Читать книгу Her Lawman On Call - Marie Ferrarella - Страница 8

T here was something about a parking structure that always made her feel vulnerable. In broad daylight, she found them somewhat confusing. Most of the time she had too many things on her mind. Squeezing in that extra piece of information which identified where she had left her vehicle was usually one piece too many. Finding her car when that happened turned into an ordeal that lasted for what felt like an eternity.

At night, when there were fewer vehicles housed within this particular parking structure, she felt exposed, helpless.

And déjà vu haunted her.

It was a completely irrational reaction, she was the first to acknowledge it as such. But it changed nothing.

She wanted to run, but chose to move slowly, retracing steps she’d taken thirteen hours ago, when her day at Patience Memorial Hospital had begun. The lighting down on this level was poor. One of the bulbs was out, leaving the resulting shadows to threaten one another.

The air felt heavy and clammy, much like the day had been. Typical New York City autumn, Sasha thought. She picked up her pace, making her way toward where she thought she remembered leaving her car, a small vintage Toyota that had seen more than a handful of design changes come and go.

Dr. Sasha Pulaski stripped off her sweater and slung it over her arm, stifling a yawn. She felt exhausted. By rights, she should have left for the apartment she shared with her two younger sisters more than two hours ago. She’d actually been on her way to the elevator when Angela had called out to her. Angela Rico was a nurse on the floor, but more than that, she was a friend. Angela told her that the young woman who’d given birth less than two hours ago had suddenly started hemorrhaging. Sasha doubled back quickly. It had taken her less time to cauterize the tiny broken vein than it had to calm down her patient, who was convinced she was going to die.

But eventually, she’d managed to get the situation under control. By the time she left, her patient was doing much better and was arguing with her husband about the name they had chosen for the baby. A name, Sasha gathered, her patient no longer liked.

She eased out of the room before her patient or her husband could ask her to weigh in on the matter. As she passed the nurses’ station, she saw that Angela had left for the night. Probably in a hurry to see her little girl before she fell asleep, Sasha mused.

Once upon a time, she’d thought that was going to be her life, too. Until the unspeakable had happened.

She forced herself to think of something else. Anything else before the loneliness took her prisoner.

God, but she felt drained. If she was lucky, she could be sound asleep in less than an hour. Never mind food, she thought. The urge for food had come and gone without being satisfied, fading away as if it had never existed. Now all she wanted was just to commune with her pillow and a flat surface—any flat surface—for about six hours.

Not too much to ask, she thought. Unless you were an intern. Those days, mercifully, were behind her. And still in front of her two youngest sisters. Five doctors and soon-to-be-doctors in one family. Not bad for the offspring of immigrants who had come into this country with nothing more than the clothes on their backs, Sasha thought. She knew that her parents were both proud enough to burst.

A strange popping noise sounded in the distance, breaking her train of thought. Instantly, Sasha stiffened, listening. Holding her breath. Memories suddenly began assaulting her.

One hand was clenched at her side, the other held tightly onto the purse strap slung over her shoulder. She willed herself to relax. More than likely, it was just someone from the hospital getting their car and going home.

Or maybe it was one of the security guards, accidentally stepping on something on the ground.

Several people had been robbed in and around the structure in the last six months and the hospital had beefed up security. There was supposed to be at least one guard, if not two, making the rounds in the structure at all times.

That still didn’t make her feel all that safe. The hairs at the back of her neck felt as if they were standing at attention.

As she rounded the corner, heading toward where she hoped she had left her vehicle, Sasha dug into her purse. Not for her keys, but for the comforting shape of the small can of Mace her father, Josef Pulaski, a retired NYPD police officer, insisted that she and her sisters carry with them at all times. Josef fiercely loved his adopted country, but he had no illusions about the safety of the streets, not where his girls were concerned.

Her fingers tightened around the small dispenser just as she saw a short, squat man up ahead. He had a mop of white hair, a kindly face and, even in his uniform, looked as if he could be a stand-in for a mall Santa Claus.

The security guard, she realized, her fingers growing lax. She’d seen him around and even exchanged a few words with him on occasion. He was retired, with no family. Being a guard gave him something to do, a reason to get up each day he had said.

The next moment, her relief began to slip away. The guard was looking down at something on the ground. There was a deep frown on his face and his body was rigid, as if frozen in place.

Sasha picked up her pace. “Mr. Stevens?” she called out. “Is something wrong?”

His head jerked in her direction. He looked startled to see her. Or was that horror on his face?

Before she could ask him any more questions, Sasha saw what had robbed him of his speech. The body of a woman lay beside a car. Blood was pooling beneath her head, straying toward her frayed tan trench coat. A look of surprise was forever frozen on her pretty bronze features.

Recognition was immediate. A scream, wide and thick, lodged itself in Sasha’s throat as she struggled not to release it.

Angela.

Horror vibrated through Sasha’s very being.

How?

Why?

She wasn’t sure if she’d only thought the questions or if she’d actually said them out loud until Walter Stevens answered her.

“I don’t know. I just found her like this. I think she’s dead,” he added hoarsely. Walter’s watery eyes looked at her helplessly, as if he was waiting for her to do something about that.

Sasha dropped to her knees, pressing her fingertips against Angela’s neck, frantically searching for a pulse.

There was none.

“Call the police!” she ordered the hapless guard.

Tossing her sweater and her purse aside, Sasha began a round of CPR that she already knew in her heart was useless. But she had to try because, despite everything she had been through, despite Adam’s death, she still believed in miracles.

But there were no miracles for Angela Rico tonight.

By the time Sasha rocked back on her heels, finally giving up her efforts to bring the maternity-ward nurse around, more than a few of the people who worked at the hospital had gathered around her, drawn by the sounds of approaching sirens and the security guard’s frantic call for help.

The murmur of voices went in and out of her head. Everyone was horrified. Angela had been one of their own. Everyone had always liked her.

In a daze, hating that it had already been too late to help Angela before she’d even got there, Sasha looked down at her hands. They were covered in blood.

Just as they had been once before.

With almost superhuman effort, Sasha fought hard to keep the dark shadows of the past from smothering her. Exhausted, she made no such effort to curtail the tears that came to her eyes.

Detective Anthony Santini was not very happy about getting the call that roused him from a sound sleep upon the sofa where’d he’d collapsed earlier. Today was supposed to be his day off.

On days off, a man could do what he wanted and what Tony had wanted to do was court oblivion. Especially today of all days.

Because today was his third anniversary.

Would have been his third anniversary, he corrected tersely in his head. If Annie were alive.

But she wasn’t.

Annie hadn’t been numbered among the living for the last ten months and nineteen days and the hole her death had created in his life just kept on getting deeper and deeper instead of closing up the way that know-nothing police shrink had told him it would when their paths had crossed. Involuntarily on his part. He placed no faith in shrinks. No faith in anything now that Annie was gone. All he had left was his work.

On days alone, he needed something to dull the pain and nothing seemed to work except a few hard drinks.

But tonight, his attempts to trample down his memories had been shattered by the phone.

Tony’d initially cursed at it, but it wouldn’t stop ringing. Not until he’d finally answered it. Captain Holloway was on the other end, asking him to check out the homicide at Patience Memorial Hospital. The captain’d had the good grace to apologize, saying that everyone else was either busy tonight, or out sick.

Tony had felt like calling in sick himself, given the way his head was throbbing. But now that his sleep had been summarily disrupted, he knew that he wouldn’t be able to get back to it. The best he could hope for was tossing and turning the remainder of the night away. So he might as well lose himself in his work. It didn’t ease the pain that haunted him night and day, but it did give him a reason to go on.

Sometimes.

Pulling into the parking structure from the street entrance, he drove down the winding path until he saw the crowd of people clustering together and staring at something on the ground. Tony parked his car to one side and got out.

The crowd, judging by the uniforms and lab coats, were all from the hospital. He hoped that they knew better than to trample the crime scene. Holloway wasn’t here, but he’d sent in several patrolmen as well as Bart Henderson, a tall, strapping man with fading red hair and a handlebar moustache straight out of another era. The man should have retired years ago.

There were times, like now, that Tony saw himself in the man’s ruddy face. It didn’t improve his mood.

Moving forward, Tony saw the body on the ground first. And the pale woman with blood on her clothing second.

Something about the woman brought to mind a line from an old fairy tale. For a second, it eluded him, and then he remembered. It was the description of Snow White. Skin pale as snow, hair black as night.

It went on, but he couldn’t remember the rest of the description. However, from what he could remember, the woman who was standing beside the body could have posed for the fairy-tale princess.

Tony took out his badge and held it up as he approached. The crowd parted, letting him through, some asking him questions he didn’t bother answering.

“Detective Anthony Santini,” he told the pale woman. “You were with her when she was killed?”

His tone indicated that he made no final assumptions, waiting for her to answer one way or another. His dark gray eyes took precise measure of her, looking for some kind of sign, a “tell” as the poker players called it, to show him whether she was lying.

The woman’s voice was low, soft, but strong as she replied, “No. She was already shot when I saw her. Mr. Stevens was standing over her—he was the one who found her.” She took a breath, as if trying to put that between herself and the memory. “I tried to revive her. I’m a doctor,” she added belatedly.

Tony nodded, keeping his eyes on her face. “Then she was still alive when you came?” It didn’t seem likely, given that the victim was shot in the middle of her forehead, but he played along, waiting to see what the woman would say. “Did she try to say anything?”

Sasha moved her head from side to side, still trying to come to terms with what had happened. “There was no pulse,” she told him, her voice devoid of emotion, as numb as she felt.

“But you still tried to revive her.”

She couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic, or just pressing her for information. “Sometimes, you can bring them back,” she replied quietly.

The hurt was beginning to burrow its way into her. Death was a terrible, terrible thing. In her head, she could still hear Angela’s voice.

I’ll see you Friday, Angela had said.

Except now, she wouldn’t, Sasha thought. Who was going to tell Angela’s little girl her mother wasn’t going to be coming home anymore?

“But this wasn’t one of those times,” she heard the detective saying.

Sasha looked at him sharply. But there was no humor, no sarcastic twist to his mouth. After a moment, she shook her head.

“No,” she whispered more to herself than to the tall, dark-haired detective with the attitude, “this wasn’t one of those times.”

The woman looked, he thought, genuinely shaken up and he wondered why. Was she close to the victim? Did she know more than she was saying? Like the popular cult icon from a few years ago, Fox Mulder from The X Files, Tony’s initial approach to a case was always the same: “Trust no one.” Every word needed to be verified or supported before it became a viable piece of the puzzle.

Tony looked at the small, heavyset man in the dark navy-blue uniform standing beside Dr. Snow White. A quick glance would have had someone labeling the older man a policeman. Only closer scrutiny would have taken note of the differences in uniforms. But there was one unsettling similarity.

“You have a gun,” Tony observed.

One ham-like hand immediately covered the gun butt as if to acknowledge the weapon’s existence.

“I’ve got a license,” Stevens said quickly. “The agency pays more per hour for guards who have gun permits. And there’ve been muggings…” With a sigh that seemed to come from his very toes, Stevens’s voice trailed off as he looked down again at the slain nurse.

Tony was aware that there’d been reports of people being accosted late at night in the hospital’s parking facility.

“But none of them were fatal,” he pointed out to the security guard.

“No. Not until now,” Walter Stevens agreed heavily. Looking at the police detective, he blew out a shaky breath. “It’s my fault.”

Tony’s eyes narrowed. Confessions didn’t usually come this early in the game and in his experience, never without some sort of prodding and usually in trade for a lessening of the ultimate sentence. Taking that into account, he truly doubted that the guard was about to make life easy for him.

Drawing on his rather limited supply of patience, Tony asked, “How’s that?”

Scrubbing a hand over his stubbled chin, Stevens rendered his confession. “I usually make my rounds earlier. If I’d been here five, ten minutes sooner, who knows? The nurse might still be alive.” He looked down at the prone figure. “I might have been able to stop whoever did this.”

Moved, Sasha placed her arm around the man’s shoulders. At five-seven, she was approximately an inch taller than he was. “You don’t know that,” she said in a comforting tone. “Whoever it was might have shot you, too.”

One of those, Tony thought, scrutinizing the woman again. A perpetual spreader of sunshine. Someone who felt called upon to lift burdens and cheer people up.

They had their place, he supposed, but preferably not in his investigations. Frowning, Tony focused on what was important.

“Why were you late in making your rounds?” The question was sharply asked, pinning the security guard to the proverbial wall.

If the attack had actually been planned, someone would have gone to a lot of trouble learning the guard’s rounds and when he passed areas of the complex. For the nurse to have been slain when she was, it had to have been an unexpected attack, without any previous knowledge of the security guard’s route. Maybe this was just a crime of opportunity and the young nurse had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or someone could have followed her without giving the guard any thought at all, which meant that he or she was unfamiliar with the hospital’s policy.

There were a great many things to consider before they could feel that they were on the right path to solving the crime.

He looked at the guard expectantly.

“Something I ate,” Stevens told him, pressing his wide hand to his less-than-flat midsection. “Been to the men’s room three, four times so far tonight.” He offered a sheepish smile. “Throws off my timing.”

“I’ll bet.” Tony cut him off before the man could get more graphic. He glanced toward the doctor. “I didn’t get your name, Doctor.”

“Sasha Pulaski.”

“Sasha,” he repeated. “Is that Russian?”

“Polish,” she corrected. “My parents are Polish.”

He noticed, even though she still looked shaken, that there was a touch of pride in her voice. He wondered what that was like, to be proud of who you were, where you came from.

His eyes swept over the doctor and the guard. “I’d like to take you both down to the precinct for a formal statement.”

Stevens looked a little uncertain about the turn of events. “If I go, there’s no one down here to cover for me,” he protested, concerned. “I’ll lose my job and I can’t afford to have that happen. I have bills—”

The guard sounded as if he was just getting wound up. Tony put his hand up to stop the flow of words before they started.

“Henderson,” he called over to his partner. The older man was consulting with one of the forensic investigators. “See if we can get one of the patrolmen to fill in for the security guard here until I get him back from the precinct.”

“Why don’t you just take a statement from Mr. Stevens right here for the time being? It might save you both a lot of time and effort,” Sasha quietly suggested.

That caught him off guard. Tony thought about the solution she’d offered, or pretended to. He didn’t like having anyone poke around in his investigation unless he asked them to, but the truth of it was, she was right. The patrolman could be put to better use canvassing the immediate area instead of taking the guard’s place. And unless the guard had something significant to offer, such as having seen someone fleeing the scene just before the body was discovered, taking him down to the precinct would be a waste of time.

Mainly a waste of his time. In his experience, most security guards with night beats were not overly observant and spent most of their working hours just struggling to stay awake.

“Does that go for you, too, Doctor?” Tony asked, shifting his attention to her. “Do you want to just give your statement here and then go?”

There was something abrasive and off-putting about the detective, Sasha thought. And he was doing it on purpose. Why? she wondered. Was he trying to create distance between himself and the people he considered suspects, or was he just trying to keep everyone at arms’ length, in which case, again, why?

Had he seen too many dead bodies and had that hardened him, or had he started out that way?

She thought of her father. All the years that Josef Pulaski had been on the job, he never once allowed it to affect him, to influence him once he was home. She knew that her father had made a conscious decision to draw a line between what he did in order to put food on the table and the time he spent with the family he did it for. When he walked across that threshold and into their house, it was as if that other world where he spent so much time each day didn’t even exist.

She supposed not all policemen could be like her father. And that, she knew, was a real pity because her father was a great cop and an even greater father, the kind who sacrificed his own comforts for his children.

“That’s up to you,” she told the detective, her eyes meeting his. She sensed that Detective Anthony Santini had no respect for the people he could successfully intimidate. “If you want to question me about what I saw just now, you’ll find yourself on the receiving end of a very short interview because I didn’t see anyone or anything—until I came up to Angela’s car.”

She’d set up an obvious question and he obliged her by asking it. “And why did you come up to the victim’s car?”

“Because mine is parked right over there.” Sasha pointed toward the light-blue vintage Toyota.

He nodded. There was more and she’d left it unsaid. “And what would make for a longer interview?” he wanted to know.

“If you want to ask me what I know about Angela.”

The way she said it, Tony thought, indicated that the doctor knew something. Whether or not that “something” was what had gotten the nurse killed had yet to be discerned. But then, that was his job, separating the fool’s gold from the genuine article.

“All right.” He looked at the security guard, making up his mind. “You can give me your statement here—for now,” he qualified, then turned to look at the tall, willowy physician. “As for you, I think you had better come down to the precinct with me for that longer statement.” The crime scene investigator stepped away, finally having gotten enough photographs of the dead woman. Tony immediately stepped forward. “But first I want to take a closer look at the body.”

“Angela,” Sasha told him. There was tension vibrating in her voice as he turned to her. “Her name is—was,” she corrected herself, “Angela. Angela Rico.”

Tony nodded, allowing the doctor her feelings even if he couldn’t allow himself to have any of his own. Not that in his present state he even thought that he was capable of having any of his own. They’d all been burnt out of him the day he had to view what was left of Annie’s mangled body.

“Angela,” he repeated with a slight incline of his head.

Squatting down beside the inert body, careful not to disturb the pool of already drying blood, Tony noted that the young nurse’s right hand was fisted. Had she been trying to punch her assailant when she’d been shot? It didn’t seem very likely.

Tony narrowed his eyes, focusing. As he examined more closely, he saw that there was just the tiniest hint of some sort of piece of paper peeking out between the second and third knuckle of her hand.

“Peter,” he beckoned to the investigator with the camera, “come here.”

“Perry,” the man corrected as he came forward.

Impatient, Tony ignored the correction. He tended not to remember names, only faces. “She’s got something in her hand. Take a picture,” he instructed.

The investigator aimed his camera. The shutter clicked twice.

Very carefully, using the tweezers he kept in his pocket, Tony extracted the paper from Angela’s hand. When he unfolded it, he found four words printed on it: First Do No Harm.