Malone shook the marshal’s hand. “Thank you for the support.”
“Of course. I’ll have people on this around the clock until we locate her. I’ll check in tomorrow.”
“Talk to you then.”
* * *
As Jesse walked toward his car, he called one of his deputies, David Rinner, who was working on the case overnight.
“Hey,” David said. “How’d the raid go?”
“Got the father and son. No sign of the girl. MPD is taking them back to their house for interrogation.”
“We’re working on following up on tips and checking train and bus stations as well as the airports.”
“I’m going home to catch a few hours of sleep.”
“I’ll have an update for you by zero seven hundred.”
“Thanks.”
Jesse pressed a button on the wheel of his Dodge Charger to end the call. He pressed the accelerator, eager to get to the hospital to check on another of his deputies, Memphis Rose Costello, after having been gone for hours.
Her mother and grandmother had arrived with all the chaos Memphis had warned him they would bring and had quickly driven him batshit crazy with their nonstop chatter, questions, anxiety, nosiness and intrusiveness. Because they were with Memphis, Jesse had gone to help find Sam Holland’s nephew, even though he was technically on leave after the showdown with Offenbach that’d led to Memphis being shot in the leg.
With her mom and grandmother around, Jesse could’ve gone straight home to get some sleep, but he headed for the hospital anyway. He needed to be with her, to see that she was still there. He’d come far too close to losing her, which had opened his eyes to a few things that made him exquisitely uncomfortable. The first of those things was that she mattered to him much more than he’d previously acknowledged.
At some point, their highly inappropriate, casual sex-buddies-who-worked-together relationship had become serious, and he hadn’t realized that until he’d almost lost her. By now, word was out that Jesse had barely left her bedside since she’d arrived by helicopter at GW Trauma in critical condition. His command would be asking questions, and he’d need to come up with the answers—quickly—or risk endangering both their careers.
The thing was… He had no answers. All he knew was that he needed to be there for her until she recovered from her injury and things could get back to normal. If that meant taking a leave of absence from work so he could care for her without anyone knowing about it, then that’s what he’d do. Whatever it took to keep her with him where she belonged.
Wait… He wasn’t saying she belonged with him. It was just that he wanted to keep her close while she recovered. After that, they could go back to the way things had been before he’d thought he might lose her forever. And why that possibility had completely upended his entire existence was something he was still trying to process days later.
There’d been so much blood. How could a person lose that much blood and still be alive? For a time, he’d been certain she would die. He’d felt the foundation under him crack and splinter at the thought of not having her by his side at work and in life. He, who’d been a rule follower all his life, didn’t give a flying fuck if anyone found out he was in a relationship—if that’s what it was called—with one of his subordinates.
Technically, she answered to him at work. In reality, she was the one who kept him on track and focused. She was the only thing keeping the wheels on the bus of his entire life, and the possibility of losing her had been one of the most terrifying things that’d ever happened.
It was a crazy thing to realize someone was the most important person in your life when you were on the precipice of losing them forever. The sick, queasy sensation in his stomach had stayed with him since that tense chopper ride from Shenandoah to UVA Health, the closest level-one trauma center.
Jesse broke into a cold sweat as he recalled the frantic efforts of the paramedics to keep her alive during the fifteen-minute flight. As someone trained to catalog details, he’d remember every one of those endless minutes spent in agonizing fear. How was it possible that the endlessly aggravating chatterbox known as Memphis Rose could’ve been silenced by something so pedestrian as a bullet?
Before then, Jesse would’ve thought a bullet would bounce off her tough outer shell, not puncture her soft skin and nick an artery, putting her life in peril. Finding out she was actually human had been humbling for someone who went through his life trying not to form attachments to people who could disappear with no warning, never to return—the way his sister had.
He couldn’t think about Jordan. Not when he was trying so hard to keep it together. He’d asked his friend Sam Holland to look at the files he’d compiled during the decades-long search for his missing sister. Hopefully, she’d get a chance to think more about that since her nephew had been found alive. Her partner, Detective Cruz, had suggested some true-crime podcasts that might be interested in the story of the U.S. marshal who found people for a living and the one person he’d never been able to find, the most important one of all.
Even though everything in him recoiled at the idea of making his private pain public for all the world to chew on, he planned to pursue that idea as soon as Memphis was recovered.
It didn’t take a shrink to tell him that Jordan was the reason he didn’t let himself form attachments to people. The first person he’d ever truly loved—the only one—had disappeared without a trace, never to be seen or heard from again. He’d learned early not to give his heart to anyone. That way, he could never be shattered when they left. With Memphis Rose, he’d broken all his own rules and formed an attachment, as much as he might’ve denied that before she was wounded.
Now, though… As he made his way into George Washington University Hospital, where she’d been transferred after being stabilized at UVA, so she’d be closer to home, he had no idea what he was going to do about that attachment he’d never wanted in the first place.
Exhaustion clung to him as he took the elevator to the fifth floor, where she was in the ICU. That she was still in the ICU was further cause for anxiety. Wasn’t she much better? Couldn’t she be transferred to a regular room? He’d get some answers to those questions while he was there. Outside her room, he was relieved to see her alone and resting. He didn’t have the bandwidth to deal with her mother and grandmother tonight.
“She’s doing better,” a nurse he recognized said.
He’d been so intent on studying Memphis that he hadn’t heard the nurse approach. He was losing it in more ways than one. “Why is she still in ICU?”
Memphis had given them permission to speak to him, so the nurse said, “Her blood pressure is still lower than we’d like it to be, so we’re monitoring her until it improves. She’s also still getting transfusions.”
