“Yes.” He lied to himself as much as Gotthard with that one.
“Trusting the wrong person right now could put you so far outside our reach we wouldn’t be able to help you, or it might force Joe to… it could get you killed.”
“Just doing my job,” Hunter said. Admit nothing.
Gotthard chuckled wryly. “Right. For the record, you don’t look any more like a doctor than Mako does, but he has the MD to go with the white coat.”
Busted. “Guess I should have been surprised at not seeing familiar faces today.” As in BAD agents around the medical center.
“Joe wants a good reason not to snatch her from you.”
“She’s the only way into the Kore records,” Hunter whispered. He had no intention of putting Abbie in the middle of all this, but he’d just given Joe a valid reason to stay out of Hunter’s way until he got the data they needed.
“I should have given you more credit,” Gotthard said, indicating he now thought Hunter was using Abbie.
Of course the people who had known him the longest believed he would put a woman at risk to find this killer and get the data. They thought he’d cut Eliot’s climbing rope.
He glanced at Abbie, who must have felt his eyes. She smiled at him and his heart swelled. She hadn’t told him everything. Was there any way the killer was manipulating her?
Gotthard continued. “We need every bit of intel we can get our hands on before Saturday. Joe needs your skills, but this operation requires everyone working like a team.”
“I’m doing my part getting inside Kore.”
“Keeping Blanton away from us isn’t team thinking. Careful who you stake your life—and national security—on. Women have exploited men for centuries. Arrogance is our biggest weakness. Well, that and our cocks.”
Hunter had never allowed a woman to fool him on an operation. Was Abbie that good? Had he been so sure of his skill at reading people he’d let her convince him she needed protecting and that she’d wanted him last night as much as he wanted her?
Still wanted her. Wrong brain talking again.
Gotthard had a point and Eliot would have agreed, based on the evidence presented, then told Hunter to flip it around and use cold objectivity. Had getting involved with Abbie caused him to overlook a potential threat?
“Don’t make a mistake,” Gotthard emphasized. “You’ll only get one.”
“I figured as much.” Hunter ended the call, but he couldn’t ignore a new question Gotthard’s call had raised. The JC killer had taken a team up the mountain to Hunter’s cabin. Had the killer placed a tracking device on Abbie? She was wearing all new clothes by the time she reached the cabin. Except for her underwear—and Hunter could personally attest to the fact that nothing was hidden on either of those slim pieces of material—which she’d left at the cabin.
When he’d heard her talking in her apartment before the confrontation with the intruder, he’d thought she’d been on the phone with someone at first or just talking to herself. Back when they first met, she’d told him how she talked to her plants but they still die on her. He tried to take a step back now and review everything that had happed with unbiased eyes. Play the devil’s advocate.
Abbie had been surprised when she found the transmitter Hunter stuck on her dress before she entered her apartment building, but what if she’d actually found it while talking to the JC killer and switched gears to put on a show by acting terrified? If so, she would have had the tracking device on her at the point Hunter had carried her out of the apartment. Where would she have hidden a transmitter…
Son of a bitch. He hadn’t done a cavity search, but he’d had no reason to do so and a woman had the perfect place to slide a transmitter the size of a small tube up inside her.
His gut argued none of that fit Abbie, that she couldn’t be an operative, but as Gotthard had pointed out Hunter was putting a lot of lives on the line based solely on what she’d told him.
He worked with some of the best female agents on the planet. But what about their meeting six years ago? No, that had been entirely by accident because he’d completed a mission so close to where she lived.
His forte was making logical decisions on a second’s notice and executing with brutal efficiency. No hesitation.
In his line of work, hesitation got people killed.
If Abbie was innocent she should have straight answers.
If not? He’d depend on his training to guide his decisions at that point and not allow some undefined emotion that was turning his gut inside out to influence him.
He looked over at her. “We need to talk.”
Abbie barely heard Hunter over the rumble of the ambulance. She stopped worrying about her mother and started worrying about his lifeless tone. What had his phone call been about? She sat up. “Okay.”
His face gave away nothing, but she could feel the vast space opening up between them. “You told me a friend got you into the Wentworth event as a favor. Who?”
She glanced away, then realized how telling that would be and met his gaze. “Just a girl from work.”
“You didn’t blackmail your boss to get inside the fund-raiser?”
Crud. What had Stuart told the police? “What are you getting at?”
“The truth. Did you or did you not blackmail your boss to get that invitation?”
“Okay, fine. Stuart Trout is a dirtbag. He wouldn’t do me one simple favor. I told him getting into the Wentworth event was very important to me.”
“This same dirtbag had just offered you a better position and more money, right?”
“Yes, but what’s that got to do with anything?”
“Just confirming details.”
Hunter’s guarded attitude surprised her. “I told you everything about that night. I had to pressure Stuart or I wouldn’t have gotten to talk to Gwen.”
“You threatened to tell his girlfriend he’d been involved with you?”
“No, I threatened to tell Brittany he made a pass at me if he didn’t help. He’s a slimeball I wouldn’t let touch my dead philodendron.”
The oddest moment of relief filtered through the suspicion holding his gaze hostage and gave her hope until Hunter asked, “How’d your father die?”
She flinched at the unexpected change of topic. “He drowned. Suicide.”
“But he was an excellent swimmer, right?”
“Yes.” What had Hunter found out about her father’s death?
“Doesn’t that sound suspicious?”
Yes. She’d spent many sleepless nights wondering if she was at fault for Raymond’s death. She had no idea why Hunter was acting as though they were on opposite sides of a wall all of a sudden. “I questioned everything about his death from the beginning, but everyone said I was looking for a way to justify an accident. I harangued the police for over a year, but they all blew me off, accusing me of being in denial. That’s the reason I got into investigative reporting, but nothing ever came of all my efforts to prove he hadn’t killed himself. His life insurance company had no investment in helping. No one did. The only reason I finally left it alone was because his death had devastated my family and I kept reopening the wound.”
Hunter stopped there, staring at her as if he tried to decide if he knew her. That hurt much more than she could have imagined. She asked, “What’s going on with you?”
“How did the guy in your apartment know your name?”
“I told you, I don’t know. Before you got there he said I did a good job. I don’t know what he was talking about. Do you?”
“I can’t say.”
“You mean you won’t say. I’ve told you everything—”
“Except for the final key to accessing the Kore database.”
“So now you’re going to strongarm me into this by acting suspicious of… what exactly are you suspicious about?”
This time Hunter was the one who looked away while he thought on something. When he lifted his head his eyes were filled with an emotion she couldn’t pinpoint. “You have to understand, Abbie. A lot of lives depend on how well I do my job. I can’t let anything but facts influence my decisions.”
“What do you think I’m guilty of ?”
“I’m not accusing you—”
“Just tell me what’s going on, dammit.” She was reaching the end of her frayed emotional rope.
“I can’t. Not yet.”
There it was. She ran headfirst against that steel-wall gaze born of a distrust that had started in childhood. She understood why, really, she did, but that didn’t change how much it cut for him to draw an invisible line between them. He probably didn’t like standing all alone on the other side of that line, but that might be the only safe haven he’d come to trust.
She wanted him to know he could depend on her.
Screaming in frustration probably wouldn’t get that message across, but her insides were on a rampage.
Abbie drew up her knees and leaned forward, propping her head on her crossed arms. “You’re making it sound like forcing my slimy boss to help me get into the Wentworths’ was a felony, that I had something to do with my father’s death, and that I know the crazy guy in my apartment.”
He seemed content to hear her out, so she continued. “Here’s the truth. If my mother hadn’t been ill I wouldn’t have risked my career by threatening my boss for an invitation to the event or badgering a Wentworth on her own property. If you hadn’t been there snooping around, you wouldn’t have gotten involved in Gwen’s shooting. If you hadn’t driven me home and broken into my apartment you wouldn’t have known about the intruder, but I will be eternally grateful that you did come back. I don’t know what’s going on or why people are chasing us or why that guy knew my name. All I know is that my mother is dying and I need your help. I’m going to give you all the access information for the database. Not because I feel threatened, but because I believe in you. I trust you. What are you going to do?”
Hunter’s stone face had given nothing away while she spoke. She knew he was inside that protective shell and that this might be her only chance to reach him.
He scratched his nose, a ploy to allow him another minute to think. “I’m offering the Kore center a substantial donation based on a tour I’ll take at four today. If I get into the files, I’ll download everything on your mother. And arrange for a medical team to treat her, too.”
She wished that was all it would take to make everything in her world right, but Hunter had been talking to someone about her and she was pretty sure it had to do with the police. “And you’ll let me go to my mother once you have the files, right?”
His elbows were propped on his knees. He dropped his chin down on his clasped hands and wouldn’t look at her. “I can’t.”
“Why?”
“Lot of questions need answering first.”
“I see.” Not really, but if she said more right now her voice might break. He was going to hand her off to strangers after all.
“We’re running out of time. Tell me what I need for the code. I’ll put you somewhere safe while I’m inside.”
He isn’t going to like this. “To access a family file the patient must be hooked to a unit that takes an immediate fingerprint and pricks the skin for a blood sample within one minute of entering the patient and a staff code to access the database. You can’t get into anything without me.”
Chapter Thirty-four
Hunter waited inside the sedan, watching Abbie walk into the front doors of the Kore Women’s Center in southwest Chicago. Once she convinced him there was no way to breach the computer system without her, he’d called Kore an hour ago and let Abbie speak to the staff to arrange for her admission.
Simpler than ordering a hamburger at McDonald’s for a woman with a rare blood type who was already in Kore’s files and willing to donate blood.
“Park across the street at that pharmacy and angle the car so I can watch the entrance to Kore,” Hunter told the driver, a longtime Thornton-Payne employee who chauffeured for Hunter’s father and Todd. One of the two drivers who could be trusted not to speak of anything that went on during a drive.
Hunter kept an eye on the entrance, fighting to stay in the car and not rush inside to keep Abbie in sight.
He thought he might never get over the look of shock on her face when he questioned her. She couldn’t have been more hurt if he’d backhanded her.
Her answers could be construed as suspicious if he wanted to lump Abbie in with all the women he’d known.
She was in a category all her own. His gut told him so.
What was he going to do with her after he got the files out of Kore?
Gotthard’s warnings pounded in the silence, but Hunter couldn’t make himself believe she was involved with the killer. He should have told her so before she stepped out of the car, should have kissed her to let her know the last thing he wanted to do was hurt her.
Instead, he’d sat unmovable as a rock, unable to give her words of comfort. Gotthard’s intel had clouded his ability to see beyond the mission.
Abbie had pulled back after the questions, unwilling to let him touch her in any way, not even to help her from the ambulance to the sedan when they reached the parking lot. He’d refused to consider her suggestion that she pretend to be ill so he could stay once she was admitted. He’d been too angry at the idea of having to let her enter unprotected to realize he was slamming door after door between them.
Her silence should have been warning enough. She finally just listened to his instructions on how to contact him if she had any problem, nodding in reply. He’d kept up a steady monologue, trying not to let his face show how the pain scarring her eyes shredded his insides.