Free The Devil's Elixir by Raymond Khoury Page A

them finally told me while struggling to set up a second intravenous line into her arm. “I can’t tell what’s been hit, but we can’t do anything about it here. She needs surgery.”
    Just then, some sensors started beeping wildly and the other paramedic blurted, “She’s crashing.” The first paramedic sprang to action and they both went frantic, hands and mouths moving at lightning speed as one of them started on the CPR while the other looked into her mouth to secure an airway for intubation. I stood back and watched in numb silence as they worked on her, feeling my whole body seize up every time she convulsed under the paramedic’s compresses, holding Alex tight against me, making sure the kid couldn’t see what was going on, hoping against hope that they’d be able to save her, but somehow knowing it wasn’t going to work out, feeling impotent and helpless at not being able to step in and make things right and bring her back to her vibrant, mesmeric self, feeling a surge of fury converging in my temples and making them feel like they were going to erupt, then the beeping stopped and the flatline took over and the lead paramedic turned to me with a tenebrous look and a small shake of the head that reached deep into my very core and shredded everything in its path.

9

    “H ow the hell did they find her?”
    We were back at the ranch, the ranch in this case being the FBI’s San Diego field office, a squat, glass-and-concrete three-story structure a couple of miles east of Montgomery Field. Villaverde and I were in his top-floor office. Besides everything that had happened, I’d spent ages briefing a couple of homicide detectives on what had gone down and describing the shooters as best as I could, and right now, I was tired and angry as hell, and my head felt all heavy and clogged up, like someone had pumped molasses into my skull.
    “Maybe they followed her from the house,” Villaverde speculated, leaning against the edge of his desk. He was tall and lean and with the clear olive skin and the combed-back onyx-black hair, a walking, talking ad for the bureau. I imagined the suits loved him, and to be fair, from what I’d seen so far, he was a straight-shooting, efficient guy.
    “She said she wasn’t followed,” I fired back, more testily than I should have. “Michelle was good. She would have spotted a tail. Especially after what happened. She was looking out for one.”
    “What about her phone?”
    “She killed the battery after calling me.”
    “Maybe she called someone else from the hotel?”
    My head snapped left and right. “No way. Michelle was a pro. She wouldn’t take that risk, not after what she’d been through.”
    Villaverde shrugged. “Well, we’ll know soon enough. If she did call anyone, it’ll show up on her room’s phone records.”
    Another possibility was clawing away at me.
    “How many hotels and motels do you think there are out there, by the airport?”
    “I don’t know. Not that many. Why? You think that’s how they found her? Trawling them?”
    “When she called me from the mall, Michelle said she’d find somewhere to hole up by the airport. If they hacked her phone and were in on that call . . . they’d be looking for a woman and a kid with no luggage and no credit card. Maybe they got lucky.”
    “Well if that’s what happened, and depending on how they did it, there might a cloning trail on her phone.” He picked up his desk phone and punched in a couple of buttons. “I’ll get the lab to check it out.”
    I stood by the large window as Villaverde made his call and stared out in silence, seething with rage. The sun was long gone, and darkness was now firmly in control, gloomy and oppressive. The streetlamps in the almost empty parking lot were low and subdued, and there was no moon or stars in the sky that I could see, no beacon, no light at the end of the harrowing tunnel that this day had turned into. It was as if nature itself was conspiring to