Hide (Detective Harriet Foster #1)(107)

The entire house went quiet, except for the echo from the rounds. “You okay there, Li?”

“No.” Li tried to reposition herself on the wall. It looked painful. “You?”

“I’ve been better.” Foster worked her way to her feet and approached Amelia carefully.

Li tried straightening her right leg out but didn’t get far. “Please tell me she’s dead.”

Foster leaned over and felt for a pulse. She found one but wasn’t sure if she considered that good news or bad. “She’s still breathing.”

Li squeezed her eyes shut. “Fuck. I need to get back to the range. Tom Morgan’s dead. In the basement . . . for real this time.”

The front door swung open and Nowak burst in, gun drawn, eyes sweeping right to left. “Police!”

“Yep,” Foster called out. “Mind calling it in?” She looked over at an unconscious Amelia. “And cuffing that.”

But before Nowak could make the call, there was the urgent sound of approaching police sirens.

Li smiled, then grimaced. “Ah, the cavalry.”

Foster took a good look at her bleeding arm and hand. “Griffin’s going to kill us.”

Li managed a grim smile. “I knew that the second I landed at the bottom of those stairs.”



The house quickly flooded with cops and paramedics. Davies was rushed out on a stretcher; Foster and Li followed right behind on stretchers of their own. The techs came for Morgan. He’d been dead for hours. Obviously, Amelia had gotten over her “daddy worship” and had decided to make him pay for killing her mother and deceiving her.

Griffin wasn’t happy when she walked into Foster’s emergency room bay an hour later. She had been stitched up, bandaged up, her arm placed in a sling, but that didn’t mean Foster would get an ounce of sympathy from the boss. Li was a couple bays down getting a cast put on her broken ankle. She’d gotten luckier with the knee. It was only sprained. None of it was good, except the part where they’d caught two maniac killers and hadn’t died. Foster hoped that would temper Griffin’s anger somewhat.

Griffin took one look. Foster saw her jaw clench. This was no courtesy visit. “Let’s hear it.”

Foster cleared her throat and ran it through again from the second she and Li had breached the door to the moment they’d shot Amelia. When she had finished, Griffin was almost the color of an heirloom tomato, and her eyes looked as inky as a snake’s. “Are you a hot dog, Foster?”

“I am not, boss.”

“Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

“We were following a lead . . .”

“No backup,” Griffin said, cutting her off. “With nobody knowing where you were going. If it weren’t for Lonergan finding the address to that house on Li’s desk, we’d have had no idea.” She stepped closer. “I could have lost two cops today. Two. In one day.”

“Yes, boss.”

Still, Griffin wouldn’t let Foster’s eyes go. “You want to play Russian roulette, you’re going to have to do it somewhere else.”

Foster shook her head. “This is not that.” It didn’t look like Griffin believed her. “It was a bad call.”

“Which one of you made it?”

A beat went by. “I did.”

Griffin glowered. “Li said it was her. I don’t know whether to pat myself on the back for putting you two together or kick myself in the ass for doing it.”

“I’ll take the fallout,” Foster said.

Griffin stood there, steaming, but Foster barely knew the woman, so it was difficult to work out what else was going through the woman’s head. “Yeah, you will. Li will too.” She yanked open the door. “I’m not sending either of you any damn flowers . . . friggin’ Rambo bullcrap.”

“Amelia?” Foster asked.

“Lucky for you two, she’s too evil to die.” Griffin stormed out and let the door ease closed behind her. Foster leaned back in bed and thought about how close she’d come to not being here, how she’d actually stopped for a moment midstruggle to work out whether she was okay with dying by Amelia’s hand. That she’d chosen correctly was a positive. It confirmed that she was strong enough, invested enough, to stay. Why hadn’t Glynnis been?

Foster stared down at her shoes, at the flecks of blood on the leather. Her blood, and Amelia’s too, likely. She decided then that they’d meet the trash the second she could get them there. “The world keeps turning,” she muttered absently. Spotting a paper clip on the instrument tray along with what was left of the bandages and gauze used to wrap her wounds, she picked it up and slid it into her pocket.

Habit. Necessity. Whichever it was, she was sure that she wasn’t ready to stop marking time. She knew that wanting to live and knowing how to live on were different things.

Reg’s memorial was approaching. There would be balloons, Felix had said. She would not be there. Foster knew another thing for sure—she was afraid to let Reg go, afraid of how little was left if she did. She ran her bandaged hand along the sling, feeling for the bandages beneath it. She’d come away with more than eighty stitches . . . and her life. She lifted off the bed, then pulled herself up straight. “Okay, Reg. Let’s do this.”