David Morrell: The Protector

Cavanaugh sat in a corner of a blindingly bright room in Intensive Care. Across from him, Jamie lay unconscious, her face pale, EKG electrodes attached to her chest, a hospital gown and a sheet covering her, an IV tube leading into her left arm, a respirator tube going down her throat. Behind her, pulse, blood pressure, and heart monitors flashed and beeped.

One of her surgeons, a slender Hispanic, turned from examining her. "She's remarkably strong."

"Yes," Cavanaugh said.

"I'll know more in twelve hours, but her vitals are encouraging. We've got reason to be optimistic."

Staring at Jamie, Cavanaugh nodded.

"She'll have you to thank," the surgeon said. "She probably would have died before she got to the hospital if you hadn't stopped the bleeding with duct tape."

"No," Cavanaugh said. "She doesn't have anything to thank me for at all."

The doctor looked curious.

"If I'd listened to her," Cavanaugh said, "she never would have gotten shot."

The heart monitor beeped.

"Can I stay in here?" Cavanaugh asked.

"Normally, we don't allow…"

Cavanaugh looked at him.

"Yes," the surgeon told him.

"The lights," Cavanaugh said, squinting from their brightness. "Can you put something over her eyelids?"

"As soon as we're finished in here, we'll dim the room."

"What about for now?"

"I'll have a nurse bring a washcloth."

"Thank you."

Thirty seconds later, Cavanaugh was alone with her.

The respirator hissed, wheezed, and thumped, Jamie's chest going up and down.

"I'm sorry," Cavanaugh told her.

His muscles ached. His eyes felt as if sand scratched them. Closing his lids to shield his eyes from the stark overhead lights, he leaned back in the plastic chair and managed a fitful sleep, even when nurses came in to check Jamie and replace her IV **ch**10

Around two in the afternoon, Cavanaugh drove a borrowed unmarked police car along Highway 1 and stopped at the side of the road just before the Carmel Highlands turnoff that would eventually lead to Prescott's street. He got out of the car and stayed close to the trees at the side of the road as he walked toward the turnoff. The afternoon was pleasant, with a gorgeous sky, but Cavanaugh paid attention only to the high branches on the trees just in from the turnoff. He approached them slowly from an oblique angle, craning his neck, taking off his sunglasses to get a better look at the trees.

When he didn't see what he wanted, he raised binoculars and scanned the branches. Continuing to remain carefully to the side, he paid particular attention to where the branches met the trunks. After ten minutes, a high Monterey pine-on the left, about forty feet in from the turnoff-became the sole object of his concentration. He focused the binoculars on a gap in the branches and nodded.

Near the entrance to Prescott's street, Cavanaugh stopped again, got out of the car, and stayed well to the side as he approached the turnoff. Now that his eyes were practiced, he took only five minutes to find the miniature TV camera, its lens about the size of a flashlight's, attached by a metal strap to the crook of a branch in a Monterey pine about thirty feet in from the entrance. The strap was painted the brown of the trunk. The camera was the same type that Prescott had said he'd hidden in the parking garage to watch for anybody who might be following him. "The Internet's crammed with advertising for them," he'd said. "Check up on your baby-sitter. See your neighbor's teenaged daughter sunbathing."

Or watch the police stake out your house and try to catch you by surprise, Cavanaugh thought. Last night, Prescott saw every move we made from when we drove into the Highlands to when Rutherford set up the roadblock here to when the SWAT team snuck up on the house. Cavanaugh recalled how the lights in Prescott's house had gone off a few seconds after the SWAT team had started to approach it. Sure, he thought. Prescott hoped that a brightly lit house would be a deterrent and buy him some time, but when he saw the police move toward it, he proceeded to stage two, shut the lights off, set the motion detectors for the strobes and the siren, then filled the house with the hormone.

Staying out of the camera's sight, Cavanaugh returned to the car. When he drove onto Prescott's street, he peered toward the end of the block and for the first time got a clear look at Prescott's house, which was low, modernistic in design, and made from flat sections of stone set on top of one another. Flanked by shrubs, a curved driveway led up to the front entrance. The door to the double-car garage was open. Yellow tape with police crime scene do not cross on it went from tree to tree, encircling the property. Other things caught Cavanaugh's interest. On the right, a large truck had a platform raised next to the utility pole, two workmen replacing the electrical transformer Cavanaugh had shot the night before. In the driveway, a bearded man in coveralls was removing sheets of plywood from a pickup truck. Half of the broken windows in front of the house had already been covered with the wood. To the left, parked along the street, pointing in Cavanaugh's direction, were two police cars and an unmarked car that Cavanaugh recognized as the dark sedan belonging to Rutherford and some of his fellow agents.

Cavanaugh made a U-turn in front of the house, doing it slowly, taking the opportunity to study the corners under the house's eaves without seeming to. Small boxes with peepholes might have been birdhouses, or they might have been receptacles for miniature TV cameras hidden under the eaves.

After parking in front of the police cars and walking toward the house, he saw Rutherford come out and study him wearily.

"Is your wife's condition any better?" Although Rutherford had changed his suit and shaved, he looked haggard. The lingering bruises on his face made his black skin seem pale.

"She's still unconscious." Cavanaugh made himself continue. "But the surgeon says her life signs are better than he expected. We're more hopeful."

"Good." Rutherford sounded genuinely relieved, despite the betrayed tone in what he said next. "Incidentally, I just found out her name's Jamie, not Jennifer."

"I'm sorry."

"Of course."

"I figured if I kept her real name a secret, in the long run she wouldn't be involved," Cavanaugh said.

"But she got involved anyway, didn't she?"

"Yes," Cavanaugh said, "she got involved."

"Why are you here?"

"There's nothing I can do at the hospital. The waiting…" Unable to finish the sentence, Cavanaugh looked around. "I hoped you could use my help."

"I don't see how. Prescott's long gone. Either he had a vehicle hidden in the area or he managed to steal one," Rutherford said. "We've got an alert out to every community north and south of here. Highway Patrol. Airports. Marinas. Train depots. Bus stations. Name it. We've staked out the car he left at the scenic lookout in Pacific Grove when he made contact with you. We're also watching the van he told you he kept in the parking garage where he stored the Porsche."

As the repairman nailed a plywood sheet to another broken window, Cavanaugh nodded toward the open front door. "Is the lab crew finished?"

"They didn't find anything useful. We confiscated Prescott's computer and all the documents he had. Maybe they'll point us in his direction."

Entering, Cavanaugh heard voices from various rooms to the right and left, FBI agents and detectives presumably making a final inspection of the house. In daylight, the building's sprawl was dramatic. Its expensive modernistic furniture matched its architecture, although bullet holes had destroyed most of the chairs, sofas, tables, and lamps. The walls and framed black-and-white photographs of the Carmel region had been similarly destroyed. Broken glass lay everywhere. Through the shattered rear windows, an ocean breeze dispelled any lingering odor from the bloodstains amid the chalk outlines on the hardwood floor.