Bloody Point (5 page)

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Bloody Point

Chapter 5

T
HE hospital corridors
were painted a soft, pale blue and decorated with watercolors of natural scenes,
vases full of flowers and ponds bordered by grassy fields. It was nearly ten at
night and the visitors were gone. The only people Cassie and Craig passed were
employees dressed in scrubs or brightly colored uniforms.

Craig seemed to know where he was going, a fact which
gratified Cassie. He held open a double door for her. “The doctors have him
heavily sedated,” he said in a low voice. “They’re hoping that will help the
swelling in his brain go down and minimize brain damage.”

“Minimize? What do they mean, ‘minimize’?”

Campbell guided her to turn into a corridor. “Jake has
sustained a very serious head injury. It’s too soon to say what his prognosis
will be, but the doctors are hopeful. He’s on a respirator, because he’s
essentially in a coma. He won’t be able to respond to you at all. You’ll see
tubes–down his nose, in his arm, in his side. His head is shaved and bandaged,
and his arm is in a sling. I just don’t want you to be surprised by his
condition.”

“How long will they keep him sedated?”

“We’re going to get through the next 12 hours, then we’ll go
from there.”

“Has anyone called Tamara?”

“I talked to her. She won’t be coming over.”

Another wave of sadness buffeted Cassie.

The pair walked into the wide bay of the intensive care unit.
Individual beds were placed in cubicles arranged like spokes on a wheel around
the central desk. Data from each patient was displayed on monitors at the desk.
At any given moment, a staff member could check Mr. Martinez’ blood pressure or
Mrs. Morgan’s heart rate.

Craig led her through the unit to a private room. He nodded
to the agent on guard as they entered.

Jake was lying motionless in the bed, strangely dwarfed by
the beeping machines that categorized and calculated his vital signs. His head
was shaved and swathed in white bandages, but Cassie could see bruising around
his right temple and cheek, and his face was misshapen. Her stomach turned. It
must have been a terrible blow to cause discoloration and swelling that far
out. His right arm was stabilized in a sling and his shoulder was bandaged. A
nasal-gastric tube ran into his nose and an IV pierced the back of his left
hand.

She began shivering. He had the look of a corpse. He bore a
resemblance to the man she’d known in life, but he was not quite right. She
wondered if life was leaving him even now.

The room was dark and quiet except for the beeping and the
sound of the respirator. Cassie approached the bed and touched his hand. It was
cool. She cradled it in both of hers. She had to fight to keep from being
overwhelmed. Six months ago it was Mike. Now it was Jake. Both men in hospital
beds, heads bandaged, full of tubes … it was all too horribly familiar. Which
one was this? It was Jake, and he couldn’t die. It wouldn’t be fair.

Campbell came up next to her and put his arm around her
shoulder. She leaned against him, finding his touch comforting. “Jake’s very
strong,” he said.

“I know.”

“He has a good chance, better than most, to make it.”

Cassie touched Jake’s face gently. They’d pulled off night
surveillances together, worked sources, followed a fugitive until they were
both sick of the guy. She’d loved her husband deeply. Jake was knit into her
soul like a brother. The three of them had been such good friends.
This
isn’t fair!
her heart cried.

“They’ve asked us to keep visits to no more than fifteen
minutes every hour,” Campbell said.

She looked up at him. “I want to stay. He’s sleeping. I just
want to stay with him for a while.”

A nurse had entered the room as she was speaking. “Are you a
member of his family?”

Cassie shook her head. “He doesn’t really have any, just his
small children and a brother in another state. I was … I am a good friend.”

The nurse looked her over from head to toe. “It’s not usually
allowed, but I don’t see how your staying here could hurt.” The nurse turned to
Craig. “Maybe you could help me bring in a chair for her.”

† † †

He was alive, or at least he thought he was. He was
floating in a sea of blackness. To his right, and behind, was a searing,
white-hot pain. He wanted to get away from it. Back and to the left was a
bottomless void, and once in a while he would begin to slide toward it. That
terrified him. He fought with every bit of strength he could muster to move
toward the voices, away from the Pit.

He felt oddly disconnected from his body. He could feel
people moving him, feel them pricking him with needles, feel hands probing him,
but he could not make his own hands or feet or head move. He wanted to speak to
them, to tell them he was in there, but he could not find his voice. And so he
fought against the pain and the Pit, silently screaming.

† † †

At 11:00 p.m. the door opened and a man she recognized walked
in. He looked at Jake, then he turned to her. “Cassidy McKenna? Do you have a
minute?”

It was Special Agent Kevin DiCarlo and he was the case agent
for the AFO, Assault on a Federal Officer. Now, he wanted to talk to Cassie.
She followed DiCarlo to a private waiting room. He pulled out a notebook, a
pen, and some reading glasses, which he perched on the end of his nose.

DiCarlo was about forty, with thinning brown hair. He was
slightly paunchy and had an old food stain on his tie. She remembered he’d
worked for years on a frustrating fraud case that had gotten hung up in the
courts. It had become a standing joke in the office. Ol’ One-Case DiCarlo.
Other than that, she didn’t know anything about him.

“I need you to tell me, Cassie, exactly what went on when
Jake came to see you, before he was attacked. First of all, why was he there?”

So Cassie began to tell the story. By the time she got to
their argument, her stomach was knotted and her head was pounding.

“So you argued. Did it ever get physical?” DiCarlo asked.

“No. No, wait.” She instantly corrected herself. “I did push
him. I was so frustrated, I shoved him away.”

“Ah,” he said, jotting something in his notebook. “Did he
fall down?”

“No, of course not.”

“Did you have something in your hand when you pushed him?”

“No.”

“A tool? A purse?”

“No!” Cassie felt her irritation growing.

“What happened after you pushed him?”

“He left. I told him to leave, and he left and went back to
his car.”

“Did you follow him?”

“No.”

“Not even part of the way?”

“Of course not! Look …”

“Did you feel intimidated by Jake?”

“No.” Cassie fingered the cross on her neck.

DiCarlo looked at her as if he didn’t believe her. “You
didn’t feel threatened by him, and yet you felt like you had to push him to get
him away from you?”

“That’s right.” Cassie stood up and started to pace.

DiCarlo jotted down some more notes. “Your husband died how
long ago?”

“The end of November.”

“And how long have you been seeing Jake?”

Cassie bristled. “We aren’t
seeing
each other.”

“Oh, well then, how would you characterize your
relationship?”

“We were partners, and friends. He was a good friend to both
me and my husband.”

The more questions DiCarlo asked, the less Cassie liked him.
He kept coming back to her relationship with Jake, as if there had to be more
to it than she was admitting. But there wasn’t, and she refused to be bullied.

Finally, his questions started to take a different angle. Had
Jake mentioned anyone lately that he had a conflict with? What about his
ex-wife? Her boyfriend? How much did he drink? Where did he tend to hang out?
Was she aware of anyone who owed him money? Or anyone Jake owed money to?

The more questions he asked the more irritated Cassie got.
Why was he focusing only on Jake’s personal life?

After an hour, DiCarlo closed his notebook. He thanked her
for her cooperation, and Cassie shook his hand firmly, to show him she wasn’t
intimidated. Then she went back to the ICU, and sat in the dim room, and
watched Jake sleep.

† † †

Relentless pain consumed him, flooding his thoughts and
overpowering him. It felt like a heated iron bar plunged into his head, behind
and above his ear.

As the voices grew more distinct, the pain increased. And
then he felt his eyes open, and he was in a tunnel, looking out. He tried to
focus, to see faces and name the people around him but it was too exhausting,
and in the end he closed his eyes again. If only he could let them know he was
there, that he could hear them. If only he could tell them about the pain.

But he couldn’t. Frustrated, soon he drifted off again,
floating in a sea of blackness bordered by despair.

† † †

Craig Campbell came into the room. He looked tired.

“Hello, Cassie.” He glanced toward Jake.

“Still no change,” she said, anticipating his question. She
leaned forward. “What’s going on?”

Craig sagged down into the second chair in the room. “Not
much.”

“What do you have so far?”

He looked at her, measuring his response. “Let’s step
outside.”

Cassie followed him out to the hallway. Craig led her away
from the guards. He stopped near an empty gurney, and ran his finger down the
bed’s metal rail. His hesitation was killing her. Finally his eyes met hers.
“We’ve canvassed the marina, and all of the houses near the park. No hits so
far. We found two 40mm casings on the ground near where we found Jake. Maybe
the perpetrator tried shooting him and missed. We don’t know. The teens are all
juveniles, but their stories are matching up. They didn’t get a good look at
the guy, they just know he’s white and was wearing dark clothes and a hat
pulled down low.”

“What kind of a hat?”

“They described it as a floppy-brim hat, white or light in
color.”

Cassie nodded. Kind of odd for a killer. “How about his
truck?”

“Jake’s SUV? No sign of it. We’ve entered it in NCIC.” The
National Crime Information Center had a huge database of missing vehicles.

“His laptop was in it. I saw it.”

“We were operating under that assumption. So whoever has the
car could hack into the laptop and access a whole lot of information. Maybe
that was the motive.”

Cassie shook her head. “This is so frustrating!”

“We’ll find him, Cassie. There’s not an agent out there who
doesn’t want to get the guy that hurt Jake. You know yourself, even the agents
who hate your guts close ranks when something like this happens.”

“I know, Craig. I know.”

“Tell me, Cassie, did Jake mention anything to you about any
of his cases?”

“Just one … he was looking into the murder up at Sullivan’s
Wharf and wanted my input. Some friend of Tam’s contacted him for help. I
couldn’t figure out why he was so concerned, but he seemed determined to pursue
it.”

“Okay, thanks. We’ll start checking that out.”

Craig touched her arm. He looked concerned. “Cassie, there is
one more thing.”

“What?”

“When the evidence techs were going over the ground where
Jake was attacked …”

She was holding her breath. What was he going to say?

“… they found something in the mud where Jake was lying … a
piece of paper with a partial address on it. It may have fallen out of his
pocket.”

“Jake was always doing that, writing addresses where he was
supposed to meet people on odd scraps of paper. It drove me nuts. What was the
address?”

“As I said, it was only a partial: 128, then we can’t read
the street, except for the letter ‘S’ and the letters ‘Annap’ which of course,
must be Annapolis. We’ve got someone looking at possibilities. But Cassie, I
need to ask you something. Did Jake ever verbalize any theories about Mike’s
death?”

“Mike’s death? Theories? What are you talking about?”
Suddenly her heart was pounding.

“About how Mike died.”

“It was an accident. Mike died in an accident,” she asserted.
Craig looked away, and Cassie’s heart tightened. She grabbed his arm. “Craig,
it was an accident. The roads were slick, it was late …” His failure to respond
to her was alarming. Cassie wanted to shake him. “That’s what they told me from
the beginning. It was an accident. Craig, look at me! What are you saying?”

His eyes were bright and filled with compassion. “I … well, I
was never comfortable with that finding. Mike had been out plenty of times in
much worse weather. He was a good driver … I don’t know. I just never bought
the idea that he’d had an accident.”

Cassie’s heart was thumping. She wondered if Craig could hear
it.

“We can read the last two digits of the zip code on that note
we found. And one possibility is an address not far from where Mike killed that
man.”

“So what? What does that prove? How many people live in that
vicinity, anyway, fifty thousand? There’s no proof that Mike’s accident was
anything but that.”

Craig swallowed hard. “I was uncomfortable, as I said, with
the findings, so once I got to Baltimore, I convinced them to have the lab go
over Mike’s Bureau car again.” He hesitated. “And they did find some green
paint on the side panel.”

“Green paint? How much? Why hasn’t anyone told me this before
now?”
Did somebody hit Mike and force him off the road?

“No one wanted to upset you. We weren’t sure what it meant.
It’s not much paint, just a little, from a Ford make, an Explorer most likely.
It may be nothing, or …”

“Or it could be that someone killed Mike? Is that what you’re
saying?” Cassie’s face was hot.

Campbell nodded. “I told Jake about all of this a week before
he was assaulted. He was furious. And if he was looking into it himself, if
he’d made contact with a source, or started asking questions …”