Accidental Heroes

by Danielle Steel

  Lucy had been dating the same guy for the past four years. He was a flying instructor and glider pilot and didn’t give a damn about the kind of work she did. He was just happy to see her whenever she was free. They never talked about her work, and he had gotten her into skydiving, which Paul told her was insane. He said he’d rather be shot than jump out of an airplane with a parachute, but Lucy loved it. She said it relieved all her tension after work, which he said confirmed what he’d known about her all along, she was insane, which she admitted freely.

  “I didn’t say she’s cheating. I said that if her ex has anger issues, he probably considers a new relationship infidelity to him.”

  Paul knew Lucy was probably right. She was smart about people and relationships. The direction they’d been given was about the subject’s rages, if he was ever abusive with her, or ever hurt her physically, and if she considered him dangerous to other people. He didn’t sound like a good guy to Paul, nor to Lucy, although they’d both heard worse about other people they investigated, and they knew time was of the essence.

  They asked for Bianca Martinez when they got to the nursing desk of the orthopedic surgical floor and were told by the attendant on duty that she was in surgery and wouldn’t be out for some time. Paul had done the talking and they hadn’t shown their badges, but the answer they’d been given was not the one they wanted, or that Ben needed in New York. And the code assigned to their mission told them that “some time” was not going to do it for them.

  “I’m sorry,” he said quietly, with a voice of authority that didn’t require a gun or a uniform. Most people reacted instantly when he put that voice on, and Lucy always laughed about it and made fun of him. She called it his Voice of God act, and it usually made people jump when he told them to. The woman at the desk was not impressed, and Paul discreetly took out his badge and showed it to her. “We need to see her on an urgent matter of national security,” he said in his God voice, and the attendant looked up at him, evaluating him.

  “Is she in trouble? Are you arresting her?” He could tell that the attendant was indulging her own curiosity for the sake of gossip later, but he decided to satisfy her, if it got them what he wanted. He was a good judge of people, and so was Lucy. They were an efficient team, and he wondered if they should have come in uniform, even if they didn’t have to, but Lucy had thought it would be a bad idea. They had changed into street clothes intentionally, so as not to scare off the young woman they had come to see.

  “No, she’s not in trouble,” Paul said quietly. “We need her help with an investigation. How long will she be in surgery?”

  The woman consulted a list and looked at her watch before she looked back at him. “Another seven or eight hours. They just started, if they went in on schedule. It’s a spinal surgery. She should be out by five or six.” It was nine o’clock in the morning, and they had only gotten the assignment at eight-fifteen and had come as quickly as they could. The flight was due to land at eleven.

  “We can’t wait,” Paul said bluntly, with his God voice getting stronger, and the look on his face told her that he meant it. “They need to get her out of surgery so we can talk to her.” The importance of the matter came through his pores as he looked at her. The woman hesitated for a moment, and then nodded and got off the stool where she was sitting.

  “I’ll see what I can do. I don’t know if they’ll let her out to talk to you.”

  “I’d hate to have to go into the operating room to get her,” he said, as Lucy smiled sweetly at the woman and looked innocent. No one would have guessed that she was a master marksman and deadly with almost any kind of weapon in her hands. Her father had been a cop, and she had wanted to be in law enforcement all her life, and was good at it. She had four brothers who were SFPD cops, and she had trumped them all by signing on with Homeland Security. She had been debating between that and the FBI as soon as she got out of college, and had worked undercover drug cases for several years before she and Paul teamed up. His specialty was more national security and international terrorism, which Lucy always told him was tame by comparison. They were both pros, and her brothers had always called her the Gladiator, because she would fight them to the death once they picked on her, and she never gave up, no matter how much pain they inflicted on her.

  The woman from the nursing desk came back ten minutes later. “She’ll be out as soon as they can replace her.”

  “How long will that be?” Lucy asked her, impatient with the woman’s vague explanations. “If it’s more than five minutes, we’re going in to get her,” Lucy said with steel in her eyes. The woman disappeared again without saying a word and came back five minutes later with her supervisor. Both agents reached for their badges and showed them to her, with stern faces that usually frightened people, especially once they saw the words “Homeland Security.” The supervisor looked appropriately nervous when she saw them.

  “I’m sorry, we can’t just pull a surgical nurse out of a spinal surgery in two minutes. We have to get another nurse to take her place.”

  “I’m sure you do,” Lucy said, without missing a beat, as Paul let her take the lead on it. “But we need to see her. Now. We’re trying to be respectful, but we don’t have time to waste here. There are lives at stake other than just your patient. We’ll go into the operating room if we have to, to get her out.” The supervisor was about to explain the situation to them again when a spectacularly beautiful young Hispanic woman appeared behind her, looking worried. She was wearing surgical scrubs and had taken her cap off. She had thick dark hair that fell past her shoulders, and she looked at Paul and Lucy with a puzzled expression.

  “You want to talk to me? I’m Bianca Martinez.” She spoke English without an accent, and was obviously American despite her exotic looks.

  “Yes, we do,” Lucy said, smiling at her, as they flipped open their badges again, relieved that she had come out to see them without further battle with the two women. “Is there somewhere private we can go to talk?”

  Bianca nodded and led them to a small room set up as a rest area for surgical personnel. “I’m sorry, it took them a few minutes to replace me. I couldn’t leave till they did.” She sighed and glanced at them, and started talking before they could ask her any questions. She was sure she already knew what this was about. ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, had come to see her before. “I know you’ve had problems with my uncle in Texas, but I honestly don’t know anything about it. My father had a fight with him years ago, and I haven’t seen my uncle since I was about four years old. Whatever he’s doing on the border has nothing to do with me. I wouldn’t even recognize him if I saw him. My parents are respectable people. We’ve never had anything to do with illegal immigrants.” Lucy and Paul could see that she had said it all previously and was tired of the story, and the headaches it must have caused them.

  “Wow,” Lucy said, “that sounds unpleasant. It must be embarrassing for your parents. But that’s not what we’re here for.” Lucy smiled at her, with her girl-to-girl look. “We’re here to talk to you about your boyfriend, Jason Andrews.” And this time Bianca looked shocked and genuinely surprised.

  “Jason?” And then she corrected them quickly. “He’s not my boyfriend. We dated for about a year. I’ve been seeing someone else for a year and a half now, a surgical resident here at the hospital. Jason and I were always on and off.” Lucy shot an innocent look at Paul, and he nodded. She’d been right again. They were no longer dating, and she was seeing someone else.

  “What can you tell us about Jason?” Lucy asked her almost casually, so she’d open up. “Is he a nice guy? How did it end between you?”

  “Badly,” she said immediately, and didn’t seem reluctant to talk about him. Lucy got the feeling that she almost wanted to, to vindicate herself for leaving him. “We had a love-hate relationship right from the beginning. That’s how he does everything. He loves you or he
hates you. He had a lot of issues about my family being Mexican. He hates all kinds of social groups, blacks, gays, Hispanics, Asians, Republicans. When I finished nursing school at USF, it took me a while to get the job here, so I did some modeling, which I did in college too, for extra money. We met at a party, and he liked the fact that I was a model, and he loved showing off with me. I did a few jobs in New York and L.A. too, and he thought I should stick with it. He thought being a nurse was stupid. I was just modeling until I could get work in my field. I was on a waiting list for this job for two years. He thought I was an idiot to give up modeling. I think he felt it made him look good that I was a model, but I never cared about it. Half the time he was showing me off and bragging about me, the other half he was making nasty comments about my origins and accusing me of cheating on him, which I never did. He refused to meet my parents for the whole year he went out with me, and my family is very important to me,” she said and then smiled, with a look of embarrassment, “except my uncle. I’m not proud of him. We think he takes money to smuggle people across the border, but we don’t know for sure. I have two sisters I’m very close to, and my parents. My older sister is a lawyer, and my younger sister just finished medical school. She’s an intern here. Jason never wanted to meet them either. He’d get really nasty about it whenever I said anything about my family to him. He has a terrible temper.”

  Lucy nodded sympathetically. She’d let her ramble on to get a better sense of her and how reliable her information might be. She sounded credible to both of them. “Tell us about that—his temper, I mean.” Lucy looked at the beautiful ex-model with sincere interest.

  “He used to fly into rages or get in really bad moods. He was always up and down, either he was crazy about me, or he acted like he hated me. We tried living together for a while, and I just couldn’t do it. He’d get mad at me and not talk to me for weeks at a time. He was always accusing me of something. I wanted him to get counseling for it and I offered to do couples counseling with him, and he wouldn’t.

  “He was having trouble with the airline at the time. He got into arguments with his superiors, and once with a pilot. They sent him to anger management classes, and it didn’t change anything. He just thought it was a joke and told them what they wanted to hear and made fun of them and how ignorant they were when he got home. I don’t think he respects anybody. The airline put him on probation a couple of times, which he didn’t care about either, but they stopped promoting him, and he got really upset about that.

  “He’s very charming. He always gets what he wants, and he knows how to work people. But they kept him stuck in the copilot seat and he was furious. He’s really smart. His IQ tests show he’s practically a genius, but his temper and mood swings blow it for him. He’s lucky the airline didn’t fire him, and gave him a chance to clean up his act. Maybe because he’s smart, and because he’s young. But he hadn’t been promoted in a while when he started dating me, and he got angrier and angrier as time went on. He kept saying they’d be sorry for it one day.

  “He used to threaten me a lot too, but it was mostly talk. I don’t think he’s an evil person, he’s just very unhappy and very screwed up. He makes everyone around him miserable. If he ever got his temper under control, he’d get what he wants. Maybe they’ve made him a captain by now. I haven’t talked to him since I left him, and I don’t want to. It’s been more than a year since he called me. He wanted to see me and he called me a lot of ugly names when I wouldn’t.” She looked momentarily panicked then and looked from Paul to Lucy. “Will he find out I talked to you about him?”

  Lucy was quick to shake her head and reassure her. “Never. You’re doing this to help us, not to hurt him. And we really appreciate it. He will never know anything about it. Did he ever hurt you physically?” That was a key question, and Lucy waited for the answer, listening intently.

  Bianca hesitated before she answered. “Just once. He threatened to a lot, though, especially when he accused me of cheating on him.”

  “What about the ‘once’?”

  “He slapped me hard and gave me a black eye. It was about Raf, the man I’m dating now. He saw him and thought I was sleeping with him, but I wasn’t then. I never cheated on Jason. He just thought I did.”

  Lucy believed her. She looked like an honest woman, and Jason sounded like a nightmare, the consummate terrible boyfriend that everyone hopes she never falls prey to, or thinks she can change “if only things were different.” Bianca had been smart to get out of it.

  “I left him after the black eye. I don’t think his anger was really about me. It was more about the airline. They were always doing something to upset him, or calling him on his behavior. They were on to him every time. They gave him a lot of chances, but they would never promote him, as long as he behaved like that, and they told him they’d fire him eventually if he didn’t get his temper under control. It’s what keeps him from everything he wants, but he doesn’t see it that way. He thinks it’s everyone else’s fault, and he thought they really screwed him over. He doesn’t get that his reactions are unacceptable.”

  “Do you think he’d ever hurt anyone else? Do you think he’s capable of harming people, or even killing someone?” Lucy knew that the girl’s answer would be of little real value to their investigation, because she wasn’t a psychiatrist or a professional trained to evaluate him, but as a nurse she might have some insight. Even as his ex-girlfriend, her response would be interesting. Bianca slowly shook her head as she thought about it.

  “No, I don’t. Killing someone, definitely not. He’s not that kind of person. He’s just a guy with an uncontrollable temper and a lot of prejudices. He’s mad at the world, and a lousy boyfriend, but he’s not a murderer. I don’t think he’s crazy, just an asshole.” She smiled as she said it, and Lucy smiled back at her.

  Bianca had given them plenty to work with, but Lucy didn’t share her opinion that Jason was “just an asshole.” He sounded like a deeply troubled guy to her, with a big beef against the airline and profound resentment for their not promoting him, although he had done it to himself, as Bianca suggested.

  “He made a lot of nasty racial slurs about me after I broke up with him. He was really pissed, and he made a big issue about my being Mexican, called me a slut and a lot of bad names. He texted me for a long time. I stopped answering him. I never went to get my things out of his apartment. I was afraid he’d beat me up if I did. I still have my key in my locker. I meant to throw it away, but I found it the other day. He’s probably gotten rid of my stuff by now.

  “Threatening people and beating people up are all he knows. He had kind of a rough childhood. He says he used to get in bar fights all the time when he was growing up, just like his father. He told me his father beat him whenever he got drunk, which was all the time. He died in an accident when Jason was in high school, but he hated him anyway. And his mother had taken off when he was a kid, because his father beat her up too. He never saw her again. I think he has issues with women because of it. He’s complicated. Therapy would have helped him. And that’s why he never understood what my family means to me, because he really didn’t have one.”

  He seemed to be a portrait of half the criminals in the world, as Lucy and Paul listened to her. Abusive, broken family. Bad, drunk father. Mother who abandoned him as a child. Deep-seated anger and rages he was unable to control. Issues with women whom he then abused and blamed them for it. No respect for family values. Inability to accept authority. Profound resentment for anyone he perceived to have wronged him, a desire to get even with them, and projection of that anger onto anyone available. The picture Bianca had painted for them was terrifying, far more than she realized.

  “You were smart to get out of it, and lucky that he let you without hurting you.”

  Bianca smiled at what Lucy said, unaware of the danger she could have been in, both with him and afterward.

  “Raf is
a big guy. He wouldn’t let anything happen to me. He’s Venezuelan, and from a close family like mine. My parents and sisters love him.” She smiled warmly as she said it. “We might get married next year. And I’m sure Jason has forgotten about me by now. He must have another girlfriend.”

  She wasn’t fishing, just being generous about him. Lucy could see it in her eyes. Then she thought of something that could be vital to them, especially since New York had said it was urgent, and they needed all the information the San Francisco office could get on him.

  “I have a favor to ask you.” Lucy looked ingenuous as she said it, and she was hard to resist when she looked honest and sincere like that. Looking at her, it was hard to believe she could take down a sniper or a hostage taker without hesitating, and almost never missed her shot. She looked like any other nice girl her age. Paul loved that about her, how tough she was and how dedicated, but still capable of relating to people at a real level. He knew plenty of good agents who couldn’t do that. “Bianca, would you lend me that key you found in your locker? I’ll give it back to you, and no one will know you did. It could make a big difference to us, and maybe to a lot of innocent people. Would you do that for me?” Lucy nearly held her breath as she waited for her answer.

  Bianca thought about it for a long moment, weighing risks and whether it was wrong for her to do, and then she nodded. What Lucy had said about protecting innocent people had made the difference to her. Lucy had chosen her words wisely, and they had resonated. “I’ll get it for you,” she said, left the room, and was back three minutes later. She handed the key to Lucy, who promised again to return it to her.