you were dead!”
“It’s complicated—”
“How could you do that to me? We were partners! You don’t do that to your partner!” Growling, she tried to throw off the patchwork quilt tangled around her legs, but the pain in her head grew excruciating. She jammed the heels of her hands into her temples, certain her head was going to explode.
The bed beneath her shifted, making the world roil around her again. Scanlon’s hands closed around her upper arms, steadying her. “You have to calm down. You’re still suffering the effects of whatever they gave you.”
An image darted through her brain. A flash of light on the point of a needle. A corresponding sting pricked the side of her neck. The alarming memory did more to dispel her escalating rage than anything Scanlon could have said.
“Somebody shot me up with something.”
“I know. There’s a needle mark near your carotid, and you were hallucinating before you passed out.” His voice emerged as hard as steel. “Stupid cretins could have killed you.”
“Who?” Why couldn’t she remember anything more than the needle? It felt as if she’d walked into a solid wall, nothing but blankness wherever she looked. “Who did this to me?”
“I’m not sure.” He dropped his hands from her arms and averted his gaze. She realized he wasn’t telling her the truth.
But why?
She changed tacks. “Any idea what they shot me up with?”
“Not sure about that, either.” He stood and crossed to the saucepan on the stove. “Food will help, whatever it was. Dilute the effects, at least.”
She wasn’t sure her rolling stomach could handle a glass of water, much less whatever it was he was pouring from the saucepan into a bowl. As he pulled a sleeve of plain crackers from a nearby cabinet, he asked, “You want to eat in bed or do you feel like sitting up at the table?”
“I don’t know if I can hold anything down.”
“Give it a try, at least.” He brought the bowl of steaming liquid to the bed, which she now realized was actually a futon sofa that took up half the wall in the small room. The rest of the room was cramped by the furnishings—a stove, a sink and a refrigerator, plus a card table that seemed to serve as a dining table, sat across from her. A door, the futon and a small bookshelf took up the wall behind her. The narrow end wall was just large enough to accommodate a low table with a television set that looked decades old.
“Where are we?” she asked.
He placed the bowl of soup on a portable tray table pulled from the narrow space between the stove and the refrigerator. “Soup first. I’ll tell you everything in a minute, I promise.”
She eyed the bowl, a little freaked out at being suspicious of Ben Scanlon. “What is that?”
“Chicken noodle soup.” He set the tray table in front of her. Up close, she noticed for the first time a wicked-looking scar on the back of his left hand.
He saw her reaction. “I didn’t escape the bomb entirely.” He turned his hand over, palm up, and she saw that the scar extended to his palm as well. “A piece of bomb shrapnel went straight through my hand. Hurt like hell.”
Any hint of appetite fled. “Any other injuries?”
“Scrapes and cuts. I got knocked into the river by the blast. Lost consciousness and damned near drowned before I came to and coughed up the water I’d inhaled.”
“They said they identified your body—” She shuddered, the memory of that day flooding back with fresh sharpness.
“Brand arranged it.”
She stared at him. “Adam Brand knew you were alive the whole time?” The SAC—Special Agent in Charge—had been one of the few people who’d seemed to understand her difficulty in dealing with Scanlon’s murder. Brand knew she’d felt guilty when she learned her partner had intercepted a note meant for her and gotten killed trying to protect her. He’d even understood her choice to leave the FBI.
So he wouldn’t have to lie to her face every day?
“We couldn’t let anyone connect me to what I’m doing here.” Scanlon slanted a guilty look at her. “Even you.”
Especially me, she thought blackly. “Where is here?”
“First, let’s get a little chicken noodle soup into you before you keel over on me.”
“Not until you tell me what the hell’s going on.” She pressed her lips together.
Scanlon sighed. “Where do you want me to start?”
“The explosion,” she said flatly. “That message was left on my desk. Morelli told me that much. You took my message from Morelli and met with my informant. Why would you do that? Why wouldn’t you call me, at least?”
Scanlon’s scarred hand stretched toward her for a second before dropping back to his lap. “I thought it was a setup.”
“So you went in my place? Without any backup?”
“Brand was with me, watching in case anything went hinky.”
She tamped down her simmering anger, trying to be dispassionate. “Did you trigger a booby trap?” That was the finding after an exhaustive postmortem of the explosion. But now she wondered if anything Brand had told her was the truth.
“It was on a delay—meant to give me time to get all the way inside before it blew. But I saw—something—” He frowned, as if making a mental effort to return to that moment in time. “I had a concussion from the blast. It seems to have erased my memories of what happened when I stepped inside the warehouse.”
“Then how do you know you spotted something?”
Scanlon’s mouth curved slightly. “I was wired for sound, at least until I ended up in the river. Brand told me I said something about a trap and then all of a sudden I was hauling butt away from the place.”
The temperature in the room seemed to drop a few degrees as Isabel pictured, not for the first time, what those last few seconds before the blast must have felt like for him. At least, this time, she could add a happier ending.
If he’s telling the truth, a bleak voice in the back of her head added.
She needed to talk to Brand. She had trouble believing he’d known this whole time. He had been so supportive—
“I quit the FBI within two weeks, you know,” she said aloud. “It was hard enough to go into that office every day and see your empty desk. When they brought in a new agent—”
“I know. Brand told me.” Scanlon leaned toward her, his expression troubled. “Go back to the Bureau. Brand will take you back—I know he will. As soon as we get you out of here.”
The last thing she wanted was to go back to the FBI, especially if Scanlon was telling her the truth. The
