by Radclyffe
Sloan reclined in the passenger seat, her left hand resting loosely in Michael’s right, their fingers intertwined. Smiling, she replied without opening her eyes. “I know that. I just wanted to be there when you came home.”
“I’m glad you were,” Michael said softly, her voice thick with a panoply of emotions—wonder, gratitude, desire. In all the years of her marriage to Nicholas, she had never felt this kind of welcome or the peaceful sense of well-being that came from knowing precisely where she belonged in the universe. “I love you.”
“Good thing,” Sloan said drowsily. “Because I’m mad about you.”
Michael had rarely seen Sloan exhausted, but she had known when she’d left for Boston that it was unlikely that her lover would sleep at all in her absence. From everything she had gathered, things were moving so quickly on the new investigation that even had she been in town, Sloan would probably have been working nearly twenty-four hours a day. It was only her quiet insistence that her lover get an occasional hour or two of sleep that ever brought Sloan upstairs during this kind of intensive assignment.
As Michael turned off the four-lane highway that ran along the river onto the maze of one-way streets in Old City, she stated emphatically, “When we get home, you’re going straight to bed.”
“Promise?” Sloan rejoined, turning her head on the headrest and finally opening her eyes. With a grin, life clearly returning to her features, she added, “I think you’re exactly what I need to jump-start my engine.”
“Well, you can just motor down, hotrod,” Michael said with a laugh. “Maybe in the morning I’ll take you for a ride.”
“I’ll be sure to pencil you in on my schedule, then.”
Michael was about to launch a comeback as she turned onto their block. Slowing, peering at the unexpected obstacle in her path, she muttered in frustration, “For God’s sake, who would leave that right in front of the driveway?”
Had Sloan been less tired, perhaps she would have been faster to make a connection. As Michael downshifted into park and opened the driver’s door to get out, Sloan glanced idly out her window toward their building. A shopping cart, turned over on its side, lay on the sidewalk in front of the wide double doors leading into their garage. Odd, she thought, as she dimly registered the sound of an engine starting nearby. Suddenly, some long-ingrained distrust pulsed through her brain. She turned just as Michael stepped from the car.
“Michael, no—”
Her words were lost in the sound of squealing tires, a muffled scream, and the rending of metal as the driver’s door of the Porsche was torn off and catapulted down the street. The Porsche then caromed sideways half onto the sidewalk from the force of the impact. By the time Sloan extricated herself from the car, which had been pushed into a parked minivan, the vehicle that had struck her lover was gone.
Ten feet away, Michael lay motionless in the road, a dark pool spreading on the pavement beneath her head.
*
“My God, did you hear that?” Catherine exclaimed as she and Rebecca stepped from the elevator.
“Sounds like a hell of a fender bender,” Rebecca muttered, instantly alert. “And it was awfully close.”
Suddenly, the sounds of frantic shouting were audible from just outside, and Rebecca hurriedly pushed through the door to the street. Directly in front of her at the foot of the steps, Sloan’s Porsche was canted onto the sidewalk with the engine still running. She glanced inside through a spiderweb of shattered safety glass. Empty. From the far side, she could hear strangled cries. “Catherine, stay here for a minute.”
“Rebecca, someone’s hurt. I’m a doctor,” Catherine said urgently from just behind her. “I need to attend to the victims.”
“I know that,” Rebecca snapped, not used to having her authority questioned at a scene. “But you’ll have to wait. I don’t know what happened here. It might not have been an accident, and I don’t want another victim.” Especially not you.
There was no time for discussion, and the detective didn’t wait for a reply. Instead, she climbed over the rear bumper of the parked minivan—which now housed a portion of the front of Sloan’s abandoned vehicle—her cell phone in one hand and her weapon in the other. Even as she assessed the activity in the street, visually searching for possible assailants, she called for an ambulance and backup in clipped, commanding tones.
From the corner of her eye, she checked the figures in the street. Sloan, blood streaking her face and arms, was on her knees above the supine body of an unconscious blond woman Rebecca did not recognize. She couldn’t tell how badly either was injured, and she couldn’t allow her concern to divert her mind from more important tasks—ensuring that there were no further threats remaining in the immediate area and preserving any evidence of the crime.
Catherine clambered over the wreck after her, and Rebecca cursed. “Keep down at least,” the detective barked, blocking the three women from the street as best she could with her body while she scoured the windows in the buildings on both sides of them, searching for any kind of movement behind the many darkened windows. She saw nothing suspicious, but it was impossible for her to tell if any of the people in the densely packed buildings might represent a danger. Curious onlookers were approaching from down the block, but fortunately there were no vehicles to be diverted yet. She glanced down once more and saw a widening pool of blood beneath the blond’s head.
“Catherine, keep them right there until backup arrives.”
“Don’t worry,” Catherine said grimly after one quick look. “No one is moving her without a backboard.”
Mitchell and Jason burst from the building. “Oh God,” Jason gasped, stopping in his tracks and staring in horror.
Rebecca, turning at the sound, ordered, “Mitchell, secure the scene. Backup is on the way. I’ll call for the crime scene unit and find out where the fuck the ambulances are. This was a hit-and-run at least.”
“Right,” Mitchell responded crisply, her face tight with shock but her voice strong as she clipped her badge to the waistband of her jeans. After glancing once at the badly smashed car, she asked in a quiet voice only Rebecca could hear, “Intentional?”
“We have to assume so, until proven otherwise,” Rebecca affirmed, noting with approval Mitchell’s quick, intelligent assessment. “Keep your eyes open. Just because this was a vehicle hit doesn’t mean there won’t be someone in the crowd or on a rooftop with a gun. I’ll call Watts down to canvass with you.”
“I’m on it.” Mitchell headed off in the direction of a rapidly approaching group of civilians.
“Jason,” Rebecca added brusquely, “you get back inside.”
Unsurprisingly, he ignored her and made his way to Sloan.
“Fuck,” Rebecca muttered in surrender and phoned Watts.
Sloan, still on her knees, was curled protectively over Michael’s motionless form. She gripped her lover’s limp hand, a world of anguish on her face. “Please, please…call an ambulance…” she implored to no one in particular, her eyes fixed on Michael’s pale face. “Oh, Jesus, please…Michael, baby…”
“Sloan,” Catherine said gently, carefully placing her hand on the dark-haired woman’s shoulder. “I need to be where you are so I can evaluate her.” The injured woman lay nearly under a parked car and Catherine couldn’t get room to assess her status. So this is Michael.
“No.” The sound was choked, agonized. Sloan looked up into Catherine’s face, eyes unfocused, and insisted desperately, “No. I’m not leaving her.”
“No, of course you’re not,” Catherine assured quietly. “Just let me close enough to help her.”
Sloan seemed not to have heard, but leaned closer to the unconscious woman, whispering in a choked voice, “Baby, it’s me. It’s okay. It’s going to be okay. Please, baby…ohgodgod…”
Jason knelt next to his friend. “Sloan—let Catherine help Michael. Just move back a little bit. You don’t have to leave her.”
Sloan looked at him as if she didn�
�t recognize him; then she blinked, and her eyes seemed to clear for an instant. “It was supposed to have been me, Jason. It’s my car. She was driving…”
“It’s okay. We’ll worry about it later.” His voice trembled on the words.
Mutely, Sloan shifted a fraction, tenaciously gripping Michael’s right hand. Catherine gently displaced her further until she could lean down and place her fingers on the injured woman’s neck, searching for a pulse.
Automatically, as often happened when examining a patient no matter whether physically or psychologically, Catherine observed many things at once, assimilating impressions almost unconsciously. While her fingers registered the faint, thready beat of blood through the artery she probed, her mind noted how achingly beautiful the injured woman was. The perfect unmarred features, fit for an artist’s canvas and incongruously free of any sign of pain, as if she were only peacefully slumbering. The left hand lying gently between her breasts, a heavy platinum band glinting in the halo of light from the streetlights overhead. The lover bending to her, devotion etched in every line of her hauntingly handsome face. Only the maroon circle of blood, rapidly darkening to black, cast a nightmare pall over the ethereal tableau.
Catherine wrenched her gaze from Michael’s face. Quietly, she murmured to Sloan, whose shallow, tortured breathing spoke of unbearable grief. “Listen to me. She’s alive. That’s all that matters. We’ll have her in the hospital in a few minutes where she can be taken care of. Do you hear me? Sloan?”
Sloan coughed and tried to catch her breath. She couldn’t think; she couldn’t feel. She wasn’t even certain her heart was beating. All she could sense was terror. “Please…please don’t let her die.” She looked at Catherine, her eyes fathomless pools of anguish. In a voice beyond torment, she repeated, “Please…I can’t…without her…I can’t…”
Catherine couldn’t offer the one promise Sloan begged for, so she said nothing. She placed the fingers of one hand beneath Michael’s chin, lifted enough to keep her airway open, and carefully slipped a folded handkerchief, which Jason had supplied, behind her head to staunch the flow of blood from a large open wound. Rebecca paced back and forth in front of them, one eye on the street, the other on them, snapping orders into her cell phone. Mitchell, amazingly, had found crime scene tape somewhere and was cordoning off the street while instructing gawkers to stay back.
In the distance, sirens approached.
*
An hour later, Rebecca walked into the brightly lit trauma unit waiting room where an anxious group had gathered. Catherine rose to meet her, her green eyes dark with concern.
“Any word?” Rebecca asked in a low voice, running one hand down Catherine’s arm in lieu of a kiss.
Catherine shook her head slightly, but some of the tension left her chest at the sight of her lover. The waiting room, the waiting, Sloan’s torment—all of it brought back too many images still too fresh. Not long ago, it had been Rebecca. Rebecca lying so still, so pale, bleeding…so much bloo—
“Hey,” Rebecca said softly, alarmed by the faint trembling she felt beneath her fingertips. “You okay?”
“Yes,” Catherine said hoarsely, forcing the memories back behind barriers still too fragile to contain them. “No word yet. I’ve been doing what I can to get updates, but because it’s Saturday night, it’s a madhouse in there. All I know is that she’s still being evaluated.”
Rebecca nodded, looking past Catherine to the other occupants of the cramped windowless space that might have been any of a dozen such hospital rooms she’d waited in during the course of her career. She concentrated on deflecting the pain that filled the air, needing to keep her distance so she could work. “Who’s the redhead?” she asked, remarking on the woman in the blue print shirt and chinos sitting with one arm wrapped protectively around Sloan’s waist.
“Sarah Martin,” Catherine replied, following her gaze. “Jason’s partner…and Sloan’s best friend, apparently.”
“Huh,” Rebecca remarked with interest. Now I’ll bet that’s a story.
“What’s happening back at Sloan’s?” Catherine asked, needing to think about something, anything, other than this nightmare.
“I finally got Watts out of bed, and he and Mitchell are running the scene. They’re canvassing the neighborhood, interviewing anyone who was around. Or anyone who will admit to being around. There’s a tavern on the corner, and they’ll need to talk to everyone they can chase down who was there. That’ll most likely take all night and a good part of tomorrow. Flanagan’s team showed up; they’re getting the crime scene photos, analyzing the impact patterns, looking for identifying tire treads. The usual. Flanagan’s fast, but it will still be at least a day or so before she has anything concrete. This kind of crime leaves a ton of physical evidence to sort through.”
Neither of them laughed at the irony of that statement.
“Was it intentional?” Catherine asked quietly, because she had to know. She had to know how close death had come this time.
Rebecca hesitated, then exhaled raggedly. “Looks like it, yeah. Someone was expecting Sloan to come back and had set it up so she’d have to get out of the car. Obviously, it didn’t go down the way they planned, because Michael was driving.”
“Why Sloan?” Catherine asked carefully, fighting to ignore the churning in her stomach. “Why not…you?”
“What?” Rebecca’s eyes shot to Catherine’s, instantly concerned. “It wasn’t me. It’s not going to be me.”
They both knew there was no way to guarantee that, but it wasn’t the time to discuss something they couldn’t change.
“Still, why Sloan?”
“More importantly,” Rebecca said darkly, “why now?” Although she hated to do it, she needed to find out. “I have to interview her.”
“Oh, Rebecca,” Catherine murmured. “She’s so vulnerable right now. Can’t it wait?”
“This was attempted murder.” Rebecca heard the censure in her lover’s tone, and it hurt, but nothing showed in her face. “No, it can’t wait.”
Catherine watched her walk away, wishing she could take back the words. She of all people should know what it cost Rebecca to do the job she did. If the image of Sloan’s agony hadn’t been so fresh in her memory, she would have remembered that.
*
Rebecca set a cup of weak vending-room coffee in front of Sloan, then walked around the small table and sat down across from her. They were alone in an unadorned, harshly lit consulting room down the hall from the trauma waiting area. “How you doing?”
The other woman shuddered as if with a sudden chill, then met Rebecca’s gaze with eyes that were slightly dazed. “If I could just see her…”
“Catherine’s working on that right now. She’ll come and get us if there’s any word.”
“I can’t believe this is happening.” Sloan passed a hand over her face. “One minute we were just talking, laughing about making lo—” Her voice caught. “Oh, Christ…I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“Sloan,” Rebecca said gently, “I need your help.”
Violet eyes gone nearly black with pain flicked to hers, caught, then held on. “I’m so fucking…scared, you know?”
“Yeah…I know.” She wanted to touch her, because she could feel the agony radiate from her skin, but sympathy wasn’t going to help find who had done this. “Michael needs your help, too.”
“No one knew I was going to the airport,” Sloan said lifelessly, as if anticipating Rebecca’s questions. “Well, Jason knew, of course. But he was the only one.”
Rebecca said nothing, preferring to let Sloan tell it in her own way. The security consultant wasn’t a suspect to be interrogated, but a witness, and a traumatized one at that. Her recollection of the event would be distorted by grief and fear and the mind’s natural desire to block out the things too terrible to contemplate, but fortunately, she was also a trained investigator. Instinctively, she would know what they needed to do and the things that Rebecca nee
ded to know.
“Obviously,” Sloan continued in a weary voice, “someone set it up so I’d have to get out of the car to move the cart, and they were waiting for me. I can’t tell you exactly what happened next, because I didn’t see anything. It was over in a few seconds, and for most of that time, the Porsche was moving from the impact. I’d already unbelted, and I was getting tossed around pretty good.” As she spoke, she unconsciously twisted the band on her ring finger, something Rebecca had never seen her do before. Rivulets of sweat ran down her face, despite the fact that the room was cool.
“What about after you got out of the car?” Rebecca asked quietly. “Did you see anything then?”
Again, Sloan shivered. “All I was thinking about was Michael. By the time I got out of the car and into the street, all I could see was Michael…she was lying on the pavement, and she wasn’t moving…” Her voice trailed off, and she closed her eyes. “Sorry,” she whispered.
Rebecca waited. She knew very well that Sloan was reliving those few terrifying seconds, seeing and feeling it all over again. After a minute, as kindly as she could, the detective probed, “Did you see the taillights of the vehicle? The license plate?”
“No.”
“Anyone on the street—someone who might have been watching the building?”
“No,” Sloan repeated hoarsely, opening her eyes and bracing her forearms on the table, staring at the speckled gray surface, trying not to see the spreading pool of Michael’s blood. “Nothing. No one.”
“Okay.” Rebecca curled her fingers around the rigid arm and squeezed firmly. “Thanks.”
For now, that would have to be enough. Tomorrow, she would ask Sloan again. Right now, the woman was clearly numb with shock and fear. When the horror had receded just a bit, she might remember more.
“It was supposed to have been me,” Sloan said dully. It should have been me. I wish to God it had been. Oh, baby, I’m so sorry…
“That’s my read on it, too,” Rebecca said, knowing that only the truth would help ease Sloan’s guilt. “The timing is too damned coincidental for this to be anything else. Who knows about the operation tomorrow night besides you and Jason?”
