Don't Look Away (Veronica Sloan) (30 page)

“Listen,” he said, “why don’t I go over to Tate’s lab and start working on the images, try to find out who the hell did this. The sooner the better, right? There’s nothing I can do here, anyway.”

Lieutenant Ambrose began to nod, but before he could say anything, Ronnie cut him off. “I’m coming with you.”

“You don’t have to do that.” Jeremy moved closer and lowered his voice. “You should stay here, be here when he comes out of surgery.”

“Waiting here while they try to patch him up isn’t going to do Daniels one bit of good. You know what will? Going there, getting into his downloads and finding out who did this to him, so that when he wakes up, we can tell him we’ve got the sonofabitch in custody.”

“But it doesn’t have to be you who does it. I can evaluate them,” he said, hating the thought of her tormenting herself even more by seeing exactly what had happened to someone she cared so much about.

“No.” She shook her head forbiddingly. “Daniels is
my
partner. If anybody’s going to share that awful experience with him, it’s going to be me.”

He knew what she was picturing, what she imagined would happen. Ronnie’s guilt was making her desperate to pick up the cross and bear it for a while. She needed to do something to share the pain of what had happened to Daniels. And there was one surefire way for her to do it.

She was going to go to that lab, step on that little white mat and put herself directly inside of her partner’s awful, painful memories. 

-#-

Although she wanted to go straight to the lab and get to work, losing herself in the effort and killing time while she waited for word on Daniels, Ronnie asked Sykes to swing by her place first. It was eleven a.m., she was wearing the uniform she’d first put on twenty-seven hours ago, hadn’t brought a brush near her head in just as long and felt disgusting and wrung out.

Sykes agreed, and they headed to her apartment, riding in another FBI vehicle that someone from headquarters brought over for him. When he told her his hotel wasn’t far away, and that he wanted to go there and clean up, too, and would return in a half-hour, Ronnie nodded, glad for the separation. It would give her time to pull herself together. Having been with Sykes all night and all morning, including during these awful hours when she’d been torn up with worry over Daniels, had made it tough for her to think clearly.

She wasn’t stupid. She knew the guilt she was feeling was a little illogical. Daniels was a grown-up, he’d made a bad choice and oh, had he ever paid for it. Whatever Ronnie might or might not have been doing at the time, and whether her decisions might have played a part in establishing her partner’s mood, wasn’t the point. The only person who was really to blame was the killer who’d attacked him.

She knew all that. Logically. Rationally.

But logic and reason in her head were fighting a war with grief and despondency in her heart. And they were losing. Grief and despondency had gripped her hard, slapping a thick layer of
it’s-your-fault
over every one of her thoughts.

Trying to focus only on what had to be done, she took a quick shower, got herself back into some kind of decent condition, ate a peanut butter sandwich and headed outside to wait for Sykes precisely twenty-seven minutes after he’d dropped her off. He got there ninety seconds later, she hopped in the car and they took off.

“Any updates?” he asked.

“Not a word.”

That was the end of conversation for the remainder of the ride to Bethesda.

Since it was a Saturday, the Tate Scientific facility was fairly deserted when they arrived. There were a few cars in the parking deck, including one or two in the reserved spaces closest to the entrance, but it looked like all the everyday workers were at home for the weekend.

Reaching the front entrance and finding it locked, they both passed their upper right arms below a wall-mounted scanner. The doors clicked open and they entered. Tate had been true to his word, having provided them after-hour access.

Perhaps because the building was locked down, there were no security officers at the gates. She supposed the fortress served as its own security on weekends. Not for the first time, she couldn’t help wondering what other kinds of experiments were going on here. It seemed like the government had spent a king’s ransom on the place; she couldn’t see them doing it only for the Optical Evidence Program, no matter how promising it looked.

“Eerie,” said Sykes.

“Very,” she agreed.

The lobby was cavernous, the silence deafening. Their footsteps clicked across the tile floor as they headed for the elevator. Though she imagined Phineas Tate, or Dr. Cavanaugh, might be working today, she didn’t suggest they stop in their offices to say hello. She was too numb, too shattered inside to even think about making small-talk. Or, God forbid, hearing any messages of condolence about her partner.

They finally arrived at their assigned lab. When she walked through the door, Ronnie saw a sticky-note attached to the monitor of her work station.

“Detective Sloan—we were so sorry to hear about the attack on your partner. His most recent files have been downloaded on both systems for the use of you and Special Agent Sykes. Good luck. E. Cavanaugh.”             

Ronnie balled up the note and pitched it on the counter, then took a seat in front of the work station. Sykes moved his chair over to sit beside her. When she reached for the mouse to scan for Daniels’s backups, he put a hand over hers.

“Are you sure you’re up for this?”

That was a stupid question. Of course she was sure.

She hated the very thought of it, dreaded it and wanted to lash out at the world for making it necessary, but yes. She was sure.

“I’ll be fine,” she insisted.

“Are you going to…”

“Yes. And don’t try to stop me. If it were you in that hospital, I’d do the same thing, and if it were me, I know you would, too. Whatever it takes, Jeremy. That’s what we do to solve this from here on out.
Whatever it takes
.”

He was silent for a moment, but didn’t argue. Instead, he turned his chair around and moved to his own work station. “I’ll watch it on the monitor while you’re inside.

“That’s fine. I won’t want to stop once I start, so if I call something out, make a note of it, would you?”

“Of course.”

She started the program, located the backups marked
Daniels
and considered them.

“How far back are you going?” Sykes asked.

Ten minutes certainly hadn’t been enough with either Carr or Underwood. But this hadn’t been a torture session, or a mutilation. She knew her partner well enough to know it wouldn’t have been easy to take him by surprise, so she wanted to see exactly what he’d seen in the several minutes leading up to the attack.

“What was it Ambrose said right before we left?” she asked, not having been paying close enough attention as her lieutenant walked them out of the hospital. “About what the E.M.T.’s discovered about the timeline?”

“That the readings of Pure V in his system meant he’d ingested it less than a half-hour before he was first injured.”

Right. Ambrose had also told them witnesses said Daniels had left the bar at around 1:30 a.m. What happened in the several minutes after that, she didn’t know. But she did know that at about 1:45, he’d been shot, at least that’s when his blood pressure had started to drop. It had plummeted sharply again a few minutes later, apparently when his hand had been lopped off. By that point, he was so near death, they hadn’t been able to determine when the second shot had been fired. The fact that the prick had shot him while he was already down on the floor, bloody, helpless and in agony, enraged her. 

“I want to know how he got hold of that drug.” It had probably been in the drink the anonymous person had bought him. She only hoped Daniels had found and thanked the guy face-to-face. “Let’s see if Daniels spotted the person who bought him that drink. Thirty minutes.”

Sykes looked over his shoulder, his mouth pulled tight. “That’s a lot.”

“I’ll be fine. From the sound of it, he was sitting in a bar for much of that time.”

Doing what? Nursing a few beers and talking with some buddies? Thinking about the case? Unwinding after a long day?

Or had he been feeling rejected by his partner, who seemed to have moved on to someone else, professionally and personally?

She killed those thoughts, knowing she—and Daniels—couldn’t afford them right now.

Taking in a deep breath, then slowly releasing it, she turned on the projection system. Picking up the remote controller, Ronnie rose from her chair and walked over to one of those innocuous-looking white floor mats and stepped onto it.

“Ready?” Sykes asked.

“Yeah.”

“Remember…I’m right here.”

She nodded, then, before she could change her mind, hit the button to start the projector, setting it to pause on the first image until she was ready to proceed.

The lights fell. Beneath her feet, laser lights began to rise, filling in the space all around her.  One second, she was standing inside a small, windowless computer lab. The next, she was sitting at a bar, looking at a rough-looking guy with wiry grey hair who held a shaker in one hand and a shot glass in another. The guy’s mouth was half-open, his eyes half-closed, Daniels O.E.P. device catching him mid-blink.

She resisted the urge to reach out and grab the bar, her equilibrium doing crazy things as the world changed so drastically around her. This wasn’t like looking at a life sized picture, the room had depth and texture. She turned her head to one side, then to the other, moving very slowly. The picture didn’t move with her—that blinking bartender didn’t travel around her entire field of vision. Instead, what she saw changed by tiny inches and degrees. She was seeing a full panorama of the room, knowing she was moving out of Daniels’s current perspective—facing the bartender—and into the world the computer had built around her. It was utilizing all the rest of the images captured in his device prior to this one, particular moment.

It was breathtaking. Shocking. A little terrifying.

Sliding her feet a bit further apart, she braced herself like a captain on a rolling ship. Taking slow, even breaths, she reminded herself that this was just like a movie, not real life, although it felt every bit as realistic as the room she’d just left behind.

As ready as she would ever be, she pressed the
play
button to begin the slideshow. She’d set it at faster than one image per second, wanting to speed through the minutes and lose herself in them the way Daniels would have.

The bartender finished blinking, closed his mouth, shook the shaker, filled the shot glass, called to someone over his shoulder, all in a flash.

There were no sound effects, obviously, but at first Ronnie would swear she could hear the tinkle of glassware, the raucous laughter of a drunken woman whose reflection she could see in the mirror behind the bar. With every deep inhalation, she could almost catch the odor of yeasty beer, pungent liquor and sweaty bodies. Those bodies seemed to fill the room, it was a crowded Friday night. They were all around her, far too many of them to fit on a three-by-three mat. The depth perception of this thing was absolutely remarkable.

She—
Daniels
—sits the end of the bar. Beside him is a weary-looking old man who keeps tapping his fingers on his glass—tap, tap, tap. The sound catches Daniels’s attention; he looks over a few times. The man looks up. Their eyes meet. He mutters something—an apology?—and stops tapping.

Daniels doesn’t have a drink in front of him. Nor even an empty glass.

He looks down, reaches into his pocket and pulls out a sheathe of papers. Unfolding it, he places them on the bar.

Printouts. Articles. Stories about the two suicide cases he’d told her about earlier in the day.

He’s not wallowing, he’s working. Oh, thank God
.

Ronnie read along with him, making a mental note to get copies of them for further perusal later. Someone must have said something, because Mark looks up, turns his head. A young man—cute, a little glassy-eyed and tipsy—is smiling from a few seats away. He says something, lifts his glass. Daniels nods. Then he reaches down and folds up the papers again, putting them away.

Were you the stranger who bought him the drink?

The guy looked innocent enough, and she’d certainly never seen him before, but she wasn’t about to rule anybody out.

After another couple of minutes of sitting there watching the people around him get more drunk, Daniels glances at his watch. 1:25 a.m. She knows he will be leaving in about five minutes.

He rises from his stool. Her perspective shifts a little, goes higher, and then they’re moving. It is the strangest sensation to be moving forward through a crowded room while still having her feet planted firmly beneath her. One thing she notices—he doesn’t seem unsteady. His vision is clear, his steps certain. He doesn’t seem at all intoxicated and certainly isn’t stoned.

Daniels walks toward the back of the bar—smiling faces offer greetings or hand-waves; he is known here. Liked.

He’s heading for the men’s room. She doesn’t speed through the scene, or close her eyes. Things like privacy or embarrassment have no place in this exercise. This is her partner and every move he makes, every person he sees, could be important.