LITMIR.BIZ

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this line?” Sitting on the edge of his king-size bed, Wells gripped the handset so hard the plastic creaked in protest. “Beatrice might’ve answered.”

      In reality, it would’ve taken far more than a ringing phone to disturb his wife. She’d been using tranquilizers heavily ever since the previous month, when their daughter Camille had fallen from the rocky cliffs into the sea during her wedding—her wedding, for God’s sake.

      Her body hadn’t been recovered yet, and both the mayor and his wife were stuck in a state of seesawing hope: they hoped that her body would wash up so they could bury her properly, while praying she didn’t, because as long as her body hadn’t been found they could pretend she might still be alive.

      Wells envied Beatrice the oblivion she’d found in the tranqs, but he didn’t have the luxury of succumbing to grief because he had a town to run. Despite his best efforts, the whispers about the Captain’s Curse had been growing louder over the past few months, even before the outbreak.

      And now this.

      “The doctors won’t be an issue,” he assured the man on the other end of the phone, who he knew only as a string of numbers from a Swiss bank account that made regular deposits into his own. “They won’t be looking anywhere near your chemical purchases. You have my word on it.”

      The mayor was sweating lightly, though.

      “Make sure they don’t.” The line went dead.

      Wells sat for a minute, holding the handset to his ear, staring out the window into the black, rainy night. Then he stood and went to the wall safe where he kept an unregistered gun locked and loaded. He pulled out the weapon, checked the safety and tucked the firearm into the inner pocket of his briefcase.

      Just in case.

      Chapter Three

      By midmorning, Luke’s team and the volunteers had not only managed to clean and sanitize the kitchen and thirty small residential rooms in the west wing of the monastery, they’d also moved the patients from the clinic and police station into their new quarters.

      The three Violents—Aztec Wheeler, boat mechanic Doug Allen and Jake Welstrom, a father of four whose symptoms had been identified during one of the house-to-house sweeps, thankfully before he hurt his family or himself—were locked in stone-walled rooms with barred windows, located at the back of the west wing.

      The eight other patients—including Rox’s clinic assistants, Jeff and Wendy Durby, as well as all four members of the Prentiss family plus librarian Cheryl Proctor and gas station attendant Henry Wylde—were housed in the middle of the west wing, in well-ventilated rooms under lighter precautions.

      The doctors had staked out rooms close to the entryway, giving them equal access to the patient rooms and the kitchen, which would serve as both mess and lab. There, the members of the CDC team were working on processing the first set of blood and urine samples for analysis.

      The outbreak response was up and running, and Rox knew she should be incredibly grateful. Instead, as she stood in the middle of the entryway watching the organized chaos that would hopefully put her town on the road to recovery, she felt a pang of resentment.

      She’d barely been keeping ahead of the symptomatic treatments on her own, never mind being able to investigate the sickness or its cause, but there was a part of her that didn’t want the others involved. She kept feeling as though she should’ve been able to handle this by herself, in her own clinic.

      “Bug has the first set of blood samples spinning down,” Luke said, appearing in the archway leading to the kitchen wing. “We should have some preliminary results in fifteen minutes or so, and that’ll give us a starting point for figuring this thing out.”

      He’d changed out of the dust-smeared clothes he’d been wearing the last time she’d seen him, into jeans and one of the long-sleeved button-down shirts they’d both favored on assignment. Made of a high-tech nylon composite, the garments looked like cotton, but wicked away sweat and heat, and were nearly indestructible.

      The sight of the shirt—and the fact that she’d long ago donated hers to Goodwill because she would never need them again—sent a little jab beneath Rox’s heart.

      Luke made a wide gesture to encompass the monastery, which was slightly less creepy in the light of day. “What do you think?”

      “I think you made good on your promise to get this done by morning,” she said, and her thoughts of a moment before made her voice sharper than she’d intended, lending accusation to the words.

      “As opposed to other promises I didn’t make good on, you mean?” Boots ringing on the stone floor, he moved to face her, expression resigned and maybe a bit impatient. “Go ahead. Ask me why I left you the way I did.”

      In other words, he was willing to talk about it if she wanted to fight. He might even be willing to say he was sorry for the way he’d left, though not for the actual act of leaving. But she could tell from his expression that it was going to be the same sort of circular argument they’d excelled at during the last few weeks before she got sick, the ones that never ended with a winner or a loser, just the incompatibility of two people who had great sex but wanted different things out of life.

      She’d been looking to slow down and scale back to something more intimate at a time when his career had been poised to take off. Part of her had known the end was coming for them even before he’d left, but she had never expected—and could never forgive—how he’d abandoned her in a field hospital, sick and alone.

      “I don’t need to ask,” she said calmly. “You left because the CDC put out an emergency call. Fine, I get that. But if you’ve got a guilty conscience because you weren’t man enough to tell me goodbye to my face, you’re just going to have to live with it. You earned it.”

      They locked eyes for a long moment. Finally, he nodded. “Fair enough.”

      “Fair enough,” she echoed. In a deliberate effort to shift the subject back to where it belonged she said, “Have you had a chance to check out my patient notes?”

      He nodded, both to her question and, she suspected, to her change of topic. “They’re pretty good, given the circumstances.”

      She didn’t bother to defend her scribblings because she figured “pretty good” was an accurate assessment. By the time she’d figured out she had a major problem on her hands, the patients had been coming in so quickly and their symptoms had been so severe that she’d been hard-pressed to do more than scrawl a few details on each chart.

      “I was thinking I’d talk to the families and get a better idea of what the patients have been exposed to lately,” she said. “We still haven’t seen any evidence that it’s transmitting person-to-person so I’m betting on a toxin.”

      “Of course it’s a toxin,” he said, as if that should’ve been obvious. But his eyes lit with the same adventurer’s interest she’d seen in Thom’s expression the night before, the same kind she used to live for. “Question is, which one, and where is it coming from?”

      When she felt that same adventurer’s excitement stir sluggishly in her blood, she shoved it aside, telling herself that the mystery had mattered in a different lifetime, to a different woman. Not now, and not to the person she’d worked hard to become.

      “I’ll ask around town, get a victim profile and get back to you.” She turned away, suddenly needing to get out of there, to get away from him and his teammates.

      “Hey, Roxie?” he said, calling her back.

      She turned, hoping he couldn’t read her emotions the way he once had. “Yeah?”

      “You still have the twenty-two?”

      She patted the pocket of her light windbreaker. “Right here. I hate to admit it, but I feel safer carrying it, especially after what happened last night with Aztec.”

      “Good. You’ve got my number, right?”

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