TEN MINUTES LATER, they sped away from the hospital in one of the Secret Service SUVs. “What about my car?” Sam asked.
“I had it taken to the same place that outfitted it for doomsday,” Nick said. “They’ll make the repairs and have you back in business in a couple of days. In the meantime, you’ll need to be very careful running around in a car that doesn’t have the same security features that yours does.”
“I’m always careful.”
He glanced at her, his brow raised. “Like you were yesterday when you chased after a car full of known killers and nearly got yourself killed in an accident?”
“That was a very distinct case of being in the right place at the right time.”
“Your definition of right place, right time and mine are vastly different.”
“How so?” she asked, playing along because she loved sparring with him so much.
“In my humble opinion, you were in the wrong place at the wrong time yesterday.”
“But I almost caught them, and how cool would that’ve been?”
He directed a fierce scowl her way. “And what was your plan for taking them down, on your own, if you happened to catch them?”
“I had backup on the way.”
A shudder rippled through his big frame. “You can’t begin to imagine the horrors that run through my mind if I allow myself to think too much about what you’re out there doing every day.”
Sam took his hand and folded it between hers. “Most days are filled with boring grunt work that’s not dangerous.”
“And then there are days like yesterday that turn dangerous on a dime. Those are the days that give me nightmares.”
“I’m like a cat,” she said, trying to lighten things up. “I always land on my feet.”
“If you’re like a cat, you’ve more than used up your nine lives.”
“Nah, I’ve got lots of lives left in the bank. Don’t worry about me.”
“I’m being serious, Samantha. This isn’t funny to me. I’m tormented by the fear of losing you suddenly.”
“I know you are, and I’m sorry you have to live with that fear. I promise you I’m as careful as I can possibly be because I have so much to live for.”
“That helps. A little.”
She snuggled up to him, wrapped her arm around his waist and listened to the strong beat of his heart as he held her close to him.
His ringing cell phone interrupted the moment. Using his free hand, he worked it out of his pocket and took the call. “Hey, Terry, what’s up?” As he listened, Sam felt his body tighten with tension. “Okay. I’ll be in shortly. We’ll talk about it then.” He ended the call. “I’m being called to testify in the Nelson inquiry, possibly tomorrow. The committee wants to hear from me about the impact of Christopher’s threats on our family.”
“What do they think the impact was when the children in our lives were threatened with decapitation and my ex-husband was tortured to death?”
“They want to hear me say it.”
“It’s going to infuriate people to hear it from you.”
“Which, I suspect, is their goal. People want him gone, even members of our own party.”
“So they’re bringing you in to help make that happen when that’s the last thing you want to have happen.”
“It’s a classic Catch-22 for me.”
“Why can’t you decline to testify? What’re they going to do? Subpoena you?”
“They might.”
“They won’t. They need you too much right now. If Nelson goes down in flames, you’re the one who’ll be left holding the baton. Decline to testify and tell them everything they need to know about how Christopher’s threats affected our family is in the police reports.”
“Not everything.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s no mention, for example, of what it felt like to be in Iran when the people I love the most were threatened with death and dismemberment or what it was like for you to know your ex-husband met a brutal, awful death because of his connection to you. Those things aren’t in any reports.”
“If you go out there and say that, if you tell the world how horrible it was for us, it’ll seal Nelson’s fate. Any supporters he has left will turn against him when the handsome, charismatic, sexy vice president details the horrors perpetrated upon his family by the president’s son. It won’t matter if Nelson had nothing to do with it. No one will care about him. They’ll care about you—and us—and they’ll want you to be their president, not him.”
He stared at her, seeming amazed—and aroused.
“What? Why are you gawking at me?”
“Are you sure you weren’t a political operative in another life?”
“Definitely not,” she said, dripping with disdain. “It’s rubbed off on me after living here all my life.”
“I love when things rub off on you.” His suggestive tone set her body on fire for him. How did he do that so easily?
She elbowed him in the ribs. “Especially you?”
“Particularly me.”
“Stop trying to change the subject. If you testify, you’ll be president so fast your head will spin, and your wife will leave you. It’ll be a terrible mess. I recommend keeping your mouth shut.”
“Wait, go back. My wife will leave me?”
“When did I say that?”
“Um, ten seconds ago?”
“I don’t recall saying that.”
“You think you’re so clever, babe, but I do hear what you’re saying, and I’ll give it careful consideration. If there’s any way I can get out of testifying, I will.”
“I don’t want you to be president. Not yet, anyway. We both have too much to do before we get trapped in that gilded cage. The one we’re in is bad enough.”
“I agree.”
The motorcade pulled into the parking lot of HQ, sending the gathered reporters into a tizzy when they realized who was arriving.
“You want me to come in with you?”
“You don’t need to.” She leaned over to kiss him. “Thanks for staying with me when I was injured.”
He returned her kiss, adding a touch of tongue for good measure. “It’s always a pleasure to be with you, especially when you’re in the hospital.”
Sam snorted out a laugh at that.
“Thank you for staying with me if I become president.”
She shot him a look. “Not funny.”
“When will I see you?”
“I don’t know. I’m in for the long haul until we find these people.”
“Don’t overdo it. You took a hell of a shot to the head yesterday.”
“I’m fine. Don’t worry.” Sam kissed him again. “Love you.”
“Love you too. Be careful with my wife. She’s everything to me.”
“I will.” She grabbed the door handle and was out of the car before the agent could open it for her. Weaving between overly eager reporters and camera operators, all of them shouting questions at her as she jogged toward the main doors at HQ, eager to get back to work.
In the lobby, she ran into Malone and Farnsworth.
“Where’d you come from?” Malone asked Sam when she joined them.
“Straight from the hospital. Checked myself out so I could get back to work. What’s the latest?”
“You sure you ought to be here?” Farnsworth asked. “You’re not looking so good.”
“Gee, thanks, Chief. Getting broadsided does that to a girl. I’m fine. I’m back. What’s up?”
“We’ve just gotten a report that a woman was seen falling out of a moving car on Sixteenth Street,” Farnsworth said. “We’ve dispatched Patrol to the scene, and we’re waiting to hear.”
“Any description of the car?”
“Only that it was an SUV.”
Malone took a call on his cell phone. He listened intently and said, “Got it. We’ll have Special Victims detectives meet you there.” After ending the call, he said, “She’s in bad shape. They’re taking her to GW.”
“I’ll get over there.”
Malone raised a hand to stop her. “No, you won’t. She belongs to SVU. As soon as they determine she’s able to talk to you, then and only then will you be brought in.”
“With all due respect, Captain, these men are killing and attacking people in our city. The sooner we get a statement from her, the faster we can track them down.”
“Give us a couple of hours to assess her condition and see what we’re dealing with, Lieutenant,” Farnsworth said. “She’s been through a traumatic ordeal. Coming at her with all guns blazing isn’t going to work in this situation.”
“Not all my guns are blazing,” Sam said, irked.
“Stand down, Lieutenant,” Malone said. “Work the other angles. As soon as she’s ready to make a statement, you’ll be the first to know.”
“Ask Erica Lucas to take this one,” Sam said. “She’s good with the vics.”
“We’re aware of that, but thank you for the recommendation,” Farnsworth said, his eyes glittering with amusement. “In the meantime, we need someone to brief the media on the latest. Take thirty minutes with your team, and then you can handle the morning briefing.”
“And here I thought you liked me,” she muttered.
“What was that?” Farnsworth asked.
“I said I’d be happy to take care of that for you.”
“Excellent.”
As she walked away, she said, “Please let me know when I’m allowed to speak to the eyewitness who is the only person who can identify the perps who’ve murdered six people.”
“You’ll be the first to know, Lieutenant.”
Frustrated and annoyed, she went to the pit to regroup with her team, but the pit was empty. “Where the hell is everyone?” she asked. Oh, right. I sent them out to find the bastards, and that’s what they did. She unlocked her office, picked up the extension on her desk and asked Dispatch to recall the Homicide squad to HQ.
“Yes, ma’am,” the dispatcher said.
Within fifteen minutes, her entire team had returned. They looked tired and spent, which didn’t bode well for a productive day. As they arrived, they asked about her health, and Sam brushed off their concerns. She didn’t have time to be injured.
“What’ve we got?” she asked when they were seated around the conference room table.
“Nothing new,” Freddie said, as the others nodded in agreement. “Other than the woman seen falling from a moving vehicle. We’re waiting to hear more on that.”
“We looked for them all night,” Green added.
“Anyone who’s been here twenty-four hours should go home and get some sleep,” Sam said. “Be back by four, and we’ll get out there again tonight.”
“I don’t want to leave,” Carlucci said, “but I’m getting fuzzy around the edges.”
“Same,” Dominguez said.
“Me too,” Green said.
“And me,” Freddie added.
“I’m good for a few more hours if you want me to stay,” Gonzo said.
“I am too,” Jeannie said.
“I’ll take what I can get,” Sam said. “The rest of you get out of here while the getting is good. You checked out the last victim and his family?”
“Yeah,” Gonzo said. “He’s clean. Lives alone and works all the time. His family has been notified of his death.”
“Thanks for handling that,” Sam said. “Anyone heard from Hill?”
“He said he had an appointment first thing,” Gonzo said, “and then he’ll check in.”
“Where are we with locating Carlos Vega?” she asked of the missing military sharpshooter.
“I have a lead on a guy he was in the service with,” Green said. “I have a call into him. I’ll let you know if I hear from him.”
“Good, thanks. Let’s hope Hill has something for us, because we still seem to be getting nowhere fast.”
* * *
AVERY HILL CLIMBED two flights of stairs to the office of Dr. Rosemary Merrill, the psychiatrist he’d been seeing for a month now. These appointments were akin to having the skin peeled from his body one excruciating strip at a time. Every time he made the climb, he told himself he was doing this for Shelby and her son, Noah, the child he hoped to raise as his own.
Because there was nothing he wouldn’t do for either of them, Avery made that climb twice a week, baring his soul to a stranger and risking his career if it should get out that the director of the FBI’s Criminal Investigation Division was seeing a shrink because his personal life was so screwed up. To maintain his privacy, he’d gone so far as to pay for the sessions out of his own pocket and insisted no records be kept.
Rosemary, as she preferred to be called, was a nice lady who was easy to talk to, but that didn’t mean he liked being there.
“Good morning, Avery,” she said as she admitted him to the cozy office where she plied her trade for eight hours a day.
How she could stand to listen to other people whine all day was beyond him.
“Coffee? Tea? Water?” She had shoulder-length light brown hair and warm, friendly brown eyes. He estimated her to be in her mid-to late-forties, and she’d told him once that she had four children.
“Just a water, please.”
She retrieved a bottle of water from a mini fridge and handed it to him.
“Thank you.” He drank half of it before she sat across from him.
“It’s going to be another scorcher,” she said.
“Uh-huh.” He sucked at small talk. Always had, and in here, the small talk became especially unbearable.
“How are things at home?”
And she cut right to the chase.
Avery leaned forward, forearms propped on his knees. “Okay. I guess.”
“What does that mean?”
“The baby... Noah... He’s so great.” Avery smiled as he thought of the little guy with the light dusting of blond hair and big blue eyes filled with wonder and curiosity. “He’s happy most of the time, sleeps great.”
“That’s such a sweet time. Enjoy him before he starts walking and talking and talking back. It goes by so fast.”
“That’s what everyone says.”
“And Shelby? How are things with her?”
“She’s... Well, she’s thrilled with the baby, of course. She waited such a long time to be a mom, and she’s crazy about him. I’ve never seen her so happy.”
“But?”
Crap, this was hard. Sharing his innermost thoughts didn’t come easily to him, although it once had, with Shelby, before he fucked it all up. “I still feel like we’re extremely cordial roommates.”
“That must be frustrating for you. Do you think she’s still angry about what happened?”
“No, I don’t, and that’s the strange part. She’s not angry. She’s not sad. She’s not anything where I’m concerned. I’m like the guy who shows up at the end of the day and helps with the baby so she can take a shower and have a drink. I sleep on the other side of her bed, but I may as well not be there.”
“How does that make you feel?”
He freaking hated that question. How did she think it made him feel? “Like shit.” Running his fingers through his hair, he said, “We had a good thing going until I made the mistake of saying another woman’s name while I was inside the woman I love. Since then, I could be any guy sharing the house with her for all she seems to care. And now... Now I’m wrapped up in another case with the woman whose name I uttered, who also happens to be Shelby’s boss and good friend. It’s such a mess. Sometimes I wonder if we wouldn’t both be better off to go our separate ways. But then I think about Noah and not seeing him every day, and I know I’ll never suggest that. Besides, the thought of living without either of them is unbearable to me.”
“You’re obviously very unhappy with the status quo, Avery.”
“So what? It’s my own fault. I caused this. Why shouldn’t I be unhappy?”
“You’ve apologized profusely to Shelby for what happened. You’ve assured her it was an honest mistake and you regret it. She knows you’re coming here twice a week, trying to work things out. You’ve done everything you possibly could for her and the baby. Why, after all that, do you still feel you don’t deserve to be forgiven?”
“Because I hurt her so badly. It was more than just that one incident. She found out I’d had feelings for Sam after we’d been together quite a while, and that devastated her. That was the first time she left me.”
“And you’d kept that from her because you knew it would hurt her, right?”
“Yeah, but that strategy blew up in my face—and Sam’s and Nick’s. She was upset with all three of us for keeping it from her.”
“Have you tried talking to Shelby about how you’re feeling?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because! She’s so wrapped up in the baby I may as well not even be there. She doesn’t care about me. All she cares about is him, which is the way it should be. He’s her child.”
“And you’re her fiancé. Certainly, she ought to care about you too.”
“Technically, I’m her fiancé. There hasn’t been one word spoken about a wedding since everything happened.”
“You have to talk to her about this, Avery. The situation you describe is not sustainable long-term. You say you don’t want to hurt her—or the baby—”
“I don’t. That’s the last thing I want.”
“If you don’t air this out with her, eventually you will hurt them both. It’ll get to be too much for you, and you’ll have no choice but to leave them.”
“I won’t do that.”
She raised a brow that conveyed a world of skepticism. “Are you prepared to live the rest of your life without sex if this estrangement with Shelby persists?”
Avery hadn’t thought about that possibility before she suggested it. “I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do. I assume you’re a normal, healthy man who likes sex as much as the next guy. When was the last time you had sex?”
Shocked that she’d come right out and asked him that, although he probably shouldn’t be, he met her intense gaze. “When I said Sam’s name instead of Shelby’s.”
“And when was that?”
“Before Noah was born, so a couple of months.”
“That’s a long time to go without.”
“We have a new baby. It’s not that unusual for new parents to go without.”
“Don’t blame the baby, Avery. You and Shelby are basically estranged but still living together. That’s not a healthy arrangement for any of you.”
“The thought of bringing this up with her... It’s...” He shook his head. He didn’t have the words to describe how that made him feel. Terrified. Wary. Vulnerable. Contrite. Disgusted with himself.
“You owe it to yourself—and to Shelby—to try to fix this. You say you want to keep Shelby and the baby in your life. You’ve said from the beginning that you love them both very much. If you want Noah to be raised in a healthy, loving home, you’ve got to at least try. If it would be easier to talk to her here, ask her to come with you.”
“That would be allowed?”
“Of course.”
“Okay. I’ll think about that.”
“You said you’re currently working with Sam again. How’s that been?”
“Fine. I’ve only seen her a couple of times at meetings.”
“How do you feel when you see her?”
“I don’t feel anything for her.” The words came out more sharply than he’d intended. Sighing, he said, “I’m sorry.”
“No need to apologize, but I’d like to dig a little deeper into that situation, if you don’t mind.”
Actually having the skin peeled from his body would be less excruciating than taking a trip down that road, wouldn’t it? “What about it?”
“Take me back to the first time you ever saw her.”
“Do we really have to do this?”
“I think we do. We’ve spent a lot of time here talking about your childhood and your relationship with Shelby. But we haven’t spent much time talking about Sam and your feelings for her.”
“I have no feelings for her.”
“But you did, right?”
Avery blew out a deep breath. “Yeah, I did.”
“Tell me about the first time you met her.”
Resigned to having to take this hellish trip down memory lane, he said, “We were working on the Woodmansee case. I was called in after it became apparent that Sam was a target. I had an immediate and extremely unwelcome reaction to her the first time we met.”
“Had that ever happened to you before with a woman?”
“No,” he said through gritted teeth.
“Did you know who she was before you met her?”
“Everyone knew who she was. She’d just married the dashing young senator in a very public ceremony and had investigated the murders of another senator and a Supreme Court nominee. Not to mention the call girl ring she uncovered that brought down some of the most powerful men in the country. I knew who she was, but meeting her in person was something else altogether.”
“How so?”
“Her public persona doesn’t do justice to the...fiery...way in which she leads her life and runs her investigations. She’s quite something, to say the least. And she’s gorgeous, as the rest of the world certainly knows by now.”
“After you had this reaction to her, what did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything about it. She was newly married and madly in love with her husband. I witnessed that myself on more than one occasion. You only had to be in the same room with them to understand she would never be available to anyone else.”
“That must’ve been hard to accept.”
He shrugged. “I was never anything more than a colleague to her.”
“Did she know how you felt about her?”
Avery’s face heated with mortification. “Apparently, I did a poor job of hiding the fact that she intrigued me. She picked up on it, her colleagues picked up on it and so did her husband. That was a real blast, as you might imagine.”
“Is it safe to say your relationship with her has been complicated from the beginning?”
“I have no relationship with her, except professional.”
“And your engagement to her personal assistant.”
“Yeah, that too.”
“When Shelby learned you’d once had feelings for Sam, did she think you’d been using her to get closer to Sam?”
“Yes.” His jaw clenched so tightly it sent shafts of pain through his face.
“I’m getting a better understanding of what happened and how Shelby must’ve felt after hearing this.”
“I want to be clear on something. I never once acted on my feelings for Sam. I respect the fact that she’s married and off-limits. Our relationship has been collegial at best, hostile at worst and an overall pain in my ass. I wish I’d never met her.”
“If you’d never met her, you might not have met Shelby.”
“I’m aware of that.”
She eyed him in a shrewd, all-seeing way that annoyed him. “I’m going to be honest with you.”
“I’d expect nothing else.”
“You and Shelby need extensive couples counseling if you’re going to have a prayer of making this relationship work. The challenges you’re facing aren’t things that’ll blow over in time or work themselves out. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
That certainly wasn’t what he wanted to hear, but it didn’t exactly come as a surprise to him. “I get it.”
Rosemary sat back in her chair and folded her arms. “You’ll talk to her and try to convince her to come in?”
“I’ll talk to her.” He just wished he knew what he’d say.