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“Uh, it will probably take them a few minutes to get here. This area doesn’t get the fastest service. Maybe it would be quicker if you drove her?” Sandy stood close behind Catherine’s shoulder, watching Rebecca’s face. “She didn’t look this bad when I called you.”
Listening to Rebecca fight for air, Catherine had to agree. “Can you stand?” she asked, pulling the blood pressure monitor from the detective’s arm and stuffing it into her bag. “We’ll help you.”
“Yes.”
Sandy and Catherine steadied Rebecca from either side with an arm around her waist and half-carried her down the three flights of stairs to Catherine’s car, which she had left in front of a hydrant a few doors down from the once elegant brownstone that now had been subdivided into apartments. By the time they got her into the front seat, and Catherine had fumbled the seat belt around her, she was barely conscious and her stridor had worsened.
“Rebecca,” Catherine said sharply, grasping her chin, turning her lover’s face up toward her. “Rebecca, don’t struggle. Breathe as slowly as you can. Do you understand?”
She couldn’t get enough air to speak, but she nodded.
Sandy bent down and whispered something to Rebecca that Catherine couldn’t hear as she ran around the front of the car to the driver’s side. She had the key in the ignition before she was completely settled behind the wheel, and she careened away from the curb without even a backward glance at the young woman who stood on the sidewalk watching the taillights disappear into the dark.
Thankfully, at that time of night there was almost no traffic in University City. Within a matter of minutes, she was screeching to a halt outside the emergency room at University Hospital. She ran through the double doors into the harshly lit admitting area and shouted, “I’m Dr. Catherine Rawlings. I have a critically ill patient in my car. Someone bring a gurney.”
Catherine glanced at the clock in the small doctor’s lounge adjacent to the emergency room. Midnight. The waiting created a painful sense of déjà vu, and as the minutes dragged on, it was harder and harder for her not to think about the night that Raymond Blake had taken her and nearly taken Rebecca’s life. Forcing her thoughts from that horror, she reminded herself that Rebecca was not dying, not tonight. But being separated from her, not knowing precisely what was happening, frayed the last remnants of her nerves, and she was losing the battle to stay calm. She had too many recollections, some of them too terrifying to erase even from her dreams. Now she had another unwelcome memory—the image of Rebecca suffering, struggling in agony for each insufficient breath. It was tearing her apart.
“Catherine?”
She spun around, grateful for the sound of another human voice to distract her from her pain.
“Jim! How is she?”
“She’s stable…”
“Where is she? Can I see her? What—”
The emergency room physician smiled, raising a hand to stem the flow of words. “In a minute. She’s on her way back from CAT scan.”
“How serious is it?” Catherine managed to ask in a more controlled fashion. The panic that had simmered just beneath the surface of her soul was beginning to abate.
“Well,” the treating physician replied, motioning to a chair beside him as he sank heavily into a seat at the small table. “If you were looking for a new job, I’m fairly certain we can find you one down here. Your exam on the scene saved us a lot of time, and her a lot of pain. She had a pneumothorax, just as you suspected. Probably an area of scar tissue had adhered to the inner surface of one of her ribs, and it tore lose tonight, collapsing her lung.”
“Are they going to need to operate?” These things happened; she knew that as well as anyone. Then why did she feel like screaming?
“A little too soon to tell.” He gave her a satisfied smile. “I put a needle in, aspirated the air, and the lung came back up. The CAT scan looks good right now. We’ll have to see if the lung stays up or not.”
“Thank you, Jim.”
“Don’t mention it. She should be back by now. Cubicle seven.”
She murmured her thanks once again and hurried away. To her great relief, when she opened the door to the small private treatment room, she found Rebecca sitting up on a stretcher, looking drawn but breathing easily. The relief was so intense, for a second she feared she might cry.
“How do you feel?” Catherine managed, struggling to keep her voice from quivering. Something of her fragile emotional state must have shown in her face, because Rebecca’s welcoming smile immediately turned to a look of concern.
“I’m okay.” Reaching out a hand, the one that was not tethered to an intravenous line, she drew Catherine closer. “If I understood what he was telling me, it was a fluke—a little bit of scar tissue acting up. Not a big deal.”
Catherine was tired. Tired and still reeling from worry and her own terrifying memories. If she hadn’t been so shaken, she probably would have been more circumspect, but she just didn’t have enough strength to control her response. “Rebecca, you could have died. If you weren’t as physically fit as you are, you probably would have. It could happen again—in fact it often does. This was a warning, and you were lucky that your young friend was quick-witted enough to realize how ill you were.”
“She’s not a friend. She’s a source.”
“What she may be to you, I don’t know,” she said more sharply than she intended. “But she’s fond of you, I’ll tell you that.”
Rebecca had never seen Catherine quite like this before. When she had first walked into the room, it’d looked like she was going to break down. That in itself was frightening, because during all the long weeks of Rebecca’s convalescence, Catherine had been nothing but upbeat and positive. If she had cried, she had done it alone. And then tonight, anger had followed so closely on the heels of her concern that Rebecca was stunned. The problem was, she wasn’t quite certain what Catherine was angry about. It seemed as if Sandy was part of it, but that didn’t make any sense—Catherine didn’t know anything about Sandy.
“Sandy is an informant,” Rebecca began carefully. “I was working—”
“You’re not required to explain,” Catherine interrupted, angry at herself for even bringing the girl up. She had no idea why she had. Except there had been something strangely intimate about the entire setting—the small cozy apartment, the takeout dinner, and the way the young woman had berated Rebecca with unmistakable tenderness in her voice. You have another life that I know nothing about. A life that might mean more to you than anything we could share.
” I’m sorry that you had to go through this,” Rebecca said, lifting Catherine’s hand and placing a kiss against the fingers she cradled in her own. “I’m sorry I had to drag you into it at all, but I didn’t want an official report—any kind of record—tying Sandy to me.”
“Why?”
She hesitated only a second. “Because officially Sandy and I don’t have a relationship. It’s safer for her that way.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t call Watts instead of me,” Catherine said, and there was pain in that knowledge. “Would you have called me if I hadn’t been a doctor?”
She hesitated longer this time. “I don’t know.”
“Would you even have told me?”
The silence between them grew so loud that Catherine slipped your fingers out of Rebecca’s hand and moved a little away from the stretcher. “Rebecca?”
“I don’t know. I would have told you—something. Maybe not all of it.”
“Why not?” Her anger was gone, replaced by an honest desire to know, and by incredible sadness. How could they feel so much, and share so little?
“Because I don’t want you to worry. I don’t want you to hate what I do,” she admitted. The foot of space between them felt like a hundred miles, and it hurt so much more now than she had hurt an hour ago. She was doing this all wrong, but she couldn’t think of the right way to do it. Desperately, she whispered, “Because I don’t know what else to do.”
“Jim says your CAT scan looked good,” Catherine said quietly. “It might be a while before they move you upstairs to a bed—you should try to rest. I’ll come by tomorrow to see how you’re doing.”
“Okay.” She swallowed, a sinking feeling in her stomach. It was all coming apart.
Catherine turned to leave, then looked back over her shoulder. “Is there anyone you want me to call? Watts?”
“No. I’ll call him.”
“Sandy?”
“No. Catherine—”
“Get some sleep,” she said softly as she closed the door behind her.
CHAPTER TWENTY
“WHAT DO YOU mean you don’t have any record of her?” Catherine asked in the general direction of the hands-free microphone that was clipped to the visor above the steering wheel while she attempted to maneuver through early rush-hour traffic. “She should have been admitted last night—sometime after midnight. Are you spelling the last name right? That’s Frye—with an e on the end.”
She listened for a few seconds, eyes searching the street for a parking place on the block with the address she had been given. Pulling to the curb, she said with uncharacteristic irritation, “Never mind. I don’t have time to wait. I’ll call back later.”
She clicked off the cell phone, cut the ignition, and sat for a few seconds behind the wheel, waiting for the last remnants of frustration to ebb. I should have stayed at the hospital last night. It was ridiculous to think I could do this now, not knowing how she is. If I were a patient, I’d say this is a very good example of self-delusion resulting from lousy conflict management and unresolved anger.
“Well, thank you. That’s helpful,” she said out loud in disgust. Glancing at her watch, she saw that she had five minutes to find the building. “And now you can just do what you came here to do.”
She locked the car and started north on Front Street, checking the building numbers as she walked. Fortunately, she had guessed right and had started searching in the appropriate direction. In less than a minute she was standing on the steps of a four story warehouse fumbling in her briefcase for her wallet and a photo ID. After the disembodied voice instructed her to enter and an electronic lock clicked open, she stepped through into the cavernous ground floor and proceeded toward the elevator as she had been directed. As curious as she was about the place, her mind was only half on her surroundings. She had spent another restless night, finding it difficult to fall asleep after the adrenaline surge of emotions that had started when she had first gotten the call from Sandy and which hadn’t begun to abate until she had seen that Rebecca was stable. It had been excruciatingly hard to leave her, but the evening had brought up so many conflicting feelings that she doubted either of them were equipped to deal with the aftermath in the middle of the night. Nevertheless, when she had finally slid naked beneath the sheets, she had ached for her, body and soul.
The elevator stopped smoothly and opened with no more than a whisper, whereupon she found herself looking out into an enormous room filled with electronic equipment. It was time to set her personal life aside, and do her job. Stepping out into the hall that ran along one side of the building opposite the warren of computer stations, she glanced right and left looking for someone who might know where the meeting was. Almost immediately, she saw a woman in jeans and an open-collared navy shirt approaching. At first glance, the startlingly attractive woman didn’t strike Catherine as being a law-enforcement officer of any type. Even discounting her decidedly informal appearance, she moved with a kind of casual confidence that suggested she rarely worried about protocol. There was none of the tight focus that Rebecca displayed when she was working or the self-important attitude of the typical bureaucrat. If she were asked to guess, Catherine would say this was the private consultant.
“Good morning,” Catherine said as the woman drew near. “I’m Doctor Catherine Rawlings.”
“J. T. Sloan, Doctor.” Sloan extended her hand to the elegant, auburn-haired woman and added, “We were just gathering in the conference room. I’ll take you down.”
“Thank you.”
As they walked, Sloan explained, “Unfortunately, the full team isn’t here at the moment, but I know your schedule is very tight so we’ll go with what we have and I’ll fill in the others later.”
Much later, Catherine thought to herself, but she merely nodded. She wondered, not for the first time that morning, if Rebecca would be pulled from the case. At this point it should be evident to everyone at police headquarters that she wasn’t ready to go back to work. In some ways, it was fortunate that the episode had occurred when it did. If it had happened when Rebecca was in the middle of an altercation, or even if she had just been out on the street alone, the outcome could have been disastrous. At any rate, she was out of danger for the moment and Catherine gratefully cleared her mind to focus on the job at hand. As she followed Sloan into a glass enclosed conference room, several people stood and turned in her direction. One of them she already knew.
“Doctor Rawlings,” Sloan began, “this is my associate Jason McBride, Agent Clark—there at the end of the table, and Officer Mitchell, who is with the Philadelphia Police Department.”
Catherine shook each individual’s hand in turn, saying merely, “Officer Mitchell,” in a neutral tone when she got to her. It wasn’t uncommon for her to run into patients in social or professional settings, and although she tried to anticipate when that might happen and discuss with the patient their feelings about it, it wasn’t always possible to do that. She had known Mitchell was involved in a task force that might have been this one, but she hadn’t really expected her to be at the briefing. As was usual when something like this happened, it was something they would have to deal with later.
“Thank you for coming on such short notice, Doctor,” Clark said with an appreciative smile. Looking pointedly at Sloan, he added, “Our investigation is moving a little faster than we had anticipated. Since I know that time is short, and I expect that what Sloan and McBride have to discuss will be of most use to you, let me say a few brief words and then turn it over to them.”
Catherine listened while he gave her a capsule summary of the task force’s purpose and some background on the results of similar operations across the nation, but she was watching the people at the table, trying to get a sense of how the individuals fit into the team. Clark, the federal representative, alone at one end of the table and the first to speak, was the titular head, but she had the feeling that Sloan, an arm draped over the back of her chair in an utterly relaxed pose, was the real leader. The woman projected an incredible sense of self-assurance and as she toyed with a pencil, her eyes fixed on a spot in the center of the table, she reminded Catherine of a great, sleek predator fixing on its prey. Her associate, the remarkably handsome man by her side, was completely expressionless, but his eyes glinted with intelligence. Mitchell sat stiffly to her right, and Catherine wasn’t certain if that was due to her presence or just the young officer’s natural intensity. Were Rebecca present, Catherine knew, she’d be sitting across from Sloan, the two of them perfectly matched in skill and drive. Rebecca, relentlessly single-minded when in pursuit of a suspect, was every bit the hunter Sloan appeared to be. The thought of Rebecca brought a swift surge of longing, and Catherine brought her complete attention back to Clark.
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