Czytaj książkę: «The Baby's Guardian»

Welcome to the first book

in Delores Fossen’s fantastic new

TEXAS MATERNITY: HOSTAGES mini-series.

Don’t forget to look out for the final instalment

The Mummy Mystery in April 2011

Chapter One

The sound of the gunshot sent Captain Shaw Tolbert’s heart to his knees.

Hell. This couldn’t happen. He couldn’t lose a single one of those hostages.

“Hold your fire!” Shaw shouted to the nearly three dozen officers and SWAT team members he had positioned all around the San Antonio Maternity Hospital.

For a split second everything and everyone around him froze. No more frantic orders and chatter from his men. Even the reporters and photographers who were pressed against the barricades nearly a block away went still, their cameras no longer flashing the bursts of light that knifed through the night.

The stunned silence didn’t last. The officers and the SWAT team already had their weapons ready, and they adjusted, taking aim in the direction of that shot.

But the shot hadn’t come from any of them.

It’d come from the fourth floor where a group of pregnant women, newborns and hospital staff were all being held at gunpoint. Hostages that included Nadine Duggan, the wife of one of Shaw’s own men, Lieutenant Bo Duggan.

That shot meant Nadine or one of the others could have been killed.

Shaw didn’t know all the hostages’ names. Heck, he wasn’t even sure he had an accurate head count. Basically, anyone unlucky enough to have been on the fourth floor at 3:00 p.m. had been taken captive by at least two gunmen wearing ski masks and carrying assault weapons. Shaw had managed to get that meager bit of information from a nurse who’d made a hysterical nine-one-one call during the first minutes of the attack. Since then, neither the nurse nor any of the other known hostages had answered their cells or the hospital phones.

Using the back of his hand to swipe the slick sweat from his forehead, Shaw maneuvered his way through his men and the equipment and hurried from his command center vehicle to the hostage negotiator. It was Texas hot, and the unforgiving August heat was still brutal despite the sun having set hours earlier.

He spotted the negotiator, Sergeant Harris McCoy, in the passenger seat of a patrol car that several officers were using as cover. The blond-haired, blue-eyed officer might look as if he’d just stepped off a glossy recruitment poster, but he was the best that San Antonio PD had. In the past four years, Harris had successfully negotiated nearly twenty hostage situations. Shaw desperately needed him to add one more gold star to his résumé.

“What happened?” Shaw asked.

Harris shook his head. “I’m not sure. I was talking to one of the gunmen on his cell—trying to get the guy to give us his demands. Then he shouted ‘she’s getting away’ and he hung up. About five seconds later, someone fired the shot.”

Shaw cursed. He prayed that shot had been fired as a warning and not deadly force. Because if a hostage had been killed, he’d have to seriously consider storming the place ASAP. He couldn’t sit back and let all those people die. But the SWAT team and police forcing their way onto the ward would almost certainly cause its own set of casualties.

“Try to get one of the gunmen back on the line,” Shaw told Harris.

While Harris pressed redial and waited for the gunman to answer, Shaw held his breath and paced. Not that he could go far. The scene was a logjam of law enforcement officers who’d initially responded, and more had arrived as this ordeal had dragged on. Nine hours. God knew what kind of havoc the gunmen could have created in that much time.

“What happened?” Harris demanded the moment he had one of the gunmen on the phone. Like the other calls throughout the afternoon and evening, this one was on speaker.

“Everything’s under control,” the gunman assured him. Which was no assurance at all.

After nine hours, Shaw was familiar with that voice, though the guy had refused to identify himself. But it was a voice Shaw would remember, and when he had everyone safely out of this, he was going after this SOB and his accomplice. That wasn’t his normal role as a captain. These days, he was pretty much a supervisor working from his desk, but for this, he’d make an exception and do some field duty.

“Is anyone hurt?” Harris asked the gunman.

“No. It was a misunderstanding, that’s all. It won’t happen again. Will it? “

“No,” someone said. A woman. And her voice created an uneasy feeling inside Shaw.

No way.

It couldn’t be her.

Shaw jerked his phone from his pocket and scrolled through the numbers until he found Sabrina Carr’s. He jabbed the call button. Waited. And cursed when he heard the ringing. Not just on his own phone, but the sound was also coming through Harris’s cell. Each ring went unanswered, and each ring confirmed that this nightmare had just gotten a lot worse. Sabrina’s phone was on the fourth floor of that hospital.

And so was she.

“That was Sabrina Carr’s voice,” Shaw managed to say to Harris in a whisper.

Harris’s head whipped up, and he pinned his alarmed gaze to Shaw’s. “You mean …” Harris mouthed, but he didn’t finish.

Shaw didn’t finish it for him, either, but they both knew what this meant. Sabrina Carr was the surrogate carrying Shaw’s child. She was eight months pregnant.

And Sabrina was a hostage.

Shaw resisted the urge to lean against the patrol car that was just inches away, and he choked back the profanity. This was a complication he didn’t need, and the situation had just gotten a lot more personal.

“Are you certain the hostage is all right?” Harris demanded from the gunman.

“See for yourself,” the man answered.

Shaw looked up at the row of eight-foot-tall windows that encircled the entire fourth floor. The building was about thirty yards away, but he still saw the movement behind the thick glass.

Someone pushed a woman into view.

The height and build were right for it to be Sabrina. About five-six and average. So was the pregnant belly that her tan cargo shorts and bulky green top couldn’t hide. Ditto for that mop of shoulder-length red hair—Sabrina had hair like that. But praying he was wrong, Shaw grabbed a pair of binoculars from the officer next to him and took a closer look.

Hell.

It was Sabrina all right.

She was shades past being pale, and he could tell from her expression that she was terrified. Probably because she’d just come close to dying. That shot had no doubt been fired at her.

Even though there was no love lost between Sabrina and him, Shaw wasn’t immune to the terror he saw on her face and in her eyes. After all, she was carrying his child.

Their child, he silently amended.

The image of his late wife flashed through his head. The baby Sabrina was carrying should have been his wife’s. His and Fay’s. Sabrina should have been just a surrogate, that’s all, but that had changed when none of Fay’s eggs had been viable. Sabrina had become the egg donor then, too. Sabrina’s DNA, not Fay’s. More than a mere surrogate. But that was an old wound that he didn’t have time to nurse right now.

“Did you know Sabrina was in there?” Harris asked, placing his hand over the receiver so the gunman wouldn’t be able to hear the question.

Shaw shook his head. Sabrina had her regular prenatal checkups at a clinic in the hospital, but she wasn’t scheduled for anything this week. Shaw knew that because she always sent him the dates and times of her appointments. Not that he’d ever gone with her to any of them. But he knew she wasn’t scheduled for anything until the day after tomorrow.

So, why was she there?

“Ask to speak to her,” Shaw instructed.

Harris nodded. “I want to talk to the hostage to make sure she’s okay,” he relayed to the gunman.

The gunman didn’t respond right away, and with the binoculars pressed to his eyes, Shaw watched. Waited.

The seconds crawled by.

Then, much to his surprise, he saw the gloved hand jut out and give Sabrina the cell phone.

Because Shaw was watching her so closely, he saw her look in the direction of that hand. The gunman’s hand. Shaw could hear the man give her whispered instructions, but he couldn’t make out what the guy was saying. It was almost certainly some kind of threat.

“Captain Shaw Tolbert?” she said.

That sent another hush around him. Inside, Shaw was having a much stronger reaction than a hush. Why the devil was she asking for him? If the gunmen knew her association with the captain of the SAPD, things could get even worse for her.

And the baby.

“Yes?” Shaw answered, trying to sound official and detached. Judging from the sound of her voice, the call was on speaker at Sabrina’s end, which meant the gunmen were listening to his every word. He certainly didn’t want to let them know that he knew her name, just in case he could salvage this situation.

“They read my medical records,” Sabrina explained. She swallowed hard. “They know you’re my emergency contact.”

Shaw choked back a groan. By knowing that bit of information, the gunmen had already guessed that Sabrina and he had some kind of relationship. Heck, her records might even say that he was the baby’s father. If so, the gunmen had some serious leverage.

Both Sabrina and the baby.

“Are you … all right?” Shaw asked.

“She is, for now,” the gunman answered for her. “You’ll need to do some things to make it stay that way.”

Even though he could clearly hear the man, Shaw took Harris’s phone and brought it closer to his mouth.

“What things?”

The gunman grabbed Sabrina’s phone as well, but she stayed in the window, staring down at the crowd. He saw her pick through the faces until she spotted him. Shaw looked away. He needed to focus, and he couldn’t do that if he was looking at her. Because looking at Sabrina only brought on those haunting images of his wife.

A man didn’t forget watching his wife die in his arms.

“My partner and I are ready to get out of here,” the gunman announced.

Shaw didn’t celebrate either silently or aloud because he knew this was just the first step to ending this, and every step afterward would be even more dangerous than the present situation.

“We’re coming out through the front entrance,” the gunman continued. “And we’ll have a hostage with us.”

They were probably planning to take Sabrina, unless Shaw could get them to change their minds.

“So, no tricks,” the gunman warned. “Have your officers back way off and have a car waiting for us out front. We’ll give the driver instructions as to where we need to go.”

Shaw sandwiched the phone between his shoulder and his ear so he could motion for one of his men to spring into action. They’d anticipated the car request and had one ready. A vehicle with not one but two hidden GPS trackers that would allow them to find the guys.

Well, maybe.

There was something not quite right about all of this.

The gunmen hadn’t requested money or any other form of ransom. That wasn’t just unusual, it was downright unsettling. After all, the men had just spent hours holding the hostages, and they’d done that without saying why this situation had started in the first place. A hospital maternity ward wasn’t the setting for many hostage standoffs, especially since this didn’t seem to be personal.

At least it hadn’t been until now.

Had the gunmen gone after Sabrina in the first place, or had that happened only after they’d learned about her connection to an SAPD police captain? Maybe the plan was to take her to a secondary location and ask for ransom?

That theory would have held some merit if Shaw had been a rich man. He wasn’t.

So, what did the men want?

Drugs, maybe. That was always a possibility when it came to hospital robberies. Maybe that was all there was to it. They’d wanted drugs and now they had them and needed to get away. That didn’t lessen the danger, but it would make the investigation a little simpler.

The officer parked the car in front of the hospital, and Shaw motioned for everyone to move away. He would pull all his men back onto the sidewalk of the building across the four lanes of St. Mary’s Street. The SWAT team would stay in place on the rooftops. Because the surrounding buildings were taller than the hospital, Shaw didn’t think the gunmen had actually seen the SWAT team. But still, they must have known they were there. This hostage situation was all over the news, and the world was watching. The gunmen must have realized that every conceivable measure would have been taken to apprehend them.

“The car’s in place,” Shaw told the gunman over the cell.

“Good. We’re coming out. Remember, no tricks.”

“My advice? Don’t take one of the new mothers or pregnant women hostage. Too much trouble, and too many things can go wrong. Take me instead.”

“No, thanks. I got my own ideas about how to handle a hostage.” And the gunman hung up.

Shaw didn’t have time to react to that bold threat because movement caught his eye. A gloved hand reached out and grabbed on to Sabrina’s arms. She snagged Shaw’s gaze then. For just a second. And the gunman yanked her out of sight.

It sickened Shaw to think of the stress this was creating for the baby. And the danger. No unborn child or pregnant woman should have to go through this, and Shaw had to make sure this ended now.

Shaw relayed the information he’d just learned to one of the uniforms who would pass it on to the other officers posted at various points around the building. He handed the phone back to Harris, and he drew his gun while he moved back across the street with his men. He kept his attention fastened to the front of the building. Watching. Bracing himself for whatever was about to go down.

When the gunmen came out, it was possible the SWAT team would have clean shots, but if that didn’t happen, the plan was to let the gunmen drive away and have plainclothes officers in unmarked cars follow in pursuit. Then, he could get his men inside the building to assess the damage. It was entirely possible they would have dead bodies or injuries on their hands. Ambulances were waiting just up the street since the hospital itself had already been evacuated, and the staff inside might need medical attention of their own.

Shaw wouldn’t be able to hold back the lieutenant whose wife was inside, so he hoped this departure ended with the gunmen being killed.

If not, well, the night was just starting.

“Smoke!” Harris shouted.

Shaw looked in the direction of Harris’s pointing finger. Oh, mercy.

What now?

It was smoke all right, and it was coming from a window on the fourth floor where the hostages were.

There was a fire engine standing by, and Shaw motioned for it to get in place. It was a huge risk. The gunmen might not come down to the car if they saw the fire department responding, but Shaw couldn’t take the chance of leaving those hostages trapped on the floor with a raging fire.

“The hospital has an overhead sprinkler system,” Harris reminded him.

But no one needed to remind Shaw that the gunmen could have disabled it. God knows what smoke and fire would do to all those babies in the newborn unit. He had to get them help immediately, even if it meant the gunmen might get away.

“Where are they?” Shaw mumbled, watching the front door.

The fire engine darted across the street and stopped at the side of the building. They immediately retrieved the ladder so they could scurry up the four floors. It was a start, but Shaw needed to get others inside so he could speed up the evacuation. In addition to the babies, there might be patients who couldn’t get out on their own.

The passing seconds pounded in his head, and at least a minute went by with no sign of the gunmen or the hostage that they claimed they would have with them.

Gray coils of smoke made their way down to them. Soon, very soon, it would obstruct their view. And maybe that’s what the gunmen had intended.

Shaw grabbed the binoculars again and checked out the front windows on the fourth floor. He could see the overhead sprinklers spewing out water. He could also see people running. Women. Some of them pregnant. Some of them carrying babies bundled in blankets.

He couldn’t delay this any longer. He had to move now.

Shaw was about to give the signal when he heard the voice on the hand-sized scanner clipped to his belt. It was Lieutenant Bo Duggan, the officer who was positioned on the west side of the building.

“The fire’s a smokescreen!” Bo shouted. “The gunmen just left through the side door and got into a white SUV with heavy tint on the windows. I can’t see the license plate number—it had mud or something covering it—and they’re moving out of the parking lot now.”

Hell.

“Shaw?” Bo said. “We couldn’t shoot at them because they have a hostage. It’s Sabrina Carr.”

Shaw’s stomach knotted, but he forced back the avalanche of emotion and dread. “Take over the evacuation,” he ordered Bo. “Get everyone out of there.” He turned to Harris. “You get in there, too. Take every available man.” Shaw turned to run toward his squad car.

“Where are you going?” Harris shouted.

“After the gunmen.”

And every second counted.

Shaw had already lost his wife, and by God he wasn’t going to let the same thing happen to his baby.

Chapter Two

Sabrina forced herself to stay calm.

It was nearly impossible to do that because there was a gun jammed against her head, and one of the ski-mask-wearing kidnappers shoved her into the backseat of an SUV. The other got behind the wheel and sped out of the parking lot.

There were plenty of officers nearby, all with guns aimed, but none of them fired a shot. Probably because they hadn’t wanted to risk wounding her and the baby. Sabrina was thankful for that, but she wondered if she’d just gone from the frying pan into the fire.

Her heart was racing, and it was so loud in her ears that it was hard for her to hear, but she thought she might have heard one of the officers shout. Maybe that meant someone would follow them because she wasn’t sure she’d be able to get herself out of this without help.

She glanced behind her at the hospital. The building was engulfed in milky gray smoke, but she could still see even more cops. Some armed with rifles were on top of the surrounding buildings.

Shaw was out there, too.

Sabrina had seen him from the window. He’d been standing among all the officers assembled to respond to the hostage situation. And even though Shaw had been so far away when she stepped into view, she had been able to make out his expression when he realized she was a hostage. That wasn’t fear on his face. More like anger.

Or even disgust.

He was probably thinking she’d screwed up again. And in a way, she had.

The gunman-driver made a sharp left turn and sent her sliding toward the door. Her captor hauled her right back so he could keep her in a close, firm grip against his side. She wanted to punch him for what he was doing.

For what he’d done back at the hospital.

Sabrina had seen him shoot an unarmed lab tech who was hardly more than a kid. He’d used a gun rigged with a silencer for that deadly assault, and the shot had hardly made a sound. It made her wonder how many others had been killed in a silent hush.

And why?

Why would be the biggest question of all.

Was it connected to the call from the nurse, Michael Frost, that she’d gotten earlier? The call that sent her to the hospital in the first place?

Maybe.

But for now, her focus had to be on survival. The cops were no doubt following them, and she had to believe they would launch a rescue. She also had to believe they would succeed. Sabrina couldn’t even consider an alterative, not with her baby’s safety at stake.

She looked up at the street signs, trying to memorize them just in case she got the opportunity to tell someone where she was, but the gunman must have noticed what she was doing because he shoved her down onto the seat.

“Curiosity killed the cat,” he snarled. He stank of sweat, onion chips from the hospital vending machine and the peppermint breath mints that he’d sucked on throughout the standoff.

Sabrina would remember that sickening scent. That raspy voice. Those dull brown eyes that were flat, like a man on the job rather than one on a personal mission.

He was almost certainly a hired killer.

And when this was over, she would make sure he and his partner were punished for this havoc they had caused. All those women and babies had been put through a nightmare, and it wasn’t over. Not for her, not for them. They would have to deal with the terrifying memories forever.

Something that Sabrina already knew too much about.

“We lost the cops,” the driver announced.

That didn’t help with the fear or the dread. But he could be wrong. He had to be wrong.

The driver slowed to a crawl, and several seconds later, the car came to a stop. In a dark alley.

Oh, God.

Sabrina tried not to think of what could happen here. She didn’t think these men had rape or assault on their minds, but they wouldn’t hesitate to use her as a human shield when the cops arrived.

“Move fast,” the gunman ordered, and he threw open the door and pushed her out into the alley.

“Right,” she grumbled. Fast wasn’t possible for her these days.

She didn’t see any other cars or people. Definitely no cops. And her heartbeat grew significantly harder and faster. God. Had the driver been right about SAPD not being able to follow her? Had the gunmen made a clean getaway?

The gunman latched on to her arm and dragged her into the adjacent building. It was dark, musky and hot. No AC. Not even a trickle of fresh air. No furniture, either. From what Sabrina could see in the shadows, it was an abandoned office building, and judging from the distance they’d driven, they were somewhere in the downtown area of San Antonio. Not a good part, either.

“Lock the door,” the gunman told his partner. “I’ll tie her up. But don’t make the call until you’re out of her earshot. No sense broadcasting what’s going on.”

The man didn’t take her to a room near the door but to one about midway down the long tiled corridor. He shoved his gun into the back waist of his pants so he could use both hands to snag her wrists.

Sabrina knew what was coming.

She’d already seen him tie up members of the hospital staff and some of the patients. He took two thin plastic handcuffs from his pocket and looped one around her wrists. The other, he hooked through the first so that it chained her to the doorknob. The plastic cuffs might be cheap, but they were extremely effective. They would hold her in place until … but Sabrina didn’t want to think beyond that.

She would get out of this before they managed to take her out of the city and to God knows where. She needed a miracle.

The man reached down and pulled off her sandals. “In case you figure out how to get out of those cuffs, there’s broken glass on the floor. It’ll slice your feet to shreds,” he snarled and went down the hall with her shoes dangling in his hand.

Being shoeless wouldn’t stop her, either. Sabrina looked around the dark room, praying there was something she could use to cut the tough plastic. Maybe a piece of the glass he’d mentioned. It was there, all right. Beer bottles had been shattered, but none of the pieces was close enough for her to reach.

There were only threads of light coming from the single window on the center wall. The glass panes were coated with grime and taped yellowing newspapers that practically blocked off illumination from the nearby streetlights. But it allowed her to see just enough to realize there was nothing she could use as a cutter. With the exception of the broken glass and some trash on the floor, the room was empty.

Inside her, the baby began to kick, hard. Probably to protest her cramped sitting position. Sabrina shifted, trying to get more comfortable, but that was impossible on a hard tile floor.

Up the hall, she heard the peppermint-popping gunman say something, and she wiggled closer to the doorway in the hopes that she could hear and see what was going on. The men had apparently stepped into one of the other rooms because they were nowhere in sight, but she did get bits and pieces of their softly spoken conversation.

“Tolbert,” one of them said.

That grabbed her attention. They were talking about Shaw. Sabrina tried to wriggle even closer though the plastic cuffs were digging into her wrists.

“It’ll work.” That was from the gunman who’d driven them away from the hospital. He was whispering as if he wanted to ensure she didn’t hear what he was saying, but the empty building carried the sound. “We can use her to get Tolbert to cooperate in case something else turns up.”

Oh, God. They were going to use her to force Shaw to do something. But cooperate with what?

All of this had to be connected to the hostage mess that’d just gone on in the hospital, but Sabrina was clueless as to why she and the others had been terrorized all those hours.

What did any of this have to do with Shaw?

The men didn’t know she was carrying Shaw’s child. Or did they? It certainly wasn’t in her medical records, but they had seen that she had listed Shaw as the person to contact in case there was an emergency. Maybe the men thought she and Shaw were lovers.

As if.

Shaw hated her with a passion. And this situation was only going to make him hate her more. Once again, she’d brought danger to someone he loved. This time, the danger was aimed at his unborn child. He would never forgive her for placing the baby at risk.

Of course, Sabrina wouldn’t forgive herself, either.

Had that call she’d received all been a hoax? Something designed to get her into the hospital?

If so, then her abduction wasn’t a spur of the minute thing as she’d originally believed. She might have been their target all along, and she hadn’t even questioned the call. She’d blindly responded to the request and had walked right into a hornet’s nest.

The minute she’d stepped off that fourth floor elevator, one of the men had aimed a gun at her and then corralled her into the hall where they were already holding several dozen hostages. Sabrina wouldn’t forget their faces. The fear. The overwhelming feeling of doom.

“The car’ll be here in ten minutes,” she heard one of her captors say. “Go ahead, give her back the shoes. I want us to be ready to roll.”

Ten minutes. Not much time at all. And judging from their other conversation, they’d be taking her with them. If that happened, they might kill her once they had what they wanted. Because of the ski masks, she hadn’t seen their faces, but she did know details about them. She was a loose end and a dangerous one.

The man appeared again, his ski mask still in place, and he carefully placed the shoes on the floor beside her. When she didn’t move to slip them on, he cursed at her, shoved them on her feet and walked away.

She waited until he was out of sight before she fought with the plastic cuffs again. No luck. So, she decided to try to chew her way through them, though she knew that would be next to impossible. The cuffs were designed to prevent such an escape. Still, she had to try. Those ten minutes were already ticking off.

There was a sound. Just a slight bump. It didn’t come from the men up the hall but from the window. Someone was outside.

Sabrina chewed even harder on the cuff, while she kept watch up the hall and at the shadowy figure on the other side of that murky glass.

There was a soft pop. And the window eased open. She got a good look at the dark-haired man then.

It was Shaw.

Relief flooded through her entire body. He’d come for her. Well, he’d come for the baby anyway. Now the question was, could he get them safely out of there?

Shaw glanced around the room and put his index finger to his mouth in a stay-quiet gesture. Sabrina quit struggling with the plastic cuffs and tipped her head toward the men up the hall.

“There are two of them,” she mouthed, and in case Shaw hadn’t heard, she held up two fingers.

Shaw nodded, climbed through the window, swung his legs over the sill and quietly placed his feet on the floor. He had his standard-issue Glock ready in his right hand, and he lifted it, aiming it at the door. If her captors heard Shaw’s entrance, they would no doubt come running.