“Did she hit her head?” asked the EMT.
“No, she didn’t hit her head. I caught her, and set her down, and called nine-one-one. Now you know everything I know, I swear. I have no idea what happened.”
On that note, Leda—who was on a gurney—sat up straight and shrieked again. “Oh my God. What is this? What’s happening? What just happened? Grady?” she asked, catching a glimpse of him. “What are these people doing here? Why am I strapped down on a table?”
“Leda! Yes. Right here.” He darted to her side. “It’s not a table, it’s a gurney. And you’re not strapped down, exactly. You’re secured so you don’t roll off and break your neck.”
“I’m not gonna break my neck,” she said, writhing and testing the straps. She yanked at the one around her waist, swung her legs off the side of the gurney and began to hop off.
The medic barked, “What are you doing? Stay where you are.”
“No, no. I don’t need this. I don’t need any of this,” she protested.
Grady put a hand on her shoulder. “Look, you passed out, okay? I called for help. Let the helpers help.”
She pushed the medic away and jumped down to the ground, grabbing the gurney to steady herself. “I didn’t pass out. Or if I did, it wasn’t a normal passing out. It was a…” She squinted at everyone in the vicinity, then aimed her squint hardest at Grady. “Special passing out. Related to what we were talking about inside.”
He shooed the EMT away. “Give us a minute, would you? She’s okay. She says she’s okay. Believe women, would you?”
The guy shrugged and walked away, probably happy to go help some other person who wouldn’t be such a dick about it. The hotel manager went back inside, looking bored to death with this entire event. From where he was standing, the whole scenario could only lead to more bad press.
When they were gone, Grady turned to her.
“Did you see something else? Anything new that might help?”
For a split second, Leda’s face froze. But her glazed expression of horror passed quickly, sliding into something more like shrewdness. He didn’t know what it meant, and he wasn’t sure he liked it.
“It wasn’t like that,” she said, keeping her voice down. “It had nothing to do with you. Unless I’m wrong. But I think it doesn’t. Except it might. Look, the flash I saw… it wasn’t about your case, okay? Definitely not about this case, or else it’s a bigger mess than I thought.”
Carefully, he said, “None of that made any sense. Do you want to back up and take another run at it?”
“I do not!” she shouted back. She made a clumsy effort to compose herself, patting down her shirt, her pockets, and then shouting to whoever might be listening, “Where the hell is my purse! I had a purse when I passed out, and I want it back!”
Grady looked around, spotted it, and swiped it off the back of the ambulance before they could close the doors and leave. “Here. It’s right here, Jesus. Calm down.”
She snatched the bag from him and tucked it under her arm. “You calm down! No, no. I’m sorry,” she said abruptly. Her eyeliner had smudged so completely that one formerly sleek black wing now zigzagged toward her temple; her hair was a hopeless brown tangle that had halfway left its original ponytail and hung down toward one shoulder. She looked like she’d fallen down an elevator shaft.
“I have to go,” she concluded. “I’m sorry, I’m really sorry. It’s not you; it’s me. I seriously have to go.”
“But what happened?” he begged. “What did you see?”
Then, because it occurred to him that he ought to, he asked, “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine! So fine. The finest I’ve ever been, no, seriously.”
She shoved her hand down into her purse, retrieved her phone, and sprinted for her car. The last thing Grady heard before she shut herself inside and peeled away was, “Niki? Oh my God, Niki, you won’t believe this….”
Grady stood in the parking lot, wearing a messenger bag full of evidence that he was absolutely not supposed to have in his possession. The ambulance and EMTs were gone; they’d left as swiftly as they’d arrived. The hotel manager had skedaddled. Leda had fled.
It was just him—confused and alone and very, very afraid that he’d colossally screwed this up.
He took a deep breath, let it out, and made for his own car.
He should’ve never involved a civilian in the case. It had been a boneheaded move from the start, and now he regretted it more thoroughly than he’d ever regretted anything, at least since his high school Juggalo phase. Christ, what was he going to do now? He needed to get the evidence back to the locker without anyone knowing that it’d ever left. There was now a 911 recording of him sounding absolutely bananas, begging for help with a woman down. He hadn’t identified himself, had he? He couldn’t remember. He didn’t think so. It had happened so fast.
The key fob beeped, and Grady opened the door wide enough to throw his bag onto the passenger seat. He climbed inside behind it and sat behind the wheel. “This was a bad idea,” he said to his own reflection in the rearview mirror. “The worst idea. Literally the worst. In the world.”
It hadn’t even seemed like a good idea at the time, when he’d first gotten a bug up his ass to look up the travel agent. It had always been a terrible idea, which was why he hadn’t told a single soul about it, except for his daughter.
He shoved the key into the ignition.
According to the clock on the dashboard, he still had a couple of hours before Molly got home from work, but Cairo would be happy to see him—and that was the number one perk of having a dog, wasn’t it? No matter how bad your day, how terrible your choices, how ridiculous your risks, a dog would never tell you how stupid you were.
“Only because they don’t speak English,” Grady grumbled to himself.
Indeed, Cairo understood refreshingly little English, and he was predictably face-licking happy to see Grady home at the unusual hour. The pooch had a doggy door so he could come or go from the house to the backyard when no one was home. If the nanny cam Grady had installed a year ago could be believed, the dog kept close to home, listened for his people’s car to pull into the driveway, and mostly snoozed in obscene crotch-upward positions all day.
Grady dropped his bag on the coffee table, paid a bit more attention to the dog, and turned on the TV with a flick of the remote’s power button. Then he sank as far into the couch as he was physically able.
It wasn’t far enough. It didn’t swallow him whole.
Cairo hopped up onto the cushion beside him, having long ignored the “no dogs on the furniture” rule that no one tried to enforce anymore. He flopped his head on top of Grady’s thigh and gave him an expression so pathetically optimistic that Grady couldn’t help but scratch his ears and tell him that yes, of course everything was all right.
“It’s all right for you, at least. You didn’t risk your job and your sanity to sneak a psychic into a crime scene.”
The dog didn’t argue. He rolled over on his back and flashed his no-longer-existent balls at the ceiling.
Grady reached over Cairo’s fuzzy, warm head and retrieved the bag with all its illicit contents—dragging it onto the couch, beside the leg that wasn’t occupied by a dog’s sprawl. The Gilman case had been driving him batty ever since it’d been more or less abandoned by the PD almost a year before. Nothing about it had ever made sense.