Patricia Potter - Cassidy and the Princess

“He wouldn’t have come in if he’d seen someone,” she said. Then her brows crinkled in a frown. “How did you get here so fast?”

“I was already on the way. I had a feeling…”

Their gazes met. Cassidy felt as if he had been hit by a sledgehammer.

The security guard looked at him curiously.

He realized he must be gaping. He pulled out his badge. “Detective MacKay with the Atlanta P.D.,” he said. “Has anything been touched or moved?”

The nurse hovering nearby shook her head. “Nothing except the telephone. I used it to call Security. He…left a needle.” She motioned to the corner of the room where the needle lay. Cassidy could tell it was still filled with some substance. He looked around. The nurse handed him a glove before he could ask for it.

“The…he had on gloves like those,” Marise Merrick said in an unsteady voice.

Cassidy pulled on the glove and leaned down and gingerly picked up the needle. He could guess what was in it. Potassium, probably. The right dosage could stop the heart almost immediately. The assailant had taken a chance. A big one. He must be afraid that she knew far more than she did.

“Did you see any more of him than you did before?”

She shook her head. “The room was dark. He wore a surgeon’s mask.”

“Perhaps some of the hospital staff did,” he said. But he wasn’t hopeful. The attacker obviously timed his attack during the change of shifts. Anyone could have slipped by the nurses’ station. Again, he blamed himself for not anticipating this.

And then there was the nagging conviction that had firmed in his mind. The killer obviously thought Marise Merrick was a danger to him. That meant she would continue to be in great danger.

“Would you like your fiancé here?” he asked, more to stop his own troubling feelings than because he wanted the man around.

“He’s not my fiancé,” she said quietly.

Cassidy felt the oddest sense of relief. “He said…”

“He asked me. I didn’t give him an answer. That’s why I wandered outside last night. I needed some distance.”

She was answering the question she hadn’t been able to answer before, not with Paul Richards in the room. Her blue eyes were late-evening blue, a rich dark color he’d never seen before. Her long hair had been plaited into a braid that fell across her shoulder.

He was aware of an attraction so strong he could barely restrain himself from reaching out to her. More puzzling was the sense that he knew her. That they had met previously, though he knew they had not. The air between them was thick yet compelling, as if he was being pulled toward her by some invisible force.

He struggled against it. “How…”

“I fell on the floor. I’m used to falling,” she said with that quirky little smile that had accompanied her admission yesterday that she’d kicked her attacker in a vulnerable place.

“Like you have strong legs,” he said.

“Yes,” she said simply.

“I want you to teach self-defense classes to some people I know,” he said. Then he realized he was suppositioning that she would be here in Atlanta longer than a day or so. And he could also see in his mind the implausibility of the princess teaching hookers how to disable a killer.

“You’re smiling, Detective,” she said as if astounded at that possibility.

Well, he was. He couldn’t remember smiling since his wife had left him two years ago.

Snap out of it, Cassidy. She’s a victim, nothing more. And not only was she a victim, but she was one he’d failed to protect.

“I’m just impressed with your abilities, Miss Merrick.”

“Marise,” she corrected him.

He’d seen the name written down. It sounded like poetry on her lips. But that was none of his affair. He tried, instead, to concentrate on the business at hand.

“Was there anything, anything at all that struck you about the…attacker?”

“His odor,” she said. “I woke and smelled it.”

He remembered her mentioning that before. “You said it was almost sweet.”

Her nose twitched slightly as if she was trying to remember.

“Cologne?” he asked.

“If it was, it was very bad cologne,” she said. “It was more like…medicinal.”

“Cloying?”

“Sharper than that.”

He had been impressed by her before, and now that image was reenforced. She was reacting analytically, objectively weighing what must have been a terrifying experience.

“Any other impressions?”

“No,” she said. “The room was too dark.”

He was already cataloging facts in his mind. Hospital gloves. Location. Until her attack, no one realized that the proximity of the hospital was important. The area was not one of the city’s best, and the hospital had not been the center of the attacks, more on the edge of a perimeter of approximately two miles. Now it assumed new significance. The attacker knew where to find her and that the change of shifts would be the best time to enter unnoticed. And now the surgical mask and medicinal smell.

She hadn’t described the odor that way before. He’d been thinking that the attacker might be a hustler, a pimp, who got off on terrifying and killing women. He and Manny had been operating on that theory, especially since the deaths had involved prostitutes. The guy might even have been trying to start a protection racket among the working girls.

But Marise’s information introduced an entirely new possibility. Someone outside the world of prostitution. Someone involved in medicine. And now, he suspected, their perp would go into hiding for a while.

Unless he had another chance at Marise Merrick.

“What are you thinking, Detective?” Her soft voice broke through his stream of consciousness.

“I’m thinking that I want you to leave this hospital,” he said.

“What about the police artist?”

“What did you see that night?”

“A blur. An impression of heaviness. Bulk. Longish hair.”

“You know how a police artist works?”

“I do watch television occasionally.”

“He’ll flash part of faces—eyes, foreheads, chins, et cetera. If anything looks familiar, he’ll start constructing a face.”

“I didn’t see enough for that.”

Cassidy didn’t say anything for a moment, then wondered out loud. “But obviously he doesn’t know that.”

“Which is why…he returned tonight,” she finished.

“Yes.”

“You believe he might try again.” It was a statement, not a question. Her eyes were even bluer, if that were possible. Deeper. And inaccessible.

“It’s possible,” he said.

“And if I leave the city?”

“Not as likely, but possible.”

“What can I do?”

Her eyes were impossibly large. Fear was there. But so was reason. Again, he wondered about his first impression. Why had she seemed so compliant to those around her when now there didn’t seem a hesitant bone in her body. Two different women. Would it be different when her mother and partner returned? He was oddly pleased that she hadn’t asked him—or apparently anyone on the hospital staff—to call them.

He knew what she could do. Did he have the right to propose it? What if something happened to her?

“What is it?” she asked.

She also could read his mind. No one else had ever been able to do that. Not his former wife. Not Manny. It was uncanny.

“Detective?” she prompted again. She’d awakened to someone trying to kill her, had dived off the bed and kept her head—and she still looked like a princess. That image, though, was misleading. If she was like a princess, she was one laced with iron.

But she would have to be tough to get to where she was. He knew how much training it must have taken. How much discipline.