Chapter Thirteen


I saw my grandmother killed in front of me when I was 9. That was the first dead body of someone that I knew and loved that I ever saw. One thing I've learned is that no matter how many you see you never become inured to it, or maybe I would if I was an assassin or soldier, but for me each one is a fresh shock. Each one sticks in my mind and I can recall the moment exactly. The sight of the body and the disbelief that this person who was alive is now not is just surreal. After my grandmother was killed I went mute for a while. I think my child's mind thought that if I didn't speak it Grant wouldn't come back and hurt me like he originally intended or that he wouldn't hurt my mother. That part of it I can't remember clearly. But always in my mind these specific moments are surreal, like they happened to someone else. And they never really go away.



There were no words he could form, no thoughts possible as Patrick walked down the starkly lit hallway. His mind was not working, only his senses. He could smell the cleaning products that were used in the hallway and beyond it the chemicals associated with death. It was similar to the smells of the hospital, but the distinction was palpable. He could hear his shoes squeaking over the tiles that were obviously recently cleaned, but dingy with age and would never again be their original white or beige. He could hear his own breath, his own heartbeat. If he listened close enough he could even hear his father's. His father who walked beside him, this time there with him to face death instead of sneaking away from it out the back door. In the midst of all this he was suddenly swamped with a love for his father that took his breath away. More and more over the past days he was coming to understand in an all too real way why his father had walked out of the hospital and out of his life to hide in a bottle when he had lost his wife. Patrick halted suddenly and closed his eyes against the tears that blinded him.

Robin had given him this.

"Son?" Noah's hand was warm and heavy on his shoulder.

"I don't know if I can do this," Patrick whispered. He reached up and wiped at the tears that wet his cheeks. He was too tired, too stricken to care that grown men didn't cry. He opened his eyes and looked into his father's matching sad ones and thought that maybe they did. He nodded at his father's questioning look. He would do this. He had to do this. That's why he had volunteered.

It could have been Anna or Aidan, but he wanted to be the one to face it. He had been surprised that Anna had let him; she was such a strong and fiercely independent woman. Much like her daughter. But maybe she had understood his need to take care of this? Or maybe she just couldn't bear to do it herself. Maybe he'd be able to ask someday.

He took one last swipe at his cheeks. "Thanks for walking with me, Dad." He reached out, hesitated and then grasped onto his father's t-shirt, near the shoulder.

"Do you want me to come in with you?"

Patrick shook his head. "Wait for me out here?" His voice was distorted by tears.

"Of course." Noah put his hand on Patrick's cheek. "You can do this."

Patrick closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He opened his eyes and licked his lips. Without another word he let go of his father and walked the remainder of the way down the hall and through the swinging blue doors.


Patrick waited in the sterile room for them to roll in…the body. He swallowed and shoved his hands into the pocket of his slacks to keep them still. He heard the squeak of the wheels of the gurney before the doors on the other end of the room were opened and the gurney was pushed through by a young guy who looked appropriately stern, despite his punk hair. Behind him was the medical examiner with a clipboard in his hand.

The guy looked at Patrick, silently asking if Patrick was ready. Patrick nodded and braced himself.

The guy pulled the crisp, white sheet back.

Patrick's heart seized when he saw the straight, dark hair uncovered. It panged when he saw the white forehead. The eyes. He walked around from his position at the head to take a look at the face. He removed his hands from his pockets. They were shaking too much and jingling the spare change in his pocket. The sound was jarring and disturbing.

"Oh my god," he couldn't stop the shocked expostulation.

"You know this woman, then?" the elder doctor asked.

"I know her." Patrick blew out a breath.

"Is this Robin Scorpio?"

"No. It's not Robin. It's not Brenda Barrett either. This is Angela Dennis."


The body that had been dumped at the city garbage dump and clothed in hospital scrubs had been pinned with Robin's General Hospital ID. The authorities had been suspicious of the identification because she resembled, but did not exactly match the photo on the ID, even with the decomposition. The group from America had wondered if perhaps it was Brenda who still had not been located. Patrick, and everyone else, had desperately hoped it wasn't either woman. And now they knew it wasn't. No one ever expected it to be the woman Patrick had met in the bar in Toronto.

"How do you know her?" the Deputy Police President based in Prague at the Czech Police HQ known as the Policejni presidium.

"We met in Toronto when we were there looking for Robin who we were told was last seen there. I bought her a drink, we chatted. She said she was there on business. Public relations, she said." Patrick tried to think back, but truthfully he hadn't been listening to what the woman was saying. "We chatted for a few minutes and then I saw…someone else I knew and left her. I never saw her again. I don't know when she left the bar." He had seen, he remembered all too vividly, Robin in her red dress walking past him and then he had seen Heather from Banana Republic. Who was also still missing, despite what Sean Donely had told them.

"How did this woman get to our city?" the police inspector asked.

Patrick shrugged. He had gone through this story three times already. He was already used to law enforcement's seeming need to hear a story over and over again, it didn't even irritate him. He just wanted it done.

The only thing that made him uncomfortable was explaining to Robin's family and his father how he met the woman. He kept reminding himself that nothing happened, but he knew that he had considered it. Had wanted it to happen. Even if it was just to numb himself for a while it made him feel guilty and he knew he looked it. Which was why the local police inspector had been suspicious of his story.

"It can't be a coincidence that you meet this woman and then she ends up here, dead, with your missing girlfriend's identification."

"No kidding." Patrick shrugged. "I don't know what to tell you. I wish you could tell me something. All I know is that the name she gave me was Angela Dennis. I met her that once and never saw her again. How she got Robin's ID." Patrick stopped and shook his head. The feeling of being useless and in over his head was starting to come back, but for now all he felt was overwhelming relief. He cleared his throat. "Are we done yet?" He had a sudden urge to go outside and shout.

"Yes. We have your contact number."

"Good." Patrick got up and strode out of the well-appointed office and straight out of the building. He walked right past Anna and Noah who were sitting in the lobby waiting for him and making phone calls. He ignored his father's calling of his name.

He needed fresh air. He needed space.

He walked through the double doors of the municipal building, down the stairs and across the street. Then he turned left and he just kept walking. His cell phone began to ring. He considered ignoring it, but the thought that it could be Robin halted him in his tracks. She was still alive, he knew it now. He opened his phone and waited.

"Patrick, are you all right," Noah asked.

"I'm fine, I need some air. I'll be back in a few minutes."

"All right, Son."

Patrick closed his phone and put it back in his pocket and continued walking. The normalcy of the crowds around him settled his nerves. These were people heading to work, going shopping, going for lunch, worrying about bills, lovers. Normal. He'd missed normal sometime a week back. God, how long had Robin been missing now? Only seven days. It felt so much longer. Her absence was becoming a permanent ache in his chest and stomach now, he felt hollow. He turned and looked at the wares for sale and realized he was stopped in front of a bookshop. After a second's hesitation he went in.


"This is getting stranger by the minute," Patrick said.

"No, this is a good thing. We're getting more and more things to work with," Anna said from where she sat on the couch across from him.

Anna and Patrick were in the suite room they had secured in Prague when it was decided to stay longer so that Alex and Noah could observe the autopsy of the woman they knew as Angela Dennis. Aidan was out hunting down her passport and other information on her whereabouts, though it was highly likely she had given Patrick a fake name. Patrick had wanted to observe the autopsy himself, but Anna had asked him to let Noah and her sister handle it. Patrick had seen a look pass between Anna and Noah and suspected they had discussed protecting his feelings, although he wasn't clear why since it wasn't Robin who was being autopsied. His stomach lurched at the thought and he walked back over to the open window that overlooked the eastern bloc capitol.

"Do we need a white board?" he asked after he took a few cleansing breaths of fresh air. He turned back around to see the woman who unnervingly resembled his girlfriend.

"I don't think that's necessary at this point. What I want to do is find Brenda. Go over with me again what her office said and what her assistant said in Paris."

Patrick reiterated what he and Aidan had found out. That her office said she was on vacation, that her assistant was surprised and panicked by her absence from the shows and that no one else at the Paris shows had heard from Brenda Barrett. There hadn't been any calls on Robin's phones and no emails, which Patrick had forwarded to his Blackberry.

"Why did you want me to stay with you? Why not Alex or someone else with more training?"

"You have a good eye, Dr. Drake. Let's go through these photographs and see what we can gain from them. There has to be a clue here, but what?"

Anna laid out the photos onto the coffee table. One after another, Patrick eyed each of them carefully, but did not touch. When she got towards the bottom of the pile something in one of them caught his eye.

"Where did you get this one?" he asked, pointing at one of the photos she had just put down.

"It was in the pile of papers you brought from Robin's apartment."

"I never saw this before. None of us had a camera." Patrick frowned as he lifted up the photo of him and Robin hugging, with Robert looking on in the background. Something niggled at him as he studied it. He moved his finger to get a better grip and his finger stuck slightly to the print. He frowned and looked up at the other photos. His eye immediately tracked onto the photo of himself during the epidemic. He leaned down and picked it up.

"What do you see, Patrick?" Anna asked.

"Both of these photos have the same weird printing effect. I thought when I found this one it was because it was printed out from Robin's printer, but I printed those from the same program and printer and they're fine." He pointed to the photos he had taken in Toronto. "I don't know how Robin could have gotten these photos, never mind printed them off." He handed them to Anna.

"They look like they were taken by surveillance cameras, not the security kind, the pocket kind. This one looks like it's in the Maarkham Islands and I suppose this one was during the epidemic and is at General Hospital? Was anyone else in the chapel with you?" Patrick shook his head. "The question is how they got to Robin."

Patrick frowned and stood up. He licked his lips as he thought. "Could…." He trailed off and looked at Anna. "Could someone have given them to her?"

"You mean whoever came to her apartment and took her?" Anna asked, nodding approvingly. "If they had these photos of you, photos that no one should have, would she have gone willingly with them? I can't think of anything else that would make her do that other than a threat to the people she loves." Anna saw him pale at her deliberate use of the word love. She raised her eyebrows at him and challenged him to deny it.

Patrick, hands on his hips, looked down at the floor for a moment, then he looked Robin's mother in the eye. "I know she loves me. I…I love her too." Now that the words were out he wondered how he had kept them in for so long.

"Feel better now?" Anna asked, quietly, moved by the tall man in front of her who had given his heart to her daughter and who had gotten hers - all against the odds of their broken pasts.

"Honestly. No." Patrick looked up at the ceiling. His skin felt cold and clammy. "It doesn't change my thoughts – all I can think is where the hell is she? Is she all right? Is she scared?" He looked again at Anna, his eyes darker than she'd ever seen them. "She gets so scared when there's violence."

Something flickered in Anna's heart at his words. How many people knew that about Robin? How many people would she allow to know that? Any trace of doubt that might have been left about this man disappeared. She walked up to Patrick and put her hand on his forearm. "Maybe inside, but there is no one better under pressure than Robin. She has many, many skills and a survival instinct like you wouldn't believe." She squeezed the arm of the newest member of the Devane-Scorpio clan.

"Krav Maga. Jijutsu. Guns. Knives." He absently rubbed his ears. "And a wit and temper that could take your skin off." Patrick put his hands back on his hips. "Clues. You said she would leave clues. These photos are clues. Are there others? Did she have time?"

"She probably didn't have time to do anything but let us know that she didn't leave by choice – the photos, leaving the PDA out of place, leaving a mess."

"She packed for a long trip,' Patrick said, once again beset by conflicting emotions – terror that she had been taken, relief that she hadn't left him by choice, hope that they would need to keep her alive. Unhurt. "Brenda's assistant said she was coming here, to Prague." He looked over the table for the photos of Brenda and Robin. "Could these photos of Brenda be real?"

"They could be or they could have just put Robin into real photos of Brenda."

Patrick studied the one of the pool closer, then he closed his eyes, thinking back. "My mother loved castles and old estates, medieval, Gothic, baroque, rococo, all the really gaudy stuff. We went on family vacations to look at places like this," he said in reference to the Baroque building in the background. "She had books all over the house. This is going to sound crazy, but I think I recognize this …" Patrick's eyes popped open and he trailed off, stunned. "This is Prague Castle, it was in the first Mission Impossible movie, it was the only thing besides the car and the women I liked. Around when the movie came out some friends of mine went and snuck in and took photos. I had some big races and couldn't go. They showed us pictures, my mom told us about the castle's history." He licked his lips and took a deep breath. His mom had died not too long after that and he had horded memories like this, it was a clear as day in his mind. Her face and voice as she recounted the history and the photo. That looked like this photo.

Anna pulled out a map of Prague while he spoke and spread it out on top of the evidence spread out on the table. She pointed to Prague Castle next to River Vltava.

"Could Brenda really be there?" Patrick asked, his voice rising with eagerness.

"Let's find out."

"I'll call Aidan and tell him to meet us near the castle." Patrick dug into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone.

"Actually, have him meet us here. I'll track down plans for the castle. We need to make a plan first."

"Why don't we just call and ask…" Patrick broke off and stared wide-eyed at his phone device. "What the hell?"

"What is it?" Anna walked over to Patrick.

"A text message. I don't know when this came in, I never got an alert. It says 'Long trip 4 wndw shppng.' What does that mean?"

"Who's it from?" Anna asked.

Patrick pressed a couple of buttons. "It was sent via the Web. No signature." He licked his lips and his heart pounded. "Could it be from Robin?" His voice broke on her name.

"Let's trace it."

Patrick wordlessly handed the device to Anna. She was alive. He knew it. He walked over to the window and realized that he could see Prague Castle in the distance.

TBC