RK02 - Guilt By Degrees (35 page)

My mind
shut down, refusing to believe what I saw. I reached out and took her hand off the steering wheel and felt for a pulse. Nothing. My heart gave a slow, heavy thump. Afraid to move her, I looked for the source of the bleeding, praying I wouldn’t find a bullet hole.

As I studied her head, her neck, her shoulders, whatever I could see, I found myself gripping her wrist, as though I could squeeze her back to life. “Bailey,” I said softly. “Bailey. Come on, come on.” Unshed tears closed my throat and my words came out in a strangled sob.

I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. Then, a sound. A low moan. The sweetest sound in the world. Bailey’s eyelids fluttered and opened. Without moving her head, she looked at me, then down at my hand, which was still wrapped like a vise around her wrist.

A croak. I leaned in closer. “Let go,” she said.

I released her wrist and she slowly sat up, groaning as she lifted her head.

“I was trying to take your pulse. I couldn’t find it.”

“’Cause you don’t know how, fool.” Bailey shook her head, then lowered it to the steering wheel with another groan.

I’d get even with her for that crack later. “Don’t move, okay, smart-ass?”

I could hear distant sirens approaching, but just in case they weren’t for us, I pulled out my cell phone and called for paramedics as I ran toward Gary’s car. It was now a crumpled mess of twisted metal, steam spewing from the hood, fluids leaking out everywhere. Bullet holes had cracked the passenger window and penetrated the door. I went around to the driver’s side and saw that the window was shattered and the car riddled with bullet holes. The air bags had deployed and filled the front seat.

“Gary!” I shouted. “Gary!”

No answer. I reached through the driver’s window and found the door handle. Underneath the air bag, I saw Gary’s face.

His eyes, wide open, stared vacantly upward. Desperate to give him air, I shoved back the air bag, but the moment I did, the blood it had been holding in streamed down the side of his neck. The source: a neat, round hole just under his jaw. I sank to the ground, too numb to scream.

I don’t know how long I sat there. I only know that at some point later, I heard the whoop of sirens and the slamming doors of ambulances and squad cars behind me. Suddenly arms were pulling me away and paramedics swarmed the car. My head swimming, I grabbed a uniformed arm, pointed to Bailey’s car, and tried to speak. The officer told me they were taking care of her and led me to a paramedic.

“Take a look at her,” he ordered.

“I’m fine,” I said, and tried to pull away. But the paramedic wasn’t having any. He sat me down and insisted on taking my vitals. Suddenly, too exhausted to argue, I submitted. When he’d removed the blood-
pressure
cuff, I asked, “Who’s taking care of Gary?” Then, without warning, I started to shake uncontrollably.

The paramedic abruptly pulled me into the ambulance and made me lie down on a gurney. “Tell me, how’s Gary? You’ve got to tell me!” I said as a surge of fear flooded my stomach with acid, making me want to retch. The paramedic wrapped a blanket around me, and I heard the crinkling of a wrapper. I felt something cold on my arm, then a swift pinch. “Gary…,” I mumbled.

The next thing I knew, I was in a bed in the emergency room and Bailey was in the bed next to me. Her head and shoulder were bandaged and she had an IV, but they’d cleaned her up and her color looked pretty good. The monitors over her bed told me her systems were in working order.

I tried to sit up, but my head began to spin. A young dark-haired doctor with a warm, sexy smile came striding in and went over to Bailey’s bed. He spoke to me over his shoulder as he examined her chart and her monitor readings.

“You okay? You might be a little dizzy after that sedative.”

I nodded toward Bailey. “Is she…?”

“She’ll be fine. Took a grazing wound to the head and a through-and-through in the shoulder area. We’ll do an MRI just to make sure, but if that comes out clean—as we expect it will—she should be good to go.”

All at once, my memory came rushing back. “What about Gary? Where is he?” I tried to sit up again.

The doctor frowned. “I don’t have a patient named Gary. But if you give me his last name, I can have someone check into it for you.”

I gave him Gary’s full name, and the doctor promised to get me some information, then left. I tried to keep myself from screaming with frustration. God knew how long it would take for someone to get back to me. I’d go find Gary myself. I was just starting to prop myself up when Eric entered with slow, tentative steps. Why was my boss here?

“Hey, Rachel.” His voice was so low it was barely audible.

“No need to whisper, Eric. They’ve pumped her full of so much stuff, she won’t wake up until next week.”

“What about you?”

I quickly gave him the condensed version, then got to what was important to me. “Have you heard anything about Gary? No one here can tell me anything.”

Eric put his hands in his pockets, then looked away.

“What? What?” I asked, agitated.

“Rachel, I’m sorry. He didn’t make it.”

I’d known, but I’d refused to accept it. I’d wanted to hear that a miracle had happened. You’d think that I, of all people, would know better. The tears came on their own, hot and silent.

They officially
pronounced Gary at 2:41 p.m.

It was a long, hideous day and night at the hospital. Bailey and I gave our statements over and over again to a parade of officers. The other investigators, who’d gone to lunch that day, were nearly suicidal with grief and guilt. They couldn’t be consoled.

Bailey’s MRI showed no internal damage, and she was cleared for release. Now I was standing outside the small hospital waiting room where Bailey was giving her last statement to the reporting officers. Head down, I wrapped my arms around my waist and circled the room, suffering over the loss of Gary and the close call I’d had with Bailey. I paced in small, tight circles, glad that Bailey wasn’t here to complain. As always, my grief had turned to anger, and my anger had turned to a need for action. Unfortunately action required a plan, and I didn’t have one. That only added to my frustration.

I was finishing my fifty-second circle when Drew rushed in. He gave me a quick hug, then held me at arm’s length and looked at me closely.

“I’m okay.”

“Where is she?” he asked, looking up and down the hallway.

“In there, finishing her statement. Should be out in a second.” Seeing his worried face, I added, “She’s fine, Drew. Really.”

His expression turned thunderous.

“When they catch that son of a bitch, I’m going to—”

At just that moment, Bailey opened the door, saving me from hearing a statement that was bound to be incriminating if we ever did catch that son of a bitch. She shook hands with the detectives and turned toward us. I’d never seen her so ragged or drained. When she saw Drew, she moved straight into his arms. He gently folded her in close, and she held on to him. Neither of them spoke for several long beats.

Drew drove us back to the Biltmore, and we immediately steered Bailey up to the room and into bed. Then I took him out to the living room and told him the whole story.

Drew leaned forward and put his head in his hands. Finally he said, “I could’ve lost both of you today.” He shook his head as though he’d been hit with a weighted glove.

“You got anything to drink around here?” he asked.

I poured him a shot of the Russian Standard Platinum, and he tossed it back.

“Does…did…Gary have a family?” Drew asked, his expression grave.

“A wife and two daughters.”

He closed his eyes. I poured us both another shot, and we downed it in one gulp.

Half an hour later, Bailey emerged from the bedroom, moving gingerly, as though her head might fall off if she made any sudden moves. She cast a longing look at the bottle of vodka.

“Don’t even think about it,” Drew said.

Bailey rolled her eyes, but she didn’t argue. Drew settled her in on the couch. “He had to be after that bag,” she said. “How’d he know we had it?”

I’d given the question a lot of thought while I was waiting for Bailey in the hospital. “The woman. Remember that young woman in the reception area? She was on the cell phone when we said good-bye to Teresa. I think she was working with the guy who was driving the car.”

Bailey nodded. “So he was going to take Gary out and then come after us.”

We all fell silent. The man had succeeded with half the plan.

“But, if you ask me, the move was kind of amateurish,” I said.

Drew shook his head. “He may not be Blackwater, but it was good enough.”

His words brought us up short, and we all fell silent. Then I heard a faint beeping sound. It seemed to be coming from my purse. It startled me at first, but then I remembered it was the signal of an unretrieved message. Toni’s message. I never did listen to it. I meant to just call her—tell her what had happened—but I pressed the voice-mail button without thinking. What I heard was the quintessential last straw.

“What’s wrong?” Bailey asked.

“The press got ahold of Simon’s case. Lilah’s photo was in today’s paper—”

“Are you friggin’ kidding me?” Bailey said, her voice cracking with fatigue.

Drew spotted the newspaper that’d been left on the table in the foyer that morning and read us the brief story, then we all looked at the photograph.

“They’ve got to be in panic mode after what happened today, and now her picture’s in the paper too,” I said. “Lilah’s going to run.”

“I don’t know,” Bailey replied. “The story’s the bigger problem. That photo…there isn’t much detail. She’s in dark glasses, you can’t see that much of her. I wouldn’t count on her taking a powder just yet. She wants that evidence.”

I hoped Bailey was right. I wanted to find her and personally choke her to death. But at the moment, my eyelids felt as heavy as concrete. I yawned and started a chain reaction that ended with Drew doing a jaw-splitting rendition that almost managed to make us laugh. Almost. Exhausted on every level, we decided to call it a night. I left Drew and Bailey to say their good-byes in privacy and took myself, and the bottle of Russian Standard Platinum, to bed.

In the
next few days, Bailey and I had lots of reporting and updating to do with our own, and each other’s, bureaucracies. How it happened, why it happened, what we were doing in that place. I must’ve repeated the same information about a hundred times.

But there was one thing Bailey and I had agreed to keep to ourselves: the evidence we’d gotten from Diane Nguyen.

We’d talked about it the following morning.

These people—Lilah’s minions—might not be pros, but they weren’t stupid. They’d know that once the evidence left our hands, there was no point in killing either of us, and they’d disappear. Now that Simon’s case had gone public—and the shoot-out had ensured it got plenty of coverage—they’d expect to see some mention of the evidence we’d found at the women’s shelter. If we kept it all quiet, there was a chance they’d think that it wasn’t
the
evidence of Tran’s hit-and-run. Or that it
was,
and we didn’t realize what we had. Either way, it might encourage them to stick around, which would buy us time to come up with a plan to find Lilah and her attack dogs and put them down before they got us.

In the meantime, I was hell-bent on finding out who had leaked Simon’s story to the press. It may’ve been irrational—maybe I just needed someone to blame for the tragedy of Gary’s death—but I believed that the story coming out had set Lilah off. True, I’d been attacked previously, but it clearly wasn’t meant to be lethal. The attack in Venice, on the other hand, was intended to be nothing else. I had to know who to blame. Then I’d figure out what to do to that filthy cretin.

At my insistence, Bailey worked her office while I worked mine. Eric had no idea who might’ve leaked and he hadn’t seen Melia talking to any reporters. When I asked her directly, she denied it with a look sour enough to tell me she wished she’d had the information to give and was pissed at having been left out of the loop to begin with. Toni’d carefully asked around, but she too had come up empty. After a few days, Bailey admitted defeat.

I refused to give up.

I continued to dig around for clues, but ultimately the mystery was solved by a more direct source. I got a call from Miles Rykoff, a reporter for the
Times.
Now that the case was public, so was my involvement. He wanted an exclusive, or at least a heads-up when something big was going to break. I saw my chance.

“Tell you what,” I said. “I’m not allowed to promise exclusives, but you’ll be my first call on everything that happens in this case—”

Miles sighed. “What do you want?”

“The name of the person who leaked the story.”

A long silence told me he knew.

“No name, no favors,” I said.

“You never heard this from me—”

“Duh, Miles.” The disclaimer was expected. His answer wasn’t.

“Brandon Averill.”

“That despicable piece of dung,” Bailey said. “But it figures, doesn’t it?”

I nodded, still bitter. I hadn’t yet figured out how I’d exact revenge, but I would eventually. I wanted to make sure I hit him where it would hurt the most.

Bailey refilled our glasses with our latest discovery: Adastra Proximus Pinot Noir.

In part to celebrate the revelation that Brandon Averill was the leak—and in part just to take a needed break—we’d decided to hit Checkers for dinner.

“But so totally in character.” I sipped the wine appreciatively.

“What’re you planning?”

“Don’t know yet.” There was a special place in hell for bottom-feeding assholes like Brandon, but I didn’t want to trust this payback to otherworldly powers. This one was mine. But I wouldn’t act in haste. I’d wait and keep my eyes open for the right opportunity. I knew it’d come eventually.

“Isn’t this the scene of the crime?” Bailey asked. “Where you and Daniel had your romantic dinner.”

“It wasn’t romantic,” I protested. “It was an accident.”

“Did you know that Daniel’s been talking about hanging out his shingle again? Wants to get back to having his own practice. Might even buy that condo he’s been renting downtown.”

“Who’s your source?” I asked.

“Toni, by way of J.D.,” Bailey said.

The judge was about as solid a source as you could get.

“That’s huge for him,” I said, trying to act nonchalant.

“Maybe not just for him,” Bailey remarked.

I pretended indifference, but the news rocked me. Bailey was looking at me shrewdly. My effort to appear blasé had not convinced her.

“So what’re you going to do?” she asked.

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

And I really didn’t.