the door, swings it wide open and steps in, gun at the ready.
‘Rachel!’
He moves speedily through his apartment, eyes scanning, finger firmly on the trigger.
‘Rachel!’
He kicks doors open. The bedrooms. The kitchen. The bathroom.
Nothing. There is nobody here.
He stands still in the center of the living room, his chest heaving, his gun still grasped in a two-handed combat stance.
A noise behind him. He whirls, his trigger finger tensing. Nadine jumps back, startled.
‘Cal? What the hell’s going on?’
‘I don’t know. Something. I don’t know. There’s a guy. He wants to hurt me.’
He knows he’s not making much sense. He can see the puzzlement and fear on Nadine’s face. But there’s no time to explain. He has to find Rachel and Amy. But how? Where to start?
He lowers the gun, starts to look at the apartment through different eyes. Searching not for people, but for signs of disturbance. Clues hinting at a struggle. Another note perhaps.
But he sees nothing. The apartment looks exactly as it always does — tidy but not obsessively so.
He holsters the Glock, then takes out his cellphone. He tries Rachel’s number again. This time he gets a ringing tone instead of voicemail.
Nadine says, ‘Cal? Where’s Rachel?’
He raises a hand to silence her while he listens.
Answer. Please God, answer.
‘Hello?’
It’s a woman’s voice, but it doesn’t sound like. .
‘Rachel? Is that you?’
‘Who’s calling, please?’
‘My name is Callum Doyle. I’m trying to get hold of my wife, Rachel Doyle. Is this. . I mean, am I calling. .’
‘Mr Doyle, could you hold on a minute, please?’
No, I can’t fucking hang on, he wants to say, but the sounds from the handset become muted, like the phone has just been smothered. He can hear snatches of a muffled conversation, but cannot make out the words.
‘Cal? Who is that?’
It’s Nadine again, and once more Doyle requests her silence with a raised finger.
The voice comes back on the line.
‘Mr Doyle, my name is Nurse Lynley. I work at Bellevue Hospital. We have your wife here.’
‘At the hospital? Put her on, please. I want to speak with her.’
There is a slight pause. ‘Mr Doyle, your wife can’t talk right now. She’s been badly beaten.’
Doyle feels his legs start to buckle. His breath comes out in a long quiver that he finds difficult to shape into words.
‘Beaten?’
‘Yes. We received an anonymous phone call. Your wife was assaulted and left in a parking lot. An ambulance picked her up and brought her straight to the ER. We’re doing all we can for her.’
‘All you can? How bad is she? She’ll live, won’t she?’
Another pause. ‘Mr Doyle, your wife is in a critical condition. Her injuries are extensive. The doctors are doing everything they can. . Mr Doyle, are you able to come over to the hospital?’
Doyle is almost shaking now. He hears how carefully the nurse is choosing her words. Worse, he knows what she’s leaving unsaid. What it amounts to is that Rachel is clinging to her life by a thread.
‘Yes,’ he answers. ‘I’ll come now. You’re. . you’re sure it’s my wife?’
‘She had this cellphone on her when she was brought in. Also, her driver’s license.’
‘I’ll be right over,’ he says, and then, ‘Wait. My daughter. A little girl. She should have been with my wife. Is she there too?’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Doyle, but nobody else was found with your wife.’
He ends the call, turns toward Nadine. She has a hand to her mouth, and her eyes are wide. It’s clear that she has caught the gist of the telephone conversation.
‘What’s happened?’ she says. ‘Tell me what’s happened.’
But Doyle cannot speak. He thunders toward the door. He needs to help his wife, make sure she recovers fully from this vicious attack. He needs to find his beautiful innocent daughter.
And then he needs to track down and kill the son of a bitch who has so savagely ripped into his family.
He takes the stairs two at a time. He hears Nadine’s clatter from above as she struggles to rush down the steps in her heels. She calls for him to wait, but he’s like a train with no brakes. He keeps going until he’s out on the street, seconds away from leaping into his car and launching it like a rocket.
‘Cal! Wait. Please. She’s my friend. She’s the only real friend I’ve got in this damned city.’
That stops him. He is surprised by her words. Although she is fairly new to the city, he has always thought of her as Miss Popular.
And so he pauses for a while, waiting for Nadine to catch up.
‘You should go home, Nadine,’ he says when she is at his shoulder.
‘Open the car. I’ll drive. You’re liable to take out half the traffic in New York.’
He is reluctant, but when she shows him the whiteness of her open palm he finds her difficult to resist. He hands her the key.
‘It’s the ER at Bellevue. You know how to get there?’
‘Head east, turn before we hit the river, right? Get in,’ she says.
She starts the car up and pulls it out into the traffic, then signals at the next turn to take her back toward Central Park West.
‘Why is she in the hospital, Cal? What did they say on the phone?’
‘Somebody beat her up. I think it’s bad. They beat her up and dumped her in a parking lot.’
‘Oh, Jesus. Is she going to be okay?’
‘I. . I don’t know. They wouldn’t say.’
‘She’ll be okay,’ Nadine says. ‘Rachel’s a fighter. All cops’ wives are fighters.’
‘That include you?’
‘I forced you into taking me along now, didn’t I?’
Doyle looks out of the passenger window at the buildings going by. He wishes he hadn’t let Nadine drive at this snail’s pace. He also wishes that he was in a squad car, so that he could put on the lights and sirens, then floor the gas pedal.
Nadine says, ‘You knew, didn’t you? That something might have happened. Even before you went into the apartment you suspected something was up.’
‘I had an inkling. I hoped I was wrong.’
‘Why? The inkling, I mean. What’s going on, Cal?’
Cal opens his mouth to speak, and then something occurs to him. Does this count? Talking to Nadine at the apartment. Getting in a car with her. In the killer’s estimation, does this cross the line regarding close contact?
‘Nadine, pull over.’
‘What? What are you talking about? We’re nowhere near the hospital.’
‘I know. Just pull over and get out of the car. You need to go home. Now!’
She glances across at him. ‘No, Cal. Not until you explain all this to me.’
Doyle thinks, She’s a fighter, all right.
‘I’m in danger. Everyone who gets close to me is in danger too. That means you, Nadine.’
‘Why? What kind of danger?’
‘Mo hasn’t told you about any of this?’
‘No. He hardly ever talks about his work.’
There is a bitter edge to her voice. A suggestion of discord between her and Franklin. It comes as no
