Velvet Haven (4 page)

“She know that Bartlett won’t give her anything but a case of VD?”

Mairi grinned at the department’s secretary. “Nah, I’ll let her figure that one out for herself. All part of the learning curve.”

“So, got yourself another one of those books, eh?”

Mairi flushed. “Yeah.”

“Pretty girl like you should be getting herself a man.” Mairi groaned. She really didn’t want to have this conversation again. Thankfully the phone rang and the secretary reached for it, allowing Mairi to go back to her manuscript. She’d collected the beautiful books for years, and this little gem was a prize. She’d found it hiding behind some books at the bottom of the antique rosewood bookcase in the library of Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow. Opening it, she realized it wasn’t just an ordinary manuscript, but some kind of diary. It was ancient, written in a language similar to Old English. Mairi knew as she held the worn leather book in her hand that she had to have it. Just to borrow, she had told herself.

The book had
spoken
to her. Like Gollum in
Lord of the Rings
, she would have stroked it and called it “my precious” if one of the nuns hadn’t walked by, forcing Mairi to bury it in her work bag.

And since that day she’d been all but consumed by it, by the need to translate the story and understand it. And since that day in the library, not only had the book come into her life, but a strange dream had as well.

“I’m gonna go for break,” Mairi called to Louise, the charge nurse for the shift. “I’ll be in the sleep room if you need me.”

Stuffing the book into her bag, Mairi picked up her coffee mug and headed to the back room that housed a twin bed and a bunch of extra equipment. The shift was relatively slow and she planned to take advantage of it.

The sleep room door creaked open and Mairi dropped her bag on the bed before flopping down onto the lumpy mattress. Digging out the book, she opened it to the page that contained the image of a Celtic triscale. Below it, in fancy gilt lettering, were the words “And so shall come the divine trinity, their numbers the sacred, elemental root of nine warriors
.
”

With her finger, Mairi traced the exquisite work and the brilliant colors of the triscale as she mulled over the words. This was the fun of collecting manuscripts—deciphering them. Normally they were chivalric or biblical stories, but this book, this was far more interesting. From what Mairi could gather, it was written by a woman who was some sort of ancient seer. She had received a vision of the coming Dark Times of her world.

Definitely the best reading she’d ever found. Most people thought she was a nerd to be getting a rush from old, dusty books, but Mairi didn’t care what people thought of her, or her hobby. It was probably why she had few close friends.

Oh, she was friendly enough with the people she worked with and even went out the odd time with them for dinner and a few drinks, but she wasn’t close to them. She had a hard time getting close to people. Trust wasn’t something that came easily to her.

Checking her watch, Mairi realized she had only a half hour left on her break. She closed the book and placed it carefully back in her bag. Removing her stethoscope from around her neck, she hung it from an IV pole and kicked off her shoes. Man, she was exhausted. Too many late nights working on the book, and too many nights of interrupted sleep from those weird dreams she kept having.

With a yawn she fell backward and was asleep before her head hit the pillow.

“Hey, MacAuley, Dr. Stud says he’s got a stiff one for you in trauma three.”

“Tell him if that’s what he’s dangling for bait, I’m not biting,” Mairi grumbled from beneath the flannel blanket she had stolen from the warming cupboard in the hospital supply room.

“C’mon, you’re not telling me that Pretty Boy Sanchez doesn’t do it for you?”

“Look, Louise, I’m on break.” Man, she had
just
fallen asleep.

“Get yer ass up, MacAuley. I need you.”

Mairi groaned. Speak of the devil. “I’m on break!” she snapped, covering her head with a pillow as the room burst into a blast of halogen light. “You ignoramus! Turn the light off.”

The husky male chuckle from the door made her teeth grate. She so didn’t get the whole Sanchez mystique. The guy was an asshole, and a mediocre ER doc at best.

“Vicky is covering me for break. Tell
her
to go.”

“Yeah, the thing is, the cops aren’t asking for Vicky.”

Mairi sat up and shoved her hair back from her face. The light was bright and she squinted. “What’d you say?”

“The cops. They want to see you.”

Great. What the hell could they possibly want with her? Maybe it was the overdose she’d helped with at the beginning of the shift. Or the suspected wife beater who’d taken his bruised wife home three hours ago. Bet that was it: The wife was dead. Whatever it was, it was damn rude interrupting her on break. A night at St. Michael’s in which you even got a break was rare, and one to be savored. Obviously, she wouldn’t be savoring this one.

Her gaze shifted to her bag, and suddenly she felt ill. Maybe the nuns had somehow discovered that she’d taken the book? Maybe it was a priceless artifact and now Mairi was going to be arrested for art theft.

“I’ll be there in a minute,” she grumbled, wiping her face with her hands. What the hell was she going to do? What was she going to say if they knew she had the book?

“Need a sponge bath?” Sanchez asked with a leer. “It’ll wake you up.”

“Like a physician’s ever given a sponge bath.”

He shrugged, watching her with his dark brown eyes as she tossed the flannel aside and reached for her shoes. “Hey, I can play nurse if you wanna play patient.”

“Not in this lifetime,” she mumbled as she swept past him. Maybe all the other nurses fell for Dr. Sex, but she wasn’t one of them. There was something about the guy that irritated the hell out of her. He was cocky, self-absorbed, and emotionally void. Perfect attitude for a trauma doctor. Horrible for relationships.

Not that she’d done any better. The guys she attracted were all the wrong sort. Besides, she wasn’t into relationships. Based on what she saw rolling into the ER, it was better to stay single and wear out sex toys than get tangled up with the wrong man.

Out in the hall, two uniformed cops were waiting for her and she suddenly forgot all about sex and the irritating Dr. Sanchez. By the look on their faces, they meant business.
Serious
business. And Mairi had the sinking feeling that somehow she’d been found out. Hell, maybe the nuns had put a security camera in the library.

“You Mairi MacAuley?” the older officer asked.

“Yes.”

“Detective Morris wants to see you.”

Mairi followed them through the busy ER to the back, where their largest trauma room sat across from the ambulance ramp. A trail of blood streaked across the floor from the sliding doors to a cubicle where the curtains were drawn.

“What’s this about, Officer?” she asked. “I’m not in trauma tonight. I’m assigned to DVSA.”

“DVSA?”

“Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault,” she clarified.

The curtain suddenly pulled back and a middle-aged man in a rumpled suit stood before her. “I’m pretty sure you’ll agree that this qualifies.” The detective glanced down at the laminated name badge that hung from her lanyard. “Mairi MacAuley?”

“Yeah.”

“In here.”

One of the cops moved her forward and Mairi froze, unable to step inside the cubicle. “What in the hell—”

“Hell was, indeed, the last thing she saw,” the detective murmured. Mairi swallowed hard when she felt bile rise up her throat. “So, Miss MacAuley, you know this woman?”

She shook her head, unable to take her eyes off the naked body. Her torso had been used for a canvas, her skin marked with knife wounds. Symbols were carved in her skin, and her wrists, neck, and ankles displayed bloodstained rope burns.

In a pile on a chair next to the stretcher were a hot pink leather dress and a pair of shiny black thigh-high stiletto boots. The detective followed her gaze to the chair. “The clothes were lying beside her. Her purse was there too. Inside was this.”

He handed her a crisp white business card.
Mairi MacAuley, RN, Crisis Worker, St. Michael ’s Hospital.

“You remember her now?” the detective asked. Shaking her head, Mairi approached the gurney, taking in the macabre artwork on her skin, noting the black wax that had been dripped onto the girl’s breasts and mons. The stench of burning skin and hair made her want to gag, and she looked away, to the face that Mairi knew she would see in her nightmares.

Her eyes were open. She hated when they died like that. And the endotracheal tube that was sticking out of her mouth told her that she hadn’t been dead when she arrived. She’d been alive, and . . . suffering.

“Well?”

The eyes were familiar, but she couldn’t recall counseling a young woman with fluorescent pink hair. She reached for the bangs and pulled the nylon wig off. A cascade of blond hair toppled out of a bun, and the wig fell from her hands.

“Lauren Brady,” she rasped, recalling her meeting with the girl last week, right after Mairi had found the manuscript and stolen it.

“Remember anything about her?”

“Seventeen. No parents. Ward of Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow.”

“The home for troubled girls?” the detective asked as he flipped open his notebook and began writing.

“Yes,” Mairi whispered, closing Lauren’s eyelids so she wouldn’t have to see the vacant stare. The action made the elastic cuff of her lab coat ride up, revealing the pale, jagged scars on her inner wrist. Nonchalantly, Mairi pulled it back down, securing it by curling her fingers around the elastic.

“When did you see her last?”

“Thursday afternoon. I volunteer at Our Lady once a week. She was my last appointment of the day.”

The detective grunted as he wrote down everything she told him. “So St. Mike’s has an outreach program or something with Our Lady?”

“No.”

“No? You do this pro bono? You a saint?”

Mairi felt her face flush with anger. “There’s still some charity in the world, Detective.”

“Yeah? I ain’t seen it in years.” He looked her up and down, his eyes narrowing. “Our Lady had problems with narcotics last year. Know anything about that?”

“You don’t have to work in a hospital to get your hands on narcotics. Besides, the days of a drug cabinet and a set of keys are long gone. The dispensing is all computerized. No chance I’m signing out two Percocets and taking a handful, if you know what I mean.”

He nodded, and Mairi knew he was just fishing, trying to bait her. Jackass. “So you go to Our Lady once a week. Why there? Why not some other place, in a better part of town?”

She shrugged. “The sisters were good to me and my mother. So I return the favor.”

His shrewd gaze landed on her left arm, where her fingers still clutched the cuff of the lab coat.
He’d seen them—the scars
.

“Were you one of those troubled girls, Miss MacAuley?”

Damn it. She didn’t want to go into this.

“I don’t see how that’s pertinent.”

His gaze shifted to the gurney. “Maybe
she’d
think it important.”

Mairi tried desperately to look anywhere but at the mottling body beside her, but it was like trying to look away from a train wreck. God, why would someone do something so sick?

“Miss MacAuley?”

Mairi shook herself, trying to focus on Detective Morris and not the satanic symbols that had been drawn on Lauren’s body, or the scars that marred her own wrist. “My mother was a cook there, and when my father took it into his head to beat the crap out of her, the nuns let us stay with them till he came around, begging for forgiveness.”

The detective stared at her with knowing eyes. “Did he do that a lot?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes it’d be months and we’d be thinking he’d reformed. Then the hammer would drop.”

His gaze once more dropped to her left hand. “And your world would collapse?”

She really hated cops. Detectives most of all. Far too perceptive. “Look, the nuns fed us, clothed us, and they helped pay for my education. I think I can give them back a day a week, Detective.”

He nodded and dropped his notebook onto the bedside table. “Did you examine her last week?”

“Yes. And she didn’t have the artwork. I would definitely have remembered that.” Her gaze traveled over the pale skin that was marked so cruelly. “Who the hell would do something like this?” She’d seen a lot of shit in her career as an ER nurse, but this topped the list.