Already Taken (Laura Frost FBI)

CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

Laura slumped into one of the dark gray plastic chairs that made up the hospital’s waiting room. Whenever she was in one of these, she always marveled at the deep lack of care on display by the hospital’s builders. She knew from experience that sitting in one of these for any number of hours was liable to give you back pain and alignment issues, and an extra need for medical intervention than whatever you came in with.

Next to her, Agent Moore sighed deeply. Laura nodded, agreeing with the sentiment.

Laura looked up at her, swinging her head around where she had it propped on her hands, elbows on her knees, to examine the small white bandage stuck over her neck. “Does it hurt?” she asked.

Agent Moore shook her head no. “It didn’t even need stitches or anything,” she said. “Just feels like a scratch.”

Laura nodded wearily. “That’s good.” It was nice to end a case without needing medical attention herself; a nurse had insisted on changing the bandage on her burned hand when she saw Laura pacing around and waiting, but it was hardly necessary. It was getting on its way toward healed just as expected, even if it was slow.

“Did you hear anything about Arthur McLean while I was gone?” Agent Moore asked. She’d tried to wait with Laura to see what the doctor would say, but she, too, had been strongarmed into getting her neck checked out by another nurse who wouldn’t take “later” for an answer.

Laura nodded. “He’s going to be fine,” she said. “The Sheriff’s deputies are all in there with him, and he’s cuffed to the bed. The bullet went right through, so they just stitched him up and gave him painkillers.”

“Are they getting backup soon?” Agent Moore asked, with a dubious expression on her face.

Laura laughed out loud, startling one of the other patients who had traipsed into the waiting room through the early hours of the morning as dawn rose outside. She lowered her voice again to reply. “Yes, there’s a team coming from the nearest city to relieve them. I don’t think they’ve actually slept since this case started. Not that we ever actually saw them until right at the end.”

“They’re really overstretched here,” Agent Moore said with total seriousness. “They should hire some more deputies.”

Laura was about to present a teaching moment about state budgets and the local population versus the number of people who really wanted to be part of law enforcement, but she stopped. Agent Moore had taken a scythe to the neck last night, after all. And the night had been a long one.

“They should,” she settled for, glancing up at the coffee machine on the other side of the room.

“Want a coffee?” Agent Moore asked, clearly seeing where her eyes had gone. “I’ll get one. Call it my gratitude toward your amazing agenting skills.”

Laura nodded, not wanting to invite further conversation on this point, and Agent Moore leapt up to skip over to the machine and feed coins into it until it spat out two insipid-looking coffees. She skipped back again, somehow not spilling them, and bounced right into her chair at Laura’s side.

“I just don’t know how you did it,” she said enthusiastically, steamrolling over Laura’s hopes that they wouldn’t have to discuss it. “I mean, how did you figure out who he was most likely to go after next?”

“I didn’t,” Laura pointed out. “I went to the wrong place first. When the sisters told me they were adopted, I thought I’d been an idiot. Made the wrong guess. It was only luck.”

“How could it have been luck alone?” Agent Moore asked, shaking her head. “You’re too modest! I know you figured it all out. But how? Will you help me see how the pieces fit together? I’d love to be as good at this as you are one day.”

Oh dear, Laura thought. She knew the truth. That Agent Moore didn’t have a hope in hell of being as good at this as Laura was. That there was a basic, born-in instinct she was never going to have. Agent Moore was never going to have visions of the future—or the past—guiding her along.

“No, seriously,” Laura said. “I just went to visit Maria Bluton to ask her some more questions about her husband, see if there was anything we’d missed. After my hunch about the next victim didn’t pan out, I thought maybe there was some extra information she could give me that would help me out. When I got there, I saw the house deserted and the shotgun on the floor, and I knew something terrible must have happened.”

“But you called me and told me to get over there with backup.” Agent Moore frowned.

“That was after I arrived,” Laura lied. “I knew something was off the moment I arrived. It took me a while to figure out where they’d gone, you see. I hadn’t found them until just before you got there. It was only because Maria screamed when he finally caught up with her with that scythe—otherwise I might have been wandering through those woods all night.”

She couldn’t tell her the truth, of course. Just the same way that she’d never been able to tell anyone the truth. Until Nate.

Laura felt a clutch of pain in her chest at the thought of him. Her rightful partner. Being paired up with Agent Moore had turned out to be not quite as horrible as she expected—though it had had its moments—but still, it should have been Nate sitting next to her now. Nate who had her back when she was facing off against an armed killer. Nate making sure she got the treatments she needed at the hospital before she headed off to the airport.

He wasn’t just her partner. He was her closest friend. And the loss of him, just at that moment, felt like something Laura didn’t think she could stand any longer.

“Oh,” Agent Moore said, frowning slightly. “It’s just, I thought I could hear the background of the call… never mind. I guess I was listening for something that wasn’t there.”

“Probably just interference on the line,” Laura said, smiling glibly as she sipped at the predictably horrible coffee. “Anyway, shouldn’t be long now before we get the all-clear to head home. As soon as I hear from Rondelle, we’ll head back to the inn and pack up, then over to the airport and back to D.C., just in time to not waste the whole of our Friday out here. You did good, kid. We got it done.”

Laura had mostly expected Agent Moore to say something about not being a kid—in fact, she’d said it that way on purpose to distract her from the topic at hand. She was not prepared for the beatific beam that spread across the rookie agent’s face, so wide Laura began to feel worried about the cut on her neck.

“You really think I did a good job?” she enthused, turning fully to face Laura by twisting in her chair, clasping her hands tightly around her own coffee. “That means so much, coming from you! Really, I thought it was you who did all the work, I was just getting in the way, and—”

“Alright!” Laura said, holding her hands up in the air in surrender. “Relax. Everyone’s kind of useless when they’re a rookie. You’re less useless than most. It’s a compliment. Now, try to be a little more chill, okay?”

Agent Moore nodded, bit her lip, and settled back in her chair. Laura immediately groaned inwardly. She didn’t meant to upset the rookie, either. She didn’t think she was very good at this part, herself.

“You don’t have to be totally silent, though,” she offered.

“Do you have any plans for the weekend?” Agent Moore asked, almost springing back up in her chair, as though she’d had the question loaded and ready to go.

“Yeah,” Laura said, studying the empty cup of coffee. She wasn’t even sure why she’d drunk the horrible stuff, except that she was going to need the energy. “I’m picking up my daughter from her father’s place tomorrow morning. We’ve got a playdate tomorrow afternoon. And I’m going to call an old friend, see if he wants to meet.”

“Sounds like fun.” Agent Moore giggled. She opened her mouth, presumably to list off all of the things she had planned in return, but Laura’s phone buzzed in her hand.

“It’s Rondelle,” Laura said with a grin, knowing that the flight home was now only a matter of hours away at most.

***