Don't Look Away (Veronica Sloan) (31 page)

When he goes back to the bar, there is a full beer sitting on it, right in front of where he’d been sitting. Ronnie sucks in a breath. Somewhere, in another universe, Sykes whispers, “Bingo,” but she ignores him.

Don’t drink it. Please don’t.

He speaks to the bartender, who shrugs in disinterest. Daniels looks around the place, doesn’t make eye contact with anyone. Then he breaks the rule every teenage girl learns before going to her first party: Don’t trust an unattended drink.

He picks up the mug. Sips. Gulps, really. But not the entire glass. He downs perhaps a third of it, then lowers it back to the bar. He has another brief conversation with the bartender. Then he looks down as he reaches into his pocket. Ronnie sees a corner of something plastic—a small package? An evidence baggie perhaps? But he shoves it back down and pulls out some cash instead. He drops it on the bar and walks out.

When he hits the street, she begins to notice the change in his vision. Everything is the slightest bit blurry around the edges. The outdoor scene looks a little off-kilter, like he’s got his head tilted. And he wobbles a bit, reaching out a hand to touch the exterior wall of the building as he begins to walk away from the bar.

The drug is kicking in. She couldn’t even imagine how much Pure V must have been in that glass for a third of it to have hit him so hard. Whoever the attacker was, he’d probably gotten lucky that Daniels had not consumed more, and that he’d left when he did. If he’d downed that whole glass, he would have ended up passed out on the floor.

That interested her and she made another mental note. This killer obviously wasn’t very good about gauging dosage. So maybe this drugging attempt was his first time. She didn’t wonder why he’d done it—Daniels was no petite woman like Leanne Carr, or a skinny, young father like
Brian Underwood, or a tired, middle-aged accountant like Girardo. Taking him head-on would have been stupid and the perp obviously knew that.

When she realized Mark had stopped walking and was turning to look at a ramshackle, abandoned building, she shook her head, reminding herself to focus. Something had drawn his attention. A noise? A cry for help? She remembered the trick her attacker had played on her, that sound in the darkness that had drawn her into his trap. Had her partner succumbed to the same kind of lure…did this mean he was, indeed, attacked by the same person?

Daniels goes in. The room is even darker—filthy, shadowed, desolate. It is like being in another world, the lights and people of the bar a distant memory.

Ronnie’s pulse pounded and her tension rose. She knew what was coming. Knew it was about to happen.

It does. Daniels trips and she sees with him that someone is behind him. Before his gaze even travels up, Ronnie recognizes the scuffed, black shoes.

They were worn by the same man who’d killed Leanne Carr.

“Oh, God,” she breathes, hardly even aware she’d spoken.

Daniels comes up fighting and swings around. In a normal state of mind, he would be more than  match for the coward dressed all in black, but he’s been weakened.

She wants to cheer when he kicks the stun gun out of the killer’s hand, but begins to shiver when Daniels bends over as if he’s about to fall.

He’s reaching for his ankle. His backup piece
. Do it! Go for it!
 

She feels like she is watching an action flick, and the hero is about to turn things around and win the day in the final reel. But she knows how this movie ends and tears form as the two men face each other, weapons drawn, and exchange shots.

Daniels misses his; the O.E.P. device captured the tiniest splintering of wood as the bullet exploded through a flimsy window covering just over the killer’s right shoulder.

His opponent doesn’t miss.

Ronnie is suddenly flying through the air, backward, landing hard on her back and looking up at the ceiling. She feels no differently, and yet pain explodes deep within her as she imagines what her partner is feeling.

Oh, God, oh, God, please let it be over.

But it can’t be over yet. She can’t stop now, even though she knows there is worse to come. Not now when she’s so close.

Her dear friend rolls onto his side. He’s…he’s bringing his left hand up, staring at it intently. So steadily. She doesn’t think he’s incoherent, as his movements seem deliberate. She becomes more sure of it when his fingers begin to move, jerkily, but intentionally.

It takes her a second to process, but when she does, when the truth hits her, she almost staggers off the mat.

“Oh, Jesus,” she whispers. Tears fill her eyes as she watches Mark form the letters R-O-N with his fingers. 

A message. He sent her a final message. In what might have been his last coherent minute on this earth, her partner was reaching out to her one last time.

She blinked away her tears, desperate to understand what he was trying to tell her.

His hands spasm, his fingers jerk. While she knew he wasn’t there, that this wasn’t happening right now, she couldn’t help but lift her own hand. She reached out to him, wanting to clasp those fingers and tell him he didn’t have to try anymore, that he’d be all right and she would take it from here.

He forms a fist, clenches it, and his pinky pops straight up.

“Is that…”

“Sign language,” she snapped at Sykes. “Write down the letters. The first three were RON. That’s an I.”

The hand shakes, the pinky drops. The fist unclenches.

His fingers straighten. Then the thumb drops. He shifts his hand to reveal a perfect L.

Ronnie barked out the letter, focused only on catching each nuance of the message, not on trying to put them together yet.

He holds that for a few beats.

“Come on, you can do it,” she whispered.

The fingers fall. His hand is flat on the floor now, as if he doesn’t have the strength to keep it up. Then, with a sudden surge of motion, he lifts his arm again, makes a fist, and deliberately jabs his middle and index finger straight out.

“A V!” she called.

Daniels stares at his hand. And stares.

Suddenly there’s a flash of light on something reflective. The very next image is splattered red. Blood, spurting, gushing, exploding from his open wrist.

“Oh, Jesus, Mark!” she cried,  knowing exactly what had happened.

He beholds his brutalized arm, sees his hand is gone, then everything goes black.

Jeremy stopped watching before the screen even went black.

Seeing what had happened to Mark Daniels on a twenty-inch monitor was one thing. He couldn’t imagine being an actual part of the visual memories. Drs. Tate and Cavanaugh might have thought they were inventing something magnificent for humanity, but as far as he was concerned, their little magic box was a torture chamber. Seeing through the misty shadows of the projection when Ronnie’s hand went up, as if she could clasp her partner’s, he’d wanted to smash the damn projector so it couldn’t wound her any more.

Instead, he’d pushed back from his workstation and gone to her side, knowing it was almost over, knowing she would need him when it ended.

The very second the images went black, he grabbed her and pulled her off the mat, holding her in his arms as she groaned and flailed in his arms.

“It’s okay, Ronnie. It’s me, it’s Sykes. You’re fine, you’re back.”

She stopped struggling and sagged against him. He felt the heaves in her chest as she gasped for breath and tried to bring herself back under control. He could do nothing but offer her silent support, stroking her back, whispering words of comfort into her hair. He knew nothing would ever erase the mental images she’d just willingly experienced, but he wanted to at least make sure she knew she wasn’t alone.

After a long minute, she began to pull away. He let her go, taking a small step back, but keeping one hand on her arm, wanting to maintain human contact whether she wanted it or not.

“I’m fine,” she insisted.

“I don’t see how you could be.”

She fell silent again, not trying to pretend all was well. Another minute ticked by. At last she said, “Okay. Not fine. But I’m better.”

That was as much as he could hope for right now.

“Did you take notes?”

Yeah, he’d taken notes. He’d written down every letter. But oh, God, did he not want to tell her what they were or what he suspected they meant. “Yes.”

She snagged her bottom lip between her teeth and raised her damp, anguished eyes. “He was talking to me at the end. Sending me a message.”

Oh, he most definitely had been.

“I know,” he told her. He didn’t elaborate, hoping she would change the subject, talk about the people in the bar, the papers Daniels had studied, the drink he’d so rashly consumed. Anything except the meaning of those last, desperate words.

She pulled away from him, walking over to his work station, grabbing the pad of paper he’d been scribbling on. Hell.

“Ron,” she said, reading the first line. “I got that much. Jesus, how did he have the presence of mind to do that, to spell out my name, knowing I’d see this?”

“I guess he had something pretty important to say,” he replied, his tone subdued, sad.

“So what was it?” she said, a puzzled frown on her weary face. “I, L, and V, those were the letters I called out?”

“Yeah,” he mumbled.

“It looked like there were some others he was trying to make in there, but I honestly couldn’t tell what they were. Sometimes his hand just seemed to be clenched in a fist, others his fingers just sagged.”

He kept his response low, gentle, waiting for her to stumble about the realization he had already reached. “I noticed.”

She raked a hand through her short hair, sending it up into wild spikes. “I don’t understand,” she snapped, studying the page. “I can’t think of a single word that has the letters ‘LV’ right in a row.”

She was getting it now.

Jeremy stepped over, putting a hand on her shoulder, squeezing gently.

“What?” she asked, wary, a little defensive. “What aren’t you saying?”

“Think about it, Veronica.”

Her eyes narrowed as she thought, but no light bulb of realization changed her expression.

“Start from the beginning. ‘Ron, I…”

“L something v?”

Her mouth fell open in shock, her eyes growing saucer-sized as the possibility struck her.

“No. No way.”

“You know how he felt—feels about you.”

She spun away from him. “That’s bullshit.”

“He’s in love with you, it’s written all over his face every time he looks at you.”

“Shut up, Sykes,” she snarled. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know him like I do. There is no way in hell you’re ever going to convince me that Mark Daniels spent the last, precious seconds of his life doing something as sappy as telling me he loves me.”

He knew she didn’t want to believe it. If he were in her position, he wouldn’t want to believe it either. The guilt was already pressing down on her, adding that burden might crush her completely. But he didn’t see any other explanations.

“I have to get out of here,” she whispered. She crossed her arms around her middle. “I want to go back to the hospital.”

“Okay. I’ll take you.”

She opened her mouth as if to argue—obviously, she didn’t even want to be in a car with him right now, feeling furious and betrayed by what he’d said, but she had no other choice.

“I’m taking his backups,” she said, challenging him to argue.

“That’s a good idea,” he murmured. “I’m sure there are moments from earlier in the day that could be important.”

She went to her work station and began backing up the files. “Yes, of course there are.”

Their ride back to the hospital was silent and icy cold. Sykes would be hard pressed to admit that he and Ronnie had spent the previous night together; right now, she looked like she wanted to slap him across the face.

He didn’t push it. She’d come to accept it sooner or later.

But as they reached the hospital and she hopped out of the car, he couldn’t help wondering if that last, desperate message from Daniels had done more than convey his true feelings. Jeremy greatly feared it had also spelled doom for his own relationship with Ronnie.

Because, live or die, Daniels last, Herculean effort was going to stay with her for the rest of her life. And Jeremy honestly didn’t know if she was ever going to allow herself to get over it.

-#-

“I love you?” she mumbled, rolling her eyes as she stalked across the hospital waiting room. Back and forth she went, practically wearing a path in the tile. “No way. You didn’t. You wouldn’t!”

Would he?

She just couldn’t make the picture come together in her mind. Okay, she could see why Sykes would leap to that conclusion. He didn’t know Daniels the way she did. He hadn’t been there through some of the incredibly rough, dangerous situations they’d shared, when Mark’s abrasiveness and toughness were the only things that had gotten them through.

She’d believe her rough-and-ready partner had wasted his last moments saying
I love you
the day she started to again believe in the Easter Bunny.

No, not again. She’d never believed in that big, stupid rabbit. And she would never believe this.

“Anything new?” she asked as a nurse marched by the room, pausing to glance in and stare at her, probably because word of her stalking and muttering had spread around the unit.

“No, he’s still in surgery,” the woman said.

Ronnie was alone in the waiting room, her lieutenant having gone back to the precinct an hour ago. Other cops came in and out, though none were here now. Daniels’s family—a mother, a brother, an ex-wife, some cousins—lived on the west coast and would arrive late tonight. Sykes hadn’t offered to stay, wanting to keep working the case, which was probably just as well. So it was just her. And with each hour that passed, she vacillated between relief that Daniels wasn’t dead yet and dread because he’d been on an operating table for more than ten hours and how could anybody survive that much damage?

“Can I get you anything? Is the coffee holding out?”

She glanced at the industrial-sized pot, which she’d sucked down to the dregs. “I’ve probably had enough.”

“Okay then,” the woman said. Then, looking back and forth to make sure she wasn’t being overheard, she added, “I heard a couple of the nurses saying things were going well, and that he was one heck of a tough man.”

She smiled and nodded. “That he is.”

Too tough to spell out freaking I-love-you!

Nope. She just didn’t believe it.

Knowing she needed to get busy doing something or go crazy, she finally remembered the files she’d copied before leaving the research facility. Her handheld wouldn’t be great for viewing the images on, but it was the best she could do here. Besides, she was wasting time when she could be trying to catch whoever had attacked Daniels.

Sitting in a back corner, where nobody could walk in and look over her shoulder at the tiny screen, she plugged in the micro-drive and pulled up Daniels’s downloads. She wasn’t going anywhere near his last half-hour. But there had been a lot of other things going on yesterday. He’d mentioned them on the phone last night and she wanted to get a little better handle on some of the things he’d told her.

She ignored much of the morning. She’d been at the precinct for the Bailey interview, and knew Daniels had spent the early afternoon on the Internet looking for info on those six dead O.E.P. implantees. She intended to do the same thing, and read the articles he found, but for now, she was more interested in the time he’d spent at the White House. He had specifically mentioned finding something in the mysterious tunnel.

“A key,” she murmured. “A strange, little key.”

When she’d called him at around 9:30 p.m., he’d said he had just left the White House, where he had explored the tunnel. So she started there.

She went back to the 8:30 mark and opened the file. Seeing that Daniels was already in what looked like it could be the tunnel in question, she backed up several minutes. When she reached the sub-basement, she stopped reversing and went forward again.

Daniels wasn’t alone. SSA Johansen was with him, and the two of them were opening a secret door behind that breaker panel at the base of the stairs. Ronnie hadn’t been back over there since hearing about the thing, so she hadn’t had a chance to see it in person. It was, she had to admit, pretty impressive. So well hidden, she never would have known to look for it.

“Okay, so about that key….”

She slowed things down, watching for several long, slow minutes as Daniels and Johansen explored. The tunnel was well lit, but she noticed her partner still had his flashlight on and was using it to spy in corners, crevices and anywhere else that wasn’t easily visible with the naked eye.

About ten minutes after they’d started exploring, Johansen said something that stopped Daniels in his tracks. He turned around, shining the beam of his light toward a baseboard that hadn’t been sealed around the bottom. Johansen obviously had a very good eye, because Ronnie doubted she would have seen the small, flat black metallic object stuck halfway beneath the baseboard.

Daniels went over, bent down and examined it, without touching. Then, realizing it might be important, he pulled out a rubber glove, put it on and gently tried to pry the key out. It took a little bit of twisting, but he popped the thing free and lifted it up for a better look.

Ronnie paused the screen, staring at the key. It was, as Daniels had said, small and unusual looking. Black, a rounded top, little thumb-nubs, then a stubby cut end. It definitely didn’t look like a key to a car, a house or a safety deposit box.

She thought hard-motorcycle? Storage unit? Nothing rang a bell.

Zooming the image in as tightly it would go, she magnified the key to a huge size. That’s when she saw the number. Engraved into the key, just above the first cut, was the number 76 in a circle. She grabbed her small note pad, flipped it open and made a quick drawing. Hopefully some expert would be able to tell her more about it.

Continuing on with the downloads, she went all the way through the tunnel hunt, noting the alcoves, the twists and turns. She also noted—through Daniels, who also noted—that it was well equipped for an emergency. There were medical kits mounted on the walls every thirty feet or so, with symbols for defibrillators. There were also fire extinguishers, panic buttons, even mounted, glass-front boxes with what looked like night vision goggles inside, perhaps in the event of a blackout. What a hideous place to be stuck if the lights went out!

Eventually, Daniels and Johansen reached the other end of the tunnel, came out in the maintenance shed near the Washington Monument, then turned around and went back the way they’d come. There was nothing more to see and she skimmed a lot of their return. She didn’t slow things down again until Daniels got in his car, at a little after nine.

“That’s all, folks,” she mumbled, knowing there wasn’t much more to see. She’d called him not long after this, and knew he’d gone to the bar right afterward.

Frustrated, she decided to find out what she could about that little mystery key.

Going online, she did a quick search for the words key, 76. She got a ton of hits for musical instruments—keyboards—and sighed in frustration. Trying several variations, she finally thought about what the key might fit. It looked like it was for some type of engine, so she tried that.