“Yeah, I think so.” Then her face squeezed together. “No.” Dark eyes flashed as she surveyed the mob. “They’re frickin’ crazy! Lunatics,” she muttered, her fury palpable. He didn’t blame her. Petroski was right. The mob was incited, an angry moving curtain. They were all hyped, certain they were about to see their beloved icon. The damned murderer. With these frenzied women of all walks of life idolizing him. She surveyed the crowd. “This is gonna get ugly.”
“It already is.” But the sirens were screaming closer.
“Detective Thomas!” a woman’s voice yelled. “Cole! Cole Thomas! If I could talk to you?” Sheila Keegan was waving one arm aloft, trying to get his attention, her cameraman at her side.
Thomas’s stomach dropped a notch. He didn’t have time for an interview.
“Just a few words.” She was trying to move through the throng, but he was ignoring her, searching for the intern who had been nearly jogging away from the scene, as if he were hurrying to get away.
Or maybe just moving quickly because he was late. Or cold.
Too late to find out. The guy was long gone. Had disappeared into the night.
Thomas bit back a curse. The intern hustling away seemed out of place, and Thomas knew from experience that wasn’t a good sign. Who the hell was he? As he turned back to the hospital and caught Sheila Keegan’s red jacket out of the corner of his eye, he thought about the hospital cameras. Maybe there was an image of the intern. If the guy turned out to be legit, so be it, but if not, maybe he could be identified.
For the first time that day, Thomas allowed himself a smile.
If only on the inside.
CHAPTER 20
Tate was true to his word.
Kara didn’t know how he’d managed it, but the security guard was no longer posted at the door to Jonas’s room. The folding chair was vacant, a jacket slung over the back, a magazine left on the floor near an empty paper coffee cup.
She didn’t wait.
Knew she didn’t have much time. She’d used up precious seconds yanking on her clothes, all of which she’d found in a closet in her hospital room.
Then, barely daring to breathe, she’d slipped past the nurses’ station without being seen. Only one of the nurses was at the desk and she’d been on the phone, staring at a computer screen, deep in conversation about a patient, her back to Kara, her head bobbing as she’d listened to someone through a headset. As she nodded, she twisted a lock of long dark hair and studied some chart.
Kara eased into the hospital room and found her brother lying faceup on the bed, his eyes at half-mast, bandages over one side of his head, bruises showing beneath both eyes. His gaze slid groggily to the side. He blinked as if in slow motion, his dark eyebrows drawing together as he attempted to focus on her. He licked his lips slowly as if it was a great effort. “Kara?” His voice was a rasp. Barely audible.
“Hey. I’m here.”
Tubes ran in and out of his body, an IV stand was nearby. A monitor was suspended over his bed, a black screen with a display of his vital signs and logging his heartbeats. His skin was sallow above his beard.
“I . . . I . . .” He forced his gaze to the window, where the sky was sullen and dark, the coming night brooding while snow was falling, collecting on the sill, and the heart monitor gave off soft beeps. “I . . . need . . . get out.”
She took stock of the tubes and wires, the pallor his skin, the bandages and dull sheen in his eyes, and heard the steady beep of the heart monitor. “I don’t think I can do that.” She inched nearer the bed. “You need to get well. Heal.”
His gaze locked with hers for an instant. She saw the anger etched in the set of his jaw, silently arguing with her. His voice when he spoke was a rasp. “They’re gonna try to pin this on me, too. They’ll never let me out.” His jaw tightened. “But . . . but I didn’t do it. I didn’t kill Merritt, and I didn’t kill Dad and Sam and . . . Oh, shit.” His mouth tightened and his eyes narrowed on her. “You put me in that place,” he accused, and her heart sank. “Your testimony.”
She wanted to defend herself, to say that she only answered the DA’s questions honestly, that the way they were peppered at her and her confusion of an eight-year-old on the witness stand contorted her testimony, twisted her words, but she didn’t. She’d tried to explain long ago and Jonas had turned a deaf ear to her explanations, to her apologies. The expression on his face suggested his attitude hadn’t changed. If anything, it had hardened.