Rick stood taller as a man walked toward them.
“By any chance do you know which way I need to go to find the cafeteria?” the stranger asked Rick and glanced around him to Olivia.
She blinked a few times.
Rick positioned himself in front of her and pointed in the direction they’d just come. “There is a map by the elevators just around the corner,” he told him.
The tall stranger looked at Rick briefly, then at her again. “Thanks.”
Olivia tried to smile, despite the pounding in her head.
As the man walked away, Rick moved to keep himself between her and the stranger.
“He didn’t look like he wanted to hurt me,” she offered.
“The more innocent they look, the more dangerous they are,” Rick said.
Olivia started to comment, but the hospital employee opened the door to the CAT scan room and moved her inside.
“What do we have?” Neil sat in his hotel room, Sasha at his side. Isaac and Lars were on point monitoring Marie Nickerson’s transfer. Once the woman was in the air, her whereabouts were between her and the federal marshals involved in hiding her in plain sight. Neil had to trust the witness protection program, even if it cut at him to do so.
Rick and AJ, two other members of his team, were assigned to Olivia.
Cooper, Claire, and Jax were back in LA doing the legwork.
Or hacking, as it stood.
The hotel suite had duffel bags tossed on the floor and three computers set up on a conference table.
Sasha sat at one, Neil at another.
Claire was on speaker so they could both hear.
“Olivia knows how to cover her tracks,” Claire stated. “She spoofed someone’s phone in North Dakota, making it almost impossible to locate where she was making her calls from. I spent some time digging and found a ping from her phone to the cell tower at the Wynn when she called you the night of the shooting. The next ping was when she called you again, this time the call bounced around. But we have a general area when you triangulate where she was walking when she was shot and the most likely places she would feel safe to stay—”
“All I want is an address.” Neil liked Claire’s skills, but didn’t need a detailed dossier of how she managed to obtain it.
“I have a block. There are three small hotels, not the kind that have cameras in every corner. My guess is the management doesn’t want to know what goes on there.”
“What about city cameras?” Sasha asked.
Jax’s voice carried over the line. “I’m working on it. Going back from when the trial began. The problem is I don’t know what I’m looking for. Was she wearing a wig, a costume? Dressed as a man? I’m going with the description from the night at the Wynn and the blonde wig.”
Neil looked over his computer screen at Sasha.
They needed to narrow this down, find out where Olivia had been staying, and empty it out before her bill came due and someone went into the room and found Olivia’s belongings. Sasha insisted the woman wouldn’t leave anything incriminating where others would find it, but that didn’t mean her fake IDs wouldn’t be found and eventually handed over to the feds.
That wouldn’t bode well for anyone.
“Give me the address you have,” Sasha told them. She jotted it down and stood.
“Don’t go in alone,” Neil instructed her.
The look on her face said she’d do what she damn well pleased if it suited her.
She grabbed her bag and walked out of the room.
Neil wanted to growl. “Where do we stand with medical and location?” he asked the team instead.
“Found a place in Colorado just outside of Durango. Remote enough to go unnoticed, but close to a hospital if the need arrives. We have a nurse, retired army. Spent some time living in tents in the Middle East in the nineties. Looking forward to combat pay.”
Sounded right up Neil’s alley for the team.
“Soon as Lars and Isaac are free of their assignment, I’ll dispatch them to Colorado. Claire, keep digging in that phone.”
“Will do. But, Neil?”
“Yeah?”
“What are the chances of Olivia remembering who she is and just bailing?”
“She’ll bolt the second she remembers. But if we can get her someplace safe, maybe she’ll give herself some time to heal and regroup.”
“And if she doesn’t recover her memory?” Cooper asked.
“That’s unlikely.” Neil just hoped it was later rather than sooner.
“Look who’s sitting up and eating.”
Leo had shown his ID to Neil’s man sitting in the chair outside Olivia’s room before walking in.
Her face had color, and someone had brushed her hair into a sweeping ponytail that trailed down one shoulder.
She put her fork down and lifted a napkin to her lips while she finished chewing. “I’m sure I’ve had better. I think.”
Leo had already gotten the report that her memory had yet to resurface. So he took her words as the joke they were meant to be.
“May I?” he asked, pointing to the chair beside her bed.
When the woman smiled, a small amount of light he hadn’t seen before reached her eyes. “Thank you for asking. Yes, please.”
He supposed her experience in the hospital was a steady stream of people doing without asking day in and day out. “You look better.”
“Hurts like a horse kicked me across an arena. But clearing my head from the narcotics is helping.”
“How is saying no to painkillers helping?”
She tapped her head with an index finger. “Less fog.”
“And the pain?”
She shrugged. “It’s just pain.”
He peered at the side of the bed, saw the same drainage bag that had been there since she returned from surgery. Same IVs, probes, and things that squeezed her legs since she was lying in bed. Her saying It’s just pain was unexpected.
“Don’t let me keep you from eating.”
She smiled and pushed the overhead table away. “I was done anyway.”
Now he felt bad. It didn’t appear as if she’d eaten a third of what was on her plate.
“Your name is Leo, right?”
It was his turn to smile. “Yes.”
“You’re a federal agent.” Her face twisted as she said those words.
“I am.”
“Have you found the person who shot me?”
“We’re working on it.”
“I suppose that’s all I can ask. For all I know I deserved to get—”
“Whoa, back up. No. You were standing there minding your own business. You didn’t deserve any of this.” He waved a hand at the room.
She lowered her eyes to her lap.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She brought her gaze to his. “Did you shoot me?”
“No,” he choked out.
“Then why are you sorry?”
Because it should be me in that bed.
“I’m sorry it happened. That you were hurt.”
She frowned. “That’s a waste of an apology.”
He laughed. “I thought women liked apologies.”
“Not me, apparently.” She gifted him another smile. “Did you tell me what we were talking about when this happened?”