He closed his eyes, exhausted from the effort to remember. There was more, he knew, but he needed a rest before he pushed any harder at a brain that felt like mush.
Whatever had happened next must have included a pretty hard hit to his head. He started to raise his right hand to his head only to see the IV in it with a unit of blood running wide open into him. Must have bled some.
Using his left hand he felt around his head and found a large surgical dressing. That’s why his head hurt. Holy hell, the dressing covered a good part of his head. The wound must have been — must be — huge.
His thigh hurt, too. Hell, everything hurt. He should give in and slip back into sleep. But there was something hiding just out of reach at the edges of his mind that he knew he wanted to remember. But what? What?
Danny. That was it. Danny had been there. He’d been dazed by the fall, slipping in and out of semi-consciousness when he heard her voice. But he couldn’t understand what she was saying. Why? Why couldn’t he … oh, she wasn’t speaking English. What was she saying?
He’d have to figure that out later. He had worked his brain as much as he possibly could. All he knew was he and Kaylea had been there but now he wasn’t, thanks to Danny. And Sam. Sam had been there too.
God, all these bits and pieces. Nothing solid to hang on to. Only fragments. It was like being in the hospital after the IED.
Holy hell, he couldn’t go there again. Not for anything. He had to hang on to something more pleasant, a better memory.
Danny. Thinking about Danny was better. He could see her leaning over him, her fingers streaked with blood. She put her hand up to his face and hushed him. Then she went on speaking. It was Hebrew. That’s it. She was speaking Hebrew.
She looked so worried. Maybe he was worse off than he thought. No, his father had been here and told him he was okay. Just lost some blood from the scalp wound. Dozens and dozens of stitches to close it up.
Why was Danny worried, then? If only he could believe she was worried about him.
Good God, there she was. He could see her standing at the door of his hospital room. She couldn’t be real. He must be able to conjure her up by thinking about her. Her blouse and trousers were spotted with something. Blood? No matter. She was beautiful. Always so beautiful.
• • •
Jake did look better. Danny could see that even from the doorway. All the blood had been washed off him and the gray pallor that had convinced them all he was dead had been wiped away by a transfusion. Satisfied that he really was all right, she thought she could leave quietly. But he seemed to have seen her. He didn’t say anything, though. Only stared at her. It was unnerving.
She broke the silence. “Jake? Are you okay?”
His head jerked back, as if he was startled. “Danny? Is that really you? You’re here?”
“Yeah, Sam and I came over as soon as the crime scene guys got to my house. I wanted to see how you … how Kaylea was.” She took a step into the room and stopped.
“She’s here, too? How is she?”
“Good. She’s good. They checked her over and she’s fine. As soon as she signs her discharge, we’ll leave.”
“You won’t be going home right away, I guess.”
“No, I thought I’d have someone come in and get your blood off my kitchen floor before I went back to living there.”
He tried to pull himself upright in bed but she could see it was a struggle. “If I need this unit of blood and all this bandaging on my head, I must have left a mess.”
“What the hell happened, Jake, that you ended up bleeding all over the floor?”
“I’m a little fuzzy on the details. I think I saw a chance to get the weapon away from Barbara. We struggled. I fell. Must have hit my head.”
Danny was quiet for a few moments, feeling the control she’d had over her emotions begin to slip away as her frustration about what had happened began to morph into anger. She didn’t want Jake to see that she had any emotion attached to him but she had a feeling her tense shoulders and balled up fists were a dead giveaway even before she spoke.
“You know, Jake,” she began, trying to control her voice, “you’re a piece of work. You lecture people who know what they’re doing about how they shouldn’t be taking risks, then turn around and do something stupid like try to wrestle a weapon away from a killer when you’re not trained to do anything like that.”
He seemed taken aback by her comment. “I wouldn’t say I didn’t know what I was doing.”
“Oh, right. I forgot. The Guard trains its docs in hand-to-hand combat.”
“Of course they don’t but I know how to deal with weapons.”
Danny jammed her hands into her trouser pockets so she didn’t give in to the impulse to wrap them around his neck. “Did it occur to you what could have happened if she’d had the presence of mind to keep pulling the trigger?”
She was sure from the look on his face that he hadn’t but he wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of saying so. However, the silence that greeted her question gave her the answer.
“Do you know what would have happened to you, to Kaylea? Hell, to my kitchen? My God, Jake, you could have been … ” She stopped and glared at him.
He squirmed in the bed, avoiding her eyes, picking at the sheet, looking more uncomfortable than he had when she walked in. “Well, she didn’t do that,” he finally said. “And as soon as I fell, I pretended to be unconscious. Then she said something that made me think she thought I was dead so I lay still and let her think that.”
“Pretending you were dead was the only smart thing you did all day. You took a stupid risk by trying to disarm her. Hell, you took a stupid risk by going to my house. You should have called me. Or if you didn’t want to deal with me, you should have called Sam.” By this time, Danny was pacing the floor in the room, running her hands over her face in frustration.
He seemed to want to say something but she didn’t let him. It felt so good to unload all her frustration. “Didn’t it seem odd to you that Barbara Black told you that Kaylea called the clinic? If she had been in trouble don’t you think Kaylea would have called your cell phone? Or called me? The cop? The person she was living with?” She turned her furious gaze to him. “And how the hell did you know where she was, anyway?”
Before he could answer, she waved him off. “Never mind. I don’t think I want to know. This is too fucked up for me to even … ”
A nurse stuck her head in the door. “Is everything all right in here? It’s getting a little loud.”
Jake said, “It’s okay, nurse. Detective Hartmann is asking me some questions about what happened. I’m afraid she’s not happy about some of my answers.”
“Well, if you could keep it down, please. You’re disturbing the patients in the next room.”
“We’ll try,” Jake said, flashing his most charming smile at her.
When the nurse had left, Jake took the opportunity to sneak in a response, “I found out where Kaylea was from Bob Aronson. He told me when I was making rounds at the camp. He thought I’d know how she was. She’d told him not to come to your place because she was afraid he’d lead the killer there.”
“So, instead you did.”
“Not on purpose. For God’s sake, Danny, cut me some slack here. I thought I was responding to a request for my help. That’s what I do.”
Danny finally stopped pacing and stood next to his bed, looking him straight in the eye. “Yeah, you respond to calls for help. That’s what you do. Like I do.” She ran her hand over her face again. “This is old ground. I didn’t mean to get into this discussion now. I’m really only here to see for myself that you’re okay, like your dad said. I’m glad you are. I better go and see to Kaylea.” Without saying good-bye she walked to the door.
Jake put out his hand to her. “Danny, wait. Can’t we talk?”
But she ignored him and left the room.
Danny took Kaylea from the hospital to the Marriot, where they stayed for three days until a company that specialized in cleaning up crime scenes got Danny’s kitchen cleaner than it had been when she moved in. Kaylea didn’t move back home with her, however. Social services found her a spot on the east side, away from any of the places with bad memories, and she settled into a small but pleasantly furnished apartment.
It was hard for Danny to move back into her house, with or without Kaylea. She couldn’t face cooking in the kitchen. No matter how clean it was, she saw Jake’s blood on the counter and floor every time she went in there. Sometimes even swore she could smell it. So for the first few nights she was back in her house, she brought take-out home with her and ate in the dining room.
Finally she decided to put on her big girl panties and cook herself a steak dinner. Wrong choice of entrée. The hunk of meat she’d spent way too much money on ended up in the garbage along with the wrapping and packaging that had altogether too much blood in it to make her comfortable.
She’d never given much thought to being a vegetarian but if this kept up she’d be one soon. A vegetarian who lived on take-out.
It didn’t help that she was pissed off at herself for blowing up at Jake in his hospital room. What the hell kind of former lover … girlfriend … whatever … was she? He’d been shot and injured and she lit into him, calling him an idiot or worse. It didn’t escape her notice that he’d been so out of it he didn’t offer much of a defense but lay there in a very un-Jake-like manner.
Of course she hadn’t heard from him since he got out. She knew he’d been discharged, because she’d checked. He’d gone home before she’d moved back to her house. Some small part of her hoped he’d call but most of her understood that, no matter what had happened in wrapping up the case, he was probably angry about how it had ended between them.
Then she talked to the Bureau’s expert on PTSD about both Jake and her reaction to the recent events at her house. It made her feel worse. He explained that Jake’s actions in Forest Park were to be expected from someone who had full-blown PTSD, as Jake apparently had. The counselor pointed out to Danny that her reaction to what happened in her house was a small taste of the same response. She might not have nightmares and flashbacks but she did have an emotional reaction to what had happened that played out after the event. It was not out of the ordinary.
That night, after talking to the company shrink, she sat eating her take-out Pad Thai, trying to face the fact that she was responsible for the huge hole in her life where her relationship — yes, dammit, they’d had a
relationship
— with Jake had been. She stared up from the hole she’d gotten into but didn’t know if she could climb out of it and walk back from what she’d done.
The only thing that was going well was work. As Sam had predicted, Lieutenant Angel was over the moon happy with how she had handled things. L.T., as his detectives called him, was known for his calm, cool, and calculated manner with everyone from his subordinates and the press to the Chief and the Mayor. But when Danny reported for work after Barbara Black had been taken into custody, L.T. just about kissed her. He insisted she do a presser with him, took her to the Mayor’s office for an official photo op with the Chief, and submitted her name for another commendation.
Danny was more interested in what they were learning from Barbara Black.
The former clinic administrator described what she’d been doing as acting as an angel of mercy to free VMSC patients with PTSD of their troubles. She’d been visiting the camps at night with boxes of food, which was how the East States Medical Supplies cardboard had gotten to the camps. The food was heavily dosed with medications like digoxin, so that the men she gave the food to, patients from the clinic, would appear to have heart attacks and die. She also added methanol to their cheap booze so if the digoxin didn’t work, they would succumb to the poison. She claimed credit for a dozen deaths, none of which had been thought to be anything other than natural.
The problem arose when Jim Branson saw her one night. She was dressed in her black hooded sweatshirt and black pants but she was afraid he had recognized her. Then a few days later, at the clinic, he said something that made her sure he had. He made a joke about her food making some of the guys sick so they’d have to come into the clinic. He said that he would watch out for her from now on. She didn’t think it was funny.
He had it wrong. She wasn’t making anyone sick so they came into the clinic; she was trying to kill them so they wouldn’t be there anymore. And he didn’t seem to make the connection between the dozen deaths she’d caused and what she was doing. However, she decided to get rid of him in case he finally put two and two together. She didn’t think she could get to him as she had her other victims and decided to upgrade to a gun. She bought one and used the two drive-bys as target practice before killing Jim. It turned out so well, she abandoned the poisoned food and booze and continued with the gun.
Nothing could shake her conviction that she was doing these men a favor by killing them, releasing them, she said, from their world of pain and suffering and thereby also ridding the clinic of the PTSD patients Jake had brought in against her wishes so she could regain control of her own private kingdom. She believed she should be rewarded, not punished.
They scheduled psychiatric evaluations.
• • •
Once Danny had suffered through being the subject of a couple news cycles, things got back to a more normal rhythm. She threw herself into her job with a vengeance. She never got home before nine and most nights was in bed by ten, reading. She didn’t take time to go out for lunch and turned down yet another invitation from Amanda and Sam to have dinner with them. If she could have, she’d have moved into Central Precinct to avoid going home to her house that was still empty of everything but bad memories.
On Friday, a week after she’d moved back into her house, she was trying to avoid thinking about the empty weekend ahead by filling the afternoon with as much work as possible. She’d made lists of the names and addresses of the witnesses in the new case she and Sam had caught and talked her partner into starting the interviews that afternoon.