Critical Condition Read online

  EVERYONE’S AT RISK

  There’s a murderer in the hospital, and nurse Tara Peterson is determined to prove it. With mysterious deaths in the cancer ward, anyone could be next. But no one wants to believe her...except undercover agent Zach Davis. The murderer wants Tara’s suspicions silenced, permanently. To protect Tara, Zach lets her in on his secret, and unwittingly into his heart. Tara and her three-year-old daughter are like the family he lost years before. Zach will risk everything to keep them safe, no matter the cost.

  “What I’m about to tell you is for your ears alone. Understand?”

  A flicker of confusion crossed Tara’s face, but she nodded.

  Zach glanced around to make sure no one was listening in. “My name is Zach Davis.”

  She glanced at his hospital badge—Zach Reynolds—and scooted closer to her daughter.

  “I’m a cop, working undercover to investigate the deaths you reported.”

  “You are?” she said excitedly. “Why didn’t Detective Gray tell me?”

  “The fewer people who know, the less likely my cover will be compromised. You are the only one at the hospital who knows why I’m really here.”

  “I won’t tell anyone. I promise. In fact, I can help you.”

  “I’d appreciate that.” Tara’s inside knowledge could prove invaluable to closing this case quickly.

  “Cop,” Tara’s daughter Suzie parroted. With the purple crayon clutched in her chubby fist, she drew a circle on her paper, jabbed dots in the middle and scratched two lines from the bottom. “Dak, cop,” she repeated gleefully.

  Zach’s heart sank. This assignment had just gotten a whole lot more complicated.

  Books by Sandra Orchard

  Love Inspired Suspense

  *Deep Cover

  *Shades of Truth

  *Critical Condition

  *Undercover Cops

  SANDRA ORCHARD

  lives on a small hobby farm in rural Ontario with her real-life hero husband and college-age children. Although she taught high school math before starting her family, her childhood dream of becoming a writer never strayed far from her thoughts. She dabbled in writing articles and book reviews, but for many years needle crafts, painting and renovating a century-old farmhouse satisfied her creative appetite.

  Then she discovered the world of inspirational fiction, and her writing took on new direction.

  In 2009 she won the Daphne DuMaurier Award for Excellence in Mystery/Suspense, and the following year, on her “graduation day” as a home educator (i.e., her youngest daughter’s first day of college), Sandra learned that Love Inspired Books wanted to publish her first novel. And so her Undercover Cops series began.

  Check out her website, www.SandraOrchard.com, for interesting series extras. Sandra loves to hear from readers and can be reached through her website, on Facebook at www.Facebook.com/SandraOrchard or c/o Love Inspired Books, 233 Broadway, Suite 1001, New York, NY 10279.

  Sandra Orchard

  Critical Condition

  The path of the righteous is like the first gleam of dawn, shining ever brighter till the full light of day.

  —Proverbs 4:18

  For Garth

  THANKS:

  As always to my husband and children

  for their unwavering support and encouragement. You’re the best!

  To my critiquers and brainstorming buddies,

  Eileen Astels, Laurie Benner, Wenda Dottridge

  and Vicki Talley McCollum for their encouragement and invaluable suggestions.

  To my accountability partner Patti Jo Moore

  for her cyber hugs, prayers and cheers.

  To my wonderful readers, blog readers and Facebook fans who encourage and bless me in

  so many ways. Your letters, posts, comments

  and “likes” spur me on in the face of

  uncooperative characters and plots.

  And most important, thanks to my Lord Jesus

  for the greatest love of all.

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  EPILOGUE

  Dear Reader

  Questions for Discussion

  Excerpt

  PROLOGUE

  Strange. Tara Peterson stepped out of a patient’s room only to be greeted by yet another call bell. Except this one blipped off as quickly as it sounded.

  It blipped again.

  A malfunction?

  Seeing no sign of the other on-duty nurse, she hurried down the hall to check on the cancer patient herself. Most days she loved being a nurse. But today, she would’ve happily traded in her orthopedic shoes for a pair of sling-backs and a plush leather chair behind a computer monitor. Eleven and a half hours of racing from one call to another, a stack of charts awaiting her attention, made it easy to forget she hated sitting still almost as much as she hated paperwork.

  She paused outside the room to ease a knot in her back and froze midstretch at the sound of something clattering across the floor, followed by a thud.

  Tara threw open the door. “Mrs. Parker, what’s wrong?”

  The frail young woman’s body stiffened, her hands contorting at an odd angle, her unseeing eyes rolling upward.

  A sudden shove propelled Tara across the room. She grabbed the bed rail, twisting her arm as momentum slammed her knees to the floor. Her head clipped the corner of the bed frame and stars exploded in front of her eyes. Biting back a cry of pain, she glanced over her shoulder in time to see the tail of a white lab coat whisk out the door.

  “Wait,” she shouted, a metallic taste filling her mouth.

  The bed rocked frantically, but a groan snapped Tara’s attention to the floor beyond, where a man lay sprawled on the cold tile. Blood spurted from a gash over his eye.

  He mumbled something Tara couldn’t make out.

  Gritting her teeth against the white-hot pain that shot up her arm, she grabbed a towel and pressed it to his cut. “Mr. Parker, you need to hold this so I can see to your wife. Can you do that?”

  Taking his grunt as a yes, Tara surged to her feet.

  Mrs. Parker thrashed wildly in the throes of a seizure.

  Tara pulled the code alarm, then checked Mrs. Parker’s airway. Clear—for now—but the woman was burning up.

  “You have to save her,” Mr. Parker croaked, his tortured gaze reaching out to his wife.

  Dr. Whittaker rushed into the room, his white lab coat flapping behind him.

  “Give her fifty c.c.’s of diazepam stat,” Whittaker barked.

  Alice Bradshaw, the other nurse on duty, shoved the crash cart through the door. “I’ll get it.”

  Dr. Whittaker steadied the patient’s arm, soothing her in the dulcet tones that had earned him the moniker Dr. Wonderful from more than one patient.

  As Tara tapped a vein to insert the intravenous, Mr. Parker cried out and c
lutched his chest.

  “Take over here,” Tara commanded the instant Alice returned with the diazepam. “I need to see to Mr. Parker.” Pulling a stethoscope to her ears, Tara knelt at his side. Parker’s breathing was shallow, his pulse thready.

  Dr. McCrae hurried in and glanced from Tara to the bed, where Alice was still struggling with the IV.

  “Help restrain the patient,” Whittaker ordered.

  Mr. Parker clutched Tara’s arm and muttered a desperate prayer.

  “It’s okay,” Tara soothed. “We’re taking good care of your wife. Don’t worry.”

  The man’s gaze shifted to the team around the bed. “You have to stop—” He gasped for air. “Stop the killer.”

  “The killer? I don’t understand. No one’s been killed.”

  Mr. Parker’s grip relaxed. And a moment later, his arm flopped lifelessly to the floor.

  ONE

  Detective Zach Davis turned up his collar against the brisk October weather and joined the hospital staff gathered outside Niagara’s newest cancer wing. The sooner he proved a murderer wasn’t behind the recent deaths at Miller’s Bay Memorial, the sooner he could escape.

  He couldn’t imagine why a couple of deaths in a palliative-care unit—a ward where people go to die—would warrant an undercover investigation. But his former partner Rick Gray had needed a detached officer from out of town and had refused to take no for an answer.

  Not that Zach had felt like explaining why this was the last place he wanted to be. He’d never told Rick he’d been married, let alone that his wife had died of cancer. As far as Rick was concerned, the five months Zach had spent posing as a computer-store owner made him the perfect candidate for his new cover as an information-technology consultant. End of discussion.

  At the front of the crowd, Dr. Whittaker—the namesake of the hospital’s new addition—slid giant scissor blades around the obligatory ribbon and offered the media a smile as polished as his two-hundred-dollar shoes.

  As spectators jockeyed to be the first through the doors, Barb, the real IT consultant, bumped her arm against Zach’s. “Come on, let’s get started.” The petite brunette hadn’t questioned her boss’s request to let Zach learn alongside her. He just hoped she’d be too distracted by her own work to notice what he really did.

  He followed Barb into the happy hum of staff sharing cake and juice with patients, smiling and clothed in bathrobes and brightly colored caps. The kind of caps that masked chemo-razed hair.

  His stomach knotted into a hard, tight ball.

  He’d held his palm to spurting bullet wounds, wrestled drug-crazed addicts, immobilized the fractured bones of abused wives. But not one of those encounters had hit him like this, with an unnerving sense that if he looked one of these patients in the eyes, his grip on his emotions would completely unravel.

  Someone—a nurse—cupped his elbow. “You okay? You’ve gone white.”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. Thanks.” An antiseptic odor coiled through his nostrils, raking up memories of nightlong vigils at his wife’s bedside. Lord, why have You brought me here? I don’t want to remember.

  “You’d better sit a minute. You don’t look so good.” The nurse ushered him to a chair along the wall. “I’ll bring you a glass of juice.” Her compassionate voice pulled his thoughts from the edge of a dark abyss.

  His colleague had kept walking, but now, her three-inch heels clicked quickly toward him. As she drew closer, her puzzled scowl softened.

  Zach scraped a hand over his face. “That bad, huh?”

  “Oh, yeah. I take it you don’t like hospitals?”

  He shook his head. “Just cancer wards.”

  “You lost someone close to you?”

  Zach let out a heavy sigh. “Yeah.” Close. The word didn’t begin to describe what he’d lost. His wife had been everything to him. His best friend. His confidante. His very being.

  The nurse hurried back with a cup of juice. “This should bring back your color. You’d be surprised how many visitors we have who get a little faint. You’ll be okay in a few minutes.”

  He doubted more time here would do the trick, but he kept the thought to himself. Undercover work was all about attitude. With the right attitude, even in uniform, he could convince the wariest drug dealer to sell him a fix. He’d never allowed a situation to get the better of him. And he sure didn’t intend to start today.

  He downed the juice, crushed the cup in his hand and rose to his feet. “Thanks, I’m good to go, Miss...” Seeing the woman’s doe-size brown eyes smile up at him, Zach backed into the chair’s arm. A jabbing pain to his thigh anchored his feet.

  “Peterson.” She tilted her head as if questioning whether they’d met before. “Tara Peterson.”

  He blinked, then swallowed to clear the roar from his ears and the image of his dead wife standing two feet away, arm outstretched in greeting.

  Not his wife. The mouth was wider, the reddish-brown hair wavier and longer. She looked a few inches taller, too. But, those eyes...

  Zach blinked again, and chalked up the leap of his heart to the woman’s uncanny resemblance to his wife.

  Forcing a smile, he extended his hand. Then her name clicked in his brain and turned his “pleased to meet you” to paste in his mouth.

  This was the nurse who’d reported the murders.

  Tara glanced at the ID badge hanging from his neck, and then to Barb’s. “I guess you two are the IT specialists we were warned about.”

  “Warned?” Zach repeated, scrambling to regain his equilibrium.

  Tara chuckled. “Sure, we finally got the hang of the last system, and now you’re going to change it on us again.”

  “I thought your present system was over five years old?” He looked to Barb for confirmation.

  Barb rolled her eyes and mouthed, “Stone age.”

  “I heard that.” Tara’s grin belied her offended tone. “You computer gurus just like to torture us. But if there’s anything I can do to help, don’t hesitate to ask.”

  Zach nodded his thanks. He liked the woman’s playful sense of humor. She didn’t seem like the type to cry wolf. Maybe his reluctance to take the case had made his negative assessment of its merits too hasty.

  Zach shadowed Barb for most of the day to acquaint himself with the job. Then he forced himself to return to the cancer ward, where the alleged murders had occurred. Implementing a new software system gave him a perfect excuse to question staff, not to mention peek at their online activities.

  As he passed the staff lounge, a commotion erupted.

  “You have to let this go,” a female voice soothed.

  “I won’t let it go. Someone murdered those people.” Zach recognized Tara’s voice and the flint of pain behind her words.

  “The coroner disagrees,” the other woman responded.

  “For all we know the murderer paid him off.”

  Zach tensed. The last thing he needed were rumors of a killing spree spreading through the hospital.

  “You’re talking crazy,” a different woman spoke up.

  “Am I? Someone shoved me into the bed. Clearly, he didn’t want to be seen.”

  “Are you sure you didn’t just trip? You hit your head pretty hard.”

  “No!” The slap of a hand against a table punctuated the denial. “How many times do I have to tell you? Someone murdered Mrs. Parker. Her husband begged me to stop the killer.”

  Zach rushed to the door. Tara might as well have painted a bull’s-eye on her forehead. He needed to get her out of there before she made the situation any worse.

  Two nurses and a doctor were in the room with her. Tara reached for a lunch container in the fridge and deposited it into a cloth bag on her arm. Absorbed in the discussion, no one acknowledged his arrival.

 
“I was there and I didn’t hear Mr. Parker say anything,” the older nurse said. “How about you, Dr. McCrae?”

  The young resident standing at the counter with his coffee shook his head. “Afraid not.” He took a sip from his mug and shot Tara a sympathetic look.

  “Well, I know what I heard.” Tara’s voice sharpened. “And if the police won’t—”

  “Miss Peterson...” Zach tapped on the door. “Sorry to interrupt, but I need your help.”

  Looking a little stunned, Tara lifted her gaze to his. “My help?”

  “With the computer setup for your nurse’s station.” When she hesitated, it was all he could do not to grab her by the wrist and yank her out of the room. Something he should’ve done the instant he’d heard the word murderer come out of her mouth. “Please.”

  “Yes, of course.” She followed him to the door, and he motioned her to go ahead of him.

  Dr. Whittaker passed them with a cursory glance. “What was all that yelling about?” he asked, stepping into the staff lounge.

  “Tara was ranting about the murderer again,” one of the nurses said.

  Zach couldn’t make out Whittaker’s riled response—something about bad press—but Tara must’ve heard, because she clenched her fingers into a fist.

  “I can’t believe the police aren’t doing anything,” she muttered.

  Zach steered her to the privacy of the empty nurse’s station. “About what?” he asked, since she had no idea why he was really here. He couldn’t believe that she’d all but thrown down the gauntlet for a murderer to come after her.

  Maybe he should have taken Rick up on the option to let her in on the operation.

  Clearly heartened by his interest, Tara seemed to forget about his computer questions and explained in detail what happened the night of Mr. and Mrs. Parker’s alleged murders.

  He nodded as if it were all news to him. “I can see how important finding this person is to you, but you might not want to broadcast your intentions.”

  Her face blanched. “You think he’d come after me?”