safe in your ivory tower, didn’t you?” The whisper slid across her skin as his hand cruised up to cup her breast and pinch her nipple through the starched lab coat. “Thought you could take her away from me and I’d do nothing?”
Genie felt her soft leather shoes slide on the linoleum floor as the sharp scent of spilled developer chemicals and madness stung her nose and tears burned her eyes. Shaking her head, she tried to say, No, no! Why are you doing this? I help people. I don’t take them away! But her struggles only excited him more and he tightened his grip.
“We’re smarter than you think, Doctor. We figured out what you and the old man are up to. And we’re going to stop you. Permanently. But first…”
He shifted his grip, his intent clear. Oh, God! Genie squealed and kicked backward but encountered only air. Her attacker chuckled and ground her harder against the sink. She whipped her body from side to side in an effort to loosen his hot, trembling arms while her hands groped wildly for a weapon. Something. Anything.
Her grasping fingers glanced off a pair of bandage scissors and sent them spinning to the floor.
Oh, God!
She flailed, straining against his superior strength and trying for the freedom she knew was only a few feet away. Then at the last possible moment, when she heard the rasp of his zipper and felt his cruel, groping hand on her body, Genie touched something else with a straining fingertip.
Something heavy.
Something cold and metal and sharp-cornered.
As his hot fingers slithered up her leg beneath the sensible gray wool skirt, Genie screamed against the impersonal latex glove, grabbed the metal thing and swung it over her shoulder with all her might.
There was a sickening thud as it connected. A bitter curse. Warm wetness sprayed her cheek and the hand fell away from her mouth. She was free!
Then she saw a quick movement of black shadow against the unholy red light.
Pain exploded in her head.
And she saw no more.
“DR. WATSON? Dr. Watson?”
At first the voice reminded her of the loudspeaker at St. Agnes, where she’d done her residency. Dr. Watson. Paging Dr. Watson. Dr. Watson to the NICU.
She’d hated the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, full of sick babies, some born with genetic disorders. For many of the tiny lives in the NICU the cures were few, the costs high, and the bright spark of consciousness too quickly snuffed. Like Marilynn. Poor, dear Marilynn. Genie shuddered and tried to slide deeper into the beckoning blackness.
But the voice wouldn’t allow that. “Dr. Watson? Genie? Come on now, wake up.”
She must be dreaming. She heard the rubba-thump, rubba-thump of the light-proof revolving door and wondered what the light lock was doing in her bedroom.
“Genie? Can you hear me?” For that matter, what was a man’s voice doing in her bedroom? The last time that had happened the voice had belonged to the cable guy, and he’d been whiny and had a hanging butt crack the size of a Smithfield ham.
“She’s unconscious. And look at all that blood.” Another voice murmured agreement as the first one said, “Where the hell are the paramedics? The genetic research building is part of Boston General, for chrissake. The E.R.’s right down the street. What’s taking them so long?”
Frustration edged the tone, but the voice was still nice-gruff and interesting, without the nasal twang of Boston. His voice made Genie feel warm and fuzzy and she wanted to snuggle into the sound and bring it with her to the safe darkness.
“Genie? Can you hear me? Open your eyes, sweetheart.”
Sweetheart? She liked that. She hadn’t been anyone’s sweetheart in a long, long time. Not since her father died.
Her eyes remained stubbornly closed when she ordered them to open, but her head began to hurt like hell as if the act had alerted thousands of anxious neurons that she was conscious and ready for pain.
Rubba-thump, rubba-thump. The sound of the revolving light lock magnified the throbbing behind her eyes and she began to feel the hard, cool floor beneath her. This wasn’t her bedroom and, oh, she was beginning to hurt.
A new voice, excited. “The police and the paramedics are here.” An audible gulp. “Is Dr. Watson going to be okay? That’s an awful lot of blood.”
“I don’t think it’s all hers. I hope to hell it’s not.” She could feel her anchor move away. With a monumental effort she cracked open her eyes and made out a blurry man-shape against the bright, stabbing light.
“Don’t leave me. Please.” Was that pitiful croak really her own voice? It must have been, because she heard him crouch down beside her, felt him take her hand—
And she slid back into the warm, blessed darkness, taking his presence with her. Feeling safe.
“WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED, Nick?” Leo Gabney looked as though he wanted to yank at his hair as he paced the moss green waiting room at Boston General’s E.R. Instead he pulled a soggy handkerchief from his back pocket, wiped it across the top of his glistening scalp, turned and marched back the way he had come.
Nick watched his boss pace and didn’t say a word. He’d screwed up, that’s what happened. The developer room was across the hall from his office, for God’s sake. He should’ve known something was wrong. He should’ve been quicker, smarter. Better, said the Senator’s voice in the back of his head, and Nick twisted his lips in rare agreement.
He’d been annoyed when Jill had told him she hadn’t developed yesterday’s DNA sequencing because the darkroom was still being used. He’d said something pithy and rude about the one-step-holier-and-a-heck-of-a-lot-smarter-than-the-creator M.D., Ph.D. he was forced to share lab space with and had ignored the Occupied—Please Do Not Enter sign on the darkroom door. He’d simply barged in, intent on giving Dr. Genius a piece of his mind.
The red lights had been on. He’d expected that, since only an idiot would handle autorad film in white light and Dr. Genius was anything but an idiot. But he hadn’t expected the little room to be torn apart, with film cassettes opened and scattered willy-nilly and the developer’s guts strewn about like spaghetti.
Then he’d stepped further into the room and his foot had slipped on something dark. Something trailing. A black ribbon that led directly to the crumpled lab coat under the sink. He’d flicked on the fluorescents and the red of the dark lights had become a patchwork of macabre crimson splashes on the floor and walls.
Blood. Lots of it. And the motionless body of his archnemesis, Dr. Eugenie Watson, M.D., Ph.D.
“Gentlemen?” The strange voice echoed in the E.R. waiting room and Nick shot to his feet. It wasn’t the cops this time. It was a doctor in bloodstained greens.
It was too soon. They couldn’t possibly have stopped all that bleeding in so little time. She must’ve died.
Genius Watson was dead.
Nick remembered that he’d been rude to her that morning in the elevator, more out of habit than any real rancor, and perhaps also because for one brief moment he’d thought she looked nice in the soft gray wool skirt and high-buttoned blouse. Pretty. Touchable.
When a man started thinking of gray wool and lace collars as sexy, he needed to get laid. Fast. Or so he’d thought at the time. Now all he could think was that he’d do anything to go back in time and murder the guy in the darkroom for trashing their experiments and injuring Dr. Watson.
Killing her?
He had a sudden, sharp image of Watson’s bloody hand lying in his as they rode to the hospital in the shrieking ambulance. She had begged him not to leave when she should have been cursing him for not finding her sooner. How had he not known something was wrong? He’d been sitting in his office wrestling with that damned journal article. How