Doctor and Protector

by Meredith Webber

  ‘I don’t like the suicide idea either,’ McCall told him. ‘Especially now you’ve mentioned a rifle. They’re hard to handle—awkward—and the easiest way to do the job is to sit down and tuck them under your chin. For this guy to have held a rifle and got the bullet to go through him where it did, he’d have to have been standing up and in a most peculiar position.’

  ‘So, someone shot him. If he survives maybe he can tell us who.’

  McCall looked at Dave.

  ‘You reckon we can be that lucky?’

  Dave shrugged.

  ‘It’s our best chance. After all, our bloke must have assumed either he or his car had been seen, to have had a shot at Joe.’

  ‘And when he hears Joe’s still alive?’

  McCall was still thinking this one through when Cassie pushed her way into the locker room, slumped down on the bench that ran along one side and burst into tears. Dave reached her first, sitting beside her and putting his arm around her shoulders, patting her until the storm subsided, then handing her his handkerchief.

  McCall fought off what just might have been jealousy, and waited until she’d recovered enough to speak.

  ‘Joe died,’ she said bluntly. ‘The surgeon’s still looking but he thinks the bullet probably chipped off a bit of bone from a rib or the sternum and that ricocheted about, causing damage to the ligament holding the aorta. It didn’t tear right through but shifted the ligament so it pulled and caused a bulge like an aneurysm on the aorta itself. While he was working on the trachea, it burst.’

  Other members of the team filtered into the room, people ripping off their theatre gear, hurling it towards the bins but not caring if it missed. There was no conversation until the surgeon came in. He saw Dave and moved towards him.

  ‘I think the body should go to Brisbane. I can do an autopsy—as can Cassie—but the folk down there can tell you a whole lot more about where that bullet came from. Even after our surgery, the path’s still pretty clear.’

  He turned to McCall.

  ‘You did a good job. No one could have suspected the secondary damage.’

  After which everyone changed in silence, the surgeon disappearing into the shower, Cassie throwing off her gown but heading back into the theatre.

  McCall thought of all she had to do—preparing the body for transport and making the necessary arrangements to get it to the morgue in Brisbane, notifying Joe’s family, writing up a death certificate, completing the myriad of forms connected to any death in hospital. He wished he could help, but knew he had more important issues to consider. Taking Dave’s arm, he steered him out of the room.

  They were barely in the corridor when McCall asked the questions in the forefront of his mind.

  ‘Have you spoken to Abigail? Can you get the family out of town?’

  Dave frowned at him.

  ‘You said that earlier. Do you think it’s important? I mean, the guy is after Cassie, not her family.’

  ‘And how is she most vulnerable if not through her family?’ McCall said.

  Dave seemed reluctant to agree, but he did admit he’d spoken to Abigail.

  ‘She said, if it was really necessary, she could send Anne, Gwen and the twins down to their holiday house, but she felt she couldn’t leave herself—said she wouldn’t leave Cassie.’

  ‘And I bet if Abigail won’t go, Anne won’t go. They strike me as that kind of family—all sticking together,’ McCall grumbled.

  ‘They are,’ Dave agreed. ‘When Mr Carew died, Cassie gave up her job—and the fiancé—to come home and help out with the family.’

  McCall nodded—it fitted with what he already knew of Cassie Carew.

  ‘But they’ve all got to go,’ he insisted to Dave. ‘I’ll talk to Abigail. You have the number?’

  ‘What do you mean, they’ve all gone to the beach?’ Cassie demanded some hours later, when they were finally able to leave the hospital and were driving towards her home.

  ‘Gone or going, I’m not sure of the timetable. But think about it, Cassie. This fellow’s made some errors, and he’s blaming you. That not only makes him more dangerous, but more unpredictable. You’ve mucked up his careful, brilliant planning, so you have to pay, and how best to make you pay?’

  Cassie pulled the car over to the side of the road, unable to drive as this final blow in a day already overcrowded with drama and tragedy started an uncontrollable shivering right through her body.

  ‘Through Anne, or Mum, or the twins,’ she managed to whisper. ‘You’re right, McCall, they’ve got to go.’

  She felt lost, inadequate, despairing, and, like a child who needed to be held so he knew he was safe, she turned towards McCall. He wrapped his arms around her and held her close.

  ‘You could go, too,’ he told her. ‘Should go, for your own safety.’

  He held her more tightly, and she felt her body relaxing against his. It shouldn’t be; she was still angry with him over the deceit. But in spite of her reservations, it was nice being held by McCall, and, as a practical bonus, her mind was beginning to work again. Still beyond speech, though, she shook her head in answer to his words.

  ‘OK,’ he said, acknowledging her head-shake, ‘but how about you move to a motel? We both move to a motel. There could be half a dozen murderers walking around that house of yours and no one would know. We can put out a story that you’ve an infestation of some kind—what kind of bugs infest houses here? Dave can organise fumigators—he can get the sort who put a big tent over the house and pump in noxious gas. That will explain why your family has gone to the beach house and we’re at the motel.’

  Nice as it was, being held by McCall, this statement brought all her doubts flooding back. Cassie knew this was the moment it had to stop. She pushed away from him, and looked him straight in the eye.

  ‘There you go again!’ she said accusingly. ‘I’m not sure this ability of yours to make up the most extraordinary yet believable lies in the blink of an eye is a good thing.’

  He smiled and she forgot her anger and almost forgot her life was in danger because of the skipping sensation that smile caused in her heart.

  ‘It’s a talent I didn’t even know I had until I came out here,’ he said modestly. ‘But even I’m impressed by the way these things come out.’

  ‘Well, you shouldn’t be,’ Cassie told him—tart because of the skipping going on in her heart. ‘It’s a very dangerous habit to get into and if you start doing it in front of someone who, well, someone you might one day want to marry or something—how will she feel? She’ll wonder if she’ll ever be able to believe a word you utter.’

  McCall smiled again as Cassie fumbled to the end of a speech she was sorry she’d begun. This time the skip became a trip, as her heartbeats juddered for a moment, then raced dangerously as if they needed to catch up.

  ‘I think she’ll always know,’ he said, and though the words meant nothing in themselves, Cassie had a feeling they were special.

  Maybe being stalked by a murderer was muddling her mind. She reached for the keys and was about to restart the engine when McCall put his hand on her shoulder.

  ‘I’ll drive,’ he said. ‘I’ll walk around, you slip across the seats.’

  It wasn’t anything any man, offering to drive, wouldn’t have said, but it reminded Cassie she was a target and the shivering began again. But this time it was heat causing it—the heat of anger.

  ‘This is stupid,’ she told McCall when he was back in the car. ‘You’re not even a real bodyguard, yet you’re making yourself a target in my place. If this maniac fires at the car and hits you, then I’ll be responsible for your death. Do you think I want that on my conscience?’

  ‘I am not going to die and nor are you,’ McCall told her. ‘Get that into your head for a start. With a fourth death, and what I’m sure will prove to be attempted murder with the family in the car, Dave’s finally getting more help. There’s already a policeman watching somewhere near your house, and two more, in plain clothe
s, will travel in convoy with your family, not to your beach house but to a resort in another seaside town. So they’ll be safe. As soon as we get to the house, I’ll phone Dave about the fumigator idea and get him going on that. If we stay there tonight, so will the policeman, and tomorrow we’ll move into a motel. And though Dave can’t afford twenty-four-hour surveillance, you can be sure he’ll have a car going by fairly frequently.’

  ‘You’ve organised all of this since Joe died?’ Cassie demanded. They were pulling into the drive, McCall making sure he was to one side of her mother’s car, presently being packed with the paraphernalia that always accompanied the twins on any journey.

  ‘We’re going to the beach,’ Ethan shouted as she got out of the car, both twins rushing towards her for a shared hug.

  ‘I know you are, you lucky ducks,’ she said, her voice husky and her arms, McCall noticed, lingering around the small bodies of her nephews.

  ‘How am I supposed to get through final-year exams when Mum makes rash decisions to whisk us all off to the beach?’ Anne complained, appearing with an armful of toys. She then looked from McCall to Cassie, and back to McCall.

  ‘I suspect,’ she added, speaking directly to him, ‘it might be her not so subtle way of leaving you two on your own. She’s been despairing that she’ll never get Cassie married off. You must seem like the last chance.’

  McCall glanced at Cassie, who was colouring with embarrassment while scowling ferociously at her sister.

  ‘Didn’t Mum tell you about the termites?’ she snapped. ‘The house is riddled with them. It’s a wonder it hasn’t fallen down on us. The only way to treat it is total fumigation—tents over the house and all that stuff—and we won’t be able to live in it for weeks.’

  Anne appeared to swallow the story, though, teenager that she was, she came up with one more question.

  ‘Then where are you and McCall going to be staying?’

  McCall could have answered, but he’d been so impressed by Cassie’s nonchalance as she’d repeated the lie he’d made up earlier that he thought he was better off letting her field it.

  Though after the talking-to she’d given him about lying, he couldn’t help raising a quizzical eyebrow at her as he waited for her response.

  ‘Oh, we’ll go to a motel,’ she said, though the new fierce colour in her cheeks belied the casualness of her voice.

  ‘Separate rooms, I hope,’ Anne said, grinning at McCall as she continued on to the car to dump her load.

  Abigail appeared next, putting down the suitcase she was carrying to hug her daughter—holding her close an extra minute as Cassie had held the twins. Then, to McCall’s astonishment, she turned and hugged him, too.

  ‘I hope you and Dave know what you’re doing,’ she whispered to him. ‘I’m entrusting my daughter to your care.’

  McCall put his hands on her shoulders as they eased apart, and looked into the face that was so very much an older version of Cassie’s.

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ he promised, and knew by the way she nodded that she understood he couldn’t make a better promise. Then he leaned forward and kissed her on her cheek. ‘She’s important to me, too,’ he said, admitting to himself, as well as to Abigail, that the woman he’d met only yesterday was fast becoming a focal point in his personal as well as his professional life.

  Which was a pretty scary thought, not only because she was the target of a psychopath but because they didn’t really know each other at all, and she could well be horrified if she knew how he was thinking—or, worse, totally repelled by him. She might hate men with brown eyes, and she certainly had reservations about his honesty.

  Then there was that recurring theme in the town about Cassie not doing relationships. Dave had said it, the woman Cassie had stitched up at the hospital the first day had intimated as much, and Anne had implied it more than once…

  ‘Go on inside. We’ll all say goodbye in there,’ Abigail said to him, giving him a little push in the direction of the house. He realised he was still standing where he’d been when she’d hugged him, though while he’d been lost in his thoughts she’d apparently lifted her suitcase and put it into the car.

  He went in through the door leading to the kitchen, guessing the family would be waiting there. Cassie was kissing Anne, and McCall knew her arms would linger around her sister, then Abigail was back, chivvying them all to get the farewells done and get into the car.

  ‘Gwen’s already out there waiting for us,’ she said.

  McCall found himself included in the farewells, the two small boys hugging his knees, so it seemed natural to lift them up and carry them out to the car, then fasten them into their restraints. As the big vehicle backed out, Cassie slid her hand into his.

  ‘It must hurt to be with children, after what happened to your family,’ she said softly, and he squeezed her fingers and hoped she didn’t hear him swallow the big lump of emotion lifting the two slight bodies had brought into his throat.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THEY were still standing, hand in hand, in the driveway, when a discreet cough startled Cassie into a shriek of terror that somehow landed her in McCall’s arms.

  ‘It’s OK, Cassie, it’s me, Nathan—the constable. Dave sent me to make sure your family got away OK. I’ve let him know they’re on their way and the car he’s got ready to follow them will fall in behind them as they go through town.’

  Cassie moved hastily out of the protection of McCall’s arms, furious with herself for reacting so impulsively. If it had been the murderer, he could have shot them both with one bullet.

  She even managed to say hello to Nathan, though her mind was working at warp speed—trying desperately to rationalise what she was feeling for McCall. It was the threat of danger lending an edge to everything, intensifying reactions, that was what it was. With the added worry that she was the reason he, too, could be a target. Did guilt make people feel sexier? Was that why every touch from McCall—usually either comforting or accidental—was causing tremors, rioting waves of heat and tripping heartbeats in her body?

  It might be an inbuilt instinct from primitive times set into the body’s programming so in times of danger sex became important to ensure the survival of the species.

  ‘I don’t think so!’ Cassie muttered, only aware she’d spoken aloud when she heard Nathan’s ‘I beg your pardon?’ and McCall’s ‘And why not?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I was thinking of something else,’ she said, searching her brain for some inkling of the conversation that might have slipped in unnoticed while she’d been thinking about sex.

  No luck.

  ‘What were you saying?’

  ‘I’d rather know what you were thinking,’ McCall murmured to her, a hint of a smile playing around his lips.

  Nathan, meanwhile, was explaining, apparently for the second time, that Dave wanted them out of the house tonight.

  ‘He’s booked you into a motel—it’s not fancy but it’s the best he could do. There’s a big Country Women’s Association do on in town this week.’

  ‘So, let’s go in and pack.’ This from sensible McCall, who obviously wasn’t thinking about survival-of-the-species sex. ‘It won’t take me long, but you should bring enough for a couple of weeks.’

  ‘I can’t leave the house for a couple of weeks—not just like that. What about the stuff that’ll go rotten in the refrigerator? What about Blondie? I can’t take her to a motel.’

  ‘I’ll empty the refrigerator for you while you pack, and check the kitchen for other perishables,’ McCall told her. ‘We’ll have to empty the freezer as well. If we’re making this look authentic, Dave will have to organise to have the power disconnected to put the tarps across. I’ll phone Dave from inside to tell him what we’ve told people. As for Blondie, are there boarding kennels in the town? Is there somewhere we can leave her?’

  ‘Only Derek’s place—he’s not often full. I’ll give him a call and drop her out there on the way. He’ll understand the lack of notice
if I explain what’s happening.’

  ‘About the fumigation,’ McCall said, leading the way into the kitchen.

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Derek’s not even on the list, he’s too old and he’s not a local, not originally. But, yes, I will tell him about the fumigation—we can’t start different stories circulating in the town. I’m not entirely stupid.’

  ‘I know you’re not,’ McCall said.

  He spoke quietly but the words still fanned her anger.

  ‘Well, you don’t show it! You and Dave have been treating me like a half-wit—setting up pretences, telling me lies—and all it amounts to is that now you’re in danger, too. You can’t tell me this maniac would hesitate to kill you if you happened to get in his way.’

  She stomped away, not entirely sure why suddenly she was so cross with the man.

  Blaming him for the strange emotions she was feeling might be one explanation. Worrying about him being killed might be another…

  She found a suitcase—amazed the family had left her one—and shoved clothes in with little regard for what she was packing. The bathroom stuff was easier; she simply scooped it all into a toilet bag and threw that into the case on top of her clothes. Most of her medical books were at the hospital, but she scanned her bookshelves, wondering if there was anything else she should take.

  ‘How are you going?’

  McCall had appeared in her doorway.

  ‘How did you know where to find me?’ she asked in turn, crabby with him and the whole situation, particularly the evidently genetically programmed attraction she was feeling.

  His smile flashed across his face, then disappeared before he said, ‘Could it have been the muttering noises accompanying the packing that drew me in this direction?’

  ‘Not funny, McCall,’ she snapped at him. ‘Here I am, lied to by my supposed allies and being forced out of my home by a homicidal maniac who could kill me any minute—why the hell shouldn’t I mutter?’

  She was zipping the case shut and, of course, something caught in the zip. She swore, which eased a little of her tension, then skittered away as McCall came over, touching her fingers as he bent to fix the problem.