“I know where she should be—right here. But she’s not.”
“She was paged about the briefing. She didn’t respond,” Dan said. “She and I were supposed to talk tonight, and she hasn’t called. She isn’t answering her phone at home, either.”
“You think she’s in trouble?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, hell,” Josh said. “I don’t need to sleep tonight. Do you?”
“No,” Dan said. There was no way he would be able to sleep tonight.
“Where do you want to start looking? Her apartment?”
“Fine. It’s going to take me an hour and a half or so to get there.”
“I’ll ask some questions around the office,” Josh offered. “Maybe somebody saw her today.”
Dan hung up the phone, reached for his clothes and dressed hurriedly, his mind going back to those first, few hazy recollections of awakening in the hospital after his shooting. He’d known that everything had changed. He’d felt the unfamiliar stirrings of panic, then he’d felt amazed that anyone’s world could shift so irrevocably in the blink of an eye. He’d kept thinking that all he needed to do was to go back in time, just the space of a day, and somehow stop it from happening. But he couldn’t. It was too late, and he knew it the instant he woke up.
He felt the same way now. He wanted to go back to the previous night. To imagine her lying naked in the tub. To hear her say she’d be there at her apartment waiting for him. And that all he had to do was come to her. He’d heard her say she was afraid something was going to happen, that she needed him with her. He’d heard himself stubbornly, stupidly saying he needed another two weeks at the rehab hospital.
What a fool he’d been to ever take such a risk with her safety.
Dan bribed one of the security guards who was going off duty to drive him to Georgetown.
At the door to her apartment, he found his heart thundering, found himself almost dizzy at the thought of what he might find inside. Praying he was wrong, he lifted his hand and knocked, just in case she’d arrived in the ten minutes that had elapsed since he last tried to call her on his cell phone. The last thing he expected was to have the door swing open and find Josh standing there.
“I have a key,” he explained.
Dan scowled, but said nothing. Josh had a key.
“She got annoyed after the first time I broke in here,” Josh explained. “So she gave me one.”
“You make a habit of breaking into her apartment?” Dan said as he wheeled himself inside.
“Not anymore,” Josh said.
Dan didn’t ask. It wasn’t the time. He just wanted to know where Jamie was. “Did you find anything?”
“I just got here. No signs of a struggle. Her car’s gone. Her purse and her keys, too. So’s her gun. There’s a message on her answering machine from her parents, saying they arrived safely in Rome, and about twenty-four hangups. Those would be you?”
Twenty-four, huh? He was in bad shape.
Dan glanced over at Josh, who was obviously enjoying some aspect of this evening, and scowled.
Josh nodded to the hallway on the right. “Why don’t you check the bedroom? I’ll go through this room and the kitchen.”
Dan turned right, not wanting to know why Joshua Carter knew where her bedroom was. He found the room empty, the floral-patterned comforter in a tangle in the middle of the double bed. He went to the side of the bed, ran his hands over the ivory-colored sheets and for a minute pictured her here in this room, in this bed. It was a quietly pretty room, the furniture sturdy, heavy and obviously old, the wood a polished mahogany. He could have seen her here, last night, if he hadn’t been so damned stubborn. He could have woken up in this bed beside her this morning.
Forcing himself to take care of the business at hand, he looked through her closet and her dresser drawers. Everything was neat and clean, giving no indication she might have packed her things and taken off, or that she’d left hurriedly.
He had trouble maneuvering in the bathroom. The space was simply too narrow. So he carefully got to his feet and found handholds to brace himself as he looked through the room.
It smelled of her in here, something light and sweet and utterly enticing. In a small wicker basket in the back corner of the tub, he found small, lavender-colored packets of bath salts. Picking one up, he inhaled deeply, the scent slaying him. Like a man obsessed, he shoved the packet of bath salts into his shirt pocket, despite the fact that the scent would make him crazy.
He was sitting on the rim of the bathtub when he looked up and found Josh standing in the doorway, eyeing him and the empty wheelchair curiously.
“Find anything?” Dan asked, standing and bracing himself with a hand against the wall as he made his way back to the chair.
“No,” Josh said, watching. “Does she know you can do that?”
“No.”
Josh cocked an eyebrow. “I wouldn’t want to be you when you try to explain why you’ve kept this little secret from her.”
Dan glared at him. “I’d be happy for the chance to give her an explanation. If we could find her.”
Josh nodded. “She left a message on my answering machine at home. Told me she needed to talk to me tonight, that she’d call back later. The message came in at 2:38 this afternoon. She didn’t call back. Three people who were at the briefing tonight remembered seeing her at the office around midmorning, but no one knows where she was for the rest of the day.”
“What about relatives?”
“She has one brother stationed in Texas right now, and another one who works at the Pentagon, but he travels a good bit. I haven’t called him yet. But if we do call him and nothing’s wrong, we’ll never hear the end of it from her. I think her family tends to be a bit overprotective.”
“Friends? Neighbors?”
“I don’t know anyone else to call,” Josh said.
“Did she tell you about the six-millimeter slug?”
“No.”
Dan filled him in on that. “This morning she was planning to meet the cop who was working the burglary case. Why aren’t you working this with her?”
“Because I’m supposed to be doing something else, too,” Josh said cryptically.
Dan let it go. He didn’t care what Josh was doing. He just had to find Jamie. They decided to call the police. They weren’t as forthcoming at 4:00 a.m. over the phone as they might have been during the day to a request in person for information about a shooting at a liquor store and the name of the cop working the case. Dan and Josh got six different friends and acquaintances out of bed before they had the cop’s name and found him coming off duty at 7:00 a.m. in a precinct that contained the warehouse where Dan was shot.
Detective Russell had seen Jamie the previous morning, had walked her through the liquor store that had been robbed, supposedly by local teenage hoods with an unidentified weapon. From the description of the suspects, they could have been the same as from the warehouse shooting. Of course, so could a few thousand other teenage hoods in the district. Still, the fact that they were so close to the warehouse, coupled with the odd-sized slug found in the liquor store wall, made the whole thing too much of a coincidence to dismiss.
“She wouldn’t let this go,” Dan told Josh as the two of them stood on the sidewalk outside the liquor store.
“I know. But why the hell wouldn’t she call one of us?”
Dan closed his eyes and cursed himself and his own stupidity, his foolish pride that kept him away from her thirtysix hours ago when she’d asked for his help, six weeks ago when he’d cut her out of his life, years ago when he first chose to deny everything he felt for her.
He couldn’t lose her now.
“She told me Wednesday night that she was worried, that she thought this thing was going to blow wide-open,” Dan admitted.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Josh said. “The whole thing never has.”
“We took a wrong turn,” Dan said. “We assumed we’d been set up by p
rofessionals who came in, got Hathaway out and left the country. We’ve been looking everywhere but here. Because we were sure we weren’t dealing with exactly what they looked like—a couple of gang kids.”
Grim-faced, Josh nodded.
“Let’s start over and assume that they were from one of the local gangs, that they’re right here somewhere. That they waltzed into something they didn’t understand, and now a government agent is dead and they’re nervous. Jamie’s down here asking questions about the gun. What are they going to do?”
“Follow her,” Josh suggested. “Maybe grab her off the streets and ask her some questions of their own?”
Or worse? Dan thought. If she didn’t answer their questions? If they didn’t like the answers she gave them? If they got the information they needed and had no further use for her?
He couldn’t let himself think about that; not if he was going to think clearly enough to find her. He checked his watch, saw that it was almost noon now. No one had seen or heard from her in nearly twenty-four hours.
He thought of the amount of ground they needed to cover, of all the resources the agency had. “Are we going to do this ourselves?” he asked Josh. “Or do we have to bring some people in on this?”
“You want to keep it quiet?” Josh asked. “Why?”
Dan told him Jamie had argued with Tanner, had been threatened with a suspension if she didn’t drop it. He didn’t think he was overreacting to the situation; he truly believed she was in danger. But if they were wrong and they went to the agency for help and she had disobeyed a direct order by simply being here and asking questions, they could get her suspended.
“That’s the reason you don’t want to go to anybody at the agency?” Josh inquired carefully.
“What other reason could there be?”
Josh said nothing.
Dan, who’d been running on sheer nerves all night and all day, had simply been pushed too far. “If you know something that could help us find her, and you’re not telling me, I swear to God, I’ll—”
“Okay,” Josh cut him off. “I think we should wait before we go to the agency for help on this—because I’m not sure who we can trust.”
Dan let the full implications of that sink in, felt his anxiety level soaring to new heights and his anger growing to a reckless, dangerous level. “You think someone inside this agency was working with Hathaway?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t think we should take the chance by bringing anyone else in on this just yet.”
“She’s been gone for nearly a day now.” He felt sickened by the direction his own thoughts were taking, but forced himself to continue. “She could be dead by now. Or dying while we stand here arguing on the street. If you know something...”
“I’d tell you. For Jamie’s sake, I would. But right now, I’ve got nothing but suspicions.”
“Your own?”
“Tanner’s. He’s had me looking into the possibility that someone in Division One was involved.”
“Who?”
“If he has a name, he hasn’t given it to me. He’s just worried that Hathaway would need help getting out. He’d been under guard for months. Security was going to get tighter still when he was moved out of D.C. If he made arrangements to sell his formula, it’s not hard to imagine the buyers looking for a little inside help to get Hathaway away from us.”
“Does Jamie know any of this?”
“No.”
“I can’t believe this,” Dan said. “One of our own people... Do you believe it?”
“I don’t want to. But we can’t ignore the possibility.”
“Okay,” Dan said. “We’ll find her ourselves.”
By midnight, they had questioned enough reluctant witnesses in the area to know that Jamie had been there the previous afternoon. Slowly, they were piecing together the route she’d taken, moving west from the liquor store toward the warehouse.
Dan knew they had to be close to finding her. He could feel it. He could sense that she needed him, that he had to find her right away. He’d never worked this way before, this urgently, this intensely, never had this much at stake before.
By the time the sun was coming up, they’d narrowed their search to a series of abandoned buildings in a oneblock area. Two people admitted hearing shouts and screams coming from somewhere on that block earlier in the day. Someone else reported seeing people keeping watch outside a couple of different buildings. They had a frustratingly unremarkable description of a car seen in the area, a beige or dirty white Honda, several years old, with oversized tires and a muffler problem, but no one had seen it for twenty-four hours or so.
Dan and Josh grimly debated the wisdom of searching inside the buildings on their own versus the risks they’d take by going to the agency for help. They decided to press on, with the help of Detective Russell and some of his colleagues.
Ten minutes later, they started kicking in doors. They’d go building by building, if they had to. She was here, and they were going to find her. They were starting on the third building when a car suddenly accelerated out of an adjacent alley. It was a dirty white Honda.
“That’s it!” Dan shouted.
Russell got on his radio, calling for anyone in the area to assist them in stopping the car. The license plate was caked over with mud, the numbers indistinguishable, but they had it in sight. Seconds later, they could hear sirens headed their way.
Dan drew his weapon, ready to shoot out the tires if necessary. He wasn’t going to let this car disappear. He was taking aim when the car swerved to the right to avoid a car making a turn in the intersection. The Honda ended up on the sidewalk.
It never came to a complete stop, just skidded sideways and slowed down. Dan watched in amazement as one of the car’s doors opened, then in horror as someone was shoved out of the car. The body went flying through the air like a rag doll, landing hard on the pavement, remaining there, motionless and deathly still.
The car tore off, tires screeching. Other cars were still coming through the intersection, and the body was still lying on the side of the road.
He couldn’t tell if she’d been hit by one of the passing cars or not. But he saw a thick mass of dark hair that fell almost to her shoulders, saw skin that gleamed white in the near darkness, and he knew.
It was Jamie.
Chapter 12
It seemed to take him forever to get to her. All around him there was chaos, people shouting and screaming and cars with their horns blaring, zipping all around. Cops were arriving, too, in response to the radio plea.
Dan was oblivious to everything but her. He had to get to her. It couldn’t be too late.
He had a good bit of advanced training in first aid in trauma cases, so he knew what he had to do. Still, he had to fight not to scoop her up into his arms the minute he got close enough to touch her.
Sitting on the street by her side, he pushed the hair back from her face. Finding her mouth and her nose, he leaned close to reassure himself that she was indeed breathing. Rapidly and shallowly, but she was breathing.
His fingers trembling, he felt for a pulse in her neck. It took agonizingly long seconds before he was sure he’d found a pulse.
Josh was kneeling at her other side. “Is she alive?”
“Yeah. She’s breathing, and she has a heartbeat.”
“We radioed for an ambulance,” he said.
Dan nodded.
Reaching out to touch her cheek, Josh said, “I’m going to go after the car.”
Dan backed away for a second, trying to think like a medic instead of a man. She was lying crumpled against the unforgiving pavement, half on her side, half on her stomach. Her clothes were dark, the sky just beginning to be light; it wasn’t easy to see. He looked her over quickly, checking for bleeding, finding it, but in no great quantities.
He was running his hands over her arms, checking for broken bones, when he found the rope. It was tied tightly around her wrists.
Stunned, so angry he was
shaking, he pulled a knife out of his pocket and cut the bindings, then gently separated her hands. They felt like ice, and he used his own hands to warm them, to try to get the circulation going again. He knew what it was like to be tied up; her entire arms would ache, and so would her shoulders, maybe her back, depending on how long she’d been this way and how tightly her wrists were bound together.
Her ankles were bound together as well, and after checking again for broken bones in her legs, he freed her ankles and worked over her feet. Then he checked her ribs and her back. No broken bones. She didn’t move an inch as he ran his hands over her body, didn’t make a sound. Her head was tilted at an angle that worried him.
He wanted to check the rest of her for bleeding, wanted to see how badly she’d hurt her head when she was thrown out of the car. The way she had fallen was oddly reminiscent of the way the girl was that night at the warehouse. He wanted to hold Jamie close and warm her with his body, reassure her with his touch.
But he was afraid to move her.
“Oh, God,” he groaned. What had those people done to her?
He leaned over her again, looking at what he could see of her face. The entire side visible to him was swollen and bruised. Someone had hit her. More than once. He nearly lost it when he saw a thin stream of blood coming from her nose and her mouth. It could be a sign of internal bleeding.
There was blood on the pavement underneath her face as well. Enough to worry him, but not enough to make him take the chance of rolling her over without the proper equipment to stabilize her head, neck and back. It took tremendous willpower, but he left her in that position, as he’d found her. He did cover her with his coat, and with another one offered by a uniformed officer who’d come to stand beside him to direct traffic.
“Ambulance is only a few blocks away now,” the officer reassured him.
Dan could hear the sirens. He checked her again. She was breathing, her heart was beating. And he was with her. He wouldn’t leave her again. He would never let himself be away from her again when she needed him, when she was afraid. It had been a long, long time since he’d begged for anything, since he’d prayed. But he did that now.
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