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  “No deaths,” Dave said, “though we’ve had close calls and some serious injuries. Everybody is recovering, some slowly, but we’re still on the hunt. If you’ve got a couple hours, I can bring you up to date on what’s gone on.”

  “I’ve got nothing but time,” he said. “Did you arrange for us to get out of here?”

  “Yeah. I have a boat and a helicopter on standby,” he said. “I wasn’t sure what I was up against coming here.”

  “I’m not sure either,” Bullard said. “We’ve also had some strangers lurking around the island. More than usual apparently,” he said. “People have been hiding in the bushes watching, and you know how I feel about that.”

  “You also have a beautiful woman here,” Dave said. “I’m sure she’s attracted plenty of looks.”

  “Maybe, but it feels like it’s more than that.”

  “Good enough,” Dave said. “I’ll still trust your instincts. Injured or not, you’ve always had an uncanny ability in that department.”

  “Dave, do we know who blew up the plane?”

  “Well, we know one layer,” he said. Then they sat down together and, for several hours, went through everything Dave knew, as methodically as he could. By the time he gratefully accepted the fresh juice from Leia who’d come to join them, his voice was raspy and dry.

  She stared at him in shock, after hearing only part of it, but understood how immense the trials against Bullard’s team had been. “It’s a miracle any of the team is alive,” she murmured.

  “It’s a miracle he’s alive,” Dave said, pointing to Bullard, “and believe me. We’re all very grateful for what you’ve done.”

  She just shrugged and walked away to give them some room, still within hearing distance but not close enough to intrude.

  “So we’re still looking for the very top man. Is that it?” Bullard asked.

  “Yes,” Dave said. “We’ve finally got it down to that, after going through layers and layers of crap to get here.”

  “I can’t believe Deedee is dead.”

  “I know,” Dave said, “and to think Kano and Catherine are together because of it.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say they’re together because of it. They were together before, and Deedee essentially broke them up,” Bullard said. “She was one hell of a bitch.” But there was almost a note of respect and admiration in his voice as he said it.

  “We were worried for a while there that you had something going with her,” Dave said.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head and looking at Leia, who was close enough to hear. “There were just some things you couldn’t do with her. Lines not to be crossed. She was a black widow if there ever was one.”

  “Apparently she did kill a couple husbands. Michael has survived and is still holding the reins of Kingdom Securities, though several of their men went rogue and have gone off the reservation. But the thing about this deal is, at every step of the way, every low-level bad guy has been taken out by the upper-level bad guys. Total clean-up from within. So we still don’t know who’s at the top, but we’re finally at the last level. Although everyone said it’s someone close enough to all of us that we’d stay with him in your absence.”

  “There aren’t too many who could be at the top,” Bullard said. “And since it isn’t Deedee, and it’s not Michael, I’m not sure who else among my competitors it could be,” he admitted.

  “That’s the thing,” Dave said. “We’ve all been wondering who this unnamed person could be.”

  Bullard nodded. “Have you called the rest of the team?”

  “Absolutely. Several are on their way because they don’t believe it, so you can expect more company,” he said.

  “Well, they need to bring supplies,” he said. “We don’t have a ton here, definitely not as much as those guys eat.”

  Dave nodded and pulled out his phone. “I’ll give them word on that,” he said. “Izzie really wants to see you as well.”

  “Ah, Izzie. We have some time to make up for. Nothing like sitting here and thinking about the things that you could have done differently,” he said. “I didn’t do well by her.”

  At that, Leia smiled and joined them.

  “Dave found out some of your history. Sounds like you were made a scapegoat. What would you have done differently?” Bullard asked her pointedly.

  “I’m not sure I could have done anything differently,” she said. “When somebody is out to set you up, how do you get away from it?”

  He nodded. “So, I presume you didn’t kill the patient?”

  “No, I didn’t kill him,” she said. “It wasn’t my knife close to an artery, but Leo had his right there.”

  “And you think he did it?”

  “He looked right at me before he sliced it,” she said, “and it wasn’t a random slice, like an accidental nick. It was a long gash in a major artery. We couldn’t save him at that point.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “And you, being the young upstart, were reviled and blamed, right?”

  “Particularly when Leo said I had done it, and he’d watched me do it. Nobody would listen to me over him,” she said. “It was all his word against mine, and, although I was a respected surgeon there and thought I had a strong support system, when push came to shove, nobody was there for me. I could have moved somewhere else or done something else, but I didn’t want to. I wanted to just walk away and not get involved in anything where my hand could be blamed for killing someone again.”

  “Do you have any tiny shred of doubt that you were involved at all?”

  “Meaning, did I wonder if somehow I had sliced his artery? No, I have no doubt about how things went down, and I was not involved,” she said. “I protested until I was blue in the face, but nobody believed me. When they started talking murder charges, I was asked to leave, and I left. They said they would do their best to mitigate any malpractice suits against me, as long as I disappeared. So I did. I up and left, then came here, and here is where I’ve been ever since.”

  “You were one of the best and the brightest surgeons of your time, according to the media,” Dave said.

  “Yes,” she said, “back then maybe I was, but things change, and I’m out of practice now.”

  “Except for me, you practiced on me,” Bullard said.

  She nodded, her gaze shrouded. “Yes, though it’s not like I had much choice. You were dying. Even then, under these primitive conditions, there was no guarantee that I wouldn’t kill you in the process.”

  “And did you operate on anybody local?” Dave asked.

  She shrugged. “Only for minor issues. Never anything major.”

  “But you could if need be?”

  “I could,” she said, “but I won’t.”

  “Unless it’s an emergency,” Bullard said.

  She glared at him. “I’m not going back to practicing like I did before,” she snapped. “Nothing you can say will make me do that.”

  “No, I wouldn’t pressure you either,” he said. “There’s nothing like broken trust.”

  “It doesn’t heal,” she said. “You’re always left to wonder and worry.”

  “What if we could do something to exonerate you?”

  “Nobody will care,” she said, staring off in the distance. “Nobody even remembers my name by now.”

  “Maybe,” Bullard said, “but somebody got away with murder.”

  “It wasn’t the first time,” she said quietly. “It definitely wasn’t the first time.”

  Chapter 7

  Leia wasn’t at all sure she could go back and face an inquiry like that again. She had been absolutely gutted to have had so many of her cohorts throw her under the bus. As the one friend had said, “A bright young light rising rapidly within their ranks wasn’t something the old establishment could handle, so they’d done what they could to squash her effectively.”

  But Leia had never suspected that anyone would have actually murdered a patient on the table in order to get her out of th
ere. She didn’t want anything to do with a world like that. Bullard spoke about exoneration, but all she saw was an extension of the pain, and it wouldn’t help anyone. Should her associate have been brought to justice? Absolutely. Would it come to that? Not likely. She didn’t have much faith in the system anymore. It was just one of those things about life that wouldn’t come together. She looked from Dave to Bullard. “I agree that he should probably be charged,” she said quietly, “but it’s not like there is any validity in whatever I say.”

  “They don’t tape any of those surgeries?”

  “Yes,” she said, “but somehow”—and her tone turned very dry—“the tape went missing.”

  Dave’s eyes widened. “That is completely unconscionable,” he said.

  “That is the industry,” she said quietly, “and, no, I didn’t know it before I headed into the field. I went in with the naive impression that I could help people.”

  “You still can,” Bullard said quietly. “I need a good surgeon.” At that, Dave looked at him in surprise.

  She looked at Dave and asked, “What’s his skill level in that field?”

  Dave shrugged. “He’s very talented. We have a full OR at home, with some of the most incredible equipment you would ever hope to work with.”

  Leia found herself intrigued in spite of herself. “My skills are too rusty,” she said immediately, backing off again.

  “The only thing that’s rusty,” Bullard said, “is your confidence, and not in yourself or your skills but in the people around you.”

  “With good reason.”

  “Absolutely, and I’m not trying to make you feel threatened,” he said. “But you do need to return and face whatever you’ve been running from, one way or another.”

  “No, I don’t,” she said. “I have a wonderfully peaceful life here. Why would I want to change that?”

  “Maybe because it’s not what you were intended to do,” he said. “Like you said, you got into medicine to help people.” He looked at Dave. “How are things with the clinic?”

  “Ugly,” he said, “we closed the doors almost immediately because we didn’t have anybody to work there.”

  “What about your niece?”

  “We’re trying to convince her to come back when she finishes her current commitment,” he said. “Oh, and she’s hooked up with Fallon now, by the way.”

  Bullard stared at him in surprise. “Wow,” he said, with a chuckle. “You know what? I can almost see that. They were always wary around each other, weren’t they?”

  “Absolutely they were,” Dave said, with a smirk. “Honestly I am thrilled because I want to keep her close.”

  “Of course,” Bullard said, with a nod. “We’ve all had such grave losses that sometimes you don’t see how to come back from it.”

  Leia looked at Dave, curious. “I don’t know anything about you or your life,” she said.

  Dave shrugged. “Let’s just say I lost my family, and it took me a long time to recover.”

  “I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine,” she said, with feeling, “but having no one left to support you must have been doubly difficult.”

  Dave nodded, looking at her. “Did you have no family to help you out?”

  “My father was a gifted surgeon, and he had a heart attack on the job. People said that he was the reason I was hired, his recommendation, I mean. But he passed away soon afterward.”

  “Ah, and people don’t like that, do they?”

  “No, they don’t,” she said. “I was also trying to do some fairly difficult surgeries with him, and people didn’t like that either.”

  “So what about your mother?”

  “She left my father and ended up with a second marriage and a second family, this time with children who weren’t quite so ambitious, just like she wanted. She wanted children who would turn around and have more children, so she could become a grandmother. She wasn’t interested in having a career woman in her world.”

  “How did that work out for her?”

  “It’s a little early to tell,” she said, “but she has four sons now, so, in that sense, she got exactly what she wanted. No more career-seeking daughters.”

  “Kind of sad in a way,” Dave said. “Having ambition is not a negative. It’s all about what you do in life and the gift of what you leave behind. We’re only here for a short time, so to sit here and do nothing but procreate—not even using their gifts—seems like a waste. I guess it works for some people, but the world needs all of us and our gifts that we can offer.”

  “But not everybody wants you to use your gifts,” she said quietly, “as I found out, far too late.”

  “You were a double threat to the establishment,” he said. “If your father had lived, he might have been able to save you. He probably didn’t realize the extent of the competition against you.”

  “No, I don’t think so. He didn’t really see humans and their failings. He only saw aortas and ventricles and cranial cavities,” she said. “He was very much into his work. The fact that I was too gave us a bond, but otherwise—without that—we probably wouldn’t have been close.”

  “Was he upset over the divorce?”

  “I think it was more of a minor inconvenience to him, but thankfully she handled everything, so he didn’t have to leave the office.”

  Even Bullard winced at that. “That must have made it even more difficult for you.”

  “Well, it certainly gave me a disassociated feeling about the whole thing. The fact that she remarried within weeks of the divorce being finalized said a lot about where she was at.”

  “So she was already moving on,” Dave said. “We’ve seen that happen time and time again.”

  “Exactly, and it left me in a weird place,” she said. “I wasn’t finished with my education, but I was doing as much as I could in practicums soon afterward. I did volunteer work constantly, overseas and at home, spending every waking hour in an operating room, or outside the OR, prepping people to go in.”

  “Your life must have been very difficult when she walked away.”

  “It was chaotic at first,” she said, “but also relief in a sense because I knew I was such a disappointment to her.”

  “You shouldn’t have let your self-confidence be shaken that way,” Dave scolded.

  “It wasn’t a lack of faith in my skills. It was like Bullard said,” she stated, with half a smile, “it was my confidence in the people around me that was shaken. In many ways I had been like my father, very narrow-minded, controlled, and centered on only what I was doing with my hands. I wasn’t so worried about the people around me, about maintaining relationships with coworkers and things like that. Maybe I was as difficult as my father was. I don’t know. My hospital demise came so quickly, I didn’t really get a chance to sort it all out.”

  “I’m sorry,” Dave said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said, staring off in the distance. “It’s easy to look back in hindsight and realize that I was probably not terribly nice to be around. I don’t know.” She shrugged. “I didn’t see what was coming at me, so I was blindsided by it all. That made it very difficult.”

  “Of course. Do you mind if I make a few more inquiries?”

  She looked at Dave in surprise. “About what?” she asked. “I’m a nobody. Nonexistent. I don’t even live in the world anymore.”

  “Great, then you won’t have a problem with me making those inquiries,” he said.

  Just the thought made her stomach heave a little bit, but she studied him for a long moment, then acquiesced. “I guess it won’t hurt. But don’t expect to find anything.”

  “No,” he said, “not at all.”

  She looked at him, frowned, and said, “You said that a little too fast.”

  At that, he gently said, “Don’t worry about it.”

  She shook her head. “That’s not likely to happen either,” she said, smiling.

  “You never know,” he said. “Life can be difficult for many peo
ple. But that doesn’t mean that it’ll be the end. What it can show you is a whole new way to live.”

  “And I found that right here,” she said gently. “Remember?”

  “You’re existing,” he said, shaking his head, “but you’re not thriving.”

  “You’re not a shrink,” she said, “and I’ve spent a lot of time in introspection, finally getting to the point where I could live quite happily like this, and I don’t need anybody to tell me that I can’t.”

  “Of course not,” Dave said, “that would be like waving a red flag at a bull. In many ways you’re like Bullard here.”

  She frowned at that, but Bullard was grinning broadly. “You seem to think that’s a compliment,” she said, puzzled.

  “Having a group around me has given me ample opportunity to see my good side and my bad side,” he said. “And they aren’t always that easy to contemplate. I want you to come back with me,” he said.

  She shrugged. The one thing she didn’t want was to have him do something like that out of guilt. She wanted so much more and didn’t know how to say it. She wasn’t even sure they had anything real here to build on. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she finally said.

  “So you’ve said before,” he said. “I suggest we ignore the shoulds or the saids or the woulds and just go ahead and do it.”

  “That’s because you’re like a bull in a china shop,” she said, “and you have this thing about getting what you want, without considering anyone else.”

  He looked at her and started to laugh. “I haven’t even been conscious all that long,” he said, “at least not with my brain intact, and look at how well you know me.”

  “You’re just cheeky,” she murmured. Then she turned and headed to her cabin. “You guys have a lot to talk about. I’ll give you some privacy to do that.”

  “Pack,” he instructed.

  “Nope, not likely,” she said, without even turning around. Then she disappeared into her cabin. As soon as she was alone, she sat down on the corner of her bed and pressed her hands against her eyes, willing the tears to stay back. It was one thing to live here with him. It was another thing entirely to leave this idyllic hideaway for something unknown and potentially very painful. As she sat here quietly, she heard an odd noise. Turning around, she saw a stranger at her door.