Saving Grace (Serve and Protect Series)

Saving Grace

Copyright © 2010 Norah Wilson

Published by Norah Wilson

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, establishments, organizations, or locations are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and are not to be construed as real. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

This book contains content that may not be suitable for young readers (under 18).

Cover by Kim Killion, Hot Damn Designs

Formatting by Michael Hale, Hale Author Services

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Thank You

Other Works

About the Author

Protecting Paige (Preview)

B
EING DRUNK SLOWED
R
AY
Morgan’s reaction time. The telephone managed a full ring before he snatched the receiver.

“Grace?” To his own ears, his voice sounded like someone else’s.

A second’s silence, then a man’s voice. “That you, Razor?”

Ray sagged back into the depths of the couch. John Quigley, from the station.

Not Grace after all. Never again Grace.

“Yeah, it’s me.” Ray dragged a hand over his face. “’Fraid I’m no good to you tonight, though, Quigg.”

Another pause. “You okay, Ray?”

“Sure. Been keeping company with Jim Beam, is all.” Ray’s lips twisted at his own wit. Okay, so maybe he wasn’t that witty, but it was either laugh or cry. “S’okay, though. I’m not catching tonight anyway. Hallett is.”

“Just a sec, Ray.”

Quigg must have covered the mouthpiece, because Ray could hear muffled conversation in the background.

“Okay, I’m back,” Quigley said.

“I was sayin’ to call Gord Hallett. He’s your man tonight.”

“I don’t need a detective, Ray. I was looking for you.”

“Huh? You’re looking for me at, what...?” He squinted across the room at the glow of the VCR’s digital clock. Grace’s VCR. She hadn’t slowed down long enough to take anything.

What had he been saying? Oh, yeah, the time. “...eleven o’clock at night?”

“It’s Grace.”

At the mention of his wife’s name, Ray felt the hollowness in his gut open up again, wide and bottomless as ever. Guess the bourbon hadn’t filled it after all.

Leave it to Grace to get stopped on her way out of town, in her red Mustang the boys in Patrol had come to know so well. Had she explained why her foot was so heavy tonight? His grip on the phone tightened. Had she told the uniform‌—‌a guy Ray would have to face every day for the next ten years‌—‌that she was rushing off to meet her lover and couldn’t spare the horses?

Her
lover
.

“You got her downtown?” he asked evenly.

“Downtown? Hell, no. They took her to‌—”

“’Cause you can keep her. You hear me, Quigg? I don’t care.”

“Dammit, Ray, listen to me. She’s been in an accident.”

Ray shot to his feet, dragging the telephone off the table. It hit the floor with a crash, but the connection survived. “What happened?”

“She missed a bend on Route 7, rolled her vehicle.”

He felt his stomach squeeze. “Is she hurt bad?”

“Hard to say. By the time I got there, they were already loading her into the bus. But she didn’t look too bad, considering she rolled that puppy like the Marlboro man rolls a cigarette. Paramedic said he thought she might have lost consciousness for a bit, but she seemed pretty with-it to me.”

Wait a minute, Quigg was off duty. Why’d they call Quigg?

Unless Grace was hurt so bad they thought his best friend should break the news.

Ray gripped the receiver so hard now his fingers hurt. “Why’d they call you?”

“Nobody called me. Suz and I were on our way home from visiting friends when we came on the scene. I stopped to see if our Mountie friends could use a hand. When I saw it was Grace, I offered to make the call.”

Okay, relax, man. Breathe. Maybe it wasn’t that bad.
But she’d rolled the car
.

Pressing a thumb and forefinger to his closed eyelids, he pushed back the images from every bad wreck he’d seen in his twelve years on the force.

“They taking her to the Regional?”

“She’s probably there already.”

“I’ll be there in‌—” Ah, hell, the booze.
Morgan, you idiot.
“Quigg, I’m in no shape to drive. Can you send a car?”

“Way ahead of you, buddy. Stevie B will be there in about four minutes.”

Four hours later, Ray sat across the desk from Dr. Lawrence Greenfield, the neurologist who’d just finished Grace’s workup.

The six cups of coffee he’d downed had sobered him up, but his stomach lining felt like he’d been drinking battery acid.

“So she’s going to be okay?” Ray had been through such a wild range of emotions in the five hours since Grace had dropped her bombshell, he didn’t know how he felt about this news. Christ, he didn’t even know how he was
supposed
to feel. He eyed the doctor, who looked way too young to be fooling around with anyone’s grey matter. “She’ll walk away with no real injury?”

“I wouldn’t go that far. At least not yet. She did suffer a Grade Three concussion.” Dr. Greenfield leaned forward in his chair, steepling his hands. “Brain injury is more of a process than an event, Detective. It can escalate over as much as seventy-two hours, so we’ll have to wait and watch for the next little while. What I
can
tell you is she has no focal injury we can pinpoint with conventional imaging.”

“Focal injury?”

“No concentrated damage in any one area. The scans were clean. On the other hand, any time a patient loses consciousness, we have to be suspicious.”

“What do you mean, suspicious?”

“She could have a diffuse injury, where the pathology is spread throughout the brain, rather than focused in a specific spot. We’ll have to follow her for a while to rule out more subtle brain injury.”

Ray slouched back in his chair, kicking a leg out carelessly. “She’s conscious now?”

“Yes. And anxious to see you.”

Ray rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “Then I think I’d go back and look at those scans again, Doc.”

“I’m sorry?”

“She can’t possibly want to see me.” He congratulated himself on how matter-of-fact he sounded. “She left me tonight. She was on her way to join her lover when she had her accident.”

Dr. Greenfield blinked. “She told me she was coming home from an interview with a man who raises miniature horses, and that you’d be worried that she was late.”

The pony interview? “Doc, that interview was a week ago. The story ran on Monday.”

“I see.” Dr. Greenfield leaned back. “Well, this puts things in rather a different light.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying we could be looking at a retrograde amnesia.”

Amnesia
? Oh, Christ, he was in a bad novel now. “But you said she’d escaped injury.”

“Amnesia can accompany any loss of consciousness, however brief, although I thought we’d ruled it out.” Greenfield removed his glasses and polished them. “She identified the date and day.”

“Couldn’t she have picked that up from the EMTs or the hospital staff?”

“Absolutely. Amnesia victims can be very good at deducing such things from clues gleaned after the accident. But she correctly answered a whole host of other questions for me, including the results of Tuesday’s municipal election.”

Ray digested this information. “Is it possible she remembers some things, but not others?”

“Oh, yes. In fact, it’s quite probable.” Dr. Greenfield replaced his glasses. “Amnesia can leave holes in the memory, with no predicting where those holes will appear. The location of the gaps can be as random as the holes in Swiss cheese. In fact, we call it Swiss cheese memory.”

Terrific. Freaking wonderful. “So she might remember the election results, but not the fact that she’s taken a lover?”

“I suppose it’s possible.”

To his credit, Greenfield’s gaze remained steady, but Ray could read his eyes. Faint embarrassment, carefully masked empathy for the cuckolded husband.

“Or she may not have forgotten Romeo at all, right, Doc?” he rasped. “Just the fact that she told me about him.”

“That’s also a possibility,” the neurologist conceded. “Whatever the case, Detective, I can vouch for the fact that she seems genuinely anxious to see you. She’s very much in need of some sympathy and support.”

Ray made no comment, keeping his face carefully blank.

“I should add that new memories are especially vulnerable, since it takes a few days for your brain to move them into permanent memory.” Dr. Greenfield hunched forward again. “Do you use a computer, Mr. Morgan?”

Ray struggled to follow. “Of course I do. Who doesn’t?”

“Well, to make a very crude analogy, fresh events, whatever might have happened in the last couple of days, are to your brain what random-access memory, or RAM, is to your computer. If the computer unexpectedly loses power before a bit of data gets stored on the hard drive, it’s lost. You can boot up again, but whatever was in the RAM has been wiped out. Thus, with any loss of consciousness, it’s possible to lose memories that were in transition.”

Great. She’d probably forgotten she’d dumped him.

Ray stood. “Well, no time like the present, is there, Doc? Let’s go see my darling wife.”

Dr. Greenfield’s eyes widened. “Surely you don’t plan to tell her ... I mean, you won’t‌—”

“Won’t what? Suggest she call her boyfriend so she can cry on his shoulder instead?” Ray drew himself up, growing in height and girth, and let his expression go flat in the way he knew inspired fear.
Bad cop to badder cop.
“Why shouldn’t I? She chose
him
.”

Dr. Greenfield looked singularly unintimidated, no doubt because he’d already seen the raw edge of Ray’s anguish.

Damn you, Grace, how could you do this to me?

“The fact remains that she seems to need
you
right now. She’s quite distraught. The last thing she needs is to be upset any further. If a diagnosis of retrograde amnesia is confirmed, I’d like to give her a chance to recover her memories on her own.” Dr. Greenfield’s intense gaze bored into Ray. “Can I have your cooperation on that point?”