Searching for Cate (9 page)

O
nce a week, Christian put in a four-hour stint in the E.R.—from 7:00 a.m. until eleven. He felt it kept him on his toes as far as emergency medicine was concerned, something that proved very handy while working at the clinic on the reservation.

He usually pulled duty on Wednesday mornings. Wednesday was his short day, barring an unexpected delivery. He only had afternoon hours, going into his office after one.

E.R. duty varied. Some days, he couldn't draw two breaths in succession, other days went so slowly they felt like a week. This morning had been in the latter category. Other than a down-on-his-luck house painter who came in with a bad case of the shingles and one small boy who had tried to break some kind of record
for the amount of berries he'd pushed up his nose, the E.R. had seen no activity.

Christian had treated the painter, then given him the name of one of his friends who was looking to paint the outside of his house. The painter had been extraordinarily grateful as he left. As to his other patient, Christian spent more time calming down the little boy's mother than he did separating the boy from the berries.

Given a choice as to the type of day he would have picked, Christian preferred working under the gun to marking time. After the minutes moved by like molasses in an ice cube tray, his shift was finally over.

“You've got empty beds, Jerry,” he told the physician who came on to take his place. “If it was any slower, we'd have to be giving patients back.”

The moment he uttered the words, the rear electronic doors leading into the E.R. burst open.

“Looks like things are about to change,” the other physician commented.

Christian raised his hands, as if to ward off any involvement. “All yours. I have a date with a ham-and-cheese sandwich in the cafeteria.”

He had every intention of keeping that date as he turned toward the side exit. The back elevators were just around the corner. There was nothing unusual about paramedics bringing in patients. It happened all the time. Paramedics routinely brought in emergency cases if they occurred within the fifteen-mile radius of Blair Memorial's jurisdiction.

Reflecting on it later, he couldn't have said if it was instinct, curiosity or something else that made him
look over his shoulder toward the parking lot. His mother would have said it was fate, but he didn't subscribe to all of his mother's beliefs.

Whatever caused it, he looked. And found himself surprised by what he saw.

Doubly so.

His sister-in-law Lydia was rushing alongside the gurney that the two paramedics were guiding in through the doors. He remembered Lukas telling him that the first time he'd met her, Lydia had just burst into the E.R. and was running alongside a gurney. Back then, it had been a suspected terrorist strapped to the moving bed. This time, a battered young woman whose dark brown hair looked to be matted with blood lay on the gurney.

That caught his attention.

What really nailed him, however, was that on the other side of the gurney, moving right beside the shorter of the two paramedics, was the woman he'd met in Joan Cunningham's room last week.

Cate something, he recalled. At the time, he'd wanted to ask her if she knew Lydia but had discarded the impulse the moment it came to him. Just because they were both special agents for the bureau didn't mean they knew each other. It was like having someone from the East Coast assume that since he came from Southern California, he knew Tom Cruise.

And yet, Cate obviously did know Lydia.

And they both looked agitated.

“I've got this one, Jerry,” he announced, waving the young physician back.

“But you're not on duty anymore, remember?” Jerry protested, although not too vehemently.

“Clock me back in,” Christian instructed the nurse behind the central desk.

By then, the gurney was almost on top of him. He quickly nodded at Lydia, then at Cate, but his main attention was on the unconscious young girl he now saw was little more than a child.

“What have you got?” he asked.

The paramedic in charge quickly rattled off the girl's condition when he'd come on the scene, then added her vital signs. They hardly met the criteria for sustaining life.

Lydia didn't seem surprised to see him there. More like relieved. “Christian, you've got to keep this kid alive,” she cried.

“That's the name of the game.” He'd never seen his sister-in-law in action before and wondered if she was so personally involved in all her cases, or if the girl's age was responsible for the extreme agitation he saw on her face. “Put her in that room,” he ordered the paramedics, pointing to the first empty room rather than just a vacant bed used to treat the more common complaints.

“She stopped breathing!” Cate cried.

Instantly, nurses seemed to swarm in on either side of the gurney as Christian began applying CPR. A young Hispanic nurse hurried in with the crash cart. Seconds ticked by as paddles were charged and then quickly applied.

It took two efforts, with the jules being raised to six hundred before the girl's heart finally responded and began beating again.

To Cate, it seemed the level of activity never de
creased. The moment the crash cart was moved aside, a caravan of machines were brought into the room. Each direction she turned, she found herself getting in the way. Machines were hooked up to monitor the girl's blood pressure and newly revived heart as well as to keep track of a host of other body rhythms.

Though she wanted to remain in the thick of it, watching, absorbing everything that was going on, Cate found herself forced to step back or be the unintended target of swiftly ebbing and flowing hospital personnel. She joined Lydia, who watched her brother-in-law's every move with rapt attention.

Cate couldn't shake the impression that Lydia was willing the girl to hang on.

A noise had Christian glancing up, his eyes meeting Lydia's. The orderly had almost crashed into his sister-in-law.

“Lydia, you're going to have to move out of the way,” Christian instructed, then glanced toward Cate. “You, too.”

Cate began to step back, but Lydia remained where she was, unwilling to leave the tight circle around the gurney. “Will she be all right?” Lydia's concern was audible.

You would have thought that Lydia was the girl's mother instead of the special agent who had brought her in, Cate thought. Was there some kind of special connection between her partner and the girl? Or was it just the sight in general of young flesh being peddled that got to Lydia? Cate made a mental note to ask the first opportune moment that presented itself.

Christian made no answer at first. He concentrated
on getting a tube down the girl's throat, intubating her until she could breathe better on her own. It was only when he was finished that he looked up again. His answer was honest. Lydia wasn't the girl's relative, so there was no need to phrase things in order to soften the blow.

“I don't know yet.”

Cate stared at the end of the lengthy tube that had gone down the girl's throat. If she woke up and had something to tell them, there was no way she was going to be able to.

“How long does that thing have to stay in?” Cate asked.

Christian turned and looked at her a moment longer than he should have. Every second still counted. The next beat, he was back fighting to stabilize the girl's vitals. Her pulse jumped all around and he was afraid that she might start having seizures.

But the tube did the trick. The regular flow of air allowed her breathing to become steady.

One problem down, a myriad to go, he thought. The girl would have to go to X-ray as soon as possible. It wasn't a stretch to assume that there was internal damage. The real question was, how much and where was it? There was no way for him to know without films.

“Until she's breathing better,” he finally answered Cate.

“We've got to question her as soon as possible,” Lydia told him. “There could be a lot of other lives at stake.”

That had to be her bureau voice, he thought. He'd never heard her this serious, this official before. “She
has to be conscious for you to question her,” he pointed out. And then he nodded over toward Cate. “Best thing you can do for her right now is to get back there with your friend.”

Lydia opened her mouth to protest, both the order and Christian's assumption. But then she realized that in the short time she and the other woman had been working together, she'd found herself getting close to Cate. She supposed that qualified the latter for the term “friend.” In any event, female friendship didn't happen to her very often. For the most part, because of her relationship with her father and the career she'd chosen, Lydia had always had an easier time getting closer to men than to women. Cate Kowalski was proving to be the exception.

As for his instruction, she knew Christian was right. She was just in the way here and had to step back to let the others do their jobs. She couldn't always control every situation. Lydia blew out a breath, and did what she was told.

A tense smile quirked her lips as she glanced at Cate. “He likes to give orders, like his brother.”

Not a hundred percent sure she followed her, Cate looked at Lydia, confusion creasing her brow. “Who's his brother?”

“My husband, Lukas.” She nodded toward the center of the activity. “That's his brother, Christian.”
Please, Christian, don't lose her.
Her eyes never left her brother-in-law's hands. “The baby of the family, if you don't count John.”

Knowing that they both needed to keep their minds occupied for the moment, Cate played along. “Who's John and why shouldn't he be counted?”

“Because he's not strictly a blood relative. John's an orphan Juanita took in. Juanita's their mother.” This time her smile was genuine, if distracted. “One hell of a woman, let me tell you. First woman who had me shaking in my shoes.”

Lydia didn't realize that her remark had carried over the din. Christian never looked up, but nonetheless he had heard her.

“She'll be happy to hear that,” he called out. “She always thinks of herself as a pushover,” he added.

There was no way Lydia was about to believe that. The woman could probably instill fear in a mountain lion with just one look. “Yeah, right. She's the original matriarch.”

Cate would have been tempted to picture the typical “mother-in-law from hell” except that there was a note of fondness in Lydia's voice as she spoke about the other woman.

Because it was noisy and she had no desire to shout, Cate lowered her head, bringing her lips next to Lydia's ear. “I take it you two get along.”

“Yes. Now.” Lydia lowered her own voice because this part she definitely didn't want Christian to overhear. She needn't have worried. The noise volume began to increase as more monitors were brought in. “Once she realized that I loved Lukas and wasn't there just to amuse myself with a Native American lover.”

She paused for a moment as she studied Cate. She knew the other woman's mother had died recently, which put her at emotional loose ends. She knew how she'd felt when her father had been killed. It wasn't so
much a matter of substitution as in finding a way to help fill a void, even temporarily.

“I'd like you to meet her sometime. She's the school principal on the reservation. Got a heart as big as all outdoors. She took in John when his parents were killed in a car accident. His parents were friends of hers. She's that kind of woman,” Lydia added with a pride that could only come from feeling as if she was a member of the family. Cate envied her, missing that feeling. Missed feeling as if she was part of something instead of just being adrift, part of nothing. Barred from everything. “She raised two terrific sons,” Lydia concluded, still watching Christian's every move intently.

Christian stripped off his gloves and stepped back. For the moment, according to the monitors, the girl was stable enough to be taken to the X-ray department. He looked at the tall orderly who had brought in the last monitor.

“Take her up to X-ray. Tell them I said she gets first priority. I want chest, pelvis, spleen—the works. She looks like she attended one hell of a party. Tell them to put a rush on it and get the films back to me as soon as possible.”

The orderly nodded, kicking back the brakes from the gurney's back wheels. A nurse fell into place, doing the same to the wheels in the front of the gurney. A minute later, the gurney was being guided out the door again.

Lydia stepped back as the gurney passed. “You're staying?” she asked Christian.

He had some time before his first patient. And if the
X-ray results took longer, he'd make adjustments.

Lydia seemed invested in this girl's survival. The least he could do was his part.

“Until I know what's up, yes. My patients are used to having my schedule reshuffled.” He thought of all the women who had gone into labor during his office hours. “Babies don't punch clocks, either.”

Babies. Lydia suppressed a sigh, but it escaped, anyway. She'd been meaning to call her brother-in-law this past week, but she hadn't gotten around to it. There was something she needed to ask.

She realized that Christian was looking at Cate. Was that interest or just curiosity? “Sorry, Christian, this is my new partner, Special Agent Cate Kowalski. Cate, this is my brother-in-law, Dr. Christian Graywolf.”

Both Cate and Christian said “We've already met” at the same time.

So it wasn't curiosity she'd seen on Christian's face, Lydia thought. That meant it was interest. Despite what was weighing heavily on her mind, the thought intrigued her.

A
ny other time, Lydia would have attempted to explore the possibilities that might be present. She dearly loved her brother-in-law and knew all about the tragedy he'd endured. It had happened just after she and Lukas had gotten married. But right now, she had other things on her mind.

She looked down the hallway as the gurney disappeared around the corner. “How long before the films come back?” she asked.

“They haven't even gotten her into X-ray yet,” he said. “Half hour, maybe more.” Was it his imagination, or was Lydia distracted? He couldn't shake the feeling that she just didn't seem to be herself. “Why?”

She moved a little closer to him, cutting out Cate. “Can I see you, Christian? Privately?” she added. “In your office.”

Now he knew something was up, and she sounded unsure of herself. This definitely wasn't the Lydia he knew. Ordinarily his sister-in-law came on like gangbusters and he'd often thought, wistfully, that his brother had more than met his match in the vibrant woman.

Christian nodded. “Sure, let's go.”

Lydia looked back at her partner, suddenly remembering she was there. “Cate, can you wait here for me?”

Cate had already gotten the message that whatever Lydia wanted to talk to her brother-in-law about, it wasn't for general knowledge. There was a chair in the hallway and Cate suddenly realized that she felt wired and drained at the same time. It wouldn't hurt to sit down for a little while.

“Sure, I'm not going anywhere.”

Lydia flashed a smile of gratitude at her partner. “This won't take long,” she promised.

“What won't take long?” Christian asked when they were safely inside the elevator car.

Lydia let out a nervous breath. “Why don't we wait until we get into your office?”

A small shrug of his shoulder told her that was fine with him. And then he looked at her.

“You're being awfully mysterious about this, Lydia.” A smile softened his features. “I thought
we
were supposed to be the ones who had a lock on that.”

For the first time since this morning, Lydia relaxed a little. “Maybe being married to ‘one of you' has rubbed off,” she teased.

Something was definitely wrong, Christian thought.
She just wasn't herself. Even her smile looked tight. He tried to distract her. “So, how long have you had this new partner?”

“Three weeks.” She decided to lay a little groundwork to get her mind off her dilemma. “I didn't think I'd like working with a woman,” she admitted, “but Cate's different.”

He'd been the quiet one in the family, developing just as keen an eye in his way as his mother had. “You mean she reminds you of you.”

Lydia began to protest, then rethought Christian's words. He was probably right. They did have a lot of things in common and seemed to think the same way on a lot of subjects. “Something like that, I guess.” She paused for a second as the floors blinked by. “Where do you know her from?”

Christian slanted a look in her direction. “Who says I know her?”

“Give me a little credit, Christian. I notice things for a living.”

The similarity in their phrasing struck him. “Funny, she said she tracks down things for a living.”

Good, he admitted meeting Cate. Next question. “When did she say that?”

He couldn't help wondering why Lydia seemed so interested. Was there something about Cate he should know? He remembered that when his brother had met Lydia, she was assigned to a terrorist task force. After they'd gotten married, her concession to him was switching departments. Lydia's mother told Lukas that he had immediately earned her undying gratitude.

“She was here the other week, visiting one of my patients.”

The elevator doors opened and he placed his hand to the small of her back, ushering her out.

“That's odd. I wasn't aware she knew anyone here. She just transferred in from San Francisco.” Because she thought it might make Cate a little more accessible to Christian, a little more human, she added a more personal note. “Her mother died recently and she thought she needed a change.”

“Her mother?” he echoed. For a moment, he'd forgotten, but then recalled that Cate had told him that herself the one time they'd talked.

“Yes, you know, like what Juanita is to you.”

Turning a corner, they approached his office. He noticed that Lydia was looking up and down the hallway, as if she was afraid of running into someone.

Lukas?

It didn't seem plausible, yet he couldn't shake the feeling that she was being incredibly secretive and that it had something to do with his brother.

Rather than take the first door that led to his office, he used the second one, the one that admitted him in the back. He saw his nurse, Lisa, looking his way, to see what was going on.

Christian nodded at her and put his finger to his lips. “I'm not here,” he whispered, then explained, “I'm still on call at the E.R.”

“Someone go into labor?” Lisa guessed.

Rather than get into the circumstances right now, Christian felt it was easier just to nod and agree. He'd fill his nurse in on the details later.

“Tell my patients if they want to reschedule, they're welcome to do that. Right now, I'm not sure how long I'll be.”

Already opening the scheduling book, Lisa nodded. She glanced once last time toward the rear of the office. “Nice to see you again, Mrs. Graywolf,” she mouthed.

Lydia forced a smile to her lips. “Same here.”

She only wished it was under better circumstances, Lydia thought as she followed Christian into the last examination room.

Christian closed the door behind her. “That didn't look very genuine.”

Suddenly very nervous, she fingered the paper sheet covering the examination table. This was it. She was going to get her answer. “What didn't?”

“Your smile.” And her voice had a slight tremor in it, now that he noticed. Christian crossed his arms before him. “Okay, what's up?”

She didn't blurt it out, although it was hot on her tongue. Instead, her FBI training kicking in, she gave him a little background information first. “My doctor recently retired. Dr. Alicia Price,” she added.

“I know. The hospital was sorry to lose her.”

Lydia ran her hands along her arms. The room temperature was low, but definitely not chilly enough to warrant her actions, Christian observed.

She moved around the room, a hummingbird trying to find a place to perch if not land. “I'm not too comfortable with who she recommended take her place.”

“Okay.” He waited, watching her struggle, the silence stretching out until he finally broke it. “Lydia, is something wrong?”

Yes, something's wrong. I'm supposed to be happy, but I can't be. Not yet.

Lydia searched for inner strength. Turning to face him again, she said, “I think I'm pregnant.”

Abandoning his role as doctor, Christian threw his arms around his sister-in-law and hugged her. “Lydia, that's wonderful.” He thought he felt a little resistance on her part, as if she just couldn't relax. Stepping back, he studied her face.

Lydia didn't look the way he thought she would under the circumstances. He'd always thought that she wanted children. He knew his brother did. “It is wonderful, isn't it?”

Lydia dragged her hand through her hair. It fell about her face, straight and long. “Yes, and no.”

He leaned against the examination table. “Tell me about the no part,” he said gently.

He's probably going to think I'm horrible,
Lydia thought. “If I'm pregnant, they're going to put me behind a desk.”

“As they should.” And then a light began to dawn on him. Lydia had never been the type to sit back and let others do the work. She was a hands-on type of person.

“Yes.” Under normal circumstances, she thought, although it would make her antsy. But these weren't normal circumstances. Not to her. “But I'm right in the middle of this case.”

He was trying to put the pieces together. “The case have anything to do with the girl in X-ray?”

Lydia nodded. “It has everything to do with the girl in X-ray.”

She didn't ordinarily talk about cases. You never knew who was listening. But it was only Christian in the room. She trusted him. That was why she'd come to him in the first place. And she needed him on her side.

“We found her unconscious and chained to a toilet, for God's sake. We think she's part of a juvenile-prostitution ring. We're working on something big, Christian, I can feel it. And I have to be out there, at least until we find out who's pulling the strings. This isn't just an isolated incident. Sitting this one out, working behind a desk, doesn't do it for me.”

He could sympathize with her, but as a doctor and as her brother-in-law, his concerns took him elsewhere. “You have to think of the baby.”

Restless, she prowled around the small space, forming semicircles around the examination table. “I know, I know, and I am, but I'm also thinking of Susan.”

“Susan?” The name was unfamiliar to him. One of her friends?

“My cousin.” Funny, bright, beautiful Susan had been born late to her parents. A generation and a half separated them. “She would have been thirty this year.” After all this time, she could still feel a tightening in her throat when she talked about her cousin and what had happened to her. “It's the usual story. Susan got to a certain age and suddenly she and her mother didn't get along. She got fed up and ran away one summer when she was about that girl's age. Her parents were frantic. They put up flyers, offered money, hired a private detective. Nothing.”

She sighed, looking beyond Christian. Into the past.

“I saw her about three years later. I wasn't even sure it was her at first, she looked so different. So old and worn out. She'd gotten mixed up in prostitution and took drugs so she could tolerate living inside her own skin. I gave her money and helped her escape—yes,” she said when she saw the look on Christian's face, “escape. The guy pimping her would have killed her rather than let her go. When she finally could talk about it, she told me that she'd been kidnapped, made a virtual prisoner forced to do things for this guy who ‘kept' her. God, the horror in her eyes when she talked—” Lydia felt tears forming and blinked them back. “Susan finally killed herself because she couldn't live with what she'd done, what she'd gone through. Someone took advantage of her, of her teenage rebellion. And someone's taking advantage of these girls. I've got to stop him.”

He understood how she felt, but Lydia was talking as if she was the only one who felt this way. “You're not alone in this.”

Lydia pressed her lips together. He was making sense. But she was talking from her heart, not her intellect. “I know, I know, there are lots of people to take my place. I'm sure that Cate's more than good for it. But don't you see, this is something I have to do, something I feel that I owe Susan?”

Christian got to the heart of the matter. “Does Lukas know? About the baby?”

“No.” She took a breath, fortifying herself. She knew she was asking a great deal of Christian. “And you can't tell him.” She fell back on a technicality. “You're my doctor.”

But Christian shook his head. “Lydia, I don't think I should be the one to examine you. I don't think either one of us would be comfortable with that.”

“But you can give me a test.”

He looked at her incredulously. “You haven't taken any?” He would have thought that would be the first thing she would have done.

Lydia held up her hand, fingers spread. “Five,” she told him. “But I've never trusted anything that comes out of a box.”

He saw through her. “You're hoping the test I do will tell you otherwise.”

“That's the hope.”

He sighed, taking a plastic cup from the rack and handing it to her. “Bathroom's that way. You know the drill.”

She nodded, leaving the room.

 

Ten minutes felt like forever.

“Well?” She fairly pounced on Christian when he walked back into the room.

He gave her the answer with mixed feelings. Ordinarily, he would have been delighted to say this to her. “You're pregnant, Lydia. As for a doctor, Dr. Sheila Pollack is excellent.” The woman was head of the obstetrics department and was well known for her skill and her bedside manner. “I suggest you see her as soon as possible. I also suggest you tell my brother as soon as possible.”

Lydia nodded, but first she needed to buy herself some time. With any luck, she could push the investigation into high gear. There had to be someone who
knew something but wasn't saying. More cages had to be rattled. More informants had to be questioned. Sullivan was letting her handle this on her own. She
had
to get results.

“I promise, Christian, and this is a good thing, it really is. I want to have lots of babies.”

“Just at a more convenient time,” he said, filling in the unspoken part.

She smiled at her brother-in-law, grateful he understood. “Something like that. You won't tell Lukas?”

He sighed. “It's against my better judgment, but it's your call. I won't break your confidence even if I'm not comfortable with this.”

She kissed his cheek, relieved that she'd made the right call. “You're the best.”

“Be that as it may, just make sure you tell him as soon as possible.”

“I will,” she promised.

He wanted to believe her.