Lenora Worth - Classified K-9 Unit Christmas

“We do have her surrounded,” Nina said. “Agents twenty-four/seven, guarding her room.”

“I hope that will keep Russo away.”

Thomas didn’t sound so confident, but they were dealing with a trained assassin. Nina couldn’t blame the marshal for being concerned. “Remember, for all he knows she’s dead. We only broadcasted that we were looking for him. Not that he’d tried to kill someone.”

“But that kind of news tends to leak,” Thomas replied. “We might need to move her, and quickly.”

They made it to the hospital without incident and were inside safe and sound in under an hour.

After getting permission from the hospital staff to interrogate Kelly Denton, they went into her room. The guard at the door was a massive sheriff deputy. No one would get past that man.

Nina approached the pale young girl, remembering her there in the moonlight last night. The bullet had just missed her heart and had become lodged in her left shoulder, but the surgery had gone as well as could be expected. Her prognosis was good, barring the killer didn’t come back. Now if they could match that bullet the surgeon had dug out to the gun that shot her, they’d have an idea what kind of weapon the killer was carrying. A stretch, but something to hope for.

“Kelly, do you remember me?” Nina asked, hoping the girl would recognize her.

She moved her head and stared with bleary eyes. “I... I don’t know.”

“I saw you last night with that man...”

The girl’s face turned deadly pale and all the numbers and graphs on the monitor jittered and changed. “He tried to kill me.”

“I know,” Nina said, glancing to where Thomas stood by the closed drapery over the window. “I was jogging and I came upon you.”

“You saved my life.”

“I tried to stop him,” Nina said. “But he shot at me and he did shoot you.” Touching Kelly’s hand, she said, “Can you tell us how you wound up with him, so far from Helena?”

“He...he took me when I was walking to my car,” the girl said, her whispers full of fear. “I’d just left a restaurant. He was waiting with an open van and he had a gun.”

Nina wrote down the name of the place. “And he drove you here to Billings?”

“Yes, he tied me up and put a blindfold on me. I was in the back—a small van.”

“Do you know the color or model?”

“No. He shoved me inside and put the blindfold on me and then tied me up. I couldn’t get to my purse or phone.” She tried to sit up, her eyes wild now. “Where is my phone? I need my phone.”

“We didn’t find your purse or phone,” Nina said, gently lowering her back down. “He probably tossed them.”

Thomas shot Nina a knowing glance. “Can you tell us anything else, Kelly?”

The girl lay still, her fingers clutching the light blanket spread over her. Nina glanced at Thomas. She’d worked with enough traumatized women to know when someone was truly terrified.

“He kept asking about a key,” Kelly said in a weak voice, her gaze darting down and to the left. “I don’t know what he was talking about. I don’t know anything. I shouldn’t have gone back there.”

“Back where?” Thomas asked.

“To Helena. I—I should have stayed away. When can I go home?”

Thomas stepped away from the window. The girl’s vitals were going crazy. “Are you sure you don’t remember something? A detail we could use?” he asked, keeping his gaze on the beeping machines. “Were you in danger before you left Helena?”

Kelly gripped the blankets, clutching them like a lifeline. “No. I can’t talk about this. I just want to go home. When are my parents coming?”

A nurse came in, her expression stern. “Time’s up.”

“Your parents are on their way,” Nina said, wishing she could comfort the girl more and find out what she seemed so afraid of. “You’re safe here. We have a guard on your room.”

“Is he coming back?” Kelly asked, fear in her eyes. “That man? If he does, he’ll kill me! He told me he’d kill me.”

“Not if we can help it,” Thomas said, honesty in each word. “If you remember anything—or decide to tell us the truth—please tell the deputy and he’ll alert us. The more we know, the sooner we can end this and then you’ll be safe.”

The girl didn’t seem so sure. She was frightened, and for good reason. Nina talked to the deputy and felt reassured when he told her one of her team members would be here later with his K-9 partner.

Nina tugged at Thomas’s jacket sleeve when they reached the elevator. “Let’s stay here a while. We can see her door from the waiting room. And...we can talk to her parents after they arrive and they’ve seen her. Maybe they can shed some light on whatever she’s not telling us.”

He nodded. “Okay, but I’m hungry. Let’s go down to the cafeteria.”

“Didn’t you eat one of those pastries from Petrov Bakery? Or maybe even two?”

He gave her a mock frown. “That was breakfast.”

“Yes, only two hours ago.”

“I have to be fed every two hours.”

Nina snorted and shook her head. “Right.” Then she said, “Okay, we’ll get you fed, but then I’m hanging out here. I’m worried about that girl.”

“She’s hiding something, no doubt,” Thomas said, turning serious in that lightning quick way she’d noticed. “She said she should never have gone back to Helena. She knows about the key and she panicked when she realized she didn’t have her phone.”

“And you can read minds?” Nina asked in surprise. But she had to agree with him.

“I can read people,” Thomas replied. “That girl is scared, of course. But it’s more. I think she purposely dropped that bit about the key to give us a hint. She’s terrified and that’s understandable, but she said she didn’t know anything. Which to me means she knows a lot.”

“You have a point,” Nina said, as they hurried through the buffet line. She got a salad and Thomas ordered meat loaf, mashed potatoes with gravy and a giant biscuit. The man knew how to down some serious food. How did he stay in such good shape? “She did seem pretty emphatic about not knowing anything.”

“My gut is burning,” he retorted.

“Maybe that’s just the pastries and the meat loaf,” she said with a grin.

“Ha, ha.” He chewed on a chunk of meat loaf before he answered. “No, this is my gut telling me I’m right.”

“Are you always right?”

“Not always. But about 99 percent of the time.”

She had to laugh. He made her do that. “Tell me about you, Deputy Marshal. So I get from the accent and the way you can go all cowboy that you grew up in Texas.”

He leaned close, his gray eyes twinkling. “Why, yes ma’am, I sure did. Texas through and through. Went to college in Austin, got my degree in criminal justice, worked in law enforcement in several capacities, applied to become a US Marshal and I’ve been one for five years now. Based out of Florida for a while, but I had a hankering to come back West.”

His smile was pro but his eyes went beyond professional. They turned all smoky and flirtatious in a quicksilver way that made her insides shake like the Jell-O the man at the next table was trying to eat.

“You like your job, don’t you?” she asked, to keep the conversation moving. To make his eyes change back to a safe level of gray.

“I do. I mean, chasing bad guys, yeah, what’s not to like?”

Nodding, she laughed at that. “Same here. I love being a K-9 officer for the FBI.”

“It’s dangerous work.”

“You mean for a woman.”

“I mean for anyone.”

Then he did the stern, serious thing again. “What put that chip on your shoulder?”

“Oh, you mean the chip about how hard it is to be a woman in what most consider a man’s profession?”