Split Second

Like facing what had happened tonight?

She thought again of her grandfather, what her grandfather had written about her grandmother’s unhealthy obsession with the ring. Lucy couldn’t remember a single time she’d been with her grandmother and wondered if something was wrong with her. Had her father seen the obsession in his mother? Had he understood it? He’d known about the ring, but had he known what it did? She didn’t think so, but it didn’t matter now; they were all dead, there would be no answers for her.

Twenty-two years her father had protected his mother, and he’d protected her, too.

Twenty-two years he’d known his father’s body was buried in the attic, waiting for the day it no longer mattered.

The strange thing was, it still mattered. She thought it might matter forever. And she wondered again, had the stress of all of that killed him too young?

Her grandfather had believed her father wouldn’t have wanted her to have the ring. But her father hadn’t known the ring could have saved Claudine.

Coop snapped his fingers in her face. “Lucy? Are you with me?”

She looked blank, then quickly focused. “I was thinking about all the chaos—the local cops crowding around us to see for themselves what a mess the feds had made. Everybody knew she was long gone before they cordoned the area.”

That isn’t what you were thinking at all. She’d lied to him, nice and clean, but he decided not to call her on it. He grinned at her. “Yeah, we sure got to enjoy a lot of their jokes. The worst one I heard was from that young rookie—he looked about eighteen?” Coop mimicked him: “‘But I thought you guys were the best in the whole world!’”

Lucy said, “Yeah, well, we’re supposed to be. Serves us right, I guess.”

She hoped she’d never see anything like tonight’s fiasco again. The ring. They’d been so lucky no one was killed. The two civilians Comafield had shot had suffered only minor wounds, thank God.

She said, “This was a learning lesson, and my father always told me learning lessons had to be painful to be worth anything. I’m afraid the price of this one is going to be too high.

“Where does Kirsten go from here, Coop? On a rampage? You know she’s unstable, and now she’s got to be enraged—at us, and at Sherlock in particular. Don’t forget Savich gut-shot her boyfriend. What is she going to do now?”

Coop laid his hand on her shoulder. He could feel the bones. She’d lost more weight. Well, her father had died, and she’d remembered her own father and grandmother dumping her grandfather into a trunk. And now there was the blasted ring.

The bloody ring—he shook his head. He wanted to ask her, but more, he wanted to press her face against his shoulder and comfort her, maybe tell her a joke, but he didn’t do either of these things.

He sighed, stepped back. “You’re probably right. Look, we’ll figure it out and we’ll catch Kirsten Bolger.” He paused a moment. She looked exhausted, from the inside out. It was worth a shot, and so he said, “Lucy, you were sitting here alone, your head down. What were you thinking about? Not about tonight, so please don’t lie to me again. Were you thinking about that ring?”

She looked at him, saw the worry in his eyes. He was a good man, she knew that now, and he was a good agent, she thought; he could probably pry sardines out of the can without opening it. He saw to the heart of things, but even that didn’t matter. She wasn’t about to tell him anything about the ring; it wouldn’t be fair to involve him, surely not yet, if ever. She touched her fingers to her shirt, felt the ring lying against her throat, warm and pulsing.

Lucy drew in a slow breath as she looked up at him. He looked tired, all the mad adrenaline drained out of him now, and he looked afraid. For her? She had to touch him. She laid her hand over his. “Don’t be worried for me, Coop. All the excitement’s over, and all of us survived tonight. We were lucky.”

Coop took her hand between his. “Lucy, I want you to know, whatever you’re going through, whatever is eating at you, I don’t want you to think you’re alone. Listen, I’d really like to be there for you. Actually—I want to be with you.” There, he’d said it, for the first time in his life, he’d said those words to a woman, to Special Agent Lucy Carlyle. Who knew?

She looked at him for a long moment and seemed to consider what he’d said. She pulled her hand away, giving a slight shake of her head as she rose. He watched her fill a paper cup with water from a water cooler and raise it in a toast. He watched her give him a bright smile. “Hey, here’s to Mr. Spicer and his handy bat. Who knows, without the bat, maybe we wouldn’t have Comafield. Excuse me, I’ve got to hit the bathroom.” And she was gone in under two seconds.

He stared after her.

CHAPTER 45

Savich said to Ruth as he slipped another hospital pillow under Sherlock’s head, “When Mr. Maitland got off the phone with Director Mueller tonight, he said the director wasn’t pleased, and that’s a whopper of an understatement. He can’t figure out how it all got so screwed up. I told Mr. Maitland I was having a hard time figuring that out, too, except then a huge herd of drunk people stampeding around flashed clear in my mind. Luckily, Mr. Maitland said he wouldn’t let the director reassign the case.”

His heart nearly stopped when Sherlock said clearly, “I should have taken her down in the bar.”

Not in this lifetime. Savich smiled, leaned down and kissed her cheek. “Next time I’m thinking knockout gas for the whole bar, everyone down and out, including Kirsten and Comafield. How do you feel, sweetheart?”

She thought about it. “Like my throat is on fire and someone hollowed out my stomach with a big scoop. What’d they do to me?”

“A little bit of this, a little bit of that,” he said. “Go back to sleep, okay? You’ll feel fine in the morning.” To his surprise and relief, she did. She whispered something, but he couldn’t make out the words. He’d wanted to ask her how she could drink that beer, knowing it was drugged, but that could wait.

Savich left Ruth to keep watch over Sherlock and walked to the waiting room to talk to the agents sitting there, drinking coffee and looking flat-out depressed. He said, “Look, guys, there’s no reason for you to hang around any longer. It’s after two in the morning. Go home and get some sleep. I’ll see everyone tomorrow at the office. Don’t forget to make all your bedtime prayers for Comafield’s continued existence on this planet. He’s our one precious lead. We’ll discuss the operation tomorrow.”

Jack Crowne said, “The plan was fine, except for that mob of people, most of them so drunk they barely realized they could have been shot dead.”

“We couldn’t have worked it any worse,” Ollie Hamish said.

Jack’s cell blasted out toe-tapping salsa. It was his fiancee, Rachel. He was smiling a little as he said hello to her and walked out of the waiting room.

No one left. They spent the next hour going over every detail of what happened, what they could have done differently, until all of them were so tired they couldn’t think of anything intelligent to say.

At three a.m. Dr. Oliver Pendergrass, his green scrubs dotted with blood, strode into the waiting room. In a surprising British accent, he said immediately, “He made it through surgery.”

There was a collective sigh of relief.

Dr. Pendergrass continued: “It amazes me what damage a single small bullet can do to the human body. That scrap of metal caused a great deal of injured bowel, I’m afraid, and I had to remove a good length of it. We’ll see how he does. The major risk now is overwhelming infection, in his belly and in his blood. The next few days will tell.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” Savich said. “You and your staff should be aware there will be police at his door and in the hospital during his stay.”