Don't Look Away (Veronica Sloan)

by Leslie A. Kelly

  God, did he hope they wouldn’t be necessary, that Daniels would pull through.

  Once they were in the air, he tried to get Ronnie to eat and drink something. She hadn’t had a thing since their stop at the fast food place last night, and he doubted she’d be making time for any meals anytime soon. So he pushed a bottle of juice and a breakfast burrito he’d purchased out of a machine into her hands and ordered her to eat.

  She sucked down the juice but ignored the food. “What if he dies on the table?” she muttered.

  “He won’t.”

  “I wasn’t there for him. He’s my partner and I wasn’t there.”

  He’d heard the refrain several times in the hour since they’d gotten the call. “Ronnie, don’t do this to yourself.”

  “I could have stopped it.”

  “Ambrose said he’d been at a bar in a really bad neighborhood,” he insisted. “He was in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

  She finally looked at him, giving him her full attention, those big brown eyes wet and anguished. “You really think that? You seriously believe this wasn’t connected to our case, that Daniels got taken down, shot and hacked up by some random drugged-out street punk?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted.

  That was the truth. He didn’t know what to believe. He only had what her lieutenant had told her to go on. Well, that and the call he’d made to the hospital to find out Daniels’s condition.

  Critical. In surgery, slim chance of survival.

  He’d never really gotten friendly with the other man, mainly because Daniels had been belligerent toward him from the moment they’d met—like a third-grader who didn’t want the new kid in school to play with his favorite little girl at recess. Still, Sykes had respected him. Not just for his loyalty as a partner, but for his determined professionalism and his abilities as a cop. He’d been highly impressed during yesterday’s interview of Agent Bailey, and thought that if they’d met under different circumstances—and weren’t both crazy about the same woman—he and Daniels could have gotten along very well.

  Absolutely the last thing he wanted was for the other man to die. The death of any law enforcement officer was bad enough. But for Ronnie, who’d already suffered so many horrible losses in her life, it would be almost insurmountable.

  “Why would he do it?” she mumbled, sweeping a frustrated hand through her short hair, a tangle of spikes and swirls this morning since she hadn’t even brushed it after leaping out of bed to answer that early phone call. “He was on the hunt, he’d stumbled onto something with those deaths. Why would he go out and tie on one last night?”

  Sykes could guess, but he didn’t wait to verbalize it.

  Daniels was no fool. The man had to have seen the tension that had been building between him and Ronnie from the minute Jeremy had hit town. Knowing they were going to another city last night, and could very well end up being gone overnight, he had to have been imagining the worst.

  It might have been the worst thing Daniels could have imagined, but it was among the best things that had ever happened to Jeremy. He had been attracted to Ronnie from the very first—drawn by her sexiness, impressed by her strength, wowed by her intelligence, blown-away by her determination. Going to bed with her had been all he’d thought about for a long time, and it had been better than his wildest fantasies. Last night had been the culmination of every sexual desire he’d felt in his entire adult life.

  This morning, she looked at him like she’d rip his hand off if he dared to touch her.

  It didn’t take a shrink to figure out why. The guilt was eating at her. Guilt that she’d been in Jeremy’s arms, in his bed, having incredible sex, when her partner was being brutalized.

  Hell, Daniels wasn’t even his partner and Jeremy felt guilty as hell, too.

  They didn’t talk much during the ride. Her concern for Daniels kept her from thinking about her fear of helicopters, and she even managed to pick at her food. There would be no stopping once they touched down; she would be on the go, doing whatever it took to ensure her partner’s survival from that point on.

  There would definitely be no post mortem of what had happened between them in that hotel room. That conversation had been indefinitely postponed. Honestly, right now, given the way she drew away from him if he got within a few inches of her, he had to wonder if they’d ever have it.

  Or if last night would ever be repeated.

  Another reason to pray to whoever was listening that Daniels survived. Because if her partner died, Jeremy knew Ronnie would forever associate the night she’d decided to take him into her bed with when she hadn’t been there for her best friend and partner.

  When they got to Reagan National Airport, a patrolman was waiting to pick them up and take them to the hospital. Ronnie plied him with questions on sight, but he was able to offer no new information. Daniels was still in surgery, no news was good news, blah blah blah.

  They rode in silence to Washington Hospital Center, and Ronnie was out of the car the minute they pulled up outside. Sykes thanked the young cop who’d chauffeured them and went in after her. She’d practically started running once she got within sight of the critical care wing, and he quickened his pace to follow, seeing her bound up to an older, uniformed cop and start plying him with questions.

  “Lieutenant, please, don’t sugar-coat it,” she was saying as he joined them. “Not for me. Not about my partner.”

  The grey-haired, kindly-looking man nodded, his sympathetic frown not disguising the firmness of his conviction as he said, “I think he’s gonna make it.”

  She sagged in relief. “Really? He’s out of surgery?”

  “No, the doctor said it’ll probably be hours yet. But come on, Sloan, you really think a couple of bullets are going to kill the most stubborn man either of us have ever known?”

  “A couple of bullets and a hacked-off hand could do the trick,” she snapped, visibly deflating. She wasn’t in the mood to accept faith in place of medical certainty. “I can’t imagine how much blood he must have lost before somebody found him.”

  The hand had surprised him, to be honest. Jeremy could see a violent gang banger shooting Daniels during a robbery. He could also see their psychotic killer bringing out a knife and cutting off a body part. But the two together just didn’t mix.

  What the hell had Daniels gotten himself into last night?

  “The doctors said they’ll try to reattach the hand. If that doesn’t work, I hear they’re doing great things with prosthetics.”

  “If he lives long enough,” she said, her pessimism not swept away by her boss’s words.

  “The first thing they gotta do,” Ambrose admitted, “is stabilize him and repair the damage from the bullets. The first one tore through his left lung. The second, apparently fired after Daniels was already on the floor, really tore up his intestines.”

  Ronnie rubbed at her eyes, as if pushing any possible tears back in their ducts. When she’d pulled herself together, she reopened them and nodded for her boss to continue.

  He did, explaining some more medical stuff that Jeremy didn’t totally understand. It was enough to hear that another cop’s internal organs had been turned into origami by a psychopath’s bullets and that his hand had been lopped off for good measure. Beyond that, all he needed to hear was that Daniels would pull through.

  Nobody could say that yet, though.

  “It’s just lucky there was an ex-Marine in that bar Daniels had just left. Everybody else ignored the sound of gunshots, but he wouldn’t do it,” explained Ambrose. “Took him a little while to get anybody else to agree to help him search after they heard the first two shots. Once the third one happened, though, nobody could pretend it had been a car backfiring. He pretty much guilted everybody in the place into going out and finding out what the hell was going on.”

  “Thank God,” she whispered. “I wonder if they scared off the assailant.”

  “I bet they did,” said the older man. “He
didn’t have a chance to finish the job and ran away before he could do any more damage.”

  “What he did was quite enough,” Ronnie mumbled. “Has Mark’s chip been evaluated?”

  “Yes. The E.M.T.’s got that data in the ambulance.”

  Jeremy was glad to hear it. At least the chips were good for more than determining if somebody was old enough to buy cigarettes. All ambulances had been equipped with scanners to gather information about patients from those pesky little implants in their arms. It was one good thing that had come out of that program—lives had been saved because medical workers had known instantly about allergies and other medical conditions.

  “They’re saying Daniels drank beer and bourbon.”

  Hell.

  “But his blood alcohol wasn’t over the legal limit.” Ambrose let out a deep, disappointed sigh. “They also found Pure V in his blood.”

  “That’s utter bullshit,” Ronnie snapped. “I know Daniels. He has never once used drugs in the decade since we met. No way would he start tripping in the middle of a murder investigation.”

  “I know, I know,” her boss said, holding his hands up, palms out to cut off her defensive tirade. “The people at the bar swear he just had a few drinks, nothing else.”

  “So somebody slipped it to him?”

  “Sounds that way. The bartender says he remembers somebody buying Daniels a round but can’t remember who it was.”

  More likely the bartender had a record and didn’t want to get too involved, lest the police look into his own background a little too closely.

  “Listen, Sloan, you should also know, somebody from Phineas Tate’s group was over here several hours ago, looking to access…well, you know.”

  Sykes listened a little more closely. The images on Daniels’s O.E.P. device would be the best clue they had to catch his assailant, at least until the injured cop got out of surgery and woke up. “Did they get them?” he asked.

  “Yes. They made it here just before he went into surgery and downloaded them wirelessly.”

  That download would hopefully answer all their questions, and put them on the path to finding the man who’d done this. If it had been a random mugging, no way would the perp have known to cover his face. If it had been the White House killer…things might be a little tougher. But the bastard had to make a mistake sooner or later. Jeremy had no doubt Daniels would have put up a fight, and yanking that hood off might very well have been where he’d started.

  “Listen,” he said, “why don’t I go over to Tate’s lab and start working on the images, try to find out who the hell did this. The sooner the better, right? There’s nothing I can do here, anyway.”

  Lieutenant Ambrose began to nod, but before he could say anything, Ronnie cut him off. “I’m coming with you.”

  “You don’t have to do that.” Jeremy moved closer and lowered his voice. “You should stay here, be here when he comes out of surgery.”

  “Waiting here while they try to patch him up isn’t going to do Daniels one bit of good. You know what will? Going there, getting into his downloads and finding out who did this to him, so that when he wakes up, we can tell him we’ve got the sonofabitch in custody.”

  “But it doesn’t have to be you who does it. I can evaluate them,” he said, hating the thought of her tormenting herself even more by seeing exactly what had happened to someone she cared so much about.

  “No.” She shook her head forbiddingly. “Daniels is my partner. If anybody’s going to share that awful experience with him, it’s going to be me.”

  He knew what she was picturing, what she imagined would happen. Ronnie’s guilt was making her desperate to pick up the cross and bear it for a while. She needed to do something to share the pain of what had happened to Daniels. And there was one surefire way for her to do it.

  She was going to go to that lab, step on that little white mat and put herself directly inside of her partner’s awful, painful memories.

  -#-

  Although she wanted to go straight to the lab and get to work, losing herself in the effort and killing time while she waited for word on Daniels, Ronnie asked Sykes to swing by her place first. It was eleven a.m., she was wearing the uniform she’d first put on twenty-seven hours ago, hadn’t brought a brush near her head in just as long and felt disgusting and wrung out.

  Sykes agreed, and they headed to her apartment, riding in another FBI vehicle that someone from headquarters brought over for him. When he told her his hotel wasn’t far away, and that he wanted to go there and clean up, too, and would return in a half-hour, Ronnie nodded, glad for the separation. It would give her time to pull herself together. Having been with Sykes all night and all morning, including during these awful hours when she’d been torn up with worry over Daniels, had made it tough for her to think clearly.

  She wasn’t stupid. She knew the guilt she was feeling was a little illogical. Daniels was a grown-up, he’d made a bad choice and oh, had he ever paid for it. Whatever Ronnie might or might not have been doing at the time, and whether her decisions might have played a part in establishing her partner’s mood, wasn’t the point. The only person who was really to blame was the killer who’d attacked him.

  She knew all that. Logically. Rationally.

  But logic and reason in her head were fighting a war with grief and despondency in her heart. And they were losing. Grief and despondency had gripped her hard, slapping a thick layer of it’s-your-fault over every one of her thoughts.

  Trying to focus only on what had to be done, she took a quick shower, got herself back into some kind of decent condition, ate a peanut butter sandwich and headed outside to wait for Sykes precisely twenty-seven minutes after he’d dropped her off. He got there ninety seconds later, she hopped in the car and they took off.

  “Any updates?” he asked.

  “Not a word.”

  That was the end of conversation for the remainder of the ride to Bethesda.

  Since it was a Saturday, the Tate Scientific facility was fairly deserted when they arrived. There were a few cars in the parking deck, including one or two in the reserved spaces closest to the entrance, but it looked like all the everyday workers were at home for the weekend.

  Reaching the front entrance and finding it locked, they both passed their upper right arms below a wall-mounted scanner. The doors clicked open and they entered. Tate had been true to his word, having provided them after-hour access.

  Perhaps because the building was locked down, there were no security officers at the gates. She supposed the fortress served as its own security on weekends. Not for the first time, she couldn’t help wondering what other kinds of experiments were going on here. It seemed like the government had spent a king’s ransom on the place; she couldn’t see them doing it only for the Optical Evidence Program, no matter how promising it looked.

  “Eerie,” said Sykes.

  “Very,” she agreed.

  The lobby was cavernous, the silence deafening. Their footsteps clicked across the tile floor as they headed for the elevator. Though she imagined Phineas Tate, or Dr. Cavanaugh, might be working today, she didn’t suggest they stop in their offices to say hello. She was too numb, too shattered inside to even think about making small-talk. Or, God forbid, hearing any messages of condolence about her partner.

  They finally arrived at their assigned lab. When she walked through the door, Ronnie saw a sticky-note attached to the monitor of her work station.

  “Detective Sloan—we were so sorry to hear about the attack on your partner. His most recent files have been downloaded on both systems for the use of you and Special Agent Sykes. Good luck. E. Cavanaugh.”

  Ronnie balled up the note and pitched it on the counter, then took a seat in front of the work station. Sykes moved his chair over to sit beside her. When she reached for the mouse to scan for Daniels’s backups, he put a hand over hers.

  “Are you sure you’re up for this?”

  That was a stupid question. Of cours
e she was sure.

  She hated the very thought of it, dreaded it and wanted to lash out at the world for making it necessary, but yes. She was sure.

  “I’ll be fine,” she insisted.

  “Are you going to…”

  “Yes. And don’t try to stop me. If it were you in that hospital, I’d do the same thing, and if it were me, I know you would, too. Whatever it takes, Jeremy. That’s what we do to solve this from here on out. Whatever it takes.”

  He was silent for a moment, but didn’t argue. Instead, he turned his chair around and moved to his own work station. “I’ll watch it on the monitor while you’re inside.

  “That’s fine. I won’t want to stop once I start, so if I call something out, make a note of it, would you?”

  “Of course.”

  She started the program, located the backups marked Daniels and considered them.

  “How far back are you going?” Sykes asked.

  Ten minutes certainly hadn’t been enough with either Carr or Underwood. But this hadn’t been a torture session, or a mutilation. She knew her partner well enough to know it wouldn’t have been easy to take him by surprise, so she wanted to see exactly what he’d seen in the several minutes leading up to the attack.

  “What was it Ambrose said right before we left?” she asked, not having been paying close enough attention as her lieutenant walked them out of the hospital. “About what the E.M.T.’s discovered about the timeline?”

  “That the readings of Pure V in his system meant he’d ingested it less than a half-hour before he was first injured.”

  Right. Ambrose had also told them witnesses said Daniels had left the bar at around 1:30 a.m. What happened in the several minutes after that, she didn’t know. But she did know that at about 1:45, he’d been shot, at least that’s when his blood pressure had started to drop. It had plummeted sharply again a few minutes later, apparently when his hand had been lopped off. By that point, he was so near death, they hadn’t been able to determine when the second shot had been fired. The fact that the prick had shot him while he was already down on the floor, bloody, helpless and in agony, enraged her.