Marisela Morales 03 - Dirty Little Christmas - Julie Leto (6 page)

“I think we should look into this drawing,” he suggested. “It could be nothing, but your sister doesn’t seem like the type to randomly doodle.”

“She’s not,” Marisela said, her hand drifting across the desk to a notepad, presumably Lia’s since this was her office space. The yellow paper was cluttered with random stick figures, flowers and shapes, probably sketched mindlessly while she talked on the phone. If asked, Frank would have predicted that Marisela hiring Lia as her office manager was a huge mistake. Two big personalities couldn’t survive both a personal and professional relationship.

But they’d proved him wrong, which meant the only two personalities who couldn’t survive the constant interaction were his and hers.

“Do you want to go check on her?” he asked as her gaze lingered over the framed picture of her and Lia looking deceptively innocent at their senior prom, when he knew for a fact that both of them had skinny dipped in a hotel pool early the next morning.

She turned the image aside. “She’s in the hospital. Her family is with her. I can’t do anything for her there. I need to concentrate on tracking down Belinda.”

“Then maybe we should interview the only other witness to her kidnapping.”

She conceded his point and agreed to run upstairs to her apartment, shower and change into something less conspicuous while he monitored the police scanner for any news on the explosion. She came down ten minutes later with her wet hair tied into a ponytail, dressed in plain green scrubs and tennis shoes and carrying a black bag.

“Think I’ll blend in?” she asked.

Frank laughed. “To me,
vidita
, you can’t blend in anywhere. But we’ll work with what we have.”

“Any news?”

“If the police know anything about your sister’s kidnapping, they aren’t saying anything on the radio.”

She squeezed around Lia’s desk, bent over and flicked a hidden switch. A drawer popped open and from it, she retrieved her back-up weapon, a Taurus 9mm, which she tucked into a holster hidden beneath her shirt. “Then let’s get her back before they ever have to find out.”

Seven

With Frankie’s help, slipping into the hospital a second time wasn’t difficult. Getting up to Lia’s recovery room without being spotted was a little trickier. But with an ID lifted from an orderly more interested in his cigarette break than security, Marisela was in and out of the reserved elevator and standing next to Lia’s mother, pretending to check the monitors before Mrs. Santorini noticed she was there.

“Marisela, what are you doing?”

She released the tubes. “Nothing. Just checking on Lia. Trying not to draw attention to myself. Same as always.”

Lia’s mother frowned, then sat forward, but didn’t drop her daughter’s hand, pressed protectively between hers. “Tell me what happened.”

Antoinette Santorini was all of five-foot-one, but she had a stare that could inject fear into the hearts of children everywhere, including her three fully grown sons, two of whom had played football all the way through college and one who was in the military. Marisela was no less intimidated. It was one thing to stare down psychopaths and remorseless killers, but it was something else to go head-to-head with an Italian mother whose daughter had been hurt.

Marisela shuffled over to the door and tugged it closed.

“My sister, Belinda, called me last week and told me she was coming home to surprise my parents for Christmas. I didn’t tell anyone, not even Lia. But she figured out I was hiding something,” she said, glancing at Lia so that Toni knew precisely who
she
referred to. “She knows that my relationship with Belinda is…complicated…so she insisted on coming with me to the airport.”

She gave Toni a quick rundown of what happened, sparing her the gory details—like how Marisela shot one of the kidnappers. Toni knew, in theory, what Marisela was capable of, but that didn’t mean she ever wanted to hand her best friend’s mother irrefutable proof.

“This shouldn’t have happened,” she said once the story was told.

“Then why did it?”

“I don’t know,” Marisela said, dropping to her knees beside Toni and taking her and Lia’s hands in hers. “But I’ll find out. You know I will.”

Toni muttered a long string of words in Italian. Marisela wasn’t fluent, but she picked up enough to know that the woman was battling between her instincts to protect her daughter and her desire to see justice done—which included outing Marisela to the police.

“Where’s Belinda now?” Toni asked.

“I don’t know,” Marisela answered.

Toni squeezed her hand a little tighter, causing a lump of something warm and gooey to form in the back of her throat. She swallowed it, ignoring the hot, bitter taste.

“What about your parents? Do they know?”

Marisela shook her head. “No, and I can’t tell them. They’re in Orlando. I arranged for them to stay in a hotel tonight. They’ll be safe and by the time they get back, I’ll have found my sister. I swear, Toni. I won’t let anyone hurt her.”

“You couldn’t stop them from hurting my Angelia.”

“No, and they’ll pay for that. But first, I need to ask her some questions.”

“The police—”

“—don’t know about Belinda,” Marisela admitted.

“They can help you! They have resources you don’t.”

“I have Titan,” Marisela lied. She still had hope that her calls for assistance would be retrieved by one of the workaholics on the Blake payroll. But in the meantime, the company directive to keep law enforcement out of their business whenever possible solidified Marisela’s silence. If she needed them, she’d break the rule, but in the meantime, she couldn’t let them slow her down. “I can’t wait for the police to go through their procedures and policies. I need to find my sister.”

She held back her ace in the hole—the fact that Belinda was pregnant. She knew this would light a fire under Lia’s mother, but it also might send her flying down the hall to wave down the nearest uniform. Unlike Marisela and Frankie, the Santorinis had faith in the system. They’d never had any reason not to.

“If you want,” Marisela conceded, “anything Lia says, you can repeat to the police the minute I leave. But I need to get out there and start looking or I will lose my mind.”

It seemed like a lifetime before Toni gave a curt nod, released Lia’s hand and backed away, but in seconds, Marisela had taken her place in the chair beside the bed. Lia’s head was no longer wrapped in gauze, but her left eye was covered by a protective shield, taped in place. Her cheeks were puckered and red. Her lips were as pale as ash. But despite how it scraped her core to do so, Marisela leaned in and whispered her name while shaking her just enough to wake her.

“Marisela?” she ground out.

“
Lo siento,
Lia
,
”
Marisela apologized.
“Lo siento del fondo de mi corazón.
”

Though it seemed like a struggle, Lia turned her head and smiled. The weak curve of her mouth tore directly into Marisela’s chest with more heat than a .45 hollow point.

“I’m so sorry,” Marisela repeated. “From the bottom of my heart.”

Lia gave her head a tiny shake, enough to communicate that Marisela’s regret—per usual—wasn’t required.

“Where’s Belinda?”

“I don’t know. I need you to tell me what you saw.”

Lia’s tongue darted from her parched lips, but before Marisela could reach for the water cup on the wheeled tray, Toni slipped the straw into her daughter’s mouth.

“Ma?”

“Tell Marisela what she needs to know, Angelia. Then you’ll rest, okay?”

Marisela watched a silent stream of emotion and understanding pass between mother and daughter, making her ache for her own mother, so far away and as always, utterly clueless about the trouble her daughter had gotten herself into. Though Toni had eventually found out about every infraction Lia had ever committed—usually at Marisela’s urging—Aida Morales was forever kept safely and blissfully in the dark.

Toni’s approval freed Lia’s tongue and she turned to Marisela with her full, though drugged attention. “He wanted her bag,” she said.

“Who?”

“The kidnapper. When he stopped for me, all he wanted was her bag.”

“Did you see Belinda? In the truck, did you see her?”

She nodded, but the movement cost her. She winced. “She was in the backseat. Only saw for her a second, but she didn’t look afraid. Just, I don’t know…desperate? Confused? He left the car door open when he got out. I heard her say, ‘I need my vitamins.’”

Vitamins? Her sister had always been obsessed with healthy living, but enough to put Lia’s life in danger?

“I don’t understand,” Marisela muttered.

“Her
prenatal
vitamins,” Lia suggested. “I think she was worried about the baby.”

Toni gasped. “Baby? What baby?”

Marisela held up her hand, not out of rudeness, but expediency. Lia’s uninjured eye was fluttering closed. Her time to interrogate her one and only witness was running out.

“Did you notice anything about the car? About the men inside?”

Lia pulled in a deep breath. “Ford Expedition. Temporary tag. Dealership on Dale Mabry. They tried to scrape off the sticker, but I saw it. That’s the last thing I remember. I’m sorry. Find her. You have to…”

She drifted back to sleep. Marisela kissed her softly on the forehead and then took a few seconds to brush her hair with her fingers so that it didn’t look quite so matted and flat. Lia had given her vital information—the least she could do was help her look presentable to the handsome doctors.

She moved to leave, but Toni grabbed her wrist, holding on with a strength that only someone who didn’t know her would be surprised she possessed.

“Belinda is pregnant?”

“Yes,” Marisela answered. “We didn’t know until she got off the plane. And the kidnappers only had her for thirty seconds before they went for vitamins. It’s as if—”

“—whoever took her cares about whether or not she and the baby stay healthy.”

Toni had spoken from a place of experience and common sense, but without knowing, she’d given Marisela a direction to pursue. She hugged her before heading toward the door.

“What do I tell the police?” she asked.

Marisela paused. “Tell them the truth if you want to. Tell them nothing if you want to stay out of this. If the kidnapper cared about my sister’s pregnancy, then that means they cared about the baby. Maybe even about her. And it proves the attack wasn’t random. Lia wasn’t targeted—she’s just collateral damage.”

“You make that sound like good news.”

Marisela forced a melancholy smile. “She’ll be safe now.”

Toni ran her hand over Lia’s arm, then looked up, her eyes brimming with the kind of rage that would send even the toughest wise-guys running for cover. “I can’t say the same for the kidnappers.”

Marisela put her hand over hers and gave it a squeeze. “No, you can’t.”

Eight

The moment of solidarity ended when a text from Frankie, who was keeping look out from the lobby, alerted her that the police detective she’d been avoiding, the Amazon named Flores, had entered the building. Marisela said a quick good-bye, took the staff elevator down to the lobby and then cut across to the emergency room, using her stolen access key.

Lia’s information at least cleared one thing up—the kidnapping was about Belinda, not an offshoot of any of her cases for Titan. She wondered if she should still keep the cops in the dark, but no matter how their resources might help, involving law enforcement would mean frustrating delays and worse—and a layer of protection between her and the bastards who took her sister. Marisela didn’t give a damn about chains of evidence or fair trials. She only wanted Belinda back. She’d trust Lia and her mother to give the police any information they might need, but she’d follow her own leads and hopefully, beat them to the punch.

Literally.

In that pursuit, she slipped down to the ER before meeting up with Frankie. She found Dr. McFuego chatting up a pair of nurses, though when he spotted her, he made a beeline in her direction, grabbed her by the arm and tugged her into an empty exam room.

“Hey!” she objected. “Some bedside manner you have.”

“What’s wrong?” he asked, snapping his pen light out of his breast pocket.

She grinned alluringly. “Aw, how sweet. You’re worried about me.”

He held her chin still and flashed the light in her eyes, then felt around to the bump on the back of her head—the one that hadn’t been hurting until he pressed hard on the tender flesh.

“Ow!”

“I was hoping not to see you again.”

She pouted. “You’re hurting my feelings. And my head,” she said, jerking out of his hold.

He held his hands up in mock surrender. “You left AMA. Unless you’re experiencing pain in a more vital organ than your thick skull, I have real patients to deal with.”

“Any gunshot vics?”

He narrowed his intensely blue eyes. “Why? Did you shoot someone?”

“Recently or just in general?” she replied, avoiding giving an answer that would force him to call security.

“Ms. Morales—” he started, but she cut him off by snagging his cell phone from where he’d clipped it to his waist.

“Look, doc, I’m not in the business of hurting people randomly, okay? But I am trying to track down a really bad guy who might be suffering from a GSW, but who also might have information about someone who could be hurt worse. If he shows up here bleeding out of his left shoulder, right about here,” she said, pressing her finger into the spot on the doctor’s shirt that matched where she’d shot the kidnapper, “I can guarantee you he’ll be less willing to talk to the cops than me. And that person who is hurt worse? She’s also very pregnant. If I don’t find this creep, she might not get the help she needs.
Entiendes
?”

With unexpected swiftness, he grabbed her wrist and twisted it, then pushed aside the leather bracelet she always wore to cover up her tattoo—a purple crown topped with a trio of blood-red jewels. “Don’t try to appeal to my Hippocratic Oath, Ms. Morales. What I understand all too clearly from working in this ER is that vigilante justice makes my job a bitch.”