In Pursuit of Justice (33 page)

From the corner of her eye, she checked the figures in the street. Sloan, blood streaking her face and arms, was on her knees above the supine body of an unconscious blond woman Rebecca did not recognize. She couldn’t tell how badly either was injured, and she couldn’t allow her concern to divert her mind from more important tasks—ensuring that there were no further threats remaining in the immediate area and preserving any evidence of the crime.

Catherine clambered over the wreck after her, and Rebecca cursed. “Keep down at least,” the detective barked, blocking the three women from the street as best she could with her body while she scoured the windows in the buildings on both sides of them, searching for any kind of movement behind the many darkened windows. She saw nothing suspicious, but it was impossible for her to tell if any of the people in the densely packed buildings might represent a danger. Curious onlookers were approaching from down the block, but fortunately there were no vehicles to be diverted yet. She glanced down once more and saw a widening pool of blood beneath the blond’s head.

“Catherine, keep them right there until backup arrives.”

“Don’t worry,” Catherine said grimly after one quick look. “No one is moving her without a backboard.”

Mitchell and Jason burst from the building. “Oh God,” Jason gasped, stopping in his tracks and staring in horror.

Rebecca, turning at the sound, ordered, “Mitchell, secure the scene. Backup is on the way. I’ll call for the crime scene unit and find out where the fuck the ambulances are. This was a hit-and-run at least.”

“Right,” Mitchell responded crisply, her face tight with shock but her voice strong as she clipped her badge to the waistband of her jeans. After glancing once at the badly smashed car, she asked in a quiet voice only Rebecca could hear, “Intentional?”

“We have to assume so, until proven otherwise,” Rebecca affirmed, noting with approval Mitchell’s quick, intelligent assessment. “Keep your eyes open. Just because this was a vehicle hit doesn’t mean there won’t be someone in the crowd or on a rooftop with a gun. I’ll call Watts down to canvass with you.”

“I’m on it.” Mitchell headed off in the direction of a rapidly approaching group of civilians.

“Jason,” Rebecca added brusquely, “you get back inside.”

Unsurprisingly, he ignored her and made his way to Sloan.

“Fuck,” Rebecca muttered in surrender and phoned Watts.

Sloan, still on her knees, was curled protectively over Michael’s motionless form. She gripped her lover’s limp hand, a world of anguish on her face. “Please, please…call an ambulance…” she implored to no one in particular, her eyes fixed on Michael’s pale face. “Oh, Jesus, please…Michael, baby…”

“Sloan,” Catherine said gently, carefully placing her hand on the dark-haired woman’s shoulder. “I need to be where you are so I can evaluate her.” The injured woman lay nearly under a parked car and Catherine couldn’t get room to assess her status.
So this is Michael.

“No.” The sound was choked, agonized. Sloan looked up into Catherine’s face, eyes unfocused, and insisted desperately, “No. I’m not leaving her.”

“No, of course you’re not,” Catherine assured quietly. “Just let me close enough to help her.”

Sloan seemed not to have heard, but leaned closer to the unconscious woman, whispering in a choked voice, “Baby, it’s me. It’s okay. It’s going to be okay. Please, baby…ohgodgod…”

Jason knelt next to his friend. “Sloan—let Catherine help Michael. Just move back a little bit. You don’t have to leave her.”

Sloan looked at him as if she didn’t recognize him; then she blinked, and her eyes seemed to clear for an instant. “It was supposed to have been me, Jason. It’s my car. She was driving…”

“It’s okay. We’ll worry about it later.” His voice trembled on the words.

Mutely, Sloan shifted a fraction, tenaciously gripping Michael’s right hand. Catherine gently displaced her further until she could lean down and place her fingers on the injured woman’s neck, searching for a pulse.

Automatically, as often happened when examining a patient no matter whether physically or psychologically, Catherine observed many things at once, assimilating impressions almost unconsciously. While her fingers registered the faint, thready beat of blood through the artery she probed, her mind noted how achingly beautiful the injured woman was. The perfect unmarred features, fit for an artist’s canvas and incongruously free of any sign of pain, as if she were only peacefully slumbering. The left hand lying gently between her breasts, a heavy platinum band glinting in the halo of light from the streetlights overhead. The lover bending to her, devotion etched in every line of her hauntingly handsome face. Only the maroon circle of blood, rapidly darkening to black, cast a nightmare pall over the ethereal tableau.

Catherine wrenched her gaze from Michael’s face. Quietly, she murmured to Sloan, whose shallow, tortured breathing spoke of unbearable grief. “Listen to me. She’s alive. That’s all that matters. We’ll have her in the hospital in a few minutes where she can be taken care of. Do you hear me? Sloan?”

Sloan coughed and tried to catch her breath. She couldn’t think; she couldn’t feel. She wasn’t even certain her heart was beating. All she could sense was terror. “Please…please don’t let her die.” She looked at Catherine, her eyes fathomless pools of anguish. In a voice beyond torment, she repeated, “Please…I can’t…without her…I can’t…”

Catherine couldn’t offer the one promise Sloan begged for, so she said nothing. She placed the fingers of one hand beneath Michael’s chin, lifted enough to keep her airway open, and carefully slipped a folded handkerchief, which Jason had supplied, behind her head to staunch the flow of blood from a large open wound. Rebecca paced back and forth in front of them, one eye on the street, the other on them, snapping orders into her cell phone. Mitchell, amazingly, had found crime scene tape somewhere and was cordoning off the street while instructing gawkers to stay back.

In the distance, sirens approached.

*

An hour later, Rebecca walked into the brightly lit trauma unit waiting room where an anxious group had gathered. Catherine rose to meet her, her green eyes dark with concern.

“Any word?” Rebecca asked in a low voice, running one hand down Catherine’s arm in lieu of a kiss.

Catherine shook her head slightly, but some of the tension left her chest at the sight of her lover. The waiting room, the waiting, Sloan’s torment—all of it brought back too many images still too fresh. Not long ago, it had been Rebecca. Rebecca lying so still, so pale, bleeding…so much bloo—

“Hey,” Rebecca said softly, alarmed by the faint trembling she felt beneath her fingertips. “You okay?”

“Yes,” Catherine said hoarsely, forcing the memories back behind barriers still too fragile to contain them. “No word yet. I’ve been doing what I can to get updates, but because it’s Saturday night, it’s a madhouse in there. All I know is that she’s still being evaluated.”

Rebecca nodded, looking past Catherine to the other occupants of the cramped windowless space that might have been any of a dozen such hospital rooms she’d waited in during the course of her career. She concentrated on deflecting the pain that filled the air, needing to keep her distance so she could work. “Who’s the redhead?” she asked, remarking on the woman in the blue print shirt and chinos sitting with one arm wrapped protectively around Sloan’s waist.

“Sarah Martin,” Catherine replied, following her gaze. “Jason’s partner…and Sloan’s best friend, apparently.”

“Huh,” Rebecca remarked with interest.
Now I’ll bet that’s a story.

“What’s happening back at Sloan’s?” Catherine asked, needing to think about something, anything, other than this nightmare.

“I finally got Watts out of bed, and he and Mitchell are running the scene. They’re canvassing the neighborhood, interviewing anyone who was around. Or anyone who will
admit
to being around. There’s a tavern on the corner, and they’ll need to talk to everyone they can chase down who was there. That’ll most likely take all night and a good part of tomorrow. Flanagan’s team showed up; they’re getting the crime scene photos, analyzing the impact patterns, looking for identifying tire treads. The usual. Flanagan’s fast, but it will still be at least a day or so before she has anything concrete. This kind of crime leaves a ton of physical evidence to sort through.”

Neither of them laughed at the irony of that statement.

“Was it intentional?” Catherine asked quietly, because she had to know. She had to know how close death had come this time.

Rebecca hesitated, then exhaled raggedly. “Looks like it, yeah. Someone was expecting Sloan to come back and had set it up so she’d have to get out of the car. Obviously, it didn’t go down the way they planned, because Michael was driving.”

“Why Sloan?” Catherine asked carefully, fighting to ignore the churning in her stomach. “Why not…you?”

“What?” Rebecca’s eyes shot to Catherine’s, instantly concerned. “It wasn’t me. It’s not
going
to be me.”

They both knew there was no way to guarantee that, but it wasn’t the time to discuss something they couldn’t change.

“Still, why Sloan?”

“More importantly,” Rebecca said darkly, “why
now
?” Although she hated to do it, she needed to find out. “I have to interview her.”

“Oh, Rebecca,” Catherine murmured. “She’s so vulnerable right now. Can’t it wait?”

“This was attempted murder.” Rebecca heard the censure in her lover’s tone, and it hurt, but nothing showed in her face. “No, it can’t wait.”

Catherine watched her walk away, wishing she could take back the words. She of all people should know what it cost Rebecca to do the job she did. If the image of Sloan’s agony hadn’t been so fresh in her memory, she would have remembered that.

*

Rebecca set a cup of weak vending-room coffee in front of Sloan, then walked around the small table and sat down across from her. They were alone in an unadorned, harshly lit consulting room down the hall from the trauma waiting area. “How you doing?”

The other woman shuddered as if with a sudden chill, then met Rebecca’s gaze with eyes that were slightly dazed. “If I could just see her…”

“Catherine’s working on that right now. She’ll come and get us if there’s any word.”

“I can’t believe this is happening.” Sloan passed a hand over her face. “One minute we were just talking, laughing about making lo—” Her voice caught. “Oh, Christ…I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“Sloan,” Rebecca said gently, “I need your help.”

Violet eyes gone nearly black with pain flicked to hers, caught, then held on. “I’m so fucking…scared, you know?”

“Yeah…I know.” She wanted to touch her, because she could feel the agony radiate from her skin, but sympathy wasn’t going to help find who had done this. “Michael needs your help, too.”

“No one knew I was going to the airport,” Sloan said lifelessly, as if anticipating Rebecca’s questions. “Well, Jason knew, of course. But he was the only one.”

Rebecca said nothing, preferring to let Sloan tell it in her own way. The security consultant wasn’t a suspect to be interrogated, but a witness, and a traumatized one at that. Her recollection of the event would be distorted by grief and fear and the mind’s natural desire to block out the things too terrible to contemplate, but fortunately, she was also a trained investigator. Instinctively, she would know what they needed to do and the things that Rebecca needed to know.

“Obviously,” Sloan continued in a weary voice, “someone set it up so I’d have to get out of the car to move the cart, and they were waiting for me. I can’t tell you exactly what happened next, because I didn’t
see
anything. It was over in a few seconds, and for most of that time, the Porsche was moving from the impact. I’d already unbelted, and I was getting tossed around pretty good.” As she spoke, she unconsciously twisted the band on her ring finger, something Rebecca had never seen her do before. Rivulets of sweat ran down her face, despite the fact that the room was cool.

“What about after you got out of the car?” Rebecca asked quietly. “Did you see anything then?”

Again, Sloan shivered. “All I was thinking about was Michael. By the time I got out of the car and into the street, all I could
see
was Michael…she was lying on the pavement, and she wasn’t moving…” Her voice trailed off, and she closed her eyes. “Sorry,” she whispered.

Rebecca waited. She knew very well that Sloan was reliving those few terrifying seconds, seeing and feeling it all over again. After a minute, as kindly as she could, the detective probed, “Did you see the taillights of the vehicle? The license plate?”