info about Rickey Charles fits,” Tucker said, though he still sounded pretty dubious. “He was found dead in his holding cell this morning.”
Chelsea sat up so fast her head spun. “He what?”
Tucker winced. “I should’ve phrased that better. Sorry, I went into cop-talking-to-ME mode and forgot you knew him.”
“What did he—” Chelsea broke off, not sure how she was supposed to feel. She hadn’t cared for Rickey and couldn’t forgive that he’d apparently made some sort of deal with the escapees, but she wouldn’t have wished him dead under any circumstance.
“It was murder concocted to look like a suicide,” Tucker said succinctly. “I guess, based on what you just told me about what the driver said to you out on the loading dock, that Rickey was supposed to have signed off on the bodies, delaying discovery of the switch. When he turned up in the holding cell instead, someone working for al-Jihad killed him either to punish him or to shut him up, or both.”
Which would mean that someone in the PD—or at least someone with access to the overnight holding cells—was on the terrorists’ payroll, Chelsea thought. She didn’t say it aloud, though, because the possibility was too awful to speak.
Tucker nodded, though. “Yeah. Big problem. That’s why I’m here.”
He hadn’t stayed with her strictly to keep her company, she realized. He’d stayed because the BCCPD had figured it might not be a coincidence that the ME who’d missed his shift that morning had wound up dead. Tucker’s bosses—and her own—thought she might be at risk, that whoever had killed Rickey might go after her next, looking to silence her before she told the cops anything that might help lead them to the escapees.
Except she didn’t know anything that would help, did she?
“Don’t worry,” Tucker said, correctly interpreting her fears. “We’re keeping the story as quiet as possible, and letting the media think you’re dead, too. If the escapees are following the news, they have no reason to think you’re alive.”
Unless Fairfax had told them for some reason. But why would he, when he’d been the one to save her?
She didn’t know who to trust, or what to believe, and the confusion made her head spin.
She sank back against the thin hospital pillow, noticing for the first time that she was wearing nothing but a hospital johnnie and a layer of bedclothes. “Can I—” she faltered as the world she knew seemed to skew beneath her, tilting precariously. “Can I get dressed and get out of here?”
His expression went sympathetic. “Yeah, you’re cleared…medically, anyway. Since your purse was still at the office, Sara used your key to grab clothes, shoes and a jacket for you, along with a few toiletries.” He gestured. “They’re in the bathroom, along with your purse. The keys are in it.”
He didn’t offer to help her, which told her it was a test: if she couldn’t make it to the bathroom and get herself dressed unassisted, she was staying in the hospital until she could.
She’d been telling the truth, though. She felt fantastic—physically, anyway—and was able to make it to the small restroom and get dressed without any trouble.
In the midst of pulling on her shirt, she paused and frowned in confusion when she saw that there wasn’t any discernible mark where the injection had gone into her arm. He’d jammed the tip of that ampoule in hard enough that it should’ve left a mark. Did that mean it hadn’t happened the way she remembered?
It didn’t take too many minutes of staring at her own reflection in the mirror for her to conclude that she didn’t know, and she wasn’t going to figure it out standing in a hospital bathroom. She emerged to find Tucker waiting for her, with his cell phone pressed to his ear.
“You shouldn’t be on that thing in here,” she said automatically, her med-school training kicking in even though the actual risk was relatively minor.
“I’m off,” he said, flipping the phone shut and dropping it in his pocket. “You ready to go?” He indicated the door with a sweep of his hand.
He didn’t offer to let her in on the phone call that’d been so important he’d broken hospital rules to take it, but his eyes suggested it was something about her, or the escapees.
Have you caught them? she wanted to ask, but didn’t because she feared it would come out sounding as though she hoped the men were still at large. Not that she did—her terrifying ordeal had more than convinced her that al-Jihad, Muhammad Feyd and Lee Mawadi were monsters who didn’t even deserve the benefit of an autopsy.
“The man who helped me, or who I think helped me, anyway…that was Jonah Fairfax, right?” she couldn’t help asking.
She hadn’t wanted to say too much about him, lest Tucker read too much into her words. But it wasn’t like she was going to be able to ask anyone else either.
After a long moment, he inclined his head. “Yeah. The description fits.”
“Have they been caught yet?”
“No.” Tucker paused. “Maybe it’d be better for you to stay in the hospital a little longer, for observation.”
Translation: I think you should go upstairs to the psych ward and have a nice chat with a professional about the definition of Stockholm syndrome.
“That’s not necessary,” she said quickly. “I’m feeling fine. Hungry, but otherwise fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“Don’t worry about me,” she said, summoning a smile. “I’m not confused about Fairfax, and I’m ready to do the debriefing thing. I figure I might as well get it over with.” She took a deep breath and beat back her nerves. “I promise I’ll hold it together.”
And she did. She held it together while they returned to the BCCPD by way of a breakfast sandwich to soothe her hunger pangs. Once she was at the PD, she held it together through several more rounds of questioning. The worst of it came from Romo Sampson, a dark-haired, dark-eyed suit from the Internal Affairs Department, but she stayed strong and answered his questions fully on everything except the way her heart had bumped when she first saw Fairfax. That much she kept to herself.
After the questioning, Chelsea also held it together—more or less—through a tearful reunion with Sara and her other coworkers, and a trip down to the morgue to say goodbye to Jerry. She held it together through a phone call to Jerry’s devastated girlfriend, and then through calls to her own parents and sister. Each person she spoke to or saw was cautioned to pretend they hadn’t heard from her if asked; her survival was being kept very quiet because the escapees—three of them, anyway—thought she was dead. The fourth was still an enigma.
Once she was off the phone with her mother, Chelsea thought about calling her father, but didn’t. Despite her mother’s best efforts to keep the family together, her parents had divorced when she was in her early teens. Her boat-captain father, a charismatic man with a wandering heart, had called and visited a few times a year for the first few years after the divorce, but that had dwindled and eventually stopped. Last Chelsea had heard, he was living with a woman twenty years his junior, running charters off the Florida Keys. He didn’t have a TV, and if he happened to hear about the escape,
