“Why?” she demanded.
The guard frowned, lifting his hand to rub the back of his neck. Clearly he sensed the danger prickling in the air, even if he didn’t recognize that it came from Sinclair.
“He’s in isolation.”
Isolation? Hmm. Clearly someone didn’t want Gerald Medlen to be bothered with casual visitors.
“I don’t care where he is,” she countered. “I was sent here to speak with him.” She lifted the phone, pretending to punch in a series of numbers. “If I need to make a call to the SAU, I will.”
The guard’s face paled. “The SAU?”
She shrugged. “They are the ones who asked me to conduct this interview.”
Licking his lips, the guard glanced over his shoulder, obviously more scared of the SAU than his boss at the hospital.
“Don’t call,” he said at last. “I’ll take you to the ward.” Grabbing a walkie-talkie, he lifted it to his mouth. “Jenson, take over for me,” he ordered. Then, with a jerky motion, he turned to lead them across the tile floor. “Follow me.”
In silence, they moved toward the door, pausing for the guard to punch a combination of buttons on the electronic lock before they entered the main part of the hospital.
There was another lobby, although this one had comfortable suede furniture and large plants to add a hint of hominess. The front desk was empty, but she could hear the sound of approaching voices.
The guard thankfully headed directly toward another door, this one leading to a stairwell.
Quickly moving forward, she breathed a silent sigh of relief as the door shut behind them.
Climbing the stairs, Sinclair remained close behind her. She savored the heat of his body that wrapped around her. It helped to ease the fear that was a hard knot in her belly. She’d never done anything so daring in her life.
It was nerve-wracking.
“I always knew it was a matter of time before the authorities showed up,” the guard said as he led them up yet another flight of stairs.
“Why do you say that?” Mira asked, depending on Sinclair to keep a watch for danger while she concentrated on pumping their companion for information.
The guard glanced over his shoulder. “They can say the patient is in isolation because he suffered from some sort of mental trauma, but we all suspect that it’s something else.”
Ah, good. A man who liked to gossip.
“What do you suspect?”
He lowered his voice, not seeming to notice that it still echoed through the stairwell.
“The return of the virus.”
“Do you have any evidence?”
“We have a lot of crazies,” the guard told her. “Most of them are locked in the east wing. Why wouldn’t Medlen be with the other loons?”
She squashed her instinctive distaste. Now wasn’t the time to inform the man that he had no business working in an institution that cared for the most vulnerable people if he didn’t have any compassion.
“Have you ever seen him?” she instead demanded.
“No. And that just proves my point,” the man said, beginning to huff and puff as they reached the fourth floor. “All the other patients are taken out onto the grounds during the day. Even those who are in wheelchairs. All of them except Medlen.”
Reaching the top landing, they were forced to halt as the guard punched in another series of numbers on the electronic pad. There was a click before the door slid open.
They entered into a waiting room that had furniture that was more functional than fashionable. Across the tiled floor was a wall made of frosted glass with a steel door in the middle.
“You’ve never seen him?” she asked as the guard came to a halt in the center of the floor.
“Not once.” The man shrugged. “As far as I know, only his sister ever goes into his room.”
Sinclair moved to stand at her side, his hand on her lower back.
“No one else has visited him?” he demanded.
“Not that I know of,” the guard answered. “’Course I’ve only been here about five years.”
Mira silently commended Jessica. If she was hiding her husband, she’d done a hell of a job. Clearly, no one knew anything about the mysterious patient.
“Do you know how long Mr. Medlen has been here?” she pressed.
“One of the older guards once told me that he’d been in that room for at least twenty years.” Inching his way back toward the door to the stairwell, the guard nodded his head toward the far wall. “The man is through there.”
Mira sent him a startled glance. “Aren’t you going to unlock the door?”
“I don’t have a key,” the guard said. “As far as I know, only his sister can get in.”
“But…” Mira’s words trailed away as the guard pulled open the door and darted away.
Like a rat leaving a sinking ship.
Giving a shake of her head, Mira turned her attention to Sinclair.
“Can you get us in?” she asked.
He gave a slow nod, his attention focused on the door slamming behind the retreating guard.
“Of course,” he said, his voice distracted as he slowly turned his head to meet Mira’s gaze. “You’re sure there’s no chance that we might be wrong?”
She frowned in confusion. “About what?”
“Could this really be a patient with the virus instead of Dr. Lowman?” he demanded. “As much as I want to expose the SAU, I won’t risk another pandemic to do it.”
She reached out to lightly touch his arm. She loved the fact that he was concerned for the humans. After all the ghastly things they’d done to the shifters, no one would blame him for condemning them to hell. But that wasn’t who he was.
Sinclair was a wolf with honor.
“I can’t be sure it’s Dr. Lowman, but I can be sure it’s not a sick patient,” she assured him. “The CDC has been monitoring the virus, making certain that it didn’t mutate so the vaccine was no longer effective. They determined that since it was a man-made virus, it has burnt itself out.”
Sinclair grimaced. “I hope to God they’re right.”
Mira gave a slow nod. She’d been too young to truly remember the horror, but her time at the CDC had revealed an insight into the horrifying death and chaos that had swept throughout the world.
“We all hope they’re right,” she said.
With faith in her assurances that warmed her heart, Sinclair moved to the door set in the frosted wall and grabbed the handle.
He glanced over his shoulder. “Ready?”
“Yes.”
With a quick twist of his wrist, the knob turned, snapping the lock with an ease that revealed just how strong Sinclair was even in his human form.
He shoved open the door, stepping into the room even as he reached back in a silent demand for Mira to stay where she was. Resisting the urge to roll her eyes, she remained in the waiting room until he returned to gesture for her to join him.
Moving through the open doorway, she allowed her gaze to move over the long space that served as both a living room and bedroom.
At the end closest to the door, was a small sofa and chair with a coffee table. At the opposite end, were a hospital bed and a dresser with a TV on top. There was another door that she assumed led to a bathroom.
It would have been depressing, in an institutional sort of way, if it weren’t for the bank of windows that lined the back wall, offering a stunning view of the gardens.
Bathed in the late afternoon sunlight, a man stood next to the windows.
Short and slender, the stranger had a thick mane of silver hair and a sharply defined profile. His back was slightly humped as if he were carrying a great weight. At the moment, he was dressed in a robe with striped pajama bottoms.
Mira had a suspicion that he had an entire closet filled with robes and pajama bottoms.
There was no need for clothes if he never left this room.
She stepped toward him, Sinclair close by her side. “Dr.
Lowman?”
The man didn’t turn, but his body stiffened. A certain sign that her suspicion had been right.
This was the man they were searching for.
“Are you here to kill me?” he asked in low tones.
Mira was caught off guard by the question. “No,” she denied. “I swear we have no intention of hurting you.”
“A shame.”
Wondering if the man was mentally unstable, Mira shared a glance with Sinclair before returning her wary gaze to the doctor.
“Excuse me?”
There was a long pause before the man finally spoke.
“There are nights when it would be easier to end it all. Unfortunately, I don’t have the courage to do it myself. I’ve never had courage.” The man’s thin shoulders hunched even further. “Plenty of brains, but no courage.”
She stepped forward, only to have Sinclair reach out to grab her arm and tug her back. Clearly, he wasn’t convinced that the doctor was as frail and helpless as he appeared.
“Why would you want to end it all?” she asked in confusion.
She didn’t know what she’d expected when she at last confronted Dr. Lowman. Anger. Denial. Excuses. But not this deep, almost tangible air of regret.
“To forget.” Slowly, he turned, revealing his narrow face that was deeply lined, although he couldn’t be much more than fifty years old. “Do you know, when I close my eyes at night, I can hear them scream.”
Mira shivered. Was there a darkness that filled the room? Or was it just her overactive imagination?
“Hear who scream?” she asked, even though she knew the answer.
Lowman gave a sad shake of his head. “The dead.”
Mira grimaced, struggling not to think about the horrific guilt the doctor would have to live with if he was somehow responsible for the mass destruction of mankind.
Instead, she focused on keeping him talking. They had to get answers. The sooner, the better.
“Are you talking about the virus?”
He gave a slow nod, pain in his pale eyes. “Yes.”
“How did it happen?” she asked, deciding to start at the beginning.
The doctor leaned against the windows, his face shadowed. “I was hired by the Verona Clinic because of my work with the Ebola virus while I was finishing my doctoral program at John Hopkins University.”
“You must have been very young,” she said.
He released a short, humorless laugh. “Young and idealistic. I thought the intention was to broaden my research to find a cure.”
A portion of the anger she hadn’t even realized she was harboring toward this man began to ease. Was it possible that he was more a victim than the evil scientist she’d been imagining?
“I’m assuming that’s not what they wanted?” she asked.
“No.” His thin body was wracked by a visible shudder. “Only months after starting at the clinic, I was told my research was being funded by Bellum International.”
“Damn,” Sinclair abruptly breathed. “That’s the connection to Ranney.”
Mira frowned. Were they talking about Colonel Ranney? The head of the SAU?
“He didn’t want a cure for Ebola,” the doctor said, his pale eyes shadowed with dark memories. “In fact, he wanted to turn it into a weapon.”
Ah. Mira belatedly understood the connection. She’d forgotten that Bellum International was a defense contractor.
“Why didn’t you quit?” Sinclair demanded, clearly not as sympathetic toward the doctor as Mira.
“They threatened to blackball me,” Lowman said. “They said I would never work in research again.”
“And your career was more important than the human race?” Sinclair snarled.
The doctor flinched, whether from guilt or fear was impossible to guess.
“It wasn’t like that,” he denied the accusation. “They assured me that it was going to be like nuclear weapons.”
Mira sucked in a sharp breath. “What’s that mean?”
Dr. Lowman restlessly plucked at the belt that was wrapped around his robe. He reminded Mira of a nervous bird, constantly on edge.
“They promised that it was only going to be a deterrent,” he said, his expression defensive. “That it would never actually be used.”
Heat prickled through the air as Sinclair struggled to contain his wolf.
“But it was,” he snapped.
The doctor took an instinctive step backward, his face paling to a pasty white.
“God forgive me.”
Mira wrapped her fingers around Sinclair’s arm, sensing he was reaching the limit of his control. And unlike other men, if Sinclair snapped, it wasn’t going to be a few angry words and maybe a punch to the face. It was going to be fur and claws and lethal fangs.
“Did they intend to destroy the world?” she asked.
“No.” The doctor hesitated as he considered his words. “Or, at least, the head of the clinic didn’t plan on doing more than trying to see how swiftly the subject was infected and if the local medical facilities could detect that it wasn’t a natural virus.”
Her lips curled in disgust. How could anyone who was in charge of a place that was supposed to promote healing actually be part of an experiment that had no purpose beyond spreading death?
“Why would it matter if the doctors could determine if it was manmade or natural?” she asked.
It was Sinclair who answered. “If you want to discreetly kill a world leader, or even destabilize a nation, you wouldn’t want anyone capable of tracing the death back to whoever ordered the assassinations.”
“Oh,” she breathed, shuddering in revulsion.
Sinclair’s eyes glowed as he glared at the doctor. “So what went wrong?”
Lowman gave a helpless lift of his hands. “The virus spread far quicker than anyone could have predicted. Before they could contain the damage, it’d grown out of control.”
A growl rumbled in the air as Sinclair curled his hands into tight fists.
“Ranney might not have intended mass genocide, but he was swift to take advantage,” he sneered.
“Yes,” the doctor breathed, his head abruptly jerking to the side as a hidden door slid open.
“Who are you and how the hell did you get in here?” a voice sliced through the air as a woman stepped into the room.
Chapter 11
Sinclair was furious with himself.
How the hell had he gotten so distracted that he’d failed to notice that someone was approaching? Even if it was through some secret door?
With a speed that no human could match, Sinclair was moving across the long room and circling the woman to approach her from behind. Then, wrapping one arm around her upper body to pin her arms to her side, he slammed his hand across her mouth to ensure she couldn’t make a sound.
“Sinclair,” Mira called out.
He ignored her protest, along with the doctor’s pained whimper. Instead, he concentrated on the woman, who was standing, frozen in fear.
“Don’t move,” he growled in her ear. “And keep your mouth shut. Understand?”
Waiting until she’d given a hesitant nod, Sinclair quickly frisked her, removing her cellphone along with a small, black pager that he shoved into his pocket.
“Please,” the doctor pleaded. “Don’t hurt her.”
Slowly stepping back, Sinclair studied her with a narrowed gaze. Wearing scrubs and a white lab jacket with a nametag that read ‘Jessica,’ he had to assume that this was Dr. Lowman’s wife.
She had dark hair that was peppered with gray and cut in a short, no-nonsense style. She was almost as thin as her husband, as if they’d both been worn to the bone over the past twenty-five years. Not that he had any sympathy for either of them.
Lowman may have been young, but he’d clearly permitted his ambition to allow him to turn a blind eye to the looming apocalypse.
Jessica licked her lips, regarding Sinclair with dark brown eyes.
“You’re a shi
fter,” she said, trying to disguise her fear behind a façade of stoic calm.
He snapped his teeth in her direction, even as Mira moved to stand at his side, her hand running a soothing path down his back.
“Sinclair, don’t,” she said. “She’s only trying to protect her husband.”
The woman’s dark eyes widened. “How did you know?”
Continuing to stroke her hand over his tense muscles, Mira’s touch anchored him. A necessary thing. His wolf didn’t care that they needed information. It just wanted to punish the people responsible for causing his people such acute pain.
“We’ve been trying to prove that the shifters are innocent of causing the Verona Virus,” Mira explained. “The trail led us to Dr. Lowman.”
Cautiously, the woman crossed the room to wrap an arm around her husband’s shoulders.
“Hasn’t he suffered enough?”
“He’s suffered?” Sinclair snarled in disbelief, glancing around the comfortable room with the sunny view of the gardens. “What about my people? They’ve been caged and branded and collared. Every day, they’re brutalized by their captors while the world condemns them as monsters who should be destroyed.”
The older woman caught her lower lip between her teeth, tightening her hold on her husband.
“It’s not our fault.”
“You knew the truth,” Sinclair said, refusing to let them off the hook. They might have convinced themselves they’d been helpless victims, but he wasn’t nearly so generous. “You knew that it was Colonel Ranney and the Verona Clinic that caused the pandemic, and yet you remained silent, allowing my people to suffer.”
Lowman groaned, leaning against his wife as if she were his only strength.
“They would have killed him if he’d tried to expose the truth,” Jessica told them in harsh tones. “How could that have helped anyone?”
“Instead, he hid here like a coward,” Sinclair accused.
The female tilted her chin, her eyes flashing with anger. “Don’t you dare judge us.”
“Jessica, he’s right,” Lowman abruptly stiffened his spine as if realizing he was cowering behind his wife. “I already told you I was a coward. My presence here just confirms it.”