Rx Missing (Decorah Security Series, Book #10): A Paranormal Romantic Suspense Novel (9 page)

That’s what I usually say—so I don’t have to explain the rest of it. Really, she’s still alive. Well, her body is alive. She’s in a vegetative state.” She stopped talking abruptly, fighting the tears blurring her vision.

“That’s rough,” Mack said, stroking his hand up her arm.

“Uh huh,” she answered, still struggling to get her emotions under control.

“I guess your family is rich,” he said.

Her head jerked up. “Why do you think so?”

“You can afford to keep her in a hospital bed. That has to take money.”

She nodded. “My parents are well off, but not exactly rich. Dad’s set up a special trust fund to take care of Shelly.”

“How old is your dad?”

“In his seventies.”

“So he won’t be here forever to insist on your sister’s treatment. And then you’ll have to decide what to do.”

“Unfortunately.”

“Why do you put it that way?”

“I used to be very clear about what I thought. Somehow it’s gotten harder over the years—not easier.”

He nodded.

“Listen, I’m exhausted. Do you mind if I take a nap?” she asked.

“I thought nobody got tired here.”

“Maybe it’s emotional exhaustion.”

“Yeah. Or maybe they flip a switch, and everyone suddenly has to sleep.”

“Is that what you think?”

“I guess we’ll find out.”

“I guess,” she agreed, not knowing what else to say.

When she eased down in the bed, he stayed beside her, and she wished there were some way to tell him that she was feeling the effects of too much intimacy. She’d focused on her career for a long time. Being with Mack made her realize that maybe she’d been too quick to give up . . . what? Marriage and a family? She’d always told herself she could do without those things. Now she wondered why she’d been so willing to set them aside. Was she like Dad—feeling guilty that she had survived the car crash with hardly a scratch, and Shelly had lost everything?

oOo

Paula Rendell looked toward the stairs. Mack Bradley and Lily Wardman had been gone for a long time. Maybe they’d gone to one of the bedrooms to talk, but Paula didn’t think so. She’d always been good at reading people, and she was pretty sure the two of them were attracted to each other. She got the feeling that Tom Wright had found them in a compromising position outside, although he hadn’t said much—only thrown some broad hints. And then the couple had gone up stairs, which she could view as keeping them out of trouble.

Her attention was refocused when a nearby door opened and, speak of the devil, Wright came out, his face a classic picture from one of those TV commercials where a poor jerk learns he’s been doing something all wrong. In the next scene, he’s going to find out the magic product to solve his problem—like a special machine that works much better than crunches to flatten his stomach. For three easy payments of $9.99. Only Paula suspected that there wasn’t going to be an easy solution for Wright—or anyone else who had ended up in the Mirador Hotel.

When Paula started toward him, his head jerked up, and she was pretty sure he hadn’t wanted to be seen coming out of the business center. Interesting.

“Something wrong?” she asked.

“I . . . I need to contact my wife.”

“You have a wife?”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t seem like the type.”

He shrugged. “We had a fight. I want to make sure she’s okay.”

Paula nodded, wondering if that was the real story. “And the computers and phones aren’t working?”

“Yeah.”

With a quick shake of his head, he turned and strode away.

Like a felon behind the wheel of the getaway vehicle after a bank heist, Grant drove with one eye on the rearview mirror. But he kept his speed below the limit as he headed away from the scene of the crime. Not his crime, he reminded himself. Now that he was in the car and driving away, it was impossible not to flash back to the impact of the bullets hitting the man he’d been holding up as a human shield. He’d thought there was no way the colonel’s men would shoot one of their own. He’d been dead wrong—although he was the one who had gotten away, leaving a bloody corpse in the shrubbery. And now that he’d made his escape, he had time to reflect on just how ruthless and brutal the attack had been. All Grant had wanted was information about his missing brother, and they’d gone to unimaginable lengths to make sure he didn’t get it.

Christ, what was going on here?

As soon as he’d opened that coffin and found the dummy inside, he’d known in his gut that something sinister was in play. He’d wanted to convince himself that there was some legitimate explanation. Now that was impossible—not after the ambush at the memorial and the hail of bullets. But, odd as it seemed, the way things had gone down gave him a tiny spark of hope.

Mack could still be alive, being held captive. But for what purpose? Like did he have some piece of information that would help a group of jihadists or something? The colonel had sounded like an American, but couldn’t that be true of a terrorist?

As he thought about the fierce attack again, Grant fought the urge to get out of sight by pulling into a downtown parking garage. But he couldn’t do it because, if they had already spotted him, he’d be trapped. Instead, he kept driving just below the speed limit and headed for upper Connecticut Avenue. A few blocks from Chevy Chase Circle, he turned off onto one of the residential side streets and pulled up under a line of mature trees along the curb. Leaving the engine running, he retrieved the dead man’s wallet from the glove compartment and riffled through the compartments.

There was about five hundred dollars in cash, but no credit cards and no ID.

Cursing under his breath, he started pulling up leather flaps and found a Maryland phone number. Just the number. No name or clue about where it was located. But Frank Decorah had allowed him to keep his password to the Decorah Security database, and Grant had left his laptop under the driver’s seat.

When he pulled it out and put in the phone number, he found it came from a facility called Hamilton Labs. And when he did some further poking around, he gathered that the place was a hush-hush biotech company.

What did that have to do with Mack Bradley? Could his brother actually be there?

Grant fought to quash the surge of hope bubbling up inside himself. It could be that the number was totally unrelated to the Mack Bradley case. But that seemed unlikely, since the operative had taken all the identifying evidence out of his wallet except this one piece of contact information.

The only way Grant was going to find out anything was to go there. And put his life in danger again?

Yeah, because that was the only lead he had.

But when he started to shove the paper with the phone number into his pocket, he realized he was wearing the pair of Bermuda shorts and tee shirt he’d just bought. His next stop was a discount department store where he bought a dark tee shirt and pants plus clean underwear, shoes and socks. No point in squishing around in wet footwear when you were sneaking up on guys who wanted to kill you.

It gave him some satisfaction to use money from the dead guy’s wallet to pay for the purchases. Then he returned to his car and took the spare handgun out of the trunk.

oOo

Lily tried to relax, but she could feel the tension building inside her as if a little man were sitting at a control panel inside her and relentlessly messing with her vital signs.

Mack turned his head toward her. “What?”

She swallowed hard. “Like I said before, this is all moving pretty fast for me. Are you going to be . . . angry if I say I need some time alone?”

“By ‘all’—do you mean the mystery of the Mirador Hotel? Or our . . . relationship?”

“Everything,” she said in a small voice.

“Okay.” Pulling the covers aside, he stepped out of bed and began picking his clothing off the floor. He was dressed in his jeans and tee shirt in under a minute.

“I can meet you downstairs in a while,” he said.

She felt instantly guilty for effectively kicking him out—and feeling relieved that he was willing to give her some space.

“Yes. Good,” she answered, hoping she sounded more casual than uptight. “Probably we don’t want to come down together and give everyone something to talk about.”

Before he left, he looked toward the window. “Does it ever get dark here?” he suddenly asked.

“What?”

“Does it get dark here?” he repeated.

The question took her by surprise, but she managed to answer, “How would I know?”

He shrugged. “Just trying to figure the place out.”

Did she even know the answer? She’d thought she would only be here a few hours and that she would keep her interactions to a minimum. That plan hadn’t worked out quite the way she’d assumed, and now every second in the hotel had started to weigh too heavily on her.

She waited with her heart pounding as Mack walked down the hall to the living room, then exited the suite. She sat up, counting to a hundred to make sure he wasn’t going to come back. Finally she climbed out of bed and pulled on her panties, bra and blouse. There was really no point in getting dressed, but she didn’t want someone—Mack—to find she’d gone with half her clothing still here. As she pulled on her slacks, she wondered what he was going to think when he found out she wasn’t in the hotel.

Standing beside the bed, she clenched her hands into fists, feeling trapped and wishing she’d planned this whole thing better. When Mack figured out she’d vanished, he’d be angry. And hurt. Could she come back and explain who she was and why she’d come here? Or would it already be too late?

She looked toward the living room. She’d like to lock the damn door, but she’d already found out that wouldn’t do her any good. And if she dragged a chair in front of the door, that was going to come across as majorly suspicious.

With her heart pounding, she went back to the place where she’d been headed when Mack had first come in—the closet, with the secret piece of equipment that wasn’t in any of the other bedrooms.

oOo

In the woods, Danny Preston wanted to scream in frustration. After Bradley and Wardman had escaped from his show in the woods, he’d scratched around for a plan B.

Probably they’d warned everyone to stay away from the other side of the wall, so luring someone else out here was a long shot, which meant that his only option was getting in there.

With his lips set in a grim line, he conjured up an army of little men and lined them up, ready to assault the wall that separated him from the hotel grounds. He sent them alone and in groups rushing toward the wall. But each time they vanished as they hit the barrier.

“Fuck,” he growled and slammed his fist against the trunk of the tree that he’d made his main base of operation. The bark dug into his hand, and he cursed again. The sensation was real enough, and he pressed his hand against his side, willing the pain to subside. He supposed that if the bark had been sharp, it would have cut his flesh. Unfortunately he was as vulnerable as any of the hotel guests. This place could hurt him, probably kill him if he did something stupid. Or maybe taking this assignment was as far as he could go into the realm of stupidity.

He clenched his teeth. He wasn’t here because he’d decided to invade someone’s private playground. He’d been hired to do a job, and he hadn’t had much choice about taking it. He’d come this far, but partial success wasn’t good enough. Which meant he’d better think of some trick to get in there, identify his target and finish the job. Or was there another way to get an entrée? Pulling out his cell phone again, he made a call to one of the people who was standing by to help him.

The phone was answered on the first ring.

“Not going so well?” his associate asked. It wasn’t the guy who’d hired him but someone he could theoretically trust.

“You could say that. I’m going to need a little help.” Quickly he began to outline what he had in mind.

“You want me to
what
?” the other man asked.

“Just do it. You know I’ll make it worth your while.”

“What if I get caught?”

“I’d advise against it,” he answered and clicked off. It was satisfying to put someone else on the spot—but would it do him any good in the long run?

oOo

Mack looked up and down the hall, glad that he was alone as he turned back and listened at Lily’s door. When he didn’t hear anything, he got out the keycard again and shoved it into the lock. Once again, it opened the door, and he couldn’t repress a little smile of satisfaction. Maybe the locks didn’t work to keep anyone from locking himself in his room and going quietly nuts—like that first guy, Jay Douglas, had done not so quietly.

Once again, Mack hurried down the interior hall. Lily wasn’t in the bedroom. She wasn’t in the bathroom, but she’d been going into the closet when he’d come here earlier. Now he threw the door open and stared inside. Lily wasn’t there, but he saw some kind of interior door, closing off an area about the size of an old-fashioned telephone booth.

There was a knob and a keypad. He pushed some numbers at random without expecting any results. This wasn’t going to be like the keycards.

Too bad he didn’t know her birthday or anything else that might give him a clue.

Christ, now what? As far as he could tell, he’d found a secret room that you got to through the closet. Was it a door into the real world? Or could she be somewhere else in her room? Grimly, he searched the suite, looking behind furniture and under the bed, but she was gone—vanished like that guy Jay Douglas.

A shiver traveled over Mack’s skin.

Had Lily been a figment of his imagination? That couldn’t be true, could it? For a moment, he contemplated that idea. Jesus, since the breakup of his marriage, she was the first woman he’d wanted more from than good sex. What if he’d made her up because he needed her—or someone like her?

That thought made his chest tighten, until he fought back to rationality. He wasn’t the only one who had seen her. The others in the bar had interacted with her. Unless he was making that up, too. Which would involve a whole new level of insanity on his part.

To reassure himself, he strode to the bed and lifted the top sheet, pressing it to his face. The scent of lovemaking was indisputable. He and Lily had been here together not long ago. If she was an illusion, she was the most realistic illusion he’d ever heard of. But then, where the hell had she gone?