In Graywolf’s Hands Read online

  Harrison glanced at the man who had come in with the blonde before looking back at her. “Everybody deserves his day in court.”

  She had thought that once, too. Before the job had gotten to her. Before she’d seen what she had today. She turned from the window to glare at the doctor spouting ideologies.

  Her eyes were cold. “A man who would blow up innocent people to vent his anger or to carry out some kind of private war doesn’t deserve anything.”

  Harrison took quiet measure of her. The woman appeared to be a handful by anyone’s standards. Probably gave her superiors grief. Not unlike Lukas on a good day, he mused.

  “Odd philosophy for a law enforcement agent.”

  “Oh, really?” Tired and in no mood for pretty-boy doctors who probably saw themselves as several cuts above the average man and only slightly below God, she fisted her hand at her waist. “And what makes you such an expert on law enforcement agents?”

  “I’m not,” Harrison said. A seductive smile spread along his lips as he regarded her. “But give me time and I could be.”

  Lydia saw her partner move closer and held up her hand to stop him in his place. “I think you’d better go now.”

  Harrison raised his hands in complete surrender, taking one step back, and then another. He had places to be, anyway. With a woman who was perhaps not as exciting as this one, but who, he was willing to bet, was a whole lot more accommodating.

  “Okay, but go easy on my friend.” He nodded toward the room he’d just vacated. “His head doesn’t grow back if you rip it off.”

  She glared at the doctor’s back as he walked quickly away. It was easy to be flippant, to espouse mercy and understanding if you were ignorant of the circumstances. If you hadn’t just seen a teenage boy destroyed, a life that was far too short snuffed out right before your eyes.

  Restless, Lydia couldn’t settle down, couldn’t keep from moving. If only she and Elliot had gotten there earlier.

  But the tip they’d received had been too late. It had sent them to Conroy’s house, where they had uncovered enough powder and detonating devices to blow up half the state. It was by chance that they’d stumbled across the intended target: the Crossroads Mall exhibit honoring Native American history.

  They’d rushed to the Crossroads, calling in local police, calling ahead to the mall’s security guards. To no avail. She couldn’t stop the bombing, couldn’t get the mall evacuated in time. She tried to console herself with the fact that things could have been worse. If this had happened at an earlier hour, the damage would have been far greater in terms of lives lost. And fortunately, it had happened in the middle of the week, which didn’t see as much foot traffic at the mall as a Friday or Saturday night.

  The bombing, according to a note sent to the local news station and received within the past hour, had been meant as a warning.

  For Lydia, even one life lost because of some crazed supremacy group’s idea of justice was one too many. And there had been a life lost. Not to mention the number of people injured and maimed. The ambulances had arrived en masse, and the victims being taken to three trauma hospitals in the area.

  Knowing that only Blair Memorial had an area set aside for prisoners, so the paramedics had brought them here.

  And now the doctor with the solemn face and gaunt, high cheekbones was trying to save the life of a man who had no regard for other lives.

  It was a hell of a strange world she lived in.

  Lydia leaned her forehead against the glass, absorbing the coolness, wishing her headache would go away.

  “I can take it from here, Lyd,” Elliot was saying behind her. “You’re beat. Why don’t you go home, get some rest?”

  She turned to the man who had been her partner from the first day she’d walked into the Santa Ana FBI building. At the time she’d felt she was being adopted rather than partnered. Elliot Peterson looked more like someone who should be behind a counter, selling toys, not a man who regularly went to target practice and had two guns strapped to his body for most of each day. He was ten years older than her, and acted as if he were double that. Elliot took on the role of the father she’d lost more than a dozen years ago. At times, that got in the way.

  He was always trying to make her job easier.

  Lydia smiled as she shook her head. She wasn’t about to go anywhere. “You’re the one with a wife and kids waiting for you. All I’ve got waiting for me is a television set.”

  “And whose fault is that?” It was no secret that he and his wife had tried to play matchmaker for her, to no avail. Loose, wide shoulders lifted in a half shrug. There was no denying that he wanted to get home himself.

  “Yeah, but…”

  There was no need for both of them to remain here. “How long since you and Janice had some quality time together?”

  Elliot pretended to consider the question. “Does the birthing room at the hospital count?”

  Lydia laughed. “No.”

  “Then I don’t remember.”

  She looked at him knowingly. “That’s what I thought. Go home, Elliot. Kiss your wife and hug your kids and tell them all to stay out of malls for a while.”

  The warning hit too close to home. His oldest daughter, Jamie, liked to hang out with her friends at the Crossroads on weekends. If this had been Saturday morning instead of Wednesday night…

  He didn’t want to go there. Suddenly ten paces beyond weary, Elliot decided to take Lydia up on her offer. “You sure?”

  This job could easily be turned over to someone in a lower position for now, but she wouldn’t feel right about leaving until she knew what condition the bomber was in.

  She started to gesture toward the closed doors behind her. Pain shot through her arm and she carefully lowered it, hoping Elliot hadn’t noticed. He could fuss more than a mother hen once he got going.

  She nodded toward the room. “As the good doctor pointed out, that guy’s not going anywhere tonight. I can handle it from here. If anything breaks, I can always page you.”

  Grateful for the reprieve, Elliot patted her shoulder. “Night or day.” He glanced through the window. The medical team was still going full steam. “From the looks of it, it might be a while. Want me to get you some coffee before I go, maybe find you something clean to put on?”

  She glanced down at her bloodied jacket. “My dry cleaner is not going to be happy about this. And, thanks, but I’ll find the coffee myself.” She didn’t like to be waited on. Besides, Elliot had put in just as full a day as she had. “You just go home to Janice before she starts thinking I have designs on you.”

  Looking back at his life, he sometimes thought he’d been born married. Janice had been his first sweetheart in junior high. “Not a chance. Janice knows there isn’t an unfaithful bone in my body.”

  That makes you one of the rare ones, Elliot, Lydia thought as she watched her partner walk down the long corridor. She vaguely wondered if there would ever be someone like that in her life, then dismissed the thought. She was married to her job, which was just the way she wanted it. No one to worry about her and no one to worry about when she put herself on the line. Clean and neat. She was too busy to be lonely.

  “You’d think a state-of-the-art hospital would keep coffee machines in plain sight,” she muttered to herself, looking up and down the corridor. About to approach the receptionist at the emergency admissions desk, she heard the doors behind her swoosh open.

  Turning, she saw the doctor who had earlier hustled her out of Room Twelve hurrying alongside an unconscious, gurneyed Conroy. They had transferred the suspect back onto a gurney and he was being wheeled out.

  She lost no time falling in beside the doctor. “Is he stable?” she asked. “Can I question him?”

  Stopping at the service elevator, Lukas pressed the up button. He’d never cared for authority, had found it daunting and confining as a teenager. The run-ins he had had with the law before his uncle had taken him under his wing and straightened him out had left a ba
d taste in his mouth.

  “You can if you don’t want any answers.” The elevator doors opened. The orderly with him pushed the gurney inside and Lukas took his place beside it. “He needs immediate surgery, not a game of Twenty Questions.”

  “What floor?” she demanded as the doors began to close.

  Lukas pretended to cock his head as if he hadn’t heard her. “What?”

  Irritated, she raised her voice. “What floor are you taking him to?”

  The doors closed before he gave her an answer. Not that he looked as if he was going to, she thought angrily. What was his problem? Did he have an affinity for men who tried to blow up young girls and cut down young boys for sport because of some half-baked ideas about supremacy?

  Her temper on the verge of a major explosion, Lydia hurried back to the emergency room admissions desk and cornered the clerk before he could get away.

  “That tall, dark-haired doctor who was just here, the one who was working on my prisoner—”

  “You mean Dr. Graywolf?” the older man asked.

  Well, ain’t that a kick in the head? Conroy and his people had blown up the exhibit because of contempt for the people it honored and here he was, his life in the hands of one of the very people to whom he felt superior.

  Graywolf. She rolled the name over in her mind. It sounded as if it suited him, she thought. He looked like a wolf, a cunning animal that could never quite be tamed. But even a cunning animal met its match.

  Lydia nodded. “That’s the one. He just took my prisoner upstairs to be operated on—where was he going with him?”

  “Fifth floor,” the man told her. “Dr. Graywolf’s a heart surgeon.”

  A heart surgeon. Before this is over, Dr. Graywolf might need one himself if he doesn’t learn to get out of my way, Lydia vowed silently as she hurried back to the bank of elevators.

  Chapter 2

  Lydia looked around the long corridor. After more than three hours, she could probably draw it from memory, as she could the waiting room she had long since vacated.

  Blowing out an impatient breath, she dragged her hand through her long, straight hair. It was at times like this that she wished she smoked. Or practiced some kind of transcendental exercises that could somehow help her find a soothing, inner calm. Pacing and drinking cold coffee to which the most charitable adjective that could be applied was godawful, didn’t begin to do the trick.

  She knew what was at the root of her restlessness. She was worried that somehow John Conroy would manage to get away, that his condition wasn’t nearly as grave as that tall, surly doctor had made it out to be. And when no one was looking, he’d escape, the way Lockwood had. Jonas Lockwood had been the very first prisoner she’d been put in charge of. His escape had almost cost her her career before it had begun.

  She and Elliot had managed to recapture the fugitive within eighteen hours, but not before Lockwood had seriously wounded another special agent. It was a lesson in laxness she never forgot. It had made her extra cautious.

  Something, she had been told time and again by her mother, that her beloved father hadn’t been. Had Bryan Wakefield been more cautious with his own life, he might not have lost it in the line of duty. The ensuing funeral, with full honors, had done little to fill the huge gap her father’s death had left in both her life and her mother’s.

  Lydia crumpled the empty, soggy coffee container in her hand and tossed it into the wastebasket.

  The corridor was almost silent, and memories tiptoed in, sneaking up on her. Pushing their way into her mind.

  She could still remember the look on her mother’s face when she’d told her that she wasn’t going to become a lawyer because her heart just wasn’t in it.

  Lydia smiled without realizing it. Her heart had been bent on following three generations of Wakefields into law enforcement. Her great-grandfather and grandfather had both patrolled the streets of Los Angeles and her father had risen to the rank of detective on the same force, doing his father proud.

  Her mother had argued that she could become part of the D.A.’s office. That way, she would still be in law enforcement, only in the safer end of it. But Lydia had remained firm. Sitting behind a desk with dusty books or standing up in court in front of a judge whose bout of indigestion or argument with a spouse might color the rulings of the day was not for her.

  With tears in her eyes, her mother had called her her father’s daughter and reluctantly given her blessing while praying to every saint who would listen to keep her daughter safe. Lydia had no doubt that her mother bombarded heaven on a daily basis.

  Mercifully, Louise Wakefield remarried six months after Lydia had successfully completed her courses at Quantico. Her stepfather, Arthur Evans, was a kind, genteel man who ran a quaint antique shop. Her mother made him lunch every day and always knew where to find him and what time he’d be home. It was a good marriage. For the first time in nearly thirty years, Lydia knew her mother was at peace.

  Lydia looked at the wall clock as she passed it. She sincerely wished she could lay claim to some of that peace herself right now. Glancing at the clock again, she frowned. It announced a time that was five minutes ahead of her own watch. Not that it mattered in the larger scheme of things. It just meant that her prisoner had now been in surgery for three hours and forty minutes, give or take five.

  She rotated her neck and felt a hot twinge in her shoulder. It had been bothering her the entire time she’d been here. She couldn’t wait for this night to be over. All she wanted to do was to go and soak in a hot tub.

  It was her bullet they were digging out of Conroy. If he hadn’t moved the way he had, it would have been lodged in his shoulder, not his chest. Though she was filled with loathing for what he’d done, she’d only meant to disarm him. Cornered, the man had trained his weapon on Elliot. There’d been no time to debate a course of action. It was either shoot or see Elliot go down.

  Lydia felt no remorse for what had happened. This kind of thing went with the territory and she had long ago hardened her heart to it. If there was pity to be felt, it went to the parents of the boy whose life had been lost and to the people who, simply going about their business, had been injured in the blast.

  Lydia sighed. The world seemed to be making less sense every day.

  She found herself in front of the coffee machine again. If she had another cup, she seriously ran the danger of sloshing as she moved. But what else was there to do? There was no reading material around and even if there had been, she wouldn’t be able to keep her mind on it. She was too agitated to concentrate.

  Digging into her pocket, she winced. Damn the shoulder anyway. It felt as if it was on fire. Probably a hell of a bruise there. When she’d shot him, Conroy’s weapon had discharged as he’d fallen to the ground. She’d immediately ducked to keep from getting struck by the stray bullet. As near as she could figure, she must have injured her shoulder when she hit the floor.

  Lydia glanced down at herself. The jacket and pants she had on were both discolored with the prisoner’s blood. Shot, he’d still tried to put up a fight. It had taken Elliot and her to subdue him. For a relatively small man, Conroy was amazingly strong. She supposed hate did that to you.

  She looked accusingly at the operating room doors. Damn it, what was taking so long? Were they rebuilding Conroy from the ground up?

  Lydia stifled a curse. She knew she could have someone from the Bureau stationed here in her place, but she didn’t want to leave until she had a status report on the bomber’s condition. She wanted to know exactly what she was up against. There was no way she was going to lose this one, even for a blink of an eye.

  Her stomach rumbled, reminding her that not even she could live on coffee alone. She tried to recall when her last meal had been. The day had taken on an endless quality.

  Lydia jerked her head around as she heard the operating room doors being pushed open. The sound of her heels echoed down the corridor as she quickly returned to her point of origin.

/>   The physician who had given her such a hard time emerged, untying his mask. He looked tired. That made two of them.

  “Well?” she demanded with no preamble.

  It didn’t surprise Lukas to find the blonde standing here like some kind of sentry. Gorgeous, the woman still bore a strong resemblance to a bull terrier, at least in her attitude. Their earlier exchange had convinced him that she wasn’t someone who would let go easily. Or probably at all, for that matter.

  Lukas took his time in answering her, walking over to the row of seats in the waiting area and sinking down onto the closest one. The woman, he noted, remained standing.

  “Well, is he alive?” she pressed.

  Lukas pulled off his surgical cap and looked at her. “Yes. He’s lucky. The bullet was very close to his heart. Less than a sixteenth of an inch closer and he’d be on a slab in the morgue.”

  Her mouth twisted. Whether the word lucky was appropriate or not was a matter of opinion. “Too bad the boy his bomb blew up wasn’t as lucky.”

  Lukas didn’t feel like being drawn into a debate. Weary, he rose to tower over the woman. It gave him an advantage. He found he preferred it that way. “Look, I don’t want to know what he did. My job is to patch him up as best I can.”

  Her eyes grew into small points of green fire. “How can you not care?” she asked heatedly. “How can you just divorce yourself from the fact that the man you just saved killed a teenage boy? That he might have killed more people had his timing been a little more fine-tuned.”

  The woman was a firebrand. The kind his uncle always gravitated toward. Too bad Uncle Henry wasn’t here to appreciate this, Lukas thought.

  “Because I’m a doctor, not a judge and jury.” The look in his eyes challenged her. He knew all about hasty judgments. “Are you sure you have the right man?”

  She laughed shortly. The tip they had gotten had specifically named John Conroy as the mastermind of the new supremacy group whose goal was to “purify” the country. The explosives they’d found in his house erased any doubts that might have existed. What they hadn’t found, until it was too late, was the man himself.