With the M.D....at the Altar?

by Jessica Andersen

  In theory, anyway. And right now, theory was all he had to go on, because none of the usual protocols had done them any good.

  Moments later the computer dinged to indicate that it had finished the sequencing runs. He clicked through, telling the software to analyze the fluorescence-based data and display it on-screen.

  A few moments after that, he stuck his head into the entryway and shouted, “Bug! Get in here!”

  When the geneticist skidded into the kitchen, wide-eyed, he was clearly expecting to find that more equipment had been sabotaged. “What? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. For a change, something might actually be right.” Luke gestured at the screen. “Take a look.”

  Bug looked. And whistled. “Nice going, boss.”

  He tapped a few keys, sat down at the computer, and tapped a few more. Within a minute, he was instant-messaging with his buddy at the Cod Project, while simultaneously searching several genome databases for genes that might be related to CP 12.21.

  “If we can figure out what this puppy does,” he said, “we should be able to come up with something to block the enzyme.”

  Luke clapped him on the shoulder. “Get on it. I’m going to check on the patients.” He headed out, but turned back when Bug called his name. “Yeah?”

  “Does this mean we’re staying?”

  “Yeah,” Luke said without a moment’s hesitation. “We’re not letting this bastard win.”

  He wasn’t sure when he’d made the choice, but there it was, fully formed inside him. He wasn’t giving up on May, wasn’t leaving Rox. He didn’t know how he’d ever considered it, or what he’d been thinking.

  This wasn’t about reunions or old arguments that still held true. It was about a murderer who’d targeted an entire town. It was about justice, and making the killer pay for what he’d done.

  And it was about making up, as best he could, for leaving Rox behind.

  BY NIGHTFALL, Rox was exhausted, both physically and emotionally. She took a short break in May’s room, sitting in the bedside chair where Bug spent most of his free time, and closed her eyes. Her bones ached with fatigue, and her heart hurt from the emotional backlash of the newest outbreak.

  She’d helped the others set up the new patients on the best supportive therapy they could muster, and then she’d talked to the families, eventually identifying produce from Coastal Fish as being the most likely source of the toxin.

  It looked like the bastard had sprayed purified enzyme over all the fruits and vegetables on display. The people who’d gotten sick were those who’d eaten the fruits or veggies raw, without washing them first. Upon learning that, Rox had brought back samples for testing, and when they’d turned up positive for the fish enzyme, she’d contacted Mayor Wells and asked him to have the market pull all their produce and put out a notice that any foods not in bottles or cans should be thoroughly washed before consumption, preferably washed and cooked.

  The mayor had agreed, and seemed genuinely concerned. But Rox couldn’t help thinking that, like his everyday persona, the concern had been too polished, too slick.

  Or maybe that was just her natural aversion to men who seemed too good to be true.

  Case in point was Luke. After his threat of the night before, when he’d acted as if it was perfectly reasonable for him to take his team and head for the hills, he’d done a complete one-eighty and now seemed committed to figuring out an antidote for the enzyme, or its toxin trigger.

  He and Bug had spent most of the afternoon with their heads together, cobbling together something they were calling “anti-CP 12.21,” after the gene that appeared to be mutated in the affected fish.

  Rox wanted to be grateful for Luke’s abrupt about-face, and the renewed energy he was pouring into the case, but she was having trouble finding the gratitude. Instead, she found herself wondering how long it would last, and she feared she already knew the answer.

  When May died, Luke would be in the wind. And the way Rox figured it, they had eighteen, maybe twenty-four hours before that occurred.

  She didn’t know what had happened in the past to give Luke such an aversion to seeing someone he knew having trouble with an illness. Logic said he’d lost a family member to a terminal illness—a parent, perhaps, or a sibling. Logic also said the experience was probably why he’d gone in to medicine.

  But that was where logic broke down, because if he’d gone into medicine to help prevent things like he’d experienced earlier in life, why would the identity of the patient matter one bit?

  “And I’m entirely too tired to figure this out tonight,” she said aloud, scrubbing both hands across her tight-feeling face. She looked over at May’s still form, automatically cataloging the EEG activity, which was holding steady for the moment, thank God. “I’m going to catch a few hours. I’ll check on you first thing when I’m up.”

  She didn’t know if the other woman could hear her, but felt like she needed to say something. It could too easily have been her lying there, dying. If she’d gone for her morning tea before doing rounds that morning—

  Don’t think about it, she admonished herself. Get some sleep.

  But when she got to her room, she found it’d gained a motion detector facing the barred window and far corner, along with a second cot and a carefully packed duffel bag that was all too familiar.

  The sight of Luke’s neatness beside her clutter grabbed her by the heart and twisted as the past and present threatened to collide, with messy results.

  It’d been five days since he’d arrived in Raven’s Cliff, and for the most part she’d come to grips with him being there, because he’d been right when he’d told her flat-out that he hadn’t changed, and neither had she.

  Unfortunately, that went both ways. The differences were the same, making it impossible for them to exist as a couple. But at the same time, the things she had once liked—and yes, loved—about him were the same, too.

  He was still larger than life, a handsome daredevil who walked into armed encampments and terrible infectious conditions with aplomb, his casual elegance easing the fears of those around him. He was still hell on wheels as a diagnostician, still ran his team with ruthless efficiency while giving his teammates their own mental space.

  He was good at what he did—one of the best—and for that reason alone she couldn’t regret that he’d come to Raven’s Cliff. Though they had yet to conquer the myriad problems facing them, she didn’t want to think about what might’ve happened if a lesser team leader had responded to her cry for help.

  Whether she liked it or not, he truly was a hero, a savior. And he was, quite simply, the hottest guy she’d ever met or wanted to meet. She’d dreamed of him long after they’d said goodbye, and she hadn’t found a man who even came close to lighting her up the way he could, not in two years of desultory dates with “I’ll call you” endings.

  And for that very reason, there was no way in hell she was sharing a bedroom with him, two cots or not.

  She spun, intending to march out and have a “no way in hell” discussion with him. She stalled when she found him standing in the doorway, eyes hooded.

  “It’s a safety precaution,” he said before she had a chance to open her mouth. “Swanson couldn’t get more motion detectors in until tomorrow, so I want us to sleep in shifts, two to a room, with the last serviceable electronic eye guarding the back of the room and a pair of cops in the hall.”

  “I don’t think—” She broke off because he was already moving across the room and dropping down on his cot. “Hey!”

  “Roxie,” he said, and his voice sounded unutterably weary. “I know it’s not the best answer, but it’s the only one I’ve got right now. I’m doing the best I can, and it’s not good enough. I get that. But could we just shut it off for a few hours and resume hostilities in the morning? I’m beat.”

  Normally, she would’ve bristled at the implication that she was the one picking fights, but something in his voice gave her pause. Beneath the we
ariness, she sensed a sadness she’d never known from him before, one that suggested he was feeling the deaths—and the gathering hopelessness—just as much as she was.

  Granted, May was one of his, and he had to be grieving over her decline whether he pretended otherwise or not. But this was more, like the whole case had become personal to him on a level that, as far as she knew, he’d always avoided in the past.

  When she’d first seen him again after so long, she’d thought she detected a new, darker layer to him. Now, she wondered if this was it, if he’d finally realized that it wasn’t about each new village, each new case. It was about the people in each new village, and the names behind the cases.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” he said softly, bringing his eyes up to meet hers.

  She was still standing near the open door, through which she could see one of their police guards standing his post. Without a word, she swung the door shut. “Don’t look at you like what?”

  “Like you see something in me that doesn’t exist.” He held out a hand as though inviting her closer, but his expression went hard. “I told you before—”

  “You haven’t changed,” she interrupted. “I know. Heard you the first time. Which leaves me wondering who you’re trying to convince, me or yourself?”

  “Roxie.” His voice went to a warning growl when she closed the distance between them. “Be certain before you start something you don’t want to finish—whether it be a fight or something else. I don’t have much left in me right now.”

  “I’m not certain of anything at the moment,” she said honestly. “Except for one thing. You’re tired, I’m tired, and you’re right that there’s safety in numbers.”

  She leaned past him and armed the motion detector, which faced away from them so it wouldn’t pick up their nighttime movements, but would catch anyone approaching from the window or the corners of the room, where there might or might not be a secret passageway.

  Then she returned to the light switch and looked at him. “I say we call it a night, boss. Sound good?”

  She flicked off the light at his nod, and retraced her steps to her cot, moving easily around her scattered things. Kicking off her shoes, she lay down, trying not to think that in the narrow room, crammed with two cots along the long sides of the space, they were no farther apart than if they’d been on opposite sides of a king-sized bed.

  “Good night, Luke,” she said, trying to pretend he was just another colleague, that this was just fieldwork, nothing more.

  “’Night, Roxie,” he said, sounding more relaxed than he had moments earlier, as though killing the lights had left him free to let down his guard a degree. “And Roxie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m not, and have never been, the boss of you.”

  She smiled a little in the darkness. “Try to keep that in mind when the sun comes up, will you?”

  LUKE SLEPT BETTER than he’d expected—better, in fact, than he had in a long, long time. Maybe it was exhaustion finally catching up to him, maybe the relief of having a breakthrough with the fish gene.

  Or maybe it was simply the sense of not being alone, the steady rhythm of another person’s breathing nearby.

  He told himself it didn’t have anything to do with Roxie, couldn’t have anything to do with her, but the assurances rang false, and as the drizzly day dawned, he lay on his side and looked at her, watching her sleep.

  The wan light washed the color from the morning, leaving everything in shades of gray. She lay on her side facing him, so they were mirror images of each other, separated by a small strip of stone floor. Her hands were folded beneath her cheek, and the long eyelashes that framed her hazel eyes when she was awake now lay fanned across her delicate skin.

  How many other times had he woken ahead of her, and just lay there watching her sleep? Too many to count, though she wouldn’t have known that because he’d never told her, had always pretended to be just waking when she did.

  Now, as she stirred, he roused himself and climbed from his cot. Deactivating the motion detector, he grabbed his shoes and tiptoed around her scattered belongings to let himself out of the room.

  Sleeping together—albeit platonically—had been jarringly intimate. They didn’t need to wake up together, too.

  But as he did morning rounds, he couldn’t stop thinking of the peace on her face as she’d slept. The trust. And as he met with Bug and Thom, who reported on their progress with the reverse-engineering, he couldn’t get Rox’s soft voice out of his mind.

  He’d been around her less than a week and already she was back under his skin.

  “What do you think, boss?” Bug asked, looking at him expectantly.

  Luke shook his head in self-disgust. “Sorry, can you say that again? My mind was on something else.”

  The geneticist gave him a long, considering look, but obliged. “The anti-CP 12.21 is as good as it’s going to get. The bench experiments show that it binds selectively to the overproduced enzyme, rendering it nonfunctional.” He hesitated. “There’s no time to try it in mice or anything. And if anyone higher up finds out that we dosed our patients with a completely untested, unapproved drug…”

  He didn’t need to finish the sentence. They all knew they were risking their careers with this move.

  Luke had done similar things before, using rumored or unproven treatments, even sometimes local remedies with questionable ingredients. But the FDA didn’t exactly have power out in the wilds of Africa. In Maine—even in the middle of nowhere of Maine—the regulations were a real concern.

  If they gave the anti-CP 12.21 to the patients and it cross-reacted with other, vital proteins in the body, the patients could die.

  But if they did nothing, the patients would die.

  “I’ll administer it,” Luke said. “That way if it goes wrong, it’s on my head.”

  “You go down, we all go down,” Bug said staunchly.

  Thom nodded. “We’ll do it. Who do you want us to start with? Of the first wave of patients still alive, the older Prentiss kid and his father are the ones who’ve been sick the longest.”

  Luke pinched the bridge of his nose weighing his options and not liking any of them. “No,” he said finally. “Start with May. She’d want us to.”

  She was a scientist, and a healer. If she’d been conscious, she would’ve been the first to volunteer. Now he was stuck doing it for her.

  Because it was his decision, and because it could so easily turn out wrong, he held out his hand. “Give me the dose. I’ll do it.”

  Bug looked like he wanted to argue, but at a nudge from Thom, handed over a syringe. “I’d push it slowly, just in case.” He paused, starting to look more than a little ill. “We’ll be standing by with a crash cart. Just in case.”

  “Yeah.” Luke waited while they gathered the necessary equipment, trying not to make it obvious to the cops that they were doing something that strayed beyond the gray zone of ethics into “somebody stop them” territory.

  But the treatment might save her. That was the one thought he kept hold of.

  Rox appeared, dressed and ready for the new day, and avoiding his eyes as though she, too, had found it strange that they’d slept in the same room without touching.

  Thom brought her up to speed in a few quick sentences, and Luke braced himself for an argument, or worse.

  She surprised him by nodding. “I’m in.”

  The four of them gathered by May’s bed, and Rox casually swung the door shut so the cop stationed out in the hall couldn’t see what they were doing.

  Bug sat in the chair next to the bed and took May’s hand in what looked like a habitual gesture, making Luke wonder whether he’d missed something between them before, or if this was a new development…and if the latter, what May would think of it when she awoke.

  “Okay, gang. Cross your fingers.” Managing for the most part to pretend that the woman in the bed was a stranger, just another patient, Luke pushed the contents of the syri
nge into the IV line—a little at first, and then a little more when there was no adverse response on any of the monitors.

  Gradually, over the course of nearly five minutes, he eased the anti-CP 12.21 into May’s bloodstream.

  Then they waited. And waited.

  Ten minutes turned to fifteen, and there was still no response. May’s EEG was still showing the burst activity indicative of shutdown, and her eyes were still open in the end-stage waking coma.

  “Damn.” Bug stared down at her hand, stroking it over and over again with his thumb. “I thought it was going to work. I really did.”

  “Science takes the time it takes,” Luke reminded him. “Give it a while longer.” He headed for the door, though he didn’t know where he was going other than out of the room.

  “No.” The geneticist lowered May’s hand with a pat, and pushed himself to his feet. “I’m going to keep working. There’s got to be a way to improve the selectivity, or the activity, or something.” He headed out into the hall, mumbling to himself, “Maybe a cofactor. What about—”

  “Wait!” Thom shouted. “I see something!”

  Rox, who was halfway out the door, spun around, and Bug and Luke crowded back into the room behind her.

  “What?” Luke asked, hardly daring to hope. “What did you see?”

  “There!” Thom pointed to the EEG, where there was a burst of activity that then went to normal, a burst, then normal.

  But Luke saw what he’d seen. “They’re slowing down.”

  As the teammates watched, the telltale bursts of abnormal activity in May’s brain slowed, and grew weaker.

  “If this keeps up,” Bug said quietly, “she’ll be back to normal deep sleep patterns in an hour. And then…” He trailed off, because none of them knew what came next.

  They could only hope.

  “Keep monitoring her,” Luke ordered. “Let’s see if the improvement continues over the next few hours.”