Robards, Karen (3 page)

“No, It was not locked. it was locked when I went to bed, but it wasn’t locked then.”

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“Which led you to assume that the … individual … you were chasing had been inside your house.”

“That-and the teddy bear. It’sJessica’s teddy bear. Whoever it was must have taken it fi7om her bedroom and then dropped it when I started chasing him. I don’t see any other way it could have ended up where I found it.”

“Maybe your daughter carried it outside and dropped it. If not tonight, then earlier.”

Grace shook her head. “She loves Mr. Bear. He was on the night table beside her bed when she fell asleep, I’m sure of it. And she wouldn’t take him outside in the middle of the night, much less drop him and leave him.

“Hnimm.” Officer Gelinsky looked down at his notes again. When he glanced up at Grace, his gaze was sharper than it had been before.

“How would you characterize your relationship with your daughter, judge Hart?”

Grace was surprised, yet not surprised. This was the turn the conversation had to take to uphold the mightmare. She wet her lips. “Why … good. Very good. Most of the time. Well, we’ve had a few … differences of opinion … since she became a teenager, but …”

There was a knock at the front door. Both Grace and Officer Gelinsky glanced toward it and rose at the

same time.

“I’ll get it.” Dropping Mr. Bear onto the couch, Grace hurried into the front hall. Officer Gelinsky followed her.

The knock sounded again, just as Grace’s hand

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curled around the cold brass knob. Turning it, she pulled the heavy door open. The porch light was onevery light in the house was on by this time, and the neighbor across the street had called to ask if everything was all right-allowing her to clearly see the man who looked at her through the fine steel mesh of the oldfashioned screened door. A glance told her that he was maybe an inch over six feet tall, stocky, with thick black hair and a bushy black beard that obscured his lower face. With his back to the light, she could see the glint of his eyes but not their color. He wore a shabby green army jacket, a pair of jeans, and ancient-looking white sneakers.

“Mrs. Hart? Uh, judge Hart?” His gaze moved beyond her as he spoke, presumably to acknowledge Officer Gelinsky, before returning to her face.

“Yes?” One hand rose to the base of her neck. Was this bad news? It came like this, she had heard. The cop at the door … Dear Lord, please no, she prayed. Not Jessica …

“Detective Dominick Marino, Franklin County Police. I have a young woman I think may be your daughter in my car.”

“What?” A wave of relief so strong it made her knees go weak hit Grace. For a moment her hand tightened around the knob, clinging to it for support. Then she let go. “Thank God! Is she okay?”

Pushing through the screen door, she rushed past him toward the cars in her driveway even as he answered. He turned to follow her progress with his gaze. “Ali, basically.”

The wind had picked up, Grace noticed distractedly

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as she ran down the front steps and along the sidewalk to where first a police car and then, behind it, a battered blue Camaro were parked. The police car she ignored. It had been there earlier. Officers Gelinsky and Ayres had arrived in it. Reaching the Camaro, she touched the still-warm hood, tried the locked door on the driver’s side and the passenger door behind it, then bent down to peer through the rear window.

It was impossible to see anything in the nearly pitchblack interior of the car.

A dark-haired man in a brown leather bomberjacket got out of the front passenger side, standing in the vee formed by the open door and the car, one arm resting on the roof. She straightened to speak to him.

He forestalled her. “if that’s your daughter in there, you better start keeping Closer tabs on her. What is she, fourteen, fifteen? She needs to be home in bed at night, not out roaming the streets.”

Taken aback by the blunt censoriousness of his words, Grace merely blinked at him for an instant without replying. He was as disreputable looking as the cop on her porch, she registered, though he was beardless.

What did he know about anything?

“Could you unlock the door?” Recovering her power of speech, Grace ignored his words completely, then was distracted by the sight of her daughter as she glanced down. The car’s interior light was on now, illuminating Jessica in the rear. Dressed injeans, sneakers, and a skimpy blue sweater, shoulder-length hair with its center hot-piDk streak falling away from her face, her daughter was curled limply in the far seat, her

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head pillowed on the blue vinyl arm rest in the middle. Her eyes were closed, and her arms dangled off the seat toward the floor. From all appearances, she was either asleep or unconscious, and only the fastened seat belt kept her in place.

Grace’s fear, which had been swamped by relief for the few brief moments since the announcement that Jessica had been found, returned full force, though in a scary new form.

“Jessica?” Grace tried the door handle again without success. She rapped on the window. “Jessica?”

Her daughter did not respond in any way. The small dome light in the roof of the car provided just enough fllummation to enable Grace to see the artificial rosiness of Jessica’s cheeks. The fi-agile bones of her slender, pointy-chinned face appeared almost skeletal in the ghostly light. Her parted lips were dry and chapped looking, which they hadn’t been when she had gone to bed only a few hours earlier.

“Jessica!” she said again, then, straightening: “Unlock the door, please!”

This time it was a command, addressed to the copshe assumed he was a cop-across the roof of the car. He had been watching her without making a move to help as she tried to get to Jessica. Now his gaze met hers, his expression impossible to read in the shifting shadows.

“Don’t get in a panic. She’s drunk, not dead.” His voice was dry.

“She has diabetes.” The tightness in Grace’s chest grew until it felt like an iron band squeezing her lungs. She sucked in air, fighting against the compression that

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threatened to cut off her breath. For Jessica’s sake, she had to stay in control, both of her erno tions and the situation.

The lock popped up with an audible click. Opening the rear door, she leaned into the car, touching Jessica’s flushed cheek. The familiar fruity breath that signified high blood sugar was as unmistakable as the smell of booze that hung around her daughter like a cloud.

“Jessica! Jess!” On her knees on the car seat now, Grace took hold of her daughter by the shoulder and shook her. Jessica’s lashes fluttered.

“Mom?” It was a drowsy, slurred question. “Jess!

Jessica’s eyes closed again, and she seemed to sag, Grace shook her, gently slapped her cheek. “Jess!” This time there was no response.

The door on Jessica’s other side opened.

“Jesus, lady, if she’s diabetic, you sure shouldn’t be letting her run wild.” The cop was looking at her with disapproval across Jessica’s limp body. He was blackhaired, swarthy-skinned, unshaven, and unkempt looking. His eyes were narrow as they met her gaze. The brows above them were thick and bushy and almost met over his nose as he frowned at her. “That’s Wect, pure and simple.”

“I did not let her do anything.” Jessica’s needs were too urgent to allow her to waste time on this imbecile. “Look, her blood sugar’s too high. She needs to go to the emergency room. Right now. Can you help me put her in my car?” Grace’s outward calm was at odds with the burgeoning panic she felt inside.

The cop stared at her for an instant.

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“Get in. We’ll drive you.”

He withdrew from the car, slamming the door, then bellowed, “Dom!” as Grace clambered into the back seat, sliding close to her daughter. Jessica’s skin felt cool and dry, with a slight roughness like a snake’s hide, a roughness that was not usually present.

Oh, God, please let her be A right! “Jess?” Her voice quivered.

“She needs to go to the hospital?” The cop from her porch-Dominick Something__Iooked in the open rear door through which Grace had entered. His obnoxious partner was already sliding into the front passenger seat.

‘Yes,” Grace said firmly. She had herself in hand again.

“Put on your seat belt,” the obnoxious one ordered, as Dominick Whatever-his-name-was slammed the rear door and got into the front seat. The inside of the car went dark as he closed his door. Grace put on her seat belt and reached across the small space separating her from her daughter to clasp Jessica’s unresponsive hand.

“Is she in shock or something?” Voice uneasy, Dominick looked at her through the rearview mirror as he started the car and reversed down the driveway. Apparently his partner had alerted him to the diabetes before he got into the car.

“I don’t-Oh, I forgot to lock the house!” Only as the car pulled out onto the street did Grace remember her open front door. Ordinarily it wouldn’t have concerned her much-Bexley was very safe-but given the events of the night …

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It surprised her to discover that, fron, the knock at her door until now, she had almost forgotten the intruder. Her concern overjessica was paramount.

“The officers who are there will see that everything’s closed up tight.” This was the second cop, Mr. Obnoxious himself, who was in the process of shrugt-ling out of his leather bomber jacket. “Here, put this around her.”

He passed the jacket to Grace over the back of the front seat. It was still warni from his body and smelled faintly of leather and man. His gaze met hers. His expression was impossible to read in the darkness of the car’s interior, but Grace could sense his disapproval. It was palpable.

“Thank you.” ForJessica’s sake, Grace accepted the coat gratetufly, despite the donor’s urgent need for an attitude adjustment, and tucked it around her daughter, who had not moved. Had it not been for the faint, regular sound of her exhalations, Grace would have been terrified for her daughter’s life,

“You’re welcome.” Mr. Obnoxious had slewed around with his left arm resting along the top of the seat so that he could watch them.

“So how bad is she?” Dominick kept glancing at Grace through the rearview mirror. She wished he would keep his eyes on the road, His job was to get them to the hospital in one piece, not to monitor her mothering skills.

“I don’t know.” It took tremendous effort to keep her voice even, Grace found. She looked at her daughter’s huddled form. Jessica was either deeply asleep or unconscious. If she had been aware, if she had even an

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inkling that she was being rushed to the hospital, she would have protested furiously.

Jessica hated to surrender to her disease in any way. And she considered going to the hospital surrendering. “You don’t know?” Uttered by Mr. Obnoxious, the words were sharp with disbelief

“I’m not an expert on diabetes. It’s hard to tell.” Grace glanced from her daughter to the men in the front seat. Except for the occasional streetlight, it was dark inside the car. She sensed rather than saw the cops exchange speaking looks. “A lot depends on if she took her insulin on time, and when she last ate. I don’t know how much of this-the way she is right nowcan be attributed to alcohol, and how much to the disease. I don’t think she’s going into a coma, but I can’t be sure. She might be, and I don’t want to take that chance.”

“No, ma’am,” Dominick said fervently, and stepped on the gas.

Grace dropped her daughter’s unresponsive hand and tried to brace her as well as she could, to keep her from being flung about as the car sped through a blur of dark, twisting streets toward the hospital.

Cbapter

4

HIO STATE UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL was a comLI/plex of towering, fifties-modern buildings that sprawled over at least a couple of my blocks at one end of the vast college campus. At night it was easy to spot, glowing like an electric torch against the inky-blue sky, its brilliance reflected in the dark waters of the nearby Olentangy River. A chunky white-and-orange ambulance, having discharged its human cargo, rolled silently away fi7om the emergency room entrance as they pulled in. Scrubs-clad orderlies moving at a near-run bundled a white-covered shape on a gurney through the sliding doors and out of sight. The red EMERGENCY sign beckoned newcomers toward the well-lit interior.

“I’ll let you out here, then park,” Dominick said, stopping the car under the carport that sheltered the wide steel-and-glass doors. A sign affixed to the roof warned, AMBULANCES ONLY. Ignoring it, Grace unfastened her seat belt, then turned to do the same for her daughter.

“Jessica?” She smoothed back the few strands of hair

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that had fallen over her daughter’s face. “Jess, we’re here.”

Jessica’s condition was unchanged. She was limp, but breathing regularly. Not by so much as the flicker of an eyelash did she acknowledge her mother’s voice or touch. Fear began to build anew in Grace, but she forced it back.

They were at the hospital now. Medical assistance was at hand. Giving way to panic would only hurt her child. But she-almost—couldn’t help it.

“Jess!” Gently, she shook her daughter’s shoulder. Jessica didn’t stir. “Jess!”

Mr. Obnoxious got out of the car and opened the rear passenger-side door. The interior light came on. For an instant, as he leaned inside, his gaze met Grace’s. He was frowning. His eyes, she saw, were a clear golden brown.

“Let’s go.” Without waiting for either emergency room workers to appear or Grace’s expressed or implied approval, he scooped Jessica out of the seat and into his arms. She lay with her head lolling back and her arms and legs dangling, totally boneless, as he bore her away toward the emergency room entrance.

“Wait!” Taken by surprise by the suddenness of his action, Grace scrambled out the opposite side of the car, and was left to hurry behind as the cop carried Jessica across the pavement. The sight of her daughter lying so limply in a stranger’s arms made Grace feel sick. It reinforced what she knew but tried not to think about: Jessica was chronically ill. She was afflicted with this damnable disease, with all its implications for her long-term health, for life.