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Kat looked at the clock again, then back at him.
“I suppose I could use a pick me up,” she told him, sliding back under the sheets, “but you’ve got to make it quick.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said as he pulled the comforter over both their heads, magically enveloping them in a warm cocoon made just for them.
***
She wasn’t lying exactly.
Kat did have to run a couple of errands, one of which was stopping by the grocery store to re-stock the mini-fridge at the Gentry Investigations office. But that wasn’t the pit stop that had her eyeing the clock. Her other errand was the one she kept from Mitch. She had to go to the hospital.
She arrived at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center at 7:45, just as she had twice a week for the last two months. She made sure to get there before the morning shift change and things got too busy. Up until then, the nurses on duty were more amenable to her visiting a patient who didn’t get called on often these days: Ash Pierce.
Ally, the young nurse who often helped her, led her into Pierce's room and pointed to the chair in the corner. Kat nodded. She understood the rules. She had to sit in the chair. She couldn't approach the bed. She could only be in the room for two minutes. And the nurse accompanying her had to stay in the room the whole time.
It was all reasonable. After all, Ash Pierce was in a coma, as she had been since the night two months ago when she had tried to kill not just Hannah, but Kat and her bodyguard, Gila Jabarin too. Unlike in Kat’s dream, it was actually Pierce who got stabbed in the neck that night. And even though the assassin had once tortured and nearly killed her, Kat had tried to save her, performing CPR until hospital staff arrived.
It had worked. Pierce had survived, if her current state could be called living. And despite the fact she was only alive because of Kat, the nurses couldn’t be expected to just trust that if they left the two women alone together, Kat wouldn’t just rip all the cords out of the wall, shutting down the machines that were keeping Ash Pierce alive.
It was a legitimate concern, though Kat had no such intention. That wasn’t why she was here today, as she had been so many days in the past. She was here to set her own mind at ease. And it was working, at least to some degree.
Pale and limp, connected to multiple machines, Pierce looked nothing like the swift, agile, shockingly strong assassin who had almost ended Kat’s life twice. It was hard to imagine this frail creature posing a threat to anyone anymore.
In a strange way—one that made Kat slightly ashamed to acknowledge—seeing her attacker like this was a source of comfort. As long as Pierce remained unconscious, with tubes in her mouth and monitors beeping constantly, Kat could handle the nightmares. They ultimately meant nothing.
Her fear was what would happen if Ash Pierce ever recovered from the coma. Her true nightmare was Pierce waking up.
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
It didn’t take long for Jessie’s mood to darken.
She and Ryan had only been at the Miramar, the Santa Monica hotel where the West Los Angeles Children's Support Network fundraiser took place, for an hour when they got an update from Jamil.
“Bad news if you were holding out hope that one of the Kirbys was our culprit,” the head researcher said over speaker phone while Jessie and Ryan waited in an empty office for the hotel manager to bring in another employee for an interview.
“What do you mean?” Ryan asked.
“As promised, they gave us full access to their GPS data for the last twenty-four hours,” Jamil explained. “There’s no indication that they went anywhere last night. All of their phone and vehicle data indicates they were at their address the whole night.”
"There's more," Beth added. "They gave us the footage from their surveillance cameras as well. They have them on the side and back of the house. We found footage from 10:22 p.m. last night of Rhett Kirby stepping out the side door of his house. He's wearing shorts and a t-shirt and holding a broom. There's no audio, but it looks like he's shooing something away from garbage cans at the edge of the frame. Then he returns inside. That all happens only eight minutes after Gabriella Silva pulled up to the parkette where she was killed."
“How far is the parkette from their house?” Ryan asked.
“About a half a mile,” Jamil said.
Ryan whistled softly.
“If he was lying to us, that doesn’t leave much time for him to get back home after killing her,” he conceded.
“I agree,” Jamil said. “Even if he killed her the second she entered that parkette, he would have had to run pretty fast just to get back home. And he doesn’t look at all winded in the video we have.”
Jessie wanted to challenge the young researcher’s conclusion, but as a regular runner, she thought he was spot on. It was hard to imagine Rhett Kirby making the logistics work.
“And remember,” Beth added, “between the GPS data and the security camera footage, there’s no indication that either of them ever left the house at all.”
“Okay,” Ryan said. “I know it’s a longshot but what about the other folks at their cocktail party—were you able to gather their contact information yet?”
“We have it all ready for you,” Jamil said, “but it’s still only 7:45 in the morning. Are you going to start calling them now?”
