His eyes burned. He pressed his thumbs into the sockets and rubbed them. He remembered the crash at Le Mans, remembered lying in the hospital bed, waiting to find out if his friend had survived the crash. Remembered the terrible moment he’d found out Joe Markham had died.
His breath hitched. He sank down on a blue vinyl sofa, elbows on his knees, his head dropping into his hands. He didn’t pray often, but he said a prayer for Cassidy, hoped it would somehow help.
His head jerked up when the door swung open and Cain and Carly walked into the waiting room. At six-foot five, two hundred twenty pounds of solid muscle, Linc seemed to take up all the space in the room. Carly was blond and pretty, strong and competent, the perfect match for his best friend.
She walked over to Beau, sat down next to him, put an arm around his shoulders, didn’t say a word.
“How is she?” Linc asked.
“Stable. That’s all I know.” He blew out a breath. “It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have let her drive the car. It was raining. Sometimes a powerful car like that can get away from you. I just . . . today was the day her mother died. I wanted to cheer her up.”
Linc sat down in a chair and leaned toward him. “It’s too early to blame yourself, Beau. You don’t know what actually happened.”
His throat felt tight. He didn’t care what had happened. He just wanted Cassidy to be okay.
The door opened again and a pair of uniformed police officers walked into the waiting room, one older, with a fringe of light brown hair, the other young and dark, probably Latino.
“Beaumont Hamilton Reese?” the older cop asked.
Beau came up from the sofa. “I’m Beau Reese.”
“You’re the registered owner of the Lamborghini involved in the accident?”
“That . . . that’s right. Cassidy borrowed it for the day. Do you know if she’s okay?”
“The doctor’s still in with her.”
“Can you tell me what happened?” Beau asked.
The officer pulled a notepad out of his pocket and checked his notes. “Apparently a farmer was working outside his barn when the car went off the road. He called 9-1-1, then went to see what he could do. She was unconscious, but he could tell she was breathing. The car was upright so he decided to wait for the ambulance.”
Beau tried not to think of Cassidy, strapped in and unconscious, surrounded by darkness in the middle of a muddy field.
The officer studied his notes, looked back at Beau. “The first officers on the scene thought it was a single car accident. Driver missed a tricky turn on a slick road in the rain. But now that they’ve had a chance to examine the site more closely, it doesn’t look like that’s what happened.”
Beau frowned. “What do you mean?”
“It looks like the Lamborghini was hit from behind. The driver of the other car wasn’t paying attention or maybe he was drunk. We don’t know. The Lamborghini spun out, slidsideways, and was T-boned by the car behind. Looks like the vehicle slammed directly into the passenger side door. The Lamborghini flipped and rolled a couple of times. The accident happened on a curve, so the car landed in the field beyond. The ground had softened with the rain, which helped.”
“The farmer didn’t see the accident,” the Latino cop added; Rodriguez was printed on his name tag. “He just saw the vehicle go into the field. He was there when the police and ambulance arrived.”
Beau thought of Cassidy inside the spinning car, the vehicle completely out of control. He knew what a crash that bad felt like, knew the fear.
A wave of nausea hit him. “Do you mind if I sit down?”
“Sure, no problem.”
He sank down on the vinyl sofa, leaned back and raked his hands through his hair. A thought struck. “What happened to the driver of the other vehicle?”
“The car, a white Chevy pickup, was found abandoned a few miles down the road. Turned out to be stolen, reported a couple years ago. No sign of the driver.”
A chill went down his spine. “The driver fled the scene?”
“That’s right. Car was stolen. Like I said, he may have been drunk. We don’t know. We’ve got no description so we can’t put out a BOLO.”
The knot returned to Beau’s stomach. The police believed it was an accident, but Beau now knew it wasn’t. Cassidy had been a target. It was the second attempt on her life in the last few days. Someone was trying to kill her.
He thought of her hooked up to some machine in intensive care, and prayed whoever had done it hadn’t succeeded.
