Red Alert (13 page)

It didn’t turn.

Somewhere in her brain she remembered locking it. She needed to turn the dead bolt the previous owners had installed to keep the kids out when mom and dad needed privacy. But her fingers couldn’t do the job. Her eyes couldn’t see through the mask of tears. She. Couldn’t. Do. It.

A roaring, rushing noise crashed over her, deafening her to everything but the jerky beat of her heart. She heard the beat falter. Slow. Stumble. And she knew she was dying.

She slumped against the door, boneless.

The last thing she heard was someone shouting her name.

Chapter Nine

“Meg!” Erik pounded on the locked door and cursed when it held. The crash had woken him and brought him running. The silence on the other side of the door had him near panic. “Meg, damn it, answer me this instant or I’m going to break down the door!”

Nothing.

What could have happened? He was damn sure nobody had gotten past him. Had the bastard come in through the window and taken her?

No. Impossible.

Erik put his face near the door to shout again, but as he drew breath, an invisible fist grabbed his lungs and squeezed. He reeled back, coughing. His nose, eyes and throat burned, and he tasted something foul on the back of his tongue.

There were fumes coming from her room.

“Stand back,” he shouted. “I’m coming in!”

In his prime, he could have kicked in the door. Maybe. But it was a sturdy slab of oak, and that sort of thing always looked easier on TV than it was in
reality. So instead of fighting the thing bodily, he used the only leverage he had.

Cursing the growing foul smell, he jammed the blunt end of his cane beneath the door and lifted, trying to pop the thing off its lock, or, failing that, to dislodge a hinge.

The corner lifted slightly, but nothing gave.

“Come on, you bastard!” he shouted, not sure whether he was talking to himself, the door or the man that hunted him.

He shouted again, a wordless cry of rage at the coward who was attacking him through the only two women to touch his life since Celia, and lifted with every shred of power left to him.

The cane gave slightly at the weak point, where the titanium shaft was joined to the molded head by a thin ring of wood he’d taken from his grandfather’s walking stick. There was a sharp cracking sound, and the leverage gave.

Erik cursed, thinking he’d broken the cane, then shouted when the door shuddered and popped inward, free of its lock.

Instead of swinging inward, it bumped against something soft.

Erik forced himself to quit breathing as he squeezed through the doorway and saw his worst fears confirmed.

Meg lay near the door, out cold. Or worse.

Eyes streaming with the caustic burn of whatever foulness cloaked the crystal-clear air of her bedroom, he bent and picked her up, nearly losing
his pitiful lungful of air when the strain overloaded his back and hip, neither of which was used to heavy lifting anymore.

His physical therapist had told him to hit the gym and strengthen the muscles he had left. At the time, he’d told the PT where to stick her crunches. Now, he wished he’d listened.

He staggered beneath Meg’s weight, then steadied himself through force of will. He made it out of the bedroom and into the hall, but the fumes had leaked through the open door and poisoned the atmosphere there, as well. Knowing he had to get her out into the fresh air, Erik descended the steps one at a time while trying to figure out if she was breathing.

He didn’t think so.

Her deadweight dragged him down, making him stagger when he hit bottom. He was panting with a combination of exertion, rage and fear by the time he got them to the front door. He opened it somehow, got her outside onto the granite landing somehow, and let her slide to the ground in an ungraceful heap.

Still not breathing.

“Come on, Meg, come
on!
” He felt beneath her T-shirt and found a heartbeat even as he yanked his spare cell phone from his back pocket and punched in 9-1-1. He gave her address along with Peters’s name, wanting the detectives in on this one.

What poisoned a room without changing the appearance of the air? How had it gotten into her bedroom after he’d made his search?

Erik cursed and shoved the questions aside. He straightened her sprawl, cleared an airway and tilted her head back slightly, remembering the actions drilled into him so long ago at the academy.

He was vaguely aware of voices and people nearby, of alarmed shouts and prurient neighborly interest, but his whole attention was focused on Meg. On her blue lips and motionless chest.

“Breathe, damn it!” He exhaled as hard as he could, trying to clear the stale, tainted air from his own lungs before he inhaled, bent and touched his lips to hers. He blocked the memory of those lips from the day before, when they’d kissed, then fought. Or rather, when they’d kissed and he’d offered to sleep with her in exchange for the NPT technology.

The memory wasn’t a pretty one in the light of day.

Breathe. Breathe.
He dimly realized he was chanting the words in between puffs, in between exhalations that left him dizzy for his own ration of air. Then hands were tugging at him, pulling him away from her.

For a moment he thought she was dead, that he had been too late, that they had come to take her body and put it in one of those cold, black bags. He’d been too late to save Jimmy eight years earlier, and now he’d been too late to save Meg.

Too damn late.

“We’ve got her. It’s okay.” A woman’s face swam into view, square jawed and kind-eyed. When he just stared at her, she gripped his shoulders and eased him
away. “You did good. You kept her going. We’ll take it from here.”

He was dimly aware of a smattering of applause from the gathered bystanders, but the whole of his attention was focused on Meg. On the rise and fall of her chest beneath the oversize T-shirt, and the rose-pink that was edging out the blue of her lips.

Relief seared through him. She was breathing.

As he watched, she coughed weakly and her eyelids fluttered partway open, then sagged shut again.

He let out the breath he hadn’t even realized he’d been holding. “She’s alive.”

“Thanks to you.” The female paramedic eased him out of the way as her partner, a younger man with a faintly panicked air of this-is-my-first-day-don’t-let-me-kill-anyone, approached with a rolling gurney loaded with a backboard. The woman subtly blocked Erik’s view of Meg. “What happened?”

“Fumes,” he said tersely, “I don’t know what kind. She was unconscious when I found her. She’d been out a minute, maybe more.”

She held out a clipboard. “Can you fill in the basics for me?”

He looked down at the sheet, which asked for her age, allergies, next of kin and their contact information. “Her name’s Meg Corning. I don’t know the other stuff. I’ll have to call her boss. They’ll have records.”

“Okay.” The female paramedic took the clipboard back but gave him an odd look. Then again, it was
just past eight in the morning, and he’d carried Meg out of her house wearing her PJs. The paramedic had added one plus one and gotten an uncomplimentary two, rather than the reality, which was more like one-and-a-half.

He wasn’t an uncaring lover or one-night stand who didn’t know the first thing about his bed partner. He was…

Hell, he didn’t know anymore.

Detectives Peters and Sturgeon arrived on the heels of two local cops. The four conferred quickly on the sidewalk before approaching the house en masse.

Peters shook Erik’s hand, a touch of normalcy that felt out of place against the backdrop of hustling paramedics and lookey-loos on the street. The detective said, “What happened?”

“That’s what I’d like to know.” As Meg was loaded onto the gurney and strapped in, Erik did his best to sketch the situation for the assembled cops. When he got to the part about the fumes, he shrugged. “I’m no chemicals expert, but it was weird. No smoke or anything in the room, but it was like breathing razor blades. It smelled like—” he frowned, thinking back “—chlorine, maybe? Only it burned like hell.” He glanced at the house, which had seemed tight the night before. “I checked the room when we got home. Nothing. How’d he get in? A window? Fiber optics? Something else?”

One of the local cops, a heavyset guy who looked too old to be in uniform without a story, asked, “You want to come in with us?”

It was the respect accorded another cop, rather than a civilian. But although Erik appreciated the gesture and part of him was itching to get back in there, to see what the scene had to tell them, he shook his head. “Thanks, but I think I’ll ride to the hospital with Meg.”

A single raised eyebrow was Peters’s only reaction to his use of her first name.

“We’ll be in touch,” Sturgeon said, and the older detective gestured the others toward Meg’s house as a marked van arrived, bearing one of the private crime scene units subcontracted to the local PD.

“You coming?” the female paramedic called from the open back doors of the ambulance. “She’s asking for you.”

Those four words loosened something tight and messy in Erik’s chest, something that told him he’d almost been too late to save her. He nodded and climbed stiffly to his feet. “Yeah, I’m riding with you.”

He took one step toward the street and his leg nearly folded beneath him.

His cane was still upstairs.

A LOW BURN of acid anger choked Edward, nearly doubling him over at the edge of the crowd gathered on the Beacon Hill sidewalk. He couldn’t believe it. The bitch had survived. Again.

He had failed. Again.

You didn’t fail,
a familiar voice whispered in his ear.
Everyone else cheats. They cheat my baby out of what you deserve. You have to make them pay. Make them pay. Make them pay…

“Hey, dude. Are you okay?”

The young boy’s voice brought Edward’s attention back to the matter at hand. He willed his mother’s voice back to the warm, remembering place where it lived inside his head and nodded at the kid. “Yeah. I’m fine.”

When the boy frowned, looking confused as he tried to peer past the sweatshirt’s hood, Edward turned and walked away. Away from the house. Away from the place where they’d cheated him out of his success.

Or not
they,
really. Falco had been the cheat. If it hadn’t been for him, the plan would have worked perfectly.

It was Falco’s fault.

He would have to be punished.

IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON before Meg managed to escape from the hospital. She signed herself out against the doctor’s orders, but she figured her medical degree gave her some perspective on the situation. She was conscious and alert, and the only lingering aftereffects of her ordeal were a faint pain in her chest and a squishy wheezing sound when she breathed. The latter symptom was improving by the hour as the drugs helped dry the fluid that had collected in response to the chemical burns.

The hydrochloric acid gas burns, to be exact.

She’d overheard the cops outside her door talking
about it after Erik left to meet with the detectives. Or, more accurately, after Erik snuck out to meet with the detectives, pretending to be headed home for a change of clothes.

She appreciated the effort, if not the deception.

Outside the hospital, dressed in the clothes a white-faced Jemma had brought for her, Meg hailed a taxi. “Chinatown police station, please.”

The cabbie glanced at her in the mirror. “There’s a closer station if you’re in trouble.”

Which made her wonder just how bad she looked. “No, thanks. I’m meeting someone.”
He just doesn’t know it yet.

The drive from the hospital to the station was a short twenty minutes in the Boston traffic, but that was long enough for butterflies to gather in her gut, pulsing in time with the ache in her chest. She’d gone to bed angry with Erik, convinced that Jemma was right and he was too much work.

She’d awoken to terror, and awoken the second time with his lips on hers, his breath forcing air into her lungs. Certainly life-saving pulmonary resuscitation should tip the scales in his favor, at least a little bit.

Right?

“We’re here.” The cabbie named his price and she paid with a hefty tip, then hesitated a moment before climbing out.

Here goes nothing.

She wasn’t sure why she was so anxious about seeing Erik again, when nothing had really changed.
But her system was revving on nerves by the time the desk officer escorted her to the conference room. The two detectives and Erik stood when she entered, a chivalrous gesture that was ruined when Erik grabbed her arms, turned her to face him and scowled.

“What the hell are you doing here? The doctor said he was keeping you overnight for observation.”

She shrugged. “Our opinions differed. I had seniority.”

He aimed her for the door. “Come on. I’ll take you back.”

“Or not.” She pulled away, sat and focused on the detectives. “What can you tell me?”

“Nothing,” Erik said from the doorway. “You’re going back to the hospital.”

When she just sat, waiting for the detectives to answer her question, he cursed and retook his seat, grumbling, “I don’t know why I’m bothering. My life would be easier if you were out of commission.”

“Be careful saying things like that. I might take you seriously.” Meg kept her tone light, but couldn’t help the faint shiver brought by his words.

Intellectually, she knew he wasn’t involved. But in her gut… No, her gut didn’t think so, either. He might have motive, but he was a better man than that, whether he believed it or not.

The detectives apparently agreed, because neither of them commented. Instead, Peters said, “We found a crude time delay device beneath your bed.” A chill chased through Meg’s system as he continued, “He
left one of those cardboard-based flowerpots filled with ice, propped up over a petri dish loaded with—” he glanced at his notes “—phosphorous pentachloride. When the ice melted, it soaked through the flowerpot until it—”