The Pregnant Witness

by Lisa Childs

  “Thank you,” she told the PA. But she didn’t look up. She couldn’t take her gaze from the amazing photo of her baby. The child had already survived so much: the loss of a parent and two bank robberies.

  “Good luck, Ms. Jenkins,” the young woman replied as she pulled the curtain closed again.

  Maggie’s smile slid off her lips. She was going to need luck to make it safely through her pregnancy and deliver a healthy baby. He was fine now. And she would do everything within her power to keep him that way.

  She dressed quickly so that she could pick up and study the picture again. Maybe she should wait for the FBI agent—to make certain that he was all right. It wasn’t as if she could leave anyway. Her purse was back at the bank, so she didn’t have any money to pay for a cab. And with Mr. Hardy busy with corporate, the only other person she could have called at the bank to bring it to her was dead.

  Sarge...

  If only he hadn’t stepped out from behind that pillar...

  If only he hadn’t tried to save her...

  Tears blurred her vision, but she blinked them back to focus on the baby picture again. She needed to focus on him or her, needed to keep him or her healthy and safe. The baby was her priority.

  She would have to find a phone she could use and call a friend to pick her up. But she didn’t really know anyone here in this suburb of Chicago. She hadn’t known anyone but Sarge. After the bank where she’d previously worked had been robbed, she had transferred to the branch where Sarge worked—thinking she would feel safer with him there. But the danger had followed her and claimed his life—cruelly cutting his retirement short. The tears threatened again, but she fought them. Sobbing would not help her blood pressure.

  The curtain moved as a gloved hand pulled it back.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, feeling guilty for taking up the area. “I realize you probably need the bed for someone else...” For someone who actually needed medical attention. “I’m all ready to leave.” She just needed someone to pick her up. “I can wait in the lobby.”

  Nobody said anything, though. But she could feel them standing there, watching her. So then she looked up, and her heart began to pound frantically as she stared into the creepy face of one of those horrible zombie masks. It was her nightmare come to life again.

  She would have screamed but for the gun barrel pointing directly at her. She already knew that these people had no compunction about killing. They had already killed once and that had been because Sarge had been trying to save her. She couldn’t scream and risk someone else getting hurt again. The only reason they would have tracked her down at the hospital was to kill again.

  To kill her...

  * * *

  BLAINE CURSED HIMSELF as he flipped screens on his tablet. The Bureau had forwarded him the case file for the bank robberies.

  Now he knew exactly what Maggie had been muttering in the back of the ambulance—because it had happened again. A different bank. A different city. But the same witness.

  Maggie Jenkins had been robbed before—a couple of months ago—at another bank where she’d been working as an assistant manager. What were the odds that the same robbers, wearing zombie masks and black trench coats, would track her down at another bank in another city? Maybe it was a coincidence, but in his years with the Bureau, Blaine had found few true coincidences.

  It was more likely that they knew her. And if they knew her, she knew them. He’d had a lot of questions for Maggie Jenkins before; now he had even more. And he wouldn’t let her tear-damp dark eyes or her sweet vulnerability distract him again.

  He dropped the tablet onto the passenger seat and threw open the driver’s door. After clicking the locks, he hurried across the parking lot to the hospital. He sidestepped through the automatic doors before they were fully open and flashed his badge at the security guard standing inside the doors. “I’m looking for a witness who was brought here from a bank-robbery scene. Maggie Jenkins.”

  After waving him through the blinking, beeping metal detector, the guard pointed toward the emergency-department desk. Blaine showed his badge to the receptionist. “I need to talk to Maggie Jenkins—from the bank robbery.”

  The older woman stared at his badge before nodding. “Nyla can show you where she is.”

  A young nurse stepped from behind the desk and pushed open swinging doors. “Ms. Jenkins is behind the last curtain on the left.”

  He followed the woman’s directions, past a long row of pulled curtains, and he pulled aside the very last curtain on the left. The bed was empty but for a black-and-white photo. Maggie was gone. He picked up the photo and recognized it as an ultrasound picture. His older sisters had shown him a few over the past ten years. He’d thought they looked like Rorschach tests. They had all prized them.

  No matter what her involvement was in the robberies, Maggie Jenkins wouldn’t have willingly left that photo behind. He reached for his holster and whirled around to the nurse who’d followed him. “She’s gone.”

  Unconcerned, the young woman shrugged. “She was cleared to get dressed and leave.”

  “She came by ambulance and didn’t have her purse,” he said. “She couldn’t have left on her own.” Not with no car and no money for a cab. At the very least, she would have had to call someone to pick her up. But then, why wouldn’t she have taken the ultrasound photo with her? “Did you see anyone come back here?”

  Metal scraped against metal as another curtain was tugged back, its rings scraping along the rod. A little girl, propped against pillows in a bed, peered out at Blaine. “The monster came for her.”

  His skin chilled as dread chased over him. “What monster?”

  An older woman, probably the little girl’s mother, was sitting in a chair next to the bed. With a slight smile, she shook her head. “It wasn’t a monster. Just someone wearing a silly Halloween mask.”

  “But it’s not Halloween,” the little girl said, as if she suspected her mother was lying and that the monster was very real.

  Blaine was worried that the monster was real, too. “Was it a zombie mask that the person was wearing?”

  The woman shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  But the little girl’s already pale face grew even paler with fear as she slowly nodded. “It was a really creepy zombie. He was wearing a long black coat.”

  Blaine’s dread spread the chill throughout him. He bit back a curse. One of the robbers had tracked her down at the hospital?

  The woman shrugged again. “He put his fingers to his lips, so that we wouldn’t say anything. He was just playing a joke.”

  Apparently the woman hadn’t seen any of the news coverage about the zombie robbers.

  The nurse shook her head in vigorous denial of the little girl’s claim. “I didn’t see anyone dressed like that in this area, and the security guard wouldn’t have let him through the front doors.”

  “What about the back doors?” he asked. “Could someone have come in another way?”

  “Only employees can,” the nurse replied.

  He doubted that employees had to go through a metal detector the way visitors had to. “Show me.”

  The nurse stepped around the curtain to show Blaine another set of double doors on that end of the emergency department—just a few feet from where Maggie had been. If the robber had come through those doors, no one would have seen him but Maggie and apparently the little girl next to her. He wouldn’t have gone through security if he’d come in the employee entrance. The nurse had to swipe her ID card to open those doors. They swung into an empty corridor.

  “How would someone get to the parking lot from here?” he asked.

  With a sigh of exasperation, as if he was wasting her time, she turned left and continued down the corridor to a couple of single doors. “The locker rooms have doors to a back hallway that leads to the employee parking lot,” she said in anticipation of his next questions. “But it’s too soon for a shift change, so nobody’s back here now.”

&
nbsp; But a noise emanated from behind one of the doors. A thump. And then a scream pierced the air. Blaine grabbed the nurse’s ID badge and swiped it through the lock. As he pushed open the door, shots rang out. A bullet struck him—in the vest over his heart. The force of it knocked him against the door and forced the breath from his lungs.

  The nurse cried and ran back down the corridor. Then another scream rang out—from Maggie Jenkins. She had fallen to her knees. But the bank robber had a gloved hand in her hair, trying to pull her up—trying to drag her to that door at the back of the locker room—the door that would lead to the employee parking lot.

  How did he know where to take her? How did he have the access badge to do it? He must either be an employee of the hospital or he knew an employee very well.

  Ignoring the pain she must have been in from that hand in her hair, Maggie wriggled and reached as she continued to scream for help. But she didn’t wait for Blaine’s help. She tried to help herself. She grabbed at the benches between the rows of lockers and at the lockers, too, as she tried to prevent the robber from dragging her off. She flailed her arms and kicked, too, desperately trying to fight off her attacker. But then the gun barrel swung toward her face and she froze.

  Was the robber just trying to scare her into cooperating? Or did he intend to kill her right here, in front of Blaine?

  Chapter Four

  Maggie couldn’t breathe; she couldn’t move. She couldn’t do anything but stare down the barrel of the gun that had been shoved in her face.

  Agent Campbell had stepped inside the room, but then a shot had slammed him back against the door. Wasn’t he wearing his vest anymore? Was he hurt?

  Or worse?

  She wanted to look, but she was frozen with fear. Because she was about to be worse, too. With the barrel so close to her face, there was no way the bullet could miss her head. She was about to die.

  In her peripheral vision, she was aware of the gloved finger pressing on the trigger. And she heard the shot. It exploded in the room, shattering the silence and deafening her. But she felt no pain. Neither did she fall. She still couldn’t move. Apparently she couldn’t feel, either.

  But the gun moved away from her face. With a dull thud, it dropped to the floor. And the robber fell, too, backward over one of the benches in what appeared to be the employee locker room.

  The robber had forced her to be quiet while they’d been in Emergency—because he’d kept the barrel of the gun tight against her belly. He would have killed her baby if she’d called out for help. But when he’d brought her to this locker room, he’d had to move the gun away to swipe the badge. And so, as the doors were closing behind them, she’d risked calling out.

  But she hadn’t expected Agent Campbell to come to her aid again. He must have recovered from the shot that had knocked him back because now he started forward again, toward the robber. But he stopped to kick away the gun, and the robber vaulted to his feet. He picked up one of the benches and hurled it at the FBI agent. It knocked Blaine Campbell back—into Maggie.

  She fell against the lockers, the back of her head striking the metal so hard that spots danced before her eyes. Her vision blurred. Then her legs, already shaking with her fear, folded under her, and she slid down to the floor.

  While the bench had knocked over the agent, he hadn’t lost his grip on his gun. And he fired it again at the robber. The man flinched at the impact of the bullet. But like the agent, he must have worn a vest because the shot didn’t stop him. But he didn’t fight anymore. Instead he turned and ran.

  “Stop!” the agent yelled.

  But the man in the zombie mask didn’t listen, or at least he didn’t heed the command in Agent Campbell’s voice as everyone else had. He pushed open the back door with such force that metal clanged as it struck the outside wall. Then the man ran through that open door.

  Campbell jumped up, but instead of heading off in pursuit of the robber, he turned back to her and asked, “Are you all right?”

  The gunfire echoed in her ears yet, so his deep voice sounded far away. She couldn’t focus on it; she couldn’t focus on him, either.

  But his handsome face came closer as he dropped to his knees in front of her. His green eyes full of concern and intensity, he asked, “Maggie, are you all right?”

  No. She couldn’t speak, and she was usually never at a loss for words. Her heart kept racing even though the robber and his gun were no longer threatening her. In fact, the more she stared into the agent’s eyes, the faster her heart beat. The green was so vibrant—like the first leaves on a tree in spring. Just as she had been unable to look anywhere but the barrel of the gun in her face, she couldn’t look away from the agent’s beautiful eyes.

  “Maggie...” Fingers skimmed along her cheek. “Are you all right?”

  She opened her mouth, but no words slipped out. Her pulse quickened, and her breath grew shallower—so shallow that she couldn’t get any air. And then she couldn’t see Agent Campbell any longer as her vision blurred and then blackened.

  * * *

  BLAINE SHOULD HAVE been in hot pursuit of the robber. He should have been firing shots and taking him down in the parking lot. Instead he was standing over a pregnant woman, waiting for her to regain consciousness. And as he waited, he drew in some deep breaths—hoping to ease the tightness in his chest.

  The intern, who had come running, along with the security guards, when Blaine had yelled for medical help, assured him that she was fine. She and her baby were fine. She must have just hyperventilated. And with someone shooting at her, it was understandable—or so the intern had thought.

  Blaine wasn’t sure what to think. Had she really passed out? Or had she only staged a diversion so the robber could get away from him and those guards that nurse Nyla had called to the locker room?

  But then, if Maggie was an accomplice, why had she fought the man so hard? Why had she looked so terrified?

  His older sisters had pulled off drama well in their teens. They’d worked their parents to get what they wanted, so he’d seen some pretty good actresses work their manipulations up close and personal. But if Maggie Jenkins had been acting in the locker room, she surpassed his sisters.

  “Who are you really, Maggie Jenkins?” he wondered aloud. Innocent victim or criminal mastermind?

  Her thick, dark lashes fluttered against her cheeks, as if she’d heard him and his words had roused her to consciousness. She blinked and stared up at him, looking as dazed and shocked as she had when she’d fallen against the lockers.

  When he’d inadvertently knocked her against them. A pang of guilt had him flinching, and he fisted his hands to keep them from reaching for her belly to check on the baby. It had been real to him even before he’d seen the picture, but now it was even more real.

  “The doctor said you and your baby are not hurt,” he assured her. And himself.

  “Are you okay?” she asked, and her brown eyes softened with concern.

  He shrugged off her worry. “I’m fine.”

  He would probably have a bruise where the bench had clipped his shoulder, but his physical well-being was the least of his concerns right now.

  She stared up at him, her smooth brow furrowing slightly, as if she doubted his words. “Really?”

  No. He was upset about Sarge. And he was frustrated as hell that he’d lost one of the leads to Sarge’s killer—or maybe the actual killer himself—when the robber had run out the employee exit to the parking lot. But Blaine had another lead—one he didn’t intend to let out of his sight.

  “I’m worried about you,” he admitted. For so many reasons...

  She tensed and protectively splayed her hands over her belly. “You said the baby isn’t hurt.”

  “The baby is fine,” he assured her. “And so are you.”

  She stared up at him again, this time full of doubt.

  So he added, “For now.”

  Despite the blanket covering her, she shivered at his foreboding tone.


  “You’re obviously in danger,” he said, “since one of the robbers risked coming here to abduct you from the ER.” Or had she called him? Had she wanted to be picked up before Blaine could question her further?

  He needed to take her down to the Bureau, or at least the closest police department for an interrogation. But if he started treating her like a suspect, she might react like one and clam up or lawyer up. Maybe it was better if he let her continue to play the victim...

  But her eyes—those big, dark eyes—didn’t fill with tears this time. Instead her gaze hardened and she clenched her delicate jaw. Angrily she asked, “Why won’t they leave me alone?”

  “I’m not sure why you were tracked down at the hospital today,” he replied.

  Could it have been another coincidence? Could the robber have been here to get treatment for the gunshot wound Blaine had inflicted and then stumbled upon her?

  But the robber hadn’t seemed injured—especially since he’d had the strength to hurl the bench with such force at Blaine. And he’d been fighting with Maggie before that. Maybe he wasn’t the injured robber, but had been bringing that one for treatment...

  But where was that person?

  He’d already lost so much blood in the van.

  “Why did one of them come here?” she asked—the same question Blaine had been asking himself. “What do they want with me?”

  That was another question Blaine had been asking himself. “Maybe you saw or heard something back at the bank,” he suggested, “something that might give away the identity of one of them?”

  She shook her head. “I couldn’t see any of their faces. They wore those horrible masks...” And she shuddered.

  “What about their voices?”

  “Only one of them spoke at the bank,” she said, “and I didn’t recognize his voice.”