Catherine wrenched her gaze from Michael’s face. Quietly, she murmured to Sloan, whose shallow, tortured breathing spoke of unbearable grief. “Listen to me. She’s alive. That’s all that matters. We’ll have her in the hospital in a few minutes where she can be taken care of. Do you hear me?”

Sloan coughed and tried to catch her breath. She couldn’t think; she couldn’t feel. She wasn’t even certain her heart was beating. All she could sense was terror. A helpless terror that made her want to pound her fists against the stone. “Please. Please don’t let her die.” She looked at Catherine, her eyes fathomless pools of anguish. In a voice beyond torment she repeated, “Please.”

Catherine couldn’t offer her the one promise she begged for, so she said nothing. She placed the fingers of one hand beneath Michael’s chin, keeping her airway open, and carefully slipped a folded handkerchief which Jason had supplied behind her head to staunch the flow of blood from a large open wound. Rebecca paced back and forth in front of them, one eye on the street, the other on them, snapping orders into her cell phone. Mitchell, amazingly, had found crime scene tape somewhere and was cordoning off the street while instructing gawkers to stay back.

In the distance, sirens approached.

An hour later, Rebecca walked into the brightly lit trauma unit waiting room where an anxious group waited. Catherine approached, her green eyes darkened to nearly black with concern.

“Any word?” Rebecca asked in a low voice, running one hand down Catherine’s arm in lieu of a kiss.

Catherine shook her head slightly, but some of the tension left her chest at the sight of her lover. The waiting room, the waiting, Sloan’s torment—all of it brought back too many images still too fresh. Not long ago it had been Rebecca. Rebecca lying so still, so pale, bleeding, so much bloo…

“Hey,” Rebecca said softly, alarmed by the faint trembling she felt beneath her fingertips. “You okay?”

“Yes,” Catherine said hoarsely, forcing the memories back behind barriers still too fragile to contain them. “No word yet. I’ve been doing what I can to get updates, but it’s Saturday night, and it’s a mad house in there. All I know is that she’s still being evaluated.”

Rebecca nodded, looking past the psychiatrist to the other occupants of the cramped windowless space that might have been any of a dozen such hospital rooms she’d waited in during the course of her career. She concentrated on deflecting the pain that filled the air, needing to keep her distance so she could work. “Who’s the redhead?” she asked, remarking on the woman in the blue print shirt and chinos sitting with one arm wrapped protectively around Sloan’s waist.

“Sarah Martin,” Catherine replied, following her gaze. “Jason’s partner—and Sloan’s best friend apparently.”

“Huh,” Rebecca remarked with interest. Now I’ll bet that’s a story.

“What’s happening back at Sloan’s?” Catherine asked, needing to think about something, anything, other than this nightmare.

“I finally got Watts out of bed, and he and Mitchell are running the scene. They’re canvassing the neighborhood, interviewing anyone who was around. Or anyone who will admit to being around. There’s a tavern on the corner and they’ll need to talk to everyone they can chase down who was there. That’ll most likely take all night and a good part of tomorrow. Flanagan’s team showed up — they’re getting the crime scene photos, analyzing the impact patterns, looking for identifying tire treads. The usual. Flanagan’s fast, but it will still be at least a day or so before she has anything concrete. This kind of crime leaves a ton of physical evidence to sort through.”

Neither of them laughed at the irony of that statement.

“Was it intentional?” Catherine asked quietly, because she had to know. She had to know how close death had come this time.

Rebecca hesitated, then exhaled raggedly. “Looks like it, yeah. Someone was expecting Sloan to come back and had set it up so she’d have to get out of the car. Obviously, it didn’t go down the way they planned.”

“Why Sloan?” Catherine asked carefully, fighting to ignore the churning in her stomach. “Why not…you?”

Rebecca’s eyes shot to Catherine’s, instantly concerned. “It wasn’t me. It’s not going to be me.”

They both knew there was no way to guarantee that, but it wasn’t the time to discuss something they couldn’t change. “Still, why Sloan?”

“More importantly,” Rebecca said darkly, “why now?” Although she hated to do it, she needed to find out. “I have to interview her.”

“Oh, Rebecca,” Catherine murmured. “She’s so vulnerable right now. Can’t it wait?”

Rebecca heard the censure in her lover’s tone, and it hurt, but nothing showed in her face. “This was attempted murder. No, it can’t wait.”

Catherine watched her walk away, wishing she could take back the words. She of all people should know what it cost Rebecca to do the job she did. If the image of Sloan’s agony hadn’t been so fresh in her memory, she would have remembered that.

CHAPTER THIRTY

REBECCA SET A cup of weak vending room coffee in front of Sloan, then walked around the small table and sat down across from her. They were alone in a consulting room down the hall from the trauma unit waiting area. “How you doing?”

The other woman shuddered as if with a sudden chill, then met Rebecca’s gaze with eyes that were surprisingly clear. “I’m okay. If I could just see her…”

“Catherine’s working on that right now. She’ll come and get us if there’s any word.”

“No one knew I was going to the airport,” Sloan began as if anticipating Rebecca’s questions. “Well, Jason knew of course. But he was the only one.”

Rebecca said nothing, preferring to let Sloan tell it in her own way. The security consultant wasn’t a suspect to be interrogated, but a witness, and a traumatized one at that. Her recollection of the event would be distorted by grief and fear and the mind’s natural desire to block out the things too terrible to contemplate, but fortunately, she was also a trained investigator. She would know what they needed to do, and the things that Rebecca needed to know.

“Obviously,” Sloan continued in a weary voice, “someone set it up so I’d have to get out of the car to move the cart, and they were waiting for me. I can’t tell you exactly what happened next, because I didn’t see anything. It was over in a few seconds and for most of that time the Porsche was moving from the impact. I was getting tossed around pretty well.” As she spoke, she unconsciously twisted the band on her ring finger, something Rebecca had never seen her do before. Rivulets of sweat ran down her face, despite the fact that the room was cool.

“What about after you got out of the car?” Rebecca asked quietly. “Did you see anything then?”

Again, Sloan shivered. Her voice was harsh as she said, “All I was thinking about was Michael. By the time I got out of the car and into the street, all I could see was Michael…she was lying on the pavement…” Her voice trailed off and she closed her eyes. “Sorry,” she whispered.

Rebecca waited. She knew very well that Sloan was reliving those few terrifying seconds, seeing and feeling it all over again. After a minute, as kindly as she could, the detective probed, “Did you see the taillights of the vehicle? Did you see anyone on the street—someone who might have been watching the building?”

“No,” Sloan replied hoarsely. “Nothing.”

For now, that would have to be enough. Tomorrow, Rebecca would ask her again. Right now, her mind was numbed by shock and fear. When the horror had receded just a bit, she might remember more.

“It was supposed to have been me,” Sloan said dully.

“That’s my read on it, too,” Rebecca said, knowing that only the truth would help ease Sloan’s guilt. “The timing is too damned coincidental for this to be anything else. Who knows about the operation tomorrow night besides you and Jason?”

Sloan’s face hardened, and anger began to drive out the mind-numbing dread. “No one. Michael…Michael left town before the whole thing came down, and I didn’t tell her when I spoke to her on the phone. Jason may have told Sarah; we can ask him. But Sarah’s ex-State. She’d never say anything to anyone.”

“I’ll double check with him just to be sure,” Rebecca commented, but she was inclined to agree that the leak hadn’t come from the three of them.

Suddenly, Sloan stiffened. “Clark. Clark called this morning—uh, Saturday—yesterday morning—and I told him we had something. That we expected an operation to go off before the end of the weekend.”

Rebecca was silent, considering Sloan’s information. Clearly, their plans had been revealed to someone who felt that Sloan, as the person most likely to uncover someone via the computer traces, was the biggest threat. The choices for the source of the leak were limited. Besides Sloan and Jason, Mitchell and Catherine knew of the upcoming meet. Neither of them had the right kind of contacts, even if they had slipped and mentioned the plans, which she doubted. She herself had told Captain Henry when she briefed him about the warrant. Recalling Trish Mark’s observation that after Captain Henry and the Chief of Detectives had met with her boss, the investigation into Jeff Cruz and Jimmy Hogan’s assassinations had been dropped, Rebecca considered that it might have been him. It was hard for her to believe that John Henry was on the payroll of the organized crime syndicate, but it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility. Then there was Avery Clark, who had come out of nowhere and put together an elite but highly unusual team. The team resembled the black ops units that worked undercover, often employing less than sanctioned avenues of investigation. Like Sloan had been doing. And if something went wrong, the government would be largely unaccountable. Clark remained a cipher, as did his true motives, and that made him a very good suspect.

“I’ll get to the bottom of this, Sloan. You have my word,” Rebecca said stonily. “For now, we have to assume that no one is above suspicion.”

Ali Torveau slid the CAT scan onto the view box and pointed. “Linear nondisplaced skull fracture, right here in the occipital area. Big scalp laceration over it. Brain looks okay, although I’m sure there’s a significant contusion.”

Catherine studied the scan, nodding. “What about systemic injuries?”

“In addition to the head injury? Bilateral pulmonary effusions, fractured left renal pelvis, and a hemarthrosis of the left knee. Basically, she got bounced around pretty good, but most of the major organ systems were spared long-term damage.”

“What about the kidney injury? Is it going to require surgery?”

“Probably not,” the trauma surgeon said. “We’ll repeat the CAT scan in six hours and follow her hemoglobins, but the perirenal space is so tight, hemorrhage usually stops on its own. Fortunately, her pulmonary status is stable right now and I took out the endotracheal tube. There’s always a possibility that she could develop acute respiratory distress syndrome, but we’ll cross that road when we come to it.”

“What about the intracranial injury?” Catherine inquired. “Any idea what to expect in terms of her regaining consciousness?”

Again, Torveau shrugged. “She’ll wake up when her neurons recover from being shaken all to hell. I can ask neurology to come and see her, but you know damn well they’re going to say they can’t tell us anything.”

Catherine smiled. She was well aware that surgeons had little regard for medical specialists who generally were unable to give a hard and fast prognosis. “If you’re confident that there’s no surgical problem, I’m sure her family will be, too. Can I see her before I talk to them?”

“Sure,” Torveau said, “She’s in trauma bay one. Bring them in whenever you want. I’ve got to go—there’s a spleen that wants to be liberated waiting for me upstairs in the OR. They can catch me later if they have questions.”

“Go ahead, and thanks for letting me take up your time.”

“No problem.” And then she pushed through the double doors and was gone.

Catherine walked through the brightly lit treatment area to one of the cubicles where stabilized patients awaited transfer to a regular hospital room. Nodding to a nurse who was busy charting the events of the resuscitation, Catherine approached the bed where Michael lay. On the far side of the small room, a rack of monitors gave continuous readouts of her status while IV poles hung with resuscitation fluids stood silent sentinel.

“Michael,” Catherine said softly, bending down close to her. It was impossible to tell what an unconscious person heard, or stored in their memory to be recalled weeks, months, or even years later. She always assumed they were listening, and she always spoke to them as if they would remember. “My name is Catherine Rawlings. I’m a friend of Sloan’s.”

To her surprise, Michael’s eyelids fluttered and her left hand twitched. Reaching for her hand, Catherine cradled the slender fingers in hers. “Michael?”

Michael opened her eyes, her pupils wide and unfocused. “Sloan?”

“She’s just fine. I’ll bring her right in.”

Catherine thought she saw a flicker of a smile before the other woman drifted away again. “And she’ll be much, much better now,” she whispered, gently releasing Michael’s hand.

Rebecca and Sloan walked out of the consultation room and the first person they saw was Avery Clark. Rebecca wasn’t even aware of Sloan moving, but in the next instant the security expert had the federal agent up against the wall with her hands fisted in the folds of his jacket.

“It’s about time you told us what the fuck is going on,” Sloan snarled, inches from his face. “Justice is famous for keeping secrets, and one of your secrets almost got my lover killed.” She punctuated each word with a shove that bounced him against the wall.

For an instant, Clark looked stunned, and then Rebecca saw his hand move under his jacket toward his weapon. In all likelihood, it was an automatic response to Sloan’s unexpected attack, but Rebecca wasn’t about to let weapons come out. “Sloan,” she barked, “let him go.”

Sloan appeared not to hear and pushed Clark’s body hard against the wall again. Rebecca moved to separate them, grasping Sloan’s left shoulder with her right hand and wedging herself between them. “Back off, Sloan.”

This time, Sloan might have heard, because she appeared to loosen her grip on Clark’s jacket. Apparently, that had been the opening he was waiting for, because he brought both arms forcefully up between Sloan’s, breaking her grip and pushing her back at the same time. The force of his blow deflected off Sloan’s arms as she let go, and his swinging fists caught Rebecca in the chest with the force of a sledgehammer. Rebecca rocked back on her heels, pain exploding in her chest.

By that time, they had drawn a crowd. Jason was between Clark and Sloan and the two men were shouting. Sarah was at Sloan’s side, gently but firmly pushing her away. Rebecca sagged against the wall, one hand pressed to her chest, struggling to get her breath.

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