Suspicious Circumstances (Badge of Honor #4) - Rita Herron
Prologue
Five years ago—Whistler, North Carolina
The hospital was on fire.
Screams of terror and panic filled the air. Firefighters and first responders rushed in to extinguish the blaze and assist the sick and helpless from the burning building to safety. They’d been working for half an hour now, ever since the alarm had sounded.
Nurse Peyton Weiss helped clear the last patient from the ER. “Come on, sweetie,” she said as she helped an elderly woman into a wheelchair. “We have to move.”
The little woman was crying and confused, gnarled hands shaking as she gripped the wheelchair, but Peyton murmured assurances to her as she steered the wheelchair out the emergency exit. The lawn was covered in patients, panicked family members, the hospital staff and now the press, and was virtually a minefield of terrified and injured people.
Heart hammering, she left the woman with a medic and scanned the chaos for her own mother. Margaret Weiss had been admitted with pneumonia a week ago.
The same day Barry Inman’s wife had died in the ER.
Fear squeezed at Peyton’s lungs as she raced across the grassy lawn, searching beds, wheelchairs and stretchers. Though the hospital had tried to evacuate in an orderly fashion by floors and departments, order had deteriorated as the blaze rapidly spread.
Thick plumes of smoke made her eyes water, or maybe it was tears. There were casualties. Two burn victims already.
Some woman was screaming hysterically that she couldn’t find her baby.
She stepped aside as a firefighter carried a man toward the triage area.
What if her mother hadn’t made it out alive? Smoke inhalation was dangerous, especially in a patient with pneumonia.
She passed a group of portable beds where the medics and doctors were assessing and treating patients. Commotion from across the lawn jolted her, and she spotted a doctor starting CPR on a patient. She broke into a run. The patient was her mother. The attending physician, Dr. Butler.
“Mama!” She took her mother’s hand. “Please, hang on.”
“We’re doing everything we can,” Dr. Butler murmured as he continued compressions.
A sob welled in her throat. Seconds ticked by. She worked in the ER, dealt with life-and-death situations every day. But this patient was her own flesh and blood. The only family she had left. She couldn’t lose her.
Everything that had happened the past week crashed back. The day Inman’s wife died in the ER. Something had gone wrong. Peyton voiced her concerns to Dr. Butler. But he’d told her to keep quiet or her career would be in jeopardy.
She had medical bills to pay for her mother’s care. Still, it was wrong, and they’d argued. That night when she’d gotten home, she’d received a threatening phone call.
Keep your mouth shut or your mother will end up like Gloria Inman.
She shuddered at the memory. Not the doctor’s voice. But whose? She’d been angry. Scared. And terrified for her mother.
Her mother’s body jerked. She gasped, then a breath.
“It’s okay, Mama. You’re going to make it.” Then we’re moving away from Whistler.
She’d done what the doctor ordered. Told the police she didn’t know what had happened in the ER with Inman’s wife.
But every night the truth haunted her. She was covering a mistake, one she feared had caused a woman’s death.
And every day the lie she’d told hacked away at her conscience.
Chapter One
Five years later
Special Agent Liam Maverick braced his Glock at the ready as he crawled through the bushes toward the abandoned cabin where his prime suspect was holed up.
Five years ago, Barry Inman, husband of Gloria Inman who’d died in the ER at Whistler Hospital, had filed a lawsuit against the doctors claiming his wife died under suspicious circumstances. When the case had been thrown out of court, Inman threatened revenge.
The next day a horrific fire broke out at the hospital, destroyed countless lives and tore the town apart. Liam’s own father, sheriff at the time, lost his life trying to save others.
His father was a hero. But he was gone. As they’d stood over their father’s grave, he and his three brothers, Jacob, Fletch and Griff, vowed to find the culprit who’d started the blaze and make him pay.
The sense that he was finally going to accomplish that spurred his adrenaline, and he flattened his body until he was on his belly. Barbed wire tugged at his leather jacket as Liam inched beneath the fencing, but he used his gloved hand to push it back.
A few feet away, already perched between a cluster of trees on a hill, Fletch, who worked SAR on the Appalachian