by Tee O'Fallon
Matt made his way slowly to the bushes, again being cautious of scaring the animal and having to chase it all over the neighborhood. He caught sight of Poofy and managed to grab him before he could take off.
At the street, Jake stood by the open doors of an ambulance. Matt made his way toward him, cradling Poofy tightly to his chest. Inside the ambulance, Trista lay on a gurney, an oxygen mask over her nose and mouth. But when she caught sight of Poofy in his arms, she sat upright and tore the mask from her face.
Matt stepped into the ambulance and handed the cat over to her.
With a look of relief, she held out her arms. “Poofy.” Then she cuddled the cat against her breasts and smiled.
That smile did something to his heart.
“Hey,” one of the medics blustered. “You can’t have a cat in here.” He stood and was about to take the cat from Trista, when Matt shot out a hand and grabbed the guy’s arm.
Shaking his head, he gave the medic a stern look. “Let it go.”
Reluctantly, the medic dropped his hands and resumed tending to Trista by placing the mask back on her face.
Tears ran down the sides of her soot-stained cheeks, but Matt couldn’t decipher whether it was from the smoke, or because her cat was alive. He turned to leave, stopping at the sound of her voice.
“Matt,” she said from beneath the mask. “Thank you.”
For several seconds, their gazes locked. Even covered in soot with an oxygen mask over her face, she was lovely. He gave a quick nod, then turned to find the medic extending another mask in his direction. Ignoring the offer, he stepped outside. He hadn’t inhaled nearly as much smoke as Trista, and conferring with Jake was more important.
Matt didn’t understand the unexpectedly protective thoughts he found himself continually having where Trista Gold was concerned. All he knew was at that moment, he felt a hundred feet tall.
“This was no accident,” he said to Jake.
Jake nodded. “I agree. A Russian hit man going after her, then her house goes up in flames. Any idea what she’s working on for the CIA?”
“Not specifically, but I will find out.” Even if he had to beat it out of someone.
“Can you follow us to the hospital?” Matt glimpsed a patrol car pulling to a stop across the street. “Just in case.”
“Already planning on it.” Jake nodded to the two uniformed officers stepping out of the vehicle. “I need to ask her some questions.”
“Join the club,” he muttered. Something big, bad, and ugly was going on here, and he was dead certain the agency knew more than it was letting on.
He closed the ambulance doors, not wanting to leave them open in case Viktor Solonik or someone else was hiding somewhere, waiting to take a pot shot. When the ambulance began rolling down the street, Jake got into his Charger, and Matt hustled to his truck to follow them to the hospital. Along the way, he called his boss.
“Buck,” he said when his boss’s groggy voice growled in his ear. “We’ve got a problem. Someone just tried to murder Trista Gold. Again.”
Chapter Eleven
“We’re just about done here,” the nurse said as she cleansed away the last of the blood from Trista’s arms and legs.
Glass shards from the basement window had gouged into the tender undersides of her arms and the tops of her thighs. Luckily, the wounds were superficial, stinging only slightly, and none of them needed stitches. That, and her asthma hadn’t kicked in again, despite the stress.
Still clad only in her cotton camisole, she shivered at the continuous blast of cold air coming from the overhead vent, but it was the only thing keeping her awake. It was three fifteen in the morning, and with the adrenaline rush quickly ebbing, she could barely keep her eyes open.
Through the gap in the ER curtain, she glimpsed Matt, Detective Sorensen, and Matt’s boss, Buxton McIntyre, with their heads together. Discussing her, no doubt.
The nurse emptied the silver tray containing a pile of bloody gauze into a red biohazard container on the floor, then grabbed a tube of something from a drawer. “How are you feeling?”
She nodded. “Good.” Relatively, that was. Considering someone tried to burn me alive. Her throat felt dry as a desert, but at least she no longer felt the need to breathe through the oxygen mask.
The nurse began dabbing ointment on the tops of her thighs. “As soon as your chest X-rays come back, the doctor will be in to speak with you and listen to your breathing one last time.”
“I’m not staying here. I want to go ho—” She had no home. Not anymore. Everything she owned was probably burned to ashes in the fire. Her clothes, her books, photos, mementos. Her phone had been stolen, and her laptop had probably melted inside the cabinet where she’d stashed it. She didn’t even have any food for Poofy, or a litter box.
“Oh, honey.” The nurse laid her hand on Trista’s shoulder. “Do you want to call your family?”
“No. My only family is, literally, on the other side of the world.” And they were probably incommunicado on an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Tears welled in her eyes, making them itchy, and she blinked them back. Along with cat food, kitty litter, and clothes, she’d also have to get new glasses, contact lenses, or both. The lenses she still wore were irritating her eyes, but if she took them out, her world would go blurry.
“How about friends? Is there someone nearby you can stay with?”
“Maybe.” She could take Bonnie or Kevin up on their offers to stay with them, but she wouldn’t dream of taking advantage of their generosity for more than a few days. “I’ll come up with something.” She forced a smile, genuinely appreciative of the nurse’s concern.
“Are you up for visitors?” She canted her head to the three men hovering outside the curtain. “That detective wants to ask you some questions, and your boyfriend seems pretty worried about you.”
“My what?” She stared at the nurse as if she’d grown two heads.
“Your boyfriend.” She glanced to where Matt and the other men stood, then squeezed a generous blob of white ointment from the tube. “The big handsome guy who hasn’t stopped pacing since you were brought in. He’s been interrogating the nurses every five minutes for an update on your condition. If he wasn’t so darned good looking, we would have tossed him into the waiting room.”
She looked through the curtains at Matt, who was deep in conversation, a dark, brooding look on his handsome face. Despite her mantra, she couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to be his girlfriend. Would he be attentive and loving? Or aloof and hard, like so many law enforcement officers tended to be?
Taking a shallow breath so as not to induce another fit of coughing, she sighed. “He’s not my boyfriend.”
Without looking up from dabbing ointment onto Trista’s cuts, the nurse uttered a high-pitched laugh. “Coulda fooled me, honey. He sure acts sweet on you. But if he’s not yours, can I have him?” She winked. “While the doctor was examining you, I cleaned and bandaged the cuts on his hands and chest, and OMG. If I had a man with that body and that face looking at me every morning at breakfast, I’d never leave my house.”
Matt sweet on me? Ridiculous. Surely the nurse had mistaken Matt’s professional interest in her well-being for something else. Processing that absurd notion was about as realistic as the internet going away, and—
“Wait.” She grabbed the nurse’s arm. “He was hurt?” She hadn’t known that, but he was standing right outside the curtain, and he seemed okay.
“Don’t worry.” She patted Trista’s arm. “He has a bump on the head and some cuts on his hands and torso. The gashes on his hands are deeper than yours, so I wrapped them in gauze to heal for a couple days. But they’re not as bad as they look. I understand he saved your cat.”
“He did.” That must have been when he’d been cut, going back through the window to save Poofy. The more she thought about it, she doubted she could have managed to re-enter the house and get both her and Poofy back out on her own.
The ang
er she’d been harboring against Matt began slipping away. If her beloved cat had died, she would have been heartbroken. Because of Matt, Poofy was safe and sound.
Why was he at my house in the first place?
“There.” The nurse capped the tube, handing it to her. “Apply this twice a day to all the cuts to ward off infection.
“Thank you.” She watched the nurse leave and speak briefly to the men waiting outside.
She picked up a Styrofoam cup of water to ease the dryness in her throat. Through the open curtain, she caught Matt looking at her, and she froze with the straw between her lips. The scowl on his face was unmistakable. He was angry. On the other hand, he scowled quite a bit. But on him, a scowl looked good.
He turned as three more people joined the group—her supervisors, Wayne Gurgas and Genevieve Grujot, and Buxton McIntyre, Langley’s chief of security. “Oh, boy,” she muttered, as the entire group amassed inside her small, curtained ER room. Matt stood to one side of the gurney, Detective Sorensen to the other. Langley’s chief of security and her two supervisors stood at the foot of the bed.
Whirring came from the overhead vent as the AC took that moment to blast her with more freezing air. Instantly, her nipples began to pucker and harden. She crossed her arms over her breasts, knowing full well it was already too late to hide her body’s responses. She would have reached for the blanket at the foot of the bed, but that would only give everyone present a better opportunity to look down the top of her camisole.
As if reading her thoughts, Matt reached over and grabbed the blanket, draping it around her shoulders. Seeing the white gauze wrapped around both his hands, her heart squeezed at what he’d done to save Poofy. After pulling the ends of the blanket across her chest, she glanced up at him. Who would have known the big bad cop had a sweet, thoughtful side? “Th-thank you.”
Nodding slightly, he still didn’t look happy. He wasn’t exactly scowling anymore, but his jaw was tightly clenched and the intense gleam in his eyes was one she hadn’t seen before.
After Wayne, Genevieve, and Chief McIntyre expressed their concern and condolences over the loss of her house, Detective Sorensen began questioning her.
“Ms. Gold.” He flipped open a pad. “I’d like to ask you some questions if you’re up to it.” When she nodded, he continued. “Did you see the fire start?”
“No.” She shook her head. “When I went to bed around midnight, everything was fine. I don’t really know what time it was when I smelled smoke. Poofy—my cat—woke me up and then all the alarms went off.”
Detective Sorensen scribbled on his pad. “Cats and other animals can often sense even the smallest amount of smoke long before humans do. What happened next?”
“I opened my bedroom door and realized the house really was on fire. I was going to get the fire extinguisher, but it was too late to be of any use. The front door, all the curtains, and most of the furniture were already ablaze.”
Pausing, she reached for the cup of water and positioned the straw in front of her mouth, but her hands were shaking.
Matt covered her hands with his, guiding the cup to her mouth, patiently waiting while she sipped and swallowed. She cast him a grateful look before continuing.
“I went back to the bedroom, grabbed Poofy then crawled into the kitchen because it was easier to breathe on the floor. I was trying to get out the back door, but it wouldn’t open.”
“Did you unlock it?” Detective Sorensen asked.
“Of course, but it still wouldn’t open.” Her hands began shaking again, so she set the cup on her lap for fear of spilling it. “So I went into the basement. There’s one window down there, and I’d just opened it yesterday. I do that regularly to prevent the basement from becoming too damp and musty.”
“I take it the window didn’t open,” Detective Sorensen said, more than asked.
“It didn’t, so I broke it with a crowbar.”
“Did you see or hear anyone else in the house?”
“No.” She thought back to Poofy’s odd behavior. “But before we went to bed, Poofy sat directly in front of the main door, looking up at it. It was strange, since he’s not an outdoor cat. I thought I heard something outside but thought it was just another dead tree limb falling from the old oak tree out back.
“Aside from smoke, did you smell anything unusual?” Matt asked.
She’d been about to say no, when she remembered that wasn’t true. She had smelled something. “Gasoline, only maybe not quite gasoline.”
“Could have been some other form of petroleum distillate,” Matt added. “Kerosene or turpentine. I smelled it, too.”
Detective Sorensen nodded as he jotted in his pad. “Did you see any lines of demarcation in the fire?”
“Yes.” How could she have forgotten? “There were distinctly straight lines of fire running from the curtains down to the floor and the furniture, both in the living room and the kitchen.”
Matt crossed his arms, looking none too happy. “Those were probably made when he poured the accelerant all around.”
Detective Sorensen looked up from writing. “Anything else you remember?”
She nodded. “When I went to bed, I left my cell phone on the desk in the living room. After the fire started, it was gone.”
“Are you sure you didn’t leave it somewhere else?” Matt asked.
“Positive.” Her fingers dug into the Styrofoam cup. “That’s where I always leave it at night so my parents don’t wake me up with their three a.m. text messages. Someone was inside my house and took it.”
Detective Sorensen looked first to Matt, then to her. “So it would seem.”
Wayne cleared his throat. “What about your laptop? Did they take that, too?”
“No. I assume it burned up or melted in the fire.”
He paused to stare at her for a moment. “Were you using it for anything work-related?”
Trista gulped, squeezing the cup tighter. “I, uh, was doing some internet searches on it.”
“Searches on what?” Genevieve narrowed her eyes.
She hesitated, knowing that if she fessed up, she’d be neck-deep in trouble. Someone’s trying to murder me. I’m already in trouble. “Iqaluit,” she reluctantly answered.
Genevieve pressed her lips together then exchanged looks with Wayne. “And?”
And now I’m about to dive headfirst into deep, deep shpooh. “I had a copy of Dark Curtain on my laptop.”
Wayne exhaled forcefully, telling her she’d pay dearly for that indiscretion.
“What’s Dark Curtain, and what’s Iqaluit?” Chief McIntyre looked at Trista, then to Wayne and Genevieve. “And don’t invoke any of that top secret need-to-know shit, because at this point, it’s safe to say we need to know. From what Sgt. Connors related to me about the attack on Ms. Gold earlier this week, the hit in CODIS on her attacker, and—”
“Wait!” She grabbed Matt’s arm, forcing him to look at her. “You got a hit in CODIS?” That meant her attacker already had a criminal record. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I only found out tonight.” The muscles beneath her hand flexed, and she released his arm. “When Jake told me the guy’s criminal history, we went to your house to check up on you.”
“Well, who is he?” She looked from Matt to the detective.
“His name is Viktor Solonik,” Detective Sorensen supplied. “He’s a low-level thug with ties to the Russian mob. He’s been suspected of a few hits, but nothing was ever proven. Do you know him?”
She gripped the bed rail tightly. For a moment, all she could do was give the detective a blank look while she processed what he’d said. A Russian hit man is trying to kill me. She shook her head to clear it, then wracked her brain for even the slightest recollection, but there was none.
“I’ve never heard of him. Why didn’t he just shoot me? If he could break into my house and douse it with gasoline without me hearing a thing, why not put a bullet in my head while I’m sleeping? Wouldn’t that
have been a lot easier?” This time when she shivered, it had nothing to do with the air conditioning. The idea of being shot while she slept was terrifying.
“Overtly murdering a high-level CIA intelligence analyst would raise a helluva lot of red flags,” Matt said. “Both a police and an internal investigation would be initiated. The first attempt on your life was almost labeled a random attack, which was probably what Solonik intended. In all likelihood, had he succeeded, he would have gone back and stolen your wallet from your car to make it look like a simple robbery. Even the fire could have been considered accidental, although using an accelerant that way was sloppy.”
“Getting back to my point”—Chief McIntyre glared at Wayne—“someone tried to murder her. Twice. That makes it my and Sgt. Connors’s business. So we definitely need to know what the hell’s really going on here.”
Wayne and Genevieve exchanged another look, this one longer in duration. Wayne poked his head around each side of the curtained room, then turned back and lowered his voice.
“Gentlemen, what you’re about to hear is ten steps beyond TS, but in the interest of Trista’s safety, we agree. You do need to know. The two of you,” he said, tipping his head first to Matt then Chief McIntyre, “will both officially be read into the program.” He gave the detective a pointed look. “You, however, were never here. Discussing a single word of what I’m about to say outside the scope of this investigation constitutes a breach of national security. And”—he indicated the detective’s notepad—“no notes.”
“Get on with it.” Matt’s tone was hard as he glared at Wayne, the muscles in his cheeks flexing. He looked…deadly. That was the word that came to Trista’s mind.
Wayne shifted, looking uncomfortable under Matt’s unyielding scrutiny.
“Ms. Gold is exceptionally good at what she does. To a fault.” Wayne’s gaze met hers, and she couldn’t be certain what he’d said was a compliment. “Using a program that she alone developed for the agency, she tracked a target in the black net, then overheard something in a secret chat room that put her life at risk. After the attack Monday night, we reread the printout of the chat but weren’t certain there was a connection to her assignment. Due to the content of that conversation and even the remote possibility that the two events were linked, we revoked her security clearance and banned her from Langley for her own safety.”
