Hidden Fire, Kobo (43 page)

"What's wrong?" Sarah said.

"Not now, ma'am. Please wait
outside. There's a lounge behind the nurse's station."

"But—"

Sarah refused to leave the hallway
outside Randy's room. Rachel and her prisoner had disappeared. She sank to the
floor and leaned against the wall. Muffled voices came from behind the door.
Commands were given using terms she only half understood. Milligrams. CCs.
Push. A machine beeped. Something hissed.

Time stopped. A hand rested on her
shoulder. "Sarah?"

She looked up. "Kovak?"

He lowered himself to the floor beside
her and put his arm around her. "What happened?"

The words came out in a rush. He didn't
stop her, just let her pour out everything that had happened. "There was a
man. Dressed in a lab coat. But he was the man who came to my shop and asked me
to ship the Garrigue mugs to Washington. He called himself Mr. Pemberton. He
must have done something to Randy. Rachel caught him and then the nurses came
and doctors and they won't let me in." She fought back tears. Most of
them, anyway. A sob escaped.

"Hush." He pulled her head
against his chest. "Your Mr. Pemberton is in custody and he told the
doctors what he injected into Randy's IV. They're taking good care of him."

She looked up at him and saw the truth in
his eyes. She wiped her eyes. "How come you know all this? They wouldn't tell
me a thing. 'Wait in the lounge,' they said. Like this is some hotel and I'm
some delicate flower."

"Helps to be a cop, I guess." He
smiled. "And for the record, there's nothing delicate about you."

The door opened. A woman stood in the
doorway. "I'm Dr. du Toit. Are you Sarah Tucker?"

Sarah jumped to her feet. "That's
me. Is he all right? Can I see him yet?"

"He's insisting on it." She
stepped aside, letting everyone out of the room. Sarah was relieved to see the
cart with the machines leaving with them.

"He's going to be groggy," the
doctor said. "He might not remember a lot yet. It's normal."

"But he's all right?" Sarah
said.

"Yes, he's going to be fine."
She smiled. "Go. He was rather adamant about seeing you. But ten minutes,
no longer. You can have him tomorrow morning."

Sarah slipped around the doctor and into
Randy's room. His bed was propped up at both head and foot. She stepped to his
side. He was pale, but not ghost-white the way he'd been before. When he smiled
at her, she grabbed the bed rail for support.

"How are you?" he asked.

"Me?" she croaked. "You
could have died."

"Doctor said … you found me. Saved
my life." His voice rasped. He rubbed his throat.

"Don't talk. You want some water?"

He nodded and she spotted a covered mug
with a plastic straw stuck in the lid on the bedside table. It sloshed when she
shook it. "Is this water?" she asked.

He hunched his shoulders. She pried the
lid off and sniffed. No odor. "I guess it must be," she said. "Want
me to test it?"

He gave a short laugh that turned into a
cough and grabbed her hand. "I'll be brave."

She watched his Adam's apple bob as he
gulped. The simple everyday act settled her. He reached to set the cup on the
table and she intercepted him. "Let me." She set the cup down, but
kept hold of his hand with her other one. As always, she marveled in the way
hers disappeared in his grasp.

There was a quick rap on the door, which
opened before either of them spoke. Kovak breezed in. "Hey, big guy. Not
smart, using vacation days instead of sick leave. Poor planning." He came
closer. "I was talking to your campus cops earlier. They said you got
yourself in a bit of a pickle. I thought I'd have to see for myself. The big
guy laid out flat." Sarah saw his flippant attitude for what it was.
Concern for his partner—his friend. She gazed at Randy and saw he knew it, too.

He glanced at the raised foot of the bed.
"How's the leg?"

"Still numb," Randy said.

"What?" Kovak said. "They
gave you anesthesia to take out a bullet? I thought you would bite on a strip
of leather. Wuss."

"It was a local," Randy said
with mock indignation. "The other guy gave me the real stuff."

"Succinylcholine," Kovak said.
He shrugged at Sarah. "Told you, it's good to be a cop. I said I needed
the information for the police report."

"Is someone going to tell me what
happened?" she said.

"I think you better fill her in,"
Randy said. "She gets testy when you don't share your day, I've found."
His lids drooped.

"Tomorrow will be fine." She
kissed his forehead. "The doctor said you need to sleep. I'll be back
first thing in the morning." His eyes didn't open, but his lips twitched
upward.

"You need a lift somewhere?"
Kovak asked. "I'm staying in town. More loose ends to tie up."

Bone-weary, she accepted. It would be
nice to have time to collect her thoughts.

"I'm fine, damn it," Randy said
as Kovak and Sarah virtually manhandled him into the motel room. "The
doctor said not to drive, that's all. I'm not an invalid."

Kovak gave a pointed look at Randy's
cane. "Yeah, right."

"And she said it might take a day or
more for all the sucks stuff, whatever the guy gave you, to be out of your
system," Sarah said.

"Succinylcholine," Kovak said.

"Right. Not to mention side effects
of the pain pills," she added.

Kovak snorted. "They only have side
effects if you
take
them, and my money says the big guy is going to wait
until it hurts too much to stand it before he pops one." He kept his eyes
on Sarah. "Of course, if you take one
before
the pain gets too bad,
then the pain doesn't get too bad, if you know what I mean."

"Did you take your ulcer pills?"
Sarah asked.

"Yes, I did. And I will continue to
do so, twice a day until they're gone. Damn it, both of you. I'm a grown man
and don't need nursemaids." Randy hobbled to the bed and tossed the bag of
medications onto the nightstand.

Sarah hurried over and arranged pillows
behind his head and under his leg. He lay back and tried not to let the relief
show. His brain had progressed from pea soup to chicken noodle. Thoughts moved
more freely, but they kept getting tangled. Drugs would make it worse and he
needed to be able to think for a while. He'd had a fitful night and called
Kovak to come get him out of the damn hospital first thing in the morning. He
needed a quieter environment to think. Sarah had arrived with Kovak.

He remembered waking up in the emergency
room after his helicopter ride and debriefing the local LEOs, although right
now he couldn't recall how much he'd been able to tell them.

"You mind some shop talk, Sarah?"
Kovak dragged the easy chair closer to the bed.

"No, of course not." She
brought a glass of water to the nightstand. "If he's up to it."

"He's up to it," Randy said. "He's
also in the room, so he can be addressed directly."

She blushed. He savored it. He patted the
bed beside him. She scooted against the headboard and he interlocked his
fingers with hers.

"You start," he said to Kovak.
His throat still hurt from the tube the doctors had inserted while they kept
him breathing. If Sarah hadn't come in when she had … The memory of the man
hovering over his bed with his evil smile while Randy tried to suck air into
his lungs was one he would carry with him for a long, long time.

"Quite a mess," Kovak said. "We
can start with the stars of this little production. First, Hugh Garrigue, who
perfected a technique of creating pottery that could hide diamonds. Tracing the
smugglers, however, is now out of our hands. Interpol will deal with it.
However, his untimely death threw a monkey wrench into the smuggling scheme. He
died before he sent Gloria the descriptions of which pieces had the diamonds."

"Who's she?" Sarah asked.

"Gloria Osgood," Randy said. "Retired
hospital worker and local coordinator. Damn good liar, too. I bought everything
she told me. Makes a nasty glass of lemonade. From now on, it's bottled water
only—unopened bottles."

"A lot of this is still speculation,"
Kovak continued. "But it seems to fit together, especially in light of
what Trent Wallace and Gloria Osgood were willing to spill. She worked with
Garrigue. He had a great scheme. Nothing large scale, but enough to let him
retire to a desert island if he'd lived long enough. He receives the diamonds. Small
quantities of investment quality gems. Hides them in pottery. Not many, not too
often and in obscure shops not likely to attract much attention."

Sarah's grip on Randy's hand tightened.
He saw indignation on her face. "Not that your shop's obscure," he
said.

She sighed. "No, in the grand scheme
of things, it's just a small-town boutique. I know what you mean. And it does
seem like a clever scheme." She frowned. "I resent being duped like
that. Not to mention considered a suspect."

"We'll see to it your name is
cleared," Randy said. "And I'll make Neville apologize in person."

"Moving right along," Kovak
said. "Gloria Osgood used her hospital connections to recruit greedy
pharmaceutical sales reps. They travel a lot and would be told where, when and
what to buy. They'd remove the diamonds and take them to a fence. For their
efforts, they were allowed to keep a stone. She didn't use the same reps more
than a few times. That was part of the beauty of the scheme. Different shops,
different parts of the country, different people moving the goods."

"Voorhees," Sarah said. "He
was one of these … what would you call them? Couriers?"

Kovak smiled at Randy. "She does
pick up the lingo, doesn't she?"

"She watches too much television."
He rubbed his thumb over the back of her hand.

"Right," Kovak said. "We
have Voorhees to thank for most of our information. He confessed everything and
the cops have been busy following up."

"I'll say," Randy said. "I
hope the town council is suitably impressed that a Pine Hills cop broke the
case."

"I'm still not following everything,"
Sarah said. "Keep going."

"Voorhees made his buy at a Garrigue
showing a few months back," Kovak said. "He knew the Garrigues were
worth something in and of themselves, so after he took out the diamonds, he
decided to glue them back together and give them to his aunt at Saint Michael's."
He smiled at Sarah. "So, we could say you gave us the break we needed. You
knew there was something fishy about the mugs and everything started to fall
into place."

Randy's insides warmed with the fresh
blush that spread to Sarah's face.

"Go on," she said.

"Our next star," Kovak said, "was
Sebastian." He looked at Sarah. "You knew him as Mr. Pemberton. He
was one of the couriers, but he was trying too hard to be smart."

"I thought he was a little too
Masterpiece
Theatre
to be real," Sarah said. "A caricature of a stereotype."

"When crooks think they're being
smart, they're usually being stupid," Randy added. "Like killing
someone to shut him up."

"Your dead guy?" Sarah said.

"Right. Walter Young. Bit player who
was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Janitor of sub-par intelligence. But
intelligent enough to put two and two together, either by hearing something or
reading something when he was cleaning Garrigue's studio. We'll probably never
know how he found out, but he hightails it up to Pine Hills and has the
misfortune of running into Sebastian, who's waiting for the curtain to rise, in
a bar. Young's studying a sketch of Garrigue's mug, and he's a talkative drunk
to boot. Sebastian recognizes the pattern in the sketch, realizes Young's going
to mess things up. He helps him get drunker, perhaps, lures him to a quiet spot
and drugs him. Tosses him in the trunk of the guy's car, which the county
sheriffs are, even as we speak, examining for trace, thanks to our tall friend's
alert."

"You talk too much, you know,"
Randy said. He reached for the glass on the nightstand and took a sip of water.
"Sebastian had been reading about the Triple X murders in the Portland
paper and decided to copy them. That's where being smart turned into being
stupid, because it created enough of an uproar to involve a lot more agencies
than a simple drunk dumped in a field would have."

"He had some bum luck, too,"
Kovak said. "Turns out the key we found was to a safe deposit box at his
hotel. Since he lost it, he had the mugs with the diamonds in his room so they
were found during the evacuation. We've matched it with his prints and he's
going to damn well show up in an IAFIS search from now on, assuming he ever
gets out of prison. We can charge him with attempted murder for starters. The
attack on Randy will be a slam dunk to prove. But we're going to shoot for
murder in the first for killing Young."

"What about Trent Wallace? How did
he get involved?" Sarah asked. "Wait. I think I know. He found
Garrigue's body. So he could have found out about the smuggling. And that the
diamonds would be in my shop."