In Pursuit of Justice (22 page)

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 doctors’ lounge adjacent to the emergency room. Midnight. She was alone in the drab, disorganized room. A pot of hours-old coffee steeped on a water-spotted, double-burner coffee maker next to the sink, and the institutional-issue table in the center of the room held the vestiges of a half-eaten pizza. It was a desolate place to be at any time of the day. 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 hostage and had 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 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’re interested in a new job, I’m fairly certain we could 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.”

“Will it require surgery?” These things happened, she knew that as well as anyone; it was no one’s fault. 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.”

Catherine 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.

“Hey, there. How do you feel?” She managed to keep her voice from quivering, but 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, Rebecca caught Catherine’s and drew her closer. “If I understood what the doc told me, it was a fluke—a little bit of scar tissue acting up. Not a big deal.”

Catherine was emotionally and physically exhausted—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. It was raw emotion, uncensored.

“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,” Catherine said more sharply than she intended. “But
she’s
fond of you, I’ll tell you that.”

“What?” Rebecca had never seen Catherine quite like this before. When she had first walked into the room, it’d looked as if she was going to break down. That was so unlike her that it was alarming. 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. Now, she was all over the place. First, on the verge of tears, then in the next second, angry—the shifts so sudden that Rebecca was stunned. Carefully, she replied, “What are you talking about? Sandy is an informant. I was working and—”

“You’re not required to explain,” Catherine interrupted, irritated with herself for even bringing up the subject of the girl. She had no idea why she had. Except there had been something uncomfortably 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 urgently, 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 not?”

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 her 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.”

“I see. Why not?” Her anger was gone, replaced by an honest desire to know, and by incredible sadness.
How can we 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,” Rebecca 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.”

“I’m sorry,” Catherine said softly, withdrawing her fingers from Rebecca’s grasp. “We can’t do this now. You need to rest.”

“Catherine—”

“Jim says your CAT scan looked good. It might be a while before they move you upstairs to a bed. You should try to sleep. I’ll come by tomorrow to see how you’re doing.”

“Okay.” Rebecca swallowed the plea for her to stay, 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.

“What do you mean you don’t have any record of her?” Catherine snapped into her cell phone’s wireless mic while she attempted to maneuver through early rush-hour traffic. “She should have been admitted last night. I don’t know—sometime after midnight. Are you spelling the last name correctly? 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 shards of frustration to ebb.
I should have stayed at the hospital last night. It was ridiculous to think I could do this briefing 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, Doctor. That’s very 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 an unremarkable-looking 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 yet 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 hadn’t begun to abate until she had been satisfied that Rebecca was out of danger. It had been excruciatingly hard to leave her, but the evening had brought up too many conflicting feelings—fear, anger, and unexpectedly, jealousy. The conversation had been deteriorating, and she doubted either of them was equipped to deal with the aftermath of an argument in the middle of the night. Nevertheless, when she had finally slid naked beneath the sheets, she had ached for her lover, 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. As she stepped 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 the whereabouts of the meeting. Almost immediately, she saw a woman approaching in jeans and an open-collared navy shirt. At first glance, the startlingly attractive dark-haired stranger 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 Dr. Catherine Rawlings.”

“J. T. Sloan, Doctor.” Sloan extended her hand to the elegant, auburn-haired woman in the stylish beige suit. “We were just gathering in the conference room. I’ll take you there.”

“Thank you.”

As they walked, Sloan explained, “Unfortunately, the full team isn’t here at the moment. I know your schedule is very tight, so we’ll go with what we have for now. 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 the detective 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 fatal. 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, but she kept any sign of recognition from her face.

“Dr. Rawlings,” Sloan gestured as she spoke, “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 the young woman.