ghaffari, right. Sorry. Of course. I'm having one of these nights where the phone rings every twenty minutes, and each time I wake up with fewer brain cells firing. It's okay, sweetie, go back to sleep,” he soothed someone in the room with him, no doubt his husband, Robin. “Just let me …” It was clear he was moving, closing a door behind him. “What's going on?”
“I'm sorry to bother you, but I'm over at Mass General,” she told him. “Here in Boston. With Dave Malkoff He was attacked in the parking lot by a man with a knife.” Her voice shook. “He was stabbed.”
“Is he all right?” Jules asked, the warmth of his concern palpable, even through the somewhat shaky cell phone connection.
“He lost a lot of blood, but he's… Yes,” Sophia told him. “He's going to be fine.”
“Has he ID'd the perp?” Jules asked. “And, wait a minute. Did you say he was stabbed in the hospital parking lot?”
“We were visiting my father,” Sophia said. “He's dying and …”
“I'm so sorry,” Jules said. “And … This isn't meant to be funny, even though it's going to come out sounding like a sick joke, but… Your father's not some Tony Soprano type, is he?”
“No,” Sophia said, laughing despite her worry, despite the tears that kept forming in her eyes. “Not a chance.”
“FYI, muggings outside of hospitals aren't uncommon,” Jules pointed out. “There've been cases of addicts trolling emergency room parking lots, hoping to score an OxyContin prescription off some poor schlub who broke his ankle.”
“That's not what this was,” Sophia said.
“Are you worried for Dave's safety?” Jules asked. “Because I can call and have a guard put on him—”
“He's got plenty of guards,” Sophia said. “But they're the other kind. The kind who are there to make sure he doesn't go anywhere. And to keep me out. They won't let me sit with him. I'm in the waiting room.”
“Okay,” Jules said. “I'm just going to shut up now and let you tell me what's going on.”
She took a deep breath, exhaled hard. “Dave says he was attacked by a big man—a skinhead—who ran away when the police arrived. But there was another man at the scene, and I don't know for sure, but it's possible he was a CIA operative. A very dead CIA operative. His throat was cut.”
“Oh, crap,” Jules said.
“Yeah. Whoever the dead man is, I'm pretty sure Dave knew him, but he swears he didn't know he was there until the police found the body. Regardless of that? The dead man was neither big nor bald. I'm also pretty sure there were two knives found—but Dave said his attacker had three. One of the knives was in Dave's hand when the police arrived, the other was on the pavement by the dead man. They're testing them for prints and blood—you know, DNA.”
Jules was silent for a moment, then said, “This incident. It's out of the blue? I mean, from your point of view? Dave hadn't mentioned an old friend or, I don't know, an old … enemy?”
“No,” Sophia told him.
“Any secretive phone calls?”
“Not that I noticed,” she said. “No.”
“Mysterious trips?”
“We both travel for work,” she answered, although a small warning bell chimed in the back of her mind. She still didn't know where Dave had gone just a few days ago, while she was in Denver. She'd assumed it was work-related, but he'd said something about taking several additional days off to come here, to Boston. It hadn't struck her as odd—additional days— until now.
“What?” Jules asked, perceptive as always.
“No,” she said. “Nothing. We just… In our business, we don't talk about our assignments. Not outside the security of the office.” But they did talk about it in the office. Dave had known she was going to Denver to close a deal with a new client. But he hadn't told her about any impending trip. Which, of course, didn't mean something hadn't come up while she was away.
Still, with a dead CIA agent in the hospital parking lot, Sophia had to wonder.
She put conviction into her voice. “This is completely out of the blue. I mean, come on. This is Dave we're talking about.”
To her own ears, she didn't sound completely convinced, but Jules chuckled.
“I hear you. And okay. I'm going to look into this, see what I can find out.”
“He's not supposed to regain consciousness until morning, but …”
“This is Dave we're talking about,” Jules finished for her. “Check.”
“Can you …” Sophia hated to ask, but she wanted in, to Dave's room. “Please, will you come down here, to the hospital, and throw your weight around?”
“Sweetie, I would if I could, but I'm in California. Robin's doing a movie out here and … Even if I could break away from my current… situation, it would be tomorrow night—at best—before I could get to you.”
Sophia couldn't help it. She started to cry, pulling the phone away from her mouth so that Jules wouldn't hear her.
Somehow he knew anyway. “Here's what I'm going to do,” he told her. “I'm going to call Yashi. Joe Hirabayashi, okay? He's one of my best agents—a really great guy. He'll make sure that, whatever happens, Dave isn't shipped off to Guantánamo, all right?”
Dear God, she hadn't even thought of that.
“That was a joke,” Jules said.
“Was it?”
“Yeah, okay, not really,” he admitted. “Let me go and call Yashi. He'll participate in any further questioning, make sure it's all kosher.”
“Thank you.”
A nurse came hurrying down the hall, glancing into the waiting area where Sophia was pacing. “Are you Sophia Ghaffari?” she called.
“Excuse me,” Sophia told Jules as she called back to the nurse, “I am.” “Mr. Malkoffs awake,” the nurse reported, “and he's asking for you. He's extremely agitated—we're afraid he's going to hurt himself.”
Sophia was already running. “Please, hurry,” she told Jules as she hung up her phone.
The world was a blur of pain and color and sound, and through the confusion and chaos, Dave was certain of only one thing.
Sophia wasn't there.
And the only conceivable reason he could come up with for why she wasn't sitting at his bedside, was that something terrible had happened to her while he was getting stitched up. That whoever was giving orders to the giant Irish skinhead had attacked again, this time going for her.
So Dave ignored the team of suits, most of whom drew their sidearms and shouted at him not to move as he pulled the IV needle out of his arm and swung himself over the metal rail on the side of the hospital bed.
The time for talking was over. He'd tried that, tried shouting, too, but it hadn't given him what he'd wanted—the reassurance, with his own bleary eyes, that Sophia was alive and in one piece.
He could feel a breeze in a place where breezes didn't often blow—no doubt because he was wearing one of those ridiculous hospital gowns and his ass was hanging out.
“Ask me if I give a shit,” he said to a nurse, who was backing away from him, her hands out and down, as if
she were trying to calm a wild animal.
“Dave! Dear God!”
It was Sophia, thank the Lord. She pushed her way into the room, past the suits and the guns, glaring at them in outrage and disbelief.
“What are you, going to shoot a wounded man? Get those weapons out of here!” She turned toward Dave and added, just as disapprovingly, “Are you out of your mind?”
“I thought …” With his anger and fear dissipated, with their numbing properties drastically diminished, his world had turned into a rather large ball of pain. “Maybe you … needed me.”
“Help me get him back into bed,” she commanded someone—the nurse—who appeared and took his right arm as Sophia took his left.
She was there, she was real, she was warm, she was solid.
And that was his blood staining her shirt and pants.
A second nurse lowered the railing—it was much easier getting in and out that way—and Dave settled back into the hospital bed, where it didn't hurt quite so much. “I'm so sorry,” he told Sophia.
“Shhh,” she said, her eyes filled with tears. She held tightly to his hand and brushed his hair back, out of his face, as the nurse checked his wound, rehooked him to his IV bag, and added a second bag to the cocktail. “I'm sorry that I let them kick me out.”
“What happened?” Dave asked. “Was that really Barney Delarow—”
“Excuse me, Ms. Ghaffari,” one of the suits stepped forward to say, “I'm going to have to insist that you leave. Until you've given your statement to the authorities …”
His voice trailed off, because Sophia had turned to look up at him, giving him her full attention—which often resulted in grown men being struck dumb. Even with blood on her clothes, hair bedraggled from the rain, she was angelic. “And you are … ?” she asked.
He cleared his throat—not once, not twice, but three times. “Special Agent Bill Connell. I'm in charge of this investigation.”
Dave focused his eyes, and … yup, it was Connell, with his florid complexion and hard-drinker's vein-riddled nose. Bill was nearly as big of an asshole as Barney Delarow had been. Wasn't this just swell?
“Good,” Sophia said, “then I'll give my statement to you, right here and now. It's pretty simple. Dave and I flew to Boston to see my father, who's in this hospital, in the cancer ward. We came in late, and likewise, it was late when we were finally ready to leave the hospital to go to our hotel. It was also raining, so Dave went to get the car. I waited in the lobby, which is where I was when he called me on my cell phone. He made certain I was okay, and then told me he'd been attacked in the parking garage.”
Whatever was in that new IV bag was making him even more woozy, so Dave used his right hand—the one that Sophia wasn't tightly holding— and pulled the little tube under the hospital blanket. He folded it in half, effectively stopping the drip, even as he forced himself to focus.
“He told me to stay with the security guard,” Sophia continued, turning to look at Dave, “which I did, since she went into the garage herself, to assist the police as they arrived on the scene. Dave was trying to get to his feet when I got there, but his injury was severe and he fell. He seemed to recognize the dead man, whose throat had been slit, and who was lying partly under our car.” Her voice didn't shake or wobble but her words became slightly more precise, and Dave cursed himself for putting her through this. “Dave insisted—quite emphatically—that this was not the man who'd attacked him. He said that his attacker had been large, with a shaved head. Dave also insisted that he was unaware of the dead man's presence until the police brought it to his attention.
“Because Dave was bleeding heavily,” she continued, “I was, at this point, focusing on getting him onto a stretcher and over to the ER. You now know everything I know, Special Agent Connell. Although surely there's footage from a security camera.”
“Conveniently, there's not,” Connell said. “Camera went out of order a few hours earlier. That's something you know how to do, isn't it, Malkoff?”
“As does nearly everyone in this room,” Sophia countered.
“Except we weren't on the premises earlier,” he pointed out, looking from Sophia to Dave, looking at their hands, which were tightly clasped together. “You work with Malkoff at Troubleshooters Incorporated?”
“That's correct,” Sophia told him. “But he's also my fiancé.”
What? Dave looked at her, but she squeezed his hand and shot him her don't argue look, disguised behind a sweet smile.
“Really,” Connell said on a laugh that was a mix of amusement and disbelief. “Malkoff, you old dog, you. What is it with you and obscenely beautiful women? You must be hung like a horse.” He turned to Sophia. “He tell you he has a habit of killing his fiancées?”
Color had already been rising in Sophia's cheeks over that horse comment, but now her demeanor turned positively icy. “If you're referring to Anise Turiano, yes, he's told me about her. About how she found out he worked for the CIA and tried to sell him to the highest bidder. About how he nearly died, thanks to her betrayal.”
“He tell you that her body was pulled out of a river, wrapped in plastic?” Connell asked. “Which was nice, since it preserved some of the forensic evidence. His DNA was all over her, inside and out—”
“I was cleared of those charges,” Dave interrupted. “Sophia knows that, yes.”
“She know that Turiano's throat was slit?” Connell asked him. “Much as Barney Delarow's was tonight? Or how about the fact that your semen was found in Turiano's body, with forensic evidence indicating ejaculation occurred after she was dead?”
Oh, shit.
“Yeah,” Dave said, giving Sophia an apologetic smile, although it probably came out more like a wince. She was moving her thumb across the back of his hand—just the slightest of caresses. It was both soothing and reassuring. “That didn't come up, because, you know—and you do know, Bill—that it was verified, through extensive testing, that the minute amounts of my … DNA found inside the body contained chemicals— spermicides and traces of latex—indicating that sperm had been taken from a used condom and—”
“That's right,” Connell said. “I forgot. According to your statement, you and your first fiancée always used condoms. Mr. Careful.”
Sophia's thumb stilled, and as Dave met her eyes he knew instantly what she was thinking.
One of the few things that he had told Sophia about his brief but tumultuous love affair with Kathy-slash-Anise was that the woman had given him an STD. Which implied that there had been at least some unprotected sexual contact.
Connell just kept on flapping his mouth. “Your story was that you didn't murder Anise Turiano and then fuck her dead body in a homicidal rage, but rather that you were framed. Right.”
Dave shook his head as he looked at Sophia in silent apology.
But the CIA agent wasn't done. “Dave passed a lie detector test,” Connell continued, speaking to Sophia now, “and since no one's ever bullshitted their way past one of those before … Case closed.”
“It was closed,” Dave said quietly, just wanting the asshole to leave the room, so he could talk to Sophia. Try to explain. “So if you're done—”
“Interestingly,” Connell said, “Barney Delarow kept the Turiano file active on his computer. He accessed it just this morning.”
Okay, so that wasn't good news.
“You know anything about that?” Connell probed.
Wearily, Dave shook his head. “I haven't seen Barney in years.”
“Phone contact?” Connell asked. “ E-mail?”
“None,” Dave said.
“That's easy enough to verify,” Connell pointed out.
“Yes,” Dave said. “I'm very aware of that and I'll say it again: I've had zero contact with Barney Delarow since I left the CIA. And I'm sorry, but shouldn't you take advantage of the fact that I'm relatively alert by getting my description of the man who knifed me—and probably killed Delarow, too? Maybe bring in a police sketch
artist, get a picture for a BOLO?”
But Connell had turned to Sophia. “Whose idea was it to come to Boston yesterday?”
“My Aunt Maureen's,” she told him flatly. “My father took a turn for the worse, we got a call Sunday morning, so we came. I came. Dave came with me.”
“I'll bet he did,” Connell said with a smirk. “I bet he comes with you a lot.”
And that was it. Dave was done. He sat up, ripping pain in his side be damned. “Get out of my room,” he spat. “Your superior will be hearing from me about your disrespectful—”
“Relax,” Connell said. “It was a joke. She doesn't mind—”
“She minds,” Sophia said curtly, even as she tried to push Dave back. “Nurse!”
One of the nurses came bustling back in, frowning at the IV bags, which, of course, weren't dripping as they were supposed to. Dave let go of the tube just before she pulled back the blanket to check both it and his stitches. But she wasn't fooled. “You're going to be one of those patients, aren't you, Mr. Malkoff?”
“Soph, you got a pen and paper?” Dave asked, and she released his hand to search through her purse.
“Go,” she said a moment later, clicking her pen open.
“White, male, six-six, two-fifty, gold tooth, Irish accent, although that could've been faked,” he told her even as he felt the sedative or painkiller or whatever they'd given him slipping through his veins. “He mentioned a name. Santucci. Give my best to Santucci. I don't know a Santucci, do you?”
She shook her head, and he went on to describe the man completely as she wrote it all down, even as he felt his eyes start to roll back in his head.
He could hear her then, speaking to someone—no doubt Connell. “FBI agent Joe Hirabayashi from the Boston office will be here at any moment. I'll give this information to him, since it's clear you're not really interested in a true investigation.”
Connell: “It doesn't alarm you, even a little bit, that Anise Turiano's killer was never found?”
“No, it doesn't. She apparently had dealings with a number of dangerous people—”
“Including David Malkoff.”
“I'll thank you to get out of this room. Dave's asleep and can't answer your accusations—”
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