Whiplash

everything Erin had let drop?

She smiled at him when he left the room to deal with hospital administration.

'You've got the neatest hair, Sherlock. Bowie's right, it's glorious. The color is like the Olympic flame.'

'Thank you.'

Erin grinned. 'All those curls, I'll bet Dillon thinks you're edible.'

'Edible? Hmm, now that sounds interesting. Erin, as much as I like hearing Ms. Morphine pay me compliments, it's time we talked.' Sherlock pulled a chair close to the bed and said very quietly not three inches from Erin's nose, 'I know you're right in the middle of this, Erin. The fact that someone tried to kill you today clinches it. It's time for the truth. I don't want to give whoever is behind this another chance to kill you.'

Erin felt the velvet fist behind the words. She whispered, 'You can't know-can you?'

Sherlock said matter-of-factly, 'You've dropped lots of things since we've met. You also tend to speak before you think. With you, if one really listens, everything is right up front.'

Erin shut her eyes. 'It's true, I have the biggest mouth. I always have. My dad would say my big mouth was fine by him, I couldn't get away with anything.'

'Does Georgie beat you at poker since everything you're thinking troops right across your face?'

'Haven't tried poker with her yet. You know, I lied once to a boyfriend in college, and you know what he did? The jerk laughed at me. It was so depressing.'

Sherlock waited.

Erin felt fatigue wash over her, both fatigue and an overwhelming sense of failure. 'I can't tell you, Sherlock, since he's a client. It's confidential. I'll have to speak to him first, see what he says.'

'Since you were nearly murdered, it seems to me this client's answer should be obvious unless he's in this mess up to his eyeballs, unless he knows who's behind the attempt on your life, or unless he's the one who tried to kill you.'

'He's a very nice man, but it's all very complicated. I'm in so bloody deep. I'll probably go to jail.'

Sherlock lightly stroked her fingers over Erin's pale cheek. 'Don't be dramatic, it'll be okay. Believe me, nothing's simpler than the truth. Spit it out. We'll deal with it, trust me.'

'No, Sherlock, I simply can't, not until-'

'Until you speak to your client who's a professor at Yale University?'

'See? A fine example of my big mouth, but you've got to let me talk to him myself.'

'You really should tell me now, Erin, so we can clean this mess up without your getting killed in the process.'

Erin wished the morphine would knock her out again, but it didn't. She was even feeling some mild throbbing in her back. It wasn't fair. 'Can I have more morphine?'

'Yes,' Sherlock said, and left her to speak to the nurse.

Half an hour later, Sherlock and Bowie were sitting side by side watching Erin sleep the peaceful sleep of the drugged.

'Well, damn and blast,' Bowie said. 'She'll have to tell us soon, Sherlock.'

'When she wakes up, I'll get it out of her. I'd rather have the truth when she's alert and willing.'

But what could Erin possibly know? Nothing important, he was sure of that. 'Are you going to tell me what you think she knows?'

'No, let's wait.'

36

MERRITT PARKWAY REST STOP

Thursday afternoon

Caskie Royal zipped up his pants, walked to the rusted sink with its dulled mirror, and stared at a face he hardly recognized. In only four days, fear had leached the color from his skin, and his jowls looked pale and saggy. He looked ill, terminally ill. That thought brought a ghastly smile to his face.

He was afraid, more afraid than he'd believed possible ever since that woman had broken into his office on Sunday night. He'd asked himself over and over how she'd known about the Culovort files, but he still had no clue how she'd known or why she'd copied them or who she was, but then again, neither did any of those agents who'd been stomping on him ever since. Was she a cancer patient? Or maybe it was her husband who was the patient? There were scores of patients very unhappy with him and the company since the Culovort shortage began, but still, that didn't ring true. If someone had merely wanted to make the papers public, why didn't the newspapers, or even the FBI, already have them? If she was a blackmailer, why hadn't she called?

He shook his head at the stranger in the mirror. Nothing made sense anymore. He had no idea if she was the one who'd murdered Blauvelt, not that he cared.

Caskie started to wash his hands. He turned on the warm water faucet, but the water was cold. He pressed down on the soap pump and lathered up, automatic after all these years. Jane Ann had nagged him to do it since the day he married her. His wife. He wasn't about to worry about her now, but his boys, Chad and Mark, were another matter entirely. How could he protect them? Protect their future? He felt a shaft of pain deep in his belly. It wasn't indigestion, it was grief.

Caskie knew he was going to be sucked down into the swamp where all the hungry alligators waited. Unless he was real careful, he'd end up in jail, or dead. Who would have thought that any of this would end up as anything more than a fine for the company at worst, maybe an early departure for him as CEO if it all hit the fan. If he'd thought jail was a possibility, would he have turned all this down? Maybe, he thought, sure he would have. No one in his family had ever gone to prison. He wasn't a young man any longer, he wouldn't be able to protect himself from all the predators in prison and he knew the predators were there, everyone knew that.

He turned his head slowly from side to side as he watched in the mirror. No, he thought, honest in that moment, the thought of jail wouldn't have deterred him. There was so much money, quite a lot of it already in his private accounts in the Grand Cayman.

What he'd done, it hadn't been all that bad. Just look at what those clowns at Pfizer had finally been nailed for, they'd deserved the huge fines. They'd deserved prison too, but that didn't happen. Fines for criminal behavior, not jail. Wasn't that a kick?

The party's over, he whispered to the deathly-pale face. The coffin lid was inexorably closing over him. He'd escaped for the moment to the men's room in the rest area, Toms with him at first, but Toms, who'd hummed while he'd peed, had finished and left. He hadn't washed his hands. Had he come back? Was he waiting outside the door? He wouldn't put anything past him, the bastard.

They'd told him, not asked him, to sit on the backward-facing rumble seat with Toms, facing Bender, Dieffendorf, and Gerlach. He'd tried to act dignified, tried to act the consummate CEO.

Dieffendorf hadn't bought it. He disliked Dieffendorf, always had, but the fact was, he hated Werner Gerlach now, hated what was in his eyes every time Gerlach looked at him. It was his own death he saw there if he couldn't convince them to trust him. And he saw in those eyes that he had failed. Caskie was nothing more than a pawn to Gerlach, he knew it to his soul. Gerlach had always been a priggish little man, barely five-foot-six in his elevator shoes-pathetic, really, when he wouldn't stop bragging about his sexy young wife, Laytha. What man in his right mind would want to be married to a woman younger than his daughter? Did she talk about getting zits? About going to bars and listening to music Gerlach hated? Caskie wondered whether Laytha cost Gerlach so much in maintenance that Gerlach had no choice but to keep coming up with new schemes to make more money. He had to keep up with Laytha's new shoes. He was brilliant at market strategies, at innovative ways to get around rules, and was endlessly greedy. Caskie supposed he'd recognized himself in Gerlach the moment the two men had met five years ago.

Gerlach and Dieffendorf had known each other forever, it seemed to Caskie, had run Schiffer Hartwin for close to twenty years now. They had always shown a united front to the world, just as now, the second in command accompanying Dieffendorf to face the latest battle.