Gated Prey (Eve Ronin #3)(37)

There was no time for Eve to ask Lopez that now. The answer could wait.

“I will.”

Eve dressed quickly in yesterday’s clothes, grabbed her gun, her badge, and her keys, and hurried out the door, calling the dispatcher on the run to send paramedics and an ambulance to Anna McCaig’s house.

But she knew she’d get there first. She lived less than two minutes away from Oakdale and she sped up to the gate, where a male guard was on duty.

Eve rolled down her window, held up her badge, and yelled, “Sheriff’s Department! Open the gate and keep it open. Paramedics are right behind me.”

As if on cue, they could hear the sirens coming. The fire station was at the corner of Parkway Calabasas and Calabasas Road, nearly as close to Oakdale as her hotel.

The guard opened the gate and Eve tore up the road to the house, came to a skidding stop at the curb, put the car in park, and left the engine running as she rushed to the door. It was mostly glass, like the one at the sting house. She pounded on the door with her fist.

“Mrs. McCaig! This is the police.”

There was no answer.

Following the ME’s advice, Eve kicked out one of the glass panes, then reached inside and opened the door. The paramedic unit pulled up behind her car. A man and a woman spilled out and grabbed their equipment from the back of the truck.

Eve rushed into the freezing house and ran down the hall to the bedroom, where she found Anna in bed, lying on her side, the comforter pulled up to her neck, a bottle of pills open on the nightstand beside an empty glass.

She whipped back the sheets, revealing Anna in her pajamas on clean sheets, just as the paramedics rushed in. The female paramedic pushed Eve aside.

“Mrs. McCaig,” the paramedic said, shaking Anna. “Do you hear me?”

Anna rolled over, groggy and disoriented. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

Eve picked up the bottle of pills. It was Ambien. Sleeping pills.

“Have you been bleeding?” the paramedic asked.

“No,” Anna said. “I mean . . . not much.”

Eve spoke up before the paramedic could. “You need to go to the hospital right away.”

“But I feel fine,” Anna said.

“You aren’t fine. The medical examiner doing the autopsy on your baby says you suffered serious internal injuries during childbirth. You need to go to the ER right now or you will die.”

Eve said that to Anna but also for the benefit of the two paramedics, who were giving her questioning looks. Her fear was that Anna would refuse to go to the hospital. So she wanted to get Anna so caught up in the urgency of the situation, and Eve’s authority, that it wouldn’t occur to her that she had the right to say no.

The female paramedic knew something was up but went along with it, turning to the ambulance attendants. “Let’s get her onto a gurney.”

Eve gestured to the male paramedic, put the lid back on the bottle of sleeping pills, and tossed it to him.

He looked at the bottle, then at Anna on the gurney, who was being covered with a sheet and strapped in. “How many sleeping pills did you take?”

“One. Maybe two. I don’t know. I couldn’t sleep. I kept seeing . . . my baby.”

“When?”

“Tonight.” Anna was confused and Eve wanted to keep her that way, at least until she got to the hospital and the doctors could look at her. “My clothes, my things . . .”

“I’ll get everything,” Eve said. “Go! Go!”

The ambulance team and the male paramedic rushed Anna out. The female paramedic lingered behind, put her hands on her hips, and gave Eve a hard look.

“What the hell is going on here?”

“What’s your name?”

“Jamie Dundas.”

Eve handed her a card. “I’m Eve Ronin. If you get any blowback for this, Jamie, I’ll take full responsibility and say I forced you into it. The woman gave birth to a dead baby yesterday. This morning the ME found parts of the uterus and an ovary attached to the placenta.”

Dundas was shocked. “There should be blood all over the place.”

Eve checked the bathroom. There was no sign of blood and it smelled of cleansers, bringing back troubling memories of her first homicide scene. She pushed them to the back of her mind. They had nothing to do with this.

“Maybe she bled in the bathroom and cleaned it up.”

“I suppose it’s possible,” Dundas said, “because it’s already a miracle that she’s still alive.”

Eve quickly gathered some clothes from the closet and the dresser drawers. “What about grogginess? Could that be a symptom of her injuries?”

“Any woman would be groggy if she gave birth yesterday, took some sleeping pills, and was awakened only a few hours later. This woman should be dead.”

“Thanks for taking a risk on me. I owe you one. I’ve got to get to the hospital,” Eve said, holding the clothes. “Close the front door, will you?”

Eve rushed out, grabbed Anna’s purse in the dining room, and ran to her car, hopped in, made a screeching U-turn, and sped off to catch up to the ambulance.

She waited until she hit Parkway Calabasas to call the ME while, at the same time, leaning on the horn and weaving through traffic.

“We got her. She’s still alive.”