“Good,” her father said. “I’ve got your room all ready. I’m already on my way to pick you up.”
That threw Lauryn for a loop. “Wait, what? You’re coming here?”
“My daughter was attacked,” Maxwell said angrily. “Of course I’m coming to get her. At times like this, you need to be at home with your family.”
“But I’ve got my own place,” she said. “All my stuff is there. I don’t even have clothes—”
But it was too late. Maxwell had clearly already made up his mind, and nothing short of Jesus himself was going to make him change it. “Home is where your family is,” he said, his preacher’s voice booming through the phone’s tinny speaker. “I’ve already left a note for your brother. I’ll be there in five minutes. Be waiting out front.”
He hung up immediately after that, cutting off the call before Lauryn could get a word in, and she jerked her phone down with a frustrated groan. “‘Be waiting out front,’” she mimicked, seething. “I’m a doctor, dammit! Not a high schooler who needs to be picked up from band practice.”
Will flashed her a sympathetic smile. “So I take it you won’t need me to give you a ride?”
“Not unless we can leave right now and you’re willing to put the sirens on,” Lauryn said, only half-jokingly. If she’d thought a cop car or sirens would have actually stopped her father, she would have jumped right in and told Will to floor it. “Looks like I’m spending what’s left of the night at my dad’s house,” she said bitterly. “Oh well, at least I’ll get to see my brother. I haven’t seen Robbie since he was in high school.”
For some reason, that made Will’s smile turn sour. “Don’t get your hopes up,” he muttered, which struck Lauryn as a weird thing to say. When she tried to ask him about it, though, Will had already turned away. “Thanks for your help tonight, Lauryn,” he said without looking back. “Take care.”
“You, too,” she said, trying not to feel like she’d just been stood up again. Thankfully, the insurance section of her remaining discharge paperwork was complicated enough to take her mind off it.
Fifteen minutes later, officially discharged, Lauryn walked out of the administration office, through the darkened main lobby, and out into the covered hospital pull-through where her father’s pristinely maintained 1982 Buick LeSabre was waiting to pick her up, exactly as promised.
“You’re late,” Maxwell said when she opened the door.
Exhausted, emotionally drained, and royally pissed off, Lauryn didn’t even dignify that with a reply. “Let’s just go,” she muttered, collapsing into the couch-soft seat. “It’s been a hell of a day.”
Maxwell scowled at her language, but must not have been in the mood for a fight, either, because he just pulled out, coasting under the hospital’s glaring lights toward the empty street.
And behind them, unseen, a solitary man on a motorcycle with what appeared to be a sword strapped to the side pulled out and began to follow.
3
Someone to Devour
Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.
The roads were empty tonight. A mercy, because Will was already late.
He made it to the Chicago PD’s main office in record time, parking his unmarked car in the vice department’s section of the icy, sprawling lot. He slammed his door as he got out, stomping through the freezing night as he cursed himself for a damn fool.
He shouldn’t have gone to the hospital.
It had made sense at the time. The new group taking over the Chicago drug scene was his case, and since the green stuff had been popping up on his informants, that made Lauryn his witness. His territory. And like most detectives, Will was possessive of his territory. This time, though, he wished like hell that he’d let someone else take the job, because seeing Lauryn again had hurt a lot more than he’d expected.
“Idiot,” he muttered as he tapped his ID against the electronic pad that opened the bulletproof door. “Stupid—”
His self-recriminations were cut off when one of the guys from Homicide came sprinting through the door, nearly bowling Will over in the process. That was pretty normal for this time of night—the wee hours of the morning were prime time for police work—and the fact that he hadn’t even seen it coming through the glass door was yet more proof of what a distracted moron he’d become, mooning over his ex like a lovesick high schooler.
The only thing he could say in his defense was that she’d looked exactly like he remembered—a tall, lovely woman with a knowing smile, warm brown eyes, and a steel backbone. Even lying in a hospital bed listening to him describe the terrifying drug she might have been exposed to, she hadn’t looked scared or beaten. Exactly the opposite. She’d been radiant with the same alluring mix of energy, intelligence, and competence that had drawn him in from the very beginning. Still drew him in like a moth to flame… which was exactly the problem, because he’d burned that bridge right down to the ground. There was no going back for a man who’d already wasted his second and third chances. Not with a girl as smart as Lauryn. He knew that perfectly well, and yet he’d still rushed straight in like an idiot the moment he had an excuse to talk to her.
Moron.
The only good thing he could say about this mess was that at least Lauryn had given him a lead. That was more than he could say about the rest of his witnesses, so Will gave his regrets the boot and got back to business, jogging up the stairs to his desk in the vice department to type up his report.
Personal issues aside, it had been a good interview. Before her, he’d had five dead druggies, three murdered witnesses, a dead cop, some unidentifiable green glop… and nothing to show for any of it. This Lenny stuff, though, this was useful. The old vet might not be talking sense yet, but at least he was alive. Even better, the green stuff seemed to be the only drug in his system. If he snapped out of it, he might be able to tell Will who’d sold it to him, which would be a huge breakthrough. Until then, Lauryn was the closest thing he had to a reliable witness, and her comments on the sulfur angle were invaluable. There was also her report of a second witness, the man with the sword…
That might not be as valuable.
He knew Lauryn wasn’t a liar, but even though her blood work had come back clean, the second half of story was just too weird to convince Will she hadn’t hallucinated her savior. But a good detective records everything, no matter how ridiculous, and so he dutifully added the swordsman to his report, typing it up exactly as Lauryn had told it to him, along with his own observations about her seemingly clear state of mind.
When he’d recorded absolutely everything he could think of, including the not-admissible-in-court glimpse he’d stolen of Lauryn’s lab report over her shoulder, Will saved the document to the department’s case file and grabbed his phone to call the lab.
“This is Tannenbaum from Vice,” he said the moment the line picked up. “I need a list of street drugs that contain or could be mixed with sulfur.”
“Sulfur?” the man asked, clearly puzzled.
“That’s right,” Will said firmly. “It’s for the new drug case.”
That should have been all he needed to say. With eight casualties and a dead cop in less than twenty-four hours, Will’s case was at the top of the department’s list. But instead of jumping to get Will the information he’d asked for like he should have, the man on the phone just sighed.