“I.” A shove. “Didn’t.” Another shove. “Kill.” Tessa kicked Wendy’s shin before the woman could dig her heel into Tessa’s calf. “Anybody.”
The heel snapped on the other shoe, and Wendy teetered before falling onto the vanity. Tessa pulled her weapon from the holster she wore under her jacket and aimed it at Wendy Monteith. “Stop.”
She half expected the woman to make a move, but instead, she raised her hands in the classic surrender pose and whimpered, “Don’t kill me. Please. I’ll forget I saw anything. Please. Just let me go.”
They hadn’t had a full dossier on Wendy Monteith, but nothing in what they did have had indicated that the woman was mentally unstable. Tessa had no idea what game Wendy was playing, but there was a look of cool calculation in her eyes that gave Tessa the creeps.
What was that about? Nothing gave Tessa the creeps. Snakes not withstanding.
A faint sound coming from the region of Tessa’s neck alerted her to the earpiece that now dangled from her collar. She slid it back in and heard, “Reed, report.”
“Upstairs bathroom, off second bedroom. One man injured. Rodriguez may be down, whereabouts unknown. Guest in the bathroom assaulted me and is convinced I’m a murderer.”
The dead silence on the other end of the line would have beenfunny at any other time. When their communications expert for the evening spoke, she managed one word. “Copy.”
Not helpful. “Where’s my backup? And we need paramedics up here stat.”
She hadn’t forgotten Graham. Not for a second. But right now, she couldn’t be sure what was the greater threat. Blood loss or Wendy Monteith.
Agents appeared in both doorways of the bathroom. “Ma’am, I need you to step outside.”
Tessa didn’t know the name of the agent who’d spoken, but she caught his eye and then flicked her gaze to the floor. “She had a gun. It’s behind the toilet.”
Those words were all the agent needed to know, and while he didn’t manhandle Wendy Monteith, he certainly didn’t treat her with kid gloves as she hobbled out of the bathroom.
As soon as she was gone, Tessa dropped to her knees and pressed a hand to Graham’s neck and found a pulse, faint but there. “I’ve got a pulse.”
She pulled a towel from the nearby rack and applied pressure to the wound. Graham moaned but didn’t open his eyes. She turned behind her and caught another agent’s eyes. “Rodriguez?”
The agent shook his head, expression grim. “I don’t know. He... I don’t know if he was breathing.”
Tessa could have cried from relief when Luke and Gil ran into the room. “Tess!” Gil knelt beside her. “Are you hurt? Let me.” He pushed her hands away from Graham’s wound and held the towel against the man’s abdomen.
Luke pulled her to her feet. “Are you hurt?”
“No. I’m fine. Where is Wendy Monteith?”
“In the next bedroom.” That came from Carver. “Ledbetter is on his way up. The guests were told that the president had tomake an immediate return to DC. He’s already in the Beast, and they’re all giddy because they think they’ve witnessed some top-secret something.”
Which meant Zane was on his way to the airport and could be on his way to DC after that. Just because he was supposed to stay for several more days didn’t mean it would happen. Not in unusual circumstances like these.
A low voice yelled from the doorway. “Everybody out so we can get to the injured man.” Tessa allowed Luke to tug her from the room, but not before she got a good look at the men coming in behind them. Once she was satisfied that she recognized them as part of the security team for the evening, she walked into the hall.
Ledbetter walked by her. “Reed. With me. Now.”
Luke and Gil gave her encouraging smiles as she followed Ledbetter into another room at the far end of the hall. That room proved to be Carmichael’s office. Carmichael was watching a security feed, his jaw so tight he could crack a molar if he wasn’t careful.
He glanced up when they entered but returned his focus to the video even as he spoke. “Special Agent Reed, I trust you are uninjured.”
“I’m fine.”
“And Graham?” His voice broke on the butler’s name.
“Being tended to now. He had a pulse when I left him.”
Carmichael had aged in the past fifteen minutes. Since she’d met him last week, he’d been the charming host, the angry homeowner, the delighted friend of the president, the mourning friend of the lost Janus painter, but never had she seen the lines that now bracketed his eyes, mouth, and creased his forehead. “I don’t see anything, Agent Ledbetter. Graham and Wendy came upstairs. They were chatting. Friendly. Lots of smiles. They walked intomy daughter’s bedroom. There are no cameras in that room. And neither of them ever came back out.”
“May I?” Tessa approached the desk, Ledbetter right behind her, and watched the video again. When it reached the end, she said, “Can you continue it? At some point, Rodriguez and I should be coming up the stairs.” Carmichael fast-forwarded the video until Tessa appeared at the end of the hall. She watched as they cleared the first room. Then entered the next.
