I don’t remember.”
She looked at him knowingly. “That’s what I thought. Go home, Elliot. Kiss your wife and hug your kids and tell them all to stay out of malls for a while.”
The warning hit too close to home. His oldest daughter, Jamie, liked to hang out with her friends at the Crossroads on weekends. If this had been Saturday morning instead of Wednesday night…
He didn’t want to go there. Suddenly ten paces beyond weary, Elliot decided to take Lydia up on her offer. “You sure?”
This job could easily be turned over to someone in a lower position for now, but she wouldn’t feel right about leaving until she knew what condition the bomber was in.
She started to gesture toward the closed doors behind her. Pain shot through her arm and she carefully lowered it, hoping Elliot hadn’t noticed. He could fuss more than a mother hen once he got going.
She nodded toward the room. “As the good doctor pointed out, that guy’s not going anywhere tonight. I can handle it from here. If anything breaks, I can always page you.”
Grateful for the reprieve, Elliot patted her shoulder. “Night or day.” He glanced through the window. The medical team was still going full steam. “From the looks of it, it might be a while. Want me to get you some coffee before I go, maybe find you something clean to put on?”
She glanced down at her bloodied jacket. “My dry cleaner is not going to be happy about this. And, thanks, but I’ll find the coffee myself.” She didn’t like to be waited on. Besides, Elliot had put in just as full a day as she had. “You just go home to Janice before she starts thinking I have designs on you.”
Looking back at his life, he sometimes thought he’d been born married. Janice had been his first sweetheart in junior high. “Not a chance. Janice knows there isn’t an unfaithful bone in my body.”
That makes you one of the rare ones, Elliot, Lydia thought as she watched her partner walk down the long corridor. She vaguely wondered if there would ever be someone like that in her life, then dismissed the thought. She was married to her job, which was just the way she wanted it. No one to worry about her and no one to worry about when she put herself on the line. Clean and neat. She was too busy to be lonely.
“You’d think a state-of-the-art hospital would keep coffee machines in plain sight,” she muttered to herself, looking up and down the corridor. About to approach the receptionist at the emergency admissions desk, she heard the doors behind her swoosh open.
Turning, she saw the doctor who had earlier hustled her out of Room Twelve hurrying alongside an unconscious, gurneyed Conroy. They had transferred the suspect back onto a gurney and he was being wheeled out.
She lost no time falling in beside the doctor. “Is he stable?” she asked. “Can I question him?”
Stopping at the service elevator, Lukas pressed the up button. He’d never cared for authority, had found it daunting and confining as a teenager. The run-ins he had had with the law before his uncle had taken him under his wing and straightened him out had left a bad taste in his mouth.
“You can if you don’t want any answers.” The elevator doors opened. The orderly with him pushed the gurney inside and Lukas took his place beside it. “He needs immediate surgery, not a game of Twenty Questions.”
“What floor?” she demanded as the doors began to close.
Lukas pretended to cock his head as if he hadn’t heard her. “What?”
Irritated, she raised her voice. “What floor are you taking him to?”
The doors closed before he gave her an answer. Not that he looked as if he was going to, she thought angrily. What was his problem? Did he have an affinity for men who tried to blow up young girls and cut down young boys for sport because of some half-baked ideas about supremacy?
Her temper on the verge of a major explosion, Lydia hurried back to the emergency room admissions desk and cornered the clerk before he could get away.
“That tall, dark-haired doctor who was just here, the one who was working on my prisoner—”
“You mean Dr. Graywolf?” the older man asked.
Well, ain’t that a kick in the head? Conroy and his people had blown up the exhibit because of contempt for the people it honored and here he was, his life in the hands of one of the very people to whom he felt superior.
Graywolf. She rolled the name over in her mind. It sounded as if it suited him, she thought. He looked like a wolf, a cunning animal that could never quite be tamed. But even a cunning animal met its match.
Lydia nodded. “That’s the one. He just took my prisoner upstairs to be operated on—where was he going with him?”
“Fifth floor,” the man told her. “Dr. Graywolf’s a heart surgeon.”
A heart surgeon. Before this is over, Dr. Graywolf might need one himself if he doesn’t learn to get out of my way, Lydia vowed silently as she hurried back to the bank of elevators.
Chapter 2
Lydia looked around the long corridor. After more than three hours, she could probably draw it from memory, as she could the waiting room she had long since vacated.
Blowing out an impatient breath, she dragged her hand through her long, straight hair. It was at times like this that she wished she smoked. Or practiced some kind of transcendental exercises that could somehow help her find a soothing, inner calm. Pacing and drinking cold coffee to which the most charitable adjective that could be applied was godawful, didn’t begin to do the trick.
She knew what was at the root of her restlessness. She was worried that somehow John Conroy would manage to get away, that his condition wasn’t nearly as grave as that tall, surly doctor had made it out to be. And when no one was looking, he’d escape, the way Lockwood had. Jonas Lockwood had been the very first prisoner she’d been put in charge of. His escape had almost cost her her career before it had begun.
She and Elliot had managed to recapture the fugitive within eighteen hours, but not before Lockwood had seriously wounded another special agent. It was a lesson in laxness she never forgot. It had made her extra cautious.
Something, she had been told time and again by her mother, that her beloved father hadn’t been. Had Bryan Wakefield been more cautious with his own life, he might not have lost it in the line of duty. The ensuing funeral, with full honors, had done little to fill the huge gap her father’s death had left in both her life and her mother’s.
Lydia crumpled the empty, soggy coffee container in her hand and tossed it into the wastebasket.
The corridor was almost silent, and memories tiptoed in, sneaking up on her. Pushing their way into her mind.
She could still remember the look on her mother’s face when she’d told her that she wasn’t going to become a lawyer because her heart just wasn’t in it.
Lydia smiled without realizing it. Her heart had been bent on following three generations of Wakefields into law enforcement. Her great-grandfather and grandfather had both patrolled the streets of Los Angeles and her
