Don't Look Away (Veronica Sloan)

by Leslie A. Kelly

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “Look, it’s on my way. My hotel’s down in the city.”

  “How do you know it’s on the way? You don’t know where I live.”

  “Sure I do. I’m an FBI agent.”

  To his surprise, that actually startled a rusty laugh out of her mouth. She lifted her hand to her head and winced, as if laughing hurt her, but the amusement in her eyes went a long way toward convincing him she was going to be okay.

  “Creepy stalker dude,” she mumbled.

  “Hard-headed cop chick.”

  “What a pair we are.”

  Oh, they could be. Someday, he suspected, they would be. But not today.

  “You’re going to go home, go to bed, and not think about this case at all until tomorrow morning, all right?”

  “You’re pretty good, Sykes, but you can’t keep me from thinking all night long.”

  He suspected he could. He definitely suspected he could come up with ways to occupy her for an entire night so thinking about a murder case would be the very last thing she’d want to do. He couldn’t do it now, though, not when she was injured and emotionally cracked.

  When she was well and healthy, and this case was over, he was going to finally do something about this strange relationship they had, namely climbing over the protective, aloof wall she kept erected around herself. But that was for later, when life could again resemble normal. In this room, in the shadow of that projection unit, with the agonized screams his brain had inserted as a soundtrack to the slideshow, normalcy seemed like a forgotten dream.

  “I might not be able to, but I bet I bet your mother could,” he threatened.

  She groaned, obviously knowing the threat wasn’t serious, but lightly slapping his arm anyway. “Don’t you dare call my mother.”

  “I think she liked me,” he said, wagging his brows, knowing he sounded smug.

  “She likes anyone she thinks might slow me down and make me push out a few grandbabies for her.”

  Her face reddened and she lifted a hand to her temple again, though this time, he suspected it was to block her embarrassed eyes from his sight. She hadn’t meant to say that. Ronnie had a habit of forgetting to be careful around him sometimes and he knew it drove her nuts.

  “You’d think she’d have figured out by now that I am not mother material,” she snapped, sounding angry at herself.

  “I don’t know,” he mused, “I can see you raising a couple of bad-ass rugrats who regularly get kicked out of school for beating-up bullies who pick on other kids on the playground.”

  Her hand remained by her face, shielding her expression, but there was no disguising the raw tone in her voice as she replied, “Never. Not ever.”

  He didn’t say something light and teasing, like, maybe you just haven’t met the right man. She sounded like her mind was absolutely made up, her decision set in stone. Knowing her the way he did, he figured there had to be a reason for it.

  Turned out, there was.

  “Did you know I was assigned to help with the recovery effort at Air & Space?”

  He suspected he knew where this was going. “No.”

  “Daniels and I both worked at the site for six days after it was deemed cleared of explosive devices. Then we were moved over to the staging area where the forensics guys tried to piece together whatever remains they’d managed to find.” She dropped her hand and turned in her chair to face him. Her dark, haunted eyes told him the rest even before her words did. “10/20 was on a Friday, you remember that, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “Popular day for school field trips, Fridays. And Air and Space was the most popular Smithsonian destination for kids.”

  Oh Jesus.

  “You know, seeing a parent howling with grief while they hold a bloody shoe that they last saw when they tied it onto their six-year-old’s foot kinda cures you of any thought you might ever have had of traveling down the happy-family-road.”

  He reached out and took her hand in his. She didn’t pull away, didn’t make a snarky comment. She just let him lace his fingers in hers and hold tight for a long, commiserating moment.

  “You were already in New York, right?” she whispered, obviously remembering from their conversation in Texas.

  “Yes. I’d left D.C. seven months before.”

  Though they’d talked about it some, they hadn’t had the full conversation. The one Americans almost always had when the subject turned to that day.

  Where were you when on it happened? Do you remember how you found out? Did you know anyone who died? Do you remember the shock of hearing President Turner didn’t make it? Wasn’t it a blessing to find out the first lady and her young children had left the White House the night before for an impromptu weekend getaway? Did you watch the coverage of the funerals? What about the trials? Did you agree with the public hangings? Do you think they’ll ever catch the rest of the conspirators?

  Five years later and the questions and answers were always the same. The grief still hadn’t left the country’s consciousness and, like survivors of a war who fell into telling old stories whenever they came together, so, too, did just about every American. Especially those in law enforcement. The post mortem would continue for decades, he imagined, until the last American alive on that day passed out of this world.

  “But you came back.”

  “Of course. I was temporarily reassigned, stayed for three months working on the investigation.” Those were days he didn’t like to think about. Trying to focus on solving the brutal crimes—so many of them, so many suspects, so brilliantly conceived yet so utterly evil and malicious. Having lost his closest friend and several colleagues, he’d sometimes wondered how he could get through another day of it.

  Knowing what he knew about Ronnie—about the even more devastating losses she’d experienced, he found himself asking, “Didn’t you take any time off? After?”

  “No.”

  No. That was all. No further explanation.

  He understood. Continuing to work, driving forward and catching the terrorists who’d slipped through the nets was all any cop or agent had been able to think about. It went above grief to a pure, basic need for vengeance.

  He wondered if she’d felt she’d gotten hers.

  He wondered if she’d realized yet that it didn’t matter a damn and certainly didn’t assuage the pain.

  “Enough of this,” she said, putting her hands on the arms of her chair. “Let’s get out of here before things get maudlin.”

  “Okay. As long as you promise to let this go for tonight, go home and recuperate.”

  “I’ll go home and I promise I won’t do a thing more until I’m feeling better,” she said.

  He looked for a hedge in there, for something that said she was covering her bases or making a fingers-crossed-behind-her-back promise, but could find nothing.

  “Guess we should go tell Dr. Cavanaugh we’re leaving,” he said.

  “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll just wait here while you find her and let her know.” Her words were almost sighed. She leaned back in her chair and her eyes drifted closed, those thick, inky black lashes falling onto her pale cheeks. She looked ready to drop.

  “I’ll be back soon.” Then, because he simply had to, he reached out and carefully smoothed her hair back off her cheek, fingering the silkiness of it, wondering how she’d managed to hide the fact that a huge hunk of it was missing.

  She mumbled something, as if she’d already fallen into a light sleep, and he left the room, cursing their unsub again for making Veronica Sloan too weak to even slap his hand away and pretend she didn’t need anyone at all.

  -#-

  Ronnie waited until Jeremy’s footsteps faded away down the hall, then she opened her eyes, spun around toward her work station and grabbed a microdrive.

  While she thought about what she needed to do, she told herself she hadn’t lied. She’d promised she wouldn’t think about the case until she was
feeling better. But she already knew she’d be feeling better in a few hours, after the medicine kicked in and she was at home in comfortable sweats and fuzzy slippers.

  So she might as well make sure she had something to do for the rest of the night.

  She moved quickly. Not only did she not want Sykes to know she intended to work all night if she had to, she also worried that he might bring Dr. Cavanaugh back with him. While Phineas Tate and his staff seemed perfectly fine about her and Jeremy working on the files and chips of their victims here in their secure facility, she wasn’t sure how they’d feel about her taking the info off-site.

  Especially info they hadn’t technically offered.

  Something one of them had said earlier today had stuck in her mind, but she hadn’t really thought much about it until a couple of hours ago. It was when Ronnie had been talking about the number of deaths they might expect to see among O.E.P. participants. As Jeremy had pointed out, the test subjects been carefully screened. They were young, healthy, with no risk factors, so there shouldn’t be a lot of deaths.

  And yet, hadn’t Dr. Tate mentioned that some of them had recently died? He’d insisted of natural causes, but something in her couldn’t help wondering about that. If the implantees had all been chosen specifically for their good health and safe profiles, how likely was it that some would already have died? Maybe the doctor thought the deaths had been natural—but, in truth, couldn’t they have been early victims of this same monster, who’d escalated to a more blatant form of murder with his most recent attacks?

  She needed to know. But she certainly didn’t want to accuse Dr. Tate of being wrong, or covering anything up. So she decided to just do a little digging herself.

  The first thing she needed was a list of all implantees. Fortunately, a guy Ronnie had dated throughout her freshman year of college had worked at an Apple store and considered himself a master at online vigilante justice. So she knew her way around a hack.

  Interestingly, after they’d parted ways, that guy had invented some social media site for people who had no lives to meet and interact with the cyber avatars of other people who had no lives. Everybody lied and invented these amazing stories about how fabulous they were, how handsome, how rich, how successful. They all lived happily in fantasyland—fully knowing none of it was true—that only their avatars had those lives, not their real-life counterparts. They went to school, paid their bills, got married, bought homes, raised kids…all without ever actually laying eyes on any other living person behind the other avatars. But nobody cared. As long as their little cyber people were happy and rich, they didn’t mind that in the real world they remained sad, boring and lonely. It blew her mind, but everybody seemed to be doing it nowadays, loving their Cybertopia lives more than their real ones.

  Of course, her ex had made a freaking fortune on the thing and was now some long-fingernailed recluse living in southern California.

  Sending him a silent thank-you for being a good teacher, if not a good lover—or a faithful one—she snuck her way into the Tate Scientific network and searched for the O.E.P. files. There was a lot of security when it came to specifics about the chip, but she wasn’t interested in that, anyway. All she needed was a list of names.

  It took a little digging, and every minute she dug was another she feared would bring the click of Sykes’s footsteps in the hallway. But finally, she found it.

  “Yes!”

  She quickly copied the files onto the microdrive. Then she considered what else she might want. Knowing she wouldn’t be able to sit through Leanne’s murder again, she didn’t even think about taking the data from the chip. The backups from Leanne’s home computer were another matter, however. Sykes had brought those up from her own precinct, and she had every right to take them. But she suspected he’d be looking for them the moment he got back, if for nothing else than to make sure she didn’t do exactly what she intended to do tonight.

  To play it safe, she copied all the files over onto the micro-drive, and had just popped it out of the system when she heard Sykes and Cavanaugh speaking just down the hall.

  “Detective Sloan,” said the pretty doctor as they entered the room, “I hear you’ve had about enough for the day.”

  “I think so.”

  The other woman came over, crouched down in front of the chair, and peered into Ronnie’s eyes. “How bad is the headache?”

  “Low and dull.”

  “Your pupils look all right. Any numbness or weakness?”

  “No.”

  “Nausea or vomiting?”

  “Neither. Honestly, I’m just weary. It’s been a long couple of days.”

  The other woman straightened, then looked at Sykes. “You should be fine taking her home.”

  Good grief, he’d asked the woman to do an examination?

  “She offered to check on your progress since you left the hospital against doctor’s advice,” he insisted, as if reading her mind, something he was pretty good at.

  “Yes, I did,” Dr. Cavanaugh said. “Now, go home and get some rest. I’m sure you’ll be feeling much better tomorrow.”

  “I’ll hold you to that,” Ronnie said as she rose from her chair a little more slowly than technically necessary. No point in having Sykes wonder if she’d had nefarious reasons for sending him out of here.

  “Let me grab my things,” he said, gathering his documents and files and slipping them into his briefcase. As she’d anticipated, he also went to her work station and ejected the disc containing Leanne’s history. He didn’t look twice at her, obviously having fully bought the idea that she was far too tired and achy to even think about doing any work at home tonight.

  Which just showed he wasn’t quite as observant a law enforcement official as he was presumed to be.

  Chapter 12

  After going home—courtesy of a quiet car ride with Sykes, during which she’d pretended to doze off, just so she wouldn’t have to talk to him while trapped in a small, confined space where every breath tasted like man—Ronnie took a lukewarm shower. It was too damned hot out for a steamy one, and the coolness felt great on her skin. So great that after getting into comfortable, loose-fitting clothes, she laid down on her bed with a cool cloth on her face. She didn’t sleep, but just relaxed and willed her blood to stop thumping in her temples. Doing some meditation exercises she usually sneered at, she found herself slowly drifting into a peaceful doze and the headache finally released its tenacious grip.

  Feeling better, she got up and picked up the phone, knowing her mom would be showing up at the door if she didn’t hear from Ronnie soon. Their conversation was tense—Christy started down the, “Why don’t you quit that dangerous job?” road and Ronnie cutting her off. The most she could do was offer to be careful, which wasn’t enough, had never been enough, would never be enough.

  By eight-thirty that night, she was ready to get back to work. Grabbing a frozen meal, she ate at her dining room table while she scanned through the entire list of O.E.P. test subjects and managed to find the names of those who had died—aside from this week’s victims.

  There were six. All had been in their thirties or forties and had died within the past two months. All, according to the notation in their files, had died of “natural causes” which weren’t identified in the files.

  Huh. That didn’t sound right to her. Six formerly health, young adults dying of natural causes in the past eight weeks? Okay, maybe statistically it was possible—she had no idea what the normal death-rate in that age bracket was, or what was defined as “natural” causes. For all she knew, getting hit by a bus might be called “natural” by some people. But it still sounded funny to her. Especially because other people in that same control group—the O.E.P. implantees—were currently being bumped off in gruesome ways.

  Of course there was one other difference between these six and her first murder victim: They were all male. According to the records she’d swiped from the Tate network, every woman in the study was still aliv
e. Obviously they hadn’t gotten around to updating Leanne Carr’s record yet.

  Though she knew there were other things to do—like looking at Leanne’s backups—she just couldn’t shake the feeling that those six deaths meant something. She still hated the idea of pressing Dr. Tate for information about them, but definitely wanted more information.

  Glancing at the clock, she thought about what Philip Tate had said that afternoon: Call any time, day or night. And he’d promised he spoke her language and could help her in ways his father and Dr. Cavanaugh could not.

  She definitely didn’t want to encourage the guy or make him think she was at all interested in him personally, but her curiosity was killing her. She couldn’t move on to other things until she found out more. So, before she could think better of it, she retrieved his business card from the pocket of her pants in the bedroom and dialed his cell number.

  “Detective Sloan!” he answered, sounding delighted to hear her voice at nine o’clock at night.

  “Hi there, Mr. Tate, I’m so sorry to bother you this late.”

  “Please, call me Philip,” he insisted. “And it’s no bother at all. I was just sitting out on my patio grilling a steak for dinner and having a glass of 2015 Chateau Margaux.”

  “Late dinner,” she replied, not recognizing the name of the wine. She was more of a beer girl, herself.

  “No rest for the wicked, I’m afraid. I was at work until an hour ago.”

  Unable to resist the opening, she asked, “What, exactly is it that you do for Tate Scientific?”

  He laughed, as if used to the question. “Not the science’y stuff, that’s for sure.”

  Right. No Science’y stuff for the golfing playboy.

  “I’m strictly management. I oversee contracts, supply orders, HR, insurance issues, government communication. I let the eggheads do their thing and make sure they have the equipment and contracts to play and experiment.”

  Okay, she could see a need for that. She somehow suspected his father wouldn’t be much good in that regard. Tate senior seemed like the type who’d forget to put his shoes on in the morning if he were anxious to get to work on an exciting new experiment at the lab.