“Look, Carmen.” Isabella had her soothing voice dialed up to its highest setting, and oh, wasn’t this a switch. “No one wants to get you or Dante jammed up. But we know he called you a couple weeks ago, and that you called him back a day after that, which means you must know him somehow. Right now, you’re the only connection we have to him, and we really need to find him so we can figure out who hurt Axel. Can you help us out with that? Please?”
Carmen opened her mouth to issue a hot and fast “no”, but nothing came out. Whatever Axel and Dante were tangled up in was clearly dangerous. But telling Isabella about the night clinic was a risk she couldn’t take. People needed the care they provided there. Yeah, she’d lose her career if anyone found out, but so would all of the other doctors and nurses who volunteered there, all of whom were just trying to help people in need. It wouldn’t matter if Carmen insisted that the doctors took a hard stand against anything illegal. Gunshot wounds, gang activity, drug seekers, all of it got reported, albeit anonymously. Their purpose was to help, not to enable, and she truly didn’t know anything about whatever had gotten Axel and Dante into trouble. So she took a deep breath, and when she exhaled, she told all the truth she could.
“I don’t know Axel, and I don’t know what he and Dante are tangled up in. I haven’t spoken to Dante in weeks, and I have no idea where he’s crashing or where he hangs out. I’m sorry.”
“But you do know him,” Isabella said, not unkindly.
Which made it that much harder for Carmen to say, “I can’t help you.”
“You mean won’t.”
Liam’s voice sliced through the room. Isabella’s brows slung upward at the same time Carmen took a step back on the linoleum, her guard locked firmly into place.
“Excuse me?”
His stare flashed over hers, a steely mix of gray and green in the overbright fluorescent lighting of the conference room. “You obviously know Dante somehow. He knew Axel was in trouble last night, and told him to call you for help. Axel’s in a coma, Dante is in the wind, and all we have is you. So, are you going to tell us exactly how you know Dante, or not?”
“No,” Carmen said, pushing the word past the rattle of her pulse at her throat. “I don’t know anything that can help you.”
“Why don’t you tell us what you know and let us be the judge of that?”
Isabella divided a glance between them, lifting one hand. “Why don’t we just—”
“No.”
Carmen crossed her arms over her chest to punctuate the refusal. Liam opened his mouth—probably to argue, if the storm clouds on his face were anything to go by—but Isabella sideswiped him with a neat shake of her head.
“Okay. If you think of anything we need to know, you can call me any time. No questions asked.”
Carmen resisted the urge to snort. “No questions asked” only went so far. Especially for someone like her, with a criminal record and a dark, dirty past. “Whatever. I have patients to triage. Can I go?”
“Of course,” Isabella said.
But it was Liam’s silence that stuck to her as she walked out the door.
5
“Would you like to tell me what the fuck just happened in there?”
One thing Liam had always liked about Isabella was that she never pulled any punches. Right now? He wasn’t exactly psyched to be under the microscope.
“I’m pretty sure that was an interview,” he said, reaching for his composure with both hands as he and Isabella fell into step beside each other on the sidewalk in front of the clinic.
“And I’m pretty sure it was a shit show,” she clapped back. “You went at Carmen pretty hard, don’t you think?”
Irritation sparked in his chest, but he tamped it down. Funny how much easier it was to do when Carmen’s dark eyes and ironclad attitude weren’t on full display right in front of him. “We’ve got a stabbing victim in a coma and no idea who tried to kill him. Plus, you can’t deny that Carmen’s acting cagey as hell about this.”
“Okay, but cagey is Carmen’s default,” Isabella said. “In case you haven’t noticed, she doesn’t exactly trust easily.”
“Oh, I’ve noticed,” Liam muttered.
Isabella stopped mid-stride, tugging him out of the path of foot traffic quickly enough that all he could do was let her. “That’s it. Start talking.”
Shit. “About what?”
Her laugh wasn’t exactly happy, but it surprised Liam all the same. “We’ve been partners for a long time, so I’m going to overlook the fact that you just asked me that. What the hell is going on between you and Carmen?”
Liam’s pulse flared, but damn it, he had to control this. They had a job to do, order to restore. The sooner they solved this case, the sooner he could move on with his nice, calm, Carmen-free life.
He could not, under any circumstances, tell Isabella why Carmen slid so easily under his skin.
Or how, sometimes, late at night, when he let himself think about it, he wanted her there so badly he could taste it.
“Nothing is going on between me and Carmen,” Liam said. “I want to find Dante so we can figure out who stabbed Axel, and she’s our only lead. She obviously knows something about Dante. I pushed because I thought it would get her to talk, but clearly, I was wrong.”
Isabella didn’t look convinced. “Are you sure that’s it? Because you’re mellow with, like, everyone on the planet except for her, and you two have been fire and gasoline for years.”
Ever since they’d worked a case where Carmen had been assaulted and left unconscious in a burning building, to be exact. He’d never told Isabella what had happened later that night, when he’d gone to check on Carmen, and clearly, Carmen never had, either. But it was over, done—no, check that. It had never even started, and wasn’t that just all the more reason to forget it once and for all?
“I’m sure,” Liam said. “Like you said the other day, Carmen’s not exactly warm and fuzzy. Half the time, you two are fire and gasoline, too.”
“That’s true,” Isabella murmured, and he wasn’t going to wait to take advantage of her hesitation.
“Look, she’s your CI. I’m sorry I pushed. We’re at a dead end with this case, and I guess that got the better of me.”
He shrugged for emphasis, and that did the trick. Isabella nodded. “We really don’t have much to go on. And even though I agree that it seems like Carmen’s hiding something, I can’t see her obstructing justice. If she says she doesn’t know who hurt Axel or where Dante is now, my gut is to believe her.”
As frustrating as it was that Carmen had gone all Fort Knox on them, Liam had to agree. She’d testified against a killer once, and helped them on dozens of cases after that, albeit most of the time grudgingly.
“Let’s see if Capelli can turn up anything else on Dante,” he said. “Maybe we can pull something useful off his social media. In the meantime, we might as well check in on Axel in person, since we’re here.”
He pointed to the sprawling hospital campus a block away from the clinic. They paused only long enough to call their location in to dispatch and send an update on Dante’s LKA to the unit. Remington Memorial’s main lobby was a two-story, glass enclosed affair that bustled with all the activity Liam would expect for the city’s largest and most prestigious hospital, and he and Isabella threaded their way through the crowd, heading toward the elevators. They’d been here enough times to know the lay of the land, which made their trip to the ICU floor both quick and uneventful.