"Anyway," Nika continued, "I came by to give you some good news."

He could certainly use that. Cole sat up, alert. "Someone caught the killer?"

"A different kind of good news," Nika amended, realizing her mistake. "You grandmother's blood pressure has finally gone down sufficiently enough for Dr. Chase to do the biopsy. His office a.s.sistant scheduled it for first thing tomorrow morning."

She was right. It was good news. But that also meant that the end results could bring bad news with it. If the ma.s.s wasn't benign...

"What time is 'first thing'?" he asked.

Chase's office a.s.sistant had booked the O.R. for the first slot of the day. "Seven-thirty in the morning."

He could be there before G was taken into the operating room. He knew she'd welcome the support, even if she wouldn't say it.

"You a.s.sisting?" he asked.

Nika nodded. "Already promised your grandmother I would be." She smiled, hoping to convey confidence to him so that he would feel more at ease about the surgery. "Can't go back on my word."

He knew she couldn't, no matter how casually she tendered that word. She was that kind of a woman, that kind of a person. Bound by her word. Honorable. Dedicated. A straight arrow the likes of which he wouldn't have believed actually existed if he hadn't met her.

If he hadn't watched her interact with his grandmother.

Cole laughed shortly, but the smile he offered to her was soft, kind. "I thought people like you went the way of the unicorn."

The look she gave him transformed her into innocence personified. "That's presupposing that unicorns don't exist."

He should have known that would be what she'd say. "Now you're going to tell me they actually do exist? Have you ever seen one?" he challenged.

"Just because you haven't seen one doesn't mean they don't exist," she pointed out.

"Makes a pretty good argument to me," he told her.

"I've never seen a native Samoan," she countered. "Doesn't mean they don't exist."

He laughed, shaking his head. "That's different, Veronika."

Her eyes were wide as she asked, "How?"

She didn't surrender easily, he'd give her that. "Plenty of other people have seen Samoans," he pointed out.

Nika inclined her head, as if indulging him. "Or so they say."

He laughed again, shaking his head. Amused. That was happening more often these days than he could remember it ever happening in years. She made him smile. "Is that the argument you use to prove that Santa Claus exists?"

"Who says he doesn't?" she asked innocently.

Cole raised his hands in the universal sign of surrender. "I yield," he declared. "You could get Satan to install air-conditioning in h.e.l.l."

It was her turn to laugh. And to appreciate how comfortable they'd become with one another in such an incredibly short amount of time. She wished she could take it as a sign of things to come, but there was a part of her that was her mother's daughter. And her mother always expected the worst to happen.

"Now, there's a worthy project," she commented. "Too bad I'm too busy at the moment to tackle it."

d.a.m.n it, here he was, the middle of the day and he found himself wanting her. Wanting her even more now than he had the first time. Or the second. It seemed that each time he made love with her just stoked the fire rather than diminished it.

The woman was clearly a witch, there was no other explanation, he thought.

"Speaking of busy-" he began.

Nika looked up into his eyes, all but paralyzing his breath in his lungs. "Yes?"

"Are you?" he asked. Then added the word "busy" in case she wasn't following him.

Nika tossed her head, not quite able to carry off blase, but then, she wasn't really trying to. "Depends on whether or not I get a good offer."

"Take-out, a movie rental and me," he rattled off, watching her face. "That good enough?"

She pretended to think it over for a moment. "Well, since that's the best I can do on short notice, I guess that's good enough," she told him, doing her best to maintain a straight face. But the sparkle in her eyes gave her away. "What time do you get off?"

"Barring any new bodies," which he fervently hoped there wouldn't be, "six o'clock."

The same time she usually did-if she were working today. "Why don't you swing by the hospital to see your grandmother," Nika suggested, "and then we'll take it from there?"

He'd always admired an organized mind. "You do think of everything, don't you?"

"Hey, mult.i.tasking is my middle name." Rising, she crossed to the bulletin board. Studying the various pieces of information, she looked at the charts. A small frown formed and played on her lips.

Cole got up and made his way over to her and the bulletin board. Her body language told him she thought she was onto something. It occurred to him that he was far more in tune to her than he was happy about. But that was a problem to be tackled another day. Right now, his chief priority was to catch the son of a b.i.t.c.h who was killing senior citizens.

"You see something?" he asked her.

It was a thought that had suddenly occurred to her, not something she'd seen on the bulletin board. "What if there isn't just one uniform thing?" she theorized, then whirled around to look at him, eager to get his input. "What if there're two?"

Was she talking about two theories? Or even more? "What do you mean?"

She was tripping over her own tongue, she thought, mentally chastizing herself. She needed to slow down. "What if the victims fall into two separate categories? The terminally sick ones and the ones who lived in nursing homes?"

That seemed like an odd division. "What are you getting at?"

"Maybe that's the killer's criteria. He's focusing on the quality-of-life issue. The terminal patients were facing a life of pain with death being the reward at the end of the road. The others, although not terminal, were just marking time until they died, because everyone re garded them as useless. They'd been abandoned by their families, or never had any. The quality of their lives wasn't very good, either."

The more she spoke, the more excited she became until the excitement all but radiated from her like beams of light. And that in turn, heaven help him, excited him as much as the theory she was advancing "What if," she continued, her voice rising, "the killer isn't killing his victims out of some kind of sense of hatred but out of some kind of misguided sense of mercy?"

"Mercy?" he repeated. The moment he said it, more pieces fell into place. "You mean like an angel of mercy?" Cole asked incredulously. "Instead of an angel of death?"

"Why not? It wouldn't be the first time something like this happened-not at Patience Memorial," she was quick to clarify, "but it has happened before at other facilities. I remember reading something about that in the last six months, but I don't recall where. That guy managed to ama.s.s twenty-three dead people before anyone caught on." Her eyes met his. "And they only came up with that figure after they caught him in the act and wound up tracing his work history. He'd left a trail of dead people in his wake."

Cole nodded, thinking. She was onto something. "All right, why don't we see if any of the staff that's currently working in the Geriatrics Unit formerly worked at some other hospital or extended care facility where an unusual number of patients died." He knew he should be spreading his net wider, but for now, he was hoping that his grim reaper was operating on a small basis-and alone. "How approachable is the head of Human Resources at your hospital?" Cole asked.

"Depends," she allowed, leaning a hip against his absent partner's desk. "You smile at her the way you just did at me and she'll be eating out of your hand," Nika promised. "I guarantee it."

"I was smiling at you?" he asked innocently.

"Yup."

Rising, Cole pulled her to him. "That's probably because I was thinking of the way we're going to spend the rest of the evening," he told her. "Especially the end of it."

She brushed her lips against his quickly. "Yes, me, too."

A tingle zigzagged through her. Judging by the look in his eyes, she wasn't experiencing that tingle alone.

It was hard to believe that this was the same no-nonsense detective who'd rescued her a little over two weeks ago.

What was even harder to imagine, Nika acknowledged sadly, was what life was going to be like without him in it.

Because she knew she'd be a fool to believe in happily-ever-after in this case. She knew, logically, that it wasn't going to happen. Cole Baker was a loner. He'd all but rented a billboard in Times Square telling her so.

So she didn't think beyond the parameters of the day and refused to allow her mind to wander toward tomorrow.

Chapter 13.

Cole supposed that, in an odd way, he should be grateful that his crime scenes and the hospital where his grandmother was to have her biopsy had fortuitously turned out to be one and the same place.

Although dealing with his emotions, much less displaying them, had not been easy for him in almost two decades, he did want to be there for the woman. Or if not "there," meaning right outside the O.R., then at least somewhere within shouting distance so that he could be quickly located if need be. He knew that logically it didn't matter in the grand scheme of things, but it mattered to him. And, he knew, it mattered to his grandmother, even though she didn't come right out and say it.

They were shorthanded on the force and he already knew without asking that he couldn't get any time off. The detective who had been lent to Homicide from another department was now out with the flu, and his own partner hadn't fully recovered yet. Most likely because he'd refused to surrender to the inevitable in the first place. The man had hung on as long as he could before his weakened immune system had finally succ.u.mbed. The last time he'd seen his partner leaving the squad room, he'd looked like death warmed over.

Since he was spending so much time in the Geriatric Department, each day he came he had to be subjected to a quick once-over to make sure he wasn't displaying any symptoms of the flu.

The first time this happened Nika had explained to him that only people who'd already had the flu this year were allowed to be on the floor. It gave the patients on the geriatric floor one less thing to worry about.

He'd noted more than once she was very protective of these old people. The same could also be said of the rest of the staff. At one point or other he'd observed them all as they went about their duties.

So who the h.e.l.l was doing away with the patients, and how was he or she doing it amid all these eyes that seemed to be trained on each patient?

How?

When?

Who?

The questions swam around in his head, all but haunting him. He had no answers.

He'd told his captain that he would be conducting interviews with each member of the staff who was currently on duty. This was intended not only to gather what could be important information but to trip up the killer somehow.

Those were his intentions, but once he arrived at the hospital, Cole couldn't seem to focus on his job. This was the morning that G was having her biopsy. So he went to her room to be with her until it was time for her to be taken to the O.R.

As the minute hand raced behind the second hand, wantonly flinging away the minutes that remained before G's surgery, it became increasingly more difficult for him to concentrate.

"You coming down with something, Coleman?" Ericka finally asked, squinting at him through her state-of-the-art bifocals that she so dearly loved.

When he'd discovered how much she favored the gla.s.ses, he had secretly paid for the pair. They had set him back a bit, but it was worth it to see her pleasure. Her pride wouldn't have allowed him to pick up the tab. So he'd gone behind her back, paid for them and told the receptionist to tell his grandmother that Medicare had actually paid the bill in its entirety.

It was apparent that G had found the whole thing highly suspect, but she'd let it go. They didn't speak about it.

There were a lot of things that they didn't speak about, a lot that went unsaid between them. That didn't mean he didn't love her the way he'd vowed not to love anyone ever again. And, he was certain, G loved him, though she hardly ever used the L-word.

"Just working hard," Cole said, answering her question about his health.

He could tell she didn't believe him. "You don't have to hang around until they take me, you know," she told him. It wasn't the first time she'd said that this morning, though if it was because she was just repeating herself or because she didn't remember saying it, he didn't know.

He didn't want to think about that now, about the possibility of dementia stealing her from him. He didn't want to think about losing G on any level.

"Can't get rid of me that easily," he told her. Wandering over to the window, he pretended to look out. Rain slid down the pane. Weatherman hadn't mentioned rain for today. Being a weatherman had to be the cushiest job in the world, he mused.

"Tell me about it," Ericka snorted, doing her best to sound put-upon. "I saw you tiptoeing into my room last night, hovering over me. You thought I was asleep because it was so late, but I wasn't. Don't you have anything better to do with your time than to hover over me?"

Cole eyed her sharply, wondering if she was misremembering or just imagining things. Or if it was something else. "I came by last night with Dr. Pulaski," he reminded her. But that was early in the evening. "Is that what you're referring-"

"No." She cut him off. "This was later. The lights were dim in the hall, so it had to be after eleven," she remembered. "I didn't have my gla.s.ses on so I couldn't see what time it was, but it was definitely after you came by here with the baby doctor."

He stared at her for a moment, wondering if she was having one of her "hazy" moments, where information fled from her brain like floodwaters over the top of a reservoir.

"Dr. Pulaski works in geriatrics, not pediatrics," he corrected his grandmother. "Not baby doctor," Ericka said, annoyed that he didn't understand. "Baby doctor." Then, because he still didn't look like he understood, Ericka went into detail. "She hardly looks old enough to have graduated high school, let alone medical school." And then Ericka shrugged petulantly. "'Course, at my age, everyone looks like a baby," she complained. "But you came back here without her and you hovered," she insisted. "You were trying to fool around with my IV, but then that nurse with the tight uniform came in." She laughed. "You dropped your hands to your sides like you used to do whenever I caught you getting into the cookie jar before dinner."

"Sure you weren't dreaming?" Cole asked. An eerie sensation shimmied up his spine.

Ericka drew herself up in bed, insulted. "I'm sure. Dreams don't smell," she added haughtily.

His eyes narrowed as he watched her. Understanding the woman was becoming more and more of a challenge. "Do you want to explain that one, G?"

His grandmother exhaled loudly, the way she always did when she was running out of patience.

"You had some G.o.d-awful aftershave on. It wasn't the kind that could make you gag half a room away, but up close and personal, well, that was a whole different story." s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up her face as if she was bracing for an ordeal, Ericka took in a deep breath, then nodded, her face relaxing. "Good, you threw the bottle away," she declared happily because there was no scent of any kind of cologne evident. "And if you didn't," she cautioned bluntly, "you should. Clean's the best kind of smell for a man."

"I'll try to remember that," he murmured, his mind racing, trying to integrate the information his grandmother had just given him.

It could all be nothing, and then again, with his grandmother winking in and out of her head on occasion, maybe she'd mistaken another man for him. A man who, from the sound of it, had been trying to do something with her IV line when someone else has come into the room, forcing him to stop whatever it was that he had been trying to do.

Something he wasn't supposed to do, because why else would he drop his hands to his sides?

"Ready?" Nika asked her patient cheerfully as she breezed into the room, dressed head to toe in blue scrubs. Glancing at Cole's expression caused the smile on her lips to freeze. "Is something wrong?" she asked him in as upbeat a voice as she could manage, for her patient's sake.