CHAPTER THREE

Earlier

"Lucas, go get your things, your mom's home!"

Sheer panic roared in Kate's ears. The world around her slowed and nothing she could do was fast enough to stop this nightmare.

One of the men outside dipped his hand inside his suit and pulled something out, something cylindrical and ominous that he lifted in his arm. A gun. Her head swivelled towards her neighbour Mrs. Weaver and back to the man hidden behind the door.

"Run!" he yelled. "Run!" And he shoved her, hard, towards the kitchen.

Kate's pulse boomed in her ears. Gunshots. Where was the stranger? Another shot followed by a loud thump. A flash of red and blue light cut through the windows into the darkness of the house.

Stomach in her throat, limbs numb, she squatted under the tiny kitchen table for a shocked beat, then there was a movement and the stranger touched her shoulder. There was a cut on the side of his face and blood streaked his cheek.

"Get up," he yelled, reaching for her arm. "Get up. Come on! We've got to get out of here!"

Lucas! She scrambled to her feet, desperate, searching. He was already in the hall, several feet ahead of her.

"I don't think so."

The stranger's head exploded.

Kate screamed as brain matter splattered her chest. She crouched to the floor, her gaze mesmerised by the stranger's ruined face and dead eyes.

Another flash of bright red cut into the hallway through the kitchen windows and open front door like an angry flashlight and for a fraction of a second illuminated a pool of black around his head. He'd been shot. He'd been shot by the FBI agent.

Her gaze jerked up to the man. But the hallway was empty. There was only the stranger lying dead on the ground, his head in bits and pieces sprayed all over the house, and her. She sank down to the floor, sitting in the pool of blood and brain matter and shattered skull and tried to get her mind to think. But it was as if her brain was refusing to cooperate with her demands. What was it that she couldn't remember? What was it that she was supposed to remember? It was something familiar, a feeling, a flash, right at the tip of her mind and just waiting to be grasped. But it was too far away to reach.

"Ma'am?"

A man was kneeling before her. No agent. No dark suit. A different uniform.

"Are you hurt, ma'am?"

There was something missing, something vitally important. But what? If only she could remember.

"I think she's in shock." A squeak on the floor as the uniform turned his back. Rubber soles. "Secure the scene. No one goes in or out. No one, got me, Lopez? I'll bring her out in a minute."

Lopez wavered in the hallway, eyes flickering back at the mutilated head with only the barest and most superficial expression of disgust. "What about the EMT's? They'll be demanding access to the victim."

"The victim is dead. No EMT is going to make a difference. You'd do better to call the guys from forensics."

He made a move to leave then turned back around. "There's an old woman shouting the place up outside. A neighbour. She's claiming to have witnessed the scene. She wants to see her," he gestured to Kate, "Says she used to be a nurse."

A pair of sophisticated eyebrows drew together in a tight frown. "I said no one, Lopez. I don't want to see a single person in here without authorisation!" The frown became a full glare. "I won't have the scene contaminated by some idiot who thinks she's helping out. Got me?"

Lopez gave a slow nod, "Yeah, got you, chief," and headed outside.

Another squeak. A man was kneeling before her. Green eyes. Dark green like the colour of those army jeeps. She wondered if he was in the army too.

"Ma'am? I'm Travis Hackney. You're safe now. I'm here to help you."

A hand on her shoulder. Or was she only imagining it? She looked down to stare at the hand.

"I have to touch you and check to make sure you're not hurt. Is that okay?"

She didn't answer. She was still trying to put together the bits and pieces that her brain seemed to have been strewn in to. A matter of life or death. What was?

"Come on. Let's get you out of here." His lips tightened as he glanced at the man lying facedown in the hallway. "I'll take you outside and we'll get you cleaned up. The doctors are already waiting for you." He helped her up and in a wide circle around the crime scene moved them towards the door just as several men dressed in all-white uniforms entered the house. "I know it's hard to believe, but everything's going to be okay."

"Detective Hackney?" A sallow faced man with a bald head and a thick red beard hanging down to his chest poked his head around the door. "There's something you should see."

"In a minute, Gates." With a hand on Kate's back, he deftly manoeuvred her through the hallway and out the door before she even realised she was moving. With a couple of quick and clever turns on the officer's part, Kate found herself outside with glaring red and blue lights shining like strobe beams all around her. People had swarmed together on the lawn, between police cars and behind the yellow tape that had been tied around her porch. Police officers were standing around, some bored, some excited, talking through car radios and walkie-talkies and pressing the public to make some room while informing them there was nothing to see here. An ambulance was parked half across her and Mrs. Weaver's lawn, the back doors of it stood wide open and one of the paramedics leaned against the porch smoking a cigarette.

Hackney moved them towards the ambulance.

"This is Jessie," he said to Kate after a quick glimpse at the paramedic's nametag and exchanging a meaningful glance with the large black woman. "She's going to take care of you while I go tend to some business. I'll be back soon. Do you think you'll be all right?"

Kate nodded at him and tried to smile. It came out crooked. Nothing seemed to be working properly any more.

"Okay."

"Come over here, darling, and I'll take a look at that nasty scrape on your forehead. Looks like it's going to be a pretty nice shiner, that one." Taking matters into her own firm hands, paramedic Jessie Pratt had Kate sitting down and attached to an IV in less than two minutes. "This is going to make you feel a little woozy but a whole lot better, okay, honey? Should take away any pain you're feeling. Just let it go."

Kate felt the world sway a little at the corners of her vision and she tried to steady it by blinking, and when that didn't work, she squeezed her eyes shut against the wave of dizziness that came over her. The next thing she knew a man in bulky clothing was kneeling down next to her, giving her oxygen, asking if she was okay. She was lying in the ambulance, she realised looking at all the equipment around her, strapped to a gurney with two paramedics hovering over her with needles and white gloves and beeping machines. With that knowledge in her mind Kate blacked out.

-

When Kate awoke, it took her a few minutes to realise she was lying in a hospital bed. A man appeared next to her, holding a cup of coffee and wearing a relieved expression.

Setting the cup aside, Mark Turner took a seat next to the bed and took her hand in his, "Christ, I'm glad you're awake. You had me seriously worried for a moment." His smile lost some of its cheerfulness and his handsome face gentled to show a deeper emotion that betrayed the lightness in his voice. "I thought I might lose you."

She tried to sit up, but he was quick to put a hand on her shoulder and held her down.

"Will you just take it easy? A man has been murdered in your house, you yourself were shot at and you've been in shock for the past several hours. You can't just get up and waltz away after something like that."

She looked around frantically, heart lodging in her throat as she remembered. "Lucas, where's Lucas?" Mark didn't answer right away, and Kate felt panic twist her stomach. "Please, Mark, please don't tell me…" her voice broke and tears rushed to her eyes.

"I can't tell you anything, because I don't know. Nobody has told me anything." He shot a look at the man sitting quietly in the corner of the small hospital room. He squeezed her hand more tightly and lowered his voice. "They haven't found any… bodies, Kate. No indication that Lucas was even there. But they haven't finished searching. We'll find him."

She felt sick. There was a sense of detachment, that all that had happened in the last several hours was just a dream. They had taken her baby. Her son. He had been taken and she would probably never see him again.

"I need to get out of here. I need to find him." She started to rise again.

"What you're going to do is lie there and get some rest."

"You're asking the impossible! I can't just sit here and do nothing! He's my son! I have to do something," she exclaimed angrily.

"You flying out of here all banged up and disoriented and maybe blacking out in your car and killing yourself and someone else in the process, well," Hackney drawled from his seat in the corner. He stretched his legs and crossed his ankles into a more comfortable position. "I fail to see how that can be a positive thing."

She swung her gaze around to him, a frown marring her brow. "Who are you and what are you doing here?"

He shot her a short razor-sharp smile and reached for the coffee Mark had brought with him. "I'm detective Travis Hackney. I'm the one who found you after the shooting. I'm also in charge of the investigation and the search for your missing son. Now, the doctor said you should rest and I would hate to go against his wishes, but if you want to do something that would make you feel useful you could begin by telling me everything you remember about last night." He sipped at the coffee, and continued, ignoring the glare Mark sent him, "I promise you I will do everything within my power to return your son to you unharmed, Ms. Monroe. But you will need to tell me every little detail that comes into your mind, however trivial it may seem."

Mark shot him a look that spoke volumes. "The doctor said she needs rest. I'm sure this can wait a couple of hours."

"The fresher the mind, the more precise the facts, Mr. Tanner."

"It's Turner," he ground out through clenched teeth, "Mark Turner."

"As I said," Hackney continued with a mirthless quirk of his lips, "time is of the essence with missing person cases. Right now you've got a 75 percent chance of getting him back. That number is only going to decrease drastically. Tomorrow it'll be 45 percent, a week later 25. The sooner I hear Ms. Monroe's story the bigger the chance we're going to nail this guy. You do want him to be found, don't you, Mr. Tanner?"

Mark's hands clenched at his sides as he willed his temper down. He'd never been anything short of a poster boy for restraint but this guy was pushing him to the edge.

"Of course he does," Kate said, her eyes darting between the two highly charged men in the room in speculation. "I will answer your questions, but I have some of my own. What happened to those men who said they were from the FBI? Did you catch them? And who was the man in my home?"

"Forensics are still running tests on the body. We don't have an ID yet. As for those two men, I was actually hoping you could tell me more about them. We haven't found so much as a stray hair yet. Nothing except for the skid marks on your lawn and your neighbour who claims to have seen them at your front door."

Kate's expression was grim. "And the bullet in the man's head."

"You're the only witness to the crime." Hackney pulled the chair up next to the bed and sat down. "Okay, tell me exactly what happened."

She did, with as much detail as she could remember. And then she recalled that Lucas was missing, that she didn't know whether he was still alive and if she would ever see him again. A fresh ball of pain settled in the pit of her stomach like a heavy lump of stone. But it wouldn't do to fall apart now. If she did, she wouldn't be able to pull herself together again and right now she needed to be collected, for Lucas. She sat back and pulled at the corners of her sheet. Her head was hurting, and she noticed for the first time that there were bandages on her left arm.

"Did I get burned or something?" she asked wearily.

"No, just cuts and bruises, nothing that won't heal. You got a bit of a bump to your head, so you might be sore for a while." Mark's lips twisted into a wry smile he didn't feel. "The doctor said you were in shock and there was pretty much nothing they could do but wait for you to snap out of it."

She managed a smile for him. "I'm fine. And I'm glad you're here." She touched his hand. "Can I go home with you tonight?"

"Only if the doctor gives you the okay to sign out."

Hackney said, "It might be a good idea to stay there for a while. Your home is now officially a crime scene so access is restricted. If there's anything you need from there, like a fresh change of clothes or anything else you may want it would be best if you let us know so that we can arrange for an officer to accompany you."

"Mark, could you?" she let the sentence trail off when he replied, "Of course. I'll go take care of it now. Is there anything else you want to take with you?"

"Just some toiletries and…" she broke off, pursing her lips when her voice trembled. "And could you bring Pixie?" She closed her eyes against the wave of tears. One slipped down her cheek. "I'd like to have it with me for when –" she blinked, swiped at the moisture. "For when Lucas gets back." She glanced at Hackney with tear-filled eyes. "Shouldn't I stay at home, in case he comes –"

"There's no need. There'll be an officer present 24/7 should your child make it home." A beat. "Under the circumstances it would be much saver if you stayed with a friend, or family. We will need to know the address and a telephone number at which you can be reached."

"I'll take care of everything and get your things." Mark grasped her hand in a squeeze and dropped a kiss on her brow. "I'll be back soon." Then he turned on his heels and left the room.

-

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