Intensive Care

by Jessica Andersen

  Ripley’s heart fell to her toes. Janice Cooper, with the jet-black hair and the daughter who’d just had a baby, was dead. And most likely, she was hot as well.

  Oh, God. She pressed a shaking hand to her forehead. While she’d been tearing up the sheets with the new RSO, one of her patients had died. R-ONC was self-destructing while she was indulging in a little rescue fantasy.

  Well, she didn’t think Cage could save her from this one. With another unexpected death so close to the last, and both bodies hot, Gabney would have no choice but to call in the authorities. And R-ONC, like her career, would be history.

  But at least no other patients would die. Ripley nod ded into the phone and forced the words through a constricted throat. “I’m on my way.” She grabbed a suit and shirt from the closet and headed for the bathroom. She ran headfirst into Cage, who was just coming out.

  She’d all but forgotten he was in the apartment.

  “Oh!” She put out a hand to steady herself and touched warm, bare flesh. Jerking away, she stood, awkward in her nudity and intent on her need to get to work.

  “Ripley.” He caught her face in his hands and forced her chin up. “Look at me.” He waited until their eyes met and held. “It’s okay. We’ll figure it out together. I’m on your side.”

  Her prior experiences warred with the desire to believe in Cage. She linked her fingers around his wrists. “Why?”

  Touching his brow to her forehead, he said, “Because I trust you, Ripley. If you say you don’t know anything about the radioactivity, then I believe you.”

  “I don’t know anything about it.” She blew out a breath. “God, I wish I did.”

  “I know.” He kissed her nose. “Me, too, but we’ll figure it out together, okay? Now, go get dressed. I’ll take a cab home for a change of clothes and meet you at the hospital.” He was halfway down the hall before he turned back. “And Ripley?”

  “Yes?”

  “Be careful, okay? Just keep yourself safe and we’ll talk about the rest of it later. Got it?” His bold gaze let her know exactly what “the rest” entailed, but Ripley wasn’t dreading the conversation quite so much anymore.

  She nodded. “Later.” And as she pulled on the clever navy suit that always made her feel in control, she thought that if happily ever after was impossible, maybe she and Cage could shoot for happily for a while.

  Maybe.

  WHEN RIPLEY REACHED the patients’ wing, the hall outside Janice’s room was crowded with people, most of whom had no business in R-ONC other than nosiness. Ripley snapped, “I want this area cleared of nonessential personnel right now,” and helped a few stragglers along with pointed references to their department heads and the need for heavier workloads if they had spare time to gawk.

  She was good at covering her insecurities with a snarl.

  That left her with Whistler, Tansy, the two nurses who had been on duty when the patient died, and Belle, who Ripley hardly classified as “essential personnel.”

  “Mrs. Cooper was one of yours, wasn’t she, Belle?” The volunteer tended to pick a few favorite patients, like Milo, for special attention. Ripley figured the older woman was lonely, and she tried not to draw too many parallels between Belle and a R-ONC who slept beside her patients’ beds.

  “She was a lovely woman, Dr. Davis.” Belle’s fingers fluttered to her throat. “So strong in her faith, and so happy that her daughter was coming to visit with the new baby. She was so happy. So peaceful.”

  Ripley thought back to the glow in the new grandmother’s eyes when she’d passed baby pictures around just the previous day. Now she was dead. Ripley bowed her head and murmured, “Thank you, Belle. You can keep going with your duties now.”

  Dismissed, Belle left with one last glance at the closed door and the distinctive black-rayed symbol slashing across it.

  Radioactive.

  “What’s the situation?” The gruff voice came from just behind Ripley, and she forced herself not to react when her heart gave a glad leap in her chest.

  “Cage.” She acknowledged him with a nod and felt her face heat when one of his dark eyebrows lifted in a silent, private “hello.”

  A quick indrawn breath from her other side alerted Ripley that the exchange had not gone unnoticed, and she shot Tansy an apologetic glance that said, we’ll talk about it later.

  Much later. After she and Cage had figured out exactly what it was and what they were going to do about it.

  Whistler answered his new boss, “White female, sixty years old, undergoing implant radiation treatment for breast cancer. The patient had a cardiac incident around nine this morning and was unable to be resuscitated. No medical history of heart problems, no known complications.”

  Ripley glanced at Whistler. His presentation was as good as any rotating student. She wondered where he’d gone to med school and how he’d ended up a lowly rad tech.

  Whether he resented it. Why he’d been at the hospital over the weekend. Twice.

  She sucked in a breath and Whistler looked over at her. Their eyes locked, and something hard and mean shifted in his. She took a step back.

  “Same sort of contamination?” Cage asked.

  Whistler nodded and his eyes went neutral. He turned his back on Ripley and her heart thundered. Had she imagined the moment? She couldn’t be sure. The tech answered, “Yep. Blood rather than surface. This time, though, there are nukes in the IV line and on the injection port.”

  Cage swore and his eyes met Ripley’s. They had found their hard evidence. But Janice Cooper, with her crocheted baby sweaters, had died to provide it.

  It was too great a cost, Ripley thought, feeling tears threaten. Tears for herself. For a new grandmother. She was tempted to give in and cry, though tears were a weakness. Guess what, Father? she asked the voice inside her head, I’m feeling weak.

  Whistler sidled over to Cage. She could just hear him murmur, “I need to talk to you. It’s important.”

  Cage nodded. “I’ll meet you in Rad Safety when I’m done here.”

  With another quick glance in her direction, Whistler headed for the elevators, leaving Ripley with a very bad feeling. “Cage, I don’t—”

  But before she could finish, Tansy pressed a folder into her hands. Ripley glanced at the first page and read halfway down before she realized she was looking at Ida Mae’s autopsy report.

  “Cage.” He was at her side instantly, his nearness settling and unsettling her even as she scanned the sparse details. Like any good scientist, she shoved aside suspicion in the face of hard fact.

  “See anything?” Cage asked. His breath tickled the back of her neck, reminding her of the many places his mouth had been the night before.

  She shook her head, trying to banish the memory and concentrate on the report. “Evidence of pain meds, but that’s to be expected. The rest is all normal.”

  Cage swore. “And no evidence of smothering or strangling. So what killed her if not the radioactivity?”

  Glancing at the closed, marked door, Ripley thought out loud. “She’d been dead for some time before we realized she was contaminated, then the autopsy was delayed until the proper shielding could be arranged. Perhaps it was something that metabolized quickly, or broke down right away after she died.”

  “A chemical with a short half-life,” Cage agreed. “That makes sense.” The brush of his body against her back was subtle but potent, acknowledging her idea and reminding her of their new partnership. Their relationship, which complicated as many things as it solved.

  Cage turned toward the head nurse, hovering nearby. “Shield yourself and draw blood from Mrs. Cooper right now, please, and have the lab test it for everything imaginable. Remind them to keep the sample shielded and call us to decon the room afterward.”

  The nurse nodded and disappeared, leaving Ripley with half-formed suspicions and no real evidence. “Cage. There’s something you should know. I—”

  The pager on his hip beeped to life. He glanced down and gr
imaced. “Whistler again. He said he’s got something to show me. Guess my little lecture about job responsibilities really stuck.” He returned his attention to Ripley. “Never mind. You were saying?”

  She shook her head, feeling foolish. This was Whistler they were talking about—midtwenties, crew cut and a single earring. Hardly dangerous. Her mind was playing tricks, seeing shadows where there weren’t any. Seeing “ever after” in what could only be temporary. She blew out a breath. “Never mind. You go ahead and meet with Whistler. Just…be careful, okay?” She stuffed her hands in her pockets, wanting to touch him but knowing it was neither the time nor the place for a goodbye kiss.

  Cage must have felt it, too, for his gaze lingered on her lips for a moment. “I’ll meet you in your office once I’ve met with Whistler, and we’ll decide where to go from here.”

  Ripley wasn’t sure if he was talking about their investigation or their lovemaking, but she nodded yes to both. “Later.” And she turned so she wouldn’t give in to the temptation to watch him walk away.

  “Into your office. Now.” Tansy grabbed Ripley’s arm and aimed her toward the inner doors. “What the hell happened while I was away?”

  As she collapsed into her desk chair, Ripley couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry. She let her head thump onto the desk and said, “Where do I start?”

  “With Cage, of course. Come on, tell me everything.” Tansy leaned back and crossed her arms. Her face was clearer today, happier. Ripley sensed that whatever had worried Tansy was now past, and she breathed an internal sigh of relief. Granted, suspecting Tansy was even sillier than suspecting Whistler, but still…

  Someone had killed the R-ONC patients. Someone she knew.

  Someone she trusted.

  IN THE RAD SAFETY OFFICE, Cage gestured Whistler to a chair opposite his. “What’ve you found about the four other patients on the list I gave you?”

  Whistler flipped through a leaning pile beside the techs’ computer, shifting the green logbooks to one side and unearthing a folded printout. He scanned the leftmost column. “Including Janice Cooper, who fits the pattern, we have contamination found in six white female R-ONC patients between the ages of fifty-five and sixty-nine. Two were being treated for ovarian cancer and four for breast cancer. All died unexpectedly, though the unexpected death reports list cardiac arrest and cite ‘natural causes.’”

  “That just means there was nothing obvious in the autopsy,” Cage observed. “And why the hell didn’t Dixon notice they were hot? Especially after he found that jar of nukes in the broom closet, he should’ve set up sweeps.”

  Whistler shrugged. “I wouldn’t know, sir.” He shifted in his chair and pushed the logbooks toward Cage.

  “I’ll call him again,” Cage said. “He’s going to have to talk to me sometime.” Though his first impression had been that the former Radiation Safety Officer was nothing more than a skirt-chasing slacker, it was possible there was something more to the man. Perhaps something devious. He looked up and caught Whistler fiddling with the green binders again. “Was there something else?”

  He’d assumed Whistler wanted to discuss the women whose old samples had turned up radioactive. The pattern—white women of a certain age being treated for women’s cancers—was deeply disturbing. It brought to mind stories of serial killers working within hospitals. Sick people murdering a mother, a sister, a lover, over and over again. Nurses. Doctors. Healers who hurt.

  Like the ones who’d killed Heather.

  No, Cage told himself, don’t go there. Not all doctors were like that. Just look at Ripley. She was different. The very thought of her brought a tingle of remembered warmth. He wasn’t sure what to do about it, but there was something very, very special between them now.

  Rather than answering, Whistler spun one of the green logbooks to face Cage and opened it to a page marked with a yellow sticky tab. There were perhaps a dozen of the tabs protruding from the book. Cage’s eyes focused on the name at the top of the page.

  Dr. Ripley Davis, MD.

  He pierced Whistler with a look. “What the hell is this?”

  The tech frowned. “The R-ONC logs. You told me to audit them. I even came in yesterday to get them. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t expect you to find anything.” Cage could feel the first licks of blackness at the edges of his heart. “Did you?”

  She hadn’t lied to him about the radioactivity, he told himself. She couldn’t have. She cared for her patients, and in the warm yellow light of their morning lovemaking, he’d believed that she cared for him, too.

  The first flicker of panic joined the blackness when Whistler nodded.

  “It was well hidden, but yes, I did find some irregularities.” He tapped the page again.

  “What sort of irregularities? Bad handwriting? Miss ing dates?” Though he’d expect her to be meticulous in all her work, Cage could forgive Ripley a measure of sloppiness. Please, let it be an illegible doctor’s scrawl.

  Whistler shook his head and inched away from the table as though he was afraid Cage might suddenly lunge for him. “No. Missing shipments.”

  “Oh, God. How many?” Cage felt the warmth slipping away. But he couldn’t grasp the concept immediately.

  Not Ripley, his heart insisted. She swore she knew nothing about the radioactivity.

  Just like the doctors at Albany Memorial had sworn under oath they hadn’t known the linear accelerator’s programming was flawed. But they had.

  “I’m missing four vials of radioactive material that were delivered to R-ONC over the last year.” Whistler gestured at the yellow tabs. “Gray eggs that our records show as arriving never appear in these logbooks.”

  Lies. Rage swirled in his gut, heavy and ugly. She had lied to him. Cage yanked the book closer and thumbed through, noticing many of the doctored pages seemed newer than their neighbors, as though she’d recently replaced the information.

  The night before his audit, perhaps?

  “Goddammit!” He slammed the logbook shut and lurched to his feet. Glancing at his watch, he realized Ripley would be waiting for him in her office. Well, good. He had a few things to say to her.

  He jammed the logbooks under his arm and slammed the door to Rad Safety. He was going to give Dr. Davis a conversation she’d never forget. Then he was going to shut down her department and tell Leo to fire her.

  And then he was going to get nasty.

  Chapter Nine

  While she waited for Cage in her office, Ripley turned her attention to the stack of files she’d requested from personnel with the ID number her father maintained. He’d have a fit when he found out, but she didn’t have the clout within the hospital to get the information. He did.

  She’d pulled the files of every member of R-ONC, as well as the Rad Safety techs, on the rationale that whoever had injected radioactivity into Janice Cooper’s IV bag had had access to both R-ONC and radioactivity. Most likely, it was someone she knew.

  Ripley eyed the leaning stack of folders. Someone she knew. She shivered and looked at the door, wishing Cage would hurry up. Though she was still unsure about him, she couldn’t deny that he made her feel safe. Protected. The outer office was empty, and she felt very alone without him nearby.

  “Great,” she muttered to herself, wincing as the word echoed in her office. “The next thing you know, you’ll be setting the dinner table for two even though you know he’s not coming home. Get a grip, Davis. You’re fine without him. You don’t need him.” Liar.

  Ignoring the little voice that thought it knew so much, Ripley pulled Whistler’s file from the leaning stack. His real name was Elmer Holyrood, which explained the nickname, but as she read further, her own lips parted in a soundless whistle. Sure enough, he’d spent three years in medical school before dropping out for “personal” reasons. Two years later, Dixon had hired him for Rad Safety, but there was no information as to what he’d done in the interim. No additional schooling. No employment hist
ory. The years were a blank.

  Ripley frowned. It still wasn’t enough. It was a hint, but not hard evidence. Hard evidence was the nukes in Janice Cooper’s IV bag. Hard evidence was the sky-high levels of adrenaline the lab had found in her bloodstream. It was possible, even likely, that the other bodies had carried high levels of adrenaline that had broken down after death.

  Someone was injecting R-ONC patients’ IV bags with a deadly cocktail of adrenaline and radioactivity. The massive dose of adrenaline stopped their hearts. And the radioactivity?

  She had no idea. It was crazy, just as the person responsible for the murders had to be.

  Ripley shivered and pushed the folder aside. She couldn’t do this alone. She was too unsettled. Too weak. But for a change, she found little shame in admitting it. In fact, it felt liberating.

  She was reaching for the phone to call Cage when she heard him in the outer office. A smile formed, but it fell away when she saw his dire expression. Her stomach dropped to her toes. What had gone wrong now? Was it another patient? She was halfway across the room when he marched into her office and slammed the door shut hard enough to rattle the blinds.

  He bared his teeth and Ripley backed up a pace.

  “Cage! What’s the matter? What’s wrong?” She caught sight of the R-ONC radiation logs tucked under his arm, and heard her tone drop to defensive. “Why do you have my logs with you?”

  She had no reason to fear her records, but her stomach dropped and she moved another step away from him.

  “Oh, Ripley.” There was a wealth of disappointment in the words, a world of accusation and betrayal. Then those soft emotions were gone from his dark eyes, and only anger remained. Once again, he looked like the dark warrior she’d first met—a man who hated doctors, especially R-ONCs.

  “Cage. Talk to me, tell me what’s wrong.” She chanced a step toward him, though his expression was anything but welcoming. “Is there something wrong with the logs?” There couldn’t be. She was scrupulous in her records and she rode everyone else in the department to be just as careful.