Sam resisted the urge to touch his arm, to comfort him. He was clearly upset, his chest rising and falling quickly as he struggled to maintain control. Maybe she’d misjudged him. Maybe he was a good man, a solid, trustworthy man. Maybe her own issues were clouding her judgment. He hadn’t done anything wrong. He’d only been delaying them, pushing them off the trail, reluctantly allowing them to be a part of the investigation. A small-town cop not wanting to be manhandled by the system, or a methodical one who didn’t jump to conclusions?
Or was this about her? Had she been so twisted by the events of the past few years in Nashville that she saw the bad in people immediately, instead of the good? Her inherent distrust of mankind, driven by years opposite the working end of a scalpel, trying to figure out why people did such horrible things to one another?
“I don’t know. We need to be cautious, and you need to find out who tried to kill Ellie Scarron. The attacker had to know we were headed here, and scrambled to murder her before we arrived. My God, another minute or two of us standing around dithering about whether she was home or not and he would have succeeded. Who did you tell? Who knew we were coming here?”
He held himself so still she wondered if he’d heard her. He finally dragged in a breath and sighed. “I made three calls on the way up here. One to Ellie herself, to tell her we were fifteen minutes out, one to a friend in the service to check out your boyfriend there and one to Mac Picker, to check what time his partners were coming back tonight.”
“Picker. All roads seem to lead to Benedict’s law offices, don’t they?”
His voice was cold and hard. “They certainly do.”
The ambulance lumbered over the crest of the hill and pulled to a stop in front of the house. Two EMTs spilled out, began gathering their gear. Sam shouted to them, “I had to do an emergency trache on Mrs. Scarron. You’ll need to stabilize the surgical field, too. It’s a little messy.”
One of the EMTs raised a hand in acknowledgment. Sam went inside, got a thumbs-up from Xander, who was helping the EMTs, had a glance at her patient, who continued to cling to life, if barely, then went into the kitchen to wash the blood from her hands.
Chapter
24
Metropolitan Police
Criminal Investigative Division–Homicide Section
Washington, D.C.
CAPTAIN ARMSTRONG STOOD at the front of the room with two FBI agents—a man and a woman. They both were fit but looked drawn and gray, which told Fletcher more than he wanted. The woman was young, pretty, athletic, her dark hair drawn back in a ponytail, and she was frowning at a BlackBerry. The man, forties, blond hair high and tight and horn-rimmed glasses that made him look like a teacher instead of an agent, conversed quietly with Armstrong.
Fletcher slipped into his chair at 6:15 p.m., out of breath from his two-and-a-half-hour tear through the Virginia countryside and the mad dash across town to the run-down morgue that housed the OCME. He’d found Nocek and dropped off the cooler with the samples from Savage’s autopsy, then rushed downtown to Metro headquarters.
He ignored the looks from the rest of the team. They’d been a little cold to him since he returned a few weeks ago, not understanding why he’d thrown away a chance to work full-time on the JTTF—the Joint Terrorism Task Force. They’d kill for it.
Let them have it. He was better suited to this. Death and mayhem one-on-one, not for a higher cause, but for personal gain. He understood it. He’d lived it for so long, he flat-out got it.
Armstrong shot him a look. “Glad you could join us, Detective Fletcher. Are you up to speed?”
Fletch nodded. He wasn’t, all he knew was what he’d learned from the news in his car and Hart’s texts, but he wasn’t about to admit that. “Let’s begin our evening update. The child has been missing for seven hours now. There have been no sightings, and damn few calls about this little girl. We’re working the media angle hard. The tip line is going out on the local news right now, so expect this all to change. The FBI’s child endangerment team is lead on the case—this is Special Agent Rob Thurber and Special Agent Jordan Blake. They’ll take it from here.”
The lights dimmed, and a picture flashed up on the screen, a three-foot-high shot of a beautiful little girl, hair a pale red, eyes blue as the sky. She was smiling, missing her two front teeth, and seemed so damn happy, and so alive, Fletcher could barely stand to look at her. The thought of those eyes staring unseeing toward the heavens made him swallow, hard. She looked vaguely familiar, but she was a kid—they all looked alike at that age, still pudding-faced and round, before their bones started pushing out of the skin to form their permanent features and identities.