“What’s good about it?” she muttered.
“Well, there’s food for you,” he said. “Not that it’s much, but it’ll keep you alive. He dropped a bowl of what looked like rice and maybe vegetables.
“How much longer are you keeping me?”
“Well, I’ve got to take some pictures to verify that it’s you,” he said. “And, once that’s been verified, I’ll set up a meeting with the third party.”
“And then they’ll be responsible for handing me over to the doctor?”
“Yep, that’s how it works,” he said.
“But doesn’t that mean you’ll lose a portion of your money to the third party?”
“Sure I will,” he said. “But you’ve got to figure that somebody out there has to be trusted. Otherwise you’ll never make the deal happen.”
“So they get to make money off the fact that you did all the work,” she pressed.
He shrugged and said, “Yeah, it sucks, doesn’t it?”
“Big-time,” she said, “but you don’t care, so whatever.”
“Well, I do care,” he said, “but it’s not like I can do anything about it.”
She just nodded and didn’t say anything, but she was hoping he would pick up on what she was trying to do, which was put some doubt in his mind about making the deal happen this way. It was one thing to deal with him, but another thing entirely to deal with a third party whose only interest was an exchange. They would get money off the top if the deal went through, and they would lose money if it didn’t. That didn’t sound like a deal she wanted to be part of at all, but there was only so much she could do.
He pointed to the food. “If you don’t want that, I’ll take it away.”
She immediately reached out from under the blanket for the bowl and snatched it up.
He laughed and said, “I should keep somebody as a pet,” he said. “You’re quite entertaining.”
And, with that, he turned walked away, going back up the stairs again. She listened when he snapped the door shut, but he didn’t lock it or put the weight back against it again. She would count that as a success. If she could keep him slightly off center and not thinking she was any kind of a threat, then maybe she’d get a chance to escape.
If nothing else, she might get up top and dive off. They had to be close enough to something to give her a shot at escaping. She was a hell of a swimmer but maybe not for the open ocean. Still, she was pretty damn sure she’d rather drown than become another man’s pet. And, in this case, she’d was on the way to becoming another man’s purchase, which sounded just as bad and was probably worse.
The doctor had no interest in keeping her alive; he probably just wanted to find out what she had and who she had told. And, if she didn’t give him the answers, he would just kill her. Why would he worry about niceties like trying to keep her alive? If she didn’t have anything of value, she’d just become someone to cause him more trouble. She was surprised he was even doing this much, but considering she did have a thumb drive, maybe it wasn’t so surprising after all.
Now she had to wonder if she could contact anyone to give that flash drive to who would see justice was done after she was long gone. Surely somebody out there gave a damn. If not for her, how about patients Leo had already killed, yet nobody knew about? And, if she couldn’t get that flash drive to somebody who could do something with it, nobody would ever know. And that she couldn’t allow to happen.
*
“Do we have an aerial view yet?” Bullard asked anybody, as Ryland expertly handled the speedboat on the water, even at full throttle.
“Kano is in the air,” Fallon said, studying his phone. “He’s in a small float plane, searching the area.”
“Good,” Bullard said, with a note of satisfaction. “That’s exactly what we want.”
“There’s also been mention of a third party involved,” Dave said, studying some information that just came in on his phone.
“Look at us,” Bullard said. “All we’re doing is digital now.”
“It’s the world we live in,” Fallon said. “We would knock on doors if we had any doors to knock on. But, right now, it’s all about what’s on the dark web, who’s buying and who’s selling.”
“And is somebody buying her or me?”
“Well, we already know there’s a price on your head,” Fallon said. “There’s still a price on all of us actually.”
“Which seriously sucks,” Bullard said, “because, by having me around, we’re getting too many of us in one place, so they can take us all out again.”
“Which is what they tried last time,” Fallon said, and he looked up to where Ryland was piloting the boat. “But we don’t kill so easy.”
“No, but we took a hell of a hard beating,” he muttered, “and we’re damn lucky we all came out of these past few months alive.” Shifting his huge body on the bench, they knew better than to ask if he was okay, since he would glare and bite their heads off anyway.
“There is talk about the doctor having recently come under questioning for another death,” Dave said, just as his phone rang. “Ice, is that you?”
“It is,” she said, “but the connection is really horrible.”
“We’re at sea, following a boat we’re hoping Leia’s being held in. I’m putting you on Speaker, so Bullard can hear.”
“Good,” she said. “Let me fill you in on a little bit that my father managed to find out. So, this doctor,” she said, “we’ll call him Dr. Smitten, has recently had another high-profile death. One of the surgical nurses suggested that he was at fault and could have saved the patient. She has since been sacked and is screaming.”
“Of course she is,” he said. “Anything to do with Leia?”
“It was pretty hard to get anybody to talk apparently. Even Dad’s friend was not very willing to open up about it. He said it was a raw deal, and she was basically a scapegoat. He said he wouldn’t be at all surprised if the surgeon had indeed killed the guy and had blamed her.”
“But nobody looked into it?” Dave asked.
“No. There wasn’t a whole lot they could do,” she said. “Besides, the patient was dead, and the family had been big donors. They were looking for a fast answer and weren’t too concerned about whether it was the right one or not.”
“Was the death convenient for anybody?” Bullard asked. There was a slight pause while Ice understood the potential implications.
“You know what? I think we’ll take a closer look at that,” she said, “because another endowment was given to the hospital by the family afterward, which some people thought was a little odd. They took it as a goodwill gesture, understanding that they had worked hard to remove the guilty party, namely Leia in this instance, so their trust had been reconfirmed.”
“Or the doctor took out the patient so the living heirs could get whatever money they were looking for, and it was all cleaned up nice and tidy without any nasty media coverage,” Bullard said.