She found herself smiling back at him. “And so very modest, Lynch.”
“False modesty is no virtue. Like I said, I’m tired of wasting time.” He walked to the door, opened it, and turned around. “I hate doing this, you know. I’ll call you from England. I’m going to find out what happened, but you need to be careful. If they got Rye, they can get any one of us.”
She nodded soberly. “I know. You be careful, too.”
“Hey, I guarantee nothing’s going to happen to me.” He said grimly, “I’m mad as hell, and I have an agenda. Both of those factors can move mountains.”
He turned and left the condo.
*
KENDRA WAS JUST ABOUT to leave the condo again when the front door buzzed. She punched her wall-mounted intercom unit’s talk button and spoke into it. “Let me guess, Lynch. You forgot your toothbrush. Or was it your semiautomatic?”
Jessie Mercado’s voice blared from the speaker. “Neither. But it sounds like he left behind some good memories.”
Shit.
“Jessie?”
“Yes. I can come back if you want to spend more time lolling in the rosy glow of your night with Adam Lynch.”
“No lolling. No rosy glow. Come on up.”
“If you insist.”
Kendra pushed the button that unlocked her building’s front door. Jessie entered her condo a minute later. “Sorry to drop by unannounced. I was nearby and decided to take a chance.” She slipped out of her leather jacket. “Where’s Lynch?”
“On his way to England.”
Jessie’s eyes widened in surprise. “Was there a break in the case?”
“Not exactly. We told you we had someone working the case from there…”
“Yeah?”
“He was murdered. They found his body early this morning.”
Jessie flinched. “God, I’m sorry.”
“It hit Lynch pretty hard. They were old friends.”
“That begs the question … Is Lynch going there to kick ass, or is he going to pick up the trail and actually work the case?”
“Hopefully both. His friend was investigating an abandoned factory that had something to do with Dr. Shaw.”
“And with Night Watch?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out.”
“Well, I’ve been investigating your pants-pissing kidnapper.”
“My pants-pissing attempted kidnapper, thanks to you.”
“Yeah, that guy. I decided to see what I could find out about him.”
“Between last night and this morning?”
“Sure. Hospitals don’t close.”
Kendra’s eyes widened. “What did you do?”
“There’s one nice thing about large health conglomerates … The minute Wallace Powers’s social security number went into the system, his entire medical history could be accessed from any computer in their network. Even if that computer happens to be in a fairly quiet, twenty-four-hour urgent-care location.”
“Don’t you need a key card and a password?”
“A pretty smile and a couple hundred bucks will go a long way in a place like that at three in the morning.”
“Did it tell you anything other than that Powers once sprained his ankle playing beach volleyball?”
Jessie smiled. “He did do that. How did you know?”
“A framed photograph in his house, signed by his teammates. It was between the front door and the bathroom.”
“I missed that. In my experience, these medical histories are more useful to get a sense of the employment history, emergency contacts, addresses where he lived, that kind of stuff.”
“Well?”
Jessie pulled a sheaf of papers from her inside jacket pocket. “I got all that. But there was something else here.”
“I hate to think of how many laws you’d just broken.”
“Then don’t think about it. Just think of him trying to drug you and carry you off in a barrel.”
“Since you put it that way…”
Jessie looked down at the papers. “Our friend was diagnosed with stage-four liver cancer. He was given eight weeks to live.”
“Eight weeks … That’s horrible.”
“The diagnosis was made over three years ago.”
“What?” Kendra took the pages and looked at them. “What kind of treatment did he have?”
“No treatment. At least none that appears in his records. The next time anyone in the network saw him, seven months later, he was completely cured.”
Kendra looked up from the pages. “Are you sure?”
“I had a doctor friend look these over, and he says his levels went from death’s door to perfectly healthy in a matter of months.”
“How is that possible?”
“It isn’t. As least not according to my doctor friend.” Jessie took the printouts back. “You have no idea what kind of work your Dr. Waldridge was doing?”
“No. I told you, he was incredibly coy about it. It wasn’t something that made him happy, though. I didn’t get the impression he’d come up with some all-powerful miracle disease cure.”
“He performed a miracle on you.”