“Five in the morning. I told David to take a break.”
The nurse checked the machines, pressed a couple of buttons and they stopped beeping. She said, “You need to talk to the doctor. You’re going through withdrawals from the drugs and we can give you something to help.”
“No. It was only three days. I’m ready to go home.”
“I’ll have the doctor talk to you,” she said as she left.
Nick sat on the edge of her bed. “Max, he pumped you up with some heavy-duty hallucinogens and narcotics. They tested all the syringes. The combination of drugs could have killed you.”
“I’m tough.”
“You are.”
She didn’t feel tough. She felt bruised and battered and scared. She did not want to be scared. She didn’t want to feel like the lost six-year-old who sat alone on her birthday in the middle of nowhere singing “Happy Birthday” to herself.
“I want to go home.”
“The doctors want to keep you for another day or two.”
“No. Not even an hour. I need to get out of this bed and find out why Duvall did this to me.”
She swung her legs over and felt dizzy.
The doctor walked in. “Ms. Revere, I’m Doctor Morris Levin. I don’t advise that you leave now. You’re still feeling the effects of the drugs, and we’ve only just begun to regulate your bodily functions. I’d like you here for a minimum of twenty-four hours, and I’d like to run more tests.”
“No. And no.”
“Detective”—the doctor turned to Nick—“I hope you can convince Ms. Revere to stay.”
Max said, “He can’t. I need to be home. I’m not sick. I’m just tired and sore and I can’t sleep here. I want my own bed. My own pillows. My stuff.” She sounded like a whiny child, but she didn’t care. She wanted to go home.
“I can give you something—”
“Hell no. I’m done. I can’t think!”
Dr. Levin wasn’t happy, but he said, “I’d like to draw some more blood, test your blood sugar, your fluids, and change the bandages on your foot. Can you give me two hours to get this done? And promise you’ll return for a checkup this week?”
Nick said, “David’s at your place. I’ll have him bring you clothes.”
“Okay,” Max agreed. “Two hours.”
* * *
It took nearly three hours before the doctor finished the tests. Max was surprised when David didn’t drive her home, but handed Nick his car keys. “I’m meeting Sally and the team who processed Baker’s apartment. I’ll let you know if I learn anything.”
Nick opened the passenger door for Max and she hated that she needed his help to sit. Every cell in her body ached. The doctor had given her pain medication—swore to her it was mild and wouldn’t cause an adverse reaction—but she didn’t want to take it.
She closed her eyes. She just wanted her bed. Her home. Her view. An unlimited supply of water. No bugs, no rats, no scorpions. No nightmares.
She woke up with a jolt. The car wasn’t moving. She opened her eyes and it was dark. Her heart raced.
“You’re home,” Nick said.
Nick.
She breathed out a long sigh. She was in her parking garage.
“I don’t want you seeing me like this,” she whispered. Her voice was raw and she wanted to cry.
You don’t cry. Man up, Maxine. You’ve been through worse.
But she hadn’t. The Mexican jail was awful, and lasted longer, but somehow the last three days was worse than anything she’d suffered before. Duvall had not only exposed her fears, he’d exposed her soul. Everything that made her who she was had been dissected and analyzed and she didn’t know if she would ever be whole again. She was nothing but a million shattered pieces.
Nick reached out and touched her cheek. She flinched, and that’s when a tear slipped out. She squeezed her eyes shut.
“I don’t know who I am,” she whispered.
“I do,” he said. He kissed her cheek, then got out of the car and opened her door. Getting out of the car was harder than getting in. “You shouldn’t have left the hospital.”
“I’m not going back.”
“I know.”
He did the protective cop thing, assessed their surroundings, checked the stairwell while waiting for the elevator door to open. But he wasn’t David. There was another side to the protection, more intimate.
She didn’t want him to worry.
“I’m okay,” she said as they rode up the elevator to her top-floor apartment.
“You will be,” he replied.
He led her into her apartment, then closed and bolted the door. “Stay here,” he told her, then searched the entire apartment. “It’s clear,” he said a moment later.
She crossed the living room to the kitchen and took a water bottle from her refrigerator. She drank half of it without taking a breath. It was so cold, so good, she almost cried out from pleasure.
Then Nick would really think she was crazy.
Crazy. Duvall was trying to twist her up, make her lose her mind. And he might have succeeded. Would he have? Would she have completely broken? She felt like she was … except that she’d escaped. But maybe that was just instinct. Maybe she really was broken and was too stubborn to accept it.
“You need to lie down,” Nick said.
“I need a shower. And food. Real food.” At the thought of eating, her stomach rebelled, even through the hunger pains. “Something light. Like the chicken noodle soup you fed me in California.”
He smiled, his eyes almost sparkling at the memory. That relaxed her. Nick was exactly who she remembered. “Let me help you upstairs.”
She didn’t refuse his help, because she wasn’t sure she could do it on her own with the damn boot on her foot.
“You could sleep downstairs with me,” Nick said when they reached the top of the stairs.
“Why are you in the guest room?” Max asked.
“Someone beat me to your bed.”
He said it casually enough, but there was an underlying hostility that Max didn’t quite understand.
Until she saw Marco’s overnight bag and an extra suit hanging on the outside of her closet door.
“Well, shit.”
“We don’t need to talk about this now.”
“We don’t need to talk about this at all.”
Max strode—as much as she could in the boot—into her bathroom. Marco’s razor and other toiletries were neatly set up on the right. She put them all back in his shaving kit and zipped it up. She went back to her bedroom and put his shaving kit in his bag, grabbed his suit and stuffed it on top, zipped everything up, and limped to the staircase. She wanted to make a statement and take it to the guest room, but she couldn’t muster the strength to walk downstairs. She dropped it, intending to leave it on the top step, but it tipped over and rolled down to where the staircase first curved around.
“You don’t have to prove anything to me,” Nick said.
She turned and stared at him. Six weeks. It had been six weeks since she’d first met Nick. Hardly enough time to foster a relationship, but she didn’t want him to think she was keeping two men in the wings. Ten years ago? She would have. Even five years ago, because she and Marco had been on and off so many times it made her head spin.
But not now. She didn’t think it was Nick who changed her, though he was part of it. She’d simply grown up. Marco was her past. Nick was her present. And she refused to think about the future.
“I was going to visit you this weekend,” she said simply. “Not Marco.”
“I know.”
Nick was the opposite of Marco. If Marco had been the one to find another man’s clothes in her bedroom while they were in the middle of something, he would have lost it. He would have yelled, tossed the clothes out, then they would have fought, and probably ended up in bed together. Marco was all fire, hot and Cuban and passionate. Passionate about everything.
Nick was calm. Cool and comfortabl
e like an ocean breeze on a warm day when all you wanted to do was lie down and soak in some sun and sand. So calm that she couldn’t read him. She wanted to. She wanted to understand what made him tick. What made him so level-headed and in control. She wanted to know was he really mad about Marco’s things or did he just not care?
Duvall was right. Maybe she was incapable of forming attachments to anyone. Maybe she masked her inner coldness and inability to express emotions because she feared there was nothing inside except the cold. The fear of being abandoned, of loss, of hopelessness. That she was inadequate. That she was only half a person because she didn’t know who her father was.
Intellectually, she knew it didn’t matter who her father was, that her mother was a wild child who’d dumped her. The first ten years of her life when she moved from place to place, no roots, no family, no friends because her mother couldn’t—wouldn’t—sit still. Living the life of princess and pauper in the span of weeks, over and over and over again.
She came from nothing and no one.
Then Nick was at her side and walking her over to the bed. “You need to sleep. I’ll make some soup.”
She sat heavily on the bed. Her head was spinning. Maybe it was the pain meds they’d given her in the hospital or her own suppressed emotions. She didn’t know. She didn’t want Nick to leave, but she hated that she didn’t want him to leave. Did that make her weak? Was she using him like she’d used so many men in her life?
She wanted to tell Nick to run away because she would hurt him. It was inevitable. Look at her track record. But what came out of her mouth was something she didn’t expect.
“Do you believe me?”
“Believe what?”
“I didn’t see him. That bastard Baker didn’t say his name. But Carter Duvall was there. He orchestrated the whole thing.”
“I know.”
“You do?”
“We’ll prove it.”
“How?”
“We’ll find a way.”
He kissed her on the lips. Once. Twice. She relaxed. She leaned back, closed her eyes, sinking into her sea of pillows. Her bed. Her home.
“Nick?”
“I’m here.”
“Bring your stuff up from the guest room.”
Then she was asleep.
* * *
Nick stood at the top of the stairs and watched Max sleep.
Someone had done a number on her.
He’d gone from worried to angry to worried again. He’d never seen her so vulnerable. The closest she’d come was the night she spent in jail in California when his colleague Beck had her arrested for obstruction, before Nick and her attorney got the charge tossed. He didn’t know the whole story about the time she spent in a Mexican prison, but he knew it had been several days and Marco had gotten her out through some off-book quasi-military operation. That intel he’d learned from David.
Nick felt like the odd man out here. David was her closest friend, Marco was her lover.
Ex-lover.
Nick pulled a blanket over Max’s pale body. The vibrant, cocky reporter was gone; he didn’t like this version of Max. For weeks he’d wondered why he was getting involved with someone like her. They were opposites. He didn’t like her methods. He didn’t like her jump-with-both-feet mentality. She had no fear of repercussions. It was like anything went as long as she got the truth. If she got hurt, she put a Band-Aid over it. She didn’t apologize, she didn’t back down.
Yet all the things he thought would annoy him also enamored him. Reckless, but driven. She cared about injustice. She empathized with victims in a way that Nick had rarely seen. It wasn’t fake, it wasn’t sweet, it was simply authentic.
She was also sexy and beautiful and had an inner confidence that made her glow.
He feared he was going through some midlife crisis. Glow. Right.
He went downstairs and rummaged through the kitchen. She had many cooking supplies and basic ingredients, but few fresh foods. Not a surprise—she’d been planning on spending the weekend with him. He found a well-stocked freezer with containers marked in Max’s large, sweeping block letters, with contents and dates. He found a gallon bag of frozen chicken noodle soup that had been made three months ago.
The soup had just started to simmer when David and Marco came in.
“I can’t believe you let her leave,” Marco said to Nick.
Nick decided to ignore the comment. “She’s sleeping. What have you learned?”
“Pierce is working on a warrant to search Duvall’s home and office. We think we can get it, based on Max’s statement, but we need to be careful in the wording,” Marco said. “The FBI’s evidence response team are still at the warehouse. There’s evidence that’s where Bachman killed his five victims.”
“Then why did Baker dump Max’s phone off the Brooklyn Bridge?” David asked.
“To confuse us.” Marco and Nick said simultaneously.
“They found plastic bags identical to the type used to suffocate the five victims. They found trace DNA and are processing it, but there are multiple samples,” Marco said.
“Duvall?”
“It’ll take days to process all the evidence, weeks or months to get back anything on DNA, even if we rush it.”
“What about the dead lawyer?”
“This is where it’s interesting,” Marco said. “We have a witness who recognized Baker’s picture, saw him early Friday morning around six.”
“Okay. Why interesting? We knew that.”
“Because Rose and I talked to the witness again today, and she said that Baker wasn’t alone. There was a young woman with him. The woman was in Warren’s yard playing with the dog when the witness took out her garbage. The witness didn’t really think much of it, even though she didn’t recognize the girl. When she came back from the Dumpster, she saw Baker leaving with the girl.”
“Six in the morning?” Nick said. “Sounds like maybe Warren let the dog out, Baker slipped in, stabbed him, left. There was nothing else disturbed in the house?”
“Nothing—except his briefcase is missing, with all his files and notes on the trial.”
“Computer?”
“Warren didn’t like computers.”
Nick sighed. “So there was another killer hanging out with Baker and Bachman? Another accomplice?”
“Possible, or Baker has a girl on the side. Good news is the witness is sharp. She’s working with a sketch artist, says she would recognize the girl if she saw her. She liked Warren because he used to watch her poodles when she went out of town. Said he was nicer to dogs than to people.”
David said, “Baker has been watching Max for a long time.”
He was upset and angry with himself.
“David,” Nick began, but he brushed him off.
“On and off for nearly two years,” David continued. “But for the last six weeks, since she got back from California, he’s been tracking her daily. He knew what car service the station used, knew when she usually left work, a list of restaurants she liked. Here’s the kicker—he knew she was at Fringe last week, and who she talked to.”
Marco said, “We already put an agent on the place, and on Melinda Sanchez, the bartender who talked to Max.”
“So this was the plan all along?” Nick said. “Why did he wait until Thursday?”
“Maybe for the trial to be over?” David suggested. “Though why, I don’t know.”
Nick turned off the soup and put a lid on it to keep it warm.
Marco said, “I’m going to check on Maxine and crash for a couple hours.” He walked over to the staircase. He saw his bag at the bottom of the stairs. Whipping around, he glared at Nick. “What the hell?”
“Take it up with Max,” Nick said with a straight face.
Marco glared at him. He grabbed his bag and brushed by Nick. Then he stopped, turned around, and said, “It won’t last.” He walked down the short hall to the guest room and firmly shut the door behind him.
David
was sitting in the living room, looking out the window. Nick sat across from him. “Sorry about that.”
David waved off the comment. Instead, he said, “I’m quitting.”
“Max isn’t going to let you quit.”
“She really doesn’t have a say. Ben hired me. And Ben was right the other day. I failed her in the worst way.”
“David, I don’t know you well, but it’s clear that Max depends on you.”
“More than she should. I think the problem is that I care too much. I need a level of disconnect, of impartiality, in order to be a good bodyguard.”
“David, were you ever just a bodyguard?”
“Yes, when I was first hired.”
“No, you weren’t. Max uses you for everything. Research. Discourse. Security. But for her, security is last on her mind. If you leave, it will do more damage than Duvall did.”
David looked out the window to the Hudson River and didn’t say anything.
Nick added, “Besides, I doubt Max will let you quit. She’s quite persuasive.”
David smiled, just a bit. “She did good. She got out of there. I’m proud of her.”
“She needs you now. I have to go back to California—I don’t want to, and that I don’t want to leave makes me uncomfortable. But I can promise I’ll be back first opportunity.”
“Good.” He winked. “Team Nick.”
“Hey, all I need is you on my side instead of Marco’s and I win.”
Chapter Thirty-two
The words blended together. Words and words, flowing over the pages, ink from her pen spilling blood.
The claw of the monster at the window …
The sting of the scorpion …
The gnawing rats, eating the flesh of the dead, waiting for Max to succumb. Would they wait until she was dead or just unconscious before they feasted?
“Do you even see? You go to all the places your mother took you. Searching for what? Answers? Answers you cannot possibly find. Everything is about you, isn’t it? Everything is about you. You and your mother. What she did. When she left. How you felt. Selfish and spoiled.”
Her mother had sounded so guilty after she’d left Max for nine days. When she returned, she promised never to do it again. And she hadn’t.
Compulsion (Max Revere Novels Book 2) Page 33