Internal Affairs (3 page)

As usual, al-Jihad’s people had been well prepared. Sara wasn’t sure what the op had aimed to do, or what the terrorists had planned or accomplished in the forest, but she knew the names of the dead men now, whether she wanted to or not. Both FBI agents, they
weren’t among her friends or acquaintances, but they’d had their own friends and families, their own loved ones who’d been cruelly left behind. More bereaved to add to the list that had grown over the past ten months.

Sadness beat through Sara as she kept working, starting another case because it wasn’t as though she had any pressing reason to go home, Friday night or not.

Della and Bradley clocked out around five-thirty and left arm in arm. Bradley had been mooning after Della—who was a good decade his senior and the mother of two grown children—for as long as he’d been working there. Sara smiled, her heart warming at seeing them so obviously together, though she found herself wondering how she’d missed that change in relationship status. Then she had to remind herself not to dwell on the fact that everyone around her seemed to be pairing up these days. Everyone but her.

Biting back a sigh, she got back to work. By the time she called it a night, around 7:00 p.m., her shoulders, back and neck were burning from the strain. She would’ve killed for a massage, or at least an hour in a whirlpool, but she couldn’t bring herself to hit the gym this late on a Friday.

There was a fine line between being single and being pathetic.

Consoling herself with the thought of a long, hot bath, she collected her hybrid from the parking lot, which was located between the BCCPD’s main station house and the connected building that held the ME’s office.

The twenty-minute drive home was an easy one, and
the sight of the small stone-faced house eased something inside her, even in the darkness.

She’d fallen in love with the place on her first drive through the city. The cottagelike house had been way out of her budget, but she’d taken an uncharacteristic leap and bought it on an adjustable mortgage, then switched over to a fixed loan as soon as she was able to afford the higher payments. These days she was managing the expenses, though there wasn’t much left over at the end of the month for extras or savings. She didn’t regret the purchase for a second, though. It was her home, plain and simple.

The house was easily big enough for two people—hell, for a small family—but she’d resisted the option of taking on a roommate because she liked to keep her space the way she liked it, with none of the rapid changes she’d endured during childhood. The one person she’d shared her home with—albeit for only a few months—had fit into her world so seamlessly, despite their obvious differences, that she’d thought it would last. It hadn’t, of course. And the final words between them had been angry ones.

“Stop it,” she told herself as she parked the hybrid near the house, then gathered her bag and coat to head for the kitchen door.

She didn’t know why her ex was so much in her mind lately, but enough was enough. He wasn’t coming back, and they hadn’t been together for the year prior to the prison riot that had taken his life. His death had been tragic, but it didn’t magically erase his sins, didn’t erase his betrayal. Not by a long shot.

Muttering under her breath, she fished in her bag for her keys, unlocked the door and let herself through. Two steps into the kitchen, with the door swinging shut at her back, she stopped dead as the smell of blood tickled her nostrils. It was a familiar odor, of course, but it wasn’t one that belonged in her house.

She stayed frozen for a moment, adrenaline kicking her heart into overdrive.

Logic said she should get out of the house, get somewhere safe and call for help. But something she couldn’t name—anger at the growing suspicion that an intruder had broken in, maybe, or a complete and utter lapse of her usual good judgment—had her flicking on the lights and moving farther into the house.

She didn’t see anything out of place in her pretty kitchen, but the back of her neck prickled, warning her that someone had been there who shouldn’t have been. Holding her breath, she eased through the doorway connecting the kitchen to the living room. And froze in horror.

A man lay on the floor beside her sofa, blood soaking the carpet beneath him.

Sara stifled a scream, swallowing it in a bubble of hysteria. Her saner self said,
Run! Get the hell out of here!
But something had her stalling in place as her heart hammered in her chest.

Her brain racked up impressions in quick succession: the big man lay motionless, but he was breathing. He wore jeans, a dark blue jacket and boots with soil and gravel embedded in the treads. She could see their bottoms because he lay on his face, hands outstretched,
one nearly touching a pen and notepad as though he’d dropped them when he fell.

Her panicked brain replayed info from the radio bulletins: a group of men had disappeared in one direction, carrying a couple of bodies. A single man had gone off alone. Having spent the day listening to snippets about the dead agents and the unsuccessful manhunt in the forests of Bear Claw Canyon State Park, Sara knew damn well she should be running for her life, screaming her head off, doing something,
anything
other than standing there, gaping. But she didn’t move. She stayed rooted in place, staring at the notepad.

She knew that writing.

Emotion grabbed her by the throat, choking her and making her heart race even as logic told her it was impossible. That wasn’t his writing. Couldn’t be. The man lying there, bleeding, was a stranger. A danger.
Get out of the house,
she told herself.
You’re imagining things.

But she didn’t run. She edged around the man and leaned down to read the note. It said:
Nobody can know that I’m here. Life or death.

Sara reached for the notepad, then stopped herself. Her hand was shaking and tears tracked down her cheeks unheeded.

“No,” she whispered, the single word hanging longer than it should have in the silence. “He’s dead.”

But she knew that writing, had seen it on countless notes tucked under her coffee mug, or left beside the phone, telling her where he was going, when he’d be back, or that he’d pick up dinner on the way. Love
notes, she’d liked to think them, even though he’d never said those exact words.

Hope battered against what she knew to be true.
He’s dead,
she thought.
I went to his funeral.

Yet she reached out trembling fingers to touch thick, wavy black hair that was suddenly, achingly familiar. And stopped herself.

All rational thought said she should call for help. The note, though, said not to. She wouldn’t have hesitated, except for the damn writing. It was shaky, but it was his. She’d swear to it.

She could turn him over and prove it one way or the other. It wasn’t as if he was going anywhere fast. He was out cold, his back rising and falling in breaths so shallow they were almost invisible. Blood soaked the rug beneath him; the smell of it surrounded him.

Sara’s inner medical professional sent a stab of warning as she dithered on one level, assessed his injuries on another.
He’s pale, probably shocky. If you don’t do something soon, it won’t matter who he is because he’ll be dead.

“Call 9–1–1,” she told herself. “Don’t be an idiot.”

Instead, she reached out and touched him—his stubble-roughened cheek first, then the pulse at his throat. As she did so, she tried to get a sense of his profile, tried to see if it was—

No. It couldn’t be.

Yet her heart sped up, her head spun and her breath went thin in her lungs as she debated between checking his spine—which was the proper thing to do before moving him—and turning his face so she could see, so she’d know for sure.

Then he groaned—a low, rough sound—and said something unintelligible in a voice that was achingly familiar. Heat raced through her. Hope.

He moved his right arm and let out another groan of pain. Then, as though sensing that she was there, he shifted, snaking out his left hand to grab her ankle—not hard, more looping his fingers around her, touching but not restricting her.

Sara squeaked and would have jerked away, but once again she was frozen in place, paralyzed by the memory of a lover who’d kept a careful distance between them when awake, but in sleep had always wanted some part of him touching some part of her, as though reassuring himself she was still there.

“Romo?” she whispered. The single word burned her lips and hurt her chest.

Then he shifted again, this time turning his face toward her, so she saw him in profile against the bloodied carpet.

Her throat closed on a noise that might’ve been a cross between a scream and a moan if it had made it past the lump jamming her windpipe. As it was, the cry reverberated in her head.

She knew that profile—the clean planes of his nose and brow; the dark, elegant eyebrows; the angular jaw. If he was awake and smiling—or snarling, for that matter—at her, she would’ve known his square, regular teeth and the glint in his dark green eyes. It was really him, she realized, her chest aching with the force of holding back the sobs.

Detective Romo Sampson. Internal affairs investigator. Live-in lover-turned-nemesis. And a dead man back from the dead.

In that first moment of recognition, Sara’s brain threatened to overload with shock and an awful, undeniable sense of hope. She wanted to scream, wanted to laugh, wanted to shriek, “What the hell is going on here? Where have you been? What have you been doing? Why did you let us—let
me
—think you were dead?”

Instead, she forced herself to do what she did best—she buried her emotions, smoothing out the roller coaster.

Clicking over to doctor mode, she shoved her feelings aside, bundling them up along with all the questions that echoed inside her skull. Where had he been for the past four months? What had happened to him? Whose grave had she stood over, dry-eyed but grieving? Whose blood was spattered on his face, arms and hands? It wasn’t all his, that was for sure.

He couldn’t answer those questions now, though, and might not ever be able to unless she worked fast. Instinct told her he was close to dying a second time.

Sara’s heart stuttered a little when she cataloged Romo’s injuries and vitals. His breathing was too shal
low, the pulse at his throat too slow. And his eyes, when she peeled back his lids, were fixed, the pupils unequal in size, indicating a concussion, or worse.

Shock,
she thought,
head injury, and…
She checked him over without rolling him, hissing in a breath when she zeroed in on the wet seep of blood beneath the jacket.
A gunshot wound.

The hole was ragged at the edges, indicating that the bullet hadn’t been going full power when it hit him, and the bruise track suggested it had deflected off his shoulder blade and done more damage to his trapezius muscle than his skeleton. The skin around the injury was inflamed and angry, the blood clotted in some places, still seeping in others. She pressed on his back near the wound, digging into the lax muscles on either side of his spine, hoping the bullet had stayed close to the surface, praying it hadn’t fragmented and deflected into vital organs.

He groaned in obvious pain, but didn’t move. His hand had fallen away from her ankle, as though having made that effort he’d lapsed more deeply unconscious.

She couldn’t find the bullet, but confirmed that his reflexes were decent in his legs, and, having removed his boots, his feet. Her brain spun. The basic exam didn’t indicate an immediate spine injury, but the bullet could lie near the vital areas, poised to shift and impinge on the critical nerves if she made a wrong move. She needed more information, needed an X-ray, needed—hell, she needed a doctor who had more experience with living tissue than dead, one who wasn’t faintly unnerved to feel warmth beneath her fingertips.

The heat of him, so unlike the refrigerated flesh she touched on a daily basis, unsettled her. More, it wasn’t just any living body. It was Romo’s living body, which should’ve been impossible.

Where the hell have you been?
she wanted to shout at him.
How could you let everyone think you were dead?

By “everyone” she meant herself and his parents, because while the funeral had been well attended, and dozens of cops, agents and other staffers had railed against the prison riot that had taken his life, as far as she’d been able to tell, she had been one of the few who had truly mourned his death, one of the few who’d truly considered him a friend, even after everything that had happened between them.

His parents had been there. They’d been shattered and disbelieving, and Sara hadn’t had the strength to say anything to them, hadn’t wanted to try to define her non-relationship with their son. And maybe she hadn’t wanted to admit that she’d been grieving more for what she and Romo’d had in the past, for the man she’d thought him, not the man he’d turned out to be.

Who, apparently, was alive, though not well.

Crouched beside him, one hand on his warm, blood-soaked shoulder, Sara fought an inner battle. She should call for an ambulance, get him to the hospital. The surgeons could deal with the bullet, the cops with his fate. She didn’t owe him anything.

But instead of reaching for the phone, she picked up his note and scanned it a second time.
Nobody can know that I’m here.
That was straightforward enough, though difficult under the circumstances, when she needed to
get him to an ER.
Life or death.
But whose life or death. Hers? His? A larger threat?

Prior to his death—or what she’d thought was his death—Romo had been working with the BCCPD and occasionally the FBI, using his undeniable computer skills in an effort to ferret out the suspected terrorist conspirators within the BCCPD. Though he’d set his sights on Sara’s office as the center of the conspiracy—no doubt thanks in part to Proudfoot’s influence—Romo had also been looking at other departments, other cops. Then he’d been killed—supposedly—in the prison riot.

The rumors had said his death had been no accident, that he’d been getting too close to the conspirators and they’d managed to take him out.

From there, Sara realized, it was a short leap to believing that his apparently faked death was related to the case, too. What if he’d used it to drop under deep cover? Chelsea’s fiancé, Fax, had pretended to be a killer in order to get himself incarcerated in the ARX Supermax, in an effort to get close to al-Jihad. It was certainly possible that Romo, though a detective rather than an agent, had done something similar. If she assumed he was the lone man who’d escaped the net of the manhunt, then maybe he’d fled the terrorists because they’d found him out, or betrayed him.

But if that were the case, why hadn’t he turned himself in to the members of the task force? If not during the chase itself, then why not later? Why had he come to her? Why tell her to keep his presence a secret?

Damn you
, she thought as she stared down at him,
trying to figure out if that scenario really made sense, or if she just wanted it to. Her hypothesis did fit the evidence, she decided, but the same evidence would also support the reverse, namely that he’d faked his death so he could drop off the grid entirely and go to work for the terrorists, then got separated from them in the melee of the task force raid on the terrorists’ cabin.

Both hypotheses fit, but which was the right one? Or was there yet another explanation she hadn’t come up with?

“That doesn’t matter right now,” she said aloud. “What matters is what you’re going to do with him.” She glanced at the note, brain spinning.

She knew Romo, knew what he’d been through as a child, and how those experiences had shaped the man he’d become. That, more than anything, told her logic favored the undercover theory. The Romo she’d known had been all about justice, sometimes to the exclusion of all other, softer emotions. She had to believe he’d been working for the good guys. That didn’t explain why he wanted to stay in hiding, but it did suggest that if the wrong people found out he was still alive, he could be in very real danger.

Which, if she followed that line of thought to its conclusion, explained why he’d come to her if he felt he couldn’t go to whoever he’d been working for. She’d had her full medical training before deciding to specialize in pathology, and kept a small set of supplies on hand in case of emergencies. He would’ve known that, would’ve known she could patch him up. And, damn him, he would’ve known that she’d be unable to turn him away.

Shaking her head, Sara stared down at him. “You’re really a bastard, you know that?”

He didn’t answer. Didn’t even twitch. Which was so not helpful.

She could call an ambulance, then dragoon one of her trusted cop friends to watch over him. There might be suspicions of complicity within the BCCPD and local FBI field office, but she knew for a fact that Chelsea, Fax, Cassie, Seth, Alyssa and Tucker were among the good guys. There was no way any of them were involved with the terrorists. They’d help keep Romo safe.

But Sara stalled, because he’d come to
her.
He’d asked
her
to keep his presence a secret. Maybe, just maybe, it made the most sense to follow his instructions for the moment, and make her decisions once he was conscious and could fill in some of the blanks.

Warning bells chimed at the back of her brain, but she couldn’t deal with them just then. She needed to make a decision, and it had better be the right one. Except when she came down to it, she knew she’d made her decision the moment she stepped toward him rather than away; the moment she’d touched his injured shoulder and felt warm skin, and remembered what they’d once been to each other.

“Fine,” she said, her words seeming too loud in the silence of her secluded home. “Have it your way. You always did.” Reaching for a double handful of his clothing—and steeling herself to be a doctor rather than a woman who still, inexplicably, wanted to weep—she said, “I need to roll you. This is going to hurt.”

She doubted he could hear her. The warning was more for her own sake than his, because she wasn’t used to dealing with patients who still had their pain responses intact.

Doing her best to minimize the amount she twisted and moved him, in case the bullet had ended up someplace grim, she levered him partway up and checked for an exit wound or other injuries on the front of his body. She didn’t find either, which was both good news and bad: good news because his injury seemed localized and treatable, assuming the bullet hadn’t punched through to something internal; bad news because she didn’t know where the damned thing had gone.

Easing him back down onto his flat stomach, trying not to remember how he’d slept like that, his face smashed into the pillow, his long limbs sprawled toward her, onto her, some part of him always touching some part of her, she rose and headed deeper into the house, through the smallish, oddly arranged rooms that she’d decorated to blend one into the next, with neutral, mossy colors and richly patterned curtains.

She took the stairs leading up to her office and the bedroom, and tried not to remember the night she and Romo had made love on the landing, early in their relationship. They’d been out with her friends, teasing each other with looks and touches, with no question in either of their minds where and how the night would end. They hadn’t even made it all the way up the stairs before they’d collapsed, twined together, needing each other so much it had seemed like madness.

Blushing, she stepped into her office, crossing
quickly to the locked gun cabinet in the far corner, where she kept not only the small .22-caliber handgun she’d purchased just after al-Jihad’s reign of terror began, but also her medical supplies. The elegant cabinet was far more graceful—and much less expensive—than a safe. She dialed in the combination and popped the door, then stood and stared for a second at the large tackle box she’d outfitted as a field kit.

She’d freshened her supplies regularly over the past year. With al-Jihad hitting targets in and around Bear Claw, she’d wanted to be prepared for emergencies. She’d never actually used the thing, though. Had hoped she’d never have to. She couldn’t handle the immediacy of living medicine, the emotions. Now, facing the prospect of working on a man she’d known intimately, a man she’d loved, she quailed. She’d never understood how her mother reveled in the godlike act of cutting into living flesh. Then again, she’d failed to understand a number of her mother’s choices over the years.

You can do this,
she told herself, squaring her shoulders and reaching for the medical kit.
You have to do this
. He’d trusted her enough to put his life and safety in her hands. She would reward that trust by patching him up.
Then, once he’s awake, I’ll get some answers out of him,
she thought as she returned to his side. Now that she had a plan of sorts, her emotions were starting to shift from dizzying relief at finding him incredibly, impossibly alive…to anger at the deception he’d perpetrated, and his presumption that she’d take him in and treat his wounds on the basis of a note that explained less than nothing.

Leave it to slick, handsome, charming Romo Sampson to assume she’d take care of him after what he’d done to her.

“Bastard,” she muttered under her breath, holding on to the anger because it steadied her hands as she cut away his jacket and black T-shirt, revealing the strong lines of his back, the angry bullet wound and the streaks of forming bruises.

She removed the bulk of his clothing, save for his boxers, which were cheap chain-store wear, and nothing like what he would’ve worn before.

Shoving that thought aside, she piled several blankets over him, then turned up the heat in the living room. She had to get him warm and find a way to get his fluid volume up. But at the same time, she knew she had to be smart, too; she needed to protect herself if things proved more complicated than her more optimistic hypothesis—that he’d been undercover, the blood spatter was from a clean kill of one of the terrorists, and he was in the clear, fully sanctioned for whatever he’d done.

A quiver in her belly warned that the explanation, when she got it, probably wouldn’t be that neat. Romo had never been one to make things easy—either on her or on himself.

His clothes were damp with sweat and blood, and streaked with dirt and other substances. His pockets were empty save for her spare key; a quick search revealed that he wasn’t carrying any wallet, ID, or weapon. She placed his clothes and boots in a paper bag and taped it shut, signing her name across the tape. Then
she locked the bag in the gun cabinet. It wasn’t a perfect chain of evidence and probably wouldn’t be admissible in court, but it was the best she could do under the circumstances.

It’s just in case,
she told herself, and worked very hard not to think about what some of those cases might be.

Returning to him, she found that his color was a little better, his flesh a little warmer beneath the blankets. It seemed very strange that her patient’s skin was flesh-toned and body temperature, but she shoved aside the oddity, locking it down along with her emotions and telling herself to woman up and do what needed doing.

She set him up on a portable monitor that told her what she already knew: his blood pressure, pulse and respiration were all dangerously depressed. Knowing she needed to get his vitals headed on the upswing, she started him on a saline drip. If it came to it, she’d transfuse him with her own blood. She was a type O, a universal donor. But God help her, she hoped it didn’t come to that. She’d already given him everything she intended to of her inner self.