Jesse had to sit down for a moment, his mind was spinning. "They arrested her? My, God, don't they know how fragile she is at the moment; how the hell could you let them take her? You're her physician you should've told them she wouldn't be able to cope with it." Jesse's voice was getting stronger with every word, and Eliana began to cry even louder.
Alex began to rock the little girl as he spoke, "Jesse, stop it. I couldn't leave Eliana alone, it isn't my place to take her to her sitter, and Rae was still functioning, I weighed up my options and it seemed more important to stay with your daughter."
Jesse calmed down a little as he listened to Alex's words. "Ok, I'm sorry, Alex. But now we need to get to Rae. Let me call Sally and see if she can have Eliana for a few days, and then we can go."
Alex and Jesse put together enough equipment for a hike to the Himalayas and then headed off for Eliana's sitter's house. They drew up outside the ranch style home and they could see a worried face looking out of the window as they walked up the path and the front door opened. "Oh, my goodness, now you both come inside, and bring that baby with you. Jesse, I don't know what to say, you must be so worried." Sally stopped talking and turned to Alex. "Hi, I don't think we have met before, are you a friend of Rae's?"
"Yes, Ma'am, I'm Doctor Alex Martin, and I'm Eliana's godfather too." Alex just loved introducing himself as a doctor it made him feel really proud, but he realised for the first time, that telling this lady that he was one of the godparents was a wonderful feeling as well.
"I'm pleased to meet you, Doctor Martin, you have a delightful goddaughter."
He blushed. "Alex please, and I have to admit, I know that."
Jesse was getting very fidgety beside them and he handed his daughter over in a bid to get the two people in front of him to stop talking.
"Jess, come on we need to go." Alex turned as he saw Eliana being moved in front of him. He leant over and kissed her gently on the cheek, and then Jesse did the same. As they moved back to the car both men looked back to see her in the doorway, her soft doll in her hands, happily cuddled up to Sally.
"Wow, that's a weight off our minds isn't it?" Alex watched the scene until Jesse's car had moved away and the house was no longer in sight.
"Oh, yeah, she's just great. Rae knew straight away that she was the one to look after Eliana and she was right. They just love each other, and she will be safe there for however long it takes us to sort out Rae." Jesse put his daughter to the back of his mind. The knowledge that she was in a warm and loving environment was reassuring enough that he knew he wouldn't have to worry about her at all while he was trying to get Rae released.
By the time that Alex and Jesse arrived at the precinct the evening was just beginning to draw in, there was a chill in the air, and Jesse pulled his jacket round him as they hurried into the station. The last warm evening had been the night of Mark's party. It had been getting colder ever since. He realised that Tony was arriving the next morning, and he would have to do something about that too. Suddenly he felt extremely weary, but he had a feeling that he was in for a long night, and it might not be until tomorrow before he had a chance to sleep. Jesse got out his cell phone and put a call through to Wil Collins and asked him to check on Mark for him. He knew that he should be there for his special patient, but Rae was his wife, and right now, in his eyes, she needed him more.
Cheryl came down the stairs to the front desk and waved Jesse and Alex over. "Hi guys, Jesse, Rae had her detention hearing and pleaded not guilty, she has been taken away from here now, she'll spend the night in the county jail and go to court again tomorrow or the next day."
"Cheryl, you know that she didn't do this, and you know that she isn't in a fit state to spend any time in a woman's jail. Everybody will know who she is. God, I can't even think about it."
"Jesse, we have witnesses this time, and film footage. She is guilty, and we will get a conviction. Murder one. I'm sorry."
"Yeah, right, I can see it written all over your face. C'mon Alex, let's go. We need to get on to Sholte and get some bail posted."
Cheryl moved over and stood right in front of Jesse, as she had a feeling that he wouldn't look at her otherwise. "She won't get bail, Jesse. She has been charged with three counts of murder, there is no way that any judge on this earth will allow her to be released."
"Yeah, well, I still have to try."
"Cheryl?" It was Alex who spoke and the detective turned and looked at him. She didn't know him very well, but she knew that Rae liked and trusted him.
"Yes, Alex?"
"I'm Rae's doctor, can you arrange for me to see her, tonight, right now, if possible?"
"No, I can't, I don't know if you understand how these things work, but how about if I find out who the doctor was that examined her when she arrived at the jail? You could speak to him, but she knew what was going on, Alex, I wouldn't have charged her if I thought she wasn't able to understand what I was saying, and the repercussions of her arrest."
"I should have been with her, but I had Eliana to tend to first, now, as her physician I need to see her."
"Alex, if I hadn't thought she was fit to be charged, I wouldn't have charged her. I know I'm the bad guy here, but Rae is my friend, and I hate this." Cheryl had raised her voice as she repeated herself, but suddenly she felt her heart begin to pound, and turned away. She was having enough trouble keeping the lid on her emotions without showing it to the two men in front of her.
"Get me the number of the doctor then, Cheryl, and I'll call him." Alex checked his watch; it wasn't too late to get in contact with anybody at the jail.
Cheryl headed back to the stairs, and was soon out of sight of Alex and Jesse. They both sat down and waited in total silence. Neither of them had any idea what to say to the other. They had both been in difficult situations in their lives, but this was running away from them. If they didn't do anything they knew that Rae could be lost forever. Jesse remembered that he hadn't spoken to Sholte and he got his cell phone out and made the call.
Five minutes later Martin came over to the two friends. "Guys, here is the number you wanted. Jesse, I'm real sorry about this, I don't think Rae did it, and I want to help all I can, but there is such a strong case against her…" Martin stopped talking, he wasn't sure what else he could say.
Steve and Jo had sat with Mark well into the night before he showed any sign of coming round from the anaesthetic and when he did Steve almost wished that he'd stayed asleep.
It was Jo who noticed that Mark was beginning to stir. "Honey, I think you need to get Doctor Collins up here, your Daddy is startin' to wake up."
Steve almost shot out of his chair. He had been leaning back with his eyes shut trying to stop thinking about the memory of his Dad lying there so still, but the words that he had spoken kept reverberating round his mind, Steve didn't think he would be able to ever forget how he had looked when he had been taken to x-ray.
He moved quickly to the phone on the wall and called down to get Doctor Collins paged. Then he sat back in the chair and gently took his Dad's hand in his own.
"Dad, Dad, can you hear me?"
Mark's eyelids began to flutter, and then he began to move, and a wave of pain passed over his face. "Rae… no, don't … No, no …" Mark coughed and the pain clouded his features once again. Steve turned to Jo as he heard the words, and saw Doctor Collins standing in the doorway, and the shock that he and Jo felt was reflected in the doctor's face.
"Ah, Steve, Ma'am, I need to check him over, do you want to wait in the hallway?" Wil had no idea what to say, but he knew that what Mark had just said was worrying the two people in front of him.
Jo stopped as she got to the Doctor. "It's Jo, you can't keep callin' me Ma'am, makes me feel old." Jo so wanted to tell him not to pay any attention to Mark, that it was the anaesthetic talking, but she couldn't because, as she looked at the man who would be her father in law, she was no longer sure. She walked out into the hallway in a daze and sat down on the first chair she came to. She felt Steve's hand on hers and she turned to him.
"Honey, is it possible that Rae did do this? Maybe everythin' that has happened has sent her so close to the edge that she really doesn't know what she's doing." Jo was suddenly sure that, even with all the problems she'd had, Rae would be incapable of such things, but she knew her friend had been badly traumatised, and she had needed to voice her fears, but as she heard herself speak she just knew that Rae was innocent.
Steve leant back so that his head was resting against the wall. "I so wanted to believe that she was blameless, she was the best partner I'd ever had, we just worked so well together, and now… now I have to face that fact that she tried to kill the two people I love the most in the whole world… why would she do that?"
"Honey, I won't ever believe that she cut my brake lines. It's just not the type of thing she would do. It is the act of a coward, an' whatever she may be, Rae is not a coward. She has been through life threatenin' an' alterin' situations, an' she has survived them, she would never cut somebody's brake lines."
"But you think she would stab somebody? In every case, somebody that she knew and liked was either attacked or murdered. Lee Tennant, she used to go in and see him whenever she could, after he lost his son. She always had a kind word and a few minutes to spare if she saw him in the hospital. Then Helen Baxter was killed. I don't know what Rae thought of her, but I know how much she admires and needs Brian Dobson, I don't think she would ever do anything to hurt him, and killing Helen would do that. Also, she never mentioned the nurse in a derogatory way, Rae didn't dislike people, she always tried to find something good about them. She didn't always succeed, but she tried."
"Steve, you are talkin' about her as if she is dead."
"If she is found guilty Jo, she will be." Steve turned away as he saw the horror in Jo's eyes.
"An' your Dad? Steve she loves your Dad, she couldn't do that. She asked him to give her away at her weddin." Jo ran out of words. She didn't believe that her best friend was a murderer, but she had heard Mark's words, and Jesse had said that Mark had been turning as he was attacked, so he would have seen her. Jo shook her head. Whatever way she looked at it, they were in the middle of an impossible situation.
It took Alex half an hour to get through to Doctor Jacobs at County Jail, and another ten minutes to make him understand why he was calling. Alex knew it was late, and he had often worked all nighters followed by a whole day, but he usually understood Basic English at the end of it.
"Mr. Martin…"
"Doctor Martin, I am Doctor Alex Martin, from Community General Hospital and you have one of my patients there, she only arrived today. Her name is Reagan …"
"Oh, yes, the detective." Doctor Jacobs voice seemed to take on a rather nasty edge.
"That's right, I would like you to give me your opinion of her mental state when she was … admitted." Alex couldn't think of another word to describe what had happened to Rae.
"Oh." Realisation dawned at the end of the phone line, "Hold on, I'll just get her papers… Can I call you back?"
"Yeah, sure, I'm at North Hollywood in the homicide department. Just ask for me when you call." Alex put the phone down with a loud bang. "Idiot."
"Alex, what is going on?" Jesse had been getting more and more agitated by the minute, and in the end Alex had turned away so that he wouldn't break his concentration.
"Jesse, just stand still, and I'll tell you… I think Doctor Jacobs is checking me out. He is gonna call back here, once he has her papers. Well, in that time I would imagine he will check that I really am her doctor, then he will call this number and check that I'm here, then he will speak to Cheryl, and then to me. That is what I think is going on."
"And Rae?"
"Jess, when I know anything, I will tell you, ok?"
Jesse went over and sat at Rae's desk. It had become the general resting place for anything that didn't have a home elsewhere, and had stacks of new pads piled high on one side, three filing trays full of maps and a stationary order form stuck to the other side, with 'please complete by Monday' written on it. Jesse sighed and shut his eyes. He could see his wife sitting at this desk, its surface perfectly clear and in order, a phone to her ear as she worked at the job she loved. He brushed a stray hair from his face and took a deep breath. On the front of the desk next to her pen tray and telephone was a picture of her three other children; he hadn't called them yet to tell them that their mother was in trouble once again. This time he would leave it to Tony. The noises of the squad room seemed to crowd around him, and for a moment he felt completely surrounded by insurmountable problems. He had a baby daughter he couldn't care for, his wife was in jail, her children would have to be told, her first husband was at this very moment flying over to conduct business in LA and was planning to stay with them, and one of the most important people in his life was lying in a critical condition in hospital, and he could do nothing about any of these problems, nothing.
"Jesse, Jess? Are you all right?" The voice of Alex cut through his panic and Jesse realised that at the very least he had shut his eyes for a moment.
"What? Oh, yeah, Alex, I'm just dandy!" Jesse couldn't help the fact that he snapped at his friend and colleague.
"Jess, I've been talking on the phone to Doctor Jacobs for the past fifteen minutes." Alex was very concerned about Jesse. He knew he was under an extreme amount of pressure at the moment, but if Jesse cracked then he had a feeling that Rae would too.
Jesse took a deep breath and tried to wake himself up. "What did he say? Can we go see her? Is she all right? Should she be receiving medical care…?" Jesse only stopped talking when he felt Alex's hand on his arm.
"Jesse, I can't go and see her tonight, but Sholte has an appointment to see her at nine in the morning and I am going to go in at the same time."
"And me, what about me?" Jesse looked at him, the panic just below the surface. He realised that however much Rae might want to see him, his need was just as great if not greater than hers.
"Rae has to send you a form to fill in requesting permission to visit. Once you receive it and fill it in you send it back and then once it has been processed you will be able to go and see her." Alex knew what Jesse was going to ask, and that he wasn't going to like the answer.
"And how long does that take?"
"About thirty days."
"Thirty Days!" Jesse was absolutely incredulous, he stood up and the chair shot back across the floor and banged into the wall behind. "I can't wait thirty days, she can't wait thirty days. My God, this will absolutely destroy her." Jesse sank back into the seat and pulled it back behind Rae's desk then he put his head in his hands.
"Jesse, there is nothing we can do tonight. Dr. Jacobs told me that Rae was quite upset when she arrived and he has arranged for her to spend the night in the hospital wing. She has been sedated and was fast asleep when I spoke to him." Alex thought it was wise not to mention that every time the doctor had said Rae's name he had practically spat it out, and when he had asked if Jacobs had a problem with her he said that he hated dirty cops. Alex knew that Rae was going to get that all along the line. She had already been tried and found guilty, and there was nothing, tonight, that they could do about that.
Doctor Jacobs had slammed the phone down once he had finished speaking to the doctor from Community General. Young upstart. He had sounded about three years old and he knew that he had taken his temper out on him. He didn't like to admit it but he was changing his opinion of the woman in his care. He had still been short when speaking about her to Doctor Martin… Doctor Martin… probably got his licence from Fisher Price Toys. And you are jealous. He is just starting out and you have about two years left. He looked over at the woman fast asleep in the end cubicle of his medical ward and shook his head. Bent cops, happened every day, but murder, multiple murder was more unusual. He was surprised to realise that he actually felt a little sorry for her. She had been polite and pleasant when she had arrived, a little disoriented and obviously upset, but she had undergone the examinations, which he knew a lot of women found humiliating without a word of dissent, and that was unusual in itself. As he sat and drank his coffee he thought about how she had behaved with him.
"Detective, do you know where you are?" He realised now that he had spoken very abruptly to her, and he had been pleased when he saw her shy away from his vicious tone of voice. Her examination had included a strip search by a female nurse, and by the time he began talking to her again she was wearing a medical gown. She had also had the medical exam which had shown that she was fit enough to be detained.
"Yes, Sir, I think so. I'm in jail, aren't I?"
"I can't find anything physically wrong with you, but I need to know that you understand why you are here."
"Yes, I'm here because they think I killed Lee Tennant and Helen, and … and somebody else, I can't remember his name. But I didn't. I really didn't, I just couldn't do that." Rae's voice had been full of confusion and it wavered as she spoke.
Doctor Jacobs had had a tick list in front of him, he had no idea if it was standard practice, but he used it to make sure that, in his opinion, all his patients were fit to be there. It was his benchmark and unless somebody told him otherwise he would continue to use it. He began to read the questions off the sheet, although he knew them all by heart, he had been using it for the last fifteen years.
"What is your full name?"
"My name is Reagan Susan Travis." Rae had smiled slightly as she said her surname.
"But you don't use your married name do you?"
"No, I'm Reagan Yeager at work."
"What do you do for a living?" He knew the answer to all these questions, and most people knew the answers to the first three or four of them, it was after them that life sometimes got interesting.
"I'm a detective with the LAPD… Or I was, I guess right now I'm not am I?" Rae had looked up and the pain and grief in her eyes had been the first thing that had begun to tap away at his inherent dislike for dirty cops. They were guilty until proven innocent to him, not the other way round.
"Are you married?"
"Oh, yes." Rae had really smiled then. "I am married to Doctor Jesse Travis, and we have a little girl called Eliana."
Well that answered the next two questions on his list; so he moved on down to number six. "Who is the President of the United States?" This wasn't such a loaded question any more. That last guy had caused some problems. There had been so many wise guys who said that his wife was in charge that he had seriously contemplated removing the question.
"Bush… I … I can't remember his first name… I'm sorry." Rae didn't look up this time, and Doctor Jacobs had been surprised. Hardly anyone apologised if they didn't know the answer, and she had been right. Either that or she was really living in the past.
"How did you get here?" He was working on her short-term memory. Long-term memory would come later.
"I came in a van." He could hear the puzzlement in her voice, and he resisted the chance to chuckle. He really needed to change the wording on that question.
"Ok, what happened to you so that you were brought here?"
Rae had thought for a moment, and then she looked up. "You mean that Cheryl and Martin arrested me at home, and Alex stayed to look after Eliana and I had to go to the station alone? Then they questioned me, I saw a judge and I came here. Is that right?"
He had seen that she was pulling at the gown she was wearing, and his heart softened a little more. The Christian names of the two detectives weren't on his forms so he had to add a question. "What were the surnames of the officers who arrested you?"
"Oh, sorry. Detective Cheryl Banks, and Detective Martin Robertson. They are my friends, or at least I thought they were."
"Do you know what will happen to you next?"
"I guess I will have to go to a … a cell, and spend the night here, right?"
Doctor Jacobs looked at her again. She must be an intelligent woman; she was a cop after all, one of the best and the brightest if all he had read was to be believed. She had been sent on secondment to LA as one of Scotland Yard's best female officers, and once her year was up she had requested and been given a permanent transfer. He also knew that ever since she stepped off the plane her life had been traumatic and fast paced. But she seemed to be taking everything he said to her at face value. She didn't look between the words to gain the true meaning of the questions, and he had a feeling that if he told her she needed to pull her socks up she would look down to see if that was indeed the case. "And then, what will happen, legally I mean?"
"I will have a preliminary hearing, and I won't get bail, and then I will go to trial."
Normally this was the time that people professed their innocence. 'There was knife dripping with blood in my hand doctor, but I didn't do it!' But she hadn't said anything about her case, and it was clear that she had no intention of doing so. He decided to switch to the long-term memory instead of going through his questions about a lawyer. "Ma'am, is your mom still alive?" He was working blind now, but he was a kind and gentle man and he could normally tell when they were telling the truth.
"Yeah, she's still alive. I haven't seen her in two years, she lives in London."
"What school did you go to?"
"Thanet Technical School…" Rae thought for a moment, then smiled and the doctor could tell that she was looking into her memories. "I used to wear a hat." She had begun to yawn then and Doctor Jacobs had finished the session. He had suggested to her, to his own surprise, that she should spend the night in the hospital wing, and she had just nodded. Once he had made sure that she was settled he had sat down to write up his notes and had been interrupted by Doctor Martin. It was funny, but now that he had gone over all the happenings in his mind, he wasn't even angry with that young man any more. He drained his now cold coffee and went back to his half finished report.
Doctor Collins had checked Mark over, and Steve was feeling quite confident until he saw the Doctor remove the dressing on the wound. Then he saw him take a deep breath and Steve felt his world stop.
"What, what?"
"I think this looks sore." Wil looked at the stitches and he could see that they were a little more vivid and slightly more puffy than he would have expected.
"But he is on broad spectrum antibiotics, Wil, shouldn't that get any infection under control?"
"Normally it would give him a fighting chance, but where he was stabbed there is an increased risk because of the colon and the bowel location. If the knife perforates either of them then it can let all the waste products back into the body. But if it is just nicked it will seep out, and cause just as much trouble. I am gonna have to keep a close eye on him, just in case."
"Why didn't Jesse check for that?" All Steve's anger welled up, and for a moment he was back in the doctor's lounge and he could hear Cheryl asking if it was wise to let Jesse operate on his father. He tried to shake the sound of her words from his ears, but found that for a few seconds he was unable to do so. Steve sat heavily on the chair, and looked over at his father. There had been so many times when he knew that he had bitten his tongue rather than tell his son to be careful as he left for work. Steve knew that he had spent too many sleepless nights by his empty bed waiting for him to return from a dangerous assignment, or at his hospital bedside waiting for him to come round when those assignments had gone wrong, and now he was here, listening to a doctor telling him the same type of frightening things, and Steve knew that the feeling of helplessness would be the same too.
"He would have checked for it. Maybe I'm just being over cautious." Wil took a deep breath, it was worrying when you had the head of internal medicine as your patient.
Doctor Jacobs had finished his paperwork and once again his mind was going over his evening. He wasn't officially off duty for another three hours, but his replacement had gone down with an awful head cold, and he had sent him home the day before and told him to take two days off. Cursing his stupidity he began to think about his list again. It was very rare that he got to the end of his sheet. It had thirty questions on it, and if he ever got to finish it, he treated himself to a glass of good whiskey when he got home; the type of people who he had to read all the questions to meant he sure needed it. After fifteen years he was just finishing the second bottle. Jacobs was brought back from his meanderings by the sound of Detective Travis… Yeager, he corrected himself, stirring in the bed at the end of the room. He had told Doctor Martin that he had sedated her but he had lied. He wanted to observe her some more. There was something about her that worried him greatly, and he hoped he might find it out by watching her both awake and asleep. But there had been no need to worry the doctor and her husband so he had let them believe she would sleep undisturbed all night.
Rae was back in that dreaded house. There were bars on the windows, and she was in a strange bed. In her half waking, half sleeping mind she could see that she was alone, but that he was there in the shadows, watching her, moving closer, with a chair, and she knew that he would just sit and stare at her. She also knew that he would touch her, just occasionally, sometimes with his hand; sometimes he had used a feather, or a scarf. He had used matches too, he had never touched her with them, he had only threatened, but she had felt the heat, and he would laugh and then blow them out in her face. She shuddered, and once the shaking started she couldn't stop it. She saw him coming closer and she cried out, hoping to maybe just this once save herself. "No, no… Don't touch me… Please, keep away. Husband, No!"
Doctor Jacobs was confused and perturbed by what he was hearing. He hadn't missed the way she had smiled when she mentioned the name of her husband, and he was sure that it hadn't been to mask any fear on her part. But now, it sounded as if she lived in dread of the man. He put his hand on her arm but she moved away from him so violently that he pulled it back in an instant. "Mrs. Travis." He hoped to get a reaction from her by using her married name and he did. She began to relax as soon as she heard it. "Mrs. Travis, you are just having a bad dream." He couldn't believe that he was talking to a prisoner in this manner. It had been almost an eternity since he had been able to use a bedside manner. Normally he was more worried about being sued than anything else.
Rae could hear a man's voice. She wasn't sure if she recognised it, but he called her Mrs. Travis so it couldn't be him. She began to relax, and then she heard her name again, and she began to fight what he assured her was just a dream. Slowly she began to open her eyes, and as she did so she realised where she was, and knew that one nightmare might be over, but another one was just beginning.