Undercover M.D.

by Marie Ferrarella

  “Up you go,” he said briskly, helping Harris off the stool and to his feet.

  Harris turned a shade of green. Moving swiftly, Terrance aimed him toward the men’s room, hoping they’d make it before the bartender wound up with something extra to clean up.

  With any luck, he figured the two women would be gone by the time he brought Harris out again.

  This getting information by inches was a torture, he thought. He carefully pushed Harris into the rest room ahead of him. But it was the very slowness of completing his mission that kept him here, that kept him around Alix.

  Folding his arms before him as he stood outside the stall, Terrance waited. There was an up side to everything, he told himself, listening to Harris retch, purging the last three hours worth of drinking.

  Even this.

  Chapter 12

  Slipping on her suit jacket, Alix hurried to her front door. She answered the doorbell on the second ring, throwing it open and uttering a cheery, “Hi, Norma,” only to stop short.

  It wasn’t the gray-haired, full-figured, sweet-faced housekeeper standing on her doorstep, but her father. His right hand was firmly wrapped around his granddaughter’s left. The latter gave the impression of a rocket about to be deployed.

  “Dad, what are you doing here?”

  Daniel DuCane allowed himself to be dragged into the living room by his energized granddaughter. “Playing hooky, just like you.”

  Alix shut the door. “Hi, pumpkin.” She bent down to kiss her daughter, then rose again, stretching to plant a kiss on her father’s cheek.

  “I’m not playing hooky, Dad, I’m going to work.” She looked down dubiously at her daughter, who had rushed off to the far side of the living room to root through her toy box. “Or, at least, I was.”

  Daniel strode into the room and made himself comfortable on the sofa. He beamed at Julie. “Don’t worry, go ahead.” Glancing toward Alix, he knew what his daughter was thinking. It never ceased to amaze him how the younger generation thought they had a monopoly on competence. “Norma’ll be here shortly.”

  Alix shifted uncomfortably, aware how delicate some feelings could be.

  “Dad, I didn’t mean to imply—”

  He laughed. “Sure you did. You think I can’t handle a short person.” He gave his daughter a scrutinizing look. “Handled you well enough, didn’t I, kiddo?”

  She couldn’t have had a better father if she’d filled out a requisition form and delivered it to God herself. “You handled me just fine, Dad,” Alix told him, laying a hand fondly on his shoulder. “I just thought that Julie might be too much for you.”

  “Not yet.” He took out a small, rectangular box from his jacket. It was time to teach his granddaughter dominos. Setting the box on the table, he opened it and dumped out the pieces on the coffee table. Julie watched his every move, fascinated. “I’ll let you know when that happens.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” she said knowingly. “Your pride won’t let you.”

  “Pride’s a funny thing.” He began laying the dominos facedown one by one. “It can boost you up, help you accomplish things you didn’t think you could—” Daniel raised his eyes and looked pointedly at his daughter. She’d been very closemouthed about Terrance the couple of times he’d tried to steer the conversation that way. Normally, they shared everything. “It can also get in your way and keep you from things that it shouldn’t.”

  She leaned over his shoulder and flipped over a domino he’d missed. “Not subtle, Dad, not subtle at all.”

  For a moment he forgot about the game he wanted to teach Julie. Turning, he gave Alix his full attention. “Hey, I’m an old country doctor, not one of those new, cutting-edge psychiatrists.”

  “Country doctor, my foot,” Alix hooted. “The L.A. basin hasn’t been thought of as ‘country’ for over fifty years.”

  He gave a careless shrug. “Poetic license. I still feel like a country doctor. Don’t forget, when I started practicing, we were still called family doctors, not ‘primary care physicians.’” He made no secret that he despised the term. It sounded so distant, so devoid of feeling and everything that he felt a doctor was supposed to stand for. “If that don’t make you shiver from the cold, nothing will.” He looked at his granddaughter, who had flipped over a domino and was probing the white indentations with tentative fingers. “Right, Julie?”

  The little girl looked up at the man adoringly and nodded her head, her baby-fine blond curls bobbing fiercely.

  The scene nudged something in Alix’s memory. She could remember looking up at her father just that way. To her, he’d seemed ten feet tall and bulletproof back in those days. Now she found herself worrying about him, about his health, about what he ate and if he was getting enough exercise. She missed the old days, she thought wistfully.

  “Anyway, I won’t be distracted,” Daniel informed her. He pinned her with a look. “Talked to Terrance lately?”

  She began looking around for her purse. She was sure she left it here somewhere. “I’m his ‘guide,’ I talk to him all the time.”

  With all the pieces facedown, he began to move them around, mixing them up. “Don’t play coy with me, Al, you know what I’m asking.”

  “Yes, I know what you’re asking.” She debated ending it there. But because he meant well, she admitted, “A little.”

  “Good.” He nodded. “Dialogue is good. But?” Alix raised a brow quizzically. “There’s a ‘but’ on your face.”

  Finding her purse, she slipped the straps on her shoulder. “Sounds anatomically improbable, or at the very least, horribly uncomfortable.”

  “Make jokes. I’ll be here when you need to talk.”

  She kissed his cheek again, grateful that he understood. “I know that, Dad, and I appreciate it. But some things I just have to sort out myself.”

  Daniel sighed, then nodded. “Toughest part of being a parent.”

  “What is?” She paused, curious.

  “Staying on the outside when you want to go rushing in, making everything better,” her father said.

  Alix knew there’d been a time when she’d come to him with everything and he had been able to make it right. But that had been before puberty had hit.

  “Wait, your turn’ll come,” he added, then looked at the little girl who was eyeing the domino pieces with unabashed curiosity. “Right Julie?”

  “Right,” she echoed.

  “Go.” Daniel waved his daughter toward the door. “Uphold the DuCane name.” He glanced at the clock on the mantel. “Can’t have you coming in late.”

  “I’ll see you later, Dad.” Alix pulled open the front door. “Norma is coming, right?”

  “Yes, Norma’s coming.” Hearing a car approaching, he leaned back in his seat and was able to partially see out the front door. “See, there she is, pulling up in the driveway now.” His eyes met Alix’s. “I’m not an old man, Alix.”

  “Sure you are,” she only half teased. “You’re my old man—” she flashed him a smile “—and I want to keep you around forever and ever.”

  “Being with Julie keeps me young.” Making a decision, he rose. The dominos would keep until later. He put his hand out to his granddaughter. “Let’s go play on the slide, honey.”

  “Dad!”

  He raised his hand in a solemn promise. “I’ll be the one with my feet on the ground.” And then he winked at her just before he left with Julie.

  Alix shook her head as she hurried out. Just her luck, she had to have Peter Pan as a father. She nodded a greeting to Norma as she past the woman.

  She was going to be late if even one light in her path was red.

  Something wasn’t quite right, wasn’t quite in sync. Alix couldn’t shake the feeling, hadn’t been able to, almost since the first. Terrance was hiding something.

  Was there someone back in Boston, someone he hadn’t told her about? Someone who loved him the way she had? It would go a long way to explaining the couple of times he’d abruptly ended pho
ne conversations when she came on the scene.

  She’d been semipreoccupied all morning, allowing extraneous thoughts to infiltrate her mind when she should have been thinking about her patients.

  There wasn’t going to be any peace until she sorted things out for herself, she knew that. But how? She couldn’t ask Terrance about it, not yet at any rate, because if she was wrong, he’d think she was paranoid.

  She wasn’t wrong. She knew him too well. Something was up.

  The best way, she decided as she made her final notations on the Gomez baby’s chart, was to start at the beginning. In this case, that meant Boston General.

  She dropped off the file on her nurse’s desk and entered the next room, issuing a greeting to the parents and child there.

  She’d become friendly with a doctor at a convention she’d attended two years ago. The woman was a young widow, too. They’d shared a few meals, stories and swapped sympathies. Stephanie Geller was based at Boston General.

  Maybe if she asked Stephanie a few questions…

  It was a comforting thought. “Okay, let’s see what you weigh, shall we?” Alix said cheerfully to the little boy who was exactly six months older than her daughter.

  Alix waited until her lunch break and then looked up Stephanie Geller’s number. It took a little maneuvering to get past the woman’s receptionist.

  “Hi, Stephanie, this is Alix DuCane.”

  “Alix, what a nice surprise. Are you in the city?”

  Alix rocked back in her chair, looking out the window. It was a clear day, and from where she sat, she could see Catalina.

  “No, still on the West Coast.” She felt a little guilty, calling out of the blue like this solely to ask for a favor. It had been a while.

  “Must be nice. The weather’s awful here. It’s been snowing off and on for three days now. So tell me, what can I do for you? Is this an official call?”

  She knew the other woman was asking if she was calling for a consultation. “This isn’t exactly about a patient. It’s about a doctor.”

  “Oh?” There was a significant pause on the other end as Stephanie considered the options. “Someone stirring your heart?”

  Was she that transparent?

  “What makes you ask that?”

  “There’s a funny note in your voice.” When they’d last talked, there had been no one in Alix’s life. Stephanie had felt bad because she had just started seeing someone and was convinced she was in love. She wanted that kind of good feeling for Alix, too. “So, tell me all about him.”

  “That’s just it.” Alix hesitated, then forged on. “I was hoping you could do that for me.”

  “Come again?”

  Maybe this was a bad idea, Alix thought. Maybe she wouldn’t like what she heard. Too late now, you put your foot into it.

  She had no choice but to continue. “He just transferred from Boston General’s pediatric department a month ago. I thought that maybe you knew him.”

  “I’m in ob-gyn,” Stephanie reminded her. “But we do intersect. What’s his name?”

  Alix took a deep breath. It was like diving into an icy lake. “Terrance McCall.”

  “Sorry, name doesn’t ring a bell.”

  Alix felt a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach. “You sure?”

  “Describe him.”

  “Six-one, dirty-blond hair. Muscular. Deep-blue eyes. Thirty-six.”

  “Wow, sounds yummy, but nope, nobody I know.” There was a touch of regret in Stephanie’s voice. “But, hey, this is a big hospital. There are a lot of doctors on staff I don’t know by name. My time has gotten rather limited since I’ve started seeing Adam.” She stopped before she went off on a tangent. “Do you think this Terrance is lying to you?”

  “No—” That wasn’t strictly true, Alix thought. “I don’t know.”

  “Tell you what, first chance I get, I’ll see if I can find someone in administration to do a search for me on the database. That make you feel better?”

  “Actually, no,” Alix confessed. Her stomach rumbled, reminding her that she’d slept through the time she’d allotted herself for breakfast. “I feel like I’m snooping.”

  “You are, but hey, this day and age, it pays to be careful.”

  She knew that, Alix thought several minutes later as she hung up the receiver. Trouble was, she didn’t really want to be. Not when it came to Terrance.

  But she had to be. Especially when it came to Terrance, she told herself. He was the one who’d hurt her before.

  He couldn’t hurt her if she didn’t let him, she insisted silently. If she hardened her heart and just concentrated on having nothing more than a good time.

  Too late, a voice whispered in her head. Stubbornly she shut it out.

  It was coming together. Bit by bit the operation was being pieced together like a giant patchwork quilt. Information trickled in from a variety of sources, wiretaps, snitches and just plain hard detective work. The parts only making sense when fit into the whole.

  Because of one late-night cell phone call, they had discovered that the security guard unlocked the basement doors for the laundry trucks twice a week. Tuesdays to collect the dirty hospital laundry, Fridays to leave clean laundry in their place. Riley had gone on to find out that because of cost cuts, a new laundry service was handling Blair’s laundry. They had only been doing business with the hospital for the past year.

  The company was owned by a holding company which in turn was connected to one of the owners of the casino that Harris frequented. A casino where he had dropped large sums of money on a fairly regular basis. An earlier investigation had turned up that Harris was heavily in debt to the casino. He had exhausted the trust fund left to him by his mother and had tapped out every source of money and then some. He was a man with his back against the wall. And then the casino boss had given him a way out. All they needed was a place to deposit the drugs when they arrived in the country until the heat was off.

  The drugs were hidden in the laundry baskets.

  Now all that was left was to wait for a shipment and catch everyone involved red-handed.

  Waiting was the hardest part of what he did. He didn’t have Monroe’s knack for it. Waiting frayed nerves that were already thin.

  Even if waiting had been a piece of cake for him, having Alix as the wild card in all this unsettled everything. Terrance was having a hard time keeping his mind on the operation, especially when all he could think about was sleeping with her again.

  He knew, when Alix had all but picked a fight the day after they had made love, that he should leave it alone. That it was best all around to let the situation just slide until it was firmly nestled in the past, the way the rest of their history was.

  Terrance had a hundred arguments for why he shouldn’t be doing this, shouldn’t be driving to her place after his shift at the hospital was over.

  He was asking for trouble, pure and simple. Alix could be out with another man. She could have decided to shoot first and ask questions later when he turned up on her doorstep. He could be compromising, if not the operation, at least his own part in it. He was blunting his edge.

  The list went on and on.

  None of it mattered. Not when his every waking thought centered on the fact that he just wanted to see her again. See her the way he couldn’t see her in the hospital.

  Arriving in her driveway, he jumped out of the car and purposefully strode toward the door. He rang the bell and waited, then rang it again, wondering if this was a huge, huge mistake on his part.

  Maybe she wasn’t home.

  The lights were on, but that didn’t mean anything. They could have been left on, or turned on automatically to make it look as if there was someone home. He was the first to know about facades.

  After the third ring he gave up, telling himself it was a sign intended for him to get his mind back on his work and not on the woman who could have been his wife, had things gone differently.

  About to turn away, he he
ard the door opening behind him.

  The last time he’d been outside her door, she’d had on a robe. This time she was wearing a large white bath towel tucked around her body. There were droplets of water still clinging to her shoulders and a look of less than patience on her face.

  “Yes?”

  “You shouldn’t answer the door like that.” She was shivering. He invited himself in just to get her out of the open. Inside, he turned around to look at her, unable to help himself. “That’s taxing a man’s self-restraint.”

  She shut the door and glared at him. “I was taking a bath.” Trying to get you off my mind. “Besides, I looked through the peephole.” Damn it, she should have grabbed her robe instead of just a towel, but she’d forgotten to take a robe in with her. She sighed, frustrated, unsettled. “Why are you here?”

  He sank his hands into his pockets to keep them away from the edge of her towel. “I didn’t like the way we left things the other day.”

  She put space between them. “I think the operating word here is left. Maybe we should.” Maybe it was the only way she’d find any peace. If she separated herself from him. “Maybe we should just leave things as they are.”

  “In chaos?” He didn’t want to leave things the way they were. He’d tried that, tried keeping his distance and it wasn’t working.

  She drew herself up, deliberately making her voice distant, her eyes cold. “It’s been done before.”

  “All right.” He put his hand on the doorknob. He wasn’t going to beg. But then something within him rebelled. Dropping his hand to his side, he swung around. “No, damn it. I don’t want to leave things the way they are.”

  She stared at him. So what was he saying? That he wanted to begin again?

  Continue the way things had been going?

  Have a private place where he could come by and have a quickie?

  No, that wasn’t strictly true, she amended. The anger she was vainly attempting to gather to her was falling by the wayside. There’d been nothing quick about the evening they’d shared last week. Or any of the other evenings that lived on in the past they’d once shared.