“Hang on.” She shouted over her shoulder, “Germane!”
“Right behind you, girl.” Germane limped through the back door, carrying a blanket beneath his arm and a cell phone against his ear. He relayed information to the dispatcher as he hurried down the stairs. “That’s right. The Sinclair Building at Ninth and Walnut. Looks like an elderly woman in the alley on the north side.” He paused and frowned. “I didn’t see nothin’. But if you don’t get that ambulance here soon, the cops’ll be investigating a murder, not a mugging.”
“Germane?” Kit took the blanket from him as he shut his phone and braced a hand on her shoulder to kneel on the opposite side of the woman. Kit winced at the bruise that must already be swelling on her shoulder blade.
His sharp eyes didn’t miss a trick. “How bad are you hurt?”
“I had a run-in with the wall, but it’s nothing serious.” Kit skipped the details and unfolded the blanket to tuck it around Helen’s slight figure. Germane was already listening to the older woman’s breathing and checking for pupil response. “How is she?”
“She’s got a concussion for sure. Hell, they could’ve cracked her skull, as deep as that wound goes.”
Kit turned toward the end of the alley where the footprints disappeared. “The muggers took her purse, and she hasn’t given me her name. I think it’s Helen, but I don’t who to contact or what to tell the paramedics. Do you know her?”
“Keep talking to her,” Germane advised, measuring the woman’s pulse. “All I know is, she lives upstairs. She’s been in a few times, pesterin’ me for my barbecue sauce recipe. Says she used to make as good. She’s always by herself, though, so maybe there isn’t anybody to cook for anymore.”
Or anyone to call. Kit smoothed away the droplets of melting snow from the woman’s cool cheek. “Helen? Can you hear me? Look at me, Helen.”
The rheumy blue eyes blinked. Her pale lips slurred a question. “Are you dead?”
“What?” Kit panicked when Helen’s eyes drifted shut. “No. I’m very much alive. And so are you. Stay with me, Helen.” She pulled the woman’s bony hand between her own and tried to rub some warmth back into it. “Helen? You’re not alone. Stay with me.”
Her cold hand went limp in Kit’s grasp as she murmured, “We’re all dead.”
Chapter Two
The fire was all around him, climbing up the walls and leaping across the ceiling.
Dr. Damon Sinclair crawled toward the emergency exit at the back of his lab. The door where he’d entered minutes earlier to pick up his notes for tomorrow’s board meeting was no longer an escape route. The glass entryway had shattered and the fire was now licking its way into the hallway on the opposite side.
Beakers exploded from the heat and rained glass on his back. Their contents fed the flames. The few sprinklers that had survived the explosion were doing little more than creating steam as they spat out water at irregular intervals.
If he hadn’t smelled the chemicals—if he hadn’t reacted to the searing stench of the volatile combination and dived beneath his desk to avoid the initial blast—he’d already be dead. The milliseconds of warning had left him with a head wound, an armful of research documentation and a chance at survival. But that chance was slim if he couldn’t find a way out.
Blinded by the blood seeping into his left eye, feverish from the blazing heat, he moved forward by instinct alone. When he hit a wall instead of the exit, he knew he had to make a choice. He set the binders on the floor with a reverence for the miracles contained inside. His work could save lives—it had saved lives. And now he’d set it aside to save his own life.
The answers were all inside his head, anyway. Given enough time, he could recreate them if he had to. If he ever got out of this hellfire, he’d have all the time in the world to…
A farewell look at his work elicited a choice curse.
“What the hell is this garbage?” These weren’t his notes. Just pages and pages of numbers and equations that didn’t make sense. He hurled the worthless counterfeits into the growing flames.
Was that what this was about? This treacherous, purposeful destruction, just to hide a theft?
Whoever was responsible… Whoever had planted that damned incendiary… Reams of notes and calculations—gone. Successful equations and rejected experiments he could learn from—gone. State-of-the-art technology designed by his own hands…
His hands…
“Son of a bitch!”
They were on fire.
Damon reengaged his brain and fought off the groggy disorientation that consumed him.
Whoever was responsible for this betrayal would not go unpunished. There were means a man of his intellect and bank account could use to make the bastard who’d sabotaged his life’s work pay.
He let the rage suffuse him. Give him strength. He clutched his arms to his stomach and doubled over to stifle the flames with his own body. “You’ll pay.” The heat from his own hands seared his flesh. “You’ll pay.”
“Help! Damon! Help me!”
“Miranda?” A pain far more cruel than any physical torture twisted in the pit of his stomach. Oh, no. God, no. “Miranda!”
His wife’s screams hurt worse than the scorching agony of the skin blistering on his fingers. Her terror cut deeper than the shrapnel in his forehead. He’d gladly give up any medical secret he could devise, but please, please, spare his wife.
“Miranda!” He shouldered aside burning tables, melting plastic and shattered glass, desperately searching through the roiling smoke. “Miranda! Ans—” He choked on the toxic gases coating his lungs and crumpled to the floor. A hoarse cough racked his body and ravaged his throat before he could summon the strength to push to his knees. “Answer me!”
“Damon!”
Her screech of desperation drove him on. He crawled through corrosive puddles and ruined work and unknown treachery to find the only thing that truly mattered. “Miranda? Please. Keep talking. I’ll find—” Coughing cut like broken glass through his raw throat. The spasms drained his strength and he collapsed again. But he pulled himself toward her ragged sobs. “I’m coming.” His administrative assistant. His love. His life. Work be damned. “I’m coming.”
“Damon…”
A chunk of ceiling gave way and crashed to the floor, shooting up a snarling roar of white heat and orange flame. Damon rolled to the side, sucking in the last breath of oxygen hovering above the floor. The firefighters and paramedics were on their way. But even if they were already in the building, they had twenty-eight stories to climb. Damon was his wife’s last—her only—hope for survival.
“Miranda!”
He found her curled into a ball in the corner of a storage closet. Her clothes and hair had caught fire, and though she’d managed to douse the flames, she’d already suffered serious burns.
If she was still breathing, Damon couldn’t tell. He could only cradle her in his arms while he carried her to safety. Outside the burning lab, he collapsed and lay her on the floor. His damaged hands couldn’t detect a pulse, but he put his lips against hers and breathed. “Come on, baby,” he rasped. “Live, Miranda. Live.”
The old images faded as Damon twisted in his sleep. But the nightmare wouldn’t end. It merely transformed—into something hideous and ugly. Like him.
They were at the asylum now. Months later. Miranda’s willowy figure was lost beneath the green hospital gown. And she was crying. At least, her shoulders moved with the sounds of sobbing. The tear ducts beneath the bandages that wrapped