Comfort Me

by Debbie Viguié

  The woman nodded, grabbed the bag, and dashed from the room. The doctor grabbed Liam’s chart with hands that had started to shake. He skimmed through it then put it down and approached Liam. “Bring me a light,” he barked.

  Another nurse scrambled forward with a penlight. They pried open one of Liam’s eyelids and shone the light in his eye. Then he yanked a stethoscope out of the nurse’s hands and listened to Liam’s heart and lungs.

  “What exactly happened in here?” the man asked, turning to Jeremiah.

  Jeremiah told him what he knew.

  “Alright, we need to get this man to imaging right now to check on his liver and spleen, make sure they didn’t sustain any more damage.”

  “What do you think he was dosed with?” Jeremiah asked.

  “No idea yet. Hopefully he was just put under.”

  “And how soon will you know?”

  The doctor shook his head then turned to his nurses. “Alright, let’s get him out of here. Everyone move.”

  They took the brakes off the bed Liam was in which was just another glorified gurney. They then started to wheel him out.

  “Stay here so I know where to find you,” the doctor instructed Jeremiah.

  He nodded.

  The doctor and nurses left and Jeremiah and the officer were once again alone. The other man was struggling to pull himself together. He glared at Jeremiah. “I know you’re friends with the detectives, but you’ve just committed battery against a police officer. You know what kind of sentence that carries?”

  Jeremiah stepped close to the other man and dropped his voice low. “Yeah, a lot shorter one than killing a police officer. Of course, they’d never be able to prove either.”

  The man’s eyes widened in terror and he reached for his gun. Jeremiah grabbed it before he could and shoved it into his waistband. He locked his eyes on the other man. “Now, you’re going to tell me everything that happened after I left this room a few minutes ago.”

  ~

  Cindy was tired as she headed to Liam’s room in the hospital. Jeremiah had left her a voicemail saying he’d meet her there after work. Her mind was still spinning with the thought that something had happened between Rose and Mr. Cartwright.

  She could hear someone speaking over the PA system. They were speaking rapidly but whatever they were saying was too garbled for her to understand. She reached Liam’s room, walked in and stopped dead in her tracks as she saw Jeremiah slap a police officer.

  “What is going on?” she asked, bewildered.

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out,” Jeremiah growled.

  She stared at the two men and pulled her phone out of her purse. Mark picked up on the second ring.

  “Cindy, is everything okay?”

  “Um, I’m not sure. I just arrived at Liam’s room. Neither he nor Rebecca is here but Jeremiah is...questioning...a police officer.”

  “Questioning?”

  “Yes. Aggressively,” Cindy added.

  There was a torrent of what sounded like profanity from Mark. Fortunately he slurred it together so much that she only caught a couple of words in all of it, most notably ‘lasagna’. There was a pause and then he hung up.

  She wasn’t sure exactly what that meant but she returned her phone to her purse.

  “Where’s Liam?” she asked.

  “Getting x-rays,” Jeremiah said.

  “And Rebecca?”

  “Being operated on.”

  “What?” she asked, feeling like she’d just stepped into some episode of The Twilight Zone where nothing was making any sense.

  “She was stabbed and Liam poisoned while this gentleman wasn’t at his post,” Jeremiah said, his voice steely.

  “Oh!” Cindy exclaimed.

  “Now I’m going to find out why he wasn’t doing his job.”

  “I told you, I was at the nurse’s station,” the man said. He had turned a sickly gray color and was sweating profusely.

  “Why?”

  “They said I had a call.”

  “Who from?” Jeremiah demanded.

  “I don’t know. The nurse who told me didn’t give me a name. When I picked up the phone no one was there.”

  “That should have taken all of twenty seconds,” Jeremiah said.

  “Yeah, well I asked the nurses who had been calling since I figured it had to be important. They were trying to find the woman who had answered the phone in the first place. So, while I waited I called the precinct to make sure no one there was trying to get hold of me. By the time the nurse who answered the phone could talk to me probably four or five minutes had passed. Tops.”

  “And what did that nurse say?”

  “Just that it was a man and that he hadn’t left a name, just that it was urgent that he speak to the officer guarding Liam O’Neill’s room.”

  “It sounds like someone was trying to draw him away,” Cindy interjected.

  “Maybe. Or maybe someone paid him to leave his post,” Jeremiah said.

  She stared at him. He was acting paranoid. There had to be more going on than she was aware of. “What exactly did happen?” she asked.

  “While he was gone, someone came in and put a foreign substance into Liam’s IV drip. They then stabbed Rebecca. I found her almost immediately after that. She was in no condition to say anything about what had happened, unfortunately.”

  “Their attacker could still be in the building,” Cindy said.

  “Not likely. He had plenty of time to escape while I was getting help.”

  “Okay, if we can’t catch him right now and the doctors are working with Liam and Rebecca, let’s all take a deep breath, sit down, and figure out what happened,” Cindy said.

  To her relief, Jeremiah gave a short nod and took a step back from the police officer. He grabbed a chair and indicated that the other man should take one, too. After they were both sitting Cindy collapsed into a chair.

  “Step me through it,” she said.

  Jeremiah settled farther into his chair and the look of agitation left his face. What remained was his customary neutral expression. She was always impressed when he could do that. Sometimes she was also a little irritated. It could be a weird experience discussing something with someone who was refusing to emote.

  “I got here at a quarter past five. I came in and said hello to Rebecca. Liam was sleeping. I asked her if I could get her something. She requested coffee. I left and went down to the cafeteria where I was for five minutes. When I left the room, he was sitting in the chair outside,” Jeremiah said, indicating the officer.

  “About thirty seconds after I saw him leave, a nurse came up to me and told me I had a phone call at the nurses’ station. I went to answer it and discovered that there was no one on the end of the line. I asked the two nurses who were there if they knew who had called me. They didn’t and they said they hadn’t answered the phone. I told them it was important that I find out who had been trying to reach me. The one went to go find whoever answered the phone. While she was gone I called the precinct on my cell just to make sure no one there had tried calling. They hadn’t. It took a few minutes but the nurse who had answered the phone came and told me that it had been a male caller who didn’t identify himself. He asked to speak with the officer on duty, so he didn’t have my name. As soon as she finished telling me that I heard shouting. I ran to the room.”

  “Where I was trying to staunch the flow of blood from Rebecca’s wound,” Jeremiah said. “I’d made it back into the room about ten seconds before that. He wasn’t sitting in the chair.”

  “Because I was at the nurses’ station,” the officer growled. “Like I said.”

  “What did you see when you came into the room?” Cindy asked Jeremiah.

  “Rebecca was lying on her back diagonally across Liam and the hospital bed. Blood was gushing from a stab wound in her abdomen. I dropped the coffee, lunged on top of her and tried to stop her from thrashing around
as I put pressure on the wound. I yelled for help. As it arrived I noticed the foreign substance in Liam’s IV, a pale green liquid, and I put a crimp in the tube until the doctor could turn off the drip.”

  “Okay, that’s weird,” Cindy said, trying to puzzle it all out. She turned back to the police officer. “Did you see anything at all when you were at the nurses’ station, glance back at the room?”

  The officer frowned in thought for a moment. “I did see a nurse go into the room, I think.”

  “Male or female?” Cindy asked.

  “Male. I think he came in here. I just got a quick glimpse.”

  Cindy exchanged glances with Jeremiah. That could have been Rebecca’s stalker.

  “Something is bothering me,” Cindy said.

  “What?”

  “If he had a knife, why bother putting something in Liam’s IV?” she asked. “Why didn’t he just stab him?”

  “That’s a good question,” Jeremiah said with a frown. “Maybe the knife was just a backup and Rebecca figured out what was going on before he could get out of there.”

  “If he’s obsessed with her why stab her?” she asked.

  The police officer jumped in. “That’s not that unheard of. He gets angry that she’s with the other guy or he realizes she’s never going to come back to him, and he just snaps and attacks her.”

  “If that was the plan all along, though, why stab one and not the other?” Cindy questioned. “It’s inefficient.”

  “Maybe stabbing her wasn’t part of the plan. Maybe he was hoping to come in, tamper with the IV, and get out before anyone could figure out what he’d done,” Jeremiah said.

  “Wouldn’t he realize she would recognize him?” Cindy asked.

  “He could have disguised his features some.”

  “I guess,” Cindy mused. “We’re probably not going to know until Rebecca is out of surgery and she can tell us exactly what happened.”

  Jeremiah grimaced. “There’s a good chance she’s not going to make it,” he said quietly.

  “Then we need to pray,” Cindy said.

  “I’ve been doing that already,” he said.

  “Pray harder.”

  He nodded his head.

  Even though her mind was racing Cindy managed to pray for Rebecca and Liam and the doctors working on them.

  Suddenly she heard running steps. She twisted around to see the door just as Mark burst through it. His hair was standing on end, his tie was askew, and his eyes were blazing with a feverish madness. He looked around the room, noticed the missing bed, and opened his mouth in a silent snarl. Then he strode straight up to Jeremiah and glared at him.

  A torrent of words issued from Mark’s mouth, none of them recognizable except for the last one.

  “Lasagna!”

  19

  “Mark, are you speaking in tongues?” Cindy asked, sounding bewildered.

  The comment surprised Jeremiah and he struggled not to laugh out loud at it. The detective had indeed seemed to be speaking pure gibberish.

  A vein in Mark’s forehead was throbbing. He glared at all three of them. “Tell me why I’m not home eating lasagna,” he growled.

  It only took a couple of minutes to bring him up to speed. At the end Jeremiah thought Mark was going to take a swing at the officer, too.

  Mark’s phone rang and after glaring at the officer he went outside to answer it. A minute later he came back glowering harder. “No luck yet on finding the guy we’re looking for,” he said.

  Silence descended as each of them realized there was nothing to do now but wait. Mark finally sat down in a chair and he looked defeated. He glanced up at the police officer. “Go home and get some rest.”

  “My shift isn’t up for another hour,” the man protested.

  “There’s no one here to guard. If there is before your relief gets here I’ll handle it,” Mark said.

  The officer looked at Jeremiah. Jeremiah smiled slowly at him, putting just enough menace into it to hopefully scare him enough to go away and not make a nuisance of himself.

  The man winced and left the room without another word.

  “What did you do to him?” Mark asked after the man had gone.

  “Do you really want to know?” Jeremiah asked.

  “No.”

  “You should go home, too,” Cindy told Mark gently.

  “No, I’m good.”

  “Go home, Mark. Traci and the lasagna are waiting. We have no idea how long it will be before we hear anything here. Once we do I’ll call,” Jeremiah said.

  “You had me at lasagna,” Mark said as he stood up. “Just do me a favor.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t hurt the next officer who comes on duty.”

  “You know I can’t make a promise like that. I don’t know who they are.”

  Mark hung his head in defeat. “Call.”

  “We will,” Cindy said.

  Mark left the room and it was just Cindy and him. She glanced over at him. “Are you okay?”

  “Not really,” he admitted.

  “Do you want me to go get you a shirt so you can clean up?” she asked.

  He glanced down and realized that he was covered in Rebecca’s blood. He hadn’t noticed. “Yeah, that would probably be a good idea,” he said with a sigh. He dug his keys out of his pocket and handed them to her. “I have a spare shirt in my trunk,” he said.

  “In case of emergencies like this?” she asked.

  “In case of emergencies like this,” he affirmed.

  She smirked, but didn’t say anything.

  She got up and headed out of the room. He walked into the bathroom in the room and stripped off his bloody shirt. He dropped it in the trash. He began scrubbing his hands and arms vigorously with soap under the hot water.

  Just as he was toweling off Cindy appeared with a clean white shirt in her hands. As she handed it to him she blushed slightly.

  “You’ve seen me shirtless before,” he said.

  She nodded, biting her lip.

  Suddenly he realized she was remembering their trip to Israel and the kiss they’d shared after the battle. He’d been shirtless then. He smiled. Death and carnage and what she focused on was the kiss.

  That was good because he did, too.

  He put on the clean shirt and then went back out and sat on one of the chairs. “Better?” he asked.

  She just smiled. Her smile faded a moment later, though. “That was a lot of blood,” she said.

  “Yeah, it was.”

  “What do you think her chances are?”

  “Not great, but we moved on it as soon as we possibly could.”

  “I feel so bad for them.”

  “I know, me, too.”

  Cindy’s stomach growled. “I’m hungry,” she admitted with a grimace.

  “I can hold down the fort while you go get something to eat.”

  “Do you want me to bring you something to eat?” she asked.

  “Yeah. And maybe a replacement coffee,” he said, noticing the cup that had rolled into the corner.

  “I’ve got my phone,” she said.

  “Great.”

  Cindy left the room.

  Where did Rebecca’s phone go? Jeremiah suddenly wondered.

  He got up and went over to the desk that she had been sitting at when he’d first showed up. Her purse was still there on the floor by her chair. The coded papers were still on the table. The phone, though, was not where it had been. When he left to get coffee the phone he’d given her was on the table.

  He looked around the chair, then checked her purse to make sure it hadn’t fallen in there. He swept the room. It wasn’t there. Rebecca had been wearing leggings and a long-sleeve shirt. No pockets.

  He grabbed his own phone out of his pocket. He’d put a tracker on the phone. He pulled up the information. The phone was currently about five miles away.

  At Rebecca’s sh
op.

  He dialed Mark.

  “Hello?”

  “We’ve got him!” Jeremiah said. “He’s at Rebecca’s shop.”

  “How do you know?” Mark asked sharply.

  “I realized the phone I gave Rebecca which was here before the attack is gone. I have a tracker on it.”

  “Don’t you think he would have checked to see if there was one of those parental trackers on?” Mark asked.

  “Not necessarily. He probably didn’t expect anyone to notice for a while that the phone was missing. Plus, what I put on the phone he’d never find.”

  “I’m heading there right now. I’ll call for backup.”

  “I’ll meet you there,” Jeremiah said, already moving out the door.

  “No, we can handle it.”

  “He was special forces. If he’s as scary as Rebecca thinks he is you’re going to want me there.”

  “Okay, but don’t go in without me.”

  Jeremiah ended the call. He was racing outside to his car now. He called Cindy, told her where he was going, and told her to wait back in the hospital room for word from the doctors. She clearly didn’t like it, but she agreed.

  A minute later he was speeding toward the shop. He glanced again at the tracker. It hadn’t moved. It was possible Mason had gone there, ditched the phone, and left. That didn’t make sense, though. As far as he knew both Rebecca and Liam were dead and no one was going to be looking for her phone for a while.

  He had probably gone to her shop to connect with what had been hers or to grab a memento for himself.

  Jeremiah turned onto the block where her shop was. Suddenly his phone rang. He expected the name to come up as Mark. Instead, it came up as Rebecca. Mason was calling him. His was one of only two numbers programmed into the phone so it made sense that Mason was trying to feel him out.

  Jeremiah turned the wheel hard and slid into a parking space. He didn’t want to drive up while on the phone and potentially give himself away.

  “Hello?” he answered.

  “Hello, Jeremiah,” the voice on the other end was angry, but controlled.

  “Who is this?” he asked.