Page 67 of Deathtoll
Once inside the small, bright room, Maria stepped forward. “Dr. Maria Gulick. Nice to meet you, Ian.”
Joe Kessler pulled out a chair for her.
“I’ll be staying,” he said and pushed a chair in the corner for himself.
“Can Kate stay?” Ian asked.
“If she wants to.”
She’d planned on calling her sister again, but Ian was looking at her so beseechingly…
“I can stay.” Kate moved a chair next to Joe’s before he had a chance to do it for her.
Maria pulled the smallest, thinnest, most feminine laptop possible from her bag. “All right, Ian. Why don’t you start with telling me about yourself?”
He did, haltingly at first, jumping around in time, childhood in one sentence, war in the next. Then he settled into his last deployment, the attacks, the friends who were dead.
After the eval, Maria made some calls and placed Ian at the secured facility they normally worked with, in the Philly suburbs. While Kate and Maria stayed with him to wait for the pickup. They talked to Ian about what he might expect, how things worked, and then Ian wanted to know more about Hope Hill, so they told him about that.
Then Captain Bing stuck his head in the door and Joe stepped out to talk to him.
A minute later, Joe came back in. “So here’s the deal,” he told Ian. “As long as you promise to check in to treatment and stay there until discharged, the captain is willing to let last week’s incident go.”
“That’s exactly what I’m gonna do, man.”
The handcuffs came off. And when the treatment center’s transport van arrived, Ian went peacefully with them.
Kate rode back to Hope Hill with Maria, who, considerately, drove at a speed that didn’t make Kate clutch the door handle.
The second she was back behind her desk, she called her sister.
Emma still wouldn’t pick up. Not on the third ring, not on the fifth, not on the tenth. Kate left another message. Then she called her mother.
“Hey, could you tell your crazy daughter to check in with your sane daughter when she stops for a driving break? She can’t punish me forever.”
“I’ll try,” Ellie Bridges said, “but she hasn’t been picking up.”
“You haven’t talked to her yet today?”
“Not since she texted this morning to let me know you kicked her out and she was leaving.”
“I did not kick her out. Okay, not like that. I asked her to leave to make sure she was safe. Same as I asked you and Dad to postpone your visit. You didn’t throw a fit.” Kate glanced at the time on the bottom of her laptop screen. “When was the last time you tried her?”
“Half an hour ago. Your father tried too. I know she doesn’t like to pick up when she’s driving, but…” Kate’s mother sighed. “You know how I worry.”
The rental came with Bluetooth. She doesn’t have to hold the phone to talk.Kate’s stomach clenched.
Emma might ignore her out of sheer stubbornness, but not their mother, and definitely not their father. She was Daddy’s girl, always had been, from Little League baseball to assisting with changing the oil in the car, to choosing to study finance at college—Daddy’s little shadow all the way, in a good way, a sweet way.
“Do you think she might have been in an accident?” The question came in a trembling voice from the other end of the line, but Kate could barely hear her mother over the word that roared through her mind.
Asael!
Chapter Twenty-Two
Kate
After Kate hung up with her mother—her chest tight, blood rushing in her ears—she called Murph.Should have called the police.Old habits were damn hard to break. She was pulling her phone away from her ear to do just that as Murph picked up.
