Under the Microscope

by Jessica Andersen

  That’s what I want, the click had said. Only that. Only her.

  Too bad he couldn’t fully trust the feeling, or the woman. They might make a good couple for a while, but she’d run in the end. That was her pattern, and he didn’t see any evidence of it changing.

  So he asked for separate rooms without a connecting door. If he was near her, he would only want her. And from the looks he’d intercepted once or twice over the course of the morning, he had a feeling she wanted him right back. But anything they’d have together would be temporary, and he wasn’t looking for temporary.

  Especially not the kind that took a part of him when it left.

  He led the way to the fifth floor and handed her a key card. “I’m right next door. Knock if you need me.”

  She looked startled for a moment, then her face flooded with a complicated mix of emotions. “Does that mean you trust me not to run?”

  “I trust that you’re smart enough to know you’re safer with me than without me at this point. And I know you’re smart enough to figure out you won’t get far without using your credit card number, which I can pretty much guarantee has been flagged by both Detective Marcus and The Nine.”

  He wasn’t sure when the existence of the shadow group had gone from impossible to probable in his mind, but too many of the facts fit best when he plugged them into a group rather than a single individual or company.

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence, I guess,” Raine said, lips twisting in a rueful smile. “I’m going to get some sleep. Want to meet for dinner?”

  “I’m going to get room service and keep working.” He jammed his key card in the slot with more force than necessary. “I’ll call the next-of-kin in Richmond. We’ll go there tomorrow morning, then swing back up to the third victim’s family in New York City.” Saying it like that brought home a point he’d begun to consider that afternoon.

  Apparently Raine caught the connection, too. “Do you think it’s significant that three of the four deaths were on the east coast?”

  He used his foot to hold open his hotel room door. “I’m not sure, but Ike’s checking it out. She’s trying to pull the sample batch numbers and see if the deaths were linked that way. Maybe a small portion of the samples were tainted during the original production process.”

  Raine frowned. “How is she going to figure out…she’s hacking into the FDA? That’s illegal!”

  “So’s conspiring to hold useful drugs off the market so your own patented compounds keep making money.” Max pushed the door open and stepped through. As an afterthought, he pulled out a twenty from the emergency funds and handed it to Raine. “Get something from room service for yourself.” When she shook her head in protest, he insisted, “Trust me, protein and carbs. You may not want to eat, but you’ll feel better if you do.”

  After a pause and a sigh, she took the twenty, lips curving in a soft smile. “You saving me again, Max?”

  “Nah. Saving myself from having to carry you around tomorrow after you faint from low blood sugar.” That got a small laugh out of her, pleasing Max. Feeling as though they were chitchatting to prolong the end of a date, he said, “Good night. Sleep well.”

  And before he’d fully processed the impulse, he leaned down and kissed her softly on the lips.

  It was a chaste kiss, little more than he might give a first date he hadn’t really connected with. But its effect on Max was anything but chaste.

  His blood leaped in his veins, revving from idle to racing speed between one heartbeat and the next. Her lips yielded beneath his, warm and inviting, and he was poised to accept that invitation-

  When she pulled away.

  She blinked up at him, then exhaled a long breath. “Sorry, Max. I’m not looking to be rescued anymore, and I don’t want a man who has to be needed that way. I’m looking for someone who’ll see me as an equal, someone who’ll need me as much as I need him.”

  I see you as an equal, he started to say, but stopped when he realized that wasn’t so. He saw her as a beautiful, desirable woman. As the surprisingly savvy boss of a company that had proved itself successful up until its current troubles. As a different person than the vulnerable, fragile woman he’d known back in Boston.

  But not as his equal. Not as someone he could turn to when things got tough.

  She nodded. “Thought so.” She pressed her lips together as though remembering his kiss. “Too bad, Max. It might’ve been fun for a while.”

  She disappeared into her room next door, leaving him alone with the taste of her on his lips.

  “WHEW. NARROW ESCAPE,” Raine said into the generic hotel room, the likes of which were becoming depressingly familiar. She glanced around, saw nothing out of the ordinary and shrugged. “Guess it’s a shower first.”

  Then she stopped, having realized that she was talking to herself, trying to fill the quiet. She’d been in constant company for nearly the past four days.

  Being alone felt strange. A little eerie.

  “Max is right next door. There’s even a connector.” She crossed the room and unlatched her side, so he could come through if she called for him. Not that she would, of course, but in the case of an emergency…

  “Get a grip,” she told herself. “They don’t know where we are. You’re safe here.”

  Still, the creepy feeling persisted as she checked and double checked the locks, then stripped down for her shower.

  She was tempted to luxuriate beneath the spray, but that felt somehow wrong after what she’d been through that day. Cari Summerton would never again take a good shower, would she? That sweet little girl would never get to swim with her mother, never get to talk to her, laugh with her, yell at her, all those things girls did when they grew up with a mother of their own.

  Many of the things Raine had missed out on.

  “This isn’t about you,” Raine said sternly as she shut off the water and stepped out onto the bath-mat. “None of it is about you. At least not directly.”

  It was about Thriller. About a group of men who, for reasons unknown, had decided to discredit the drug and destroy her in the process.

  Collateral damage, Ike had called it.

  When self-pity threatened, Raine scrubbed harder at her hair, wringing it dry until the tears came from the pull at her scalp rather than worthless sniveling. She wrapped a dry towel around her torso and stepped out into the hotel room.

  And stopped. “Oh, hell.” Her relatively clean clothes-the business outfit she’d washed in the sink last night and hung to dry-were in Max’s duffel. She looked down at herself. “Oh, hell no. That’s so not happening.”

  Refusing to be so stupid-or obvious-as to visit Max in a hotel-size towel, she grimaced and pulled the jeans and sweater back on. She padded to the connecting door barefoot and knocked.

  She heard the sound of a lock being thrown, and the door swung open to reveal a scowling Max. “There wasn’t supposed to be a connecting door.”

  Though she felt a frisson of disappointment at how thoroughly he wanted to avoid her, Raine shrugged. “Sorry. I promise not to bother you again. I need my clothes.”

  His face went blank. Then comprehension washed over his expression. “Right. Wait here.” He turned away, cursed and turned back. “Ignore me, I’m being an ass. Come in.” He gestured to a table beneath the single window, where a room service tray rested. “Eat. I got enough for two, because I figured you wouldn’t follow orders.”

  “I just got out of the shower!” But even given the circumstances, Raine found a faint smile. “It’s one of the basic differences between men and women. The woman showers first. The man orders food.”

  Still standing, they shared a tentative smile.

  At Max’s prompting, she sat. Their knees bumped beneath the hotel-issue table, but neither of them mentioned the contact.

  Many things went unspoken as the meal progressed.

  By silent accord, they kept the conversation light. They didn’t speculate on the case. They didn’t tal
k about their past association or the way it had ended. They didn’t talk about Charlotte or Max’s empty apartment. Raine didn’t ask whether he’d ever gone to New Bridge, looking for her once she’d run.

  Instead, they stuck to safe stuff like movies-which they mostly agreed on-books-ditto-and the occasional foray into current affairs and politics, where they were forced to agree to disagree.

  The good news was that it made for a pleasant meal. The bad news was that it recalled entirely too many of the hours they’d shared during her stay at Boston General.

  Worse, it reminded her that Max wasn’t just a handsome face stuck on a hell of a body. He wasn’t just an overprotective macho man in search of a little woman to take care of.

  He was both of those things, true.

  But he was also really good company, damn it.

  When the meal was over, their conversation faltered. She fell silent, and after a moment, he did, too. They stared at each other over the remains of their food. The scene was lit by daylight filtering through cheap hotel curtains. It wasn’t romantic, wasn’t ambience, but Raine’s heart tilted nonetheless.

  “Aw, hell.” Max leaned forward and Raine met him halfway. Their kiss tasted of red wine and companionship, and the heat built gently. Surely. As though this time it was right.

  Only it wasn’t. He’d already admitted he didn’t see her as an equal.

  He was still looking to save her.

  Raine pulled away, blood humming, and saw the knowledge already written in his eyes.

  “Not yet,” he said as though they’d already discussed it. “Not tonight.”

  Maybe not ever. Probably not ever.

  “Thanks for the meal.” Raine stood and gathered her change of clothes. “See you tomorrow.”

  She surprised herself by sleeping through the afternoon and night, and she woke with the taste of him on her lips.

  THE ADDRESS IKE HAD GIVEN THEM in Richmond, Virginia, belonged not to a family member of the second victim, Minifred Tyrrel, but to her former roommate, Jenni, a late twenty-something who died her hair platinum blond and wore her pants two sizes too small.

  She had agreed to meet with them at noon. When she opened the door, she took one look at Max and couldn’t have been more helpful.

  “Minni was on the pill,” she said, inching a little closer to Max on the love seat she’d insisted they both use, leaving Raine on the big couch by herself.

  Max forced himself to hold his ground and continue with the questions as though her stocking-clad foot wasn’t taking a leisurely tour of his inseam. “Any other meds? What about recreational drugs?”

  “A little X. Maybe some pot now and then. Nothing hard-core.” She glanced at the kitchen, overtly ignoring Raine. “Can I get you anything?”

  “No, I’m fine,” Max answered, leery of what she might offer. “Did Minni smoke or drink?”

  “She drank some. Nothing heavy-duty. And she used to smoke, but she quit right before she got her nose done. The doctors said it would screw up the healing.”

  “True enough.” As he kept going with the questions-mostly gleaned from basic medical history reports, with a few oddball-risk factors Ike and Raine had come up with-Max took a look around the third-floor apartment. It was cramped and vaguely seedy, though one of the girls had made an effort to pretty the place up by draping brightly colored scarves over the lamps and tacking travel posters across the more obvious cracks in the drywall.

  By the time they’d gotten to Minni’s eating habits-and Jenni’s foot had cruised past Max’s knee-Raine interrupted, “No offense, Jenni, but you don’t seem too broken up by your roommate’s death.”

  “We weren’t tight.” As though realizing that sounded bitchy, she quickly said, “And I’m on antidepressants.”

  Which made it all better, apparently.

  Max ran her through the rest of the questions at lightning speed, and he and Raine escaped into the early afternoon air of Virginia.

  They made it to the car before they looked at each other and burst out laughing.

  “Her foot was…it was…” Raine pointed and dissolved into giggles.

  “I know exactly where it was, thank you,” Max said, still chuckling. “And where it was going.”

  Their laughter drained quickly, but it had boiled off some of the tension between them as they pulled back onto the road, headed for New York City and the parents of the third victim, Denise Allen.

  The disposable cell phone rang just before they reached the Virginia border. He answered. “What have you got for me?”

  “I think I’ve got a few things you’ll be interested in hearing,” Ike’s voice said, sounding far away.

  “Tell me.” The cheap plastic creaked when his fingers tightened on the casing, but the disposable phones were the only safe method of communication. There was too good a chance that their regular numbers were being monitored.

  Raine mouthed, Is that Ike? When Max nodded, she gestured for him to hold the phone away from his ear and leaned close so she could listen in.

  Ike said, “First off, I’ve tracked down the sample batch information for the four dead women, to see when the pills that-allegedly-killed them were manufactured. Two came from the same batch, but the other two don’t come close to matching, which seems to rule out the possibility that one or two batches were somehow contaminated during the production process.”

  “That’s good news for Rainey Days, but doesn’t help the investigation a whole lot,” Max said.

  “There’s more. Agent Bryce actually made pretty good progress before the explosion. Although the dead women don’t appear to overlap in terms of their doctors, hospitals or medical conditions, the FDA records show that all four sample batches were distributed at a trade show attached to a big medical conference last month.”

  “We had reps there,” Raine confirmed. “It was one of our promotional pushes.”

  There was a pause, and Max expected Ike to say something about Raine being on the line. Instead, she continued with her report, voice more subdued than it had been. “Granted, Rainey Days’ records show that the samples were only distributed in a limited number of venues, but it does seem suspicious. It’s possible some of the samples were subjected to adverse conditions during the trade show-heat or contact with another chemical or something.”

  “Or maybe that was where The Nine met to engineer their plan,” Max said grimly.

  “Make a theory to fit the evidence, Vasek,” Ike cautioned. “Don’t twist the evidence to fit your theory. But yeah, it plays both ways.”

  Raine spoke up. “Was there anything else in the FDA files? Anything on the data ghosts?”

  “Nothing,” Ike said flatly. “It looks like the investigation had been more or less shut down, though they’re waiting on the DNA information of the bombing victim. They have their suspect, and Detective Marcus had a judge issue a warrant for your arrest.”

  Raine recoiled from the phone, face going sickly pale.

  Max reached over and squeezed her knee. “That doesn’t change anything important.” Except that now they were trying to avoid both the cops and The Nine. He returned his attention to the phone. “What else do you have for us? Anything on that disk Charlie gave me?”

  Max felt a dig of remorse that he’d fled the murder scene, but reminded himself that they’d go to the authorities as soon as they had the evidence to back up their admittedly wild theory.

  Nobody would buy into it otherwise.

  “I was able to confirm that he lost his wife to cancer last year. I couldn’t find the wonder drug that was supposedly suppressed, but get this-the disk he gave you was a conference room surveillance video from his own law firm. Seems like they tape their meetings-wonder if the clients know? Anyway, there are two men on the clip-one is the managing partner, Niles Brant. The other fits the description you gave me last night of the man you saw get out of the limo the other night. The audio’s corrupted, so I don’t have anything of the conversation yet. I know a guy w
ho knows a guy who might be able to help us, though.”

  Max cursed the delay. “Any idea who the second man is?”

  “Working on it. He doesn’t seem to belong to any of the big drug companies. I’m thinking I’ll show the picture around Boston General today. If he’s a local and he’s in the medical or biotech fields, someone should know him.”

  “Be careful,” Max warned.

  “Yes, Dad.” But Ike’s tone was serious when she said, “I’m headed to the Cape for the weekend with a friend, but I’ll bring the laptop and keep this phone. Call if you really need me.”

  “Hot date?”

  “Hot enough,” she answered with a thread of amusement in her voice. “But I’m here if you need me.”

  “Thanks Ike, I owe you one.”

  “Just take care of yourself and we’ll call it even,” she said, and he knew she wasn’t just talking about the possibility of an attack.

  She hung up before he could respond.

  Max folded the phone shut and tucked it into his pocket before glancing at Raine. She was too pale, too quiet.

  “Hey,” he said softly. “I mean it. The warrant doesn’t change anything substantial. We’re working the case. We’ll figure it out and pull together enough evidence that they can’t possibly charge you.” He wanted to touch her again, but kept both hands on the steering wheel. “I won’t let them put you in jail. If they do, I’ll bust you out, okay?”

  She stirred, forcing a weak smile at the joke. “That’s one rescue I’ll hold you to, Vasek.” She looked down at her hands. “It’s not the warrant. Or not just the warrant. It’s everything.” Her gesture encompassed the vehicle, the passing scenery and the two of them. “On Monday I was sitting in my office with two of my most trusted employees watching the first of the Thriller ads debut on national TV. Now it’s Friday and I’m a fugitive, thanks to one of those trusted employees. I’ve got no home, no office, and quite possibly no way to fix either of those things.” She shrugged. “I’ve got nothing.”

  “You’ve got me,” he said without thinking.

  The words hung motionless for a few heartbeats, then sank with a sigh.