TWO

      Victor saw the situation unfold, but his head did not believe it. One moment he was heading toward Brooke Ramsey, wondering at the frightened look on her face. The next, he saw a car pull up outside the office, the window rolled down just far enough for him to see a gun thrust through the opening. He had a split second to leap on top of Brooke and carry her to the ground before three shots drilled through the glass. They tumbled along the tile floor, small pieces of the safety glass crackling underneath them. There was a scream from somewhere as the car pulled away and out of sight.

       Her breath came in short pants against his cheek. He pushed away a section of her glossy hair and looked into her eyes, so close he could see his own expression mirrored there.

       “Are you hurt?”

       She tried a few times to answer before any words came out. “I don’t think so. What happened?”

       He took another look to make sure the car hadn’t returned before he rolled off her and moved her away from the glass. “A shooter,” he managed, before he noticed the front desk person sprinting across the lobby, shouting into a radio.

       Victor followed his progress. Brooke must have, too, because he heard her gasp, her hands flying to her mouth. Then his body was moving on instinct, feet crunching over the broken glass, mind running like a mad thing as he raced to the dark-haired woman lying motionless on the floor.

       Mid-fifties, he guessed as he checked her vitals. No breathing, no heartbeat, bullet wound visible on her forehead. He knew the prognosis of a bullet plowing through the frontal lobe of the brain, but he ignored it, tilting her jaw to open the airway and starting chest compressions. Every few cycles he rechecked the vitals without much hope.

       Cold horror seeped into him as he was transported back to the moment when he’d awakened in a wrecked car, Jennifer unconscious and broken next to him. He could still feel the warmth of her body under his hands as he frantically tried to restart her heart. There must have been people there, too, as there were now, standing helplessly, dialing cell phones, calling encouragement to the victims of the awful accident, but he hadn’t heard them. Everything faded into a mumbling haze except the reality of his hands on her ribs, his lips blowing air into her mouth, the fading pulse under his frantic fingertips.

       “Help me, God,” he’d said, because that’s what Jen would have prayed.

       And He hadn’t.

       And Victor couldn’t either.

       Jennifer was gone.

       Victor knew with the same sickening certainty that the black-haired woman was gone, too. He could force her heart to pump, squeeze it into pushing the blood around, but the life, that indefinable force that separates the living from the dead, was gone. He continued the compressions anyway, shoulders burning, until the paramedics arrived and took over the effort. When he finally did move away, he saw Brooke staring at him in shock. An officer took her by the arm and another one escorted him to a nearby hallway, away from the broken glass and the death that lay in awkward display on the cold tile floor.

       He was surprised to find that his hands were shaking, so he stuffed them into his pockets as the officer began to ask him questions. He retold the strange interview with Brooke and her assertion that someone was following her. With a start, Victor remembered why he’d gone to the lobby in the first place.

       “Someone called my office looking for Ms. Ramsey, pretending to be her sister.”

       The officer raised an eyebrow and dutifully recorded the information. “Why don’t you sit down here while we look into some things, Mr. Gage?” The officer moved off and Victor caught sight of Brooke talking to another cop, the freckles standing out strikingly against the paleness of her skin.

       He wished he could settle on one feeling, but a stream of conflicting emotions surged through him. Post-traumatic shock, he figured. He’d just witnessed a murder, and if he hadn’t been there it would have been Brooke on the floor. The thought sickened him.

       Stephanie appeared, eyes wide and scared. She took hold of his arms, squeezing hard. “Are you all right?”

       He reassured her, bringing her briefly up to speed. Stephanie shook her head. “Drive-by shooting? Gang related, maybe?”

       He shrugged, and he read in her face that she didn’t believe it was a random shooting any more than he did. He glanced over at Brooke.

       Brooke nodded at some question from the officer and looked as though she might cry.

       Was this related to the phone call? Or was this a random shooting? He should help her figure it out, dive into the situation with all the zeal he possessed, isolate the problem, cure the ailment.

       He looked again at Brooke as the officer led her to a chair. “It was the woman…the woman I thought was following me back in San Diego.”

       The same woman?

       She avoided looking at him.

       It was just as well.

       Brooke needed help, but he was not the man to give it to her, or to anyone else.

      * * *

       Brooke had to force herself to remain in the chair. She had the insane desire to run, to plow through the ruined front doors and sprint all the way back to San Diego to her father. She’d heard the front desk man say something about gangs and drive-by shootings but she knew in her soul, deep down in the instinctive part, that the bullet had been intended for her, not the black-haired lady who had been wheeled out on a stretcher to the waiting ambulance. She could tell by the expression on Victor’s face when the medics arrived that the lady would not survive. Had the woman been trying to help her? To warn her? Of what? Of whom? Brooke’s head spun.

       After an hour of questioning, waiting and more questioning, she was spent. Blinking back tears, she pulled the phone out of her purse and dialed. It rang once, twice, until someone picked up.

       “Dad,” she breathed, trying to keep her voice steady.

       A woman’s voice answered. “Brooke, it’s Denise. Your father’s taking a nap. Are you okay? You sound funny.”

       Brooke relayed the events as simply as she could to her father’s cousin.

       Denise gasped into the phone. “What? Are you hurt? Who was shot?”

       Brooke reassured her, “A lady I don’t know was killed. I wasn’t hurt, thanks to—” she shot a look at Victor, who had closed his eyes and leaned his head against the wall behind him “—the man I was meeting, to look into the situation. He kept me out of the line of fire.”

       “Brooke, this is crazy. You need to come home right now. Tell that man you don’t care about the painting anymore and head home before something worse happens.”

       She sighed. “He didn’t take the case anyway.”

       Denise exhaled loudly. “Then you’ve got no reason to stay. Come home where you’ll be safe.”

       Brooke glanced at Victor, who was now gazing at her with haunted eyes. She wondered for a moment what it would be like to bring someone back from the brink of death. Or fail to. She blinked away the thoughts. “I’m going to stay the night, try to plead my case with Dean Lock myself.”

       “It’s a lost cause. You know that. Way too much past history there.”

       “I know but I’ve