She shuddered, unable to stanch the tears, and he lifted her slightly and settled her in his lap, her legs straight out on the couch.
“You’ll be okay,” he promised, tucking her face into the hollow of his neck. “The best thing you can do is keep the leg still and try to relax. The slower your heart beats, the less the poison will spread.”
“I thought you said it didn’t look bad?”
His fingers continued their gentle massage, and despite the pain, Lucy felt herself calming.
“It doesn’t. But snake-wrangling is best left to experts. How’d you get bit?”
“It was in my car,” Lucy murmured into his neck. He smelled of soap with a hint of spice, and sweat with a bitter undertone. Fear? Had he been frightened for her? She slid her arms around him and hung on, giving comfort and taking it at the same time.
“It must have been under the driver’s seat. I heard it, but didn’t register what the sound meant. Then I felt movement and jumped out, but obviously not fast enough.”
“Took balls to put it there. You could have caught him at any moment.”
“He probably thought I was in for the night. If he was watching, he would have seen me turn off most of the lights when I went up to take a shower.”
“So you took a shower, then what?”
“I made myself a sandwich. And then I was coming to see you.”
“Without pants?” he teased, and Lucy actually laughed.
“Jerk. The nine-one-one operator told me to take them off.”
“Damn. Here I thought I’d succeeded in charming the pants off you. But at least you were on your way to see me, so I take that as progress.” He pressed a light kiss to her forehead, and Lucy felt it all the way to her toes. Before she had time to respond, however, he changed the subject.
“So did you find anything useful in Palo Pinto?”
“Yes and no. I met my mother’s best friend from high school.”
“Wow. What was that like?”
“I’m not really sure. I haven’t processed it yet. I tend to . . .”
“You tend to what? Finish it. By now you should know you can trust me.”
“I do.” And she did. When had that happened?
“Then tell me.”
“I guess I’m not very comfortable with emotional situations. So when I encounter them, I—I tend to keep things in a bit of a box until I can sort through what they mean to me.”
Ethan was silent a long time. Did he realize she had been talking about more than just Gina, that their relationship, whatever it was and wherever it might be going, constituted another situation that would take her a while to process?
“That must make life complicated,” he said, just as Lucy heard sirens.
She shrugged. “I wish I could be different, but I can’t.”
He tilted her chin up and looked her directly in the eye. “If you want to change, sweetheart, you can change. I’ve never met anyone more determined. And this, well, I’d be happy to help.” His tone was unbearably gentle, and Lucy felt tears clog the back of her throat once more. But Ethan slid her off his lap and went to the door to greet the paramedics.
Chapter Nine
Momma used to tell me, “Better safe than sorry.” She also warned me never to trust a man. Like so many people, however, she was better at giving advice than at taking it.
from A Bad Day to Die by Lucy Sadler Caldwell [DRAFT]
ETHAN LISTENED TO the paramedic question Lucy about the size of the snake and other factors affecting the bite with half an ear. Simply maintaining his customary control consumed the remainder of his energy. He hung on to Lucy’s hand as the ambulance bounced and jerked over the pitted, potholed road, and for the life of him he couldn’t have said which of them the touch was meant to reassure. For her part, Lucy didn’t seem any more anxious to let go than he was. Even as her mind turned back to practical matters, her long, slim fingers remained entwined with his.
“If they’re going to keep me overnight,” she said, “I’m going to need some things from the house.”
“No problem. Once we get you settled in, I’ll have TJ pick up whatever you need.” She wouldn’t want anyone else in her home.
“A change of clothes, my computer, and my tote bag should do the trick.”
“Hospitals aren’t designed to be the easiest places to work, you know. Not like they give you a desk and an ergonomic chair or anything.”
“What else am I supposed to do?”
“You could rest.”
Her eyebrows went up and her lips twisted down. “Right. Like I am going to sleep in a public hospital when someone just put a damned rattlesnake in my car.”
Ethan rubbed his thumb across the back of her hand, feeling the small bones and veins beneath the soft skin. She was fragile, despite her toughness. Of course, she’d never admit it. “You’ll be in a private room. And you won’t be alone.” He’d be with her every second. “No one will be able to get to you.”
“I won’t be able to sleep anyway. I might as well work.”
“Okay.” He certainly wasn’t about to stress her out with an argument. When the docs shot her full of pain medication, she’d go to sleep.
At the hospital, the EMTs rolled Lucy into an exam room, and Ethan followed over the protests of the battle-axe manning the intake station. She came after him, but he dug his badge from his back pocket and shoved it in her face, too impatient and worried to be polite.
“Where she goes, I go,” he said to the woman. She glared at him but backed off and let him enter the curtained room where Lucy was being transferred from gurney to bed. Moments later, a harried-looking doctor came in, introduced himself, and asked Lucy to remove the sheet covering her leg. He paid Ethan no mind at all.
After prodding at the wound, which made Lucy hiss in pain and Ethan clench his fists to stop from strangling the guy, the doctor proclaimed the venom level low.
“Doesn’t look as if he got you too badly.” The doctor checked the chart that, Ethan assumed, contained the notes from the EMTs. “We have to wait to get the blood test results back, but you should be out of here tomorrow. We’ll move you upstairs for tonight as soon as Myrna finds you a bed.”
“She’s under police protection,” said Ethan. “She’ll have someone with her at all times and needs her own room.”
“As it happens,” the doctor said with a sniff, “when this place was built, they made all the rooms singles. So you don’t need to worry about the attention your girlfriend will get.”
“She’s not my girlfriend. She’s the victim of a crime.” Shit. Could he sound any more defensive? But “girlfriend” sounded so damned high school, and it didn’t touch whatever it was he was beginning to feel for Lucy.
The doctor shrugged. “Fine. Your victim, my patient. She’ll be moved up to the third floor as soon as Myrna gets it organized.” He fiddled with Lucy’s IV. “Now. Do you have any allergies?”
Lucy shook her head.
“Good. We’ll put you on an antibiotic as well, to counteract infection in the punctures. I’m on all night, so I’ll be checking your levels periodically. Once you’re in your own room, you’ll be on a morphine pump for the night. It will allow you to dose yourself—within reason, of course—for the pain.”
“Don’t bother,” Lucy said. “I’m not planning on using it.”
“Bother,” Ethan said. She glared. “You don’t have to use it. But pain builds up. Trust me.”
Her eyes went to his shoulder, then his knee, and she nodded.
The doctor snorted and muttered under his breath, then left the room.
“Thanks for coming with me,” Lucy said. She gave him a half-hearted smile. “I’m not a fan of hospitals. I can’t imagine you are, either.”
“Not so much, no.”
A young attendant came in before Etha
n could say anything else.
“We’re going to move you upstairs now,” he said. He snapped the brakes off the bed and began to roll her away. Ethan followed, alert to everything and everyone that crossed her path. It was unlikely anyone would try to get to her in such a public place, but nothing about this situation conformed to textbook procedures. First, a brick through the window, then the violent and ritualistic murder of someone unrelated to Lucy, then a snake that could have been deadly? It was almost as if three separate people had committed the crimes.
“What else happened in Palo Pinto?” he asked as soon as the attendant left them alone in Lucy’s new room.
Her blue eyes went wary. “What do you mean?”
“You weren’t coming to see me to tell me about your mother’s friend. And much as I’d like to believe you just couldn’t stay away, well, that’s not your style. So you found information important to the case, or something happened.”
“Okay, yeah.” She shifted in the bed and wouldn’t meet his gaze. “I put an ad in the local paper. Online, too. Asking for information about my mother. And I left a phone number. The number of a burn phone I bought for this case, not my personal cell.”
Ethan’s gut tightened. “And?”
“He texted me. Or someone did. When TJ brings my stuff, the phone will be in my tote. I am sure he texted from a burn phone of his own, but it’s at least worth the effort to see where the number leads.”
“Hell yes, it’s worth the effort. What did it say? And why didn’t you call me as soon as you got it?”
“It said he was watching me. He . . .” She swallowed, and Ethan braced himself. “He called me a whore.”
“Dammit, Lucy.” Ethan wanted to hit something. “Whore” in red paint on paper wrapped around a brick, “whore” written in blood across a dead woman’s abdomen, “whore” muttered over and over by a serial rapist, and now “whore” again, in Lucy’s text message. Would he find it in her car somewhere, placed there with the snake, once he’d had the Rover towed in for fingerprinting?
“I know. But it gave me an idea about the killer’s message.” She explained her theory about the killer wanting people to fear him. “TJ said you were thinking along the same lines.”
“I am. Let me call her and get her to pick up your stuff. You said you wanted clothes, your computer, and your tote bag?”
“Yeah. It has my phones and my notes from the trip in it, and I want to enter them while they’re still fresh in my mind.”
Ethan called TJ and explained the situation.
“I’ll be there in forty-five,” she said. “I’ll have to break a window, though, unless you left the door unlocked.”
“No, it’s locked. Do what you have to. Then call a glazier. I want it boarded the instant you’re done and fixed properly ASAP.”
“Boards are in the garage,” Lucy said.
“Got it,” TJ replied. “I’ll ask Scott to put the boards up while I hit the hospital. I saw him signing out not too long ago, and he said he was only planning on drinking beer in front of the television.”
“Good. I’ll pay him overtime out of my own pocket.” He flipped his phone closed and examined Lucy, whose fair skin had acquired a decidedly olive tint. From more than just the fluorescent lights and the reflection of the pale green walls.
“Pain?”
She nodded. “I thought it would get better. Or at least stay the same. But it seems to be building.”
“It happens that way.” He sat down on the edge of the bed and pushed her hair away from her face. “Hit the pump.”
“I have work to do.”
“And you can’t do it if you’re in pain. You don’t want to sleep. You don’t want to lose control. I get that. Believe me, no one understands it better than I do. But TJ won’t be here for almost an hour, and if you relax now, you’ll be in better shape when she brings your stuff.”
“Forty-five minutes?”
“Yeah. So take a dose and close your eyes. I’ll be here. Nothing will happen. I promise.”
The pain had to be bad, since she didn’t argue further.
“Thanks,” she whispered. In minutes, she was asleep.
For the next half hour, Ethan paced the room, trying to work out what could possibly be going on. When TJ arrived, Ethan pulled her out of the room so as not to disturb the still-sleeping Lucy.
“She’s going to be okay?”
“Yeah. But I’d for damn sure like to know how a four-foot rattler got into her car. You’re having it impounded?”
“It’s done. The print guys are working it over now, though I’d hardly handle a snake like that without gloves, so they probably won’t find anything.”
“No. We need a break.”
“Ethan, you might want to talk to Scott Allenby about the rattler. Just . . . go easy on him.”
“You think he knows something? And you left him at Lucy’s?”
“No, I don’t think he knows anything. But his brother might. Eric was forever terrorizing the girls in school with snakes, toads, spiders . . . any creepy-crawly thing he could find. I’m not saying he did this, but he’s not afraid of anything that lives in the woods, and he might have been willing to catch a rattler if someone asked him to.”
“Shit. Have I ever met Eric?”
“He’s kind of a skinnier, scrawnier version of Scott. He works five nights a week as a security guard over at Farmer’s Feed Plant.”
“Oh, yeah.” An image took form in Ethan’s mind. He’d met the man once, maybe twice. Nothing remarkable about him at all.
“Okay. I’ll see what I can find out. In the meantime, check and see whether you can find any snake owners or dealers locally. If you don’t mind putting in the overtime, check websites, too, and see if anyone has shipped any vipers to our area. If a guy has one, he may have more, so keep the search general.”
“Will do.”
Ethan took the bag TJ had brought for Lucy and slipped back into the room. In the brief time he’d been outside, she’d woken up and was struggling to raise herself higher on the pillows. He dropped the bag into a chair and went to help her.
“Was that TJ?” she asked, her voice muzzy with sleep.
“Yeah. She brought your things. But there’s no need to get up yet. Why don’t you go back to sleep for a while?”
“No, I’m fine. Can you get my laptop?”
He did as she requested. But instead of returning to the chair, he nudged her over so he could sit on the bed beside her. She was trying to withdraw, he could feel it, and he wouldn’t let her get away.
• • •
PANIC WELLED INSIDE Lucy for a minute when Ethan slid his long body onto the bed beside her. He was always so close, always invading her carefully cultivated personal space. But she had to admit, his warmth was welcome. Despite the painkillers, her body throbbed oddly and her skin still felt chilled. He slipped one arm around her shoulders, tugging her even closer, then glanced down at the program she’d opened on the computer.
“I’ve never seen anything like that. Do you use it for your writing?”
She considered lying. It would have been easier. But Ethan deserved better.
“It’s in development, as yet unnamed, but I call it DJ.”
“DJ?”
“It’s the brainchild of a friend, a computer programmer who used to work in law enforcement. He could follow details in his head that no one else could—give him eight suspects, twelve crimes, and he’d manage to track where each guy was on each night, separate them by all kind of characteristics. Since I do a lot of timelines and picayune detail for the books, I once joked that I needed a ‘digital Jake.’ He said I could beta test the one he was writing as long as I uploaded notes on features and bugs to the server while I was using it.”
“So how does it work?”
He pressed closer sti
ll, eyes fixed to the screen, and she felt the heat of his body all along the side of her own. It would be so easy to turn into that warmth, to surrender to the promise of comfort and security, as well as to the spice of excitement, but she couldn’t afford to let herself do so. She focused on the laptop instead.
“There are sections. This card, for example, is in the victim biography section. I’d put everything I can find out about my mother here. Not about the murder—that’s an event, and goes on a different form—but about her. The straight facts you can get off a driver’s license, and the not-so-obvious. There are places for friends, enemies, and acquaintances. There’s a spot to list a person’s frequent activities—does she go to the gym three times a week? Get her nails done on Mondays? You don’t have to fill everything in, but there are spaces for whatever you can get. There’s even a section for free-association notes. Jake calls it ‘intuition entry.’ Then there are tags. For Cecile, I have dozens, everything from ‘prostitute’ to ‘mother’ to ‘outsider.’ My mother’s father was a preacher. I discovered that in Palo Pinto, and once I enter it, the program will look for significant religious background in other victims, as well.
“There are other kinds of biography cards. Suspects, random people who turn up in the investigation who are hard to keep track of but you don’t want to forget. People you have no good reason to suspect but just feel hinky about. You can put in cards for anyone you want. Of course, you’re not going to have as much data on them, but you add them anyway. The program looks for links between them and victims, as well as between victims and each other. Let’s say all your victims have a three somewhere in either their birthdays or their addresses. You probably wouldn’t notice—and it might mean nothing at all—but DJ will flag the recurrent number as interesting.
“There’s also the event section.” Switching screens, Lucy brought up the page for her mother’s murder. “The first thing the program wants to know is as close to the exact time of the event as possible. Sometimes, you have nothing to go on for timing, so the event ends up outside the case timeline. My mother was killed between two and three that afternoon. Then the program asks where everyone else with a card for this case was at that time. I’m working on filling that in at the moment, because it’s the easiest way to eliminate people.”
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