Grounds to Believe (22 page)

“He believed in Madeleine. But not enough to risk Ryan’s life.”

The doors swung open and Michael Archer walked over to them. “Julia,” he said. He looked at Ross. “Have you been talking to her about—”

“Yes. She knows.”

“How can we bear it?” Michael asked her, as if Ross wasn’t there. His face was pale and rough with stubble. Perspiration matted the normally faultlessly groomed hair falling on his forehead. “She used me. All these years, she’s been playing cat and mouse with me, destroying my credibility, my faith in myself, my reputation…I can hardly believe it. And yet…how can we do this?”

“I don’t know,” Julia said dully. “But Ryan’s life comes first.”

“What are you asking us to do?” Michael asked Ross, settling on the arm of the adjoining couch with a sigh of resignation.

Ross didn’t waste any time. His tone was businesslike. “First of all, it isn’t enough that we can confirm the alcohol in his blood. We have to tie it to Madeleine. Otherwise, it’s too easy for someone else to be blamed.”

“Someone else? Like a nurse? Or…even Michael?” Julia asked.

Ross gave her an approving glance. “Yes. Put bluntly, we have to catch her in the act.”

“But—but that might kill him!” Michael protested. “He’s hemodynamically unstable as it is. His heart is in danger of failing.”

“The timing has to be perfect. We need a way to watch her with him, yet stop her before she does any more damage. That’s why I need your help, Doctor.”

“You need access to the surveillance system,” he said.

“You have one here?” The last word rose on a note of incredulity.

Michael’s lips twitched in a tired smile. “Even out here in the sticks. But only in the ICU, which is where Ryan is right now. The things are designed to look like smoke detectors. There’s one over every bed.”

“Are you telling me we might already have her on tape? When can I review them?”

“No, no. These are only in ICU. Ryan was only moved in here when his condition deteriorated. Up until last night he was in his usual bed in pediatrics.”

Ross fought against the disappointment. “Who monitors the cameras?”

“The nurses.”

“Not good enough. I can’t hang around the nurses’ station for hours on end. Neither can you. Madeleine will know something’s up, and she’s so chummy with them there’s no telling what they’ll spill. Can you have the feed moved to a monitor somewhere else?”

Michael thought for a moment. “That isn’t really my
area of expertise, but I’ll go talk to the director of security and see what he can do.”

“What can I do?” Julia whispered. All this talk of security and cameras was too real—more real even than reading about Ryan’s symptoms in a book. She needed to go home and hide. But she couldn’t. Ryan couldn’t fight for himself. He needed every bit of help he could get.

“Come with me,” Ross said, and took her hand.

R
oss and Julia sat knee to knee in an office no bigger than a closet, at the end of the hallway bisecting the intensive care unit. Banks of television monitors loomed over them on both sides. Once every thirty minutes the security officer moved from screen to screen, doing his rounds. Movement flickered all around them as the night-shift nurses entered and left through the various doors and stairwells observed by the security cameras, but Ross’s attention was divided between the woman beside him and the single screen containing an overhead view of Ryan’s bed. Security hadn’t let him down. They’d split and rerouted the video feed so that Ross could watch Ryan from above like a guardian angel.

Madeleine just had to make one move and Ross would be down that hallway so fast the doors wouldn’t even have time to shut behind him.

He leaned toward the monitor. Julia shifted uncomfortably, and he caught a whiff of her scent, that intoxicating
compound of shampoo and clean cotton that made him want to pull her into his arms and keep her there forever.

“Is she asleep?” he asked in a low voice.

The shadowy black-and-white figure on the screen had slumped bonelessly in the chair next to the bed. Her head tipped back, and her mouth fell open, making her look childlike and vulnerable.

“She must be,” Julia replied, watching her sister.

“You don’t quite believe she’s doing it, do you?”

“How can I?” Julia asked. “I don’t even know why I’m here.”

He sat back. Loyal to the very last. And maybe beyond. He might as well face it. Once this operation was over, it was stupid to hope he and Julia could ever be together. He’d destroyed her trust, and now he was working hard at destroying her family. Despite her affection for Kailey, he had to admit that life with him would hold very little appeal for her.

“What do you believe about me?” he blurted, and then cursed himself. Why couldn’t he keep his mouth shut and leave dead romances to lie?

She seemed to flinch, then schooled her body into its previous calm. Watching the monitor in front of her, she said, “What do your finks usually think about you?”

The breath whooshed out of him in astonishment. “What?”

“That’s what you call us, right? Finks? People who get you information so you can arrest other people?”

“Julia, you are not a fink.”

“And you’re not a heavy equipment mechanic.”

Ouch. “Touché.”

“It must have been fun, getting what you wanted out of me. Information and some rolling around in the grass. Two for the price of one.” He had never heard such a bitter tone from those sweet lips, thinned now with suppressed disappointment and hurt.

“Please don’t do this.” He’d give anything to stop her inflicting this kind of pain on herself. Especially when every word hurt him twice as much.

She gave him a cold look over her shoulder, and turned her gaze back to the monitor. “I’m not afraid of the truth.”

“It isn’t the truth. Not entirely.”

“Oh? Which was the lie?” She huffed a sardonic laugh. “It couldn’t have been the information. Must’ve been the rolling around.”

“That wasn’t a lie, either.”

She rolled her eyes. “Give me credit for some intelligence. Or are you always so enthusiastic about your undercover jobs?” She gave a particularly nasty emphasis to
undercover.

“I wanted that to happen. I wanted
you.
I’ve been fighting how I felt about you since the beginning.”

He didn’t know what he expected as an answer, but anything would be better than this silent rejection. Julia watched her sister’s sleeping image on the screen. Her eyes were dry. She didn’t even blink.

May as well get it all out into the silent intimacy of this little room while he still could. The chances of seeing her and explaining anything after he arrested Madeleine were nil.

“I believed you were in a cult,” he began, his voice quiet and matter-of-fact. “So the fact that I was attracted to you—well, I hated it. I hate cults, period. I’ve been tracking them down and doing whatever the law allows to break them for years. But that was just an excuse so I could search for Kailey.”

He glanced at the video screen. No change there. The changes were all in the atmosphere between them, thick with emotion and words that must be said.

“Two kids have died in the Elect since February. Then there was Ryan. In my line of work, that’s enough to get a file opened. We believed you were doing some kind of sacrifice.”

Julia said slowly, “Going through the ice isn’t what I’d call a sacrifice. Neither is crib death.”

“I know. A little investigation discounted that theory almost right away. But the thing I couldn’t discount was Ryan and his history of illness. Evidence just kept piling up until finally I knew I had a case. A different one than the one I’d started with, but a case.”

“But why me?” she asked, her voice so low it was almost a whisper.

He took her hand, and when she would have pulled it away, gripped it tighter. “When I first saw you, I thought you were Ryan’s mother.”

“Me?”

“You were crying. Grieving. Because you loved him. I knew then that between your love and my work, we might have a chance to save him.”

“And you needed someone close to my family.”

He paused, then forced the truth past his teeth. “Right.”

“Someone you could get close to.”

“Right.” He could see where she was going with this. “And like I said, the closer I got, the more I wished circumstances were different. That we weren’t together because of my job, but because we cared about each other. You’re not going to forgive me for this, are you?”

“I don’t know yet.” She held his penitent gaze with her own honest one. “Let’s take one thing at a time.”

He gave her a crooked smile and turned back to study the monitor, the tightness easing from his shoulders. One thing at a time. There was still hope. He felt strangely at peace in one way, and on edge with tension in another.

Madeleine stirred. Yawned. Then slid to her knees, templing her hands under her chin. He fought down a spurt of anger that she could do what she was doing and still believe that God was listening to any of her prayers. Then he stopped himself. It wasn’t his place to judge her relationship with God. It was his place to get her into a position where the justice system could judge her actions. That was all.

“Are we going to sit here all night?” Julia said. “It’s past midnight.”

“I am. You can go home whenever you want to, you know.”

“I don’t want to. There’d just be—” She stopped.

He looked quickly at the screen, but Madeleine hadn’t moved. “What?” She took a deep, shuddering breath, and let it out slowly. He squeezed her hand.

“There’d just be a phone message from Melchizedek telling me they want my answer. And I’m not ready to give them one.”

“About what?”

She told him, in a voice so low he could hardly hear. What he did hear appalled him. “You mean that because we went to recover Kailey, you either get excommunicated or you have to marry Derrick Wilkinson? Are these people crazy?”

Her eyes were bleak. “It doesn’t matter if they are or not. Either way I lose. I give up my family and friends, or I give up my independence and a chance at happiness with someone else.” She gave him a wistful glance through strands of hair that were beginning to come down. “For Kailey it was worth it. But for me? I don’t know.”

Pain and guilt twisted deep within his gut, and he dropped her hand reluctantly. He’d done this to her. He’d allowed his disregard for the rules and his needs to override everything, and this was the result. And it wasn’t even finished. The price had escalated even higher than he had imagined.

“There must be something we can do.”

“One thing at a time,” she repeated. “That’s the only way we can get through this. You have a job to do. Maybe we should concentrate on that. Ryan is more important right now, then Kailey, then ourselves.”

Always the giver, always putting someone else before herself. Admiration for her courage rose through the pain. He wasn’t going to let them throw her to the wolves. Once this was behind them, he would—

“Ross! What’s she doing?”

He leaned in toward the monitor. The shadowy figure that was Madeleine rose and went to the machine that administered the cardiac drip that was practically all that was keeping Ryan stable.

She looked around, then reached up and pressed the buttons. Ross was no expert on these things, but he did know that messing with those numbers was bad.

He leaped to his feet. “Call Archer! Get Security up there too,” he ordered, and dashed down the corridor.

An alarm bell went off with a suddenness that made him jump, and a nurse pushed by him shouting, “Emergency in 137B!”

An emergency team ran down the hall and burst into the room, with Ross right behind them. Madeleine screamed at them to help.

“I was sitting here praying for him when the alarm went off,” she wept, and one of the nurses put an arm around her and led her to the other side of the room, making soothing noises while the team worked.

Ross gripped Madeleine’s arm, and she raised huge, beautiful eyes to him. “Mr. Malcolm,” she said. “Are you here to help, too?”

“What did you do to that dial, Madeleine?” he asked.

“What?” The nurse glared at him. “Get out of here. Don’t you see we have an emergency with this woman’s child? How did you get in here?”

He pointed at the cardiac drip. “She changed the IV drip. I was monitoring the video feed. Check it.”

The nurse hovered between anger and incredulity. “Who are you?”

He yanked his ID out of his pocket and flashed it at her. “Investigator Malcolm, Organized Crime Task Force. Check the system. Now.”

Without another word, the nurse went and checked it, then grabbed Michael Archer, who had just joined the crash team.

“The rate is tripled! I swear I checked him just a little while ago, and it was fine.”

“Leave that alone!” Madeleine exclaimed. “My son will die if you touch it!”

Ross tightened his grip on Madeleine’s arm. “He’ll die if you don’t keep away from him. We’ve got you on camera, Mrs. Blanchard. I have grounds to believe you attempted to murder your son. You have the right to remain silent….”

Julia slipped into the visitors’ room as quietly as she could, and to her intense relief, no one looked up. Everyone was there…her parents, Owen, Derrick. Oh, no. Even Melchizedek, despite the fact that it was painfully early in the morning. She hadn’t slept at all. She doubted anyone had.

What if, once they knew Ryan was out of danger, they decided to take up Testimony against her here and now? After all, she had compounded her sin. She had betrayed Madeleine on top of everything else. Even Ryan’s safety wouldn’t be enough to alleviate that.

Stop thinking of yourself. There are bigger things at stake here than Silencing you.

She shrank into a corner of the couch, thankful beyond words when Michael stood and captured everyone’s attention. He braced himself with one hand on the back of the nearest couch, and cleared his throat. “Mark, Elizabeth, Owen. Melchizedek. The first thing I want to say is that we’ve discovered the cause of Ryan’s illness.”

Elizabeth cried out. “Oh, thank the Lord! Thank the Lord!” Clutching her husband, she looked at Michael. “What was it, Michael? The gastroenteritis that Madeleine suspected?”

Mark patted her back, his own gaze riveted on Dr. Archer. “Will he pull through?” he asked urgently.

“Yes, he’ll pull through. We got it in time.”

“Got it in time?” Mark repeated. “You make it sound like cancer. It’s not, is it? He’s only four!”

“No, not cancer. It was a—an allergy. We just discovered it last night, pumped out his system, and put him on an alternate treatment. He’s responding as well as can be expected right now, but he should show signs of improvement within days.”

Julia frowned. Why was he making up stories?

Michael glanced at Derrick and Melchizedek, and it was obvious that respect for the Shepherd of his soul fought with duty. “I’d like to talk to the family privately but I know how close you are. Please keep what we say in this room confidential.”

Derrick looked uncertainly from the doctor to Julia and nodded. He moved to stand behind Julia’s couch.

Was he staking out ownership? Or just offering support? Either way, she could do without it. Julia eyed a chair against the wall with sudden longing, but she didn’t dare move and draw attention to herself.

Her dad moved restlessly at the delay. “Michael, is there something wrong? Something about my grandson’s condition that only the family should know? And where is Madeleine?”

Michael shook his head. “Ryan will be fine. He has round-the-clock care.” He closed his eyes for a moment, and his lips moved in prayer. When he looked at Mark, his face was full of pain. “Now, about Madeleine.”

Owen took a step forward, his fists clenched. “What about her? Why wasn’t she in Ryan’s room this morning? Is she all right?”

“She’s fine. But she—she—” He paused. “She’s going to need your support over the next several weeks.”

“Of course she is. She’s been through hell lately. Why would you think we wouldn’t give—”

“What I’m trying to say is that she—well, she isn’t herself right now.” His fingers made parallel dents in the vinyl covering of the back of the couch. “We have evidence that she may be suffering from a disorder. Of the mind. And in the grip of that disorder she may have behaved in a way that wasn’t normal.”

Owen stared at the doctor incredulously. “What are you saying?”

“We have reason to believe that she may have been, ah, adding something to Ryan’s medication in um, the
mistaken belief that she was helping him, but in reality…” Michael stopped in the face of Owen’s and the McNeills’ identical expressions of horror and hostility.

“What?” Elizabeth snapped. “Are you saying Madeleine was causing Ryan’s illness? Our Madeleine? Are you crazy?”

“No, Elizabeth, I’m not. The police are involved.”

Owen seemed to understand what Michael meant several beats ahead of Julia’s parents. Julia stared out the window. She couldn’t bear to look at her brother-in-law’s face.