Internal Affairs (9 page)

“I’m nervous,” he said finally.

It was the last thing she would’ve expected him to be feeling, never mind admitting it, that she just sat there a moment longer. “You’re afraid of what you’re going to remember? What you might’ve done?”

He nodded, jaw clenching and unclenching before his expression firmed once again. “Well, putting it off isn’t going to change the past, is it?”

She shook her head. “Not in my experience, no.”

“Then let’s go.” They locked up the hybrid, abandoning it for the time being in the long-term lot, knowing that sooner or later the task force was going to start looking for her, and they needed just under two days of space to do what they needed to do. They took a shuttle to the terminal, another to a nearby hotel, where they caught a cab to another airport hotel. There, figuring they’d muddied their trail sufficiently, they rented connecting rooms using the cash she’d pulled from an ATM when she’d bought the disposable phone.

By unspoken consent, they both went straight into his room. It was a supremely generic midscale hotel room, complete with mirrored closet doors, a generous marble-and-chrome bathroom, and a main room done in greens and browns, with a big king-size bed and bank of wide windows overlooking the parking lot.

Romo flicked on the lights, then crossed to the window and closed the curtains. He turned to her, seeming larger somehow than he had only moments before, his presence commanding her attention, her imagination. “Did we ever travel together?” he asked, his voice low and rough, almost wistful.

She shook her head. “No. We stayed close to home.”

He grimaced. “Pity. I would’ve liked to be the sort of guy who took his girl down to Cancun for the weekend, just because.”

You could be,
she almost said, but the words wound up stuck in her throat because she wasn’t sure that was the truth. If the pentothal worked and he regained his memory, he’d go back to being the man she’d almost loved, the one who hadn’t loved her back. It didn’t seem realistic to hope that he’d retain the more open, giving personality he’d shown her over the past few days. That wasn’t Romo. It was…a fantasy, she supposed. A nice wish. The man who could’ve loved her back. The man, she thought, she would’ve fought for.

He smiled sadly, as though she’d said the words aloud. “Yeah. No second chances, right?”

“Right.” She waved him to the single king-size bed. “Get comfortable.”

He tried to send her a suggestive leer, but it fell flat. So instead he took a deep breath, toed off his shoes, shrugged out of his blazer and lay facedown on the bed, close to the edge of the mattress. She killed the room lights, leaving the small space lit only by the dim, indirect illumination coming from the bathroom. Then she pulled the desk chair up close to him, loaded a syringe, bared the crook of his elbow and injected the liquid into his vein with little ceremony.

As she did so, she hoped to hell she’d gotten the dosage right. Pentothal was a barbiturate, which meant if she dosed him too heavily, he’d fall asleep instead of
remembering. So she went very light on the dose, thinking she could add if she needed to.

She thought she’d come close to getting it right, though. Within a few minutes, his eyes started going unfocused. His eyelids drooped and he looked at her with fuzzy good humor. “Am I remembering anything?” he said, voice blurry.

“You tell me,” she said.

He smiled goofily. “Tell you what?”

The silly, too-open expression on his normally grim-edged face made her heart turn over in her chest, made her soul whisper,
Oh, Romo.
But she knew she couldn’t let that show, couldn’t let him know how close she was to falling all over again, for a man who didn’t really exist.

R
OMO WAS FLOATING
on something warm and soft, surrounded by golden light, with an angel hovering over him. On one level, he knew he was in an airport hotel, that the angel was Sara and he was stoned on barbiturates. On another level, though, he was someone else, someone he didn’t recognize. That man was closed and unhappy, angry with himself, untrusting of the world. He hoped that wasn’t the real him. If it was, he didn’t think he was going to like the guy very much.

The thought brought a pang of unease, a slash of grief, because now he better understood Sara’s reluctance to give him a second chance. He couldn’t blame her if this was the guy she’d dated, the guy who’d broken her heart. Romo would’ve fought the bastard if he knew how. He didn’t, though, which meant that all he could do was howl in silent anguish as that dark,
angry part of him overtook the man he’d been for the past few days.

The world darkened around him, grew dim and unhappy.

As if from far away, he heard Sara ask, “Do you remember the prison riot?”

Yes, he remembered. And he wished to hell he didn’t, because the moment the floodgates cracked, the memories started spilling back. Shock rattled through him, tempered with excitement at the thought that finally—finally!—they were getting somewhere.

He could picture his contact, the man who’d recruited him as a code cracker, tempting him with promises of money and all the computer power he could want. The guy had said there wouldn’t be any killing except for Romo’s faked death and the subsequent body switch, which would be covered up by conspirators within the various organizations. The man had lied, though. Several guards and prisoners had died, along with the prison warden himself.

But then something seriously weird happened—the moment those images flashed in his reconnecting brain, they morphed to another scene entirely, one of rainy darkness and a blood-drenched alleyway. And a woman lying sprawled inelegantly on the street, her throat cut, her eyes staring up at him in accusation.

Where were you?
her eyes demanded.
Why didn’t you save me?

Nausea and horror twisted through him as the rest of it came back. And he wished to hell he’d left it buried.

One second Romo was lying quietly, and the next, he arched back on the bed, his hands fisting in the covers and his face etching with horror.

“Alicia!” he cried. The word seemed torn from his throat, a single word of anguish, of despair.

Sara froze. “Romo?” she whispered. “What’s wrong? What are you seeing?”

Ugly suspicions took root, bringing a flare of jealousy. Had he started a relationship under his postfuneral identity, whatever it had been? What had happened to the woman? From the sound of his voice and the pain on his face, it hadn’t been good. Trying to calm the rapid gallop of her heart, telling herself it might be important, no matter how much it hurt to hear that he’d found someone after her, Sara made herself ask, “Who is Alicia?”

“Detective Alicia Frey.” His eyes were closed, his face carved with terrible pain. “She was my partner back in Vegas, before I came to Bear Claw.”

Surprise rattled through Sara, along with a good dose
of unease. He’d never talked about his years in Vegas, or why he’d left and come to Bear Claw, going straight into the internal affairs department, which was an unusual choice for a transferring cop.

That’s old history,
she told herself.
It’s not important right now.
It meant the drug was working, though. She knew she should steer away from the subject, which wasn’t related to the case at hand. But the weak, needy part of herself, the part that had wept for him long after he was gone, needed to know.

“What happened?” she asked softly, figuring that was a general enough question that it didn’t entirely violate the trust he’d placed in her when he’d agreed to the pentothal. It came very close, though.

“We were working a series of casino robberies, armored cars being hit on a specific schedule. It was obvious that there were cops involved—payoffs and information being dropped, that sort of thing. We got too close and made the wrong people nervous. A call came in, we answered…it was an ambush. I made it out. She didn’t.”

The staccato recitation might have robbed the story of its horror if it hadn’t been for the grief slashed across his face, the hollowness of his voice.

“Let’s focus on—” she started to say, but he wasn’t done.

“I didn’t realize I loved her until she was gone,” he said in a quiet tone that was laced through with self-recrimination. “We never dated, never even kissed. We both knew we couldn’t have a relationship like that and stay partners. But eventually we stopped dating other
people, too. We joked about our surrogate relationship, not realizing until too late that it was the real thing, at least for me. When she was gone…I lost it. I went after the men who’d set us up, nearly killed two of them, came close to getting myself chucked out of the force for good. But the powers that be were embarrassed by what had been going on under their noses, and let me transfer the hell out of Vegas instead. I couldn’t stay there. Not after what had happened. But I couldn’t let it go, either.”

“So you came to Bear Claw,” she said, losing track of the proprieties as things started lining up in her head.

His face smoothed some, though it remained etched with the echoes of grief. “The first week I was in town, I saw you walking from one building to another, wearing a long yellow coat and a wool hat. Pretty, pretty Sara. But I knew you weren’t for me. After what happened with Alicia, I didn’t want something serious, and you had serious written all over you. Still do.”

She knew she should say something, knew she should redirect him to the months after his supposed death, but at the same time she was riveted by what he was telling her. She had a feeling this explained much of what had happened between them, but knew she was still missing pieces of the puzzle. Her moral core said she should stop him, that he’d never given her permission to grill him about his past. But the ex-girlfriend inside her, the one that had always wanted to understand what went wrong between them—that piece of her said to keep going.

Knowing she was better than that, and she owed both
of them more, she said, “The day of the prison riot, you were going there to meet with an informant. Did he have actual information for you, or was that part of the setup for faking your death?”

He frowned. “I don’t know. I can’t…I can’t remember. I remember Alicia, and I remember you. It was that night in the alley, you know. That was the night I ruined everything.”

It took her a moment. “You mean when those punk kids hassled us?” She’d all but forgotten about the incident, given what had happened later, when Romo had left the house, supposedly on a call, and had wound up in a bar, going home with another woman. Earlier that night, though, there had been an incident, she remembered now. It had just been another one of those city annoyances to her, but had apparently been more than that to him.

Casting back, she remembered that the night had been dark and rainy, the air heavy with the ominous tingle that presaged thunder and wind. She and Romo had been living together for a few months at that point, and things had been going great—or so she’d thought. They’d been out to dinner with Tucker and Alyssa, Cassie and Seth, and Chelsea and one of the few and fleeting boyfriends she’d had prior to meeting Fax. Sara and Romo had spent the entire meal playing footsie and exchanging caresses under the table, all an unstated warm-up for things to come when they got home. Blood pumping, feeling giddy and foolish with lust and—in her case, at least—love, they’d headed to his car wrapped in each other, oblivious to anything but the prospect of getting naked.

As they’d passed by the mouth of a dark alleyway, shadows had detached themselves from the darkness, two in front, two behind, punks wearing slung-forward hoodies and sneers. Under other circumstances it might’ve been a really bad situation, but Romo had flashed his badge and gun, and the punks had taken off. She’d been a little surprised that he hadn’t detained them while she called for backup, especially knowing that four other cops had just left the restaurant and were close at hand. But that small oddity had soon been lost amid far bigger things, at least to her mind, in the days that followed. Things like infidelity. Like heartbreak. Like the fact that they hadn’t gone home and made love; instead, he’d dropped her off and pretended to answer a damned call from his superior at IAD.

“I went back there later,” Romo said, pulling her out of her memories and into the moment. “Back to that alley.”

He’d opened his eyes and was looking straight at her. Aside from a slight dilation of his pupils, he looked pretty normal. Had the injection worn off so quickly? She didn’t know the answer to that any more than she knew why he was suddenly determined to rehash their breakup. But by the same token, she could no more bring herself to stop him now than she’d been able to forgive him back then.

“Why?” she asked softly, beginning to realize there had been far more to that night than she’d ever begun to imagine.

“Because I was furious,” he said, his voice all but inflectionless. “Because for a moment, when they were standing around you, making their sleazy threats, I flashed back on what it’d felt like to lose Alicia, and I froze.”

Sara frowned. “You didn’t freeze. You chased them off by showing them your badge and your gun.”

His eyes went cold, reminding her all too strongly of the man he’d been back then. There was zero warmth in his tone when he said, “I didn’t go for the gun intending to wave it at them.”

“Oh.” Blood rushed through her ears, sounding like the ocean. “But—”

“I went back later,” he repeated, “because I wanted to teach those guys a lesson. I found two of them, and beat the crap out of them, nearly killed them. I was…I was completely outside myself. Didn’t recognize the thing I’d become—all that rage, all that guilt. Until then, I’d been holding it together as our relationship developed. I’d told myself that it was okay, that I could deal with the things I felt for you, because you weren’t a cop, weren’t likely to find yourself on the wrong end of a gun. But then you did, and I froze. If those punks had been more committed, that night could’ve ended very, very badly for you.”

“That night
did
end very badly for me,” she snapped. “Or have you conveniently blocked out the part where you—I’m guessing here, so correct me if I’m wrong—finished your revenge and went straight to the nearest bar, where you bought yourself a couple of shots and a waitress.”

He winced and said, “I was all messed up inside my head at that point.” It wasn’t much of an explanation, but was still more than he’d given her previously regarding the incident. “I’d never told Alicia how I felt—she died not knowing I loved her, with us not ever giving it a chance.”

Something went very still inside her. “I’m not Alicia, and you and I were giving our relationship a chance. At least I was. In retrospect, I wonder whether you ever really did.”
You never said the words,
she wanted to say, but didn’t because that was too weak, too female. She hadn’t needed the words—though they would’ve been nice. What she had needed was fidelity.

“I tried,” Romo grated, which wasn’t the same as saying that he’d loved her. “But I was starting to struggle even before that night.”

She shook her head, baffled. “Struggle with what? I thought we were great together!”

“We were, and that was the problem. The harder I fell, the more terrified I was of losing you. I had nightmares, reliving Alicia’s death over and over again, only it wasn’t Alicia, it was you.”

A half-remembered conversation suddenly clicked into place. “That was why you wanted me to go full-time over at the hospital in the pathology department, rather than sticking with the ME’s office.”

“I hated that you were anywhere near police work. I wanted to keep you safe, but I knew I couldn’t follow you every moment of every day. It wouldn’t have been healthy.”

“A great deal of this sounds unhealthy,” she observed. Leaning forward, she checked his eyes, which looked almost normal. “Is this you or the pentothal talking?” It had to be the drug, she knew. It wasn’t as if the real Romo would’ve voluntarily given up so much of himself, offering her more insight into his inner workings than she’d ever had back when they’d been a couple.

“A combination of the two, I suspect.” He rolled his head on his neck, wincing slightly, no doubt when his stitches twinged a protest. “The room’s stopped spinning, and I don’t feel stoned anymore, but the memories have stuck with me.” He paused. “I think I remember everything up to the prison break and the events surrounding it. I’ve got my parents and my childhood back, which is a huge relief. I’ve got Vegas and Alicia back, which is far less of a relief, except that it gives me a much better understanding of why, even though we’d broken up, you remained the one person I trusted with my life when I needed help.”

“Because you didn’t love me as much as you loved Alicia,” she said bitterly, finally seeing it after all this time. It wasn’t that he’d been fatally flawed as a human being, unable to stay faithful. It had been far worse than that. He had, whether consciously or unconsciously, done the one thing he knew she’d be unable to forgive. He’d wanted out of their relationship, but hadn’t had the guts to dump her. Instead, he’d forced her to dump him.

Bastard.

Crossing her arms over her abdomen, where a sharp ache had taken root, she turned partly away from him, wishing she could go to her room and lie down for a few hours. But she’d been the one to drug him. She’d see it through, no matter how badly it hurt.

“You’ve got it wrong,” he said, his voice rough with emotion. “In fact, you’ve got it entirely backward.”

“How’s that?” she asked without looking back at him. She didn’t want to see the emotion in his face, didn’t want to be reminded of the man she’d gotten to
know over the past few days, the one who’d accepted his own feelings—and hers—far more readily than the old Romo ever had. He had his memories back; he knew who he was, knew almost everything that mattered. The new Romo was gone, subsumed in the old one, or maybe by the man he’d become over the months he’d been undercover.

But the man he was now—whoever that was—wouldn’t let her avoid his eyes. He reached out, pried one of her hands loose from their defensive clench, and clasped her fingers in his. “I sabotaged our relationship because I panicked, pure and simple. I’d started to realize that what I felt for you was ten times stronger than what I’d felt for Alicia. Which meant that the fear of losing you, the terror of having something happen to you, of having to live through that again, was ten times worse, too, if not more.” He grimaced and shook his head. “I couldn’t…I couldn’t be with you, fearing every time you left that you might not come back.”

His words tugged at something wistful deep inside her, but she scowled. “So your solution was to sleep with someone else, knowing I’d dump you?”

“It wasn’t a solution. It was panic. Only it didn’t really fix anything, because even after we broke up I couldn’t stop thinking about you, worrying about you. I knew almost immediately that I’d made a huge mistake, but I also knew that it would be a long time—if ever—before you could learn to trust me again. I started seeing a shrink, started trying to fix myself before I tried to fix things with you. Then there was the prison break and the task force, and things went downhill fast.”

“You sure picked a strange way to show your affection,” she snapped. “Your investigation almost gave Proudfoot the excuse to shut down my office.” She tried not to acknowledge that the events of the past few days could very well have sealed that deal for the acting mayor. By now he might know she’d set up the meeting that had nearly killed Fax and Tucker, might even know she was harboring the target of Friday’s manhunt. Even if he didn’t know those things, there was no way she could show up at work on Monday. She’d be too much of a target.

“My official investigation moved away from the ME’s office within the first few days after al-Jihad’s prison break,” Romo said, his eyes intent on hers, losing the last of their blurriness as she watched.

“Like hell it did. You were breathing down my neck for months after that.”

“It was the simplest way to stay close to you and make sure you kept out of the case.” His fingers tightened on hers. “When you and the others went off the radar to help Chelsea and Fax that first week after the prison break, I almost lost my mind trying to find you. It…well, let’s just say it wasn’t pretty.” He paused. “I’ve made mistakes with you, I know that. But I never set out to hurt you. Please believe that, if you believe nothing else about me.”